I will not accept that piece of shit as legal tender.
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Chaos is the point. The longer it takes to sort out the more the raging right are prepared to believe it is a fraud and Trump already knows he will lose.
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In years to come those $1.00 coins will serve as targets to be thrown in the air by sharp shooters demonstrating their marksmanship.
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Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
All was good for him until what he demanded happen to others, happened to him.
Now, it’s wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Too bad, so sad.
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Why the big push for top two primary or the ranked voting? What is the problem of just an individual vote? I know some municipalities have a no party election, but everyone knows which party the candidate is connected to. And most voters know which candidate is lying biggly as to what party they align to.
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Bypassing the postal service in favor of a commercial delivery company seems a reasonable way to assure the ballots are distributed in a timely fashion. I can drop off my ballot in person at a conveniently located ballot drop box. A good plan B in case future fuckery occurs.
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Markwayne Mullin: “The only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place or we’re serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down.”
Wrong on both counts. If there is a threat to a polling place, that’s the responsibility of the local or state police to deal with. The Federal government has zero authority over elections. And ICE, since they are armed Federal officers, cannot, by law, be anywhere near a polling place, regardless of their “warrant” pretext. Most of those warrants, in any case, are administrative warrants, not judicial ones, and have no legal authority at all - legally, they are nothing but written instructions to employees.
Mullin has been repeating these illegal scenarios for weeks now, trying to normalize them. He needs some hard and very public pushback.
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A big problem with political parties is that there are no good other options. Campaigns are expensive, the higher the office, the more expensive it is. Not only is there the issue of exposure, do you really want the political landscape to be dominated by internet influencers? and TV personalities?, but campaign staff, advisors who know what form to file where and the general nits and bolts of a campaign vanishes when a campaign ends for whatever reason. And each candidate has to build it all anew every time. Political parties offer access to a pool of people who know things. This is an issue the US ran into in the very beginning. They didn’t want parties, the UK Parliament gave ample reasons to dislike them. But the complexities of running a campaign even in the 18th century were such that a candidate who was a party member was going to beat the true, independent candidate in most cases. Now running for a local office in the small village your grew up it that might be different. But that is about the only case.
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That’s exactly what it is.
we should have voted for the ranked-choice question when it was up last time. In MA, where most of the decisions are made in the primary, it makes sense to use ranked choice since there is the possibility of a large number of candidates, meaning someone could win with like 22% of the vote in a race with 9 candidates. (See Jake Auchincloss, former Republican who won his Democratic primary this way. and now he’s an incumbent who is more difficult to unseat)
really, this top two primary idea is a scam to replace the ranked choice idea which would actually work for us. Allow us to choose the best candidate from a larger field with an actual majority, not just who can squeak in with 20% of the votes because all the other more progressive candidates split the vote.
ETA if we should be learning anything from the California “jungle primary” it should be that it’s a complete mess.
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I’ve used ranked choice when I lived in Cambridge as a young voter. It’s not difficult to understand. You get to choose your favorites in order from 1 to however many you want. People understand “top 10 lists”. Where ranked choice is used, people like it. It gives you, the voter, MORE say.
meanwhile, we are always hearing people say they hate having to choose “the lesser of two evils”. It makes you feel like voting is worthless and you don’t enjoy it. Being able to rank your choices makes you feel like you actually got to express your preference, without throwing your vote away. It allows for a larger field of candidates, so more opportunities for better candidates.
I don’t think we should be choosing crappy systems based on what conspiracy theorists will shout about. because they’re going to do it anyway. And I would posit that ranked choice actually makes a voter feel more included, which tends to reduce the “it’s all rigged” complaints.
The main danger of ranked choice is that it gives more power to the voters to choose collectively the candidates they most prefer. That, is a GOOD thing.
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he wasn’t sent to CECOT, was he? Or Central African Republic? so no, what happened to others didn’t even really happen to him. He got deported back to his home country the way people used to get deported. When we were a country of laws. What a privilege for him.
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One could say that he got to go back to the UK unlike the others because the others were from ‘less favored’ countries?
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Because then the party establishment will try to rig the candidate selection in the primary by clearing the field for a preferred person. This is what happened in this year’s Maine Senator race that almost got them a truly unelectable candidate. My recap/spin: Dem Party BigWig Schumer wanted Maine Gov. Janet Mills (who is old and very 20th century - believes in the filibuster and vetoed her legislature’s moratorium on data centers) to be the candidate. Schumer’s elbows kept the better candidates out of the running and Mills eventually did declare her candidacy. But Mills was soo f’g unattractive to the state voters that they ran screaming and fell hard for a very talented and progressive politician - who sold himself as having problems in the past (troubled, drunken veteran issues) but that he’d changed and that wasn’t who he was now. So, the “past issues” were supposed to be a mea culpa box nobody was going to talk about or explore but in theory everyone accepted. “The past is the past and people can change.” And Graham Platner won his primary (I think Mills gave up and withdrew even before the vote). Well, turns out the past is not the past and too many details emerged - he raped an ex-girlfriend (drunk af but that is what he did) - and the Democratic Party in Maine just barely was able to force him out and get a good consensus candidate – one who had just lost the governor’s primary and may have been pushed out of the Senate race initially by Schumer’s shenanigans.
I think it is pretty rare for the Dem establishment to lose when they try to fix who the candidate will be (oh, the NYC mayor race - Mamdani - was another faceplant); I’m sure the manipulation happens regularly at the edges out of sight and not as obvious(ly bad) as what Schumer did here. On the other hand, Republicans have been losing winnable race when the the candidate selection a lot with their whacko Tea Party/Freedom Caucus/Openly Corrupt candidates for awhile. See Cornyn and Paxton in this year’s Texas Senate race. The Georgia (or was that Alabama?) mall creeper, “I am not a witch”, etc.
This is always going to be spy vs. spy stuff – the party bigwigs want to use their power &/or their judgment to tip the scales. But they can’t be allowed to shut out the voters completely. With ranked choice, the voters get more say - by being able to signal clear preferences and hopefully yanking the agenda back into alignment with rank and file American voters.
Many GOPedo voters aren’t happy with their GOPedo choices but because they are unwilling to ever vote for a Dem, their votes have zero influence on selecting their candidates. Because they will always vote for the final R candidate, they never need to be courted and PedoPeeps really couldn’t care less what they want.
Sorry. That’s a lot of words. I feel better now. Thanks.
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yes, this. A top two primary doesn’t solve the issue of the parties having too much influence. In fact, it further supports the whole “back room dealing” part of it. Because this is how it works:
- the party in the minority puts up one candidate that all of their voters will support
- the party in the majority has a lot of candidates that will split the vote
- panic. the party in the majority has to push some of the candidates on their side to back out, or the candidates themselves have to collectively decide to back one of them and tell their supporters to vote for someone other than themselves. (this usually happens last minute, and to varying degress of success or failure)
it still removes the voters from the process of choosing, just in a more chaotic way than we even have now. And leads to lots of resentment.
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Reminder, the California jungle primary was brought to us by Republicans Schwarzenegger¹ & Maldonado at a time when Republicans were losing their grip on CA. Sold as a way to weed out extremists, thus electing more centrists who would ultimately serve the majority population better (remember the Moral Majority???).
As anyone who can do simple arithmetic could imagine, in an election that can include dozens of candidates, the top-2 (or any ‘top’ system) is a failure. E.g., in our very first jungle election, one of the lesser state offices (controller, maybe?) there were 2 similar/viable Dem choices and 2 similar/viable Repub choices. Polling put them all at abt 24% popularity. Fortunately, 1 Dem & 1 Repub finished top 2. So we had a viable election. But it easily could have gone differently, with 48% of the voters essentially shut out of the final election.
¹elected Governor with 48.6% of the vote in CA’s sketchy recall system. The recall effort was successful after wealthy Repub Rep Darrell Issa, who expected to be the replacement, donated $2 million to a new committee, Rescue California, which then led the effort.
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So, instead they will place a candidate in a ranked or top two who can just as easily be planted by the party as the preferred. Got it.
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Access to birth control is important for several reasons.
And you are clearly not a low-information voter. I know because you can correctly use “posit” 
You also appear to have much more faith in the intelligence of the American public than I. I have none, and feel justified in that position by the 72,000,000 who voted for an adjudicated rapist in 2024.