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GOP splits over Trump’s false election claims, unfounded fraud allegations

InternationalNov 07. 2020

By The Washington Post · Katie Shepherd · NATIONAL, POLITICS 
President Donald Trump questioned the presidential election results Thursday night in a speech so riddled with false and unfounded claims that many major news networks, including MSNBC, CBS and ABC, cut away to fact-check the Republican incumbent in real time.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/6130ea38-1141-43eb-98ba-5fabde19fe13?ptvads=block&playthrough=false

Trump’s broadsides have exposed tensions within his party, splitting GOP officials who spoke publicly on Thursday night into warring camps: those who defended the president and those who defended the U.S. election process. Many others have stayed silent.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has not addressed Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud. But in a Friday tweet, he wrote, “Every legal vote should be counted. Any illegally-submitted ballots must not. All sides must get to observe the process. And the courts are here to apply the laws & resolve disputes.

“That’s how Americans’ votes decide the result.”

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, also encouraged voters to respect the counting process and the outcome.

“States have the authority to determine the specific rules of elections,” Collins said in a statement Friday morning. “Every valid vote under a state’s law should be counted. Allegations of irregularities can be adjudicated by the courts. We must all respect the outcome of elections.”

Trump’s loyalists, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Ted Cruz, R-Texas, echoed Trump’s evidence-free claims of widespread fraud in Pennsylvania and other swing states that have been trending toward former vice president Joe Biden as more votes are counted.

“President Trump won this election,” McCarthy falsely claimed to Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Thursday night. He followed up his on-air comments with a tweet proclaiming: “Republicans will not be silenced. We demand transparency. We demand accuracy. And we demand that the legal votes be protected.”

GOP senators similarly echoed false and misleading claims that Trump has made about the vote-counting process in Pennsylvania.

“Philadelphia elections are crooked as a snake,” Graham told Fox’s Sean Hannity. “Why are they shutting people out? Because they don’t want people to see what they’re doing.”

Strong rebukes also flew in, mostly from regular GOP critics of Trump such as Utah Sen. Mitt Romney and from Republican politicians who are leaving office.

“A sitting president undermining our political process & questioning the legality of the voices of countless Americans without evidence is not only dangerous & wrong, it undermines the very foundation this nation was built upon,” Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, who will retire when his term ends in January, said in a tweet. “Every American should have his or her vote counted.”

At least one person from Trump’s inner circle has been pushing back publicly on the president’s claims. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, a close Trump ally who helped him campaign, also turned against the false and misleading claims coming from the White House. Christie denounced Trump’s premature victory claim early Wednesday, when millions of votes remained to be counted, and on Thursday he said the president was sowing discord.

“Show us the evidence. We heard nothing today about any evidence,” Christie said on ABC. “This kind of thing – all it does is inflame without informing.”

The president has called for vote counting to stop in Pennsylvania, where he was narrowly ahead early Friday but has been losing ground as poll workers process mail-in ballots from parts of the state that heavily favor Biden. Meanwhile, Trump has urged counting to continue in Arizona, where Biden’s lead has been shrinking as Maricopa County continues to tally votes.

Hannity on Thursday night suggested that the tight race in Pennsylvania has been sabotaged because election officials in Philadelphia blocked Republican observers from ballot counting. (In fact, observers from both political parties are allowed to watch poll workers count ballots in Pennsylvania, and the counting process is live-streamed online. A court order on Thursday also granted a Trump campaign request to move observers closer, within six feet of poll workers.)

Then, Hannity asked Cruz whether Pennsylvania’s GOP-controlled legislature should “invalidate” the results and hold a “do-over” election.

“Look, that’s exactly right,” Cruz said. “Now, that’s a big cannon to use. I can tell you during Bush v. Gore we were having very explicit conversations about that, as we were seeing an effort to steal that election. The answer that I want to see, the outcome that I want to see, is to count every vote that was legally cast and for the president to win.”

Tommy Tuberville, the Republican senator-elect in Alabama and former college football coach, also questioned the shifting election results as votes continue to be counted.

“The election results are out of control,” Tuberville said in a tweet following Trump’s speech. “It’s like the whistle has blown, the game is over, and the players have gone home, but the referees are suddenly adding touchdowns to the other team’s side of the scoreboard.”

Election officials and candidates knew that the final vote counts would not be available on Election Day. The coronavirus pandemic led many states to encourage voting by mail, and some states did not allow poll workers to tally those ballots until after polls closed Tuesday. A large number of mail-in ballots, combined with an extremely tight presidential contest, resulted in races too close to call in five states Thursday night.

As Trump’s closest allies backed his unfounded claims, some other Republicans defended the election process and the poll workers who are still counting hundreds of thousands of legally cast ballots.

Maryland Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, who did not vote for Trump, said there was “no defense” for the president’s misleading speech.

“America is counting the votes, and we must respect the results as we always have before,” the Republican governor said in a tweet. “No election or person is more important than our Democracy.”

Romney said in a statement that “counting every vote is at the heart of democracy.”

“That process is often long and, for those running, frustrating,” he added. “The votes will be counted. If there are irregularities alleged, they will be investigated and ultimately resolved in the courts. Have faith in democracy, in our Constitution, and in the American people.”

Reps. Denver Riggleman, R-Va., and Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., called for the president to present evidence of his claims and “respect the democratic process that makes America great.”

“STOP spreading debunked misinformation,” Kinzinger tweeted. “This is getting insane.”

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., similarly reassured the public that continuing to count legally cast ballots is “NOT fraud,” although he also suggested that Trump was within his rights to challenge any votes “cast after the legal voting deadline.” (No evidence of late voting has been publicly disclosed.)

Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., offered a more tempered stance but still raised the specter of election irregularities.

“All votes that comply with Pennsylvania law must be counted, regardless of how long the process takes,” Toomey said in a statement Thursday, adding that a recount “should be immediately granted” if the vote count meets the threshold for one.

“Once a final count is reached and certified, all parties involved must accept the outcome of the election regardless of whether they won or lost,” he added.

Many other Republicans, including some former governors and governors-elect in states still counting votes, also urged the public to remain patient and ignore unfounded allegations.

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House Democrats trade blame over surprise losses in election

InternationalNov 06. 2020Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., wears a protective mask as she speaks during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on Sept. 15, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Stefani Reynolds. 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Billy House · NATIONAL, POLITICS, CONGRESS 
Frustration among Democrats over U.S. House election losses spilled over during a conference call Thursday as several moderates blamed party progressives for promoting an ultra-liberal agenda that turned off swing voters.

Rep. Abigail Spanberger, who narrowly won re-election in a Republican-leaning Virginia district, was one of several Democrats who voiced anger that the party lost races it should have won, according to people familiar with the private caucus call.

She and others contended that issues promoted by the Democratic left — such as calls to defund the police — gave Republicans an opening to paint the entire party as socialists and radicals. Spanberger’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

At least seven incumbents, six of them first elected in the 2018 Democratic wave, lost their bids for re-election. And the party fell short of flipping seats in states such as Texas that had appeared to be prime targets in this election.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told fellow Democrats that she disagreed with the assessment that the election weakened the party, according to one person who listened to the call. She also said that policies that are popular in her hometown of San Francisco might not work elsewhere in the country, reminding Democrats that they needed to find consensus for a winning message.

She emphasized that Democrats had held control of the House and that Joe Biden is on a path to winning the presidency, according to the person. The party also needs to mindful of the message it sends to voters ahead of January runoffs for the Senate in Georgia that could give Democrats control in the Senate, she told them.

Reps. Marc Veasey of Texas and Vicente Gonzalez of Texas were described as joining Spanberger in airing similar grievances. They complained that progressive members embracing socialism were endangering the continued Democratic hold on the House majority, according to another person familiar with the call. The offices of the two didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The power of the party’s young and vocal progressives, led by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is set to grow with the addition next year of several new members who replaced have more centrist veterans.

Ocasio-Cortez hailed those results as evidence that the progressive message works, and called for appreciation of those members’ efforts. In a series of tweets Friday, she argued that some campaigns suffered because they failed to execute effectively via social media platforms.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, an Ocasio-Cortez ally who also was first elected in 2018, said on Thursday’s call that she viewed the complaints from the centrists as pressure on her not to speak her mind, according to one of the people.

For his part, President Donald Trump on Thursday hailed Republican victories in House races against predictions. The GOP “actually won many new seats and I think many more on the way,” he said.

There were still 39 seats left to be settled late Thursday. Democrats currently have 232 seats to 197 for Republicans and one Libertarian. Five seats are vacant.

Democratic tensions will be building leading up to the 2022 elections. The party in control of the White House historically has lost seats in midterms, and Democrats will have a narrower majority to defend heading into that vote.

The internal bickering played out in public as almost real-time leaks of the back-and-forth on the call Thursday. Some members tweeted during the discussion, pleading with colleagues to stop.

“I’ve gotten texts from 3 different reporters asking me to live-leak juicy details to them. No. We (Dems and the media) need to stop this nonsense,” Rep. Jared Huffman of California tweeted at one point.

The turmoil illustrates the challenge Pelosi will be confronting in managing the various factions of her slimmed-down majority in what could be her last two years as speaker.

Pelosi has promised colleagues she won’t serve as speaker beyond 2023, to allow a new generation of Democrats to assume leadership. She has said she will seek the post for the next two-year session; House Democrats will nominate a speaker in party leadership elections Nov. 18 and 19.

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Virginia county removes Civil War monuments in front of its courthouse

NationalNov 07. 2020Fairfax County has removed several Civil War markers from in front of its judicial complex. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by John McDonnell 

By The Washington Post · Antonio Olivo · NATIONAL, POLITICS, COURTSLAW, RACE, HISTORY

Fairfax County, Va., on Thursday night removed a trio of Civil War markers in front of the county’s judicial complex, part of a broader effort in Virginia to turn a page on the state’s Confederate legacy.

Under a new state law giving localities authority over the fate of war monuments and memorials in their communities, the county’s Board of Supervisors decided last month to donate a stone obelisk honoring the first Confederate soldier who died in a land battle to the Stuart Mosby Historical Society in Centreville, Va.

A state historical marker commemorating that June 1, 1861, battle – the first land confrontation in the war – will be given to the state Department of Historic Resources. A pair of Dahlgren howitzers that were also in front of the complex will go to the Manassas National Battlefield Park in nearby Prince William County.

“We started today with a Fairfax County that better reflects our values,” Jeff McKay, D, chair of the county board, said in a tweet Friday announcingthe monuments had been removed. The items are being stored in a county warehouse until the donations are complete, McKay wrote.

Several localities in Virginia have taken down Civil War monuments or are in the process of doing so, while protesters have pulled down others as demonstrations over racial inequality surged around the country afterGeorge Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer in May.

But there has also been resistance to those efforts in Virginia. Gov. Ralph Northam, D, was sued after he announced plans to take down a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee on Richmond’s Monument Avenue. A judge last month ruled in favor of Northam, but left intact an injunction keeping him from taking down the statue to allow the group fighting to preserve the statue to mount an appeal.

And voters in several rural localities in the state this week opted against removing their Civil War monuments. Meanwhile, officials in other communities – including Prince William County, in addition to Fairfax – are conducting inventories of their Confederate markers before they decide their fate.

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In Pennsylvania, a Trump supporter sees his mural in a new light

InternationalNov 06. 2020Randy Bunch, a 53-year-old construction contractor, commissioned the mural of President Trump in McConnellsburg, Pa. MUST CREDIT: Photo by Amanda Andrade-Rhoades for The Washington Post. 

By The Washington Post · Hannah Dreier · NATIONAL, POLITICS 
FULTON COUNTY, Pa. – On the day after the election, sometime between when former vice president Joe Biden was declared the winner of Wisconsin and when he was declared the winner of Michigan, Randy Bunch went to see his mural of President Donald Trump. It always made him feel better.

“I’m not liking how this election is going,” Randy said as he stood next to the painting on the main road through the 1,000-person town of McConnellsburg.

People passing by slowed and honked when they saw Randy standing in the golden afternoon light, unmistakable with his Bunch Construction cap jammed down over thick salt-and-pepper hair.

“Hey, boy, what are you up to?” Randy called to a friend in a pickup truck.

“Hi there, how you doing?” he waved to another, and then turned back to admire the mural.

There was nothing else like it in town, and Randy was its unlikely patron – a 53-year-old construction contractor with no political experience who had never thought of commissioning a mural before Trump won office and inspired him to reimagine what a politician could be, and what he himself could be.

It was not a small painting. It was 8 feet high and 8 feet wide, a depiction of Trump’s face rendered in blocky red, white and blue, with flowing hair and what Randy described as a “grin that says ‘Pennsylvania, I love you.’ “

He had wanted people to see the president as he did – smiling out at them, brimming with energy to make their lives better.

“That expression. That twinkle in his eye. That’s what I see,” he said. “I see a person who loves America and the people in it.”

The mural was one of the few landmarks in Fulton County, which in 2016 became the reddest county in the state, with 84% of voters supporting Trump. McConnellsburg, the county seat, was a mountain town with two gas stations; one where the town’s old men socialized and the other where teenagers hung out. Most everything else – the movie theater, the bowling alley, the coffee shops – had closed after a highway bypass was built around the town years ago.

Randy had grown up poor here and dropped out of high school at 16 to work construction. After a while, he started his own company and soon he was earning enough to comfortably support four children. He built his family a wood-paneled home and decorated it with a dozen stuffed and mounted deer heads and one stuffed wild turkey. People in town saw him as a decent man who spoke his mind and charged fairly, and his business thrived. Voting was something he did every few years that interrupted his 12-hour days, and he rarely followed politics.

That was the way it was in 2016 as well. Like almost everyone else in the county, Randy voted for Trump. In his case, it was almost automatic. But then as the months went by, he began paying attention because he liked Trump’s style. This was a man like him. A businessman, not a politician. A straight talker. Self-made. “He’s probably lost a lot of money by being the president,” Randy said. “He’s got a big heart.”

Two years after voting for him, Randy had come to like the president so much that he called up a man named Charlie Harr, the one person in McConnellsburg who was known as an artist, who had a studio in town and hosted regular “paint nights” to teach residents the basics, and told him, “Hey man, I need you to paint me Trump.”

The price: $300. The design was based on a photo of Trump that Harr found and Randy approved. For a week, Harr stood on a ladder, blasting heavy metal in his studio and painting in bright colors he hoped would help the mural stand out on the faded main street.

As soon as Harr was done and Randy screwed the painting into the chipped blue cinder blocks of his building, people began coming to take their photo with it. First it was just locals, but then people began driving in from other towns. Randy had rented part of the building to a dog grooming business, and one of the employees there quit, saying it sickened her to have to see Trump’s face every day. But hers was the minority reaction in town, and the business owner quickly replaced her. She was a Trump fan, too. People started giving directions relative to “the big Trump head.” Over the summer, when spreading Black Lives Matter protests reached Fulton County and some people marched through town, other people stood guard in front of the mural armed with rifles.

Randy assumed that eventually someone would deface his Trump, but in the two years it’s been up, no one ever had.

By the time Election Day arrived this week, Randy was more enthusiastic about Trump than ever. Amid pandemic shutdowns, Trump had spoken up for reopening places like McConnellsburg, where a factory that was one of the last big employers had been forced to stop operating even though the town had seen just a handful of covid-19 cases. “He’s the best president since I’ve been born. God first. Pro-life. Freedom. And right on down the line,” Randy said. Trump seemed like a leader who would endure.

The mural had endured too, continuing to attract visitors.

“It reminds me of Andy Warhol,” a nearby store owner said on Election Day, looking at the mural as he took a break outside.

“I actually think it’s a good picture of him. Usually every TV station uses a picture of him that’s been all distorted,” said a woman who worked as a hairdresser.

It was like that all day long, as people wearing “I voted” stickers passed by, but on the day after, as the national results began turning away from Trump, a couple from out of town looked at the mural and wondered how long it would last.

“They might have to rip it down, unfortunately,” the husband said.

“If the town supports him, they should let it be,” the wife said.

A worker at the store next door was telling people not to worry. “If I know Randy Bunch, he’ll keep it up,” he said.

Now, though, in late afternoon, as Biden took Wisconsin and was about to take Michigan, and the person looking at the painting was Randy himself, he was thinking that even if the mural and Fulton County hadn’t changed, the country around him might have.

He was doing what he couldn’t have imagined doing even the day before – wondering what would happen if Trump lost. He wanted to think no one could take away the movement Trump had started, and what it had meant to him. “His energy, his rallies, and his uplifting spirit – nobody’s ever gonna forget that,” he said.

He took a few steps back. “The size always gets people,” he said.

He looked at his favorite part, the smile. “Around here, we would call it a s— eating grin,” he laughed.

He looked at the colors. “Red, white and blue. So it’s patriotic.”

The light was waning, and all of it was in the shadows now, harder to see. If Trump lost, what would he do about the mural?

He could take it down and hang it in his home. Or move it to the shed behind the building. But his choice was to act like he thought Trump would, and follow the example of the best president of his lifetime. He would repaint the building, and have Harr refresh the mural if it started to fade. “It’ll be here for a good while,” he said.

It was dinner time now and the streets were empty. The few stores were closing. Ballot counting was continuing in other counties and Biden was picking up more votes. Randy took a last look at his smiling Trump, then turned away to drive home to watch the rest of the results.

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World hunger problem means some nations risk famine, UN Says

InternationalNov 06. 2020

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Agnieszka de Sousa · WORLD, EUROPE 

The world’s hunger problem is worsening and some nations in Africa and the Middle East could soon slip into famine as conflict, economic hardship, weather extremes and the covid-19 crisis limit access to food.

That’s the warning from the United Nations, which said areas of Burkina Faso, northeastern Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen face famine if conflict escalates and humanitarian access is further cut in the coming months. Food insecurity is rising globally and another 16 countries are at high risk of more acute hunger, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Programme said.

“This report is a clear call to urgent action,” Dominique Burgeon, the FAO’s director of emergencies and resilience, said in a statement. “We are deeply concerned about the combined impact of several crises which are eroding people’s ability to produce and access food, leaving them more and more at risk of the most extreme hunger.”

Parts of the population in the four hot spots are already experiencing a critical hunger situation because of the “toxic combination” of problems, with some people partially or completely being cut off from humanitarian assistance, according to the agencies.

Overall, in the next three to six months, some 20 areas around the world are likely to face potential spikes in high acute food insecurity, and require urgent attention, the agencies said. Food prices and weather conditions will also determine how the situation evolves in the highest risk countries, they said.

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U.K. hits Denmark with quarantine after covid mink mutation

InternationalNov 06. 2020

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Morten Buttler · WORLD, EUROPE 
The U.K. is imposing a two-week quarantine on travelers from Denmark, following an outbreak of a rare mutation of covid-19 in the Nordic country’s mink farms.

“I have taken the swift decision to urgently remove Denmark from the government’s travel corridor list as a precautionary measure given recent developments,” U.K. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said in a statement.

Denmark said earlier this week it had found a “unique” mutation of the virus that has the potential to derail work on developing a vaccine. Health officials in the country are coordinating their efforts to contain the outbreak with the World Health Organization, which includes culling the entire population of mink, or up to 17 million animals.

At a briefing late on Thursday, Danish Health Minister Magnus Heunicke said the covid mutation, which originated in the western peninsula of Jutland, has now also been identified in at least one person in the country’s east, closer to the capital Copenhagen.

Danish health officials say they know of 12 people who have been infected with the new virus. On Friday, local media reported that over 200 people have contracted various forms of coronavirus mutations stemming from mink, 14 of whom were outside the region in which the mutation originated.

On Friday, Denmark recorded 1,427 new coronavirus cases, the highest number yet, though health authorities said the figure also reflects an increase in testing.

Kare Molbak, Denmark’s top epidemiologist, said the WHO representatives he’s spoken with have made clear they are “very worried” about the findings in his country.

Molbak said Denmark so far hasn’t received reports from other countries with large mink populations, such as the Netherlands, of similar outbreaks. Denmark’s situation is “unique,” he said.

People who have contracted the new form of the virus don’t appear to be suffering more severe symptoms, according to Danish health officials. The virus was most likely originally transmitted to the mink from humans, and then back again.

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Biden takes lead in count in Pennsylvania and Georgia

InternationalNov 06. 2020

By The Washington Post · John Wagner · NATIONAL, POLITICS 

Joe Biden overtook President Donald Trump in the count in Pennsylvania just before 9 a.m. as the state’s Democratic-leaning counties reported additional vote count totals.

President Trump departs after speaking in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on Thursday. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford,The count is ongoing. But Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes would put Biden over the 270 votes needed even with a handful of other states still too close to call.

Biden also took a small lead in Georgia early Friday, though vote counting is not yet complete. Thousands of requested overseas and military ballots may arrive by the deadline Friday, and there are provisional ballots left to count.

In Pennsylvania, Biden pulled ahead with the release of the vote count of mail-in ballots from heavily Democratic Philadelphia.

With the update, Biden leads Trump by more than 5,000 votes. If Biden win the state’s 20 electoral votes, he will have enough to claim an electoral college win.

Before the latest release, Biden had been trailing Trump by about 18,000 votes in Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania was among the most hotly contested states of the cycle, with both Biden and Trump making regular trips to the state for most of the campaign.

Both candidates spent considerable time there in the final days of the race, with Biden holding a final rally in Pittsburgh the night before the election and making an additional two stops on Election Day.

The Trump campaign indicated Friday that it will continue to press legal challenges in four key states, despite losses in court a day earlier as two judges rejected its claims.

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel on Friday released a list of 12 political, legal and communications staff who will focus on Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania. All but one person already worked for the Trump campaign, the RNC or state Republican parties, according to their LinkedIn and Twitter profiles.

“We will not give up on this process until every last issue has been resolved,” McDaniel said in a statement.

The Trump campaign has run into legal setbacks to its aggressive push to stop vote-counting in Michigan and Georgia. Judges in those states rejected the campaign’s lawsuits on Monday, and in Pennsylvania, a request to stop the count in Philadelphia was denied after a deal was struck to allow 60 observers from each party to watch the process.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., advocated Friday that the election process continue to play out and that courts resolve disputes.

In a tweet, McConnell echoed Trump’s refrain about not counting illegal ballots but was silent on baseless conspiracies that Trump has pushed alleging widespread election fraud in states where Biden has picked up votes in counting since Election Day.

“Here’s how this must work in our great country: Every legal vote should be counted,” McConnell said. “Any illegally submitted ballots must not. All sides must get to observe the process. And the courts are here to apply the laws & resolve disputes. That’s how Americans’ votes decide the result.”

U.S. stocks were poised for an opening bell slide Friday as investors grapple with a maelstrom of uncertainty: record coronavirus infections, a weakening economic recovery and a yet-to-be called presidential race.

After mounting their sharpest rally since April, all major U.S. indexes were pointing lower in premarket trading as investors awaited October job numbers and the outcome of the presidential election. 

After unleashing a tirade from the White House briefing room Thursday night that was filled with falsehoods about the U.S. electoral system, Trump continued to air grievances overnight on Twitter and demanded that the U.S. Supreme Court intervene in the election.

One of Trump’s predawn tweets drew a warning label from Twitter for disputed and misleading content. In it, Trump falsely asserted that campaign observers were not allowed to do their job “in any way, shape, or form.”

“I easily WIN the Presidency of the United States with LEGAL VOTES CAST,” Trump claimed. “The OBSERVERS were not allowed, in any way, shape, or form, to do their job and therefore, votes accepted during this period must be determined to be ILLEGAL VOTES. U.S. Supreme Court should decide!”

There is no evidence of widespread fraud in this election. Officials in several states are still counting ballots that were legally submitted by mail and in person.

In his White House appearance on Thursday, Trump baselessly claimed that there was widespread fraud in states in which he was losing, but not in those he was winning. There is no evidence for his statements.

Trump’s broadsides have exposed tensions within his party, splitting GOP officials who spoke publicly on Thursday night into warring camps: those who defended the president and those who defended the U.S. election process. Many others, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have stayed silent.

Trump’s loyalists, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Ted Cruz, R-Texas, echoed Trump’s evidence-free claims of widespread fraud in Pennsylvania and other swing states that have been trending toward former vice president Joe Biden as more votes are counted.

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China is awash with schadenfreude over U.S. election tumult

InternationalNov 06. 2020

By The Washington Post · Gerry Shih · WORLD, ASIA-PACIFIC 
TAIPEI, Taiwan – “Hopeless America,” a columnist at China’s official Xinhua News Agency thundered.

“U.S. democracy now a joke,” the Beijing-backed Ta Kung Pao broadsheet pronounced.

“A bit like a developing country,” the Global Times sniffed as it contemplated the possibility of post-election violence erupting in the world’s most powerful democracy.

As the United States tallied votes in a presidential election that appears headed for a court battle and fractious final phase, Chinese commentators and state mouthpieces this week lined up to portray the cross-Pacific superpower – viewed with awe and envy by generations of Chinese – as a politically crumbling edifice in 2020.

The Chinese criticisms, while pointed, mirrored broad concerns among both U.S. allies and rivals as the United States wrestled with unfounded allegations of electoral fraud from President Donald Trump on Wednesday, an emerging legal showdown and the prospect of internal divisions that could endure well beyond Inauguration Day. Sizing up the situation, newspapers in South Korea and Japan this week questioned the “intrinsic value of democracy” while Britain’s former foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt warned about a potential “catastrophe for the worldwide reputation of democracy.”

But in China, state media and the commentariat followed the unprecedented scenes from the United States not with anxiety but schadenfreude. The country had been locked in an increasingly ideological confrontation with the Trump administration and has doubled down in recent years on promoting the legitimacy of Communist Party rule to its citizens.

In a piece in Xinhua’s China Comment magazine, Wang Pengquan, a state socialism researcher, chastised his compatriots for reflexively “kowtowing” to U.S. superiority and urged them to build a “modern socialist country.”

“America-worshippers exaggerate its political system’s ability to self-correct and tout its so-called freedom,” Wang wrote. “Facts speak louder than words. The vast majority of Chinese can see through the reality of U.S. political division, economic stagnation and social turmoil.”

No matter the outcome of the election, there is little hope for the United States to regain the global leadership it inherited at the end of World War II, wrote Xinhua editor Wang Jinwei in another piece as he described a country racked by racial tensions, economic inequality and unchecked coronavirus cases.

Criticisms of liberal democracy, to be sure, are nothing new from Beijing, where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) holds power with an iron grip. China has rapped neighboring Taiwan and South Korea, for instance, when brawls have broken out in their parliaments. When the presidential election in 2000 between George W. Bush and Al Gore descended into controversy before being settled by the Supreme Court, state media noted mildly that the U.S. electoral system “is in fact not perfect.”

The tone was harsher this time.

“Democracy has not made America great again, nor has it saved Americans from the pandemic,” said Wang Wen, an executive dean at Renmin University in Beijing who wrote an essay earlier this year titled “the End of the American Century.”

“This is no longer the United States we knew in the past,” Wang told The Washington Post.

Freedom House, a nongovernmental, nonpartisan advocacy organization in Washington, D.C., released a report this year that included the United States among countries where democratic institutions have weakened.

But Sarah Cook, a China researcher at Freedom House, said the Chinese criticisms of democracies were “ironic” and a “typical part of the playbook” from its state media. Cartoons and memes mocking Trump and U.S. politicians have been widespread in China, but “any user posting anything even remotely irreverent of Xi Jinping faces severe punishment, including possible imprisonment,” she said, referring to the Chinese president.

“Those kinds of actions speak louder than words in terms of the deep level of insecurity behind the CCP and state media’s boasting of their own system.”

As vote totals climbed, many independent outlets on Chinese social media, which represent the most popular way for many Chinese to consume news, scrambled to provide readers detailed explanations on matters such as the U.S. electoral college, why absentee ballots could dramatically shift vote totals after polls closed, and the implications of Trump declaring an early victory.

Government censors, for the most part, stayed at arm’s length from discussions about U.S. politics as the topic racked up nearly 7 billion views on Weibo.

In Hong Kong, where Beijing has accused Washington of political interference, the Communist Party-controlled Ta Kung Pao newspaper seized on the election turmoil as an example of Washington’s “double standards.”

The U.S. government sided last year with Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters who demanded the right to choose the city’s leader rather than selecting from candidates prescreened by Beijing. Yet the U.S. president is also not selected simply by popular vote, the newspaper argued, while pointing out that the U.S. election could be mired in a legal challenge and that the White House is barricaded behind steel bars.

“What is infuriating is that Americans themselves reject so-called true universal suffrage but ask Hong Kong to promote it,” Ta Kung Pao opined. “The U.S. election is not a model of democracy, but an ugly demonstration of democracy. It’s a worldwide laughingstock.”

When the U.S. Embassy in Beijing also sought to explain the electoral college on Weibo as part of the State Department’s public diplomacy, it was also greeted with skepticism.

One Chinese user derided the state of democracy in the United States as “slipping to the level of Belarus or Venezuela.”

Another joked that America is so divided it should adopt China’s “one country, two systems” framework for governing Hong Kong: “You can have two governments and two presidents!”

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

Judges in two states reject Trump campaign lawsuits as the president continues to press unsubstantiated claims of fraud

InternationalNov 06. 2020President Donald Trump speaks in the briefing room at the White House on Thursday in Washington, D.C. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford 

By  The Washington Post · Amy Gardner, Jon Swaine, Michelle Ye Hee Lee, Emma Brown · NATIONAL, POLITICS, COURTSLAW 
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump and his allies pressed their claims Thursday that election officials have allowed ballot fraud to infect the counting process in the battleground states poised to decide the presidency, but they offered no evidence of irregularities and met with two immediate defeats in court.

In Georgia, a local judge in Chatham County, home of Savannah, denied the Trump campaign’s effort to disqualify about 50 ballots that a Republican poll watcher claimed may have arrived after the 7 p.m. deadline on Election Day. In court, the poll watcher offered no evidence that the ballots had arrived late, and county election officials testified that they had arrived on time.

And in Michigan, a Court of Claims judge said she would deny the campaign’s request for an emergency halt to the counting of votes in the state. She noted that the request made little sense, given that the counting has essentially been finished in the state, with former vice president Joe Biden ahead by about 150,000 votes. He has been declared the winner of the state by national news organizations. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office described Trump’s request as an “attempt to unring a bell.”

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign announced its intent to file a lawsuit in another state where counting is continuing apace: Nevada. At a chaotic news conference in Las Vegas, campaign officials said that they plan to file a suit in federal court to stop the counting of what they called “improper votes.”

The threatened legal action was part of a barrage of lawsuits that the president’s campaign has filed since Election Day, seeking to slow the vote count as Biden’s totals steadily increase. So far, they have threatened legal challenges or demanded recounts in five states – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada.

The campaign also joined in a lawsuit against Maricopa County, home of Phoenix, claiming that large numbers of Republican ballots were invalidated after voters used Sharpie pens to mark their choices. The complaint was filed on behalf of two voters, one of whom, the suit alleged, was denied a second ballot after a poll worker canceled the first one because a machine couldn’t read it. State and local election officials have said repeatedly that Sharpies are preferred for filling out ballots and that there is no evidence they cause difficulties in the scanning process.

The Maricopa County attorney’s office wrote to the state attorney general’s office Thursday saying that no ballots were rejected at the county’s voting centers and that when ballots cannot be read, voters are given the option of casting new ones.

In a call with reporters, Biden campaign attorney Bob Bauer accused Trump’s campaign of filing “meritless” lawsuits meant to misinform the public and disrupt the vote count.

“This is part of a broader misinformation campaign that involves some political theater,” he said, saying the Trump camp has provided no evidence of wrongdoing.

But the president repeated unsubstantiated claims about fraud throughout the day, pushing a line of attack he has pressed throughout the campaign.

“All of the recent Biden claimed States will be legally challenged by us for Voter Fraud and State Election Fraud,” he tweeted in a message tagged by Twitter as misleading. “Plenty of proof – just check out the Media. WE WILL WIN! America First!”

Trump’s supporters demanded that the count continue in Arizona, meanwhile, where Biden held a healthy lead Thursday but where hundreds of thousands of ballots remained uncounted. 

The president’s allies touted a minor legal victory in Pennsylvania, where a state appeals court on Thursday allowed GOP poll watchers to observe the counting of ballots from six feet away. The decision prompted election officials in Philadelphia to stop counting temporarily to accommodate the observers; the count had resumed by midafternoon.

The decision is unlikely to have an immediate impact on the vote count. Observers are not permitted to challenge the validity of ballots. The Trump campaign said in its brief that it was not trying to change this and “simply wants the right to observe.”

“Under the Constitution, the legislature has the right to make these laws, which they’ve made, and the judge just confirmed that they must be followed,” Trump campaign attorney Pam Bondi said at a news conference in Philadelphia. “So we plan on entering that building and legally observing the voting process.”

The legal jockeying drew competing rallies to the city streets: on one side, about 25 Trump supporters shouted, “Legal votes matter!” and “Trump!” Across the street, about 50 counterprotesters chanted, “Count every vote!”

The Trump team is engaged in half a dozen lawsuits in Pennsylvania, including those seeking to halt the counting of a small number of mail ballots whose voters were given the opportunity to correct errors. A new suit filed late Thursday seeks to disqualify 600 ballots in Montgomery County that had no secrecy envelopes as required by law. 

The president sought to intervene in a Pennsylvania case already filed at the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to reverse a state court’s decision to extend the deadline for receiving mail ballots from 8 p.m. on Election Day to 5 p.m. Friday.

Although the Trump campaign claimed that the case “may well dictate who will become the next president,” the Democrats said that “is not remotely clear at this juncture.”

The Trump campaign said it would open another front in its legal war in Nevada. At a news conference Thursday morning at the Clark County elections department headquarters, Adam Laxalt, a former Nevada attorney general and co-chair of the Trump campaign in the state, claimed without providing evidence that ballots from deceased people had been counted, and that “thousands” of people had voted despite moving out of Clark County during the pandemic. As of late afternoon Thursday in Las Vegas, no such lawsuit had been filed.

Laxalt ignored reporters’ questions asking for examples of the fraud he described. About 100 Trump supporters swarmed the news conference waving Trump flags and carrying signs reading “Stop the Steal.”

Trump’s efforts to block the counting of votes coincided with a painstaking process in four battlegrounds – Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania – that will determine the next occupant of the White House. In Georgia and Pennsylvania, Trump is ahead, but his lead has diminished with each new update of counted votes.

Top Biden campaign officials, while calling for patience as final ballots are being counted, continued projecting confidence that their candidate will soon be declared the winner of the presidential election.

“We are absolutely confident that Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States,” campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said on a call with reporters, which included slides on how campaign officials think they will win at least four of the most hotly contested remaining states.

In Georgia, for instance, Trump’s lead had narrowed to fewer than 10,000 votes by early Thursday evening, with roughly 19,000 ballots left to count statewide. Biden was winning the late-counted ballots by large margins in part because they were concentrated in Democratic enclaves around Savannah and metro Atlanta, and also because they were mail ballots, which Democrats had used in greater numbers than Republicans.

The tightening margin in Georgia may lead to a recount request. If the margin is less than or equal to 0.5 percent of the certified results, a candidate can request a recount. There is no automatic recount in the state, and a candidate must request a recount within two business days after the certification, which is scheduled to take place by Nov. 20.

The president’s allies, meanwhile, appeared poised to open up a new front in their effort to secure the election for Trump. Conservative talk radio host Mark Levin urged Republican-controlled state legislatures to prepare to override the popular vote in their states and appoint their own slate of electors.

“REMINDER TO THE REPUBLICAN STATE LEGISLATURES, YOU HAVE THE FINAL SAY OVER THE CHOOSING OF ELECTORS, NOT ANY BOARD OF ELECTIONS, SECRETARY OF STATE, GOVERNOR, OR EVEN COURT,” Levin tweeted. “YOU HAVE THE FINAL SAY.”

Federal law empowers state legislatures to step in and appoint electors if an election has “failed” to produce a result. But what constitutes a “failed” election is the subject of much dispute – and would most certainly wind up in court if lawmakers in Arizona, Georgia or Pennsylvania – the three states with GOP legislatures – declared the election a failure.

Even if Republicans did appoint Trump electors in any of these states, state election officials could seat Biden’s electors on the basis of the popular vote. In that case, an obscure federal law called the Electoral Count Act would leave it to Congress to decide which set of dueling electors to seat.

If Congress deadlocks, as it might, given Republican control of the Senate and Democratic control of the House, the electors seated by a state’s executive branch – its governor or secretary of state – would prevail over those seated by the state legislature (though that scenario, too, would be likely to prompt litigation).

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

World watches with unease as drawn-out, contested election batters America’s global image

InternationalNov 06. 2020Mary Alice Phillips opens absentee ballots and prepares them for scanning In the Pre-Tabulation Room at the Dekalb County Voter Registration and Elections Office in Atlanta on Nov. 4, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Kevin D. Liles 

By The Washington Post · Simon Denyer, Rick Noack, Adam Taylor, Siobhán O’Grady · WORLD
As the world reckoned with another day of uncertainty over the result of the U.S. presidential election, Trump’s premature victory claim, unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud and the threat of legal challenges continued to overshadow the drawn out vote count, from which no clear winner has emerged. The indecision was met with deep unease around the globe over what lies ahead for the U.S. political process – and more than a little glee from America’s traditional adversaries.

Here are the latest developments:

– “I think the whole world waits for the final outcome in the United States,” New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told reporters Thursday. “We have faith in the institutions in the United States and of course faith that those final votes will continue to be counted and there will be a final result declared.”

– “STOP THE COUNT!” Trump tweeted Thursday. “IT’S CALLED DEMOCRACY!” former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta wrote in response.

– Trump’s strong showing has left many foreign observers bewildered – and asking whether Trumpism is here to stay.

– Stock markets around the world held up on Thursday despite the uncertainty. Asian markets closed up across the board Wednesday, and European indexes broadly advanced.

– – –

Amid the slow count, America’s global image as a model for other democracies to emulate has taken yet another battering, especially among its allies around the globe.

In Canada, lawmakers have been relatively silent on the aftermath of the vote, but election coverage continued to dominate the country’s largest newspapers, to the point that they nearly resembled U.S. dailies.

The Toronto Star described a “nagging, palpable sense of dread” that no matter who prevails, Canada has never felt “so far apart” from its southern neighbor. An editorial in the Globe and Mail, meanwhile, commented on Trump’s litigiousness.

“Better an army of lawyers than an army of Proud Boys,” the paper wrote. “Americans suing Americans? Yawn. Have at it.”

After Trump falsely declared victory before the votes were counted on election night, he spent much of Wednesday and Thursday leveling allegations of electoral fraud without evidence. His campaign has since announced legal challenges to determine which votes will count. Days of court battles and political uncertainty lie ahead. Many fear violence.

Lawmakers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe who had observed the U.S. election said Trump’s comments were “baseless” and “harm public trust in democratic institutions.”

– – –

The U.S. push for global human rights and democracy – while the country’s political system is so affected by moneyed influence and apparent electoral problems, and its foreign policy record so marked by support for dictators and its own economic interests – has long carried more than a whiff of hypocrisy for many observers abroad. But the idea of U.S. democracy still has the power to inspire.

“America has represented optimism, looking forward and ideas,” said Tatsuhiko Yoshizaki, chief economist at the Sojitz Research Institute in Tokyo. “And yet, over the past four years, we have come to see the dark side in the United States.”

The same sentiment was echoed in Europe on Thursday, where Germany’s left-leaning Der Spiegel newsweekly compared Trump to a “late Roman emperor” who has “set a historic standard for voter contempt.” One of the paper’s conservative competitors, Die Welt, chose a similar comparison.

France, though, offered a hopeful assessment on Thursday. “I have faith in U.S. institutions validating the results of the election,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told Europe 1 radio.

In Britain, some commentators responded with disgust – with the left-leaning Daily Mirror calling Trump “a liar and a cheat until the bitter end” – while other papers turned to humor, especially over the slow pace of the vote count. The front page of the Metro newspaper read: “Make America Wait Again.”

Without weighing in directly, some world leaders appeared to react to Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s emerging lead in electoral votes. Irish Deputy Prime Minister Leo Varadkar privately told lawmakers Wednesday that a Biden presidency would allow the European Union to secure a better trade agreement with Britain, “because the Democrats watched our backs on Brexit,” the Irish Times reported.

Mick Mulvaney, U.S. special envoy for Northern Ireland and former White House chief of staff under Trump, tried to calm nerves when he appeared at an online panel run by the Dublin-based Institute of International and European Affairs. “American elections can be a sloppy, ugly thing,” he said, according to an Irish reporter watching the panel. “We describe it like making sausages, no one wants to see it happen but you enjoy the final product.”

Some U.S. officials did not attempt to shy away from partisan efforts to project reassurance. “Pres Trump had done an awesome job,” U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Kyle McCarter, a Trump appointee, wrote on Twitter. “The only ones to be shamed are those to break the law and cast illegal votes.”

JJ Omojuwa, a blogger in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, has been live-tweeting the election’s aftermath to his 1 million followers – and growing increasingly concerned. “It is just sad that dictators elsewhere will be emboldened by Trump’s antics,” he said, “and unlike the United States, there will be no strong institutions to check their antics.”

Mathias Hounkpe, a pro-democracy activist in Senegal who has helped monitor elections across West Africa over the years, said he had never seen anything like what Trump supporters were doing Wednesday night in Arizona. Some had come armed to a protest outside an election office in Maricopa County.

“We can’t believe that people are taking guns to where votes are being counted,” said Hounkpe, who is from Guinea. “Even in Africa we do not see that.”

– – –

Governments across Asia have largely refrained from meaningful comment, in the absence of an outcome. But newspapers and analysts were not so circumspect.

Trump’s speech prematurely declaring victory as ballots were still being counted sparked alarm in India, the world’s most populous democracy.

The move marked a “distinctly authoritarian turn” that overshadowed a “relatively peaceful election exercise in the world’s oldest democracy,” the Hindu, a newspaper, wrote in an editorial.

To some in Asia, the U.S. divisions served as a warning. In Indonesia, social media was abuzz with Trump’s false declaration of early victory, a move reminiscent of an Indonesian presidential hopeful, Prabowo Subianto, who lost last year’s election but continued to claim victory and encouraged his supporters to protest. The retired army general is now the defense minister.

And in South Korea, a U.S. ally, the division on display in the United States held up a painful mirror to its own democracy, which has also become extremely polarized. “The chaos in the so-called advanced democracy of the United States sparks concerns that we are not much different,” the Seoul Shinmun newspaper wrote in an editorial.

In New Zealand, where progressive leader Jacinda Ardern just secured a second term after effectively stamping out the coronavirus in the country, commentators were baffled by the narrow race.

Trump’s surprising strength is a sign that the United States is “splintering into two distorted, mirror images,” the website Newsroom added in an op-ed, written by a U.S. journalist based in the country.

New Zealand’s government recorded a surge in interest on how to move to the country this week, prompting warnings that disappointed American voters should not get ahead of themselves. “Fleeing Americans bound for disappointment at NZ border,” Newsroom warned its readers.

In the event of a Biden victory, newly appointed Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga would likely travel to the United States after inauguration next year, the Japan Times reported this week. But if Trump were to win, Suga might visit sooner, the paper reported. The pair have not met since Suga took over his role in September. He told lawmakers this week that he plans to forge a “firm” relationship with the White House regardless of who wins.

In China, a number of publications used the election to highlight shortcomings of the American system.

U.S.-style democracy is a “joke” with clear “double standards,” said an editorial in the Ta Kung Pao newspaper in Hong Kong, controlled by China’s liaison office in the city.

“One can feel the anxiety for potential chaos seeing metal fences and security being hastily installed around the White House,” the editorial said.

Still, China’s vice foreign minister, Le Yucheng, voiced hopes on Thursday about repairing bilateral relations after the election. “I hope the new U.S. administration will meet China halfway,” he said, according to CNBC.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to hold “an international telephone conversation” on Thursday evening, the Tass news agency cited Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying. It was unclear with whom Putin would speak, but the announcement was seen as unusual by Kremlin observers.