- A recent poll shows 77% of those who voted for Trump, believe the election was stolen via fraudulent means. Something similar happened in Germany after WWI. Conservatives were spreading lies that Germany did not lose the war which many believed. Hitler seized upon these lies, enflaming Nationalist fervor, threatening scapegoats like Social Democrats and Jews, and eventually taking power in 1933. Trump’s lies are currently undermining democracy in similar ways.
- If Trump goes to Georgia to campaign for Republicans in the Senate runoff elections, and he continues to rant about fraudulent and rigged elections in that state, Republicans will be less likely to come out to vote or mail in a ballot thus swinging the election to two underdog Democrats and thereby flipping the Senate Blue. Once again, Trump’s rhetoric and actions may backfire.
- Many of the people who voted against Trump either then voted for Republicans down ballot or didn’t vote for anyone except Joe Biden. These were probably Republicans who truly opposed Donald Trump and split their votes to stay loyal to Republicans down ballot. Given his clinical narcissism, I don’t think Trump wants to acknowledge that.
- It is unlikely Donald Trump will run again in 2024, although he has given indication that he might just do that. This self described “winner” will not wish to risk losing again. Also, he will be 78 years old, and will not have the advantage of running against someone as hated as he was. The RNC and most Republicans beyond his cult followers will want nothing to do with Trump, given his impulsive, Twitter approach to governance. And too, he may be in jail by then, or deceased. They finally jailed Al Capone on tax evasion. Trump may suffer the same fate.
- Contrary to Trump’s false allegations, Joe Biden won this election by a larger margin than most presidential candidates in history.
- Donald Trump is currently trying to sabotage Joe Biden’s transition to power and make it difficult for him to set the country on a course to recovery and health. Consequently thousands more could die or be thrown into despair and poverty. That sounds like treason in my book.
- It is likely that Trump knew about and allowed this assassination in Iran to happen to put Biden in a tough position to negotiate with the Iranians after he takes office. In this light, this assassination is criminal, reckless, irresponsible, immoral, and typical of Trump’s style of revenge at the expense of others.
- As a result of the recount in Wisconsin, President-elect Biden’s lead over President Trump grew by 87 votes. Under state law, Trump was required to foot the bill for the partial recount — meaning his campaign paid $3 million only to see Biden’s lead expand.
- Trump is a compulsive lier as the courts have recently verified. Here’s a piece from HuffPost, reporting from Fox News (right, that Fox News!) a report that exposes Trump’s desperate moves to delegitimize Biden’s election victory. “FOX HOST PULLS APART PRESIDENT’S LIES Fox News host Eric Shawn on Sunday debunked election disinformation that President Donald Trump disgorged hours earlier on the same network in his first live interview since the election. Shawn pointed out that Trump’s campaign has failed to prove any of his accusations in court, and invited Axios political reporter Hans Nichols to help dismantle many of Trump’s bogus claims, including that ballots counted after the initial tallies on election night were somehow fraudulent.”
- Trump’s campaign is in debt, and to pay that debt down, he has deceived his supporters into thinking their current donations are being used to reverse the election results. They are not. Donations to the RNC are being used to pay down RNC and possibly Trump’s personal debt. During a time of pandemic hardship when every dollar of one’s family is critical to that family’s budget, Trump, the loser of the election, is scamming his supporters for more money to pay his debts.
- As we approach 280,000 Covid-19 deaths, Trump was out playing a full round of golf on Thanksgiving Day. Fore right!
Archives for November 2020
The Breakable News (sort of)Exclusive Interview with DJT
Breakable lucked into an interview recently with guess who? The President-unelect Donald J. Trump. Our sports correspondent Mike C.R.O. Weatherbee happened to be out looking for lost golf balls in the woods off Trump’s golf course in Virginia when His Concede-less happened along in his gasoline powered golf cart.
Mike W: Mr President, a word please.
DJT: Sure, I know you. You’re with that Breakable News that I think is on my side, but sometimes I wonder. Hop in the cart here.
MW: I’ve been wanting to ask you. Many think you lost the election, but you say you’ve won. What’s up with that?
DJT: Pretty straight forward, Mike. As I’ve said all along from right after my inauguration four years ago, except for when I win, elections in this country are rigged, what with all the mail order ballots, and allowing people to vote without showing their birth certificates. I mean how do we know they’re Americans. Biggest fraud in the history of this great country. Whatever happened to elections that ended on Election Day. No more counting, period. Any mail order votes come in, they’re illegal. So I won, Big Time. Landslide. Get it. I’m still the President and that’s that. Besides, I’ve got Rudy in court as we speak. I instructed him to Ditch the Dye and go natural, like me.
MW: Isn’t that mail-in ballots, sir, and I believe you mailed one in yourself?
DJT: That’s nasty, Mike. Mail-in, mail order. What’s the difference? You’re either with me or you’re with me on this. Anymore questions? I’m a busy man. I’ve got nine more holes to play before dinner, and I never miss dinner. Hey, you know what we’re having tonight? The turkey I pardoned today. Ha! Ha! That’s off the record, mind you. If you publish that Mike, you’re fired!
MW: But I don’t work for you, Mr. President.
DJT: You do now. I’m making you Secretary of State. Put out your right hand and repeat after me.
MW: I’m not sure I…
DJT: Don’t “not sure” me, it’s official. I’ll get Mitch to fast-track it and I’ll tweet your appointment tonight. You like to travel? Lots of perks with this job. Your first mission is Russia. Give Putin anything he wants. Clear?
MW: But…but.
DJT: Gotta go, Breakable Mike. Get the hell off the cart. What the hell were you doing in those woods anyway? See you later for dinner and wear a frigging tie for God’s sake. Mitch’ll be there, and Miss Coney Island too, for the swearing in ceremony.
And there you have it faithful faithless readers. You heard it first here on these pages: the up to the minute account of the goings on of our lamest of our lame duck presidents from our sports correspondent Mike CRO Weatherbee who is now apparently…the Secretary of State.!
Next week we’re hoping for an interview with Lying Mike Flynn, who was just given a full pardon by the president and appointed Chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee (which is hard to do because Flynn is not even a Senator, but Trump wrote an EO authorizing McConnell to change the rules which, we understand, Mitch gladly and dutifully did.)
And with that, we, at Breakable News, the news you always wanted to unsubscribe from but somehow forgot, wish you the happiest of happy Thanksgivings. And remember to not actually try to pass the gravy to your Uncle on the other side of the country on Zoom. That could get messy.
Later, Kids.
The Georgia Runoff: How You Can Help!
As the Republican campaign in Georgia is based on keeping the Senate in GOP hands, so the Democratic campaign is based on wresting control of the Senate and putting it their hands. It’s as simple as that. The candidates on both sides are not particularly qualified to be U.S. senators, but with Purdue being a Trump stalwart and accused of insider trading, and Loeffler being a novice appointee in total lockstep with Heir Trump, I would say the Democrats, Ossoff and Rev. Warnock are more honest, more competent, and will support Biden’s coming reformation.
But the battlelines are simple: The choice is essentially a decision between who do you think should control the Senate. If you’re strong on the need for Democrats to do so, then if you live in Georgia you should vote for the two Democrats, for it will take both to win to take control. This will make Joe Biden’s work quite a bit easier in trying to bring this country back into some semblance of balance and subsequent progress. It will effectively remove Mitch McConnell, who, in my humble opinion, is a traitor on equal footing with Benedict Arnold, from his infamous stint as the ultra-conservative majority leader. If you feel Republicans should retain control, then your vote should obviously be for the candidates of that party.
If you don’t live in Georgia, and want to send financial support then it’s a matter of which party in the runoff to support and how much to give. Personally, in live in Washington state and feel strongly that the Senate should be controlled by the Democrats; so, yes, I have contributed to the Democratic candidates. Money, for better or for worse, does make a differrence in political campaigns in the U.S. In this case, I suspect that approximately equal amounts have been contributed for all the candidates involved. Voters’ minds are probably already made up.
I surmise then, the most effective place to put my money is with Stacey Abrams’ organization devoted to registering new voters just now reaching voting age, particularly African Americans and Hispanics, and encouraging them to vote Democratic. It worked for Stacey in the presidential election and I suspect it will work in this predictably tight election. She and her volunteers are very determined community organizers. Their Republican counterparts don’t stand a chance against them.
The best way to support Stacey’s organization is to go to Fair Fight, fill out their form to be kept informed, and click on the donate button. That’s how to get money directly to Stacey Abrams who I believe is the key person to help flip the Senate Blue, and who will ultimately be elected Georgia’s next Governor in 2022.
Please advise your friends to do the same. Thanks very much.
Lame Duck?
I am loathe to use the term Lame Duck when referring to Donald Trump. The lame ducks I’ve come across in my experience as an animal lover and protector have been gracious beings, humble, and thankful for my attention and care. I once helped raise a passel of orphan ducklings, allowing them full sun and ample space on our front lawn in Berkeley in the early 80s. They were happy “lame ducks” who eventually were placed back into wild nature which they took like veterans. We had trained them to dive for food in our bathtub so they were well prepared for the pond we freed them in.
Trump is lame, all right, but has nowhere near the resilience or the look of gratitude of the disabled ducks I’ve encountered. He is conniving, boorish, self-absorbed, and unwilling to accept the reality of his present circumstance, something our little lame ducklings were quite adept at.
Not only is Trump unaccepting of his present status, he is arrogantly behaving like a vindictive tyrant who is unwilling to accept the will of the people. He seems to have little to no regard for the welfare of the country that elected him, and absolutely no compassion for the thousands who have Covid or who have already died from the pandemic. Instead he spends most of his time at one of his resorts playing golf.
Incidentally, as a golfer, I can tell you, golf is no consolation for a wounded ego, as Trump seems to suffer from. It is a game filled with far more misery than celebration, especially for an amateur like him. Of course, as has been noted, he is a chronic cheat, which ultimately wears at the soul of a golfer playing a sport which prides itself on the player being totally and unequivocally honest with himself.
So the Lame Duck designation? No, I wouldn’t want to insult the lame ducks out there. Jane Goodall recently said as much when asked if Trump was acting like the chimpanzees she so skillfully studied in the wild. “I wouldn’t want to insult the chimps,” she replied with, I suspect, a wry smile.
So without denigrating Trump too viciously, I’ll just call him the outgoing Trump, and hope, perhaps hope beyond hope, that he will refrain from his continual denial of the reality of his defeat and his efforts to sabotage President Biden’s initial forays into cleaning up the inordinate messes Trump has created in his thankfully brief reign.
Thankful For…
Thankful for Sly the Fly for revealing the lack of peripheral nerve cells in the brain of Mike Pence.
Thankful for the coronavirus, not for the pain and suffering it has caused but the fact that without it, Donald Trump would have been reelected by his cult followers, leading to the possible destruction of American democracy, and the establishment of a long term oligarchy of Trump family rule.
Thankful for Donald Trump for his persistent and chronic habit of putting his hand into the figurative monkey trap, an ingenious device that places food into a tethered gourd. A monkey comes by, sticks his hand into the gourd, grabs food, and can then no longer pull his hand out, and is trapped as his fist with the food is now too large to remove himself from the trap. All the monkey has to do to go free is let go of the food. But conditioned greed and desire will not allow it to do so. And so it is with Trump, the sitting President who provoked his own defeat by his unwillingness to let go of actions which were deleterious to himself and the country, particularly his minimization of the coronavirus and its subsequent Covid-19 pandemic, leading to business shutdowns and a major economic downturn, all leading to Joe Biden’s historic victory. Thank you, Angels.
Thankful for Stacey Abrams of Georgia for bouncing back from a stolen gubernatorial election in 2018 to form an organization, Fair Fight, that opposed voter suppression to such an extent that it empowered Black and Hispanic voters to vote in record numbers in 2020 not only in Georgia but in other battleground states, that disempowered Republican efforts to suppress as many minority votes as they could for now and in the future. If I were President, I would give Ms. Abrams the highest medal of honor I had in my quiver of medals.
Thankful for front line medical staff who valiantly faced the virus, despite the dangers to themselves and their families.
Thankful for the late George Floyd and Black Lives Matter who brought a mirror up to the face of America and forced us to see our pervasive systemic racism up close and personal.
And thankful to President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris for having the courage to run an honest, heartfelt campaign against a Trump steamroller whose aim was to flatten everything in its way. Joe and Kamala never wavered in the face of the Trump onslaught, and still stay steadfast in the face of Trump lies and crooked efforts to reverse the results of a fair and honest election in the aftermath of their victory.
And finally, I’m thankful for my wife Ruth who has stayed by my side these past years during a fourth stage cancer diagnosis and chemo treatment, along with subsequent heart failure and a period of insomnia I wouldn’t wish on anyone, including Donald Trump. I’m not out of the woods yet, but am making significant progress.
Love and good health to you all! And a very Happy Thanksgiving.
Breakable News Goes Big…Really, Really Big
What’s all the hullabaloo, you ask? Well, Breakable News–the news America turns to after Fox News has folded after Trump is gone– has acquired Facebook, forming an entirely new department called BreakaBook. Isn’t that the bee’s knees? We thought so too. Of course, Facebook, as we now know it, will still be available on newsstands by subscription only. After intense negotiations with Mark Zuckerberg, they agreed to sell only if we returned to their original mission of bringing the world together with pleasant social content only. No more fake news. No more hatred. No more nasty comments. No more wacko conspiracy theories. No more politics. No more coronavirus misinformation. Just 24/7 cats, dogs, horses, gardens, seagulls, ping pong, and pecan pies. Oh sure, puzzles too. Lots of puzzles and petifores, petunias, pets, and people–happy, loving, generous, smiling people. All the stuff Mark envisioned as he lounged around his dorm room, before he got greedy after figuring out that puzzles didn’t sell ads, before he started cranking out those algorithms that noted every product, every fantasy, damn, every thought that ever came floating by our brains and spit them back to “third parties” that turned out to be a whole lot more than “third parties”, better known as high roller global corporations. When the money started tsunamiing in, Mark still hoped to bring the world together, but placed it a bit further down his “to do” priorities list that turned into a kind of ghost list–it was there but you couldn’t see it.
Soon Facebook, lacking editors as newspapers, magazines, and normal websites have, was helping to start wars, elect charletans, encourage white supremacy, spread nutsy conspiracy theories, inspire hate crimes, spawn fake accounts from eastern Europe and Russia that were out to stir discord in America–stuff that Mark never imagined would sprout from his little dorm room entrepreneurial brainstorm. He just envisioned billions from around the world holding hands digitally and singing Kumbaya. And this actually came to fruition…only thing was quite a few other hands had rudely joined with blood on them.
So we called Mark after his last Congressional hearing and asked if he was interested in talking and dealing. Well gosh did he jump at that like a trout does a fly. Here’s how our conversation went, with Mark visibly nervous and sweating profusely:
BreakaBook: So Mark, where does that leave Facebook now?
MZ: Huh? Wha? I dunno. I’ve got 17 houses around the world with a new car out front each of them. Couple of planes. How am I going to afford all that? We’re a tech company not a news outlet. I’m in over my head, Breakable. You gotta help me out of this mess. We just figured on the First Amendment. Whatever was posted, we allowed. Me and the guys figured everyone would be nice. I’m down to the last hairs on my head.
BaB: All right. Calm down. Calm TF down. Just leave the country. We’ll take care of Congress…and Trump.
MZ: But…but…what about bringing the entire world together as one? What about our mission, our purpose…our…our… money?
BaB: But think of it. No stress. No Trump ranting and raving, threatening lawsuits. No Ted Cruz screaming in your face. No Lindsay Graham’s smarmy comments. No…
MZ: But…but…no money?
BaB: Well…no. But you can always spend your days BreakaBooking. Think of all the BreakaBook friends you’ll have. All the cat videos you can watch. All the family photos you can view and comment on. All the puzzles you can puzzle over. Think of it…Mark?… Mark? Sheesh. He just up and left….
And there you have it, Breakableables. Another Breakable exclusive. Just go to BreakaBook dot calm to comment. But remember, nothing negative, controversial, obnoxious, or anxiety producing. As we say here at BreakaBook, keep it light, keep it lovely, keep it to yourself.
Our sponsor today has been Algorithm Depot, the cyber superstore that knows your every dream, wish, desire, command, and what you do when even you don’t know what you’re doing. As they say at Algorithm, If we don’t have it, you don’t need it; and if you don’t need it, you probably still think you need and, in fact, want it. (sorry, i think our ad agent may have copied that down wrong.)
BuhBy…for now!
Two Peaches and a Couple of Coconuts in Georgia Runoff
Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock. Two fine and qualified men to represent Georgia in the U.S. Senate. And if both are elected, the Senate will be tied 50-50 between the two parties, with Vice President Harris coming in to break any tie votes. Definitely an added bonus. From what I’ve read, Stacey Abrams is going all out to register young people who are just turning 18 and in time to vote in this election. Stacey is a registration phenom and, I believe, has discovered a way to combat chronic voter suppression efforts by the Republicans. This tactic of theirs is downright unAmerican and against the basic tenets of democracy. For honoring the right to vote is essential for a healthy democracy. Voting is guaranteed to every citizen of our country. Republicans think–and Trump admited–that they would lose every election if they couldn’t make it difficult or impossible for people to vote. That is not necessarily true. They would just have to get off their butts and work harder at registering more people as Stacey Abrams has done.
And she has done this with an organization that extends far beyond the borders of Georgia. Abrams, along with LaTosha Brown of Black Voters Matter, contributed considerably to the victory of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris by as large a margin as they did. With close elections, as these runoffs are predicted to be, it comes down to numbers. Voters have already chosen [Read more…] about Two Peaches and a Couple of Coconuts in Georgia Runoff
Trump is Threatening Our Democracy
Trump is inciting his people to defy a legal vote, firing all who oppose him, ignoring the coronavirus, defaming Blacks Lives Matter, continuing to deny Joe Biden his rightful position as President-elect. I now believe, to add to my previous diagnosis of Bi-Polar disorder, that he may also be a narcissistic sociopath (this essentially combines two personality disorders), doing harm to our democracy and possibly planning a coup. He must be stopped. Joe Biden must do more than label Trump an embarrassment or demand he do something about Covid. He must take aggressive legal action to force Trump and his enablers to acknowledge his election defeat and approve the transition of power.
In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote this: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness… it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
He clarified there had to be justifiable cause to overthrow a corrupt government that was threatening our [Read more…] about Trump is Threatening Our Democracy