DEAD PEOPLE VOTED is probably my favorite stupid right-wing meme.
Austen Fletcher, a former Ivy League football player turned right-wing internet journalist, said in videos posted to Twitter that he had discovered registration documents on a State of Michigan website that showed that four people with reported birth dates from 1900 to 1902 had submitted absentee ballots ahead of Tuesday’s election. “How long has this been going on?” he asked.
[…]In one case, a 74-year-old woman in Hamlin Township, Mich., had asked for an absentee ballot for the first time in years, setting off a notice from the state’s digital voter rolls that her birth date was not on file, according to Catherine Lewis, the town’s clerk. The system had assigned the woman the default birth date: 01/01/01, or Jan. 1, 1901.
[….]Then, on Thursday morning, after a marathon week for Ms. Lewis running the town’s vote, her phone began ringing. “I have had 18 calls and at least 20 strange emails asking me if I committed voter fraud,” she said. She was staying home with her family. “I need to be concerned about my family’s welfare,” she said.
Fuck all these clowns claiming voter fraud. They will all rot in hell. So we’ve got that going for us.
Let’s fight for Georgia. There are lots of things you can do.
Opportunities to Help with Georgia!
.
Phone bank into Georgia with Fair Fight.
Phone bank into Georgia with the New Georgia Project.
Volunteer for Georgia with Vote Save America.
Write postcards for Georgia with the Georgia Postcard Project.
Write postcards for Georgia with Postcards to Voters.
Write postcards for Georgia with Postcard Patriots.
Write letters to Georgia with VoteFWD.
Donations
Balloon Juice for Fair Fight
Donate to GASenate.com (donations split evenly between Ossoff, Warnock, and Fair Fight)
Jon Ossoff, Georgia Senate Runoff! (starting at 311,771, hoping DougJ can do a new BJ thermometer for the recount)
YES this includes the 2018 race.
Raphael Warnock, Georgia Senate Runoff! (starting at 27,997, hoping DougJ can do a new BJ thermometer for the recount)
Baud
Why would you try to call or email someone you thought was a dead person?
piratedan
I believe it was Descartes who stated: “Fuck those fuckers!”
Cameron
OF COURSE, dead people voted! How do you think Christopher Lee kept coming back to life in those Hammer Films?
Cameron
@Baud: Cheaper than a seance.
Baud
I also thought we fixed all these issues with Y2K.
John S.
@Baud: For the same reason you would check their countertops?
Kent
@Baud: You can’t fix stupid.
Baud
@piratedan:
“I think, therefore I’m not Republican.”
John S.
@Baud: Man, there’s all kinds of fucked up shit out there still running on COBOL. And a lot of it is pretty important stuff.
That’s a great place for the government to spend some money and modernize our technological infrastructure.
Splitting Image
Trivia note: this was literally the first election in which people born in 2001 were able to vote, so this is likely to be the last time that the default date would be assumed to refer to 1901.
David ?Booooooo!? Koch
I don’t know what they’re complaining about, it’s a well known fact that dead people are the target audience of Fox News.
mrmoshpotato
No small feat. Good for us! LOL!
mrmoshpotato
@Baud: The depths of these assclowns’ dumbfuckery knows no bounds.
mrmoshpotato
@David ?Booooooo!? Koch: Brain dead, not dead dead.
billcinsd
@Baud: The person saying that is the town clerk, not the voter.
Also, why did Ossoff raise so much more money here than Warnock? Does that include 2018 money?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@billcinsd: at a guess: donor network from his ’17 special election (?) race when he raised an ungodly amount of money and lost to Karen Handel (Lucy McBath holds the seat now) and he was polling better before ED.
Yutsano
@John S.:
To wit: the entire IRS backbone computer system. Hell our system is still old we still use magnetic tapes. I’m not kidding. It’s one of the reasons why we can’t just have employers submit information to us and we calculate the return for y’all automatically. There are other reasons but that’s one of them.
Chetan Murthy
@billcinsd: At the time (late summer) Ossoff was reckoned to be running a better race than Warnock (IIRC). Warnock was supposed to be an inept campaigner, etc. I donated to Ossoff and not to Warnock, based on reading those prognostications. Obviously they were incorrect.
Another Scott
Yup.
If anything forces the GOP to distance themselves from him, it’s this.
Cheers,
Scott.
John Revolta
I don’t understand all this fuss about dead people voting. Then again, I grew up in Chicago……….
?BillinGlendaleCA
Interesting trivia, the “she” in the song was Peter Fonda. He and Lennon were dropping acid and Fonda kept on saying “I know what it’s like to be dead”.
LuciaMia
Silly RWers. Everybody knows the dead always vote Republican! Check Simpsons: season 6, episode 5. “Sideshow Bob Roberts”
PsiFighter37
Sure hope we can pull it off – I cannot see how the GOP is doing itself any favors with their behavior right now with regards to this race.
gene108
Republicans, with an assist from Trump, have successfully delegitimatized the victory of Joe Biden to most of their voters.
The slim chance of coming together’s been shot hell less than two weeks after the election.
Baud
@gene108:
Bullshit.
It’s not their voters choice.
Cheryl from Maryland
The GOP never gives up. During 1994, the GOP candidate for Governor in Maryland lost. She immediately claimed voter fraud due to dead people voting, citing George and Martha Washington in Baltimore (her lawyers only had small anecdotal evidence of fraud). WaPo interviewed George and Martha, who were a very much alive black married couple. The GOP candidate’s last name forevermore became “Sour Grapes” instead of “Sauerbrey.” W gave her a job in the State Department; another reason W is the worst fuckup since Trump.
Kay
I think it’s important to keep bringing up that they are attacking voters.
All of the Trump/GOP attacks in this election have been directed at voters. They are accusing tens of millions of people of committing felonies. Wholly baseless accusations aimed at ordinary voters- people who did nothing wrong. The multimillionaires on Fox? They’re targeting ordinary people.
When do voters get tired of being attacked by Republican politicians, operatives and media celebrities?
RSA
@John S.:
True, but I think this is a more general problem for a lot of database systems, maintaining information about why some value isn’t available. NULL or a well-defined default value or an ad hoc value that’s believed not to be used otherwise? Designers and programmers may take shortcuts, and the results may not always come out right.
gene108
@PsiFighter37:
They are keeping their voters engaged, they are tainting the legitimacy of Biden’s soon to be Presidency, and maybe successfully depress voter turnout among independents, who get disgusted with the nastiness of politics, but came out to vote for Democrats a couple of weeks ago.
They are not going to lose any voters by behaving this way. There’s no downside
Kay
We all need to concerned about our families welfare. All of us are vulnerable to attack by these cynical, lying, wholly self-serving GOP operatives. When do people get sick of it and tell the whole rotten bunch to fuck off and leave us alone?
different-church-lady
@David ?Booooooo!? Koch:
As of the moment, it’s mostly future dead people. Near future, based on their pandemic decision making…
gene108
@Baud:
Just pointing out Biden trying to rally the nation to fight the coronavirus will be met with cries of “stolen Presidency” from Republican voters to state and local officials to Congressional Republicans making any national response far less effective than it could be.
Sab
@Baud: You and they have different religious views. They believe they will be voting in the afterlife. Also followimg football teams.
gene108
@Kay:
Never, it seems.
different-church-lady
When John Bolton is the sanest person in your party, you’ve got problems.
Sab
@Cameron: Only snowbirds vote. My mom died in Ohio, where she was registered to vote. Had she died in Florida, where she did not have a winter condo, she would still be voting, since Ohio SoS would not know that she was dead.
Don’t know any of this. Just pure speculation. Except that Mom died in Ohio.
Kay
I also love how we’re supposed to work with these people to “improve election systems” and NONE OF THEM bothered to understand the first thing about election systems before they started throwing around accusations aimed at ordinary people.
They’re both malicious and nasty AND lazy as hell. Once again the whole country has to grind to a halt while people on the Right do some BASIC READING about the subject they’re screaming about. Do some work! You want to opine on election systems? You’ll have to read something. Until they do no one should work with them on anything. It’s not the rest of the worlds JOB to drill basic facts into their big, loud heads. No remedial crash course in election processes for the low quality Trump hires. Figure it out yourselves.
Yarrow
@gene108: There was never a chance of the nation coming together after the election. We’re fighting an entire RW media and info ecosystem that has leaned into its fascist underpinnings and is funded by our enemies. We are at war, as Adam Silverman keeps saying, but most people don’t realize it. Unfortunately for us, a significant portion of one of our two major parties is also part of all that, leaving Democrats, Never Trumpers and others who recognize that the fight isn’t left vs right, D vs R, but instead is democracy vs authoritarianism to fight for the country. There’s still a lot of work to do and those that have a lot to lose from things changing will fight that change hard.
Martin
@Baud: It’s not necessarily a technical problem, though any system that can’t assign NULL and handle NULL conditions really should be set on fire.
We went through this at work migrating old records when the programmers had no fucking idea how to handle records with addresses with no zip codes, because we’re (barely) an old enough institution to predate universal zip codes. They worked on this for two months and then invited me as a user to opine on what to do. They wanted to throw out the records entirely as being invalid. But they are valid. They’re still valid even when the name of the city has changed, the street no longer exists, and so on. That they couldn’t validate today an address collected in 1965 was inconceivable to them. Their next best option was to put 00000 or 99999 in as a zip code.
My remedy was simple – set the zip code to NULL. You don’t know what it is, it’s not an error, don’t make some shit up. Problem was their (non COBOL) system purchased in 2015 couldn’t handle NULL.
But the real problem is that the programmers didn’t know shit about addresses, assumed there would never be a 00000 or 99999 zip code (probably true for the former, but not for the latter) but also didn’t consider that by passing something that looked like a valid zip code, would be treated like a valid zip code – or that it might someday be an actual zip code. And they didn’t realize that we didn’t always have zip codes and assumed those records were somehow corrupted which is why they wanted to purge them to start with.
paul w, chicago
Please! Please! Please! Do not give to candidates or the Senate Campaign Committee, they generally don’t know what to do and are a part of the consulting class. Give to those grass roots registration/GOTV groups like Fair Fight and the New GA Project listed above (and the Planned Parenthood Votes pac-they do very good work on the ground too). These are the people who make it happen in elections, the actual candidate campaigns will be swimming in money. Give money where it matters.
Another Scott
2 hours 15 minutes to go for the SpaceX Dragon manned launch. On C-Span and likely elsewhere.
Cheers,
Scott.
Aleta
I know for certain that Elvis has voted in every presidential election since 1976 and this is based on facts. That’s when he started working for the FBI.
Baud
@Yarrow:
Exactly. Unity was never in the cards for the near future. There is only our strength versus theirs.
Baud
@Martin:
I once dabbled with coding. I now realize it was hard because I was trying to do it well.
different-church-lady
@Martin: I still want to know who the brilliant programmer is who thought it would be a perfectly valid solution to hit “cancel” when you wanted to continue using your bank card as a credit card at the grocery store.
Chris Johnson
@Yutsano: I never, ever forget your statistic that every dollar given to the IRS nets eight dollars in Treasury income from tax cheats getting caught.
It’s so weirdly hilarious to be an avowed leftist absolutely devoted to throwing more money at the IRS. And the Post Office, sure… I really want to see postal banking and will switch to it given the opportunity… but it seems such a great unexpected win, to fund the IRS properly.
Ain’t gonna be poor people you get the money from, I know that. It’d be giving you resources to go after the REAL money (and the real criminals, quite literally)
JPL
@Another Scott: I’ve been watching online on the NASA site. link
Redshift
My favorite bit of dumbassery is GOP officials citing as “evidence” of something suspicious that so many people voted GOP downballot but didn’t vote for Trump. “That can’t be right.”
Especially when coupled with crowing about how they did better than expected for the Senate, which is exactly the same set of numbers in the other order.
I guess in keeping with their other grade school “arguments” “I know you are but what am I?” and “I’m rubber you’re glue,” they’re now going with “head I win, tails you lose.”
gene108
@Yarrow:
@Baud:
I’m not expecting unity. I doubt South Dakota would cooperate with anything like a national mask mandate. But maybe they would cooperate with some other measures, like federally coordinated distribution of medical supplies.
These claims of a stolen election make even the smallest bit of cooperation with the Biden administration even less likely.
It makes a bad situation worse.
randy khan
The odds are that every single one of these dead or really old people voting falls into one of three categories:
dirge
@Baud:
Coding well is much easier if and only if you’re still going to be around to deal with your own mistakes. My top advice for junior programmers is that the worst coder in the world, the guy you’re going to truly learn to hate, is that asshole checking in code under your name a year ago. Try not to be that guy.
These days, I get the impression that management has fully bought in to the myth of the 10x coder, in reverse: 10 guys with no clue are just as good as one genuine expert. Better, in fact, because they’re never going to say no, regardless of how catastrophically stupid the “plan” is.
WaterGirl
@billcinsd: YES, the Ossoff thermometer includes the 2018 race.
Someone asks that on every thread so I just updated it to always say that. :-) Appreciate the reminder!
WaterGirl
@Baud: Because they are morons. I can hear it, can’t you?
“I want to talk to the dead lady who’s still voting.”
“Which one of you dead people voted illegally?”
tokyokie
A dead Studs Turkel voted for Obama in 2008. But it was legal. One of his last acts while still alive was to vote absentee by mail. He died between the time he voted and Election Day.
Chyron HR
@paul w, chicago:
It’s kind of funny how you guys can’t stop using your shibboleths long after they’ve become red flags for everyone else.
Chetan Murthy
@dirge:
That guy! He never writes any comments, and tests? Fugeddaboudit! Amirite, folks? Amirite?
Heh. I almost take pride in never writing comments — if I can’t figure out what the code does by reading it, I don’t deserve to be able to use it! Ha! But OTOH, I write copious tests for anything that’s meant to hang around a while.
Ruckus
@John S.:
I understand that the IRS has looked into it and the change over would cost more than it’s worth and everything they’ve tried worked slower than what they have.
No idea if any of this is in any way true, it may just be an excuse to not do anything. But they do have computerized records going back decades so the concept of changing everything to a new language actually might be true. And trying to build up anything new of that scale seems to be, what’s that word, oh yes, daunting.
Redshift
@Kay: For decades, Fox and Rush have been feeding them “everyone knows” America has a conservative majority, so it’s obvious that if liberals win, they must have cheated. They barely need to say the second part any more.
Reboot
@gene108:
I’m pretty sure the incoming Biden administration along with everyone reading comments here is aware of this (even without this being the nth reiteration of this particular sentiment). Possibly there’s even a plan in place to deal with it–I’d rather speculate on that.
danielx
@John S.:
It’s true. An old buddy of mine made a shit ton of money down to Y2K because he’d taken a couple of COBOL courses about a zillion years ago. Nobody who had gotten computer science degrees knew anything about it; he had the golden programming hands at the right point in time.
Of course, that was when programming was done on computers with a whopping 64k of ram, so it had to be done right, tight, documented and commented.
Woodrow/asim
@paul w, chicago: I have no idea what you’re on about. I actually have a good friend who just won to the GA State Senate this cycle, and I assure you she’s not part of any “consulting class”.
I think you’d be damned hard-pressed to argue that Rev. Warnock, esp., is some kind of standard pol.
JanieM
@Ruckus:
For the last ten years before I retired, I was part of an effort to “get out of DOS” at a company microscopic in comparison to the IRS. It was, yes, daunting.
So-called “Gall’s law” comes to mind:
Whether Gall’s law has any validity or not, rewriting the IRS systems would be a mind-boggling project. Or will be. Because it’ll have to be done someday, somehow, I’m sure.
Reboot
Oops. My comment at 59 was meant to reply to gene108 at 32–my apologies.
lgerard
Believe it or not. I read through all 200+ “affidavits” that the trump campaign filed in their lawsuit in Michigan. Almost all of them were from people who were butthurt that they did not understand the election process or that workers would not take their direction as to which ballots should count and which should not.
There was only one “affidavit” which actually alleged fraud, and it was the very last one. A woman claimed that her dead son had cast an absentee ballot. A few minutes investigation revealed that the voter in question was someone with the same name and a different birth date. Her son had been removed from the register several years ago right after his death.
Lawyers! What are they supposed to do?
opiejeanne
@dirge: The Buzzie Bavasi baseball theory of management. He let Ryan go, saying he can get two mediocre pitchers for the same price who between them could get as many outs.
It did not work.
danielx
@JanieM:
A while back I read an article about why most
nearly alllarge scale IT projects fail. One of the reasons listed was failing to spend enough time defining the requirements of the project, i.e. some upper management type screaming about how he/she wanted to see some progress when engineers had been defining needs for six months. And six months after that screaming that the system simply had to include esoteric features X,Y and Z, and why the hell didn’t you include them when you were defining system needs….?BillinGlendaleCA
@tokyokie: As did Obama’s grandma.
Llelldorin
@billcinsd: I think it has something to do with the differing circumstances of their respective first round races as well. Ossoff was in a tight race to deny his opponent a first-round win, while Warnock was benefiting from an entertainingly nasty red-on-red duel in his race. Obviously none of that applies anymore—donate to both!
pamelabrown53
@Kay:
Thank you, Kay. You are head and shoulders above most of the MSM who continue their breathless coverage of Trump and frame it as somehow Biden or even corrupt REPUBLICANS are secretly pro-Biden.
Cut to the chase: it’s about disenfranchising voters. Until our media makes this important shift in their reporting/analysis, the damage to our democracy will go unabated.
opiejeanne
@lgerard: What were the reasons the observers thought ballots should not be allowed?
Martin
@Baud: I’m of the view that coding has crossed a critical boundary where the majority of coding shouldn’t be done by people who are principally coders, but by people with domain expertise who have coding as a skill. That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be software engineers involved in security, project design and so on, but if you want quality election systems developed, have them designed/written primarily by election experts with software engineers providing support, and not the other way around.
For that reason I don’t recommend computer science for new students – rather I suggest they focus on the discipline or industry they want to work in and add the computer science into that space, as a minor, etc.
Suzanne
About two hours ago, the rain finally stopped, so Mr. Suzanne and I took the kids to the park. Some classy and economically anxious Trump fan who certainly believes that property is just as important as human life had defaced the kids’ play structures, spray painting “FUCK BIDEN”.
I’m sure all the pearl clutchers on the right will have words of wisdom for me.
pamelabrown53
@different-church-lady:
NO FUCKING WAY YOU’RE NOT WRONG IN THIS! (Heh). The republicans will use people who died of Covid after they voted as “evidence” of voter fraud. They kill us then use our deaths to wholesale wrecking ball our democracy.
Do I sound too shrill?!
lgerard
@opiejeanne:
It is interesting because most of the complaints had nothing to do with ballots. They largely complained that everyone who wanted to get into the building could not due to limitations and that they had to stand at a distance from the workers and could not stand over their shoulders watching every move they made. They also could not understand how ballots moved from station to station.
All f this would have been eliminated had they had even a basic understanding of the election process. There was no training for these people, they were recruited by facebook posts and they could not understand that workers trying to do their jobs might be resentful of clueless outsiders coming into their community and questioning everything being done. There were also quite a few complaints about black people wearing BLM masks or shirts, as if that should somehow disqualify them.
It was really a misunderstanding of their role, they seemed to assume that they were “challengers” who could give a thumbs up or down on each ballot rather then observers.
There were a couple of complaints that stated that they felt the “number on the sealed envelop did not match that on the ballot”, but I don’t understand that and there was no concrete evidence presented.
It was really a case of people not having a clue about how elections work thinking that because they did not understand it, it must be corrupt.
PS I remember that Buzzy moment……he said he could just get 2 pitchers who could go 10-10.
cain
This twitter account of what’s going on in El Paso, TX at a hospital is heart breaking.
The hospital is so understaffed they are getting prisoners to wheel the dead away. It just seems horrifying what’s going on there. This stuff needs to be on every local news show so that people will take it seriously.
Mask up and stay home!
Just Chuck
@Martin: I would rather have an election system _designed_ by domain experts, and _programmed_ by people actually familiar with concepts like writing secure and robust code. People in the business domain like to use spreadsheets, and they tend to write software that behaves like spreadsheets. Not a recipe for long-term success.
mrmoshpotato
NowThis News has a short compilation of people prank calling the Soviet shitpile’s I’m-not-a-total-loser “voter fraud” number, and it’s fucking hilarious.
Goku (Amerikan Baka)
@gene108:
Well, then I guess we’re doomed, DOOMED, DOOMED!!!!!
Come on, that’s not the right attitude to have
lowtechcyclist
I said, who put all those things in your head?
And more important, why are you stuffing other people’s heads with this bullshit?
MisterForkbeard
@Martin: I’m in the tech industry as a middle manager, and this is basically correct.
I’ve watched domain experts with coding skills, and I’ve watched programmers work off documents generated by domain experts. The first is vastly preferable and has better results.
Gretchen
@Kay: The judge in Detroit was pretty impatient with the Republican challengers who didn’t bother to go to the training, went to the vote counting place ready to prove fraud, and had no idea of what they were looking at or the processes that were going on, because they didn’t do the work of going to the training!
lowtechcyclist
The first national election, sure. But people born in 2001 voted in last year’s Virginia legislative elections, when Dems took control of the legislature.
CliosFanBoy
@Cheryl from Maryland: I remember her. What a joke. I wondered where she went.
Cameron
I liked this, even though I’m not a very good Democrat:
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/biden-can-overcome-political-gridlock-by-anatole-kaletsky-2020-11
Kay
I’m still sort of idly wondering how bad it has to get before elected Republicans find the courage to object to this.
How bad will it have to get for them to defy or speak out against Trump? I personally think there is no bottom but I wonder if the general public believe the Republicans they elected will save them from Donald Trump punishing the entire country because he lost an election.
Kay
I have a conservative client who loathes Trump. He didn’t vote for him in 2016 or 2020 but he votes GOP down ballot. He asked me if I could picture this happening “on my side”, the complete surrender of the entire Democratic Party and liberal and Left side to one man. The worship. How fearful they are of him and how they made a US flag with his name on it.
I told him I could have imagined it in 2016 when Trump was elected. I could have imagined us getting that far, to electing a liberal version of Trump. But this far? No. I can’t imagine “my side” doing this. I don’t think we would. I think we would have dumped him within a year after he was elected and he would have had a primary challenge after that and lost.
I think this only could have happened on the Right, was my answer, this complete and utter abdication of all agency and independent thought or dissent.
Kay
One of the judges made this point in one of the cases Trump lost. More might have made it- I’ve only read three of the cases.
The judge asked if the people who cast the 8000 votes Donald Trump and the Republican Party were trying to throw out had any interest in this at all. They weren’t even noticed that Donald Trump and the Republican Party were attempting to throw out their votes. Judge said that – he said “electors are not aware what you’re petitioning for here today”.
Voters have not been part of this discussion, and they need to be. Who is their advocate?
Ruckus
@Kay:
They are not a party of thinkers, only of followers. The few who think at all have left the party or at least didn’t vote for shitforbrains. This time around.
Will they think or follow in the future? Tis anyone’s guess. But the republicans have been saying get on board or jump the hell off and die for a few decades now and I don’t think that there is enough of the cult who hasn’t swallowed the kool aid to matter a whole lot.
hilts
@Ruckus:
It’s no longer a political party, it’s a religious cult.
divF
@Martin: 40 years of mentoring in high-performance computing for scientific simulation has taught me that it is much lighter lift to teach a mathematician software engineering than it is to teach a software engineer mathematics. Not impossible, mind you, but much more difficult.
ETA: even better is to have a team that is “eating its own dogfood”, i.e. are consumers of the software they are developing. You know, like Hair Club for Men.
dirge
@Martin: I’m of the view that coding has crossed a critical boundary where the majority of coding shouldn’t be done by people who are principally coders, but by people with domain expertise who have coding as a skill.
Based on my experience working with quants and data scientists, there’s some truth to this, but with massive caveats. Domain experts with coding skills typically know just enough to get themselves, and everybody else, into trouble. It’s important to have experts in the programming domain in that team as well, to educate, provide support, and lay down the law.
I’ve built a few systems designed to sandbox amateur coders in a way that lets them do what they need to without making a mess. That can be pretty successful, but even so those guys are going to be more productive if someone is around to push good habits.
Worst case is domain experts unleashed, tossing inscrutable, buggy code over the wall, and screaming about how long it takes to get it deployed into a mission critical production environment.
That said, I’d agree that the best use of an expert programmer’s time is figuring out how to get domain experts to write useable code themselves. It’s just harder than it sounds.
Ken
Accounts vary, but generally involve Lee saying “NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER” and Hammer Films saying “What if we add another 0?”
Calouste
@Kay: Fairly easy to imagine actually, just read a few posts by Tony Jay and his worship of St. Jeremy.
craigie
@Chetan Murthy:
I hope this is snark. But in any case, the real purpose of comments is not what something does, but why it does it.
Geminid
@Kay: A lot of people believe trump can’t pull off a theft of this election, and republican officeholders holders may believe that and justify their silence accordingly. They just don’t want to cross trump. If they reject him, his supporters will reject them, and at this point they are not competitive without trump’s cult members. Since they set aside whatever integrity they had soon into trump’s presidency, most republican officeholders will keep their heads down for now. Their best case scenario would be for trump to stroke out tomorrow. The more ruthless would poison him if they thought they could get away with it.
Calouste
@Just Chuck: Most programmers’ mental model of a database is a spreadsheet. So you get the more or less the same long-term success anyway.
JR
Read this and tell me that names aren’t fates
dmsilev
From WaPo just now
The series of Incredible Shrinking Lawsuits continues, and if they’ve essentially given up on any large scale litigation in PA, the whole thing is even more clearly just a facade. Whether it’s cover for making Trump feel better about himself or an attempt to delegitimize Biden’s victory, or some mix, who knows, but they’re no longer actually trying to win the election.
Kay
@Calouste:
Obama was hugely charismatic, very popular, won with big margins and was personally (his behavior) really beyond reproach. After his election there was never a period where at least 25% of the elected Democrats and some portion of the Dem and liberal base weren’t either criticizing him or actively working against him. In the 2010 midterms it was understood that Democrats in swing or Right leaning districts would be running away from him, and they did. Obama had pushback from both the Left and the Right not just from the D base but also from elected Democrats almost immediately after he was elected. There has been nothing like that on the Right re: Trump. They follow him like sheep.
jimmy higgins
I know I’m a little late here, but “a former Ivy League football player.” Really?
Does he bill himself this way or is somebody having a li’l snark with him?
WaterGirl
@Reboot: fixed!
Kay
@dmsilev:
You know, anyone can file anything and Trump’s lawyers are so repulsive they would file literally anything, but look at what the GOP is endorsing here! The Republican Party cannot throw out 600,000 American’s votes, but they completely endorse the idea of throwing them out. 600,000 votes are 600,000 people. That’s how many they would throw under the bus to rescue their Supreme Leader. They’re all backing this.
WaterGirl
@Kay: It is appalling.
dmsilev
@Kay: And, of course, they were advocating throwing away that vast number of votes based on a lie.
Kay
@Calouste:
There’s another comparison too. We’re told that no Republican can criticize or take any action at all to hold Trump accountable or rein him in. This is impossible, we’re told, because the GOP base is so important to them and specifically the religious Right is so important to them. This is the excuse for why these cowards won’t defend the country. “our BASE! We must kowtow to our BASE”
Obama was the first AA President. AA’s are a HUGELY essential part of the D base. No Democrat would ever win another national election without support from AA voters. They are absolutely as essential to Democrats winning as the religious Right is to Republicans winning. Yet. Obama was criticized constantly, in his own Party, from both the Left and the Right.
So that’s not a good excuse either. No, I think I have to conclude that people on the Right are just more vulnerable to lockstep, sheep-like following.
danielx
@hilts:
It was that way when W was in office, it’s worse now.
Kay
@dmsilev:
Peoples votes. Peoples valid, legal votes. The Republican Party endorses throwing them out. Alito gave a whining, put-upon speech the other day about how he is a victim of liberals, how they suppress speech, wah, wah, poor me, same old song and dance.
Is there anything that is more purely political speech than a vote? His Party endorses silencing 600,000 voters to keep this shitty, sleazy crook in power.
danielx
@Kay:
The Authoritarians
They thrive on group think and being told what to do and how to think. Unless it’s for the protection of their and everyone else’s health, in which case it’s a complete abridgement of their rights per Samuel Alito.
Fuck them, and fuck Justice Alito and the horse’s ass he rides upon.
lgerard
@dmsilev:
This is a situation where the judge might recommend remedial education ala Kris Koback.
There is nothing illegal or improper about this
dmsilev
@Kay: I was glad to see that there was some real pushback against the lawyers who were doing the GOP’s bidding. Spare me the whining which inevitably ensued. Just like Sarah Huckabee Sanders has no Constitutional right to eat in a specific restaurant without being hassled for her incessant lies in the service of a monster, expensive attorneys don’t get an automatic ‘I was just representing my client’ free pass from social shunning.
danielx
@dmsilev:
But…but Alan Dershowitz isn’t getting dinner invitations the way he used to and is entitled to! Is there no end to this politically correct persecution?
I hope not.
Sab
@Kay: Late to this thread. I have always been a Democrat but I have on occassion voted for Republicans. I absolutely never will again. When they rise high enough in the hierarchy even the best ones sell their souls to please the big donors.
George Voinovich sold out his own neighborhood to please the big banks, and now Slavic Village is a mess. Ken Blackwell was in many ways a good Sec of State but he did major voter suppression.
Calouste
@Kay: Where did I mention anything about Obama? I was talking about the cult-like behavior of Corbyn supporters. (And of course Sanders supporters as well). The seeds are definitely there on the left as well, although I doubt they will ever be a majority. Obama of course isn’t the kind of politician who would encourage that kind of behavior in his supporters, as opposed to others mentioned.
Calouste
@jimmy higgins: Just another example that they let just about everyone into the Ivy League, provided they have money of course. And apparently he was too stupid to even get a gentleman’s C, otherwise he could have passed himself of as an Ivy League educated lawyer or somesuch.
Kay
@lgerard:
I actually love the opportunity to cure. People get lots and lots of notice for other state recording processes- they don’t just throw out the deed for your house if you filed it and it’s wrong. They give you an opportunity to cure. Voters should get one too. It’s much easier to communicate with voters now. They can check their ballots on websites, leave a cell phone number, all kinds of wonderful innovations. No reason a small error on a ballot should mean it doesn’t get counted.
Kay
@dmsilev:
They’re kind of piggybacking on the constitutional right to counsel for criminal defendants and conflating the two. They do this constantly in a lot of areas. They seem to have real trouble differentiating between state action and personal or purely commercial transactions.
In Alitos speech he objects to people thinking other people are bigots. I just don’t know where to start with that. I think they can think that! Pretty sure that’s not a 1A violation. I’m not clear if he wants to disallow me thinking he’s a bigot or disallow my saying he’s a bigot.
lgerard
@Kay:
It is no different then giving an in-person voter the opportunity to correct a ballot that was rejected by the scanner. It is also the very concept behind provisional ballots….that the voter be given the opportunity to correct anything which affects the status of their vote.
Not surprisingly, I saw the GOP making the exact opposite argument in court in Arizona. There several people testified (without any degree of certainty) that election officials overrode their rejected ballot without giving them the chance to “cure” it.
So to summarize, if voters are given the opportunity to correct their ballots, the election must be overturned. If they are not given the opportunity to correct their ballots, the election also must be overturned.
Rudy logic!
RaflW
@billcinsd: That’s been my question both the other day and today, that it looks like (but I ay be misconstruing the two thermometers) that even if you start at the new baselines in the text above each thermo, BJers seem to be thinking Ossof has the better chance, or better campaign, or … something?
We don’t get control of the Senate unless we win both!
Kay
@lgerard:
It’s a great idea. Voting should be convenient and voter-friendly and efficient. We don’t need a bunch of people who come to work every day to tell people “no”. If they made an error on a ballot we should notify them and let them fix it. We love voters, right? Want them to participate? Value their time? Let’s be pro-voter. Republicans and Donald Trump can be anti-voter.
I love early vote. I go when I have time, it’s not crowded and no one is stressed and cranky. I also like the idea of relieving pressure on the Big Day because I know it’s patched together with chewing gum and needs all the help it can get. If I can get there early and beat the rush why shouldn’t I have that option? It works out better for everyone.
Just Chuck
@Calouste: No database programmer deserving at all of the name thinks of a database that way. But ok, the intersection of “deserving” and “Most” …
Funny thing is, the data model of spreadsheets is fucking terrible, but the way they’re programmed with formula on other cells is basically functional programming, which has gone mainstream in a big way nowadays. plus ça change…
Kay
@Calouste:
I also don’t think it’s true at all that Democrats would have followed Bernie Sanders, even if he had won. In fact, I feel like I know exactly what Democrats would do with Bernie Sanders. Democrats on the Right would have opposed his policies and Democrats on the Left would have been disappointed and called him a sell out. There would have been opposition almost immediately and from “my side”. What wouldn’t have happened is what happened with Trump, where the entire Republican Party followed and follow him like sheep.
This isn’t just the GOP base following this creep- it is the ENTIRE Republican Party. Democrats actually had an unpopular incumbent. Jimmy Carter. Here’s what happened:
dnfree
@craigie: Exactly! Especially if the code appears illogical or wrong. I always commented why I had done something if it wasn’t obvious in the code. Sometimes th3 person I was informing wasn’t even another programmer—it was myself two years later when I wondered why I did it that way.
I once took a C language programming course. At the end of the course the teacher put a short one-sentence C command on the board and asked us what it would do. There were at least four interpretations offered. After much discussion, the teacher explained which was correct. There’s something wrong with a language like that.
The Moar You Know
@gene108: There was never any chance of that at any time before or after this election. Hell, there has never been any chance of that after 2008, unless by “coming together” you meant “give in to every single demand by the GOP, ever”.
I might add that after four years of Trump I’m in pretty much the same headspace. Unconditional and total surrender by the GOP is the minimally acceptable position as far as I’m concerned. I know it’s not helpful to the nation to feel that way, but I do.
JanieM
@dnfree:
Me too. Not only “sometimes” but almost exclusively, I did it for myself. Besides the obvious reason that you cite, almost no one (at least where I worked) ever read anyone else’s code anyhow. I made the last third of my career out of being the only person willing and able to read old code, and/or other people’s code.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay:
Well, they’re only attacking Democratic voters, so the Republican voters I suppose will never get tired of it.
SFAW
Re: fraudulent voting
One thing I do not see much of (if at all), but would like Biden’s new AG look into, is discussion of voting fraud perpetrated by the Republicans (or on their behalf) in NC and FL. Trump picked up eight percent (from polling to actual) in the last two days of the campaign? How is that less suspicious than any of the things the Rethugs whine about.
For the record, I don’t seriously think the Russians (or DeSantis and his minions) necessarily did any of that, but I think the DNC and a few loud Dem voices should do their best to put the Rethugs on defense. Especially considering the FL history of Rethug voting fuckery
ETA: I think it would also be worthwhile for the new AG to look into fuckery in some of the Senate races (Tillis, Collins, for example).
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
The approach to voting has shifted on the Right, and in a bad direction. In the olden days, voting was like going to the library or reading or exercising. It was considered this good thing that people should do and we were all happy about it and encouraging it. “Smoking? Bad. Voting? Good”. That was the position of officials in government.
Year after year, for the last 20 years, Republicans have turned it into something disreputable, like voters need to be approached with suspicion and jump thru hoops to show they are “real” or “deserve” to vote. It’s fucked up. In this view, voting is ABOUT the candidate. The candidate’s rights. The candidate’s wishes. They keep referring to “ballots”. Ballots are voters. For many of them, even most of them, it is the only communication they have with elected leaders, only opportunity they have to weigh in.
I mean jesus christ. These people are really going to lecture us about political speech? The people who have made it central to their party platform to silence voters and shut them up? I’m not trying to throw out any Trump votes! I might think Alito is a bigot and I might even say it but I’m not trying to throw his BALLOT out. I really have to listen to whining about “cancel culture” from people who seek to throw out votes? Talk about cancelling! They’d shut everyone in Philadelphia and Detroit up in a heartbeat if that would protect Dear Leader.
dnfree
@JanieM: we probably have something in common. At three different workplaces I was the person who found bugs in the code of departed colleagues when the bugs surfaced. Some hadn’t been found for years.
JanieM
@dnfree:
Sounds like it. I miss that kind of puzzle-solving. I especially miss getting paid for it. ;-)
But retirement has its advantages too, and I’m off doing other things now.
Brantl
@Chetan Murthy: Never writing comments SUCKS full stop
tybee
amen
Brantl
@dnfree: just because people don’t pay attention to learning syntax, to correctly interpret what a language does, doesn’t make the language wrong.