Season finale of Last Week Tonight

The show had its last episode on Sunday before going on hiatus until February. The show’s seasons usually end with a splashy finale but given the current situation, this one was weirdly interesting. The end of it reminded me of a scene from the film Michael Clayton with George Clooney but that was not popular enough to be worth alluding to and I am open to other suggestions.

I also find it interesting that the film 2001: A Space Odyssey has had such a major cultural impact that hearing the Strauss waltz The Blue Danube no longer brings to my mind people swirling around in elegant outfits in a huge ballroom but instead suggests some kind of event on a cosmic scale is about to occur.

John Oliver examines One American News

Donald Trump and his supporters have soured on Fox News because they think that apart from Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham, the rest of the hosts were not sufficiently supportive of Trump and not enthusiastic enough is peddling his lies that the election was stolen from him. As a result they are seeking even more extreme news sources and one that is becoming popular is a cable news outfit called One America News.

About seven months ago, John Oliver took an in-depth look at OAN.

Estimating crowd sizes is tricky

The National Parks Service used to issue estimates of the sizes of crowds at various public events but stopped doing so after getting hammered on all sides, both by those who wanted larger figures and those who wanted smaller ones. So now there are no ‘official’ crowd sizes, enabling anyone to make any claim that suits their purposes. Take for example, the Million Maga March in support of Trump held in Washington DC last Sunday. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany excitedly tweeted that a million people had actually turned up, while Trump initially claimed hundreds of thousands and later said tens of thousands.
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Trump is really going bonkers

In the latest move during the current purge of people in Trump’s administration, he has fired the person who said that the recent election was the most secure in US history. (I wrote about the official expecting to be fired two days days ago.)

Trump fired Christopher Krebs, who served as the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa), in a tweet on Tuesday, saying Krebs “has been terminated” and that his recent statement defending the security of the election was “highly inaccurate”.

The firing of Krebs, a Trump appointee, comes as Trump is refusing to recognize the victory of the president-elect, Joe Biden, and removing high-level officials seen as insufficiently loyal. He fired Mark Esper, the defense secretary, on 9 November part of a broader shake-up that put Trump loyalists in senior Pentagon positions.

Krebs had indicated he expected to be fired. Last week, his agency released a statement refuting claims of widespread voter fraud. “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history,” the statement read. “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

Krebs, a former Microsoft executive, ran the agency, known as Cisa, from its creation in the wake of Russian interference with the 2016 election through the November election. He won bipartisan praise as Cisa coordinated federal state and local efforts to defend electoral systems from foreign or domestic interference.

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How false claims of election fraud spread

Trump campaign has had a bad 72 hours in courts in their efforts to challenge the results by arguing that there was widespread fraud.

Since Friday, state and federal judges in Pennsylvania have rejected Trump’s challenges to small batches of ballots ranging from the hundreds to the low thousands; Biden leads Pennsylvania by more than 68,000 votes, according to Decision Desk HQ. Judges have also undermined some of the legal theories that underpin the campaign’s effort to stop Pennsylvania from officially declaring that President-elect Joe Biden won the state.

The morning after Election Day, Trump declared that he would take the election to the Supreme Court, invoking the image of another Bush v. Gore, when the justices halted a ballot recount in Florida that handed the 2000 election to former president George W. Bush. Two weeks later, the legal landscape does not look at all like 2000. Trump would have to find legal paths to flip multiple states that Biden won, and the only case pending before the Supreme Court involves the fate of the 10,000 absentee ballots that arrived in Pennsylvania after Election Day.

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Time is rapidly running out for Q and QAnon and Trump

I am curious as to what is going to happen to the QAnon movement now. As readers know, these are people who think that there is someone at the top levels of government with high-level security clearance (possibly Donald Trump himself) who uses the pseudonym Q to drop hints as to what is going on behind the scenes. As a result, QAnon followers believe that the top echelons of the Democratic party consist of pedophiles, sex-traffickers, and even those who eat children and that Trump has a plan to flush out and arrest them in a spectacular denouement. They have been eagerly waiting for this moment. And waiting. And waiting. But like Godot (or perhaps more appropriately, Guffman), Q has so far not revealed themselves and the prediction have so far failed to materialize.
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Michele Bachmann urges her god to use his iron rod

One of my favorite wackos, former Minnesota congresswoman and seeker of the Republican nomination for president in 2012 Michele Bachmann, has tweeted out a video of her praying, urging her god to bring out his iron rod and smite the delusions of the forces of evil arrayed against Trump who are trying to defeat him. It is likely that she does not have a dirty mind like mine and is thus oblivious to the double entendre.

The parodies mocking Trump begin in earnest

It has been a while since I posted any of the Downfall Hitler parody memes but you knew that the parallels between Trump hunkered down in the White House wondering what the hell he can do and Hitler in his bunker during his last days offered too many ripe opportunities to resist. This is one that really captures what I think is likely going through his mind.

Trump is still in denial and tweeting away that he has still won and that all will be revealed soon.

Meanwhile the landscaping company whose back lot was used for Giuliani’s hilarious press conference is now hawking merchandize making fun of the whole thing.

Four Seasons Total Landscaping – a Philadelphia groundskeeping company situated between a crematorium and a sex shop where on Saturday Rudy Giuliani somehow held a press conference about baseless claims of voter fraud – has swiftly sought to cash in on its newfound fame, selling merchandise emblazoned with Trump-inspired puns.

“MAKE AMERICA RAKE AGAIN”, read one sticker on sale on the company website on Monday. It also featured the phrase “LAWN AND ORDER!” The stickers were selling for $5 each.