The GOP are fascists who hate our form of government (democracy)

wrbtrader · May 9, 2021

userque said:
"Again" implies he wasn't at one point.
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The character of Elitetrader.com changed dramatically from 2016 to 2020. I first saw it when I came home from the hospital / coma in December 2016.

It seemed suspicious at first but ET was far from my mind at that time considering I had more important things to think about...recovery from a very serious illness (airborne deadly virus) that almost killed me.

By 2018, I started paying close intention and notice a dramatic drop of debates in the Technical Analysis threads (it works...it does not work). On the flip side, there was a dramatic increase of debates in the Political threads.

In fact, people that use to debate about TA were part of the increase of the debates in the Political threads. I saw many show their true character as in they hid it very well until Trump was elected President.

It still doesn't make sense considering those leading most of the debates...their guy Trump had been elected President. One would think they would be happy.

Instead, they behaved as if life had become worst for them.

Just as bad, some didn't realize a few (like me) knew not only did they not reside in the United States...they were not Americans. Instead, just online propagandists / conspiracy theorists with a strong liking of Trump.

This is also about the time I learned that Qanon was a big thing in other countries outside of the United States.

wrbtrader

Cuddles · May 9, 2021

ph1l · May 9, 2021

wrbtrader said:
The character of Elitetrader.com changed dramatically from 2016 to 2020. I first saw it when I came home from the hospital / coma in December 2016.
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They say "correlation is not causation," but ...

Just kidding.

wrbtrader · May 10, 2021

ph1l said:
They say "correlation is not causation," but ...
View attachment 258514

Just kidding.
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It's people in reference to after the November Presidential Elections of 2016...an election I missed due to being on Life / Support since early September 2016...

The Trump followers should have been thrilled that he won the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. They should have been relishing in it.

Yet, they were behaving (arguing / defending) as if Trump had lost. It took me until 2018 to figure out what was going on because I couldn't find hardly any debates any more that Technical Analysis works / doesn't work...

Many of those involved had moved to the Political threads. It was like a scene out of Tom Cruise's movie War of the Worlds in which the real threat to the forum had been buried beneath the Technical Analysis section before it revealed its true self in the Political section.

wrbtrader

Cuddles · May 13, 2021

who could've seen it coming?

oh yeah, this guy:

Here4money said:
cons don't want "cancel culture" because they love their dark money

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news...argest-election-reform-bill-in-half-a-century

Inside the Koch-Backed Effort to Block the Largest Election-Reform Bill in Half a Century
On a leaked conference call, leaders of dark-money groups and an aide to Mitch McConnell expressed frustration with the popularity of the legislation—even among Republican voters.

In public, Republicans have denounced Democrats’ ambitious electoral-reform bill, the For the People Act, as an unpopular partisan ploy. In a contentious Senate committee hearing last week, Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, slammed the proposal, which aims to expand voting rights and curb the influence of money in politics, as “a brazen and shameless power grab by Democrats.” But behind closed doors Republicans speak differently about the legislation, which is also known as House Resolution 1 and Senate Bill 1. They admit the lesser-known provisions in the bill that limit secret campaign spending are overwhelmingly popular across the political spectrum. In private, they concede their own polling shows that no message they can devise effectively counters the argument that billionaires should be prevented from buying elections.

A recording obtained by The New Yorker of a private conference call on January 8th, between a policy adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell and the leaders of several prominent conservative groups—including one run by the Koch brothers’ network—reveals the participants’ worry that the proposed election reforms garner wide support not just from liberals but from conservative voters, too. The speakers on the call expressed alarm at the broad popularity of the bill’s provision calling for more public disclosure about secret political donors. The participants conceded that the bill, which would stem the flow of dark money from such political donors as the billionaire oil magnate Charles Koch, was so popular that it wasn’t worth trying to mount a public-advocacy campaign to shift opinion. Instead, a senior Koch operative said that opponents would be better off ignoring the will of American voters and trying to kill the bill in Congress.

Kyle McKenzie, the research director for the Koch-run advocacy group Stand Together, told fellow-conservatives and Republican congressional staffers on the call that he had a “spoiler.” “When presented with a very neutral description” of the bill, “people were generally supportive,” McKenzie said, adding that “the most worrisome part . . . is that conservatives were actually as supportive as the general public was when they read the neutral description.” In fact, he warned, “there’s a large, very large, chunk of conservatives who are supportive of these types of efforts.”

As a result, McKenzie conceded, the legislation’s opponents would likely have to rely on Republicans in the Senate, where the bill is now under debate, to use “under-the-dome-type strategies”—meaning legislative maneuvers beneath Congress’s roof, such as the filibuster—to stop the bill, because turning public opinion against it would be “incredibly difficult.” He warned that the worst thing conservatives could do would be to try to “engage with the other side” on the argument that the legislation “stops billionaires from buying elections.” McKenzie admitted, “Unfortunately, we’ve found that that is a winning message, for both the general public and also conservatives.” He said that when his group tested “tons of other” arguments in support of the bill, the one condemning billionaires buying elections was the most persuasive—people “found that to be most convincing, and it riled them up the most.”

McKenzie explained that the Koch-founded group had invested substantial resources “to see if we could find any message that would activate and persuade conservatives on this issue.” He related that “an A.O.C. message we tested”—one claiming that the bill might help Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez achieve her goal of holding “people in the Trump Administration accountable” by identifying big donors—helped somewhat with conservatives. But McKenzie admitted that the link was tenuous, since “what she means by this is unclear.” “Sadly,” he added, not even attaching the phrase “cancel culture” to the bill, by portraying it as silencing conservative voices, had worked. “It really ranked at the bottom,” McKenzie said to the group. “That was definitely a little concerning for us.”

Gretchen Reiter, the senior vice-president of communications for Stand Together, declined to respond to questions about the conference call or the Koch group’s research showing the robust popularity of the proposed election reforms. In an e-mailed statement, she said, “Defending civil liberties requires more than a sound bite,” and added that the group opposes the bill because “a third of it restricts First Amendment rights.” She included a link to an op-ed written by a member of Americans for Prosperity, another Koch-affiliated advocacy group, which argues that the legislation violates donors’ freedom of expression by requiring the disclosure of the names of those who contribute ten thousand dollars or more to nonprofit groups involved in election spending. Such transparency, the op-ed suggests, could subject donors who prefer to remain anonymous to retaliation or harassment.

The State Policy Network, a confederation of right-wing think tanks with affiliates in every state, convened the conference call days after the Democrats’ twin victories in the Senate runoffs in Georgia, which meant that the Party had won the White House and majorities in both houses of Congress, making it likely that the For the People Act would move forward. Participants included Heather Lauer, the executive director of People United for Privacy, a conservative group fighting to keep nonprofit donors’ identities secret, and Grover Norquist, the founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, who expressed alarm at the damage that the disclosure provisions could do. “The left is not stupid, they’re evil,” he warned. “They know what they’re doing. They have correctly decided that this is the way to disable the freedom movement.”

Coördinating directly with the right-wing policy groups, which define themselves as nonpartisan for tax purposes, were two top Republican congressional staffers: Caleb Hays, the general counsel to the Republicans on the House Administration Committee, and Steve Donaldson, a policy adviser to McConnell. “When it comes to donor privacy, I can’t stress enough how quickly things could get out of hand,” Donaldson said, indicating McConnell’s concern about the effects that disclosure requirements would have on fund-raising. Donaldson added, “We have to hold our people together,” and predicted that the fight is “going to be a long one. It’s going to be a messy one.” But he insisted that McConnell was “not going to back down.” Neither Donaldson nor Hays responded to requests for comment. David Popp, a spokesperson for McConnell, said, “We don’t comment on private meetings.”

Nick Surgey, the executive director of Documented, a progressive watchdog group that investigates corporate money in politics, told me it made sense that McConnell’s staffer was on the call, because the proposed legislation “poses a very real threat to McConnell’s source of power within the Republican Party, which has always been fund-raising.” Nonetheless, he said that the close coördination on messaging and tactics between the Republican leadership and technically nonpartisan outside-advocacy groups was “surprising to see.”

The proposed legislation, which the House of Representatives passed on March 3rd, largely along party lines, has been described by the Times as “the most substantial expansion of voting rights in a half-century.” It would transform the way that Americans vote by mandating automatic national voter registration, expanding voting by mail, and transferring the decennial project of redrawing—and often gerrymandering—congressional districts from the control of political parties to nonpartisan experts. Given the extraordinary attempts by Donald Trump and his supporters to undermine the 2020 election, and Republicans’ ongoing efforts to deter Democratic constituencies from voting, it is the bill’s sweeping voting-rights provisions that have drawn the most media attention. During his first press conference, last week, President Joe Biden backed the bill, calling Republican efforts to undermine voting rights “sick” and “un-American.” He declared, “We’ve got to prove democracy works.”

But as the State Policy Network’s conference call demonstrated, some of the less noticed provisions in the eight-hundred-plus-page bill are particularly worrisome to conservative operatives. Both parties have relied on wealthy anonymous donors, but the vast majority of dark money from undisclosed sources over the past decade has supported conservative causes and candidates. Democrats, however, are catching up. In 2020, for the first time in any Presidential election, liberal dark-money groups far outspent their conservative counterparts, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign spending. Nonetheless, Democrats, unlike Republicans, have pushed for reforms that would shut off the dark-money spigot.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, from 2010, opened up scores of loopholes that have enabled wealthy donors and businesses to covertly buy political influence. Money is often donated through nonprofit corporations, described as “social welfare” organizations, which don’t publicly disclose their donors. These dark-money groups can spend a limited percentage of their funds directly on electoral politics. They also can contribute funds to political-action committees, creating a daisy chain of groups giving to one another. This makes it virtually impossible to identify the original source of funding. The result has been a cascade of anonymous cash flooding into American elections.

The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics reports that in the 2020 federal election cycle more than a billion dollars was spent by dark-money groups that masked the identity of their donors. Of that total, more than six hundred and fifty-four million dollars came from just fifteen groups. The top spender was One Nation, a dark-money social-welfare group tied to McConnell. The For the People Act requires greater disclosure of the identities of donors who pay for election ads—including those released on digital platforms, which currently fall outside of such legal scrutiny. It also requires that donors who give ten thousand dollars or more to social-welfare groups be identified, if that donation is spent to sway elections. Donors who fund non-election-oriented activities by such groups can remain anonymous. And, notably, the legislation calls for the disclosure, for the first time, of large donors trying to exert control over the selection of judicial nominees. This provision appears to target groups such as the Judicial Crisis Network, on the right, and Demand Justice, on the left, which have mounted multimillion-dollar public-advocacy campaigns to influence the confirmation of Supreme Court nominees.

Brendan Fischer, a campaign-finance-reform advocate in favor of the legislation, said that the conference call showed that “wealthy special interests are working hard to protect a broken status quo, where billionaires and corporations are free to secretly buy influence.” After listening to the recording, Fischer, who directs the Campaign Legal Center’s Federal Reform Program, added that it exposed “the reality that cracking down on political corruption and ending dark money is popular with voters across the political spectrum.”

On the call, McKenzie, the Koch operative, cited one “ray of hope” in the fight against the reforms, noting that his research found that the most effective message was arguing that a politically “diverse coalition of groups opposed” the bill, including the American Civil Liberties Union. “In our message example that we used, we used the example of A.C.L.U., Planned Parenthood, and conservative organizations backed by Charles Koch as an example of groups that oppose H.R. 1,” he said. “I think, you know, when you put that in front of people . . . they’re, like, ‘Oh, conservatives and some liberal groups all oppose this, like, I should maybe think about this more. You know, there must be bigger implications to this if these groups are all coming together on it.’ ”

However, that test message was inaccurate. Planned Parenthood does not oppose the For the People Act. It is, in fact, on a list of organizations giving the legislation their full backing. And the A.C.L.U. supports almost all of the expansions of voting rights contained in the bill, although it has sided with the Koch groups and other conservative organizations in arguing that donors to nonprofit groups could be harassed if their names are disclosed. Advocates for greater transparency in political spending argue that there is no serious evidence of any such harassment. Asked if she could cite any examples, Kate Ruane, a senior legislative counsel at the A.C.L.U., said that the only one she knew about was atypical—the online backlash experienced by the actor Mila Kunis, after she had made a donation to a pro-abortion group in the name of Mike Pence, a staunch opponent of abortion rights.

With so little public support, the bill’s opponents have already begun pressuring individual senators. On March 20th, several major conservative groups, including Heritage Action, Tea Party Patriots Action, Freedom Works, and the local and national branches of the Family Research Council, organized a rally in West Virginia to get Senator Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat, to come out against the legislation. They also pushed Manchin to oppose any efforts by Democrats to abolish the Senate’s filibuster rule, a tactical step that the Party would probably need to take in order to pass the bill. “The filibuster is really the only thing standing in the way of progressive far-left policies like H.R. 1, which is Pelosi’s campaign to take over America’s elections,” Noah Weinrich, the press secretary at Heritage Action, declared during a West Virginia radio interview. On Thursday, Manchin issued a statement warning Democrats that forcing the measure through the Senate would “only exacerbate the distrust that millions of Americans harbor against the U.S. government.”

Pressure tactics from dark-money groups may work on individual lawmakers. The legislation faces an uphill fight in the Senate. But, as the January 8th conference call shows, opponents of the legislation have resorted to “under-the-dome-type strategies” because the broad public is against them when it comes to billionaires buying elections.
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Here4money said:
Go read the New Yorker story on dark money and the election reform bill if you want to learn how you're being played with "cancel culture" outrage.

I'm GOP PAC, I start petition, I hire click farm, I feed outrage culture to garbage outlet in India.
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Here4money said:
He's drank the kool-aid, he's gone. He'll toe the line when fox says dark money disclosure efforts, citizens united rescission efforts, and voter disenfranchisement boycotts are "cancel culture"
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Here4money said:
You're missing my point, this single leaked call of a single big donor exploration tried to float "cancel culture" as a way to push back against HR1's dark money donor disclosure provisions.

You really think this is the only call by operatives and the Kochs' the only big donors exploring that angle? Why's "cancel culture" suddenly the big story?

“to see if we could find any message that would activate and persuade conservatives on this issue.” He related that “an A.O.C. message we tested”—one claiming that the bill might help Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez achieve her goal of holding “people in the Trump Administration accountable” by identifying big donors—helped somewhat with conservatives. But McKenzie admitted that the link was tenuous, since “what she means by this is unclear.” “Sadly,” he added, not even attaching the phrase “cancel culture” to the bill, by portraying it as silencing conservative voices, had worked. “It really ranked at the bottom,” McKenzie said to the group. “That was definitely a little concerning for us.”
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Cuddles · May 15, 2021

gwb-trading said:
Wisconsin joins the Arizona ''the election was stolen and we're gonna prove it'' derp brigade.

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Cuddles · May 16, 2021

gwb-trading said:
The mental illness in Arizona is spreading...

Arizona Senate considers expanding audit of Maricopa County ballots to all races
https://www.azcentral.com/story/new...maricopa-county-ballots-all-races/5100735001/

The Arizona Senate is considering expanding its audit of Maricopa County ballots cast in the 2020 election to include all contests, not just for president and U.S. Senate.

Audit organizers now say they want to test county voting machines by examiningresults from all of the races.

“We are looking with other companies to do a machine tabulation of all the races on the ballot to compare with the Dominion tabulation back in November," said Ken Bennett, who is serving as the Senate's audit liaison.

"We will be looking at the images of all 2.1 million ballots.”

The examination would not involve a physical recount like the one underway at Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum. Rather, it would be a separate audit using digital images of each ballot, Bennett said.

The effort would, however, require a reexamination of the nearly 500,000 ballots that auditors have gone through since the audit began April 23.

Bennett said the Senate is considering hiring a California company to conduct the digital tabulation, but he declined to name it. He said the imaging would be done “in the time of the rest of the counting.”

Auditors said in April the recount of ballots would be completed by May 14, when its lease on the coliseum expired. But with less than 24% of the ballots counted as the audit takes a week's break for high school graduations, auditors have indicated the recount of the races for president and senator could last into July.

Republican state senators launched the audit after questioning the validity of the general election results in Maricopa County, where President Joe Biden defeated former President Donald Trump by 45,109 votes.

Senate President Karen Fann says the results will not be used to attempt to overturn the election results but instead will be used to ensure election integrity in future races.

Who is paying for it? Audit could cost millions
The Senate will not provide an accounting of audit expenses, but election experts say the costs could run into the millions.

Several sites established by GOP operatives are soliciting money for the audit, Those include Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne and One American News Network personality Christina Bobb.

It's unclear how donations are being used or which companies are benefiting from them.

The Senate has so far used $150,000 of taxpayer money. It hired Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based company, to lead the audit. Its CEO is Doug Logan, a Trump supporter whohas espoused election conspiracies.

Two other companies are doing hands-on work.Pennsylvania-based Wake Technology Inc. is in charge of the hand recount, while Virginia-based CyFIR is analyzing voting machines.

Senate Republicans in January issued subpoenas to the county requesting the 2.1 million ballots cast in the county's general election. They also demanded all of the county's voting machines, voter rolls, routers and tabulators used in the 2020 election.

'Bias and incompetence': Voting machine company won't provide key data
The county leases its voting machines from Dominion Voting Systems, which has been falsely accused by Trump and supporters of rigging its machines to steer votes to Biden.

The company said in a statement on Thursday that it provides information to auditors who have been accredited by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to certify voting machines, but will not provide information, including passwords, to unaccredited auditors.

The company did not specifically say whether it had provided passwords to the two private firms the county hired to do a comprehensive audit of the county's voting machines in February.

Dominion accused Cyber Ninjas of demonstrating "bias and incompetence" in the way it has conducted the audit.

Dominion has sued Powell and Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, each for $1.3 billion. It has also sued Trump supporter and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell for $1.3 billion and Fox News for $1.6 billion.

The company has accused them in lawsuits of spreading false and damaging claims about election fraud as part of a disinformation campaign.
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gwb-trading · May 17, 2021

gwb-trading · May 17, 2021

Cuddles · May 17, 2021

and the witch hunts keep revealing themselves:

https://thehill.com/regulation/admi...naed-twitter-for-identity-behind-nunes-parody
Trump DOJ subpoenaed Twitter for identity behind Nunes parody account

The Trump administration subpoenaed Twitter for information on who was operating an account parodying Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), a close ally of the former president, according to court documents unsealed on Monday.

A federal judge on Monday unsealed a motion from Twitter filed on March 10 to quash the subpoena that was issued in November. In the newly public filing, Twitter argued that it was concerned the government was aiding Nunes's legal efforts to attack and unmask his online critics and said the subpoena violated the First Amendment.

"It appears to Twitter that the Subpoena may be related to Congressman Devin Nunes’s repeated efforts to unmask individuals behind parody accounts critical of him," the motion reads. "His efforts to suppress critical speech are as well-publicized as they are unsuccessful."

The subpoena sought identifying information from Twitter about the account @NunesAlt. There is little public information about the court proceedings around the subpoena. It's not clear whether Twitter ever complied with the demand or if it was ultimately quashed by a federal judge.

It's also unclear if the Biden administration's Justice Department stood by the subpoena after Trump left office. A Justice Department spokeswoman did not immediately respond when asked for comment.

According to the unsealed motion, the subpoena was issued along with a gag order prohibiting Twitter from revealing or talking about the document. A spokesman for Twitter did not immediately respond when asked for comment.