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      'If I lost, I'd be a very gracious loser': Trump pushes false fraud claims in Georgia – video

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      Donald Trump campaigned for two Republican senators in Georgia on Saturday, at a rally that some in the party feared could end up hurting their chances by focusing on his efforts to reverse his own election defeat. In his first rally appearance since he lost to Joe Biden, Trump repeated baseless claims of widespread fraud in the presidential election. The crucial January runoff will determine which party controls the Senate
      Trump rails against election result at rally ahead of crucial Georgia Senate runoff More

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      Trump heads for Georgia but claims of fraud may damage Senate Republicans

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      Donald Trump will return to the campaign trail on Saturday – not, notionally at least, in his quixotic and doomed attempt to deny defeat by Joe Biden, but in support of two Republicans who face January run-offs which will decide control of the US Senate.The president and first lady Melania Trump are due to appear in Valdosta, Georgia at 7pm local time.“See you tomorrow night!” Trump tweeted on Friday, as Vice-President Mike Pence stumped in the southern state.But the president couldn’t help tying the Senate race to his baseless accusations of electoral fraud in key states he lost to Biden.“The best way to insure [sic] a … victory,” he wrote, “is to allow signature checks in the presidential race, which will insure [sic] a Georgia presidential win (very few votes are needed, many will be found).“Spirits will soar and everyone will rush out and VOTE!”To the contrary, many observers postulate that Trump’s ceaseless baseless claims that the election was rigged could depress turnout among supporters in Georgia, handing a vital advantage to Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, the Democratic challengers to senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.If Ossoff and Warnock win, the Senate will be split 50-50, Kamala Harris’s vote as vice-president giving Democrats control. Polling in both races is tight.Trump’s recalcitrance is being encouraged by congressional Republicans. On Saturday the Washington Post reported that only 25 of 247 Republican representatives and senators have acknowledged Biden’s victory.Biden won the electoral college by 306-232, the same result Trump said was a landslide when it landed in his favour over Hillary Clinton. The Democrat is more than 7m ballots ahead in the national popular vote, having attracted the support of more than 81 million Americans, the most of any candidate for president.Democrats performed less well in Senate, House and state elections, however, making the Georgia runoffs vital to the balance of power in Washington as leaders look for agreement on much-needed stimulus and public health measures to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic and its attendant economic downturn.Earlier this week, two lawyers who have both been involved in legal challenges to Biden’s victory and trafficked in outlandish conspiracy theories, Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, told Trump supporters not to vote in Georgia unless Republican leaders act more aggressively to overturn the presidential result.“We’re not gonna go vote 5 January on another machine made by China,” Wood said on Wednesday. “You’re not gonna fool Georgians again. If Kelly Loeffler wants your vote, if David Perdue wants your vote, they’ve got to earn it. They’ve got to demand publicly, repeatedly, consistently, ‘Brian Kemp: call a special session of the Georgia legislature’.“And if they do not do it, if Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue do not do it, they have not earned your vote. Don’t you give it to them. Why would you go back and vote in another rigged election?”After a rush of defeats on Friday, Trump has won one election-related lawsuit and lost 46. But he continues to attack, in Georgia slamming Governor Brian Kemp and secretary of state Brad Raffensperger for overseeing a contest in which the state went Democratic for the first time since 1992.Matt Towery, a former Georgia Republican legislator now an analyst and pollster, told Reuters Trump could help in the state “if he spends most of his time talking about the two candidates, how wonderful they are, what they’ve achieved.“If he talks about them for 10 minutes and spends the rest of the time telling everyone how terrible Brian Kemp is, then it will only exacerbate things.”Gabriel Sterling, the Republican manager of Georgia’s voting systems, this week blamed the president and his allies for threats of violence against election workers and officials. On Friday, he said: “I think the rhetoric they’re engaged in now is literally suppressing the vote.”At a rally in Savannah, the vice-president was greeted by chants of “stop the steal”.“I know we’ve all got our doubts about the last election,” Pence said, “and I actually hear some people saying, ’Just don’t vote.’ My fellow Americans, if you don’t vote, they win.”Kemp and Loeffler missed campaign events on Friday after a young aide to the senator was killed in a car crash.Former president Barack Obama held a virtual event in support of Warnock and Ossoff. From Wilmington, Delaware, where he continues preparations to take power on 20 January, Biden said he would travel to Georgia at some point, to campaign with the Democratic candidates. More

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      in US Politics

      Biden's outspoken nominee to run budget office deletes 1,000 tweets

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      [embedded content]
      Joe Biden’s nominee for a key economic post has deleted more than a thousand of her own tweets, some of which were critical of senators who now hold her fate in their hands.
      The Daily Beast first reported the steps by Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress (CAP) think tank who Biden has nominated to lead the federal Office of Management and Budget.
      “Can people on here please focus their ire on [Senate majority leader Mitch] McConnell and the GOP senators who are up [for re-election] this cycle who enable him,” Tanden wrote in June 2019, in a tweet recovered by the Beast.
      Tanden named those “enablers” as Cory Gardner, Susan Collins, Joni Ernst, John Cornyn, David Perdue, Thom Tillis “and many more”.
      A tweet calling McConnell “#MoscowMitch”, a common nickname for the majority leader among liberals during the investigation of Donald Trump’s links to Russia, was also among those deleted.
      Tanden’s fate may hinge on two runoff elections in Georgia in January. If Democrats win both seats – one held by Perdue – they will control the Senate via Kamala Harris’s casting vote as vice-president. That would make Tanden’s confirmation achievable – if party discipline held.
      But Tanden, a former policy aide to Hillary Clinton, has also been a fierce critic of senators from the Democratic side of the aisle, for example the progressive Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.
      “It’s an odd choice for Biden and his ‘healing’ presidency to bring someone in who is so combative, especially on Twitter, being that we just ended a four-year Twitter presidency,” Josh Fox, a climate activist and Sanders surrogate, told the Beast. “She causes ire unnecessarily.”
      Fox also said CAP “pretends to be aligned with progressive values, but Neera Tanden seems so cynical that she attacks progressive policies like a ban on fracking, the Green New Deal and Medicare for All”.
      The Massachusetts progressive Elizabeth Warren is among prominent Democratic senators who have backed Tanden.
      Republicans have been quick to tell reporters Tanden will not be confirmed if their party can help it. On Monday, Cornyn, from Texas, told reporters he thought Tanden was Biden’s “worst nominee so far”.
      “Her combative and insulting comments about many members of the Senate, mainly on our side of the aisle, [create] certainly, a problematic path,” he said.
      The Beast said Tanden had deleted at least one tweet in support of MJ Hegar, the Democrat Cornyn beat for re-election last month.
      Speaking on MSNBC, Claire McCaskill, a former Democratic senator from Missouri, accused Republicans of displaying “a whole new level of hypocrisy”.
      “The Republican senators are now all of a sudden worried about tweets that hurt their feelings,” she said. “This is just ridiculous.
      “We’ve had a president who has used his Twitter account like a battering ram, going after not just his political opponents but Republican senators, unfairly, with incredibly brutal tweets. Now all of a sudden it’s a disqualification for someone to serve in the cabinet that engaged in her own opinion on Twitter? I think that’s dumb.”
      In a statement emailed to the Guardian, a transition spokesperson said Biden would “choose the most-qualified, most experienced candidates capable of leading on day one” and “looks forward to working in good faith with both parties in Congress to install qualified, experienced leaders.
      “The president-elect has been heartened to see a number of Republican senators express their desire to work together and indicate that they believe that presidents deserve latitude in building their team.”
      Jen Psaki, Biden’s incoming White House press secretary, said Tanden was “a brilliant policy expert and she knows how vital funding for [government] programs is. As a child, for a period her family relied on food stamps to eat, on Section 8 vouchers to pay the rent and on the social safety. Her fresh perspective can help meet this moment.”
      Tanden did not comment on the Daily Beast report. She tweeted: “After my parents were divorced when I was young, my mother relied on public food and housing programs to get by. Now, I’m being nominated to help ensure those programs are secure, and ensure families like mine can live with dignity. I am beyond honored.”
      She has also changed her Twitter biography. It now reads: “Director of OMB nominee, liberal, Indian American, feminist, mom, wife. Not in that order. Views expressed are most definitely my own.” More

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      in US Politics

      Romance novelists raise $400,000 for Georgia Senate races – with help from Stacey Abrams

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      Rallying behind Stacey Abrams, the Democratic politician, voting rights activist and romance author, American romance novelists have helped raise nearly $400,000 to help elect two Democratic senators in Georgia.Now, Abrams herself has joined the “Romancing the Runoff” fundraiser, and has donated a copy of the first of her eight published romance novels–one signed with both her real name, and her pen name, Selena Montgomery.“I’m privileged to be one of you,” Abrams wrote on Twitter, praising the romance authors’ “amazing” fundraising efforts.Abrams’ work fighting against suppression of black voters and organizing voter registration efforts is widely credited with helping Joe Biden become the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Georgia in more than a quarter century. Democrats have said her work was “pivotal” in flipping Wisconsin and other battleground states.Thank you @RomancingRunoff for your amazing efforts. I’m privileged to be one of you. For the cause, I’d like to throw in an autographed copy of my first novel, Rules of Engagement, in the rare hardback version. Both Selena & Stacey will sign. 😉https://t.co/32aiezmJmW— Stacey Abrams (@staceyabrams) November 25, 2020
      Since election day, Abrams has not stopped fighting: a January runoff between two pairs of Democratic and Republican candidates in Georgia will determine whether Republicans maintain control of the US senate – and have the votes to block Democrats and the incoming Biden administration from enacting any substantial new policy agenda.In the week after the election, Abrams helped raise $3.6m in just two days to help campaigns for the Georgia Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock as they fight re-matches in a runoff election against the incumbent Republican senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.Meanwhile other American romance novelists, many of whom have active social media platforms, began organizing to auction off romance-novel related items to support the Democratic candidates through donations to the New Georgia Project, Black Voters Matter, and Fair Fight, the voting rights group Abrams founded.“Democracy only thrives when every vote can be cast and counted, and we are fighting to help dismantle the legacy of voter suppression in Georgia,” the four bestselling authors who organized the auction said in a statement.Political activism is not a new development in the American romance writing community, which has been fighting fierce battles over entrenched racism in the publishing industry, as well as within their own industry trade group, the Romance Writers of America, for years.But the Georgia fundraising effort is also a testament to romance novelists’ pride in Abrams, who has continued to tout her work as an author of romantic suspense, even as she has become a star in national Democratic politics and a bestselling author of political nonfiction, including her memoir, Lead from the Outside.When writers who got their start publishing romance novels move on to more prestigious genres, “they sometimes back away from romance, like it’s this dirty secret in their past: ‘Oh, I don’t write those kinds of books any more,’” the author Courtney Milan, one of the auction’s organizers, said. “Stacey Abrams has never once done that to us.”“She’s not playing the game of trying to advance where she is by denigrating where she’s been,” Milan said. “She’s very clear that she doesn’t think any apologies are needed, which they aren’t.“I revel in having been able to be a part of a genre that is read by millions and millions of women, in part because it respects who they are,” Abrams told Entertainment Weekly in an interview in 2018, when she was campaigning to be governor of Georgia.Asked by the Washington Post how she would respond to people who made fun of the romance genre, Abrams wrote: “Telling a well-crafted story is hard. Full stop. Regardless of genre, good writing is good writing”. She added that she was “honored to be in the company of extraordinary writers.”The “Romancing the Runoff” auction had grown past its initial goal of raising $20,000, Milan said, as a wide range of authors and romance fans donated thousands of items, including first editions of romance novels, including the first Harlequin novel published by a black author, Sandra Kitt’s Rites of Spring; one-on-one sessions for writing advice, a chicken recipe from Dame Barbara Cartland, and handmade crafts, such as a “blue wave” crocheted scarf to a hand-embroidered sampler reading “F*ck the GOP”.The fantasy and science fiction novelist Neil Gaiman also joined the effort, donating a signed collector’s edition of one of his novels that sold for $4,590.A spokesperson for Fair Fight did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment about the Romancing the Runoff fundraiser beyond Abrams’ tweet.Milan said she had “no clue” how much money the copy of Abrams’ own signed romance novel might raise for the Georgia election, but she expected it would “easily be four figures”.Hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent on political advertising in Georgia in the weeks before the runoff election on 5 January, NBC News reported this week, with at least $46m already spent since election day. More

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      in Elections

      Facebook and Twitter CEOs face Senate hearing over handling of 2020 US election – video

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      The chief executive officers of Twitter and Facebook appear before a US Senate hearing to testify about allegations of anti-conservative bias and their handling of the 2020 election. Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg face questioning for the second time in as many months, with Republican lawmakers alleging – without evidence – censorship of conservative views
      Twitter and Facebook CEOs testify on alleged anti-conservative bias More

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      Twitter and Facebook CEOs testify on alleged anti-conservative bias

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      The chief executive officers of Twitter and Facebook took the stand on Tuesday to testify, again, about allegations of anti-conservative bias on their platforms.
      Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey were subpoenaed in October to appear at Tuesday’s hearing with the Senate judiciary committee in order to “review the companies’ handling of the 2020 election”.
      [embedded content]
      Republican lawmakers frequently allege – without evidence – censorship of conservative views, but this particular hearing was called in response to the companies’ handling of a New York Post article about Joe Biden.
      When the story was published in October, Twitter took unprecedented steps to limit its circulation, blocking users from posting links or photos of the report. At the time, Twitter said the measures were taken due to “the origins of the materials” included in the article, which were allegedly pulled from a computer that had been left by Hunter Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019. Twitter policies prohibit “directly distribut[ing] content obtained through hacking that contains private information”.
      The company later walked back on its response, tweeting that the communication around the actions on the article “was not great”. It also changed its hacked materials policies in response to the outcry. Facebook took a less aggressive stance, placing some limitations on the article due to questions about its validity.
      In his opening statement, Dorsey explained again the company took action against the New York Post tweet due to “the origins of the materials” included in the article and said that Twitter upon further review decided that action was wrong. “I hope this illustrates the rationale behind our actions and demonstrates our ability to take feedback,” Dorsey said. “Mistakes and changes were all transparent to the public.” More

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      Lindsey Graham condemned for allegedly pressuring Georgia to toss out ballots

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      Democrats and political observers were quick to condemn the Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, after it was reported that he pressured Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to exclude ballots in the state’s presidential recount.
      In a tweet, Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar called the alleged approach “insane and illegal”.
      Hakeem Jeffries, a US representative from New York, asked: “Did Lindsey Graham illegally pressure the Georgia secretary of state to rig the election after the fact? The justice department should find out.”
      Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, said: “For the chairman of the Senate committee charged with oversight of our legal system to have reportedly suggested that an election official toss out large numbers of legal ballots from American voters is appalling.”
      Graham, from South Carolina, should resign his role as chair of the judiciary committee, Bookbinder said.
      Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in Georgia by just under 15,000 votes, the first time the state had gone for a Democrat since 1996. A hand recount was ordered, and is expected to be completed by 20 November.
      It is unlikely to change the result. If it did, the state’s 16 votes would not change the overall result in the electoral college, which Biden won 306-232. The threshold for victory is 270.
      Nonetheless, Trump refuses to concede defeat and continues to peddle debunked conspiracy theories regarding voter fraud and electoral irregularities which election officials from both parties have dismissed as baseless.
      Raffensperger told the Washington Post Graham had indicated he should find ways to toss out legal mail-in ballots.
      “It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” he said.
      Counties administer elections in Georgia, making Raffensperger powerless to do what Graham apparently wanted.
      “It was just an implication of, ‘Look hard and see how many ballots you could throw out,’” Raffensperger told CNN.
      Graham told the Hill the claim was “just ridiculous” and that “if he [felt] threatened by that conversation, he’s got a problem.
      “I actually thought it was a good conversation,” the senator said, adding that he was “surprised to hear [Raffensperger] characterized it that way”.
      On Tuesday, Graham said he had spoken to election officials in several battleground states, where a dwindling group of Trump allies continue to push his baseless claims.
      “Yeah, I talked to Arizona, I talked to Nevada,” Graham told reporters on Capitol Hill.
      He was forced to clarify that he had spoken to the Republican governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, not Katie Hobbs, the secretary of state, after she said she had not spoken to Graham.
      Raffensperger has faced mounting criticism from his own party for defending the state’s electoral process. He told the Post he had received threatening messages from “people on [his] side of the aisle”, demanding that he “better not botch” the recount.
      Georgia’s two senators, David Perdue and Kelley Loeffler, have called for his resignation. Both face tight run-off elections.
      Graham’s alleged approach to Raffensperger prompted widespread criticism in the mainstream media.
      Writing for the Post, the conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin asked why Graham “would need to know this information and decide directly to contact Raffensperger.
      “Federal and/or state law enforcement should get to the bottom of this, requiring both parties to the conversation, and any witnesses, to preserve evidence. Graham’s actions have called into question his willingness to uphold the sanctity of elections.” More