hayduke2 wrote:

 

Stand Up 4 America!!!  Instagram #standup4america @martiniandoliveshow #getmitch

Dr. Zaius - It's Not Too Late

This year, residents of Maine will be using ranked choice voting to vote for the president. So they can put their favorite choice on top, and a second lessor (of two evils) choice next. So they can voice their hope and still cast a safety vote. 

No, it's not perfect, but I'd take it over what we have most everywhere else now. 

https://reason.com/2020/09/23/...

 islander wrote:
 

 kurtster wrote:
 

No and Yes. It's an odd use case where you seem to be using an 'aw shucks' 'good old boy' image to offset your self from 'the elites'. 

 kurtster wrote:
 

Uh, okay. Knock yourself out. 

 kurtster wrote:
 
Uh, we've both been around here a while and generally disagree, so sure. No, I don't recall you using this term so much until the last couple of years. If you feel especially stalked... well, uh, okay. Maybe if I was a better stalker i'd have a better record. 


 kurtster wrote:

Okay then. in all my stalking I really hadn't picked up your time in Florida. 


 kurtster wrote:
 
Yeah, like I said. We get it, we're 'the others' you loath so much and you're not. 


 kurtster wrote:
 
when you want to be 'elite'?


 kurtster wrote:
 

To busy stalking, maybe later.  Did you see which way Manbird went?

 KarmaKarma wrote: 
photoshopped

 islander wrote: 
Curious.  So now you're a Vernacular Nazi.  Are you accusing me of cultural misappropriation ?

I guess that I need to start calling out people who use the word "Dude" who have never been on a surfboard ...

You've been stalking me for years here now and I've been using that term the entire time I've been here.  So now it bothers you ?

I've been known to use it in real life on occasion.  I picked it up when I went to school in Florida in 1970.

I use it here to distinguish between you the poster and you all as to address those other than the poster.

Except when it's not ...

Have you tried knitting ?  I hear that it is very therapeutic, y'all ...

kurtster wrote:

And Hillary and others are demanding Biden never to concede regardless of the outcome should he lose.



kcar wrote:

When and where? Again with your fantasy crap. Put up some links to back your claim or shut up. Jesus you are becoming worse than KarmaKarma.






 sirdroseph wrote:
 


Which one of you do I congratulate more: Kurt for misinterpreting Clinton's statement or you for compounding the error? 

Did you read the very article you linked to, sirdroseph? HRC was commenting on the fact that we'll likely not get the complete and correct vote tallies by the end of election night. She was pointing out that many ballots will be submitted by mail. As the quote below notes, those mailed ballots will in a number of states will not be counted as rapidly as votes cast in person. Also, some states like OH and NC will allow mailed ballots to count as long as they are postmarked by election day—even if those ballots reach their destination days later. 

Numerous newspapers have reported that vote counts will take dramatically longer in this election. That's why Clinton was urging Biden not to concede on election night. Yet Kurt claimed

"And Hillary and others are demanding Biden never to concede regardless of the outcome should he lose."

and you let his claim stand without comment, correction or objection. 



From the article you linked to and quoted, sirdroseph: 

Clinton conceded defeat on the night of the election in 2016 but said the shift to mail-in voting due to the coronavirus pandemic means it could take longer to know the winner in November.

She said this year's election day results might point to Trump having a narrow advantage. But in that case, Clinton said, "Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances because I think this is going to drag out."

...

As many as half of U.S. voters are expected to cast their votes by mail this year, more than twice as many as in 2016, but not all state and local officials have the capacity to count mail ballots as quickly as those cast in person.

Also, some states, including battlegrounds like Ohio and North Carolina, allow ballots to count if they arrive days after polls close but are postmarked by election day.

"Eventually I do believe he (Biden) will win if we don't give an inch and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is," Clinton said.

 Garlique wrote:
 
A reflection indeed; mixed with instant karma it seems.
We all shine on, or not.

From Jonah Goldberg of the National Review, my favorite conservative writer:

President Trump isn’t plotting a coup, but that is not the defense of the man you might think it is.

More on that in a moment.

First, let’s say you took the job of basketball coach for your kid’s rec team.

You like basketball, but you aren’t a master of the rules and it’s not like you know how to design plays, motivate kids, or do anything that’s generally considered basketball-y. So why did you take the job in the first place? It doesn’t matter—at least, not for these purposes. Maybe the school or your church asked you to do it when no one else would. Let’s just say you did it for good reasons. There was a need and you stepped up.

What would you do? You might buy a book on coaching, or on the fundamentals of basketball. You might seek advice from people who’ve coached before or who know more about the game than you do. In short, you’d do some homework, because you don’t want to let the kids and the community down and—reasonably enough—you don’t want to embarrass yourself.

This is a very short and admittedly partial example of what Yuval Levin is getting at when he notes how, traditionally, institutions were things that “shaped character.” To do the job right as a basketball coach, you have to bend yourself to the task. You’ve gotta carve out huge amounts of time, and muster scads of emotional energy, learn a whole bunch things you didn’t know or even necessarily want to know, all to serve other people.

Now imagine you took the coaching job, but all you did was spend every practice talking about how great you are and how biased the refs are. At every game you barely paid attention to the action on the court, and spent most of your time posturing for the fans in the stands.

This is what Yuval says has happened to too many of our institutions. We want to bend them to us rather than bend ourselves to them. We use them to preen and perform on.

Now, honestly, which one of these two scenarios does Donald Trump represent?

I ask, because if he took the job seriously—as seriously as a conscientious basketball coach might—he’d know how to answer this question: “Win, lose, or draw … will you commit here today for a peaceful transferral of power after the election?”

This isn’t complicated. This isn’t ideological. This isn’t next-level anything. Trump doesn’t know the job because he doesn’t want to know it.

If you’re a basketball coach and you don’t know what a layup is or what someone means when they say “set a pick,” you don’t know the job. If you don’t know how to answer a question about whether you will commit to a peaceful transfer of power—and you’re the frick’n president of the United States of America—you don’t know the job. And if you’re coming up on your fourth year on the job, it means you never cared enough to learn it.

Now, I don’t think he was saying he will deploy or demand state violence if the returns don’t go his way (though that is not to say that he won’t welcome it or encourage it). My point here is he just didn’t recognize the terms. I think he thought “commit to a peaceful transfer of power” was just a quirky way of asking whether he will contest the election results—a question he’s been asked many times and his answer Wednesday didn’t break much new ground.

There’s just one problem: They aren’t the same question. Going to court to fight over ballots does not represent a lack of commitment to the peaceful transfer of power. The Florida recount fight might have been ugly, but it did not lead to an unpeaceful transfer of power.

If Donald Trump had the slightest patriotic inclination to let the institution of the presidency shape him, he’d know this. He’d know that he was being asked to disavow using violence to cling to power. But he doesn’t know the job. He didn’t know the history of “America First” or “the Silent Majority” when reporters first introduced him to the phrases, either. He didn’t—and doesn’t—know what the Trans-Pacific Partnership does or how tariffs work. He doesn’t know the job.

If his superfans weren’t so eager to cling to the idea that this man always knows what he’s doing, they’d loosen their grip enough to acknowledge he screwed this up because he doesn’t know the job.

I admit that loosening the grip must be hard when you’re so deeply invested in the notion that Trump is the Great Defender of Our Eternal Principles.™ I mean Sy Sperling wasn’t just the president of the Hair Club for Men, he was also a client. So you’d expect the President of the United States and Defender of the Constitutional Faith to familiarize himself with the product line in the Prager U course catalog too. But his thumbless grasp of the roles and responsibilities he volunteered to take on is just fine in a world where institutions are solely self-serving.

So much for what he didn’t say. What he did say was still very bad. “Get rid of the ballots and … we’ll have a very peaceful—there won’t be a transfer. Frankly, there’ll be a continuation .”

That’s heinous.

There are legitimate problems and challenges with mail-in ballots. But Trump has made it very, very clear that he doesn’t care about grappling with the legitimate issues. (Heck, he’s all but begging seniors in Florida to send in their ballots.) He doesn’t care about the legitimacy of ballots or the election, he just cares passionately that—should he lose—his loss will be seen as illegitimate. If he cared about the job, he’d mobilize resources to make sure the election was free and fair. He ain’t doing that.

On August 17, he said: “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged. Remember that.”

Again, imagine what you would think about a basketball coach who talked this way before every game. Is that how you want your kid to think about sports? Or life? If not, why are you holding the president to a lower standard?

One last crucial point: It’s fine to argue that Trump wasn’t calling for violence. Again, I don’t think he was. But this kind of talk can still lead to violence. My “defense” of Trump here is that he was too ignorant to understand what he was being asked. But such ignorance can have consequences. There’s a reason presidents are supposed to shut down any talk of violence in elections: Because there are a few thousand years of history supporting the worry that political passion leads to violence.

Right now, parts of the right are celebrating vigilantism at least as much as parts of the left are celebrating street violence. A president who understood that question about the peaceful transfer of power, and who understood the demands of the presidency, would have leapt at the opportunity to give a forceful answer to that question given the state of the country. But he doesn’t know the job. And sometimes, not knowing the job has consequences.

It boggles my mind that anyone with a shred of sense — left wing, right wing, no wings at all — could look at Trump's job performance and not see exactly what Goldberg sees: preening, narcissistic incompetence on an unprecedented scale.

from john silva at newslit

"Just so you know, it's entirely possible to have a reasonable, civil discussion with someone on Twitter who's ideology differs from yours. It's called "discourse" and we should all try harder at achieving it."

 rgio wrote:
 
No. Facts are important
like the fact, trump didnt say he won't leave,
as he didnt say he will leave.
he says something in between/ambiguous because he knows some people will assume  he meant he won't leave peacefully,
and others will defend him and say thats not what he said, fake news
and all  the above = divisiveness

 Garlique wrote:
 
And so the reality that one-third of the country actually spews the complete and utter nonsense of the idiot king.  

By projecting every single action of his own onto the other party, he has literally brainwashed the uneducated, white, middle-aged and older into believing he's the one who can eliminate the corruption.  The party knows better, but they are frozen by fear, not knowing how to save themselves if they upset the hoard. The rest of the world watches and asks "how can they be so stupid?", yet we march toward an election where the current leader is telling anyone who will listen that if he loses, it's fixed...it's a coup...and he won't leave.

Facts are irrelevant.

 kurtster wrote:
 

Lots of wrong things...
Clinton didnt say never concede...just dont concede on the night of the election, because of mail in ballots...
Trump said something similar, but was more allusive/ambiguous about what he meant. 

As for the "coup"
Was there an unorganized effort by democrats AND republicans to keep trump from being president? Yes
Was there reason for many of the actions taken to thwart trump? yes
take the wire tap...there was grounds to tap a candidate who had 'unusual" ties/meetings with russians...

So once again, trump supporters may be asking some good questions, they just have the wrong answers 

 kurtster wrote:
 

In what alternate universe has anyone been convicted of attempting a "coup" against Trump?

In the universe I live in, the only convictions have been of Trump's associates. Perhaps you're referring to the prosecutions of vile anti-Trump forces at work in the "deep state" that you & others like you have been telling us for years are just around the corner, next week, next month. Kinda like Trump's ACA replacement. 
 

 Proclivities wrote: 
And to be clear, not only am I including the candidates, their teams and the leaders themselves, I meant them in particular.

 sirdroseph wrote:
 
Maybe not "most politically active people " in true numbers, but the most noticeable ones tend to have those traits you speak of.

Most politically active people are angry, abusive and say awful things about each other.  Most of it true of course.

 kcar wrote: 

Hillary Clinton says Joe Biden should not concede on election night

She said this year's election day results might point to Trump having a narrow advantage. But in that case, Clinton said, "Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances because I think this is going to drag out."