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Month: March 2021

Jim Crow in a peach-colored suit and tie

President Joe Biden on Thursday called Republican legislation such as Georgia’s new vote suppression law “un-American” and “sick.” Stacey Abrams called the legislation “Jim Crow in a suit and tie.” Wearing his Thursday evening, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) signed it anyway.

Black voters were instrumental last fall in delivering Georgia’s electoral votes to Joe Biden and in handing both of the state’s U.S. senators to Democrats. So among other outrages, Kemp and Republican legislators made it a crime in Georgia to hand out food or water to persons waiting for hours in notoriously long voting lines that occur predictably in Democratic precincts.

More ominously (Associated Press):

The law replaces the elected secretary of state as the chair of the state election board with a new appointee of the legislature after Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger rebuffed Trump’s attempts to overturn Georgia’s election results. It also allows the board to remove and replace county election officials deemed to be underperforming.

Had this and other provisions been in place on November 3, 2020, “Donald Trump might have succeeded in overturning Georgia’s results,” Ari Berman (“Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America“) told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow after the signing. “His biggest Republican critic in Georgia was the secretary of state.” So legislators cut the secretary of state out of the loop. Georgia’s Republican legislature has taken “unprecedented power” over election administration, Berman continued, with the ability “to challenge the election results … and refuse to certify them if they don’t like who the winner is.”

Protests were immediate.

Georgia Capitol police arrested state Rep. Park Cannon after she knocked on the governor’s door to witness the signing. Police charged Cannon with two felonies: felony obstruction and preventing or disrupting general assembly session. The state constitution exempts members from arrest during sessions of the General Assembly “except for treason, felony, or breach of the peace.” Officers could legally arrest her for nothing less. The charges are unlikely to hold up in court but Cannon has been made an example.

The question now is what happens next.

Democrats’ top election law attorney, Marc Elias, immediately files a lawsuit on behalf of Stacey Abram’s New Georgia Project as well as Black Voters Matter and Rise, a student organization. Elias’s clients, like Cannon, will likely prevail in court. But the Republican party is ingenious in its efforts to disrupt democracy, Elias worries, and “we can’t count on” winning. Only Congress can protect our democracy and end these attacks because “we’re not going to beat them all in court.”

https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1375276793603760133?s=20
https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1375303426410754050?s=20

When North Carolina passed its infamous “bathroom bill” (HB2), the economic impact was immediate. A group of 68 major corporations, including Apple, Cisco and eBay, joined a lawsuit challenging the law. The ACC and NCAA pulled tournament play from the state. Lionsgate studios pulled its production. (Georgia film production became even an even larger sector of its state’s economy as a result.) Deutsche Bank froze plans to expand its workforce in North Carolina.

Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam, Nick Jonas, and Itzhak Perlman cancelled North Carolina performances. For them and others it’s encore time.

The Associated Press estimated the impact to North Carolina could amount to $3.76 billion over a dozen years. Neither Brian Kemp nor the bill he signed will be around that long and the economic impact to Georgia could be even greater.

The heat is already on Coca-Cola, Delta, and Home Depot, all headquartered in Atlanta. Expect it to get even hotter in Georgia than in North Carolina.

And we have not forgotten you, Chief Justice Roberts.

Thinking Big

Trump famously said that the doesn’t need to read anything or consult with experts because he already knows everything he needs to know. That’s unusual for most adults, much less for someone who ascended to an extremely important job leading hundreds of millions of people without any experience or expertise. But that’s Trump.

Biden is different:

Hosting historians around a long table in the East Room earlier this month, President Biden took notes in a black book as they discussed some of his most admired predecessors. Then he said to Doris Kearns Goodwin: “I’m no FDR, but … “

He’d like to be. The March 2 session, which the White House kept under wraps, reflects Biden’s determination to be one of the most consequential presidents.

The chatty, two-hour-plus meeting is a for-the-history-books marker of the think-big, go-big mentality that pervades his West Wing.

Biden’s presidency has already been transformative, and he has many more giant plans teed up that could make Biden’s New Deal the biggest change to governance in our lifetimes.

Biden, who holds his first formal news conference today at 1:15 p.m. in the East Room, started his term with the $1.9 trillion COVID bill, with numerous measures tucked in to reduce inequality.

Vaccines are rolling out, positioning Biden to get ahead of the pandemic. Democrats in Congress are pushing the most sweeping changes in voting rights since the 1960s.

And he’s preparing an infrastructure and green-energy plan that’s bigger than the original tab for the Interstate highway system, to be followed by a domestic proposal (free community college, universal pre-K) that brings the pair of packages to $3 trillion, with possible pay-fors that would dramatically rebalance the tax system.

[…]

The session was organized by Jon Meacham, the presidential biographer and informal Biden adviser who has helped with big speeches from Nashville, and serves as POTUS’ historical muse.

Besides Goodwin, participants included Michael Beschloss, author Michael Eric Dyson, Yale’s Joanne Freeman, Princeton’s Eddie Glaude Jr., Harvard’s Annette Gordon-Reed and Walter Isaacson.

[…]

Biden made it clear to his guests that he knew the gravity of the multiple crises facing America. He knew a lot about Franklin D. Roosevelt, and peppered Goodwin with questions about the World War II leader.

Beyond the icons (Lincoln, LBJ), the conversation got as granular as the Jay Treaty of 1794.

They talked a lot about the elasticity of presidential power, and the limits of going bigger and faster than the public might anticipate or stomach.

AfterwardBiden told an aide: “I could have gone another two hours.”

It sounds interesting. Biden is at an age in which his future is now. Maybe that makes a difference.

The insurrection as inspiration

This Fresh Air interview with Elizabeth Neumann about the new convergence of various white supremacy factions is well worth listening to. Donald Trump may have divided the country but he managed to bring these violent extremists together:

TERRY GROSS: She sees a connection between many people on the far right and Christian nationalism, which teaches that America is not only a Christian nation, it’s God’s chosen nation. As a Christian, she finds this very disturbing. Elizabeth Neumann has more than 20 years’ experience in homeland security, dating back to when she served on George W. Bush’s Homeland Security Council. She initially joined Trump’s Department of Homeland Security in 2017 as then Secretary John Kelly’s deputy chief of staff. She’s now co-director of the Republican Accountability Project, which was founded to push back against the lies and conspiracy theories about voter fraud and claims that the 2020 election was rigged, and to hold accountable elected leaders who have supported those claims and tried to overturn a legitimate election.

Elizabeth Neumann, welcome to FRESH AIR. I want to start with the January 6 insurrection. In a lot of ways, it did not succeed. It didn’t succeed in overturning the election. It didn’t return Donald Trump to the presidency. Over 300 people have been charged by the Justice Department. Some of the Q followers were disillusioned that the prophecy about Trump remaining president didn’t come true. So in that sense, the insurrection was a failure. Are there ways in which it was a success for the far right?

ELIZABETH NEUMANN: Thanks for having me, Terry. And unfortunately, yes, it was viewed as a success for white supremacists, for anti-government extremists and, quite frankly, probably, many of our enemies overseas. They saw it as a success in that we have such societal discord that we can’t seem to find, even post-January 6, the ability to come together on a basic thing like a commission to study domestic terrorism in our country and what happened on January 6. So we are very fractured as a nation at this point, very polarized. And that plays into our enemies’ hands.

So while the guard rails held up and the presidential transition happened on January 20, there is damage to our democracy that persists today, including the fact that you see so many Republicans at the state level and at the national level spending so much time and energy on voter suppression, because a sizable portion of the Republican Party, the Republican voters, believe that the election was stolen from them. That is not healthy. We are in a very precarious place in our country.

GROSS: Are there ways that January 6 empowered the right-wing groups, the hate groups, the white supremacist groups, the militias?

NEUMANN: Yes. In particular, if you look at white supremacists, they have this ideology behind them. And not every white supremacist holds to this. But going back 40, 50 years to the ’80s when the white supremacist movement kind of consolidated and came to the conclusion that they were no longer going to be able to establish or achieve their aims through the government, they realized that they needed to make the government their enemy. And they basically declared war on the government and stated that their aim was to overthrow the U.S. government, to establish a white nation. So when you see the Capitol being attacked, which is this symbol of our seat of government, it has this rallying effect for a white supremacist who holds to this ideology that, eventually, there’s going to be this massive war. And the U.S. government’s going to be overthrown. And they’re going to be able to establish this white nation.

So it’s not like they destroyed the Capitol. It’s not like they disrupted the transition of power. But it was seen as kind of almost the starting point, perhaps, of the civil war that they have believed in their mythology was going to come at some point, a race war. And so you see on online chat rooms that you have groups using this as a recruitment tactic, that it’s finally happening, if – you know, there’s going to be this race war, that we’re finally going to be able to achieve our aim of ridding the country of all of these people we don’t think should be here, establishing our own country. And any time you have, for an extremist group or a terrorist group, something that symbolic, it affects and helps them with their recruitment, with their morale. So these – certainly, on the white supremacist side, we see an emboldening effect for those groups.

GROSS: Which of the groups want to see a race war and want to see, like, a civil war that leads to a white nation?

NEUMANN: So that particular strain is going to be in your white supremacist group, so neo-Nazis and other groups that borrow their mythology largely from Germany and Nordic countries. What you also see, though, is there’s this other movement called the boogaloo boys. You may have heard of them as well. They also believe in a coming civil war. They also subscribe to an ideology of accelerationism, which a white supremacist might also ascribe to. That concept is that we are going to commit certain acts to accelerate societal collapse, to encourage the oncoming of a civil war. So it’s not just a belief that someday there will be a civil war, as if you’re being prophetic and you have awareness of something happening in the future. The accelerationism is it is my job to help bring it about.

So boogaloo boy believes in civil war. And it may also have a white supremacist viewpoint, might believe it’s a race war, but not necessarily. There are a lot of boogaloo boys who just believe that there’s a coming civil war and it has nothing to do, at least at a witting level, with race. So the – (laughter) one of the hard things in studying extremism, especially today, is that increasingly, we have these groups kind of morphing. An individual may have multiple ideologies that they have cobbled together to form almost their own version of an ideology. And so you might easily have a white supremacist who is also a boogaloo boy. You also see that the melding between the white supremacist groups and the anti-government extremist groups, there tends to be a lot of overlap there.

But you could find somebody easily – you could find a militia or a member of a militia who hates racism, who hates white supremacy. They are just about the right to bear arms and be able to exercise protection for their neighborhood through a militia. So it’s really hard to categorize with broad brush strokes. And part of the reason that, perhaps, we haven’t been able to take domestic terrorism as seriously as we should have is because of that decentralized lack of organization to many of these groups. I mean, you often see infighting between supposed leaders of these groups. And it can give this false sense that they don’t have their act together, they’re not actually that dangerous because they’re always fighting with one another. And they can’t even agree on the issues that they stand for.

GROSS: Well, did January 6 and the insurrection have the effect of bringing these groups together and creating a previously un-existing alliance?

NEUMANN: Definitely did. In fact, that’s one of the biggest concerns that we had is (laughter) you had groups that maybe wouldn’t have interconnected before, have an in-person, in-real-life experience, which during a pandemic is kind of rare to begin with, where they’re meeting people. So that networking effect can be very powerful. Not only did they meet in person, they’re having an experience that for them it had a lot of adrenaline, a lot of euphoria. It bonds you. It’s like being in the foxhole together in war. It bonds you in a way that just meeting on the street would not bond you.

So there is a concern then on the other side of January 6, you have groups interconnected in a way that they weren’t before. We heard in the news on Wednesday that prosecutors have found interconnection between Oath Keepers and Proud Boys and Three Percenters. I think we’re going to see more of this to come as the investigation unfurls. But the knowledge that they had been coordinating in the weeks up to January 6 is rather significant. These are not groups that necessarily share the same ideology. They shared a common purpose clearly and showing up on January six. And what has been revealed so far is basically coordination to be able to attack what they expected to be antifa showing up on January six. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s any more coordination specific to the capital, though, in the messaging traffic that was released, they were talking about an insurrection.

So there clearly was this understanding in the weeks prior to January 6 that something that they labeled an insurrection was going to happen on January 6 and that they needed to coordinate to be able – to achieve that common purpose. That is rather concerning in that heretofore most of these groups kind of kept to themselves. And so, again, it’s – something about January 6 definitely shifted the makeup and the threat that we were facing. It used to be small groups. And we were predominantly worried about the white supremacist groups because historically they have been the most lethal in their violence.

But the other major problem with January 6 is so far of those indicted about, 85 to 90% – the numbers will change depending on, you know, who gets indicted next – but it’s somewhere in that 85 to 90% of the individuals indicted are unaffiliated. That means they’re not Proud Boys. They’re not neo-Nazis. They’re not Oath Keepers. They are just people that are passionate about Donald Trump. They are MAGA. To have that many unaffiliated people doing what happened on January 6 – and clearly, they were led by people that were more coordinated, more organized – they crossed into acts of terrorism by what they did to the Capitol on January 6.

That’s really concerning to most extremist researchers because it demonstrates we’re kind of in a very different threat environment. It’s not just these organized groups. It’s that we have mass violence justified for political purposes. It’s rather stunning, actually, the more the data comes out about who actually crossed the threshold into the Capitol.

GROSS: Are you saying that when Trump was president, he was able to accomplish the kinds of things that these disparate groups, the Proud Boys, the white supremacist groups, the Three Percenters, all the accelerationists (ph), what they were not able to accomplish?

NEUMANN: That’s a great way to frame it. Yes.

There’s a lot more and it’s well worth listening to the whole thing. Perhaps this is just one of the regular paroxysms of racist, right wing activity that doesn’t necessarily lead to major outbreaks of organized violence. But something feels different about this. I hope I’m wrong.

Priorities

You cannot make this stuff up.

But there was this:

"If you do run, will Vice President Harris be on your ticket?" — Kaitlan Collins

Kristen Welker asks Biden if he bears "responsibility for everything happening at the border now"

Biden: "The idea that I'm gonna say, which I would never do, that if an accompanied child ends up at the border we're just gonna let him starve to death and stay on the other side — no previous administration did that either, except Trump. I'm not gonna do it."

Biden says current conditions at camps housing unaccompanied children on the border are "totally unacceptable" and that new facilities are becoming available

Biden says he "strongly supports" making it more difficult for senators to filibuster

"It's sick. It's sick" — Biden on the GOP push to make it harder to vote

"This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle" — Biden on the GOP's voter suppression push

"My predecessor … oh God, I miss him" — Biden throws shade at Trump while saying he plans to run for reelection

"I would like elected Republican support, but what I know I have now is electoral support from Republican voters" — Biden

"I love the fact that they found this whole idea of concern about the federal budget. It's kind of amazing" — Biden points out that the same Republicans who are now concerned about spending weren't so concerned when they were cutting taxes for the rich

Biden says his next big initiative will be infrastructure

"They have to posture for a while. They gotta get it out of their system" — Biden on why he hasn't engaged Republicans on immigration reform so far

Biden ended his first formal press conference without taking a question from Fox News. Peter Doocy hardest hit.

Originally tweeted by Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) on March 25, 2021.

He did not scream out “you are fake news!”or call anyone names.

They can’t help themselves

At least when it comes to nominating extremists. (Recall “I am not a witch” and “legitimate rape”?)The question is whether it will work this time:

The entry of two hard-right candidates this week into Senate races in Missouri and Alabama exposed the perils for Republicans of a political landscape in which former President Donald J. Trump is the only true north for grass-roots voters.

Strong state parties, big donors and G.O.P. national leaders were once able to anoint a candidate, in order to avoid destructive demolition derbies in state primaries.

But in the Trump era, the pursuit of his endorsement is all-consuming, and absent Mr. Trump’s blessing, there is no mechanism for clearing a cluttered primary field. With the former president focused elsewhere — on settling scores against Republicans who advanced his impeachment or showed insufficient loyalty — a combative Senate primary season is in store for the 2022 midterms, when Republicans who hope to regain the majority face a difficult map. They are fighting to hold on to five open seats after a wave of retirements of establishment figures, and even deep-red Missouri and Alabama pose potential headaches.

A scandal-haunted former Missouri governor, Eric Greitens, entered the race on Monday to replace the retiring Senator Roy Blunt. His candidacy set off a four-alarm fire with state party leaders, who fear that Mr. Greitens may squeak through a crowded primary field, only to lose a winnable seat to a Democrat.

In Alabama, the entry of Representative Mo Brooks, a staunch but lackluster Trump supporter, into the race for the seat being vacated by Senator Richard C. Shelby raised a different set of fears with activists: that Mr. Brooks, who badly lost a previous statewide race, would cause waves of Republican voters, especially women, to sit out the off-year election and crack open the door in a ruby red state for a Democrat.

Both candidacies are likely to pose challenges for Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, who has weighed in to cull potentially flawed candidates in the past and has said he may do so again this time. Last year, a super PAC aligned with Mr. McConnell intervened in a Senate primary in Kansas against Kris Kobach, a polarizing figure whose candidacy threatened the loss of a seat that was ultimately won by the G.O.P. establishment’s favorite, Roger Marshall.

Mr. Trump has so far stayed out of the potential pileups to fill the open Senate seats — the others to date are in Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Alabama and Missouri, both Republican strongholds, afford the G.O.P. a margin of error even with a flawed candidate, a cushion not available in the more competitive traditional battleground states.

I’m afraid these are exactly the kind of Senators the Trump cult wants. Why wouldn’t they?

Dear Leader won’t lead

I think it’s obvious why Trump is afraid to encourage his followers to take the vaccine: he’s afraid of how he will look if they don’t do it.

I think people underestimate the degree to which Trump is led by his crazies as much as leading them. Remember, before he ran, he had Sam Nunberg listen to hours of talk radio so he could know what he was supposed to think about the vast range of issues about which he has no knowledge. He watches Fox, OAN and Newsmax today for the same purpose.

The Daily Beast reports that he just can’t bring himself to do it and his aides have begged him to. Maybe they should have a chat with Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity instead:

In the final months of Donald Trump’s term in office, several of the then-president’s top advisers were monitoring a growing concern: that COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, particularly among Republicans and Trump supporters, was going to pose a major problem as the United States embarked on its mission to vaccinate millions.

According to three people familiar with the matter, then-President Trump was repeatedly warned by some of his closest advisers and administration officials about this MAGA-specific issue during his closing weeks as leader of the free world. But in the two months since President Joe Biden took over at the White House, polls show that aversion to the new coronavirus vaccines remains markedly higher among Trump fans and GOP voters than it is among liberals and Biden supporters. That reality has stoked grave concern among public health officials and experts, and has left some of the ex-president’s friends and allies frustrated over the fact that Trump, from his new home in Florida, isn’t doing more to reach his base and combat the problem.ADVERTISEMENT

“I have practically begged him to get out there constantly [during his post-presidency] and make videos calling on his supporters who are hesitant to get their shots,” one person close to Trump said. “Last time I checked in, I hadn’t heard of any positive movement in that direction.”

In a small number of public appearances and TV interviews lately, the former president has encouraged—at times as mere asides—his true believers to get vaccinated, but has yet to embark on anything close to a vigorous campaign to leverage his sizable megaphone on the subject. Further, it was not publicly revealed he and then-first lady Melania Trump had been vaccinated until nearly a month and a half after he was no longer president.

Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign adviser who served as the assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, told The Daily Beast that in September, shortly before he was diagnosed with cancer and departed the administration, he too talked to the president about the anti-vaccine sentiment rapidly emerging among the MAGA faithful.

“Donald Trump and I had a conversation about broader issues, and I mentioned it briefly,” he recounted. “It was a glancing conversation in the Oval Office in September, in between meetings, and I mentioned how vaccine hesitancy was likely going to be a big problem, especially among Republicans and Trump supporters. And he said, ‘Yes, I understand, and it’s a problem.’ I’ve been told there were other conversations on this after I left, and that the conversations with the president continued…We started getting more and more suspicious of [anti-vaccine sentiment on the right] as I left. We were talking amongst ourselves in HHS in August, saying that it was ironic that the most vaccine-hesitant among us were our friends, our allies. And we still face that question.”

By November, Trump’s focus had largely shifted—not to his management of the global pandemic that had torpedoed the U.S. economy and left hundreds of thousands of Americans dead, but to his and Republican’ court battles and anti-democratic crusade to overturn Biden’s clear victory in the 2020 presidential contest.

In the weeks following Biden’s inauguration, Trump has only sporadically called on his supporters to get their COVID vaccines, including at his headlining speech during last month’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference, and has yet to mount anything resembling a sustained campaign or effort. Just last week, Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club and residence in Palm Beach, Florida, had to partially shut down due to a new coronavirus outbreak.

Recent polling has consistently found that Trump fans and Republican men are some of the demographics most likely to decline, or be skeptical of, getting a coronavirus vaccine.

Ever since settling into his post-presidency, Trump has at times casually discussed with certain confidants the prospect of starring in his own videos or ads to promote the vaccines, and also to tout the successes of his administration’s Operation Warp Speed, according to two people with direct knowledge of the conversations. However, when asked if any such videos had been produced yet, a Trump adviser said last week that there was “nothing scheduled” at the moment in terms of release.

He’s terrified of demonstrating to the world that he’s lost his power. So he will never do anything that goes against his cult’s attitudes and beliefs. He doesn’t need to. If attitudes change and they get vaccinated, he’ll just take credit for it and they will be happy to give it to him.

Oh Lordy

Here are the new articles off wingnut faith.

Because I am a masochist, I subjected myself to a cavalcade of crazy yesterday. I watched / listened to much of the seven hours of a nutso livestream from Regent University masquerading as an academic forum on “election integrity.”

Enough falsehoods were spewed by the speakers sponsored by Pat Robertson’s school yesterday to merit two-dozen rebuttal articles—but in the interest of time, I’ll just give you some broad strokes.

First, I would like to note that the emcee of the event was former Republican congresswoman, failed presidential candidate, and dean (!) of the Robertson School of Government, Michele Bachmann.

This is a woman who, after election day last year, asked God to #StopTheSteal in a prayer. I am not kidding:

Her opening statement yesterday was . . . really quite something. Do our votes even count anymore? she wondered. Did the pilgrims give us Biblical principles that are no longer being followed today? What about the elites and their pursuit of continued power? Is cancel culture coming after people who question the results of the 2020 election? (Brad Raffensperger, don’t answer that.)

Already I knew it was going to be a long day.

After Bachmann spoke, there was an opening prayer offered by Eric Metaxas—the Trumpist childrens’ book authorsupposed Bonhoeffer scholar, and alleged sucker-punch-assault perpetrator. Surprisingly, as he offered up a prayer to “Father God,” there was nary a MyPillow promo code to be seen. Praise be.Eric Metaxas

After Metaxas came Dr. Ben Carson, the former neurosurgeon and former housing and urban development secretary. In his Teddy Ruxpin tone, Carson insinuated that the media never talks about election fraud. Don’t tell the right-wing media.

Next up was John Fund, who was the ghostwriter for Rush Limbaugh’s first book, spent many years at the Wall Street Journal, and now writes for National Review. Much of Fund’s writing, including two books, has focused on voting, elections, and concerns about fraud. Yesterday, he said that the voting-reform bill H.R. 1 was the “single worst” piece of legislation he’s seen in his forty years of commenting on American politics. As hyperbolic as that may seem, it is at least slightly toned down from what Fund said about H.R. 1 at CPAC last month: There he called it “the worst bill that’s of a non-fiscal nature that has ever been introduced in Congress.” Worse than the Sedition Act? The Indian Removal Act? The Fugitive Slave Act? Prohibition? The act backing up FDR’s internment of Japanese-Americans? To say nothing of the countless horrible bills that were introduced but never passed.

Fund yesterday also had some fun ‘2016 whataboutism’ to justify 2020 truthers because there was a poll where a certain percentage of Democrats thought that Trump stole the 2016 election. Which is true: Every election, some percentage of Americans, more often on the losing side in the election, doubt the validity of the results. And in 2016, recall that the first news reports of Russian interference in the 2016 election emerged just a few days after the election. But comparing that small, lingering resentment in 2016 to what happened after the 2020 election, when a false belief in massive electoral fraud became a defining feature of the Republican party, and when the defeated president pushed that lie and instigated an insurrectionist mob at the Capitol, is risible.

Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft spoke yesterday, too, telling anyone who would listen that he would file a lawsuit and tell the feds to “pound sand” if H.R. 1 were to become law. Ashcroft apparently has a fetish for in-person voting, which comes across as a bit unseemly for an attorney, much less an elected official who oversees elections. In the Q&A, Ashcroft, Fund, and the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky were referred to as the “three smartest people on the planet.”

Whoever made that reference (I think it was Bachmann) needs to get out more.

Next up were Jim Hoft and his twin brother, Joe. You probably don’t know who these guys are unless you’re extremely online, but Jim runs a blog that, according to Joe, gets “670 million hits” a day. Which seems totally legit. (Anybody who knows anything about how web traffic works knows that “hits” is a useless figure.)

Joe and Jim had an Abbott and Costello routine going, where they went through some of the claims of fraud posted on their website—like the supposed incident in which a van with an out-of-state license plate brought ballots into Pennsylvania, thereby throwing the election—all of which have been thoroughly debunked. It tells you a lot about Regent—none of it good—that Jim Hoft, a raving conspiracy theorist, would be given prime billing at a conference like this.

But it gets worse.

Peter Navarro, a left-wing gadfly who got a job in the Trump administration because he hates free trade, has an election “report” and he and the others want to tell you about it. Navarro seems to believe that the Democrats, of which he was one until Trump descended from that brass escalator in his gaudy highrise, “stole just enough votes to win.” Odd strategy. Perhaps losing seats in the House was just cover?

Navarro went on and on about “fake ballots” and “fake fire alarms” to prove his case, but let one thing be known: Graphic design is Peter Navarro’s passion:

Navarro, who holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, talked about election turnout that supposedly was “above 100 percent” and claimed “this election was stolen.” He also name-dropped his buddies Steve Bannon; Raheem Kassam, an alt-right British journalist; and John Solomon, a discredited propagandist.

Then came Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state who ran the post-2016 election-fraud investigation that then-President Trump concocted—an investigation that failed to find any evidence of widespread fraud—and then ran for a Senate seat last year and lost in the primary to Roger Marshall.

Despite tech issues, Kobach, now a private citizen, was able to make clear his views that voter ID doesn’t necessarily stop voter fraud, and that we need signature verification at a level that might make a bank-fraud analyst blush.

The moral of the story? Voting should be harder than it is. For good measure, Kobach also attacked the ACLU.

I tuned out for a bit to put my kids to bed, but came back to find on my screen Mark Steyn, the Canadian commentator better known for his cat crooning than any expertise in the intricacies of election integrity, sharing such gems as this: “The minute you’re driving it [the ballot] around, it becomes less secure.”Mark Steyn

Also, Steyn suggested, without reference to any—what are they called again? oh yeah—facts that widespread mail-in voting and voting via digital machines that count your vote “enable fraud” and that judges have the ability to “amend an election,” whatever that means.

Many of the panelists brought up (you guessed it) GEORGE SOROS. I didn’t count how many times this bogeyman’s name was invoked, but if you had been playing a drinking game while watching yesterday’s livestream with the sole rule of having another shot every time someone said “Soros,” you’d soon have been under the table. Which, come to think of it, might have been the best way to experience this travesty.

The event’s organizers saved the “best” for last: David Clements, a professor at New Mexico State University. Clements staged a talent show of absurd MAGA whataboutism that made all the day’s other participants, even the Hofts, look cautious by comparison. Judges? Cowards. Why not jury trials? Do I even understand basic legal concepts? Probably not. Sidney Powell? She’s the “gold standard.” Why not have an eight-month-long mock trial? She’s so brave. We should rally around her.David Clements

The ballots brought in from a rented truck with out-of-state license plates? ALL THE HALLMARKS OF ARTIFICIAL MARKING. President Biden? The “fraud in chief.”

Michele—excuse me, Dean—Bachmann closed off the circus by saying “I don’t think we’ve heard the real story yet.” That may have been the truest thing said all day—just not in the way she meant it.

Political theater of the absurd

Still image from Endgame by Samuel Beckett – Steppenwolf Theatre Company.

If you missed E.J. Dionne’s takedown Wednesday of the absurdist logic of Republicans opposed to statehood for the District of Columbia, treat yourself. Here is part:

“D.C.,” said Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.), “would be the only state, the only state, without an airport, without a car dealership, without a capital city, without a landfill.”

Wow! Just imagine the patriots of 1776 chanting: “No representation without car dealerships and a landfill!” Later, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) offered a friendly amendment to Hice’s comment, saying, “The only dealership there now is a Tesla dealership, which is I think a high-end car.” That settles it, right?

As it turns out, there are several car dealerships in D.C. Hice apologized for wanting to deny 700,000 Americans representation in Congress over that.

And if you think that is not a large enough population to entitle D.C. to two senators, then you would have to take senators away from both Wyoming and Vermont, which have smaller populations still.

But Republicans are ready to argue that the people of Wyoming (which happens to have two Republican senators) are “well-rounded” compared with D.C. residents. This entitles Wyoming folks to rights D.C. folks shouldn’t have.

I kid you not. Last year, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said this: “Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population, but it has three times as many workers in mining, logging and construction, and 10 times as many workers in manufacturing. In other words, Wyoming is a well-rounded working-class state. A new state of Washington would not be.” Funny, I find no provision in our Constitution that gives miners and loggers (or, for that matter, car dealers and landfill workers) special privileges.

The Baltimore Sun Editorial Board last month provided advice to Republicans who suggest instead that D.C. be absorbed into Maryland and/or Virginia in a process called “retrocession.” Considering that the population of D.C. is greater than that of Wyoming and Vermont, “Why not merge the nation’s least populous states or territories when they are contiguous?” the Board suggested. “Call it South Dakoming or, better yet, Wyokota …”

Don’t worry, Wyokotans. You will get to keep your four senators. But pondering having your representation in the Senate cut in half might make you a trifle more sympathetic to Washingtonians who have no representation there at all. Partisanship is no reason to treat the rights of hundreds of thousands of fellow Americans as landfill.

Who walks around with this?

Police provided this image of the weapons confiscated from a man who entered a Publix grocery store in Atlanta on Wednesday.

Police apprehended a man with several weapons Wednesday afternoon at a Publix grocery in downtown Atlanta. No shots were fired (CNN):

A man armed with a rifle entered an Atlanta Publix Supermarket Wednesday in Midtown at Atlantic Station, a commercial and residential area in the city, police said.

A witness saw the man entering “the location openly carrying a rifle and entered the bathroom” and alerted the store management and then notified police, according to a preliminary investigation.

Officers immediately located and detained the man. During the investigation, officers recovered five firearms (two long guns and three pistols) and body armor, according to the Atlanta Police Department.

(That’s three pistols plus one revolver by my count in the photo above. Multiple reports say five.)

The witness told ABC in Atlanta:

“I saw an AR-15 and I was like … you know, this kind of startled me, again with the events that just recently happened in the grocery store up in Colorado,” Russell said. “I went to the clerk at the customer service desk working at the time and let them know. It wasn’t acted upon right away. It was actually taken a little more lightly than I thought it would be, especially with the recent events.”

Atlanta police have identified Rico Marley, 22, and charged him with reckless conduct. Emergency services gave Marley a mental health evaluation before police transported him to jail. Police have provided no information about Marley’s intentions.

A later report (WSB-TV) indicates Marley has been charged with “6 counts of Possession of Firearm or Knife During a Commission of or Attempt to Commit Certain Felonies and 5 counts of Criminal Attempt to Commit a Felony.”

WSB also learned that Marley had a prior arrest for simple assault dismissed on a technicality three years ago and was in possession of a “weapons carry license” when arrested.

Atlanta Station shut down later in the day while police investigated a suspcious package. It contained “clothing and other miscellaneous items,” police said.

Atlanta is still reeling after a spree shooter killed eight people (six of them women of Asian descent) at three massage parlors on March 16. Then a mass shooter at a Boulder, Colo. grocery store murdered 10 people on Monday. (I guess it’s only a mass shooting if it occurs all in one place.) Now it seems police may have prevented a copycat grocery store mass shooting.

There are several thousands of dollars worth of firearms shown in the police photo at the top. Seems a lot for a 22-year-old.

The relief from having had my vaccinations has worn off.