24.2 %
12.1 %
30.3 %
27.3 %
6.1 %
Arizona’s “audit” is bad news for US democracy
On the surface, the Arizona audit didn’t work out for Trump or the Arizona GOP — that is, it didn’t find the election fraud they’ve alleged exists, contrary to all evidence. On another level, however, as the Washington Post’s Philip Bump pointed out Friday, Trump and company got exactly what they wanted.
“The Cyber Ninjas appear to have done exactly what they were hired to do,” Bump wrote ahead of the release of the final report. “They were not hired to recount ballots that had already been counted. They were, instead, hired to slather some semblance of authority on top of conspiracy theories. To anchor irrational assumptions about fraud to something resembling rationality.”
The problems with that are obvious — despite the complete lack of evidence, claims of voter fraud have taken root with a broad portion of the Republican electorate, election workers are facing a barrage of death threats and harassment, and a CNN/SSRS poll conducted earlier this month found that a slight majority of Americans, 56 percent, now feel that American democracy is “under attack.”
The prospect of more recounts to come in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Texas also means that problem isn’t likely to abate any time soon — and as the immediate calls for more “audits” by pro-Trump officials in Arizona underscore, the goal isn’t so much to confirm the accuracy of the 2020 election as to confirm a preconceived, false belief that the election was stolen from Trump.
“Though many may experience a short burst of schadenfreude at the Republicans’ failure here, the result isn’t really funny,” the Atlantic’s David Graham wrote on Friday. “All is not well that ends well. Faith in elections is essential to a functioning democracy, and Trump and his allies have sought to undercut the belief that the election system is accurate.”
A Texas judge ruled the far-right conspiracy theorist and Infowars host Alex Jones is liable for damages to families of children killed in the 2012 Newtown massacre in two lawsuits, after he repeatedly refused to produce documents for the court cases.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... ts-damages
The rulings are “default judgments”, or rare de facto losses, because of Jones’s repeated failure to comply with discovery, or the process of producing documents for a court case. The court will convene a jury to consider damages.
“The court finds that defendants’ failure to comply … is greatly aggravated by [their] consistent pattern of discovery abuse throughout similar cases pending before this court,” wrote the Texas judge, Maya Guerra Gamble, in a judgment reported by CNN.
“The court finds that defendants’ discovery conduct in this case is the result of flagrant bad faith and callous disregard for the responsibilities of discovery under the rule,” she wrote.
Malcolm Armsteen wrote: ↑Sat Oct 02, 2021 12:47 am Here we say 'reamed out with the raggedy end of a broom'.You know "reamed" was the verb that spring to mind, even before I scrolled down and saw this.
Malcolm Armsteen wrote: ↑Sat Oct 02, 2021 12:47 am Here we say 'reamed out with the raggedy end of a broom'.We Scots are fond of the expression “given a good pull-through with a Christmas tree”.
A Trump rally, at this point, is a political movement distilled into its purest form. It's the realm of flag-bedecked pick-up trucks, vendors selling obscenity-laced signs directed at Biden and Maga-hat-wearing die-hards sporting T-shirts that claim Democrats stole the 2020 election, that vaccines mandates are government dictatorship and - perhaps most importantly - that Trump will be back in 2024.They now have a Three Word Slogan for their hats:
Abernathy wrote:I thought they were going for “Make America Great Again - Again”That'd be more likely as it's less inflammatory ("Take America Back" is only on a hat after all), but this is the latter day GOP we're talking about. I don't know if you've read the article but it worryingly says a challenger to Trump would be more likely to come from the right than the left.
Boiler wrote: ↑Thu Oct 14, 2021 5:07 pm Just in case you thought he'd gone away...I tried that, but the guy at the checkout observed that it was rotten and well past its sell-by date.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-58904507
A Trump rally, at this point, is a political movement distilled into its purest form. It's the realm of flag-bedecked pick-up trucks, vendors selling obscenity-laced signs directed at Biden and Maga-hat-wearing die-hards sporting T-shirts that claim Democrats stole the 2020 election, that vaccines mandates are government dictatorship and - perhaps most importantly - that Trump will be back in 2024.They now have a Three Word Slogan for their hats:
"Take America Back".
Bones McCoy wrote: ↑Thu Oct 14, 2021 8:52 pmBest before: 1492.
I tried that, but the guy at the checkout observed that it was rotten and well past its sell-by date.
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