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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM

blkwhtrbbt The Dragon of the Eastern Sea from Doesn't take orders from Vladimir Putin Since: Aug, 2010 Relationship Status: I'm just a poor boy, nobody loves me
The Dragon of the Eastern Sea
#183501: Apr 18th 2017 at 2:07:20 PM

The topic of this thread is now this thread

Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for you
MadSkillz Destroyer of Worlds Since: Mar, 2013 Relationship Status: I only want you gone
Destroyer of Worlds
#183502: Apr 18th 2017 at 2:09:43 PM

We can't even heal the rift between ourselves.

I certainly hope the Dem party is better at it than we are.

BearyScary Since: Sep, 2010 Relationship Status: You spin me right round, baby
#183503: Apr 18th 2017 at 2:12:15 PM

[up][up]Threadception

Do not obey in advance.
Parable Since: Aug, 2009
#183504: Apr 18th 2017 at 2:13:39 PM

An oil platform off the California coast is being decommissioned.

Why is it that Trump considers ocean windfarms a blight but oil platforms are something everyone want so look at?

How's the special election in Georgia going?

MadSkillz Destroyer of Worlds Since: Mar, 2013 Relationship Status: I only want you gone
Destroyer of Worlds
#183505: Apr 18th 2017 at 2:18:53 PM

Well Ossoff needs 50 % so there's no run off. He'd be given a fight then.

I think I heard he's projected to get around 48 % which would mean he'd just miss it.

People are still voting atm

TacticalFox88 from USA Since: Nov, 2010 Relationship Status: Dating the Doctor
#183506: Apr 18th 2017 at 2:20:08 PM

If he gets over 50% lawd have mercy, Trump's twitter is gonna be full of salt.

New Survey coming this weekend!
CenturyEye Tell Me, Have You Seen the Yellow Sign? from I don't know where the Yith sent me this time... Since: Jan, 2017 Relationship Status: Having tea with Cthulhu
Tell Me, Have You Seen the Yellow Sign?
#183507: Apr 18th 2017 at 2:26:45 PM

No numbers yet (polls close at 7), but...

This'll be updated periodically: Live Updates in the Sixth

Updated at 5:00 p.m.

As we wait for polls to close, let’s break down what we know about the ballots that were cast ahead of time. Nearly 55,000 people voted early, mostly in-person but some absentee. And whereas early numbers showed Democratic front-runner Jon Ossoff with a notable lead, Republicans appeared to catch up as more early voting sites opened.

The Upshot’s Nate Cohn estimates that at the end of the day, early and absentee voters were “split evenly between the two parties, each at 41 percent, based on whether voters had last participated in a Democratic or Republican primary.” At the same time, he warns that relying on early voting numbers alone is likely misleading. For starters, Republican voters had far more candidates to sift through, so many may have held off on voting until today.

What we do know is that early numbers are good for gouging voter enthusiasm. It’s clear that Democrats are more riled up than they have been in years. As Cohn notes, their numbers are much higher than early voting in the 6th District midterms in 2014. The last time a special election was held in the same congressional district in 1999, it drew more than 79,200 voters.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, has now weighed in on the race for the sixth time in the last three days on Twitter.

  • Just learned that Jon @Ossoff, who is running for Congress in Georgia, doesn't even live in the district. Republicans, get out and vote!

Also:Why Kasim Reed is happy to see Jon Ossoff on Donald Trump’s mind

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed was on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” today, talking about the Sixth District and setting up some Democratic talking points for this evening.

Reed on President Donald Trump’s morning Twitter barrage aimed at the leading Democrat:

“Clearly, Jon Ossoff is on the president’s mind. And we think that’s a good thing….”

On the chances of Ossoff clearing the 50 percent bar and avoiding a June 20 runoff:

“The last trackers we’ve seen in the last 48 hours have him at about 45, 46 (percent) – so with a very strong GOTV turnout, we think it’s within reach. But no matter what, he’s going to win tonight…”

Asked what he meant by that, Reed framed the evening’s argument. Said Reed:

“A typical Republican should be winning this seat by 20, 24 points. And as we stand here now, Jon Ossoff is winning it with 45 to 46 percent of the vote….

“This district isn’t in the 70 most competitive districts in the United States. And right now, Jon Ossoff is winning it. So we’re not going to let the president or Republicans, who spent $4 million attacking Jon Ossoff, turn a win into a loss by raising the standards so high.”

edited 18th Apr '17 2:29:01 PM by CenturyEye

Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our lives
blkwhtrbbt The Dragon of the Eastern Sea from Doesn't take orders from Vladimir Putin Since: Aug, 2010 Relationship Status: I'm just a poor boy, nobody loves me
The Dragon of the Eastern Sea
#183508: Apr 18th 2017 at 2:50:27 PM

Have we already talked about how Jabba the Trump demanded to be driven around in a gold carriage during his next visit to England?

Disregarding the fact that only the Royal family is ever driven around in the gilded carriages, and even then, only rarely?

edited 18th Apr '17 2:50:57 PM by blkwhtrbbt

Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for you
MorningStar1337 The Encounter that ended the Dogma from 🤔 Since: Nov, 2012
TrashJack Confirmed Doomer from beyond the Despair Event Horizon (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
Confirmed Doomer
#183510: Apr 18th 2017 at 3:07:37 PM

[up][up] He deserves to ride in the carriage that contains manure, rabid wolverines, and rusty nails.

But until such time that the Royal Family decides to get a carriage like that, Trump can shut his big mouth, ride in an ordinary carriage, and like it.

edited 18th Apr '17 3:15:52 PM by TrashJack

"Cynic, n. — A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be." - The Devil's Dictionary
Rationalinsanity from Halifax, Canada Since: Aug, 2010 Relationship Status: It's complicated
#183511: Apr 18th 2017 at 3:10:40 PM

They might not even clear a carriage ride period, due to security concerns.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
pwiegle Cape Malleum Majorem from Nowhere Special Since: Sep, 2015 Relationship Status: Singularity
Cape Malleum Majorem
#183512: Apr 18th 2017 at 3:33:48 PM

Let him fucking walk, I say. Don't even let the taxis stop for him. (Knowing Trump, he'd probably stiff the cabbie for the fare, anyway.)

edited 18th Apr '17 3:35:36 PM by pwiegle

This Space Intentionally Left Blank.
math792d Since: Jun, 2011 Relationship Status: Drift compatible
#183513: Apr 18th 2017 at 3:36:00 PM

[up] It's the Midlands. If he walked on the streets, someone would smack him with a brick.

...Not that it wouldn't be cathartic as hell.

Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.
pwiegle Cape Malleum Majorem from Nowhere Special Since: Sep, 2015 Relationship Status: Singularity
Cape Malleum Majorem
#183514: Apr 18th 2017 at 3:39:37 PM

[up]All the more reason to make him take the Heel-and-Toe Express. Besides, he's a fat slob, and needs to work off some of that fast food he lives on...

This Space Intentionally Left Blank.
AngelusNox Warder of the damned from The guard of the gates of oblivion Since: Dec, 2014 Relationship Status: Married to the job
Warder of the damned
#183515: Apr 18th 2017 at 3:47:42 PM

No Mister Trump, I expect you to walk!

Inter arma enim silent leges
blkwhtrbbt The Dragon of the Eastern Sea from Doesn't take orders from Vladimir Putin Since: Aug, 2010 Relationship Status: I'm just a poor boy, nobody loves me
The Dragon of the Eastern Sea
#183517: Apr 18th 2017 at 3:55:07 PM

Or something else

Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for you
DeMarquis (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
#183518: Apr 18th 2017 at 3:56:20 PM

As regards systemic political corruption, Hacker and Pierson's book "Winner Take All Politics" and Lawrence Lessig's "Republic Lost" are both worth a read.

Lessig says: "Lessig emphasizes that he believes that individual members of Congress are no more personally corrupt than the average person, but he indicts instead a political system that now allows corrupting influences to distort the legislative process. Due to this systemic corruption, Congress no longer tracks the will of the people."

Hacker and Pierson: "They describe what they call “The Thirty Year War” in which federal policy has been used to ensure that the rewards of economic growth have been hyper-concentrated at the top of the socio-economic scale... Their answer to the “mystery” of why the United States has experienced such a marked concentration of wealth at the very top of the income ladder is the effect that money has had on the American political process."

The ultimate goal is to overturn Buckley vs Valeo and Citizens United, make political contributions transparent, and greatly reduce the influence of money on politics.

I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.
megaeliz Since: Mar, 2017
#183519: Apr 18th 2017 at 4:05:00 PM

Trump's idiotic border wall would leave some Americans on the Mexican side of the border.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/border-wall-could-leave-some-americans-mexican-side-n747141

edited 18th Apr '17 4:05:09 PM by megaeliz

MadSkillz Destroyer of Worlds Since: Mar, 2013 Relationship Status: I only want you gone
Destroyer of Worlds
#183520: Apr 18th 2017 at 4:19:44 PM

[up][up] Seems like books I'd be interested in.

And if anyone wants to read on the going ons within Hillary's campaign, I'd recommend "Shattered". It's by the same people that wrote HRC and have inside connections with Hillary's people.

The New York Times highly recommends it.

Here's the article on it today.

In their compelling new book, “Shattered,” the journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes write that Clinton’s loss suddenly made sense of all the reporting they had been doing for a year and a half — reporting that had turned up all sorts of “foreboding signs” that often seemed at odds, in real time, with indications that Clinton was the favorite to win. Although the Clinton campaign was widely covered, and many autopsies have been conducted in the last several months, the blow-by-blow details in “Shattered” — and the observations made here by campaign and Democratic Party insiders — are nothing less than devastating, sure to dismay not just her supporters but also everyone who cares about the outcome and momentous consequences of the election.

In fact, the portrait of the Clinton campaign that emerges from these pages is that of a Titanic-like disaster: an epic fail made up of a series of perverse and often avoidable missteps by an out-of-touch candidate and her strife-ridden staff that turned “a winnable race” into “another iceberg-seeking campaign ship.”

It’s the story of a wildly dysfunctional and “spirit-crushing” campaign that embraced a flawed strategy (based on flawed data) and that failed, repeatedly, to correct course. A passive-aggressive campaign that neglected to act on warning flares sent up by Democratic operatives on the ground in crucial swing states, and that ignored the advice of the candidate’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, and other Democratic Party elders, who argued that the campaign needed to work harder to persuade undecided and ambivalent voters (like working-class whites and millennials), instead of focusing so insistently on turning out core supporters.

The authors aren't anti-Hillary apparently since they wrote her highly sympathetic biopic HRC:

Allen and Parnes are the authors of a 2014 book, “H R C,” a largely sympathetic portrait of Clinton’s years as secretary of state, and this book reflects their access to longtime residents of Clinton’s circle. They interviewed more than a hundred sources on background — with the promise that none of the material they gathered would appear before the election — and while it’s clear that some of these people are spinning blame retroactively, many are surprisingly candid about the frustrations they experienced during the campaign.

Here are some parts:

There was a perfect storm of other factors, of course, that contributed to Clinton’s loss, including Russian meddling in the election to help elect Trump; the controversial decision by the F.B.I. director, James Comey, to send a letter to Congress about Clinton’s emails less than two weeks before Election Day; and the global wave of populist discontent with the status quo (signaled earlier in the year by the British “Brexit” vote) that helped fuel the rise of both Trump and Bernie Sanders. In a recent interview, Clinton added that she believed “misogyny played a role” in her loss.

The authors of “Shattered,” however, write that even some of her close friends and advisers think that Clinton “bears the blame for her defeat,” arguing that her actions before the campaign (setting up a private email server, becoming entangled in the Clinton Foundation, giving speeches to Wall Street banks) “hamstrung her own chances so badly that she couldn’t recover,” ensuring that she could not “cast herself as anything but a lifelong insider when so much of the country had lost faith in its institutions.” As described in “Shattered,” Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook — who centered the Clinton operation on data analytics (information about voters, given to him by number crunchers) as opposed to more old-fashioned methods of polling, knocking on doors and trying to persuade undecideds — made one strategic mistake after another, but was kept on by Clinton, despite her own misgivings.

These problems were not corrected in the race against Trump. Allen and Parnes report that Donna Brazile, the Democratic National Committee chairwoman, was worried in early October about the lack of ground forces in major swing states, and that Mook had “declined to use pollsters to track voter preferences in the final three weeks of the campaign,” despite pleas from advisers in crucial states.

Here's an interesting part about Sanders(he wasn't sure about running):

Sen. Bernie Sanders, the independent Vermont senator who made a strong push against Clinton during the Democratic primaries, wanted someone to run to the left of Clinton. It's no secret that he wasn't a fan of Clinton's policy stances or her ties to big banks.

And that's how he eventually landed in a meeting with Obama aide Alyssa Mastromonaco.

"I'm not sure sure about this," Sanders told her in October 2014, about seven months before he announced his candidacy. "A lot of people have told me I should run."

"You should only do it if your heart is in it," Mastromonaco replied. "And you shouldn't do it as an issue candidate."

When he wondered if there was a place for him in the race, she said, "I think there's a place for everybody. I don't think it's good for Democrats if there's no challenge in the primaries."

DeMarquis (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
#183521: Apr 18th 2017 at 4:30:15 PM

"I don't think it's good for Democrats if there's no challenge in the primaries."

Amen to that.

I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.
MadSkillz Destroyer of Worlds Since: Mar, 2013 Relationship Status: I only want you gone
Destroyer of Worlds
#183522: Apr 18th 2017 at 4:31:00 PM

Here's a better article on it that makes me feel a bit more sympathetic for her.

Far from a juggernaut, the campaign we see in these pages is plagued with division, unease and anxiety practically from the outset. When things go right, it only means they are soon to go terribly wrong. Win a primary, lose a caucus. Quash a rumor, see three more go viral. Close one wound and find another torn open again.

Among those wounds, the first cut is the deepest. The email stories that began in March 2015 never go away. First, it's Clinton's own private server, then the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the endless email dump stolen from campaign chairman John Podesta. Email becomes the cyber-incubus the campaign cannot shed.

Whether anyone with Trump connections was colluding or complicit in the Wiki Leaks-Russian caper or not, the continual media focus on email issues could scarcely have been more convenient for the Trump campaign.

The authors also see lasting damage inflicted by her Democratic-primary rival Bernie Sanders' challenge from the left. Sanders' rather quixotic campaign not only tested Clinton, it played perfectly into Trump's own critique of "crooked Hillary" and his tactic of tying her to globalism and Wall Street.

"For both sides, Hillary was the perfect symbol of everything that was wrong with America," the authors conclude. "At times, Trump and Sanders would act as the right and left speakers of a stereo blaring a chorus on repeat: Hillary's a corrupt insider who has helped rig the political and economic systems in favor of the powerful."

But in the end, Allen and Parnes contend, the worst blows Clinton suffered were self-inflicted. If the controversies and corruption memes came to define her, they write, it was largely because she never managed to define herself.

The Clinton we see here seems uniquely qualified for the highest office and yet acutely ill-suited to winning it. Something about her nature, at its best and its worst, continually inhibits her. Her struggle to escape her caricature only contributes to it.

Parable Since: Aug, 2009
#183523: Apr 18th 2017 at 4:48:13 PM

The carrier strike force "Armada" Trump blustered about that was supposed to warn off North Korea is apparently still in Australia.

TacticalFox88 from USA Since: Nov, 2010 Relationship Status: Dating the Doctor
#183524: Apr 18th 2017 at 5:03:02 PM

You know, as much as I agree that Clinton made a lot of mistakes as the article points out (and honestly, her campaign up until BEFORE the Convention was practically flawless and on cruise control, considering she crushed Bernie with kid gloves and his slander) there is still this subtle, yet unmistakable form of gas lighting from all these postmortems about the 2016 election.

With the exception of a few journalists I can count on two hands, there has been an absolutely disgusting amount of revisionist history, trying to erase Hillary's history, her strengths, her accomplishments, her approval ratings, her knowledge of policy, her focus on intersectionality, her willingness to keep it real and call Trump voters for the pieces of shit that they are.

Not only the above, there also seems to be an effort to not just dismiss the grotesque sexism and double standards but to pretend that they were never a factor at all! Do you know how many of her supporters (myself included) had to stay quiet during the primary because they didn't want to be harassed on social media by bumbling fools who supported both Bernie and Trump? We really have to insist that she's some "shitty" candidate because to do that it keeps the others from admitting fault of having fallen for Russian propaganda, fake news, the meddling of James Comey, and Donald Trump's explicit appeal to white supremacy and racism.

So, instead they keep asking us to ignore the fact that this election the country showed its ass on what it thinks of women and people of color, by electing someone who admitted on tape to sexual assault and has numerous rumors of other sexual misconduct to numerous to name.

They want us to ignore that Trump egged on his supporters at rallies where they wanted to "Lock Her up", or had blatant caricatures of Clinton with sexist overtones. Trump himself called her a "nasty" woman. Then he accused HER of playing the woman card. And the media lapped that shit up.

And speaking of the media, fuck them too. They gave nearly two billion in free advertising to this clown because it was good for ratings and constantly despite him flashing a neon sign saying "Hey, I'm racist! " they still tried to portray them in false equivalence. The moment she lost, all of these mostly white men wrote all these op-eds saying the Democrats need to abandon identity politics, at a time when identity in and of itself is under attack and will be under attack until Trump (and quite frankly the rest of the GOP) is removed from power.

But despite all of that, we're just being asked to accept that she's just a terrible flawed candidate, and Bernie would've won! despite the fact that she won the popular vote and got more votes than any other man NOT named Obama in our history.

That work she did for the C Hildren's Defense Fund? Forgotten.

When she went undercover after graduating college to uncover racist policies by schools? Forget it she's a Goldwater girl after all.

Allowing Trans people to change their Genders on Passports at the State Department? Nah, she didn't endorse Gay Marriage until 2013 so it doesn't count.

The work and phone calls she made to various Senators and Congressman to get the ACA passed DESPITE the fact that she had her hands full around the world? Hillary doesn't want a single payer so she must be against UHC, right?

The OP Ed she wrote for the NYT two years before the financial crisis, showing that the system was in danger of collapsing? She's a Wall Street shill, so I guess it doesn't matter, no?

And there are countless more examples. And they want us to "get over it". Here's what I have to say to that:

Fuck.

You.

From the bottom of my heart.

edited 18th Apr '17 5:03:36 PM by TacticalFox88

New Survey coming this weekend!
Fourthspartan56 from Georgia, US Since: Oct, 2016 Relationship Status: THIS CONCEPT OF 'WUV' CONFUSES AND INFURIATES US!
#183525: Apr 18th 2017 at 5:05:04 PM

[up] [awesome]

Well said, this encapsulates my thoughts exactly.

"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang

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