All-purpose news and politics thread: Two Steps Beyond!(Part II)

[Tami]

What if the Republicans Win Everything Again?

The end of Robert Mueller’s investigation. The loss of health insurance for several million people. New laws that make it harder to vote. More tax cuts for the rich. More damage to the environment. A Republican Party molded even more in the image of President Trump.

These are among the plausible consequences if the Republicans sweep the midterm elections and keep control of both the House and Senate. And don’t fool yourself. That outcome, although not the most likely one, remains possible. The last couple of weeks of polling have shown how it could happen.

Voters who lean Republican — including whites across the South — could set aside their disappointment with Trump and vote for Republican congressional candidates. Voters who lean left — including Latinos and younger adults — could turn out in low numbers, as they usually do in midterm elections. The Republicans’ continuing efforts to suppress turnout could also swing a few close elections.

If Republicans do manage to keep both chambers of Congress, it would cause a political shock. So far, much of the speculation has focused on what a Democratic House takeover might mean — attempts to rein in Trump’s executive actions, subpoenas, investigations, maybe even impeachment. But it’s important to understand that a Republican victory would also change Washington.

It would be validation for Trump, who could then brag that he had defied the experts once again. It would mean he had outperformed Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Lyndon Johnson and Harry Truman, all of whom suffered drubbings in the first midterm election of their presidency. It would embolden Trump to push even harder toward the America he wants — where corporate oversight is scant, climate change is ignored, voting rights are abridged, health care is a privilege, judicial independence is a fiction and the truth is whatever he says it is.

[aja_christopher]

(Deleted.)

[Tami]

U.S. Begins First Cyberoperation Against Russia Aimed at Protecting Elections

WASHINGTON — The United States Cyber Command is targeting individual Russian operatives to try to deter them from spreading disinformation to interfere in elections, telling them that American operatives have identified them and are tracking their work, according to officials briefed on the operation.

The campaign, which includes missions undertaken in recent days, is the first known overseas cyberoperation to protect American elections, including the November midterms.

The operations come as the Justice Department outlined on Friday a campaign of “information warfare” by Russians aimed at influencing the midterm elections, highlighting the broad threat the American government sees from Moscow’s influence campaign.

Defense officials would not say how many individuals they were targeting, and they would not describe the methods that Cyber Command has used to send the direct messages to the operatives behind the influence campaigns. It is not clear if the information was delivered in an email, a chat or some other electronic intervention.

[Tami]

Texas Trump voter tells MSNBC he’s backing Beto O’Rourke because president’s rallies are ‘absolutely insane’

A former Trump voter told MSNBC on Tuesday that he had decided to vote for Democratic Senate nominee Beto O’Rourke because President Donald Trump’s rhetoric had become “absolutely insane.”

Reporting from a polling place in Houston, Texas, MSNBC’s Vaughn Hillyard spoke to one “conservative” voter about how Trump’s rallies had influenced his vote.

“Even last night, the president talking about how that caravan coming in to the United States is infiltrated with MS-13 members and, I don’t know, like, ISIS operatives or something — just absolutely insane,” the man said, shaking his head.

“I just hope people understand that they’re not going to come and just break down the doors and start wreaking havoc,” the man added. “I just don’t want people to vote based off of misinformation or a misconception [about] what’s actually going to happen.”

[Tami]

Florida, Georgia, North Carolina Still Purging Voters at High Rates

Earlier this summer, when the Brennan Center released a report examining voter purge data through 2016, we found that four million more people were purged from the rolls between the federal elections of 2014 and 2016 than between 2006 and 2008. Much of that increase came from states that were previously required under the Voting Rights Act (VRA) to get election changes cleared in advance, before that part of the law was eviscerated by the Supreme Court in 2013.

Although comparable data for the two years ending in 2018 won’t be available until early next year, we were able to use different data sources to figure out how many voters have been purged over the past two years in three states we had studied — Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. A preliminary analysis supports our initial alarm over the purge processes in these three states, showing that they continued to have high purge rates.

Purges in and of themselves aren’t bad. They’re commonly used to clean up voter lists when someone has moved, passed away, and more. But too often, names identified for removal are determined by faulty criteria that wrongly suggests a voter be deleted from the rolls. When flawed, the process threatens to silence eligible voters on Election Day — especially in states where purge rates are high.

[Tami]

Fox 'Error': Kamala Harris Picture Used In Murder Story

This morning Fox ran more than once, a sensationalist story (ALERT!) about a black (of course) shooter in Utah. The guy had already taken his own life but Fox and Friends ran this story as NEWS more than once during the hour.

The first time they include in their footage a picture of Kamala Harris? Sitting US Senator Kamala Harris? Because her picture is "accidentally" filed under "black shooter"?

And it is shown INSTEAD OF a convicted sex offender's mugshot. Oopsie.

Fox News should be off the air for their repeated white supremacist BS. Running the story repeatedly is biased enough. They aren't fooling anyone except their stupid racist viewers, the end.

Here's their "apology."

Good morning. Fox News has already issued a correction for using a picture of a Democratic senator to accompany a story about a suspected murderer.

[TheDarman]

This is something the left doesn't realize in efforts to help protected classes and achieve their policy goals. Power granted to the benevolent stays with the next side.

I will admit, it was one of my concerns with the way that progressives reacted with Obama. Obama did an awful lot through executive action, which was quite easily set back by the very next administration. Still, I remember progressives, such as those who appear regularly on The Young Turks arguing Obama didn't go far enough to protect undocumented immigrants and the like. If we allow our president to go relatively unrestrained by the laws that preceded him, including a vaguely assertive anti-immigration policy dating back to before Ronald Reagan, then that opens the door for actions like President Trump undermining many programs that are ascribed by law. There is an argument that President Trump has done that on multiple occasions, particularly with the ACA, but the point still stands that we shouldn't be asking our president to go outside of precedent and embody a larger role in the government than we would want.

Still, I don't think that the same logic follows with policy. Maybe with passage of policy--precedent set with the ACA's passage have also led to many Republican priorities being passed as mere budget reconciliation acts to get around Senate rules against filibusters, such as the tax cuts that were passed this past year. However, with policy itself, I think that most people recognize that one action to protect a minority class on one side isn't exactly like the other. Protecting transgender individuals and ensuring minorities have the right to vote doesn't seem to run parallel to Republican policy to protect churches and those who want to discriminate against LGBT individuals. For example, I don't think that many people think that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would illicit a Conservative response in the kind of trying to prevent discrimination on the basis of religion. Partly because I think many Conservatives are very particular about which religious identities that they don't want discriminated against (they are more than happy to promote in their primary debates more investigations of American Muslims for instance), but partly because they aren't discriminated against in the same way. Unless I'm misunderstanding your point, I don't think that liberal priorities as they pertain to the pursuit of social equality for transgender individuals or ethnic minorities or securing voting rights have Republican equivalents and I think that Republicans do have a difficult time with these issues saying "well, it's okay when liberals do it!" because the policies aren't similar enough in intent or effect to warrant such a comparison. I might be being unfair to your point though so please feel free to clarify.

As it stands, I agree with the premise. We should be careful about ceding powers to legislatures, the president, and, indeed, the federal government, if we really don't want that same power being used to enforce policies we don't like. However, I think that people can agree that these entities should have the power they have and disagree about how it is being used, which is what I think most people who are invested in politics think about presidential power or judicial power, for instance, when their ideological leanings aren't represented. However, I think policies are often difficult to direct in parallel with one another. I often think of liberal policies and conservative policies as divergent and, when they come in contact with each other, it is usually in a way that is clearly in conflict.

[MindofShadow]

My wife just got a text that said:

"This is President Trump. Your early vote has NOT been RECORDED on *insert state* roster. I need you to vote GOP. Confirm your polling place *insert link*"


A. it was an old state

B. what the literal hell

[Dalak]

My wife just got a text that said:

"This is President Trump. Your early vote has NOT been RECORDED on *insert state* roster. I need you to vote GOP. Confirm your polling place *insert link*"


A. it was an old state

B. what the literal hell

I've gotten spam texts before but this is ridiculous.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

My wife just got a text that said:

"This is President Trump. Your early vote has NOT been RECORDED on *insert state* roster. I need you to vote GOP. Confirm your polling place *insert link*"


A. it was an old state

B. what the literal hell

And people scoffed when suspicions arose about Trump using the National Emergency Text Alert System for political ends. And there you are.

[Tami]

Exclusive: In Leaked Audio, Brian Kemp Expresses Concern Over Georgians Exercising Their Right to Vote

Brian Kemp, Georgia Secretary of State and the Republican nominee for Georgia governor, expressed at a ticketed campaign event that his Democratic opponent Stacey Abrams’ voter turnout operation “continues to concern us, especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote,” according to audio obtained by Rolling Stone.

An attendee of the “Georgia Professionals for Kemp” event says they recorded 21 minutes and 12 seconds of the evening, held last Friday at the Blind Pig Parlour Bar near Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood. As proof of their attendance, the source shared with Rolling Stone a receipt of their donation, which granted access to the gathering.

Not long after Kemp began his remarks, the candidate expressed worry about early voting and “the literally tens of millions of dollars that they [the Abrams camp] are putting behind the get-out-the-vote effort to their base.”

Kemp then asserted that much of that Abrams effort is focused on absentee ballot requests. “They have just an unprecedented number of that,” he said, “which is something that continues to concern us, especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote — which they absolutely can — and mail those ballots in, we gotta have heavy turnout to offset that.”

[Tami]

Even janitors have noncompetes now. Nobody is safe.

One of the central contradictions of capitalism is that what makes it work — competition — is also what capitalists want to get rid of the most.

That’s true not only of competition between companies, but also between them and their workers. After all, the more of a threat its rivals are, and the more options its employees have, the less profitable a business will tend to be. Which, as the Financial Times reports, probably goes a long way toward explaining why a $3.4 billion behemoth like Cushman & Wakefield would bother to sue one of its former janitors, accusing her of breaking her noncompete agreement by taking a job in the same building she had been cleaning for the global real estate company but doing it for a different firm.

Now, the company claims this wasn’t a noncompete per se but rather a “non-service” agreement meant to prevent a competitor from easily taking over the management of a building. But the effect is the same: limiting your current employees' future choices.

See, it’s not that keeping this specific cleaner from leaving is somehow vital to Cushman & Wakefield’s business — although, of course, the firm is obliged to say otherwise. (It would be “irreparably harmed,” its lawyers said, “the extent of which cannot be readily calculated.”) Rather, what’s important is keeping all of its workers from leaving for better pay. Especially when a few of them had already been defecting to its top competitor.

Because that’s really what this is all about: whether workers are allowed to leave for greener pastures or their bosses are given the green light to put up such high fences around them that they’re forced to stay. In other words, it’s about power: who has it and who doesn’t. Or, more precisely, whom we give it to and whom we don’t. If we create a legal framework that puts workers on an equal footing, then they can go get a raise without having to wait for their employers to deign to give it to them. But if we don’t, then those bosses, secure in the knowledge that their employees can’t easily leave, can get away with offering only minuscule pay increases, if that.

[PaulBullion]

I am shocked. Shocked!

White Nationalist Richard Spencer’s Wife Says In Divorce Filings That He Physically And Emotionally Abused Her

[cannibalrector]

And people scoffed when suspicions arose about Trump using the National Emergency Text Alert System for political ends. And there you are.

It's not the President using the National Emergency Text Alert System. It's political campaigns using pretty standard campaign tactics.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Exclusive: In Leaked Audio, Brian Kemp Expresses Concern Over Georgians Exercising Their Right to Vote

This is what worries, maybe even frightens Republicans these days: that Americans expressing their right to vote might keep the GOP from winning if people don’t lean right in the polling place. So, to that end, Republicans, unwilling to trust the democratic process have outright chosen to lie, cheat and steal, anything to win and stay in power so they can continue screwing the American people like a five dollar whore. To any and all Republican supporters here, I hope to hell you’re proud of your party.