Tag: Voting

Closing Thought–23Jul20

Pres. Trump has been setting the stage to challenge an election since 2016…..and he has made it clear that he will not accept the votes that are cast if he does not win.

In a Fox News interview that aired Sunday, President Donald Trump refused to commit to accepting the results of the 2020 presidential election and baselessly claimed mail-in voting is going to “rig” the contest—remarks one advocacy group condemned as an “insidious” attack on democracy.

“I have to see,” Trump said when asked by Fox News host Chris Wallace whether he intends to accept the election results. “No, I’m not gonna just say yes. I’m not gonna say it, and I didn’t last time either.”

Sean Eldridge, founder and president of Stand Up America, said in a statement that Trump’s comments show “he is an existential threat to our democracy and has no respect for the rule of law.”

“For five years, Trump has sought to undermine our elections again and again—from soliciting foreign interference to making baseless claims about voter fraud to lying about the results of the 2016 election,” said Eldridge. “Today’s comments are an escalation in these attacks on our democracy and show the insidious ways in which Trump is working to sow doubt about the outcome of this election before votes are even cast.”

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/07/19/existential-threat-our-democracy-trump-refuses-commit-accepting-2020-election

I will be interested in see how many of his supporters will come to his side and defend such blatant treasonous attitudes.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Mail-In Voting

I was going to leave this bit of lunacy alone…but it just keeps getting worse and worse…..especially the idiotic ideas coming from the small mind of Donald the Orange…

His best piece of manure has been that there would be thousands of people sitting in living rooms across the nation stuffing ballot boxes……

If you do not like that piece of political manure…then just wait a few days and the rhetoric will change….and VIOLA!

President Trump has been arguing for a while that mail-in voting is vulnerable to fraud, and he pushed a new theme on that front in not-so-subtle terms Monday. In an all-caps tweet, he warned: “RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!” Before that, he tweeted a link to a Breitbart News story in which Attorney General William Barr expresses a similar sentiment. “It absolutely opens the floodgates to fraud,” Barr said of mail-in voting during a Sunday interview on Fox News. “A foreign country could print up tens of thousands of counterfeit ballots, and (it would) be very hard for us to detect which was the right and which was the wrong ballot.”

The coronavirus has led to calls for greater access to mail-in ballots for voters, but the White House opposes the move. “You get thousands and thousands of people sitting in somebody’s living room, signing ballots all over the place,” Trump said in April, per the Hill. When reporters asked for evidence, he responded, “I think there’s a lot of evidence, but we’ll provide you with some, OK?” AFP reports that the political impact of mail-in voting is unclear, citing a new Stanford study that while the practice seems to increase overall voting, it “does not appear to increase either party’s vote share.”

Foreign nations will influence our electoral process….REALLY?

Someone needs to investigate…..

But like everything else in the Trump government…..what is bad for the people is perfectly fine for his band of thugs and thieves…..

Vice President Mike Pence and a half-dozen senior advisers to President Trump have repeatedly voted by mail, election records obtained by the AP show. That undercuts the president’s argument that the practice will lead to widespread fraud this November. More than three years after leaving it, Pence still lists the Indiana governor’s home as his official residence and votes absentee accordingly. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has permanent absentee voting status in her home state of Michigan. Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager, voted absentee in Texas in 2018 and didn’t vote two years earlier when Trump’s name was on the ballot. Two other senior Trump campaign officials—chief operating officer Michael Glassner and deputy campaign manager Bill Stepien—have repeatedly voted by mail in New Jersey. And Nick Ayers, a senior campaign adviser who was the vice president’s chief of staff, has voted by mail in Georgia since 2014.

In most election years, voting by mail is an unremarkable event. But Trump has railed against state efforts to expand access to mail-in voting as an alternative to waiting in lines at polling places during a pandemic. He has argued without evidence that mail-in voting will lead to fraud and warned Monday that foreign countries could print ballots. That, some experts say, is a double standard that amounts to voter suppression. “These are people who are taking advantage of—which is perfectly legal—their right to vote absentee,” said Trevor Potter of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. “But they don’t want other people to do the same thing.” Trump himself voted by mail in the Florida primary this year. And Attorney General William Barr, who has also raised concern about the practice, voted absentee in Virginia in 2012 and 2019, the Washington Post reported. Tim Murtaugh of the Trump campaign defended the Trump aides who have voted by mail.

If you still support this maniac in the White House then you are a hateful tool that we would be better off without.

Trying to rig an election without having to plan it behind closed doors……time to change the dirty laundry in DC….it is starting to draw flies.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Super Tuesday!

The 2020 election is getting serious by the vote…..we are down to 5 candidates……and Super Tuesday is the proving ground for the nomination.

Here we go….the media has tried to assassinate the candidacy of Bernie after his loss in South Carolina…..did the tactic by the corporate media succeed?

Now we have a cleat picture of the direct this election will travel….

The Super Tuesday polls are closed, and it’s shaping up to be a good night for Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, Not so much for Elizabeth Warren and Michael Bloomberg. Biden came out strong, particularly in the South, but Sanders took the night’s biggest prize, California, as expected. He’s also leading in the second biggest, Texas. Biden racked up wins in Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Massachusetts (Warren’s home state), and Minnesota. Sanders also took his home state of Vermont and Colorado. Delegates are what matter, though, and a whopping 1,344 are at stake. Sanders is expected to be the leader when all is said and done, but because these are not winner-take-all races, the full effect of the voting might not be clear until Wednesday. The states at play, in order of delegates, per the Hill and Vox:

 
  • California: 415 delegates; polls closed at 11, and the AP called the race quickly for Sanders. The key questions are how big his margin of victory will be and how many delegates his rivals can win. Sanders dominated in early results, with 67 delegates to 18 for Biden, 8 for Bloomberg and 5 for Warren.
  • Texas: 228 delegates; all polls closed at 9; the AP called it for Biden hours later.
  • North Carolina: 110 delegates; the polls closed at 7:30, and the AP called the race for Biden about 15 minutes later.
  • Virginia: 99 delegates; polls closed at 7, and the AP immediately declared Biden the winner. That the race was called so quickly bodes well for Biden because it suggests he “cleaned up” with African-American voters, per Politico.
  • Massachusetts: 91 delegates; polls closed at 8, and the AP called the race for Biden about three hours after polls closed. This is Warren’s home state, of course, and thus a bad loss for her. Worse, she was on track to finish in third behind second-place Sanders.
  • Minnesota: 75 delegates; polls closed at 9, and the AP called the race for Biden within the hour. Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s endorsement surely helped.
  • Colorado: 67 delegates; polls closed at 9, and the AP immediately called the race for Sanders.
  • Tennessee: 64 delegates; polls closed at 8, and the AP called the race for Biden about 9:30.
  • Alabama: 52 delegates; polls closed at 8, and the AP immediately called the race for Biden.
  • Oklahoma: 37 delegates; polls closed at 8, and the AP called the race for Biden about an hour later.
  • Arkansas: 31 delegates; polls closed at 8:30, and the AP called the race for Biden about 90 minutes later.
  • Utah: 29 delegates; polls closed at 10, and the AP called the race for Sanders.
  • Maine: 24 delegates; polls closed at 8
  • Vermont: 16 delegates; polls closed at 7, and the AP declared Sanders the winner of his home state at 7:20.
  • American Samoa: The US territory held a caucus, and Bloomberg won five of six delegates; Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who was born there, won the last one.

Pay close attention to the media reports…..the fight will be in those states of the Rust Belt…..

Watch This Blog!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

 

South Carolina Vote Results

I know it is Sunday and I feel I must deviate from my FYI policy and report on the results of the vote in South Carolina.

All eyes were on Joe Biden for South Carolina was said to be his firewall against the rush of Bernie toward the nomination.

And the media did a great job selling the centrist policies to black voters and he came out on top and there is the stry in the news until Super Tuesday.

And the winners are…..

South Carolina was seen as a must-win state for Joe Biden, and it turned out to be just that. In fact, it wasn’t even close. Major outlets including CNN, ABC, and NBC called the race for the former VP as soon as polls closed at 7pm. Bernie Sanders was in a distant second and Tom Steyer third in early returns. (Steyer later dropped out of the 2020 race.) The big questions will be the final size of Biden’s victory—the AP is already calling it “resounding”—and how the rest of the field shakes out. “The bigger the win, the bigger the bump,” Biden said earlier Saturday in Greenville, per Politico. The “bump” comes days ahead of next week’s Super Tuesday vote. The first returns show why the race was called so fast:

  • Joe Biden, 50%
  • Bernie Sanders, 18%
  • Tom Steyer, 11%
  • Pete Buttigieg, 7%
  • Elizabeth Warren, 6%
  • Amy Klobuchar, 3%
  • Tulsi Gabbard, 1%

And Bloomberg was not on the ballot.

Now we will see if the rest of the country is as easy to please as South Carolina.

Watch This Blog!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

2020 New Hampshire Results

Now we can say that the voting in 2020 has actually begun in the first in the country, New Hampshire…..

Results in the vote are as follows……let me start with the results for Trump…….

There were no surprises in the Republican primary in New Hampshire Tuesday as President Trump cruised to victory by a wide margin over challenger Bill Weld. With almost 90% of precincts in, Trump had 85.7% of the vote, Weld had 9.1%, and assorted write-in candidates had 2,5%, the Union-Leader. That gives Trump all 20 delegates and the biggest margin of victory for an incumbent president in the state’s GOP primary since Ronald Reagan, who scored 86.43% in 1984. Trump’s total vote count in the New Hampshire primary is higher than that of any previous incumbent president, reports the AP.

Not much surprise here with the exception that about 12% of Repubs voted against a GOP president…..that should be worth a bit of look….

Now on to the battle for the Dem nomination…..

Bernie Sanders has won the New Hampshire primary, reports the AP, Politico, CNN, and the Washington Post. The final tally isn’t yet in, but it appears Pete Buttigieg will finish in a close second and Amy Klobuchar a strong third. Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden trailed that trio by quite a bit. “This victory here is the beginning of the end for Donald Trump,” Sanders told his supporters. Meanwhile, tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang and Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet have dropped from the race. With 93% of results in, CNN has the percentages as:

  • Sanders, 26%
  • Buttigieg, 24.4%
  • Klobuchar, 19.8%
  • Warren, 9.3%
  • Biden, 8.4%.
  • Sanders (who also won New Hampshire in 2016) and Buttigieg had been 1-2 in the final polls. The bigger question was who would finish third, and Klobuchar’s campaign should get a boost out of the night’s results. “We have beaten the odds every step of the way,” she told supporters, reports the Wall Street Journal.
  • Warren and Biden, however, will have serious assessments to make, given that neither will hit the 15% threshold necessary to earn national delegates. Still, both told their supporters Tuesday night that they are very much still in the race. “I am here to get big things done,” said Warren, reports CNN. “We’re just getting started,” said Biden, per NPR.
  • Addressing his own jubilant supporters, Buttigieg declared, “Now our campaign moves on to Nevada and South Carolina and across the country, and we will welcome new allies to our movement at every step,” per the AP.

Two down…..now on to Nevada….

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

The Iowa Clusterf*ck

Appears that the total chaos in Iowa is coming to an end….the numbers are in (sort of)……..

Clouded by doubts on a chaotic day-after, the Iowa Democratic Party began releasing partial results of the state’s first-in-the-nation presidential caucus on Tuesday, the AP reports. The data, made public for the first time nearly 24 hours after voting concluded, reflected the results of 62% of precincts in the state. While campaigns were eager to spin the results to their advantage, there was little immediate indication that the incomplete results eased the confusion and concern that loomed over the opening contest of the Democrats 2020 presidential primary season. It was unclear when Iowa’s full results would be released. CNN currently has Pete Buttigieg with 26.9% of state delegates, Bernie Sanders with 25.1%, Elizabeth Warren with 18.3%, Joe Biden with 15.6%, and Amy Klobuchar with 12.6%; everyone else is at 1.1% or lower.

During a private conference call with campaigns earlier in the day, state party chairman Troy Price declined to answer pointed questions about the specific timeline—even whether it would be a matter of days or weeks. “We have been working day and night to make sure these results are accurate,” Price said at a subsequent press conference. The leading candidates pressed on in next-up New Hampshire, which votes in just seven days, as billionaire Democrat Michael Bloomberg sensed opportunity, vowing to double his already massive advertising campaign and expand his sprawling staff focused on a series of delegate-rich states voting next month.

The big news was not the voting…..but the future for the first in the nation vote……

If you thought people were fed up with Iowa’s first-in-the-nation voting status before Monday night’s chaos, it’s nothing compared to the sentiment surfacing Tuesday morning. Examples:

  • The overview: “Iowa’s outsize role has faced attacks for decades, along with periodic failed attempts by other states to take the first-in-the-nation slot,” notes Steve Kornacki of NBC and MSNBC. “But criticism has been louder than ever this past year, and now those critics may have the ammunition they need to kill it.”
  • A prediction: From here on out, “Iowa won’t go first,” writes Tim Alberta at Politico. “It can’t go first. Not anymore.” At best, it might keep some “ceremonial capacity” in the early stages of the nominating season, but “Monday night will go down as the self-inflicted knockout punch, and with it, the end of a political era.” He adds that the state’s refusal to use a simpler voting method is one reason it has become a political “punch line.”
  • RIP, I: Responding to a tweet praising esteemed Iowa political journalist David Yepsen for predicting this mess, Yepsen himself replied, “Sorry I was right. RIP caucuses.” Later he added, “This will probably be the last caucus we’ll have to worry about.”
  • RIP, II: The headline of a piece by Eric Levitz at New York has a similar sentiment: “R.I.P. the ‘First-In-the-Nation’ Iowa Caucuses (1972-2020).” The influence of Iowa’s “wildly anti-democratic” nominating process has always been “indefensible,” but not even its biggest critics “dreamed it would subject the country to something like this,” Levitz writes. He’s skeptical Iowa will be able to recover from the damage.
  • Shaky ground: “Iowa has found itself—more this year than ever—in the position of defending its perch,” write Matt Flegenheimer and Sydney Ember in the New York Times. “Why should a state so disproportionately white take such a leading role, especially for a Democratic Party that prides itself on its diversity? Why is a hodgepodge of gatherings in school gymnasiums the pinnacle of American democracy?” Now, the state’s “precarious standing” just took another hit.
  • In defense: The state’s GOP senators, Charles Grassley and Joni Ernst, are standing up for Iowa, saying its caucus system “encourages a grassroots nominating process that empowers everyday Americans,” per a statement cited in the Washington Post. Its first-in-the-nation status “has the full backing of President Trump,” they added. “We look forward to Iowa carrying on its bipartisan legacy of service in the presidential nominating process.” But fellow Sen. Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois and the Senate minority whip, said Tuesday the caucus system is no longer practical for modern voters. “I think the Democratic caucus in Iowa is a quirky, quaint tradition that should come to an end,” he said on MSNBC.

My thought is close them all down and go to a national primary….all this silliness and news coverage would be one day….possibly two….

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

The Coming Democratic Candidates

The long awaited 2020 election is speeding to a conclusion…..each month the events seem to speed up….after 700+ days of Trump all eyes look to the next election.

So far we have 4 announced Democratic candidates for the presidency….and more in the wings waiting for the best time to announce….we are doing good we have 4 women, one Hispanic and counting (as they say…whoever “they” are)……

The fun thing is that the Dems in 2020 will look like the GOP field in 2016…crowded…and some good ideas will be lost in the rush to the front runner position.

But so far the field has many prospects and all have a track record to run on not like the GOP of old.

For fun the site fivethirtyeight.com has a list of the Dems and how they will be broken down…..I know it is early but it will be fun to see just how accurate the site is this time around.

So for the 2020 Democratic nomination, we’ve resolved to entertain multiple hypotheses about the contest simultaneously. Perhaps the party will decide, and so we should be looking at how much support each candidate has from party elites. Perhaps the candidate most dissimilar to Trump will win, and so we should be evaluating the candidates based on that criteria. Perhaps the primary is just so hard to forecast that you might as well look at the polling, crude as it might be. (It has more predictive power than you might think.)

We’ll see. But we nonetheless think that (despite its mixed success in 2016) the coalition-building model is also a useful tool, especially if we make a few tweaks to how we applied it four years ago.

Just as with the Republicans in 2016, the concept this time around involves considering five key groups of Democratic voters. Here are those groups:

  1. Party Loyalists
  2. The Left
  3. Millennials and Friends
  4. Black voters
  5. Hispanic voters (sometimes in combination with Asian voters)

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-5-key-constituencies-of-the-2020-democratic-primary/

The field keeps expanding and the diversity of the Party will be brought forward…….but is it really a diversified group?

The country wants “new” candidates….we are tired of the same promises and the same lies and the same inaction….we want “new blood” for DC….

A new USA Today national poll shockingly showed that Democratic voters and Democratic leaning independents overwhelmingly prefer “someone entirely new” to any of the current field of potential presidential candidates. This cannot be for lack of choices; there are potentially four times the number of candidates lining up at the starting gate as the most recent Democratic presidential primary.

Yes, this is one poll, but maybe we should refuse to dismiss voter feedback too easily.

Lots of woman announced and some waiting…..but what will this uptick in gender equality could mean to politics…..

Advocates for gender equality are reckoning with what one called a “wonderful challenge”—four or more women running for president in 2020, the AP reports. To many activists, that means a field more reflective of a party that counts women as a crucial voting bloc. But the prospect of multiple women in the race also presents obstacles, with no single candidate holding a claim to women’s votes to the degree Hillary Clinton did in 2016. The women’s vote, and groups that provide financial and grassroots support, could split. Looming over it all is persistent gender bias and the question of whether Americans are ready to elect a female president. “We do realize there’s still sexism in this country, and what we’re trying to do is change minds,” says EMILY’s List President Stephanie Schriock, whose group aids the campaigns of Democratic women supporting abortion rights.

In the early days of the Democratic primary, leaders of many advocacy organizations are thrilled that so many women are seeking the presidency, but are not backing any particular candidate. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren last month became the first woman to launch a presidential exploratory effort, joined shortly afterward by New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota also are considering running. Among those candidates, Gillibrand is particularly vocal in invoking her gender as a driver of her campaign, while Warren’s campaign has emphasized economic inequity. So is gender still a problem for candidates? “Because there are so many women running, it doesn’t totally inoculate women from sexism, but it does provide some guardrails,” says a gender-equality activist.

Questions Asked….Waiting For Answers!

Learn Stuff!

Will They Or Won’t They?

For months upon months we have been bombarded with election stuff…..predictions and speculation will not stop until the votes are counted…..

There is one group in this election that all pundits are concerned with that they may not go to the polls…..and they just cannot understand why Millennials would not vote.

But why would they not want to be part of the process?  The same reason that many do not want to be part of the process.  The process is broken and money plays too big in elections…..but the Millennials are a group, a generation. that could well make a difference…..

In what people are calling — accurately, in my opinion — the most important American midterm election in our lifetimes, there’s been a lot of things we’ve never seen before: like, for example. a president sending thousands of troops to the U.S. southern border or erasing the existence of more than a million transgender people, all to boost GOP voter turnout a point or two.
And then there’s this: non-voter porn.
If you read the news, you know the kind of political smut I’m talking about. Full-frontal exposures of mostly attractive 20-somethings, revealing their often lame-sounding excuses why they’re joining the more than 60 percent of eligible Americans who typically don’t vote in midterm elections.
We’re talking about 20-somethings who’ve never used the U.S. mail and are traumatized by the idea of finding a postage stamp for a registration form, or so don’t see how a small president in search of a balcony is any different than any other politician.
Tomorrow will these voters go to the polls or will they stay home and let the old farts pick their leaders….and then they bitch…..
Shut up and go vote!

 

Populism And The World

The catch word that was batted around during the 2016 elections was populism and according to the MSM  the win by Trump meant that it was on the rise in the US……and tide that could not be stopped….well according to the d/bag Bannon.

Then there is Europe and the rising tide of populism or of right wing politics…some even see that the rise of it in Hungary and Italy among others could signal the end of the EU…..

The newly-installed US ambassador to Germany, Richard (Ric) Grenell, is at the center of a Trumped-up “controversy,” after having given an interview to Breitbart saying that he’s looking forward to encouraging beleaguered European conservatives. The NeverTrumpers went wild: neocon Anne Applebaum accused him of being part of a conspiracy on the part of the Trump administration to back “nativist, pro-Russia and anti-pluralist” forces – as opposed to the globalist, neo-liberal, cravenly pro-Washington (as opposed to pro-American) sock puppets we’ve been backing previously. Applebaum was joined by German Communist leader Sarah Wagenknecht, a leader of the far-left wing of the far-left “Die Linke” Party, who demanded that Grenell be expelled from Germany.

https://original.antiwar.com/justin/2018/06/06/populism-and-the-end-of-the-european-union/

Okay Europe is not the only region that has seen a rise in populism…..Iraq and its latest election…..the leader that gave the US so much trouble in the early years of the occupation has now been elected as the new Prime Minister of Iraq……

The worldwide populist revolt toppling conventional politicians in the United States, Europe and even the Philippines has now reached Iraq. Most Westerners still following Iraqi politics assumed that incumbent Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s Dawa Party would handily win the parliamentary election, but nope. Dawa came in third. Firebrand cleric Moqtada al Sadr’s Sairun party came in first.

You remember Moqtada al Sadr. He’s the guy who mounted an Iranian-backed Shia insurgency against the United States, the Iraqi government and his Sunni civilian neighbors between 2003 and 2008. He’s a very different person today. He still raises and shakes his fist in the air but today he’s shaking it at crooked elites, and he’s shaking it at his former Iranian patrons.

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/michael-j-totten/populist-revolt-reaches-iraq

The rest of this story is waiting to be written…..and it is being written in DC as we speak….but what will it be?

Let’s Go To The Speculation

For decades I have bitched about the endless speculation by the media when our elections roll around…..their predictions have been really wrong in the past….the last couple of elections have proven just how wrong they can be…..I Have witnessed it first hand and so have most Americans yet they allow the MSM to dictate to them or better yet they allow the confusion to keep them from exercising their right to vote…..

The WaPo has decided to cover this tactic in a recent article…..

Where were you on the night of Nov. 8, 2016? If you’re like many political junkies, you were watching election night coverage and wondering not whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump would win but might Clinton do so well that she’d win in places like Texas and Arizona.

When she lost, many on both sides of the aisle were shocked. After all, forecasters gave her odds of winning that ranged from 70 to 99 percent. These statistical win-forecasts are increasingly prominent and widely shared — thanks in part to the work of sites like FiveThirtyEight, the Huffington Post, the New York Times Upshot and the Princeton Election Consortium.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/03/22/how-election-forecasts-confuse-americans-and-may-lead-them-not-to-vote-at-all/

We are only a few short months from the mid-terms and the MSM has been bombarding the airways already…all in prep work for the vote….I agree that all this speculation is turning off people from voting……I mean think about it…..about 49% of the voting public actually votes anymore…that is a sad stat….DO NOT let the endless speculation turn you off from voting…..exercise your right and maybe then we can get a government that we can be proud of…we have seen what happens when we allow crap to be elected.  DO NOT allow it to happen again!

Please do not depend on the media and its speculation when you vote…you see what we got this last general election….weak minds produce candidates like Trump…..