Trump’s Pennsylvania case also thrown out

In what is being seen as the biggest setback to Trump’s futile quest to cling on to power. the lawsuit argued by Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell (described by one of Trump’s legal advisors as “an elite strike force team”) before a federal judge in Pennsylvania has been thrown out. The suit alleged such widespread fraud in the election that they were asking the judge to invalidate the results and declare Trump the winner in the state. In what has been described as a blistering opinion, the judge was brutal in his assessment of the case presented by this allegedly elite strike force team, describing it as a “Frankenstein’s Monster, [that] has been haphazardly stitched together from two distinct theories in an attempt to avoid controlling precedent.”
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Is duck kosher? It’s complicated

I was chatting with a friend of mine about the upcoming Thanksgiving and the December holiday season and I said that I was not a big fan of turkey and preferred duck. She said that while she has never heard about duck being explicitly forbidden as not being kosher, she has never seen it for sale in any of the kosher butcher shops where she gets her meat, nor are there any recipes for it in her Jewish cookbooks. We both became intrigued about the kosher status of duck and so I looked it up and, as is often the case with religious dietary rules, it is complicated.

The Torah apparently simply lists those birds that are forbidden to eat. But the problem is that the list was compiled way back by people living in one small part of the world and it is not clear what animals some of the names even refer to and what to do now that one has to deal with animals all over the world that were not known to the compilers of the lists.
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A real life Clayton Bigsby

There is an African American in Alabama who is an ardent supporter of the confederacy, waves its flag proudly, and opposes the removal of monuments and the renaming of buildings that honor the leaders of the rebellion. He was part of an otherwise white group of people who were interviewed when they came to protest the removal of confederacy-era monuments.

One of the interviewed individuals is a Black man named Daniel Sims, seen in the video wearing a variety of Confederacy-supporting merchandise.

“Regardless how the next person feels, I’m not gon’ take my flag down,” says Sims, who states that his family is entirely white. “If I got anything to do with it, ain’t no monument gon’ come down.”

Sims also claimed to have been taught “everything I know” from someone who fought in the Civil War, a claim that is mathematically dubious.

“My whole family is white, I went to an all-white school, lived in an all-white neighborhood,” he said. “My grandfather was white and he was the main one that fought in this war here. And he taught me everything I know.”

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When you won’t even appear on Tucker Carlson’s show, then you’ve got nothing

MAGAland has a new star. A lawyer named Sidney Powell has achieved her 15 minutes of fame as Rudy Giuliani’s sidekick, mouthing even more insane conspiracy theories about how the election was stolen from Trump without providing a shred of evidence. She alleges that somehow the Venezuelan government (yes!) and George Soros (of course!) were behind a plot that managed to co-opt vast swathes of people from the local to the national to the international level to plan and execute a massive fraud that stole an election that Trump rightfully won. Need I mention that she is also a QAnon supporter and is considered one of the ‘heroes’ of the movement? Are you surprised?
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I have a better idea than Geraldo Rivera

Geraldo Rivera was once, if you can believe it, considered to be a genuine reporter but he descended into the fever swamps of Fox News and is now one of Trump’s most groveling sycophants. But he outdid himself with the suggestion he made yesterday.

I think that a better idea would be to rename to coronavirus that causes covid-19 after Trump. Right now it has the awkward and hard-to-remember name of SARS-CoV-2. Calling it the ‘Trump virus’ would not only be easier, it would be more appropriate since it is his utter failure to deal with it that has now led to over a quarter of a million deaths in the US with no end in sight.

Then we could ask each other, “Have you got your immunity to Trump?”

Was Trump hoist with his own petard?

Joe Biden has been declared the president-elect again. And again. And possibly a few times more before his inauguration.

After the recount due to the audit in Georgia not changing the outcome and concluding that he won Georgia by about 12,000 votes, the AP has finally called the state for Joe Biden and updated its final tally for him from 290 to 306 versus 232 for Trump. Biden’s lead in the total votes nationwide has increased to an astonishing six million (79,695,884 versus 73,712,282 or 51.9% to 48.1% with votes still being counted, an almost 4% difference) but in the US version of democracy, such a large margin of victory in the national popular vote counts for nothing.
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The increasing isolation of the US in the world

Under Donald Trump, the US has become increasingly alone on the international stage.

One example is the new Asian trade agreement that excludes the US and includes China. After initially gushing over what a great leader China’s Xi Jinping was and praising their response to the covid-19 epidemic, when the pandemic got bad in the US he seemed to realize that he needed a scapegoat to escape blame and started attacking China. But his conflict with China predated that as part of his dislike of multilateral agreements that led to him declaring war on the trade agreements that his predecessors had agreed on with groups of other nations, and his strong criticisms of the NAFTA, WHO, NATO, and the Paris Climate Accord.

One of the thing he withdrew from was the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a deal that was being negotiated by the Obama administration that was designed to exclude China and increase trade links of Asian nations with the US. Trump pulled out of that deal and now those Asian nations have signed a huge trade pact that includes China and excludes the US.
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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.

State by state analysis of Trump’s legal challenges

The Trump Administration has been on a tear, filing lawsuits left and right in an effort to overturn what everyone except Trump cultists have accepted: that Trump lost and should concede prior to leaving office on January 20. The flurry of cases can be confusing and this article nicely summarizes where the challenges to six states are as of this morning.

ARIZONA

THE CASE: The Arizona Republican Party is trying to block the certification of the election results in the state’s most populous county, Maricopa, until the court rules on the party’s lawsuit asking for a new hand count of a sampling of ballots. An audit already completed by the county found no discrepancies, officials said.

WHAT HAPPENED: The judge was expected to issue a decision on Thursday.
In a separate case, Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee had sought to delay the certification of election results in Maricopa County. Republicans asked for the manual inspection of ballots in metro Phoenix, alleging that some votes were improperly rejected. A judge dismissed the case on Nov. 13 after the campaign’s lawyers acknowledged the small number of ballots at issue wouldn’t change the outcome of how Arizona voted for president.
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What happened to the women voters?

Before the election, there was widespread expectations that Trump had lost support among women, especially suburban women, and the elderly. As far as the women’s vote is concerned, that prediction does not seem to have been borne out

Before the election, Trump was widely mocked for the sort of desperate, tone-deaf comments he made in that Michigan speech, while polls predicted the president’s support among female voters would crater in a fatal blow to his and his party’s election hopes. But those predictions were mostly wrong. According to exit polls, Trump did one point better with women as a whole than in 2016, five points better with both black and Hispanic women, and three points better with white women. In a year with record voter turnout, those gains weren’t enough to match Joe Biden’s numbers, but the president can console himself with the fact that, come January, he will have helped put a record number of Republican women to work in the halls of Congress.
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