American Politics from 2019 on

[Tero]

The bald guy in there is the most MAGA. He was governor in the Trump 4 years and appointed himself senator when Sasse quit.

Ricketts is running in special election gor the remainder of the 6 year senate term.

[Tero]

Elsewhere

Libertarians make up a tiny portion of the electorate. But it's not like there isn't just as many or more Libertarian principles to vote for Democrats in this election as there are to vote for the Grand Old Fascist Party.

My next door neighbor is a hard core Libertarian. Even was the party's nominee for US Senate in my state a few election cycles back. And he wants to destroy MAGA more than I do.

I was thinking they would not vote for Trump or Harris. Only on big issues state level.

[Brian Peacock]

A libertarian is someone who believes they were dropped into a cot on the day they were born and left to get on with it.

[macdoc]

and thinks they succeeded

[Tero]

Kamala to collect trillions! To waste on sex changes, electric cars or whatever the Democrats do with hard earned corporate money.

So far, her campaign has said she would increase the corporate tax rate to 28%, up from the 21% rate set by former President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cut law – which would raise about $1 trillion over the next decade, according to the committee.

Harris has also said she supports the revenue-raising provisions in Biden’s fiscal year 2025 budget blueprint, which includes tax hikes on wealthy Americans and big companies. Overall, these measures would raise about $5 trillion.

https://news.yahoo.com/harris-economic- ... 07695.html

[pErvinalia]

Brave move to increase taxes. You don't really see that much these days. Socialism!

[Sean Hayden]

[Tero]

Naive voter distrust Democrats

I'm overall unchanged, but I like her better now.
I lost a lot of faith in the Democratic Party when they told us Joe Biden was fine, and then it turns out he's not, and so it's hard to trust that same administration going forward.
I do not want to vote for Trump, but I do not like this current administration. I won't change my mind before November, I'd just be less worried if she were to win.

guy will drag himself to vote, unless he has hangover

Mat was considering skipping the election all together but after the debate he says he has made up his mind.

The debate was something.
Kamala Harris definitely did very well. I think Trump kind of did not. He lost his focus and kept rambling on where it was kind of incoherent.
After last night, I think I'll vote for Kamala Harris. I don't know if I'll be very enthusiastic about it but I will probably be voting for her.

Kamala way too rehearsed

She came across pretty rehearsed to me, but she dropped a lot of, sort of, baited statements that I think Trump bit on really hard - rattled him a bit, made him pretty angry.
All of this seemed pretty calculated to me, and that's not exactly what I was looking for out of her. I was looking for her to be a little more personable, a little more natural.

She has a point. Yet the policies were in no way hidden.

I didn't feel like the topics were discussed in depth, it was mostly the candidates talking at each other.
I was disappointed, really.
I personally wished they would go in depth about their policy, instead of attacking the other person for something about their policy.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ceq53wvpe5xo

[macdoc]

Tero didn't know you hung aot at International Skep

One of the better images

[Tero]

CNN contacted 70 voters
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/11/politics ... index.html
One..of 70 ...changed her vote. None of the others did. Many republicans will write in a random republican name.

[Tero]

Who knew? Trump has a vision. Maybe after he has it explained to him?

Trump’s radical vision
Trump busted many norms while in office, like when he invoked emergency power to spend more taxpayer funds than Congress approved for a border wall. If he wins again, as my colleagues and I have reported in a series about the policy stakes of his campaign, he has vowed to go farther.

Trump says he’d make it easier to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with loyalists. (He issued an executive order laying the groundwork late in his term, but President Biden rescinded it; Trump has said he would reissue it.) He also says he’d bring independent agencies under White House authority and revive the tactic, outlawed in the 1970s, of refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs he dislikes.

Building on how Trump pressured prosecutors to scrutinize his foes during his first term, the former president and his allies signal that they’d end a post-Watergate notion: that the Justice Department has investigative independence from the White House. He has threatened to order the prosecution of perceived adversaries, including Biden, election workers, a tech giant, political operatives and lawyers and donors supporting Harris.

Trump also wants to use American troops on domestic soil to enforce the law. And he is planning a crackdown on illegal immigration with millions of deportations a year — far higher than the several hundred thousand per year that recent administrations, including his own, managed. To do it, his chief immigration adviser has said, the government would carry out sweeping raids and construct giant detention camps near the border in Texas.

Trump is full of bluster. But there are reasons to believe that a second Trump term would carry out more of his ideas than the first. While he was sometimes constrained last time by judges or his own political appointees, he pushed courts rightward by the end of his term. And his advisers plan to hire only true believers in a second term.

Ordinary boundary-pushing

Unlike Trump, Harris is signaling that she would be a normal president. That would mean usually adhering to a consensus understanding of executive power. But I wouldn’t be surprised if she occasionally pushed the boundaries of presidential authority — albeit within ordinary parameters.

Presidents of both parties have stretched executive powers when they haven’t been able to get new bills through Congress — think of Barack Obama’s attempts to shield certain undocumented immigrants from deportation or Biden’s attempts to forgive student debt. They have also claimed sweeping and disputed power to use military force without congressional authorization — like when Obama ordered airstrikes on Libya and when Trump directed the military to attack Syrian forces.

Notably, when Harris sought the Democratic nomination in 2019, she wrote for an executive power survey I conduct every four years that “the president’s top priority is to keep America secure, and I won’t hesitate to do what it takes to protect our country.” Still, she also said presidents must obey surveillance and anti-torture laws that George W. Bush claimed the power to override — as well as a detainee transfer statute that Obama claimed he could bypass.

If Republicans in Congress blocked Harris’s nominees and legislative agenda, it is likely she would take more aggressive unilateral actions. Those typically lead to accusations of overreach and legal challenges. The growth of executive power has been a story of bipartisan aggrandizement: Presidents take a disputed action, pushing the limits of their legitimate authority; their successors build on that precedent. But based on what Trump has said he is planning to do, I would expect Harris to accelerate that trend much less than Trump.

Charlie Savage NYT

[Tero]

My son was complaining about Kamala not reaching his age group enough to bother to vote. I gave him the scare speech:
As far as the outcome of the election, these are the scenarios: 1 Kamala wins and MAGA remains. Almost nothing major will get through. GOP comes up with a 2028 candidate to "fix the border." 2 Trump wins. He may not get much through the senate. But he will dismantle as many cabinets as possible, fire 50000 federal workers and all this for his corporate clients.

[Tero]

Voting districts count the ballots from where the (mostly) paper ballots are cast. Then the mail votes are counted. They are in envelopes! The date and signature on the envelope is read. The voter signature has to be pulled up and compared! Wrong dates are rejected in PA.

For the second straight presidential election, it is becoming increasingly likely that there will be no clear and immediate winner on election night and that early returns could give a false impression of who will ultimately prevail.

Large swaths of Americans have changed their voting habits in recent years, relying increasingly on mail-in ballots, which take more time to count than those cast in person on Election Day. States with prolonged vote-counting processes, such as Arizona, have become suddenly competitive. And the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump appears extremely close.

https://news.yahoo.com/harris-trump-onc ... 48834.html

[Tero]

Tariffs.Not huge. Trump vs Biden. 2018. They are still in effect.

The Biden administration on Friday also published a long-awaited review of the tariffs that the Trump administration placed on more than $300 billion worth of Chinese goods beginning in 2018.
practices froThe report, which runs to 187 pages, concluded that the Trump tariffs had been effective in reducing U.S. exposure to harmful tradem China, and that they should be maintained. It found that those tariffs had encouraged China to take steps toward eliminating some of its harmful policies, though the report said such programs continue to exist.

The report also said that the tariffs contributed to U.S. companies shifting their sourcing out of and away from China. China’s overall share of U.S. imports fell to 13.7 percent in 2023 from 21.6
percent in 2017.

As part of the review, the Biden administration said it was adding or increasing tariffs on additional products from China, including electric vehicles, battery parts, medical gloves, graphite, semiconductors and other goods. Those levies will go into effect on Sept. 27.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/13/us/p ... =url-share

[Tero]

Ocean rises 1/8 inch in 400 years, sea front property claim by Trump:
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Kelly Lepley ✈
@kclepley
In Jacksonville, the army corps just spent $32.4 million to replenish the beach that eroded from the rising sea. We have houses falling into the ocean along the banks of N. Carolina, due to the rising sea, and he thinks rising water will increase seafront property?
https://x.com/kclepley/status/183630778 ... 98fbed9f14