#also that particular poll got like twice the votes some of the others did which is funny. to me

[hasarjunadoneanythingwrong]

the plus side is 493 people agreed karna is autistic

#also that particular poll got like twice the votes some of the others did which is funny. to me #his twink swag just couldnt handle being against a highschooler #which is lore accura- #sorry #my post

[makeste]

BnHA 6th Popularity Poll Reaction Post - Risky Spoiler-Dodging Edition

hey guys, so seeing as the results from the 6th popularity poll were leaked today, I figured I would do a separate reaction + analysis post this year, rather than piling it in as an extra on top of the chapter reaction post tomorrow. I figure this makes more sense anyway, since they’re really two completely different things. also this way I can write as much as I want lol.

also, just fyi, I am still completely unspoiled for chapter 293. and probably the smart thing to do to keep it that way would be to log off tumblr and hold off posting this until tomorrow, but I apparently have no impulse control today so oh well. anyway, so I’m hoping you guys will keep this spoiler-free if you don’t mind! as always, I would prefer to just jump right in completely unaware tomorrow like Troy returning to the study room with the pizza boxes lol.

okay so this first part is just going to be my predictions. fyi I am writing this part on Wednesday night, and then I’ll add on the results part on Thursday or Friday (ETA: Thursday, apparently, since I am impatient.)

okay so first of all, just as a refresher, this poll was open to Japanese voters from Aug 3 to Sep 30. meaning chapters 279 through 285. meanwhile last year’s poll took place around the tail end of the MVA arc. so between then and now we had Heroes Rising, the Endeavor Agency arc, and the War arc up to the part where the 1-A kids took on Gigantomachia in Gunga, and started battling Tomura in Jakku. so technically only a couple of arcs, but a LOT of stuff going down in them. oh and season 4 of the anime as well

so! firstly, I predict that my truculent africanized honeybee son will hold on to his crown at #1, coming off a year in which he did some internship-boosted soul searching, borrowed OFA in movie canon, and finished out the voting period as the my-body-moved-on-its-own character development MVP. like CALL ME CRAZY lol, but I’m pretty sure his title is safe. and then after him will be Deku and Shouto as usual

Aizawa should hopefully also have a strong showing because the dude had a banner fucking year. reunited with his old dead friend, took on Tomura with his hopelessly inept hero pals, and then chopped his fucking leg off. he had better be in the top 10. his fucking leg died for this, idk what else he has to do

Endeavor also stands a decent chance of doing well given the internship arc and the final episode of season 4. which I’m sure will go down just swimmingly if that does happen lmao. especially if he somehow manages to rank higher than...

Dabi, which I don’t think he will btw, but you never know. anyways though, but I’m thinking Dabi’s going to have a stronger showing than in past years (in the last poll he only got 367 votes and was ranked 19th). mostly because of his fight in the Gunga mansion, and his cheekily censored name reveal to...

Hawks, who is also going to rank pretty high here, I think. might be he loses some points for killing off Twice, but his back was basically to the wall there. and he has always been very popular, and I think season 4 will also give him a boost, along with his heavy involvement in the first half of the War arc

Tomura was already in 6th place last year and I think he cracks the top 5 this year. he’s gotten exponentially more popular since the MVA arc, and got a boost in the last poll even though his flashback had only just barely happened, and he hadn’t finished Awakening yet and all that stuff. anyway, so he’s only gotten cooler and more tragic since then so I think he makes a big play here

Kirishima, Momo, Tokoyami, and Mina should also hopefully do well, since the poll opened right in the middle of all that Gigantomachia action, and Toko had just got done being an absolute badass and protecting his birb dad. I don’t think he’ll quite make it to the top ten, but he should

and last but not least, I’m hoping that Mirko will come out and take the polls by storm, although I have no clue how popular she is in Japan lol. she’s clearly Horikoshi’s favorite though. she SHOULD be everyone’s favorite, but I mean, we’ll see how it goes

anyway that’s it as far as predictions! and so now, through the magic of writing stuff at different times, we will fast-forward to the part where we actually find out the results!

OH MY GOD YES, STEAMPUNK KHLKSLLKL. HERE FOR IT. JOLLY GOOD SHOW. 5 STARS

Kacchan looks SO COCKY and SO HAPPY and SO ADORABLE, YES I SAID IT. he is adorable as FUCK. I don’t quite know what it is about this particular Kacchan that just screams “LOOK HOW FUCKING CUTE MY STUPID, LOUD SON IS WITH HIS BIZARRE WINDOWPANE-LOOKING CONVERTIBLE SUNGLASS GOGGLES and his POORLY TIED CRAVAT”, but I think it’s because he looks like if a Digimon character and a FMA character had a baby

anyway, so it looks like most of the people present here are more or less who we expected to see. except that I can’t tell for sure if that’s Dabi or Shindou, and if it’s Shindou I’m going to punch somebody in the face so you will have to excuse me

Iida wearing a TRENCHCOAT and a TOP HAT with ENGINE EXHAUST GOGGLE ACCENTS is my new favorite Iida of all time. take note how there is no possible way he can wear those goggles with them sitting on top of his hat like that. plus he’s already got glasses on. these are just purely for aesthetic and IF THAT AIN’T JUST THE STEAMPUNK WAY

Deku out here speaking softly and carrying a lead pipe. Kacchan you best look out. seems like he’s done watching you take first place year after year while he languishes in the number two spot. your only hope is that he trips while attacking you because his boots are unbuckled

Shouto’s standing over there with the rest of the non-first-and-second-place characters, but what are the odds his results are actually within spitting distance of Deku’s same as always. anyway he doesn’t mind, though. also his outfit is by far the most sensible one here, but if you look closely he’s got some sort of fire extinguisher/jet pack thing strapped to his back that’s got a control switch on his belt. Shouto are you jetpacking or putting out fires

Kirishima out here all “I’m not sure what steampunk is so I’m just going to take off my shirt and pose”

AIZAWA WITH THE EYEPATCH SKLKSDLKFJLSKJLDFKJSLDFFJLDKSJFL:KS. SIR. SIR. also, lowkey furious that Horikoshi refuses to show us the automail leg that he is clearly sporting here but which we just can’t see, SHOUTO MOVE GODDAMMIT

Endeavor has TWO fire extinguisher-slash-jetpacks. THE BETTER TO... WHATEVER. look at you here in the top ten again. you really live for that controversy

HAWKS OUT HERE WITH HIS STEAMPUNK BEATS BY DRE AND HIS WEARING A RING ON EVERY FINGER. nice to see you’ve still got your wings there, kiddo. then again Deku still has both of his arms too so who even knows what is going on

BUT SERIOUSLY THOUGH, IS THIS DABI OR SHINDOU. as if I don’t know the truth deep down in my heart. y’all I am gonna flip lmao. it’s not that I dislike Shindou, strictly speaking. but just... I can’t explain what it is, but if you put him and AFO next to each other and told me “you can only punch one”, I would be having a serious crisis. just, THIS FUCKING GUY, idek. STOP SMILING

Tomura looks like he just wandered onto the set here by mistake and has no idea where he is or what is going on. it’s because you’re wearing a bigass severed hand that’s blocking your entire view, Tomura. just take the hand off your face my sweet murder dumpling

anyway! so I managed to also find a link to the full poll results while somehow managing to avoid spoilers, and then I wanted to compare the results to last year’s poll, and so I made... this

hopefully you can all see this. if you’re on desktop you might be screwed, but on mobile you should be able to click and enlarge it. I mean, assuming you actually give a fuck about boring poll analysis spreadsheets lmao

anyway, so there were actually 13k fewer votes cast this year which is a bit of a surprise. is the series not still growing in popularity? do people apparently have better things to do during their quarantine lol

anyways but despite this, and despite getting 8k fewer votes overall, Kacchan still managed almost twice as many as his closest competitor. well fought, Deku. please put down that pipe

I somehow always underestimate the power of ship popularity to influence these things. but for example, it looks like Present Mic got that Vigilantes Trio bump. ride that wave for all it’s worth my man! hell, you got me on board

Iida fucking Tenya somehow got some sort of POWER BOOST out of NOWHERE which I can’t explain at all lmao, but I’m here for it. NOT BAD FOR AN OLD MAN

Sero managed to get the exact same number of votes in both 2019 and 2020. clearly the most loyal fans in the business

Mirko being all the way down at #20 is, of course, a travesty, and I hereby nominate her to be the one to punch Shindou in the face

ngl though, the lack of a single female character in the top ten hurts just a bit. it’s not overly surprising, but still. the worst part of it is that even if you kicked Shindou to the curb and moved everyone else up one slot, it would still be all dudes since Mic beat out Momo by a margin of a little more than a hundred votes. hard to stay mad at Mic for too long, though. ah well

Tomura actually lost a bunch of votes which is a genuine surprise to me. I know the villain standom isn’t as dominant in Japan as it is in Western fandom, but still. you can go ahead and punch Shindou too I guess

Tokoyami lowkey doubled his vote count over the past year while hiding down there at #18. he is slowly becoming more powerful. biding his time

anyway so I think that’s it! I mean not really, but I’m getting kind of tired lol. so just, you know, insert the usual gripes at Overhaul’s ranking here, although we can be happy about Magne making her way onto the list (r.i.p.), and Mineta and AFO taking a very satisfying slide down (all the way out, in AFO’s case; good riddance you bum). Hadou also got a huge boost which is awesome. Mustard’s persistent ownership of the #36 spot will forever remain a mystery to me, but oh well

anyways, this was fun. and I really do feel like everyone is looking away on purpose so that when Deku brains Kacchan with that pipe in about two seconds from now, there will be no witnesses, oh my fucking god

#bnha 293 #bnha popularity poll #bakugou katsuki #midoriya izuku #todoroki shouto #aizawa shouta #shigaraki tomura #bnha #boku no hero academia #bnha spoilers #mha spoilers #bnha manga spoilers #makeste reads bnha

[biwenqing]

So this is for the day three prompt: Social Media AU for Spring Sleuthing over at @tsomdevents! I wrote this fic a while ago, and it fits perfectly for this. But I realized it was going to be more than one chapter. I will continue it once the prompt week is over!

teen | pre-relationship | WIP | ao3 link | formatted as tweets | wc:1767

WZ @theroommatedilema

i made this secret account to live tweet my two oblivious roommates having a quarantine romance. or not. they are idiots. follow to find out will they/won’t they.

he/him | Joined March 2020

WZ @theroommatedilema . March 27 we are starting week 2 of quarantine and i realized i needed to document this. my two roommates who have been dancing around each other since before shit hit the fan are driving me crazy and if i have to watch this the world has to as well.

WZ @theroommatedilema . March 27 we need to give them code names because, while i don't think either of them will find this account, best not to tempt fate. so we have 'hot chef' and 'smart aleck'.

WZ @theroommatedilema . March 27 all that out of the way, we can now get to the live tweet. hot chef was doing his laundry so he was walking around the apartment shirtless. smart aleck walked into a wall, not once, not twice, but three times. hot chef didn't help this when he put on an apron

WZ @theroommatedilema . March 28 smart aleck started the day by almost burning down our kitchen trying to make breakfast to impress hot chef. luckily i was awake and stopped things before there was a grease fire, before making breakfast myself. they both seemed to like it.

WZ @theroommatedilema . March 29 hot chef thinks we should try and exercise, but i think it is cold and slippery out, so if he expects me to join him on his morning runs, he is wrong. smart aleck did make an attempt and i got to watch him wipe out from the window. lucky for him hot chef caught him. yea i know

WZ @theroommatedilema . March 29 follow up to wipe out: hot chef helped smart aleck back into the house and then took care of him, before then still going on his run. smart aleck pouted next to me on the couch, watching out the window for when he came back like a puppy.

WZ @theroommatedilema . March 30 smart aleck has decided he needs to clean and organize the whole apartment. i think he just doesn't want to do his real job. this has led to an argument with hot chef because smart aleck has taken everything out of the kitchen cabinets and messed with his books.

WZ @theroommatedilema . March 30 as a household, we have a pretty solid 'don't touch my stuff' understanding, but that apparently goes all out the window during a pandemic. hot chef keeps all his cooking tools and supplies in a special order that makes sense only to him and i leave it be

WZ @theroommatedilema . March 30 but smart aleck wants to "help" and didnt ask if anyone wanted help so here we are. don't worry, this account isn't in vain, i can confirm that their argument is more bickering and that bickering is the stereotype of an "old married couple"

WZ @theroommatedilema . March 30 SA: but you do so much, i wanted to help! HC: if i need help, i'd ask for it SA: *arms crossed* would you? give an example of when you have asked for help. HC: ....i haven't needed help SA: bullshit! remember when you got the flu last year and didn't tell us?

WZ @theroommatedilema . March 30 SA: you practically passed out before you let WZ and i take you to see a doctor! and then you still argued about us making sure you got the food and fluids and everything you needed so you didn't die! HC: ...i didn't want either of you to get sick

WZ @theroommatedilema . March 30 SA: oh yes so ignoring the issue really helped? it’s better that you almost died? in case you didn’t already notice, smart aleck is always dramatic.

WZ @theroommatedilema . March 30 for those wondering, smart aleck is not wrong here. this is exactly how events occurred. it was only a few months after I moved in with them. for the fight i think smart aleck somehow won this round. tune in tomorrow for what happens next!

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 4 no updates because they have been pretending to ignore each other and focused on work. hot chef in particular. smart aleck claims it is because hot chef isn’t used to being cared about. he told me this in a deliberate stage whisper.

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 4 i think it is important to note that hot chef did still make dinner each night to share... he just went back to his room after.

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 5 i got a question asking what we all do for work. that’s classified. and mostly unrelated. though it is how we met in a very odd course of events.

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 5 that was not an invitation to send me more questions. i know you are all nosy, or else why would you be following this account. but we have established this account must go unnoticed.

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 5 fine. general ages = smart aleck is in his 20s. hot chef is in his 30s. and because you for some reason all want to know: i am also in my 20s.

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 5 pets = yes one. smart aleck has a pet cat named goat he inherited from a past roommate. goat the cat tries to eat anything and everything, thus the name. she particularly likes to eat house plants. she likes smart aleck the least, hot chef the most. i hold a pretty solid 2nd place.

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 6 update: they made up. a package arrived today and it was apparently a pan to replace one smart aleck had destroyed. hot chef made smart aleck’s favorite dinner. SA talked the whole way through to meal, and HC looked smitten. so we’re back to normal.

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 10 where do we rank the level of domestic where one person brushes their teeth/gets ready for the day while the other is in the shower? bonus points for some mild discussion and/or bickering.

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 11 smart aleck has a new scheme. he is trying to persuade hot chef to teach him to cook. so far HC has held firm. we mark day one of this new standoff.

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 12 i’ve been asked a few times why i don’t just use initials of smart aleck and hot chef’s names. it’s all part of keeping this hidden. i have also chosen nicknames that i don’t think they would think i’d use for them.

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 12 smart aleck is the type to figure this out if i’m not careful. he’s both too clever and too dumb for his own good. which is part of the reason i must document all of this, so i can shove it in his face later.

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 12 we are also on day two of cooking teaching standoff. i think some of you rightly assume SA is imagining hot chef standing behind him and idk helping him cut vegetables

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 13 standoff continues. i made dinner to see if that would throw the balance off. no change yet

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 14 resolution! hot chef did give in, on the condition that he teaches both of us. i didn’t manage to escape because smart aleck seemed to decide this was the only way. don’t know how this fits into whatever romantic daydreams he had.

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 14 i see those comments that this might give me a chance to put them together. but i think it is more fun to not help them at all. they need to do this on their own

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 15 to do such teaching, a grocery shopping mission is needed. because the world is... well. i suggested just they go together so fine. maybe i will try and assist.

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 15 level of domestic of sneaking things you know your “just friends roommate” loves but won’t buy for themselves in the cart without them knowing?

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 15 you ask how i know that and it is of course because smart aleck, so proud of himself, announced it as soon as he reentered the apartment. goat the cat tried to get into the bags to eat raw fish while this occurred.

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 16 first cooking lesson, some simple stir fry. i already can cook this so i get to just perch at the counter and watch. vote on the poll below how you think this will turn out

[hands brushing softly] [sparks, and not the sexy kind] [food hopefully?]

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 16 everyone who voted for fire won. the neighbors are quite upset. and not even goat the cat will eat the final product. i ordered take out and a fresh fire extinguisher while they dealt with the mild fire and smoke detector.

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 17 smart aleck is pouting so there will be no cooking lessons today. the good news (for his employer) is he seems to actually be focusing on doing his job.

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 20 hot chef actually asked smart aleck if he wanted to try cooking again. very interesting. this has mostly been coming from SA’s side, so i would call this positive movement.

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 20 SA has completely perked up and agreed.

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 20 oh apparently the plan is SA will watch and i get the place as the student in the kitchen. this is probably safer for everyone

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 21 for those asking what happen: dinner was made with no issue. I was in charge of the main dish and that left HC to work on side dishes. SA even helped wash and chop some vegetables. goat took some chicken right off SA’s plate and ran away with it growling.

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 21 i take that to mean the cat approves of my cooking. but she also tried to steal things from the trash, so that isn’t much of an endorsement.

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 22 SA is avoiding work and trying to clean again. he actually asked if he could move stuff around. growth.

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 25 hot chef spotted leaving smart aleck’s room this morning?

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 25 false alarm, he was just looking for the cat.

WZ @theroommatedilema . April 30 final report for this month: progress made in communication. new together activity established. the apartment has not burned down. a baby step closer, yet still so far away from them figuring this out...

#the sleuth of ming dynasty #tsomd #wang zhi #tang fan #sui zhou #springsleuthing #my fic #we'll pretend any grammar or spelling issues are on purpose idk amshauwhroaw #it is very late and i am Tired #sleuth trio #idk how dong'er fits into this i'm thinking on it #since this is only the start

[antoine-roquentin]

Here’s some Real interference in election campaigns

[Slightly abridged version of chapter 18 in William Blum’s Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower; see it for notes]

Philippines, 1950s:

Flagrant manipulation by the CIA of the nation’s political life, featuring stage-managed elections with extensive disinformation campaigns, heavy financing of candidates, writing their speeches, drugging the drinks of one of the opponents of the CIA-supported candidate so he would appear incoherent; plotting the assassination of another candidate. The oblivious New York Times declared that “It is not without reason that the Philippines has been called “democracy’s showcase in Asia”.

Italy, 1948-1970s:

Multifarious campaigns to repeatedly sabotage the electoral chances of the Communist Party and ensure the election of the Christian Democrats, long-favored by Washington.

Lebanon, 1950s:

The CIA provided funds to support the campaigns of President Camille Chamoun and selected parliamentary candidates; other funds were targeted against candidates who had shown less than total enchantment with US interference in Lebanese politics.

Indonesia, 1955:

A million dollars were dispensed by the CIA to a centrist coalition’s electoral campaign in a bid to cut into the support for President Sukarno’s party and the Indonesian Communist Party.

Vietnam, 1955:

The US was instrumental in South Vietnam canceling the elections scheduled to unify North and South because of the certainty that the North Vietnamese communist leader, Ho Chi Minh, would easily win.

British Guiana/Guyana, 1953-64:

For 11 years, two of the oldest democracies in the world, Great Britain and the United States, went to great lengths to prevent Cheddi Jagan – three times the democratically elected leader – from occupying his office. Using a wide variety of tactics – from general strikes and disinformation to terrorism and British legalisms – the US and Britain forced Jagan out of office twice during this period.

Japan, 1958-1970s:

The CIA emptied the US treasury of millions to finance the conservative Liberal Democratic Party in parliamentary elections, “on a seat-by-seat basis”, while doing what it could to weaken and undermine its opposition, the Japanese Socialist Party. The 1961-63 edition of the State Department’s annual Foreign Relations of the United States, published in 1996, includes an unprecedented disclaimer that, because of material left out, a committee of distinguished historians thinks “this published compilation does not constitute a ‘thorough, accurate, and reliable documentary record of major United States foreign policy decisions’” as required by law. The deleted material involved US actions from 1958-1960 in Japan, according to the State Department’s historian.

Nepal, 1959:

By the CIA’s own admission, it carried out an unspecified “covert action” on behalf of B.P. Koirala to help his Nepali Congress Party win the national parliamentary election. It was Nepal’s first national election ever, and the CIA was there to initiate them into the wonderful workings of democracy.

Laos, 1960:

CIA agents stuffed ballot boxes to help a hand-picked strongman, Phoumi Nosavan, set up a pro-American government.

Brazil, 1962:

The CIA and the Agency for International Development expended millions of dollars in federal and state elections in support of candidates opposed to leftist President João Goulart, who won anyway.

Dominican Republic, 1962:

In October 1962, two months before election day, US Ambassador John Bartlow Martin got together with the candidates of the two major parties and handed them a written notice, in Spanish and English, which he had prepared. It read in part: “The loser in the forthcoming election will, as soon as the election result is known, publicly congratulate the winner, publicly recognize him as the President of all the Dominican people, and publicly call upon his own supporters to so recognize him. … Before taking office, the winner will offer Cabinet seats to members of the loser’s party. (They may decline).”

As matters turned out, the winner, Juan Bosch, was ousted in a military coup seven months later, a slap in the face of democracy which neither Martin nor any other American official did anything about.

Guatemala, 1963:

The US overthrew the regime of General Miguel Ydigoras because he was planning to step down in 1964, leaving the door open to an election; an election that Washington feared would be won by the former president, liberal reformer and critic of US foreign policy, Juan José Arévalo. Ydigoras’s replacement made no mention of elections.

Bolivia, 1966:

The CIA bestowed $600,000 upon President René Barrientos and lesser sums to several right-wing parties in a successful effort to influence the outcome of national elections. Gulf Oil contributed two hundred thousand more to Barrientos.

Chile, 1964-70:

Major US interventions into national elections in 1964 and 1970, and congressional elections in the intervening years. Socialist Salvador Allende fell victim in 1964, but won in 1970 despite a multimillion-dollar CIA operation against him. The Agency then orchestrated his downfall in a 1973 military coup.

Portugal, 1974-5:

In the years following the coup in 1974 by military officers who talked like socialists, the CIA revved up its propaganda machine while funneling many millions of dollars to support “moderate” candidates, in particular Mario Soares and his (so-called) Socialist Party. At the same time, the Agency enlisted social-democratic parties of Western Europe to provide further funds and support to Soares. It worked. The Socialist Party became the dominant power.

Australia, 1974-75:

Despite providing considerable support for the opposition, the United States failed to defeat the Labor Party, which was strongly against the US war in Vietnam and CIA meddling in Australia. The CIA then used “legal” methods to unseat the man who won the election, Edward Gough Whitlam.

Jamaica, 1976:

A CIA campaign to defeat social democrat Michael Manley’s bid for reelection, featuring disinformation, arms shipments, labor unrest, economic destabilization, financial support for the opposition, and attempts upon Manley’s life. Despite it all, he was victorious.

Panama, 1984, 1989:

In 1984, the CIA helped finance a highly questionable presidential electoral victory for one of Manuel Noriega’s men. The opposition cried “fraud”, but the new president was welcomed at the White House. By 1989, Noriega was no longer a Washington favorite, so the CIA provided more than $10 million dollars to his electoral opponents.

Nicaragua, 1984, 1990:

In 1984, the United States, trying to discredit the legitimacy of the Sandinista government’s scheduled election, covertly persuaded the leading opposition coalition to not take part. A few days before election day, some other rightist parties on the ballot revealed that US diplomats had been pressing them to drop out of the race as well. The CIA also tried to split the Sandinista leadership by placing phoney full-page ads in neighboring countries. But the Sandinistas won handily in a very fair election monitored by hundreds of international observers.

Six years later, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Washington’s specially created stand-in for the CIA, poured in millions of dollars to defeat Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas in the February elections. NED helped organize the Nicaraguan opposition, UNO, building up the parties and organizations that formed and supported this coalition.

Perhaps most telling of all, the Nicaraguan people were made painfully aware that a victory by the Sandinistas would mean a continuation of the relentlessly devastating war being waged against them by Washington through their proxy army, the Contras.

Haiti, 1987-1988:

After the Duvalier dictatorship came to an end in 1986, the country prepared for its first free elections ever. However, Haiti’s main trade union leader declared that Washington was working to undermine the left. US aid organizations, he said, were encouraging people in the countryside to identify and reject the entire left as “communist”. Meanwhile, the CIA was involved in a range of support for selected candidates until the US Senate Intelligence Committee ordered the Agency to cease its covert electoral action.

Bulgaria, 1990-1991 and Albania, 1991-1992:

With no regard for the fragility of these nascent democracies, the US interfered broadly in their elections and orchestrated the ousting of their elected socialist governments.

Russia, 1996:

For four months (March-June), a group of veteran American political consultants worked secretly in Moscow in support of Boris Yeltsin’s presidential campaign. Boris Yeltsin was being counted on to run with the globalized-free market ball and it was imperative that he cross the goal line. The Americans emphasized sophisticated methods of message development, polling, focus groups, crowd staging, direct-mailing, etc., and advised against public debates with the Communists. Most of all they encouraged the Yeltsin campaign to “go negative” against the Communists, painting frightening pictures of what the Communists would do if they took power, including much civic upheaval and violence, and, of course, a return to the worst of Stalinism. Before the Americans came on board, Yeltsin was favored by only six percent of the electorate. In the first round of voting, he edged the Communists 35 percent to 32, and was victorious in the second round 54 to 40 percent.

Mongolia, 1996:

The National Endowment for Democracy worked for several years with the opposition to the governing Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRR, the former Communists) who had won the 1992 election to achieve a very surprising electoral victory. In the six-year period leading up to the 1996 elections, NED spent close to a million dollars in a country with a population of some 2.5 million, the most significant result of which was to unite the opposition into a new coalition, the National Democratic Union. Borrowing from Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America, the NED drafted a “Contract With the Mongolian Voter”, which called for private property rights, a free press and the encouragement of foreign investment. The MPRR had already instituted Western-style economic reforms, which had led to widespread poverty and wiped out much of the communist social safety net. But the new government promised to accelerate the reforms, including the privatization of housing. By 1998 it was reported that the US National Security Agency had set up electronic listening posts in Outer Mongolia to intercept Chinese army communications, and the Mongolian intelligence service was using nomads to gather intelligence in China itself.

Bosnia, 1998:

Effectively an American protectorate, with Carlos Westendorp – the Spanish diplomat appointed to enforce Washington’s offspring: the 1995 Dayton peace accords – as the colonial Governor-General. Before the September elections for a host of offices, Westendorp removed 14 Croatian candidates from the ballot because of alleged biased coverage aired in Bosnia by neighboring Croatia’s state television and politicking by ethnic Croat army soldiers. After the election, Westendorp fired the elected president of the Bosnian Serb Republic, accusing him of creating instability. In this scenario those who appeared to support what the US and other Western powers wished were called “moderates”, and allowed to run for and remain in office. Those who had other thoughts were labeled “hard-liners”, and ran the risk of a different fate. When Westendorp was chosen to assume this position of “high representative” in Bosnia in May 1997, The Guardian of London wrote that “The US secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, praised the choice. But some critics already fear that Mr. Westendorp will prove too lightweight and end up as a cipher in American hands.”

Nicaragua, 2001

Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega was once again a marked man. US State Department officials tried their best to publicly associate him with terrorism, including just after September 11 had taken place, and to shamelessly accuse Sandinista leaders of all manner of violations of human rights, civil rights, and democracy. The US ambassador literally campaigned for Ortega’s opponent, Enrique Bolaños. A senior analyst in Nicaragua for Gallup, the international pollsters, was moved to declare: “Never in my whole life have I seen a sitting ambassador get publicly involved in a sovereign country’s electoral process, nor have I ever heard of it.”

At the close of the campaign, Bolaños announced: “If Ortega comes to power, that would provoke a closing of aid and investment, difficulties with exports, visas and family remittances. I’m not just saying this. The United States says this, too. We cannot close our eyes and risk our well-being and work. Say yes to Nicaragua, say no to terrorism.”

In the end, the Sandinistas lost the election by about ten percentage points after steadily leading in the polls during much of the campaign.

Bolivia, 2002

The American bête noire here was Evo Morales, Amerindian, former member of Congress, socialist, running on an anti-neoliberal, anti-big business, and anti-coca eradication campaign. The US Ambassador declared: “The Bolivian electorate must consider the consequences of choosing leaders somehow connected with drug trafficking and terrorism.” Following September 11, painting Officially Designated Enemies with the terrorist brush was de rigueur US foreign policy rhetoric.

The US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs warned that American aid to the country would be in danger if Mr. Morales was chosen. Then the ambassador and other US officials met with key figures from Bolivia’s main political parties in an effort to shore up support for Morales’s opponent, Sanchez de Lozada. Morales lost the vote.

Slovakia, 2002

To defeat Vladimir Meciar, former prime minister, a man who did not share Washington’s weltanschauung about globalization, the US ambassador explicitly warned the Slovakian people that electing him would hurt their chances of entry into the European Union and NATO. The US ambassador to NATO then arrived and issued his own warning. The National Endowment for Democracy was also on hand to influence the election. Meciar lost.

El Salvador, 2004

Washington’s target in this election was Schafik Handal, candidate of the FMLN, the leftist former guerrilla group. He said he would withdraw El Salvador’s 380 troops from Iraq as well as reviewing other pro-US policies; he would also take another look at the privatizations of Salvadoran industries, and would reinstate diplomatic relations with Cuba. His opponent was Tony Saca of the incumbent Arena Party, a pro-US, pro-free market organization of the extreme right, which in the bloody civil war days had featured death squads and the infamous assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero.

During a February visit to the country, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, met with all the presidential candidates except Handal. He warned of possible repercussions in US-Salvadoran relations if Handal were elected. Three Republican congressmen threatened to block the renewal of annual work visas for some 300,000 Salvadorans in the United States if El Salvador opted for the FMLN. And Congressman Thomas Tancredo of Colorado stated that if the FMLN won, “it could mean a radical change” in US policy on remittances to El Salvador.

Washington’s attitude was exploited by Arena and the generally conservative Salvadoran press, who mounted a scare campaign, and it became widely believed that a Handal victory could result in mass deportations of Salvadorans from the United States and a drop in remittances. Arena won the election with about 57 percent of the vote to some 36 percent for the FMLN.

After the election, the US ambassador declared that Washington’s policies concerning immigration and remittances had nothing to do with any election in El Salvador. There appears to be no record of such a statement being made in public before the election when it might have had a profound positive effect for the FMLN.

Afghanistan, 2004

The US ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, went around putting great pressure on one candidate after another to withdraw from the presidential race so as to insure the victory for Washington’s man, the incumbent, Hamid Karzai in the October election. There was nothing particularly subtle about it. Khalilzad told each one what he wanted and then asked them what they needed. Karzai, a long-time resident in the United States, was described by the Washington Post as “a known and respected figure at the State Department and National Security Council and on Capitol Hill.”

“Our hearts have been broken because we thought we could have beaten Mr. Karzai if this had been a true election,” said Sayed Mustafa Sadat Ophyani, campaign manager for Younis Qanooni, Karzai’s leading rival. “But it is not. Mr. Khalilzad is putting a lot of pressure on us and does not allow us to fight a good election campaign.”.

None of the major candidates actually withdrew from the election, which Karzai won with about 56 percent of the votes.

[patriotsnet]

Who Raises More Money Democrats Or Republicans

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/who-raises-more-money-democrats-or-republicans/

Who Raises More Money Democrats Or Republicans

The Fundraising Arm Of The Us Democratic Party Raised More Money In July Than Its Republican Counterpart Helped By Big Contributions From Billionaire Donors Including Investor George Soros And Former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt Disclosures Filed On Friday With The Federal Election Commission Showed The Democratic National Committee Raised About $131 Million Last Month Above The $129 Million Raised By The Republican National Committee

Reuters

The fundraising arm of the U.S.Democratic Party raised more money in July than its Republican counterpart, helped by big contributions from billionaire donors including investor George Soros and former Chief Executive Eric Schmidt.

Disclosures filed on Friday with the Federal Election Commission showed the Democratic National Committee raised about $13.1 million last month, above the $12.9 million raised by the Republican National Committee. The RNC still had more money in the bank at the close of the month – $79 million compared to nearly $68 million held by the DNC – although Democrats narrowed the gap.

Raising more money does not necessarily translate into Election Day victory, but a big bank account helps U.S. parties support their candidates’ campaigns and pays for ads and polling. Democrats have narrow majorities in the U.S.Senate and the House of Representatives, and losing control of either in the November 2022 contests would be a blow to Democratic President Joe Biden’s agenda.

While the DNC has raised slightly more than the RNC this year, Republicans have been spending money more aggressively. It also spent more in July, shelling out $1 million to JDB Marketing Inc, a Mount Pleasant, South Carolina firm that specializes in direct mail fundraising.

Some of the DNC’s largest outlays during the month were also to support fundraising efforts, including more than $1.1 million to RWT Production, a direct mail firm from Annandale, Virginia.

READ MORE ON:

Democrats Raised Twice The Money Republicans Did In Five 2020 Races That Could Determine Control Of The Senate

U.S.Senate2020 ElectionDemocratic PartyRepublican Party

Democratic challengers raised nearly twice the amount Republicans did in first-quarter fundraising in five must-watch races that could determine who controls the Senate, the latest campaign finance figures showed.

Republican incumbents facing tough re-elections races in Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, Maine and North Carolina all raised significantly less cash than their Democratic rivals in the first three months of 2020.

These contests are some of the best opportunities Democrats have to flip the seats and regain the Senate majority in November. They’re rapidly becoming some of the most expensive and contentious matchups in the country. In Kentucky, for example, the multi-million dollar ad war between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Amy McGrath started 16 months before Election Day.

In some races, such as Maine and North Carolina, Democrats actually doubled the amount of cash brought in by their Republican challengers. In Maine, state representative Sara Gideon raised nearly three times more money than four-term incumbent Susan Collins.

The Senate is now made up of 53 Republicans, 45 Democrats and two independents who caucus with the Democrats. Democrats need to win four seats to regain control of the chamber, or three seats if the vice president is a Democrat. The vice president serves as the “president of the Senate” and can cast tie-breaking votes.

Thirty S&p 500 Ceos Vote For Biden With Their Wallet Though They Dont Contribute As Much As Trumps 15 Do

S&P 500 chief executives have combined to give more money to Trump’s campaign than Biden’s, even as the Democratic challenger has more S&P CEOs as donors.

+0.47%

As the Nov. 3 election sparks record campaign contributions, the CEOs of S&P 500 companies are helping to fund the war chests of President Donald Trump and challenger Joe Biden, while also contributing to other Republican and Democratic politicians.

In their political giving as individuals, these chief executives have combined to give more to Trump than Biden. Some 15 CEOs whose companies are components of the S&P 500 US:SPX have donated a total of $2.489 million to Trump’s principal campaign committee, its joint fundraising groups with the Republican National Committee or pro-Trump super PACs.

Meanwhile, 30 chief execs have contributed $536,100 to Biden’s main campaign committee, its joint groups with the Democratic National Committee or pro-Biden super PACs. These figures come from a MarketWatch analysis of processed Federal Election Commission data on individual contributions made between January 2019 and August 2020. Anyone who held the CEO job in 2019 or 2020 at a company that was part of the S&P 500 is included.

S&P 500 CEOs giving their own money to Trump’s campaign

* Former CEO who held the position during the FEC’s 2020 election cycle that started Jan. 1, 2019

Total $536,100.00

* Former CEO who held the position during the FEC’s 2020 election cycle that started Jan. 1, 2019

Companies’ responses

Here’s How The Deficit Performed Under Republican And Democratic Presidents From Reagan To Trump

This article was updated Aug. 2 to include a graph with the annual federal deficit in constant dollars.

A viral post portrays Democrats, not Republicans, as the party of fiscal responsibility, with numbers about the deficit under recent presidents to make the case.

Alex Cole, a political news editor at the website Newsitics, . Within a few hours, several Facebook users postedscreenshots of the tweet, which claims that Republican presidents have been more responsible for contributing to the deficit over the past four decades. 

Those posts racked up several hundred likes and shares. We also found , where it has been upvoted more than 53,000 times.

“Morons: ‘Democrats cause deficits,’” the original tweet reads.

Reagan took the deficit from 70 billion to 175 billion. Bush 41 took it to 300 billion. Clinton got it to zero. Bush 43 took it from 0 to 1.2 trillion.Obama halved it to 600 billion. Trump’s got it back to a trillion.Morons: “Democrats cause deficits.”

— Alex Cole July 23, 2019

Screenshots of the tweet on Facebook were flagged as part of the company’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed.

At PolitiFact, we’vereportedextensively on how Republicans and Democrats often try to pin the federal deficit on each other — muddying the facts in the process. So we wanted to see if this Facebook post is true.

Some people confuse the federal deficit with the debt — but they’re two separate concepts.

Featured Fact-check

The First Modern Campaign Finance Restrictions Were Soon Followed By A Boom In Pac Spending

FEC, Corrado, Center for Responsive Politics

In the early 1970s, and particularly after the election spending abuses revealed in the Watergate scandal, Congress put new limits on donations to candidates. But the overall amount of money in politics didn’t decline. The money instead started going to PACs, or political action committees, rather than candidates. Thousands of new ones were formed, and they started raising hundreds of millions of dollars each year overall. This shows a problem for would-be campaign finance regulators: If one particular aspect of election spending is regulated or capped, big money will try to find another way in.

Congress Responds More To The Preferences Of The Wealthy Than To Those Of Average People

Gilens and Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics

Who really matters in our democracy — the general public, or wealthy elites? These charts, from a study by political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern, seek to answer that question. The first one — the flat line — shows that as more and more average citizens support action on an issue, they’re not any more likely to get what they want. That’s a shocking finding in a democracy. In contrast, the next chart shows that as more economic elites want a certain policy change, they do become more likely to get what they want. Specifically, if fewer than 20 percent of wealthy Americans supported a policy change, it only happened about 18 percent of the time. But when 80 percent of them were in support, the change ended up happening 45 percent of the time. There’s no similar effect for average Americans.

Big Problems With Small Money Republicans Catch Up To Democrats In Online Giving

Alex Seitz-Wald

WASHINGTON — Republicans are beginning to catch up with Democrats in online fundraising, creating for the first time in modern history a political landscape where both parties are largely funded by small donations — for better or, some say, for worse.

Democrats, who have dominated online fundraising since the early days of the internet, have claimed that the billions they raise in small donations are evidence that they are the party of the people, less reliant on wealthy donors and business interests than the GOP.

Republicans have spent years playing catch-up, mostly unsuccessfully. But now, just in time for the 2022 midterm elections, they are starting to pull even, thanks in large part to former President Donald Trump and his army of online devotees.

“This is the harvest of the seeds of digital infrastructure Republicans have been planting for years,” said Matt Gorman, a GOP strategist who worked for the party’s congressional campaign arm during the last midterm election. “That’s why you’re seeing things like freshman members of the House raising over $1 million . In 2018, we were begging folks to raise a fifth of that.”

Even out of office, Trump continues to raise massive sums of money, largely online. He announced Saturday that his political groups had collected nearly $82 million in the first half of the year , giving him a war chest of more than $102 million.

Democratic Party Committees Raised More Money Than Republican Committees In 2013

Paul Blumenthal

WASHINGTON — The three major Democratic Party committees raised $16 million more than their Republican Party counterparts in 2013.

The Democratic committees raised $193 million for the year, compared with $177 million for the three Republican committees, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.

The fundraising success for the Democratic committees stems from big numbers posted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The DCCC raised $75.8 million, the most of any party committee, while the DSCC pulled in $52.7 million. Both committees topped their Republican counterparts by more than $15 million.

“Our substantial fundraising lead is the result of one major dynamic: Americans are ready to replace this broken Republican Congress with leaders who have the right priorities and who will focus on solving problems,” DCCC Chairman Steve Israel said in a statement.

The Republican National Committee, however, beat the Democratic National Committee in head-to-head fundraising for the year. In 2013, the RNC raised $80.6, almost $16 million more than the $64.7 million pulled in by the DNC.

The money raised by these committees will finance large advertising purchases in battleground House and Senate races, among other things.

Report: Trump Has Raised More Money In California Than Most Democrat Candidates

California is well known as arguably the most liberal state in America, however recent statistics may shock both Democrats and Republicans.

It looks like there may be more Trump supporters in the “deep blue” state of California than most people think.

According to the news site Cal Matters, President Trump comes in third place for the most money raised in California out of all the Democratic candidates. He is just behind Mayor Pete Buttigieg of Indiana and Senator Kamala Harris who resides in California. 

Check out what Cal Matters reported:

This may come as surprise to the president, the national media and more than a few Californians, but there are plenty of Trump supporters in the “Resistance State,” too. And since the beginning of the year, they’ve been spending a lot of money to keep the president in the White House.

New campaign finance statistics show that President Donald Trump raised $3.2 million—more money from the California donor class than all of his Democratic challengers, but two.

Not only that, but the Trump campaign collected more from itemized small donors—those who gave in increments of less than $100 at a time—than anyone else in the field. The president bested even Democratic contender Bernie Sanders in the small-donor sweepstakes.

But it’s not all pixie dust for Trump in California: 89% of all itemized presidential campaign donations from Californians went to contenders out to defeat him.

More than $3 million has come since the beginning of this year.

Democratic Senate Hopefuls Are Raising Tons Of Money They’re Also Spending It

Congressional races heat up as Dems try to fl…02:14

Democratic Senate hopeful Jaime Harrison of South Carolina raised $57 million between July and September. Sara Gideon in Maine raised more than $39 million in that same period. And Mark Kelly in Arizona brought in $38.7 million. 

These eye-popping numbers shattered the previous record for fundraising, Beto O’Rourke’s $38 million cash haul in the third quarter of 2018. 

Now  the Democrats are spending that money in the face of massive Republican super PAC funds. And it’s left many Republican candidates with more cash on hand than the Democrats in the final weeks of the race.

In South Carolina, where the Senate race is unexpectedly tight, Harrison’s $57 million in three months was double Republican incumbent Senator Lindsey Graham’s $28 million haul, a state record for a Republican. Records show from July through September, Harrison spent more than $55 million. According to his October FEC filing, Harrison paid AL Media LLC more than $42 million over three months for TV, radio and digital advertising. He also spent another $6.5 million for digital advertising and services to Mothership Strategies, and $2 million to Blueprint Strategy LLC for radio and billboard advertising. $641,000 went to “direct mailing services.” That amounts to more than $51 million spent on ads and direct mail alone. 

Who Is Richer Democrats Or Republicans The Answer Probably Wont Surprise You

Which of the two political parties has more money, Democrats or Republicans? Most would rush to say Republicans due to the party’s ideas towards tax and money. In fact, polls have shown about 60 percent of the American people believe Republicans favor the rich. But how true is that?  can help you write about the issue but read our post first.

Presidential Campaign Spending Is Overwhelmingly On Tv Ads In Swing States

Data: Kantar, Analysis: John Sides, Washington Post

Presidential campaign money goes overwhelmingly to purchasing TV ads in just a few swing states. This map shows where ad spending was heaviest in 2012: Florida, Virginia, and Ohio, where more than $150 million was spent. Iowa, North Carolina, Colorado, and Nevada saw more than $50 million each. But most of the country saw nothing at all. Presidential campaigns have become a quadrennial stimulus bill for purple states funded by donors in red and blue states.

Democratic Party Enters 2021 In Power And Flush With Cash For A Change

The Democratic National Committee has a roughly $75 million war chest, raising the party’s hopes of keeping power in 2022 and accelerating a Democratic shift in the Sun Belt states.

After years of flirting with financial disaster, the Democratic Party entered 2021 not only in control of the White House, the House and the Senate but with more money in the bank than ever before at the start of a political cycle.

The Democratic National Committee will report to the Federal Election Commission on Sunday that it ended 2020 with $38.8 million in the bank and $3 million in debts, according to an advance look at its financial filings. In addition, there is roughly $40 million earmarked for the party, left over from its joint operations with the Biden campaign, according to people familiar with the matter. This gives the Democrats a roughly $75 million war chest at the start of President Biden’s tenure.

“This is a number that is unimaginable,” said Howard Dean, a former party chairman.

Party data, resources and infrastructure undergird candidates up and down the ballot, and Democratic officials are already dreaming of early investments in voter registration that may accelerate the political realignment Democrat are hoping to bring about in key Sun Belt states.

“We had to juggle who we were going to pay,” Tom Perez, who until earlier this month was the chairman of the D.N.C., said of the early part of his tenure, which began in 2017.

The Supreme Court Has Struck Down Many Limitations On Election Spending

Over the past four decades, Congressional attempts to regulate the campaign finance system have repeatedly been stymied by the Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds. This table lists the major cases in which the court has ruled campaign finance restrictions unconstitutional — and how closely divided the court has been in every case. The first major such case was Buckley v. Valeo, in 1976, which struck down much of the newly-adopted campaign finance infrastructure in the name of free speech. The next major campaign finance overhaul — the 2002 McCain-Feingold law — survived an initial court challenge in 2003. But after Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was replaced with the more conservative Sam Alito in 2006, the court had a majority that objected to major provisions of the law. Since then, a series of 5-4 decisions have narrowed the scope of permissible campaign finance regulations further and further.

Us Democratic Fundraising Arm Outraises Republican Counterpart In July

Jason Lange

Supporters of Democratic U.S. presidential nominee Joe Biden gather with their cars for a socially distanced election celebration as they await Biden’s remarks and fireworks in Wilmington, Delaware, U.S. November 7, 2020. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

WASHINGTON, Aug 20 – The fundraising arm of the U.S. Democratic Party raised more money in July than its Republican counterpart, helped by big contributions from billionaire donors including investor George Soros and former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt.

Disclosures filed on Friday with the Federal Election Commission showed the Democratic National Committee raised about $13.1 million last month, above the $12.9 million raised by the Republican National Committee.

The RNC still had more money in the bank at the close of the month – $79 million compared to nearly $68 million held by the DNC – although Democrats narrowed the gap.

Raising more money does not necessarily translate into Election Day victory, but a big bank account helps U.S. parties support their candidates’ campaigns and pays for ads and polling.

Democrats have narrow majorities in the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives, and losing control of either in the November 2022 contests would be a blow to Democratic President Joe Biden’s agenda.

Soros, a famed investor and a bogeyman of conservatives due to his status as a major donor for liberal causes, gave the DNC at least $250,000 in July.

Who Raised More Money In A Majority Of Tight House Races Democrats Did

Total reported in the most competitive House races

DEMOCRATS RAISED $172MILLION

With the midterm elections just weeks away, Democratic candidates have outraised their Republican opponents in a majority of the 69 most competitive House races, according to fund-raising numbers filed by the candidates on Monday. Some of the biggest earners include two Democratic women: Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey’s 11th District and Amy McGrath in Kentucky’s Sixth District.

Many Democratic candidates raised large sums from small donations online. Democrats are betting on small donor energy to make a difference in tight races.

Facing a host of tough races, Republican Party leaders have begun pulling money away from some struggling incumbents, especially in suburbs where President Trump is unpopular.

How much candidates in the most competitive House races have raised

*Incumbent shown with an asterisk.

DISTRICT

Republicans Winning Money Race As They Seek To Take Over House In 2022

The National Republican Congressional Committee announced Wednesday that it had raised $45.4 million in the second quarter of 2021, the most it has ever raised in three months of a non-election year, as Republicans seek to take over the House in 2022.

House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy This story has been updated with additional developments Wednesday.

The Most Famous Political Figures Can Make Millions In Speaking Fees

CNN

For the top echelon of famous and recognizable political figures, there’s another way to cash in after leaving offices — by giving high-priced speeches to corporate groups. Former politicians and aides from both parties participate in this practice — the more famous they are, the higher the fee they tend to be able to charge. But the undisputed king of speaking fees is Bill Clinton, who charges at least $250,000 per speech — and charged $750,000 for at least one. This chart, based on data assembled by CNN, shows how speaking fees have made Clinton over $100 million since he left office.

How Trumps Team Spent Most Of The $16 Billion It Raised Over 2 Years

Biden and Trump spar in final presidential debate

President Donald Trump‘s reelection team kicked off 2020 with what seemed like an unbeatable cash advantage, boasting a massive fundraising operation, bolstered by the joint efforts of the Republican Party.

Fast-forward 10 months and they’ve burned through a whopping $1.4 billion of the more than $1.6 billion raised over the last two years, struggling to keep up with former Vice President Joe Biden, more than what former President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign and the Democrats had raised and spent by the end of the 2012 cycle.

The revealing figures, released as the two presidential candidates debated on stage Thursday night for the last time before Election Day, came after the campaign blew through $63 million in the first two weeks of October alone — a critical time when it only brought in $44 million. The vast majority of the money spent during that time — nearly $45 million — went to television and online advertising, according to the latest disclosure report filed to the Federal Election Commission, as Biden and pro-Biden efforts ramped up his ad spending.

MORE: Trump campaign trailing behind Biden in funding, weeks before Election Day, new filings show

MORE: Trump commits to familiar playbook to define Biden in tamer final debate: ANALYSIS

So where has the president’s money gone?

MORE: Trump heads into final campaign stretch forced to play defense against Biden

Questions about staff payments

The Massive Difference In How Democrats And Republicans Raise Money

You probably have a preconceived notion of where the political parties raise their money. Republicans get lots of donations from wealthy individuals and corporate interests; Democrats get money from less rich individuals and a somewhat overlapping set of corporate interests. Well, we have news for you: That perception is completely correct.

arrow-right

At least, that is, for the parties’ Governors Associations. On Tuesday, organizations and candidates that raise money for political campaigns had to file quarterly reports with the Federal Election Commission. The Democratic Governors Association and the Republican Governors Association both reported how much they’d raised between April 1 and June 30. The RGA did much better, about $24 million raised versus under $14 million, although the DGA had more donors, about 1,500 to 400.

When money is given to these groups, which can accept unlimited donations unlike their federal counterparts, the organizations have to document who gave, and how much, and when. Organizations that give just list an address; individuals have to identify their employer. Which lets us see pretty easily how those two groups break down.

And so, we see that the RGA got a much larger percentage of their donations from organizations than did the DGA.

far86 times

Who are these beneficent individuals? The DeVos family, of Amway fame. Las Vegas megadonor Sheldon Adelson. And  Kotch? Koch? Someone named “David Koch,” if you’ve heard of him.

Congressional Staffers Can Take Trips Funded By Foreign Governments

Washington Post

After the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, Congress put several new restrictions on gifts that could be offered to members of Congress or their staffers. Yet there’s one significant loophole that remains — Congressional staffers are allowed to take trips abroad funded by foreign governments.The Washington Post’s TW Farnam reported on paid trips taken by Congressional staffers last year, and the map here is our depiction of Farnam’s findings. Between 2006 and 2011, 226 staffers took trips to China, 121 to Taiwan, and 65 to Saudi Arabia — where those countries’ governments footed the bill.

[smokeybrand]

Play It Again, Sam

Texas passed their voter suppression bill on the sixth, under the cover of night, because they know it's bogus. Three in the morning, if I'm not mistaken. Now, the bill as drafted, was passed in an effort to quell voter fraud and "protect the purity of the ballot box." That was term actually used by the kid, and i do mean kid, who drafted SB7 because it's enshrined in the Texas State Constitution under Article VI, Section 2, and Chapters Twelve and Thirteen. I just want to make sure you understand what I just said because it's going to be a thing in a minute. The kid who wrote SB7, cited Article VI of the Texas constitution, as precedent to write his own law. Okay. Now the violence. That article was passed into law after women were granted the right to vote WAY back in the late Tens. I think 1918, to be exact. There was an Amendment added to the Constitution out there but I can't remember if it was in 1918 or 1919 but around there is when women got to go to the polls legally. But not all women. Not Black women. Not Black people. Period.

You see, Article VI of the Texas Constitution was added to specifically disenfranchise Black people,  and Minorities as a whole, but us Negroes in particular, from voting. That language used to justify the voter suppression bill in Texas that just passed under the dead of night on the sixth of May, in this, the year of our lord, 2021, SB7, was pulled directly from an Article in their constitution, created for the sole purpose of denying Blacks and Minorities the right to vote in Election Primaries, back during the Reconstruction. You know what that was called? There was name for it because it was a thing in the South. I'll give you two guesses.

White Primaries.

"Protect the purity of the ballot box" was the legalese used back during Jim f*cking Crow to suppress Black people from voting and that exact language, that exact Article, was used as justification, as the linchpin precedent, on which to base SB7. Which passed. Under cover of night. Because anyone with a cursory understanding of Reconstruction Era America and access to Wikipedia, could see how f*cking outrageous this sh*t is. They were called White Primaries, man! That, alone, is enough to give me pause but not Texas. F*ck no, they went all in so here the f*ck I go!

That verbiage appears, verbatim, in SB7. "Protect the purity of the ballot box.” So, if you're pulling from a law designed to suppress votes, how is your bill not designed for the same thing? Tell me again how this sh*t isn't objectively race motivated when the Constitutional Article sighted as precedent to create this bill, was? Tell me again how this bill is to protect voter fraud and not to stop the very, very, Purple Texas from going all the way Blue, based on ll the polling showing the Minority vote, the vote this new bill, like the old, specifically targets, is only growing more and more powerful? Tell me again how this isn't blatantly voter suppression when the core of the actual f*cking bill, is based on a racist law written into the State Constitution, to deliberately suppress Black and Minority votes so much, they called the entire voting process 'White Primaries?" That's historic fact. Look it up. It was rampant through the South until Thurgood Marshall successfully argued the case in front of the Supreme Court back in 1944 and they ruled in his favor. Article VI became Texas law in 1923 so, after some quick math and a whole ass Supreme Court ruling against it's constitutionality, we're doing this same filed sh*t again, ninety-eight years later? We're really using century old, racist propaganda, to suppress Black and Brown voices in 2021? Outstanding! Tell me again how using the exact same goddamn tactics from Jim Crow, doesn't make this Jim Crow 2.0? How is it f*cking different? How can the position be different if you use the same goddamn laws and justifications from back then, to support your position, now? That's what precedent is! That's what it's used for. And that precedent, that law, was already struck down at the highest level for being unconstitutional. On the basis that it's F*CKING RACIST! It's like they're not even trying to hide the bigotry anymore and, as an intellectual and free thinker, i find that sh*t mad insulting.

It took me ten minutes of google to verify everything i said here. I saw Maddow do a thing on this and, not that I don't trust her to do the do-diligence or what have you, I don't trust anything anyone just says to me, ever. So I did the research on my own. Research the kid who wrote that f*cking thing didn't do because you'd think he'd find some other old ass precedent that wasn't so unapologetically f*cking racist, to justify his unapologetically racist new law. A sitting Texas State Lawmaker, couldn't be bothered to fact check the origin of the precedent on which he based his new law. That happened. That's real. Are you f*cking kidding me?The first thing they teach you in English comprehension is to double check your work. Proofread your sh*t. The first thing they teach you when you start writing reports is to verify the facts and cite your sources. I literally did it with this post! Uploaded it to Word and proofread it twice! Double-checked most of my dates and made sure to correctly label Articles and Cases because people are lazy as sh*t and they won't do research for themselves. That asshole makes a living writing legislation and working in law. His whole industry is based on research. That's his entire job. That asshole wrote a whole ass law and did none of that! And it passed! I f*cking hate the South so much.

Now, i know that read was a little redundant at times. That was for emphasis. I wanted to make sure my points hit home. Redundancy is a good way to do that. You might not agree but, apparently, Texas does. They seem to be falling over backwards to give Jim Crow a second shot with SB7, in the most obvious and blatant way possible. I guess they REALLY want to emphasis how goddamn racist they are, out there in the Lone Star. Also, an this has nothing to do with Texas, but I just found out the Missouri finally desegregated all of their school districts in 2017. Civil Rights act passed in 1964.

I hate the f*cking South so much, man.

[jamierumbelow]

some thoughts on the election

Here are a few thoughts, mostly unstructured, and in no particular order, on the general election:

Why is everybody so surprised that so many working-class Northern seats went Tory? The moment Labour prevaricated over their Brexit position was the moment they lost them.

This is an empirical point I’ve not tested, but it looks like May did the bulk of the work in 2017. Johnson’s – and Cummings’ – brilliance was to realise and leverage it.

It would only work if they managed to convince the right voters in the right places that Parliament – this Parliament – was the block, and needed overhauling. While the rest of us were moaning about prorogation, and mocking Johnson for losing all those votes, he was quietly winning the election he hadn’t even called yet.

The Momentum brigade are just as bad after the election as they were before it. I saw more on my feed from Corbynites trashing the Liberal Democrats than I saw criticising the Conservatives, or even making a positive argument for Labour.

Relatedly, ‘the media has a right-wing bias’ and ‘FPTP disadvantages us’ are terrible excuses for losing an election. Tough. Of course the media have a right-wing bias (though I see the symmetric allegations of left-wing bias on Brexit Twitter when I venture out of my own half of the bubble). Of course FPTP is a preposterous system that offers the Conservatives an entrenched advantage. We’ve known this for years. The Left needs to learn to work within these constraints rather than decry them. And, this election, Labour singularly failed to do so. This is on you.

I’ll leave my thoughts on antisemitism in the Labour Party for another day. But they got everything they deserved, and their loss is something to celebrate.

The Liberal Democrats have been bruised, but they’ve been bruised before. And it wasn’t all bad. Increased majorities, a gain in vote share, moving into second place. As my friend E said, if they had held East Dunbartonshire but lost Jamie Stone, they would be saying it was a good night.

I think it’s likely that ‘presidentialising’ the campaign – "Jo Swinson’s Liberal Democrats" – killed it more than the revoke Article 50 overreach. As people got to know her more, people liked her less.

Obviously, the Conservatives ran a remarkably ugly campaign too, and their victory should also be lamented. This was not a victory of ideas. It was the final nail in the coffin Thatcher and Blair built. Democracy’s epistemic function is over.

That being said, I’m a little more optimistic about a Johnson government with a seventy-odd-seat majority rather than a minority, or a 5-seat majority, particularly one enabled by working-class Northern seats. These voters are still, quite rightly, naturally suspicious of the Conservatives. He has very little good will indeed. I think he understands this – his "you’ve lent me your vote" comment is telling.

Turkeys voting for Christmas? It’s this arrogance and superiority, this smug self-indulgent paternalism in which I’ve indulged a lot myself, that lost the election for people like me and the ideas I believe in. Of course the average voter doesn’t have the time, skills, knowledge, whatever to make comprehensive, informed decisions. Their vote still counts, and their voice should still be heard. It’s up to politicians to craft a narrative – which is to say, an abstraction of ideas and policy proposals – that resonates with people.

Also, it’s really easy to forget that a lot of people are instinctively, naturally, ineluctably conservative. A lot of people don’t like immigration. A lot of people don’t like taxes, and have a strongly negative aesthetic response to the social justice movement. We can debate any of these individual positions until we’re – cough – blue in the face, but for a lot of people it’s just a gut thing.

It now seems clear to me that Remain is no longer an option, democratically or otherwise. We’re not getting a People’s Vote. We are going to leave the European Union, at least formally speaking, in January. In this sense, the debate is over.

In another sense, it’s just beginning. Remainers who care about preserving the tangible benefits of EU membership need to plan, regroup, and lean on interest groups, business, the trades unions, local government and the other relevant institutions of civil society to protect or otherwise emulate those benefits in a Brexit context. Democracy doesn’t end between elections (even though it might feel like it does sometimes.) Nor is it only implemented in Westminster.

A lot of people in my circles – including people who have taught me – are arguing that there’s no mandate for Brexit since the Tories were elected without a majority of the popular vote, or polling suggests slight support for remain, or whatever. This misses the point. We have procedures, whatever issues from those procedures are called democratic, and Brexit, loosely defined, has now issued from those procedures twice. If you don’t like it, change the procedures – and I really hope we do.

One might reply with illegal contributions, Russian hacking, lies on busses etc. It’s horrendous, I agree. But I’m starting to think that the fact that enough people believe they voted for Brexit for their own valid reasons, and voted subsequently for the Tories to reaffirm that Brexit position, is enough to make the implementing the outcome both legitimate and indeed required, at least morally speaking (though perhaps not epistemically). You can’t tell people they’re empowered and then not let them wield that power –– certainly not twice. The social contract is a fragile thing.

I’m aware of the slippery slope in the point above. I still haven’t figured out what all this means for my theoretical commitments. As with everything in the social sciences – and possibly value theory – it’s a moving target.

There was nothing unpatriotic about campaigning for a People’s Vote in the GE. The courts’ suspension of Johnson was not traitorous. People like Dominic Grieve will be looked upon kindly by history. The Remain movement was important, urgent, and its cause noble.

But we’re having a different conversation now. And I think Remainers need to realise this, lest we beat on, boats against the current. There’s nothing noble in that.

These opinions are, of course, liable to change.

[heytheredevlopr-blog]

10+ Best Reasons to Get Excited for Samsung Galaxy Fold 2

Samsung's second galaxy fold is now literally on the horizon and is looking so good that it might just be a day one switch from me here at the top six reasons why still as 2 things that have ME pretty upset the initial.

Galaxy fold what I've been using for a month now is a book a fern that folds out horizontally to make one large tablet displays the fold too is looking like it's gonna be a clamshell a fern that starts smaller and falls out vertically to make a normal-sized phone and that's a really good thing it'll mean a device that's way less large however additional significantly one that solves the ratio drawback see with the book type issue if you've 2 halves that area unit quite tall folding them outwards is gonna result is basically a square and a square is just not good for 90% of content movies games and most phone apps are designed to work on rectangular displays with a clamshell tho' as we have seen with the new Motorola Razr you'll be able to have a tiny low square screen on the front and that is fine as a result of the main screen on the within are tall a touch taller than we're wont to however that is much better than being too wide robot Authority. Recently did a poll on individuals's favorite folding and therefore the Motorola RAZR got regarding doubly as several votes because the Galaxy fold people just like the clamshell style of the razor and even off that group of people who picked the Galaxy to fold some of them only did so just because it's a better SPECT phone if you think about it the Galaxy fold too should have the best of both worlds the clamshell design of the razor and quite possibly even better specs than the original fold also this is a refined purpose however i feel the clamshell are some things that encompasses a higher likelihood of initiating sales-wise as a result of individuals area unit or deeds subconsciously aware of the concept 15 years ago nobody would have even questioned what the purpose of a flip phone was it was accepted and so if Samsung can come in with the flip phone reinvented i feel it's a neater sell then welcome to the book for reading then we have got one UI to Samsung's really named however fantastically redesigned little bit of code which is gonna help all of their phones but in particular this foldable you've got standard all-round improvements like less intrusive notifications and even smarter dock mode that works across more applications and simply typically additional customization however a giant focus here has been reaching ability if we have a tendency to area unit about to see this super tall show on the within of the next fold this update could not have come back at a more robust time.

It'll all of these UI components your fingers really want to act with nearer to the lowest to cut back the quantity of reaching you wish to try to you would possibly already know this galaxy fold uses a plastic show in spite of everything once glass gets super skinny it loses a great deal of its structural strength and simply typically as a cloth glass is not very bent friendly but it looks like.

Samsung has found how a neighborhood glass provider referred to as dawn sees I feel has opposed idli developed thereforelution|an answer} that's ultra-slim sturdy and versatile so this might be BIC one of the primaries criticisms of the first fold is its display it scratches easily and it's got this massive crease going down the middle now I never personally thought it had been a deal-breaker I got accustomed the crease pretty quickly however whenever I share this phone to some other person

it's one among the primary things they suggests in order that reasonably speaks for itself anyway this glass answer may solve each scratching and creasing issues promptly a lot of those reports i have been reading square measure inform towards the show size on fault to being six-point seven inches that is nice in my expertise with current phone thickness and edge size this can be concerning as huge as you'll be able to go whereas still being usable however I may see why this can be not a profit to everybody you may argue that there's one thing special concerning having the ability to hold around a seven-plus in. show therein smaller kind issue it's going to in all probability even be a hole-punch screen, not a full uninterrupted panel and this can avoid wasting thickness versus having to use a motorized pop-up for the front camera however speaking of cameras the particular camera Hardware on these Samsung flagships it hasn't had a significant push since the galaxy s7 one thing has reasonably favored style enhancements over camera upgrades that is getting ready to amendment in 2020 consistent with code found within the Samsung camera app they are already performing on a firm which will shoot not simply 8k video the 108 megapixel photos and this might line up dead with past leaks but also the fact that Samsung has actually launched a 108 megapixel sensor it's already a very real thing assuming then that the next the fold will still be positioned as a high-end device as a decent likelihood it's about to take pleasure in this - conjointly if you simply count the number of cameras on the initial fold you get 6 for 6 cameras and at any one time you're only ever using a maximum of three you've got one selfie camera for when you're using the front screen - selfie cameras for once you are victimization the most screen and 3 cameras at the rear it's simply a small amount inefficient they've effectively engineered constant camera system twice just so you can take selfies in both folded and unfolded positions which increase cost and thickness if they can find a way on this new fold to have just one camera. The system that you can use to take selfies while the phone is folded and then rear photos well unfolded that would be game-changing it would mean they could pour their entire resource pool into only one set of cameras rather than scattering their resources over 3 sets which you'll be able to take not simply mind-blowing rear shots however also selfies with constant quality and speaking of quality.

I'm extremely attempting to up the sport on YouTube thus if you may subscribe that will be wonderful currently it's wanting just like the second Galaxy fold isn't reaching to be a traditional successor and in fact instead of going up in price something is supposedly coming down if I had to guess I'd say around $1500 compared to 2,000 for this one there have been a full range of reports concerning this recently however the one factor I did notice that backs it up is that the proven fact that the code name of the second fold was leaked as being SMF 700 which if true suggests it would fit below the existing SMF 900 fold because this is such a new category of devices Samsung may be still figuring out where the fold fits in its lineup I can say one thing for sure at $2,000 there is no way the original fold was shipping at high volume numbers and so considering the incredible amount of R&D that would have gone into making this thing there's a good chance at the company's current foldable ventures of running at a loss, of course, it alone takes one hit product to turn all that around and The Fault too could very well be the one and what makes me especially hopeful is that Samsung has been in this situation before their original Galaxy S was seen by many people is just a cheap iPhone different however the Galaxy s2 that came next cemented its place as a real rival Samsung's initial incurvate phone the Galaxy spherical was an entire flop however it sealed the means for his or her future incurvate endeavors that while not universally wanted are a giant hit the corporate has quite developed a name for bouncing back okay two things i'm disturbed concerning and i am not talking concerning things sort of a lack of a earpiece jack or lack of water the resistance i believe these things are pretty major first of all as I mentioned very likely Samsung will make the fall to a cheaper phone but it still needs to have the absolute best specifications it's got to have the most recent chipset it's got to possess lots of RAM we tend to already expect these items from traditional flagships so what i am expression that this versatile kind issue can't come at the cost of performance now the the reason I am particularly worried about this is because Motorola thinks that it can they've discharged a firm that appears heaps like what Samsung has planned however they've opted for a few underwhelming hardware it's flower 710 chip 128 gigabytes of non expandable storage any 5-megapixel selfie camera the second thing is battery there's going to be a massive the trade-off here because I have no doubt that if this thing does eventually come out the manner, one thing goes to promote it one amongst the most commerce points goes to be that you simply will fold it up and it will be pocket-sized and so supported this and also the proven fact that Samsung incorporates a little bit of a name for giving merely enough battery there is a probability they will do constant here and give it merely enough battery so at the purpose of shopping for it once it's latest it's going to last a full day then again six months of serious use down one line you'll probably be reaching for the charger at 6 p.m. whilst I welcome a cheaper phone I think the for two needs to be in everything phone with pro users in mind, not a sleek-looking mid-range phone with a cool foldable gimmick function over form to put another way I would also add to this as a third minor concern that there is a the rumor that Samsung's also gonna put an S Pen inside of this thing and I don't think this is a particularly smart move the way I look at it is this you could see some customers as a Venn the diagram you've got people who want an S Pen in one circle and people who want a foldable in another circle and already both of these circles are fairly small these are niche ones but if something makes one flexible phone and this also is an S Pen focus device then they're catering primarily for just this tiny the overlap here for everyone else you're just getting a smaller battery a little bit extra cost and yet another thing that's going to drain your battery so that's the next fold it'll probably be announced March to April next year but I'll have more info before then so if you could subscribe that would be amazing I hope to examine a firm that is a lot of refined quicker and a lot of sturdy thus perhaps this point we can't even would like an avid video simply to inform you the way to take care of it thanks for reading and I'll catch you in the next one!

Via - https://www.maunohanan.co.in

Heytheredevlopr

[gibsongirlselections]

Making Democrats Own Their “Summer of Love”

Remember all those “peaceful protestors,” later amended to “mostly peaceful protestors”?  You probably recall, also, the Main Stream Media’s determined effort to portray the people in the streets protesting the death of George Floyd as nothing but well-meaning reformers—until pictures and video made the spin wear thin.

Indeed, now even Democratic politicians are conceding that this wasn’t the “summer of love.”

With costly reality staring him in the face, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, on July 2, sent a letter to President Trump, formally requesting $15.6 million in federal disaster assistance for the damage done to Minneapolis and St. Paul during the  protests/violence over the last two months.  As Walz put it, “Nearly 1,500 businesses were damaged by vandalism, fire, or looting.”  He added, “These corridors provide lifeline services like food, pharmaceuticals, health care, housing, and transportation to thousands of Minnesotans.”

In fact, Walz estimated that the total cost of the damage could be upwards of $500 million; he described the events in his state’s two largest cities as “the second most destructive incident of civil unrest in United States history after the 1992 Los Angeles riots.”  Walz further observed, “The social and economic impacts of this incident will be felt for years, if not decades.”

So who, exactly, did all this damage?  Here, Walz had to walk a fine line.  Good progressive that he is, he couldn’t afford to be too critical of the protestors—because he might need their votes in his next election bid.  Indeed, back in May, he tried to argue that most of the violence was committed by non-Minnesotans.

This dubious assertion was quickly knocked down, and yet in his letter to Trump, Walz offered a different slant on the same outsiders-did-it argument, writing, “Individuals bent on destruction infiltrated otherwise peaceful protests and began to incite violence and vandalism.”  We might pause to note that Walz seems to be de-emphasizing, here, a word that he mentioned only once in the letter: looting.  Why?  Perhaps because looting is so singularly unattractive (to most people) that it’s best minimized when looking for bailout.

Yet in fact, the looting was so brazen that even The Minneapolis Star Tribune felt obligated to detail it on July 10; as the newspaper put it, “Near Hennepin Avenue and W. Lake Street, nearly 40 businesses were broken into or heavily looted, including large retailers like H&M, Timberland, an Apple store, Kitchen Window and Urban Outfitters.”

The Star Tribune further added that Walz’s $500 million estimate might be on the low side: “The full extent of damage to Twin Cities buildings—including residences, churches, non-profits and minority-owned businesses—could take weeks or months to calculate.”

Indeed, sometimes the damage done to a city in the wake of a riot unfolds over decades.  For instance, Detroit has never recovered from the riot of 1967; the population of Motown fell from 1.67 million in 1960 to 713,000 in 2010.

In the meantime, on July 11, the Star Tribune reported that the Trump administration has turned down Walz’s aid request.  The report included a quote from Rep. Tom Emmer, a Republican representing exurban Minneapolis as well as rural areas; it seems that Emmer had written a letter of his own to Trump two days earlier, asking the administration to “undertake a thorough and concurrent review of my state’s response to the violence and provide recommendations so that every Governor, Mayor, and local official can learn from our experiences and ensure appropriate plans are in place to prevent something like this from ever happening again.”  In other words, Emmer was seeking, at minimum, to add strings to the aid.

As Emmer put it, the feds should analyze “the actions that were—or were not—taken by local and state officials to prevent one of the most destructive episodes of civil unrest in our nation’s history.”  And to drill the point even harder, he cited news media headlines supporting his supposition of state and local fecklessness: “‘They Have Lost Control’: Why Minneapolis Burned,” and “Gov. Tim Walz Laments ‘Abject Failure’ of Riot Response.”

Emmer, of course, is a conservative, not in tune with, for example, the Twin Cities’ most famous lawmaker, Rep. Ilhan Omar, who has embraced “defunding the police.”  By contrast, on July 11, Emmer tweeted a poll showing that 81 percent of  residents in the small city of St. Cloud, in Emmer’s district, believe that the police there “have an excellent relationship with the community.”

We might also note that Emmer is more than just a Republican lawmaker representing a conservative district.  He is also the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of the House Republicans.  Not surprisingly, the NRCC Twitter feed regularly zings House Democrats, and it’s a safe bet that Emmer and his rapid responders are now poised to target those who might take a progressive position on the national response, including financial aid, to recently afflicted cities.  We can see the NRCC tweet now: “Rep. ___ supports bailout for mayors that looked the other way while their cities were vandalized and looted.”

In fact, between Trump’s opposition and Republicans on watch, it’s likely that the Democrats will say little about rebuilding vandalized and looted cities—at least until after the election.

However, if Joe Biden wins this November—and the polls show him nearly 10 points ahead, which suggests Democrats everywhere will do well—then it’s likely that a Biden administration will look more kindly on Walz’s request.

Indeed, we could expect that the whole federal government, starting with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, will seek to spend freely.  After all, Biden tweeted, just on July 5, “We won’t just rebuild this nation—we’ll transform it.”  And Sen. Bernie Sanders, fresh from his policy mind-meld with the Biden campaign, declares that Biden is shaping up to be the most progressive president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.

So one wonders: In such a heady ideological moment, how far could the Democrats go?  Perhaps another “Great Society”?  Or maybe a “Marshall Plan” for the Other America?   And can the Green New Deal be focused on blue dot cities?

Yet even if Republicans are out of power next year, they won’t be without a voice.  For his part, Emmer raises pointed questions about urban aid, and so some Democrats—especially those many now representing suburbs—will have to think twice about voting for blank checks to mayors and their lefty constituents.  That is, if the city council in Minneapolis votes, as it did, unanimously, to defund the police, well, maybe most Americans will think that woke urbanites ought to be left to stew in their own crime juice.

Other Republicans, too, seem ready to pounce.  On the floor of the Senate on July 2, Mike Lee of Utah blasted “mob violence,” including “dimwitted, phony drama addicts.”  Lest he be misunderstood, Lee went on to rip “a privileged, self-absorbed crime syndicate with participation trophy graduate degrees, trying to find meaning in empty lives by destroying things that other Americans have spent honest, productive lives building.”

Then Lee got right down to the money issue: “The whole garbage fire that is the woke ideology depends on federal money. The mob that hates America on America’s dime.  It’s time to cut off their allowance!” So put Lee down as a loud “no” on any big bailout.

Then on July 12, Sen. Ted Cruz tweeted, “Minnesota Dems willfully allowed Minneapolis to burn & then blamed the police whom they demonized.  Now, they want the fed govt to pay the bill.  I’m introducing legislation to make local govt liable to private property owners if officials deliberately withhold police protection.”

Cruz’s bill won’t pass this year, nor the next, and yet a line has been drawn.  If Cruz and Republicans can figure out how to hold a vote on that liability legislation—or on other bills of a similar nature—they will be putting Democrats in a tough spot.

Of course, the typical legislative response to a “poison pill” bill is not to vote on it.  Indeed, both parties have grown skilled at the parliamentary art of obscuring unpopular items with “omnibuses” and “continuing resolutions”; that is, the money gets spent, but with no specific fingerprints on any particular line item.

Yet in the long run, the voters will figure out who voted to bail out looter-friendly cities—and who didn’t.

Still, in the shorter term, Emmer, Lee, Cruz, & Co. will be dismissed as mere gadflies, especially if the Democrats win big this year.  Indeed, Biden is ahead in Texas, and credible pundits even speculate that he could win the biggest victory for a Democratic presidential nominee since 1964.

And if Democrats were to win big this year, they’d be high in the water, indeed, in the 117th Congress convening next year.  Why they might even seek to emulate the 89th Congress, which convened in 1965, and which did, indeed, dream big.

If so, then Republicans will have to rely on smart Congressional critics such as Emmer, Lee, and Cruz.  One’s crystal ball for the future is, of course, cloudy, and  yet the record of the past is clear enough, and so we can recall that in the mid 60s, when ebullient Democrats over-promised and under-delivered—on everything from urban renewal to Vietnam pacification— Republicans were ready with their counterstroke.  And the voters were ready with their backlash.

Thus just two years after their 1964 triumph, Democrats were drubbed in the 1966 midterm elections; one of the GOP winners that year, we might recall, was that underrated actor-turned-underrated politician, Ronald Reagan.

Then in 1968, just four years after they had been crushed in the national election, Republicans won the the presidency.

Thus a half-century ago, Democratic hubris met Republican nemesis.  Today, that’s something for Democrats to ponder as many plan, once again, to transform the nation.

The post Making Democrats Own Their “Summer of Love” appeared first on The American Conservative.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

The Bernie Sanders rally that I attended on the evening before the New Hampshire primary drew a reported 7,500 people — about twice as many as his actual 3,867-vote margin of victory in the primary the next day. I say that not to endorse crowd sizes as an alternative to the polls. (Despite the large crowds, Sanders slightly underperformed his polls in New Hampshire, in fact.1 Nor do I mean to imply that Sanders won in New Hampshire because of the rally. (It was held before a largely student audience at the University of New Hampshire — people who were already likely to vote for Sanders.) But it does go to show how razor-thin the margins have been so far in the primaries. The voters who pushed Sanders past Pete Buttigieg in New Hampshire could fit within half a college hockey rink.

But the rally was also impressive. It was full of star power, including speakers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, former Ohio State Sen. Nina Turner, actress Cynthia Nixon and political activist Cornel West — all of whom were introduced to the crowd like heavyweight boxers — along with a concert by The Strokes. In between the big names, Sanders organizers gave students detailed voting instructions.2 Everything was tightly scripted.3 It was a show of force.

What the rally largely lacked, though, were attempts to persuade voters who weren’t already aboard the Sanders train. On the contrary, the emphasis was on turning out the faithful, and the faithful were all presumed to be on board with Sanders’s lefty platform. Nixon, for instance — who earlier had drawn a round of boos for a brief reference to Hillary Clinton, which she quickly shushed — said that nominating a moderate candidate would ensure that nobody showed up on Election Day.

This was despite the fact that moderates had once been a source of strength for Sanders. Four years ago, Sanders won voters who identified as moderate by 20 points in New Hampshire, about the same as his overall margin of victory in the state over Clinton. But this time, Sanders finished third among moderates, getting 16 percent of the moderate vote compared with 27 percent for both Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar.

So, let’s talk about the ‘c’ word: ceiling.

Does Sanders have a ceiling on his support?

I shudder to ask the question in part because of bad memories from four years ago, when theories about Donald Trump having a ceiling were a big reason that people like me initially dismissed his chances in the primaries.

In Trump’s case, though, there was at least some polling-driven evidence of a ceiling. He tended to lose ground in polls that asked about hypothetical head-to-head matchups against other Republicans, for instance. And his favorability ratings among Republican voters were quite low for someone who was leading the field.

There isn’t much evidence of this for Sanders. On the contrary, his favorability ratings are roughly as good as any other Democrat’s — and often the best in the field, depending on which poll you look at.

It’s also worth mentioning that Sanders gets a lot of support from younger African Americans and Hispanics, making his coalition among the most diverse in the race. Granted, he does have very little support from voters over the age of 65, but of all demographic deficiencies, that may be one of the easier ones to overcome. There are plenty of young voters in every state, provided you can turn them out.

Additionally, a set of YouGov polls last week showed Sanders winning in hypothetical head-to-head matchups against every other Democrat — narrowly beating Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren while more clearly defeating Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Michael Bloomberg. (There are some qualifications to that YouGov poll. Buttigieg and Klobuchar still have fairly low name recognition, and earlier polling that tested head-to-head matchups hadn’t shown Sanders doing so well, especially against Biden.)

But if you look at the actual behavior of voters in Iowa and New Hampshire — and the most recent polling from upcoming states on how voters are reacting to the Iowa and New Hampshire results — then there are a few troubling signs for Sanders, including some evidence of what you might call a ceiling on support. In no particular order of importance:

In both Iowa and New Hampshire, Sanders did relatively poorly among late-deciding voters. In New Hampshire, he got 17 percent of the vote among voters who decided in the last few days, as compared to 35 percent among voters who decided before then. And in Iowa, he got just 13 percent of late-deciders, versus 28 percent of early-deciders. These numbers are a potential hallmark of a campaign that emphasizes turnout over persuasion. They identify their voters early, and they turn them out. But they don’t have a lot of voters drift into their orbit late in the race.

In Iowa, where voters could realign to second choices if their candidate didn’t clear the viability threshold (usually 15 percent in their precinct), Sanders gained relatively little from this process, going from 24.7 percent on the first-alignment vote to 26.5 percent on the final alignment — a gain of 1.8 percentage points. (By contrast, Buttigieg added 3.8 percentage points to his vote total via this realignment process despite starting out with a lower vote share than Sanders.) Sanders’s gains were considerably less than our model expected, too. It thought that if Sanders had around 25 percent of the initial vote, he would have wound up with about 30 percent of the vote after realignment. This realignment process doesn’t take place in most states — although it does occur in Nevada and a few states later on that have ranked-choice voting — but it’s nonetheless a negative sign for Sanders as it would seem to indicate that he is relatively few voters’ second choice. That means he might not stand to gain as much as other candidates when opponents drop out or fall in the polls.

Based on the evidence we have so far, Sanders has gotten relatively little bounce in the polls from his outright win in New Hampshire and popular-vote win4 in Iowa. In our national polling average, he is at 22.9 percent, only slightly higher than he was in our final average before Iowa, when he was at 21.7 percent.

Even in fairly liberal states like New Hampshire, voters seem to prefer a more moderate candidate in the abstract. Nearly two-thirds of voters in the New Hampshire exit poll said they preferred a candidate who could beat Trump to one who agreed with them on the issues. (Although, note that a lot of voters see Sanders as being electable, and he polls pretty well in head-to-head polls against Trump.) And 50 percent of voters said Sanders’s positions were too liberal. Meanwhile, the combined vote shares for Buttigeig, Klobuchar and Biden (52.6 percent) considerably exceeded that for Sanders and Warren (34.9 percent). No, it’s not quite as simple as there being two distinct lanes (left and moderate) with no overlap between them. But as the primary has evolved, the electorate has behaved more and more as the lanes theory might predict — Buttigieg and Bloomberg have gained ground as Biden has declined in national polls, for instance.

Finally, turnout in the first two states has been a mixed bag. Turnout in Iowa was 176,000 people, about what it was in 2016 but well below 2008 and what most observers expected. Turnout in New Hampshire — about 300,000 voters in the Democratic primary — did end up being record-breaking. The Iowa numbers probably weren’t as bad as they looked, though. The caucuses did not receive their typical amount of media attention, thanks to a busy news calendar involving impeachment, the Super Bowl and other stories. Also, Iowa has drifted red, so there are simply fewer Democratic voters in that state than there once were. But if the Iowa numbers weren’t as bad as they looked for Democrats, the New Hampshire ones weren’t as good as they seemed. Democrats were not going up against a competitive Republican primary as they were in 2008 or 2016, which helped boost turnout in a state where independents can vote in either primary. Nor was turnout particularly high as a share of registered voters as the number of registered voters has grown since 2008.

So overall, while Demcoratic turnout has been just fine, it has not exactly been revolutionary, so to speak. It may even be that the Sanders campaign — if it has a highly loyal but relatively fixed number of voters — prefers lower turnout overall, since that means its base will make up a higher share of the electorate. In Iowa, with its relatively low turnout, 24 percent of voters were under 30. In New Hampshire, meanwhile, under-30 voters were just 13 percent of the electorate, down from 19 percent in 2016.

Think less about ceilings — and more about volatility

Over the course of building our primary model late last year, I grew less skeptical of Sanders’s chances. In fact, our model is now quite bullish on Sanders, having him as by far the most likely Democrat to win a majority of pledged delegates — although the most likely scenario is that no one wins a majority (meaning a contested convention is possible).

Ideally, working on a model helps you to see a race with a fresh set of eyes and to reexamine premises that might be outdated based on the most recent evidence. Relevant to Sanders, we found that endorsements had less predictive power than they had once had, no doubt in part because adding data from 2016 (when Trump won the GOP primary and Sanders was competitive against Clinton despite receiving little support from party insiders) undermined the “Party Decides” theory of the race. Conversely, we found that fundraising was more predictive than we had previously assumed.

I don’t want to go overboard here: The media probably still ovestates the importance of money overall, and for the most part, the best indicator of a candidate’s position in the race is simply his or her polls. Nonetheless, Sanders’s lack of endorsements is only a marginal reason to be worried about his chances, while his excellent small-donor fundraising is a reason to be optimistic.

We also found in building the model that the concept of “ceilings” and “floors” tends to be a rather fuzzy one; like “electability,” it’s something that would benefit from more precise specification. For instance, we found no evidence that candidates who were frequently cited in polls as voters’ second-choice picks were more likely to grow their support than ones who weren’t. (Although that data is hard to come by for previous election cycles, so I wouldn’t take that conclusion as definitive.)

But we did find that candidates who carved out their own space and have few close substitutes see their polling behave differently than those who have a lot of competition.

To categorize candidates, we rate them along four dimensions:

how liberal or moderate they are on social policy;

how leftist or centrist they are on economic policy;

whether they portray themselves as “insiders” or “outsiders”;

and whether they tend to be technocrats (who mostly appeal to elites and college-educated voters) or populists (who mostly draw support from the working class).

And in this conception, Sanders is somewhat of an island unto himself. Warren is close to Sanders on the issues, but she is less anti-establishment and more reliant on support from college-educated voters than he is. None of the major candidates apart from Warren are very close to Sanders at all.

This means someone like Sanders has few direct competitors, and as such, his polling swings tend to be smaller. If things are going poorly, there are fewer places for his voters to go because there isn’t a clear alternative for his supporters. But someone like Sanders also tends to pick up less support from other candidates when things are going well because he’d represent a big leap for, say, a college-educated, moderate Klobuchar supporter.

Conversely, a candidate like Buttigieg — or Kamala Harris before she quit the race — can experience more polling booms-and-busts. In trying to be an acceptable choice to everyone, these candidates have high upside potential, but because they may be relatively few voters’ first choice, they can also have a low floor.

To put it another way, instead of thinking of hard ceilings, it’s probably best to think of candidates as being either low or high volatility based on the amount of competition they face. It’s also best to think of this as being a dynamic status that can evolve over the course of the race. For example, Biden once seemed to have little direct competition, but the growth in support for Bloomberg, Buttigieg and Klobuchar has suddenly made the moderate/establishment lane far more crowded.

As to whether you’d prefer to be a low-volatility or high-volatility candidate, that depends on a lot of different factors. But being a low-volatility candidate definitely helped Sanders during a rough stretch of the campaign in October when Warren was surging in the polls and he took a break from the trail following a heart attack.

At the time, I thought some of his support would jump ship to Warren, perhaps putting her in the overall driver’s seat for the nomination. Instead, Sanders’s base largely stuck with him, and he received endorsements from Ocasio-Cortez and others. And by late November, Sanders had overtaken Warren and reclaimed second place in national polls. It was an impressive feat of loyalty from his supporters.

So even if you do want to think in terms of ceilings instead of volatility, know that ceilings imply the existence of floors — and low ceilings and high floors generally go together. Having a high floor can be helpful, too, especially in a multi-candidate race where the support of 20 or 25 percent of voters can be enough to lead polls and win states.

Sanders has several ways to win

To state the obvious, no one knows with much certainty how the Democratic race is going to turn out. But Sanders will likely have some paths toward victory almost no matter what:

If everything stays the same, Sanders could win the nomination with a plurality of pledged delegates. It remains quite possible that some candidate — whether it’s Sanders or someone else — will have some kind of polling surge in the race soon, making the top of the field less crowded. But suppose that doesn’t happen and the race muddles along roughly as it is now, with Sanders at around 25 percent of the vote and several moderate candidates with around 15 percent each.

That would actually be a pretty nice scenario for Sanders. He’d get delegates almost everywhere, whereas the moderate candidates sometimes wouldn’t, depending on whether they hit the threshold required to win delegates in particular states and districts. So you could go into the convention with a scenario like: Sanders has 40 percent of pledged delegates, one of the moderates (Biden, Bloomberg, Buttigieg or Klobuchar) has 30 percent, while another moderate candidate has 25 percent, and Warren has 5 percent.

Would convention delegates try to deny Sanders the nomination when he had a fairly clear plurality? I don’t know. (Our forecast model doesn’t try to predict the outcome of a contested convention.) It would be a heck of a story to cover. Sanders certainly would have a decent shot, though. And if Sanders had a very clear purality — say, 47 percent of the delegates, while the next-closest competitor had 28 percent — his chances would be stronger still.

As the rest of the field slowly consolidates, Sanders could gradually increase his vote share just enough to win a narrow majority. Even if the moderate lane consolidated to just one or two alternatives later on in the race — say, at some point in March or April — Sanders would still be in a pretty decent position. He would probably have a head start on the competition by having won a lot of delegates on Super Tuesday and in the first four states while the rest of the field sorted itself out. Contests up to and including Super Tuesday account for 38 percent of all pledged delegates, so this matters a lot.

Also, even if there is some upward resistance to Sanders’s numbers — more than there might be for the average candidate — it isn’t likely to be absolute resistance. Case in point: Sanders improved his support from 15 percent in national polls for much of last year to the low-to-mid 20s now. Without those gains, Sanders might be in the fairly difficult position that Warren now finds herself in, following third- or fourth-place finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Making slow-but-steady polling gains was roughly the path that Trump followed in 2016 to win the Republcian nomination, too. True, Trump had one major advantage that Sanders didn’t: the presence of winner-take-all states, especially later on in the race. (All Democratic states use proportional delegate allocation above the 15 percent threshold.) Still, Trump gained ground later in the race once Republican voters realized that they faced a choice between Trump and a contested convention (which might nonetheless have resulted in his nomination). Democratic voters might act similarly. Maybe a voter would prefer Buttigieg to Sanders in the abstract, but if a Buttigieg win would require a contested convention, while a Sanders win would not, she might feel differently.

Sanders could easily win a one-on-one race. Finally, suppose that we do wind up with a two-candidate race fairly soon; Biden loses South Carolina, for instance, and quits the race, and the large majority of delegates on Super Tuesday go to either Sanders or Bloomberg.

This seems to be the outcome that a lot of moderates that I talk to are rooting for. But it could also fairly easily lead to a Sanders nomination. Say that Sanders’s main opponent was Bloomberg, for instance. He’d play perfectly into Sanders’s messaging about the corrosive influence of money on the democratic process. Bloomberg also has a lot of baggage that has been somewhat untested because of his late entry into the race. Against Buttigieg or Klobuchar, meanwhile, Sanders would probably have the more diverse coalition, and he’d also have the organizational advantage against someone like Klobuchar, who is only now starting to raise serious money.

I don’t know who would be favored in a head-to-head matchup between Sanders and another Democratic candidate, especially a resilient Biden, or if it somehow came down to Sanders against Warren. (As the YouGov polling shows, these are potentially tougher matchups for Sanders.) But the bottom line is this: Even if Sanders is far from the textbook nominee — and even if he’s likely to have some trouble winning new voters to his side — all of the other candidates have a lot of problems too. Sanders is in the strongest position for now, and he has a high floor of support that should win him delegates almost everywhere, while the rest of the field is a mess behind him. Ceiling or not, that’s why you’d rather be in his position than anyone else’s.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Nate Silver

[patriotsnet]

Who Raises More Money Democrats Or Republicans

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/who-raises-more-money-democrats-or-republicans/

Who Raises More Money Democrats Or Republicans

The Fundraising Arm Of The Us Democratic Party Raised More Money In July Than Its Republican Counterpart Helped By Big Contributions From Billionaire Donors Including Investor George Soros And Former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt Disclosures Filed On Friday With The Federal Election Commission Showed The Democratic National Committee Raised About $131 Million Last Month Above The $129 Million Raised By The Republican National Committee

Reuters

The fundraising arm of the U.S.Democratic Party raised more money in July than its Republican counterpart, helped by big contributions from billionaire donors including investor George Soros and former Chief Executive Eric Schmidt.

Disclosures filed on Friday with the Federal Election Commission showed the Democratic National Committee raised about $13.1 million last month, above the $12.9 million raised by the Republican National Committee. The RNC still had more money in the bank at the close of the month – $79 million compared to nearly $68 million held by the DNC – although Democrats narrowed the gap.

Raising more money does not necessarily translate into Election Day victory, but a big bank account helps U.S. parties support their candidates’ campaigns and pays for ads and polling. Democrats have narrow majorities in the U.S.Senate and the House of Representatives, and losing control of either in the November 2022 contests would be a blow to Democratic President Joe Biden’s agenda.

While the DNC has raised slightly more than the RNC this year, Republicans have been spending money more aggressively. It also spent more in July, shelling out $1 million to JDB Marketing Inc, a Mount Pleasant, South Carolina firm that specializes in direct mail fundraising.

Some of the DNC’s largest outlays during the month were also to support fundraising efforts, including more than $1.1 million to RWT Production, a direct mail firm from Annandale, Virginia.

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Democrats Raised Twice The Money Republicans Did In Five 2020 Races That Could Determine Control Of The Senate

U.S.Senate2020 ElectionDemocratic PartyRepublican Party

Democratic challengers raised nearly twice the amount Republicans did in first-quarter fundraising in five must-watch races that could determine who controls the Senate, the latest campaign finance figures showed.

Republican incumbents facing tough re-elections races in Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, Maine and North Carolina all raised significantly less cash than their Democratic rivals in the first three months of 2020.

These contests are some of the best opportunities Democrats have to flip the seats and regain the Senate majority in November. They’re rapidly becoming some of the most expensive and contentious matchups in the country. In Kentucky, for example, the multi-million dollar ad war between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Amy McGrath started 16 months before Election Day.

In some races, such as Maine and North Carolina, Democrats actually doubled the amount of cash brought in by their Republican challengers. In Maine, state representative Sara Gideon raised nearly three times more money than four-term incumbent Susan Collins.

The Senate is now made up of 53 Republicans, 45 Democrats and two independents who caucus with the Democrats. Democrats need to win four seats to regain control of the chamber, or three seats if the vice president is a Democrat. The vice president serves as the “president of the Senate” and can cast tie-breaking votes.

Thirty S&p 500 Ceos Vote For Biden With Their Wallet Though They Dont Contribute As Much As Trumps 15 Do

S&P 500 chief executives have combined to give more money to Trump’s campaign than Biden’s, even as the Democratic challenger has more S&P CEOs as donors.

+0.47%

As the Nov. 3 election sparks record campaign contributions, the CEOs of S&P 500 companies are helping to fund the war chests of President Donald Trump and challenger Joe Biden, while also contributing to other Republican and Democratic politicians.

In their political giving as individuals, these chief executives have combined to give more to Trump than Biden. Some 15 CEOs whose companies are components of the S&P 500 US:SPX have donated a total of $2.489 million to Trump’s principal campaign committee, its joint fundraising groups with the Republican National Committee or pro-Trump super PACs.

Meanwhile, 30 chief execs have contributed $536,100 to Biden’s main campaign committee, its joint groups with the Democratic National Committee or pro-Biden super PACs. These figures come from a MarketWatch analysis of processed Federal Election Commission data on individual contributions made between January 2019 and August 2020. Anyone who held the CEO job in 2019 or 2020 at a company that was part of the S&P 500 is included.

S&P 500 CEOs giving their own money to Trump’s campaign

* Former CEO who held the position during the FEC’s 2020 election cycle that started Jan. 1, 2019

Total $536,100.00

* Former CEO who held the position during the FEC’s 2020 election cycle that started Jan. 1, 2019

Companies’ responses

Here’s How The Deficit Performed Under Republican And Democratic Presidents From Reagan To Trump

This article was updated Aug. 2 to include a graph with the annual federal deficit in constant dollars.

A viral post portrays Democrats, not Republicans, as the party of fiscal responsibility, with numbers about the deficit under recent presidents to make the case.

Alex Cole, a political news editor at the website Newsitics, . Within a few hours, several Facebook users postedscreenshots of the tweet, which claims that Republican presidents have been more responsible for contributing to the deficit over the past four decades. 

Those posts racked up several hundred likes and shares. We also found , where it has been upvoted more than 53,000 times.

“Morons: ‘Democrats cause deficits,’” the original tweet reads.

Reagan took the deficit from 70 billion to 175 billion. Bush 41 took it to 300 billion. Clinton got it to zero. Bush 43 took it from 0 to 1.2 trillion.Obama halved it to 600 billion. Trump’s got it back to a trillion.Morons: “Democrats cause deficits.”

— Alex Cole July 23, 2019

Screenshots of the tweet on Facebook were flagged as part of the company’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed.

At PolitiFact, we’vereportedextensively on how Republicans and Democrats often try to pin the federal deficit on each other — muddying the facts in the process. So we wanted to see if this Facebook post is true.

Some people confuse the federal deficit with the debt — but they’re two separate concepts.

Featured Fact-check

The First Modern Campaign Finance Restrictions Were Soon Followed By A Boom In Pac Spending

FEC, Corrado, Center for Responsive Politics

In the early 1970s, and particularly after the election spending abuses revealed in the Watergate scandal, Congress put new limits on donations to candidates. But the overall amount of money in politics didn’t decline. The money instead started going to PACs, or political action committees, rather than candidates. Thousands of new ones were formed, and they started raising hundreds of millions of dollars each year overall. This shows a problem for would-be campaign finance regulators: If one particular aspect of election spending is regulated or capped, big money will try to find another way in.

Congress Responds More To The Preferences Of The Wealthy Than To Those Of Average People

Gilens and Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics

Who really matters in our democracy — the general public, or wealthy elites? These charts, from a study by political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern, seek to answer that question. The first one — the flat line — shows that as more and more average citizens support action on an issue, they’re not any more likely to get what they want. That’s a shocking finding in a democracy. In contrast, the next chart shows that as more economic elites want a certain policy change, they do become more likely to get what they want. Specifically, if fewer than 20 percent of wealthy Americans supported a policy change, it only happened about 18 percent of the time. But when 80 percent of them were in support, the change ended up happening 45 percent of the time. There’s no similar effect for average Americans.

Big Problems With Small Money Republicans Catch Up To Democrats In Online Giving

Alex Seitz-Wald

WASHINGTON — Republicans are beginning to catch up with Democrats in online fundraising, creating for the first time in modern history a political landscape where both parties are largely funded by small donations — for better or, some say, for worse.

Democrats, who have dominated online fundraising since the early days of the internet, have claimed that the billions they raise in small donations are evidence that they are the party of the people, less reliant on wealthy donors and business interests than the GOP.

Republicans have spent years playing catch-up, mostly unsuccessfully. But now, just in time for the 2022 midterm elections, they are starting to pull even, thanks in large part to former President Donald Trump and his army of online devotees.

“This is the harvest of the seeds of digital infrastructure Republicans have been planting for years,” said Matt Gorman, a GOP strategist who worked for the party’s congressional campaign arm during the last midterm election. “That’s why you’re seeing things like freshman members of the House raising over $1 million . In 2018, we were begging folks to raise a fifth of that.”

Even out of office, Trump continues to raise massive sums of money, largely online. He announced Saturday that his political groups had collected nearly $82 million in the first half of the year , giving him a war chest of more than $102 million.

Democratic Party Committees Raised More Money Than Republican Committees In 2013

Paul Blumenthal

WASHINGTON — The three major Democratic Party committees raised $16 million more than their Republican Party counterparts in 2013.

The Democratic committees raised $193 million for the year, compared with $177 million for the three Republican committees, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.

The fundraising success for the Democratic committees stems from big numbers posted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The DCCC raised $75.8 million, the most of any party committee, while the DSCC pulled in $52.7 million. Both committees topped their Republican counterparts by more than $15 million.

“Our substantial fundraising lead is the result of one major dynamic: Americans are ready to replace this broken Republican Congress with leaders who have the right priorities and who will focus on solving problems,” DCCC Chairman Steve Israel said in a statement.

The Republican National Committee, however, beat the Democratic National Committee in head-to-head fundraising for the year. In 2013, the RNC raised $80.6, almost $16 million more than the $64.7 million pulled in by the DNC.

The money raised by these committees will finance large advertising purchases in battleground House and Senate races, among other things.

Report: Trump Has Raised More Money In California Than Most Democrat Candidates

California is well known as arguably the most liberal state in America, however recent statistics may shock both Democrats and Republicans.

It looks like there may be more Trump supporters in the “deep blue” state of California than most people think.

According to the news site Cal Matters, President Trump comes in third place for the most money raised in California out of all the Democratic candidates. He is just behind Mayor Pete Buttigieg of Indiana and Senator Kamala Harris who resides in California. 

Check out what Cal Matters reported:

This may come as surprise to the president, the national media and more than a few Californians, but there are plenty of Trump supporters in the “Resistance State,” too. And since the beginning of the year, they’ve been spending a lot of money to keep the president in the White House.

New campaign finance statistics show that President Donald Trump raised $3.2 million—more money from the California donor class than all of his Democratic challengers, but two.

Not only that, but the Trump campaign collected more from itemized small donors—those who gave in increments of less than $100 at a time—than anyone else in the field. The president bested even Democratic contender Bernie Sanders in the small-donor sweepstakes.

But it’s not all pixie dust for Trump in California: 89% of all itemized presidential campaign donations from Californians went to contenders out to defeat him.

More than $3 million has come since the beginning of this year.

Democratic Senate Hopefuls Are Raising Tons Of Money They’re Also Spending It

Congressional races heat up as Dems try to fl…02:14

Democratic Senate hopeful Jaime Harrison of South Carolina raised $57 million between July and September. Sara Gideon in Maine raised more than $39 million in that same period. And Mark Kelly in Arizona brought in $38.7 million. 

These eye-popping numbers shattered the previous record for fundraising, Beto O’Rourke’s $38 million cash haul in the third quarter of 2018. 

Now  the Democrats are spending that money in the face of massive Republican super PAC funds. And it’s left many Republican candidates with more cash on hand than the Democrats in the final weeks of the race.

In South Carolina, where the Senate race is unexpectedly tight, Harrison’s $57 million in three months was double Republican incumbent Senator Lindsey Graham’s $28 million haul, a state record for a Republican. Records show from July through September, Harrison spent more than $55 million. According to his October FEC filing, Harrison paid AL Media LLC more than $42 million over three months for TV, radio and digital advertising. He also spent another $6.5 million for digital advertising and services to Mothership Strategies, and $2 million to Blueprint Strategy LLC for radio and billboard advertising. $641,000 went to “direct mailing services.” That amounts to more than $51 million spent on ads and direct mail alone. 

Who Is Richer Democrats Or Republicans The Answer Probably Wont Surprise You

Which of the two political parties has more money, Democrats or Republicans? Most would rush to say Republicans due to the party’s ideas towards tax and money. In fact, polls have shown about 60 percent of the American people believe Republicans favor the rich. But how true is that?  can help you write about the issue but read our post first.

Presidential Campaign Spending Is Overwhelmingly On Tv Ads In Swing States

Data: Kantar, Analysis: John Sides, Washington Post

Presidential campaign money goes overwhelmingly to purchasing TV ads in just a few swing states. This map shows where ad spending was heaviest in 2012: Florida, Virginia, and Ohio, where more than $150 million was spent. Iowa, North Carolina, Colorado, and Nevada saw more than $50 million each. But most of the country saw nothing at all. Presidential campaigns have become a quadrennial stimulus bill for purple states funded by donors in red and blue states.

Democratic Party Enters 2021 In Power And Flush With Cash For A Change

The Democratic National Committee has a roughly $75 million war chest, raising the party’s hopes of keeping power in 2022 and accelerating a Democratic shift in the Sun Belt states.

After years of flirting with financial disaster, the Democratic Party entered 2021 not only in control of the White House, the House and the Senate but with more money in the bank than ever before at the start of a political cycle.

The Democratic National Committee will report to the Federal Election Commission on Sunday that it ended 2020 with $38.8 million in the bank and $3 million in debts, according to an advance look at its financial filings. In addition, there is roughly $40 million earmarked for the party, left over from its joint operations with the Biden campaign, according to people familiar with the matter. This gives the Democrats a roughly $75 million war chest at the start of President Biden’s tenure.

“This is a number that is unimaginable,” said Howard Dean, a former party chairman.

Party data, resources and infrastructure undergird candidates up and down the ballot, and Democratic officials are already dreaming of early investments in voter registration that may accelerate the political realignment Democrat are hoping to bring about in key Sun Belt states.

“We had to juggle who we were going to pay,” Tom Perez, who until earlier this month was the chairman of the D.N.C., said of the early part of his tenure, which began in 2017.

The Supreme Court Has Struck Down Many Limitations On Election Spending

Over the past four decades, Congressional attempts to regulate the campaign finance system have repeatedly been stymied by the Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds. This table lists the major cases in which the court has ruled campaign finance restrictions unconstitutional — and how closely divided the court has been in every case. The first major such case was Buckley v. Valeo, in 1976, which struck down much of the newly-adopted campaign finance infrastructure in the name of free speech. The next major campaign finance overhaul — the 2002 McCain-Feingold law — survived an initial court challenge in 2003. But after Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was replaced with the more conservative Sam Alito in 2006, the court had a majority that objected to major provisions of the law. Since then, a series of 5-4 decisions have narrowed the scope of permissible campaign finance regulations further and further.

Us Democratic Fundraising Arm Outraises Republican Counterpart In July

Jason Lange

Supporters of Democratic U.S. presidential nominee Joe Biden gather with their cars for a socially distanced election celebration as they await Biden’s remarks and fireworks in Wilmington, Delaware, U.S. November 7, 2020. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

WASHINGTON, Aug 20 – The fundraising arm of the U.S. Democratic Party raised more money in July than its Republican counterpart, helped by big contributions from billionaire donors including investor George Soros and former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt.

Disclosures filed on Friday with the Federal Election Commission showed the Democratic National Committee raised about $13.1 million last month, above the $12.9 million raised by the Republican National Committee.

The RNC still had more money in the bank at the close of the month – $79 million compared to nearly $68 million held by the DNC – although Democrats narrowed the gap.

Raising more money does not necessarily translate into Election Day victory, but a big bank account helps U.S. parties support their candidates’ campaigns and pays for ads and polling.

Democrats have narrow majorities in the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives, and losing control of either in the November 2022 contests would be a blow to Democratic President Joe Biden’s agenda.

Soros, a famed investor and a bogeyman of conservatives due to his status as a major donor for liberal causes, gave the DNC at least $250,000 in July.

Who Raised More Money In A Majority Of Tight House Races Democrats Did

Total reported in the most competitive House races

DEMOCRATS RAISED $172MILLION

With the midterm elections just weeks away, Democratic candidates have outraised their Republican opponents in a majority of the 69 most competitive House races, according to fund-raising numbers filed by the candidates on Monday. Some of the biggest earners include two Democratic women: Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey’s 11th District and Amy McGrath in Kentucky’s Sixth District.

Many Democratic candidates raised large sums from small donations online. Democrats are betting on small donor energy to make a difference in tight races.

Facing a host of tough races, Republican Party leaders have begun pulling money away from some struggling incumbents, especially in suburbs where President Trump is unpopular.

How much candidates in the most competitive House races have raised

*Incumbent shown with an asterisk.

DISTRICT

Republicans Winning Money Race As They Seek To Take Over House In 2022

The National Republican Congressional Committee announced Wednesday that it had raised $45.4 million in the second quarter of 2021, the most it has ever raised in three months of a non-election year, as Republicans seek to take over the House in 2022.

House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy This story has been updated with additional developments Wednesday.

The Most Famous Political Figures Can Make Millions In Speaking Fees

CNN

For the top echelon of famous and recognizable political figures, there’s another way to cash in after leaving offices — by giving high-priced speeches to corporate groups. Former politicians and aides from both parties participate in this practice — the more famous they are, the higher the fee they tend to be able to charge. But the undisputed king of speaking fees is Bill Clinton, who charges at least $250,000 per speech — and charged $750,000 for at least one. This chart, based on data assembled by CNN, shows how speaking fees have made Clinton over $100 million since he left office.

How Trumps Team Spent Most Of The $16 Billion It Raised Over 2 Years

Biden and Trump spar in final presidential debate

President Donald Trump‘s reelection team kicked off 2020 with what seemed like an unbeatable cash advantage, boasting a massive fundraising operation, bolstered by the joint efforts of the Republican Party.

Fast-forward 10 months and they’ve burned through a whopping $1.4 billion of the more than $1.6 billion raised over the last two years, struggling to keep up with former Vice President Joe Biden, more than what former President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign and the Democrats had raised and spent by the end of the 2012 cycle.

The revealing figures, released as the two presidential candidates debated on stage Thursday night for the last time before Election Day, came after the campaign blew through $63 million in the first two weeks of October alone — a critical time when it only brought in $44 million. The vast majority of the money spent during that time — nearly $45 million — went to television and online advertising, according to the latest disclosure report filed to the Federal Election Commission, as Biden and pro-Biden efforts ramped up his ad spending.

MORE: Trump campaign trailing behind Biden in funding, weeks before Election Day, new filings show

MORE: Trump commits to familiar playbook to define Biden in tamer final debate: ANALYSIS

So where has the president’s money gone?

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Questions about staff payments

The Massive Difference In How Democrats And Republicans Raise Money

You probably have a preconceived notion of where the political parties raise their money. Republicans get lots of donations from wealthy individuals and corporate interests; Democrats get money from less rich individuals and a somewhat overlapping set of corporate interests. Well, we have news for you: That perception is completely correct.

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At least, that is, for the parties’ Governors Associations. On Tuesday, organizations and candidates that raise money for political campaigns had to file quarterly reports with the Federal Election Commission. The Democratic Governors Association and the Republican Governors Association both reported how much they’d raised between April 1 and June 30. The RGA did much better, about $24 million raised versus under $14 million, although the DGA had more donors, about 1,500 to 400.

When money is given to these groups, which can accept unlimited donations unlike their federal counterparts, the organizations have to document who gave, and how much, and when. Organizations that give just list an address; individuals have to identify their employer. Which lets us see pretty easily how those two groups break down.

And so, we see that the RGA got a much larger percentage of their donations from organizations than did the DGA.

far86 times

Who are these beneficent individuals? The DeVos family, of Amway fame. Las Vegas megadonor Sheldon Adelson. And  Kotch? Koch? Someone named “David Koch,” if you’ve heard of him.

Congressional Staffers Can Take Trips Funded By Foreign Governments

Washington Post

After the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, Congress put several new restrictions on gifts that could be offered to members of Congress or their staffers. Yet there’s one significant loophole that remains — Congressional staffers are allowed to take trips abroad funded by foreign governments.The Washington Post’s TW Farnam reported on paid trips taken by Congressional staffers last year, and the map here is our depiction of Farnam’s findings. Between 2006 and 2011, 226 staffers took trips to China, 121 to Taiwan, and 65 to Saudi Arabia — where those countries’ governments footed the bill.

[douglasacogan]

Should a state judge be campaigning against a state criminal justice reform initiative when talking to potential jurors?!?!?

I have been more than a bit troubled by the fact that Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor has been serving for months as the campaigner-in-chief against an interesting and intricate drug sentencing and prison reform initiative on the November 2018 ballot here in Ohio.  Originally called the "Neighborhood Safety, Drug Treatment and Rehabilitation Amendment," the initiative now is just known within Ohio as Issue 1 (and the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center at OSU has been hosting public panels about Issue 1 under the title Ballot Insights, and has created a Resources Page for Issue 1 and a Commentary Page on Issue 1).  One of my concerns has been that her visible role has put her in lock-step with advocacy by Ohio's prosecutors, and also seemingly has made many Ohio state judges feel comfortable speaking out against Issue 1 while making it hard for other state judges to feel comfortable speaking out for Issue 1.

Whatever one thinking about a judge or justice discussing their views on a ballot initiative in public, I am especially troubled by this story out of Cleveland that prompts the question in the title of this post.  The piece is headlined "Cuyahoga County judge politicks against Issue 1 to potential jurors inside courthouse," and here are the details:

A Cuyahoga County judge who is a vocal critic of a sentencing reform initiative on the ballot for the Nov. 6 election has taken his opposition to residents forced to show up for jury duty at the Justice Center.

Multiple times in recent weeks, Common Pleas Court Judge David Matia has used the time usually reserved for a judge to welcome the hundreds of potential jurors to their mandatory civic duty to instead deliver a spiel in which he explicitly urged them to vote against Issue 1.

Administrative and Presiding Judge John J. Russo does not object to Matia's actions, which Matia insisted in a Monday phone interview did not violate any judicial ethics rules. Judges are allowed to take public stances on issues that "directly affect the administration of justice," and it is up to a particular judge to determine when and where it is appropriate to make those comments, according to a 2002 advisory opinion by the Ohio Supreme Court's Board of Commissioners on Grievances and Discipline.

"Whether it's a group of jurors or a bingo hall, it doesn't matter," Matia said. "The opportunity to educate the public should not be ignored by members of the judiciary."

But Matia's choice to deliver the message as part of the regular duties of his seat on the bench -- to a group of people with no choice to leave -- raises serious ethical questions, a legal expert said. "He's got a right to announce his views," Charles Geyh, a law professor at Indiana University, told cleveland.com. "What I don't like is he is using his judicial office as a vehicle for addressing a captive audience. That's where he's abusing the prestige of his judicial office."...

Matia said he has spoken to potential jurors three times. He said he has done so in addition to the judge on the schedule twice, and spoke on Wednesday in place of the judge who was supposed to address the room when that judge did not show up. He said he hit the usual talking points he hits when he speaks in public about the issue, and urged a "no" vote. "It's not a political issue," he said. "This is a matter directly affecting the administration of justice, and frankly it's our duty to educate the public on this issue and how it will affect the administration of justice."

Russo said in a statement through a spokesman that he "was made aware that his colleague has been speaking to jurors" about the measure. "Judge Matia is an elected Cuyahoga County official and is speaking to constituents about an issue that impacts the administration of justice in the state," Russo said in the statement.

Rick Dove, director of the court's Board of Professional Conduct, said this situation is not explicitly spelled out in any judicial ethics rules, or addressed in any advisory opinions. Dove pointed to the 2002 opinion, which came in response to a complaint filed over a judge's public endorsement of a proposed constitutional amendment that dealt with expanding the use of drug treatment in sentencing....

The board wrote that judges could address certain legal issues that affect the administration of justice, and that it was not inappropriate for judges to do so in newspaper editorials, radio and TV ads, public forums and other mediums. "No rule within the Ohio Code of Judicial Conduct, provides a list of appropriate forums for judicial speech," the board wrote. "A judge must exercise his or her discretion regarding appropriate forums for speaking to the public regarding the law, the legal system, and the administration of justice."

But Matia's advocacy did not occur at a forum or a public meeting where people came voluntarily to hear thoughts about the issue. It came inside the courthouse, to a group of people who had been summoned to perform a mandatory government duty. Matia carried the authority of being a judge inside the courthouse and acted within the scope of his judicial office when he took the stance, all to an audience who was not free to leave, Geyh argued. "He seems to be exploiting his role as judge to create this opportunity to vent his ideological point of view with respect to this view of legislation," Geyh said.

Matia called his advocacy at the courthouse "a non-issue, ethics wise." He sent a copy of the 2002 opinion to cleveland.com Monday in a text message after the phone interview for this story. "Just remember to vote no on [Issue] 1," Matia wrote, adding a smiley-face emoticon.

I am squarely with Professor Geyh on this one, and I have concerns about Judge Matia's actions that go beyond the specifics of talking about Issue 1 to a captive audience inside a courthouse. At least some of these prospective jurors are going to be asked to participate in cases that might involve applications of the laws and policies that are the subject-matter of Issue 1, and I worry about how the judge's comments may be impacting the jury pool beyond how the judge has become a campaigner for a partisan position in the courthouse.

Prior related posts:

Interesting and intricate Ohio drug sentencing initiative poised to qualify for November 2018 ballot 

Ohio gubernatorial candidate talking up criminal justice reform while advocating for state constitutional drug sentencing initiative

Events and resources covering Ohio sentencing and prison reform ballot initiative known now as Issue 1 

Excited to hear Shon Hopwood speak about earned prison credit as Ohio considers ballot initiative known now as Issue 1

Despite fear-mongering opposition ads, drug sentencing and prison reform initiative polling strong in Ohio

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247011 https://sentencing.typepad.com/sentencing_law_and_policy/2018/10/should-a-state-judge-be-campaigning-against-a-state-criminal-justice-reform-initiative-when-talking-.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

[benrleeusa]

Should a state judge be campaigning against a state criminal justice reform initiative when talking to potential jurors?!?!?

I have been more than a bit troubled by the fact that Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor has been serving for months as the campaigner-in-chief against an interesting and intricate drug sentencing and prison reform initiative on the November 2018 ballot here in Ohio.  Originally called the "Neighborhood Safety, Drug Treatment and Rehabilitation Amendment," the initiative now is just known within Ohio as Issue 1 (and the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center at OSU has been hosting public panels about Issue 1 under the title Ballot Insights, and has created a Resources Page for Issue 1 and a Commentary Page on Issue 1).  One of my concerns has been that her visible role has put her in lock-step with advocacy by Ohio's prosecutors, and also seemingly has made many Ohio state judges feel comfortable speaking out against Issue 1 while making it hard for other state judges to feel comfortable speaking out for Issue 1.

Whatever one thinking about a judge or justice discussing their views on a ballot initiative in public, I am especially troubled by this story out of Cleveland that prompts the question in the title of this post.  The piece is headlined "Cuyahoga County judge politicks against Issue 1 to potential jurors inside courthouse," and here are the details:

A Cuyahoga County judge who is a vocal critic of a sentencing reform initiative on the ballot for the Nov. 6 election has taken his opposition to residents forced to show up for jury duty at the Justice Center.

Multiple times in recent weeks, Common Pleas Court Judge David Matia has used the time usually reserved for a judge to welcome the hundreds of potential jurors to their mandatory civic duty to instead deliver a spiel in which he explicitly urged them to vote against Issue 1.

Administrative and Presiding Judge John J. Russo does not object to Matia's actions, which Matia insisted in a Monday phone interview did not violate any judicial ethics rules. Judges are allowed to take public stances on issues that "directly affect the administration of justice," and it is up to a particular judge to determine when and where it is appropriate to make those comments, according to a 2002 advisory opinion by the Ohio Supreme Court's Board of Commissioners on Grievances and Discipline.

"Whether it's a group of jurors or a bingo hall, it doesn't matter," Matia said. "The opportunity to educate the public should not be ignored by members of the judiciary."

But Matia's choice to deliver the message as part of the regular duties of his seat on the bench -- to a group of people with no choice to leave -- raises serious ethical questions, a legal expert said. "He's got a right to announce his views," Charles Geyh, a law professor at Indiana University, told cleveland.com. "What I don't like is he is using his judicial office as a vehicle for addressing a captive audience. That's where he's abusing the prestige of his judicial office."...

Matia said he has spoken to potential jurors three times. He said he has done so in addition to the judge on the schedule twice, and spoke on Wednesday in place of the judge who was supposed to address the room when that judge did not show up. He said he hit the usual talking points he hits when he speaks in public about the issue, and urged a "no" vote. "It's not a political issue," he said. "This is a matter directly affecting the administration of justice, and frankly it's our duty to educate the public on this issue and how it will affect the administration of justice."

Russo said in a statement through a spokesman that he "was made aware that his colleague has been speaking to jurors" about the measure. "Judge Matia is an elected Cuyahoga County official and is speaking to constituents about an issue that impacts the administration of justice in the state," Russo said in the statement.

Rick Dove, director of the court's Board of Professional Conduct, said this situation is not explicitly spelled out in any judicial ethics rules, or addressed in any advisory opinions. Dove pointed to the 2002 opinion, which came in response to a complaint filed over a judge's public endorsement of a proposed constitutional amendment that dealt with expanding the use of drug treatment in sentencing....

The board wrote that judges could address certain legal issues that affect the administration of justice, and that it was not inappropriate for judges to do so in newspaper editorials, radio and TV ads, public forums and other mediums. "No rule within the Ohio Code of Judicial Conduct, provides a list of appropriate forums for judicial speech," the board wrote. "A judge must exercise his or her discretion regarding appropriate forums for speaking to the public regarding the law, the legal system, and the administration of justice."

But Matia's advocacy did not occur at a forum or a public meeting where people came voluntarily to hear thoughts about the issue. It came inside the courthouse, to a group of people who had been summoned to perform a mandatory government duty. Matia carried the authority of being a judge inside the courthouse and acted within the scope of his judicial office when he took the stance, all to an audience who was not free to leave, Geyh argued. "He seems to be exploiting his role as judge to create this opportunity to vent his ideological point of view with respect to this view of legislation," Geyh said.

Matia called his advocacy at the courthouse "a non-issue, ethics wise." He sent a copy of the 2002 opinion to cleveland.com Monday in a text message after the phone interview for this story. "Just remember to vote no on [Issue] 1," Matia wrote, adding a smiley-face emoticon.

I am squarely with Professor Geyh on this one, and I have concerns about Judge Matia's actions that go beyond the specifics of talking about Issue 1 to a captive audience inside a courthouse. At least some of these prospective jurors are going to be asked to participate in cases that might involve applications of the laws and policies that are the subject-matter of Issue 1, and I worry about how the judge's comments may be impacting the jury pool beyond how the judge has become a campaigner for a partisan position in the courthouse.

Prior related posts:

Interesting and intricate Ohio drug sentencing initiative poised to qualify for November 2018 ballot 

Ohio gubernatorial candidate talking up criminal justice reform while advocating for state constitutional drug sentencing initiative

Events and resources covering Ohio sentencing and prison reform ballot initiative known now as Issue 1 

Excited to hear Shon Hopwood speak about earned prison credit as Ohio considers ballot initiative known now as Issue 1

Despite fear-mongering opposition ads, drug sentencing and prison reform initiative polling strong in Ohio