Nalod wrote:https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-obama-bill-portland/fact-check-obama-did-not-sign-bill-allowing-federal-agents-to-snatch-protesters-off-the-streets-idUSKCN24P298

Discussed in relevance via Reuters.

Made a point of saying the president has yet to invoke it.

“I have been shot at a lot and nearly killed a bunch of times,” said Gen. Barry Richard McCaffrey (ret.). “I‘m not an alarmist. I stay cool under pressure. Mark me down as alarmed. I just listened to Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) — wonderful, experienced, mature guy — say this is just payback to [Mark] Esper not being a loyalist. I don’t believe it. We’re watching a setup of some people who are unqualified for office to be in control of the 2.1 million men and women of the armed forces.”

McCaffrey said, “And I remind our viewers, the only one who can give orders to the armed forces is the president and the secretary of defense. This acting secretary Chris Miller is a perfectly good, experienced combat soldier. He is unqualified for this office. The other three, one of them, a retired one-star, is a dangerous man. That team moving in, no one in his right mind would have accepted an appointment for 90 days. These people are in there to control a coercive institution of U.S. democracy.

“The federal government tools could be used in an oppressive manner, start with the attorney general of the United States, the Department of Homeland Security, and federal law enforcement agencies, who — unless they get an order that is patently illegal — will carry out their instructions. So the end of the story is, you know, I don’t believe in any way this should be minimized or this is just a tantrum of a president trying to accommodate himself to the outcome of the elections. This is some crazy thinking going on inside that White House.”

McCaffrey added, “If I was a CIA officer trying to understand what was going on in a third-world country and I saw this pattern of behavior, I would say the stronghand’s trying to take over the government and defy an election — and I think they’re playing with that idea inside the White House. I can’t imagine that Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) and even [Sen. Mitch] McConnell (R-KY) and people like this are going to disregard the Constitution, but I think that’s the thinking that’s going on in the White House right now and we ought to be worried about it. And the Republicans in Congress ought to speak up and push back

Tweet was deleted or there was problem with the URL:

https://twitter.com/MarkMuro1/status/1326574610427621376

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https://twitter.com/GernotWagner/status/1326612539975888896

capitalistic societies shouldnt have their govt be decided by folks that contribute so little, right?

djsunyc wrote:

Tweet was deleted or there was problem with the URL:

https://twitter.com/MarkMuro1/status/1326574610427621376

Tweet was deleted or there was problem with the URL:

https://twitter.com/GernotWagner/status/1326612539975888896

capitalistic societies shouldnt have their govt be decided by folks that contribute so little, right?

I heard this the other day. Thanks for pulling up the numbers

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https://twitter.com/erubio_p/status/1327303854887632897

I'm a registered Democrat who is very happy that Trump lost for the record.

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https://twitter.com/RonBrownstein/status/1327349693135740928

The Washington Post reports that more than 130 Secret Service members are either infected with coronavirus or under quarantine in the wake of President Trump's campaign travel. Carol Leonnig discusses her reporting on the story.

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https://twitter.com/tburages/status/1327456402923728899

In comparison to the electoral map(From most dependent(1) to least dependent(50))

1 New Mexico - Biden
2 Kentucky - Trump
3 Mississippi - Trump
4 West Virginia - Trump
5 Montana - Trump
6 Alaska - Trump
7 South Carolina - Trump
8 Indiana - Trump
9 Arizona - Biden
10 Wyoming - Trump
11 Alabama - Trump
12 Louisiana - Trump
13 Maine - Biden
14 North Dakota - Trump
15 Tennessee - Trump
16 Pennsylvania - Biden
17 Missouri - Trump
18 Oklahoma - Trump
19 Maryland - Biden
20 South Dakota - Trump
21 Arkansas - Trump
22 Vermont - Biden
23 Georgia - Trump
24 New York - Biden
25 Oregon - Biden
26 Idaho - Trump
27 Michigan - Biden
28 North Carolina - Trump
29 Rhode Island - Biden
30 New Hampshire - Biden
31 Nevada - Biden
32 Ohio - Trump
33 Wisconsin - Biden
34 Texas - Trump
35 Florida - Trump
36 Connecticut - Biden
37 Colorado - Biden
38 Hawaii - Biden
39 Nebraska - Trump
40 Virginia - Biden
41 California - Biden
42 Washington - Biden
43 Minnesota - Biden
44 Massachusetts - Biden
45 Illinois - Biden
46 Utah - Trump
47 Iowa - Trump
48 Delaware - Biden
49 New Jersey - Biden
50 Kansas - Trump

Democrats will win both runoff elections in Georgia to retake the US Senate, according to projections from Decision Desk HQ and Insider.

Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue lost their seats to the Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.

Democrats will now control the Senate for the first time since 2015 and have unified control of government for the first time since 2011.

Ossoff and Warnock's victories are a major breakthrough for Democrats in the formerly red Georgia and give President-elect Joe Biden more power to enact his agenda.

Democrats won both runoff elections in Georgia to regain control of the US Senate, according to projections from Insider and Decision Desk HQ.

Decision Desk HQ projected at 11:13 p.m. on Tuesday that Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who was appointed to fill a vacancy in late 2019, lost to the Democrat Raphael Warnock.

And it projected at 2:14 a.m. on Wednesday that first-term Republican Sen. David Perdue was defeated by the Democrat Jon Ossoff.

Democrats will now control the US Senate for the first time since 2015. And with President-elect Joe Biden set to take office on January 20, Democrats will have unified control of government - holding the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives - for the first time since 2011.

Both Democratic candidates are also set to make history. Warnock will become Georgia's first Black senator and the first Democratic Black senator from the South. And Ossoff, 33, will be the first millennial in the US Senate and the first Jewish senator to represent Georgia.

The candidates
Two US Senate runoffs took place in the formerly safe-Republican Georgia, which in November voted for a Democratic presidential nominee, Biden, for the first time since 1992.

In Georgia, if no candidate earns at least half the overall vote in a given election, the race goes to a runoff between the top two vote-getters. To ensure a candidate earns over 50% of the vote, no third-party or write-in candidates are permitted in runoff elections.

Republican Sen. David Perdue, a former business executive first elected in 2014, was running for a second term against the Democrat Jon Ossoff. Ossoff is a 33-year-old CEO of an investigative-documentary filmmaking company and a former US House staffer who was the Democratic nominee for the June 2017 special election for Georgia's 6th Congressional District.

Sen. Kelly Loeffler, a wealthy Atlanta businesswoman and owner of the WNBA team the Atlanta Dream, was appointed in late 2019 to replace Sen. Johnny Isakson, who retired before the end of his term because of health concerns.

In November, Loeffler competed in a special jungle election with 20 other candidates to serve out the rest of Isakson's term, which was set to expire in 2022.

Loeffler and the Democrat Raphael Warnock, senior pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, emerged from the jungle election as the top two vote-getters.

Warnock led with 32% of the vote compared with 26% for Loeffler and 20% for GOP Rep. Doug Collins, the third-highest vote-getter.

The worsening COVID-19 pandemic, including the high-stakes effort to get a coronavirus relief bill passed through Congress and the failed push for $2,000 stimulus checks, helped shape the dynamics of the runoff races.

Themes of class and economic status also played a defining role. Ossoff and Warnock accused Loeffler and Perdue, both of whom have high levels of personal wealth and are prolific investors, of using their positions in the Senate for profit, including with pandemic-related stock trades. Both senators denied any wrongdoing.

In turn, Loeffler and Perdue tied Ossoff and Warnock to policies like defunding the police, a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and other progressive priorities to paint both as advancing a socialist agenda.

Loeffler, in particular, hammered Warnock as "radical" in debates and ads and said Warnock would be the first "Marxist" senator. She has zeroed in on comments Warnock had made during sermons and on guests who had appeared at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, as well as Warnock's personal life.

Kelly Loeffler
Sen. Kelly Loeffler of Georgia at a campaign event on December 21 in Milton, Georgia. Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
The stakes
Entering the runoffs, Republicans controlled 51 seats compared with 48 for Democrats (Perdue's term technically expired at noon on Sunday pending the outcome of his runoff race, leaving the Senate with 99 members). The Democrats flipped two Senate seats in Arizona and Colorado in November but lost Sen. Doug Jones' seat in Alabama.

With the Democrats winning both seats, the composition of the Senate will be 50-50, with incoming Vice President Kamala Harris as the tiebreaking vote. Because of Harris' role as president of the US Senate, Democrats now hold the majority in the chamber.

Ossoff won't be up for reelection again until 2026. But the Loeffler-Warnock race was only a special election, and Warnock will have to prepare to run again in 2022 for a full term.

The runoffs seemed poised to be an inflection point in a bitterly contentious fight within the GOP after President Donald Trump's narrow loss in Georgia's presidential election.

Trump and his allies waged an all-out assault on the integrity of the state's election process and continue to insist he would have won if not for massive fraud - even after a risk-limiting audit that included a hand recount of all 5 million ballots cast in the presidential race and a subsequent machine recount requested by the Trump campaign affirmed Biden's victory.

Trump has spent weeks publicly attacking Georgia's Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, for their refusal to echo his unfounded allegations of massive election fraud, with Loeffler and Perdue also calling on Raffensperger to step down as he staunchly defended the integrity of Georgia's election.

On Saturday, Trump called Raffensperger to explicitly ask him to overturn the twice-certified Georgia election. In a stunning hour-long phone call, a recording of which was obtained and published by The Washington Post, Trump unsuccessfully pleaded with Raffensperger to "find 11,780 votes" for him and regurgitated long-debunked conspiracy theories and misinformation about the election.