“[S]ad, frightening remarks in the White House”

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert: Stephen Rips Up The Monologue And Starts Over After Trump’s Heartbreaking Thursday Night Lie Fest. (YouTube, 16:29min)

“We all knew Donald Trump would do this, that he would refuse to show dignity in defeat. But what we didn’t expect is how much it would hurt. Watch Stephen Colbert process his feelings in real time as he delivers a new monologue written in the wake of the President’s sad, frightening remarks in the White House briefing room.”

Hybrider Unterricht klingt viel besser als Homeschooling!

ZDF Heute-Show: Erneuter Lockdown! Restaurants müssen schließen, die Schulen bleiben auf. (YouTube, 3:27min, ganzes Video 10:48min)

An meiner Schule löst man das Problem, dass sich die meisten Fenster nicht öffnen lassen, nicht mit einem Hammer, sondern indem man jede Lehrkraft mit einem Fenstergriff ausstattet, den man dann zum Lüften in jedes Fenster stecken kann. Jetzt könnte mal jemand ausrechnen, wie viel Unterrichtszeit für dieses Prozedere verwendet wird, wenn pro Unterrichtsstunde alle Fenster mindestens zwei Mal geöffnet und zweimal wieder geschlossen werden müssen.

Ach ja: Seit Beginn der Pandemie hat mein Bundesland jeder Lehrkraft eine (in Zahlen: 1) Alltagsmaske geschenkt. Seit den Sommerferien gilt, dass alle Schülerinnen und Schüler wieder in die Schule gehen und im Klassenraum keinen Abstand halten und auch keine Maske tragen müssen. Erst jetzt, eine ganze Woche nach Ende der Herbstferien, wird die Maskenpflicht auch im Klassenraum eingeführt.

“Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition”

Radiolab: What if? (Podcast, 41 minutes)

“There’s plenty of speculation about what Donald Trump might do in the wake of the election. Would he dispute the results if he loses? Would he simply refuse to leave office, or even try to use the military to maintain control? Last summer, Rosa Brooks got together a team of experts and political operatives from both sides of the aisle to ask a slightly different question. Rather than arguing about whether he’d do those things, they dug into what exactly would happen if he did. Part war game part choose your own adventure, Rosa’s Transition Integrity Project doesn’t give us any predictions, and it isn’t a referendum on Trump. Instead, it’s a deeply illuminating stress test on our laws, our institutions, and on the commitment to democracy written into the constitution.
[…]
You can read The Transition Integrity Project’s report here.“

“Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede.”

The Atlantic: The Election That Could Break America. “If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result. Who will stop him?” By Barton Gellman.

“The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that un­certainty to hold on to power.

Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that the president’s term in office “shall end“ at noon on January 20, but two men could show up to be sworn in. One of them would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.

“We are not prepared for this at all,“ Julian Zelizer, a Prince­ton professor of history and public affairs, told me. “We talk about it, some worry about it, and we imagine what it would be. But few people have actual answers to what happens if the machinery of democracy is used to prevent a legitimate resolution to the election.“ “

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