Will the new Trump team bring “The Troubles” to the U.S.? Will the secular majority organize to protect the Establishment Clause?
We need to face this problem and resolve it again to continue the founders vision for freedom for and from religion.
Just do no harm and stick a fork in the rest.
Voting, or not voting, has consequences. Those who deny responsibility by not voting, accept the default consequences which as a rule, suck. Civics and all that quaint stuff.
These radical conservative traitors stole the election.
Hey now, this is America. Everything will automatically be fine. /s
That’s the way it turns out in the tv sitcoms and reality contest shows. And in the commercials, people happily sing and dance their way through diabetes. What a country!
I don’t think it passes the Occam’s Razor test. It’s too complicated. Every state runs its own election, and they’re all done differently, ranging from full in-person voting at polling places to 100% vote-by-mail like here in WA. Every state shifted a little towards Trump compared to his run against Biden in 2020. Every one. Even my state of WA, although it shifted the least of all the states at just one quarter of a percentage point.
I don’t see how Trump could have rigged every single state’s voting system this way. It was a systemic gain. I don’t know how much of it was simple misogyny, the idea that a woman couldn’t be President, or how much was post-pandemic blues over high prices due to inflation, or the fact that the Right now dominates social media where too many young people get their “news.”
Or maybe it was just the simple fact that Harris ran her campaign as basically Biden 2.0 and people didn’t want that. But I’ll believe it was some combination of these things before I’ll believe that Trump managed to rig the election.
My wife and I manage to avoid commercials 99% of the time, but after having football on all day long yesterday, we had to ask ourselves, “What is it about those eczema medications that makes those people so damned happy?”
I think any rigging was done right out in the open by billionaire donors and RW media. With rulings like Citizen’s United, there really is no need for any covert operations here. Just rancid hate filled propaganda 24 hours a day on YouTube, Tik Tok, podcasts and, of course, OG FOX “news”.
I hate that Jardyine ad SO much!
I have to admit, the original Skyrizi song has grown on me and I wish I could find it on Apple Music.
Occam’s razor cuts the opposite way for me. We are all scratching our heads about this election. One thing explains it perfectly, without gaming out a linear combination of coinciding factors. Without getting into the weeds, I’ll just say I have unfailing faith in the corruption of trump. That’s a fact, unlike our speculation about other causes. Why should we trust him one inch, when all we need is some targeted recounts of paper receipts or scanner ballots to compare against the tabulation? Why is a random audit of something so critical taboo? That’s just wrong.
We know that legions of trumpy election deniers had their hands on each of the different manufacturers voting systems. Election deniers were given copies of this software and have had 4 years to reverse engineer it to find vulnerabilities. Many of these same election deniers ran the elections in critical swing states in 2024. Why isn’t an audit pro forma, rather than give these people the full benefit of the doubt?
Why did trump tell people repeatedly he didn’t need their votes?
Why did Elon Musk tell Joe Rogan that he knew the vote totals 4 hours before they were announced, by looking at an “app”?
What did Musk do with that list of names and home addresses he compiled by bribing people to vote for him?
Why were many of the people who took the bribe and registered told that they didn’t need to vote, that it would be done for them?
What was the role of the scores of bomb threats called in to swing state polling sites in democratic areas? These shut down polls for hours, suppressing votes, yes, but also raise serious questions regarding preservation of the custody chain for election systems and data.
Occam’s razor would tell us that these are all isolated incidents.
Trump won for all the reasons you cite – plus, there has been a shift to the right almost on a worldwide basis. Turned out that all those polls showing him 1,2 points ahead were right.
A retired academic lifelong friend of mine did an informal, unpublished study of this shift in Europe about 15 (?) years ago. Trump was not in the game at the time, but my friend suggested we would see a Trump type near term.
Hitler only got 37% of the vote. Of course, then he got appointed to chancellor.
Doesn’t take much to end up with an autocrat.
Trumpy election deniers did not have their hands on the manufacturer’s voting systems in every state. We don’t even do in-person voting here in WA. And yet every state shifted a little to the right.
Musk’s loophole to buy voter registration and votes were only focused on the 7 swing states. And yet every state shifted a little to the right.
Bomb threats were called in to the 7 swing states. And yet every state shifted a little to the right.
It was a systemic shift, caused most likely by the things I mentioned above. This was not a rigged election. We have to understand what happened and change a few things in how Dems appeal to voters. It’s hard but necessary work, not the easy path of going down conspiracy theory rabbit holes.
I’m not going to debate elections stats. Neither of us have the data to do that in any useful way. I am talking about not giving them the benefit of the doubt. Why do we implicitly trust them? Why are we waiting for evidence that they cheated to have random audit? Trust but verify. There is too much of the “nothing to see here” attitude out there for my comfort.
Part of the reason trump screamed so loudly about fraud in 2020 was to “cry wolf” so nobody would ever believe those claims, so let us be sure that this is not forcing people into silence now.
Can you dumb it down a little for me Doc?
Let’s be clear about these people. Russ Vought and his crew are no different than the Taliban that the Americans fought for 20 years in Afghanistan. They are no different than the Nazis who created the death camps, and the civilian and military that staffed them. They are no different than the apparatchiks who did Stalin’s bidding. They are no different than the jailers, the torturers, the executioners, and the murderers who did Mao’s filthy work in China, and they are no different than the narrow, arrogant, sick little people who carry out the violence mandated by the authoritarian and dictatorial leaders in the world today. And they are the narrow, arrogant, sick little people who will carry out the violent destruction of American society and government under the control of the psychotic rule of Trumpism.
Led by the “devils disciple” himself.
There are many reasons a person may fall into the voting-eligible non-voter category. Lazy, of course. But there’s also multipage ballots that are like reading tests. That’s California, and you can take the test in English or Spanish. There is the added issue of voter registration, which is tied to driving in many states. Many countries register people automatically upon attaining the age of 18. And there is the incompetence of county elections offices. But I think the least-discussed important reason is economic survival. Just as we saw with United Russia’s ascendence in the early 2000s, voting for the wrong party can be a threat to your job or at least advancement. In some companies, entire tiers of management can be avowed Republicans. That’s daunting for many Hispanics, already a suspect class for being assumedly Catholic, are expected to vote for Democrats. To overcome this liability, you hear such claims as “I’m not political” “non-partisan” or “never vote” to assure management that the potency of their votes is not threatened.
Before turning the U.S. into a “Christian nation,” how about turning American Christians into real, practicing Christians.?
Or that any Republican could have performed better than Trump.
