Not News

[GaryDenton]

Mark Cuban calls Trump "snake oil salesperson," praises Biden

https://www.axios.com/2024/03/05/mark-cuban-biden-endorsement-trump-snake-oil

Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban lambasted former President Trump on Tuesday as a "snake oil salesperson" while explaining his decision to back President Biden in the upcoming election.

Why it matters: The endorsement from one of America's most high-profile businessmen comes as the 81-year-old president struggles in the polls amid swirling questions about his age and his handling of the Israel-Gaza conflict.

"I don't want a snake oil salesperson as President," Cuban told Axios by email Tuesday. "I'm voting for Biden/Harris over Trump all day every day."
Zoom in: "It's the snake oil salesperson vs the incumbent, traditional politician," Cuban said.

"One will tell you his snake oil will cure everything that ails you. The other will show you the details of his policies through charts, graphs and statements," Cuban said.
"He is precise and methodical and wants to sell the steak," Cuban said of Biden. "Not the sizzle."
"Trump voters are happy with their snake oil whether it works or not."
The big picture: The fresh comments from Cuban expand on his recent remarks that he would support Biden even if the president was on his death bed.

"If they were having his last wake, and it was him versus Trump, and he was being given last rites, I would still vote for Joe Biden," Cuban told Bloomberg on Monday after a meeting at the White House about prescription drug costs.
The tech billionaire and Dallas Mavericks minority owner co-founded a company called Cost Plus Drugs in 2022 which aims to bring down prices for generic drugs.
State of play: Trump's stranglehold on the GOP is set to be on full display as Super Tuesday results start to flow in, setting him up for a rematch with Biden in November's general election.

Cuban told Bloomberg he supported Nikki Haley, Trump's lone remaining Republican opponent, in the Texas primary — calling it a "protest vote against Trump."

The intrigue: Cuban also predicted a potential AI-driven "October Tech Surprise" before election day.

Cuban said the information a voter is served on the presidential candidates depends on what platform they use, with X increasingly leaning right, some other platforms leaning left, and TikTok users getting "different versions" of the news depending on their demographics.
With most consumers now getting their news from such platforms, he believes "the campaign that figures out how to reverse engineer the algorithms and use them to their advantage" will be the one that wins critical undecided voters.
"It would not surprise me if someone is using machine learning and LLMs (large language models) to reverse engineer those algorithms in hopes of an 'October Tech Surprise,'" he said.

[Pack Rat]

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTLdXUDxq/

[GaryDenton]

“20 years of data shows no link between mailed ballots and illegal voting”

https://electionlawblog.org/?p=141785

“If voting by mail creates more opportunities for fraud, those opportunities do not appear to have been realized in the data,” George Mason University assistant professor Jonathan Auerbach and Stephen Pierson, director of science policy for the American Statistical Association, wrote in their 2021 analysis for ASA’s journal, Statistics and Public Policy.

The statisticians are not saying voter fraud does not exist. They are showing — with state-by-state data from 2000 through 2019 — that it is exceptionally rare. When illegal voting has occurred, their charts reveal, it usually involves no more than several dozen ballots. That volume is nowhere near the thousands of votes that would have been needed to alter the closest recent presidential election margins…..

.

[GaryDenton]

"They frankly laugh behind the backs of their own voters": How Republicans bamboozle rural whites

https://www.salon.com/2024/03/05/-the-media-should-stop-treating-rural-people-like-children/

It's really the quality of the Republicans that they're electing. And as Paul has pointed out, it's because of the economic malaise, because of the healthcare maladies and because of the brain drain and people moving out of rural communities. Two-thirds of rural counties lost population between 2010 and 2020. That's incredible. And a majority of counties in the nation lost population between 2010 and 2020. To our knowledge that had never happened between two consecutive censuses. This is creating this rural ruin, as we call it. We understand the anxiety that that creates. The question is, what are you going to do about it?

One option is to blame faraway cities and liberals and minorities and woke and CRT and antifa and college professors like me for all of your problems. You'll be rewarded if you say that. There's a steady diet of conservative talk hosts, from Fox News and OANN and Newsmax, who will tell you that's where all your problems come from. Read Katherine Cramer's book, "The Politics of Resentment," about Wisconsin. That's where they think all the problems come from — Milwaukee and Madison — and that everything that's going wrong in the upper part of Wisconsin is because of liberals in the cities, and Blacks in Milwaukee and the college professors in Madison. That might make you feel good on Election Day, but it's not going to solve your material problems. What rural America needs is to stop waiting on Democrats to rescue them, even though it is Democrats who are bringing rural broadband.

But when Ted Cruz says, my pronouns are "kiss my ass" or "you can't limit me to two beers," now he's more insulting. What he is saying is, these voters are so easily won over by performative politics. I can reduce their core urges and reflexes to this. And I don't have to deliver a thing for rural Texas. I don't have to go to these counties. I don't have to live their experiences. I don't. I can go to Cancun on vacation and they'll still vote for me as long as I'll put on a flannel shirt and say, "my pronouns are 'kiss my ass'" and that's good enough to get me reelected.

Nobody is more insulting to rural voters than the people who are giving them nothing and taking their votes. They claim Democrats are insulting, but Democrats are doing something for them and getting none of their votes. But nothing's more condescending than getting votes and doing nothing in return. J.D. Vance, Elise Stefanik and Tom Cotton: All these people were educated at Harvard and Yale. They frankly laugh behind the backs of their own voters to some degree, right? Those are the people who are really insulting. There's an old D.C. adage about stabbing people in the front. Republicans look you right in the eye and stab you right in the front.

There was an interesting study that we cite in the book that found that there were three things that really determined whether a rural area was going to be able to prosper economically: Do you have strong schools? Do you have good broadband that businesses [can] rely on so they can prosper and flourish? Do you have access to contraception so women don't have to have babies before they're ready? If you have those three things in place, then your area can prosper. And those, of course, are three things that Republicans are undermining.

They shortchange the schools and they try to shift money away from public schools into private school vouchers. And in a lot of rural areas, there are no private schools. They couldn't take advantage of that even if they wanted to. Republicans stood in the way of expanding broadband. And of course they promote abstinence-only sex education and make sure that women don't have access to contraception, which I know you have written about a lot.

I could go on all day about lack of contraception access in a small town. But I want to ask about another hobby horse of mine, and almost no one is talking about it: The brain drain issue. We're seeing a lot of young people growing up and leaving these areas and never coming back. It is an underrated source of the resentment and the anger that we're seeing from rural white people.

Schaller: It's decimating. Rural America is older on average than any other part of the country. In the suburbs and the city, 40% of people tell their children they should consider leaving. But 60% of rural people tell their children they should leave. The best and brightest students are encouraged by their parents and their teachers to leave and get an education. Some of them may have come back to become a doctor or a lawyer locally. Most of them graduate school and maybe they had loans and they needed to move to the city to make an income to pay it back.

You could be the best auto mechanic in your area, but if there's only two people a week who need their car fixed, you can't build a thriving business. But some part is the lack of investment. There's an inability to build something in a place where nothing else is getting built. The only businesses that are thriving are the Dollar Stores.

The brain drain is also affecting the personality of rural and urban Americans. Will Wilkinson wrote this massive study called the "Density Divide" in 2019. He showed it's not just that red America and blue America have different economies and there are different attitudes. You can now predict where people score on the basic big five personality characteristics. People who score high on "openness to experience" are more likely to leave rural America. People who score low are more likely to stay. It's creating a personality blue/red divide.

The Trevor Project, which studies LGBQT+ issues, found that 49% of rural youth said that their communities are unaccepting of gays and lesbians. That's about twice the rate in the suburbs and in the cities. That's another reason young people don't want to come back. In addition to few economic opportunities at home, they feel some hostility, especially if they're liberal.

That's how it feeds on itself and becomes a cycle. Conservatives are constantly being told that not only that cities are hellholes and places that are alien to your values, but also if you send your kids to college, which is the path to more economic opportunity for most people, that they are going to reject you and your values. That they're going to hear all these alien ideas and that's going to break up your family. And it is sometimes true that you go to college and you get exposed to all these different ideas. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're "woke" ideas, but there are things that you never thought about. A lot of kids do come home from college and say, "You know, Mom, Dad, I don't think you're right about this anymore." People don't like that.

The newspaper industry is in crisis everywhere, but especially in rural areas. Local papers have shut down. The ones that remain got bought out by some private equity firm and they don't really report on local issues anymore. And they used to cover issues that can bind people together, stuff that that doesn't have to do with partisanship. Questions like, "Are we gonna build a new city hall? " or "Is there going be a festival in in town next summer?"

If that source of information is not there, not only are people disconnected from what's going on in their community, but the only messages that they get, especially from Fox News and conservative talk radio, is all about how they are besieged. That they're surrounded by enemies who want to literally destroy them and their way of life.

Is there any solution? Is there any hope? Because you guys describe a vicious cycle of rural white people hurting themselves by electing Republicans, and then playing the victim, even though they did it to themselves.

Rural white people need to engage politically and get something that's not just about saying that they're mad at liberals. If they start demanding more of their Republican representatives, then they might actually provide something better and you could have a more active politics in those places.

You have people in rural areas saying socialism is destroying their economies. But if you look at why the mom-and-pop shop closed and got replaced by a Dollar General? That's late stage capitalism. That ain't socialism. Right? If you look at why hospital and treatment facilities are closing, it's because rural hospitals don't turn a profit. That's capitalism, pure and simple. The same people who are complaining that socialism and communism are taking over America are watching their communities being decimated by late stage capitalism. And they're pointing fingers at cultural elites in faraway cities.

Somebody needs to go in there and say, pay attention to what's destroying your communities. Pay attention to who did it and who voted for those people because it's not the people that you think it is. Just like the old metaphor at the poker table, if you're not sure who the mark is at the table, it might be you. Which is not us saying that rural people are stupid. We actually think they're quite smart. As I told you, nobody insults them more than the people who take their votes and give 'em nothing in return. They're picking their pockets, electorally and politically. And frankly, they're picking the pockets of their future.

[GaryDenton]

GOP Voters Don’t Care About Winning Elections, Just Owning the Libs

https://www.thedailybeast.com/gop-voters-dont-care-about-winning-elections-just-owning-libs

Both national and swing state polls show Haley is a dramatically stronger candidate than Trump in the general election. (A new Marquette University poll has Haley beating Joe Biden by 16 percentage points, while Trump and Biden are in a statistical tie.)

Republican voters look at Trump’s attempts to overthrow the government, the document thefts, the gaseous malice, the insults to service men and women, and his pledges to pardon rioters who attacked cops…and they have decided they want four more years of it.

Trump has been found liable for sexual assault and defamation, faces a half-billion dollar judgment for fraud, and may stand trial on 91 felony charges, but GOP voters are unfazed. To the contrary, the evidence suggests they are jazzed.

And they are entertained.

At his recent CPAC appearance, Trump described his return to power as “judgment day” for the “liars and cheaters and fraudsters and censors and imposters who have commandeered our government.” He boasted that is victory in November would be “my ultimate and absolute revenge.”

The crowd abso-freaking-lutely loved it.

Trump promised the largest mass deportation in the nation’s history, adding: “We have languages coming into our country… they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a horrible thing.” Black people, he said, liked him, because he’d been indicted so many times, and they “embraced” his defiant mugshot.

Haley called the remarks “disgusting,” but Republican voters simply shrugged, because Trump was, once again, breaking things.

Breaking things, after all, is the point, isn’t it?

This does not seem like a political party that is interested either in returning to normal or to winning elections. But that’s no longer the point. The rage, the trolling, the purging—that’s the point.

[Lonous]

Here is some more of your circle, being entertained by billionaires having a slap fight with other billionaires.
If either of you are in the audience please point yourselves out.

[Pack Rat]

Here is some more of your circle, being entertained by billionaires having a slap fight with other billionaires.
If either of you are in the audience please point yourselves out.

What is your point. Fake wrestling?