October 28, 2020

Why do Republicans hate the troops voting???

The rightwing Supreme Court cut off late absentee ballots from Wisconsin. What about the troops voting overseas???

This was a huge deal that Republicans used against us in 2000.

I guess we are so far beyond simple hypocrisy now? But still-- what about military voters?

October 28, 2020

New Poll: What Voters are Hearing Down the Home Stretch

really interesting piece with a cool graph

https://messagebox.substack.com/p/new-poll-what-voters-are-hearing

The poll which was conducted October 23-24 by surveying 1,125 likely voters nationwide, offers a fascinating window into which stories are breaking through to which voters and reveals some really disturbing insights into our broken information ecosystem.

We didn’t do this poll to see who was winning the race. We are living in a flood of polling data. Each new poll brings the possibility of doom or the slightly reassuring feeling that nothing has changed (as long as the polls aren’t wrong!). You need that rush, we need that rush — so, of course, we asked people who they were going to vote for.

No need for doom from this poll … at least. Our poll was roughly in line with the average of polls — Biden leads 51-43 with only 2 percent undecided. Fifty-seven percent say they’ve already voted and Biden leads among that group 62-34.

October 28, 2020

How Democrats Can Learn Hardball From the Republicans of 1861

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/27/how-democrats-can-learn-hardball-from-the-republicans-of-1861-432698

Neat piece:

If you’re looking for a historical example of a revanchist political minority that kept its foot on the neck of a growing and restive majority, look no further than the defenders of slavery in antebellum America. In the interest of keeping Black people in a state of intergenerational servitude, pro-slavery politicians in the antebellum period trampled flagrantly and frequently on the civil liberties not only of Black Americans, but of white people who opposed slavery’s expansion. They shut down the right of abolitionists to use the U.S. Postal Service and the halls of Congress to proselytize against the Peculiar Institution. They deployed violence and voter fraud to rig elections. To maintain property in human beings, they perverted the institutions of American democracy.

It wasn’t until the Civil War, when many of those pro-slavery politicians rebelled to fight for the Confederacy, that the anti-slavery Republicans had their chance to reverse the damage. And they did it by playing hardball.

With Southern Democrats absent from Congress and their northern pro-slavery allies reduced to a shadow of their former power, anti-slavery Republicans pursued a bold, majoritarian agenda that remade the nation in the North’s free-labor image. After decades of violent obstruction from the slaveholding minority, they exhibited little concern for traditions and niceties. From changing the size of the Supreme Court and adding new states to the Union (partly to pad their majorities in Congress and the Electoral College), to their refusal to honor the credentials of Southern congressmen-elect who were chosen in sham midcycle elections in 1865, the Republican Party of the 1860s used hard-knuckle measures to enact a sweeping constitutional revolution that established the foundation for liberties that Americans of all races enjoy today.

These Republicans of the 1860s weren’t angels. Their motives were not uniformly pure. And they didn’t always agree with each other. But in response to decades of anti-democratic incitement by white politicians from slaveholding states, who represented roughly just 25 percent of the country’s population in 1860, Republicans in the age of Lincoln and Grant united to make the rules work for the majority, even when doing so required rewriting the rules wholesale.

October 28, 2020

Trump using Air Force 1 to fly to rally after rally-- Using taxpayer money to campaign?

Is this legal?

I though typically presidents couldn't use Air force for campaign events. Typically they would schedule some official meeting to provide some excuse then have the campaign event.

But it seems like Trump is just using AF1 to fly from event to event-- totally taking advantage of his position (what else is new?). Using taxpayer money to campaign. A violation of the Hatch Act too, right?

I'm sure they are not repaying the government, are they (I know Obama did that).

October 25, 2020

Trump's campaign is not returning donations from white supremacist donors

but he's the least racist person ever!!!

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/white-supremacist-donors-trump-campaign-2020_n_5f9336c7c5b6494ba13be8d8?ncid=engmodushpmg00000004

President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign has repeatedly accepted donations from well-known white supremacists, extremists and bigots, Federal Election Commission records show.

Among the far-right figures who have given money to Trump’s reelection bid are a neo-Nazi pastor in Louisiana, a wealthy Florida businessman who called former President Barack Obama the N-word, and a neo-fascist activist recently arrested for opening fire on Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Portland, Oregon.

The Trump campaign, which did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment on this story, has been aware of at least some of the white supremacists’ donations, past media reports show. But it has declined to reject or return their money ― even though it is common practice for political campaigns to voluntarily forfeit donations from extremists. In 2015, for example, the Republican presidential campaigns of Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz returned thousands of dollars in contributions from the leader of a white supremacist group.

The extremists’ donations to Trump’s campaign can be seen in official FEC filings. The contributions were spotted and compiled into a dossier by American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic super PAC that conducts opposition research to boost the campaign of Trump’s opponent, Joe Biden. HuffPost independently verified the records of the contributions.

October 22, 2020

We've had 4 years of non-stop scandal, criminality, madness, the most incredible corruption ever,

every day a new obnoxious or idiotic statement, over 200,000 Americans dead from a mismanaged pandemic AND what could be rightfully called treason from this president.

He is clearly unfit for this office, a complete disgrace to the country and rightfully should be in jail.

What I don't understand is how he has ANY CHANCE of winning?

I know FoxNews, his cult, rightwingers are in a bubble, blah blah blah.

But COME ON!!!!

Hands down, he's the worst president ever. Economy is way worse than when he started. Our standing in the world has plummeted. The country is in a horrible mess: a raging pandemic, massive debt, civil unrest, political chaos.

And it could be that the polls are right and Biden does win in a landslide.

But WHY THE FUCK does tRump have any chance???

I mean, we are seriously at the point where somehow the past 4 years don't matter, it's all even and whatever happens in the next two weeks could change the outcome??

What the everloving fuck?

October 20, 2020

If Trump somehow wins, after all the evil crap he's pulled in the past 4 years

it will be the biggest IOKIYAR ever.

I cannot even imagine the insanity of that madman getting another 4 years. Deeply hated by the left, no doubt will have lost the popular vote again, certainly only winning by serious cheating, the country mired in crisis and major debt.

Will the media really fucking overlook all that and normalize him again???

I fucking can't.

October 19, 2020

Every Trump Lie Is a Confession-- William Rivers Pitt

https://truthout.org/articles/every-trump-lie-is-a-confession/

A thousand of Trump’s most avid devotees came from miles around to stuff themselves into an enclosed indoor space, where they stood packed like cattle in a high-density field, maskless almost to a person, screaming and sweating all over each other in an orgiastic celebration of the death of reason.

I picture a COVID-19 virion, its crowns bristling red, feet up and reclined on its Barcalounger after a hard day at work killing people, looking serenely over that mob of reckless idolators before leaning to a virion friend and saying, “Hold my beer.” We will be hearing about the medical consequences from Sunday evening’s event before the calendar page turns, if the pattern holds, which it has with nearly unfailing consistency since this dismal year began.

Trump’s speech was an abomination of lies, distortions, exhortations and puling complaints. In other words, it was every speech he has given at every rally since he came down the golden escalator five years ago. It was a triumph of the mundane, proof itself of the banality of evil, so boring after endless repetition that none of the networks, not even C-SPAN, bothered to broadcast it. I had to work to find the thing.

As I let the bilge tide of Trump’s gibberish wash over me, however, I found myself encased in a rare moment of clarity. It is difficult to think straight when the president is ruining your country in real time at the top of his voice and right in your face. That, of course, is the entire point of the exercise. “For those who have been beaten down by the Trumpian disaster porn,” writes Tim Miller for The Bulwark, “rallies such as this don’t really make a mark any longer.”

October 18, 2020

Is anyone else doing calls (phone banking) for Biden-Harris?

https://www.mobilize.us/2020victory/event/291103/

I started yesterday. It's actually pretty easy once you learn the system.

It's kind of interesting though as you can imagine most calls are hangups or answering machines.

A lot of people have already voted.

I called Florida tonight and it was a little rough, more weird people, semi-hostile and Trump people than other calls I made yesterday. I don't have a ton of experience yet but it is a good way to get out the vote.

October 13, 2020

Historian Timothy Snyder "Not a Normal Election"

Excellent piece--
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/not-normal-election

During a normal campaign, both candidates take for granted that they will walk free after the election. One will be in the Oval Office; the other will go home. This year is different. One candidate, Donald Trump, knows that, should he not remain in power, he will descend into poverty, go to prison, or both. He can hold the ongoing criminal investigations at bay so long as he is president, but not thereafter. Trump owes hundreds of millions of dollars to his creditors and has no visible means to pay them back. As president he can expect his creditors to wait; as a private citizen he cannot.

If someone can maintain wealth and freedom only by holding onto power, that person will fight to hold onto power. Behind the ideologies and the propaganda, this is the core history of tyranny: government becomes the bodyguard of a gangster. Modern authoritarians such as Vladimir Putin have much to say about why they must remain in power, but the real issue is that they wish to die wealthy and in their own beds rather than poor and in prison. In authoritarian countries, the anxiety of the tyrant can be allayed by a promise not to prosecute the leader and his family, and to leave their bank accounts in peace. Because the rule of law still (more or less) prevails in the United States, no one can offer Trump such a deal. He is therefore in a fight for his life; from his point of view, he needs to spend the rest of it in the White House. His predicament might not be obvious to Americans, but people in authoritarian countries see it right away.

(snip)

If we take Trump at his word and begin from the premise that he cannot win the election, then his actions make sense. The plan is not to win the popular (or even the electoral) vote, but rather to stay in power in some other way. We don’t even really have to guess about this, since Trump has spelled it out himself: he will declare victory regardless of what happens, expect state governments to act contrary to vote counts, claim fraud from postal ballots, court chaos from white nationalists (and perhaps the Department of Homeland Security), and expect the Supreme Court to install him. In general, the idea behind these scenarios is to create as much chaos as possible, and then fall back upon personal ruthlessness and an artificial state of emergency to stay in power. If Trump creates a constitutional crisis while his supporters commit acts of violence, the Supreme Court might be intimidated.

In this transition from democracy to authoritarianism, otherwise known as a coup d’état, the actual number of people who vote for Trump matters less than it would in an ordinary election. In this scenario, it matters more how angry they are, and how willing some of them are to endorse extraordinary actions by Trump, or to take such actions themselves. Since he is treating election day as the occasion for a coup, Trump has good reason not to soften his message to reach more voters. In doing so he would risk losing some of the emotion he needs when he tries to stay in power by non-democratic means. He only has to stay within about ten points of Joe Biden to avoid the demoralization that arises when even core supporters realize they have been deceived by their leader and overwhelmed by their fellow citizens at the polls.

Read the rest:
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/not-normal-election