Impact of COVID on Democracy

I mistrust MSM because during my 70 years on this planet the MSM has been lying about pretty much everything. As Daniel Ellsberg showed, so is the government. Also, I'm familiar with many other examples of MSM enabling government deception.

It took about 2 months, but I now see Fauci for what he is, a career bureaucrat with strong lines of megalomania willing to terrorize the country for his own aggrandizement. For the first 2 months I saw him as a hero. I finally came to my senses.

 

Your missing the basics of the relationship between the constitution, the legislature, democracy, etc.

 

What Elsberg knew would not have come out were it not for the mdeia being who they are and doing the job they do.

Fauc is not a beaurocrat. He's a scientist. His credits include his work on AIDS and other seriously difficult medical issues especially with contagious disease.

There has not be one signle statement or act on the part of Fauci that has the chararicteristics you suggest.

His statements have been consistent with statements from every significant accredited medical science organization.

 

It is yourself ignoring basic facts about your own country.

 

LOL.

Democracy does not mean you get to ignore the constitution.

However, our democracy allows us to change our constitution.

Get it?

 

There is immensely more assurance that transporting and counting votes is much safer with mail-in voting than with in-person voting. I have been voting by mail since 2008. I can go online and check that my vote was received and counted. Authorities have a paper trail and can easily follow up if there are any questions. Ballots are individually identified and coded to the person to who each specific ballot was issued to, and the signature on the ballot can easily be checked against the one in the database. with a security code that can only be and nobody can use somebody else's ballot. Mail carriers scan bar codes that identify exactly from where each individual ballot was mailed and the whole route from the voter to the office of the supervisor of elections. Any wide-scale attempt to alter the election results would be easily traceable.

The problem Republicans have with mail-in ballots is not that it's not secure. On the one hand it's that it's too secure. And on the other, that it makes voting too easy. Republicans feel that more people exercising their right to vote means more people voting in their own interest, instead of in the interest of the politicians. And that is a detrimental to their candidates. They need people to vote based on what their propaganda tells them are the facts, and not on what their own eyes and ears tells them. Remember who it was that told people not to believe what they see and hear.

 

That's true. While Trump is in the WH it's a dictatorship.

 

I agree with everything except the last part, and I feel the need to clarify the matter.(And yes, it does get annoying to have to clarify everything the President said. Because of how easily misconstrued it is.) So when the President said that the "news is real, the report is fake.", I wish he had said "the facts tend to be exaggerated.", because that's what he's pointing out.

To use a relatively recent example, the Lysol crap. No, the President didn't say that. The President didn't say anything close to that. He was wondering about the uv-light treatments(which in of themselves will come with side effects, but meh it's something we'll have to deal with.)

So the fact that the President was wondering aloud was true, the exaggeration was absolutely ridiculous. And that does a disservice to everyone. We, the US Citizenry whether we are right or left-leaning deserve better than what we've gotten so far from the media.

 

Tampering with the mail is a federal crime. Polling place activity is not subject to federal criminal prosecution and is almost always ignored.

I fully support Golem's comments, but another aspect needs to be added.

Today, the majority of the assaults on our election come in the form of decisions made by those in power - including incumbent candidates! And, the ability to attack our polling places is increasing as the voting behaior of neighborhoods and analytical ability is incredible.

The result is a range of strategies for attacking elections that would be defeated by "vote by mail".

For example, today voting equipment is missallocated, leaving some polling stations with super long lines. Polling places are selected in ways that leave some with easy access while others experience transportation problems. Polling hours are a lever than can not be weilded against wager earners who often have to give up work hours to vote. Polling place staff usually includes volunteers who don't know the law and who inappropriately handle ballots. Polling places are centralized public locations that are available for targeting.

That is by no means a complete list.

All states have vote by mail systems for absentee voters. Vote by mail makes that system available to all (since it is restricted in most states) and to make that system secure which is not the case in most states.

Today, states are closing many of their polling places, "justified" by COVID concerns - even though that leaves longer lines of people from a wider distribution!

Guess how polling places are selected for closure!

 

I don't believe that is what he meant. It's definitely not how most of his supporters interpreted it. You can see evidence that it's not on this forum. Every single news story, piece of information, expert opinion, .... everything that "displeases" Trump is regarded by his followers as "false". Doesn't matter if it's poll showing him trailing, or a scientific study showing that wearing masks is indispensable to solve the current pandemic, ... and everything in between. All of it is immediately dismissed by Trump loyalists. And that is what that phrase was meant to reinforce. And it did. If I say that the number of Covid 19 cases are increasing, and show the NYT as reference, they attack the NYT. Not the fact that the cases are increasing. That is the purpose of that and similar statements. It's automatic.

He didn't say Lysol. But he did want them to test injecting disinfectant in patients. As well as "introducing" ultraviolet light inside the body. How they could do that just .... sets off the imagination.

What is ridiculous is the image of a President so desperate to take a worldwide crisis that costs hundreds of thousands of lives (at the end... millions) and find a way to gain political points. It shows what little concern he has for the life of people, and such a huge one for how it can affect his own political aspirations.

 

That's your interpretation of it. My interpretation of it is a man searching desperately, franatically(like all of us) to get a solution to the ccoronavirus. Also, the UV Light was a medical research by medical doctors, it wasn't some wacked out idea that came from "dumb, orange man bad."

The overall point I'm trying to make, is that exaggeration does not make the point. It just diminishes it. And from that diminished value, that is why we say "orange man bad". Nothing he does or ever do will please certain Americans, nothing he says or ever will say will please them. If he was on a rocket to Mars tomorrow, a good portion of them would cheer.

Not merely due to political disagreements, but sheer human disliking of him and that's what's different from Obama. For Republicans, it was 95% political disagreement, 5% personal. With Trump, it's 100% personal, 100% of the time and that's why we as a nation are here.

 

Inserting in the body, as well as injecting a disinfectant came 100% from "dumb, orange man incompetent"

You say "orange man bad" (not me). And you say it because it hides the fact that the many inadequacies this administration has demonstrated cannot be explained by Trump simply being "bad".

And nothing he does or ever do will displease certain Americans. He can stomp on the constitution, abuse power, obstruct investigations by Congress and a special council that his own administration appointed, separate children from their family with no intention of reuniting them, use the military to disperse absolutely peaceful protesters, and on and on.... none of this moves them criticize the man.

If the last name of the guy doing these things were Obama, or Clinton, even a tenth of any of the many things this guy has done they would be screaming "bloody murder".

I have praised him when I had the opportunity. I just haven't had many. A couple at the beginning of his term. But there is nothing much to praise even if you try.

Yes. People liked Obama because he was an honest moral person. Did he make mistakes?.... Many! And there is no way to hide them. ButTrump supporters seem to believe that his being so unlikable exonerates Trump from his dishonest and incompetent actions. When our descendants read about this in history book, they will have a hard time understanding how there could be people who excused every single action of somebody as dishonest and incompetent as Trump.

With Trump it's 100% personal and 100% his incompetence and dishonesty. One thing does not remove the other.

You saying that it's 100% personal proves my point. In order for it to be 100% personal he would have had to have made 0% poor decisions. Obviously he has made many poor decisions. But Trump loyalists refuse to believe what they see or hear.

 

We all remember the Al Franken win.

 

Exactly. We had one like that here in WA in a governor's race back before we had vote by mail.

Vote by mail in WA, OR, CO, et al are now not susceptible to that kind of problem.

Plus, the officials of these states are no longer able to manipulate who votes and who doesn't by using allocation of equipment, setting polling places, setting ovoting hours, and the other methods that get used to make in substantially harder for those they don't want to vote.

Also, EVERY state has a vote by mail system for absentees. But, many aren't adequately secure and some states allow that system to be used only by certain people.

We know how to do it. It's been tested for years. It eliminates a lot of the crookedness that exists in ALL voting systems that use polling places.