sofa king
sofa king's JournalNPR hyped the Libertarians all weekend.
It's clear to me now that those planning to steal this election have given up on any conservative force helping to pull it off as a third-party candidate. Trump's racism and nationalism is what Republicans have really wanted all this time and there's no stopping him now.
Now that Republican voters feel safe to tear off the mask and show their swastikas Trump is no longer a guaranteed loss and now the GOP has to find some force which can steal votes from both sides to ensure that nobody wins a majority of electoral votes.
So they've bounced out to the silly Libertarians, who are still struggling to position themselves as a viable third alternative. That's why "someone" decided to make them a major story on public radio this weekend.
With the Libertarians in the picture there are still two ways for Republicans to steal it from everyone:
1) Use the Libertarian presence to divert votes from both Trump and Clinton to toss elections to the overwhelmingly conservative state legislatures. Thus a plurality win by Clinton can be pissed away by diverting electoral votes to a non-viable candidate, like the state's own governor, for example;
2) Use election theft mechanisms to divert electoral votes directly to the Libertarians, winning entire states for them and keeping both Trump and Clinton below 270 electoral votes.
You can laugh and say I'm crazy today, but your kids will be joining in the torchlight marches tomorrow if you do. The way Republicans plan--and have been planning--to steal this election is to ensure that no candidate wins a majority of electoral votes. If that happens Congress is supposed to choose from one of the three top vote-getters, but if they DO NOT CHOOSE, then Speaker Paul Ryan inherits the Presidency through continuity of government provisions in January (assuming the GOP retains the House and Ryan is reelected as Speaker in early January, 2017). Congress has only two weeks at the end of this year to decide; if they can run out the clock then there is no provision for choosing a new President and COG rules prevail.
A third-party candidate is critical to Republican election theft plans because a third party makes public opinion polls less reliable and permits the massive Republican election-theft mechanism to work properly behind the curtains. Just divert one out of five votes for either Trump or Clinton to the Libs and suddenly nobody wins.
The poop-wave
Sometimes, storms off the coast of India churn up a thousand years of human effluvia from the sea bottom, and they paint the shoreline with mephitic, diseased feces from the past.
Donald Trump is that poop-churning storm, and now even Dan Quayle has washed ashore.
He's his own neologism.
Like Quisling, Chauvin, Bowdler, and Mesmer, Trump is well on his way to having a negative word coined after him.
For hundreds of years to come, a "Trumpism" will mean, "the factually vacant bloviations of an ignorant Fascist," and a "Trumpist" will come to mean "the rare ignorant fool who actually believes a Trumpism and the Fascist who proclaims it."
How Republicans can steal a contested election:
and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelfth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
If no candidate wins a majority of electoral votes, it is this very Republican Congress which would first have the option to decide, shortly after electors cast their votes, which is shortly after the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, or Monday the 19th of 2016.
At that point Congress is supposed to pick among the top three candidates--which is where the ultraconservative spoiler has a chance to steal it. The way the vote goes is strange: each state has only one vote, and a candidate must win 26 states. That works heavily in favor of the flyover states, which suddenly have a dramatically out-of-proportion influence relative to their populations. Mitt Romney got whooped by over 120 EVs and still won 24 states in 2012; I don't know how many states have a majority of Republican Members in the House, but thanks to their gerrymandering, I'll bet it's more than that. (Democrats might try to assert that it's the senior Member of the delegation who decides, but it won't work.)
They would of course pick among the two running Republicans if Trump does us the favor of flipping the House for the next Congress. But if he doesn't, there's another option....
Members of the House are up for election in only two years, and they'll pay dearly for stealing an election. What if they do what they do best, and do nothing?
Sure, they're supposed to immediately choose, just like the Senate is supposed to hold hearings on a Supreme Court nominee. But nothing happens if they don't, and they only have to delay for two weeks before the 115th Congress ends.
One could and surely would argue that when the next, 116th, Congress takes over in early January, 2017, the window of opportunity to choose a President is clearly lost and now the line of succession as dictated by the 25th Amendment and continuity of government laws prevails.
And the evenly-divided Supreme Court would deadlock 4-4 and be of no help. It would be easy to run out the clock and simply move the problem beyond the 12th Amendment decision.
So if they don't choose in December, everything turns on the elections within Congress in the first week of January, 2017. It's a new Congress and therefore they have to elect a new Speaker of the House and President Pro Tempore, who are third and fourth in line of succession to the Presidency, according to continuity of government laws, and first and second when the terms of President Obama and Vice President Biden expire on January 20.
Whomever wins as Speaker--and Paul Ryan is the runaway favorite--would become acting President at noon on January 20, and in completely uncharted territory.
Is he supposed to hold an emergency election? Probably, but he won't. If you toss it into court, he'll nominate Dick Cheney as the ninth Supreme Court Justice and win 5-4, whatever he decides. Does the Acting President's term ever end? What if he declares a state of emergency and suspends elections forever? Republican criminals are in a position to decide all those things, and they're on the verge of a permanent demographic collapse, where stealing the United States forever might be their last and only chance to retain power....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-fifth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_line_of_succession
Anyway, that's all I've found so far. Sleep well, Democrats. Check your voter registration first thing on Monday, and don't piss away your vote forever on a protest candidate, eh?
I have to make a real guess.
Usually, and this goes waaaay back, the more chickenhawkish the conservative front-runner, the more militaristic the running mate. Dick Cheney, a former Secretary of Defense, picked himself as W's running mate. Ross Perot picked Admiral James Stockdale. Reagan had combat veteran GHWB. Nixon had Bronze-star winner Spiro Agnew.
Plus Kevin Spacey's narcissistic opponent has a general sidekick, and House of Cards has been absurdly prescient about these things.
Here are six guys with about twenty stars between them who could be on the short list. Two of them are SOCOM generals or admirals, rare as hens' teeth and probably way too smart to run with Trump. Webb ran as a Democrat and is probably also too smart. Allen West might be too tea party to consider an offer. My money is on the Marine, Gen. James Mattis, with Adm. Samuel Locklear a close second.
http://taskandpurpose.com/6-military-leaders-who-could-run-for-president/
Someone was reputed to be vetting Mattis for an independent run against Trump a couple of weeks ago, but deciding not to run could be a tip that Trump got to him first, and that "change of heart" bullshit could work for them. The important thing is that Mattis showed an interest in running at all, which most people with stars don't.
Adm. Locklear, on the other hand, has recently fingered climate change as a destabilizing force and could serve as a powerful triangulator to draw in people who aren't drooling idiots. But he'd have to be picked by a drooling idiot and he'd have to say yes to a drooling idiot, and he's not one. But he got effed over for Chief of Staff. So there's that.
This is going to be excruciating.
I'm saying this out loud, both for myself and a lot of you. American Presidential elections are bullshit. Total bullshit.
There is a particular cycle that runaway elections go through; I can give you three recent examples: Dole v Clinton ('96), McCain v Obama ('08), Romney v Obama ('12).
All three of these elections were blowouts, pretty much from beginning to end, although you can fairly say that McCain v Obama wasn't a blowout until they picked Palin as the running mate. In each case the Republican candidate was weak and fatally flawed, yet the Republican enjoyed the majority of the coverage--usually because they were saying stupid things.
All three of these elections went through a totally fucking infuriating cycle in which the press "pushed" the eventual loser closer, and closer, and closer to the leader and pretended it was a much closer race than it really was. All three had a fake-ass "surge" in August which was really just pollsters and news organizations trying to make the race interesting in the political black hole that is August.
Two out of the three races then "walked back" the polls in October, as pollsters began trying to establish a good call so that they could get hired in the next cycle. (It's pretty damned scary that some polls did not walk back Obama-Romney, and tried VERY hard to keep it within the margin of error. If they could have, the GOP would have tried to steal it like they did in '04.)
In the end, all three were solid victories. And, also infuriatingly, in the aftermath of all three were a series of sheepish articles in which political and journalist insiders confessed that they knew it was a blowout months in advance.
And this is where we are. We know this is a blowout, months in advance. If we all do our duty, check our registrations right now, and make sure not to let shitty employers and governments prevent us, we'll crush this election.
Soon, my anxiety won't let me believe my own words. But here it is, the whole story, long in advance: The Press and the Republican Party will make a good show of it because a close race sells subscriptions and protects the gerrymandered House. But even with a third party candidate in it--and I expect one any day now--they're still going to get their asses kicked.
Yessss.
I'm proud to rack this one up in the "I told you so" column. Back in March your Nostra-Dem-US proclaimed:
It permits the President to play an extremely not-lame duck role in this election. The President can pick an extremely qualified candidate, let the Republicans refuse to hold hearings, mention the refusal at every press conference, and begin to make a couple dozen Senatorial elections turn on the idea that no matter who's running for President, it's also a mandate for President Obama's Supreme Court nominee.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=1375971
President Obama's most amazing ability has always been to find a way to turn the vile behavior of Republicans against themselves. Here he is doing it again, working to flip the Senate while a lesser lame-duck President would be ignoring the elections and organizing his biographical notes. We are so much better off for him, and if we are lucky, we just might find him on the Supreme Court himself in a couple of years, thanks to this effort.
Just the tip of the iceberg.
Sibel Edmonds has been claiming for years that Turkey was blackmailing Hastert--now we know how. That also means the Bush Administration knew about Hastert's high crimes, because Edmonds was working for the US government when she translated the intercepted phone conversations, and it was they who silenced her.
And what about Congressional investigations into 9/11, blowing the cover of the US WMD spies, the false information used in the run-up to the Iraq war, the election thefts of 2000 and 2004, manipulating the appropriations process to punish enemies of the White House, and on and on and on and on. Everything Congress did in the Bush years, which benefited the Bush Administration, can now be considered to be illegally coerced, thanks to their knowledge--and presumed threats to expose--Hastert's crimes.
He wasn't just a child molestor. Dennis Hastert was a known child molestor whose liability was exploited to facilitate an unknown number of high crimes. He was a criminal bitch whose crimes were exploited for the benefit of even worse criminals--criminals who were in charge of our government.
He's been wonderful.
The nuts-and-bolts of President Obama's political acumen will be studied by scholars for the next 200 years.
Getting tax cuts for the rich to expire, then luring Republicans into holding the government hostage to bring the tax cuts back, then using that to force the GOP to agree to cut a trillion dollars out of the defense budget was the most brilliant political maneuvering I have ever seen.
His ability to focus the hatred of his enemies back upon themselves is legendary and will surely form part of the American mythos from now on.
And he did it all while being personally above reproach, picking competent and scandal-avoidant underlings, and rarely if ever losing his composure in public. He is the model President of the modern age, and we are unlikely to get so lucky twice in my lifetime.
I wish he weren't such a moderate, though. But I can accept his centrism in exchange for his unflappable competence. He was the President we needed at the exact time that we needed it.
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