Tag: 2024 elections

MSNBC Cuts Off Trump Victory Speech; Claims It’s “Irresponsible” To Broadcast

MSNBC’s salty anchor Rachel Maddow once again cut away from Donald Trump giving a victory speech after winning 15 of the Super Tuesday states, reasoning that it is “irresponsible to allow” Trump to “knowingly lie.”

As Trump was speaking, Maddow interjected “Yeeeaaaah okay,” while one of the other clowns laughed in the background.

The anchor then stated, “I will say it is a decision that we revisit constantly in terms of the balance between allowing somebody to knowingly lie on your air about things they have lied about before and you can predict they are going to lie about, so therefore, it is irresponsible to allow them to do that.”

Maddow continued, “It is a balance between knowing that that is irresponsible to broadcast and also knowing that as the de facto soon to be de facto nominee of the Republican party, this is not only the man who is likely to be the Republican candidate for president, but this is the way he is running.”

MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle chimed in “Well here is how to balance it. We fact check the hell out of him.”

“Yes, and we do that after the fact,” Maddow responded, adding “That is the best remedy that we’ve got. It does not fix the fact we broadcast it.”

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Supreme Court rules Trump cannot be kicked off ballot

The Supreme Court on Monday handed a sweeping win to former President Donald Trump by ruling states cannot kick him off the ballot over his actions leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — bringing a swift end to a case with huge implications for the 2024 election.

The court in an unsigned ruling with no dissents reversed the Colorado Supreme Court, which determined that Trump could not serve again as president under section 3 of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

The court said the Colorado Supreme Court had wrongly assumed that states can determine whether a presidential candidate is ineligible under a provision of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

The ruling makes it clear that Congress, not states, has to set rules on how the 14th Amendment provision can be enforced. As such the decision applies to all states, not just Colorado.

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Missouri GOP Candidate for Governor Was Only ‘Honorary’ KKK Member

A man with a history of “honorary” membership in the Klu Klux Klan not only managed to make it on the unofficial ballot to be the Republican nominee for Missouri governor, but may even appear atop the official ballot when GOP voters vote in the primary this August. 

Those revelations came to light last night when former Missouri Representative Shamed Dogan (R-Ballwin) tweeted out a screenshot showing the unofficial candidate filing list for governor posted to the Secretary of State’s website. On it, Darrell Leon McClanahan III’s name sits atop more well-known GOP contenders like Mike Kehoe and Jay Ashcroft. 

The candidates’ names are listed in ballot order, and because McClanahan drew a low number his name appears first. 

A 2022 article on the Anti-Defamation League’s website shows McClanahan next to a man in white robes as both men give what appear to be Nazi salutes in front of a burning cross some time around 2019. 

The ADL article claims that the organization’s Center on Extremism has been tracking McClanahan for years, as he has affiliated with various white supremacist and Christian identity groups. 

“Hey @MissouriGOP I just learned the candidate listed first on our primary ballot for Governor is a cross-burning KKK member who ran for US Senate 2 years ago and freely admits his KKK membership & white supremacist beliefs,” Dogan wrote, adding in a subsequent tweet that he hoped the party would reject McClanahan’s filing fee, calling him a “racist loser.”

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Meta Launches Real-Time Content Censorship Unit for 2024 Elections

When Facebook (Meta) wants to safeguard its “right to censor,” the company presents itself as basically just another private company out there minding its own business.

But when election campaigns get in full swing, especially in the US, but also the EU, the way Meta reacts, announcing all sorts of yet new policies and new units to deal with information related to elections, shows that it could have a massive influence on their outcome.

And while it’s repeatedly said that (mostly arbitrarily “defined”) misinformation is the scourge of democracy, there is another, this time, no doubt about it: censorship, sometimes based on such flimsy excuses as basically somebody’s subjective opinion – for example, “potential threats.”

None of this seems to be important to Meta, who have just announced how they are “preparing” for the elections in the EU this summer.

There’s a slew of news on this front: Meta will have what it calls an Elections Operations Center whose job will be identifying “potential threats.” And then real-time “mitigation” (i.e., censorship) will follow.

Oh happy news: despite all the controversies around “fact-checker,” Meta has announced it is continuing to rely on them, and even boasts about having “the largest fact-checking network of any platform.”

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Report: South Carolina Voters Unable to Vote Due to Internet Outage – Voters Told to Put Ballots in ‘Another Slot’

South Carolina primary voters are reportedly unable to vote due to ballot tabulators being unable to connect to the internet.

Real America’s Voice reported Saturday that poll workers are claiming that because the internet is not working, they’ve had to take primary ballots and put them into a separate bin.

Even more unbelievably, vote tabulators are not even supposed to be connected to the internet in the first place, and the media since the 2020 election have denounced claims that they were connected to the internet as baseless conspiracy theories.

According to one voter, a poll worker said “they didn’t have internet” and that he would have to take his paper ballot and “fold it and slide it into another slot. It looked kind of like a trash can.”

“So I walked out scratching my head, and there were a number of other voters that were just as confused as I was,” he told RAV reporter Michelle Backus.

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Under the fog of war, Ukraine cancels its 2024 presidential elections

A very significant political event occurred in Ukraine earlier this month, and almost nobody noticed.

President Volodymyr Zelensky, the leader of the war-torn country, just received approval from his parliament to extend Martial Law another 90 days. There have been many parliamentary extensions of the wartime mandate, but this one carried special significance because the 2024 presidential elections in Ukraine were scheduled for March 31, 2024, coinciding with the end of Zelensky’s five year term. Now that Martial Law is in place to cover that time period, Ukraine’s presidential elections have been canceled indefinitely.

There is currently no set date for a next election, as lawmakers in the Verkhovna Rada (parliament) have failed to entertain the matter. They only agreed that elections should take place no sooner than six months after the end of the war with Russia.

While it’s not particularly unreasonable to want to postpone elections during a devastating war, the case of Ukraine deserves a closer examination, given the series of events leading up to the decision to extend Martial Law.

In November, a former Zelensky adviser named Oleksiy Arestovych announced that he would be challenging Zelensky for the presidency, promising to focus on a negotiated settlement to end the war with Russia. Arestovych was fiercely critical of Zelensky’s approach to the conflict, maintaining that a settlement was in the best interests of Ukrainians. Far from a pro-Moscow shill, the Russian government has an active arrest warrant out for him.

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Joe Biden, Unlike Trump, Didn’t Take Cognitive Test in Annual Exam, Sanjay Gupta Says

President Joe Biden is considered perfectly fit for duty after a physical exam Friday, according to a report from the president’s doctor, Kevin O’Connor.

Additionally, the president, unlike his immediate predecessor, did not undergo a test of his cognitive abilities, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Sanjay Gupta said.

During an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Anderson Cooper 360, Gupta was asked if Biden had taken any type of exam to measure his mental state.

“There’s been a lot of focus on his cognitive abilities, questions raised by opponents and others, and in 2018 the former president [Donald Trump] had a test that measured mental acuity, was that part of today’s test?” Cooper asked Gupta.

“It doesn’t seem like it,” Gupta replied. “I read pretty carefully through the doctor’s report and they mention neurological exam, but that was more in terms of testing motor strength and sensation and things like that.”

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‘Extremely Alarming’ Election Threats Trigger Warning From FBI

An FBI official warned that state election systems are being targeted as the 2024 election approaches, describing them as “extremely alarming.”

“The threat environment, unfortunately, is very high,” said Tim Langan, executive assistant director for the Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch of the FBI during a Washington conference with secretaries of state, according to Stateline. “It is extremely alarming.”

Officials said that voter databases could be hacked via phishing or ransomware attacks. They also warned about the rising use of artificial intelligence (AI) that could be used to potentially trick voters, according to the report.

Eric Goldstein, the executive assistant director for cybersecurity at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), told the news outlet that there have been significant advancements that could allow China, North Korea, and Russia to target election systems.

“We are in a really difficult cybersecurity environment right now,” he said. “Every single location is at risk regardless of size, regardless of sector,” he added

Neither official provided any concrete examples in the report. But during the event, Kentucky Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams said last month that a bomb threat was called into the state capitol in Frankfort, saying that explosives would “make sure you all end up dead.” No bombs were found, and eight other state capitols received threats.

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New York Times Publishes Op-Ed Calling for Biden to Step Aside and Allow Another Democrat to Run

The New York Times has published an opinion piece calling for Joe Biden to step aside and allow another Democrat to run in 2024.

The article by Ross Douthat was titled “The Question Is Not If Biden Should Step Aside. It’s How.”

Douthat began by pointing to the special counsel report released Thursday that found Biden had mishandled classified documents, but should not be charged, at least in part, because of his failing memory.

The report referred to him as an “elderly man with a poor memory” and “significant limitations.”

“Joe Biden should not be running for re-election,” Douthat’s article began. “That much was obvious well before the special prosecutor’s comments on the president’s memory lapses inspired a burst of age-related angst. And Democrats who are furious at the prosecutor have to sense that it will become only more obvious as we move deeper into an actual campaign.”

The writer explained that he does not necessarily believe that Biden is currently unfit for the presidency, but that he may not be during a second term.

“Saying that things have worked OK throughout this stage of Biden’s decline, though, is very different from betting that they can continue working out OK for almost five long further years,” the article continued. “And saying that Biden is capable of occupying the presidency for the next 11 months is quite different from saying that he’s capable of spending those months effectively campaigning for the right to occupy it again.”

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