[y66]

DACA Is Restored After Court Rules DHS Head Served Illegally by Michelle Hackman at WSJ:

Quote

WASHINGTON—A federal judge in New York invalidated Trump administration rules narrowing the program that protects immigrants living in the U.S. since childhood without legal permission, ruling the restrictions were improperly issued.

The ruling Saturday restores the program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, to near-full operation, after multiple attempts by the Trump administration to end or curtail it. That means, for the first time since September 2017, new applicants who weren’t previously eligible, typically because they were too young, may now apply.

The DACA program was created by the Obama administration in 2012 to protect the young immigrants, known as Dreamers, who have been living in the country without legal permission since childhood, and has been the subject of legal battles for the past three years.

In June, the Supreme Court ruled the Trump administration’s first attempt to end the program didn’t follow the proper procedure required for federal policy-making.

The following month, acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf issued a memorandum narrowing the program to existing applicants, who would be offered renewals of only one year, rather than two, and closing the program to any new candidates. The move was intended as an intermediate step while the administration considered whether to make another attempt to end the program entirely, as the Supreme Court had allowed it could do.

That memo was the subject of the latest round of litigation. The judge, Nicholas G. Garaufis of the Eastern District of New York, ruled it was improperly issued because Mr. Wolf hadn’t been properly appointed to his acting position.

The ruling is the fifth to find that Mr. Wolf is serving illegally in his acting role, following a Government Accountability Office report that found Mr. Wolf and his predecessor, Kevin McAleenan, both had been improperly appointed under federal law on job vacancies.

“Wolf was not lawfully serving as acting secretary of Homeland Security…when he issued the Wolf Memorandum,” Judge Garaufis, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton, concluded in a 31-page opinion.

Judge Garaufis said the ruling applies to anyone who might qualify for DACA under the 2012 memo establishing the program, issued by then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

[Winstonm]

It appears that the Republicans have been successful in turning the clock in American back to the 50's: The 1850's, that is.

Quote

The largest militia group in the US will refuse to recognise President-elect Joe Biden as the nation's duly elected leader when he is sworn in on 20 January 2021.

The Oath Keepers, an armed right-wing organisation that boasts tens of thousands of members with law enforcement and military backgrounds, was one of several groups to demonstrate in Washington over the weekend at the "Million MAGA March" in support of Donald Trump, whom news networks project has lost the 2020 election.

"I think about half this country won't recognise Biden as legitimate. They won't recognise this election," Stewart Rhodes, who founded the Oath Keepers, told The Independent on Saturday in the nation's capital.

"What that means is that everything that comes out of his mouth will be considered not of any force or effect, anything he signs into law we won't recognise as legitimate. We'll be very much like the founding fathers. We'll end up nullifying and resisting," Mr Rhodes said.

Yippee Ki-Yay Motherf*ckers!

[barmar]

 kenberg, on 2020-November-11, 09:40, said:

And now, with no penalty, does this mean that it is no longer a tax? And if so, is in tow an unconstitutional mandate?
Ok, I can make an argument. In my youthful days I sometimes had tax withheld from my paycheck. Then, at the end of the year, I would get it all returned because my total income was such that I owed no taxes. That is, I had a tax of zero dollars. With that logic, if "logic" is the right word, a tax that has been reduced to zero can still be considered a tax. So no problem.
Well, yuk. The thought that this could all come down to whether the penalty was a tax or a fine was bad enough, and now if we have to argue whether reducing the tax/fine to zero changes its status is depressing.

My guess is that they'll say that the amount of the tax is ephemeral, Congress can increase and decrease it from year to year. The law doesn't change if some years they happen to change it to zero -- it's just a temporary reprieve.

[barmar]

 johnu, on 2020-November-12, 15:53, said:

The only important thing to know is that the ex Manchurian President has absolutely zero authority to influence the federal government. Instead of being the sociopath and whackjob president who can screw up people's lives, he will be the sociopath and whackjob private (and hopefully imprisoned) citizen who has no more influence than the sociopaths and whackjobs on Fox Propaganda Channel. or other ultra right fringe outlets.

The problem is that he still has a base of followers that believe everything he says, and the GOP depends on their votes and activism.

One of the arguments given for while Republican leaders are indulging Trump in his challenges to the election is that they need his support to win the Georgia run-off elections. And even though he won't have any official authority after he leaves office, they might still go along with him so he doesn't turn his base against them.

He won't be as dangerous as he has been for the past 4 years, but he'll still have plenty of ability to much with the system.

[kenberg]

 barmar, on 2020-November-15, 18:29, said:

 kenberg, on 2020-November-11, 09:40, said:

And now, with no penalty, does this mean that it is no longer a tax? And if so, is in tow an unconstitutional mandate?
Ok, I can make an argument. In my youthful days I sometimes had tax withheld from my paycheck. Then, at the end of the year, I would get it all returned because my total income was such that I owed no taxes. That is, I had a tax of zero dollars. With that logic, if "logic" is the right word, a tax that has been reduced to zero can still be considered a tax. So no problem.
Well, yuk. The thought that this could all come down to whether the penalty was a tax or a fine was bad enough, and now if we have to argue whether reducing the tax/fine to zero changes its status is depressing.

My guess is that they'll say that the amount of the tax is ephemeral, Congress can increase and decrease it from year to year. The law doesn't change if some years they happen to change it to zero -- it's just a temporary reprieve.

This might illustrate both a problem and an opportunity.


If you interviewed a hundred people, randomly chosen from a phone book, I would be surprised if you found even three who could give a clear summary of the argument(s) before the court. But you would find a great many who are worried about the virus. Of course there will be some, there will always be some, who let political views dominate their thinking. But when I was young, people worried about polio. Those who voted for Eisenhower worried about polio and those who voted for Stevenson worried about polio. Yes, there were the John Birchers, they were crazy. But most people were not like that.


We are right now in a terrible situation. The virus is moving quickly, we are in a transition between government leaders what a mess. I suspect that there are more than a few people out there who usually vote R but are now very open to the idea that the incoming administration and the outgoing administration need to deal with this. We might not convert Rs to Ds, but can we get Rs to make their voices heard about the need for a cooperative power transfer? Of course it should always go that way but we have extra reasons for wanting it now. Put aside the issue of who voted for whom, and get working on a cooperative transfer of power, and right now. That couold have pretty broad appeal I think. Not to everyone. No one claims everyone. But then we never claim everyone for anything.

I know I am sometimes seem as hopelessly naïve. Ok, naïve has its good points sometimes.

[Winstonm]

 barmar, on 2020-November-15, 18:41, said:

The problem is that he still has a base of followers that believe everything he says, and the GOP depends on their votes and activism.

One of the arguments given for while Republican leaders are indulging Trump in his challenges to the election is that they need his support to win the Georgia run-off elections. And even though he won't have any official authority after he leaves office, they might still go along with him so he doesn't turn his base against them.

He won't be as dangerous as he has been for the past 4 years, but he'll still have plenty of ability to much with the system.

Obama touched on this subject in a recent interview - and the point is that there is no consensus any longer on our facts. There is a reason for that, and Richard (Hrothgar) posted this on another thread but it needs repeating: https://www.vox.com/...-misinformation

That article helps explain this one: https://www.nybooks....acys-afterlife/

Quote

As we are now seeing, the difference for a democracy is existential. A tactic of maneuvering to hold power against the wishes of the majority of voters is contingent, opportunistic, reactive. It is innately time-limited. It will advance when it can and retreat when it must. But when the tactic becomes the strategy, there can be no retreat. A program of consolidating the means by which a minority can gain and retain power must try to institutionalize itself, to become so embedded that it can withstand the majority’s anger. To do that, it must not merely evade the consequences of losing the popular vote in this or that election. It must, insofar as it can, make those elections irrelevant

This is the most important thing to understand about the postmortem Republican Party. The logic is not that a permanently minority party may move toward authoritarianism but that it must. Holding power against the wishes of most citizens is an innately despotic act.

[kenberg]

I said I was naïve but I don't admit to being a complete babe in the woods. The problems are real. The question is what to do. I am thinking that right now, with the virus spreading rapidly again, there might be some people out there who don't vote the way I vote and perhaps do not even much think the way I think but who nonetheless are up for some cooperative behavior. Sure, I have known many in my life, not all of them conservatives, who simply are not up for any such thing. But then some are, or at least in the past some have been. Perhaps we can work with them. The key would be, as it often is, to focus on an important area of common interest while ignoring other areas, perhaps some of them very basic, where there is disagreement.

It sometimes seems that we have ruled out that approach. Too bad. I am not yet ready to crawl into a hole and give up.

[Winstonm]

 kenberg, on 2020-November-16, 11:21, said:

I said I was naïve but I don't admit to being a complete babe in the woods. The problems are real. The question is what to do. I am thinking that right now, with the virus spreading rapidly again, there might be some people out there who don't vote the way I vote and perhaps do not even much think the way I think but who nonetheless are up for some cooperative behavior. Sure, I have known many in my life, not all of them conservatives, who simply are not up for any such thing. But then some are, or at least in the past some have been. Perhaps we can work with them. The key would be, as it often is, to focus on an important area of common interest while ignoring other areas, perhaps some of them very basic, where there is disagreement.

It sometimes seems that we have ruled out that approach. Too bad. I am not yet ready to crawl into a hole and give up.

Without consensual facts, we are all in a hole regardless. The lack of consensual facts is a direct result of a coordinated effort by the conservative media. As O'Toole noted in the article I linked to above, holding power as a minority is an innately despotic act. Using Russian intelligence techniques in that end becomes a patriotic virtue if you believe in that side - and that there is no consensual set of facts.

[y66]

I enjoyed the Fintan O'Toole piece that winstonm linked even if it is a little long-winded. Another excerpt:

Quote

The dominant power in the land, the undead Republican Party, has made majority rule aberrant, a notion that transgresses the new norms it has created. From the perspective of this system, it is Biden, and his criminal voters, who are the deviant ones. This is the irony: Trump, the purest of political opportunists, driven only by his own instincts and interests, has entrenched an anti-democratic culture that, unless it is uprooted, will thrive in the long term. It is there in his court appointments, in his creation of a solid minority of at least 45 percent animated by resentment and revenge, but above all in his unabashed demonstration of the relatively unbounded possibilities of an American autocracy. As a devout Catholic, Joe Biden believes in the afterlife. But he needs to confront an afterlife that is not in the next world but in this one—the long posterity of Donald Trump.

[barmar]

 kenberg, on 2020-November-16, 06:30, said:

This might illustrate both a problem and an opportunity.


If you interviewed a hundred people, randomly chosen from a phone book, I would be surprised if you found even three who could give a clear summary of the argument(s) before the court. But you would find a great many who are worried about the virus. Of course there will be some, there will always be some, who let political views dominate their thinking. But when I was young, people worried about polio. Those who voted for Eisenhower worried about polio and those who voted for Stevenson worried about polio. Yes, there were the John Birchers, they were crazy. But most people were not like that.


We are right now in a terrible situation. The virus is moving quickly, we are in a transition between government leaders what a mess. I suspect that there are more than a few people out there who usually vote R but are now very open to the idea that the incoming administration and the outgoing administration need to deal with this. We might not convert Rs to Ds, but can we get Rs to make their voices heard about the need for a cooperative power transfer? Of course it should always go that way but we have extra reasons for wanting it now. Put aside the issue of who voted for whom, and get working on a cooperative transfer of power, and right now. That couold have pretty broad appeal I think. Not to everyone. No one claims everyone. But then we never claim everyone for anything.

I know I am sometimes seem as hopelessly naïve. Ok, naïve has its good points sometimes.

Unfortunately, the people who believe Trump when he says that the D's stole the election also believe him when he says that Covid-19 is not that serious. So it's unlike when you were young and just about everyone was worried about polio -- there's a large enough faction that think that Covid-19 is a left-wing media hoax, like climate change.

This is indeed a terrible situation. We can't put all the blame on Trump (climate change denial has been going on for years), but he definitely took advantage of the division and exacerbated it.

[pilowsky]

[kenberg]

 barmar, on 2020-November-16, 17:38, said:

Unfortunately, the people who believe Trump when he says that the D's stole the election also believe him when he says that Covid-19 is not that serious. So it's unlike when you were young and just about everyone was worried about polio -- there's a large enough faction that think that Covid-19 is a left-wing media hoax, like climate change.

This is indeed a terrible situation. We can't put all the blame on Trump (climate change denial has been going on for years), but he definitely took advantage of the division and exacerbated it.

I agree.

But still I ask, what do we do?

There is not one single answer, of course not.

And how did it happen? No doubt there will be many theories, many papers, probably quite a few Ph.D. theses. Surely technology has played a role. I can sit in comfort here and berate people that I will never meet. There is a danger in that. But still, what to do?

It must, in part, depend on what you think of people. There are many people who know more about politics than I do. But there are also many who know less, at least in part because they have a job and kids rather than being a retired guy with few demands on his time. I am suggesting that we go a little easy on condemning them to hell. If we offer an open door, some will walk through it.. And, of course, some won't.

I do understand that our current president has contributed greatly to our problems. I do get that. My posts are not in denial of that.

[pilowsky]

In the USA in 2020 the total number of eligible voters was 239,247,162.

Incredibly, despite the ravages of COVID19 and the worst economic depression in history and a President straight from a reality television show, about 60,000,000 of these apparently sentient beings chose not to exercise their right to express an opinion.

What did Sir Thomas More say? "Qui tacet consentiret": the maxim of the law is "Silence gives consent". In other words, These non-voters are tacitly approving the status quo.

In 2020 there was an extraordinary voter turnout in the USA. For the first time ever around 70% of the eligible population decided to show an interest in who represents them.

Voting in America is a peculiar thing. When an American votes, it's because they believe that there should be no taxation without representation.

Hilariously, the whinging and hand-wringing that is going on in America at the moment can all be traced back to the Declaration of Independence. Let's be clear, the much-vaunted 'D of I' was, in fact, a complaint about taxes.

The (white slave-owning, property-owning male) Americans of the day were complaining that the British were levying taxes on them but were not allowing them to elect members of their parliament.

This makes quite a lot of sense when you remember that the British don't even have enough room in the Palace of Westminister to fit their own members of Parliament. The whole Gormenghastian edifice in London is crumbling around their ears. Guy Fawkes would have done them a favour.

The Americans did not want 'freedom' when they declared independence. What they wanted was money. They also wanted slaves. The British didn't need slaves. In Britain, 'people know there place'. If they forget their place, they have to go to Australia, or Essex, or into coal mines in the North of England. There may also be an area called Scotland but I'm not too sure. Women of course didn't count.

This year 73,125,673 Americans voted for Trump. That's exactly 30.5%. I once stood for parliament in the safest conservative seat in the state of South Australia at a time when my friend was desperate to find a candidate to stand. Australia has compulsory voting.

The Labor party was really on the nose because the State Bank had just collapsed. I managed to garner more than 30% of the vote. Even when the ***** hits the fan a corpse can get 30% of the vote.

Even in a country where everything is so appallingly Gerrymandered and up means down and the words 'alternative facts' are spoken without a trace of irony. you can still get 30% of the vote if you're a major party candidate.

It's meaningless.

It's the people that didn't vote that baffle me. what were they thinking? Who are they?

[Winstonm]

 kenberg, on 2020-November-16, 19:16, said:

I agree.

But still I ask, what do we do?

There is not one single answer, of course not.....There is a danger in that. But still, what to do?

I'm not clear if you - or we, all of us - understand just how big of question this is. How do you unwind the results of the educational morass where the sciences are only suggestions no more valid than the book of Genesis, generational racism, voter apathy, and a concerted effort to rule as the minority regardless of what happens to the country?

The problems are so huge by now that they may well be unsolvable.

[pilowsky]

 Winstonm, on 2020-November-16, 20:33, said:

I'm not clear if you - or we, all of us - understand just how big of question this is. How do you unwind the results of the educational morass where the sciences are only suggestions no more valid than the book of Genesis, generational racism, voter apathy, and a concerted effort to rule as the minority regardless of what happens to the country?

The problems are so huge by now that they may well be unsolvable.

Are you suggesting I have to write that bloody book again!

[Chas_P]

A little comic relief.

[y66]

Georgia Republicans Worry Trump Feud Could Hurt Key Senate Runoffs by Cameron McWhirter and Lindsay Wise at WSJ

Quote

ATLANTA—The Georgia Republican Party is beset with infighting, as leading Republicans in the state come under public attack from President Trump and his supporters following his apparent defeat by President-elect Joe Biden there—the first loss by a GOP presidential candidate since 1992.

The internal strains come as state party leaders are trying to rally support for two sitting senators facing Jan. 5 runoffs that will determine control of the U.S. Senate.

The Senate’s partisan breakdown after the Nov. 3 election stands at 50 Republicans and 48 Democrats. If Democrats win both Georgia runoffs, they will hold a majority in the chamber, since Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, in her role as president of the Senate, could cast tiebreaking votes.

“These two seats…are the last line of defense against this liberal, socialist agenda the Democrats will perpetrate,” Sen. David Perdue (R., Ga.) said on Fox News Channel on Sunday. Mr. Biden, who was criticized during the Democratic primaries for not embracing a more liberal agenda, has mocked accusations that he’d lead as a socialist. “Do I look like a radical socialist?” Biden said in August.

Mr. Perdue is trying to fend off Democrat Jon Ossoff, a documentary filmmaker, while Georgia’s other Republican senator, Kelly Loeffler, is being challenged by the Rev. Raphael Warnock, pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church.

Energizing Mr. Trump’s base is essential to the GOP’s runoff strategy, and Republicans in Georgia and in Washington, D.C., would like to see the president train his fire on Messrs. Ossoff and Warnock. But Mr. Trump, apparently preoccupied with a continuing recount of the state’s presidential results, instead spent the past few days on Twitter attacking top Georgia Republicans: Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Gov. Brian Kemp, both once considered allies of Mr. Trump.

“This could really go off the rails and really cause long-term damage,” former GOP state Rep. Buzz Brockway said Saturday. “The long-term health of the GOP is on the line here in Georgia.”

More than a dozen Republican officials and strategists said they worried the intraparty feud was distracting from the runoff effort and could hurt the party’s chances in 2022, when the governor and one of the Senate seats will be on the ballot.

The Trump campaign declined a request for comment.

One GOP official said the situation is more problematic for Mr. Kemp than for Sens. Perdue and Loeffler and pointed to financial resources and manpower flooding the state for the runoffs from the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Republican National Committee and other GOP groups.

“That said,” the official added, “I think it’s important for everyone to be on the same page, working to the same goal, which is to make sure Republicans hold on to the Senate majority.”

David Shafer, the current state party chairman, declined to speak on the telephone to a reporter Sunday but texted in response to queries, “I believe the party will pull back together. There is too much at stake for us not to reunify.”

On Sunday, Mr. Biden’s lead in the contest for Georgia’s 16 electoral votes was roughly 14,000 out of about 5 million cast. The Associated Press hasn’t called the race because it said the tight margin means it could be subject to a post-certification recount under Georgia rules; however, major media organizations have called the race for Mr. Biden. A special by-hand recount of the presidential contest, before certification, is under way already.

Trump campaign officials called for the early recount, but in tweets over the weekend Mr. Trump assailed the process. On Saturday, Mr. Trump said on Twitter that the by-hand recount is flawed because “they are not showing the matching signatures.”

The recount is meant to review ballots, not signatures. Absentee voters had to sign on the outside of the envelope, not the ballot. Election officials compared that signature to the voter’s registration file. If the signatures were consistent, the envelopes were then separated from the ballots to safeguard voters’ ballot choices. Election officials also verified signatures on paper applications for an absentee ballot.

Mr. Raffensperger last week defended the system and said he didn’t believe the recount would change the vote tally because he had confidence in the state’s voting machines.

Sens. Perdue and Loeffler last week took the extraordinary step of calling for fellow Republican Mr. Raffensperger to resign, alleging election mismanagement. They didn’t offer evidence for that assertion. Mr. Raffensperger wasn’t notified of the call until he saw a mass email sent to media outlets. He refused to resign.

Rusty Paul, a former chairman of the Georgia GOP, said the senators had no choice but to publicly disavow Mr. Raffensperger because if Mr. Trump turned on them in frustration, it would be disastrous for their re-election prospects. “If the president is tweeting bad things, the base is not coming out,” Mr. Paul said.

The Senate candidates threw Mr. Raffensperger overboard to save themselves, he said. “Somebody’s got to go,” Mr. Paul said. “This is about survival.”

An adviser to Mr. Raffensperger said Saturday that the secretary of state, a strong supporter of the president since 2016, was baffled by the attacks. Those who claim the election was corrupt are in “complete looneyville,” the adviser said.

“Why is this guy lying?” the adviser recalled Mr. Raffensperger asking in a reference to the president.

On Monday night, Mr. Raffensperger said that he started receiving threats and nasty emails and texts, including threatening messages sent to his wife’s cellphone, right after Sens. Perdue and Loeffler called for his resignation. “That’s when the stuff started coming in,” he said.

Mr. Raffensperger, who put himself in quarantine last week after being exposed to Covid-19, said he was surprised by the attacks from Mr. Trump. Mr. Raffensperger has been a conservative Republican all his life and he will remain so, he said.

“I am absolutely Republican,” he said. “I have never voted for a Democrat. Where would I go?”

Mr. Trump also criticized Mr. Kemp on Twitter over the voting process.

The governor, who doesn’t oversee elections, couldn’t be reached for comment. Mr. Kemp, who is expected to run for re-election in 2022, narrowly won in 2018 over Democrat Stacey Abrams. Mr. Kemp was aided, in part, by campaign visits from Mr. Trump. After Mr. Kemp won, the president sent him a signed note congratulating him, written on a newspaper clipping about his victory.

But the relationship has been strained since. In 2019, Mr. Trump privately questioned the governor’s choice of Ms. Loeffler to succeed retiring Sen. Johnny Isakson (R., Ga.). Ms. Loeffler has repeatedly voiced support for the president, and Mr. Trump has publicly warmed to her. But relations between Messrs. Kemp and Trump remain frosty. Earlier this year, the president publicly questioned the timing of the governor’s decision to allow some businesses to reopen after a Covid-19 lockdown.

Some of Mr. Trump’s supporters have soured on Mr. Kemp, too. At a “Stop the Steal” rally outside the state Capitol held Nov. 7, protesters chanted, “Where’s Brian Kemp?” several times. On Saturday, a smaller “Stop the Steal” protest gathered outside the governor’s mansion in Atlanta.

Former Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R., Ga.) said he hoped the infighting would die down so the party could unify behind Sens. Perdue and Loeffler but added, “No one party is going to dominate forever. We did dominate for a period of time. Now it’s competitive.”

[PeterAlan]

I've been wondering for a while about posting this anecdote; it's fairly well-known, but may be new to some.

The pre-eminent mathematical logician Kurt Gödel fled Austria just before the second world war, and settled at the IAS in Princeton. In 1947 he had applied for US citizenship, and was about to undertake the examination, with Albert Einstein and Oskar Morgenstern as his witnesses. Being the man he was, he took this very seriously, and gave the Constitution close study.

Shortly before the examination, to Morgenstern's consternation, Gödel told him that he had found a logical flaw in the Constitution that could lead to the legal establishment of a dictatorship in the United States. Morgenstern was concerned that Gödel would pursue this at the examination, and enlisted Einstein's help in trying to dissuade him from it; they spent the journey to Trenton by telling one joke after another in an attempt to distract him.

The examination was conducted by Judge Phillip Forman, who had done the same for Einstein a few years earlier and was friendly with him. Early on in the process, Gödel picked him up on the distinction between German and Austrian citizenship, and Forman made some remark about it being just the one dictatorship, adding that it "couldn't happen here." This, of course, triggered Gödel, but Forman was a sensible man and interrupted, hastily changing the subject, and the rest of the process passed off smoothly.

The thing is, Morgenstern doesn't seem to have made a record of the point that Gödel had found, and I'm not aware of any suggestion of just what it was. Suddenly, though, it begins to seem more pertinent ...

[y66]

Brad Heath at Reuters said:

A federal judge won't delay tomorrow's hearing on President Trump's lawsuit to overturn the election he lost in Pennsylvania because most of his lawyers quit. His remaining lawyer - who's also a radio host - will have to go it alone and is "expected to be prepared."

Quote

Three of President Trump's other lawyers in the Pennsylvania case filed a somewhat noisy request to withdraw today, saying "Plaintiffs [that's Trump] will be best served" if they're allowed to leave the case.

Quote

A Russian, a Cuban, an American and a lawyer are in a train. The Russian takes a bottle of the best vodka out of his pack; pours some into a glass, drinks it, and says: "In the USSR, we have the best vodka in the world, nowhere in the world you can find vodka as good as what we produce in Ukraine. And we have so much of it, that we can just throw it away...". Saying that, he opens the window and throws the rest of the bottle out the window.

All the others are quite impressed.

The Cuban opens a box of Havanas, takes one of them, lights it and begins to smoke it saying: "In Cuba, we have the best cigars of the world: Havanas. Nowhere in the world are there better cigars, and we have so many of them, that we can just throw them away...". Saying that, he throws the box of Havanas out the window.

One more time, everybody is quite impressed.

The American just stands up, opens the window, and throws the lawyer out...

[y66]

WaPo's version of what's happening in Georgia provides more detail than the WSJ version.

Quote

In the interview, Raffensperger also said he spoke on Friday to Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has echoed Trump’s unfounded claims about voting irregularities.

In their conversation, Graham questioned Raffensperger about the state’s signature-matching law and whether political bias could have prompted poll workers to accept ballots with nonmatching signatures, according to Raffensperger. Graham also asked whether Raffensperger had the power to toss all mail ballots in counties found to have higher rates of nonmatching signatures, Raffensperger said.

Raffensperger said he was stunned that Graham appeared to suggest that he find a way to toss legally cast ballots. Absent court intervention, Raffensperger doesn’t have the power to do what Graham suggested because counties administer elections in Georgia.

“It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” Raffensperger said.

In an interview on Capitol Hill on Monday evening, Graham denied that he had suggested that Raffensperger toss legal ballots, calling that characterization “ridiculous.”

But he said he did seek out the secretary of state to understand the state’s signature-matching requirements. Graham said he contacted Raffensperger on his own and was not asked to do so by Trump.

“The main issue for me is: How do you protect the integrity of mail-in voting, and how does signature verification work?” he said.

“If he feels threatened by that conversation, he’s got a problem,” Graham added. “I actually thought it was a good conversation.”

On the same day that Graham spoke to Raffensperger about signature matching, a lawsuit was filed in federal court in Georgia challenging the way county election officials check signatures and allow voters a chance to fix ballots with errors.

The suit, filed by Atlanta lawyer and Trump supporter Lin Wood, seeks to block certification of Georgia’s election until all ballot envelopes are inspected.

Also that day, Trump tweeted about signature-matching in Georgia and criticized Raffensperger for his management of the state elections: “Georgia Secretary of State, a so-called Republican (RINO), won’t let the people checking the ballots see the signatures for fraud. Why? Without this the whole process is very unfair and close to meaningless. Everyone knows that we won the state.”