The Third Party Mindset.

OK, this blog post is from a Libertarian site. It's not Green, but it shows the mindset of people who voted for the third parties. Switch "Jill Stein" for \"gary Johnson" and this could be taken from a Green Party site:

I’m so tired of hearing this nonsense from both sides: "A vote for Gary Johnson is a vote for Hillary.  A vote for Gary Johnson is a vote for Trump."

For Heaven’s sake, ENOUGH of that broken record!  Remember the Electoral College?  That institution that guarantees one party will take all the state’s electoral votes in the presidential election?  Unless you live in 1 of 9 or 10 battleground states, the Electoral College guarantees your vote doesn’t matter.

Yep. There was a lot of talk about whether one was in a safe state or not. But the real bottom line was this:

5% in the general election will get us federal funds, automatic ballot access in all states, and inclusion in the national polls and the debates.  Gary Johnson has polled in the 20-30% range between last week and today.

The real issue for a lot of third party voters was to get the 5% ballot access since we knew winning was impossible. On the other hand, the 5% share of the vote for a third party seemed possible.

Maybe we could have done something to change the way elections are run in the US.

Source:

• Electoral College: your vote doesn't count in 40 states

More proof that the Election Rigging is Internal, not External.

Exhibit No 1: The US Presidential Debates.

Here is a quote from one of the many articles I found when I went looking for the statement from the League of Women Voters about why they stopped hosting the Presidential debates (do a search on "League of Women Voters Presidential debates" for some interesting reading).

The Commission on Presidential Debates, a non-profit institution, is organizing the debates this year, as it has since its founding in 1987. Led by a board of high ranking members of the two major parties, the Commission largely operates behind closed doors, where it pre-screens questions and vets moderators. Though opaque, this week audiences caught a glimpse into how the body makes decisions. Its chief, Janet Brown, said it was the duty of the candidates, not of the moderator, to fact check each other.

Here is the video I was looking for:

The takeaway line from the speech is:

The League of Women Voters is withdrawing sponsorship of the presidential debates … because the demands of the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter. It has become clear to us that the candidates’ organizations aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and answers to tough questions. The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.

The League made sure that the debates were run in a truly impartial manner before the two parties created The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), which is a non-profit corporation established in 1987 under the joint sponsorship of the Democratic and Republican political parties in the United States.

If that doesn't stink to you, then you probably should go back to believing the Russians rigged the election. This commenter pretty much sums up what the debates have become:

Instead of any substantive exploration of the candidates' proposals, we will be treated to a mélange of showmanship and complaining, obstinacy and irrelevance, petty quibbles, grandstanding, pandering, half-truths, and punchlines. The candidates will be rehearsed, the moderators timid, the questions calculated, and the answers at once too short and too long. We will learn little to nothing that could not be discovered at this very moment by any Google user of modest skill. And inevitably, we will drink — a shot for every boast, a chug for every lie — because drinking games have become as guaranteed a fixture of our presidential debates as the candidates themselves. Is it any wonder debate viewership has been on a steady decline for decades?

The bottom line is that the CPD has made it hard for third parties to get involved in the debates. Toss in that the debates have no real substance. That's because they are a pointless exercise in duopoly PR.

There is a reason that Climate Change got short shrift  no attention whatsoever in the 2016 debates. It is impossible for third parties to get the 15% share of the voting public without any publicity.

The CPD is one of many examples of how the US elections are not "free and fair".

On the other hand, isn't having a president who wasn't popularly elected enough to persuade you of that?

See Also:

• Presidential Debates under the League of Women Voters
• The secretive commission that controls the presidential debates
• How Presidential Debates Became ‘a Fraud on the American Voter’
• How Third Parties Are Kept Out Of Presidential Debates
• End the presidential debate cartel

I don't get why Russiagate is a thing.

OK, the Mueller report is out: where are the indictments? For that matter why isn't everybody talking about it?

crickets chirp.

Let's toss in that James Clapper is alleged to be a perjurer. But like Hillary Clinton and the insider trading thing we can't talk about it since the statute of limitations has tolled. No matter how much both of those things stink.

Anyway, lots of talk about nothing which resulted in all the same issues still being around to cause trouble.

I am betting that Trump gets a second term because of the failure to address the problems that plagued the 2016 election.  His victory will be from a failure to learn from those mistakes.

See also:

• Why 2020 Democrats Are Nervous About the Mueller Report 
• The Mueller report no one's talking about - POLITICO

Reasonable Doubt

Ok, the presupposition is that Russians somehow interfered in the US election. Question would be how?

Were they responsible for Hillary Clinton being the Democratic Party Nominee?
Were they responsible for Trump being the Republican one?
Were they responsible for Bernie Sanders?
Given the Democrats made it clear that the e-mails weren't an issue during the election: why would their revealing them have rigged the election?

Since I mentioned "attempt", there is another legal issue here called "reasonable doubt", which is the standard in a criminal prosecution. The evidence must be so convincing that no reasonable person would ever question the defendant’s guilt. The standard requires that the evidence offer no logical explanation or conclusion other than that the defendant committed the crime. The doubt doesn't need to be absolute, only reasonable.

“Beyond a reasonable doubt” doesn’t mean, however, that the prosecution must eliminate all unreasonable doubts a jury could possibly have. Nor must the prosecution prove the case beyond a shadow of a doubt or to an absolute certainty. These would be impossible burdens because only witnesses to an alleged crime can be certain—and even then, not all witnesses can be certain. Rather, this highest of standards requires—after consideration of all facts—only one logical conclusion: that the defendant is indeed guilty.

So, if there is another explanation, which is far more plausible, then we have reasonable doubt. Anyone pushing Russiagate has to address the fact that Hillary Clinton was an unpopular candidate who ran a poor campaign that lost in the electoral college.

That means we can have something which is a far more obvious and better explanation, then we have reasonable doubt. Anything that makes the allegations questionable is reasonable doubt.

In my case, I have yet to see how the Russians did anything beyond point out the flaws in the system. What happened was more like someone witnessing a crime and then reporting it.

See also:

• Critical Cybersecurity Takeaways From Hillary’s Email Debacle
•  Hillary Clinton’s emails: What you need to know

Heckler & Koch ceases US sales

Heckler & Koch announced today that it has adopted a more ethical export control policy than the German government's. H&K announced that will no longer to sell arms into warzones or to countries that violate corruption and democracy standards.

Heckler & Koch – sometimes called Germany’s deadliest company by activists – said it would now sell only to “green countries,” which it defined according to three criteria: membership of Nato or “Nato-equivalent” (Japan, Switzerland, Australia and New Zealand); Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index; and the Economist Intelligence Unit’s democracy index.

 The US fails in two categories and Trump is talking about removing the US from NATO.

I applaud Heckler & Koch for being a corporate good citizen and realising that the US is one place where arms do not belong.

If the US isn't a "crisis region", I don't know what is!

See also:

• Germany's 'deadliest company' pledges to stop selling guns to crisis regions
• America falls short of being a full democracy for second year running, report finds
• Is the U.S. No Longer One of the Top 20 Most Democratic Countries in the World?
• U.S. Is a Rich Country With Symptoms of a Developing Nation