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Dirtytricks3 Bak

color problem

see lie any means:(

:{:{editor's note: This article has been updated to reflect that the cancellation of 400,000 Pennsylvania voter registrations was due to normal list maintenance, not challenges from outside groups

:{:{A collection of GOP-aligned organizations are already hard at work planning to make it harder for predominantly Democratic constituencies to cast their ballots this November

:{:{According to a Wednesday report in tech publication Wired, groups like True The Vote, the Election Integrity Network, Check My Vote and the Nevada-based Pig Pen Project are planning to blitz urban voting precincts in some of the more competitive battleground states this November like Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. This initiative is likely to create headaches for voters who may show up to their polling place this fall only to find that their registration was removed due to challenges from one or more of these groups

:{:{“These groups and the broader election denial movement have been building these structures, building these projects, over the course of many, many months and years, in preparation for this moment,:(Brendan Fischer, who is the deputy executive director at Documented, told Wired. “:{And the pieces are finally falling into place, where they can begin to file these mass challenges for voter eligibility

:{:{READ MORE:[Lara Trump says Republicans plan to 'strike' at 'major polling locations' and 'hit things'](https://www.alternet.org/lara-trump-republicans-strike:{:{"Staffing poll observers, both during early voting and on election day, in addition to mass voter challenges, in addition to conducting citizen research about election conspiracy theories, these are all priorities for them," he added

:{:{Republican National Committee (RNC) co-chair Lara Trump — who is former President Donald Trump's daughter-in-law — has previously hinted at a well-funded infrastructure put in place to both challenge voter eligibility and to challenge election results themselves. During a Fox Business interview in May, Lara Trump told host Maria Bartiromo that the RNC is ready to engage in a campaign of mass disruption in the weeks following the November election.:(

:{:{"We plan on having attorneys in all of these major polling locations across the country," she said. "We can't wait to litigate something weeks after it has happened. We need to strike at a moment's notice. We want people there on the ready to hit things and hit the ground running when they happen so that we are never seeing 2020 happen ever again"):

:{:{Pennsylvania Secretary of State press secretary Matt Heckel told Wired that election officials are already constantly working to keep voter lists accurate and up to date, saying that 400,000 registrations were removed in 2023 due to regular list maintenance. He warned that a wave of superfluous challenges from outside groups would only add to what is already a considerable workload.:(

:{:{READ MORE:'Carry that with me for the rest of my life': PA election worker lives under constant threat:(

:{:{"Challenges which seek to remove voters on the basis of unverified information or a timeline inconsistent with federal law will lead to disenfranchisement, unnecessary litigation, and a harassing diversion of already-stretched county resources," Heckel told Wired.:(

:{:{After losing the 2020 election, former President Trump filed more than 60 legal challenges to election results in various states. He lost all but one of those challenges, and the sole victory involved a negligible number of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania that were rejected on a technicality. Those ballots did not have an impact on the final tally

:{:{READ MORE:[Election workers 'scared to death' of threats from 'volatile' conspiracy theorists in 2024](https://www.alternet.org/election-workers-scared

{Click here to read Wired's report in full (subscription required).

---===

Elections lawyer and Democracy Docker publisher Marc Elias has been warning that if Donald Trump loses the 2024 presidential election, his MAGA allies in key swing states have a plan to fight the election results — including some MAGA Republicans who now sit on the Georgia Board of Elections. Caputo, however, isn't the only legal expert who is sounding the alarm.

txt 8 24

1219 NO PARTICULAR REASON

missing text at top?

1/22 tag drtytrk

see infiltration

see coordination campaign (also a crime but never punished)

see pseudo-event stunt

see oppo research

see testimony oppos res character assass guilt by assoc kennedy LA

see doctored video

election integrity BS SEE EAGLE AI VOTER ROLL PURGE

see legal and voter suppression, also GERRY

we may need to create a higher category?

see retaliation/ intimidation --> authoritarian -->fascist

see lie any means

belated dirty tricks tag

see lie any means

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an 8 24

editor's note: This article has been updated to reflect that the cancellation of 400,000 Pennsylvania voter registrations was due to normal list maintenance, not challenges from outside groups.*

A collection of GOP-aligned organizations are already hard at work planning to make it harder for predominantly Democratic constituencies to cast their ballots this November.

According to a Wednesday report in tech publication Wired, groups like True The Vote, the Election Integrity Network, Check My Vote and the Nevada-based Pig Pen Project are planning to blitz urban voting precincts in some of the more competitive battleground states this November like Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. This initiative is likely to create headaches for voters who may show up to their polling place this fall only to find that their registration was removed due to challenges from one or more of these groups.

“These groups and the broader election denial movement have been building these structures, building these projects, over the course of many, many months and years, in preparation for this moment,” Brendan Fischer, who is the deputy executive director at Documented, told Wired. “And the pieces are finally falling into place, where they can begin to file these mass challenges for voter eligibility.”

READ MORE:Lara Trump says Republicans plan to 'strike' at 'major polling locations' and 'hit things'

"Staffing poll observers, both during early voting and on election day, in addition to mass voter challenges, in addition to conducting citizen research about election conspiracy theories, these are all priorities for them," he added.

Republican National Committee (RNC) co-chair Lara Trump — who is former President Donald Trump's daughter-in-law — has previously hinted at a well-funded infrastructure put in place to both challenge voter eligibility and to challenge election results themselves. During a Fox Business interview in May, Lara Trump told host Maria Bartiromo that the RNC is ready to engage in a campaign of mass disruption in the weeks following the November election.

"We plan on having attorneys in all of these major polling locations across the country," she said. "We can't wait to litigate something weeks after it has happened. We need to strike at a moment's notice. We want people there on the ready to hit things and hit the ground running when they happen so that we are never seeing 2020 happen ever again."

Pennsylvania Secretary of State press secretary Matt Heckel told Wired that election officials are already constantly working to keep voter lists accurate and up to date, saying that 400,000 registrations were removed in 2023 due to regular list maintenance. He warned that a wave of superfluous challenges from outside groups would only add to what is already a considerable workload.

READ MORE:'Carry that with me for the rest of my life': PA election worker lives under constant threat

"Challenges which seek to remove voters on the basis of unverified information or a timeline inconsistent with federal law will lead to disenfranchisement, unnecessary litigation, and a harassing diversion of already-stretched county resources," Heckel told Wired.

After losing the 2020 election, former President Trump filed more than 60 legal challenges to election results in various states. He lost all but one of those challenges, and the sole victory involved a negligible number of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania that were rejected on a technicality. Those ballots did not have an impact on the final tally.

READ MORE:Election workers 'scared to death' of threats from 'volatile' conspiracy theorists in 2024

{Click here to read Wired's report in full (subscription required).

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an ah 8 24

Political strategists and organizers have not only been expressing their fears about the possibility of unrest or violence during the 2024 presidential election — they are also worried about interference from a foreign power.

Talking Points Memo's David Kurtz addresses that concern in an article published on August 12.

"We've entered the mean season for the dark arts: foreign influence, computer hacks, and disinformation," Kurtz reports. "The question is whether we're any better prepared to withstand them than we were in 2016. The outlook isn't promising."

READ MORE:**Trump is losing it because he's afraid of losing**

Kurtz goes on to describe some things that recall "the Russian influence scheme of 2016 but with the focus this time on Iran."

The TPM reporter notes that on July 9, U.S. intel officials described Russia as the "preeminent threat" to U.S. election security this year but also described Iran as a "chaos agent."

On August 10, Politico's Alex Isenstadt reported on hacked political materials that included a 271-page research dossier used in the vetting of Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), now Trump's running mate.

The Washington Post reported, on August 11, that it had also received a copy of that dossier.

READ MORE:**'An implosion': Conservatives warn 'deeply unwell' Trump grows more 'dangerous' as Harris soars**

"It's only August," Kurtz comments. "There's a long way until November."

READ MORE:**'Has he met his boss?' Vance mocked after whining about Dems turning tables on the GOP**

*Read Talking Points Memo's full article at this link.

===

an 6 24

Stone — a longtime confidant of former President Donald Trump — recently revealed to two undercover journalists that Trump's 2024 campaign is already hard at work planning to challenge 2024 election results in multiple states.

In new audio obtained by Rolling Stone, documentary filmmaker Lauren Windsor and journalist Ally Sammarco spoke with Stone at an event at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this year while posing as conservative Catholics who were fans of the far-right activist. At one point in his conversation with Sammarco, Stone told her that Trump's 2024 campaign is far more prepared than the former president's 2020 campaign to dispute election results. He even suggested that Trump has friends in high places who will lend him a hand when election results are litigated.

"At least this time when they do it, you have a lawyer and a judge — his home phone number standing by — so you can stop it," Stone told Sammarco. "We made no preparations last time, none … There are technical, legal steps that we have to take to try and have a more honest election. We’re not there yet, but there’s things that can be done."

READ MORE:Roger Stone under investigation by Capitol Police over threat to murder House Democrats

While Stone didn't say the name of the judge the campaign is allegedly close with, he did tell Windsor that the campaign was prepared to mount a multi-state offensive to disrupt certification of election results using "lawyers, judges [and] technology." He also hinted that Trumpworld viewed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon — whom Trump appointed to the judiciary just months before he was voted out of office — as a fellow traveler, given her repeated accommodations of Trump's delay tactics in the federal classified documents case.

"We are beating them,” Stone is heard saying to Sammarco. “[Trump’s] trial in Georgia is falling apart. I think the judge is on the verge of dismissing the charges against him in Florida. They’re delayed in New York City and they’re now delayed in Washington.”

That event, which happened in March, was held several months before Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts in his New York criminal trial, and Cannon last week rejected Trump's attempts to dismiss the Mar-a-Lago case. However, Cannon has been unusually slow in her oversight of the pre-trial process, and scuttled the initial May 20 trial date arguing that she would need until at least July to rule on the various pre-trial motions still pending.

Sammarco asked Stone a leading question about how the Trump campaign planned to stop "voter fraud" like "ballot harvesting," and the Trump advisor assured her that for some friendly MAGA-adjacent state governments, "it’ll be easier to stop. In other places, it won’t."

READ MORE:Experts: Judge Cannon 'running out the clock' for Trump after denying Jack Smith motion

"We should be suing in half a dozen places,” Stone continued. “I mean we’re finally now on an offensive footing."

Other parts of Sammarco's conversation with Stone captured him praising the Trump-led takeover of the Republican National Committee and the elevation of his daughter-in-law, Lara, to become co-chair of the GOP's national campaign apparatus. He said this change means Republicans can spend "lots more" money on challenging elections. He then boasted about favorable "changes in state law, real-time voter list monitoring, going to court as we just did to challenge some of the vote laws," and bragged that the campaign "went into court to sue in Michigan over the hand [written] ballots."

READ MORE:'Where's the DOJ?' Experts demand arrest of Roger Stone after hearing murder threat audio

*Click here to read Rolling Stone's report in full (subscription required).

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Right-wing media misleadingly used a video from a fundraiser to renew their attacks on Biden's age

06/18/24 mma

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see fox

dirty trick pseudo-event

6 24

mma

in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, right-wing media are doubling down on deceptive messaging around gas prices to attack President Joe Biden — in part by promoting a campaign launched by Americans for Prosperity, the fossil fuel billionaire Koch brothers' conservative political advocacy group.

//

Right-wing media used OPEC oil cuts to blame Biden for domestic gas price volatility

10/24/22

  1. ### Fox News attacks Biden for “surging” gasoline prices as they fall for 27th consecutive day

07/11/22

  1. ### Fox News accusing the Biden administration of deliberately spiking gas prices represents a cynical narrative escalation

06/16/22

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heATED 5 23

Geoffrey Supran, the director of the Climate Accountability Lab at the University of Miami, is one of the country’s foremost experts on climate disinformation.

That’s why the former Harvard researcher was called to testify in the Senate Budget Committee’s hearing yesterday, titled “Denial, Disinformation, and Doublespeak: Big Oil’s Evolving Efforts to Avoid Accountability for Climate Change.”

Supran’s opening statement for the hearing included 120 cited sources, all of which he said “clearly demonstrate that the fossil fuel regime has deliberately denied Americans and Congress their right to be accurately informed about the climate crisis, just as tobacco companies misled Americans about the harms of smoking.”

So when it came time for Senator John Kennedy—a heavily oil-funded Republican from Louisiana—to question Supran, one might have expected him to take issue with Supran’s sources or claims.

Instead, Kennedy attempted to discredit Supran personally, by tangentially associating him with a climate activist group that routinely calls politicians potty-mouth names. (The horror!)

[vid]

In an attempt to cast doubt on Supran’s credibility as an academic, Kennedy accused him of making social media posts “in support of” the youth-led direct action group Climate Defiance.

Kennedy:On December 14th, 2023, you tweeted in support of Climate Defiance. That's an entity that the Brookings Institute has called a “radical climate change group.” Is that correct?

Supran:I don’t recall, I’m afraid.

Kennedy:Would this be the same Climate Defiance—I'm looking at your tweet, you tweeted in support of them—that called, Senator Joe Biden a “sick fuck?”

Supran:I don’t know.

Kennedy:Would this be the same Climate Defiance that called Senator Lisa Murkowski a “murderer?”

Supran: I don’t know, but as I said in my statement…Kennedy:Would this be the same Climate Defiance who told the CEO of Exxon to “Eat shit, Darren?”

Supran:I’m not responsible for the statements of others.

Kennedy:Nice group you’re hanging around with, doc.

Visibly confused by the accusation, Supran asked to see the tweets in question. While he waited to receive them, Kennedy cast doubt on Supran’s ability to be objective as a researcher, repeatedly calling him “doc” and “good doctor.”

“Thank you for your ‘objective’ advice, doc,” Kennedy said. “I’d like to submit all of the good doctor’s objective tweets.”

But Supran had never actually posted or re-posted any of the profane name-calling statements Kennedy referenced. Supran had only ever re-postedone tweet from Climate Defiance in December, which had described the group’s preferred method for climate action: chasing down fossil fuel CEOs and politicians, rather than sending letters or signing petitions.

Kennedy was using Supran’s re-tweet of Climate Defiance to associate the academic with everything the activist group has ever said. “The line of questioning itself was a bad faith, ill-mannered, and failed attempt to bait me,” Supran told HEATED. “It is unfair and unrealistic for anyone to be held accountable for everything that an independent organization has ever said.”

At the time, though, Supran did not have a chance to explain or clarify this. He only interjected: “These are not my tweets. These are retweets”—which made it seem like he had, in fact, retweeted a statement calling Joe Biden a “sick fuck.”

To this, Kennedy exploded. “Do you often retweet stuff you don't support?” He said. “Is that what you're telling me, doc?”

“I just want to say, this form of character assassination is characteristic of the propaganda techniques of fossil fuel interests,” Supran said.

“Are you gonna call me a sick fuck??” Kennedy replied.

Shortly afterward, video clips of Kennedy’s “sick fuck” remark went viral—but not because of outrage at Supran.

Source: X

In fact, they went viral in part because they were re-posted by Climate Defiance as a fundraising tool.

“We really struck a nerve,” the group said in an e-mail blast to its supporters about the exchange.

Indeed, Climate Defiance founder Michael Greenberg told HEATED that Kennedy’s meltdown was a powerful endorsement of his group’s aggressive tactics.

“It shows that this stuff is working and getting under peoples skin, and making people in power squirm,” he said. “The fact that an oil-funded Senator from Louisiana is referencing a group of young, broke kinds fighting for their lives shows the power of the movement we’re creating and the change we’re making.”

As for Supran, he told HEATED in a statement that he hopes the exchange can serve as an unorthodox educational tool:

More important than the Senator’s theatrics themselves is how they typify the hostile tactics that the fossil fuel industry and its allies have resorted to for decades to attack not just the message but the messenger.

It’s straight out of Big Tobacco’s playbook. In fact, research by John Cook and his colleagues has shown that character assassination has been one of the most common ways in which fossil fuel interests have attempted to deny accountability for the climate crisis.

The Senator’s behavior is also living proof of the influence of oil money on American politics. As I mentioned in my testimony, scholars at Yale and Cambridge have statistically shown that the more Congresspeople vote against the environment, the more money they get from oil companies.

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that Senator Kennedy has taken $1.5 million from the oil and gas industry.

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Kentucky strips power of Democratic governor to appoint Mitch McConnell’s successor - Alternet.org

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pt man on voter suppression 2024?

an 3 24

Trump campaign says it plans to change tactics from 2020 when Joe Biden beat the then-incumbent president by more than 7 million votes, and this time go on “offense” by having “soldiers” and “poll watchers” at polling places.

Despite the Trump campaign’s relentless claims of voter fraud, more than 60 court rulings found those claims to be unsupported by facts: there was no significant voter fraud. Last year The Brookings Institution cited an extensive report from the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which found, for example, voter “fraud in Texas amounted to 0.000096% of all ballots cast.”

Vowing to “to play offense this time around,” Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday, appearing on “The Kimberly Guilfoyle Show,” said they are “investing a lot of money into voter integrity efforts to ensure that every American knows their ballot will be cast and counted and matter.”

“We’re not going to play defense, like we unfortunately did in 2020. We’re going to have soldiers, poll watchers on the ground who are making sure that there are no irregularities and fraud like we saw in the last election.”

READ MORE: Trump Says He Thinks He’s ‘Allowed’ to Accept Foreign Money to Pay Fines

Guilfoyle, who is engaged to Donald Trump Jr., was at the January 6, 2021 rally at the Ellipse, and helped organize and fundraise for the event. Propublica that year reported she had “boasted to a GOP operative that she had raised $3 million for the rally that helped fuel the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.”

“Guilfoyle’s texts, reviewed by ProPublica, represent the strongest indication yet that members of the Trump family circle were directly involved in the financing and organization of the rally. The attack on the Capitol that followed it left five dead and scores injured.”

“I love it,” Guilfoyle told Leavitt. “I cannot wait.”

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new level borderline criminal? pluto plus pvt intel?

an 12 23

a far-right Republican House lawmaker is alleging some members of Congress are compromised by “women, drugs, booze,” and suggested they are being blackmailed by Russia.

“This is how it works,” **U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett**(R-TN) told far-right podcast host Benny Johnson (video below). “You’re visiting, you’re out of the country, or out of town, or you’re in a motel or a bar in D.C., and some, whatever you’re, you’re into – women or men or whatever – comes up, and they’re very attractive, and they’re laughing at your jokes and, and they, and you’re buying them a drink, next thing you know you’re in the motel room with them naked.”

“And next thing you know, you know, you’re about to make a key vote and what happens?” Burchett continued. “Some well-dressed person comes up and whispers in your ear, ‘Hey, man, there’s tapes out on you,’ or, ‘Were you in a motel room, on, whatever with whoever?’ And then you’re like, ‘uh-oh,’ and [they] said, ‘You really ought not be voting for this thing.'”

Johnson described Burchett’s description as being “BLACKMAILED.”

READ MORE: ‘I Fought for It’: Republican Takes Credit for $650,000 in Federal Funds From Bill She Voted Against

“You got powerful people and they write the big checks,” Rep. Burchett said. “Let’s be honest and powerful people in this country, they write the big checks, and they, you know, they’re the ones out on the tarmac when the President comes and visits, and, whichever party they’re in, they’re always either out on the tarmac or in the private room. They’re the ones that write the big checks.”

“They don’t care who’s in, they hate this country, they hate what we’re about, but they love their portfolios and they love their money more than they do anything else,” Burchett continued. “And they protect it and they protect the people that do that and by doing so, you know, the old honeypot. The Russians do that. And I’m sure members of Congress have been caught up – why in the world would good conservatives vote for crazy stuff like what we’ve been saying out of Congress?”

“If it’s women, drugs, booze, it’ll find you in D.C. and in most elected offices, and that’s what people in power influence do. And it’s just, and I’ve been in this game my whole life has been 16 years in the state legislature in Tennessee and eight years as county mayor, and now I’m in my fifth year of Congress, but it’s just it. The stakes are higher but the with the game is still the same.”

===

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an 12 23

Rep. Brandon Williams (R-New York) is accusing two former staffers of blackmailing him by threatening to expose his adult daughter's page on adult subscription site OnlyFans.

According to Politico, Williams says Michael Gordon, who was his former chief of staff, along with former legislative director Ryan Sweeney, threatened to "expose" his 27-year-old daughter's profile on the site after they were both fired earlier this year. The threat appears to stem from a confrontation Williams and Gordon had at a Capitol Hill holiday party. In a video recorded by a Syracuse university student, Williams is seen putting his finger in Gordon's face, saying "you f--- with my family, I’ll end every relationship you have."

Williams said Gordon was "trying to exert some leverage over me," and added "I just simply won’t allow that to happen."

After Williams gave Gordon a notice that he had 30 days to find new employment, Gordon reportedly went to GOP consultant Aaron Evans. The consultant then relayed to Williams that he should "think about the potential embarrassment his family would experience if [gossip site] TMZ found out about his daughter’s OnlyFans account."

For his part, Gordon told Politico "the allegations Congressman Williams has levied against me are categorically false." Sweeney asserted that "the congressman’s allegations are completely false."

On the day before former Rep. George Santos (R-New York) was expelled from the House, the embattled former congressman called for the House Committee on Ethics to investigate Williams for his behavior. Williams was a member of the group of New York Republicans who pushed for Santos' expulsion.

Williams is a freshman member of the House of Representatives who represents a swing district. After winning in 2022 by just one point, Williams' district has been targeted by House Democrats as a top priority in order to win back a majority in the chamber in 2024. Politico chose not to publish the name of Williams' daughter to protect her identity.

===

Pro-Trump influencer Douglass Mackey is now headed to federal prison to serve a seven-month sentence after being convicted by a federal jury in March. Prosecutors asked for Mackey, who was arrested in 2021, to serve between six months and a year behind bars.

Mackey, a West Palm Beach, Florida resident who went by the name "Ricky Vaughn," was found guilty on one count of conspiracy against rights for trying to defraud Hillary Clinton supporters in the 2016 election. According to the New York Times, Judge Ann M. Donnelly, of the Eastern District of New York, said while sentencing Mackey that he was "one of the leading members" of the conspiracy to prevent Clinton supporters from voting, adding that it was "nothing short of an assault on our democracy."

The conspiracy in question stemmed from a series of posts, meant to look like they were from the former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, encouraging Black and Latino supporters to vote by text message or through social media, knowing that those votes would not actually be counted. One of those posts showed a Black woman holding a sign, and another post was in Spanish, and included the Clinton campaign logo with fine print attached that read "Hillary for President."

One of the fake Clinton ads created by Douglass Mackey a.k.a. "Ricky Vaughn." Screenshot: Twitter via BuzzFeed News

At the time of the conspiracy, Mackey's "Ricky Vaughn" Twitter account had approximately 58,000 followers, and was labeled by the M.I.T. Media Lab in February of 2016 as the 107th most powerful influencer of the then-upcoming presidential election. While Mackey's attorney argued during the trial that his client's actions accounted to just a few clicks on a computer, prosecutors countered that Mackey's "true power was his ability to spread messages to convert his clicks into tens of thousands more."

Notably, former President Donald Trump is also facing the same charge of of conspiracy against rights that Mackey was just sentenced under. Special Counsel Jack Smith indicted Trump on that charge, among several others, in his August indictment pertaining to Trump's role in the January 6 insurrection. Trump is scheduled to stand trial on those charges on March 4, 2024, just before the pivotal Super Tuesday primaries.

===

an 8 23

Revealed: The shocking voter purge crisis of democracy

Thom Hartmann

andRaw Story

August 14, 2023

If you live in the Blue part of a Red state, Republicans don’t want you to vote. And their latest strategy is their most brute-force method: simply remove you from the voting rolls.

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A shocking new study from Demos lays out the dimensions of this voter purge crisis of democracy brought to us by an increasingly desperate GOP.

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Republicans are doing this because they know that their policies are unpopular: most Americans aren’t fans of tax cuts for billionaires, more pollution, deregulation, high-priced drugs, privatizing Medicare, ending Social Security, criminalizing abortion and birth control, student debt, hating on Black and queer people, and the GOP’s war on unions and working people.

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So, the GOP does everything they can to make voting difficult or even impossible, particularly for people in heavily Democratic neighborhoods (which are usually college towns, big cities, and Black neighborhoods).

When Republicans run elections in such areas (typically Blue cities in Red states), they’ll close or change polling places at the last minute to sow confusion and cause people to give up when they show up at their normal polling place and find it closed.

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For example, in this week’s election in Ohio the state changed polling places for mostly Blackvoters in Cuyahoga and Summit counties just five days before the election, as Newsweek noted in an article titled:

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“Ohio GOP Changing Polling Locations Days Before Election Raises Questions”

Ohio voters were outraged, and that outrage spread across X (formerly Twitter) with comments like this:

“The Ohio GOP is playing ‘Your polling place has moved’ with 47,000 voters in the largest African American voting county in Ohio—just five days before the election. Making it harder to vote—in the crucial August 8th special election (deciding if a majority of voters still can amend Ohio's state constitution)—is wrong.”

Another X user noted:

“Ohio Republicans are so damn shady! … This stinks to high heaven. At the last minute, before Ohio’s special election, polling locations were changed in Cuyahoga and Summit counties. More than 47,000 voters are affected by changes to 50 voting precincts.”

The fact that this little trick in Ohio this week got virtually no national press coverage guarantees Red states will be doing more of it in the upcoming 2023 and 2024 elections.

But that’s just the beginning.

Knowing that working-class people are less likely to vote Republican than white upper-class suburbanites, Republicans also engineer polling situations so people paid by the hour will have to wait for hours in line just to vote, losing out on income.

Every year, we’re treated to pictures and videos of hours-long lines to vote in Blue cities in Red states, while lines in white suburbs typically run less than 10 to 15 minutes.

Similarly, many Red states have imposed draconian penalties on people conducting voter registration drives for making even the smallest mistakes, or for failing to “properly register” themselves with the state. This has shut down many voter registration programs, including some from long-term organizations like the League of Women’s Voters.

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As The Kansas Reflector newspaper noted, the penalty for even a minor, inadvertent error is now 17 months in the state prison and a $100,000 fine:

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“The League of Women Voters of Kansas and other nonprofits are suspending voter registration drives for fear of criminal prosecution under a new state law.”

The League has sued Florida, Tennessee, and Texas for their criminalization of voter registration drives as well.

But purging voters — by the tens of millions every election cycle — is where the GOP finds their best result. As the Demos report notes:

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“Between the close of registration for the 2020 general election and the close of registration for the 2022 general election, states reported removing 19,260,000 records from their voter registration rolls. This was equal to 8.5% of the total number of voters who were registered in the United States as of the close of registration for the 2022 general election.”

Additionally, seventeen million voters were purged in the two years leading up to the 2018 election, fully ten percent of America’s voting population, according to the Brennan Center.

Given that the most radical purges took place among Black and youth voters in Republican-controlled Red states, those 8.5 percent and 10 percent “national averages” could well be twice or three times that percentage in the states where these purges are concentrated.

They added, most of the purge activity was taking place in former Confederate Red states that — before five Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in their 2013 Shelby County decision — had to have purges pre-cleared by the federal government:

“The median purge rate over the 2016–2018 period in jurisdictions previously subject to preclearance was 40 percent higher than the purge rate in jurisdictions that were not covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.”

More than a quarter of those purged during this period from 2016-2022 were removed from the rolls either because they failed to vote in the previous election or because they failed to return a postcard mailed out by a Republican secretary of state (that is usually designed to look like junk mail).

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This is called “caging” andused to be illegal, but Sam Alito broke the tie and wrote the 5-4 decision in their 2018 Husted v A Phillip Randolph Institute when the five Republicans on the Court ruled that Ohio Republican Secretary of State Husted could continue his practice of mailing the postcards into Ohio cities with the largest Black populations.

In his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out that only around 4 percent of Americans move out of their county every year. Yet, he wrote:

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“The record shows that in 2012 Ohio identified about 1.5 million registered voters—nearly 20% of its 8 million registered voters—as ineligible to remain on the federal voter roll because [Husted said that] they changed their residences.”

The Brennan Center found that just between 2014 and 2016, in the two years leading up to the Hillary/Trump presidential election, over 14 million people were purged from voter rolls, largely in Republican-controlled states.Then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp purged over a million in Georgia alone leading up to his 50,000 vote 2018 election win against Stacey Abrams.

Calling the findings “disturbing,” the Brennan Center noted, “Almost 4 million more names were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016 [just after the Supreme Court legalized large-scale no-oversight voter purges in 2013] than between 2006 and 2008. This growth in the number of removed voters represented an increase of 33 percent—far outstripping growth in both total registered voters (18 percent) and total population (6 percent).”

Another strategy that the GOP has rolled out in a big way to suppress the vote in Blue areas of Red states is “strict signature matching.” They primarily use this against voters who’ve succeeded in obtaining vote-by-mail ballots, which are authenticated by comparing the signature on the envelope with the voter’s registration card.

Because signatures change over time and often vary a lot when people are in a hurry, this is low-hanging fruit for the GOP. Last year they started a program to field an “army” of 50,000 “poll watchers,” including interviewing candidates from among white supremacist militia groups, for the 2024 election.

While some of thesepoll watcherswill be on hand to try to intimidate or challenge Black and young voters (a practice that’s legal in most Red states), many will be overseeing the counting of mail-in ballots, which are generally more Democratic than Republican.

All they have to do is claim that, in their opinion, a signature doesn’t match and the ballot goes into the “provisional” pile and won’t be counted until or unless the voter shows up in person at the county elections office. Most people never even know their ballot was challenged and not counted.

Meanwhile, the GOP in Texas is quietly recruiting 10,000 white volunteers “courageous” enough to go into Black and Hispanic polling places and confront people trying to vote.

As Jessica Corbett reported for Common Dreams:

“Common CauseTexas on Thursday shared a leaked video of a Harris County GOP official discussing plans to ‘build an army’ of 10,000 election workers and poll watchers, including some who ‘will have the confidence and courage’ to go into Black and Brown communities to address alleged voter fraud that analyses show does not actually exist.”

Voting in Red states has become difficult, and registering voters is now treacherous since five Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized all these little tricks and strategies to purge or discourage Democratic voters.

If you live in a Blue area of a Red state, get ready: the GOP plans to pull out all the stops for the 2024 election.

Double-check your voter registration every month or two, and be sure to double-check it in the weeks just before the deadline for registration, as Republican Secretaries of State prefer to purge people in this window so by the time people discovered they’re purged it’s too late to re-register.

Forewarned is forearmed. Pass it on to your friends in Red states.

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https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/t**hey-blew-up-my-life**/

no lnx docs

mARTINSVILLE, Ind. — It started April 12, right afterFox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime, one of the most-watched news programs in the country.

A phone call: “You stupid b*tch.”

Then an email: “Everyone you ever encounter … should spit in your face, fling their feces at you (with impeccable aim), punch you, knock you down, kick you, piss on you and hold you there for similar treatment by everyone waiting in line for their turn — you despicable sad excuse for a sub-human being.”

And that was just the first 11 minutes for Jenny Oakley, a mid-level public school administrator in Martinsville, Ind., who found herself depicted in a nationally televised secret camera video and thrust suddenly — and, she said, unfairly and inaccurately — into culture war cruelty.

It would get worse.

During sleepless nights, Oakley’s husband Justin took out his guns for the first time in 10 years. Police began patrols outside the Oakleys’ home after they reported harassment. The couple bought a Doberman named Zeus for added protection. Late on a Saturday night in their quiet neighborhood, a burst of sound — Pow-Pow-Pow — startled them and then a louder Boom.

Having previously enjoyed a quiet life, Jenny Oakley found herself in a debilitating new reality, breaking down when people merely asked how she was doing. She enjoyed reading, but now she couldn’t concentrate. She liked watching videos, but a video got her in this situation. Videos triggered dread.

Oakley describes herself as someone who wants to be liked, someone who has “always cared what people think, to a fault.” She said she avoids controversy and isn’t very political. Justin is the opposite. He works for an Indiana teachers union and ran for state Superintendent of Public Instruction in 2012 before dropping out of the race.

But on social media, strangers took off on Jenny’s character, including one who wrote, “I do not believe in any way that she is a good person.”

An email from the night of the program carried the subject line “God Bless You,” but what it said stung Oakley the most. She could handle the heinous screed of some kook. But this cut deep as an educator and mother of a middle schooler.

“You should never be near any children again, including your own…,” the email said.

That middle schooler helped her mother during the difficult days ahead.

Jenny Oakley and Zeus, her family's Doberman. Doug McSchooler / Raw Story

“I don't think she had ever seen me cry except at funerals,” Oakley said. “And I was walking around here like a zombie, basically. And she made out little Bible verses and stuck them all over the house, you know, trying to hold me up.”

And to what end are the Oakleys suffering through this ordeal?

“I just think it's just part of a bigger attack on public education,” Oakley said. “And, you know, that's the ultimate goal. I wasn't the target necessarily, but I'm definitely the collateral damage.”

Hidden camera, open wounds

In an exclusive interview with Raw Story, Oakley recounted her experience as one of seven public educators from different school districts in Indiana who Accuracy in Media recorded on a hidden camera. Fox News used the video for its April 12 segment on Jesse Watters Primetime.

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Accuracy in Media, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit, and Fox News alleged that the educators were “stealthily” teaching “principles associated with Critical Race Theory,” a highly controversial front in the culture wars that, at its core, alleges systemic racism in America.

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Raw Story last week requested an interview with Accuracy in Media President Adam Guillette. Accuracy in Media responded with an unsigned email requesting Raw Story submit written questions in advance. Raw Story declined to do so, and Accuracy in Media did not respond to subsequent interview requests. Accuracy in Media also did not respond to several emailed questions.

Fox News did not respond to requests for an interview.

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The supposed deception of parents, Accuracy in Media argues, reinforces the need for public tax money to go to charter and private schools.

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“Our goal is school choice where the money follows the child,” Guillette said on Fox News. “That is the only solution.”

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Within the past few months, Accuracy in Media also published hidden-camera video of public educators in Ohio, North Carolina, Texas, and Nebraska. In those states — plus Indiana and several others — such recordings are legal because only one party to a conversation needs to consent.

ALSO READ: A neuroscientist warns: We're watching the largest and most dangerous 'cult' in American history

Educators were accused, as in Indiana, of sneaking CRT concepts into public school curriculum.

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“After this happened, I was like, ‘How in the world did they align what I was talking about to CRT?’” Oakley said. “Because in fact, I couldn't even talk intelligently about CRT at that time.”

Through open records requests to the districts involved, Raw Story obtained Accuracy in Media’s lightly edited video from the Elkhart, Ind., public school district, plus hundreds of pages of emails from all of the districts.

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Oakley said she spoke to Raw Story to explain her side, advocate for the teaching profession and to show the human cost of rabid culture war fighting.

She appears for 24 seconds in the Accuracy in Media video.

“We’ve talked about, to our textbook companies that are coming in to do presentations — and I actually prep them a little because I’m like, “We want this in our curriculum, so if you could just not say specifically this, then it won’t cause a red flag with the community,’” Oakley says. “And I hate that we have to do that. But that way, it’s still there. And the community would support it if just the content was there. They just … it’s the title.”

The Fox News story started with a graphic over Watters’ shoulder showing children’s blocks with the letters CRT.

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“Children are fed CRT propaganda,” it said on the lower-third of the screen.

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Watters started the segment by asserting, “Schools are brainwashing our kids and then lying about it.”

Jenny Oakley is the first educator shown. The Fox News segment cut something Oakley sees as critical from the Accuracy in Media video — the part where she says, “And the community would support it …”

In an interview, Oakley said the red flag she meant was Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), which is sometimes mistakenly conflated with CRT. Teaching SEL is part of Indiana’s state academic standards and is promoted on a flyer from three state agencies.

It equates to skills such as building resiliency, communicating effectively, and goal setting. Indiana schools are required by law to teach SEL concepts, the Plainfield, Ind., school district explained in a Q&A strongly supportive of its administrator who appeared in the Accuracy in Media video.

CRT, however, is another matter. In June, the Metropolitan School District of Martinsville sued Accuracy in Media, saying it defamed the district and presented it in a false light by saying it teaches CRT. In July, the district withdrew its complaint.

The complaint alleged, “MSD of Martinsville believes that AIM has manipulated a surreptitious recording of a School District employee in an effort to falsely claim that the School District is teaching CRT and is lying to School District parents about it."

Superintendent Eric Bowlen declined comment for this story, including why the district dismissed the lawsuit it brought.

Oakley has not seen the unedited version of the video. The school district’s lawsuit said Accuracy in Media initially agreed to provide it and then went silent.

A day after the Fox News segment, a truck with a large screen on the side played the Accuracy in Media video as it rolled around downtown Indianapolis, with the city about to host the National Rifle Association’s annual convention.

It’s unclear who hired the truck, but Accuracy in Media’s tactics were generating attention.

‘Sydney Greenberg’

On a Thursday morning in February, two women who Oakley thought were in their 20s showed up at Martinsville’s administration building unannounced, saying they were looking for a school district for their child in first grade.

Their story, according to an email Oakley wrote later that day to district colleagues: They came from Texas, but Texas was too conservative and they wanted a new community and school. They expressed concern about censored curriculum and book banning.

It was more than two months before the Fox News story.

Oakley wouldn’t normally be the one to talk with school shoppers. That would be her boss, Suzie Lipps, assistant to the superintendent for curriculum, instruction and human resources. But Lipps was working on an issue outside the building, so Oakley, the director of e-learning and literacy, spoke with them. These opportunities are not taken lightly. That’s especially the case with Indiana’s legislature using tax money for a robust voucher program supporting private, usually faith-based, schools.

When Oakley asked the women what part of town they moved to, they named a local church. The conversation lasted five or 10 minutes, Oakley said. She later contacted the principal of the elementary school the child would be attending and suggested inviting the women to a cultural festival at the school that night.

Oakley got a name from one of the women, “Sydney Greenberg,” and a phone number.

Nobody returned the call inviting them to the cultural event. When Raw Story called the number this month, there was a generic message to leave a voicemail.

Martinsville is a conservative town in a red state. It’s not the place one would think of for a couple seeking a community aligned with their progressive politics.

ALSO READ: Why violent extremists get security clearances — but people of color must sometimes wait and wait

Nothing came of the women’s visit until an email at 2:39 p.m. on April 12 from Max Kiviat, associate producer for Fox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime. He addressed it to Lipps and copied Oakley.

“Tonight we will be covering a story about an undercover investigation involving your school district,” the email said. “Video shows administrators admitting that the schools are using misleading language to confuse parents into stealthily teaching students principles associated with Critical Race Theory. We wanted to offer the school district a chance to comment on the story. We are going live at 7:30pm ET.”

The email didn’t say what specifically the district was being asked to comment on. Oakley said during ensuing conversations, she, Lipps and Bowlen all wondered if they were the one being targeted.

A little after 5 p.m., after internal discussions and consulting with lawyers, Lipps emailed back to say the district would wait to see the story. Two minutes later, Kiviat sent a link to the video Accuracy in Media had posted.

In their living room at home, Jenny and Justin Oakley watched the video on a laptop. Then Jenny started to hear from friends that her face was being used on Fox News promotions for that night’s Jesse Watters Primetime show.

The attacks on her would start in a few hours.

Oakley did have supporters in the community. Some came to her defense on social media. She sought therapy.

Before a school board meeting, local pastors led a prayer circle outside the building for people with all points of view on the situation. One of the pastors invoked the Gospel of John: “Love one another. Such as my love has been for you, so must your love be for each other. This is how all will know you for my disciples: your love for one another.”

A pastor led a prayer before a school board meeting at Martinsville High School the week after Fox News aired a story about Accuracy in Media video featuring a local school administrator. He invoked the gospel of John to love one another. Photo: Stacey Miers

About a week later, Justin learned his mother had brain cancer. This added to the pressure on their daughter who couldn’t have both of her parents in a prolonged dark place.

“So I had to snap out of it,” Jenny Oakley said. “I had to snap out of it for her, just being strong in the fact that I did not do anything wrong and that it'll be interpreted how it is no matter what.”

Unedited video

Accuracy in Media reported $908,000 in contributions and grants on its latest federal tax filing.

As a federally recognized nonprofit organization, it did not have to detail the source or sources of its money. Accuracy in Media says its mission is to “monitor the accuracy of news reporting activities by the media” and “promote accuracy, fairness and balance in news reporting.”

Guillette, the group’s president, makes $200,000, according to the document.

As part of a public records request, Raw Story obtained what Accuracy in Media described in an email to the Elkhart, Ind., school district as a lightly edited, 15-minute hidden-camera conversation with Brad Sheppard, assistant superintendent of instruction.

The edits, Guillette wrote, were to protect Accuracy in Media’s tactics during an “ongoing investigation.”

In the video, what sounds like a man and a woman gave Sheppard frequent affirmations of his answers — “right on,” “good,” “I love that.” The couple’s full pretense for showing up wasn’t part of the video, but what they said to Sheppard left little doubt about their supposed political views.

ALSO READ: A deafening silence from Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s Black football players

“In Texas, unfortunately, we banned anything that has to do with the 1619 Project,” the woman says, referring to the controversial New York Times project that put slavery at the center of America’s history.

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“In Texas, they passed one of those stupid laws banning what they call Critical Race Theory,” the man says.

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“We’re really hoping not to get a MAGA version of history, to put it bluntly,” the woman says.

Regarding what’s taught in the classroom, Sheppard emphasized the Indiana state academic standards.

“As long as (teachers) can tie it back to the standards, they’re covered,” he said. “That’s really the bottom line. Are you teaching the academic standards?”

Sheppard was shown in the Fox News video answering what educational material in the district needs to be “relabeled.”

“I think CRT, Social-Emotional Learning are the two biggies,” he says. “We just have to avoid the words. You know? The labels.”

An Accuracy in Media person says, “We can still do the content, just no labels.”

Sheppard says yes, to which the Accuracy in Media person says, “That’s cool.”

Sheppard was placed on paid administrative leave, returned to his same position and retired in June, according to a lawyer for the district.

ALSO READ: How the long 'arc of the moral universe' just landed in a New York City fire hall

Other records obtained by Raw Story show that Sheppard and another administrator in the Fox News story, Laura DelVecchio of the public school district in Plainfield, Ind., received the same email Oakley did suggesting a line of people punch her and urinate on her.

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All of them arrived within 15 minutes after Jesse Watters Primetime ended. Attorney Jon Little, who represents the Oakleys, believes that indicates a connection to an organization with all-purpose, pre-written screeds for perceived political enemies.

Trustees from the Plainfield school district received a long, racist email suggesting, amid the talk of CRT, a “Thank You White People Day.” It said, “White people created the very high standard of living all races in the USA enjoy” and “many immigrants don’t want to assimilate.” It claimed discrimination against “heterosexual White males.”

In the weeks that followed,Indiana attorney general Todd Rokita got involved on social media, encouraging journalists to write about the Accuracy in Media video.

When DelVecchio received an interview request from Indiana Public Media, she echoed what Oakley said, although they have never met or communicated.

“The story really isn’t about me,” DelVecchio wrote, “it is about the fate of public education.”

A life, changed

Jenny Oakley recalled with a touch of disbelief how, years ago, her husband used to rave about being an eighth grade teacher.

“He would come home every day and say, ‘I just can't believe I get paid to do this as a job,’” she said. “He would come home. He was so excited about the impact that he was making on kids and his conversations every day and the light bulbs going on and all those things.”

For many, teaching is a calling. Pay is often low, but the rewards are supposed to be great. That perception seems to be changing. Indiana has a teacher shortage.

Young teachers, Oakley said, “turn on their TV or hop on Facebook, and all they're seeing are attacks on their profession. And it's hard to keep up the intrinsic motivation of teaching when you have so many of these negative external factors.”

Many of the attacks come from advocates for private and charter schools.

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“I don't think that they're going to be happy until public education just completely crumbles,” Oakley said. “And then they're going to see what kind of pillars of the community we really are, and they'll have to build it back up.”

Among the administrators in the Accuracy in Media video, four are in the same job, one retired, and two districts (Monroe County and Fairfield) did not respond to Raw Story’s inquiry.

Oakley has continued to work. But she said she still can’t be certain about her future in the district.

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Oakley still doesn’t know the identity of the women who came to Martinsville. They weren’t asked to sign in. Now the district office uses the same system as its schools, scanning the driver’s license of everyone who comes in.

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“Thankfully, they didn't walk in here with a backpack that they left behind,” Oakley said, “but they blew up my life.”

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beyond suppression

bill allows gop guy to negate only biggest cty = dem; 2nd bill any cty?

https://www.alternet.org/republicans-texas-sweeping-power-grab/

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bad code an plus $

an bad code no lnx

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bad code an plus $

an ah 6 23

2020 was an incredibly tumultuous year in the United States, from the COVID-19 pandemic to the murder of George Floyd and the unrest that followed to a bitter presidential race. Former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election results are the focus of two separate criminal investigations: one by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and special counsel Jack Smith, the other by Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis.

Trump's MAGA supporters were willing to go to great lengths to get him reelected in 2020, including — according to CNN's Kara Scannell — possibly trying to "infiltrate" the Democratic National Committee (DNC) "ahead of the election."

Federal DOJ prosecutors, Scannell reports, have been investigating those efforts and "have subpoenaed Richard Seddon, a former British intelligence official, and Susan Gore, a Republican donor and heiress to the Gore-Tex fortune" in connection with their probe.

READ MORE: Jack Smith wants to go after Trump's 'good news boy' to crush his January 6 defense: legal expert

"The investigation appears to stem from a 2021 New York Times article that, citing interviews and documents, detailed 'an undercover operation by conservatives to infiltrate progressive groups, political campaigns, and the offices of Democratic as well as moderate Republican elected officials during the 2020 election cycle,'" Scannell reports. "One of the subpoenas, which was sent in the past two weeks, seeks documents and communications from January 2018 through the present involving numerous limited liability companies and individuals, including Gore; Seddon; Erik Prince, the security contractor and brother to former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos; and James O’Keefe, the former head of Project Veritas."

The CNN reporter adds, "The people familiar with the investigation said prosecutors are looking into whether any campaign finance laws were violated. No one has been accused of any wrongdoing."

Scannell notes that the New York Times "reported that two operatives trained by Seddon pledged sizable political donations ranging from $1250 to $10,000 to Democratic organizations and candidates."

"Some of the donations gained the operatives, a couple, entry to fundraisers and even a Democratic primary debate in Las Vegas," Scannell explains. "It is not clear where the couple got the money to make the donations. It is illegal to use another person's name to make political donations, and prosecutors have brought numerous so-called straw donor prosecutions in recent years."

READ MORE:

On June 25, 2021, New York Times journalists Mark Mazzetti and Adam Goldman reported that "conservatives"..."https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/us/politics/spies-conservatives-left-political-enemies.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Beau Maier and Sofia LaRocca attended Democratic events in Las Vegas pretending to be "idealistic Democrats." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/us/politics/spies-conservatives-left-political-enemies.html"  Mazzetti and Goldman reported, "During a cocktail reception…. they worked the room of party officials, rainbow donkey pins affixed to their lapels. In fact, much about them was a lie. Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca were part of an undercover operation by conservatives to infiltrate progressive groups, political campaigns and the offices of Democratic as well as moderate Republican elected officials during the 2020 election cycle, according to interviews and documents. Using large campaign donations and cover stories, the operatives aimed to gather dirt that could sabotage the reputations of people and organizations considered threats to a hard-right agenda advanced by President Donald J. Trump." Ultimately, efforts to keep Trump in the White House failed. Now-President Joe Biden won 306 electoral votes and defeated Trump by more than 7 million in the popular vote READ MORE three of the most prominent rightwing groups which spread election denial lies and advocate for restrictions on voting rights in the US

have joined forces in a secret attempt to woo top election officials in Republican-controlled states.

Led by the Washington-based conservative thinktank the Heritage Foundation, the groups have created an incubator of policies that would restrict access to the ballot box and amplify false claims that fraud is rampant in American elections. The unstated yet implicit goal is to dampen Democratic turnout and help Republican candidates to victory.

Details of the two-day “secretaries of state conference” held in Washington in February were obtained by the watchdog group ...guk Officials from 13 Republican-controlled states, including 10 top election administrators, participated in the event. Attendees discussed controversial “election integrity” ideas of the sort weaponized by Donald Trump.

Among the participants were nine secretaries of state and Virginia’s election commissioner, all of whom preside over both statewide and federal elections in their states including next year’s presidential contest. .

Documented also obtained the conference agenda which lists a number of Trump associates among the speakers. They include Ken Cuccinelli who, as acting deputy secretary for homeland security, played a key role in setting elections policy for the Trump administration.

Cuccinelli now runs the&...Election Transparency Initiative which is fighting Democratic efforts in Congress to shore up voting rights, and has been active in pushing state-level vote restriction measures.<...Heritage Foundation Secretaries of State Conference Agenda, obtained by Documented.

The keynote speech was given by Ken Blackwell,former secretary of state in Ohio. He was an early adopter of Trump’s lie about rigged elections, championing the idea in the 2016 presidential race which Trump won.

Blackwell now chairs the Center for Election Integrity at the America First Policy Institute,a rightwing thinktank led by former Trump officials. The center has been touting election-related model legislation.

Heritage was careful to organize the conference amid tight secrecy. Among the records obtained by Documented is an email from Hans von Spakovsky, a lawyer at the foundation who leads their election work.

Responding to a query about the event from a Texas official, Von Spakovsky said: “There is no livestream. This is not a public event. It is a private, confidential meeting of the secretaries. I would rather you not send out a press release about it.”

Email to Texas Senator Paul Bettencourt's staff from Hans von Spakovsky, obtained by Documented

Von Spakovsky has long been at the forefront of efforts to undermine US elections by claiming falsely that fraud is endemic. He helped spearhead the attack on voting by mail during the pandemic, holding private briefings with Republican state election officials – a drive that became a core part of Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.

Heritage and its political arm, Heritage Action for America, have spent tens of millions of dollars promoting their own model bills that impose strict restrictions on voting. They have targeted the investment on key battleground states such as Arizona, Georgia and Michigan that could hold the balance of power in the 2024 presidential race.

Heritage began hosting annual gatherings of Republican secretaries of state at the start of the Trump presidency in 2017. February’s in-person conference was the first to be sponsored by three rightwing powerhouses of election denial and voter suppression – Heritage, together with the Public Interest Legal Foundation (Pilf), and the Honest Elections Project (HEP).

Pilf is a conservative legal group that sues election officials to force them to purge voter rolls, a process that has affected eligible US voters. The group is led by J Christian Adams, a former justice department lawyer who tried to use the Voting Rights Act to claim voting discrimination against white people.

Trump’s former lawyer Cleta Mitchell also sits on the Pilf board.

HEP is a conservative dark-money group closely tied to the Republican operative Leonard Leo who was instrumental in engineering the current conservative supermajority on the US supreme court. Reporting by ProPublica and the New York Times last year revealed that Leo has received control of a staggering $1.6bn to advance rightwing causes.

Concern about the potential of top election officials to subvert democracy intensified during the 2022 midterm elections when a number of individuals committed to Trump’s stolen election lie also ran for office. They formed the “America First Secretary of State Coalition” which became a conduit of far-right conspiracy theories linked to QAnon.

Most of those candidates failed in their bid to take over the reins of election administration in their states. But the Heritage conference suggests that the desire to deploy Republican secretaries of state as channels of voter suppression and election misinformation remains very much alive.

Though chief election officials are tasked with ensuring that ballots are fair and impartial, the Heritage conference was attended only by Republican secretaries of state.

The Guardian asked Heritage to explain why its conference was held in secret and with only Republican attendees. The group did not answer those questions.

Von Spakovsky said that the event was an “educational summit intended to provide information on current issues in elections and ensure that our election process protects the right to vote for American citizens by making it easy to vote and hard to cheat”.

He disputed the argument that security measures at the ballot box such as voter ID suppressed turnout. “The claim that secure elections somehow promote greater restrictions is outrageous and has been clearly disproven,” he said.

Von Spakovsky also pointed to Heritage’s election fraud database, which he said sampled “proven instances of election fraud from across the country”. The database records 1,422 “proven instances of voter fraud” stretching back to 1982 – a 41-year period during which billions of votes have been cast in the US.

Several of the participants at the conference have election denial and voter suppression track records. They include Florida’s secretary of state, Cord Byrd,who, soon after beingappointed by Governor Ron DeSantis last spring, refused to say whether Joe Biden had wonthe 2020 presidential election.

Byrd runs Florida’s “election integrity unit” that was set up by DeSantis last year to investigate election crimes, even though there is scant evidence of substantial voter fraud. More than a dozen citizens accused of illegally voting have been arrested at gunpointunder DeSantis’s crackdown on supposed voter fraud.

Another attendee – Jay Ashcroft, secretary of state of Missouri – has been a leading proponent of that state’s new restrictive voting law. His office has been named in numerous lawsuits in the last year for imposing extreme constraints on voter registration, including a recent lawsuit accusing Ashcroft of illegally blocking a ballot measure.

Tennessee’s secretary of state, Tre Hargett, another listed participant, has been accused by Democratic leaders in Tennessee of purging thousands of voters from the official rolls.

Panel discussions laid out in the agenda were held on several of the core talking points of the current Republican party. The opening discussion, moderated by Von Spakovsky, was on “Auditing Expertise”.

The main speaker was Paul Bettencourt, a state senator in Texas who has sponsored several bills making it harder to vote including a measure that would deploy armed “election marshals” to oversee polling stations.

Before the conference-goers attended a cocktail reception and dinner held at an upscale restaurant in downtown Washington, day one ended with a session entitled: “Realistic Eric Fixes and Reforms”. Eric – the Electronic Registration Information Center – is a non-profit group run collectively by 28 states which is used to finesse the accuracy of state voter rolls.

In recent months it has become the target of rightwing conspiracy theories fueled by Trump who claimed falsely that it was rigged to benefit Democrats.

Ashcroft, the Missouri secretary of state, was one of the speakers in that session. Earlier this month he announced that he was pulling Missouri out of Eric, making it one of the first Republican-controlled states to quit the organization along with Alabama, Florida and West Virginia.

||A guest post by|Ed Pilkington

Ed Pilkington is chief reporter of the Guardian in the US||---||

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raw 4 23

social media influencer was convicted Friday in connection with a plot to undermine 

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, the Department of Justice said.

Douglass Mackey, also known as “Ricky Vaughn,” was convicted of conspiracy against rights for a “scheme to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote,” the agency said.

Mackey faces up to 10 years in prison.

“Mackey has been found guilty by a jury of his peers of attempting to deprive individuals from exercising their sacred right to vote for the candidate of their choice in the 2016 Presidential Election,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said in a news release.

"Today’s verdict proves that the defendant’s fraudulent actions crossed a line into criminality and flatly rejects his cynical attempt to use the constitutional right of free speech as a shield for his scheme to subvert the ballot box and suppress the vote.”

Mackey amassed some 58,000 Twitter followers and was ranked as the 107th most important influencer ahead of the presidential election in February, 2016, by the MIT Media Lab.

Prosecutors alleged that Mackey in the months leading up to the 2016 election conspired with other influential Twitter users, among others, to spread disinformation encouraging Clinton supporters to cast invalid votes via text message or social media, the DOJ said.

In the days leading up to the election, Mackey sent tweets suggesting the importance of limiting “black turnout,” tweeting an image depicting an African American woman standing in front of an “African Americans for Hillary” sign.

The ad stated: “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home,” “Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925,” and “Vote for Hillary and be a part of history.”

The fine print at the bottom of the deceptive image stated: “Must be 18 or older to vote. One vote per person. Must be a legal citizen of the United States. Voting by text not available in Guam, Puerto Rico, Alaska or Hawaii. Paid for by Hillary For President 2016.”

The tweet included the “#ImWithHer” hashtag.

At least 4,900 unique telephone numbers texted “Hillary” or some variant of the 59925 text number, which had been used in multiple deceptive campaign images tweeted by Mackey and his co-conspirators.

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an bad 3 23

**U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene** (R-GA) and **U.S. Senator Mike Lee** (R-UT) are actively spreading anti-Ukraine disinformation, posting to Twitter a deceptively-edited video of Volodymyr Zelenskyy,which they falsely claim means the Ukrainian President wants America's "sons and daughters" to die defending Ukraine.

Senator Lee complained his personal Twitter account was suspended at some point after he retweeted the video. It was recently restored and his post with the deceptively-edited video has not been removed.

The original Twitter sources of the video have warning labels that Greene and Lee appear to have ignored before posting. Greene posted it to her official U.S. government Twitter account.

That warning, in the form of a readers' note, says: "This quote is taken out of context. The full quote is :'If Ukraine loses, Russia is going to enter Baltic states, NATO states, then the U.S will have to send their sons and daughters exactly in the same way as we are sending our sons and daughters to war'."

READ MORE: Marjorie Taylor Greene SPOX Issues Profanity-Filled Response When Asked Why She Lied About a Family's Fentanyl Tragedy

The Associated Press also published a fact check on Wednesday noting the deceptively-edited video is "missing context." The AP states: "He was not suggesting Americans would have to fight in Ukraine."

But in the deceptively-edited video Greene and Lee tweeted, Zelenskyy (via an interpreter) says, "the U.S will have to send their sons and daughters exactly in the same way as we are sending our sons and daughters to war."

Zelenskyy goes on to say, "and they will have to fight because it's NATO that we're talking about. They will be dying, God forbid, because it's a horrible thing."

In the full video from February 24, Zelenskyy is urging Americans to not give up on Ukraine. The most important portion of Zelenskyy's remarks have been edited out in Greene's and Lee's version: "If Ukraine loses, Russia is going to enter Baltic states, NATO states."

Greene tweeted, "There's not a parent in America that wants their son or daughter dying defending Ukraine's border. When have Ukrainian & NATO sons and daughters died defending America's border?"

READ MORE: 'Trump Bullying Worked': Experts Blast FBI After Bombshell Report Reveals Agents Were 'Afraid' to Raid Mar-a-Lago

Lee tweeted, "Zelensky has no right to presume that our sons and daughters will fight his war. Shame on him. We've somehow sent the message that we work for him. Shame on us!"

The 19-second deceptively-edited video has been viewed nearly 400,000 times.

Zelenskyy'sfull remarks (via interpreter):

"I would like to thank the American people. I would like to thank all of the American people that are supporting Ukraine, the Congress, the President, the TV channels, the journalists, and everyone that has been supporting us, and that percentage of Americans, as you've mentioned is increasing. I can tell them only one thing. If they do not change their opinion, if they do not understand us, if they do not support Ukraine, they will lose NATO, they will lose the clout of the United States, they will lose the leadership position that they are enjoying in the world, that they are enjoying for a very fair reason, and they will lose the support of the country with 40 millions of population, with millions of children. Are American children any different than ours? Don't Americans enjoy the same things as we do? I don't think we're that different. And I'm actually very happy that we have bipartisan support, but we keep hearing those messages from time to time and they’re dangerous.

There are political leaders that are elected by people. And if this issue is raised, those political leaders need to be responsible and cautious because people are looking at them. Who wants a third world war? Would anyone risk would anyone be willing to accept that risk? The US is never going to give up on the NATO member states. If it happens so that Ukraine, due to various opinions and weakened and depleting of assistance, loses, Russia is going to enter the Baltic states, NATO member states, and then the US will have to send their sons and daughters exactly the same way as we are sending their sons and daughters to war and they will have to fight because it's NATO that we're talking about and they will be dying, God forbid because it's a horrible thing."

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no lnx docs

'They will ruin my life': January 6th panel publishes additional testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson

Brandi Buchman and Daily KosStaff December 22, 2022

On Thursday, the Jan. 6 committee published two transcripts from its extensive interviews with Cassidy Hutchinson, the former Trump White House aide who offered some of the most damning and explosive testimony to emerge from the 18-month probe of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

When she appeared publicly before the committee this summer, Hutchinson recounted how former President Donald Trump waved off warnings from his security detail about armed people in the crowd and urged that they be allowed to pass through metal detectors unmolested. She revealed learning about how Trump had lunged at the neck of his own Secret Service agent when his request to be ferried to the Capitol after the speech at the Ellipse was denied. She recalled the secrecy of her boss, former chief of staff Mark Meadows, who allegedly burned paperwork after a meeting with Rep. Scott Perry, an outspoken advocate of Trump’s Big Lie.

Hutchinson’s testimony was an embarrassment of riches for the committee, filling in blank spots left open by less-than-cooperative Trump White House officials. But the transcripts released Thursday also illuminate the huge pressure she came under by testifying.

Hutchinson told the committee that she recalled telling her mother plainly: “I’m f*cked.”

Cassidy Hutchinson Sept 14 by Daily Kos

She was “f*cked,” she said, because she was effectively trapped.

She didn’t have the ability to shell out huge sums of cash to attorneys who could represent her when she went before the committee so was stuck with Stefan Passantino, a Trump White House lawyer whose fees were being paid by the former president’s Save America political action committee.

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“I am completely indebted to these people,” she told her mother, the transcript shows. “And they will ruin my life Mom, if I do anything they don’t want me to do.”

[Cassidy Hutchinson Sept 15 by Daily Kos

She went to her estranged father, a Trump supporter, and asked him for help.

“I drove up to New Jersey, and I went to his house one night and begged him. It’s probably the one thing I regret in all of this, I wish I didn’t stoop to that level because it was a no— but I begged him to help me. I said I would pay him back, like, ‘name your interest rate,’” she said. “Like I just need help. And I remember saying to him, ‘you have no idea what they’re going to do to me if I have to get an attorney with Trump world,’ because he’s a very big Trump supporter, as is his own right, and I don’t—it’s not being critical, it’s just a fact. And he just didn’t get it. And I didn’t expect him to. But I just left there feeling defeated.”

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Passantino, she told the committee, urged her to skimp on details when answering the investigator’s questions. He advised her to mislead the committee, she said, though she stressed that he did not instruct her to lie explicitly.

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“I want to make this clear to you,” Hutchinson said. “Stefan never told me to lie. He specifically told me, ‘I don’t want you to perjure yourself but ‘I don’t recall’ isn’t perjury.”

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She remembered him adding: “They don’t know what you can and can’t recall.”

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He also suggested that she avoid meeting with the committee altogether when she had an appointment in June. She should consider drawing a contempt of Congress charge instead of testifying, he allegedly advised. It would be an unpleasant risk but a smaller one.

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Hutchinson said Passantino told her, “running to the right is better for you.”

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Passantino represented Hutchinson during three of her depositions before she hired a different attorney. The transcripts published on Thursday are dated Sept. 14 and Sept. 15, both dates when Passantino was not representing her. For these meetings, Hutchinson was represented by attorney Jody Hunt.

The committee has not yet published its final report in full or the complete record of its witness transcripts. Her earlier interviews under Passantino’s representation are expected to be included in that group.

When news first broke Wednesday about Passantino’s alleged advice to Hutchinson, he denied any wrongdoing in statements to reporters. Hutchinson, he said, was truthful and cooperative and he never instructed her to mislead the committee. His biography, meanwhile, has been pulled off the webpage of the law firm where he serves as partner.

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During her initial interviews with the committee prior to September, Hutchinson said Trump aides would reach out to her. Jason Miller and Justin Clark extended potential job offers to her after she met with the select committee for the first time. The next time she was scheduled to testify, she said Ben Williamson, an aide to her former boss Mark Meadows called her on the eve of her appearance.

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‘Mark wants me to let you know that he knows you’re loyal,” Williamson said in a voicemail, Hutchinson recalled. “He knows you’ll do the right thing tomorrow and that you’re going to protect him and the boss.”

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The “boss” was watching, Passantino would later hint to her.

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https://theintercept.com/2022/12/16/viral-spread-lies-katie-porter-shows-twitters-power-amplify-disinformation/

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intercept 12 22

LIES ABOUT REP. KATIE PORTER reached millions ofTwitterusers this week, as the California Democrat’s remarks about how the platform has been used to falsely label LGBTQ+ people as pedophiles were misleadingly edited and captioned in tweets by influential right-wing activists.

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The deceptive clips of Porter’s remarks, accompanied by false claims that she had condoned pedophilia, were viewed more than 2.2 million times on Twitter after being shared by right-wing activist accounts, including Chaya Raichik’s Libs of TikTok and Jaimee Michell’s Gays Against Groomers.

Those video clips were created by Porter’s political enemies, who made it seem as if Porter, at a Congressional oversight hearing on Wednesday, had argued that pedophilia was not a crime but an identity.

Transcripts and video of Porter’s complete remarks make it clear that she was saying something entirely different — namely, that right-wing activists have inspired hatred of LGBTQ+ Americans in tweets falsely accusing them of being pedophiles, or so-called groomers.

[vid]

a spokesperson for Porter also told the fact-checking service VERIFY, which works with local news stations in 29 states, that the representative “did not say that pedophilia is not a crime.”

In an irony that perfectly encapsulates the impossibility of reasoned discourse with far-right activists willing to lie, the video used to smear Porter was taken from her discussion of a report documenting how activist accounts like Libs of TikTok and Gays Against Groomers use Twitter to falsely accuse LGBTQ+ liberals of pedophilia. The report was produced by the LGBTQ+ civil rights organization Human Rights Campaign.

At the hearing, Porter prefaced a question for Kelley Robinson, the HRC president, by saying: “Your organization recently released a report analyzing the 500 most viewed, most influential tweets that identified LGBTQ+ people as so-called groomers. The ‘groomer’ narrative is an age-old lie to position LGBTQ+ people as a threat to kids. And what it does is deny them access to public spaces, it stokes fear, and can even stoke violence.”

Porter then asked Robinson if Twitter’s hateful conduct policy allows users to call LGBTQ+ people “groomers” on the platform.

After Robinson explained that those slurs are used in violation of Twitter’s poorly enforced community guidelines, she added that when people baselessly use words like “groomers” and “pedophiles” to describe LGBTQ+ people, “it is dangerous, and it’s got one purpose: It is to dehumanize us, and make us feel like we are not a part of this American society, and it has real-life consequences.”

Porter responded by saying that she agreed with Robinson that the use of such terms to smear members of LGBTQ+ communities whose politics differ from the far-right activists was intended to marginalize them.

“I think you’re absolutely right,” Porter said. “And it’s not, you know, this allegation of ‘groomer’ and of ‘pedophile,’ it is alleging that a person is criminal somehow, and engaged in criminal acts, merely because of their identity, their sexual orientation, their gender identity. So this is clearly prohibited, under Twitter’s content, yet you found hundreds of these posts on the platform.”

in addition to Raichik and Michell, whose anti-LGBTQ+ activism has previously been amplified by America’s most-watched cable news host, Tucker Carlson, misleading clips of Porter were also shared by Greg Price, a former Republican operative and Daily Caller social media editor; Sebastian Gorka, who was fired by the Trump White House; and Ian Miles Cheong, a far-right Malaysian blogger Elon Musk frequently replies to and agrees with on Twitter.

While the tweets from Cheong and Raichik — who falsely asserted that “Rep Katie Porter (D) says pedophilia isn’t a crime- it’s an identity” — were eventually flagged as misleading by Twitter users, the 1.5 million people who follow Michell, Price, or Gorka encountered no such warning.

Although he did not share the video, Rep. Ronny Jackson, a Texas Republican, also lied about what Porter said on Twitter. “Katie Porter just said that pedophilia isn’t a crime, she said it’s an ‘identity,'” Jackson claimed, falsely. “The sad thing is that this woman isn’t the only VILE person pushing for pedophilia normalization. This is what progressives believe!”

While the HRC report Porter highlighted showed that right-wing activists had violated Twitter’s hateful conduct policy repeatedly before Musk bought the platform, the previous ownership team did make some attempt to rein in Raichik, who was temporarily suspended several times.

Related

Left-Wing Voices Are Silenced on Twitter as Far-Right Trolls Advise Elon Musk

Since Musk took control, however, “retweets of right-wing figures’ tweets that included the anti-LGBTQ ‘groomer’ slur increased substantially, as did mentions of right-wing figures in tweets containing the slur,” according to new data from LGBTQ+ advocacy group GLAAD and Media Matters, a watchdog group that monitors right-wing misinformation.

Michell’s Gays AgainstGroomers account, the study found, “saw an increase of nearly 300% for retweets of tweets with the slur,” comparing the two months before and after Musk took control of the platform. Raichik’s Libs of TikTok “saw more than a 600% increase in its mentions,” over the same period for tweets using “groomer” slurs.

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an 10 22

In most of the U.S. Senate races that reporters are paying close attention to, the two main contenders are a Democrat and a Republican: Democrat John Fetterman versus Republican Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Democratic incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock versus Republican Herschel Walker in Georgia, Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan versus Republican “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance in Ohio. But a major exception is the U.S. Senate race in deep red Utah, where incumbent Republican Sen. Mike Lee’s main competitor isn’t a Democrat, but a Never Trump conservative and former Republican who is running as an independent: Evan McMullin.

The Bulwark’s William Saletan, himself a Never Trumper, examines this race in a think piece published on October 28. As Saletan sees it, the antics of MAGA Republicans in this race and others underscore the “moral emptiness” that the Trumpified GOP is bringing to the 2022 midterms.

While Lee is very much a Trump loyalist and supported the former president’s coup attempt in late 2020, McMullin has no use for Trump and hasn’t been shy about slamming the Big Lie as a fabrication. McMullin can be quite critical of President Joe Biden from a policy standpoint, but like Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, McMullin has made it abundantly clear that he views Biden as the loyal opposition and the legitimately elected president of the United States — not someone who stole an election via widespread voter fraud.

READ MORE: 'We trusted you': Evan McMullin collars GOP Senator Mike Lee over his role in Donald Trump's failed coup

“The most interesting political race of 2022 isn’t between a Democrat and a Republican,” Saletan writes. “It’s in Utah, where incumbent Republican Sen. Mike Lee faces independent challenger Evan McMullin. McMullin, a nearly lifelong Republican, is conservative on most issues, so Lee can’t beat him with the usual playbook: calling him woke or a tax-and-spender or a socialist. By neutralizing the GOP’s favorite lines of attack, McMullin has reduced the race to one crucial difference between the candidates: Lee’s complicity in Donald Trump’s schemes to undo the 2020 election.”

Saletan continues, “The Lee-McMullin race poses a difficult question: What exactly does the GOP stand for? Why should voters support a Republican senator against an opponent who agrees with him on policy but not on subverting democracy? If economic, moral, and foreign-policy conservatism no longer define the party, what does? What does it mean to be a Republican in 2022, beyond conspiring — or defending others who have conspired — to overturn elections when your party doesn’t win? McMullin is discovering that there are answers to that question, and they’re ugly.”

Utah’s Senate race has become a battle between a right-wing MAGA Republican and a right-wing non-MAGA ex-Republican. Saletan notes that because McMullin has promised not to caucus with either Republicans or Democrats if he wins, the Utah Democratic Party endorsed him — and Lee has responded by claiming that McMullin is “a Democrat running in disguise.”

Saletan slams Lee’s anti-McMullin attacks as “pure partisanship,” adding, “They’re about McMullin’s associations, not about issues. Lee talks about the Democratic Party the way red-baiters used to talk about the Communist Party: Any association with it is suspect. It’s true that McMullin courts Democratic voters and donors, along with independent and Republican voters and donors. That’s the whole point: McMullin is campaigning on unity. But to Lee, the Republican voters and donors are irrelevant. Consorting with Democrats, per se, is forbidden.”

READ MORE: 'Please get on board': Mike Lee goes on Fox News to beg Mitt Romney for help against 'fierce' Senate challenger

One of Lee’s cheerleaders has been Fox New’ Tucker Carlson, who, Saletan notes, likened McMullin to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (who is openly gay) in order to “insinuate that McMullin was gay.” McMullin is now married to a woman, but Carlson commented that in 2016, McMullin “was 40 years old, never married, and very obviously odd. Very odd.”

The “ugly” MAGA “smears” against McMullin, Saletan writes, demonstrate “the moral emptiness of today’s GOP.”

“A candidate who’s conservative on spending, values, and national security is under attack for courting Democrats, having been being unmarried in his thirties, refusing to vilify Dr. Fauci, affirming that black lives matter, and acknowledging that House Republicans tried to overturn the last election. In 2022, these are the taboos that define the Republican Party. Win or lose, McMullin has exposed them.”

READ MORE: How Fox News is giving Mike Lee an unfair advantage over challenger Evan McMullin: attorney

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/coming-right-wing-attack-pennsylvania-vote

mma no twt

Republicans and their right-wing media surrogates are telegraphing an attack on the legitimacy of the vote in Pennsylvania during next month’s midterm elections. Their deceptive strategy mimics the approach former President Donald Trump and his allies took in the lead-up to and following the 2020 elections.

Leigh Chapman, Pennsylvania’s top election official explained during a Wednesday interview that because of a state law that does not allow officials to begin counting mail-in ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day, results for Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial and U.S. Senate elections might not be available for “days” afterwards. Since Democrats are more likely to trust and participate in mail-in voting while Republicans are more likely to vote in-person, early tabulations could show Republican candidates with a lead that is then whittled down as mail-in ballots are tabulated over time.

This is a known issue that was in effect during the last election cycle – and its continued existence is entirely the fault of Pennsylvania Republicans. Chapman, Pennsylvania’s bipartisan Election Law Advisory Board, Democratic state legislators, and Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf have all called for the Republican-led state legislature to pass legislation allowing those ballots to be “pre-canvassed” before Election Day, as occurs in other states. But the General Assembly adjourned its legislative session this week without taking action.

Nonetheless, after the New York Post wrote up Chapman’s interview using the headline, “Pennsylvania election results could take 'days,' secretary of the commonwealth says,” right-wing politicians and media figures began using her comments to baselessly cast doubt on the integrity of the counting process.

[twt]

gOP gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano chimed in on Thursday morning. He described Chapman’s comments as “an attempt to have the fix in” during an interview on the Trumpist Real America’s Voice network.

This wave of false suggestions that the lengthy counting process — which has been enshrined by Republican legislators — is actually evidence of Democratic malfeasance is the latest sign that the GOP and right-wing media are planning to contest the Pennsylvania results if their candidates lose:

It’s also a rerun of the attack Trump, Carlson, Levin, and their allies made on the integrity of the 2020 presidential race. Election experts had long predicted that Election Day 2020 would end with a “red mirage” showing Trump in the lead, only for there to be a “blue shift” afterward as key states counted mail-in ballots that heavily favored Democratic nominee Joe Biden. But Trump carried out his planned strategy to declare victory on election night, baselessly cited his declining margins and reversals as evidence of widespread election fraud, and spent weeks trying to subvert the result. And right-wing allies like Carlson and his colleagues helped him work their viewers into a frenzy over the fantasy that the election had been rigged.

[twt]

the same strategy could play out in Pennsylvania this cycle, with Mastriano and Senate nominee Mehmet Oz holding early leads on election night, declaring victory, and, with the support of the right-wing press, alleging that mail-in ballots that subsequently reduce or eliminate their leads are fraudulent. Mastriano is a committed election denier who supported Trump’s 2020 election subversion and would have no qualms about following his subversion plan. And Oz actually road-tested a plan like that after the primary election – holding a narrow lead but with observers declaring the race too close to call, he took Trump’s advice, went on Fox, and said, “This election is ours,” while his ally Sean Hannity baselessly raised the prospect of election fraud changing the result.

Trump’s 2020 statements were obvious nonsense, and everyone at Fox knew it. Chris Stirewalt, the network’s politics editor during the election, explained during a June hearing of the January 6 committee that the “red mirage” phenomenon was well known. He even testified that he and some of his colleagues had “gone to pains” before the election to stress to Fox viewers that this would happen “because the Trump campaign and the president had made it clear that they were going to try to exploit this anomaly.”

Don’t expect to see much of that effort at Fox if the situation repeats this cycle – Stirewalt’s former colleagues have seen what happened to employees too eager to tell the truth about elections. The network purged Stirewalt shortly after the election as executives rallied around Trump to preserve flagging ratings.

Perhaps this time will be different – plan A for everyone involved is to use demagoguery, smears about the Democrats, and misrepresentations of the Republicans’ extreme positions to win the elections for Mastriano and Oz outright. But Fox and the right-wing media are putting the country back on the edge of the abyss. The last time they did that, the result was a bloody insurrection at the U.S. Capital and the near-toppling of American democracy. And two years later, Trump’s election lie has been institutionalized within the GOP, and the meager guardrails in place on the party’s extremism have been leveled.

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actual fake news:

an me 10 22

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is facing scrutiny for his latest attempt to criticize Democrats. Although he claimed "The Left is beyond parody," his attack fell flat when he was slammed for sharing a fake article that was photoshopped with reporter Abby Ohlheiser's old byline.

Blogger Parker Molloy has taken to Twitter with a series of fiery arguments laying out the case against Cruz and offering the Republican lawmaker a timeline for Ohlheiser, who is currently with The Washington Post — not The Atlantic.

"So, someone created a fake story, slapped [Abby Ohlheiser]'s byline on it even though they haven't worked at The Atlantic since 2014, which has led to a bombardment of harassment, and now a U.S. Senator is sharing said fake article," Molloy tweeted.

READ MORE: 'How very sad': Ted Cruz pilloried for saying January 6th hearings are 'idiocy' and 'designed to be theater'

The write went on to further expound on the context of the fake story. "And when I say 'fake story,' I mean that the story literally does not exist," Molloy explained. It's just a mock-up that some right-wing troll made, and now these f°cking ghouls and liars like Ted Cruz are spreading it. 'Beyond parody,' Cruz says about something that isn't even real."

The writer added added, "Before Cruz tweeted it out, [Abby Ohlheiser] was already being smeared with antisemitic, transphobic BS from people insisting that the article was real. Cruz (who had FINALLY deleted his tweet) is only making it worse."

"One thing that's interesting, however: in their attempts to find a "real" article to smear [Abby Ohlheiser] with, they DID find a real headline... but because it was written by Conor [Friedersdorf] their conservative buddy, they changed the byline in their photo edits," Molloy also tweeted.

READ MORE: Ted Cruz says Obergefell was 'wrong when it was decided'

"Also, this isn't even necessarily photoshop," the writer explained. "Anyone can go in and create mock-ups of articles in their own browser, with the correct fonts and everything. Look, I did this on my phone. It's easy. It's fake."

Although Cruz appears to have removed his tweet, screenshots are still circulating.

READ MORE: 'Lacks principle': Liz Cheney torches 'chameleon' Ted Cruz over his attack on the FBI

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A federal jury found last week that the methods used by Project Veritas in the group’s 2016 sting operation on progressive consulting firm Democracy Partners were unlawful, further tarnishing an organization notorious for its undercover gotcha videos. The ruling confirms what watchdogs have been saying for years about founder James O’Keefe and the nefarious  tactics he employs, even as right-wing and even some mainstream media have irresponsibly treated Project Veritas videos as legitimate sources.

On September 22, a jury declared that O’Keefe’s operatives had unlawfully recorded the consulting firm in the leadup to the 2016 election, and that those same operatives had fraudulently identified themselves in the process of infiltrating the group. O’Keefe says he will appeal.

Much like in the group’s other sting operations, Project Veritas operatives had used false identities to secure meetings and an internship with Democracy Partners. Evidence for the trial included emails written by O’Keefe showing that he had offered cash bonuses to any employee who could provide content that implicated Democracy Partners in committing voter fraud, along with court documents detailing a voter fraud scheme that operatives attempted to plan within Democracy Partners.

This verdict serves as a damning indictment of O’Keefe and his legacy. The tactics condemned in the Democracy Partners verdict mirror those that Project Veritas has employed for years in its theatrical crusades and smear campaigns, which have included concocting fake stories and schemes and arranging dates and other personal meetings under false identities. This should put to bed any of the organization’s claims that it operates as a legitimate journalistic enterprise.

While the actions undertaken by Project Veritas against Democracy Partners have resulted in its most substantial legal backlash so far, the group has a long and storied history of similarly outlandish stunts. In the past few years alone, the group has:

Less than a year before this week's verdict, mainstream outlets and press rights groups had rushed to defend Project Veritas after O’Keefe and some of his associates were raided by the FBI to investigate the theft of President Joe Biden’s daughter Ashley Biden’s diary. Several outlets echoed O’Keefe’s own claims that his journalistic rights had been violated. This positive attention only served to validate his claim that he’s a journalist.

Some outlets have bolstered Project Veritas by covering their smear campaigns as though they're legitimate stories, even as they acknowledge questions about the group's methods. O’Keefe’s methods even earned him a truth award from an organization run by Ed Martin, then a CNN contributor.

Project Veritas is an organization built on deceitful tactics that lack journalistic merit, and last week’s finding should demolish any shreds of credibility it retained with mainstream media.

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dirty trick

an 9 22 badash

More than 50 House and Senate Republicans are joining in an effort to disenfranchise “lame duck” Democrats in the House and Senate to prevent them from voting on critical budget legislation, but not trying to apply the same standard to their fellow GOP lawmakers.

In a move that sounds somewhat like what Senator Mitch McConnell did to derail Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court appointment, the far-right Republicans are urging their colleagues to block any budget bill until a new Congress is sworn in, hoping Democrats lose control of one or both branches of Congress.“

The Monday letters come as Congress has 10 days to take action before government funding runs out at the end of the fiscal year after Sept. 30,” The Hill reports.

READ MORE: Biden Approval Soars as Trump’s Sinks

“We must not accept anything short of a ‘clean’ Continuing Resolution (‘CR’) that contains no additional spending or extraneous policy riders,” writes Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) in the Senate GOP’s letter. “At a minimum, any agreement on a clean CR must carry over into the beginning of the 118th Congress. Failure to stand strong against lame-duck spending and caving to the Democrats will likely worsen inflation, prolong the current economic recession, and advance policies contained in the Biden administration’s progressive wish-list.”

The U.S. is not in a recession, nor is one expected in the coming months.

The House letter is even more extreme.

READ MORE: ‘Ignoring the Truth Is Not a Path Forward’: Critics Warn on Trump’s Rally – ‘Uncanny Resemblance’ to ‘Nazi Salute’

“Federal dollars are fueling rampant inflation and funding theBiden administration’s radical agenda,” it begins. “This includes empowering authoritarian bureaucrats at agencies like the IRS and FBI, implementing open-border policies that are threatening our communities, imposing COVID-19 mandates that shut down schools and are forcing our military servicemembers out of their jobs, and advancing self-destructive energy policies.”

Among the far right Republicans signing on to the Senate letter are Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL).

In the House, signatories include far right GOP Members of Congress Chip Roy, Ralph Norman, Jim Banks, Dan Bishop, Jim Jordan, Lauren Boebert, Kat Cammack, Scott DesJarlais, Scott Perry, Jody Hice, Ken Buck, Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Byron Donalds, Thomas Massie, and Louie Gohmert.

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note retaliation audit IRS Comey and ---.

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wait till end to avoid blowback?

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an 8 22 tom b raw

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According to a deep dive by the New York Times, Donald Trump and his former White House Chief of staff rushed to get private FBI files redacted so the former president could declassify them and turn them over to journalistssympathetic to his administration.

The report states that work was completed just three days before Trump left office but was abandoned by Meadows after he was advised he could and government officials could be in conflict with privacy laws.

According to the report, "In Mr. Trump’s last weeks in office, Mr. Meadows, with the president’s blessing, prodded federal law enforcement agencies to declassify a binder of Crossfire Hurricane materials that included unreleased information about the F.B.I.’s investigative steps and text messages between two former top F.B.I. officials, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who had sharply criticized Mr. Trump in their private communications during the 2016 election."

The Times reports that FBI officials were concerned about releasing anything from the files, but that Meadows, "dismissed those arguments, saying that Mr. Trump himself wanted the information declassified and disseminated."

According to the report, "Just three days before Mr. Trump’s last day in office, the White House and the F.B.I. settled on a set of redactions, and Mr. Trump declassified the rest of the binder. Mr. Meadows intended to give the binder to at least one conservative journalist, according to multiple people familiar with his plan."

That plan was set aside after Meadows was warned off, with the Times reporting, "Justice Department officials pointed out that disseminating the messages between Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page could run afoul of privacy law, opening officials up to suit."

The report adds that those files were not ones that were recently seized at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort just over two weeks ago.

You can read more here.

an 9 22 badash

More than 50 House and Senate Republicans are joining in an effort to disenfranchise “lame duck” Democrats in the House and Senate to prevent them from voting on critical budget legislation, but not trying to apply the same standard to their fellow GOP lawmakers.

In a move that sounds somewhat like what Senator Mitch McConnell did to derail Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court appointment, the far-right Republicans are urging their colleagues to block any budget bill until a new Congress is sworn in, hoping Democrats lose control of one or both branches of Congress.“

The Monday letters come as Congress has 10 days to take action before government funding runs out at the end of the fiscal year after Sept. 30,” The Hill reports.

READ MORE: Biden Approval Soars as Trump’s Sinks

“We must not accept anything short of a ‘clean’ Continuing Resolution (‘CR’) that contains no additional spending or extraneous policy riders,” writes Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) in the Senate GOP’s letter. “At a minimum, any agreement on a clean CR must carry over into the beginning of the 118th Congress. Failure to stand strong against lame-duck spending and caving to the Democrats will likely worsen inflation, prolong the current economic recession, and advance policies contained in the Biden administration’s progressive wish-list.”

The U.S. is not in a recession, nor is one expected in the coming months.

The House letter is even more extreme.

READ MORE: ‘Ignoring the Truth Is Not a Path Forward’: Critics Warn on Trump’s Rally – ‘Uncanny Resemblance’ to ‘Nazi Salute’

“Federal dollars are fueling rampant inflation and funding theBiden administration’s radical agenda,” it begins. “This includes empowering authoritarian bureaucrats at agencies like the IRS and FBI, implementing open-border policies that are threatening our communities, imposing COVID-19 mandates that shut down schools and are forcing our military servicemembers out of their jobs, and advancing self-destructive energy policies.”

Among the far right Republicans signing on to the Senate letter are Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL).

In the House, signatories include far right GOP Members of Congress Chip Roy, Ralph Norman, Jim Banks, Dan Bishop, Jim Jordan, Lauren Boebert, Kat Cammack, Scott DesJarlais, Scott Perry, Jody Hice, Ken Buck, Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Byron Donalds, Thomas Massie, and Louie Gohmert.

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see push poll is telephone morphs online to quiz messaging (see also online survey)

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June 2018

The American Energy Alliancereleased the results of a pollasking voter’s opinions on electric vehicles (EVs) and fuel efficiency standards. DeSmog, after reviewingthe actual poll questions, reported the poll was an example of a “push poll,” defined by the American Association for Public Opinion Research as “a form of negative campaigning that is disguised as a political poll.” [67], [68], [69],[70]

“Voters want to make their own decisions about what kind of cars and trucks to buy. And they definitely don’t want to pay for the toys of the rich,” the American Energy Alliance said was the takeaway from the results. [71]

The poll was conducted by :{MWR:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: Strategies, a lobbying firm whose clients have included Koch Industries and the American Fuel :{&}: Petrochemical Manufacturers. The questions implant the idea that consumers are being pushed to buy certain vehicles and that taxpayers are being forced to pay for the federal programs that support EV sales. [69]

For example, one question states that every purchaser of an electric vehicle is paid “75 hundred dollars” by the “taxpayer,” which misrepresents the mechanics of the non-refundable electric vehicle tax credit. The tax credit simply lowers the buyer’s tax rate in the year of purchase — functionally the same way that a home mortgage interest deduction or child tax credit works. [69]

Another question claims that the average income of an electric car buyer is $150,000, and then asks whether the respondent thinks it’s “fair” that the buyer should “be paid 75 hundred dollars.” As of 2016, 54 percent of EV purchasers have a household income above $100,000, not $150,000. Also not noted, nearly 80 percent of EVs are leased rather than purchased, and only 38 percent of leases have a household income above $100,000. [69]

Below is a sample of one split sample question, where the interviewer uses to different wordings to ask the same question: [69]

The first question, set up to make respondents feel a direct personal sacrifice, 29 percent answered that this was “way too much” and 25 percent said it was “about right.” The second question, framed without the direct emotional connection, the percentage of respondents that said it was “about right” rose slightly to 27 percent, and those who said it was “way too much” dropped to 19 percent. Both wordings were misleading, considering a tax credit is not a payment from the government and not all buyers of EVs get the full value of the tax credit. [69]

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how dirty?

the pitch was this is an insurance policy/holding action while we wait on lawsuits?

testified without subpoena?!

gaz.com? ryan king oddly oK?

Today's Digital Newspaper

The Gazette

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RNC coordinated fake electors at Trump's 'direct request': Ronna McDaniel

By Ryan King The Washington Examiner 

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel confirmed Tuesday that former President Donald Trump was involved in lawyer John Eastman's fake elector scheme.

During a brief excerpt from her deposition played during the Jan. 6 committee hearing Tuesday, McDaniel explained that Trump called her and put her in touch with Eastman, who then engaged with the RNC about the scheme over the following months.

"He turned the call over to Mr. Eastman, who then proceeded to talk about the importance of the RNC helping the campaign gather these contingent electors in case any of these legal challenges that were ongoing changed the result of any of the states. I think more, just helping them reach out and assemble them," she said. "My understanding is the campaign did take the lead, and we just were helping them in that — in that role."

Eastman, who was a visiting professor of conservative thought and policy at the University of Colorado-Boulderduring the 2020-21 academic year, was providing legal advice to Trump's allies about efforts to challenge the election. The House Jan. 6 select committee has battled Eastman in court for weeks, seeking his emails to gain insights about what advice he had been giving to Trumpworld. Eastman turned over roughly 1,000 pages of emails in April, and the committee ordered that he turn over hundreds more earlier this month.

McDaniel's testimony before the committee helped members establish the direct role Trump played in the fake elector plot.

During the hearing Tuesday, the panel honed in on some of Eastman's scheming to put forward an alternative slate of electors for key battleground states. The goal was to challenge the election results in select states and have an alternative slate of electors on standby in case those legal challenges were successful.

Amid the fallout of the 2020 election, Trump's own White House Counsel’s Office said the plan was "not legally sound," according to the panel.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) has long teased that the committee had evidence of Trump's involvement in a plot to supplant official electors with those who favored the former president to tip the election to him.

“We’ll show evidence of the president’s involvement in this scheme,” Schiff hinted during an interview with CNN Sunday. “We’ll also, again, show evidence about what his own lawyers came to think about this scheme.”

Part of the plan appeared to revolve around Congress and states decertifying the 2020 election results. Once the election results were decertified, the theory was that the fake slate of electors could be used to give Trump the victory.

All of this culminated with then-Vice President Mike Pence's refusal to decertify the election on Jan. 6, 2021. A mob of angry protesters had stormed the Capitol earlier that day, but Pence ultimately participated in the certification of then-candidate Joe Biden's electoral triumph over Trump.

Gazette.com Coloradosprings.com Gazettepreps.com Best of the Springs OutThereColorado.com

The Colorado Springs Gazette, L.L.C., 30 East Pikes Peak Ave., Suite 100 Colorado Springs, CO | Terms of Use | Privacy PolicyPowered by BLOX Content Management System from TownNews.com.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/second-embarrassing-gop-campaign-ad/

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in the space of three weeks, the National Republican Senatorial Committee overseen by Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) has watched two ads attacking Democrats that were blatantly misleading pulled off the air, according to a report from MSNBC.

According to Steve Benen of MSNBC, complaints about misrepresentation in attack ads are common, but what is less common is the offending ads being yanked from public view by local TV stations.

"It can be frustrating, but the vast majority of the time, stations don’t want to be in the business of deciding which commercials are so brazenly dishonest that they’re ultimately unsupportable," but that there are exceptions which Scott's committee found out the hard way in less than a month.

The first ad claimed that gas prices under Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) increased 23 percent during her prior tenure as governor -- which turned out to not only be false, but prices actually decreased according to the report the GOP cited.

The second ad went after North Carolina’s Cheri Beasley and accused her of setting free a "child porn offender,” when she served as chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court.

As the New York Times reported, "On Friday, five TV stations in Raleigh and Charlotte said they would pull the ad or that they had 'paused' it pending an examination of its claims, according to emails from the stations to Courtney Weisman, a lawyer working for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which were reviewed by The New York Times. On Thursday, two Charlotte stations took the ad off the air."

According to Benen, who called the two ads an "embarrassing" black eye for Republicans, "For those keeping score, the National Republican Senatorial Committee has now had two television ads pulled over the course of three weeks. Election Day 2022 is still 22 weeks away, and I don’t imagine anyone would be too surprised if that total grows."

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character assass/hit man?

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aha: hooked up to jumper cables; real men do not talk about feelings, but Biden and Raskin have to great effect, so in greatGOP trad of turning strength (swift boat) into an attack, these 2 pow:

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6 22

united States Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) appeared on a recent edition of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia)'s podcast and suggested that Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) is unable to do his job because his son committed suicide.

Raskin served as the House of Representatives' manager of former President Donald Trump's second impeachment for inciting the January 6th, 2021 Capitol insurrection. Raskin also sits on the Select Committee investigating the attack, which was triggered (at least in part) by Republican lawmakers refusing at Trump's behest to acknowledge President Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election.

Now, with just 24 hours remaining before public hearings revealing what the bipartisan congressional commission has found begin, Gaetz and Greene have launched a new and unusually cruel offensive against Raskin.

"When people encounter trauma, they often associate a lot of the other things around that trauma with it, even if they don't naturally or even rationally associate. And what I worry about for the Congress and for Jamie Raskin, you know, no one would ever want to lose a child, particularly to suicide," said Gaetz.

"As human beings, our hearts go out to him. But I think that he takes that trauma and he associates it now with his work in the Congress to such an interwoven way that he's unable to do the congressional experience outside of just the dungeon of that personal trauma," Gaetz continued, "and I think it makes him look at everything in these very like, dark and severe ways."

Greene agreed.

"You know, we try to come to the job to uplift people," Gaetz resumed.

"We're here to serve the people," Greene interjected.

"Well and we love this country," Gaetz added.

"Absolutely," said Greene.

"We're not here out of a sense of grievance or hatred. We love America," Gaetz said.

"No we love it," Greene chimed in again.

"And we want to vindicate the rights of our citizens and we want to champion their causes andbattle their dislikes," Gaetz remarked.

"Yes that's right," Greene said.

"But I think for Jamie Raskin, it's really like, his service in the Congress has almost become like inextricably attached to this sad personal trauma he's had," Gaetz proclaimed. "And I do think it clouds his judgment and you could see that, that very darkness and that pain manifest on Thursday in a way that's not particularly relevant to the challenges that we've talked about, but it might be deeply relevant to what he's going through. And the country shouldn't have to go through all that with him."

Greene then stated the quiet part out loud.

"Well my goodness, it's a horrible thing, what he went through, but it doesn't change the fact of, uh, his political beliefs," she said, "andI believe he's a communist and I believe what he's doing on the January 6th Committee is completely wrong."

Watch below via PatriotTakes:

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an 5 22

Three Florida Republicans have been charged with multiple counts of election fraud relating to the 2020 cycle.

A dozen charges against "Seminole County Republican Party Chair Ben Paris, political consultant Eric Foglesong, and former independent candidate Jestine Iannotti from Senate District 9 came down through indictments sought by the State Attorney for Florida’s 18th Judicial Circuit after a Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) investigation," Florida Politics reported on Tuesday. "The investigation began in July 2021 after JC 18 State Attorney Phil Archer requested the FDLE look into the election."

Prosecutors allege that Iannotti ran as an independent “ghost candidate” to funnel votes away from Democrat Patricia Sigman in favor of Republican Jason Brodeur, who ultimately prevailed with 50.3 percentof the vote over Sigman's 47.5 percent. Iannotti, meanwhile, received 2.1 percent.

“Some NPA candidates, commonly referred to as ‘ghost’ candidates, have been used by political parties as a way to close elections or siphon off votes. While not illegal per se, many have questioned the ethics of the practice. However, when the candidate and the partisan political operatives involved violate election finance laws by illegally funding those races and filing false reports, it is the responsibility of government to act," Archer said in a press release. “Today’s actions represent our commitment to ensuring the integrity of Florida’s election process and holding those who violate state campaign laws accountable.”

FDLE Acting Commissioner Mark Glass's office explained in a statement that "Iannotti ran as an independent candidate for Florida State Senate District 9 in the 2020 election. The investigation showed that Iannotti illegally accepted a $1,200 cash donation from Foglesong in support of her candidacy. Agents found that Iannotti and Foglesong falsely used the names of other individuals as contributors in official campaign finance documents reported to the Florida Department of State to skirt Florida laws on campaign contributions. Agents say that Paris provided the name and address of one of the individuals Iannotti and Foglesong falsely used in their official campaign reporting, even though Paris knew the individual had not contributed to the campaign."

Glass added that "elections are the cornerstone of our democracy, and we must do everything we can to ensure they are fair and transparent. Protecting the integrity of our elections is a top priority in Florida, and that includes making sure candidates follow the laws.”

Arrest warrants have been issued for Foglesong and Iannotti, who are out on $4,500 and $10,000 bond, respectively, and have been ordered to surrender by May 25th.

The story continues here.

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https://democracychronicles.org/lawsuit-nra/

from the Campaign Legal Center:

Today, Campaign Legal Center Action (CLC Action) filed suit on behalf of Giffords against the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for failing to announce any action against the National Rifle Association (NRA) for using shell corporations to coordinate campaign spending with seven federal candidates spanning three election cycles from 2014-2018. The lawsuit was filed two days before President Trump addresses the NRA’s annual convention for the third year in a row – the only time in American history a president has done so.

The NRA’s complicated scheme had the effect of evading campaign contribution limits and shielding millions of dollars of political spending – including up to $25 million coordinated with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign – from public scrutiny. The Trace first reported on the NRA’s scheme.

Campaign Legal Center (CLC) and Giffords filed four complaints with the FEC to address these violations. The FEC is the independent regulatory agency tasked with enforcing campaign finance laws in federal elections, the agency routinely deadlocks and fails to reach the required four votes necessary to open an investigation. Today, Giffords is asserting its right of action in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the 120-day period expired in which the FEC was legally required to respond.

“Our elections are awash in secret cash, and the federal agency charged with enforcing our nation’s election laws is asleep on the job,” said Trevor Potter, president of CLC, and a former Republican Chairman of the FEC. “Campaign finance laws are supposed to limit the influence of money in our politics. For our system to function properly, the FEC needs to enforce the laws that preserve the independence of campaigns and limit the influence of well-funded special interests.”

“When the FEC doesn’t do its job, groups like the NRA are able to get around the rules designed to limit the influence of money on our democracy,” said Brendan Fischer, director, federal reform at CLC. “The FEC’s failure to enforce the law sends a message to wealthy special interests that they can push the legal envelope and get away with it.”

“The FEC is supposed to be the nation’s election watchdog, but in this case it didn’t bite, bark, or even whimper,” said Adam Skaggs, Chief Counsel, Giffords Law Center. “Instead, it turned a blind eye while the NRA’s leadership made clear it’s more interested in handing bags of cash to candidates who will carry its water than following American laws or looking out for the interests of gun owners. In a desperate attempt to hold onto power and influence, NRA executives have flagrantly ignored our campaign finance laws and undermined the integrity of our election system. The FEC must bring illegal campaign conduct into the light of day and we are proud to join with CLC in calling on it to uphold the laws that protect the legitimacy of our democracy.”

Watch our video, which explains the underlying story behind the NRA’s scheme.

Campaign finance law allows outside groups like the NRA to make unlimited expenditures supporting candidates only if the expenditures are completely independent of those candidates. To protect this independence, the FEC has rules prohibiting coordination between outside groups and campaigns, which include restrictions on how a vendor may work for both a candidate and an outside group supporting that candidate. Otherwise, the common vendor can act as a conduit to funnel strategic information to the outside group, and then that group’s expenditures are no longer independent.

The lawsuit implicates the NRA’s spending in support of the following seven candidates:

You can see the full video here:

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"Partisan tactic by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s campaign delays thousands of requests for mail-in ballots from Texas voters" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Thousands of applications for mail-in ballots submitted by Texas voters have been delayed — and some voters may ultimately not receive ballots — because Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick's campaign instructed eligible voters to send requests for absentee ballots to the Texas secretary of state’s office instead of their local elections offices.

A mass mailing by Patrick went out to Republican voters across the state in January, ahead of the March primary, and included a two-page letter emblazoned with the seal of his office encouraging voters to submit the requests following “three easy steps.” The problem was the third step, which instructed voters to return the applications in an enclosed reply envelope that was addressed to the state.

The lieutenant governor’s campaign said it used the secretary of state's address because “many Republican voters are rightly suspicious of Blue County election officials.”

“The decision to direct return mail to the Secretary of State (SOS), someone who is trusted and respected, gave voters an added layer of comfort,”Allen Blakemore, a campaign consultant for Patrick, wrote in an email.

But the campaign’s approach forced the secretary of state, which had a stated policy of rejecting applications erroneously sent its way, to sort and forward the Patrick-inspired forms to the counties where they should have been sent originally.

The delayed delivery could put voters’ requests for mail-in ballots at risk as counties continue to see higher-than-normal rejection rates of applications under new ID requirements enacted by Republicans last year. Any issues with defective applications must be resolved by Friday so voters can receive a mail-in ballot.

State workers have been forwarding the waylaid applications to respective counties, which this week were still receiving packages containing hundreds of misdirected applications.

The fiasco has further muddled the first election held since Patrick, as head of the state Senate, presided over last year's passage of new laws tightening voting processes, including a measure making it a crime for local election officials to send out applications for mail-in ballots to people who did not request them.

“Everyone age 65 and older has earned the right to vote early by mail. As Republicans, we have fought to make it easier to vote while protecting election integrity, so we need to make sure we increase our turnout by taking full advantage of this convenient and secure voting option,” Patrick wrote in a letter dated Jan. 20 that was attached with the applications.

Though the letter contains the official state seal for the lieutenant governor, as allowed by law,the materials were labeled as being sent out by Patrick’s campaign and not at taxpayer expense.

The mailing went out to voters in Harris County and central Texas, with Patrick endorsing area Republican candidates in different versions of his letter obtained by The Texas Tribune. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram recently reported the mailer also reached Tarrant County residents.

Unsolicited mailing campaigns from candidates and political parties are not uncommon. But Republicans’ penchant for encouraging voting by mail for their voters has come under scrutiny as they've worked to limit expansions of mail-in voting during the pandemic and criminalized the mailing of applications by county election administrators to voters who did not request them.

Republican lawmakers last year made it a state jail felony for local election officials to send out unsolicited applications for mail-in ballots, even to voters 65 and older who automatically qualify under the state’s strict eligibility requirements. They also prohibited local officials from even encouraging people to vote by mail.

The full scale of Patrick’s mailing efforts is unclear; his campaign did not answer a question about the reach of the mailings. But the secretary of state’s office previously told some county officials that it had received at least two pallets of applications, and some local election officials have indicated they were receiving hundreds of delayed applications.

“The SOS has always accepted ABBMs and quickly and efficiently routed them to the proper local offices,” Blakemore said, referring to applications for a ballot by mail. “We believe that this will ensure that Blue County election officials are more likely to properly handle our ABBMs when they know they are being watched and monitored by the SOS.”

In an email responding to questions about the misdirected applications, a spokesperson for the Texas secretary of state did not address the mailing campaign by the lieutenant governor.

“Generally speaking, we request that voters do not mail, fax, or email completed applications for Ballot by Mail to the Secretary of State Office,” wrote Sam Taylor, the spokesperson, noting that the office would forward applications to early voting clerks “as a courtesy to help the voter.”

“It is not the voter’s fault if a third party put the incorrect return address on an ABBM, so we want to ensure voters are not adversely affected by that,” Taylor said.

This appears to be a departure from the office’s previous stance on applications wrongly sent to its office. The secretary of state’s website previously warned voters against sending applications to its office, noting that “all applications received by this office will be rejected.” That language was removed from the website at the beginning of the month, according to a screenshot of the same page archived by the Wayback Machine.

County election officials receiving the waylaid applications this week are now under a time crunch to process them and reach out to voters if their applications are defective. Hundreds of applications to vote by mail in the primary have been initially rejected in recent weeks after voters did not fill out new ID rules that require them to provide a driver’s license number or partial Social Security number.

Voters can correct the issue but must do so by the Friday deadline for counties to receive applications for the primary election. Otherwise, their application will be finally rejected.

Taylor said the secretary of state’s office had been working to “expedite” the forwarding of applications it received and planned to label those that came to them before the deadline to request mail-in ballots.

The unsolicited mailings come as the Texas attorney general argues in federal court that the restrictions on county election officials in regard to voting by mail are intended to limit “official encouragement” of voting by mail. In a hearing for a related case, a lawyer for the attorney general indicated to a federal judge last week that the state preferred people vote in person even if they qualify to vote by mail.

On Thursday, Blakemore defended the new prohibitions as “guard rails” established by the Legislature following Harris County’s unsuccessful attempt to send applications for mail-in ballots to all of its registered voters in 2020.

“It was that overreach, as well as drive-thru-voting, that brought about SB1,” Blakemore said.

In 2020, Patrick referred to vote-by-mail expansion efforts as a “scam by Democrats to steal the election,” saying there was no reason anyone under 65 should be “able to say I am afraid to go vote” during the pandemic. Patrick himself has used the voting option, opting to vote by mail in a 2007 Houston municipal election and an ensuing runoff.

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an 222

erik Prince, an ally to former President Donald Trump and the former CEO of a security firm previously named Blackwater, reportedly helped raise funding for an effort designed to surveil Democratic, progressive and anti-Trump Republican candidates head of the 2018 midterm elections.

On Tuesday, February 8, The New York Times released a report consisting of documents and interviews that detailed Prince's role in the surveillance effort. Prince reportedly conducted a meeting withBritish spy Richard Seddon as they allegedly worked to dig up incriminating information on opposing politicians across multiple states.

Since Seddon previously served as an unofficial advisor to Trump administration advisors, the report sheds light on the connection between the Trump administration and the spy effort.

The report also reveals Susan Gore, founder of the right-wing organization, Wyoming Liberty Group and heir to the Gore-Tex waterproof brand, had become the main financial supporter of the effort.

Per NY Times:

"Mr. Prince took on the role of celebrity pitchman, according to interviews and documents, raising money for Mr. Seddon’s spying operation, which was aimed at gathering dirt that could discredit politicians and activists in several states. After Mr. Prince and Mr. Seddon met in August 2018 with Susan Gore, a Wyoming heiress to the Gore-Tex fortune, Ms. Gore became the project’s main benefactor."

The group reportedly developed a plan to begin their efforts in Gore's home state of Wyoming and eventually expand to more states including Arizona and Colorado.

Former Wyoming lawmaker Marti Halverson also provided the group with a shortlist of specific targets that they'd planned to surveil. Those individuals include: Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon (R), who is referred to as a RINO; John Cox, who previously served as the director of Wyoming's Department of Workforce Service; and Scott Talbott, the former director of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.

Read the full report at the Times.

===

AHA  note // direct mail  dark posts neg ads

ref

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no lnx

Pharmaceutical industry likely to shatter its lobbying record as it works to shape Democrats’ spending bill

A years-long battle over prescription drug prices reaches its apex as the industry spends tens of millions to alter the plan.

By Yeganeh Torbati and Jonathan O'Connell

November 5, 2021

In September, Rep. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) began noticing mailers arriving at homes across his district, including his own and that of his parents, with an alarming message. The mailers alleged that Kim was intent on preventing Medicare patients from getting the drugs they needed.

That was news to Kim, who has made lowering seniors’ health-care costs and expanding their access to Medicare a signature issue. The mailer, along with a slew of digital ads and text messages, was sponsored by a group called A Healthy Future, LLC, and claimed that Kim and other New Jersey Democrats wanted to cut off “access to lifesaving medicines” and shift Medicare money into other social safety-net programs.

Soon after the mailers landed in New Jersey mailboxes, Kim’s office began receiving calls from puzzled constituents.

“I’ve been attacked before, but I’ve never seen one as egregious as this one in terms of ‘Andy Kim’s trying to cut Medicare,’” Kim said. “That’s just so absurd, and I actually think that has affected how the district has responded.”

Watershed or watered down? Democrats’ drug pricing deal leaves many unsatisfied.

Kim was certain the attacks were coming from the pharmaceutical industry, but it was hard for him to be sure. A Healthy Future’s website includes no contact information, and a message to its Facebook page went unanswered. But a nonprofit group called A Public Voice listed A Healthy Futureas being under its control in its 2018 and 2019 tax filings and described the LLC’s primary activity as “supporting a vibrant health care system.”

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A Healthy Future and its anonymous funders, it turned out, had fought previous efforts in Washington to reduce the cost of prescription drugs. According to Google digital ad data, A Healthy Future also paid for ads in fall 2020 arguing against a Trump administration attempt to address prescription drug costs.

Brian Newell, a spokesman for PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry’s chief lobbying arm, when asked whether the organization had ever had any financial or other relationship with A Healthy Future or A Public Voice, said: “Like most industries and associations, PhRMA engages with groups and organizations that have a wide array of opinions and priorities, including those who do not want the government to come between patients and their medicines.” DENIAL NON-DENIAL ~ WATERGATE b&wOODWARD

The ads targeting Kim and others were one strand of a massive, months-long advertising, lobbying and political donation blitz undertaken by the pharmaceutical industry and its allies, perhaps the strongest of all corporate voices in Washington, to kill a Democratic proposal to lower the cost of prescription drugs by empowering the federal government to negotiate their prices.

That provision to control drug prices became a focal point of the $1.75 trillion spending package Democrats are trying to move through Washington. The measure was in, then out, then watered down, going through a fierce ping-pong of backroom negotiations that is likely to continue once the Senate considers the bill in coming weeks.

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Pharmaceutical industry lobbyists defended their effort, alleging that the Democrats’ proposal would stifle research. They also said many other groups poured millions of dollars into the other side of the debate.

“As we’ve said repeatedly, our advocacy has focused on delivering solutions that will lower what patients pay out of pocket for prescription medicines, while opposing reforms that would ultimately leave patients trapped in a broken insurance system, restrict access to lifesaving medicines, and destroy the development of new treatments,” Newell said.

The influence campaign at times worked through groups whose funding sources are hidden. At least 20 different advertisements were run on television and online across the country. The advertisements were augmented by a campaign byPhRMA, which spent nearly $23 million on lobbying through the first nine months of 2021, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets, which tracks corporate spending and political influence. That puts PhRMA on track this year to beat its own spending recording of $29.3 million in 2019.

“The intensity right now of K Street and the deployment of lobbying and dark money is extraordinary,” said Nick Penniman, chief executive of Issue One, which advocates for transparency in Washington. “It is a frenzied state right now.”

The intense effort is reflective of just how much many companies have at stake in the Democrats’ evolving tax-and-spending bill. This article, which is based on interviews, documents and lobbying and ad spending data, offers a window into the efforts one sector took to shape the bill, much of which was crafted in secret.

The drug pricing provision agreed to by House Democrats this week does not go as far as many Democrats including Kim had hoped. But it still delivers reforms that could cut costs for millions of Americans bycapping out-of-pocket spending for seniors at $2,000 a year, capping insulin costs, preventing price increases that exceed the rate of inflation, and allowing Medicare to begin negotiating prices for some drugs.

“What we’re trying to do is defying one of the most powerful special-interest lobby groups in Washington, D.C.,” Kim said. “The fact that we were able to get something that will meaningfully help people was important.”

Other industries, including tobacco and electric vehicles, have worked aggressively to pare down or reshape parts of the bill in their favor, too. But the effort to fight back on drug-price increases stands out because of the enormous scope of the campaign waged by the pharmaceutical industry and its allies, which have derailed similar proposals for the past two decades, despite how popular many of the changes are with voters, according to polling data.

“They’re the Goliath,” said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of OpenSecrets. She said that aside from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, of which pharmaceutical firms are members, the industry had spent more than any other by a wide margin so far this year, deploying so many lobbyists — 1,600 — that they outnumber members of Congress 3 to 1.

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The industry made $90.6 million of political contributions during the 2020 election cycle, according to OpenSecrets,61 percent of that to Democratic candidates and groups.

The industry’s focus on drug pricing has increased dramatically in recent years as the issue became more top-of-mind for voters. In 2012, lobbyists registered to work on the issue of “drug prices” 69 times for 20 different clients. In 2021 so far, they have filed to lobby on the issue 1,192 times for 242 different clients, according to OpenSecrets data.

While the industry lobbies on many different issues in a given year, the Democratic bill H.R. 3 that would have given the government more expansive power to negotiate drug prices was the bill PhRMA cited most often for lobbying; the bill appeared in its reports 35 times so far this year, OpenSecrets found.

Research by Patients for Affordable Drugs Now, which advocates for lower prices, found that PhRMA and its allies spent at least $26.5 million on television and digital ads attacking proposals on price negotiations between July and early November. That included $2.7 million spent by PhRMA, but also $4.5 million in ads by the 60 Plus Association, which bills itself as a conservative version of AARP anddid not respond to a request for comment.

Also lining up behind the effort was the American Action Network,a major conservative nonprofit advocacy group, with $7.9 million in ads. PhRMA gave the American Action Network $4.5 million in 2019, along with $75,000 to the 60 Plus Association, according to tax filings.

Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) holds one of Congress’s most competitive seats, having wrested it from Republican control in 2018 and narrowly winning reelection in 2020. She shaped her campaign around a platform of tackling rising health-care costs and has maintained focus on that issue, inviting a Type 1 diabetes patient with sky-high insulin costs to be her guest at the 2020 State of the Union address.

According to data tracked by Patients for Affordable Drugs Now, the American Action Network funded an ad in Slotkin’s district starting in August that accuses Democrats of pushing a “socialisthealth-care plan to control what medicines you can get.”

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Her office is now accustomed to fielding calls from constituents who see ads like that one on television, Slotkin said.

“We can really tell the first couple of days those ads run because that’s when we’ll see a spike in the number of people calling our office,” she said. “We literally write a response that our staff can use to forcefully push back and try to contradict the purposeful misinformation.”

Asked about the accuracy of the advertisement targeting Slotkin, American Action Network spokesman Calvin Moore reiterated its message, saying such proposals amount to “socialist price controls” that could limit development of new prescription drugs. “Stifling innovation to this degree has profound consequences,” Moore said.

Many of the backers of these efforts are difficult to identify because of rules allowing anonymous funding of political groups. A Public Voice, which described itself on its 2018 and 2019 tax forms as the “direct controlling entity” of A Healthy Future, is based in Thornville, Ohio.It listed nearly $5 million in contributions in 2018, though it declined to name its donors, and spent the money on consulting, marketing and funding conservative causes across the country. That year, its donations included $240,000 to Fund for a Working Congress, a political action committee that supported Republican candidates, and $370,000 to Ohio First PAC, which supported a challenge by Republican James B. Renacci against Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio).

A voice mail left at a number listed on tax filings for A Public Voice received no response. Documents filed with the state of Ohio show that the entity originally formed in 2012 as Protect Your Vote Ohio and show its registered agents as lawyers with Langdon Law, a Cincinnati-area law firm known as a nexus for “dark money” groups on the right.

David Langdon of Langdon Law did not respond to an email and voice mail requesting comment.

The approximately 20 digital and television video ads compiled by Patients for Affordable Drugs Now and reviewed by The Washington Post warned viewers about an array of crises that could befall them should Congress allow Medicare to negotiate prices for drugs, among them that the industry could no longer develop new medications, that the government would limit access to prescriptions, that Medicare would be cut or that millions of jobs would be lost.

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“They call it negotiation, but it really means government decides what medicines I can get,” says “Sue,” awoman labeled in one ad as a diabetic from Ohio.

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“Imagine a future in which a vaccine for covid-19 was never discovered,” says a voice in another spot.

Pro-industry advertising ran during opinion shows on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, as well as during college football games, according to the advertising data firm iSpot.tv.

Once the drug cost proposal was added to President Biden’s larger legislative package, some advertising took direct aim at Democrats’ spending priorities. One claimed the proposal called for “gutting Medicare” in exchange for “pie-in-the-sky special-interest kickbacks.” It depicts House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) riding atop an animated unicorn, she and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) sliding down rainbows, and Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) at a dessert buffet. Another depicts the proposal as a shell game that “loots Medicare.”

Jayapal says Democrats almost have the votes to pass Build Back Better

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) described her frustration with lengthy negotiations on the Build Back Better act in an interview with The Washington Post Nov. 5. (Zach Purser Brown/The Washington Post)

Previous presidents, including Barack Obama and Donald Trump, vowed to pass bills to lower prescription drug costs, only to see their efforts die on Capitol Hill, in part because of a relentless lobbying blitz.

When Montana’s Brian Schweitzer ran for Senate in 1999, he elevated his long-shot campaign by busing senior citizens to Canada so they could illegally buy drugs at lower prices.

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He got his first taste of the pharmaceutical lobby shortly afterward, when he said television ads started attacking him for trusting medicines made in other countries. He said in his case, the attacks helped make his political career. “Virtually everybody in America has a friend or family member who is taking that expensive medicine,” he said.

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Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.) holds anothercompetitive seat, representing an Allentown, Pa., district that narrowly favored Biden in the 2020 election. She said that as she began supporting drug price reform early in her career, lobbyists began relentlessly calling her office, even though she had vowed not to take corporate PAC donations.

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“If they’re calling me nonstop, imagine what they’re doing to those who actually do take their money,” she said.

During the most recent negotiations, Wild began receiving automated emails from constituentsworried they wouldn’t be able to get their medicines if the government could negotiate prices. But on Sunday she joined 14 colleagues from other competitive districts, including Kim and Slotkin, to urge Democratic leadership to deliver on their promise to reduce drug prices.

She said she knows what comes next.

“I am quite certain that because I have been so outspoken on this issue, that I am going to face an attack ad,” Wild said. “I have an idea for what it could be, but I don’t want to tell you in case they see it. I don’t want to give them any ideas.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/florida-dark-money/

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Friday, January 21, Nikki Fried, the commissioner of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Affairs, released a statement about the investigation which will determine if the organization, known as Let’s Preserve the American Dream, violated Florida law regarding funding solicitation.

“As always, our department will enforce the law to the fullest extent to protect consumers,” Fried said in a prepared statement. “Our Consumer Services team is currently investigating whether this entity was previously operating in violation of Chapter 496, Florida Statutes, and we are unable to comment further at this time.”

The investigation reportedly centers on LPAD's association with some of the biggest businesses in the state of Florida and how its donations may have been used to fund ghost campaigns to tilt elections in Republicans' favor.

Per the Orlando Sentinel:

"The records show that the nonprofit, 'Let’s Preserve the American Dream,' wired $600,000 on Sept. 29, 2020, to another nonprofit, 'Grow United Inc.' Grow United then used that money to send $550,000 to a pair of political committees that paid for mailers touting independent candidates in three important Senate races, in what authorities say was a ploy to confuse voters and tilt the races to Republicans."

Transcripts of an interview show that Ryan Tyson, a Tallahassee-based Republican strategist and the executive director of LPAD, confirmed he ordered the $600,000 payment to Grow United.

Tyson also indicated that he told the political consultant overseeing Grow United "to expect a request for a donation from Alex Alvarado, another operative who worked for Tyson as a subcontractor to Let’s Preserve the American Dream — and who records show set up the two political committees that paid for the ghost candidate advertising."

However, he insists he had no control over Grow United's transferring the funds to Alvarado’s political committees.

“Did you know when this $600,000 was sent to Grow United... that $550,000 of it was going to go to Alex Alvarado’s two political committees?” Miami-Dade County Assistant State Attorney Tim VanderGiesen asked Tyson.

He responded saying, "I had a hunch they’d help him."

Tyson later added, “I assume they’d probably be supportive if Alex called. but I had no way to know if they actually would. Because once I make a contribution to an entity, I lose control of how they spend that money.”

Investigators are seeking to determine whether or not LPAD violated election and campaign finance laws.

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Records: Tallahassee strategist helped boost ghost candidates with dark money ad buy

Samantha J. Gross, Miami Herald - Tuesday

A longtime political strategist paid for more than half a million dollars in misleading mailers promoting no-party candidates inthree key state Senate races in 2020, according to court records released by the Miami-Dade County State Attorney’s office Tuesday as part of a public corruption probe.

The records show that Ryan Tyson’s “Let’s Preserve the American Dream” wired $600,000 to “Grow United Inc” on Sept. 29, 2020. Days later on Oct. 2,Grow United sent $550,000 to two political committees that paid for the misleading mailers — The Truth and Our Florida — which were set up by Tallahassee consultant Alex Alvarado.

Investigators say the ads were meant to confuse voters to benefit the Republican candidates in the races, including two in Miami-Dade and one in Central Florida. The mailers featured messaging on issues that historically appeal to Democrats and promoted no-party candidates who had not actively campaigned. The ads urge voters to “cut the strings” from party-backed candidates.

The candidates in the three races — Senate Districts 37 and 39 in Miami and Senate District 9 in Seminole County — did not campaign themselves and were only advertised to voters via the mailers. All three races were won by Republicans.

Ryan Smith, a GOP consultant who owns Tallahassee firm ‘96 Consulting, Alvarado, the stepson of the printer who brokered the mail-piece project, and Tyson, all received a cut of the $550,000 payment.

Up until 2019, Tyson served as vice president of pro-business lobbying group Associated Industries of Florida, which has denied being involved in the committees.

Prosecutors have zeroed in on Tyson and Alvarado as well as Dan Newman, a prominent Democratic fundraiser, and Richard Alexander, the chairman of the dark money group Grow United. On Dec. 23, 2021, each was sent what is known by prosecutors as a “prior to” letter, which generally precedes criminal charges in a case. As of Tuesday, no charges have been filed.

It is not illegal to mislead voters or pay for misleading mail advertisements.

Records released as part of pretrial discovery in the case of former Republican state Sen. Frank Artiles, who is facing several charges related to the no-party candidate who ran in District 37, were received by the Miami Herald on Tuesday.

Court records show that Tyson, the executive director of Let’s Preserve the American Dream, told investigators that in his role as director, it was his idea to send the money to Grow United for the purpose of helping “left of center” candidates. He said he was originally approached byJeff Pitts, a consultant who controlled Grow United and now runs a Tallahassee-based firm called Canopy Partners LLC.

Miami-Dade County Assistant State Attorney Tim VanderGiesen asked Tyson during a Sept. 30 interview: “Did you know when this $600,000 was sent to Grow United, that $550,000 of it was going to go to Alex Alvarado’s two political committees?”

“I had a hunch they’d help them,” Tyson responded.

During the interview, Tyson also told VanderGiesen that Let’s Preserve the American Dream had reimbursed Alvarado for legal fees since the public corruption investigation began.

““I don’t think a single donor that has ever contributed to Let’s Preserve the American Dream would ever believe that Alex Alvarado was committing a crime,” Tyson said.

An ongoing criminal investigation

The candidate in Senate District 37, who shares a surname with the Democrat incumbent and received more than 6,000 votes in an election decided by 32, was arrested on four felony campaign finance charges last year. Auto-parts dealer Alexis Pedro Rodriguez later took a plea deal in exchange for helping prosecutors build a case against his acquaintance, Artiles. Investigators say Artiles paid Rodriguez $40,000 to run as a no-party candidate to sway the outcome of the election.

Both men were charged with conspiracy to make or accept campaign contributions in excess of legal limits, accepting and making those excess campaign contributions, false swearing in connection to an election and aiding in (and eventually, submitting) false voter information. Under state law, each of those charges carry sentences of up to five years in prison if convicted.

Let’s Preserve the American Dream paid Artiles’ Atlas Consultants more than $125,000 for “South Florida research services” dating back to 2017. The last payment to Artiles’ firm was Nov. 15, 2020, three days after the Democrat incumbent in Senate District 37 lost in a manual recount.

Tyson seeks to block records

Tyson’s lawyers have asked a Miami circuit court judge to block the release of bank records that would disclose its donors, arguing that the release of such information would violate donors’ constitutional rights and could “chill speech across the political spectrum.”

Records released Tuesday also show that Tyson’s lawyers emailed Hancock Whitney bank, asking that it review responsive documents before they are produced to the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office.

His lawyers have argued that releasing bank records that would show donations and contributions from Let’s Preserve the American Dream, from February 2020 to August 2021, are “irrelevant” to Artiles’ case.

No charges have been brought against Tyson or his dark money organization, and neither have been accused of wrongdoing, his lawyers said. They also said that Tyson voluntarily appeared for an interview with prosecutors to “demonstrate that LPAD complies with all state, federal and local laws.”

Unlike political committees, which are legally required to disclose their donors, dark money groups are not required by law to do so, which makes them useful for funders who don’t want their identities revealed when backing certain campaigns or causes.

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an 1 22  no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/tina-peters/

Colorado, a state that President Joe Biden won by 14% in 2020, Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters is among the far-right MAGA Republicans who has promoted the Big Lie and false claims that the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump — a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked. Now, according to the Colorado Sun, a grand jury in Mesa County is investigating allegations that Peters tampered with election equipment.

The grand jury, according to Sun reporter Thy Vo, “accepted the case” on January 12.

“Peters, a Republican who was barred from overseeing the 2021 election by the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office, has been under criminal investigation by local, state and federal authorities for months,” Vo reports. “Peters has spread baseless claims about the 2020 presidential election being stolen and has been facing scrutiny since she allegedly allowed an unauthorized person to attend a sensitive Dominion Voting Systems software update in May. Photos of passwords taken during the update were then posted online.”

Peters was among the speakers at MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s “Cyber Symposium” event in South Dakota in August. Lindell, a leading promoter of the Big Lie, is being sued for defamation by Dominion for making the false claim that its equipment was used to help Biden and his Democratic allies steal the election.

On Thursday morning, January 13, Mesa County District Attorney Dan Rubenstein and Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser issued an official statement on the case.

“Over the past few months,” Rubenstein and Weiser explained, “we have made progress in the multi-agency investigation. This investigation will be thorough and guided by the facts and the law. More information will be made available when the prosecutors are ethically and legally permitted to provide additional details. To maintain the impartiality of the investigation, we have no further comment at this time.”

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Mesa

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chris h with  asks what if next time it's FBI making offer?

it's just ye now ;)  lang rhet interesting/odd

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loose end to tidy up == kill?!

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/kanye-trump-voter-fraud/

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grifter/ ideol entre?

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publicist for rapper Kanye West is accused of traveling to Georgia in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election and pressuring a poll worker to confess to voter fraud,as alleged by then-President Donald Trump and his allies. Despite their extensive efforts to prove Trump actually won the election, their claims of voter fraud have been consistently debunked and rejected by courts.

According to Reuters, the publicist Trevian Kutti attempted to confront 62-year-old grandmother and poll worker, Ruby Freeman. On Jan. 4, Kutti reportedly arrived at Freeman's home with an unidentified male to discuss the election. Kutti is said to have insisted that she'd come as a representative of a "high-profile individual” to deliver a clear ultimatum: "confess to Trump’s voter-fraud allegations, or people would come to her home in 48 hours, and she’d go to jail."

Out of fear, Freeman called 911. “They’re saying that I need help, that it’s just a matter of time that they are going to come out for me and my family,” Freeman said on the call. When a Cobb County police officer arrived at the home, he suggested that they all speak at the station. After going there, Kutti spoke with Freeman as she continued to explain the purpose for her visit.

Audio recordings of Kutti's discussion with Freeman have also come to light in the Reuters article. While she did not detail specific consequences, Kutti did appear to issue a veiled threat to Freeman.

“I cannot say what specifically will take place,” Kutti is reportedly heard saying to Freeman in the audio recording. “I just know that it will disrupt your freedom," she said, "and the freedom of one or more of your family members.”

Kutti continued, “You are a loose end for a party that needs to tidy up."

According to Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague, the co-authors of the previously-released book, "The Steal,” Kutti went a step further with her remarks suggesting that Freeman and her daughter provide statements to a U.S. attorney.

“What I would like for you to do is consider talking to a U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Georgiawho is willing to take a statement from you and your daughter. And who in turn, if you are honest about the course of events that took place at State Farm Arena, will possibly be willing to grant you and your daughter immunity from charges that will imminently be brought,” Kutti told Freeman.

Kutti has not responded to any requests for comments. Watch the video below:

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https://www.salon.com/2021/01/29/florida-mans-arrest-on-2016-election-charges-suggests-russia-probe-may-have-survived-bill-barr/

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Florida man's arrest on 2016 election charges suggests Russia probe may have survived Bill Barr

Indictment of a Roger Stone-connected operative may signal that Robert Mueller's spinoffs are still bearing fruit

By ROGER SOLLENBERGER

PUBLISHED JANUARY 29, 2021 5:59AM (EST)

Florida man Douglass Mackey, a notorious white nationalist and right-wing social media troll, was arrested this week on charges of conspiring with others to deprive citizens of their right to vote ahead of the 2016 election, the Department of Justice announced on Wednesday.

"According to the allegations in the complaint, the defendant exploited a social media platform to infringe one of the most basic and sacred rights guaranteed by the Constitution: the right to vote," Nicholas McQuaid, acting Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division, said in a press release. "This complaint underscores the department's commitment to investigating and prosecuting those who would undermine citizens' voting rights."

It also suggests that the Russia investigation, at least in part, survived the tenure of former Attorney General Bill Barr.

According to the complaint, Mackey's Twitter account had nearly 60,000 followers, and in February 2016 the MIT Media Lab ranked him 107th in its list of the most influential personalities ahead of the election, higher than NBC News and Stephen Colbert. Prosecutors say that in the months before the election, Mackey collaborated with unnamed co-conspirators to encourage Hillary Clinton supporters to cast votes via text messages or social media — which are not viable or legal voting methods in any state.

The conspiracy charge against Mackey, who was arrested in West Palm Beach, could indicate that the Justice Department has been probing a broader network. Three of his co-conspirators were identified by HuffPost reporter Luke O'Brien, who wrote an in-depth 2018 profile of Mackey:white nationalist financier Jeff Giesea; conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich, who has ties to onetime national security adviser turned QAnon hero Michael Flynn;and Jack Posobiec, a far-right provocateur with ties to neo-Nazi groups and longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone. The pro-Trump group, who called themselves "MAGA3X," fueled the Pizzagate social media campaign that smeared Hillary Clinton and other Democratic leaders in the run-up to the 2016 election.

Notably, both Stone and Flynn came under the focus of former special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into the weaponization of social media in 2016. Flynn had repeatedly shared content from the Russian-linked account @TEN_GOP, which shared disinformation to tens of thousands of followers under the auspices of the Tennessee Republican Party.

Stone, a misinformation mastermind, also imprinted on the Trump campaign the importance of social media. Just this summer, Facebook wiped more than 100 Facebook and Instagram accounts and pages that Stone and unnamed associates had used to push disinformation related to the 2016 election, as well as to Stone's criminal trial.

One arm of Stone's social media work in 2016 was an effort to suppress the Black vote, which is also specified in the charges against Mackey. Mueller had questioned and subpoenad Stone's associates who helped orchestrate his social media campaigns.

Former President Trump's efforts to block Mueller — or even fire him — have been well documented. In anticipation of possible acts of executive sabotage, the special counsel's office in the course of its work spun off a number of investigations to other divisions, primarily the Southern District of New York. As one of Barr's first acts in office, he appointed his own special prosecutor, Connecticut U.S. attorney John Durham, to investigate the origins of the Russia probe — and potentially pursue charges against FBI agents and Obama administration officials. Barr has long been suspected of spearheading a secret effort to suppress evidence and snuff out ancillary investigations, and after Mueller submitted his final report, congressional Democrats requested the attorney general's communications regarding the spinoff cases.

Considering all this, it seems possible, even likely, that the Mackey indictment indicates that some Russia-related inquiries have survived Barr's efforts to uproot them. Investigative journalist Marcy Wheeler proposed another, deeply ironic possibility: The charges could have stemmed from Trump's efforts to undermine the 2020 election and reverse his defeat.

About a week after the election, Barr, under pressure from Trump, took the unprecedented step of authorizing prosecutors to pursue election fraud cases ahead of the Electoral College vote. It's possible, Wheeler suggests, that if one of those prosecutors had ahold of evidence from prior investigations, Barr's authorization could have allowed that prosecutor to prioritize the Mackey case and bring an indictment — which would be a prodigious case of cosmic payback.

ROGER SOLLENBERGER

Roger Sollenberger is a staff writer at Salon. Follow him on Twitter @SollenbergerRC.

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silly filibuster args. is dirty trick?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/mitt-romney/

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1021 an

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Michele Carew is the latest casualty in the Trumpist war on voting. The veteran elections administrator tendered her resignation to officials in Hood County, Texas, on Friday after a brutal campaign by Trump loyalists to oust her. Trump won 81 percent of the vote there, but Carew still found herself in the crosshairs of those seeking to entrench the GOP's control over election administration. They want to see Carew's duties reassigned to a county clerk, who is notorious for (what else?) sharing electoral conspiracy theories on social media.

Carew is one of many local election officials across the country who have chosen to quit rather than absorb right-wing abuse.Among 14 southwestern Ohio counties, one in four of election officials has already called it quits. Pennsylvania is grappling with a similar exodus.

"These conspiracy theorists are in it for the long haul," county clerk Barb Byrum told the Associated Press. "They're in it to completely crumble our republic, and they're looking at these election administrator positions. They're playing the long game."

It all keeps coming back to the Big Lie. The Big Lie of voter fraud is a classic stabbed-in-the-back narrative. These fantasies crop up whenever fascists need to reconcile their conviction that they're strong and special with the reality that they've been shut out of power. They convince themselves that they would have won, if it hadn't been for the treacherous Other who denied them their glorious birthright.

In the most famous stabbed-in-the-back narrative, it was the German Army of World War I that supposedly could have triumphed had the craven politicians not betrayed them. Today, Donald Trump's supporters console themselves with the fantasy that they won the 2020 election, but Democrats, unions, Black people and the Chinese Communist Party cheated them out of power.

A good stabbed-in-the-back narrative also suggests a target at which to direct resentment and even violence. "Stop the Steal" was the rallying cry that Trump used to sic a mob on the Capitol on Jan 6.

Local elections officials are still bearing the brunt of Trumpist fury. A special investigation by Reuters documented 102 threats of death or violence against 40 local election officials. Those are a fraction of the true number of threats. Milwaukee election official Claire Woodall-Vogg estimated she'd received 150 threats since a Gateway Pundit, a massively popular conspiracy blog, published lies about her.

Election administration skews disproportionately female, like education and public health — two other spheres where GOP radicals have directed their ire. The California Voter Foundation, a watchdog group, estimates that 75 percent of local election officials are women.

"The common thread is that no one has any respect from women […]," Milwaukee elections official Woodall-Vogg said in an interview with CNN in which the mother of two small children recounted how her harassers delight in calling her a cunt and a whore.

In Georgia, Republicans are using a new state law to purge Democrats of color from local elections boards. At least 10 board members have been removed under the new state law or by local ordinances. Of these, at least 5 of the ousted members are people of color.

"I speak out and I know the laws," Ms. Lonnie Hollis, an ousted Black board member told the Times. "The bottom line is they don't like people that have some type of intelligence and know what they're doing, because they know they can't influence them."

Michigan Republicans are busily replacing local election board members with pliant functionaries who, they hope, will refuse to certify future Democratic victories. The state's former elections director warned that it would create "a mess" if 10 or 15 counties refused to certify the election. It would be more than "a mess." It would be yet another procedural coup attempt. The GOP is organizing to steal the next election in plain sight, but the Department of Justice has done little more than convene a task force to study the problem. The Big Lie must not be allowed to cast a shadow over our democracy.

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dead of night

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/texas-gerrymandering/

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/pennsylvania-gop/

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bypass governor voter suppr

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trad DT is used in election to get pwr, now used to hold onto power, using tools of state = fascism [tho nixon]

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aha: // mlk on switch out modifier: good trouble,  gang of 5 we are the new/true radicals; appropriation/inversion/perversion of lefty god term[at the same time attacking woke, new PC]; for left/reality racial diversity does being intellecti\ial diversity dofferent POV; builds on Lichter? Horo BS of how lefty commie profs discriminate ~ conservatives; gop is in death spiral, at least demographically so must cheat to preserve minority power[states rights BS ~ HR1 ~ voter suppress, gerry, dark corp $); GOP can't win in mktplace of ideas[libtard bankrunpted by covid fail; must explain away fail by saying media, soc media and univ ~ them

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msnbc moral panic: you raise kids w/ right values/american and univ makes them into liberals[and/or gay?]

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/ron-desantis-2653505905/

Florida goes full fascist': Ron DeSantis sparks furious backlash with ‘authoritarian’ campus political surveys

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Raw Story June 23, 2021

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation requiring Florida students, faculty, and staff to register their political views in surveys in an effort to promote "intellectual diversity" at colleges and universities, and the measure set off backlash across social media.

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Critics decried the law, which DeSantis claims will promote freedom of speech, as a "thoroughly Orwellian" attempt to gain control over academic debate at institutions of higher learning.

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Well, this is thoroughly Orwellian. ?? Faculty and students of Florida, you know what to do! Freep Mini-Trump's stup… https://t.co/N2nEE5UzuM**

— Betty Cracker ?? (@Betty Cracker ??)1624454881.0

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Well that's got to be unconstitutional: Florida students required to register political views with the state to pro… https://t.co/b1Bh8p98uN**

— David Rothkopf (@David Rothkopf)1624455537.0

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DeSantis wants to survey university students and staff, with the threat of budget cuts if he doesn't get his way???… https://t.co/IWfcM8nGhI**

— Witty Librarian In a Mask (@Witty Librarian In a Mask)1624455089.0

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/facebook-pro-trump-groups/

salon no twt

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Reporting on Friday revealed that Facebook knowingly allowed a digital marketing firm tied to a pro-Trump group to release a series of ads purporting to be from a fake left-wing organization ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, while election officials failed to investigate the group at the time.

As The Guardian reported, a right-wing marketing firm called Rally Forge ran a $5,000 ad campaign beginning just days before the2018 election, showing ads promoting Green Party candidates in an effort to split the Democratic vote and help Republicans in several close races. The ads were purported to be placed by a group called America Progress Now and expressed support for democratic socialism.

Facebook launched an investigation into the ads just after the election and quickly determined that America Progress Now's official page on the platform was run by the same three men—Jake Hoffman, Connor Clegg, and Colton Duncan—who were administrators for Turning Point USA, the pro-Trump college organization.

To the alarm of a number of Facebook employees, The Guardian reported, the company did not find Rally Forge or Turning Point USA to be in violation of any of its policies.

One product manager at the time said a case could be made for Rally Forge and Turning Point USA having engaged in voter suppression through the ads, and asked, "Can we strengthen our ads transparency policies so that political ads are indeed transparent to the user?"

After the election, Facebook deactivated several other right-wing accounts run by the administrators, but the move did not stop Rally Forge from establishing a "troll farm" out of Phoenix, Arizona in 2020. Working for Turning Point Action, a group linked to Turning Point USA, the firm hired teenagers to post pro-Trump messages on social media, some of which cast doubt on the integrity of the election system.

Sophie Zhang, aformer Facebook employee who participated in the investigation of the fake Green Party ads, wrote on Twitter Friday, "One wonders if [Rally Forge] would have escalated to troll farms, had FB deterred them in 2018." twt]

"This is egregious," tweeted the women's rights group UltraViolet on Friday.

Beyond Facebook's decision to allow the firm to remain on Facebook after determining the ads were fraudulent, the ads "appeared to violate federal laws that require independent expenditures to be filed with the [Federal Election Commission] and include proper disclosures on advertisements," The Guardian reported.

"This is an example of why disclosure is so important in elections: swing state voters who saw 'America Progress Now' ads promoting Green party candidates would've had no idea that they were the handiwork of Republican political operatives," Brendan Fischer, director of federal reform at CLC, told The Guardian.

The Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint with the FEC in 2019 over America Progress Now and the administrators' failure to disclose the true source of the Facebook ads, only to have the case dismissed before the FEC could conduct an investigation.

The election commissioners declined to look further into the complaint after a man named Evan Muhlstein contacted them to take full responsibility to the ads, claiming he alone had failed to file the ad expenditures with the FEC and saying his "inexperience" was to blame.

"The FEC's job is to enforce the transparency laws and protect voters' right to know who is trying to influence them, but the agency here failed to conduct even a minimal investigation," Fischer said.

According to former FEC Commissioner Ann Ravel, who served on the commission from 2013 to 2017, Muhlstein's admission to the FEC appeared to amount to "clear fraud," as he never disclosed to the officials that the ads had been the work of Rally Forge.

At the time, though, Muhlstein's claim was enough to convince at least one FEC commissioner, James "Trey" Trainor, that the CLC had engaged in "wild speculation" by filing a complaint.

"This case wasn't about a 'fake political group … exploit[ing] Facebook rules … and hid[ing] spending from the FEC,'" Trainor wrote. "In fact, APN was established by an unsophisticated individual trying to show his support for several third-party candidates, but he got tripped by the myriad regulations governing online political speech."

Zhang denounced the FEC for failing to contact Facebook regarding Muhlstein's claim to verify that he'd administered the America Progress Now page—a cursory investigation which would have immediately revealed the true owners of the page.

"It's quite possible that FB would have blown the FEC off," Zhang said. "But many employees were upset over this case, and may have come forward if asked. I would likely have if I'd known."

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std boogie man roger stone dirty trick is to run fake/3rd cand to split vote, sometimes pick someoe w/ same name

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/gop-spolier-candidate/?rs=182

ablind veteran who ran for Congress in Minnesota last year under the Grassroots Legalize Cannabis Party now alleges he was tricked into running by a Republican Party operative to siphon votes from then-Democratic-Farmer-Labor Congressman Collin Peterson in Minnesota's 7th Congressional District, according to local news outlet KMSP.

Kevin Ne Se Shores, said the report, "was surprised by the unsolicited call he got in June of 2020 from a man who encouraged him to run against Congressman Collin Peterson (D-MN) as a candidate for the Grassroots Legalize Cannabis Party. Shores, who suffers from Gulf War Illness, used cannabis to get off pain killers. He told the FOX 9 Investigators he assumed he was being recruited by a member of the Grassroots Legalize Cannabis Party. 'I was under the impression he was a part of that political party,' Shores said. 'That was my assumption.' He was wrong."

"Unknown to Shores, the man who called encouraging him to run was a Republican strategist, Kip Christianson, who at the time was on the payroll of the Republican National Committee, according to the Federal Election Commission," said the report. Shores also alleges that Christianson paid his $300 candidate filing fee, telling him, "Don't worry about it."

Shores only later became aware that Christianson was an RNC employee and 2016 Donald Trump delegate for Minnesota.

Ultimately, Shores lost the nomination for the third party to Rae Hart Anderson, and the combined 24,000 votes for the Grassroots Legalize Marijuana Party and the Legal Marijuana Now Party would not have been enough to secure re-election for Peterson, who lost to former GOP lieutenant governor Michelle Fischbach by 50,000 votes.

However, in races further down the ballot, GOP covert support for the Minnesota cannabis parties may have spoiled state Senate races, and may have been decisive in helping Republicans retain control of the chamber — which ironically makes cannabis legalization far less likely in the state.

Congressional candidate says he was tricked into running by RNC strategist | FOX 9 KMSP..[vid]

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2nd corps

https://www.democracynow.org/2021/5/7/headlines/new_york_ag_says_18_million_fake_comments_were_posted_in_support_of_2017_fcc_net_neutrality_repeal

new York’s attorney general says the nation’s largest broadband companies funded a secret campaign to influence the Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of net neutrality rules. Attorney General Letitia James said Thursday an investigation by her office found that in 2017, “The broadband industry hired marketing companies that co-opted and created identities and filed nearly 18 million fake comments with the FCC and sent over half a million fake letters to Congress in support of the repeal.” Supporters of net neutrality say protections are needed to preserve an open internet and to bar internet service providers from stopping or slowing down the delivery of websites.

TOPICS:

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aha 1st corp, ~ restore commons

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/louis-dejoy-2652858940

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raw dc rept

After the failed union vote at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama, the critical postmortems ignored a reality that may result in another election: Amazon cheated.

And Louis DeJoy, the Trump-era holdover dismantling the U.S. Postal Service, helped.

A May 7 labor board hearing will consider a request for a new vote sought by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. Its complaint details a campaign of intimidation to pressure employees to reject the union.

The Labor Board has a long history of looking the other way when given evidence of cheating by employers in union elections. But this time may be different because of who helped cheat --- from local on up to national officials.

The Jeff Bezos company installed drop boxes to collect votes on company property. Amazon placed these boxes despite being told by the National Labor Relations Board staff not to do so.

The drop boxes were placed with the connivance ofthe service led by DeJoy. Former President Donald Trump installed this high-rolling donor to worsen mail delivery during the fall presidential election Trump was hellbent to win. Less mail, less votes; less votes, less competition.

Here, we use the pejorative verb connivance because the drop box installed inside Amazon's Bessemer parking lot did not carry any postal insignia.

Amazon can leverage the Postal Service because Amazon has made itself crucial to USPS finances.

The Postal Service generated nearly $4 billion in revenue from Amazon in 2019 and counted an eye-popping $1.6 billion of that in profit. The volume of business Amazon delivered grew bigly last year because of the coronavirus pandemic.

This reliance on Amazon for highly profitable business likely explains why, beyond his well-documented anti-union animus, DeJoy would help Amazon fight the union.

The struggle between American workers and the bosses has been, and continues to be, fantastically lopsided.

A pro-union worker, Jennifer Bates, told reporters last month that colleagues at the Bessemer Fulfillment Center were reluctant to deposit ballots in the mysterious drop box that suddenly appeared in the parking lot.

Workers Feared Amazon

"Some of the people are afraid to put them in there," Bates said. "The 'yes' voters feel that Amazon will probably try to steal their ballots."

Labor lawyer Brandon Magner tweeted: "If Amazon did install these mailboxes, or if they exercise control over the mailboxes, such as having a key to the ballot box, that would clearly merit setting aside the election if the union were to lose."

During the voting, which lasted from Feb. 8 to March 29, Amazon demonstrated just how crucial controlling the Bessemer warehouse parking lot — and what went on inside it — was to the company.

'Coercion and Intimidation'

The union made the following claims:

- Amazon hired police officers to patrol the parking lot and surveil interactions between employees and union organizers. The constant presence, according to the union's protest filing, "created an atmosphere of coercion and intimidation thereby interfering with the right of employees to a free and fair election."

Without a union, individual workers have no power. And while some who voted against the union told journalists after the vote that Amazon paid them well, the issue is whether it should pay them even better along with improving their benefits and work rules.

Record Profits

Last year, Amazon reported a profit of $24.2 billion before taxes, up from $13.9 billion in 2019 and almost 10 times its 2016 pretax profit.

Amazon pays little in federal income tax. In 2020 its "effective federal income tax rate of just 9.4%, less than half the statutory corporate tax of 21%." So said Mathew Gardner of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy earlier this year when Amazon announced its latest financial success.

Amazon has been so successful that a dollar invested when it first sold stock in 1997 has now grown to $2,300, making it one of the most fantastically profitable investments even in this era of high profits in high tech.

While the company doesn't want to share more of its gains with the blue-collar Americans whose labor makes its profits possible by quickly fulfilling orders, it does lavish money on its executives. One reason to favor the top is that the way Amazon pays executives provides a stealth financial and tax subsidy.

Costly Stock Options

The company showered so many valuable stock options on its highest-paid people that the tax savings alone came to more than $600 million last year, Gardner calculated.

Stock options save companies on corporate income tax. The companies get to deduct their value even though the cost is borne by existing stockholders. The stockholders' share of the company is diluted by the new shares given to executives. In other words, it's a tax deduction that costs the company nothing.

Options are also a form of compensation that cost the company nothing, unlike the hard cash it must pay out to rank-and-file workers like those at the Bessemer warehouse.

What's most troubling about this union election is that a federal government corporation worked with management against the workers. That's a troubling sign of authoritarianism.

Remember Amazon worked inconcert with the service to install the dropbox to collect ballots on company property. The service acted after staff at the Labor Board, the federal agency tasked with protecting the rights of American workers in the private sector, told them they couldn't do it. But just as it pressured workers, Amazon pressured the service into pleasing Bezos, the richest person in America.

No Answers

Dave Partenheimer, a postal public relations manager, would not talk about who ultimately gave the go-ahead to install the dropbox in the Amazon warehouse parking lot.

Partenheimer declined to say whether the service knew that the Labor board already denied Amazon's request for such a dropbox. He also declined to identify who ultimately approved installation.

Instead, Partenheimer reiterated an earlier statement about a "Centralized Box Unit [CBU] with a collection compartment" being "suggested by the postal service as a solution to provide an efficient and secure delivery and collection point."

The Labor board isn't talking about the dropbox either, at least not while it considers the 23 separate objections filed by the Retail Store, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

The Labor board spokeswoman, Kayla Blado, declined to comment on whether the Postal Service has the authority to supersede her agency's decisions. She would not even confirm that the agency did, in fact, deny Amazon's request to have a ballot drop box installed on its property.

DeJoy Strikes Again

The persistent controversy about the dropbox and the Bessemer vote overall, however, parallels the madness that surrounded mail-in ballots during the last presidential election. DeJoy ordered the removal of mail sorting machines in the run-up to the vote, while the rest of the Trump administration whined about the supposed inability of the Postal Service to properly deliver ballots.

Trump also complained throughout his four years in office that the Postal Service was subsidizing Amazon. This was to advance his attacks on the aggressive reporting by The Washington Post, which Bezos owns, but whose newsroom he has never influenced according to the top editor and reporters working there.

We now know that the prices Amazon paid generated outsize profits for the Postal Service, exposing yet another Trump lie though only a few Americans, like DCReport readers, know this.

Fought Mail-in Votes, Then Didn't

At first, Amazon fought hard to block mail-in voting. It dismissed the potential dangers of in-person voting during the pandemic. Then it reversed course and challenging the ability of the Postal Service to deliver mail-in ballots in a timely fashion. Taken together it was a classic case of Amazon talking out of both sides of the company's mouth.

Lisa Y. Henderson, the Labor board's acting Region 10 director, dismissed the company's contradictory arguments in January and ordered that balloting be conducted by mail.

How the Labor board rules, and whether the long list of federal rules that hobble union organizing, will be addressed by President Joe Biden's administration. Decisions will be crucial to whether Americans as a whole prosper, or we continue to create inequality through policies that tilt heavily to the side of business owners and investors.

The struggle between American workers and the bosses has been, and continues to be, fantastically lopsided.

The Economic Policy Institute's Unequal Power Project, for instance, notes an "inherent imbalance in bargaining power between employers and employees" that creates "a lack of freedom in the workplace."

Pro-union workers at Amazon's Bessemer Fulfillment Center remained undaunted after losing the initial vote, declaring, "This battle has just begun."

"I'm not discouraged, Linda Burns told reporters after losing the vote by a more than 2-to-1 margin. "This is the beginning. [Jeff] Bezos, you misled a lot of our people. We're going to fight for our rights."

Co-worker Emitt Ashford said if the Labor board does order a new election, "We would see a change in the tide now that people have the information."

"We would win," he said.

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- Biden nominates 3 to postal board as delays persist ›

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sued same day? says can't count on ct, must have reform [hr 1?]

AA Dem woman jaile for dr knock presser; 2 pp bill --> 100 signed next day?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/georgia-voter-id-law

Georgia, State Rep. Donna McLeod was among the Democrats who fought hard against the voter suppression bill that Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law on Thursday, March 25 — and the next morning, McLeod did not mince words when she slammed the law as "White supremacy" and "Jim Crow 2.0" during an appearance on CNN's "New Day."

McLeod, who was first elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 2016, told CNN hosts Alisyn Camerota and John Berman, "I live in Gwinnett County. We have endured lines every single election. This is just going to create more lines because you're not giving people more options to vote. And with longer lines, that means you're going to have people that will probably not want to vote anymore."

Georgia's new law goes out of its way to make voting more difficult in the Peach State, from limiting early voting to making absentee voting more complicated to reducing the number of ballot drop boxes. And the law is so draconian that it even makes it a crime to give food or water to someone who is waiting in line to vote.

"To actually say to people you can't give food or water, that's just cruel," McLeod told Camerota and Berman.

“Jim Crow 2.0 is represented in that picture,” Georgia state Rep. Donna McLeod says about the group of white men su… https://t.co/L68IvIar2q**

— New Day (@New Day)1616758431.0

The 53-year-old McLeod is originally from Kingston, Jamaica, and she told the "New Day" hosts that as someone who worked hard to become a United States citizen, she is appalled that Georgia Republicans are going out of their way to make voting more difficult in her state — especially in heavily Black areas.

McLeod urged Democrats at the federal level to do away with the filibuster in the U.S. Senate and pass House Resolution 1, a.k.a. the For the People Act — a comprehensive voting rights bill that she said would, if passed, protect voters from the type of abuses in Georgia's "disgusting" new voter suppression law.

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sorta neglected

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an 321georgia Republicans push a draconian bill to criminalize giving food and water to people in voting lines

Alex Henderson

March 04, 2021

On Monday, the GOP-controlled Georgia House passed, by a 97-72 margin, a voter suppression bill that would greatly restrict absentee voting, early voting, weekend voting and ballot drop boxes in that state.

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Insulting' GOP bill would let Arizona lawmakers throw out presidential election results

Meaghan Ellis

February 06, 2021

As Republican lawmakers in Arizona introduce a number of proposed election bills, one piece of legislation has sp...

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still stop steal BS?

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/arizona-2020-election/

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meadows on raff call

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~ beyer

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/trump-gop

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/mitch-mcconnell-re-election/

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no lnx

many maps tables

Busted? Why the numbers behind Mitch McConnell's re-election don't add up

Mitch McConnell slammed for repeatedly sabotaging stimulus negotiation efforts

Meaghan Ellis

DC Report December 19, 2020

On a Thursday in August in Louisville, months before the 2020 election, a parade of cars filled with Kentucky Teamster representatives and labor groups, showed their fury at Mitch McConnell's constant blocking of critical COVID aid. They drove by McConnell's office raucously honking and bearing signs saying "Mitch better have my money."

In 2017, a Public Policy Polling Survey asked Kentuckians, "Do you approve or disapprove of Senator Mitch McConnell's job performance?" Only 18% approved. He clawed his rating back up to 39% on the eve of the election.

McConnell, leader of Senate Republicans, rarely holds town hall meetings with Kentucky voters—not since a heated exchange with an angry constituent went viral.

1 out of 5 voters appear to have filled out their ballots with votes for both the female Democratic Amy McGrath and the Republican pussy-grabber Donald Trump.

So, what exactly drove these angry Kentuckians to reelect Mitch McConnell with a 19-point advantage over opponent Amy McGrath—57.8% to 38.2%?

Even as Republicans across the country still insist that the election was rife with fraudulent Democratic votes, no one's asking how McConnell managed one of the most lopsided landslides of the Nov. 3 election. They should. An investigation of Kentucky voting results by DCReport raises significant questions about the vote tallies in McConnell's state.

McConnell racked up huge vote leads in traditionally Democratic strongholds, including counties that he had never before carried.

There were wide, unexplained discrepancies between the vote counts for presidential candidates and down-ballot candidates.

Significant anomalies exist in the state's voter records. Forty percent of the state's counties carry more voters on their rolls than voting-age citizens.

Kentucky and many other states using vote tabulation machines made by Election Systems & Software all reported down-ballot race results at significant odds with pre-election polls.

[caption id="attachment_21747" align="aligncenter" width="625"] The 2020 Kentucky U.S. Senate election results map[/caption]

DCReport focused on the results in three counties in eastern Kentucky's Appalachian Mountains, two of which Democrats usually always win, but similar patterns emerge in other counties across the state. Even in counties that voted overwhelmingly for Democrats as recently as the 2019 gubernatorial election, there were a staggering number of Democrats voting Republican in 2020.

In rural Breathitt County, for instance, there are 9,508 registered Democrats and just 1,599 registered Republicans. The county has a history of close contests, but Amy McGrath got only 1,652 votes versus 3,738 for McConnell, a 67% to 29% trouncing. McGrath's votes, if accurate, equaled only 17% of registered Democrats in Breathitt County.

Conventional political wisdom in McConnell-land holds that these days "ancestral Kentucky Democrats" vote Republican, and analysts shouldn't correlate party registration with voting patterns. But simply dismissing any anomalies based on anecdotal hearsay ignores the data and other possible explanations. McConnell won Breathitt County in 2020 with 1,308 more votes than he received in the county's much closer 2014 race, which he won by fewer than 400 votes. The 2019 governor's race was also a squeaker in Breathitt County, but Democrat Andy Beshear eked out a 69-vote victory. Beshear won the race statewide.

McConnell's results were even more out of whack in two other nearby Appalachian counties. In his six previous Senate elections, Elliott and Wolfe counties had never voted for McConnell. Even up to last year, Elliott County remained reliably Democratic in non-presidential races, voting for the party's entire Democratic slate in both the 2015 and 2019 statewide elections. Yet in 2020, McConnell won 64% of the votes in Wolfe County and 66% of the votes in Elliott County. McGrath only got 21% of registered Democrats in Wolfe and 20% in Elliott.

Next, take the premise that there would be some basic logic in the voting patterns of those who did vote Democratic. One might expect a registered Democrat, who's going to vote Democratic, would walk into the booth and cast their vote for both Joe Biden and Amy McGrath. But the data tell another story. In 119 of 120 counties, Amy McGrath got more votes than Joe Biden. In some counties, the votes were close. But in counties like Breathitt and Elliott, 1 out of 5 voters appear to have filled out their ballots with votes for both the female Democratic Amy McGrath and the Republican pussy-grabber Donald Trump.

Then there is the question of why a county like Breathitt has more registered voters than it has people of voting age? 2019 population data shows that Breathitt County had 12,630 people with approximately 23% below the voting age of 18. This means approximately 9,700 people are of voting age, yet there are 11,497 registered voters. Having 100% of the voting-age population registered would be astounding enough, but Breathitt County appears to have almost 120% more registered voters than age-eligible citizens. And looking further, it appears this is not limited to Breathitt.

In November 2017, Judicial Watch, a right-wing non-partisan foundation promoting transparency, sued Kentucky over its "Dirty Voter Rolls" and its failure to maintain accurate voter registration lists.The suit argued that 48 of the 120 Kentucky counties had more registered voters than citizens over the age of 18 and alleged that Kentucky was one of only three states with a statewide active registration rate greater than 100% of the age-eligible citizen population. Kentucky's inflated voter rolls, and lack of transparency, provide a perfect cover for malfeasant behavior regarding the election results.

Turning an 18% approval into a 58% win may seem like a "turning water into wine"-style miracle, but a "smoke & mirrors" parlor trick seems more likely. To better understand how the data could have been manipulated, look no further than Trump's own legal filings. In an incompetent post-election lawsuit, the Trump team may have intended to accuse Democrats of election fraud, but in describing a possible plot, they attributed the cheating to Trump himself.

In a Dec. 4 filing in Georgia, Trump's legal team referred to a "machine-controlled algorithm deliberately run" by a voting machine vendor, Dominion Voting Systems. They allege this algorithm "generally took more than 2.5% of the votes from Mr. Biden and flipped them to Mr. Trump." So Trump's own legal team, instead of providing evidence of fraud by Biden's side, may have inadvertently revealed fraud benefiting Trump. In describing a deliberate, vendor installed, machine-controlled algorithm automatically taking a percentage of Biden's votes and giving them to Trump, they certainly are outlining how fraud could have been executed.

Trump's team claims Dominion was the machine vendor embedding algorithms to "flip" votes but is Trump pointing to one machine vendor to distract from another?

In Kentucky, when looking at counties where the numbers leap out on behalf of Mitch McConnell, none used Dominion machines. Most used machines from Election Systems & Software (ES&S), a Dominion competitor. If you swap ES&S for Dominion in the alleged vote-flipping scheme, you may arrive at an alternate explanation for why Amy McGrath's numbers weren't lining up and correlating with Biden's.

To steal an election it may make sense to use different algorithms for each race on the ballot so results did not appear to be uniform. Knowing the McGrath-McConnell race faced more nationwide scrutiny, schemers might have had to miscount votes by different margins in the presidential and Senate races. Flipping more votes from Biden to Trump than McGrath votes to McConnell would explain her getting approximately 20% more votes than the Democratic presidential candidate.

Significantly, Trump and his post-election legal team have pointed at Dominion voting machines and implored courts to look into this automated vote-flipping premise—but only in states that he lost. So, let's test it in ES&S states like Kentucky where Trump won.

McConnell had his biggest percentage of registered Democrats voting Republican in counties using ES&S machines. But he wasn't the only senator to perform so well. Other Republican incumbents, whom polls indicated would have close races, had similar luck to their majority leader on election day.

Lindsey Graham's race in South Carolina was so tight that he infamously begged for money, yet he won with a comfortable 10% lead—tabulated on ES&S machines throughout the state. In Susan Collins's Maine, where she never had a lead in a poll after July 2, almost every ballot was fed through ES&S machines. Kentucky, South Carolina, Maine, Texas, Iowa and Florida are all states that use ES&S machines. Maybe the polls didn't actually get it wrong.

When Trump says "look over here" at Dominion voting machines, maybe we should look at ES&S machines instead. When Republicans spout unfounded claims that Democrats stole the election, maybe we should be looking at Republican vote totals instead. And when Trump calls this the most fraudulent election in our history, maybe he knows of what he speaks.

You can follow Alison Greene on Twitter @GrassrootsSpeak.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/florida-voter-registration/

broken promises 501c4

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A Florida group is at the center of scrutiny for its alleged use of dark money to fund political expenses and campaigns for phantom candidates despite being categorized as a "social welfare organization."

On Thursday, Dec. 17, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) submitted a written complaint to Internal Revenue Service (IRS) urging the department to launch an investigation into the group, Broken Promises.

CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder outlined a number of potential violations the group is responsible for as he explained why the group appears to be a political organization masquerading as a social welfare non-profit. It was also reported that the group has spent a whopping 99.6% of its funding on politically-linked endeavors.

Bookbinder also reiterated the legal requirements for tax-exempt organizations to receive tax breaks and benefits.

"Broken Promises blatantly misled the IRS about its primary activities and exploited our federal tax laws to get the benefits nonprofits are entitled to while secretly acting as a political organization," said Bookbinder. "The law is clear that tax-exempt organizations that receive tax benefits and do not disclose donors cannot spend the majority of their money on politics, but that is exactly what Broken Promises did."

The report also breaks down expenditures from the group's 2018 tax documents highlighting: "the dark money group spent a total of $161,010, though it failed to disclose that $160,470 of it went towards political activity. Most of the money was in-kind contributions of advertising or direct mail provided to the political committee Friends of Charles Goston, which supported an independent candidate whose state Senate race candidacy was directly backed by donations from Republican lobbyists."

He also noted that the contributions raised speculation about the tactic being a way 'to split the Democratic vote to help Republicans.'"

Instead of admitting to the IRS how the funds were actually used, the group denied any allegations of wrongdoing insisting any "direct or indirect political campaign activities on behalf of or in opposition to candidates for public office."

Bookhinder concluded by expressing concern about the long history of dark money and its improper impact on American elections.

"For far too long, dark money groups have secretly wielded their influence to overshadow the voices and interests of the American public, and it is past time for the IRS to ensure that nonprofit groups do not abuse their tax status to improperly influence politics," said Bookbinder. "The IRS should open an investigation into Broken Promises' behavior and should they be found in violation of the law, act swiftly to reconsider their tax status."

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- Florida GOP-Led Voter Fraud Investigation Finds Nothing - Except ... ›

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/did-donald-trump-steal-the-election-2648992261/

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digby

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Back in September, Politico's Anita Kumar reportedthat for the previous year the Trump campaign had been assembling a team of election lawyers from all over the country to familiarize themselves in local election laws and prepare "prewritten legal pleadings that can be hurried to the courthouse the day after the election, as wrangling begins over close results and a crush of mail-in ballots." The effort was led by "a 20-person team of lawyers" from major law firms who were overseeing a strategy in "key states the Trump campaign is targeting, like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan." It sounded like a very serious and professional operation, one which came as no surprise to me, since Republicans have specialized in disenfranchising Democratic voters for many decades.

Trump himself repeatedly made clear on the campaign trail what he planned to do, from contesting the validity of mail-in ballots to declaring himself the winner on election night regardless of whether the votes had been counted and filing a flurry of lawsuits contesting the election with an eye toward having "his" judges (including newly-minted Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett) deliver the election to him if necessary. I don't think anyone can possibly say they are surprised at how he has reacted to losing the election.

In the weeks before Nov. 3, Trump did have that team of high-powered legal talent arguing cases around mail-in ballots and shifting deadlines in various states, some of which did make it to the Supreme Court. But then the election actually happened and vote-counting began, and since then Trump's crack team has been been remarkably unsuccessful. The good lawyers have either been pressured to to quit orthrew in the towel themselves as it became patently obvious that they had no evidence of voter fraud.

That hasn't stopped Trump from plowing ahead anyway with the self-described "elite strike force" led by his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, last seen prior to the election with his hand down his pants in the latest Borat movie and famously presiding over a post-election press conference at a landscaping company next door to a sex shop and a crematorium. Trump was evidently impressed by Rudy's performance in both venues, because he gave the former LifeLock spokesman (hat tip to Salon's Roger Sollenberger) full authority to conduct the legal strategy to overturn the election results by any means necessary.

CNN reports that Giuliani has taken full control. For instance, upset by what he was hearing from three of the lawyers assigned to argue one of the Pennsylvania cases, the man once described as "America's mayor" fired them on the spot and took over the case — which was being argued the very next day — himself. He hadn't been inside a courtroom in more than 30 years, and it showed. He was very nearly laughed out of court.

Giuliani was undaunted. He immediately pulled together the other members of the "elite strike force": Sidney Powell, who is former national security adviser Michael Flynn's Fox News lawyer; veteran right-wing husband and wife team Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova, also Fox News lawyers; and over-the-top Trump defender and campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis. None of them have any expertise in election law, but then they don't have a legal strategy either.

Having lost over and over again in court, Trump and his team have switched to their Plan B, which, as longtime Democratic strategist Chris Marshall spelled out in detail in Salon on Thursday, is to delay the certification of the vote in certain states and try to get Republican legislatures to assign electors to vote for Donald Trump instead of the actual winner, Joe Biden. This is based on the theory that if they can create enough chaos around the election results, Republican loyalists will rise to the occasion and "save democracy" from the Democrats, who are allegedly stealing the election.

This idea has been pushed by conservative talk show host Mark Levin and picked up by the right wing as a way to keep their beloved president in office for at least four more years. It's a theory that is very unlikely to prevail, particularly since the Supreme Court just decided a case on "faithless electors" last July, in which the justices made it very clear that whatever the founders may have anticipated in the 18th century, our democracy today demands that electors express the will of the people. It will take some convoluted intellectual gyrations for them to conclude that state officials can simply change the results at their discretion.

In order to blow the smoke as thick as possible, Giuliani and the "strike force" held a press conference at Republican National Committee headquarters on Thursday which was so surreal that it may have displaced the COVID task force briefing where Trump suggested that people might inject disinfectant as the all-time weirdest press conference of the Trump era.

Giuliani, Powell and Ellis held forth for 90 minutes, going full Infowars and throwing out one insane conspiracy theory after another. They said that Dominion voting machines had been created by former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez (who has been dead for seven years) and financed by George Soros, the Clinton Foundation and "communistic" countries China and Cuba. Just in case that didn't work, the corrupt Democrats had also rigged the vote with a sophisticated computer hack that was only foiled because Trump won so overwhelmingly that it tripped up the algorithm which allowed the "strike force" to catch them in the act. Also, the mail-in ballots were fraudulent because so many of them were filled out properly. (Yes! The fact that there were *very few problems with mail-in votes was somehow evidence they were fake!)*

Meanwhile, rivulets of black liquid were running down Giuliani's face as if he were an extra in an Alice Cooper video from the 1970s. The assumption is that it was some kind of temporary hair dye. But it could have been embalming fluid, for all we know.

Powell later made the rounds to expand on their theory and she made no bones about what they hope to do:

You'll notice that she just blithely uses the term "overturn," as if that were perfectly normal.

If that doesn't work, the "strike force" are also talking about a Plan C, which would be to delay the vote certification for so long that the states can't send Biden's required 270 electors to Congress by the deadline, which under the 12th Amendment to the Constitution would throw the election to the House, where every state's delegation gets one vote. As luck would have it Republicans hold 26 of the 50 delegations. Surprise!

Is any of this remotely possible? Sure. It's unlikely, but it's possible. It's tempting to think this is all so nuts that it could never possibly happen, but we thought everything Donald Trump has done over the past five years was nuts, and here we are. All our hand-wringing about this plot being un-American and destructive to our democracy is sadly irrelevant — not just to the preposterous Giuliani and the equally preposterous Trump but to the entire Republican Party. They have learned the power of total shamelessness, and it is profound. I would never count them out.

===

wapo nyt fortune mag

some lawyers at Jones Day and Porter Wright, which have filed suits about the 2020 vote, said they were worried about undermining

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no lnx twt

Meaghan Ellis November 14, 2020

Rudy Giuliani may be President Donald Trump's personal attorney, but his presidential campaign is reportedly not pleased with his involvement in the post-election legal battle. For months, the president had been setting the stage to contest the results of the presidential election by claiming that the results would be rigged due to widespread voter fraud. But now, Giuliani threatens to dismantle it all.

It was announced on Friday that Trump placed Giuliani in charge of the election lawsuits — a new development his campaign team is not thrilled about. Some of Trump's advisors have even described Giuliani as a "counterproductive" presence in what is already being described as an uphill, and nearly impossible, battle.

A half-dozen other Trump advisers have described Mr. Giuliani's efforts as counterproductive and said that he was giving the president unwarranted optimism about what could happen. Those advisers have said that they are concerned Mr. Giuliani is damaging not only Mr. Trump's remaining legal options, but his legacy and his future opportunities in politics as he considers another campaign in 2024.

The latest development comes just days after Giuliani's prelude to disaster on last weekend. From the moment the Trump campaign learned of the location of Giuliani's press conference held on last Saturday, they knew it was a disaster in the making. In fact, the location, alone, signaled alarm bells for campaign advisors.

At the time, it was announced that Giuliani would be holding a press conference at the Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia, Penn. Although campaign advisors scrambled to axe the event, Giuliani forged ahead. Standing outside of the Four Seasons location, which adjacent to a crematorium and sex shop/adult bookstore, the former New York City mayor spewed countless conspiracy theory with little to no evidence to back his claims.

Ironically, Giuliani was holding the press conference as President-elect Joe Biden was being declared the winner of the election.

A report published by Politico has outlined the consequences that could arise as a result of Giuliani's actions.

Giuliani's promotion also threatens to complicate a legal apparatus that has been in the works since June. The campaign began assembling a team of lawyers in swing states and counties where recounts might take place. The effort has been overseen by Citizens United President David Bossie, who was tapped because of his conservative street cred and connections to pro-Trump activists around the country.

As of Saturday, November 14, Trump has had nearly a dozen post-election lawsuits dismissed by judges in state courts across the country.

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sorta neglected instances 2020 election results, eg

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ric Grenell and Matt Schlapp fled in a van when asked by Jacob Soboroff to present evidence of their claims of voter fraud.

some dude in van shooed reporter w/ dismissive gesture not seen since marie a carriage? gnats?

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/eric-trump-wants-minnesotans-to-get-out-and-vote-today-a-week-after-the-election/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/latest-james-okeefe-election-fraud-claim-crumbles-but-not-before-barr-used-it-cast-doubt-on-election/

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is he so dumb/delusional that he believes lies or is it just score points gin up any BS that could be useful to win/vs irrelefance unable to raise $?

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Kos

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fraudster and felon James O'Keefe took advantage of the chaos at the U.S. Postal Service to do his usual thing: commit fraud in order to prove that voter fraud is real. In this case, he conned a postal worker into claiming postal workers in Erie, Pennsylvania were instructed to backdate ballots mailed after Election Day. The postal worker, Richard Hopkins, has recanted, telling postal workers that he made it all up. But not after Trump's little BFF Sen. Lindsey Graham used the allegations to ask the Justice Department for a federal investigation. Which Trump-owned Attorney General William Barr then opened.

When shit got real and it came to lying to investigators from the U.S. Postal Service's Office of Inspector General, Hopkins got cold feet. Officials told both The Washington Post and the House Oversight Committee that he recanted in a signed affidavit, saying that he had lied.And then in a video tweeted out by O'Keefe, Hopkins recanted his recanting. Which probably had more to do with trying to preserve the $136,000 he'd raised on a GoFundMe page by Tuesday evening. If so, it was in vain. GoFundMe's Bobby Whitmore told the Post the money raised on the site was "not disbursed and Hopkins never had access to the funds." O'Keefe is undaunted, as usual, and says that he's got recordings of the investigators coercing Hopkins and pressuring him to sign a document he didn't understand. Which seems pretty farfetched—the guy had to understand what "I lied before" means.

That Graham and Barr are using O'Keefe to call the results into question in Pennsylvania is so Trumpy it's disgusting. And completely predictable. When it comes down to whether there was any actual fraud in Pennsylvania, though, and when lawyers are facing a judge, in court, the fraud claims melt. When it comes to real legal jeopardy of lying about voter fraud—interfering in an election, which is a crime—these people fold.

There's another bit of fraud by the Trump campaign, though, that could be happening. Remember how the Trump campaign in Wisconsin was recruiting volunteers to call Pennsylvania Republicans to get them to send in ballots after the election? Illegally? Well, thousands of ballots were received in post offices Monday, which "included hundreds meant for closely fought contests in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona." More than 400 were received in Pennsylvania. None of them will count. Pennsylvania is the only state among the aforementioned ones that had an extended deadline for receiving ballots, but the deadline was this past Friday.

Whether that actually was part of the Trump campaign's fraudulent call for voter fraud or just people who don't understand how elections work is unknown. But knowing how Republicans love to commit voter fraud, you've got to wonder.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

- The Secret Right-Wing Donors Behind James O'Keefe's Vile Project ... ›

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/a-far-right-radio-host-promoted-an-authoritarian-plan-to-steal-the-election-and-donald-trump-jr-signed-off-on-it/

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Thursday, former Vice President Joe Biden had won 253 electoral votes in the U.S. presidential race compared to 214 for President Donald Trump — and as the vote-counting continued in Pennsylvania, Nevada and other battleground states, Biden's chances of a victory looked better and better.

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In response to this dismal situation for the president, far-right radio host Mark R. Levin responded with a tweet suggesting a plan to overturn the results. Mother Jones' Tim Murphy denounced the idea as an authoritarian idea for trying to steal the election if Biden is declared the winner, and Murphy noted that Donald Trump, Jr. has signed off on Levin's idea.

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Levin, typing in all caps, tweeted:[wacko rant re electors]

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Murphy explains: "With Pennsylvania on the verge of flipping into the Democratic column — the remaining uncounted ballots appear to heavily favor Biden — Levin was promoting a legal theory that drew some attention before the election. Because state governments have to formally certify results and then formally send electors to the Electoral College, the Republicans who control the state legislatures of Pennsylvania and several other swing states could, in this theory, simply send their own set of rival electors and force Congress to choose — potentially tipping the election to Trump."

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Trump, Jr., Murphy notes, signed off on Levin's idea for an authoritarian power grab by forwarding his tweet.But the Mother Jones reporter also points out that Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent has explained why there are many reasons to be skeptical of such a strategy from a legal and constitutional standpoint.

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"Changing the process by which Pennsylvania appoints its electors requires changing Pennsylvania law, which the Democratic governor (Tom Wolf) would veto," Murphy writes. "If Biden goes on to win enough of the remaining uncalled states, perhaps his sizable Electoral College and popular vote lead will dissuade Republicans from attempting to deploy such chicanery."

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Murphy also points out that Republican Jake Corman, majority leader of the Pennsylvania Senate, "wants nothing to do with" that type of power grab.

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twt:

For anyone wondering: spokesperson for Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman reiterated just now that the Republican controlled state legislature will NOT move to appoint electors to override popular vote, despite concerns about PA electoral process.

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Nonetheless, Murphy stresses, it is disturbing when a well-known radio host wants to brazenly defy the will of the voters and the president's son signs off on it.

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"The thing about going into untrodden territory is that no one really knows what it's like; the only sure thing is that it's not where you want to be," Murphy warns. "Even President Trump hasn't gone this far yet. But his son's promotion of such a plan is an ominous development as the campaign seeks to claw its way back by taking away people's votes."

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/more-and-more-republicans-are-piling-onto-conspiracy-theories-about-vote-counting/

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kos

To read Donald Trump's Twitter feed, you'd think that counting votes is an inherently suspicious activity. As his campaign files lawsuits to try to stop votes from being counted in Michigan and Pennsylvania, Trump is frenetically trying to whip up his base against any vote-counting activity that might not help him—and a series of House Republicans are acting as his winged monkeys, throwing their weight into legitimizing Trump's efforts to delegitimize the basis of democracy.

Trump has promoted a Breitbart piece attacking Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, and announced, as if it was evidence of wrongdoing,"We are winning Pennsylvania big, but the PA Secretary of State just announced that there are 'Millions of ballots left to be counted.'" Four of Trump's tweets in the past 24 hours have gotten Twitter warning messages that "Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process."

He has help.

Rep. Paul Gosar bragged about having joined Trump supporters outside the site where ballots were being counted in Maricopa County. The aggressive group was apparently motivated by a conspiracy theory about votes being changed rather than counted, and it included far-right anti-immigration activists and threatened reporters.

Rep. Kevin Brady repeated Trump's lies about vote counting being conducted in secrecy, cloaking a lie as a call for transparency.That transparency already exists, however—though law enforcement in more than one city has had to defend vote-counting sites against mobs of Trump supporters trying to get inside to disrupt counting. Rep. Jim Banks tied together a Peter Strzok conspiracy theory with a reference to "the shady ballot counting happening in WI, MI and PA." You know, the ballot counting. Which Republicans insist must be shady, because it's not going their way.

The majority of the Pennsylvania state House tweeted that "The failure of Pennsylvania to have firm election results on Election Day is an openly partisan failure by Democrats from the Wolf administration to the PA Supreme Court." Except the failure of Pennsylvania to have firm election results on Election Day is a direct result of Republican legislators blocking election officials from counting or even processing mail ballots before Election Day!

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich enthusiastically jumped on board with claims that "Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania are all being stolen by Democrats." Again, because votes are being counted.

That's the substance of Republican angst: Votes are being counted, and those votes may not go the way Republicans want them to go. That must be the result of conspiracy and cheating and outright theft by Democrats, they claim, with a big dose of rage that the votes of Black people are being counted at all.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden's message is simple: "Every vote must be counted."

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/listen-democratic-voters-are-receiving-suspicious-calls-in-effort-to-suppress-votes-on-election-day/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/this-democrat-is-beating-his-gop-opponent-so-the-right-wing-is-lying-about-him-dressing-up-as-hitler

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Arizona senatorial candidate Mark Kelly is currentlybeating his Republican challenger Martha McSally by about 5 percentage points. So a right-wing media outlet decided to try and take Kelly down by posting a photo and lying about him dressing up as Nazi leader Adolf Hitler during his school days at the Merchant Marine Academy.

On Friday, the right-wing website the National File shared photographic "proof" that Kelley had dressed as Hitler, and the post quickly went viral. But Kelly's former classmates Jennifer Boykin, Peter Lindsey, Mark Baden and Ed McDonald have all said that the image isn't of Kelly.

Lindsey in particular said someone contacted him with the image via the professional social network LinkedIn asked "and asked if the person in the costume was Mark Kelly. I told them no, and want to say again, Mark is not in those photos. I have spoken to numerous classmates about this evening, and they concur that he is not in any of these pictures. The people spreading these lies should stop."

"The person who reached out to Lindsey was identified by the campaign as a paid consultant for a super political action committee aligned with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-K.Y., that is spending millions of dollars to help defeat Kelly," AZCentral.com reports.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/house-gop-vows-to-investigate-biden-for-campaigning-on-amtrak/

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Republican Office of the Subcommittee on Rail, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials

gibbs smucker, scott perry crAWFORD

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/vote-for-trump-or-else-florida-voters-receive-threatening-emails-linked-to-overseas-servers/

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Dozens of Florida voters and others residing in heavily-Democratic counties across several states have received threatening emails warning them to vote for President Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential election or suffer consequences.

Ahead of early voting, Democratic voters in Alachua County, Fla., began receiving the disturbing emails. Voters in Alaska and Arizona also reported receiving the same message.

The subject line for the email reads: "Vote for Trump or else!"

Targeting voters registered as Democrats, the email message opens with a disturbing statement telling potential voters all of their personal information has been exposed as the sender claims to have infiltrated the "entire voting infrastructure."

The sender also warned Democrats to vote for Trump or they would "come after" them. Voters are also being told to change their political party affiliation so it can serve as confirmation of agreement to the terms of the threat.

"We are in possession of all your information (email, address, telephone… everything)," the message stated. "You are currently registered as a Democrat and we know this because we have gained access into the entire voting infrastructure. You will vote for Trump on Election Day or we will come after you. Change your party affiliation to Republican to let us know you received our message and will comply. We will know which candidate you voted for. I would take this seriously if I were you."

Although initial investigative findings suggest the emails were sent from the right-wing group The Proud Boys' official email address "info@officialproudboys.com," a review of the source code embedded in seven of the emails suggests the messages were sent from an overseas server linked to "IP addresses linked to servers located in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Estonia," according to CBS News.

However, Dmitri Alperovitch, former chief technology officer of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, explained why the IP addresses do not necessarily reveal the exact location the emails were sent from. He also weighed in on the verbiage in the email.

"It could be that they are simply relaying through this infrastructure," Alperovitch told CBS News in an email. "In fact, given how this email was sent, using their web interface, that's most likely the case — that the people behind this found a vulnerable server in Saudi through which they can route lots of emails."

The latest developments come just two weeks before election day.

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but the emails oct surprise dirty tricks

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/pompeo/

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uS. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is at the helm of an investigation and the Office of Special Counsel will determine if he illegally used his position to bolster politics on behalf of President Donald Trump.

The investigation into Pompeo was sparked from a Fox News interview conducted in early October where he teased about the release of emails connected to former secretary and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton "before the election," per Politico.

"We've got the emails, we're getting them out. We're going to get all this information out so the American people can see it," Pompeo told Fox News's Dana Perino during the interview. "We're doing it as fast as we can. I certainly think there'll be more to see before the election."

During that interview, Pompeo responded to pressure and criticism from Trump who had also discussed the Clinton emails that same day when he said: "They're in the State Department, but Mike Pompeo has been unable to get them out, which is very sad, actually. I'm not happy about him for that reason. He was unable to get them out. I don't know why. You're running the State Department, you get them out."

Pompeo insisted the release will come before the election, raising questions about whether or not he could be violating the Hatch Act, which "limits certain political activities of federal employees, as well as some state, D.C., and local government employees who work in connection with federally funded programs," according to the Office of Special Counsel's website.

"The law's purposes are to ensure that federal programs are administered in a nonpartisan fashion, to protect federal employees from political coercion in the workplace, and to ensure that federal employees are advanced based on merit and not based on political affiliation."

In a letter dated Friday, October 16, the watchdog group American Oversight expressed concern about Pompeo's remarks with Election Day just two weeks away. According to the group, Pompeo's remark "warrants an investigation of whether Secretary Pompeo has given directives or orders to State employees in violation of the Hatch Act."

Now, Pompeo is denying any possibility that he would illegally politicize his office. When asked whether he would release Clinton-related emails so close to the upcoming election date, he said: "Releasing emails for the sake of transparency can't possibly be a violation of the Hatch Act. That's a ridiculous question."

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trump-takes-one-more-step-toward-becoming-an-autocrat-and-it-hardly-makes-a-ripple

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/fake-black-trump-supporters-with-tens-of-thousands-of-followers-purged-on-social-media

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Matthew Chapman and Raw Story October 14, 2020

On Wednesday, Forbes reported that Twitter is suspending several fake accounts posing as Black supporters of President Donald Trump, saying that they violate the guidelines on spam and account manipulation.

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Many of these accounts used identical language over and over, like "YES I'M BLACK AND I'M VOTING FOR TRUMP". Some used images of real Black people without their knowledge or permission. According to Clemson University communications professor Darren Linvill, two dozen of these fake accounts have been retweeted or promoted over 265,000 times.

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"Social media platforms are scrambling to tighten and enforce policies on misinformation and disinformation in the runup to November 3, as they seek to avoid a repeat of the 2016 poll that saw Russia interfere through troll accounts, and other tactics, on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube," reported Isabel Togoh. "Twitter has banned all political ads on the platform and is flagging misleading posts and content more prominently (including President Trump's), while Facebook has succumbed to pressure from lawmakers and campaigners and made a lastminute U-turn on certain forms of misinformation spreading, including those related to Covid-19, Qanon, and Holocaust denial."

[[twt

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Darren Linvill

@DarrenLinvill

·

Oct 13, 2020

Pleased to have worked on this great piece with @craigtimberg & @isaacstanbecker. This network really points to the difficulty the platforms have playing whack-a-mole with disinformation accounts. 1/5

Fake Twitter accounts posing as Black Trump supporters appear, reach thousands, then vanish

Fake accounts from supposed Black Trump supporters gain thousands of followers in just a few days before Twitter can take them down.

washingtonpost.com

Darren Linvill

@DarrenLinvill

Most of these accounts were using "digital black face" and pretended to be Black American #MAGA supporters. They used images of real Americans in their profiles. Several had tens of thousands of followers and received many thousands of retweets and likes. 2/5]]

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https://www.facingsouth.org/2020/10/institute-index-confronting-gops-poll-watcher-threats

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Hours after the start of the Sept. 29 presidential debate betweenPresident Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden — in which Trump refused to condemn white supremacists, made false claims about voter fraud, and urged his supporters to "go into the polls and watch very carefully"— that Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring issued a Tweet saying "voter harassment and intimidation will not be tolerated" in his state: 14 also CA

Number of days before the debate that Herring issued an advisory opinion outlining protections in both state and federal law against voter intimidation in response to reports of activity near polling places that led some voters to fear for their safety: 5

Date on which a group of Trump supporters waving campaign flags disrupted early voting in Fairfax County, Virginia, by rallying near the entrance to a polling placefollowing a "Trump Train" parade led by Republican National Committee (RNC) Co-Chair Thomas O. "Tommy" Hicks Jr. of Dallas: 9/19/2020

Year in which the RNC, after a lawsuit over its hiring of off-duty police to monitor polling places in Black and Latino communities in New Jersey as part of a so-called "ballot security" operation, signed a consent decree pledging to end intimidation of Democratic voters though admitting no wrongdoing: 1982

According to RNC officials, number of voters another one of their 1980s-era so-called "ballot security" efforts was expected to kick off Louisiana's rolls in an effort the officials said was designed to "keep the Black vote down": 60,000 to 80,000

Year in which the consent decree expired despite Democrats' attempts to get it extended, making the 2020 presidential election the first without its protections in 40 years: 2017

Date on whichPresident Trump, in a private meeting with civil rights leaders at Trump Tower, acknowledged that lower turnout among Black voters helped him defeat Hillary Clinton: 1/16/2017

Year in which Justin Clark, an attorney and Trump reelection campaign official, was recorded telling Republican lawyers that the expiration of the consent decree was a "huge, huge, huge, huge deal": 2019

Number of people the Republican Party is now aiming to recruit to serve as what it calls "poll watchers" to look for election problems, raising concerns about possible voter intimidation: 50,000

Date on which Roger Stone — the longtime Trump confidant convicted of felonies for witness tampering and lying to investigators in the Russia election interference case and whose sentence was commuted by the president — appeared on the radio show of Dallas-based far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and said the only legitimate outcome to the 2020 election would be a Trump victory: 9/10/2020

Date on which, Stone, who has Proud Boy ties, organized what became known as the "Brooks Brothers riot" — a violent protest involving George W. Bush campaign operatives who targeted a meeting of election canvassers in Florida's Miami-Dade County during the 2000 presidential recount and succeeded in shutting it down, ultimately leading Al Gore, who won the popular vote, to concede: 11/22/2000

Of the 50 states, number with statutes regulating poll watchers, also known as "partisan citizen observers": 45

Of the 13 Southern states*, number with poll watcher statutes: 13

Number of provisions of federal law that also bar voter intimidation, some of which impose lengthy prison sentences: 6

Factor by which the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a voting rights advocacy group, has boosted its squad of attorneys who'll be on call to help voters who experience intimidation or other problems at the polls this year: 4

Number of attorneys now helping that effort nationwide: more than 21,000

Phone number that voters who experience problems can call to get help from those attorneys: 866-OUR-VOTE

* Facing South counts among the Southern states Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trump-campaign-discussing-plans-to-appoint-its-own-state-electors-no-matter-the-results-report

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/right-wing-fraudsters-jacob-wohl-and-jack-burkman-get-criminally-charged-in-election-conspiracy

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Right-wing smear artists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman will face four counts in an alleged criminal scheme to influence the 2020 election after Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filed charges on Thursday.

Nessel accused the pair of intimidating voters, conspiring to break election law, using a computer to commit an election crime, and using a computer to carry out a conspiracy.

The charges center on a robocall scheme the Nessel said was an attempt to "discourage voters from participating in the general election." According to the press release, the scheme targeted urban areas, including Detroit, and was focused on "areas with significant minority populations."

Wohl previously denied to CNN that he or Burkman were involved in any robocall schemes.

"It's believed around 85,000 calls were made nationally, though an exact breakdown of the numbers of calls to each city or state are not available," according to Nessel's office. Similar robocalls reportedly were made in New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, the last two of which are swing states in the presidential election.

The robocall allegedly attempted to make voters afraid to cast their ballots, telling them to not be "finessed into giving your private information to the man" [JOK SUPERFLY PIMP STRIKES AGAIN] and that they should "beware of vote by mail." The press release explained:

The caller, who claims to be associated with an organization founded by Burkman and Wohl, falsely tells people that mail-in voting, in particular, will allow personal information to become part of a special database used by police to track down old warrants and by credit card companies to collect outstanding debts. The caller also deceptively claims the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will use the information to track people for mandatory vaccines. However, none of that is true.

"This effort specifically targeted minority voters in an attempt to deter them from voting in the November election," said Nessel. "We're all well aware of the frustrations caused by the millions of nuisance robocalls flooding our cell phones and landlines each day, but this particular message poses grave consequences for our democracy and the principles upon which it was built."

Burkman and Wohl have made themselves notorious with a series of stunts that included trying to smear former Special Counsel Robert Mueller and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg with bogus and sexual assault allegations.

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aha is JOK MO stolen from Yes Men, mske fake org/website?

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/mysterious-benefactor-for-nc-voting-rights-groups-raises-suspicion-of-gop-sting-operation/

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according to The Daily Beast, voting rights groups in North Carolina were approached by a strange benefactor calling himself "James Fortune" — and his behavior aroused suspicions that he might be part of a Republican sting operation to discredit laws expanding access to the vote.

"Fortune, who claimed to be the operator of a progressive-minded North Carolina gym called 'Equality Gym,' donated a few thousand dollars to the groups. Then he started asking whether they could illegally register undocumented immigrants to vote," reported Will Sommer. "As the groups became suspicious, Fortune vanished — leaving behind only a blurry picture of himself, no proof that his gym actually existed, and suspicions that he was using an alias."

Indeed, the only evidence that Equality Gym exists is a Twitter account created in June, that provides no link to a website or information about a company. Its location is set to "New York" and its entire feed consists of random retweets of Democrats and sports news.

Democratic groups suspect that the whole thing could be the work of James O'Keefe, a right-wing activist whose group, Project Veritas, sets up sting operations to try to trick Democrats into supporting illegal activity and then posting videos of it. There is no evidence that O'Keefe specifically is involved, although he did launch a similar operation in Wisconsin, setting up a fake documentary team called "Zeitgeist Pictures" to interview progressive organizations.

Whether or not O'Keefe is behind the North Carolina affair, though, there is a clear Republican footprint.

"Whoever he really is, Fortune appears to have been working on behalf of at least one Republican operative. That $1,500 payment to Fortaleza, according to Echeverria and reporting from the News & Observer, traced back to a mysterious Georgia business called Blue Sky Med Labs," reported Sommer. "Blue Sky Med Labs is registered to Jason Boles, a Georgia Republican operative who also registered the campaign organization for Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon believer and Georgia House candidate almost certain to win a congressional seat in November."

You can read more here.  https://www.thedailybeast.com/liberal-groups-fear-james-okeefe-election-sting**

beware TEADS]

no lnx twt vid

Liberal Groups Fear O’Keefe Election Sting

‘BIG IF TRUE’

This summer, a mystery man named James Fortune began approaching voting rights groups in North Carolina.

Will Sommer

Updated Sep. 26, 2020 3:12AM ET / Published Sep. 26, 2020

The election is less than 40 days away. Donald Trump is refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. And now the Trumpworld hunt is on for material that can be used to discredit any election results that show Joe Biden winning the election.

This week:

James O’Keefe and associates circle voter registration groups.

Bogus ballot “destruction” story blows up on the right

Liberal groups fear election infiltration from O’Keefe and allies

This summer, a mystery man named James Fortune began approaching voting rights groups in North Carolina.

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Fortune, who claimed to be the operator of a progressive-minded North Carolina gym called “Equality Gym,” donated a few thousand dollars to the groups. Then he started asking whether they could illegally register undocumented immigrants to vote.

As the groups became suspicious, Fortune vanished—leaving behind only a blurry picture of himself, no proof that his gym actually existed, and suspicions that he was using an alias. But the wired money came from a Georgia group with ties to a QAnon House candidate and a network of other Republican figures, raising suspicions among the groups that Fortune was working for right-wing undercover prankster James O’Keefe or an O’Keefe imitator.

Right around the same time that Fortune was attempting to infiltrate progressive North Carolina groups, a so-called documentary film crew called “Zeitgeist Pictures” began interviewing six liberal groups in Wisconsin for what they claimed was a documentary about voting rights. The groups became suspicious, though, after the filmmakers began asking whether the groups were willing to break the law to illegally register voters.

The film crew disappeared as the groups grew more suspicious when they found no proof, aside from a barebones website, that there’s an actual film company called Zeitgeist Pictures. The activists interviewed by the crew claim they were able to identify one of their “interviewers” as O’Keefe associate Christian Hartsock, using pictures of Hartsock online.

Unlike the Wisconsin operation, the North Carolina scheme hasn’t been publicly linked to O’Keefe, and Project Veritas spokesman Neil W. McCabe said O’Keefe’s group won’t “comment on investigations, real or imagined.” But on Monday, Project Veritas plans to release a video that O’Keefe claims will offer “UNDENIABLE VIDEO PROOF OF SYSTEMIC VOTER FRAUD.”

They say voter fraud “doesn’t exist.”

They say there is “no evidence.”

They say the evidence hasn’t been “substantiated”

And in a world where people don’t believe what they read or hear

Maybe people just need to see…https://t.co/OiRymtsgkk#BallotHarvesting

09.28.2020 pic.twitter.com/PqMBkcd71e

— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) September 24, 2020

If it’s anything like past O’Keefe stings, the video will likely vastly overstate or decontextualize what actually happened. And it almost certainly will become fodder for the right, considering that Trump not only has ties to O’Keefe (he’s donated in the past to Project Veritas) but is eager to hype evidence of voter fraud. How much the media picks up on this depends both on whether they’ve learned lessons from covering O’Keefe’s past work and, frankly, whether he can actually produce the receipts for his work.

What we know so far is that a North Carolina organization, Fortaleza, received $1,500 in donations from Fortune before he disappeared, according to Fortaleza executive director Angeline Echeverria. But Echeverria grew suspicious of Fortune after he began asking whether her group could register undocumented immigrants.

“We’re really concerned that we may have been recorded, and that they might edit it in some way to give very false impressions of our work and our organization,” Echeverria told me.

Whoever he really is, Fortune appears to have been working on behalf of at least one Republican operative. That $1,500 payment to Fortaleza, according to Echeverria and reporting from the News & Observer, traced back to a mysterious Georgia business called Blue Sky Med Labs.

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920 salon

republicans to ask Supreme Court to restrict voting by mail in Pennsylvania in post-Ginsburg appeal

IGOR DERYSH

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fair # of these, not all capt eg

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trump already ‘laid out the roadmap’ to cheat in the upcoming election: analyst

AlterNet Staff  September 23, 2020

John Heilemann, the national affairs analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, explained how President Donald Trump has already laid out his “roadmap” to cheat in plain sight for the upcoming…

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/presenting-democrat-voters-against-joe-biden-a-group-so-fake-its-hilarious/

hunter kos

no lnx

just some of the anonymous Democrat voters who are super-concerned that Democrat Biden is too Democrat, maybe?

If you have at some point stumbled across a political group onFacebook (of course) calling itself “Democrat Voters Against Joe Biden,” you probably noticed a few things that made the group sound … suspicious. First, it is not likely that a true group of Democratic voters would use an illiterate-sounding conservative slur to refer to themselves: “Democrat Voters” is a Luntzian term used by hardline partisan Republicans, who remain utterly convinced that using a noun where an adjective should be used is the Ultimate Lib Ownage for reasons that remain mysterious to this day.

Second: Also that. Third and fourth: That, but repeated. Honestly, if you’re going to be so lazy in setting up your fake trolling operation that you can’t even be bothered to run your proposed name through the ol’ Partisan Despittler 3000, give back the damn check and go home already. Gawd, what an embarrassment.

The Daily Beast discovered the group, and investigated its (cough) oranges, and reports their findings: The group “Democrat Voters Against Joe Biden” is quite possibly one of the laziest attempted political trolls ever run. It is a project of Americans for Responsible Government, a conservative nonprofit. It parrots the exact talking points beingpromoted in other far-right internet puddles, concerns about Biden’s “mental state” that appeared everywhere in Republicanism, all at once, after Donald Trump got mocked for shuffling down a gentle incline in a not-exactly-presidential fashion.

It “so far” has one (1) video testimonial from an allegedly disgruntled “Democrat Voter.” It is by a “Tracy,” who turns out to be a longtime Trump supporter whose son is, reports The Daily Beast, a field organizer for Trump’s campaign.

Perhaps the best part, though, is the website. The Daily Beast notes that language on the “Democrat Voters” website “is copied nearly verbatim from the [Republican Voters Against Trump] website, with some minor stylistic changes and Biden’s name switched out for Trump’s.”

Oh my God that is so on-brand it genuinely hurts. A conservative group was feeling stung by the not-fake “Republican Voters Against Trump” campaign. The response was, of course, to launch a fake group, featuring a fake testimonial from a fake Democratic voter, and cut-and-pasting the “Republican Voters Against Trump” language almost verbatim rather than rubbing even two brain cells together to write up their supposedly deep convictions themselves....

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nyt

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The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the Green Party’s presidential candidate will not appear on the state’s presidential ballot, a decision that came as a sigh of relief to election officials who had worried that a wholesale reprinting of thousands of ballots could bring chaos to an already stressed electoral system.

The decision against the candidate, Howie Hawkins, also could provide a small but potentially significant lift to Joseph R. Biden Jr., whose Democratic allies had expressed concern that the presence of a third-party progressive candidate on the ballot could siphon votes away from Mr. Biden and help President Trump.

Both the Biden and Trump campaigns view a path to victory through Wisconsin, which Mr. Trump carried by less than 23,000 votes in 2016.

Days before the start of mail voting, the court ruled that Mr. Hawkins and his running mate, Angela Walker, had waited too long to appeal a decision from the Wisconsin Elections Commission that denied their placement on the ballot, giving the court no recourse.

“Given their delay in asserting their rights, we would be unable to provide meaningful relief without completely upsetting the election,” the court ruled.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission had denied the request on Aug. 20 because of a discrepancy in Ms. Walker’s address on petitions, and it took the Green Party candidates two weeks to file a request for review with the court. The request was filed on Sept. 3.

The court did not rule on the merits of the Green Party case, but concluded that the candidates’ delay in a situation with “very short deadlines” made it impossible to grant the motion without causing “confusion and undue damage to both the Wisconsin electors who want to vote and the other candidates in all the various races on the general election ballot.”

In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Hawkins said his campaign had been working to find a lawyer to take its case to the State Supreme Court and had reached out to a number of progressive lawyers before finally finding a firm that would take the case, acknowledging that the firm was a conservative one whose representation was being financed by an unnamed conservative benefactor.

More than a million Wisconsin voters have already requested absentee ballots, and the prospect of an enormous reprinting would have affected every county and municipal election official in the state....

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/wisconsin-ballot-green-party/2020/09/11/797aa4d2-f44a-11ea-bc45-e5d48ab44b9f_story.html

wapo no lnx

Politics

Pending Wisconsin Supreme Court decision on whether to add Green Party ticket to the presidential ballot upends election preparations

An election worker in Milwaukee sorts absentee ballots for Wisconsin's spring primary on April 8.

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By

Amy Gardner

September 11, 2020

An imminent Wisconsin Supreme Court decision on whether the Green Party presidential ticket has qualified to appear on the state ballot has upended election preparations and raised the prospect of a last-minute addition that could benefit President Trump in a state he won by a hair in 2016.

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The pending court case comes after the Wisconsin Elections Commission declined on Aug. 20 to put presidential contender Howie Hawkins and his Green Party running mate, Angela Walker, on the Nov. 3 ballot because their signature petitions featured two different addresses for Walker. State election officials argued against letting the ticket on the ballot, saying the campaign failed to meet the requirements.

Hawkins and Walker filed a legal petition with the state’s high court, which on Thursday ordered local governments not to send any ballots out until it reaches a decision.

That has left election clerks across the state in limbo. They warned that millions of ballots have already been printed, and cities and towns have begun stuffing and labeling envelopes and preparing to send out more than 1 million ballots that have been requested so far by voters.

Now, local officials may need to order new ballots — and cough up the money to pay for them — while facing imminent state and federal deadlines to send them to voters. The state requires that ballots be sent to voters who have requested them by Sept. 17, and the federal deadline for mailing ballots to overseas and military voters is two days later, Sept. 19.

After those deadlines, local governments must send ballots out on a rolling basis as they receive additional requests, up until the state deadline for requesting a ballot on Oct. 29.

“This is really nuts, honestly,” said Scott McDonell, the clerk in Dane County, who was on the phone with the county’s printing contractor this week in preparation for the ruling and expected his staff to work through the weekend to prepare envelopes, instructions and mailing labels for the arrival of new ballots.

Democrats say they fear that a last-minute change to the ballot will create havoc for election officials and confusion among voters with just weeks to go before the election. There is also the possibility that a Green Party ticket could siphon votes from their nominee, former vice president Joe Biden.

In a state that Trump won by just under 23,000 votes four years ago — less than a percentage point — a third-party candidate could attract a difference-making number of votes. In 2016, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein won more than 30,000 votes in Wisconsin.

Hawkins suggested in an interview that Trump supporters had helped the Green Party ticket with its legal claim before the state Supreme Court. The party’s petition was filed by attorneys from the Milwaukee-based von Briesen & Roper law firm, which has a history of representing Wisconsin Republicans.

“You get help where you can find it,” Hawkins told The Washington Post when asked whether Republicans had financed the legal action. “They have their reasons and we have ours.”

Hawkins’s campaign manager, Andrea Merida, later denied that, saying she “literally used Google” to find a law firm because others had turned her down. She said she doesn’t know the partisan affiliation of donors from Wisconsin supporting the Green Party ticket.

A von Briesen lawyer listed on the court filing, Andrew Phillips, did not respond to a request for comment. The chairman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, Andrew Hitt, denied any involvement in the effort. A spokesman for the Republican National Committee declined to comment.

Questions about the Green Party ballot petition began in August, when a state voter complained that there was a discrepancy in Walker’s address on the party’s signature pages. The campaign said that Walker had moved during the signature-gathering phase.

But campaign officials failed to respond to a request from the state elections commission to fix their signature sheets, which they could have done by submitting an affidavit explaining the address discrepancy.

In a report to the Wisconsin Elections Commission ahead of its Aug. 20 meeting, the commission’s staff argued that the affidavit would have “easily cleared up confusion” — but absent that, the commission is left with “legitimate arguments” against the petition’s validity.

Weeks later, the Green Party ticket asked the Supreme Court to intervene.

The state Supreme Court is controlled by a 4-to-3 conservative majority that has regularly ruled in favor of Republican interests over the past decade, notably in 2014, when it upheld a law ending collective bargaining for teachers championed by then-Gov. Scott Walker (R).

Wisconsin is one of at least five states where The Post has identified Republicans, including activists who had recently voiced support for Trump, working on an effort to put rapper Kanye West on the ballot. As with the Green Party ticket, the GOP involvement has raised fears among Democrats that West’s candidacy is intended to peel votes from Biden.

In West’s case, Lane Ruhland, a Madison lawyer and former general counsel for the state Republican Party, delivered his ballot petition to state regulators in early August.

Kanye West’s presidential bid bolstered by Republican operatives in at least five states

The commission voted 5-to-1 in August to bar West from the ballot, arguing his petition had been submitted moments after a 5 p.m. deadline on Aug. 4. West challenged that decision in state court. A judge ruled against him Friday night, but the decision is expected to be appealed.

Like other county clerks across Wisconsin, McDonell is now waiting to find out if he must order new ballots.

McDonell and other officials said they were particularly frustrated that the Green Party ticket waited two weeks to ask the state Supreme Court to intervene, especially because the Wisconsin Elections Commission gave the campaign an opportunity to fix the deficient signatures when they were filed.

“If they had just sent an email confirming that they had moved, they would be on the ballot right now,” McDonell said. “We could have added the Green Party and it would have been fine, and that’s not still true today. The fact that the Green Party took two weeks to file — I don’t even know what to say about that.”

Local governments were made aware of the possibility of a ruling on Thursday, when the Supreme Court ordered them not to send out any ballots until it determined whether the Green Party would qualify.

The state elections commission’s online system shows that as many as 378,000 ballots have been mailed by cities and towns, but most local governments reported Friday that they had not actually sent any yet, but were still in the preparatory stages, stuffing envelopes and affixing mailing labels.

A decision for the Green Party would force all counties to print new ballots — an expensive job for the state’s larger jurisdictions but less so for smaller communities. Dane County, for instance, will have to spend around $100,000 to replace its ballots.

McDonell said it would probably take a week for the new ballots to arrive once he orders them, meaning voters will have that much less time to return their ballots by Wisconsin’s Nov. 3 deadline.

That’s significant at a time when the U.S. Postal Service is under fire for recent operational changes, such as a reduction of overtime and limits on mail trips, that have prompted reports of backlogs nationwide.

This week, the Postal Service sent a mailer to postal customers urging them to “start today” on the process of voting by mail, and to mail ballots “at least” seven days before Election Day.

Rosalind S. Helderman and Alice Crites contributed to this report.

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Election 2020: What to know

Updated September 12, 2020

Amy Gardner joined The Washington Post in 2005. She has worked stints in the Virginia suburbs, covered the 2010 midterms and the tea party revolution, and covered the Republican presidential nominating contest in 2011-2012. She was a politics editor for five years and returned to reporting in 2018.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/democracy-wilts-on-the-vine-trump-campaign-resorts-to-lies-conspiracy-theories-and-disinformation-as-biden-leads-in-the-polls/

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Reporter Ashley Parker, in an article published in the Washington Post over Labor Day Weekend, discusses some of the ways in which President Donald Trump’s campaign and its allies have been aggressively promoting disinformation — from “doctored and misleading videos” to bogus conspiracy theories.

For example, Parker notes, Trump recently “retweeted footage of a black man violently pushing a white woman on a subway platform under the caption, ‘Black Lives Matter/Antifa’ — but the man was not affiliated with either group, and the video was shot in October (2019).” And according to Parker, “White House Social Media Director Dan Scavino shared a manipulated video that falsely showed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden seeming to fall asleep during a television interview, complete with a fake TV headline.”

In addition to those things, Parker notes thatHouse Minority Whip Steve Scalise — a Louisiana Republican and Trump ally — “released a video splicing together quotes from activist Ady Barkan — who has Lou Gehrig’s disease and uses computer voice assistance — to falsely make it sound as if he had persuaded Biden to defund police departments.”

Whitney Phillips, a communications professor at Syracuse University, told the Post, “When you have this disinformation and it’s introduced to one side of the forest, for example, it can travel so quickly through so many different communities and does so many unintentional things before you can even do a fact-check. He’s able to muddy the waters so thoroughly that democracy wilts on the vine."

trump, Parker points out, has “repeated a false claim that just 6% of the nation’s death toll” in the coronavirus pandemic “was actually caused by the novel coronavirus itself — part of his ongoing effort to portray the virus as less deadly or pervasive than it actually is.” That conspiracy theory has been promoted by QAnon and has no basis in reality, but that hasn’t prevented Trump and other Republicans from promoting it.

Trump is hardly the first candidate to play hardball during a presidential race. From President Lyndon B. Johnson’s infamous “daisy ad” of 1964 to President George H.W. Bush’s racist Willie Horton ad of 1988 to the Swift Boat Veterans ads that helped President George W. Bush defeat Democrat John Kerry in 2004, presidential candidates — both Democrats and Republicans — have dealt some harsh blows to their rivals over the years. But Lily Adams, a Democratic National Committee senior adviser, argues that Trump’s campaign is taking disinformation to another level.

Adams told the Post, “Spin has been something that folks in politics have come to expect,but this is the invention of a totally new reality. Because they can’t run on the reality that every American is seeing, they’re inventing a new one.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-has-a-plan-to-steal-the-election-in-fact-he-has-at-least-5-of-them/

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dirty tricks authoritarian

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an 920

no lnx

Amanda Carpenter is not a liberal. She not even a moderate. She’s worked for two of the most right wing Republican Senators and at several far right wing publications. Now a CNN conservative contributor, Carpenter is also anti-Trump. And she’s warning about how she thinks President Donald Trump is already rigging the election.

Wednesday evening she posted a Twitter thread in response to Attorney General Bill Barr’s disastrous and disturbing CNN interview. One part of his comments, she says, that “set off alarm bells” for her was Barr’s odd insistence that a foreign government could send thousands of fake ballots to rig the election – and that he refused to offer and evidence, other than what he says is “logic.”

More than anything in the interview, this set off alarm bells in my mind. Loud ones. https://t.co/BhCHfmbNb9

— Amanda Carpenter (@amandacarpenter) September 2, 2020

Here’s Barr making the strange claim to Wolf Blitzer. Notice how Blitzer seems stunned and for a moment speechless when Barr says “logic.”

Attorney General Barr says he doesn’t have evidence that foreign countries could successfully interfere in the election with fake ballots. He says he’s “basing it on logic.”

Wolf: Pardon?

Barr: “Logic.” pic.twitter.com/FzzIRL2PrK

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) September 2, 2020

Carpenter, who by the way was a senior staffer for Senator Ted Cruz and Senator Jim DeMint, goes on to explain her reasoning.

Basically, she’s saying Trump is going full-force against mail-in ballots, while the Trump administration lays the groundwork to blame China for rigging the election against him. Carpenter explains how:

“Let me tell you why. Trump has said the election will be rigged. He has cast aspersions over mail-in ballots. And now the AG is suggesting foreign interference w mail in ballots. While the Admin refuses to provide oral briefings about election interference to Congress.”

Yes, the Trump administration has notified Congress it will no longer provide them with in-person intelligence briefings. Only written information.

“That means whatever written story about election interference that goes to Congress is the story,” she continues. “No pushback. And print material leaks. They will set the narrative. Barr and others are saying don’t worry about Russia. It’s China that’s the problem.”

China allegedly is in favor of a Biden presidency over as Trump presidency.

“You don’t need a crystal ball to see it. Blame China for rigging mail-in ballots,” she warns.

So whattya think Trump and friends are angling to do here. You don’t need a crystal ball to see it. Blame China for rigging mail-in ballots somehow against Trump. Keep your eyes open people.

— Amanda Carpenter (@amandacarpenter) September 2, 2020

“This isn’t a cover-up. It’s what’s ahead.”

I saw this coming over the weekend when we got the news oral intel briefings were donezo. Here was my reaction. This isn’t a cover-up. It’s what’s ahead https://t.co/JKbUt5VlTp

— Amanda Carpenter (@amandacarpenter) September 2, 2020

By the way, CNN Anchor and Chief National Security Correspondent Jim Sciutto seems to agree with Carpenter:

...

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/right-wing-political-operatives-jack-burkman-and-jacob-wohl-target-black-voters-with-robocalls-disinformation/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/twitter-shuts-down-fake-african-american-accounts-designed-to-hurt-democrats/

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The far right is well aware of the fact that if African-Americans vote in big numbers in the 2020 presidential election, it could be very helpful to Democratic nominee Joe Biden. As a result, troll accounts on social media will try every dirty trick imaginable to discourage African-Americans from voting. And Twitter, according to NBC News, is taking action against some fake accounts that are pretending to be from African-Americans.

NBC News’ Ben Collins reports that Twitter “has taken action to stop a spam operation that pushed messages from fake accounts about black people abandoning the Democratic Party.” Twitter, according to a spokesperson, has terminated two fake accounts as well as the account of a San Diego man who spammed its platform.

“The fake accounts were purported to be run by black people whose viral tweets received tens of thousands of shares in the past month,” Collins reports. “One of the accounts, @WentDemToRep, logged over 11,000 retweets on a single tweet that claimed that the user was a lifelong Democrat who was pushed to vote Republican by the Black Lives Matter movement. The tweet was posted shortly after the account was created Tuesday.”

According to Collins, “The WentDemToRep account quickly tagged two other accounts in a reply, @PeterGammo and @KRon619, which were suspended at the same time Tuesday. The Twitter spokesperson said all three accounts were suspended for spam and ‘specifically, artificially manipulative behavior.’"

but the fact that the troll posts were deceptive and misleading doesn’t mean that they didn’t go viral. Collins notes that the fake accounts “had five separate posts with at least 10,000 retweets.”

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dereg under covid is a dirty trick, as in recalculate costs of reg to indirectly kill:

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no lnx

https://www.nytimes.com/:{2020/04/:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:16/climate/epa-mercury-coal.html

E.P.A. Weakens Controls on Mercury

The agency is changing the way it calculates the benefits of mercury controls, a move that would effectively loosen the rules on other toxic pollutants.

By Lisa Friedman and Coral Davenport

April 16, 2020

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WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Thursday  weakened regulations on the release of mercury and other toxic metals from oil and coal-fired power plants, another step toward rolling back health protections in the middle of a pandemic.

The new Environmental Protection Agencyrule does not eliminate restrictions on the release of mercury, a heavy metal linked to brain damage. Instead, it creates a new method of calculating the costs and benefits of curbing mercury pollution that environmental lawyers said would fundamentally undermine the legal underpinnings of controls on mercury and many other pollutants.

By reducing the positive health effects of regulations on paper and raising their economic costs, the new method could be used to justify loosening restrictions on any pollutant that the fossil fuel industry has deemed too costly to control.

“That is the big unstated goal,” said David Konisky, a professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University. “This is less about mercury than about potentially constraining or handcuffing future efforts by the E.P.A. to regulate air pollution.”

The proposed change is the latest in the Trump administration’s long-running effort to roll back environmental regulations and reduce regulatory burdens, particularly on the coal, oil and gas industries. Over the past three years the administration has weakened rules to cut planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, restrict coal companies from dumping debris in streams and claimed falsely that that President Trump has revived the dying coal industry.

Over the past few weeks as the nation struggled with the coronavirus, the administration has also rushed to loosen curbs on automobile tailpipe emissions, opted not to strengthen a regulation on industrial soot emissions and moved to drop the threat of punishment to companies that kill birds “incidentally.”

The deregulatory push appears designed to secure less restrictive rules quickly, in case Republicans lose control of Congress and the White House in November. A new government could move quickly under the Congressional Review Act to overturn any regulation or federal rule within 60 days of it being finalized — making any rule completed after late May or early June vulnerable.

The mercury rollback is a particular victory for Robert E. Murray,the former chief executive of Murray Energy Corporation and a top fund-raiser for Mr. Trump. Mr. Murray personally requested the rollback in a written “wish list” to top officials shortly after the president took office. The company has since declared bankruptcy and is undergoing a reorganization.

“Under this action, no more mercury will be emitted into the air than before,” Andrew R. Wheeler, the E.P.A. administrator said in announcing the rule.

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Climate and Environment ›

[Keep Up on the Latest Climate News

Once nonexistent, campaign cash earmarked as "climate donations" is flowing to Joe Biden as a small but growing counterweight to the monied muscle of fossil fuels.

Environmental lawyers and public health leaders called the timing of the final mercury rule, as well as its substance, an attack on air quality.]

“What is most disconcerting to me is this administration’s lack of interest in science and, frankly, their lack of concern for our nation’s children,” said Aaron Bernstein, interim director of the Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Mercury pollution in the United States damages our children’s brains before they even come into the world, and estimates are that that cost is in the billions of dollars.”

Patrick Parenteau, a professor at the Vermont Law School, noted that in virtually every environmental rollback, Mr. Trump’s E.P.A. has acknowledged in the fine print that enormous increases in health problems and deaths will occur because of increased pollution.

A plan to weaken carbon dioxide emissions at power plants, for example, predicted as many as 1,400 additional premature deaths a year. A draft analysis of the soot policy put forward this week showed that tightening the existing standard by 25 percent could save as many as 12,150 lives a year.

Two people close to the administration said the White House was concerned enough about the public perception of loosening environmental rules during the outbreak that it held the mercury plan for several weeks after it passed a review from the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. E.P.A. officials assured the White House that the agency was merely responding as required to a 2015 Supreme Court ruling that found it must justify the economic impact of the mercury standards.

The weakening of the mercury rule would be one of the most significant regulatory rollbacks engineered by the Trump administration. The existing federal regulation on mercury pollution, completed in 2012, is the most expensive clean air regulation ever written by the E.P.A.

When it published its draft cost-benefit changes last year, the Trump administration’s E.P.A. said the cost of cutting mercury from power plant emissions “dwarfs” the economic benefits and argued that the Obama rule could not be justified as “appropriate and necessary.”

The E.P.A.’s 2012 regulation was the first federal standard to require power plants to install pricey pollution controls to limit mercury emissions — at a cost to industry of $9.6 billion a year. The Obama administration justified that cost with some mathematical legerdemain of its own. The Obama E.P.A. tallied not just the benefits of reducing mercury but also “co-benefits” like reducing sulfur dioxide, fine particulate matter and other pollutants that were also curbed by the equipment.

In his announcement on Thursday, Mr. Wheeler called the Obama administration’s accounting of health benefits “dishonest.”

Driving down mercury emissions alone, the studies at the time found, would yield a $6 million annual benefit, a fraction of the cost of the controls. But by adding in co-benefits like projected gains in avoided heart disease, asthma attacks and other health problems, the total benefits reached $80 billion over five years. Overall, the Obama administration estimated that the rule would prevent 4,700 heart attacks, 130,000 asthma attacks and 11,000 premature deaths each year.

Under the Trump administration’s new rule, such co-benefits will no longer be calculated with cost, only direct benefits.

While coal producers urged Mr. Trump to roll back the rule, the vast majority of electric utility companies have agreed the cost-benefit changes may be of little help to them, because they have already spent the billions of dollars needed to come into compliance. Many of those companies urged the Trump administration to leave the mercury measure in place.

Coal plants subject to the rule “have already spent millions of dollars to install mercury equipment to reduce mercury emissions,” wrote Scott A. Weaver, the director of air quality services for American Electric Power, an Ohio-based electric utility company that operates power plants in 11 states, in a public comment on a draft of the rule.

“Rescinding the standards at this point will create new problems” Mr. Weaver wrote, noting that companies that have sought to recoup the cost of installing mercury control equipment through bills to customers may no longer legally be able to do so. That means the new rule could actually cost companies more money.

Yet in comments to the E.P.A, major coal companies and the United States Chamber of Commerce also supported changing the underlying cost-benefit analysis to prevent future rules that they might consider onerous.

Matthew Davis, a former E.P.A. scientist who worked with the agency’s office of children’s health protection to develop the original rule, said weakening the rule still represented a threat to children’s health.

“The reason we did this rule is because children and developing fetuses are harmed by mercury,” said Mr. Davis, who now works at the League of Conservation Voters.

Jeffrey R. Holmstead, an attorney for the electric utility industry who served in the E.P.A. under the second President George Bush, rejected the idea that the decision was a cynical calculation to set the stage for other regulatory rollbacks.

“It’s not as if the administration has been shy about rolling back other things,” Mr. Holmstead said, dismissing environmental concerns. “I don’t think there’s any impact whatsoever from this.”

In Congress, the Obama-era mercury rule has bipartisan support. Senator Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works committee, and Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the chairman of an energy and water appropriations subcommittee, wrote an opinion piece in USA Today in November urging the Trump administration to leave the regulation unchanged.

“Changing the rule after billions of dollars have already been spent means that utilities will have less certainty about federal regulations,” they wrote. “The gains we have made over the past decade to protect children and families from dangerous mercury pollution should not be lost.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/history-repeating-trump-is-openly-pushing-russian-propaganda-against-biden

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no lnx

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Cody Fenwick August 18, 2020

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Though former Special Counsel Robert Mueller did not establish that Donald Trump or members of his campaign conspired with the Kremlin in 2016 to influence the election, he famously concluded:

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The presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump (“Trump Campaign” or “Campaign”) showed interest in WikiLeaks’s releases of documents and welcomed their potential to damage candidate Clinton.

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…

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[The] investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts…

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And this is, undoubtedly, happening again. Despite everything that happened in 2016, the chaos and scandal it unleashed, and all we’ve learned about the Russian efforts to interfere an American Democracy since then, Trump is welcoming Russia’s help once again.

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On Sunday, Trump shared a tweet that included audio that U.S. intelligence has determined to be Russian propaganda.

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As CNN reported:

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Late Sunday, Trump amplified a tweet that contained audiotapes of a 2016 conversation between Biden and then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko — material that was released earlier this year by AndriyDerkach, a Ukrainian lawmaker named by the US intelligence community in its August 7 statement about Russia’s disinformation campaign against Biden. US authorities labeled Derkach’s efforts as disinformation because they are intentionally designed to spread false or misleading information about Biden.

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By retweeting material that the US government has already labeled as propaganda — and doing so with the 2020 Democratic National Convention kicking off on Monday — Trump demonstrated once again that he is willing to capitalize on foreign election meddling for his own political gain.

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The conversation does not actually implicate Biden in any wrongdoing. A voice, purportedly Poroshenko, seems to cast doubt on the claim that the prosecutor Biden pushed out of a top position in Ukraine while he was vice president was corrupt. However, it was the official position of the U.S. government that the prosecutor was corrupt, and his removal was a goal shared by international allies. Additionally, Poroshenko has dismissed the recordings as fake.

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The AP reported:

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By amplifying the recording to his more than 85 million Twitter followers, Trump underscored the ease with which pro-Russian narratives can seep into American public discourse ahead of the 2020 election despite being flagged by intelligence officials as the product of a concerted Russian effort.

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Russia has also published disinformation under the guise of legitimate news stories, U.S. officials say, reflecting something of a shift in tactics from 2016, when Russia relied on a social media campaign to sow discord and also orchestrated the release of stolen Democratic emails.

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To be clear: Trump has undoubtedly been briefed on what’s going on. So either he knows what he’s doing or is barely paying attention enough to care.

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And he’s not the only one. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has been warned that the investigation he’s leading into Biden’s past is tainted with Russian disinformation. But he has dismissed these concerns. And despite the obviously opportunistic nature of the inquiry — Republicans had no interest in Biden’s actions in Ukraine until he became a candidate for president — he is shamelessly ramping it up.And he has openly admitted that the section of he could use the portion of his probe focused on Trump’s “Obamagate” conspiracy theory to have an impact on the election.

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“The more that we expose of the corruption of the transition process between Obama and Trump, the more we expose of the corruption within those agencies, I would think it would certainly help Donald Trump win reelection and certainly be pretty good, I would say, evidence about not voting for Vice President Biden,” Johnson saidin a recent interview, as Politico reported.

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More broadly, the GOP has, again and again, rejected Democratic efforts to secure our elections and to forestall further foreign intervention in our politics. While not as overt as Trump and Johnson, the party as a whole has — tacitly or otherwise — become comfortable with letting Russia help the president. What was scandalous in 2016 has now become commonplace.

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omfg

aug 3

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Inside the Project Veritas Plan to Steal the Election

James O’Keefe’s group is part of a sprawling campaign to delegitimize mail-in balloting in the fall—a campaign being led by the White House.

https://newrepublic.com/article/158622/inside-project-veritas-plan-steal-election

https://newrepublic.com/article/158622/inside-project-veritas-plan-steal-election

James O’Keefe had big plans for 2020. The founder of Project Veritas, the conspiratorial right-wing group that specializes in Fox News–friendly “stings” intended to expose supposed liberal bias and corruption in American society, was planning on getting married this past May. The wedding, to a public school teacher, was to be at an exclusive country club in upstate New York. The guest list was packed with Make America Great Again world cognoscenti: Donald Trump Jr., Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and his activist wife Ginni were all invited, as were several of O’Keefe’s most generous conservative donors, including Texas shale oil billionaire George Bishop and Bullpen Capital founder Paul Martino.

The wedding was, per an email blast, “postponed indefinitely” over the coronavirus, as the pandemic swept across the state this spring and early summer. Although O’Keefe himself declined to comment on this and many other details for this story, a well-placed frenemy is “90 percent sure they broke up.” In any event, while the pandemic may have derailed his personal life, it has only heightened the urgency of some of O’Keefe’s most lucratively funded dirty tricks.

For well over a year, Project Veritas has been secretly producing undercover stings designed to undermine the integrity of absentee and mail-in ballot counts—an endeavor codenamed “Diamond Dog,” according to documents we have obtained. Diamond Dog began as only one facet of Project Veritas’s 2020 rat-fucking strategy, but with the onset of the pandemic, which has made in-person voting a dicey proposition, it has since become one of the group’s top-line action items.

The shift reflects the Republican Party’s near-existential concerns about mail-in voting in November. Donald Trump has disingenuously railed against the practice numerous times over the past few months, betraying a deep anxiety. “Mail in ballots substantially increases the risk of crime and VOTER FRAUD!” he has tweeted. At other times he has claimed: “It will be the greatest Rigged Election in history”; “IT WILL ALSO LEAD TO THE END OF OUR GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY”; and “SCAM!” Last week, he went so far as to suggest that the election should be delayed, saying that because of “Universal Mail-in Voting,” the vote would be “INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT.”

The purpose of Diamond Dog, as one source close to the organization put it, is “literally to get Trump reelected.” This source, like other past and present Project Veritas employees who have talked to us for this article,expressed fear of reprisals from the group and would only speak under the condition of anonymity.

Last year, Project Veritas’s donor development team solicited big-ticket funders with a pitch deck—frequently tailored to a given patron’s pet ideological grievances and personal hang-ups—offering tantalizing details about the group’s undercover operations for the 2020 campaign cycle. One iteration of this Apple Keynote file was prepared for an ask meeting with a person who appears to beCognex Corporation founder Robert Shillman, a devoted funder of Islamophobic causes who was also one of O’Keefe’s would-be wedding guests. (Shillman ended up pledging to donate $50,000 to the group.) The slate of investigations in the “Dr. Bob” pitch included schemes to procure evidence of “illegal aliens voting,” mail-in ballot tampering at “nursing homes,” and “the sale of absentee ballots and voter profiles on the ‘Dark Web.’”

By the end of summer 2019, Diamond Dog had already grown to be a cross-country effort, based on internal Project Veritas memos, research notes, and other documents that we have obtained. InCalifornia and Texas, Project Veritas has tasked its operatives with unearthing supposed evidence of widespread mail-in ballot forgery. In both states, Project Veritas has worked toinfiltrate the groups of volunteers and paid canvassers who collect absentee and mail-in voter applications from low-income, elderly, and minority groups—a perfectly legal practice in most states that conservatives have tried to label as nefarious “ballot harvesting.”

In Texas, Project Veritas has also coordinated in secret with a local Republican operative named Aaron Harris, codenamed “Dragon,” currently chief of staff toRepublican congressman Lance Gooden. In turn, through the activist group he founded, Direct Action Texas, Harris has helped Project Veritas covertly strategize with a staffer working for the office of the state’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton is leading the state’s “election integrity initiative,” one of many Republican efforts nationwide to suppress the vote under the guise of rooting out the nearly non-existent threat of voter fraud.

Granted, Project Veritas, whose fervor to own the libs is matched only by its comical incompetence, is hardly likely to tip the election in Donald Trump’s favor all by itself. But it is at the vanguard of a larger underhanded approach that Republicans, starting at the very top, are taking to the 2020 cycle. If they want to win, they really have no other choice but to undermine the vote: Trump’s poll numbers are in the basement, and he appears constitutionally incapable of making appeals beyond his hardcore supporters on the right.

Republicans have all but admitted that this is their strategy. In coordination with the Republican National Committee and a raft of independent conservative groups, Trump has staked the success of his entire reelection campaign to a widespread voter suppression effort built on the pretext of preserving election integrity.The project, led by his campaign’s senior counsel Justin Clark, has worked to place operatives in at least 10 battleground states to challenge voter rolls and procedures. Between lawsuits and local advertising blitzes—all regularly relayed to Trump in the Oval Office—the effort could cost “well over $20 million,” as the RNC told The Washington Post. 

Project Veritas has been among the on-the-ground organizations at the forefront of these efforts and has benefited substantially as a result. According to internal Project Veritas documents, the group’s fundraising total for 2019 leaped up to more than$13.44 million, $4.58 million more than their 2018 returns and the group’s largest reported annual revenue figure to date. The group may be comically incompetent, but in these cursed times, we all know how dangerous comical incompetence can be once enough money and clout line up behind it.

For an operation premised on conspiracy theories and fueled by raging paranoia, it will come as no surprise that the agents helping to spearhead Project Veritas’s election mischief are oddballs on the fringes of American political life. In one slide prepared for Dr. Bob, a 69-year-old Florida resident, a registered Republican named Joseph Vancheri notifies O’Keefe of his soon-to-be status as apoll worker in Broward County, likely for undercoverElection Day snooping on Project Veritas’s behalf. Vancheri, an ex-cop and die-hard Trump supporter, has routinely taken to Facebook to lash out against “all the Trump haters” and “SHEEP,” including “SHIFTY SCHIFF” and “the Idiot Warren,” using Trump’s preferred epithet “Pocohontas [sic].” A first-generation immigrant himself, Vancheri has nevertheless long harbored hardline views on immigration that echo his anxieties over the potential for illicit enfranchisement of foreigners.

In another slide, Project Veritas boasts of receiving a tip from a former broadcast meteorologist named Arch Kennedy, who found it suspicious that 300 people were all registered to vote at the address for Emory University’s Emory Muslim Student Association in Atlanta. (In all likelihood these voters, who constitute 2 percent of Emory’s total student population and .0028 percent of Georgia’s population, have their mail forwarded there.) In 2017, Arch organized one of the anti-Muslim group ACT! For America’s 28 nationwide “March Against Sharia” rallies. Held in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park, it was a sparsely attended affair but still managed to include Republican Georgia State Senator Michael Williams, then mounting a doomed primary campaign for governor. [graf]

Iit’s unclear if either Vancheri or Kennedy’s offerings matured into full-fledged stings banked for the 2020 election. Neither they nor Project Veritas responded for comment, while the Project Veritas source who supplied the “Dr. Bob” pitch deck admitted that “a lot of it was kinda BS,” another example of the group “hyping themselves up to make themselves look better” and squeeze more money out of donors.Project Veritas went back to the well this weekend, soliciting donors in a mass email Saturday afternoon that promised a major ballot harvesting investigation that needs to be “completed as soon as possible.”

But other stings outlined in the Keynote file did materialize. The presentation, forexample, teased an inside man at Pinterestwho was “increasingly worried” about the platform’s “expanding community safety restrictions.” Sure enough, two months later, an ex-Pinterest Android app developer named Eric Cochran came forward with (later debunked) allegations in a series of Project Veritasvideos and a *Newsweek*op-ed claiming that the platform was censoring anti-abortion Christian advertisers. The pitch deck also promised an exposé from a “CNN Insider” named Cary Poarch, a bombshell that fizzled in October 2019 when Poarch’s hidden recordings, taken while working as a freelance satellite truck operator for the news network, failed to expose more than the personal opinions of a few random employees.

Well before the pandemic drew national attention to mail-in voting, these documents show a discernible focus on “ballot harvesting” as part of the larger Republican effort to paint voting by mail as a threat to democracy. The concern stems from the party’s entrenched belief that, as Trump has tweeted, vote-by-mail “doesn’t work out well for Republicans,” since it often helps low-income people and minorities.

By late August 2019, the “Story Objective” for Diamond Dog had expanded, per one internal meeting document, to exposing “corruption within CA ballot harvesting companies and other states (TX) based on intel gains.” A Project Veritas undercover operative codenamed “Magnum” had been busy “attending local Democratic events in CA to find discussions of harvesting.” Another operative codenamed “GDog” was creating anentrapment scheme by posting “ads online looking for people to join his ballot harvesting.”

Texas has been a major theater for Project Veritas’s Diamond Dog operations, in no small measure because raw demographics have been threatening to turn the state blue for years. The sense of crisis comes from the state GOP’s failure to bring Latinos into their voting bloc. The legacy of such botched strategizing has been an assault on the state’s Latino electorate itself, with right-wing officials and political operatives raising suspicions about their very legitimacy as legal participants in the voting process.

Aaron Harris, a son of white evangelical missionaries who picked up Portuguese while growing up in Brazil and went on to become fluent in Spanish, has been relentlessly stoking paranoia over mail-in ballots since his first failed foray as a paid political consultant in 2014. Despite a sizable war chest from Dallas hotel magnate and Tea Party financier Monty Bennett, Harris’s candidates in the 2015 local election for the Tarrant Regional Water District lost. He quickly became fixated on the idea that thousands of forged mail-in ballot applications had been responsible for their defeat.

Unlike some Project Veritas associates, Harris has already managed to stir up some public alarm about alleged balloting fraud in cooperation with elected officials from the Republican Party. He has made repeated open records requests for “applications for ballot by mail” and copies of signed “ballot carrier envelopes” in Tarrant County and elsewhere in Texas, eyeballing the signatures on each for signs of fraud. (Emily J. Will, the board-certified forensic document examiner who tried to warn 60 Minutes about the dubious provenance of President George W. Bush’s supposedly doctored Air National Guard records in 2004, told us that a non-expert like Harris couldn’t be relied upon to discern a forged signature.)

In 2016, Harris sent the fruits of that labor to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, leading to four conspicuously timed indictments two years later on the eve of the 2018 midterm elections. Paxton described the four Hispanic women, paid canvassers soliciting mail-in ballot applications door-to-door, as an “organized voter fraud ring.” He named (but did not charge) a former local Democratic Party leader, Stuart Clegg, as the ringleader in the court filings.

That case, which is still ongoing, reveals the ways in which the official GOP subtly coordinates with its army of right-wing irregulars in the field. Paxton stridently enforces one of the strictest voter I.D. laws in the nation, while Harris and his political allies at Direct Action Texas and Empower Texans work to independently legitimize the attorney general’s partisan vendettas. Harris and local Republican lawyer Alex Kim, for example, inserted themselves into the prosecution’s caseby independently visiting one of the charged canvassers in prison, seemingly on their own initiative, in an effort to coerce the woman into flipping on Clegg.(A month after helping Harris sneak into the Tarrant County Jail to harass the canvasser, Kim won a local race to preside over the entire county as a judge for Texas’s 323rd District Court.)

Paxton’s office has often pursued these voter fraud cases through a prosecutorial diversion program, allowing them to juke their stats with “de minimis” cases without ever having to prove their arguments in open court or subject their methods to independent review. Their biggest confirmed conviction to date: sending a 37-year-old Mexican citizen and mother of four, Rosa Maria Ortega, to prison for eight years for the high crime of being confused that her status as a legal resident in Texas did not actually confer unto her the voting privileges of full United States citizenship. Ortega voted in five elections between 2004 and her 2017 sentencing, casting ballots for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012—and, tragically, for Ken Paxton himself in the 2014 Texas attorney general’s race.

All signs point toward Paxton getting even more aggressive in 2020, thanks to a wrecked-up and paralyzed response to the pandemic by both Trump and Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Republicans are nervous that even blood-red Texas might be in play come November. Last April, Paxton threatened felony charges for anyone who requests or advocates for mail-in ballots “based solely on fear of contracting Covid-19”—a move that was upheld by the Texas Supreme Court in May, then by the Trump-stacked U.S. Supreme Court in June. It’s now sure to set the stage for many of the alleged mail-in schemes that Project Veritas will purport to expose later this year.

One local Project Veritas operative assigned to coordinate with Aaron Harris in Texas is also a former undercover volunteer: Cassandra Spencer, codenamed “Foxtrot” and sometimes “Foxtrot Smith” internally. In 2017, Spencer became O’Keefe’s “Facebook Insider” after leaving a public information officer post with the Pflugerville, Texas, police department to join Facebook’s contingent workforce operations at BCForward in Austin as a social media content moderator.

Spencer has positioned herself at the extremely online intersection of gaming culture and the alt-right. She has described herself as a “Proud Boy’s Girl” on Medium and attended “Austin’s premier anime convention” IKKiCON in Final Fantasy X cosplay. She traveled to Washington, D.C., for the inaugural DeploraBall and operates her own Twitch stream, which she dubbed “a First Amendment zone” for her conservative followers, “not like many others.”For the 2020 Democratic primary in Iowa, Spencer posed as a volunteer for presidential hopefuls Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders as part of a Project Veritas sting then-codenamed “Gold Mine."

[graf doc]

al?ready staked out on the Texas ballot-harvesting vanguard, Aaron Harris “met with Foxtrot” in person and “gave her a lead with someone to follow,” per internal Project Veritas research notes. As Diamond Dog progressed, Harris’s ties to Project Veritas deepened to include longtime employee and recruiting director Spencer Meads, codenamed “Brady,” and possibly an undercover journalist (UCJ) codenamed “Peter Pan.” Project Veritas’s expanding pool of Texas sources was meant to be a state secret, but the document offered a huge clue about who might be involved in an all-caps and highlighted portion that read: “CANNOT MENTION ATTORNEY GENERAL.” In the same document, after listing a series of major metropolitan areas in Texas as potential sites for their “ballot harvesting” investigation,a question is proposed: “Where does the AG’s guy suggest they go?”

When pressed for comment on his apparent role in facilitating communications between the Texas attorney general’s office and Project Veritas, Harris responded via his congressional email, “Do not contact me about my previous employment on official channels. Learn to be competent at your job.” After it was pointed out to Harris that the internal Project Veritas documents were sourced in the early fall of 2019, approximately 10 months after he became Congressman Gooden’s chief of staff, Harris became belligerent. To questions reiterated via personal text message, he responded, “I’ve asked you to stop harassing me and you want to argue about it? You are an idiot. You just keep proving it.”

Spencer did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Only two principal targets, old Harris foes, were mentioned by name in the Project Veritas strategy document: Texas-based personal injury attorney Domingo Garcia, a former state representative and the president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC; and the Harvest Project Food Rescue of Dallas, a community group that Harris seems to believe is an insidious front through which the state’s left-wing operatives entice immigrant communities, with the lure of unsold fresh produce donated by local distributors, into filling out their own mail-in ballots and thus enfranchising themselves. (“I wake up usually at 4:30 in the morning, I have to go pick up the food by six,” Harvest Project co-founder Danaë Gutiérrez-Martínez said when asked about Harris’s allegations. “I don’t get home ’til eight at night, nine at night, sometimes, to get up the next day and do it again, especially right now with everything that’s happening. You know, I must be Superwoman if I have time to do anything else.”)

A long-since-ousted co-founder of the Harvest Project, Jose Barrientos was very publicly implicated in a mail-in ballot forgery scheme in 2017. But Paxton and the local district attorney ultimately indicted someone else entirely, 27-year-old Miguel Hernandez, for the felony offense. After 180 days stewing in jail, Hernandez was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor with the understanding that his sentence would be limited to time served.

The beef between Harris’s groups and LULAC has been considerably more fraught. In the fall of 2016, Garcia publicly offered a $25,000 reward, funded through LULAC, for any information leading to the conviction of individuals “trying to intimidate a senior in Fort Worth or anywhere in Texas.” The target of their bounty was pretty clear, teed-up as it was by a Texas state representative, Ramón Romero, who had called out Harris by name for his door-to-door inquisition of seniors in Fort Worth’s predominantly Hispanic north side. Later at that same press conference, a related community service nonprofit, the United Hispanic Council of Tarrant County, announced that it had filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice against Harris’s Direct Action Texas for creating “an atmosphere of fear and intimidation” in local Hispanic neighborhoods.

In January 2019, LULAC filed a lawsuit against Attorney General Paxton and the secretary of state in Texas, David Whitley, accusing them both of violating the Voting Rights Act in their haphazard attempt to purge the state’s voter rolls of non-citizens.

Whitley’s offices would quietly walk back their initial list of 95,000 suspicious voters, many of whom were discovered to be, in fact, naturalized citizens. Shortly thereafter, San Antonio federal district court Judge Fred Biery put a stop to the purge, declaring that state Republicans were trying “to ferret the infinitesimal needles out of the haystack of 15 million Texas voters.” Harris, for his part, was unrepentant, telling the*Texas Observer*, “We are changing the entire discussion on voter fraud in Texas.” He was not wrong. While Harris is now planning to run for a House seat himself, his tireless efforts there have laid the groundwork for Project Veritas and its GOP partners this election season.

When mainstream Americans think about James O’Keefe, if they think about James O’Keefe at all, it’s usually in reference to his most hilarious failures: ruining his own sting on George Soros’s Open Society Foundation by leaving a self-incriminating voicemail; failing to lure a CNN reporter onto his yacht for a detailed “faux seducing” prank; revealing his unseemly ties to the billionaire mercenary Erik Prince by posting his own vanity spy training photos on social media. If Diamond Dog follows the Project Veritas playbook, it will likely focus on goosing a few unguarded comments out of canvassers and other volunteers in the hope of netting an inflammatory sound bite or two.

A modest, practically harmless October Surprise. But it’s typically down ballot where the average Project Veritas video tends to have its most pernicious effects. Less well known than O’Keefe’s blunders on the national stage are the numerous documented instances in which his stings have been cited to justify new and more onerous voter I.D. laws or other election integrity legislation in state legislatures across the country.

In April 2012, Chris McDaniel, then Mississippi’s Senate elections committee chairman, cited a Project Veritas voter fraud video as evidence justifying the passage of the state’s “photo identification requirement” bill⁠, which the state’s Republican Governor Phil Bryant signed that May. Despite legal challenges, this law is still on the books today.

Also that year, a Republican Minnesota state representative, Steve Drazkowski, praised a locally shot O’Keefe video—in which Project Veritas undercover operatives requested ballot applications for their friends “Timothy Tebow and Thomas Brady”—during a floor debate for his party’s own draconian voter I.D. bill. While Minnesota’s Democratic Governor Mark Dayton vetoed a strict version of that voter I.D. legislation, and Minnesota voters backed his decision in a ballot initiative later that year, the state’s Republican Party still plans to revisit the issue again this year. (“We have had a number of studies that have been completed, there’s a lot of new data on this topic, and there are court cases that have been decided,” as Minnesota GOP State Senator Scott Newman ominously put it, “none of which we had in 2012.”)

O’Keefe’s “Primary of the Living Dead” stunts during theNew Hampshire andNorth Carolina primaries in 2012—in which his operatives requested but crucially did not actually attempt to use, the ballots of deceased primary voters—aided the passage of stringent voter I.D. laws in those states. After New Hampshire enacted a law in 2018 tightening the state’s voting statutes, partly in response to a new series of Project Veritas videos, Democratic legislators made repeated attempts to repeal them, only to be thwarted by Republican Governor Chris Sununu’s veto.

O’Keefe’s wealthy donors surely remember these and other victories in vivid detail, in no small measure because they are reiterated tirelessly during O’Keefe’s paid speaking engagements and fundraising conclaves. Among Project Veritas’s 2019 contributors were several wealthy political groups, charitable foundations, and conservative billionaires with apparent interests in the outcome of Diamond Dog.

From California, a donation of at least $10,000 from a pledged $100,000 came to Veritas from Susan Groff, president of the Los Angeles-area construction equipment rental company Northwest Excavating. A prolific Republican donor along with her husband Howard, both Groffs were praised as “good friends, entrepreneurs and patriots” in a loving tribute entered into the Congressional Record by their longtime beneficiary, former GOP House Rep. Elton Gallegly.(Another $50,000 came into Project Veritas from a donor listed only as “Arnott”; the Orange County-based investment guru Robert D. Arnott, a Koch network ally and prolific Republican donor, denied responsibility when reached via email.)

In Texas, another $50,000 was passed on to Project Veritas from the Texas Free Market Fund through the group Donors Trust, the dark money “donor-advised fund” that has helped make contributions from the Kochs, the DeVos family, and others untraceable in future IRS filings. The charitable foundation of late Texas oilman Ken W. “Stinky” Davis, based like Project Veritas ally Aaron Harris in Tarrant County, also kicked in $5,000 to the group, the latest in the foundation’s influential spending spree on Republican politics in the Lone Star State and across the country.

In Florida, another donation of $50,000 came to the group through Donors Trust, this time from the free market defenders at the Thomas W. Smith Foundation.

There was also a whopping $261,000 donation from the “Smith Family.” Could it be the Smith family that has monopolized local network TV affiliates through Sinclair Broadcasting? Or is it Randall and Barbara Smith, Palm Beach residents whose vulture fund Alden Global Capital was once described by Joshua Benton, the founder of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, as “the gelatinous cube scouring the news industry’s dungeon”? Neither Smith families responded to requests for clarification on this issue.

Many additional hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of contributions to Project Veritas were attributed solely to “DT” on the group’s quarterly financial meeting documents. The initials may refer to Donors Trust or to the constellation of corporate and (ostensibly) philanthropic organizations tied to President DonaldTrump himself. While Trump is a well-known past donor to Project Veritas—a framed photo of him and O’Keefe rests prominently on a bookshelf at Project Veritas headquarters in Mamaroneck, New York—many other donors were evidently so secret that they were listed simply as “anonymous” even on the group’s own internal documents.

Cash matters, but O’Keefe’s personal connectionsare where the depth and seamlessness of this coordination with the Republican Party become truly apparent. They also offer a glimpse into the vast network that has formed to suppress the vote this fall—a network years in the making, of which Project Veritas is but a humble node.

Take litigator William Consovoy, the legal point man on many of the conservative-funded election integrity cases pursued during the Trump era. He is, like O’Keefe, a New Jersey native with a long history in local Republican politics. A former law clerk for Clarence Thomas, Consovoy is also reportedly a friend of Federalist Society Executive Vice President Leonard Leo, whose nephew David Maxham has been a friend of O’Keefe’s since their undergraduate years at Rutgers. (Maxham, naturally, was also invited to O’Keefe’s wedding.)

This year, Leonard Leo has stepped aside from day-to-day management of the Federalist Society to run a new conservative donor group, CRC Advisors, that is pouring money into Consovoy’s legal challenges in key battleground states across the country. CRC has been steering money into something called the “Honest Election­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­s Project,” a fictitious name filed in Virginia for Leo’s old group the Judicial Education Project,now officially called the 85 Fund. As The Guardian reported, 99 percent of the Judicial Education Project’s funding in 2018 was a single $7.8 million donation funneled through Donors Trust.guk?

With generous assistance from the Honest Election­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­s Project and the RNC, Consovoy’s firm Consovoy McCarthy PLLC has recently brought cases against the re-enfranchising of felons in Florida and sued to block California’s plans to deliver absentee ballots to all of the state’s registered voters. Consovoy has contributed to related motions filed in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Michigan, and Texas, where Ken Paxton’s victory against mail-in voting in May earned praise from President Trump on Twitter. 

If you strain to look beyond the lonely partisan kitsch of James O’Keefe’s bungled scams and harebrained hoaxes, it’s plain to see the march of a whole battalion of Diamond Dog operatives and lawyers turned loose on the integrity of the ballot in key battleground states.

Liz Farkas, a New York state–licensed private investigator, provided additional reporting and research for this article.

Matthew Phelan@CBMDP

Matthew Phelan has written for Chemical Engineering, New York, Jacobin, and Gawker, where he founded the conspiracy vertical Black Bag in 2014.

Jesse Hicks@jessehixxx

Jesse Hicks is a journalist whose work has appeared in Vice, Politico, Harper’s, and elsewhere.

Read More: 

The Soapbox, Politics, Election 2020, Donald Trump, Project Veritas, James O'Keefe, Clarence Thomas, Donald Trump Jr., Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity, FOX News, Texas, California, Republican Party, Federalist Society, Ken Paxton, Greg Abbott, Aaron Harris, George Soros, Erik Prince, Voting Rights

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hope?

kos

backers of putting an initiative on Arkansas’ November ballot to create an independent redistricting commission have announced that they have filed 50,000 more signatures following a 30-day deadline extension by Arkansas’ Supreme Court while it reviews supporters’ appeal of GOP Secretary of State John Thurston’s decision to reject all of their signatures as supposedly invalid. Thurston contends that signature-gatherers for this initiative and a separate one to adopt a form of instant-runoff voting had not “passed” background checks, even though the groups certified that they had “acquired” them.

Redistricting reformers had already submitted nearly 100,000 signaturesbefore the initial deadline earlier this summer, and combined with this latest tranche of signatures, they should have a sufficient cushion to ensure that at least 89,000 are valid statewide and are of a number equivalent to 5% of the votes cast in the last gubernatorial election in at least 15 of Arkansas’ 75 counties—that is, if the state Supreme Court overturns Thurston’s decision to reject all of their signatures in the first place.

A federal appeals court had recently rejected allowing supporters to gather signatures without being witnessed in person, which a lower court had enabled so that voters could sign the forms at home and mail them in. However, while the plaintiffs haven’t indicated whether they would appeal that ruling, the fact that they just submitted tens of thousands of additional signatures shows that their loss in federal court may not end up defeating the ballot effort.

If this effort does qualify for the ballot and wins voter approval, it would prevent Arkansas Republicans from gerrymandering the congressional and legislative districts for the first time since at least the Reconstruction era, if not ever...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/reformers-submit-signatures-to-put-a-measure-to-end-gerrymandering-on-arkansas-ballot-this-fall/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/gop-operatives-push-to-get-kanye-west-on-the-presidential-ballot-reports/

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alex h

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In 2018 and 2019, Kanye West was President Donald Trump’s most prominent supporter in the hip-hop community, sometimes inspiring criticism from other rappers who considered the president overtly racist. But on July 4, West tweeted that he planned to run for president — running against Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden in the general election. And according to reporting from the New York Times and CNN, some Republican operatives have been trying to help West get on the presidential ballot in various states.

One of the GOP operatives cited by reporters Maggie Haberman and Danny Hakim in the Times isMark Jacoby, who they describe as “an executive at a company called Let the Voters Decide.” Jacoby, they note, “has been collecting signatures for the West campaign” in Ohio, West Virginia and Arkansas.

Others Republicans named by Haberman and Hakim include Gregg Keller, former executive director of the American Conservative Union, and Chuck Wilton — who they describe as “a convention delegate for Mr. Trump from Vermont” and “an elector with the West operation who could potentially cast an Electoral College vote for Mr. West."

[twt]

dan Merica and Jeff Zeleny of CNN, meanwhile, report that some GOP operatives tied to Trump “are actively helping Kanye West get on presidential general election ballots in states ranging from Vermont to Arkansas to Wisconsin.” And according to the CNN reporters, some Democrats believe that Republicans see West as a possible spoiler who could take African-American votes away from Biden.

“Democrats in Wisconsin and beyond called it a blatant attempt to appeal to young black voters who may be unenthused about the Biden campaign,” Merica and Zeleny report. “Any downturn in turnout for Biden among young black voters, a group the Trump campaign has tried to target in the race against the former vice president, could impact the outcome in states with traditionally narrow margins, like Wisconsin.”

However, Haberman and Hakim report that “if Mr. West’s goal is to disrupt the general election between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, he is going about it in a strange way.”

“Some of the states where he has filed to get on the ballot have been solidly red states, like Arkansas, where his presence would almost certainly do little to change the general election equation,” Haberman and Hakim note. “But other states he is targeting, like Wisconsin, are seen as pivotal.”

In some states, Haberman and Hakim observe, it is too late for West to get on the ballot — as he has missed the filing deadline.

Democratic Rep. David Bowen of Wisconsin described Republican efforts to promote West’s campaign as underhanded, telling CNN: “Thankfully, the Trump team is showing their cards that the real force driving Kanye West to run is not people, but Trump. This is clearly a targeted effort by Republican operatives to cause confusion and problems for typically Democratic voters on Election Day…. It’s sad to see a popular music artist like Kanye be used as a pawn to trick his own people (and) fans to vote for a fake campaign.”

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820 an

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{{_{CNN fact checker Daniel Dale on Thursday showed how President Donald Trump’s campaign has been blatantly manipulating photos of former Vice President Joe Biden to make it look like he has spent the last year sitting in his basement.

While appearing on “New Day,” Dale dissected images of Biden in Trump’s new ad and showed how the campaign used Photoshop to put the photos in a completely different context.

“[The ad] uses three misleading images, one of which is egregiously altered,” Dale said. “That first image shows Joe Biden speaking at a town hall in Iowa outdoors at a nature preserve… what the ad does is remove the microphone from his hand and remove the trees, replacing it with a wall to make him seem like he’s alone and not talking to anyone.”

Dale also said that Trump campaign manipulated a photo of Biden praying at a church to make him look weak.

“A third misleading use of an image in that ad, they also show Biden sort of looking down, hands clasped, looking defeated,” he said. “Well, he was actually praying at an African-American church in Delaware after the death of George Floyd. This wasn’t him looking downcast because he’s being beaten by Donald Trump, it was a solemn moment used to make him look bad.”[vid]}}}_

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dirty tricks gerry

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/the-dirty-republican-plan-to-cut-the-census-short-is-potentially-illegal/

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ivy meerpol the nation 6/20

EG: How do you think Cohn was affected by the homophobic and anti-Semitic environment of Washington, D.C.?

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IM: Do you know the story of Lester Hunt? He was a senator from Wyoming. Around the time that Cohn was in Washington, Hunt was a very popular Democrat. The Republicans, including McCarthy, were always trying to figure out how to get him out of the way, because he was powerful, beloved, and very progressive. At one point, Hunt’s son was arrested for propositioning a male undercover police officer for sex, and this was discovered by McCarthy and some other senators. They confronted Hunt, saying they’d go public with this story if Hunt didn’t pull out of his race for reelection. Hunt tried to stay strong and fight back, but they threatened again, and rather than face that kind of humiliation and the humiliation of his son, Hunt committed suicide.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/a-staggering-percentage-of-top-accounts-supporting-reopen-push-are-bots-in-a-propaganda-machine-report/

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kos

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Russia’s 2016 campaign in support of Donald Trump included many different means of inserting false information into the national conversation. It featured ads on radio stations in key cities intended to suppress Black support for Hillary Clinton, faux local news sites filled with fabricated stories supporting Trump, and fake Black Lives Matters sites on Facebook meant to increase the fear of rural white voters. There were targeted ads that leveraged online tools to plant false stories directly into critical districts, and direct intrusion into voter databases that did … who knows what. But one key component of the 2016 campaign was a vast army of ‘bot’ accounts, managed by a team of Russian military hackers. That effort filled Twitter, Facebook, and other sites—and in the process became some of the most influential accounts in social media.

Now it appears that it’s happened again. A new study shows that when it comes to forcing workers to go back into offices, stores, and factories, almost half the online voices shouting for the “reopening of America” were, and are, bot accounts. Of the accounts that have tweeted most on this topic, more than half are bots. Of the most influential, almost all are bots. And behind the bots … is someone still unknown.

The report comes out of Carnegie Mellon University. Digging through over 200 million tweets discussing COVID-19 or the novel coronavirus, researchers focused in on the most influential accounts—those most active, most retweeted, and most liked. Out of the top 1,000 accounts, 62% are bots. Perhaps even more amazing: of the 50 most influential accounts on this topic, 82% are bots.

The bots may be numerous, but their message isn’t varied. They’re not being used to pass along accurate news about COVID-19, to encourage social distancing, or to support state government calls for preventive measures. In addition to pushing false cures, like Trump’s much-pushed hydroxychloroquine, and spreading general false information about the dangers of COVID-19, there’s one point where bots are driving the whole of social media. According to the report, they are “dominating conversations about ending stay-at-home orders and ‘reopening America.’"

other disasters have also brought along swarms of bot accounts trying to take advantage of the chaos to drive either profit or political division, but CMU reports that the pandemic has generated far more fake accounts than expected. Those bots aren’t just participating in the online discussion about reopening America, they are driving it.

These same bots are also pushing stories that deaths due to COVID-19 are being overcounted, that medical workers and hospitals are exaggerating the scale of the pandemic, that hospital rooms are filled with crisis actors or even mannequins to make the situation seem far worse than it is. The bots are both originating and repeating more than 100 different categories of false stories about COVID-19, the pandemic, and the steps needed to fight the disease. These conspiracy theories are designed to both increase anger and generate distrust of medical authorities. They’ve also played a role in driving in-person protests in cities across the country.

See if this looks familiar:

If any of that seems like a repeat, it’s because that was exactly Russia’s 2016 playbook. And that’s not a great surprise. Because this isn’t some random group of bots cobbled together by hackers just for kicks. The scale of this effort is huge, the messages are coordinated, and the impact has already been felt nationwide. According to CMU professor Kathleen Carley, “…it looks like it’s a propaganda machine, and it definitely matches the Russian and Chinese playbooks.”

Proving the origin of the bots may be difficult, and there are certainly other candidates. The first reopen protests were in Michigan, where they were funded and pushed through an online effort of the Michigan Freedom Fund. The MFF is funded by the family of Betsy DeVos. The tools and propaganda developed by the MFF for that first protest were used as a template for other protests in other states. These protests have also leveraged pro-gun groups that descended on state capitols in the past—which is why the same protesters have appeared to threaten officials in multiple states.

The coordinated effort behind reopening America may or may not be a Russian plot. But it is a plot; one that has been eagerly supported by a network of conservative organizations who definitely learned a lesson from 2016. What they learned is that America is hugely vulnerable to a coordinated propaganda campaign, that a small number gun-waving protesters can be made to seem like a mass movement, and that they can get their way even if a majority of Americans disagree.

Whoever is behind it, it’s clear they got tired of asking Americans to sacrifice themselves for Wall Street. So they just took away the options.

2016 demonstrated America’s vulnerability to this kind of attack. 2020 shows that the nation is no more secure … but the attackers have improved.

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omfg baaaaaaccckkk!?

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/the-terrifying-return-of-karl-rove-a-republican-character-assassin-joins-trumps-team/

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digby

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There have been many rumors in recent weeks that the Trump campaign is starting to disintegrate. This is not surprising. All you have to do is read Trump’s Twitter feed to see that the president does not like bad news and he will kill any messenger who brings it to him. Lately, there has been a whole lot of bad campaign news.

The New York Times has reported that Trump has been getting so angry at the decaying poll numbers that he yelled at campaign manager Brad Parscale and threatened to sue him during a heated phone call. (Parscale reportedly replied, “I love you too,” and flew up to Washingon right away to mend fences.)

Indeed, the polls have not been looking good for Trump, but then they haven’t looked very good his entire term. An impeached president whose approval rating has always hovered around 42% doesn’t have a lot of room for error to begin with. Now that he’s shown what a disastrous leader he is in a crisis, there very little prospect that it’s going to improve.

Naturally, Trump blames his campaign operatives for this because he will never accept responsibility for anything that goes wrong. Parscale has been just a bit too high-profile recently, even getting celebrity treatment from the New York Times, which is the sort of thing that makes the boss very angry. He doesn’t like to share the spotlight, particularly with someone who seems to be making buckets of money while working for him.

The Never Trumper PAC known as The Lincoln Project yanked Trump’s chain with that information this week, running another one of its ads pointedly designed to get under the president’s thin skin.[vids death star ]

setting aside the macabre tastelessness of calling your campaign operation the “Death Star” while your candidate is recklessly mismanaging a runaway epidemic that has killed close to 100,000 of his own people, even as a pop-culture reference it’s absurdly off-base. Does Parscale know that things didn’t end well for the Death Star?

Parscale has cultivated a close relationship with Jared Kushner, the son Trump never had, so he’s probably safe. But you never know with Trump. His 2016 campaign cycled through a number of campaign operatives, some of whom are now either in prison or awaiting sentencing. There have been whispers that Trump might bring back Corey Lewandowski or Steve Bannon, but Javanka never cared for either of them so they’re probably off the table. If things get really desperate, I suppose he can always pardon Roger Stone and Paul Manafort and bring them back on board.

The sad fact is that Trump’s options are limited. While the entire Republican establishment has not just capitulated to Trump but now eagerly supports him, it’s interesting to note that so many high-profile GOP campaign strategists have gone the other way. There simply aren’t very many experienced people Trump can call for help.

But there is one guy: Karl Rove, the man they used to call “Bush’s Brain,” whom George W. Bush affectionately dubbed “Turd Blossom.” Rove has backed away from active campaigning in recent years, preferring to drop his pearls of wisdom on Fox News and advise the dark-money super PAC American Crossroads, which he founded back in 2010. But reports this week suggest that despite Trump’s antipathy for the Bush family, Turd Blossom may be back in the saddle, advising Trump on how to salvage those swing states he sees slipping away.

According to NBC News, Rove has been quietly worming his way into the campaign for some time:

Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale has consulted Rove since the 2018 midterm elections, per three people familiar with the discussions. Before the pandemic, Rove had advised the Trump campaign it could be modeled, in some ways, after the Bush 2004 re-election race.

Of course he did. He certainly wouldn’t want to remind anyone of his total meltdown on Fox News on election night in 2012, when he refused to accept that Republican nominee Mitt Romney had lost Ohio, and with it the election, insisting that his own numbers were more reliable. Romney’s family had to call and tell Rove to back down so the candidate could concede with some measure of dignity.

In fact, Rove is a perfect addition to the Trump team. For all his reputation as a “data guy” and number-cruncher,he’s really just an old-fashioned Republican character assassin. The New York Times has reported that Rove had a recent meeting with Trump and warned him “that he had fallen behind in the task of damaging [Joe] Biden, people familiar with the meeting said.” That’s the kind of tactic in which Rove specializes.

Rove first came to national attention as George W. Bush’s campaign manager in 2000. According to James Moore and Wayne Slater’s book “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential,” Rove was personally behind one of the most scurrilous episodes in GOP campaign history. He allegedly came up with the infamous push poll used in South Carolina to undermine support for Sen. John McCain with outright racist innuendo: “Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?”

But then, Rove was a Lee Atwater protégé, so what else would one expect?

Crudely tearing down the opponent isn’t the only way in which Rove is particularly suited to be a Trump adviser. He was always exalted among the Beltway press for his supposed genius in figuring out that you should attack your opponents on their perceived strengths. For instance, the Bush campaign attacked John Kerry over his Vietnam War record in the 2004 election, when that was considered Kerry’s ace in the hole. In reality, Rove was always projecting his own candidate’s weaknesses onto his opponent. In that election, Bush had had to contend with the fact that he had started a useless war in Iraq and had himself dodged the draft, so the campaign’s best recourse was to make Kerry look like a liar and a coward.

I hardly have to tell you how Trumpian that is. If Rove can get Trump to actually listen to him — which he probably won’t, since Trump won’t listen to anyone — it could be a formidable partnership.

Karl Rove won elections through the clever manipulation of the media with lots of talk about “the math,” the supposed inevitability of Republican victory and his own inflated mystique. In that regard, he mirrors Parscale, the high-living Trump campaign manager who has snookered the press into believing he’s a high-tech genius possessed of secret knowledge and endless resources. Both of them managed to slip their clients into a first term with a dubious Electoral College victory and a popular-vote defeat. It remains to be seen if Parscale can replicate Rove’s second-term victory in 2004, in which Bush won the popular vote, but almost lost the Electoral College.

Bush’s Brain and Trump’s ego are going to ride Brad Parscale’s Death Star into November. Fasten your seatbelts; it’s going to be a bumpy flight.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/newly-released-fbi-documents-reveal-extent-of-roger-stones-direct-communications-with-julian-assange-report/

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veteran GOP operative and long-time Donald Trump ally Roger Stone, who was sentenced to three years in federal prison in February for felonies that included witness tampering and lying to Congress, continues to vie for a presidential pardon. Meanwhile, FBI documents continue to offer insights on Stone’s past communications with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange: according to FBI documents made public this week, Stone asserted in a 2017 direct message via Twitter that if prosecutors came for him, “I will bring down the entire house of cards.”

The Associated Press (AP) is reporting that FBI documents show that Stone sent that message weeks after former FBI Director Robert Mueller was appointed to head the Russia investigation. According to AP reporters Eric Tucker, Colleen Long and Michael Balsamo, the FBI records “reveal the extent of communications between Stone and Assange, whose anti-secrecy website published Democratic e-mails hacked by Russians during the 2016 presidential election, and underscore efforts by Trump allies to gain insight about the release of information they expected would embarrass Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.”

FBI records, according to AP, show that in a direct Twitter message sent inJune 2017, Stone “reassured Assange that the issue was ‘still nonsense’ and said, ‘As a journalist, it doesn’t matter where you get information — only that it is accurate and authentic.”

Stone, AP reports, mentioned a 1971 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that paved the way for newspapers and magazines to publish the Pentagon Papers — documents about the Vietnam War that had been classified. The Trump ally, via Twitter, told Assange, “If the US government moves on you, I will bring down the entire house of cards. With the trumped-up sexual assault charges dropped, I don’t know of any crime you need to be pardoned for — best regards. R.”

Stone, in that message, appeared to be referring to the Swedish government’s sexual assault case against Assange, which was dropped.

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several like this/ 420 an

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/stoking-divisions-and-driving-a-new-explosion-in-the-pandemic-republicans-think-they-can-win-through-sheer-chaos

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digby no lnx

...

FreedomWorks, the instrumental force behind the Tea Party, “is holding weekly virtual town halls with members of Congress, igniting an activist base of thousands of supporters across the nation to back up the effort” led by right-wing commentator Stephen Moore.the Associated Press reported. Other right-wing groups vocally opposing shutdowns include Americans for Prosperity, an organization funded by the Koch brothers, and the conservative Heritage Foundation. There is even a connection to the family of Trump’s Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. As Michigan’s governor noted, the DeVos family foundation helped fund Facebook ads for this week’s protest.

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Pro-gun activists have gotten in on the act as well. It’s an astroturf Tea Party reunion tour. If there’s one thing that riles up the right wing, it’s apparently the government trying to save lives.

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‘There’s no pandemic…Media’s the cancer’ — People across the U.S., many of whom are vocal Trump supporters, are protesting stay-at-home orders.

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COVID-19 has killed more than 37,000 people in America within the last 7 weeks. pic.twitter.com/2xtbPXfjz9

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— NowThis (@nowthisnews) April 19, 2020

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Trump has personally praised the protesters, as has Vice President Pence, even as they both pretend to care about their new guidelines for opening up the country.

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All of this seems odd, considering that common sense and all legitimate scientific advice says that prematurely letting our guard down will likely lead to a resurgence of the epidemic, which means shutting down the economy all over again, with even worse consequences. But there’s a method to their madness. As chaotic and dysfunctional as they are at governing, Trump and the Republicans are united on their electoral strategy. They’ve decided that opening up the economy as soon as possible is their ticket to re-election.

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According to Politico, conservatives are still convinced that a highly divisive strategy focused entirely on their base voters divisive, is the way to go, even in the midst of an unprecedented public health crisis:

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Trump-supported activists are protesting strict stay-at-home orders. Conservative groups’ internal polling in red-leaning and swing states show a significant uptick in Americans who favor reopening the country. A growing chorus of Republican lawmakers across the nation are on board.

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“If you don’t see something start to happen … you’re going to see a conservative revolt by our base,” said Adam Brandon, president of FreedomWorks, a conservative group which recently polled on reopening the economy. “The worst strategy for him is to keep things shut until August. Trump is basically going to win or lose his election right now, in the next month.”

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Yes, that would be the same FreedomWorks that is ginning up the protests, along with the other big money groups financed by the likes of Charles Koch. Big-money donors seem to have activated their astroturf groups to get people out in the streets to make sure that Trump feels the pressure from his beloved base to open up the economy. These donors care about preserving their power, privilege and profit margins, but Trump only cares about the November election. They are manipulating him, and his supporters, to make him believe that his ends are aligned with theirs.

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Republicans in Congress are doing their part as well. The bill coming up for a vote this week to refill the small-business bailout fund is missing something vital that Democrats and governors of both parties have been begging for: help for state and local governments, many of which are in dire economic trouble and hamstrung by balanced-budget requirements.

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You might think that providing them with federal funds to keep the lights on would be a no-brainer. But according to Axios, Republicans will use this prospect as a cudgel to force states to reopen: “The thinking among some Trump administration officials is that many states should be reopening their governments soon and that additional funding could deter them from doing so.”

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If anyone thinks that depriving aid won’t hurt Trump’s political enemies more than his allies, they still don’t understand how he plays this game. (There’s already evidence that more federal aid has gone to red states.) This may end up being the most destructive thing Trump has done, at least in economic terms.

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420 jurors in danger?! judge nix new trial? flipbd

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/its-time-for-democrats-to-start-playing-hard-ball-against-the-gops-threat-to-the-2020-election/

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danger  in normalizing gop bad actor like gov't hostage but...

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trms had head of legis in full ppe saying perfectly safe mofo

republicans can’t seem to help themselves from weaponizing this public health crisis to advance their own self interest and cement their grip on power. And they’re getting help from right-wing judges – including the far-right majority on the U.S. Supreme Court!

Yesterday, the Wisconsin GOP – with the help of the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court – forced Wisconsin voters to choose between risking their health and the health of others and exercising their right to vote ... during the pandemic ... with the number of polling places drastically reduced so, for instance, voters in Milwaukee, who usually have nearly 200 polling places, would have to crowd into FIVE.

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4/20 election pushed tho pandemic cf prev voter suppress; state scotus 5-2 one of worst guys (appt?) by walker vs smart dem woman

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why judges will likely play a crucial role deciding how 2020 elections are run during the pandemic

Steven Rosenfeld / Independent Media InstituteApril 3, 2020

The jaw-dropping conclusion of a federal court hearing on April 1 about Wisconsin’s statewide elections on April 7 was no April Fools’ joke. U.S. District Judge William Conley said the…

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https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2020/03/16/right-wing-super-pac-runs-pro-sanders-ad-after-running-anti-sanders-ad/

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alex k

right-wing, billionaire-funded Club for Growth Action super PAC has a message for liberal voters: Billionaires behind Joe Biden are helping the Democratic Party rig the presidential primary against Bernie Sanders.

“After Mike [Bloomberg’s] $600 million couldn’t get it done, now the billionaires are propping up Joe Biden…because they own him,” says the narrator of thedigital ad. “Don’t let them steal it.”

Just weeks ago, the same super PAC ran an ad attacking Sanders for his progressive positions on health care and climate change.At the time, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) reported that Club for Growth Action’s biggest donors included billionaires Richard Uihlein, owner and CEO of shipping supplies company ULINE, Jeff Yass, managing director and co-founder of financial firm Susquehanna International Group, and private equity owner John Childs.

A March 10 Club for Growth Action press release says the group will spend five figures on the digital ad, which will run in the four states set to vote on Tuesday, March 17: Arizona, Florida, Illinois, and Ohio.

“Remember” is the fourth ad that Club for Growth Action has released in the Democratic presidential primary. The group has also run an ad attacking former candidate Beto O’Rourke and another criticizing Biden for working with “racist Dixiecrats” to oppose school busing integration. The super PAC has spent a total of nearly $180,000 on ads against Democratic presidential contenders Biden ($86,000), Sanders ($59,000), and O’Rourke ($35,000), according to Federal Election Commission data.

Club for Growth Action has made over $5 million worth of independent expenditures in the 2020 elections so far, much of it going towards Republican congressional primaries, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Other conservative super PACs have made independent expenditures opposing Biden and Sanders, as CMD recently reported. As of March 4, The Committee to Defend the President had spent nearly $900,000 against Biden, while the Republican Jewish Coalition Victory Fund spent $69,000 against Sanders. Additional conservative groups have spent smaller amounts attacking both candidates.

Club for Growth, the 501(c)(4) social welfare nonprofit linked to Club for Growth Action, with an annual revenue of $6.7 million, is also reliant on conservative billionaires. For example, the Charles Koch-backed trade association now called The Seminar Network Chamber of Commerce donated $175,000 to Club for Growth in 2017. A few years before, the group received over $1 million from the Koch-backed Center to Protect Patient Rights.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/erik-prince-recruited-ex-spies-to-help-infiltrate-activist-groups-hostile-to-trump-agenda-report/

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OMFG

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no lnx

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Erik Prince recruited ex-spies to help infiltrate activist groups ‘hostile’ to Trump agenda: report

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Written by Common Dreams March 8, 2020

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An explosive New York Times report revealed Saturday thatnotorious war profiteer Erik Prince recruited former American and British spies to work with the right-wing group Project Veritas to infiltrate at least one Democratic congressional campaign and organizations “considered hostile” to President Donald Trump’s agenda.

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“Secretary DeVos’ brother was directly involved in a spying scheme in her home state against a teachers’ union she’s been hostile with for years. If this doesn’t clear the bar for an immediate Congressional investigation, nothing does.”

—Derek Martin, Allied Progress

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Prince is the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and founder of the mercenary firm Blackwater. Through a spokesperson, he declined the Times‘ request for comment on the piece, which is based on interviews and documents obtained by the newspaper, including internal Project Veritas emails.

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“Both Project Veritas and Mr. Prince have ties to President Trump’s aides and family,” the Times noted. “Whether any Trump administration officials or advisers to the president were involved in the operations, even tacitly, is unclear. But the effort is a glimpse of a vigorous private campaign to try to undermine political groups or individuals perceived to be in opposition to Mr. Trump’s agenda.”

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The results of the Times‘ investigation were described by readers on social media as “chilling,” “stunning,” and “insane.” Jacobin magazine assistant editor Alex Press declared, “My paranoid fantasies are all true!” In response to a tweet about the reporting, author and activist Naomi Klein simply wrote, “Read.”

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The consumer watchdog group Allied Progressresponded with a statement Saturday night, calling on the House Oversight Committee to conduct an immediate investigation into what DeVos knew about Prince’s activities.

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“There’s not a lot of dots to connect here,” said Allied Progress director Derek Martin. “Secretary DeVos’ brother was directly involved in a spying scheme in her home state against a teachers’ union she’s been hostile with for years. If this doesn’t clear the bar for an immediate Congressional investigation, nothing does.”

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“We already know Secretary DeVos is no friend of public education, but if she gave the go-ahead to enlist former intelligence officers to steal documents from public education advocates that she disagrees with, it steps well beyond policy disagreement and into criminal territory,” Martin added. “If Secretary DeVos was in any way involved, it will confirm that she stops at nothing to undermine public schools.”

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According to the Times:

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One of the former spies, an ex-MI6 officer named Richard Seddon, helped run a 2017 operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the nation. Mr. Seddon directed an undercover operative to secretly tape the union’s local leaders and try to gather information that could be made public to damage the organization, documents show.

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Using a different alias the next year, the same undercover operative infiltrated the congressional campaign of Abigail Spanberger, then a former CIA officer who went on to win an important House seat in Virginia as a Democrat. The campaign discovered the operative and fired her.

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Both operations were run by Project Veritas, a conservative group that has gained attention using hidden cameras and microphones for sting operations on news organizations, Democratic politicians, and liberal advocacy groups. Mr. Seddon’s role in the teachers’ union operation—detailed in internal Project Veritas emails that have emerged from the discovery process of a court battle between the group and the union—has not previously been reported, nor has Mr. Prince’s role in recruiting Mr. Seddon for the group’s activities.

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The Times reported that it is unclear whether Seddon was involved in the Spanberger operation and the former British intelligence officer—who is married to American diplomat Alice Seddon—did not respond to the newspaper’s request for comment.

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James O’Keefe of Project Veritas told the Times that his group is a “proud independent news organization” and “no one tells Project Veritas who or what to investigate.” Although he declined to discuss the details of the report, he also claimed that various sources are “providing confidential documents, insights into internal processes, and wearing hidden cameras to expose corruption and misconduct.”

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Past targets of Project Veritas have included the nonprofit healthcare organization Planned Parenthood, the political group Disrupt J20, and recently, David Wright, a 20-year veteran political correspondent at ABC News. Project Veritas has also recorded undercover video of a Times editor and approached the Washington Post with a false story about Roy Moore, a Republican Senate candidate in Alabama.

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The Project Veritas operative inside AFT Michigan was Liberty University graduate Marisa Jorge, according to the Times. O’Keefe and Seddon used the code name “LibertyU” for Jorge when discussing the operation over email. Jorge, who also reportedly infiltrated the Spanberger campaign by posing as a volunteer, did not respond to the newspaper’s request for comment. The federal lawsuit that AFT Michigan brought against Project Veritas is scheduled to go to trial later this year.

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In a statement to the Times, AFT president Randi Weingartensaid: “Let’s be clear who the wrongdoer is here: Project Veritas used a fake intern to lie her way into our Michigan office, to steal documents and to spy—and they got caught. We’re just trying to hold them accountable for this industrial espionage.”

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Weingarten added on Twitter Saturday, “They didn’t succeed in their attempt to hurt our union but note what the right wing will do to try to eliminate workers’ voice.”

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The Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill—who released the book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army in 2007—wrote on Twitter Saturday that with this piece, the Times “pushes the 2017 story from [The Intercept‘s Matthew Cole]? forward about Erik Prince attempts to infiltrate liberal groups via Project Veritas.”

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Last year, Cole published an article for The Intercept titled “The Complete Mercenary: How Erik Prince Used the Rise of Trump to Make an Improbable Comeback.”

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Noting that Trump gave Project Veritas thousands of dollars through his foundation and met with O’Keefe shortly after announcing his run for president, Cole reported:

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It is unclear if Trump’s support of Project Veritas spurred Prince’s interest in the group, but in late 2015 or early 2016, Prince arranged for O’Keefe and Project Veritas to receive training in intelligence and elicitation techniques from a retired military intelligence operative named Euripides Rubio Jr. According to a former Trump White House official who discussed the Veritas training with Rubio, the former special operative quit after several weeks of training, complaining that the Veritas group wasn’t capable of learning. Rubio did not respond to requests for comment.

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In the winter of 2017, Prince arranged for a former British MI6 officer to provide more surveillance and elicitation training for Veritas at his family’s Wyoming ranch, according to a person with direct knowledge of the effort. Prince was trying to turn O’Keefe and his group into domestic spies. For his part, O’Keefe posted photos on Instagram and Twitter from the Prince family ranch of himself holding a handgun with a silencer attached and wearing pseudo-military clothing. He described the ranch as a “classified location” where he was learning “spying and self-defense,” in an effort to make Project Veritas “the next great intelligence agency.”

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“Erik was weaponizing a group that had close ties to the Trump White House,” said the former White House official familiar with Prince’s relationship with O’Keefe and Project Veritas.

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Cole acknowledged the Times reporting on Twitter Saturday and highlighted a summary of it tweeted by The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer:

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Currently, the Times noted, “Prince is under investigation by the Justice Department over whether he lied to a congressional committee examining Russian interference in the 2016 election, and for possible violations of American export laws.”

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Former FBI assistant director and current NBC News national security contributor Frank Figliuzzi shared the Times report on Twitter Saturday and commented that “there are likely numerous criminal violations here.”

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aha let note that dirty tricks are in many domains pvt actors?

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ohio energy nuke fight

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https://www.ideastream.org/news/dark-money-in-the-spotlight-in-heated-nuclear-bailout-referendum-campaign

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hmmn, seems legit

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The controversial U.S. Supreme Court decision Citizens United v FEC almost a decade ago helped bring in hundreds of millions of dollars into political campaigns – and the groups that get some of it don’t have to disclose where it came from.

_{}__{_{}_}_Dark money gets a lot of attention at the federal level, but it’s hard at work in Ohio right now.

The proposal to overturn the state’s new nuclear power plant bailout isn’t even on the ballot. But the group that’sgathering signatures to put it there has launchedits first ad.

“If someone approaches you with a petition to allow you to vote on corporate bailouts, sign it,” the ad copy reads.

This comes in response to a campaign working against the potential ballot issue. It’s estimated to have spent $3.5 million on its own petition supporting the bailout, though it does nothing beyond that, along with mailers featuring vivid images invoking the Chinese flag, and ads including a new one, featuring the line: “They’re bringing in outsiders into our state to roam our neighborhoods with petitions, and they’re asking for your personal information.”

Bradley Smith is a professor at Capital University Law School near Columbus and a former chair of the Federal Elections Commission. And he’s fascinated.

“To me, what's really interesting is that they're doing this all this just to keep the petition from even qualifying for the ballot and that's what I don't recall saying before. Is somebody coming forward and trying to spending a large amount of money just to get the issue from even being placed on the ballot,” Smith said.

Smith uses that word “somebody” because nobody knows exactly who is Ohioans For Energy Security, the group behind those commercials and fliers. And spokesman Carlo LoParo says that’s the way it will stay.

“It's not that we won't disclose our donors. It's that we're following the law, and the law allows us free speech. And we're exercising that free speech right,” LoParo said.

To be fair, the group trying to overturn the bailout law, Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts, is also not revealing its donors. But the law requires that group as a ballot issue PAC, to file financial disclosure forms within 30 days of filing its petitions to put the law before voters next year – which they have to do by October 21.

But its spokesman Gene Pierce said his group is made up of those who opposed the bailout law when it was House Bill 6. “You're talking about consumer groups, business groups, renewable energy advocates and people who want to offer more competitive pricing and the electricity marketplace in Ohio.”

LoParo said that group also includes natural gas companies, and that a Chinese government-owned bankhas invested in those companies. Pierce saysit’s ridiculous to tie the referendum group to the Chinese. And he pointed to FirstEnergy Solutions, the owner of the state’s two nuclear power plants, and its former parent company FirstEnergy as likely donors to the bailout opposition.

There is little known about that opposition. Ohioans For Energy Security is alimited liability corporation, and there’s little information in its filing with the Secretary of State’s office. Carlo LoParo is a longtime Statehouse PR figure, having worked for, among others, Republican former Secretary of State and candidate for governor Ken Blackwell – who also employed Gene Pierce.

LoParo also spoke for the Ohio Clean Energy Jobs Alliance, which advocated for passing the bailout law, along with Generation Now, another dark money group. That group is sending people it’s calling monitors out to share the pro-bailout side with people being asked to sign petitions to get the bailout to the ballot. And there have beenclashes between circulators and monitors.

Groups including the League of Women Voters and Common Cause Ohiohave called for more financial disclosure of the groups involved in this referendum. Ohio State University Moritz College of Law professor Dan Tokaji said it’s simple....

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/how-conservatives-rigged-our-politics-republicans-are-beating-democrats-at-a-game-they-dont-even-know-theyre-playing

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no lnx review/  summary

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How conservatives rigged our politics: Republicans are beating Democrats at a game they don’t even know they’re playing

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Written by David Edward Burke / Washington Monthly February 26, 2020

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According to Gallup polling, more Americans identify as Democrats than Republicans. On average, roughly 29 percent of Americans identify as Democrats, 27 percent as Republicans, and 41 percent as independent. It’s close, but the edge is enough that one would expect our legislatures, courts, and governorships to reflect that advantage.

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They don’t. Despite being the less popular party, Republicans have controlled the majority of our state legislatures and governorships for the past decade. In twenty-two states, Republicans control both branches of government, compared with only sixteen for Democrats. A majority of Supreme Court justices have also been appointed by Republican presidents. And Donald Trump won the presidency despite losing to Hillary Clinton by almost three million votes. How have Republicans pulled this off?

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In The Democracy Fix, Caroline Fredrickson, president of the American Constitution Society (and a regular writer for this magazine), gives a detailed and often demoralizing account of how Republicans seized political power that vastly exceeds the public support for their ideas.Tracing the origin story back to Lewis Powell’s memo—in which the then corporate attorney who would later become a Supreme Court justice outlined a plan for conservative dominance of public policymaking—Fredrickson shows how the GOP used gerrymandering, voter suppression, dubious scholarship, and dangerous media outlets to rig the system in their favor. And although she offers a plan for Democrats to fight back, it feels like Republicans have already won a game Democrats didn’t realize they were playing.

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Cynical gamesmanship—like Mitch McConnell denying a confirmation hearing to President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland—has allowed Republicans to gain control of our democratic institutions in unseemly ways. Fredrickson’s book weaves a fascinating tapestry that shows the different pieces that fit together as part of Powell’s devious master plan.

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In his 1971 memo, Powell created an ingenious road map for pro-business interests to gain control of legislatures, the courts, and the media. The plan, as Fredrickson notes, was to “fund a broad array of institutions that would exert control over the instrumentalities of power.” And they did: Wealthy conservatives like John M. Olin, the Coors family, Richard Scaife, and Charles and David Koch supported a web of think-tanks, media outlets, lobbying groups, and other organizations that have helped fulfill Powell’s vision.

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At the same time, gerrymandered districts have given Republicans the means to win legislatures even when Democrats win the majority of votes. For example, in 2012, Democratic statehouse candidates in Pennsylvania won 51 percent of votes, but ended up with just 28 percent of legislative seats. The practice of drawing legislative districts to favor one political party over another dates to at least the 1700s. But it has arguably never been done more aggressively than it was by Republicans in the late 2000s.

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Before the 2010 census, Karl Rove proposed a plan called REDMAP to help Republicans gain control of state legislative seats so that the party would have control over the new maps. Republicans spent more than $30 million in key states and were able to flip control of the General Assembly in states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Ohio, giving themselves a significant electoral advantage. By the time Republican legislators were drawing districts in their favor, other pieces were in place to ensure GOP success. President George W. Bush’s Supreme Court appointee, John Roberts was instrumental in weakening the Voting Rights Act through cases like Shelby County v. Holder, in which the Court removed the requirement that states get federal approval before changing their election laws.

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But gerrymandering was just one piece of the puzzle. Republicans further stacked the deck in their favor through voter suppression tactics largely formulated by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), with funding from Scaife and Koch.

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ALEC is not your run-of-the-mill lobbying group. It recruits candidates, drafts model legislation, pays for legislators to come to their conferences, where ALEC feeds them ideas and talking points for how to enact a conservative agenda. Through this model, ALEC has pushed voter ID laws to make it more difficult for younger voters, poorer voters, and people of color to cast their ballots. Years ago, courts could be counted on to strike down such laws as unconstitutional. But Republican executives have filled courts with conservative judges, thereby entrenching those law and fulfilling Powell’s overarching strategy.

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Then there’s the Federalist Society, founded in 1982and funded in large part by Scaife and Koch money. It was a breeding groundfor conservative academics in the mold of Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia to elevate their judicial careers.  Similar groups soon began to emerge, like  Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), which ran targeted campaigns to support conservative judges and attack more liberal nominees. The JCN spent more than $10 million to help get Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court.

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Right-wing think tanks and media outlets have strengthened the conservative operation even more. “Experts” from the Heritage Foundation appear on Fox News to advance conservative ideas and give them a façade of credibility.

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All in all, Frederickson expertly unpacks the the reason Republicans have successfully seized political power from Democrats: They understood that “power precedes policy and not the other way around.” In other words, while Democrats were trying to beat Republicans with superior policy proposals on a level playing-field, Republicans were changing the rules of the game.

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Fredrickson believes Democrats need to catch up, but in a more ethical fashion. They need to unrig the system. Rather than going back and forth with Republicans on gerrymandering, Democrats in power, she argues, should install nonpartisan redistricting commissions that cannot be manipulated by either party.

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She champions other critical solutions, like pushing for clean-money campaigns to diminish the impact of PACs and Super PACs that emerged after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, as well as instituting strong protections for voting rights, and making it easier to vote.

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Fredrickson also emphasizes that the left needs to match the Federalist Society’s pipeline of judges to get more progressives on the bench, through increased support for organizations like her own: the American Constitution Society. What’s more, Democrats need to put much more money and effort into winning state and local elections for legislators and judges alike

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Although Fredrickson proposes clear, essential solutions as an answer to Powell’s memo, The Democracy Fix is less clear about how to enact them. More specifically, it does not explain how an average person, who isn’t a wealthy donor or leader of a large organization, can realistically play a significant role in reversing the damage Republicans have done.

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For example, Fredrickson argues that progressive donors need to better coordinate funding to provide “a major and undivided focus on elections … on the courts, on core legislative priorities, and on an effective communications infrastructure.” She calls for a “robust analog” to the JCN. While all of those are worthy goal, there is little that even a die-hard political activist can do to advance them.

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At times, The Democracy Fix gives the impression that, even in a country of more than 300 million people, the struggle for political power is a chess match between a handful of elites. Perhaps that is truer than we would like to admit. Still, it is dispiriting to learn how a relatively small group of conservative funders and thinkers constructed the apparatuses that led to right-wing dominance. Equally disconcerting is the sense that only a small group of better organized liberal funders and thinkers can balance the scales.

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Nonetheless, Fredrickson’s central thesis holds strong. Democrats need their own Powell memo. More importantly, they need the will and infrastructure to follow through.

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David Edward Burke is the founder of Citizens Take Action, a nonprofit organization that advocates for political reform.

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Voting Rights Roundup: Virginia Dems advance redistricting reformanhttps://www.alternet.org/2020/02/voting-rights-roundup-virginia-dems-advance-redistricting-reform/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/cnn-exposes-controversial-trump-associates-reportedly-buying-rally-attendance-and-votes-for-cash

no lnx

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CNN exposes controversial Trump associates reportedly buying rally attendance and votes for cash

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Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story February 16, 2020

On Sunday morning, CNN took a deep dive into reports that groups allied with President Donald Trump are funneling cash to potential voters in the hopes that they will turn out in November in what is expected to be a close presidential election.

The report centers on Darrell Scott, a pastor from Cleveland who is a prominent ally of the president and has been running a possibly illegal program designed to win over black voters for the president that literally involves handing them envelopes stuffed with cash at mini-rallies.

“At the center of the controversy is a new charity called the Urban Revitalization Coalition led by Ohio Pastor Darrell Scott,” the report states which has, “Raised red flags saying the cash events may violate tax laws that bar nonprofits from engaging in political campaign activities and could jeopardize the group’s tax-exempt status. In an interview, Scott said he’s careful to follow the law., but groups like the NAACP accuse him of trying to buy support for President Trump.”

CNN shared clips from the rallies where the envelopes were handed out and, in one, a rally organizer can be seen exhorting attendees to attend the next rally by saying, “Come back in February when we give you $50,000.”

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You can watch the video below:

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truscott

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/were-slipping-further-into-fascism-as-trump-indulges-all-his-worst-instincts-with-the-help-of-his-toadies/

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no lnx

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We’re slipping further into fascism as Trump indulges all his worst instincts — with the help of his toadies

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President Donald J. Trump delivers remarks at the 2020 National Prayer Breakfast Thursday, Feb. 6, 2020, at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian

Written by Lucian K. Truscott IV / Salon February 15, 2020

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There will come a time when we look back on this week as the moment in our history when we finally understood that we have a man as president who is acting like a fascist dictator. Just look at the headlines from one day’s New York Times alone: “Alarm in Capital as Axes Swing in Growing Post-Acquittal Purge,” “Justice Dept. Acts to Ease Sentence for a Trump Ally.” If either one of those headlines had run on the front page of a major American newspaper before now, not to mention both of them at once, we would have believed as a people, as a citizenry, that we were facing a national crisis. But this week? Wednesday was just another day in Donald Trump’s America.

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The day before that, in what became known as the “Tuesday night massacre,” all four prosecutors in the case against Trump’s longtime friend and political bad boy Roger Stone had resigned in protest of the intervention by Trump and his attorney general, William Barr, to reduce the sentence recommended by the Department of Justice in Stone’s conviction for lying to congressional committees and tampering with witnesses.

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All of this followed closely the “Friday night massacre” of last week, when Trump fired two of the impeachment witnesses against him, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman of the National Security Council and Gordon Sondland, ambassador to the European Union.

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But two “massacres” in a row was just the beginning. By mid-week, Trump was suggesting that Army officials with court-martial authority over Vindman should “take a look at” punishing him for testifying at the impeachment hearing. On Thursday, the New York Times front page trumpeted, “U,S. Lawyers Fear Removal of a Guardrail: Sone Case Stirs Worry of What’s to Come.” And by Friday morning, a panel of legal pundits on MSNBC were worrying about what would happen when Trump didn’t merely step in to help allies like Stone but actually began prosecuting his political foes.

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Folks, let’s not mince words: This is the kind of stuff we read about happening in dictatorships like Russia and North Korea and Iran. And yes, it’s the kind of rule by strong-arm fiat that was practiced by Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany.

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Before this week, I would have thought it an exaggeration to compare Trump’s frequent rallies to the infamous Nuremberg rallies Hitler held during the1930s. No longer. Trump’s rallies are unnervingly close to those held in Nuremberg. The MAGA hat has become a kind of Trumpian Nazi  helmet. The denunciations of hated minorities are the same. As is his insane bellowing before a crowd screaming its slavish obeisance.

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Let’s just stop for a moment and consider the angry chants of “Lock her up,” first directed at Hillary Clinton, now at Nancy Pelosi.What do Trump’s cheering crowds want his Democratic opponents locked up for? Neither of those women has faced criminal charges, much less been convicted of any crime. Neither is even under investigation for corruption or alleged criminal behavior. But that doesn’t matter to Trump and his rally crowds. This stuff has been going on for so long, it’s clear that they actually do want them locked up. When Trump stands before his screaming fans, raising his arms and smiling, it’s obvious he does, too. To call for the imprisonment of political opponents without trial is not playing with rhetoric for effect. It’s not political gimmickry. It’s not cute. It’s not funny. It’s not clever. Let’s say out loud what it is: It’s pure fascism, plain and simple.

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The man who stands before those rallies and encourages such idolatry isn’t merely running for president. He is calling, directly and without apology, for the kind of obedience and loyalty demanded by dictators. He is commanding worship and submission. It must be why he attracts so completely the support of evangelical Christians. He truly is the false idol their Bible warned them against. They have fallen for him in the same way the most conspicuously devout worshipers commit sins. The inevitability of Trump and his evangelical masses is jaw-dropping, and yes, biblical.

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By the end of the week, we had the practically comic spectacle of Attorney General Barr scolding Trump publicly for his tweets in an interview with ABC News, saying they “make it impossible for me to do my job.” Within hours, Trump replied — by tweet, naturally enough — that he has the “legal right” to tell Barr what to do in a criminal case, “but I have so far chosen not to!”

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Which given the events of the rest of the week is a little bit like reassuring the “Lock her up” minions at his rallies, “Just wait.”

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It’s hard to put a finger on the worst thing Trump has done since taking office, but right up there is the complete destruction of the idea that the person in the Oval Office is the president of all the people. He isn’t. He doesn’t want to be. If you didn’t vote for him, if you’re not out there wearing a MAGA hat and screaming at his rallies, you’re a non-person. If your state didn’t go for him in the 2016 election, forget about it. Just ask California, or Puerto Rico, still waiting for federal assistance after natural disasters. Or ask New York, which Trump is now extorting like a domestic Ukraine, by denying New Yorkers access to the “Trusted Traveler” program unless the state “stop all of its unnecessary lawsuits & harrassment” [sic]....

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dirty tricks? mcconn see DT 2

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/mitch-mcconnell-mulling-kill-switch-that-will-allow-him-to-pull-plug-on-trump-impeachment-at-any-time-report/

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trumpista?!

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https://www.salon.com/2019/10/29/former-trump-aide-who-now-works-for-devin-nunes-reportedly-leaked-ukraine-whistleblowers-name/

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former Trump aide who now works for Devin Nunes reportedly leaked Ukraine whistleblower’s name

Derek Harvey, a former Trump adviser who now works for Nunes, outed the whistleblower who reported Trump's call

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IGOR DERYSH
OCTOBER 29, 2019 

Atop aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., leaked documents identifying the Ukraine whistleblower’s name in an attempt to out him, _{The Daily Beast}_ has reported.

Derek Harvey, a former adviser to President Trump who now works for Nunes on the House Intelligence Committee, handed notes to House Republicans identifying the whistleblower’s name ahead of closed-door depositions in the Trump impeachment inquiry in hopes of getting the name in the record of the proceedings, which Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff vowed to release, sources told The Daily Beast.

The allegation follows a Saturday _{Washington Post report}_ that Republican lawmakers and aides have “repeatedly” used the whistleblower’s purported name during the secret depositions. The Post reported that Harvey was “passing notes the entire time” one former Trump official was being questioned, suggesting that he was feeding Republicans questions.

Mark Zaid, an attorney for the whistleblower, warned that exposing his client’s identity would put him and his family at risk.

“Exposing the identity of the whistleblower and attacking our client would do nothing to undercut the validity of the complaint’s allegations,” Zaid told The Daily Beast. “What it would do, however, is put that individual and their family at risk of harm. Perhaps more important, it would deter future whistleblowers from coming forward in subsequent administrations, Democratic or Republican.”

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Far-right news outlets like OANN and the Gateway Pundit have identified an official they claim to be the whistleblower.

The whistleblower’s account has long since been _{corroborated by witnesses from Trump’s administration}_.

Harvey has also spread a false story claiming that the whistleblower contacted a Democratic staffer on the Intelligence Committee before submitting his _{complaint}_ about Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the subsequent cover-up. Harvey was apparently attempting to “discredit” the whistleblower as a partisan, a source told The Daily Beast.

Democrats grew so “alarmed” at Republican lawmakers’ “eagerness” to go after the Democratic staffer in question that they reached out to Republican leaders about the matter.

“We are aware of these unsupported and false attacks on a respected member of our staff,” a senior Intelligence Committee official told The Daily Beast. “It is completely inappropriate, and we have previously urged the Republican leadership to address this situation.”

This isn’t the first time Harvey has passed similar information to conservatives. Harvey compiled a set of documents that contained a list of State Department officials he suspected of being disloyal to Trump, _{The Daily Beast}_ reported in March. Harvey previously worked at the White House as a member of the National Security Council, where he washired by former national security adviser Mike Flynn during the latter's brief tenure. Harvey was later_{fired}_ by Flynn's successor, H.R. McMaster.

Harvey is not the only Nunes associate doing the White House’s dirty work. Politico _{reported}_ that Kash Patel, a former Nunes staffer who now works on the National Security Council, fed Trump damaging information about Ukraine.Patel got his White House position after _{leading Nunes’ effort}_ to discredit the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

Nunes himself has been using his time at the closed-door depositions trying to defend Trump by repeatedly citing theSteele dossier,_{The Daily Beast}_ reported earlier this month. The dossier is at the heart of the Republican conspiracy theory that operatives of the "deep state" had conspired to stop Trump in 2016. It was completely irrelevant to the topics discussed at the depositions, sources told the outlet, describing Nunes’ questioning as “nutso.”

On Monday, Nunes _{appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News prime-time show}_ to declare the impeachment inquiry, which has uncovered damning revelations from members of Trump’s administration, the “Ukraine hoax.”

Despite _{near-daily revelations from Trump staffers}_, Nunes claimed that the “hoax” is based on “conspiracy theories” and bragged that he won’t discuss them with reporters.

“These aren’t real reporters. They are assassins,” Nunes said. “They are assassins that are taking information from the Democrats on the Intelligence Committee and they are spreading it out there.”

Schiff, who replaced Nunes as chairman of the Intelligence Committee after Democrats won a House majority last year, hit out at Republicans for ignoring the _{mounting evidence against Trump}_ and for their criticisms of the investigation.

“It will be said of House Republicans,” _{Schiff tweeted}_, “When they found they lacked the courage to confront the most dangerous and unethical president in American history, they consoled themselves by attacking those who did.”

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Polling Experts Bash **Koch-Funded Electric Car Survey as 'Highly Biased'** and 'Highly Misleading'

desmog 1/20

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/russia-is-still-listening-democrats-take-aim-at-trump-after-report-uncovers-potential-new-election-help-from-the-kremlin/

no lnx

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‘Russia is still listening’: Democrats take aim at Trump after report uncovers potential new election help from the Kremlin

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Written by Cody Fenwick January 14, 2020

A new report for the New York Times about a Russian hack of the Ukrainian oil company Burisma is giving many a disturbing sense of history repeating itself.

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The company, which is at the center of the impeachment of President Donald Trump, was reportedly targeted by Russian military hackers. The Times explained:

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…experts say the timing and scale of the attacks suggest that the Russians could be searching for potentially embarrassing material on the Bidens — the same kind of information that Mr. Trump wanted from Ukraine when he pressed for an investigation of the Bidens and Burisma, setting off a chain of events that led to his impeachment.

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Former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter worked on the board of Burisma while his father was in office and conducting diplomacy with Ukraine, which raised concerns about conflicts of interest and influence peddling. However, there’s been no credible allegations or evidence put forward to indicate that the Bidens were engaged in wrongdoing, and the vice president’s efforts to root our corruption in Ukraine may have even cut against the interests of his son’s company. Nevertheless, Trump and other Republicans have tried to turn the matter — which was entirely overlooked until Biden became a formidable 2020 contender — into a massive scandal for the Democratic frontrunner.

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Now, it looks like Russia is helping in the effort. This is hardly a wild accusation, given the extensive evidence that Russia intervened in 2016 to get opposition research on Trump’s opponent and to otherwise manipulate the election.

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Democrats are casting a critical eye at the Trump administration following the publication of the report, noting that Trump has done far too little to curb Russian election interference and has, in fact, encouraged it.

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“We only learned of this hacking through the press,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is one member of the Gang of Eight that is traditionally kept in the loop on significant intelligence matters. “Congress must be briefed on what the administration knows about this attack and why the president doesn’t have a plan to protect our elections.”

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It’s not clear how much the administration knows about the cyberattack, though the Times’ report does indicate that one “American security official” was a source for information about the operation.

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“Russia is still listening, Russia is still attacking,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), who sits on the House Intelligence Committee.

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He was referencing Trump’s infamous proclamation during the 2016 campaign: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find [Hillary Clinton’s] 30,000 emails that are missing.” According to former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Russian hackers made their first attempts that same day as Trump’s request to obtain Clinton’s personal emails.

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So it seemed that Russia was listening then, and it seems like Russia is following Trump’s lead now by targeting Burisma, the company he is so personally interested in. And he’s made it clear that, if Russia or anyone else wanted to offer him dirt on an election opponent, he would welcome it.

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“I think I’d take it,” he told ABC News in June when asked about whether he’d accept opposition research from foreign governments. “I think you might want to listen, there isn’t anything wrong with listening.” Though he equivocated, he suggested he might not inform the FBI if presented with such an offer, despite the obvious counterintelligence risks and potential for criminal activity.

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“As far as I see it now, knowing that this president in the past, as Special Counsel Mueller said, invited, welcomed, and planned to benefit as a candidate from Russia’s help, if he does not condemn this, I and many other Americans will hold him as complicit in any attack on any candidate that seeks to benefit Donald Trump,” Swalwell told MSNBC.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/here-are-7-stunning-new-pieces-of-impeachment-evidence-just-released-by-the-house/

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no lnx

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Here are 7 stunning new pieces of impeachment evidence just released by the House

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Written by Cody Fenwick January 14, 2020

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House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, dropped a new slate of deeply revealing evidence Tuesday night in the impeachment case against President Donald Trump.

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Though the evidence doesn’t change the basic narrative of the case against Trump — that he and a group of his cronies used the administration in various ways to put pressure on Ukraine to announce investigations into his political rivals as the 2020 campaign heated up — it adds more color and detail to the story and should make the president’s culpability in a disturbing plot even harder for his Republican allies to deny.

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Here are seven stunning new facts the new evidence revealed:

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1. Rudy Giuliani told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky he’s working with Trump’s “knowledge and consent.”

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Writing to Zelensky on May 10, when Giuliani was trying to plan a trip to Ukraine to pressure the country into investigating former Vice President Joe Biden, the president’s lawyer wrote that he is acting with Trump’s “knowledge and consent.” This claim fundamentally undercuts the argument some defenders of the president have been inclined to make that Giuliani was operating as a rogue agent.

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2. In the same letter, Giuliani says he is acting in his “capacity as personal counsel to President Trump.”

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“I am private counsel to President Donald J. Trump,” Giuliani wrote. “Just to be precise, I represent him as a private citizen, not as President of the United States.”

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This confirms, as many have argued repeatedly, that Giuliani’s efforts in Ukraine were clearly for Trump’s personal benefit, not the country’s. That’s part of the reason why it was so grossly wrong, and indeed impeachable, for him to use the powers of his office to induce Ukraine to announce an investigation into Biden and other political opponents.

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Kyle Cheney

@kyledcheney

· 20h

Replying to @kyledcheney

The House released 50 pages of the evidence here, but it’s just a portion of the materials: https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/20200114_-hpsci_transmittal_letter_to_hjc_-new_evidence_attachment.pdf …https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/20200114_-_parnas_excerpts_translated_slide_deck.pdf …

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Kyle Cheney

@kyledcheney

AMONG THE EVIDENCE: A letter from Giuliani to Zelensky seeking a May meeting which he says has Trump's "knowledge and consent."

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3. Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow gave John Dowd, another attorney, permission from the president to defend Igor Furman and Lev Parnas, two of Giuliani’s associates who have been indicted on campaign finance charges, in part, for their Ukraine-related work.

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Trump has claimed he doesn’t know who Furman and Parnas are, even though he has appeared in pictures with them. This evidence makes it harder to believe this is true and raises more questions about why he was trying to conceal his dealings with them.

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4. Parnas wrote notes on Ritz-Carlton stationery suggesting he was directly involved with the Ukraine scheme.

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“get Zalensky [sic] to Annonce [sic] that the Biden case will Be Investigated,” he wrote.

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In a letter to House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler, Schiff said Parnas’ lawyer confirmed that he wrote the note.

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5. Parnas texted with a man named Robert F. Hyde, believed to be the same person who is running for a House seat in Connecticut, about removing former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.

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Schiff explained:

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In response to some articles, tweets, and videos accusing the Ambassador of being disloyal to President Trump, Mr. Hyde wrote “Wow. Can’t believe Trumo [sic] hasn’t fired this bitch. I’ll get right in that. Mr. Hyde then sent a series of text messages suggesting that he had Ambassador Yovanovitch under physical surveillance in Kyiv and that “They are willing to help if we/you would like a price.”

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6. Parnas was also communicating with Ukrainian officials which, Schiff argued, demonstrated “that Mr.

Parnas served as a direct channel between President Trump’s agent, Mr. Giuliani, and individuals close to President Volodymyr Zelensky.”

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Parnas tried to set up a meeting for Giuliani and Zelenksy in May 2019 via senior aides to the Ukrainian president, the texts show.

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7. Giuliani tried to get a visa approved for a disgraced former Ukrainian prosecutor.

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Parnas told Giuliani that formerProsecutor General Viktor Shokin, who has been feeding the unsupported allegations against Biden, was denied a visa to the U.S. Giuliani said in response: “I can revive it,” despite having no formal role at the State Department.

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Cody Fenwick is a senior editor at AlterNet. He writes about politics, media and science. Follow him on Twitter @codytfenwick.

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Wylie covers plenty of ground, explaining in illuminating and often scary detail how Cambridge Analytica exploited the data to create Facebook pages that would needle “neurotic, conspiratorial citizens,” propagating an outraged solidarity.(The efficacy of these techniques is still a matter of debate.)He describes another project that the company called “voter disengagement” — that is, suppression of African-American voters. Republican clients, worried that demographic changes were spelling electoral trouble for them, asked Cambridge Analytica to find “ways to confuse, demotivate and disempower people of color.”

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1219 an

no lnx

Listen: Top Trump advisor admits GOP ‘traditionally’ suppresses votes

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement December 21, 2019

A bombshell audio recording reveals a top Trump campaign official admitting that the Republican Party regularly suppress ES the vote and he is promising a much more aggressive and “better-funded” program for the 2020 election after relaxed Election Day rules.

“Traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places,” the senior political adviser and senior counsel to the Trump re-election campaign, Justin Clark, says in the audio, according to the Associated Press. “Let’s start protecting our voters. We know where they are. … Let’s start playing offense a little bit. That’s what you’re going to see in 2020. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.”

Clark, who made the remarks during an event with influential Republicans, “said he was referring to false accusations that the GOP engages in voter suppression,” the AP notes.

“Neither I nor anyone I know or work with would condone anyone’s vote being threatened or diluted and our efforts will be focused on preventing just that,” Clark said.

The audio offers other insights.

“We were able to change state party rules in 37 states around the country that are not only streamline [sic] the process but really beneficial to the President,” Clark says (below).

Former Georgia House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams, who lost her gubernatorial election campaign by 50,000 votes after the Georgia Secretary of State, her opponent, kicked 670,000 voters off the rolls, weighs in:

Ahem. ?? Voter suppression isn’t a bug; it’s a feature for the GOP. Wisconsin, Georgia, Ohio, Michigan, Florida…you name the competitive state, and I can tell you their plan. They’re just finally saying the quiet part out loud. @fairfightaction #FightVoterSuppression https://t.co/7gSU0QkIoe

— Stacey Abrams (@staceyabrams) December 20, 2019

Clark’s remarks begin at the 5:00 minute mark. At the 7:30 mark Clark begins to brag about how they have been able to change state rules to make them better for President Trump.

Listen:

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also chaffetz

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_{}__{_{}_}_:{Fox & Friends promotes Republican fundraiser page for “conservative squad”:(style="text-align:left;box-sizing:border-box"):}:

12/12/19 10:04 AM EST

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