Trump's America

[Cenedril_Gildinaur]

That so much depends on so few people shows that those few people have far too much power.

[yovargas]

Well, technically those few people only have power because a large number of people agreed to give them power so.....

[Túrin Turambar]

This is my main criticism of the U.S. Bill of Rights - it puts major decisions of public policy in the hands of the Supreme Court.

[yovargas]

Of course, those popularly elected legislators have the power to change any decision made by the Court. It's just really, really hard. Which is part of the point.

[Frelga]

State-by-state response to the request of the Trump administration's election integrity commission to release voter registration information, including party registration, history of past votes, and last 4 digits of social security number.

Forty-four states have refused to give certain voter information to Trump commission

No state so far has agreed to release private information such as the SSN. Some promised to release information that is publicly available under the state law, others flatly refused to participate at all. Only Colorado, Missouri and Tennessee have given positive responses although they did not specify which information they are going to provide

Most of the responses are remarkably bipartisan.

"My response to the Commission is, you're not going to play politics with Louisiana's voter data, and if you are, then you can purchase the limited public information available by law, to any candidate running for office.

The President's Commission is a waste of taxpayer money and a distraction from the real threats to the integrity of our elections today: aging voting systems and documented Russian interference in our elections.

My reply would be: They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico, and Mississippi is a great state to launch from.

[Griffon64]

So how about those tweets the NPR twitter account sent out yesterday?

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/0 ... /23017129/

https://twitter.com/NPR/status/882313133863436288

These are the people who call themselves more 'Murican than anybody else. Sad!



Frelga - I'm heartened by that story and the bipartisan response to that rubbish request. I would freakin' hope the states would push back as one on that request. I loved the Mississippi response in particular.

[River]

I saw that Griff, and I can't decide if I should laugh at them or cry for them. A real prescient b*stard, that Thomas Jefferson. Being mean and nasty to Donald Trump over 200 years before he was ever elected. What an a-hole. Sad!

[Primula Baggins]

Well, it was a dangerously subversive idea at the time that a people were entitled to change their government if their rulers infringed their inalienable rights (the idea of such rights was itself subversive).

[River]

Yes, on July 4, 1776 the Declaration of Independence was a call to arms that's been celebrated annually ever since. Today, in 2017, it's one of the founding documents of the nation...but apparently not enough people actually read the text, or are capable of recognizing it when posted on Twitter, and interpreted it as a call to arms against the current government. So, in essence, basic US history is now considered subversive and revolutionary by a rather vocal subset of Americans.

I think I'll go cry now.

[Frelga]

I suspect that if one were to make a vague tweet criticizing the intelligence of an unnamed individual, you'll have Trump supporters jumping to his defense, even if one were actually complaining about a neighbor's cat.

[Túrin Turambar]

I also found it funny when some people complained NPR was tweeting "spam", apparently mistaking the Declaration of Independence for unsolicited commercial e-mail messaging. The jokes pretty much write themselves.

[Cerin]

According to Greg Palast, who has for many years been reporting on problems with our electoral system, many Republican Secretaries of State, including some of those who've made a show of protesting Kobach's recent request for voter information, already turned over this information to him in his capacity as Kansas Secretary of State before the last election. Kobach is the one who engineered the 'cross check' scam that resulted in the purging of hundreds of thousands of voters from voting rolls in the swing states this last election. It is these cross check purges that are behind Trump's claim that 3 million people voted illegally in the last election. I wonder why these Secretaries of State are making a show of protesting now, when they willingly turned over that information earlier.

Records obtained by The Progressive from the Kansas Secretary of State office showed that Schedler turned over nearly three million voter files to Kobach earlier this year, including voter birthdates and Social Security information.

In Mississippi, Hosemann turned over the state’s entire voter rolls to Kobach, some 2,092,886 files. Each file includes voter names, last four digits of their social security numbers, voting address, and voting history.

. . .

Twenty-one states listed by CNN as refusing Kobach his demands for voter files have already turned over voter files to Kobach’s office.

States with a Republican as Secretary of State (labeled red) that have indicated to CNN that they will “resist” Kris Kobach’s demand for full voter files—but have already given him those files. Four states with a Democrat as Secretary of State (labeled blue) have made the same inaccurate claim. North Carolina’s Democratic Governor last week ordered his Board of Elections not to hand over voter files to Kobach—but the Republican-controlled board had already turned over 6,745,639 voter files.

. . .

According to a Rolling Stone analysis of data obtained from states participating in Interstate Crosscheck, as many as 1.1 million names were purged from voter rolls before the 2016 election.

According to database expert Mark Swedlund, an astonishing one in six Hispanics and one in nine African-Americans are on Kobach’s “potential double registered” list of seven million suspects in the twenty-eight states.

TheProgressive

[Alatar]

This pretty much sums up how most people outside the US feel about Trump. Ignore the clickbait title.

[yovargas]

Most people inside the US too.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Donald Trump, Jr. posted emails proving conclusively that he, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort all broke the law. You almost never see such clearcut evidence of wrongdoing. And yet, I would not at all be surprised if they get away with it still.

[yovargas]

Link?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Link?

Basically the entire internet.

Here is one of the numerous stories on CNN.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/11/politics/ ... index.html

Basically, Trump, Jr. is told that the meeting with the Russian lawyer is about the Russian government's ongoing effort to assist the Trump campaign by providing incriminating information about Clinton. He responds by saying "if so, I love it!" and then he forwards the messages to Kushner and Manafort, and all three of them proceed to meet with the lawyer.

Here is a good explanation of why this is illegal, from an expert on election law:

http://electionlawblog.org/?p=93740

The group Common Cause has already filed a complaint against Trump, Jr. and the Trump campaign with the FEC alleging illegal solicitation:

http://www.commoncause.org/press/press- ... ional.html

The office of Robert Mueller has no comment.

[Frelga]

V, what do you think of the assertion that none of it matters because Trump can pardon anyone, up to and including himself?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Trump himself is very likely to not be in any legal jeopardy as the Justice Dept. would almost certainly not indict him; he would not to be impeached, which he could not stop with a pardon. It certainly is true that he could, if still in office, pardon his son, son in law, or anyone else, but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't matter. More likely is that he would fire Mueller (and Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein if Rosenstein refuses to agree to fire Mueller) but if he did that, that would like cause a firestorm in Congress, even among the GOP. Basically the real question here is how long Ryan, McConnell and their GOP cohorts can ignore the smoke and pretend that there was never any fire.

[Frelga]

Forever, probably. So far, the Republican plan appears to be to retain the majority in 2018 by means other than fair voting.

While no state has committed to providing complete information requested by the vote suppression commission, most did promise information publicly available under their State laws. There have already been reports from Colorado, one of the few states with a positive response to the request, of voters withdrawing from the registration rolls to protect their information.