The 2016 United States Presidential Election

See Election Rigging. Sorry, not an equivalent claim. That is voter fraud and not election fraud. The level of voter fraud has been investigated and documented and it has been shown to be a red-herring argument by the GOP to hide their election frauds. So we should ALL be interested in revising the system to that we can trust the result. This was Jill Stein's main reason for insisting on the recounts -- to show that our system is broken and unreliable, that it is too susceptible to tinkering by any party in control of the machines. I did not see much of that, but then I didn't pay much attention to them. I DID see the primary system wasrigged against Bernie in the primaries, by the methods listed in Election Rigging, and I did see massive bias in the media. Mostly media pundits living in the Hillary bubble that thought she was the best thing since sliced bread. Reality is a harsh mistress. Because electors are voted on in the same districts as are gerrymandered for the House of Representatives? We can expect that disease to spread.

Yes, and even more alarming is that over time this inability to discern and filter real from unreal will only cement their views more firmly. They'll find no fact so firm it can't be explained away in their own minds if it conflicts with their opinion.Faith seems to think that voting against Trump means a preference for Hilary. I think I'm like many people in disliking both candidates, but when it comes to who's made of the better presidential timber, who has the most knowledge and experience, who has the more appropriate temperament and qualities, clearly it's almost anyone but Trump. Those who think exploiting and dehumanizing women, walking unannounced into woman and teenager dressing rooms, keeping finances secret, expressing racist sentiments, taking away health insurance, putting the ignorant in charge of government agencies, expanding gun ownership, not being concerned about our air and water, conducting trade wars, rebooting the nuclear arms race, are all good things, then Trump's their man.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Added climate and trade war concerns.

As an outsider to all of this, it appears to me that the vast majority of Americans that voted for Trump didn't vote for him because they liked him or what he stands forever. I think that the vast majority of voters in that election on both sides voted against something, and in the case of those who voted for Trump they largely voted against the established ruling class of politicians from both parties. Nobody represented the establishment more than Hillary Clinton. People were able to close their eyes to all of Trump's shortcomings.

This is the same none evidence you posted the last time I asked. Yeah, the machines are hackable. The question is whether they were hacked to deliver results for Trump in the general election or Hillary in the primaries. There is zero evidence of either. To be clear, I'm specifically asking you about hacked voting results. Uh, no.Gerrymandering has no effect on the number of electors that a state has, and with the exception of the two states that divide up electors proportionately, gerrymandering has a similar lack of effect on how electors are assigned. With the exception of Maine and Nebraska, electors are picked statewide. Maine and Nebraska also don't have enough electors to allow gerrymandering to have any effect on the presidential election.The advantage is because folks gerrymander themselves through their election to live and work in urban vs rural settings.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

For an outsider to hack into the machines is something that I would question, though for an outsider to hack into the systems that collect and tally the data from those machines would be another question.Rather, for the voting machines to have been hacked would have required an insider threat. People working within the system to tamper with the machines and with the process. There is evidence of tampering of the voting machines. Voting machines with their seals broken. Counties in one of the vital swing states "suddenly" at the first sign that there would be a recount finding and discarding extra votes for Trump.The search for evidence has been called off when the recount was cancelled in some of the key 3 states and not allowed to even begin in others. As I understand, the federal government has started an investigation into election fraud, but how far do you realistically believe the GOP-dominated Trump Administration will allow that to proceed? Quite true. I fully agree with this assessment. The number of electors a state has is based on its representation in both houses of Congress, in which its representation in the House is based on population. Gerrymandering has no effect on those numbers. Rather, gerrymandering only affects the election outcomes of House races. Uh, nope! Gerrymandering is indeed an artificial manipulation of populations to affect the outcome of the election of House representation.First, where a voter works has absolutely nothing to do with who his representative is. Rather it is where he/she lives! Here is an extremely simple example to make that point. A very great number of people work in New York City, yet many of them live in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, or commute in from some other neighboring state. Does some congressman from New York City represent them? Do they vote for a congressman from New York City? No, of course not! They vote for and are represented by whichever congressman represents the congressional district where they reside.Second, no they are not gerrymandering themselves by choosing where to live. The entire reason for the term "Gerrymander" is because of how the drawing of district lines creates districts that are so monstrously contorted as to invoke visions of horrific monsters, "Gerrymanders" (part salamander part German???).For example in Orange County, CA, my friend informed me (and I checked it out at the time) that San Clemente (on the southern-most sea coast of Orange County) and Yorba Linda (about 32 miles away, where the Santa Ana Canyon opens into Orange County's central basin) were in the same congressional district. When I investigated back when, I saw how those two cities were connected by an extremely narrow band of land (if we could so exaggerate) running through mountainous wilderness (yes, the OC does have that!). How much more blatantly obvious could you possibly be? Connecting two remote communities through an essentially empty umbilical? Did the inhabitants of San Clemente move there in order to be associated with the inhabitants of Yorba Linda? Or vice versa? No! They absolutely did not choose to "gerrymander themselves" in such a manner!However, now via Google Earth I see that San Clemente is in District 44 along with communities like Corona (31 miles away) and Riverside (38 miles away) and Crestmore Heights (44 miles away). Please compare that with how distant Yorba Linda was.Now, compare that with your statement: " ... folks gerrymander themselves through their election to live and work in urban vs rural settings." OK, you were trying to a different point, but I propose that gerrymandering renders your point moot. San Clemente is South County. It is part of a sizable demographic which centers around living in the county's mountainous south while commuting to the county's central basin which is where most of the businesses are (though they have been spreading towards the south). In the meantime, you have the Inland Empire (IE) centered around Riverside and San Bernadino. Two very different regions. If you wanted to "gerrymander yourself" to the Inland Empire, then you would have moved there, whereas if you really wanted to "gerrymander yourself" to Orange County then you would have done so (ignoring the economic phenomenon of many people working in Orange County but having to live in and commute from the IE just to be able to afford the cost of housing).People live where they choose to live, for whatever reasons or necessities. Political parties in power choose to gerrymander. People do not choose to gerrymander themselves!

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The search for evidence has been called off when the recount was cancelled in some of the key 3 states and not allowed to even begin in others. As I understand, the federal government has started an investigation into election fraud, but how far do you realistically believe the GOP-dominated Trump Administration will allow that to proceed?

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Given the reports I heard - the Trump campaign doing everything they could to prevent a recount - I can be pretty confident that the Trump administration will not be in favour of any investigation. (And I have to say that such determination in stopping the recounts is just a little suspicious to my mind)

Sorry, but I want to take additional exception to what you said: Sorry, but ... what!?!?!?!?You are a farmer. So you're going to settle in the city? What!?!?!?!?Your business deals directly with farmers, whether in working with them, offering farming implements or stategies, or you buy from them and run grain elevators, etc. So you're going to settle in the city? What!?!?!?!?You work in tech, so you settle way out in the sticks in the middle of nowhere (BTW, been there; took the photos at Rugby, ND). What!?!?!?!?You work in whatever service or minor manufacturing work has still survived but is still centralized within the city. So you're going to settle out in the country away from the city? What!?!?!?!?To provide a bit of perspective, back in 1977, before all this current nonsense, my Permanent Duty Assignment was to Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota. As a married junior airman with extremely limited resources, we found a house to rent in Hatton, 25 miles from base. It was also 40 miles away from town, Grand Forks, ND. At the time, we had only one vehicle. I worked "swing shift" (1630 to 2400) so for the wife to shop at the commissary, we had to come in a bit early so she could drop me off at work, go to the commissary, and then drive those 25 miles back to base to pick me up at midnight. There wasn't any employment for her in Hatton, so commute to "the big town" (since there's no town in ND able to classify itself as an actual city) would have been way beyond our means.Of course, the "extreme" climate of North Dakota may be cited as an exception, but that same paradigm does still hold true across so much of this country. "Extreme climate". Two or three years we were there (out of five), there was always a blizzard on Halloween, but the kids still came out in their winter suits with their costumes on top. Similarly, every year local teenagers who had grown up in all this and were immune would eventually be found in the spring in the middle of a field a short distance from their abandoned car. Or the first year we were there, a toddler went missing in the middle of a blizzard only to be found in the spring in his own front yard.There is indeed a disparity between city and rural. Our local newspaper published a map of the election results of 2012, who voted for whom. All the cities were darkly blue while the countryside remained red. Shouldn't that disparity between city and rural be something that they need to work out on the local level instead of on the federal level? And with the gerrymandering added in, what has been the outcome?So shouldn't the rural folk be grouped together and the urban folk grouped together? Instead of being sliced and diced and rearranged in a manner favorable to the political party in power?

The statement was supposed to be humorous. My fault for not including some kind of sarcasm indicator. Sigh. With respect to the election for president, the current arrangement was not created by the political party in power. It was created at the formation of the union to give the Southern states, with their lower (slaves excluded) population more of a say in electing the president. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Yes, I know full well that any mention of Hitler is a signal that your own position is dead in the water. But after 35 years of sincere and repeated dedication to protecting the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic, I must speak.The Constitution of the German Reich, AKA "The Weimar Constitution", was perhaps the most liberal constitution ever devised. It remained in effect throughout the entire Hitlerzeit ("Hitler time", the time when Hitler was in power), 1945. Despite having officially remained in effect for that entire time, it had no actual effect. If nobody was ever moved to uphold the Weimar Constitution, then it meant absolutely nothing whatsoever.If nobody is ever moved to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America, then it never meant absolutely anything whatsoever.Think about that. On 1933 Jan 30 Hitler became Kanzler. On 1933 Feb 27 the German Congress, the Reichstag, was burned down. On 1933 Feb 28 Hitler declared the Reichstag Fire Decree of 28 February which suspended

Wrong.My comments about Gerrymandering applied only to the presidential election. There are no "presidential" districts in presidential elections. Voting is state wide, and neither party gets to tinker with state boundaries in a way that affects the presidential election.The issue here is the proportioning and use of the electoral college. Period.

From today's New York Times: Obama Strikes Back at Russia for Election HackingThe Obama administration ejected 35 Russian diplomats it claims were spying and sanctioned Russian's two foremost intelligence agencies. I don't think this solves anything, and I expect Russia will respond with a roughly equivalent number of ejections and sanctions against the US.The New York Times today also reran their December 13^th story on the how of the Russian hacking: The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.There are three main reasons Trump will be president, and if only two of them had happened the outcome would have been different. But the Democrats ran a weak candidate, the Russian hacking caused a weekly flood of leaks of DNC and Clinton campaign emails, and the FBI director revived the Clinton email server issue in the form of two letters to Congress just a week before the election, the second just two days before election day. It seems unlikely that the Russian hacking swung the election by itself.AbE: Here's some irony from the first link:

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A more detailed report on the intelligence, ordered by President Obama, will be published in the next three weeks, though much of the detail especially evidence collected from implants in Russian computer systems, tapped conversations and spies is expected to remain classified.

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Got that? Some of the important evidence of Russian hacking was gathered through the hacking of Russian computers by the US. But hey, we're the victims here.--PercyEdited by Percy, : AbE.

And the No Such Agency gets job security for at least a decade.

It seems that Russia is not doing that and is retaining all US diplomats and doing no sanctions.Seems like that opens the door for Trump to have a reason to "revert Obama's mistake" as soon as he gets into office?
Or maybe Putin is just a really nice guy

New Republican Congress reverses ethics move after outcryThe Republican caucus, after a secret vote, decided to end the independence of the Office of Congressional Ethics.Donald Trump tweeted against it, the Republicans held an emergency meeting and reversed the decision.

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I'm talking about making SOMEBODY ELSE obey the commandments
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One: Ananias and Sapphira who withheld some of the proceeds from the sale of their property from the disciples' fund, lied about it when they didn't have any reason to, since as the disciples said, they had the full right to use their property however they wanted to, to give or withhold whatever amount they chose. Instead they pretended to give it all when they gave only part of it. The point is this idea that the hotel owner had some kind of obligation to provide for the refugees is wrong wrong wrong. And again you have no idea what he may already do to obey the commandment. And you also have no idea whether he himself would suffer severely financially if he did what you self-appointed judges of his conscience want him to do, What a bunch of Pharisees you all are.

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And the other thing was that Jesus tells us if someone steals our coat to also give them our cloak. He doesn't tell us that we are to make someone else give up their cloak, which is what you all are doing.

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As usual I'm sorry I got myself trapped into any discussion at EvC

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Here is what the Old Testament says about the issue. It has to do with the ACTUAL Biblical reason for the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. (not the lies of the preachers)

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Ezekiel 16:49-50
Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty and did an abomination before me. So I removed them, when I saw it.
ESV

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When one gets to the New Testament, then it gets to the most disgusting lie preachers peddle today. That lie is the issue that the tither is still in effect. It is not! That was an Old Testament law that is no more.However.The New Testament features both the Gospels (via the words of Jesus) and Acts demanding 100% of income (and property) going into a (fledgling) governmental fund. I was just reading the World Book Encyclopedia on Apostle Barnabas. They actually mention the issue of 100% of income (and property) being required.I have been in endless debates on this issue, and the only verses offered, by those trying individuals to show that a tithe is still in place in the New Covenant, are actually (contrary to their claim)verses where Paul is collecting money for the "poor" Jerusalem Christians of James (that seemed to have called themselves Ebionites or Nazarenes). It is most ironic considering todays fundamentalist Christians are from a tradition that killed off those Jewish Christians over 1500 years ago. And todays fundis continue to despise their views intensely.Fundamentalists "Christians" of today are the biggest liars and phonies on the face of the planet. The last liar I debated was back in Lincoln (I'm not in the mood to argue with the endless trillions of New York City fundamentalists so I haven't agued much anymore) and he overheard me debating somebody else on the tithe. He stated matter with certainty that the tithe was indeed in the New Testament. All he could offer was 2 Corinthians 9. Ironic that he started talking to me by asking me what my source was for the "Pella Flight" which I mentioned to the others (before he jumped in)while talking about verses about Paul's collection for the Jerusalem Christians. He said "where do you get you information". I said Eusebius talked about the Jewish Christians of Jerusalem refusing to fight the Romans in the Jewish uprising during the 60s A.D and how they fled to palla in trans-Jordan. "Go read it", I said. I spelled out Eusebius, letter by letter, and told him that his c. 325 A.D. Church History is in most Christian bookstores either in book form of software. Fundamentalists like him a lot. He refused. He refused other book references too (I told him about the Interpreters Commentary Matthew-Mark volume 7 having scholarly articles that accept the historicity of the Pella Flight and the fact that Ebionites were their genuine descendants).Romans 15, Acts 21, 1 Corinthians 16, Galatians 2 were already covered (in my debates with the others), then he brought up 2 Corinthians 9 when he jumped in. All refer to the "poor" Christians (Ebionites) that followed James.Google

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Romans 15:25-26
At present, however, I am going to Jerusalem bringing aid to the saints. For Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to make some contribution for the poor among the saints at Jerusalem.

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I have been in so many debates on this issue that it is unreal. And the arrogance is amazing . I've had to deal with people brag loudly about how they showed me "the tithe" in 1 Corinthians 16 even AFTER I showed that it was a collection for the Jerusalem Christians of James. I "refuse to see the truth" because I don't accept that it is a tithe and infact has nothing to do with a national Israel governmental law from the Old Testament.Faith.Do you claim there is still a tithe that Paul is collecting? I do think the collection was voluntary. I still think a 100% "tax" was the ideal government that the Christians were to seek however.