2017 Democratic Thread

[Quin]

Trump letting down small farms, so now Grassley is finally mad.

[StrangeSox]

University of Florida is spending $500k on security to make sure a Nazi can speak on campus, and they're letting the Nazis control which members of the press have access to this "free speech" event.

 

That price tag for one day of security for a speaker who brings zero value to the academic institution is equal to the annual budget of some departments.

[StrangeSox]

Speaking of free speech

 

76% of Republicans think the media simply makes stories up about Trump and a plurality of Republicans think broadcasters should have their licenses revoked.

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/18/t...ews-poll-243884

 

 

I'm not sure how to fix a problem of a sizable number of citizens in a democracy refusing to believe anything they don't like is real.

[illinilaw08]

Rabbit, I know that this wasn't the point of your post, but the ignorance of the American voter can be staggering.

[StrangeSox]

What do you think drives that overall percentage so high? It's the partisan split. Only 11% of Republicans don't think the media makes up stories to make Trump look bad.

 

Anyway, this is the "Democratic Thread" and I posted the link to the article for anyone to read.

[illinilaw08]

Wouldn't this post be better suited to be aimed at the person who posted the article? Not sure why you directed this at me as opposed to SS. I was just quoting the article to give a greater understanding of the poll results instead of nitpicking what suited an agenda.

 

Well, the quote that you pulled out was done to suit your agenda right? You have been hammering away at the mainstream media since as far back as I can remember in the 'Buster. I assumed that the point of you pulling that quote was to support your position that Americans don't trust the media.

[Soxbadger]

The internet has really screwed up facts.

 

Its shocking how little people know and how much people rely on what they read on the internet.

[StrangeSox]

This, combined with gerrymandering, is the national GOP plan on how to "win" elections

 

Rigged: How Voter Suppression Threw Wisconsin to Trump

And possibly handed him the whole election.

 

You can’t say Andrea Anthony didn’t try. A 37-year-old African American woman with an infectious smile, Anthony had voted in every major election since she was 18. On November 8, 2016, she went to the Clinton Rose Senior Center, her polling site on the predominantly black north side of Milwaukee, to cast a ballot for Hillary Clinton. “Voting is important to me because I know I have a little, teeny, tiny voice, but that is a way for it to be heard,” she said. “Even though it’s one vote, I feel it needs to count.”

 

She’d lost her driver’s license a few days earlier, but she came prepared with an expired Wisconsin state ID and proof of residency. A poll worker confirmed she was registered to vote at her current address. But this was Wisconsin’s first major election that required voters—even those who were already registered—to present a current driver’s license, passport, or state or military ID to cast a ballot. Anthony couldn’t, and so she wasn’t able to vote.

 

The poll worker gave her a provisional ballot instead. It would be counted only if she went to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get a new ID and then to the city clerk’s office to confirm her vote, all within 72 hours of Election Day. But Anthony couldn’t take time off from her job as an administrative assistant at a housing management company, and she had five kids and two grandkids to look after. For the first time in her life, her vote wasn’t counted.

 

The impact of Wisconsin’s voter ID law received almost no attention. When it did, it was often dismissive. Two days after the election, Talking Points Memo ran a piece by University of California-Irvine law professor Rick Hasen under the headline “Democrats Blame ‘Voter Suppression’ for Clinton Loss at Their Peril.” Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said it was “a load of crap” to claim that the voter ID law had led to lower turnout. When Clinton, in an interview with New York magazine, said her loss was “aided and abetted by the suppression of the vote, particularly in Wisconsin,” the Washington Examiner responded, “Hillary Clinton Blames Voter Suppression for Losing a State She Didn’t Visit Once During the Election.” As the months went on, pundits on the right and left turned Clinton’s loss into a case study for her campaign’s incompetence and the Democratic Party’s broader abandonment of the white working class. Voter suppression efforts were practically ignored, when they weren’t mocked.

 

Stories like Anthony’s went largely unreported. An analysis by Media Matters for America found that only 8.9 percent of TV news segments on voting rights from July 2016 to June 2017 “discussed the impact voter suppression laws had on the 2016 election,” while more than 70 percent “were about Trump’s false claims of voter fraud and noncitizen voting.” During the 2016 campaign, there were 25 presidential debates but not a single question about voter suppression. The media has spent countless hours interviewing Trump voters but almost no time reporting on disenfranchised voters like Anthony.

 

Three years after Wisconsin passed its voter ID law in 2011, a federal judge blocked it, noting that 9 percent of all registered voters did not have the required forms of ID. Black voters were about 50 percent likelier than whites to lack these IDs because they were less likely to drive or to be able to afford the documents required to get a current ID, and more likely to have moved from out of state. There is, of course, no one thing that swung the election. Clinton’s failings, James Comey’s 11th-hour letter, Russian interference, fake news, sexism, racism, and a struggling economy in key swing states all contributed to Trump’s victory. We will never be able to assign exact proportions to all the factors at play. But a year later, interviews with voters, organizers, and election officials reveal that, in Wisconsin and beyond, voter suppression played a much larger role than is commonly understood.

 

Republicans said the ID law was necessary to stop voter fraud, blaming alleged improprieties at the polls in Milwaukee for narrow losses in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. But when the measure was challenged in court, the state couldn’t present a single case of voter impersonation that the law would have stopped. “It is absolutely clear that [the law] will prevent more legitimate votes from being cast than fraudulent votes,” Judge Lynn Adelman wrote in a 2014 decision striking down the law. Adelman’s ruling was overturned by a conservative appeals court panel, which called Wisconsin’s law “materially identical” to a voter ID law in Indiana upheld by the Supreme Court in 2008, even though Wisconsin’s law was much stricter. The panel said the state had “revised the procedures” to make it easier for voters to obtain a voter ID, which reduced “the likelihood of irreparable injury.” Many more rounds of legal challenges ensued, but the law was allowed to stand for the 2016 election.

 

After the election, registered voters in Milwaukee County and Madison’s Dane County were surveyed about why they didn’t cast a ballot. Eleven percent cited the voter ID law and said they didn’t have an acceptable ID; of those, more than half said the law was the “main reason” they didn’t vote. According to the study’s author, University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Kenneth Mayer, that finding implies that between 12,000 and 23,000 registered voters in Madison and Milwaukee—and as many as 45,000 statewide—were deterred from voting by the ID law. “We have hard evidence there were tens of thousands of people who were unable to vote because of the voter ID law,” he says.

 

According to a comprehensive study by MIT political scientist Charles Stewart, an estimated 16 million people—12 percent of all voters—encountered at least one problem voting in 2016. There were more than 1 million lost votes, Stewart estimates, because people ran into things like ID laws, long lines at the polls, and difficulty registering. Trump won the election by a total of 78,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

 

In Wisconsin, the intent of those who pushed for the ID law was clear. On the night of Wisconsin’s 2016 primary, GOP Rep. Glenn Grothman, a backer of the law when he was in the state Senate, predicted that a Republican would carry the state in November, even though Wisconsin had gone for Barack Obama by 7 points in 2012. “I think Hillary Clinton is about the weakest candidate the Democrats have ever put up,” he told a local TV news reporter, “and now we have photo ID, and I think photo ID is going to make a little bit of a difference as well.”

 

The strategy worked. While we’ll never know precisely how many people were prevented from voting, it’s safe to say that thousands of Wisconsinites like Anthony were denied one of their most fundamental rights. And with Republicans now in control of both the executive and legislative branches in the federal government and a majority of states, that problem will likely get worse.

 

In other states, the rollback of voting protections was aided by the Supreme Court, which in 2013 gutted the Voting Rights Act, ruling that nine primarily Southern states—and cities and counties in six others—with long histories of voting discrimination no longer had to clear new election rules with the federal government. The 2016 election was the first presidential contest in more than 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act.

 

A month after the Supreme Court ruling, North Carolina passed a sweeping rewrite of its election laws, requiring voter IDs, cutting early voting, and eliminating same-day registration, among other changes, before the law was struck down in a federal court for targeting black voters “with almost surgical precision.” Ohio repealed the first week of early voting, when African Americans were five times likelier than whites to cast a ballot. Florida barred ex-felons from becoming eligible to vote after serving their time, preventing 1.7 million Floridians from voting in 2016, including 1 in 5 black voting-age residents. Arizona made it a felony for anyone other than a family member or caregiver to collect a voter’s absentee ballot, disproportionately hurting Latino and Native American voters in the state’s rural areas.

 

“We’re moving into a pre-Voting Rights Act era, where there isn’t any real watchdogging of elections and changes to election laws,” says Albrecht. “States, including Wisconsin, are making maverick changes that have a significant impact on populations that have been historically disenfranchised. “The GOP shows no signs of letting up on its campaign to restrict voting rights. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has reversed the Obama administration’s opposition to a restrictive voter ID law in Texas and voter purging in Ohio. And the request by Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity for the voter data of every American has led thousands of voters to unregister in swing states like Colorado and sparked fears that the administration will propose new policies to undermine access to the ballot at the federal and state levels. Emboldened by these efforts, Republican-controlled statehouses have already passed more voting restrictions in 2017 than they did in 2016 and 2015 combined. Taken together, “there’s no doubt that these election changes affected the turnout among young voters, first-time voters, voters of color, and other members of the Obama coalition that overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton,” says Marc Elias, general counsel for Clinton’s campaign, who filed a half-dozen voting rights lawsuits in the months before the 2016 election.

 

On September 22, 2016, McGrath accompanied Zack Moore to the DMV on the east side of Madison in her well-traveled blue Acura to get a photo ID. Moore, a 34-year-old African American who’d recently moved from Chicago, worked at a car wash and in landscaping until he broke his leg playing basketball, lost his job, and became homeless. He kept an even keel despite his tough circumstances and had met McGrath at a church breakfast a few weeks earlier, asking whether she could help him vote in the upcoming election.

 

Moore, who has high cheekbones and a trim beard, came prepared with his Illinois photo ID, his Social Security card, and a pay stub for proof of residence. But he didn’t have a copy of his birth certificate, which had been misplaced by his sister in Illinois. “I’m trying to get a Wisconsin ID so I can vote,” Moore told the clerk. “I don’t have my birth certificate, but I got everything else.” Despite a sign at the DMV that said, “No Birth Certificate? No Problem!” the DMV wouldn’t give Moore a voter ID.

 

Under the terms of a court order resulting from ongoing litigation over the voter ID law, within six business days the DMV should have given Moore a credential he could use for voting. Instead, a clerk told him to go down to Illinois, get his birth certificate, and come back to the DMV. That would cost Moore money he didn’t have. If he entered Wisconsin’s ID Petition Process, it would take six to eight weeks for him to get a voter ID and he most likely would not be able to vote on Election Day.

 

A few weeks earlier, US District Judge James Peterson, who oversaw the implementation of the voter ID law, had found that Wisconsin’s process for issuing IDs was a “wretched failure” that “has disenfranchised a number of citizens who are unquestionably qualified to vote.” Eighty-five percent of those denied IDs by the DMV were black or Latino, he noted in his ruling. The roster of people denied IDs bordered on the surreal: a man born in a concentration camp in Germany who’d lost his birth certificate in a fire; a woman who’d lost use of her hands but was not permitted to grant her daughter power of attorney to sign the necessary documents at the DMV; a 90-year-old veteran of Iwo Jima who could not vote with his veteran’s ID. One woman who died while waiting for an ID was listed as a “customer-initiated cancellation” by the DMV.

 

In the trial that Peterson presided over, Todd Allbaugh, a former chief of staff for state Sen. Dale Schultz, a moderate Republican, described the discussions preceding the law’s passage. When Republican legislators debated the bill behind closed doors in 2011, he recounted, state Sen. Mary Lazich rose from her chair, smacked the table, and said, “We’ve got to think about what this could mean for the neighborhoods around Milwaukee and the college campuses around the state.” Schultz expressed concern about disenfranchising African American and younger voters, but Glenn Grothman, then a state senator and now a member of Congress, cut him off: “What I’m concerned about is winning. We better get this done while we have the opportunity.” Allbaugh testified that at least two other GOP senators were “giddy” and “politically frothing at the mouth” over the bill, including state Sen. Leah Vukmir, the board chair of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, which had helped draft voter ID laws in Wisconsin and other states.

 

Republicans were explicit about the purposes of these changes as well. On the floor of the state Senate, Grothman said of extended early voting hours in heavily Democratic cities like Madison and Milwaukee, “I want to nip this in the bud before too many other cities get on board.” (Roughly 514,000 Wisconsinites voted early in 2012; they favored Obama over Mitt Romney by 58 to 41 percent, according to exit polls.) The county clerk of conservative Waukesha County said early voting gave “too much access” to voters in Milwaukee and Madison. Judge Peterson later ruled the early voting cuts had been passed “to suppress the reliably Democratic vote of Milwaukee’s African Americans.”

[Quin]

Well when Fox News is allowed to fabricate stories left and right, of course everyone will distrust people that report real stories that don't gain traffic on Breitbart, The Blaze, InfoWars, etc.

[Quin]

And I can't forget the President who fabricates around 5 lies a day.

[GoSox05]

George W. Bush slams Trumpism, without mentioning president by name

 

 

George Bush is cool now!! Nah, just kidding, he is still a piece of s*** war criminal.

 

 

The amount of Democrats that are now going to start kissing his ass is going to be pretty awful.

[Soxbadger]

George W. Bush slams Trumpism, without mentioning president by name

 

 

George Bush is cool now!! Nah, just kidding, he is still a piece of s*** war criminal.

 

 

The amount of Democrats that are now going to start kissing his ass is going to be pretty awful.

 

While I may disagree with many of his decisions, I have consistently stated that he is not nearly as bad as people made him out to be.

[GoSox05]

While I may disagree with many of his decisions, I have consistently stated that he is not nearly as bad as people made him out to be.

 

He started an endless war that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

 

 

[Soxbadger]

He started an endless war that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

 

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-love/w...fo_b_85652.html

 

People voted for the resolution. Putting it all on Bush is just not factually correct. And you can pull the threads on this board, I was probably the most vocal opponent to attacking Iraq, because I guaranteed they would not find any real WMD's. And no sarin gas doesnt count.

 

 

 

 

[GoSox05]

His administration lied about why we were going into war.

 

I could also list off dozens of other reasons why he is horrible, but we should know them all by now.

 

This constant looking back at people like George Bush with rose colored glasses is probably why we continue to see people like Donald Trump get elected. I can't wait to see all the same people get excited for Donald Trump to join #TheResistance during Roy Moore's administration.

 

 

 

[Soxbadger]

His administration lied about why we were going into war.

 

I could also list off dozens of other reasons why he is horrible, but we should know them all by now.

 

This constant looking back at people like George Bush with rose colored glasses is probably why we continue to see people like Donald Trump get elected. I can't wait to see all the same people get excited for Donald Trump to join #TheResistance during Roy Moore's administration.

 

IMO its actually the opposite. Demonizing Bush led to the rise of people like Trump because when people tried to show how Trump is truly an evil/incompetent/unfit person it just seemed like noise.

 

Its no different than the boy that cried wolf, if you call every little puppy a wolf, eventually people tune it out and then when the real wolf comes, no one listens.

 

And Im not saying Bush was good/bad, just that when you say he is a "war criminal", you then have to put a bunch of other President's into that list as well. Id rather not deal in sensationalism. If you believe Bush was wrong on X, say he was wrong on X. The same away if Obama is wrong with Y.

 

But its way to easy to say "Bush/Obama are war criminals", and that is what society is becoming. Most of life is grey, its not black, its not white.

[southsider2k5]

IMO its actually the opposite. Demonizing Bush led to the rise of people like Trump because when people tried to show how Trump is truly an evil/incompetent/unfit person it just seemed like noise.

Its no different than the boy that cried wolf, if you call every little puppy a wolf, eventually people tune it out and then when the real wolf comes, no one listens.

 

And Im not saying Bush was good/bad, just that when you say he is a "war criminal", you then have to put a bunch of other President's into that list as well. Id rather not deal in sensationalism. If you believe Bush was wrong on X, say he was wrong on X. The same away if Obama is wrong with Y.

 

But its way to easy to say "Bush/Obama are war criminals", and that is what society is becoming. Most of life is grey, its not black, its not white.

 

Boy that sounds familiar...

[Soxbadger]

Boy that sounds familiar...

 

Ive agreed and disagreed with pretty much every person on this board at some point.

 

And despite having many differences, you are one of the people who have consistently said that, and to me its scary that other people arent seeing the results.

 

We are watching America being dumbed down by an elite wealthy class and people who are seemingly intelligent are falling for it.

[StrangeSox]

what if Bush and Trump are both evil and terrible Presidents but in different ways and neither should ever have come close to having any real power

[Soxbadger]

what if Bush and Trump are both evil and terrible Presidents but in different ways and neither should ever have come close to having any real power

 

Do you really believe that Bush is evil?

 

Deep down, do you actually believe that?

 

Its a serious question, because evil is a lot different than "terrible", "unqualified", etc.

[StrangeSox]

Boy that sounds familiar...

the key flaw in your argument is that you're basically always letting conservatives off the hook for voting for increasingly awful and incompetent candidates and policies. at the end of the day, they're still the ones who voted Trump and it shouldn't matter if Democrats called McCain or Romney too conservative.

[StrangeSox]

Do you really believe that Bush is evil?

 

Deep down, do you actually believe that?

 

Its a serious question, because evil is a lot different than "terrible", "unqualified", etc.

 

He did evil things and empowered evil people. His administration is responsible for two forever wars that have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.

[Soxbadger]

the key flaw in your argument is that you're basically always letting conservatives off the hook for voting for increasingly awful and incompetent candidates and policies. at the end of the day, they're still the ones who voted Trump and it shouldn't matter if Democrats called McCain or Romney too conservative.

 

Ends justify the means. Why do we keep having this circular argument? If not sensationalizing the "evilness" of people means that guys like Trump never get elected again, then why not do something to change it?

 

Seriously we just elected someone that I wouldnt leave in charge of my goldfish. At some point you have to start looking in the mirror and asking "What can I do to change this."

 

Maybe there are a million other things to blame, but if those things are out of my control, dont I have to focus on what I can control. What I can do?

 

Whatever happened in the past is the past. No amount of labels is going to change what was done 1 second ago, let alone 10 years ago. But what we can change is tomorrow, next year whatever. And if approximately 50% of the population thinks the earth is flat, and we keep showing them the same picture of the earth being round and it isnt changing their mind, maybe we need to show them a different picture? It doesnt matter how stupid or whatever it is.

 

 

[Soxbadger]

He did evil things and empowered evil people. His administration is responsible for two forever wars that have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.

 

Do you think Obama is evil? Do you think Truman is evil? Thomas Jefferson?

 

I could make arguments for all of them. But I leave that term for people who I truly think are trying to purposefully do bad things. And that is the difference, evil requires intent.

 

If Bush was truly evil, he wouldnt be friendly with Obama, he wouldnt be out there trying to make things better. If you cant see the difference between Trump and Bush, I dont really know what else to say.

Edited October 19, 2017 by Soxbadger

[StrangeSox]

Because I think that argument is fundamentally bulls***. The John Birch Society started taking off in the 50's. Barry Goldwater's crazy ass was the Republican nominee back in '64. Reagan was a far right President who almost took the nomination in '76 and won in '80. Bush's administration was full of hardline neoconservatives and radicals with Liberty University fundamentalist backgrounds. McCain chose Palin to try to placate an increasingly radical base.

 

Democrats pointing out that the GOP keeps getting more and more conservative doesn't cause people to vote for increasingly dumb and crazy candidates. If Obama had attacked Romney as a "moderate," that's not going to suddenly make the conservative base who jumped on board with Donald "Mexicans are drug dealers and rapists/ban all Muslims/Obama is a Kenyan" Trump from the beginning of his campaign to rethink their support.

Edited October 19, 2017 by StrangeSox