Raoul?
This song should make you happy
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Here’s a short fact-check on Trump’s Rally.
Bunch of small lies, as well as the Big one.
The short version:
As the Department of Justice investigates his handling of highly classified documents, former President Donald Trump spoke for nearly two hours in a rally in Pennsylvania that was filled with false, exaggerated and misleading statements:
- Trump falsely claimed that DOJ used a “phony pretext” to search his Mar-a-Lago property. Trump and his staff repeatedly thwarted efforts by government officials to recover all documents for more than a year before DOJ resorted to seeking a search warrant.
- The FBI didn’t “stage” a photo to “pretend” that Trump left classified documents on the floor of his Mar-a-Lago office. The seized documents were found in a container, but were placed on the floor so agents could photograph them as evidence, officials say.
- Trump falsely claimed that an FBI investigation into whether his 2016 campaign colluded with Russia was “developed by Hillary Clinton,” his 2016 opponent. The probe was launched when a Trump campaign adviser told a foreign official that the Russians had damaging information on Clinton.
- Trump made numerous false statements about Clinton’s use of a private server while secretary of state. There’s no evidence that Clinton’s emails were “plundered by foreign hackers” or that she deleted emails and “smashed” cell phones to destroy evidence, as Trump claimed.
- He repeated (and repeated) his false claims that the 2020 election was “rigged.”
- He exaggerated both how low gasoline prices got during his presidency and how high they then became under President Joe Biden. And in any case, experts told us neither president had much to do with the price fluctuations.
- Trump falsely claimed that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg “confessed” that Facebook censored posts in response to the FBI feeding Facebook “the false narrative that the Hunter Biden laptop from hell was Russian disinformation.” Zuckerberg said the FBI only warned Facebook officials generally about Russian propaganda.
- He said Biden “should have never left [Afghanistan] without keeping Bagram [Air Base].” But when he was president, Trump reached an agreement with the Taliban to withdraw American forces from all bases in Afghanistan.
- Trump falsely claimed he “ended” Nord Stream 2, a pipeline from Russia to Germany, and that Biden “opened up the pipeline.”
- No one has authorized “87,000 IRS agents” to “carry guns” and “go after you,” as Trump claimed. The bureau may hire that many employees over the next 10 years, but the majority won’t be tax auditors or “special agents” who carry firearms, officials say.
Trump made his remarks Sept. 3 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, at a campaign rally for the state’s Republican candidates for governor and U.S. Senate. The rally came less than a month after FBI agents executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago.
The article has a fact-check for each of these lies in more detail.
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GA has asked the FBI to aid in the investigation of the breech of electronic voting equipment in Coffee County
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A Proud Boy pleads guilty to seditious conspiracy
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Good; glad things are moving forward there.
Did Tucker Carlson cry about him last night?
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Poll watchers have long been an important part of making sure the electorate has faith in our voting process. However, current efforts being employed by Big Lie proponents to turn poll watchers into tools to intimidate poll workers and voters is going to turn the 2024 election into a clusterf in some areas. I think we will just get a small taste of that in 2022.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/stop-steal-supporters-train-thousands-us-poll-observers-2022-10-13/?
Yep, a very big problem.
I can be somewhat optimistic and imagine that these people come, watch the process, and say “nothing suspicious at my precinct”. That would be good.
Unfortunately, I imagine lots of voter and election worker intimidation.
I wonder what it would take to get the UN to send actual poll watchers to make sure everything is run fairly. I think we are getting close to that level.
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There are something like 100,000 polling locations in the US, so that would be a big ask.
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You can sign up at https://www.powerthepolls.org/ if you’re interested in working the election, or you can sign up locally if you can navigate your county website. I applied to work the election but I haven’t heard back, maybe we have enough workers already.
My employer offers paid time off to work elections without using PTO. 
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Some Republicans in counties in my state are training open-carry “poll watchers” to stand just outside the legal boundary, as well as unarmed poll watchers to be inside.
I’m sure most of you have seen the video of the seminar where they were explicitly trained to cheat by illegally taking cell phone videos and similar.
After the huge mess that took place in 2016 at some local polling places here, I offered to volunteer on my county’s website for the 2020 election. I was disappointed that no one responded to me at all. An acknowledgment that they already had enough volunteers would be nice. Maybe I’ll try again in 2024, as I imagine it might be too late for 2022.
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Good for you! I suspect my county has a lot of volunteers, I’ve voted in person twice and there have been more people working than voting when I went in. My city is pretty politically engaged.
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Yeah, this is a subset of some of the crap the stop the steal folks are cooking up. Normal poll watching like we’ve always had is a good thing for democracy, but intentional violation of laws and intimidation is what these guys are training people for. It’s going to be a fat mess, and probably even more so if Trump runs.
Voting should be done online, period.
If taxes can be done online, so can voting.
so my 97 year old father who doesn’t use a computer can’t vote?
The 9% of the population without broadband can’t vote?
um. I don’t mean close the voting booths.
People who don’t own computers can still do their taxes.