Allahpundit:
The chaos in Michigan continues this evening, as does its recount — but not for long. A federal judge that ordered an immediate start to the recount early Monday morning has vacated that order, just a few hours after the state board voted to reject Jill Stein’s petition:
BREAKING: Federal judge lifts order that had allowed Michigan's recount, effectively ending it.
— The Associated Press (@AP) December 8, 2016
This caps off a long day of chaos. The state’s Board of Canvassers voted to reject Jill Stein’s petition to comply with a state appellate court order that scolded the board for letting it start in the first place. That 3-1 decision ordered all counties put their recounts on hold by tomorrow morning, while they waited to see whether the federal judge would comply with a 6th Circuit ruling that essentially tells him to butt out of the question of qualification:
Michigan’s Board of State Canvassers on Wednesday ordered elections officials to halt the presidential recount on Thursday morning if a federal judge allows the statewide recount to end.
The panel of two Republicans and two Democrats voted 3-1 on a motion that could pause the recount in the event Detroit U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith lifts his previous order that forced the recount to begin mid-day Monday.
The Board of State Canvassers has a 9:30 a.m. meeting Thursday and the order was designed to prevent election workers from starting to recount ballots Thursday morning in more than 30 counties if there’s a likelihood that the board will vote to end the recount altogether.
Goldsmith’s order makes their ruling effective immediately. Even the 3-1 decision came from drama and chaos. The board originally thought they’d get a ruling from Judge Mark Goldsmith this morning, and then after a brief recess around noon ET. Goldsmith instead decided to take the matter under advisement and issue a written decision later … which came a lot later than most had guessed.
Here’s the brief order from Judge Goldsmith:
Stein’s attorneys have filed an appeal at the state Supreme Court, as well as a demand that two of the justices recuse themselves because they appeared on Donald Trump’s list of potential picks for the federal Supreme Court. That would still leave a 3-2 Republican majority on the court, so that’s not going to go anywhere. Goldsmith’s ruling was really the last straw.
It didn’t come early enough to prevent a little amusing drama from the board. By 4 pm, the state board had recessed a couple of times, but finally the Republican members had had enough and wanted an order that complied with the state appellate court. Democrats wanted to adjourn until Goldsmith ruled, but after a 2-2 deadlock on adjournment, Democrat Julie Matuzak threw in the towel and voted to end the recount — but she wasn’t very happy about it:
Democrat Julie Matuzak voted with the Republicans: "It was clear they were going to hold us hostage here until they got their way." https://t.co/tRBv1jrmoy
— Chad Livengood (@ChadLivengood) December 7, 2016
“Hold us hostage” could also describe the way the Stein recount is holding up the Michigan electors too, at least theoretically. In the hearing earlier today, Attorney General Bill Schuette’s team argued that Goldsmith should require Stein to pay a $5 million bond if he forces the recounts to continue, to cover the costs of this futile exercise. Stein’s attorneys objected on the basis that Michigan’s cost estimates lack foundation, but they’re certainly costing something. Meanwhile, the state legislature plans to take up a bill tomorrow that will require Stein to pay the whole cost of the recount, plus the GOP majority plans to pass a voter-ID bill to answer Stein’s foundationless claims of fraud. The first effort is moot, but don’t bet on the legislature dropping the second.
For the record, the results of the recount showed only minor changes:
stein is funding her own personal and political agenda. she is a fraud and her past personal life is a biblical joke. clueless and brainless and monitoring her speech and behavior patterns she is approaching a borderline personality disorder.
As they began opening ballot boxes in Detroit at least one was found to contain only 50 ballots instead of the 306 it was “sealed” with. The great majority in that box of “306” were Clinton votes. Not a surprise the Left wanted to close this recount down too.
The recount is not what it is intended to achieve vis a vie, accuracy that would impact either stein or mrs clinton, period.
Wonder what it is that the rabid right is so afraid of in the recount?
@Ajay42302: Wasting time and money, but liberals are not concerned with wasting time and money. Their stance on AGW is proof of that.
Once this charade is over with, Hillary will have lost the election twice- once on election day and then with the recount. Gotta love watching the lefty elitists implode.
The loony left’s hypocrisy is amazing… They go on about wanting to “insure a fair count” and “every vote counts”, but let someone suggest insuring anyone who votes is actually qualified to do so and it’s SHTF time.
2 Electoral College members are suing Colorado in plan to stop Trump
The Electoral College Was Meant to Stop Men Like Trump From Being President
Maybe they’re just trying to see if they can provoke Trump to say something that will get him booted off of Twitter.
Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House
What a shocking revelation. Who ever would have suspected?
The documentation should be declassified and made public before Obama exits the White House. Otherwise it will be buried for the rest of time, and no one will ever know what happened.
At the end of the election on Nov 8 and the votes counted , Trump won 306 electoral votes and Hillary won 232. After all the ‘commotion’ and posturing, on Jan 6th when the electoral votes are counted, I predict the final official count will be 306-232.
Maybe so, maybe not. The objective of those attempting to instigate an Electoral College rebellion isn’t to elect Clinton instead of Trump, or even a democrat instead of a republican. It’s to block Trump’s election. To that end, some Democratic electors are proposing not to vote for Clinton, but instead for some alternate republican candidate. From Could Faithless Electors Really Deny Trump the Presidency?:
Such an effort is very unlikely to sidetrack Trump’s election, but it might well alter the Electoral College vote count.
The top Senate Republican had a defiant response to intelligence on Russia’s alleged involvement in the election
Got that? McConnell threatened retaliation against President Obama if he publicly challenged Russia based on the conclusions of our own intelligence services that they illegally hacked U.S. targets with the specific purpose of changing the course of our presidential election.
Do you have any inkling how totally over-the-top inappropriate that is, or are you so far gone at this point that you just don’t get it?
@Greg:
The recount effort did not work, next….a fake news story in the washignton compost: The russians did it……
This ‘report’ was ready in record time, less than a week.
Meanwhile, several so called ‘investigations’ of Hillary Clinton drag on unfinished. Most of them having lasted over 18 months already. But don’t jump to any conclusions!
@Greg:
This is very misleading. One: when they say Russian, they mean hackers who have ties to hackers in Russia. They have no evidence that the Russian Government or even Russians were involved.
Two: The hack they are talking about is the release of Podesta Emails. Nobody said that any of those emails were fake. And of course the Hillary emails were released by our own government.
Three: So the term “influence the election” means that someone, maybe Russians, showed that the election was rigged and demonstrated it to the American people. Hillary was given debate questions, she did not deny. The press let the Hillary campaign influence their publications, writing, editing articles, the press admitted it. The DNC was helping Hillary over Bernie. The DNC admitted it.
I don’t call that influencing the election. I call that good journalism. And nobody is saying that the democrats could not respond. Or that the US electorate didn’t weigh the evidence and decide who to vote for.
There was no vote tampering. There was no denial of the email’s veracity.
And Hillary publicly said in the debate that the US CIA believed the hacker to be Russian.
So the electorate understood the total story before the vote. And then they voted for Trump.
The CIA is a democrat-infiltrated bureaucracy just like any other in D.C. Whether it’s leaks about Black Sites and Rendition during Bush or falsified and covered up assessments about ISIS the CIA as currently constituted cannot be trusted.
I’m sure General Flynn has told Trump all about it.
So Trump’s putting them on notice and Mike Pompeo will be doing a house cleaning as soon as he gets in there.
@Greg:
WASH POST FAKE NEWS? CIA says Russia intervened in election…
WASH POST FAKE NEWS? CIA says Russia intervened in election…
WASH POST FAKE NEWS? CIA says Russia intervened in election…
WASH POST FAKE NEWS? CIA says Russia intervened in election…
WASH POST FAKE NEWS? CIA says Russia intervened in election…
As the popular count continues and draws near a final official total, Hillary Clinton now leads Donald Trump by a margin of 2.8 million votes. The popular vote margin of no other candidate who won the popular vote but lost the presidency has ever come anywhere near that. Her winning popular vote margin is over 5 times greater than the highest previous margin in such a situation.
Just that one thing taken by itself stands out as an anomaly. It would be enough to make thoughtful people wonder. But then, to add to that, you’ve got the Russian hacking issue, the carefully-timed unauthorized leaks of bogus information from inside the FBI, and a president elect who has more international conflicts of interest that you can shake a stick at, while refusing to resolve entirely legitimate questions about them by releasing his tax returns as past candidates and presidents have done. Observant people note that he lies constantly, has reversed his positions frequently, appears to be utterly clueless about the realities of geopolitics, and evidently believes the U.S. intelligence community knows nothing.
None of which his supporters seem to give a rat’s patootie about. What they want is for people to shut up about it and stop asking questions—which is how this guy won the GOP nomination to begin with.
@Greg:
Uh, civics 101.
Popular count only wins the electoral votes from any one state….
@July 4th American, #19:
You are missing the point entirely.
The question isn’t whether Trump won. The question is about how that happened, and it’s very damn clear that no one in the Trump camp wants that question to be asked, let alone looked into—despite what our intelligence community is telling us.
Why is that? Why aren’t we supposed to question any of the seriously deep bullshit surrounding this election, and this president elect?
Why are the people who believed any and every accusation about Obama, no matter how absurd, and who were obsessed with perpetual investigations of Hillary Clinton, no matter how many times an issue had been previously investigated, now willing to give Donald Trump an automatic pass on virtually anything?
Long before the election, the guy looked the television cameras straight in the eye and told America he could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and not lose a single voter. This was apparently meant as a serious observation. Trump was making the observation that he could get away with murder, and the right’s response was to vote for him.
Clinton Campaign Demands Intelligence on Possible Russian Efforts to Elect Trump
@Greg: You are delusional.
How it happened? He got 306 electoral votes, that is more than the required number to be elected. The rules going in was to get 270 or more electoral votes. He targeted the areas and people necessary to do that. Hillary and her stupid staff couldn’t figure that out. There was no ‘goal’ to get more popular votes, only to get 270 electoral votes. Not sure why the lefties are having such a struggle figuring that out.
What do you think you would know if Trump ‘released’ his tax return that would have caused someone to vote differently? I think he might actually have gotten more votes had he released it because some, such as you, seem to think he was hiding something. Talk about hiding something: tell us where Obama was born, tell us who his father is, tell us why he doesn’t have a birth certificate, tell us where he went to school, tell us why he claims to have attended and graduated from Columbia when we all know that’s a lie. Why is ‘the truth’ important about Trump but you didn’t and don’t give a damn about the truth about Obama?
Automatic Pass? What did Trump get a pass on? Certainly not why he let 4 people get uselessly killed at benghazi. Certainly not about getting the debate questions ahead of time. Certainly not about letting thousands of classified emails be on line and available to the public.
@Greg:
McCain is about as, or even more so, delusional than you are. He doesn’t know if his butt was bored or punched. Why would you quote a delusional old guy such as McCain, a Rino, on anything. His claim to fame is the “gang of eight” all Rino’s.
Bottom line–Trump won fairly with 306 Electoral votes.
HRC got approx 2.5 Million more votes than DT
This large divergence is unprecedented in American history.
IMO This was more an HRC loss than a DT win. Millions of Dem. voters like myself wouldn’t pull the lever for either of these extremely flawed candidates–Biden would have won fairly easily.
Trump won by default in a close election
@Rich Wheeler: default:
Which obligation did Trump fail to fulfill? His obligation was to get 270 electoral votes. There was no obligation to get ‘more votes’. In fact, the electoral college was set up for exactly this situation. Just so one huge state couldn’t have an undue influence on the election. Suppose the only difference had been that Trump got 10 million more votes in the State of Texas, would that have changed the electoral vote at all? Should it have? Suppose hillary had gotten 10 million more votes in California, would that have changed the electoral vote? Should it have?
Hillary had a lot of negatives, let’s face it. Benghazi, emails, Slick Willie, lyiing, telling coal miners she was going to shut down their mines. I can understand why someone would not want to vote for her.
So? Does the fact that Reagan got about 17 million more popular votes than Mondale change anything? He got 525 electoral votes. Did that make him a ‘Super President” somehow?
Let’s face it. Hillary ran a crappy campaign and she got outsmarted. The country is/was ready for something other than a bunch of liberals screwing everything up.
@RedTeam,
He’s one of a nearly extinct species in the Republican Party: a reasonable traditional conservative and a generally rational person. Trump is neither of those things. He is, in fact, no sort of a conservative. A third thing that Trump is not is a man who voluntarily put on a uniform, and went to war for his country when he was ordered to do so. Trump only put on a toy soldier uniform and strutted about a parade ground wearing a toy sword. He dodged the actual event. (Nice medals, Donnie, but John McCain’s are the real deal.)
@Greg:
Blockquote>Jill Stein Recount Efforts Expected To Come To a Close
why is there several comments missing from this thread?
A few minutes ago, there were 27 comments, now we are back to 24. Webmaster is having problems?
@Greg:
I’ve never seen or heard any evidence that McCain even ‘claims’ to be a conservative. He’s a Republican in Name Only. If you think he’s such a dedicated and loyal politician, why did he not endorse and vote for the candidate of his party?
Trump was never ordered to report for duty. You must be thinking about Slick. Trump was ordered to report for a physical for induction. He failed the physical. His classification would not allow him to be inducted. It was Slick that was ordered to report for duty and went to Russia to dodge the draft and become a felony draft dodger. Just exactly what did John McCain do in the military that caused him to be awarded a medal. All I’ve ever heard of was getting shot down and captured and being a prisoner. I’ve never heard of a medal for ‘exemplary prisoner of war for the enemy’. McCain is not even loyal to his party.
@Redteam, #30:
Because he instantly recognized what Donald Trump is, and is not.
@Greg:
Wow! Instantly ? Really? Wonder if he had so much insight why he didn’t refuse to fly that mission when he got shot down? Now, exactly what was it that he recognized that Trump ‘is’ or ‘is not’? Or would it take McCain to explain that because it’s above your level?
Donald Trump on Twitter, 16 hours ago:
Oh, please. It was brought up repeatedly, but totally ignored on the right.
The FBI had already concluded Russia was behind the hacking before election day. The FBI advised Obama not to publicly accuse Russia, because such an accusation would appear to politically motivated. This article appeared on November 1:
Comey was concerned publicly blaming Russia for hacks of Democrats could appear too political in run-up to elections
@Greg:
The futile effort of the left to overturn the election results have ended in failure, just like the democrat candidate. I especially like what one of her campaign coordinators said post election, “It was a successful failure”…..
@Greg: #21
@RedTeam, #32:
It doesn’t take all that much insight to figure Donald Trump out. All you have to do is listen closely and think about what he’s saying.
@July 4th American, #34:
It’s not just the the left, is it? Nor is it the left’s fault. It’s the the fault of those on the right who never bothered to vet Trump at any stage of the process. They never looked into the obvious causes for concern, never questioned the contradictions, and never gave a thought to the obvious lack of experience and qualifications. The truth is that they still don’t want to, and are attacking anyone who dares to question this absurdity. That’s just one more flashing red warning light on a warning panel that has been lit up like a Christmas tree for months.
Don’t blame democrats. Democrats aren’t saying anything they haven’t been saying all along. It’s not the democrats Trump is on a collision course with. The democrats have been effectively sidelined. They haven’t controlled either house of Congress for 2 years, will not regain control of either house for at least another 2, and after next month won’t have the White House either. Trump is on a collision course with his own party.
@Greg:
The democrat party is unlikely to regain congressional majority for multiple future elections. The American people gave the strongest rebuke to the democrats in 2016. The agenda of the democrat hard left is not in the best interest of America or its citizenry.
more comments missing again.
@RedTeam: Which comments? Haven’t deleted any.
@Greg:
McCain is not a conservative, period.
Some of the comments on this thread are missing. Does anyone know what is happening? Is it just ‘technical difficulties’ Is it happening on other threads alsol? Anyone else notice this?
Curt, for example just a few minutes ago I wrote a message
‘here’ that should be number 32, but I had written a response to No. 31 last night and it is not there. back up this thread, some messages were missing, in the ’20’s’ I had originally posted a comment which was no. 27, then later it was missing and we were back to No. 24. No. 31 is the last comment showing right now, but as I said, I’ve already written 2 no. 32’s, this will be the 3rd one.
@RedTeam: wow, when I posted that comment, the comment no. jumped all the way up to number 43. Seems they are hanging out there at times in the vaposphere or somewhere and shows up when they want to.
the second no. 32 I wrote now shows up as 39 and the third one is now no. 42. maybe whatever was holding them up is now working.
@Greg:
Greg, just curious, but do you think anyone ‘vetted’ Hillary? Do you think anyone looked into the obvious causes for concern, such as abandoning state dept people at benghazi? Do you think anyone on the left is concerned about the thousands of emails that Clinton put on a public server, opening them to the world without anyone even having to ‘hack’ to get the secrets? Was no one on the left even slightly concerned that she is a complete dingbat? If you want someone to take your positions seriously about Trump, you have to face it. The Libs put up the most flawed candidate since Obama. Just imagine her telling those coal miners she was going to ‘shut down these mines’ and put them out of work and the gall to be ‘laughing’ when she said it, as if it were a joke to her. Well, she was the butt of her own joke and now she’ll never have what she thought she was ‘destined’ to have. Now she’ll be primarily known as a pedophile enabler.
Note: this is comment No. 46 (or should be)
Democrat interest in doing Recounts suddenly drops to zero.
WHY:
http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2016/12/12/records-many-votes-detroits-precincts/95363314/
Too many votes in 37% of Detroit’s precincts
Optical scanners at 248 of the city’s 662 precincts, or 37 percent, tabulated more ballots than the number of voters tallied by workers in the poll books.
Hillary overwhelmingly prevailed in Detroit.
oh no, now it is showing that no. 31 is the last comment and this should be no. 32, but I ;just posted No. 46. This is strange.
@Nanny G: Nanny, that’s a much bigger problem than it seems. Detroit is one of the areas where Clinton got more votes than Trump. But when the ballot boxes are being checked, they are finding that there really is not nearly that many for Hillary. But then the killer. If the actual votes in the box does not agree with the numbers tallied from poll workers, then the number remains ‘unchanged’. So if a box has 50 votes and Trump got 40 and Hillary 10 but ‘the vote tallied from that box on election night is 306 and 280 are for Hillary and 26 for Trump Since that is a discrepancy, the vote from election night, 306 is kept unchanged and Hillary would have stolen 270 votes. It has been determined that basically all of the ballot boxes in Detroit have these problems which will cause an audit. Want to bet we’ll never get the results of those audits.
This should post as No. 49
I popped into the twilight zone is Greg defending a republican, I had to check if it was a coke and not coke and rum and rum and rum. It was the DNC that was hacked, they are responsible for their own security, and they never said what was found was not accurate, therefore the only ones undermining the election were the DNC themselves, them and CNN for providing the debate questions, requesting the DNC edit their “reporting”. There has been zero proof of hacking the election, the recount in WI came up with nada, not even in Cowsit, the real threat comes from the alt-left liberals death threats to the electors, completely undermining the republic.
Mc Carthy was right there are subversives in this country some in the government, others just sore losers who want California to run the frigging country.