Kind of hard for them to black"mail" somebody anyway, since they’re doing their darnedest to kill the USPS.
Not that that’s the point, but the “mail” in “blackmail” is not the USPS kind of mail, but taken from a middle english word meaning “rent”.
Yes, I knew this but that’s really not the point.
The idea of literally black envelopes flying around in the post is kind of fun, though.
TBF, Cawthorn has trouble with ‘insurrection’ and ‘personal accountability’ as well.
Considering it was a small town (the guy won with 60 votes), I would think that him murdering his wife recently would be the talk of the town. So I’m going with they just didn’t care.
Near as I can tell from the election results (pdf) there were three candidates on the ballot for the county township seat, and the instruction was to vote for three. The other two candidates got 110 and 106 respectively. So what probably really happened was that about half the people just clicked all three names while the other half either voted for one of the other two candidates or voted for both of the other two and explicitly avoided his name.
In other words not really much of a story.
“No member of the club is to be a p***ter - if there’s anyone watching?”
My experience has been that researching candidates for local office is almost impossible. There’s very little information available unless you happen to know the person already.
Sometimes there are local newspapers that post statements from each of the candidates, which can help. Another useful thing - the guy who paints his platform on the roof of his house is not the guy you want to vote for.
I have been able to research local candidates.
Mentioned in another thread, but Steve Schmidt spilled a metric fuckton of tea yesterday, both on Twitter and his Substack, effectively calling out John McCain as being the first candidate to be led by Putin:
The original tweet thread:
TLDR:
Schmidt is making the claim that McCain’s campaign was the first infiltration, by Russia, in an American Presidential campaign. The result was the selection of Sarah Palin, the ur-MAGA, and while she couldn’t resurrect a campaign as moribund as McCain’s, she did prove that a rightist blowhard energized the Republican base.
8 years later, here comes Trump…
…so, while she maybe couldn’t actually see Russia from her house, she DID talk to Russia on her home phone a lot, is that it?
Also that McCain had a longstanding relationship whilst married that was the subject of a New York Times article as well as a lawsuit against the paper. If she didn’t know about it, I feel bad for his wife if this is how she learns the facts.
A republican being shitty to a woman in his life?
Hmm, I wonder why that didn’t make the headlines.
A Naval Aviator being unfaithful? I’m shocked!
Wasn’t that how he and Cindy got together? I could swear I’d read he’d been having an affair with her and then divorced his first wife to marry her.
Although I could be mixing him up with the Newt.
McCain had a history of cheating on his wife and that portion seems to align with public reporting by the NYT and WaPo. The starting bit about Russia, though, seems a bit haphazardly thrown in. He says that McCain was on a Russian yacht on his 70th birthday but links to a story about McCain going onto the yacht of Raffaello Follieri, an Italian who had convinced Anne Hathaway to date him by creating a “foundation focused on efforts such as providing vaccinations for children in poor countries”.
The Hill confirms that McCain did have his 70th birthday with Deripaska:
But it also notes:
Taking our current knowledge and extending it back to 2008 isn’t reasonable. And Mr. Schmidt doesn’t seem to have any personal knowledge to confirm behind-the-scene interactions between the Russians, Davis, and McCain. We know that, later, McCain went to Ukraine to cheer for Maidan and he also turned in Trump for interacting with Russians, so it doesn’t seem like he was in bed with them or that they had anything on him.
My read would be that this guy felt guilty about covering up the affair and, after reading about Manafort, started to get obsessed with the matter of how close he had been to Russian interests, and sort of pulled his guilt for one over into the other - even if he had nothing to base that on.
Or at least, as said, McCain only ever seems to have done things to piss off Russia.
Yes, McCain was unfaithful to his first wife with Cindy.
Newt was also in this boat. His story is, of course, well known, having his first wife served with divorce papers while she was in the hospital for cancer treatment. And then later divorcing that wife in favor of his third wife, with whom he’d been carrying out an affair for some time.
I suppose ‘family values’ means something different when applied to older, rich conservative white men than just about anybody else. But that seems par for the course.
I would say it was more that he felt guilty about unleashing Palin on the world and as a result jump starting the ignorance is a virtue attitude that has taken over the GOP. Most of what I get from this tweet thread is, “Palin wasn’t my fault. If I had known what she was going to be like I never would have left her in obscurity. She’s all McCaine’s fault.”
One of the advantages in having a mail-in ballot is that I can spend hours, over several days, researching. Everyone from US Senate and Governor down to Constable and JP has campaign websites these days, although some are coy about their platform.
The tough part are the judges. Below the state Supreme Court, judges come up every few years on a retain or not choice. They have no websites and about the only information freely available are the polls of DAs, attorneys, and their fellow judges which are always in the mid to high 90s approval.