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2020 Presidential Election -- Biden v Trump: Sleepy Joe vs Dopey Don [Results begin on page 409]


Patrick Bateman

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3 hours ago, hayden_horn said:

cable access in austin circa 1998 for the fucking win. 

Raw Time around 1996/1997. Our phone provider in the dorms (Campus Link) rendered caller ID useless and we maximized every prank call opportunity. Those hosts must have been masochists. 

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57 minutes ago, Hefeweizen said:

The Koch brothers is one reason I like to believe there is a hell as described in Dante's Inferno.

Oh there is a hell.  But you don’t have to wait till you die to see it, and it certainly doesn’t let billionaires like Koch bros in.

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4 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

All my Trumpiest friends have gone quiet on Facebook. Are they on Parler or did they just shut up?

My favorite is a trumpkin friend who keeps bitching and moaning about Twitter and Facebook "censoring" Trump every time he posts bullshit about election fraud. She thinks Zuckerberg is infringing upon the rights of Trump and "conservatives" to just make up shit. She's a bless her heart kinda lady.

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Oh shit, was that today?   Dammit, left behind again.  I gotta get my life together. 
 

I’m not on Facebook but a deep Trumper friend told me there was some call from on high to not use/tacit boycott Facebook for a day or a week or something, not even sharing family/friends.  This would demonstrate to them what all these users mean on lost revenue.  If Facebook doesn’t cower; then the official exodus to Parler commences.  

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7 minutes ago, Lobo said:

Oh shit, was that today?   Dammit, left behind again.  I gotta get my life together. 
 

I’m not on Facebook but a deep Trumper friend told me there was some call from on high to not use/tacit boycott Facebook for a day or a week or something, not even sharing family/friends.  This would demonstrate to them what all these users mean on lost revenue.  If Facebook doesn’t cower; then the official exodus to Parler commences.  

Cancel cultists.

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21 minutes ago, GhostOfTomJoad said:

My favorite is a trumpkin friend who keeps bitching and moaning about Twitter and Facebook "censoring" Trump every time he posts bullshit about election fraud. She thinks Zuckerberg is infringing upon the rights of Trump and "conservatives" to just make up shit. She's a bless her heart kinda lady.

I’ve got one of those. Lives on a small ranch in Atascosa county. About once a week he complains that he’s got over 600 friends on Facebook, and that whenever he posts he gets 20-30 likes and 10+ comments, except when he posts about DemoRAT corruption or Making America Great Again or now how the election is being stolen by computers he only gets 2-3 likes and the same 3-4 people commenting, including a couple of Trump haters! 
ergo, Facebook is trying to silence him.

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32 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

All my Trumpiest friends have gone quiet on Facebook. Are they on Parler or did they just shut up?

Have people seen the Parler - Russia connection on twitter (Dave Troy)?

To be honest, the first time I heard of Parler I thought that this is the natural extension of Russian influence into the Make-Amer-Grieve-Again space.

 

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56 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

All my Trumpiest friends have gone quiet on Facebook. Are they on Parler or did they just shut up?

It's like they are mourning, acknowledging the reality their Cheeto God will not.

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21 minutes ago, Enchubben said:

A time for unity! The party of tolerance!

Certainly unity is our strength. But the mendacious comment above makes a mockery of the cries for unity when it is agents of dark money, propaganda, lies, and crimes against humanity that are crying victimhood. Unity with our fellow Americans but no crime should go unpunished. Have you forgotten that the unmarked soldiers were unleashing tear gas and rubber bullets on peaceful protestors and criminal miscreants w/o making a distinction between them? I believe you are smart enough to make the distinction between those as well as between the oligarchs pursuing to upend democracy and the rule of law and the average voters trying to get along with their neighbors.

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-trumps-voter-fraud-war-room-became-a-fart-infused-room-from-hell?via=twitter_page
 
On Friday, the remnants of Donald Trump’s failed re-election campaign informed staff that they were putting an end to “voter fraud” hotline duty. It meant the death of a bare, depressing communal office space tucked away on a floor of the Team Trump headquarters in Arlington, Virginia; a workspace that one senior Trump campaign official described to The Daily Beast simply as “the room from hell.”
 
 
For the past few days, as the president’s political lieutenants and attorneys have hunted for nonexistent evidence of a massive voter-fraud conspiracy that—they would then argue—tilted the 2020 election to President-elect Joe Biden, campaign brass have assigned mid-level and junior staffers to man the in-house phone and email hotline recently set up to field tips. The “room from hell” had some TVs, on which staffers could pass the time by watching sports or cable news. The office space was lined with phones and swivel desk-chairs, where a dozen or more aides could field calls at the same time.
 
When the room first opened for business, staffers worked in rotating shifts, from 7 a.m. ET to 1 a.m. the following day, a source with knowledge of the matter said.No complimentary food was regularly provided. And the phones were constantly ringing in the dreary, dull hell-space, like a scene out of the movie Boiler Room.
But unlike Boiler Room, the day there was filled with a far greater number of death threats and infinitely more farting sounds on the telephone lines.
 
 
Spoiler

According to three people familiar with the situation, the hotline was inundated for nearly a week by crank callers impersonating public figures such as Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, anti-Trump callers launching into vulgarity-laden tirades, pranksters making sounds of flatulence, and others issuing threats of physical violence at the lower- and mid-level Trump 2020 staffers.
For every three or four hours of threats and pranking endured, staff estimated that they’d get roughly one caller with an earnest, maybe-promising tip. This was done against the backdrop of a re-election campaign that virtually all of them knew was over and defeated. The search for “FRAUD,” they knew, would not actually stop Biden’s presidency from commencing.
After hours stuck on tip-line duty, staff would often leave looking visibly upset, worn out, and feeling undervalued. One staffer told The Daily Beast they had to go to the bathroom at least twice over the last few days just to cry because of the sheer volume of abusive phone calls.
“It’s misery. It’s one of the worst ways to end a campaign that you could think of,” this person said. Some staff had started getting aggressive with the prank callers, giving fake names and arguing or yelling back into the landline.
Though these Trump campaign hands exhaled a heavy sigh of relief on Friday as news trickled out that the telephone tip-line would cease operations, the emotional damage had already been done and the insult already layered thickly on top of injury.
The fiasco of Team Trump’s hotline was a perfect microcosm of the ongoing flailing of the president and his senior officials’ efforts to play make-believe that Trump had actually won the election. An effort to obstruct and delay the presidential transition process following a decisive Biden victory in both the popular vote and the Electoral College count has been plagued from the start by an utter lack of seriousness.
The hotline, and what came with it, also represented a fitting coda to President Trump’s unsuccessful bid for a second term, during which a candidate famous for refusing to return the loyalty that he demands from his underlings left numerous staffers who’ve devoted years of their lives to his cause to fend for themselves, as he works to construct an alternate reality.
Some Team Trump staff have talked amongst themselves about filing for unemployment next week, as many contracts were set to expire on Nov. 15 and the campaign undergoes downsizing. Senior officials offered scant guidance about what was coming next, though the human resources department did tell them that many of their campaign emails would soon be shut off. And in keeping with Trump’s delusion of an imminent second term, the situation froze several more senior officials from even offering themselves up as listed references to junior staff scrambling to find another job for fear that they’d get in trouble for aiding with some informal transition.
Earlier this week, CNN reported that an assistant to Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien had yelled at a staff member for printing a résumé at the campaign HQ.
“Instead of throwing staff a life line they’re tying anchors to their feet as they begin to navigate the murky waters associated with massive job turnover throughout Washington, D.C.” one of the sources said.
However, on Friday night, Jason Miller, a senior Trump adviser on the campaign, told The Daily Beast, “We also asked for everyone’s resumes for potential future endeavors.” And Tim Murtaugh, the Trump 2020 communications director, told The Daily Beast that the campaign, while downsizing because it had shifted into “a legal and recount fight” was “retaining appropriate staff to see the post-election process through to the president’s victory.”
As for the hotline, Murtaugh confirmed that there was “verbal abuse” that often included “very sexually graphic language…including physical threats and death threats.”
“That our staffers were able to withstand this in order to hear from voters who had real concerns about the security of the election is a testament to their dedication to the president and his re-election,” he added.
On Friday morning, an email did go out from top staff to others on the team thanking them for their “sacrifices” and calling everyone aboard Team Trump a “family.” The email, which was obtained by The Daily Beast, was signed by senior officials Bill Stepien, Justin Clark, Miller, and Stephanie Alexander.
“[W]e want each of you to know how much we have appreciated your hard work and dedication to President Trump,” the note read. “Each member of this team has made sacrifices in order to participate in this re-election effort, and that will not be forgotten. We also realize today is the last day in the office for many of you, and we want to make sure you are aware that we are here to help you chart out the next phase of your career. We get it. We too have been there before and know how it feels.”
In addition to the email, two senior staffers said that they personally made themselves available to underlings as professional references and offered help in future endeavors.
But one of the three sources described the email and the outreach as “too little too late.”
In recent days, Trump officials had also asked campaign subordinates if they’d be interested in being uprooted to key states such as Nevada and Pennsylvania to assist with the legal challenges and public-relations blitzes that prominent Trump advisers and lawyers have been waging to attack the legitimacy of the election. Several aides have immediately declined the offer of such a transfer, assuming the work would be short-lived, pointless, and yet another obstacle to staffers getting on with their lives.
Through all of this, their candidate has seemed unaware of, or uninterested in, the plight of his foot soldiers. So far, according to knowledgeable sources, there has been no conference call or memo from President Trump thanking staffers for their service and for committing themselves to the fight.

 

They knew what they were getting into. I say let em crash!

Seriously. You went to work for the worst human being on the planet. And now you’re upset because....he’s acting like the worst human being on the planet. No fucking sympathy.

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1 hour ago, Lobo said:

Oh shit, was that today?   Dammit, left behind again.  I gotta get my life together. 
 

I’m not on Facebook but a deep Trumper friend told me there was some call from on high to not use/tacit boycott Facebook for a day or a week or something, not even sharing family/friends.  This would demonstrate to them what all these users mean on lost revenue.  If Facebook doesn’t cower; then the official exodus to Parler commences.  

So like one of those "Day Without a Mexican" walkouts, except that most people actually like Mexicans?

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3 hours ago, HenryJames said:

 

I said she'd be selling Trump T-shirts at 3am on broadcast television. Like the sad loser I am, I was wrong. She will be offering us investment opportunities in collectible Trump/Molon Labe private mint coins. Just look at the authentically rugged matte bronze finish! Every box of these has been blessed by DJT placing his hand on the lid. Touched by Trump!

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1 hour ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

All my Trumpiest friends have gone quiet on Facebook. Are they on Parler or did they just shut up?

 

You're lucky.  I still have a couple of people posting shit like the below.  A LOT.  Every day.

I should just unfollow them but part of me is mildly fascinated by their ability to live in a completely different reality, and like I car crash I can't look away.

The below were all posted in the last 24 hours by the same person, and I could have posted 10 more.  She spends all day posting about the election, fraud, and how Trump has it under control and is winning.  She's obsessed.

 

trump1.GIF.9c7b8a9aebde3b76d8f802f201bdc3cc.GIF

 

trump3.GIF.611e768743e44ca26977780c0d0da5f1.GIF

 

trump2.GIF.52af2c05ee3c93cd8ebefb9cf0e71850.GIF

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2 minutes ago, Tom said:

You're lucky.  I still have a couple of people posting shit like the below.  A LOT.  Every day.

I've only got 1 FB friend who regularly reposts pro-Trump stuff, I usually scroll through it. When I do read it, it's usually at least somewhat ironic, better than the Cracker Barrel dreck I see shown here.

The guy was a cocaine dealer in his youth, so maybe that sharpened his wits a good bit.

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9 minutes ago, Tom said:

 

You're lucky.  I still have a couple of people posting shit like the below.  A LOT.  Every day.

I should just unfollow them but part of me is mildly fascinated by their ability to live in a completely different reality, and like I car crash I can't look away.

The below were all posted in the last 24 hours by the same person, and I could have posted 10 more.  She spends all day posting about the election, fraud, and how Trump has it under control and is winning.  She's obsessed.

 

trump1.GIF.9c7b8a9aebde3b76d8f802f201bdc3cc.GIF

 

trump3.GIF.611e768743e44ca26977780c0d0da5f1.GIF

 

trump2.GIF.52af2c05ee3c93cd8ebefb9cf0e71850.GIF

You're the one living in a different reality,  ya stupid lib

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brisket

No fucking sympathy.

Beyond no sympathy.  They need to turn the phone bank back on.  Room 101 on acid for a week should be the sentence for everyone that propagated trumperspeak (i.e. newspeak since the night of the election).  The worst offenders of stupidity infliction on the american public like kelly mcenfuckme need to be put on the rack with headphones piping calls in to her brain for 18 hours a day.

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15 minutes ago, HenryJames said:

 

"Even if Trump won a single court fight, there’s another major roadblock: Congress would be the final arbiter of whether to accept electors submitted by Republican legislatures. If the Democratic-controlled House and GOP-controlled Senate could not agree on which electors to accept and who becomes president, the presidency would pass to the next person in line of succession at the end of Trump and Vice President Mike Pence’s term on Jan. 20. That would be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat."

nuke the site from orbit.  it's the only way to be sure.

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https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/14/giuliani-trump-legal-plans-436475

 

Quote

President Donald Trump’s senior campaign aides were gathered in their headquarters Saturday morning when word emerged that Rudy Giuliani would be holding a news conference in the parking lot of a Philadelphia landscaping business. 

They knew that meant trouble.

 

Quote

Senior campaign aides scurried to urge organizers to kill the event, infamously staged at the wrong “Four Seasons” — a landscaping business adjacent to an adult bookstore and a crematorium. But Giuliani plowed ahead anyway, delivering a conspiracy-filled rant that undercut the legal strategy the president’s advisers had meticulously mapped out in the run-up to the election.

Campaign officials described the episode as disastrous, saying it scared off many of the lawyers they spent months recruiting, who now no longer wanted to be involved. With the campaign already facing exceedingly long odds in its recount efforts, there are widespread concerns within Trumpworld and GOP circles that Giuliani’s antics are thwarting the president’s legal machinery from within.

 

Quote

“I can’t imagine that a rational person" in the general public "wouldn’t be adversely affected by the way he conducts himself,” said Barry Richard, who represented George W. Bush in the 2000 Florida recount. 

Yet Giuliani is taking on a heightened role. The president on Friday appointed him to oversee any new post-election litigation. The move, which was first reported by the New York Times, has distressed top campaign officials and other advisers, who worry Giuliani's Hail Mary ploys will damage Trump's reputation and potentially harm his future political aspirations.

 

Spoiler

Giuliani's promotion also threatens to complicate a legal apparatus that has been in the works since June. The campaign began assembling a team of lawyers in swing states and counties where recounts might take place. The effort has been overseen by Citizens United President David Bossie, who was tapped because of his conservative street cred and connections to pro-Trump activists around the country. 

The Republican National Committee member from Maryland has also served as a bridge between the campaign and RNC, which had at times clashed during the final months of the race. He has been working the phones from home after testing positive for the coronavirus early this week.

Bossie has joined a regular 9:30 a.m. conference call with general counsel Matt Morgan, as well as top campaign officials Bill Stepien, Justin Clark and Jason Miller, to discuss the day’s agenda. The group has also been holding daily conference calls with on-air surrogates to go over messaging, and with legal and political operatives in the half-dozen states with slim margins.

They have been meeting regularly with the president, allowing him to poke and prod at their ideas while presenting him with a menu of options. The group — which has told the president that he's facing an uphill path — has outlined to him how they view each state as a mini-campaign governed by different laws.

Looking to buttress its infrastructure, the campaign has shifted staffers from Florida to neighboring Georgia, which is conducting a hand recount. 

Much of the focus, however, has been on crafting lawsuits in three states that zero in on specific allegations of voting irregularities. In Arizona, the campaign has drawn attention to issues with voting machines. In Michigan and Pennsylvania, it is complaining about not having adequate observation at voting sites. 

The Pennsylvania suit also revolves around the idea that voters in Democratic-heavy Philadelphia had more of an opportunity to “cure” improperly cast ballots than those in the more conservative parts of the state. While the Arizona case was dropped Friday, the Michigan and Pennsylvania cases are pending.

Campaign officials describe it as an incremental approach aimed at chipping away at Biden’s leads and creating margins that are small enough to force recounts. While they concede their lawsuits are unlikely to succeed, they insist they’re not frivolous. 

But their strategy has resulted in a clash with Giuliani, who has advocated for more of a damn-the-torpedoes approach. The former New York City mayor has been working independently of the Trump legal apparatus. He's gone on Fox News and made allegations of widespread voter fraud. Early on, he ordered lawsuits to be filed without the consent of the campaign’s legal team. 

Things came to a head during a meeting at the White House last Friday, one day before the Four Seasons Total Landscaping imbroglio. As the group batted around options before the president, Giuliani interjected and derided them as insufficiently aggressive. Some in the room were taken aback. 

During a Thursday meeting at the White House that was attended by the president, Giuliani accused Trump aides of lying to Trump about his chances. Clark aggressively pushed back, and the two shouted at one another. Vice President Mike Pence was also present. The encounter was first reported by the Times.

Neither Giuliani nor a spokesperson responded to requests for comment.

Giuliani has been joined by Sidney Powell, an attorney for retired Gen. Michael Flynn. During a Sunday appearance on Fox News, she described a “massive and coordinated effort to steal this election” and said there had been an effort to “delegitimize and destroy votes for Donald Trump” and “manufacture votes for Joe Biden.”

She added that Democrats “used an algorithm to calculate the votes they would need to flip and they used computers to flip those votes from Trump to Biden and from other Republican candidates to their competitors also.”

Powell was apparently referring to a debunked conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems, an election software company, altered vote counts in Michigan and Georgia.

Bossie has told the president there needs to be a more nuanced, state-by-state approach targeted to specific instances of irregularities, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

With Giuliani's ascendance, there are now expected to be two parallel legal teams working on different tracks. Senior Republicans doubt Giuliani’s ideas will go anywhere and say Bossie’s team will proceed with its own efforts.

Republican officials said they viewed Trump's decision to promote Giuliani as an implicit acknowledgment that his legal options are closing and a sign that he's determined to go out guns blazing. Top Republicans described a feeling of resignation late Friday that the election was coming to a close.

The president made the move after advisers informed him in the morning that the Arizona lawsuit had been dropped. Giuliani spent part of the day working out of the campaign's headquarters.

Trump’s legal team is also facing pressure campaigns from outside detractors. On Thursday evening, the law firm Porter Wright Morris & Arthur told a federal judge that it was withdrawing from a Pennsylvania lawsuit the reelection effort had filed. The move came after the anti-Trump Lincoln Project published a tweet urging supporters to contact the firm’s attorneys through their social media accounts.

Still, the president’s team has pushed forward, working 12- to 15-hour days as they race against certification deadlines. They’ve set up a hotline staffed by 40 people to collect reports of irregularities. Prank calls have proven disruptive, however. 

While the campaign is expected to lay off much of its staff in the coming days, it is keeping on employees whose work is relevant to the legal fight, including people in the communications and research departments.

Trump advisers have begun looking at the possibility of pushing Republican-controlled state legislatures to put forward a slate of Trump electors to the Electoral College rather than Biden ones.

But there is mounting skepticism even in Republican circles that Trump can pull it off in the courts. He has suffered a string of legal defeats in recent days and Biden’s lead in the contested states has climbed well into the thousands, making it unlikely that any recount could put Trump over the top.

And many see little evidence of irregularities.

“There’s zero, zero basis” for overturning the election, said Richard, the ex-Bush attorney. “They’re not going to win this. All these cases, I think, will be dismissed by the end of next week.”

 

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9 minutes ago, Pam Cummings said:

This is what is looks like when someone who isn't funny tries to make a joke.

I can’t believe I’m even having to type this, but the comment was not a joke. I was merely pointing out the kind of vitriol hate speech that will keep hundreds of millions of people divided and show that not even the party of tolerance is tolerant.

Feel free to wish me burning in hell as well if that floats your boat, just don’t do it while telling me you’re tolerant and want us all to come together.

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3 minutes ago, Enchubben said:

I can’t believe I’m even having to type this, but the comment was not a joke. I was merely pointing out the kind of vitriol hate speech that will keep hundreds of millions of people divided and show that not even the party of tolerance is tolerant.

Feel free to wish me burning in hell as well if that floats your boat, just don’t do it while telling me you’re tolerant and want us all to come together.

tom cruise GIF

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17 minutes ago, Hagbard Celine said:

"Even if Trump won a single court fight, there’s another major roadblock: Congress would be the final arbiter of whether to accept electors submitted by Republican legislatures. If the Democratic-controlled House and GOP-controlled Senate could not agree on which electors to accept and who becomes president, the presidency would pass to the next person in line of succession at the end of Trump and Vice President Mike Pence’s term on Jan. 20. That would be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat."

nuke the site from orbit.  it's the only way to be sure.

I don't even like Nancy but that shit right there would be hilarious.  

Crazy-Laughing-Man-Funny-Gif-Image.gif

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14 minutes ago, Enchubben said:

I can’t believe I’m even having to type this, but the comment was not a joke. I was merely pointing out the kind of vitriol hate speech that will keep hundreds of millions of people divided and show that not even the party of tolerance is tolerant.

Feel free to wish me burning in hell as well if that floats your boat, just don’t do it while telling me you’re tolerant and want us all to come together.

That poor Koch family. When will they catch a break

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3 minutes ago, Homercles said:

Spews continual messaging of hate and division,  to millions of people in a coordinated fashion...apparently opponents view is invalidated by a few people on a message board. 

Wishing people who fund ignorance that leads to an epidemic that kills hundreds of thousands of fellow americans would get theirs = So MuCh FoR tHe ToLeRaNt LeFt!

Edited by Pam Cummings
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21 minutes ago, Enchubben said:

I can’t believe I’m even having to type this, but the comment was not a joke. I was merely pointing out the kind of vitriol hate speech that will keep hundreds of millions of people divided and show that not even the party of tolerance is tolerant.

Feel free to wish me burning in hell as well if that floats your boat, just don’t do it while telling me you’re tolerant and want us all to come together.

I can't believe I'm having to type this but maybe you should understand tolerance is relative and that out of 160 million some-odd liberals in this country some are going to be more tolerant than others and that casually remarking that the Koch should go to hell or that Enchubben should choke on an enchubbed dick is still light years more tolerant than anything your average trumper spews on a regular basis.  

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2 minutes ago, Your Mom said:

I can't believe I'm having to type this but maybe you should understand tolerance is relative and that out of 160 million some-odd liberals in this country some are going to be more tolerant than others and that casually remarking that the Koch should go to hell or that Enchubben should choke on an enchubbed dick is still light years more tolerant than anything your average trumper spews on a regular basis.  

Ha! More tolerance! You’re making my point for me. 

5 minutes ago, Pam Cummings said:

Wishing people who fund ignorance that leads to an epidemic that kills hundreds of thousands of fellow americans would get theirs = So MuCh FoR tHe ToLeRaNt LeFt!

I don’t follow, the Koch brothers are responsible for covid deaths? And that seems logical and sane to you?

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1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:

 
 
 
 
Spoiler

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According to three people familiar with the situation, the hotline was inundated for nearly a week by crank callers impersonating public figures such as Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, anti-Trump callers launching into vulgarity-laden tirades, pranksters making sounds of flatulence, and others issuing threats of physical violence at the lower- and mid-level Trump 2020 staffers.
For every three or four hours of threats and pranking endured, staff estimated that they’d get roughly one caller with an earnest, maybe-promising tip. This was done against the backdrop of a re-election campaign that virtually all of them knew was over and defeated. The search for “FRAUD,” they knew, would not actually stop Biden’s presidency from commencing.
After hours stuck on tip-line duty, staff would often leave looking visibly upset, worn out, and feeling undervalued. One staffer told The Daily Beast they had to go to the bathroom at least twice over the last few days just to cry because of the sheer volume of abusive phone calls.
“It’s misery. It’s one of the worst ways to end a campaign that you could think of,” this person said. Some staff had started getting aggressive with the prank callers, giving fake names and arguing or yelling back into the landline.
Though these Trump campaign hands exhaled a heavy sigh of relief on Friday as news trickled out that the telephone tip-line would cease operations, the emotional damage had already been done and the insult already layered thickly on top of injury.
The fiasco of Team Trump’s hotline was a perfect microcosm of the ongoing flailing of the president and his senior officials’ efforts to play make-believe that Trump had actually won the election. An effort to obstruct and delay the presidential transition process following a decisive Biden victory in both the popular vote and the Electoral College count has been plagued from the start by an utter lack of seriousness.
The hotline, and what came with it, also represented a fitting coda to President Trump’s unsuccessful bid for a second term, during which a candidate famous for refusing to return the loyalty that he demands from his underlings left numerous staffers who’ve devoted years of their lives to his cause to fend for themselves, as he works to construct an alternate reality.
Some Team Trump staff have talked amongst themselves about filing for unemployment next week, as many contracts were set to expire on Nov. 15 and the campaign undergoes downsizing. Senior officials offered scant guidance about what was coming next, though the human resources department did tell them that many of their campaign emails would soon be shut off. And in keeping with Trump’s delusion of an imminent second term, the situation froze several more senior officials from even offering themselves up as listed references to junior staff scrambling to find another job for fear that they’d get in trouble for aiding with some informal transition.
Earlier this week, CNN reported that an assistant to Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien had yelled at a staff member for printing a résumé at the campaign HQ.
“Instead of throwing staff a life line they’re tying anchors to their feet as they begin to navigate the murky waters associated with massive job turnover throughout Washington, D.C.” one of the sources said.
However, on Friday night, Jason Miller, a senior Trump adviser on the campaign, told The Daily Beast, “We also asked for everyone’s resumes for potential future endeavors.” And Tim Murtaugh, the Trump 2020 communications director, told The Daily Beast that the campaign, while downsizing because it had shifted into “a legal and recount fight” was “retaining appropriate staff to see the post-election process through to the president’s victory.”
As for the hotline, Murtaugh confirmed that there was “verbal abuse” that often included “very sexually graphic language…including physical threats and death threats.”
“That our staffers were able to withstand this in order to hear from voters who had real concerns about the security of the election is a testament to their dedication to the president and his re-election,” he added.
On Friday morning, an email did go out from top staff to others on the team thanking them for their “sacrifices” and calling everyone aboard Team Trump a “family.” The email, which was obtained by The Daily Beast, was signed by senior officials Bill Stepien, Justin Clark, Miller, and Stephanie Alexander.
“[W]e want each of you to know how much we have appreciated your hard work and dedication to President Trump,” the note read. “Each member of this team has made sacrifices in order to participate in this re-election effort, and that will not be forgotten. We also realize today is the last day in the office for many of you, and we want to make sure you are aware that we are here to help you chart out the next phase of your career. We get it. We too have been there before and know how it feels.”
In addition to the email, two senior staffers said that they personally made themselves available to underlings as professional references and offered help in future endeavors.
But one of the three sources described the email and the outreach as “too little too late.”
In recent days, Trump officials had also asked campaign subordinates if they’d be interested in being uprooted to key states such as Nevada and Pennsylvania to assist with the legal challenges and public-relations blitzes that prominent Trump advisers and lawyers have been waging to attack the legitimacy of the election. Several aides have immediately declined the offer of such a transfer, assuming the work would be short-lived, pointless, and yet another obstacle to staffers getting on with their lives.
Through all of this, their candidate has seemed unaware of, or uninterested in, the plight of his foot soldiers. So far, according to knowledgeable sources, there has been no conference call or memo from President Trump thanking staffers for their service and for committing themselves to the fight.

 

They knew what they were getting into. I say let em crash!

Seriously. You went to work for the worst human being on the planet. And now you’re upset because....he’s acting like the worst human being on the planet. No fucking sympathy.

Play stupid games and you get, well, you get this as a job. 

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