Monday, September 26, 2016

Last Call For History's Dustbin

As we go into tonight's debate, remember Trump is the guy supposedly running neck and neck with Clinton, and he's doing it with support from people like this.

A vendor at the Bloomsburg Fair in Pennsylvania advertised his wares by displaying a large Nazi flag next to a Donald Trump banner, according to The Citizens' Voice, a local Pennsylvania paper.
The flag was taken down Monday after it was initially spotted and a fairgoer posted a picture of it on social media Sunday night.

“Security and the directors and other people did take care of it,” concessions clerk Barbara Belles told The Citizens’ Voice. Belles also said the vendor was apparently displaying the flag for political purposes.

Additional Nazi flags were confiscated from the vendor Monday morning, according to ABC affiliate WNEP.

Nothing to see here.  But you'll keep up with your third party protest vote because keeping this asshole (who is getting support from literal, actual Nazis!) out of the White House somehow is less important than registering your equal displeasure with both major parties, right?

The III Percent Solution

Meanwhile, back in Second Amendment Remedy territory, we're seeing Trump supporters like Jimmy Arno and his wife, Dani of Lawrenceburg, Georgia all but promise armed insurrection if Clinton voters don't shut up and let The Donald win.

“If you go to a movie theater, you’re liable to get shot, you go to a mall, you’re liable to get shot,” Jimmy Arno said. “If you go to Atlanta or a major city, you’re liable to be shot or attacked.” 
Dani Arno expressed concern about a Black Lives Matter protest at the local high school, and Jimmy Arno expressed dismay at the demonstration against the display of Confederate flags. 
The Arnos used to fly a Confederate flag but took it down out of courtesy after some of their daughter’s friends said it made them uncomfortable, although they still hang a framed portrait of Robert E. Lee over their living room couch. 
Jimmy Arno blames President Barack Obama for the increase in racial tensions that worry him 
“I know that we were a whole lot further along racially eight years ago than we are today,” he said. 
The couple both plan to vote for Donald Trump, saying Hillary Clinton would just be a continuation of the Obama administration, and they dismissed stories about the real estate developer cheating contractors and other “ordinary people.” 
“Hillary wants to be elected and Donald Trump wants to be elected,” Jimmy Arno said. “They’re going to talk bad about everything that they can about the other candidate so that you vote for them. I discount the whole thing, because I want to know what your plan is to help the country, that’s what I want to know. Donald Trump, if I understand him correctly, and I hope I do, he wants to stop the flow of illegal people in this country. Stop the flow. Well, by stopping the flow, more Americans have an opportunity to go to work because they’re not losing their jobs to illegal immigrants.” 

And of course Jimmy is considering watering the Tree of Liberty if he needs to.

Jimmy Arno told NPR he was considering joining a local militia group, because he wants to be prepared in case his darkest fears become a reality. 
Should martial law, civil war — whatever — break out in this country, they will uphold the Constitution and rebuild our loss,” he said. “The war that’s going to break out if Hillary Clinton’s elected, if that happens. Your patriots are going to overthrow the government.”

Pretty sure the Arnos are going to vote.  And here's a guy publicly saying he's considering joining an armed militia group to overthrow a rightfully-elected Clinton administration.

But both sides are corrupt, right, so why bother?

The Maine Event

It looks like for the first time since legislation was passed to allow Maine's electoral votes to be divided by its two congressional districts, the Pine Tree State will almost certainly split its four electoral votes. How that will affect the overall race is anyone's guess, but it goes to show just how divided voters are this year in states, and apparently there are still quite a few undecided Mainers even this late in the election season.

Republican Donald Trump has a commanding 15-point lead in the state’s northern and more rural 2nd District, while his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton has an even bigger 21-point lead in the state’s more urban and southern 1st District, according to a new Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram poll.

Clinton leads Trump statewide by four points, with 40 percent of those surveyed saying they will vote for her while 36 percent said they favor Trump. Another 12 percent said they will vote for Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson and 3 percent favor the Green Party’s Jill Stein. The remainder said they will vote for someone else or are undecided.

With only seven weeks remaining before the election, only 59 percent of voters said they definitely know who they’ll vote for, up only eight points from the newspaper’s poll in June, when 51 percent of voters said they had made up their minds.

Andrew Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, which conducted the poll, said voter indecision is high for mid-September, when about 70 percent of voters normally say they’ve made up their minds. Smith said the low commitment level reflects the unpopularity of both of the top candidates.

The poll found that only 37 percent of likely voters view Clinton favorably, compared to 36 percent in June, while only 32 percent view Trump favorably, compared to 28 percent in June.

“You’ve got two very unpopular candidates and people are voting against candidates rather than supporting people,” Smith said. “Voters truly are unsure about who they are going to support.”

Forty percent undecided is a lot...and they may not decide at all in the end, if the state's stubborn streak has anything to say about it.  But we're looking at a massive divide between urban and rural America this year, even within the same state.

Comparing the two major parties, 77 percent of registered Democrats said they had made their decision, while only 61 percent of the state’s registered Republicans have, the poll found.

The newspaper data showed that in June, Clinton had a slightly larger lead over Trump, with 42 percent supporting her compared to Trump’s 35 percent – statewide.

Some poll respondents, such as Peggy Coolong of Houlton, say they are so dissatisfied with their choices for president that they will leave that part of the ballot blank in November.

“I just can’t vote for them,” said Coolong, a 76-year-old widow who calls herself “a pure independent.”

“I do not think that Hillary is trustworthy and I feel very strongly that Mr. Trump probably is going to lose his temper, understandably, but at the wrong time and get us into trouble,” Coolong said.

She said the entire presidential campaign cycle has been so disappointing to her that she’s tuned it out entirely.

I just got fed up and stopped watching, it’s just too frustrating,” Coolong said. “The political climate is so polluted it’s like a tsunami going across the United States and it’s inhabited by a clown puffer fish and a piranha who are followed around by meatheads – half-conscious people who can’t stop talking about it.”

Of course, that's exactly what Donald Trump's camp wants to see: large numbers of voters who say they just don't give a damn and want the "half-conscious meatheads" to stop talking about the election so they can get back to their TV shows.

The only necessary thing for the triumph of Trump is for good people to not vote, to paraphrase Edmund Burke.  In fact, Trump is counting on it, and frankly, it's working.

StupidiNews!