I oscillate regularly between optimism and pessimism about the upcoming election. If you’re on Team Don’t Drink Bleach, then Trump must go, of course, but the composition of Congress is everything too. Whether we get an opportunity to take a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser to the orange shit-stain in the White House, pass legislation that will address galloping inequities in everything from justice, wealth, health, etc. — it all depends on a free and fair election.
Republicans showed in Wisconsin just how far they’re willing to go to deny people the franchise. Thanks to that state’s excellent party organization, Democrats beat back the GOP effort to rig a state supreme court election. Are parties in the other states prepared? Probably not, but now is the time to get ready.
We got some good news over the weekend in Florida:
TALLAHASSEE — A federal judge ruled Sunday that it is unconstitutional to prevent felons in Florida from voting because they can’t afford to pay back court fees, fines and restitution to victims, striking down parts of a law passed by Republican lawmakers and signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis last year.
Calling the law a “pay-to-vote system,” U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle’s 125-page ruling declares that court fees are a tax, and it creates a new process for determining whether felons are eligible to vote.
Poll tax, zapped. But the governor is a Trump toady, and he will surely appeal the decision, which may make it to the SCOTUS before the election. I don’t doubt for a second that the partisan Republican majority on the SCOTUS will reinstate the FL poll tax if they think it will help the party keep the Federalist Society conveyor belt running to deposit hard-right cranks onto the bench.
Trump has been bellowing about voter fraud on Twitter for weeks years and is at it again today, equating the same mail-in ballots he and the Third Lady use to ALL CAPS VOTER FRAUD. As we know, voter fraud isn’t really a thing in U.S. elections. In-person voter fraud is vanishingly rare, and the few cases of consequential fraud detected are almost always perpetrated by Republican operatives committing election fraud (like the NC 9th case) or the recent Florida kook whose party registration scheme imploded due to stupidity.
But reality is no obstacle to determined liars and cheats. So, we need to make this the question in each and every state: Why are Republicans trying to stop you from voting?
One persistent problem we have with our electorate is that too many regard the franchise as an act of performance art rather than a civic duty. Among that group, many are non-voters overcome with ennui because “both sides.” Well, here’s a clear contrast that will become clearer every day between now and the election: Republicans want to make it hard for you to vote. If voting becomes an act of defiance as it did in Wisconsin, maybe Republicans’ cheating to win strategy will blow up in their ugly faces again.
For this election cycle, I’m focusing 100% of my volunteer efforts on supporting voting rights nationwide and encouraging swing state Democrats to vote by mail. In the six swing states that will likely determine the election (AZ, FL, NC, MI, PA, WI), voters can already apply for a mail-in ballot, no excuse needed.
As we know to our sorrow and ruination, Republicans have an enduring structural advantage in the Electoral College. But we’ve already won the war on mail-in ballots in these crucial states, and since we can anticipate the levels of fuckery the GOP will throw at us and cannot know what wrinkles the pandemic will introduce in November, we need to press that advantage starting right now.
I’ve said this before and will probably continue to be a broken record on this for the next several months. I apologize in advance for that. But it’s super-important! There are many wonderful organizations out there already engaged in this fight. I’m a fan of VoteRiders and Postcards to Voters, but please feel free to share links to other outfits that are working on these issues in comments.
Open thread!
mattH
The “the recent Florida kook” link is about some school bus drivers btw.
O. Felix Culpa
Co-signed 100%. I also recommend Stacey Abrams’ organization, Fair Fight 2020, in addition to VoteRiders and Postcards to Voters. Voter protections are going to be critical in this election. The Republicans have already announced plans
to prevent voter fraudfor voter intimidation in November.From Fair Fight’s website:
Mike in NC
After SCOTUS handed the 2000 presidential election to Dubya, I expected there would never be another free and fair election. The various forces (Putin, Saudis, etc.) that gave us Fat Bastard in 2016 are determined to make that happen.
Jeffro
No need to apologize, BC – this is an issue that needs a broken record.
CliosFanBoy
as of July add Virginia to the “no excuse needed” absentee ballot list.
Frankensteinbeck
I am far, far less sure. We hear about the times when Roberts goes Republican Hack, but they’re not actually consistent, including in voting rights. For example, gerrymandering cases are running about 50/50 on approving or striking down gerrymandering. A poll tax is the type of thing where there is a reasonable chance Roberts will come down on the right side.
Baud
@Frankensteinbeck:
As I understand it, one of the problems with this particular poll tax is that people didn’t even know what each voter’s tax was. It’s worse than something that said people had to pay $5 to vote.
Betty Cracker
@mattH: Thanks — fixed!
Tony Jay
The following rant was smuggled out of Lower Brexitannia as part of a forbidden cache of Unpatriotic Writings hidden in the clothing of a party of disguised Librarians and a yak called Dave. None of the Librarians made it to the border, but Dave did. This is so not his story.
“It is my sad duty to inform you that last night, after a long but ultimately futile struggle against the barbarity of anti-democratic ‘conservatism’, the outsourced corporate franchise formerly known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and (checks notes) Northern Ireland (Really? I thought we’d hived that off to the EU? Not yet? Could have fooled me) ceased to exist as an independent country of laws when it surrendered to some scruffy balding bastard called Dom. In accordance with this new reality, subjects of the Dominion of Dom are ordered to stop bloody whinging and get themselves properly infected ASAP so that he can promote the survivors as a probably immune and thoroughly yoke-broken workforce to whichever coalition of cash-stuffed oligarchs it is he’s promised the carcass of your country to. Anyone who has a problem with this can just dry their eyes and put on some big-boy pants, pronto. Eugenics is the only future on offer, proles, and if it costs the lives of 100,000 or 200,000 of the genetically weak to put another million or two in Big Dom’s tracksuit pocket, well, that’s not really much of a sacrifice, is it? More of a purification, actually. A distillation of all that is worthwhile into a form more pleasing to the Illuminated Ones and their shareholders. Thank you for your time, and should you still have any questions after this perfectly clear description of the facts as they stand, please direct them towards the snuffling and bewildered mass of masturbatory instincts in an ill-fitting suit you might recognise as “That fat wanker off the telly who the newspapers told you to elect Prime Minister last year.”
So, yeah, that happened.
For those of you not keeping up with the court politics of the Old Country, Dominic Cummings, the alt-Right data-trawler whose toxic emissions poisoned the ground during the 2016 Referendum and later inflated the cheap Baby Trump Blimp knock-off you may know as Alexander ‘Boris’ de Pfeffel Johnson into the shape of a Conservative Prime Minister, has got himself into a wee spot of bother with the revelation that he broke various guidelines in place at the start of the national Lockdown by taking a spin across the country to his parent’s rural estate, ostensibly to seek childcare for his offspring while he and his right-wing journo wife endured a case of Schrodinger’s Covid-19 (only visible when necessary for PR purposes), and nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that it was his mother’s birthday and there was a Party to go to. Without getting into it too deeply none of this was ever mentioned during the weeks when the British Media was asking Flobalob Johnson about his advisor/handler’s health, or even when he and his wife made numerous references to their brave struggle to survive Lockdown in Labour-Red London and all the childcare issues stemming from not being able to leave the capital. When it did blow up Johnson tried dismissing the whole thing as a future over nothing, but the intensity of the anger felt by millions of people (many of them Tories) who had stuck by the Lockdown rules that Cummings had flouted eventually burned through the protective layer of bluster and bullshit until Cummings himself had to announce that he would be giving a statement.
Pause for a moment. Yes, it is actually part of the legal code surrounding the position of government advisors that them giving public statements is strictly verboten, especially in front of a specially convened scrum of national media, and most definitely especially in the bloody Rose Garden (what a coinkydink) at the back of Number 10 Downing Street. Shitting all over boring old conventions, though, that’s just par for the course for the incredible Dancing Dom in his anarchic rampage through the corridors of power clad in a stained ‘Me So Horny’ T-Shirt and an acid-smoothed James Carville mask. If any of the trappings surrounding these shenanigans sound wearily familiar, it’s because they are. Everyone’s working from the same handbook these days, which is not in the least bit disposing of any kind of conspiracy or centrally organised plot, your honour.
But it got worse. Alpha Dog Dom pissed all over the assembled media scrum by turning up over half an hour late for his own speech, proceeded to claim it was all Fake News even though his newly edited account didn’t conflict with the revelations in the newspapers, and then tossed another log onto the bonfire of hilarity by explaining away eye-witness accounts that also had him and his nomadic family spotted in Barnard’s Castle, a nice little day-out some 30 miles away from his sire’s demesne, by explaining that he’d started having issues with his vision and so decided that a 60 mile round trip with wife and son on board was the best way to see if he was safe to drive or not….. because…. obviously…. that’s not the most absolutely bollocks excuse since Hugh Grant “stopped for directions” and a young woman’s mouth fell on his privates. Oh, and it’s just an another unfortunate coinkydink (naturally) that this just happened to take place on his wife’s birthday.
Yeaaaaaaaah. Pull the other one, it squirts question marks made of diamond you slimy trolling oddball.
Anyhoo, we’ve since had Flatulent Wordgust shamble in front of the nation’s gobsmacked journalists to cough up loosely affiliated phrases and the odd complete sentence that could be translated into an affirmation that Cummings had answered all the accusations and proven himself as blameless as a newborn ham…uh….lamb….uh…..whamalam….uh….Get Brexit Done…. Bifflebaffle….cheese and scones….fruit bikini….next question. The array of non-entities and unindicted co-conspirators he calls a cabinet, barely one of which doesn’t have “disgraced former minister” prominently displayed on their dating-app profile, have proven mostly unable to find any time to throw Dom their support, which is odd. While the ones who have rushed to show their bellies to the One True King are all using exactly the same not-at-all-suspiciously identical phrasing and are either, a) Murdoch loyalists like Michael Gove and (apparently) the Chancellor Rishi Sunak, playing the ‘I got your back, stiletto in hand’ game familiar to fans of GOT and musical theatre, or, b) moronically over-promoted tailthumpers like the current Attorney General Suella Braverman, who has plonked her entire career on the line by declaring Cummings to be innocent of any crime and as sweet-smelling as Natalie Portman’s burps.
It’s not going away though, far from it. Polling has the public well dissatisfied with Cummings’ arrogant dismissal of any wrongdoing, journalists are still picking away at his claims like star-nosed moles snuffling about in search of worms (bless ‘em, they just don’t have any experience in actually investigating Tories, just in interviewing, recording, repeating and agreeing with them, so this is entirely uncharted territory and way out of their comfort zone) and, most ominously, backbench Tory MPs are proving to be unconvinced by the vaudeville theatrics and one – Doug ‘No, not that one’ Ross, MP of the virtually Scandinavian seat of Moray up in Pictish Scotland – has actually put the entire Cosmic Balance of the Multiverse out of whack by showing an ethical core and resigning his junior-ministerial post in the Government over it, which is so unnatural I’m consulting my copies of the Stygian Apocrypha to see if it’s mentioned as one of the Signs and Portents of a F.R.I.E.N.D.S reunion. Bishops who have made statements denouncing Cummings for shitting all over the credibility of the Government’s Lockdown orders have received online abuse and death threats from right-wingers, leading to demands for Prime Minister Flobalob to take responsibility for his supporters’ actions and apologise directly to all Christians for the hurt caused by his Party’s intolerance. Ha! No, not really. That only happens to left-wing Labour Party leaders, Tories don’t have to apologise for crap like that, and it’s fairly likely that the BBC’s Chief Political
ApologistEditor will soon be furiously tweeting ‘proof’ from her trusted sources in Whitehall (initials D.C.) that everyone involved is really a secret Labour activist anyway, so no one needs to pay any attention to what those maniacal trotskyites say. Oh, and Cummings has also been caught re-editing his social media entries from months ago to make it appear he was a concerned little puppy about pandemics and not even a bit responsible for telling Johnson to do exactly nothing to prepare for or mitigate the initial damage of the C-19 outbreak because of his fixation on ‘herd immunity’, which is what they call it when everyone gets exposed and the living get to bury their dead free of concerns about social-distancing or working-from-home. This guy is the ‘genius’ who makes Westminster shake in its polished lace-ups? Do me a favour.All in all, this is a disaster for the Party of Oozing Mendacity and a stake right through the heart of Flobalob’s main selling point, his ability to make stupid people think that he was someone they could trust because he made them laugh. In all of British history any unelected advisor causing this much damage to a recently elected majority Government would have been out of the door and seen no more days if not weeks ago, but not Big Dom. Johnson has wrapped his flabby hide around this entire clusterfuck and made it his own. Too weak to do without his Brain? Too scared of what he might reveal if chucked? Too obedient to the outside interests that put him and Cummings together in the first place? Whatever the reason it’s absolutely astounding that the Brute of the Bullingdon Club is placing his loyalty to Dominic Cummings over everything else, with no great expectation I can see of it benefitting him in any timeframe.
Could this bring him down? Plausibly, but so what? He’ll just be replaced by another corporate placeman so the British Media can declare a bright new dawn of Tory Purity and go back to nodding along to every crafted lie like the Access-driven jobsworths they are. There’s less chance of Tory MPs voting to bring down their own majority Government and force a General Election than there is of me forming the meat in a Shakira/Rihanna sandwich, and I say that having had to refuse that exact offer at least once a month since I accidentally sent them pictures of a bratwurst sausage under the heading “How Spicy is This?” We’ve got at least four more years of this refuse-dump of a Government, it doesn’t particularly matter what brand-name the broken fridge tossed on top of it has.
These fucking people, etc.
Patrianakos
@Frankensteinbeck: They may well issue a stay until next year, then consult the election returns. Same with the Affordable Care Act lawsuit.
Betty Cracker
@Frankensteinbeck: My take on Roberts is that he’s a partisan hack through and through with one opposing trait: unlike many GOP hacks, he actually does care about “optics” and his reputation. That and that alone leads him to occasionally rule in a manner that doesn’t benefit the GOP, but on those occasions, he builds as many partisan landmines as possible into the decisions (see ACA ruling).
I think he’ll weigh the reputational hit of a GOP-friendly FL poll tax ruling from the SCOTUS against the national implication of FL voting blue and decide the GOP suit has merit. We’ll see.
SFAW
@Patrianakos:
Stay for which? The poll tax? Or the injunction against it? [I’m tentatively assuming you mean a stay of the court order striking down the law (so to speak).]
Ramiah Ariya
How come the story of what Trump is doing to Lori Klausutis’ family is not front page news in every newspaper across the US? I don’t get it. This is horrifying and it is business-as-usual apparently. You have to suspect that the press covering for Trump is not just liberals avoiding bias; but that much of the press, including the NY Times have white supremacists in their upper echelons.
J R in WV
@Tony Jay:
Thanks for the update, Tony!
It provides much needed reassurance that our gov’t is NOT the worst gov’t in the English-speaking (kinda) world. Barely, anyhoo.
Plus amusement, nearly laugh out loud lever amusement. Hugh Grant, who the heck>? Oh, yeah, now I recall that episode.
Gin & Tonic
@Tony Jay: I just love reading your trenchant commentary on politics across the pond.
Funny thing about DC’s retroactive perspicacity – he was editing not only social-media stuff, but also his Web page, apparently not understanding that very many people, among them many not-fans of his, understand how the Internet works quite well, and are busy documenting the exact edits and the exact dates he made them.
I wish for more entertainment from Dominic and Boris, especially since it will eventually come here filtered through your prose stylings.
UncleEbeneezer
I signed up for FlipTheWest.com which is doing postcards to CO and AZ for GOTV for Senate seats. Real easy. Just register and then email Johanna for names/addresses. ReclaimOurVote.org and TonyTheDemocrat are two others that I have used in the past. I was able to knock out about 40 postcards in just 2 hours or so, dropped them in the mail yesterday.
randy khan
“Why are Republicans trying to stop you from voting?” is such a great line. It needs to be repeated often.
Patrianakos
@SFAW: You are correct. A stay of the judge’s ruling. Remember, in Florida you must be registered four weeks before an election and the non-presidential primary is in late August, so there’s not much time to leave the rules up in the air.
MattF
FWIW, I got my Maryland primary ballot in the mail the other day. It’s… complicated. The primary was postponed, so the ballot has the wrong date. Some people have to submit additional proof of identity, there’s a separate six-step instruction sheet, a separate sheet to be filled out by anyone who is assisting, and everything is duplicated in English and Spanish. There’s a need, at a minimum, for understandable explanations. Of everything.
ETA: And, I should add, it’s assuming voting by mail.
H.E.Wolf
Thank you, Betty Cracker, for highlighting this issue AND for highlighting organizations which are working to get out the vote.
Thanks also to O. Felix Culpa and UncleEbeneezer for the shout-out to these groups:
More good stuff – thank you!
“TonyTheDemocrat” is the Twitter handle for the founder ofhttp://PostcardsToVoters.org – and like you, I’ve found them easy to volunteer with.
Postcards To Voters is doing a collaborative project with the FL Democratic Party: writing to every registered Democrat in FL, urging enrollment in FL Vote By Mail.
They also GOTV for liberal Democratic candidates/slates across the country… and they don’t shy away from “red” locations, because GOTV in 2020 may bring tangible results in 2022 or 2024.
The Moar You Know
@Ramiah Ariya: Because Dems have flogging the same story with the same angle (Scarborough murdered his sexytime aide!) from the early 2000s on.
germy
MattF
@Ramiah Ariya: There are a number of good WaPo stories on it. Not front page, but unambiguous about what’s going on.
Geminid
I am encouraged that Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania now have Democratic governors. Makes it harder to suppress and steal votes. I hope for another blue wave like the congressional elections in 2018, and Virginia in 2017 and 2019. But if it’s close, Wisconsin is worrisome. We may have to pick off one of North Carolina, Arizona, or Florida. North Carolina is promising, and has a Democratic governor. I don’t see any state that Clinton carried at risk, although the republicans will give New Hampshire and Minnesota a shot. Of 10 major party candidates running in five presidential elections since 2000, trump had the second lowest vote total, barely edging out McCain/2008. My hope is that trump underpolls McCain and sets a low vote record that lasts the rest of the century.
rikyrah
sdhays
Over here, Republicans have learned that if you just tell the press to fuck off, if they have to wait a year or more before facing voters, no one will remember or care when election time comes around again (the press certainly won’t want to bring up ANCIENT HISTORY!!1!). I’m sure that’s what Dom and BoJo want to do. I guess it depends on how much the backbenchers complain?
Jinchi
@The Moar You Know: Which Dems? Was this something Obama and Biden were doing in 2014? Because its the current president of the United States that’s peddling this BS, not some unknown twitter activist.
OGLiberal
Completely OT but did you all see the cops kill a man on camera in Minneapolis by basically suffocating him to death. It’s tough to watch…and people were there yelling at the cops and filming but they didn’t care….just let the guy die.
Miss Bianca
@UncleEbeneezer: Oh, thanks for that! I have a special interest in flipping CO and AZ, living in the first and having friends and fam in the other.
Patrianakos
@Jinchi: One particular Democrat, named Markos Moulitsas. It’s why he’s not welcome on MSNBC.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Jinchi: in fairness, i don’t think twitter existed the last time some DKos commenters were irresponsibly speculating about that case in the wake of the Chandra Levy story and the roughly contemporary stories about (IIRC, it’s been a while) Joe Scarborough’s (second?) divorce
on a somewhat related note, I see on the twitters that Daily Kos launched 18 years ago today
Kent
Oh, FFS. Can you give ONE SINGLE EXAMPLE of Roberts doing the right thing on a hard vote? Not some throw-away vote, but an actual hard vote with GOP interests lining up on the opposite side? And don’t tell me he saved the ACA with that corrupt decision that left tens of millions of mostly southerners without healthcare.
O. Felix Culpa
@Miss Bianca: So do I! Have an interest in those electoral outcomes, that is, since I live in a neighboring state and have family in both AZ and CO.
[waves from NM]
Baud
@Patrianakos:
Heaven help us if “Democrats” are bound by something Markos Moulitsas has said.
Citizen Alan
@The Moar You Know: In our defense, democrats were flogging the lori klosatis story because at the same time republicans were flogging the Chandra Levy story. Even though Joe Scarborough’s conduct around that time it was far more suspicious than anything pertaining to Congressman what’s his name.
Tony Jay
@J R in WV: Poor Hugh. Who among us hasn’t felt the need to pay for a little automotive affection when riding high as one of the world’s premier man-crushes?
It was all a dare with Eddie Murphy agreed over half a bottle of tequila and a bag of dried peyote, anyway.
Eddie won, BTW
@Gin & Tonic:
Cummings’ reputation for Machiavellian genius has been waaaaay overinflated by the success of his Leave campaign’s micro-targeting and the performative ruthlessness of his ‘man-management’ techniques. He fills the roll they want him to fill, playing the part they’d like to see played in order to sex up boring stories about Tories being lying bastards.
Take away his links to the Cambridge Analytica/Palantir types and he’s just a bargain basement nutter with a ton of rope.
Tony Jay
@sdhays:
Yup. This is all about who gets to be the star sitting on top of the Tory Christmas tree, factoring in the ongoing C-19 disaster, the fast-approaching Brexit cataclysm and the likelihood that whoever replaces Johnson wants to do so “more in sorrow than in triumphant glee”.
There’s a lot to account for, much calculation and timing issues, but at the end of the day they’re all absolute shithearts and we’re stuck with them for years.
Hopefully you’ll learn from our example and turn November into a rout that will send shockwaves through the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.
Kent
Oops! Wrong thread.
MattF
Twitter senior management has repeatedly declined to tag or remove Trump’s tweets, and they declined again this morning. It just ain’t gonna happen.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
It looks that way, provided voters get to vote.
We’re going to have a lot of vote suppression to get through first. Armed bubbas standing inside the polling places “poll watching”, cops prominently parked on the roads leading to the polling stations, cops stopping buses taking people to the polls and turning them around, millions of voters struck silently from the rolls for no reason whatsoever (except, obviously, their party registration), closing of polling stations and removing machines from others … all of that has happened in every election in the recent past, and they’ll have more tricks we haven’t even thought of.
Do they play those games in the Old Country?
One thing about this time: I used to wistfully wonder during some Republican administrations whether the Queen would take us back, maybe as foster children, just for a little while. I no longer wish that.
Kent
Weird how I lived through those times and was as much of a news junkie as anyone. I remember the Chandra Levy story of course, but the whole Scarborough affair just went down my memory hole. I don’t remember any of this stuff.
Geminid
@H.E.Wolf: I’m glad Postcards to Voters hits the “red” districts. The reddest congressional district in my state of Virginia is the 9th- basically everywhere south and west of Roanoke. It votes ~62%-38% republican/Democrat, less than two to one. Those Democratic votes add up in statewide races.
sdhays
@Tony Jay: So you don’t think BoJo is going to survive this? I mean, he was handsomely rewarded for the degrading shit show that he put your country through last autumn during his embarrassing flailing over Brexit with a great big Conservative majority, so it’s hard for me to comprehend what he would have to do stop floating to the top of the Conservative Party like a turd in a sewage punch bowl.
Or are you anticipating that in 4 years, things are going to be so bad that the Conservatives are going to want to try out a “fresh face” to put all “broken eggs” and “omelettes” of the BoJo years behind them in hopes of hanging on to their majority?
Bill Arnold
@Tony Jay:
As an American, I’m slightly envious that you have a scandal about somebody who is a 2-word dick joke; “Johnson’s Brain”.
Slightly.
I hope this stings them a bit (because it <em>will</em> kill human beings):
Beach-goers cite Dominic Cummings lockdown breaches as reason for packed resort (Helena Horton, 25 May 2020)
japa21
O/T. Mrs. Japa has apparently been reading BJ too much, particularly NotMax. Went to see the surgeon today for follow-up and to get the pathology results. The first words out of her mouth when the surgeon walked in was, “Okay, doctor, today we are going to play medical diagnosis Bingo and the first number had darn well better be B-9.”
It was.
sdhays
@Kent: I missed it too. Probably because as much as (some) Democrats apparently made the point, the corporate media was oddly more interested in the Democrat.
e julius drivingstorm
I fully expect republican officials to succeed at suppressing democratic votes. They make election day voting difficult by not providing enough convenient polling places, forcing long lines: and by closing some familiar polling places and forcing voters to travel several miles further from home to find yet another inadequate place. This year a line that’s a block long would look like it’s five blocks long with social distancing in place. We should show up with free food trucks and portable restrooms for dems who are forced into these types of travesties because the GOP was successful at keeping them from voting by mail.
‘
joel hanes
Help fund the flipping of Texas!
Juanita Jean’s is organizing again.
Donate or sign up to help with the postcard-writing here
WereBear
@japa21: All the yays! Glad to hear, and it made me smile.
Miss Bianca
@japa21:
Oh, frabjous day! : )
Dorothy A. Winsor
@japa21:
Excellent!
Baud
@japa21:
Horrible news. You have my sympathies.
MagdaInBlack
@japa21:
Good news ?
Tony Jay
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Vote suppression here has always been very minor-league compared to what I’ve heard about in the States, though though the last Election did have some examples of fuckery like polling places abruptly closed or changed, which is hardly surprising considering how slavishly today’s Conservatives model themselves on the ‘successful’ Republican electioneering model.
They usually rely on the media to do their suppression for them. Don;t vote for the other party because they’re a bunch of commie limpwrists who will raise your taxes, steal your homes and give it all to Those People gets their voters out, but this time they had the enthusiastic co-operation of the the ‘left-wing’ Guardian, a sizable chunk of the institutional and Parliamentary Labour Party and the moronic petulance of Jo Swinson’s Liberal-Democrats in their corner too. That’s plenty of suppression to add to the appeals to nativist racism.
Makes me ‘proud’ to be British…not.
Bill Arnold
@Gin & Tonic:
Very much this.
“Curation” of one’s internet history through edits and deletions is a red flag for me. Adjusting one’s personal historical narrative to fit today’s desires is a sign of bad character; at least over-egotistical, and almost as certainly, a fabulist. Perhaps a con-person as well.
It’s also stupid, because, as you say, the internet does not truly forget and opponents will find those adjustments if pressed.
FelonyGovt
@japa21: The BEST Bingo number! Yay!
Immanentize
@japa21: whew. Another fucking cancer avoided. Congrats. Your wife is funny.
Tony Jay
@sdhays:
I’m looking at this and thinking that the foreign oligarchs and lobby groups who outright own the Tory Party think they’ve ‘won’. A combination of racism, deliberately inflicted ‘economic unease’, hardcore nationalism (Scottish as well as English) and the slavish obedience of the national Media looks like giving their puppets an electoral edge for the forseable future, so the only trophies left to compete for are about the spoils. Having ‘your’ loyal underling in Downing Street provides bragging rights as well as a definite advantage in securing the prime cuts and sweetmeats when the drained carcass gets chopped up for the plate.
Fuck knows who ‘owns’ Johnson, but we know Murdoch owns Gove, and that backstabbing little shit is always there or thereabouts displaying his absolute loyalty – just before he sticks the knife in. Johnson’s popularity is cratering, usually craven Tory rags are scenting his blood, and with Brexit already inevitable they must be asking, what sells more papers? “Johnson blathers his way into another cock-up” or “The King is Dead – Who will succeed him?”.
We’ll just have to see. He’s certainly badly wounded by all this and it’s not going away yet.
japa21
Thanks everybody. Big sighs of relief.
Chyron HR
Everybody knows the only “cheat-to-win strategy” is when the Democrats let African-Americans vote in their primary, thereby rigging it against Bernie.
Tony Jay
@Bill Arnold:
There’s a lingering suspicion that that’s exactly how they decided to spin this. Once it was clear that they couldn’t bury it Cummings decided to stir up the One Rule For Me, Another For Thee anger in the expectation that ‘people’ would punch themselves in the dick by breaking the Lockdown “To show them we’re as good as they are”, which is exactly what the Tories want people to do.
If the general public reject the Government’s ‘advice’ because of Fake News and media hysteria then the Government can’t be blamed for the next wave of infection, can they? And trying to restore the Lockdown would clearly be an authoritarian rejection of the will of the people, wouldn’t it?
Wouldn’t surprise me in the least. And yes, a LOT of people are going to get sick and die. We’ve already got hospitals announcing they can’t deal with the wave that followed Flobalob’s initial bollox about relaxing the Lockdown. It will only get worse until it gets much worse.
Cheery Cheery, Happy Happy.
dogwood
Voting by mail is popular , and doesn’t seem to advantage one party over the other. But if it becomes more widespread, it does screw with one of the GOP’s favorite voter suppression tactics . Closing down polling sites in urban areas which can force Democratic voters to stand in line for hours on end.
Roger Moore
@dogwood:
I’m not sure how you can say both those things. If it messes with the Republicans’ voter suppression strategies, it’s good for the Democrats, even if it only does so by preventing cheating rather than enabling it.
sdhays
@Roger Moore: There was a discussion about this the other day. The current data shows that it doesn’t help one party over the other, but the states which have implemented it didn’t have major voter suppression operations going on that depended on being able to fuck over Democratic (black) voters.
If Georgia, for example, gets vote-by-mail, the data will definitely show an improvement for Democrats.
Roger Moore
@sdhays:
I guess I would say it differently: vote by mail doesn’t give either party an unfair advantage. But if it prevents one party from cheating the system, that makes it advantageous to the non-cheating party.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Roger Moore: In the same way that truth and science have a well-known liberal bias, so does counting the votes.
laura
@japa21: that is solid good news – happy for you and Mrs. Japa
I suddenly heard the Ronettes swing into “Be 9, be 9 baby, be 9 baby now….” (no apologies to Phil Spector, he’s a bad apple).
J R in WV
Let’s not forget the big difference between voter fraud, which operates with numbers like 12, 16, even just one; and election fraud, which operates on numbers like 102,392 people dropped off a voter registration roll.
Southern WV used to have lots of voter fraud, which can make a difference in a county race with a 4 digit vote total… the USAG put a lot of local pols in prison, and pretty much ended voter fraud here.
Dunno about election fraud, our Secretary of State is a RWNJ likely to do anything to help Trump win, not that he needs to in a state full of rednecks like WV…
dogwood
@Roger Moore:
Exactly. They they know their claim that “vote by mail” facilitates massive fraud is a lie. They don’t want it because it lessens the effectiveness of their other suppression shenanigans.
WaterGirl
@japa21: What a relief!!! So happy for you!
Now nobody gets to say that today was a bad day.
rikyrah
@japa21: yeah????????
Brachiator
@Tony Jay:
This clearly is not working. People are remembering the sacrifices they made, the things they gave up, the friends and family they lost. Ending the lock down does not restore anything.
Cummings can’t stir people to sympathetic action when he so clearly and openly believes that he is better than the rabble.
Also, the greatest opposition to Cummings is not coming from the people or from the left, but from right wing elements who perhaps believe that Cummings needs to be taken down.
Brachiator
@japa21:
Great news!
gbbalto
@Kent: I remember the accusations about Scarborough and, once I read the background, I thought that it was shameful. I hope we do not see the like again from Democrats.
evodevo
@Tony Jay: OMG that was brilliant lolol
karensky
@Betty Cracker: I am feeling the same way as you about the CJ. But, I really like your “ Why don’t the Republicans want you to vote” message. Imma use it and share it. Thanks, swamp lady.
Citizen Alan
@gbbalto: I don’t even remember accusations about Scarborough so much as people being angry that the media refused to discuss it in any shape or form while giving Gary Condit/Chandra Levy conspiracy theories round-the-clock coverage.