Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[y66]

At 10 AM EDT Tuesday May 12, the Supreme Court will hear highly anticipated arguments over whether the president’s accountants and bankers must disclose information about his financial affairs.

 

Story: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/11/us/scotus-trump-tax-returns.html?campaign_id=57&emc=edit_ne_20200511&instance_id=18401&nl=evening-briefing&regi_id=59211987&segment_id=27327&te=1&user_id=2d8b72dd84a9ff194896ed87b2d9c72a

 

The NYT will provide an audio link at nytimes.com

[Winstonm]

 

 

Winston, you sort of made my day:

 

Ths is what I have been looking/hoping for. And

 

[/color]

 

 

This is the sort of thinking everyone can understand. Our fate lies in their hands.

 

We don't need everyone to change their mind, that won't happen. But we do need a good sized number. Trump needs to be beaten by a large enough margin so that the inevitable claims of fraud and fake news can be seen for what they are.

 

My mathematician friends are not the key to winning. These guys remind me of the neighborhood I grew up in. There are many many of them. If they come around, Trump is done.

 

“A lot of voters wanted to believe Trump – that out there in Washington it’s all BS, and that a savvy businessman could straighten it out,” Custer said.

I understand this to a degree. Lots of people do not follow news and politics as closely as they should to be an integral part of self-governing, but that is where we are as a nation. So I do not fault those who were genuinely fooled and wishing for something that worked better.

 

About 10 of those 30 branded Keokuk men voted for Donald Trump. This year, Custer figures maybe five of them will.

 

This part, I cannot understand.

 

“The vibe is: a lot of people figured out that the boss isn’t worried about them. My veteran friends, they don’t like what’s going on. They’re looking for leadership in government and the workplace. Really, everybody is.”

 

And this part, I think, is near universal except for the hardliners of both parties.

[johnu]

We don't need everyone to change their mind, that won't happen. But we do need a good sized number. Trump needs to be beaten by a large enough margin so that the inevitable claims of fraud and fake news can be seen for what they are.

While that might be an admirable goal, the fact of the matter is that beating the Manchurian President by a large popular vote margin is 100% totally irrelevant. In 2016, the Grifter in Chief lost the popular vote by 3 million votes. He claimed he would have actually won the popular vote if it wasn't for illegal voting. You would have to be unbelievably naive to believe if he lost by say 10 million votes that he wouldn't make up some equally ridiculous excuse, or reuse his old excuses.

 

The only goal in the 2020 presidential election is to win by 1 electoral vote and I personally don't care if the Manchurian President wins the popular vote by 50 million votes (as long the Democrats also win the Senate).

[Winstonm]

I think there are more encouraging signs that Donald Trump is losing his hold:

 

At this point, a number of states have begun lifting stay-at-home orders and allowing nonessential businesses to reopen, with the hope that they can start unthawing their economies even if the coronavirus hasn’t been fully contained.

 

But the defrosting process seems to be going slowly—at least if you judge by the number of people brave enough to eat out. At restaurants that use OpenTable’s booking software, the number of diners in every state where the company tracks data was still down by 82 percent or more through Sunday, compared with a year before. That includes early reopeners like Georgia (down 92 percent), Utah (down 91 percent), Nebraska (down 90 percent), South Carolina (down 89 percent), Tennessee (down 87 percent), Texas (down 83 percent), and Oklahoma (down 82 percent).

 

I wonder if the OpenTable bookings diners numbers might not be a reasonable proxy for unwavering Trump support. I've guessed around 25% but it is possible that the virus has dropped that to 18-20%, I suppose.

[kenberg]

While that might be an admirable goal, the fact of the matter is that beating the Manchurian President by a large popular vote margin is 100% totally irrelevant. In 2016, the Grifter in Chief lost the popular vote by 3 million votes. He claimed he would have actually won the popular vote if it wasn't for illegal voting. You would have to be unbelievably naive to believe if he lost by say 10 million votes that he wouldn't make up some equally ridiculous excuse, or reuse his old excuses.

 

The only goal in the 2020 presidential election is to win by 1 electoral vote and I personally don't care if the Manchurian President wins the popular vote by 50 million votes (as long the Democrats also win the Senate).

 

I said nothing about popular vote, I said beaten as in, well, as in beaten. in 2016 he was not beaten. He did not get the majority of the vote, but he was not beaten. So I want beaten.

 

My point was that beaten is not enough. We need thoroughly beaten. Of course trump lies, lies about everything. But the encouraging part of the article Winston posted was that, at least hopefully, a significant portion of his supporters are coming to think of him as full of BS. That's very important. When he spouts his bull, we need people out there, plenty of them, from all walks of life, saying that they recognize crap when they hear it. A person can get away with a lot, sometimes beyond imagining how, but it can come to an end.

 

In short, being thoroughly beaten is very relevant. It will be the start of recovery. There is a lot to recover from.

[Winstonm]

I said nothing about popular vote, I said beaten as in, well, as in beaten. in 2016 he was not beaten. He did not get the majority of the vote, but he was not beaten. So I want beaten.

 

My point was that beaten is not enough. We need thoroughly beaten. Of course trump lies, lies about everything. But the encouraging part of the article Winston posted was that, at least hopefully, a significant portion of his supporters are coming to think of him as full of BS. That's very important. When he spouts his bull, we need people out there, plenty of them, from all walks of life, saying that they recognize crap when they hear it. A person can get away with a lot, sometimes beyond imagining how, but it can come to an end.

 

In short, being thoroughly beaten is very relevant. It will be the start of recovery. There is a lot to recover from.

 

Ken, here is another article that I hope helps make your day:

President Donald Trump is losing a critical constituency: voters who see two choices on the ballot — and hate them both.

 

Unlike in 2016, when a large group of voters who disliked both Trump and Hillary Clinton broke sharply for Trump, the opposite is happening now, according to public polling and private surveys conducted by Republicans and Democrats alike.

 

It's a significant and often underappreciated group of voters. Of the nearly 20 percent of voters who disliked both Clinton and Trump in 2016, Trump outperformed Clinton by about 17 percentage points, according to exit polls.

 

 

Four years later, that same group — including a mix of Bernie Sanders supporters, other Democrats, disaffected Republicans and independents — strongly prefers Biden, the polling shows. The former vice president leads Trump by more than 40 percentage points among that group, which accounts for nearly a quarter of registered voters, according to a Monmouth University poll last week.

[johnu]

I said nothing about popular vote, I said beaten as in, well, as in beaten. in 2016 he was not beaten. He did not get the majority of the vote, but he was not beaten. So I want beaten.

 

My point was that beaten is not enough. We need thoroughly beaten. Of course trump lies, lies about everything. But the encouraging part of the article Winston posted was that, at least hopefully, a significant portion of his supporters are coming to think of him as full of BS. That's very important. When he spouts his bull, we need people out there, plenty of them, from all walks of life, saying that they recognize crap when they hear it. A person can get away with a lot, sometimes beyond imagining how, but it can come to an end.

 

In short, being thoroughly beaten is very relevant. It will be the start of recovery. There is a lot to recover from.

The Manchurian President's people aren't going to abandon him. They are going to wear their MAGA hats, their KKK hoods, their neo-nazi paraphernalia, wave their anti-immigrant signs... Another group of his supporters are among those who can be fooled all of the time. Then there is the group that will vote for him because it is part of their "religion". You don't have to look any further than the US House and Senate where no Republicans in the House voted to impeach, and the Senate where only 1 Republican voted to convict.

 

Hopefully enough of the most marginal supporters and those who flipped a coin and went with the hope of an unknown will vote the other way but it is most like that this will be another very close election. I hate to say it but a thorough beating is a pipe dream.

[cherdano]

In short, being thoroughly beaten is very relevant. It will be the start of recovery. There is a lot to recover from.

I've got bad news for you. He won't be thoroughly beaten.

[johnu]

Mission Accomplished!

 

Accidental poisonings from bleach and disinfectants more than doubled in April — the same month Trump suggested they could be injected

 

An interesting poll would be how many of those who were poisoned by bleach and disinfectants are still planning to vote for the Grifter in Chief.

[y66]

The US Administration is reportedly preparing to bar foreign graduates of US universities from staying here to work.

 

Each percentage point fall in those graduates as a share of population is estimated to reduce innovation (patents per capita) by 9–18%.

 

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.2.2.31

Some policies are no-brainers.

[y66]

Ezra Klein at Vox: No plan? No goal? No framework? No President?

 

Americans have made tremendous sacrifices to buy their government time, and that time has been wasted. That is why we are left with an increasingly polarized, and polarizing, debate between endless lockdowns and reckless reopening: The government has failed to do what functional governments in other countries have done and create a better option.

 

“It’s like the Lewis Carroll line, ‘If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.

Well, I don’t know where we’re going.” -- Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy

[johnu]

Don't worry, be happy. Republican hypocrisy knows no bounds.

 

John Cornyn Encourages People To Sign Up For Obamacare After Fighting To Repeal It

 

Let's jumpstart that economy, even though your job disappeared along with your health care coverage.

 

After voting more than a dozen times to repeal the Affordable Care Act and leading Senate Republican efforts to dismantle it, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said Monday that the “good news” is that people can sign up for President Barack Obama’s signature health care law if they’ve lost their jobs and need health insurance amid the coronavirus pandemic.

 

“The good news is that if you lose your employer-provided coverage, which covers about a 180 million Americans, that is a significant life event, which makes you then eligible to sign up for the Affordable Care Act,” Cornyn said in a PBS Austin interview. “As you know, it has a sliding scale of subsidies up to 400% of poverty. So that’s an option for people.”

 

t’s quite a change of tune for Cornyn, who voted to repeal or defund the ACA (or to move forward with bills to do so) here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here.

 

Cornyn’s job was to secure the votes to repeal the ACA in 2017 when he was the Senate GOP Whip, the third-highest-ranking Republican. He spoke confidently for months about having the votes to do it. But the bill ultimately failed at the hands of Senate Democrats and three Republicans.

Cornyn, house Republicans, and Senate Republicans lined up behind the Manchurian President to file suit that the ACA unconstitutional. If the Supreme Court rules against the ACA in the pending case, forget that ACA lifeline of medical insurance coverage.

[y66]

Adam Goldman and Katie Benner at NYT:

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/us/politics/bill-priestap-michael-flynn.html

 

WASHINGTON — A key former F.B.I. official cast doubt on the Justice Department’s case for dropping a criminal charge against President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn during an interview with investigators last week, according to people familiar with the investigation.

 

Department officials reviewing the Flynn case interviewed Bill Priestap, the former head of F.B.I. counterintelligence, two days before making their extraordinary request to drop the case to Judge Emmet G. Sullivan. They did not tell Judge Sullivan about Mr. Priestap’s interview. A Justice Department official said that they were in the process of writing up a report on the interview and that it would soon be filed with the court.

 

The department’s motion referred to notes that Mr. Priestap wrote around the bureau’s 2017 questioning of Mr. Flynn, who later pleaded guilty to lying to investigators during that interview. His lawyers said Mr. Priestap’s notes — recently uncovered during a review of the case — suggested that the F.B.I. was trying to entrap Mr. Flynn, and Attorney General William P. Barr said investigators were trying to “lay a perjury trap.”

 

That interpretation was wrong, Mr. Priestap told the prosecutors reviewing the case. He said that F.B.I. officials were trying to do the right thing in questioning Mr. Flynn and that he knew of no effort to set him up. Media reports about his notes misconstrued them, he said, according to the people familiar with the investigation.

 

The department’s decision to exclude mention of Mr. Priestap’s interview in the motion could trouble Judge Sullivan, who signaled late on Tuesday that he was skeptical of the department’s arguments.

 

Mr. Priestap and the Justice Department declined to comment. Mr. Priestap told investigators that he did not remember the circumstances surrounding the notes that he took, and that he was giving them his interpretation of the notes as he read them now, according to a person familiar with his interview.

 

Former prosecutors and defense lawyers called the department’s position hypocritical and troubling.

 

“If it is accurate that the F.B.I. official provided context around those notes, which is materially different from what they suggest, this could be a game changer in terms of how the court views the motivations behind the request to dismiss the case,” said Edward Y. Kim, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan.

[Chas_P]

I said nothing about popular vote, I said beaten as in, well, as in beaten. in 2016 he was not beaten. He did not get the majority of the vote, but he was not beaten. So I want beaten.

 

My point was that beaten is not enough. We need thoroughly beaten. Of course trump lies, lies about everything. But the encouraging part of the article Winston posted was that, at least hopefully, a significant portion of his supporters are coming to think of him as full of BS. That's very important. When he spouts his bull, we need people out there, plenty of them, from all walks of life, saying that they recognize crap when they hear it. A person can get away with a lot, sometimes beyond imagining how, but it can come to an end.

 

In short, being thoroughly beaten is very relevant. It will be the start of recovery. There is a lot to recover from.

 

If the choice were Trump vs JFK I would vote for JFK in a heartbeat. If the choice were Trump vs WJC I would probably vote for Clinton (WJC, not HRC). But if the choice is Trump vs ANY of today's Democrats, I'm voting for Trump. As for

"recognizing crap", I'm not sure Biden knows where he ***** last.

[Winstonm]

For those who are not closely following the Michael Flynn/Bill Barr attempted justice coup, the latest is that Judge Sullivan has placed a former judge in the position to argue the positions abandonded by the DOJ. In other words, now that Barr and the DOJ are acting like Flynn\s defense counsel after he has twice pled guilty and committed potential perjury by backtracking on that plea, Judge Sullivan has decided that the government needs someone on its side to argue in favor of letting the conviction stand.

 

Curiously, the retired judge chosen is John Gleeson, who happened to be the prosecutor of John Gotti. Go to this site for excellent coverage of all aspects of the Flynn/Barr attempt to misuse justice.

[hrothgar]

If the choice were Trump vs JFK I would vote for JFK in a heartbeat. If the choice were Trump vs WJC I would probably vote for Clinton (WJC, not HRC). But if the choice is Trump vs ANY of today's Democrats, I'm voting for Trump. As for

"recognizing crap", I'm not sure Biden knows where he ***** last.

 

Remember back in the before times, when Chas tried to insist that he didn't actually like Trump and was trolling the libs?

 

BTW, anyone else find it amusing that JFK, Bill Clinton, and Trump are all well extremely well known for committing sexual offenses and Chas is very careful to qualify that voting for women is unacceptable to him... Guess we know one quality that he selects for.

[Trinidad]

Remember back in the before times, when Chas tried to insist that he didn't actually like Trump and was trolling the libs?

 

BTW, anyone else find it amusing that JFK, Bill Clinton, and Trump are all well extremely well known for committing sexual offenses and Chas is very careful to qualify that voting for women is unacceptable to him... Guess we know one quality that he selects for.

I am not saying that I like Chas_P's political ideas, but this is simply data mining on a sample size of 3. You should know that this is ridiculous, but you imply that it "could be significant". I could make a similarly bold statement that Chas, despite his emphasis on the letter 'P', has a remarkable preference towards presidents that have a name starting with 'J' (regardless whether it is John or Jefferson). There is no basis for an association of Chad with the letter 'J' and there is also no basis for the association of Chad to the "relational behavior" of these three presidents.

 

Rik

[hrothgar]

I am not saying that I like Chas_P's political ideas, but this is simply data mining on a sample size of 3. You should know that this is ridiculous, but you imply that it "could be significant". I could make a similarly bold statement that Chas, despite his emphasis on the letter 'P', has a remarkable preference towards presidents that have a name starting with 'J' (regardless whether it is John or Jefferson). There is no basis for an association of Chad with the letter 'J' and there is also no basis for the association of Chad to the "relational behavior" of these three presidents.

 

Rik

 

Perhaps Chas' well documented history of racist postings has biased me to think that he is a sexist as well...

[cherdano]

If the choice were Trump vs JFK I would vote for JFK in a heartbeat. If the choice were Trump vs WJC I would probably vote for Clinton (WJC, not HRC). But if the choice is Trump vs ANY of today's Democrats, I'm voting for Trump. As for

"recognizing crap", I'm not sure Biden knows where he ***** last.

Thank you for your eloquent persuasive contribution. I thought I'd cast my vote for Biden if I had one, but given the points you make, I have reconsiderd.

[Winstonm]

Perhaps Chas' well documented history of racist postings has biased me to think that he is a sexist as well...

 

Perhaps those who still support Trump do so because they see so much of themselves in him.

[kenberg]

Re chas post and responses :

 

I worry that on Wednesday Nov. 4 the Dems will have a really good argument to explain how unfair it is that Biden lost.

 

I much prefer a celebration of Biden winning.

 

For this celebration to take place, Biden needs votes of people other than, say, Winston and Richard. And other than mine. I hope that they are working on that.

 

We will see how the campaign goes. My own view of Trump is that I would rather have a duck, any duck, in the oval office. But others might not think the choice is that clear, and I hope the strategists are not just writing them off. Not everyone has seen the brilliant arguments I have presented here on the WC.

 

Winning is good. Complaining about the unfairness of losing is not good. It's game time.

 

 

 

[Trinidad]

Perhaps Chas' well documented history of racist postings has biased me to think that he is a sexist as well...

That is an entirely different data set...

 

Rik

[Winstonm]

What is the crime of Obamagate? Obamagate = Presidenting while black.

 

I'm afraid John is right that there will be no crushing defeat of Trump - as this election is a referendum on white privilege, i.e., a reenactment of the Civil War in America. And it has already lasted nearly as long.

 

If you’re looking to pin down the crime that Donald Trump has accused President Obama of committing, don’t look in the criminal code. For now, at least, “OBAMAGATE!” is not listed in Title 18, the crimes and criminal procedure section of the United States Code. But even if it were, Attorney General Bill Barr might have a tough time building a case against the former president.

 

That’s because the crux of what is ostensibly being alleged against Obama—that he illegally investigated the Trump campaign while he was president—could never be, by Barr’s own definition, a crime.

[shyams]

In my (uncharitable) opinion, the definition of a crime depends on who is committing it --- i.e. different standards for Republicans and Democrats. Quite similar to how MeToo works --- different standards for Kavanaugh and Biden.

[y66]

Even when pundits win twitter debates with Josh Hawley, even engaging in them on any level is a win for his strategy of obtaining a reputation as populist thinker while casting rigid party line votes.

10-4 Matt, but how is this relevant for engaging with all of the other trolls?