US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6330

On November 29 2016 03:07 zlefin wrote:

looked into it a bit, but not enough to tell reliably. so take all I say here with several grains of salt.
looked possible.
It's not actual electoral fraud, which is indeed very rare;
what it may or not involve is voter suppression.

As a practical point, when people move and register to vote somewhere else, their old voting place is supposed to be notified so people can't vote twice. But systems aren't perfect, especially when you cross state lines, so sometimes they aren't. The system is supposed to help spot such issues so they can be corrected. People also move all the time, and don't always inform the gov't in much if any detail.
There are concerns that, in some instances, the purges appear to disproportionately affect certain groups.


This article seems not terrible and on-point:
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/do-voter-purges-discriminate-against-poor-minorities-n636586

the tldr of the long article, at least from what I read of it; is that they generally don't discriminate; in a few jurisdiction they do appear discriminatory. and they appear to affect very poor voters (of all races) worse than average (very poor voters tend to be democratic voters iirc).

On November 29 2016 01:48 LegalLord wrote:
Speaking of appointments, rumor mill has it that Tulsi Gabbard is in the running for SoS and that Romney is in trouble with some important Trump loyalists like Conway. You probably know her as the lady who supported Sanders in the primary and was criticized by the DNC for it. What you may not know is that she also has a strange history of supporting far right positions, and in a previous marriage she was associated with a Hindu cult of some sort. A strange person all in all.

I'd be ok with that option, if the rumors really are true.

On November 29 2016 01:16 GreenHorizons wrote:


Ok so you know that off the top of your head, you assert, because of their marketing/messaging. You didn't understand why the NRA was a bad comparison, so let me ask some questions that I think may illuminate that.

When was the NRA created?

When was BLM created?

Since people have liked to use the random business example, would you say that comparing the brand recognition of Coca Cola and Jones Soda is a fair comparison on it's face? Or that Jones Soda isn't as well known as Coca Cola because they are doing a poor marketing job?

On November 29 2016 03:51 LegalLord wrote:
The thing about Google is that if you don't know how to ask the right questions, you won't get a great result from it.

On November 29 2016 03:47 Acrofales wrote:


You got me to do the experiment. I googled "Black Lives Matter".

The first hit was Wikipedia (good).

However, the biggest and most prominent hit (with a picture and taking up half the screen) was this article:

Black Lives Matter Salutes Fidel Castro, is 'Grateful' He Harbored an FBI Most Wanted Terrorist

Are you sure you want people googling to discover what BLM is?

PS. I screenshotted it to show no shenannies. And in comparison, I also googled National Rifle Association. This gives me the NRA homepage first hit. Then a big block with "questions people are asking about the NRA" which I might be interested in. Third, the NRA about page. Fourth, wikipedia entry for the NRA. Rest would require me to scroll.

Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein is taking steps to initiate a recount in Pennsylvania, three days after filing for a recount in Wisconsin. Recount requests were filed Monday in more than 100 Pennsylvania precincts, according to her campaign.

"The Stein recount effort is mobilizing concerned voters across Pennsylvania to request recounts in their precincts," Stein campaign manager David Cobb said in a statement. "Additionally, the campaign filed a legal petition in state court today on behalf of 100 Pennsylvania voters to protect their right to substantively contest the election in Pennsylvania beyond the recounts being filed by voters at the precinct level. This petition will allow the campaign to pursue a full statewide recount in Pennsylvania if precinct-level recounts uncover any irregularities or tampering.”

The Pennsylvania action follows Stein's initiation of the recount process in Wisconsin, where her campaign filed just before the state's 5 p.m. deadline Friday. Stein had promised supporters that if she raised enough money to pay for additional recounts, her campaign would also file for similar action in Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Hillary Clinton's top campaign lawyer said Saturday that the Democratic nominee's campaign would participate in the Wisconsin recount initiated by Stein, and would follow a similar approach in Michigan and Pennsylvania if she pursued recounts in those states.

In Wisconsin, Trump’s margin of victory is just over 22,000 votes. And in Pennsylvania, it's even larger — roughly 71,000 votes.

On November 29 2016 03:47 Acrofales wrote:


You got me to do the experiment. I googled "Black Lives Matter".

The first hit was Wikipedia (good).

However, the biggest and most prominent hit (with a picture and taking up half the screen) was this article:

Black Lives Matter Salutes Fidel Castro, is 'Grateful' He Harbored an FBI Most Wanted Terrorist

Are you sure you want people googling to discover what BLM is?

PS. I screenshotted it to show no shenannies. And in comparison, I also googled National Rifle Association. This gives me the NRA homepage first hit. Then a big block with "questions people are asking about the NRA" which I might be interested in. Third, the NRA about page. Fourth, wikipedia entry for the NRA. Then the UK's NRA (dafuq?) and the NRA-ILA lobby group. Rest would require me to scroll.

Another edit: I also googled BLM. That is the Bureau of Land Management, and the first 3 hits are that. Then a British law firm, and then the same news article mentioned above. You really don't want people to Google BLM until BLM has invested something in SEO.

On November 29 2016 03:54 Blisse wrote:


Eh, Google usually hits you with the news story of the day any time you search for something of that nature, and takes into account your search habits. This is a poor counterexample. My second BLM hit on Google is their website's "Who We Are" page. The first is Wikipedia.

I really can't see how it isn't clear what a group called "Black Lives Matter" who raises a lot of buzz whenever black people are harassed by police wants to do. Everything they do basically falls on the spectrum of "minority group is disadvantaged". I mean, I do see how it's unclear exactly how far they would be willing to go, but the general direction seems pretty self-evident by the name?

WASHINGTON ― President-elect Donald Trump falsely claimed on Sunday that “millions of people” voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election. In a conference call with reporters on Monday, Trump’s campaign team did not produce any evidence to support that allegation.

But the strangest thing about the president-elect’s claim isn’t that there is zero evidence to support it — it’s that Trump, who has turned away daily intelligence briefings since winning the election, took time out of his day to repeat a rumor that initially spread because of one guy on Twitter. (Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s former campaign manager, has said the president-elect is receiving information “from a number of sources.”)

Gregg Phillips, a board member of the conservative anti-voter fraud group True the Vote, tweeted on Nov. 13 that he had “verified more than three million votes cast by non-citizens.” Phillips, who did not respond to a request for comment on Twitter, has not released any data to back up his claims. Snopes, a website that debunks conspiracy theories, reported that its inbox “exploded with messages” asking them to investigate this issue the day after Phillips made that claim.

Phillips’ assertion didn’t spread because of compelling evidence ― he didn’t provide any. And covering up millions of illegal votes would require a massive conspiracy of the sort never seen before. But the internet’s relentless rumor mill amplified Phillips’ claim anyway. Conservative websites like Drudge Report and Infowars elevated his tweets, and as of Monday, one of them had been retweeted more than 9,000 times. It doesn’t seem far-fetched to think that Trump, an avid Twitter user, might have first encountered the claim somewhere on social media.

The Trump campaign did not say where Trump came by the idea that “millions of people” voted illegally. But Trump has repeatedly boosted unfounded conspiracy theories from the dark corners of the internet, whether calling into question President Barack Obama’s birth certificate or entertaining the idea that the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia might have been intentionally smothered to death with a pillow.

Even True the Vote, the group of which Phillips is a board member, did not repeat his exact claim about 3 million votes.

“We’ll publicly release all our findings when our research is complete,” Catherine Engelbrecht, president of True the Vote, told The Huffington Post in an email Monday.

Phillips’ tweet is “steeped in this ongoing research,” Engelbrecht said, but “we do not plan to publish until every state has appended and published its own voter registry to include 2016 voting information.” (Based on the timing of the tweets, any data to back up Phillips’ claim would have had to come in before states certified their election results, as The Washington Post’s Philip Bump noted on Sunday.)

Asked whether she was aware of anyone publicly making this kind of claim besides Trump and Phillips, Engelbrecht said only that “the erosion of election was a top talking point in the past election, with lots of people saying lots of things. We are glad the issue is getting the attention it deserves.”

The Trump campaign did not offer any evidence to back up the president-elect’s claims during a Monday conference call with reporters. Trump spokesman Jason Miller cited two studies ― but one of them has been debunked, and the other did not investigate what Miller implied it did. In addition, both studies Miller cited were conducted well before the 2016 election. One of them, a 2014 study, was subsequently discredited by peer-reviewed research. The other study, a 2012 Pew report, actually focused on invalid voter registrations, which are different from actual votes.

Asked whether the Department of Justice would investigate Trump’s claim of illegal voting, or if Trump had notified state and local governments of his supposed discovery, Miller dodged the question.

Senate Republicans are wary of making a historic move to nix the filibuster despite growing pressure from conservatives.

Roughly two weeks after Donald Trump's White House win, GOP lawmakers are already facing calls to overhaul Senate rules and help push through the real estate mogul's agenda.

The calls to go "nuclear" are only likely to intensify next year when Democrats begin to carry out their pledge to fight Trump's agenda on areas where they disagree.

But Senate Republicans are openly skeptical about making a rules change they believe could come back to bite them, when they are inevitably back in the minority.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who led a task force to review potential rule changes, said there isn’t “very much” of an appetite to overhaul the filibuster.

On November 29 2016 04:32 Danglars wrote:
The Hill

One of the first challenges of the Trump administration is what to do about the inevitable filibuster of appointees and bills he wants to sign. Reid suspended it when he wanted Obama appointees confirmed. We'll see if the man and his Twitter can compel similar levels of action from entrenched senators he spent the entire campaign trashing.

On November 29 2016 04:31 TanGeng wrote:
On BLM, I'm not sure who to trust to deliver the mission statement for the BLM movement or if it is a unified movement at all where there is one authority on the mission statement.

I've also not cared to find out all that much.

President-elect Donald Trump is "furious" with senior adviser Kellyanne Conway for speaking out against considering 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney for secretary of state, MSNBC's "Morning Joe" reported Monday.

Further, sources "at the top of the Trump transition team" confirmed to New York Times political reporter Jeremy Peters that she "went rogue" at Trump's expense, "Morning Joe" reported.

"Kellyanne went rogue at Donald Trump's expense at the worst possible time, a source familiar with Trump's thinking said," Peters reported. A top Trump aide was "baffled" by Conway's comments. The source suggested it feeds into a growing concern inside the campaign that "instead of driving Donald Trump's message she's pushing her own agenda."