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U.S. Politics: The Jeff Sessions: The Killing of a Keebler Elf


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Ugh.

Just read that the Mooch's wife filed for divorce while nine months pregnant.

That is one pissed off woman.

And while he was with Trump at the infamous Jamboree, she was rushed off to hospital to give birth a couple of weeks early. Took him 4 days to go see his new son.

Apparently no other woman was involved, just dedication to Trump.

Their marriage was a 2nd marriage for both. He had been married for 23 years and had 3 children. She worked at his investment firm. They started dating after they both split from their spouses, and got married after the birth of their first child, once his divorce was finalized, three years ago.

Sounds pretty shitty, all round.

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31 minutes ago, ThinkerX said:

Isn't there supposed to be a supreme court verdict coming out soon that could cripple gerrymandering?

There was news on the case just yesterday:

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The group said it has devised a means of measuring partisan gerrymanders, which the Supreme Court in the past has said was missing. Its measure, called the “efficiency gap,” shows how cracking (breaking up blocs of Democratic voters) and packing (concentrating Democrats within certain districts) results in wasted votes — excess votes for winners in safe districts and perpetually inadequate votes for the losers.

In its brief, the state argues that the Supreme Court has never found that any state legislature has engaged in unlawful partisan gerrymandering, and that the Democratic group has given the court no new redistricting principles or test.

“They have, instead, recycled arguments that this court has already rejected, while attacking a plan that complies with traditional redistricting principles and is strikingly similar to the immediately prior, court-drawn plan,” lawyers from the state Office of the Solicitor General wrote. “Given the jurisdictional and merits-based deficiencies in plaintiffs’ claims, their lawsuit must be dismissed.”

SCOTUS has struck down racial gerrymandering multiple times, but never partisan gerrymandering.  If they rule against Wisconsin, that would be incredibly important step in stopping gerrymandering - if the "efficiency gap" can be replicated and established nationwide (haven't looked into this).  However, I'm doubtful this court will decide against the state.

18 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Their marriage was a 2nd marriage for both. He had been married for 23 years and had 3 children. She worked at his investment firm. They started dating after they both split from their spouses, and got married after the birth of their first child, once his divorce was finalized, three years ago.

Sounds pretty shitty, all round.

He's got nothing on Gingrich.

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47 minutes ago, dmc515 said:

There was news on the case just yesterday:

SCOTUS has struck down racial gerrymandering multiple times, but never partisan gerrymandering.  If they rule against Wisconsin, that would be incredibly important step in stopping gerrymandering - if the "efficiency gap" can be replicated and established nationwide (haven't looked into this).  However, I'm doubtful this court will decide against the state.

Isn't it really down to what Kennedy thinks?  I thought he said that he is against Partisan Gerrymandering, but since there isn't a better way to do it, there is nothing he can really do about it until someone creates a measure.  I am hoping this satisfies him.

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11 minutes ago, Guy Kilmore said:

Isn't it really down to what Kennedy thinks?  I thought he said that he is against Partisan Gerrymandering, but since there isn't a better way to do it, there is nothing he can really do about it until someone creates a measure.  I am hoping this satisfies him.

Aye, it is down to Kennedy in all likelihood.  See here for why I'm doubtful:

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In fact, the constitutionality of partisan gerrymandering is a matter of extensive debate—and the Supreme Court will almost certainly decide its fate next term in a blockbuster case called Gill v. Whitford. Alito, it seems, is already gearing up for Whitford. His Harris dissent is peppered with warnings about the hazards of judicial intervention into political redistricting disputes. Alarmingly for voting rights advocates, Justice Anthony Kennedy joined the opinion in full, lodging no protest against the passages framing partisan gerrymandering as constitutionally permissible politics as usual. Given that Thomas has no issue with partisan (as opposed to racial) gerrymandering, the plaintiffs will likely need Kennedy’s support to pull off a victory in Whitford. But his vote on Monday suggests the justice might not be ready to take down partisan gerrymandering.

 

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6 hours ago, ThinkerX said:

Isn't there supposed to be a supreme court verdict coming out soon that could cripple gerrymandering?

Doubt it will favour common sense with this current make-up. Five of them pride themselves as reading law as it was originally written. And it was written by racist slave-holders who didn't see men and women as equals.

The idea of elite powerbrokers determining who gets to vote where in a way that favours them is consistent with a broken and biased oligarchy  that gives power to an electoral college, not a nation's people.

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So I saw Senator Susan Collins on one of the Sunday Morning Talking Head Shows (I think it was Meet the Press). Thank Dog for the stand she took against this shitty excuse for a farce of a bill, but once again I'm struck by the age and diction of many of our representatives. She came off as more than a bit doddering. Pretty much stuttered her way through the whole interview and it looked like she had some sort of facial or neck tremor. So many of these Senators just seem way past their expiration dates.  

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10 hours ago, Yukle said:

Doubt it will favour common sense with this current make-up. Five of them pride themselves as reading law as it was originally written. And it was written by racist slave-holders who didn't see men and women as equals.

The idea of elite powerbrokers determining who gets to vote where in a way that favours them is consistent with a broken and biased oligarchy  that gives power to an electoral college, not a nation's people.

Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch and Roberts yes, but Kennedy might surprise you.

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On 7/29/2017 at 4:32 AM, IamMe90 said:

Of course, it doesn't particularly matter what we, as board members, make of these polls. But I have to imagine many similar conversation are taking place within the Democratic party leadership, and I really hope they aren't taking your position. That sort of complacency is deadly. Especially early on, when long-term election strategy can still be adjusted.

Oh stop it. No one is being complacent. I probably have 10 emails from Stabenow already asking for donations.

The reason not to hit the panic button yet, but still be aware that it may be a close race (which I already alluded to in my post) is because Michigan is a hard state to poll. The large number of independents and lack of affiliation required for registration makes it so. Therefore, this one poll is practically meaningless, particularly this far out.

Speaking of complacency, on the eve of the 2016 elections I'd said that it was possible Michigan could go for Trump even though Hillary was +4 there at the last average, for precisely those reasons. We will be sweating it here unless Stabenow is say +10 ahead (and even then).

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1 hour ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

once again I'm struck by the age and diction of many of our representatives. She came off as more than a bit doddering. Pretty much stuttered her way through the whole interview and it looked like she had some sort of facial or neck tremor. So many of these Senators just seem way past their expiration dates.  

I don't think this is fair.  First off, Collins isn't that old.  She's right between my parents' age (64, and if that's too old to be a Senator at this point, then wow), and is almost exactly the median age for a Senator - the 49th oldest.  I've watched her on television for over a decade now and she has always been a bit....stuttery.  That's just the way she is.  I agree there's been noticeably more physical "tremors," for lack of a better term, too lately, but the content of what she's been saying is perfectly rational - and much more so than many other elected officials that run their mouths on TV.  I don't see the point in attacking Susan Collins for the way she speaks, in fact it seems pretty classless.  If she has serious health issues, I trust she'll divulge them in the appropriate manner and time.  If she doesn't, you just end up looking like an asshole.

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Speaking of MTP, Chuckie T put up some graphs showing Trump's net approval by state near the end of the hour.  This is derived from Gallup releasing state-by-state data of their daily tracking polls.  This is a good depiction of the peril his approval rating puts him in.  Both Florida and Texas (!) are at 42-51, or -9.  Arizona is at 43-52 for -9 as well.  Georgia is at 43-50, or -7.  Even without these states, if you count Pennsylvania, Wisconsin (both at 43-52, or -9) and Michigan (42-52 or -10), with all the states that have worse net figures, Trump loses 284-254 in the electoral college.  These are the type of numbers that, if they hold, suggest very significant losses come the midterms as long as you can rely on a mobilized Dem base.

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What is the Maginstky act about?  William Browder testifies before Congress and tells NPR why the Maginsky act matters.  

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William Browder knows Vladimir Putin's Russia all too well.

Browder made a fortune in Russia, in the process uncovering, he says, incredible amounts of fraud and corruption. When he tried to report it to authorities, the government kicked him out of the country and, he alleges, tortured and killed the lawyer he was working with.

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Browder founded and ran one of the largest investment firms in Russia, Hermitage Capital Management, from 1996-2005. When he and his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky discovered a massive corruption scheme, they went to the authorities...................He was denied access back into the country after an international trip, but Magnitsky wasn't so lucky. Browder told the senators the Russian lawyer was detained by the authorities, denied medical treatment for pancreatitis while he was jailed, and then allegedly beaten to death in 2009 while chained to a prison cell bed.

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Much of Thursday's hearing was spent getting at the bigger question: Why is the Russian president so fixated on the Magnitsky Act?

There are two reasons, according to Browder:

  • The first is purely financial. Browder believes Putin is the richest man in the world, with an assortment of assets worth what Browder estimates to be $200 billion at his disposal, but those assets are "held all over the world" including in America. When the accounts of Putin's intermediaries are frozen because of the law, that is in effect, freezing some of Putin's cash flow as well.
  • The second is that the banking sanctions imposed by the law devalue Putin's promises, and so decrease his power. Putin gets his intermediaries to "arrest, kidnap, torture and kill" by promising absolute impunity, Browder said. But the law's sanctions create a tangible consequence. Not only do the sanctions affect violators vis-a-vis their U.S. dealings, but, internationally, other banks abide by a sanctions list put out by the Treasury Department that includes those found to have violated the Magnitsky Act, Browder explained to lawmakers. "As a result, you basically become a financial pariah," he said.

"This is a war of ideology between rule of law and criminality," Browder also told the senators. "And if we allow all the corrupt money to come here, then it's going to corrupt us until we end up like them."

This is an informative article about how thw Maginstky Act came about and worth a read.  

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Just junk the electronic voting machines and go back to little old lady counting ballots.

Quote

Hackers descend on Las Vegas to expose voting machine flaws

By KEVIN COLLIER

LAS VEGAS — Election officials and voting machine manufacturers insist that the rites of American democracy are safe from hackers. But people like Carten Schurman need just a few minutes to raise doubts about that claim.

Schurman, a professor of computer science at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, used a laptop’s Wi-Fi connection Friday to gain access to the type of voting machine that Fairfax County, Virginia, used until just two years ago. Nearby, other would-be hackers took turns trying to poke into a simulated election computer network resembling the one used by Cook County, Illinois.

Story Continued Below

 

Elsewhere, a gaggle of hackers went to work on a model still used in parts of seven states, as well as all of the state of Nevada. Though the device was supposedly wiped before it was sold by the government at auction, the hackers were able to uncover the results the machine tallied in 2002.

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/07/30/hackers-voting-machines-las-vegas-241130

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17 minutes ago, Nasty LongRider said:

Just junk the electronic voting machines and go back to little old lady counting ballots.

The biggest flaw with electronic voting is that it only takes one infiltration of software into a centralised system to corrupt the entire process.

Paper voting is much much MUCH harder to corrupt. Most nations don't even allow pens as voting tools because they're paranoid that the ink will rub off (like with a lot of gel pens) or people will switch authentic pens for fading pens surreptitiously at voting booths they know will back their opponents.

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1 hour ago, dmc515 said:

I don't think this is fair.  First off, Collins isn't that old.  She's right between my parents' age (64, and if that's too old to be a Senator at this point, then wow), and is almost exactly the median age for a Senator - the 49th oldest.  I've watched her on television for over a decade now and she has always been a bit....stuttery.  That's just the way she is.  I agree there's been noticeably more physical "tremors," for lack of a better term, too lately, but the content of what she's been saying is perfectly rational - and much more so than many other elected officials that run their mouths on TV.  I don't see the point in attacking Susan Collins for the way she speaks, in fact it seems pretty classless.  If she has serious health issues, I trust she'll divulge them in the appropriate manner and time.  If she doesn't, you just end up looking like an asshole.

Yeah, she's not that old. Like 65 maybe. I'm not that familiar with her normal speaking style, so I don't really have anything to compare it to. You're right that she was rational (although she really didn't have much of substance to say, it was the standard we have to reach across the aisle and craft a bipartisan bill, blah, blah, blah) but watching her speak was really uncomfortable. I didn't mean this as an attack so much as an observation. 

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15 minutes ago, Yukle said:

The biggest flaw with electronic voting is that it only takes one infiltration of software into a centralised system to corrupt the entire process.

Paper voting is much much MUCH harder to corrupt. Most nations don't even allow pens as voting tools because they're paranoid that the ink will rub off (like with a lot of gel pens) or people will switch authentic pens for fading pens surreptitiously at voting booths they know will back their opponents.

That's interesting about corrupting the use of ink pens in voting.  huh, people will try anything!

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2 hours ago, Nasty LongRider said:

That's interesting about corrupting the use of ink pens in voting.  huh, people will try anything!

I know, it's wild! Cheating in elections is, I assume, as old as elections themselves.

The Roman Republic passed a law that voting boxes had to be at the end of a corridor only wide enough to allow one person through at a time (to stop people "checking" you voted correctly).  It was a real problem with poorer citizens who were often intimidated to vote a certain way by those who held their debts. They also made it a law that you weren't allowed spare voting ballots (or tokens, which some elections used instead) so you couldn't vote twice.

They eventually passed a law saying that you weren't allowed to serve in the same office twice within a ten-year period.

Even scarier, though, was the voter manipulation done during Germany's annexation of Austria in the 1930s. You had to tick the tiny circle stating no if you disagreed, or make any mark at all in the gigantic "yes" circle if you agreed. Since some patriotic and upstanding citizens would obviously be confused by these instructions, those counting the ballots were reassured that a mark made anywhere on the paper except for the no circle counted as a yes and a blank ballot paper was also assumed to be a consent - why else would a voter not take care to mark the paper unless they disagreed?

In a less extreme but still sad example from the United States, when Florida began a recount after the 2000 election, its high court demanded to know why thousands of ballots were disregarded. The hole punchers used in many voting stations were blunted after so much use and papers without completely punched holes were thrown out. The fact that poorer communities were more likely to have less robust voting equipment was probably a complete coincidence in deciding whether the papers counted or not... as was the case in Ohio in 2004. ;)

Before I keep slamming the USA, though, Australia has its own quirks. We have preferential voting and all boxes must be numbered. There are usually more than 100 Senate candidates per state. If you make any mistake - skipping a number, writing one twice, leaving a box blank by mistake - too bad, so sad, your ballot may be disregarded. By sheer coincidence, those with low numeracy are the most likely to be confounded by this process, and are more likely to live in poorer areas. Starting to spot a theme here...

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With leaders like this, the democratic party becomes its own worst enemy:

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/pelosi-unimportant-to-win-midterm-elections/ar-AAp8dav?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=msnclassic

 

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Sunday said it is "unimportant" for Democrats to win the midterm elections in 2018.

 

During an appearance on "Fox News Sunday," host Chris Wallace asked Pelosi to estimate the chances that Democrats win back the lower chamber back in 2018 and whether she would run again for speaker if they did.

 

"That's so unimportant. What is important is that we have the lively debate on a better deal," Pelosi said.

 

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8 hours ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

Like 65 maybe. I'm not that familiar with her normal speaking style, so I don't really have anything to compare it to. You're right that she was rational (although she really didn't have much of substance to say, it was the standard we have to reach across the aisle and craft a bipartisan bill, blah, blah, blah

First - she's 64 damnit!  Sure she'd want that to be clarified.  Second, to the bolded, that describes pretty much every media visit for an officeholder ever, or at least how the latter aim the visit to be.

8 hours ago, Yukle said:

Paper voting is much much MUCH harder to corrupt. Most nations don't even allow pens as voting tools because they're paranoid that the ink will rub off (like with a lot of gel pens) or people will switch authentic pens for fading pens surreptitiously at voting booths they know will back their opponents.

Um, that's not very convincing.  Paper ballots have been corrupted since they've existed.  Honestly, just speaking as an observer here, I don't trust paper ballots any more than I do any computerized system.  Anyway, the solution in the United States is mail-in ballots.  There's only three states that do this entirely - Oregon, Washington, and Colorado, but there's plenty of states that have no-excuse absentee voting. (They're the ones in the green).  And, frankly, I've voted absentee one way or another since I was 18, which counts 7 national (2-year) cycles.  At this point, the election board sends me a ballot before I even ask.

Anyway, where am I going with this?  Mail-in voting, that's where.  I suppose it's not the most environmental method, but it has been shown consistently to up turnout and ensure a legit count.  Is there a risk of not counting the least fortunate?  Sure.  That's why you use the VRA to ensure you still have precincts open, but a large-scale shift to mail-in would be beneficial to us all.

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49 minutes ago, ThinkerX said:

With leaders like this, the democratic party becomes its own worst enemy

Indeed.  Pelosi needs to go, this response to basic questions is sad.  Feel free to paint me as the great sexist since....Oh that's right, almost any GOP member in office.

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So, health care is on hold, at best, for now. Let's talk tax reform.

I've seen it suggested that Trump and Bannon are in agreement that this is the place to push the populist agenda that'll secure re-election. There's also the suggestion that the White House and Republican Congress are seeing eye to eye on the basic directions for the reform, although that could be the same usual horseshit. But at least border adjustment tax won't be a point of conflict.

So what are your predictions? Will this be a relatively easy takeback of lost approval for Trump and R, or are there critical issues that the caucuses will have a difficult time seeing eye to eye on that could put this on the same path as health care? (If it isn't obvious, I'm asking as a complete tax policy ignoramus.)

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