Trump’s streak of making the sub-text, text continues.
With regard to voting-rights issues, a TPM article the other day looked at Joe Biden’s positions (or lack thereof).
Both chambers in Congress plus the White House – and even then there will be Republican hack judges to deal with.
It’s an endless but important struggle.
Even crucial, one might think, but apparently not everyone agrees.
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Retaining the office of the presidency, by whatever means, is his ultimate and only goal. Only his narcissism mixed with fear could drive him to the lengths he appears willing to go. And only power retention (along with some strong apprehension, if not fear) could drive those helping him abuse power to stay in office.
I hope during my lifetime to learn what he and they are so very afraid of. Consequences for their corruption and criminality (I hope)? Something more connected to psychological pathology?
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From your lips…
Good point. But about the only tool in his pocket to make the election as fraudulent as he wants is to cripple the Post Office, which his is trying to do by not funding it.
As I see it, voting by mail serves four purposes:
- Makes it much harder for Russia to hack
- Makes it easier to vote in states which try to make it hard to get to polling places.
- Greatly reduces the chances of voter intimidation efforts at polling places.
- Stymies a possible attempt to cancel the election citing coronavirus concerns.
On the whole, a good thing that the states have control over this rather than the federal government under Trump.
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That there won’t be a sub class of impoverished to work the fields for them and fetch their mint juleps and fan their fevered brows…you know, the good ol’ days gone by.
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All of these utterances about fraud, cheating, bad polls, expansion of the vote thereby risking reelection are laying the groundwork for delegitimizing the November election results.
Unless Trump were to win, that is.
This malignant buffoon and his henchmen are trying their best to undermine the country. What better way than to attack free elections–the cornerstone of democratic governance–with heavy doses of doubt and accusatory rhetoric?
Papa Vlad must be proud.
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Keep talking Mr. president*. You’re writing voting advocates’ brief for them. All they need to do is string together a bunch of your statements about mail-in ballots.
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Trump Says That If Campaign’s Effort To Block Voting By Mail Expansions Fail, His Reelection Is ‘At Risk’
… … … …
Oh good, best news so far today. Yesterday I filled out a form from my local county recorder. I registered for a mail in ballot for our primary election this August and the general election in November. I want to see Martha McSally get the boot out of the Senate and Mark Kelly elected in her place. I want to do my part in FIRING trump. In fact I have a visual all lined up for the occasion:
It’s just for you donnie “bunker boy” trump:
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Don’t forget the paper trail – that is becoming increasingly rare.
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Well, you gotta give Fat Ass props for one thing: he always ends up saying the quiet things out loud.
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Whether this is planned or not (and with Trump, long-range planning is what he wants for lunch, so probably not planned by Trump himself), complaining about vote-by-mail has a utility beyond its potential to decrease how much we go to vote-by-mail in this COVID era. If he loses, this complaint will form the basis for the lawsuits that will contest election results in states that did vote-by-mail to any greater extent than the baseline of recent years.
There will be other issues as well, for example, that blue states conspired to keep his vote down by hampering his ability to freely hold rallies, and even his nominating convention. All of these issues that they raise have this virtue to their side, that unlike the more traditional and actually justiciable complaints about how an election was conducted, they don’t depend on the results being at all close. They could lose by millions of votes in a state, and still argue that they would have won had the evil blue state govt of that state not violated their free speech rights during the campaign, then used vote-by-mail to allow them to steal votes.
Of course this works much better if the results are pretty close, in the EC count as a whole, and in individual states, because the fact that there are more traditional and justiciable election contests anywhere in the US, will lend their “unconventional” complaints some credibility with enough people to make pulling the whole scheme off more doable. The point of the unconventional election contests will not be to get a court to rule in their favor, that, sure California really voted for Trump because that state wouldn’t let him hold a million person rally in San Francisco, then fudged millions of mail-in-votes, so California’s EC votes would be ordered to be credited to Trump. The object will be to get the courts to declare that these unconventional claims are not justiciable, that they can only be resolved by the actual controlling legal authority in deciding which EC tallies sent in by states are valid, Congress meeting in joint session early in January 2021.
However low Trump’s approval ratings are by then, they are bound to be 10-20 points higher than approval ratings for Congress. We are going to have to depend on most people’s willingness to accept that Congress gets to choose the next president in early January 2021, because even the courts declared that they could not resolve the unconventional claims that Trump really won. Maybe that will all go off without a hitch, and will result in an inspiring moment of national clarity about the need to change how we elect presidents, and empowerment for the role of Congress in our govt. But maybe it won’t go off that well, and God knows what happens next.
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I cannot wait for his rally speech tomorrow, where he will spend 90 minutes comparing his struggle to navigate a ramp to the crucifixion of Christ.
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Trump’s biggest problem is nobody can tell if he actually said that or not.
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“My biggest risk is that we don’t win lawsuits,” Trump said during an interview with Politico. “We have many lawsuits going all over. And if we don’t win those lawsuits, I think — I think it puts the election at risk.”
From Putins lips to the ears of a baby.
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We need to enact national voting standards for federal elections. We can’t have 50 states voting about 45 different ways. Clearly, nothing can be computerized as there are multiple designs that are impossible to secure or can be counted on to be 99% reliable.
Subtext darling, subtext.
Donny, we’re perfectly okay with allowing voters to determine what rings true.
Are you?
Sure seems like he’s effectively saying it. He’s saying the quiet part out loud more and more these recent months. Sort of like the time my sister messed up and said, “He hit me back!”
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He’s right though. Where was Obama when we needed someone to invent ‘covfefe’?