I guess this is me being politically ill-informed, but when people say the election was stolen or there is a coup, does this mean in particular Trump is making political machinations that might actually make him remain president, or making political moves that will just make it suck more for Biden? And if the former, how does this happen without it just being “the secret service escorts him out now”?
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I think interpretations vary, but my opinion is that the GOP has undermined the process of a democratic election to the point that the B/H presidency will always have an asterisk next to it. And that coup = the current Ol’ Boy remains in office.
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Who would give the secret service this order? Their head was appointed by Trump.
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Oh right…
I R sad now.
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I keep hoping it’ll be the marines.
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Ah, but, that’s why the shake up at the Pentagon is so interesting, innit? The short, sharp point. Because the Secretary of Defense and the Under Secretaries of Intelligence and Operations were just replaced with folks with more…direct loyalties.
If SecDef says Ol’ Boy is the legal Commander in Chief, then what shall be done?
The military could split, and the country will be under a true coup d’etat. Or, the military could keep the peace, and the country has been usurped.
The fact that we’re even discussing this is part of what I mean, when I say the election has already been stolen. Democracy isn’t breaking down. It is broken. Installing Biden into office will not fix it.
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Exactly. It’s all very chilling, deep down.
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Small reminder as well that we were never a true democracy to begin with.
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We don’t have a SecDef now, though. Chris Miller cannot be SecDef (edit: or acting SecDef) without explicit Congressional action because of the recency of his active duty.
Which doesn’t make this less a clusterfuck.
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I thought it was the “advice and consent of the Senate,” even with the recent service. It’s it different for Miller, due to regency?
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Same situation as with Mattis - Congress (as a whole, I believe) has to bypass the law requiring the Secdef be at least 7 years out of active duty.
This article is from just before Congress bypassed the law for Mattis (perfectly okay since Congress can do that):
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2016/12/02/here-s-why-officers-can-t-easily-become-defense-secretaries/#:~:text=U.S.%20law%20states%20that%20a,years%20out%20of%20active%20duty.
I didn’t know until just now, looking all this up, that Miller’s a maverick.
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Maybe they’ll be with COVID or quarantined then too.
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And now apparently this is a thing? Sigh.
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If you (like me) have a conspiracy theorist in the house who is falling into the “the Dominion software was rigged” rabbit hole, you might want to share this link with them:
Even the CATO F-IN INSTITUTE (one of the rightest of right wing thinktanks) says there was no rigging. Of course the true conspiracy theorists will just retort that even the Cato Institute is in on the rigging, because they are full of elites. Sigh. So I haven’t shared in my house. But maybe it will help some of you.
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Sorry friend. Sending love. 
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Well, now I have to go find a gif of a dead person mailing an entire voting machine (I guess with Cyrillic text on the screen to prove it was hacked?) after Nov. 3. This conspiracy is becoming more and more complicated. Then again, we did have a fun argument with a random friend-of-friend who showed up in a zoom call insisting that the election was rigged because they had a projected winner in our state with 100,000 votes still uncounted…for some reason the fact that every single one of those votes going to Trump would mean that he’d still lose by over 400,000 votes took a while to comprehend. I’m not sure people quite register the math in some of these cases.
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I know. On the ranty thing he was listening to this morning they were talking about how in some places in the post-election-day counts places were seeing batches of votes coming in with 100k+ for Biden and only 25k for Trump. As if that was impossible in places that traditionally had been 60-70% democratic voting strongholds + all the Trump voters were told to go to the polling places while all the dems were voting mail in. MATH, PEOPLE, MATH!
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In case anyone wants a quick and dirty way to monitor the status of our current hellacious limbo state:
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Thank god the GA Secretary of State is a Republican who still has ethics. Check out what their analysis of primary versus regular election stats revealed:
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This would be the best thing I’ve heard all week if it weren’t for two effective vaccines.
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