Political Discussion

The audit of the 2020 election in Arizona has Trump and his base rallied up that there was fraud.

The audit chief reported to the State senate that they have found a little over 74,000 main in ballots in Maricopa County that were never mailed. There is no record of them being requested.

"In Arizona, 74,000 ballots were counted with no record of being sent in. That's not normal. That's not right. That's not safe nor is it secure,"
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Trump tweeted about ballots "magically appearing".


But election officials said not so fast.

Here's why it's entirely normal for Maricopa County's submitted-ballots list to include a significant number of votes that do not match up with entries on the requested-ballots list. After the deadline to request a mail-in ballot, which was October 23 in 2020, the requested-ballot list doesn't get updated by the county. But the submitted-ballots list does get updated after that October 23 deadline -- with the votes of in-person early voters.
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Basically the finding sums up that the ninja auditors from Florida, who have no experience in auditing elections, have no clue what they are doing or how the election system works.

But the damage may have already been done. For those who believe that Biden did not win this is proof. There was fraud, case closed. They reasoning behind the finding is being dismissed.
 
The infrastructure bill appears to be on the brink of collapse again.

While it appeared it gained bipartisan support and enough votes to pass when it was just an infrastructure bill with nothing added to it and no tax increases, now all the sudden the GOP is concert about the national deficit and how we are going to pay for it.

The feel it is just to expensive, going to increase our nation's debt and further increase inflation.

They agree that the work needs to be done for our country. But that it's just simply to expensive with no clear path to pay for it so it's just going to increase the national deficit further. What is ironic is the GOP under Trump had the third largest deficit increase of any president and we started no new wars during Trump's presidency.

I wonder if that is just a cop out so the GOP can say Biden didn't accomplish anything during his presidency.
 
RenegadeMonster said:
The infrastructure bill appears to be on the brink of collapse again.

While it appeared it gained bipartisan support and enough votes to pass when it was just an infrastructure bill with nothing added to it and no tax increases, now all the sudden the GOP is concert about the national deficit and how we are going to pay for it.

The feel it is just to expensive, going to increase our nation's debt and further increase inflation.

They agree that the work needs to be done for our country. But that it's just simply to expensive with no clear path to pay for it so it's just going to increase the national deficit further. What is ironic is the GOP under Trump had the third largest deficit increase of any president and we started no new wars during Trump's presidency.

I wonder if that is just a cop out so the GOP can say Biden didn't accomplish anything during his presidency.
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The problem is that this needs to be funded by the rich, and I'm talking about all those people who aren't paying their fair share of taxes. But the GOP took that off the table, so now, the right is correct, there's absolutely no way we can pay for this. An investment like this needs to have billionaire tax dollars involved, a lot of billionaire tax dollars. For reference:

This month, ProPublica revealed that American billionaires essentially do not pay taxes, and within hours the White House had awkwardly promised no fewer than four federal investigations into the identity of the individual who had alerted the news organization to this fact.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jun/22/jeff-bezos-space-petition-blue-origin-flight
By Thursday, a North Carolina congressman was demanding the FBI director explain why he hadn’t made any arrests or at the very least, “executed any search warrants or raided any offices” in the international manhunt for the leaker.

By the weekend, demands for justice on behalf of America’s parasite oligarchs had unified the Republican party like nothing since perhaps the phrase “public option” was a thing you heard on cable television. Politicians from Susan Collins to the author of the infamous North Carolina “bathroom bill” both grilled law enforcement officials testifying in their committees about the website’s “illegal” violations of mega-billionaire privacy.

Fox News screamed about Twitter’s double standard in enabling sharing of the ProPublica revelations despite blocking an earlier New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. At least 19 senators signed angry letters demanding the investigations they had been repeatedly assured were well under way. (Senator Mike Crapo alone released three separate statements to this effect.) The ranking member of the powerful ways and means committee told the Hill on Friday that the revelations had dealt Democratic proposals to add an additional $8bn to the annual IRS budget – which was meant to help with tax law enforcement and compliance – “close to a death blow”.

Meanwhile, the Democrats hardly had a better response. The billionaire tax avoidance story warranted nary a mention on the Twitter feeds of the four founders of “the Squad” aside from a retweet from AOC. And so the only elected officials who seem to have read the story ProPublica president Richard Tofel had framed as “the most important story we have ever published” were the ones calling for the feds to ransack the ProPublica offices.

But the worst part of the whole saga was the realization that ProPublica’s bombshell revelations would probably have received more attention during the presidency of Donald Trump. ProPublica carefully chose the six billionaires whose tax returns it chose to single out for specific scrutiny, and several of them – Jeff Bezos, George Soros and Mike Bloomberg – are so loathed by conservatives it would have been impossible for a Trump-era Republican party to respect their constitutional right to dodge taxes. The scarce press coverage of the fact that billionaires have not only paid virtually no taxes, but that they have also added to their net worths in recent years, makes the four-year media obsession with former president Donald Trump’s tax returns feel like a partisan crusade that was never about a genuine commitment to ending billionaire tax avoidance, but just scoring points against Trump alone.

www.theguardian.com

US billionaires don’t pay tax, and our politicians don’t seem bothered | Maureen Tkacik

Fifteen years of tax return information on thousands of plutocrats is one of the biggest stories of the decade. And yet … crickets
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
nolalady said:
The problem is that this needs to be funded by the rich, and I'm talking about all those people who aren't paying their fair share of taxes. But the GOP took that off the table, so now, the right is correct, there's absolutely no way we can pay for this. An investment like this needs to have billionaire tax dollars involved, a lot of billionaire tax dollars. For reference:

This month, ProPublica revealed that American billionaires essentially do not pay taxes, and within hours the White House had awkwardly promised no fewer than four federal investigations into the identity of the individual who had alerted the news organization to this fact.
Petition urges Jeff Bezos to blast into space – and stay there
By Thursday, a North Carolina congressman was demanding the FBI director explain why he hadn’t made any arrests or at the very least, “executed any search warrants or raided any offices” in the international manhunt for the leaker.

By the weekend, demands for justice on behalf of America’s parasite oligarchs had unified the Republican party like nothing since perhaps the phrase “public option” was a thing you heard on cable television. Politicians from Susan Collins to the author of the infamous North Carolina “bathroom bill” both grilled law enforcement officials testifying in their committees about the website’s “illegal” violations of mega-billionaire privacy.

Fox News screamed about Twitter’s double standard in enabling sharing of the ProPublica revelations despite blocking an earlier New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. At least 19 senators signed angry letters demanding the investigations they had been repeatedly assured were well under way. (Senator Mike Crapo alone released three separate statements to this effect.) The ranking member of the powerful ways and means committee told the Hill on Friday that the revelations had dealt Democratic proposals to add an additional $8bn to the annual IRS budget – which was meant to help with tax law enforcement and compliance – “close to a death blow”.

Meanwhile, the Democrats hardly had a better response. The billionaire tax avoidance story warranted nary a mention on the Twitter feeds of the four founders of “the Squad” aside from a retweet from AOC. And so the only elected officials who seem to have read the story ProPublica president Richard Tofel had framed as “the most important story we have ever published” were the ones calling for the feds to ransack the ProPublica offices.

But the worst part of the whole saga was the realization that ProPublica’s bombshell revelations would probably have received more attention during the presidency of Donald Trump. ProPublica carefully chose the six billionaires whose tax returns it chose to single out for specific scrutiny, and several of them – Jeff Bezos, George Soros and Mike Bloomberg – are so loathed by conservatives it would have been impossible for a Trump-era Republican party to respect their constitutional right to dodge taxes. The scarce press coverage of the fact that billionaires have not only paid virtually no taxes, but that they have also added to their net worths in recent years, makes the four-year media obsession with former president Donald Trump’s tax returns feel like a partisan crusade that was never about a genuine commitment to ending billionaire tax avoidance, but just scoring points against Trump alone.

www.theguardian.com

US billionaires don’t pay tax, and our politicians don’t seem bothered | Maureen Tkacik

Fifteen years of tax return information on thousands of plutocrats is one of the biggest stories of the decade. And yet … crickets
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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Hard truths are hard to swallow.

Unrelated:
C159F40F-C40A-478F-97FB-11C3C88DEB6F.jpeg
 
The vote on the infrastructure bill will take place later today.

Republicans are signaling that they will block it. The filibuster will be used.

Yet again did we put a lot of work in trying to get the bill to be bipartisan only to have the GOP block it at the end.
 
RenegadeMonster said:
I thought they had all this shit figured out already. How is the bill not written yet?
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The GOP won’t sign off until it’s paid for.

The Dems were hoping to pump more money into the IRS for enforcement purposes. Supposedly that would have covered something like 80% of the package but GOP begged off as there is still a portion of their base that is anti-tax (thus anti-IRS enforcement).

So right now the biggest hurdle is that they need to find the money in the existing budget to pay for the bill without raising taxes on anyone or cutting military (GOP) or social services (Dems) before they can finalize the package.
 
TenderLovingKiller® said:
The GOP won’t sign off until it’s paid for.

The Dems were hoping to pump more money into the IRS for enforcement purposes. Supposedly that would have covered something like 80% of the package but GOP begged off as there is still a portion of their base that is anti-tax (thus anti-IRS enforcement).

So right now the biggest hurdle is that they need to find the money in the existing budget to pay for the bill without raising taxes on anyone or cutting military (GOP) or social services (Dems) before they can finalize the package.
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you also forgot to add "while not increasing the national deficit".

So, it's just how they will pay for the bill that is not finished.

That can be figured out later. There is nobody saying the infrastructure work does not need to be done. So get it done.
 
RenegadeMonster said:
you also forgot to add "while not increasing the national deficit".

So, it's just how they will pay for the bill that is not finished.

That can be figured out later. There is nobody saying the infrastructure work does not need to be done. So get it done.
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Of course, that is essentially what the vote today is about. Schumer is putting a spur to the bipartisan committees ass to get things moving.

TBH, I think many on the Left don’t care if the bipartisan bill is successful or not. They are playing nice to get the Centerist Dems on board but if the GOP takes their ball and goes home the Dems will roll this “traditional” infrastructure bill into the other much larger bill and Ram the whole thing through via a party line vote via budget reconciliation but to get that they need to show to Siennima and Manchin that they tried in good faith to pass the bi-partisan bill but the GOP was being unreasonable.
 
The January 6 commision is quite the shitshow / circus.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and other Republicans spoke out against authoritarianism and abuses of power -- but they leveled those accusations at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and not the twice-impeached former President.
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This comes after McCarthy selections for the special committee where Trump's biggest allies, voted against certifying the election and were clearly there only to distract. Not to mention they said January 6 never happened.

Poelosi then vetoed 2 of the 5 selections McCarthy made.


And this is what lead to the above comments.
 
Chucktshoes said:
The FBI Says It Thwarted A Plan To Kidnap Michigan’s Governor. The Suspects Say It Was A Setup.

Remember the plot to kidnap Gov. Whitmer in Michigan? Looks like the FBI is back to its old trick of hatching a plot to arrest some idiotic schmuck(s) they can lure into it. They did this a bunch post 9/11 to fight “Islamic terrorism” and now it seems they’re back to going after the domestics again. They’ve been doing this sort of thing for literally decades.
View attachment 106342
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The kid in Portland comes to mind. Convicted Bomb Plotter Sentenced to 30 Years
This is the exact thing that breeds domestic terrorism. The Waco, Ruby Ridge botch jobs and entrapment techniques... policing at every level is hot trash.

I'm not advocating consoling terrorists of any ilk, but I am for not giving them ideological ammo because of institutional incompetence. I'm also guessing some of this is for show for the Biden admin. to claim they're actually doing something about white nationalists.
 
jaycee said:
The kid in Portland comes to mind. Convicted Bomb Plotter Sentenced to 30 Years
This is the exact thing that breeds domestic terrorism. The Waco, Ruby Ridge botch jobs and entrapment techniques... policing at every level is hot trash.

I'm not advocating consoling terrorists of any ilk, but I am for not giving them ideological ammo because of institutional incompetence. I'm also guessing some of this is for show for the Biden admin. to claim they're actually doing something about white nationalists.
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Yup, there was another in New York, and at least several a year over the course of the last 20 years. (Tin foil hat on)Hell, when you dig into the OKC bombing you discover that there is an unindicted, unnamed co-conspirator that some folks believe was a fed. Or the fact that at one point nearly every single member of the ruling council of the Aryan Nations was an informant for a federal, state, or local LE agency. (Tin foil hat off) You want to calm down anti-government activity, that’s not how you do it. Hatching your own plots to keep good press in the public eye is not how LE should work.

/rant on/
Also, want to touch on something in your last sentence that is not directly aimed at you, but the rhetoric in general. Labeling every right wing group or viewpoint as Nazis or white nationalists doesn’t help anything at all. One, it’s demonstrably false. An example is the Proud Boys. Not defending them at all (I think they’re mostly idiots) but a multiracial group headed by a dark completed Puerto Rican is a hard sell to me as being white nationalists. Two, the more you call folks something that they aren’t, the more you push them towards that thing. It’s a pretty well understood phenomenon and I t helps nothing at all.
/rant off/
 
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