US Election 2024

Away End - General Chat
2719

Trump threatened to back out of Black journalists interview over live fact-checking

Donald Trump reportedly didn’t want to be live fact-checked during his disastrous visit to the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual convention in Chicago, according to the group’s president.

NABJ president Ken Lemon confirmed to Axios that Trump initially refused to take the stage if the journalists fact-checked him live. The disastrous Q&A with the former president was ultimately delayed by more than an hour — though that is not unusual for a Trump event — but he did eventually sit for the talk.

Trump blamed the delay on problems with the venue’s audio. Lemon confirmed that there had been audio issues, but they were solved quickly, and that Trump’s reluctance to be fact-checked was holding up the event.

Lemon told Axios that the “bigger problem was his threat not to take the stage.”

“He did not want to be fact-checked, but we could not let him on the stage without fact-checking,” he said.

Lemon said that he was preparing himself to go out to the crowd and explain why Trump wouldn’t be appearing when the former president decided to walk out and do the Q&A.

The Trump campaign disputed Lemon’s account to Axios, saying Trump had to wait for “close to” 40 minutes for an audio issue to be resolved.

Trump’s convention appearance was met with concern and condemnation from some commenters online, but Lemon said the organization was acting in accordance with its guidelines when it invited the former president.

“I consulted with a group of our Founders and past NABJ Presidents Tuesday on-site in Chicago, and as a group, we affirmed that the invitation to Former President Trump was in line with NABJ’s usual practices since 1976,” Lemon said. “It has always been our policy to ensure that candidates know that an invitation is not an endorsement. We also agreed that while this race is much different — and contentious — so are the consequences.”

“While we acknowledge the concerns expressed by our members, we believe it is important for us to provide our members with the opportunity to hear directly from candidates and hold them accountable,” he added.

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2720

That why I said “sounds like” and not “is like”. I doubt that this is a purely republican based tactic. That being said, I banned Netflix for their election interference, so now for fairness sake, I will no longer be buying a Tesla. I reserve the right to change my decisions after the election.

2721

Yes, when you are this deep into cognitive dissonance everything critical of Trump/republicans sounds like lies.

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2722

I though that link was critical of Musk, and not Trump.

2723

Did you read it? All the way to the bottom? And did you understand it?

The piece clearly says the Musk pac is exploiting a newly created loophole that allows PACs to coordinate directly with campaigns and explains how it will be using this tactic to do that.

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2724

It seems a natural extension of citizens united.

America is far removed from the idea of one person having one vote, and all those votes would carry equal weight, and whoever gets the most wins, albeit via the antiquated electoral college mechanism.

Bad actors like Musk will manipulate things to move the dial.
States like Georgia will scrub hundreds of thousands from the records, disqualifying them from voting, while ‘winning’ by 50k.
Gerrymandering has been extreme from the Republicans for a long time, since they do not want people choosing their politicians, but politicians choosing their people.

Significant, common sense reform needs to happen. It will probably be too much to ask for here, though.

The John Lewis voting act, if passed, would be a good step in the right direction.

The Republicans, at least in their current guise, simply do not have the numbers to prevail, in a fair fight. And given population trends, that is only going to worsen for them, as we go.

Their solution is to suppress enough votes, lie their arses off, and own the political system at all levels, to prevent democracy from happening. It has been a successful tactic for them, in large part, to date. But because they just do not have the numbers the tactics get more and more brazen.

At some point, and hopefully we are nearing that time, they will lose enough times that someone, somewhere, might think that they need to do some soul searching and think about how to enlarge their appeal.

The outcome of this election will either solidify their tactics, or cause some reflection, as Trump will be widely seen as the serial loser he is.

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2725
2726

The mask has now completely come off on CJ John Roberts. For years he has been presented by mainstream court experts as a bulwark against the most extreme right wing forces. Someone who prioritized the legitimacy of the court was retained in the public consciousness and that required only incremental change and non-partisan splits. He can now never be described this way again with a straight face. It is not just the extreme outcomes we’ve seen from this court, but it has now been reported that it was he who lead the charge to hear the immunity case having already decided he’d grant whatever was asked for.

In that light it is worth revisiting his decision on the overturning of the core protections of the voting right acts, an awful decision but one made even worse with his argument that the protections were no longer need because racism was over. That change meant state sponsored cheating could be instituted and the burden of proof was now on the public to challenge the state to roll back the changes, a process that takes time and over, as described above with the Abrams election in GA, often cannot be resolved before the election takes place. It was this very decision that allowed the house to flip in 2022 as since then enough legal challenges of various electoral changes have been upheld in court that if remedied by a court prior to the election, or prevented being instituted with the core provisions of the voting rights act still in place, would have seen the Dems keep the house. We can not longer see Roberts as a good natured man who just made a mistake with that decision. We now have to see him as being no different from Alito and Thomas and that the difference between them is only in the role they play in public.

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2727

I obviously know the guy is very biased, just posting it for the 7 second clip.

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2728

When it comes to US politics, I will just wait for results because conversations and discussions are all biased. It just so happens this forum is majorly left, but I would say the same too if for some reasons I find myself in a right leaning forum. Maybe I am just numb to the circus show that American politics is. Everyone on both sides always have ‘analysis’, ‘articles’, ‘theories’, ‘conspiracies’, ‘secret leaks’ and more to reinforce that they are ‘correct’. Maybe it’s just in my world, I never understood politics based on right or left.

Good luck people in November.

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2729

Most people on this forum are not US citizens and are merely trying to get an idea as to what is going on. Obviously, the US has such an influence globally, it is of greatest interest to those not involved.

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2730

It just so happens that the city of Liverpool is majorly left.

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2731

I don’t consider myself ‘majorly left’. I’m often at odds with friends who have much more extreme views.
However, there are certain values that I believe in: support for the disadvantaged in society, freedom of expression, freedom of and from religion, respect for one’s fellow citizens, anti-racism, decency and so on which are closer to the Democratic party than the Republicans, at least in their current forms.
This means in the US I would probably be considered left/liberal, in the UK, moderate, in Venezuela right wing.

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2732

There is almost nothing about Trump related discourse that can be understood through the normal left vs right prism.

I would argue that one of the few things that can be understood that way is the insistence on viewing the disagreements as a basic left vs right thing as pretending criticisms of Trump are just down to bog standard partisan arguments from the left is one of the few weapons Pro Trump people have.

“oh, please. Democrats are only complaining about selling our national secrets for personal gain for politics.”

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2733

Debate sort of verified, Sept. 4 in Pennsylvania, hosted by Fox News. Trump has accepted, and I’m assuming Harris has accepted. Hopefully same rules as last time.

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2734

Trump unilaterally agreed with Fox to do a debate. That is obviously not normally the way debates are organized so we’ll see how Harris responds.

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2735
2736

His argument against ABC is relevant imo. Maybe they can do CNN again.

2737

Trump filed the suit in March. The issue he is raising about why ABC is not viable existed at the time he agreed to the debate. It is an excuse he is throwing into the air to pressure Harris into more favourable territory for him and hoping people are gullible enough to buy it.

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2738

Why can’t they have a jointly hosted debate?

Each channel present 1 co-host and all fact checkers to be totally impartial wiht no previous political connection

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