They don't even ever have any actual reasoning for requesting massive swaths of ballots be thrown out. If they see even a hint of light shining through a crack where they can make an argument about some meaningless technicality, they will take it. They just want to throw out as many ballots as possible, hoping that it is successful enough in the aggregate to benefit them. This is quite literally all they have left. Just begging for people's votes to not be counted.
It's all over the place. Anywhere they know they have to win, they're just trying to stop voting/counting votes.
Every legitimate vote that isnt counted is no different than casting a fraudulent vote. There's no difference between the two inn the end. Just like packing the the court is no different than stealing a SCOTUS seat.
It's functionally the same.
The guns at the polling place in Michigan is the most insanely American thing on that list. What possible reason would anyone have for open-carrying a gun when they go to vote, other than to purposefully intimidate the other people there??
Lame duck periods in general are pretty absurd. Lame duck periods of almost three months are outright insane, and pretty solid proof that the people who put this together were not above reproach. Anything over a week is too much in my eyes.
The final part of that, that Trump could completely ignore taking measures against coronavirus and this would make little practical difference compared to what has come before, is true and so damaging
They don't even ever have any actual reasoning for requesting massive swaths of ballots be thrown out. If they see even a hint of light shining through a crack where they can make an argument about some meaningless technicality, they will take it. They just want to throw out as many ballots as possible, hoping that it is successful enough in the aggregate to benefit them. This is quite literally all they have left. Just begging for people's votes to not be counted.
It's all over the place. Anywhere they know they have to win, they're just trying to stop voting/counting votes.
Every legitimate vote that isnt counted is no different than casting a fraudulent vote. There's no difference between the two inn the end. Just like packing the the court is no different than stealing a SCOTUS seat.
It's functionally the same.
The guns at the polling place in Michigan is the most insanely American thing on that list. What possible reason would anyone have for open-carrying a gun when they go to vote, other than to purposefully intimidate the other people there??
RE PA: The SCOTUS did not grant the GOP's argument that ballots arriving after November 3rd will be thrown out. Sort of. Instead, they've required that all ballots received after November 3rd be separated so that they can be discounted *after* the election.
How completely insane is that? The SCOTUS might swing in and kill already counted ballots after the fact.
They don't even ever have any actual reasoning for requesting massive swaths of ballots be thrown out. If they see even a hint of light shining through a crack where they can make an argument about some meaningless technicality, they will take it. They just want to throw out as many ballots as possible, hoping that it is successful enough in the aggregate to benefit them. This is quite literally all they have left. Just begging for people's votes to not be counted.
It's all over the place. Anywhere they know they have to win, they're just trying to stop voting/counting votes.
Every legitimate vote that isnt counted is no different than casting a fraudulent vote. There's no difference between the two inn the end. Just like packing the the court is no different than stealing a SCOTUS seat.
It's functionally the same.
The guns at the polling place in Michigan is the most insanely American thing on that list. What possible reason would anyone have for open-carrying a gun when they go to vote, other than to purposefully intimidate the other people there??
RE PA: The SCOTUS did not grant the GOP's argument that ballots arriving after November 3rd will be thrown out. Sort of. Instead, they've required that all ballots received after November 3rd be separated so that they can be discounted *after* the election.
How completely insane is that? The SCOTUS might swing in and kill already counted ballots after the fact.
There is no way anyone is ACTUALLY concerned about legit, postmarked ballots being counted after midnight on November 3rd. This is an absurd argument. California and other states often take WEEKS to get the actual results. We only KNOW who won on election night because of projections that are based on almost 100% certainty of the eventual outcome. There isn't an ounce of good faith in this entire argument. They are weaponizing the public PERCEPTION that all votes are counted by 11:59pm, and implying that anything counted afterwards is some sort of nefarious act, even though it is TOTALLY NORMAL.
I would like to add that the main person Kavanaugh quoted in his opinion yesterday was actually arguing the EXACT OPPOSITE of what Kavanaugh did in his vote. Kavanaugh knows full-well his argument about this is horseshit. There isn't a single part of him that believes otherwise. That he is taking this route anyway proves everything you need to know about him. He is a political operative, a veteran of Bush v. Gore who was put on the bench for this exact reason.
We've reached the point where the GOP wants to disqualify votes after they've been legally cast, and the only justification for rejecting them is because they weren't counted soon enough.
That's it. We've reached the point where the GOP is opposed to legal votes.
The last pretense has fallen. John McCain is dead and the GOP does not accept electoral democracy.
They don't even ever have any actual reasoning for requesting massive swaths of ballots be thrown out. If they see even a hint of light shining through a crack where they can make an argument about some meaningless technicality, they will take it. They just want to throw out as many ballots as possible, hoping that it is successful enough in the aggregate to benefit them. This is quite literally all they have left. Just begging for people's votes to not be counted.
It's all over the place. Anywhere they know they have to win, they're just trying to stop voting/counting votes.
Every legitimate vote that isnt counted is no different than casting a fraudulent vote. There's no difference between the two inn the end. Just like packing the the court is no different than stealing a SCOTUS seat.
It's functionally the same.
The guns at the polling place in Michigan is the most insanely American thing on that list. What possible reason would anyone have for open-carrying a gun when they go to vote, other than to purposefully intimidate the other people there??
RE PA: The SCOTUS did not grant the GOP's argument that ballots arriving after November 3rd will be thrown out. Sort of. Instead, they've required that all ballots received after November 3rd be separated so that they can be discounted *after* the election.
How completely insane is that? The SCOTUS might swing in and kill already counted ballots after the fact.
Depending on if they like the winner or not, ffs. If it's Trump they can be like oh it's cool count them! If it's not they will be like "omg I'm a constitutional originalismist and these ballots must not count!"
They don't even ever have any actual reasoning for requesting massive swaths of ballots be thrown out. If they see even a hint of light shining through a crack where they can make an argument about some meaningless technicality, they will take it. They just want to throw out as many ballots as possible, hoping that it is successful enough in the aggregate to benefit them. This is quite literally all they have left. Just begging for people's votes to not be counted.
It's all over the place. Anywhere they know they have to win, they're just trying to stop voting/counting votes.
Every legitimate vote that isnt counted is no different than casting a fraudulent vote. There's no difference between the two inn the end. Just like packing the the court is no different than stealing a SCOTUS seat.
It's functionally the same.
The guns at the polling place in Michigan is the most insanely American thing on that list. What possible reason would anyone have for open-carrying a gun when they go to vote, other than to purposefully intimidate the other people there??
RE PA: The SCOTUS did not grant the GOP's argument that ballots arriving after November 3rd will be thrown out. Sort of. Instead, they've required that all ballots received after November 3rd be separated so that they can be discounted *after* the election.
How completely insane is that? The SCOTUS might swing in and kill already counted ballots after the fact.
There is no way anyone is ACTUALLY concerned about legit, postmarked ballots being counted after midnight on November 3rd. This is an absurd argument. California and other states often take WEEKS to get the actual results. We only KNOW who won on election night because of projections that are based on almost 100% certainty of the eventual outcome. There isn't an ounce of good faith in this entire argument. They are weaponizing the public PERCEPTION that all votes are counted by 11:59pm, and implying that anything counted afterwards is some sort of nefarious act, even though it is TOTALLY NORMAL.
I would like to add that the main person Kavanaugh quoted in his opinion yesterday was actually arguing the EXACT OPPOSITE of what Kavanaugh did in his vote. Kavanaugh knows full-well his argument about this is horseshit. There isn't a single part of him that believes otherwise. That he is taking this route anyway proves everything you need to know about him. He is a political operative, a veteran of Bush v. Gore who was put on the bench for this exact reason.
What's wild is that for Trump this seems to just be borne of his ignorance about the issue. States have never certified election results on election night. It just doesn't happen. As you say, what the public thinks of as an election being decided, is merely the press making an accurate assessment of who will win. Trump is too pig ignorant to distinguish between what the television says and what a state board of elections actually does.
But the Republican Party and freaking Supreme Court justices should know better.
They don't even ever have any actual reasoning for requesting massive swaths of ballots be thrown out. If they see even a hint of light shining through a crack where they can make an argument about some meaningless technicality, they will take it. They just want to throw out as many ballots as possible, hoping that it is successful enough in the aggregate to benefit them. This is quite literally all they have left. Just begging for people's votes to not be counted.
It's all over the place. Anywhere they know they have to win, they're just trying to stop voting/counting votes.
Every legitimate vote that isnt counted is no different than casting a fraudulent vote. There's no difference between the two inn the end. Just like packing the the court is no different than stealing a SCOTUS seat.
It's functionally the same.
The guns at the polling place in Michigan is the most insanely American thing on that list. What possible reason would anyone have for open-carrying a gun when they go to vote, other than to purposefully intimidate the other people there??
RE PA: The SCOTUS did not grant the GOP's argument that ballots arriving after November 3rd will be thrown out. Sort of. Instead, they've required that all ballots received after November 3rd be separated so that they can be discounted *after* the election.
How completely insane is that? The SCOTUS might swing in and kill already counted ballots after the fact.
There is no way anyone is ACTUALLY concerned about legit, postmarked ballots being counted after midnight on November 3rd. This is an absurd argument. California and other states often take WEEKS to get the actual results. We only KNOW who won on election night because of projections that are based on almost 100% certainty of the eventual outcome. There isn't an ounce of good faith in this entire argument. They are weaponizing the public PERCEPTION that all votes are counted by 11:59pm, and implying that anything counted afterwards is some sort of nefarious act, even though it is TOTALLY NORMAL.
I would like to add that the main person Kavanaugh quoted in his opinion yesterday was actually arguing the EXACT OPPOSITE of what Kavanaugh did in his vote. Kavanaugh knows full-well his argument about this is horseshit. There isn't a single part of him that believes otherwise. That he is taking this route anyway proves everything you need to know about him. He is a political operative, a veteran of Bush v. Gore who was put on the bench for this exact reason.
What's wild is that for Trump this seems to just be borne of his ignorance about the issue. States have never certified election results on election night. It just doesn't happen. As you say, what the public thinks of as an election being decided, is merely the press making an accurate assessment of who will win. Trump is too pig ignorant to distinguish between what the television says and what a state board of elections actually does.
But the Republican Party and freaking Supreme Court justices should know better.
In fact, its my understanding that there is legislation on the books in most or all of these states that they do not need to certify a winner for quite some time after the election. There's nothing to challenge and nothing unconstitutional about it. It's just how the the sausage is made.
Until 2000, it was never an issue. Now it will be again.
They don't even ever have any actual reasoning for requesting massive swaths of ballots be thrown out. If they see even a hint of light shining through a crack where they can make an argument about some meaningless technicality, they will take it. They just want to throw out as many ballots as possible, hoping that it is successful enough in the aggregate to benefit them. This is quite literally all they have left. Just begging for people's votes to not be counted.
It's all over the place. Anywhere they know they have to win, they're just trying to stop voting/counting votes.
Every legitimate vote that isnt counted is no different than casting a fraudulent vote. There's no difference between the two inn the end. Just like packing the the court is no different than stealing a SCOTUS seat.
It's functionally the same.
The guns at the polling place in Michigan is the most insanely American thing on that list. What possible reason would anyone have for open-carrying a gun when they go to vote, other than to purposefully intimidate the other people there??
RE PA: The SCOTUS did not grant the GOP's argument that ballots arriving after November 3rd will be thrown out. Sort of. Instead, they've required that all ballots received after November 3rd be separated so that they can be discounted *after* the election.
How completely insane is that? The SCOTUS might swing in and kill already counted ballots after the fact.
There is no way anyone is ACTUALLY concerned about legit, postmarked ballots being counted after midnight on November 3rd. This is an absurd argument. California and other states often take WEEKS to get the actual results. We only KNOW who won on election night because of projections that are based on almost 100% certainty of the eventual outcome. There isn't an ounce of good faith in this entire argument. They are weaponizing the public PERCEPTION that all votes are counted by 11:59pm, and implying that anything counted afterwards is some sort of nefarious act, even though it is TOTALLY NORMAL.
I would like to add that the main person Kavanaugh quoted in his opinion yesterday was actually arguing the EXACT OPPOSITE of what Kavanaugh did in his vote. Kavanaugh knows full-well his argument about this is horseshit. There isn't a single part of him that believes otherwise. That he is taking this route anyway proves everything you need to know about him. He is a political operative, a veteran of Bush v. Gore who was put on the bench for this exact reason.
What's wild is that for Trump this seems to just be borne of his ignorance about the issue. States have never certified election results on election night. It just doesn't happen. As you say, what the public thinks of as an election being decided, is merely the press making an accurate assessment of who will win. Trump is too pig ignorant to distinguish between what the television says and what a state board of elections actually does.
But the Republican Party and freaking Supreme Court justices should know better.
They do know better. They absolutely, 100%, without question know better. They are doing this because Donald Trump declared, some weeks if not months ago, that the winner must be known on election night. So their "legal position" has followed suit. I don't ever want to hear about what brilliant jurists these people are ever again. And a healthy dose of the contempt for their voters we talked about earlier. Because they KNOW their people will swallow it hook, line and sinker and start repeating it.
What is the argument here?? What besides the clock turning from November 3rd to November 4th makes these ballots less legitimate?? There isn't a single person in the country who can come up with a valid answer to this question. In fact, IF you are simply throwing out ballots that weren't counted first, you are whole-sale violating the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment, which the court disingenuously used as an excuse in Bush v. Gore. Mind you, in that case, they weren't concerned about the 14th Amendment rights of the VOTERS. They argued the 14th Amendment rights of Bush himself were being violated.
Watch what happens if Biden is declared the winner on election night. The entire Republican stance on not counting ballots after November 3rd will COMPLETELY change on a dime. And they will pretend they weren't literally filing lawsuits arguing against it less than a week earlier. That's how shameless they've become.
Tired and I have things to post, just not now. It just really hit my while watching his campaign speeches that he is tired of sucking up to those he sees as inferior to him. It is so obvious, kinda wonder if any of them see it?
Lame duck periods in general are pretty absurd. Lame duck periods of almost three months are outright insane, and pretty solid proof that the people who put this together were not above reproach. Anything over a week is too much in my eyes.
Well, the constitution was written long before railroads. A 3 month period does indeed seem absurd now, but the framers had to allow for the possibility of a journey of several thousand miles by wagon. That's a good illustration of the general point of how absurd it is to try and still interpret the constitution literally when the conditions it was designed for have changed so radically ...
There are two distinct but related issues happening right now with how the voting and vote counting is being handled.
Trump wants them to stop counting on November 3rd. The SCOTUS is lowkey threatening to throw out ballots postmarked before the 3rd but arriving after the third.
Those are different and equally concerning measures, although Trump's supercedes the the SCOTUS's because if there is no more counting after the 3rd, it doesnt really matter what's done with late arriving ballots.
Some counties in PA arent even going to begin counting mail in votes until the 4th. Meaning that Trump, who won that county by 18 points in 2016, will probably be ahead, what - by 40 points at the end of the night on the 3rd? It's a fake lead, but if Trump can sue to prevent counting of those (not even late arriving) mail in ballots, he'll have disenfranchised thousands of voters.
I'm old enough to remember back when people in this thread used to argue about voter fraud vs voter suppression. Seems like a bit of a joke, now.
First it was voter ID laws, then it was closing DMVs so it was harder to get those IDs. Then it was reducing the number of polling stations. Then they said you couldn't vote by mail. Then they reduced drop-off boxes in Texas to ONE per county. Now they are saying even properly cast ballots should be eliminated based on some completely amorphous and arbitrary time constraint on counting that has never existed before October of 2020.
So maybe, at long last, it's time for the skeptics to admit what has been obvious from the beginning. Not only do Republicans not WANT certain people to vote, they don't believe they have any RIGHT to do so whatsoever. And about 30% of the country subscribes to that way of thinking. Take it for what it is. Because that's where you live, and that's where we are. It's not based on anything in the Constitution they claim to revere, it certainly isn't based on any precedent or law they can explain without going into mental contortions. It's based on one thing, which is "we get to win no matter what the score is." Period.
Even after ALL the fucking bullshit roadblocks Republicans have thrown up to make voting harder over the last decade, it STILL isn't enough. They now have to resort to, "oh look, the timer ran out, drop what you're doing, go home, and toss everything that hasn't been tabulated yet." I mean, for Christ's sake, what else do they have to do to tell you what their actual views are??
It's one of the other reasons I've grown more suspicious and less willing to assume best intentions. The same thing happened: underneath the phony calls to prevent voter fraud lay even more shameless opposition to the right to vote.
It's one of the other reasons I've grown more suspicious and less willing to assume best intentions. The same thing happened: underneath the phony calls to prevent voter fraud lay even more shameless opposition to the right to vote.
There's always an angle underneath what Conservatives are saying. It's become easy for me at this point to see through it.
Today the Republican Senate had the CEOs of Twitter, Facebook and Google on so they could scream at them for "censoring Trump". It's the same "religious freedom" argument. They want to do something and if you say now wait a minu.. they start screaming about you denying their rights. That's the game here. They want to ensure Trump (and themselves) can lie and spread misinformation without any pushback at all.
They want a propaganda state. Where you can't vote unless it's for the party that they want to win. They are determined to get some Soviet Russia or Communist China style "elections" where there's one party that wins no matter what the people want.
So the Trump campaign, either through a failure of logistics or just not giving a shit, ABANDONED his own crowd three miles from civilization in freezing cold temperatures last night in Nebraska
The freezing cold would not have been a problem if they just stopped testing the temperature so often.
More election meddling. Minnesota will not quarantine late arriving ballots so that they can be thrown out rather than counted.
Legal, sent before the election but late arriving because the USPC is a joke under Dejoy - and they might be used to try to steal an election.
It's a five-alarm fire. The extra hurdles that have to be climbed to get these bastards out of power is nothing short of exhausting, which is the point. This is how you full descend into authoritarianism:
What exactly are they supposed to be "watching" for?
Right wing violence is out of control and encouraged by the President.
""To the extent that Bob Kroll wants to participate in a voter intimidation campaign, the city will take that very seriously," Minneapolis City Council Member Jeremiah Ellison told the Minnesota Star Tribune. "There's the clear dog whistle of 'rough area,' and we need people who aren't 'easily intimidated,' and people who aren't scared."
Sounds like Bob is trying to prime people to shoot first because it's so "dangerous".
Away from the US election, there's more trouble for the Labour party in the UK with the suspension of former leader Jeremy Corbyn. I've noted before that, under his leadership, there were a lot of concerns raised about anti-semitism - and that was a factor in him losing the leadership. The latest twist is that those historic concerns had resulted in an 18 month long review by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) that has just concluded. They found that Labour had had sufficiently bad procedures to break the law in a number of areas. Labour are now required to draw up a plan on how they will rectify the position - and will end up in court if they don't do so.
Keir Starmer, on becoming the new leader, had distanced himself from Corbyn by taking a very strong line that there would be no tolerance for anti-semitism. However, he (wisely I think) hadn't taken any action against Corbyn for those historic problems. Yesterday though, on hearing of the EHRC report, Corbyn disputed the findings and said that the scale of anti-semitism had been "dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party". Starmer, in line with his actions since becoming leader, had of course already accepted the report and said Labour would implement all its recommendations. As a result I think he had little choice but to take action against Corbyn, or the allegations of anti-semitism that had dogged Labour for years would immediately have returned.
Corbyn though still has enormous support within the party as a whole, particularly in the trade union movement and local membership. At best a disciplinary process will prove a long and severe distraction for the party, but it could easily result in many people leaving Labour - and possibly even result in the formation of a new left-wing party.
For anyone interested, I've put down a few of my thoughts below on why Corbyn, who almost everyone agrees is not personally racist, has managed to dig himself such a large hole on this issue:
For most of his political career Corbyn was an outsider, acting as something of a maverick within the party. That meant he was pretty free to express controversial opinions and regularly did so. One of those was his support for the Palestinian cause over many years, including being prepared to stand with those labelled 'terrorists'. That gained him plenty of support from Palestinians - see this article responding to his suspension for instance - but many people were concerned about his views.
Corbyn's position was that he was not anti-semitic, but just objected to some Israeli policies - see this article for the background to this. Essentially I agree with most of his views - but it's fair to say that the nuances are easy to miss. As a result I also agree with the EHRC that a culture grew up over a long period in the Labour party that permitted the growth of anti-semitism. Corbyn though had a blind spot of how his actions were perceived in this area and consistently failed to give clear messages. For instance a couple of years ago the party was already attempting to show that it had addressed concerns by adopting the definition of anti-semitism used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance into its code of conduct. However, Corbyn was originally only willing to partially adopt that - on the grounds that some of the examples might prohibit criticism of Israel. Again, I have sympathy with that as a purist position, but the practical impact was to cast doubt on his statement that he would not tolerate anti-semitism. That particular row dragged on for many months before the party eventually agreed to adopt the full definition - but also made an accompanying statement that cast doubt on whether they really meant that.
In politics, it's often the case that, in order to make your position clear to the general public, you have to drop some of the nuances and complexities you believe in. Sometimes, as we've seen over and over with Trump, politicians may deliberately seek to not make their position clear. I don't think that's the case with Corbyn though. Instead I just think his strong personal convictions and years in the political wilderness, where he had no particular need to present a particular media image, proved unhelpful in a situation where most people sought a simple statement of his position.
@Grondo I agree with this excellent analysis and think Starmer, who is generally playing things right, had no choice.
There was a hilarious quote in the Guardian yesterday from someone at Labour HQ yesterday saying no-one could believe Corbyn’s response to the report. Erm, anyone that has the vaguest understanding of Corbyn would know this is exactly what he would do!
Corbyn is a very divisive politician and has shared platforms with some pretty dubious people in the past. He has lost two general elections against some of the most risible Conservative leaders in recent history and handed Johnson a huge majority, having been overwhelming rejected by the public.
Ideological purity doesn’t change lives, you have to be in power for that, which Starmer realises and he is trying to take Labour back from the brink. Corbyn really would be better off taking a step back (though the same could also be said for Tony Blair), unless he’s wants another decade of Tory rule.
If Corbyn were a Conservative mole, he couldn’t be doing a better job. In short, he has zero capability to take one for the team but, hey, at least he knows he’s right.
I've never really understood the issue of anti-Semitism as it relates to the Labour party in the UK. Which is to say - it seems like it mostly stems from the fact that a lot of Labour members feel that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is absolutely brutal. I understand that some political opportunists would like to say that any repudiation of Israel = anti-Semitism, but that seems/feels/looks like a specious argument.
In the USA - Democrats seem to have a pretty good handle on being both: Against the treatment of Palestine by Israel, and not convincingly labeled as anti-semitic because of it. To the point that the Democrats are far more favorable to the Jewish population in the USA than the GOP is.
So I guess my question is: Is there more to it then? Are there other issues relating to Labour and anti-Semitism that I'm unfamiliar with (I assume there is quite a bit)
I've never really understood the issue of anti-Semitism as it relates to the Labour party in the UK. Which is to say - it seems like it mostly stems from the fact that a lot of Labour members feel that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is absolutely brutal. I understand that some political opportunists would like to say that any repudiation of Israel = anti-Semitism, but that seems/feels/looks like a specious argument.
In the USA - Democrats seem to have a pretty good handle on being both: Against the treatment of Palestine by Israel, and not convincingly labeled as anti-semitic because of it. To the point that the Democrats are far more favorable to the Jewish population in the USA than the GOP is.
So I guess my question is: Is there more to it then? Are there other issues relating to Labour and anti-Semitism that I'm unfamiliar with (I assume there is quite a bit)
The actual incidents under investigation don't seem to be publicly stated anywhere, but from what I understand they were all done by minor campaign functionaries and not Corbyn himself.
Doing a little more digging allowed me to discover this link, which has a few concrete examples, although I can't comment on their veracity:
Now is this stuff actually true? I can't say, and i'm reluctant to accept any claims of criminal behavior without proof. But Corbyn, rightly or wrongly, has an image of being a little too friendly with violent radicals, so confirmation bias is in play here to some degree in my opinion.
For my part, I respect Corbyn for sticking to his principles and accepting the logical end point of those principles. If he truly thinks Israel is in the wrong it stands to reason he would support Palestinian groups, and the like, regardless of the electoral consequences.
However, he has been a total failure when it comes to politics. Conservatives have trampled him nearly every time. Brexit changed the political winds to be even more against Labour until the details are sorted out, in my opinion, but well before that Corbyn was losing to the Tories. They just need a new figurehead.
Back to the U.S, House Democrats have, among themselves, condemned Anti Semitic behavior from their sitting congresswomen, but this never translates into anything meaningful, whether reform or electoral consequence, because when you control the media you control what people are discussing. I find it hard to believe such comments would go uncontested by the media in the UK, for example, based upon the things they already see as problematic. At the very least, they would be extensively questioned on the matter, which never happened and, I can't emphasize enough, never *would* happen here. Corbyn, on the other hand, has been getting criticism over the matter for years.
The UK media seems to have the ability to launch principled criticisms across both sides of the aisle and believes in balance rather than ideological dominance. I remember last year or so a conservative journalist named Andrew Neil embarrassed Ben Shapiro on air. I can't even imagine saying the words "conservative journalist" in the context of U.S politics. Neil participates in the mainstream like the BBC. A "conservative journalist" in the U.S gets relegated to one of a few ghettoes where they will be safely ignored. Our information ecosystem looks much more like a tin-pot dictators state t.v than something resembling a free press that tries to get to the truth of political matters rather the obscuring them. But enough restating things I have already said.
The US policy around Israel revolves around two things, which are the donations of defense contractors, and the votes of Evangelicals who believe the Jewish people must be in the correct place on the chess-board for the coming of the end-times (to them, they might as well be the Staff of Ra, insert here). And a lobbying group (AIPAC) who has convinced everyone that any criticism of them is anti-Semitism. It's bi-partisan, and only recently have even a handful of people in the Democratic Party tried to loosen AIPAC's vice grip on Congress, to absolutely no avail. Meanwhile, the President has suggested on numerous occasions that Jews who don't support the policies of Israel are disloyal (to a country they aren't even citizens of) and the aforementioned Shapiro has, on the record, basically called the same people "fake Jews", because they aren't sufficiently orthodox for his tastes.
The Palestinian people have been occupied for decades and live in one of the most densely populated hellholes on the planet, with absolutely NO hope of anything changing when the country with the boot on their neck has the unlimited backing of the most bloated military regime in the history of humanity. Yet even pointing this out is apparently akin to Holocaust denial.
My opinion of Israel was sealed when they used White Phosphorus against civilian populations while I was in high school. Not only is it a war crime, it's one of the most brutal ways to die, and they used it casually on civilian targets. Napalm is the closest equivalent.
There was widespread and systemic antisemitism in the Labour Party under Corbyn which went well beyond legitimate criticism of Israel. Antisemitic abuse was rife (see Luciana Berger and Margaret Hodge’s experiences and the Panorama documentary, some links are below if you want more info) and Corbyn’s office ignored the issues (you can say you a lifelong antiracist as much as you like, it doesn’t make it true) and interfered in the complaints progress.
The EHRC is independent and has no axe to grind. Its conclusions were well researched and reasoned, and should be very uncomfortable reading for those in team Corbyn.
All Corbyn had to do now was to not make this not about him again and not belittle the negative experiences of those on the receiving end of abuse on his watch.
A small man with a history of friendship with members of terrorist organisations and who led a bizarre cult not dissimilar to Trumpism in its blind devotion to the leader. He gifted the country to Johnson. Thank goodness he’s gone.
Edit: That Ben Shapiro interview with Andrew Neil is great. It’s like Nigel Farage going on US TV and accusing Tucker Carlson of being on the left when he starts losing.
Comments
The guns at the polling place in Michigan is the most insanely American thing on that list. What possible reason would anyone have for open-carrying a gun when they go to vote, other than to purposefully intimidate the other people there??
Lame duck periods in general are pretty absurd. Lame duck periods of almost three months are outright insane, and pretty solid proof that the people who put this together were not above reproach. Anything over a week is too much in my eyes.
The final part of that, that Trump could completely ignore taking measures against coronavirus and this would make little practical difference compared to what has come before, is true and so damaging
RE PA: The SCOTUS did not grant the GOP's argument that ballots arriving after November 3rd will be thrown out. Sort of. Instead, they've required that all ballots received after November 3rd be separated so that they can be discounted *after* the election.
How completely insane is that? The SCOTUS might swing in and kill already counted ballots after the fact.
There is no way anyone is ACTUALLY concerned about legit, postmarked ballots being counted after midnight on November 3rd. This is an absurd argument. California and other states often take WEEKS to get the actual results. We only KNOW who won on election night because of projections that are based on almost 100% certainty of the eventual outcome. There isn't an ounce of good faith in this entire argument. They are weaponizing the public PERCEPTION that all votes are counted by 11:59pm, and implying that anything counted afterwards is some sort of nefarious act, even though it is TOTALLY NORMAL.
I would like to add that the main person Kavanaugh quoted in his opinion yesterday was actually arguing the EXACT OPPOSITE of what Kavanaugh did in his vote. Kavanaugh knows full-well his argument about this is horseshit. There isn't a single part of him that believes otherwise. That he is taking this route anyway proves everything you need to know about him. He is a political operative, a veteran of Bush v. Gore who was put on the bench for this exact reason.
That's it. We've reached the point where the GOP is opposed to legal votes.
The last pretense has fallen. John McCain is dead and the GOP does not accept electoral democracy.
Depending on if they like the winner or not, ffs. If it's Trump they can be like oh it's cool count them! If it's not they will be like "omg I'm a constitutional originalismist and these ballots must not count!"
What's wild is that for Trump this seems to just be borne of his ignorance about the issue. States have never certified election results on election night. It just doesn't happen. As you say, what the public thinks of as an election being decided, is merely the press making an accurate assessment of who will win. Trump is too pig ignorant to distinguish between what the television says and what a state board of elections actually does.
But the Republican Party and freaking Supreme Court justices should know better.
In fact, its my understanding that there is legislation on the books in most or all of these states that they do not need to certify a winner for quite some time after the election. There's nothing to challenge and nothing unconstitutional about it. It's just how the the sausage is made.
Until 2000, it was never an issue. Now it will be again.
They do know better. They absolutely, 100%, without question know better. They are doing this because Donald Trump declared, some weeks if not months ago, that the winner must be known on election night. So their "legal position" has followed suit. I don't ever want to hear about what brilliant jurists these people are ever again. And a healthy dose of the contempt for their voters we talked about earlier. Because they KNOW their people will swallow it hook, line and sinker and start repeating it.
What is the argument here?? What besides the clock turning from November 3rd to November 4th makes these ballots less legitimate?? There isn't a single person in the country who can come up with a valid answer to this question. In fact, IF you are simply throwing out ballots that weren't counted first, you are whole-sale violating the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment, which the court disingenuously used as an excuse in Bush v. Gore. Mind you, in that case, they weren't concerned about the 14th Amendment rights of the VOTERS. They argued the 14th Amendment rights of Bush himself were being violated.
Watch what happens if Biden is declared the winner on election night. The entire Republican stance on not counting ballots after November 3rd will COMPLETELY change on a dime. And they will pretend they weren't literally filing lawsuits arguing against it less than a week earlier. That's how shameless they've become.
Well, the constitution was written long before railroads. A 3 month period does indeed seem absurd now, but the framers had to allow for the possibility of a journey of several thousand miles by wagon. That's a good illustration of the general point of how absurd it is to try and still interpret the constitution literally when the conditions it was designed for have changed so radically ...
Trump wants them to stop counting on November 3rd. The SCOTUS is lowkey threatening to throw out ballots postmarked before the 3rd but arriving after the third.
Those are different and equally concerning measures, although Trump's supercedes the the SCOTUS's because if there is no more counting after the 3rd, it doesnt really matter what's done with late arriving ballots.
See for repercussions
Some counties in PA arent even going to begin counting mail in votes until the 4th. Meaning that Trump, who won that county by 18 points in 2016, will probably be ahead, what - by 40 points at the end of the night on the 3rd? It's a fake lead, but if Trump can sue to prevent counting of those (not even late arriving) mail in ballots, he'll have disenfranchised thousands of voters.
I'm old enough to remember back when people in this thread used to argue about voter fraud vs voter suppression. Seems like a bit of a joke, now.
voter suppression and election fraud that's where it's at.
So maybe, at long last, it's time for the skeptics to admit what has been obvious from the beginning. Not only do Republicans not WANT certain people to vote, they don't believe they have any RIGHT to do so whatsoever. And about 30% of the country subscribes to that way of thinking. Take it for what it is. Because that's where you live, and that's where we are. It's not based on anything in the Constitution they claim to revere, it certainly isn't based on any precedent or law they can explain without going into mental contortions. It's based on one thing, which is "we get to win no matter what the score is." Period.
Even after ALL the fucking bullshit roadblocks Republicans have thrown up to make voting harder over the last decade, it STILL isn't enough. They now have to resort to, "oh look, the timer ran out, drop what you're doing, go home, and toss everything that hasn't been tabulated yet." I mean, for Christ's sake, what else do they have to do to tell you what their actual views are??
There's always an angle underneath what Conservatives are saying. It's become easy for me at this point to see through it.
Today the Republican Senate had the CEOs of Twitter, Facebook and Google on so they could scream at them for "censoring Trump". It's the same "religious freedom" argument. They want to do something and if you say now wait a minu.. they start screaming about you denying their rights. That's the game here. They want to ensure Trump (and themselves) can lie and spread misinformation without any pushback at all.
They want a propaganda state. Where you can't vote unless it's for the party that they want to win. They are determined to get some Soviet Russia or Communist China style "elections" where there's one party that wins no matter what the people want.
The freezing cold would not have been a problem if they just stopped testing the temperature so often.
More election meddling. Minnesota will not quarantine late arriving ballots so that they can be thrown out rather than counted.
Legal, sent before the election but late arriving because the USPC is a joke under Dejoy - and they might be used to try to steal an election.
Update: After this ass whoopin' Perdue backed out of the last debate.
It's a five-alarm fire. The extra hurdles that have to be climbed to get these bastards out of power is nothing short of exhausting, which is the point. This is how you full descend into authoritarianism:
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-recruits-ex-cops-watch-polls-minnesota-where-biden-leads-8-points-1543358?piano_t=1
What exactly are they supposed to be "watching" for?
Right wing violence is out of control and encouraged by the President.
""To the extent that Bob Kroll wants to participate in a voter intimidation campaign, the city will take that very seriously," Minneapolis City Council Member Jeremiah Ellison told the Minnesota Star Tribune. "There's the clear dog whistle of 'rough area,' and we need people who aren't 'easily intimidated,' and people who aren't scared."
Sounds like Bob is trying to prime people to shoot first because it's so "dangerous".
Keir Starmer, on becoming the new leader, had distanced himself from Corbyn by taking a very strong line that there would be no tolerance for anti-semitism. However, he (wisely I think) hadn't taken any action against Corbyn for those historic problems. Yesterday though, on hearing of the EHRC report, Corbyn disputed the findings and said that the scale of anti-semitism had been "dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party". Starmer, in line with his actions since becoming leader, had of course already accepted the report and said Labour would implement all its recommendations. As a result I think he had little choice but to take action against Corbyn, or the allegations of anti-semitism that had dogged Labour for years would immediately have returned.
Corbyn though still has enormous support within the party as a whole, particularly in the trade union movement and local membership. At best a disciplinary process will prove a long and severe distraction for the party, but it could easily result in many people leaving Labour - and possibly even result in the formation of a new left-wing party.
For anyone interested, I've put down a few of my thoughts below on why Corbyn, who almost everyone agrees is not personally racist, has managed to dig himself such a large hole on this issue:
Corbyn's position was that he was not anti-semitic, but just objected to some Israeli policies - see this article for the background to this. Essentially I agree with most of his views - but it's fair to say that the nuances are easy to miss. As a result I also agree with the EHRC that a culture grew up over a long period in the Labour party that permitted the growth of anti-semitism. Corbyn though had a blind spot of how his actions were perceived in this area and consistently failed to give clear messages. For instance a couple of years ago the party was already attempting to show that it had addressed concerns by adopting the definition of anti-semitism used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance into its code of conduct. However, Corbyn was originally only willing to partially adopt that - on the grounds that some of the examples might prohibit criticism of Israel. Again, I have sympathy with that as a purist position, but the practical impact was to cast doubt on his statement that he would not tolerate anti-semitism. That particular row dragged on for many months before the party eventually agreed to adopt the full definition - but also made an accompanying statement that cast doubt on whether they really meant that.
In politics, it's often the case that, in order to make your position clear to the general public, you have to drop some of the nuances and complexities you believe in. Sometimes, as we've seen over and over with Trump, politicians may deliberately seek to not make their position clear. I don't think that's the case with Corbyn though. Instead I just think his strong personal convictions and years in the political wilderness, where he had no particular need to present a particular media image, proved unhelpful in a situation where most people sought a simple statement of his position.
There was a hilarious quote in the Guardian yesterday from someone at Labour HQ yesterday saying no-one could believe Corbyn’s response to the report. Erm, anyone that has the vaguest understanding of Corbyn would know this is exactly what he would do!
Corbyn is a very divisive politician and has shared platforms with some pretty dubious people in the past. He has lost two general elections against some of the most risible Conservative leaders in recent history and handed Johnson a huge majority, having been overwhelming rejected by the public.
Ideological purity doesn’t change lives, you have to be in power for that, which Starmer realises and he is trying to take Labour back from the brink. Corbyn really would be better off taking a step back (though the same could also be said for Tony Blair), unless he’s wants another decade of Tory rule.
If Corbyn were a Conservative mole, he couldn’t be doing a better job. In short, he has zero capability to take one for the team but, hey, at least he knows he’s right.
In the USA - Democrats seem to have a pretty good handle on being both: Against the treatment of Palestine by Israel, and not convincingly labeled as anti-semitic because of it. To the point that the Democrats are far more favorable to the Jewish population in the USA than the GOP is.
So I guess my question is: Is there more to it then? Are there other issues relating to Labour and anti-Semitism that I'm unfamiliar with (I assume there is quite a bit)
The actual incidents under investigation don't seem to be publicly stated anywhere, but from what I understand they were all done by minor campaign functionaries and not Corbyn himself.
Doing a little more digging allowed me to discover this link, which has a few concrete examples, although I can't comment on their veracity:
https://medium.com/@lucianaberger_76642/i-am-grateful-to-the-ehrc-for-its-comprehensive-investigation-which-today-finds-the-the-labour-43391203d62e
Now is this stuff actually true? I can't say, and i'm reluctant to accept any claims of criminal behavior without proof. But Corbyn, rightly or wrongly, has an image of being a little too friendly with violent radicals, so confirmation bias is in play here to some degree in my opinion.
For my part, I respect Corbyn for sticking to his principles and accepting the logical end point of those principles. If he truly thinks Israel is in the wrong it stands to reason he would support Palestinian groups, and the like, regardless of the electoral consequences.
However, he has been a total failure when it comes to politics. Conservatives have trampled him nearly every time. Brexit changed the political winds to be even more against Labour until the details are sorted out, in my opinion, but well before that Corbyn was losing to the Tories. They just need a new figurehead.
Back to the U.S, House Democrats have, among themselves, condemned Anti Semitic behavior from their sitting congresswomen, but this never translates into anything meaningful, whether reform or electoral consequence, because when you control the media you control what people are discussing. I find it hard to believe such comments would go uncontested by the media in the UK, for example, based upon the things they already see as problematic. At the very least, they would be extensively questioned on the matter, which never happened and, I can't emphasize enough, never *would* happen here. Corbyn, on the other hand, has been getting criticism over the matter for years.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2019/nov/26/corbyn-refuses-to-apologise-to-british-jews-in-bbc-interview-video
The UK media seems to have the ability to launch principled criticisms across both sides of the aisle and believes in balance rather than ideological dominance. I remember last year or so a conservative journalist named Andrew Neil embarrassed Ben Shapiro on air. I can't even imagine saying the words "conservative journalist" in the context of U.S politics. Neil participates in the mainstream like the BBC. A "conservative journalist" in the U.S gets relegated to one of a few ghettoes where they will be safely ignored. Our information ecosystem looks much more like a tin-pot dictators state t.v than something resembling a free press that tries to get to the truth of political matters rather the obscuring them. But enough restating things I have already said.
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000169-4b08-dc75-affd-dfb9cd250000
The Palestinian people have been occupied for decades and live in one of the most densely populated hellholes on the planet, with absolutely NO hope of anything changing when the country with the boot on their neck has the unlimited backing of the most bloated military regime in the history of humanity. Yet even pointing this out is apparently akin to Holocaust denial.
The EHRC is independent and has no axe to grind. Its conclusions were well researched and reasoned, and should be very uncomfortable reading for those in team Corbyn.
All Corbyn had to do now was to not make this not about him again and not belittle the negative experiences of those on the receiving end of abuse on his watch.
A small man with a history of friendship with members of terrorist organisations and who led a bizarre cult not dissimilar to Trumpism in its blind devotion to the leader. He gifted the country to Johnson. Thank goodness he’s gone.
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/29/key-findings-of-the-ehrc-inquiry-into-labour-antisemitism
https://www.thejc.com/news/uk/panorama-antisemitism-whistleblowers-write-letter-thanking-the-community-for-its-support-1.505793
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/29/antisemitism-labour-party-echr-report
Edit: That Ben Shapiro interview with Andrew Neil is great. It’s like Nigel Farage going on US TV and accusing Tucker Carlson of being on the left when he starts losing.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/30/trump-election-nigel-farage-campaign-us-president-britain