Seen on the street in Kyiv.

Words of Advice:

"If Something Seems To Be Too Good To Be True, It's Best To Shoot It, Just In Case." -- Fiona Glenanne

“The Mob takes the Fifth. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” -- The TOFF *

"Foreign Relations Boil Down to Two Things: Talking With People or Killing Them." -- Unknown

“Speed is a poor substitute for accuracy.” -- Real, no-shit, fortune from a fortune cookie

"If you believe that you are talking to G-d, you can justify anything.” — my Dad

"Colt .45s; putting bad guys in the ground since 1873." -- Unknown

"Stay Strapped or Get Clapped." -- probably not Mr. Rogers

"The Dildo of Karma rarely comes lubed." -- Unknown

"Eck!" -- George the Cat

* "TOFF" = Treasonous Orange Fat Fuck, A/K/A Dolt-45,
A/K/A Commandante (or Cadet) Bone Spurs,
A/K/A El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago, A/K/A the Asset., A/K/A P01135809

Friday, January 1, 2021

The Golden Rule of Politics

Is "I'll Do Unto You Like You Did Unto Me."

Picture this: It's the 2024/28/32 election. The presidential election wasn't even close. The losing party controls both houses of Congress. On the day that the electoral votes are presented to Congress, objections are raised in both houses of Congress. The objections are sustained and the losing presidential candidate becomes president.

How will the American people react when they realize that the election was, essentially a sham? That a coup was just held?

Or what happens when the losing candidate challenges the results in court and this time around, the judges hearing the cases are loyal to their party and not to the facts and the law? And again, the lsing candidate takes over and the election itself was essentially a sham?

At that point, this coiuntry will no longer be a republic. It will be something else, a nation where politicians, through means foul and filthy, overturn the results of the election.

What we have to do, now, is make certain that the politicians who have tried to overturn the results of the election pay a price. Those who are engaging in this attempt at overturning this election pay a price. Trump and his cadre of bozo lawyers have filed something like fifty cases and have come up with nothing. No proof of voter fraud that meets any sort of legal standard.

For example, Josh Hawley is forty years old. For however much time he has on this world, his bit of sedition should be put before him every freaking day. It should be a law that Hawley is hereby and forever forbidden from displaying the American flag. His lapel pin should be the poop emoji. For he is a walking, talking, steamng pile of sentient excrement. And that is all he ever will be.

The Republican party is, indeed, the party of Trump, the party of treason. If you call yourself a Republican and if you haven't taken a stand against the Turmpist coup, then you are as evil as they are.

16 comments:

B said...

"How will the American people react when they realize that the election was, essentially a sham? That a coup was just held?"

Probably the same way the American People are reacting in this instance....they realize that there is nothing they can do without going to war, and they really see a civil war as the (short term) worse option....so they will do nothing.

And they will stand by and watch the Republic die. Killed by election fraud in 2020.

Eck! said...

Hawley and other fascists call themselves repubicans. If you find
that gets your hair up maybe you should explore why.

The ideals of conservatism have been co opted by a cult of personality.
We have been long a multi party system with smaller others. When one
party becomes too dominant and tries for total rule is is neither
party liberal, progressive nor conservative. We need constructive
rule not a power grab to finance political friends that are
ideologically opposed to democracy and the republic it built.

The cult of Trump is the party of treason. If you call yourself a
Republican, a conservative, and if you haven't taken a stand against
the Drurmfpist coup, then you are risking evil. You the collective
little guys are selling out to a cult of power theft. You the
collective will get the short end of the stick and less. They are
working for them and not you and have lied to you as a tool toward
their goals.

Consider, what do you get for all that? A so called freedom to
defy health ordenances? How free is being sick as a dog, in a
hospital, on a vent? Maybe not you, instead someone important
to you, the guy you work for, or maybe even family. Remember
everyone that died from Covid got it from someone that may
still be living. Were you the one that passed it to them?

Wake up America. Freedom comes with a price and its the
responsibility for your actions and those you take with or
against others. For those unclear that means the idea of
making a fist and waving it is American. We are a loud
and brash people that came from revolution and building
a rough country. Hit me with that fist the other American
rule is they invoked and I will beat you to a pulp by your
invitation. We have the right to defend ourselves, our
rule of law and government is an extension of that. That
defense comes in many forms. You have that option to not
cause yourself pain, I strongly and carefully suggest
that you consider what the wrong choice can bring.

As a reminder we pay a price for ignoring our history. We bear
the price of those errors and more. Our children will bear
the price of our added errors and wrong choices. Your path
will cost them or make their lives better. Choose.


Eck!

Dark Avenger said...

B, these matters of “election fraud” have been taken to court, and have lost, sometimes in front of Trump-appointed judges.

The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).

https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/

DTWND said...

One word: Liar.

Dale

commoncents said...

#1 ON TRENDING - Youtube Rewind 2020, Thank God It's Over - Mr. Beast Video
https://commoncts.blogspot.com/2021/01/1-on-trending-youtube-rewind-2020-thank.html

ps. would you consider adding CC to your blogroll? Thanks!

dinthebeast said...

Propaganda is dangerous.

-Doug in Sugar Pine

Ten Bears said...

Characteristic number fourteen of the Fourteen Defining Characteristics Of Fascism is Fraudulent Elections – Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

Comrade Misfit said...

B, you keep repeating falsehoods (massive mail election fraud, no poll watchers), a falsehood that has been shown to be just that by Trump's own AG.

Repeating falsehoods is why I have come to question both the sanity of conservatives and their commitment to the American Experiment. The plain fact of the matter is that conservatives believe in fair elections only if they win. If they lose, the election has to have been rigged. Because Trump, Fox News and the rest of the Right Wing Propaganda Machine tell them so and guess what? You believe it.

It is clearer than it has ever been: The Right claims to love America while despising a majority of the people who live in it. It is a party of authoritarians, of fascists.

In short: Conservatives hate America.

Stewart Dean said...

Again: "The Right says it, I believe it and that settles it". A parareligious cult.
De-programmers needed, isolation, detoxification and counseling. Maybe a TBA, like AA, for recovering True Believers.

B: What would you take to make you reconsider your beliefs? Fox has begun to walk back some of its most egregious lunacy....so now the TBs are deserting it, taking their tin foil hats and Ptolemaic orreries with them

Eck! said...

His brain has been hacked.

However if you put it incontext of propaganda the claim of fraud out then
his people the cult of drumpf then believe and react as if there was fraud
and they then also believe without any factual support they must save the
republic from those nasty vote stealers. That is the dog whistle.

The Big lie is the election has been hacked.
The supporting focus are the lies and half truths are he claims of fraud.
Repetition is the supporting element.
The provoke the people, attract attention.
The appeal to emotion, you have been denied your vote.
Pander to the people, ignore those people claiming to have the truth
as they are the other sides lies.

Propaganda works, its advertising on the political level.
Paid and unpaid (facebook, twitter, parlay) political advertising
works if it is done right.



Eck!

B said...

I'd be;lieve no e;ection fraud happened when no indications are that it happened.

No overwhelming statistical anomalies, no irregularities in ballots (especially mail-in ballots which were pushed HARD by the DNC for this election) no poll watcher exclusions (it happened, deal with it). Free and clear and CLEAN election processes.
It didn't happen. Lots of irregularities happened. Enough to make Trump win and Biden lose? I don't know.
If you claim tht these were clean elections then you are either delusional or lying to yourself.

DTWND said...

Jesus Christ, B. Your own people have stated there was NO widespread fraud. Nothing that could/would change the outcome. But YOU know better than the experts cause...? You’re an idiot to continue in your beliefs just because Trump lost, and in your continuing diatribe that ‘we wuz robbed’.

You’re willingly be obstinate. And lying.

Dale

Dark Avenger said...

No overwhelming statistical anomalies,


Benford’s law says that in many naturally occurring sets of numbers, the first digits of these numbers (eg. the ‘1’ in ‘15’) are not evenly distributed. Measurements with a lower first digit occur more frequently: 1 is the first digit in a number about 30 percent of the time while 9 begins less than 5 percent of numbers. In certain data sets ranging from rainfall amounts to town populations, the numbers follow a Benford’s Law distribution. Deviation of data from Benford’s law has been examined in areas such as finance to detect if something is not right, for example fraud, mistakes or misstatements (here , here) .

The posts, such as those here and here , show graphs that compare candidate’s vote tallies by leading digit to the expected distribution according to Benford’s law in order to contend that Biden’s vote tallies do not follow Benford’s Law but Trump’s do. Posts state that Benford’s law is a test that has been used before to detect fraud (here) . Captions on the posts include, “Joe Biden’s votes violate Benford’s Law”; “It’s easy to win if you cheat”; “Statistically impossible odds […] now MATH doesn’t even agree with their faux victory.”

Reuters sought comment from experts regarding these claims.

Theodore P. Hill, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Georgia Tech, Atlanta, cautioned that regardless of the distribution uncovered, the application of Benford’s Law would not provide definitive evidence that fraud took place.

“First, I’d like to stress that Benford’s Law can NOT be used to “prove fraud”,” he told Reuters by email. “It is only a Red Flag test, that can raise doubts. E.g., the IRS has been using it for decades to ferret out fraudsters, but only by identifying suspicious entries, at which time they put the auditors to work on the hard evidence. Whether or not a dataset follows BL proves nothing.”

Walter Mebane, Professor at the Department of Political Science and Department of Statistics at the University of Michigan (here) authored a December 2006 article (here) around the application of Benford’s Law to the US presidential election results. The article suggested some limitations of the process, but said in the Abstract: “The test is worth taking seriously as a statistical test for election fraud.”

Nevertheless, Mebane’s article also said, in the Discussion: “In any case, the 2BL test on its own should not be considered proof either that election fraud has occurred or that an election was clean. A significant 2BL test result can be caused by complications other than fraud. Some kinds of fraud the 2BL test cannot detect.”

On Nov. 9, 2020, in response to “several queries” Mebane published a paper called “Inappropriate Applications of Benford’s Law Regularities to Some Data from the 2020 Presidential Election in the United States” (here). His paper says, “The displays shown at those sources using the first digits

“It is widely understood that the first digits of precinct vote counts are not useful for trying to diagnose election frauds,” he writes.

Elsewhere, a study called “Benford’s Law and the Detection of Election Fraud”, published in 2011 by Joseph Deckert, Mikhail Myagkov, Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon (here) and Peter Ordeshook, Professor of Political Science at Caltech (here), found that Benford’s Law was “problematical at best” when applied to elections: “We find that conformity with and deviations from Benford's Law follow no pattern. […] Its “success rate” either way is essentially equivalent to a toss of a coin, thereby rendering it problematical at best as a forensic tool and wholly misleading at worst.”



https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-benford/fact-check-deviation-from-benfords-law-does-not-prove-election-fraud-idUSKBN27Q3AI


Did you ever take statistics in college, B? I did, and I never heard of Benford’s Law until now.

Dark Avenger said...

irregularities in ballots (especially mail-in ballots which were pushed HARD by the DNC for this election)

Ah, we had this thing called a pandemic?


The Democratic Party is kicking off the most complicated get-out-the-vote campaign in history — all without knocking on a door.

The party’s virtual convention marked the unofficial start of a massive public education, voter contact and legal strategy to make voting by mail a success in the fall, a huge priority for Joe Biden’s campaign. Record high numbers of people plan to vote by mail due to the coronavirus pandemic, and that group skews heavily Democratic, according to polling and absentee ballot request data.

While party leaders spent much of the spring and summer pushing mail voting as a safety measure amid coronavirus, Democratic operatives stress nearly unanimously that voting-by-mail shouldn’t be viewed as the only option for voters. Campaigns must make clear that voters can still vote in-person, they said, either on Election Day or in early voting.

“I do worry about some of the vote-by-mail push, in that we’re now taking voters with 15 years of voting X way and we’re encouraging them to vote Y," said Steve Schale, a Florida-based Democratic strategist who works with Unite the Country, a pro-Biden super PAC. “We should help people vote in the way they’re most comfortable voting. We shouldn’t force them into vote-by-mail either.”

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s recent attacks on the USPS and on mail-voting is raising concern among voters, operatives say.

“We've seen such an increase from young people in terms of concern about their ballot casting,” said Jared DeLoof, the states director of NextGen America, which targets younger voters. “They want to vote, they want to make sure that that vote is going to count.”


That means a bigger emphasis than usual on following up after putting a ballot in the mail. When a voter votes early, that usually marks the end of campaigns’ efforts to reach them. “I always say if you want to stop getting phone calls from the campaign, vote,” Ridder joked.

But this year, Democrats believe they will also have to follow up with some voters after their ballot has been cast, in an effort to help them fix ballots that have been rejected for technical reasons. State rules vary widely on if or how voters can correct their ballots, and the time windows to do so can be short.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/21/democrats-vote-by-mail-plan-399671

Dark Avenger said...

Poll watcher exclusions?

JUDGE BRANN
The next judgment comes from Judge Matthew Brann, in federal District Court in Pennsylvania on November 21.
I’m going to spend a bit more time on this case, as it was the Trump campaign’s highest profile lawsuit. This is the one Mr Giuliani thought important enough to argue in court himself.
The campaign sought to stop Pennsylvania from certifying its results, arguing its voters’ “equal protection” rights under the Constitution had been violated (i.e. that Pennsylvania had treated Trump voters differently to Biden voters).
There were two core allegations. First, that Republican observers had been prevented from properly watching the vote count. Second, that some voters (mostly in Democratic-leaning counties) had been given a chance to cure technical defects with their ballots, while others (mostly in Republican-leaning counties) had not.
Note what I didn’t mention there. The campaign did not make any specific allegations of voter fraud, or offer any proof that fraud had occurred. The closest it came was to argue that fraud may have been allowed to happen, due to the treatment of its observers.
Under questioning from Judge Brann during oral arguments, Mr Giuliani conceded it was “not a fraud case”.
“None of these allegations claim that the Trump campaign’s watchers were treated differently than the Biden campaign’s watchers,” Judge Brann noted in his judgment, addressing the campaign’s first argument.
“Simply alleging that poll watchers did not have access to some areas does not plausibly plead unequal treatment. Without actually alleging that one group was treated differently than another, plaintiffs’ argument falls flat.”
It didn’t help that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled, on the same day as Mr Giuliani’s oral argument, that election workers’ treatment of observers had been perfectly legal.

https://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/us-politics/donald-trump-says-judges-have-refused-to-look-at-the-evidence-of-voter-fraud-is-he-right/news-story/d4f1fd532cfa6e9ccebc45793f0f6ab3

It didn't happen. Lots of irregularities happened. Enough to make Trump win and Biden lose? I don't know.
If you claim tht these were clean elections then you are either delusional or lying to yourself.


You have evidence of some sort? Not to get all schoolyard on you, but, having disproven your allegations, put up, or ................

As Master K’ung noted, virtue must not be left to stand alone

Dark Avenger said...

Looks like there was an attempt at election tampering, but after they were held.

According to audio of the call, obtained by The Washington Post, Trump asked Raffensperger to "find" the votes necessary to alter the results in Georgia.

"So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state," Trump said.

Raffensperger and his general counsel repeatedly disputed the President's perception of the situation in Georgia and insisted that the results were fair and that he had lost, but Trump persisted.

"There's no way I lost Georgia. There's no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes," he claimed.

Raffensperger, a Republican and a Trump supporter, has consistently turned back Trump's claims of voter fraud in Georgia. He has overseen three different recounts of the vote and conducted several other reviews of the process. He recently tasked the Georgia Bureau of Investigation with conducting an audit of the signature match system in Cobb County that determined the system was 99.9% accurate and revealed no evidence of fraud.


https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/01/03/politics/georgia-election-brad-raffensperger-donald-trump/index.html