Starker on 26/10/2020 at 06:00
Not to mention those campaign chairs of Lord Dampnut who were convicted of child sex trafficking, his friend Epstein who his labour secretary helped get off, and his own barging into the dressing rooms of teenage beauty pageant contestants.
The way this is going, the next thing we find out he was actually born in Kenya.
heywood on 26/10/2020 at 16:28
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
I still find it depressing that the Democrats would rather keep the status quo where the Republicans get to be in power (doing massive damage to the country) for roughly half of the time, rather than risking another party having a chance by actually fixing the completely broken electoral system.
The problem is that the electoral college is specified by the Constitution, and the Constitution was written to make it hard to change. To move a proposed amendment forward to the ratification process, you either need 2/3 vote of both the US House and Senate, or petition by the legislatures of 2/3 of the states. And then 3/4 of the states need to ratify it. It's a very high bar. Right now, the electoral college is perceived to favor Republicans, so states under Republican control are unlikely to ratify a change. On top of that, most of the less populous (smaller or rural) states prefer the electoral college because it allows them to use a winner-take-all system, which amplifies their influence on the election. They fear that with a national popular vote, there would be no reason for candidates to pay attention to them because they wouldn't have any influence on the outcome. The same motivation is why we have an oddly long and drawn out primary campaign season for Presidential elections.
Quote:
Ireland, by some strange and happy accident, has one of the best electoral systems in the world: the single transferable vote. In each election, you can vote for as many candidates as you want, in order of preference, and if your first choice is eliminated, your vote instead goes to your second, and so on down the list.
In the case of the USA, that would effectively mean that the vast majority of the third-party votes would instead go to Democrats, as the lesser of the two remaining evils chosen as the second choice of those who want third parties like the Greens.
But once they head down that path, there's always a chance that one of those third parties might actually gain significant ground, because voting for them is no longer shooting yourself in the foot if you don't want the Republicans to get into power.
We have one state right now, Maine, who uses the ranked choice/single transferable vote system for state and federal elections
except for President. There's also a ballot initiative for ranked choice voting in Massachusetts which is up for a vote this Nov. I'm not sure whether it will pass, because there's a lot of people undecided. There was also a petition in California this year, but it didn't get enough signatures to make the ballot. I think it's a good idea and hope it gains traction.
Starker on 26/10/2020 at 21:49
And the time window for the prophesised mass arrests grows ever smaller.
Quote:
(
https://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/crim/629/)
[...]
The number of prosecutions for child sex trafficking has significantly declined during the Trump Administration, after climbing steadily during the Obama years. Prosecutions reached a peak of 273 and 277 in FY 2016 and FY 2017, respectively. Since then, the number of cases dipped to 221 in FY 2018, and then continued to decline to less than 200 in FYs 2019 and 2020. See Figure 1. (See also Table 1 at the end of the report.)
Criminal referrals to U.S. Attorney offices during this entire period are substantially larger than those federal prosecutors decide to file in court. Comparing the last three presidential admin*istrations, not only were the number of prosecutions higher during the Obama years, but the proportion of criminal referrals for child sex trafficking on which charges were brought was also higher. During the Bush Administration, 46 percent of criminal referrals were prosecuted. During the Obama Administration, that proportion increased to 49 percent. During the Trump Administration, prosecutors chose to file charges in 43 percent of cases—a notable decline from both the Obama and Bush years. See Figure 2.
[...]
heywood on 26/10/2020 at 21:56
Quote Posted by demagogue
Re: third party candidates, in 1992 Ross Perot's vote under the Reform Party was considered very relevant to GHW Bush's loss. I actually did my undergrad thesis on Perot voters in that election, so I remember crunching the numbers district by district and demographic by demographic. (He was already forgotten by the time of his 1996 campaign, and who even remembers now that Trump was the 2000 Reform Party candidate?)
What's interesting about that election is that it was a kind of trial run for the 2016 election, once you realize that Trump actually is the third party candidate that happened to coop an entire mainstream party and drag it (kicking and screaming by its establishment) into the third party camp. He basically lifted the entire Reform Party platform and made it into the GOP's.
That makes for one of the funnier paradoxes where Republican voters tend to accuse
actual Republicans as RINOs (Republican in name only) because their own party is itself RINO, and anyone that was still an actual Republican was booted out.
Who is to say who the actual Republicans are? The Lincoln Project people certainly aren't. The party has changed a lot since I was a Teen Age Republican in the 1980s trying to get GHWB elected. Back then, I was already feeling uneasy in the party because the Christian right was trying to pull the party platform and priorities to the right of where Reagan had set them, and certainly to the right of where I wanted them to be on social issues. 1992 was an insurrection, and not just because of the Reform Party. Bush's top challenger for the nomination was Pat Buchanan, and even David Duke got 100k+ primary votes. You're absolutely right that it was a trial run for 2016. Except Trump turned out to be more like Pat Buchanan than Ross Perot.
The "Contract with America" was significant in that it brought most of the Reform Party supporters back into the Republican party, resulting in the 1994 mid-term landslide. That election also precipitated a move to the right by the Democratic party establishment. Around the same time, conservative talk radio became a factor driving the unification of the Republican party around a common disdain for the Clinton administration. It helped maintain party unity, but it was also heavily critical of moderates, compromisers, and blue state liberal Republicans. That's when I first heard the term RINO and felt a movement towards blind ideology in the party.
In 2000, the economy was soaring, we survived Y2K and an Asian financial crisis, and everything looked so optimistic. There wasn't much reason to rock the vote and go against the establishment. By 2004 we were in a war and had a 9/11 hangover. In 2008, the religious conservatives split their vote between Huckabee (in the South) and Romney (in the North and West), giving the nomination to John McCain. McCain found himself dealing with a populist uprising and tried to reel it in by nominating Palin. Obviously that didn't work, and the result was a second insurgency in the form of the Tea Party movement. Ever since then, the Republican party has been effectively dominated by a coalition of religious conservatives and right populist nutjobs.
In hindsight, I don't think Trump stole the party in 2016. He just recognized where the party already was. The two candidates who were most representative of the party in 2016 were Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. I admired John Kasich's run. But he was the last of the Contract with America guys and the party has moved on. I hoped Trump would be less ideologically Republican and more pragmatist given his history with the Reform party, his donations to Democratic politicians throughout his career, his talk about infrastructure projects, etc. It's clear that I was wrong. He epitomizes the 21st century Republican party.
Gryzemuis on 26/10/2020 at 22:40
Did I hear correctly? During an interview, Biden could not remember Trump's name? He called him George, even.
Jezus fucking Christ ...
Starker on 27/10/2020 at 06:35
Grimms' tales just got an update:
[video=youtube;8QGat1WxC14]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QGat1WxC14[/video]
Starker on 27/10/2020 at 10:04
Why contain it? Let it spill over into the schools and churches. Let the bodies pile up in the streets. In the end, they'll beg us to save them.
lowenz on 27/10/2020 at 18:13
Quote Posted by Starker
Why contain it? Let it spill over into the schools and churches. Let the bodies pile up in the streets. In the end, they'll beg us to save them.
Best line ever, right? :D
20 years passed so fast.....
