Month: January 2022

How’s that for a clickbait headline?

Infectious disease experts think the light they see ahead is not the one you are supposed to walk into, reports CNN:

“I think if we do it right, we’re going to have a 2022 in which Covid doesn’t dominate our lives so much,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, who was director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under President Obama and is now the CEO and president of Resolve to Save Lives.

Christopher J L Murray of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle concurred last week in The Lancet. He explains, “The unprecedented level of infection suggests that more than 50% of the world will have been infected with omicron between the end of November, 2021 and the end of March, 2022.” The Omicron variant is a scourge, but a fading one:

The impacts of future SARS-CoV-2 transmission on health, however, will be less because of broad previous exposure to the virus, regularly adapted vaccines to new antigens or variants, the advent of antivirals, and the knowledge that the vulnerable can protect themselves during future waves when needed by using high-quality masks and physical distancing. COVID-19 will become another recurrent disease that health systems and societies will have to manage.

The recent death toll among SARS-CoV-2 patients resembles a bad flu season in the northern hemisphere. Murray’s prognosis?

“The era of extraordinary measures by government and societies to control SARS-CoV-2 transmission will be over,” Murray writes. “After the omicron wave, COVID-19 will return but the pandemic will not.”

Still, deaths continue to rise. Hopsitals in many parts of the country are still feeling the strain. But in parts of the country the peak seems to have been reached even as records are shattered (New York Times):

“It’s important for people to not be like, ‘Oh, it’s over,’” said Aubree Gordon, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan. “It’s not over until we get back down to a lull. We’re not there yet.”

More than a quarter of all U.S. Covid-19 cases have been logged in the past month, CNN’s report continues:

What the next part of the pandemic looks like and when it will get there are what Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, an epidemiologist and infectious disease specialist at Stanford Medicine, and experts at federal agencies, academic colleagues and local public health leaders spent the holidays trying to figure out.

There was a general consensus among the experts about what happens next: “We really don’t know exactly,” Maldonado said.

There are disease models and lessons from pandemics past, but the way the highly infectious Omicron variant popped up meant the scientists’ proverbial crystal ball got a little hazy.

How hazy? If the end of the pandemic is near, how near?

The next four-to-six weeks are still going to be rough, says Dr. John Swartzberg, an expert in infectious diseases and vaccinology and clinical professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Public Health.

Swartzberg believes March through spring or into summer will be like last year, with a continued decline in the number of cases. “There will be a sense of optimism, and then we will be able to do more things in our lives,” Swartzberg said. “I think May or June is going to really look up for us. I’m quite optimistic.”

Don’t shop for a new grille for that 4th of July cookout just yet.

It’s not because of their ideology it’s because there are only so many Trump loving nutballs to go around and they are all watching Fox. How do these wingnuts like capitalism now?

Before One America News Network host Dan Ball finished an interview with guest Jim Jordan this past week, he asked the Ohio Republican congressman for a favor.

“Please put some pressure on AT&T and DirecTV for us,” said Ball, whose nightly program “Real America” airs nightly on the right-wing cable channel. “OAN would love to continue broadcasting on that platform and we know for a fact it is all political behind the scenes on why they’re doing that to us.”

Earlier in the week, Ball solicited viewers to send him “dirt” on William Kannard, chairman of of the board for DirecTV parent AT&T, including any evidence of marital infidelity. OAN’s 80-year-old founder, tech entrepreneur Robert Herring, also went on camera to plea with viewers to ask other cable and satellite providers in their areas to add the channel to their lineups.

The desperate calls for help — which would be considered unseemly on a traditional cable news outlet — follow DirecTV’s Jan. 15 announcement that it will drop the San Diego-based OAN from its service in April. DirecTV, which AT&T spun off last summer, accounts for nearly half of the 35 million homes that can receive OAN on cable or satellite TV. The channel is not broadly distributed enough to be measured by Nielsen.

The loss of DirecTV will deprive the channel of its major source of revenue and cast doubt on the future of the operation, where President Biden’s administration is called a “regime” and concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic are described as hysteria. OAN correspondents have promoted efforts to audit the vote counts in the 2020 election.

OAN is not be the only conservative outlet losing distribution. Newsmax, the Boca Raton, Fla.-based channel that is the TV home of former President Trump’s first press secretary, Sean Spicer, was dropped from four cable systems in January after it failed to reach new carriage agreements with those companies.

The two channels gained notoriety in recent years by seeking out conservative viewers who believe right-leaning Fox News, the dominant ratings leader in cable news, did not show enough unwavering fealty to Trump. Both believe it’s now open season on conservative outlets.

“We count 11 liberal news and information channels in a typical cable package, with Fox News Channel and Newsmax as the only alternatives,” Newsmax Chief Executive Chris Ruddy said in a statement to The Times. “All Americans are harmed when any voice, liberal or conservative, is closed down. We believe that society as a whole benefits from more discussion and political views being represented, not less.”[…]

OAN, Newsmax and Fox News, are all being sued for defamation by voting technology companies Smartmatic and Dominion. Both firms allege their reputations were damaged by false statements presented by anchors and guests who echoed Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was rigged against him.

The lawsuits could create significant liabilities and a heap of bad publicity for the networks, complicating their relationship with distributors. The networks have said they were within their 1st Amendment rights to report on election fraud allegations made by well-known public figures, including Trump his advisors and members of Congress. (Fox News has a motion to dismiss the Smartmatic suit.)

The pay TV providers who dropped OAN and Newsmax make the case that it’s not politics that drove their decisions, but the upended economics of their business.

Cable and satellite companies are coping with subscriber loss as the emergence of streaming services, such as Netflix, disrupts TV habits. The number of pay TV homes declined by nearly 9% through the first nine months of 2021, according to research firm MoffettNathanson. DirecTV has seen significant subscriber losses as well.

The cost of a cable package is a major factor in the consumers’ decision to cut the cord, which means service providers are under pressure not to raise rates. Cable bills creep up when the cost to carry programming is passed along to consumers.

DirecTV did not comment on OAN beyond its initial statement saying the decision to drop it came “after a routine internal review.” The company’s chief executive Bill Morrow did offer an explanation in a memo to employees obtained by The Times.

Morrow said carriage decisions on channels are based on “industry trends such as secular decline, programming price increases, competitive offerings with lower price points, our competitors’ offers, and consumers’ desire to have more narrow bundles.”

Breezeline, the Quincy, Mass.-based cable company formerly known as Atlantic Broadband, took a similar stance in its comment on its decision to part with Newsmax.

“While we worked in good faith to negotiate a fair agreement, Newsmax insisted on terms and conditions that we could not accept,” said Andrew Walton, a spokesperson for Breezeline. “The decision was not related in any way to the content on the network.”

Hey, if you can’t deliver an audience …

I thought you might be interested in this discussion I had with Matthew Sheffield on his “Theory of Change” podcast this week about Biden’s first year and Democrats vs Republicans in general. It was an interesting discussion.

Here’s Matthew talking to John Stoehr on the same topics:

John Stoehr: What can be done about lies vs. facts? Take the “war on Christmas.” There is no war. Yet it dominates the imaginations of so many. What do Democrats need to understand that they don’t?

I wonder to what degree Democrats are aware that support for Republicans is based almost entirely on identity politics, and that this has been the case since long before Trump. His supporters are fully aware he lies, but they see his utterances as in the service of the larger goal of protecting their Christian identity. The lies about a “war on Christmas” are designed to feed this persecution complex.

Since the GOP has become openly oppositional to democracy, this actually is an outreach opportunity. But this is work that Democrats have to do themselves. They cannot outsource it to the mainstream news media that seems barely aware that it’s happened.

When polling showed weak support for the Republican tax cut bill, they passed it anyway. This was the story of most of Donald Trump’s administration. They’d come up with ideas and then just do them. By contrast, with Joe Biden, Democrats seem to be focusing their efforts on policies they see as popular. This is an obsolete approach. 

To a certain degree, Democrats believe there are swing voters. The 2018 midterms seemed to prove that. Same for 2020. Democrats still think the press corps is interested in truth. What do you say to that?

The mainstream press is interested in “filling the news hole” more than anything else. The profusion of elite journalists who withheld critical information about Donald Trump to make money selling books has demonstrated that media elites are not interested in public service.

Elections are decided by both swing voters and by casual party loyalists, that is, people who are more against the opposition rather than in favor of the party for which they vote. For all the focus in DC on physical infrastructure by Democrats, they have spent almost nothing on creating an infrastructure of democracy. You have to go where the people are and to explain yourself. Flushing millions of dollars down the TV ad toilet is not explaining yourself.

Some have argued, I have, that the Democrats should go full-on anti-racist. But what you’re saying seems to suggest they don’t have to change their rhetoric so much as build an infrastructure for it.

Understanding how bigotry is integral to right-wing politics is critical for left-wing thought leaders, but this is advanced political science totally inscrutable to the average person who has other things to do. One of the biggest things I noticed since leaving the right is that there are hundreds of millions of dollars being thrown at people who want to advocate for Republicans to the public. There is much less money being spent for the same reasons and purpose by Democrats.

Simply “fact-checking” a lie is not enough. You have to provide an alternative so people vulnerable to it can have their needs addressed. We have a grossly asymmetric politics where about 30 percent of the media outlets advocate for the right and about 2 percent advocate for the left. It’s no wonder things keep drifting rightward.

Liberals tend to think, “Well, if I know this, everyone does.”

The public needs to understand how radical the GOP base is and what it wants. The mainstream media will never tell this story on its own, because it’s not about DC gossip and because doing so would jeopardize its access to Republicans who have said gossip. 

At the same time, most people leaning Democratic are rarely spoken to outside of campaign season. Mainstream media has little to offer them. Right-wing media not only defends Republicans; it helps with right-wing organizing efforts. The “critical race theory” strategy in Virginia only worked because right-wing media helped it along.

Democrats seem to think that delivering some speeches and running some TV commercials is how you engage with your voters. Not true.

Most people leaning Democratic are rarely spoken to outside of campaign season. Mainstream media has little to offer them. Right-wing media not only defends Republicans; it helps with right-wing organizing efforts. The “critical race theory” strategy in Virginia only worked, because right-wing media helped it along.

It should be said the audience we are talking about is what I call respectable white people – white people invested in their public image as respectable among other respectable white people. Black people, people of color, LGBTQ, et al. – they already get it.

I think it is true that people who are in the crosshairs of white Christian identity politics are more sensible, but even then, they are not nearly as engaged with our political system as the far-right. 

Every few years, the Pew does a “typology” survey to go beyond D versus R. And what they’ve consistently found is that “faith and flag conservatives” are much more engaged than everyone else.

What’s happened on the political left is that a small highly educated group of mostly white people is talking to itself. That group does not interact with or understand the concerns of the rest of its coalition members. That group is where most Democratic politicians and progressive journalists are in. It needs to get out more.

I’ll end with a question from Thomas Zimmer, a historian. “I’d be interested in the relationship between the right-wing propaganda machine controlling the base versus the base following deeply-held ideological convictions about what ‘real’ America should be.”

Right-wing media is a bidirectional system. Talk radio with its listener call-ins and websites with easily viewable traffic stats provide instant feedback to GOP elites about what the base wants to hear.

At the same time, it is undeniable that right-wing media does work to disseminate messaging campaigns created by elites. The Republican strategy of creating fear and panic over “critical race theory” is a good example of this. Right-of-center voters were certainly not concerned about CRT before the 2021 campaign. They had never even heard of it.

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… or we are in even bigger trouble

Election expert Rich Hasen has some ideas about how to proceed with election reform:

The debate over whether Democrats should pursue their large voting rights package or a narrower law aimed against election subversion became moot on Wednesday when Democrats could not muster up enough votes to tweak the filibuster rule to pass their larger package. Some Republicans are now making noise that they would support narrower anti-election subversion legislation centered on fixing an 1887 law known as the “Electoral Count Act.” Democrats should pursue this goal but think more broadly about other anti-subversion provisions that could attract bipartisan support. Bipartisan, pinpointed legislation is the best chance we have of avoiding a potential stolen presidential election in 2024 or beyond.

The wide-or-narrow voting bill debate was weird because it was never an either/or proposition. As I wrote in the New York Times a few weeks ago, “reaching bipartisan compromise against election subversion will not stop Democrats from fixing voting rights or partisan gerrymanders on their own—the fate of those bills depend not on Republicans but on Democrats convincing Senators [Joe] Manchin and [Kyrsten] Sinema to modify the filibuster rules. Republicans should not try to hold anti-election subversion hostage to Democrats giving up their voting agenda.”

With the wide option off the table, the operative question is how best to go narrow as more Republicans, including most recently House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, signal they might be open to such a bill. Sens. Manchin and Susan Collins are among a group of senators working on reform. Bipartisan buy-in is especially important because it means that both sides are more likely to feel bound by the rules if a future dispute arises.

Fixing the Electoral Count Act is a no-brainer. As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern recently wrote, former President Donald Trump’s attempt to reverse his loss to Joe Biden in the electoral college depended upon exploiting holes and ambiguities in the poorly-drafted set of rules for Congress to certify Electoral College results from the states. Stern says Democrats should “seize the moment to get this done.”

If Republicans are really prepared to come to the table (and that remains a big if), Democrats should not limit themselves to small tweaks to the Electoral Count Act such as ones that would simply limit the vice president’s discretion in presenting state electoral college votes to Congress. Of course Republicans would be inclined to support such a change when the next counting of electoral college votes will be presided over by Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.

Other potential ECA changes should include raising the threshold for objecting to state electoral college votes; right now it takes only one senator and one representative to raise an objection. There are other creative ideas out there as well, such as involving federal courts in resolving certain disputes when there are competing electoral college slates submitted by officials from a state. It is in the interest of both Republicans and Democrats to prevent manipulation of the process and ensure that the winner of the election is actually declared the winner. The more that can be clarified in advance behind the veil of ignorance, the better all who believe in democratic elections are going to be.

But ECA reform should not be the only thing on the agenda in any bipartisan talks to prevent subversion. I’ve proposed a long list of reforms that don’t have a partisan valence. Consider, for example, a requirement that voters cast their ballots using equipment that produces a paper ballot that can be recounted in the event of a dispute over the winner of the election. Some Americans still vote on wholly electronic voting machines, where the only proof of the election winner is code spit out by a computer. In an era when voters distrust election results and manipulators like Trump seek to sow doubt in election integrity, physically tangible ballots that can be examined by a court or other neutral actor in the event of a dispute are indispensable. A provision requiring paper ballots was included in the larger voting bill that went down to defeat earlier this week, but there’s no reason it can’t also be part of any ECA reform.

So too with laws raising the penalty for interfering with election proceedings or threatening or intimidating election workers and election officials. Some of this activity is illegal now, but not all of it. Those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 with an intent to stop the counting of electoral college votes deserve serious punishment for interference with democracy; this kind of crime is much worse than, say, breaking into a shopping mall or even destroying government property unconnected to the democratic process.

It is not clear if Republicans would go along with another proposal that was in the larger voting bill that would create a federal right for voters to sue if the fair count of their votes were interfered with. It’s a strong, desirable remedy that would get federal courts involved in preventing attempts on the state and local level to cook the books, something which we can no longer rule out after the events following the 2020 election. Republicans tend to be skeptical of creating new rights, but federal courts (and the Supreme Court) are stacked with conservative judges, so maybe the aversion to court involvement can be overcome.

Republicans also may not be on board with laws that limit the overpoliticization of election administration on the state level. The Democrats’ larger voting bill had a provision that would have prevented states from firing certain election officials without good cause. That kind of federal limitation on state control over elections may be a bridge too far for some Republicans, and so Democrats might want to think about other ways of assuring that legislatures do not interfere with state election officials and states don’t interfere with local election officials to try to manipulate election processes or vote totals.

Finally, Democrats and Republicans should support pinpointed anti-subversion legislation aimed at stopping lies about when, where, and how people vote. As I argue in my upcoming book, Cheap Speech, such laws are likely constitutional under the First Amendment because they support society’s compelling interest in assuring that voters can effectively cast their votes, and they do not interfere with contested political speech: whether or not voters are allowed to vote by text (they are not) is not a debatable question. Such laws can help assure that elections are not manipulated by private or public actors seeking to interfere with the fair workings of the election process.

I get that yous shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good when it comes to something this important. But I think these remedies are wildly optimistic. Republicans are the beneficiaries of all these new laws subverting elections and suppressing the vote so I think there is almost zero chance they will go along with anything. But to the extent they will it will almost certainly be the one which expressly limits the VP’s discretion in counting the votes. Some of them have already proposed that and you have to wonder if they aren’t just doing it in anticipation of the shenanigans the GOP governments in the swing states are already putting into place? Do they want to ensure that those votes have no backstop at all?

If they agreed to the other suggestions Hasen offers maybe it would be reasonable to trust them on this one thing. But considering their track record I’m afraid that might just be giving away the only recourse that might exist if the right wing pulls something like having a state legislature overturn a legal election and substitute their own hand-picked electors to award the election to the Republicans. They are actively discussing this.

I really hope the Dems are considering all their options on this issue. We have a very serious problem on our hands and just saying “we’ll out-organize them” as if that’s all it takes (and that they are particularly skilled at doing that) isn’t going to cut it. There are three years left to get this issue of the electoral college straightened out and that’s assuming the congress doesn’t flip over to the GOP next January which is very well may do. They need to move on this.

This piece by Alex Pareene is right on the money. He describes his average day with his son, in January 2022 taking him to school, picking him up, playing, homework, the usual. And then writes this:

It all seems very normal. It seems a bit uncannily normal, really, happening against a backdrop of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of new Covid-19 infections across the nation, and months of Americans dying by the thousands. And yet! To hear some people, this is a country where panicky scolds refuse to allow children to go back to school, or, in some vague sense, let people have their normal lives back.

Of course, the normalcy is unequally distributed. “Normal” is still an impossible state of affairs for an untold number of people with immunodeficiency or hospital jobs or dead parents or lost homes. Our schools here are open (except when classes go remote, as they regularly do, because, again, so many people are catching Covid-19), but parents everywhere are understandably at the ends of their ropes in the current surge. We’re deeply relieved our kid just became vaccine-eligible; others might still wait a year or more.

But, with a couple exceptions, those sorts of people, with legitimate complaints about what the unchecked spread of the virus has done to their lives, aren’t really the ones you actually see complaining so goddamn much, because most of those sorts of people don’t have the sorts of platforms that would lead me to come across their complaints. It is very much mainly people in households very much like mine (or ones that have it even easier!) that are the primary sources of the most well-publicized opining on how This Has Gone On Long Enough and It’s Time For the Democrats to Say Enough Is Enough and Make It Stop.

If I wanted to be charitable I’d say I sort of understand it. We are obviously in a privileged position, but life is certainly not normal for us by our pre-pandemic standards (though it is all perfectly normal to my son, who cannot remember a pre-pandemic world). My wife is still at home on endless video calls each day. We’ve postponed the kid’s proper birthday party until he has full immunity from his second dose of the vaccine. We are traveling and going out less than we used to (though I also largely stopped “going out” a few years prior to the pandemic, for reasons you can probably deduce with context clues). I have lost precious time with my grandmother and other family members. But, honestly, I don’t want to be charitable! The people in the press and on social media complaining the loudest about Covid-19 restrictions are, at this point, people for whom Covid-19 is just a thing they are sick of hearing and thinking about.

What most of the restrictions on our behavior (and the behavior of most other Americans) have in common is that they are not being imposed on us by power-grabbing authority figures. They are largely decisions we made, or decisions made for us by other private actors, in response to the inescapable fact that a dangerous and highly transmissible virus is spreading rapidly throughout the city, and the state, and the country, and the world.

This is why I find the tenor of discussion around Covid-19 restrictions genuinely bewildering. There basically aren’t any. The United States is powering through the Omicron wave with its usual enforced individualism. The hard restrictions on our activities are, for the most part, not mandated or enforced by the state, acting at the behest of liberals who refuse to go back to normal because they are addicted to panic and quarantine; the limits are imposed by the virus that isn’t going away. My kid’s school class went remote for a while because people had Covid-19. He’s back in school now even though his principal has Covid-19. 

As usual in the United States, the people who won the political argument are now complaining the loudest that they’re dissatisfied with the results, and, apparently, it’s all the fault of the losers.

“As usual in the United States, the people who won the political argument are now complaining the loudest that they’re dissatisfied with the results, and, apparently, it’s all the fault of the losers.”

Somebody put that on billboard. I’ve rarely read anything that is so true.

This twitter thread from a few months ago on the silly controversy over the alleged “canceling” of the Dr Seuss books is fantastic. (He’s referring specifically to this column by Ross Douthat.) It perfectly applies to something everyone is talking about today which I will put at the bottom of the post:

A quick thread on what we, in TV writing, call the Idiot Ball. This is a term used to describe when one character, in order to make the show work, has to behave, uncharacteristically, like a complete idiot. It is usually a different character each week.

This term was coined, I heard, by actor Hank Azaria, who was complaining about a show he was on and asked “who’s carrying the idiot ball this week?” The modern conservative intellectual movement is now reduced to passing around the idiot ball.

Dr. Seuss is this week’s idiot ball, and in order to be part of the show, you have to carry it. You have to make bad faith or stupid arguments to be part of the show. The difference is, now, *everybody* has to pass the idiot ball around, all episode.

Freedom Fries. Antifa. Dr. Seuss. Millions of missing ballots. Neanderthals. Ordinarily smart people have to pretend to be earnestly dumb and make idiotic arguments about each of these, or be tossed from the show.

Ross [Douthat] absolutely knows that this was a decision by the rights holder to pull books with illustrations which are racist by even lax standards. This is their right, and is actually just smart capitalism. But he has to carry the Idiot Ball.

So now, you have the shorthand. Whenever you hear some ridiculous fake scandal or outrage, you can just chalk it up to “Oh, it’s this week’s Idiot Ball” and it says everything you need to know about both the subject, and the person carrying it.

John Rogers  @jonrog17 Mar 2021

Why is this making the rounds now? Well, this one’s a doozy:

Nobody carries that idiot ball like Tucker.

Maybe it’s because Pavlovitz lives down the road a piece. (Okay, several hours down the road. It’s a long state.) But I follow his tweets because he seems so sane in a religious culture gone mad. Maybe it’s because I recall a time when evangelicals called the shots politically down here and Blue Laws were still in effect.

Then the textile industry collapsed. And the furniture industry. Southerners scrambled to rebuild their manufacturing base and put out the red carpet for companies from north of the Mason-Dixon and from across the Atlantic and from Asia. With those companies came people who were not evangelicals (Surprise!) and who did not share the parochial world view the South sought to protect against carpetbaggers.

Unintended consequences are like Murphy. They’ll get you when you’re not looking.

Pavlovitz reposted a December “sermon” on why he’s having trouble accepting Republican friends’ beliefs these days. He used to think it was about lack of education. If they were aware of the truth, the truth would set them free, etc. But no:

It’s only very recently that I realized that they already are aware:

They know their party tried to violently overthrow the Government and overturn an election, and is still actively perpetuating the big lie.

They know they are willfully prolonging the pandemic by shunning safeguards and opposing vaccines and peddling disinformation.

They know they’re gerrymandering and suppressing votes and installing corrupt electors because they can’t win elections any other way.

They know their party is fully infected with Proud Boy, KKK white supremacist domestic terrorism.

They know it is filled with unqualified, unstable sociopaths like Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Madison Cawthorn, and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

They know Donald Trump is a lying, vile, incompetent, traitorous monster who hasn’t had a noble instinct in his lifetime.

They know that their party is on balance, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-LGBT, anti-Semitic, and anti-women.

They know all these things.

They just don’t care.

Worse than that, they’re happy about it.

They are “winning,” in whatever way they define that, and so the intoxicating ends justifies the sickening, violent, shameful means. They no longer have a need to weigh the morality of the people they are in bed with, no longer worry about abiding the teachings of Jesus, no longer have to do the uncomfortable work of examining their own hearts.

The victory trumps decency.

Over the past five years, they have seen the absolutely unfathomable criminality of Donald Trump and the Republicans—and despite knowing the depths of their misdeeds and the human collateral damage and the economic toll and the national disfigurement—they will vote Republican again without a moment’s deliberation. I can’t get over that.

They have Jesus on their side. Of that they are sure. What if Jesus won’t have them?

Digby last night cited reports that Republicans in at least two states are now calling for creating special police forces within their states for the purpose of enforcing election laws.

Barrett Holmes Pitner of Daily Beast reminds readers that back in the day, politicians and law enforcement partnered with the Klan to prevent Black people from voting. Of actions in Florida and Georgia, Pitner writes:

They aren’t breaking new ground, but joining a long tradition of dressing up efforts to suppress and intimidate Black voters as somehow protecting the integrity of our American democracy.

One does not have to time-travel back to Reconstruction to find such activities. Or even to 1965’s “Bloody Sunday” and police violence led by Alabama’s “Bull” Connor that led, finally, to passage of the Voting Rights Act.

Let’s travel back to 1981. New Jersey. There was a governor’s race that November. In the aftermath, the state and national Democratic Parties filed suit against their state and national Republican counterparts. The February 11, 1982 scanned filing is not in OCR format, so I’ve reconstructed some illustrative parts below. In addition to engaging in voter caging efforts using out-of-date voter lists to identify over 45,000 “black and Hispanic” voters whose votes Republicans wanted to challenge….

21. The defendants did not resort to the carefully prescribed procedures described in paragraphs 13-20 above for ensuring that only qualified voters cast a ballot in the November 3rd 1981 general election in New Jersey. Instead they engaged in an extra-legal activity which has been employed by defendant Republican National Committee for a number of years, under the guise of ballot security, to harass and intimidate duly qualified black and Hispanic voters for the purpose and with the effect of discouraging these voters from casting their ballots in federal and state elections. In the November, 1981 general election in new jersey, the operation was conducted under the name “National Ballot Security Task Force.”

22. As part of their activities described in paragraph 21, the defendant selected predominantly black and Hispanic precincts in New Jersey for the activities of the National Ballot Security Task Force.

26. To assist in their efforts to disenfranchise duly registered black and Hispanic voters, the defendants then hired county deputy sheriffs and local policemen to patrol the targeted predominantly black and Hispanic polling places. Defendant Kelly himself was deputized as a deputy sheriff to further defendants efforts. Officials of local police agencies assisted in recruiting county deputy sheriffs and local policeman for this purpose.

27. On Tuesday, November 3, 1981, defendants representatives placed posters in and around polling places for predominantly black and Hispanic precincts in New Jersey. These posters measured approximately 20″ x 30″. The print was in bright red ink with some letters 5″ tall. The poster was headed:

It offered a reward of $1,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone violating the New Jersey election laws, and contained a toll-free long-distance number to be called. Now where did the poster indicate that it was a partisan political document of the defendants. The posters were displayed within the targeted polling places and within 100 ft of the exterior entrance to said pulling places in violation of state law, N. J. S. A. 19:34-15.

28. The defendants then fielded an army of workers on election day, including the deputy sheriffs and local policemen described in paragraph 26 above, to appear at the targeted polling places predominantly displaying revolvers, two-way radios, and armbands with the words National Ballot Security Task Force printed thereon.

29. Through the actions of the National Ballot Security Task Force including the police officers described in paragraph 26 above, which operated under defendants direction and control and pursuant to policies and procedures which they had established, defendants obstructed and interfered with the operations of the targeted polling places in predominantly black and Hispanic precincts in a number of ways, including, but not limited to, disrupting the operations of polling places, harassing poll workers, stopping and questioning perspective voters, refusing to permit perspective voters to enter the polling places, ripping down signs of one of the candidates, and forcibly restraining poll workers from assisting, as permitted by state law, voters to cast their ballots.

That 1982 lawsuit resulted in a consent decree that prohibited Republicans from engaging in such practices for decades. Until 2018.

As Pitner observes, Republicans’ actions in Florida and Georgia are not breaking new ground.

So, so happy!

You just have to love penguins:

Happy Friday!