First things

First things

If you haven’t mailed in your California recall ballot, drop it off today or go to the polls in person to vote No:

Newsom, now in the third year of his first four-year term, has in recent weeks taken a strong lead in the recall race as more Californians became aware of the need to vote in September of a non-election year.

Doesn’t matter if California’s electorate is “more heavily Democratic since 2003, when voters last ousted a Democratic governor.” Be the good citizen others are not. Do your part.

First time

An ill wind (and rain):

Last month, for the first time in recorded history, rain fell on the highest point of the Greenland ice sheet. It hardly made the news. But rain in a place historically defined by bitter cold portends a future that will alter coastlines around the world, and drown entire cities.

[…]

A consortium of climate scientists writing two years ago in Nature, a prestigious scientific journal, concluded that if Greenland continues to melt, in one bad-case scenario after another, tens of millions of people could be in danger of yearly flooding and displacement by 2030 – less than nine years from now.

And by the end of this century, when Antarctica, which contains vastly more ice than Greenland, also enters a phase of catastrophic melting, the number of annual flood-prone people could reach nearly half a billion. It’s more than farewell, Miami. It’s goodbye, Florida.

First place

First impulse

2/ have been a staple of GOP politics going back two decades, both as a way to refuse to accept electoral defeats and also as a tool to restrict voting.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) September 14, 2021

"Democrats can only win elections in California when they're rigged" is a good illustration of "fraud" being motivated not by the presence of any actual fraud but the ideological belief that Democratic constituencies themselves are illegitimate.

— Adam Serwer 🍝 (@AdamSerwer) September 13, 2021

Democratic constituencies could be 99% of the electorate and Republicans would consider their wins illegitimate.

Digby wrote in 2008, “This is the realization of a very long term plan to chip away at the Voting Rights Act. Republicans, like all aristocrats, know that if enough average people vote, they will lose. Period.”

This meme goes back more than two decades, however.

Rick Perlstein has written of “Operation Eagle Eye” from 1964:

The “vote fraud” fantasies are tinged by deeply right-wing racial and anti-urban panics. I’ve talked to many conservative who seem to consider the idea of mass non-white participation in the duties of citizenship is inherently suspicious. It’s an idea all decent Americans should consider abhorrent. It is also, however, a very old conservative obsession–one that goes back to the beginnings of the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party itself.

And here we are.