Sunday, November 4, 2018

Last Call For A Peach Of A Liar

This morning I noted that on Friday, a federal court ordered that Georgia GOP Secretary of State Brian Kemp's scheme to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters was illegal and that Georgia had to allow people to vote even if their signatures weren't an "exact match" on their voter registration forms.  

Kemp was using his office's powers to systematically void the voter registrations of registered black Democrats as Kemp is running against Democratic state Rep. Stacey Abrams for governor.

But now Kemp is trying one last dirty trick, blaming Democrats for an attempted hack over the weekend into the state's voter registration system.

Georgia's Secretary of State's office says it has launched an investigation into a "failed attempt to hack the state's voter registration system" on Saturday evening. 
The office of Brian Kemp, who is also the Republican candidate for governor, said in a Sunday morning news release that they will investigate the Georgia Democratic Party as part of its probe, but did not offer any details on why it is investigating the Democratic party. 
"While we cannot comment on the specifics of an ongoing investigation, I can confirm that the Democratic Party of Georgia is under investigation for possible cyber crimes," said press secretary Candice Broce in the release. "We can also confirm that no personal data was breached and our system remains secure." 
The Georgia Democratic Party said in a statement Sunday that the "scurrilous claims are 100 percent false" and called the investigation "another example of abuse of power" by Kemp. 
"This political stunt from Kemp just days before the election is yet another example of why he cannot be trusted and should not be overseeing an election in which he is also a candidate for governor," the state party's executive director, Rebecca DeHart, said in a statement. 
Stacey Abrams, Georgia's Democratic gubernatorial nominee, told CNN's Jake Tapper that the investigation was an attempt to distract voters two days before the election. 
"I've heard nothing about it, and my reaction would be that this is a desperate attempt on the part of my opponent to distract people from the fact that two different federal judges found him derelict in his duties and have forced him to accept absentee ballots to be counted and those who are being held captive by the exact match system to be allowed to vote," Abrams said. 
"He is desperate to turn the conversation away from his failures, from his refusal to honor his commitments and from the fact that he's part of a nationwide system of voter suppression that will not work in this election because we're going to outwork him, we're going to out vote him and we're going to win," she said. 

I'm glad that Abrams and the Georgia Democratic Party jumped on Kemp's ridiculous story.  Singling out the Democrats for this, when China, Russia, and other foreign groups have been attacking voter systems in 2016 and 2018, is the height of abuse of power.

I cannot wait for Kemp to lose, but frankly unless Abrams wins by ten points, I fully expect Kemp to illegally disqualify thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Democratic voters on Tuesday.  We may not know who is governor of Georgia for months.

But in all honesty if we saw a candidate in another country who was currently in charge of counting the ballots for his own election to higher office, and then that candidate announces 48 hours before the election that the opposition party is now under investigation for hacking the voter registration system, we'd call it a banana republic and demand UN election observers.

Trump's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Trump continues to play the "scary other people" card because it works, and while I expect Democrats will continue to win the women vote overall, white women will continue to vote Republican because what they want most is Daddy Trump protecting them.

Standing in an airplane hangar in the mid-autumn chill awaiting the arrival of President Trump, Joan Philpott said she was angry and scared. Only Mr. Trump, she said, can solve the problems she worries most about.

He wants to protect this country, and he wants to keep it safe, and he wants to keep it free of invaders and the caravan and everything else that’s going on,” said Ms. Philpott, 69, a retired respiratory therapist.

Ms. Philpott was one of thousands of women who braved a drizzle for hours to have the chance to cheer Mr. Trump at a rally here on Thursday. While political strategists and public opinion experts agree that Mr. Trump’s greatest electoral weakness is among female voters, here in Columbia and places like it, the president enjoys a herolike status among women who say he is fighting to preserve a way of life threatened by an increasingly liberal Democratic Party.

He understands why we’re angry,” Ms. Philpott said, “and he wants to fix it.”

As Republican candidates battle to keep their congressional majorities in the midterm elections on Tuesday, Mr. Trump is crisscrossing the country to deliver a closing argument meant to acknowledge — and in many cases stoke — women’s anxieties. At rally after rally, he has said that women “want security,” warning of encroaching immigrants, rising crime and a looming economic downturn if Democrats gain power.

Some of Mr. Trump’s female backers initially supported him only reluctantly or do so now in spite of reservations about his bawdy language and erratic behavior. But they shared in his victory after the bitter and partisan battle over the confirmation of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. And many believe the president when he reminds them during each of his hourlong pep rallies that the world they know — largely Christian, conservative and white — is at stake on Tuesday.

“Honestly, I’m nervous about it,” Amy Kremer, a Tea Party activist and the co-founder of the Women for Trump PAC, said of the election, which is widely viewed as a referendum on Mr. Trump. “I’ve never seen this energy and momentum for a midterm, but also the polls weren’t correct in 2016.”

Ms. Kremer said she and the other women in her Atlanta-area social circle “love” Mr. Trump, adding, “We like when somebody promises to do something and they follow through on it.”

But that warmth toward the president is decidedly a minority view among women around the country, and Republican officials fret privately that Mr. Trump’s harder-edged messages will alienate the women the party needs to preserve vital seats.

There are two theories, one, enough white women will vote for the Republicans in order for the GOP to keep the House and make Senate gains, or two, enough non-white voters will show up to counteract this group and the Democrats take back the House and maybe, just maybe, the Senate.

But let's not pretend we don't know what Trump is selling here when he says that women want "security" to a group of white, Christian women in a state like Montana that's 90% white.  White women put Trump in the White House, and he's counting on them to keep the GOP in total power on Tuesday.  "Only I can keep you safe" is what abusers and fascists tell people.

It's the last play he's got, and in a midterm electorate that will most likely be 40% white women, it's the most effective play Trump has.

Sunday Long Read: That Little Domestic Terrorism Problem of Ours

NY Times reporter Janet Reitman takes a look at the failure of American law enforcement to stop white supremacist terrorists in America, because in far too many cases, American law enforcement is hunting their own, and any new powers to tackle domestic terrorists would almost certainly be used by Trump to target his political enemies.

White supremacists and other far-right extremists have killed far more people since Sept. 11, 2001, than any other category of domestic extremist
. The Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism has reported that 71 percent of the extremist-related fatalities in the United States between 2008 and 2017 were committed by members of the far right or white-supremacist movements. Islamic extremists were responsible for just 26 percent. Data compiled by the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database shows that the number of terror-related incidents has more than tripled in the United States since 2013, and the number of those killed has quadrupled. In 2017, there were 65 incidents totaling 95 deaths. In a recent analysis of the data by the news site Quartz, roughly 60 percent of those incidents were driven by racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, antigovernment or other right-wing ideologies. Left-wing ideologies, like radical environmentalism, were responsible for 11 attacks. Muslim extremists committed just seven attacks.

These statistics belie the strident rhetoric around “foreign-born” terrorists that the Trump administration has used to drive its anti-immigration agenda. They also raise questions about the United States’ counterterrorism strategy, which for nearly two decades has been focused almost exclusively on American and foreign-born jihadists, overshadowing right-wing extremism as a legitimate national-security threat. According to a recent report by the nonpartisan Stimson Center, between 2002 and 2017, the United States spent $2.8 trillion — 16 percent of the overall federal budget — on counterterrorism. Terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists killed 100 people in the United States during that time. Between 2008 and 2017, domestic extremists killed 387 in the United States, according to the 2018 Anti-Defamation League report.

“We’re actually seeing all the same phenomena of what was happening with groups like ISIS, same tactics, but no one talks about it because it’s far-right extremism,” says the national-security strategist P. W. Singer, a senior fellow at the New America think tank. During the first year of the Trump administration, Singer and several other analysts met with a group of senior administration officials about building a counterterrorism strategy that encompassed a wider range of threats. “They only wanted to talk about Muslim extremism,” he says. But even before the Trump administration, he says, “we willingly turned the other way on white supremacy because there were real political costs to talking about white supremacy.”

In March 2018, a 20-year-old white evangelical Christian named Mark Anthony Conditt laid a series of homemade I.E.D.s around Austin, Tex., in largely minority communities. The bombs killed two African-Americans and injured at least four others over the course of several weeks, terrorizing the city, yet the local authorities preferred to describe Conditt, who committed suicide, as a “very challenged young man.” Also last spring, another white man, 28-year-old Benjamin Morrow, blew himself up in his apartment in Beaver Dam, Wis., while apparently constructing a bomb. Federal investigators said Morrow’s apartment doubled as a “homemade explosives laboratory.” There was a trove of white-supremacist literature in Morrow’s home, according to the F.B.I. But local cops, citing Morrow’s clean-cut demeanor and standout record as a quality-control manager at a local food-processing plant, made sure to note that just because he had this material didn’t mean he was a white supremacist. “He could have been an individual that was doing research,” the local police chief said.

In this atmosphere of apparent indifference on the part of government officials and law enforcement, a virulent, and violent, far-right movement has grown and metastasized. To combat it, some officials have suggested prosecuting related crimes through expansion of the government’s counterterrorism powers — creating a special “domestic terrorism” statute, for instance, which currently doesn’t exist. But a report released on Oct. 31 by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School argues that the creation of such a statute could easily be abused to target “protesters and political dissidents instead of terrorists,” and that law enforcement already has ample authority to prosecute domestic terrorism: “Congress must require that counterterrorism resource decisions be based on objective evaluations of the physical harm different groups pose to human life, rather than on political considerations that prioritize the safety of some communities over others.”

The report also calls out the Justice Department for its “blind spot” when it comes to domestic terrorism and hate crimes, which Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein conceded earlier in the week. During a conference on Oct. 29, Rosenstein said that according to the latest F.B.I. crime report, “88 percent of agencies that provide hate-crimes data to the F.B.I. reported zero hate crimes in 2016.” The Justice Department was reviewing the accuracy of the reports, he noted. “Simply because hate crimes are not reported does not mean they are not happening.”

In 2016, the latest full year of data available from the F.B.I., more than 6,100 hate-crime incidents were reported, 4,270 of them crimes against people (as opposed to, say, defacing property). And yet only 27 federal hate-crime defendants were prosecuted that year. “The F.B.I. knows how many bank robberies there were last year,” says Michael German, an author of the Brennan Center report and a former F.B.I. agent, “but it doesn’t know how many white supremacists attacked people, how many they injured or killed.”

More concerning to German, though, is that law enforcement seems uninterested in policing the violent far right. During the first year after Donald Trump’s election, protests and riots erupted across the country, often involving men with criminal histories who, by definition, were on the law-enforcement radar. During the so-called Battle of Berkeley in March 2017, for instance, a far-right agitator named Kyle Chapman became a hero to the alt-right after he reportedly pummeled an anti-fascist counterprotester with a billy club. Chapman was a 41-year-old who had two previous felony convictions. He proceeded to travel around the country, engaging in violence at other protests, now under the online moniker Based Stickman — a cheerful reference to the Berkeley attacks.

Chapman was one of a number of known white supremacists to align with the Proud Boys, a nationalist men’s movement founded in 2016 by the anti-immigrant “Western chauvinist” Gavin McInnes, a founder of Vice Media. There was also the Rise Above Movement (RAM), an alt-right group composed largely of ex-cons, many with ties to Southern California’s racist skinhead movement. Over the past two years, each group engaged in violent confrontations with their ideological enemies — a lengthy list including African-Americans, Jews, Muslims, nonwhite immigrants, members of the L.G.B.T. community and the progressive left — and generally escaped punishment. This changed to a degree over the past few weeks when, after a yearlong campaign by journalists at ProPublica and other media outlets, federal prosecutors filed charges against eight members of RAM, including two of its leaders. Similarly, after a pressure campaign on social media, the New York Police Department arrested and charged six members of the Proud Boys in connection with an assault after a speech by McInnes at a Republican club in Manhattan on Oct. 12. On his podcast, McInnes noted that he has “a lot of support” in the N.Y.P.D. (The police commissioner denies this.)

In at least one instance, the police have in fact coordinated with far-right groups. In 2017, a law-enforcement official stationed at a rally in downtown Portland, Ore., turned to a member of a far-right militia group and asked for his assistance in cuffing a left-wing counterprotester, who had been tackled by a Proud Boy.

“This is what public demonstration looks like in an era when white nationalism isn’t on the fringes, but on the inside of the political mainstream,” says Brian Levin, a former New York City police officer who now leads the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University-San Bernardino. During the run-up to some of last year’s major events in places like Charlottesville or Berkeley, he notes, “there was an unending stream of violent themed chatter and an almost choreographed exchange of web threats between antagonists across wide geographic expanses” that earned barely a nod from law enforcement.

So there are two major issues: white supremacist terrorists are very often former military and/or law enforcement, and giving law enforcement any new powers to deal with domestic terrorists will be abused by the Trump regime with near absolute certainty.

The combination of the two, having both a wide community of people on the ground that sympathize and want to protect these terrorists for ideological reasons, and having a regime in place that prioritizes protecting those same people for political reasons, makes for a climate that perpetuates these attacks for the foreseeable future.

It will only get worse.

It's About Suppression, Con't

Once again, Republicans know full well that they win when as few people as possible vote, especially in midterm elections.  But we've seen a host of judicial rulings where the courts have stepped in and called the GOP out on their racist voter suppression, and that has happened now in Georgia as Secretary of State Brian Kemp, himself the GOP candidate for governor, now must answer for his efforts to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters.

Georgia must change its procedures to make it easier for some people flagged under the state’s restrictive “exact match” law to vote, a federal judge ruled Friday, dealing a blow to Republican gubernatorial candidate and Secretary of State Brian Kemp.

The “exact match” law flags voter registrations that are found to have discrepancies, such as a dropped hyphen, with other official identifications. Potential voters are allowed to settle the discrepancy by providing proof of identity.

But the state’s procedures under Kemp, whose office oversees elections, stipulated that those who had been flagged as potential noncitizens be cleared first by a deputy registrar when seeking to vote. In October, a coalition of civil rights groups sued him.

U.S. District Judge Eleanor L. Ross ruled Friday that the procedures were likely to result in the violation of voting rights for a large group of people and needed to be halted immediately. She said Kemp’s restrictions raised “grave concerns for the Court about the differential treatment inflicted on a group of individuals who are predominantly minorities."

The preliminary injunction she issued required the state to change its procedures immediately to allow those flagged, some 3,100 individuals, to prove their citizenship more easily, with a U.S. passport or similar documentation, and only to a poll manager. It also signaled that the coalition of civil rights groups that brought the case against Kemp would probably succeed should the lawsuit continue.

“With respect to Tuesday’s election, we deem this a total victory in our fight against Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s exact match scheme,” said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “Our goal in filing this lawsuit was to ensure that no eligible voter was unfairly denied the right to vote because of this discriminatory voter suppression effort."

And it worked, at least this time.  But with a Roberts Court now including  Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh as justices, expect a GOP voter suppression case to go before SCOTUS before the 2020 contest, with an outcome that will almost certainly mean that millions, if not tens of millions, will lose their right to vote.
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