"Just another day in paradise, okay?" April 2017 President Trump and oppo dump thread

Our idiot voters are more likely to just draw a C&B on the ballot than vote for a Trump.

I'll grant you Clive Palmer, but wouldn't you prefer an elected millionaire tweeting sad poems about how he misses cheeseburgers?

i vote no to forced voting

was always relieved late in life when Mom told me she wasn't voting

So the argument is optional voting weeds out the people you wouldn't want voting anyway? Worked so well in the last presidential election

Actually I think it works the other way round. Compulsory voting shifts things to the centre and away from the extremes. We have Donald Trump type politicians in Australia but they poll 10-15% of the vote, not 48% or whatever Trump got.

white house photographer, it's still kind of a job?

http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/2/15140892/trump-white-house-photographer-shealah-craighead-vs-pete-souza-obama

there's a subtext to this that just seems to infest the entire administration - just winging it, whatever seems like it mostly works, resulsts!!! - so basically everything about how our government runs is now the macrocosm of shit like this amazing moment, whatever's supposed to be going on here

https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8261591/17157745_1278383738897730_4999235804013350519_o.jpg

https://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/848702920128438272

Jared Kushner is in Iraq right now, a senior administration official confirms.

Can he stay there?

ppl who don't vote wd vote the way people who do vote vote, studies have shown

thought we all caught that one

tee hee Gerson's bit in the Post is merciless

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-failing-presidency-has-the-gop-in-a-free-fall/2017/03/30/e0882d62-1581-11e7-ada0-1489b735b3a3_story.html

Heading into last year’s election, Republicans knew that this problem — the tea party predicament, the Freedom Caucus conundrum, the Boehner bog — had to be dealt with. The GOP needed a large and capable leader who could either unite the whole party (at least temporarily) with a bold, conservative vision, or peel off some centrist Democratic support with innovative policy. They needed an above-average president.

What they got is unimaginably distant from any of these goals. They got a leader who is empty — devoid of even moderately detailed preferences and incapable of using policy details in the course of political persuasion.

ppl who don't vote wd vote the way people who do vote vote, studies have shown

again a) if you make more people vote, you get more people thinking about their votes, and especially b) I don't think you can show studies that indicate this wrt preferential voting and proportional representation? bcz if we're fantasising about electoral reform improving the US anyway

if you make more people vote, you get more people thinking about their votes

[citation needed]

regardless, mandatory voting would draw more minority voters into the fold, which would be bad news for republicans.

According to the Center for American Progress, “poll closures and limited voting hours disproportionately affect black voters”. And looking at early voting data, they found that trend was particularly noticeable in North Carolina, where there were 158 fewer early polling places in counties with large black communities and African American voter participation was down 16%.

Our idiot voters are more likely to just draw a C&B on the ballot than vote for a Trump.

surely this would be correctly interpreted by the courts as a vote for Trump tho

i have no data to support this but i don't think the slackers who didn't vote would have gone for trump

he was the exhausting prospect, the weird one

make the voting day a national holiday imo, it works very well in France.

while I am initially horrified by the idea of entering voters into a lottery system, I have decided the time for principles is over and whatever pisses off and attenuates the right wing is something we should do

We have compulsory voting in Australia. The fine if you don't vote is only $20

Nope, its $75 - I know I just got fined for not voting in the fricking local council elections of all things haha :(

But yeah, make voting day a saturday and have BBQs like we do. Make it fun (ish)!

i'm p much 100 percent in favor of mandatory voting. the idea of "low-information voters" ruining our election seems like a moot point after the last election, and making it illegal not to vote (and therefore presumably illegal to interfere with people voting) seems like the only thing that could effectively end the republicans' war on voting.

i know it's hard, but imagine it actually being worse. you can't force people to be informed and i don't buy that the people too lazy/disinterested to go vote now are suddenly going to find the energy to be better informed for something they're not inclined to do in the first place. you're going to have a lot of people just getting it over with and checking off whatever name they recognize. probably the incumbent, or failing that, any professional wrestler that happen to have thrown his/her hat in the ring.

That "fine old American tradition" of letting all fifty states fuck around with having their own voting and elections standards means nationwide mandatory voting will NEVER HAPPEN. As in NOT EVER. Also known as NOT IN A MILLION YEARS.

Wait so even with the system you do have, you dont have a consistent method of placing the votes/who supervises the count etc? Dont you have like a dept of voting or something akin to our Electoral Comission??

I mean we have state and local elections as well as federal, but theres very consistent and very carefully supervised methods. (and it is very simple! Paper forms and pencils, no crappy hackable computers or weird mechanical items)

you dont have a consistent method of placing the votes/who supervises the count etc?

You nailed it!

best to remember that the US has very strong state's rights w/r/t/ most policy, and any unifying national policy is a huge uphill battle. just to take part of my field, for example, the National Electrical Code is currently being adopted in various stages by all 50 different states, some have 2014 code but some don't.

to conclude, the US is a ridiculous patchwork of regulations. Not all the states even keep the same time! Voting laws are totally different state-to-state, just look at the insanely complex primary/caucus processes!

and yeah Aimless is otm for all these reasons. best we can hope for is to adopt vote-by-mail in more states, fight gerrymandering, and push back on voter-exclusion tactics.

http://i207.photobucket.com/albums/bb119/Celtic_12557/nec-map_zpsd53a570f.gif

http://whatzhotandnot.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/vote-or-die.jpg

you're going to have a lot of people just getting it over with and checking off whatever name they recognize.

Thermo otmfm

keep finding back-of-envelope ways to make things perfect in time for Chelsea tho

Yeah, to hell with Dems fighting for voting rights. It's all a sham to help Chelsea Clinton. There's nobody anywhere in the US who is being targeted by voting rights laws, right? They're just lazy, that is all.

Is there any problem in the US where a Clinton isn't the real villain, Morbs?

most of the ppl who are genuinely too lazy/ignorant/disinclined to vote will just pay the $20 fine and not vote

meanwhile, we'll have all the ppl currently being prevented from voting by reactionary, racist republicans + all the ppl who are reasonably well-informed but are "too busy to vote" etc back in our elections

this sounds like a pretty good deal to me, but admittedly it doesn't do anything to STOP HILLARY (AND CHELSEA) which i gather some ppl believe is still the most pressing issue of our day

The people that don't turn out for voting are not necessarily the uneducated.

Lots of people recognise "Whoever wins, it will make no difference to my life" so they vote on the basis of who else needs what's on offer and who should get that support. The rich? The poor? Minorities? At that point, there's a whole bunch who will say whatever, its not worth the trip out and their lives will be more enriched if they don't go off and vote but mow the lawn instead.

All I can say is that compulsory voting works pretty well in Australia and there is no serious opposition to it. I don't think I've even read so much as an op ed piece saying it should be abolished; it's just part of the electoral furniture at this stage. The obligation it places on people is pretty tiny.

If you make voting compulsory you have to provide everyone a reasonable chance of actually being able to cast a vote, otherwise you get sued. Similar to the health insurance mandate. This would cost states and/or the fed govt approximately Big Bucks and a massive overhaul of the entire system, for the better in every way (weekend voting, relaxation of ID requirements, etc) but our country has demonstrated that it's incapable of doing big things anymore so, you know, how many angels can fit on the head of a pin

you can vote over an extended time period by mail in most states, right?... lemme guess, the problem is... disenfranchises transients ?

i don't know, ianal, but i imagine that to survive court challenges you'd need every state to have uniform procedures and you know, good luck w/that

Mandatory voting will still be subject to "prove you haven't already voted", though - the bullshit won't go away as long as it has a hook to hang on.

My understanding of Australia is that most people are pretty happy and carefree, and there's always one person who cares enough for everything, who cares entirely too much - this understanding come to me from Neighbours and Home & Away, which I have only just now reconsidered as pro-suffrage propaganda.

(this is not my actual understanding of Australia, calm down sic)

That saiiiid, while I am fond of a lot of Australians, didn't you have Trump's John the Baptist as your previous Prime Minister?

good mourning!

where's the tax returns?

I think you could sell mandatory voting to republicans if you promised not to stop their voter suppression efforts, so they can make it hard as possible for minorities to vote, then shake em down for fines/prison labour

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/848857910297980928

Never really seen what the problem was with getting the questions early. Thought that was just better research since the end result is just to make a coherent argument rather than know a single factual answer.
& am surprised by the epistemology of somebody getting stuck on that. But that is a weird epistemology anyway, & not sure it's coherent at the best of times.

Just asking!

Yeah, it's strange that people (our president) seem to think she got the answers to the debate questions, as if there are correct answers

I think you could sell mandatory voting to republicans if you promised not to stop their voter suppression efforts, so they can make it hard as possible for minorities to vote, then shake em down for fines/prison labour

I'm glad someone made this argument. We already have so many things that criminalize both poverty and being not-white. We don't need more of them.

Also, that information was released through Podesta hacks. So he is still pushing Russian intel.

mandatory voting will never happen, and tbh instituting it while we still vote on tuesdays w/o a holiday would end up penalizing all the working folks that feel like they can't skip out to vote right now

move all elections to saturday. this is something that could be advocated for at the state level as well as at the federal level, and would probably get bipartisan support as it appears to be pretty innocuous and common-sensical on the face

(nb that probably also means that it might not be terribly effective at increasing voter turnout, esp since many service-economy voters are still working saturday, but it would at least be a step in the right direction. like, i can't see many downsides)

Surely the problem with the debate questions was that it gave Hillary an unfair advantage over Bernie, no?

The tweet is about 'answers'.

"True or False: Lead was found in the water in Flint, MI"

http://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/img/editorial/2016/11/08/104090081-still.600x400.jpg

xpost: sure, but I was responding to: "Never really seen what the problem was with getting the questions early"