US Election 2020

[Tero]

https://www.kios.org/post/sleepy-joe-tr ... -advantage

[Tero]

Though the masks have now emerged as a major theme for the election, conspiracy theories are doing well, causing people to mistrust any Washington politician. The point is to send "new" people there:

Sharlet and The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance have both written about QAnon’s overlap with some strands of Christianity, including those which have for decades found a home on the right. QAnon, writes LaFrance, “may be propelled by paranoia and populism, but it is also propelled by religious faith. The language of evangelical Christianity has come to define the Q movement. QAnon marries an appetite for the conspiratorial with positive beliefs about a radically different and better future, one that is preordained.” The American Christian right, Sharlet recently told Bill Moyers, was already undergoing a transformation under Trump. “Evangelicalism might have an authoritarian streak,” said Sharlet. Its reverence for a supernatural God was, he believed, “this sort of circuit breaker that prevented them from going full fascist.” But now, “they’re willing to put their money entirely on an actual person, Trump, and to build it around his personality, and to build it around this man and his capability for violence and revenge.”

Q may not be a “political” movement, but it is a movement useful to politicians. It doesn’t need a coherent politics for that; its base is there for the taking, if a candidate can graft their campaign to its story. Even if these Q-adjacent conservatives don’t really believe in Q, all they need to get a boost from the movement is a willingness to look as detached from the truth as the president. They’ll get adoration from Q followers, so long as they appear to return it.

Trump, too, does not need to be a Q believer to share in its paranoid style of sex trafficking politics. At his rallies, he regularly invokes sexual violence to animate the crowd. “This obsession with what is done to the bodies of children by Democrats is, like the rape fantasies with which Trump has taken to lacing his rally speeches, grossly sexualized,” observed Sharlet after Trump’s Tulsa, Oklahoma, rally. “It allows his followers to wallow in the most grotesquely taboo thoughts and to relish the revenge they’ll take on those whom they imagine actually committing such horrors.” While it’s important to fact-check such things, you can’t deflate the power of a fantasy with the truth.

That’s what’s so intoxicating and also potentially fruitful about Q for those seeking higher office: That fantasy of the power they hold, as the few to whom the truth has been revealed, could actually get them closer to real power. “Everything I have heard about Q, I hope that this is real,” said Lauren Boebert, in an interview after her primary victory in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District. “If this is real, then it can be really great for our country.”

https://newrepublic.com/article/158500/ ... AL8vZpkPn0

[Brian Peacock]

I've never liked bumper stickers. ever

"Honk if you hate people who honk bumper stickers!"

[Tero]

Biden hides in basement.

“Biden can't put two sentences together,” Trump said. “They wheel him out. He goes up -- he repeats -- they ask him questions. He reads a teleprompter and then he goes back into his basement. You tell me the American people want to have that in an age where we're in trouble with other nations that are looking to do numbers on us.”

Wallace asked Trump if he thinks Biden is senile, but Trump refused to go there, but still continued his attack.

“I don't want to say that. I'd say he's not competent to be president. To be president, you have to be sharp and tough and so many other things. He doesn't even come out of his basement. They think, ‘Oh this is a great campaign.’ So he goes in, I'll then make a speech, it'll be a great speech, and some young guy, starts writing, ‘Vice President Biden said this, this, this, this.’ He didn't say it. Joe doesn't know he's alive, OK? He doesn't know he's alive.”

Later on, Trump said that this is why he will be victorious.

“[Y]ou know why I won’t lose, because the country, in the end, they’re not going to have a man who – who’s shot. He’s shot, he’s mentally shot,” Trump said.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump- ... -interview

In that basement, underground, maybe Biden is a Gray Panther?

[Brian Peacock]

PR advisor: "Mr President, remember to emphasise that Biden is weak for hiding from the virus."

[laklak]

We're doomed. Fucking doomed.

[Tero]

Insurance companies prepare to bring you socialism under Biden:

There are now 37 states that have adopted Medicaid expansion after voters in Oklahoma last month approved a ballot initiative to extend Medicaid benefits to 200,000 low-income adults. Medicaid expansion has been a boon to UnitedHealth, CVS Health’s Aetna health plan unit, Centene, Anthem and Molina as well as many Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapse ... house/amp/

[Tero]

Election officials from dozens of states dispute President Trump's claim mail-in voting will result in rampant fraud

As many states ramp up their preparations for significant expansions to vote-by-mail in the fall amid voter concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic, ABC News reached out to elections authorities in all 50 states for their assessment of Trump's claims.

Of nearly 30 secretaries of state and elections board offices who provided on-the-record responses, none expressed doubts in their state's ability to protect the integrity of their elections this November. Many states cited unique security protocols tailored to their own electoral systems to root out and detect potential fraudulent activity, including measures like signature verification software, registration vetting, and ballots with bar codes unique to registered voters.

Citing the coronavirus pandemic, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson announced in May that 7.7 million ballot applications would be mailed out to all state registered voters, with Benson arguing "we have ensured that no Michigander has to choose between their health and their right to vote."

Trump, then threatened to withhold federal funding from the state, after initially claiming falsely that 7.7 million "ballots" were mailed to voters.

In an exclusive interview last week, ABC News asked Barr about the responses from state elections officials and said his concern was states whose entire election systems are based on vote-by-mail.

Both Barr and Trump have pointed specifically to reports of alleged fraud in a special election in Paterson, New Jersey, this past May, where several city officials have faced voter fraud charges and the county elections board rejected nearly 20 percent of mail-in ballots submitted.

Election security experts have argued that the Paterson election, by contrast, shows that safeguards to protect against fraud actually worked effectively given the alleged fraud was quickly reported out to state officials.

The state has said the nearly 3,300 ballots that were rejected were either because signatures on ballots didn't match voters' signatures on file or because of issues with sections being filled out improperly by those submitting the ballots on the voters' behalf -- thus making it unclear what percentage might be related to attempted "fraud." The New Jersey secretary of state's office declined to comment on Barr and Trump's comments when asked by ABC News -- citing the ongoing law enforcement investigation into the Paterson election.

A separate theory floated by Trump and Barr argues that foreign actors might seek to flood the United States with fraudulent ballots this November seeking to sway the election in a particular way.

However neither has provided evidence or intelligence to support this theory, and multiple state officials told ABC such an effort would likely be easy to detect given the strict safeguards in place for mail-in ballots, such as signature verification, identifying markers that vary from county to county, and even the different sizes, colors and weights of ballots in order to prevent possible forgery.

"It's just incredibly implausible that a foreign actor could pull of successfully what the president and the attorney general suggests," Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold told ABC News. "It's all incredibly far fetched and I do think that the President talking about it is a form of misinformation and disinformation to further corrode confidence in our election. And unfortunately, he's really opening the door to a foreign country attempting to do that and failing."

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/electio ... d=71833120

[Brian Peacock]

I see Kayne tried do a Trump-style rally. What's the vibe on that?

[JimC]

He's not the Messiah, he's just a naughty boy...

[L'Emmerdeur]

So, candidate West dissed Harriet Tubman because she didn't do anything about racism (I think) and proposed a cunning plan to bring abortion in the US down to practically nil without making it illegal. Ready for this? Give a million dollars ('or something in that range') to every woman who has a child. That young man will go far.

[JimC]

...far away, I hope...

[Sean Hayden]

Dumb and wildly successful. That's a double whammy against the likelihood of him riding the introspection train to awareness.

[Tero]

Biden likely to achieve some legislation, though healthcare will be tough:

Vox
Tucked into this argument is Biden’s view of the Republican Party: He sees it not as a monolith but as a coalition. Some members of that coalition love Trump and will grieve his defeat. They’re not going to work with Biden, and he doesn’t expect to work with them. But some Senate Republicans dislike Trump, regret what their party has become, and are looking for redemption. What they need is a Democrat they can work with — a Democrat who doesn’t antagonize their voters and won’t rub their noses in their loss.

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy ... n-election

[Tero]

CNN maling a big deal of 8% of Black voters supporting Trump:
Biden leads in those polls by an 83% to 8%, or 75-point, margin. That, of course, is a huge advantage for Biden, but it also represents a small improvement for Trump since 2016.

Hillary Clinton was ahead of Trump by a 79-point margin among Black registered voters in the pre-election polls taken right before the 2016 election, as compiled by the New York Times' Nate Cohn.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/07/21/poli ... index.html