Congratulations, Stupid.

[JackRiddler]

Harrington's "my liberal friend" is a construct that seeks to spread the blame for the Clinton/DNC machine decisions to an abstraction that can include some image of Brooklyn hipsters one doesn't like. If it doesn't define a multi-purpose, multi-meaning term like "liberal," it's noise.

.

Now various thoughts prompted by a thread arguing that recent "Alt-Right" activity online was engineered by David Brock to set up Trump as the loser to Clinton, then backfired. General Patton's version in response, telling some of the history of the relevant Reddits and 4chan, sounds a lot more credible. Can't say, as I haven't frequented those precincts.

It's altogether plausible that the Brockian "Ratfuckers for Clinton" tried to reinforce Alt-Right pro-Trump activity online, but to give them credit for the results is denial of a different and very real Rat's Nest that they did not and could not have invented. Maybe Brock even is a secret agent for his old cause, as guruilla speculates, but it still wouldn't have done more than to contribute slightly to a very noisy phenomenon that was underway on its own momentum.

There's no comparison to the DNC primaries defamation of Sanders supporters, because "Bernie Bros." was an easy campaign to initiate and run within that niche. Clinton troops online were guaranteed to re-post that shit instantly. It was a different corner of the modern media universe, and much more a monoculture, much more controlled and predicatable. Alt-Right online may be a smaller niche in personnel, but unfortunately it represents a real outbreak from real idiots, just like many you may know in real life. Not to suggest there aren't all kinds of big-league socio-cultural influences feeding into it, and over a long term, but it ain't no simple top-down model.

You can sort the Brock Alt-Right Plot along with a lot of other narratives that seek to monocausally attribute some real-life street protest (anti-Trump marches in New York) or meme surge like Alt-Right, or action of a whole set of long-existing demographics (the Trump vote itself) to a single mastermind campaign. In this version of the Trump win, Brock replaces "Putin" as the Trump puppetmaster. Unfortunately, Trump's support is a real, genuinely American outgrowth.

You want to find one element without which it would not have happened, a necessary-if-not-sufficient condition, look to the outrageous conduct, in the year prior to any primary vote, of CNN-CBS-MS/NBC-ABC-Etc. They made his latest tweet or call to Morning Joe or rally of the day into 1/2 of the election story by air time, already in 2015. Their last month's penance of discovering he is a bad man, in the longer context, largely served to firm up his base by confirming their "liberal media" belief. That is the headline story of what happened in 2016, even if there's a whole newspaper's worth of other stories to go along with it. Number two on the front-page is of course the bad politics and failed strategy of the Clinton-DNC machine itself.

The election was entirely Clinton's to lose. How that happened is incredible. If Brock or someone else on the inside of the Clinton machine was responsible, then for the ad-buy strategy that just talked about Trump the bad man, nothing programmatic. They couldn't even find room to lie that they would do anything for the people. Maybe in their policy wonk papers there were some neoliberal poison-pills dressed in a cute progressive outfit, but they did not show up where it counted most, on the TV. Ad-buys are one main track of a major-party campaign strategy, and the other track was their even more disastrous media-talk strategy. They just pushed "Russia hacking the election," again absolutely nothing programmatic. Where was the last-minute jobs program promise, or anything?! Both of the tracks were just used to attack Trump. One was true: he is a bad man, but superfluous. The other was ridiculous: he is a Russian agent! These a) merely repeat and do not add to what the corporate media was already doing for Clinton in the last month, b) reinforce the Trump base's sense of personal victimization without adding anything whatsoever to the Clinton vote, c) reinforce the impression that there's no political program on the Clinton side.

Utterly disastrous, incomprehensible choices, and yet so fucking in line with what the Clinton machine was always about. Then the Dead Hand of 1787 waved, and voila: minority wins.

.

[Belligerent Savant]

.

JR:
Ad-buys are one main track of a major-party campaign strategy, and the other track was their even more disastrous media-talk strategy. They just pushed "Russia hacking the election," again absolutely nothing programmatic. Where was the last-minute jobs program promise, or anything?! Both of the tracks were just used to attack Trump. One was true: he is a bad man, but superfluous. The other was ridiculous: he is a Russian agent! These a) merely repeat and do not add to what the corporate media was already doing for Clinton in the last month, b) reinforce the Trump base's sense of personal victimization without adding anything whatsoever to the Clinton vote, c) reinforce the impression that there's no political program on the Clinton side.

Utterly disastrous, incomprehensible choices, and yet so fucking in line with what the Clinton machine was always about.

And there it is, succinctly laid out. 900 pages of 'Trump is Seriously Dangerous' postings can not change the above factors. If anything, they only serve to divert attention away from what may invariably turn out to be repeatable mistakes if not addressed directly.

(disclaimer: I've no personal interest in either party rectifying strategy, as any correction would only serve the beneficiaries of either/both Parties. The success of any correction/re-calibration would largely rely on occlusion; sleight of hand; high-end parlor tricks. The commoners are gluttons for optics.)

[seemslikeadream]

And there it is, succinctly laid out. 900 pages of 'Trump is Seriously Dangerous' postings can not change the above factors. If anything, they only serve to divert attention away from what may invariably turn out to be repeatable mistakes if not addressed directly.

Oh fuck it everything diverts attention from something...have you read the pizza thread threads?

you say pizza ....I say Standing Rock

[JackRiddler]

Whether one's surplus attention lately has been devoted to "Pizza" or Standing Rock is as good a test of any of how full of shit one allows oneself to be.

[The Consul]

I swore I'd stay away from this place... but In the best why bother sense I just can't help myself...
It’s the post two worst candidates world were the least defensible candidate of all time is raking up the dead leaves of those so desperate for a “shake up” that they believe he just might do it! By golly! Holy cow! Give him a chance! Wow! Some have gone from the well you know there’s good news and there’s bad news – the good news is one of them lost and the really bad news is, the other one won! Now suddenly for some it’s all about dancing on the corpse of one in deference to the other (while heaving their own failed purists over board). How totally Nuevo RI! Like if one doesn’t choose between a sore loser and a crazy winner one has no spine, like anyone could be an outsider or agent of change in the construct of either partisan entity. Is it a way of making it more bearable, more interesting or just preparation to switch over to The Rapture? Tic….tic…tic…..tic….

I think Hotel Guy is just a symptom . Like a cancer that’s been bubbling down deep in the bones that suddenly almost overnight explodes in a huge disfiguring burst of tumors all over the center of your face. You’ve known you had it for a long time, you’ve known it was rotten, you couldn’t bring yourself to deal with it, and then one day….holy fuck. Now, everyone gets their own Denial kit. And they're really easy to use! Delivered with a smile and a guarantee that everything is true. Everything. You are not dying. You will live forever. Just like America!

Myself, I like music. I actually wrote to Hotel Guy (true story) and suggested that it was totally fucking stupid for him to use “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”, not because the Stones hate him and asked him to stop, but because the song is about a guy going to score a bag of china white heroin in Hyde park and his pusher doesn’t show up so he settles for something less. I told Hotel Guy that the subtext of this song was too ironic for the enlightened throngs chanting You ESSss Aaaayyy! And llaaauuug hehr uuup! No, I asked Hotel Guy if it wouldn’t be better to use Wilco’s song “Happiness” at the end of the rallies. Everyone could sing along
So sad it's nothing
Happiness depends on who you blame

Much more chipper and futuristic, doncha think? A totally infectious concept that seems to be at the very heart of our wonder plagued civilization. We are all so wise and well informed, after all, nothing can stop us! All we have to do is keep foaming at the mouth.

Namaste!

[seemslikeadream]

[JackRiddler]

.

Watch the news report linked below, please:

75,000 Michigan ballots were not counted and will not be, now that Jill Stein's recount efforts have been killed in state courts! Most of these were cast in Detroit and Flint, and the official margin in Michigan was just 11,000 votes. If you're looking for election rigging, this is how it would have been done: through the long-standing practice of Republican-controlled states suppressing and not counting the votes of black people and poor people. Just like in Florida in 2000. (Back then it was also Greg Palast delivering the best news reports, while the corporate media ignored the story.)

A selective recount in the Philadelphia area had meanwhile cut Trump's lead by 30,000 votes before Pennsylvania killed the statewide recount. Why didn't the Clinton campaign with its deep pockets join the recount efforts?

Instead of hearing about the possible real rigging, we are now getting a CIA-led circus show about "Russian" hacking. None of the so-called revelations in the last few days have claimed any form of manipulation of the actual vote totals by the alleged hackers. It's all about how maybe Russians who maybe are associated with the Moscow government maybe hacked DNC and Podesta accounts and maybe provided the e-mails to Assange that Wikileaks then published. In short, nothing that was not already being claimed before the election.

And here comes the war party, McCain and Lindsey Graham in the lead, calling for a cyberwar with Russia. Don't get me wrong, who reading this wouldn't welcome evidence that sinks Trump? But this evidence is not being released, possibly because there is no evidence other than the circumstantial and speculative stuff you can read in the NYT today. And what do you think will be the likeliest result if this actually works? The only thing worse than Trump is Pence!

Let's say "Russia" really was behind the e-mail hacks. How did this affect the election? I'll tell you the main way: In the final month before the vote, the Clinton campaign was goaded into committing collective suicide by devoting their media news-time to claiming a Russian connection to Trump. They didn't bother with presenting a credible programmatic alternative that might actually interest American voters. (Platforms posted online do not count - what they said on TV counts.)

The Clinton campaign's last ad-buys, meanwhile, were all about how Trump is bad for children, as if the corporate media were not already presenting the same message. Did this win a single net vote? Trump's last ad buys were about addressing income inequality (with a not-so-subtle anti-Semitic encoding).

In other words, Trump told the more effective lie. He maintained the Republican vote at the Romney 2012 level, while millions who had voted for Obama didn't vote for Clinton. She still won the popular vote by a quarter-mile, but her side didn't fight. Her concession speech didn't bother with even noting her victory. Her message was to support the new president!

And what's the real story supported in the Wikileaks releases? 1. That the DNC worked to sabotage Sanders during the primary campaign. Which of course, we already knew. 2. That the Clinton campaign hoped to see Trump as their general election opponent. Whether or not their efforts to talk him up with journalists had an impact with the corporate media is questionable. As a function of business model, they chose to devote 50% of their total campaign news air-time in 2015 and during the primary season to one of their own Reality TV products, guaranteeing that Trump would win the Republican nomination. When they turned on him, it was far too late.

Strategically, #2 was not such a bad idea: Clinton should have had a landslide against the #KayfabeHitler. Of course the corporate media, the "fake news" tactics of the Alt-Right, and the Republican-led voter suppression (and maybe the suspect vote-counting machines) all had their effects. But losing the Elecoral College to Trump still required the worst campaign strategy of modern U.S. election history. The blame for that lies not with Russia, but with the Clintonistas in their neoliberal echo chamber.

Greg Palast: By Rejecting Recount, Is Michigan Covering Up 75,000 Ballots Never Counted?

DECEMBER 13, 2016

https://www.democracynow.org/2016/12/13 ... recount_is

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue our update on the presidential election to look at the results of the recount effort in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Wisconsin’s Election Commission announced Monday, after its recount, Republican Donald Trump’s margin of victory widened by about 162 votes. In Pennsylvania, a federal judge Monday rejected a request to recount paper ballots and scan some counties’ election systems for signs of hacking. Hours later, state officials certified the results of the election, with Trump winning by less than 1 percent of the vote. Former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein had requested recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, three states where Donald Trump narrowly beat Hillary Clinton. A federal judge had already ordered Michigan’s Board of Elections to stop the state’s electoral recount. Trump won Michigan by fewer than 11,000 votes out of nearly 4.8 million votes cast.

We turn now to Rolling Stone investigative reporter Greg Palast, who went to Michigan to investigate the vote. He filed this report for Democracy Now!

GREG PALAST: Officially, Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes. But a record 75,335 votes were never counted. Most of these votes that went missing were in Detroit and Flint, Michigan, majority-black cities. How could this happen? Did the Russians do it? Nyet. You don’t need Russians to help the Michigan GOP. How exactly do you disappear 75,000 votes? They call them spoiled votes. How do you spoil votes? Not by leaving them out of the fridge. Most are lost because of the bubbles. Thousands of bubbles couldn’t be read by the optical scanning machines.
SUE: I saw a lot of red ink. I saw a lot of checkmarks.
GREG PALAST: Sue is a systems analyst who took part in the recount.
SUE: We saw a lot of ballots that weren’t originally counted, because those don’t scan into the machine.
GREG PALAST: The machines in Michigan and Wisconsin can’t read these bubbles. But a much better machine, the human eyeball, can easily read what the voter intended. Both Michigan and Wisconsin, you have to pay the state millions of dollars to have humans read the ballots. This woman, Jill Stein, raised the money for the human count of these uncounted ballots. According to Stein, this human review was finding a whole lot of...
DR. JILL STEIN: Votes that were blank, many of which were in communities of color that are historically Democratic. So, obviously, this was a—this was a concern for him.
GREG PALAST: Enough votes that Mr. Trump would lose. So, then, a GOP politician came to Mr. Trump’s rescue.
This is Trumpville, rural Michigan. And this is their hero, the man who shut down the recount. Bill Schuette is the Republican attorney general of Michigan. He issued an order saying that no one would be allowed to look at the ballots in over half the precincts, 59 percent, in the Detroit area—the very place that most of the votes had gone missing.
DR. JILL STEIN: And it’s shocking to think that the discounting of these votes may be actually making the critical difference in the outcome of the election.
GREG PALAST: We went to speak with the secretary of state, whose spokesman said the missing votes in Detroit were simply people who waited in line but didn’t want to vote for president.
FRED WOODHAMS: You know, I think when you look at the unfavorability ratings that were reported for both major-party candidates, it’s probably not that surprising.
GREG PALAST: Back in Detroit, there was another explanation. Some of the votes missing resulted when 87 machines, responsible for counting thousands of ballots, broke down. Carlos Garcia is a media specialist at Michigan State University. He witnessed the breakdown.
CARLOS GARCIA: The start of polling at 7:00 a.m., the machine didn’t work. And at 9:15 a.m., they brought in a replacement, and it was replaced by 9:30. The people that didn’t wait, their ballots were in the bottom in the ballot box.
GREG PALAST: But they weren’t scanned.
CARLOS GARCIA: And so, at the time when they started having anyone who was waiting scan their ballots, those ballots were not taken out of the machine. So, any new scanned ballots were falling in on top of the old ones.
GREG PALAST: They weren’t counted. Activist Anita Belle.
ANITA BELLE: Only 50 ballots in the ballot box. Hot mess. Hot mess!
GREG PALAST: How did Detroit end up in a hot mess with these ballot-destroying machines? Republican state officials took direct control of the government’s spending in Flint and Detroit. Result? Flint’s water was poisoned, and the voting system of Detroit was poisoned, as well.
DR. JILL STEIN: Whereas if you’re voting in a wealthy white suburban precinct, no sweat, your vote will be validated, you can have assurance and confidence in your vote. But if you’re African-American, these questions cannot be asked.
GREG PALAST: And then there are voters who never got to vote in the first place.
DR. JILL STEIN: Whether it’s because of the chaos in—you know, some polling centers are closed, and then some are moved, and there’s all kinds of mixups. So, a lot of people are filling out provisional ballots in the first place, or they were being tossed off the voter rolls by Interstate Crosscheck.
GREG PALAST: Crosscheck is a list that was created by Donald Trump’s operative, Kris Kobach, to hunt down and imprison voters who illegally voted or registered in two states in one election.
FRED WOODHAMS: Michigan participates in the Interstate Crosscheck, like a number of other states, so we do match voters who may be registered in another state.
GREG PALAST: Do you know how many names are on it?
FRED WOODHAMS: There’s a lot of names.
GREG PALAST: There’s a lot of names. Yeah, I’d say there’s a lot of names. Here’s Michigan: 499,092 Michiganders are on this suspect list.
FRED WOODHAMS: Mm-hmm.
GREG PALAST: Is this to eliminate fraud, or is this to eliminate voters?
FRED WOODHAMS: It’s to clean our voter lists and ensure—
GREG PALAST: Well, why would you—now—
FRED WOODHAMS: —that there’s no vulnerability for fraud.
GREG PALAST: No—so, do you believe that there’s fraud in Michigan?
FRED WOODHAMS: Well, we’ve been very aggressive in closing vulnerabilities and loopholes to fraud.
GREG PALAST: Well, I see the aggression. Here, Michael Bernard Brown—
FRED WOODHAMS: Mm-hmm.
GREG PALAST: —is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Anthony Brown. Then Michael Timothy Brown is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Johnnie Brown.
FRED WOODHAMS: Mm-hmm. And you’re correct that, you know, I’m sure that there are some false positives that show to us. But we go through it thoroughly, and we’re not just canceling people.
GREG PALAST: Statistical experts who have looked at this list say it’s heavily overweighted against minorities, because it’s using—it’s just basically a list of common names.
FRED WOODHAMS: I’m not familiar with that.
GREG PALAST: Michael Brown. Jose Garcia.
FRED WOODHAMS: Mm-hmm.
GREG PALAST: Could you imagine that that would be a problem, in terms of—
FRED WOODHAMS: I did not know Brown was identified with one race or the other.
GREG PALAST: Common—OK, you know that Brown was a common name in America, and a black name?
FRED WOODHAMS: It’s a very common name.
GREG PALAST: It’s a very common black name in America, yes?
FRED WOODHAMS: I’ve known a lot of white Browns.
GREG PALAST: Donald Trump promotes Kris Kobach’s and Michigan’s Crosscheck crusade. Stein doesn’t buy it.
DR. JILL STEIN: If he thinks that Michael Louis Brown is the same person as Michael James Brown, he’s confused. And the American people should not be duped into believing him for a minute. It’s the opposite of what he is saying: not people who are voting fraudulently and illegally, but actually legitimate voters who have had their right to vote taken away from them by Kris Kobach and by Donald Trump. And there is no legitimacy to his claim that there are fraudulent voters that have distorted the outcome of this election. It is a Jim Crow system, and it all needs to be fixed. It’s not rocket science. This is just plain, basic democracy. And I think the people of Detroit are so inspired and principled and passionate. They really are a model for this struggle around the nation.
GREG PALAST: And so the recount slogged through, uncovering missing votes and missing voters that could change the presidency. So Republicans rushed in to shut down the recount completely. Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, here in Michigan—we may be way north of the Mason-Dixon Line, but the elections are still run by Jim Crow. For Democracy Now!, this is Greg Palast.
AMY GOODMAN: And joining us from Washington, D.C., is Rolling Stone reporter Greg Palast. His new film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. So, Greg, what most surprised you in this latest research in Michigan?

GREG PALAST: Well, you know, people are looking for Russians, but what we had is a real Jim Crow election. Trump, for example, in Michigan, won by less than 11,000 votes. It looks like we had about 55,000 voters, mostly minorities, removed by this racist system called Crosscheck. In addition, you had a stoppage—even before the courts ordered the complete stop of the vote in Michigan, you had the Republican state officials completely sabotage the recount. They said, in Detroit, where there were 75,335 supposedly blank ballots for president—75,000—they said you can’t count 59 percent of the precincts, where most of the votes were missing. There were 87 machines in Detroit that were—that didn’t function. They were supposed to count about a thousand ballots each. You’re talking about a massive blockade of the black vote in Detroit and Flint, enough votes, undoubtedly, to overturn that election.

And you saw a mirror of this in Wisconsin, where, for example, there were many, many votes, thousands of votes, lost in the Milwaukee area, another African-American-heavy area. And there, instead of allowing that eyeball count of the votes that are supposedly blank, they said, "Oh, we’ll just run them back through the machines." It’s like betting on an instant replay. It’s the same game. They just put them through the bad machines again. This is not just a bad way to count the ballots; it’s a way to not count African-American ballots.

And I want to emphasize that, Amy, which is that when we use the term "recount," we’re actually talking about ballots that were never counted in the first place—way over 75,000 in Michigan. There are enough ballots uncounted that if you looked at them with the human eye, because the machines—these are terrible machines which can’t read your little bubble marks next to the candidate’s name on the piece of paper. If the human eye looks at these things, it’s easy to tell that someone voted for a presidential candidate. A lot of the machines said that they voted for two candidates. Not many people do that. The human eye could do that.

But the question is: Where are these ballots not counted? They are not counted in African-American areas, in Dearborn, where there’s a heavy Arab-American community, in Latino communities. So, while we’re discussing hacking the machines, a lot of this was old-fashioned Jim Crow tactics, you know, from way back. And by the way, a lot of this is the result of the destruction and the gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which this is the first election post the Voting Rights Act. So, we saw—and Jill Stein said it correct—she expected to see a lot of hacking. What she found was, as she said, a Jim Crow election.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, we just have a minute, but what do you think needs to happen now?

GREG PALAST: Well, we need to have kind of a Standing Rock for voting. We need to restart the voting rights movement, because with Jeff Sessions coming in as attorney general, we have to start investigations now. I’m in Washington because 18 Million Rising, the Asian-American group, and the Congressional Black Caucus Representative Hastings, they have presented 50,000 signatures to the Justice Department, begging Justice, please, open an investigation of this racist Crosscheck system created by Donald Trump’s operatives, operating in 30 states, knocking off Asian-American, African-American, Latino voters. Please open the investigation now, before it becomes a new Justice Department—or maybe it’s in an Injustice Department.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you, Greg, for your report. Rolling Stone reporter Greg Palast, his new film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, based on his original book by the same title.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we’ll talk about another Trump appointment. Stay with us.

[OP ED]

I seem to recall being mocked for suggestions that MI vote was stolen. I don't know because I live in one of those places. Also the AG's office isn't accepting calls.

Stuff like this, contra assertions above, is what made me start looking more seriously at pizza, because I can't think of very many reasons someone would let something they've worked their entire life for be stolen away.

[stefano]

Just finished a really great long read by Ta-Nehisi Coates: My President was Black

Worth your time!

Six months later the awful price of a black presidency would be known to those students, even as the country seemed determined not to acknowledge it. In the days after Donald Trump’s victory, there would be an insistence that something as “simple” as racism could not explain it. As if enslavement had nothing to do with global economics, or as if lynchings said nothing about the idea of women as property. As though the past 400 years could be reduced to the irrational resentment of full lips. No. Racism is never simple. And there was nothing simple about what was coming, or about Obama, the man who had unwittingly summoned this future into being.

It was said that the Americans who’d supported Trump were victims of liberal condescension. The word racist would be dismissed as a profane slur put upon the common man, as opposed to an accurate description of actual men. “We simply don’t yet know how much racism or misogyny motivated Trump voters,” David Brooks would write in The New York Times. “If you were stuck in a jobless town, watching your friends OD on opiates, scrambling every month to pay the electric bill, and then along came a guy who seemed able to fix your problems and hear your voice, maybe you would stomach some ugliness, too.” This strikes me as perfectly logical. Indeed, it could apply just as well to Louis Farrakhan’s appeal to the black poor and working class. But whereas the followers of an Islamophobic white nationalist enjoy the sympathy that must always greet the salt of the earth, the followers of an anti-Semitic black nationalist endure the scorn that must ever greet the children of the enslaved.
...
In the week after the election, I was a mess. I had not seen my wife in two weeks. I was on deadline for this article. My son was struggling in school. The house was in disarray. I played Marvin Gaye endlessly—“When you left, you took all of me with you.” Friends began to darkly recall the ghosts of post-Reconstruction. The election of Donald Trump confirmed everything I knew of my country and none of what I could accept. The idea that America would follow its first black president with Donald Trump accorded with its history. I was shocked at my own shock. I had wanted Obama to be right.

I still want Obama to be right. I still would like to fold myself into the dream. This will not be possible.

[JackRiddler]

Pretty good backspin on the McCarthyism!

(just anything... it's almost like an art form.)

"McCarthyism" is a very American phenomenon. (For me, speaking historically, this evokes the paranoid anti-communist style and purges that got going after WWII, which were rooted in the first red scare from WWI. Both started under Democratic administrations, and both were run partly by J. Edgar Hoover, although it's McCarthy's name that got attached to the madness, since he was the most extreme exemplar who ultimately was disciplined for being too crazy.)

Sonce it is an American phenomenon, it is never surprising to see revivals of its techniques in more than one place and for different functions, all at the same time. It does not suprise me to see a Trumpian McCarthyite revival at the same time the Clintonists/neoliberals are pushing a new Cold War hysteria about "Russia" taking over America.

Only Trump, however, actually started his career with Roy Cohn himself as his mentor and counsel in court. And if you don't fully know who Ray Cohn is, and what his significance is, then you should read up and figure it out. This is hardly just "anything," and it requires no art to point out.

In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Cohn showed a total lack of repentance on for his crimes during the 1950s, including his work to get Ethel Rosenberg executed. He continued using a style of attack that obviously rhymes with Trump's own, and that he no doubt helped to cultivate in the younger Donald. But it is not so hard to learn how to be an asshole and a predatory alpha villain. Trump had plenty of examples besides his "mentor" Cohn. His own father, for one.

It is probably even more significant that in the same years Cohn was representing Trump, he was also a lead lawyer for the New York mob chiefs of the time, Gotti and co.

(Hmmm, construction in NYNJ and casinos in Atlantic City, which then went "bankrupt" through losing "one billion dollars." What could possibly be the connection between that and mobsters?)

I talked with a friend in Missouri the other day, and he had this to say about the Trump supporters there: "They're not from New York, they don't know him. They still think he's a successful businessman."

I wish that were enough, but what my friend meant was not that being from New York makes you smarter. It just means that, if you have lived long enough, you have also been exposed to this predatory and criminal character constantly, for more than 30 years. He has been famous longer than the Clintons, and as well-known as them, the whole time.

.

To this I'd add how annoying the calls have been for me (and other "liberals") to get in touch with the Trump voters and their supposed concerns. As if there aren't any Trump voters in New York, as if there are not 60 million plus Trump voters in this extremely fucked-up nation. And as if they're not also in my fucking family!

I have stuck with this thread title, and agree with it still, but it should have been longer: "Congratulations, Stupid - and Congratulations, Wolves." As in, man is wolf to man.

Watching Trump and being unable to read him pretty much puts one on the emotional intelligence level of those who think professional wrestling is real. (Watching Clinton and being unable to read through her puts one on a more middling level of intelligence: those who think American presidential elections are real.)

Then there are those who read Trump just fine - his New York City voting base, for example. In New York the Trump voters consist of just the core supporters, minus the patsies. And they are not stupid, at least not in the sense that they are blind idiots being conned into thinking Trump is some kind of anti-establishment good guy. They know what he is, and they are happy with it. They identify with it.

.

[OP ED]

It's going to be so entertaining.

I should get televisions.

[JackRiddler]

It's going to be so entertaining.

I should get televisions.

You can watch the show with 8bit.

[dada]

Alright. Liberals and points left are all friends again. The media is still a mindfuck brainwash con. Business as usual in DC.

So where do we go from here, Jack? Any long-range prognostications? Let's try to influence the future by skrying on it.

Wherever it is, I'm willing to help. I have no power, money or influence, for what it's worth. But my mind is open to suggestions.

All suggestions welcome, by the way. Not only Jack.

[JackRiddler]

Alright. Liberals and points left are all friends again.

Depends how defined, right? I resist easy attacks on "liberals" when the term is not defined clearly, given the abuse of this term in the American context of the last 40+ years as a right-wing caricature of everything to the left of Reagan. I am not liberal in any proper definition of the term (except maybe in the sense of supporting protection of individual rights), but you and I are in an environment wherein a majority by a long process of training and conditioning have been rendered incapable of identifying us except as "liberal."

What next? I certainly hope two million at the Million Women March, for a start. So big that it dwarfs the Inauguration turnout. In a way that can't be ignored. Because that will be attempted. The same media that 99% made the Trump candidacy, and then attacked it for a month, will continue to operate predictably and by business model in the next phase, by completely normalizing everything about it, and legitimating all of its views as part of the spectrum of acceptability no matter how openly and aggressively stupid, violent or destructive of world and country. Since it's the president of still the democratic and most wunnerful and bestest country in the universe ever conceivable. A big chunk of the market voted for the beast, after all, and though they don't cover it the media corps are of course very well aware that this demographic has a higher average income than that of the non-Trump voters.

The other danger if MWM is successful will be cooptation, of course. I could stand Sanders and Warren speaking, but god what if Clinton should appear?!

.

[JackRiddler]

I am logging this here for completeness' sake:

Yeah, it was fraud. Yeah, the electors didn't give a shit. Yeah, it still deserves to be reported. The truth matters.

The Republican Sabotage of the
Vote Recounts in Michigan and Wisconsin

Sunday, December 18, 2016

By Greg Palast for Truthout

Before the Electoral College votes, they should know this.

Michigan officials declared in late November that Trump won the state's count by 10,704 votes. But hold on – a record 75,355 ballots were not counted.

The uncounted ballots came mostly from Detroit and Flint, majority-Black cities that vote Democratic.

According to the machines that read their ballots, these voters waited in line, sometimes for hours, yet did not choose a president. Really?

This week, I drove through a snowstorm to Lansing to hear the official explanation from Ruth Johnson, the Republican secretary of state. I was directed to official flack-catcher Fred Woodhams who told me, "You know, I think when you look at the unfavorability ratings that were reported for both major-party candidates, it's probably not that surprising."

Sleuthing about in Detroit, I found another explanation: bubbles.

Bubbles?

Michigan votes on paper ballots. If you don't fill the bubble completely, the machine records that you didn't vote for president.

Susan, a systems analyst who took part in the hand recount initiated by Jill Stein, told me, "I saw a lot of red ink. I saw a lot of checkmarks. We saw a lot of ballots that weren't originally counted, because those don't scan into the machine." (I can only use her first name because she's terrified of retribution from Trump followers in the white suburb where she lives.)

Other ballots were not counted because the machines thought the voter chose two presidential candidates.

How come more ballots were uncounted in Detroit and Flint than in the white 'burbs and rural counties? Are the machines themselves racist?

No, but they are old, and in some cases, busted. An astonishing 87 machines broke down in Detroit, responsible for counting tens of thousands of ballots. Many more were simply faulty and uncalibrated.

I met with Carlos Garcia, University of Michigan multimedia specialist, who, on Election Day, joined a crowd waiting over two hours for the busted machine to be fixed.

Some voters left; others filled out ballots that were chucked, uncounted, into the bottom of machine. When the machine was fixed, Carlos explained, "Any new scanned ballots were falling in on top of the old ones." It would not be possible to recount those dumped ballots.

This is not an unheard of phenomenon: I know two voters who lost their vote in another state (California) because they didn't fill in the bubble – my parents! Meet mom and dad in my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vi2DBJtOoSI

How did Detroit end up with the crap machines?

Detroit is bankrupt, so every expenditure must be approved by "emergency" overlords appointed by the Republican governor. The GOP operatives refused the city's pre-election pleas to fix and replace the busted machines.

"We had the rollout [of new machines] in our budget," Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey said. "No money was appropriated by the state."

Same in Flint. GOP state officials cut the budget for water service there, resulting in the contamination of the city's water supply with lead. The budget cuts also poisoned the presidential race.

The Human Eye Count

There is, however, an extraordinary machine that can read the ballots, whether the bubbles are filled or checked, whether in black ink or red, to determine the voters' intent: the human eye.

That's why Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, paid millions of dollars for a human eyeball count of the uncounted votes. While labeled a "recount," its real purpose is to count the 75,355 votes never counted in the first place.

Count those ballots, mostly in Detroit and Flint, and Trump's victory could vanish.

Adding to the pile of uncounted ballots are the large numbers of invalidated straight-ticket votes in Detroit. In Michigan, you can choose to make one mark that casts your vote for every Democrat (or Republican) for every office. Voters know that they can vote the Democratic ballot but write in a protest name – popular were "Bernie Sanders" and "Mickey Mouse" – but their ballot, they knew, would count for Clinton.

However, the Detroit machines simply invalidated the ballots with protest write-ins because the old Opti-Scans wrongly tallied these as "over-votes" (i.e., voting for two candidates). The human eye would catch this mistake.

But Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette stymied Stein's human eye count. The Republican pol issued an order saying that no one could look at the ballots cast in precincts where the number of votes and voters did not match – exactly the places where you'd want to look for the missing votes. He also ordered a ban on counting ballots from precincts where the seals on the machines had been broken – in other words, where there is evidence of tampering. Again, those are the machines that most need investigating. The result: The recount crews were denied access to more than half of all Detroit precincts (59 percent).

I met with Stein, who told me she was stunned by this overt sabotage of the recount. "It's shocking to think that the discounting of these votes may be making the critical difference in the outcome of the election," she said.

This story was repeated in Wisconsin, which uses the same Opti-Scan system as Michigan. There, the uncounted votes, sometimes called "spoiled" or "invalidated" ballots, were concentrated in Black-majority Milwaukee. Stein put up over $3 million of donated funds for the human eye review in Wisconsin, but GOP state officials authorized Milwaukee County to recount simply by running the ballots through the same blind machines. Not surprisingly, this instant replay produced the same questionable result.

Adding Un-Votes to the Uncounted

Stein was also disturbed by the number of voters who never got to cast ballots. "Whether it's because of the chaos [because] some polling centers are closed, and then some are moved, and there's all kinds of mix-ups," she said. "So, a lot of people are filling out provisional ballots, or they were being tossed off the voter rolls by Interstate Crosscheck."

Interstate Crosscheck is a list that was created by Donald Trump supporter and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to hunt down and imprison voters who illegally voted or registered in two states in one election.

An eye-popping 449,092 Michiganders are on the Crosscheck suspect list. The list, which my team uncovered in an investigation for Rolling Stone, cost at least 50,000 of the state's voters their registrations. Disproportionately, the purged voters were Blacks, Latinos and that other solid Democratic demographic, Muslim Americans. (Dearborn, Michigan, has the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the US.)

The Michigan Secretary of State's spokesman Woodhams told me the purpose of the mass purge was, "to clean our voter lists and ensure that there's no vulnerability for fraud. We've been very aggressive in closing vulnerabilities and loopholes to fraud."

While Woodhams did not know of a single conviction for double-voting in Michigan, the "aggression" in purging the lists was clear. I showed him part of the Michigan purge list that he thought was confidential. The "double voters" are found by simply matching first and last names. Michael Bernard Brown is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Anthony Brown. Michael Timothy Brown is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Johnnie Brown.

Woodhams assured me the GOP used the Trump-Kobach list with care, more or less. He said, "I'm sure that there are some false positives. But we go through it thoroughly, and we're not just canceling people."

As to the racial profiling inherent in the list? Did he agree with our experts that by tagging thousands of voters named Jose Garcia and Michael Brown there would be a bias in his purge list?

The GOP spokesman replied, "I've known a lot of white Browns."

Jill Stein didn't buy it. Responding to both Michigan's and Trump's claim that voter rolls are loaded with fraudulent double voters, Stein said, "It's the opposite of what he is saying: not people who are voting fraudulently and illegally, but actually legitimate voters who have had their right to vote taken away from them by Kris Kobach and by Donald Trump."

Crosscheck likely cost tens of thousands their vote in Pennsylvania as well.

"It is a Jim Crow system, and it all needs to be fixed," Stein concluded. "It's not rocket science. This is just plain, basic democracy."