Month: October 2016

Catholic Conflicts, Christian Abandon, Wiki, Weak Pillars

  • James Wigderson breezes past the Trumpian blunders at the Al Smith Dinner this past week. Have we ever heard a candidate booed by the clergy at past dinners? James reminds us briefly that both candidates have disagreements with the Catholic Church. Which is pretty much saying that neither candidate is Catholic, right? Although many seem unaware that I am an alert observer, I knew that already.
     
  • Capt. Fogg at Human Voices notes a right wing headline about Hillary’s secret plan to force Christians to abandon Christianity, and advances his thesis that the internet now allows folks to tailor an alternate reality.
     
  • The Big Empty goes all elephant-in-the-tea-party, suggesting that the more significant difference between the sides of the ideological divide is one that is not often considered.
     
  • nojo at Stinque is not alarmed by Donald’s refusal to accept the results of a national election. In fact, far from weakening a pillar of democracy, that sort of rejection of principle highlights its strength. The Republic is safe.
     
  • Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged, briefly reviews the history of James O’Keefe, which history mainly involves videos heavily edited to show the opposite of what the unedited versions show. What the unsophisticated among us might call “lying.” Vixen wonders about the hiring of O’Keefe by Donald Trump..
     
  • Green Eagle puts back of hand to the forehead at the latest scandal posted by Wikileaks. Has to do with a family member of one of the staff and a windshield wiper. Such is the current state of the conservative/Putin political alliance.
     
  • Last Of The Millenniums has taken a closer, documented, look at Julian Assange and Wikileaks, as have I.
     
  • Infidel 753, who provides insight about such things, examines the imminent liberation of the Iraqi city of Mosul, the largest city held by ISIL, and the only significant stronghold left outside of Raqqa in Syria. Infidel suggests that, even if Mosul falls before the election, the victory itself will present problems for President Hillary Clinton.
     
  • At The Intersection of Madness and Reality, Darcwonn distils the hypocrisy in the NFL concerning domestic violence and presents Josh Brown.
     

When Employers Like Jim Beam Don’t Hire the People They Need

found online by Raymond

 
From Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass:

So 250 well-paid workers at Jim Beam Distilleries in Kentucky are on strike.

Not for higher pay; they’re some of the highest-paid manufacturing workers in the country.

Not for better conditions; Jim Beam treats them OK.

No, they’re on strike for fewer hours.

This is the dirty little secret of the recovering economy;

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Corporate-Owned Media After Trump is Vanquished

found online by Raymond

 
From Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post:

“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS!”
– CBS CEO Les Moonves –

It is utterly disgusting that the once-great CBS, a one-time news leader and the home network of such noted top-notch investigative journalists as the late great Edward R. Murrow and the late great Walter Cronkite would stoop so low as to revel in the likes of Donald Trump.

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President Obama Scorches GOP Over Years of “Toxic” Politics

found online by Raymond

 
From Tommy Christopher at Shareblue:

President Obama is relishing his role as campaigner-in-chief, and at a Hillary Clinton rally in Miami on Thursday, he showed why he is so good at it. Many people have spent the last year trying to make the point that Donald Trump is the distillation of, not a departure from, Republican politics. But no one has come close to making the point so well:

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Factless Autobiography

found online by Raymond

 
From Vincent at A wayfarer’s Notes:

Sometimes I have to look in the mirror to be reminded of who I am. Not a deliberate act but incidental, while shaving. It recalls to me who I am now, what I have become. At other times, perhaps in the night, I may lie awake when anticipating some event of uncertain outcome, some issue yet unresolved, some journey out of the ordinary. Unconsciously, I slip back into an earlier time, where ghosts of my past still lurk in wait, insinuating themselves into my old weak spots. The weak spot is our friend, to tell us, to warn us, to confirm our mortality. In the same way, an electric power circuit needs a fusebox. This is how the weak protects the strong.

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Cheatos for Breakfast

found online by Raymond

 
From (O)CT(O)PUS The Swash Zone:

I begin each day with morning coffee, a newspaper, and a glance at the opinion pages. This morning, I found a letter to the editor exhorting us to “Vote Republican (even if you don’t like Trump).”

Written by Robert G. Bannon of Vero Beach, FL, I wondered: Is this Bannon related to Steve Bannon (who choked his wife, faced battery charges, and threatened to kidnap his own children)? The one who hates Jews and considers them to be “whiny brats?” Steve Bannon of Breitbart, the fright mart of cringeworthy conspiracy news? Steve Bannon who now serves as Donald Trump’s campaign manager?

My overactive imagination jumps to conclusions; never judge one Bannon by another.

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Experts Lose Their Rigging

Oh man, how I hate experts. At least I hate experts who get swallowed by their own expertise.

They know things the rest of us just guess at. They perform important studies. They increase the sum of human knowledge. They could be useful advocates for Truth – with a capital T – Justice and everything that’s right.

But so many simply do not know how to talk understandably.

I get especially irritated by experts who are on my side.

Four years ago, I got to an unusual meeting.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was just being organized to keep the little folks from being ripped off by the big folks.

Pretty much everyone had been nickeled or dimed or dollared out of some amount by some obscure sub-clause that nobody but lawyers knew about.

Anyone who has ever seen the insurance ad about turning to page five and finding that it says blah blah blah blah knows that we live in an asymmetrical world of legal language brokering.

Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was about to become one of the big folks that would be on the side of the little folks that most of us are.

Well it was about time.

Someone at the new agency decided to get democratic – with a small ‘d’. So they held informational hearings around the country. That was so they could tell ordinary everyday people, the little folks they wanted to protect, about the new agency. And they wanted to hear from folks around the country.

At the St. Louis meeting, the nice folks from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau began by carefully explaining to us that REO considerations in lending had to be taken into account. Uh huh. REO.

As the evening wore on, they got to interest differentials. One of the more conservative experts used big words to get around the actual low down.

What the conservative was trying hard not to say was that if life was more fair, then people couldn’t be cheated, then return would go down, then corporate risk would increase, then rates would go up, then life would be unfair.

You see, we have to be cautious about unanticipated consequence. More fair leads to unfair. So maybe we should just leave ill enough alone. Cheating ordinary people means more profits which will lead to lower rates.

Got all that? Such was his interest differential concern.

Most of those on the panel who disagreed were just as obscure.

A lot of verbiage had to get to the cutting room floor before their arguments got through the film. And only one of the experts seemed capable of pushing back in clear, standard, non-jargonized English.

Earning an honest buck was a better way to increase profits than squeezing consumers by cheating them. And, by God, the new agency would draw blood from large corporations if they tried to make unsuspecting consumers bleed.

I’ve been thinking of those blah blah blah experts as I listened to a television discussion of election rigging.

Donald Trump, and the more delusional of his supporters, believe that elections are stolen by a combination of illegal immigrants who sneak into the United States to steal jobs, and come out of hiding to vote illegally, and legal voters who sneak around voting multiple times.

Republicans have been making that argument since the dawn of the new century. They have used it as a reason to make voting harder for those who don’t drive cars: low wage workers who ride the bus to their jobs, retirees who don’t drive anymore, students who walk to class. Eligible voters who do not drive tend to vote more for Democrats. So there you have it.

So… voter suppression gets kind of easy. Demand photo IDs, make it as inconvenient as possible to get a non-driving photo ID, then, in case some folks get photo IDs anyway, make voting places in some areas very hard to get to by bus.

You can justify voter suppression by telling folks that we need to prevent voting fraud.

There are two short answers to the voter fraud argument.

  1. It doesn’t happen. Elections do not get stolen that way.
     
  2. It can’t happen. Elections can’t get stolen that way.

 
How do we know it doesn’t happen? Well, people have looked.

A major 5 year study by the George W. Bush administration was intended to document voter fraud. In every election in every local, state, and federal jurisdiction, they found just a few cases of in-person fraud. And, in those very few cases, it was always for some other reason than to steal an election. A candidate wanted to establish a residency requirement in order to run, a battered wife on the run wanted to keep her identity from any public record. That sort of thing.

That result was recently replicated by an intense study by Loyola College. Out of more than a billion votes – that’s billon with a ‘B’ – in years of elections around the country, there were only 31 cases of anyone voting when it was not legal. 31 out of a B-b-b-billion.

That’s how we know it doesn’t happen.

How do we know it can’t happen? By reading the law.

Stealing an election through in-person fraud involves a massive conspiracy with lots and lots of participants. Penalties are very high. Long prison terms along with very high fines. It will only take one person to crack under that sort of pressure and expose the entire foolish operation.

So elections are stolen through ballot stuffing, jiggling the totals. You know: backroom manipulation. Nothing that a voter ID will affect. Nothing that Donald Trump is interested in.

Nothing that can be accomplished to steal much of anything nationwide.

So, CNN brought in a couple of experts. Two experts who read their words from page six. Blah blah blah blah.

Julian Zelizer takes a swing at why we’re safe from the voter fraud that Donald Trump tells us should terrify us deep into our timid souls.

There’s been controversies when elections were contested and decided in Congress, which was in 1824. But it’s virtually impossible in 2016 to rig an entire election. It’s decentralized. It’s fragmented. And there’s very little evidence that this could happen.

Well isn’t that convincing!

Decentralized. Fragmented.
What the hell does that mean?

Very little evidence.
So what? Do we wait for it to happen?

So Douglas Brinkley takes a shot.

Well, you know, calling a whole election rigged is very extreme. That’s saying democracy utterly doesn’t work.

Convinced yet? If you didn’t already think rigging an election is extreme, and if it hadn’t occurred to you that rigged elections pretty much would make democracy not work, utterly not work, you really shouldn’t be voting, or driving, or feeding yourself without a bib.

Poor Julian bravely digs downward. He goes to 1960, where Democrats in Illinois were accused of stealing the election for John F. Kennedy. What does he say about that?

In 1960 in Illinois, there’s a lot of evidence that Republicans stole tickets — stole votes downstate, so in some ways it would balance out.

So everybody in Illinois was voting lots of times? And both sides did it? And that’s supposed to convince us that voter fraud doesn’t happen? It’s enough to make baby Jesus cry.

Listen up. Nobody accused anyone in 1960 of voting twice. Folks in Illinois and Texas were accused of behind the scenes changing of totals. No voters were involved. And investigations in 1960 didn’t find enough of that to make a difference.

Trump and company aren’t accusing election officials of changing totals.

Today, even those behind the scenes changing of totals are almost impossible. Those opportunities don’t exist anymore. The first vote counts are by purely non-human means. We have electronic checking and cross checking, later verified by human ballot counting. That last human part is done by bi-partisan teams. All sides are in on the watching, and the tabulating, and the totaling, and the verifying.

  • Decentralized – Fragmented
     
  • Calling a whole election rigged is very extreme
     
  • Very little evidence
     
  • That’s saying democracy utterly doesn’t work
     
  • Republicans stole votes … it would balance out
     
  • Oh for the love of our Living God.

Why can’t they talk Americanized English? It isn’t that hard.

Listen up:

  1. Stealing elections through voter fraud doesn’t happen.
     
  2. Stealing elections through voter fraud can’t happen.

 
Can we please, please, be clear on that?

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