Time is running out! The Electoral College is scheduled to vote on Monday. Please add your voice to those demanding a delay in the vote so the electors can be fully briefed on Russia’s interference in our election, interference which arguably cost Hillary Clinton an electoral college victory.
There are a number of different petitions to sign on Avazz, and MoveOn.org to demand that the electors be given a briefing before they vote on Monday or that the vote be delayed until such a briefing can be arranged.
Avazz has a petition demanding that electors get a briefing before they vote.
MoveOn.org has one demanding that the government declassify all evidence of Russian interference and host intelligence briefing for electors before Electoral College votes on December 19. There are a number of related petitions there as well.
Post information about these petitions and the issue in general on Facebook and Twitter and other social media. Post some of the memes I’ve made on the subject or make your own.
At this point, these petitions may be something of a futile endeavor, as the CIA has reportedly said that there will be no briefing, but I think it’s still worth it to stand up and say something about this travesty.
If the vote isn’t delayed, consider joining one of the candlelight vigils that will be held in all 50 state capitals tomorrow night, intended to support those electors who do what’s right and vote against Trump. You can also support this campaign by taking a photo of yourself with a candle and posting it to social media.
For more information on the vigils, see here.
As I see it, there are three main reasons why the electors should vote against Trump.
He lost the popular vote by more than three million votes, demonstrating just how screwy it is that we decide our elections not based on who gets the most votes but on a convoluted system that essentially makes the votes of white rural voters worth more than those of people of color. Electors, protest this absurdity by voting against Trump!
The Russian hacks. Do we really want the outcomes of our elections to be determined by dirty tricks engineered and overseen by Vladimir Putin? Do we want to have a president who is beholden to the autocratic Russian leader?
Trump has made clear that he intends to oversee a kleptocracy designed to benefit himself and his friends. He has refused to take even the most basic steps to disconnect himself financially from his businesses. He will be violating the laws, and the constitution, from the moment he takes office.
Any of these things would be enough to render Trump an illegitimate president. But all three? Voting against Trump is not just an option for the electors. It’s their duty to their country.
Six months from now, none of us want to wake up to this:
Here’s another version of the puppet graphic:
And a blank one if you want to add your own words:
I’m going to be making a lot more of these little propaganda posters in the next few days and weeks. Please spread them around! And make some of your own!
Every year or so I end up rereading Warren Ellis’ “Transmetropolitan” and it never stops being both both an awesome comic and relevant somehow. Not to mention the SF aspects mostly age ridiculously well.
I felt it happened after the September 11th attacks. The political discourse, especially under the Bush Administration, became very Us vs. Them, and since the GOP was in charge during 9/11, they identified America as the GOP very strongly and admonished the Democrats as being with Them (i.e. terrorists) if they weren’t with Us (GOP). It just got worse when President Obama was elected, being the perfect representation of the Other to scare their base into a racist, xenophobic froth that culminated in the Tea Party movement, and now Trump.
Podkayne,
Republicans have always been proven affirmative action for themselves. It’s why they get so upset when people talk about privilege. They don’t want to be caught in their hypocrisy so they have to pretend otherwise.
I’d start with the pivot point being Newt Gingrich and work forwards(?) and outwards from there for the beginning/ development of pure bloody-minded intransigence as a general strategy.
I think the seeds of that divide were planted during the early 1980s under Reagan. Reagan threw out nearly everything Carter accomplished and implied that the Democrats were trying to drag the country in the wrong direction. The Republicans also largely seized control of the language of political discourse. Even so, they didn’t start becoming truly uncooperative and obstructive until the mid-1990s under Clinton. It was a very gradual shift which took over a decade.
But if I were to blame just one person for all that, it wouldn’t be Reagan, but Rush Limbaugh. He was essentially a popular conservative “shock jock” who became an Alex Jones type figure, just less extreme, if only because few people would have bought into Jones back in the ’80s. He used his vast audience to normalize the direction the Republicans were heading in the eyes of the general public, while demonizing the Democrats for not following them.
…That being said, I wouldn’t really blame *just* Limbaugh, as I could name several other players who did their part to change the game. That’s just of I had to pick only one person for some reason.
“Anti-Putin” isn’t the same thing as “anti-Russian,” just as “Anti-patriarchy” isn’t the same thing as “Anti-male” and “Anti-racism” isn’t the same thing as “Anti-white.”
This.
Otherwise, there’s a hell of a lot of anti-Russian Russians. Which, incidentally, is what Putin accuses them of being.
ETA : Thanks for the answers to my question. Looking into it right now, and it’s starting to make sense.
Our current situation, in which an extremist is poised to become the president of the USA, probably had many starting points. Other commenters have named several of them.
I’m gonna say that reality television did a lot to normalize social Darwinism. And Trump is (in part) a product of reality TV.
@sinkable john & sfhc
It is very nice to make that comparison but i cannot say that i agree. Specially when you have over excited journalists dusting off the old stereotypes. I am the last person to defend putin and this is kot what i am doing. But also i have seen mainly amoung russians and expat russians (who have taken interesy in this anyway) that they are generally holding the same opinion as me. Sceptical and concerned about xenophobia in US and UK media and public opinion.
In my experience there is a habit to join russia and putin as one and the same and a big lack of empathy for ordianry russians. I remember one article in Guardian or something making light of sanctions and joking about no more French cheese in Russia. My friend in Novorossiysk has not worked for half a year (he is surveyor for building contractors) because of sanctions.
But this is now off topic. But to be clear what i meant. I feel no, most opions i have seen from russain and russian expat side are sceptical and concerned. And no – anti russian and anti putin can be considered connected as long as putin is veiwd as russia.
I heard this very thing on the bridge this night ‘we are taking food for putin’. As a joke from Captain to Pilot. This is the very common and dangerous attitude i see and it needs to change, before statement like yours can be considered true.
The evangelicals entering the political arena didn’t help matters any, either, from what I’ve seen. With G.W. Bush, they opened the door to more religion in politics than has been seen for decades and it just snowballed from there. They’re able to promote anti-woman, anti-minority agendas in the guise of religious freedom. And since it’s worked very well — hundreds of restrictive laws on abortion passed in the 2010s alone and many attempts at religious freedom laws allowing discrimination against LGBT+ people — they’ve gotten very bold with their political demands restricting the freedoms of others in the name of their religion.
I’m still waiting for any evidence that Russia had any effect. They eroded the Popular vote for Clinton so her lead has wasted away to a mere 2.8 million votes. Getting the Red States to go for Trump would be as tough as selling vodka in Yakutsk in the dead of winter. So that leaves the three states that most likely tipped the balance: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. How did those scheming commie rats convince Hillary not even to visit Wisconsin at all? Is it vaguely possible that 22,000 Wisconsinites were angered enough by the mockumentary “Making of a Murderer” to vote Trump?
One of the hallmarks of a crackpot conspiracy theory is a Rube Goldberg approach to achieving things that any rational person can achieve more simply. Given an electorate willing to believe Clinton is part of a child sex ring operating out of a pizzeria, why would anyone think hacked e-mails could make a difference? Who needs real e-mails? Make the suckers up on the fly. If Russia really wanted to influence the results, their best tactic would be to have hordes of trolls and sock puppets posting on social media.
For years I’ve posted on liberal sites trying to explain what the Tea Party was so angry about, and I got nonstop denial games. Now, since the election, it’s wall to wall denial games. It was externalities like globalization (and nothing to do with those jobs being destroyed by automation long ago). It was racism, religion and guns. The voters were idiots, they were wrong, we were right, screw them, who cares what they think anyway?
It’s not like there aren’t ten thousand right wing blogs out there explaining in excruciating detail what people were angry about. God forbid that anyone ask what liberals did to alienate Trump voters.
Something extremely significant is going on and few people really see it. It goes back to 1833, and a guy named Barron whose wharf was silted up by road work in Baltimore. He sued on the grounds that his property had been unjustly taken in violation of the Fifth Amendment. The Supreme Court ruled, in Barron v. Baltimore (1833) that the Bill of Rights limited only the Federal government. Ever wonder why there were so few Bill of Rights cases in the 19th century? That’s why. Barron v. Baltimore gets my vote as one of the most important (and awful) Supreme Court opinions that most people have never heard of.
It wasn’t until 1925 that the Supreme Court began to accept the argument that the 14th Amendment extended Bill of Rights protections to the local level. This doctrine, the Incorporation Doctrine, is another extremely important legal principle that most people have never heard of. If you’ve seen the movie “Loving,” you know it wasn’t until 1968 that the Supreme Court struck down bans on interracial marriage.
So until living memory, states and local governments could censor materials (“Banned in Boston”), ban meetings, permit the use of improper searches, allow segregation, ban homosexuality, ban abortion and ban interracial marriage. I recently saw a comment on gay marriage that said “fifty years ago, they were saying the same thing about interracial marriage.” And that completely misses the point. Lots of people never accepted interracial marriage. They kept a low profile and kept silent. That’s why Political Correctness is bad – not because it inconveniences the far right, but because nobody else can hear them or have any idea how numerous they are.
Well, now we know. Until a few decades ago, the alt-right had almost complete control of social policy at the state and local level. And they want it back.
Was wondering if anyone would take my concerns seriously. Then steven duch comes and calls russians ‘scheming commie rats’ and jokes about vodka in Якутск-_- then i see you like Tea Party and talk about ‘liberal websites’. Huh. Obvious troll is obvious
My pick would be Newt Gingrich. But yes, there are a lot of players one could name. Off the top of my head: Rush Limbaugh, Billy Graham, Francis Schaeffer, James Dobson, Phyllis Schlafly, Bill O’Reilly, Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, Barry Goldwater, Lewis Powell, Richard Nixon, Paul Weyrich, Charles and David Koch, Richard Mellon Scaife, Edith Efron, Leo Strauss, […] and John Wilkes Booth.
Booth quite possibly killed Reconstruction before it even properly began, and might thereby have enabled the cultural triumph of the South. Which, I think, continues to this day, despite the victories the Civil Rights Movement managed to achieve.
@Valentine
You’re right about the way it’s being presented. Some days I’m wondering if the Cold War’s actually over yet.
@Steven Dutch
… huh.
Incidentally, Putin does exactly that.
Yeah, ’cause “we the people” are angry about : abortion & birth control, darker-skinned immigrants, darker-skinned non-immigrants, non cishet people having access to public bathrooms and/or marriage, the Affordable Care Act, Barack HUSSEIN Obama takin’ away our guns to impose Sharia Law, Creationism not being taken seriously enough for schools to teach it as science (this one always cracks me up), dirty hippy Injuns who don’t want oil in their drinking water while the white, well off residents of the nearby city categorically refused that same pipeline as well, and I could go on like this forever, but I think you get the idea. Yeah, all of that is definitely what “we the people” are so angry about.
I’ll pretend to ignore that you also said something in the lines of “the Tea Party has a point” because that is way more than I can adress in the morning like this.
@Steven Dutch
Are you tired of black people walking around unmolested like they own the place? Of homosexuals telling everybody what to do? Of Muslims running the show? Of women always getting their way? I’m so sorry.
Oh, gross. I came in here to be sad about how today’s that day that’s been looming off in the future since 11/8, and I see someone’s cat left a giant pile of vomit in the middle of the thread. Bad cat!
I disagree with every “convservative” idea I can think, and the realization that Trump is the president makes me feel physically ill; however I think the slogan “Not my President” is a part of the problem. People often refuse to believe things that are inconsistent with their understanding of the world. When people refuse the believe something that happens to be true that obviously leads to problems.
David Futrelle spends an extreme amount of time studying the alt-right (that is, the manosphere, anti-progressive, etc). They championed “The Donald” and so it is natural to think of Donald Trump as the Alt-Right candidate; but that is just part of the story. Admitting that yes, Donald Trump is my president doesn’t prove those guys right; (though it does prove that Demogoguery still works unfortunately).
“Not my President” Straw Man Detected! Film at 11!
Yes, but most of those blogs sound as though the writers have been mixing absinthe with paint thinner.