Britain no longer dumbest electorate *official.

Hi all.

Been a while since I visited this blog. Europe is another part of the world indeed and I can be not omnipresent. (no vulcans this time)

Anyway, fellow earthlings. All I can offer is a chance to reflect on Pontius Pilate, Barabbas and Solomon, the chance of a half baby.

N.B. I mention this to reflect my thoughts, not any religion. Examples works best if they have a common cultural reference I think.

At the recommendation of The Mathbabe, my first action is to support independent journalism. I just joined The Guardian and, once I post this, I'm setting up monthly support for TheBradBlog!

Abrupt Political Climate Change

WWBD
What would Bartcop do?

How much of our future will be from Paul Ryan/Koch brothers, and how much of it will be from Donald Trump (whatever that is). What about Mike Pence's brand of christo-fascism?

Corporations are people, my friend.

Trump touted revitalizing our "crumbling infrastructure" and "renegotiating" our corporate-friendly trade agreements. This Red State victory came out of nowhere and it came out ofeverywhere. People who voted for Trump did so for many reasons.

On the Bill Press show today John Nichols said Bernie Sanders was the canary in the coal mine. I agree.

Thanks, DNC, for keeping us inside until it blew up. Those who say you want things to go over the edge before people will wake up, you got your wish. As for me, I hope buyer's remorse kicks in before the pogroms.

What this tells me is that either:
Our two party system and it's leaderships are no longer representing the will of the people so we feel we have to go to this extreme to get rid of them. The Republicans elites were tossed aside this spring and the Democrats are shown to be worthless now....or
The election system is rigged and there is no democracy as we would like to believe.
The Brexit vote would seem to indicate the first, but what we read at Bradblog would seem to indicate the other (or both). Either way we have a lot of work and fighting to regain (or establish) the democracy we want to have that does not include Dems or Reps. While we are at it maybe a seaschange in the media and its elites would help too.
Some might say I am throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but electing Trump shows that it's more than just the bathwater that's the problem.

Time for the archaic Electoral College to go! It's time is long passed and it's no longer useful.

On the media:
Trump is now going to be a regular fixture to our media. The media elites got all the ratings and money when he was a novelty and shocking. Now he will be with us every day. The question is, when will people get tired of the reality TV persona and just turn off the media and stop listening (because there is no rational alternative besides sites like the Bradblog). They wanted Trump for their ratings, now they've got him for four years. How's that gonna work for you?
Be careful what you wish for, you might get it (and a lot more than you wished for). Maybe the "truth" will become the novelty and become the new thing that the media will be able to get ratings with. We will have to go through a long bout of lies before truth becomes a ratings grabber. Bradblog is going to become more important in the future (if they let us keep it).

This is election fraud, Brad. There is no way for the polling to be so far off --- so consistently off --- in the battleground states. Such a thing has never happened before.

Although I have not yet done the necessary research, I heard a number of times last night that the exit polls were looking good for Hillary, and were in conformity with polling expectations.

We must research the hell out this. We cannot allowed ourselves to be cowed by calumnies as we try to understand what his us.

Remember:

1. Donald Trump's best friend Roger Stone is the consummate dirty trickster.

2. Trump had the aide of an adversarial state who, throughout the campaign, was willing to sic his hackers on our electoral process. If they were willing to skulk into John Podesta's emails, they were certainly willing to find a way to get hold of the tabulating machines.

3. We ARE fighting fascism here. Fascists have no morals, no scruples.

Someone has just reminded me that this is the anniversary of Kristallnacht. How could I have forgotten?

Election theft? Votes flipped? Could it be the biggest political heist ever?

I listened to Fridays show here with Beverly Harris and I was truly terrified.

Looks like we're getting that 9th supreme court justice now. Certainly no government shutdowns on the horizon.

All hard feelings about pussy grabbing are gone. This guy is the GOP dream come true. The rest of our balls are in the vice. Thank the media.

This report from Michigan is instructive:

The emerging narrative for why the results were so different from polls AND early projections is that urban Republicans voted for Trump less (vs Romney) while rural Republicans voted more. This has a surface plausibility, but should be followed up to verify that it fits the facts on the ground.

Those areas came in "last" --- that can also be a flag, as we no, for precincts where election fraud is happening, and they want to be sure they know how much to cook the numbers to make a difference. We don't have evidence that this happened yet (as far as I know), but we should look to Michigan, Wisconsin, and Florida for suspicious patterns and anomolies. (We may or may not find them, but no one else will even look.)

There is NO way this election result was the true result. There is NO way that many polls were wrong throughout the campaign.There is NO way that the exit polls and strategist were wrong all nite. There was corruption here but Donald J Trump and WE based tofind it and experience it. God help us to make this terrible injustice RIGHT. Anyone with me?

http://americablog.com/2...ternet-election-day.html
I don't know if this is valid or not. Would it surprise if it were true? No.

Trump has been cheating his entire life, cheating his contractors, the government, his wives, his customers, and everyone else. This election was different only in scale, not degree. The GOP has used every dirty trick in the book.

Make no mistake, this isn't just the end of America as we know it. It's the end of life on Earth as we know it. Trump will reverse everything Obama has tried to do, including the climate change treaties. The only good news is, the current generation probably won't live long enough to see it.

My reaction in 4 words: We are so fucked.

Brad, we have spoken on the phone before, unfortunately in similar circumstances of the stolen 2004 election. We have another stolen election here. Here are two Michael Green quotes from on Steven Freeman's Election Integrity forum pointing to clear evidence that a massive election fraud in the form of shifting votes from Clinton to Trump detectable in the exit polling. "...The exit polls compared with the vote, showed a very consistent shift of the vote count from Clinton to Trump. According to the exit polls, Clinton won the popular vote and it was shifted 3.1% in the direction of Trump. According to the exit polls, Clinton won the electoral vote and it was given to Trump..."

"...In the US, we have two checks on the vote count: the pre-election polls and the exit polls. Both are fallible but often very good measures of voter intent, especially when the exit polls deviate en masse beyond quantified margins of error. In this case both the pre-election polls and the exit polls indicate a Clinton victory... a mass red-shift is observed in essentially one direction only—for Trump...where political analysis and action are concerned; where there is a rich precedent for such theft; where such theft is routinely detected and demonstrated by the exit polls, the reasonable and strongly supported conclusion is that the election was stolen from Clinton and given to Trump.

Sorry, here are the URLs for the above quotes.

First quote above

Another context of first quote above

Second quote above

Trump said that the election was rigged, and was only going to complain if it didn't go his way.

Like everything else Trump has said in his campaign, it's a projection of his issues.

He was only going to complain if the Dems were better at cheating than he was.

Sure would like to be able to have some confidence that the announced results reflect how we actually voted. It's such a mind fuck. And I'm completely furious that we are no longer privy to exit polls. They have no right to keep that information/reality from us. These are our elections. We have every right to use every tool(in the absence of the obvious fix of publicly hand-counted paper ballots) to try to ascertain the realities of our election. You know, like who won and who lost!

I have to echo the concerns of commenters above, this reeks of election fraud. I drove one voter to the polls right before they closed and she said the optical scanner (Portsmouth OH) would not accept her ballot twice, and the poll worker said she would "just put it on the bottom." Have no idea what this meant, could be innocuous. But I think that the point about polling plus exit polls holds true, it would be one thing to be off in certain states, virtually impossible for the averages to be off like that when pollsters use different methods in different areas. Something stinks folks

Jon Husted S of S of Ohio wanted everyone to vote this year so he mailed everyone on the voter rolls a absentee ballot this year. Some time is late Oct I read where the suburban areas was having no problem with the forms but in the urban area they were throwing out a lot of the forms for minor mistakes. This could explain why there was a low turnout in these areas.
I had problems with absentee ballots before and now go to the early voting and place my ballot in the locked box. Jon Husted has been caught a number of times of trying to suppress the voting.

If we lose our right to a fair election we are going to lose our democracy. The republican party has a long history of cheating. When someone like Trump with his history wins, it's a sad day in this country we love so much. I'm afraid the right wing media is destroying our democracy.

* So many to choose from, just getting warmed up

Instead of saying trump is racist and blocking whites from crossing a college bridge (not even the Irish boy can go thru? what about the Railroad slavery ?!), WHY do progressive knowingly support treason? this is the part the SILENT MAJORITY said enough.

How about progressive marxist commies give reparations to the IRISH for the RAILROAD SLAVERY

I suggest you find a new hobby but I can see you're all still with "YES WE CAN DICKWEED"

digression

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Here's My FaceBook post today. (It's my suggestion of how to raise the question of election fraud in mixed company, and how we should go about getting to the truth.):

Whenever reported results of elections differ wildly from forecast models, especially when there are dozens of scientific models using different methods, I believe we have a RESPONSIBILITY to ask the question: "Is it possible the models were right, and the REPORTED RESULTS were wrong?"

This is taboo in our political culture: no one wants to be called a "conspiracy theorist". Everyone wants to "believe" in "free and fair" elections --- but shouldn't that be based on EVIDENCE and not on "faith"?

My proposal is that we CONSIDER the HYPOTHESIS of election fraud. To do so, we ask "IF the reported results were not how people actually voted, how might that have been accomplished, and what evidence might be left behind?" We could focus on WI and PA and NC, where the most extreme variance occurred, where the most was at stake, and there were Governors of the party that stood to gain from fraud in charge (motive).

To test (or, if it makes you feel better, "disprove") the hypothesis, we examine poll logs (do the number of voters matches the reported number of votes?) We look at exit poll data (unaltered) to see if it parallels reported results. We look for unusually patterns --- from one precinct with wild results to impossible turnout levels to statistically-abnormal uniformity. We conduct random audits to confirm a match between votes and reported results. And so on.

If such tests turn up nothing, then we have done our work as citizens and our democracy is strengthened. If such tests unearth incongruities, then we keep digging --- TO GET TO THE TRUTH WHATEVER IT MAY BE. That will also strengthen our democracy.

There are only two paths that weaken democracy. The first is to be afraid to ask the question. The second is the growing lack of transparency, where "counting" is done only by unaudited machines and computer programs, and there is no true paper trail to verify. In such cases, democracy has been replaced by "faith-based voting" --- that is, it is pure ritual without substance.

The Electoral College--America's Last Hope

The link for the above did not go through. This is the second attempt.

I get really annoyed by the people who excuse the fact that Hillary was a bad candidate by saying people did not want a woman president. Yes there are some mysogynistic men and self loathing women, but the majority of people who did not vote for Hillary was because it's Hillary. I would think the women's movement would take a little chip off their shoulder when they realize that we weren't choosing for/against her because she's a woman, but because of her policies and her history. We voted based on our understanding (correct or incorrect) of her character, not her gender. If you voted because of her gender you're as sexist as Trump is mysogynist. There's more to Hillary than her gender (isn't that what the LGBT community has been saying, look past our gender identity and accept me for me). The question is whether we read and understood the other parts of her.

http://www.dailykos.com/...lege-America-s-Last-Hope

Marvin Jones -

When using the link button in the toolbar above, you'll want to highlight the text you wish the link to work on first. Otherwise, just past the URL without using the button. (I've tried to fix one of the comments above for you.)

Not happy with either of the candidates, both being repugnant liars. But I am relieved we will probably not have a war with Russia over Syria or the Ukraine. So there is that.

Also, does anyone seriously believe that Donald Trump, who was reviled by the entire political establishment and almost every single major media outlet, who has no history working as a government official at any level, somehow masterminded the greatest election heist in history without any support from the political/corporate elite?

More, he was able to rig the government controlled election machinery while running against the living embodiment of the establishment elite, against a woman whose husband cornered the FUCKING ATTORNEY GENERAL ON A PRIVATE PLANE days before the DOJ was to announce whether or not it would indict her.

Oh yeah, it was Russia. Russia did it. Let's kill Russia. Too bad Hillary wasn't elected.

Honestly, if Russia did do it, I wouldn't blame them one bit, if the alternative is a psychopathic war monger making repeated threats of military action against them with absolutely no justification for such threats. They would probably prefer a childish, foul mouthed super narcissist over death, which is what Hillary ultimately represents.

In response to the lady that called into your show saying she was blaming Hillary (and her campaign) for relinquishing so fast (like Gore, and Kerry) is that the Dems have been cheating the system for years as well. How can Hillary shout "Cheat!" when she would get caught cheating too under a thorough investigation. It was easy for Trump to yell "Rigged!" because both sides are doing it. He rightfully said he would not yell rigged if he won. To preserve the facade of democracy, Trump won.
In 2000 there was a huge litigation fight that was very narrowly focused. The rest of us were just saying "Count all the ballots" but that might expose too much.
The Republicans were just better at cheating this time than the Dems. (That's how Bernie lost, because the Clintons have a few tricks up their sleeve, it's not just money). Both sides like to claim they are passing the baton in a peaceful change of power, but there is a lot more to it than that. Really they are trying to cheat the system and win at all cost.
It depends on which side cheats better. The Republicans included more voter suppression than in years past. HRC could have won several states without the voter suppression. She could have won if a lot of things were different. Trump could have won by more if other things were different.

Alex @ 33 said:

How can Hillary shout "Cheat!" when she would get caught cheating too under a thorough investigation. It was easy for Trump to yell "Rigged!" because both sides are doing it.

For the record, I have seen no persuasive evidence to suggests that "both sides are doing it" or that HRC was "cheating", either in the general or the primary. Just FYI, since you seem to offer it as fact.

Anyone who's considering making FOIA requests for voting records, check out the website I'm linking to below. FOIA Machine is a non-profit that has automated and streamlined the process of making FOIA requests. You can make the results of your requests public if you wish so that others can also examine them. https://www.foiamachine.org/about/

The link I attempted to post above was removed. I guess links aren't allowed, which is understandable. Just google foiamachine and you'll find it.

Dave @ #36 says:

The link I attempted to post above was removed. I guess links aren't allowed...

It's working. We put links in all the time here.

Yeah, it's there now. It wasn't right after I posted it. Maybe a glitch in my browser or something.