Here’s the thing. All of that’s for show.

Part of the problem is that the attacker generally…well…attacks first. By the time the snipers and drones even realize something’s going on, people are already dead and scrambling and the damage has been done.

If a lone-wolf attacker, especially one smart enough to keep his big mouth shut and not look for “how to make big bomb” on his phone, wants to attack, there is absolutely no way to stop them. None. Checkpoints are really just choke points where a whole bunch of people are standing there in a nice, little easy-to-attack group waiting to go to the next checkpoint. Their mission was successful and the damage they inflicted was done before you even realized what was going on . You may be able to pick him off before he does more damage (assuming he didn’t just kill himself in the blast), but the victims are still dead and the message has still been sent.

The ironic part about all of those soldiers and the razor wire and the guns and snipers and stuff is probably having the exact chilling effect that they were trying to avoid in the first place. I don’t care who’s there to protect me from whom. It becomes a question of “You’re going to protect me from them? Well who’s going to protect me from you?” Two people with big guns fighting over supposedly protecting little ol’ me who wants none of it is a classic case of two wolves and a sheep debating what to have for dinner.

Unfortunately for them, you can’t make it legal retroactively by changing your story.

gestures broadly at Trump’s entire presidency

Uh…wanna bet?

The poles. Really. I mean, I guess there are a few US citizens in those research labs in Antartica, but I hardly doubt there’d be enough to make it worth the effort…

Saying he lost to a black woman still gives off an incorrect implication that she’s somehow beneath him.

He’s a fragile pussy bitch and if he loses it’s because he’s a fragile pussy bitch and he’ll know that everybody thinks of him as a fragile pussy bitch except for the people he pays to tell him he isn’t a fragile pussy bitch.

And remember. We all know the truth about ourselves. That little voice deep, deep down inside that you can’t ignore forever. And while he will never, ever, ever admit it publicly, I take solace knowing that he goes to bed every night with that voice telling him that he’s a fragile pussy bitch who paid for a trophy wife and still can’t get any. Because he’s a fragile pussy bitch.

There’s zero chance this would win. It would effectively bring an end to a free and independent pre…oh…

But even if he does win, there’s no way the Supreme Court would upho…oh…

I guess we can throw “free press” on the growing pile of things in the Constitution that the courts write off as “unenforceable”.

Remember when the Constitution was a sacred document of the rights of the People instead of just a list of ideas that can be ignored at will when they become inconvenient? Pepprige farm remembers.

Washington Post: Refuses to endorse a candidate in order to appease Trump.

Also Washington Post: Gets sued anyway for not appeasing Trump enough.

How’s that non-endorsement working out for you, Bezos?

Too bad the MAGA crowd considers this a checklist of promises kept.

People haven’t learned yet. Everybody knows Trump’s lies. His racism. His misogyny. His crimes. There is literally nobody in the country left to convince one way or the other. He is held to a completely different standard by literally everybody up to and including the Supreme Court. He commits acts on the daily that would end anyone else’s political career several times over. But people just. don’t. care. And attempting to do so at this point is literally trying to play chess with a pigeon. They’re just going to knock all the pieces over, shit on the board, strut around like they won, and then fly away the minute you so much as flinch at them.

There are exactly three types of people in this country:

• People who know about Trump’s lies, crimes, and bigotry and have been shouting it from the rooftops for years now.
• People who know about Trump’s lies, crimes, and bigotry, or at least heard from other people who have been shouting about it from the rooftops, and are saying “Look, we know about that stuff. We don’t care. We want it that way.”
• People who know about Trump’s lies, crimes, and bigotry and are just saying they’re “undecided” because they either don’t like talking politics with friends and family, or just want whatever idiot is pestering them about it to go the fuck away.

It’s nice to have these lists all in once place for convenience. But at this point, nobody’s convincing anybody of anything.

That’s only for the plebians not named Trump.

that it was a R stealing R test ballots,

For clarification, he and a number of other voters were pre-selected to test the functionality of the ballots and voting machines to ensure no glitches happen on November 5. And while they were not the final draft of the ballots that were actually used, they were legitimate ballots by actual voters who voted early, and those ballots were just as valid as the final drafts.

So yeah, the guy stole 3 votes.

I commend the effort and the long post to explain yourself, but it’s ultimately conjecture. None of the battleground states will go “decisively” to any of the candidates.

I guess we’ll see in a week. But I have trouble believing that a state that has voted deep red for over 3 decades except for the cases where the GOP has put up a literal pedophile and a football player with advanced dementia is suddenly going to vote for a black female democrat. I just don’t see it. And keep in mind. The pedo and dementia patient almost won. I’d be very surprised if the split is anything less than a 55/45 split in Trump’s favor.

Similar for NC. A GOP supermajority in the state legislature, a MAGA suck-up in Graham for a senator in a seat that’s very safe for him. Yeah, they’ve got a Democrat governor, but Massachusetts has voted almost exclusively Republican governors for over 30 years now (With the exception of the current governor and one former governor). And they are as deep blue as you could possibly get, so the choice of governor really doesn’t make much of a difference. Their overall voting is very deep red, and I expect that to be reflected in the election.

And for the record, I’d love nothing more to be completely wrong on both of them. But I am also acknowledging the reality of the situation and am not going to hold my breath in anticipation.

Because the Republicans put up a pedophile and a football player with CTE. And they still almost won.

A few things to keep in mind.

• Georgia is a battleground state.
• When the GOP isn’t putting up literal pedophiles and football players with lots of CTE and no political experience, Georgia tends to vote pretty deep red. At least, deep enough where they’re normally considered safe Republican.
• Georgia is home to Margorie Taylor Greene, who holds a very safe seat in Georgia despite being absolutely batshit crazy.
• The current mail-in counts skew noticeably towards women, who currently are nationally favoring Trump by about 3 points.
• The Hispanic population of Georgia has also grown by several thousand people in the past two years, and Trump has managed to erase the lead among Hispanic voters that Democrats normally rely on.

The fact that mail-in voting has spiked so heavily in Georgia may not be the saving grace Democrats think it is.

Here’s the way I look at it.

I don’t consider North Carolina and Georgia battleground states. Those are probably going to go pretty decisively to Trump. There’s a lot of fuckery going around in Arizona which gets me to believe that Arizona will go to Trump as well. I think Nevada will ultimately be irrelevant. Harris needs to pick up Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and either Michigan or flip Arizona to win. I think that’s her only path.

• I believe Wisconsin and Michigan will go to Democrats
• Trump absolutely will challenge Pennsylvania if he doesn’t win. And with the recent headlines, it’s not the desperate grasping at straws that Trump was doing in 2020. At least in the forum of public opinion, he’ll have a case. He also knows that the court system has historically largely deferred to Trump, either out of party loyalty or fear of retribution, and that the Supreme Court has all but announced they’re ready to anoint him as king, and in the case of a contested election, rules set forth by the Constitution heavily favor Trump.

This election is not going to be pretty. Remember that we have nearly 50% of the voting public who are seeing Trump’s rise to facist power and are actively saying “Yes, we know he’s a bigoted facist. We want it that way.” And they’ve already proven that if they can’t get there legitimately, they will resort to cheating. And if that doesn’t work, they’ll just threaten violence until a judge rules in Trump’s favor out of fear for his life.

Never underestimate the appeal of a strongman dictator who promises that he’s willing to solve all of your problems by going after “them”. That is a very strong motivator for a lot of people.

easiest way to fix this would be to stop making voting a state by state thing

That would require several changes to the Constitution, which is not going to happen any time soon.

Why would anyone have to sign up to Truth Social to see what he’s posted? Wouldn’t a single bot reposting it elsewhere do the job?

For the same reasons anyone signs up for Twitter, or Facebook, or Reddit, or Lemmy. Just to be a part of it. Or maybe to curry favor with Trump. Or because their job requires it if they’re a reporter. Or because they think they’ll somehow profit off it. Or because they’re cult members. Any number of reasons. Whatever the reason, my main point is that if Trump wins the Presidency, Trump Social becomes the de-facto social media arm of the most powerful and influential nation on Earth, which automatically means it goes from an also-ran Twitter knock-off to one of the world’s most important social media network. This alone absolutely will drive up user counts, and therefore ad revenue, and therefore Trump’s profits.

It’s corrupt as all hell and he’ll face…oh, wait…never mind. It’s legal now.

I’m pretty sure Musk is on board to hand him back the POTUS Twitter handle and say any censorship or moderation would be unconstitutional and unpatriotic. Regardless of the result, probably. He will not care if Truth Social tanks if he’s got that.

I will bet all my money that if Trump wins the election, Twitter and Trump Social will merge, it will be bought out in some shady and highly illegal deal where the government grossly overpays for both of them and they both walk away making billions, while Trump declares it an official government act and avoids prosecution.

Can confirm. I became a lay-z-boy recliner just to be offended.

This is and always has been nothing more than a glorified Las Vegas bet on whether or not Trump wins the election. People who think Trump is going to win are trying to get in on as close to the ground floor as possible.

If Trump loses, the investors lose all their money. Trump’s stock price tanks and his dime store social media platform becomes even more obscure and worthless.

If Trump wins, Truth Social essentially becomes the official social media platform of the President of the United States. Regardless of what you think of Trump, his platform, or anything else, this will drive people to the site in droves. It will force people to pay attention even if they don’t want to, because at the end of the day, he’ll still be President and that’s where all official information will be disseminated. It will bring in advertising revenue and the people who bought the stock previously will make absolute bank.

It’s literally the equivalent of taking your entire life savings to the Roulette table and putting it all on #27. You’re probably going to lose everything, but if you win, you’re going to be set for life. That’s what Trump’s investors are doing. Except their odds are much, much better.

Russian propaganda mills actually hire B movie writers

Have you ever seen a film from one of these countries? Russia, North Korea, etc? Those writers only hope to one day aspire to be at the level of B movies. I’ve seen porn with better plots.

Mail in ballots are just as easily placed in any blue post office box or your own mailbox which is impossible for would be destructors/interceptors to know when your ballot is in the mail.

Republicans can get bent.

They’ll just start blowing up the mailboxes, which would also serve the purpose of sowing distrust and unreliability in our postal system.

Can we stop putting up articles stuck behind paywalls please?

“Did __________ pull punches to appease Trump?”

The blank can be filled in with the following:

• The LA Times
• Every other media outlet for the past 10 years
• The entire Republican Party
• Politicians in general
• Our entire legal system

Trump’s rise to power solely rests on the fact that everybody continues to play Trump’s games by Trump’s rules and wondering why they keep losing. -