Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[pilowsky]

There are real grassroots social media campaigns based on actual facts. Then there were the 2016 and 2020 Russian bot/Fox Propaganda Channel campaigns to rile up the QOP base and spread misinformation by promoting controversial alternative facts.

 

Fair enough - for reasons that are unclear to me I am bombarded with emails from the DNC three times a day.

They don't provide information, facts or policy: just requests for money.

 

I don't know why - I've never lived in the USA for longer than a few weeks.

I did try to purchase a mug once from the Obama campaign with his birth certificate printed on it but they refused because I'm a foreign person.

Fortunately I was able to acquire one from a friend.

Unfortunately I never get "real grassroots social media campaigns".

 

If it's any consolation the right-wing political BS in the USA has infested Australia, but with any luck we'll turf them out in a few months.

It's all very sad.

The world's gone to s**t.

[kenberg]

Fair enough - for reasons that are unclear to me I am bombarded with emails from the DNC three times a day.

They don't provide information, facts or policy: just requests for money.

 

I don't know why - I've never lived in the USA for longer than a few weeks.

I did try to purchase a mug once from the Obama campaign with his birth certificate printed on it but they refused because I'm a foreign person.

Fortunately I was able to acquire one from a friend.

Unfortunately I never get "real grassroots social media campaigns".

 

If it's any consolation the right-wing political BS in the USA has infested Australia, but with any luck we'll turf them out in a few months.

It's all very sad.

The world's gone to s**t.

 

In 1956 I got a letter from Hubert Humphrey congratulating me on graduating from high school. I suppose one of my teachers had expressed their concern about me to him.

My favorites are addressed to Kenneth R Berg III. My adoptive father's name when he came here from Croatia was Anton Perekovic, he became Thomas Berg, so how I became Kenneth R Berg III would be an interesting story.

I get email from a hospital in Oklahoma reminding me of upcoming appointments. Since it might be important for the actual patient to get these reminders I have called them and written to them explaining that I live in Maryland. I still get the reminders.

When you are on a list you stay on a list.

 

If you buy a political mug, use an alias.

[Winstonm]

In 1956 I got a letter from Hubert Humphrey congratulating me on graduating from high school. I suppose one of my teachers had expressed their concern about me to him.

My favorites are addressed to Kenneth R Berg III. My adoptive father's name when he came here from Croatia was Anton Perekovic, he became Thomas Berg, so how I became Kenneth R Berg III would be an interesting story.

I get email from a hospital in Oklahoma reminding me of upcoming appointments. Since it might be important for the actual patient to get these reminders I have called them and written to them explaining that I live in Maryland. I still get the reminders.

When you are on a list you stay on a list.

 

If you buy a political mug, use an alias.

 

I'm going to use Ken Berg.

[Winstonm]

Fair enough - for reasons that are unclear to me I am bombarded with emails from the DNC three times a day.

They don't provide information, facts or policy: just requests for money.

 

I don't know why - I've never lived in the USA for longer than a few weeks.

I did try to purchase a mug once from the Obama campaign with his birth certificate printed on it but they refused because I'm a foreign person.

Fortunately I was able to acquire one from a friend.

Unfortunately I never get "real grassroots social media campaigns".

 

If it's any consolation the right-wing political BS in the USA has infested Australia, but with any luck we'll turf them out in a few months.

It's all very sad.

The world's gone to s**t.

 

Usually, if you scroll to the very end of the message and read the fine print and have a safety pin small enough, you will find a tiny tab that allows you to stop receiving their notifications. The DNC actually stops sending, too, but it takes a while.

 

 

[Winstonm]

Richard Nixon: 17-minute gap.

Donald Trump: 7-hour gap.

 

Was 7 hours the result of inflation or criminal obstruction?

 

 

For the trolls:

 

WhatAbout______________.

[y66]

Richard Nixon: 17-minute gap.

Donald Trump: 7-hour gap.

 

Was 7 hours the result of inflation or criminal obstruction?

 

 

For the trolls:

 

WhatAbout______________.

Please stop baiting the troll.

[y66]

In the “first formal finding of presidential criminality by a federal court in United States history.” Judge Carter wrote that, if the Eastman/Trump “plan had worked, it would have permanently ended the peaceful transition of power.”

 

A Federal Judge Rips Trump for Plotting a Coup

 

Monday’s ruling is notable on two levels. First, it makes available more of Eastman’s records for the January 6 committee. Carter ruled in favor of turning over roughly 100 documents to the committee, only withholding fewer than a dozen of them on privilege grounds. What exactly is on these documents is not clear. But it’s possible that they will shed more light on how the plot against America took shape in the frenzied months between Election Day and January 6, 2021.

 

One of the documents appears to tie Eastman’s efforts to Rudy Giuliani’s quixotic campaign to overturn the results in court. Carter gave a brief description of it while he reviewed the potentially privileged material, all of which he read. “This may have been the first time members of President Trump’s team transformed a legal interpretation of the Electoral Count Act into a day-by-day plan of action,” the judge wrote in his ruling. “The memo is both intimately related to and clearly advanced the plan to obstruct the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021.” Its exact contents are, as of yet, unknown; Carter’s reaction suggests that they may be somewhat hair-raising.

 

Second, and perhaps most importantly, Carter’s ruling effectively lays out a theory of prosecution for Trump himself. There is no specific federal law stipulating that it’s illegal for the president to urge his supporters to storm the Capitol, disrupt the Electoral College certification, and attempt to lynch the vice president. But the January 6 committee previously identified three federal crimes that Trump may have committed as part of the insurrection: obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and common-law fraud. Carter found in each of the three cases that it was “more likely than not” that Trump had committed the offenses.

 

Some of those charges have requirements that, at first blush, might be difficult to prove in court. But Carter found enough support for the charges to defeat Eastman’s challenge. The obstruction count, for example, would require a prosecutor to prove corrupt intent on Trump’s part. Trump appeared to genuinely believe, at least in public, that the election was stolen from him. But a review of his private actions undercut that belief. For one, the election was not only not stolen, but countless state, local, and federal officials told him that it wasn’t. What’s more, Trump undercut his defense here by infamously pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him enough votes to win the state. So did Eastman by telling Pence’s lawyer, at one point, that they were no longer playing by “Queensbury rules,” referring to the nineteenth-century code of rules for boxing matches, and, by extension, the rule of law.

 

Carter laid out the conclusions in a remarkably sharp tenor for a federal judge. “The illegality of the plan was obvious,” he wrote. “Our nation was founded on the peaceful transition of power, epitomized by George Washington laying down his sword to make way for democratic elections. Ignoring this history, President Trump vigorously campaigned for the Vice President to single-handedly determine the results of the 2020 election.” The judge effectively concluded that Eastman’s legal arguments, as well as Trump’s many legal battles, were a fig leaf to seize the republic by executive fiat.

 

There are limits to Carter’s ruling. He reached this conclusion in a civil lawsuit, so it does not have direct implications for any criminal charges that could be brought against Trump. But his ruling does bolster the case for prosecuting the former president—and place additional pressure on the Justice Department to do so. With the apparent collapse of the Manhattan district attorney’s case against Trump for his dubious business activities, his role in the insurrection is now the most significant source of legal peril for him.

 

How likely is it that the Justice Department will bring any charges? That is unclear. Attorney General Merrick Garland insisted in January that federal prosecutors would pursue those responsible for January 6 “at any level,” implying that a case against Trump is not off the table. At the same time, federal prosecutors might be reluctant to bring such a politically potent case without sufficient evidence, and that evidence may not be possible to obtain. Trump foiled previous investigations by cajoling potential witnesses with possible pardons if they refused to cooperate with the authorities, as well as political or professional exile if they “flipped” on him.

[Winstonm]

Please stop baiting the troll.

It’s not bait. It’s troll spray. It takes away 2/3 of their vocabulary and it’s environmentally safe, which they also hate.

[y66]

[https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/01/opinion/jackson-supreme-court-republicans.html

 

When Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination reaches the Senate floor soon, every Republican who votes against her confirmation will be complicit in the abuse that the Republican members of the Judiciary Committee heaped on her.

 

Every mischaracterization of Judge Jackson’s record on the bench. Every racist dog whistle about crime. Every QAnon shout-out about rampant child pornography. Every innuendo that a lawyer who represents suspected terrorists supports terrorism.

 

So far, only one Republican senator, Susan Collins of Maine, has said she will vote to confirm Judge Jackson. The Republican senators who don’t disavow their colleagues’ behavior during last week’s confimation hearing will own it. All of it.

 

Every Republican voting no will be Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, asking, “On a scale of one to 10, how faithful would you say you are in terms of religion?” Each one will be Ted Cruz of Texas, distorting the argument in a law review note by the nominee to suggest slyly that beginning as a student she harbored an agenda of going easy on sex criminals.

 

Each Republican will even sink so low as to be Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, moving her pen across the page as she read the right-wing talking points and demanding that the nominee define the word “woman.” The definition that came to mind, although not to Judge Jackson’s lips, was “a mature female who can maintain her composure while being badgered on national television by posturing politicians.”

[Winstonm]

Maybe if we start a rumor that Putin is diabetic we could get Republican support for lowering the cost of insulin.

[pilowsky]

Maybe if we start a rumor that Putin is diabetic we could get Republican support for lowering the cost of insulin.

 

If you start a rumour that Putin is diabetic they'll start sending him hydroxychloroquine.

[Winstonm]

I ver mec tin

you ver mec tin

I ver mec tin

who could ask for anything more!

[johnu]

If you start a rumour that Putin is diabetic they'll start sending him hydroxychloroquine.

 

Ivermectin with a splash of bleach has been proven to be effective against diabetes in numerous posts on facebook, reddit, and other non-peer reviewed sites. Many of the posts have hundreds or thousands of "Likes" so they must be true.

[Winstonm]

Ivermectin with a splash of bleach has been proven to be effective against diabetes in numerous posts on facebook, reddit, and other non-peer reviewed sites. Many of the posts have hundreds or thousands of "Likes" so they must be true.

 

One correction: the “Likes” are peer-reviewed.

[y66]

President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings.

[Winstonm]

I notice the use of “will” and no explanation of when that can be expected to begin.

[y66]

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-03/what-if-fox-news-viewers-watched-cnn-instead

 

The establishment of Fox News in the late 1990s forever changed both media and politics in America, transforming the formerly staid world of television news into the series of political shoutfests we know and love-hate today. More than a quarter-century after its founding, however, the question persists: Does watching Fox News actually change voters’ minds?

 

It’s worth noting that, in a famous study published 15 years ago, economists showed that exposure to Fox could have a measurable impact on elections. Comparing markets that had received Fox to those where it was not yet available, the study concluded that the presence of Fox News was good for a Republican gain of 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points between the 1996 and 2000 elections. It was a decidedly modest effect — but large enough to sway that super-close election.

 

It’s a slightly different question how watching Fox affects someone’s views of the day-to-day controversies of politics. One view is that Fox is such an echo chamber that it can’t possibly be changing minds. Only committed conservatives, the theory goes, would bother to tune in to Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson, so what difference could it make what they say?

 

A pretty big difference, as it turns out, according to a new study by political scientists David Broockman of Stanford and Joshua Kalla of Yale. The research offers a much more granular look at the impact of Fox on its viewers, thanks to reliance on a resource-intensive experiment, rather than the broad aggregates of that earlier paper.

 

Broockman and Kalla recruited a sample of regular Fox News viewers and paid a subset of them to watch CNN instead. (Compliance was enforced with some news quizzes, for which additional compensation was offered.) Then the treatment group of switchers and the control group of non-switchers took three waves of surveys about the news.

 

The results: Not only did CNN and Fox cover different things during the September 2020 survey period, but the audience of committed Fox viewers, which started the month with conservative predispositions, changed their minds on many issues.

 

Switchers were five percentage points more likely to believe that people suffer from long Covid, for example, and six points more likely to believe that many foreign countries did a better job than the U.S. of controlling the virus. They were seven points more likely to support voting by mail. And they were 10 points less likely to believe that supporters of then-candidate Joe Biden were happy when police officers get shot, 11 points less likely to say it’s more important for the president to focus on containing violent protesters than on the coronavirus, and 13 points less likely to agree that if Biden were elected, “we’ll see many more police get shot by Black Lives Matter activists.”

 

These are meaningful differences, even if the group that switched to CNN remained very right-wing in their view of the American political landscape. While far fewer of them believed that Biden supporters were happy about police shootings, for example, the overall share who did believe was still 46%. And only 24% of the CNN switchers said they supported voting by mail.

 

Still, these are reasonably large changes from a one-month experiment. And they occurred despite the long-term effort of then-President Donald Trump to discredit CNN and other mainstream media outlets.

 

What’s more, only so much news occurs at any given time. One story that broke while the experiment was ongoing was Bob Woodward’s revelation that Trump was aware early that the new virus was “deadly” — specifically, that it was much worse than the flu, contradicting the president’s later public efforts to downplay the virus. Those in the treatment group were more likely to know about this, as well as the fact that Trump did not meet with the family of Jacob Blake, the victim of a police shooting in Wisconsin the month before.

 

Over a longer span of time, presumably, more stories ignored by Fox News would have piled up. And indeed one of the things that switchers changed their minds about was Fox News itself: They became more skeptical that Fox would cover a story that reflected poorly on Trump, even if it were true.

 

This mode of political influence, where partisan media can simply ignore stories that are inconvenient, is a potentially powerful challenge to democratic accountability. It’s also probably not symmetrical. Even media outlets that skew liberal in their coverage generally don’t shy away from covering the Covid death toll or the rise in inflation.

 

Of course, Democrats can’t improve their standing with the public by paying Fox viewers to switch channels. But one lesson they can take from this experiment is that nobody is impossible to reach.

 

Republicans have relentlessly criticized the mainstream media for decades, but they also gleefully participate in it. Republican members of Congress routinely accept invitations to appear on the network Sunday-morning talk shows. Former Trump Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney has signed on as a CBS News contributor.

 

The left, by contrast, tends to stigmatize any engagement with right-wing media, as if fearing contamination through association. If it were true that this media is consumed exclusively by people who are totally impervious to dissonant information, boycotting the RWM might be a defensible strategy. But Broockman and Kalla’s research indicates that information flows at the margin really do matter. Any opportunity to present new facts to people, and new arguments, is valuable.

[kenberg]

From the above post"Broockman and Kalla recruited a sample of regular Fox News viewers and paid a subset of them to watch CNN instead. "

I asked myself if I would agree to watch Fox news if I were paid to do so. Perhaps it comes down to how much I get paid and how much I have to listen, and to whom, but my guess is that my price would be far higher than they would wish to pay. Actually I am not much for warching CNN either.

The other thing that occurred to me is something from my high school days that I have mentioned before. We were told to pick some topic, our choice as long as it was current events (and probably baseball was not allowed), and read the coverage in three different weekly news mags. We were to then write up how the coverage differed from one mag to another. This was a very good assignment for someone who was 15 or so.

Added: One good feature of the assignment was that it was open. That is, we were to concentrate on finding the differences. Which approach, if any, we agreed with was up to us.

[y66]

From the above post"Broockman and Kalla recruited a sample of regular Fox News viewers and paid a subset of them to watch CNN instead. "

I asked myself if I would agree to watch Fox news if I were paid to do so. Perhaps it comes down to how much I get paid and how much I have to listen, and to whom, but my guess is that my price would be far higher than they would wish to pay. Actually I am not much for warching CNN either.

The other thing that occurred to me is something from my high school days that I have mentioned before. We were told to pick some topic, our choice as long as it was current events (and probably baseball was not allowed), and read the coverage in three different weekly news mags. We were to then write up how the coverage differed from one mag to another. This was a very good assignment for someone who was 15 or so.

Added: One good feature of the assignment was that it was open. That is, we were to concentrate on finding the differences. Which approach, if any, we agreed with was up to us.

That's a smart way to get people to read more widely and think about the information they're consuming. Maybe someone can figure out how to get social media algorithms to work like that.

 

You'd have to pay me a lot to watch Fox or CNN or any mainstream media channel besides PBS these days. I posted a story by James Pogue about what's happening in Redding, CA a while back. I liked the way he humanized the militia types and got readers thinking about where they're coming from. But then after reading takes from local reporters at A News Cafe and Shasta Scout, it's pretty clear the militia types are mostly thuggish alt-right azzholes who think tearing down stuff is more heroic than doing the hard work of governing.

[pilowsky]

From the above post"Broockman and Kalla recruited a sample of regular Fox News viewers and paid a subset of them to watch CNN instead. "

I asked myself if I would agree to watch Fox news if I were paid to do so. Perhaps it comes down to how much I get paid and how much I have to listen, and to whom, but my guess is that my price would be far higher than they would wish to pay. Actually I am not much for warching CNN either.

 

The other thing that occurred to me is something from my high school days that I have mentioned before. We were told to pick some topic, our choice as long as it was current events (and probably baseball was not allowed), and read the coverage in three different weekly news mags. We were to then write up how the coverage differed from one mag to another. This was a very good assignment for someone who was 15 or so.

Added: One good feature of the assignment was that it was open. That is, we were to concentrate on finding the differences. Which approach, if any, we agreed with was up to us.

 

I try to glance at as many different news feeds as possible - even Newsmax.

How else am I to try and understand what other world views are?

[johnu]

President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings.

 

The longer (and accurate version of this) post:

 

Manchurian President Trump will watch Fox Propaganda Channel TV while tweeting from his unsecured cell phone from the time he wakes up until early afternoon, after he's had his 3 Big Mac lunch. Then he will do "official" White House stuff for a couple of hours before returning to the White House residence at 5PM. Then he will call his friends like Hannity and Carlson and discuss more official White House business while doing some more tweeting about important stuff.

[y66]

They found the voter fraud

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — A former Trump administration official now running for Congress in New Hampshire voted twice during the 2016 primary election season, potentially violating federal voting law and leaving him at odds with the Republican Party’s intense focus on “election integrity.”

 

Matt Mowers, a leading Republican primary candidate looking to unseat Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas, cast an absentee ballot in New Hampshire’s 2016 presidential primary, voting records show. At the time, Mowers served as the director of former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s presidential campaign in the pivotal early voting state.

 

Four months later, after Christie’s bid fizzled, Mowers cast another ballot in New Jersey’s Republican presidential primary, using his parents’ address to re-register in his home state, documents The Associated Press obtained through a public records request show.

 

Legal experts say Mowers’ actions could violate a federal law that prohibits “voting more than once” in “any general, special, or primary election.” That includes casting a ballot in separate jurisdictions “for an election to the same candidacy or office.” It also puts Mowers, who was a senior adviser in Donald Trump’s administration and later held a State Department post, in an awkward spot at a time when much of his party has embraced the former president’s lies about a stolen 2020 election and has pushed for restrictive new election laws.

 

https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-chris-christie-new-jersey-new-hampshire-congress-734e2b2722c66883eab85bfca96fbc8c

[kenberg]

This post about Matt Mowers is stunning. I have always thought that while it was probably possible for someone to do such a thing, only a moron would actually do it. I have not changed my mind about that.

[y66]

Before Biden nominated Jackson, when a Yahoo News/YouGov poll asked people to assess Jackson’s qualifications, 57% of Republicans said she was qualified. Only 19% of Republicans (and 11% of all Americans) said she was not qualified. While the hearings made her lose some support across the board, it still left her popular with Democrats and Independents. Republican opinions, though, have changed dramatically. Now just 31% say she’s qualified, and 47% say she’s unqualified.

[y66]

From What I Learned When Trump Tried to Correct the Record by Julian E. Zelizer at The ATlantic:

 

Our entire meeting suggested that Trump sometimes does care about expertise, despite his vitriol toward the academy. After all, he was the one who had decided to reach out to a group of professional historians so that we produced “an accurate book.” As he has done many times before, Trump proudly mentioned his uncle who was a professor at MIT. While talking to us, Trump was working to influence the narratives that were told about him—as he’d done repeatedly during his time in the Oval Office. Indeed, he had even closed out his term peddling the case that he was not a failed one-term president, like Herbert Hoover or Jimmy Carter, but someone who had victory stolen from him.

 

When the Yale historian Beverly Gage brought up the president’s relationship with the FBI and the intelligence community—the subject of her chapter in our book—he eventually turned to the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021. According to his memory, the expert opinion was off. The “real story,” Trump argued, “has yet to be written.” When Congress met to certify the Electoral College results, Trump told us, there had been a “peaceful rally,” more than a “million people” who were full of “tremendous love” and believed the election was “rigged” and “robbed” and “stolen.” He made a “very modest” and “very peaceful” speech, a “presidential speech.” The throng at the Capitol was a “massive” and “tremendous” group of people. The day was marred by a small group of left-wing antifa and Black Lives Matter activists who “infiltrated” them and who were not stopped, because of poor decisions by the U.S. Capitol Police when some “bad things happened.”

President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings. Bad things will happen.