Deepspace: regarding trolls I'm adopting a policy of, Ignore and Replace! Otherwise, I'm just wasting my time. Personally, I think you are much to intelligent to condescend to even give them the time of day. They would never believe you anyway.

But on the other hand, I greatly enjoy your posts and find them most informative.

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ABDICATION of DUTY - {a rhyme}

We fret o’er our nation’s commotions

with a yuuge range of negative emotions.

We’ve anger, we’ve fear, we’ve disgust

with Republicans’ breaches of trust.

Their duty they abdicate,

not serving the good of the state.

===========================

@35 Diane,

Washed up lefties have no balls, tripping over there dicks is the best they can do. :):)

The problem is not Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Socialists or Greens, etc. The problem is political parties against true democracy. The solution is to replace the system of elections for choosing legislators (from city councils all the way up to the U.S. Congress) with a lottery. Anyone willing to serve would take what amounts to a civil service examination to prove competency. Pass the examination and your name goes into the lottery. Chosen, you serve one term (of, say, four years), after which you return to your private life and someone else is chosen. No campaigning. No elections. No fund-raising. No corporate lobbyists driving legislatiion. Actual participatory democracy by citizens.

Now the Republicans will do all they can to defund every aspect of our health care. They are really unhappy as the Koch Brothers have closed their piggy banks until the reform is passed.

kilosqrd: "Yet the only [emphasis mine] lying, cheating, and stealing in the last election was done by the democrats..."

LMAO! This time, you only got to the third word of a post before revealing and utterly discrediting your entire, empty-headed argument, a classic false equivalency. Trolls from the swamp providing cheap entertainment is usually good for a short laugh, but sometimes it's just embarrassing. Seriously, for your own sake, quit watching Fux News, put your pants on, and get out of the basement. You really need some fresh air and sunshine.

It's true that during the primary certain dirty-trick operatives in the Democratic Party and Hillary's campaign played dirty (Gee, when does that ever happen in politics? "It ain't beanbag.") -- principally Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Donna Brazile -- no doubt in coordination with senior campaign aides and possibly with even Hillary herself, although there is no evidence of that. All involved paid a high political price for their nefarious deeds, especially Hillary and the party as a whole for backing the wrong horse, now didn't they? Such is life in the fast lane.

Okay, fine. But where is the accountability in the Republican Party for their institutionalized, decades-long, lie-cheat-and-steal crusade of truly monumental proportions to disenfranchise millions upon millions of, primarily, Democratic voters, of which the evidence is boundless. In your "alternative facts" universe, of course, if it wasn't on Fux News, it didn't happen.

What Republicans have done, and are still doing, is on a whole new level of the lie-cheat-steal scale, never before achieved in the history of American politics, which makes whatever amateurish, slap-happy crap the Democrats were doing look like child's play. The fact that potentially hackable voting machines with no paper trail has made every election, where they are used, extremely vulnerable to outside manipulation has been clearly demonstrated by nearly every expert -- and there are many -- who has ever probed into the matter.

Yet, old and susceptible machines with outdated technology and prone to error, spitting out high percentages of "unreadable" ballots (with no independent paper record) and deliberately sprinkled around in heavily Democratic districts in the swing states in election after election, is only one small tactic in the overall strategy of Republican state legislatures and their Secretaries of State (with a wink and a nod from the GOP and the Republican members of Congress slithering around in Washington D.C.) -- sophisticated, coordinated assaults on targeted minorities, young people, and the poor, all who typically vote Democratic in large numbers. During the short season of actually casting votes, numerous other unethical tactics employed in key Democratic districts include cutting the number of machines, days, hours, polling places, and poll workers to create long discouraging lines in November's normally foul weather.

All that is bad enough but still only makes up a small fraction of Republicans' war on voting and their maniacal sprint to the finish line of one-party rule and fascism. Caging, intimidation at polling stations, illegally purging Democrats from the registration rolls by the millions (Interstate Crosscheck) before they even get a chance to cast ballots, phony voter-suppression ID laws, and probably the most effective: a deluge of lies across every media platform -- TV, radio, internet, newspapers drowning out everything liberal, progressive, and "DemocRAT."

You are correct that extremely partisan gerrymandering doesn't affect a presidential election, but it certainly HAS guaranteed a Republican majority in the House despite several millions more ballots cast for Democratic contenders in every election since 2010. Nice!

Any cloak-and-dagger efforts by the Russians pale in comparison to what Republicans have been doing all along, brazenly and shamelessly out in the open right under our noses. As far as your "zip, zero, nada" evidence that Russians attacked at least 21 state election computers, hacked deeply into campaign computers, and engaged in a massive, weaponized internet blitz against Hillary in favor of your pussy-grabbing clown dummy, look no further than our own 17 intelligence agencies' assessments and the numerous, formal investigations now being conducted by your party in Congress.

BTW, a U.S. citizen colluding with a foreign government against our national interests -- especially our electoral process, the beating heart of democracy -- if proven, is most definitely illegal, as spelled out clearly in the Constitution as well as the large body of case law going back to the founding of our nation. Fux News and MSM dragging an acre of shite into your darkened basement hidey-hole is not your best source of information, ya gobber.

As far as your "zip, zero, nada" evidence that Republicans have been attacking our electoral process for decades, look no further than the reams of evidence gathered by such investigative reporters as Brad Friedman, Greg Palast, Amy Goodman, and lawyers Robert F. Kennedy and Mike Papantonio -- to mention a few. (Sorry if the truth and the truth tellers might sound liberal to your plugged-up, right-wing ears.) Fear not; there are many other credible investigators and stacks of on-record evidence too numerous to mention in a blog comment. A good place to start is Greg Palast and his short documentary, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy." One would be remiss not to read his books also, offering rich detail. (FYI, he is a highly trained former FBI investigator, the one put in charge of the Valdez oil spill in Alaska, who cuts no slack for Democrats.)

Another avenue of research that MSM dutifully glosses over is the mysterious and unexplained "red shift" in reliably Democratic districts that can't be accounted for and that are wildly out of sync with exit polling, the international gold standard used to detect and verify election fraud in every democracy in the world, except ours. (BTW, voter fraud is virtually nonexistent in the U.S. -- "zip, zero, nada" evidence.)

Your turn ..."put up or shut up." Oh never mind, fun's over -- not interested in toxic swamp gas! Gabh síos ort fhéin'.

Wait, almost forgot: The single biggest, hands down, pathological liar, cheater, and stealer of all time, not just this last election, is the blubber-butt buffoon who fooled you and 63 million other gullible Americans, the low/wrong-information voters who feed on lies:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/23/opinion/trumps-lies.html

http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/statements/byruling/false/

http://www.newscorpse.com/ncWP/?p=30264

What happens if one were elected yet may have great indebtedness to someone or something foreign?

"He couldn't have won without gerrymandering..." Lynn Harold

Say what??? How on earth did gerrymandering affect the Presidential vote? Would someone please explain?

K2

There were 2 candiates that had any chance at all of winning. I was a Bernie supporter that voted for anyone that stood a chance of defeating Trump. That was Hillary. After working on the Bernie campaign I worked on the Democratic Party campaign. I did not waste my vote on a write in for Bernie. I did not waste my vote on a third party candidate that might get 1%. I blame your type for why we are stuck with Trump when Hillary would be better.

Come on, Thom, Trump won because Hillary was an awful candidate. I did not vote for her. I voted for Jill Stein.

What really suprises me is that people like Stein did not get more votes.

In any case, I have a problem, I can't put my comments on MSN. It gives me a message that they are updating the system and they have been updating their system for over a week now. I can't believe they are so incompetent, so, I'm wondering if I got blocked somehow.

I don't know anyone that comments there, so I can't say for sure. That is why I'm mentioning it to you, just in case a way has been develop to quiet anyone who gives opinions that are frowned on. That would descrive me to a "T".

I think the bigger concern is the fact the democrats don't want to win. The fiasco just confirms the true purpose of the democrat party. http://bit.ly/democrats-stop-progressives

Either gerrymandering or oligarchs from Russia, how will we ever know?