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[Frumple]

Again, or is that the one that's already came up? Don't feel like wrasslin' with flash right now. Or actually listening to a politician speak*.

*I massively prefer transcripts. They tend to lessen the seething rage politicin' ramblings tend to incite in me

[scriver]

It's the same as before.

[Darvi]

It's a sad thing that the elections still aren't all but lost after such screwups.

[lemon10]

What the fuck? Paying more taxes than required is somehow a bad thing?

If was paying more then required out of some sense of patriotism or wanting to pay his fair share it would be one things, but it seems like he was paying more the required so that he could go "See, I pay more then 10% taxes, and I have for the past years, yeah, 14% is low, but its over 10%", when it reality he can deduct that amount from his future taxes if he feels like, and is pretty much just so that he doesn't get hurt more in the polls by how little he is paying.

[palsch]

A piece on Ralph Nader that generalises to all third party attempts at changing the narrative. The meat;

You turn the Democratic Party into what you want it to be by controlling the mechanisms of everyday party life. By becoming a force that must be reckoned with or at least co-opted. By becoming the Populists in the 1880s and 1890s, eventually forcing the Democratic Party off its Cleveland-era support of plutocracy and helping usher in the Progressive Era. By becoming the abolitionists in the 1850s and 1860s, whose constant moral harping gave them power within the Republican Party far outstripping the small number of fanatical followers of William Lloyd Garrison.

And by becoming conservatives in the 1960s who burrow into the Republican Party structure and transform it from within.

Ralph Nader cared about none of this. He wasn’t committed to a real leftist movement. He wasn’t committed to pushing progressive change from either within or outside the system. He took no leadership positions within progressive movements after 2000 to move the country back to the left except to make another vanity run for president in ’04.

One-off candidates like Nader accomplish almost nothing except to give people an outlet for their anger at a political system they think has betrayed them. These candidacies are performance art done to make a point, in Nader’s case explicitly to throw the election to Bush.

I have no problem at all with a third-party candidacy from the left–if it is a real third party that is serious about making a long-term challenge to the Democratic Party. I would still be philosophically OK with his 2000 run today, even with what we know now, if Nader had cared one iota about doing what it actually took to create a progressive party not controlled by big money interests. Whether that happened inside or outside the Democratic Party, it doesn’t much matter to me. But he didn’t care.

I generally agree with all this. While my view of third parties is favourable from living and voting in the UK, I can't imagine any third party succeeding in the modern USA. The systematic and structural hurdles are simply too high to overcome from outside the existing system. That means any energy that would be dedicated to supporting third parties is far better spent in efforts to change and reform the two main parties in attempts to make such structural changes possible in the future.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Romney voter fraud? Romney voter fraud.

[Capntastic]

Romney voter fraud? Romney voter fraud.

As terrible as that is, I think that's more a case of someone ignorant of their actual duties being overzealous about Romney, more than any overt fraud op.  Of course, this is my thought solely because I don't have more evidence.

[mainiac]

If she's working for the county then she is using government resources to support a candidate and that is illegal.  I think she maintained plausable deniability about everything else though.  Ironically the thing that would be more likely to be punished in a court of law would be the woman filming the illegal behavior without the consent of the person being filmed.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

That would depend entirely on the state. Most states are one-party consent and would care absolutely nothing about her consent. A few are two-party, one of which only requires that you notify the other to qualify for "consent", and even those ones only apply to situations where one has an expectation of privacy. Not only is she out in public, but she's polling people. That's the opposite of an expectation of privacy.

So no, you couldn't get a court to pursue her filming without consent.

[Euld]

Here's the full story, the county clerk has no idea who she is and she is definitely not working for them.

Poor girl, I think she's in over her head.

[RedKing]

Relevant: AP report concludes that despite exhaustive investigations, actual cases of voter fraud are extremely rare.

well....mostly exhaustive...

Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson, a Republican, last week estimated that as many as 4,000 noncitizens are on the state's voter roll.

The department said it verified 1,000 registered voters who are noncitizens, based on an analysis of about 20 percent of complete citizenship data. She extrapolated the 4,000 number from the most recent U.S. Census' five-year American Community Survey, which showed Michigan has a noncitizen population of about 304,000.

That's as far as the investigation has gone. The figures have not been verified.

There's a pattern in the other states they profile where Republicans make inflated claims about tens of thousands of non-citizens on the voting rolls, then gradually reduce their estimates as the investigation goes on, and finally wind up with a number so small as to be statistically insignificant on the state-wide level.

[Mego]

So my friend decided to start a tumblr dedicated to "Good Guy" Romney memes.

I'm really not sure what to think of this. Are people *that* disillusioned?

[Darvi]

Sure he's not being ironic?

[RedKing]

And I see a grand total of one item. Which is admittedly a good guy thing, but still.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

So my friend decided to start a tumblr dedicated to "Good Guy" Romney memes.

I'm really not sure what to think of this. Are people *that* disillusioned?