Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[ldrews]

Your statement about California is absolutely false. Only citizens are automatically registered to vote when issued driver's licenses, illegal immigrants are not. An applicant can obtain an AB-60 driver's license without a birth certificate or passport proving citizenship, but is not then automatically registered to vote. Because it's easy to get the license, there's no need for the illegal immigrant to risk fraud, and California isn't going to vote for Trump regardless.

 

Where do you come up with this nonsense?

 

I could be misinformed. Can you provide me with a link to an authoritative description/discussion of the California Driver License application process as it applied to applicants without proof of citizenship?

[PassedOut]

I could be misinformed. Can you provide me with a link to an authoritative description/discussion of the California Driver License application process as it applied to applicants without proof of citizenship?

You can find that information readily. DMV.org, for example, describes the Driver's License & ID requirements for each state, and there are several other sources as well. Here is information about California's AB-60 Driver's License:

 

SUMMARY: California Driver's License for Undocumented Residents

 

As of January 2015, California residents who cannot establish legal presence in the United States may apply for a driver's license if they can show eligible proof of identification and residency in the state. These driver's licenses may not be used for identification purposes. By law, no one may discriminate against a holder of an AB-60 license, or use this license to attempt to question the holder's citizenship or immigration status.

You can read the details about obtaining this license -- which definitely does not trigger voter registration, and cannot be used as voter identification -- on the linked page. You can also read the section on applying for a standard license to see that proof of citizenship is one of the identification requirements for the standard license with automatic voter registration.

 

What puzzles me, though, is how you could have thought for even a moment that California automatically registers illegal immigrants for voting. I'm not a democrat and I do know that legislatures pass dumb laws, but a law like that would never fly anywhere. And if any legislature did try to pull a stunt like that, they'd be in court before the ink could dry -- and the media would have a field day covering it. It wouldn't be just some old drunk on a barstool providing you with "information" that beggars belief.

[y66]

From Let Bannon Be Bannon! by David Brooks:

 

I continue to worry about Steve Bannon. I see him in the White House photos, but he never has that sprightly Prince of Darkness gleam in his eye anymore.

 

His governing philosophy is being completely gutted by the mice around him. He seems to have a big influence on Trump speeches but zero influence on recent Trump policies. I’m beginning to fear that he’s spending his days sitting along the wall in the Roosevelt Room morosely playing one of those Risk-style global empire video games on his smartphone.

 

Back in the good old days — like two months ago — it was fun to watch Bannon operate. He was the guy with a coherent governing philosophy. He seemed to have realized that the two major party establishments had abandoned the working class. He also seemed to have realized that the 21st-century political debate is not big versus small government, it’s open versus closed.

 

Bannon had the opportunity to realign American politics around the social, cultural and economic concerns of the working class. Erect barriers to keep out aliens from abroad, and shift money from the rich to the working class to create economic security at home.

 

It was easy to see the Trump agenda that would flow from this philosophy: Close off trade and immigration. Fund a jobs-creating infrastructure program. Reverse the Republican desire to reform and reduce entitlements. Increase funding on all sorts of programs that benefit working-class voters in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

 

Many of us wouldn’t have liked that agenda — the trade and immigration parts — but at least it would have helped the people who are being pummeled by this economy.

 

But Bannonesque populism is being abandoned. The infrastructure and jobs plan is being put off until next year (which is to say never). Meanwhile, the Trump administration has agreed with Paul Ryan’s crazy plan to do health care first.

 

Moths show greater resistance to flame than American politicians do to health care reform. And sure enough it’s become a poisonous morass for the entire party, and a complete distraction from the populist project.

 

Worse, the Ryan health care plan punishes the very people Trump and Bannon had vowed to help. It would raise premiums by as much as 25 percent on people between 50 and 64, one core of the Trump voter base. It would completely hammer working-class voters whose incomes put them just above the Medicaid threshold.

 

The Trump budget is an even more devastating assault on Bannon-style populism. It eliminates or cuts organizations like the Appalachian Regional Commission and the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative that are important to people from Tennessee and West Virginia up through Ohio and Michigan. It cuts job-training and road-building programs. It does almost nothing to help expand opportunity for the working class and almost everything to serve defense contractors and the national security state.

 

Why is Bannonism being abandoned? One possibility is that there just aren’t enough Trumpians in the world to staff an administration, so Trump and Bannon have filled their apparatus with old guard Republicans who continue to go about their jobs in old guard pseudo-libertarian ways.

 

The second possibility, raised by Rich Lowry in Politico, is that the Republican sweep of 2016 was won on separate tracks. Trump won on populism, but congressional Republicans won on the standard cut-government script. The congressional Republicans are better prepared, and so their plans are crowding out anything Bannon might have contemplated.

 

The third possibility is that Donald Trump doesn’t really care about domestic policy; he mostly cares about testosterone.

 

He wants to cut any part of government that may seem soft and nurturing, like poverty programs. He wants to cut any program that might seem emotional and airy-fairy, like the National Endowment for the Arts. He wants to cut any program that might seem smart and nerdy, like the National Institutes of Health.

 

But he wants to increase funding for every program that seems manly, hard, muscular and ripped, like the military and armed antiterrorism programs.

 

Indeed, the Trump budget looks less like a political philosophy and more like a sexual fantasy. It lavishes attention on every aspect of hard power and slashes away at anything that isn’t.

 

The Trump health care and budget plans will be harsh on the poor, which we expected. But they’ll also be harsh on the working class, which we didn’t.

 

We’re ending up with the worst of the new guard Trumpian populists and the old guard Republican libertarians. We’re building walls to close off the world while also shifting wealth from the poor to the rich.

 

When these two plans fail, which seems very likely, there’s going to be a holy war between the White House and Capitol Hill. I don’t have high hopes for what’s going to emerge from that war, but it would be nice if the people who voted for Trump got economic support, not punishment.

 

For that, there’s one immediate recipe: Unleash Steve Bannon!

We're ending up with the worst of the new guard Trumpian populists and the old guard Republican pseudo-libertarians? Yup.

[Zelandakh]

When you "no evidence of large-scale voter fraud" are you saying there is evidence of smaller scale voter fraud?

This is like having a conversation:

A: "I think UFOs exist."

B: "I see no evidence of UFOs."

A: "Are you saying that aliens exist then?"

 

or

 

A: "Meckwell cheat on every hand"

B: "I see no evidence that Meckwell cheat on every hand."

A: "Are you saying that they cheat on some hands then?"

 

What has the one statement to do with the other other than that they relate to the same theme? Our conversation for comparison:

 

L: "There is large-scale voter fraud."

Z: "I see no evidence of large-scale voter fraud."

L: "Are you saying there is evidence of smaller scale voter fraud?"

 

This is just schoolboy debating. Please grow up if you want to be engaged at all. Fwiiw I see no evidence of large-scale voter fraud by the GOP. It is probably at least as likely to be the case as with immigrants. Perhaps we should launch a major federal investigation to check for that. Picking out one group with zero evidence and harassing them is one basis for discrimination. Why are you so keen to go after immigrants, who have a vested interest in not attracting the attention that voter fraud would entail, rather than those that do have a vested interest in rigging elections? You said you wanted to "drain the swamp", the politicians pushing voter de-enfranchisement regulations are the swamp!

 

 

Can you link me to any reputable studies on the subject.

Here is one. And here is the factcheck on the subject that contains many further links all pointing towards voter fraud being at negligible levels. Of course negligible is not zero and there are some well-documented cases of voter fraud. To use this as the basis for mass de-enfranchisement though is about as anti-democratic as the American election process gets and every intelligent person should stand up against those playing this game.

[jogs]

He can't seem to grasp that the purpose of the U.S. Constitution is to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority.

 

When will democrats protect the rights of conservatives to speak on university campuses?

[Winstonm]

When will democrats protect the rights of conservatives to speak on university campuses?

They have the right to speak - but not the right to force their views. If a college invites a conservative speaker, that is fine.

[jogs]

They have the right to speak - but not the right to force their views. If a college invites a conservative speaker, that is fine.

No one can force their views.

 

Middlebury. The speaker was denied the right to speak.

 

Condi Rice was denied the right to speak a few years back.

[barmar]

When you "no evidence of large-scale voter fraud" are you saying there is evidence of smaller scale voter fraud?

What it means is that there's no evidence of a level of voter fraud that would swing elections and justify extreme measures to combat it. Trump's millions of illegal aliens voting is a total fabrication, intended to scare people into supporting these voter ID laws, and it apparently worked on you. You've totally drunk the Kool-Aid, and you believe any nonsense he spouts.

 

No crimes can be eliminated completely, but you have to assess the threat level and make the defenses appropriate.

[Winstonm]

No one can force their views.

 

Middlebury. The speaker was denied the right to speak.

 

Condi Rice was denied the right to speak a few years back.

 

Try expanding your horizons and look for information outside your bubble.

[Winstonm]

I think this is an important article to understand.

 

When Angela Merkel meets with Donald Trump on Friday, she won’t just be representing Germany. She’ll be bringing all the hopes and anxieties of an anxious continent—one whose fears have been stoked by the fervor sweeping from Amsterdam to Rome, Paris to Berlin. It’s no exaggeration to say that this meeting between Trump and Merkel could set the tone for the very future of the Western Alliance.

 

For a specter is haunting Europe—the specter of populist nationalism. Ideologically indeterminate, it manifests across the Continent in the form of France’s right-wing National Front, the post-communist German Left party and the Italian Five Star Movement, which defies any traditional political label. While these parties, and the intellectual currents to which they give voice, may not align on everything, they are invariably anti-establishment, opposed to the European Union, and hostile to America. They are also all supported—either materially or through other, less tangible instruments—by Russia.

[jogs]

Try expanding your horizons and look for information outside your bubble.

I live in San Francisco. Heard all the arguments of the left and have rejected them.

[jogs]

PBS did a special on (dis)honesty. The hostess was upset that Trump attacked the media. Has she ever put herself in Trump's shoes?

Since the election 90% of all stories about Trump from ABC, NBC, and CBS are negative. Non-stop negative from CNN and MSNBC. The world isn't falling apart. Trump must have done something right. Consumer confidence is up. Small business confidence is way up.

Trump defunded the US contribution to PBS. Since they are part of the dishonest news.

[nige1]

Those unfamiliar with the US democratic process are intrigued by the seemingly unending and irresolvable argument about the justice of legislation against electoral fraud. First questions:

 

• What is the proposed legislation against electoral fraud?
• Would it really reduce electoral fraud?
• Would it disenfranchise legitimate voters?
• How?
• Would it target particular groups?
• And how many would it affect?

An analogy: currently, in the UK, we allow postal votes. A boon to those who find it hard to attend a poll-station, in person. Allegedly, however, some patriarchs collect all the postal-votes from their extended families. Such block-votes could have a significant effect on election results. Hence, although stopping postal-votes could disenfranchise some citizens, it might be beneficial overall, by reducing potential abuse of the electoral process.

[rmnka447]

Try expanding your horizons and look for information outside your bubble.

Has there been a case where a left wing/progressive speakers was denied the right to speak on campuses because of right wing interference with the lecture/speech?

 

There haven't been any that I can recall recently.

 

I think a strong argument can be made that it's progressives that aren't willing to let anything challenge their beliefs by shutting down dissent that's outside their bubble.

 

The Middlebury and UC-Berkeley protests/riots are exhibits A and B for that assertion. Change the black clothing and masks at Berkeley for brown shirts with swizstika armbands and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between now and 1930's Germany.

[cherdano]

Change the black clothing and masks at Berkeley for brown shirts with swizstika armbands and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between now and 1930's Germany.

 

LOL

[Winstonm]

I live in San Francisco. Heard all the arguments of the left and have rejected them.

 

Thanks for identifying yourself as a right wing troll.

[mikeh]

 

 

The Middlebury and UC-Berkeley protests/riots are exhibits A and B for that assertion. Change the black clothing and masks at Berkeley for brown shirts with swizstika armbands and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between now and 1930's Germany.

There speaks someone with only a 'sound-bite' level of understanding of history. As it happens, I am almost finished reading a current book about the rise of the Nazi party. What is truly striking are the passages from Mein Kampf (translated into English) in which Hitler wrote about propaganda and the importance of appealing to emotion, not reason, when seeking support. Keep it simple, don't worry about whether what one says is 'true'

 

In addition, once Hitler was Chancellor (as part of a coalition), he often made speeches in which he denounced the extraordinary violence being perpetrated by his supporters, but in the same speech gave clear signals, to those prepared to listen, that suggested that the violence was fine with him and justified.

 

The resemblance to Trump's tactics, including that part of the address to Congress where he pretended to deplore violence, is striking.

 

Now, do I think that Trump has ever read Mein Kampf, or any book explaining how to dupe the populace? No, of course not. He apparently limits his reading to press clippings in which he is discussed. However, Bannon has pretensions to intellect. He has already quoted Lenin in one interview, and it is not a far stretch to think that he will have read similar works. And there can be little doubt but that Bannon is largely behind Trump's racist world views.....in earlier times, Trump sounded like a somewhat disconnected liberal. He saw nothing wrong with trans people using bathrooms consistent with their chosen gender, for example. His racism, as a landlord, seems to have been inherited from his father and was probably on selfish economic grounds, in that he feared having blacks in his buildings would lead to fewer whites wanting to rent, and whites generally tend to have more money.

 

Bannon, otoh, has frequently cited racist trash as great writing and sees Islam as an existential threat (made all the worse by the colour of the skin of most muslims, it seems).

 

By the way, one major difference is that in Germany, several political parties had associated with them large organizations of well armed paramilitaries. It wasn't just the communists and Nazis, and indeed the largest paramilitary group was mostly on the sidelines until Hitler gained power, at which time he very quickly crushed the political leadership of other parties, including the nationalists with whom the Nazis were in theory in coalition, and then merged their paramilitary with his.

 

These groups, containing many WWI veterans as well as disgruntled younger men, numbered in the hundreds of thousands and were well organized. Fortunately Trump doesn't seem to have access to that sort of thuggery. The Berkley protestors have nothing in common with the German paramilitaries and only a profoundly ignorant person would think they did.

 

So I do agree with the broad theme that there are currently some truly disturbing similarities between 1930's Germany and today's USA.....just not the one the poster was suggesting. But, heck...why let facts get in the way of a nice sounding post? I mean, aren't alternative facts even better than truth amongst trump-boys?

[Winstonm]

 

The Middlebury and UC-Berkeley protests/riots are exhibits A and B for that assertion. Change the black clothing and masks at Berkeley for brown shirts with swizstika armbands and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between now and 1930's Germany.

 

I disagree with the protests' violence - but the protests themselves were protected rights.

[ldrews]

I disagree with the protests' violence - but the protests themselves were protected rights.

 

My,my! You disagree! How restrained.

[y66]

From Green beer and Rank Hypocrisy by Fintan O'Toole:

 

Does green beer taste better laced with hypocrisy? Does shamrock smell sweeter perfumed with historical amnesia?

 

We may be about to find out, for this year’s St. Patrick’s Day jamboree at the White House will be a breathtaking celebration of double standards and the willful forgetting of America’s recent past. Even by the crooked yardstick of the Trump administration, the disconnect is surreal: The president will salute the legacy of one wave of immigrants even as he deploys against other immigrants the same calumnies once heaped upon the Irish.

 

In the blizzard of executive orders, it was easy to miss a proclamation President Trump issued on March 1. The president declared this Irish-American Heritage Month and called on “all Americans to celebrate the achievements and contributions of Irish-Americans to our nation with appropriate ceremonies, activities and programs.” The proclamation could hardly be more upbeat in its praise of the Irish for “overcoming poverty and discrimination and inspiring Americans from all walks of life with their indomitable and entrepreneurial spirit.” Mr. Trump embraced these poor and despised foreigners as the forebears of “the more than 35 million Americans of Irish descent who contribute every day to all facets of life in the United States.”

 

The Irish are at least as fond as anyone else of being told how great they are, but as an Irish person, I find this more than a little disconcerting. It is like having your chastity praised by a brothel keeper, or your temperance and thrift eulogized by a drunken sailor. The whole thing would be funny if it did not raise the most uncomfortable question: Is it right to applaud the legacy of mass immigration from Ireland because the Irish are white and Christian?

 

The question is especially pertinent because so many of the people who have devised, defended and attempted to carry out Mr. Trump’s policy of identifying immigrant communities with criminality and terrorism are themselves Irish-Americans. The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, announcing in January that his boss would continue the tradition of accepting a bowl of shamrock from the Irish prime minister on March 17, told reporters that the St. Patrick’s Day reception is “an issue that’s near and dear to me” because of his pride in his own Irish roots. Mr. Trump’s senior strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, boasts of his “blue-collar, Irish Catholic” family background. Kellyanne Conway (née Fitzpatrick) is half-Irish. Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly, who has the job of enforcing Mr. Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, “is remembered fondly” in Massachusetts, according to The Boston Globe, “as an adventurous Irish Catholic son who reached the highest echelons of military service.”

 

These are intelligent people, and it seems unlikely that they are so romantic as to imagine they’re descended from Irish kings and Celtic goddesses. Most probably, some of their ancestors were wretched people. The Irish Catholic immigrants who washed up in the United States after the potato famine of the 1840s were, on the whole, the most destitute national group ever to arrive on American shores.

 

They were nobody’s ideal of the desirable immigrant. The typical Irish Catholic arrival in New York or Boston was a peasant with little formal education and few material resources. Worse, these people were religious aliens — the papist hordes who threatened to swamp Protestant civilization and, in their ignorance and superstition, destroy enlightened democratic American values.

 

The people around Mr. Trump surely know this history, yet they act as if they were the descendants not of these poor immigrants but of the American nativists and Know Nothings who slandered and derided them. Mr. Trump’s assertion that millions of illegal immigrants voted to deprive him of his victory in the popular vote directly echoes one of the most common charges against the Irish in the 19th century: that, in the words of one Yankee, “Irishmen fresh from the bogs of Ireland” were led to the polling booths “like dumb brutes” to “vote down intelligent, honest native citizens.”

 

The relentless campaign to associate undocumented migrants with criminality reworks the charge that Irish Catholics were innately crooked and violent. And the demonization of Muslims as implicitly un-American reproduces the canard that Irish Catholics could not be trusted in high office because they would take orders from the Vatican. As late as 1960, John F. Kennedy faced exactly these slurs in a presidential election.

 

In the Trump era, there are only two ways to toast the achievements of the Irish in America. One of them is tacitly racist. It relies on a silent distinction, an assumption that the Irish are somehow different from, say, today’s migrants from Latin America. But what is that distinction? It is not that the Irish were wealthier or better educated by contemporary standards, or more highly skilled or harder working. It is simply that they were white and their whiteness gave them a right to be in the United States.

 

If we are not to collude in this obnoxious distinction, people of Irish descent must celebrate their heritage in a radically different way: as the ultimate rebuke to a paranoid frenzy about immigration. We Irish are not Know Nothings. We know something important: what it’s like to be feared, to be discriminated against, to be stereotyped. We know from our own family histories that anti-immigrant hysteria is founded on lies. And we know that, over time, those lies are exposed. Yesterday’s alien is today’s workmate; yesterday’s pariah is today’s patriot.

 

St. Patrick’s Day is always in danger of being drowned in beer and sentimentality, but President Trump and his inner circle of Irish-Americans have given it the possibility of renewed gravity and seriousness. They have made it what it once was when the Irish were outsiders: a day when people who are in the shadows stand up and say, “We belong here.”

 

The Irish belong, not because they are better or worse than any other group of migrants, now or in the past. They belong because they are exactly the same: hopeful people doing their best to build dignified lives.

[Winstonm]

My,my! You disagree! How restrained.

 

I presume you think this this opinion piece invalid, then.

In a similar vein, the conservative group Turning Point USA recently published a “Professor Watchlist,” a catalogue of what it thinks are dangerous and “anti-American” professors who deserve public shaming for allegedly trying to “advance a radical agenda in lecture halls.” (Among those “radical agenda” items: advocating gun control, calling Ted Cruz’s infamous “New York values” statement anti-Semitic.) The watchlist homepage of course includes a disclaimer that Turning Point will “continue to fight for free speech and the right for professors to say whatever they wish.”

[ldrews]

I presume you think this this opinion piece invalid, then.

 

You seem to think that publishing something adverse is in the same category as hitting a person in the head with a rock or or blunt weapon, or breaking windows and destroying property.

[rmnka447]

There speaks someone with only a 'sound-bite' level of understanding of history.

 

Thanks for your opinion, and that's all it is -- an opinion, happily it's not a fact. But then again isn't that part of your tactics? You impugn anyone who disagrees with you as ignorant or superficial and not to be listened to.

 

As it happens, I am almost finished reading a current book about the rise of the Nazi party. What is truly striking are the passages from Mein Kampf (translated into English) in which Hitler wrote about propaganda and the importance of appealing to emotion, not reason, when seeking support. Keep it simple, don't worry about whether what one says is 'true'

 

In addition, once Hitler was Chancellor (as part of a coalition), he often made speeches in which he denounced the extraordinary violence being perpetrated by his supporters, but in the same speech gave clear signals, to those prepared to listen, that suggested that the violence was fine with him and justified.

 

The resemblance to Trump's tactics, including that part of the address to Congress where he pretended to deplore violence, is striking.

So my rebuttal to winstonm was about free speech on campuses and you go off on President Trump likening him to a second coming of Hitler. I think the propaganda technique is to deflect the discussion to another subject. Nice Try.

 

OK, but I guess maybe you missed the parts where Nazis used violence to break up meetings of dissenters and stop any dissent. So explain to me how the instances I cited don't fall into the category of doing just that. Their purpose went beyond simply protesting what the speaker would likely say and to prevent the speeches/discourse in the first place. If you can't see the parallel, so be it. I certainly can.

 

So I do agree with the broad theme that there are currently some truly disturbing similarities between 1930's Germany and today's USA.....just not the one the poster was suggesting. But, heck...why let facts get in the way of a nice sounding post? I mean, aren't alternative facts even better than truth amongst trump-boys?

 

Well, saying that "The resemblance to Trump's tactics, including that part of the address to Congress where he pretended to deplore violence, is striking." isn't a fact. Can you prove that Trump was pretending to deplore violence? That's an opinion NOT a fact. It's my opinion that his comments were genuinely made.

 

It is your opinion that there are similarities between 1930's Germany and today's USA because of Trump. Fine, that's your right. Just don't try to pass it off as fact.

[Winstonm]

You seem to think that publishing something adverse is in the same category as hitting a person in the head with a rock or or blunt weapon, or breaking windows and destroying property.

 

You must like to make yourself look stupid.

[jogs]

What it means is that there's no evidence of a level of voter fraud that would swing elections and justify extreme measures to combat it.

There was also no claim that voter fraud changed the results of any state.

 

Most voter fraud occurred in blue states. Hillary was always winning those states. The claim was voter fraud increased the magnitude of her wins in some blue states.