All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[Tendrin]

So supporting entrepreneurial Americans, not burdening the working class with taxes and reducing government involvement in private affairs is not a collection of ideas? A minimal state is still a core GOP platform that seems to come out every four years. You might not agree with that but it exists as much as you try to mischaracterize it as some fringe and out of date vestige of America.

I don't know what party you're describing but it's not the GOP.

[Xheight]

Not really - to the point of "believe that to be true" or is falsifiable true? We more often argue here on the former than the later but we should not rest on an absolute truth here in any case.

[Xheight]

This makes me laugh so hard. The whole GOP talking point that the Mail in Vote went so heavy for Biden. Why?

Because for a year before the election Trump pretty much every time he opened his mouth talked about how unsafe mail in voting is. Dont use mail in votes, If you are a Republican and you care you wont vote by mail. Even though he has done so more then once by the way.

So the GOP Cult listened. They did not vote by mail. Trump their cult leader said its bad. Cant be trusted.

The Dems do vote by mail and did.

Then the GOP bitches that the mail in vote goes so heavy for Biden when they themselves did not vote by mail and told everyone in their party not to do so.

Or that Dems outspent, litigated and mobilized registration around the mail in vote? One is theory the other verifiable fact.

https://www.scotusblog.com/election-litigation/

Republicans, for the most part, are opposing such measures, arguing that judges should not be rewriting elections laws passed by legislatures.

“There is a state-by-state battle over this, with lawsuits in almost every state, where the progressive left is trying to change the rules in place for absentee ballots,” said Hans von Spakovsky, a former elections official in Fairfax County, Va., and a lawyer at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

The late changes in the process, he said, are almost certainly creating a scenario for widely contested elections and prolonged vote counts, from tight congressional races to the presidential election.

“You should not be changing the rules in the middle of the election,” von Spakovsky said. Fixing flawed ballots, he added, may sound good in theory. “But from a practical standpoint, where in the past you might have a couple hundred ballots where people screwed up, now you have tens of thousands. Imagine having to contact that many voters; it will take weeks.”

https://headlineusa.com/mail-ballots...tion-election/

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaig...urnout-in-2020

The Voter Participation Center, a nonpartisan group based in Washington, raised $85 million and spent even more through 2020, according to tax filings reviewed by The Hill. That money is orders of magnitude larger than the $14 million it spent during the last presidential election, in 2016.

[Xheight]

I don't know what party you're describing but it's not the GOP.

Not according to the NYT perhaps but that's a narrative of someone else where I thought primacy of self-definition was a liberal value.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

So supporting entrepreneurial Americans, not burdening the working class with taxes and reducing government involvement in private affairs is not a collection of ideas? A minimal state is still a core GOP platform that seems to come out every four years. You might not agree with that but it exists as much as you try to mischaracterize it as some fringe and out of date vestige of America.

Reducing government involvement, eh? So, what do you call those hideously restrictive anti-abortion laws enacted by Qpublican governors which basically say a woman doesn’t have jurisprudence over her own body? Or the GQP’s current crusade to not only deny transgendered children the help they need, but actually encourage citizens to tell on the parents of those kids and even have those children taken out of their homes? I don’t know what bizarro world you live in, but I wouldn’t call that reducing government involvement.

[SUPERECWFAN1]

We have to remember Trump started beating this drum in 2016 that no way could he lose and it would be fraud if he did. His followers lapped it up and Trump planted that seed. No way could he lose folks. Its all fraud. So he kept that deal up.

[babyblob]

We have to remember Trump started beating this drum in 2016 that no way could he lose and it would be fraud if he did. His followers lapped it up and Trump planted that seed. No way could he lose folks. Its all fraud. So he kept that deal up.

I think the first time he started beating that drum is when Ted Cruz beat him in Iowa primaries. Trump bitched a few times about fake votes and fraud even then.

The fact is he cant handle losing anything. So of course he beats the fraud drum.

[Xheight]

Reducing government involvement, eh? So, what do you call those hideously restrictive anti-abortion laws enacted by Qpublican governors which basically say a woman doesn’t have jurisprudence over her own body? Or the GQP’s current crusade to not only deny transgendered children the help they need, but actually encourage citizens to tell on the parents of those kids and even have those children taken out of their homes? I don’t know what bizarro world you live in, but I wouldn’t call that reducing government involvement.

Majoritarian abuses is what I would call it. That the party has conflicting ideology is not that different from the Democrats building a giant war machine and calling it centrist support for the country rather than stay true a Left no war stance. Many Republicans that I know see the abortion question as a demand and state involvement issue that markets should arbitrate. In Texas I can only guess that majorities are over stepping in defining community and what the community finds acceptable not dissimilar to the masking debate that Liberals took up as forced community value.

The larger issue is that what Republicanism does mostly? Persecute or Free people to be their own economic agents?

[JB]

It would take massive coordination to pull off fraud with mail-in ballots, at an unprecedented scale. It would require a lot of people and require them all to keep quiet.
My personal concern regarding the security of our elections is the voting machines and that's thanks to the work done by at the time Senator Harris. She put together a demonstration after the 2016 election as investigations into Russian interference were taking place where they invited hackers to try to break into the machines. She and other members of Congress watched it happen in real time and rather quickly. This led to her putting forth legislation to remedy this but I'm not sure if it went anywhere.

Kamala Harris says she watched voting machines being hacked
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c49651...achines-hacked

This also led to a documentary on HBO called Kill Chain highlighting a convention in 2018 where hackers were invited to once again try to hack voting machines currently being used in the US. They were very successful and Senators Klobuchar, Lankford, Warner, and Wyden are featured in the film, as well as the Supervisor of Elections at the time and the US Ambassador to NATO.

Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's Elections
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12041084/?ref_=vp_vi_tt
A clip from the documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-oc33kpFjI

The fear of course was that Russia could easily access our machines to interfere with the 2020 election, and the House held a few hearings where several representatives testified that the machines were vulnerable because they're old and their operating systems are not properly updated. Videos are probably on CSPAN's site.

The documentary was released in early 2020 but then covid hit and I don't know if any action has been taken since. If you have access to it it's worth watching.

[Xheight]

I think the first time he started beating that drum is when Ted Cruz beat him in Iowa primaries. Trump bitched a few times about fake votes and fraud even then.

The fact is he cant handle losing anything. So of course he beats the fraud drum.

Again this is a story, a narrative that drive your understanding of an individual with as much ascribed power as that which has been shown to be in evidence to hold up the mail in vote as something to be protected. In other words discounting the power on the side of political machine as if it were absent.

That and was it not Hillary's lawyers also claimed fraud in a pre-empted info strike.

[SUPERECWFAN1]

I think the first time he started beating that drum is when Ted Cruz beat him in Iowa primaries. Trump bitched a few times about fake votes and fraud even then.

The fact is he cant handle losing anything. So of course he beats the fraud drum.

He can't handle losing or being seen as losing in deals. Pull up that USFL 30 for 30 where Trump gets angry at the fact he's painted as the loser who sunk a league. He blames the league , the owners and even NFL. But nothing he did. Nope...nothing he ever did.

Guy is the ultimate sore loser.

[Xheight]

It would take massive coordination to pull off fraud with mail-in ballots, at an unprecedented scale. It would require a lot of people and require them all to keep quiet.
My personal concern regarding the security of our elections is the voting machines and that's thanks to the work done by at the time Senator Harris. She put together a demonstration after the 2016 election as investigations into Russian interference were taking place where they invited hackers to try to break into the machines. She and other members of Congress watched it happen in real time and rather quickly. This led to her putting forth legislation to remedy this but I'm not sure if it went anywhere.

Kamala Harris says she watched voting machines being hacked
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c49651...achines-hacked

This also led to a documentary on HBO called Kill Chain highlighting a convention in 2018 where hackers were invited to once again try to hack voting machines currently being used in the US. They were very successful and Senators Klobuchar, Lankford, Warner, and Wyden are featured in the film, as well as the Supervisor of Elections at the time and the US Ambassador to NATO.

Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's Elections
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12041084/?ref_=vp_vi_tt
A clip from the documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-oc33kpFjI

The fear of course was that Russia could easily access our machines to interfere with the 2020 election, and the House held a few hearings where several representatives testified that the machines were vulnerable because they're old and their operating systems are not properly updated. Videos are probably on CSPAN's site.

The documentary was released in early 2020 but then covid hit and I don't know if any action has been taken since. If you have access to it it's worth watching.

Massive coordination is what Direct Mail consultants do along with Data Scientists aggregating registration info into private (party controlled hands) and has been documented as working for the Biden/DNC efforts.

OLd Fashioned box stuffing is I see not your concern either but direct number manipulation would be the most detectable feature (curve analysis has been offered and used in some districts) and any steal strategy would have to be multi valent in corrupting the various systems in place.

Microsoft Corp. says that SKDKnickerbocker (SKDK), one of the advisory firms working on Joe Biden’s election campaign, was targeted by Russian state-backed hackers, according to a report from Reuters.

The Washington-based campaign strategy and communications firm was targeted with phishing (i.e. tricking staff into disclosing passwords) and other attacks over the past two months, according to sources cited by Reuters.

A source familiar to the story told Reuters that the consultancy was not breached. “They are well-defended, so there has been no breach,” they said.

SKDK has a long history of working with the Democrats, having advised the party on six presidential campaigns.

Nice cover piece here for the wink and nod that SKDK was knee deep in the data science part of registration data. Where is the whistleblower? Same reason the the FB one only came out I suppose, because they feel they are doing the "right thing".

[Gray Lensman]

He can't handle losing or being seen as losing in deals. Pull up that USFL 30 for 30 where Trump gets angry at the fact he's painted as the loser who sunk a league. He blames the league , the owners and even NFL. But nothing he did. Nope...nothing he ever did.

Guy is the ultimate sore loser.

Trump also has a zero sum mentality - if the other guy isn't the obvious lover, then you are the loser. The idea of a win/win deal is unfathomable to Trump, and hurts him on the foreign stage, creating resentment where none existed before.

[SUPERECWFAN1]

Trump also has a zero sum mentality - if the other guy isn't the obvious lover, then you are the loser. The idea of a win/win deal is unfathomable to Trump, and hurts him on the foreign stage, creating resentment where none existed before.

Remember when the United Nations leaders all laughed in his face at him. His look was priceless. Like , he couldn't understand why he was a joke on a world stage and they laughed at him. Then there was Canada and others who in a clip openly mocked him for his silliness.

[Jack Dracula]

Have you never changed your mind about a single issue as a result of discussion on this thread?

Or been influenced about something by internet debate elsewhere?

Yes, I have. But, I understand the pitfalls of ego and bias and try to be objective. I have admitted to being wrong here on a few occasions.