Last Call For The Big Lie, Con't

We know Trump had the Rosen Justice Department interfere with Arizona's election certification process, now we find out he did the same in Georgia through former acting Civil Rights division head Jeffrey Clark.

 

Top members of the Department of Justice last year rebuffed another DOJ official who asked them to urge officials in Georgia to investigate and perhaps overturn President Joe Biden's victory in the state -- long a bitter point of contention for former President Donald Trump and his team -- before the results were certified by Congress, emails reviewed by ABC News show.

The emails, dated Dec. 28, 2020, show the former acting head of DOJ's civil division, Jeffrey Clark, circulating a draft letter -- which he wanted then-acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue to sign off on -- urging Georgia's governor and other top officials to convene the state legislature into a special session so lawmakers could investigate claims of voter fraud.

"The Department of Justice is investigating various irregularities in the 2020 election for President of the United States," the draft letter said. "The Department will update you as we are able on investigatory progress, but at this time we have identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia."

The draft letter states: "While the Department of Justice believe[s] the Governor of Georgia should immediately call a special session to consider this important and urgent matter, if he declines to do so, we share with you our view that the Georgia General Assembly has implied authority under the Constitution of the United States to call itself into special session for [t]he limited purpose of considering issues pertaining to the appointment of Presidential Electors."

The vote count in Georgia became a flashpoint for Trump and his allies and Trump at one point falsely claimed that it was "not possible" for him to have lost the state.
MORE: Statewide audit results reaffirm Biden winner in Georgia

But to date, the Justice Department has uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud that would tip the results of the presidential election. Attorney General William Barr also announced in December that the department had "not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome of the election." A statewide audit in Georgia last year also affirmed that Biden was the winner.

The emails were provided by the DOJ to the House Oversight Committee, which is investigating efforts to overturn the election results. And they come as the DOJ investigator general looks at whether any officials in the department sought to overturn the outcome of the election.

Donoghue's notes about Trump telling Republican members of Congress to "leave it to him" when it came to the January 6th coup attempt was bad enough, but now we see that the efforts to manufacture a coup came about because Trump couldn't get acting AG Jeffrey Rosen to bite on saying the elections were fraudulent.

And yes, Trump absolutely had acting DOJ employees who wanted to publicly trash the 2020 elections as fraud, as we can see here.

We came this close to a coup, folks.

Cuomo's #MeToo Moment, Con't

With the investigation into his misconduct now complete, NY Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo is almost certainly not going to last until the end of the year as the state's chief executive, he may not make it until the end of the month.

 

An investigation found that Gov. Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed multiple women inside and outside state government and worked to retaliate against one of his accusers, New York’s attorney general announced Tuesday in a finding that is certain to renew calls for the Democrat’s resignation or impeachment.

The nearly five-month investigation, conducted by two outside lawyers who spoke to 179 people, found that the Cuomo administration was a “hostile work environment” and that it was “rife with fear and intimidation.”

People interviewed included complainants, current and former members of the executive chamber, State troopers, additional state employees and others who interacted regularly with the governor.

“These interviews and pieces of evidence revealed a deeply disturbing yet clear picture: Gov. Cuomo sexually harassed current and former state employees in violation of federal and state laws,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said at a press conference on Tuesday.

James said her investigation has concluded. There were no referrals to criminal prosecutors, though that wouldn’t preclude local authorities from using the evidence and findings of the report to mount their own cases.

On at least one occasion, the investigation found, Cuomo and his senior staff worked to retaliate against a former employee who accused him of wrongdoing. Cuomo was also found to have harassed women outside of government, the investigation found.

The report also detailed, for the first time, allegations that Cuomo sexually harassed a female state trooper on his security detail. It said that the governor ran his hand or fingers across her stomach and her back, kissed her on the cheek, asked for her help in finding a girlfriend and asked why she didn’t wear a dress.

“These brave women stepped forward to speak truth to power and, in doing so, they expressed faith in the belief that although the governor may be powerful, the truth is even more so,” Joon Kim, one of the lawyers leading the investigation, said at the press conference.

Investigators said they found all 11 women were credible, noting that their allegations were corroborated to varying degrees, including by other witnesses and contemporaneous text messages.

 

Cuomo's last grip on the side of the cliff was "We need to wait until the investigation is completed, which will exonerate me."

 

The investigation damned him instead. The victims deserve justice.

 

A long fall for a man who deserves to not only be removed from office, but put in prison. 

Al Franken did the right thing and resigned for less.

At the absolute minimum, Cuomo has to step down and await the criminal investigation and charges, and face those in a court of law, and then there's the entire nursing home COVID disaster he has to answer for too.

No, Cuomo has to go.

Left-Handed Compliments

The big political story in the Tri-State today is the Democratic primary in OH-11, as Cuyahoga County Democratic Party chair Shontel Brown takes on former Bernie Sanders campaign aide Nina Turner for Rep. Marcia Fudge's seat, as Fudge is now Biden's HUD Secretary. Two Black women Democrats competing for a Democratic Black Congresswoman's seat should be a cause for celebration, but the fight between Turner and Brown has gotten deeply personal and even ugly as Turner has all but lost her commanding lead over the last six weeks.

Despite taking place during a politically off-cycle campaign year, a major intraparty battle heavy with national implications is brewing in Tuesday's Democratic primary special election for Ohio's 11th Congressional District.

The contest presents an early test case of whether progressives can gain traction ahead of a pivotal midterm election cycle by going up against establishment-backed candidates. A slew of high-profile figures even descended on the Cleveland area in the lead-up to election day -- including Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and House Majority Whip Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C.

With Republicans simultaneously vying in another heated primary in the suburbs of Columbus in the state's 15th Congressional District, Tuesday's race in the 11th district takes place in one of Ohio's few reliably blue areas and features more than a dozen Democratic candidates. Whoever comes out on top is all but guaranteed to go on to fill the seat left vacant by Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge when she joined the Biden administration.

Over the last several months, the field narrowed down to two candidates -- Nina Turner, former state senator and top Sanders campaign aide, and Shontel Brown, who currently serves as chairwoman of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party.

Regardless of who advances from the primary, either of the two candidates would continue the more than two-decade long tradition of Black women representing the 11th district in Congress. Although the pair of front-runners share the common cultural baseline in their goal of speaking on behalf of the majority-Black district in Washington, Turner and Brown approached the campaign trail from different ends of the Democratic political spectrum.

"I've talked to people, my team has talked to people, and although people ... believe that things can change, they also say that they want a fighter, somebody that's gonna push back," Turner told ABC News in an interview.

Turner has brought in some big guns: Bernie himself, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson, but Brown has come to the fight with her own endorsements: Rep. Jim Clyburn, CBC chair Rep. Joyce Beatty, and Marcia Fudge's mother, Marion Saffold.

Turner had a big lead earlier this year in the polling, but that has evaporated as her own less-than-glowing comparison of Joe Biden's 2020 campaign as eating "half a bowl of shit" (compared to Trump's full fecal feast) came to light. Turner has also flubbed easy questions like "Did you vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016" which of course she won't answer.

But Brown has her own problems, with The Intercept accusing her of corruption in contract dealings as party chair (hello, Walker Bragman!) and stating she'll face an ethics probe. While anything Bragman does makes me immediately suspect that Brown is the better candidate by an astronomical unit or six, the attacks in the final week or so have been hurting Brown.

We'll see who prevails today. Most of you I suspect know how I feel about Nina Turner.

For what it matter, I want to see Shontel Brown win.

Last Call For Hungary? Tucker In!

I've talked about Hungarian PM Viktor Orban before and his authoritarian government, but apparently not only is FOX News Professional White Supremacist Tucker Carlson a big enough fan to go speak at Orban's International House Of Paincakes conference, he's hosting his White Supremacist Power Hour from Budapest itself.

Tucker Carlson is on the bill to deliver a speech, appropriately titled “The World According to Tucker Carlson,” this coming Saturday at MCC Feszt, a far-right conference in Budapest that is backed by Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orban.

The news of Carlson’s apparent appearance follows a reported meeting between the Fox News star and Orban, as a friendly photo posted to the leader’s Facebook page revealed on Monday that Carlson had hosted Orban on his online show for Fox Nation.

Carlson appeared on his show from Budapest on Monday evening and announced his show would be broadcast from the Hungarian capital all week.

Earlier this year, The New York Times reported that Orban granted $1.7 billion—or about one percent of Hungary’s GDP—to Mathias Corvinus Collegium, or MCC, with the aim of training a new generation of conservative elite across Europe.

According to Open Secrets investigative researcher Anna Massoglia, Hungary paid a D.C. lobbying firm $265,000 in 2019, in part to arrange an interview on Carlson’s Fox News show.

In turn, Carlson has publicly praised Orban’s government on Fox News, including in July of that year, when he lauded the prime minister’s anti-immigration policies in the face of declining birth rates.

“Instead of helping the native population to have more children, the Hungarian government, they say, should import a replacement population from the Third World,” Carlson said at the time of the “neoliberals who run” the European Union. “That’s the George Soros solution. But Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, has a different idea. Instead of abandoning Hungary’s young people to the hard-edge libertarianism of Soros and the Clinton Foundation, Orban has decided to affirmatively help Hungarian families grow.”

 

Folks, this is Carlson straight-up doling out pro-Orban white supremacist propaganda, uncut and raw, and speedballing it on world TV. This is not Carlson's usual footsie with facists here, this is a make-out session at Lovers' Lane.

 

Orban is an unrepentant proto-fascist. Carlson is sucking up to him, giving him free airtime in the US on his super-popular show. 

That should be a problem, but...well...we all know Carlson will be rewarded for this, and so will Orban.

The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Republicans really can't help themselves with disgusting, anti-Semitic comparisons of vaccine mandates to the Holocaust, because they know they can get away with it.

On Friday, John Bennett, the chairman of the Oklahoma Republican Party, made a striking comparison on the group’s Facebook page: Private companies requiring employees to get the coronavirus vaccine, he said, are just as bad as the Nazis forcing Jews to wear the yellow Star of David on their clothes.

“Those who don’t KNOW history, are DOOMED to repeat it,” read the caption, below an image of a Star of David patch with “Unvaccinated” written across the top.

The post triggered swift condemnations from top state Republicans and Jewish organizations in Oklahoma. But on Sunday, Bennett doubled down on his comments in a nearly seven-minute video he shared to the party’s Facebook page.

The Nazis “gave [Jews] a star to put on, and they couldn’t go to the grocery store, they couldn’t go out in public, they couldn’t do anything without having that star on their shirt,” Bennett said. “Take away the star and add a vaccine passport.”

Bennett, a Marine Corps veteran who served three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, was elected chairman of the Oklahoma GOP in April. The former state lawmaker has a history of making hateful comments, specifically about Muslims, according to the Oklahoman.

In a town hall meeting in 2014, Bennett said Islam “is a cancer in our nation that needs to be cut out.” In 2017, he drafted an 18-question survey for Muslims in Oklahoma to fill out before he agreed to meet with them in his legislative office. One of the questions asked was “Do you beat your wife?” A senior imam of the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City told the Oklahoman that Bennett threatened to demolish all the mosques in town.

Bennett is the latest GOP official to equate the persecution of the Jewish people during the Holocaust to mandates related to the coronavirus. In March, Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) compared vaccine passports to Nazis forcing Jews to wear the yellow Star of David. In June, Washington state Rep. Jim Walsh (R) wore a yellow Star of David during a live stream, stating that it conveyed how “denying people their rights … can lead to terrible outcomes.”

Also in June, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) apologized after she repeatedly compared mask mandates to the Star of David. But she evoked the Holocaust again in July, this time calling those leading a vaccine push from the Biden administration “brownshirts.” The term refers to a paramilitary group that helped Hitler and the Nazis gain power in Germany.

The image of the yellow Star of David patch that Bennett posted on the Oklahoma Republican Party’s Facebook page on Friday included what appeared to be identification numbers and a chip.

The post also said: “Limited access to travel within their State, Province or Territory. The bearer may not fly, cannot enter a pub, restaurant, club or theatre. … WAKE UP PEOPLE — Is this sounding familiar?”

 

It won't end, because Republican voters will continue to elect anti-Semite jackasses like Bennett and Greene and Cawthorn, who will have lifetime terms in Congress as performative hate junkies. Take from a guy in KY-4 with clown Thomas Massie, who still has yet to get a single piece of legislation out of committee.

And voters are fine with this. They will send these jackasses back to Congress for decades just to pick fights, because "Congress is useless anyway".

So these are the electeds we get.

The Good Package, Con't

The Senate has wrapped up the infrastructure bill, which means it's actually Infrastructure Week™ for once and unironically so.

Senate Democrats and Republicans unveiled on Sunday a roughly $1 trillion proposal to improve the country’s roads, bridges, pipes, ports and Internet connections, setting in motion a long-awaited debate in the chamber to enact one of President Biden’s economic policy priorities.

The package arrives after weeks of haggling among a bipartisan bloc of lawmakers, who muscled through late-night fights and near-collapses to transform their initial blueprint into a roughly 2,700-page piece of legislation. The fate of their labors now rests in the Senate, where proponents of infrastructure reform have little margin for error as they race to adopt the sort of bill that has eluded them for years.

Virtually no part of the U.S. economy is untouched by the plan chiefly put together by Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.). Roughly half of its $1 trillion overall price tag constitutes new federal spending, with the rest coming from existing, planned investments in the country’s roads, highways and bridges, according to details released in recent days by lawmakers and the White House, which supports the proposal.

Those thoroughfares would see major expansions and repairs under the bill, which has additional investments in the nation’s transit system as well. Senators also said the measure calls for $66 billion targeting passenger railways, which the White House says is the largest such investment since the creation of Amtrak nearly a half-century ago.

Lawmakers plan to set aside $55 billion to improve the country’s drinking water, including a program that seeks to replace every lead pipe in America. There’s an additional $65 billion to expand broadband Internet access nationwide and ensure those who do have connectivity can afford their monthly payments. And Senate lawmakers are pursuing additional sums to upgrade key commercial hubs, including potentially $25 billion for repairs at major airports.

The proposal, called the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, further seeks a significant tranche of funding to combat the threat of climate change, aiming to reduce emissions and respond to the deadly consequences of a fast-warming planet. Lawmakers have called for $73 billion to modernize the nation’s energy grid and $21 billion to respond to environmental concerns, including pollution. And they propose allocating new sums to advance clean-energy technologies, including a $7.5 billion initiative for a first-ever national network of electric vehicle charging stations, they announced last week.

“It takes our aging and outdated infrastructure in this country and modernizes it, and that’s good for everybody,” Portman said in a Sunday night speech, one of many from the deal’s chief architects heralding their work.

As I said before, this really is a good package, and this will pass the Senate.

The House, well...that's another story. 

Moderate Democrats held a press conference Friday calling for a speedy vote in the House. But progressives, along with a key committee chair, are insisting that they won't support it until the Senate passes a separate multitrillion-dollar bill to advance Biden's other priorities.

"First, we've got to get it out of the Senate. Then we'll get it here. There's a thousand permutations of how this could go," Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., told reporters. "When it gets here we should have a standalone vote."

Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., said the House should vote on it "as soon as possible."

But Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., the chair of the Transportation Committee, said in an interview that the Senate deal was "an imaginary bill" written by senators "who know nothing about transportation."

He said that based on the outlines he has seen, the water provisions were "not good" and that the bill entrenches highway-centric policies that "will not deal with climate change." He added that it should only be considered in the House alongside a separate bill that includes policies to combat climate change.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has insisted that the House won't consider the bipartisan infrastructure deal until the Senate also passes the so-called budget reconciliation bill.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., the leader of the progressive caucus, repeated demands that both bills must be sent to the House before a vote is taken.

And Democrats are battling over the parameters of the larger bill.

Sinema said Wednesday she doesn't support the $3.5 trillion price tag that party leaders are targeting, which drew a fierce rebuke from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.

"She is threatening to nuke everything — bipartisan deal, reconciliation, all of this — by reneging on an agreement that was already settled several weeks ago," Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview, calling the $3.5 trillion price tag "already too low" and a product of compromise.

 

It's possible that some Republicans in the House will vote for the Senate infrastructure bill, but a grand total of zero Republicans will vote for the reconciliation Even Better Package™ .

The hard reality is that the reconciliation bill isn't going to pass, and that Mitch McConnell has quietly won again, getting a bipartisan deal that's a fraction of what Biden and the Dems were talking about in reconciliation. Sinema will absolutely blow up the reconciliation bill trhe moment the Senate Bill gets passed, saving McConnell the trouble. He doesn't have to be the bad guy here.

Dems will do it for him. Ideally for McConnell, when Sinema kills the reconciliation bill, The Squad will turn around and kill the Senate Bill, and Mitch will get a complete victory without lifting a finger.

Maybe I'm fatalist, I mean Dems did get the ACA done (at great and terrible political cost), but 2010 is going to look like a picnic if Dems blow this now.

We'll see if they fall into the pit, or cross the ravine on a tightrope vote.

Last Call For The Vax Of Life, COn't

There are far fewer cases of delta variant COVID right now than there were in January.

The number of hospitalizations is worse now than it was seven months ago, or ever, in this ongoing pandemic.

It will get worse from here.

As the country grapples with a surge in the delta variant of the COVID-19 coronavirus, Dr. Anthony Fauci believes that lockdowns the country saw last year are likely to not return, though he warned "things will get worse" during an interview on ABC's "This Week."

"I don't think we're gonna see lockdowns. I think we have enough of the percentage of people in the country -- not enough to crush the outbreak -- but I believe enough to not allow us to get into the situation we were in last winter. But things are going to get worse," the nation's top infectious disease expert told "This Week" co-anchor Jonathan Karl on Sunday.

"If you look at the acceleration of the number of cases, the seven-day average has gone up substantially. You know what we really need to do, Jon, we say it over and over again and it's the truth -- we have 100 million people in this country who are eligible to be vaccinated who are not getting vaccinated. We are seeing an outbreak of the unvaccinated," he added.

"From the standpoint of illness, hospitalization, suffering and death, the unvaccinated are much more vulnerable because the vaccinated are protected from severe illness, for the most part, but when you look at the country as a whole. And getting us back to normal, the unvaccinated, by not being vaccinated, are allowing the propagation and the spread of the outbreak which ultimately impacts everybody," Fauci said.

Concerns over the coronavirus resurged this week, as research about the outbreak of the virus in Provincetown, Massachusetts, indicated that the now-dominant delta variant may be able to spread among fully vaccinated people.

During an investigation of the outbreak, researchers learned that the amount of virus in the noses of vaccinated people experiencing a breakthrough infection was the same as in an unvaccinated person -- a concerning sign that vaccinated people can also spread the virus.

The data helped the CDC make its decision to bring mask guidelines back for vaccinated individuals in areas of high or substantial spread of the virus -- despite the fact that breakthrough cases in vaccinated individuals are overwhelmingly mild and do not result in hospitalization or death.

"That has much more to do with transmission," Fauci said of the new guidelines.

"You want them to wear a mask, so that if in fact they do get infected, they don't spread it to vulnerable people, perhaps in their own household, children or people with underlying conditions," Fauci said of the new guidance for the vaccinated.

 

Get the vaccine.

 

Wear a mask indoors.

 

I'll keep saying this until I'm blue in the face...or more correctly, until you're blue in the face, intubated, awaiting palliative triage.

The Rent Is Too Damn High, Con't

Neither President Biden nor House Democrats moved to extend the eviction moratorium over the weekend, and starting Monday as many as six million Americans will be kicked out of their apartments and rental homes right into the teeth of the delta variant. As CNN's Zachary Wolf states, this didn't have to happen.

It's like Democrats in the White House and Congress forgot the date. 

Now it's the first of the month and rent -- and back rent -- is suddenly due for millions of Americans who have been shielded from eviction during the pandemic. 

Millions of households could face eviction over the next month -- when lawmakers on are on their annual August recess -- and some have predicted a full-blown eviction crisis, just as a surge in Covid cases from the highly contagious Delta variant may be prompting renewed calls for people to stay home and keep their distance. 

"We only learned of this yesterday," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters Friday evening after the House tried and failed to pass legislation that would extend the federal eviction moratorium. "There was not enough time to socialize it within our caucus as well as to build a consensus necessary," she said, with a promise from her top lieutenant to revisit the issue ASAP. Probably after the break. 

Pelosi was likely referring to the fact that the Biden administration only formally asked Congress to pass an extension on Thursday, two days before the program expired. 

Some White House officials made a late-stage push last week to reexamine the legal potential for President Joe Biden to extend the moratorium but were told by administration lawyers it wasn't possible, according to people familiar with the deliberations. 

You'd never know from the White House's late ask or Pelosi's lame excuse that the Supreme Court was very clear one month ago; either Congress could vote again to authorize the program or evictions could go forward. 

Not that a successful House vote would have accomplished anything. An eviction moratorium bill that can't pass the Democratic House would have been laughed out of the evenly divided Senate, where the rules give any one senator the right to slow anything down. There are plenty of Republicans who opposed the temporary hold on evictions when it was first enacted during the Trump administration in September of 2020. Today, there is a gaping divide over whether the government can or should tell private landlords they can't kick tenants out. 

But this is a story of Democrats' failure to manage time just as much as it is about Republicans' obstruction.

"I absolutely believe that in this moment, yes, we are failing the American people," Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley told CNN's Ryan Nobles on Saturday evening. "We absolutely should have received word from the White House much earlier than we did. ... There is still time, though, to right this wrong. I do believe that the White House and CDC can act, should act unilaterally. And if we are challenged by the courts, that will still buy these families time." 

And it's a clear sign that extraordinary efforts by the government to help Americans through the pandemic are temporary, even if the virus is here to stay. 

Expanded unemployment benefits that Democrats were able to sustain without Republican help will expire in September. 

A novel new direct payment for parents, meant to pull kids out of poverty, will end in 2022 unless they can find a way to extend it. 

What may be most frustrating for Democrats who helped Biden enact his American Rescue Plan to fight Covid this year is they earmarked money to help renters, but most of it has not yet been spent.

 

That's the real problem though. States are sitting on billions earmarked for rental relief, and most have made no effort to spend a dime of it.  Landlords in particular made no effort to go through the process to get the money they are screaming about losing, because they want to evict people and make room for renters who *can* pay. The vast majority of landlords in America are large rental corporations who can afford to take a temporary hit if it means clearing the decks of lower-income renters and bringing in new tenants at higher rents.

Congress knew that the Roberts Court made it clear that they, not Biden, had the authority for the moratorium extension. And all Mitch had to do in order to win again was drag out the clock on everything else, leaving Dems high and dry this weekend.

Not passing a House bill and not forcing a Senate vote is something that's going to haunt the Dems well into 2022 and beyond.

As for the millions evicted, well, you can't vote without an address, can you?

Which was always the point.

Sunday Long Read: Olympian Pressure

As the Tokyo Summer Games continue into their second week, and the world discusses delta variant spread, the toll on athletes mental health, and whther or not the Olympics can still be justified from an economic, infrastructure, housing fairness, and moral standpoint, we have our Sunday Long Read from Australian former rhythmic gymnast Rebecca Liu in The Guardian, who looks back on her childhood career and what it meant.

Every four years, the same argument plays out. The Olympics reminds the public of the existence of rhythmic gymnastics and the public scoffs at this ridiculous spectacle, with its “ribbon dancing”, its sequins, its extravagant bending and pirouetting. Where artistic gymnastics – the one with the beam and the bars, the one with triple backflips and the constant risk of broken bones – is dignified and athletic, rhythmic gymnastics is frilly and absurd. How is this even a sport? Why is it part of the Olympics? These are the usual criticisms. In return, embattled admirers will point out that rhythmic gymnastics is extremely difficult, actually. There is immense skill involved in those backbends and leaps; besides, have you tried throwing and catching a ball while holding your foot above your head?

When I first caught sight of rhythmic gymnastics, I knew nothing of this. The reasons the sport is mocked – the sequins, the balletic dancing, the kilowatt-bright, beauty-pageant smiles of the gymnasts – were the reasons I found it delightful. I was six, sitting in my kitchen in Auckland, staring at the television. On screen, a gymnast at the 2000 Sydney Olympics tossed a bright red ribbon high into the air before catching it with astonishing ease. She was, to me, the height of womanly sophistication: beautiful, graceful, and covered in glitter. I dragged my mother into the room, pointed to the television and announced that this was the sort of lady I would like to become.

My mother was used to this. When I was a baby, she had moved us to New Zealand, while my father stayed in China, working to support our lives abroad. Like many immigrant parents, she wanted to provide her child with opportunities that she, growing up as one of four siblings in rural 1970s China, did not have. By the time I was a toddler, I was going to Chinese dance lessons, which I loved, and Chinese language classes, which I hated. As I grew older, I built up a near-maniacal collection of hobbies. I wanted to play piano, then violin. I wanted to be a ballerina. I was gripped by figure skating. Much later, my mother started worrying about the lack of male influences in my life and I was sent to after-school electronics clubs, where I spent a lot of time soldering.

These fixations were intense and brief. I usually lost interest within weeks. But with rhythmic gymnastics, it was different. Not long after my epiphany in front of the TV, my mother searched through the Auckland Yellow Pages and found a gymnastics club near our house. A few weeks later, we set off on a 15-minute journey through the suburbs for my first class. It was a good opportunity, my mother thought, for her daughter to get some regular exercise.

Later, when my gymnastics career was behind me, after all the accolades and the trophies and the gold medals, I would loudly reminisce about it to my friends, teachers, acquaintances, anyone who would listen – a 13-year-old wistfully reflecting on her glory days. But as I grew older, embarrassment crept over me. I wondered what it had meant to dedicate so much of my childhood to a sport that now seemed shamefully girly and unfeminist. This is a sport that first asks women to be graceful and model-thin, then scrutinises their every movement and facial expression for imperfections. The lifecycle of an elite rhythmic gymnast would please the most ardent misogynist. Ideally, you begin as early as possible, so you develop maximum flexibility before the grim reaper (puberty) comes knocking. Then, in the years when you are allegedly at your most beautiful, and certainly at your most emotionally insecure, you are expected to dazzle. Once you are no longer capable of dazzling, you exit the stage. Senior competitive gymnasts commonly retire in their early 20s.

At university, I made peace with my childhood passion by presenting it cynically, showing friends photos of myself on the gym floor, clad in makeup and sequins, with an air that said, “Yes, I, too, have semi-read The Second Sex”. Mostly, though, when I looked at these photos, I felt old. One summer, watching yet another round of gymnasts getting their taste of Olympic glory, all of whom seemed to be rudely getting younger and younger, I phoned my dad in a panic, telling him that I had become a has-been. He replied that I was 18, and thus still had plenty left to live for.

Almost a decade on, I recently searched online for any remnants of my life in rhythmic gymnastics. Gone. I asked my mother if she still had any of the medals. Lost in an old house move. What about that time I was interviewed in the local paper? Gone, gone, gone. That child national champion, so driven and so athletic, feels like another person who somehow inhabited my body decades earlier, before bolting it without warning, shutting the windows and doors and leaving no trace. Was that even me?

It's a good story, and we all know someone like Rebecca, a childhood athlete, prodigy, wunderkind. We ask "What happened to so-and-so" some decades later, as plenty compete in sports as kids, but rarely do they ever rise to the ranks of Simone Biles or LeBron James.

I still think the Olympics have outlived their usefulness, however.

Last Call For Insurrection Misdirection

Republicans are settling in on their message for drowning out the January 6th committee: Nancy Pelosi staged a riot in order to detain American Patriot Eagle Trump political prisoners! 

This past week, just before the officers began to deliver anguished testimony about the brutality they had endured, Mr. McCarthy repeatedly laid blame not with Mr. Trump, the rioters or those who had fueled doubts about the election outcome, but with Ms. Pelosi, one of the invading mob’s chief targets.

“If there is a responsibility for this Capitol, on this side, it rests with the speaker,” Mr. McCarthy said.

Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the recently selected House conference chairwoman, went even further, saying Ms. Pelosi “bears responsibility” as speaker “for the tragedy that occurred on Jan. 6” and deriding her as “an authoritarian who has broken the people’s house.”

Ms. Pelosi is not responsible for the security of Congress; that job falls to the Capitol Police, a force that the speaker only indirectly influences. Republicans have made no similar attempt to blame Mr. McConnell, who shared control of the Capitol at the time.

Outside the Justice Department, meanwhile, a group of conservative lawmakers gathered to accuse prosecutors of mistreating the more than 500 people accused in the Jan. 6 riot.

Encouraged by Mr. Trump, they also echoed far-right portrayals of Ashli Babbitt, a rioter who was shot trying to break into the House chamber, as a patriotic martyr whose killing by the police was premeditated.

As if to show how anti-democratic episodes are ping-ponging around the globe, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in June seized on Ms. Babbitt’s killing — calling it an “assassination” — to deflect questions about his own country’s jailing of political prisoners.

Some senior Republicans insist that warnings of a whitewash are overwrought.

“I don’t think anybody’s going to be successful erasing what happened,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas. “Everybody saw it with their own eyes and the nation saw it on television.”

For Mr. Cornyn and other lawmakers, continuing to talk about the attack is clearly an electoral loser at a time when they are trying to retake majorities in Congress and avoid Mr. Trump’s ire.

Most Republican lawmakers instead simply try to say nothing at all, declining even to recount the day’s events, let alone rebuke members of their party for spreading falsehoods or muddying the waters.

Asked how he would describe the riot, in which a hostile crowd demanded the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence, his brother, Representative Greg Pence of Indiana, responded curtly, “I don’t describe it.”

Yet the silence of party stalwarts, including nearly all of the House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump for his role in the attack and the Republican senators who voted to convict him, has created an information void that hard-right allies of Mr. Trump have readily filled. And they have found receptive audiences in a media environment replete with echo chambers and amplifying algorithms.

In a July poll by CBS News, narrow majorities of Trump voters said they would describe the attack as an example of “patriotism” or “defending freedom.”

That silence follows a familiar pattern: Rather than refute false allegations about a stolen election and rampant voter fraud, many leading Republicans have simply tolerated extremist misinformation.

 

Not only do they tolerate it, they believe it because it allows them to justify what's coming. And what's coming is grim.

Nearly half of Republican voters believe there will come a time when the so-called "American patriots" will "have take the law into their own hands," the findings of a new survey reveal.

The new survey, conducted by GW Politics Poll, analyzed the belief systems of Democrats and Republicans. Based on the survey's findings, there are stark differences between Democratic and Republican voters' perspectives of the law and their trust and confidence in the government.

Republican voters in states former President Donald Trump won during the 2020 election have a higher level of trust in their state and local officials than Republicans residing in blue states won by President Joe Biden. While the same trend is evident where Democratic voters are concerned, the survey indicates it is far "less profound."

Danny Hayes, a George Washington University political science professor and co-director of the GW Politics Poll weighed in with more details about the survey findings.

"Most of the state and local officials who run our elections are long-time public servants whose goal is simply to help our democracy operate smoothly," Hayes said. "But if we've gotten to a place where voters trust the electoral system only when their side wins, then that undermines the idea of non-partisan election administration, which is essential for democracy."

The survey highlighted the following:

"Support for fundamental principles such as free and fair elections, free speech, and peaceful protest are nearly unanimous among both Democrats and Republicans. Their views on other democratic values, however, differ dramatically. Over half of Republicans (55%) supported the possible use of force to preserve the "traditional American way of life," compared to 15% of Democrats. When asked if a time will come when "patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands," 47% of Republicans agreed, as opposed to just 9% of Democrats."

January 6th, for all its horror, was only a warm-up for what's coming, and soon.

The Vax of Life, Con't

Solid majorities of Americans support vaccine mandates for schoolchildren, college kids, airline passengers, and yes, even in general for everyone.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they'd support federal, state or local governments requiring everyone to get a coronavirus vaccine, according to a new survey conducted by The COVID States Project.

Why it matters: This kind of blanket mandate hasn't even been proposed, at any level of government. But more piecemeal requirements are rapidly becoming more popular, and the survey suggests Americans are fine with that.

The big picture: There's recently been a surge in vaccine requirements for employees among health care organizations, governments and private businesses. The federal government yesterday became the latest employer to create a new vaccination policy. 

But many of these requirements stop short of being actual vaccine mandates, and instead impose additional burdens — such as extra testing — on people who choose to remain unvaccinated. They also only apply to a select group of people, like employees, students or customers.

By the numbers: 64% of respondents said in June or July that they'd support government vaccine requirements, a slight bump up from the 62% who said the same in April or May. 70% said they'd support vaccine requirements to get on an airplane; 61% support requiring children to be vaccinated to go to school; and 66% support requiring college students to be vaccinated to attend a university. 

A majority of every demographic subgroup except Republicans said they'd support vaccine requirements. Only 45% of Republicans said they approve of such mandates. A majority of respondents in all but three states — Wyoming, North Dakota and South Dakota — said they support requirements that everyone be vaccinated.

Between the lines: Unsurprisingly, vaccinated people are more likely to support mandates, and most of the people who "strongly disapprove" of mandates are unvaccinated, according to Matthew Baum, a public policy professor at Harvard University and one of the report's authors.

 

As WaPo columnist Ruth Marcus puts it, it's far past time to stop coddling the reckless. 

 

P­­­ay people to get vaccinated, no matter whether that is unfair to those who didn’t receive checks for jabs. Require them to do so as a condition of going to work or enrolling in school. Do whatever it takes — and, recent weeks have shown, it is going to take steps like these — to get the pandemic under control.

Those of us who have behaved responsibly — wearing masks and, since the vaccines became available, getting our shots — cannot be held hostage by those who can’t be bothered to do the same, or who are too deluded by misinformation to understand what is so clearly in their own interest.

The more inconvenient we make life for the unvaccinated, the better our own lives will be. More important, the fewer who will needlessly die. We cannot ignore the emerging evidence that the delta variant is transmissible even by those who have been fully vaccinated. “The war has changed,” as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded.

President Biden recognized this new reality with his actions Thursday. He announced that federal employees must be vaccinated or mask up and submit continuing proof that they are not infected; he urged private employers to do the same; and he encouraged the use of federal funds to prod — okay, bribe — the unvaccinated to step up.

If anything, Biden didn’t go far enough. He should have imposed a tighter mandate on federal workers and contractors — no frequent testing option as an alternative. He should have required vaccines for airline and railroad travel. He should have mandated vaccines for members of the military rather than kicking that can a few weeks down the road.

If I sound exasperated, I am, and I don’t think I’m alone. I have been looking forward to going back to my office — or backish, since it likely won’t be full-time — in a few weeks. Now, with D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) having wisely reimposed a mask mandate in the city, it’s hard to see how we’re going to actually pull that off. Better to straggle along on Zoom, seeing one another’s faces, than mask up for eight hours or more.

I have been looking forward to attending synagogue for the Jewish holidays in September, to going to dinner in indoor restaurants with friends, to resuming real life. I have been appreciating the ability to see my 86-year-old mother without fear of infecting her; now I have to worry anew about her getting on a plane to come visit us, as she was planning.

As I was writing this, a vaccinated friend texted to say he had tested positive. He’s not very sick, but he could have infected others who are more vulnerable. This variant is no joke.

It’s reasonable, it’s fair, and it’s legal to step up the pressure on the reckless noncompliant. By reckless, I mean to exclude some people: If you have a medical condition that counsels against vaccination, you are excused.

But even Marcus goes on to say that those with religious objections should be given exemptions as well, something no doubt 99% of the current anti-vax nutjobs will claim, thanks to the Roberts Court.

My advice remains simple: get vaccinated if you're not already, wear masks indoors in public, and stay safe. It's 2020 all over again, only this time the stakes are much higher. You're much more likely to end up in the ICU this time thanks to delta if you're not vaccinated.

Be smart, folks.

Hack The Planet, Con't

The Justice Department has cases against multiple Russian nationals in the wake of the Trump regime, but don't worry, if they're hiding anything, the Russians already know all of it.

 

The Russian hackers behind the massive SolarWinds cyberespionage campaign broke into the email accounts of some of the most prominent federal prosecutors’ offices around the country last year, the Justice Department said Friday.

The department said 80% of Microsoft email accounts used by employees in the four U.S. attorney offices in New York were breached. All told, the Justice Department said 27 U.S. Attorney offices had at least one employee’s email account compromised during the hacking campaign.

The Justice Department said in a statement that it believes the accounts were compromised from May 7 to Dec. 27, 2020. Such a timeframe is notable because the SolarWinds campaign, which infiltrated dozens of private-sector companies and think tanks as well as at least nine U.S. government agencies, was first discovered and publicized in mid-December.

The Biden administration in April announced sanctions, including the expulsion of Russian diplomats, in response to the SolarWinds hack and Russian interference in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Russia has denied wrongdoing.

Jennifer Rodgers, a lecturer at Columbia Law School, said office emails frequently contained all sorts of sensitive information, including case strategy discussions and names of confidential informants, when she was a federal prosecutor in New York.

“I don’t remember ever having someone bring me a document instead of emailing it to me because of security concerns,” she said, noting exceptions for classified materials.

The Administrative Office of U.S. Courts confirmed in January that it was also breached, giving the SolarWinds hackers another entry point to steal confidential information like trade secrets, espionage targets, whistleblower reports and arrest warrants.

The list of affected offices include several large and high-profile ones like those in Los Angeles, Miami, Washington and the Eastern District of Virginia.

The Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, where large numbers of staff were hit, handle some of the most prominent prosecutors in the country.

“New York is the financial center of the world and those districts are particularly well known for investigating and prosecuting white-collar crimes and other cases, including investigating people close to the former president,” said Bruce Green, a professor at Fordham Law School and a former prosecutor in the Southern District.

 

So yeah, every major federal case from 2020, assume the Russians have everything. Not just against Russian nationals, but all the FBI info into investigations involving the Trump regime itself, and the people Trump wanted targeted too.

All in Vlad's grimy little hands.

Think he might be able to do some damage with it?

He already has, most likely.

The Big Lie, Con't

Yes, there was absolutely a Trump conspiracy to pressure the Justice Department into declaring his loss to Joe Biden as election fraud with the express intent of overturning the election and justifying the January 6th terrorist attack.

President Donald J. Trump pressed top Justice Department officials late last year to declare that the election was corrupt even though they had found no instances of widespread fraud, so that he and his allies in Congress could use the assertion to try to overturn the results, according to new documents provided to lawmakers and obtained by The New York Times.

The demands were an extraordinary instance of a president interfering with an agency that is typically more independent from the White House to advance his personal agenda. They are also the latest example of Mr. Trump’s wide-ranging campaign during his final weeks in office to delegitimize the election results.

The exchange unfolded during a phone call on Dec. 27 in which Mr. Trump pressed the acting attorney general at the time, Jeffrey A. Rosen, and his deputy, Richard P. Donoghue, on voter fraud claims that the department had disproved. Mr. Donoghue warned that the department had no power to change the outcome of the election. Mr. Trump replied that he did not expect that, according to notes Mr. Donoghue took memorializing the conversation.

“Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me” and to congressional allies, Mr. Donoghue wrote in summarizing Mr. Trump’s response.

Mr. Trump did not name the lawmakers, but at other points during the call he mentioned Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, whom he described as a “fighter”; Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, who at the time promoted the idea that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump; and Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, whom Mr. Trump praised for “getting to bottom of things.”

The notes connect Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress with his campaign to pressure Justice Department officials to help undermine, or even nullify, the election results.

The lawmakers did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Mr. Jordan ultimately voted to overturn the election results in key states, but has downplayed his role in the president’s pressure campaign. Mr. Perry continues to assert Mr. Trump won, but has not been tied directly to the White House effort to keep him in office. And Mr. Johnson, whom Mr. Trump recently endorsed as he weighs whether to seek a third term, maintains that it is reasonable to have questions about the integrity of the election, though he has recognized Joseph R. Biden Jr. as president.

The Justice Department provided Mr. Donoghue’s notes to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, which is investigating the Trump administration’s efforts to unlawfully reverse the election results.

Typically, the department has fought to keep secret any accounts of private discussions between a president and his cabinet to avoid setting a precedent that would prevent officials in future administrations from candidly advising presidents out of concern that their conversations would later be made public.

But handing over the notes to Congress is part of a pattern of allowing scrutiny of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. The Biden Justice Department also told Mr. Rosen, Mr. Donoghue and other former officials this week that they could provide unrestricted testimony to investigators with the House Oversight and Reform and the Senate Judiciary Committees.

 

As important as the ongoing January 6th committee work is going, the House Oversight and Senate Judiciary investigations into the final days of the Trump regime are just as vital, especially their recommendations to the Justice Department about whether to charge members of the regime with criminal acts. 

I still don't believe for a second that Merrick Garland would actually follow through.

But the full note here from Donoghue says that Trump, on December 27th, told his allies to "leave the rest to me + R. Congressmen".

Then January 6th happened, ten days later.

Here endeth the lesson.

 

Barely Masking Their Hatred

The mask wars here in Kentucky have been fully joined, as Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear has issued an executive order this week for state employees to wear masks indoors, but several Republicans in statewide offices all say that they won't enforce the mandate at all.

Though Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear's administration is now requiring state government workers to wear a mask in state offices, several constitutional offices have chosen not to enforce the masking rules for their employees.

Whereas only unvaccinated state workers had been required to mask for the past several months, a memo from Personnel Cabinet Secretary Gerina Whethers on Thursday stated that all executive branch employees would be required to wear a face covering when around others in state offices or vehicles, regardless of their vaccination status.

The move followed a Tuesday advisory by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that all people should wear masks around others indoors in areas of "substantial and high transmission" of COVID-19 — which currently includes most counties in Kentucky and many other states — citing the rapid spread of the more-transmissible delta variant.

However, at least three of the five constitutional offices run by Republican elected officials won't enforce the mandate, including those of the state auditor, agriculture commissioner and state treasurer.

Sean Southard, the spokesman for Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles, said the two-term officer "disagrees with the Governor’s mask mandate and as such, the Kentucky Department of Agriculture will not be enforcing it."

Quarles tweeted Thursday that with vaccines widely available, "it's time to end the mandates as the voluntary vaccines offer the best protection from COVID-19 and the Delta variant. It's an individual choice."

 

Quarles, State Auditor Mike Harmon, and State Treasurer Alison Ball all say they won't enforce the rule, and I would expect that will go double for Secretary of State Michael Adams and AG Daniel Cameron, who I expect will have a lawsuit on the KY Supreme Court's doorstep by Monday and a motion for an injunction to stop the mandate.

Gov. Beshear of course has been stripped of most of his power to institute a mask mandate for any non-state employee by the State legislature, requiring him to call an emergency session for a vote after 30 days for any emergency mandate of any kind. Right now that fight is on hold in Kentucky's Supreme Court, and Beshear is not considering a statewide mask mandate at all, although he is encouraging people to wear masks in offices and schools.

I would suspect though that the fight here in Kentucky is just beginning as delta makes the rounds. Me, I'm still masking up.

So should all of you, because the delta variant makes last year's outbreaks look like a picnic.

The delta variant of the coronavirus appears to cause more severe illness than earlier variants and spreads as easily as chickenpox, according to an internal federal health document that argues officials must “acknowledge the war has changed.”

The document is an internal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention slide presentation, shared within the CDC and obtained by The Washington Post. It captures the struggle of the nation’s top public health agency to persuade the public to embrace vaccination and prevention measures, including mask-wearing, as cases surge across the United States and new research suggests vaccinated people can spread the virus.

The document strikes an urgent note, revealing the agency knows it must revamp its public messaging to emphasize vaccination as the best defense against a variant so contagious that it acts almost like a different novel virus, leaping from target to target more swiftly than Ebola or the common cold.

It cites a combination of recently obtained, still-unpublished data from outbreak investigations and outside studies showing that vaccinated individuals infected with delta may be able to transmit the virus as easily as those who are unvaccinated. Vaccinated people infected with delta have measurable viral loads similar to those who are unvaccinated and infected with the variant.

“I finished reading it significantly more concerned than when I began,” Robert Wachter, chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, wrote in an email.

CDC scientists were so alarmed by the new research that the agency earlier this week significantly changed guidance for vaccinated people even before making new data public.

The data and studies cited in the document played a key role in revamped recommendations that call for everyone — vaccinated or not — to wear masks indoors in public settings in certain circumstances, a federal health official said. That official told The Post that the data will be published in full on Friday. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky privately briefed members of Congress on Thursday, drawing on much of the material in the document.

One of the slides states that there is a higher risk among older age groups for hospitalization and death relative to younger people, regardless of vaccination status. Another estimates that there are 35,000 symptomatic infections per week among 162 million vaccinated Americans.

The document outlines “communication challenges” fueled by cases in vaccinated people, including concerns from local health departments about whether coronavirus vaccines remain effective and a “public convinced vaccines no longer work/booster doses needed.”

The presentation highlights the daunting task the CDC faces. It must continue to emphasize the proven efficacy of the vaccines at preventing severe illness and death while acknowledging milder breakthrough infections may not be so rare after all, and that vaccinated individuals are transmitting the virus. The agency must move the goal posts of success in full public view.

 

With more and more Americans living in states now that actively deny any emergency measures, mask mandates, or public health measures indoors, the odds of millions of Americans contracting the delta variant are far worse than even the horrible winter we had.

This is the near worst-case scenario, folks. Mask up, get vaccinated, and be careful.

It only gets exponential from here.

It's About Suppression, Con't

Georgia Republicans in the state legislature gave themselves the power to throw out and replace at will any and all county election officials, and the first order of business is to get rid of every county board where Democrats won and appoint a single Republican official to oversee the entire county election process, starting with Atlanta and Fulton County.

Georgia Republicans have taken the first step on their freshly blazed path toward a possible takeover of Fulton County’s elections.

A letter obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows two dozen state senators support a performance review of Fulton elections chief Richard Barron. The letter was written Tuesday, the very same day a front-page AJC story examined the prospect of a takeover of elections in Fulton, home to a tenth of all Georgians.

“We’re asking them to simply correct a record they say is easily corrected. Is it or isn’t it? The people of Georgia deserve answers,” wrote Republican Senate President Pro Tem Butch Miller, who signed the letter.

As written into Senate Bill 202, the State Election Board can replace a county’s election board following a performance review/audit/investigation. Then, a temporary superintendent would enjoy full managerial authority of how the county counts votes and staffs polling places.

Barron was not available for comment due to a scheduling conflict, according to a county spokesman.

A performance review begins upon request of at least two state representatives and two state senators from the county.

With more than enough senators, the letter addresses the representatives needed: “We have every reason to believe that the requisite number of Fulton’s House delegation will respond likewise, thereby triggering the performance review.”

Two representatives confirmed to the AJC on Wednesday that they would join the effort.

“I support and will be calling for a performance review of the Fulton County Elections Board Director because of repeated and systemic elections process failures,” House Speaker Pro-Tempore Jan Jones, a Milton Republican, wrote in an email. “This includes an investigation and evaluation of his technical competency and compliance with state law and regulation.”

From Rep. Chuck Martin, a Republican representing the Alpharetta area: “I want to see and will be requesting a full process review of the Fulton County Elections Operations because all the people of Fulton County and the State of Georgia deserve answers ... Let’s work together, get this review moving and get to the truth; the people deserve the truth.”

Rep. David Dreyer, an Atlanta Democrat and head of the Fulton House delegation, said elections are massive logistical undertakings.

“If I were to audit Chick-fil-A and Home Depot … I’d find things that aren’t done perfectly,” he said.

Fulton Commission Chairman Robb Pitts said a takeover is really a GOP attempt to wrest control of the U.S. Senate from Democrats and retain the governorship in 2022, with eyes toward 2024.

“It’s been rhetoric until this point. This letter is the first official step in the process,” he said.

Pitts said he intends to form a plan with his staff, including the county attorney, Thursday.

 

As I said earlier, this is an obvious effort by Georgia Republicans to accuse county election officials in blue (and Black, especially) counties of straight up fraud, remove them for "performance" reasons, and replace them with Republicans who will suppress the Black vote, creating systemic obstacles to Black voters.

I'm hoping that the Justice Department's Voting Rights section comes in like a hurricane to put a stop to this and does way more than just to send sternly-worded letters.

The Justice Department is putting states on notice about their obligations under federal law as GOP-led efforts to conduct reviews of the 2020 election intensify.

Federal authorities on Wednesday issued a pair of new guidance documents to states and voters to remind them of their responsibilities — and their rights.

The moves are part of the Biden administration's push to demonstrate it is on guard amid new voting restrictions proposed and enacted by Republican-led states across the nation — and as Democratic-led federal voting legislation has stalled in Congress.

"We are keeping a close eye on what's going on around the country," said a Justice Department official, who requested anonymity to brief reporters. "If they're going to conduct these so-called audits, they have to comply with federal law."

 

And while putting an end to Big Lie audits are important, fixing this is just as important, even more so.