How To Steal An Election, Con't

National Republicans are silent on the fact Rep. Mark Harris stole an election through fraudulent absentee ballots, they're counting on Harris to win the new election anyway and making all of it go away.  But the real problem is that Republicans have all but accused Democrats of stealing elections over the last decades, and when finally shown proof that it's Republicans committing election fraud, they don't care.

Republican politicians across the country have for years railed against the threat of voter fraud. Some have made unproven claims about how rampant it has become in order to pass voter ID laws and open sweeping investigations. The sanctity of the vote, they have said, must be protected at all costs.

But when a hard-fought congressional election in North Carolina — in which a Republican candidate appeared to narrowly beat his Democratic opponent — was overturned this week because of election fraud by a Republican political operative, the party was measured, and largely muted, in its response.

The state party chairman, Robin Hayes, issued a statement after officials ordered a new election calling the affair “a tremendously difficult situation for all involved.” National Republicans have been mostly mum. President Trump, who has made election fraud one of the hallmarks of his administration, was quiet on Twitter, although on Friday, facing reporters at the Oval Office, he condemned fraud — “all of it, and that includes North Carolina.”

Mark Harris, the Republican nominee, had eked out a 905-vote lead over Dan McCready. But the North Carolina Board of Elections refused to certify Mr. Harris as the winner and opened an investigation into irregularities. This week, the five-member board, made up of Republicans and Democrats, convened an evidentiary hearing in Raleigh at which witnesses described a voter-turnout effort that relied on the rogue collection of absentee ballots.

In several hours of testimony on Thursday, after his campaign acknowledged that it had withheld damning records from the board, Mr. Harris denied wrongdoing but also appeared to mislead regulators. He then surprised everyone by abandoning his claim to the Ninth Congressional District seat, which covers part of Charlotte and much of southeastern North Carolina.

Witnesses detailed how people working for a Harris campaign operative, L. McCrae Dowless Jr., had filled out parts of some absentee ballots and improperly collected others. On Friday, Lorrin Freeman, the district attorney in Wake County, said she could seek charges within weeks against Mr. Dowless and some of the people he hired.

“Obviously, it’s within the province of the grand jury as to whether they will return indictments,” Ms. Freeman said. “But do I anticipate there will be a criminal prosecution going forward? I do.”

State Republicans, who over the past few years have tightened voting laws and had fought to preserve Mr. Harris’s victory, were far less vociferous in denouncing voter fraud than they have been in the past.

That stands in marked contrast to 2016, when the state’s Republicans filed many complaints and claimed for a month that Roy Cooper, the Democrat who was elected governor that year, should not be seatedbecause rampant fraud had enabled his victory. The charge proved baseless.

Again, the GOP plan here is that Harris dodges charges, is quickly re-elected with some cash help from the national party screaming about SOCIALIST DEMOCRATS, and that once in office, he's shielded from attack.  After all, it worked for Duncan Hunter in California.  Hunter is still facing federal indictment for campaign embezzlement, but easily won reelection by calling his Democratic opponent a Muslim terrorist, and it worked.

There isn't any real reason to make me think NC Democrats have their act together enough for Dan McCready to win the seat in a special election, especially since I fully expect a gag order very soon from a Republican-friendly judge barring McCready's campaign from being able to mention the reason why there's a new election in the first place in any debates or campaign commercials.

It's entirely possible that Harris will win by an even larger margin...

The Second Civil War, Con't

One of the big moves by the right is to casually imply that allowing Mueller and/or the other investigations to complete and find criminal action is the right vowing that such an "illegal coup" justifies deadly mass violence against liberals, and those calls are now getting much louder.

On a disturbing episode of Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s “The Laura Ingraham Show Podcast” Thursday, guest Joe diGenova echoed the calls of some of the darkest parts of the far-right movement in the United States.

“We are in a civil war in this country,” diGenova, as first pointed out by Media Matters for America. “There’s two standards of justice, one for Democrats one for Republicans. The press is all Democrat, all liberal, all progressive, all left — they hate Republicans, they hate Trump. So the suggestion that there’s ever going to be civil discourse in this country for the foreseeable future in this country is over. It’s not going to be. It’s going to be total war. And as I say to my friends, I do two things — I vote and I buy guns.
One particularly odd fact about his claims is that they seemed to come out of nowhere. Ingraham had just ended a diatribe about how liberals supposedly shifted attention away from discussions about the imperiled Democratic leadership in Virginia government to allegations of a hate crime made by actor Jussie Smollett, who has since been arrested on charges of filing a false police report. It was a bizarre and twisted theory, completely out of line with reality. but it had nothing to do with a supposed “civil war.”

But for many on the fringes of the far right, casual talk about political divisions in the United States easily slips into discussions of open warfare and violence.

President Donald Trump, it should be noted, once announced that he was hiring diGenova for his legal team, but he never came on board.

It's not a coincidence that this is being said just hours after a white nationalist Coast Guard lieutenant was busted by the feds with a stockpile of firearms and ammo and a list of Democratic politicians and journalists to be murdered.

We already had a newsroom shot up in Maryland in the last year.  More are definitely going to follow.  And that's what they want, a Left too scared to resist any longer.  It won't take too many deaths for that to happen, either.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

The Trump regime is ending Planned Parenthood funding using a Title X "gag rule" barring any federal funds to be used by anyone that provides abortion services, meaning Planned Parenthood is out $60 million a year.

The Trump administration took aim at Planned Parenthood Friday, issuing a rule barring groups that provide abortions or abortion referrals from participating in the $286 million federal family planning program — a move expected to redirect tens of millions of dollars from the women’s health provider to faith-based groups.

The change means federally funded family planning clinics can no longer refer a patient for abortion and must maintain a “clear physical and financial separation” between services funded by the government and any organization that provides abortions or abortion referrals. Groups receiving money under the Title X program, which serves an estimated 4 million low-income women, were already prohibited from performing abortions with those funds.

The changes, which opponents vowed to challenge, were celebrated by social conservatives who oppose abortion and helped elect President Trump. Health and Human Services Department officials have said they were necessary to ensure transparency and the legal and ethical use of taxpayer funds.

The move represents “decisive action to disentangle taxpayers from the big abortion industry led by Planned Parenthood,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an antiabortion group, said in a statement.

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said Planned Parenthood and other abortion centers now have to choose between shuttering their abortion services or moving them if they want to continue to receive federal funds. “Either way, this will loosen the group’s hold on tens of millions of tax dollars,” he said.

Critics, including 15 governors and the American Medical Association, decried the change as a “gag rule” that would undermine the physician-patient relationship and threatened legal action to block it from taking effect. They have also described it as an indirect way to defund Planned Parenthood, which has long been a target of antiabortion activists as the nation’s largest provider of reproductive care services.

New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) tweeted that the new rule is “dangerous & unnecessary,” putting millions of Americans at risk, and that the state would take legal action.

So immediately this fight is going to happen, and an injunction sought.  But as with the ban on Muslims entering the country, the Supreme Court will get the final say.

I'm not sure at all this won't be the end of Planned Parenthood, and a fatal blow to the remaining abortion clinics in the country.