2016 Election Day Night

[Luther Blissett]

That post doesn't really cover all the bases, namely his alleged cabinet, the violence of his supporters, and the biggest existential threat facing humanity, climate change.

[slomo]

I'll grant you on climate change. Most of the cabinet (Bannon excluded) seem like the usual GOP suspects.

But the violence of his supporters would have been as bad, if not worse, if Clinton had been elected. Obviously we can never know, but consider the violence of the anti-Trump protesters... (And no, don't tell me that rioting and property destruction are forms of "non-violent" protest.) If the anti-Trump folks, who say they are committed to non-violence, riot in response to Trump being elected, imagine what would happen when people who say they are committed to violence don't get their way.

I'm not happy about Trump winning, but please...

[Rory]

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/11 ... n-podesta/

Radio host Todd Kincannon from The Kincannon Show tweeted today that a CNN reporter told him Hillary Clinton became physically violent towards Robby Mook and John Podesta around midnight last Tuesday as the presidency was slipping away.

CNN reporter tells me Hillary became physically violent towards Robby Mook and John Podesta around midnight; had to be briefly restrained.

— The Kincannon Show (@kincannon_show) November 14, 2016

Hillary Clinton did not make it on stage that night. She sent John Podesta out instead.

Hillary was drunk.

She was. I posted about that too. She was in a "psychotic drunken rage" according to my reporter friend. Doctor added sedatives to the mix. https://t.co/jZv376ydDM

— The Kincannon Show (@kincannon_show) November 15, 2016

The reporter said CNN would not publish the story!

The CNN reporter didn't fail to report it. His editors will not let him. CNN has banned all "Hillary in the bunker" stories. https://t.co/Iq7WlezU4i

— The Kincannon Show (@kincannon_show) November 15, 2016

I sure hope someone has video… somewhere. That would be epic!

Get news like this in your Facebook News Feed,
Gateway Pundit

[Luther Blissett]

Aside from flag-burning and some isolated incidents in Portland, most of the photos of "American" anti-Trump riots circulating around conservative media have been photos of riots in Greece or elsewhere in Europe. I agree that we can't know how bad the domestic terrorism would have been, if at all, had Clinton been installed.

I do disagree though that these appointees seem like the usual GOP suspects. It's difficult to imagine Poppy Magog considering a mind-scrambled no-nothing do-nothing like Palin.

[Belligerent Savant]

.
Meh, never mind.

(post deleted)

[brekin]

.
Meh, never mind.
(post deleted)

Most of my posts end that way.

[Freitag]

[brekin]

Freitag, give us the update from the Trump camp.
Are you happy about possible cabinet picks?
Think the transition is going good?
Think the protests/riots are bad sportsmanship?

I am here to learn.

[Freitag]

I am here to learn.

You just learned that your President can shit-talk big league

[seemslikeadream]

republicans are one state away from a Constitutional Convention

in March they were six states away

FEATURES » MARCH 14, 2016
Corporate America Is Just 6 States Short of a Constitutional Convention
If ALEC succeeds in rewriting the constitution to mandate a balanced budget, we’ll be stuck with supply-side economics for at least a generation.
BY SIMON DAVIS-COHEN
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What would stop this constitutional convention from turning out like the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, which led to the scrapping of the Articles of Confederation and the drafting of an entirely new U.S. Constitution?
In February, Republican presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) signed on to a call for a constitutional convention to help defeat “the Washington cartel [that] has put special interest spending ahead of the American people.”

Cruz, along with fellow Republican presidential aspirants Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Gov. John Kasich (Ohio), has endorsed an old conservative goal of a Constitutional amendment to mandate a balanced federal budget. The idea sounds fanciful, but free-market ideologues associated with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a secretive group of right-wing legislators and their corporate allies, are close to pulling off a coup that could devastate the economy, which is just emerging from a recession. Their scheme could leave Americans reeling for generations. A balanced budget amendment would prevent the federal government from following the Keynesian strategy of stimulating the economy during an economic depression by increasing the national debt. (Since 1970, the United States has had a balanced budget in only four years: 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001.)

Article V of the Constitution lays out two routes for changing the law of the land: An amendment can be proposed by Congress or by a constitutional convention that is convened by two-thirds of the states (34). Either way, three-fourths of the states (38) have to ratify it. Previously, changes to the country’s founding document have been achieved by the first process. But as of today, 28 states—six shy of the two-thirds threshold required by Article V—have passed resolutions calling for a constitutional convention to consider a balanced budget amendment.

The ALEC-affiliated Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force (BBATF), which proffered the pledge signed by Cruz, is hoping to meet that 34-state threshold by July 4. BBATF is one player in an astroturf movement backed by the billionaire Koch brothers and embraced by right-wing state legislators.

A balanced budget amendment has long been a holy grail for the Right since the 1930s. In the 1980s, conservatives made a push for a balanced budget constitutional convention and, 20 years later, the idea was resurrected as part of the Tea Party platform. That’s when BBATF was formed to carry the movement forward. With 16 resolutions held over from the previous wave of conservative activism, BBATF has since passed resolutions in Alabama (2011), New Hampshire (2012), Ohio (2013), Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, Michigan, Louisiana (2014), South Dakota, North Dakota, Utah (2015) and West Virginia (2016), bringing the total to 28. This year, BBATF is targeting 13 states: Arizona, Idaho, Kentucky, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming. In six of these states Republicans control both legislative bodies and the governorship, making passage a real possibility and leaving BBATF one state shy of the magic 34.

Domino effect
While the BBATF’s 27 resolutions are tied specifically to the balanced budget amendment, a group called Citizens for Self-Governance launched a project called Convention of States, whose proposal for a constitutional convention has also been adopted by ALEC as a model policy. Convention of States has passed resolutions calling for a convention in Florida, Georgia (2014), Alabama, Arkansas (2015) and Tennessee (2016). Convention of States advocates a constitutional convention to not only pass a balanced budget amendment, but also to curtail the “power and jurisdiction of the federal government.” What precisely this means and how it would be accomplished is not clear. This uncertainty at once whets the appetite of anti-government zealots while raising serious concerns about a “runaway” convention that could make drastic changes to the Constitution.

Both BBATF and Convention of States have struggled to address worries of a runaway convention. What would stop it from turning out like the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, which led to the scrapping of the Articles of Confederation and the drafting of an entirely new U.S. Constitution?

To address these concerns, a group called Compact for America, which has passed resolutions in Alaska, Georgia, Mississippi and North Dakota, has proposed that states combine their calls for a constitutional convention with the final ratification process. This would mean states attending the convention would propose the amendment and ratify it in one fell swoop, which would require the 38 states needed for ratification under Article V, not just the 34 needed to call a convention.

Convention of States and BBATF have tried to quell fears of a runaway convention by saying the convention would be bound by the subject matter of the resolutions, and that the convention only has the power to propose amendments, which then must be ratified by the required 38 states.

That the subject matter of the resolutions will prevent a runaway convention may make sense in reference to the BBATF, whose resolutions focus specifically on the balanced budget amendment, but when applied to the Convention of States’ agenda, the argument fails, as the subject of their resolutions includes broad language to curb the power and jurisdiction of the federal government. Convention of States spokesman Michael Farris has written that, “It is relatively certain that there would be at least a few amendments proposed, perhaps as many as 10 to 12.” In other words, if Convention of States has its way, there could well be a runaway convention.

Within striking distance
Arn Pearson at the Center for Media and Democracy, a watchdog group based in Madison, Wisc., is closely tracking the movement. He describes the campaign for a constitutional convention as “a very live threat.” “If between the groups they get to 34 states,” he says, “there is really nothing preventing them from aggregating those calls even if they’re not identical, and pushing for a convention.”

Another uncertainty, Pearson notes, is the controversy over whether the 16 resolutions left over from the effort in the 1980s can still be counted. There is no precedent to lean on. Pro-convention advocates maintain that Congress, which is tasked with processing the states’ applications, may not meddle with the process. If a state doesn’t want a convention, they argue, it can rescind its application. Pearson suspects the Supreme Court would get involved.

“There are a lot of different parts of the Koch machine pulling on this oar,” says Pearson, “from their think tanks up through their elected officials, they’re pushing on it. They’re pushing on it hard.” And, given how red BBATF’s 2016 target states are, says Pearson, “it’s within striking distance. If [ALEC and the Koch brothers] get a convention,” says Pearson, “they get to lock in their conservative supply-side policies for the next generation or more. That’s where they’re going.”

The Kochs and company, with their gridlock of Washington, have bred a type of discontent that has made once unimaginable change possible.

Tugging on citizen discontent, Convention of States’ propaganda highlights the 2013 government shutdown, creeping NSA surveillance, Gallup polls showing Americans’ dissatisfaction with “government” and tales of federal bureaucratic waste.

But such a convention is not the tonic to satiate this discontent. Democratic control is what the American people yearn for, but that is not what the convention would offer.

Maybe the alternative is the revolution Bernie Sanders is envisioning: Electing insurgent candidates to Congress, state and local office; strengthening and expanding direct democratic institutions like the ballot initiative process; making constitutional changes that elevate democratic decisions above corporate personhood; and building a movement that engages the thousands of communities where democratic governance has been all but quashed by ALEC-endorsed legal doctrine and legislation.

Editor's note: This story was updated after West Virginia passed a resolution on March 12.

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18940/a ... convention

[brekin]

I am here to learn.

You just learned that your President can shit-talk big league

Sorry, still waking up. Do you mean Obama?

Obama: Trump tapped into a 'troubling' strain
http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/15/politics/ ... index.html

Or Trump?

And where you at with Trump's progress so far? His transition to power? A-, B, C, etc.? Inquiring RI'ers want to know.

[Rory]

Interesting position from Dimitri Orlov

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-technosphere-hiccups.html

Those who took hard Hillary Clinton’s defeat and are now going through the Kübler-Ross five stages of grief are butts of a cruel joke, though played on them by an entity quite devoid of a sense of humor. The technosphere—an artificial machine-like sentient entity that wants to control everything including you and is busy destroying the biosphere and us with it—has taken pains to align their values with its own, to make them easier to control. It has no use for humans except as technocratic servants—engineers, scientists, technicians, bureaucrats, enforcers—and the best servant material is the lonely, atomized individual, snatched away from their family at a young age, their every interaction with other humans mediated by easy-to-monitor electronic communications systems, ideally a mental patient, chemically controlled, and too fragile to leave the man-made environment and venture out into the real world. On the other hand, autonomous, separatist, tribal groups are almost impossible for the technosphere to understand or to control.

The technosphere certainly wanted Clinton—the person at the epicenter of a large number of political technologies (some would call them “rackets”) contrived to control the populace and suck the life’s blood out of it: the financial racket, the medical racket, the defense and security racket, the prison-industrial racket, the higher education racket… She and her husband are as close as one ever gets to pure ectoplasmic emanations of the technosphere—special interest brokers and propagandists par excellence. Bernie Sanders was no challenge to this machine, and was knocked out of the running through purely bureaucratic means. But then there arose a more difficult problem: to select and promote a Repubican candidate who was strong enough to win the primary but too weak to win against Clinton in the general election. This situation is represented by the following Venn diagram.


As you see, the intersection of “able to win Republican nomination” and “unable to win against Hillary Clinton” is a null set. Thus, Trump’s electoral victory can be viewed as a purely technical glitch, caused by the problem of the Missing Candidate.

Back to those grieving Clinton’s loss: ironically, they are clustered in the larger cities, and would be the first to be killed by a Russian nuclear strike if Clinton’s relentless warmongering and Russia-baiting succeeded in triggering World War III. Thus, for them, voting for Clinton was symptomatic of a suppressed instinct of self-preservation. But this is not entirely their fault: they have been manipulated into thinking that anyone who supports Trump is automatically stupid, ignorant, racist, sexist and a xenophobe—and that simply isn’t true. The reason they are clustered in the big cities is simple: those are the places that the technosphere controls most fully. City dwellers tend to be oversocialized, eager to strive for ever greater inclusive fitness within a large and anonymous social realm, and that makes them easy to control. The technosphere’s reach is not infinite, and being a rational and machine-like intelligence, it applies cost-benefit analysis to its resource allocation decisions. This is why the electoral map looks like a handful of oversized blue blobs surrounded by a sea of red. Look at Pennsylvania: Pittsburg and Philadelphia voted Blue, but everyone else voted Red. Case in point: the technosphere can gain no purchase among the Amish.


And so it would appear that the technosphere has suffered a setback. But it will not give up so easily, and the next step for it is to deploy political technologies to, if at all possible, invalidate and nullify the results of its electoral defeat. Indeed, this has already started: Bill and Hillary Clinton have recently shown up for a meeting with another ectoplasmic emanation of the technosphere, the predatory billionaire George Soros, clad in accents of Roman imperial purple. The rationale they gave for displaying the colors of the emperor’s toga is that it is a mixture of red and blue, and thus represents compromise. However, compromise, in their case, would be to exit from public life, for both of them are too old to ever run for any office again. No, this display of imperial colors is just that: a signal that the empire is getting ready to strike back: we should look forward to another attempt at a Color Revolution—the Purple Revolution—this time in the United States, financed by the very same George Soros. This mixed-up signaling is typical: after the Russian election, in which Putin was again elected president, the same Color Revolution syndicate organized and financed protests there, featuring little white ribbons—which, as it happens, were worn by Nazi collaborators during World War II. This nuance was not lost on the Russians, and the protests came to naught.

cont..

[Freitag]

And where you at with Trump's progress so far? His transition to power? A-, B, C, etc.? Inquiring RI'ers want to know.

Well brekin, there are separate threads for that aren't there? In this thread the EC vs. popular vote issue has been mentioned on the last couple of pages so that's what I'd like to comment on. Speaking of, did you know the issue is moot because, had the rules of the game been different, Trump would have campaigned differently? Had you thought of that? That's a point I haven't seen made in this thread yet. Everyone assumes the popular vote would have been the same under different rules but maybe that's not the case.

[seemslikeadream]

campaigned differently.....would that mean more or less racism?

[82_28]

Many people can shit talk, scro. It is not a claim to fame. Since my girlfriend has a child I have become very accustomed to always saying please and thank you and cutting down on my famous usage of the word FUCK. I was just telling her that I am going to have a headache for the rest of my life. But I can talk shit but choose not to. I never have, ever. I am also not a pushover, never have, ever. I just don't dig cruelty or making anything fear. This is why I hate trump. Should I relabel that with dislike? I do not know.