welch (May 21st, 2021)
Come on, Kazooskins. Not many people diagnose Trump remotely, although his niece, who has training and knows him, suggests that he is something of a narcissist and a sociopath. Of course, she has not brought him in for a full-fledged diagnosis, and, of course, would not.
We do see Trump spout grotesque lies over and over. He is still whining that he won the 2020 election in a "world-historic" landslide. Take a look at his latest about the "Republican"-paid for recount in Maricopa County, Arizona. The (actual) Republican election boards say, more or less, that this is an obscene attempt to destroy democratic voting in Arizona.
Meanwhile, Trump is raving about Antrim County in Michigan, where a (Republican) clerk punched something wrong and recorded Biden as having won the heavily Republican-voting county. Officials noticed the mistake and fixed it in a couple hours. Two recount-audits have confirmed the corrected vote-count, but Trump insists that every vote and voting machine in Detroit -- nowhere near tiny Antrim.
Trump is an idiot, criminal, and liar. He was each of these before he was elected, he was each of these during his four years in office, and he is each of these now.
I wouldn't give a shit about him much, except that so many people still believe in his toxic bullshit. I despise him because he is a toxic conman, still trying to con his followers.
Trump's followers continue to claim that voting machines can flip votes to Democrats because, well...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...viVe9HB35ahmko
At a public meeting last week in Cheboygan County, Mich., a lawyer from Detroit told county commissioners that the voting machines they used in 2020 could “flip” votes and throw an election. She offered to send in a “forensic team,” at no charge to the county, to inspect ballots and scanners.
In Windham, N.H., supporters of former president Donald Trump showed up to a town meeting this month chanting “Stop the Steal!” and demanding that officials choose their preferred auditor to scrutinize a 400-vote discrepancy in a state representative race.
And at a board of supervisors meeting May 4 in San Luis Obispo County, on California’s Central Coast, scores of residents questioned whether election machines had properly counted their votes, with many demanding a “forensic audit.”
The ramifications of Trump’s ceaseless attacks on the 2020 election are increasingly visible throughout the country: In emails, phone calls and public meetings, his supporters are questioning how their elections are administered and pressing public officials to revisit the vote count — wrongly insisting that Trump won the presidential race.
The most prominent example is playing out in Arizona’s Maricopa County, where Republican state lawmakers have forced a widely pilloried audit of the 2020 vote. That recount is being touted as an inspiration by small but vocal cohorts of angry residents in communities in multiple states.
“I think there is clearly a justification to do that type of audit that they’re doing in Maricopa County. That’s what I wanted to see done here,” said Ken Eyring, a local activist in Windham who recently appeared at a rally with former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. Eyring said his only goal is to make sure Windham’s machines are accurate.
Behind the scenes, a loose network of lawyers, self-styled election experts and political groups is bolstering community efforts by demanding audits, filing lawsuits and pushing unsubstantiated claims that residents are echoing in public meetings. Much of it is playing out in largely Republican communities, where Trump supporters hope to find officials willing to support their inquiries.
The increasingly vocal protests seven months after Trump lost the White House show how deeply the former president has undermined confidence in the nation’s elections, an attack he began early in the 2020 campaign as state and local officials expanded mail voting in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Even as national Republican leaders say they want to move on from the last election — a rationale they used to expel Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), a Trump critic, from her leadership post last week — the widespread echoes of Trump’s lie that the election was stolen show how his supporters are keeping that narrative alive.
Cheering them on is Trump himself, who has been issuing near-daily statements from his private Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, claiming that a cascade of findings that the election was rigged will appear any day.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they found thousands and thousands and thousands of votes,” Trump recently told a crowd attending a party at Mar-a-Lago, according to a video posted online by an attendee. “So we’re going to watch that very closely. And after that, you’ll watch Pennsylvania and you’ll watch Georgia and you’re going to watch Michigan and Wisconsin. You’re watching New Hampshire. Because this was a rigged election. Everybody knows it.”
What a lying con man.
welch (May 22nd, 2021)
I don’t know what is worse: Trump’s behavior or the Republicans that still support him. Surely most of them (Marjorie Green being the exception - she probably really doesn’t know any better) are smart enough to know these are all lies. To still endorse him and what he stands for is such an appalling, cynical, immoral, but overly transparant push for power, that it is beyond me how they can look in the mirror.
"A truth does not mind being questioned. A lie does not like being challenged."
I have different standards for judging common citizens versus politicians in party power. And there are different degrees of lies with different degrees of perniciousness. However, the majority of American citizens, since they are both literate and educated, *should* know better than to join with Trump's con, but as many writers have described over the last 200 years, we are not the most sophisticated of nations, we are crass materialists, we can only tolerate so much intelligence before we scorn it, we are suckers for jingoism and bombast, and we are deeply racist (on a cultural-genetic level).
Enter the Donald.
welch (May 22nd, 2021)
Since I am neither a national nor a resident, I leave that conclusion to you. However, I applaud your sincerity and bow in respect for your honesty. An inconvenient truth... (and it is not as if we Dutchies do not have armies of skeletons in many closets)
welch (May 22nd, 2021)
Meanwhile in Arizona, "Republicans" work to undermine the Republicans who ran the 2020 election. For people not stuck inside US news, ex-president Trump shrieks every day that "a kraken" will overthrow election results nearly everywhere because he "just knows" that he won by millions of votes.
That is now an article of religious faith within the "Republican" Party.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlo...lection-audit/
By Jennifer Morrell
Jennifer Morrell, a former local election official and national expert on post-election audits, is a partner at The Elections Group.
May 19, 2021 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
When Arizona’s secretary of state asked me if I would serve as an observer of the Arizona Senate’s audit of Maricopa County’s ballots, I expected to see some unusual things. Post-election audits and recounts are almost always conducted under the authority of local election officials, who have years of knowledge and experience. The idea of a government handing over control of ballots to an outside group, as the state Senate did when hiring a Florida contractor with no elections experience, was bizarre. This firm, Cyber Ninjas, insisted that it would recount and examine all 2.1 million ballots cast in the county in the 2020 general election.
So I figured it would be unconventional. But it was so much worse than that. In more than a decade working on elections, audits and recounts across the country, I’ve never seen one this mismanaged.
I arrived at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum on the morning of May 4. Security was conspicuously high: At three stations, guards checked my ID and my letter from the secretary of state. No bags were permitted on the floor, and I had to surrender my phone, laptop and smartwatch. I was allowed a yellow legal pad and red pen to take notes, and provided with a pink T-shirt to wear so I would be immediately identifiable. The audit observers hired by Cyber Ninjas, in orange T-shirts, followed me wherever I went and reported random things about me they found suspicious, like that my foot had crossed the tape perimeter separating the work and observation areas. Several times someone asked to test my pen, to ensure it really had red ink. Once, they even demanded that I empty my pockets, in which I carried that pen and a pair of reading glasses. I was allowed to ask only procedural questions of the Cyber Ninjas attorney; I couldn’t talk to anyone else performing the work. The atmosphere was tense.
I was stunned to see spinning conveyor wheels, whizzing hundreds of ballots past “counters,” who struggled to mark, on a tally sheet, each voter’s selection for the presidential and Senate races. They had only a few seconds to record what they saw. Occasionally, I saw a counter look up, realize they missed a ballot and then grab the wheel to stop it. This process sets them up to make so many mistakes, I kept thinking. Humans are terrible at tedious, repetitive tasks; we’re especially bad at counting. That’s why, in all the other audits I’ve seen, bipartisan teams follow a tallying method that allows for careful review and inspection of each ballot, followed by a verification process. I’d never seen an audit use contraptions to speed things up.
Speed doesn’t necessarily pose a problem if the audit has a process for catching and correcting mistakes. But it didn’t. Each table had three volunteers tallying the ballots, and their tally sheets were considered “done” as long as two of the three tallies matched, and the third was off by no more than two ballots. The volunteers recounted only if their tally sheets had three or more errors — a threshold they stuck to, no matter how many ballots a stack contained, whether 50 or 100. This allowed for a shocking amount of error. Some table managers told the counters to recount when there were too many errors; other table managers just instructed the counters to fix their “math mistakes.” At no point did anyone track how many ballots they were processing at their station, to ensure that none got added or lost during handling.
I also observed other auditors working on a “forensic paper audit,” flagging ballots as “suspicious” for a variety of reasons. One was presidential selection: If someone thought the voter’s choice looked as though it had been marked by a machine, they flagged it as “anomalous.” Another was “missing security markers.” (It’s virtually impossible for a ballot to be missing its security markers, since voting equipment is designed to reject ballots without them.) The third was paper weight — the forensics tables had scales for weighing ballots, though I never saw anyone use them — and texture. Volunteers scrutinized ballots for, of all things, bamboo fibers. Only later, after the shift, did I learn that this was connected to groundless speculation that fake ballots had been flown in from South Korea
The fourth reason was folding. The auditors reasoned that only absentee voters would fold their ballots; an in-person, Election Day voter would take a flat ballot, mark it in the booth and submit it, perfectly pristine. I almost had to laugh: In my experience, voters will fold ballots every which way, no matter where they vote or what the ballot instructs them to do. Chalk it up to privacy concerns or individual quirks — but no experienced elections official would call that suspicious.
At one point, I overheard some volunteers excitedly discussing a stain on a ballot. “It looks like a Cheeto finger,” one said. “Like someone’s touched it with cheese dust!” That had to be suspicious, their teammate agreed. Why would someone come to the polls with cheese powder on their hands? But I’ve seen ballots stained with almost anything you can imagine, including coffee, grease and, yes, cheese powder. Again, when you have experience working with hundreds of thousands of ballots, you see some messes: That’s evidence of humanity’s idiosyncrasies, not foul play.
Their equipment worried me more than their wild theorizing. At the forensics tables, auditors took a photo of each ballot using a camera suspended by a frame, then passed the ballot to someone operating a lightbox with four microscope cameras attached. This was a huge deviation from the norm. Usually, all equipment that election officials use to handle a ballot — from creating to scanning to tallying it — has been federally tested and certified; often, states will conduct further tests before their jurisdictions accept the machines. It jarred me to see volunteers using this untested, uncertified equipment on ballots, claiming that the images would be used at some point in the future for an electronic re-tally.
In a sense, it was heartening that, whenever the secretary of state released letters listing our concerns, the auditors would try to address them. On my first day in the arena, for example, I noticed runners collecting tally sheets from the counting tables and bringing them to a single person who entered the data into some kind of aggregation spreadsheet, without anyone to verify that this person was entering the data correctly. By my last day of observation, on May 7, the auditors were attempting to set up a quality-control station.
But procedures should never change in the middle of an audit. Here, they did, and not just a couple of times, but almost daily. The training for volunteers also evolved: At first, they got no guidance about how to determine a voter’s intent on a ballot; only a week later did the auditors add a few slides to their training presentation, summarizing a few scenarios in which the volunteers might run into this issue. When I asked my designated auditor about these shifting guidelines, he called it “process improvement.”
What I saw in Arizona shook me. If the process wraps up and Cyber Ninjas puts together some kind of report, that report will almost certainly claim that there were issues with Maricopa County’s ballots. After all, Cyber Ninjas chief executive Doug Logan has publicly voiced his wild conjecture about the 2020 election. But the real problem is the so-called audit itself.
Audits are supposed to make our elections more secure and transparent — to strengthen the public’s trust in our democratic process. Maricopa County is known for having some of the best election practices in the country: Officials had already undertaken a hand-count audit and a forensic audit of their 2020 ballots and found no evidence of fraud. Now a group with no expertise, improvising procedures as it goes, is sowing doubt about the result of a well-run election.
This is not an audit, and I don’t see how this can have a good outcome.
This "review" is another elaborate con, regardless if the result. Like Trump's term in office: incompetent, bush league, sham.
welch (May 25th, 2021)
Speaking of con games and the election of 2016, Trump has settled this suit out of court, to the tune of $750k:
NPR: Trump inaugural committee settles D.C. lawsuit related to hotel overpayments.
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/03/10961...uit-settlement
Decision makes sense to me, and it was initially a bi-partisan effort in the legislature:
The Philadelphia Inquirer: Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court upheld the state’s mail voting law after a long legal fight.
https://www.inquirer.com/politics/el...-20220802.html
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This bothered me.
"Today, voters in Kansas overwhelmingly rejected an amendment to their state constitution that would have stripped it of protections for abortion rights. With 86% of the vote in, 62% of voters supported abortion protections; 37% wanted them gone. That spread is astonishing. Kansas voters had backed Trump in 2020; Republicans had arranged for the referendum to fall on the day of a primary, which traditionally attracts higher percentages of hard-line Republicans; and they had written the question so that a “yes” vote would remove abortion protections and a “no” would leave them in place. Then, today, a political action committee sent out texts that lied about which vote was which."
https://heathercoxrichardson.substac.../august-2-2022
I'm gonna see if I can find this tweet to see for myself
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Ok the text is all over social media. Clear attempt to deceive voters at the last hour. Total scum tactic.
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Lloyd (August 3rd, 2022)
Oddly, if it hadn’t been for “foreigners”, the US as a nation would have never existed.😂 BTW, thanks Thomas Paine.
Some came willingly and most didn’t. The ones already here were destroyed as was the land.
We would do well to consider ourselves as global citizens and support the human dignity of all. This “silo” mentality is toxic.
The lawyer with the briefcase can steal more money than the man with the gun. —Don Vito Corleone
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