Political Discussion Thread (With Rules)

[Lord Liaden]

I can't blame him. The "fourteen characteristics of fascism" he refers to in this video, he laid out in another one from a year ago. This development was utterly predictable, and predicted by many. There's only one place this situation can escalate to from here. The world has seen that place many times, and it's horrible.

[Starlord]

Co-founder of conservative Federalist Society calls Trump's tweet about election delay 'fascistic' and 'grounds for impeachment'

[Lawnmower Boy]

Sorry, dude. Bandwagon's full.

[DShomshak]

 

trump is of course flailing around looking for ways to avoid losing. He is also probably trying to distract people from his abysmal mishandling of the pandemic. And he likes to make outrage just to see people scurry in response. But I thought of another possible reason: He's just jealous at John Lewis' funeral pushing him off the front page. Everybody's praising this old black guy Trump never heard of, instead of paying attention to HIM!

 

In my local paper, though, it still didn't put Trump on the front page.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Cygnia]

Washington Post: USPS workers sound alarm about new policies that may affect 2020 mail-in voting
 

[Lord Liaden]

2 hours ago, DShomshak said:

 

trump is of course flailing around looking for ways to avoid losing. He is also probably trying to distract people from his abysmal mishandling of the pandemic. And he likes to make outrage just to see people scurry in response. But I thought of another possible reason: He's just jealous at John Lewis' funeral pushing him off the front page. Everybody's praising this old black guy Trump never heard of, instead of paying attention to HIM!

 

In my local paper, though, it still didn't put Trump on the front page.

 

Dean Shomshak

 

Another Canadian perspective: Donald Trump can't delay the election or stop it, but he can avoid it.

[archer]

On 7/30/2020 at 5:46 PM, Lord Liaden said:

 

Mail-in balloting is crucial to Americans living overseas, and American military stationed abroad. Neither of whom appear to be supportive of Trump overall. All the polling I've read to date suggests that voting by mail favors the total for Democratic candidates. I'm beyond confident that if it favored Republicans, Trump would be solidly behind it. We also have to consider that it's the safest way to conduct the ballot while maintaining social distancing. How many Americans is it acceptable to disenfranchise, or put at risk of disease, to deny Trump "ammunition?" I expect if he wants to contest the election result he'll find some other unfounded excuse if denied this one, and his followers will believe him.

 

 

In any rational country, Trump would no longer be president. But setting that aside for the sake of discussion in order to talk about mail-in balloting:

 

The best feature of in-person balloting is that the ballots are secured all the time. Someone is supposed to have custody of them or they are supposed to be locked up at every point in time. Frankly, I've irritated a lot of party people over the years by pointing out how wide open for fraud our current system is to anyone who is smart, who wants to take on some minor risks, and who wants to put in some effort. And my suggestions for changing ballot security have never been well-received.

 

Changing over to mail-in balloting is taking out the need for someone "to be slightly intelligent" and "to take some minor risks" in order to defraud the election. It's great that there hasn't been detectable levels of ballot tampering in places in the US which have used mail-in voting in the past. But we're in a much more politically charged election this time around than in the past which is going to change the level of motivation for people to want to tamper with things.

 

With mail-in balloting, in many places in the US, people will be putting their ballot into their personal mailbox, lifting a flag, and the ballot will sit in the mailbox unattended overnight until the mailman gets there the next day to pick it up. 

 

All anyone needs to tamper with that system is to go around to mailboxes in the middle of the night and collect ballots. There's YouTube videos on how to open envelopes without being detected. Open them up, trash the ballots who voted "wrong", fully fill out the other ballots in all the down-ballot races which the voter probably didn't bother to finish, reseal the envelopes, drop the envelopes into a post office drop box. 

 

If the fraudster is slightly smart, he could look at traditional voting patterns in precincts and go out of his way to steal from mailboxes in whichever places are most likely to vote against his preferred candidate. 

 

All of the "signature matching" and "bar codes on ballots" in the world aren't going to stop filled out ballots from being taken out of individual's mailboxes in the dead of night. 

 

If Trump pulls out a win, I'd suspect something like that to be the cause. It's the kind of low tech solution that would spontaneously occur to and appeal to a bunch of Luddites. There wouldn't even have to be an organized effort. Just the idea occurring to a large number of highly-motivated people at the same time might be enough.

 

My preference is:

 

1) mandatory voter registration for everyone in the country. 

2) no excuse absentee voting for people who request that.

3) 24 hour early voting for a couple of months before the election, which caters to people who work odd hours and lessens congestion at polling sites.

4) have "poll workers go to homes" rather than have "voters go to polls" to take care of the elderly and those who have disabilities & mobility problems of all kinds.

5) have election "day" be a three day weekend in order to lessen congestion at the polls.

6) pay poll workers as if they were professionals working a dangerous job rather than as if they were volunteers getting a tip. Hopefully that would get an adequate number of workers.

 

Of course, my preferences are very rarely catered to.

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.

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I don't have a problem with mail-in voting in small amounts. But having everyone in the country being aware that there are tens of thousands of ballots laying around in mail boxes every night, that's too much like depending on the honor system for my tastes. In my experience talking to people from various parties who are avidly interested in politics and working inside a political party for a few decades, there's vanishingly few people who are avidly interested in politics who I would be comfortable trusting with an honor system.

[Ragitsu]

With the amount of surveillance these days (cameras on private property), that type of mass-vote tampering is going to be noticed very quickly. Some people with itchy trigger fingers may even elect to take matters into their own hands.

[archer]

46 minutes ago, Ragitsu said:

With the amount of surveillance these days (cameras on private property), that type of mass-vote tampering is going to be noticed very quickly. Some people with itchy trigger fingers may even elect to take matters into their own hands.

 

Would it being noticed and reported on actually stop it? Or would it just make more people aware it was happening and perhaps motivate more people to participate in order to "level the playing field"?

 

I'd expect those some people with itchy trigger fingers to be more motivated to be roaming around tampering with the vote than to be safeguarding neighborhood mailboxes. 

 

[Simon]

Best way to think of that is the scale needed to have any impact.

 

is it possible (easy, even) to get at an individual ballot without detection?  Yes.  Full stop.

 

but that’s like saying that you can get full access to one user’s Facebook account - doesn’t really get you anything.

 

is it possible to get at ballots on a scale that would impact a regional election (without being detected)?  Probably not.  Vastly easier to focus on concentration points like polling locations.

[Ragitsu]

49 minutes ago, Simon said:

Vastly easier to focus on concentration points like polling locations.

 

I imagine the security there would be significantly tighter.

[Simon]

beside the point.  Easy to “hack” a single vote...and pointless.  When you start talking about a scale needed to actually make a difference you look to concentration points- too much noise to do individual on a large scale.

[Simon]

As was seen in Georgia 

[Tjack]

This isn’t strictly political but I need a place to vent and I don’t want to infect a different thread with something so negative. Also I wanted a place where the people who might respond weren’t nuts.

 

     The U.S. Court of Appeals just commuted the death charge against the Boston Marathon bomber...WTF!!!!!!!
The reasoning is that he couldn’t get a fair trial since everybody knew he and his scumbag brother killed a bunch of innocent people!!    SO ****in’ WHAT!!!!!  
     Even his lawyers never tried to say they didn’t do it.  The little weasel should be happy the cops didn’t blow his brains out right there or even better turn his little ass over to the crowd.  This was no political or religious battle, this was two dipshits who thought they might feel better about their own sad-ass lives if they murdered somebody. 
    Screw ‘em and the boat they hid under!!!!    Real Justice for for the families of their victims and the wounded and maimed they left behind would be a public beheading at the finish line right as the first runner crosses the line.

The CoA is generally a fine thing when deciding if someone’s rights were violated and even when a bad guy is released we as a society can take comfort in the process of law.   This however is ridiculous.  What city or State in the Union would give a different verdict? Where’s the jury willing to say “Yeah we know he admitted it, and the physical evidence is substantial and let’s not forget they told other people they were going to do it.....”What the hell, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt!”

   Robe wearing jackasses make me ashamed to be a liberal.

 

       Thanks for the use of the stage.   I’m stuck in the hospital right now.  It makes me crabby.

Edited August 2, 2020 by Hermit
Profanity

[Lectryk]

They vacated a few of the charges, they over turned the death sentence on procedural grounds, and remanded to the original court for re-trial on that phase. 

 

"Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's convictions on Counts 13, 15, and 18 are reversed, and the district court is directed to enter a judgment of acquittal on those counts," the ruling, which was entered at 3 p.m. on Friday said. "Dzhohkar Tsarnaev's death sentences on Counts 4, 5, 9, 10, and 14 are vacated, and the matter is remanded to the district court with directions to hold a new penalty-phase trial."

 

They did not commute the sentence.  You can be happy knowing that he will probably still fry (or whatever means they use...) and the continuation of the case will cost 10-15 times more than if they had simply tried him on murder with special circumstance, and throw him into a deep, dark, dank hole for the rest of his life.

 

 

[Starlord]

22 hours ago, Tjack said:

This isn’t strictly political but I need a place to vent and I don’t want to infect a different thread with something so negative. Also I wanted a place where the people who might respond weren’t nuts.

 

     The U.S. Court of Appeals just commuted the death charge against the Boston Marathon bomber...WTF!!!!!!!
The reasoning is that he couldn’t get a fair trial since everybody knew he and his scumbag brother killed a bunch of innocent people!!    SO ****in’ WHAT!!!!!  
     Even his lawyers never tried to say they didn’t do it.  The little weasel should be happy the cops didn’t blow his brains out right there or even better turn his little ass over to the crowd.  This was no political or religious battle, this was two dipshits who thought they might feel better about their own sad-ass lives if they murdered somebody. 
    Screw ‘em and the boat they hid under!!!!    Real Justice for for the families of their victims and the wounded and maimed they left behind would be a public beheading at the finish line right as the first runner crosses the line.

The CoA is generally a fine thing when deciding if someone’s rights were violated and even when a bad guy is released we as a society can take comfort in the process of law.   This however is ridiculous.  What city or State in the Union would give a different verdict? Where’s the jury willing to say “Yeah we know he admitted it, and the physical evidence is substantial and let’s not forget they told other people they were going to do it.....”What the hell, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt!”

   Robe wearing jackasses make me ashamed to be a liberal.

 

       Thanks for the use of the stage.   I’m stuck in the hospital right now.  It makes me crabby.

 

The death penalty...and death row...is a waste of money...also...the younger brother was a waste of time anyway...he just went along with it.

[Pattern Ghost]

5 hours ago, Tjack said:

The reasoning is that he couldn’t get a fair trial since everybody knew he and his scumbag brother killed a bunch of innocent people!!

 

The reason was that the trial was in the same city that he bombed. Which is a fair call, to be honest. I'd just as soon leave it up to the aggrieved community, but our system is supposed to try to be as neutral as possible and have decisions made on the facts of a case rather than emotion.

[Cygnia]

How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan “Went Poof Into Thin Air”

Quote

 

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert. That logic may have swayed Kushner. “It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out,” the expert said.

 

[csyphrett]

2 hours ago, Cygnia said:

How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan “Went Poof Into Thin Air”

 

Man were the political folks wrong on this.  Top ten states are California, Texas, Florida, New York, Georgia, Illinois, Arizona, North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Louisiana.   

New York City has enough cases to be its own entry. So how many of these states are blue. I know NC, GA, FLA,  and Texas aren't.

[Ternaugh]

18 minutes ago, csyphrett said:

Man were the political folks wrong on this.  Top ten states are California, Texas, Florida, New York, Georgia, Illinois, Arizona, North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Louisiana.   

New York City has enough cases to be its own entry. So how many of these states are blue. I know NC, GA, FLA,  and Texas aren't.

 

Out of that list, California, New York, Illinois and Massachusetts would be considered blue states. Texas, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina and Louisiana are considered red states. Florida is a "purple" state, that's gone red in 2 of the last 4 elections.

[Ranxerox]

40 minutes ago, csyphrett said:

Man were the political folks wrong on this.  Top ten states are California, Texas, Florida, New York, Georgia, Illinois, Arizona, North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Louisiana.   

New York City has enough cases to be its own entry. So how many of these states are blue. I know NC, GA, FLA,  and Texas aren't.

 

The list is a bit different if you look at total cases per capita, which is a more useful number in determining your own risk as resident of the state.  In deaths per capita, the top ten states are Louisiana, Arizona, Florida, New Jersey, Mississippi, Rhode Island, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and the District of Colombia. Of those ten only New Jersey, Rhode Island, and the District of Columbia are blue. As pointed out Florida is a swing state.  The other six states generally vote Republican.

[csyphrett]

I admit I just looked at the list at the cdc reporting, but either way what kind of moron thinks a virus is going to stay in one area. Someone should have given them a copy of Virus Attack (I'll ask my boy what the name of the game is, but essentially you design your own virus and spread it around until it starts killing people) from Steam.

CES 

 

[archer]

Don't know if anyone is in the mood to be horrified but there's a very graphic sexual harassment lawsuit which has been filed against Fox News and their on-air personalities Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Howard Kurtz, and Ed Henry.

 

The lengthy allegations against Ed Henry include some violent rape which he was kind enough to document the aftermath of with a series of texts to the victim (some of which are included in the article and the attached lawsuit).

 

There's no NSFW images included but I wouldn't leave the story up on your screen if you have a boss or your kids around.

 

https://www.showbiz411.com/2020/07/20/huge-new-sex-harassment-lawsuit-against-fox-news-anchors-ed-henry-rape-propositions-from-hannity-tucker-kurtz

[Lord Liaden]

I wish I could be horrified. But if these accusations are as well-founded as they appear, they're no surprise from men so obviously full of arrogance and need for attention. We've seen this scene played out all too often in recent years.

[Pattern Ghost]

Whoever wrote that headline needs to learn to use punctuation.