End it. End it now

Every morning now I get up and check the election returns, groan in disgust, and never look again until the next day. The first day or two, yes, it was ambiguous, the counts were incomplete, it was a close contest and it’s fair to avoid calling it for one or the other. That’s not the case anymore, though — the ineluctability of the math means it’s clear that Biden wins Pennsylvania, tacking 20 electoral college votes onto the 253 he already has, pushing him over the 270 vote threshold and making him the president-elect.

However, the television networks, which have somehow become the final arbiter of our electoral process, have been reluctant to declare an end to the four antic years of the reality TV presidency. Maybe they fear losing my once-a-day click on their news sites (because they will; I never want to hear from CNN or FoxNews ever again). Even the newspapers seem to regret that Trump’s chances are “fading”.

I know my country is afraid of math, but it’s kind of unavoidable when you’re tallying up the votes of a few hundred million people. Accept it. Only now are the news media, cowards that they are, beginning to question the wisdom of airing Trump’s lies. Hey, maybe post-election, Twitter will finally attain a spine sufficiently rigid to finally ban Trump’s racist ass, as they finally did Bannon.

Also, while I’m speaking of math and counting the hordes, I’m tired of the claim that Pennsylvania is going to win this for the Biden/Harris camp. It is only a quirk of the timing of the count and variations in election law that mean Pennsylvania might carry this one across the finish line — the whole country had to struggle and work together to barely eject the fascist/racist slug.

Another reason to end it now: the Republican cheaters are working hard to call any results into question. A couple of QAnon supporters were caught trying to smuggle a truckload of fake ballots into Philadelphia. You know they were going to try to blame the Democrats for ballot fraud, it’s just that they were caught doing it first.

Two armed Virginia men who were arrested Thursday outside the Philadelphia Convention Center were “coming to deliver a truck full of fake ballots” to the city, CNN affiliate KYW reported, citing prosecutors.

The center is one of the places where election workers have been counting votes from the 2020 general election, which includes the race for president.

Text messages reveal that the men were concerned about the tallying of votes at the convention center, prosecutors said, according to KYW.

Right. Because bringing fake ballots to the election center is exactly the thing to alleviate people’s concerns.

Both men were carrying loaded handguns, and police found an AR-type rifle in the Hummer, authorities said at a news conference Friday. About 160 rounds of ammunition were found in the weapons and the vehicle, authorities said.

We need to end this election farce because at some point we’re going to have to confront the seditious armed militias and conspiracy theorists who have rallied behind the worst president ever.

Almost tempted

I hear distant echoes of a possible Biden/Harris victory, but I refuse to believe it until the hammer drops and the evil orange turd is declared a loser, and fired. Until then, I’ll just read The Rude Pundit’s take.

I gotta tell you: I watched Trump’s appearance today in the White House press room with enough burning schadenfreude to power a small city. As much as I wanted to be appalled and saddened and enraged, mostly what I thought was “Suffer, motherfucker.” If Biden ends up winning, as almost everyone seems to believe he will, this excruciating ballot count will have been worth it because Donald Fucking Trump was dragged down into the shit he created, watching it all fall apart. Sure, a swift ending would have been preferable, but this is so obviously tearing his tiny brain and his titanic ego to shreds that I’ll take it.

I’m almost tempted to tune into the preznit’s Twitter feed or to watch one of his press appearances just to see the meltdown in progress, but I shall resist. Get him out first, then let’s sweep out the rest of the slime.

But I’m not celebrating yet. I’ve witnessed too many years of Republican ratfucking.

The Woke are gonna get you!

The Right is trying their best to invent imaginary enemies. They’ve been whining about Antifa™ for a while now, worrying over their growing membership rolls, and how their leadership was scheming to overthrow everything they love, when antifa is actually nothing but a loose sentiment, with no formal structure and no hierarchy of bosses running the show. Conservatives just can’t imagine any movement without a rigid hierarchy, so they conjure one up in their fever dreams.

It makes me wonder…would the atheist movement be in better shape if no one had tried to pretend it was at all structured? No President of Atheism, no Four Horsemen, just people who thought for themselves? As soon as a pretense of leadership appeared, they formed a target and started exposing themselves and everything went downhill.

Anyway, the increasingly ridiculous James Lindsay has started blaming everything on a scary phantasm, The Woke or Wokeness.

He thinks that if Joe Biden gets the presidency, it will be an expansion of the Woke’s tentacles of power. Joe Biden. I don’t know. If I were trying to imagine a King of the Wokes, it wouldn’t be an old white centrist Democrat who has been grasping for the presidency for decades. He isn’t even a Jewish billionaire! How are you going to motivate your legion of neo-Nazis if the figurehead you’re targeting is as cluelessly Aryan as they are?

Lindsay also thinks The Woke are a concrete, formal organization with finances and funding run by religious fanatics.

Yeah, right. That’s simply palpable paranoia and projection, and it’s ironic that Lindsay himself is a bought and paid for tool of Michael O’Fallon, Catholic reactionary, and his Sovereign Nations grift.

I wonder…have I been triple-dipping as a Captain (ret.) of Atheism™, foot soldier of Antifa™, and now, Padre of Wokeism™? Why aren’t I rich yet? Maybe my salary is just late this decade. I hope it gets here in time for the Raging Twenties, coming soon!

America’s Mayor, everyone!

Creepy Uncle Rudy is nuts.

I’m convinced. I didn’t vote for Hunter Biden, fortunately, and think presidents shouldn’t be promoting their unqualified relatives to positions of high influence and power. That would be bad. Maybe they shouldn’t ask raving loonies to work on their re-election campaigns.

Democrats need fire in their bellies now

There is a good collection of hard-hitting political videos at this independent site. They go for the gut, punching hard at how awful Trump’s policies are, and where his decisions are taking us.

Why aren’t the Democrats fighting as fiercely as the people they expect to vote for them? I just can’t picture Pelosi or Schumer campaigning for their party with this same anger; I can’t imagine Biden doing it either.

Are you ready for disappointment and betrayal?

Even if the Democrats win the election, don’t expect much of a change.

Joe Biden’s transition team is vetting a handful of Republicans for potential Cabinet positions — despite doubts it will win him new support from the right and the risk it will enrage the left.

Reaching across the aisle to pick senior members of his administration could shore up Biden’s credentials as a unity candidate, a message he’s made a cornerstone of his campaign. Past presidents including George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have all done the same. But that tradition died with President Donald Trump, and liberal Democrats are already warning that a Republican pick, even a moderate one, could sow distrust within the party before Biden even takes office.

It’s bad enough that we’re settling for a tepid centrist Democrat, but if he caves to that degree, I hope he’s ready to be primaried so hard and to be a one-term president.

The October surprise!

It’s here! Rudy Giuliani has it. Hunter Biden, who is not running for office, is claimed to have left incriminating evidence of terrible crimes on a hard drive.

“The process was that the laptop was left by Hunter Biden, in an inebriated, heavily inebriated state with the merchant,” Giuliani told conservative radio host David Webb of SiriusXM Patriot 125 on Thursday. “The merchant fixed the laptop, tried to reach out to Hunter Biden, and Hunter Biden never came back for it. The document that I have signed by Hunter Biden says that after 90 days, the hard drive is abandoned, and becomes the property of the merchant.”

The shop owner told the New York Post that he had given a copy of the computer’s hard drive to Giuliani, who later provided a copy of the drive to the tabloid earlier in October. The New York Post subsequently published some of the contents in the hard drive on Wednesday, including an email that spoke of potentially setting up a meeting between a senior official from Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings, where he sat on the board, and his father, former Vice President Joe Biden.

Uh, OK. So Hunter Biden got drunk, left a broken laptop at a repair shop, and forgot about it, so the repair shop owner gets possession and passes it on to the always credible Giuliani, who sits on it for 6 months and is now trickling out little bits info while promising that the remainder proves that Hunter Biden is owned by China.

Weak sauce.

A better surprise is that Rudy Giuliani’s daughter, Caroline, has repudiated her father’s politics.

If being the daughter of a polarizing mayor who became the president’s personal bulldog has taught me anything, it is that corruption starts with “yes-men” and women, the cronies who create an echo chamber of lies and subservience to maintain their proximity to power. We’ve seen this ad nauseam with Trump and his cadre of high-level sycophants (the ones who weren’t convicted, anyway).

What inspires me most about Vice President Biden is that he is not afraid to surround himself with people who disagree with him. Choosing Senator Harris, who challenged him in the primary, speaks volumes about what an inclusive president he will be. Biden is willing to incorporate the views of progressive-movement leaders like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on issues like universal health care, student debt relief, prison reform, and police reform. And he is capable of reaching across the aisle to find moments of bipartisanship. The very notion of “bipartisanship” may seem painfully ludicrous right now, but we need a path out of impenetrable gridlock and vicious sniping. In Joe Biden, we’ll have a leader who prioritizes common ground and civility over alienation, bullying, and scorched-earth tactics.

Do people still listen to Giuliani? He’s terrible.

“smashing you in the face with a gourd full of spiders”

Why do you have to ruin this pitch-perfect rant about the election by dissing spiders, Cody? That one line hurt, you know.

The rest, though, is spot on. Biden sucks, but we’ve got to vote for him.

I won’t be able to watch the election returns on 3 November. Because of the electoral college, and the corruption, and the rat-fucking Republicans, and the poisoning of the courts with unqualified evil jerks, I don’t have that much confidence that Trump will be thrown out of office.

The Raccoons of the Resistance have a realistic perspective

As long as they can avoid getting all duckist.

Yes! Recognize the flaws in our democracy, but the first step in correcting them is to vote for a party that isn’t amplifying them. It’s a tiny step, and don’t assume voting for Biden fixes anything — it’s just the beginning of the fight.

The choice also ought to be easy for any reasonable person: that other party is the home of QAnon, the emerging prion disease that is eating brains softened by decades of Republican propaganda. QAnon alone is the one issue that ought to resolve the debate for any atheist (not you, David Silverman), because that crap is one terrifying cult.