Election 2024: The Quest for Peace

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Thad
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Re: Election 2024: The Quest for Peace

Postby Thad » Tue Oct 29, 2024 7:21 pm

Friday wrote:My dad was a diehard Republican his whole life. I'm probably not the most-left person here, but I'm for sure the most left person of everyone I know irl. I've dragged all my friends to the left, of course, the same way you guys dragged me. Not that I wasn't left before I came here, but I'm a lot more left now.

So no, blood isn't ironclad. In fact, sometimes it shows you what not to do and be. I don't know if that's the case for W's daughter(s), but it might be.

I'm about where my parents are politically. My dad's a Bernie Bro and that can get exhausting when he starts talking about it, but we're largely on the same page on the candidates and the issues even if one of us is a lot more inclined to believe conspiracy theories than the other.

My gran's a Democrat and probably pretty closely aligned with my views, though she watches a lot more CNN and NBC than I do and I think it gives her a bit more of an establishment perspective. My grandpa is an actual RINO; he registered Republican in California in the 1950s when that meant Earl Warren, and he's remained Republican even though he's been voting Democratic since the parties realigned in the 1960s. He gets a certain ironic enjoyment out of all the Republican Party junk he receives in the mail; he had a framed photo of Reagan in his office when I was a kid and I used to wonder why because I knew he hated Reagan, but eventually I realized he must have gotten that photo in the mail from the Republican Party and framed it and hung it up as a joke.

My other grandparents were Republican. Grandpa didn't talk much about, well, anything except college sports and the weather; I rarely heard him say anything about politics, but he didn't seem happy with the W Bush administration (I remember him griping about how much money we spend on the military instead of on education, and I once heard him call Alberto Gonzales a "goddamn worthless Mexican", which, on the one hand, yikes, but on the other hand, at least we agree on the "goddamn worthless" part). Grandma was an evangelical Christian and part of what you'd call the Republican base; she was a sweet and kind person on an individual level but held some beliefs that were not at all sweet or kind. It was interesting watching her rationalize her support of Trump in her final years; she clearly found him off-putting as a person, but as Fox News and whatever Jesus stations she watched on the TV repeated their talking points at her she came around to deciding okay he's not that bad even if I wish he wouldn't say the things he says sometimes.

And I've already gone over my own shifts in how I vote. I've always thought tactics and results matter, but my opinions on what tactics lead to which results have changed (and Arizona has changed too). What I want hasn't changed; my willingness to tolerate assholes like Sinema as a step on the road has.

So I suppose, as in so many things, I've come back around to being more like Gran than like my parents. (Though I have heard my dad acknowledge Biden as "not bad for what he is," which I guess is about how I feel.)

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Re: Election 2024: The Quest for Peace

Postby Mongrel » Tue Oct 29, 2024 9:21 pm

Politico: Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle.
If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would have been wiped out.

Goddamn. Well, that's one way to disown a sack-of-shit relative.

There's some extra twists in here in that the family on the uncle's side was (and is) Jewish and Miller's uncle volunteers with a formerly Hebrew, now secular org which supports refugees, and which at one time helped Miller's great-grandparents (and the rest of the family) immigrate to the US. All but seven of the two-thousand Jews from their original hometown perished in the Holocaust.

EDIT: Modest life goals.
Live a life where your close relatives don't feel compelled to write 2000 words in a prominent publication about what an unmitigated trash heap you are as a person.
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Re: Election 2024: The Quest for Peace

Postby Thad » Wed Oct 30, 2024 3:48 pm

So I've seen people talking about this in a couple of places: That “Little Secret” Between Trump and Johnson? Here’s What It Could Mean.

I think the plan is to steal the Electoral College outright by getting states Trump loses to refuse to certify the results of their election. That’s because the 12th Amendment provides that the president is the person who wins the majority of the “whole number of Electors appointed.” That “whole number” is supposed to be 538. But one potential reading of the amendment is that Trump doesn’t have to win 270 Electoral College votes but just a majority of however many electors show up. Trump’s goal, I believe, is to decrease the number of electors appointed until he wins.

This reading is untested. Nobody has yet tried to win an election with fewer than a majority of the Electoral College votes by decreasing the overall number of electors appointed after the election. But it’s an argument the Trump team could put forward, and it’s an argument Democratic lawyers and experts are preparing for.

The first step in such a process is to get Republicans in states Trump loses to contest the certification of their own elections. In 2020, Trump and his team illegally tried to get slates of alternate electors submitted in states where Republicans control the state legislatures. They could try that again, but for this scheme to work, they don’t even have to get “fake” electors submitted but just to convince Republican state legislatures or Republican governors not to submit their valid slates of electors before statutorily imposed deadlines. All slates of electors are supposed to be certified by December 11. Those electors are then supposed to vote and submit their results by December 25.

What this means is that Republicans just have to delay long enough to pass those deadlines. They don’t have to win; they just have to stall.

There are currently 27 states with Republican state legislatures, including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. There are currently 26 Republican governors running states like Florida, Georgia, Nevada, and Virginia. If some of these people are able to delay certification past the deadline, the “whole number of Electors appointed” would be diminished, lowering the number of electors Trump would need to hold a majority.

No disrespect to Elie Mystal but this is noodling.

I'm not saying it's not plausible that Trump and Johnson are having that conversation, but it's one of those theories that's needlessly complex and requires everything to break in exactly the right way across multiple states and at the federal level to work.

I've said this before, but be wary of any theory about stealing the election that sounds like the planning montage in a heist movie. You know how Republicans steal elections? By preventing Black people from voting. (Obviously Mystal knows this, but he's a legal commentator and sometimes legal commentators get caught up in weird legal hypotheticals.)

The reason Trump came as close as he did to a coup on January 6, 2021 isn't his underlings' crackpot legal theories about how to count electors. It's the literal attack on Congress he instigated.

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Re: Election 2024: The Quest for Peace

Postby Mongrel » Wed Oct 30, 2024 6:06 pm

One comment I heard was something to the effect of "What do you think is more likely? That Johnson has actually set up a detailed plan with Trump to carry out a coup, or that Johnson just threw some bullshit at Trump to shut him up until the election?"

Note that I don't think Johnson isn't capable of following a coup or morally against it, but he's such an absolutely craven shitsack that I feel confident in saying he'd be garbage at PLANNING one, much less actually orchestrating it.
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Re: Election 2024: The Quest for Peace

Postby Thad » Wed Oct 30, 2024 7:13 pm

Trump doing a photo op in a garbage truck and how are these motherfuckers this dumb?

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Re: Election 2024: The Quest for Peace

Postby Mongrel » Wed Oct 30, 2024 7:40 pm

Thad is not exaggerating (Trump later showed up to his rally in his "garbage man" cosplay outfit).

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At the VERY SAME TIME, Trump staffers are trying to pretend Hinchcliffe, just, what.... snuck in and grabbed a hot mic for an entire set?!

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THIS IS THE GUY THEY WANT?!

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Listen.

Fuck the polls. Their methodologies have been so bad. Every indication outside them is so overwhelmingly for Harris that I'm not going to pretend that I think Trump has any real chance any more. Winning campaigns do not have to kidnap and abuse people to get them to knock on doors (see Musk thread). Trump's brain is PISS and he has literally never won the popular vote and he sure as hell ain't going to do it NOW.

AND NOW THEY'RE LITERALLY GOING AROUND SAYING, IN EFFECT, YES. WE ARE GARBAGE.

Maybe it'll be close, and that's still a problem to reckon with, but we're gonna win and the nazis are gonna eat shit. Trump isn't stealing shit or pulling off a coup either. Not happening. Not even with SCOTUS's help; you tell me how many divisions John Roberts commands. Somewhere in that little crawdad brain of his, he knows.

These stupid motherfuckers are not going to win. Sorry team Loser, you're cooked.
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Re: Election 2024: The Quest for Peace

Postby Mongrel » Wed Oct 30, 2024 7:46 pm

Okay.

GAME TIME.

Everybody make two predictions for the election. Only rule is they must be legit predictions, not like "Kodos Wins" or whatever.

They can be shit! That's okay! Taking a brobdingnagian jump and seeing where you land is most of the fun. Kinda like when we do drawing games!

Mine:

1) Ted Cruz is gonna lose his seat.
2) After they lose conclusively (i.e. coup attempts or fraud or whatever is all done, if anything happens at all), the GOP is gonna start eating itself alive.
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Re: Election 2024: The Quest for Peace

Postby Crick » Wed Oct 30, 2024 8:38 pm

This feels like bad luck, but

1) Harris wins by at least 303 EV
2) Trump has a memoir locked and loaded and is gonna start hocking it soon after

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Re: Election 2024: The Quest for Peace

Postby Mongrel » Wed Oct 30, 2024 11:02 pm

RFK Jr: "Trump promised me control of the CDC, FDA and other assorted health-related agencies if he wins."

The whalejuice mendicant's been saying this to everyone he knows for two days now.
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Re: Election 2024: The Quest for Peace

Postby Mongrel » Fri Nov 01, 2024 11:39 pm

While the election is looking to have better and better odds for Harris now, it's worth noting that if Harris makes it, she's going to have to do something about this or there's going to be some long-term headaches:

11,000 political groups in the US have spent $14.7 billion to influence the 2024 election.

- Bloomberg

In today's example of "everyone knows a billion is brobdingnagian, but not how brobdingnagian"

So far this cycle (to Oct 24) Trump has raised ~ $109m in small dollar donations.

(at least) three of his billionaire supporters are /individually/ higher than /all/ of those combined

Mellon: $150m
Musk: $132m
Adelson: $105m

For the record, $109 in small donor donations is only 28%(!) of what Trump had in 2020. It's also less than DeSantis spent on just his Primary campaign ($160m). Harris is just shy of half a billion in small-donor donations by comparison, which does not include Harris's gigantic advantage in in-kind donations of time by volunteers. Like DeSantis, Trump instead must spend some of his funds to try and match what Harris is getting free (which is going amazing between all the amateur graft, embezzlement, and the occasional episode of Musk's human trafficking).

Without billionaires throwing money (and the occasional blitheringly incompetent attempted shadow endorsement) at Trump, he'd have been completely dead in the water.

As I mentioned in chat, I've basically come fully around the belief that massive punitive taxes on billionaires is only minimally about redistribution, and that just destroying billionaires is the much more important policy goal.

Regardless we should laugh at their failure. Rub their fucking noses in it. Never let them forget how bad they are at this.
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Re: Election 2024: The Quest for Peace

Postby Thad » Fri Nov 01, 2024 11:42 pm

Mongrel wrote:Regardless we should laugh at their failure. Rub their fucking noses in it. Never let them forget how bad they are at this.

Doesn't seem to have deterred the Adelsons after their $20 million contribution to the Gingrich 2012 campaign.

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Re: Election 2024: The Quest for Peace

Postby Mongrel » Fri Nov 01, 2024 11:47 pm

Thad wrote:
Mongrel wrote:Regardless we should laugh at their failure. Rub their fucking noses in it. Never let them forget how bad they are at this.

Doesn't seem to have deterred the Adelsons after their $20 million contribution to the Gingrich 2012 campaign.

I wonder what percentage of their wealth that amounted to then versus now.

Also Miriam is a lot less enthusiastic than Sheldon was. That $105m is a lot but she's refused to sign any more cheques since that initial donation.

In any case, public shame for them is still a public good, even if they find themselves to be shameless, especially if there's more of them.
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Re: Election 2024: The Quest for Peace

Postby Mongrel » Sat Nov 02, 2024 5:05 pm

A Harris campaign official in Pennsylvania says their volunteer team is averaging 2,000 door- knocks per minute across the state on Saturday as of 12:54 pm

(Average during typical door-knocking hours)
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Re: Election 2024: The Quest for Peace

Postby Mongrel » Sat Nov 02, 2024 8:21 pm

List of retail products RFK Jr. has said he'll ban if Trump is elected:

- Mountain Dew
- Crest toothpaste
- Children's Tylenol
- Welch's Fruit Snacks
- Grape juice
- Vaseline
- Children's sunscreen
- Mayonnaise
- Gatorade

This is not a complete list. It also does not include non-retail stuff, like his brobdingnagian "banning fluoridation" announcement, etc.
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Re: Election 2024: The Quest for Peace

Postby Büge » Sat Nov 02, 2024 8:47 pm

Mongrel wrote:"banning fluoridation"


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Re: Election 2024: The Quest for Peace

Postby Mongrel » Sat Nov 02, 2024 9:10 pm

So the other day the Daily Beast claimed they got over 100 hours of Epstein talking, a portion of which is Epstein talking about Trump, their relationship and long history together.

Tapes have dropped now

I'm not going to go out there and listen to 100 hours of *waves hands* that, especially when a great deal of it was for a biography and all of it is bound to be self-serving, but it sure is something when Jeffrey Goddamned Epstein thinks the way you get laid is morally questionable.
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Re: Election 2024: The Quest for Peace

Postby Mongrel » Sat Nov 02, 2024 10:47 pm

RFK Jr. just added Cheez-its, Captain Crunch, and Doritos to his list of foods to ban.
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Re: Election 2024: The Quest for Peace

Postby Mongrel » Sat Nov 02, 2024 11:59 pm

Has he... realized?

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Re: Election 2024: The Quest for Peace

Postby Thad » Sun Nov 03, 2024 12:26 am

Well he's sure been mad about Pennsylvania the past few days, which doesn't suggest his internal polling there is good.

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Re: Election 2024: The Quest for Peace

Postby KingRoyal » Sun Nov 03, 2024 1:07 pm

He sounds like shit, slurring his words constantly
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