The Republican Arizona audit by the Cyber Ninnies of Florida proved to be what everyone expected and predicted, a complete waste of time and money. According to The Guardian, a hand recount found 99 more votes for Biden and 261 fewer votes for Trump. But they won’t let the truth stand in the way of a good lie. The report attempted to cast common voting legal practices as something sinister, when in fact it was nothing like the Cyber Ninnies wanted to report.

In any event, Trump went to Georgia Saturday to raise money and debut the GOP primary ‘Trump ticket.’ I know how this will go in 2022 and 2024. The Republican controlled states will attempt to force a win for Republicans in the mid-term, and Trump in 2024. The battle for sanity and democracy in this country isn’t over; in fact, it’s headed for round 2.

The Washington Post was extremely conservative when it called the winner in each state. It was the last to call Arizona for Biden, and now, it’s finally called Georgia, giving Biden 306 electoral votes, the same number Trump got in 2016. And Trump called that a landslide. Furthermore, Biden also has won the popular vote by over 5.3 million votes.

Meanwhile, Trump keeps trying to launch lawsuits to change this, and they keep failing. Just like Trump. Today a group of Magats showed up in Washington to support the man they so admire. Needless to say it was a rabble of noisy white trash. Just the kind that would vote for Trump.

Biden won. Period. No exceptions. Nobody is trying to steal this election except the GOP.

Here are some captures of the headlines that pretty much sum up how I currently feel.

If you’re curious about the headline, it’s from Gerald Ford when he was sworn in as President after Nixon resigned. You can read Ford’s entire speech here: https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/speeches/740001.asp . I thought it appropriate, considering that we haven’t had a Republican president this bad since Nixon.

And of course, our current child in chief is throwing a Twitter and Facebook temper tantrum, proclaiming he won this election “by a lot.”
No Donny-boy, you did not. You really tried to cheat by getting your base to slam the polling stations on election day, and they trying to shut down the counting of all mail-in ballots that you knew were heavily Democratic. The only way you know to win is by cheating. It didn’t work this time. Oh, and by grossly mis-managing what you, as president, should have managed properly.

So here we are, still waiting. It should be noted that Biden is ahead of Trump by 3.5 million popular votes. By comparison, in 2016 Hillary beat Donald by 2.9 million votes. And since we’re talking about popular vote statistics, Trump 2020 is beating Hillary by about 3 million, but Biden 2020 is beating Hillary by over 6 million and counting. That sounds wonderful, but it’s been noted that Florida alone had 6 million voters who did not vote in 2016. Imagine how Florida might have turned out if all those voters had gone to the polls. That one item alone underscores to me that the Democratic Party is its own worst enemy, not the Republicans.

Some random facts gleaned so far:

• A surprising number of Black men voted for Trump, the highest ever. Black women supported Biden at the same levels as Clinton in 2016 and Obama in 2008 and 2012: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-men-drifted-democrats-toward-trump-record-numbers-polls-show-n1246447
• And interesting analysis of Latino voting in south Florida, Texas, and Arizona shows a diverse, some might say fragmented, group of voters. Needless to say the Democrats did poorly with Latinos in Florida and Texas, better elsewhere including Arizona. I can’t provide a link, but an editorial stated that what pulled in many Latinos in south Florida was how Trump treated Cuba, Bolivia, and Venezuela. That is Trump used strong-man tactics that did nothing to fix the issues, but made him appear strong, and thus appealed to many of the Latino voters who have emigrated from those countries and, I believe I read, would accept revenge via Trump’s treatment of those countries if they couldn’t get a proper solution.
• For whatever reason, the economy was the top concern of voters, followed by the pandemic. Never realizing that the economy is shit because of how the pandemic has been so grossly mis-managed by the Trump administration.
• That about half the voters in this country are still incredibly selfish, racist, misogynistic, and just down right stupid in voting for Trump. We have some real issues in this country, and the Democrats are going to have to really work to address them. And that doesn’t mean trips to the Hamptons (I’m looking at you, Hillary) when things get stressful.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the pandemic still rages on. Here’s today’s statistics.

I kept away from the news for the better part of today (except for this morning, of course). It wasn’t going to do any good doom scrolling through all the news waiting for final results. I got this around 8pm Orlando time, and when I checked right before writing this post, the numbers hadn’t changed. Biden needs just six more electoral college votes to win the Presidency. It’s been a nail-biter the entire way. I’ve been voting since I was old enough in 1972, and I’ve never seen one drag out like this. But then I’ve never seen a party as dishonest as the Republican party is today trying to cheat another four years.

In case you’re curious, I grew up in a Republican household in Atlanta, listening to William F. Buckley every Sunday on my local PBS station with my dad. I voted for Nixon in 1972, Ford in 1976, and Reagan in 1980. It was during the first Regan administration that I came to see how corrupt an administration could get, far more than Nixon. Trump is no different than Reagan was in that respect. I tried to vote for a Democrat in 1984 by voting for Walter Mondale, but Reagan won every state except Minnesota. Everyone talks about Biden picking a female vice president running mate, but Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro for his running mate in 1984. It’s taken us 36 years to pick another woman VP running mate.

Trump is railing against the voting, as usual, and his lawyer minions are filing lawsuits to derail the counting. This is after he declared victory. Right, Frumpy-boy, right.

Everyone is calling Biden the winner, and I’m just going along with what they call. Time to put myself to bed and see what tomorrow brings.

Just like all their competitors, including Apple, Samsung released the next iteration in their Galaxy series, the S7 and S7 Edge. There’s so much hype surrounding this release I’ll let you use Google to read all about it, if you haven’t been overwhelmed at whatever news source you frequent already. Although I switched to an Apple iPhone 6S Plus back in November, the Galaxy is still interesting enough to pay attention to. Here’s what I’ve noticed so far.

• The S7/S7 Edge have micro SDHC card capability again. My Galaxy S4 had it and I used it as well as Android 4.4 and Android 5 would allow, which wasn’t much. Google really screwed over users when they restricted external SDHC card usage as much as they did. That negative change was the first big push away from Android and Samsung and towards Apple. Fortunately for those who’ve stuck it out, Android 6 is supposed to make external storage devices like micro SDHC cards look like part of the overall storage pool. I have no details how that works as the only Android 6 devices I still own and use are a pair of 2013 Nexus 7 tablets. Of course, with the 128GB of device storage on my iPhone 6S Plus, the need for a piddly external micro SDHC device is pretty much eliminated. I’ve yet to read of an S7 being offered with 128GB.
• The S7/S7 Edge are dust and water proof – again. The S5 (or at least the S5 Active) was dust and water proof, but the S6 wasn’t. No explanation about why that critical feature was dropped when the S6/S6 Edge were released, except perhaps Samsung spent so much time on making the S6 pretty they must have run out of time making it physically robust. The iPhone 6s Plus is reasonably water resistant (as reported here by Wired), so that was a big fat positive feature for me. Another reason to move to Apple.
• The S7/S7 Edge are coming out of the chute with the latest version of Android, 6.0.1. That’s nice, considering that past Galaxies have been first released with older Android releases, and it took Samsung a very long time to release more up-to-date versions of their cooked version of Android. I have no idea how quickly Samsung will now follow Google when Google releases newer versions of Android going forward. Ideally Samsung’s release would be the same day as an Android update is announced, much as what Apple does when it announces a new release of iOS. I got tired of waiting not for major feature releases of Android on my Galaxy S4, but critical bug fixes that Google would announce. Part of the problem of timely updates is Samsung itself, part of the problem is AT&T. When I finally bought my iPhone, I did so knowing full well that even though AT&T is my provider, they don’t get in the way of Apple pushing out iOS updates.

The S7/S7 Edge look very pretty to be sure. And with the latest processor and support for even faster graphics, the S7 appears poised to make some spectacular mobile gaming possible. They even have a tie-in with virtual reality via Oculus; that’s one reason why pre-orders will get free VR headgear.

All exciting to be sure. But there’s one feature that nobody is mentioning that has my attention at the moment, and that’s on-device encryption. Apple is in a brutal battle with the DoJ, where the D0J wants Apple to create a backdoor into iOS in order to get the contents of a specific iPhone 5C used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. I believe in what Apple has done so far with iOS encryption on all its mobile devices, especially fighting incredible government overreach, enough to put my hard-earned money into buying Apple hardware. And it will stay that way, regardless of how pretty the latest Samsung phones are (or any other Android phone for that matter). Hopefully I won’t have to eat these words later, but I trust Apple to do the right thing on this important issue. That same level of trust is totally lacking with all Android handset providers, especially where AT&T is directly involved.

I made my switch to Apple back in November. I have no intentions of switching away.

This is the same lie first puked out by Carl Rove in early May and reported by that bastion of northern journalistic integrity the N.Y. Post. This was Carl Rove and the Republican establishment attempting to keep alive the Benghazi lies and misinformation by any means possible. The key event is then Secretary of State Clinton’s admission to a hospital for three days for health reasons right in the middle of the initial Republican Benghazi witch hunt. The Republicans took this as a personal affront, and Karl Rove hit upon the brilliant, if twisted, lie of accusing Ms. Clinton of brain damage and a 30 day stay in the hospital.

This is the start of the 2016 presidential silly season (even if it is 2014). This is the Republican’s efforts by any means possible to discredit through lies, like they tried with Obama’s birth certificate and the resulting birther controversy. This is also Rove’s attempt to get back into the good graces of the right after his meltdown during the 2012 election reporting of Ohio presidential results, where he tried to keep Fox News of all people from calling Ohio for Obama. Who’s acting like they’re suffering from brain damage?

What makes this sickening for me personally: I have no desire to try and support either Obama or Clinton. But the behavior of Rove and Co. makes them the worst of the two sides. I won’t put up with lies from anyone, and in Rove’s particular case, his means never justify any of his ends.

Update 1

The Republican we all love to hate, Sarah Palin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwzKrIJI40g