ChiGoose

Solid point. To be a Republican today is to disregard any policy position or independent thought in favor of having your tongue wrapped gently over Trump’s *****. Anyone who rejects that is, by definition, not a Republican anymore. It’s all about drinking the juche

Watch this, and when you do, just think that the absolute best that the GOP can offer this family is “thoughts and prayers” even though this sh!t doesn’t happen this frequently anywhere else.

Are you ok? Can any of your family help you?

Is there anyone out there who honestly believes this isn’t a scam at this point?

Within an hour of the Trump Campaign chairs emailing the campaign team not to leak things to the press, the email was leaked to the press. LOL

I’m also a big space exploration fan and I’m currently reading A City On Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. It’s a very eye-opening about the realities of colonizing Mars and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in the topic.

If they didn’t just assume everything about everyone and actually listened to other people, they might actually realize that they’ve been parroting utter BS and nonsense. The resulting cognitive dissonance might actually kill them, so they just repeat the same bogus talking points.

Why is it that the GI Joe crew is constantly blaming Cobra for when bad things happen? When people tried to rob Fort Knox, they said it was Cobra When people tried to cut off the world's energy, they blamed Cobra When someone tried to destroy the Panama Canal, they blamed Cobra When people tried to destroy Tokyo with an earthquake bomb, they blamed Cobra When someone tricked the GI Joes to detonate a bomb underwater in a fault line, they blamed Cobra When someone hijacked a satellite and used it to melt the Golden Gate Bridge, they blamed Cobra It seems like GI Joe thinks that any time bad things happen, it MUST be Cobra. Cobra, Cobra, Cobra. They're obsessed with Cobra! These GI Joe idiots and their supporters keep falling for the Cobra HOAX!

Evergreen Onion article: ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens "WINDER, GA—In the hours following a violent rampage in Georgia in which a lone attacker killed at least four individuals and injured nine others, citizens living in the only country where this kind of mass killing routinely occurs reportedly concluded Wednesday that there was no way to prevent the massacre from taking place. “This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,” said New Mexico resident Edward Turner, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations. “It’s a shame, but what can we do? There really wasn’t anything that was going to keep this individual from snapping and killing a lot of people if that’s what they really wanted.” At press time, residents of the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past eight years were referring to themselves and their situation as “helpless.”

Lots of projection and nonsense from someone who seems fundamentally incapable of reading comprehension. The EC was adopted largely in part because it was acceptable to slave states like Virginia. No country setting up a democracy today would choose the EC as the way to do it. It is an incredibly inefficient way to determine the will of the electorate. I don’t have a problem with losing. I’m a Bills fan. Losing has been a part of my DNA for decades. What I have a problem with is blind faith in an outdated institution that does not accomplish its supposed objective and a reluctance to dare to dream that we deserve better than a system handed down to us over 200 years ago by people who owned other people.

Man, you keep on with the projection, huh? Can’t stand that you were proven wrong so now you want to change the subject while pretending you know what I believe even though you seem fundamentally incapable of simply reading words without your prejudices changing the meaning? Is reading a problem for you?

It’s really hard to get so many things wrong in one sentence, but you’ve managed quite a bit here. For starters, Superdelegates can’t even vote on the first ballot in the Dem nomination process.

The fundamental problem you seem to be having is that you do not understand my argument. You assume that the words I type mean something other than what they plainly mean. You are bringing your biases in to the point that it's clouding what you're actually reading. My argument: The electoral college is a vestige of having to deal with slave states and it no longer serves the purpose it once did. There are better ways to elect a president. If you think my goal is for Dems to win every election, you do not know me. So do not pretend that you do. If I had may way, both the Democratic and Republican parties as we know them today would cease to exist. Also, if your best argument for the EC is "it did something good 150 years ago" then your argument is as outdated as the EC is.

Care to elaborate? Tremendous leaps of logic here. The EC no longer does what it was designed to do. It is outdated, obsolete, and no country designing an electoral system today would copy it. So maybe, just maybe, it's not the best way to elect a president.

Why? Seems completely unrelated to the topic of this thread.

If only there was some record of what the Founders thought about the Electoral College and slavery. Like, if James Madison, often called the Father of the Constitution had thoughts on it.. Oh wait. "There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections." (James Madison July 19, 1787) Wow. It's almost as if one of the major factors in designing the Electoral College was to appease the slaves states...

Yeah man, I cited a couple of sources but started with wiki because I wasn't super confident in your comprehension ability. In any case, the slave states rejected every proposal for selecting the president until they agreed on the EC because, in combination with the 3/5ths compromise, it gave them power disproportionate to their voting population. It's not exactly a secret. Do you ever wonder why education correlates with partisan leaning? And finally, if I was programmed growing up, they did a terrible job at it since most of my family voted for Trump...

I'm not sure on the timing, but that would make sense. Doesn't help him in the general to spend any time in NY because of the EC.

I'm honestly not sure that's true. The top 10 cities combined represent just 8% of the US population. The top 20 are only 10%. Even if you go to the top 50 cities, you're only at 15% (coincidentally, about how much of the US population lives in the current swing states). A city-focused campaign would ignore the vast majority of the country. Plus, urban media markets are incredibly expensive. Campaign ad dollars go a lot further in rural areas than they do in cities. I remember back in the 2016 election when Trump came to Rochester. It was a big deal because presidential candidates don't normally go there. In the end, it didn't do anything for him electorally since NY isn't a swing state. But under the popular vote, it would have been cheaper for him to target areas like Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse to pull in the surrounding rural voters than to spend money in Pittsburgh and Philly because he wouldn't be concerned about needing to win PA as a state, just run up the vote in rural areas and smaller cities.

I actually fully agree with you. The current swing states are just the current swing states. It's been different states in the past, and it'll be different states in the future. But what makes them important in the EC isn't that they are small, it's simply that they could go either way. You could argue that New York was a swing state for most of US history. I appreciate you consistently fulfilling your role here. You could probably save yourself a lot of time by just having a bot randomly post about "MSM", "Dems" and "statists". Wouldn't change much for the rest of us.

Tommy Eyerolls always sticking to the script. Typing in those talking points that contribute nothing to anything other than stroking his own ego.

The Electoral College was officially selected as the means of electing president towards the end of the Constitutional Convention due to pressure from slave states wanting to increase their voting power (since they could count slaves as 3/5 of a person when allocating electors) and by small states who increased their power due to the minimum of three electors per state.[31] The compromise was reached after other proposals, including to get a direct election for president (as proposed by Hamilton among others), failed to get traction among slave states.[31] Levitsky and Ziblatt describe it as "not a product of constitutional theory or farsighted design. Rather, it was adopted by default, after all other alternatives had been rejected." *** Both during slavery and also after slavery, well into the 20th century in fact, the states of the South stood firmly in opposition to the adoption of a national popular vote. The South was the bulwark of opposition during the period of slavery, of course, because slave-holding states received extra electoral votes thanks to the three-fifths clause. White Southerners, thus, gained added influence in the Electoral College, and if they had switched to a national popular vote, they would have lost that influence. *** In 1787, roughly 40 percent of people living in the Southern states were enslaved Black people, who couldn’t vote. James Madison from Virginia—where enslaved people accounted for 60 percent of the population—knew that either a direct presidential election, or one with electors divvied up according to free white residents only, wouldn’t fly in the South.  “The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States,” said Madison, “and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.”  The result was the controversial “three-fifths compromise,” in which three-fifths of the enslaved Black population would be counted toward allocating representatives and electors and calculating federal taxes. The compromise ensured that Southern states would ratify the Constitution and gave Virginia, home to more than 200,000 slaves, a quarter (12) of the total electoral votes required to win the presidency (46). You seem to be confusing how parties work with how elections work. There are no provisions in the Constitution for parties nominating their candidates because the Founders did not anticipate political parties (Washington famously argued against them in his farewell address). If you have a problem with party officials selecting the nominees, then you have a problem with basically every president before Nixon. You're also making a bunch of assumptions about me personally despite you not knowing me. It may come as a surprise to you, but I have no influence on how the Democratic Party selects its presidential nominee, nor do I agree with every decision it makes. You just seem to like to result to strawmen and assumptions because it's easier than dealing with reality. The idea that the electoral college makes every square inch of the country matter is ridiculous. Where is the breathless coverage of both candidates duking it out in Fargo or Cheyenne? Occasionally candidates travel to non-competitive states to boost local candidates, but there's no strategy of winning the election that is going to invest campaign resources in Wyoming, Hawaii, or Vermont, etc. Those places do not matter in presidential elections because of the EC. The millions of Republicans who vote in California and New York do not matter. California had more Trump voters than any other state in 2020 and none of them mattered, thanks to the EC. While my point has been more about how the EC is bad than an advocation for the national popular vote (which would be an improvement but doesn't solve the problems we're seeing), were the popular vote to decide the election, it would put *more* people and places in play. Any candidate who focused just on the big cities would lose because not only are the biggest cities just a small portion of the overall population, ignoring the majority of Americans who don't live in big cities would alienate them from the majority of voters. The current battleground states of PA, GA, MI, AZ, WI, and NV comprise of 15% of the US population. So even your fear of only 30% of the country mattering would be twice the current situation with the EC. I'm surprised you're not advocating eliminating the EC given that. Again, that's irrelevant from the conversation around the EC and I don't have any say over how the Democratic Party picks it's nominee. I just have to live with the choices on hand.

Tommy Eyerolls sticks to the script. Do NOT engage on the actual arguments. Do NOT inquire about what someone actually advocates for. For that is the path to revealing you are incapable of critical thought. DO throw out eyerolls. DO make a bunch of strawman arguments. DO follow the talking points. For that is how you feel superior despite adding no insight or value to the conversation.

Couple of points on this: The Electoral College was created as a compromise to slave states. As such, it's been outdated for 150+ years The ostensible purpose of the EC was that the electors would serve as a check against the will of the people, voting for a candidate other than the one who won the popular vote if they felt that candidate was a danger to the country. It obviously does not work like this. Any idea that it's a "check against tyranny" is just wishcasting. The most common argument for it is that it gives the small states power. This is demonstrably false. Were it true, we'd spend every election season focused on the smallest states such as Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, and the Dakotas. Instead, we're talking about Pennsylvania (5th most populous state), Georgia (8th), Michigan (10th), Arizona (14th), Wisconsin (20th), and Nevada (30th). If your support for an electoral system is based on the fact that it helps your team, you're not actually interested in democracy, you want authoritarianism disguised as democracy. Don't know why I would need an "excuse" for November. The race is currently a coin toss. Anyone who says they know definitively how it is going to turn out is just bragging about their ignorance.