Mr Trump demanded on Thursday via Twitter that election officials “STOP THE COUNT!”, and later wrote that “ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!”

Campaign spokesman Jason Miller said Mr Trump did not want ballots that arrived by mail to continue to be counted. An estimated 65 million Americans used postal ballots.

Mr Trump is against voting by mail because data shows more Democrats use it than Republicans, who preferred to wait for election day. He also spent months discrediting postal votes, and urging his supporters to turn out on November 3 itself.

• Related: What Trump may do in the final days of presidency

On Saturday (local time), Mr Trump’s preferred social network – Twitter – warned of the veracity of his claims after he declared himself the winner of the election. That was despite leading US media organisations predicting a Biden victory.

“Some or all of the content shared in this tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process” is a warning note the platform has added to many of Mr Trump’s tweets since then.

However, Mr Trump has continued to allege irregularities in voting and in the scrutiny, despite a lack of evidence.

He has also claimed observers have not been allowed to witness the count and – repeatedly – that he won the election.

Twitter flagged also flagged these posts.

Elsewhere, the nonpartisan Centre for Presidential Transition is urging the General Services Administration to certify Mr Biden as the winner of the 2020 election and begin the presidential transition process.

The group, which advises incoming administrations, has written a letter pushing for the Trump administration and Biden campaign to begin work on an orderly White House transition.

“We urge the Trump administration to immediately begin the post-election transition process and the Biden team to take full advantage of the resources available under the Presidential Transition Act,” it said.

“This was a hard-fought campaign, but history is replete with examples of presidents who emerged from such campaigns to graciously assist their successors.”

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/world/us-news/us-election/2020/11/09/us-election-donald-trump-biden/

See toon at top.

From the SMH, 9/11/2020

When all the recounts and lawsuits are done, Joe Biden almost certainly will be the next president. Yet Donald Trump has every right to challenge that — and Democrats have no excuse for raging about it.

Biden’s apparent Electoral College lead would require Trump to erase leads of tens of thousands of votes in at least three states — which won’t happen unless the president can show a lot more wrongdoing than he has so far.

But he has every right to try: Contesting results is part of democracy, one Democrats have done many times in recent elections. Al Gore’s 2000 effort in Florida left the election unresolved until Dec. 12. And other Dems demanded recounts in Wisconsin and Michigan in 2016, along with other lawsuits.

Heck, most Democrats still pretend Stacey Abrams “really” won the 2018 governor’s race in Georgia, evidence be damned.

And most of the party still won’t accept the 2016 results, regularly claiming that election was stolen with help from Russia.

Nancy Pelosi and all the rest who’ve encouraged that belief have no excuse now for insisting that Republicans tell Trump to give up. As we’ve noted, Trump’s extreme rhetoric now makes him look bad — as bad as Nancy Pelosi and all the other leading Democrats who’ve been making mirror-image crazy claims for the last four years.

Read more:

https://nypost.com/2020/11/10/trumps-bid-to-shift-the-election-may-be-hopeless-but-dems-have-done-it-since-2016/

by George Liebmann

Only the unobservant will be startled by the recent announcement by the Mellon Foundation of its appropriation of $250 million for a “Monuments Project: Building the Commemorative Landscape for the 21st Century” on October 11. This is said to be the “largest initiative in the foundation’s fifty year history.”

If this allocation were devoted to the creation of new monuments to inspiring but neglected figures, there could be no objection to it. As Maryland’s Senate President Emeritus, Thomas V. Mike Miller recently observed, we need more monuments, not fewer of them. In an increasingly collectivist age, it is useful for the young to be reminded of the difference individuals can make, and for the middle-aged to be given the hope that their achievements will be indelibly memorialized.

But construction of new monuments is not, one fears, the focus of this new endeavor. The first grant announced from the $250 million is one of $4 million for a “National Monuments Audit,” to be accompanied by a “concurrent database of reported protest activities tied to monuments.” An additional $1 million is allocated for “ten Monument Lab field offices” that will “re-imagine monuments,” including the “relocation or re-thinking of existing monuments.”

Most citizens are unaware that their built landscape, the product of centuries of accretion, is to be “audited” by largely anonymous teams of activists nominated by philanthropoids from New York and equipped with a large budget for what is euphemistically called “re-location” but which generally means disappearance. This disrespect for local opinion and aspiration to rule from afar is in itself unattractive; one is reminded of the mantra of one of the first and greatest of the neo-conservatives, the late Sidney Hook, who once declared: “Heresy, yes; conspiracy, no!”

There stands outside my apartment building in Baltimore a conspicuous empty plinth, a suitable monument to intellectual vacuousness, which once supported a sad-eyed and tragic depiction of Chief Justice Roger Taney. This was removed at the instance of our since-jailed mayor, without a required hearing before the City Council, after a vote by a narrow majority by a Commission on Confederate Monuments appointed to by-pass existing review commissions on Municipal Art and on Historic Preservation. Never mind that Taney was a Unionist who did not follow his colleague Justice Campbell to the South, that he manumitted the slaves he inherited, that his justifiably infamous activist Dred Scott decision was motivated by a desire not to perpetuate slavery but to forestall civil war, and that the monument was erected not by Confederate memorialists but by Henry Walters, one of Baltimore’s great civic benefactors, and that those attending its dedication included prominent citizens imprisoned during the Civil War in defiance of Justice Taney’s attempt to vindicate the writ of habeas corpus in the Ex parte Merryman case, some of whom had been advocates of emancipation and defenders of the rights of free blacks.

No one wants context where there are “protest activities”; one of the municipal officials involved vindicated disappearance of the monument on the ground that it might otherwise be subjected to vandalism, public vandalism thus being preferred to the private variety.

It is clear that this sort of activity is what the Mellon grant is designed to support. It was one of five foundations (with total assets of $34 billion) contributing to the disappearance, with the help of another politically correct mayor, of four monuments in New Orleans. Three of these were to Confederate officials, Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and P. T. S. Beauregard. The fourth explicitly commemorated the restoration of ‘white supremacy’ by the temporary overthrow of a military-imposed government.

One can understand the resentment of blacks and some well-intentioned others at these commemorations. But there are nuances lost even here. Jefferson Davis was a fanatic, who favored the continuation of guerilla warfare after Appomattox. But a treason prosecution of him was abandoned for fear of his acquittal, the non-existence of a right of secession being far from clear before the Civil War. Robert E. Lee had not joined the Confederacy on its establishment, but only when his own state seceded after Lincoln’s call for troops to coerce the seceding states, and he forestalled continuation of the war after the surrender. The monument to the restoration of white supremacy was also a monument to the restoration of self-government, however deplorable the purposes to which it was put. The South was bitter and ruined when these monuments were erected, its infrastructure damaged, its economy subjected to the Republican protective tariff, its leadership class at least temporarily proscribed, most of its personal property confiscated without compensation, and its governments emerging from alien rule sustained by a formerly slave populace that was, though through no fault of its own, 90% illiterate. Along with the monuments, this context is sought to be expunged from memory. In Baltimore, a new interpretive plaque was not enough for the fanatics; any appreciation of Taney’s life, achievements,  and motivations had to be completely expunged.

The purpose here, sought to be so systematically advanced, is that anticipated in George Orwell’s 1984, where “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been re-written, every picture has been re-painted, every statue or street or building has been re-named, every date has been altered. And that process has been continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless Present in which the Party is always right.”

I was curious as to what sort of Board of Directors approved the Mellon project. I was not surprised that it consisted of the late sixties generation come to power. The President and four of the other eleven other board members are Afro-American; one of the others is Richard Brodhead, former President of Duke who was noted for his acquiescence to pressure group demands in his handling of the Duke Lacrosse case. Remarkably enough, the presidents of three of the four other foundations, the Ford, Rockefeller and Kellogg Foundations cooperating in the removal of the New Orleans monuments are Afro-American, as are 5 of 16 directors at Ford, 4 of 16 at Kellogg, and 5 of 13 at Rockefeller. This progress on the part of a once-oppressed 13% minority should be gratifying to all good citizens. The difficulty is that the demands for tolerance and understanding on the part of these recruits to the American nomenklatura appear to be directed ever outward, never inward. Inspection of foundation board composition discloses a pattern of aggravated incest.

It is rather astonishing that Mellon, which bills itself as “the largest supporter of the arts and humanities in the U.S.” should, at a time when symphony orchestras, museums, and theaters are fighting for survival in the coronavirus crisis, be giving its largest-ever grant to what is, in its most visible activities, a work of destruction.

It is also remarkable that an American elite given to virtue-signaling should be devoting so much of its energy to the co-opting of Afro-Americans onto non-profit boards and into the student bodies and faculties of elite universities while, as in 1968, huge percentages of Afro-American young men, for want of better employment opportunities, are relegated to participation in the drug-dealing underworld. Scarcely a dime of the resources of Mellon and the other large foundations is devoted to the promotion of vocational education, once urged by such as Booker T. Washington and William Howard Taft. As a recent study has shown, the leading foundations devoted more than a billion dollars to support of studies and advocacy groups promoting ‘gay rights’ while agitating scarcely at all for de-funding the drug underworld through legalization or reviving the Civilian Conservation Corps.

When the Rockefeller Foundation applied for a federal charter, it was refused by President Taft and his trust-busting Attorney General, George Wickersham, the latter decrying “an indefinite scheme for perpetuating vast wealth…entirely inconsistent with the public interest.” As a study by the present writer demonstrated as long ago as 1962, American foundations have long since abandoned uncontroversial activities such as medical research, largely yielded to government. Instead they have ventured ever more deeply into the domain of politics. The Ford Foundation in the era of Mc George Bundy, an American Grand Master (along with Justice Frank Murphy and Defense Secretary Robert Mc Namara, of the art of ‘failing upward’) sponsored two misbegotten initiatives: New York City regional school boards, designed as a sandbox for rising minority politicians, and endowment of La Raza to organize the previously quiescent Hispanic population. The former gave rise to militant teachers unions, the latter to formalized identity politics, as shown in the late Georgie Ann Geyer’s Americans No More.

The most somber prophet of modern totalitarianism, Jacob Burckhardt, wrote that in the wake of the Paris Commune, “there are everywhere good, splendid, liberal people who do not quite know the boundaries of right and wrong and where the duty of resistance and defense begins. It is these men who open the doors and level the paths for the terrible masses everywhere.” “A new element has entered politics,” he added, “a thoroughness that former conquerors knew nothing of, or at least made no conscious use of. They try to humiliate the conquered as deeply as possible in his own eyes, so that in the future he shall not rise again to any self-confidence.”

The last serious examination of the political activities of foundations was the congressional Reece Committee that proposed and imposed some restrictions on them, since diluted, in 1954. There is need for another Reece Committee, one more detached and less partisan, from which foundation-aided personnel should be rigorously excluded.

George Liebmann is the author of several books on law and politics, most recently America’s Political Inventors (Bloomsbury 2019).

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-taliban-come-to-america-disguised-as-philanthropoids/

Read from top.

Imagine 2037... Will the world have improved on the 2020 crap? Will we remember Joe Biden as the saviour of the planet or for his mega failure? Will we remember the Trump years like we cry in pain about the Tony Abbott years? What about those lying bastards, Tony Blair, Bush and Howard? Will we remember them as the war criminals they were?... Will we find out who really killed JFK? Would the dorks leading the countries of this wild planet then — and I mean WILD, in the sense of human crazy, because the wildlife will be a footnote on the page of our hysterical history — be the present youngsters with placards chastising our inaction on global warming, that became the lord masters who own windmills, solar panels and perovskite industrial complexes, lithium mines plus bicycle shopping centres?...

Will people care?... Read from top.

Chinese entrepreneur sells pensive Donald Trump Buddha statues

One buyer says he bought statue of former US president on Taobao as reminder not to be ‘too Trump’

Donald Trump is not known for his calm and peaceful demeanour, but that hasn’t stopped one entrepreneurial furniture-maker in China from casting a statue of the former US president in a pose more readily associated with the Buddha.

The Trump Buddha statue, listed on the Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao, is priced at 999 Chinese yuan (£110 GBP/$150 USD) for the small version, which measures 1.6 metres tall. A larger version, listed as 4.6 metres tall, is available for 3,999 yuan (£440/$610).

The statue, with Trump’s hands folded in his laps, thumbs pointing outwards, is a pose from Buddhist art that signifies meditation and contemplation, something the 74-year-old has had more time for since leaving the White House in January for his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Florida.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/10/donald-trump-buddha-statue-china-taobao

Read from top...

...

For most of her career as a Bible teacher, Ms. Moore, 63, avoided the culture and political battles that consumed the attention of many prominent evangelical men. She wrote extremely popular study guides focused on particular books of the Bible. And she spoke to arenas full of evangelical women about matters both spiritual and personal, mining biblical texts for lessons in purpose and encouragement.

But Ms. Moore has described the election of 2016 as a turning point. She began speaking out after the “Access Hollywood” tape, released just weeks before the election, captured Mr. Trump bragging about forcing himself on women.

Since then, she has become increasingly outspoken online and has exerted her authority and power in new ways that have challenged the male-dominated culture of evangelicalism.

In 2018, she published a letter to her “brothers in Christ” sharing her bruising experiences with sexism as a female leader in the conservative Christian world. On Twitter, where she now has more than 950,000 followers, she has denounced Christian nationalism, the “demonic stronghold” of white supremacy and “the sexism & misogyny that is rampant in segments of the SBC.”

Ms. Moore has become a kind of lightning rod for critics of the Southern Baptist Convention from the right. In 2019, an offhand online remark from Ms. Moore about speaking at a Sunday morning service on Mother’s Day set off a sprawling evangelical debate about whether women should be allowed to preach in church. One California megachurch pastor told her to “go home.”

Within the denomination, her departure has so far been greeted largely by either silence or measured regret.

“I have loved and appreciated Beth Moore’s ministry and will continue to in the future,” the denomination’s president, J.D. Greear, said in a statement. Mr. Greear said he hoped the news of Ms. Moore’s departure would cause the denomination to “lament,” pray and rededicate itself to core values.

“It saddens me to hear from those like Beth who no longer feel at home within our convention,” Ronnie Floyd, the president and chief executive of the denomination’s executive committee, said in a statement.

An assistant to Ms. Moore at her Houston-based ministry said she had no further comment beyond her interview with Religion News Service. Ms. Moore told the news service she had recently ended her longtime publishing relationship with Lifeway Christian Resources, the denomination’s publishing arm. She suggested that her writing and speaking career would continue, though she expected that her audiences might be smaller for a while.

Ms. Moore has also publicly supported others critical of conservative evangelicalism from within. This week Mr. Tisby, the president of the Black Christian collective, described on a podcast for the first time his experiences of racism in white evangelical communities. His testimony was part of a campaign called #LeaveLoud, to tell the stories of Black Christians leaving evangelical spaces. Ms. Moore replied to him on Twitter.

“Jemar, one of the most powerful podcasts I’ve ever heard,” she said, adding: “You will be a hero to your descendants. And you are one of mine.”

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/10/us/beth-moore-southern-baptists.html

Read from top.

Gus is a rabid atheist.