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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Updates from the ATL
Early voting in Georgia’s April 18 special election surpasses 21,000
!
In the Sixth District 'Conservatism' is shifting
Few embraced the Tea Party moniker. And none of the highest-polling candidates pledged to join the Freedom Caucus, the hard-line conservative group whose uncompromising ideology helped derail Mr. Trump’s efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
One of the few exceptions to this has been the conservative Club for Growth PAC, which was one of the conservative, Washington-based groups to align itself with the Freedom Caucus and lobby against the House Republican plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act — because it didn’t go far enough.
Club for Growth has endorsed Bob Gray, a Republican and former Johns Creek city councilman — but has gone out of its way to focus on one of his rivals, former Georgia secretary of state Karen Handel. Until now.
Mailers sent out this week took a shot at both Handel and former state Sen. Dan Moody as a “two-headed tax-and-spend monster” backed by lobbyists. It’s a sign that Moody is rising in the polls as Republicans compete for what could be one June 20 runoff spot against Democrat Jon Ossoff.
Handel’s husband, Steve, shot back at the group in a Twitter message:
Looks like @Bob Gray GA’s attack dog @club4growth knows that he’s in 3rd place among Republicans https://t.co/zWLigK3IYj
— stevehandel (@stevehandel) April 9, 2017
Just checked the election results per state: New York went 59.01% for Clinton, just 2.72% behind California, and it was the second highest vote count (4,556,124) for her in any state (California being first with 8,753,788 votes for Hillary). So yeah, I'd say the son of a Trump running for governor is just going to give Cuomo (or whomever else is running if he doesn't go for reelection) a landslide victory.
1 2 We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. -KVTrump Administration withdraws request for Twitter Leaker information, Twitter will no longer sue Trump.
That's both good (in that Trump loses again and Freedom of Speech and Privacy are protected) and bad (Trump won't get sued by Twitter).
Kay Ivy becomes Governor of Alabama after Rob Bentley resigns.
She is the 2nd Female Governor the State (that I currently live in) has had, and is seen as somewhat of a Moderate who will be Governor until next year's Election.
edited 10th Apr '17 8:59:26 PM by DingoWalley1
👀👀👀
Apparently there's a poll w/ the GOP only up by 1 point in Kansas:
edited 10th Apr '17 9:19:22 PM by TacticalFox88
New Survey coming this weekend!@Lance: Well, people need food. And the farm lobbies are strong. And a lot of water "conservation" in agriculture is sham; it only causes rivers and groundwater to dry up faster. Or the Salton Sea, a good example of water conservation going awry.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman@Angelus Nox post 182199
Well, he didn't sign the TPP. I guess that's something. YMMV on how bad or how good that is, but he did fulfill that promise. Granted, that was the easiest promise he could fulfill: to not sign a document.
...But he's apparently planning to add the Internet copyright stuff that was one of the, if not the, reason so many people didn't want the TPP in the first place to NAFTA.
Yes, Trump has even botched up "killing" TPP (which again only required that he not sign something) by trying to reincarnate one of the nastiest parts of it in NAFTA instead.
edited 10th Apr '17 10:55:06 PM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprisedI don't know about "fixing". Some researchers investigated that question a while ago in a simulation during a hypothetical 72 year long drought with only 50% of normal precipitation. Agriculture would suffer hevaily (to say nothing of the environment) and cities would get draconian water restrictions and a boom of desalination, but the state would not collapse or anything. Referred to here
I suppose you can build some giant desalination projects, but the costs would be high -150 billion dollars I've estimated for a story I've put together where such a project is a plot point.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanFor the cities, shifting to nuclear powered desalination would lead to a drop in water costs (because they're currently paying almost the entirety of the bill for infrastructure which mostly supplies farmers with water at below cost) That doesn't help the agricultural sector, but.. well, the less water intensive parts of it could also be supplied in that way too without breaking the economy. Not the people growing alfalfa - but for rice on upwards in terms of "Value of crop per cubic meter of water" it works. And this is an infinite supply of water - it all ends up back in the pacific eventually anyway, and dispersing the brine responsibly into pacific is simple enough engineering.
TPP was dead long before Trump came into office, and not because of the US but because other countries were hesitant. Same with the deal Obama wanted to work out with the EU. It is a little bit funny that the Americans think that they dodged a bullet in this regard, while the rest of the world is pretty much happy to not have American business practices entrench on their turfs.
The only thing Trump managed so far is funnelling money into his own pockets. Mar-o-Lago (stupid name, btw) and Trump Tower being the more obvious pathways, but there is also this little fact that Trump owns stocks in the company which makes the bombs he launched...and whose stock went through the roof in reaction to his actions last week.
I never said it was a worthwhile promise or that it had any real impact, though him not signing it was the final nail in the coffin. It was just an example of Trump actually keeping a campaign promise by not signing something he said he wouldn't sign.
Trump's stocks and holdings: Conflicts of interest? What conflicts of interest?
edited 11th Apr '17 3:40:15 AM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprisedI really don't know what to say to this.
https://thinkprogress.org/amp/p/425ca28de8da
The Koch Brothers and dark money
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dx9wKYOOZSc
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/interviews/a54178/dark-money-neil-gorsuch-jane-mayer/
The DNC is targeting traditionally republican Orange County in California, for midterm elections. They are hopeful because Clinton won in 2016, and they feel like it is a possible flip district
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-republican-orange-county-targets-20170409-story,amp.html
edited 11th Apr '17 5:59:06 AM by megaeliz
Sneak Peak at a Governor's Mansion up for Grabs (and yet another Litmus Test for Demographic Strategy)
2018 race for governor could revive Stacey Abrams-Brian Kemp feud
The two have long been on opposite sides of the debate over elections issues, with Kemp advocating for stricter voter ID laws to prevent what he called the threat of illegal voters casting ballots and Abrams contending those new rules could disenfranchise minorities, the disabled and the elderly.
But they clashed the sharpest during the 2014 after Abrams new voter registration group, the New Georgia Project, announced ambitious goals to register 800,000 minority voters within a decade.
The group said it submitted 86,000 voter registration forms during the 2014 cycle, but Kemp’s office argued that tens of thousands of applications were either missing or had not been properly submitted.
Abrams’ group and other advocates filed a lawsuit that sought to force Kemp to process about 40,000 of the files, triggering an escalating legal battle in the final days of the 2014 election.
That lawsuit was later dismissed; a judge ruled that there was no evidence that local officials were not processing eligible applications.
Kemp trumpeted the ruling as proof that the lawsuit was “frivolous” and “ridiculous” and evidence that left-leaning groups were trying to abuse the system. Abrams, meanwhile, vowed to continue to seek help from the courts.
her voter group supported a coalition that sued Kemp’s office again in 2016 over the cancellation of nearly 35,000 registration applications from 2013 to 2016 due to mismatched information.
That lawsuit was settled in February 2017, with the state agreeing to no longer reject applications that don’t exactly match identification information in state and federal databases.
The voter rights issues are likely to play a prominent role in both campaigns.
At Kemp’s kickoff earlier this month, he told cheering supporters that he fought “Georgia Democrats trying to undermine the integrity of the ballot and won.” And he cast himself as a defender of Georgia’s ballot from fraudsters seeking to vote.
And Abrams, too, appears likely to make voting rights a cornerstone of her campaign. She opposed legislation approved this session that she said could disenfranchise minority voters. And the New Georgia Project said it has thus far registered 200,000 minority voters – about one-quarter of its goal.
The possibility of a Democratic race for governor between two Staceys
But Abrams’ path was complicated last Wednesday night, when state Rep. Stacey Evans of Smyrna began making phone calls, letting friends know that she, too, was contemplating a run for governor. Evans, who is also an attorney, was first elected to the Legislature in 2010. Only five years later, Democrats in Washington tried to lure her into a contest against U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson. She refused.
...two of the brightest minds in the state Capitol — regardless of gender — would be vying to become the first woman to top a major party ticket in Georgia.
Race is part of the worry, as is always the case in a party built on a white-black alliance. Abrams, 43, is black. Evans, 38, is white. Voters of color dominate the Democratic primary, and demographics continue to list in their favor. But aside from non-partisan judicial contests, an African-American hasn’t won statewide office in Georgia since 2006, when Michael Thurmond was labor commissioner and Thurbert Baker was attorney general.
the real fight between Abrams and Evans would be strategic, a laboratory test of a tactical argument that has split every campaign since Sonny Perdue sent Democrats into exile – including Carter’s 2014 run for governor.
On one side are those who would return Democrats to dominance by luring back the working class whites swept away by Ronald Reagan, a statewide fight over the Confederate battle emblem, and – most recently – President Trump.
On the other side is the argument that says Georgia Democrats need to double down on the demographic shift already underway, by seeking out African-Americans, Hispanics and other voters of color who haven’t registered to vote – and driving them to the polls.
Abrams sits squarely in the latter camp. She’s the daughter of working class parents in Mississippi who both later became Methodist ministers after moving the family to Atlanta. They were big on education. Abrams graduated from Yale Law School.
Since arriving in the House 11 years ago, Abrams has been a driving force for increased voter registration. Her New Georgia Project has spent the last several years, and several million dollars, registering voters in Georgia.
The effectiveness of her effort has been criticized by some Democrats, who point out that registering voters is relatively easy. Getting them to the polls on or before Election Day is the heavy lift — and where their party has fallen short.
Evans has a wholly different biography. Born in Ringgold, Ga., she was the child of workers in a north Georgia carpet factory. She was the first in her family to go to college, then law school. Success as a litigator has given her financial independence.
Her emphasis in the Legislature has been on the extension of the HOPE scholarship to technical colleges across Georgia that churn out blue-collar workers. Evans’ approach to a statewide campaign for governor likely would retain that direction, seeking to bolster Democratic standing among those lower-wage earners outside metro Atlanta who stampeded to Trump last year.
Should she run, Evans and — on the Republican side — Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, might be the only candidates in a 2018 race for governor who could stand in front of a mobile home and say, “I used to live here.”
There's always a chance.
The Russian hacker arrested in Spain claimed to his wife that he had coded a virus that contributed to Trump's election win
. KrebsOnSecurity, however, believes that the hacker runs a spam botnet and paid multiple other virus coders to create fake antivirus ransomware.
Gorsuch takes the Oath(s): Trump: Supreme Court's Neil Gorsuch will be 'truly great'
"And I got it done in the first 100 days," Mr Trump quipped at a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden. "You think that's easy?"
Mr Gorsuch's appointment to the Supreme Court comes after a year-long political battle over filling the vacant seat.
At one point during Neil Gorsuch's Rose Garden swearing-in ceremony, Donald Trump thanked Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mc Connell "for all he did to make this achievement possible".
The thanks were certainly well earned. Mr Mc Connell quite possibly did more than any other US senator in history to ensure his party's nominee was confirmed to the Supreme Court.
He defied tradition in holding the late Justice Antonin Scalia's seat vacant for nearly a year so Democrat Barack Obama couldn't get his man on the court.
He then reversed more than half a century of precedent by abandoning the filibuster rule and allowing Mr Gorsuch a straight majority vote.
With Mr Gorsuch on the high court Mr Trump has fulfilled a campaign promise that was instrumental to his election last autumn.
The prospect of a liberal majority serving as the final arbiter of legal disputes was terrifying to many hard-core and evangelical conservatives who might have otherwise been reluctant to fall in line behind their party's unorthodox nominee.
Instead they voted for Mr Trump in droves - by a larger margin than they did Mitt Romney in 2012.
The deal is now done, and the rest of Mr Trump's presidency stretches before him. While the Gorsuch nomination unified Republicans of all stripes, the coming political battles will hardly be as clear-cut - and Mr Mc Connell may not be the hero for the president that he was today.
For many of those who voted for [Trump], securing a conservative judge on America's highest court was a top priority.
Six key cases Gorsuch could rule on:
- Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v Comer - A Missouri church denied state funding for a playground in a case concerning separation of church and state.
- Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission - A Colorado baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple.
- Peruta v San Diego - Does the second amendment grant California gun owners the right to carry a concealed weapon in public places?
- North Carolina v North Carolina NAACP - A North Carolina voting overhaul that was said to target African Americans "with almost surgical precision".
- Hernandez v Mesa - The case of a 15-year-old Mexican who was on the Mexican side of the border when he was shot dead in 2010 by a US border patrol agent.
Keith Olberman's new video, "The Media Fell for Trump's Syria Stunt"
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sGFel-fhGkw
edited 11th Apr '17 7:41:46 AM by megaeliz

Upstate trends less fundie though, though its general conservatism is undeniable.
Hugging a Vanillite will give you frostbite.