American Politics from 2019 on

[pErvinalia]

What midterms?

[Brian Peacock]

... Election analysts believe this is a strong sign that Democrats will sweep the midterms.

This radical-leftist scum shouldn't be allowed to STEAL ANOTHER ELECTION simply by going out and getting more votes than honest opponents standing for True American Values™.

[Tero]

Immigrants voting! Who ever allowed this? They are jsut supposed to drive cars.

Since Trump regained the White House, his administration has launched a series of unprecedented initiatives to find and prosecute voting by noncitizens, which he’s long claimed, without evidence, is rampant.

He’s stepped up this push in recent weeks, saying in a nationally televised speech that the American election system was “so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.” To support that assertion, the Department of Homeland Security, HSI’s parent agency, released documents asserting it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in just four states, all led by Democrats. The documents included no explanation of how that number was calculated.

HSI’s involvement in the hunt for election fraud traces at least to summer 2025, when agency supervisors embraced a proposal from a midlevel agent who’d publicly echoed Trump’s claims about elections. He argued the agency’s powerful databases and tools could find noncitizens even on the voter lists that states make publicly available, from which the most confidential information has been redacted. Under Trump, the Justice Department had collected many public voter rolls as part of a controversial effort to compel states to turn over the unredacted versions.

Between January 2025 and May 2026, a ProPublica analysis of Justice Department data shows, fewer than 150 alleged noncitizen voters were referred for prosecution. Even fewer — 41 — were charged with voting illegally or other election-related crimes. (More than 150 million people voted in the most recent presidential election.)

In response to questions from ProPublica, administration officials insisted the effort spearheaded by HSI was producing meaningful results.

There’s an array of reasons why Trump’s campaign to document claims of widespread voter fraud hasn’t succeeded. Most obviously, it’s exceedingly rare, as countless studies and state audits have found. Noncitizens often get on voter rolls by accident or when government officials make errors. Last month, New Jersey disclosed that a mistake involving its Motor Vehicle Commission caused 6,600 noncitizens to be registered (fewer than 400 voted).

Trump’s enlistment of HSI in his election fight is no accident. Cobbled together in the aftermath of 9/11, the agency has 7,100 armed, highly trained agents and another 800 criminal analysts, as well as access to troves of confidential data about hundreds of millions of Americans.

Though part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency has historically stayed out of immigration cases. During the first Trump administration, leaders of 19 HSI regional offices — virtually its entire top field hierarchy — signed a letter calling for HSI to become a standalone agency, arguing that ICE’s deportation work dissuaded people from cooperating with its investigations.

By January 2026, scores of HSI agents were fanning out across the country to investigate thousands of leads about illegal voting.

About 25,000 of them involved people SAVE had identified as potential noncitizens on state voter rolls. Another 15,000 were given to HSI’s cross-border financial crimes unit, which was told to prioritize them over money laundering and fraud cases, a former high-level HSI official said. Quiñones’ unit led a separate effort to find additional cases by reviewing whether people who’d recently become citizens had voted before they were naturalized, then lied about it in naturalization interviews.

Ohio: As of May, just two voting cases had been referred for prosecution in Ohio and no one had been charged, federal data shows. The state has nearly 8 million voters.

Its latest tactics include threatening to withhold funds from states it says are refusing to check their voter rolls for noncitizens and saying it will prosecute state election officials who “knowingly” fail to remove noncitizens. Trump has also continued to press Congress to enact the SAVE America Act, which would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote, a measure advocates have criticized as a barrier to voting. Democrats are preparing for the prospect of federal troops being sent to the polls to intimidate voters.

https://www.propublica.org/article/nonc ... stigations

[Tero]

State finds 400 noncitizens (all allowed to drive!) voting. Trump finds 35 0000: In a post on Truth Social after Sherrill’s announcement, Trump stated, “35,152 is the new number just released by Homeland Security of non-citizens registered to vote in New Jersey. These are just the ones that got caught. The real numbers will prove to be many times this amount.”
https://www.factcheck.org/2026/08/trump ... ew-jersey/

[Brian Peacock]

350000 eh?

[Tero]

Well the 152 is important, too.

[Tero]

Expel the ambassador?

"Canadian Petition to Expel U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra Takes Off."

"More than 170,000 people have signed a petition to the Canadian Parliament, submitted by a Calgary resident on July 21, calling for the removal of the ambassador, Pete Hoekstra.

"The petition asserts that Mr. Hoekstra, a faithful messenger of President Trump’s aggressive stance toward Canada, has harmed U.S.-Canada relations. The two countries are locked in a trade war, and their relationship, once the closest two nations can be, has been at a historic low since Mr. Trump retook office."

"The petition lays out the reasoning for Mr. Hoekstra’s removal: it argues that he has “normalized the Trump administration’s threats to annex Canada as the 51st state.” Mr. Hoekstra has reposted Mr. Trump’s 51st-state jabs on social media and has dismissed Canadians’ anger at the rhetoric as “emotional” and inexplicable.
"It also states that Mr. Hoekstra has interfered in Canadian politics in a manner “inconsistent with diplomatic protocol.” It lays out how activists from Alberta seeking to break away from the rest of the country repeatedly met with State Department officials, “raising serious questions about U.S. diplomatic interference in Canadian unity.”

"The petition calls on the Canadian government to invoke the Vienna Convention of Diplomatic Relations, the international accord that governs diplomacy, to declare Mr. Hoekstra “persona non grata” and request his removal from office, as well as to set up a parliamentary committee to review “U.S. diplomatic interference in Canadian domestic affairs."

NYT

[Woodbutcher]

Expel the ambassador?

"Canadian Petition to Expel U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra Takes Off."

"More than 170,000 people have signed a petition to the Canadian Parliament, submitted by a Calgary resident on July 21, calling for the removal of the ambassador, Pete Hoekstra.

"The petition asserts that Mr. Hoekstra, a faithful messenger of President Trump’s aggressive stance toward Canada, has harmed U.S.-Canada relations. The two countries are locked in a trade war, and their relationship, once the closest two nations can be, has been at a historic low since Mr. Trump retook office."

"The petition lays out the reasoning for Mr. Hoekstra’s removal: it argues that he has “normalized the Trump administration’s threats to annex Canada as the 51st state.” Mr. Hoekstra has reposted Mr. Trump’s 51st-state jabs on social media and has dismissed Canadians’ anger at the rhetoric as “emotional” and inexplicable.
"It also states that Mr. Hoekstra has interfered in Canadian politics in a manner “inconsistent with diplomatic protocol.” It lays out how activists from Alberta seeking to break away from the rest of the country repeatedly met with State Department officials, “raising serious questions about U.S. diplomatic interference in Canadian unity.”

"The petition calls on the Canadian government to invoke the Vienna Convention of Diplomatic Relations, the international accord that governs diplomacy, to declare Mr. Hoekstra “persona non grata” and request his removal from office, as well as to set up a parliamentary committee to review “U.S. diplomatic interference in Canadian domestic affairs."

NYT

Yes, Hoekstra is a cunt. But with a name like that, he could be an illegal alien! Call ICE!

[pErvinalia]

Dutch American Canadian ambassadors are the best Canadian ambassadors.

[Tero]

Trump has ruined the economy. Stagflation is here.

"But the most recent Employment Situation report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that employment actually fell in July, while simultaneously revising the estimates for earlier months down," he added. "Thus July’s report confirmed the now widespread view among economists that the Trump-era job slowdown isn’t a blip. It’s now clear that America has entered a new, possibly permanent era of stagnant employment."

Earlier this month, the BLS released a jobs report that showed the country lost 23,000 jobs between June and July. The only industries to see growth during that period were health care and social services, which some analysts say speaks to the overall weakness of the economy.

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-economy-2677713437/

[Brian Peacock]

Trump has ruined the economy. Stagflation is here.

Stagflation is everywhere. When the US catches a cold the whole world sneezes.

[macdoc]

Need a change of meme - when the US cooks the whole world roasts.

Welcome to supersized El Nino

[JimC]

Bushfires for Oz this summer...

[macdoc]

Nothing new there but yeah drought in many places. Friend is in UK and it looks like the Australian savannah in drought.

[pErvinalia]

Aderpt or derp!