We’re still kinda fucked.
Agreed. But just imagine if someone with a clue about anything at all had some influence with the President.
The startling amateurishness of the Trump team never ceases to amaze me:
https://thinkprogress.org/anonymous-leak-racist-attacks-mueller-trump-da557b23e613/
You have the resources of the President of the United States at your disposal. You have a tight relationship with the end of the news spectrum that deals less in facts and more in sensationalism (your son-in-law ran a New York tabloid, the National Enquirer runs anything you want, Fox News defends your every errant outburst). You have more multimillionaires working with you than any recent President. You have a direct line to Wikileaks and Moscow if you need something to happen, appearing like it came from somewhere else. And all you need to do is discredit Mueller’s investigations.
So what do you do? You just call up your old buddy Richard the gossip columnist over at the New York Post and impersonate an anonymous source. Do you delegate it to a staffer, maybe someone with communications, legal, or media experience? No, you’ve done this impersonation thing before and you have the world’s most convincing fake accent. You cannot leave this to chance – you give up that coveted 1:30 tee time and make the call yourself. Do you run the text of what you say by anyone to see if it sounds either incredibly racist or maybe even idiosyncratically Trumpian? No, man. Hold my beer. I got this.
Seriously, if Trump was even 1% as competent as Nixon or Putin, we’d be fucked.
PM sent. Warning: the full project files are bigger than the ROTJ files you deleted…
Bannon is saying people around Trump were “treasonous” for meeting with the Russian.
Can’t tell if this latest move by Bannon is a play for leniency or relevance.
I hope he gets neither.
I can still see it.
Probably because you’re the author. I saw it before, and it’s definitely not there now.
I don’t know how YouTube comments work (much as I don’t know how sausage is made, because I don’t want to), but using the term “a-hole” probably gave him all the leeway he needed, if he needed any, to remove it. He just argues with everyone else.
It would be fun to see the fur fly if they did ban him. What are his followers going to do? Piss and moan about it on the very site they would now despise. Not like twitter has any real competition.
Trump’s followers have already migrated to Gab since Twitter started their fascist purge. But I suspect that won’t stop them from pissing and moaning anyway, because they’re pros at this point.
From Donald Trump:
“North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”From the Twitter Rules:
“You may not make specific threats of violence or wish for the serious physical harm, death, or disease of an individual or group of people.”Open and shut case.
Actually I think there have been far clearer violations, but they’re numerous enough everything else is just gravy.
The argument of “Twitter is responsible for letting Trump start nuclear war!” seems unconvincing to me. If Twitter has never existed, Trump would have other means to star nuclear war.
No, but the argument “Twitter has rules and procedures for repeated abusers of the platform and it should enforce those rules equally” has some merit.
Lots of people saying Twitter should suspend Trump over this.
I’m not so convinced.
Trump has violated The Twitter Rules about 70 gazillion times already. The question is: how far do the special “Trump Rules” they’ve already crafted just for him extend? Which is the underlying problem with making special carve-outs for important people.
I don’t think (and I don’t know of anyone else who thinks) that Republicans are maliciously trying to hurt anyone.
These things are often packed into an ideology that makes it seem like it’s not hurting people.
For example, there’s a belief that hardworking red states pay the taxes that support the freeloading blue states. So a tax bill that hits blue states harder is about fairness, not hurting people. Similarly, making healthcare unaffordable is about the free market. It’s about choice, not hurting people. And although the data indicates otherwise, there’s a belief that cutting taxes can increase government revenue, because a guy drew it on a napkin once, so we’ll increase those services the second all that extra revenue starts pouring in… any minute now, just wait. In the meantime, here’s another tax cut for rich people. Maybe if we cut them more it’ll work. This time for sure. And so on and so on until you’re Kansas.
I forget where I’d heard this phrase before: “So, you’re saying it’s a conspiracy?” “No, it’s worse than a conspiracy. It’s an ideology.”
Yes, Politico is clearly right-wing because it said almost all Democrats are evil.
brb gonna go shave.
I almost had half a beard after not shaving for a week. I would make a lousy Democrat.
There’s another kind?
Three-quarters of a beard?
This article’s a little outdated, but an important counterpoint to darth_ender’s point:
https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2013/08/the-10-best-mustaches-in-congress-169827
Fred Milton Beat Poodle is the best! Especially “When a Dog is Barfing”!
As long as Earnest and Zippy make regular appearances, I suppose it’s the same. New media bah!
Dave Barry writes books now?
Off my lawn.
No chance.
Welcome back
I spent a solid minute trying to figure out how anyone could welcome someone back who didn’t use idiosyncratic line breaks or the word “later”. Turns out you were just welcoming him back.
Police murder an innocent man based on a fraudulent phone call. The police brutality angle is what people are ignoring here.
Looks like at least half of the feedback on Yahoo News to this article is about the inappropriate police response. Even some police responding saying that the lack of verification before sending in a SWAT team, let alone drawing weapons, was very strange. Nobody seems to be ignoring it.
And it appears the instigator has now been apprehended.
Hard to say. If you noticed aliasing before, it may have been from the BDSup2Sub semitransparency bug I mentioned earlier–some earlier versions of the project were affected by it before I found a workaround. But it’s equally likely it was something else. Since 1080p is unlikely to be a problem, you could certainly try it first.
Also, this new info further establishes the timeline. We now have yet more confirmation that the Trump campaign knew the Russians had Clinton’s e-mails months before they were released to Wikileaks (meaning the high-level link between the campaign and Russian intelligence). Every new independent confirmation is a new set of witnesses for the Trump legal team to attempt to discredit. Smearing Australian diplomats is certainly not below them, but you can only smear so many unrelated figures before it starts to look suspicious to even some of your partisan supporters.
PM sent. Technically there are small and probably not relevant differences. The 720p subs are smaller and might work better with a space-limited format like BD25. Also some players may have bugs and either not scale the subtitles at all, or scale them improperly (the BDSup2Sub utility scales semitransparency badly, but I haven’t seen any bugs in a player yet). 720p subtitles don’t scale up to 4K as nicely as 1080p ones. But for most purposes, no – it should not matter. I’d match resolutions to the video just to be 100% certain there won’t be issues, but chances are you won’t see issues either way.
The following is a thought experiment, so please do not take too much umbrage.
In the 2016 election, Trump [earned] 58,501,015 votes and Clinton [earned] 57,099,728 votes - if we exclude the votes in California for both candidates. Considering the matter on a state-by-state basis, it’s funny that California would negate the popular choice of the 49 other states. Consider further that even if we also exclude Texas’s votes, Trump still wins the popular vote in the remaining 48 states. That is how big a difference the people of California can make in a popular vote system.
I want a candidate to be made to appeal to as broad a swath of America as possible. I abhor that pretty much every GOP candidate in the 2016 primary bowed to the ethanol lobby in states like Iowa. And yet, it is one example of how candidates are made to appeal to interests in individual states. If you think the ethanol subsidies are great, this should appeal to you.
Voting demographics are not divided along state lines. You don’t have one state full of liberals and another full of conservatives. You just have all states with slightly different mixes of all the national voting demographics. You simply cannot target California voters as a whole for no other reason than that Dana Rohrabacher and Maxine Waters are both Californians. You can only target one voting demographic or another, and pick up ideologically-aligned supporters across the country, possibly picking up states in the process.
Yes, there are state issues like ethanol which may gain you a few more percentage points in specific states, but that’s really only a few percentage points (offset in an NPV system by equivalent losses in other states–these offsets exist in the electoral system too, but they may be in states you have written off). Also, larger states with more diversified economies tend not to have one issue that appeals to the whole state, except in that it may appeal to whatever’s the dominant demographic in that state.
So sure, California can throw the election one way or another. Or Texas, or Florida. But the margin of the last election was 2.9 million votes. That’s Kansas–consider how many Kansas Democrats don’t vote because the current system ensures their votes will never count. If nothing else, the NPV should improve opposition turnout in “safe” states on both sides.
Clinton was faulted for not making the efforts she needed to in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The idea that a Republican - let alone Trump - would win those three states was far-fetched. If a candidate thought they could ignore those three states now, they certainly would under a NPV. I think that shows that one can’t count on simply picking up ideologically-aligned supporters across the country - there are people who can be swayed one way or another. It shows that, as you rightly point out, demographics cross state lines. But they’re not just ideological. The idea now is that a future Democratic candidate won’t take those voters and those states for granted. I think that’s a really good thing.
The only system under which a Democratic Presidential candidate would make appeals to voters in Wyoming, Alabama, and Oklahoma would be something like the NPV, where those votes would actually be counted for something. Similarly, Republicans candidates may visit Hawaii for more than just the golf courses. The EC encourages candidates to focus exclusively on swing states and ignore the rest of the country (but they should, as you point out, know what the swing states are). A popular vote means they focus on getting the most voters, in any state with voters. Sure, big states have more voters, but every state has some, and they all count equally. And I think that’s really a better thing.
EDIT: Example – last election, I had someone come to my door to encourage me to vote for Hillary. I live in what’s known as a non-swing state. That’s the first time anyone has ever come to my door to ask me to vote for a particular Presidential candidate, over several decades. Now, yes, that’s a good thing–the Dems cared to send someone, I feel special like a desired voter, yay for that. But it’s also a bad thing–I knew the Dems were wasting money sending people to doorbell my street when my state was in the bag. If we had the NPV, it would not have been a wasted outreach, plus I’d have likely also had the opportunity to tell some redcap to get the fuck off my porch.
(However, I do think we should expand the size of Congress which would greatly mitigate the problem of a disparity between the Electoral and Popular vote.)
I’m not so are about the Congress idea. 535 people is already quite a a lot to know, and increasing the size of Congress might introduce new inefficiencies and make it harder for Congesspeople to collaborate. I hear this is a problem in the EU legislature.
There are downsides. As you politely observe we have quite a lot of uncooperative nitwits already. The Capitol would end up looking like the Republic Senate too. But there could be some way to work out the logistics. I don’t know how the Chinese National People’s Congress works but I guess it does.
There are also additional upsides. In addition to making the Electoral College more closely match the popular vote (I should say again, because they used to be much more closely aligned than they are today), smaller Congressional districts are harder to gerrymander to very much effect.
The following is a thought experiment, so please do not take too much umbrage.
In the 2016 election, Trump [earned] 58,501,015 votes and Clinton [earned] 57,099,728 votes - if we exclude the votes in California for both candidates. Considering the matter on a state-by-state basis, it’s funny that California would negate the popular choice of the 49 other states. Consider further that even if we also exclude Texas’s votes, Trump still wins the popular vote in the remaining 48 states. That is how big a difference the people of California can make in a popular vote system.
I want a candidate to be made to appeal to as broad a swath of America as possible. I abhor that pretty much every GOP candidate in the 2016 primary bowed to the ethanol lobby in states like Iowa. And yet, it is one example of how candidates are made to appeal to interests in individual states. If you think the ethanol subsidies are great, this should appeal to you.
Voting demographics are not divided along state lines. You don’t have one state full of liberals and another full of conservatives. You just have all states with slightly different mixes of all the national voting demographics. You simply cannot target California voters as a whole for no other reason than that Dana Rohrabacher and Maxine Waters are both Californians. You can only target one voting demographic or another, and pick up ideologically-aligned supporters across the country, possibly picking up states in the process.
Yes, there are state issues like ethanol which may gain you a few more percentage points in specific states, but that’s really only a few percentage points (offset in an NPV system by equivalent losses in other states–these offsets exist in the electoral system too, but they may be in states you have written off). Also, larger states with more diversified economies tend not to have one issue that appeals to the whole state, except in that it may appeal to whatever’s the dominant demographic in that state.
So sure, California can throw the election one way or another. Or Texas, or Florida. But the margin of the last election was 2.9 million votes. That’s Kansas–consider how many Kansas Democrats don’t vote because the current system ensures their votes will never count. If nothing else, the NPV should improve opposition turnout in “safe” states on both sides.
Going by the popular vote isn’t going to fix the underlying problems with the first-past-the-post system.
No, but the electoral college is a problem that can be fixed without a constitutional amendment.
Such a fix is a workaround, not the true solution, and I’m not sure I favor workarounds. I’m pretty firm in my conviction that if the Constitution isn’t working in some way, then the Constitution should get fixed instead of finding loopholes. Unfortunetly, the Constitution may be just a tad more difficult than desirable to amend.
The National Popular Vote is one workaround, but there are other things that I’d classify a lot closer to actual fixes which also do not require a Constitutional Amendment. The NPV is merely the method that, at least at the moment, is most likely to succeed.
PM sent.