Month: October 2022

A poor white supremacist RNC thug is martyred

Marco Rubio has clearly fallen completely down the MAGA rabbit hole and it’s disconcerting to see it. We always knew people like Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson were just total whores but Rubio always struck me as more of an original type of opportunist. I didn’t think he’d go the way of a full-blown Trump sycophant like Lindsey Graham. Once again, I was wrong:

Monday morning, Senator Marco Rubio sent out a tweet with the horrifying news that “one of our canvassers wearing my T-shirt and a Desantis hat was brutally attacked by 4 animals who told him Republicans weren’t allowed in their neighborhood.” Rubio’s account was quickly repeated by conservative organs like the New York Post (“Rubio campaign canvasser ‘brutally’ beaten by man who told him GOPers not allowed in his neighborhood”), National Review (“Rubio Supporter Savagely Beaten While Canvassing in Florida”), Washington Free Beacon (“Marco Rubio Canvasser Violently Attacked in Dem Neighborhood”), and Washington Examiner (“Rubio canvasser brutally assaulted in Florida, senator says”).

Rubio and his supporters held up the attack as evidence of his opponents’ predilection for violence. (“Since the Supreme Court’s summer ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, conservative people and organizations across the country have been repeatedly targeted for vandalism, harassment, and outright assault,” noted National Review by way of context.) What it actually revealed was something different than, and close to the opposite of, Rubio’s intended point.

There is no question the canvasser, Christopher Monzon, was the victim of a ghastly assault. But mainstream media reporting on the episode quickly cast doubt on Rubio’s central claim: that the assailant told the canvasser Republicans weren’t welcome there. The initial police report noted no political motivation for the attack, which took place in a high-crime neighborhood. The assailant had been charged with two prior felonies and, according to his mother, has never voted and has no interest in politics.

The true significance of this episode is a detail that emerged shortly after Rubio’s tweet: Monzon turns out to be close with the Proud Boys, a right-wing paramilitary organization. The Proud Boys, a sort of hybrid social club and political gang with racist and violent tendencies, played a central role in organizing the January 6 assault.

Last June, the New York Times reported on how the Proud Boys has begun to take over the powerful Miami-Dade Republican Party organization. It is one of the more alarming signposts of the Republican Party’s evolution into authoritarianism — I would say “most,” except that there are so many — because it signals violent and explicitly racist organizations are being formally welcomed into the party structure.

Monzon was one of the characters featured in the story. Before he joined the GOP, Monzon was involved in other white supremacist causes. He participated in the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, where he allegedly used his Confederate flag to attack counterprotesters. His social-media posts from that period are filled with slurs like “Here’s to all the filthy n- – – – – – out there” and “Dirty n- – – – – – love abusing power.”

Monzon told the Times he has been on a “path to de-radicalization.” But when the Miami New Times tried to interview Monzon in the hospital, its reporter was denied access by a contingent of former and current Proud Boys. This suggests his self-professed “de-radicalization” has been, at best, incremental.

The HuffPost reports that Monzon was paid more than $10,000 by the Florida Republican Party this year. Rubio described him as one of his canvassers. Rubio was the Republican establishment’s choice to defeat Donald Trump in 2016, and he briefly gave a convincing performance as a person who was anguished by Trump’s abuse and lies. That he appears perfectly comfortable to work within a party that is developing a racist paramilitary wing is the clearest sign of the party’s complete surrender to extremism.

In June, a local reporter asked Rubio if he was okay with Proud Boys working in the Republican Party. Rubio deflected the question with the kind of hypothetical whataboutism that hackish partisans regularly employ: “Well, when you ask me about the Communists and socialists that are part of the local Democratic Party, then we can talk about members of the Republican Party.” [what???]

There are some “socialists” in the Democratic Party, but advocating policies like single-payer health care and high tax rates is hardly equivalent to advocating racism and violence. I’ve never come across a Communist who views the Democratic Party with anything other than contempt.

This deflection is revealing for the way one of the smears that has become normalized in conservative discourse — that Democrats are Marxists and Communists — can be repurposed as a justification for Republican extremism. The false charge that Democrats are committed to violent authoritarianism has become Rubio’s pretext for doing that very thing.

He’s been very weird in this campaign as if he was truly afraid he was going to lose and had to pander to the base. But he really hasn’t been behind. This seems more like a real transformation at this point. He’s MAGA all the way. It sure seems like he likes it.

Election deniers are making life hell for local officials

This story from Bolt magazine is just chilling:

The lawyer was clear: what the commissioners of Otero County, New Mexico were thinking of doing this fall was against the law. If they followed through they could be removed from office and could face criminal charges. 

But Commissioner Couy Griffin was adamant. As the founder of Cowboys For Trump, he was steeped in election conspiracy theories that sprung up after Trump’s loss in 2020. At an August 11 meeting Griffin pushed for their county to eliminate election ballot drop boxes and voting machines, which he argued could be tools for voter fraud. He also wanted to sue Democratic Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, who months earlier had gone to court to force them to certify primary election results that Griffin didn’t trust. 

The other two commissioners, also Republicans, weren’t buying it. As their county lawyer RB Nichols made clear, the use of voting machines and drop boxes is dictated by state law. “It won’t matter what we vote, we have no authority to do anything,” said Gerald Matherly. Fellow Commissioner Vickie Marquardt agreed, saying “this is out of our purview.”

Hours later, after a raucous community meeting that included shouting, allegations of fraud, and calls for resignations, Griffin prevailed. The commission voted 2-1 to do away with drop boxes and voting machines, as well as to sue the secretary of state. 

These moves kicked off an intra-party showdown between Republican elected officials following the rule of law and others who are trying to overturn the system as they pursue election conspiracies in a county that voted 62 percent for Trump in 2020. 

They offer a preview for the types of fights that could ensue as more election deniers seek positions of electoral power in New Mexico. So far those on the side of following the law are winning, but that is only true as long as key positions are filled by people willing to resist pressure from constituents who have bought into Trump’s Big Lie conspiracies. 

Otero County Clerk Robyn Holmes, also a Republican, is refusing to comply with the commission’s directive. Holmes says she has the power to decide how local elections are run and the voting machines and drop boxes will stay.

“They cannot create laws. I took an oath of office to follow the law and that’s what I’m going to do,” Holmes told Bolts. 

Holmes has the benefit of knowing that in her showdown with the commission, she has Toulouse Oliver backing her up. Back in June the Otero Commission refused to certify primary election results—despite one commissioner, Matherly, being on the ballot and needing his own candidacy to be certified. The commission had no discretion to refuse to certify results under state law, and Toulouse Oliver went to court to force the commission to reverse course. The state supreme court stepped in and sided with her. Asked if having an election denier as secretary of state would change the dynamic and make her job more difficult, Holmes said “I think absolutely it would.” 

New Mexico is one of several states this fall where an election denier is vying to take over the secretary of state position. The Republican challenger to Toulouse Oliver is Audrey Trujillo, a pro-Trump candidate who rejected the results of the 2020 presidential election and called Biden’s victory a “coup.”

Trujillo has endorsed various conspiracy theories and claimed that school shootings were conducted by “the deep state” in order “to push an agenda” to take away guns. She is campaigning heavily on conspiracies about election security, saying that current New Mexico leaders weaponized voter laws and the Covid-19 pandemic to “secure their elections for at least 100 years.” Similar to the movement in Otero County, she claims voting machines manipulated election results and has called for hand counting ballots. In June, Trujillo publicly urged the state’s county commissioners to not certify their primary election results without a hand recount and encouraged them to stop using voting machines from Dominion Voting Systems.

“I just want to improve the system we have in place; I’m not here to recreate the wheel,” Trujillo told the Las Cruces Sun News in September. “But if there are questions on those machines, we’re going to do our damnedest to do our research and see how we can do it a better way and an easier way.”

“Do our research” is a tip off that she’s down the wingnut rabbit hole in a big way.

The source of many of these theories is a husband and wife couple, David and Erin Clements, who have traveled all across the country to evangelize their brand of election denialism. They happen to be from New Mexico, one county over from Otero. In their home state they have dubbed themselves the New Mexico Audit Force and released an extensive report full of voter fraud allegations that fall apart under scrutiny.

Neither have a background in elections. Erin Clements was a civil engineer. David Clements was a business professor at New Mexico State University who was fired after refusing to comply with the school’s Covid safety policies on masking or vaccinations. He amassed a large following online and raised over $300,000 from a crowdfunding campaign.

The couple travels from state to state urging people to show up at their local government meetings to demand voting machines and drop boxes be removed. They have been particularly active in New Mexico—and it’s working. County clerks have been receiving steady pressure to dismantle the machinery of elections. 

“It’s consistent, it is unrelenting, it is sometimes aggressive. I’ve had to report a couple of threats to the FBI,” said Doña Ana County clerk Amanda López Askin. “I hate to say it but it’s part of the job at this point, sadly.”

She counted 141 Freedom of Information Act requests from election deniers, including requests for in-person tours to audit election machinery. “They have really weaponized public records requests. If I let them they would incapacitate my office to the point where we would not be able to run an election,” said López Askin.

In Otero County, this dynamic exploded into a chaotic community meeting the evening of August 11.

The Clementses were welcomed onstage to discuss their report. When County Attorney RB Nichols reiterated that the commission had no legal authority to do away with voting machines or ballot drop boxes, David Clements lambasted the local officials for cowardice.  “It’s tyranny. And you don’t help them. You don’t help us. You don’t fight. You just do whatever the secretary of state tells you to,” he said.

Supporters in the public gallery cheered along. Nichols was insistent, saying he would not go along with the Clementses demands that the county sue the secretary of state. “I’m not going to file a frivolous lawsuit, David. I have to have a good-faith basis.”

When an audience member called for following the law, Clements said that Nazis under the direction of Hitler were also following the law. When commissioner Matherly discussed downgrading the motion to a request so that they would not risk going to jail, Clements shamed him. “And why are you scared of going to jail?”

The Clementses, along with commissioner Griffin, waged a steady pressure campaign. Griffin argued that the commission should sue Toulouse Oliver for forcing them to certify primary results that he claimed were later proven to be fraudulent.

The basis for Griffin’s fraud claim is that a hand recount changed the results of one primary race by three votes. Clerk Holmes explained that three people filled out their ballot incorrectly and that the machine would have notified them of their mistake and directed them to get a new ballot, but sometimes people do not want to start over and submit it anyway. She said during the hand recount election workers determined that voter intention of those three ballots were clear enough to be counted.

Despite this explanation, Griffin continued to insist that the discrepancy was proof of voter fraud.  “If there were three votes that weren’t counted in that race, how many other races were the same?” he said. “And how does that affect the big picture, OK? Again, I’m just fighting for the truth up here and I see it pretty clearly right now.”

David Clements jumped up to a microphone to shout down Holmes. “You need to resign,” he said. “Disgusting how you fight the people.”

Griffin and the Clementses won the day, convincing commissioner Marquardt to vote for removing drop boxes and voting machines, as well as for suing the secretary of state. 

For everything they say about hand counting I think we know what they really want. They want Republicans to be able to count the votes and ensure they win. Otherwise they would not be against machine votes that could be audited in case of a close result. Trump has even said it out loud (of course.)

López Askin, the Doña Ana County clerk, is one of the most vocal clerks in the state in responding to election conspiracy theories, which she finds are regularly brought up at community meetings. She recalled one resident at a meeting shaking with anger and demanding officials look into fraud as she held up the Clementses self-described audit.

López Askin said that she and her colleagues try to explain the multiple levels of security built into the system—certification of machines, accuracy tests, recounts in close races, post-election audits of results—but ultimately she fears people will opt out of the democratic process because they believe the people telling them it’s a sham.

“These folks get up there and they are fully angry and emotional. They believe it. I don’t know if there’s anything I could say at this point that could continue otherwise,” she said. “So I actually feel mostly compassion for them.”

I don’t. They have agency. They are adults. And they are in love with anger, lies and hate. It has become their entire identity. This is not something that happens to decent people.

I know I promised to ignore the polls (and we should!) but I can’t help but share this:

Does this mean it’s going our way? Who knows? But the truth is that in close races the timing of momentum shifts means something. In 2016, remember, it was that heinous announcement from Comey ten days before the election that sank Clinton. If she’d had a couple of weeks to recover she probably would have won.

So we’ll see. I’m not getting my hopes up. All the pollsters are looking at a close race favoring Republicans. But you never know …

Just vote. And if you’re inclined to help, do some canvassing. The rest is up to fate.

I’m not going to get into the recriminations and deep “analysis” of the Fetterman-Oz debate last night. Suffice to say that I do not think Fetterman is cognitively impaired so I don’t care to engage in theater criticism of his “performance” as he recovers from his stroke. The Senate is full of stoke survivors, even right now. Senator Ben-Ray Lujan and Chris VanHollen both had strokes this year and they’re doing fine. Mark Kirk of Illinois had a much more serious stroke than Fetterman, was out for a year and remained significantly disabled and yet was welcomed back with open arms and served for another five years without any hint that he was unable to serve.

So, as far as I’m concerned there is no logical reason why anyone should change their minds and vote for a con artist TV personality with zero political experience who is running in the election denying party of Donald Trump (with his enthusiastic backing) over a man with progressive values and tons of experience who happens to have a temporary disability. It’s incoherent, IMO.

But that’s neither here nor there. It’s up to the people of Pennsylvania to decide and I just hope they don’t pick the guy who says that abortions should be decided by “a woman, her doctor and local political officials.”

The Washington Post featured an interesting story about Fetterman this morning which would have gotten more traction if he’d been more successful in the debate last night. It’s not all ositive by any means, but it does show the kind of mavericky, “get it done”, sensibility of the man who worked hard to revitalize his town with unorthodox methods. Apparently, he stepped on some toes in the process and even offended the old timers who didn’t want the hipster sensibility that Fetterman used to lure in entrepreneurs and investors.

“I think you can best determine what your values are by where you chose to spend your life and your career,” Fetterman, 53, said during an interview earlier this month with the PennLive editorial board. “Twenty-one years ago I came to Braddock, which is an overwhelmingly majority Black community that was abandoned and forgotten and I chose to run a GED program. There’s no money there, there’s no glamour there, it was a commitment to make sure these people had the opportunity to get their education back on track.”

Fetterman ran for mayor in 2005. His young mentees plastered “JKF” stickers all around town — Karl is his middle name — and the vote was a squeaker: a 149 to 148 victory for Fetterman. It wasn’t a mandate, and the borough council was wary of Fetterman’s grand plans. For his part, Fetterman quickly concluded local government was a dead end.

“If there was a dream team of holding everything collectively back, you couldn’t assemble a finer group,” Fetterman told Pittsburgh City Paper months after his election. “I mean, if your mission was to stifle any kind of creative energy or idea …”

Several council members Fetterman served with have died, while others declined interview requests or couldn’t be reached. In an 2015 interview with the PennLive website before his death, former council president Jesse Brown said Fetterman didn’t seem to understand the mayor’s limited powers in a borough predominantly controlled by the council.

“He first come in thinking that he was in charge of everything,” Brown said. “After a couple run-ins him and I had, he stopped coming to meetings. He should have been in all council meetings to break a tie in case there was a tie or if he had some input he could put input in, but he didn’t do that.”

Doose, though, said she didn’t blame Fetterman for skipping most meetings. “He could have argued with them until he was blue in the face,” she said. “It was not a productive environment.”

Incompetence and corruptionalsoplagued the town government in those years. Two months after Fetterman became mayor, the council sued the elected tax collector for failing to turn over records of unpaid property taxes. In 2011, the borough manager pleaded guilty to stealing about $170,000 from the town. The borough’s financial activities also were constrained by a state oversight program for poor communities.

So the new mayor turned to Braddock Redux, which he had started with his family’s money in 2003. The nonprofit spent $50,000 that year to buy a century-old, red-brick-church in Braddock, which Fetterman envisioned becoming a vibrant community hub with recreational and educational programs for kids and young adults.

Over the next few years, Fetterman’s efforts as mayor to draw attention and money to the blighted town drew outsize attention — from Rolling Stone magazine to “The Colbert Report.” The buzz attracted Levi Strauss & Co., which saw the gritty community as the ideal setting for its “Ready to Work” advertising campaign. Fetterman insisted on locals starring in the ad — and on a generous donation to his nonprofit.

Levi Strauss & Co. contributed $948,001 to Braddock Redux between 2010 and 2012 to support the renovation of the community center and a vacant, weedy lot into a vegetable farm, according to a company spokesperson. Doose said the tiny borough did not have the capacity to handle those projects.

It sounds as though he was really trying to do something. And, as per usual, it shook up the establishment.

The Post goes into all the financing suggesting that his family backed more of the project than has been revealed although I don’t know why that should be a problem. They note that Fetterman didn’t take money from the foundation and it doesn’t appear that anyone was siphoning off funds or anything. I’m not sure what the point of this suspicion is. His father said that he supported his son’s projects because he believed in them which I guess is just impossible in the minds of the cynical media.

They admit that he was doing what a lot of small communities in that blighted area are forced to do:

In this economically hollowed out corner of the Rust Belt, it’s not unusual for local governments trying to boost the quality of life for residents to turn to nonprofits, experts said. In Allegheny County, Braddock is among 128 municipalities, some of which are small fiefdoms with shrinking tax bases that can’t cover basic services.

“This is considered the most fragmented local government structure of any region in the United States,’’ said Chris Briem, a regional economist at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Social and Urban Research. “Many local governments are so small or distressed that they don’t have the fiscal capacity that is common elsewhere. The result of that is that you see a large role for nongovernmental organizations attempting to fill the void.” …

One of his constituents said this:

“It’s a dying community, forgotten, and he put some adrenaline in it,” Johnson said of Fetterman. “Did he change everything in this town? No. Did he make a difference? Absolutely he did.”

It’s a truism that no good deed goes unpunished. Let’s just hope that Fetterman defies the odds.

Master whiffed in the debate and said that the election wasn’t stolen but now he’s back in the fold with Fox News appearances backing the Big Lie. I guess they just assume that Arizona voters are too stupid to care.

The Grand Canyon state is up to its old tricks again

Contrary to popular myth, the United States was not founded on the concept of “one person, one vote.” In fact, there isn’t a right to vote enshrined in the Constitution at all, a fact which the late Justice Antonin Scalia made sure to mention in his notorious Bush v. Gore opinion that decided the 2000 election. Managing elections was at first left entirely up to the states, which meant that in most places, most of the time, only white male landowners had the franchise. It took several decades, until the Andrew Jackson era, before essentially all white men were allowed to vote, let alone anyone else. (A few property-owning African Americans were permitted to vote in Northern cities before the Civil War, but no women could vote anywhere until Wyoming enacted universal suffrage in 1869.) 

After the Civil War, the end of slavery and the 14th Amendment, all Black men were officially granted citizenship, but very few were allowed to vote before the enactment of the 15th Amendment in 1870, which specified that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” That led to the brief period of Reconstruction, which saw Black men not just voting across the South but also elected to high office: Sixteen African Americans served in Congress (including two U.S. senators) and several hundred served in state legislatures. But by the 1880s all that was over, as Southern whites (with the federal government’s permission) launched the systematic disenfranchisement, vote suppression and voter intimidation of the Jim Crow era, meaning that virtually no Black people in the South could vote until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

But it’s a mistake to believe that voter suppression only happened in the Deep South — or only happened in the distant past. Over the past 20 years we’ve seen a huge resurgence of such tactics in most states run by Republicans. In Florida, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Maryland, Indiana and Texas, for example, GOP officials have purged voter rolls, limited early voting and mail-in ballots, established “caging” lists, spread voting disinformation and enacted onerous voter-ID laws and ballot requirements. Just this week, a pair of notorious GOP dirty tricksters were convicted of felony telecommunications fraud in Ohio for spreading false information by robocall in 2020.

Most of those tactics, primarily (although not exclusively) targeting Black and Latino voters, were assumed to be illegal under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — at least until the conservative-majority Supreme Court struck down huge portions of the act in their 2013 ruling from Tennessee, Shelby County v. Holder. The justices held, in an astonishing denial of reality, that voter suppression was no longer much of a problem in the South (or anywhere else) so many of the Voting Rights Act’s provisions were no longer necessary.

Last year the high court outdid itself with the decision in Arizona’s Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee case, upholding a ban on what they called “ballot harvesting” — that is, collecting and turning in mail ballots by anyone other than a voter’s immediate family members or caregivers — and allowing states to toss out any ballot cast in the incorrect precinct. Republicans are effectively creating updated Jim Crow-style voting restrictions all over the country, with the support of a supermajority on the Supreme Court. 

Arizona, however, must be regarded as a special case. While many states had discriminatory laws of one kind or another until fairly recently, Arizona has been on the voter suppression bandwagon all along, and stands as the leading example so far in 2022. That “live and let live” libertarian spirit of the Southwest seems to have led conservatives in the Grand Canyon State to a culture of election intimidation that just won’t quit.

I’ve noted in several columns over the years the famous Arizona suppression scheme from the early 1960s known as Operation Eagle Eye. It’s particularly famous because the late William Rehnquist, chief justice of the Supreme Court from 1985 to 2005, was an eager participant early in his career.

The New York Times reported this during Rehnquist’s confirmation process in 1986:

Republicans say that in the 1960, 1962 and 1964 campaigns, he helped plan and direct a poll-watching program that was intended to block what Republicans called illegal attempts by Democrats to win elections by bringing large numbers of unqualified black and Hispanic residents to the polls shortly before they closed.

They also had a special trick:

A Phoenix lawyer and longtime Democratic activist, who said he did not want to be identified because he expected Justice Rehnquist to be confirmed as Chief Justice, said that at the 1962 election he was photographed by William Rehnquist as he and another Democrat approached a voting precinct in a minority community.

”We asked him what he was doing, or perhaps he just told us, ‘I’m taking pictures of everybody,’ ” the lawyer recalled. ”We asked if that wasn’t harassment. He just laughed and said, ‘There’s no film in the camera.’ ”

That sounds familiar, doesn’t it? We are getting daily reports of armed, masked yahoos dressed in tactical gear staking out ballot boxes in Arizona filming people dropping off their ballots.

The sheriff of Maricopa County, which includes the city of Phoenix and has a population of 4.5 million, said he has been forced to increase security at drop boxes so voters can feel safe dropping off their ballots. This “monitoring” is being done at the behest of “voter integrity” groups that have been gathering in the state and around the country, claiming they are training “poll watchers” to make sure that the election is on the up and up. It doesn’t sound as if that’s their actual goal.

This is voter intimidation plain and simple, just as it was when Rehnquist stood there taking pictures of voters (whether or not there was film in the camera). And it’s being endorsed, of course, by extremist election denier Mark Finchem, the Republican nominee for Arizona secretary of state, who tweeted this week, “[George] Soros does not want people to watch their shenanigans. We must watch all drop boxes because they do not have live cameras on them streaming to the public for people to ensure there is no fraud in the process.” That’s the man who will be in charge of Arizona’s elections if he wins the election on Nov. 8. (Notice the cutting-edge MAGA touch of sneaking in a little old-fashioned antisemitism. It’s all the rage these days.)

Citizens who are simply driving up to drop off their ballots are confronted with these people who record them doing it, photograph their license plates and in some cases even follow them in an apparent effort to figure out where they live. Several complaints have been forwarded to the Department of Justice and two lawsuits have already been filed. Whether John Roberts’ Supreme Court will agree that this is unconstitutional remains to be seen, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. After all, the right-wing justices upheld Arizona’s ludicrous ban on anyone dropping off ballots but their own, which was filed by Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich and another Republican election denier. 

This ridiculous obsession with nonexistent ballot stuffing at drop boxes is what formed the so-called basis of the thoroughly debunked claims of fraud in Dinesh D’Souza’s “2000 Mules” movie, which has inspired millions of Trumpers to believe the 2020 election was stolen. These amateur surveillance efforts are being organized by a rogue’s gallery of right-wing groups with anti-government views and associations with white nationalism, including the Oath Keepers, True the Vote, Lions of Liberty and the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association.

You can always count on Arizona right-wingers to be in the vanguard of any innovative attempt at voter suppression and intimidation. They’ve been at this for decades and are way ahead of the rest of the country. They once put one of their own in the chief justice’s chair — and the current Supreme Court has their back all the way.

Nothing says freedom like pissing yourself in a dually

Nothing says freedom like asking your boss for permission or shooting yourself in the head (wait for it).

These are going to be popping up all day.

Who knew? Freedom is a contested concept in MAGAstan. Kindness is outlawed. Feeding the homeless in the streets is a bad look and bad for business.

Unless the homless have been shelled first. (Hey! There’s an idea!)

Don’t just sit there.

Pay no attention to those pundits behind the curtain

Professionals get paid to opine on anything and everything whether or not it matters. At election season, they handicap the horse race. Who’s up? Who’s down? What do the polls show? Last week. This week. They “what if” elections to death in commentaries with less shelf life than Liz Truss. Or a lettuce.

Why we still pay attention to polls and pundits after so many rounds of bad guesses is beyond me. As I was reminded the other day, they were wrong about Clinton sealing up the Democratic nomination in 2008, about Romney winning in 2012, about Trump’s loss in 2016. Biden was a dead duck in the 2020 primaries, etc. Not to mention exit and other polling.

Joe Biden, with slim Democratic congressional majorities and Sens. Manchin and Sinema dragging their own party, will get nothing done in the face of Republican stonewalling? The professionals were wrong about that too. Despite party misteps and dysfunction.

Mike Lux and his American Family Voices team want to remind everyone just what Democrats have accomplished under Biden in a “ridiculously long” political ad. It’s not likely to get network coverage or airtime, but it is a reminder that Democrats came to govern the republic.

It’s the the small, unsexy things no one writes breathless commentary about that make a difference in people’s lives. A friend on the Olympic Penninsula this week complained that, because the state had reduced the number of ballot drop boxes, he had to drive 30 minutes to mail his ballot at the nearest post office. Little stuff matters.

Republicans seek office to sabotage what they can’t profit from. And to shrink government small enough to fit in your uterus.

Elections aren’t won in our heads, on TV, or in the newspapers. They are won on the ground. Democratic canvassers here are in NC-11 out-knocking the rest of state. Will it be enough? For some candidates, yes.

But as Sen. Elizabeth Warren likes to say, you don’t get what you don’t fight for.

If you think that this Arizona Attorney General isn’t completely full of it, you need your head examined:

The thing is, people know he’s a lying scumbag. That’s what they like about him. He’s basically saying that he happily will steal the election for Republicans. What’s not to like?

Really? We have to do this now?

I don’t know what went on with that progressive Ukraine letter or why it was sent just two weeks before the election but it’s … odd, to say the least. I guess they have withdrawn it now which seems a wise decision. With Vladimir Putin clearly banking on political support for Ukraine cratering if Republicans retake congressional power it makes little sense for progressives to even imply any daylight between them and the administration right now even if they are privately lobbying for more diplomacy.

Anyway, here’s a conversation between Greg Sargent at the Washington Post and Timothy Snyder who knows a thing or two about the subject:

Many Republicans continue to support funding for Ukraine, so it’s unclear how real McCarthy’s threat wouldprove even if he were to become speaker. But with numerous GOP candidates running for the House and Senate while expressing hostility to that funding, the threatcannot be dismissed. The GOP’s budding “pro-Putin wing,” as Cheney put it, is a real phenomenon that must be reckoned with.

So I reached out to Timothy Snyder, a historian of Europe who has become one of the leading thinkers onthe rise of authoritarianism around the globe, for help in exploring the larger implications of this development. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Greg Sargent: The guy likely to become House speaker is openly declaring that Republicans might not continue U.S. military aid to Ukraine. A number of House GOP and Senate candidates are also hostile to such aid. How seriously do you take this threat?

Timothy Snyder:I take it very seriously, because democracy around the world depends on Ukrainians winning this war. I also find it puzzling, because the Ukrainians are doing more for declared bipartisan American national security interests than any American foreign policy has done for decades.

By pinning down the Russian army and substantially weakening it, they are weakening China’s cat’s paw, which is Russia. By showing how difficult it is to carry out this kind of invasion, Ukraine is making the scenario for war with China — a Chinese invasion of Taiwan — much less likely.

A lot of Republicans genuinely support the Ukrainian cause and want the United States to help Ukraine prevail. But now we might see a genuine power struggle inside the GOP over whether the party will retreat from backing Ukraine.

I talk to quite a few Republicans who say and do exactly the right things regarding Ukraine. But an underlying source of the [power struggle] you mention is media. The guidelines for state-sponsored Russian propaganda television predict very well what Tucker Carlson says about Russia and Ukraine. Then Russian propagandists play clips of Tucker Carlson for their viewers.

So an awful lot of Americans and Republican voters are imbibing Russian propaganda tropes without knowing it.

It seems to me that the alignment of nontrivial swaths of the Republican Party with Vladimir Putin — we should try to understand this as potentially a serious geopolitical development.

We are actually on the verge of winning in Ukraine. We’re also on the verge of a tipping point back toward democratic institutions, and I don’t mean just in the West; I mean around the world. An awful lot hinges on Russia losing and Ukraine winning.

The tipping point can also go the other way. If the Ukrainians hadn’t fought — or if they had already lost — we would have already seen a tipping point where authoritarianism and Putin-style nihilism would be much more popular.

Right now, we have an opportunity for a positive tipping point. We could throw it all away if we do the wrong thing after November. Things could go either extremely well or extremely poorly.

If much of the GOP does back away from support for Ukraine, could that signal to our allies that our commitment is weakening even as energy challenges in Europe strain the Western alliance?

Yes. Right now, the NATO alliance, the European Union and individual member states have rallied, have consolidated and have taken risks on behalf of Ukraine. Not since the end of the Cold War has there been this much coordination and success. That bodes very well for the future of transatlantic and European cooperation.

If we get through three months of winter without breaking, I think the Ukrainians are going to win. But if after the November elections, the Americans pull the blanket away from everyone else, things could go very badly.

Is it fair to surmise that Putin hopes that the GOP does take power and then undermines U.S. funding for Ukraine’s efforts?

This is no secret. This is what Russian propagandists root for on Russian television practically every night. When they talk about how they’re going to win in Ukraine, what they say is “We’re counting on the Republicans in November.” It’s up to Republicans to prove them wrong.

There’s a way to understand this as a Hail Mary on Putin’s part: hope for a Republican victory that would then undermine the Ukrainian war effort. But that might not happen, and Putin’s bet on the Republican Party could fail.

The Republicans have agency. I very much hope that if they do win, their first step will be: “We want to do more than the Biden administration.” I hope they compete. There are Republicans who say this, that we should be doing more.

Can we apply this context to the move by Russia and Saudi Arabia to cut back oil supplies to push up gas prices? Do you see this as a conscious effort to shift our midterm election outcome?

I do. Are there any other interpretations of it?

There’s another Mideast connection: Another place where Republicans want to be tough is on Iran. And Iran is supplying Russia with drones. Who is now resisting Iranian power directly? It’s the Ukrainians who are shooting down the Iranian drones.

If your line is that you’re going to be tough on Iran, that’s one more reason you should be supporting Ukraine.

I think that makes it genuinely harder for the pro-Putin caucus inside the Republican Party to make real headway.

I would like to hope that’s true.

I would too. I really don’t think progressives need to help them.