Who can believe that the Russians are behind that oh-so-amateur laptop story? They are the pros. We know they can do better than that.
(And no, I’m hardly the first or only one saying that.)
(ETA: I’m referring to the professional Russian spycrafters, of course. If it’s just Rudy and Derkach, then probably could be.)
Idly scrolling through this thread as I do once a month or so and this got me thinking. I hate to even broach this because of the surefire accusations of naivete 
and perhaps the Pit is the wrong place to reply.
But personally I’m not so certain there will be massive cheating. Oh, there will be cheating alright and the most effective will likely be voter suppression efforts. And to be fair I won’t be surprised if there is massive cheating at a level that will break the election.
But I’m not certain there will be simply because in this day and age it is harder and harder to keep that sort of thing a secret and it’s not the easiest thing to implement. We shall see, but the paranoia I’m seeing about a 3% swing at the low end and at the high end a what, up to 6-9% swing to be certain of beating the polls in key battleground states? I’m not yet sold.
Caution is advisable, overconfidence is a killer and Trump and his malignant crew are completely untrustworthy and have to be watched with an eagle eye. But despair and bitterness because you are convinced it is already all over isn’t warranted either. Save the despair and bitterness for if Trump does win again. I’ll be certain to join you for awhile at that point.
Note: Also the possibility exists, though quite low, that Trump could legitimately win on his own “merits.” Which frankly would probably depress me more than if he cheated his way to a victory.
Maybe they’ve added Jacob Wohl to the staff.
If he’s working for Rudy now, that could help explain the amateurism. If you mean maybe the Russian professionals have hired him, I can’t imagine that.
I guess it depends on what you mean by massive and cheating. The Texas governor ordered one ballot dropbox per county. There is no rational explanation from a security perspective. This will predominantly affect urban areas that are more likely to vote Democratic. I’d call that cheating, and the potential impacts of something like that are massive. But there’s no attempt at secrecy; they just do it out in the open.
The closures of urban voting locations in other states is the same. It’s cheating and it’s massive. Even if it doesn’t reach the scale of affecting the presidential race, it certainly affects state-level races.
Aren’t you a darling? 
Thank you!
In other news, can there be more of a fucked-up indicator of a clusterfuck than this? In a good way. Sort of.
Individual 1 has a Chinese bank account.
… which was used to launder $15 million to Trump in 2017, and whose existence was not disclosed on any financial documents produced by him or his orgs.
In a sane world, Donald J. Trump wouldn’t win a single state. What the fuck happened to America?
The rise of right-wing radio. When the fairness doctrine went out the window in '87, lunatics took over the airwaves, and dimwits swallowed the bullshit.
And here we are, a nation where lunatics and bullshit-swallowing dimwits have way too much power.
State? In a sane world where no one who hates America casts a vote, he wouldn’t even get a single popular vote.
Wow. Pravda.
According to the Maddow show last night, the money appeared in the account right after the inauguration.
People have been asking what happened to all that unaccounted for money that was raised for the inauguration but never spent. The timing is rather suspicious.
News – the Post Office has suspended the Postal Service Police for the next two weeks – just before the election.
I never heard of this branch before. Evidently they oversee the security of the mail, making sure it’s not tampered with. Exactly the kind of thing you’d want with so much voting by mail.
It’s hard to imagine any sort of legitimate reason to furlough them at a crucial time like this
Worst Attack Ever:
https://twitter.com/joshscampbell/status/1318707740504514561
Yet another “Trump says something…I’m Joe Biden, and I approve this message” TV ad. The Biden campaign could make this in five minutes.
Your post reminds me of something that’s been percolating in my head for a while, which is that we’re living in a time when technology - especially communications technology - has developed faster than our understanding of how to manage it.
A lot of people who cling to the traditional notions of tolerating free discourse are not confronting the realities of the modern age, in which disinformation can spread and essentially outperform factual information. If we don’t take this into consideration, we lose.
It is obviously incumbent upon the Big Tech and social media firms to police themselves, but we will also have to assume that they won’t do that as long as there’s a financial disincentive against consistent self-policing, which the example of Facebook clearly shows. Although it makes us uncomfortable to think of regulating content on the internet, we will have no choice. The alternative is to allow horse shit to compete and overtake reality, and that is something that’s simply incompatible with a societal self-governance.
Obviously, great care has to be taken in terms of the approach. A light-touch regulatory approach with a harder approach if firms continue to fail at living up to their obligations would be the way to go. We need someone - the FCC, the FTC, whatever - to step in and regulate these firms in a nonpartisan way. Otherwise, they will be regulated in ways that are highly pro-partisan in the end. But regulation of social media is inevitable. It’s a matter of whether we get ahead of the curve and do it in ways that represent the public interest, or whether it ultimately becomes a tool of American despots.
And hopefully an emergency court order will slap that down fast.
Going hand in hand with the unchecked, unregulated rise of communications technology is the damage it’s done to traditional mainstream media sources, in which rigorous fact-checking used to be the norm. A free press is essential to act as a check and balance to leadership in a Democracy. But now things have gone from sources like the New York Times, to right-wing echo chamber sources of information that are further and further divorced from reality, to platforms like Twitter and Facebook where any whacko CS group like QAnon has an international platform.
During all that devolution of factual sources of info, trump comes along and takes a page out of the dictator’s playbook, yelling that the MSM is “FAKE NEWS!”, discrediting the old-guard fact-checked sources of information to his followers, and adding another nail to the coffin of the free press.