Political Discussion Thread (With Rules)

[TrickstaPriest]

No point in impeaching him.  I'm just watching the legal stuff play out.

[Ragitsu]

"The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the Axe, for the Axe was clever and convinced the Trees that because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them" - Turkish Proverb

[Sociotard]

I'm trying to play similarities/differences:

 

In 2016 the Democrats hoped against hope that some of the Electors would be faithless, because those Electors would acknowledge the foreign interference, and that Trump was a bad person, and that the popular vote should mean something.

 

In 2020 the Republicans hoped against hope that some of the State legislatures would declare the vote illegitimate and simply assign Republican Electors, because those legislatures would acknowledge that "everybody knows" how rampant electoral fraud is. 

[TrickstaPriest]

9 minutes ago, Sociotard said:

I'm trying to play similarities/differences:

 

In 2016 the Democrats hoped against hope that some of the Electors would be faithless, because those Electors would acknowledge the foreign interference, and that Trump was a bad person, and that the popular vote should mean something.

 

In 2020 the Republicans hoped against hope that some of the State legislatures would declare the vote illegitimate and simply assign Republican Electors, because those legislatures would acknowledge that "everybody knows" how rampant electoral fraud is. 

 

I don't disagree how similar it is.  I don't know if the democrats tried the same level of legal campaigning and so on...

[tkdguy]

In 2016 I definitely got emails to sign petitions to the Electoral College to vote for Hillary Clinton. I signed, but I suspected it wouldn't work. Of course, Hillary had already conceded by then. 

 

Hopefully Trump's tactics fail. Most experts think it will, but this melodrama will go on until the Electoral College votes, maybe even after that.

 

I for one am weary of it all.  I'm going to unsubscribe to this thread again. But I'm going to post this little ditty to make me feel a little better:

 

Donald has only got one ball

Rudy has two but very small

Bill Barr has something similar,

And poor Pompeo has no balls at all.

[csyphrett]

Trump's legal team (man you guys don't know how hard it was to write that without laughing until I choked) are like 1 in 31 wins. Every judge that sits on one of these cases, Repub or Demo, basically gives them the three Is and tells them to quit wasting the court's time. I would love for a judge to just say "You know, I have been on the bench a long time. I have seen some really dumb stuff over the years. You people are the dumbest I have ever seen. I think that I am going to hold you in contempt until Biden is sworn in. Maybe that will give you an appreciation of the law and the time you have wasted on nonsense."

CES

[Lord Liaden]

Giuliani stepped up to the plate because Trump's lawyers keep withdrawing, so I'm sure they're well aware of how stupid these cases are. They did get their billable hours in, though (on the taxpayers' dollar, mind you).

[Starlord]

Why Republican voters say there’s ‘no way in hell’ Trump lost

 

In Reuters interviews with 50 Trump voters, all said they believed the election was rigged or in some way illegitimate. Of those, 20 said they would consider accepting Biden as their president, but only in light of proof that the election was conducted fairly.

 

Proof is readily available.

[Starlord]

[Hermit]

1 hour ago, Starlord said:

 

I am interested and would like to subscribe to this newsletter

 

 

[Pariah]

4 hours ago, Starlord said:

Why Republican voters say there’s ‘no way in hell’ Trump lost

 

In Reuters interviews with 50 Trump voters, all said they believed the election was rigged or in some way illegitimate. Of those, 20 said they would consider accepting Biden as their president, but only in light of proof that the election was conducted fairly.

 

Proof is readily available.

 

But there exists no proof that these folks would be willing to accept, because anything that might be offered will contradict what they already KNOW to be true.

 

You can't educate someone who's already convinced they know everything.

[Old Man]

Of course not, there's nothing left for me to learn.

 

Meanwhile, I found another cool graphic of our "fraudulent" election results:

 

[TrickstaPriest]

https://medium.com/indica/i-lived-through-a-coup-america-is-having-one-now-437934b1dac3

[Old Man]

8 minutes ago, TrickstaPriest said:

https://medium.com/indica/i-lived-through-a-coup-america-is-having-one-now-437934b1dac3

 

This article was excellent, if short on solutions.  Thanks.

[unclevlad]

16 minutes ago, TrickstaPriest said:

https://medium.com/indica/i-lived-through-a-coup-america-is-having-one-now-437934b1dac3

 

The story won't help;  the writer's core bashing of American democracy is excessive, for example.

 

But several of the points are valid, and the warning is VERY valid, IMO.  The path we are on is leading to serious violence and chaos.

[Pariah]

3 hours ago, Old Man said:

Of course not, there's nothing left for me to learn.

 

Meanwhile, I found another cool graphic of our "fraudulent" election results:

 

 

Whoa, Joe Biden won three counties in Utah? That seems...remarkable.

 

Edit: Ah, the third is Grand County, where Moab is. That makes a bit more sense now.

[Cygnia]

Trump lawyers to avoid Michigan lawmaker meeting after COVID exposure

[Sociotard]

8 hours ago, TrickstaPriest said:

https://medium.com/indica/i-lived-through-a-coup-america-is-having-one-now-437934b1dac3

 

Okay, here are my quibbles.

Quote

 

One person is refusing to accept the people’s will. He’s taking power that doesn’t belong to him. That’s a coup.

...

This is the point. You have taken an orderly system balancing a whole lot of chaos and ____ed with it. I don’t know how it’s going to explode, but I can promise you this. It’s going to explode. 

 

Fair, but I lurk on enough conservative forums that I can anticipate their response. One of their posters literally said, that before Trump we'd only had one lapse in the peaceful transfer of power: when Obama let the FBI investigate the Trump campaign. Thus, to a conservative, THAT was the coup, and THAT was mucking with a system balancing chaos, and THIS is the explosion from that muckery.

Or, the real first coup was Al Gore dragging out the 2000 election with litigation and recounts. (an interference that the 9/11 commission pointed out as a contributing factor in that failure of intelligence.) Remember how that left Democrats howling that Bush was illegitimate?

So then came the Obama presidency, and the Republicans did their own little coup, hounding him the whole eight years with baseless and racist accusations of having been born in Kenya and thus illegitimate.

And then Trump won. We can see he was already plotting the seeds of a coup in the style of Al Gore; he was proclaiming the vote as compromised by rampant fraud before the vote even happened, preparing for litigation and howling about Clinton's illegitimacy.

But he won, and the Democrats cried that it was illegitimate instead. They claimed foreign interference and begged electors to be faithless. And the Republican's saw this as a failure in the peaceful transition of power, because Obama allowed the investigation to continue.

 

This isn't a novel coup, this is just the latest in a cycle of ever more extreme attacks on the peaceful transition of power. That article quoted "the second coming".  Turning and turning in the widening gyre; The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

The widening gyre.

The gyre is a cycle. Widening means it grows ever more extreme and out of control.

 

Well, here is your cycle. You can plead for most of the democratic acts that I pointed out. Al Gore's loss was a lot more narrow than Donald Trumps and thus its litigation was more reasonable. Obama was also reasonable with how he allowed the investigation continue. And yet, each time the Republicans saw it as an egregious slight, and answered in ever greater retaliation

[Starlord]

8 hours ago, TrickstaPriest said:

https://medium.com/indica/i-lived-through-a-coup-america-is-having-one-now-437934b1dac3

 

The problem is that Republicans feel that the same thing is happening from their POV.

[Sociotard]

Exactly. To them, the lack of evidence for fraud is only proof that fraud is too difficult to detect and we need to make voting more restrictive, with voter IDs and in-person voting with those dye marks they use in poor countries.

[archer]

Don Trump, Jr. tests positive for COVID.

 

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/526967-donald-trump-jr-tests-positive-for-covid-19

 

HUD Secretary Ben Carson is better after his bout with COVID. He credits his recovery to taking the Oleander poison (literally a known poison that people in Asia use to commit suicide) which the "My Pillow" guy has been pushing to his friends in the White House as a COVID cure.

 

Carson is a medical doctor.

 

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/526992-ben-carson-says-hes-out-of-the-woods-after-being-extremely-sick-with

[Sociotard]

Ben Carson makes me see neurosurgeons in a whole new way.

[Pariah]

Yeah, I don't think I'm ever going to be able to say "Look, it ain't brain surgery" any more.

 

At least I've still got rocket science to fall back on.

[archer]

23 minutes ago, Sociotard said:

Ben Carson makes me see neurosurgeons in a whole new way.

 

I'll try not to rant here.

 

Medical doctors aren't as bad as doctors who have a PhD in other fields since the vast majority of them get a broad medical education before they're allowed to specialize. 

 

But they still specialize and no matter how good they are in their specialty, they aren't necessarily great in other specialties like pharmacology.

 

I was vastly amused in the 1990's when the main argument most people made for global warming was that 95%+ of scientists believed in global warming.

 

The vast majority of scientists weren't reading anything more about the climate than the magazines which were available to the general public. And I would have waged that the majority of scientists couldn't wade their way through the piles of data which were available if it had been set in front of them and have reached a conclusion because they don't know enough about the field to have understood the implications of what they were seeing.

 

When scientists were being asked "do you believe in global warming" they were answering "yes" while meaning: "from what I've read in the media, scientists who study the climate have concluded that there is global warming and I trust that those scientists are acting in a professional manner when doing their work".

 

And that despite exposure in the media that some climate scientists (at that time) had not acted in a professional manner when doing their work.

 

Fortunately since that time, we've had a couple of more decades of climate scientists who've done professional work and aren't having to depend so much on belief.

 

If someone had put a history of the use of oleander in suicides in front of Dr. Carson, he might have decided he needed to do some research on his own rather than depend on a pillow salesman to prescribe "medicine" to him.

 

[archer]

I really don't read other people's blogs or link to them. But this one is just too good.

 

 

DO TRUMP’S LAWYERS KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING?

 

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/11/do-trumps-lawyers-know-what-they-are-doing.php

 

 an affidavit signed by Russell Ramsland, a Texas resident who is an expert on cyber security. The affidavit was filed by Lin Wood in the Georgia lawsuit, but it relates entirely to Michigan, and it is a safe bet that it has been filed in one or more cases in that state as well.

The Ramsland affidavit is part of the Trump team’s case relating to Dominion. In paragraph 9, the affidavit states:

Based on the significant anomalies and red flags that we have observed, we believe there is a significant probability that election results have been manipulated within the Dominion/Premier system in Michigan.

 

...Here’s the problem: the townships and precincts listed in paragraphs 11 and 17 of the affidavit are not in Michigan. They are in Minnesota.