A Rare ‘Christmas Star’ is Coming This December for the First Time in 800 Years

 By Good News Network

www.goodnewsnetwork.org

 

 

 

Look up at the night sky on winter solstice this year, and you’ll be able to catch a rare sight. On December 21, Jupiter and Saturn will appear closer to one another than they have in eight centuries.

lignments between the planets, known as a ‘conjunction’, is “rather rare,” Rice University astronomer Patrick Hartigan explained in a statement, “but this conjunction is exceptionally rare because of how close the planets will appear to one another.”

The last time these gas giants appeared so closely, at a visible separation of only 0.1 degrees, was in the Middle Ages: at predawn on March 4, 1226.

Of course, the appearance of the ‘Christmas Star’ or ‘Star of Bethlehem’—so named because the closeness of the planets creates a shining point of light—is a phenomenon only observed from Earth. In reality, Jupiter and Saturn remain millions of miles apart.

Where to see the ‘Christmas Star’

Saturn and Jupiter have been moving steadily closer to each other since summer 2020.

Taking the time to look for these planets over the coming nights is worth it. “You can watch [the planets] move which is super cool, because you’re actually seeing planets in orbit” Hartigan told USA Today, and watching for the pair coming together before solstice night will make identifying them that bit easier on the 21st.

Though visible around the world, the best place to see the conjunction is close to the equator, between dusk and just after nightfall, when the sky is dark enough for fainter Saturn to appear, but when it’s not so late that the planets have moved below the horizon for the evening.

Looking low on the western horizon, on winter solstice the two planets will appear to be separated by less a fifth of the diameter of a full moon.

If you can access a telescope, several of the planets’ largest moons will also be visible in the same field of view that night.

If it’s cloudy where you are on December 21? Jupiter and Saturday will still appear extra near to each other for the week surrounding solstice. And if you miss the phenomenon completely? There’s always March 15, 2080. That when the next close conjunction of the planets is expected to occur.

 

If Trump wants Republicans to keep the Senate and protect his legacy, he needs to change his tune

 by The Washington Examiner Editors

www.washingtonexaminer.com

 

 

President Trump says he wants Republicans to keep the Senate and will be campaigning in Georgia. But his persistent claims that the election was stolen from him and attacks on Georgia’s Republican leadership are fueling disillusionment that could backfire on conservatives and the Republican Party, and make Sen. Chuck Schumer the majority leader.

As things stand, Republicans will enter January with 50 Senate seats to 48 for Democrats, with the two Georgia seats to be determined by runoffs. If Republicans win at least one of them, they can maintain control of the Senate. If Democrats sweep both, then they will take over a 50-50 Senate, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris serving as the tie-breaking vote.

It takes no more than one Senate seat to make a huge difference in how President-elect Joe Biden’s first term plays out. With a Republican Senate, Biden can say goodbye to plans to pass legislation that would raise taxes, implement a Green New Deal, ban guns, cater to unions, expand Obamacare, and implement a whole host of other liberal priorities. With Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell at the helm, Biden won’t be able to confirm radical nominees to the Cabinet or judiciary. Instead, he’ll be forced to offer more centrist choices if he wants vacancies to be filled. Though he can still try to govern by executive order, that will invite years of litigation that will slow down his agenda.

But if Democrats sweep in Georgia, Schumer will be in charge of the Senate floor. Sen. Joe Manchin will be the only thing standing in the way of the liberal agenda. Republicans will be stuck on the sidelines, forced to sit and hope Manchin holds his ground under enormous pressure from his party and resists cutting backroom deals with Schumer. There isn’t much reason to be confident that this will work out. During his time in the Senate, Manchin voted with Schumer a majority of the time, and as high as 86% during one Senate term during the Obama era. Manchin may not rubber-stamp Sen. Bernie Sanders's wish list, but there are plenty of liberal priorities that he’d be willing to advance for the right price.

If Trump were to have taken our advice and conceded, right now, he could be helping Republicans win the Georgia races by arguing exclusively that voting for Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler would place a necessary check on Biden. He could be arguing that voting for them would be crucial to preserving his legacy.

Instead, the president's continued insistence that the election was stolen from him amid widespread fraud is undercutting his message. His insistence that he really won Georgia requires such a vast conspiracy that it’s impossible not to implicate Georgia’s Republican leadership, which certified the state for Biden.

“Georgia Secretary of State, a so-called Republican (RINO), won’t let the people checking the ballots see the signatures for fraud,” Trump tweeted. “Why? Without this the whole process is very unfair and close to meaningless. Everyone knows that we won the state. Where is @BrianKempGA?”

Such rhetoric directs anger at Georgia Republicans, encouraging disillusionment among GOP voters just weeks ahead of the runoff elections.

It is also creating fertile ground for lawyers Sidney Powell and Lin Wood (who has a history of donating to Democrats) to spread conspiracy theories that are even more far-fetched. Trump elevated Powell by including her as part of his legal team, allowing for her statements to gain traction now even though the legal team has subsequently distanced itself from her.

Without providing evidence, Powell has said Gov. Brian Kemp received financial kickbacks to award a contract to Dominion, the vote-counting machine company, which, she further claims, rigged the election by flipping a massive number of votes from Trump to Biden.

Powell and Wood went so far as to discourage Georgia Republicans explicitly from voting, attacking Loeffler and Perdue as part of the problem for not demanding a special legislative session to deal with their fraud claims. "There should not be a runoff," Powell said. "Certainly not on Dominion machines. I think I would encourage all Georgians to make it known that you will not vote at all until your vote is secure."

It’s possible that most Republicans in Georgia will not pursue the self-defeating strategy of boycotting the runoff election. We certainly hope that's the case. But given how close the races were this year and how tight polls are, if even 1% of the Republican electorate is convinced not to turn out, it could be the difference. And that difference is one between Republicans having veto power over the liberal agenda or Biden being sworn in with unified Democratic control of Washington.

 

The Post-Election Madness Gets Worse

 By Jim Geraghty

www.nationalreview.com 

 

On the menu today: Two lawyers who aren’t formally on the president’s legal team but who keep filing lawsuits on his behalf tell Georgia Republicans to not vote in the Senate runoffs; Michael Flynn endorses a call for “limited martial law” and a “re-vote” of the presidential election; and the president retweets a claim that Nevada is setting up “fake hospitals” that have “never seen a single patient” to exaggerate the extent of the pandemic. You can be forgiven for feeling as if you awoke this morning in a twisted, insane mirror universe.

The Post-Election Craziness Takes a Darker and More Dangerous Turn

What we’ve seen in the past day or two represents a very 2020-appropriate turn of events for the post-election period.

Two lawyers who are not formally a part of the president’s legal team, but who are widely perceived to be some sort of allies, held a “press conference” in Atlanta that looked and sounded a lot like a political rally, complete with chanting supporters, with the clear message that Georgians should not vote in the runoff elections:

Pro-Trump attorneys Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood urged Georgians not to participate in a runoff vote that will determine control of the Senate in January until state officials address unsubstantiated claims that President-elect Joe Biden won the White House through voter fraud. Powell and Wood are not working for the Trump campaign in an official capacity but have waged legal battles on his behalf. Speaking to the president’s supporters at a press conference in Atlanta, Powell said state residents should not vote until Georgia overhauls its procedures and ends the use of Dominion voting machines.

“I would encourage all Georgians to make it known that you will not vote at all until your vote is secure – and I mean that regardless of party,” Powell said. “We can’t live in a republic, a free republic unless we know our votes are legal and secure. So we must have voter ID and we probably must go back to paper ballots that are signed and have your thumbprint on them. We certainly should be able to find a system that can count them, even if it has to be done by hand.”

“This is Georgia – we ain’t dumb. We’re not going to go vote on January 5th on another machine made by China. You’re not going to fool Georgians again. If Kelly Loeffler wants your vote, if David Perdue wants your vote, they’ve got to earn it,” Wood said. “They’ve got to demand publicly, repeatedly, consistently: Brian Kemp, call a special session of the Georgia State Legislature. And if they do not do it…they have not earned your vote.”

Matthew Boyle of Breitbart, about as reflexive a defender of the president as they come, points to Wood’s long history of campaign donations to Democrats.

State records also show that Wood has not voted in a Republican primary since 2004, but did request Democrat ballots in the 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2018 primary elections in Georgia. That means that even when Trump was president, in the 2018 midterm elections, Wood requested a Democrat primary ballot in Georgia and voted for Democrats in the primary in the state while Trump was universally backing Republicans there.

Wood’s declaration that Perdue and Loeffler haven’t earned the votes of Trump supporters echoes the language of ReallyAmericanPAC, a liberal, pro-Biden political-action committee. That PAC is posting billboards in “Trump counties” in Georgia denouncing Perdue and Loeffler for “not delivering for Trump” — discouraging Trump supporters from voting for the Republican senators.

You may have seen the Twitter hashtag, #WriteInTrumpForGA. There is no line for write-in candidates in the Georgia Senate runoff elections. This is consistent with Georgia election law: “The run-off primary or election shall be a continuation of the first primary or election, and only those votes cast for the candidates receiving the two highest numbers of votes in the first primary or election shall be counted. No write-in votes may be cast in such a primary, run-off primary, or run-off election.” Any write-in vote for anyone will count as a spoiled ballot.

Meanwhile, the recently pardoned Michael Flynn — who was the president’s national-security adviser for 25 days, and a client of Sidney Powell — tweeted a call for the president “to invoke limited martial law” and to “hold a new election.” The call for “limited martial law” comes from an organization called We The People Convention:

You must be ready, Mr. President, to immediately declare a limited form of Martial Law, and temporarily suspend the Constitution and civilian control of these federal elections, for the sole purpose of having the military oversee a national re-vote.

You must also act, like Lincoln did, to silence the destructive media’s one-sided propaganda designed and proven to influence the election outcome, and end the unlawful censorship of Big Tech, to restore the confidence of the American People in our electoral process or we cannot continue as a nation. Failure to do so could result in massive violence and destruction on a level not seen since the Civil War. Limited Martial Law is clearly a better option than Civil War!

The message concludes, ‘We will also have no other choice but to take matters into our own hands, and defend our rights on our own, if you do not act within your powers to defend us.”

When those with prominent platforms and positions of responsibility begin to characterize presidential elections — a normal quadrennial step in changing or maintaining leaders in a constitutional republic — in life-and-death terms, and compare the loss of a preferred candidate to mass murder — say, comparing it to the terrorists in the cockpit of Flight 93 — no one should be surprised when certain folks out there take those words literally and start to see the outcome of an election as a life-or-death struggle that justifies violence.

The President Promotes a COVID Hoax

Yesterday, Worldometers stated that 2,833 Americans died from COVID-19. The Covid Tracking Project puts the figure at 2,733. Johns Hopkins University puts the number of deaths Wednesday at 2,597. I’m sure some folks will point to the discrepancies as evidence of their inauthenticity, but different institutions are tabulating the deaths in different ways and from different sources. Worldometers is updated throughout the day, and the others aren’t.

I mention this awful daily death toll because earlier this week, the president of the United States retweeted a hoax picture claiming that a coronavirus patient-care site was empty, adding, “fake election results in Nevada, too!” The picture represented a case of online identity theft:

In the picture posted to Twitter on Sunday, the doctor, Jacob Keeperman, is standing at the Renown Regional Medical Center’s alternate care site in Reno, Nev. In the background, empty hospital beds covered in plastic stand in a vacant parking area. The photo was taken on Nov. 12, the day the site opened, so patients had not yet arrived, Renown Health said.

“I want to thank all the incredible staff who are Fighting the Good Fight to help all those suffering from COVID-19,” Dr. Keeperman, the medical director for Renown’s Transfer and Operations Center, wrote. “With 5 deaths in the last 32 hours, everyone is struggling to keep their head up. Stay strong.”

His photograph was then used by the account @Networkinvegas to erroneously claim that it showed a “fake hospital” that had “never seen a single patient.”

On Tuesday, President Trump brought that falsehood to a wider audience, retweeting the @Networkinvegas post with the comment: “Fake election results in Nevada, also!” Twitter flagged the president’s tweet, noting that the claim about election fraud was “disputed.”

In fact, the alternate care site in Reno has cared for a total of 219 Covid patients in the three weeks it has been open. And across Nevada, hospitalizations have risen 43 percent in the last 14 days, with a 55 percent increase in deaths, according to a New York Times database.

We’re witnessing more than 2,000 Americans perish from this pandemic per day, and the president believes that Nevada hospitals are creating fake treatment centers that have no patients in order to fool the public about the severity of the coronavirus pandemic. He’s got an entire government full of doctors and virologists and epidemiologists who will answer any question he has on this. He’s the president of the United States; anyone in the world will answer his phone call and happily and gladly explain anything he wants to know, walk him through any aspect that confuses him, and get him any answer he needs — particularly doctors, and particularly those who are trying to save patients infected with COVID-19.

The president of the United States chooses to believe the assertions of some account on Twitter, instead.

 

Trump’s Disgraceful Endgame

By The National Review Editors

www.nationalreview.com 

 

 

President Trump said the other day that he’d leave office if he loses the vote of the Electoral College on December 14.

This is not the kind of assurance presidents of the United States typically need to make, but it was noteworthy given Trump’s disgraceful conduct since losing his bid for reelection to Joe Biden on November 3.

Behind in almost all the major polls, Trump stormed within a hair’s breadth in the key battlegrounds of winning reelection, and his unexpectedly robust performance helped put Republicans in a strong position for the post-Trump-presidency era. This is not nothing. But the president can’t stand to admit that he lost and so has insisted since the wee hours of Election Night that he really won — and won “by a lot.”

There are legitimate issues to consider after the 2020 vote about the security of mail-in ballots and the process of counting votes (some jurisdictions, bizarrely, take weeks to complete their initial count), but make no mistake: The chief driver of the post-election contention of the past several weeks is the petulant refusal of one man to accept the verdict of the American people. The Trump team (and much of the GOP) is working backwards, desperately trying to find something, anything to support the president’s aggrieved feelings, rather than objectively considering the evidence and reacting as warranted.

Almost nothing that the Trump team has alleged has withstood the slightest scrutiny. In particular, it’s hard to find much that is remotely true in the president’s Twitter feed these days. It is full of already-debunked claims and crackpot conspiracy theories about Dominion voting systems. Over the weekend, he repeated the charge that 1.8 million mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania were mailed out, yet 2.6 million were ultimately tallied. In a rather elementary error, this compares the number of mail-ballots requested in the primary to the number of ballots counted in the general. A straight apples-to-apples comparison finds that 1.8 million mail-in ballots were requested in the primary and 1.5 million returned, while 3.1 million ballots were requested in the general and 2.6 million returned.

Flawed and dishonest assertions like this pollute the public discourse and mislead good people who make the mistake of believing things said by the president of the United States.

Elected Republicans have generally taken the attitude that the president should be able to have his day in court. It’s his legal right to file suits, of course, but he shouldn’t pursue meritless litigation in Hail Mary attempts to get millions of votes tossed out. This is exactly what he’s been doing, it’s why reputable GOP lawyers have increasingly steered clear, and it’s why Trump has suffered defeat after defeat in court.

In its signature federal suit in Pennsylvania, the Trump team argued that it violated the equal-protection clause of the U.S. Constitution for some Pennsylvania counties to let absentee voters fix or “cure” their ballots if they contained an error while other counties didn’t. It maintained that it was another constitutional violation for Trump election observers not to be allowed in close proximity to the counting of ballots. On this basis, the Trump team sought to disqualify 1.5 million ballots and bar the certification of the Pennsylvania results or have the Pennsylvania General Assembly appoint presidential electors.

By the time the suit reached the Third Circuit, it had been whittled down to a relatively minor procedural issue (whether the Trump complaint could be amended a second time in the district court). The Trump team lost on that question, and the unanimous panel of the Third Circuit (in an opinion written by a Trump appointee) made it clear that the other claims lacked merit as well. It noted that the suit contained no evidence that Trump and Biden ballots or observers were treated differently, let alone evidence of fraud. Within reason, it is permissible for counties to have different procedures for handling ballots, and nothing forced some counties to permit voters to cure flawed absentee ballots and others to decline to do so.

Not that it mattered. The court pointed out that the suit challenged the procedures to fix absentee ballots in seven Democratic counties, which don’t even come close to having enough cured ballots to change the outcome in the state; the counties might have allowed, at most, 10,000 voters to fix their ballots, and even if every single one of them voted for Biden, that’s still far short of Biden’s 80,000-plus margin in the state.

The idea, as the Trump team stalwartly maintains, that the Supreme Court is going to take up this case and issue a game-changing ruling is fantastical. Conservative judges have consistently rejected Trump’s flailing legal appeals, and the justices are unlikely to have a different reaction.

Trump’s most reprehensible tactic has been to attempt, somewhat shamefacedly, to get local Republican officials to block the certification of votes and state legislatures to appoint Trump electors in clear violation of the public will. This has gone nowhere, thanks to the honesty and sense of duty of most of the Republicans involved, but it’s a profoundly undemocratic move that we hope no losing presidential candidate ever even thinks of again.

Getting defeated in a national election is a blow to the ego of even the most thick-skinned politicians and inevitably engenders personal feelings of bitterness and anger. What America has long expected is that losing candidates swallow those feelings and at least pretend to be gracious. If Trump’s not capable of it, he should at least stop waging war on the outcome.

 

33 Farm attacks and 10 farm murders in South Africa – November 2020

During November 2020 there were thirty three farm attacks and ten farm murders in South Africa, whilst three farm attacks were successfully averted. During October 2020 there were 42 farm attacks and 7 farm murders in South Africa, whilst 5 farm attacks were successfully averted. The onslaught against the white minority, especially farmers, continues unabated with no action from government.

During September 2020 there were 48 farm attacks and 5 farm murders in the country and one attack was successfully averted.

Farm attacks and farm murders – the year so far:

November 2020- 33 farm attacks, 10 farm murders.
October 2020- 42 farm attacks, 7 farm murders.
September 2020- 48 farm attacks, 5 farm murders.
August 2020- 52 farm attacks, 9 farm murders.
July 2020- 55 farm attacks, 9 farm murders.
June 2020- 56 farm attacks, 7 farm murders.
May 2020- 15 farm attacks, 4 farm murders.
April 2020- 17 farm attacks, 1 farm murder.
March 2020- 35 farm attacks, 6 farm murders.
February 2020- 31 farm attacks, 8 farm murders.
January 2020- 17 farm attacks.

Information supplied by The Rome Research Institute of South Africa

South Africa Today – South Africa News

https://southafricatoday.net/south-africa-news/33-farm-attacks-and-10-farm-murders-in-south-africa-november-2020/

Carmen Maria Nevers Claypool, How did I do it?":

 For those wondering, ′′ How did I do it?":

I boiled 1/2 gal of water, added 2 tablespoons of vinegar, 1 teaspoon of sodium bicarbonate, two cups of coke and half cup of lemon juice then stirred well . Waited 3 minutes, put the pan in the solution for 45 minutes, then added a quarter cup of chlorine bleach to the mixture. Then I brushed it with a firm toothbrush and put it back into the liquid for another 25 minutes. I took it out, rinsed it and it looked exactly the same, so I threw it away and went out and bought a new one

After 50 years together, Jackson couple died from COVID-19 in the same minute

 https://www.mlive.com/news/jackson/2020/12/after-50-years-together-jackson-couple-died-from-covid-19-in-the-same-minute.html?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=grandrapidspress_sf&fbclid=IwAR1vEcrOsKLz97-XNn1SXXxHhQ8YuLjOeT7nhxZjNZEUHwrTCcJlj78Sa0E

JACKSON, MI – Leslie and Patricia McWaters built a full life in the nearly 50 years they were together.

They loved spending time with each other and their friends, from dancing where they met at Julie’s Bar in 1971 and hosting pool parties and family functions, to driving on backroads in their 1959 Corvette or watching their great grandchildren in quarter midget auto racing.

It breaks the heart of their family members to know they died together as well.

Leslie, known as LD, and Pat died on Nov. 24 after battling COVID-19 at Henry Ford Allegiance Health in Jackson, their hometown. Hospital staff recorded their deaths at the same time that Tuesday before Thanksgiving, according to their obituary.

“Those of us that know them, know that mom went first and said, ‘LD, it’s time to go!’” the obituary reads.

Pat, 78, was a surgical nurse for 35 years at Henry Ford Allegiance Health, while LD, 75, was a truck driver and veteran of the U.S. Navy Reserve.

They were known for their opposite personalities. Pat was a no-nonsense person, while LD was a jokester. If someone was sick or injured, Pat would take care of them without a thought. LD’s goal was to make them laugh, his daughter Joanna Sisk said.

“Before he could tell us the punch lines, he was laughing so hysterically,” Sisk said. “I don’t think we ever heard a punch line to one of his jokes. He’d giggle and giggle and giggle, tears streaming down his face.”

The two were competitive, Sisk said. They loved to play the domino game Mexican Trains and card game Hand and Foot.

LD loved bodybuilding, too. He was the first Mr. Rose City bodybuilder, Sisk said, and continued to train bodybuilders or athletes at the high school and preaching an all-natural approach to muscle gain. His impact was so wide in that community that Pat’s nurse at Henry Ford Allegiance Health had previously trained with him – they joked they were the only steroid-free builders in Jackson.

Pat and LD were first diagnosed with COVID-19 on Nov. 12 and 14, respectively, Sisk said. They were taken to the hospital on Nov. 17, riding in the same ambulance together. They were never intubated, but Sisk said her dad thought the effort it took to breathe and get oxygen was “excruciatingly painful.”

“At the end he said, ‘I don’t have any fight left in me. I try so hard but it’s painful and exhausting,’” she said.

Sisk said her parents suspect they caught the virus at a restaurant outside of Jackson, where they observed many people without masks and walking between tables to speak to others.

While they took the virus seriously at first, they let their guard down as the months went on and as they became flooded with the breadth of misinformation and opinions from news channels and social media, Sisk said.

“That’s why people are so skeptical and not taking this as seriously as they should,” Sisk said. “We were those people as well. They feel that (news channels) really need to get on the same page.”

Now, Sisk hopes the family’s painful loss of two parents in one moment can be a lesson to others.

As their story goes viral and is featured in multiple news outlets, Sisk said she hopes her parents can be an example of love and fun, but also a warning to take the necessary precautions to avoid transmitting COVID-19.

“It gave us a whole new purpose,” she said of the media attention. “In hope for somebody else to not have to feel what we’re feeling now. That’s how my parents were – they helped everyone with anything that they needed at any time.”

 

Australian authorities seize child, rule parents ABUSIVE for resisting hormone therapy to help daughter become son – report

An Australian couple whose child was reportedly seized by state authorities is appealing a magistrate's ruling finding them abusive and “dangerous” for resisting testosterone therapy for their daughter, who identifies as male.

Lawyers for the unidentified parents filed papers last week seeking to appeal a magistrate's October decision, setting up what appears to be the country's first test case on parental rights regarding gender dysphoria medicine, the Australian newspaper reported on Saturday. Their child, then 15, was taken away from the family last year, after discussing suicide online.

“The authorities say we will not allow her to change gender, so it's dangerous for told her to come back to our house because we will mentally abuse her,” the father told the Australian. “They want us to consent to testosterone treatment.”

The parents are seeking an independent psychological review of all possible causes of their child's depression, as well as consideration of non-invasive treatment options. The teen struggled after losing friends at 13, when the family relocated, and those difficulties were compounded by a difficult start to puberty and anxiety about eating and body image, the mother said.

The family migrated to Australia a decade ago, the newspaper said, without identifying their native country. The magistrate found that the teen likely suffered verbal abuse over “his feelings and expression of gender identity,” which the parents denied.

Lawyers for the child earlier this month filed papers seeking approval to begin hormone therapy.

A Twitter commenter who said her own daughter suffered from rapid onset gender dysphoria, said state interventions such as in the Australia case mark “the end of parenting as we knew it.”.

We have no rights. Our children can be seriously harmed by the government and medical profession, and we are powerless to stop it.

As the debate on treatment for gender dysphoria heats up in Australia, some US states are creating exceptions to parental consent laws to enable children to get such treatments as hormone therapy and sex-change surgeries without parental consent. Starting this year, children as young as 13 in Washington state have been allowed to obtain confidential treatment for gender dysphoria, billed to their parents insurance plan and done without parental consent.

.“Hard to overstate how radical this is,” Abigail Shrier, journalist and ‘Irreversible Damage’ author, tweeted. “States are intervening in a loving relationship between parent and minor child and declaring: ‘We will physically transform the child against your wishes and behind your back.’”

.

 

Donald Trump Urges Joe Biden to ‘Get Well Soon!’ After Fracturing Foot

“Get well soon!” Trump wrote on Twitter sharing news footage of Biden leaving an orthopedic office in Deleware.

Biden’s office said “on background” that the former Vice President “slipped while playing with his dog Major, and twisted his ankle” while at his home in Delaware.

Biden was taken to an orthopedist for an examination and an x-ray.

A statement from Dr. Kevin O’Connor, the Director and Executive Medicine, of George Washington Medical Faculty Associates stated that Biden had “sustained a sprain of his right foot” but transported Biden to a different medical facility for a CT scan. 

The CT scan revealed that Biden did have fractures in his foot after the injury.

“Initial x-rays did not show any obvious fracture, but his clinical exam warranted more detailed imaging,” OConnor wrote, noting that the CT scan “confirmed hairline (small) fractures of President-elect Biden’s lateral and intermediate cuneiform bones, which are in the mid-foot.”

“It is anticipated that he will likely require a walking boot for several weeks,” O’Connor concluded.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/11/29/donald-trump-urges-joe-biden-to-get-well-soon-after-fracturing-foot/

The Trumpiness of the GOP’s Future: Five Key Questions

 By Robert VerBruggen

November 27, 2020 6:30 AM

www.nationalreview.com 

 

 President Trump waves to supporters at a rally in Murphysboro, Ill., October 27, 2018. (Al Drago/Reuters)

 

 Has he remade the party in his image?

Let’s be frank: Over the past 30 years, Republicans have not fared well in presidential elections. Since 1992, Democrats have won five times and carried the popular vote all but once. Republicans won three times, but lost the popular vote in two of those. The 2000 win relied on a very narrow victory in Florida; the 2016 one came at the hand of Donald Trump, a very unconventional Republican by any measure, and relied on thin margins in Rust Belt states where his particular message resonated.

Dubya’s 2004 reelection aside, either we’re getting our butts kicked, or we’re barely scraping the votes together to pull off wins that leverage the peculiarities of the Electoral College. Going forward, the question is how to put together a better winning coalition — and how much that coalition will look like and build on you-know-who’s.

No one, including yours truly, really knows where this battered ship is headed. But here are five key questions that should frame this debate heading into 2024.

1. How unusual was Trump’s coalition, really? And should we be satisfied with an “Electoral College hack”?

When thinking about presidential coalitions, it helps to look at the data at three different levels: states, which of course decide the Electoral College; smaller geographical units, especially the gaps between rural, suburban, and urban areas; and individual demographics.

At the state level, things actually haven’t looked that unusual in the Trump era. Red states are still red, blue states are still blue, and purple states still hover around the 50 percent mark — with states across the country tending to shift toward the Republicans or the Democrats together. To illustrate this, I grabbed some data on the two-party vote share in 48 states in 2012, 2016, and 2020. (I left out D.C., California, and New York: D.C. is an outlier with next to no Republican presence; the other two, as of this writing, are still taking their sweet time counting their 2020 ballots and are not in play for the GOP anyway.)

Here’s how things shifted between Romney’s loss in 2012 and Trump’s victory in 2016, with a diagonal line indicating where states would fall if both candidates did equally well. Dots above the line indicate states where Trump did better than Romney had.

Despite the huge differences in these contests — the nation’s first black president up for reelection against a Mormon, as compared with . . . well, Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump — the overall pattern is pretty simple and boring. Trump outperformed Romney in the vast majority of states, yet the vote shares in the two races are very strongly correlated.

Trump’s 2020 performance maps onto his 2016 performance even more directly. If you take his 2016 vote share from a given state and knock two points off, you’ll probably end up pretty close to his share in 2020.

These data make clear that presidential contests are fought between the 40-yard lines. Trump didn’t redesign the field and restart the game; he kept most of what Romney had, gained enough new ground to beat Clinton, and then lost enough ground to lose to Biden. And the shifts in vote shares are not limited to a handful of important states, but broadly distributed.

Nonetheless, it remains true that Trump had to do well specifically in Rust Belt swing states to win the Electoral College, and that his strategy paid off especially well there. Nationwide, he barely surpassed Romney’s share of the two-party vote (about 49 percent vs. 48 percent), and yet he beat Romney’s electoral-vote count by half. RealClearPolitics election guru Sean Trende thinks it unlikely that another Republican could have won in 2016:

Rubio et al. might have amassed similar — or better — popular vote counts, but they wouldn’t have been as efficiently distributed as Trump’s and still would have lost. Remember, in 2012 the Electoral College actually had a Democratic bias to it, in part because Romney famously failed to connect with blue-collar voters because of his stance on fiscal issues and his culturally upscale persona.

Rubio would have done little to fix that. Yes, he would have run better in the suburbs and probably among Hispanics. He might have carried Nevada, and we would probably not be talking about blue (or purple) Arizona or Texas today. At the same time, it is hard to see him appealing to out-of-work steelworkers in western Pennsylvania in the same way that Trump did. With massive support from rural and small-town voters, Trump barely carried Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Rubio wouldn’t have gotten that turnout, or made up for it in the suburbs given his social conservatism.

When you break voters down into rural, suburban, and urban categories this way, however, you also see how Trump’s appeal balanced on a razor’s edge. In 2016, it won him the election even though more people voted for Clinton, because his rural supporters lived in the right states and just barely canceled out his losses in urban areas. By 2020, he had antagonized the Democratic base and alienated the suburbs enough that his rural support was no longer sufficient. A candidate who could appeal to rural areas without proving toxic to suburbanites would of course be a welcome development. So would a candidate who’s simply likable and popular in general.

Lastly, let’s look at the individual-level characteristics of Trump’s supporters these past four years. In a piece over at Economics 21, Chris Pope argues that Trump’s populist coalition is largely a myth. At most, it amounts to an “Electoral College hack” that boosted just the right voting blocs, concentrated in just the right places, to achieve an unlikely victory four years ago. Some Republicans are claiming the party has become “working-class” and “multiracial” thanks to Trump, but that overstates recent developments, at least going by the exit polls:

The 54% share of Americans with household incomes exceeding $100,000 that supported Trump in 2020 was the same as that which supported Romney in [2012]. The proportion of Americans with incomes below $50,000 who supported Trump (42%) was only slightly greater than that which supported Romney (38%), while the share of the electorate in that lower-income group fell from 41% to 35%. Trump’s 49% share of voters without a college education was only a touch more than the 47% that supported Romney.

The conventional wisdom is also mistaken on race. Trump’s 57% level of support among white voters in 2020 was lower than the 59% share Romney received. With Obama and his legacy off the ballot, the GOP share of black voters surged from 6% in 2012 to 12% in 2020, while that among Hispanics ticked up from 27% to 32%. Due to the fact that white voters make up a larger share of the electorate, the net impact of these shifts roughly cancelled out. Nor has Trump done much to inflate the gender gap. In fact, the difference between Trump’s 2020 share of male and female voters (49% to 43%) was smaller than that for Romney in 2012 (52% to 44%).

Combining Pope’s observations about the Trump coalition with Trende’s conjectures about how a standard Republican might have fared in 2016, one might ask: Is an “Electoral College hack” all we can hope for? It’s more than John McCain or Mitt Romney had, obviously, but it’s not exactly a satisfying way to win.

 Given shifting national demographics, the Trump coalition at minimum feels awfully tenuous. To win going forward with the Trump approach, we’ll need to push the modest progress Trump made among minorities and the working class further, ideally while regaining support among the groups he sacrificed.

And to win another way, we’d need to, uh, figure out another way.

2. What to make of the fact that GOP Senate candidates ran ahead of Trump in both 2016 and 2020?

As John McCormack pointed out four years ago,

In almost every state with a competitive Senate or presidential race, the Republican Senate candidate ran ahead of Trump — sometimes by a wide margin — regardless of whether or not the candidate stood by Trump. . . . There aren’t any Senate races in which GOP candidates rejected Trump and performed worse than him, but there are examples of Republican candidates who rejected Trump and did much better than him.

The same thing happened this year. As Aaron Blake of the Washington Post noted the day after the election, “Nine competitive Senate races were held in states that were also in play at the presidential level. In seven of them, Trump is running behind the GOP Senate candidate’s margin. He even ran behind challengers to incumbent Democrats in two key states.”

So perhaps the normal Republican approach isn’t so dead after all?

3. How much of all this was about Trump himself, and how much is it about the people he was up against?

As Trende notes, Trump explicitly and deliberately appealed to the white working class. But his opponents also played a role in his coalition-building. Hillary Clinton was a weak candidate who ran her campaign poorly. And while Joe Biden presented himself as a moderate, many believe he was dragged down among minority groups, Hispanics in particular, by his fellow Democrats’ cries of “socialism” and “defund the police.” (Hopefully we’ll have better polling data on these issues soon.)

Trende has forgotten more about the nitty-gritty of election data than I could ever hope to learn, and we were colleagues a few years back, when I ran the policy vertical over at RealClear. But between the GOP’s Senate performances and the weaknesses of Trump’s opponents, I’m not entirely convinced that these factors couldn’t have propelled a different Republican to victory.

 

On a more pessimistic note, future Republican candidates can’t necessarily count on future Democrats to screw up so badly.

4. To the extent this is about Trump, to what degree is it about his policies as opposed to his celebrity and rhetoric?

If “Trumpism” is the solution, what is Trumpism exactly?

The Donald came into the 2016 race with sky-high name recognition thanks to decades in the media spotlight, first as a real-estate mogul and then as a reality-TV star. He masterfully exploited the media’s hunger for ratings and clicks, letting loose a steady stream of ridiculous and offensive comments that the networks and newspapers ate up. I don’t want any future Republican candidate to follow in those footsteps, but I can’t say it didn’t work.

I’d ask what Ted Nugent is up to these days, but I probably shouldn’t even joke about that.

Trump’s actual policies, meanwhile, were somewhere in between the populism he proclaimed and the standard Republican platform. Immigration and trade restrictions, yes, but also tax cuts, deregulation, a business-friendly labor board, and three solid originalist Supreme Court picks.

As I’ve put it in the past, Trump nailed down the GOP base by adopting the usual positions on “dealbreaker” issues such as guns and abortion, but beyond that took license to appeal to other constituencies with unorthodox positions: trade restrictions for the Rust Belt, Social Security for seniors, etc. This is probably fertile ground for a future candidate.

5. How does Trump plan to occupy himself these next four years?

As you may have noticed, to this point I’ve taken little note of the diarrhea storm raining down on us at present. Trump seems unwilling to admit his clear loss and is filling the courts with embarrassingly weak legal challenges.

He’s not going to ride off into the sunset, his orange hair waving in the breeze. He could start a TV network, try to make himself a kingmaker in GOP politics in the coming years, or even run again in 2024. If he’s successful at any of those things, Trumpism will continue to have force even if another strategy could work just as well politically.

About half of Republicans think the election was stolen, so this strategy hasn’t backfired, at least not yet.