The 2022 Midterms

Cmaier said:
My wife is a therapist, and has some D’Souza book on her shelf. Makes me vomit in my mouth whenever i walk into our home office.
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Secretly replace it with Bill Joy's Having Fun With the vi Editor. Vomit be gone. :)
 
SuperMatt said:
D’Souza is a convicted felon. His crime was interfering in the electoral process. The book version of his mockumentary was pulled by the publisher so they could take out all the libel and/or slander and re-issue it in a way to avoid lawsuits. D’Souza is facing a lawsuit from a person he falsely accused of illegally voting. The man is proven to have voted legally, but D’Souza kept up with the false claims, which led to threats against the man… not to mention he had to defend himself from prosecution for no good reason. So when people say “I saw people illegally voting in the movie” - no they didn’t. They legally voted, but D’Souza intentionally lied, claiming they were doing something illegal. The movie is intentionally deceptive, but truly laughable for anybody looking at it objectively. Bill Barr literally laughed when asked about it in his Jan 6 interview.

Right now, ”True the Vote” (who produced the movie) members are actually in jail for contempt of court. Why? Because they have been ordered to back up some of their claims against a software company they slandered… but of course they can’t. So now they are pretending to have a secret source in the FBI that they can’t disclose in order to protect the agent’s safety. The judge saw that BS for what it was and locked them up.

But if all that still doesn’t convince you that D’Souza is totally full of 💩, please read this interview. Philip Bump interviewed D’Souza to allow him to back up any of his claims from the movie. Well, read for yourself. If you want the short version, whenever D’Souza is asked to back up a claim, he asks the interviewer to prove the claims false instead. 🤦‍♂️

(paywall removed)

If anybody from this point forward uses 2000 mules as a source of anything, you can safely ignore them. Believing anything in it is like watching Finding Nemo and then dunking your head into a fish tank hoping for a conversation.
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The parade of right-wing grifters is pretty awe-inspiring. If we can’t convict them we should at least give them an annual award show. Name it after Trump. Have the guy who produced the 1/6 hearings produce it so it’s top quality and gets the attention it deserves.

To be fair, populating the US early on mostly has grifters to thank. So we’ve come full circle with big lies and false promises.
 
SuperMatt said:
If you want the short version, whenever D’Souza is asked to back up a claim, he asks the interviewer to prove the claims false instead. 🤦‍♂️
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"...he asks the interviewer to prove the claims false instead."

Where have I heard that rebuttal before? :)


I just read the D'Souza's Wiki summary. That's enough.
 
Citysnaps said:
That's interesting. Is that some kind of trump stay out jail maneuver? Normally the DOJ employs a 60 day period before an election barring them from filing criminal charges on a candidate. I wonder if trump announcing his presidential run now would somehow cause the DOJ to extend that period? Just spitballing, can't see Garland doing that...
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Probably not. It's likely that he's doing it knowing it'll stoke the flames of the inevitable backlash to his arrest even moreso.
 
TBL said:
To be fair, all politics is mostly about wanting the people you don't like to suer.
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The Ds seem to me like they want other people to have a chance, a choice... so long as one person's opportunity does not leave others with no choice, or no chance. Can't say that I think the Republicans of today view things that way.

I'm not sure the Rs consciously want other people to suffer. Still, it's a guaranteed offshoot of the policies that Republicans endorse: permanent tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, deregulation, reduction of social spending and reduced enforcement of disliked laws or agency rulings they haven't been able to turn around yet.

Then there are the overt attempts of a maliciously conservative-packed SCOTUS to gut Voting Rights legislation and to (electively) overturn Roe v Wade via the broad Dobbs ruling. For the high court to mess with urban areas' erstwhile perfectly reasonable constraints on gun permits was abusive. For Republicans to bring suits whining about persecution of Christians is a mockery of history, common sense, statistics and the rule of law itself.

However one wants to characterize the Rs' observable behavior, the result is not "benign neglect" as I've sometimes heard critics describe effects of Republican social programming aspirations.

It's punitive, not neglectful when Rs pass state laws that cause women's health clinics to shut down across entire states. What are we to think of a country that shrugs off the idea of a woman having to be helicoptered to another state to get timely treatment of an ectopic pregnancy??!

It's punitive for some states now to deprive voters of the convenience of absentee voting when other states have been processing such ballots or standard vote-by-mail ballots essentially fraud-free for decades.

But when you get down into levels of school boards, well... I might have to retract my objection to the idea that some people active in politics just want other people to suffer. It gets personal at that level, and whatever one thinks about trans females in high school sports, there's something really ugly about the ultraconservative parents now trying to get books with any LGBTQ+ content banned from library shelves.
 
lizkat said:
The Ds seem to me like they want other people to have a chance, a choice... so long as one person's opportunity does not leave others with no choice, or no chance. Can't say that I think the Republicans of today view things that way.
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That's exactly how I see it. Even Dixiecrats were more about limited/eliminating opportunities for Black people. That was decades ago. Republican pols have taken up that mantle and expanded it with the aim of being cruel and vindictive.

Clarification: so there can be no confusion, my reply to @TBL wasn't aimed at him, but to GOP/conservative pols. I was rushed for time and my wording was imprecise.
 
Citysnaps said:
That's interesting. Is that some kind of trump stay out jail maneuver? Normally the DOJ employs a 60 day period before an election barring them from filing criminal charges on a candidate. I wonder if trump announcing his presidential run now would somehow cause the DOJ to extend that period? Just spitballing, can't see Garland doing that...
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Who knows what he has in mind. He may be hoping for some kind of chaos during the post-election period and figures to piggyback his announcement on that --with a pitch that "American carnage" will only subside when he alone returns to fix it.

Maybe he wants to beat an indictment and thinks Garland won't indict in the immediate post-election time frame. Or maybe wants to throw a stick into the wheels of the 1/6 committee, which has served him a subpoena and must wrap up with their report to DoJ by year end.

Honestly I think the Republican leadership will be annoyed. They don't really want Trump in the picture for 2024. He's only in the picture because the Nov 8th ballots are not counted yet. McConnell loathes him. McCarthy has only been kissing the Don's ring because if the base and other Rs can flip the house, he will be Speaker of the House. People like McDaniel and Stefanik will have fingers to the wind but would probably rather work with De Santis than Trump. Who wouldn't?!

After the midterms there's a window for Republicans to start putting some daylight between themselves and Trump, and not suffer any real consequence from Trump's base over it. So of course Trump could try to put the kibosh on that by grabbing the spotlight immediately with a 2024 announcement. He might at least find out if donor fatigue is a growing problem.
 
Tuesday seems like a long time away, and I can only imagine the incidents of intimidation we will see, and the number of close races which will spawn tons of conspiracy theories.

We’re already at the point of the capitol being stormed and elected officials homes being broken into and their spouses attacked, what’s next? I guess we’ll find out next week.
 
rdrr said:
IMO Biden squandered the 2 years, and made a huge mistake trying to be polite and work with the other side. The other side doesn't want to work with us and has gotten worse with the divisive crap they pull. Biden should have used his first two years to protect Transgender Rights, addressed Racism and Hate Speech with stronger laws, packed the courts, forgiven student loans way sooner, and put the burden of the taxes clearly on the Corporations and Ultra Wealthy. We'll see what happens come next Tuesday, but it isn't looking good. I fear for the future of democracy, and for my children's future.
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So you’re saying you wanted Biden to spend the first two years ruling by Executive Order? Cause without a majority Senate, that would have been his only option.
 
Herdfan said:
I don’t think it is about intimidating individual voters, but about intimidating those who are dropping off scores of ballots.
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Yeah so some states want to make it illegal to bring ballots from a nursing home? What, so you want every family with someone in that sort of facility to go get the ballot and bring it to the polling station?

publicintegrity.org

‘Chaos and confusion’: The campaign to stamp out ballot drop boxes

Campaigns against drop boxes are increasingly succeeding. Laws, court rulings and politicians in at least a dozen states have targeted them.
publicintegrity.org publicintegrity.org
 
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If if all goes south for fans of democracy, it won't be accidental. Map from Center for Public Integrity on voting rights changes.

Details in cited piece

publicintegrity.org

Who Counts?

Emboldened by a right-wing shift on the Supreme Court, fueled by conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, and against the backdrop of changing demographics that threaten to upend the country’s power dynamics, 26 states have made access to voting and political representation less equal in the...
publicintegrity.org publicintegrity.org

map changes in voting rights for 2022.jpg
 
There’s going to be a lot of amateur Matlocks out there recording everything and offering it up as “evidence” and “proof” or widespread voter fraud. I’m sure some innocent worker who’s been doing this for decades without incident is suddenly going to face death threats because someone showed Trump a video of them “doing something suspicious”.

We already know it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy with these knuckleheads, so desperate are they to find proof of their fairytales that they will commit the acts they are accusing others of.
 
TBL said:
To be fair, all politics is mostly about wanting the people you don't like to suffer.
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There is a difference between me being happy with the results as opposed to me being happy that most of you are unhappy.

I said the former. Some have assumed the latter. 😟
 
GermanSuplex said:
I’m sure some innocent worker who’s been doing this for decades without incident is suddenly going to face death threats because someone showed Trump a video of them “doing something suspicious”.
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Apparently that's already happening widespread. Two nights ago on the national news there was a story about that with election workers getting death threats, being stalked, etc.

What's bewildering and sad is there seems to be no one in the Republican Party that's willing or patriotic enough to stand up and call that crap out. Apparently because it works in their favor.

What an effn bunch of unpatriotic chickenshits. :(

EDIT: A huge hat tip to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for standing up and caring about democracy. Sadly, that's rare Republican patriotism.
 
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