A little more Democrat rank hypocrisy POLITICS Why Democrats Might Need to Play Dirty to Win The party is trying to ban partisan gerrymandering nationwide, but aggressively redrawing districts in blue states like New York might be the only way to preserve its House majority. To hear Democratic leaders decry gerrymandering as part of their current bid to enact landmark voting-rights legislation, you’d think the centuries-old practice was a mortal threat to the republic. But political necessity could soon demand that Democrats drop their purity act. To keep their narrow House majority, they might have to deploy the tactic everywhere they can, and every bit as aggressively as Republicans do. Nowhere are the stakes higher for Democrats than in New York. The party there has its largest legislative majorities in a century and more sway over more seats than anywhere else in the country. A cutthroat approach to redistricting in New York could eliminate or substantially alter as many as five GOP-held seats—a number equivalent to the Democrats’ entire edge in the House. The early maneuvering by New York Democrats is already revealing the party’s shaky commitment to its national anti-gerrymandering push, one that has long been rooted less in principle than the Democrats’ passionate message would suggest. What could impede the Democratic effort to make the most of its dominance in New York is not the fear of hypocrisy but the party’s internal politics. Nationwide, the challenge for Democrats is formidable: The shuffling of House seats as a result of the decennial census is expected to shift power from mostly Democratic states like California, New York, and Illinois to states like Texas, Florida, and North Carolina—all of which will have legislatures controlled by Republicans who will be in charge of drawing new districts. “The bottom line is: If this becomes an arms race, and both parties maximize their advantage in the states that they control, Republicans will come out ahead,” David Wasserman, an analyst for the nonpartisan newsletter The Cook Political Report, told me. The GOP needs to flip just five Democratic seats to recapture the House majority in 2022, and conceivably, the party could gain all of those seats through gerrymandering alone. Wasserman projects that Republicans could net anywhere from zero to 10 seats from redistricting. That gerrymandering poses a danger to America is a relatively recent discovery for Democrats. Only after Republicans routed them in state and congressional elections in 2010 and redrew hundreds of districts in their own favor did Democrats express outrage, which reached a fever pitch when they won the nationwide vote in the next election but saw the GOP secure its second-largest House majority in 60 years. The ensuing Democratic campaign against gerrymandering pushed states like Colorado and Virginia to adopt independent redistricting commissions aimed at preventing politicians from choosing their own constituents. None of this stopped Democrats elsewhere from gerrymandering themselves. After the 2010 census, they drew a notoriously skewed congressional map in Maryland that left Republicans with just a single seat in the eight-member delegation. In sheer numbers, New York is the Democrats’ best opportunity to offset Republican redistricting gains. It’s also, Wasserman said, “the biggest question mark.” In 2014, the citizens of New York joined the movement against gerrymandering by voting to create an independent commission that would redraw the state’s congressional and legislative districts. Power in New York was divided at the time, and the state constitutional amendment creating the panel emerged from a deal between Governor Andrew Cuomo and Republican leaders in Albany. Yet the commission does not have the last word over the maps: The law allows the legislature to reject or modify the panel’s submission. Now that Democrats have won supermajorities in both the assembly and the senate, they’ve moved quickly to claw back even more of the power that voters gave to the commission. Earlier this year, lawmakers approved the inclusion of an amendment on the upcoming November ballot that would make it easier for Democrats to enact their own redistricting plan without support from Republicans. The commission, meanwhile, must submit its first maps to the legislature by the beginning of 2022, but the legislature has starved it of money so far. The commission has no office, no telephone, and no email address. “We’re virtually stalled,” a Republican member, Charlie Nesbitt, told me. The panel has hired staff but has been unable to pay them. Nesbitt said he was hopeful that the legislature would allocate money in the upcoming budget, but when I asked him whether he thought Democrats were trying to hobble the commission, he replied: “It’d be hard not to draw that conclusion.” Publicly, Democrats say that’s not true. “We absolutely want it to work,” Assembly Member Robert Rodriguez, the chair of a legislative task force in charge of reapportionment, told me. Privately, however, multiple members told me they expect legislators to draw the maps. Neither the commission nor the legislature can begin its work in earnest until the Census Bureau releases data from the 2020 count, which was hampered by the pandemic. New York is expected to lose at least one of its 27 House seats, possibly two. Democrats would want to ensure that both seats come from the Republican delegation, which currently has eight members. That effort became easier last week when Republican Representative Tom Reed, who had been accused of groping a 25-year-old lobbyist, announced that he would not seek reelection. Legislators could merge Reed’s district with another GOP-leaning seat and create a Democratic-leaning district elsewhere. Democrats could also pack more upstate Republicans into Representative Elise Stefanik’s geographically enormous district in New York’s North Country, making the Republicans in neighboring districts, Representatives Claudia Tenney or John Katko, more vulnerable. In New York City, Democrats could target the lone congressional seat held by a Republican, Representative Nicole Malliotakis of Staten Island, by adding to the district more liberal areas of Manhattan or Brooklyn. And on Long Island, an aggressive redistricting map could threaten Representative Lee Zeldin, a Republican who has already announced he’s exploring a run for governor next year. For national Democratic leaders—who include New York Representatives Sean Patrick Maloney, the chair of the DCCC, and Hakeem Jeffries, the chair of the House Democratic Caucus—the overriding objective is to have state lawmakers secure every seat they can and preserve the party’s majority in the House. But Democratic members of the New York delegation undoubtedly will have their own political concerns: They may be reluctant to give up certain loyal constituencies or take on more Republican voters that would force them to campaign harder for reelection. Internal party politics also come into play. Democratic leaders could use the redistricting process to protect or punish certain members, or to insulate themselves from primary challenges. Speculation is already circulating that some Democrats could target the New York City district of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who hasn’t ruled out a 2022 challenge to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. This seems unlikely, however: Ocasio-Cortez has powerful allies in the legislature who will probably protect her seat. Republicans have never had qualms about acknowledging the partisan aim of their gerrymandering efforts. None of the Democrats I talked with, however, would admit—on the record, at least—that they needed to draw maps with the same ruthless precision as the GOP. “The redistricting process in New York has been so rigged in favor of Republicans for so long that mere fairness would yield Democratic gains,” State Senator Michael Gianaris, the deputy majority leader and a co-chair of the reapportionment task force, told me. He and other Democrats argue that because the population loss costing New York at least one seat in Congress is coming from the predominantly Republican areas upstate, the party that loses those districts should be the GOP. But from another perspective, the Democratic advantage in Congress already exceeds its standing in the state. Democrats won about 60 percent of the New York vote in 2020, while capturing 70 percent of its congressional seats. If Democrats aggressively redraw the maps to their advantage, that number could grow to nearly 90 percent. Such a map would be difficult for people like Burton to defend. She’s vowed to take Republican states to court to challenge extreme gerrymandering. Would she sue New York Democrats if they did the same? Burton dodged the question with a chuckle, replying that Republicans had already promised to bring lawsuits in places like New York.
Democrats have been playing dirty for decades. Also, they scream gerrymandering anytime a district is not drawn to their liking. Remember their idea of unity is you do it my way. Got to pass it to find out what's in it.
better late than never i guess... @JackPosobiec Mainstream media finally finding out about the Hard Drive from Hell We reported on it extensively in October at @OANN and BlueAnon responded by losing their minds I offered copies publicly to @jaketapper & @joerogan Now forensics proves it is Hunter’s laptop 2:46 PM · Apr 8, 2021·Twitter for iPhone 1,145 Retweets 35 Quote Tweets 3,607 Likes
good read https://www.realclearinvestigations..._new_york_times_772343.html?mc_cid=9d47640633 The Absentee Vote Logic of the New York Times What accounts for the change from a dark presentation of the issue to a decidedly rosy one? RealClearInvestigations asked a spokesperson for the New York Times whether the paper’s current enthusiasm for absentee voting meant its staff’s previous criticism and reporting were wrong or misleading. RCI also asked whether the articles had been, even just unintentionally, part of what Times staff editor Bokat-Lindell called “a decades-long disinformation campaign by the Republican Party and others to suppress votes”? She did not respond to those two questions.
imagine that.... https://www.thedailybeast.com/us-intel-walks-back-claim-russians-put-bounties-on-american-troops U.S. Intel Walks Back Claim Russians Put Bounties on American Troops "It was a blockbuster story about Russia’s return to the imperial “Great Game” in Afghanistan. The Kremlin had spread money around the longtime central Asian battlefield for militants to kill remaining U.S. forces. It sparked a massive outcry from Democrats and their #resistance amplifiers about the treasonous Russian puppet in the White House whose admiration for Vladimir Putin had endangered American troops. But on Thursday, the Biden administration announced that U.S. intelligence only had “low to moderate” confidence in the story after all. Translated from the jargon of spyworld, that means the intelligence agencies have found the story is, at best, unproven—and possibly untrue...." i'd strike through 'possibly' in the last sentence, but that's just me....
When are we going to start throwing journalists in jail or fining the shit out networks for purposely putting out false stories?? This is NOT what the 1st was intended for.
That’s not going to happen unless they break an existing law. What needs to happen is the civil shield needs to be lowered so they actually face real risk. However some of this is leaked by government employees who should be in jail.
Maybe one day the idiots on the farm will realize what we have known all along, that there is no way in hell pedo joe won this fair and square. Thats putting a lot of faith in idiots though
