Heated Oval Office meeting included talk of special counsel, martial law as Trump advisers clash

 https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/19/politics/trump-oval-office-meeting-special-counsel-martial-law/index.html

 President Donald Trump convened a heated meeting in the Oval Office on Friday, including lawyer Sidney Powell and her client, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, two people familiar with the matter said, describing a session that began as an impromptu gathering but devolved and eventually broke out into screaming matches at certain points as some of Trump's aides pushed back on Powell and Flynn's more outrageous suggestions about overturning the election.

Flynn had suggested earlier this week that Trump could invoke martial law as part of his efforts to overturn the election that he lost to President-elect Joe Biden -- an idea that arose again during the meeting in the Oval Office, one of the people said. It wasn't clear whether Trump endorsed the idea, but others in the room forcefully pushed back and shot it down.

Trump downplays cyberattack on U.S., breaks with Pompeo on Russia's role

 https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/19/pompeo-russia-behind-cyberhack-of-us-agencies-448625

 President Donald Trump on Saturday publicly broke with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo over Russia's involvement in a massive cyberattack on the U.S. government.

Trump, in his first public comment since reports of the wide-scale breach surfaced last week, downplayed the attack in a series of tweets, suggesting without evidence that China may have been responsible and hacks on U.S. voting systems might have occurred as well.

Trump's Latest 'Con': Ripping Off MAGA Fans After Losing | The Beat With Ari Melber | MSNBC

Trump raised $200m from false election claims. What happens to the money now?

 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/19/trump-raised-200m-from-false-election-claims-what-happens-to-the-money-now

 The battle is lost. The supreme court and electoral college have spoken. Even the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, so adept at remaking the rules for political advantage, has acknowledged that Donald Trump will not be the next president.

But the money flowing into Trump’s political coffers suggests that defeat will not drive the soon-to-be-former president into the political shadows.

Trump has been on a fundraising drive since the election, rapidly bringing in an astonishing $200m or more on the back of his false claims that the vote was rigged.

His campaign bombarded supporters with emails and text messages – as many as 30 a day – pleading for donations to a fighting fund to challenge the result. But with the election settled, that is not where the money is going.

The Price of Good Intentions By Yonoson Rosenblum | December 16, 2020 or why slavery and discrimination were really good and helping is bad

Try substituting Jew for the word black in this attempt to rationalize discrimination, Better yet this could justify discrimination against chareidim and Kollel by chilonim. After all Chareidim are also beneficiaries of the same good intentions section 8 foodstamps and antidiscriminaton laws as blacks

https://mishpacha.com/the-price-of-good-intentions/

Trump will leave office with a historically bad economic record

 https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/13/politics/trump-economy-record/index.html

 "Trump's economic record ranks near or at the bottom compared with other presidents," concludes Moody's chief economist Mark Zandi, who compared the economic results of all presidents from the last 70 years. "The economy under his watch has performed very poorly."

To be sure, the deadliest public health pandemic in a century has devastated economic activity during this last year of the President's term. But responding to unexpected catastrophe -- from hurricanes to terrorist attacks to civil unrest to financial crises -- represents a big part of the job. And, as Zandi notes, Trump's bungled coronavirus response has exacerbated and extended damage to jobs and output.

Trump silent in wake of massive cybersecurity hack

Trump Threatens Not to Leave White House on Inauguration Day: A Closer Look

Wisconsin judges denounced Trump lawsuit, antisemitic harassment follows

 https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/wisconsin-judges-denounced-trump-lawsuit-antisemite-harassment-follows-652523

 “What you want is for us to overturn this election so that your king can stay in power,” Karofsky said, according to The Associated Press. “I do not know how you can come before this court and possibly ask for a remedy that is unheard of in U.S. history.”

Trump fights for a job that he's not doing as coronavirus rages

 https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/18/politics/donald-trump-absent-covid-stimulus-vaccine/index.html

 When the history of the pandemic is written, one of the great mysteries will be what President Donald Trump was doing in the waning days of his presidency as the number of Covid-19 deaths in the US soared past 3,000 each day, the virus spread unchecked and Congress dithered over the details of an emergency relief package that could be the difference between people being able to eat and being forced to sleep on the streets this holiday season.

Trump ran for president pretending he was the consummate dealmaker, the chief executive who could make things happen with a snap of his fingers. He will go down in history as a president who worsened the grief and tragedy of the most consequential pandemic in 100 years by being contemptuous of masks and the safety precautions designed by his own administration -- a man incapable of empathy, who chose to remain cocooned in his White House bubble at a time when leadership would have mattered.

For weeks now, Trump has spent most of his time plotting how to nullify the results of President-elect Joe Biden's November victory as he has fleeced his supporters to pay for a string of ill-conceived lawsuits that were tossed out of court by some of his own judicial appointees. When those efforts failed, he began looking ahead to January 6 when a joint session of Congress meets to formally count the Electoral College results -- seeing another opportunity to try and thwart the democratic process.

Putting 'politics in front of lives': DeSantis faces criticism over Florida's Covid-19 response

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/17/us/desantis-covid-florida-invs/index.html

 The Florida health department's social media feeds have barely mentioned Covid-19 in months, breaking the silence only this week to celebrate the arrival of the first vaccines. DeSantis has consistently downplayed the severity of the pandemic, following President Donald Trump's lead in denouncing mask mandates and restrictions on businesses. The governor has blocked local governments from enforcing their own measures to protect residents from coronavirus, and sidelined health experts even as he promoted questionable science, according to CNN interviews with more than a dozen Florida officials and experts.

Former NH GOP Chair Announces She's Leaving The GOP | Morning Joe | MSNBC

The Trump Presidency And American Democracy | Morning Joe | MSNBC

Does the Trump Administration Have Blood on its Hands? Olivia Troye: 'Yes.' | The Mehdi Hasan Show