#election 2000

Incoming presidents, since Truman’s day, receive briefings and, since Kennedy’s day, get funding for their transition teams, but, according to the law, only once it’s clear who won. The last time this happened, the Bush transition was blocked by Democrats until December.

But the media is boosting its Biden cable network coup by threatening the head of the GSA.

A week after the election, the media descended on Emily Murphy, the head of the General Services Administration (GSA), demanding that she release funds to a Biden transition.

Media hit pieces like the New York Times' "How Emily Murphy Stands Between Biden's Team", Bloomberg's "Who Is the GSA's Emily Murphy, Trump Appointee Holding Up Biden Transition", and the Washington Post's "Trump Appointee at GSA Declines to Sign Letter Authorizing Biden Transition", personalized the issue and set off a lynch mob swiftly leading to threats against her.

It’s still early in November. The media conveniently forgot the time its party blocked a presidential transition for over 4 weeks, not just through November, but into December.

David Barram, a top Clinton donor who supported every one of their campaigns since 1992, and tech industry figure, who had been appointed to head the GSA, didn't get this kind of treatment when he turned down transition funding to the Bush-Cheney campaign after the 2000 election.

Not only did Barram block funding until Florida’s vote was certified, but he kept blocking it until the Supreme Court had made its decision, leaving very little time for any transition to happen. The Bush-Cheney campaign pursued its own privately funded transition, as did Al Gore, the way presidential transitions used to work until the Presidential Transition Act changed all that.

Despite all this, Barram was never publicly attacked or threatened the way that Murphy is.

Worse still, the media recently trotted out Barram to argue that the GSA should release transition funding to the Biden-Harris campaign. “First off, all these media outlets who call the election have called it for Joe Biden, I think the winner is pretty clear,” Barram recently insisted.

Video:  2/2 Crowds Storm the White House the Night Before Obama's Inauguration! 1/19/09

A bright spot.  Exactly eight years ago, I went down to the White House to soak in the atmosphere of the crowds coming from ALL OVER THE WORLD to celebrate the inauguration of Barack Obama (honestly, what reason would anyone from anywhere else have to come to THIS one? Unless they voted for Brexit...)  That night, I wrote:

“The excitement in the air is ridiculous. The out-of-towners, the in-towners, the swarms of people walking around the White House and Pennsylvania Avenue just buzzing about Barack Obama's impending inauguration, and Bush's last day in office - forever!”

The first election I voted in -- 2000 -- at 19 years old, we lost, and thus began eight miserable years with an idiot for a president.  I felt hopeless and helpless.  I went to protests against him.  I wrote papers in college and law school about the stupidity -- and unconstitutionality -- of his decisions and policies.  I wore a shirt every time I left the country that said, “I’m sorry my president’s an idiot; I didn’t vote for him” in six languages.  I campaigned against him in 2004, and my girlfriend cried when he won, again.  I had never been political before 2000, but having a president that sought to ban same-sex marriage by AMENDING THE US CONSTITUTION TO BAN IT and the factions of the country that supported him played a role in my decision to go to law school to focus in civil rights work and GLBT advocacy.

In 2008, when I had graduated and moved to DC to do that work, I got to SEE THAT ERA (ERROR) END.  I got to be there to witness the excitement of the world of him leaving, to be part of the crowd that was booing him during Obama’s inauguration when the helicopter came to take him away (somehow, that made me feel a tiny bit bad for him.  But just a tiny bit).

And so that’s my bright spot.  That dark, hopeless time ended.  And this one will too.  And this video reminds me of what it looks (and feels, and sounds) like when it happens.  Many people believed that if we had not had someone as awful as Bush, we would not have had someone as magnificent as Obama.  Just imagine: We don’t even know who might come next.  And all of us now?  We’re going to make that happen.

Elon Musk essentially bought the election. And he had no ethical problem with deceiving voters in the process.

Elon Musk plowed at least $260 million into efforts to send Donald Trump back to the White House, new filings show – a massive infusion that makes him one of the largest single political underwriters of a presidential campaign and underscores the outsized influence of the world’s wealthiest person on this year’s election. Thursday’s filings with the Federal Election Commission show that the Tesla and SpaceX executive gave a total of $238 million to a super PAC that he founded this year, America PAC, which worked to turn out voters on Trump’s behalf in key states. But he also was the financial backer of other groups that cropped up in the final days of the election to support Trump, including one that spent millions on advertising to defend his record on abortion. It had sought to link Trump’s views on abortion to those of late Supreme Court Justice and liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Musk, through a trust that bears his name, donated $20.5 million to the group, named RBG PAC, on October 24, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. He was the sole donor to the group, which was formed in mid-October. The donation’s timing meant that Musk’s involvement was not disclosed until Thursday’s post-election filings with the federal regulators.

And Musk even promoted RFK Jr. in swing states where Brain Worm was still on the ballot.

According to the new filings, Musk also donated $3 million to the MAHA Alliance, a super PAC that ran stark ads in key swing states urging supporters of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to back Trump in the closing stretch of the campaign. Kennedy himself had ended his independent campaign over the summer and endorsed Trump. MAHA stands for “Make America Healthy Again,” Kennedy’s spin on Trump’s MAGA catchphrase. Trump has now tapped Kennedy, one of the nation’s most prominent anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists, to oversee the Health and Human Services Department.

If Musk invested $260 million in getting Trump elected, you can imagine what sort of return on that investment he is expecting.

A historical digression...

^^^ a sample ballot somebody created for Nevada. 😆

Funny, but we need to take third party stand-ins for Trump seriously.

We should remind people that 1848 was the last year that a non-Democrat or non-Republican was elected president. That's not going to change in 2024. And as Rachel Maddow said on election night in 2016: "If you vote for somebody who can’t win for president, it means that you don’t care who wins for president."

When one of the two major candidates is preaching hate and violence, we really do need to care who wins for president.

In particular I'm no fan of the so called Green Party. Their candidate in 2000, Ralph Nader, ran with the intention of helping elect George W. Bush. It was part of the old and discredited Leninist theory of "heightening the contradictions". In plain English, that means making life miserable for the masses in the hope that they will turn to your party.

And Bush gave us two wars, two rounds of tax breaks for the filthy rich, and two recessions – including the Great Recession. Bush also ignored warnings of an impending attack by al-Qaeda. He appointed Chief Justice John Roberts and the odious Associate Justice Samuel Alito to the US Supreme Court. Of course, people did not turn to the Green Party for bringing this string of horrors to the country. If anything, Ralph Nader is somewhat like the Gavrilo Princip of the 21st century.

Jill Stein is in some ways worse than Nader. She had been cultivated by the Kremlin to help elect Trump in 2016 and is attempting to do a repeat in 2024.

Seriously, she was a political nobody in 2015 when she was invited to sit at Putin's table at the anniversary of Russia's propaganda outlet RT in Moscow. Also at that table, sitting next to Putin, was Trump conspiracy nut Michael Flynn.

Guess Who Came to Dinner With Flynn and Putin

People on the left who express support for Jull Stein are helping to elect Trump. If the votes which Stein got in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in 2016 had instead gone to Hillary Clinton, Trump would not have been elected. (look up the results in those states!)

It's obvious that RFK Jr. picked his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, because he needed somebody who was filthy rich to fund his campaign. Shanahan is the ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin who probably has enough money to buy one of the smaller Hawaiian Islands.

Why Shanahan doesn't mind being an ATM for the worm-brained RFK Jr. is that she shares his idiotic conspiracy theory which falsely links autism to vaccines.

It’s easy to see why the controversial heir to the most prestigious liberal name-brand in American politics chose Shanahan, a relative unknown, to be his nominee for vice president. As an ambitious and athletic millennial who surfs and grows her own food with her boyfriend, a cryptocurrency software developer she met at Burning Man, the 38-year-old attorney brings a woman’s presence, and youthful energy, to a race dominated by octogenarian men, not to mention the 70-year-old Kennedy. And as the former wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, the seventh richest man in the world, Shanahan brings another factor crucial to the campaign: unfathomably deep pockets. Her backing enables Kennedy to skirt questions about why the notoriously anti-immigration GOP megadonor Timothy Mellon is financing the super PAC supporting Kennedy’s campaign, American Values. Mellon has poured millions into Trump’s Make America Great Again Inc., while donating $53 million in stock to the state of Texas to build the former president’s border wall.

As an aside, shouldn't the RFK Jr.-curious be concerned about the loot he's getting from MAGA megadonor Timothy Mellon? 🤔

Back to Shanahan...

So how did Shanahan end up on a “spoiler” ticket praised by right-wing ideologues like Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn and Roger Stone, the notorious GOP mischief-maker who called an alliance between Kennedy and Trump his “dream ticket”?

The turning point in her life came in 2020, she says in an Instagram video, when (daughter) Echo was diagnosed with autism. The Daily Beast claims that Shanahan “chafed at Brin’s left-brain thinking” about the best practices for raising a child on the spectrum, and the Google co-founder filed divorce papers shortly thereafter, citing “irreconcilable differences.” She initially contested their prenuptial agreement and sought $1 billion of Brin’s fortune but eventually settled out of court.

"Left-brain thinking" is often a euphemism for being logical and analytical. In other words: rational. Rationality is not a strong point for conspiracy freaks.

But while she claims that world-class experts keep her apprised of cutting-edge autism research, her ideas about her daughter’s condition seem stuck in the 1990s; during that era, actress Jenny McCarthy was hailed as an autism expert, and Andrew Wakefield triggered a global panic about vaccines with the publication of a paper in The Lancet linking autism to vaccines. That paper was later retracted after multiple investigations found it based on fraudulent data and riddled with conflicts of interest.

So Nicole Shanahan is fixated on a debunked and retracted article from three decades ago.

For somebody who is allegedly concerned about her autistic daughter, why is she the running mate for a candidate who calls people with autism "zombies"?

And you wouldn’t know it from listening to Kennedy, who routinely caricatures people on the spectrum as “vaccine-injured” zombies. “They get the shot ... and three months later, their brain is gone,” Kennedy told an audience in 2015. Insisting that previous generations of autistic people simply never existed—when in truth, they were often hidden away in institutions because of a thoroughly discredited theory that autism is caused by bad parenting—the candidate told radio and TV host Michael Smerconish last year: “I have never in my life seen a man my age with full-blown autism, not once. Where are these men? One out of every 22 men who are walking around the mall with helmets on, who are non-toilet-trained, nonverbal, stimming, toe-walking, hand-flapping. I’ve never seen it.”

RFK Jr. is intent on being the 2024 version of Ralph Nader. In 2020 Nader, as the Green Party candidate for president, hoodwinked enough gullible progressives into voting for him so that he helped George W. Bush take Florida – the deciding state in the 2000 election. Bush then gifted the US with two recessions (including the Great one), two wars (one totally unnecessary and one which could have been avoided if he had paid more attention to terrorism), two rightwing appointees to the Supreme Court (one bad, one horrendous), and two rounds of tax breaks for the filthy rich.

One way to undermine RFK J.'s support among some people on the left is to strongly debunk his autism vaccine conspiracy theory.

Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) at the University of Pennsylvania published a new survey showing that 12% of Americans feel that a link between the MMR vaccine is either definitely true or probably true.

False Belief in MMR Vaccine-Autism Link Endures as Measles Threat Persists