Herschel Walker is totally unfit to be in the US Senate.
In fact, don’t think he’s even fit to be on Glenn Beck::
Via Daily Kos:
In an August 2020 interview with right-wing talk show host Glenn Beck, Walker hyped two unspecified aerosol COVID prophylactics. One was the aforementioned “dry mist,” for use in an interior environment; the other was some sort of “spray.”
Walker dropped the big news unprompted about 40 minutes into the interview, amid a discussion of law enforcement, beginning by telling Beck that he “probably shouldn’t tell you.”
“Do you know right now, I have something that [you can bring] into a building, that will clean you of COVID, as you walk through this, this dry mist?” Walker asks.
Beck, processing this information, squints. Walker interprets this as an invitation to proceed.
“As you walk through the door, it will kill any COVID on your body,” he continues. He leans in and adds, “EPA-, FDA-approved.”
That claim would seem to indicate that the mystery treatment is an existing product. While there are obviously disinfectant sprays that are FDA-approved, no spray has been proven to stop the transmission of the airborne coronavirus. Walker’s claims seem to be based on nothing. Beck does a double-take, but the football icon isn’t done.
“When you leave—it will kill the virus as you leave, this here product,” Walker says. He adds that he has a second unspecified miracle product, a “spray” possibly indicated for use after the dry mist treatment.
“They don’t want to talk about that. They don’t want to hear about that,” Walker says. “And I’m serious.”
Dana Milbank writes about Bill Barr’s reaction to the “oranges” investigation:
This week saw the unmasking of former Trump administration attorney general Bill Barr, and it wasn’t pretty.
A jury deliberated for just six hours before reaching a unanimous verdict acquitting former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, leaving the Barr-appointed special prosecutor John Durham with essentially nothing to show for his years-long attempt to find wrongdoing by the FBI and the Clinton campaign in the Trump-Russia probe.
Hours after the jury dismissed Durham’s bull, BuzzFeed published a previously secret Justice Department report, also ordered by Barr, in which Barr’s own DOJ concluded that the Obama administration didn’t intend to expose the identity of Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn “for political purposes or other inappropriate reasons.” It was further evidence that another favorite Trump claim enabled by Barr — that Obama officials engaged in illegal “unmasking” — was bunk.
The day after these twin repudiations of Barr’s fantasies, the hoaxster explained himself on Fox News — by arguing that Durham’s failure in court was in fact a triumph. “While he did not succeed in getting a conviction from the D.C. jury,” Barr said, “I think he accomplished something far more important.”
This is about as convincing as the Washington Nationals saying, “While we did not succeed in scoring a run for 27 innings, we think we accomplished something far more important.” In a courtroom, a prosecutor either wins or loses.
So what did Barr think was more important than Durham actually winning his case? “He crystallized the central role played by the Hillary campaign in launching, as a dirty trick, the whole Russiagate collusion narrative,” Barr said, and “he exposed really dreadful behavior by the supervisors in the FBI.”
Durham didn’t “crystallize” or “expose” anything. He packed his court filings with innuendo, and the jury decided he hadn’t made his case. The only conviction Durham has earned to date was a plea deal with an FBI lawyer over a doctored email — and that wrongdoing was uncovered by the Justice Department’s inspector general, not Durham.
But Barr’s argument, that the innuendo Durham spread is “far more important” than proving actual wrongdoing, unmasks Barr’s perverted view of justice. He didn’t tap Durham (or John Bash, who handled the unmasking probe) primarily to prosecute criminal behavior. He launched the inquiries to tell a political “story.”
“Part of this operation is to try to get the real story out,” Barr told Fox News. “And I have said from the beginning, you know, if we can get convictions, if they are achievable, then John Durham will achieve them. But, the other aspect of this is to get the story out.” Bringing a case for such a purpose violates Justice Department policy.
Running Trump’s DOJ, Barr was all about telling stories rather than prosecuting wrongdoing. He sat on the Mueller report of the original Russia investigation, instead releasing his own purported summary that gave a misleading impression of Mueller’s findings. Barr baldly alleged, “I think spying did occur” against the Trump campaign, but no proof has surfaced.
In fulfilling Donald Trump’s demands to investigate the Russia investigators and those who allegedly “unmasked” Flynn, Barr wasn’t seeking justice. He now admits that trying to make a case that the FBI acted in bad faith against Trump — as Republicans allege — would have been “onerous” and “a herculean case” and a “very hard thing to prove.”
Barr was giving Justice cover to the reckless allegations being made by Trump and his allies. Barr made sure the lies had a lengthy head start to leave lasting impressions before any corrective could be issued.
Barr made space for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) to predict “one of the biggest political scandals in American history”; for Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) to proclaim a scandal “bigger than Watergate”; for Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to claim there was a “smoking gun found”; for Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio) to declare “a threat to democracy itself”; and for Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) to allege that Obama officials “were unmasking anyone and everyone so that they could leak information to a press that was willing to take that illegal information.”
Now we know Trump’s DOJ, in its own words, had “not found evidence” of inappropriate unmasking. And we see Durham’s claim of wrongdoing in the Russia probe ending in swift acquittal.
Barr, unmasked, now claims the federal jurors in Durham’s failed case violated their oaths by following political biases. “A D.C. jury,” he said, “is a very favorable jury for anyone named Clinton and the Clinton campaign. Those are the facts of life. … There are two standards of the law, and we have had to struggle with that.”
So, now, Barr is trying to discredit the centuries-old American jury system. It’s just one more “story” he tells to replace the rule of law with the reign of innuendo.
It’s really rich that he calls the Russia investigation a Clintonian “dirty trick. (It wasn’t.) In fact this sort of character assassination and death by innuendo makes Bill Barr is the perfect bridge between the Nixonites and the Trumpists. They are all cut from the same cloth.
Supporters on the fringes of former President Trump’s circle explored seeking sweeping authority after the 2020 election to enlist armed private contractors to seize and inspect voting machines and election data with the assistance of U.S. Marshals, according to a draft letter asking the president to grant them permission.
The previously undisclosed “authorizing letter” and accompanying emails were sent on Nov. 21, 2020, from a person involved in efforts to find evidence of fraud in the election that year. The documents, which were reviewed by The Times, are believed to be among those in the possession of the House Select Jan. 6 committee, which is scheduled to begin public hearings Thursday.
The letter appears to be one of the earliest iterations of a draft executive order presented to the then-president in the Oval Office on Dec. 18, 2020, by former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, former national security advisor Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne in an effort to take control of voting machines.
The email and attached draft letter were sent to Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan and cybersecurity expert Jim Penrose by Andrew Whitney, a British technology entrepreneur who made his way inside Trump’s circle in 2020 after he sought the president’s support for Oleandrin, a toxic botanical extract Whitney claimed was a miracle cure for COVID-19. Logan, who went on to conduct an audit of election results in Maricopa County, Ariz., and Penrose worked for weeks after the 2020 election with a group including Powell, Flynn and Byrne that sought access to voting machines in an attempt to find proof of election fraud.
Whitney and Penrose did not respond to requests from The Times seeking comment, and Logan declined an interview request.
Next time they won’t deploy Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn. The DeSantis faction is much smarter and more efficient and they will have mapped out a much more professional coup.
A new kind of conservatism, represented by right-wing elites like Ron DeSantis, Christopher Rufo and Tucker Carlson, is making itself known. We are just beginning to see its impact. The anti-critical-race-theory laws, anti-transgender laws and parental rights bills that have swept the country in recent years are the movement’s opening shots. They have made today’s culture wars as fierce as they have been in decades. But this new campaign is also distinctly differentfrom the culture wars of the late 20th century, and it reflects a broad shift in conservatism’s priorities and worldview.
The conservative political project is no longer specifically Christian. That may seem strange to say at a moment when a mostly Catholic conservative majority on the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. But a reversal of the landmark 1973 ruling would be more of a last gasp than a sign of strength for the religious right. It’s hard to imagine today’s culture warriors taking any interest in the 1950s push for a Christian amendment to the Constitution, for example. Instead of an explicitly biblical focus on issues like school prayer, no-fault divorce and homosexuality, the new coalition is focused on questions of national identity, social integrity and political alienation. Although it enjoys the support of most Republican Christians who formed the electoral backbone of the old Moral Majority, it is a social conservatism rather than a religious one, revolving around race relations, identity politics, immigration and the teaching of American history.
Today’s culture war is being waged not between religion and secularism but between groups that the Catholic writer Matthew Schmitz has described as “the woke and the unwoke.” “Catholic traditionalists, Orthodox Jews, Middle American small-business owners and skeptical liberal atheists may not seem to have much in common,” he wrote in 2020. But all of those demographics are uncomfortable with the progressive social agenda of the post-Obama years.
Rather than invocations of Scripture, the right’s appeal is a defense of a broader, beleaguered American way of life. For example, the language of parental rights is rarely, if ever, religious, but it speaks to the pervasive sense that American families are fighting back against progressive ideologues over control of the classroom. That framing has been effective: According to a March Politico poll, for example, American voters favored the key provision of Florida’s hotly debated Parental Rights in Education law, known by its critics as the Don’t Say Gay law, by a margin of 16 percentage points. Support for the initiative crosses racial lines. In a May poll of likely general election voters in six Senate battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the conservative American Principles Project found that Hispanics supported the Florida law by a margin of 11 percentage points and African Americans by a margin of four points.
The upshot is that this new politics has the capacity to dramatically expand the Republican tent. It appeals to a wide range of Americans, many of whom had been put off by the old conservatism’s explicitly religious sheen and don’t quite see themselves as Republicans yet. As the terms of the culture war shift, Barack Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant” — the mix of millennials, racial minorities and college-educated white voters whose collective electoral power was supposed to establish a sustainable progressive majority — is fraying, undermining the decades-long conventional wisdom that America’s increasing racial diversity would inevitably push the country left.
That thesis was prominently advanced by the progressive political scientists John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, but both of them have grown alarmed about the rightward movement among nonwhite voters in recent years. “If Hispanic voting trends continue to move steadily against the Democrats, the pro-Democratic effect of nonwhite population growth will be blunted, if not canceled out entirely,” Mr. Teixeira wrote in December. “That could — or should — provoke quite a sea change in Democratic thinking.” In the absence of that sea change, however, it is likely that disaffected people of all races will continue to move into the Republican coalition.
But is all this good for American conservatism? Particularly for social conservatives older than I am, who have sustained a long string of losses in the culture war, the potential for a new Republican majority is nothing to sniff at. But some have already expressed misgivings about this coalition. “We must not allow evangelical political priorities to be co-opted by functional pagans simply because we share a limited set of political objectives,” wrote Andrew T. Walker, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Pushing back on “woke lunacy” is valuable, he said, but it may not be worth embracing a politics that “causes Christians to adopt or excuse the disposition of cruelty and licentiousness.” As of now, the new secular conservatives and the old religious right are bound together in an uneasy partnership to fight the cultural left. But they may yet find themselves at odds about the country’s future.
[…]
The decline in Republican church membership directly coincides with the rise of Mr. Trump. As Timothy P. Carney found in 2019, the voters who went for Mr. Trump in the 2016 primary were far more secular than the religious right: In the 2016 G.O.P. primaries, Mr. Trump won only about 32 percent of voters who went to church more than once a week. In contrast, he secured about half of those who went “a few times a year,” 55 percent of those who “seldom” attend and 62 percent of Republicans who never go to church. In other words, Mr. Carney wrote, “every step down in church attendance brought a step up in Trump support, and vice versa.”
The right’s new culture war represents the worldview of people the sociologist Donald Warren called “Middle American radicals,” or M.A.Rs. This demographic, which makes up the heart of Mr. Trump’s electoral base, is composed primarily of non-college-educated middle- and lower-middle-class white people, and it is characterized by a populist hostility to elite pieties that often converges with the old social conservatism. But M.A.Rs do not share the same religious moral commitments as their devoutly Christian counterparts, both in their political views and in their lifestyles. As Ross Douthat noted, nonchurchgoing Trump voters are “less likely to be married and more likely to be divorced” than those who regularly attend religious services. No coincidence, then, that a 2021 Gallup poll showed 55 percent of Republicans now support gay marriage — up from just 28 percent in 2011.
These voters are more nationalistic and less amenable to multiculturalism than their religious peers, and they profess a skepticism of the cosmopolitan open-society arguments for free trade and mass immigration that have been made by neoliberals and neoconservatives alike. “M.A.Rs feel they are members of an exploited class — excluded from real political representation, harmed by conventional tax and trade policies, victimized by crime and social deviance and denigrated by popular culture and elite institutions,” Matthew Rose wrote in “First Things.” They “unapologetically place citizens over foreigners, majorities over minorities, the native-born over recent immigrants, the normal over the transgressive and fidelity to a homeland over cosmopolitan ideals.”
In this sense, the fierceness of today’s culture wars is actually tied to the decline in organized religion. Frequent church attendance is correlated with more negative attitudes toward gay men, lesbians and feminists, but as the pollster Emily Ekins noted in 2018, it softened respondents’ views of culture war issues such as race, immigration and identity. Nonchurchgoing Trump voters are more likely to support a border wall, tighter restrictions on legal immigration and a ban on immigration to the United States from some Muslim-majority countries. They are less inclined to agree that “acceptance of racial and religious diversity is at the core of American identity.” While the majority of religious conservatives eventually fell in line behind Mr. Trump, the political and cultural energy he represented was primarily a reflection of the nonreligious right.
Oh, and the seculars don’t like uppity gays and feminists either (the good ones who know how to act are ok) and are perfectly willing to outlaw abortions as long as their daughter or girlfriend can get one somewhere if she needs it. They HATE transgender people so that is one subject on which they are in perfect accord with the religious right.
This writer sees this new right as being in ascendancy and delivering where the religious right was unable to do so because it has harnessed this secular, white working class grievance (he doesn’t put it that way) to dominate the “woke left.”
Well, maybe. But he neglects one thing in this analysis: age. He notes that there is tension between the libertarian/libertine right that could cause a fracture. (I have my doubts because most conservative Christians are hypocrites, which he exemplifies, but that’s another story.) But he doesn’t seem to notice that the largest generations in the country are Millennials and Gen Z — and they are very, very woke.
Just as it was in the 60s, these people are on a collision course with their own children.
Stay tuned. If you can, read the whole thing in the NY Times. The writer is a religious right believer who is basically exposing his own capitulation to a bunch of racist homophobes — and celebrating because they may be able to deliver on his pet issues. It’s clarifying.
It’s been barely a week since a gunman in Uvalde, Texas, massacred 19 children and two teachers, but Ohio Republicans have already snapped into action with a new bill that reduces the amount of training required for teachers and other school staff who want to carry handguns on school grounds.
House Bill 99 was reportedly rushed through both the state House and Senate in a single day. Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, has already announced that he plans to sign it into law.
Barring an unexpected development, this means that school staff will no longer have to go through the 737 hours of training required under current law to wield deadly weapons on campus. The new minimum amount of training outlined by the bill is 24 hours.
Under the tortured logic of the new Ohio legislation, armed school staff with only 24 hours of training will now be expected to do what Uvalde law enforcement could not: incapacitate or possibly kill a would-be mass shooter before a multitude of lives are lost. Such a policy could also make it more likely that a school employee will shoot someone who isn’t a deadly threat.
On Thursday, presidents of the top education worker unions in the state — the Ohio Education Alliance and the Ohio Federation of Teachers — issued a joint statement calling for DeWine to veto the bill.
“Our students need to be in safe learning environments where they can focus on getting a world-class education; they should not have to worry about what could happen with a gun in the hands of an undertrained individual in their classrooms with them,” the groups’ presidents wrote.
The Ohio Fraternal Order of Police opposes the law as well. When Ohio Republicans introduced a similar bill last year, the order’s director of government affairs, Mike Weinman, testified that the organization “strongly disagrees” with the law. Weinman reiterated the need for high-level training to effectively handle situations with guns. “Teachers and students will not receive this training level during an eight-hour concealed carry class or a weekend-long training class,” he said.
None of this will come as a surprise to people with common sense. It’s not a teacher’s job to combat gun violence, so many teachers in Ohio don’t want to do it. It is a police officer’s job to combat gun violence, and, knowing the difficulty of the job, they also don’t want teachers to do it, especially if they lack proper training.
I predict a lot of teachers will leave the profession if this sort of thing comes to their schools and it will become much more difficult to recruit new ones. And that will give the right wingers a secondary victory: destroying the public schools. It’s all good.
“Right there! There’s my great-granddaughter! Where were you when they were calling for your help? And you policemen did nothing!”
Whistleblower Art Acevedo, the former Houston and Miami police chief has a few words for the police in Uvalde, Texas. Officers he has spoken with are sick about the nonresponse that contributed to the deaths of children there last week. “We failed the children. We failed the teachers. We failed the families,” Acevedo writes (CNN):
In policing, we have what’s called the “fatal funnel” — the physical area where the bullets are going to come flying when an officer responds to an active shooting scene.
In Uvalde, the fatal funnel was the entryway to that classroom where the gunman was shooting those little kids. The police knew that when they popped that door to enter that classroom they would have to enter that fatal funnel. Someone was going to have to put their life on the line.
I hate to say it, but losing officers is sometimes part of the job. We take an oath to protect and serve, even if it means risking our own lives, rather than swerve from the path of duty.
After the shooting in Uvalde, police had to assume that there were a lot of wounded, innocent children inside those classrooms. Their duty was to gain access to those classrooms at all costs, neutralize the threat and take those children out of that classroom. Their task was to get those shooting victims to trauma centers and to try to save them.
In a mass shooting situation, you never operate under the assumption that everybody’s dead unless you know that for a fact. You have to assume that people are wounded and require medical attention. The only way that shooting victims are going to get help is for police to confront the threat and neutralize it.
By not going in, the police in Uvalde absolutely made the wrong call.
This Uvalde great-grandfather feels it.
Heartbreaking video of man confronting police in Uvalde: “Right there! There’s my great-granddaughter! Where were you when they were calling for your help? And you policemen did nothing! Put me in jail, kill me, do whatever you want!” pic.twitter.com/U9MGLEFdO0
Acevedo acknowledges that “some of those officers felt frustrated. They didn’t agree with the decision,” not to breach the classroom. He calls out political leaders for not doing more to restrict access to weapons of war. Nonetheless, he writes, “The epic failure by police in Uvalde to meet the requirements of dealing with that horrific event calls attention to another problem: At some point, we have to rethink our policing model.”
We’ve covered this ground before. Also, they have chosen the wrong line of work if self-preservation is a cop’s first priority:
Death and dishonor by Tom Sullivan
No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. You won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.
The Patton quote above gained new notoriety after it opened the movie Patton in 1970. For several years, an autograph my father-in-law got from Patton during the war has been in a large envelope on the shelf here. I never looked at it until just now. It’s on a program from the Folies Bergère. I looked at it this morning because I’m still processing the week’s events in the aftermath of the Freddie Gray homicide in Baltimore. I looked at it because it seems some of our police believe they’re fighting a war, a war to be won by ensuring the other poor dumb bastard dies first.
Six Baltimore police officers now face “a litany of charges that include second-degree depraved-heart murder, involuntary manslaughter, false imprisonment and misconduct in office.” Recent killings by police in Ferguson, in New York, and in North Charleston brought to mind another well-known quote, not from war, but policing:
Malone: You just fulfilled the first rule of law enforcement: make sure when your shift is over you go home alive. Here endeth the lesson.
Protests turned to riot and looting after Freddie Gray’s funeral last week. Whenever that occurs in a black neighborhood, pundits rush to explain it as a symptom of a dysfunctional culture in the black community. Maybe it’s time to examine whether “the first rule” hasn’t bred a dysfunctional police culture in some departments. Because it’s not just a dramatic device from the movies.
Steve Blow of the Dallas Morning News has heard that trope too: “The No. 1 duty of a police officer is to go home to his or her family at the end of the shift.” Really? he asked back in March [dead link fixed]:
If self-preservation is the first and foremost priority of a police officer, then you get what we have seen in recent months and years — a series of unsettling police shootings.
You get what we saw on that video released last week showing Dallas police shooting a mentally ill man nonchalantly holding a screwdriver in his hands.
You get the questions swirling around the shooting death last month of an unarmed man said to be approaching a Grapevine officer with his hands raised.
It would explain other such shootings in situations that seemed to pose no immediate threat to officers.
Maybe it’s time to quit nodding along and question the maxim that going home at the end of the day trumps all other considerations.
Is that how we train firefighters? Not to save people trapped in burning buildings because they might not go home to fight fires another day?
From childhood we are taught that policemen and firefighters (and soldiers) who risk their lives to save their fellow citizens deserve honor and respect. Putting others’ lives before their own is how that respect is earned. Yet “the first rule of law enforcement” is in direct conflict with that. Perhaps it is “better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.” But where is the honor in being paid to put your own safety first?
The “officer survival movement” has made it a key part of the training that officer safety is paramount. And that’s fine to a point. But combined with the military surplus gear being handed out like candy by the federal government, the “first rule” has bred an officer survival culture. It trains for a “warrior mentality [that] makes policing less safe for both officers and civilians,” writes Seth Stoughton, a former officer and professor of law at the University of South Carolina. Furthermore:
Police training needs to go beyond emphasizing the severity of the risks that officers face by taking into account the likelihood of those risks materializing. Policing has risks—serious ones—that we cannot casually dismiss. Over the last ten years, an annual average of 51 officers were feloniously killed in the line of duty according to data collected by the FBI. In the same time period, an average of 57,000 officers were assaulted every year (though only about 25 percent of those assaults result in any physical injuries). But for all of its risks, policing is safer now than it has ever been. Violent attacks on officers, particularly those that involve a serious physical threat, are few and far between when you take into account the fact that police officers interact with civilians about 63 million times every year. In percentage terms, officers were assaulted in about 0.09 percent of all interactions, were injured in some way in 0.02 percent of interactions, and were feloniously killed in 0.00008 percent of interactions. Adapting officer training to these statistics doesn’t minimize the very real risks that officers face, but it does help put those risks in perspective. Officers should be trained to keep that perspective in mind as they go about their jobs.
Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com.
Monroe County Indiana poll workers count ballots (2013). Photo by Indiana Public media via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
Since the days of Jim Crow, conservatives determined to keep the “wrong” people from voting have done most of their election suppression outside the polling place. They were Democrats before the New Deal and the Civil Rights movement; they are Republicans today. Beatings, threats, intimidation, poll taxes, literacy tests and more in the old Confederacy. Since Republicans took over the election suppression business, their methods have been more subtle, mostly, and mostly outside the polling place. Post 2020, they mean to change things up a bit.
Heidi Przbyla reported this week in Politico that rather than deploy volunteers outside to disrupt operations and challenge voter eligibility, the GOP is recruiting and training poll workers, the taxpayer-paid election judges and administrators who operate inside the polls for local boards of election:
The plan, as outlined by a Republican National Committee staffer in Michigan, includes utilizing rules designed to provide political balance among poll workers to install party-trained volunteers prepared to challenge voters at Democratic-majority polling places, developing a website to connect those workers to local lawyers and establishing a network of party-friendly district attorneys who could intervene to block vote counts at certain precincts.
“Being a poll worker, you just have so many more rights and things you can do to stop something than [as] a poll challenger,” said Matthew Seifried, the RNC’s election integrity director for Michigan, stressing the importance of obtaining official designations as poll workers in a meeting with GOP activists in Wayne County last Nov. 6. It is one of a series of recordings of GOP meetings between summer of 2021 and May of this year obtained by POLITICO.
Backing up those front-line workers, “it’s going to be an army,” Seifried promised at an Oct. 5 training session. “We’re going to have more lawyers than we’ve ever recruited, because let’s be honest, that’s where it’s going to be fought, right?”
Seifried also said the RNC will hold “workshops” and equip poll workers with a hotline and website developed by Zendesk, a software support company used by online retailers, which will allow them to live-chat with party attorneys on Election Day. In a May 2022 training session, he said he’d achieved a goal set last winter: More than 5,600 individuals had signed up to be poll workers and, several days ago, he submitted an initial list of more than 850 names to the Detroit clerk.
The people who administer elections are recommended by the major parties but are supposed to act in good faith in the public interest to administer elections fairly and dispassionately. Those who do not get the boot. (That happened to one Republican judge here during the North Carolina primary; the decision by the county board of elections was bipartisan.) The GOP appears to have plans to game that system as well. Politico has video.
This is Republicans’ “precinct strategy,” former Trump adviser Stephen Bannon tells listeners to his podcast.
“Democrats have had a monopoly on poll watching for 40 years, and it speaks volumes that they’re terrified of an even playing field,” said RNC spokesperson Gates McGavick. “The RNC is focused on training volunteers to take part in the election process because polling shows that American voters want bipartisan poll-watching to ensure transparency and security at the ballot box.”
Read closely. Poll watching is not the same as poll working. The RNC is conflating the two here. Poll watchers are inside observers only and may only interact with the chief judge if there are problems with long lines, broken machines or other voting issues. Poll workers are paid and trained by the boards of elections as good-faith election administrators. Or, that’s the idea. It’s just not what the RNC has in mind.
Democratic National Committee spokesperson Ammar Moussa said the DNC “trains poll watchers to help every eligible voter cast a ballot,” but neither the DNC nor the state party trains poll workers. The DNC did help recruit poll workers in 2020 due to a drop-off in older workers amid the pandemic; but he says it is not currently doing so and has never trained poll workers to contest votes.
“You shouldn’t have poll workers who are reporting to political organizations what they see,” said Rick Hasen, a law and political science professor at U.C. Irvine who operates Election Law Blog. “It creates the potential for mucking things up at polling places and potentially leading to delays or disenfranchisement of voters,” especially “if [the poll workers] come in with the attitude that something is crooked with how elections are run.”
And if they find nothing crooked, Republicans mean to crook it. With a focus on Michigan for now.
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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com
About two weeks ago, four capybaras were born at Schönbrunn Zoo in Austria. For the two parents, it is the first joint offspring. “The young capybaras still spend the day mainly sleeping and drinking milk – but they also eat some hay. They are precocial, which means that the young animals are already so developed at birth that they can follow the parents independently. Above all, they enjoy the warm weather and from time to time dare to bathe in the water together with the adult animals,” reports animal keeper Alexander Keller.
Capybaras, are the largest living rodents with a shoulder height of up to 50 cm and belong to the guinea pig family. They like to stay in the water. They have short webs between their toes and can dive for minutes. “Capybaras are native to South America, so they inhabit our South America Park together with Anteater, Vicunia, Seriemas and Rheas. The landscape of the complex is modelled on a South American Prairie. Crisscrossed by hills, streams and ponds, it offers the animals a lot of variety and our visitors great perspectives,” says Zoo Director Stephan Hering-Hagenbeck.
In the wake of deadly mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas, Representative Chris Jacobs of New York, a soft-spoken congressman serving his first full term in the House, stunned fellow Republicans by embracing a federal assault weapons ban and limits on high-capacity magazines.
It took only seven days for political forces to catch up with him.
On Friday, facing intense backlash from party leaders, a potential primary from the state party chairman and a forceful dressing down from Donald Trump Jr., Mr. Jacobs announced that he would abandon his re-election campaign.
The episode, which played out as President Biden pleaded with lawmakers in Washington to pass a raft of new laws to address gun violence, may be a portent for proponents of gun control, who had welcomed Mr. Jacobs’s evolution on the issue as a sign that the nation’s latest mass tragedies might break a decades-old logjam in Washington.
It also serves as a crisp encapsulation of just how little deviation on gun policy Republican Party officials and activists are willing to tolerate from their lawmakers, despite broad support for gun safety measures by Americans.
As Chris Hayes said:
An increasingly mainstream message of gun maximalists is that the *reason* to be armed is so that you can use violence or the threat of it to get your way in the political sphere, basically:”People in government need to worry we’ll pump their bodies full of lead if they cross us”
In fact, under a certain (once fringe, now common) reading , that’s the whole *point* of the second amendment. People should be sufficiently armed to be able to murder agents of the state en masse if it comes to that.
This an *obviously* deranged reading of it all, totally incompatible with basic principles of civic life and liberal democracy, but it casts a very long and ominous shadow over our politics right now. One that’s getting longer by the day.
Here’s just one example basically at random, subtly dropped in towards the end of the ad. The second amendment is so people can protect themselves from “intruders or an overly intrusive government.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J59yo3XQNQ8
Just play out what that means. You have the right to shoot an intruder to your home. And you have to right to…put a bullet in the head of someone from the government who is doing things that are “overly intrusive”
That’s why, of course, as Stevens’ dissent in Heller so persuasively shows, the “well-regulated militia” stuff in the text of the amendment isn’t just throat clearing. The Founders were smart enough not have their new government cede its monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
I guess we know why Pence didn’t want to get in the car with anyone but his own secret service detail on January 6th now:
The day before a mob of President Donald J. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff called Mr. Pence’s lead Secret Service agent to his West Wing office.
The chief of staff, Marc Short, had a message for the agent, Tim Giebels: The president was going to turn publicly against the vice president, and there could be a security risk to Mr. Pence because of it.
The stark warning — the only time Mr. Short flagged a security concern during his tenure as Mr. Pence’s top aide — was uncovered recently during research by this reporter for an upcoming book, “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America,” to be published in October.
Mr. Short did not know what form such a security risk might take, according to people familiar with the events. But after days of intensifying pressure from Mr. Trump on Mr. Pence to take the extraordinary step of intervening in the certification of the Electoral College count to forestall Mr. Trump’s defeat, Mr. Short seemed to have good reason for concern. The vice president’s refusal to go along was exploding into an open and bitter breach between the two men at a time when the president was stoking the fury of his supporters who were streaming into Washington.
Mr. Short’s previously unreported warning reflected the remarkable tension in the West Wing as Mr. Trump and a band of allies, with the clock running out, searched desperately for a means of overturning the election. Mr. Trump grew agitated as his options closed, and it became clear that he was failing in his last-ditch effort to muscle his previously compliant vice president into unilaterally rejecting the voting outcomes in key states.
The warning also shows the concern at the highest levels of the government about the danger that Mr. Trump’s anticipated actions and words might lead to violence on Jan. 6.
It is unclear what, if anything, Mr. Giebels did with the message. But as Mr. Trump attacked his second in command — and democratic norms — in an effort to cling to power, it would prove prophetic.
A day after Mr. Short’s warning, more than 2,000 people — some chanting “Hang Mike Pence” — stormed the Capitol as the vice president was overseeing the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory. Outside, angry Trump supporters had erected a mock gallows. After Mr. Pence was hustled to safety, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, is reported to have told colleagues that Mr. Trump said that perhaps Mr. Pence should have been hanged.
Mr. Short was asked about the conversation with Mr. Giebels during an interview with the House committee investigating the Capitol riot, a person familiar with his appearance said.
The fact that Pence hasn’t completely turned on Trump after all that perfectly illustrates what a cowardly, empty suit he is. They knew that Trump would unleash his rabid followers and he did. And yet Pence can barely bring himself to say anything about it. What a loser.
