Lurker > Antifar

The AJC mapped Georgias 7 million registered voters and compared how distance to their local precincts increased or decreased from 2012 to 2018. During that time, county election officials shut down 8% of Georgias polling places and relocated nearly 40% of the states precincts.

Most of the precinct closures and relocations occurred after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 ended federal oversight of local election decisions under the Voting Rights Act.

The AJCs analysis, vetted by two nonpartisan statistics experts, showed a clear link between turnout and reduced voting access. The farther voters live from their precincts, the less likely they are to cast a ballot.

Precinct closures and longer distances likely prevented an estimated 54,000 to 85,000 voters from casting ballots on Election Day last year, according to the AJCs findings.

People gotta stop freaking out over nothing and people need to stop instantly thinking of black people when they see a monkey. Those people are just as fucked as the racist or racist people.

topic about 'x'

where 'x' = (insert topic of your choice here) prompts backlash in 2019.... evil sensitive snowflakes from the left AND right melt before the useless banter that is current year political discourse

Last I heard he was. He was breaking tradition of former Presidents not going back into politics.

An Army Facebook post about the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge sparked fierce pushback on Monday over its display of a Nazi war criminal.

The post appeared on the verified Facebook page of the XVIII Airborne Corps which fought in the monthlong battle between Allied and German forces in 1944 and featured a prominent photo of Joachim Peiper, a Nazi SS-Standartenfhrer, roughly equivalent to a colonel.

Peiper, who led thousands of men in Germany's last major offensive, was convicted of war crimes for a massacre of U.S. prisoners of war during the battle.

The post was followed by a description of Peiper's mission during the battle although it didn't mention his role in what became known as the Malmedy Massacre.

The post, its author explained, was the first in a series marking the battle's 75th anniversary.

https://twitter.com/USArmyPAO/status/1206725290992570368

Scrolling through his Facebook feed on Monday night, an Army public affairs officer based in Pennsylvania saw the same three pictures of Peiper.

The officer, Lt. Col. Brian Fickel, posted the screenshots to his personal Twitter page, adding that he was "dumbfounded by the decision to prominently display a Nazi on military social media on the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge."

Within hours, Fickel's post had received thousands of likes and hundreds of retweets. In comment threads, dozens of people echoed Fickel's criticism.

The public affairs unit at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, which is home to the Airborne Corps, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did the administrator of the Facebook page. After an NBC News reporter contacted the page, the photo of Peiper appeared to have been removed.

In an earlier comment thread, a moderator responded to criticism by saying Peiper had been featured because it was a technique used in "effective storytelling."

"Sometimes in movies, the movie will create a sense of tension by introducing a bad guy," the moderator wrote.

In a tweet, the Airborne Corps added that Peiper was a "terrible person" but an "effective combat leader."

"A teenager when Hitler come to power, Peiper joined the SS after serving as a member of the Hitler Youth," the corps said. "He rocketed through the ranks during the war, racking up medals, & promotions."

He has. He endorsed several Democrat candidates for Gubernatorial campaigns back in 2018 and they lost to the Donald Trump endorsed GOP Gubernatorial candidates.

I heard Step-Douche returned and there was some closure on Chloe and Max, what's that about

Bernie Sanders is sorry for your troubles, but thats not the reason hes asking you to talk about them which he is, everywhere he goes. He wants you to talk about your medical bill the one you cant pay. He wants you to talk about losing your house because you got sick. He wants you to talk about the payday loans you took out to keep your kid in school. About the six-figure student debt thats always on your mind. About living off credit cards, or losing your pension, or working multiple jobs for wages that wont be enough to support your family.

He would like you to talk about this publicly, in detail, and on camera. He will ask you to do this in front of reporters, or in a room full of strangers at one of his town halls. Of course, the Bernie Digital Team will be there they are always there taping your story on camera, or streaming it in real-time to his own mass broadcast system on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. On any given day, he is capable of reaching millions of people.

Who wants to share their story? hell say. Dont be embarrassed. Millions of people are in your boat.

He has, it turns out, built an entire presidential campaign around an open invitation to speak to talk plainly about the reality of life in this country to be loud so everyone can hear.

His suggestion, by asking you to speak up about your private anxieties, many of them financial, is that you and the millions of people in the proverbial audience will begin to see your struggles not as personal failings, but systemic ones. He is less interested in explicitly presenting solutions than naming the problem that we have millions of people in the richest country in the history of the world who are struggling every single day, which is a phrase he repeats daily, almost like an exhortation, as if to grab the American working class by its shoulders.

He doesnt deal in pity or reassurance. Yes, hell give hugs one arm, from the side, other hand still clutching the mic. But mostly hell just listen and nod, gaze lowered. Or hell shake his head at the crowd, like can you believe this? And then, from the gut, a clipped scoff, like of course you can believe it. Thats the point. He has heard your story before, because its all part of the same story: a broken system, driven by profit and greed, built to reinforce the notion that if youre bright enough, if you work hard enough, then you can travel the path to the middle class. And if you dont make it therewell, maybe youre the problem. And who wants to talk about that?

He believes his presidential campaign can, he says, help people feel less alone.
He is trying to change the way people interact with private hardship in this country, which is to say, silently and with self-loathing. He is trying, in as literal a sense as you could imagine, to excise shame and guilt from the American people. These are not words you hear often in politics, but in interviews this year with the candidate, his wife, and his top advisers, they are central to his strategy to win. He is imagining a presidential campaign that brings people out of alienation and into the political process simply by presenting stories where you might recognize some of your own struggles. He is imagining a voter, he says, who thinks, I thought it was just me who was struggling to put food on the table. I thought I was the only person. I thought it was all my fault. You mean to say there are millions of people?
He still has his rallies, but its a different campaign, and we do things differently, he says. I can give the greatest speech in the history of the world, but it will not have the significance and the impact that the real-life experience of ordinary Americans will have. At many of his events, the antiseptic macro focus of the oligarchy speech the anonymous actors on Wall Street, the greed of the American corporation, the rigged system has been replaced by the most intimate details of someones life. The outrage in his voice, a booming rasp amplified across three tiers of an NBA-size venue, is softer now. The arena itself has morphed into a digital platform for one voters story.

Show them, he says. Show them, not me.

We understand presidential campaigns, in their most basic form, as a conversation between a candidate and the American people. The conversation is happening all the time, in person and online, directly, indirectly, at every possible scale: Its a handshake, a speech, a television ad, a sponsored post on Facebook. Its a policy rollout. Its the signage at a rally, the way an American flag is steamed and hung just so on a stage. Every dollar of every campaign is spent on shaping or beautifying or amplifying some message from the candidate. Bernies first presidential bid, in a sense, was the unprocessed, stripped-down version of that conversation: It was the speech. In terms of the mechanics of the thing, as he put it in late 2016, he wasnt reinventing the wheel.

Four years later, he is attempting to run a presidential campaign that facilitates an entirely different conversation one between people like Pamela and the American people. The stories he collects and broadcasts across the internet arent just voter testimonials produced to validate the campaign or its policies theyre aimed, in Bernies mind, at people validating one another.

After 50 years, this is an unlikely place for the political revolution to land. Its more human. More empathetic. More personal than what youd expect from a man whos willingly played along with his persona as a perma-outsider and, as he put it in 2015, grumpy old guy.

Theres this idea that Bernie Sanders is a man of the people who doesnt like people just issues. Thats not exactly right, though the precise balance between the two can be difficult to pin down. Policy, policy, policy, says his wife, Jane, who is a strategic partner on her husbands campaign. Fight, fight, fight which is true, but hes also about people.
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Everyone is sensitive about how to describe this. Theres been a lot of experimentation with this, one of his advisers will start to explain before doubling back to say that, actually, I think experimentation is the wrong word. Theres no precedent for it. Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren often invite you to consider your story through the lens of their own. Bill Clinton said I feel your pain, but he never asked people to reorient the way they feel about their own pain.

Bernie says he is trying to redefine our value system. Jane talks about breaking down decades of societal muscle memory: It seems to be the American way, she says. That we all think its our fault instead of recognizing there is a system that is making

The votes of the smaller states carrying more influence than a populous one, is laughably ironic when you consider how much campaigning is actually done in those areas.

Just remember that California and Texas essentially will make all elective decisions for our country.

Because they can game the numbers. Like go for super majority in certain places and completely ignore large portions of the country that have few people but are still important to the country.

How big of a baby do you have to be to whine about changing rules that have been around forever just because your preferred candidate didn't win LOL

Also fun fact: Trump would've still won without the EC. He would've shifted his campaign tactics to target the important voter areas to get majority votes. The results would've been different but the outcome the same.

I think it's an easier system to manipulate than the EC

States with smaller populations, such as N.Dakota, only get three votes. If anything, they're way under represented compared to California, which has 55 votes.

If someone can explain to me how abolishing the electoral college won't just end up with only New York, Florida, Texas, and California mattering in a presidential election

3. The electoral college gives states electoral votes based on how many house members they have, plus two for your Senators. They trust states to elect representatives that would look out for their interest best, so that each state is fairly represented in the election process. However, this system still has its own issues, such as the denser states controlling the most votes (which would also be a problem in a popular vote system).

More people live in urban areas than rural

Do you honestly think that any politician would focus on campaigning in places like North Dakota or Rhode Island, when they'd have much bigger fish to fry in New York and California? They wouldn't.

This article is from 2016, and given the ever growing amount of immigrants entering the country (with sanctuary states like California being their most popular destination), there's a pretty good chance those 9 states will soon out vote the other forty-one.

Does a candidate really represent the people, if he or she only focused on half the population? Of course not, they would only represent those people, and place more attention on their problems.

Another thing people should consider, is when the pendulum inevitably swings the other way, and a majority of the population consistently votes Republican for the next few years or whatever, and we end with a full Republican government.

Now it doesnt because candidates have to campaign nationwide.

On Wednesday night at Jubilee Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a group sits around the same sort of rickety conference table youd find in churches all over the town, the state, the country. In the cabinets behind them, there are old Baptist tracts and stacks of New Testaments with covers declaring GOOD NEWS AMERICA, GOD LOVES YOU. But no ones reading Galatians tonight. Theyre reading Karl Marx.

Lets go around and introduce ourselves, says Joe Stapleton, the high school English teacher leading the class. Names, pronouns, how youre feeling.

Everyone opens their handouts a section of Marxs Capital, with handy summaries and annotations. They work slowly through the idea of use value versus exchange value and commodity fetishism. Its most peoples first time with the material, and its admittedly a slog. At one point, after a particularly theoretical passage, someone exclaimed, What the hell did I just read?

But Stapleton is a clear and patient teacher. On deskilling, he explains: It makes it so that any worker can be plugged into any job, so that if you want to unionize, they can say, Oh, fuck off. On the way we talk about the economy, as if it were a natural force, he elaborates: People make it sound like its some monster living in the woods that you have to make sacrifices to, but the economy is just us. How am I doing? Thats how the economy is really doing.

When he says that the way capital works in our lives is outside our individual control, but not our collective control, theres a soft shout from across the room: Someone should say an amen!

The room explodes in laughter, but its a reminder: This class all comes back to church. At various points, John Thornton Jr., one of the co-pastors of Jubilee, asks, So why is this important to us, as Christians?

The intro to the Marx reading packet cheekily called Financial Literacy Class makes it explicit. At Jubilee, we know our Christian faith has something to say about our whole lives, it reads. God cares about our race, gender, sexuality and class. God wants us to live full lives with each other, to provide for one another and to struggle together, bearing one anothers burdens. Because our lives depend so heavily on money and our money comes from our jobs, we think we should have a good understanding of how our economy works and who it works for.

Thats one of several straightforward ideas at the heart of Jubilee, a church guided by the overarching premise that if God does, indeed, care about our daily lives, then he also cares about the ways that we currently suffer in them. And the way so many of us suffer has to do with money, and debt, and all sorts of intersecting forms of oppression. To ignore these things is to abdicate the churchs role in society and cede its place in daily life. The leaders of Jubilee Thornton and his two co-pastors, Heather Folliard and Kevin Georgas are determined not to let that happen.

A year ago, the congregation, then called Ephesus Baptist, had dwindled from a solid membership of several hundred people in the 90s down to just twelve regular attendees, the youngest of whom was in his fifties. The church had half a million in savings, but its demise seemed imminent. Then Georgas, the pastor at the time, had a wild idea: What if the church started over entirely and used the savings to help repay the debts of its members and others in the community in need?

This September, Ephesus was reborn as Jubilee Baptist: a quasi-socialist, anti-burnout, anti-racist, LGBTQ-affirming church focused on debt forgiveness and worker solidarity. When I spent a week at Jubilee this October, it felt vital, and alive, in a way I have not experienced in over three decades of attending church. It doesnt feel like a social justice club or particularly cool in any way. It just feels like a place where people genuinely care about other people which, in the current landscape of American Christianity, can feel incredibly radical.
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Most people, Jubilee leaders believe, dont actually want the best praise music, or a pastor who tells them who they can or cant love, or a book that tells them how God wants them to be rich. They want a church that believes that the way things are, especially in terms of oppression financial, racial, and otherwise doesnt have to be the way things will continue to be. That life can, and should, be dramatically different. And that the church should have a central role in making that happen.

Jubilee is not about changing the world in the were gonna win the war on Christmas, soldiers-in-the-culture-war sort of way, with its focus on rooting out any element of society that could be considered secular, from Harry Potter to queer people. Nor in the were gonna collect change for overseas missions or volunteer once a month at a soup kitchen sort of way. Not even in an Im going to try to be a kinder person sort of way. Jubilee believes that truly following Jesuss teachings, especially in the contemporary, capitalist world, requires a radical reconsideration of wealth and work and power. It means working toward revolution: political, economic, and social.

All the sermons Id heard before were always so inward-looking, like, talk to Jesus all the time and youll get rich and prosper. But Jubilee addressed the precarious position were all in the general feeling that were all fucked, Josh Fugate, an early church member, told me. I mean, I got laid off, Im in debt. What happens if I get sick? Most of my problems arent actually spiritual. Jubilee is fixated on working people."
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One of the primary ways that Jubilee would be different, and attempt to remake the world, would be its focus on debt forgiveness. Debt Liberation Grants would be allocated once a month to a member of the church, while the Jubilee Fund would be directed toward lifting two to four people out of poverty in a given year. For the last three months, the fund has been directed toward a 37-year-old woman who cares for five children while working two jobs and whose landlord has recently started eviction proceedings. A church member referred her to Jubilee, and the cooperative council, which controls the fund, committed to paying three months of her rent and bills, and $400 a month for groceries for three months afterward.

We want to respect the fact that she doesnt owe us anything, Thornton told me. Not showing up to church, not her story or her kids story. If anything, we owe her everything. We want to be respectful of her story and what we do with the Jubilee Fund in a way thats not exploitative.
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Thornton also drew up plans for mutual aid teams, where groups of four or five would work to pay off each others debt, round-robin style. First, a group would allocate extra money to one person with a high-interest debt, and pay it off entirely

Former Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina said she thinks it is "vital" that President Donald Trump be impeached, but stopped short of calling for his removal from office and did not rule out voting for him again in 2020.

The former Hewlett-Packard CEO told CNN on "Boss Files with Poppy Harlow" that she sees the President's conduct as impeachable and "destructive to the republic."

"I think it is vital that he be impeached," Fiorina said. But whether Trump should be removed from office, Fiorina said, "this close to an election, I don't know."

House Democrats last week unveiled the two articles of impeachment they prepared against Trump after a two-and-a-half month investigation into his pressure on Ukraine to investigate his 2020 political rival Joe Biden as well as conspiracy theories about foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election. The full House will vote on the articles this week.

In 2016, there was speculation Fiorina was under consideration for a Cabinet position in the Trump administration. She met with Trump in Trump Tower shortly after he was elected, and a senior transition official told CNN at the time that the two were meeting to discuss the Director of National Intelligence position. Fiorina told Harlow for "Boss Files" that no specific position was discussed during that meeting.

After dropping out of the race for the Republican nomination in 2016, Fiorina said she did vote for Trump in 2016, citing her disapproval of then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, but since then she has been "bitterly disappointed." But when asked whether she would vote for Trump in next year's presidential election, Fiorina did not rule out voting for him again.

"It depends who the Democrats put up," she said.
Fiorina condemned Trump's attacks on Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a decorated veteran who is the National Security Council's top Ukraine expert and testified before House impeachment investigators.

"Some of this conduct, like publicly berating a decorated war veteran who shows up in response to a lawfully issued subpoena of Congress, I think that conduct is not just unbecoming, I think it's destructive to our republic," Fiorina said.

Fiorina faced her own share of attacks from Trump during the 2016 Republican primary.
In a September 2015 Rolling Stone interview, Trump mocked Fiorina's looks and said, "Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?" Trump later said he was talking about her persona, not her appearance.

Fiorina responded the following week at a CNN debate, and said, "I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said.

Fiorina told Harlow on "Boss Files" that Trump has "undoubtedly done some of the right things," and praised him for his role in strengthening the economy. But, she said, "I do think that the systematic tearing down of people, institutions, political opponents, will have long-lasting damage if it goes on for much longer."

Fiorina told CNN she does not know whether she would run for president again. At the moment, she said she doesn't think that running as a Republican is something she has interest in.

She said the Republican Party "right now seems to be all about pledging fealty to Donald Trump no matter what. And I'm just not in that place."

Ohh gotcha. Do you know, how does the amount of missions from 1 to 2 compare?

It has a window on the side?

I enjoyed the first game.

But, the missions youre talking about, they sound like they are in the same locations in 2 as they were in 1. Or are you talking about 1?

Holy fuck this mission is intense

Carlson has distinguished himself from the rest of Foxs prime-time lineup in large part for his willingness to denounce Republicans. Hes probed the destruction wrought by vulture capitalism in small towns and called Trump generally incapable of getting things done. Hes praised Elizabeth Warrens economic policies as pure, old-fashioned economics that make obvious sense.

All of which could make Carlson singularly poised to rewrite conservatism, to cohere the populist tenor that continues to attract much of the electorate. And yet when we sat down for our interview, not half an hour after his standout segment on AEI, Carlson seemed to trade that appeal to nuance for something else. When I asked him how one could square segments such as the one Id just watched with his comments last year, for example, that immigrants make America dirtier, he looked appalled that I might wonder whether one take was more sincere than the other. I hate litter, he said. For 35 years now, he said, he has fished in the Potomac River, and it has gotten dirtier and dirtier and dirtier and dirtier. I go down there and that litter is left almost exclusively by immigrants, who Im sure are good people, but nobody in our country

Wait, I said, cutting him off, how do you know theyre

Because Im there, he said. I watch it.