Contributors

Sunday, November 29, 2020

The right needs to stop falsely claiming that the Nazis were socialists

Great piece by Ronald J. Granieri from last February. It breaks down the complete nonsense of the Nazis being leftists. 

I get it, right-wingers. It's very overwhelming for you when you get upset at the left. You like to create drama. But this is just out and out lying. Further, it obfuscates the actual authoritarianism of the right. Goebbels 101.

Liberals and moderates need to go on offense with this stuff. Pummel the right for being the obvious dictators they want to be. Never let up. More stuff like Moscow Mitch! 

Monday, November 23, 2020

The Fucking Hammer

There has been a lot of talk lately about coming together and looking at each other not as liberals or conservatives but as Americans. My interest in doing this begins when conservatives in our country own their insane bullshit. 

The facts are that they are in a cult and have spent the better part of three decades demonizing liberals. They have done a great job of getting people to believe that “both sides” are just as bad and there are such things as “alternative facts.” They have actively worked to erode faith in our institutions for the express intent of holding on to their slipping power. 

If they take responsibility for all this crap, I’m more than willing to address the minor transgressions of the left (cancel culture, partisan spin). Until then, they get the hammer.

Every. Single. Day.

Sunday, November 22, 2020

Rudy Melts Down Amid Republican Campaign to Disenfranchise Voters

In trying to steal the 2020 election, the Trump campaign must be getting tired of all that losing. A conservative Republican Pennsylvania judge just tossed out Trump's case, ridiculing Trump's legal team. In particular, Rudy Giuliani is doing an absolutely abysmal job while literally melting down.

The Trump campaign’s main argument challenges an email that Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar sent to county-level voting officials, encouraging those officials to “provide information to party and candidate representatives during the pre-canvass that identifies the voters whose ballots have been rejected,” so that those voters can be notified that they made an error while submitting those ballots, and will have the opportunity to cure that error.

As it turns out, not all counties took this advice. The Trump campaign claims that Philadelphia, a Democratic stronghold, notified voters that they needed to cure errors in their absentee ballots, while county officials in Republican-leaning counties did not. Thus, the campaign claims, absentee ballots cast in Biden-friendly Philadelphia were more likely to be counted than ballots cast in more Trump-friendly regions of the state — and this discrepancy amounts to unconstitutional discrimination.

The judge dismissed this argument as total crap. The Republican officials who didn't allow ballot curing were the ones doing the unconstitutional discrimination: suppressing Democratic votes to steal the election. 

Trump has been doing everything in his power to discourage Republicans from voting by mail, encouraging them to vote in person on election day (and to vote twice, causing even more mayhem and confusion on election day). That means absentee ballots are going to skew Democratic. 

Republican county officials refused to allow absentee ballots to be "cured," knowing that they were more than likely to be Democratic.

There's nothing at all wrong with curing ballots. It's done all the time: when you vote in person your ballot is run through the tabulator, and if there are any inconsistencies the machine spits it out and you get a new ballot. This is almost always innocent: for example, accidentally voting for two judges in the same race, which is really easy to do when there are like 20 judge races, most of which only have one candidate.

Republican officials -- intentionally disregarding instructions from the secretary of state -- prevented voters from fixing erroneous mail-in ballots stole votes from people who made trivial clerical errors.

Those Republican officials should be prosecuted for disenfranchising voters. But, like always, the Republicans are trying to their own crimes to their advantage.

Thursday, November 19, 2020

Radical New Democratic Ideas

 
















Is this the world that the "far-left" wants? OMGGG!!!!!!! Hide the women and children. Evil is about to reign down on all of us. Soon we will be floating in a boiling pit of sewage...

Wednesday, November 18, 2020

The Year 2020

2020 has been labeled many things but the simple fact is that it will be remembered for the year that alternative facts literally killed Americans. 

And our national obsession with “both sides” let those responsible (conservatives) off the hook.

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

What I Wish Would Happen, What Actually Happens

What I Wish Would Happen: 
 
-Facts are presented. 
-People change their minds based on reality. 
-People are more enlightened and humanity progresses 

What Actually Happens: 

-Facts are presented. 
-People experience cognitive dissonance and feel personally attacked. 
-People dig into their beliefs, refused to be enlightened and we don’t progress.

Friday, November 13, 2020

The Guide On The Side

With much of the country steeped in distance learning, an inherent flaw in our education system has been exposed. This flaw is one of perception by the general public and has unfortunately been fueled by many in the field of education. In fact, it's a belief that needs to be extinguished. Here it is... 

The responsibility of education lies solely with educators. In fact, it lies primarily with parents and the scholars themselves. 

If neither takes this responsibility seriously or understand how to assume this responsibility, then school officials face a losing battle. 

This is what we need to teach the families of our country. Teach your children at the earliest age possible to take control of their learning. Devote time to supporting them in this endeavor. Show them successful ways to learn and be good scholars. 

And educators, you aren't the "Sage on the Stage." You should be the Guide on the Side. That's what leads to more successful scholars. They need to own it. So do their parents. Give them the space to do that. 

If we don't burst this myth and change our course, we will have serious problems with people who can't function for themselves in our culture.

Sunday, November 08, 2020

The Problem with Polling

There's a lot of handwringing in the press about polls that indicated Joe Biden would win by a larger margin than he actually did:

While the polls generally underestimated Trump, the errors were more acute in some states. In Wisconsin, which has mostly completed its count, Biden won by seven-tenths of a percentage point, 49.6 percent to 48.9 percent. But that’s after taking an 8.4-point lead into Election Day in the FiveThirtyEight average.

Other states where the polls missed: Ohio, where Trump had an advantage of 0.8 points in the FiveThirtyEight average, currently shows an 8.2-point lead for Trump in the vote count. In Florida, preelection polls showed Biden up by an average of 2.5 points, suggesting the Democrat had a slight edge in an election he’s currently trailing by 3.2 points.

There were some polls that hit the mark in those states. Trafalgar Group, which says it tries to account for respondents who lie to pollsters about their support for Trump, performed well in Wisconsin (Biden +1 in their last poll) and Florida (Trump +2). But the firm also released other polls that overstated Trump’s position, like a survey in too-close-to-call Georgia that showed Trump leading by 5 points, and one in Michigan that gave Trump a slight edge in a state he lost by 3 points.

Still, the more common miss for public pollsters was in the other direction. The ABC News/Washington Post poll in October showing Biden ahead by 17 in Wisconsin got a lot of ink as an outlier, but the problems were more pervasive than that. The final New York Times/Siena College polls in Wisconsin and Florida had Biden up 11 points and 6 points, respectively.

There are lots of theories as to why this is the case. Some theorize that Trump voters are "shy;" which is the politically correct way of saying that Trump voters are ashamed to admit they support such a morally and ethically corrupt scumbag.

Others say that Trump voters are just plain liars, trying to screw with the polls. Which doesn't really make any sense, because nothing ticks off Trump more than bad poll numbers.

The most likely reason, though, is what I've been saying for years: likely voters just don't answer their phones when pollsters call. Why would they? It's been at least a decade since I gave up answering the phone when I get a call from a number I don't recognize.

Before VOIP dialing technology made telephone spam calls the plague of the Internet age, I used to answer the phone. And back in the day I answered some political preference polls. 
 
But that brings up another issue: the polls themselves. The problem is that so many polls are dishonest "push polls." They aren't legitimate attempts by a news organization to find out how you plan to vote. They're run by political hacks who ask misleading questions packed with lies in an attempt to influence your vote.

The real question about polls in this election cycle is whether people were ashamed about voting for Trump and lied about it, or whether polling in general is just not working anymore. I think it's the latter, because so many polls got House and Senate races wrong too.
 
News organizations and political campaigns are seriously worried about whether polling is completely broken. Polls are useful for telling the general mood of the country, which is important for business as well as governance. Campaigns definitely need them to decide where to spend money.
 
But because legitimate polling organizations can't get through to a representative sample of the electorate, I think phone-based polling is done for.

It's likely that polling will be replaced by measuring people's online habits: their search engine queries, what Twitter feeds they follow, what Facebook posts they click on and share, what news sites they visit, etc. 
 
Which means the opinions of people who aren't online won't be measured, which includes the elderly and certain minority groups.
 
That also means that our online lives will be under even more scrutiny, and companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter will have even more power. 

Given what havoc Twitter and Facebook have wreaked on our lives these last five years, with all the evil misinformation and outright lies spread through them on the election and the pandemic, this is not a Good Thing.

Unless we all delete our Twitter and Facebook accounts, we are going to be one very unhappy and dysfunctional country.

Friday, November 06, 2020

Dear Democrats...

Democrats, the core goal of Republicans and conservatives is to get you to hand wring through trolling. That’s how they get you to put yourselves in losing positions. It’s a specific strategy. 

So, when you get shit for the lack of a blue wave (even though we still don’t know how things are going to clarify over the next few weeks), don’t fall for it. Be reflective, make changes but don’t fall back into running from a position of apology. That’s just what they want you to do because they know it’s a loser. 

If the Democrats want to fix their problems, they should put the following four people in charge of the party. 

Pete Buttigieg 
Stacey Abrams 
Rachel Bitecofer 
Andrew Yang

Trump Intentionally Let the Pandemic Get Out of Control to Screw Up Voting by Mail

In June it took a week to count all the absentee ballots in the Pennsylvania primary. Back then everyone predicted that it would be worse in November.

It was also in June when Donald Trump appointed Louis DeJoy, a Republican fundraiser with huge conflicts of interest, to be postmaster general. Almost immediately DeJoy started sabotaging the post office's efficiency. He eliminated collection boxes. He got rid of automated sorting machines. He cut back on overtime.

Of course, the mail backed up. Thousands of chicks sent to Maine farmers died due to these delays.

In August Trump admitted he was intentionally screwing up voting by mail.

And to make sure that as many people voted by mail, Trump encouraged everyone to run around and spread the coronavirus. He wanted the pandemic to be out of control on election day, because he needed more Democrats to vote by mail. The crush of ballots would overwhelm the post office and the election judges who have to go through a complex process to handle them.

Meanwhile he encouraged Republicans to go out and vote in person. He even had the CDC declare that people infected with the coronavirus could break quarantine and vote in person.

In Missouri an election judge supervisor who had tested positive for COVID broke quarantine and worked at a polling site. She then died.

Now Trump is trying to stop the election count with another mountain of lies. He's trying to run out the clock on the election, falsely claiming that ballots postmarked but not counted on election day should not be counted.

That includes thousands of ballots that found sitting in post offices around the country the day after the election because the post office refused a court order to process them expeditiously.

This election was intentionally sabotaged by Trump and DeJoy. That is the fraud.

And what made that possible? An out-of-countrol epidemic that has killed 235,000 Americans. Trump is using misery and death from the coronavirus to steal this election.