Nov 13, 2016

Presto Change-O Followup

In a post I put up a few days ago, I postulated that rat-fucking played a key role in electing Trump.

I'm not a big fan of Greg Palast - I have to wonder about a guy who wears that 1950s Reporter Costume on a regular basis - but he's managed to do some decent work on occasion and if he's uncovered something worth looking at, I wanna look at it.

So:
Before a single vote was cast, the election was fixed by GOP and Trump operatives.
Starting in 2013 – just as the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act – a coterie of Trump operatives, under the direction of Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State, created a system to purge 1.1 million Americans of color from the voter rolls of GOP–controlled states.
The system, called Crosscheck, is detailed in my Rolling Stone report,
The GOP’s Stealth War on Voters,” 8/24/2016.
Crosscheck in action:
Trump victory margin in Michigan: 13,107
Michigan Crosscheck purge list: 449,922
Trump victory margin in Arizona: 85,257
 Arizona Crosscheck purge list: 270,824
Trump victory margin in North Carolina: 177,008
North Carolina Crosscheck purge list: 589,393
On Tuesday, we saw Crosscheck elect a Republican Senate and as President, Donald Trump. The electoral putsch was aided by nine other methods of attacking the right to vote of Black, Latino and Asian-American voters, methods detailed in my book and film, including “Caging,” “purging,” blocking legitimate registrations, and wrongly shunting millions to “provisional” ballots that will never be counted.
It's shitty, and it's underhanded, and it's dirty, and it's perfectly legal. This is where we are now.

Infestation

Keep Fighting - Maybe

My inclination right now is to tell Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon (eg) - and everybody else who sat on their asses complaining about Hillary instead of chopping the wood and carrying the water - my first inclination is tell y'all to fuck off.

Show the fuck up or shut the fuck up.


I'm nowhere near as calm or as gracious as either Hillary (or Kate pretending to be Hillary).

It may be a while before I'm at all pleasant to be around.  And I'm not begging your indulgence here. I'm not asking anybody for anything - not your patience, not your understanding, nothin'. Ya pays your money and ya takes your chances.

I'll try to suck it up; rub some dirt on it; walk it off and get back in there.  Just know that if you say anything that sounds like "Told-Ya-So" or the fantasy bullshit about Bernie and unicorns and rainbows and free puppies, I'm likely to tell you to take a flying fuck at a rollin' donut.

Large percentages of American voters believe in angels and talking snakes. They think Creationism isn't much different from Evolution. Half or more of the US population can't name the 3 branches of government. 40% can't identify North America on a map. And about a third don't know that the Earth orbits the sun.

They were convinced Hillary would abolish the 2nd amendment, outlaw Christianity and convert the US to Sharia law by importing millions of Muslims from Syria to slaughter her Christian enemies. And just because she could, she'd go ahead and suspend the rest of the Constitution because Presidents don't really need that shit anyway. (I'm not making any of that up, btw - that's all from actual conversations with actual rubes over the last several months - and there's plenty more where that came from)

I think I finally get what driftglass has been saying for quite a while.

Get over the idea that a well-reasoned argument will bring the "conservatives" over to your side. You can tell 'em your Democrat or that other Democrat or this Socialist or that Independent thinks just like they do, and that if they could just listen for a minute, maybe we could make some common cause and blah blah fucking blah.

"Conservatives" have become Informationally Isolated.  Guess what happens when part of a species is totally isolated from the rest of that species? 

In a small simplistic nutshell, here's what it comes down to, Lefties: - You Are The Liberal Elite as far as the rubes are concerned. You can make as much noise as you want. You can stomp and stumble and trash the jungle, but there it is - they believe you're no different from Hillary, so You.Are.The.Liberal.Elite. 

You wanna tell everybody what they can eat and what kinda exercise they hafta do and what cars they can drive and what light bulbs they're allowed to own and on and on and on.

It doesn't matter that you're not trying to dictate anything to them - it doesn't matter that all you wanna do is convince them to give it a shot and see for themselves...what did I just say?!

They don't fucking care what's true - they only care about what they believe

Here's the kicker - as far as I'm concerned, you just handed it all over to them because you were too busy breathing your own farts, and so you didn't show up. 

I'll keep hoping the really shitty parts of this nightmare don't materialize, but now the GOP is one simple-majority vote away from changing the filibuster rule in the Senate - and then the game is fucking over. The Republic dies. And if that's how it works out, then all we're doing right now is arguing over who gets to do what with the corpse.

'Course, I'm sure you'll have a grand old time finally getting your chance to lie down in front of that tank.

Like I said, I keep hoping - and if there's any chance down the road, I suspect I'll be right back chopping wood and carrying water again, but yeah - not gonna be very pleasant for a while.

Dave Returns

I can't think of a better way to kick it all off.  We always need a heapin' helpin' of  Dave Chapelle. I'm glad he's back.

Nov 12, 2016

Today's Tweet

Presto Change-O

How could the pollsters have gotten it so wrong?



You call a jillion registered voters, and they tell you they're ready to go, and they shake out like: Hillary's up by 5 points or Hillary's up by 8 points or 2 points or whatever.

But then, on the big day, it goes in the shitter and nobody can figure it out - it must be because those Black Voters Under-Performed (and don'tcha just love that kinda language?  "We lost - let's blame the Black People!")

"No, man, it was those stoopid fuckin' Protest Voters!"

"It was because Hillary's a lousy candidate and she failed to connect with blah blah blah - it never woulda happened with Bernie...I told ya so, man".

Fuck that noise.  Fuck all that noise.
How many voters showed up in Florida only to get turned away because of Voter ID or some such?

How many were a little skittish about it in the first place and finally decided just to stay home because they were afraid of being hassled?

Then Virginia (not enough to swing it, but holy fuck did they come close)
Then North Carolina (kind of a toss-up anyway, but she was trending)
Then Pennsylvania - fuck
Then Michigan - fuck
Then Wisconsin - fuck!

I wonder what the arithmetic looks like if you convert the final Polling Numbers for those states into an actual number of votes (X), minus Trump's margin of victory (Y), and compared that difference to the numbers of Registered Voters who turned out, but were denied their right to exercise the franchise.

And what the fuck is up with this apparent rash of No Vote at the top of the ticket?

Where did Kellyanne Conway send Trump in the last coupla weeks of his Scampaign®? 

What the hell was he doing in places that "Hillary had all sewed up"?

The pollsters weren't all that wrong.

There was no massive Bradley Effect.

Plenty of Black and Latin Voters turned out, and Women did their thing for her.

Hillary didn't blow it, and "Those Shitty Little Millennials" didn't blow it for her.

A combination of 
Voter ID Laws 
+ Fewer Polling Stations 
+ Purging Registration Rolls 
+ SCOTUS ruling against The Voting Rights Act
+ Rumors of Fraud and Rigged Elections
+ Threats of intimidation
+ Fliers and Text messages directing people to wrong or non-existent precincts
+ That world-famous Voter Apathy here in USAmerica Inc.
+ etc etc etc
= President-Elect Trump

This looks to me like a perfectly legal rat-fucking of the highest possible order, having been well-targeted and executed down to the last tiny detail - which includes knowing how to play the Electoral College Game.

And it keeps working for as long as voters have to be spoon-fed by the candidates; for as long as we can't be bothered to figure shit out for ourselves; for as long as we insist that we have to be inspired and uplifted by some Great Leader Of The New And Awesomely Stupendous and Tremendous Movement - for as long as we're not willing to hold this system to the standards laid out by the guys who wrote up the original instruction manual for us.  There's some pretty good shit at the end of the first paragraph.

It may sound like I'm being nostalgic; yearning for some golden age that never really existed. I'm not. There may never have been an election that was perfectly Free-n-Fair, and there may never be one. But can't we try to make the next one a bit "more perfect" than the last one? And the one after that?

PS) Hillary got the most votes. A lousy candidate with a bad message and a clunky disconnected style doesn't get the most votes. Don't fucking forget that.

PPS) This is fucked up and complicated - and since it didn't suddenly get all fucked up and complicated yesterday, we're not gonna un-fucking-complicate it by tomorrow.

We got Rat-Fucked, and now we get to wonder if the rubes will ever become aware that the Big Bamboozle is back in full swing.

Nov 11, 2016

Today's Today

Jack Leroy Tueller


On the 11th day of the 11th month at the 11th hour

Every year for 98 years now. We can always hope.