Arizona GOP State Senator Now Regrets Recount: 'It Makes Us Look Like Idiots'

[Pommer]

Awaiting the cite of Arizona law that states that the paper used in ballots must be domestically produced and that no bamboo at all must be used in the manufacturing of the ballot-paper.
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[KCfromNC]

Can someone please explain to me the black-light looking for bamboo? Because I suspect most of those papers have OBA's (Optical Brightening Agents) in them which fluoresce quite strongly under black light. Even the Chinese know about the magic of OBA's. They are used across the paper industry and China has a huge paper industry. I wish someone would explain to me how the UV lights are going to find bamboo and if so what would it matter?

Also: there actually are real honest science methods to figure out what fibers are in paper that require a bit more than just looking at it with a UV light. There's actually professionals who do this for a living. They do it because sometimes paper manufacturers use non-sustainable forestry sources that are barred by international agreement. And China would be just as likely to use forestry sources elsewhere in SE Asia since they are not a huge forest supplier themselves, if I recall correctly. Many Chinese paper manufacturers work with wood from far afield of China.

You're assuming these people are doing an honest investigation where conclusions come from the preponderance of the evidence. Imagine for a moment that the opposite were true - people "know" the right answer a priori and just need to dig until they find data which is barely convincing enough to let them continue to believe what they wanted to in the first place.

 

[TLK Valentine]

The left-wing media and the people they like to consult misjudged Trump as someone who would surely lose the election. Sure, he was an obnoxious clown, but that was good for ratings, and he had an established record of being much further left than Republicans on key policies, including policies he ran on. The left-wing media has a pattern of promoting the most liberal Republicans in the primaries, he qualified. They also like stories and scandals, he had plenty of them. They had not counted on his irrational appeal with his base, or how unlikeable Clinton really was.


Oh, I definitely believe that, whichever reason for his intentional harm to the Republican party, and therefore the country, is true.

Still, the notion that the left would in any way be responsible for Donald's antics is laughable...

...and even on the impossible chance that they did arrange for Donald to rise and subsequently fall off the deep end, they couldn't have predicted, let alone arranged, for so much of the GOP to willingly follow him like so many lemmings.

Donald is responsible for his own self-destruction... as is the rest of the GOP.

 

[Sketcher]

Still, the notion that the left would in any way be responsible for Donald's antics is laughable...

...and even on the impossible chance that they did arrange for Donald to rise and subsequently fall off the deep end, they couldn't have predicted, let alone arranged, for so much of the GOP to willingly follow him like so many lemmings.

Donald is responsible for his own self-destruction... as is the rest of the GOP.

Someone like him will do all the work, he's a bull in a china shop.
He's responsible whether he's a pawn, a queen, or if he was acting completely on his own.

 

[TLK Valentine]

Someone like him will do all the work, he's a bull in a china shop.
He's responsible whether he's a pawn, a queen, or if he was acting completely on his own.

The idea of him being a pawn implies that someone in the Democratic party thought it would actually be easier to rig the system to set up an opposing candidate and have him defeat 16 career politicians in the primaries, instead of just rigging the system to win it themselves.

I understand the appeal of conspiracy theories -- they make people feel smart and in the know... but this one is absurd.

 

[Sketcher]

The idea of him being a pawn implies that someone in the Democratic party thought it would actually be easier to rig the system to set up an opposing candidate and have him defeat 16 career politicians in the primaries, instead of just rigging the system to win it themselves.

I understand the appeal of conspiracy theories -- they make people feel smart and in the know... but this one is absurd.

What I'm saying is that it makes sense from a strategic perspective. First choice to the Democrats in any election is that the Democrat wins. But if that doesn't happen, they'd rather have the worst Republican - someone who can be painted as ineffective, lacking in leadership and character, or who will at least push policies that are closer to policies that the Democrats themselves would push to mitigate what they would see as damage (i.e. Trump's earlier, documented positions on health care, guns, and abortion). Trump blew up in a way that most people couldn't predict, but at the end of the day the win for the Democrats is that Trump was the biggest publicly recognized disgrace to the office since Nixon.

 

[TLK Valentine]

What I'm saying is that it makes sense from a strategic perspective.

First choice to the Democrats in any election is that the Democrat wins. But if that doesn't happen, they'd rather have the worst Republican - someone who can be painted as ineffective, lacking in leadership and character, or who will at least push policies that are closer to policies that the Democrats themselves would push to mitigate what they would see as damage (i.e. Trump's earlier, documented positions on health care, guns, and abortion).

I can seethe Democrats cackling with glee at Donald's nomination, seeing him as an easy opponent... and but for the EC, he was.

If you're suggesting that the media hyped up Donald's campaign, that's certainly plausible -- his entertainment value alone would've made his eventual crash and burn a ratings bonanza. That, and not some cockamamie liberal scheme to rig the election, makes sense.

Of course, nobody -- I suspect least of all the man himself -- expected Donald to actually win. A combination of our Byzantine election laws and Americans' continual confusion between popularity and quality let America to be careful what it wished for: Electing a game show host was a novel idea; they got a novelty president.

Trump blew up in a way that most people couldn't predict, but at the end of the day the win for the Democrats is that Trump was the biggest publicly recognized disgrace to the office since Nixon.

The latter is certainly true -- Donald turned out to be the best friend the Democrats ever had, being the first president since Hoover to hand over the Oval Office, the Senate, and the House inside of four years. But it almost wasn't -- Were it not for COVID, and the administration's abysmal response to it, Donald would've easily sailed into a second term.

I hope you're not thinking of his post-defeat tantrums as "blew up in a way most people couldn't predict" -- plenty of people saw that coming. But what we couldn't predict was Donald's frighteningly loyal base, who only grew more loyal after every setback, failure, and meltdown. They never ran out of other people to blame for Donald's own shortcomings...and they never will. Even today, they're trying to paint the events of January 6 in a whole new (gas)light.

"Normal tourist visit": Some Republicans downplay January 6 riot amid Democratic objections - CBS News