Can You Imagine in Book Seven: Reconstruction 2020

Can you imagine believing that your faith is the ideal faith, that all people should follow it, that your version of God is the only correct path… and then literally attempting to force people through violence, fear, intimidation, and coercion to follow that religion??

Sorry. Wrote a whole big long piece and decided that, ultimately, fuck it.

There is no Good Faith anymore. And I don’t mean that religiously. I mean that in terms of “honesty or sincerity of intention.”

The world is full of wonderful and beautiful people of all different faiths, values, and backgrounds. I am impressed with and awed by people of ALL political leanings. But this must be said: If you are conservative and sing the praises of Trump, that he can do no wrong, and is the savior of this country? THAT is who you are. It overshadows EVERYTHING ELSE because by its very nature, it establishes a delusional, extremist, DANGEROUS rhetoric. Every Biden supporter I know says, “It’s not great, but he’ll do.” That’s the world. Accepting less than perfect. People who (for reasons FAR beyond my understanding) continue to pretend that Trump is some kind of Miracle?? Do you understand how such a batshit position consumes all the good about you?? How, the more you sound like a Cultist, the less the genuine good in you matters??

Even worse? I have (finally) found some who say “Trump has issues” but then they immediately turn those issues into positives.
“Trump doesn’t understand the world of politics” which is GOOD because fuck politicians. K… but do you know what three concepts “politics” stands for?? (1) Legal Knowledge; (2) Diplomatic Understanding; and (3) Mediation/Persuasive Ability. Now, if you read that and say “That’s not American Politics” you’re right… because we’ve gone and fucked it up, in part, by demanding our politicians lack one or more of the three stated concepts. But that is what politics is. Fucking it up and saying it’s broken isn’t a victory for you when you’re intentionally trying to keep fucking it up.
“Trump’s abrasiveness proved that the media lies and the Democrats are evil socialists!” Uhm, sweetie, that’s cute and all but a few things here… (1) The media distorts and misrepresents, that’s true. But you have to check facts and process against personal gain. For example, BBC and the NHK reporting COVID rates skyrocketing in the United States? That’s fact-based. They gain nothing monetarily by reporting those facts. As a counter point? Fox News intentionally not covering something of National Importance in order to have Tucker Carlson bash Vice President Biden for two hours? That’s such shitty ‘news media’ that it was actually determined in a court of law to not legally be allowed to be called news! As to the dedicated fabrication that America’s Democratic party is “evil socialists” allow me to explain some things, here. In all of the modern capitalist “1st World” countries in the world… only ONE has continued to allow healthcare to be a profit driven nightmare sending over 1/3 of its population into debt due to Medical Bills. That’s the US. So… you consider changing that… changing the broken system that is controlled by Insurance companies in an effort to grab as much profit while providing as little health care as possible… changing that is something you consider to be evil. And you expect yourself to be taken seriously when you say that?

Then we get to the ultimate:
Trump is the only man standing between God and Satan because he will outlaw abortion!
That’s… that’s fascinating. If preventing abortion is really such a spiritually moving element for you, can I suggest you do some research? Because in every study performed around the world; the thing they can say that does NOT successfully reduce abortions is outlawing it. Outlaw abortions, fine, but you increase maternal deaths, maternal suicides, wife-battering in an attempt to terminate the pregnancy, and (for the wealthy white women voting against abortion to begin with) Abortion Tourism (which is already a thing and contributes to multiple health problems in young woman every year). No, if you ACTUALLY gave a shit about lowering abortion rates, you’d call for comprehensive sexual education, increased use of condoms and iuds (that could even be covered by healthcare), increased educational opportunities for young mothers in poorer socio-economic areas. Y’know… doing for others. But as has been ROUTINELY evidenced by the current Trump Supporter en masse… giving a shit about other people isn’t your forte. You’re anti-mask and pro-COVID or just outright keep calling it a hoax. Hell, I would love to go to a pub, eat inside a restaurant, check out the new brewery in town.... but I have more self-respect and respect for the people I encounter. This morning, Iowa Hospitals announced that they ANTICIPATE running out of beds soon. Because too many of you are still saying “COVID is a Hoax” or “It’s only a 1% death rate.” Add in the incoming flu numbers and the inability for Iowa Hospitals to keep up? That death rate is going to go up… because of irresponsible people.

I just… I can’t anymore. I can’t. I don’t know WHAT THE FUCK y’all are reading or ingesting or bathing in… to consider Trump to be a significantly better option to run this country. I am going to go on the record RIGHT NOW and say confidently and with no equivocation… that has never NEVER in my lifetime been a worse candidate for President on the ballot. And to really drive it home?

Voting by mail, absentee ballots, early voting, and actually counting the fucking votes: if you give a crap about our military AT ALL, you won’t allow Donald Trump to invalidate their vote. Mail In voting and counting those ballots after the first Tuesday of November have been around for over 100 years. Trump demanding that no ballot be counted after Voting Day… and Trump demanding that there be a winner announced on Voting Day… both prove that he has no understanding nor desire to understand how the United States actually votes and works. If you support him, FINE, but MAKE SURE OUR MILITARY VOTES ARE COUNTED! Or shame on you for supporting someone so blindly that you intentionally disrespect those you claim to revere! Because this is how voting is supposed to go as many states, even with vote by mail and early voting, have laws that forbid them from beginning to process or count votes until Election Day.

SO THE WAY VOTING HAS WORKED IN THIS COUNTRY FOR DECADES is
people vote up to the end of voting day (the first Tuesday of November, every four years).
those votes are calculated, tabulated, and counted again (what the news reports is always referred to as “projections” because news organizations project winners based on partial counts).
Thus, many weeks later (some times more than 3) the votes are ACTUALLY KNOWN and a winner is selected from the Popular Vote. Then the Electoral College votes and may chose to be faithful or faithless electors. It is from this Electoral College vote that the President is chosen. ONE WAY this is circumvented is by “conceding”. If a Candidate “conceded” the race, it meant that they were quitting and the remaining candidate would win. That isn’t and never was “I lost, here’s my concession speech.” It was and always has been, “It looks like I didn’t win; I won’t wait for the results, here’s my concession speech.”
BUT… and this is true if Biden wins the Popular Vote or the Electoral Vote… Trump has already demanded that this election be resolved by the courts. SO HE doesn’t give a shit about votes ANYWAY. AND… here’s the truth… in this instance, Florida has already made Trump’s position the appropriate one! They fucked up their Felon Voting Rights Act in such a way as to require that they invalidate votes that were previously case in good faith. SO THIS IS ALREADY EAR MARKED TO GO TO THE COURTS! Stop suggesting that “Biden and the Dems are going to steal this election!” Fuck. Or as an actual journalist said:

By Maggie Astor

For weeks, President Trump and his allies have been laying groundwork to challenge the results of the election if he loses. Now, in the final days of the campaign, he has settled on a blatantly ahistorical closing argument: that the votes in a fair election should not be counted past election night.

“The Election should end on November 3rd., not weeks later!” he tweeted on Friday, two days after telling reporters in Nevada, “Hopefully, the few states remaining that want to take a lot of time after Nov. 3 to count ballots, that won’t be allowed by the various courts.”

“You would think you want to have the votes counted, tabulated, finished by the evening of Nov. 3,” he said at a campaign event a week earlier.

In reality, the scenario Mr. Trump is outlining — every vote in a modern election being “counted, tabulated, finished” by midnight — is not possible and never has been. No state ever reports final results on election night, and no state is legally expected to.

Americans are accustomed to knowing who won on election night because news organizations project winners based on partial counts, not because the counting is actually completed that quickly. These race calls mean Candidate A is far enough ahead that, given the number of outstanding ballots and the regions those ballots are coming from, Candidate B would realistically be unable to close the gap.

The difference this year is not the timing of final results — those will come, as always, by the certification deadlines each state has set, ranging from two days after the election in Delaware to more than a month after in California. The difference, rather, is when news organizations are likely to have enough information to make accurate projections.

If, as Mr. Trump suggested, courts were to force states to stop counting after Nov. 3, it would be an extraordinary subversion of the electoral process and would disenfranchise millions of voters who cast valid, on-time ballots.

“Everyone — including Joe Biden, the Democrat Party, the mainstream media and the American public — should want election results they can trust and for every valid ballot to count,” said Thea McDonald, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump’s campaign. “President Trump and Republicans have long fought for these key principles of our democracy, and in many states won, in the fight against Democrats’ attempts to effectively delay Election Day.”

Ms. McDonald pointed to efforts in some states to accept ballots that are received late if the postmark is not clear and said this was “exactly the kind of late ballot counting President Trump has been fighting to prevent.”

But Mr. Trump has explicitly criticized the counting and tabulating of votes past Election Day, something that will happen no matter when the ballot receipt deadline is. Ms. McDonald declined to explain or clarify those statements on the record.

Mail ballots tend to take longer to process than in-person votes, and millions more people are voting by mail this year than ever before because of the pandemic. Because the voters choosing to do this are disproportionately Democrats, neither in-person ballots nor mail ballots will be representative of the full vote count.

And because of the intense confusion around voting rules, more voters than usual may have to cast provisional ballots, meaning election officials will have to verify their eligibility before counting their votes.

In some states — like Colorado, which has been conducting elections by mail for years, or Florida, which allows officials to begin processing mail-in ballots before Election Day — it may still be possible to call winners on election night, depending on how close the races are.

But in many other states — including the all-important Pennsylvania, where some counties will not begin counting mail-in ballots until Nov. 4 because of limited resources — it could take several days to get an accurate picture.

If this happens, it will be evidence not of a conspiracy but of the electoral system working as it should, by counting every vote. And while much about this year’s election is abnormal, delayed results would not be. Even in the smoothest elections, we don’t necessarily get quick calls in close races.

On election night in 2018, it wasn’t clear who had won governor’s races in Florida, Georgia and Wisconsin; Senate races in Arizona and Florida; and a slew of House races in California, Georgia, New York, Texas and Utah. While there were recounts and legal disputes in a handful of these races, the uncertainty in most places had nothing to do with changing or challenging the counts — it just took time to finish counting.

If the tallies had been frozen at midnight, even many in-person votes would not have been counted. And the ballots tallied after Election Day did not uniformly benefit one party.

In Minnesota’s First Congressional District, for instance, they benefited the Republican candidate, Jim Hagedorn, who was ahead by fewer than 100 votes just after midnight but ended up winning by about 1,300 votes. In California’s 21st Congressional District, they benefited the Democratic candidate, T.J. Cox, who appeared to be losing on election night but ended up winning by about 850 votes.

When we talk about delayed results, it is easy to think of a nightmare scenario like the 2000 presidential election in Florida: a race close enough to trigger a recount, in a tipping-point state, with clear ballot irregularities that can’t easily be resolved, ultimately decided not by the count but by the courts.

But most of the time, the circumstances are much more anodyne, and the results are finalized with no serious questions about their legitimacy.

Few people are likely to remember that it took two weeks to call Missouri for John McCain in 2008, because the election didn’t hinge on the outcome. When the state finally was called on Nov. 19, by a margin of about 0.1 percent, The New York Times reported simply, “The Missouri secretary of state’s office had been waiting for some jurisdictions to examine thousands of provisional ballots and certify and mail in their totals.”

In 2012, it took four days to call Florida for President Barack Obama — and again it was not particularly memorable, because he had already won re-election without the state. While there were plenty of recriminations about how long the counting took, the results themselves were not disputed.

Four years later, Michigan counted ballots for more than two weeks after the Nov. 8 election before delivering Mr. Trump one of his most cherished victories.

“The Great State of Michigan was just certified as a Trump WIN,” he tweeted after that, “giving all of our MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN supporters another victory — 306!”

Last updated November 02, 2020