losing the house just gives Trump an excuse for not doing things he wouldnt have done anyway.
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U.S Presidential Election
- Thread starter Chiang Mai Tiger
- Start date
The gerrymandering must be off the charts. The Dems won, like, 57% of the votes and still lost 2 seats in the Senate. Even the House result should be seen through the lens of gerrymandering and voter suppression. In a more even race the Blue Wave would have been overwhelming.
Their Senate is like ours, I think it is 2 Senators per state and each state elects a senator 2 out of 3 elections. Hence a senator from Wyoming needs far less votes than a senator from California.
The senate result reflects that 6 years ago the Dems won so many senators they couldn't defend all the incumbents (they won 23 to 8 in 2012).
So the Dems losing 2 senators in 2018 is a pretty good result for them.
The House is another matter - much gerrymandering and voter suppression is out of hand. Black voters wait hours longer in their districts than white voters, this is documented. Not sure how they do voting outside of your district, although I suspect it would depend where you are. In some states the ballots are different for each county (including federal ballots like the President (Electoral College) and House), in other states they have the same ballots across the state.
They really could do with an electoral commission, but it doesn't fit with their constitution. Remember the USA is a union of states not a federation.
DS
The senate result reflects that 6 years ago the Dems won so many senators they couldn't defend all the incumbents (they won 23 to 8 in 2012).
So the Dems losing 2 senators in 2018 is a pretty good result for them.
The House is another matter - much gerrymandering and voter suppression is out of hand. Black voters wait hours longer in their districts than white voters, this is documented. Not sure how they do voting outside of your district, although I suspect it would depend where you are. In some states the ballots are different for each county (including federal ballots like the President (Electoral College) and House), in other states they have the same ballots across the state.
They really could do with an electoral commission, but it doesn't fit with their constitution. Remember the USA is a union of states not a federation.
DS
KnightersRevenge said:
80% of the states have 25% or less the population of California, which is a Democrat stronghold.
LeeToRainesToRoach said:
Yes? And? Arnie was a Republican. They tend to elect Republican governers who tend to be more centrist because the large progressive cities are what they need to get elected.
Are you saying that by dint of living in a more populated state Californians deserve to have there voice diluted? That's democratic is it? It is like Bill Maher says "Why are there 2 Dakotas?!"
KnightersRevenge said:
Does not compute.
Been a comfortable Democrat state for at least 20 years. In part due to illegal immigrants. Have a look at the southern border of Texas - all Democrat due to illegal immigrants.
Is that what I said? California is worth more than 10% of Electoral College votes by dint of its large population.
LeeToRainesToRoach said:
Oh *smile* off "illegal immigrants". It is democratic because cities are progressive and it has some of the largest cities in the U.S.
Fair point, went off half cocked. But that is a disingenuous claim. California has a population of 40mill and has 2 Senators. The Dakotas, combined pop. 1.6 million, 4 Senators.
KnightersRevenge said:
It’s not my country or political system. Maybe the Dakotas should have no representation if everything is run to scale.
LeeToRainesToRoach said:
Who knows? Probably a bit like Tassie and their "over"representation in the Senate.
Brodders17 said:
Not exactly, but it doesn't stop them.
Do non-citizens vote in U.S. elections?
Main points
- Some non-citizens cast votes in U.S. elections despite legal bans.
- Non-citizens favor Democratic candidates over Republican candidates.
- Non-citizen voting likely changed 2008 outcomes including Electoral College votes and the composition of Congress.
- Voter photo-identification rules have limited effect on non-citizen participation.
Presumably any children they have are automatically US citizens.
on Thanksgiving Trump was thankful "for having a great family and for having made a tremendous difference in this country. I've made a tremendous difference in the country. This country is so much stronger now than it was when I took office that you wouldn't believe it."
"And I mean, you see, but so much stronger people can't even believe it. When I see foreign leaders they say we cannot believe the difference in strength between the United States now and the United States two years ago,"
He is a quality bloke. as he keeps telling everyone.
"And I mean, you see, but so much stronger people can't even believe it. When I see foreign leaders they say we cannot believe the difference in strength between the United States now and the United States two years ago,"
He is a quality bloke. as he keeps telling everyone.
Brodders17 said:
Somebody has to spruik him, even if it's him. 80% of the media want to talk him down.
https://www.canberratimes.com.au/world/north-america/bottomless-pinocchio-the-false-claim-repeated-over-and-over-by-trump-20181211-p50le8.html
Bottomless Pinocchio: The false claim repeated over and over by Trump
Washington: It was US President Donald Trump's signature campaign promise. He would build a wall along the nation's southern border, and Mexico would pay for it.
Shortly after becoming President, Trump dropped the Mexico part, turning to Congress for the funds instead. When that, too, failed - Congress earlier this year appropriated money for border security that could not be spent on an actual wall - Trump nevertheless declared victory.
"We've started building our wall," he said in a speech on March 29. "I'm so proud of it."
Despite the facts, which have been cited numerous times by fact checkers, Trump repeated his false assertion on an imaginary wall 86 times in the seven months before the midterm elections, according to a database of false and misleading claims maintained by The Washington Post.
Trump's willingness to constantly repeat false claims has posed a unique challenge to fact checkers. Most politicians quickly drop a four-Pinocchio claim, either out of a duty to be accurate or concern that spreading false information could be politically damaging.
Not Trump. The President keeps going long after the facts are clear, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to replace the truth with his own, far more favourable, version of it. He is not merely making gaffes or mis-stating things, he is purposely injecting false information into the national conversation.
To accurately reflect this phenomenon, The Washington Post's Fact Checker is introducing a new category - the Bottomless Pinocchio. That dubious distinction will be awarded to politicians who repeat a false claim so many times that they are, in effect, engaging in campaigns of disinformation.
The bar for the Bottomless Pinocchio is high: the claims must have received three or four Pinocchios from The Fact Checker, and they must have been repeated at least 20 times. Twenty is a sufficiently robust number that there can be no question the politician is aware that his or her facts are wrong. The list of Bottomless Pinocchios will be maintained on its own landing page.
The Fact Checker has not identified statements from any other current elected official who meets the standard other than Trump. In fact, 14 statements made by the President immediately qualify for the list.
The President's most-repeated falsehoods fall into a handful of broad categories - claiming credit for promises he has not fulfilled; false assertions that provide a rationale for his agenda; and political weaponry against perceived enemies such as Democrats or Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Some of Trump's regular deceptions date from the start of his administration, such as his claim that the United States has spent $US7 trillion ($9.3 trillion) in the Middle East (36 times) or that the United States pays for most of the cost of NATO (87 times). These were both statements that he made repeatedly when he campaigned for president and continues to make, despite having access to official budget data.
Another campaign claim that has carried into his presidency is the assertion that Democrats colluded with Russia during the election (48 times). This is obviously false, as the Democrats were the target of hacking by Russian entities, according to US intelligence agencies. (The assertion, also spread widely by Trump allies in the conservative media, largely rests on the fact that the firm hired by Democrats to examine Trump's Russia ties was also working to defend a Russian company in US court.)
On 30 separate occasions, Trump has also falsely accused Mueller of having conflicts of interest and the staff led by the long-time Republican of being "angry Democrats".
A good example of how objective reality does not appear to matter to the President is how he has framed his tax cut. When the administration's tax plan was still in the planning stages, Trump spoke to the Independent Community Bankers Association on May 1, 2017, and made this claim, to applause: "We're proposing one of the largest tax cuts in history, even larger than that of President Ronald Reagan. Our tax cut is bigger."
He reinforced that statement later that day, with similar wording, in an interview with Bloomberg News.
From the start, it was a falsehood, as Reagan's 1981 tax cut amounted to 2.9 per cent of the overall US economy - and nothing under consideration by Trump came close to that level. Trump's tax cut was eventually crafted to be just under 1 per cent of the economy, making it the eighth-largest tax cut in the past century.
Yet Trump has been undeterred by pesky fact checks showing he is wrong. He kept making the claim - 123 times before the midterm elections - and still says it. "We got the biggest tax cuts in history," he told Chris Wallace of Fox News in his November 18 interview.
Similarly, in June, the President hit upon a new label for the US economy: it was the greatest, the best or the strongest in US history. He liked the phrasing so much that he repeated a version of it every 1.5 days until the midterm elections, for a total of 99 times. The President can certainly brag about the state of the economy, but he runs into trouble when he repeatedly makes a play for the history books. By just about any important measure, the economy today is not doing as well as it did under presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton - not to mention Ulysses Grant.
Trump has 40 times asserted that a wall was needed to stem the flow of drugs across the border - a claim that is contradicted the by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which says most illicit drugs come through legal points of entry. Traffickers conceal the drugs in hidden compartments within passenger cars or hide them alongside other legal cargo in tractor trailers and drive the illicit substances right into the United States. Meanwhile, fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid, can be easily ordered online, even directly from China.
Some of Trump's most repeated claims verge on the edge of fantasy. Thirty-seven times, he has asserted that US Steel has announced that it is building new plants in response to his decision to impose steel tariffs. Depending on his mood, the number has ranged from six to nine plants, suggesting a bounty of jobs. But US Steel made no such announcement. It merely stated that it would restart two blast furnaces at the company's Granite City Works integrated plant in Illinois, creating 800 jobs. The company in August also said it would upgrade a plant in Gary, Indiana, but without creating any new jobs.
Similarly, Trump has repeatedly inflated the gains from his 2017 trip to Saudi Arabia, upping the amount from $US350 billion to $US450 billion when he came under fire for defending the Crown Prince believed to have ordered the killing of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi.
Separately, he also inflates the jobs said to be created, at one point offering a fanciful figure of 1 million. The Fact Checker obtained detailed spreadsheets of both the military and commercial agreements that showed a total of $US267 billion in agreements; we determined that many were simply aspirational. Many of the purported investments are in Saudi Arabia, indicating few jobs would be created for Americans.
Other claims on the list include:
That the administration has removed thousands and thousands of MS-13 members from the streets, either through deportation or prison. (The group is estimated to have only about 10,000 members).
That he came just one vote short of repealing Obamacare. (The late Senator John McCain blocked a trimmed-down version, but the full plan was soundly defeated, and there was little consensus on a compromise version).
That the United States has "lost" billions of dollars on trade deficits. No economist would agree with that statement, but Trump has said some version of it 131 times.
That the United States has the worst immigration laws in terms of keeping immigrants out. That's simply not true. In fact, the US has among the world's most restrictive immigration laws.
One other four-Pinocchio claim by Trump may soon make the list. Fifteen times, the President has claimed to audiences that the Uzbekistan-born man who in 2017 allegedly killed eight people with a pick-up truck in New York brought in two dozen relatives to the United States through so-called "chain migration". But Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov is not even a US citizen, so the actual number is zero.
Washington Post
Bottomless Pinocchio: The false claim repeated over and over by Trump
Washington: It was US President Donald Trump's signature campaign promise. He would build a wall along the nation's southern border, and Mexico would pay for it.
Shortly after becoming President, Trump dropped the Mexico part, turning to Congress for the funds instead. When that, too, failed - Congress earlier this year appropriated money for border security that could not be spent on an actual wall - Trump nevertheless declared victory.
"We've started building our wall," he said in a speech on March 29. "I'm so proud of it."
Despite the facts, which have been cited numerous times by fact checkers, Trump repeated his false assertion on an imaginary wall 86 times in the seven months before the midterm elections, according to a database of false and misleading claims maintained by The Washington Post.
Trump's willingness to constantly repeat false claims has posed a unique challenge to fact checkers. Most politicians quickly drop a four-Pinocchio claim, either out of a duty to be accurate or concern that spreading false information could be politically damaging.
Not Trump. The President keeps going long after the facts are clear, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to replace the truth with his own, far more favourable, version of it. He is not merely making gaffes or mis-stating things, he is purposely injecting false information into the national conversation.
To accurately reflect this phenomenon, The Washington Post's Fact Checker is introducing a new category - the Bottomless Pinocchio. That dubious distinction will be awarded to politicians who repeat a false claim so many times that they are, in effect, engaging in campaigns of disinformation.
The bar for the Bottomless Pinocchio is high: the claims must have received three or four Pinocchios from The Fact Checker, and they must have been repeated at least 20 times. Twenty is a sufficiently robust number that there can be no question the politician is aware that his or her facts are wrong. The list of Bottomless Pinocchios will be maintained on its own landing page.
The Fact Checker has not identified statements from any other current elected official who meets the standard other than Trump. In fact, 14 statements made by the President immediately qualify for the list.
The President's most-repeated falsehoods fall into a handful of broad categories - claiming credit for promises he has not fulfilled; false assertions that provide a rationale for his agenda; and political weaponry against perceived enemies such as Democrats or Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Some of Trump's regular deceptions date from the start of his administration, such as his claim that the United States has spent $US7 trillion ($9.3 trillion) in the Middle East (36 times) or that the United States pays for most of the cost of NATO (87 times). These were both statements that he made repeatedly when he campaigned for president and continues to make, despite having access to official budget data.
Another campaign claim that has carried into his presidency is the assertion that Democrats colluded with Russia during the election (48 times). This is obviously false, as the Democrats were the target of hacking by Russian entities, according to US intelligence agencies. (The assertion, also spread widely by Trump allies in the conservative media, largely rests on the fact that the firm hired by Democrats to examine Trump's Russia ties was also working to defend a Russian company in US court.)
On 30 separate occasions, Trump has also falsely accused Mueller of having conflicts of interest and the staff led by the long-time Republican of being "angry Democrats".
A good example of how objective reality does not appear to matter to the President is how he has framed his tax cut. When the administration's tax plan was still in the planning stages, Trump spoke to the Independent Community Bankers Association on May 1, 2017, and made this claim, to applause: "We're proposing one of the largest tax cuts in history, even larger than that of President Ronald Reagan. Our tax cut is bigger."
He reinforced that statement later that day, with similar wording, in an interview with Bloomberg News.
From the start, it was a falsehood, as Reagan's 1981 tax cut amounted to 2.9 per cent of the overall US economy - and nothing under consideration by Trump came close to that level. Trump's tax cut was eventually crafted to be just under 1 per cent of the economy, making it the eighth-largest tax cut in the past century.
Yet Trump has been undeterred by pesky fact checks showing he is wrong. He kept making the claim - 123 times before the midterm elections - and still says it. "We got the biggest tax cuts in history," he told Chris Wallace of Fox News in his November 18 interview.
Similarly, in June, the President hit upon a new label for the US economy: it was the greatest, the best or the strongest in US history. He liked the phrasing so much that he repeated a version of it every 1.5 days until the midterm elections, for a total of 99 times. The President can certainly brag about the state of the economy, but he runs into trouble when he repeatedly makes a play for the history books. By just about any important measure, the economy today is not doing as well as it did under presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton - not to mention Ulysses Grant.
Trump has 40 times asserted that a wall was needed to stem the flow of drugs across the border - a claim that is contradicted the by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which says most illicit drugs come through legal points of entry. Traffickers conceal the drugs in hidden compartments within passenger cars or hide them alongside other legal cargo in tractor trailers and drive the illicit substances right into the United States. Meanwhile, fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid, can be easily ordered online, even directly from China.
Some of Trump's most repeated claims verge on the edge of fantasy. Thirty-seven times, he has asserted that US Steel has announced that it is building new plants in response to his decision to impose steel tariffs. Depending on his mood, the number has ranged from six to nine plants, suggesting a bounty of jobs. But US Steel made no such announcement. It merely stated that it would restart two blast furnaces at the company's Granite City Works integrated plant in Illinois, creating 800 jobs. The company in August also said it would upgrade a plant in Gary, Indiana, but without creating any new jobs.
Similarly, Trump has repeatedly inflated the gains from his 2017 trip to Saudi Arabia, upping the amount from $US350 billion to $US450 billion when he came under fire for defending the Crown Prince believed to have ordered the killing of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi.
Separately, he also inflates the jobs said to be created, at one point offering a fanciful figure of 1 million. The Fact Checker obtained detailed spreadsheets of both the military and commercial agreements that showed a total of $US267 billion in agreements; we determined that many were simply aspirational. Many of the purported investments are in Saudi Arabia, indicating few jobs would be created for Americans.
Other claims on the list include:
That the administration has removed thousands and thousands of MS-13 members from the streets, either through deportation or prison. (The group is estimated to have only about 10,000 members).
That he came just one vote short of repealing Obamacare. (The late Senator John McCain blocked a trimmed-down version, but the full plan was soundly defeated, and there was little consensus on a compromise version).
That the United States has "lost" billions of dollars on trade deficits. No economist would agree with that statement, but Trump has said some version of it 131 times.
That the United States has the worst immigration laws in terms of keeping immigrants out. That's simply not true. In fact, the US has among the world's most restrictive immigration laws.
One other four-Pinocchio claim by Trump may soon make the list. Fifteen times, the President has claimed to audiences that the Uzbekistan-born man who in 2017 allegedly killed eight people with a pick-up truck in New York brought in two dozen relatives to the United States through so-called "chain migration". But Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov is not even a US citizen, so the actual number is zero.
Washington Post
LeeToRainesToRoach said:
It's a bit like climate change L2. If everybody is saying the same thing they're probably on to something.
Brodders17 said:
The hypocrisy of Trump knows no bounds, he continually boasted and bragged that he was going to build a great wall and make Mexico pay for it.
Now he's saying he will bring the country to a standstill by shutting down the Government if they don't give him the funding to build it ??? ??? ??? ???
