Month: August 2022

The Russians are still there and having a tough time

While U.S. attention is focused internally….

CNN:

Russian forces in the occupied Kherson region in southern Ukraine are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain the flow of ammunition, armor and fuel to front-line units, according to Ukrainian officials and Western analysts, thanks to a concerted Ukrainian campaign to cut off river and rail supply lines as well as target ammunition depots.

Ukrainian officials say the Russians are moving command posts from the north of the Dnipro River to the south bank as bridges have been heavily damaged.

The first deputy head of Kherson regional council, Yuri Sobolevsky, claimed on his Telegram channel that a significant portion of the Russian military command had already left Kherson city. Ukrainian forces are about 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) north of the city, towards Mykolaiv.

Much of Kherson region has been occupied since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As part of Kyiv’s counteroffensive to try to retake lost territory in the south, Ukrainian forces are targeting critical bridges to disrupt supply routes in and around Kherson.

BBC:

Ukrainian artillery has struck a headquarters of Russia’s shadowy Wagner paramilitary group of mercenaries in eastern Ukraine, reports say.

The extent of damage to the military base of the group – which has been linked to war crimes – is not clear.

Luhansk’s governor claims its secret location was revealed after a Russian journalist shared its address.

Last week, pro-Kremlin correspondent Sergei Sreda posted a photo on Telegram of the base with its apparent address.

Whoops.

The Guardian:

• • Explosions have rocked an ammunition depot in Crimea, severely disrupting railway services, Reuters reports. Moscow’s senior representative in the region, Sergei Aksyonov, said two people were wounded, railway traffic was halted and about 2,000 people were evacuated from a village near the military depot – but he skirted talk of a cause. Ukraine hinted at involvement but has not explicitly claimed responsibility. It comes after another reported explosion at a substation in Crimea.

  • The Russian defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, has said Russia has no need to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. During a speech at the Moscow international security conference, he alleged that Ukrainian military operations were being planned by the US and Britain, and that Nato had increased its troop deployment in eastern and central Europe “several times over”, Reuters reports. Shoigu added that the Aukus bloc of Australia, the UK and US had the potential to develop into “a political-military alliance”.

  • Russia’s Black Sea fleet is struggling to exercise effective sea control, with patrols generally limited to the waters within sight of the Crimean coast, according to the latest British intelligence report. The Black Sea fleet continues to use long-range cruise missiles to support ground offensives but is keeping a defensive posture, the British Ministry of Defence said in its daily intelligence bulletin.

New York Times:

Explosions rocked a Russian ammunition depot on the occupied Crimean Peninsula on Tuesday morning, delivering another embarrassing blow to Moscow’s forces a week after blasts at a Russian air base in the same region destroyed several fighter jets.

A senior Ukrainian official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the operation, said that an elite Ukrainian military unit operating behind enemy lines was responsible for the blasts. Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a statement that the episode was an “act of sabotage,” according to the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.

The apparent attacks this month, which used covert forces behind enemy lines, underscore the inventiveness of Ukraine’s forces. Since the war began, they have adopted unconventional tactics in the hopes of leveling the playing field while trying to repel attacks from a much larger and better equipped Russian military.

Dudes, Zelensky is a comedian. Improvisation is his thing.

An adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky taunts this morning:

Morning near Dzhankoi began with explosions. A reminder: Crimea of normal country is about the Black Sea, mountains, recreation and tourism, but Crimea occupied by Russians is about warehouses explosions and high risk of death for invaders and thieves. Demilitarization in action.

— Михайло Подоляк (@Podolyak_M) August 16, 2022

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Extremists’ violent rhetoric has predictable consequences

Conservative politicians and pundits, the supposed adults in the room, are with ill-informed and inflammatory, conspiratorial rhetoric busily stoking anti-government violence and sedition. In the wake of the FBI’s search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence, his allies have been “frantically cycling through excuses,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes observed Monday, to explain why.

Trump stole boxes and boxes of government documents, some highly classified, and squirreled them away at Mar-a-Lago. The fault, they allege lies with a corrupt, out-of-control Department of Justice, Joe Biden administration, and an imperious, Deep State, federal bureaucracy Trumpists mean to dismantle should Republicans regain control of the White House after 2024.

.@chrislhayes on the Trump excuse that he was so convinced his coup would work that he didn't start packing until the last second:

"It conjures the image of a forlorn, wistful Trump stuffing his possessions into a black trash bag like a college freshman on move-out day." pic.twitter.com/Zg1GBy6qPC

— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) August 16, 2022

Trump himself has not spared the wild accusations and victim-theater, a reprise of his stolen election gambit after losing the presidency to Biden in November 2020. The latter resulted in a deadly insurrection and the sacking of the Capitol on Jan. 6. The former last week claimed one Trumpist who died after attacking an FBI office in Cincinnati.

More are lining up to Pickett’s Charge their way into the civil war of their fantasies (Daily Beast):

On Friday, a Pennsylvania anti-vaxxer enraged over the FBI’s search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort allegedly vowed to murder as many federal agents as possible before they got him.

“Come and get me you piece of shit feds,” he wrote on social media. “I am going to fucking slaughter you.”

On Monday, 46-year-old Adam Bies found himself in handcuffs, instead.

Press critic Dan Froomkin calls out the media for not stating plainly what Trump and his MAGA allies mean to instigate at arm’s length:

The phrase they’re looking for is “stochastic terrorism.”

It may not trip off the tongue, but it needs to become part of the media lexicon.

Stochastic terrorism means terrorism that’s statistically predictable but individually unpredictable. In simpler language, it means that when Trump or his allies encourage violence — when the say the kind of stuff they say all the time now — it is not just possible that someone at some point will do something about it, it’s damn near inevitable.

Trump and Co. will keep it up until they are held to public account. Because, as Pres. Bill Clinton once said, “because they think it works” for them. They won’t stop until it doesn’t.

When Donald Trump told white supremacists to “stand by” at the September 2020 presidential debate, then summoned them to Washington on January 6 and told them to “fight like hell,” he was engaging in stochastic terrorism.

When Fox personality Jesse Watters says “They’ve declared war on us and now it’s game on,” it’s not just talk. It’s stochastic terrorism.

Mother Jones, Froomkin notes, describes the tactic in its style guide:

A method of inciting extremist political violence by using rhetoric ambiguous enough to give the speaker and the speaker’s allies plausible deniability for any resulting bloodshed. For more, see Mark Follman’s reporting here and here.

Froomkin scrolls through the few instances when the national press called out right-wing extremists. But the press remains shy about assigning blame beyond extremist web sites to the politicians and pundits whose talk of civil war and enemies within stoke hatred there.

The rhetoric about violence is not limited to things Trump, of course. Lindsay Beyerstein wrote an important piece for AlterNet in April about how Republican allegations that political opponents are pedophiles “is a tacit incitement to violence.” She noted: “If a campaign is waged from huge platforms over a long time, as we’re seeing now, it crosses the line into stochastic terrorism.”

Alejandra Caraballo, who teachers cyberlaw at Harvard, tweeted in May in response to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene endorsing “war” against “groomer teachers.”

“This is going to get people killed. Stochastic terrorism in action,” Caraballo wrote.

Extremist rhetoric was not this hot when Timothy McVeigh truck-bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. He killed 168 people, including 19 children, and injured 684. Fox News would not launch for another 18 months.

Fox’s stoking of anti-immigrant rhetoric and “replacement theory,” Froomkin explains, have had results that for too many are “not remotely abstract.”

As Martha Pskowski of the El Paso Times reported last week:

Politicians from Brackettville to Austin to Amarillo have embraced the language of a border invasion, language that El Paso leaders fear could inspire another attack on the majority Latino community. They say El Paso ⁠— where 80% of residents are Hispanic ⁠— cannot heal from the events of August 3, 2019, if elected officials are promoting the same hateful ideas the shooter believed.

It’s just a matter of time before it happens again. The key, going forward at least, is to identify, call out, and condemn stochastic terrorism by name, and explain the likely consequences, in real time — not just when the inevitable violence takes place.

For now, reporters continue to avoid blaming and shaming the reactionaries, perhaps for fear of becoming greater targets of violence themselves, if not for simple pecuniary reasons.

A friend observed that as revelations trickle out that Trump absconded with national security secrets (classification level is irrelevant) for reasons undetermined, political support for Trump may slowly be trickling away as Nixon’s did once investigators obtained his Oval Office tapes. One can only hope.

For now, nearly the entire Republican Party is engaged in stochastic terrorism. Peter Wehner concludes at The Atlantic, “This can’t end well.”

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I won’t shed a tear

The Times reports on Wyoming’s MAGA turn:

At an event last month honoring the 14,000 Japanese Americans who were once held at the Heart Mountain internment camp near here, Representative Liz Cheney was overcome with emotions, and a prolonged standing ovation wasn’t the only reason.

Her appearance — with her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, as well as former Senator Alan Simpson and the children of Norman Mineta, a Democratic congressman turned transportation secretary who was sent to the camp when he was 10 — was part of a groundbreaking for the new Mineta-Simpson Institute. Ms. Cheney was moved, she said, by the presence of the survivors and by their enduring commitment to the country that imprisoned them during World War II.

There was something else, though, that got to the congresswoman during the bipartisan ceremony with party elders she was raised to revere. “It was just a whole combination of emotion,” she recalled in a recent interview.

As Ms. Cheney faces a near-certain defeat on Tuesday in her House primary, it is the likely end of the Cheneys’ two-generation dynasty as well as the passing of a less tribal and more clubby and substance-oriented brand of politics.

“We were a very powerful delegation, and we worked with the other side, that was key, because you couldn’t function if you didn’t,” recalled Mr. Simpson, now 90, fresh off being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and as tart-tongued as ever about his ancestral party. “My dad was senator and a governor, and if I ran again today as a Republican I’d get my ass beat — it’s not about heritage.”

I admire Cheney for taking on Trump, even if I think there is a strong element of political calculation involved. It’s a brave choice, whatever the motive. But I don’t shed a tear for the end of the Cheney dynasty. Or the Simpson Wallop years either. Alan Simpson may have worked across the aisle from time to time with conservative Democrats but he was a nasty guy, rude and mean much of the time. He trolled before trolling existed. If he were of today’s generation he’d be a top Trump accomplice.

He shows he’s a chip off the old Trump block

He’s running, all right. And he’s going right at the heart of MAGA:

Florida GOP Gov. Ron Desantis is taking part in a very closely watched tour to Arizona, New Mexico, Ohio and Pennsylvania. On Sunday, DeSantis was in Phoenix for an event with Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters and GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.

DeSantis took a swipe at the FBI and Justice Department over the search of former President Donald Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago to retrieve classified documents (h/t Aaron Navarro of CBS News):

“These agencies have now been weaponized to be used against people that the government doesn’t like, and you look at the raid at Mar-A-Lago…”

“Maybe someone here can remind me about when they did a search warrant at Hillary’s house in Chappaqua.”

DeSantis also mocked President Joe Biden over having Covid: “How many times did he test positive for Covid?” More than 78,000 people in Florida have died of Covid since the pandemic started, but hey, it’s a good joke, right?

Ain’t he sweet?

Think about that when you hear certain Never Trumpers bellyaching about their brethren who aren’t rushing back to the GOP to work for DeSantis.

Trump’s changing excuses are pathetic

Trump has now had a long list of shifting explanations as to why he had all those government documents stored at his commercial resort. But the bottom line is this:

“What he doesn’t have the right to do is possess the documents; they are not his,” Jason R. Baron, a former director of litigation at the National Archives for more than a decade, said. “There should be no presidential records at Mar-a-Lago, whether they are classified or unclassified or subject to executive privilege or subject to attorney-client privilege.”

Documents covered by executive privilege are meant to be kept within the government too. They are not his either. All of his excuses, every last one, are irrelevant.

The New York Times, from which the above excerpt is taken, noted this about the most fatuous excuse of all:

Kash Patel, a former Trump administration official, subsequently justified the handling of the documents by saying that Mr. Trump had declassified them before leaving office — a claim echoed by the former president this week.

In an appearance on Fox News on Friday night, the right-wing writer John Solomon, one of Mr. Trump’s representatives for interacting with the National Archives, read a statement from the former president’s office asserting Mr. Trump had a “standing order” during his presidency that “documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them.”

That claim would not resolve the investigation. Two of the laws referred to in the search warrant executed this week criminalize the taking or concealment of government records, regardless of whether they had anything to do with national security. And laws against taking material with restricted national security information are not dependent on whether the material is technically classified.

Mr. Bolton, who served as Mr. Trump’s third national security adviser over 17 months, said he had never heard of the standing order that Mr. Trump’s office claimed to have in place. It is, he said, “almost certainly a lie.”

“I was never briefed on any such order, procedure, policy when I came in,” Mr. Bolton said, adding that he had never been told of it while he was working there, and had never heard of such a thing after. “If he were to say something like that, you would have to memorialize that, so that people would know it existed,” he said.

What’s more, he pointed out, secure facilities for viewing sensitive material were constructed at Mr. Trump’s clubs in Florida and New Jersey, where he often spent weekends as president, meaning that the documents wouldn’t need to be declassified. And if they were declassified, Mr. Bolton said, they would be considered subject to public record requests.

He continued, “When somebody begins to concoct lies like this, it shows a real level of desperation.”

If they are all declassified then they are all subject to FOIA.

Lock him up.

Is it?

Moderna’s CEO says they are throwing away 30 million covid shots because no one anywhere in the world will take them. Yeah, no kidding, the shot is garbage. And everyone is slowly realizing it. It’s why no parents are getting it for their kids too: https://t.co/dQKUXM0tBw

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) August 15, 2022

Ok:

I have never been more grateful for medical science.

“Joseph McCarthy was right”

This NY Times report on the state of the GOP in Arizona is mind-boggling. And the Times calls them a bellwether for the nation. Yikes:

R​​ose Sperry, a state committeewoman for Arizona’s G.O.P., answered immediately when I asked her to name the first Republican leader she admired. “I grew up during the time that Joe McCarthy was doing his talking,” Sperry, an energetic 81-year-old, said of the Wisconsin senator who in the 1950s infamously claimed Communists had infiltrated the federal government. “I was young, but I was listening. If he were here today, I would say, ‘Get him in there as president!’”

Sperry is part of a grass-roots movement that has pushed her state’s party far to the right in less than a decade. She had driven 37 miles the morning of July 16, from her home in the Northern Arizona town Cottonwood to the outskirts of Prescott, to attend the monthly meeting of a local conservative group called the Lions of Liberty, who, according to the group’s website, “are determined to correct the course of our country, which has been hijacked and undermined by global elites, communists, leftists, deep state bureaucrats and fake news.” That dismal view of America today was echoed by nearly every other conservative voter and group I encountered across the state over the past year.

Arizona has become a bellwether for the rest of the nation, and not just because of its new status as a swing state and the first of these to be called for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. It was and has continued to be the nexus of efforts by former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies to overturn the 2020 election results. At the same time, party figures from Trump down to Rose Sperry have sought to blacklist every Arizona G.O.P. official who maintained that the election was fairly won — from Gov. Doug Ducey to Rusty Bowers, speaker of the state’s House of Representatives. Such leaders have been condemned as RINOs, or Republicans in name only, today’s equivalent of the McCarthy era’s “fellow travelers.”

The aggressive takeover of the Arizona G.O.P. by its far-right wing was made manifest on primary night earlier this month, when a slate of Trump-endorsed candidates — the gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, the U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters, the state attorney general candidate Abraham Hamadeh and the secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem — all prevailed. As a group, they maintain that the 2020 election was stolen, have promoted conspiracy theories about Covid and have vowed to protect Arizona’s schools from gender ideology, critical race theory and what McCarthyites denounced 70 years ago as “godless communism.” They have cast the 2022 election as not just history-defining but potentially civilization-ending. As Lake told a large crowd in downtown Phoenix the night before the primary: “It is not just a battle between Republicans and Democrats. This is a battle between freedom and tyranny, between authoritarianism and liberty and between good and evil.” A week later, in response to the F.B.I.’s executing a search warrant at Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, Lake posted a statement on Twitter: “These tyrants will stop at nothing to silence the Patriots who are working hard to save America.” She added, “America — dark days lie ahead for us.” Far from offering an outlier’s view, Lake was articulating the dire stance shared by numerous other Republicans on the primary ballot and by the reactionary grass-roots activists who have swept them into power.

Whether that viewpoint is politically viable in a swing state is another question. Arizona’s two U.S. senators, Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema, are both Democrats. The tissue-thin Republican majorities in Arizona’s State Legislature — 31 to 29 in the House, 16 to 14 in the Senate — are the most precarious the G.O.P. has experienced in over a quarter-century as the ruling party. And, of course, Trump lost Arizona in 2020, in large part by alienating the college-educated suburbanites who have relocated to the Phoenix metropolitan area of Maricopa County in increasing numbers.

Arizona has thus become what the state’s well-regarded pollster Mike Noble characterizes as “magenta, the lightest state of red.” In the face of this shift, the state’s G.O.P. has aggressively declined to moderate itself. Instead, it has endeavored to cast out some of its best-known political figures. Last year, it censured its sitting governor, Doug Ducey; its former U.S. senator Jeff Flake; and Cindy McCain, the widow of the U.S. senator and 2008 G.O.P. presidential nominee John McCain, arguably the state party’s second-most-famous elected official, after Barry Goldwater.

In the weeks leading up to its Aug. 2 primary, and now as it turns toward the general election in November, Arizona has presented an American case study in how backlash to demographic and social change can cause a political party to turn on itself, even at its own electoral peril. “The fact that so much energy is being spent RINO-slaying and not beating Democrats is not a healthy place for our party to be in the long run,” one political consultant who works in multiple Western states including Arizona (and who requested anonymity to not alienate current and potential clients) observed fretfully.

When I recently spoke by phone with the state G.O.P.’s chairwoman, Kelli Ward, and shared this consultant’s concern, she offered a defiant laugh. “That’s the same argument that they’ve been making again and again and again, decade after decade,” Ward told me. “And they deliver us these spineless weaklings who cave in like rusty lawn chairs at the snap of a Democrat’s finger. I’m sick of it, and the people are sick of it.” A day after we spoke, Ward announced on Twitter that party officials had voted to censure yet another of their own: Bowers, the sitting House speaker, one of the few state Republican leaders who had remained steadfast in publicly saying that Trump lost Arizona fair and square, and had recently testified to the Jan. 6 House committee that vengeful opponents had driven a van through his neighborhood with a video screen calling him a pedophile. Bowers, Ward proclaimed in her tweet, “is no longer a Republican in good standing & we call on Republicans to replace him at the ballot box in the August primary.” (Bowers was defeated.)

They’re not just railing against the establishment like a bunch of ancient 60s radicals. They have gone much further than that:

[I]ts core activists, as well as a growing number of officials and those campaigning for governmental positions, openly espouse hostility not just to democratic principles but, increasingly, to the word “democracy” itself. It has long been a talking point on the right — from a chant at the 1964 Republican convention where Goldwater became the G.O.P. nominee to a set of tweets in 2020 by Senator Mike Lee of Utah — that the United States is a republic, not a democracy. The idea, embodied by the Electoral College’s primacy over the popular vote in presidential elections, is that the founders specifically rejected direct popular sovereignty in favor of a representative system in which the governing authorities are states and districts, not individual voters. But until very recently, democracy has been championed on the right: President George W. Bush, a subject of two books I’ve written, famously promoted democracy worldwide (albeit through military aggression that arguably undermined his cause). For that matter, in Trump’s speech at the rally on Jan. 6, he invoked the word “democracy” no fewer than four times, framing the attempt to overturn the 2020 election as a last-ditch effort to “save our democracy.”

What is different now is the use of “democracy” as a kind of shorthand and even a slur for Democrats themselves, for the left and all the positions espoused by the left, for hordes of would-be but surely unqualified or even illegal voters who are fundamentally anti-American and must be opposed and stopped at all costs. That anti-democracy and anti-“democracy” sentiment, repeatedly voiced over the course of my travels through Arizona, is distinct from anything I have encountered in over two decades of covering conservative politics.

It’s the failure to reinstall a legitimately defeated president, under the misguided belief that victory was stolen from him, that seems to have ushered in the view among Arizona Republicans — and many more across the nation — that democracy itself was at fault and had been weaponized by the political left, or the “enemies from within,” as McCarthy once put it. As it happened, Rose Sperry wasn’t the first person to invoke the Wisconsin senator at the Lions of Liberty event. “I had a weird dream last night about Joseph McCarthy,” said one of the morning’s featured speakers, Jim Arroyo, the head of Arizona’s biggest chapter of the Oath Keepers, a far-right paramilitary group made up largely of current and former members of the armed forces and law enforcement. McCarthy, he said, “was not only right — he understated the seriousness of it.”

Read the whole thing. They have completely lost their minds. The candidates they have chosen to run are horrific but what is, perhaps, the worst of it is the fact that what’s left of the GOP establishment (which was as conservative as its humanly possible to be already) have decided to embrace “unity” with these nutcases in the name of political power. Apparently, the likes of Mark Kelly and Kirsten Sinema are worse in their eyes — which says everything.

And by the way, McCarthy isn’t the only political miscreant of the past Republicans are embracing these days:

Fox host defends Trump’s handling of top secret documents: “President Nixon said, that if the president does it, that it is not illegal. Is that not truly the standard when it comes to classified documents?” https://t.co/xGTOhrP52O pic.twitter.com/ZXorS95AV4

— Media Matters (@mmfa) August 14, 2022

Just wait

You ain’t seen nothin’ yet heat-wise says a new report on warming trends (Axios):

A new study reveals the emergence of an “extreme heat belt” from Texas to Illinois, where the heat index could reach 125°F at least one day a year by 2053.

The big picture: In just 30 years, climate change will cause the Lower 48 states to be a far hotter and more precarious place to be during the summer.

• • The findings come from a hyperlocal analysis of current and future extreme heat events published Monday by the nonprofit First Street Foundation.
  • The new report is unique for examining current and future heat risks down to the property level across the country, and joins similar risk analyses First Street has completed for flooding and wildfires.
  • As average temperatures increase due to human-driven greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels for energy, instances of extreme heat are forecast to escalate.
  • This report makes clear where households will be vulnerable to what would now be considered almost unheard-of heat indices, which show how the air feels from the combination of air temperature and relative humidity.

Threat Level: The report, which is based on First Street’s peer reviewed heat model, shows that the number of Americans currently exposed to “extreme heat,” defined as having a maximum heat index of greater than 125°F, is just 8 million.

Reporter Andrew Freedman adds, “The states likely to see the greatest growth in dangerous days are Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri and Florida, First Street’s analysis found.”

• • The counties with the largest changes in dangerous days between 2023 and 2053 are mainly located in Florida, led by the populous areas of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties.

Assuming, of course, by mid-century those areas are not under water or rendered uninhabitable by salt water intrusion into the local aquifers.

What will become of Mar-a-Lago?

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Trust in elections gets in authoritarians’ way

A national pattern emerged after the 2020 election in which unsanctioned investigators sought access to voting machines they suspected of shifting votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. Thar’s fraud in them thar machines, MAGA cultists alleged, and evidence or not they would not rest until they found it, the Washington Post reports:

In states across the country, including Colorado, Pennsylvania and Georgia, attempts to inappropriately access voting machines have spurred investigations. They have also sparked concern among election authorities that, while voting systems are broadly secure, breaches by those looking for evidence of fraud could themselves compromise the integrity of the process and undermine confidence in the vote.

In Michigan, the efforts to access the machines jumped into public view this month when the state attorney general, Dana Nessel (D), requested a special prosecutor be assigned to look into a group that includes her likely Republican opponent, Matthew DePerno.

The expected Republican nominee, Nessel’s office wrote in a petition filed Aug. 5 based on the findings of a state police investigation, was “one of the prime instigators” of a conspiracy to persuade Michigan clerks to allow unauthorized access to voting machines. Others involved, according to the filing, included a state representative and Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf.

Touch screen voting machine have always drawn side-eye. After Florida in 2000, so did punch card ballots. The gold standard for voting is hand-marked paper ballots. They leave a tangible record, a paper trail. Modernity being what it is, states use digital scanners to read the ballots. Tabulators are checked before voting for accuracy and ballots re-scanned in random precincts afterwards to verify totals (not in all states) along with hand counts.

Three pressured Michigan township clerks turned over tabulators to “third parties.”

The petition says tabulators were taken to hotel rooms and Airbnb rentals in Oakland County, where a group of four men “broke into” the tabulators and performed “tests” on them. The petition says that DePerno was present in a hotel room during some of the testing.

Officials got the tabulators back weeks or months later, in one instance at a meeting in a carpool parking lot. DePerno has denied any wrongdoing, as has Leaf, the Barry County sheriff. The DePerno campaign issued a statement calling the petition for a special prosecutor “an incoherent liberal fever dream of lies.”

Once election officials lose control of voting machines, the machines can no longer be used because of the risk of hacking. Moreover, voters can lose faith in the country’s electoral infrastructure when they hear about machines that have not been adequately protected, election experts warn.

In essence, take them from election officials and you’ve broken them. They must be replaced.

“Unfortunately, we have a number of instances in the last year or so where this sort of thing has happened around the country,” said Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser at the nonprofit Democracy Fund versed in election procedures. “It is deeply troubling.”

Third parties accessing the machines is illegal, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson reminds the Post, but there is a broader pattern of attempts to do just that in multiple states.

In Michigan, investigators included Leaf, a “constitutional sheriff” who told clerks to keep quiet about his visits. Hawthorne, the clerk from Rutland Charter Township, is just one.

“They seem to think there was some kind of microchip in our tabulators that was throwing votes to Biden,” Hawthorne said. “But Trump won Barry County. He won by 65 percent of the vote, so I don’t know where they’re thinking that any kind of chips were in any of our machines or thinking that something had happened to them. The whole thing is nutty. It is nutty, totally nutty.”

The machine-tampering attempts are widespread enough to provoke national concern.

On Friday, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law sent a memo to organizations representing thousands of local election officials nationwide advising them of the growing problem of machine breaches and how to respond to it. “Public confidence in future elections can be severely damaged by plausible allegations that unauthorized or biased actors have been given physical access to voting equipment,” the memo says.

The memo urges officials to have a plan in place to quickly investigate possible breaches of voting machines and to replace or decommission election equipment if needed. The memo recommends practices to prevent such tampering, including closely restricting access to election systems, instituting background checks on those who have access and installing surveillance cameras.

“It is super important for election officials to know these breaches of election security are occurring and that there have been swift and strong reactions to it,” said Lawrence Norden, director of elections and government for the Brennan Center. “We want to be sure local election officials know they have an obligation to detect and quickly take remedial action if a breach occurs.”

Undermining faith in elections is the whole point of Republican fraud-mongering. From vote suppression effort like Operation Eagle Eye 60 years ago to New Jersey in 1981. From their efforts to kill off ACORN to REDMAP and their push to require photo IDs for voting. In the digital era and in the time of cable news and right-wing talk, Republicans have sown seeds of doubt among a wider audience than ever.

That their allegations of widespread fraud are baseless are beside the point. Weakening trust in the system the way they have neutered truth and agreed-upon facts is how Republicans (and now MAGA) mean to neuter democracy itself and prepare the country for a one-party state led by an authoritarian strongman.

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Here is video of his whole disgusting schtick:https://t.co/im6xM4bflc

— Lauren Windsor (@lawindsor) August 14, 2022

I don’t think I need to elaborate.