American Politics

[SubCmdr]

There you go. Trump misspent around $700 billion. And Obama and Biden around a trillion dollars! Nobody knows what a lot of that was even spent on. And you and the other Bernie Bros still believe we should keep shoveling more and more money to an inefficient and wasteful federal government?

Are you down with spending 86 million USD for mass deportations?

[EihTooms]

With all this talk about lying, cheating, stealing, election-rigging House Repubs never getting their fair share of House seats considering the utterly irrelevant total national vote count in a world of extreme Repub gerrymandering showed them with a minor utterly irrelevant edge, I suddenly remembered that, by golly, there has been Congressional legislation proposed and put up for a vote in the House and the Senate meant to make it so wonderfully fair the Repubs could count on riding that now utterly irrelevant national vote count edge to a permanent Repub Majority!

Therefore, that legislation banning partisan gerrymandering MUST have been proposed by Repubs, overwhelmingly supported and voted for by Repubs and rejected and blocked by Dems, right?

Uh. No.

For the People Act/The Freedom to Vote Act

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_People_Act

The Freedom to Vote Act (formerly known as the For the People Act), introduced as H.R. 1, is a bill in the United States Congress intended to expand voting rights, change campaign finance laws to reduce the influence of money in politics, ban partisan gerrymandering, and create new ethics rules for federal officeholders.

The act was originally introduced by John Sarbanes in 2019, on behalf of the newly elected Democratic majority in the United States House of Representatives as the first official legislation of the 116th United States Congress. The House passed the bill on March 8, by a party-line vote of 234193. The bill was viewed as a "signature piece of legislation" from the Democratic House majority. After the House passed the bill, it was blocked from receiving a vote by the then Republican-controlled Senate, under Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

In 2021, in the 117th Congress, congressional Democrats reintroduced the act as H.R. 1 and S. 1. On March 3, 2021, the bill passed the House of Representatives on a near party-line vote of 220210, advancing to the Senate, which was split 5050 between Democrats and Republicans (with Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris holding the tie-breaking vote), and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer vowed to bring it to the floor for a vote. On June 22, 2021, a vote on the bill was held in the Senate. It received unified support from the Democratic caucus, but Senate Republicans blocked the bill with a filibuster, as it lacked the 60 votes needed to invoke cloture after a party-line vote.

TO RECAP:

The legislation was introduced by a Democrat, in a Democratic Party House Majority, multiple times. It was originally introduced by the Dems as their FIRST official legislation after winning the Majority in the House. It was that important to them even AFTER just winning the Majority under the then current gerrymandering conditions!

It was voted on BY Democrats on a party-line or near party-line vote every time but, also every time, BLOCKED by Repubs in the Senate.

Now, that is a puzzlement, isn't it?

What in the world were the Repubs thinking?

Don't Congressional Repubs know they have almost always gotten more national votes than Dems in this world of extreme gerrymandering but not getting their "fair share" of House Seats?

Hmm. From the part-line voting pattern on that bill and the consistent effort to BLOCK it by their Repub brothers in the Senate, I might conclude any talk about poor put-upon lying, cheating, stealing election-rigging Repubs not getting their "fair share" of House Seats is just so much partisan Repub BS.

In fact, I have come to that conclusion.

Congressional Repubs don't even want to come CLOSE to banning their precious and necessary extreme gerrymandering. They already know they need that and any lying, cheating, stealing election-rigging they can pull like they did in NC this time around in order to squeak out a Pink Tinkle or less majority every now and then.

[Sirioja]

Not even in White House, but crazy Trump already play Putin with Canada, Groenland and Panama. Do like Ukraine, resist to this crazy dangerous. For me, same like I don t buy shit chinese products, I won t buy USA products under Trump, when I trust more European quality than Boeing or Tesla. Better to isolate crazy like Trump, Netanyahou and Putin.

[MarquisdeSade1]

He just sounds like another neoconservative, racist, Indian-bashing, ex-Republican Democrat to me.

Racist? Seriously? I didn't hear one racist word, are you really Spidy?

Indian bashing? Really I didn't hear that.

I don't have anything against Indians, I might visit India this spring?

But I've never heard anyone say anything good about them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orIFs72HGmM

"I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. " This is a typical example, a quote none other than from Winston Churchill.

[EihTooms]

Ah, that's better.

Now it is almost unanimous among the Presidents-UNelect and their Assistant, Trump; you MAGA Repubs who think Immigrants are taking YOUR jobs and were suckered into voting for the Assistant on the premise that either he or his bosses would do a damn thing about it are retarded, too dumb to be trained and simply unworthy of being hired for those good, well-paying AMERICAN jobs with a real future.

President-UNelect Bannon is the lone holdout on that conclusion. But his Chinese billionaire buddy who has been supporting him for several years will probably bring him around to that prevailing Musk / Ramaswamy Administration sentiment too fairly soon.

Trump says H-1 B visa program is 'great' amid MAGA feud over tech workers.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/28/trum...ndroidappshare

[EihTooms]

I think it's a whole lot simpler. Just look at the numbers. The Democrats have done a much better job of gerrymandering House districts than Republicans. I addressed that before:

From 1946 until at least 1968 the districts you're referring to as "Democrat" were the same regional voters who vote for MAGA Repubs now. The Democratic Party lost them when they passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. If they were cheating as Dems then they are cheating as Repubs now and since at least 1968.

Aside from that, any assertion of which Party gets the most House votes is utterly and totally irrelevant until and unless gerrymandering is outlawed.

Where there is no gerrymandering, such as Senate and Presidential elections, Dem candidates have proven to get far more votes than Repub candidates more often than not for decades and decades.

Let's see what happens when there is no gerrymandering of any districts. Until then, any claim to anything regarding "more votes across the country" is meaningless blather.

And you and anyone else has zero or less than zero argument that Dem voters get THEIR fair share of Senate representation as long as every state only gers 2 Senators regardless of the number of votes for Dem vs Repub candidates or THEIR fair share of Presidential representation as long as the vote counts for the 2000 and 2016 have not been wiped from the record books on President-UNelect Musk's order.

We already have a 6 Seat MAGA Repub SCOTUS Majority put there either by Repub so-called presidents who were awarded the presidency despite getting FEWER votes than the Dem candidate or by Repub Moscow Mitch cheating like burning hell to put them there.

Isn't that enough cheating, rigging and stealing your unfair share of American governance? Now you want NC to steal the House Majority for your beloved Repubs without anyone mentioning or objecting to it too?

[MarquisdeSade1]

That's fucking low. Little people can't really do much about our weight. We have the same sized organs as you do, packed onto a smaller frame. I wouldn't make fun of you for your horns or tail, and you shouldn't make fun of my weight.

As to "facts to back that up", the 4% low end is from this study, which says "if all death-sentenced defendants remained under sentence of death indefinitely at least 4. 1% would be exonerated. We conclude that this is a conservative estimate of the proportion of false conviction among death sentences in the United States. ".

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1306417111

The 12% upper end is from this.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/researc...cence-epidemic

Now I believe 12% is probably way too high, but more likely to be true than a $556,000 per year cost to imprison a murderer for life. That just applies to New York City, where the Bernie Bros control the city and state government. And that's their decision, whether they execute people or not. I don't live there so it's none of my business.

What I've seen indicates it costs more to impose the death penalty than life imprisonment without parole.

From 1978 to around 2010, California's death penalty system cost about $4 billion more than a system with life imprisonment:

https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/llr/vol46/iss0/1/

Death penalty cases in Kansas cost an estimated 70% more than cases in which the death penalty wasn't sought, including the cost of incarceration:

https://www.ksabolition.org/wp-conte...op-Handout.pdf

The death penalty in Washington state costs about $1 million more in costs per case compared to cases where the death penalty is not sought. This study included the cost of incarceration too:

https://law.seattleu.edu/media/schoo...alty-in-WA.pdf

Now, what you truly fail to appreciate is this:

If people like me were in charge of the penal system, we'd make incarcerating those murderers a paying proposition! Contrary to what you say, I believe prisoners should, in the words of Milton Friedman, be Free to Choose. So I'd give them a choice, eat prison gruel and lead a difficult life. Or volunteer to work for Tiny's Global Solutions Inc! We'd have them cleaning up radioactive waste, rent them out as mercenaries, and so on. And we wouldn't pay them anything! Just provide lobster, steak and cheap hookers! I bet we could get 90% of them to go for that over prison gruel! And make a bundle!

And yes you do favor execution of innocents. If you impose a death penalty, you WILL execute innocent people. Using the lower end, 4%, there's a very good chance that one or more of the 37 people on death row whose sentences were commuted by Biden were innocent. Please note that 4% x 37 = 1.5 innocents saved!



Parasitic turd in the view of you and your Economic Heroes (Bernie Sanders, Karl Marx and Juan Peron.) But not me and mine!

As to your link, we don't know exactly what the money in his "Believe in People" foundation will be spent on. But based on his book by the same name, we should expect that an outsized portion or the majority will be spent on education, health care innovation, and community development.

But Charles Koch's bigger contribution to humanity and America was through his leadership of Koch Industries. During his time as CEO, Koch grew from fewer than 500 employees and $187 million in revenues to 120,000 employees and revenues of $125 billion. The company provided lots of jobs, and products that benefit all of us. Thank goodness for people like Charles Koch! And his principled support of free market ideas and libertarianism is just the icing on the cake!

Well I believe Libertarians only oppose prisons because they don't want to be put in there for not following the laws all of us should follow!! Ie PAYING THEIR TAXES.

If death penalty opponents are so opposed to killing innocents why can't they show it actually does that, I've never EVER seen 1 single credible case.

You mention the higher cost, well that's from worthless attys that have nothing better to do then appeal appeal appeal and that costs the state millions.

So to make sure NONE of them are innocent.

You can't tell me a savage killer gets 56 appeals over 20 years with 200 attys but still gets executed and is innocent, NOT a chance.

Libertarians resent govt power espec their power to kill savages, it scares them!! But don't worry don't be a scumbag savage and they won't!!

As to your link, we don't know exactly what the money in his "Believe in People" foundation will be spent on. But based on his book by the same name, we should expect that an outsized portion or the majority will be spent on education, health care innovation, and community development.

I think its say on illegal aliens!! They make slavery in 2025 possible!!

[MarquisdeSade1]

I have been so preoccupied with enjoying the Winter Wonderland Christmas festivities here in the Land of Smiles, the delicious buffets, live entertainment, fireworks, good times and fun I had completely missed the opening shots of the Civil War between the MAGAs and the Con Artists who suckered them into voting for Trump.

It seems the short hand version of this so far is that Ramaswamy, Musk, Boomer, Bannon, everybody who is important and calling the shots in the upcoming Trump's Pandemic and Economic Disaster Part 2 are locked, loaded and taking aim at the MAGAs Trump suckered and each other, admitting the Big Con was that dumb, lazy MAGAs, unworthy of being hired to work at real jobs have only themselves to blame for why those who suckered them must still bring in lots of Immigrants to take their jobs, that the Bull Shit Department of Government Efficiency was set up by Con Man Trump only to make MAGA suckers think they are saving money for them when in fact it is meant to take money from them and make him and his billionaire buddies wealthier. Lololol. Fun stuff.

So I did a search on the topic to catch up a bit more and discovered this very interesting overview of what is going on by Steve Schmidt, a former Repub Party campaign strategist and advisor who knows the Big Repub Con very, very well.

An 8:56 minute video well worth the time:

https://youtu.be/QQttuiH8gfY?si=hV50vLhOtItPb6mC

"MAGAs unworthy of being hired to work at real jobs have only themselves to blame for why those who suckered them must still bring in lots of Immigrants to take their jobs".

Sounds like quintessential sour grapes, I live in a bad ass Penthouse and I don't know anyone that needs to move to the third world just to get by LOLOLOLOL.

Stop projecting so much its a really bad look LOLOLOLOL.

[MarquisdeSade1]

Of the 24 or so reliably, historically, traditionally Blue States and Districts, only three of those Blue States flipped to Trump and only by a razor-thin margin. It was where less than a 0. 9 point swing from Harris to Trump in one of those three states, less than a 0. 8 point swing in another and less than a 0. 5 point swing in the third one was enough to do it.

That would be PA, MI and WI, the only 3 states that determined the difference between a President-elect Harris today and a Presidents-elect or is it Presidents-UNelect Musk, Ramaswamy and Bannon.

See screenshot below.

Scroll down to "Results" on this link for the latest numbers and points:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024...ntial_election

Now, here are a few points about the election in general and those three states in particular that I suspect the "Every Great Depression, Great Recession and Massive Jobs Loss of the past 100 years and none of the historic Economic Recoveries, Expansions and Jobs Gains happening under Repub Presidents and all of the Polar Opposite Results happening under Dem Presidents is just a wild, magical and mystical coincidence" crowd will dismiss as not ringing true. To them.

Nevertheless, the empirical evidence, admissions and acknowledgement by the key participants and beneficiary as well as the final and actual overall numbers and results provides overwhelming proof of the truth of them:

1. They were the three closest states in terms of final Trump vs Harris votes.

2. Related to the above point, they were the three states Harris spent the most time in campaigning and ad expenditures.

3. Even if Biden had been the candidate to the very end he would have only had an additional 90 days or so to campaign than Harris vs the 7 years Trump spent campaiging for it. It turns out, unlike Trump, Biden had an actual job to keep him busy since January 20,2021; recovering the colossal mess on all economic, jobs destruction, national security, health, life, death, crime rate, foreign policy, American Insurrection, Overthrowing of American democracy fronts Trump left behind and doing so in historic, remarkable and unprecedented sucessful fashion.

Ergo, Biden would have had scarcely more free time to focus on campaigning in much more than those same three states as Harris did.

And that is in contrast to Trump who, as far as anyone can tell, his only "work time" as so-called president was the 20 minutes or so it took him to sign that ridiculous, deficit-ballooning waste of tax-dollars Tax Cuts and Jobs Act put together by the Repubs in Congress one day in late December 2017. Other than that, nothing. Just walking and talking and golfing and campaigning for his 2nd term run.

4. By all accounts, those three states are not the only states in the country where demos such as, oh, black men, non college-educated whites, Latinos and yeah, even angry Muslims reside.

5. By all accounts, those three states are not the only states in the country that had access to news feeds and personal opinions and experiences regarding the economy, trannies, pronouns, immigration, Roe v Wade, who referred to who as "Hitler", crime rates, etc etc etc.

6. Yet, none of those 24 or so typically Blue States and Districts flipped to Red in the presidential contest, none of the supposedly critical Dem demos were compelled to shift from Harris to Trump in ANY of those typically Blue States or Districts enough to flip the entire state to Trump if even by a razor-thin margin or swing in votes, except THREE.

7. Those three states also happen to be the only three states where Muslim Community Leaders mobilized to channel the anger of their Community of voters, sizable in all three states, to deny the Biden Administration a presidential win due to their conflating the USA support for Israel in its conflict with Gaza with love and support for Netanyahu, who they hate. Even though almost immediately after they "gave Trump the presidency" in that way and for that reason they have deeply regretted doing so.

8. All the buzz issues Trump and his sucker MAGAs spent at least 7 years conjuring up and carried mostly unchallenged into Americans' homes by obedient pro Repub Mainstream Media and non traditional media along with all those red herrings about Dems "losing their Demos to Trump" did not matter one whit with regard to which candidate won the presidential election.

9. The only thing that mattered was that relative handful of angry Muslim joker in the deck that no one other than them had control over, unfortunately for them as well as the rest of the country, popped up in Trump's hand on that one critical day.

10. Could a surge of uncharacteristically intelligent and suddenly roused out of their MSM-assisted, Trump Con-induced hypnotic state MAGAs have rushed in to save themselves and America by voting for Harris instead of Trump in those three states and thereby counteracted the effect of those mobilized angry Muslims on the unfortunate election result, perhaps if she hadn't been a she and the other ethnic minority mix she was?

Sure. Coulda Woulda Shoulda.

But didn't.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/o...-politics.html

Opinion.

David Brooks.

Why We Got It So Wrong.

Nov. 14,2024.

A crowd of people seen from behind, looking into floodlights.

Credit. Jesse Rieser for The New York Times.

Share full article.

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David Brooks.

By David Brooks.

Opinion Columnist.

Let me ask you a few questions:

If the Democrats nominated a woman to run for president, would you expect her to do better among female voters than the guy who ran in her place four years before?

If the Democrats nominated a Black woman to run for president, would you expect her to do better among Black voters than the white candidate who ran in her place four years before?

If the Republicans nominated a guy who ran on mass deportation and consistently said horrible things about Latino immigrants, would you expect him to do worse among Latino voters over time?

If the Democrats nominated a vibrant Black woman who was the subject of a million brat memes, would you expect her to do better among young voters than the old white guy who ran before her?

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If you said yes to any of these questions, as I would have a month ago, you have some major rethinking to do, because all of these expectations were wrong.

In 2024, Kamala Harris did worse among Black voters than Joe Biden did in 2020. She did worse among female voters. She did much worse among Latino voters. She did much worse among young voters.

She did manage to outperform Biden among two groups: affluent people and white voters, especially white men. If there is one sentence that captures the surprising results of this election, it is this one from the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi: "Democrats lost because everyone except for whites moved in the direction of Donald Trump this cycle. ".

Going into this campaign, I did not have that one on my bingo card.

Why were so many of our expectations wrong? Well, we all walk around with mental models of reality in our heads. Our mental models help us make sense of the buzzing, blooming confusion of the world. Our mental models help us anticipate what's about to happen. Our mental models guide us as we make decisions about how to get the results we want.

Many of us are walking around with broken mental models. Many of us go through life with false assumptions about how the world works.

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Where did we get our current models? Well, we get models from our experience, our peers, the educational system, the media and popular culture. Over the past few generations, a certain worldview that emphasizes racial, gender and ethnic identity has been prevalent in the circles where highly educated people congregate. This worldview emerged from the wonderful liberation movements that highlighted American life over the past seven decades: the civil rights movement, the women's liberation movement, the gay rights movement, the trans rights movement.

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The crucial assertion of the identitarian mind-set is that all politics and all history can be seen through the lens of liberation movements. Society is divided between the privileged (straight white males) and the marginalized (pretty much everyone else). History and politics are the struggle between oppressors and oppressed groups.

In this model, people are seen as members of a group before they are seen as individuals. When Biden picked his running mate in 2020, he had promised to pick a woman, and when he picked his Supreme Court nominee in 2022, he had promised to pick a Black woman. In both cases her identity grouping came before her individual qualities.

In this model, society is seen as an agglomeration of different communities. Democrats thus produce separate agendas designed to mobilize Black men, women and so on. The goal of Democratic politics is to link all the oppressed and marginalized groups into one majority coalition.

In this model, individual cognition is de-emphasized while collective consciousness is emphasized. Groups are assumed to be relatively homogeneous. People are seen as representatives of their community. Standpoint epistemology reigns. This is the idea that a person's ideas are primarily shaped not by individual preferences but by the experience of the group. It makes sense to say, "Speaking as a gay Hispanic man." because a person's thoughts are assumed to be dispatches from a communal experience.

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This identity politics mind-set is psychologically and morally compelling. In an individualistic age, it gives people a sense of membership in a group. It helps them organize their lives around a noble cause, fighting oppression.

But this mind-set has just crashed against the rocks of reality. This model assumes that people are primarily motivated by identity group solidarity. This model assumes that the struggle against oppressive systems and groups is the central subject of politics. This model has no room for what just happened.

It turns out a lot of people don't behave like ambassadors from this or that group. They think for themselves in unexpected ways.

It turns out that many people don't see politics and history through the paradigm of liberation movements. They are concerned with all kinds of issues that don't fit into the good-versus-evil mind-set of oppressor versus oppressed: How do you fix inflation? How can we bring down crime? What should our policy on Ukraine be?

Plenty of people are exhausted by the crude generalizations that are so common today. For example, analysts talk about gender wars and hypermasculine Trump supporters. But in most elections, as in this one, there's not a vast difference between how men and women vote. The differences within the male and female populations are greater than the differences between these populations.

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A lot of the group categories that identity politics rely on don't make much sense. For example, the category "Hispanic voter" includes people of Mexican descent whose families have been in Texas for 350 years as well as families from Chile who came to New York a decade ago.

The category "people of color" doesn't make sense, either, as a way to group individuals as a political force. America has been uniquely wretched to Black Americans, practicing structural racism that shows up today, for example, in the horrendous wealth gap between Black and white people. The diverse communities we call Asian and Hispanic Americans came here largely voluntarily. Many of them have been able to prosper and experience educational and income trajectories that are different from those of a community that has suffered hundreds of years of slavery and discrimination.

Even the most solid identity group categories are fluid. As a recent Pew Research Center study found, among people who married in 2022,32 percent of Asian Americans married outside their ethnic group, as did 30 percent of Hispanics, 23 percent of Black people and 15 percent of white people. In one Pew survey 58 percent of Hispanics also identified as white.

The identity politics mind-set has made it harder to deal with nuts-and-bolts issues like how to address the homelessness crisis or reduce opioid deaths and how to run an institution in which people treat one another decently. Have you noticed that the places most rife with this mind-set (progressive cities and elite universities) have experienced one leadership failure after another?

This is a time when we all should be updating our mental models and making our view of society more complex. And I'm seeing a lot of that around me as people try to learn from what just happened.

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But I'm also seeing many people who are still victims of conceptual blindness. They are so imprisoned by their mental models, they can interpret these results only in identity politics terms: Harris lost because America is racist (even though she did virtually the same as Biden did among white voters). Harris lost because America is sexist (even though she underperformed among women). Some people blamed white women for abandoning their Black sisters, as if lack of gender solidarity were the main thing going on here.

Identitarian takes are strewn across the media. The New Yorker ran an analysis piece headlined "How America Embraced Gender War. " Slate ran a piece called "Men Got Exactly What They Wanted. " The Guardian ran a piece called "Our Mistake Was to Think We Lived in a Better Country Than We Do. " If the election didn't come out the way we wanted, it must be because of their groups' bigotry against our groups.

As I try to update my own models, a few stray thoughts enter my mind. First, you don't reduce racial, ethnic and gender bigotry by raising the salience of these categories and by exaggerating the differences between groups. Second, integration is better than separatism. Diverse societies prosper when people in different categories cooperate in respectful ways on a day-to-day basis, not when we divide people into supposedly homogeneous enclaves. Third, assimilation is not a dirty word, as long as it's voluntary; it's not a sin to feel that your love for America transcends your love for your ethnic group, and you don't really love America if you despise half its people. Fourth, most of the world's problems are caused by stupidity and human limitation, not because there's some malevolently brilliant group of oppressors keeping everybody else down.

Fifth, seeing groups in all their complexity requires seeing individuals in all their complexity. To see people well, you have to see what makes them unique. You also have to see which groups they belong to. You also have to see their social location — where they fit in the economic, social and status hierarchies. When you're able to see people at all three levels of reality, you're beginning to see them holistically.

Finally, we need a social vision that doesn't rely on zero-sum us / them thinking. During his first term, Trump unleashed a cultural assault based on his version of identity politics. The left responded by doubling down on its identitarian mind-set. We have to do better this time.

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In 1959 the British jurist Patrick Devlin made a point that should haunt us: "Without shared ideas on politics, morals and ethics, no society can exist. " he added, "If men and women try to create a society in which there is no fundamental agreement about good and evil, they will fail; if having based it on common agreement, the agreement goes, the society will disintegrate. ".

We need a social vision that is as morally compelling as identity politics but does a better job of describing reality. We need a national narrative that points us to some ideal and gives each of us a noble role in pursuing it. That's the gigantic cultural task that lies ahead.

[Tiny 12]

House Majorities are not determined by how many votes every Dem House candidate got across the country vs every Repub House candidate.

House districts are so gerrymandered that many if not most districts barely experience a true campaign. The candidates' party has chosen its voters and they simply wait for the election results to come in.

We don't know how many overall votes would be for Dems vs Repubs if districts were drawn strictly by population and not by Party affiliation, thereby requiring each Party's candidate to duke it out in a real campaign.

It may very well be that the only reason more Repubs vote for Repub House candidates is because the Repub Party gerrymanders their districts so tight within an inch on either side of a registered Repub that there is virtually no reason for a Dem to spend 1 dime or an afternoon campaigning there trying to reverse total insanity.

If the number of votes for Dem Senators vs Repub Senators as well as Dem presidential candidates vs Repub presidential candidates over the past 35 years is any indication of how outlawing gerrymandering would change the overall number of votes across the country for House Dems vs Repub Dems I would say Repubs better hope gerrymandering is never outlawed.

See, the kind of campaign I am talking about is where the candidates have to put some time into covering their particular district's needs while also actually explaining that, no, the unemployment rate is not at an all-time high, the stock market is not at an all-time low, the price of gasoline is not double where it hit in 2019, Joe Biden did not overturn Roe V Wade, yes, Joe Biden did drop out of the race and Kamala Harris is now the Dem presidential candidate and so on.

You know, basic information that sizable numbers and percentages of voters were actually unclear about, thanks to the wonderful world of typically pro Repub Mainstream Media, right up to and beyond November 5th.

I think it's a whole lot simpler. Just look at the numbers. The Democrats have done a much better job of gerrymandering House districts than Republicans. I addressed that before:

This "what if" line of reasoning appeals to you and some MAGA Repubicans. "What if" 100% of Muslims had voted for Harris? "What if" Republicans had just gotten 11,284 more votes in Georgia, 21,347 more votes in Wisconsin, and so on?

I saw the sanctimonious, delusional partisan Democrat, Wiley Nickel, on MSNBC's Morning Joe yesterday. He's the subject of the article you linked to above at bullshitout.org. Since 1946, Democrats have cheated much more effectively than Republicans, in getting more than their fair share of House seats. During that period, since 1946, Democrats got on average 3.9% more House seats than they deserved based on the House popular vote. That's an average of 9 more House seats, every election!

Republicans managed to turn the table in 2012 to 2016, but since then Democrats have gotten a marginally higher % of House Seats than votes.

See the last column in this table compiled by the Democrat-controlled Brookings Institution if you want to verify:

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content...s_ch2_tbl2.pdf

The table goes through 2018. Here's the difference between the Democratic percentage of seats won, and the percentage of votes won since then:

2020 +0.7%
2022 +1.2%
2024 +1.6%.

The 2024 results reflect a final tally of 220 GOP House seats and 215 Democrat seats. The Republicans won the House by a 5 seat margin, not one seat, as you keep repeatedly saying. .

So, Republicans are up to the same dirty tricks in North Carolina that Democrats (and Republicans) have been up to in other states for at least the last 78 years. Here are some stats for comparison.

North Carolina: Harris received 47.6% of the popular vote; House Democrats got 28.6% of the seats.

New York: Trump 44%; House Republicans 27%
Illinois: Trump 44%; House Republicans 18%
Oregon: Trump 41%; House Republicans 17%
New Mexico: Trump 46%; House Republicans 0%

You can reproduce using the following sites and switching states:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/202...-house-results
https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/re...north-carolina

Admittedly I could probably come up with Republican states just as wildly unfair as the blue states above. Still, historically, the Democrats have cheated more effectively than Republicans, as clearly shown by the numbers. Democrat think tanks and media sources attempt to show that Republicans are better at gerrymandering House seats, but the numbers clearly show they're wrong. Crafty Democrats.

[Tiny 12]

So I did a search on the topic to catch up a bit more and discovered this very interesting overview of what is going on by Steve Schmidt, a former Repub Party campaign strategist and advisor who knows the Big Repub Con very, very well.

An 8:56 minute video well worth the time:

https://youtu.be/QQttuiH8gfY?si=hV50vLhOtItPb6mC

He just sounds like another neoconservative, racist, Indian-bashing, ex-Republican Democrat to me.

[Tiny 12]

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/...oper-payments/

The Biden Legacy: Nearly a Trillion in Improper Payments.

President Joe Biden holds a cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, the. See. , June 6, 2023. (Evelyn Hockstein / Reuters).

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130.

By Rachel Greszler.

December 27,2024 6:30 AM.

130 Comments.

Listen.

Over four years, the Biden administration unintentionally misspent $926 billion to say nothing of the trillions it misspent on purpose.

The fiscal year 2024 data are in, and they show that the Biden administration has overseen a record $926 billion in improper and unknown federal payments since 2021.

That is 38 percent more than the Trump administration's $673 billion total over four years, and it's only 4 percent less than the Obama administration's $962 billion total over eight years. Moreover, all of these figures are underestimates as they only account for about 68 programs out of the more than 2,000 that the federal government operates. The Biden administration's $926 billion total translates to more than $7,000 for every household in America. .

There you go. Trump misspent around $700 billion. And Obama and Biden around a trillion dollars! Nobody knows what a lot of that was even spent on. And you and the other Bernie Bros still believe we should keep shoveling more and more money to an inefficient and wasteful federal government?

[Tiny 12]

You are opposed to Killing the SAVAGES.

"If there's anything that's truly evil, it's the state directing the execution of its citizens. " even the evil savages? So you defend the evil savages right to live.

I most definitely do NOT!

I know your problem (well at least one of them) you have no clue the difference between good and evil!!

Here's a question for you?

I hope it doesn't hurt.

You wrote.

"If there's anything that's truly evil, it's the state directing the execution of its citizens. ".

Ok this savage is an illegal alien from the NYC subway, and you still want to defend this monsters right to breathe at tax payers expense for the next 50 yrs?

$556,000 per person each.

(Credit: Jim Henderson) In 2021, the New York City Comptroller revealed the cost of incarceration has grown to more than $556,000 per person each year. That's over $1,500 each day to lock up just one person. Jan 17,2024.

"Good peace to all and all a good night".

(except Evil homicidal savages).

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd753r47815o

I hope they execute her on live TV and its so popular it makes it way to US court rooms.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39535957

US executions need to be televised live like the Super Bowl.

4%-12% of executions are innocent LMFAO.

You're going to make ET piss himself when he reads that.

Lets see some facts to back that up Morbidly Obese Tiny The Bullshitter.

....But you haven't told us how you snuck that laptop into the Texas State Mental Hospital (under your rolls of fat? Or your YUGE ass crack?

That's fucking low. Little people can't really do much about our weight. We have the same sized organs as you do, packed onto a smaller frame. I wouldn't make fun of you for your horns or tail, and you shouldn't make fun of my weight.

As to "facts to back that up", the 4% low end is from this study, which says "if all death-sentenced defendants remained under sentence of death indefinitely at least 4. 1% would be exonerated. We conclude that this is a conservative estimate of the proportion of false conviction among death sentences in the United States. ".

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1306417111

The 12% upper end is from this.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/researc...cence-epidemic

Now I believe 12% is probably way too high, but more likely to be true than a $556,000 per year cost to imprison a murderer for life. That just applies to New York City, where the Bernie Bros control the city and state government. And that's their decision, whether they execute people or not. I don't live there so it's none of my business.

What I've seen indicates it costs more to impose the death penalty than life imprisonment without parole.

From 1978 to around 2010, California's death penalty system cost about $4 billion more than a system with life imprisonment:

https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/llr/vol46/iss0/1/

Death penalty cases in Kansas cost an estimated 70% more than cases in which the death penalty wasn't sought, including the cost of incarceration:

https://www.ksabolition.org/wp-conte...op-Handout.pdf

The death penalty in Washington state costs about $1 million more in costs per case compared to cases where the death penalty is not sought. This study included the cost of incarceration too:

https://law.seattleu.edu/media/schoo...alty-in-WA.pdf

Now, what you truly fail to appreciate is this:

When you dream you don't dream about pussy like normal men, you dream about being a Slave Owner circa 1800 Savannah Ga.

If people like me were in charge of the penal system, we'd make incarcerating those murderers a paying proposition! Contrary to what you say, I believe prisoners should, in the words of Milton Friedman, be Free to Choose. So I'd give them a choice, eat prison gruel and lead a difficult life. Or volunteer to work for Tiny's Global Solutions Inc! We'd have them cleaning up radioactive waste, rent them out as mercenaries, and so on. And we wouldn't pay them anything! Just provide lobster, steak and cheap hookers! I bet we could get 90% of them to go for that over prison gruel! And make a bundle!

And yes you do favor execution of innocents. If you impose a death penalty, you WILL execute innocent people. Using the lower end, 4%, there's a very good chance that one or more of the 37 people on death row whose sentences were commuted by Biden were innocent. Please note that 4% x 37 = 1.5 innocents saved!

Koch bros, the dead one wasn't nearly as bad as Chas.

Chas Koch=a real life iteration of Montgomery Burns.

I have never heard of Chas Koch donating to anything EVER.

That wasn't completely self serving, like donating to help illegals get drivers licenses or new immigrants to vote.

As that what you call poverty alleviation? You're TWISTED.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdur...wo-nonprofits/

He's a parasitic turd and you consider him your hero.

Parasitic turd in the view of you and your Economic Heroes (Bernie Sanders, Karl Marx and Juan Peron.) But not me and mine!

As to your link, we don't know exactly what the money in his "Believe in People" foundation will be spent on. But based on his book by the same name, we should expect that an outsized portion or the majority will be spent on education, health care innovation, and community development.

But Charles Koch's bigger contribution to humanity and America was through his leadership of Koch Industries. During his time as CEO, Koch grew from fewer than 500 employees and $187 million in revenues to 120,000 employees and revenues of $125 billion. The company provided lots of jobs, and products that benefit all of us. Thank goodness for people like Charles Koch! And his principled support of free market ideas and libertarianism is just the icing on the cake!

[Sirioja]

And they will have it but not before they learn how to live in peace with their neighbors.

For the umpteenth time: They had their independence, but they blew it by starting the war. Losing a war has consequences. A Frenchman who knows the history of his own country should understand it better than anyone.

Where is future Palestine? When criminal Netanyahou killed more than 1000 children in Gaza. Just a shame to support him.

[EihTooms]

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/...oper-payments/

The Biden Legacy: Nearly a Trillion in Improper Payments.

President Joe Biden holds a cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, the. See. , June 6, 2023. (Evelyn Hockstein / Reuters).

Share.

130.

By Rachel Greszler.

December 27,2024 6:30 AM.

130 Comments.

Listen.

Over four years, the Biden administration unintentionally misspent $926 billion to say nothing of the trillions it misspent on purpose.

The fiscal year 2024 data are in, and they show that the Biden administration has overseen a record $926 billion in improper and unknown federal payments since 2021.

That is 38 percent more than the Trump administration's $673 billion total over four years, and it's only 4 percent less than the Obama administration's $962 billion total over eight years. Moreover, all of these figures are underestimates as they only account for about 68 programs out of the more than 2,000 that the federal government operates. The Biden administration's $926 billion total translates to more than $7,000 for every household in America. .

Holy shit! Trump made almost 66% of a $Trillion in improper payments after inheriting a stunning economy from Obama-Biden and accomplishing nothing over the next 4 years except losing a Trade War with China, ushering in and exacerbating Trump's Pandemic, presiding over NEGATIVE job growth, adding $Trillions to the deficit and leading a violent mob of cop-killing and maiming insurrectionists to storm and invade the Capitol in an attempt to overturn a free and fair election and overthrow American democracy?

On what and to whom, exactly? His kids?

Now, if he had inherited the total shitstorm of colossal economic disaster, massive jobs destruction by the millions and managed to pull us out of one quagmire counterproductive Repub-initiated War as Obama inherited and did and all of that plus a historic, worldwide-economy destroying and global supply-chain collapsing, hyper-inflation triggering, mass murdering by the millions Trump's Pandemic to clean up and recover the world from as Biden did, well, we could understand some serious money falling between the cushions here and there to accomplish so much and so many positive results.

But from just playing golf, failing and lying about everything for 4 solid years as Trump did? Astonishing.