Cont: The Trump Presidency: Part 23

[Regnad Kcin]

I remember when we got our new washing machine (clothes), and I was like, where is all the water? And the answer was, you don't need to fill the whole thing up with water to get clothes clean.

Now, I don't think it rinses as well as it could, and it seems like more water would help there, but, you know, these companies have really smart engineers working for them that do things like figure out exactly how much rinsing has occurred and stuff like that, so my opinion isn't really all that meaningful in that regard.

The first thing a dishwasher does is to assess the contents to determine how much water is going to be needed. And it uses that, instead of wasting water.

Sure, but does your hair have to be perfect?

 

[pgwenthold]

Sure, but does your hair have to be perfect?

It is as perfect as can be all the time!

It's not hard to do, because there isn't much there.

 

[Paul2]

Latest Rasmussen poll has President Trump's approval rating at 49%.

Even after adjustment for Rasmussen's bias, fivethirtyeight.com says that's still 44% approval and it's 4% to 5% higher than last week's Rasmussen poll.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/?cid=rrpromo

I hope someone has ninja'ed me, but you have a typo. 538 has Trump's approval rating not at 44%, but at 40.3%, in a decline since the beginning of April.

 

[The Don]

I hope someone has ninja'ed me, but you have a typo. 538 has Trump's approval rating not at 44%, but at 40.3%, in a decline since the beginning of April.

Yes I was just looking at the Rasmussen polls. If it was such an outlier, 538 would have compensated accordingly.

IMO President Trump isn't as dead as the polls would show.

 

[Dr. Keith]

I hope someone has ninja'ed me, but you have a typo. 538 has Trump's approval rating not at 44%, but at 40.3%, in a decline since the beginning of April.

I believe our respected colleague, The Don of Don Manor, is referring to 538's reporting of the Rasmussen poll and their adjustment to correct for some of its biases.

 

[Stacyhs]

Some example tweets

Laurie
@10254Kerr
Replying to @WhiteHouse @POTUS and @realDonaldTrump
I'm very upset about this. You flipped on us. I just donated to you. Will anyone ever be honest with us about this scamdemic????

Lion's Biggest Fan
@loudproudTexan
Replying to @WhiteHouse and @realDonaldTrump
@POTUS I have the RIGHT TO RISK. As Americans, it's our body or choice to take the risk of getting COVID-19 if we want to.
The government is not to limit WHO I AM or WHERE I GO. They're to ensure my safety. I DIDN'T CALL YOU.

Lorie #ImpeachCommieTommieWolf
@LorenaBax8989
Replying to @WhiteHouse and @realDonaldTrump
Not happy about this AT ALL.
I have not worn a mask and never will. And I'm sick of the mandates. I was.joping you'd tell off these governors for infringing on our rights.

Mike Lisanke
@lisanke
Replying to @WhiteHouse and @realDonaldTrump
Mr @POTUS @realDonaldTrump, many of US are NOT going to get use to the Masks (we know they don't do anything). And, we aren't preparing to accept Yours and @BillGates Warp Speed Vaccine. Just saying! when did you become their Dim?

While I'm glad to see some Trumpers actually angry with him, in all probability, they will still vote for him. These tweets reveal just how stupid they are. "Scamdemic"? "@BillGates Warp Speed Vaccine"? Face palm.

 

[timhau]

Yes I was just looking at the Rasmussen polls. If it was such an outlier, 538 would have compensated accordingly.

They don't compensate for outliers, only for previous record. Outliers are part of data and expected in any sample-based business.

 

[Stacyhs]

"As Americans, it's our body or choice to take the risk of getting COVID-19"

Sure, as long as we're not talking about a woman's reproductive rights.

The"..it's our body..." claim seems to be conveniently forgotten when talking about abortion.

People around you also have separate rights. If protecting a foetus is not an infringement on an individuals rights since it protects a separate body, then why a different tune for masks?

I agree. I bet some of these anti-maskers refuse to wear seat belts and helmets because the 'gubmint cain't tell me what to do!"

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

... This could become the standard practice for any GOP incumbent beaten by his/her Democratic Party opponent - claim voter fraud, challenge the result through the courts and/or state legislature,

I don't think that's likely but then again, I didn't think Trump would ever be elected in the first place. I actually thought people weren't that stupid and could see him for the narcissistic, disgusting, lying clown he is. I was wrong.

The GOP tried it back in GW's administration here in WA State in the governors' race. But Bush's own appointed state AG refused to go along with it. Bush fired him but the contested election was left with McKay's ruling: there was nothing to contest.**


**

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McKay_(attorney)
The Seattle Times noted in February 2007, "One of the most persistent rumors in Seattle legal circles is that the Justice Department forced McKay, a Republican, to resign to appease Washington State Republicans angry over the 2004 governor's race. Some believe McKay's dismissal was retribution for his failure to convene a federal grand jury to investigate allegations of voter fraud in the race."[2]

I'm surprised the Wiki entry makes it look like there was doubt about his firing. There wasn't any. I heard McKay talk about it on a panel at the U of WA that included John Dean. Makes me wonder who edited this Wiki entry but that's an off-topic discussion about revising history.

... end up with the case in SCOTUS and if RBG is replaced by a Conservative (which she will unless the Democrats have a majority in the Senate) then the election result may be overturned.

Democratic POTUS with a GOP Senate, no, they can't hold up a SCOTUS appointment for a year. Be nice to see them try and wake the Democrats up for once.

 

[carlitos]

I was just thinking about that Washington state race. I was consuming a lot of conservative media in 2007, and I vaguely remember them "finding" Democratic ballots in King County - a parking garage or basement or something. Thanks for posting that.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Yes I was just looking at the Rasmussen polls. If it was such an outlier, 538 would have compensated accordingly.

IMO President Trump isn't as dead as the polls would show.

Rasmussen has always been an outlier favoring GOP candidates.

The Hill: Pollster: Rasmussen Research has a pro-GOP bias

Rasmussen Reports uses research techniques that make its polls favor Republicans, Ipsos Public Affairs research director Mallory Newall said Monday during an appearance on “What America’s Thinking,” Hill.TV’s new show about public opinion research.

Newall singled out Rasmussen's practice of adjusting results by party identification in arguing that the pollster, which has been touted by President Trump and often has shown him with higher approval ratings than in other polls, favors the GOP. ...

“Obviously we’re quite comfortable with our partisan breakdown. Let me remind Ipsos that we got the 2016 presidential race right,” Coombs continued. “The vast majority of pollsters did not.”

So many things went into the Clinton loss I don't find this reply to mean much.

It goes on with more reasons why the polls are off the norm.

 

[Segnosaur]

This is where a charismatic Democratic challenger would come in real handy, to convince them to flip.

Unfortunately, we have Biden, who is by all accounts a decent fellow, but he's hardly inspiring.

He might not be 'inspiring', but he has 2 things going for him:

- His connection to Obama has given him significant support with minority demographics. (Yes, the Democrats were likely going to get most of those votes, but it does mean that fewer of them will sit out the election)

- His appeal to senior voters (largely due to his own age). Seniors are more reliable voters than younger people, and when Trump attacks Biden over his age, it seems to have a little blow-back, causing those seniors to switch to Biden.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

I was just thinking about that Washington state race. I was consuming a lot of conservative media in 2007, and I vaguely remember them "finding" Democratic ballots in King County - a parking garage or basement or something. Thanks for posting that.

That's not what happened.

The Republicans scrutinized signatures on the mail in ballots from King County and picked out a bunch they thought didn't match. (Because you know, whose sig matches what they signed decades earlier.) They sent those people notices that gave them only 2 days to contact the voter registration office in person to verify their ballots. That is 2 days when the offices are only open when a lot of people are at work.

That resulted in a number of ballots being tossed. The GOP claimed that proved voter fraud. But what McKay wisely said was if you are going to do that you need to scrutinize the sigs in every county. The GOP didn't want to do that.

 

[Segnosaur]

I've never quite understood how filling judicial slots is somehow an achievement for any President. It seems pretty easy to me.

Its not an achievement. (If 'credit' goes to anyone, its Moscow Mitch, who's obstructionism during Obama's years have allowed slots to go unfilled.)

Actually, I'd even go further... Trump's actions to fill judicial slots have been a failure. Yes, he has gotten right-wing judges on the bench. But whom he appointed and the way it was done may cause the GOP more harm and limit their ability to appoint judges in the future.

Take for example Judge Drunky McRapeface. Yeah, republicans are happy that they got someone else on the supreme court who will help overturn abortion rights... but his nomination was one of the factors that seems to be driving some voters away from the GOP, both in congress and for the white house. (That nomination alone might cause the senate to flip, as the senate race is tight, and Collin's vote to confirm seems to be one of the main reasons she is in trouble in her reelection campaign.)

Trump could have easily withdrawn Kavanaugh's nomination and found someone who was less obvious about his bias. It might have saved a few GOP votes, maybe even made Trump look like he cared (while still giving the anti-abortionists more power on the bench). But he stuck with Kavanaugh, and now republican control of the senate is at risk.

And while it may not get as much attention, Trump's habit of nominating people who are unsuitable to be judges is drawing unwanted attention to something that is often a rather... uneventful activity.

 

[carlitos]

nvm

 

[carlitos]

That's not what happened.

Actually, I wasn't too far off. . [wikipedia] King County found some ballots in storage. Afterwards, other counties found missing ballots too; one county found their ballots under some mail trays.

I remember the whole stink about Democrats trying to steal the election by "finding" these ballots. My memory of the story wasn't that far off.

Note that I am not saying that the GOP characterizions of the Dems "stealing" that election were true. Anyway, thanks again.

 

[Trebuchet]

The GOP tried it back in GW's administration here in WA State in the governors' race. But Bush's own appointed state AG refused to go along with it. Bush fired him but the contested election was left with McKay's ruling: there was nothing to contest.**

Minor nitpick: Not the State AG, but a US Attorney. The State AG is a statewide elected position. The AG during the 2004 election was Christine Gregoire, who won the election for governor!

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Actually, I wasn't too far off. . [wikipedia] King County found some ballots in storage. Afterwards, other counties found missing ballots too; one county found their ballots under some mail trays.

I remember the whole stink about Democrats trying to steal the election by "finding" these ballots. My memory of the story wasn't that far off.

Note that I am not saying that the GOP characterizions of the Dems "stealing" that election were true. Anyway, thanks again.

I don't care what that says, it's wrong. Someone is revising history on Wiki.

I was here. I saw it happen. I followed it closely at the time. I posted volumes about it at the time if you want to hunt back through the GW firing 8 attorney's and related threads. I heard McKay talk about it.


Edited to add, look what it says:

King County Council Chairman Larry Phillips was at a Democratic Party office in Seattle on Sunday December 12, reviewing a list of voters whose absentee votes had been rejected due to signature problems, when to his surprise he found his own name listed.

The signature challenges were the reason for the "found ballots". They had been found rejected, not found as in someone's garage or wherever.

... The discovery prompted King County Director of Elections Dean Logan to order his staff to search the computers to see if any other ballots had been incorrectly rejected.

Logan announced on December 13 that 561 absentee ballots in the county had been wrongly rejected due to an administrative error.[14]

Administrative error as in rejected for their signatures.

The next day, workers retrieving voting machines from precinct storage found an additional 12 ballots, ... county workers discovered a tray in a warehouse with an additional 162 previously uncounted ballots.[15] All together, 723 uncounted or improperly rejected ballots were discovered in King County during the manual hand recount.

So the "found ballots" amounted to 174, while 561 were improperly rejected.


The GOP tried to use the whole thing to claim voter fraud had been discovered in King County when no such thing had occurred. The GOP has been using this tactic for decades:

... The Washington State Republican Party called into question the discrepancy between the list of voters casting ballots in King County (895,660) and the number of ballots reported in the final hand recount (899,199). They claimed that hundreds of votes, including votes by felons,[22] deceased voters,[23] and double voters,[23] were included in the canvass. ... election officials claimed that they had yet to finalize the list at the time, and argued that discrepancies in the two numbers are common and do not necessarily indicate fraud. As the election officials had expected, once the two lists were completed on January 5, the two numbers were indeed very close to one another.

And the dead people voting also was being claimed back then:

Also on January 5, 2005, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published an article investigating votes in King County apparently cast by dead people.[24] The PI uncovered eight cases of votes attributed to dead people; these included one administrative error, two ballots cast by the spouses of recently deceased voters (one who voted against Gregoire), one case of a husband apparently voting his dead wife's ballot instead of his own, and a man who legally voted his absentee ballot and then died before election day. One dead woman was marked as having voted in person at the polls.[24]

So the charge of voter fraud in King County was based on the typical GOP shenanigans and making it up.

On February 19 Judge Bridges denied the Democratic motion calling for the challengers' burden of proof to include a comprehensive list of disputed ballots cast for each candidate. The Republicans acknowledged that such an exhaustive list would be impossible to complete, but continued to argue that the volume of illegal ballots, and the electoral tendencies of the counties in which they were cast, demonstrated a strong likelihood that the illegal ballots had led to Gregoire's victory.

Count the GOP counties, what? But everyone knows only the Democrats cheat at the ballot box. The GOP cheats before voting by disenfranchising voters.

Aftermath
The 2004 election became a focus of media attention again in early 2007 when news broke that eight federal prosecutors including John McKay, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington, had been fired. Republicans had hoped that after the election McKay would begin a federal investigation into alleged voter fraud, but he did not; McKay stated afterward that he would not convene a grand jury for purely political reasons and emphasized he had not seen any evidence of voter fraud in the Governor's race.[36]

And Treb is right, McKay was the federal AG for the state.

 

[Bob001]

....
And while it may not get as much attention, Trump's habit of nominating people who are unsuitable to be judges is drawing unwanted attention to something that is often a rather... uneventful activity.

Q: What do you call someone who is entirely unfit to sit on the federal bench, but who is nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate?
A: Judge.

For life.

If his nominees cost Trump votes, they were never guaranteed in the first place. But they cement his support among evangelicals and traditional Repubs who don't like the man, but who want to win any way they can.

 

[carlitos]

I really doubt that someone is going back and hacking online archives of the Spokane Spokesman-Review from 2004 and then editing wikipedia.

I really only wanted to thank you for mentioning something that I had meant to look up, having recently remembered the King County ballots being misplaced and then found in odd places after the election. It was mail trays and storage lockers, and I had misremembered the reports as having said there were ballots found in parking garages and basements. It's probably a mix of my memory being wrong and conservative media lying about it at the time.