New Study Claims that Most NFTs are Now Worthless

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Thursday September 21, 2023 · 3:00 PM PDT

2023/09/21 · 15:00

no image description available — Maybe not so wrong to stay away...

NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens for the uninitiated) were once the new, hot thing being hyped to provide artists and content creators a way to profit from the digitization of everything. Inherently tied to cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, this was supposed to be the way of the future for artists. But there were always skeptics, those who pointed out that NFTs were basically vapor art. The art itself was also depressingly easy to copy, steal, and counterfeit. Then, of course, they rely on the use of cryptocurrencies that are highly volatile. None of this inspired confidence in many of us. Then there was the over-hyped nature of the entire NFT market. Too many with a vested interest in profiting from the spread of this idea rather than by producing their own art or content (those involved in the Trump NFTs being a prime example) also gave some of us pause as we contemplated not a new way for artists to market their art but a new tulip bulb craze.

Now, it seems, those fears and hesitations have been borne out. A new study by dappGambl has estimated that some 95% of all NFTs are now essentially worthless, leaving about 23 million NFT holders in the lurch. More troubling for content creators is the fact that only about 20% of NFT collections have 100% ownership, meaning that many NFTs are now going unbought and unwanted. This is all pretty grim news for those who thought investing in NFTs was a good bet.

The size of dappGambl’s study is impressive, looking at 73,257 NFT collections. This was an extensive survey of the market and a depressing one for NFT enthusiasts. Of those 73,257 collections, 69,795 of them had a market cap of zero. A PetaPixel article discussing the study also points out that the underlying cryptocurrencies like BitCoin and Ethereum that NFTs are valued in have also fallen in value significantly from the high points they enjoyed at the height of the NFT buying boom in 2021. The article also notes the disenchantment some artists are experiencing in the NFT market as it drops and the way in which potentially big players like Meta and Canon have backed away from the NFT market significantly.

In general, we shouldn’t find any of this surprising. NFTs were always laden with the problems of cryptocurrency and the nature of digital art. That the whole enterprise seems to be well on it’s way to collapse is a natural consequence of these problems. Some have no doubt made out very well from the whole exercise, especially those who hyped them to begin with and made their money quickly by buying ans selling early. Some artists certainly did make some money from offering NFTs early on, which is never a bad thing, but now seem to have been left behind by the market that no longer gives them a solid way to market their art. Where NFTs go from here is anybody’s guess, but the likeliest place seems to be down into oblivion.

THIS is Democratic Activism Reaching Out to Voters

Stwriley

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Wednesday June 28, 2023 · 2:15 PM PDT

2023/06/28 · 14:15

MIAMI, FL - JULY 13: Immigration advocates with the Florida Immigrant Coalition go house to house handing out fliers on July 13, 2019 in Little Havana in Miami, Florida. The Trump administration is moving forward with a nationwide immigration enforcement operation this weekend targeting migrant families. (Photo by Saul Martinez/Getty Images)

Today, I found something wonderful when I came back home from a trip to the store. Stuck into my door (and the side door that we actually use at home, too) was a leaflet from my local Democratic party titled “Voting Precinct News”. Here’s an image of the leaflet:

June 2023 edition of the Leaflet Every Doorstep Campaign leaflet on Abortion Rights and Reproductive Freedom

It’s an amazing piece of voter outreach and the first installment of a campaign that is a fine model for how Democrats need to do outreach, not just in Democratic strongholds like Durham, but across North Carolina and the nation.

The leaflet is part of the Leaflet Every Doorstep campaign that aims to put a focused, policy and legislation based information leaflet on literally every doorstep in Durham every month from now until November 2024. It relies on an army of local volunteers in each precinct to do the delivery, but also has a broader reach based on what they call the “layer cake” model. Here’s how they explain it:

We are Democrats in Durham who have started a campaign to leaflet every doorstep in our precinct on a regular basis with simple, short messages about how Democrats differ from Republicans on what they are doing in Raleigh and in Washington on specific issues of concern to our neighbors.

Our theme is a layer cake!

Our first layer is an army of volunteers leafletting every doorstep every month.

Our second layer is smaller teams of volunteers knocking on doors and talking with voters, doing phone calls, writing postcards, and doing other targeted outreach.

The icing on the cake is advertising in the media by state and national organizations.

A strong precinct will inspire people to get involved in democracy on a regular basis, create a feeling of community, and be an agile organization that accomplishes a variety of important outreach tasks. Such an organization will give people hope for change and will celebrate achievements.

It’s a deceptively simple idea that has great potential to motivate and mobilize voters. This is what we need to be doing in every single precinct in every single state. The more we can inform, the more we can motivate Democratic and Independent (and even well-meaning Republican) voters to get to the polls and support issues and ideas that are popular and embraced by Democratic candidates, the better our chances are of retaining and expanding our democracy.

I’ll be volunteering in this effort going forward. I encourage those of you elsewhere to talk to your own Democratic party organizations, be they local, regional, or state, about mounting similar campaigns to inform and motivate voters from now until November 2024. Together, we can reach every doorstep and every voter.

Poll

20 votes Show Results

Would you participate in a leaflet every doorstep campaign?

20 votes Vote Now!

Would you participate in a leaflet every doorstep campaign?

Yes

19 votes

1 vote

I'd rather just eat pie.

0 votes

Supreme Court Dismisses Texas Challenge to Immigration Enforcement Policy

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Friday June 23, 2023 · 8:25 AM PDT

2023/06/23 · 08:25

MESA, AZ - FEBRUARY 28: A security contractor carries chains for immigration detainees from Honduras ahead of a deportation flight to San Pedro Sula, Honduras on February 28, 2013 in Mesa, Arizona. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), operates 4-5 flights per week from Mesa to Central America, deporting hundreds of undocumented immigrants detained in western states of the U.S. With the possibility of federal budget sequestration, ICE released 303 immigration detainees in the last week from detention centers throughout Arizona. More than 2,000 immigration detainees remain in ICE custody in the state. Most detainees typically remain in custody for several weeks before they are deported to their home country, while others remain for longer periods while their immigration cases work through the courts. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

In a definitive 8-1 ruling, the US Supreme Court dismissed the challenge to the Biden administration’s immigration enforcement policy that had been raised by the states of Texas and Louisiana. The court ruled that the states did not have standing to challenge the policy for failing to adhere to Federal law. CNN has the details:

The ruling is a major victory for President Joe Biden and the White House, who have consistently argued the need to prioritize who they detain and deport given limited resources. By ruling against the states, the court tightened the rules concerning when states may challenge federal policies with which they disagree.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion.

“In Sum, the States have brought an extraordinarily unusual lawsuit,” Kavanaugh wrote, in an opinion joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “They want a federal court to order the Executive Branch to alter its arrest policies so as to make more arrests. Federal courts have not traditionally entertained that kind of lawsuit; indeed, the States cite no precedent for a lawsuit like this.”

Justices Gorsuch, Thomas, and Coney Barrett concurred in the ruling, but not on the details. They found that the states lacked standing not because of “the lack of a “judicially cognizable” interest or injury” but because their suit lack “redressability”, based on law passed by Congress that limits what courts can do to order enforcement of immigration law specifically. Basically, they rejected the idea that states don’t have standing in the first place to seek enforcement of Federal law when they can’t show actual injury, but substituted a much more limited objection that even if they can, it doesn’t matter because there is no remedy available that could address that injury.

With a five member majority joining Kavanaugh in his findings, this is a ruling with deep implications. Not only is Biden’s Department of Homeland Security free to prioritize immigration enforcement as they see fit (including continuing DACA) but it also makes it much harder for states to challenge federal policies on the enforcement of Federal laws. How this will play out in the long run is unknown, but it does mean that states cannot simply sue to force the executive branch to perform enforcement actions that do not conform to stated policy. This can be both good and bad, in the long run.

In the enforcement of Federal law, it is possible that many good things can be fostered by this decision. For instance, states are now blocked from trying to have Federal drug laws enforced in states where marijuana has been legalized, on the grounds that this is harming the states which have not pursued legalization. How ever, this ruling could also prevent states from suing to have environmental laws enforced on other states, even when this could be causing environmental problems in the state that files, though this is a less sure outcome of this ruling, given that the filing state could point to actual and demonstrable harm.

So, we have a win for current immigration policy and no return to the more extreme policies that Texas and Louisiana had sought to have enforced. But we also have a curtailment of a power that states can use for both bad and good reasons. Only the future will show whether this will prove to be an overall good or bad decision in the long run.

Ohio Legislature Votes to Arm Teachers

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Saturday June 04, 2022 · 7:50 AM PDT

2022/06/04 · 07:50

Of all the stupid and counter-productive ideas floated by Republicans in the wake of every school shooting, one of the dumbest is the push to arm teachers. It may be the logical extension of the “good guy with a gun” trope that the gun fondlers so love to throw out, but like it’s ideological parent it doesn’t actually make any sense if you stop to think about it for more than a half second. But far be it for the GOP dominated Legislature of Ohio to stop and think for that half second. Instead, they spent a lot of time to craft this awful piece of legislation to enable the arming of teachers with very little in the way of safeguards.

The news of this travesty was broken by the inimitable education blogger Mercedes Schneider, whose analysis on this (and everything related to education policy) is spot-on. The details of this bill, which Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has promised to sign, make it clear that the Legislature has no idea what introducing guns to the classroom would actually mean or what the definition of a “well-regulated militia” might entail when applied to educators.

First up, it seems that parental rights only go so far with the GOP when it comes to armed school personnel (unlike when it comes to diversity training or anything else that might challenge white supremacy.) Districts are required to inform the public if they choose to have armed educators, but there are no provisions to mandate informing parents of which teachers are armed or if guns are present in their child’s classroom.

Much more importantly, as Schneider points out, there is very little training required before a teacher is allowed to be armed on school property.

Initial instruction: 24 hours or less. Not even a full work-week’s worth of hours. Then, one full day of brush-up a year. ...

Less than 24 hours and the everyday teacher is ready to become an action-film hero.

But the classroom is no action film, and this bill leaves much unanswered.

Mind you, this is 24 hours or less of training to cover all these topics outlined in the bill:

(a) Mitigation techniques;
(b) Communications capabilities and coordination and collaboration techniques;
(c) Neutralization of potential threats and active shooters;
(d) Accountability;
(e) Reunification;
(f) Psychology of critical incidents;
(g) De-escalation techniques;
(h) Crisis intervention;
(i) Trauma and first aid care;
(j) The history and pattern of school shootings;
(k) Tactics of responding to critical incidents in schools;
(l) At least four hours of training in scenario-based or simulated training exercises;

(m) Completion of tactical live firearms training;
(n) Realistic urban training.

This bill also has no specific provisions for how firearms are to be secured or stored in the classroom. It lacks pretty much any provisions for basic gun safety or for informing parents of what gun safety measures might or might not be in place.

As a high school teacher myself, I look on this legislation as a positive danger to students. The very idea of introducing more guns into a school situation is terrifying. Not only do you have the problems at the high school level, where you have potentially volatile teenagers with as-yet-unmatured judgement or emotional maturity with ready access to a loaded gun, but you have all the problems of ill-trained people carrying and potentially using those guns in close proximity to students. Then you have the possibility of guns around even younger students, who may or may not be of an age to even understand the danger they represent. How often have we seen stories of young children shot by their peers because they got their hands on a gun and didn’t understand that it was dangerous? The very idea of putting a gun in a first grade classroom should have every parent involved running for the doors with their children. Yet this same Ohio bill makes no provision for parents who might not agree with the idea of having their children around an armed teacher. So we can see just how far that “parent’s rights” idea goes when it conflicts with the sacred cult of gun worship. It also leave aside a host of other questions that Schneider brings up:

Is the teacher carrying a concealed weapon as that teacher works in close contact with students? Is it locked in a safe in the classroom? Who has access? Are the exact teachers “packing heat” kept a secret from parents and students? What if those teachers are discovered and publicized on social media? Do they then become marks by those who see it as a challenge to confront a teacher carrying a gun? Does it become a dangerous game to some students to try to steal the teacher’s gun? Does videoing the teacher’s gun become a social media challenge?

How will districts pay for the liability insurance? What companies will insure the 24-hour-trained, gun-toting teachers in rooms full of children?

The questions just keep piling up, but they won’t be answered by this bill. The likelihood is that the answers will only be forthcoming when another child is dead and, this time, it is a teacher’s gun that has been used to make it happen. But don’t look to these legislators for answers, because they obviously haven’t bothered to think that far ahead.

Supreme Court Refuses to Stay Court-drawn Congressional Maps in NC and PA

Stwriley

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Monday March 07, 2022 · 3:46 PM PST

2022/03/07 · 15:46

The Supreme Court has just refused to stay congressional maps for North Carolina and Pennsylvania in a decision that is good news for Democrats in both states (and for fair voting and redistricting advocates) but also has some hints that things may not go as well in the future. The news was sent out by Mark Joseph Stern on Twitter, along with some interesting analysis of what it all means:

BREAKING: SCOTUS has refused to stay congressional maps drawn by the state Supreme Courts of North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch dissent from the North Carolina decision. Orders posted shortly.
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) March 7, 2022

In particular, Stern notes that the three dissenting justices in the NC case (apparently there were no dissents to the PA case) are endorsing the “independent state legislature theory”, a radical doctrine that was bandied about during the Big Lie promotion. It holds that legislatures have sole and unchecked authority over elections and that no other entity (including courts and state constitutions) can override this. It also seems that Kavanaugh may also be on board with this idea, but concurred in the court’s decision based on the Purcell v. Gonzalez principle that courts should not interfere in elections too close to their time. Since candidate filing has already closed in NC, this apparently was enough for him to allow these maps to be used, at least this one time.

What is amazing in this is two-fold. First, both Roberts and Barrett apparently do not support the independent state legislature theory, which means we still have five votes to keep this kind of electoral shenanigan from being given the stamp of constitutional approval. Second, we also had Alito doing a complete reverse from his concurrence with the Rucho decision that allowed state courts to act against partisan gerrymandering in the first place. We can only hope that this decision stands and that any further erosion of the ability of state courts to keep elections free and fair is avoided.

"Detox the Vaxx" is the New Anti-Vaxxer Grift on TikTok Reacting to Vaccine Mandates

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Saturday November 13, 2021 · 4:57 PM PST

2021/11/13 · 16:57

A vial of the Pfizer/Biontech Comirnaty COVID-19 vaccine — This doesn't need a detox

Well, it was almost inevitable that this would happen, given the gullibility of a certain segment of the American population: anti-vaxxers are now promoting the idea that that those who have finally agreed to vaccination due to mandates can “undo” their vaccines. As a reaction to the increasing percentage of the population that has received a vaccine and not suffered the litany of side-effects and horrible consequences that the anti-vaxxers warned about, the quacks and grifters have now started shifting their target to convincing people that every little problem they have is the result of vaccination and that only they have the solution (sometimes literally) that can solve the problem for them. It’s classic medical quackery and will, no doubt, find a willing and enduring audience on social media.

The Ur-quack in this case seems to have been a "Dr.” Carrie Madej, who put out a TikTok video claiming that a bath solution she invented would “detox the vaxx” for those who tried it. Ben Collins at NBC News lays out what this bath entails:

The ingredients in the bath are mostly not harmful, although the supposed benefits attached to them are entirely fictional. Baking soda and epsom salts, she falsely claims, will provide a “radiation detox” to remove radiation Madej falsely believes is activated by the vaccine. Bentonite clay will add a “major pull of poison,” she says, based on a mistaken idea in anti-vaccine communities that toxins can be removed from the body with certain therapies.

Then, she recommends adding in one cup of borax, a cleaning agent that’s been banned as a food additive by the Food and Drug Administration, to “take nanotechnologies out of you.”

Of course, borax is a highly caustic substance that’s usually used in cleaning products and is much more likely to “toxify” you than the opposite. But, to be fair, this video was at least removed by TikTok over a month ago. Unfortunately, by the use of TikTok’s duets feature, the underlying message is still being circulated and the formula is still being passed around. Madej herself is a classic for these anti-vaxx nuts, since she claims that the vaccines contain a “liquefied computing system” and are a “gateway to transhumanism”. But there have still been hundreds of thousands of people who have seen this nonsense through TikTok and very likely some who have acted on it.

Nor is Madej the only entrant in the “undo the vaccine” Olympics. There are also people promoting things like cupping (with or without cutting the injection site beforehand) to somehow “draw out” the vaccine like it was an old-fashioned snakebite cure. Others are actually promoting the idea that you can “un-inject” the vaccine with syringes. Needless to say (for the actually sane and sensible crowd) neither of these is even remotely possible. When my wife was three years old, she once saw her mother put a spoonful of medicine in her orange juice and insisted that she take it back out, so her mother took out a spoon of juice and my wife happily drank the rest down. But she was three years old. Why a supposedly competent adult would fall for essentially the same ruse is beyond me, but apparently it’s become one of the new anti-vaxx concepts that’s spreading through the community.

Of course, this could all be much worse. As one of the experts Collins consulted for his article put it:

“Once you’re injected, the lifesaving vaccination process has already begun. You can’t unring a bell. It’s just not physically possible,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist and adjunct professor at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada.

So in the end, the whole movement may have evolved in a direction that’s less harmful to society as a whole, though doubtless still dangerous to those who sign on to this quackery. If the idea that they can “undo” the vaccine gets these hold-outs to obey the mandates and get vaccinated, I for one could care less if they strip a few layers of skin off themselves in a borax bath or cover themselves with cupping glasses and tiny razor cuts. At least that way they’re only hurting themselves (and not so badly that they’ll need to take up valuable hospital beds) and the rest of us can enjoy the benefits of having a sufficient number of people vaccinated to hopefully put an end to this pandemic once and for all.

BREAKING: Pence and Trump vow to work together for remainder of term according to Bloomberg

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Monday January 11, 2021 · 6:52 PM PST

2021/01/11 · 18:52

It seems that Pence’s meeting with Trump did not produce the results that Nancy Pelosi had hoped for. Bloomberg Politics has announced that Pence and Trump have agreed to work together for the remainder of their term in office. This means that there will be no 25th Amendment removal of Trump nor will Trump resign. The report comes from unnamed White House officials.

The two men, meeting in the Oval Office, agreed that people who broke into the Capitol don’t represent Trump’s “America First” movement and pledged to continue their work on behalf of the country for the remainder of their term, the official said. It was a good conversation in which Trump and Pence discussed the week ahead and reflected on the last four years of the administration’s work, the official added.

It seems that Pence has, for some reason, gotten over having mobs hunt him through the Capitol building in an attempt to hang him after Trump sent them rampaging down the Mall. What that reason might be, whether raw ambition, abject cowardice, kompromat, or simple stupidity, we may never know. It does seem to be an accurate account of the meeting between the two, however, given that the source officials bluntly stated that the information they relayed had been worked out between Pence’s office and Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. So we can forget about Pence and his supposed anger over Trump’s betrayal. He’s going to fall in line like the toady he’s always been and enable Trump to the end. It seems his actions during the electoral vote counting were only because he couldn’t find a way to not do his duty. But now he’s reverted to his natural state of unquestioning support.

On Black Friday, Think Ahead to Small Business Saturday

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Friday November 27, 2020 · 8:15 AM PST

2020/11/27 · 08:15

COLUMBIA, SC - APRIL 24: Small business owner Birl Hicks helps a customer at Area 57 at Columbia Place Mall on April 24, 2020 in Columbia, South Carolina. Beaches and some businesses deemed nonessential were allowed to reopen this week in South Carolina. (Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images) — Small businesses like this one need our support

On this traditional day of shopping and excess, the Black Friday where businesses hope to turn the red ink to black for the year, we need to remember the excessive red ink that has poured in a flood over small and locally owned businesses during the pandemic. The potential for failure and closure of small businesses has been extremely high for months, with some 60% reporting back in April that they had less than five months of likely survival without aid. Though some was forthcoming with the passage of the CARES Act, there has been no action on getting more aid to these businesses since the PPP program, and the effectiveness of that has been questioned more than once. Yet these businesses are the literal backbone of the economy and the way that money stays in communities. According the the Small Business Administration, some 60.6 million Americans are employed by small businesses in 2020, 47.1% of all employees in the United States. The 31.7 million small businesses represent 99.9% of all businesses in the country. They make up the livelihoods of our neighbors, friends, and communities.

And that is the point of this diary today, on a day when many are turning to that 0.1% of businesses to buy gifts for the upcoming holidays. This year, big businesses will expect to see even more action on this day than usual, as long as they have a significant presence online, since many will not be shopping in person as is traditional on Black Friday. But it is the small and local businesses that we need to pay attention to, to give our support and our dollars to, so that they can continue to sustain our local economies and our communities. It’s also well to remember that many local businesses give back to their communities in a wide variety of ways: local charitable giving, support for local causes, socially conscious business models, and many other ways of supporting the communities that give them life and livelihoods.

So this year, we should all look past this Black Friday and save our shopping for tomorrow, Small Business Saturday. Search out small and local businesses that you can buy gifts from. Take a break from Thanksgiving leftovers and order out from local restaurants (especially those that also do business locally with farmers and other local suppliers.) Give your money to those who will keep it in your own community and help strengthen it’s economy. Seek businesses that fulfill a larger social purpose with what they do. It’s as easy as using your favorite search engine and seeking out “Small Business Saturday in xxxx” or “local business in xxxx” to find a host of local businesses that you can support this holiday season. Look at the lists compiled by activists and media figures that seek to promote small and minority-owned businesses (Oprah and Beyoncé have both put these out recently.) As an example of this, in and near my own community of Durham I have recently given my business to both Bright Black candles (a very socially active and minority-owned business) and Benevolence Farm (a business that helps recently released female prisoners.) This is the kind of socially conscious and local spending that we all should keep in mind this holiday season.

After all, it’s your own community that you’ll be supporting.

An Excellent Primer on Why There Will Not Be a Coup No Matter What Trump Does

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Friday November 20, 2020 · 2:03 PM PST

2020/11/20 · 14:03

There has been a lot of breathless worry here and elsewhere over all the moves that the Trump campaign has been making in their (pseudo)fight to try and overturn the election of Joe Biden. Many pundits and commentators have postulated ways in which Trump might try to overturn the election well beyond the ridiculous legal actions that have been taken so far. There’s been much made of the analysis Van Jones offered in his TEDtalk, for instance. Now, with the summoning of the top GOP legislative leaders from Michigan to the White House, this kind of speculation has reached a fever pitch. It’s frightening to even think that we might see our democracy subverted by underhanded moves that use the machinery of the state (and the Electoral College in particular) to change the loss of Donald Trump into a victory.

But we all need to breathe, relax a moment, and remember that Trump and his enablers do not have control of all the mechanisms that would allow a “soft” coup of this kind to actually succeed. There are numerous Democratic officials in key places that can and will block any avenue by which such a thing could be done. Don’t believe me?

Well, don’t take my word for it. Take the word of constitutional lawyer T. Greg Doucette, who has explored these issues extensively. As Doucette himself says, he heard so much of this kind of talk on his Twitter feed and elsewhere, he felt compelled to try and lay it to rest, which he’s done with a fantastic (and fairly funny) video:

YouTube Video

Be warned that the video is 50 minutes long, but I assure you it will be the best 50 minutes you spend on anything all week.

Doucette’s argument is that, essentially, every possible path to a soft coup runs up against the hard wall of the US House of Representatives and its Democratic majority and their authority under the The Electoral Count Act, 3 USC §1-17. There is simply no way for the actions of the state legislatures that might try to flip slates of electors without the consent of the Democratic governors of the critical states (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania) to produce even a situation where we have the 12th Amendment apply, much less where Trump comes out with a win in the Electoral College. He lays out the case in fantastic detail and with a solid grounding in the work of other legal scholars that I have listed below. Basically, Trump may be trying a soft coup, but it is one that is doomed to failure. He might even manage to push things far enough to prevent Joe Biden from becoming president on Jan. 20th, 2021, but even that will only get the country...Acting President Nancy Pelosi (not exactly the preferred outcome for the GOP.) Watch the video for his whole argument, and then breathe a bit and go enjoy your Thanksgiving. Goodness knows, we have a lot more to be thankful for than we might have this year.

References from T. Greg Doucette’s video:

EXPERTS TO READ

Congressional Research Service on counting electoral votes (published 15 November 2016)

Law Professor Edward Foley on disputed presidential elections (published Winter 2019)

Scott Anderson on resolving contested presidential elections (published 23 October 2020)

CONSTITUTION AND STATUTES TO READ

Constitution Article I, Section 5

Constitution Article II, Section 1

The 12th Amendment

The 20th Amendment

The Electoral Count Act, 3 USC §1-17

The Presidential Succession Act, 3 USC §19

By the way, just in case anyone thinks that there might be a “hard” coup using the Insurrection Act or other action by the military...you can relax about that too. The military leadership has already made it as clear as serving officers can that they will not obey an order from Donald Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, nor will they otherwise act to keep him in power against the will of the voters. Simply put, they hate Trump and will be (quietly) glad when he’s gone and a man they actually trust (Joe Biden) is their Commander-in-Chief.

Edit: Wow! Rec List! But the credit belong to Doucette and his clear-headed thinking about what we face and what we don’t.

Stwriley

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Saturday October 03, 2020 · 6:55 PM PDT

2020/10/03 · 18:55

UNITED STATES - MARCH 12: Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., talks with reporters in the basement of the Capitol on Thursday, March 12, 2020. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)

So, I received a very interesting call on my seldom-used landline tonight. When the phone rang, I checked the caller ID as always do, since it’s a number I virtually never give out and I get a lot of SPAM calls on it. The ID said it was from the polling firm Dynata, so I actually picked up. Never one to dodge a political poll, I told the nice but obviously inexperience young woman that I’d answer their questions.

At first, it seemed like any poll. They asked to speak to the youngest voter in the house (which is me, though I’m probably not as young as they’d hoped at 57.) Then there was a series of standard polling questions about the presidential, NC Senate, and NC Governor races. Then the pollster went into a series of questions about recent news. They’d already tended to focus questions on the Senate race, so I had assumed they were doing a Senate poll or were working for one of the campaigns. Which one rapidly became apparent. After asking a couple of general open-answer questions about what I had heard recently about each candidate, they read a series of statements about both Cunningham and Tillis, but with a definite pro-Tillis stance. In particular, they were concentrating on two things: 1) the sexting scandal that just broke about Cunningham and 2) Tillis’ support for the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett. They were very obviously trying to test messaging to use to support Tillis’ voting to confirm Barrett before the election and to attack Cunningham on the sexting. Being the died-in-the-wool Democrat that I am, I did my best to make a hash of their polling and squash the messaging attempts. But it looks like the Tillis campaign is trying to see if the sexting thing will have any legs and to see if Tillis has cover to vote for Barrett. What the effects are, we’ll see, but voters in NC should be aware that this poll is in the field and they may be calling you in the next couple of days. It’s interesting that they were testing this message on me, since my area code identifies me as a Triangle resident, which is not an area where Tillis has as much traction. It may well be that they want to find out how to try to win back suburban voters in the Triangle to Tillis, but if that’s their aim, then they’ll need to do a lot better than this.

I Just Got a Highly Questionable Fundraising Email from the Trump Campaign

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Tuesday June 16, 2020 · 3:18 PM PDT

2020/06/16 · 15:18

NEW YORK, NY - JUNE 16: Business mogul Donald Trump rides an escalator to a press event to announce his candidacy for the U.S. presidency at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015 in New York City. Trump is the 12th Republican who has announced running for the White House. (Photo by Christopher Gregory/Getty Images) — He actually wants us to remember this

I’ve been signed up to the Trump campaign’s email blasts for a while, in the spirit of knowing what the enemy is up to. Many of these emails have been reported on DailyKos by others and, honestly, they’re mostly generic Trumpian blather that doesn’t really rise to the level of news. As such, I’ve never bothered to share any of them here...until now.

Today’s fundraising missive from the campaign has me questioning exactly how they can make such a claim in an official fundraising letter. Not that it contains the usual Trump lies or exaggerations (those are actually in one of their milder forms, believe it or not) but that it makes a claim about the donations themselves that seems, well...illegal.

Here are screen shots of the email as I received it. I had to do these in four images since the email is stretched out by weird spacing and graphics, none of which I wanted to leave out so everyone would get the full effect.

Fundraising email from the Trump Make America Great Again Committee.

As you can see, the official committee (since it is combined fundraising committee of the Trump campaign and the RNC) is offering to match contributions by individual donors at 500%. How, exactly, they are going to do this is left unsaid, but can be of at best questionable legality. This is essentially approving a contribution in someone else’s name. How exactly the campaign will abide by the legal contribution limits for individuals while doing this is an open question. Just as importantly, it is not strictly legal to funnel money through another individual in their name to make a contribution to a campaign to avoid contribution limits. So the question then becomes, what is the source of these matching funds? If they come from one or a few individuals, then very little matching is going to actually take place, before they too run into their own contribution limits and then we’re looking at illegal campaign contributions all over again. In pretty much every instance, this looks extremely fishy.

But as we know, playing fast and loose with campaign rules and especially with contributions is par for the course for the Trump campaign. But perhaps this is something that needs looking into to find out if they really are using ordinary people as dupes to funnel in extra cash from big donors, or if they’re simply lying to their own donors and have no intention of actually matching anything. Either way, it looks like the Trump campaign is once again trying to scam the public, one way or another.

WP: Trump Admin Discussing Resuming Nuclear Weapons Tests

Stwriley

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday May 23, 2020 · 8:47 AM PDT

2020/05/23 · 08:47

Photo-showing-late-stage-mushroom-cloud-of-Ivy-Mike-test-Oct-31-1952-104-Mt-yield.png — And we thought we'd seen the last of these...

That the Trump “administration” has been a disaster for the international arms control treaty obligations of the United States is unquestionable. They’ve abrogated the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty that had contained the deployment of nuclear-armed missiles in Europe since 1987, they’re now pulling out of the Treaty on Open Skies, and they ditched the Iran Nuclear Treaty. But now they’re going to send us down an even more dangerous road, if Trump gets his way. According to the Washington Post, the administration has been discussing resuming nuclear weapons testing. While the U.S. has never ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, we have abided by it’s provisions since 1992. That could all be changing:

The Trump administration has discussed whether to conduct the first U.S. nuclear test explosion since 1992 in a move that would have far-reaching consequences for relations with other nuclear powers and reverse a decades-long moratorium on such actions, said a senior administration official and two former officials familiar with the deliberations.

The matter came up at a meeting of senior officials representing the top national security agencies May 15, following accusations from administration officials that Russia and China are conducting low-yield nuclear tests — an assertion that has not been substantiated by publicly available evidence and that both countries have denied.

It seems that the reasoning behind this is an attempt to strong-arm the Chinese into joining the nuclear arms talks with the U.S. and Russia. It’s an intimidation tactic. Unfortunately, it’s also one that’s likely to blow up (pun absolutely intended) in Trump’s face. Just the fact that the U.S. conducted such a test is dangerous (and unnecessary) according to arms control experts:

“It would be an invitation for other nuclear-armed countries to follow suit,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association. “It would be the starting gun to an unprecedented nuclear arms race. You would also disrupt the negotiations with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who may no longer feel compelled to honor his moratorium on nuclear testing.”

…

“If this administration believes that a nuclear test explosion and nuclear brinkmanship is going to coerce negotiating partners to make unilateral concessions, that’s a dangerous ploy,” Kimball said.

But, as we know, Trump doesn’t listen to experts, even ones in his own administration. The article points out that officials from the National Nuclear Security Administration objected during the discussion, but apparently had their concerns dismissed.

This move is a major escalation of Trump’s use of the military as a campaign prop and personal plaything. In trying to prove that he has the national security chops and the machismo to face down other world leaders, he keeps making these dangerous moves that decrease, rather than increase, our national security. But Trump simply doesn’t understand or care, as long as he thinks it makes him look “strong”. Hopefully, someone can distract him from this long enough that he won’t be able to manage a test before he’s thrown out of office in November. Otherwise, we might all need to start practicing those “duck and cover” drills again as Trump fosters another Cold War.

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