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    Trump supporters rally against election outcome as Proud Boys and Antifa face off

    Conservative groups protesting against US president-elect Joe Biden’s election victory gathered for protests across the country on Saturday, including in Washington where far-right groups clashed with counter-protesters despite a heavy police presence.Organizers of Stop The Steal, who allege without evidence that the 3 November election win was tainted by fraud, and church groups urged supporters to participate in “Jericho Marches” and prayer rallies.But in downtown Washington, tensions rose after dark as scores of pro-Trump “Proud Boys” protesters and “Antifa” counterprotesters faced off, separated by police in riot gear and on bicycles.Around 200 members of the Proud Boys, a violent far-right group, had joined the marches earlier on Saturday near the Trump hotel in the capital. Many wore combat fatigues and ballistic vests, carried helmets and flashed hand signals used by white nationalists.The two groups shouted insults at each other across a street near McPherson Square and some set off fireworks, but police kept them apart.Police pepper-sprayed at least two counter-protesters before the Proud Boys left the area and regrouped several blocks away.Protests were also planned in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona, where Trump’s campaign has sought to overturn vote counts.More than 50 federal and state court rulings have upheld Biden’s victory. The US supreme court on Friday rejected a long-shot lawsuit filed by Texas and backed by Trump seeking to throw out voting results in four states.“Whatever the ruling was yesterday … everybody take a deep, deep breath,” retired army general Mike Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, told protesters in front of the supreme court, referring to the court’s refusal to hear the Texas case.Flynn who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts with the former Russian ambassador, spoke in his first public address since Trump pardoned him in November.“My charge to you is to go back to where you are from” and make demands, Flynn told the crowd, without being more specific. The US constitution is “not about collective liberty it is about individual liberties, and they designed it that way”, he said.Trump has refused to concede defeat, alleging without evidence that he was denied victory by massive fraud. On his way to Andrews air force base and then to the annual Army-Navy football game in New York, Trump made three passes in the Marine One helicopter over the cheering protesters.Trump’s supporters carrying flags and signs made their way in small knots toward Congress and the supreme court through downtown Washington, which was closed to traffic by police vehicles and dump trucks.Few of the marchers wore masks, despite soaring Covid-19 deaths and cases, defying a mayoral directive for them to be worn outside. Several thousand people rallied in Washington, fewer than during a similar protest last month.As some in the crowd echoed far right conspiracy theories about the election, a truck-pulled trailer flew Trump 2020 flags and a sign reading “Trump Unity” while blaring the country song “God Bless the USA”.“It’s clear the election has been stolen,” said Mark Paul Jones of Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania, who sported a tricorner revolutionary war-era hat as he walked toward the supreme court with his wife.Some protesters referenced the Biblical miracle of the battle of Jericho, in which the walls of the city crumbled after soldiers and priests blowing horns marched around it.In his speech, Flynn told the protesters they were all standing inside Jericho after breaching its walls.Ron Hazard of Morristown, New Jersey, was one of five people who stopped at the justice department to blow shofars – a ram’s horn used in Jewish religious ceremonies – to bring down “the spiritual walls of corruption”.“We believe what is going on in this county is an important thing. It’s a balance between biblical values and anti-biblical values,” Hazard said. More

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    Trump loses another case challenging election results in latest legal rebuke

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    Donald Trump lost a federal court challenge on Saturday in Wisconsin while judges said yet another case being fought there “smacks of racism”.
    The slap-downs came less than 24 hours after the abrupt dismissal by the US supreme court of the most audacious Republican attempt yet to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the election almost six weeks ago.
    But despite the latest stinging legal defeats and rebukes, Trump took to the skies in the Marine One presidential helicopter on Saturday on his way to an engagement in New York and flew above a protest of several hundred diehard supporters in Washington DC, who persist in bolstering his false claims that the election was “stolen” from him by fraud and conspiracy.
    This as the US electoral college will vote on Monday to confirm Biden’s resounding victory, alongside his Democratic vice president-elect, Kamala Harris.
    And a trickle of Republicans joined leading Democrats in speaking up about the increasing futility but also the insidiousness of the lame duck president’s aggressive clinging to power.
    After the supreme court decision, Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, said of the Trump campaign challenges to the election result: “It is now truly over. Trump and his acolytes need to stop all efforts to deny millions of votes.”
    More than 120 Republican members of the House of Representatives wrote an amicus brief to the supreme court last week in support of the lawsuit brought by Texas, which had been joined by Trump and aimed to overturn Biden’s victory in four key swing states, which the court on Friday night abruptly refused to consider.
    Michael Steele, the former chair of the Republican National Committee, called the effort “an affront to the country”.
    “It’s an offense to the constitution and it leaves an indelible stain that will be hard for these 126 members to wipe off their political skin,” he told the New York Times.
    In Wisconsin on Saturday, the US district judge Brett Ludwig dismissed one of Trump’s latest lawsuits there that asked the court to order the state’s Republican-controlled legislature to name him as the winner, whereas in fact Biden won Wisconsin on his way to winning the White House.
    Even as Ludwig said Trump’s arguments “fail as a matter of law and fact” an attorney for the president, Jim Troupis, was busy arguing in another case, before a skeptical Wisconsin state supreme court, a lawsuit that, if successful, would disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters in Wisconsin’s most diverse counties, Dane and Milwaukee, where Biden won.
    Trump is not challenging any votes in Wisconsin counties that he won.
    “This lawsuit, Mr Troupis, smacks of racism,“ the justice Jill Karofsky said to Trump’s attorney early in his arguments.
    “I do not know how you can come before this court and possibly ask for a remedy that is unheard of in US history … It is not normal,” she added.
    One of Karofsky’s fellow judges in that case, where a decision is now awaited, pointed out that Trump also did not make such challenges when he won Wisconsin on his way to the White House in 2016. More

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    Trump's end-of-term execution spree is nothing more than a perverse power trip

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    The ‘pro-life’ party strikes again
    Donald Trump is on a killing spree: as his time in power comes to an end, the president seems intent on executing as many people as possible. On Thursday night, Brandon Bernard was put to death by lethal injection at a prison in Indiana. Bernard’s was the ninth federal execution this year; four more are planned before Joe Biden’s inauguration on 20 January.
    It’s hard to overstate just how unprecedented and sadistic the Trump administration’s flurry of federal executions is. The overwhelming majority of prisoners who are put to death in America are executed under state law, rather than by the federal government. Since 1927, when record keeping began, 37 federal executions have occurred. There hadn’t been a federal execution for 17 years until this summer, when Daniel Lewis Lee was put to death. What’s more, there hasn’t been a federal execution during a presidential lame-duck period for 130 years. The last one was in the 1890s during the presidency of Grover Cleveland. “It’s hard to understand why anybody at this stage of a presidency feels compelled to kill this many people,” the director of the Death Penalty Information Center said. “This is a complete historical aberration.”
    Racking up executions during the last weeks of your presidency would be disgusting at the best of times. Doing it during a pandemic that has killed almost 300,000 Americans takes callousness and cruelty to a whole new level. Particularly when you are a party that has branded yourself “pro-life”. I know words don’t have any meaning any more but does being pro-life really mean ramping up the death penalty, reinstating archaic practices like death by firing squad and poison gas, separating migrant children from their parents, escalating drone strikes, attempting to strip healthcare from people, and trying to cut food stamps during a pandemic? If so, then Trump is going to go down as the most pro-life president in American history. He certainly looks set to become the president who has executed the most people in over 130 years. If the next four executions proceed as scheduled, Trump will have put to death about a quarter of all federal death-row prisoners.
    The Trump administration, to be clear, isn’t under any pressure from the American people to do this. A majority of Americans (60%) support life in prison over the death penalty, according to a 2019 Gallup poll. A majority of Americans, it should be noted, also want to keep abortion legal. Republicans don’t really care what the majority of Americans want. They don’t care about democracy. They don’t care about the “sanctity of life”. All they care about is power. In many ways, this end-of-term execution spree is nothing more than a perverse power trip: Trump is killing people to “own the libs”.
    First federal execution of a woman in 70 years
    Lisa Montgomery is scheduled to die on 12 January; the first woman to be federally executed since 1953. Montgomery was sentenced to death in 2007 after murdering Bobbie Jo Stinnett and cutting an unborn baby out of her womb. Her crime was undeniably awful, but her lawyers and activists have argued that she committed it while in the middle of a psychotic episode. Montgomery was reportedly sexually trafficked by her mother as a small child; she has suffered horrific sexual and physical abuse since childhood. Montgomery is also set to be transferred to an all-male prison for execution, which her lawyers say would trigger a “catastrophic psychiatric breakdown”. None of this absolves Montgomery – but there is nothing to be gained from killing her except a compounding of cruelty.
    Argentina’s lower house approves bill legalizing abortion
    The landmark bill allows for voluntary abortions to be carried out up to the 14th week of pregnancy. This is a massive deal: in Latin America, abortion is only legal in Cuba, Uruguay, some parts of Mexico, Guyana and French Guiana. (Chile and Brazil make exceptions in the case of rape.) In 2016 alone, nearly 40,000 women were admitted to public hospitals in Argentina for complications arising from illegal abortion.
    Global female prison population rises by 100,000 in past decade
    “The number of women in prison globally is climbing at an alarming rate – even though they are typically convicted of low-level, nonviolent crime,” said Olivia Rope, executive director of Penal Reform International.
    A women’s football match in China called off over hair dye
    One of the player’s hair was deemed “not black enough”, apparently.
    Saint Dolly Parton saved a child’s life
    Not only did the singer fund a Covid vaccine, it seems she whisked a small child away from the path of an oncoming vehicle while shooting a new holiday movie. Dolly 2024, anyone?
    Men bored of helping out with the kids
    There was a 58% increase in the time British men spent on childcare, according to a study done in May. Now it seems that men are bored of helping out, and the burden of childcare is once again being disproportionately shouldered by women.
    The forgotten trend of 19th-century women’s endurance walking
    The long-distance walkers were known as “pedestriennes” and were “labeled as everything from ‘symbols for women’s rights’ to ‘morally disreputable figures’”. Can you imagine walking hundreds of miles in a petticoat and corset? It’s hard enough in Lululemons. On a somewhat related note, you can instantly make your week better by reading about Annie Edson Taylor, the first woman to go over Niagra Falls in a barrel. She was a 63-year-old school teacher who thought the stunt would help fund her retirement. (It didn’t.)
    A woman will probably walk on the moon in 2024
    Nasa has announced 18 astronauts who will be travelling to the moon under the Artemis program; nine of them are women.
    The week in poultryarchy
    The holiday movie nobody ever asked for has finally arrived! Mario Lopez is starring as Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Colonel Sanders in a short Lifetime movie called A Recipe for Seduction. While this is obviously a marketing stunt, it’s worth noting that a lot of content these days is just wanton product placement disguised with a few plot-lines. Watching a KFC movie has never been on my bucket list; nevertheless I have to admit that a 15-minute commercial about a sexy chicken chef does feel like a fitting way to round off an incredibly unpalatable year. More

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    Supreme court rejects Trump-backed Texas lawsuit aiming to overturn election results

    The US supreme court has unanimously rejected a baseless lawsuit filed by Texas seeking to overturn the presidential election result, dealing the biggest blow yet to Donald Trump’s assault on democracy.In a brief, one page order, all nine justices on America’s highest court dismissed the longshot effort to throw out the vote counts in four states that the president lost: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.The decision hammers another nail in the coffin of Trump’s increasingly desperate effort to subvert the will of the people and deny Joe Biden the presidency.The suit filed by Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, sought to invalidate the results in four swing states, asking the court to extend the deadline for election certification so alleged voting irregularities could be investigated.It was backed by Donald Trump, 17 other states and 126 Republicans in the House of Representatives – more than half the caucus – including the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy of California, and the minority whip, Steve Scalise of Louisiana.Trump had long expressed hope that a disputed election would go before the supreme court, to which he appointed three justices during his term, ensuring a 6-3 conservative majority. Earlier on Friday he tweeted: “If the Supreme Court shows great Wisdom and Courage, the American People will win perhaps the most important case in history, and our Electoral Process will be respected again!”But hours later, his hopes of a political miracle were all but extinguished. The supreme court wrote: “The State of Texas’s motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution. Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed as moot.”Officials in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin had derided the suit as a publicity stunt. More than 20 other attorneys general from states including California and Virginia also filed a brief on Thursday urging the court to reject the case.Josh Shapiro, the attorney general of Pennsylvania, welcomed the court’s ruling. “Our nation’s highest court saw through this seditious abuse of our electoral process,” he tweeted. “This swift denial should make anyone contemplating further attacks on our election think twice.”Democrats in Congress also expressed gratitude. Eric Swalwell of California tweeted: “The Supreme Court, a mix of conservative and liberal members, united to defend your vote against @realDonaldTrumpand his democracy deniers in Congress.”And Senator Ben Sasse, one of relatively few Republicans to acknowledge Biden’s victory, signalled that it was time for the party and government to move on. He said: “Since Election Night, a lot of people have been confusing voters by spinning Kenyan Birther-type, ‘Chavez rigged the election from the grave’ conspiracy theories, but every American who cares about the rule of law should take comfort that the Supreme Court – including all three of President Trump’s picks – closed the book on the nonsense.”Courts have dismissed numerous of lawsuits and appeals by the Trump campaign and its allies in various states. William Barr, the attorney general and a staunch Trump ally, has said the justice department uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could change the outcome of the election.Saturday will mark the 20th anniversary of the court resolving the 2000 election in Republican George W Bush’s favour but that was a much closer contest that came down to one state: Florida. Biden gained 306 votes in the electoral college – the same as Trump in 2016 – and leads the national popular vote by 7m.Some Democrats have accused Trump and his Republican backers of sedition. Chris Murphy, a senator for Connecticut, said in a floor speech on Friday: “Those who are pushing to make Donald Trump president for a second term, no matter the outcome of the election, are engaged in a treachery against their nation.” More

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    Nearly two-thirds of House Republicans join baseless effort to overturn election

    More than 120 Republican members of the US House of Representatives formally asked the US supreme court this week to prevent four swing states from casting electoral votes for Joe Biden to seal his victory in the November election, a brazen move that signals how the Republican party has embraced Donald Trump’s baseless attacks on the American electoral system.The request from 126 GOP members – nearly two-thirds of the Republican caucus – came in support of a lawsuit Texas filed earlier this week that sought to block the electoral votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia, all states Biden won in November. The lawsuit also won support from top House Republicans.The suit was ultimately rejected by the supreme court on Friday. The US constitution gives states clear authority to set their own election and does not give other states the right to interfere. Texas’s argument in the suit was also based on unsupported claims of fraud that have been dismissed in lower courts.“The lawsuit has so many fundamental flaws that it’s hard to know where to start. It misstates basic principles of election law and demands a remedy that is both unconstitutional and unavailable,” Lisa Marshall Manheim, a law professor at the University of Washington, wrote in an email. “At core, it’s an incoherent amalgamation of claims that already failed in the lower courts.”Despite its ultimate failure the lawsuit represented a troubling case that was unprecedented in American history: a quest to overturn a presidential election on the basis of unsubstantiated claims by an incumbent who soundly lost his re-election bid.It also became a test of fealty for the president’s party that pitted Republican governors, lawmakers and elected officials against one another.One supreme court brief, filed by prominent Republicans in opposition to the Texas lawsuit, said the arguments “make a mockery of federalism and separation of powers”.Among the 126 lawmakers who signed on to the brief is a particularly puzzling group: 19 Republican members of Congress who represent districts in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and Wisconsin.Those members all appeared on the same ballot as the presidential candidates and all but one were elected under the same rules to which they are now objecting.(Meanwhile, Doug Collins, a Georgia congressman, ran for a US Senate seat and lost. Collins conceded his race, thereby accepting his defeat in a statewide election, and was later chosen by the Trump campaign to lead its recount effort in the state.)By signing on to the brief, those lawmakers are essentially arguing that their own results could have been tainted by the same irregularities they say cost Trump the election in their state.The Guardian contacted the offices of all 18 of those Republicans who won re-election to ask if they believed there should be further investigation into their electoral victories in November. None of them responded to a request for comment.Most of the lawmakers who supported the effort are far-right conservatives from deep red districts that voted for Trump. But collectively, their support for the lawsuit meant that more than a quarter of the House, including the California congressman Kevin McCarthy, the Republican minority leader, believe the supreme court should invalidate the votes of tens of millions of Americans.Seventeen Republican attorneys general have also signed on in support of the last-ditch legal bid to overturn the 2020 presidential contest before states’ electors meet on Monday to officially declare Biden the victor.Biden won the election with 306 electoral votes, the same number that Trump won in 2016, and he leads the popular vote by more than 7 million. The four states targeted by the Texas lawsuit represent 62 electoral votes.Biden soundly defeated Trump in Michigan and Pennsylvania, part of the “blue wall” that Trump shattered in 2016. Biden also clawed back a third “blue wall” state – Wisconsin – while eking out a surprise victory in Georgia, where multiple recounts have affirmed his win despite an audacious attempt by the president to pressure the Republican governor and secretary of state to reverse the result.Dozens of lawsuits brought by Trump’s campaign and allies in state and federal court were unsuccessful, with the cases so lacking in evidence of the widespread voter fraud they alleged that judges summarily dismissed, derided and even denounced them as meritless. Election law experts have also roundly criticized the Texas lawsuit, pointing to what they say are substantial legal flaws in the argument brought forth by the state’s Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton.Paxton, a staunch ally of the president, is under indictment in a long-running securities fraud case and faces a separate federal investigation related to allegations that he abused the power of his office in connection with a political donor. He has denied the allegations. Yet Paxton’s attempts to override the election results have raised speculation that he may be angling for a presidential pardon, though he insists that is not his motivation. More

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    States targeted in Texas election fraud lawsuit condemn 'cacophony of bogus claims'

    Attorneys general from both parties reject baseless allegations in case filed with US supreme courtGeorgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin on Thursday urged the US supreme court to reject a lawsuit filed by Texas and backed by Donald Trump seeking to undo Joe Biden’s victory, saying the case has no factual or legal grounds and makes “bogus” claims.“What Texas is doing in this proceeding is to ask this court to reconsider a mass of baseless claims about problems with the election that have already been considered, and rejected, by this court and other courts,” Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s Democratic attorney general, wrote in a filing to the nine justices. Continue reading… More

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    Republicans' devotion to Trump pits them against democracy, history – and reality

    The supreme court tersely rejected a bid to overturn to the election result but much of the GOP is rallying to the lost causeOn Tuesday, the US supreme court delivered a devastating blow to Donald Trump’s dreams. A terse one-sentence order left the president even more desperate than he was at the start of the day: “The application for injunctive relief presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied.”The three justices whom the president appointed to the highest court failed to rescue him from the voters’ verdict. When he needed them the most, the persons that Trump called “my judges” were not his. Continue reading… More

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    Supreme court rejects Republican bid to overturn Biden's Pennsylvania victory

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    The US supreme court on Tuesday turned away a long-shot bid by Republicans to overturn the election results in Pennsylvania, where Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 race.
    The suit, filed on behalf of Mike Kelly, a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, took issue with a 2019 state law that adopted no-excuse absentee voting, and argued that the expansion of mail-in voting was illegal.
    Several courts, including the Pennsylvania supreme court, had already denied the request, noting that Kelly waited until after the 2020 election to file his suit when the law was in place well before the election.
    The case is the first piece of 2020 election litigation to reach the US supreme court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority including three Trump appointees. But the decision is not a surprise. As is customary with emergency requests, the supreme court did not offer an explanation for its decision. There were no noted dissents.
    Pennsylvania was one of the pivotal states in the election, with Biden, a Democrat, defeating Trump after the Republican president won the state in 2016. State officials had already certified the election results.
    Trump has falsely claimed that he won re-election, making unfounded claims about widespread voting fraud in states including Pennsylvania. Democrats and other critics have accused Trump of aiming to reduce public confidence in the integrity of US elections and undermine democracy by trying to subvert the will of the voters.
    “This election is over. We must continue to stop this circus of ‘lawsuits’ and move forward,” the Pennsylvania attorney general, Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, wrote on Twitter.
    The supreme court also must decide what to do with another election-related case brought on Tuesday. Republican-governed Texas, hoping to help Trump, mounted an unusual effort to overturn the election results in Pennsylvania and three other states – Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin – by filing a lawsuit against them directly at the supreme court.
    The Republican plaintiffs argued that the universal, “no-excuse” mail-in ballot program passed by the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania legislature in 2019, enabling voters to cast ballots by mail for any reason, violated the state’s constitution.
    Biden won Pennsylvania by 80,000 votes and received a much higher proportion of the mail-in votes than Trump. Many more people voted by mail this year because of health concerns prompted by the coronavirus pandemic as they sought to avoid crowds at polling places.
    Ahead of the election, Trump urged his supporters not to vote by mail, making groundless claims that mail-in voting – a longstanding feature of American elections – was rife with fraud.Pennsylvania said in a court filing that the Republican challengers were asking the justices to “undertake one of the most dramatic, disruptive invocations of judicial power” in US history by nullifying a state’s certification of its election results.
    The state said most of what the challengers had sought was moot because the election results already were certified and what they were really wanted was for “the court overturn the results of the election”.
    Trump’s campaign and his allies have lost in a stream of lawsuits in key states won by Biden, also including Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and others. Judges have rejected sweeping assertions of voting irregularities.
    Biden has amassed 306 electoral votes – exceeding the necessary 270 – compared to 232 for Trump in the state-by-state electoral college that determines the election’s outcome, while also winning the national popular vote by more than 7m votes.
    Tuesday represents a “safe harbor” deadline set by an 1887 US law for states to certify presidential election results. Meeting the deadline is not mandatory but provides assurance that a state’s results will not be second-guessed by Congress. After this deadline, Trump could still pursue lawsuits seeking to overturn Biden’s victory but the effort would become even more difficult.
    Reuters contributed to this report More