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#the usurper donald trump – @pocochina on Tumblr
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semi-titled

@pocochina / pocochina.tumblr.com

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum
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democracy was on the ballot and it won

I am a slow-boring-of-hard-boards realist about politics. I am delightedly surprised when I get what I want AT ALL. Months and months ago, I said that my number one issue in this election was the desperate need to put the brakes on democratic backsliding in the United States. I’m not sure how to process the fact that I’ve started to get what I wanted even before the transition.

There is a real path forward for democracy reform in this country. EVEN WITH an aspiring autocrat doing everything he could to rig this election, EVEN WITH a pandemic raging, EVEN WITH malicious foreign actors still trying cause problems, EVEN THOUGH we still have not restored the Voting Rights Act, EVEN WITH all the structural imbalances built into our creaky eighteenth-century constitutional system:

  • Voter participation went way up! People voted over the course of several weeks from the comfort of their own homes, or on weekends, or on Election Day. And because people took responsibility and spread out their votes like that, it was safer to go to polling places. That was a huge collective choice to prevent a lot of suffering and even some deaths.
  • A big part of why they could do that is the enormous number of citizens who rallied to work at the polls so that the retirees who usually do the job could sit this year out.
  • Cities and states around the country took the time they need to count carefully.
  • Media gatekeepers, for the most part, had the discipline and the patience to be helpful to users about what we knew and what we didn’t. If anything, they’re erring on the side of being too cautious. This is after weeks of most media gatekeepers having the discipline to debunk a disinformation campaign by Trump’s allies and Russian backers, instead of aggressively participating in it.
  • Social media companies took the most aggressive countermeasures yet against election misinformation.
  • The person who got the most votes is also the person who won the election, which is pretty cool!

That is a huge improvement from EVERY PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. Just in terms of how well the election itself was administered, my only major criticism is that we still did not do something called risk-limiting audits. In the case of an election, audits are basically a carefully calibrated statistical smell test. They’re not a recount. They are a reliable and cost-effective way of figuring out if a recount or some other type of scrutiny should be done for the sake of public confidence in the results – and that makes them a cost-effective deterrence against any bad actors who are considering sabotage. Audits are important whether an election goes your way or not, just like smoke detectors are important whether your building catches fire or not.

But that absolutely should not take away from the fact that we overcame all the new problems that were introduced this year and took some big steps toward solving a lot of old ones – despite the best efforts of Trump and all his enablers. Imagine what we could do under an administration that is helping democracy revitalization instead of aggressively hindering it.

The easiest way for us to make the most comprehensive change would be to win the Senate, which would allow a Biden administration to pass a revitalized Voting Rights Act and restore legitimacy to the federal courts. If you have any time or money to spare in the next few weeks, consider sharing it with the two excellent Democratic candidates in the Georgia Senate runoffs.

We should be realistic about the situation: we’re probably not going to get to do it the easy way, at least, not until after the midterms. But we’re not going to be doing it the hard way any more. The hard way is what we’re doing now. We’re about to get a Department of Justice that opposes civil rights violations and enforces what’s left of the current Voting Rights Act. The intelligence and military cybersecurity units are going to be able to work with the administration instead of around it. And we aren’t going to have to deal with a 24/7 fusillade of lies and voter intimidation coming from the Oval Office. To spin out the “it’s a marathon, not a sprint” metaphor: we’ve been running a marathon uphill carrying forty-pound backpacks. We’ve reached the top where the path levels out, and someone just took our bags and gave us protein bars.

And while we have our protein bars, let’s look around, because the view is as clear and as beautiful as it’s going to get. Donald Trump had every intention of wrecking American democracy, and the entire Republican party had every intention of supporting his aspiring dictatorship. And, while Trump himself is and always has been a clown, the person occupying the Oval Office is the most powerful person on the planet. Actually, that’s an understatement. Since Truman gave the order to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, our technology has grown stronger and our government has concentrated more and more power in the executive branch, which means that every holder of that office has arguably been the most powerful person in the history of the world. Every other holder of that office has at least wanted to think of himself as using that power for the advancement of democracy and humanity. Donald Trump affirmatively tried to use all that power to entrench himself there permanently.

We stopped him. We stopped him peacefully. We stopped him without further harming the many vulnerable people he holds hostage in a hundred different ways. We stopped him not by elevating an equal-but-opposite charismatic demagogue for a two-men-enter-one-man-leaves smackdown, but by building a vibrant, heterogenous coalition and finding competent, experienced, principled leaders who respect that coalition in all its raucous power. We stopped him, in short, by choosing to do democracy.

That feels good today and it’s enormously consequential. It is also proof of concept. It is something that can happen, because it has happened.

Something that political scientists and democracy advocates have been saying for the past few years is that Trump has been a propaganda gold mine for dictators. They use him as a cautionary tale against liberal democracy or even against hoping that things can ever get better: see, even the Americans are no better than we are! Dictators can artificially insulate themselves from accountability in the short term, which makes them ill-equipped to think about backfire. Train your people’s eyes on the aspiring American autocrat, and they can all see his humiliating fall.

To our sisters and brothers around the world, from Idlib to Hong Kong, from São Paolo to Moscow, and along every wide country road in between: this is the only true thing your oppressors have ever told you. We are no better than you are. We are no more suited for or entitled to liberation. Look what we have done. Imagine what you can do.

There’s kind of a false dichotomy going on where people swung from “Trump is going to successfully rig the election for himself” pessimism to “oh, Biden only ousted an incumbent by a freakishly large margin, it wasn’t an immediate electoral college landslide, why did Trump get so close.” This take has set in before deep blue California and New York have come close to completing their mail-in ballot counts, which tells you that it isn’t serious, but it’s also beside the point. Trump succeeded in making the election unfair. If he hadn’t illegitimately put a whole lot of thumbs on the scale in his favor, if we’d actually had the free and fair election we deserved, I think he probably would have lost in a landslide. We did the work and showed up in numbers that were ultimately too big to rig. That led to victory, although not a victory you can quantifiably measure against the dozen or so American elections that were more or less free and fair. That doesn’t mean the rigging didn’t happen or have any impact. It means we beat the spread. As the world’s most prominent train enthusiast once said, that is a big fucking deal.

A government of the people, by the people, and for the people has not perished from the earth. One day soon, it may even exist. That is our charge. That is our choice.

So take a moment to recharge. Enjoy the view. Breathe. We got work to do.

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the voting ends today but the fight almost certainly does not

If you’re the kind of person who can get into the weeds of federal court filings on elections, you probably already have your hair on fire. If you’re not, I don’t recommend picking up the habit right now. It’s just going to make your head swim. These are so incoherent and meritless that even our corrupt federal judiciary and plenty of conservative state judges have frequently brushed them off. I get the sense that Trump’s lawyers are more hoping to win those cases than trying to win them. What they seem to be trying to do with these lawsuits is some mix of the following dishonest things:

That is what makes me think Trump’s plan to barricade himself in the White House and tweet out a declaration of victory the first moment Fox News reports a good exit poll for him is only mostly about his pathetic need to self-soothe with an autocratic display. He’s also making one last go-for-broke play for the public narrative. He thinks – again, not unreasonably – that if he says he won, then he’ll get a bunch of “Trump Declares Victory” headlines and chyrons, which puts a thumb on the scale in terms of how people frame any resulting developments in their own minds. It’s not a good strategy, it’s more of a hail Mary, but it’s the only potentially helpful option he’s left for himself.

All of this has, once again, summoned the specter of the 2000 election.

We can’t look one day into the future. But we might be able to prepare ourselves for it if we look about twenty years into the past.

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pocochina

It is COMPLETELY NOT WRONG to worry about the cheating, because it’s impossible to predict or prepare for, as long as you remind yourself that THEY CHEAT BECAUSE THEY KNOW THEY CAN’T WIN FOR REAL.

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A Tale of Red States and Blue States

Once upon a time, there was a state.

It was a large state, with vast stretches of country between its world-class cities. It had communities rich in diversity and activism and ideas – and it had a lot of resentful white people who were just plain old rich.

The richest and most resentful white people created a terrible blight they called “modern conservatism.” They set their wicked curse on the state, and then unleashed it on the nation with two Republican presidents – one lamentable, the next even worse.

There were many along the way who sounded the alarm, but there were more who ignored the danger far too long. The spell had summoned a beast. The beast was hideous and stupid. It was no good at anything except being a hateful beast. But the dark spell had done so much damage that being a hateful beast was enough for the beast to win, at least for a time.

In one version of the story, the state is called “California.”

In another, it is called “Texas.”

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pocochina

live shot of doug jones reelect hq:

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FIVE MORE DAYS

There are three things you need to do in the next few days.

I. If you haven’t voted yet, you need to do that.

  • If you still have your absentee ballot lying around somewhere, you need to bring it to a drop box or your local elections offices. If you try to mail it in, the regime’s capture of the Supreme Court and sabotage of the postal service may succeed in stealing your vote. Don’t let them.
  • If you didn’t request an absentee ballot, that’s totally fine, but you need to make your plan to vote now. If your state has early voting, you need to go TODAY.

Absolutely no bullshit games about “oh I’m in a safe state, I can not vote/vote third party/write in my dog.” Do not let anyone get away with saying that shit in your presence. First of all, no state is safe until it’s certified. Second of all, the margin of the popular vote is REALLY IMPORTANT. Any crap these mobsters might be tempted to pull is going to be more difficult and less appealing if there’s a five point Biden win than a one point win, harder and less worth their while still if there’s a nine or ten point blowout. That’s true in any particular state and it’s true nationally. If they think they’re going to contest or throw out votes, AND THEY DO, then we need to have more votes in the bank than they have time to steal.

II. You need to keep your head.

Their plan is to overwhelm everyone with their bullshit. It probably would’ve been smarter not to spend four years teaching us how to tune them out; lucky for us, they’re brainless jackasses.

Their big confusion play seems to be scaremongering if we don’t have a winner called, like, during prime time on Tuesday night. Ignore them. If it takes a few days, it takes a few days. That’s part of making sure the votes get counted. Even recounts and lawsuits in the days and weeks afterward are part of a sensible process. Don’t let these goobers overwhelm you with their shitty Trump fanfiction.

III. You need to prepare yourself for Wednesday, November 4.

I don’t mean emotionally. I mean that you should expect you will need to take some kind of direct action the day after all the votes are cast. Keep an eye on Protect the Results for events near you. If it’s available in your state, download the ACLU mobile justice app and get familiar with it now; if not, at least get the number of your state or local ACLU into your phone. Pack a little knapsack now:

  • hand sanitizer and a spare mask;
  • a tiny bottle of whatever OTC pain medication you use, plus a dose or two of any prescriptions you need;
  • a bottle of water and some snacks you can eat while you’re out;
  • an extra flannel or sweatshirt;
  • a photo ID and some bail money might not be the worst idea in the world.

In my opinion – AND THIS IS JUST MY READ ON THE SITUATION, WHICH CAN CHANGE ANY MINUTE – I still think the most likely scenario for next week is pretty similar to the midterms, where Trump goes to bed that night thinking the margins are close enough that he can wriggle his way out of a real loss, but the magnitude of a Democratic landslide gets clear pretty quickly. He doesn’t have the guts for a real fight, and he doesn’t have the psychological ability to absorb a narcissistic injury fast enough to take action. He’s spent years alienating the top brass of the military. He’s spent weeks trying to give his Secret Service detail the ‘rona. (Seriously, what successful coup has included “try but fail to kill a bunch of your armed bodyguards”? I’m genuinely curious.) But that’s the most likely scenario out of a lot of scenarios. It’s not over until it’s over.

People are anxious. They’re disoriented after 2016, when everyone knew Democrats would win a free and fair election but too few people realized that wasn’t what we were having. And they’re discombobulated now, because most Americans don’t have practice waiting for an election that they already know will be unfair. Chances are pretty good that at least a few of these people are in your social media feeds. So you might see a lot of doomporn loser talk about how it’s all rigged and he’s never going to leave anyway and blah blah blah.

Those aren’t misplaced concerns. But there’s a way to talk about them in a way that’s a lot more constructive, and it’s this:

Trump cannot win legitimately. That’s not me reading tea leaves or interpreting polls or whatever. He cut himself off from that possibility with his solicitation of foreign interference, his extortion of foreign leaders and American governors for his own political benefit, his willful destruction of the infrastructure we need in order to have an election, and his incitement of terrorism against journalists, opponents, and voters. He did not want to win an election with any democratic legitimacy and so he won’t.

That doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll win. But I like our chances. Even knowing about so much of his cheating, and being aware that there’s almost certainly more cheating we don’t know about yet, I like our chances.

So let’s do it. Get that ballot in. Use whatever platform you have to remind other people to do the same. Make calls if you can. It’s not too late to chip in to your state party or the DSCC – they’re probably done buying ads, but we should assume they’re going to need money for recounts and lawsuits.

This is it. Crunch time. We can do this. Let’s go.

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pocochina
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supreme dysfunction

A lot of the politics around the Supreme Court has a kind of soft-focus, sepia-toned Before Times deceptiveness about it. The obfuscation is as thick and persistent as it is because the situation is extremely simple. Several decades ago, Republicans realized they could not win fair and square, so they put a lot of institutional focus and an obscene amount of money into rigging the courts. Cheating is the secret sauce. I realize that’s not a satisfying explanation for years of political dysfunction, but it is what it is.

And yet here we are, six weeks from Election Day, facing the prospect of a Trump-brand replacement for the irreplaceable Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

What you need to do is keep your head for the next few weeks. If that means putting this out of your mind as soon as possible, fine. All you need to know is that anyone this criminal would nominate to the court will be a disaster and anyone who would accept a nomination under these circumstances is wildly unfit to judge a dog and pony show. Republicans really did tell loud and insulting lies all throughout 2016 about why they wouldn’t confirm the replacement for a Supreme Court justice who passed away nearly a year before an election, and they really are out here now mocking the idea that anyone might have had to pretend to believe them then. They will probably succeed in pushing through a sentient garbage fire before the election, but we have to try to make it hurt. All you need to do is call your senators and tell them to honor Justice Ginsburg’s wish by refusing to confirm anyone Trump nominates. Either you’ll hear that they’re trying to do the right thing, which might make you feel better, or you’ll get an opportunity to call a Republican a fascist pig, which always makes me feel better.

If you are going to be following this farce, out of interest or because you can’t block it out, let me help you prepare for some of the bullshit that’s coming at you.

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pocochina

Shout-out to anyone who followed me for something other than an endless banshee howl of “I FUCKING HATE THESE PEOPLE.”

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if the GOP could win for real, they would do a lot less cheating

Something you have to understand about recent American history is that the Republican party lost its shit in the 1960s. There are always plenty of reasons for decades-long historical trends, but arguably the core one is that Lyndon Johnson’s administration made a bunch of human rights advances known collectively as the Great Society, the cornerstone of which was a sincere and substantive effort to address the unfinished business of Reconstruction with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

Racist white people who didn’t want to share democracy with everyone else became reliable Republican voters, but they’re nowhere near enough to win an election on their own. Republicans realized that their ideology is a miserable death cult that can’t win a fair fight. They could have gotten better ideas, but instead, they started sabotaging democracy.

I am not here to overwhelm you with a list of all the American right wing’s assaults on democracy. But there is a relatively narrow subset which forms a pattern that has become increasingly urgent: times Republicans have abused, usurped, or radically and unilaterally bastardized the power of American government in order to limit voters’ ability to hold them accountable in free and fair elections.

Because it only includes events backed up by reliable and freely available sources, it necessarily only includes the times times they were ham-fisted or sloppy enough to get caught. It has over two dozen entries and is almost certainly incomplete.

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pocochina

it’s so easy to forget how many reasons there are to fucking hate these people

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this is what i get for watching the news

i keep hearing about this ~democratic base~ that needs to be ~~motivated in november and like

that is just next-level magical thinking

what marginally democratically-inclined, or even persuadable, voter is not feeling motivated right now

what kind of GOD DAMN SOCIOPATH might lift a finger, LITERALLY, A FINGER, to make this PLAGUE-INFESTED KLAN RALLY stop, but ONLY if they’re INSPIRED

and what is the secret sauce here that’s going to pry the GOD DAMN SOCIOPATH demographic away from the GOD DAMN SOCIOPATH IN CHIEF

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the advisor’s book, the fixer’s confession, and the lawyer’s firing

The Traitor-in-Chief was hoping we’d talk about the racist incitement he tried to unleash at his Nuremberg Rally in Tulsa. This was, of course, dangerous and evil despite its pathetic failure, so instead of rewarding him for it, let’s go over this weekend’s reminders of his authoritarian escalations, his gluttonous corruption, and the glaring illegitimacy he is failing to hide.

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pocochina

a “Ben is Glory” hex on the political press would explain A LOT

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THEY KEEP DOING THIS BECAUSE THEY LIKE IT

the Republican incumbent in 1984:

Is he “running things”? Is he “a full-time President”? That such questions are being asked suggests there are some big pieces still missing in the Reagan puzzle. By the fourth year of a Presidency we are supposed to be examining the quality of an incumbent’s performance, not whether he shows up for work.
What tends to be forgotten—what has never been fully recognized—is that Ronald Reagan earned his greatest fame not on the movie screen but on the television tube. People got to know Ronald Reagan, the man, not at their neighborhood theaters but in their own living rooms. By the millions they met him not as an actor but as something subtly but profoundly different—as a television personality. Rather than see him playing someone else, they grew used to him in a far more intimate role, that of himself: your host, Ronald Reagan.
Each week, as he schmoozes with us over the airwaves, he purrs the same message: they are the ones responsible. No matter what is ailing the country at the time, those who tune in at 12:05 P.M. Eastern Standard Time hear the same off-stage “they” being called on the carpet. Each Saturday that Iowa trained radio voice comes to us bristling with complaints about government—that dread purveyor of deficits, crime, irreligion in schools, and other evils. Listening to him, it is easy to forget that this Paul Harvey-on-thePotomac is in real life the head of the federal Administration.
It was from this ambiguous position that he described the shabby treatment given his good friend Jim Watt. Free to ignore the immediate cause of Watt’s departure, the famous reference to “a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple,” our host rounded up the usual suspects—the media, the far-out environmentalists—and bemoaned the injustice done his friend. Tuning in, one would never have guessed that this indignant but apparently uninvolved commentator was actually the same man who had quite briskly accepted Watt’s resignation.
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