US Politics, October 2018: next week will be even longer

these are people influenced by those who argue the earth is flat and Obama is literally an emissary sent directly from hell

he received a standing ovation, said "thank you", and then said "that was a very bipartisan statement"

"I pooped today! ......... General Kelly helped me flush."

very good boy

my mom's friends are strangely receptive to my snopes-esque attempts to correct their conspiracy theorizing. they're like, "oh, thanks. hmm, I guess I was wrong." you'd think after 20x posting weird unsubstantiated things from websites like bluewave4real.biz and realizing it was dubious, you'd develop a stronger bullshit detector.

btw why is rush limbaugh so seldom mentioned these days? did he lose his audience to Fox News? was he just outpaced by even crazier, more craven right-wing people? back in the early 2000s he was the face of the right-wing media.

he's still incredibly popular, he's just not the most outrageous right winger anymore

he must be held together with string and chewing gum at this point, how has he not had a fatal coronary by now?

you'd think after 20x posting weird unsubstantiated things from websites

I still see Trump's bogus "I'd run as a Repub, they're stupid" quote regularly. Some folks never learn.

i've seen "kavanaugh's first vote was to disenfranchise native americans in North Dakota" regularly over the past two weeks and had to correct people

uncharted territory

Average dollars raised by House candidates as of quarter 3 2018:

Democrats: 1.4 MILLION
Republicans: 200 thousand

Dems raising 7x as much cash as Republicans this year. Was 1.7x in 2006. https://t.co/hW3q1oVwc5 pic.twitter.com/BoJGKo2x9k

— G. Elliott Morris📈🤷‍♂️ (@gelliottmorris) October 24, 2018

xp a plausible lie is the best kind of lie

It's nice that Dem are raising more money, but also what a complete waste of money campaigning is.

almost makes you wish you actually could just buy elections

a little silly to look at means when certain races are getting the lion's share of that sum -- gimme that sweet average individual contribution figure

but idk obv morris is smarter than me?? w/e

if there was campaign finance reform, voter rights reform, ballot reform, district reform, electoral structure reform and the dismantling of the two-party system, you could get a pretty nice democracy going

This essay is worth a read.

That chart only looks at money donated to individual candidates, when the Rs have more than matched that $ if RNC, RCCC, and PAC money is brought into the picture

yeah there's no way dems will ever beat GOP in pure cash flow, not by much, anyway. the question is whether the flood of individual donations is a reliable barometer of turnout.
i suspect not... a lot of the money coming into the race in my district (where the dem is running a very uphill campaign in a R+20 district) is from elsewhere... people in blue districts with money to burn. there are plenty of locals donating, too, sure. but a good % of people donating are out of district and while that "helps" (in terms of campaign hiring staff, printing up signs, etc.) it probably doesn't translate in any strong way to votes.

i;ve been doing as much volunteering as i can, but i've noticed that the campaign is emphasizing turnout rather than persuasion... going over and over the same neighborhoods w/ more reliably dem voters to make sure they've talked to everyone. but in a district where GOP has a +30% or +40% registration advantage that isn't going to cut it. we'll see.

a fair chunk of that out-of-district money should be going to GOTV and canvassing, which def increases turnout. at any rate, we'll know in a couple weeks.

lol xp

"persuasion" is generally not a reliable investment of campaign cash, not nearly as reliable as registration drives + GOTV operations

right, it increases turnout, but in a red district you need turnout + lots of republicans not voting + a fair number of republicans switching sides.
of course, that's just my district.

when you're on the ground canvassing it's hard to imagine, sometimes, that it has any affect. i talk to lots of folks and have good conversations but maybe one person every day or two seems to have been genuinely persuaded to vote when they wouldn't otherwise.

er, effect.

the best day i had was going around a puerto rican neighborhood where we talked to probably a half-dozen people who were like "honestly i wasn't going to vote because nobody is reaching out to us but i'm glad you came by and talked to me and i'm going to vote now" but i can't take any credit for that b/c my canvassing partner was a spanish speaker and she did 95% of the talking and i just stood back and smiled and nodded occasionally.

this is why old-school union operations were so effective - they would physically take you to the poll and make you sure you voted the way they wanted. Or (in the more corrupt cases) they just voted for you and stuffed ballot boxes.

xp

i had a couple of those "i'm going to nod and pretend i 100% understand oh shit he just addressed a question to me and i have no idea what to say" moments (i have very spotty spanish from back in 7th grade).

xpost

i once drove an old (like 80something) woman to the polls! it wasn't actually my job that day, but i knocked on her door and she was like "i'd love to vote, but i can't walk there" (actually, she only spoke spanish but somehow we were able to communicate enough to figure this out) so i was like, "uh, i guess i'll just drive you." it felt really good. she took an hour to vote, though, so i shared like three cigarettes with the woman handing out flyers for the dems outside the polling place (whose aunt was running for a local judge position).

anyway.

would do it for a Negroni tbh

i have this argument w/ my girlfriend sometimes but some old-school machine corruption was kind of effective, or at least more effective than some of the current alternatives.

i don't just mean "effective" in a machiavellian sense either.

Has Wild Wild Country taught us nothing? Everyone has to show up to vote.

wait a second, didn't the Wild Wild Country leaders recruit destitute people from other jurisdictions and bring them in to swing the vote at the last direction?

i should probably stop making this joke before some conservative blog finds it and thinks they've discovered another liberal conspiracy

didn't the Wild Wild Country leaders recruit destitute people from other jurisdictions and bring them in to swing the vote at the last direction

nothing illegal about this at all btw as long as they were registered to vote in their current jurisdiction in time for the election

this is why old-school union operations were so effective - they would physically take you to the poll and make you sure you voted the way they wanted. Or (in the more corrupt cases) they just voted for you and stuffed ballot boxes.

xp

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, October 24, 2018 8:58 PM (forty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

one of my favorite stories about Fred Ross, Cesar Chavez's organizing mentor, is the LA city council election his org swayed by inventing the blueprint for the systematic talk-to-every-friendly-voter-on-election-day approach that smart campaigners still use today. fuckin clipboards and lists and knockin on doors.

That chart only looks at money donated to individual candidates, when the Rs have more than matched that $ if RNC, RCCC, and PAC money is brought into the picture

one explanation i heard for the validity of the chart presented up there, rather than one that includesthe PAC, etc. funds, is that the individual donations correlate much more reliably to positive voter turnout and not only across individual candidates but across the party at issue?

From CNN OpEd:

"Recent terrorism has emanated from the left and right. In June 2017, 66-year-old James T. Hodgkinson III attacked Republican members of Congress who were practicing baseball in Alexandria, Virginia, injuring five, including House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, who was gravely wounded."

Then it goes on to describe how 73 out of the 104 acts of domestic terror came from far-right groups.

Violence from the left is property damage and ruining someone's weekday dinner plans. Violence on the right is murdering doctors, students, churchgoers and people just trying to live their life.

yeah but Steve Scalise

should have died

if there were any justice in the world

"Chinese and Russian spies are listening in on calls by President Trump, who has often ignored warnings from aides that his iPhones aren't secure." - NYT alert

oh man, this is going to humiliate all of the people who were so concerned about the security vulnerabilities introduced by hillary clinton's use of private email servers. i mean, if they didn't care about Trump using his iphone against all advice, they'd be deeply hypocritical. wow

The whole story is amusing.

The New York Times reports Chinese spies are listening to the president's calls on his iPhone. And, though aides have told him to use secure lines – and have told him the Russians/Chinese are listening – he still insists on calling from his cellphone.https://t.co/n6PTFlgjRH pic.twitter.com/MuLuHatVJV

— 💀andrew👻kaczynski🎃 (@KFILE) October 24, 2018

"...they have told him that Russian spies are routinely eavesdropping on the calls, as well. But aides say the voluble president, who has been pressured into using his secure White House landline more often these days, has still refused to give up his iPhones."

well of course. using his iPhone is an easy way to keep in touch with Putin's friends without having to go all the way over there and demand that they hold a one-on-one meeting with no one else present.

There’s a great example of this in Fame is the Spur by howard spring, a novel about the early Labour Party in the UK. The protagonist pushing a old man to the polls nearly gets run down by the lord of the manor bussing Tory voters to the poll in his coach. There’s currently an 80sradio adaptation of this, starring Ian McKellan, streaming on the BBC right now.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0121293

See also scenes in the the brensham trilogy by John Moore, beer or cash for votes.

Not sure why I’m derailing the thread with this but enjoy.

xpost If I were Hannity this news might give me a little pause.

trump certainly has little paws amirite

because of his nonstop rampage about clinton's server? it should give him a little pause, because of the hypocrisy, but...i mean who's going to call him out on it that he cares about?

Probably not really a security concern because whatever lines of bullshit they pick up from his calls would only muddy the waters.

BREAKING: Justice Department asks Supreme Court to rule businesses can discriminate against workers based on their sexual orientation, gender identity without violating federal law. https://t.co/5DGvkfuBRd

— Bloomberg Law (@BloombergLaw) October 24, 2018