Monday morning you sure look fine

I will leave it to Fleetwood Mac fans to finish the verse. Happy Monday all. Just a few Banana bread crumbs for this morning. Yes, it was good with my coffee.

It is great to see Lula beat Bolsonaro in Brazil. Of course, I did not expect to see Bolsonaro concede, but he has long admired Trump, so that is not a surprise in some respects, as he said he would contest the election before it happened. It is a narrow victory 50.9% to 49.1%, so it will likely get looked at

I saw where Boris Johnson might attend the Climate Change conference after King Charles was denied the chance to speak. I think the latter decision was a poor one, but it shows the long reach of fossil fuel funding of politicians in the UK. As for Boris, it is par for the course to show gamesmanship. Top of mind, sincerity is not a word I would use to define Johnson.

On another blog, among other things, a commenter was equating Trump’s contesting of the 2020 election to the 2000 election to rationalize Trump’s continual contesting. Not even close. As for 2000, Al Gore and George Bush were both right to get to the bottom of the Florida portion of the election which drove who won. It was very close and there were issues involved with the counts. But, after contending the election until the SCOTUS vote, Gore did something that Trump has still failed to do. He conceded. Trump has won only 1 out of 65 court cases and lost every recount, audit and review, but still has not conceded.

I am exhausted by the rationalizing going on with the assailant who broke into the Pelosi house and harmed the Speaker’s husband. Stop the BS and state the obvious. This is not right. We must be able to disagree without being violent toward one another. There are certain politicians who have dialed up the temperature with incendiary comments. We know who they are. The significant majority of them are in the GOP due to the gerrymandering which has occurred over the last several years These folks need to be called out for what they are doing. If they are not in a consistent manner, someone will get hurt, as there are too many extreme thinkers that buy into their aggressive stances.

As an independent and former Republican and Democrat, I can argue policy with Democrats, but I have to argue the truth with too many Republicans. It makes me sad the truth tellers in the GOP get vilified and even threatened with violence. The party must get back on better footing as there are too many that believe some of this BS and it is dangerous. As conservative pundit Michael Gerson says the “Republican party is in decay.”

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Letter to Editor on persistent election fraud claims

I sent the following letter to my newspaper based on a front page headline of how various Republican Senator candidates are addressing “The Big Lie” of the former president.that way too many Republicans believe. Please feel free to adapt and use, if you concur.

Front page headlines reveal that Pat McCrory (former NC Governor running for Senator) would vote to certify the 2020 election results. Of course he should and I am puzzled that this was and remains an issue in my former party. Several dozens of Republican election officials and governors have audited, certified and confirmed the election results. Further, dozens of Republican judges have ruled in over 60 court cases against the former president’s accusations of election fraud, with him winning one small case.

The US Attorney General William Barr was fired in December for calling the former president’s claims BS, as was the head of election cyber security, Chris Krebs, in November after claiming the election was very secure. Now we learn that Michigan just did an extensive audit led by a Republican state senator that confirmed the results as fair and, this weekend, a former president of Fox News took his network to task for spreading misinformation on the election fraud claims and usage of COVID masks.

People can choose whom they wish to believe – a person who has a well documented history of untruthfulness from multiple people and sources or these many Republican (and other) officials who told this person he is wrong and not telling the truth. People died resulting from the January 6 insurrection because of these untruths and we should never forget that. Full stop.

Michigan Republican State Senator calls out what he found

In an article called “The Senator Who Decided to Tell the Truth” by Tim Alberta of The Atlantic, a farmer named Ed McBroom is highlighted because of his extensive work on an election review for the state of Michigan. This livestock breeder is also a state Senator. Here are a few paragraphs that capture the essence of the article, which can be read in its entirety with the link below.

“A few days earlier, McBroom, a Republican state senator who chairs the Oversight Committee, had released a report detailing his eight-month-long investigation into the legitimacy of the 2020 election. The stakes could hardly have been higher. Against a backdrop of confusion and suspicion and frightening civic friction—with Trump claiming he’d been cheated out of victory, and anecdotes about fraud coursing through every corner of the state—McBroom had led an exhaustive probe of Michigan’s electoral integrity. His committee interviewed scores of witnesses, subpoenaed and reviewed thousands of pages of documents, dissected the procedural mechanics of Michigan’s highly decentralized elections system, and scrutinized the most trafficked claims about corruption at the state’s ballot box in November. McBroom’s conclusion hit Lansing like a meteor: It was all a bunch of nonsense.

‘Our clear finding is that citizens should be confident the results represent the true results of the ballots cast by the people of Michigan,’ McBroom wrote in the report. ‘There is no evidence presented at this time to prove either significant acts of fraud or that an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity was perpetrated in order to subvert the will of Michigan voters.

For good measure, McBroom added: ‘The Committee strongly recommends citizens use a critical eye and ear toward those who have pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain.'”

The response from the former president is to call out the commission as part of a cover-up. Did I mention this was yet one more of many dozens of Republican election officials, judges and legislators who have confirmed there was no widespread election fraud in any state. It should be noted that the former president’s Attorney General, William Barr, told Trump in a group meeting that his claims of election fraud have “always been bull**it.” This got Barr fired from his position, just as Chris Crebs, the cybersecurity election official, was for saying this was the most secure election in history.

Call me crazy, but one would think that even his most ardent followers would catch on that the former president, who has a well documented history of untruthfulness from multiple sources and former colleagues, has been lying about the election fraud. The fact he is lying is not a surprise, but what bothers me most is his enablers who rationalize and support this lie. I am bemused that Senator Ted Cruz referred to critics of the GOP as “gaslighting” people. Really? Cruz is accusing others of doing something he is doing to whitewash the bad history of the former president.

The Senator Who Decided to Tell the Truth (msn.com)