Month: June 2021

A friend who knows him describes a state Republican House member‘s simple campaign strategy:

● Listen for voters’ latest complaint
● Blame Democrats; turn it into a wedge issue
● Drive the wedge relentlessly

Christopher Rufo “all but singlehandedly bootstrapped [the] moral panic” on the right over critical race theory (CRT) using the same strategy. The Week‘s Ryan Cooper explains:

This panic, as I’ve previously written, has nothing to do with the actual arguments of critical race theory scholars. But that raises the question of what it really is about. The answer is the George Floyd protests of last summer and the ongoing surge of anti-racist activism.

Ben Wallace-Wells recently published an excellent profile in The New Yorker of Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist who all but singlehandedly bootstrapped this moral panic. In Rufo’s own telling, it all started with someone sending him an annoying anti-racism seminar in July of last year. He then read books by Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi about anti-racism that surged to the top of bestseller lists last year and followed the footnotes therein to older articles about critical race theory. Then he went on Tucker Carlson and delivered a carefully-prepared harangue about CRT; President Trump (of course) was watching, leading to a call from then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Trump began to attack anti-racist trainings and scholarship, numerous conservative states have passed laws attacking CRT, and here we are.

Find a wedge. Drive it relentlessly. The wedge issue itself unimportant. Classic Republican hissy fit.

Cooper adds:

Rufo straight-up admits that it was corporate and educational anti-racist trainings that motivated his crusade, not critical race theory itself; that the primary reason he selected it as a target was its ominous sounding name; and that he neither knows nor cares about the actual substance of CRT. “Strung together, the phrase ‘critical race theory’ connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American,” he told Wallace-Wells. At a recent conference, he contemptuously scoffed at “pathetic … angry graduate students” who try to argue with him about CRT or other topics. “I don’t give a s**t about this stuff,” he said.

Here Rufo posts that admission to Twitter:

The George Floyd protests and subsequently videoed mistreatment of Black people by police took the national spotlight away from the grievances of White conservatives, in their minds the only Real Americans™. This could not stand. They demand that spotlight (and their country) back. Rufo shows them the way:

A new ideological construct was needed to sweep all this discontent about racial injustice under the rug, and Rufo eventually made one up. As the writer John Ganz argues:

Rufo and his cohort are in the process of creating an ideological space where the signifier “anti-racism” will necessarily imply bloody Marxism, the gulag, the end of American democracy, the seizure of private property etc., but mentions of “racism” will also imply Critical Race Theory, which in their formulation creates the “real racism” through even talking about race. [Unpopular Front]

Like much else on the right, critical race theory hysteria is a con, a distraction, a bid for attention from people who, Cooper snarks, “just five minutes ago were whining about campus snowflakes being a threat to free inquiry.” Now they demand that states thought-police what is taught in classrooms and punish those who refuse to put a sock in it about racial injustice. All this from an astroturfed smear campaign.

What is pathetic after all this time is how easily the press and Democrats get sucked into “teach the controversy” model conservatives use to promote their bogus wedge issue du jour.

I’m afraid that just won’t do. She made one mistake and it is unforgiveable:

During Jane Timken’s tenure as Ohio’s GOP chair, Donald Trump won the one-time bellwether state by a whopping 8 percentage points. She put 150,000 miles on her car driving to the state’s 88 counties as a surrogate for the president. And she raised a total of $5 million for his two campaigns.

But that sterling record of MAGA support might not be enough to guarantee the former president’s support in her bid for the GOP Senate nomination. Timken’s sin? In her capacity as state party chair, she failed to immediately condemn home-state Republican congressman, Anthony Gonzalez, for voting to impeach Trump in response to the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6.

At the time, Timken said the congressman had a “rational reason why he voted that way. I think he’s an effective legislator, and he’s a very good person.”

That statement is proving costly. In a Republican Party where a candidate’s viability is measured in degrees of fealty to the former president, the crowded field of primary opponents is insisting Timken has failed a key test.

Days after entering the Senate race in February, Timken changed gears and called on Gonzalez to resign. But despite that — and despite calling both Trump impeachments a “sham” — Timken’s foes and two dozen conservative activists penned an open letter this weekend to the state Republican Party that called on primary voters to reject her candidacy.

“Timken is everything that President Trump stood against: politicians who say one thing and do another,” read the letter, a hard copy of which was also sent to Trump and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “Timken defended Anthony Gonzalez’s vote to impeach President Trump, then called for his resignation the moment it became politically toxic for her to stand with Gonzalez.”

You DO NOT excuse someone who said that Trump did not win the election. EVER. That is MAGA treason.

But it doesn’t change a thing …

In a highly anticipated report released Wednesday, the Republican-led Michigan Senate Oversight Committee rebutted former President Donald Trump’s voter fraud claims, debunking allegations of malfeasance in the state’s election last fall and affirming that Joe Biden was victorious.

The report is the product of an eight-month inquiry and concludes there was no basis or evidence to support the Trump campaign’s repeated claims that the election results failed to reflect the will of the voters.

“As is often the case, the truth is not as attractive or as immediately desirable as the lies and the lies contain elements of truth,” state Sen. Ed McBroom, the Republican chairman of the committee that investigated the election, said in a statement that accompanied the report. “We must all remember: ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof’ and ‘claiming to find something extraordinary requires first eliminating the ordinary.'”

The report, which was supported by every Republican on the committee, was clear: “This Committee found no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud in Michigan’s prosecution of the 2020 election.”

Biden won Michigan by 154,000 votes, a 3 percentage-point victory over Trump. The election results had already been affirmed by court rulings, state canvassers and earlier audits completed by the Michigan secretary of state.

Good news right? That ought to put an end to a lot of this Big Lie bullshit. Republicans have agreed the Michigan vote count was fair, there was no “late night” ballot dump of illegal Biden votes and all the Black people in Detroit didn’t steal the election. Huzzah.

Sadly, that doesn’t mean a thing:

McBroom said he feels confident the state’s results were accurate following his review, though he has continued to offer support for Republican-led voting law changes. McBroom said many of the claims of malfeasance were the result of “a misunderstanding or an outright deception.”

“Also, sources must lose credibility when it is shown they promote falsehoods, even more when they never take accountability for those falsehoods,” he said. “At this point, I feel confident to assert the results of the Michigan election are accurately represented by the certified and audited results.”

That is incoherent. These people will supposedly lose credibility except for the fact that he supports their push to change the laws so they can rig the vote in their favor in the future.

Still, I guess this is important for the history books is we manage to keep these people from passing laws that erase everything they don’t like in them:

The report singled out the false claims of fraud in Antrim County, a small county in the northern part of the state where human error by election officials initially led to results showing Biden winning the county. The error was quickly corrected, and the certified results showed a substantial Trump victory there. But the rectified error has fueled false claims of fraud in the state.

“The Committee recommends the attorney general consider investigating those who have been utilizing misleading and false information about Antrim County to raise money or publicity for their own ends,” the report said, adding, “The many hours of testimony before the Committee showed these claims are unjustified and unfair to the people of Antrim County and the state of Michigan.”

In his statement, McBroom said, “All compelling theories that sprang forth from the rumors surrounding Antrim County are diminished so significantly as for it to be a complete waste of time to consider them further.”

Trump’s backers have alleged that the election technology used by elections officials there may have changed votes or otherwise incorrectly processed the results. Those claims have contributed to a push from some on the far right to conduct an Arizona-style partisan ballot review in the state.

“Most of the rigorous debate over additional audits comes from fears surrounding the technology used and its vulnerabilities as allegedly demonstrated in Antrim County,” McBroom said. “Without any evidence to validate those fears, another audit, a so-called forensic audit, is not justifiable.”

Here he goes again with the bullshit:

“Michigan’s already completed post-election audit and risk-limiting audit are also far more substantive than Arizona’s standard audit,” he added. “However, I am keeping a close eye on the legislatively-initiated forensic audit in Arizona and will continue to ask questions regarding other election issues I feel are not settled.”

Right. That chinese bamboo in the ballot thing is something they really need to keep an eye on.

Nonetheless, they found zero proof of anything:

The report examined, point by point, other theories of election fraud promoted by Trump and his supporters, including votes by dead people. The report said such claims were researched and the committee “concluded that most were false.”

“There were two claims of deceased individuals casting votes that were found to be true; one was a clerical error while the other was a timing issue,” the report said. “The Committee concluded that none of these constituted fraudulent election activities or manipulations.”

The committee also found no evidence “indicating that hundreds of thousands of absentee voter ballots were mailed to Michigan voters without previously being requested,” though it recommended that the secretary of state discontinue mailing out unsolicited ballot applications.

The report also addressed claims of late-night “ballot dumps” in Detroit. The basis of one claim was a video that actually showed a local news photographer hauling equipment, not ballots. A second video, the committee said, depicted the unloading of absentee ballots from a van around 3:30 a.m. after Election Day, but there was no evidence the ballots were fraudulent.

Had ballots been fraudulently counted that were not cast by authentic voters, there would have been evidence of irregular turnout. But the inquiry found turnout was not irregular in any way.

Additionally, the report stated “the data suggests that there was no anomalous number of votes cast solely for the President, either in Wayne County or statewide.”

THERE WAS NO CHEATING BY THE DEMOCRATS!!! The only cheating that has been going on is by these Republicans. I know you know that. But sometimes you just have to say it out loud.

I can’t imagine why the military might want to take a look at “white rage” and study up on extremism in the ranks:

When FBI agents in San Diego seized the cell phone of a suspected white supremacist last year, they discovered text messages with a Georgia sheriff’s deputy boasting of racial violence and preparations for a civil war.

The text message chain, called “Shadow Moses,” between San Diego plumber Grey Zamudio, 33, and 28-year-old Cody Griggers, a former Marine and sheriff’s deputy in Wilkinson County, revealed plans to steal explosives, dry runs with illegal silencers and boasts of racial violence. In one text, Griggers said he hoped law enforcement and the military would join their side in the coming conflict.

“Our only saving grace is that for the time being they have not brainwashed the military completely,” Griggers wrote, according to court records.

Griggers, who was a military policeman stationed in San Diego until his honorable discharge in 2017, said he wished he could “go ahead and fast-forward so I can enjoy the suffering of the abortion that is the American population.”

What a lovely fellow. He’s not unique, unfortunately.

Griggers’ involvement shines a light on the growing concern inside the intelligence community about the far-right radicalization of service members and law enforcement officers.

“They have valuable skills that extremists want,” said Seth Jones, senior vice president at the non-partisan think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Most of them have experiences with small unit tactics, operational security.” […]

According to a newly released study by the Program on Extremism at Georgia Washington University, of the more than 450 people arrested in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, 12% are current or former members of the armed services, a greater percentage than in the general population.

And the Defense Department has acknowledged that the FBI had open investigations on 143 current or former service members in 2020, half of which were for domestic extremist activity.[…]

The FBI described “Shadow Moses,” an apparent reference to the setting of the 1998 video game Metal Gear Solid, as a “prepper” group where Griggers, Zamudio and possibly others discussed building illegal weapons, acquiring explosives, and plotting potential attacks. It was also where they expressed their white supremacist and anti-Semitic beliefs.

In one exchange, Griggers wrote about getting police equipment and explosives in preparation for what he expected would be the racial and political violence to come. Other law enforcement officers could be brought to his side or attacked for “siding with the enemy.”

“I’m either positioned to maximize damage by attacking from the inside or coordinate efforts to safely identify ourselves as patriots in order to maximize weapons pointed towards the enemy and minimize friendly fire,” he wrote.

The FBI said Griggers spoke approvingly of the Holocaust, and when they raided Zamudio’s home, they found an anti-Semitic and racist novel well known among the radical right for its depiction of an apocalyptic race war. Griggers indulged in such fantasies where the assassination of “famous liberals” could be blamed on Muslims.

Griggers may not have been in the only Georgia member of the cell. In a message sent in April 2019 he wrote, “We made a .3000AAC suppressor the other day that I’m quite proud of.”

The message referred to making a silencer to suppress the noise made by a common military bullet, but the FBI noted the use of “we” in the text suggested a larger conspiracy. In the same message, he bragged he had recruited four people to the cell, which he called “shadmo east.”[…]

Sheriff Richard Chatman said there appears to be no correlation between Griggers’ claims of violence against minorities and time he spent as a sworn officer before being his arrest.

“He liked to talk a lot — a lot,” he said. “But nobody came up to me and said, ‘Sheriff, Griggers ain’t right.’”

The sheriff said Griggers gave no indication of his extremist views prior to his arrest. But Griggers wasn’t asked.

These are the guys Laura Ingraham says are conservative evangelicals. Sadly, she may be right. They are also violent white supremacists.

I don’t think there’s any doubt that there are some people in the police and military who are into this stuff. There’ probably always have been. But the support they are receiving from one of the major political parties with its propaganda machine and tens of millions of followers is something we’ve not seen before and it should scare the hell out of all of us.

There’s more on this story at the link. Is this guy just come yahoo with a big mouth and a lot of gun? Maybe. But I really don’t think it’s a good idea to make that assumption and excuse these grotesque beliefs as Fox News and the rest of the Right Wing Noise machine is doing, much less the political establishment. This will not end well.

CNN:

Donald Trump on Saturday will kick off his revenge tour against Republicans who defied him in the aftermath of the 2020 election and January 6 insurrection, hoping to convince his supporters to fire Ohio Rep. Anthony Gonzalez.

The effort to oust the Republicans who crossed him will be one of the biggest tests of Trump’s post-presidential power, assessing whether the former President still has the sway with base Republican voters that he enjoyed during his four years in the White House. Trump’s trip to Northeast Ohio is expressly meant to remind voters in the area of Gonzalez’s vote to impeach the Republican president earlier this year, and boost Max Miller, a former Trump aide who is challenging the congressman in the district’s Republican primary next year.

Trump cheered as Republicans in the Ohio congressional district erupted in anger after Gonzalez, a two-term congressman who had largely toed the Republican line, voted in favor of impeachment. Some voters accused him of doing the “unthinkable,” while others fumed that they had to wait until 2022 to oust him.

But time has helped Gonzalez, with even his most ardent opponents admitting that the furor around his vote has since dissipated, as voters go about their daily lives and, in part, forget about the outrages of early. “If the election was (months ago), I do believe Gonzalez would have lost,” said Jim Renacci, a longtime Ohio Republican who is mounting a primary challenge against incumbent Gov. Mike DeWine. “If the election was today, he is probably still in a danger zone… I think it would be a very tough race for him today, but he has got a year to prove himself out and voters do forget.”

Trump’s goal this weekend is to make sure that doesn’t happen.

“President Trump will aggressively campaign against any and all RINOS who do not represent the will of their voters,” Liz Harrington, a spokeswoman for the former president, said, referring to “Republicans in Name Only.”

Gonzalez has stood his ground throughout the political fracas, arguing that Trump’s rhetoric ahead of the January 6 insurrection and the fact that Trump did little to stop those actions swayed him to back the impeachment charges. And he has doubled down: Much to the dismay of local Republicans, Gonzalez also voted to establish a bipartisan commission on the insurrection…

Gonzalez has also responded to the blowback by raising questions about his own party and warning members about too much Trump loyalty.”The reality inside our party is people do feel differently about President Trump. If we are going to win elections going forward, retake the House, retake the Senate, retake the White House, there has to be room for both,” he said in a May interview with The City Club of Cleveland. “And if we are going to excommunicate people who feel differently…I think it is a losing strategy for a party.”

But Gonzalez’s warnings have largely fallen on deaf ears among Republican activists in his district, many of whom are hellbent on ousting Gonzalez. And his break with Trump earned him a serious primary challenge from Miller, who announced his campaign in February expressly because Gonzalez “betrayed” his voters when he voted for impeachment.

“I won’t back down. And I’ll never betray them,” Miller tweeted at the time. Trump quickly endorsed his former aide.

But get this. You cannot make this stuff up:

Miller, despite being directly tied to Trump, has issues he will have to address during his campaign. Some Republicans, including another challenger to Gonzalez, have already noted Miller faced multiple criminal charges against him between 2007 and 2010.

QOTD:

TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): Pundit after senator after professor after general: each one of them spewing race hate. Whiteness, white rage — dressed up as some new academic theory. We certainly have the tape. We’ll spare you, because you’ve seen it, it’s everywhere. The question is — and this is the question that we should meditating on day in and day out — is how do we get out of this vortex, this cycle, before it’s too late? How do we save this country before we become Rwanda?

If you are unfamiliar with the Rwandan genocide it was the Hutu Power Movement whoich proposed a “final solution” to the problem of the Tutsi’s and the moderate Hutus., resulting in close to 100,000 grizzly murders.

I think we all know which side America’s white power movement will be on if America turns into Rwanda, don’t you?

Last night in Ohio, for some reason, Trump was talking about voter fraud in Montana, a state he won by 16.4 points:

He seemed confused. I would guess he was actually talking about this:

Wisconsin Republican leaders on Saturday pushed back against former President Donald Trump’s claim they aren’t doing enough to investigate the November 2020 election, saying Trump was “simply misinformed.”

A day before Saturday’s Republican state convention, Trump lashed out at Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester; Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg; and Senate President Chris Kapenga, R-Delafield, for not conducting a forensic election audit, particularly in Milwaukee.Listen now: Badgers men’s basketball players talk ‘disconnect’ with coach Greg GardPlay Video

University of Wisconsin men’s basketball players Brad Davison, Micah Potter and Walt McGrory give pointed feedback to coach Greg Gard in a secretly recorded meeting between seniors and coaches on Feb. 19, 2021.

“I think this is one of those cases where the president was just misinformed by his staff or he didn’t see the media reports,” Vos said Saturday. “At the end of the day, I am very confident we are doing the right thing.”

LeMahieu said Trump’s statement was “really unfortunate.”

“I don’t know where he got that information from,” he said. “We’re auditing the election results.”

The episode underscores the needle Republicans must thread to respond to the party’s ardent base while trying not to alienate other voters who were turned off by Trump.

The GOP-controlled Legislature in February authorized a 2020 election audit to be conducted by the Legislative Audit Bureau. It will examine such issues as how the state maintains its voter rolls and when it allows voters to get absentee ballots without showing identification.

Vos has hired retired police officers to “to investigate ‘potential irregularities and/or illegalities’ in the 2020 presidential election.” They are to be paid as much as $9,600 in taxpayer funds apiece for three months of work.

During Saturday’s convention, Vos announced that former conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman will serve as the attorney who will oversee the election probe.

Gableman served on the court from 2008 to 2018. Gableman was a reliable conservative on the court, and was in the majority in a pair of 2014 cases that upheld Wisconsin’s voter ID law.

Trump on Friday said the leaders are “working hard to cover up election corruption” in the state and are “actively trying to prevent a forensic audit of the election results.”

“Don’t fall for their lies!” Trump said.

Despite Trump’s claims, Wisconsin officials have not found any widespread fraud during the November elections.In Wisconsin, local election officials identified just 27 cases of potential voter fraud out of nearly 3.3 million votes cast in the November election that they forwarded to prosecutors. No charges have been brought in any of the cases.

It’s tempting to laugh uproariously because it’s so stupid. But the potential fallout from all this is quite serious.

Public infrastructure is not only physical objects, but systems as well. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy seems bent on degrading the mail system with which, ostensibly, he is charged with stewardship:

Seventy percent of first-class mail sent to Nevada will take longer to arrive, according to The Post’s analysis, as will 60 percent of the deliveries to Florida, 58 percent to Washington state, 57 percent to Montana, and 55 percent to Arizona and Oregon. In all, at least a third of such letters and parcels addressed to 27 stateswill arrive more slowly under the new standards.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy contends the plan will cut costs, revitalize the agency’s network and create more consistency in transportation schedules. Though the Postal Service has significantly outpaced its own financial expectations so far this year, it faces a projected $160 billion deficit over the next decade. It estimates that the transportation changes will save as much as $10 billion over that span.

[…]

But consumer advocates and the mailing industry’s largely friendly but competitive stakeholders have panned the new initiative, saying it will harm customers, drive away mail users and further erode the 246-year-old agency’s credibility, which has taken a hit after a year of pronounced delivery declines.

Attorneys general from 21 states, led by Pennsylvania and New York, on Monday wrote to the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) to oppose the changes, arguing they discriminate against mail consumers based on geography and that the Postal Service was poised to fall back into poor operational decisions that slowed mail service in the run-up to the 2020 elections.

If you are holding your breath for the Pentagon to cut costs, revitialize its worldwide network of installations, create more consistency, and outpace financial expectations, you are a goner. Republicans only demand that from public services they wish either to kill or to privatize. DeJoy seems bent on doing both to the USPS. Republicans have for decades treated public assets the way thieves cut up stolen cars for parts.

It is why friends are both hopeful and suspicious about Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure deal announced Friday. Public-private partnerships are included in the mix. I’ve been clear what I think of those.

“Why do only the bad ideas from the 1990s hang around?” asks Alex Lawson of Social Security Works.

In Surfside, Fla., four people are known dead and 159 are still missing after the collapse of the 12-story Champlain Towers South. on Thursday. Madeleine Romanello, a Realtor with listings in the building, said Thursday, “The building was in okay shape … They were just starting repairs to upgrade.”

A 2018 engineer’s report cited in the New York Times, however, found “’major structural damage’ to the concrete slab below the pool deck and ‘abundant’ cracking and crumbling of the columns, beams and walls of the parking garage …”

A multimillion dollar repair project was scheduled to begin soon when two and a half years later the building pancaked without warning. The city released that report on Friday indicating damage caused perhaps by years of exposure to salt air and water intrusion:

“Though some of this damage is minor, most of the concrete deterioration needs to be repaired in a timely fashion,” the consultant, Frank Morabito, wrote about damage near the base of the structure as part of his October 2018 report on the 40-year-old building in Surfside, Fla. He gave no indication that the structure was at risk of collapse, though he noted that the needed repairs would be aimed at “maintaining the structural integrity” of the building and its 136 units.

[…]

“Abundant cracking and spalling of varying degrees was observed in the concrete columns, beams, and walls,”Mr. Morabito wrote. He included photos of cracks in the columns of the parking garage as well as concrete crumbling — a process engineers refer to as “spalling” — that exposed steel reinforcements on the garage deck.

Prior repairs to cracks were failing. Concrete on many balconies was also deteriorating

After watching a surveillance video showing the collapse of the building, Evan Bentz, a professor at the University of Toronto and an expert in structural concrete, said that whatever had caused the collapse would have to have been somewhere near the bottom of the building, perhaps around the parking level. Though he had not seen the 2018 report at the time, he said such a collapse could have several possible explanations, including a design mistake, a materials problem, a construction error or a maintenance error.

“I’d be surprised if there was just one cause,” Mr. Bentz said. “There would have to be multiple causes for it to have fallen like that.”

Although this tragedy was not a public property, the collapse speaks nevertheless to the infrastructure talks going on in Washington, D.C. Bridges, highways, and other infrastructure in this country are deteriorating and in dire need of repair or replacement. People who have lectured for decades about personal responsibility and that there is no free lunch nonetheless fight to cut taxes and limit funding for maintaining infrastructure our forebaers built. Yet, they expect it to be there for them … safe and intact, for free.

How many years have structural engineers been warning us?

But grasshoppers gonna fiddle.

We just need some puppies…