[jedrider]

An elected official in Oregon is leaving the Republican Party, and she says President Donald Trump is to blame.

Lori Stegmann, a Multnomah County commissioner, had been a Republican for nearly four decades. But this week, she announced that she has officially become a Democrat because of the “misogyny” and “racism” of the Trump administration.

“I have not changed but the Republican Party most certainly has,” Stegmann told The Oregonian on Tuesday.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/gop-politician-switches-parties-over-trump-administration-racism-misogyny_us_5b59df4fe4b0de86f49473f5

People have a checklist and reality sometimes strikes at that checklist.

[dissident]

Mueller is clutching at yet more straws. Now he is looking for evidence of obstruction in Trump's tweets. What a joke.

Where is the collusion evidence? I was told that there was a solid financial case linking "bankrupt Trump" to Russia. If anyone thinks that firing Comey was obstruction, then they 1) have no objectivity or 2) do not know what the term means. Removing Comey would never have stopped any investigation. And Comey's behaviour warranted him being pink slipped.

[Cog]

House Republicans are now investigating whether the fbi was spying on trump before the official investigation started in July 2016. Like I warned cid over a year ago when the sc was appointed, all roads lead back to hillary, obama, and the dnc.

[dissident]

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-07- ... le-dossier

“This ruling gave us everything that we had hoped for,” Evan Fray-Witzer, a lawyer for Gubarev, told The Daily Caller News Foundation - adding “After a year of trying everything they could think of to avoid being deposed, Fusion is finally going to have to sit down and answer our questions."

Aleksej Gubarev, owner of global tech firm XBT Holding - which owns Dallas-based Webzilla, is suing BuzzFeed for defamation, claiming they failed to properly investigate the dossier's allegations before publishing the 35-page document - which include the claim that Gubarev was "recruited under duress" by Russia's Federal Security Service, the FSB.

Some GRU document. LOL.

The biggest meddler in the 2016 US elections was the Democratic Party, its MSM loyalists, and the corrupted FBI and CIA. Funny how Republicans and over 50% of Americans are being cast as some sort of fringe. With the Democrats as a de facto one-party "normality" (how dare Hillary lose). Perhaps voting for the Republican Party should be made illegal. Because Russia.

[onlooker]

What a comical issue. The Russians Stole the elections. When we already have an internal stealing of a national election ie. Bush vs Gore. And we have Diebold voting machines with a suspect history and programming.

So, Russian hackers override all other voting considerations and billions upon billions of campaign financing. PLEASE. The Democrats and compliant media are on a far fetched witch hunt

[KaiserJeep]

What we need to do is vote by punching paper ballots, then handing them to a poll official who strips off the reciept tab and puts it in a slot while you watch. Then you read the punched cards with a machine, and you count the number of ballots and match them against the voter rolls. Then you save the sealed ballots for a recount.

Because you see I remember my Father working as a volunteer poll official in S Illinois in 1960. He and I were hanging out in the house he had just had built, and were painting interior walls. A couple of days before, my Mother had had conniptions when her chosen paint colors went into the wrong bedrooms. So 9-year-old me and my Dad were painting, and he had gone down to the polling place to make sure that his straight Republican ticket was registered as valid. While he was there, they "Shanghi'd" him as a "volunteer".

So I was "helping" and he was explaining about the R's and the D's. Later that night, after damn near the whole state had voted R (i.e. for Nixon) the polls closed late as Mayor Daley rounded up hundreds of thousands of dead people who were still on the voter rolls and they all voted for JFK. It was truly astonishing to watch. Daley kept messaging the DNC to ask how many more votes they needed. This was done by an ancient teletype device that typed words on paper, and the machine in our town printed the entire conversation between Daley and the DNC.

If I had only saved that roll of teletype paper, I would be a millionaire. It more or less proved that Daley stole 1960 from the Republicans. Nixon and his cronies knew this, but finally conceded "for the good of the country".

This was my introduction to D vs R partisan politics at age 9. Nowadays they say that Daley's infamous Democratic political machine corruption was a "myth".

This is Mayor Daley in the White House being thanked by JFK.

[Newfie]

I’ve read about that myself. Just not the teletype machine bit.

At one point in my career I had to reinstall a slightly modern version of that same system you mention. It was a way of sharing real time train movements between a half dozen locations with a verifiable paper trail. They eventually replaced it with a multi-million dollar system that didn’t work so well.

[Plantagenet]

What we need to do is vote by punching paper ballots, then handing them to a poll official who strips off the reciept tab and puts it in a slot while you watch. Then you read the punched cards with a machine, and you count the number of ballots and match them against the voter rolls. Then you save the sealed ballots for a recount.

Too late.

One of the prior times when Ds went crazy was when Bush Jr. beat Gore, and the Ds demanded that the voting system be "modernized" to get rid of paper ballots. Fortunately, Alaska didn't fall for the hysteria, and we've still got out paper ballot system intact and functioning. When we need recounts, people trust the recounts because the paper ballots provide physical evidence of the votes. But much of the rest of the country was swept up in the hysteria and went to all electronic voting machines, which are easily hacked and impossible to check through recount.

Good luck getting that fixed and bringing back paper ballots. Most likely the Ds would howl and move to block any effort to do undo their little "fix" to the voting system.

Cheers!

[Cog]

Voter ID is racist according to democrats.

[KaiserJeep]

Newfie, you will appreciate this "sea story" from the good old days in the USCG. This was the early 1970's when the USCG was part of the then brand new Department of Transportation, but had not yet moved USCG HQ from the US Treasury offices in downtown Washington DC.

I was a newly-minted ET3 (just promoted from SNET) when I was told that we were getting a new watchstander and that I was to personally train the new guy. Then to my surprise what showed up after the mail plane delivered him was TT2 Walker. "TT" of course stood for "Teletype Technician" and it was a dying rate, they needed so few that they had shut down TT "A" school. TT2 Walker had just been demoted from TT1 Walker, you could still notice the unfaded portion on his blue chambray shirt sleeves where the third chevon used to be. He also had an impressive full beard and a hangdog look.

Later that night I had bought TT2 Walker a couple of brews at our bar "The Swinging Oozik", and his tongue had loosened.

Aside: The Walrus Oozik bone we had hanging above the beer taps looked like this. The Walrus is the only mammalian species to possess an Oozik, which probably comes in handy when the male walrus has to mate in near freezing water or in snow (or wherever walruses mate).

Back to Walker's story. He had just bought a new townhouse in Maryland, and pleased his wife to no end, because she was now living next to friends and family. So she and the two kids were still in the townhouse. Walker himself had joined me at one of the most infamous duty stations in the USCG, "PTC" - Port Clarence, AK, just 40 miles or so from the Arctic Circle, and N of Nome, AK.

I was there because I had already figured out that I wanted out early and had taken them up on a "Six Month Early Out" for ET's who volunteered for certain undesirable duty stations. Walker I was guessing was not there by choice, and my guess was right.

In the one floor of the downtown US Treasury building that comprised the "holiest of holies" USCG HQ, there were two offices. One was for the USCG Commandant, the Admiral with more stars than anybody else. The second one, right next door, was for the senior enlisted man of the USCG, the one called "Command Master Chief of the US Coast Guard". These two had decided between them that they wanted a teletype machine in the hallway midway between their offices, and that they would assign a very attractive blonde female Yeoman to sit near this machine, read the messages through the locked cover, and decide when to interrupt these august personages with the teletype message.

Walker had gotten the work ticket to install the teletype machine, complete with a special shroud that was painted the special color that matched the "bulkhead" color. Walker was told where to place the machine, and to route the wiring invisibly, and he had done this over the course of several hours while admiring the blonde. The power cord was the last piece of wiring to get tucked along the wall, after testing the machine. So Walker disconnected the machine end, plugged the plug end into the wall socket, and carefully and neatly routed it almost invisibly underneath the wall conduit that ran between the TT machine and the wall socket, using cable ties. He was of course anticipating an "attaboy" endorsement from his Chief, plus the two men in the nearby offices who had wanted the machine. Apparently the blonde then coughed or did something else to cause her impressive breastworks to jiggle distractingly, just as Walker decided to remove the three feet of excess power cord. So, forgetting that he had plugged in the plug and that the cord was live, he cut through it with the "diagonal cutting pliers" that we called "dykes".

There was an impressive flash, and the US Treasury building went dark. The circuit breakers for that circuit, the sub panel for the entire floor, and the main building breaker all tripped at once. Twenty four hours later, TT2 Walker had arrived at PTC, after it was explained to him that if he "volunteered for isolated duty" he would earn enough extra "isolated duty pay" to make up for the TT1 to TT2 demotion, and continue to make mortgage payments on his new townhouse. He would spend the next 12 months reflecting upon his fate, earning back his 3rd chevron, and hopefully becoming wiser, and of course: without sleeping with his wife every night.

Now the traditional "sea story" ending. I swear that this is all true.

[Outcast_Searcher]

What we need to do is vote by punching paper ballots, then handing them to a poll official who strips off the reciept tab and puts it in a slot while you watch. Then you read the punched cards with a machine, and you count the number of ballots and match them against the voter rolls. Then you save the sealed ballots for a recount.

Too late.

One of the prior times when Ds went crazy was when Bush Jr. beat Gore, and the Ds demanded that the voting system be "modernized" to get rid of paper ballots. Fortunately, Alaska didn't fall for the hysteria, and we've still got out paper ballot system intact and functioning. When we need recounts, people trust the recounts because the paper ballots provide physical evidence of the votes. But much of the rest of the country was swept up in the hysteria and went to all electronic voting machines, which are easily hacked and impossible to check through recount.

Good luck getting that fixed and bringing back paper ballots. Most likely the Ds would howl and move to block any effort to do undo their little "fix" to the voting system.

Cheers!

The technology exists to provide a credible reconstruction of EXACTLY what occurred for something like an election: Vote by vote, machine by machine. It's called modern database technology with logs, and, for example, IBM DB2 has it.

Now, do the voting machines or "the system" have anything remotely like that? Well, no, because that would cost a lot of money.

And near as I can tell, NEITHER side wants to spend the money to do the job right.

...

Why is it that with government, old school, which is horribly expensive and inefficient is a good thing? Whether it's the IRS, voting, or the census, it seems to me that using modern technology over time (like the rest of the first world) for large complex information projects would be the thing to do.

But if we want the data flow to be credible, accurate, and logged -- it costs money. It's not necessarily a lot cheaper with a quality modern system, but it should be a hell of a lot better re capabilities. At least it would be if competently managed by the private sector, over time.

[KaiserJeep]

I did not make my paper ballot suggestion frivolously. There is actually no harm in waiting for election results or even waiting for unplanned extra days or weeks for vote re-counts.

Compare that to TWO YEARS OF BS during the Russia investigation, plus a Special Prosecutor, plus endless distracting political BS, that both sides are using as a smoke screen while robbing the taxpayers.

[Tanada]

The electronic voting machines used in my corner of Ohio use an internal paper roll that looks like a receipt from a cash register. You look through a window when you are done making your selections and verify the paper tape recorded what you wanted on your ballot. Then when you are satisfied you hit complete vote or whatever the heck it says, the paper turns enough to make your results disappear and the next person gets to use the machine. IOW there is a paper record you verify as well as the electronic recording of your vote.

[Newfie]

PAs vary but the majority are of an electro-mechanical type with only rudimentary hard programming.

Hacking would require a personal visit by a technician and some amount of physical effort, an hour or two for each machine, so I’ve read. Seems reasonable.

I’m with KJ in spirit if not exact method.

No network, no even “sneaker net” means no hacking.

[jedrider]

The Permanent Lie, Our Deadliest Threat
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-permanent-lie-our-deadliest-threat/

The permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism. It no longer matters what is true. It matters only what is “correct.” Federal courts are being stacked with imbecilic and incompetent judges who serve the “correct” ideology of corporatism and the rigid social mores of the Christian right. They hold reality, including science and the rule of law, in contempt. They seek to banish those who live in a reality-based world defined by intellectual and moral autonomy. Totalitarian rule always elevates the brutal and the stupid. These reigning idiots have no genuine political philosophy or goals. They use clichés and slogans, most of which are absurd and contradictory, to justify their greed and lust for power. This is as true on the Christian right, which is filling the ideological vacuum of the Trump administration, as it is for the corporatists that preach neoliberalism and globalization. The merger of the corporatists with the Christian right is the marrying of Godzilla to Frankenstein.

A chilling description of our current political predicament that while it zeroes in on Republicans, is just as apropos of current Democrats, at least, if you follow what they do rather than what they say.

[Pops]

The merger of the corporatists with the Christian right is the marrying of Godzilla to Frankenstein.

word.

The stroke of genius is to set up the mouthpiece as an imbecile (or at least a trailer park Midas) so the hoard thinks he's one of them.

[Newfie]

So who are the Dems gonna run for P in 2020?

What will the platform be?

[Newfie]

A totally different view of the partisan divide

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/opin ... eft-region