I think that on one of the Voter ID cases (perhaps in Texas) one lawyer made the statement that the law wasn’t intended to discriminate against blacks but against Democrats, which would be perfectly legal.
And, no, I can’t cite it but I do remember thinking that is was pretty repugnant.
What kind of thoughts go through your head when you read about gerrymandering?
You must know that things like this happen, right?
This is a law intended to discriminate against Republicans.
Right?
How repugnant is this?
Two points.
(1) You seem to imply that gerrymandering (reassigning voters from one district to another) is just as repugnant as suppressing voters altogether (or effectively suppressing them by deliberate design of partisan obstacles). This is the first I’ve ever heard of that. For one thing, gerrymandering is a gamble — your own cite shows that an alleged gerrymandering may backfire. Voter suppression programs like Crosscheck, OTOH, are designed to prevent likely Democratic voters from voting at all.
(2) Even if one stipulates that the alleged gerrymander you cite rises up to the level of GOP malfeasance we’ve become so sick of, you seem unable to cope with simple arithmetic. If your post means anything at all, it means “Nanner, nanner, you come up with 50 instances of GOP mischief, and all I need is one Democratic instance to refute it! Your side does it too. Quantity doesn’t matter. Nanner nanner nanner!”
Mocking again.
No other participants have anything to say about this, huh?
Your argument is rancid pigshit on a plate.
Does that satisfy your need of corroboration?
Gerrymandering is shitty. The only party looking to get rid of it is the dems. They do it to, of course. But because of the wave of 2010, the GOP did it shamelessly and got a persistent lock for a decade.
Gerrymandering isn’t the same thing as keeping people from voting. It’s surprising you don’t understand that.
It should also be noted that over the past ten years, owing to increasingly sophisticated computer programs, gerrymandering is now more science than the art form which was the case previously.
Please keep discussion civil. Denigrating a person’s arithmetic skills in this fashion is bordering on personal attacks.
[/moderating]
While it apparently crosses the line in this forum, the fact that he is mocking has no bearing on whether he is correct. If it did, then the fact that you have mocked septimus for his lack of legal knowledge would have made you wrong. I’m sure we all agree that is not the case.
His response still works without the mocking:
No, gerrymandering is not as bad, since it has an actual built in failure point. But, even if we treat it as just as bad, the problem is that it still fails as a tu quoque. The entire country is gerrymandered for Republicans, making it where we need more than a majority of each to get a majority in the House and Senate. You can’t tu quoque a single instance against 50.
My response goes further: tu quoque arguments are invalid on their face. No, it doesn’t make you wrong, but it does mean that the argument can continue as if the tu quoque was never uttered. Hence why I would not be surprised that people have no response.
I mean, what if E-DUB doesn’t think it’s as bad?. What does that do to his argument? It just winds up with an ad hominem: you’re a hypocrite, so what you say is wrong. That is not a refutation.
Bringing up any time the Democrats have done something wrong will never in any way refute that that thing is wrong, any more than one of us bringing up that Republicans doing something proves that it is actually wrong.
Of course Gerrymandering is wrong. And of course Voter ID laws designed to disenfranchise is wrong.
Post snipped.
Actually, I suspect for a good number of middle class/blue collar folks the idea that the voted against their own self interest is false.
This is why.
The middle class has been getting squeezed for years. Both parties say that they are going to help the middle class. The Democrats had the last eight years and things for the middle class really haven’t gotten much better.
Clinton and the Democrats toss some stuff out about helping the middle class were more vocal about issues that don’t really affect them. Clinton offered free in state tuition. Great but it doesn’t help get the mortgage paid. Clinton wanted to raise the minimum wage. If you are making 20 bucks an hour, that doesn’t mean shit and can actually hurt your finances. Clinton said she wanted to make all the illegal aliens citizens. Great, more competition for jobs if you are on the lower end of the pay scale.
Trump hit the bring back jobs hard. Is he full of shit? Probably but Trump spoke about something that would have a direct positive impact on their lives.
Slee
Many were voting for Trump because they think they have nothing to lose. America has failed them and those in power ignore them. So they don’t care if the whole thing comes crashing down - they’ll think they’ll be no worse off. I would disagree, but I’m not the person on the ground.
…Are you seriously implying that Clinton is the “bigger liar”?
Speaking of full of shit: the claims that:
[ol]
[li]The democrats “had the last eight years”; they didn’t[/li][li]The claim that things haven’t gotten better[/li][li]The implication that things could have gotten much better than they said they would[/li][/ol]
I don’t know which of those perceptions angers me more, but I know the more damaging one is “[the masses] listen to Progressives”. But I’ll respond to the whole stinkin’ post.
First: You might have a point that ‘establishment’ Democrats don’t listen as closely as you’d prefer to progressives -oh, excuse me capital “P” Progressives- but only if you really narrow your definition of progressivism to some sort of ideological purity level. Which indicates all by itself a poor understanding of progressivism. It’s like Christians who latch onto Leviticus but gloss over everything in the New Testament except for the “whosoever believes” part. Progressivism isn’t supposed to be some exclusive club of pure beliefs.
Second: I don’t believe, and did not assert, that rural voters don’t hear ‘the progressive message’ because Hillary’s message didn’t resonate. In fact, when small sample group rural GOP voters are given progressive policy proposals without the ‘liberal’ label and without political party ownership assigned, those proposals do tend to resonate. Because they don’t boil down to government giveaways to lazy brown people and government confiscation of hard earned wages, which is what they ‘know’ those liberals are all about.
I asserted that Hillary’s message didn’t resonate with those voters because they never heard it. Hillary’s mouth was moving, so they “knew” what she was saying. Giveaways to immigrants and higher taxes. Because she’s the Hill-beast, Killery Klinton the corrupt schemer, as the network news and their nice local representative kept reminding them. (And even that nice visiting Progressive lady who for some reason loved the Jew socialist, but she’s so nice anyway you can’t blame her she’s “city” folk, anyway even she knows about that bitch Hillary…)
Third: Describing Hillary Clinton as “right wing” anything is divorced from objective reality. Even if it’s put in bold font. If Bernie Sanders supporters had any effect on HRC supporters during the primaries, it wasn’t to drive us away from Bernie because of all your insults and false charges of cheating (yeah, the Sanders supporters -and note, I don’t say “surrogates” because it would be stupid to assign responsibility to Sanders for everything any Sanders booster said- gave as good as they got). Your effect by that sort of rhetoric was to reinforce any worries we had that the Sanders message might be coopted in the general to one way too stereotypically leftist for most voters.
Elite insiderism is a problem only if you like progressive rhetoric better than you like progressive action. Clinton’s record in the Senate and in public speech shows center-left to left political preferences and a propensity to make deals to achieve progress. She compromises. Because -another spoiler alert here!- that’s a good thing in a democracy. You don’t like her, I get that. Lots of her supporters don’t like her general demeanor and are not sanguine about her coziness with the power structure. But we see the benefit of that coziness, because that’s how deals get made, and, one more time, deals are how progress happens in a democracy. That’s progressivism.
Fourth and Final: I’m not going to blame the poor Democratic turnout on Bernie boosters who stayed home. There’s not that many who did; most Sanders supporters voted as Democrats when they voted, and I believe most who were active in supporting Sanders actually cast ballots. But I will blame your anti-Clinton rhetoric for helping to solidify that distaste for the straw Hillary that depressed enthusiasm among the generally Dem leaning non political junkies. Just enough of those usually Democratic voters stayed away from the polls that it allowed the narcissistic con man to win the White House.
So thanks very much for your progressive passion. Wonderful progress you’re achieving.
Funny how the Trump supporters are coming out of the woodwork now. You know, those people who were too ashamed or afraid to say that they were going to vote for him before. My, my, how things have changed.
So tell me, when was the last time in history that the FBI publicly and directly interfered in an election on the side of one particular candidate? Or that that candidate was so foul-mouthed and truth-free in his pronouncements?
How in the fuck can you call out Hillary’s campaign for their insults to you when Trump lived and breathed it at every rally? Let’s talk about hypocrisy.
You don’t without a wrenching change in their lives. It just is not possible.
I certainly can’t speak for Shayna and doubt she’d ever want me to.
But I don’t believe that her post signaled that she was a Trump advocate. I gathered from her post that she was suggesting that voters who were generally loyal to the Democratic party – and were enthusiastic Bernie Sanders supporters – were subject to such withering attacks from the Clinton supporters that it was hard to get motivated to work on her behalf or turn out to vote for her.
She wasn’t saying Trump was better – she was (IMO correctly) pointing out that Clinton failed to inspire what should have been a solid core of voters for her. The fact that Trump was a worse insulter didn’t enter the argument.
I will never understand how one can say “conservative beliefs” and use that phrase as an excuse for outright immoral bigotry, racism and phobias of every terrible kind. No matter how much you sincerely think that abortion, for example, is a sin, you cannot plausibly use that as an excuse for voting for the hot mess that is Trump. You have to be sharing his horrible antisocial attitudes to vote for that idiot.
It’s an absolute mystery to me why anyone would think that there is any condescending derision directed at anyone here.
So, Trump won because he spoke to the middle class with a promise to ‘bring jobs back’…and that was the only thing they listened to?
I’m running for office next year, and I intend to use, as my campaign slogan. “Vote for me and I’ll make you unbelievably rich!” Should make me a shoo-in.
yes, you nailed it. My opinion of Trump voters is ‘condescending derision’, because that is exactly what they deserve. Why should I be conciliatory about such an important vote that you Trump voters completely screwed up? You picked a completely lousy candidate for all the wrong reasons.
Yep, there are no ifs, ands, or buts about it. If you voted for Trump, you are at an absolute minimum complicitous with his elitism, racism, misogyny, narcissism, and mania. It doesn’t matter how you rationalize it, them’s the facts.
And that is what is known in the trade as deplorable.