U.S. Electile Dysfunction 2016

[Prime95]

Originally Posted by chalsall

If I may please ask you a sincere question: if it was between Hillary or Trump, how would you vote?

Bloomberg

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by Prime95

Bloomberg

Thank you for that. Truly.

I still find it somewhat ironic that Al Gore would have likely won in 2000 if Ralph Nader hadn't diverted votes.

The world might have been in a very different place....

[kladner]

Originally Posted by chalsall

If I may please ask you a sincere question: if it was between Hillary or Trump, how would you vote?

Please feel free to not answer.

Most of us outside of the US of A are watching this without really understanding what is really going on....

I see either as very likely disastrous. We could certainly count on military adventures with Clinton.

Trump??? It is hard to guess how real power would affect him. It is also hard to imagine him "growing into the job," since he is quite convinced that he is already flawless in everything he is and does. What a huckster!

In the end, with those choices, the Imperial Corporate Status Quo would likely end up continuing , whichever one got in.

Then, maybe the real estimate to make is, "Which one is more likely to use nukes?"

[Brian-E]

Originally Posted by chalsall

I still find it somewhat ironic that Al Gore would have likely won in 2000 if Ralph Nader hadn't diverted votes.

I find it not ironic but downright scandalous that he would likely have won if Kathryn Harris hadn't chosen which votes should be counted and which shouldn't.

[only_human]

Originally Posted by Brian-E

I find it not ironic but downright scandalous that he would likely have won if Kathryn Harris hadn't chosen which votes should be counted and which shouldn't.

So he could have won if Kathryn Harris' slathered mascara didn't scare off all males except party operatives.

[ewmayer]

The Vampire Squid Tells Us How to Vote | Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

Why Wall St. doesn’t care about Hillary’s cold shoulder | CNBC

Wall Street gets it. And Wall Street Democrats, in particular get it.

Hillary Clinton has been postponing fundraisers with financial executives ahead of the New Hampshire primary. But don’t expect folks on Wall Street to be offended that Clinton is distancing herself from them. In fact, they see it as smart politics and they understand that Wall Street banks are deeply unpopular, particularly with the Democratic primary base voters, according to a survey of several prominent Wall Street Democrats by CNBC.

“Everybody knows how the world works,” said one Democrat working at a Wall Street bank. “If you take offense to that, you’re really unsophisticated.”

For Hillary supporters on Wall Street, the focus is very much on keeping Bernie Sanders — who they see as much, much, worse for Wall Street — away from the Democratic nomination for president. “Democrats like me say: ‘Do what you need to do to get in the seat,‘ ” said the Wall Street Democrat.

WTH is a "Wall Street Democrat", exactly, and how does that purported subspecies of Oligarchus Corruptus differ from a "Wall Street Republican"?

[Prime95]

Originally Posted by Brian-E

I find it not ironic but downright scandalous that he would likely have won if Kathryn Harris hadn't chosen which votes should be counted and which shouldn't.

This is false (i.e. not scandalous).

Democrats (and Republicans) have never been able to accept that the Florida vote was a tie -- the difference was far, far below the threshold to accurately determine the intent of Florida voters (unless you believe their intent was "no preference"). In such cases, and with so much on the line, both parties scrambled hard to shape the recount (if any) process to their perceived advantage.

As is the case with all tie votes the final outcome was rather arbitrary. No matter which candidate was declared the winner, the other side was not going to admit that the result was legitimate.

The Republicans did have a huge edge in the process. Round 1: Republicans had Kathryn Harris to certify the election. Round 2: Advantage Dems with the Florida Supreme court ordering a recount in heavily Democratic counties. Round 3: Advantage Dems again as local Board of Elections ran the recount process (set the rules for infamous "hanging chads"). Round 4: Advantage Republicans -- the Supreme Court. Round 5 never happened -- advantage Republicans. If the Board of Elections couldn't certify a result in time, the republican run state government would have selected the Electors.

[kladner]

Exclusive:

After Saudi-backed Syrian rebels balked at peace talks and the Russian-backed Syrian army cut off Turkish supply lines to jihadists and other Syrian rebels, the U.S. and its Mideast Sunni “allies” appear poised to invade Syria and force “regime change” even at the risk of fighting Russia, a gamble with nuclear war, writes Joe Lauria.

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter last October said in a little noticed comment that the United States was ready to take “direct action on the ground” in Syria. Vice President Joe Biden said in Istanbul last month that if peace talks in Geneva failed, the United States was prepared for a “military solution” in that country.

The peace talks collapsed on Wednesday even before they began. A day later Saudi Arabia said it is ready to invade Syria while Turkey is building up forces at its Syrian border.

The U.N. aims to restart the talks on Feb. 25 but there is little hope they can begin in earnest as the Saudi-run opposition has set numerous conditions. The most important is that Russia stop its military operation in support of the Syrian government, which has been making serious gains on the ground.

[ewmayer]

Speeches That Earned Clinton Millions Remain a Mystery | ABC

As intriguing as I find the prospect of our thoroughly bought MSM starting to sniff a scent of potential non-inevitability w.r.to President Hillary and thus begin issuing stories about the obvious and pervasive Clinton family corruption business model, this hit piece strikes me as having more than a bit of sour grapes about it. Consider: why would it be an issue for Goldman to simply pay her going rate - note the $225K is for the 30-minute speech, not the even-pricier full-hour version colleges often pay for out of their mandatory student fees - for a series of three talks? Given Hillary's outrageously profitable, albeit brief, venture into commodities trading, is it so hard to understand that even the elite grifters at GS would be envious and wanting to be let in on some of her secrets of successful investing? I mean team Vampire Squid is surely used to fairly regular 10-baggers on their various trades, but a 100-bagger in 10 months is gonna impress even their jaded sensibilities.

Similarly I find the hue and cry over hubby Bill's last-day-in-the-White-House presidential pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich (and several hundred other persons) to be more sour grapes on the part of people who just don't understand what it takes to be a Winner™ in the game of life. So what if the former longtime Mrs. Rich made substantial donations to both the Clinton library and to Hillary's senate campaign around the same time? Like I said, *former* Mrs. Rich -- why anyone would suggest that her post-divorce largesse might have anything to do with her hubby's I'm-sure-well-deserved pardon is simply beyond me. You people are so cynical!

[only_human]

Originally Posted by Prime95

As is the case with all tie votes the final outcome was rather arbitrary. No matter which candidate was declared the winner, the other side was not going to admit that the result was legitimate.

Even so, spurrious voter roll purging should be included too.
How the 2000 Election in Florida Led to a New Wave of Voter Disenfranchisement

The NAACP sued Florida after the election for violating the Voting Rights Act (VRA). As a result of the settlement, the company that the Florida legislature entrusted with the purge—the Boca Raton–based Database Technologies (DBT)—ran the names on its 2000 purge list using stricter criteria. The exercise turned up 12,000 voters who shouldn’t have been labeled felons. That was 22 times Bush’s 537-vote margin of victory.

No one could ever determine precisely how many voters who were incorrectly labeled felons were turned away from the polls. But the US Civil Rights Commission launched a major investigation into the 2000 election fiasco, and its acting general counsel, Edward Hailes, did the math the best that he could. If 12,000 voters were wrongly purged from the rolls, and 44 percent of them were African-American, and 90 percent of African-Americans voted for Gore, that meant 4,752 black Gore voters—almost nine times Bush’s margin of victory—could have been prevented from voting. It’s not a stretch to conclude that the purge cost Gore the election. “We did think it was outcome-determinative,” Hailes said.

[kladner]

I had not realized that electronic vote-thieves went back to 1988.

As the New Hampshire primary lurches toward the finish line, the reality of electronic election theft looms over the vote count.

The actual computer voting machines were introduced on a grand scale in New Hampshire’s 1988 primary. The godfather was George H.W. Bush, then the vice president. As former boss of the CIA, Bush was thoroughly familiar with the methods of changing election outcomes. The Agency had been doing it for decades in client states throughout the world.

In the Granite State, Bush was up against Bob Dole, long-time senator from Kansas. Dole was much loved in hard-core Republican circles. But Bush had an ace-in-the-hole. For the first time, the votes would be cast and counted on electronic voting machines, in this case from Shoup Electronics.

Governor John Sununu, later Bush’s White House Chief of Staff, brought the highly-suspect computer voting machines into New Hampshire’s most populous city, Manchester.

The results were predictable. Former CIA director George H.W. Bush won a huge upset over Dole and the mainstream for-profit corporate media refused to consider election rigging.