Mourning in America - Trump Year One: November '16 to

fwiw I've been thinking a lot about the Bannon "darkness is good" quote:

“Darkness is good,” he said. “Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when they get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”

Remarkably, this quote is getting used exactly the way he's admitting he wants it to be used -- people are sharing it as proof he's evil. Which he may in fact be, but it's just interesting that if you read it carefully he's really saying that he likes people to get hysterical about him so they can't see straight. And people are getting hysterical about him.

"If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him."

https://twitter.com/dansolomon/status/801119923577569280

Interesting - looks like Outgamie county had 1126 more votes counted than ballots cast, and all 1126 were for Trump. Guess the GOP had a GOTV effort after all!

i saw something about this last night. feel a bit stupid getting conspiratorial but ...hm

I also feel v wary about getting sucked into conspiracy theories especially when they tell me what I want to hear but I've been thinking since the election that Trump projected every one of his vices onto Clinton and spent a last months of the election saying the vote would be rigged.

exactly, he's telegraphed all this so blatantly that, geez, I dunno. I can see us looking back like, "I can't believe all you idiots actually thought 61 million people voted for Donald 'Grab her by the pussy' Trump"

whoa @ that Twitter thread

so HRC needs to ask for a recount? good luck with that.

I'm very skeptical about all of this. If there were a conspiracy to inflate Trump votes spanning multiple states, then it should definitely be investigated and prosecuted, but I don't think that Clinton requesting a recount spanning those states because of messed up results in one county is really the most constructive thing to do at this point.

I'm getting pretty tired of all these people holding out hope that electors will switch their votes or other crazy things will happen to magically change the result of the election. What in the world good would that do other than further undermining what little democracy still remains here? It's time to accept that Trump won and determine how to stop his agenda rather than hoping for a bizarre miracle.

Nazis don't use the term Judeo-Christian ime

― Mordy, Tuesday, November 22, 2016 1:06 PM (fifty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well, neither do Jews, but neither here nor there

no one has accused bannon of being jewish tho!

maybe we should just to confuse matters!

sorry I just loathe "Judeo-Christian" as an idea, I decline to be co-opted by Christian hegemony especially in service of islamophobia

I realize that's not your point I am just prickly about it

lol Shep going ham

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/shepard-smith-trump-news-you-can-choose

I'm with ya Moodles, just irritated that Trump spent an entire month whining about how the vote was rigged, only to find out that virtually every instance of rigging or suppression happened in his favor, not to mention the electoral college giving him the victory despite losing by a projected 2.5 million

http://www.snopes.com/audit-the-vote/

for the record this "It's not a conflict of interest if I do it" bullshit is so damn infuriating. If Clinton said that they'd already be starting the impeachment proceedings.

i feel like what could actually get the vote overturned is if there were pretty clear and convincing evidence that russian hackery or something did inflate trump vote count

but anything less than that is just not going to fly

i'm sure the director of the NSA is doing everything he can to validate the results

http://www.wsj.com/articles/adm-michael-rogers-leading-candidate-to-be-trumps-director-of-national-intelligence-1479495306

is it weird or wrong that i can't completely dismiss the idea that that might have happened? (russian hackery) i mean it seems super-unlikely, but i feel like i'm living in a basically insane universe now

for the record this "It's not a conflict of interest if I do it" bullshit is so damn infuriating. If Clinton said that they'd already be starting the impeachment proceedings.

― frogbs, Tuesday, November 22, 2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bz49AVqsFnE

I was thinking last week about Trump's continual reiteration about the election being rigged possibly being an admission. Always best to hide in plain sight or redirect attention or whatever.

is it weird or wrong that i can't completely dismiss the idea that that might have happened? (russian hackery) i mean it seems super-unlikely, but i feel like i'm living in a basically insane universe now

lol ditto, I remember thinking Tuesday night "I'm going to wake up and there's going to be a massive story about how the voting machines were all compromised, because there's no way in hell this many people actually voted for Donald Trump"

it's not crazy - just a month ago, a bunch of toasters connected to wi-fi took down the internet

http://www.billjamesonline.com/fixing_a_presidential_election/

If the Russians were capable of tweaking the actual votes, would they have done all the other stuff (hacking DNC emails, etc)? I mean, would people even be talking about the Russians now if that stuff had never happened?

otoh, maybe they did do that stuff to produce arguments just like mine here. It's all about . . . levels.

Maybe they did all the other stuff to make the election close enough to steal.

Maybe they were only capable of hacking a few select locations without detecting suspicion and they knew that that alone wouldn't be enough to tip it. The system is totally decentralized.

Or mordy otm - didnt see your post

i still think non-hackery explanations are more plausible though - gains for trump over romney were present in p much all the states, not just in the swing states. i think trump is going to end up with 1-2 million more votes than romney had in 2012.

i want to rule it out because i hate conspiracy theories but somehow it seems possible to me

whatever happened to oppo dump

xpost

that, and actually makes me start wondering about brexit

Not convinced by any conspiracy talk so far, but it did occur to me in the last few days before the election that if there were indeed plans to somehow rig the election, Trump's repeatedly hinting that he might dispute the results thus forcing Democrats to strongly defend the democratic process and the legitimacy of the results would have been a pretty smart move.

never attribute to malice what can be explained by systemic racism and the electoral college

my faith is democracy is already pretty rocked by the loser of this election getting 2.5 million more votes than the winner

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/activists-urge-hillary-clinton-to-challenge-election-results.html

Hillary Clinton is being urged by a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers to call for a recount in three swing states won by Donald Trump, New York has learned. The group, which includes voting-rights attorney John Bonifaz and J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, believes they’ve found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked. The group is so far not speaking on the record about their findings and is focused on lobbying the Clinton team in private.

Last Thursday, the activists held a conference call with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and campaign general counsel Marc Elias to make their case, according to a source briefed on the call. The academics presented findings showing that in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots. Based on this statistical analysis, Clinton may have been denied as many as 30,000 votes; she lost Wisconsin by 27,000. While it’s important to note the group has not found proof of hacking or manipulation, they are arguing to the campaign that the suspicious pattern merits an independent review — especially in light of the fact that the Obama White House has accused the Russian government of hacking the Democratic National Committee.

i'm not an expert in the field but apparently halderman is a serious person whose opinion should have weight

each election should be independently verified imo.

i'm pretty sure any attempt to audit the vote would be a total shitshow - immediately politicized, trump voters claiming "they're trying to steal the election" -- there's already such a void of legitimacy in the govt (for v good reasons) that it would be impossible to reach a conclusion that would not leave a substantial portion of the country feeling cheated

the only way this would succeed without, ah, conflict is if it triggered any constitutional reconsiderations, but that ain't happening. This is one of the few shoe-is-on-the-the-other foot scenarios: according to the rules, Clinton lost, and I sure as hell wouldn't want Trump contesting results if he had won the popular vote.

otm

there'd have to be some kind of smoking gun. supposedly WI is already doing its own recount. if they announced that they found evidence of tampering - like let's say after inauguration day - that would presumably trigger a huge crisis

ghosts in the data is not enough - you need a smoking gun

though i would have thought digital only counties would be urban counties given the higher cost, and urban counties would have skewed blue, not the other way around

there's no good solution to this mess apart from maybe going back in time and stopping donald trump from existing

or going back in time and grabbing Madison, Hamilton, and Morris by the lapels.

She won't do it

sad