NEW — The Trump campaign spent nearly half a million dollars on fireworks. https://t.co/fZG0rBPMAg
— Sam Stein (@samstein) September 22, 2020
Literal fireworks! “Displays of grandeur & petty media feuds!”
The Squatter-in-Chief and his minions are busy stealing everything but the copper plumbing out of the White House walls, but that’s *not* the mark of a campaign that expects to cruise to reelection. Don’t let the Very Serious Media Village Idiots and the professional Dems in disarray! doomcasters discourage you into premature surrender.
The idea that the Republican party will move heaven and earth to keep Trump in power despite a clear landslide defeat hinges a lot on Mitch McConnell wanting to keep groveling to a reality TV star after he's already gotten his three supreme court justices.
— Syndicalist Weedle Collective (@Weedledouble) September 23, 2020
“According to sources… “
This isn't going to work, but it shows that he doesn't plan on rigging votes or doing a coup. He knows he's going to lose so he's coming up with harebrained schemes like these. https://t.co/fd4vINLhI4
— Tentin Quarantino (@agraybee) September 23, 2020
Remember when Trump floated delaying the election and then every Republican from Mitch McConnell on down said "absolutely not." This is going to be that all over again.
— Tentin Quarantino (@agraybee) September 23, 2020
Here's what we know are some of Trump's plans for victory:
-Make the mail late
-Call Biden's win fake
-Maybe something with courts?
-Convince state legislators to just, you know, don't let Biden win, or something.Does this sound like a guy who thinks he's winning?
— Tentin Quarantino (@agraybee) September 23, 2020
Somehow the oral history of this became "Gore won but the Supreme Court overturned it." The Supreme Court stopped the recount on the grounds that different counties having their own recount rules violated equal protection. Bush won by 537 votes. This isn't a workable formula.
— Tentin Quarantino (@agraybee) September 23, 2020
Super important!! The vast, vast majority of the time when stuff goes wrong with elections, there is not widespread fraud and things are not being “rigged” — this year will be challenging no matter what, and it’s key to keep that in focus with viral posts about voting/elections https://t.co/4CiRERd9Dl
— Grace Panetta (@grace_panetta) September 23, 2020
cain
My mom called me in a panic about all this. Trump is trying to get his way, but you know – the whole loyalty strikes a cord with these assholes. They want a king.
It makes me angry when you know these people are all about the constitution and whatever, but they will be the first to ditch it. Just like they ditch the bible on a regular basis. They are just words.
Everything conservatives brag about standing for honor, truth, and integrity are all lies.
Amir Khalid
No, but let’s not forget that a cornered animal can be dangerous.
TS (the original)
@cain:
As soon as Obama was elected they 100% ditched the concept of Family Values. The only value conservatives have it the “right to rule” value.
Anne Laurie
@cain: They want us to panic (& not vote, or at the very least give them some figleaf to ‘invalidate’ our votes).
Our (obsessively attentive to politics peoples’) job is to highlight how much of this is bullshit, and to keep our less-plugged-in fellow Dems from panicking.
So, good for you, calming your mom down!
Chris Johnson
Finally, a political thread that can blow up properly. I never seem to get to a fresh thread. Ha! Now I can blow off some steam and go to bed like the codger I am.
That’s literal. I saw the video of it. His answer to ‘how will you guarantee a peaceful transfer of power’ is ‘come and get me, coppers!’
Ask him that again. Feed him more rope. He is NOT supposed to say shit like that, his tyrant license will be fuckin’ revoked, the dumbshit.
You’re not supposed to say ‘get rid of the ballots, and then there will not BE a transfer of power, there’ll be a continuation’. Like fucking hell there will be. Anyone asked the military, who swear to the Constitution, what they think about that? Just because shit-for-brains cares about nobody and nothing doesn’t mean every other fucking person in the country is as brain-damaged as he is.
I am SO PISSED OFF and it seems really unreasonable. Breonna Taylor protestors have way more to be outraged at than me. But there’s something personal about it: because I went to early vote, but they’re not doing it that way. I’m getting mailed a ballot. I’m supposed to send it back, by mail. And I intend to do just that, because it is smarter and it’ll work. And I saw dudes seemingly guarding a box, at town offices, and I was rattled. Tried to figure out if they were wingnuts trying to intimidate people… and on the way out I saw the box, all red-white-and-blue, and they spoke to me again, and I understood. Yeah, they’re some kind of guards. One wore a mask and one did not wear a mask.
This is Vermont. I think chances are good that they are legit and not Trumpists, but I also think it’s wise of them to be there. In case some Trumpist thinks it’s clever to have a box full of liberal votes disappear.
But I had to think about it. I had to trust.
And now this?
SO pissed off at Trump right now. He had better hope that the Republicans pull him up short, even if they are in fear of their life from Russian poisoning and random murders on US soil (or indeed MAGA murderers). Because if he continues in this way, I’ll willingly die to take my country back, and I am pretty sure I know at least one Vermont redneck huntin’ dude who can set me up with certain tools and training, and I don’t think I will be alone.
And the thing about being this kind of outraged but not a hysterical MAGA shithead? Your boat don’t sink, and you are more disciplined and levelheaded, and when shit goes down I think you are the better soldier. I guess we’ll see.
‘get rid of the ballots’, HELL.
phdesmond
i wish i could share tentin quarantino’s optimism. sounds like a plan to steal three whole states by having the legislators send their own passel of electors to washington for the big electoral college vote. or whatever the procedure is.
Major Major Major Major
Did not read that Atlantic article everybody was in a tizzy over… will not read it, I get the idea.
Here, have a joke
Yutsano
@cain:
Adjusted. The Republicans don’t care about the medium. As long as they get to make the rules and can therefore give their paymasters even more money, power, and control, they will use whatever means are necessary to ensure that.
Their timing sucks. The country is less moving towards the left over lurching. Minority rule won’t be tolerated for long. If the Republicans get permanently relegated to the hinterlands or better yet split because of QAnon I shan’t shed any tears.
sanjeevs
I would feel more confident if the country hadn’t been failed by every Republican – the Senators, the judges, Mueller, Rosenstein etc etc.
Comey and the (almost exclusively Republican) FBI top echelon who handed Trump the last election get vilified by Trump and his supporters for it and the Republicans STILL line up to back Trump
Jay
Leto
Here, have some more good news (via WaPo): Judge orders Eric Trump to meet with N.Y. attorney general’s investigators by Oct. 7
Leto
@Jay: Well I’m glad Kay, earlier this morning in one of the morning threads, say that we have nothing to fear from these people. Just because they’re doing this, setting up check points stopping people fleeing fires, have tacit support from law enforcement… yup, no worries here.
Anne Laurie
They’re loyal to the vehicle (figurehead), not to the individual. Trump has pretty clearly outlasted his usefulness as a vehicle; McConnell and his venal cronies are already signalling that, once Trump inevitably loses, they’ll hunker down as a guerilla force fighting Biden until they can find the next figurehead.
Jay
Jay
@Chris Johnson:
push comes to shove, I know a few guys who can help.
Hell, I can help.
prostratedragon
A former AAG has some ideas about how we citizens can respond to that guy’s threat. Foremost to me is to realize
Joshua A. Geltzer’s thread
Rawstory summary
[Edited for full name]
Jay
@Leto:
you forgot to add in “with the support of Cops”,….
because most of them are cosplay , most, but not all ppl have
Nothing to fear from them, because they will never encounter them.
Brachiator
@Amir Khalid:
Does this sound like a guy who thinks he’s winning?
This is true, and Trump can be really vicious. But he doesn’t have much to back up his growl, and he depends on the gullible and the venal to protect him.
And what is starting to hurt him is that he is too stupid to adapt or to run away and regroup. His lies and bullcrap look more obvious and more desperate. And Biden’s calm demeanor rattles him. Being self-assured is not the same thing as being sleepy.
And with early voting underway Trump has less time than he thinks to cause any trouble.
Kattails
So he spent half a million on fireworks and how many mils of campaign money on fighting off assorted lawsuits? Gotta say, the “what we know about Trump’s plans for victory” set is rather comforting in a quirky way. The guy has fucked up virtually every bloody thing he’s ever touched, and this is infinitely more complicated than any of them. The RVAT twitter feed can be interesting. One guy claimed he did not vote for DT in 2016 because, having worked in NYC real estate, he knew Trump to be both stupid and mean. Another basically said “we Republicans broke this, it’s up to us to fix it.”
@cain: large sign on a fence near me: “Trump 2020 no more bullshit”– I mean, how can anyone put this on a 4 x 6′ sign and not die of embarrassment? I am so tempted to spend my evenings leaving grossly insulting messages on the phones of every cowardly, hypocritical Republican senator and insult their staff while I’m at it. Something like, “I wish I could be sorry for leaving this to a lackey rather than directly in the ear of the intended recipient, but anyone who can work with such an asshole can’t have a functioning conscience so why should I bother to engage mine?” Purely for gratification, otherwise a waste of time.
Jay
HumboldtBlue
@phdesmond:
I fear they’re going to steal Wisconsin Georgia and Florida.
I have little confidence in the judiciary despite the firewall of state control of election results.
Jean
@Anne Laurie: This is exactly what Mr. J says–It’s all bullshit and he doesn’t want to hear any more about it. We are going to vote early in person on Friday in VA and get our flu shots. We are just taking one day at a time and getting stuff done.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
Blowing $500,000 is bound to make the Republican moneybags (moneybagses) happy…
I wonder when—or even if—Republicans are ever going to wake up and see that this guy and his collection of grifty hangers-on don’t really have the best interests of the party at heart.
craigie
It would be nice to believe that, but if it were really true, they wouldn’t have said “this isn’t a precedent, it’s a one-time deal.” They stopped the recount because they wanted Bush to be President, full stop.
Kattails
@Chris Johnson: JHC, and you’re in VERMONT? I’m next door, (NH), maybe I need to get out more–guards on the mailboxes to protect from what, cows? Chipmunks? Admittedly there’s been quite an explosion of them this summer but… I hadn’t noticed that you were declared an anarchist zone or whatever.
prostratedragon
Wise counsel from Asha Rangappa
Major Major Major Major
And here’s a good sanity check thread on the Atlantic article. https://twitter.com/teri_kanefield/status/1308851838406610945?s=21
Chris Johnson
@Jay: Remember not to become the baddies. I think that’s possible. It’ll probably mean letting some of the Republicans get away due to them claiming, much like postwar Nazis, that they didn’t really mean it and were just following orders and didn’t know what was going on.
Tonight’s Lincoln Project podcast was LIT. They had a guy on who had been Homeland Security chief of staff, working directly in the White House with Mattis etc. during the time that Mattis quit.
Nobody here would be surprised at the shit he revealed, or that the guy really didn’t want to be thought of as one of history’s monsters. It was interesting to see that the Lincoln folks were pushing him hard, trying to see if they could use him to get OTHER higher-ups to break and come on the show and reveal what they knew.
Trump has been sincerely ‘get rid of judges’ for some time and they humored him. I’m not sure how recently he became ‘get rid of BALLOTS’ which for some would be crossing a line, because for some time he would have believed he was winning bigly. So that might be just the last couple days.
Make him double down on that one, BEFORE the election. It splits the Republican party, even if the elected ones genuinely believe they will all be murdered by QAnons if they break from Trump.
And maybe they would. And so fucking what? You made this, motherfuckers. Die, or go into witness protection. The terrorists you have groomed and made are hysterical, stupid, and disorganized, and you’re not in as much danger as you would be if you, for instance, crossed the mob.
Or if you continued to back Trump’s plays, which would mean you had crossed US.
Lotta people with American liberties who aren’t being watched by the feds, who aren’t wearing black skins or breasts or whatever, who have nice button down shirts to wear, who have friends and loved ones at risk or dead from the MAGA threat. If you are really serious about this sort of thing you do NOT cosplay like a super-soldier and parade around intimidating people with your AR-15. You would do something else, that you can do because nobody knows to watch out for you.
Just a thought.
And we need to make most of our thoughts be about rebuilding society and the expectations of our country, because we can’t go on this way. We MUST do better or we’re basically Rwanda. Rule of law absolutely must return. Even if it costs us some vengeance, rule of law is more important.
Jay
@prostratedragon:
Omnes Omnibus
@Jay: @Jay: Come the fuck on, if you are going to spam every late thread with tweets, could you, at least, use different ones?
Chris Johnson
@Kattails: No, I went to town offices. There were two guys, not obviously armed but kinda scruffy militia or workmen types, in the lobby. And they spoke to me, both when I came in and when I headed out. And on the way out (OF town offices) I saw there was a box that looked just like what you’d use for a ballot drop box. Not a mailbox, a lil red-white-and-blue box that was the sort of thing you’d use for ballots, right in the lobby. It’s possible the guys would have directed me to this if I’d come bearing a ballot to vote. Since I didn’t have one, no dice.
Still don’t want to use that method, though, especially with the two guys watching it. That said, I can picture some assholes grabbing the box, so it’s a damn good idea for SOMEONE to be watching it. It looked like one guy without a mask and one guy who immediately pulled up a ‘turtleneck’ type mask as soon as I showed up wearing a mask. The guy without mask was behind a counter.
Our town offices double as a movie theater’s lobby. He was behind the popcorn counter :)
Marcopolo
This in from the dude who is tracking actual ballots cast by going to state election sites & tabulating their info as it is put up:
It’s a small data point but this is after only 6 days of early voting in VA. I’m beginning to think this will be a high turn out election.
glyph2112
I am as depressed as everyone in this online community. And I got to thinking, if we can’t beat Trump right now given the every immoral, disgusting, crooked thing he has done in office, how will we ever win an election.
I took a breath and thought, we are a nation that elected Obama twice. We have sane people. Even in 2016 our side had more votes. WE HAVE MORE VOTES! And logically, I can see the perfect storm that had to happen to get Trump elected. But since then, he has only lost support. Other than his batshit crazy base, I can not think of a single demographic that he will be able to flip.
People who had Clinton fatigue, will vote blue; people who stayed home since Hillary had it in the bag, will show up and vote blue; Minorities who weren’t excited for Hillary as they were for Obama, will get out and vote blue; people who thought Trump would pivot, will vote blue; Conservatives who truly believe in the constitution and rule of law, will vote Biden; Armed forces who normally vote republican, many will vote Biden due to Trumps comments.
Trump has only his loyal cultists. So ya, we show up, we have the votes. But of course the ratfvcking. We must be vigilant but still, Trump is no genius nor are the people surrounding him the cream of the crop. They managed to screw up a rally in Tulsa, somehow these geniuses are going to orchestrate an election that takes probably hundreds of thousands of people to perform?
And there comes a point where republicans will carry his water, but how many are willing to commit crimes for him? Who is willing to go to jail for him? If he tries to stay in power after the election, how many of the republicans are going to risk treason to support him? How many of the Secret Service, FBI, Military Generals would really support using force to keep him in power?
Trump is all bluster. Remember the Government shutdown where he caved. He says whatever his pea brain spits out to bolster his tiny ego.
Anyway, thats’ been gnawing at me for weeks. I try to stay positive but in the end it’s depressing when you know the stakes and you can’t be sure.
HumboldtBlue
“let ol’ Trixie sit up front…”
JaySinWA
@Omnes Omnibus: You may have put the hex on him, posting code instead of links.https://balloon-juice.com/2020/09/23/late-night-open-thread-the-gang-that-couldnt-loot-straight/#comment-786978
Of course he may clean it up before the timeout. Damn I am getting tired of our Canadian brother.
Omnes Omnibus
@JaySinWA: Well, it was different if still annoying.
Mallard Filmore
@Chris Johnson:
Not such a long shot. Going “herd immunity” will result in a body count in the millions, somewhere between Pol Pot and the Nazi Holocaust.
Jay
@Jay:
srry, f’d up visual and text again.
tell me again how this is a smart phone and autocorrect is my “friend”,….
frosty
@HumboldtBlue: Rs will win GA and FL without stealing, I’ve already written them off. If they win WI it will be matched by Ds winning AZ. Go play with 270toWin. Biden has a lot more ways of winning than Trump does.
prostratedragon
@Marcopolo: My fantasy is 100 million for Biden; assumes that we can get 40 million of the 100 million who did not vote in 2016. However, I’d settle for 75-80 million, and my over/under is somewhere in there. I think 62 million might be the other one’s highwater mark. Bet no one suspected I was such an optimist.
Morzer
@Jay: Let’s just call them terrorists who hate Americans because of our freedoms.
mrmoshpotato
Ahhh….the past 40+ years.
Redshift
@Marcopolo: More people have requested absentee ballots in Virginia than the number who voted in 2016.
frosty
@Omnes Omnibus: Thank you, my feelings as well.
Ruckus
@cain:
This is the most succinct description of conservatives and/or the republican party.
They have not been for governance for the past at least 50 yrs. They are for total self interest and money. The concept of anything, anyone else does not exist on their timelines. All their bullshit is to hide/disguise/misdirect their true end. Even turtle’s packing the SC is to help them in dismantling the government so they can remain in power and steal.
Jay
@Omnes Omnibus:
ah, asshole has to stay true to form and asshole,
got it.
I understand, you never have technical difficulties, because you never link, embed, add, you just spend all your time here, shitting on other posters.
You must have a wonderful life.
HumboldtBlue
@frosty:
Your words and suggestions are a comfort.
I am skeptical.
Omnes Omnibus
@Jay: Whoosh, there goes my point right past your head.
I’m no George Bailey, but my life isn’t too bad. Thanks.
Redshift
@Major Major Major Major: I thought that was a good one, too. One of the things it makes clear, though not on so many words, is that the original article conflates that fact that state legislatures set procedures for choosing electors with the idea that they can just directly choose electors.
The reality is they can’t just vote to name some electors, they have to vote to change the law about choosing electors, which is a much bigger hurdle for a GOP legislature with a Dem governor.
Chris Johnson
@Mallard Filmore: Which is why NOT to jump up and down stomping your little feet and saying MAGA-like threatening things. If you’re really serious, maybe you say nothing at all.
I know some rightwingers, where I visited their house. Wasn’t the first time I’d seen an AR15 or whatever the things are, but it did startle me. They did not talk about this stuff, and I do not tell people which friend it was where I saw this… and I am not entirely sure where they ended up on the spectrum, or even whether the couple’s views exactly align with each other. They could be MAGAs. They could be Lincoln Project types. If they are the latter, the MAGAs should be really really fucking scared, and it’s possible the MAGAs will never even see where these folks were hidden. I’ve got another friend who’s a hunter, deer by preference, and I KNOW he is not a MAGA because he’s been seen on Facebook cursing out the President in a subdued way.
Don’t be drawn into a posturing contest with MAGAs and QAnons. Treat it as, they choose to be terrorists while also lighting off fireworks and accompanying themselves with brass bands. It’s a good model of how not to act. Such things only work when people are not too backed into a corner. We are now officially too cornered to flee, and too pissed off to flinch.
When Ireland had the Troubles, at least they weren’t obsessively infecting themselves with COVID and parading down the street. If we do have civil war, it’ll be very painful. For them.
Marcopolo
It’s my bedtime, but for everyone fretting right now. The election is happening. Folks are voting. Take all that nervous energy and use it to encourage everyone you know to get out and vote. Friends, family, neighbors, co-workers, old school mates. Make calls, write emails, send texts. I did my first group GOTV email to my circle of friends this morning (voting started here yesterday) & pretty quickly got several replies: “we just got our ballots in the mail & are filling them out today” “we plan to go vote in-person absentee Friday” “should I be concerned if I haven’t gotten my ballot in the mail.” It was so nicely weird cause these folks usually ignore the group “political” emails I send out every few weeks.
Honestly, unless you are lawyer affiliated with a campaign (or other voting rights/election protection group) spending time & energy worrying about the end of our democracy when you can actually be positively engaged in its defense seems like a wasted opportunity. Anyway, my 2 cents.
Finally if you truly have no idea what to do go to Swing Left & see what’s happening near your zip.
Eljai
@glyph2112: The stakes are high and the trauma of 2016 hangs in the air. Dump is a narcissist and narcissists want to keep people in a state of trauma because it’s harder to focus when you’re traumatized. But you’re right — he is all bluster. He didn’t win because he’s smart or particularly savvy. Not only is he not invincible — he’s a coward who is absolutely terrified right now. And all the energy and momentum is on our side.
Jay
@Morzer:
yurp, they use the symbology of two different wars, they lost to the US.
Heywood J.
I wish I had that Quarantino guy’s confidence. I look at his list of Florida 2000 unrepeatable quirks and, aside from the lack of a spoiler candidate, current conditions are the same or worse.
And on and on. Georgia seems to be having some sort of weird contest with Florida to see who can be the most openly corrupt.
We’ve all been hearing this “Trump will never get away with ___________” shit for several years now. The guy’s a lifelong fuck-up, but the one thing he keeps doing right is getting away with it. Who does Tarantino suppose is going to stand up to Trump and Barr if they decide to invalidate the election results — Mitt Romney? Some heretofore unseen cadre of Republicons who, at long last, finally decide to put country before party? The Joint Chiefs of Staff? The Secret Service?
I’m cautiously optimistic that there will either be a landslide, or that Trump’s bluff and bluster will finally fall flat. But I have no idea how anyone could be so smugly confident that, naw, there’s no way that could happen.
There’s no way a chief executive could scoff at 200k dead Americans in six months, and not face calls to resign from responsible media and political entities. There’s no way a chief executive could spend the entire summer pre-emptively discrediting the election process, and not get any serious pushback. There’s no way an American president* could be on record as ignoring the fact that the Russian government is paying Islamic militants for American military corpses, and not face any consequences.
I don’t know what the hell Tentin Quarantino is drinking, but I’d like a double shot.
Chetan Murthy
@Jay: FWIW, Jay, I appreciate your
posting these tweetsbringing us these mangoes, so I don’t have togo to the Twitter machineget out of the boat.Ruckus
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):
The republican party only has the interests of power and money. What they call themselves is real only a concern to hide their entire point of continued existence. And that isn’t to be a political party, not in the sense we mean political party here. In the sense of the mid to late 30s in Germany or in the USSR. They have been and are continuing building a dictatorship, from the parts of the US that are left after they rework the entire structure. They started by using the 2nd amendment to build an armed insurrection force. Of course they built it using only Barney Fife replicas raised in basements.
mrmoshpotato
And Jay, how about some damn commentary about the tweets you post?
Oh, and your Canadian ass isn’t going to come here armed to fight. Ha ha
Bill Arnold
@Chris Johnson:
DJT’s poor information feeds (and conceptual biases (oh hell, stupid narcissistic arrogance; his mind is shit)) are contributing to some large political mistakes. (Same for many on his team/in his administration; many/most cannot accurately mentally model Democrats.) Mistakes can be encouraged in various ways; not much time left though.
You wouldn’t be (both abstractly and literally; big country and etc.), but those paths (and related paths) are very very dark, with nasty escalation graphs. Let’s work really hard to keep the US out of them?
eddie blake
@Chetan Murthy:
“fucking TIGER, man!”
2liberal
absurdity and animals mixed together
https://twitter.com/SlenderSherbet
Jay
@Omnes Omnibus:
y’all realize that most of “us” hated you before Dolt 45, and all of your comments towards “furriners” are exactly what Dolt 45 says.
some of us are rooting, trying to post for the few remaining “nice ones” amongst you.
some of us “furriners”, are gloating at how well you have fucked yourself and are gloating about it.
me, even if Biden get’s elected, the border should stay closed, until 90% of you are vaccinated with an actual effective vaccine, which will never happen.
Remind me again, how many million Iraqi’s did you guys murder?
Really, I wish y’all well, but so many of you are tiny dick assholes.
Jay
@Chris Johnson:
for everyone.
Omnes Omnibus
My comments towards “furriners?” Link up, bro.
Honus
@Redshift: yep. Between early voting, which started last week, and absentee ballots, we already have 25% turnout in Albemarle County.
Jay
@Marcopolo: ???????
prostratedragon
@Major Major Major Major:
Also,
Eljai
@Heywood J.: I took Quarantino’s tweets more as an admonishment not to give Trump superhuman powers that he does not possess. So, rather than reacting with “we’re doomed!” we can see through the bluster and remind ourselves that we can beat this guy.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take what’s going on in PA or GA or FL seriously. It’s kind of exhausting. Every day I have to balance my emotions between confidence and panic. Right now I’m kind of feeling panic but in a calm measured determined way.
Omnes Omnibus
Exactly. He and the GOP are a threat, but we are currently winning and they aren’t 10′ tall and bullet-proof.
frosty
@HumboldtBlue: Skeptical is OK. Personally I’m freaking out about PA, because I was a poll watcher in 2016 and watched first-time Trumpie voters come out of the woodwork. Will they be back. Will Philly overwhelm them? Who knows?
Kropacetic
Tonight, for the first time in a long time, I felt really good when I listened to this. Pumped even.
mrmoshpotato
@Major Major Major Major: Thanks M^4. That’s a good thread.
Splitting Image
This is basically the long and the short of it. If Trump were half the dealmaker that he claims to be, he’d refuse to nominate a replacement for Ginsburg until after the election, forcing the true believers to back him to the bitter end if they want that seat. If he gets his nominee confirmed, he’ll have given up all of his leverage.
Note that Mitt Romney has already taken advantage of this. Lickspittle Mitt will vote to confirm Trump’s nominee, while Independent Moderate Mitt will distance himself from the unrestrained fascist. Win-win.
Jay
@Chetan Murthy:
ahhhh, lazy, got it.
I’m just going to fuck off now and use my connections to get Canada out of NATO and make sure the border with the US never opens.
Yeah, sadly, I have connections.
Y’all have SAR-Covid 19 cooties and will for decades.
American exceptionalism, 200,000+ deaths, (290,000 over median) so far,
A national trend, left, center and right of shitting on “furriners”,
got the same shit before the Iraq War, how well did that work out for you?
and you fucking assholes, white supremacist colonial mysoginisists drove Imandy Gandy away.
Omnes Omnibus
@frosty: We are living through it. We can’t know. But we do know what we need to do.
Subsole
@cain: I feel this. I have lived most of my life in red America. Everything, every single word that came out of these peoples’ mouths for the last half-century was just absolute horseshit.
The really sad part is, they DO believe it in the moment. They really do.
But at the end of all things, they didn’t stand for any of it.
I am surprised that I was surprised, and I think what surprises me on reflection is not that they ditched it all, but that they dropped it so quickly and with such little effort. A little hypocrisy is everyone’s burden to bear and we are all contradictions, but this? This was just…the shallowness of their convictions insults me.
I can’t see into their souls so I don’t know their struggle, but if these people had to wrestle at all with their conscience I have seen no sign. Like, do we think Graham lies awake at night pondering what he ended up being?? Can you really even picture that? Or Romney? Or any of them?
False. Utterly false people. They all ended up being hollow as a fucking clay pot.
Ian
@Chris Johnson:
If it comes to that we will all be in universal pain.
Ruckus
@glyph2112:
A small reality is that life is a lot better than it was 75 yrs ago, in so many ways. So some of us get complacent and forget how the country was formed in the first place, how it has existed for this long, how hard it is to make it better, women’s rights, minority rights, voting rights, and on and on. It’s better but it can be improved, and that is still hard because there are always people who don’t like change or fight it because whatever. Yes this is a serious detour this crap of a human being playing as president is attempting because other wise he’ll probably be sleeping in a cell, where he belongs. As shaken as we are as our norms are being shown to be far weaker than imagined because they require people to actually follow the law and to be realistic humans. The republican party of today is not a realistic political party in a democracy, and hasn’t been for a longer time than is today, glaringly obvious. Yes it’s a fight, yes it is one well worth fighting and winning. It’s scary, our health is also on the line and a couple hundred thousand people have died because of the current republican party and it’s “leader.”
But it is a winnable fight, if we remember our reason for fighting in the first place, we want and need a better democracy. That means fixing and improving a lot of things that republicans/conservatives have broken.
JaySinWA
@Omnes Omnibus: yes T wins if enough of the right people enable him to do this and enough people believe it. We need to be prepared to call bullshit. The assumption that he has this kind of real power is self defeating. He does not, unless we grant him that power.
Subsole
@Chris Johnson: It is entirely reasonable to be angry at people who see you as a serf. I am cautiously hopeful it won’t come to that. There are way more of us than them.
Heywood J.
@Eljai: That’s probably a better way to look at it. Like I said, I am cautiously optimistic. It’s just that none of the institutions and guardrails have been functioning, and obviously we are deep in uncharted territory in several different ways right now. Assuming that the usual procedural mechanisms will just magically function in a deliberately-stoked crisis is, at this point, not something I would take for granted.
That, and I think a good chunk of the hand-wringing and concern in just a natural consequence of people being told to ignore the polls and to operate as if “we’re twenty points down” for months. Between all that and the world blowing up around them, nobody in a position of power doing anything to stop any of it, and the open daily threats of a demented nutjob, it’s easy to understand why some folks might be getting worried.
HumboldtBlue
@frosty:
Skeptical was the wrong word,
I see a deliberate erosion and perversion of confidence in public services.
I hope the electoral reaction is overwhelming and I hope my concerns fall flatter than the beer I froze last night.
Ruckus
@Subsole:
And as brittle and obvious when broken.
Glyph2112
@prostratedragon: I don’t disagree his bullshit gets our side riled up and prompts a lot of hand wringing. But other than his own mind, I don’t believe it makes him appear strong. It just confirms how totally unfit he is as president. And while panic and depression will be the mood for the month, I have not heard one person say they are giving up and not voting. In fact, I believe that kind of talk only hardens our resolve to vote.
Ian
@Jay:
Walk me through how that is good for your country.
Omnes Omnibus
I have always seen that as a dangerously depressing tactic.
mrmoshpotato
@Ian: I wanna hear about these connections that would make a founding member of NATO under Trudeau’s leadership walk away from a 70+ year old alliance.
I think Jay is forgetting that Dump is Putin’s bitch, not Justin. (Not that I’m saying the US is going to ditch NATO.)
prostratedragon
@Glyph2112: When the tweeter said “makes him appear strong” I think she means precisely in his own mind (which is also the mind of his cultists), as this is his motivation for doing stuff like this. It has no power as long as we refuse to see it that way.
Edit: Yes, many people are the sort who would be antagonized into greater steadfastness by this bullshit.
Subsole
@Jay:
One of the only bright spots these last few years was watching AltRight goobers getting SWAMPED by decent people every time they dared pop their heads up after C-ville. Again, if it comes to that, we have the numbers.
I really, really hope it doesn’t come to that.
Subsole
@Chris Johnson: Damn. As someone who wants 21 justices on the court and Nuremberg trials, your point about sacrificing vengeance for the law is very well said.
Ruckus
@Heywood J.:
He’s thinking that if we scare the shit out of ourselves rather than work hard at winning we can lose. So be a supporter rather than a downer. All fights are lost by those who don’t show up. Politics hasn’t been obviously dirty and an obvious fight for a while, while it should have been looked at that way. He’s not stupid at all, he’s working the positive side of the street. Look at this post. There’s a lot of down here. There’s politics, there’s covid, it’s a fucking mess. How do we clean it up, because it’s for sure at least a third of the country is not going to help. Fuck them, let’s do our part and kick their asses. And that’s his message.
SectionH
@Glyph2112: Are you talking about Trump or Jay?
‘k but I couldn’t resist.
Yutsano
@Major Major Major Major: And if you don’t want to follow the tweet stream I unrolled it for your convenience.
Subsole
@Chris Johnson: So…you’re saying we’re a big guy…?
Heywood J.
@Omnes Omnibus: Possibly. I think there was the feeling after 2016 that maybe just enough Dem voters assumed that HRC had it in the bag, and so didn’t show up. So this was a way to try to prevent that sort of complacency. And there’s a downside to that “eternal underdog” dynamic sometimes.
So as not be totally doom-and-gloom here, I do see some important factors favoring Biden:
Biden should just saturate every swing state with ads taunting Trump about how his big health-care plan has been “two weeks” away for almost four years now. Intersperse it with video of him saying that 200k COVID deaths in six months is no big whoop. Just pound it straight into everyone’s brain till they’re humming it in their sleep.
Subsole
@Chetan Murthy:
I just wanted to cook man! I just wanted to fucking cook!!
mrmoshpotato
@Heywood J.: “Hey Donnie Dipshit. We wouldn’t have 200K dead if your tremendous bigly healthcare plan actually existed.”
Subsole
@Splitting Image: We know Trump blurts what other people tell him. Are we SURE McConnell isn’t feeding him this cockandbull story to get him to hurry up and name a judge, giving up his leverage and handing McConnell the space to cut Trump loose???
Heywood J.
@Ruckus:
That’s some of it, but not all of it. And that part of it will backfire — I have no doubt that it strengthens everyone’s resolve to vote him out, and intimidates no one.
You don’t have to worry about me, I’ll be there. I’ll do my part. I despised this dime-store Guccione long before he ever thought about getting into politics. It is to this nation’s permanent shame that this piece of shit ever got close to any political office.
I think people will show up and vote. My concern is that his batting average at bulling his way through things everyone insisted “couldn’t be done” is pretty close to 1.000 .
Hell, I’m old enough to recall when ol’ Bobby Three Sticks salted the EDVA and SDNY districts with enough extra slam-dunk cases to keep Orange Foolius’ crime syndicate in court and prison for a long time, regardless of the main investigation and report. And then Barr came along and squashed it all. Then he had Jeff Epstein murdered in lock-up, raided his houses and torched all the incriminating evidence.
When the institutions are failing more than they’re working, and when one of the two parties is openly treasonous, and the guy is flat-out saying he’s going to ignore the election results, it is not irrational to be concerned. Use it as a motivating factor, rather than a vehicle for despair. But it’s there all the same.
Heywood J.
@mrmoshpotato: Now you’re talkin’.
Subsole
@Ruckus:
“Tell them your name.”
“Reek. Our name is Reek.”
Ruckus
@Heywood J.:
Exactly. He only wins if we let him. It’s fortunate that he understands so little, like how things work. If he starts his bullshit about the election results it’s up to the states to tell him to go fuck himself. Yes there are a couple of states that might just back him but I’d bet that won’t actually work well. The republican party is massively hated at this point and stands to lose a lot of elected offices for their support of shitforbrains. We’ve been hearing polls that show dems losing by 20 points and yet that’s not what the party is seeing. It’s not what is showing by the honest polls. Every time SFB opens his mouth, he sticks his dick in and takes a bite. It’s not helping. Yes we won’t win by 20 either but he just doesn’t have that support. The country won’t turn solid blue, that’s not going to happen. But it’s not going to be as bad as is impossible either. Yes he might cheat, and that will take a lot to over come but damn he’s fucking stupid and not getting any smarter. Yes it’s a fight, but SFB is no genius, he’s just lucky as fuck and his luck is running out. Fast. We all need to do our part and kick his fucking ass to the curb. And if he manages to even look like a possibility then we need to figure out what’s next.
Morzer
@Subsole: FWIW, I think that McConnell knows that he’s lost the Senate and that Trump is going to lose bigly. He’s gambling that he can lock in SCOTUS for 30 years, stop the Democrats from doing much of anything and obstruct all the way to the bank. He expects that the Democrats will be too weak, institutional and, probably, divided to do anything radical. I am not at all sure that he’s wrong in that calculation.
Gvg
Well to provide some not gloom, it’s 2 am in Florida and I couldn’t sleep so I looked up my voter status. Today is the day voting by mail ballots can be sent to voters and my status is already sent (to me but the county supervisor of elections). I should get it in the next few days.
we are allowed to deliver it to a ballot box either at the supervisors office or an early vote site, but those don’t start for a few weeks so supervisors office it will be. In the primary, it showed as counted online the day after I turned it in.
Florida counts mail in votes as received, not after the election. They can’t release the results until the polls close, but the first results for a county are the early votes including “mail in”.
if there is a problem with my ballot, that shows to me online too, so plenty of time to “cure”
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@cain: Do point out her that Trump talking about it gives our side a chance to counter dumb ass Donny’s latest Balric level cunning plan.
opiejeanne
@mrmoshpotato: Well, he certainly showed us what he thinks of us, after all this time. Sometimes I appreciated his posts, when he found good things to post, other times he was just posting terribly depressing, apocalyptic stuff, and I told him that I might have to pie him if he kept it up.
cain
@Kattails:
Yeah, someone had that near me too.. I don’t see it anymore. In fact, there was one home that had a trump sign and it disappeared.
This neighborhood is mixed. But I do know that my President Obama sign was stolen from my yard. :P
James E Powell
@Heywood J.:
I’ve never seen anything definitive on whether people stayed home because they thought Clinton would win. Anyone who did that should vote a straight D ticket this time, then shave their heads and enter a cloistered life of perpetual penance.
The thought that keeps me feeling positive – on the days that I do – is that I do not think Trump has become more popular in PA, MI, and WI and he won those states by less than the margin of misogyny. The people that loved him before still love him and they are loud and the press/media love to put them front and center, but I do not think their numbers have increased.
I’m in Southern California so I almost never see national campaign ads. I’d like to see one that shows Trump when he said that he takes no responsibility. Just that line with the facts of the deaths, the hospitalizations, the shutdowns and layoffs, the corruption.
Dan B
@Omnes Omnibus: It would be a relief if you stop.
Screaming at each other does what?
Geminid
@James E Powell: I don’t think we can really know why people stayed home in 2016, although I think it stands to reason that some less motivated voters might if they thought Clinton had the election sewn up. But a lot of the social media propaganda out of St. Petersburg was designed to sap motivation. And I think a lot of Gary Johnson’s voters knew Trump was bad news, but thought Clinton was certain to win, and thought they had a free protest vote. Johnson pulled in 3.2%. I am encouraged that this year the Libertarians aren’t running a candidate with a national profile, but have reverted to past practice by selecting an obscure party stalwart, whose claim to fame is the vice-presidential spot on the 1996 Libertarian ticket.
Dan B
@mrmoshpotato: Why do you dislike Jay? Nothing you have said is persuasive.
He posts lots of links. I hate him.
?
Dan B
@Omnes Omnibus: What has made you become such a jerk? We have differences of opinion. Can you have a mature discussion? I’m not sure you can.
Just One More Canuck
@Major Major Major Major: my daughter called one of her grandfathers “Poopah” which amuses me to this day. He’s the man who puts the poop in poopah. Sadly, she now just calls him grandpa
Splitting Image
@Subsole:
I doubt McConnell is pushing to get someone confirmed so he can cut Trump loose. He just understands that banking the seat before the election is better for him and for the Republicans overall. Trump might lose no matter what McConnell does. Best get a wingnut on the court while there is time.
Trump doesn’t think like this. He’ll push to get someone on the court because it will win the morning. Winning the morning is good. Even if it dooms him in the election and losing the election dooms him to spending the rest of his life in prison. Trump is very very stupid.
Matt McIrvin
@Ruckus: One of the things that’s going on here is that the right would like very much to convince us that normal legal/political channels are useless and goad us into violent responses, so they can come back with the mailed fist, and even have the public on their side. (Of course the vast majority of the violence is already on their side so far, but never mind.)
I think we may well need an army before this is all over. But the first step is to go total Lisa Simpson, insist on the law and doing things by the book so if you have to fight in other ways, you’ve got as much perceived legitimacy as possible.
I don’t think it’s bad, though, to have a heads-up about everything the other side might try to pull. One goal is to throw a holy fit about it to make it clear that if they do pull it, people won’t acquiesce.
Gvg
@Dan B: have you read this thread? He is being really nasty about Americans. I don’t care for it. Just go back and reread. You may not see what I did, but I am offended.
He has also attacked OO before.
Sab
@Gvg: OO and Jay routinely attack each other. It’s just part of BJ at night.
Warblewarble
When institutions participate in anticipatory collapse fascism advances. A Reichstag fire shitshow on every corner is a means to this end. Clear focus and getting the vote out can rout the fascists.
lowtechcyclist
Let’s see if that happens this time.
Here’s the difference: neither Trump nor the Senate has the authority to move Election Day. So Mitch told him it couldn’t be done.
But the Constitution explicitly gives the authority to state legislatures to direct the manner in which their states’ electors are chosen. Right there at the top of Article II.
I’ll be glad to be wrong on this one. But I’ll bet that, rather than Republicans in the state legislatures in question telling Trump to fuhgeddaboutit, we’ll hear crickets if they’re not directly asked, and unclear or evasive answers if they are.
nclurker
“i piss down the throat of all these nazi bastards,
and i’m too old to give a shit what they think”
hunter s. thompson
Heywood J.
@Ruckus: Yes, Trump is an industrial-strength buffoon, and can always be counted on to screw up the simplest things.
That’s not the problem. The problem is that his peculiar brand of evil stupidity ends up being buttressed by a complaisant media and a complicit party.
Again, if someone had told you five years ago that in 2020, we’d have a worldwide pandemic that crashed the economy, killed a quarter-million Americans, and was entirely preventable, and the chief executive lied about it the entire time, AND no one was calling for the fucker to resign in disgrace, you’d have trouble believing that, right?
I’m not worried about Trump anymore. It’s clear what he is, what he has always been. I’m more concerned with the number of Americans for whom that doesn’t really seem to be a problem. Unfortunately, too many such people have positions of real power and responsibility, and are happy to help him do plenty more damage on the way out.
Never say that something is impossible, or that it can’t get worse. These scumbags take that as a challenge. In the end, all we can really do is to show up and vote, and stay alert. Make a list of individuals who need to be driven out after this is over. Any network that (for example) gives that MagaNinny thing a show, their sponsors are fucking dead to me, and I’ll be sure to let them know.
Uncle Cosmo
@Matt McIrvin:
Slightly o/t, but your point is equivalent to the refutation of gun-nut claims that “if the German Jews had armed themselves, the Holocaust would never have happened.”
(This ignores the fact that the mechanisms of persecution didn’t devolve into unbridled genocide until the invasion of the USSR in June 1941, and the “Final Solution” was not orchestrated until the Wannsee conference in January 1942. The armed resistance of such a small proportion of the German population – half a million or 0.75% of the population – at any point, e.g., a Jewish shopowner plugging a bunch of SA thugs on Kristallnacht, would have immediately been used to justify much harsher treatment, & could have moved up the Holocaust by years, with the deaths of millions more.)
Like I said, o/t, but something that might be worth thinking about. I wouldn’t speculate as to how many cops and/or
militiamenarmed thugs would have to be killed before a similar dynamic kicked in here&now…but with the suborned MSM safe in their home offices egging on the forces of fascism, it’s unlikely to be all that many.Heywood J.
@James E Powell:
I think that’s really the key to it. He won by a very narrow sliver across a string of states that usually skew Democratic. It’s one thing for a narrowly elected official to convey an attitude of having a popular mandate; it’s quite another to actually believe it, and do nothing on the back end to increase that narrow sliver you won with.
We’re lucky, in a back-handed way, that Trump is stupid, and surrounds himself with toadies and like-minded grifters. The next one of these will be worse, and tougher to extricate. Liberal and Democratic voters had best get their shit together and start showing every time, for every race.
I’m in the State of Jefferson, so far more Chumpkins around here, a few Q-balls popping up as well. I think he retains his base around here for the most part, but there are a lot of small business owners that might otherwise be voting for him, but are frustrated at spending the last six months struggling to keep their doors open. They blame Gavin Newsom out loud, but they know goddamned well whose fault this really is.
Miss Bianca
@Jay: You’re really comparing yourself to ABL? That’s some fucking nerve.
All you ever do is hector us, pepper us with shit tweets, and expound on either your own antifa greatness or trash us. Is your life really that bad, that you’re so pathetically needy and self-aggrandizing? Get the fuck over yourself or GTFO.