Last Call For Louisiana Blues For The Blue Team

Democrats have done pretty well in 2023's special elections, but as we're now only a few weeks away from Election Day, political gravity is reasserting itself in a painful way in red states like Louisiana.

 

Attorney General Jeff Landry, a Republican backed by former President Donald Trump, has won the Louisiana governor’s race, holding off a crowded field of candidates.

The win is a major victory for the GOP as they reclaim the governor’s mansion for the first time in eight years. Landry will replace current Gov. John Bel Edwards, who was unable to seek reelection due to consecutive term limits. Edwards is the only Democratic governor in the Deep South.

“Today’s election says that our state is united,” Landry said during his victory speech Saturday night. “It’s a wake up call and it’s a message that everyone should hear loud and clear, that we the people in this state are going to expect more out of our government from here on out.”

By garnering more than half of the votes, Landry avoided an expected runoff under the state’s “jungle primary” system. The last time there wasn’t a gubernatorial runoff in Louisiana was in 2011 and 2007, when Bobby Jindal, a Republican, won the state’s top position.

The governor-elect, who celebrated with supporters during a watch party in Broussard, Louisiana, described the election as “historic.”

Landry, 52, has raised the profile of attorney general since taking office in 2016. He has used his office to champion conservative policy positions. More recently, Landry has been in the spotlight over his involvement and staunch support of Louisiana laws that have drawn much debate, including banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender youths, the state’s near-total abortion ban that doesn’t have exceptions for cases of rape and incest, and a law restricting youths’ access to “sexually explicit material” in libraries, which opponents fear will target LGBTQ+ books.

Landry has repeatedly clashed with Edwards over matters in the state, including LGBTQ rights, state finances and the death penalty. However the Republican has also repeatedly put Louisiana in national fights, including over President Joe Biden’s policies that limit oil and gas production and COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

 

People forget that while Bobby Jindal is now a national punchline and the ultimate has-been who never was in Republican politics, the guy did outright win the state's jungle primary for governor twice, and he won easily. 

Current Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards has been the only thing stopping Louisiana from becoming as red as a boiled crawfish, and that's going to be a painful experience for the poorer parts of the state in the years ahead, especially in NOLA and Baton Rouge.

Hopefully we'll have a better outcome here in Kentucky next month.

Let's Make A Deal: Georgia Edition

The wheelin' and dealin' in the Peach State continues after the dam broke with the first of Trump's Georgia election fraud co-conspirators cutting a deal last week. More are now expected to follow.

Fulton County prosecutors are floating plea deals to a number of defendants in the election interference case involving former President Donald Trump, according to people with knowledge of the proposals.

At least a handful of the now 18 defendants have received offers from the District Attorney’s office — or prosecutors have touched base with their attorneys to gauge their general interest in striking a deal for a reduced charge in exchange for their cooperation, according to the legal sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive ongoing negotiations.

It’s common for prosecutors to float plea deals to lower-level defendants in large racketeering cases as they home in on their biggest targets. Trump and his former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani face the most charges in the 41-count indictment, which centers on efforts to overturn the results of Georgia’s 2020 presidential election.

Late last week, Atlanta bail bondsman Scott Hall became the first defendant to accept a deal, pleading guilty to five misdemeanor counts in exchange for his testimony.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has learned that Fulton prosecutors have also offered a deal to Michael Roman, who worked as director of Election Day operations for the Trump campaign in 2020. A member of Roman’s legal team told The AJC they rejected the DA’s proposal and that no agreement has been reached.

”We’re maintaining our client’s innocence,” the legal team member said.

People who were indicted for their alleged roles in the appointment of a slate of Trump electors, election data breach in Coffee County and harassment of Fulton poll worker Ruby Freeman have also been approached by prosecutors, according to multiple sources. In the case of at least two of those defendants, no concrete offer has been made.

“It’s kind of a dance,” said John Banzhaf, a professor of public interest law at George Washington University who is closely tracking the case.

“Basically, the first person who flips always gets the best deal. The next one who comes along probably will get a deal that’s almost as good,” he said. “But at a certain point the addition of an extra person… is less important (to prosecutors)… so they’re not going to get as good a deal.”

A spokesman for DA Fani Willis declined to comment. It’s unclear how many defendants have tentatively accepted prosecutors’ offers. The AJC reached out to lawyers for each of the 18 remaining defendants for this story.

Fani's crew makes the deals, and they roll over on Rudy and Trump. For all the shouting about Trump being the House GOP circus's new ringmaster, it's gonna be hard for him to do much from an Atlanta jail cell. 

Stay tuned. I'm betting more deals get announced soon.

Last Call For The NC GOP Just Stole Your Vote

The most horrifying result of the defection of Democratic state Rep. Tricia Cotham to the NC GOP, giving Republicans a veto-proof supermajority in the General Assembly over Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper has just made itself clear: Republicans in the legislature can now determine the winner in every single election in the state.

North Carolina Republicans on Friday passed a major power grab, stripping the state’s Democratic governor of the authority to appoint a majority of members to state and county election boards and giving the heavily gerrymandered GOP legislature far more influence over how elections are run and certified in the battleground state.

In North Carolina, the governor dictates the political makeup of the state and county election boards, which are each composed of five members. Under Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, the boards have three Democrats and two Republicans. The governor appoints the members of the state board and the chair of the county boards. Under the new bill, those bodies would be evenly divided, with legislative leaders choosing the members of the state and local boards.

While that is theoretically more bipartisan, it is a recipe for gridlock that could hand sweeping new powers to Republicans in the legislature, who have a supermajority in both chambers due to the gerrymandered maps they drew in 2021.

If the state election board deadlocks and cannot certify a winner of an election, that power would instead go to the legislature. That means Republicans could determine the state’s presidential electors and potentially subvert the popular vote winner of the state if a Democrat carries North Carolina. “The legislature now gets to decide the outcome of all of our elections,” says Melissa Price Kromm, executive director of North Carolina Voters for Clean Elections, a pro-democracy coalition in the state. “When people vote is the will of the people still going to be accepted in North Carolina?” (State and federal courts could still order that elections be certified, and in presidential elections the legislature would need to comply with the revamped Electoral Count Act passed by Congress in 2021, which makes it harder for rogue legislatures to overturn the will of the voters.)

The bill also makes it easier to overturn elections in another way: only five of eight members of the new state board need to vote in favor of redoing an election, compared to four out of five members under the previous law (the board would grow in size from five members to eight under the new bill).

In addition to subverting fair election outcomes, the bill could lead to a huge decrease in voter access as well. Local election boards currently determine the number of early voting sites in a county, but if those boards deadlock under the new legislation there would only be one early voting location per county. That would dramatically limit the number of early voting sites in large urban counties that favor Democrats, leading to much longer lines at the polls. In 2020, for example, Wake County, home to Raleigh, had 20 early voting sites used by 374,000 voters, according to WRAL News. “There would only be one early voting location in counties with more than a million people,” says Price Kromm. “Can you imagine how long the lines would be?”

More than half of North Carolinians used early voting in 2022 and Democrats were more likely to cast a ballot that way. “In the state’s 2022 Senate race, writes Daniel Walton of Bolts magazine, “in-person early voters favored Democratic candidate Cheri Beasley by five percentage points, even as she lost the election overall by more than three percentage points to Republican Ted Budd.”

That’s not all. The legislation could also lead to the ouster of the current executive director of the state board of elections, Karen Brinson Bell, who is widely respected but has been targeted by election deniers for extending the deadline for returning mail ballots during the pandemic. If the state board cannot come to an agreement on the board’s executive director by July 15, 2024, Republicans in the legislature would get to make the selection, allowing them to put in place someone who is more allied with the GOP just months before the 2024 election.

And thanks to the villainous Tricia Cotham, the NC GOP has the margin to overturn Gov. Cooper's veto of the plan.  The state Senate has already passed the bill, and if Cooper's veto is overridden, North Carolina ceases to become a democracy.

Understand that there's not a reason to pass this bill other than to steal elections. It's specifically designed to allow Republicans to deadlock a county or state election board and have the legislature name the winner. Who or what will stop Nc Republicans from declaring the party's candidate the winner in every single election in the state?

What are Democrats in NC going to do about this? Because if the answer isn't "fight this until they win" then democracy is 100% lost in my home state.

Last Call For Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

A federal judge has determined that Florida's congressional redistricting by Republicans is unconstitutional and that it disenfranchises Black voters in particular.

 

A Florida redistricting plan pushed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis violates the state constitution and is prohibited from being used for any future U.S. congressional elections since it diminishes the ability of Black voters in north Florida to pick a representative of their choice, a state judge ruled Saturday.

Circuit Judge J. Lee Marsh sent the plan back to the Florida Legislature with instructions that lawmakers should draw a new congressional map that complies with the Florida Constitution.

The voting rights groups that challenged the plan in court "have shown that the enacted plan results in the diminishment of Black voters' ability to elect their candidate of choice in violation of the Florida Constitution," Marsh wrote.

The decision was the latest to strike down new congressional maps in Southern states over concerns that they diluted Black voting power.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Republican-drawn map in Alabama, with two conservative justices joining liberals in rejecting the effort to weaken a landmark voting rights law. Not long after that, the Supreme Court lifted its hold on a Louisiana political remap case, increasing the likelihood that the Republican-dominated state will have to redraw boundary lines to create a second mostly Black congressional district.

In each of the cases, Republicans have either appealed or vowed to appeal the decisions since they could benefit Democratic congressional candidates facing 2024 races under redrawn maps. The Florida case likely will end up before the Florida Supreme Court.

 

Anyone who has been paying attention to these states knows what I'm going to be asking next: 

 

What difference does it make? 

Ohio Republicans already ran out the clock once on redistricting after the Ohio Supreme Court ruled against their redistricting plan multiple times, and the right-wing Trumpists on the federal courts basically ruled that flawed or not, Ohio had to use those unconstitutional districts or else risk disenfranchising the entire state without representation, and Republicans in the Buckeye State have made no efforts to fix the problem since.

 

Ohio Republicans are so corrupt that former state House GOP Speaker Larry Householder was convicted on bribery charges and sentenced to 20 years in prison, where he's serving out his sentence in a low-security federal prison in Elkton, Ohio.

 

There's a plan to get yet another redistricting amendment on the state ballot in 2024 that would abolish all lobbyists and politicians from the commission that would handle the new process, but even if that passes, there's no reason to believe the process would be fixed for 2026.

In Alabama, Republicans in the state legislature are openly ignoring a Supreme Court order to redraw the lines and are almost certainly going to get away with it.

 

Although Justice Brett Kavanaugh provided the fifth vote against Alabama’s maps in Milligan, he also wrote a brief and cryptic concurring opinion that seemed to suggest that the results test must have a sunset date. “Even if Congress in 1982 could constitutionally authorize race-based redistricting under §2 for some period of time,” Kavanaugh wrote, “the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.”

The Alabama GOP’s open defiance of the Court’s decision in Milligan suggests that it thinks it has a real shot of picking up Kavanaugh’s vote if this case goes up to the Supreme Court a second time. And this Court has shown such hostility toward the Voting Rights Act in the past that there is a decent chance that Alabama’s second attempt to gerrymander the state could prevail.

 

Wisconsin's GOP gerrymander is so bad that Republicans there are planning to fire the head of the state's non-partisan redistricting commission and then impeach the liberal state supreme court justice elected earlier this year, leaving the court deadlocked at 3-3 with no way forward and no way to continue with redistricting.

With a new supermajority, Republicans in the state Senate are moving to fire Meagan Wolfe, the administrator of the nonpartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission who continues to be the target of false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

Democrats say Republicans don’t have the power to remove Wolfe. Their battle could land in state courts – where the GOP is considering an unprecedented power grab and further partisan battles are brewing.

Just months after liberal Justice Janet Protasiewicz won a 10-year Wisconsin Supreme Court term in a race that focused largely on abortion rights and gerrymandering, handing liberals a 4-3 majority on the bench after 15 years of conservative control, state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and other influential Republicans have floated the prospect of impeaching Protasiewicz. It would be a move that has only happened once in Wisconsin history – in 1853, when the Assembly voted to impeach a state judge accused of corruption, who was later acquitted by the Senate.

Further complicating the situation: Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, a Republican, has said the chamber would not consider acting on Protasiewicz. If the Assembly votes to impeach the justice and the Senate were to convict and remove her from office, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers would appoint her replacement. But if the Senate takes no action at all, she would be suspended from all official duties – leaving the court deadlocked, 3-3.

Canon described that potential course of action as “an even more diabolical twist.”

“This is actually a more potent tool to dismantle the liberal majority by having an impeachment vote in the Assembly, which is just a majority vote, and then having the Senate do nothing. She basically is removed from office and can’t rule on any cases,” he said.

Meanwhile, the justices themselves are ensnared in a bitter, public feud – playing out before Protasiewicz has even ruled on a case. The conservative chief justice, Annette Ziegler, accused the liberal majority of a “coup” after the court’s four liberal members voted to weaken the chief justice’s powers and fire the conservative director of state courts.

 

Wisconsin is so gerrymandered that Republicans have a two-thirds supermajority in the state House and Senate while only getting 51% of the vote in November 2020, and it only got worse in 2022.

 

There's no reason whatsoever to believe Florida Republicans won't get away with this in 2024 and beyond. 

The Big Lie, Con't

Yet another county elections official in a Biden 2020 swing state has been run out of town on a rail by slobbering MAGA chuds threatening them and their family over the Big Lie.

 

An Arizona county elections director quit Tuesday, accusing the local elections department of caving to "a faction of the Republican party" and failing to protect her from "intimidation."

"I have watched as you idly stood by when I was attacked," Geraldine Roll, the Pinal County elections director, wrote in an email to the county's manager, Leo Lew.

Roll added that she has been “subject to ridicule, disrespect, intimidation” and “cannot work for an individual that does not support me.”

In an interview with Pinal Central, which first reported the email, Roll emphasized the fraught nature of her departure. She said she had "quit," rather than "resigned," adding: "I think there's a big difference."

In her email, Roll also alleged that the elections department had become politicized, arguing that the office has departed from "impartiality" and "common sense" in favor of "extremist" rhetoric catered toward "a faction of the Republican party."

"Clearly, politics are the value this administration desires in a place where politics have no place: election administration," Roll wrote. "With no regrets, I quit."

A Pinal County spokesperson has confirmed the email’s contents to NBC News.

In a statement, Lew thanked Roll for her "service during very challenging times."

"Although I disagree with her assessment, she has been an impactful public servant, and I wish her the best and know that she will continue to do great things in her career," Lew said.

The election director's resignation is the latest in a string of headwinds to hit the Pinal County Election Department. Last year, the department mailed roughly 63,000 defunct ballots to voters about a month before the primary election, when some polling places were faced with a ballot shortage.

Since the 2020 election, the Department of Justice has received a growing number of reports of threats to election workers.

 

Republicans don't want elections. They lose them.

 

So they are driving out all the people who run them.

A Supreme Week From Hell, Con't

The good news: the "independent state legislature" theory is dead and buried after a 6-3 SCOTUS decision today authored by Chief Justice Roberts. The bad news is the NC GOP is likely to redraw an even worse, more gerrymandered map that favors the GOP and will cost Democrats two or more House seats in 2024.

 

The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to impose new limits on state courts reviewing certain election-related issues by ruling against Republicans in North Carolina fighting for a congressional district map that would heavily favor their candidates.

The justices ruled on a 6-3 vote that the North Carolina Supreme Court was acting within its authority in concluding that the map constituted a partisan gerrymander under the state constitution.

In doing so, the court declined to embrace a hitherto obscure legal argument called the “independent state legislature” theory, which Republicans say limits state court authority to strike down certain election laws enacted by state legislatures.

After the then-Democratic-controlled state Supreme Court issued the ruling last year, the court flipped to Republican control following November's mid-term elections and recently overturned the decision, a move that prompted questions about whether the justices even needed to decide the case.

The congressional map in North Carolina will be re-drawn ahead of the 2024 election anyway because of a state law provision that says interim maps can only be used for one election cycle. As a result of the North Carolina Supreme Court’s ruling, that map is likely to tilt heavily toward Republicans.

The independent state legislature argument hinges on language in the Constitution that says election rules “shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.”

Supporters of the theory, which has never been endorsed by the Supreme Court, say the language supports the notion that, when it comes to federal election rules, legislatures have ultimate power under state law, potentially irrespective of potential constraints imposed by state constitutions.

A Supreme Court ruling that embraced the theory would have affected not only redistricting disputes, but also other election-related rules about issues like mail-in voting and voter access to the polls that legislatures might seek to enact even when state courts have held that those rules violate state constitutions. The theory could also bring into question the power of governors to veto legislation.

Then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist embraced a version of the theory in the Bush v. Gore ruling issued later in 2000, which ultimately led to Republican George W. Bush’s taking office as president. During December's oral argument, several justices cited Rehnquist’s opinion, which did not secure a majority at the time, in support of the notion that there should be some constraints on the scope of state officials, including judges, to make changes to election laws enacted by legislatures that are not anchored in law.

The independent state legislature theory has subsequently been cited by supporters of former President Donald Trump in various cases during the 2020 presidential election and its aftermath.

The North Carolina case was being closely watched for its potential impact on the 2024 presidential election.

 

Roberts stepping in himself here to put an end to this nonsense is definitely one of those "I'm not going to go down as the villain in history!" kind of efforts, even though it's largely too late for that. Still, with both the NC state legislature and state Supreme Court firmly in the hands of the GOP, expect the 7-7 party split in the US House to become 10-4 or even 11-3 GOP in 2024. Your state's gerrymander will depend on whom you elect to run your state.

The real issue though is that Roberts does leave the door open for federal review of state Supreme Court rulings on gerrymanders in "extraordinary" cases. That could be very important down the line and it's going to be tested sooner rather than later. We're not out of the woods yet.

 

Also, the Chief Justice rules that states are bound by their constitutions as far as electors go, so the Trumpian theory of "alternate slates of electors" also gets tossed into the trash can.

Oh, and Clarence Thomas's dissent is just two dozen pages of whinging. Fuck him.

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

Georgia officials have finally cleared the two Black women election officials in Fulton County that Donald Trump accused of election fraud, finding no evidence that either woman committed any wrongdoing in 2020.

 

State officials have formally dismissed two high-profile claims of election fraud stemming from the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.

Investigators found no wrongdoing in a complaint against two Fulton County election workers whose lives were upended when former President Donald Trump falsely accused them of fraud. In a separate complaint, they also found no evidence of “pristine ballots” that fueled suspicions of election fraud.

The conclusions in the final investigation reports echo what the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office has been saying for two years and a half years – that it found no evidence to support allegations of rampant fraud in these and other cases. But the State Election Board formally dismissed both complaints Tuesday, bringing to a close investigations of some of Trump’s most sensational claims.

The first case involved allegations of election fraud against Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, the mother and daughter captured in an infamous video from State Farm Arena on election night. Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani played portions of the video to Georgia lawmakers in December 2020, claiming it was “smoking gun” evidence of election fraud.

It wasn’t. Investigators from the FBI, the GBI and the secretary of state’s office interviewed election workers and reviewed hours of video. They determined the video showed normal ballot counting.

What’s more, the FBI interviewed the person who created a fake Instagram account that appeared to contain a post by Freeman admitting she conspired to influence the election results. The creator of the account confirmed the content was fake.

“All allegations made against Freeman and Moss were unsubstantiated and found to have no merit,” the investigation report concluded.

Freeman and Moss endured death threats and other harassment because of the false claims. They have filed defamation lawsuits against people and organizations that spread the allegations and have already recovered a settlement from One America News Network. Lawsuits against Giuliani and the Gateway Pundit are still pending.

“This serves as further evidence that Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss – while doing their patriotic duty and serving their community – were simply collateral damage in a coordinated effort to undermine the results of the 2020 presidential election,” one of their attorneys, Von DuBose, said of the investigation report. “Lies about Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss have been proven false over and over again, and those who perpetuate them should be held accountable.”

 

Donald Trump personally ruined the lives of these two Black women because he knew he'd get away with it. An entire conspiracy to try to generate fake evidence sprang up upon Trump's command. I hope the defamation suits break him.

 

I hope the Georgia election fraud RICO case that Fulton County DA Fani Willis is bringing adds decades to his prison time, and that she rounds up multiple members of his inner circle -- and the corrupt Georgia GOP as well.

Last Call For The Big Lie, Con't

The Big Lie about the 2020 election continues unabated.

 

Three-in-10 Americans still believe President Joe Biden won his 2020 election only due to voter fraud, a new poll shows — a durable number that highlights the disconnect on one of the foundational issues facing American democracy.

A new Monmouth poll finds 30% of respondents believe Biden's victory came thanks to voter fraud, while 59% say he won the election "fair and square." That share is virtually unchanged in Monmouth's polling since November of 2020 — the share of Americans who believe it remained between 32% and 29%.

There remains no evidence that widespread fraud substantially affected the outcome of the 2020 election, and virtually all of the dozens of legal cases filed by former President Donald Trump and allies were dismissed or withdrawn. But despite that, Trump has continued to repeat his claims the election was stolen from him, accusations elevated by other prominent allies along the way.

Virtually all Democrats (93%) say Biden won the election fairly, a view shared by 58% of independents. Just 21% of Republicans believe Biden won his election fair and square, while 68% say he won "due to voter fraud."

That's very similar to Monmouth's findings in the weeks after the 2020 election, when 18% of Republicans, 67% of independents and 95% of Democrats said Biden's election victory was fair.

While there has been only small movement among Republicans on the question of the 2020 election's legitimacy, Monmouth finds more significant movement on questions related to the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Forty-four percent of Republicans say it's appropriate to describe the events that occurred that day as a "riot," down from 62% in June of 2021. And only 15% of Republicans say it's appropriate to describe the events as an "insurrection," down from 33% in June of 2021.

 

This won't change anytime soon.  Republicans will continue to swear that 2020 was stolen from them, and that belief will be used to justify a lot of things in the weeks and months ahead.

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

Texas Republicans have removed election functions from Harris County, home of Houston and 4.8 million Texans, and granted those powers to Secretary of State Jane Nelson, setting the county and one-sixth of the state's citizens to be disenfranchised in future elections.

Texas Republicans wound down their regular legislative session Sunday by changing election policies for a single populous Democratic stronghold but not other parts of the state.

The measure gives the secretary of state under certain conditions the power to run elections in Harris County, home to Houston and 4.8 million residents. It follows a bill approved days earlier that shifts the oversight of elections from its appointed elections administrator to the county clerk and county assessor.

Harris County officials at a news conference last week said they would bring a lawsuit challenging the measures as soon as Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signs them into law.

“These bills are not about election reform,” said Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the county’s chief executive. “They’re not about improving voters’ experience. They are entirely about suppressing voters’ voices. The reasoning behind these bills is nothing but a cynical charade.”

Also over recent days, the Republican-controlled legislature passed bills increasing penalties for illegal voting and likely setting the stage for the state to withdraw from the Electronic Registration Information Center. The center was formed in 2012 to help states maintain accurate voter rolls, identify instances of potential fraud and contact people so they can register to vote. More than half the states belong to the consortium, but some Republican-run states have bolted from it over the last year as election deniers have spread false information about its work.

Critics are concerned about how the two bills affecting Harris County will interact with one another. One bill requires the county to change who oversees its elections starting Sept. 1, just weeks before Houston holds its election for mayor.

The quick transition could easily lead to problems, opponents of the measure say. If problems do occur, Secretary of State Jane Nelson could use the provisions of the other newly passed bill to oversee elections in Harris County. That would mean Nelson, a former state senator appointed as secretary of state by Abbott, would be in charge of the 2024 presidential election for the county.

And if Nelson did not believe that the new officials in charge of elections — Harris County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth and County Assessor Ann Harris Bennett — had rectified problems, she could initiate legal proceedings to remove them from office under the legislation. Local officials said it would be unjust to allow the secretary of state the power to take action against two Black women but not those who hold equivalent positions in the state’s 253 other counties.

Under the bill, Nelson could oversee elections in Harris County if she found “good cause to believe that a recurring pattern of problems with election administration or voter registration exists in the county.” She would get to sign off on all of the county’s election procedures and could install members of her staff in Harris County offices.

 

The bill is of course designed to make Harris County elections fail so that Republicans can simply remove county elected officials (who just happen to be Democrats) and to replace them with Republican state officials. Of course, this only applies to Texas's most populous county, setting up a situation where the Secretary of State can annul and overturn any elections in the county because of "irregularities" and disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters without anything more than a whim. 

Near-permanent one-party rule is the goal, where any Democrats elected in Harris County would have their elections thrown out. It's what fascist states like Texas do.

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

Leaving county school and election boards and other local offices to the MAGA CHUDs mean you don't get these offices, or the services they provide, back. The goal is to drive everyone with a brain cell out of local civil service until they control everything, and then shut all of the local services -- schools, libraries, and elections -- down for good. A perfect example is Buckingham County, Virginia:

 

Lindsey Taylor loved running elections here.

The previous registrar had spent nearly three decades in the job, and Taylor, 37, hoped to do the same when she was hired in 2019. She loved her staff and the volunteer poll workers, and she took pride in the detail-oriented work. She implemented dozens of new laws in 2020, ran elections through the pandemic and impressed many in the rural, conservative, tight-knit community of Buckingham County.

But then the voter fraud claims started.

In January, the GOP assumed control of the Buckingham County Electoral Board that oversees her office, and local Republicans began advancing baseless voter fraud claims that baffled her. The electoral board made it clear it wanted her out of the job.

“There were people saying that they had heard all these rumors — that the attorney general was going to indict me,” Taylor said, days after leaving the office for the last time. “Mentally, I just — I couldn’t take it anymore.”

Three weeks ago, frustrated and heartbroken, Taylor, along with two part-time staffers, quit. Their resignations followed a deputy registrar who left in February, citing the same conflict.

The four departures left residents without a functioning registrar’s office; there was no way to register to vote or certify candidate paperwork, at least temporarily.

A state elections worker arrived in town a week later to try to pick up the pieces, looking through drawers and opening the mail, as the two remaining members of the electoral board — both Republicans, because the one Democrat had also recently quit — began the difficult process of restaffing a completely barren department.

“It’s just sad that the big lie has come to Buckingham,” said Margaret Thomas, who worked as the general registrar in Buckingham County for more than 28 years before retiring. “And before it was never here.”

Years after former President Donald Trump began pushing his lies about stolen elections, communities like Buckingham County are grappling with the aftershocks: What happens when election denialism drives out the people needed to keep local democracy running?

“A lot of election officials I’ve talked to are asking themselves: Why am I doing this? Why am I getting paid like a civil servant to be constantly harassed?” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research that helps support election officials. “Whether it’s the intent or not, the effect is to drive a lot of these public servants — upon who we’ve relied for decades in some cases — out of the field, which will leave elections more vulnerable than they’ve been before.”

Which is, of course, the exact point of the exercise.

Republicans don't want any of these to exist outside of their total control of them.

A Test Run For Tester's Run

Montana Republicans are considering changing the election rules for Democratic Sen. Jon Tester's reelection race in 2024 and only his 2024 election in order to prevent third party voters from giving Tester another sub-50% win, and then changing the rules back in 2025.

 

A Republican-backed bill to create a “jungle primary” that would box-out third party candidates in the next U.S. Senate race in Montana has advanced.

Senate Bill 566 would create a primary system in which the top two candidates who win the most votes advance to the general election, regardless of party. Right now, each party has separate primaries and advances a winner.

Sen. Greg Hertz, a Republican from Polson, said the bill aims to ensure the most popular candidate wins for a high profile office.

“These are six year terms and to me, if we’re going to send someone to Washington, D.C., they should have the majority support of our voters,” Hertz said.

Hertz called his bill a test run as it includes a sunset date in 2025.

The bill would take effect ahead of the 2024 campaign, when U.S. Sen. Jon Tester is up for reelection. Tester is the last remaining statewide elected Democrat and his bid to hold office is expected to be highly competitive.

In 2012, Tester faced both a Republican and Libertarian candidate. Rep. Hertz highlighted that election saying Tester won with less than 50% of the vote.

Senate Minority Leader Pat Flowers pointed out that in 2022, U.S. Congressman Ryan Zinke also won with less than 50% of the vote due to a third-party candidate, but the bill won’t address U.S. House races. Flowers said it’s obvious the bill is targeted at Tester.

“Let’s not kid ourselves, this is just brazen partisanship targeting a single race. This isn’t fair, this isn’t what Montanans want, they don’t want one party rule,” Flowers said.

The Montana Libertarian Party said in a statement that they oppose the bill, calling it an unabashed attempt to eliminate Libertarian access to the ballot. Libertarians tend to pull votes from Republican candidates.

 

The one race in the state where third-party voters might actually make a difference in favor of the Democrat is Tester's 2024 run, so Republicans have to interfere to make sure that doesn't happen, and they're not even being subtle about it. They no longer have to, because it's not like Republicans will pay any sort of price for it and most likely they get a Senate win out of the deal.

That's how politics work in red states. I'm not saying Democrats haven't done similar nonsense, but at least they made it consistent, as with California's jungle primary system affecting all House and Senate races, not just to get rid of one Republican.

 

Wacky Fascist Roundup Time

Republicans in Oklahoma, Florida and Iowa are pushing legislation to make their polical enemies as miserable as possible as GOP fascism rolls on across the USA. First, Oklahoma is making all gender-affirming care ineligible for insurance and banning procedures completely for those under 18.

 

The Oklahoma House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a bill that would prohibit gender transition services for minors.

House Bill 2177 would ban health care professionals from providing, attempting to provide or providing a referral for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and gender reassignment surgeries for minors. State Reps. Kevin West, R-Moore, and Jim Olsen, R-Roland, co-authored the measure.

The House passed the bill with an 80-18 vote.

"This legislation is about protecting our children from those who would seek to profit from their gender confusion," West said in a news release. "As a state, we must not be partner to irreversible health practices that permanently change the bodies of our children before they are of an age where they can fully understand the consequences of their decisions."

The bill allows exceptions for minors with a medically verifiable disorder. The legislation grants a six-month time period to tape off any minor currently on hormone therapy.

House Bill 2177 also prohibits insurance coverage for gender transition services performed within Oklahoma on any minor or adult.

"Common sense tells us that the decisions people make as a teenager may be shortsighted and later regretted, especially in regard to a major action like these irreversible procedures," Olsen said. "Even one child who undergoes a life-altering procedure and later laments their decision is one too many. I'm proud to stand against these reprehensible actions and proud to protect Oklahoma's children."

Groups – including Freedom Oklahoma, the ACLU of Oklahoma and Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes – have spoken out against the bill and call on the legislature to end an attack on best-practice medical care for transgender Oklahomans.

 

The bill would also allow anyone who received these services to file action up to age 45.  

Meanwhile in Florida, Republicans are trying to outlaw the entire Florida Democratic Party.

The Florida Democratic party would not exist if a new Senate bill is passed and signed into law.

Spring Hill Republican Senator Blaise Ingoglia has filed SB 1248, which would be called "The Ultimate Cancel Act."

While it does not mention the Democratic party's name, it would direct the Florida Division of Elections to "immediately cancel the filings of a political party, to include its registration and approved status as a political party, if the party’s platform has previously advocated for, or been in support of, slavery or involuntary servitude."

Southern Democrats advocated for slavery during the Civil War.

Under the Bill, registered Democrats would be automatically re-registered as having "no party affiliation." The Democratic party officers could reorganize, but only under a substantially different name.

"For years now, leftist activists have been trying to "cancel" people and companies for things they have said or done in the past. This includes the removal of statues and memorials, and the renaming of buildings. Using this standard, it would be hypocritical not to cancel the Democrat Party itself for the same reason," explained Sen. Ingoglia.

 

That's entirely not a fascist, authoritarian thing to do, isn't it?

Finally, Iowa Republicans are planning a direct challenge to Obergefell v Hodges by trying to ban same-sex marriage as "religious freedom".

Nearly eight years after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage and several months after Congress codified gay nuptials, Iowa legislators proposed banning such unions in their state constitution.

“In accordance with the laws of nature and nature’s God, the state of Iowa recognizes the definition of marriage to be the solemnized union between one human biological male and one human biological female,” says the joint resolution, introduced Tuesday by eight Republican members of the state House.

If the measure becomes law, it would conflict with the Supreme Court’s 2015 landmark decision to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide, Obergefell v. Hodges, and Congress’ bipartisan passage of the Respect for Marriage Act late last year. Therefore, it is unclear that such a law could be enforceable, as federal law and the federal Constitution take precedence over state law.

State Rep. Brad Sherman, one of the bill’s eight co-sponsors, said in an email that the joint resolution "would take several years to accomplish."

"Should the people of Iowa vote for such an amendment, laws would have to be adjusted to make laws fair for all," he said.

The seven other co-sponsors did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Several Iowa Democrats were quick to criticize the proposal, saying it would take the state — which became one of the first to legalize same-sex marriage in 2009 — “backwards.”

“No, @IowaGOP, we will not be going back to the days when committed, loving same-sex couples don’t have the same right to marriage equality as everyone else,” state Rep. Sami Scheetz tweeted. “This kind of disgusting hatred and backwards thinking has no place in Iowa. And I’ll fight it every single day.”

This is clearly being set up as a massive SCOTUS fight for 2024, where they clearly expect both Obergefell and the Respect for Marriage Act to get trashed, and a Supreme Court that would side with Iowa in this case would absolutely put us on the 8-lane interstate highway to a Christian white supremacist theocracy and eliminate the entire Civil Rights era in the name of "closely held religious beliefs".

Things are getting scary out there, folks. Republicans want LGBTQ+ folks and hell, even Democrats eliminated. They're going to certainly try it. 

There is darkness and buckets of blood down this path, I guarantee.

Last Call For Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

Alabama's new GOP Secretary of State Wes Allen was one of the few 2020 election deniers that won his race as the state's top election official, and his first act is pulling the Yellowhammer State out of a bipartisan national compact to share voter roll information.

 

On his first day in office on Monday, Allen terminated Alabama’s membership in the Electronic Registration Information Center, a consortium of roughly 30 states that share data about their voter rolls to keep them up to date, citing concerns about data privacy.

“I made a promise to the people of Alabama that ending our state’s relationship with the ERIC organization would be my first official act as Secretary of State,” he said.

Allen’s quick move, fueled by right-wing conspiracies about ERIC that spread last year, alarmed election administration professionals.

“Anything that makes elections more secure is a target for the election deniers, and the attacks on ERIC are just another tactic in this effort,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, an organization that works closely with election administrators.

Becker, who is a non-voting member of ERIC’s board after helping spearhead its launch a decade ago, attributed the decision to the lies about election administration spread by election deniers.

Allen first promised he would leave ERIC on the campaign trail last year, shortly after the conservative website Gateway Pundit published a series of stories falsely tying ERIC to George Soros, the progressive-leaning billionaire. Those stories, which called ERIC a “left wing voter registration drive disguised as voter roll clean up,” spread among Republicans who were already fanning other conspiracies about election administration, helping turn ERIC into a target of far-right organizations. Allen himself referred to Soros in explaining his hostility to ERIC in early 2022.

ERIC is financially supported by its member states, including many staunchly red ones that are governed by Republicans, such as South Carolina and Texas, as well as many blue states. The current chair of ERIC, Mandi Grandjean, is the deputy assistant secretary of state of Ohio under Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Trump-endorsed Republican.

John Merrill, Alabama’s outgoing secretary of state whom Allen replaced, and a Republican known for his own poor record on voting rights—he threatened to go after hundreds voters who mistakenly thought they could vote in a partisan runoff, failed to inform voters of their rights, and lashed out at critics of the state’s voting rights record—steadfastly defended ERIC throughout 2022.

“This continued narrative of ERIC being a George Soros system is untrue. ERIC was not founded nor funded by George Soros, and to claim otherwise is either dishonest or misinformed,” Merrill said in November. Becker echoed that characterization on Wednesday. “Putting aside the nature of those attacks, it’s just 100 percent false,” he said.

Tammy Patrick, the CEO of Election Center, a national organization that represents election administrators, stressed that ERIC was built to meet the practical needs of officials from both parties. “From its inception ERIC has been a bipartisan effort,” she told Bolts on Wednesday. “The policies and functionality were all created taking into account the perspectives of election administrators from across the political spectrum.

 

Increasingly, Secretaries of States in red state offices are being elected to destroy election integrity, not to protect it. The eventuality is that state elections will be so one sided in both candidate qualifications and vote qualifications that Republican legislatures will simply take over the state's "broken" election system and just declare GOP candidates to win, all the time.

At the very least, so few people will vote that Republicans will win anyway, and that's the point.

Jacinda Rescinded, Or, Totally Out Of Petrol

New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern is resigning ahead of election season in the country, saying she no longer is "the right person to lead".

“I’m leaving, because with such a privileged role comes responsibility. The responsibility to know when you are the right person to lead and also when you are not. I know what this job takes. And I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice. It’s that simple,” she said.

Her term as prime minister will conclude no later than 7 February, but she will continue as an MP until the election later this year.

“I am human, politicians are human. We give all that we can for as long as we can. And then it’s time. And for me, it’s time,” she said. Ardern said she had reflected over the summer break on whether she had the energy to continue in the role, and had concluded she did not.

Ardern became the world’s youngest female head of government when she was elected prime minister in 2017 at age 37. She has led New Zealand through the Covid-19 pandemic, and major disasters including the terror attack on two mosques in Christchurch, and the White Island volcanic eruption.

“This has been the most fulfilling five and a half years of my life. But it’s also had its challenges – amongst an agenda focused on housing, child poverty and climate change, we encountered a … domestic terror event, a major natural disaster, a global pandemic, and an economic crisis,” she said.

Asked how she would like New Zealanders to remember her leadership, Ardern said “as someone who always tried to be kind.”

“I hope I leave New Zealanders with a belief that you can be kind, but strong, empathetic but decisive, optimistic but focused. And that you can be your own kind of leader – one who knows when it’s time to go,” Ardern said.

Over the past year, Ardern has faced a significant increase in threats of violence, particularly from conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine groups infuriated by the country’s vaccine mandates and Covid-19 lockdowns. She said, however, that the increased risk associated with the job were not behind her decision to step down.

“I don’t want to leave the impression that the adversity you face in politics is the reason that people exit. Yes, it does have an impact. We are humans after all, but that was not the basis of my decision,” she said.

Ardern said she had no future plans, other than to spend more time with her family.

She thanked her partner, Clarke Gayford, and daughter Neve, whom she gave birth to while holding office, as “the ones that have sacrificed the most out of all of us”.

“To Neve: mum is looking forward to being there when you start school this year. And to Clarke – let’s finally get married.”

The prime minister’s announcement comes as New Zealand enters a closely-fought election year, with the date of the vote announced for 14 October. Polling over recent months had placed the Ardern-led Labour party slightly behind the opposition National.

 

People quit jobs all the time.  This one just happened to be Prime Minister of New Zealand.

Ardern is going to face a lot of ruthless attacks for admitting this, because national leaders aren't supposed to just up and quit on their people like this. But you know what? She's doing the right thing for her, and that makes it the right thing for New Zealand.

 

Having said that, her popularity at home was cratering, big time. 

Bring it on,” Jacinda Ardern told a cheering crowd in early November, addressing party members at Labour’s last conference before the next election. It was a battle-cry for a party and leader who know there’s a tough fight ahead.

In the weeks that followed, political headwinds accelerated: projections of a recession, stubbornly high inflation, national fears over crime, grim polling and enduring pockets of anti-government conspiracists dominated the news cycle. The last year and a half have been brutal for the progressive leader, who has slipped from near-unprecedented levels of popularity to some of the lowest polling of her political career.

The last polls of 2022 had Labour at about 33%, compared with the centre-right National party’s 38-39%. Those results are among the lowest of Ardern’s leadership, representing a turn back toward the bleak polling the Labour party was mired in when she first took over in 2017.

 

Hopefully the country will be able to move on and continue recovery, but it's going to do so without Ardern.

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

As I've been telling you for years now, Republicans consider any election they lose to be "fraud", and Arizona GOP loser Kari Lake is no different.

 

Kari Lake, the losing Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, filed a lawsuit Friday contesting the results of an election that was certified by the state this week.

Ms. Lake’s lawsuit came after she had spent weeks making a series of public statements and social media posts aimed at sowing doubt in the outcome of a contest she lost by more than 17,000 votes to her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs. That loss was certified in documents signed on Monday by Ms. Hobbs, who currently serves as secretary of state.

A former news anchor, Ms. Lake centered her candidacy on false conspiratorial claims that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from Donald J. Trump, who had endorsed her. For the past month, Ms. Lake, her campaign and other allies have been soliciting Election Day accounts from voters on social media and at rallies.

“If the process was illegitimate, then so are the results,” Ms. Lake said on Twitter on Friday evening after announcing her lawsuit. “Stay tuned, folks.”

Ms. Hobbs called Ms. Lake’s suit “baseless” in a post of her own on Twitter, describing it as the “latest desperate attempt to undermine our democracy and throw out the will of the voters.”

Ms. Lake sued Ms. Hobbs as well as officials in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and is Arizona’s largest county.

The suit claims that the election was corrupted in Maricopa County and that she should be declared the winner. The 70-page filing relies on a hodgepodge of allegations, ranging from voter and poll worker accounts to poll numbers claiming that voters agreed with Ms. Lake on the election’s mismanagement. Some of what is cited comes not from last month’s election but from the 2020 contest. Other allegations accuse officials of wrongdoing for taking part in efforts to try to tamp down election misinformation.

Fields Moseley, a spokesman for Maricopa County, said the court system was the proper place for campaigns to make their case to challenge results.

“Maricopa County respects the election contest process and looks forward to sharing facts about the administration of the 2022 general election and our work to ensure every legal voter had an opportunity to cast their ballot,” Mr. Moseley said.

A number of those cited as experts in the lawsuit and one of the lawyers who filed the case — Kurt Olsen — are part of a loose election-denial network led by Mike Lindell, the pillow company entrepreneur who has been pushing conspiracy theories about election machines since early 2021. Another Lake lawyer, Bryan Blehm, represented the contractor Cyber Ninjas during the partisan audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 election results last year and also represented supervisors in Cochise County this year in a lawsuit over an attempt to carry out a hand-counted audit plan.

Ms. Lake’s legal action came as lawsuits were also filed Friday by two other Arizona Republicans who lost their midterm elections: Mark Finchem, who ran for secretary of state, and Abe Hamadeh, the attorney general candidate. Mr. Hamadeh, who is trailing his opponent by 511 votes in a race that is undergoing a recount, was joined in his lawsuit by the Republican National Committee.

Mr. Hamadeh previously filed suit late last month seeking to overturn the election, but the suit was dismissed by a Maricopa County judge for being filed prematurely. His new suit — filed in Mohave County, a Republican stronghold where he won 75 percent of the vote — is more narrow than Ms. Lake’s, claiming that it is not questioning the election’s validity. But, as with Ms. Lake, Mr. Hamadeh is seeking an order overturning the election results and declaring him the winner, claiming he is not alleging widespread fraud but rather “certain errors and inaccuracies.” On Twitter late Friday, Mr. Hamadeh wrote that “Maricopa County faced unprecedented and unacceptable issues on Election Day.”

Dan Barr, a lawyer for Mr. Hamadeh’s opponent, Kris Mayes, said the lawsuit was “based on speculation” and contained “no real facts.” He said he planned to file motions to dismiss it and move it to Maricopa County early next week.

Mr. Finchem, one of several secretary of state candidates around the country who denied the results of the 2020 presidential race, lost by more than 120,000 votes. In his suit, filed in Maricopa County, Mr. Finchem alleged that Arizona had “failed miserably” to administer a “full, fair, and secure election” and asked that the court declare the election “annulled” and name him the winner.

That suit was filed by Daniel McCauley, who also represented Cochise County in its recent failed attempt to deny certification of the election results.

 

You can't have a circus without clowns, and there are plenty involved in this "legal" process. The whole point of course is to justify the violence coming against Arizona Democrats who won. If you somehow still thought that Mike Lindell and his army of election liars were just going to go away, well, you have your answers.

Only crushing sanctions, disbarment, and punitive contempt charges are going to begin to slow these guys down.

We'll see.

Ridin' With Biden, Con't

In the wake of last week's assassination attempt on Nancy Pelosi by a right-wing domestic terrorist that invaded the Pelosi's home, President Biden laid out his final argument before the midterms why MAGA trolls are the biggest threat to American democracy in decades.

Signs of strain in the nation’s democratic system mounted Wednesday with less than a week left before the midterm elections, as President Biden warned that candidates who refuse to accept Tuesday’s results could set the nation on a “path to chaos.”

Biden’s grim assessment in a speech Wednesday evening came as the FBI and other agencies have forecast that threats of violence from domestic extremists are likely to be on the rise after the election. In Arizona, voters have complained of intimidation by self-appointed drop-box monitors — some of them armed — prompting a federal judge to set strict new limits. And the GOP has stepped up litigation in multiple states in an effort to toss out some ballots and to expand access for partisan poll watchers.

Speaking at Washington’s Union Station — steps from the U.S. Capitol, which was attacked by a pro-Trump mob in the wake of the nation’s last major election — Biden warned of an ongoing assault on American democracy. The president spoke as a growing number of major Republican candidates have said they may follow in former president Donald Trump’s footsteps and refuse to concede should they lose.

“It’s unprecedented. It’s unlawful. And it is un-American,” Biden said. “As I’ve said before, you can’t love your country only when you win.”

The virtually unprecedented presidential message — a plea to Americans to accept the basic tenets of their democracy — came as millions of voters have already cast their ballots or are planning to go to the polls on Election Day, and as some election officials expressed confidence that the system would hold.

Biden spoke days after an assailant armed with a hammer broke into the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and, according to police and prosecutors, bludgeoned her 82-year-old husband, Paul. Biden opened by addressing the gruesome early Friday morning assault.

“We must, with one overwhelming unified voice, speak as a country and say there’s no place, no place for voter intimidation or political violence in America, whether it’s directed at Democrats or Republicans,” he said. “No place, period. No place, ever.”

Last week, multiple government agencies, including the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, issued a memo warning that threats posed by domestic violent extremists would probably increase in the 90-day post election period, according to a copy of the document obtained by The Washington Post.

The memo listed possible scenarios that could trigger more violence, including “actual or perceived efforts to suppress voting access.”

“Following the 2022 midterm election, perceptions of election-related fraud and dissatisfaction with electoral outcomes likely will result in heightened threats of violence against a broad range of targets — such as ideological opponents and election workers,” the memo read.

 

Judging from the screeching and howling from the right today, Biden's plea for  basic human dignity is falling on deaf ears. As John Ganz writes, Biden is on the right side of history here, and you can't make people who don't want democracy actually want democracy.

The idea that one party, even if it has a clear-cut ideological or partisan agenda, can also embody the democracy as such has a lot of historical precedent. That was part of Roosevelt’s appeal. It’s also an old tradition in France, where the entire left would periodically identify itself with the republic and adopt a politics of “republican defense” against the right, usually when the right would engage in some coup-like behavior. The last great example of this, the Popular Front of the 1930s, was not a government of centrist compromise but quite radical in the social reforms it pushed through. The idea was that the surge of the far-right suggested a fundamental social problem that needed to be remedied through bold action. Did that approach work? Well, in some ways yes and in some ways no, but let’s leave that for another time.

Democracy is not simply the presence of a multi- or two-party system: That’s a necessary but not sufficient condition. There are some actual substantive commitments that come with it. One of the most important of these is a belief in popular sovereignty, which is the principle that virtually all Republican politics are designed to get around: either in the old fashioned form of Senatorial or Judicial anti-majoritarianism and gerrymandering or its more recent politics of menacing putschism and election denial. The former is bad, but conforms to the rule of law and one hopes can be remedied over time. The latter breaks the system. Fused together, as they are now, they form the basis of potential one-party rule.

Look, they even say it all the time—“We’re a republic, not a democracy,”—or some such similar bullshit. It’s just the simple truth: They don’t want the country to be a democracy anymore. They know it. We know it. But for some reason all these pundits say we shouldn’t say it. The centrist pundit, in either his cynical or naive form, loves to warn about the dangers of rhetoric, but this kind of equivocation about the parties sets the predicate for political cynicism and resignation: everyone shrugging their shoulders and saying, “Well, they are both bad, they Democrats have their authoritarian side, too, after all. I mean, look at all that manipulative ‘ saving democracy’ talk.” It also allows us to settle for the curtailing of democracy, but not an absolute destruction: some kind of hybrid regime: “Well, it’s not really an authoritarian dictatorship, there’s an opposition, after all, look, there’s still a Democratic mayor of…Ann Arbor.”

Are the Democrats incompetent, cynical, flailing, etc.? Of course. After all, this is the Democratic Party we are talking about. But, as always, they are still not the Republicans.

 

Choose a side, folks.

Last Call For The Mask Slips Once Again...

...and a Republican accidentally tells the truth about what they will do if elected.

 

Hinting at his plans to overhaul how elections are run, the Republican running for governor of Wisconsin this week said his party would permanently control the state if he wins.

“Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin after I’m elected governor,” construction executive Tim Michels told supporters Monday at a campaign stop.

Michels is seeking to unseat Gov. Tony Evers (D), who over his four years vetoed a string of Republican-backed bills that would have changed voting rules in a battleground state that Donald Trump narrowly won in 2016 and narrowly lost in 2020.

Michels has promised to sign similar legislation and has said he would restructure the state’s bipartisan elections commission. He has never spelled out what specific changes he would make to the commission, which is run by three Democrats and three Republicans.

Michels, who won his August primary with Trump’s endorsement, has left open the possibility that he would try to decertify the 2020 election in Wisconsin, which legal scholars say is impossible. He has declined to say whether he would certify the results of the 2024 election.

 

Now of course the Michels camp is saying that economic growth in Wisconsin will be so good under one-party rule that nobody will want to vote Democratic, but of course Wisconsin is the most gerrymandered state in the nation, where Democrats could get 51% of the state's US House votes and still only win two of the state's 8 districts, and would have to win 57% of the state's US House votes to get to 5 of 8.

We'll see how it goes next week with Democrat Tony Evers trying to keep his place as governor.

Last Call For Brazil, Nuts Con't

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has been defeated in today's national elections, and Luiz Lula de Silva will once again claim the country's highest office. Maybe.

 

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is set to become the next president of Brazil, after defeating his rightwing rival, incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, by a razor-thin margin.

The leftist former leader, widely known as “Lula,” won 50.83% of the votes, with over 98% of the votes counted in a fiercely contested run-off election on Sunday.

Bolsonaro, who mustered 49.17% votes, will be denied a second term.

The two candidates had previously gone head to head in a first round of voting on October 2, but neither gained more than half of the votes, forcing Sunday’s runoff vote, which has become a referendum on two starkly different visions for Brazil.

Lula da Silva supporters thronged São Paulo Avenida Paulista on Sunday evening after polls closed. The mood was celebratory even before the results were called, with people setting off flares when he was declared winner by the country’s election authority.

Many had tears in their eyes, telling CNN that they were hopeful for the country, which has been struggling with high inflation, limited growth and rising poverty.

But others on Avenida Paulista expressed fears. Lula da Silva’s razor thin margin comes as fears mount that Bolsonaro will not accept defeat, having repeatedly claimed that Brazil’s electronic ballot system is susceptible to fraud. The entirely unfounded allegation has drawn comparisons to the false election claims of former US President Donald Trump. 

 

Bolsanro has not conceded as of this post, and he's not exactly the type of person who loses gracefully.  He's warned that he will not accept a loss due to "fraud".

Things could go very bad in Brazil this week.

Americans in particular should be paying very close attention.

 

 

The Big Lie, Con't

Arizona Republicans have been fundraising for this entire cycle off of "efforts to find election fraud" to the tune of millions.

Arizona’s Republican Party raised record sums in 2021 with repeated appeals to supporters for money to help audit the 2020 presidential election. “Pitch in to Help Us Finish America’s Audit!” and “Help America’s Audit” were among the dozens of pitches from the party.

But Kelli Ward, the state party chairwoman, was sending a very different message to top Republicans in Washington at the time.

“We have not been raising money to pay for the audit,” Ward wrote in one June 25, 2021, text message, according to a person with knowledge of the message, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal details. “We were expressly told that we could/should not raise money for the audit and auditors before the audit began.”

Instead, Ward wrote in the text, the party was going to “keep the pressure” on for an audit and “communicate” about an audit.

The text message suggests that Arizona GOP leaders had no intention of using donations to help pay for the audit effort, despite what it had been telling its supporters in fundraising pleas. In the end, the $6 million audit was bankrolled through a separate fundraising effort by election denier groups, along with $150,000 in initial taxpayer money.

The final report, which was prepared by private contractors and submitted to Republican leaders of the state Senate, reaffirmed President Biden’s victory in the battleground state over former president Donald Trump.

Arizona GOP spokeswoman Kristy Dohnel did not address questions about the text message, but said in a statement that the state party “contributed to covering costs for security to ensure the safety of those who participated in the nonpartisan audit.”

“The Republican Party of Arizona has been able to raise millions of dollars under Chairwoman Kelli Ward’s leadership with amazing partners and relentless grass roots donors,” Dohnel said. “They know that Dr. Ward is honest, operates with integrity, and because of this, they trust her team with their resources. The role of the state party is to keep the political pressure on different entities.”

Arizona Republican officials discovered that raising money off the audit was a smashing success. From May to September 2021, at least 92 emails mentioned the audit as a reason to give to the Arizona GOP. The state party secured almost $1.1 million during that five-month period of a non-election year, compared to about $865,000 for 2020 and 2022 combined.

“In order to be on track to finish this historic, thorough, nonpartisan effort to strengthen our republic, we’ll need to raise $40K before the end of the month!” read one June 24, 2021, email. “We know these sound like lofty goals, but we’re fighting for our very right to have strong, secure elections. Will you rush in your support with everything that’s on the line?”

The pattern was evident around the country. In total, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol found that more than $250 million was raised off fraudulent claims that the election was stolen. Trump’s campaign continued to raise money for an “Election Defense Fund” that did not exist. Trump’s PAC has raised more than $100 million, much of it on claims the election was stolen, and he has largely hoarded the money while spending some on candidates and some on his own lawyers.

 

Millions and millions of rubes were parted from their cash across the country and The Big Lie raised a quarter billion dollars.

And if you think pointing out all these millions of people were scammed will stop a single one of them from voting, well. You haven't been paying attention these last two years.

The Big Lie is the most successful, profitable psy-op the GOP has run in years.

Better vote the Big Liars out or they'll reshape reality to make all of this true, for every election they can steal.

Brazil, Nuts, Con't

Brazil's presidential election between current right-wing fascism-curious President Jair Bolsonaro and former President Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva just got a whole lot more interesting as Bolsonaro, trailing by double digits, has suddenly found new life and new hope as he has forced a runoff in Sunday's first round.

Brazil's top two presidential candidates will face each other in a runoff vote after neither got enough support to win outright Sunday in an election to decide if the country returns a leftist to the helm of the world's fourth-largest democracy or keeps the far-right incumbent in office.

With 99.5% of he votes tallied on Sunday's election, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had 48.3% support and President Jair Bolsonaro had 43.3% support. Nine other candidates were also competing, but their support pales to that for Bolsonaro and da Silva.

The tightness of the result came as a surprise, since pre-election polls had given da Silva a commanding lead. The last Datafolha survey published Saturday found a 50% to 36% advantage for da Silva. It interviewed 12,800 people, with a margin of error of 2 percentage points.

"This tight difference between Lula and Bolsonaro wasn't predicted," said Nara Pavão, who teaches political science at the Federal University of Pernambuco.

Carlos Melo, a political science professor at Insper University in Sao Paulo, said: "It is too soon to go too deep, but this election shows Bolsonaro's victory in 2018 was not a hiccup."

Bolsonaro outperformed in Brazil's southeast region, which includes populous Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais states, according to Rafael Cortez, who oversees political risk at consultancy Tendencias Consultoria.

"The polls didn't capture that growth," Cortez said.

Bolsonaro's administration has been marked by incendiary speech, his testing of democratic institutions, his widely criticized handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the worst deforestation in the Amazon rainforest in 15 years.

But he has built a devoted base by defending conservative values, rebuffing political correctness and presenting himself as protecting the nation from leftist policies that he says infringe on personal liberties and produce economic turmoil.

While voting earlier Sunday, Marley Melo, a 53-year-old trader in capital Brasilia, sported the yellow of the Brazilian flag, which Bolsonaro and his supporters have coopted for demonstrations. Melo said he is once again voting for Bolsonaro, who met his expectations, and he doesn't believe the surveys that show him trailing.

"Polls can be manipulated. They all belong to companies with interests," he said.

 

To recap, Brazil's version of Trump managed to avoid a blowout in the last week or so, with his popularity in the shitter, constantly questioning the accuracy of the polls and the integrity of the election itself for more than a year now., claiming his assured victory would be stolen by rigged voting machines.

But astonishingly, the election results find him able to force a runoff election when a total loss was expected, against the skyrocketing fortunes of Lula, whose conviction for corruption was thrown out by the country's Supreme Court as biased and political.

Imagine if Trump ran against Hillary Clinton again after having her locked up, and then her conviction overturned by SCOTUS, and you get the idea.

The runoff election will be held in 4 weeks on October 30.

It's a runoff that many folks, including myself, think should not be necessary, but here we are.