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So, Here’s A Great Example Proving (Some) Conservatives Are Living In A Different World

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The world has changed, and now many — if not most — Americans have become so partisan that we can no longer even hear or read the same words and walk away with the same understanding of their meaning.

For example, President Barack Obama’s comments this week on gun control:

“You hear some of these quotes: ‘I need a gun to protect myself from the government.’ ‘We can’t do background checks because the government is going to come take my guns away,’ Obama said. “Well, the government is us. These officials are elected by you. They are elected by you. I am elected by you. I am constrained, as they are constrained, by a system that our Founders put in place. It’s a government of and by and for the people.”

What does that mean to you?

To me, it says that President Obama has every intention of working within our democratic (small “d”) system, including trying to convince Congress of the need for gun reforms, to achieve the results he wants.

Not to conservatives.

To conservatives, apparently, President Obama’s words mean exactly the opposite.

Enter radical conservative Ann Althouse:

As a lawprof, I read that to mean that he is not constrained. He’s juggling a few ideas, but what he’s getting at is: The Founders put into place a system that would be populated by elected officials, who are to act for the sake of the people and as the people want. If what the people want our government to do is control guns, then it is within the power of government to do it.

That’s the constitutional argument he has in mind. It’s an idea of constitutional government as a political system, within which rights are only another manifestation of what the people want. And, in the ultimate scary twist on the idea of rights: Government is not to be regarded as in need of limits, because the government is us. Anything we — the government — want to do is never tyranny, but freedom.

And yes, this is a law professor. Regular readers may remember I’ve written about Ann Althouse before, especially her inhumane response to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s blood clot.

Althouse is a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, just as Dr. Ben Carson is a a neurosurgeon and the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. Smart, but totally existing in a different world.

What’s sad is Althuse has a huge following, of perhaps not-so-smart readers.

Take a look at some of their comments on Althouse’s post claiming Obama didn’t say what he said:

  • The Constitution expresses limits on the power of government. Obama is saying that the government can do anything it wants because we elected the 535 members of Congress and the President/Vice President (which make up a miniscule fraction of the government as a whole). In short, he’s saying there are no limits on government. That is the rhetoric of a dictator.
  • We can’t do background checks because the government is going to come take my guns away,’ Obama saidUh, nobody, anywhere, ever, said this.

    What a pathetic piece of shit this man is.

  • He opens his mouth and Uncle Saul (or is it Chairman Mao?) always comes out.Translation:

    I am constrained by this system of checks and balances those WHITE MEN put in place to frustrate me, personally, from achieving my goals of turning this into a People’s Paradise with Me as your All-Knowing, All-Wonderful Messiah For Life.

  • I do not see democrats doing ONE damn thing to prevent criminals and felons from obtaining guns. The democrats are obsessed with chipping away at the second amendment — one crisis at a time.
    Law abiding citizens hardest hit.
  • I’m not sure that Ann has captured the fact that the Dear Leader was making his typical sales pitch. His pitch was, “Look, you can trust me and my pinko pals, because we are constrained by the fact that you can toss us out if we abuse this power we want you to give us”.”…….oh, and I promise to call y’all in the morning after we bone you in your rosy plump rumps”.

    Hitler pretty much made the same pitch. It’s odd how goofy we are as a society when we so quickly forget how tyrants acquired, then abused AND kept their powers through elections. I’m sure that as long as Jimma is around to certify the results, none of us has a single thing about which to worry our little shaggy sheep heads.

  • thankfully, the constitution also limits this turkey to two terms.I wager that a trial balloon will be floated in regard to Obama seeking a third term. It will be suggested. You watch.
  • This is the Marxist argument that Obama is making… He has the ethics and soul of a dictator. The only thing keeping him in check are our traditions and the vestiges of our laws.

And on and on and on.

So, what do you think? Have we become so different we are no longer speaking the same language?

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News

Election Denialism Embraced by ‘Large Proportion’ of Trump’s Followers: Report

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May 2, 2024

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Since at least 2012 Donald Trump has been engaging in election denialism. Now, a tenet of the Republican Party, the refusal to accept official election results they don’t like is ingrained in a large number of his followers.

“I think that the powers that be on the Democratic side have figured out a way to circumvent democracy,” Darlene Anastas, 69, of Middleborough, Massachusetts, told NBC News. The network “spoke to more than 50 Trump supporters, most of whom said they don’t believe Biden can win legitimately in November.”

“Poll after poll,” NBC also reported, “has found that a large proportion of the Republican electorate believes the only reasons Joe Biden is president are voter fraud and Democratic dirty tricks, buying into former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election.”

NBC spoke with 72-year old George Crosby, from Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, who said, Democrats “cheat like crazy” (video below).

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“I think they cheated before, and I think they’re going to try to do it again, because they’re a bunch of communists,” Fitzwilliam added.

38-year old James Russon of Eagle Mountain, Utah told NBC, “There’s no way Biden could legally … win without unfair means.”

“He added that the only way Biden could prevail would be through ‘cheating’ or ‘a lot of deceased people voting.'”

62-year old Randall Minicola of Las Vegas said it would be “impossible” for Biden to win. “I don’t think he’s got a following. I mean, you look who’s behind him — the only thing he’s got is ghosts behind him. That’s what I believe. Where’s the supporters then? Are they in the basement with him? I don’t think so.”

NBC News did not report on where these particular GOP voters got their information or how they came to believe these claims, but it did note the “possibility of another election in which large numbers of Republicans refuse to accept a Biden victory has also been stoked by influential conservatives.”

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Trump’s election denialism is so strong that in 2020 CNN published “A list of the times Trump has said he won’t accept the election results or leave office if he loses.”

Election denialism continues to be spread throughout the right.

“A senile man is not going to get elected in the most powerful country in the world unless there’s fraud,” former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in March, NBC noted. Carlson, a purveyor of conspiracy theories, has spoken very positively about Russia and its authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin, and against Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Numerous studies and fact checks have found mail-in voting to be safe and secure, with little opportunity for fraud, yet just last week Carlson, like Trump, was claiming massive election fraud. Undermining Americans’ faith in democracy was a main goal of Russian President Putin’s 2016 attack on the U.S. elections, according to a 2017 report issued by a group of U.S. Intelligence agencies.

But just last week Carlson claimed, “About one in five mail-in ballots in the last election was fraudulent, handing Biden the presidency. We know this because the people who committed the fraud have admitted it in a new poll.”

A portion of NBC’s report from Thursday also appears in this January 2024 NBC News video.

Watch the video below or at this link.

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News

Trump Won’t Commit to Accepting Election Results if He Doesn’t Win State He Falsely Claims He Won

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15 hours ago

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May 2, 2024

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Falsely claiming he won the state of Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election Donald Trump is now refusing to commit to accepting the 2024 results for the Badger State this November.

In an interview with Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Trump appeared to dance around the issue, declaring he would only accept the official results “if everything’s honest.”

“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results,” Trump told the paper’s Alison Dirr and Molly Beck in an interview Wednesday. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

“But if everything’s honest, which we anticipate it will be — a lot of changes have been made over the last few years — but if everything’s honest, I will absolutely accept the results,” he said.

The Journal Sentinel reports Trump “offered similar conditions when asked the same question by news outlets in 2016 and 2020.”

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“I’d be doing a disservice to the country if I said otherwise,” he said.

In that interview Trump once again falsely claimed he won Wisconsin in 2020, a state President Joe Biden actually won by more than 20,000 votes.

“If you go back and look at all of the things that had been found out, it showed that I won the election in Wisconsin,” Trump told the newspaper. “It also showed I won the election in other locations.”

Trump’s “Big Lie,” that the 2020 election was “rigged” against him, along with his support for the January 6, 2021 insurrection, have been central to his 2024 campaign.

“Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the last presidential election in Wisconsin and his new comments placing conditions on when he would accept the results of the next election come as Republicans are seeking to persuade GOP voters to restore their trust in the state’s system of elections and embrace absentee voting,” the Journal Sentinel reported. “There’s no evidence to support that Wisconsin’s election was tainted by cheating or fraud in 2020. The results have been confirmed by recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties that Trump paid for, court rulings, a nonpartisan state audit and a study by the conservative legal firm Wisconsin Institute of Law & Liberty, among other analyses.”

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In October of 2016, weeks before Election Day, during the final presidential debate, Trump was asked if he would make the commitment “that you will absolutely accept the results of this election?”

“I will look at it at the time,” Trump replied. “I’m not looking at anything now, I’ll look at it at the time.”

He then went on to sow doubt about the credibility of the election.

Trump’s refusal to accept election results stretches back more than a decade, even before he ran for president.

After he refused to accept his loss in 2020, ABC News reported “Trump has longstanding history of calling elections ‘rigged’ if he doesn’t like the results.”

“On election night in 2012, when President Barack Obama was reelected, Trump said that the election was a ‘total sham’ and a ‘travesty,’ while also making the claim that the United States is ‘not a democracy’ after Obama secured his victory.

“We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!” Trump wrote on Twitter

One month later, in December of 2012, Trump tweeted, “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.” Ironically, four years later he became president after losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, but winning the Electoral College.

Watch the video above or at this link.

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News

‘No Place for Antisemitism’: Biden Denounces Violent Campus Protests, Hate Speech and Racism

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18 hours ago

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May 2, 2024

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President Joe Biden made rare, unscheduled remarks from the White House Thursday morning, denouncing the recent violent protests on college campuses, and telling Americans there is “no place” for antisemitism anywhere across the nation. He also denounced “hate speech” and “racism,” while declaring his support for the right to peacefully protest.

“There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students,” President Biden declared. “There is no place for hate speech, or violence of any kind, whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans. It’s simply wrong. There’s no place for racism in America. It’s all wrong. It’s un-American.”

“Violent protest is not protected,” Biden said strongly. “Peaceful protest is.”

Stressing “the right to free speech,” and the people’s right “to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard,” President Biden also declared the importance of “the rule of law.”

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“We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent,” the President also said, praising the ideal of peaceful protests, which he said are in the “best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues.”

“But,” he added, “neither are we a lawless country. We are a civil society and order must prevail.”

America is a “big, diverse, free thinking and freedom-loving nation,” Biden said, denouncing those “who rush in to score political points.”

“This isn’t a moment for politics, it’s a moment for clarity.”

“It’s against the law when violence occurs. Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations. None of this is a peaceful protest,” he warned. “Threatening people, intimidating people. instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Dissent is essential to democracy but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish a semester and their college education.”

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“Look. It’s basically a matter of fairness. It’s a matter of what’s right. There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos. People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.”

“I understand people have strong feelings and deep convictions in America. We respect the right and protect the right for them to express that. But it doesn’t mean anything goes. It needs to be done without violence. Without destruction, without hate, and within the law. And I’ll make no mistake. As President, I will always defend free speech. And I will always be just as strong standing up for the rule of law. That’s my responsibility to you the American people. My obligation to the Constitution.”

The President also responded to reporters’ questions, including saying he saw no need to call up the National Guard.

Watch the videos above or at this link.

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