Senate The US Politics discussion

Well for example you seem to think getting a photo ID is easy but in Alabama they've been conveniently shutting down DMVs in primarily black neighborhoods "for some reason."

 

anakinfansince1983 For this night at least, you can put the drinks away! (Unless you're pouring one in celebration, of course. )

 

The only reason for IDs being required to vote is to prevent impersonation/fraud. Neither happens in this country to any statistically significant degree.

There's no meaningful reason to require IDs to vote, unless it's about suppressing the vote.

 

appleseed I stand corrected on Voter ID laws being used as a form of suppression. I just did some reading from Slate and Vox, and it appears some the enacters of Voter ID laws in Alabama were quoted saying they intended to repress black voting, calling them aborigines and illiterates... Here is the article.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-poli.../alabama-voter-suppression-senate-moore-jones

The article claims also that the DMV closures were mostly all in 2015, and have since been reversed. Either way, it does seem to be clear voter suppression. I think I'm too reluctant to believe the worst in people sometimes, but this is pretty awful.

 

I've heard reports of people being forced to vote provisionally because of being taken off the active voter rolls due to mailing shenanigans (reply to this postcard or get taken off, etc.), yes.

 

A crucial thing to note in this election is the role played by black voters:



Leave it to people of color to continually save us white people from ourselves.

 

Yowza. I was over in Alabama a few weeks ago and saw maybe three Moore lawn signs and felt a little bit hopeful. Read about some of the GOTV efforts by the NAACP and others earlier today and felt more hopeful. Still pretty amazed.

 

I know you've already noted some of the instances where voter ID laws are clearly aimed at suppressing votes, so I don't want to take you to task for anything you said in this post I'm quoting, but I did want to highlight this one line just so I could make a statement. I get what you're saying about the inability being the least of someone's problems if they can't afford a photo ID; however, I would just point out that voting is maybe the only recourse that person has when it comes to seeing a lot of their problems get fixed.

And I'm glad to see appleseed being glad about this election. I'm not going to try to tell you everything is fixed because of this election and it remains troubling just how hard it was to get a victory for Jones when it should have been a slam-dunk, but we can savor every victory we get.

 

It's also a fundamental right. We're not talking about someone being unable to watch the latest season of Stranger Things.

 

I think Senator Shelby's TV appearance on Sunday helped Doug Jones out a lot. I suspect it gave implicit permission to many Republicans to either vote for Jones or to stay home. Between that and write-in votes, I think that's the margin of victory right there. Of course, on the flip side, it may be that it just helped make up for lost would-be Jones votes that weren't cast due to voter suppression.

Either way, I think Shelby was glad to damage Moore's chances.

 

Also if an ID is so important maybe it shouldn't be "Who can't pay $20?", maybe it should be "Why should anyone have to pay?"

Or, for that matter, wait for entirely too long at pathetically understaffed DMVs?

 

That understaffing is intentional, of course, and points back to much of the problem that most people say they have with government, which is that it's inefficient, wasteful, etc. A large part of that comes from being starved of financial resources to be efficient. Obviously, there's a point where more money wouldn't help. It's safe to say that most governmental agencies are not at that point, particularly at the local level.

 

I love it when I wake up in the morning and it's Christmas come early

Dread Pirate Roberts (going back to an earlier conversation) One reason it's easy to find overlap between social conservatives and fiscal conservatives IMO is the fact that you'll often find that moralising concepts such as the deserving poor vs the undeserving poor underlie fiscal conservatism, and these concepts usually (but not always) come as part of an ideology that defines what it means to be a "good" citizen and community member in socially conservative terms. I do think however that the overlap was greater in the past than it is nowadays.

About the need for a national ID, I firmly believe that everyone should have one but that the process to obtain it should be 1. simple and 2. free of charge. Even here in the labyrinth of Greek bureaucracy you can get an ID card in less than half an hour from your local police station. You only have to provide the most basic, easily accessible documents, and in the past you also had to bring along two witnesses the first time you got one. You only have to pay if you're replacing a lost ID, and even then it's an entirely symbolic amount, in the order of 2-3 euros.

 

Another insidious form of voter suppression can be seen in these results: denying the vote to people in prison, to felons, or making it very it very difficult to regain the right.

Black males made up only 11% of the electorate while Black women made up 17% (a 50% greater turnout) most likely because so many black men are disenfranchised in this way.

 

USA Today goes all-out against Trump


https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/12/12/trump-lows-ever-hit-rock-bottom-editorials-debates/945947001/

A president who would all but call Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand a whore is not fit to clean the toilets in the Barack Obama Presidential Library or to shine the shoes of George W. Bush.

 

Holy ----! I guess I ought to be happy that Jones won, but look at that chart! It's bad enough I've felt guilty for being an American my entire adult life (living in an empire, and all that...). Now I feel just as badly for being white!

To all minorities: I'm sorry. I'm truly sorry that 65-70% of my Southern brethren voted for a ----ing pedophile and white supremacist.

 

I would be curious as to the turnout for this vote as compared to the Presidential election. I am wondering if this might be an indicator that voters in this country learned their lesson and intend to turn out, rather than take this as a reaction to Moore.

 

Never have I been so happy to be wrong. You just backed the loser down in Alabama, twice.

Suck on that, Mr Trump.

 

That would end him. If the GOP ignored that after tonight, they’d be wiped out next November in both houses of Congress. Won’t stop the Orange Cheeto from trying, though.

Sorry for the double-post, I’m just so damn happy right now.

 

Make Liberalism Great Again

One Senate seat at a time.

 

I don‘t see how anyone can be overly happy about this result. When push comes to shove, a racist, homophobic, misogynistic bigot who has twice been suspended for essentially ignoring the Constitution lost by a whisker because he chased after teenage girls at the mall. Leave out that last detail and he would have won.

 

Moore refuses to concede per CNBC.

 

Yeah, I stopped paying attention to the news because I was expecting it to go the other way. And it was still really close (50% to 49% or something like that?), which says something, but still, good news! Ironically if Luther had been the candidate Jones would never have had a chance.

Wow, a Democrat from Alabama. I just hope they actually seat him and don't stall him forever from the Senate. They'll be in even more of a rush to rob the middle class with a smaller margin of error now), not to mention various other voter suppression schemes. Good news for once, even though it took long odds. Here's hoping for 2018 and 2020.

Tomorrow is sure going to be a busy day on Twitter, Trump will either be busy deleting pro-Moore tweets and/or he'll come up with some other distraction (like lowering rich people taxes isn't enough of a distraction already).