That is a perfect example of the GOP bubble, very reminiscent of their ongoing insistence that they won the election because Trump got more votes than any Republican in history.
"what digby sez..."
Month: May 2021
The mainstream media is finally starting to sound the alarm about what the Trump party is really up to in the states. I don’t know if it will help. Democratic voters seem to be apathetic now that Trump is out of office and not on TV. But it’s a huge mistake.
Here is Doyle McManus of the LA Times:
Donald Trump’s campaign to steal the 2020 election after clearly losing at the ballot box failed for a couple of reasons.
His baseless claims of fraud were thrown out by virtually every court that heard them. Perhaps most important, many GOP officials refused to play along — including Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who declined to “find” the 11,780 more votes Trump needed, and then-Vice President Mike Pence, who turned down a demand from the president that he block Joe Biden’s victory from being certified by Congress.
But the former president and his allies aren’t done.
Pro-Trump forces in dozens of states are now working to change election laws to make it harder for Democrats to win — and easier for Republicans to challenge the results if their candidate loses. If they’re successful, the chaotic aftermath of the 2020 election may only have been a rehearsal for a second round in 2024.ADVERTISING
“What was really scary about 2020 was how close we came to a meltdown,” Edward B. Foley, an election law expert at Ohio State University, told me. “It’s not too early to worry about Jan. 6, 2025.”
One part of the GOP election-law campaign has gotten plenty of publicity: new laws in Georgia and elsewhere to make voting more difficult, including a statute that makes it a criminal offense to give people water while they wait to vote.
But other, less visible actions may be even more important. In at least 36 states, Republican legislators have proposed laws to weaken the autonomy of local election officials and put more power over vote-counting in the hands of legislators.
This is the real problem. Vote suppression is terrible, particularly awful practices like purging of voter rolls with dubious criteria. But this new thing where they want to put the elections in the hands of Republican legislatures to simply refuse to accept outcomes they don’t like is truly dangerous.
That’s a recipe for political meddling in election results. “It’s the opposite of what good election administration should be,” Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state, said recently.
In Georgia, for example, the same law that criminalized giving water to thirsty voters also gave the Legislature the right to appoint the chair of the state election board — and gave the board the right to take over a county’s election management.
“The most destabilizing thing is the effort to change who’s in charge of the vote-counting process,” Foley said. “That’s really dangerous.”
[…]
To understand why those jobs matter for the 2024 presidential election requires a brief refresher on the creaky machinery of the electoral college.
The Constitution gives every state legislature the power to regulate the elections that produce electoral votes. In advance of election day, the legislators write the rules. Then each state’s secretary of state administers the election and oversees the vote count.
Once the votes are tallied, it’s up to the governor to certify the electoral college result and send it Congress. Congress counts the electoral votes and confirms the result.
In most election years, that process is uncontroversial. But when a losing candidate contests the election, it can turn into a thicket of ill-defined powers.
Last year, for example, Trump asked several GOP governors to refuse to certify their states’ results — under the legal theory that if electoral votes for Biden weren’t certified, they couldn’t be counted.
When Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp refused, Trump called him “worse than a Democrat” and threatened him with a primary challenge.
Next step: If no candidate has a majority of certified electoral votes, the House of Representatives decides the winner — under a peculiar system in which each state’s delegation gets one vote.
If Trump had succeeded in throwing the 2020 election to the House, he could have won a second term, because 27 of the 50 House delegations have Republican majorities.
“To control the outcome [in a given state], one party has to be in control of both the legislature and the governorship,” Foley told me. “That makes the gubernatorial elections in 2022 critical in swing states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.”
The otherwise obscure races for secretary of state will matter as well. In Georgia, where Raffensperger refused Trump’s request to “find” extra votes, the former president has already endorsed a challenger, Rep. Jody Hice, who is casting himself as a Trump loyalist.
“They are trying to lay the groundwork [for 2024] to make sure local officials will jump if Trump tells them to jump,” Foley said. “They didn’t jump last time, but they might the next time.”
Do Republicans really want to win a presidential election this way? Probably not; any political party would rather have a clear and convincing majority, without any need to resort to chicanery.
But Trump clearly has no such scruples — and his supporters like House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, who hopes to be speaker of the House by 2024, have fallen in line. McCarthy signed on to a pro-Trump lawsuit that asked the Supreme Court to invalidate Biden’s electoral votes in four states, and was one of 126 GOP House members who voted against accepting the electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania, which Biden won.
When voters choose governors, legislators and secretaries of state next year, they need to realize that there is far more at stake than what happens within the boundary of state lines. The outcome of the 2024 presidential election may be on the ballot, too.
I wish I felt more sanguine that midterms will produce a good result for the Democrats. But we are all just sitting around waiting for this big economic comeback that’s supposedly going to focus everyone on how great their “kitchen table” issues are looking. (Maybe the Supreme Court will overturn Roe and raise the energy, although I’m not sure how voting in 2022 solves that problem.) Meanwhile, the other side is seeing massive turnout at local party meetings filled with Trump cultists foaming at the mouth to avenge the 2020 election. Their energy is through the roof.
The problem is that, in spite of Trump’s post-election hysterical temper tantrum and an assault on the Capitol, Democratic voters don’t seem to be aware of just how acute the danger is. It will be great if we are all back to normal life and the economy is growing but that is not going to stop this underhanded, corrupt assault on our democratic system.
That’s the first part of the letter Trump cult heretic Adam Kinsinger’s family sent to him disavowing him for his opposition to Dear Leader.
It’s not just QAnon. This cultish behavior is a requirement to be a mainstream Republican as well. There is no room for personal pride or loyalty to anyone other than Donald Trump in his cult. It’s all or nothing:
On Jan. 6, supporters of Donald Trump broke into the Capitol in an effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. While doing so, some of them chanted “Hang Mike Pence,” citing the vice president whose support for their plot was deemed insufficient. They got dangerously close to being able to make good on that threat.
As they were marauding through the Capitol, Trump offered his first thoughts on the siege. He took to Twitter not to call off the dogs, but to attack Pence. It’s a tweet that, we’ve come to find out, came despite Trump apparently having been apprised of the danger Pence and others faced.
Despite all of this, Pence’s brother, Rep. Greg Pence (R-Ind.), on Wednesday voted against a bipartisan commission to look into what transpired that day.
Not only did he do that, he also suggested it was actually House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) who was planning a “hanging.” A political one. Of Trump.
There are many nuances here. Opposing this specific commission doesn’t inherently mean you don’t want to get to the bottom of what happened. But the proposal was a bipartisan one negotiated by a top House Republican, and 35 House Republicans voted for it. Yet despite Greg Pence having arguably the closest personal connection to someone directly targeted by the mob, he’s apparently not terribly interested in probing the situation. Like many Republicans, he appears more concerned that the probe will reflect poorly on his party.
Alas, he’s hardly the only Republican to apparently set aside Trump’s attacks on his family while aligning with Trump. We’ve seen it over and over again during the Trump era — and repeatedly in recent days.
Mike Pence himself has apparently let bygones be bygones. Despite the personal danger he faced thanks to Trump’s “big lie” about a stolen election — and an initial estrangement between the two men and Trump’s continued attacks to this day — Pence has reemerged by again touting the fealty to Trump that marked his four years as vice president. He even wrote an op-ed questioning the integrity of the election, despite courts repeatedly ruling against such claims and them leading to him being targeted.
Another Republican primed to cast a key and perhaps decisive vote against the Jan. 6 commission — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) — also has been heavily criticized by Trump in recent months. Trump has also gone after McConnell’s wife, former transportation secretary Elaine Chao, mocking her and attacking her over her supposed family ties to China. (Chao was born in Taiwan.) McConnell has in the past labeled similar attacks as racist.
But McConnell isn’t the only Republican to shrug off such ugly attacks on his family while standing by Trump.
Even just this week, George P. Bush reiterated he supports Trump and went so far as to say Trump should be the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nominee. This despite Trump having regularly attacked his uncle (former president George W. Bush) as being responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States; his dad (Jeb Bush), and even his mother (Columba Bush). Similar to the attack involving Chao’s heritage, Trump at one point promoted a tweet suggesting Jeb Bush was soft on “Mexican illegals” because his wife was born in Mexico. At a 2016 debate, Bush demanded an apology, but Trump declined and re-upped the attack.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) might be the most oft-cited example of this. Trump at one point promoted a tweet attacking the appearance of Cruz’s wife. Trump also suggestively floated a baseless supermarket tabloid conspiracy theory that Cruz’s father might have been involved in killing John F. Kennedy. (Sometimes we forget Trump actually did this, but I checked, and it did really happen.)
The attack on his wife was initially enough to make Cruz raise a ruckus at the 2016 Republican National Convention, but he has since become a top Trump ally.
Cruz, Pence and George P. Bush, of course, have rather obvious personal political calculi. Cruz and Pence clearly have presidential ambitions, and right now in the GOP that runs through Trump’s base. Bush might be the only high-profile member of his family standing by Trump, but he also just happens to be the one Bush who is ramping up his political career. He appears likely to challenge Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) in a primary in which there will be a premium on Trumpiness — or at least keeping Trump disengaged. (Paxton spearheaded the far-flung effort to get the Supreme Court to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss.)
For the others like Greg Pence and McConnell, it’s perhaps less about Trump and more about party fealty, which at the moment translates to fealty to Trump. McConnell, for instance, sharply criticized Trump’s conduct vis-a-vis Jan. 6 in an apparent effort to distance the Republican Party from Trump. But that effort failed, as Rep. Liz Cheney’s excommunication from the GOP House leadership shows. With that issue apparently settled, the Jan. 6 probe threatens to rehash a story that Republicans would very much like to avoid rehashing ahead of the 2022 election. That’s an election in which they have real hopes of regaining both chambers of Congress — and McConnell could regain his status as Senate majority leader. McConnell’s No. 2, Sen. John Thune (S.D.), essentially acknowledged that political calculus on Wednesday.
How anyone can admire this obsequious, servile, bootlicking of that ridiculous clown is beyond me. It still makes me feel like I’m losing my mind.
It looks like they are putting the full court press on Alan Weisselberg:
The New York attorney general’s office has been criminally investigating the chief financial officer of former President Donald J. Trump’s company for months over tax issues, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
The office of the attorney general, Letitia James, notified the Trump Organization in a January letter that it had opened a criminal investigation related to the chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, the people said. The investigators have examined whether taxes were paid on fringe benefits that Mr. Trump gave him, including cars and tens of thousands of dollars in private school tuition for at least one of Mr. Weisselberg’s grandchildren.
Previously, Ms. James’s office had been conducting only a civil investigation into the Trump Organization, meaning it could sue the company and seek fines, but not criminal charges.
The focus on perks and Mr. Weisselberg overlaps with the Manhattan district attorney’s long-running criminal fraud investigation of Mr. Trump and his family business. The district attorney’s office has been investigating the extent to which Mr. Trump handed out fringe benefits to some of his executives, including Mr. Weisselberg, and whether taxes were paid on those perks, The New York Times previously reported.
In recent weeks, Ms. James’s office suggested to the company in a new letter that it had broadened the criminal investigation beyond the focus on Mr. Weisselberg, one of the people said. It was unclear how the inquiry had widened.
In general, fringe benefits — which can include cars, flights and club memberships — are taxable, though there are some exceptions. Companies are typically responsible for withholding such taxes from an employee’s paycheck.
Rather than risk bumping into each other, the two investigative offices recently began collaborating, another person with knowledge of the matter said. Two assistant attorneys general from Ms. James’s office have joined the district attorney’s team, which has been seeking to turn Mr. Weisselberg into a cooperating witness against Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization, people with knowledge of that effort said.
Mr. Weisselberg has not been accused of wrongdoing. His lawyer, Mary E. Mulligan, declined to comment.
The attorney general’s office revealed the collaboration Tuesday, announcing, “We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan D.A.” The office did not comment further, and the district attorney’s office declined to comment.
In addition to the fringe benefits, Ms. James and the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., have examined whether Mr. Trump’s company inflated the value of his properties to obtain favorable loans and lowered the values to reduce taxes.
I still have my doubts that this will come to anything. But maybe that’s just me being a pessimist.
I have to say that I enjoyed this commentary today, however:
Michael Cohen appeared on MSNBC Wednesday to give an interesting take on the investigations surrounding Donald Trump. The former Trump personal attorney and convicted felon was asked by Joy Reid for his view on the news that the New York Attorney General has been looking into the tax records of Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg.
According to one report, “Prosecutors are seeking to find leverage that could sway Weisselberg into cooperating with authorities.”
During the segment, Cohen alleged the Trump Organization used lies and gimmicks to fudge the company’s tax returns, and that “every single penny in and every penny out went through Allen Weisselberg’s desk and then [was] reported before and after to Donald J. Trump.”
Cohen then recommended that Trump’s associates and even members of Trump’s family should get their own lawyers because Trump would flip on them given the chance.
“Everyone keeps talking about oh Rudy, Rudy, Rudy,” said Cohen. “What did we get off his electronics [in the FBI search of his home]? What are they going to get now from the Trump Organization? How are they going to get Weisselberg to flip?”
He then took Reid by surprise by claiming, “I think Donald Trump is going to flip on all of them. What do you think about that? Including his children.”
Cohen elaborated:
I really believe that Donald Trump cares for only himself, and he realizes that his goose is cooked. So when he turns around and he gets questioned about what you were just asking about – inflation – “It wasn’t me. It was Allen! It was my accountant. It was the appraiser.”
It’s never Donald. See, this is the problem. It’s never, ever Donald Trump. It’s always somebody else. It wasn’t Donald Trump who had the affair. It wasn’t Donald Trump who directed me to make the payments to Stormy Daniels. It wasn’t Donald Trump who got the benefit of the relationship and the actions. It was Michael Cohen. And I’m the bad guy into it. Why? Because I didn’t take the fall.
[…]
What’s going to happen when all of a sudden they turn around and start asking him about his tax returns or about the devaluation of the assets or the way that he took deductions?
‘I don’t do my taxes. It’s my accountant.’ So he’s going to turn on his accountant and point the finger. He’s going to say ‘Don Jr. handled that, Ivanka handled that. Melania. Don’t take me. Take Melania!’ He’s going to tell them to take everyone except for himself.
Lol.
Here’s another bit of speculation from someone who worked with Trump:
Donald J. Trump will throw everyone around him under the bus when prosecutors come for him, former Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen said on Wednesday.
“I think Donald Trump is going to flip on all of them. What do you think about that? Including his children,” Cohen told MSNBC’s Joy Reid.
New York Attorney General Letitia James announced Tuesday that her office’s civil investigation into the Trump Organization’s finances is now a criminal one.
“We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan DA,” James’ spokesman Fabien Levy told CNN. “We have no additional comment.”
Sarah Burris has a partial transcript at Raw Story:
“I really believe that Donald Trump is going to turn — you always get shocked when I say things, Joy,” Cohen continued. “I believe that Donald Trump cares for only himself. And he realizes his goose is cooked. When he turned around and gets questioned about what you were asking about, inflation. It wasn’t me. It was Allen. It was my accountant, it was the appraiser. It’s never Donald. This is the problem. It’s never, ever Donald Trump. It’s always somebody else. It wasn’t Donald Trump who had the affair. It wasn’t Donald Trump who directed me to make the payments to Stormy Daniels. It wasn’t Donald Trump who got the benefit of the relationship and the actions. It was Michael Cohen. I’m the bad guy. Why? Because I didn’t take the fall.”
He went on to anticipate that when the DA and AG begin asking questions about his taxes that Trump will simply say, “I don’t do my taxes. It’s my accountant.” He’ll turn on the accountant, say that Don Jr. handled something, even Ivanka or Melania handled it.
“He’s going to tell them to take everyone other than himself,” said Cohen.
But you knew that.
Pray for a hard rain.
This dreadful looking into things! writes Alexandra Petri:
Oh, detective. Must we look into the events of the past? Must we really? Must we dwell on the unpleasantness of a few months ago rather than moving forward? I for my own part would much prefer to move forward. Indeed, it strikes me as unavoidably morbid to ponder too closely what nearly befell my poor husband, Henry. I say “poor” only in the sense of unfortunate, of course — Henry is quite well off, and if I were ever to be his widow, I would also be quite well off. But fortunately Henry is still alive, and I am not his wealthy widow, and that is not a scenario we need to worry about or look into at all!
How that arsenic got into his martini, well, one just cannot say, can one? “Answering questions under oath? Under oath, detective? No, I think not.”
Despite the prospective widow’s objections, and over House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s, 35 House Republicans joined Democrats on Wednesday in passing legislation to establish an independent commission of inquiry into the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. One suspects the Republicans opposed to such a commission might have reservations about investigating who put the arsenic in poor dear wealthy Henry’s martini that day.
Republicans are by nature ever so selective about when looking backwards is justified — cough, Benghazi. Looking backwards at the results of the 2020 election seems totally justified. Because questions.
Still, local Republican officials have had enough of the “fraudit” going on in Maricopa County, Arizona. Former President Trump posted a statement last week claiming, in part, that “the entire Database of Maricopa County in Arizona has been DELETED! This is illegal and the Arizona State Senate, who is leading the Forensic Audit, is up in arms.”
For Republican officials in Maricopa County, Stop the Steal! had become Stop the Clown Show:
The GOP-dominated Maricopa County Board of Supervisors cast the audit as a sham that’s spun out of the control of the state Senate leader who’s ostensibly overseeing it. Board Chairman Jack Sellers said Senate President Karen Fann is making an “attempt at legitimatizing a grift disguised as an audit.”
[…]
Last week, Fann sent a letter to Sellers questioning records that document the chain of custody of the ballots and accusing county officials of deleting data. The county on Monday sent a 12-page response vehemently denying wrongdoing, explaining its processes and accusing Cyber Ninjas of incompetence.
“They can’t find the files because they don’t know what they’re doing,” Sellers said during a public meeting held to refute Fann’s allegations. “We wouldn’t be asked to do this on-the-job training if qualified auditors had been hired to do this work.”
Trump’s comments are “unhinged,” tweeted the county’s top election official, Stephen Richer. “I’m literally looking at our voter registration database on my other screen. Right now.”
“We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer,” said Richer. “As a party. As a state. As a country. This is as readily falsifiable as 2+2=5.”
But even as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed there would be no looking back on the Jan. 6 insurrection, Trump fans are elsewhere are hot and bothered about looking into things past:
At a public meeting last week in Cheboygan County, Mich., a lawyer from Detroit told county commissioners that the voting machines they used in 2020 could “flip” votes and throw an election. She offered to send in a “forensic team,” at no charge to the county, to inspect ballots and scanners.
In Windham, N.H., supporters of former president Donald Trump showed up to a town meeting this month chanting “Stop the Steal!” and demanding that officials choose their preferred auditor to scrutinize a 400-vote discrepancy in a state representative race.
And at a board of supervisors meeting May 4 in San Luis Obispo County, on California’s Central Coast, scores of residents questioned whether election machines had properly counted their votes, with many demanding a “forensic audit.”
So much backward-looking instead of moving forward when the right’s people are doing the looking. Just not when the looking into things could implicate the very congressional Republicans voting to authorize it. That could send the wrong message heading into an off-year election.
“Peace is what Henry and I need, now, more than anything,” says Petri’s widow-in-waiting. “Peace and quiet. I absolutely oppose any more of this dreadful looking into things! I won’t have it, and Henry agrees with me, I am sure. It would divide us, and put strife into our marriage. That is the last thing we need, finger-pointing and blame and strife.”
They are no longer even slightly tethered to reality. Get a load of this piece by Jennifer Morrell, a former local election official and national expert on post-election audits, on the rolling shitshow that is the Arizona “audit.”
When Arizona’s secretary of state asked me whether I would serve as an observer of the Arizona Senate’s audit of Maricopa County’s ballots, I anticipated that I would see some unusual things. Post-election audits and recounts are almost always conducted under the authority of local election officials, who have years of knowledge and experience. The idea of a government handing over control of ballots to an outside group, as the state Senate did when hiring a Florida contractor with no elections experience, was bizarre. This firm, Cyber Ninjas, insisted that it would recount and examine all 2.1 million ballots cast in the county in the 2020 general election.
So I expected it to be unconventional. But it was so much worse than that. In more than a decade working on elections, audits and recounts across the country, I’ve never seen one this mismanaged.
I arrived at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum on the morning of May 4. Security was conspicuously high: At three stations, guards checked my ID and my letter from the secretary of state. No bags were permitted on the floor, and I had to surrender my phone, laptop and smartwatch. I was allowed a yellow legal pad and red pen to take notes, and provided with a pink T-shirt to wear so I would be immediately identifiable. The audit observers hired by Cyber Ninjas, in orange T-shirts, followed me wherever I went and reported random things about me they found suspicious. Several times someone asked to test my pen, to ensure it really had red ink. Once, they even demanded that I empty my pockets, in which I carried that pen and a pair of reading glasses. I was allowed only to ask procedural questions of the Cyber Ninjas attorney; I couldn’t talk to anyone else performing the work. The atmosphere was tense.
I was stunned to see spinning conveyor wheels, whizzing hundreds of ballots past “counters,” who struggled to mark, on a tally sheet, each voter’s selection for the presidential and Senate races. They had only a few seconds to record what they saw. Occasionally, I saw a counter look up, realize they missed a ballot and then grab the wheel to stop it. This process sets them up to make so many mistakes, I kept thinking. Humans are terrible at tedious, repetitive tasks; we’re especially bad at counting. That’s why, in all the other audits I’ve seen, bipartisan teams follow a tallying method that allows for careful review and inspection of each ballot, followed by a verification process. I’d never seen an audit use contraptions to speed up the process.
I also observed other auditors working on a “forensic paper audit,” flagging ballots as “suspicious” for a variety of reasons. One was presidential selection: If someone thought the voter’s choice looked as though it was marked by a machine, they flagged it as “anomalous.” Another was “missing security markers.” (It’s virtually impossible for a ballot to be missing its security markers, since voting equipment is designed to reject ballots without them.) The third was paper weight — the forensics tables had scales for weighing ballots, though I never saw anyone use them — and texture. Volunteers scrutinized ballots for, of all things, bamboo fibers. Only later, after the shift, did I learn that this was connected to a conspiracy theory that fake ballots had been flown in from South Korea.
The fourth reason was folding. The auditors reasoned that only absentee voters would fold their ballots; an in-person, Election Day voter would take a flat ballot, mark it in the booth and submit it, perfectly pristine. I almost had to laugh: In my experience, voters will fold ballots every which way, no matter where they vote or what the ballot instructs them to do. Chalk it up to privacy concerns or individual quirks — but no experienced elections official would call that suspicious.
At one point, I overheard some volunteers excitedly discussing a stain on a ballot. “It looks like a Cheeto finger,” one said. “Like someone’s touched it with cheese dust!” That had to be suspicious, their teammate agreed. Why would someone come to the polls with cheese powder on their hands? But I’ve seen ballots stained with almost anything you can imagine, including coffee, grease and, yes, cheese powder. Again, when you have experience working with hundreds of thousands of ballots, you see some messes: That’s evidence of humanity’s idiosyncrasies, not foul play.
Their equipment worried me more than their wild theorizing. At the forensics tables, auditors took a photo of each ballot using a camera suspended by a frame, then passed the ballot to someone operating a lightbox with four microscope cameras attached. This was a huge deviation from the norm. Usually, all equipment that election officials use to handle a ballot — from creating to scanning to tallying it — has been federally tested and certified; often, states will conduct further tests before their jurisdictions accept the machines. It jarred me to see volunteers using this untested, uncertified equipment on ballots, claiming that the images would be used at some point in the future for an electronic re-tally.
In a sense, it was heartening that, whenever the secretary of state released letters listing our concerns, the auditors would try to address them. On my first day in the stadium, for example, I noticed runners collecting tally sheets from the counting tables and bringing them to a single person who entered the data into some kind of aggregation spreadsheet, without anyone to verify that this person was entering the data correctly. By my last day of observation, on May 7, the auditors were attempting to set up a quality-control station.
But procedures should never change in the middle of an audit. Here, they did, and not just a couple of times, but almost daily. The training for volunteers also evolved. When I asked my designated auditor about these shifting guidelines, he called it “process improvement.”
What I saw in Arizona shook me. If the process wraps up and Cyber Ninjas puts together some kind of report, that report will almost certainly claim that there were issues with Maricopa County’s ballots. After all, Cyber Ninjas chief executive Doug Logan has publicly voiced his wild conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. But the real problem is the so-called audit itself.
Audits are supposed to make us better. They are supposed to make our elections more secure and transparent — to strengthen the public’s trust in our democratic process. Maricopa County is known for having some of the best election practices in the country: Officials had already undertaken a hand-count audit and a forensic audit of their 2020 ballots and found no evidence of fraud. Now a group with no expertise, improvising procedures as they go, is sowing doubt about the outcome of a well-run election.
This is not an audit, and I don’t see how this can have a good outcome.
It is an atrocity, nothing less. It will not be the last we see of this lunacy, either.
I’ve been a fan of animated science explainers since “Hemo the Magnificent*” so of COURSE I was going to love this explainer video by Dr. MarkAlain Dery, an infectious disease physician, and Dr. Eric Griggs, a community health specialist. Watch as they journey inside the human body to explain COVID-19 vaccines!
It has the whole Fantastic Voyage “tiny humans in a body” action which I love. It gives visuals for people to lock onto to understand what is happening with the MRNA vaccines. If you want more details watch him on the Majority Report. He answers a lot of questions about what is happening with the vaccines and discusses why we might be needing booster shots.
I’m a huge fan of Dr. Dery because he talks about the science behind viral epidemics and ALSO how society responds to them.
To get the message out about an effective response to COVID we need to do more than just tell people the truth. We must understand where people get their information from and figure out how to reach different audiences with different concerns.
(Dr. Dery @thedrdery mentioned he is working on a book on the history of discrimination in medicine. We need to understand how racism, misogyny, trans and homo phobia in medicine impacts our responses so we can address them.)
People and organizations are actively working to confuse people about vaccines.
The Government is hesitant to crack down of dangerous misinformation. Asking social media organizations to do this is a problem since they generate revenue through siloed sharing of any type of information.
The government likes to fund positive actions and using gimmicks like vaccination lotteries which are apparently very successful.
(Ohio hits highest vaccination rate in weeks after offering $1m lottery prize)
I happily support those efforts, but the government also needs to bust people for spreading disinformation. On that front I suggest you listen to this GREAT interview with Imran Ahmed, the CEO, of the Center for Countering Digital Hate on Matt Binder’s Doomed Podcast.
I learned about @imi_ahmed and @CCDHate back in March when they exposed the 12 people behind vaccine disinformation (The Disinformation Dozen. PDF link)
He explained how they profited from it and how to stop them. If you want to hear the short version, listen to NPR, which finally got around to talking to him May 7th,
You should know that Matt Binder is months ahead of all media on stories like this. I was on his show in April Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Defund the Right (w/ Spocko) explaining how the Spocko Method cost right wing media 100’s of millions in lost ad revenue and how to use it today. Multiple independent listeners said it was informative, funny and riveting.)
Hemo the Magnificent* was the second of nine Bell Lab videos that were produced in the late 1950’s . Four of them, including Hemo, were written and directed by Frank Capra. They had a huge impact on me, I can still quote lines from Hemo to this day. “Sea water.”
Today we aren’t just fighting the COVID virus, we are also fighting the vicious virus of misinformation. We need to defeat that too.
And, of course, they do.
When House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) announced Tuesday that he opposed a bipartisan deal to create a commission to examine the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, it served notice that the proposal was in trouble. House Republicans can’t kill the proposal by themselves, but it seemed to signal the party’s overall stance on this, which would put pressure on members to fall in line.
And if McCarthy put the nail on the board, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) may have just delivered the hammer blow.
McConnell told colleagues Wednesday morning that he, too, opposes the proposal. In a later speech on the Senate floor, McConnell pitched the commission as redundant — pointing to legal prosecutions and other congressional probing using the regular committee process — and suggested it was a partisan proposal.
Shamelessness is a powerful, powerful thing.
Ohio GOP Senate candidate and author of “Hillbilly Elegy” (a book that many liberals inexplicably loved) just lets his fascist freak flag fly:
He and Donald Trump will decide what “fighting the American nation state and fighting the values and virtues that make this country great” means. I’m sure they’ll let us know.
We can assume it means authoritarianism, free pussy grabbing, inveterate lying, monumental shamelessness, total incompetence and overwhelming racism, xenophobia, misogyny and chauvinism among virtually every other toxic, anti-social cultural characteristic.