Last Call For The Big Lie, Con't

Republicans don't want free and fair elections, they want elections where they control the election process and they always win, and anyone who doesn't go along with creating false election results is punished.

A local Republican Party leader in North Carolina threatened to get a county elections director fired or have her pay cut unless she helped him gain illegal access to voting equipment, the state elections board told Reuters.

The party official, William Keith Senter, sought evidence to support false conspiracy theories alleging the 2020 election was rigged against former U.S. President Donald Trump. The previously unreported incident is part of a national effort by Trump supporters to audit voting systems to bolster the baseless stolen-election claims.

Senter, chair of the Surry County Republican Party, told elections director Michella Huff that he would ensure she lost her job if she refused his demand to access the county's vote tabulators, the North Carolina State Board of Elections said in written responses to questions from Reuters. Senter was "aggressive, threatening, and hostile," in two meetings with Huff, the state elections board said, citing witness accounts.

Senter did not respond to requests for comment.

Huff, who refused Senter's demands, was disturbed by the incident of political intimidation. Such threats have become common nationwide since the 2020 election. Reuters has documented more than 900 threatening or hostile messages aimed at election officials in a series of investigative reports.

"It’s a shame, that it is being normalized," Huff told Reuters. "I didn’t expect to get it here in our county. We are just trying to do our job by the law."

Senter's demands are a potential violation of state law. In a legal memo responding to community calls for a "forensic audit" of voting machines, Mark Payne, an attorney retained by the Surry County Board of Elections, wrote this week that it was illegal to provide access to voting machines to unauthorized individuals. Anyone threatens or intimidates an election officer could also face felony charges, according to a state statute.

Senter and a prominent pro-Trump election conspiracist, Douglas Frank, met with Huff on March 28, claiming “there was a 'chip' in the voting machines that pinged a cellular phone tower on Nov. 3, 2020, and somehow influenced election results," the state election board said, calling the claim “fabricated disinformation.” Separately, in a public gathering that Huff did not attend, Senter threatened to have Huff's pay cut, according to Huff, who said a person at the meeting told her about the threat.

Two days before meeting with Huff, Frank gave a speech in Dobson, a town in the rural county of 72,000 people on the northern border with Virginia, where he spoke about "debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 election," the board said. The day after the meeting, Frank, an Ohio math teacher, thanked his "patriot" hosts in a post to the messaging app Telegram about his trip to North Carolina and said he was "leaving behind a bonfire burning in good hands.”

Frank did not respond to requests for comment. 

 

Multiple state GOP parties are controlled by people who believe there was massive election fraud in their state, even in the states Trump won. The fact that red state Democrats exist is proof enough of widespread fraud, you see. And they'll do anything to "find" this fraud.

And if you think anyone in these state parties will be punished, you're fooling yourself. Meanwhile, ground beef is $5 a pound, so we're apparently going to hand the country right back to the people who believe democracies are a nuisance on the way to fascism.

As of this writing, redistricting remains incomplete in Florida, Missouri, and New Hampshire. However, for the sake of argument, let’s assume the following: 1. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) gets his way, and Republican state legislators approve his recently proposed map, where we’d rate 20 districts at least leaning Republican and 8 at least leaning Democratic; 2. Missouri eventually adopts a map that preserves 6 Republican-leaning seats and 2 Democratic-leaning ones; and 3. New Hampshire passes a map with 1 Democratic-leaning seat and 1 Toss-up.

If that happens, and no other state maps change due to legal action, here would be our topline ratings: 210 seats would be rated Safe, Likely, or Leans Republican, 198 would be rated Safe, Likely, or Leans Democratic, and 27 would be rated as Toss-ups.

Given the political environment, we’d expect Republicans to do quite well among the Toss-up races. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, they win 20 of the 27. That would result in a 230-205 Republican House, or a net gain of 17 from what Republicans won in 2020.

To be honest, that seems a little light in terms of Republican gains. If we had to guess, today, what Republicans would net in the House, we’d probably pick a number in the 20s. So that means our ratings are probably at least a little bit friendlier to Democrats than perhaps they should be. However, we do have several more seats rated Leans Democratic (15) compared to Leans Republican (8), which is one way of indicating how the playing field could grow. On the other hand, our ratings also reflect the possibility of a Democratic comeback in which they limit Republican advances.

Still, don’t be surprised to see more House updates from us later this year in which all or nearly all of the changes are in favor of Republicans. It’s just that kind of cycle, at least for the time being.

 

For the love of God, fight back or die.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Another court filing by the January 6th Committee has revealed more devastating evidence against sitting GOP members of Congress and their role in participating in the conspiracy to overthrow the American government.

Republican members of Congress were heavily involved in calls and meetings with former President Donald Trump and his top aides as they devised a strategy to overturn the election in December 2020, according to new evidence filed in federal court late Friday.

Deposition excerpts filed by the Jan 6. select committee — part of an effort to force former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to appear for an interview — suggest that some of Trump’s top allies in Congress were frequently present in meetings where a handful of strategies to prevent then-President-elect Joe Biden from taking office were discussed, including efforts to replace the leadership of the Justice Department with figures who would sow doubts about the legitimacy of the election.

Lawmakers who attended meetings, in person or by phone, included Reps. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and numerous members of the House Freedom Caucus, according to Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Meadows who provided key testimony about the conversations and meetings Meadows had in December 2020.

The new evidence underscores the expansive cast of elected Republicans who had ultimately enlisted themselves in Trump’s last-ditch effort to cling to power. Members traded theories about ways to push then-Vice President Mike Pence to single-handedly stop Biden’s election, they parried with the White House Counsel’s Office on the boundaries of the law regarding presidential electors and they met directly with Pence’s staff to encourage him to take direct action on Jan. 6, when Congress convened to count electoral votes.

“They felt that he had the authority to — pardon me if my phrasing isn’t correct on this, but — send votes back to the States or the electors back to the States,” Hutchinson recalled.

The disclosure came as part of a Friday evening court filing by the select panel asking a federal court to throw out Meadows’ lawsuit against the committee. In the filing, the select committee revealed that Meadows turned over 2,319 text messages during a brief period of cooperation but withheld more than 1,000, citing various privileges.

“[H]e was not acting as anything like a typical White House Chief of Staff advising the President on official matters of government policy,” House General Counsel Doug Letter wrote. “Mr. Meadows was playing a campaign role, attempting to facilitate a strategy that would have reversed the certified results of the 2020 election.”

The committee indicated that Meadows told Jordan in a text message that he supported efforts to convince Pence to send the election back to the states.

“I have pushed for this. Not sure it is going to happen,” Meadows texted Jordan early in the morning on Jan. 6.

Some of the GOP lawmakers were present in December meetings, Hutchinson recalled, when members of the White House Counsel’s Office raised significant legal doubts about a plan for pro-Trump activists to submit “alternate” electors in states won by Joe Biden.

Others attended a Dec. 21 meeting where Rudy Giuliani, then the president’s personal lawyer, and some associates advocated a plan for Pence to unilaterally refuse to count Biden’s electors and instead send the election back to various GOP-controlled state legislatures to replace Biden’s electors with Trump’s.

 

The conspiracy to defraud the United State and overthrow the government, sedition, is right there in the open, folks. We know it happened because it's still happening. These same people are trying to remove Biden and all Democrats from power. 

The question remains what we choose to do about it. Because if the answer is "nothing" then the days of MAGA bloodshed and violence will only get exponentially worse.

A man was arrested this week for threatening violence over the dictionary definition of “female,” the latest indication of where things are headed in this moment of homophobic and transphobic hate.

According to the Department of Justice, 34-year-old Californian Jeremy David Hanson sent threatening messages to Springfield, Massachusetts-based Merrimack-Webster through the dictionary’s online contact form.

“[Your] headquarters should be shot up and bombed,” Hanson wrote. ”It is sickening that you have caved to the cultural Marxist, anti-science tranny [sic] agenda and altered the definition of ‘female’ as part of the Left’s efforts to corrupt and degrade the English language and deny reality. You evil Marxists should all be killed. It would be poetic justice to have someone storm your offices and shoot up the place, leaving none of you commies alive.”

There’s good reason to take threats like Hanson’s seriously. Street violence against the LGBTQ community is increasing at a time when attempts to marginalize and dehumanize them at the legislative level are snowballing.

In Morrisville, Vermont earlier this month, a trans woman named Fern Feather was stabbed to death; the killing came after escalated anti-trans rhetoric from state GOP leaders (who have since blamed the killing on “defund the police”).

A Florida family beat the boyfriend of their youngest son nearly to death and blinded him—teachers in the state are banned from telling children about the very existence of gay and trans people. The state’s Health Department issued guidance recommending against people under the age of 18 transitioning, even socially; a bill in Missouri (one of a series of laws proposed around the country) would make giving gender-affirming treatment punishable by law.

What Republican want is power, and the ability to used armed force against those out of power to keep them there forever. We're getting closer to that breaking point every day.

A Border Line Jackass

Even Texas Republicans are starting to point the finger at GOP Gov. Greg Abbott, whose week-long pre-Easter truck inspection border stunt cost the state of Texas billions of dollars.

Gov. Greg Abbott increasing inspections of commercial trucks entering from Mexico in the hopes of staunching illegal smuggling activity resulted in zero migrants detentions or illegal drug seizures, despite allegedly costing the Lone Star State billions of dollars.

Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller stated in an email to supporters this week that the enhanced truck inspections cost Texas consumers and businesses an estimated $4.3 billion "despite not catching a single illegal alien or confiscating a single gram of illegal drugs."

"However, Governor Abbott successfully persuaded Mexico states to enhance security on their side of the border," Miller added. "Both of these things are true at the same time."

The Texas Tribune reports that over an eight-day period beginning on April 8, troopers conducted more than 1,400 truck inspections. Despite no drugs being discovered, troopers managed to take 850 trucks off the road for various equipment violations, including under-inflated tires, broken turn signals and oil leaks.

The inspections also created a backlog of 18-wheelers on both sides of the border, with some truckers reporting waiting more than 30 hours for a process that typically takes three hours, according to the Dallas Morning News. The delays resulted in $240 million in spoiled produce and empty shelves at local markets.

Miller's estimate roughly coincides with findings released by The Perryman Group, a Waco-based economic analysis firm, which estimates the delays cost the state $4.2 billion in gross domestic product and the U.S. nearly $9 billion in GDP.

Abbott ordered the enhanced truck inspections in response to President Joe Biden ending Title 42, a border policy that allowed federal agents to quickly deport migrants attempting to enter the country citing COVID-19 restrictions. Last week, the Republican leader called off the inspection initiative after signing agreements with leaders of four Mexican states that border Texas who said they would increase border security measures.

Despite the economic impacts of shutting down traffic at the border, Abbott isn't ruling out reinstating the policy. Asked about the impacts during a roundtable with law enforcement in San Antonio Thursday, Abbott responded, "Obviously there are concerns about the economy but there are even larger concerns about the unabated immigration that the Biden administration is promoting."

 

There's no doubt in my mind that Abbott will do this again.  He's learned that he can damage the economy, make national news, blame Biden for it, and suffer no consequences for doing so, and that he can basically do it at will. And considering the number of Democrats now openly running against Biden ending Title 42, he knows he can use it to put House and Senate Democrats on the spot this fall.

No, Abbott now knows he can do ten billion dollars in economic damage a week with a stroke of his pen. He'll use that ability again and again and again to hurt as many people as possible until the White House gives him whatever he wants.

Terrorism, you see.