Politics

There are 164 posts filed in Politics (this is page 2 of 17).

The sentencing of Donald Trump

Today, Donald Trump was sentenced for his conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records to interfere with the 2016 US presidential election.

Coverage: (CNN – Takeaways) (CNN – live blog) (CNN – audio of hearing) (MSNBC – audio of hearing) (USA Today – article and downloadble audio) (CBS – audio excerpts from hearing).

I listened to the USA Today audio (download), it was a little clearer than the audio file provided by the NY State Unified Court System (download). I am providing the USA Today audio download in a player at the end of this post.

Here are my notes of the hearing:

  • Counsel introductions (People and Defense)
  • Both sides are reviewing the probation report, neither side had anything to add to the record
  • Clerk informed People and Defense that they could make statements before sentencing
  • People/Josh Steinglass
    • People recommend unconditional discharge
    • Reviewed how Trump showed no remorse and threatened to retaliate against prosecutors in this case
    • Jury reached a unanimous verdict
    • Probation report says defendant sees himself as “above the law”
    • Must be mindful of the office of the presidency
  • Todd Blanche
    • Disagrees with what the government just said
    • Case should not have been brought
    • We will seek an appeal
  • Donald Trump
    • Very terrible experience
    • Political witch hunt
    • Lots of complaints
    • DOJ is very involved
    • I won the election
    • This is a weaponization of government
    • I was treated very unfairly
  • Juan Merchan
    • Wishes to explain reasoning for sentencing decision
    • A judge must decide what is correct sentence
    • Court must consider the facts of the case and any other mitigating circumstances
    • Extraordinary circumstances involved in this case
    • One power that the presidency does not provide is the power to erase a jury verdict
    • Pronounced sentence of unconditional discharge

Court Documents

What is the plan for Democrats?

So, here we are. Mike Johnson was elected speaker of the House 218-215 (in a 90 minute vote with phone calls to the holdouts by Donald Trump). What was the next opportunity to test the Republicans? The rules package. What was the vote? 215-209, with 10 not voting and one Democrat voting for the package.

WHAT!

If all Democrats voted against (including that one outcast), it would have lost 214-215. Why didn’t the Democratic conference flex their muscle there? Ugh.

Next, the electoral count. I was not expecting any challenges, and there were none, which is as it should be. Today, the House passed the Laken Riley Act. The Hill reports that “The legislation cleared the chamber in a 264-159 vote, with 48 Democrats joining all Republicans in support. The Senate is expected to take up the legislation this week…..Democratic leadership did not whip for or against the Laken Riley Act, allowing members of the caucus to vote their conscience.”. Well, I guess the Democrats are “keeping their powder dry”….

Now Trump is boasting about buying Greenland and taking back the Panama Canal, among other stupid ideas. Representative Jim McGovern has the right idea:

This would be a good start – don’t let the people forget about what Trump “promised” he would do when he became President. Democrats, let’s get out there and keep the pressure up! And, let’s try not to feed the troll…

The certification of the 2024 US presidential election

Today, a joint session of the US Congress, chaired by Vice President Kamala Harris, certified the results of the 2024 US presidential election, declaring Donald Trump the winner.

This was not the result I wanted, but it is a result which honored the votes of the American people, via the system of voting in the US called the Electoral College. The length of the proceeding was less than 30 minutes, as there were no objections by any Representative or Senator. It was amazing how quickly it went, as opposed to 2021 where numerous objections were raised by Republican (see my liveblog from the 2021 certification).

Kamala Harris released a video today stating that she would fulfill her constitutional duty to preside over the electoral count today:

The House and Senate Congressional leaders held a brief ceremony to remember the events of January 6, 2021:

In CNN’s liveblog coverage for today, Jamie Raskin shared part of a conversation with fellow representative Bennie Thompson:

“I was reflecting on the fact that we can feel proud of standing up for the constitutional order and the election process as it is supposed to work, but it’s also a very tough pill to swallow” Raskin told CNN of his private conversation with Thompson.

Previously on this weblog:

Other coverage:

In the US today, the Electoral College is meeting to cast electoral votes for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Per CNN, Donald Trump has already received enough votes to win the presidency. I tried to find where the Oregon Electoral College meeting is, but did not find anything. Quite a difference from four years ago, when almost all of the electoral college meetings were televised.

Follow-up on “How to get the Democratic message out there”

Recently, I wrote a post about an idea of trying to get the @kamalahq social media feeds going again. I took the following actions:

  1. Reached out to the communications contact for my county Democratic committee, sent them a pointer to my post, and asked if there was anything the county committee could do to help. The person wrote me back, said they agreed with my post, and added a link to the post in that week’s newsletter. I waited a few days, but did not get any response. I touched base with the county committee person again, the response was “there are some connected people on the mailing list. I have not written back.
  2. I signed up for a trial of LinkedIn Premium to be able to send directly email to Lauren Kopp (head person of @kamalahq feeds), asking if the feeds might be restarting. No response yet (need to remember to cancel my trial….)
  3. Sent email to the digital director for the Oregon Democratic Party, with the same info I sent to the county party committee. No response yet.

What to do next? I will follow up to the state party office (probably should write the top person) and the county committee (maybe the comms person has some other ideas). I am not surprised by the level of response, but perhaps a second try will get a little farther.

What a difference 161 votes makes

There is a saying that ” your vote makes a difference” or “every vote is important”. In a Oregon House race that just concluded, every vote was, indeed, important.

This happened to be Oregon House District 22, in which I reside. The incumbent, Republican Tracy Cramer, was being challenged by Democrat Lesly Munoz. On November 5th, initial results showed Cramer leading by over 500 votes. However, as votes continued to be processed, Cramer’s lead narrowed. On November 14th, Munoz took the lead by a single vote.

Oregon is a vote-by-mail state, and in addition, Oregon counts votes mailed that are postmarked by Election Day and received within 8 days after Election Day. As a result, my county (Marion County, Oregon) was still receiving valid votes through November 12, and then was continuing to process ballots after that point. so vote totals kept changing.

After all valid ballots had been counted, there were still over 800 ballots for this House district that needed to be “cured” to be considered valid ballots. In general, this meant that there was a signature verification issue, and the ballots were set aside. Marion County then sent letters to all of those registered voters informing them of the problem and told them they had to go to the county elections office to “cure” their vote by 5pm on November 26th. The campaigns and parties also received lists of these voters, and worked to get these voters to cure their ballots. As of November 25th, there were still over 500 ballots not cured, and the last report from Marion County showed Munoz ahead by 149 votes. The final unofficial tally was released by Marion County around 6:00pm on November 26, with Munoz leading Cramer by 161 votes. Yes, in this race, every vote did make a difference.

In The Car Podcast – November 23, 2024

I recorded this on 11/23/2024, so I am using that in the title, even though I am posting it 2 days later. Coves the election, what to do next, and what technical projects I think I will work on next.

Links referenced in the podcast:

Emptywheel: What next?

Emptywheel: Lessons from Red States on How to Push Back

Oregon Public Broadcasting: Responding to residents proved foundational in Gluesenkamp Perez victory as district picked Trump

CNN: Gallego offers advice to Democrats after winning in state Trump won

The East Is A Podcast: I was referencing this episode

Datasette: Datasette is a tool for exploring and publishing data. It helps people take data of any shape, analyze and explore it, and publish it as an interactive website and accompanying API.

Federated Wiki: Main Github repo

How to get the Democratic message out there

Recently, Dave Winer has written about how the Democratic Party stops communicating its message when the election is over. His position is that the Republican Party has supporters/surrogates/podcasts/TV networks pushing the Republican message 24/7/365, but that the Democrats are only “on-the-air” during the lead up to an election.

This is not a new message from Dave Winer. He has long voiced the opinion that past Democratic campaigns (Obama in particular, but now Harris as well) shut down the campaign websites they created, lost contact with the voters they organized, and left a void in the Democratic Party organization. See also similar comments from Ken Smith echoing this refrain.

Shortly after the election, Dave Winer put out a request for identifying who was behind the @kamalahq social media feeds, which did a good job of responding to Republican activities during the 2024 presidential campaign, pretty much in real time. Within a few days, he had a name (Lauren Kapp), a link to her LinkedIn site, and a link to one of her TikTok videos, where she said that two staffers and three interns produced the content for these feeds. Based in the frequency of updates, I would say they worked seven days a week keeping the flow of content going.

I think it was great that Dave Winer was able to use his blog and network to find this person. His next steps were a little underwhelming, and I think it is worth taking some time to analyze how the “call to action” could have had more effect. His post of November 19th where he revealed the identity of Lauren Kapp included these words:

“We need to get her back on the air, with her team, fully funded and supported. We need leadership on the social web.”

Good statements, but no next action step provided. Also, the use of the “royal we” (“We need to…”) implies that someone needs to take the ball and move it forward, but no effort is made to identify or motivate “them”. If you wanted to try to do something about this communication problem, why stop at identifying the talent and leaving the rest up to “them”? Dave recorded a podcast giving some more detail on how he sees this project, but again, no next step is provided. Also, I think it would be easier for the target audience (“them”) if there was a next step in the post instead of trying to get someone to listen to a podcast that has no action step.

Two days later, Dave Winer followed up on his first post, saying he would contribute $100 to get @kamalahq “back on the air”:

“Let’s get the Dems back on the air before the inauguration. I’ll kick in $100 to get it started, and I’ll tell everyone I know to fund it too. There’s no time to waste.”

A nice offer, but who is going to do something about it? The phrase “when everyone is in charge, no one is in charge” comes to mind. Dave’ earlier version of this post encouraged people to reach out to every Democratic influencer they know about this topic, but it ended up getting revised to “I’ll throw in money when someone else puts it together. Maybe he made some other efforts, but if he did, why not tell us about it?

Before I examine some alternatives, I want to be clear – this is a typical problem of ideas thrown out on the Internet. “Here’s an idea, world – get back to me when you have it implemented”. I am boring down a little deeper on this one because Dave puts out calls like this fairly often, and I think it’s a good idea, but sometimes ideas need help.

Now, what if there were some steps suggested that people could take like:

  1. Reaching out to Lauren Kopp before even making the first post and seeing if she is interested in participating in keeping this news flow going, and if she is, telling us about it. That could provide a spark.
  2. If she is interested, start a GoFundMe or some other crowdfunding vehicle to see if there is other interest.
  3. Reach out to your local Democratic county organization or state organization, provide links to these posts, see if there is interest/support (here is a next step for readers)
  4. Keep banging the drum (Dave says he does this for projects he is promoting)

These are a few ideas of how to help make this idea (getting a prolific social media platform for Democrats going again) a reality again.

SPOILER ALERT: I actually did steps 1 and 3, will post back on what response I get…taking action is key, not just posting ideas on the Internet…