The debt ballooned before 2020,

When did it start? The charts say it didn't start with Trump, dunno if you've heard, it's been happening for quite some time, lets look at some numbers:

FY2015: .44T
FY2016: .59 T
FY2017: .67 T
FY2018 .78 T
FY2019: .98 T
FY2020: 3.13 T
FY2021: 2.77 T
FY2022: 1.38 T

If it ballooned before 2020... what would you call 2020?

largely due to his massive tax cuts and out-of-control military spending.

Yes, I note your shibboleth, would be nice if you'd bring more than talking points without context, note how I did?

You know this, so why do you insist on lying about it?

Except I don't. Spending has been out of control for ages, some, like you it seems think that if you just tax more, it will solve the problem, meanwhile, the US has not taken in more revenue than it's spent in decades, and when it has happened, it's usually been an accounting gimmick (ala 2001).

If you cared about the debt so much you wouldn't be making it a partisan issue. The current occupant of the White House is still spending and nothing is being done to reduce the debt, if anything he keeps trying to increase it, unilaterally, such as with his blatant vote buying scheme, errr, student loan cancellation. SCOTUS will reign in the overreach, and now with the debt ceiling deal student loan payments will resume and be applied to the revenue side of the equation, slowing the rise of the debt.

How is believing that the popular vote should be what counts, rather than a distorted metric that artificially inflates the vote of low-population states by almost a factor of four?

Again, those are the rules, objections to them could/should have been lodged earlier, but weren't, same reason so many GOP objections to state changes to laws were tossed out, latches and such.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that's what she was saying at the time of the election.

Thank you, you admit you're assuming and don't actually know. Is there any more purpose here? You cannot actually support the argument that SHE said that, which is the point.

I think she...

Again, you, not her.

but does lead to legitimate questions about disinformation and how fragile democracy is when it can be so easily influenced by small numbers of people whose voices are amplified by bot armies on social media.

Legitimate question yes, but does that make the election or presidency illegitimate?

You mean preventing free states from having more power than slave states? That was, after all, the main reason for its existence [time.com].

Citing a 2016 article, clearly unhappy with the recent election results to prove your point... not exactly persuasive. Sure would be nice if you could/would cite some earlier sources, say from the founding or framing to support the assertion. Dunno if you've heard... slavery has not been a thing in the United States for nearly 158 years now... if the only/primary reason for the ECs existence was slavery, you would think it would have been tossed at some point in that time, hell, the EC has existed for longer without slavery than it did with, by 2x even! ... it's as if there are other reasons for it you've left out.

Think the EC is outdated and doesn't comport with modern times? You're free to campaign for it's replacement... only your argument is even more dated.

So can I when I'm not posting on iOS. Slashdot's site is absolutely and completely useless for posting on iOS. No preview, mishandled punctuation... it is absolute garbage. I'll try not to make that mistake again.

It was Clinton's election to lose, and she did... excuses after the fact do nothing but admit failures.

A tactical vote would have been a vote for Clinton, not for Stein.

To you, a Clinton supporter. Stein voters would disagree, just as Perot voters disagreed back in 92.

The people who stayed home are the reason we got TFG, and the massively increased national debt.

Are you suggesting that if Clinton had won in 2016, COVID-19 wouldn't have reached the United States, thus there wouldn't have been massive inflationary spending (which also added massively to the national debt) to encourage people to stay home for months at a time? Talk about fan fiction.

Whilst WaffleMonster destroyed your counterargument, there's more.

[Citation Needed]

Russia weren't on trial.

I do not believe "weren't" is the correct tense here. More so, what does a trial have to do with anything here? There is an outstanding question as to if the Russian's hacked Secretary Clinton's email on the express order or suggestion of then candidate Trump, or, as evidence actually points to, they'd been hacking emails for some time.

And so their response isn't terribly relevant

Which response?

it just proves they were likely responding to DumpsterFire's instructions.

Wait... their response isn't important... but it still proves the point that they acted on his 'instructions'? Talk about conspiracy theories!

The point is more that the bald fat fascist asked US' #1 enemy for aid in perverting democracy.

What color is the sky in your world?

He also asked the Proud Boys for the same thing.

That's news to me.

There's just more evidence on intent with the latter so that's what he'll be going to prison for.

Except Trump isn't currently on trial, nor is he likely to be for anything during his presidency, no matter how much many of his opponents want it, for one simple reason: Putting an ex-president on trial for an alleged criminal action(s) during their presidency, ANY ex-president is a fantastic way to ensure that every subsequent presidency is followed by investigations by the other branches to see what they could push against their enemies.

I mean, if you really want former President Obama behind bars for murder of an American citizen.... you'd at least be being consistent... though I doubt that.

Clintonâ(TM)s reason for claiming illegitimacy was because the electoral college distorts the vote so that she, despite getting a statistical majority of votes, did not win the election.

Can you provide a quote of her linking those two things?

Questioning the wisdom of retaining an archaic vote counting scheme system...

Except if you're right, that that was what she was saying, it's not questioning, it's textbook election denialism.

Like it or not, there are a series of rules which govern how elections run, when they are followed the outcome is legitimate, when they aren't, it isn't.

You can disagree with the rules all you want, even seek to change them, but until they are changed, results based on them are no more illegitimate as when people you happen to like get elected.

...that was designed to compensate for an ancient reality where news about the candidates took months to get across the country instead of minutes and in an era when vote counting took weeks instead of hours...

We get it, you don't like the electoral college, interesting how you skipped over the other reasons why it exists and will remain for quite some time.

...is not remotely the same thing as claiming that the election was rigged and encouraging the people in charge of elections at the state level to âoefind votesâ to âoeproveâ that the candidate won.

Sounds like you're trying to play whataboutism, citing other bad behavior to provide cover for what you implicitly admit was not ok (her denialism (if that's why she said what she did, which I'm still waiting for a quote of)).

If you canâ(TM)t understand why those two things are different, then I very much hope you donâ(TM)t vote.

I can at least format my comments properly, perhaps I'm more qualified to vote than you as I demonstrate certain degree of care and attention to the subject at hand.

Both ideas can be concurrently true.

Can be is different than is, and there was a specific claim here I'm still waiting for evidence of.

Mordor

Who? What?

...could have had an existing influence campaign against the US and could have also responded to Trump's public request to find the emails.
It is certainly an interesting correlation hours later attempts would be made to do just that.

Why is it interesting? Your article claims they attempted to do so that day... did they the day before? week? month? Did they only start then? My firewall notes Russian IPs trying to get into my network right now, but I don't simply don't assume they are doing it because of this conversation... because they do so pretty constantly, along with the Chinese and quite a few other actors, I view the data in context... which is lacking from what you've provided.

NBC reported that as far back as June of 2015, a year before the Trump quote the Russians were already at it against the DNC:

June 2015 - November 2016: In the U.S., Russian hackers penetrated Democratic party computers, and gained access to the personal emails of Democratic officials, which in turn were distributed to the global media by WikiLeaks. Both the CIA and the FBI now believe the intrusions were intended to undermine the election, hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump win.

We know now that the Russians were already at it, successfully with other targets, but what? Assume that they only started going after Clinton because Trump said so? Seems pretty silly.

I don't see anyone here saying that.

You seem to have missed the point.

Imagine being so naive thinking that Putin and his lackeys are sitting around the Kremlin one day, wondering how they will spend the next few years, when suddenly they see that video and think "You know what? We now have permission to go hack the Americans and sow discord and confusion within their country!"... which they had never ever done before.

Voting tactically is always better than not voting at all. 2016 should be proof enough of that.

You mean like the Jill Stein voters who voted tactically and in numbers larger than the margin Hillary Clinton lost by in three states?

Had they simply not voted, a whole lot of people would have been less disappointed, but final election still been the same.

You've spammed the "Russian collusion was proven true" link 3x in the comments here, but have yet to substantiate anything you claim, would you mind being specific as others have asked?

Your other links are hyper-partisan and seek not to engage in honest dialog, but push a narrative, a false one in some cases which you happily accept and are willing to do your part to push.

I'm so old, that I remember the current President assuring the American people that it was a pandemic of the unvaccinated, AND “You’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations."... with a whole lot of framing and deflecting, CNN called such statements "inaccurate".

I won't call you a "lying piece of shit", as a lie requires knowledge that what one is saying is false and to deliberately deceive... you just don't know what you're talking about, automatically believe some (who are inaccurate or do lie), and are quick to discount sources or arguments which do not comport to your already accepted narratives.

For example, you proclaim with your link that "Masking works", yet the title of the article is actually "Association of social distancing and face mask use with risk of COVID-19" Had you actually read the article, you would have noted that it itself doesn't make it's own claim of the effectiveness of masks, instead it cites a different paper from two years earlier titled "Association of social distancing and face mask use with risk of COVID-19" which says, emphasis mine:

We conclude, based on the evidence showing a benefit for cloth masks and the recent reports supporting a role for aerosols in the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, that cloth masks will be effective when used correctly.

Once again, you defer to opinions you are already primed for, ignoring important caveats, or that science is not a moment in time thing, but an evolving understanding, and reporting, where your friends at the CDC have noted that cloth masks (the same sort touted above, though not as strongly as you suggest) are/were in fact not as effective as once claimed: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/0...

WP said it themselves:

An earlier version of this story incorrectly described Jacob Blake as unarmed. While his family has said he was not armed when shot by police, prosecutors on Tuesday said video evidence depicts him holding a knife. The story has been corrected.

They eventually deleted a tweet with the unarmed claim.

ESPN: https://twitter.com/ClayTravis...

CNN still has the claim up to this day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Learn to read. AC didn't say she didn't concede the next day, but that she didn't actually accept the results, the very thing you were replying to.

She said the words on November 9th yes, but how long did she say that Trump was an "illegitimate president"? She's right up there with Stacy Abrams in election denialism.

Can you point to anything that really changed between governments?

One of the biggest things is the appointing of judges more in line with who is elected, as a result last year we saw Roe vs Wade being overturned, removing the federally protected right to elective abortion which had existed seemingly unassailable for nearly 50 years, leading to quite a few states banning it outright... as just one example.

What is the big difference between Democrats and Republicans? From over here in Europe, the difference is rather insignificant.

Because you're looking in from the outside, your average American, even one who is steeped in American politics has very little context as to the specific differences between...

• Austrian People's Party
• The Greens
• Freedom Party of Austria
• The New Austria and Liberal Forum
• Social Democratic Party of Austria

(just to note the parties making up the current parament) ... or the other 1100 or so parties registered in the country.

Sure, the corporations change that get the pork, but otherwise, same shit, different flavor.

That also has a long tail with downstream effects, which industries are favored vs not.

You still think presenting yourself as an expert...

Strawman again, I have never claimed I am an expert on anything, I actually avoid using that word. I have demonstrated myself to be more knowledgeable about the subject then you however.

on what people think about something

Some people, who like you are ill-informed. Again, why are you trying to remove the voice of unions and it's memberships from political discourse?

when you don't actually know shit about it

FACT CHECK: False!

(which is actually a lie, but we'll grant it for the purpose of the conversation) isn't itself a lie.

It's a shame you have no coherent line or train of thought, just a jumble of word salad, repeating talking points which sound good, instead of actually understanding the topics at hand, like the definition of words.

Well, it is.

Again, you unilaterally declaring something as true does not make it so.

It's lying about one's familiarity with the subject matter.

You're obsessed with name calling and projection, proclaiming falsehoods and then declaring those who disagree with you are telling lies.

What of minors? They can currently contribute to campaigns and work on them too though cannot vote. Unions themselves cannot vote, but their members can, just as the members of a partnership or employees of a company can.

Define 'in anyway', if a permanent resident (who cannot vote) can share a Facebook meme in support of or against a candidate or cause, what punishment would you have for them? Or of a non-citizen abroad telling their US domestic friends/family how they think they should vote?

Most of us are not the most eloquent in our arguments nor have the bank budget to spread our views wide, what is wrong with people of like minds banding together to push a shared view?

If they can't vote, something unions and businesses have in common, why should they have political rights like the right to bribe politicians.

Children cannot vote, but are able to donate money to a campaign directly, as well as to political causes, they can even work on a campaign, just as union members and members of or employees of a corporation can.

Please clarify though, is donating to a candidate or PAC bribery of that candidate/politician in your mind?

At that, in common law, bribery is illegal, and the 1st amendment did not over ride common law, just said no new statuary law to be passed by Congress.

Bribery is also illegal in the US wrt many a politician and official, though the law has also been crafted to define what is/isn't bribery.