October 16, 2020

Donald TRUMP - I'm your Puppet

October 16, 2020

How We Can Stop Trump From Stealing The Election

via email......

HOW TO STOP TRUMP FROM STEALING THE ELECTION

President Donald Trump and his allies have repeatedly spoken about their plans to intimidate voters, disrupt the count of mail-in ballots, and seek favorable election rulings from the Supreme Court. If all of this fails to swing the count his way, Trump will likely try to overturn the election results by having his allies in Republican legislatures send illegitimate electors to the Electoral College. A new report, “The Count: A practical guide to defending the Constitution in a contested 2020 election," written by Zack Malitz, Brandon Evans, and Becky Bond answers the question: if a worst-case scenario comes into play, what should elected officials and voters do?







https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aqmM4xtwrQICCu5KldYePLf3Zk_TMzRo71wRvyPmLfk/edit

October 16, 2020

Would the Supreme Court Let Trump Steal The Election?

via email......

There is little stopping Republicans from confirming Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court, which would form a 6-3 conservative bench. In 2000, the Supreme Court’s controversial Bush v. Gore ruling blocked a hand recount of presidential ballots in Florida, spurring Gore’s concession. This year, the RNC and Trump’s campaign have doubled their legal budget. Fights over which ballots can and cannot be counted will be the most intense political—and legal—fight yet. Some of those legal battles may end up in front of SCOTUS.

TRUMP RELYING ON THE COURT -- During the first presidential debate, Trump said he was “counting” on the Supreme Court to “look at the ballots.” He has also said that he thinks the election “will end up in the Supreme Court” and that having eight justices is “not good.”

HE’S NOT THE ONLY ONE -- South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who as Senate Judiciary Chair is leading the charge for Barrett’s confirmation told Fox News, “I promise you as a Republican, if the Supreme Court decides that Joe Biden wins, I will accept the result,” Mr. Graham added. “The court will decide.”

WHY SCOTUS MATTERS -- In the last few weeks, SCOTUS upheld South Carolina’s witness requirements, allowed Maine’s ranked-choice voting to go ahead, okayed Montana sending mail-in ballots to all registered voters, and could still rule on several more cases, including a ballot deadline case from Pennsylvania. After election day, federal lawsuits or appeals from state supreme courts could end up in front of SCOTUS.

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The Count: Jay Willis on Why Amy Coney Barrett Won't Recuse Herself from Election Cases







Three Supreme Court Justices Just Showed They’re Willing to Throw Out Mail-In Ballots

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/10/supreme-court-south-carolina-mail-ballots-signature.html

The Supreme Court reinstated South Carolina’s witness signature requirement for mail-in ballots on Monday night, a predictable blow to voting rights in a state with a close Senate race. Monday’s order certainly was bad news; it means that South Carolinians, including those infected with COVID-19, will once again need witnesses to sign their ballot envelopes. This administrative burden is potentially dangerous and totally pointless, and it will likely lead the state to nullify thousands of otherwise valid ballots.

But considering the court’s current composition, that decision was probably the best-case scenario. What’s frightening is how close the court came to triggering an election meltdown. Three conservative justices wouldn’t have just reinstated the witness signature rule but allowed South Carolina to apply it retroactively, nullifying tens of thousands of ballots already cast. Donald Trump has repeatedly said that he wants the Supreme Court to throw out mail-in ballots, which could overturn election results. It appears that three justices are ready to do just that.

Six states require absentee voters to procure a witness signature before sending back their ballot. A few other states jettisoned the requirement this year due to the pandemic, but not South Carolina. U.S. District Judge J. Michelle Childs nonetheless blocked the state’s witness rule for the June primary, finding that it unconstitutionally burdened the right to vote in light of COVID-19. South Carolina declined to appeal that decision, so the state held its primary with no witness requirement. On Sept. 18, Childs blocked this requirement for the November election as well. This time, South Carolina appealed. A panel of judges for the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the state, but the full court promptly vacated the panel’s decision and kept the requirement on hold. South Carolina then asked the Supreme Court to intervene on its behalf.

SCOTUS has become the place where voting rights go to die, so it was no surprise when the justices gave South Carolina most of what it wanted on Monday. With no noted dissents, the court let the state reimpose the witness rule—although, as usual for a shadow docket case, it didn’t explain its decision. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion citing the notorious Purcell principle, which holds that courts should not alter voting laws in the runup to an election. But the lower courts did not actually alter the voting procedures currently in place; they simply preserved the status quo, since the witness requirement has been suspended since May. It was the Supreme Court that changed the status quo on Monday by imposing the witness requirement less than one month from Election Day, violating the principle that Kavanaugh claimed to vindicate.

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October 15, 2020

Are there any persuadable voters left in the US?

‘White working-class men’ are seen as the hard core of Trump’s support, yet a big group of working-class voters—black, brown and white—are persuadable.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/are-there-any-persuadable-voters-left-in-the-us

by Karen Nussbaum

‘Voters have made up their minds,’ reads one recent headline. ‘Blue collar men … are the core of Trump’s base of support, and their enthusiasm has only deepened,’ the Washington Post asserts. Scenes of crowds of white supporters at Trump rallies are in every newspaper, punctuated with pictures of white men in military gear and automatic weapons at right-wing militia shows. America’s political institutions are more divided than they have been since the civil war and basic democratic practices are threatened, including the peaceful transfer of power. But the American people are far less polarised than we may think. If we write off the ‘white working class’ as right-wing, we’ll lose the election and the very voters who are necessary to maintain democracy. Working-class voters have legitimate grievances with the Democratic Party, which has aligned with corporate interests on neoliberal policies. Over time, there has been a move to Republicans. And there was a substantial shift to Donald Trump among white working-class voters in 2016—largely as a way to lash out. But it was smaller than typically suggested, according to the Center for American Progress. Research at Vanderbilt University shows that while 60 per cent of white working-class voters supported Trump in 2016, they accounted for only 30 per cent of his vote. Trump enjoyed broad support across the social range of Republican voters.

Other demographic factors

Class and education tell us less about who is an immutable Trump supporter than other demographic factors. ‘While there is an education gap in the United States, it is nothing compared to the gap along the lines of religious affiliation,’ says Michael Podhorzer, senior advisor to Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO trade union confederation. And in the US that matters. According to Pew Research, in much of western Europe, only one in ten describe themselves as very religious, while in the US over half say religion is very important: ‘White evangelical Protestants, who constituted one out of every five voters, consistently have been among the strongest supporters of Republican candidates and supported Trump by a 77% to 16% margin.’ Ownership of a firearm is another important predictor of vote choice. In the US gun ownership is three times as great as in the most armed country in Europe (Montenegro). Nearly half of all civilian-held guns in the world belong to people in the US. Sixty-two per cent of gun-owners voted for Trump—10 percentage points more than voted for the then Republican candidate, John McCain, in the 2008 presidential election. Religious affiliation and gun ownership are associated with strong values such as a belief in personal liberty and distrust of government. And, of course, the biggest supporters of Trump are ‘free-market’ Republicans.

Not fixed outlook

But many voters are not committed to a fixed outlook. ‘By some measures, around half of the population is either disengaged or has ideologically inconsistent views,’ write Nate Cohn and Sabrina Tavernese in the New York Times. ‘Together, 54 percent of Americans either hold a roughly equal mix of conservative and liberal positions or say they don’t follow the news most of the time.’ That’s what I found when I knocked on doors with Working America, a national community organisation affiliated with the AFL-CIO. We were in Columbus, Ohio, in the industrial midwest, a few months after the 2016 election. We were talking to people who had previously voted for Barack Obama but turned to Trump. We learnt that we shouldn’t tell people they’re wrong—that Trump is bad or they’re racist—but tell them something they don’t know. Gertrude, a retiree, is a good example. She was a strong Trump supporter and didn’t want to hear anything bad about him. But when we told her that one of Trump’s policies included eliminating public assistance to pay for home heating, something she depended on, she fell back in her chair. ‘That’s not what he promised,’ she said. Gertrude is one of 3.5 million Working America members, working people who aren’t union members. Most—75 per cent— are white working-class and 25 per cent are people of colour. Nine out of ten are not involved with any other progressive organisation.

Battleground-state voters

Working America has combined its knowledge of its members gleaned over the last 17 years with clinical research and finds that 20 million voters in battleground states can be persuaded to be new voters for Joe Biden and down-ticket Democrats standing for Congress. Most likely to be persuaded are those without a college degree who don’t watch cable TV—the low-information voters identified by the New York Times as those who aren’t polarised. One in five will be people of colour. Convincing these voters, regardless of race, depends on using the same approaches that broke through to Gertrude: talking about their concerns—not politics and politicians—and finding common ground on economic issues such as healthcare. With careful identification of those voters who are most responsive and avoiding divisive content, we shall include about 5 million gun-owners among those we contact. Just as Working America’s working-class base has to be understood in a nuanced way, so do union members. There is an image of union members moving from Obama to Trump in 2016, especially among men in the building trades. But that may be changing. ‘It’s going to be close among my members between Biden and President Trump,’ Sean McGarvey, president of North America’s Building Trades Unions told [link:file:///Users/robinwilson/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail%20Downloads/FECEE9C1-936F-4059-AE6D-2DE4AEFCD286/politico.com/news/2020/09/22/donald-trump-union-support-snub-joe-biden-418329|Politico]. But, especially because of Trump’s response to the coronavirus, there had been ‘dramatic change in the last six months’, he said.

People of colour...........

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October 15, 2020

Teens Did Surprisingly Well in Quarantine

More sleep and family time—and less social media—may have made the difference.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/10/how-teens-handled-quarantine/616695/



As the coronavirus pandemic took hold in the United States in March, work and school moved online, restaurants closed, and unemployment soared. The effects on mental health were immediate: U.S. adults in spring 2020 were three times more likely to experience mental distress, anxiety, or depression than adults in 2018 or 2019. According to data collected by the Census Bureau, anxiety and depression rose even further among American adults in June and July, after the killing of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests. How American teenagers fared during this time is more of a mystery. With teens no longer going to school and few able to see friends, many people worried about how teens would adapt. However, teens’ experiences of these events might differ from adults’, just as responses to the Great Depression varied by age. To better understand the experiences of teenagers during this unique time, my colleagues and I fielded a survey of 1,523 U.S. teens from May to July this year, asking about their mental health, family time, sleep, technology use, and views on the race-related protests and the police.

We assessed mental well-being using four measures: life satisfaction, happiness, symptoms of depression, and loneliness. We then compared the 2020 teens’ responses with responses to identical questions from a similar survey in 2018. Surprisingly, teens’ mental health did not collectively suffer during the pandemic when the two surveys are compared. The percentage of teens who were depressed or lonely was actually lower in 2020 than in 2018, and the percentage who were unhappy or dissatisfied with life was only slightly higher. This relatively positive picture for mental health occurred despite many of the challenges faced by the teens in our survey. Nearly one out of three teens (29 percent) knew someone diagnosed with COVID-19. More than one out of four (27 percent) said a parent had lost a job, and exactly one out of four was worried about their families having enough food to eat. Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) were worried about catching the virus, and two-thirds worried about not being able to see their friends. So why was teen mental health stable, or even better, during the pandemic?

First, teens have been sleeping more during the pandemic, and teens who are sleep deprived are significantly more likely to suffer from depression. In 2018, only 55 percent of teens said they usually slept seven or more hours a night. During the pandemic, this jumped to 84 percent among those for whom school was still in session. With teens going to school online during the pandemic, they were likely able to sleep later in the morning than usual. When school is held in person, the large majority of middle and high schools begin classes before 8:30 a.m., and some as early as 7, requiring many students to get up very early to commute to school. This creates a mismatch between school schedules and the shift to a later circadian rhythm that occurs during biological puberty, when teens find it difficult to fall asleep earlier. Teens who were able to sleep later during the early months of the pandemic might have improved their mental health. With many parents working from home and most outside activities cancelled for both parents and teens, the majority of teens reported increased family time. With positive family relationships linked to better mental health, more family time might have mitigated any negative mental-health effects of the pandemic.

Fifty-six percent of teens said they were spending more time talking with their parents than they had before the pandemic, and 54 percent said their families now ate dinner together more often. Forty-six percent reported spending more time with their siblings. Perhaps most striking, 68 percent of teens said their families had become closer during the pandemic. Family closeness was associated with mental health: Only 15 percent who said their families had become closer during the pandemic were depressed, compared with 27 percent of those who did not believe their families had become closer. Although the teen mental-health outcomes during quarantine were not as bleak as we might have supposed, the financial distress caused by the pandemic still had an impact. Twenty-five percent of the teens who reported that a parent had lost a job during the pandemic were depressed, compared with only 16 percent of those without parental job loss. Similarly, 26 percent of those worried about their families not having enough money were depressed, versus 13 percent who did not have this concern. Food insecurity was associated with the largest difference: Among teens who worried that their families would not have enough to eat, 33 percent were depressed, versus 14 percent of teens who were not worried about having enough food.

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October 15, 2020

Why I'm Glad I Left America

Life in France is better, especially now.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/american-emigre/616705/



I am sprung from people who emigrated from the country of their birth to America. The United States was their refuge, their hope, and the dream they passed down to us, their American descendants. I could never have imagined as a child that, one day, I would leave America for a better life in another country. Yet that is what I did when I moved from New York to Paris in 2010, and my decision seems wiser by the year. There hasn’t been a day since Donald Trump was elected in 2016 that I haven’t been thankful that I live in France, and not in the United States. Gun violence, white-supremacist militias, the shamelessly voiced opinions that all lives don’t matter—and that if you die from COVID-19, well, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles—fill me with dread. So does climate-change denial while the West Coast, where I was born and raised, goes up in smoke. France isn’t paradise. The country has been hit hard by the pandemic, which has thrown more than 1 million people into poverty. Cases are on the rise again, and the government is trying to find a balance between keeping the economy going and protecting lives.

Our president, Emmanuel Macron, is a neoliberal technocrat tacking to the right, but no one in the French leadership has encouraged rebellion against local authorities trying to contain the pandemic, as has happened repeatedly in America. Macron, for all his faults, believes in science and that climate change is real. He is also capable of paying homage to fellow citizens who have been killed by the coronavirus. The pandemic isn’t the only threat we face in France. The country is wrestling with the legacy of its colonial past; a new generation of French-born descendants of former colonized peoples is staking a claim to the country, which they demand include them without erasing their heritage. The trial of alleged accomplices in the January 2015 attack on the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the recent attack with a meat cleaver in front of its old address are reminders that Islamist terrorism is still with us. Yet the risk of dying in a terrorist attack here pales in comparison with the risk of dying in a mass shooting in the United States. Last year, 417 mass shootings occurred in the U.S., and 15,381 people were killed by guns (including suicides, homicides, and accidents). The same year, out of a population of 67 million, 880 people were murdered in France. We don’t have armed militias patrolling our streets or our polling places. I feel far safer here.

France is also a more humane country: Health care, education, affordable housing, paid parental leave, and five weeks of annual paid vacation are seen as rights, not pipe-dream privileges. I feel less vulnerable in France, knowing that if something happens and I can’t take care of myself, France will take care of me. In 2000, the World Health Organization ranked France’s national health-care system the best in the world. The pandemic and budget cuts have strained France’s health system, but it still delivers better care to more people at a lower cost than America’s does. Health-care expenditure per person in the United States tops $10,000 a year. France spends less than $5,000 a year per person, yet infant mortality is lower, the French live longer, and fewer require rehospitalization. Preventive care is free. I recently received reminders to get my regular colon-cancer and breast-cancer screenings done. They won’t cost me a cent. The system isn’t perfect: Too many rural areas and poor suburban areas are “medical deserts,” lacking doctors, clinics, and hospitals. Overall, though, access to quality, affordable medical care is not something the French have to worry about the way Americans do.



Paying for college, the nightmare of the American middle class, is also simply not a source of the same angst in France. Higher education is considered a right. Undergraduate tuition at France’s public universities is just $200 a year for members of the European Union and residents of Quebec. For foreign students, tuition is $3,262 a year. Compare that with UC Berkeley, which charges in-state undergraduate students $14,254 for tuition and nonresident students $44,000. Private universities in France, including the prestigious grandes écoles in business and administration, are more expensive, but are still a bargain compared with the United States. Sciences Po, for example, charges students on a sliding scale based on their parents’ income. Maximum undergraduate tuition is $12,601, whereas tuition at the private liberal-arts college my daughter attended in the United States is now $60,000 a year. Granted, many American students receive financial aid, but most colleges and universities expect students to take on debt as part of their total financial-aid package, saddling young adults with loans some will never be able to repay.

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October 14, 2020

Lieberman is a pure spoiler against Warnock in GA Special. He needs to drop out NOW and endorse

Warnock.

Without Matt Lieberman, Warnock has an outside chance at hitting 50% and thus avoiding a runoff, where he may lose.

The only positive is that I now see no way that the 2 Rethugs will both top Warnock and thus end up with all Repug runoff.

So sick of the Liebermans overall, especially Joe, who helps run RW dollars to shit on real Democrats (like he did against Marie Newman where his No Labels group (which is the bi-partisan Problem Solvers Caucus' (who are once again trying to kneecap Pelosi, this time over the COVID Relief bill) parent group) outrageously and falsely (obviously) smeared her as a holocaust denier and tried other shitbaggery.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/senate/georgia/








ETA

The other Democratic candidate, Tarver, should do the same as well.

October 14, 2020

220,900 US COVID-19 deaths as of 10 04 AM GMT, October 14, 2020

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

October 14, 2020

Trump's Plot To Steal The Election (a detailed list of what he will try to do)

https://theappeal.org/the-count-trumps-plot-to-steal-the-election/









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https://twitter.com/theappeal/status/1314690737351479296


so, so much more at the top link

October 12, 2020

Paradox-Free Time Travel Is Theoretically Possible, Researchers Say

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/27/917556254/paradox-free-time-travel-is-theoretically-possible-researchers-say?ref=thefuturist



"The past is obdurate," Stephen King wrote in his book about a man who goes back in time to prevent the Kennedy assassination. "It doesn't want to be changed." Turns out, King might have been on to something. Countless science fiction tales have explored the paradox of what would happen if you went back in time and did something in the past that endangered the future. Perhaps one of the most famous pop culture examples is in Back to the Future, when Marty McFly goes back in time and accidentally stops his parents from meeting, putting his own existence in jeopardy.

But maybe McFly wasn't in much danger after all. According a new paper from researchers at the University of Queensland, even if time travel were possible, the paradox couldn't actually exist. Researchers ran the numbers and determined that even if you made a change in the past, the timeline would essentially self-correct, ensuring that whatever happened to send you back in time would still happen. "Say you traveled in time in an attempt to stop COVID-19's patient zero from being exposed to the virus," University of Queensland scientist Fabio Costa told the university's news service.

"However, if you stopped that individual from becoming infected, that would eliminate the motivation for you to go back and stop the pandemic in the first place," said Costa, who co-authored the paper with honors undergraduate student Germain Tobar. "This is a paradox — an inconsistency that often leads people to think that time travel cannot occur in our universe." A variation is known as the "grandfather paradox" — in which a time traveler kills their own grandfather, in the process preventing the time traveler's birth. The logical paradox has given researchers a headache, in part because according to Einstein's theory of general relativity, "closed timelike curves" are possible, theoretically allowing an observer to travel back in time and interact with their past self — potentially endangering their own existence.

But these researchers say that such a paradox wouldn't necessarily exist, because events would adjust themselves. Take the coronavirus patient zero example. "You might try and stop patient zero from becoming infected, but in doing so, you would catch the virus and become patient zero, or someone else would," Tobar told the university's news service. In other words, a time traveler could make changes, but the original outcome would still find a way to happen — maybe not the same way it happened in the first timeline but close enough so that the time traveler would still exist and would still be motivated to go back in time. "No matter what you did, the salient events would just recalibrate around you," Tobar said.

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