LibertyVoter.Org

By Lauren Floyd

Just as one did in Georgia, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit Saturday launched by President Donald Trump’s campaign to bar Pennsylvania state election officials from certifying the state’s election results, CBS News reported. U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann wrote in his order that Trump’s attorneys employed “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence. In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state.”

The words have apparently inspired some Republican legislators to come to terms with the truth of President-elect Joe Biden’s election win. “With today’s decision by Judge Matthew Brann, a longtime conservative Republican whom I know to be a fair and unbiased jurist, to dismiss the Trump campaign’s lawsuit, President Trump has exhausted all plausible legal options to challenge the result of the presidential race in Pennsylvania,” Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania said in a statement Saturday.

Toomey continued in the statement:

“This ruling follows a series of procedural losses for President Trump’s campaign. On Friday, the state of Georgia certified the victory of Joe Biden after a hand recount of paper ballots confirmed the conclusion of the initial electronic count. Michigan lawmakers rejected the apparent attempt by President Trump to thwart the will of Michigan voters and select an illegitimate slate of electoral college electors. These developments, together with the outcomes in the rest of the nation, confirm that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and will become the 46th President of the United States.”I congratulate President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on their victory. They are both dedicated public servants and I will be praying for them and for our country. Unsurprisingly, I have significant policy disagreements with the President-elect. However, as I have done throughout my career, I will seek to work across the aisle with him and his administration, especially on those areas where we may agree, such as continuing our efforts to combat COVID-19, breaking down barriers to expanding trade, supporting the men and women of our armed forces, and keeping guns out of the hands of violent criminals and the dangerously mentally ill. ”

Make no mistake about it, I am deeply disappointed that President Trump and Vice President Pence were not re-elected. I …read more

Source: ALTERNET

By Daily Kos

Grifting a free vacation? Going the extra mile—or extra 8,000 miles—to pretend there’s no presidential transition from Donald Trump to Joe Biden? Whatever it is, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Andrew Wheeler is packing on the official travel miles in his final weeks in government before he presumably heads back to being a fossil fuel lobbyist.

Wheeler will be traveling to Taiwan in December and Latin America in January. The Taiwan trip will involve a $250,000 charter flight as a coronavirus precaution, and, The New York Times reports, “Two people knowledgeable about the trip said meetings with top officials in Taiwan were not planned far in advance as is typical of such trips, and instead were hurriedly cobbled together.”

Wheeler’s EPA defended the planned trip by noting that Obama-era EPA head Gina McCarthy went to Taiwan. In 2014, in the middle of President Obama’s second term. Not during a pandemic.

The Taiwan trip is “to collaborate on issues including the Save our Seas initiative and marine litter, air quality, and children’s health,” an EPA spokesman said. But of course the about-to-be-replaced EPA head is not an essential participant in such efforts.

As for the Latin America trip, it’s even sketchier, somehow. The “people knowledgeable about the trip” told the Times there were no concrete plans, “only a preference for countries to visit.” Stated policy goals? Nah, there aren’t any of those.

“The pandemic adds expenses and difficulty to almost everything but certainly to any kind of official travel. When that travel is necessary for the government’s business, people understand that whatever resources it takes are needed and probably wouldn’t begrudge extra expense,” Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington’s Noah Bookbinder told the Times. But that’s not what’s going on here, and, “It’s hard to imagine a situation in a nonemergency scenario where a cabinet official’s time is going to be better spent traveling internationally than here in Washington preparing for an orderly transition.”

Yeah, that. But getting in a few last expensive, unnecessary trips while pretending the Biden presidency isn’t about to begin is just what you’d expect for the last gasps of Trumpian grifting.

…read more

Source: ALTERNET

By Salon

Donald Trump loves executive orders as a tool of dictatorial power, avoiding the need to work through Congress. But that works both ways, making it relatively easy for incoming President Joe Biden to reverse many of Trump’s most disastrous decisions. Here are 10 things Biden can do as soon as he takes office. Each one can set the stage for broader progressive foreign policy initiatives, which we have also outlined.

1) End the U.S. role in the Saudi-led war on Yemen and restore U.S. humanitarian aid to Yemen.

Congress already passed a war powers resolution to end the U.S. role in the Yemen war, but Trump vetoed it, prioritizing war-machine profits and a cozy relationship with the horrific Saudi dictatorship. Biden should immediately issue an executive order to end every aspect of the U.S. role in the war, based on the resolution that Trump vetoed.

The U.S. should also accept its share of responsibility for what many have called the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world today, and provide Yemen with funding to feed its people, restore its health care system and eventually rebuild this devastated country. Biden should restore and expand USAID funding and recommit U.S. financial support to the UN, the WHO and World Food Program relief programs in Yemen.

2) Suspend all U.S. arms sales and transfers to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Both countries are responsible for massacring civilians in Yemen, and the UAE is reportedly the largest arms supplier to Gen. Haftar’s rebel forces in Libya. Congress passed bills to suspend arms sales to both of them, but Trump vetoed them too. Then he struck arms deals worth $24 billion with the UAE as part of an obscene military and commercial ménage à trois between the U.S., the UAE and Israel, which he absurdly tried to pass off as a peace agreement.

While mostly ignored at the behest of the weapons companies, there are actually U.S. laws that require the suspension of arms transfers to countries that use them to violate U.S. and international law. They include the Leahy Law, which prohibits the U.S. from providing military assistance to foreign security forces that commit gross violations of human rights, and the <a target=_blank href="http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/t/0/0/alternet/~https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_Export_Control_Act" rel="noopener noreferrer" …read more

Source: ALTERNET

By David Edwards

One of President Donald Trump’s most high profile legal defenders on Sunday said that he did not expect the results of the election to be reversed.

Alan Dershowitz, who defended Trump at his impeachment trial earlier this year, told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo that the president’s legal team has failed to prove claims that the election was stolen by Democrats.

“They have to show that it affected numbers greater than the margin of victory,” Dershowitz explained. “They are not going to win on retail challenges here and there. The only chances they have of winning — and it’s the perfect storm and it’s very unlikely to happen — is if they can show retail wholesale constitutional arguments that affect a large number of voters sufficient to be greater than the margin of victory. I don’t think they’re there. I don’t think they can make that case.”

According to Dershowitz, the president’s case is “very, very uphill.”

“And if you’re betting widow’s and orphan’s money, if you’re betting money you can’t afford to lose, you have to bet that the outcome of the election will not be reversed,” he explained to Bartiromo.

Watch the video below from Fox News.

Alan Dershowitz: ‘The outcome of the election will not be reversed’

youtu.be

…read more

Source: ALTERNET

By Elizabeth Preza

While a certain Florida man plots how to squat in the White House long past his unceremonious eviction, a venerable Floridian hero is reshaping what it means to be a “Florida man” after surveillance cameras caught him on-tape rescuing his puppy from the jaws of an alligator.

AS CBS Miami reports, Richard Wilbanks, a retiree, wrestled the alligator in his backyard ponds after the reptile snatched up his 3-month-old puppy Gunner.

“We were just out walking by the pond, and it came out of the water like a missile,” Wilbanks told CNN. “I never thought an alligator could be that fast. It was so quick.”

“I just automatically jumped into the water,” Wilbanks said of the rescue.

In addition to single-handedly prying open the gator’s mouth to free his puppy’s leg, observers note that this gentleman is likewise single-handedly redefining what it means to be a “Florida man.” Some are also pointing out that this Florida man completed his heroic feat without even dropping his cigar.

Check out some responses below. And learn from Wilkens, who now walks Gunner on a leash, at least 10 feet from the pond’s edge.