2020Election

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see 2020 tag

expand to cover year in gen'l

see big lie coup

see gerry2

see voter suppress 3

micro-target data

gotv

vote by mail

see stop the steal

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stats results

Behind Biden’s 2020 Victory | Pew Research Center

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5094602-a-landslide-just-0-15-percent-of-all-voters-determined-trumps-2024-victory

How close, exactly, was the 2024 election?

President Donald Trump and his allies have called his win a “landslide” and “blowout.” From their telling, Trump’s “sweeping,” “historic” victory has given MAGA a “powerful mandate” to govern.

:{Some commentators have pushed back, noting, for instance, that Trump’s 1.5 percent popular vote victory is one of the smallest ever — just a fraction of Lyndon B. Johnson’s 22.6 percent landslide win in 1964.

Trump failed to secure a majority of the popular vote, at 49.7 percent, unlike George W. Bush in 2004 (50.3 percent), Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 (52.9 percent and 51 percent) and Joe Bidenin 2020 (51.3 percent). And while Trump won all seven swing states, his 312 electoral votes were only a handful more than Biden’s 306 in 2020 — and far less than Obama’s 365 in 2008 or Ronald Reagan’s 525 in 1984.}:

These rebuttals are all true. Yet they obscure a deeper point. If the size of your mandate is the size of your win, neither popular vote margins nor electoral vote totals are the best place to look.

Take first the national popular vote margin. This number tells us how divided voters are across the country, but it is simply not how we pick winners under the Electoral College system. In the starkest example, Hillary Clintonwon nearly 3 million more votes than Trump did in 2016, an apparent Democratic blowout — except for the fact that she lost.

The electoral vote total isn’t much more illuminating. While electoral votes do decide who becomes the president, the winning candidate’s margin is easily inflated by most states’ winner-take-all rules. In 2000, had Gore gained an additional 538 votes out of the 6 million cast in Florida, he would have won 25 more electoral votes (and the election).

Ultimately, both measures miss the heart of what it means for an election to be “close”: How far was the nation from a different election outcome?

To precisely answer that question, we developed a new measure that we call the Determinative Popular Vote (DPV). As we describe in a forthcoming article in Election Law Journal, DPV is the minimum number of votes — placed across the right states — that a candidate would have needed to change the Electoral College outcome.

If you’re a political junkie, you probably saw something like DPV discussed informally after the past few elections. In 2016, for example, despite winning the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, Clinton lost to Trump in the Electoral College. Had Clinton won just 77,000 more votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, she would have won the Electoral College. (In fact, had Clinton flipped one district in Nebraska instead of Wisconsin, a mere 62,000 voters would have also thrown the contest to the House of Representatives).

In 2020, though Biden won by an even bigger popular vote margin of 7 million, just 43,000 additional Trump votes across Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin would have tied the Electoral College and chaotically thrown the election to the House.

Those tiny fractions of voters — 0.04 percent in 2016 and 0.03 percent in 2020 — determined the election, irrespective of millions of others. In 2016, these determinative voters broke against the popular vote winner, choosing Trump; in 2020, they broke with the popular vote winner, choosing Biden. Everyone’s vote counted, but the real outcome came down to the choices of just a sliver of swing state voters.

A similar story happened in 2024. Trump defeated Harris 312 to 226 in the Electoral College and won 2.3 million more popular votes. But had Harris won Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — which Trump won by just 230,000 votes — then she would have secured exactly the 270 electoral votes needed for the win.

A mere 0.15 percent of voters nationwide was the difference between Trump’s second term and Harris’s first. Is that really a mandate?

The point is not a partisan one. As DPV reveals, Biden’s win in 2020 was closer than Trump’s in 2024, even as Biden’s popular vote margin more than tripled Trump’s. That is the sober clarity only a measure like DPV can provide, since it accounts for where votes are cast — which, for better or worse, is pertinent in our Electoral College system.

Looking at DPV historically further reveals the relative closeness of the 2024 election. In our article, we calculated DPV for every presidential election since 1836. 2024 is the 13th closest among these 48 elections. If the 2024 election was a landslide, then so too must be the other 35.

Under the Electoral College — where a handful of swing states are central to the outcome — a small number of fortunate, “determinative” voters ultimately pick the president. Politicians will always have an incentive to overstate their margin of victory. Determinative Popular Vote now makes it harder to do so, as it puts into plain sight how close we actually were to a different election outcome.

So yes, Trump clearly won the 2024 election. But it was no blowout — and he has no major mandate.

Mark Haidar is an associate at Elias Law Group. Aidan Calvelli is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University.}:

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an 7 24

on Thursday, in the midst of the July 4th holiday, a former Donald Trump staffer who worked on his 2016 campaign went public with a series of texts she allegedly made with Trump attorney Jenna Ellis asking about secret lawsuit settlements for accusations of "sexual harassment and gender discrimination" within the campaign.

In replies to those texts from attorney A.J. Delgado, who posted them on-line, Ellis appears to reply, "Yes off record — Boris The campaign settled multiple lawsuits. Have your investigator contact [campaign staffer] Michael Glassner. I will of course tell you the truth."

As the Daily Beast's Josh Fiallo wrote, the "bombshell" texts were included in a filing by Delgado as part of a lawsuit she filed against Trump campaign adviser and he supervisor, Jason Miller, whom she has accused of raping her while they were having an affair.

The video player is currently playing an ad.

According to the report, "As part of that lawsuit, Delgado, a lawyer who’s representing herself, filed a motion Thursday that included a text thread she claims to be between her and Jenna Ellis, another ex-Trump staffer who is a co-defendant in his election subversion case in Georgia."

Ellis pleaded guilty in the Georgia case.

The report adds that the Boris in question appears to be Boris Epshteyn, who has been at Trump's side during his courtroom appearances.

The report states, "The Daily Beast has not independently verified the authenticity of the texts, and neither Ellis, Delgado or a Trump representative responded to questions messaged and emailed on Thursday night. It’s the second time the texts were submitted as evidence by Delgado, after the Trump campaign’s lawyers asked her to re-submit them without names redacted and an offer to mark them as “confidential” appeared to be ignored."

Fiallo added, "The texts did not specify what sort of lawsuits “Boris” may have faced, but Epshteyn was accused of repeatedly groping two sisters at an Arizona bar in 2021 until a bouncer and cops intervened to remove him. "

You can read more here.

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trump dark money 2019

at the outset of Donald Trump’s bid for the White House, he blasted super PACs on Twitter as “scams” and “unfair” and disavowed such outside help.

This story also appeared in PRI

Then he changed his tune. By the end of his 2016 campaign, more than a hundred super PACs and similar groups had spent more than $72 million on his behalf, helping him defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Trump’s army of organized support has expanded since then, with a dozen or so major nonprofits and super PACs pushing his policy platform and priming the public for Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign. Many of the groups feature former Trump staffers or campaign aides. Trump and his surrogates frequently appear at events hosted by some of the ventures.

Other pro-Trump groups, however, spent four, five or even six figures paying their own leaders and employees, filling the coffers of their consulting firms instead of spending money to boost Trump’s political future.

The Center for Public Integrity has this month analyzed the activities of each of these organizations. Read on to make sense of what political committees, super PACs and nonprofit groups are actively in orbit around Trump’s own 2020 re-election committee:

**America First Action Inc.**

Type: super PAC

A group of former Trump aides designed the super PAC America First Action and a nonprofit arm, America First Policies, to push Trump’s policy platform. Even Vice President Mike Pence traveled across the country to attend America First events and help raise money. Dallas investor Doug Deason and Roy Bailey, a partner at Giuliani Partners LLC, handled the finances for the two groups. Former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr., is the groups’ vice chairwoman. The super PAC collected $39 million from 2017 through 2018. It spent $29.2 million on political messages during that time, mostly attacking Democrats such as former Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Sen. Jon Tester of Montana.

Donald Trump Jr., and Kimberly Guilfoyle hold hands during a rally for Republican U.S. Senate candidate John James in Pontiac, Mich., on Oct. 17, 2018. (AP/Paul Sancya)

America First Action attracted multimillion dollar contributions from real estate developer Geoffrey Palmer, philanthropist Cherna Moskowitz, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and Adelson’s wife, philanthropist Miriam Adelson. Trump last year awarded Miriam Adelson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the nation’s highest civilian honors.

The group has also hired and paid firms associated with former Trump employees or backers. They include: Trump’s counselor Kellyanne Conway’s former firm, the Polling Company ($476,000); former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski’s firm, Green Monster Consulting ($75,000); former Milwaukee sheriff and Trump booster David A. Clarke’s firm, DAC Enterprises ($92,000); current Trump campaign manager, Brad Parscale, and his firm Parscale Strategy LLC ($184,000); and Trump campaign aide Katrina Pierson’s Pierson Consulting Group ($60,000). The super PAC also paid former White House spokesman Sean Spicer’s firm RIGWIL LLC $46,000. Spicer is now the super PAC’s senior adviser and spokesman. Additionally, the group chose to frequent Trump properties, paying about $415,000 to the Trump International Hotel and restaurants inside.

America First Policies

Type: nonprofit

High turnover has plagued this nonprofit, which has chosen not to disclose its donors. Rebekah Mercer, daughter of conservative megadonor Robert Mercer, considered funding the group, but left for another nonprofit called Making America Great. At its outset in January 2017, this 501(c)(4) “social welfare” nonprofit hosted big names in Trump’s orbit. Among the co-founders and initial staffers:

Parscale, Trump’s current campaign manager
former deputy White House Chief of Staff Katie Walsh, who left to return to the Republican National Committee as a senior adviser
adviser Nick Ayers, who left to become Pence’s chief of staff
former Pence aide Marty Obst
Pierson, who is now a senior adviser for Trump’s 2020 campaign

Brad Parscale, campaign manager for President Donald Trump, waits for his arrival during a campaign rally for Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, at Houston Toyota Center on Oct. 22, 2018, in Houston. (AP/Evan Vucci)

Trump’s former deputy campaign manager, Rick Gates, also co-founded the group. But he left in March 2017 and has since been indicted and has pleaded guilty, in a matter unrelated to America First Policies, to making a false statement to prosecutors and violating foreign lobbying laws.

The nonprofit and its sister super PAC were chaired by Thomas Hicks Jr., now co-chair of the Republican National Committee. Hicks was a national finance chairman for Trump’s 2016 campaign. The nonprofit’s 2017 board of directors includes Dallas financial executive Bailey, oil billionaire Harold Hamm and Douglas Ammerman, a retired partner at auditor KPMG LLP, according to the group’s latest tax filing. The nonprofit’s president is Brian Walsh, former president of conservative outside groups American Action Network and the Congressional Leadership Fund.

Walsh declined to speak with the Center for Public Integrity. Communications director Erin Montgomery said the group is “not prepared to share our 2020 plans publicly at this time.”

Because it’s a nonprofit, the organization isn’t required by law to disclose its donors. But a review of Internal Revenue Service filings indicate Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America gave America First Policies $2.5 million, tobacco company Reynolds America donated $1.4 million, Southern Company donated $1 million, CVS Health gave $500,000 and Dow Chemical gave $100,000. In total, the nonprofit raised $22.2 million in 2017.

The group paid for advertising, telephone calls and “grassroots advocacy” to support repealing the Affordable Care Act and boost Trump’s’ Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, immigration reform and confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. The nonprofit’s 2017 tax filing shows it also paid $2.8 million to Parscale’s company for “media advocacy services” and $160,000 to Obst’s firm for “consulting.”

Committee to Defend the President

Type: hybrid super PAC

Formerly named “Stop Hillary PAC,” the Committee to Defend the President spent $3.4 million during the 2016 election on anti-Hillary Clinton ads, using messaging centered around the 2012 Benghazi attacks, in which the U.S. ambassador to Libya was killed. The group raised $6.9 million from 2015 to 2016, and $8.9 million during the 2018 election. It spent $4.4 million on Trump-positive messages. The super PAC also attacked Democrats such as failed Senate candidate Phil Bredesen in Tennessee and Sen. Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin. The group has $720,000 in the bank as of Dec. 31.

“The Committee is focused on defending President Trump — and when necessary his allies in Congress and elsewhere, as it did to great effect in Tennessee last cycle where we spent over $1 million to elect Marsha Blackburn [to the U.S. Senate in Tennessee],” said Ted Harvey, the group’s chairman and a former Colorado state senator. “Our efforts will take whatever form makes the most sense at the time…”

In April 2018, the hybrid PAC sued the FEC, alleging the agency failed to act on a complaint the PAC filed against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. The Committee to Defend the President charged that Clinton violated federal law by funneling $80 million in contributions through state parties. The case is pending.

Great America PAC

Type: hybrid super PAC

Great America PAC, which aims to re-elect Trump and pro-Trump candidates, probably won’t involve itself in the Democratic primary.

“We’re fine letting the Democrats publicly out-crazy one another for the next year before we tar whatever looney tune comes out of their ‘process,’” Great America PAC attorney Dan Backer said in an email.

Ed Rollins, President Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager, is chairman of this hybrid super PAC, formerly known as TrumPAC. The super PAC’s executive director, Brent Lowder, is also the president of Apex Strategy Group, which Great America PAC paid $492,429 in 2016 and $150,000 in 2018. Rollins received a total of $240,000 in 2017 and 2018 for “payroll and strategic consulting.”

Eric Beach, the finance chairman for Newt Gingrich’s 2012 presidential campaign, was a former co-chairman of Great America PAC. Beach is a managing partner at Frontline Strategies & Media, a public affairs firm that Great America PAC paid more than $5 million from 2015 to 2018, more than any other committee paid it during both cycles.

The committee raised close to $29 million during the 2016 election, spending almost $24 million of those funds on pro-Trump ads. From 2017 to 2018, the group spent $5.4 million to support Trump. It also spent a few hundred thousand dollars backing Republicans running in U.S. House and U.S. Senate races, including Roy Moore in Alabama. Its top donors from 2016 include Marvel Entertainment CEO Isaac Perlmutter ($5 million), now-deceased Houston Texans owner Robert McNair ($2 million) and banker Andy Beal ($2 million). In 2018, megadonors such as Robert Mercer of Renaissance Technologies ($400,000) and Richard Uihlein of U-Line Corp ($100,000) topped its list of contributors.

Attorney Dan Backer (right) speaks with Shaun McCutcheon (left) at a Federal Election Commission meeting in February 2015. (Center for Public Integrity/Dave Levinthal)

“Our ability to be nimble and adapt is what made Great America PAC the largest pro-Trump group in 2016, and his biggest champion since,” Backer wrote.

The super PAC has been riddled with scandals.

In May 2016, Jesse Benton, a former leader of the group, was found guilty on campaign finance charges in connection with his 2012 work on Republican Ron Paul’s presidential campaign. A federal appeals court upheld the charges, which preceded Benton’s work with Great America PAC, in May 2018. Before that, *The Telegraph* published an investigation in which reporters posed as consultants for a Chinese national wanting to donate to pro-Trump groups, which is illegal. Benton allegedly said he was a consultant for Great America PAC and apparently offered the reporters a way to disguise the foreign donation to the group. Backer, the super PAC’s lawyer, denied the super PAC engaged in any activity of the sort. Benton left the group in May 2016.

Also in 2016, the super PAC mistakenly published donor information not normally made public, such as email addresses and cell phone numbers for hundreds of its backers. A month later, it erroneously published credit card numbers for 49 donors. The super PAC offered free security monitoring to the donors and said it changed its data collection and compliance processes.

Great America Alliance

Type: nonprofit

The nonprofit Great America Alliance shares staff and resources with its partner super PAC, Great America PAC. Tomi Lahren, the conservative political commentator, was a senior aide to the nonprofit before leaving it for a job at Fox News. Andy Surabian — a former Steve Bannon aide and war room director of Trump’s 2016 campaign — also was a senior adviser. The nonprofit reported it spent $1.5 million in 2017 to educate voters about health care, taxes, national security and trade. It spent $291,000 on political campaign activity, according to a filing with the IRS.

Tomi Lahren seen at Politicon 2016 at The Pasadena Convention Center on June 25, 2016, in Pasadena, Calif. (Invision via AP/Colin Young-Wolff)

News reports from 2017 stated Gingrich and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani were in talks to become co-chairmen of Great American Alliance, but Backer, the group’s attorney, said that did not happen. The nonprofit’s 2017 tax filing lists Brent Lowder as president, Beach as executive director and Christina Needham, a senior associate attorney at political.law, founded by Backer, as director.

The 501(c)(4) “social welfare” nonprofit raised $3.5 million in 2017, according to the latest tax filing available. It also paid $955,000 that year to public affairs firm Frontline Strategies, which is owned by Eric Beach, a former director of the group now “retained to provide management services.” It also paid $369,000 to Campaign Solutions, the political consulting firm of the Committee to Defend the President’s Ted Harvey, and $123,000 to Apex Strategy Group, owned by the nonprofit’s president Brent Lowder.

Future45

Type: super PAC

Future45 is a super PAC heavily funded by the deep-pocketed Ricketts family, which owns the Chicago Cubs baseball team. Future45 brought in $6.3 million in 2018, including from other megadonors such as philanthropist Helen Schwab, Elliott Management Group’s Paul Singer and Citadel LLC’s Kenneth Griffin. The super PAC poured $5.8 million into 2018 midterm messaging attacks on Democrats, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rep. Maxine Waters of California, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

The group is led by Brian Baker, longtime political adviser to the Ricketts family.

“The Democrats tried to nationalize the midterms around Trump, and we tried to push back against that, and show the extreme elements in the Democratic Party,” Baker told the Center for Public Integrity. “Little did I imagine the conversation would stay the same but the characters would change. It used to be all about Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters but nowadays it’s all about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.”

45Committee

Type: nonprofit

The super PAC Future45 also has a sister “social welfare” nonprofit, 45Committee, which raised about $48.6 million from 2015 to 2017, according to federal tax filings.

“In 2017 and 2018, we were one of the leading groups pushing the tax reform bill, and really fought the nomination fight for the high profile nominees like the Supreme Court or Secretary of State,” said Baker, the president. 45Committee has not publicly reported its donors and is under no legal obligation to do so. But other tax filings show it received grants from Wellspring Committee ($750,000), the Judicial Crisis Network ($250,000) and Ricketts-connected Ending Spending ($75,000). That’s only a fraction of what’s in its bank account: the nonprofit’s tax filings show it received four donations in 2017 that were each worth $7.5 million.

45Committee distributed its own grants in 2017 to the Mercer-funded Secure America Now ($2 million), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ($350,000), Judicial Crisis Network ($200,000) and the NRA Institute for Legislative Action ($70,000), among others. The group reported spending $21.6 million on political campaigning and $18.9 million on issue ads.

45Committee’s latest tax filing shows Baker became chairman and president after conservative strategist Brian Walsh left the role in September 2016. CNBC contributor and former George W. Bush aide Sara Fagen is on the board of directors, as well as Randy Scheunemann, a lobbyist for foreign governments at Orion Strategies, and Rob Collins, a lobbyist and strategist who helped push Neil Gorsuch’s appointment to the Supreme Court.

Rebuilding America Now

Type: super PAC

This super PAC was started by California financier Tom Barrack, a Trump confidant and chairman of the president’s inaugural committee. It spent more than $21 million during the 2016 election attacking Democrat Hillary Clinton and boosting Trump, although it’s been mostly dormant since. Now-U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., led the committee.

Tom Barrack, CEO of Colony Capital, takes the stage to speak during the final day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on July 21, 2016. (AP/Mark J. Terrill)

The group’s past activity has caught Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s attention. Prosecutors note former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was “instrumental” in setting up Rebuilding America Now at the same time he was Trump’s campaign chairman, an apparent violation of federal law. (The super PAC also began paying Ken McKay, a former Trump campaign adviser, days after he left Trump’s campaign, seemingly violating the 90-day cooling-off-period rule.) The group also hired Manafort’s longtime associate, Laurance Gay, as chairman. During the 2016 cycle, the super PAC paid Gay $330,000 and McKay $295,000 for “political strategy consulting.”

A spokesman for McKay and Gay told Reuters they were Trump volunteers who didn’t “possess strategic information,” so they said the cooling-off-period rule didn’t apply.

In court filings, prosecutors say Manafort lied to investigators about a $125,000 wire transfer in 2017 to the super PAC in order to cover a debt, *The New York Times* reported. A federal judge ruled in February 2019 that despite agreeing to cooperate, Manafort lied to Mueller’s team during its Russian interference investigation. He will be sentenced in March.

In 2016, the super PAC accepted six-figure donations from megadonors such as Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, real estate developer Palmer and former WWE wrestling executive Linda McMahon, now Trump’s Small Business Administration administrator. It also took $100,000 from Anthony Scaramucci, later Trump’s communications director for one week; $200,000 from coal outfit Murray Energy and $225,000 from private prison operator GEO Corrections. (The nonpartisan watchdog Campaign Legal Center filed an FEC complaint accusing GEO of violating the federal contractor donation ban. The case is pending.)

“Although GEO Corrections Holdings Inc., the company that made the donation, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the GEO Group, it is a non-contracting legal entity and has no contracts with any governmental agency,” company spokesperson Pablo Paez told VICE News in a statement, saying the donations to Rebuilding America Now are “compliant with all applicable federal election laws.”

In 2018, Rebuilding America Now received $30,000 in donations, with $25,000 coming from Florida real estate developer E. Llwyd Ecclestone Jr.

From 2017 to 2018, Rebuilding America Now spent most of its $2 million on paying Gay ($775,000) and McCay ($210,000) for consulting fees. It also used its money to fund travel and high-priced dinners — at places such as The Trump International Hotel in Washington and BLT Prime in Washington. It reported no money during that time on overtly pro-Trump communications.

Great America Committee

Type: leadership PAC

Great America Committee is the first leadership PAC that a vice president created while in office.

Pence formed Great America Committee — not to be confused with the two other pro-Trump groups starting with “Great America” — in May 2017 to help boost other Republicans. The move was so unusual that many believed Pence was setting himself up for his own presidential run. That didn’t happen — instead, Pence doled out $886,000 in 2018 to candidates such as Rep. Andy Barr, R-Ky. and Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn. The leadership PAC also gave $5,400 to Trump’s presidential campaign.

In this March 15, 2016 file photo, Donald Trump’s then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski (left) listens as Trump speaks in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP/Gerald Herbert, File)

The PAC raised $4.1 million in 2018. Since forming, it spent $70,000 for consulting services at Green Monster Consulting, the firm of Trump’s former campaign manager, Lewandowski. It also paid $332,000 to MO Strategies, the firm of Obst, Pence’s senior political adviser, who was also the senior adviser of pro-Trump nonprofit America First Policies and executive director at the Trump super PAC Great America Committee. The PAC paid the firm for “finance and political strategy consulting.”

America Fighting Back

Type: hybrid super PAC

“We must protect Donald Trump and his agenda from impeachment,” declares America Fighting Back, led by former 2012 Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain.

Cain appears in an America Fighting Back ad in which he says Democrats’ “mission is to remake America and implement their socialist agenda.” The group asks viewers to call a 1-800 number to pledge their support for President Trump. The phone number directs a dialer to a recording of Cain bashing the “phony Russian delusion witch hunt.”

Businessman Herman Cain, who ran for president as a Republican in 2012, appears in an advertisement for his America Fighting Back PAC committee. (Screenshot)

Cain then asks callers to make a contribution. America Fighting Back, formed in July 2018, raised $347,000 during 2018, accepting donations from Citizens United founder and America Fighting Back co-chair Floyd Brown ($45,000) and the family trust of Edward Robson, a retirement community developer ($10,000). It reported spending $171,500 on pro-Trump messaging, although some of that messaging — such as Cain’s advertisement — serves the dual purpose of soliciting money for America Fighting Back itself.

The PAC’s executive director is Lori Klein Corbin, former Arizona state senator and national committeewoman for the state. Its chief strategist is Todd Cefaratti, a former 2012 campaign aide to Newt Gingrich.

Make America Number 1

Type: super PAC

Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, Make America Number 1 has yet to make the splash it did in 2016. Previously a Ted Cruz-backing super PAC named Keep the Promise I, the group rebranded to Make America Number 1 and spent $4.4 million attacking Clinton. Before Citizens United Chairman David Bossie left in 2016 to work as Trump’s deputy campaign manager, he ran the super PAC. Megadonor Rebekah Mercer took over managing the group.

Robert Mercer with his wife Diana Mercer (right) and daughter Rebekah Mercer (left) at the 2014 World Science Festival Gala. (Sylvain Gaboury/PMC, ©Patrick McMullan)

It was primarily funded by Robert Mercer, Marcus and Clarium Capital’s Peter Thiel, as well as Erik Prince, brother of Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and the founder of the controversial security firm formerly known as Blackwater USA. The super PAC also paid $5.7 million to Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct data firm that harvested Facebook users’ data without permission.

During the 2018 midterms, the super PAC raised only $807 in small donations, and spent $379,000 mostly on legal expenses and upkeep. The super PAC starts 2019 with $699,000 in the bank.

* * * * *

Other political groups and nonprofits that don’t primarily advocate for Trump have nevertheless been instrumental in advocating for his election. They include:

National Rifle Association

Type: nonprofits, PAC, super PAC

The National Rifle Association spent about $30.3 million to directly boost Trump during the 2016 presidential election, more than any other group that cycle.

The association may have gone a step further: An investigation by *The Trace* found that Trump’s campaign and the NRA used the same consultants to air TV ads, an apparent violation of the law that prohibits campaigns and outside groups from coordinating.

What’s more, federal investigators are exploring ties between NRA officials and the Russian government. Russian national Maria Butina pleaded guilty in December 2018 to conspiring to illegally act as a foreign agent. She admitted trying infiltrate the NRA and convince its members that Russia is a friend, not an enemy, to the U.S. The effort was apparently backed by at least one Russian official, Alexander Torshin, a former deputy governor of the Russian Central Bank. Russian President Vladimir Putin may have even approved the effort, according to a U.S. intelligence report reviewed by *The Daily Beast*. NRA officials did not respond to the Center for Public Integrity’s numerous requests for comment.

Citizens United

Type: nonprofit

The organization behind the pivotal campaign finance U.S. Supreme Court case, Citizens United v. FEC, Citizens United’s super PAC spent $182,000 on pro-Trump messages in 2016.

Donald Trump, left, reacts to the crowd as he shakes hands with co-host David Bossie at the Freedom Summit, Saturday, May 9, 2015, in Greenville, S.C. (AP/Rainier Ehrhardt)

People affiliated with the group have had a hand in other organizations backing Trump: Its president, Bossie, was Trump’s 2016 deputy campaign manager, while founder Brown is co-chairman of the super PAC America Fighting Back. Citizens United hasn’t reported any pro-Trump expenditures since he was elected.

“I am an outspoken supporter of this president and will help him in whatever way is most beneficial to his re-election,” Bossie told the Center for Public Integrity.

Committee to Restore America’s Greatness

Type: super PAC

Two months after Roger Stone exited the Trump presidential campaign, the notorious political operative formed a pro-Trump super PAC in October 2015.

The group stayed in business a little more than a year, raising $587,000 yet only spending $16,000 on pro-Trump billboards. The group’s largest donor was film and television producer John Powers Middleton.

Roger Stone leaves federal court on Feb. 1, 2019, in Washington. Stone appeared for a status conference just three days after he pleaded not guilty to felony charges of witness tampering, obstruction and false statements. (AP/Andrew Harnik)

Most of the PAC’s spending covered legal fees, consulting and travel. As the Center for Responsive Politics reported, Special Counsel Mueller subpoenaed a few vendors of the PAC, including John Kakanis, whose firm was paid $137,000 for “voter fraud research”; social media specialist Jason Sullivan; and Andrew Miller, who Stone paid $4,000 for consulting.

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an 6 22

U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has released a new bulletin to raise awareness about the possibility of election misinformation, warning the U.S. could see a rise in violence in the summer months and upcoming midterm election season, thanks in part to the Supreme Court's potential decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

On Tuesday, June 7, the National Terrorism Advisory System released its bulletin as it explained that "threat actors" are on the rise, according to CNN.

"Threat actors have recently mobilized to violence due to factors such as personal grievances, reactions to current events, and adherence to violent extremist ideologies, including racially or ethnically motivated or anti-government/antiauthority violent extremism," a National Terrorism Advisory System bulletin issued Tuesday said."

One DHS senior official also expressed concern the political events set to transpire later this year as many are still displeased with the outcome of the 2020 presidential election which was shrouded by disturbing claims of misinformation.

"One of the key upcoming events that we are worried about are first and foremost the mid-term elections," said the DHS official.

Per CNN, the DHS official also noted thatindividuals who still feel slighted by the outcome of the 2020 presidential election "may feel compelled to respond to the election season using violence."

"As the United States enters mid-term election season this year, we assess that calls for violence by domestic violent extremists directed at democratic institutions, political candidates, party offices, election events, and election workers will likely increase," the bulletin, obtained by CNN, said.

The bulletin also highlighted concerns about the controversy surrounding abortion rights and the U.S. Supreme Court's final opinion which is gearing up to be "a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade's holding of a federal constitutional right to an abortion."

Per the DHS bulletin: "Given a high-profile U.S. Supreme Court case about abortion rights, individuals who advocate both for and against abortion have, on public forums, encouraged violence, including against government, religious, and reproductive healthcare personnel and facilities, as well as those with opposing ideologies."

The DHS senior official also warned that "going forward, we're concerned that grievances related to restricting abortion access in general could fuel a broader response."

The latest bulletin is the sixth DHS has released since the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol which took place Jan. 6, 2021. In addition to the domestic concerns, the bulletin also noted that this unpredictable time may be one that foreign agitators may attempt to seize on.

"Foreign adversaries — including terrorist organizations and nation state adversaries — also remain intent on exploiting the threat environment to promote or inspire violence, sow discord, or undermine U.S. democratic institutions," the bulletin said.

It was also noted that social media platforms continue to pose heightened risks as it is still considered a hub for misinformation.

"Individuals in online forums that routinely promulgate domestic violent extremist and conspiracy theory-related content have praised the May 2022mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas and encouraged copycat attacks," the bulletin said. "Others have seized on the event to attempt to spread disinformation and incite grievances, including claims it was a government-staged event meant to advance gun control measures."

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

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 1021

no lnx

New study reveals the group that was crucial to toppling Trump in 2020

Julia Conley and Common Dreams October 15, 2021

Calling into question widespread perceptions of lower-income Americans and their level of political engagement, a new study released Friday detailed the high turnout among poor voters in the November 2020 elections—particularly in battleground states which helped deliver victories for President Joe Biden and Democrats in the Senate and House—following a concerted effort by campaigners to engage with low-income communities regarding the issues that mattered to them in the election.

Released by the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival (PPC:NCMR); the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice; and Repairers of the Breach, the study shows that of the 168 million Americans who cast ballots last year, 59 million, or 35%, had an estimated annual household income of less than $50,000, classifying them as poor or low-income.

According to the report, titled "Waking the Sleeping Giant: Low-Income Voters and the 2020 Elections" and written by Kairos Center policy director Shailly Gupta Barnes, those voters were among the Americans that the Poor People's Campaign reached out to last year when it held a non-partisan voter outreach drive across 16 states including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin.

The organization reached over 2.1 million voters, with campaigners speaking with them about "an agenda that includes living wages, healthcare, strong anti-poverty programs, voting rights, and policies that fully address injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, and the war economy," according to the report.

The Poor People's Campaign found "that the reason poor and low-income voters participate in elections at lower rates is not because they have no interest in politics, but because politics is not interested in them."

"They do not hear their needs and demands from candidates or feel that their votes matter," wrote Rev. Dr. William Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, co-chairs of the Poor People's Campaign, in the foreward to the report. "They are less likely to vote because of illness, disability, or transportation issues, not to mention the rise of voter suppression laws—all systemic barriers rather than individual failures."

"Intentional efforts to engage these voter" in the leadup to the 2020 election,contact the groups found, were key to turning out low-income voters in states where Biden's margin of victory was near or less than 3%, including:

Arizona, where low-income people represented 39.96% of voters;

Georgia (37.84%);

Michigan (37.81%);

Nevada (35.78%); and

Wisconsin (39.8%)

"While the data cannot be used to claim that being contacted by PPC:NCMR was the only factor that drove them to vote, we can say that our efforts to directly reach out to low-income, infrequent voters improved their turnout rates in these states," the report reads.

The groups highlighted the case of Georgia, which was carried by Biden—marking the first Democratic presidential victory in the southern state since 1992. Outreach by the Poor People's Campaign helped encourage more than 39,000 Georgians who didn't vote in 2016 to cast ballots last year—"accounting for more than three times the final margin of victory for the presidential contest in the state."

The racial demographics of low-income voters in Georgia were fairly evenly split between Black and white low-income voters, with 1.9 million low-income white voters casting ballots last year and 1.6 million Black Georgians going to the polls. Another 164,000 low-income voters were classified as Hispanic.

In other states carried by Biden, white people made up a larger share of eligible lower-income voters reached by the PPCNCMR, including in Michigan, where 2.95 million out of 3.8 million poor voters were white; Pennsylvania, where three million of the state's 3.95 million eligible low-income voters were white; and Wisconsin, where 1.8 million out of 2.1 million low-income voters were white.

The statistics present "a challenge to the media-driven narrative that emerged out of 2016 and before, i.e., that white low-income voters are the de facto base of the Republican Party and delivered Donald Trump into the White House," wrote Gupta Barnes.

"While the narrative that white low-income voters are voting not only against their own interests, but also the interests of other racial segments of low-income voters, persisted through the 2020 elections, our analysis suggests something significantly different," the author added. "The findings suggest that, rather than writing white low-income voters off, it is possible to build coalitions of low-income voters across race around a political agenda that centers the issues they have in common."

Though the Poor People's Campaign made an intentional effort in 2020 to reach low-income voters, listen to their concerns, and urge them to turn out in the elections, the report notes that legislative action must be taken to turn last year's high turnout among poor Americans into a long-term reality.

"To realize the potential of the low-income electorate, our voting infrastructure must be expanded to encourage these voters to both register and vote," the report reads.

As Common Dreams has reported this year, the PPCNCMR has campaigned extensively to urge the passage of the For the People Act, which would outlaw partisan gerrymandering, expand early voting, establish a national automatic voter registration system, and take other steps to strengthen the country's election system.

"While mechanisms to increase registration are important for low-income voters, there is an even greater need for policies and legislation that increase their ability to cast a ballot and actually vote," wrote Gupta Barnes.

Additionally, the report says, Democrats must identify—and pass—"an agenda that appeals to important concerns of low-income voters across race, that is, issues like raising hourly wages, stimulus payments, paid leave, housing, and healthcare."

"According to exit polls, 72% of Americans said they would prefer a government-run healthcare plan and more than 70% supported raising the minimum wage, including 62% of Republicans," the report reads. "In Florida, the $15/hour minimum wage referendum got more votes than either of the two presidential candidates."

The report comes as progressives in Congress are pushing back against corporate Democrats' claims that the Build Back Better Act—the spending package which would invest $3.5 trillion in climate action, child care, affordable housing, and other measures to help lower- and middle-income people—is unaffordable.

As Common Dreams reported on Tuesday, the Poor People's Campaign held a press conference on Capitol Hill this week to demand the legislation's passage.

The report, wrote Gupta Barnes, "underscores why the needs and concerns of low-income voters must be brought more fully into our political discourse, platforms, and campaigns—and why candidates who are elected on these platforms must live up to their campaign promises."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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Trump isn't the only Republican who is refusing to accept defeat ... ›

'The time has come': Report says Melania Trump told husband to ... ›

God’s will is being thwarted': Hard-liners seek more partisan control of elections — even in solid Republican counties

Jeremy Schwartz ProPublica The Texas Tribune

October 03, 2021

by Jeremy Schwartz, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

...

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Extreme partisan gerrymandering once again saved Michigan Republicans — despite Biden's statewide win

Jeff Singer Daily Kos

June 28, 2021

Daily Kos Elections has calculated the 2020 presidential results for every state Senate and state House district in Michigan, where the GOP's gerrymandered maps will be replaced next year...

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trump undermines belief in elect thus democr

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/2020-election/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/voting-2020/

After initially focusing on the surprisingly lopsided results of the senatorial election in Kentucky, DCReport broadened our scope to look at the electronic vote-counting software and electronic voting systems that we rely on to tally our votes. This prompted us to raise questions about Electronic Systems & Software (ES&S), America's largest voting machine company. What we found was a revolving door between government officials and ES&S.

Voting results in three states that saw surprising majorities by vulnerable incumbent Republican senators—Maine, North Carolina and South Carolina—were almost all tabulated on ES&S machines.

Trump and his inept legal team have barely mentioned ES&S, focusing almost exclusively on Dominion Voting Systems.

Rudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell and Fox hosts have been making such bold and naked claims against the ES&S competitors, without any substance or evidence, that Fox News, NewsMax and OAN have all been threatened with litigation unless they fully retract their claims and correct a number of egregious factual errors.

Team Trump has been so vigorous in going after Dominion that it prompted us to look into how ES&S operates. What we have found so far is far from comforting.

Owned by a private equity firm, ES&S has been elusive about identifying the people in its ownership.

A number of ES&S executives and lobbyists have ties to top GOP election officialsand politicians.

The ES&S executive in charge of the security previously worked in the Trump administrationas a government executive at Health and Human Services before leaving under a cloud.

Forty of the 50 states use ES&S to cast & count some of their votes.

Of the 25 states Trump won, all but 3 either partially or fully relied on ES&S machines. The states where Trump won that didn't use ES&S machines were Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Alaska.

[map]

Counties that used ES&S equipment in the 2020 elections. (Verified Voting)

Concerns about the reliability of vote-counting software are not new, dating back to the 1980s. Having the ability to audit votes, and making sure ballots are counted properly, has long been a major concern of computer scientists, politicians and election officials.

In December 2019, Democratic lawmakers sought answers from those top three voting machine vendors which "facilitate voting for over 90% of all eligible voters in the United States."

Three separate letters were sent to the private equity firms who "reportedly own or control each of these vendors, with very limited 'information available in the public domain about their operations and financial performance.' "

Elections at Risk

In the second letter, addressed directly to the McCarthy Group, the private equity firm that owns ES&S, lawmakers wrote that "voting machines are reportedly falling apart across the country, as vendors neglect to innovate and improve important voting systems, putting our elections at avoidable and increased risk."

In requesting details about the ownership of ES&S, the lawmakers specifically noted "we are particularly concerned that secretive and 'trouble-plagued companies,' owned by private equity firms and responsible for manufacturing and maintaining voting machines and other election administration equipment, 'have long skimped on security in favor of convenience,' leaving voting systems across the country 'prone to security problems'."

DCReport placed numerous calls and emails to ES&S at its headquarters on John Galt Boulevard in Omaha. Only once was the phone answered by someone who would not put us through saying "they are not going to be able to talk to you.". DCReport was directed to ES&S's website. DCReport submitted the form repeatedly but got no reply.

Understanding the Software

Our democracy now relies on private companies, which build proprietary electronic systems, to reliably count our votes. It seems reasonable, if not crucial, to understand who is behind these companies as a standard to ensure election integrity. Without such knowledge, we run the risk that zealots, or investors with a financial stake in who wins elections, or those susceptible to bribery, have an incentive to use subtle software programming techniques to deliberately miscount votes to guarantee an outcome. In close elections, software code that invalidates or miscounts a mere sliver of ballots can change the outcome.

One of our concerns is ES&S providing junkets and gratuities to election officials, as uncovered in June 2018 by McClatchy newspapers. For at least 11 years, the voting equipment and software company curried favor with election officials by paying for trips to Las Vegas, tickets to shows and gifts.

"As many as a dozen election officials" attended a meeting in Las Vegas, with a number of them accepting airfare, lodging, and meals, McClatchy reported. A company spokeswoman told McClatchy that the junkets were "immensely valuable in providing customer feedback. One of our key results is customer satisfaction, and this is how we achieve that."

Marci Andino, the current executive director of the South Carolina State Election Commission, received more than $19,000 worth of flights, hotels and meals from ES&S since 2009, according to South Carolina Ethics Commission disclosure forms.

Andino's influence extends beyond the Palmetto State. She is also a member of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission's Standards Boardand has testified on election issues. She is a former President of the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED). To have an election official tied to a voting company creates concerns about conflicts.

Executives with Political Ties

DCReport also looked into the careers of some key ES&S executives. What we found is concerning.

Kathy Rogers, ES&S's senior vice president for government affairs, landed at ES&S after controversy over her work as a Georgia state elections official. She opposedlegislation trying to ensure vote counts could be verified.

In 2019, The New Yorker wrote about her actions in "How Voting-Machine Lobbyists Undermine the Democratic Process."

"In 2006, a bill requiring a verifiable paper record of each ballot, introduced in the Georgia legislature at the urging of election-integrity advocates, failed after the state's elections director, Kathy Rogers, opposed it," the magazine reported.

Georgia used ES&S machines in 2018 but now relies on Dominion equipment.

Georgia's 2018 gubernatorial race is noteworthy because it was overseen by Brian Kemp, who was then in charge of Georgia elections as secretary of state. That year, Kemp also ran for governor while overseeing his own election, a conflict of interest that he dismissed.

Kemp won a narrow victory over Democrat Stacey Abrams, but only after his office blocked 53,000 voter registration applications using a "strict" name matching protocol comparing state records to voter registration forms.

Kemp's Conflicts

Registrations were tossed if, for example, a person used a first name, middle initial and last name, on one form, but then used all three names in full on another. This invalidated a huge number of voter registration applications under Kemp's policy.

After Kemp won, a federal judge declared that Georgia had to implement a completely new voting system in time for the 2020 elections, replacing what the judge called "unsecure, unreliable and grossly outdated technology." Kemp tried to keep using the ES&S equipment for future elections, prompting Peach State Democrats to assert cronyism in the Kemp administration.

In January 2019, the Georgia Democratic Party challenged the integrity of voting machines that did not create an auditable paper trial, a policy he pursued through the creation of the Secure, Accessible & Fair Election or SAFE Commission.

The Democrats demanded a delay on recommendations for a new voting system "following the discovery that a leading vendor under consideration, whose machines are currently being investigated in a lawsuit due to errors in the 2018 election, has deep connections to Brian Kemp's office". That vendor was ES&S. The deep ties were due to Kemp having hired a longtime associate who was a registered lobbyist for ES&S.

As Politico characterized it at the time: "Georgia likely to plow ahead with buying insecure voting machines." It also reported that "Critics argued that the bill appeared to be written with one vendor in mind: the voting technology giant Election Systems & Software, whose former top lobbyist, is now Kemp's deputy chief of staff."

How many other states are conducting elections on "grossly outdated" or otherwise unreliable ES&S technology in 2018 and in 2020? This is an issue we are still investigating.

In Georgia, it was Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who succeeded Kemp as the elections overseer, who announced Dominion Voting Systems as the new elections vendor.

A Clean Election

The most recent Georgia election seems to be the first election in recent Georgian history not marred by voting-machine controversy other than Trump's nakedly false claims of vote stealing and corruption aimed at Republican Raffensperger.

The 2020 voting took place on a new system with an auditable paper ballot system. Three recounts, including an audit requiring "roughly 5 million votes in that contest to be recounted by hand" and as Secretary of State Raffensperger stated, showed results as close as imaginable.

"We have now counted legally cast ballots three times, and the results remain unchanged," Raffensperger said. Furthermore, a Judge declared Trump's legal team produced "precious little proof" in their pleadings.

ES&S's revolving door policy means its lobbyists taking top government official positions as well as government political appointees becoming ES&S executives.

One of these is Chris Wlaschin, who left the Trump Administration in March 2018. He was the chief information security official in the Health & Human Services Department. A few weeks later he landed at ES&S as "its new vice president of systems security responsible for the company's security efforts."

HHS to ES&S

Wlaschin abruptly left the Trump administration after HHS Secretary Alex Azar received a letter from a lawyer representing two HHS executives. The letter asserted that Wlaschin had improperly removed the pair and cited an eye-popping false claim Wlaschin used to justify disciplinary action.

"Mr. Wlaschin has stated that my clients were removed from their positions in order to protect an ongoing OIG investigation," wrote lawyer I. Charles McCullough, a former Inspector General for the National Security Community.

"You can, therefore, imagine the shock and surprise of my clients when they were both recently advised, unequivocally and categorically, by senior investigators from the HHS OIG, that neither of them are currently or were at any time in the past under investigation" by the inspector general's office, McCullough wrote.

The letter was dated March 12, 2018. Wlaschin's resume says he joined ES&S the next month.

The integrity of voting systems, and especially the ability to audit vote counts, has been the subject of public debate for more than four decades. But most of the recent attention has been focused on one company, Dominion Voting Systems, most recently because of frivolous lawsuits filed by Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell and others. But is that simply a distraction.

We think the issue of who counts our votes, how they are counted, and what ties the companies selling these systems have to politicians deserves more attention. Politicians who must win elections, in order to wield power, must not be able to exert influence on the companies we rely on to tally our votes. We need serious scrutiny over our elections so we can be assured that they represent the will of the people, not of the politicians themselves, and the companies they hire to process our ballots.

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'naked ballots' crisis triggered by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court just put 100,000 votes on the line in the key state

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trump admin civil rights office sidelined? felony vote fla

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an 920

first presidential debate set to ignore humanity’s most pressing issue — even as the planet is burning

Jake Johnson / Common Dreams September 23, 2020

Even as devastating wildfires across the U.S. West Coast and rapidly shrinking Arctic sea ice offer alarming evidence of the reality and immediacy of the climate crisis, the planetary emergency was apparently deemed not…

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fair # of these, not all capt eg, also campaign

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/former-federal-prosecutor-explains-how-ag-barr-could-help-trump-steal-the-election-and-take-the-us-to-a-very-dark-place/

between the coronavirus pandemic, civil unrest in major U.S. cities, huge anti-racism protests, bitter political divisions, a heated Supreme Court battle and President Donald Trump’s ruthless voter suppression efforts, the United States’ 2020 presidential election is turning out to be even more chaotic than the elections of 2000 and 1968. Trump has a devoted loyalist in U.S. Attorney General William Barr, and former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade discusses the effect he could have on the 2020 election in a disturbing op-ed published in the Washington Post on September 22.

“William P. Barr sounds more like a far-right-wing news pundit lately than the nation’s attorney general when he’s discussing politics and the coming election,” McQuade warns. “The difference is that unlike talk show panelists, Barr has the power to do something about it.”

McQuade gets into specific comments from Barr, noting, “He said, ‘These so-called Black Lives Matter people’ are ‘not interested in black lives. They’re interested in props: a small number of blacks who were killed by police during conflict with police, usually less than a dozen a year, who they can use as props to achieve a much broader political agenda.’ He told a journalist that if President Trump is not reelected, then the nation would be ‘irrevocably committed to the socialist path.’ He called coronavirus lockdowns ‘the greatest intrusion on civil liberties other than slavery.’ Later, he lauded the role of politics in prosecution, saying, ‘The most basic check on prosecution is politics.’”

The former U.S. attorney adds that Barr has joined Trump in making the baseless claim that mail-in ballots encourage voter fraud on a grand scale, and she fears that if the presidential election is close, Barr won’t hesitate to intervene or to give Trump an unfair advantage over his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden.

"Barr has demonstrated a determination to use his position — and the legal powers of the federal government — to advance the president’s political interests,” McQuade explains. “So, what damage could Barr do in the days and weeks after the election to help Trump stay in office no matter what voters might prefer? First, Barr has the power to file criminal charges of voter fraud. The presidential election is really state elections, but that doesn’t mean the federal government can’t step in.”

A “determined Barr,” McQuade goes on to say, “could use the fraud statute to charge voters, the Democratic Party or even state election officials with a crime” and “could also involve the Justice Department in civil suits challenging election results.”

McQuade notes, “If a candidate or party filed a lawsuit challenging the election results in one or more states, a statement of interest would allow the Justice Department to make arguments that favor Trump’s campaign. Think Bush v. Gore, but with the U.S. government taking sides. That tactic could bring the powerful voice of the Justice Department to the case, potentially influencing the court of law as well as the court of public opinion.”

“The Justice Department has long taken pride in being independent of politics,” McQuade writes. “Barr’s erosion of this tradition could take our country to a very dark place — sooner than we think.”

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fla desantis actic suppress felony

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Bloomberg raises $16 million to pay fines of 32,000 former felons so they can vote again in Florida: reportAlex Hend

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/the-right-wing-plan-to-steal-the-election-is-right-in-front-of-our-noses/

no lnx

The right-wing plan to steal the election is right in front of our noses

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon September 17, 2020

There has been a ton of news about Bill Barr — official title, “Attorney General of the United States;” actual job, Donald Trump’s capo — crawling across cable news chyrons in recent days, so much so that it’s hard to keep track of it all. There’s that thing he said about quarantine restrictions being nearly as bad as slavery. And the thing where he whined about the Justice Department staffers that’s more interested in enforcing the law than protecting Trump’s political power. And where he compared such people to preschool children, for having the temerity to question his decisions.

All that is bad, but probably the worst news this week is a report from the New York Times that “Barr told federal prosecutors in a call last week that they should consider charging rioters and others who had committed violent crimes at protests in recent months with sedition.”

He also asked federal prosecutors “to explore whether they could bring criminal charges against Mayor Jenny Durkan of Seattle for allowing some residents to establish a police-free protest zone near the city’s downtown for weeks this summer.”

This is especially alarming in light of Barr’s assertion, in the same speech where he made offensive comments about his own staff and about slavery, that he believes he has “virtually unchecked discretion” in determining what cases to prosecute.

Barr was talking about cases stemming from the protests in various cities over the summer. Although the vast majority of those protests were peaceful, there were a few incidents of violence and looting, though absolutely no evidence of plots to overthrow the U.S. government (which is what “sedition” means). Barr’s eagerness to overreact, however, is another alarming sign that he is exploring ways to assist Trump’s public and obvious plans to do whatever he can to steal the presidential election.

Thursday morning, in the midst of one of his lengthy morning Twitter tantrums, Trump hinted yet again at his plans to use phony claims about “fraud” as cover to keep election officials from counting all the ballots after Election Day:

[twt pix]

It’s a muddled mess of a tweet, but basically, he’s using scare quotes to suggest that votes by mail, at least by Democrats, are illegitimate. He’s also, in his usual manner, accusing his opponents of doing what he’s clearly planning to do, which in this case is to keep the ballots from being accurately tallied.

This is where Barr’s dark talk of “sedition” comes in. Should the votes in swing states be close — and every indication from polling is they will be — Trump will likely try to declare victory on the night of the election. After that, there will be a massive battle, as happened under similar circumstances in 2000, over how and whether to count all those mail-in ballots. Much of that will be in the courts, but there will be a street component, as well, as pro-democracy protesters will hit the streets to demand a full vote count, and election officials could face efforts to physically stop them from counting votes.

It’s increasingly clear that putting down those anticipated protesters and stopping the vote count is a priority for Trump and his allies. So there’s increasing talk from prominent Trump allies of a possible “insurrection” by the left after Election Day, and the need to use maximum force to put it down.

Michael Caputo, a 2016 Trump campaign aide and bug-eyed right-wing conspiracy theorist who was given the job of assistant secretary for public affairs at Health and Human Services, recently made news for a truly wacky set of utterances during a recent Facebook Live event. Among other things, Caputo accused government scientists of, yep, “sedition” and accused the left of plotting an insurrection, recommending that right-wingers “buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get.”

A wave of bad press compelled Caputo to take a leave of absence from his government job, citing vague medical concerns, but what he said directly echoes the rhetoric of Roger Stone, his longtime friend and fellow Trump confidant. Stone recently saw his sentence for felonies related to his role in the Russian conspiracy to undermine the 2016 election commuted by Trump, and has been at the forefront of trying to characterize efforts to count all the votes as an “insurrection” to be suppressed with violence.

During a segment on Infowars last week, Stone suggested that Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act or declare martial law and that early voting and mail-in ballots in Nevada “should be seized by federal marshals and taken from the state” to keep them from being counted. Stone claimed such ballots were fraudulent, but of course the real concern is that they’re legitimate — and that far too many of them will be cast for Joe Biden.

On Tuesday, Mark Levin — who is currently a radio TV host, but formerly worked with Barr at the Justice Department during the Reagan/Bush years — warned that the protests from the summer will “multiply by five or 10” and that Trump should declare them insurrections because they “need to be put down.”

Levin was being vague about what he thinks might provoke such enormous protests, but it’s not hard to see what upcoming event might do such a thing: A close election that Trump will try to steal by suppressing vote-counting.

And let’s be clear that Barr himself is on board with this idea that mail-in ballots are inherently illegitimate and that fighting to keep them from being counted is therefore justified. Barr has repeatedly floated baseless claims that mail-in ballots are fraudulent or that foreign countries “could easily make counterfeit ballots.”

None of this, it cannot be stated strongly enough, is true. It’s a shameless pretext for what is likely an upcoming fight to get those ballots thrown out.

It’s tempting to see all this talk of “insurrection” and “sedition” from the right — including Trump’s own government officials — as nothing more than hyperbole from Republicans who are emotionally overwrought in the face of what looks to be a lost election. Unfortunately, as the scandal around slowdowns at the U.S. Postal Service and lawsuits over mail-in voting make clear, the Trump administration is doing more than talk. It’s actively pulling whatever levers it can to keep Democratic votes from being counted this November.

Once those ballots have been cast, the fight to make sure they’re counted is going to get rough — not just in the courts, but in the streets. Much could depend on the ability of the left to hit the streets, not just in protests to put pressure on election officials to finish the vote count, but possibly to physically protect officials who are counting votes from armed right-wingers whom Trump has whipped into a frenzy. All this chatter about “insurrection,” “riots” and “sedition” is an effort to preemptively characterize pro-democracy protesters as a threat, and to justify using violence to suppress them.

Remember, Trump was willing to use tear gas and baton assaults against peaceful protesters just to keep them from heckling him. There’s no telling how far he’ll go to keep those same peaceful protesters from messing with his efforts to steal an election.

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/federal-judge-orders-usps-to-stop-sending-patently-false-mailers-to-voters-that-will-sow-confusion/

no lnx twt pix

Jake Johnson / Common Dreams September 13, 2020

A federal judge late Saturday ordered the U.S. Postal Service to immediately stop sending mailers containing false voting information to Colorado residents, saying he is “deeply troubled” by the decision to distribute the misleading postcards to households across the nation.

“As a result of false information contained in the notice, some Colorado voters may not vote because they erroneously believe that: (1) they must request a ballot at least 15 days before the election; (2) they must mail their ballot at least seven days prior to the election; or (3) they may not vote if they lose their ballot,” wrote U.S. District Court Judge William Martínez in a 10-page ruling (pdf) granting Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s request for a temporary restraining order.

“In reality, Colorado voters do not need to request a ballot at any time. Voters who receive a ballot do not need to mail the ballot back at least seven days before the election; they may alternatively deposit that ballot at a drop-box or may choose to vote in person up to and including on Election Day,” Martínez continued, describing some of the information on the mailer “patently false.”

“The notice, if distributed, will sow confusion amongst voters by delivering a contradictory message,” the judge said.

The ruling came hours after Griswold sued Postmaster General Louis DeJoy—a Republican megadonor to President Donald Trump—and other top USPS officials over the mailers, which have already arrived at households in Colorado and other states just weeks ahead of the November election.

While acknowledging the postcards “may have started off as a well-intentioned effort” to inform voters ahead of the election, Griswold tweeted late Friday that “confusing voters about mail ballots in the middle of a pandemic is unacceptable.”

As Common Dreams reported Saturday, election officials in California, Washington state, and Maryland have also publicly raised alarm about the postcards, which contain both broad advice on how to vote by mail as well as specific timelines that could mislead residents of states with different rules.

In an emailed statement Saturday as at least five additional states considered suing over the postcards, the USPS said the mailers are intended to provide “general, all-purpose guidance on the use of the mail, and not guidance on state election rules.”

“The mail-piece—which has already been delivered to most households and will reach every American residential mailing and P.O. Box address in the coming week—contains a single set of simple recommendations for voters throughout the nation, regardless of where they live and where they vote,” the Postal Service said. “At the same time, we are aware that each state has its own specific rules, deadlines and requirements, and the mail-piece acknowledges that fact.”

Griswold said Saturday that she urged the Postal Service not to send out the mailers in Colorado due to the misleading information, but her request was denied.

“As the chief election official of the state of Colorado, it’s my job to try to stop misinformation and any unnecessary election confusion,” said Griswold. “The importance of this election, combined with the fact it is being held amidst a national pandemic, further heightens the need to provide correct voting information to Coloradans.”

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yikes

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/new-report-paints-a-disturbing-picture-of-the-kremlins-ability-to-wreak-havoc-in-the-2020-election

russkie President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin have a preference in the United States’ 2020 presidential election, and it isn’t former Vice President Joe Biden. Efforts by Russian operatives to interfere in this year’s election — just as they interfered in 2016’s presidential election — and help President Donald Trump win a second term have been well documented. Journalist Franklin Foer, this week in an article for The Atlantic, warns that the Kremlin will be relentless this time.

“Events in the United States have unfolded more favorably than any operative in Moscow could have ever dreamed,” Foer explains. “Not only did Russia’s preferred candidate win (in 2016), but he has spent his first term fulfilling the potential it saw in him — discrediting American institutions, rending the seams of American culture, and isolating a nation that had styled itself as indispensable to the free world. But instead of complacently enjoying its triumph, Russia almost immediately set about replicating it. Boosting the Trump campaign was a tactic; #DemocracyRIP remains the larger objective.”

The United States’ election vulnerabilities, Foer warns, have “widened, not narrowed, during the past four years.” And Trump, according to Foer, “has dismissed Russian interference as a hoax and fired or threatened intelligence officials who have contradicted that narrative, all while professing his affinity for the very man who ordered this assault on American democracy.”

Foer is, of course, referring to Putin.

"The Russians have learned much about American weaknesses and how to exploit them,” Foer notes. “Having probed state voting systems far more extensively than is generally understood by the public, they are now surely more capable of mayhem on Election Day — and possibly, without leaving a detectable trace of their handiwork. Having hacked into the inboxes of political operatives in the U.S. and abroad, they’ve pioneered new techniques for infiltrating campaigns and disseminating their stolen goods…. Russia’s interference in 2016 might be remembered as the experimental prelude that foreshadowed the attack of 2020.”

Foer specifies some of the United States’ election vulnerabilities, observing that the U.S. has “alluring targets: the vendors, niche companies that sell voting equipment to states and localities, the employees of those governments — each with passwords that can be stolen — voting machines that connect to the internet to transmit election results.”

Putin supporters in Russia, Foer adds, could use malware to go after U.S. voter databases.

“If the Russians attached such a bug to a voter registration database, they could render an entire election logistically unfeasible,” Foer warns. “Tracking who had voted and where they’d voted would be impossible.”

Foer adds, “But Russia need not risk such a devastating attack. It can simply meddle with voter registration databases, which are filled with vulnerabilities…. Such meddling could stop short of purging voters from the rolls and still cause significant disruptions: hackers could flip the digits in addresses, so that voters’ photo IDs no longer match the official records. When people arrived at the polls, they would likely still be able to vote, but might be forced to cast provisional ballots. The confusion and additional paperwork would generate long lines and stoke suspicion about the underlying integrity of the election.”

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omg

https://theintercept.com/2020/09/12/georgia-district-14-qanon/

gEORGIA DEMOCRAT DROPS OUT, PAVING THE WAY FOR QANON CANDIDATE TO ENTER CONGRESS

George Chidi

The question now is whether Georgia’s secretary of state will allow Democrats to replace Kevin Van Ausdal on the ballot.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/heres-a-breakdown-of-the-8-battleground-states-that-will-decide-the-presidential-election-analysis/

...The eight states that Politico focuses on include four northern states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota) and three southern states (Florida, Georgia, North Carolina) as well as Arizona. Collectively, these eight states have 127 electoral votes, and Politico has published an article for each state.

“Within each of these swing states,” Politico’s staff explains, “the roadmap ahead for President Donald Trump and Joe Biden is clear. The president must max out his performance with rural voters. Biden needs a robust turnout in the big cities, particularly among African-American voters. Trump must halt his erosion in the suburbs, and turn out white working class voters who didn’t vote in 2016.”...

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-has-a-plan-to-steal-the-election-in-fact-he-has-at-least-5-of-them/

dirty tricks authoritarian

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/nightmare-scenario-senator-warns-trump-is-laying-groundwork-for-election-result-mayhem

bernie:

with the pandemic and a massive increase in mail-in voting, state legislatures must take immediate action to allow for votes to be counted before Election Day, as they come in;
The news media needs to prepare the American people to understand there is no longer a single Election Day and that we may not know the results on November 3;
:{Social media companies must finally get their act together and stop people from using their tools to threaten and harass election officials and spread disinformation; and

We need Congressional hearings with local officials to learn how they plan to handle the Election Day process and the days that follow.

===

no lnx

‘Trump is showing us his playbook’: The president tips his hand on the plan to exploit the ‘red mirage’

Written by Julia Conley / Common Dreams September 2, 2020

President Donald Trump on Wednesday morning openly embraced a theory put forth by analysts earlier this week that he would try to misdirect the American people on election night by claiming a “landslide” victory that doesn’t exist—leading grassroots organizers to begin planning for a chaotic post-election period during which the president is liable to claim that the counting of mail-in ballots is evidence of cheating by the Democratic Party.

While getting the details and implications of the story exactly backward, Trump tweeted the phrase “Rigged election?” along with a link to an article at right-wing website The National Pulse, titled “WARNING: Democrat Data Firm Admits ‘Incredible’ Trump Landslide Will Be Flipped By Mail-In Votes Emerging A Week After Election Day.”

The article presented a right-wing narrative regarding what political data firm Hawfish this week called a “red mirage”—election night results which could give the appearance of a Trump victory before mail-in ballots have been tallied.

As Common Dreams reported Tuesday, Josh Mendelsohn, CEO of Hawkfish—founded by former Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg—warned that as in-person votes are counted on November 3, the president could claim victory as he appears to be in “a stronger position than he actually is.”

Almost twice as many Democrats as Republicans plan to vote by mail to prevent the spread of Covid-19 pandemic, according to recent surveys, and Trump has been sowing doubt about the validity of mail-in ballots for months as it became apparent their use would skyrocket amid the coronavirus pandemic—despite the fact that the president himself voted by mail as recently as last month.

The National Pulse attempted to turn Hawkfish’s warning on its head, claiming an election night victory by Trump—one that would not include millions of mail-in ballots—could be unfairly “flipped” after all of the votes are counted.

Natalie Winters of The National Pulse compared Hawkfish’s projections with a warning from far-right British politician Nigel Farage about “‘dark art operatives in the Democrats’…intent on ‘abusing’ mail-in ballots to secure a victory for [Democratic presidential candidate Joe] Biden.”

“It’s called counting votes,” tweeted journalist Thor Benson in response to Trump’s promotion of the article.

By twisting Hawkfish’s warning to suit his own narrative about an election he says he is bound to win—despite the fact that his approval ratings have never risen above 49% during his presidency according to Gallup, and just 39% of Americans approved last week of his handling of the pandemic that’s killed more than 850,000 people in the U.S.—”Trump is showing us his playbook,” said Sarah Dohl, co-founder and chief communications officer at Indivisible.

“He’s signaling that he may try to exploit the confusion surrounding this unique election cycle to declare a premature ‘victory’ when the counting of ballots has only just begun,” Dohl told Common Dreams.

To counter Trump’s narrative, pro-democracy grassroots organizers say, voters—36% of whom currently believe results will be available on November 3, according to an Axios-Ipsos poll released Tuesday—should shift their understanding of election night and begin preparing for an “election period” during which all the ballots must be counted.

“The fact is that we will not get results on election night—it may take days or even longer for states to count the unprecedented number of mail-in ballots needed to conduct a safe election after Trump botched the response to the coronavirus,” Ryan Thomas of Stand Up America told Common Dreams. “The baseless charges being spread by Trump’s allies and right-wing media about the election results is not only damaging to the foundation of our democracy, it’s wholly un-American.”

Stand Up America, Indivisible, and other advocacy groups are incorporating into their voter outreach efforts information about how the pandemic has created a situation which won’t allow for all votes to be counted on election night.

“Donald Trump is not running a re-election campaign. He’s running a power grab,” said Ben Wessel, executive director of NextGen America, which joined the coalition. “We must be prepared to protect the integrity of this election and ensure that the voices of the people determine the outcome.”

The organizations on Wednesday unveiled Protect the Results, a coalition that will mobilize Americans “should Donald Trump contest the election results, refuse to concede after losing, or claim victory before all the votes are counted.”

“For months Trump has ignored democratic norms and threatened to reject the results of the 2020 election,” said Liz Butler, vice president of organizing at Friends of the Earth Action, in a statement. “It is no surprise that a man who embraces brutal authoritarian dictators would question the legitimacy of our elections. Trump has used his position to benefit himself and his corporate cronies at the expense of our communities, and he’s desperate to hold onto that power. His words are not bluster, and we must be prepared in November for this potential attack on our democracy.”

Along with Trump’s sabotage of the U.S. Postal Service, which millions are expected to rely on to mail in their ballots, and his baseless claims that the use of mail-in ballots will invite fraud, “This is just one more reason: we need to be ready to mobilize to protect the legitimate results of the election,” said Dohl.

“He’s laying the groundwork now to steal the election; we need to lay the groundwork now to fight back,” she added.

===

DHS DNI stand down on meddling/ lie

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/facebook-confirms-that-russia-is-at-it-again/

it's no secret that Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin are hoping that President Donald Trump will defeat his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, in November — as they rightly view Trump as much more sympathetic to Russian interests. The Trump administration has already confirmed that they are intervening once again. And according to Facebook, Russian operatives are trying to manipulate U.S. voters this year on the social media platform just as they did during the 2016 presidential election.

On Tuesday, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan is reporting, Facebook announced that a St. Petersburg, Russia-based troll group that interfered in the 2016 election, the Internet Research Agency, is trying to interfere in this year’s election as well. O’Sullivan notes that a “network of Facebook accounts and pages” that the social media platform removed was “set up to look and operate like a left-wing news outlet.” Facebook removed the Russian troll pages after receiving a tip from the FBI.

“This is the first publicly available evidence that people connected to the Russian troll group, which is known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA), are using unwitting Americans in an attempt to meddle with the 2020 election and stir discord,” O’Sullivan reports. “The operation seems to have been shut down before it could get much traction on Facebook or the rest of the internet.”

The Internet Research Agency received close scrutiny from former Special Counsel Robert Mueller during the Russia investigation. And that investigation was still underway when the St. Petersburg-based group tried to interfere in the 2018 midterms. But O’Sullivan notes that the trolls’ activities in 2018 were “halting and small” compared to 2016.

facebook hired Graphika, a company specializing in social media analytics, to study the matter — and Ben Nimmo, who heads investigations at Graphika, told CNN: “This looks like an early-stage attempt to target left-wing audiences on a range of issues.”

According to Nimmo, “The (U.S.) election wasn’t the only focus, but it looks like the operation wanted to divide Democratic voters the same way the IRA tried in 2016.”

Four years ago, Russian trolls who wanted to see Trump elected tried to turn Democratic voters against Hillary Clinton. Similarly, Russian trolls are now trying to dissuade Democrats from voting for Biden. One of the troll articles that came to Facebook’s attention was from Peace Data — which claims to be a left-wing “news organization” — and was headlined “The Biden-Harris Ticket Encapsulates How the Western Left Will Give in to Right-Wing Populism.”

Nathaniel Gleicher, director of cybersecurity policy at Facebook, told CNN Business that Russian trolls are “actively, aggressively and creatively trying to target the United States in the run-up to the (2020) election.”

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omg

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/democrats-slam-shocking-abdication-of-responsibility-as-intelligence-officials-scale-back-election-security-briefings

no lnx twt

Julia Conley / Common Dreams August 31, 2020

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) indicated on Sunday that his committee may subpoena intelligence officials, following Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe’s announcement that regular election security briefings will be scaled back ahead of the general election.

“This intelligence paid for by taxpayers doesn’t belong to Donald Trump, it doesn’t belong to the intelligence agencies, it belongs to the American people,” Schiff told Dana Bash on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Democrats expressed outrage over the weekend after Ratcliffe announced that lawmakers will no longer be receiving in-person briefings on election security, even amid concerns that foreign powers are attempting to interfere with the 2020 general election.

In what Democratic leaders called a “shocking abdication” of responsibility, Ratcliffe sent letters to members of the Senate and House Saturday evening, indicating that only written briefings will be provided until the November election and blaming leaks from Congress for the decision.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Schiff (D-Calif.) accused Ratcliffe of betraying “the public’s right to know how foreign powers are trying to subvert our democracy.”

“This intelligence belongs to the American people, not the agencies which are its custodian. And the American people have both the right and the need to know that another nation, Russia, is trying to help decide who their president should be,” said Pelosi and Schiff, referring to intelligence shared in a briefing last month.

On Twitter, Schiff accused President Donald Trump of “lying and projecting” after Trump spoke about the decision in a press conference.

“They leaked the information,” Trump said of Ratcliffe’s decision. “And what’s even worse, they leaked the wrong information. And he got tired of it. So he wants to do it in a different forum, because you have leakers on the committee.”

The scaling-back of briefings comes a month after Politico reported on a classified security briefing given to all members of Congress by William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center. At the meeting, Evanina acknowledged that “Russia is again trying to boost President Donald Trump’s reelection and denigrate his opponent.”

Democrats in the briefing urged Evanina to acknowledge the information publicly and denounced an earlier public statement he made in which he warned of potential election interference by Russia, China, and Iran.

The vague statement was “almost meaningless” and not helpful to voters, Democrats said.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer accused Trump of using Ratcliffe, a loyalist to the president who was elevated to his current position after serving in the House, “to hide the ugly truth from the American people—that the president is again receiving the help of the Kremlin.”

“DNI Ratcliffe has made clear he’s in the job only to protect Trump from democracy, not democracy from Trump,” said Schumer.

Previously, Trump and his postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, have overseen what critics call the sabotage of the U.S. Postal Service. Ahead of a general election in which millions of Americans will rely on voting-by-mail due to the coronavirus pandemic, DeJoy ordered cuts to overtime, the removal of mailboxes and mail-sorting machines, and changes to post office hours. The president has also baselessly claimed that the use of mail-in ballots will invite fraud, despite the fact that he himself has voted by mail, and openly admitted that undermining the USPS will ensure universal voting-by-mail is not possible.

In 2018, Special Counsel Robert Mueller charged 13 Russian nationals and three Russian organizations including a government-supported “troll farm” with conspiring to interfere with the 2016 U.S. election. Trump had long accused Mueller of leading a “witch hunt” and a “hoax” about Russia’s involvement. The Mueller Report, released in 2019, found that Trump campaign officials had extensive contacts with Russians and that many lied about those communications, but stopped short of accusing the president and his advisors of conspiring with Russia in 2016.

This year, former Office of Government Ethics director Walter Shaub tweeted, “if America has a legitimate election, it’ll be in spite of Trump’s best efforts to prevent one.”

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, who was at the center of Trump’s impeachment trial last year regarding the president’s attempt to bribe Ukraine to open a public investigation into Biden’s son, accused Ratcliffe and Trump of violating the country’s “national security and sovereignty.”

“For the DNI to curtail one of the most basic duties of our nonpartisan Intelligence Community—to keep the United States Congress fully informed about threats to our nation, in this case, about the real and rising threat of foreign election interference—is nothing less than a shameless partisan manipulation to protect the personal interests of President Trump,” said Biden. “And it is a betrayal of the oath sworn to the American people and our Constitution.”

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/the-lie-at-the-heart-of-trumps-vision-of-america/

in a new book published this month, New York Times reporter Jim Tankersley set out to get to the bottom of the problems in the American economy. “The Riches of This Land: The Untold, True Story of America’s Middle Class” traces the changes that have shaped Americans’ jobs and lives in the second half of the 20th century and recent decades, diagnosing what has gone wrong and how politicians have failed to offer solutions.

A primary target of the book is President Donald Trump’s vision of American society, in which immigrants supposedly compete for scarce jobs and white working-class men are tossed aside in favor of other groups. This perspective, Tankersley makes clear, does not match reality —even if the media erroneously lent it credibility. Workers are not actually pitted against each other in the American economy, and racial minorities and women have often suffered along with if not worse than white workers encountering hard times. Fixing what ails working Americans involves getting everyone to see that their interests are aligned, not in tension.

Tankersley also dismantles Trump’s frequent claims that he kept his 2016 campaign promises and built an economy that works for everyone prior the coronavirus, a central theme of the Republican National Convention. This just isn’t true, and the pandemic and economic crisis have revealed that devastating fissures in society remain pernicious sources of unjust inequality and disadvantage. Even before the crisis hit, Tankersley argues, we weren’t on a sustainable path to creating a secure and prosperous economy for everyone.

I spoke with Tankersley about the book and how he understands the ongoing economic crisis, as well as Trump’s leadership.

Fenwick: You’ve clearly been working on this book for a while, but it actually discusses the pandemic and the current economic crisis extensively. How much did recent events change or affect your thinking?

Jim Tankersley: Like you said, it’s years in the making. Which is cool. But we had basically put it to bed around New Year’s. And then here comes this pandemic in late February and early March, and we knew right away that we needed to update it because this was going to be a huge economic crisis. So I did. I ripped out probably 5,000 words and wrote an additional 5,000 on top of that, so I probably changed or added 10,000 words while I was balancing with my day job covering the crisis for the Times.

So I think, in retrospect, this crisis just makes the themes of the book that much clearer. The people who had been hurting, even in our recovery, are the ones who were dramatically, lopsidedly, the most damaged by this crisis. I’m glad we were able to get some of that in.

That’s interesting. Obviously there’s this idea that Trump is running on that before the pandemic, everything was going fine in the country. That’s pretty explicitly his message. But obviously, you argue that a lot more was going on. But doesn’t he have something of a good case? There were a lot of strong economic indicators coming out.

There were. First off, we have to judge Trump based on his own promises. And on that, it’s clear he didn’t live up anywhere close to what he said. He said you’d have 4 or 5 or 6 percent growth, you’d pay off the entire budget deficit, he’d bring millions of jobs back from overseas. None of that happened. It didn’t come anywhere close to happening. And in fact, what did happen was that he basically had a 21st-century replacement-level economy for a second-term president — he just happened to get a recession at the end of his term, not at the start.

So Obama and George W. Bush both inherited economies that are both basically in recession or falling toward it, in Bush’s case. And then they spend their first terms digging out. And then their second terms look almost identical in terms of growth rates to Trump’s, both for employment and GDP and for wages.

But the difference for Trump is he inherits an economy that is getting closer to full employment. Low unemployment already. It’s been growing for several years in a row. It becomes the longest expansion in American history. And so that allows him to claim credit for the rising wages and things that happen at the end of his third year in office.

And he also just dumps a bunch of fiscal and monetary stimulus on it. I’m not critical of those moves — they kept an expansion going — I just don’t think they’re long-term politically sustainable. You’re just not going to have low interest rates and high budget deficits forever. And, you know, recessions come along. And that’s the other part of this. It’s true that for the first three years Trump had, like I said, a stretch very comparable to Obama or Bush’s first three years of their second terms.

But we can’t really deny the fact that the fourth year looks really bad. So to compare his record to Obama’s — Obama’s included a recession too. So I think it’s fair to judge it on those merits.

Yeah. One thing I’ve written about is that while Trump likes to claim credit for the economy, but a lot of the economy is just on autopilot for a president. They’re not actually creating jobs every day. And what you really want to worry about is what happens when things go wrong. So how are you assessing how he’s handling things now that things are going wrong?

I think there’s two things. First, his economic team back in February was incredibly dismissive of the idea that the coronavirus was going to affect our recovery. The chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers — I was in this briefing with reporters — when he was asked: “Are you worried about coronavirus?” And he said: “No, I’m not worried about it at all. I think it’s overblown.”

And there were some in the White House who were very worried about it, but the initial response was shaped in part by this idea that they had built this bullet-proof recovery. Which they hadn’t. Obviously, no country in the world has been able to escape the difficulties of this pandemic on their economy. Then, I think, once we get into it and the decision is made to shut down economic activities, state by state, city by city, you obviously can’t blame the president for that.

But what we’re starting to see as we’re coming out of it, particularly as the numbers start to slide again, is this real damage of opening up the economy before sufficient tracing and testing, and other ways of getting the virus under control, in place first. And it’s that impatience which — and Trump absolutely was impatient about this. He wanted the economy open again by Easter. That impatience, I’m increasingly hearing from economists, held back the recovery. Officials and others are saying Trump has been so eager to claim recovery is happening that the country has not really done the work to make sure we have the systems in place to track, trace, test, and otherwise reassure American consumers that they can get back to something like normal life with the virus still raging.

And so the economy is going to be held back so long as that’s not under control.

Do you have any theory of why Trump still polls relatively well on the economy?

First off, his numbers have slipped on the economy. They used to be his strongest suit — I think they still are his strongest, but I’ve seen several polls this summer where he had fallen even or fallen behind Biden on economic questions.

I think the president is a very good economic storyteller. And a lot of people who support him — not just his white working-class base, but a lot of his Republican donor class — still really buys this idea of his approach of low taxes, low regulations. And there’s perhaps varying degrees of buy-in to his trade policies. But there’s this idea that he had a business acumen that could get the country back going.

And I think a lot of people underrated that narrative in its ability to capture voters in 2016, and I think it’s very sticky for people. And he’s also just relentlessly selling the idea that the economy is doing well. The vice president the other day was on television the other day bragging that they had created more jobs in two months than Obama had created in his presidency. That is chutzpah! But it is relentless messaging. I don’t think there’s any sorcery behind why the president’s popular on the economy — I think he’s relentlessly selling the idea that he’s good on the economy, and for a long time he had the levels on low unemployment to sell that.

And even now — there’s been no reshoring of jobs from China — [but] you still see people telling pollsters that they think he brought back a lot of jobs. And I just think that’s really effective political messaging.

So I wanted to get to the core idea of the book, as I interpreted it, that the president and much of the media push this false idea that there’s a zero-sum competition between white, male working-class workers and a lot of other groups. Can you summarize what you think is the best evidence against that idea?

I think there’s a lot of evidence against that idea. The best evidence in part is just the idea that we have seen times when white male workers were the best, the middle-class boom of the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, have also been amazing for women and when immigrants who came in weren’t “stealing” jobs. And wages were going up for everybody.

The central argument of the book goes beyond that, to show that in deep economic research, 40 percent of the U.S. per-worker growth since 1960 has come from the improved allocation of talent. Which is a fancy way of saying breaking down barriers of discrimination to education and job opportunities for women, for Black men, for people who aren’t white guys.

It’s an intuitive but cool-when-you-think-about-it idea. There’s no rational reason why 95 percent of all doctors, lawyers, or engineers in the United States should be white men. That’s on its face evidence of discrimination. So when you start opening up opportunity for other people to fill those jobs, you get better performance from those jobs. And that better performance helps lift the entire economy. ...

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/john-roberts-dark-and-sordid-history-may-haunt-us-if-the-2020-election-goes-to-the-supreme-court/

as election day approaches, voting-rights lawsuits are heating up across the country. In two separate federal cases in August, 20 states and the District of Columbia sued President Trump and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to reverse cutbacks to the postal system designed to undermine the agency’s ability to deliver the expected upsurge in mail-in ballots this fall.

At the same time, the Trump administration has filed federal lawsuits to invalidate vote-by-mail procedures adopted in Pennsylvania, Nevada, and New Jersey. The administration alleges, without any supporting evidence, that easing the rules on mail-in balloting will lead to massive fraud.

The vote-by-mail litigation joins other ongoing election cases that have been launched in Texas, Alabama, Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina and elsewhere, challenging restrictive voter ID laws, voting roll purges, the closing of polling stations in minority communities, and other suppression techniques.

A few of the pending lawsuits have already reached the Supreme Court and more, perhaps those involving the Postal Service, are undoubtedly on the way. Thus far, however, the court has declined to take any action to halt the growing tide of voter suppression, displaying a clear animosity to voting rights.

the performance of Chief Justice John Roberts has been especially regrettable, but by no means surprising. Although Roberts has established himself as the court’s decisive swing justice, his record on voting rights, both as a well-connected GOP attorney in his younger days and later on the bench, is long and truly abysmal.

Roberts made his initial mark in the voting-rights field in 1982 when, as a special assistant to Reagan-era Attorney General William French Smith, he authored a lengthy memorandum urging the administration to oppose an expansion of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), the landmark legislation passed by Congress in 1965 to outlaw racial discrimination in voting.

Eighteen years later, while in private practice in Washington, D.C., Roberts reportedly played an important behind-the-scenes role in the litigation that led to the Supreme Court’s decision in *Bush v. Gore*, the infamous judicial coup d’état that halted a manual recount of the disputed Florida vote in the 2000 presidential election and handed victory to George W. Bush.

In the run-up to his 2005 Supreme Court confirmation hearing, Roberts’ role in the Florida recount controversy was the subject of a small handful of newspaper articles, in particular one published in July 2005 by the Miami Herald. According to reporter Marc Caputo, now a staff writer with Politico, Roberts was an integral part of the Republican legal team assembled to work on the Florida recount, operating as a “consultant, lawsuit editor and prep coach for arguments before the nation’s highest court.”

Roberts was recruited to the team by none other than Ted Cruz, then a young and very conservative Harvard-educated lawyer who, like Roberts, had once worked as a clerk for Chief Justice Rehnquist. In 1999, Cruz hired on with the Bush election campaign as a domestic policy adviser.

By the time Caputo caught up with Cruz in 2005, Cruz had become the solicitor general in Texas, and had earned a reputation as a pugnacious litigator, arguing nine cases of his own before the Supreme Court.

Contacted by Caputo, Cruz said that Roberts spent “a week to 10 days” in the Sunshine State working on the recount. According to Caputo, Roberts traveled from D.C. to Tallahassee to advise Gov. Jeb Bush on his options for certifying the outcome of the Florida vote, and later participated in what Caputo termed “a dress rehearsal to prepare the Bush legal team for the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Asked at his confirmation hearing about his views on Bush v. Gore, Roberts declined to comment, remarking, “Well, that’s an area where I’ve not been—I’ve not felt free to comment whether or not I agree. …”

On September 29, 2005, the full Senate confirmed Roberts as the 17th chief justice of the Supreme Court by a vote of 78 to 22. Since then, Roberts has proven time and again to be an enabler of GOP-inspired voter suppression.

In 2008, Roberts joined in the court’s 6-3 ruling (*Crawford v. Marion County Election Board*), upholding Indiana’s voter ID law. The ruling set the stage for restrictive voter ID laws in other states.

In 2010, Roberts joined the 5-4 majority opinion written by Anthony Kennedy in :{Citizens United v. FEC:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:. The decision opened the door to the formation of super PACs and unlimited spending in federal election campaigns.

In 2013, Roberts returned to the Voting Rights Act, authoring the majority 5-4 opinion in *Shelby County v. Holder*. Regarded by some commentators as of the past 60 years, Roberts’ opinion gutted the act’s “preclearance” provisions, which had required states and localities with a legacy of racial discrimination, mostly located in the deep South, to obtain advance approval from the Justice Department or the courts before implementing new voting laws and procedures.

Roberts’ reasoning in Shelby was both naïve and dangerous. At the heart of his opinion is the view that racism in America is largely a thing of the past. When the Voting Rights Act was enacted in 1965, Roberts wrote, “the States could be divided into two groups: those with a recent history of voting tests and low voter registration and turnout, and those without those characteristics.” But, he insisted, echoing GOP talking points, “things have changed dramatically” over the past 50 years, and the act’s preclearance procedures were no longer warranted, nor fair to the states that had been required to comply with them.

The impact of *Shelby* on voting-rights litigation cannot be understated. The VRA’s preclearance procedures placed the legal burden of proof in such cases on states and local governments to justify material changes to their election laws. In the absence of the preclearance requirements, the burden of proof falls on victimized voters, not only requiring them to initiate cases, but also saddling them with enormous litigation expenses.

If Roberts never participated in another voting-rights case after Shelby, he still would have secured his legacy as an opponent of free and fair elections. But his work didn’t end with Shelby.

In 2019, Roberts turned his attention to “partisan” gerrymandering, the practice of purposely designing electoral districts so as to advantage one political party over its rivals. Partisan gerrymandering is widespread, and where it exists, it stifles political debate, gives rise to state legislatures and congressional delegations impervious to changes in public opinion, and in states like Wisconsin, permits one party to win a large majority of seats even when it fails to receive a majority of the overall popular vote.

Writing once more for a 5-4 conservative majority in *Rucho v. Common Cause*, Roberts held that issues of partisan gerrymandering are “political questions” beyond the jurisdiction of federal courts.

This year, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Roberts and his Republican brethren have issued orders in cases from Alabama, Texas, and Wisconsin that have made it harder for voters to cast absentee ballots. And in a case from Florida, the court refused to intervene in a dispute over the right of ex-felons to vote, potentially disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of people with prior convictions in a key battleground state.

So, hold your praise for John Roberts. When it comes to ending the scourge of Donald Trump at the ballot box, he’s not your friend, let alone your savior.

Bill Blumis a retired judge and a lawyer in Los Angeles. He is a lecturer at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication. He writes regularly on law and politics and is the author of three widely acclaimed legal thrillers: Prejudicial Error, The Last Appeal, and The Face of Justice.

yikes: if trump wins 2020 he gets to fill N RBG seat?!

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/177013

Trump’s Claim He’ll Send Sheriffs to Polling Places is Revealing in a Lot of Unintended Ways

Breaking News

tags: Republican Party, voting rights, Donald Trump, Vote Suppression, voter intimidation

“Are you going to have poll watchers?” Hannity asked his friend during an interview clearly aimed at pulling viewers away from simultaneous coverage of the Democratic convention. “Are you going to have an ability to monitor, to avoid fraud and cross check whether or not these are registered voters? Whether or not there’s been identification to know that it’s a real vote from a real American?”

“We’re going to have everything,” Trump replied. “We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement, and we’re going to have hopefully, U.S. attorneys, and we’re going to have everybody, and attorney generals. But it’s very hard.”

This, understandably, raised eyebrows. The president would send law enforcement to police polling stations? It’s a scenario that seems analogous to elections conducted by Eastern European strongmen, not by an elected official in the United States.

There are a few things to keep in mind about this claim, though.

The first is that, like so many of Trump’s wild assertions, he has made it before. In August 2016, he gave a speech in Altoona, Pa., in which he pledged to combat what he presented as endemic fraud in the state.

“We have to call up law enforcement. And we have to have the sheriffs and the police chiefs and everybody watching,” he said then, later adding another familiar refrain, that “the only way they can beat [me] in my opinion — and I mean this 100 percent — is if in certain sections of the state they cheat, okay?”

When he made the claim at the time, though, there was a significant roadblock to the plan. The Republican Party had been restricted from dispatching poll watchers to precincts for more than 30 years, the result of a lawsuit filed by the Democrats in 1981. Why? Because the Republican National Committee was using “poll watchers” in an effort to intimidate non-White voters....

active measures russia

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/democrats-raise-alarms-about-the-trump-administration-concealing-threats-to-the-2020-election/

no lnx

Democrats raise alarms about the Trump administration concealing threats to the 2020 election

Written by Kerry Eleveld / Daily Kos August 7, 2020

Congressional Democrats are sounding the alarm bells about 2016 redux playing out in this year’s election with extensive foreign interference while American voters are left in the dark.

Shortly before a closed-door intelligence briefing for senators on Tuesday, Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut called the classified documents he had reviewed as “chilling.”

“Declassify this information,” he urged in a tweet. “Americans deserve & need to know about ongoing foreign interference (even sabotage) in our election system.”

Now three of his Democratic colleagues have written to FBI Director Chris Wray, urging him to go public with the attacks being leveled at U.S. elections by foreign actors. The Democrats—Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois; and Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee—seem particularly concerned about foreign disinformation being targeted at Congress, laundered by certain members, and then disseminated to the public with the apparent imprimatur of a U.S. lawmaker. Specifically, Democrats believe they are seeing that play out with a probe GOP Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin is currently leading into Joe Biden’s Ukraine diplomacy while he was vice president.

“Senator Schumer and Speaker Pelosi noted in their July 13th letter to you that ‘Congress appears to be the target of a concerted foreign interference campaign, which seeks to launder and amplify disinformation in order to influence congressional activity, public debate, and the presidential election in November,’” the senators wrote to Wray, in a letter obtained by Politico. “We attended classified briefings from the intelligence community and FBI over the past week and our concerns with respect to this targeting have only grown.”

Pelosi and Schumer attached an addendum to their mid-July letter singling out Johnson’s inquiry as a vehicle for the spread of Russian disinformation.

The briefings have detailed malign actions taken by both Russia and China. Politico reports that in one briefing, William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, admitted under pressure from Pelosi that Russia is specifically trying to help Trump get reelected while politically damaging Biden.

The briefings have also singled out Ukrainian individuals by name such as Andrii Telizhenko and Andrii Derkach who have made dubious claims about both the Democratic National Committee and Joe Biden. Both men also say they have turned over information to Sen. Johnson’s investigators.

The letter from Menendez, Durbin, and Reed pressed Wray to brief all senators on the information so they would be aware of foreign efforts to manipulate them. “Members must understand the risks inherent in accepting information generated by foreign sources, especially those committees currently conducting investigations,” they wrote.

Johnson remains obstinate about such warnings, saying Democrats’ objections only lead him to believe he’s on the right track. Johnson, who gave Trump cover on his initial effort to illegally fabricate a Ukrainian investigation, seems dead set on delivering Trump the corrupt Ukraine probe that was scuttled last year by a whistleblower complaint. Apparently, voting to acquit Trump of soliciting foreign help in his reelection wasn’t enough for Johnson. Now he’s recreating the bogus investigation that even Ukrainian officials refused to conduct.

It should be incumbent on the FBI to make crystal clear to the American people who’s trying to manipulate this election and how they are trying to do so. Nothing less than the integrity of U.S. elections and the future of the republic are at stake.

===

ny mag

at least two people with links to Kanye West’s nascent presidential campaign are also active in Republican Party politics.

One of West’s electors in the state of Vermont will also be a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Charlotte. Chuck Wilton, one of the three electors West’s presidential campaign named in a filing submitted with the Vermont secretary of State on Monday, was also elected by the Vermont Republican Party in May to serve as a delegate for President Trump at this year’s RNC. (Electors are the people who would – were the candidate to win the state – vote for them in the Electoral College.)

Asked by Intelligencer if he was the same person who was listed as a delegate, Wilton replied, “Yup, that would be me.” He said that he had been involved in politics in Vermont for years, and had been connected to the West campaign “through political contacts.”

“Somebody said that Vermont needs electors for certain people and [it was] something I said that I’m more than willing to do,” Wilton explained. He described himself politically as “conservative libertarian/center right,” adding that he was “not disappointed with [Trump] but wanted to search out some more alternatives to him.” Wilton said that he thought West was “center right” just like him.

The Republican National Committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Wilton was the second person with ties to the GOP to be linked to the West presidential campaign on Monday. A prominent Republican operative, Gregg Keller, was listed as the campaign’s point of contact in a filing with the Arkansas secretary of State. Keller, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment, is the former executive director of the American Conservative Union and has worked for a number of prominent Republican politicians including Mitt Romney and Josh Hawley.

West has expressed his opposition to abortion on Twitter and at a campaign event in South Carolina last month, and met with Trump wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat at the White House in 2018. He has since backed away from his support for Trump, but did tell *Forbes* in July, “Trump is the closest president we’ve had in years to allowing God to still be part of the conversation.”

West’s campaign has faced a number of stumbles in recent weeks while trying to get the rapper on the ballot this November, but the campaign did successfully file to appear on the ballot in Arkansas, West Virginia, and Vermont on Monday. The signatures he submitted in the first two states still need to be validated. Vermont does not require any petitioning to appear the ballot.

The rapper is also pushing forward with efforts to get on the ballot :{in }::{two key }::{swing states}: this week. In Wisconsin, which Donald Trump won by fewer than 23,000 votes in 2016, there are 45 people on the ground working to get West on the ballot. He needs to collect and submit at least 2,000 valid signatures in that state by Tuesday evening. In Ohio, West is pushing to collect the 5,000 valid signatures needed to appear on the ballot, which have to be submitted on Wednesday.

His campaign still faces a number of hurdles, including a hearing in New Jersey on Tuesday morning over allegations that signatures submitted to get West on the ballot in the state were forged.

West would need to appear on the ballot in some combination of states totaling 270 electoral votes in order participate in the presidential debates. The Commission on Presidential Debates, the nonpartisan group that has moderated presidential debates since 1988, requires candidates meet that threshold, as well as having at least 15 percent support in opinion polls. West is precariously short of missing the second threshold. And even if he manages to stay on the ballot in every state where he has submitted signatures, the rapper would need to almost run the table for ballot access in the remaining states — and would need to make the ballot in California, which requires nearly 200,000 signatures that must be submitted by Thursday.

The West campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

===

omfg

aug 3

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

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 Veritas 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.

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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 the and 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.

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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.

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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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/gop-strategists-fear-a-kris-kobach-nomination-could-cost-republicans-greatly-the-senate-majority-runs-through-kansas/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/here-are-13-ways-a-democratic-wave-pickup-of-double-digit-senate-seats-is-a-real-possibility/

pompeo opt out of run -->

Kansas Senate seat in play as Republicans look to re-nominate perpetual loser Kris Kobach

an 620

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/senate-hopeful-kris-kobach-bankrolled-by-billionaire-peter-thiel-says-coronavirus-numbers-are-being-cooked-to-hurt-trump/

no lnx

Senate hopeful Kris Kobach — bankrolled by billionaire Peter Thiel — says coronavirus numbers are ‘being cooked’ to hurt Trump

Written by Alex Henderson July 28, 2020

With Republicans in fear of losing the U.S. Senate in November, the last thing they need is for far-right extremist Kris Kobach to win the state’s GOP senatorial primary this summer and put the seat in play for Democrats. And Kobach’s recent comments on COVID-19 are a prime example of why Democrats believe they could defeat him in the general election: Kobach is claiming that the coronavirus death count is being exaggerated as part of a conspiracy to hurt President Donald Trump. Regardless, Kansas’ former secretary of state continues to pursue the nomination, and he has a major ally in tech billionaire and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

On the YouTube program “National File,” Kobach said of the pandemic, “I believe that the numbers are being cooked.”

According to researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the COVID-19 pandemic has killed more than 654,300 people worldwide and over 148,000 in the United States. Truth be told, that 148,000+ figure is probably too low — as the death count in the U.S. focuses on hospital deaths and doesn’t take into account all of the Americans who have died from COVID-19 in their homes and were never hospitalized. But Kobach nonetheless insists that the pandemic isn’t as deadly as Trump’s critics are making it out to be.

On the July 13 edition of K-File, Kobach claimed, “The books are being cooked, and the purpose, at least on the political left, is to use those numbers to scare the public and to scare the political leadership into shutting down. Now, they want to continue the government shutdown for — the business shutdown — with government pressure, for as long as they can. If they can slow it down by using masks as a signal that things are not back to normal — and therefore, you should not go out, you should not buy, you shouldn’t open up your business yet — whatever, but the reason is obvious.”

Such claims are a prime example of why Democrats believe they could defeat Kobach if he wins the Republican senatorial primary in Kansas and makes it to the general election — especially in light of the fact that Democrats defeated him once before. In Kansas’ gubernatorial election in 2018, Kobach (who served as chairman of the Kansas Republican Party from 2007-2009 and as Kansas’ secretary of state from 2011-2019) lost to a Democrat: centrist Laura Kelly, now Kansas’ governor. And as deep red as Kansas is, Kobach’s defeat in 2018 demonstrated that a Democrat can win a statewide race in that state if the GOP nominee is extreme enough.

But as extreme as Kobach is, he has found a major ally in Thiel. According to Vox’s Theodore Schleifer, Thiel held a fundraiser for the Republican in Manhattan and has since “pumped $850,000 into a super PAC behind Kobach.”

Schleifer reports, “If Kobach is elected, it could give Thiel a loyal ally in the Senate because of how powerful he is proving to be in the race. That alliance becomes all the more key if Trump loses this fall, which would weaken the Washington influence of Thiel — a board member at Facebook and a founder of Palantir, which has deep ties to the government.”

Patrick Miller, who teaches political science at the University of Kansas, believes that Thiel has become indispensable to Kobach’s Senate campaign. Miller told Vox, “I don’t want to overstate it and say that Kobach wouldn’t have a campaign without him. But I think the money that that super PAC is putting into the race — primarily through this one rich guy — is absolutely the lifeblood of the pro-Kobach campaign at this moment. You take that money away, and Kobach doesn’t have a lot of campaign left.”

Kobach is running for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Republican Sen. Pat Roberts, who is retiring. In the primary, he is up against Rep. Roger Marshall — and the GOP strategists who fear that Kobach, if nominated, would lose to a Democrat are rallying around Marshall aggressively and hoping to God he becomes the nominee. Scott Reed, a political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told Politico, “A Kobach victory would definitely put the Republican majority in jeopardy because it would add another state that would need serious resources.”

According to Steven Law, president of the Senate Leadership Fund, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is hoping that Kobach becomes the nominee because he believes that Kobach would be easier to defeat than Marshall. Law told Politico, “The latest ad from Schumer’s Kansas pop-up PAC shows that they want to start the general election early by going after Marshall, and we aren’t going to let them get the jump on us.”

part 5 of civ rights avt~ prevent cop intimidation at polls?

an 720

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/here-are-6-signs-trump-may-use-dhs-stormtroopers-to-stop-democrats-from-voting/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/heres-how-trump-will-try-to-rig-the-election/

bob cesca salon

By now, it’s relatively easy to forecast Donald Trump’s tyrannical moves. There are no advanced Frank Underwood-style chess gambits in play here. It’s barely Candyland, despite the fascistic goals involved. Trump is, on top of it all, a simple-minded, easily predictable Golgothan who telegraphs every move of self-preservation. Sometimes it can be reassuring to have a sense of where he’s going with his repetitious blurts. At other times it leaves us with this perpetual sense of instability, knowing what might be lurking around the corner. The November election fits horrifyingly into the latter category.

I believe I know how Trump will try to interfere with the process as well as the outcome, and it’s more than a little unnerving, especially given the cataclysmic stakes this time. Warning: This is a bit of a horror show, so hang on tight. Oh, and everything that follows presumes a close race, with the advantage leaning in Joe Biden’s direction.

We’re all brutally aware that every move Trump makes is aimed squarely at re-election. If he’s not re-elected, he could face criminal prosecution and dozens of lawsuits after he returns to being a private citizen. He knows better than anyone that the presidency is the only thing saving him either from the slammer or from an underground escape to a non-extradition country.

As part of his herky-jerky maneuvers to evade legal jeopardy, we also know he’s willing to sentence hundreds of thousands of Americans to death, and millions more on top of that to suffer from permanent pre-existing conditions, due to his near-genocidal indifference to the pandemic — indifference aimed at manipulating the stock market and thereby boosting in his re-election chances. It’s a matter of historical record that he was impeached by Congress and put on trial for trying to cheat in the election, while refusing to discourage Russia from cyber-attacking the process again.

You get the point. He’s capable of doing anything in order to win, even risking his legal future. But none of the above tactics directly addresses how he might handle the actual process of suppressing and overturning votes.

Like a petulant boy who tosses a board game across the room when he’s losing, Trump is going to hurl the election process into absolute chaos. Here’s how: He’ll continue to suppress voting by discouraging absentee voting, while benefiting from new and existing roadblocks to in-person voting. Then, on and after Election Day, he’ll sue to try and stop absentee ballots from being counted.

You might’ve seen the unintentionally hilarious video of Trump on “Fox News Sunday” last weekend. During his sweaty, lie-filled exchange with Chris Wallace, the president once again repeated, “I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election.” He also said that he might not accept the outcome of the election. “I have to see,” Trump said when pressed on the question. Absentee voting, also known as “mail-in” voting, will be his primary target in his plan to derail the election. (Point of order: all mail-in ballots are absentee, including the president’s ballots. I will therefore use the term “absentee” from this point forward.)

Election Day won’t be a “day” at all. In fact, some estimates suggest we won’t know the winner of the presidential election, let alone contested Senate and House races, for a week or more after Nov. 3, mainly due to the record number of absentee ballots used during pandemic conditions. It’ll take days to electronically tabulate all those votes, and maybe weeks for hand-counted ballots in some precincts. I’m not even factoring in the possibility of recanvassing or actual recounts.

So far, there are 34 states, including the District of Columbia, allow some form of voting by mail without an excuse for one’s absence. (Oregon has conducted all elections by mail since 1998, with no significant problems. Colorado and Washington state have adopted universal vote-by-mail more recently.) By the way, the absentee voting states include Florida, where Trump will be voting by mail this year — again, with no excuse needed. The other 17 states require an excuse, but at least some of those will likely change the rules before November, eliminating the need for an excuse.

The main focus of Trump’s shrieking about absentee voting, of course, is to establish a hearts-and-minds framework to support legal challenges against those ballots. To that end, he’s routinely exploiting the bully pulpit to manufacture doubt about the reliability of absentee voting. From there, he’s capable of launching a series of lawsuits against boards of elections — perhaps in every state where absentee ballots are used, or just in states with margins too close to call or individual counties with narrow margins. As long as he continues to hammer his loyalists about the evils of absentee voting between now and Election Day, they’ll be increasingly likely to back him up during the actual process, organizing demonstrations and maybe a few “Brooks Brothers riots” not unlike Election 2000....

red flag twit bitcoin grift hack 7/20 verifid users

Putin's Goal Is to Bring Down American Democracy - The ...www.theatlantic.com › magazine › archive › 2020/06

The Russians were expecting the election of Hillary Clinton—and preparing to immediately declare it a fraud. The embassy in Washington had attempted to ...

Missing: qanon ?| Must include: qanon

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/putin-american-democracy/610570/

[long]

...#democracyrip was both the hashtag and the plan. The Russians were expecting the election of Hillary Clinton—and preparing to immediately declare it a fraud. The embassy in Washington had attempted to persuade American officials to allow its functionaries to act as observers in polling places. A Twitter campaign alleging voting irregularities was queued. Russian diplomats were ready to publicly denounce the results as illegitimate. Events in 2016, of course, veered in the other direction. Yet the hashtag is worth pausing over for a moment, because, though it was never put to its intended use, it remains an apt title for a mission that is still unfolding.

Russia’s interference in the last presidential election is among the most closely studied phenomena in recent American history, having been examined by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his prosecutors, by investigators working for congressional committees, by teams within Facebook and Twitter, by seemingly every think tank with access to a printing press. It’s possible, however, to mistake a plot point—the manipulation of the 2016 election—for the full sweep of the narrative.

Events in the United States have unfolded more favorably than any operative in Moscow could have ever dreamed: Not only did Russia’s preferred candidate win, but he has spent his first term fulfilling the potential it saw in him, discrediting American institutions, rending the seams of American culture, and isolating a nation that had styled itself as indispensable to the free world. But instead of complacently enjoying its triumph, Russia almost immediately set about replicating it. Boosting the Trump campaign was a tactic; #DemocracyRIP remains the larger objective.

[From the April 2020 issue: George Packer on how Trump is winning his war on American institutions]

In the week that followed Donald Trump’s election, Russia used its fake accounts on social media to organize a rally in New York City supporting the president-elect—and another rally in New York decrying him. Hackers continued attempting to break into state voting systems; trolls continued to launch social-media campaigns intended to spark racial conflict. Through subsidiaries, the Russian government continued to funnel cash to viral-video channels with names like In the Now and ICYMI, which build audiences with ephemera (“Man Licks Store Shelves in Online Post”), then hit unsuspecting readers with arguments about Syria and the CIA. This winter, the Russians even secured airtime for their overt propaganda outlet Sputnik on three radio stations in Kansas, bringing the network’s drive-time depictions of American hypocrisy to the heartland....

The Russians have learned much about American weaknesses, and how to exploit them. Having probed state voting systems far more extensively than is generally understood by the public, they are now surely more capable of mayhem on Election Day—and possibly without leaving a detectable trace of their handiwork. Having hacked into the inboxes of political operatives in the U.S. and abroad, they’ve pioneered new techniques for infiltrating campaigns and disseminating their stolen goods. Even as to disinformation, the best-known and perhaps most overrated of their tactics, they have innovated, finding new ways to manipulate Americans and to poison the nation’s politics. Russia’s interference in 2016 might be remembered as the experimental prelude that foreshadowed the attack of 2020....

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actblue vs > gop funders (but note ctr attack BS)

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/the-gops-reliance-on-mega-donors-is-backfiring/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/how-donald-trump-electorally-broke-the-gop/

kos

Ideologically, the GOP isn’t broken. Today’s Republican Party is the honest representation of everything its ideology celebrated—government so small you could drown it in a bathtub, unable to respond to a global mass-death pandemic. Racism so central to its core, that a key Trump reelection plank is defending the confederacy. An utter disdain for science and experts that we are the global leaders in mismanaging the coronavirus pandemic, and have lost over 130,000 people (and counting) as a result.

But electorally? Donald Trump has been the worst thing to happen to the Republican Party since Richard Nixon.

2016: Trump was selected in our country’s bizarrely undemocratic Electoral College (thank you, Alexander Hamilton), in an election that otherwise saw Democrats gain two seats in the Senate, in Illinois and New Hampshire, as well as six seats in the House (though remaining in a deep 241-194 minority). Given the sturm und drang of the year’s election, the tight results ended up representing a sort of stalemate. Unfortunately, Trump squeaked through, and the world was turned upside down.

The TL;DR:

AD REMOVED FOR SUBSCRIBED USER

	2016	2019	DIFFERENCE
U.S. SENATE	54-46 R	53-47 R	D+1
U.S. HOUSE	241-194 R	235-199 D	D+41
GOVERNOR	33-16 R	26-24 R	D+8
STATE LEGISLATORS	4,121-3,164 R	3,834-3,442 R	D+278
STATE LEGISLATURES	68-30 R	59-39 R	D+9

2017: The first big electoral battle of the Trump era was in late 2017, filling the Alabama Senate seat of Jeff Sessions, off on his ill-fated turn as Trump’s first attorney general. Democrats picked up this seat, in a state that Trump won 62-34. Sure, Republicans had nominated a child predator, Roy Moore, but even that was a reflection of modern GOP priorities—that Republican had made his name by unconstitutionally insisting on a statue of the Ten Commandments be displayed in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building. Performative piety trumped, in the minds of Republican voters, any history of sexually assaulting teenagers....

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720

wealthy Donors and Fossil Fuel Interests Pump Millions into Super PACs for 2020 Elections

February 28th, 2020 by Alex Kotch Leave a Comment

…PAC ($2.1 million). Warren A. Stephens, CEO of investment bank Stephens, Inc.: $3.6 million. 1820 PAC ($250,000), America First Action ($500,000), Congressional Leadership Fund ($750,000), Security is Strength PAC ($50,000),…

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/trump-is-bleeding-support-from-the-only-voters-who-have-stuck-with-him-since-2016/

620 an raw story

Donald Trump is losing support from his evangelical base as he lurches from one crisis into another.

Numerous polls show that religious Americans, like most other Americans, disapprove of the president’s performance, and that could imperil his re-election chances, reported the New York Times.

Nearly 80 percent of white evangelicals — a group that’s already shrinking as a share of the electorate — approved of Trump’s performance in March, but his handling of the coronavirus pandemic has bled 15 points from their support, according to a new poll from Public Religion Research Institute.

“He had an opportunity in March when people were looking to him,” said Robert Jones, the institute’s chief executive, “and then within four weeks he squandered it.”

Those losses could be offset by efforts from activist group’s such as Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition, which plans to spend tens of millions of dollars to identify and register new religious conservative voters and rallying right-wing Christians.

And another PRRI poll from last year found that 31 percent of white evangelical voters said there was almost nothing Trump could do to lose their support.

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trump camp rudding 1 mil dark online ads pushing __ 5/20

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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/

kos

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:

A social media campaign that dominates a national conversation, introduces divisive themes, and helps to orchestrate small physical protests.
Out-sized media coverage and intense social media amplification that makes those protests seem both far more significant and legitimate.
A network of lies and conspiracy theories that opens divisions in the nation, plays on existing fears, and generates distrust of knowledgeable sources.

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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aha: omg vote by mail quashed in swing states! see vote by mail

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/why-experts-are-worried-about-absentee-voting-across-the-country/

More than 30 statewide elections will be held in the 91 days from May 19 to August 18, previewing how unfamiliar or difficult absentee voting may be across America this fall.

The next big test is June 2, when eight states and the District of Columbia hold their presidential primaries. Despite President Trump’s claims that absentee voting cannot be trusted, red-run states (Indiana, Iowa, South Dakota) holding primaries that day have more experience with voting by mail and voters dropping off ballots at polling places than blue states and territories (Maryland, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and D.C.). Only one state in this group, purple Montana, has held an election where most people voted absentee.

States are turning to absentee voting in response to the pandemic. But as the next wave of statewide contests nears, experts are beginning to worry about the capacity of many states to handle surges of mail-based voting—now and in the fall. April’s primaries in Wisconsin and Ohio were mostly mail-based elections that were beset with problems due to partisan factors and rapidly changing plans. Meanwhile, many election officials preparing for June 2 primaries are scrambling.

“Administrators have struggled to accommodate both the requests for and issuance of absentee ballots in a timely manner during low turnout primaries,” Christopher Thomas, Michigan’s former election director, and Matthew Weil, director of the Elections Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), wrote in one of the few recent reports to assess voting in the pandemic. “During a high turnout general election, these [requests] are likely to overwhelm jurisdictions, causing huge delays in sending and subsequently counting absentee ballots."

in 2018, 52 million people, or 43.2 percent of voters nationally, cast ballots outside of Election Day in-person options, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission said. In 2016’s presidential election, the figure was 57.2 million, the EAC said.

“Regardless of what policy changes are made, we predict that vote-by-mail ballots will represent more than half of all ballots cast in [the fall of] 2020,” the BPC authors said, “which would be at least a 190 percent increase over 2016.”

Precedents for the Fall?

In the next three months, starting with Idaho on May 19 and continuing to Florida on August 18, more than 30 states will be holding presidential primaries or other statewide elections. While many states have updated some aspects of their absentee voting rules, what is becoming clear is that most of these states are not likely to offer voting options that meet the best practices touted by elections experts.

How easy or hard mail-based voting will be varies by state. A few states automatically send voters ballots. Most states require voters to apply for an absentee ballot. That step has variables, such as providing IDs, who pays for postage and deadlines. On the receiving end, officials have to vet applicants and then send ballots. Ballots have to be returned on time with correctly filled-out envelopes or dropped off at polling places. Just like voters are checked into precincts, these envelopes have to be vetted before ballots are counted. These steps are laborious, even with technology that automates some of the processes.

The dividing line between less-prepared and better-prepared states does not always follow the map of red and blue states. While there is a split among some GOP-run states that are making absentee voting easier (ignoring President Trump’s rants that mail-based voting cannot be trusted) and states where partisan legislators are forcing state election officials to impose procedures that have confounded voters, the real dividing line is battleground and non-battleground states.

The most recent example of that contrast can be seen in Ohio and Nebraska, which held their primaries on April 28 and May 12, respectively. The rule-heavy process in Ohio resulted in 20 percent voter turnout, a historic low. Two weeks later, nearly 14 percent of all ballots had yet to be officially accounted for (see “Ballots Cast” tab). Nebraska, in contrast, loosened its rules and sent absentee ballot applications to all registered voters. It set a turnout record that was 14 percent higher than its prior record set during 1972’s primary. (In 2018, 24 percent of Nebraskans had voted absentee, underscoring its experience with mail-based elections.)

Looking to the 10 primaries on June 2, the assessments are not overly encouraging.

The National Vote at Home Institute (NVAHI), the leading national organization promoting mail-based voting, on May 14 issued a report assessing every state and the District of Columbia’s ability to meet best practices. On a one-to-five scale based on 30 variables in running mail-based elections, six of the nine places holding June 2 primaries received a low grade of two (Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Washington, D.C.). Two states received a grade of three (New Mexico, Rhode Island) and one a grade of four (Montana).

The NVAHI report is a policy document. It strives for what it considers to be the ideal. As its experts said on a May 14 conference call, a successful vote-at-home election is glitch-free and boring. They cited Alaska’s trouble-free Democratic Party primary and Wisconsin’s problematic primary (for both parties), both held the same week in April, as counterpoints.

The contrast makes a broad point, but the two primaries were different in scale. Alaska’s party-run primary had 19,600 voters—all were sent mail-based ballots, while Wisconsin’s government-run primary had 1.55 million voters, who endured court fights, had to request absentee ballots or had to find an open polling place to vote.

Nonetheless, NVAHI has the difficult role of trying to advise state officials and lawmakers of what to do while encountering layers of resistance for adopting their preferred voting method: partisan opposition to expanded balloting, administrative challenges, budgetary constraints and little time to prepare for upcoming elections. Legislatures that haven’t looked at updating their voting rules or have not acted have left many election officials without clear rules or funds for voting this fall.

When asked for examples of progress, NVAHI’s responses revealed that elections evolve incrementally. For example, they said that Pennsylvania might adopt one of its suggestions, a tool that helps voters to track ballots in the mail like people track Amazon packages. Some Wisconsin counties were eyeing the same tool, NVAHI said. But that step, as helpful as it may be, was only one of the 12 “categories that we determined to be the foundation of a vote by mail system,” its assessment said.

Their other 11 foundational categories and concerns included: do voters need to give an excuse to obtain an absentee ballot—and does COVID-19 qualify? Does the state have good enough “data integrity” to mail all registered voters a ballot? Does it have online voter registration? Does it have online absentee ballot request forms, or must voters submit paper forms? Does the state pay for postage on ballot applications and ballot return envelopes? Does it have other return options, such as drop boxes? Do state deadlines allow for all of the processing—applying for, sending, receiving, vetting and counting ballots—to be completed? Does the state have a uniform signature verification process (before taking ballots out of envelopes)? Does it have processes to allow voters to fix mistakes? Does it count ballots postmarked on Election Day that arrive later? Does it mail ballots to voters?

In a report prepared for the Wisconsin Election Commission’s May 20 meeting, statewide administrators said that 120,989 ballots—9.3 percent of the 1.3 million ballots sent to voters for April’s primary—were not returned or counted. That figure was lower than the national non-return rate of mail-based ballots in 2018, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

Voting Isn’t Always Simple

Standing up absentee voting systems is more complex than debuting a new voting machine. NVAHI’s list also was not the full picture of what awaits voters. Other national groups, such as the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, have compiled charts with every state’s voter registration and absentee balloting laws, applications and filing deadlines. Some of these rules are the subject of more than two-dozen federal lawsuits by the Democratic Party, which seeks to reverse or suspend pre-COVID-19 requirements such as that an absentee ballot envelope must have a witness signature or be notarized.

Voting rights activists also look at the emerging absentee voting landscape differently than policy experts. Instead of seeing what needs to be done to have a functional process, advocates such as Progressive Democrats of America and Advancement Project, a civil rights law group, have been discussing what can go wrong for voters—and how to educate voters so that they can vote and their ballots count.

These discussions have identified voter information that is not readily available. For example, Voting Booth has yet to find a table of which states allow people to register to vote and to receive an absentee ballot at the same time. (In most states, one has to register first, wait until they are added to voter rolls, and then apply for an absentee ballot; all of which cannot be done at the last minute.)

Grassroots groups are also scrambling to compile state-by-state advice on what to tell voters to do if they have applied for an absentee ballot and it does not arrive. Must they go to a polling place and vote with a provisional ballot? Those ballots are the last to be counted and are rarely audited when assessing vote count accuracy.

In short, most stakeholders—voters, advocacy groups and election officials—are scrambling to stand up new systems and fill in the blanks. Against this backdrop, the Bipartisan Policy Center report subtly suggested that many states might not have the ability to accommodate a surge in absentee voting.

“States that choose to push more voters toward this option must address policy, implementation, and capacity issues on an extraordinarily short timeline,” Thomas and Weil wrote for BPC. “Regardless of what decisions are made, we strongly believe by November there will be high voter interest in the presidential election; voting by mail will likely represent well over half the ballots cast; and some amount of Election Day voting will continue but may be very different than normal.”

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.

This article was produced by :{Voting Booth}:, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

---

rationale for ignore election?!

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/eric-trump-predicts-covid-19-is-a-conspiracy-against-his-dad-that-will-magically-disappear-in-november/

Trump predicts COVID-19 is a conspiracy against his dad that will ‘magically’ disappear in November

Written by Bob Brigham / Raw Story May 17, 2020

President Donald Trump’s son Eric suggested that coronavirus lockdowns were a conspiracy to keep his father from holding 2020 campaign rallies during a Saturday appearance on Fox News with Jeanine Pirro.

With America leading the world in reported coronavirus fatalities, the president’s son was focused on the 2020 campaign against former Vice President Joe Biden.

“Listen, Biden loves this,” he claimed. “They think they’re taking away Donald Trump’s greatest tool, which is being able to go into an arena and fill it with 50,000 people every single time.”

“So you watch, they will milk it every single day between now and November 3rd,”

“And guess what, after November 3rd, coronavirus will magically all of the sudden go away and disappear and everybody will be able to reopen,” he predicted.

“They’re trying to deprive him of his greatest asset, which is the fact that the American people love him, the fact that he’s relatable, and the fact that he can go out there and draw massive crowds,” he argued.

In the segment, his claims about his father’s crowd sizes and popularity were both exaggerated.

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5/20 50% approval on economy b/c he played bizman on TV?!

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aha: abortion turned xian anti-gubmint; in 80's RR grifter televangelists had TV programs/stations; Rove courted (organized) for Bush 43; now drollinger cabinet and GOTV network (AI/digital tracking?); scary overlap with militias?! patriot prayer ~ stay at home order , boogaloo

putin cozied up to? thus US xians gave him pass on collusion, plus if true delegitimatizes trump, who delivers anti-abortion judge and SCOTUS w/ mcconnell

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/why-religious-freedom-stokes-coronavirus-protests-in-the-u-s/

...

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authoritarian to use levers of pwr in election

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/voting-rights-roundup-delay-in-2020-census-data-release-could-heavily-disrupt-redistricting-process/

an 420

Expert who wrote the book on Republican redistricting warns: US will see a ‘real festival of partisan gerrymandering in 2021’Alex Henderson

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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

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.

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.

‘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.

COVID-19 has killed more than 37,000 people in America within the last 7 weeks. pic.twitter.com/2xtbPXfjz9

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) April 19, 2020

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.

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.

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:

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/new-2020-battlefronts-are-emerging-in-the-struggle-for-voting-rights-in-key-swing-states/

took massive organizing effort by wi dems

huge win, trump stumped for B hack

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/jill-karofsky-wisconsin-supreme-court.html

Jill Karofsky, a liberal judge running for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, has defeated Daniel Kelly, the conservative incumbent, according to results from the April 7 election that were released Monday afternoon. Karofsky’s victory narrows the court’s conservative bloc to a 4–3 majority, putting progressives in striking distance of flipping the powerful court. It may also force Republicans to reconsider their position on absentee voting during the coronavirus pandemic. Wisconsin Republicans sought to exploit COVID-19 to suppress Democratic votes, forcing citizens to risk their health to stand in line for hours at a handful of polling places or surrender their right to vote. Donald Trump and his allies appeared to be eyeing a similar strategy for November. But in Wisconsin, at least, that strategy seems to have backfired.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/its-time-for-democrats-to-start-playing-hard-ball-against-the-gops-threat-to-the-2020-election/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/republicans-arent-just-trying-to-cheat-at-elections-its-much-worse-than-that/

voter suppress

no lnx

Republicans aren’t just trying to cheat at elections — it’s much worse than that

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon April 8, 2020

The Wisconsin Republican Party has been at the cutting edge of the efforts to make sure few, if any, Democratic voters ever make it to the polls again. Under the guidance of former Republican governor Scott Walker, a stalwart opponent of food having flavor, the state enacted a dizzying program of voter suppression, requiring people to have updated government-issued IDs while simultaneously making those IDs much harder to get, especially for people of color. They also suppressed the college student vote by banning most student IDs as a legitimate form of identification.

From the beginning of this war on voters, which has been spread out across the country, it’s been understood primarily as a partisan power grab, an attempt to keep certain constituencies from voting because they tend to vote for Democrats. Even Donald Trump, always saying the quiet parts out loud, said recently that if voting by mail becomes widespread, “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

This partisan understanding has, unfortunately, effectively muted both press coverage of this widespread voter suppression and public outrage. Covering this story necessarily requires portraying Republicans as villains and Democrats as victims, since that’s the truth. Unfortunately, mainstream journalists, always wary of being seen as “biased,” have almost universally reacted by underplaying this story, leaving it instead to left-leaning outlets like Mother Jones. Many Americans, drunk on the myth that all politicians are corrupt and always looking for an angle, tune out Democratic complaints about voter suppression as more partisan sniping.

But what’s happening in Wisconsin this week defies the usual partisan understanding of voter suppression. Wisconsin Republicans are exploiting the coronavirus to keep everyone from voting. It’s a preview not just of the way Republicans will use this crisis to shut down voting in particular instances, but an expansion of their anti-voting views in general. It’s starting to look like the Republican war on voting isn’t just about partisan gain, but even more about a deep hostility to democracy itself, and an objection to very idea of letting the people choose their leaders.

On Monday, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, signed an executive order delaying the election scheduled for April 7 until June. His reason was simple enough: People can’t maintain state-mandated social distancing and also vote. In addition, the majority of poll volunteers are over 60 and in a high-risk group and can’t come out at all. Many polling locations had already been closed due to staffing shortages, which ensures that crowds will be even thicker at the ones that remain open, leading to more danger of spreading the coronavirus.

Republicans in the state sued to end Evers’ order, and the conservative-controlled state Supreme Court sided with them, so now the election will go forward as originally scheduled. In addition, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that absentee ballots have to be postmarked today — even though many voters haven’t even gotten their ballots yet.

This decision will “disenfranchise untold thousands of Wisconsin voters and consign an unknown number of Wisconsinites to their deaths,” Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, said in a statement.

But what’s particularly strange about the Republican insistence on holding election today, in a naked bid to reduce the Badger State turnout to practically nothing, is that it’s not at all clear this will benefit Republicans in the short term.

It’s true that, typically, higher voter turnout tends to benefit Democrats over Republicans. That’s because Democratic-leaning voters significantly outnumber Republicans, but Democrats tend to be younger and less well-to-do on average, and therefore are more likely to skip voting. That’s why voter suppression techniques typically focus on making it hard for younger or poorer people to vote.

But no one can be sure that the coronavirus voter suppression will work the same way, because the people at most risk tend to be older — and therefore more likely to vote Republican. And while there are some general election races on the ballot, including important judicial contests, the most high-profile race is still the Democratic presidential primary, which could create more incentive for Democrats to risk coming out while Republicans sit at home.

That fact hasn’t slowed down Wisconsin Republicans one bit, however. It’s not hard to grasp the reason: This isn’t just about winning elections by cheating, as it’s commonly understood. It’s also about a deep loathing among conservatives for the very idea of democracy, and a compulsive need to shut as many people as possible out of the process of choosing their own leaders.

This is also true on a national scale. There’s increasing pressure, in the wake of the coronavirus, to make mail-in ballots the norm across the country, as it is in states like California and Oregon. Republicans, however, have made no bones about the fact that they will fight any and all such measures until the end of time.

That makes sense as a partisan move in normal times, because the evidence is clear that Democrats fare well in states with mail-in ballots. But in the age of the coronavirus, the most obvious beneficiaries of universal mail-in ballots would voters over 65, a demographic in which Trump won 52% of the vote in 2016. Meanwhile, the group that would feel the least fear about showing up to the polls, because they’re far less likely to face serious complications from COVID-19, is voters aged 18 to 29, most of whom voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Ultimately, it seems that taking a stand against democracy itself matters more to Republicans than worrying about how the coronavirus crisis has shifted partisan incentives.

This fits an overall pattern of Republicans instinctively choosing authoritarianism over democracy at every turn. Attorney General Bill Barr, for instance, has spent his career pushing for a virtually unlimited level of presidential power and a deep hostility toward allowing Congress to hold the president accountable — even though such unlimited powers would be held by the next Democratic president as well. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s single-minded focus on packing the judiciary with conservative judges is about his desire to monopolize power, of course, but it also bespeaks an enthusiasm for the fact that federal judges don’t have to answer to the public and can rewrite the law without fear of losing an election.

The rise of authoritarianism on the right has coincided with conservatives’ growing realization that Republicans can’t win elections fair and square anymore. But it’s also true that for the right authoritarianism is a reward in and of itself, so much so that Republicans are willing to risk short-term electoral losses for the long-term goal of whittling down democracy into nothingness.

The Republican war on voting, therefore, shouldn’t be understood purely through the lens of electoral gamemanship. That allows both journalists and ordinary voters to treat voter suppression less seriously, as another form of politics as usual. Instead, it’s important to understand that Republican politicians see fewer people voting as an important goal, in and of itself. They’ve largely focused on keeping Democrats from voting up till now, but it sure looks like they’d be just fine with a situation where barely anyone, of any party, voted at all.

pretty definitive proof that scotus will throw election to trump?!

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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see scotus, roberts, covid

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/why-the-supreme-court-and-the-coronavirus-could-be-a-lethal-combination-for-the-right-to-vote/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/how-the-war-against-voting-rights-became-a-pillar-of-the-conservative-agenda/

4/20 WI 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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GOP Moves to Stack FEC in Its Favor

By :{Alex Kotch}: | March 9th, 2020 at 5:14 PM (CDT)

Trump nominates a Republican to the Federal Election Commission who has fought against donor transparency and has ties to the Koch political network, while leaving the Democratic seat vacant.

Read more >>

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https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2020/02/28/wealthy-donors-fossil-fuel-interests-pump-millions-super-pacs-2020-elections/

Independent political spending groups are readying their arsenals to flood the airwaves with 2020 election ads praising their preferred candidates or attacking those they don’t like. Right-wing millionaires and billionaires and fossil fuel corporations are helping them do so.

Leading the pack are Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, the midwestern executives of shipping supply giant Uline, having donated a total of $19.4 million to seven super PACs from January 2019 through January 2020.

Oil and materials conglomerate Koch Industries has donated the most of any corporation so far, giving nearly $5.3 million to three super PACs, including $4 million to AFP Action, which is the sister group of Charles Koch’s flagship political nonprofit, Americans for Prosperity. Also funding AFP Action is the group’s predecessor, Freedom Partners Action Fund, which gave nearly $6.5 million.

Conservative super PACs owe thanks not just to Koch Industries but to a number of other fossil fuel companies, a trade group, fossil fuel executives and their spouses, and heirs to fossil fuel fortunes. Fossil fuel interests donated nearly $18.8 million to conservative super PACs and hybrid PACs–committees that operate both a super PAC and a traditional PAC–from January 2019 through January 2020.

Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Valero all gave over $1 million to GOP super PACs. Executives such as Western Refining Chairman Paul Foster, Midland Energy CEO S. Javaid Anwar, and coal producer Alliance Resource Partners CEO Joe Craft gave six- or seven-figure sums.

The Megadonors

Richard Uihlein has emerged as a key Republican megadonor in the last several years. In 2010, he was 36th on the list of top donors to outside political spending groups at the federal level. Over that decade, he inched up the ladder until he vastly increased his spending in 2018, giving nearly $38 million to outside groups.

In the current election, Uihlein’s giving appears to be continuing this upward trend. Since last year, Richard and his wife, Elizabeth Uihlein, have given the most money–$12.5 million–of any donor to Club for Growth Action. But they also gave large amounts to the pro-Trump America First Action ($1.5 million), Americas PAC ($1.5 million), House Freedom Action ($1 million), Kentucky Tomorrow ($250,000), Restoration PAC ($2.5 million), and Senate Conservatives Action ($125,000). In total, the couple has delivered $19.4 million to conservative super PACs.

In May 2016, Elizabeth Uihlein landed on the Trump Victory Committee, which raised money for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, after considerable political spending.

The Uihleins have also spent heavily in state elections, boosting the 2014 campaign of Republican Bruce Rauner, who became governor of Illinois. Richard Uihlein has expressed anti-gay and anti-transgender views and has backed extremist candidates such as Alabama’s Roy Moore, a right-wing evangelical accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women.

Timothy Mellon, the majority owner of transportation holding company Pan Am Systems and an heir to the Mellon steel fortune, donated $10 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund, which spends money to boost Republican House candidates, for the second election cycle in a row. In addition, Mellon gave $2.5 million to Senate Republicans’ main super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund.

Mellon is a big Republican Party donor who donated $1.5 million in 2010 to Arizona’s legal defense fund as it fought lawsuits over its harsh anti-immigrant law SB 1070. In 2014, he put $30,000 into the National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee and donated the maximum allowed amount to Carson’s presidential campaign the following year. In the current election cycle, Mellon has donated mostly to GOP candidates, but gave the maximum allowed amount of $2,800 to Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s (D-HI) campaign.

Mellon is related to the Scaife family, which, through the Scaife family foundations, is one of the biggest bankrollers of the right-wing movement, including several hate groups.

Other top donors who have given multiple millions of dollars to GOP super PACs include:

Jeff Yass, managing director of investment firm Susquehanna International Group: $4.1 million. Club for Growth Action ($2 million) and Protect Freedom PAC ($2.1 million).

Warren A. Stephens, CEO of investment bank Stephens, Inc.: $3.6 million. 1820 PAC ($250,000), America First Action ($500,000), Congressional Leadership Fund ($750,000), Security is Strength PAC ($50,000), Senate Leadership Fund ($1.5 million), Waiting for Women Action Fund ($500,000).

Paul E. Singer, president of hedge fund company Elliott Management Group: $3.5 million. Congressional Leadership Fund ($1 million), Senate Leadership Fund ($2 million), Waiting for Women Action Fund ($500,000).

Stephen A. Schwarzman, CEO of private equity firm Blackstone: $3 million. 1820 PAC ($500,000), Congressional Leadership Fund ($2.5 million).

In total, 24 individuals and couples have given $1 million or more to conservative super PACs since 2019....

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GOP doesn’t want to hear about Russian interference. It’s too busy wrecking American elections on the ground level

Written by Sophia Tesfaye / Salon February 24, 2020

Ever since the 2016 election, the U.S. intelligence community has consistently claimed that Russia and its agents continue to work to undermine American elections. When intel officials returned to Congress on Feb. 13 to warn — as required by law — that Russians are already interfering in the 2020 election to aid President Trump, several Republican lawmakers pushed back against the assessment before rushing to the White House to complain.

“I’d challenge anyone to give me a real-world argument where [Vladimir] Putin would rather have President Trump and not Bernie Sanders,” Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, told The New York Times after the briefing before the House Intelligence Committee. According to reports, the intelligence community’s top election security official told committee members that multiple agencies have concluded that Russia wants President Trump re-elected to serve the Kremlin’s interests. Days later, Trump booted the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, and replaced him with Richard Grenell, a political lackey who lacks any relevant experience.

This rinse and repeat of Republican corruption and cover-up at the expense of our elections is nothing new. Recall that Robert Mueller’s investigation concluded the Russians had hacked both the Democratic and Republican national committees. The DNC’s information was released ahead of the 2016 election, while the RNC’s information was withheld — presumably to control the GOP. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the Republican leader in the Senate, then threatened President Obama that if his administration went public with information about Russian interference, he would tell the voters that it was Obama who was interfering with the election.

At least a dozen Republican congressional campaigns went on to use materials stolen from Democrats by Russian hackers during the 2016 election. The GOP coverup continued within hours after Mueller’s testimony about foreign election interference before the House Intelligence Committee in 2019, when the Republican-controlled Senate moved to block four separate bills to defend the U.S. democratic process.

In a clear demonstration of the principle that rampant corruption always begins at the top, the RNC announced plans this week to support the downriver ripples of Republicans’ long-term war against democracy.

Republican lawmakers across the country, faced with losing the popular vote by greater margins election after election, have responded by restricting access to the ballot before elections — and then crippling the power of winning Democratic opponents after an election. In Kentucky, a GOP supermajority in the state legislature just voted to strip some executive powers from newly-elected Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat. Beshear won a closely contested election in which Republican incumbent Matt Bevin, who initially refused to concede.

It’s a move replicated by Republicans in North Carolina after losing the governorship in 2016, in Wisconsin after the 2018 defeat of Republican Gov. Scott Walker, and in Michigan, where Democrats swept every statewide office in 2018’s midterm elections. Now the RNC, along with Trump’s campaign, plans to spend millions to defend the GOP’s nationwide efforts to thwart democracy ahead of the 2020 election.

As Politico first reported, RNC chair Ronna McDaniel has committed to spend $10 million in legal fees this cycle to defeat what she called “the Democrats’ voter suppression myth” and to defend Republican legislation that imposes draconian restrictions on voter behavior, like Michigan’s potential 90-day prison sentence for anyone found guilty of providing transportation to the polls for a person who is able to walk — even a legally blind voter who cannot drive.

“These actions are dangerous, and we will not stand idly by while Democrats try to sue their way to victory in 2020,” McDaniel said of lawsuits challenging Michigan voting laws. McDaniel pledged to use the RNC’s resources to “aggressively defend the integrity of the democratic process and support the right of all eligible voters to cast an effective ballot.”

Republicans in battleground states like Florida are already gearing up for Election Day voter challenges on citizenship and residency grounds, as evidenced by a new GOP bill that allows the political parties to assign poll watchers from outside a given district. In 24 states, any citizen can challenge a voter without documentation to prove his or her eligibility. In Indiana, Republicans are again advancing a bill that would allow county election officials to kick voters off the rolls immediately without notice, even after two federal courts found such a practice violates voters’ rights. Republicans in several states have introduced a new crop of voter ID bills ahead of the 2020 elections.

So while Republicans in Congress openly act to support Russian interference in our elections, Republicans in state legislatures across the country are determined to limit the number of Americans who can actually vote. Without these twin assaults on democracy, they know they can’t win.

Sophia Tesfaye is Salon’s Deputy Politics Editor and resides in Washington, D.C. You can find her on Twitter at @SophiaTesfaye

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120 bernie gaining ground in Iowa? corp press ignores? nader et al see corp dem bias to ctr?

https://www.ecowatch.com/bernie-sanders-fracking-ban-2644992555.html

While Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has been in Washington this week for the impeachment trial, he has put forth two bills to help the environment.

On Tuesday, he pushed forward a bill to ban hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, as The Hill reported. The bill, titled "A bill to ban the practice of hydraulic fracturing, and for other purposes," will go to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources for review.

While the text of the bill is not yet available, Sen. Jeff Merkley from Oregon is a co-sponsor of the bill. On Thursday, Sanders tweeted that he also worked on the bill with Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Darren Soto (D-Fla.), as The Hill reported.

"I don't mind if @MarkRuffalo spoils his own movies. But please, don't ruin the surprise of our new legislation with Rep. @AOC, @SenJeffMerkley and @RepDarrenSoto. I don't want the dirty fracking industry CEOs to know what hit them," wrote Sanders in his tweet, which embedded a video of the actor and activist, Mark Ruffalo, touting a potential federal ban on fracking.

...

he bill drew support from several environmental activist organizations.

"Senator Sanders' bill names the problem and provides the only solution," Natalie Mebane, Associate Director of Policy at 350.org, said in a statement. "In order to avoid the worst of the climate crisis, we must rapidly transition off of fossil fuels, and end fracking and the dangerous pipelines that come with it."

The ban on fracking that Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren advocate has democrats concerned that such a policy could push Pennsylvania, a crucial swing state, to President Donald Trump in November.

"In Pennsylvania, you're talking hundreds of thousands of related jobs that would be — they would be unemployed overnight," said John Fetterman, Pennsylvania's lieutenant governor, to The New York Times. "Pennsylvania is a margin play. And an outright ban on fracking isn't a margin play."

Sanders not only introduced a ban on fracking. On Wednesday, he, along with Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Ma), introduced The Preventing Future American Sickness (PFAS) Act, which takes aim at 'forever chemicals' polluting waterways, as The Hill reported.

As EcoWatch reported, a recent study from the Environmental Working Group found that toxic forever chemicals, or PFAS, are far more prevalent in drinking water than previously thought.

"As hundreds of communities across the country are dealing with toxic PFAS contamination in their drinking water," Sanders says in a statement put out by Food and Water Watch, "it is unconscionable that huge corporations like DuPont have, for decades, concealed evidence of how dangerous these compounds are in order to keep profiting at the expense of human health. Congress must pass this legislation to put an end to corporate stonewalling and criminal behavior and tackle this public health crisis. It is not a radical idea to demand that when people in the world's richest country turn on their taps, the water they drink is free of toxic chemicals."

The legislation would ban the chemicals from food packaging and ban the incineration of PFAS firefighting foam. It would also direct the Environmental Protection Agency to designate PFAS as hazardous under both the Clean Air and and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act — commonly called CERCLA or Superfund, as Common Dreams reported.

Labeling the chemicals as hazardous substances would force manufacturers to foot the bill for cleaning them up, according to The Hill.

"Every American—regardless of the color of their skin, their zip code, or their income—has the right to be free from exposure to a slew of carcinogens and hazardous chemicals," said Merkley, as Common Dreams reported. "But millions of people are ingesting dangerous PFAS chemicals against their will through the air they breathe, the water they drink, and the food they eat. Congress needs to come together to put the health of our communities above the wish lists of American's biggest polluters, and that means establishing and enforcing chemical standards that protect Americans from PFAS substances."

Both bills face an uncertain future in a Republican-controlled senate. Even if they did get through the Senate, Trump has said he would veto them, as Common Dreams reported.

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57 sci bernie gnd ~ boden

an 120

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57 climate scientists object after Biden falsely claims ‘not a single solitary scientist’ thinks Sanders’ Green New Deal can work

Written by Jon Queally / Common Dreams January 29, 2020

After former Vice President Joe Biden late last week falsely claimed that “there’s not a single solitary scientist that thinks” the kind of bold Green New Deal initiative put forth by his 2020 Democratic primary rival Sen. Bernie Sanders “can work,” more than four dozen U.S. climate scientists responded Tuesday to make clear that just isn’t true.

Sanders’ Green New Deal is a sweeping proposal that calls for “100 percent renewable energy for electricity and transportation by no later than 2030 and complete decarbonization by at least 2050” while investing $16.3 trillion over ten years to create an estimated 20 million new jobs, support vulnerable communities and a just transition for workers, and fund a massive infrastructure project.

The Vermont senator has said such a plan is necessary to avert the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

Biden made his comment attacking the plan during a campaign event in Iowa on Friday, but climate experts like meteorologist and journalist Eric Holthaus were quick to object:

I’m a scientist, and I think it can work. https://t.co/w2TlbQz4wv

— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) January 24, 2020

Sanders also rejected the comment, telling a crowd in Iowa, “Well, Joe, you’re wrong.”

.@BernieSanders responds: “My good friend Joe Biden has recently said, and I quote, “not a single, solitary scientist” endquote agrees with my plan. well Joe, you’re wrong. Many leading scientists agree with our plan. ” https://t.co/RIMk5bhTKU pic.twitter.com/7VoBsrQ4S3

— People for Bernie (@People4Bernie) January 26, 2020

Proof of that support came Tuesday in the form of the succinct yet forceful letter (pdf) addressed to Sanders by 57 climate researchers and scholars. “The top scientific body on climate change, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), tells us we must act immediately to bring the world together to stop the catastrophic impacts of climate change,” the letter states.

“The Green New Deal you are proposing is not only possible, but it must be done if we want to save the planet for ourselves, our children, grandchildren, and future generations,” it continues. “Not only does your Green New Deal follow the IPCC’s timeline for action, but the solutions you are proposing to solve our climate crisis are realistic, necessary, and backed by science. We must protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the planet we call home.”

In a tweet Tuesday night, Geoffrey Supran, a research associate in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University, said that while the “scholarship is clear” and the technology to solve the climate crisis is available, “what we lack most is political will.” According to Supran, “Mr. Biden’s comment embodies that.”

The letter is far from the only endorsement of the Sanders’ climate plan. As soon as his Green New Deal plan was released in August of 2019, it was heralded by green groups and climate experts as a “game-changer“; “a roadmap of what we as a society need to do to confront the climate emergency“; and the only proposal “put forward by a major candidate that represents a level of ambition that matches the scale of the unprecedented crisis in which humanity now finds itself deeply entangled.”

According to Dharma Noor, writing for Earther over the weekend:

You can argue about some of the details of Sanders’ climate plan, but you can’t argue about the seriousness of the crisis it will have to take on. The climate crisis is already causing heat waves, wildfires, storms, and floods. And unless we take serious action, it’s going to get far, far worse. On that, the science is clear and the Sanders’ plan is absolutely in line with what’s needed to address it.

“To have any chance of getting to net-zero by 2030, we certainly need a plan that looks a lot more like Sanders’ than Biden’s,” [Dr. Peter Kalmus, Associate Project Scientist at the UCLA Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science & Engineering] said. “I don’t know if we can get to net-zero emissions by 2030, no one knows. But I do know that it’s up to us, and if we don’t try, then we certainly will fail.”

According to the climate ranking scorecard put out by Greenpeace, which assess the proposals of all the 2020 candidates, Sanders is the only presidential hopeful who garners an A+ grade, putting him at the top of the chart. Biden, meanwhile, ranks in 5th place—behind Tom Steyer (A), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (A), and Pete Buttigieg (B+)—with a B+.

===

...

The biggest recent change is Republicans' increasingly precarious hold on the Senate.

National Journal's Josh Kraushaar writes in his "Against the Grain" column that "the pathway for a narrow Democratic takeover of the upper chamber is looking clearer than ever": "If Trump doesn’t win a second term, Democrats only need to net three seats to win back the majority."

Scott Reed, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce senior political strategist, tells me that third-quarter fundraising reports showing three Republican senators being out-raised by Democratic challengers (in Arizona, Iowa and Maine) "are a three-alarm fire."

"The party was shaken by that," Reed said. "We're all worried."
The well-funded Chamber started TV ads in Arizona last week, launches an ad today in Maine, and will add a third state next week.
That's the earliest the group has ever gone on the air: Ads typically begin after Thanksgiving or New Year's.
"We have to spend early because the climate stinks," Reed said. "All these incumbent senators have terrible job approvals and terrible favorables."
But Reed thinks Trump has a better than 50-50 chance of hanging on: "He's still wildly popular in the middle of the country."...

120 an moved way up in polls by dint of massive ad spend

How Michael Bloomberg is spending a fortune and driving Trump batty

Joshua Holland

Let me preface this post by acknowledging that billionaires trying to purchase the Democratic nomination represent an affront to democracy. (According to FiveThirtyEight, Tom Steyer had spent $120 million on TV ads…

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120 an will Hurd’s legacy casts shadow over Republicans vying to replace him in the US House

Patrick Svitek / The Texas Tribune

ew w1`20

At first glance, the images seem more like nightmares than real life. Blood-red skies that appear to have seeped into the earth below, staining it hellishly. Cyclone-like whirls with at their centers. People and animals huddled close together on a beach, ready to jump into the ocean should the encroaching fires reach their makeshift camp and leave them with no choice.

New years are supposed to augur new beginnings: the chance for all of us to reconsider our priorities, refresh our spirits, and recommit to goals yet unreached. But the images coming out of Australia — where bushfires have destroyed more than 12 million acres, killing at least 26 people and perhaps as many as a billion animals — make it difficult to greet 2020, or the new decade, with optimism about the fight against climate change. The personal accounts of those who have endured the fires, which were exacerbated by drought and record-high summer temperatures, use words like "apocalyptic," "dystopian," and "Armageddon" — language that connotes not only devastating loss but also a stark finality.

Occurring simultaneously with the Australian bushfires but receiving far less coverage is the massive flooding in and around the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, which as of this writing has already displaced hundreds of thousands of people and killed at least 66. In a normal world, where an entire continent wasn't burning so violently that the smoke was visible from outer space, Indonesia's floods would easily count as the biggest climate change story of the new year. But we've now reached the point where there are bound to be multiple climate-related disasters happening around the world at the same time. Paradoxically, the more frequent these events are, the less likely any individual one of them is to command our full attention — even though the very fact of this increased frequency is undoubtedly the most important story of our lifetimes.

Australians and Indonesians are suffering almost unimaginably right now. But in addition to pain, there's fury. And in that fury, there's hope that the people of the world will demand more from their leaders. Visiting the fire-ravaged New South Wales town of Cobargo last week, Australian prime minister Scott Morrison was met with open hostility by residents, angered by what they saw as the government's lackadaisical response to a disaster that began back in September and is expected to go on for several more months. (He also did himself few favors by jetting off to Hawaii with his family at the height of the crisis.) But for many Australians, Morrison's greatest transgression has been his stubborn refusal to connect the protracted length and deadly intensity of Australia's fire season to climate change — a topic he would rather avoid, given his close relationship with his country's fossil fuel industry. In 2017, while serving as Australia's treasurer, he addressed Parliament while holding a lump of coal, proudly showing it off to the lawmakers and urging them to not be "afraid" of it. Morrison isn't a climate denier, exactly; when asked about it, he'll acknowledge that climate change exists. He's more of a climate hypocrite: someone who's willing to concede the point, rhetorically, all so that he can deflect attention from the dirty energy policies that are demonstrably contributing to his country's current miseries. In fact, Australia has earned the dishonor of being ranked dead last out of 57 countries recently evaluated for how well they're fighting climate change at the policy level.

Meanwhile, Indonesians are directing their fury at their government's inability to respond quickly and forcefully enough to a single, inescapable truth: Jakarta is sinking. According to the World Bank, the city could well be at 16 feet below sea level in just five more years. Last August, in a move that stunned the world, Indonesia's leaders revealed that they would be transferring the nation's capital to Borneo. While many government workers may have been relieved to hear the news, the announcement did little to quell the fears of the other nine million or so people who live in and around Jakarta and who lack the resources to pack up and leave. Wealth inequality is rampant in Indonesia; climate change is showing us what it looks like. One photograph on Twitter taken during the recent flooding distills the magnitude of this problem simply and breathtakingly. The aerial image shows both an upscale, resort-style hotel and the much poorer residential neighborhood separated from it by the resort's security fence. The hotel appears untouched by the flooding; the adjacent neighborhood, however, is almost completely underwater. The reason: The hotel — like most new d"

If 2019 was the year that climate consciousness hit its tipping point, thanks in large part to the efforts of Greta Thunberg and the youth climate strikers, then 2020 is already shaping up to be the year that we fully absorb the message these activists have been struggling to impart: Policies matter. The people of Australia and Indonesia need immediate disaster relief. (Learn more about how you can help them here and here.) But once they've gotten it, they need something else: governments that will work to prevent future disasters by enacting climate policies that cut carbon emissions, hasten the end of coal and other dirty fossil fuels, preserve and improve infrastructure, encourage cities to adapt to a new slate of inevitable challenges, and ensure that the negative effects of climate change aren't borne disproportionately by the poor and politically marginalized.

The images coming out of Australia and Indonesia right now are hard to look at. But we can't afford to look away.

By nearly every credible account, 2020 is the last year we have to get things right. The horror we're witnessing in just these first weeks is a reminder that there's no time to waste — and definitely no time to indulge governmental hypocrisy or lassitude. This is the year that the people hold their leaders to account. It has to be.

Reposted with permission from onEarth.

FB VP admitted elected trump AND MIGHT again?!

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/how-facebook-misunderstands-free-speech/

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How Facebook misunderstands free speech

Written by Keith A. Spencer / Salon January 11, 2020

Only three months ago, social media megalith Facebook made the universally-reviled announcement that they would not be fact-checking, censoring, or otherwise banning political ads that deceive or mislead. “We don’t believe [that] it’s an appropriate role for us to referee political debates and prevent a politician’s speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny,” a Facebook spokesperson said at the time. The controversy over the announcement was so heated that the hashtag #DeleteFacebook began to trend, while presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren mocked the policy (and the company’s CEO) in her own promoted Facebook post.

Now, the biggest social media platform on Earth has doubled down on its tone-deaf policy. In an official announcement posted to Facebook’s newsroom, the company’s director of product management tries to spin a separate policy of increased transparency as some kind of net plus for freedom of speech, while defending the ad policy that gave carte blanche to politicians and PACs to prevaricate....

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/here-are-5-disturbing-trends-to-watch-at-the-start-of-2020/

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Here are 5 disturbing trends to watch at the start of 2020

Written by Alex Henderson January 1, 2020

At the start of 2020, the news is as troubling in other countries as it is in the United States. Freedom House, an organization that measures how democratic countries are, has reported that “political rights and civil liberties” suffered a 13-year decline from 2006-2018 — and 2020 isn’t shaping up to be any better. From white nationalism in the U.S. to Hindu nationalism of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, democracy has been under attack all around the world.

Here are some disturbing trends to watch out for at the start of 2020.

1. The anti-immigrant climate in the US

According to research by the Brookings Institution, immigration to the U.S. has seriously declined under President Donald Trump: between 2017 and 2018, immigration decreased by more than 70%. Randy Capps, director of U.S. research for the Migration Policy Institute, told the New York Times that the decrease in immigration to the U.S. can, in part, be attributed to “the general effect of Trump being president.” Trump has been promoting an anti-immigrant climate in the U.S., and the result is less immigration.

Acts of white nationalist terrorism are hardly a welcoming sign for would-be immigrants: on August 3, a gunman in El Paso — determined to kill Latinos — opened fire on a crowd and murdered 22 people. And violent anti-Semitic attacks have been on the rise.

2. Islamophobia in India and China

Two of the worst countries for Muslims minority groups have been China and India, where Prime Minister Modi has been pushing an intense Hindu nationalism — and there are some troubling parallels between the two countries when it comes to the treatment of Muslims. The Indian parliament recently passed a bill offering amnesty to illegal immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, but only if they aren’t Muslim. The Modi government’s anti-Muslim outlook has inspired angry protests in Kashmir, where broadband internet service was suspended for over four months last year — a move that mirrors the Chinese government’s suspension of internet service in the heavily Muslim Xinjiang region in 2009.

Last year, James Millward, a history professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., told The Nation, “The current Kashmir shutdown, and in particular the turning off of the Internet and communications, is awfully similar to the one in Xinjiang post-2009 riots. One wonders if Modi is taking a page from the Chinese book there.”

3. Authoritarians are winning elections around the world

Authoritarian leaders don’t necessarily come to power via a violent coup: in many cases, they are voted into office — and that has happened in a long list of countries, including Brazil with Jair Bolsonaro, Turkey with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Philippines with Rodrigo Duterte and Hungary with Viktor Orbán. Once in power, they undermine a country’s checks and balances and pursue authoritarian measures. Turkey used to be the most democratic and progressive country in the Islamic world; under Erdogan, new prisons have been built to clamp down on dissent. And the thing Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Duterte and Orbán have in common is a far-right nationalism that voters found appealing; voters in their countries have chosen authoritarianism.

4. Voter suppression efforts around the US

When Republicans hold office in a state, one of the things they do to stay in power is enact voter suppression measures. Georgia recently struck almost 100,000 voters from its rolls; in Wisconsin, around 200,000 voters are set to be purged. And Republicans aren’t doing that to keep Republicans from voting — they are making a concerted effort to disenfranchise Democratic-leaning voters to maintain the GOP grip on power.

5. Reproductive freedom under attack in many parts of the US

With Justice Brett Kavanaugh having replaced the more libertarian Anthony Kennedy on the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018, it’s entirely possible that 1973’s Roe v. Wade decision will be essentially overturned — in which case, individual states would be free to ban abortion at the state level. And draconian abortion restrictions (some worse than others) can be found in Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana and many other states. In Alabama, the Human Life Protection Act calls for an almost total ban on abortion, although in October, District Judge Myron Thompson blocked the law.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-republicans-have-a-coordinated-attack-to-assure-an-electoral-victory-in-2020

iowa swarmed by dems for caucus?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/trump-in-danger-of-losing-midwestern-state-in-2020-election-that-he-won-overwhelmingly-in-2016-report/

yikes

...Reelecting A ‘Christian’ President

While the Christian right has, since Ronald Reagan’s presidential run in 1980, rallied around GOP nominees, the tenor and nature of the mobilization for Trump’s reelection is markedly new. While many of the expressed fears — that a Democratic president would nominate pro-Roe v. Wade judges or take away Christians’ religious freedom — are familiar, the motivation now is not just to avert liberal judges and policies. It is much more deliberately an imperative to reelect a singularly “Christian” president. As Ralph Reed reportedly will argue in a book to be published this spring, evangelicals “have a moral obligation to enthusiastically back” Trump in 2020.

With Trump’s reelection once again hinging on slim margins in a few key states, a multifaceted get-out-the-vote operation is getting underway. Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition is aiming to raise $42.7 million for its 2020 Project, aimed at bolstering its “unparalleled values-voter database, supporting field offices, and coordinating volunteers and staff to get out the vote.” It will be, Reed promised supporters, the “largest Christian Get Out The Vote (GOTV) effort in history,” necessary because “the left is already turning the re-election of Donald Trump into a three-ring circus, aimed at impeaching our president and reversing all progress for voters of faith.”

Reed’s organization is not alone. United In Purpose, an organization that provides polling and voter data to Christian right organizations, helped organize a pivotal 2016 meeting between a thousand evangelical leaders and Trump, during which he sealed an alliance by promising to nominate judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade and eliminate the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits churches from using tax-exempt resources to endorse political candidates. Although his organization is “still in the planning stages” for the 2020 election cycle, UIP’s president, Bill Dallas, said in an interview that the conservative Christian get-out-the-vote operation ? as well as its opposition’s ? will exceed 2016 in terms of “the sophistication, not just the data mining, using every technique to get the votes out.”

Maximizing white evangelical turnout for Trump will be key in Michigan and Wisconsin, two states he won in 2016 by narrow margins. White evangelicals made up 27% and 28% of the electorate in those states, respectively, according to exit polling data. Other closely watched states with high percentages of white evangelical turnout in 2016 include North Carolina (38%), Iowa (34%) and Ohio (33%).

According to Dallas, the views driving Trump’s support among the Christian voters that United in Purpose targets have already begun to solidify. “The reason why Trump has such a strong support base is because he did what he said he would do,” said Dallas. “I don’t see that [impeachment] turning off Christian voters. What would turn off Christian voters is if he didn’t fulfill his promises and commitments that he said he would do if he was elected.”

For the 2020 cycle, My Faith Votes, an organization that boasts Huckabee as its honorary national chairman, has also been organizing voter registration drives. “As Christians,” Jason Yates, the group’s CEO claims, “we must always look to elect leaders who defend our values and believe that God is the ultimate authority in this nation.” (Yates did not respond to interview requests.) In an email to My Faith Votes supporters, Huckabee described the group’s efforts in more detail. Over the course of the year, he wrote, “TV and radio PSAs will be running around the country reaching millions; millennials and Generation Z will be reached on Christian campuses; hundreds of thousands of Christians will be mobilized using peer-to-peer texting and door-to-door outreach, all in an effort to motivate and equip Christians with everything they need to take action.”

In November, Yates announced a partnership with Intercessors for America, an organization based in Purcellville, Virginia, that hosts weekly prayer calls and enlists supporters to engage in prayer against supposed deep-state and George Soros-led schemes against Trump and his allies. In a webcast, Yates and Dave Kubal, Intercessors for America’s president, announced they were developing a phone app to identify Christian voters with a “low propensity” to vote. But apps and microtargeting of voters are not the only way to keep evangelical voters in the Trump camp. The next day, Kubal was on a conference call with Paula White, her chief of staff, Todd Lamphere, and the evangelists Jon and Jolene Hamill announcing the launch of the One Voice Prayer Movement, carrying out, according to Kubal, White’s “vision to see the church of Jesus Christ come together, and pray for this administration and pray for our country.” (Kubal did not respond to an interview request. The Hamills, who are hosting a “Revolution” conference on New Year’s Eve at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, also did not respond to interview requests.)

On the call, White prayed for 10 minutes, during which she asked God to protect Trump and deliver him from his enemies. “Lord, we ask you to deliver our president from any snare, any trap, any setup of the enemy according to Ephesians 6:12,” a verse in the Bible that forms the core of the “spiritual warfare” that Trump’s prayer warriors say they are engaged in on his behalf. (“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”)

But White has a plan to protect Trump from those dark forces, vanquish his enemies, and to defend the “biblical” government that has elevated Christian right personnel and policy priorities. And she left no doubt that the multiple roles she plays — presidential personal pastor, White House employee and defender of Trump against his enemies — have merged into a single message of God’s wrath against anyone who dares criticize him. “Any persons, entities, that are aligned against the president,” she said on the One Voice Prayer Movement launch call, “will be exposed and dealt with and overturned by the superior blood of Jesus.”

Sarah Posner is a reporting fellow with Type Investigations.

ABOUT THE REPORTER

SARAH POSNER

Sarah Posner is a reporting fellow with Type Investigations and author of God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters

WHERE IS OBAMA?! CANCEL CULTURE? promised anti-gerry w/ eric h, who is not doing much?

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aha-let: 3 prong attack: huge soc med buys for dark ads/video 2) structural gerry and vote suppreee 3) post-truth disinfo eg tweet altered quotes

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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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Wall Street Banks Court Moderate Democrats to Blunt Warren's Hostility (The New York Times*)*

Wall Street bank lobbyists are seeking moderate Democratic allies in Congress to deprive Elizabeth Warren of votes and curb policies they consider hostile to their interests.

see voting machines

an 1219

...The House of Representatives approved a bill over the summer that would provide $600 million for states to buy new voting machines that would not connect to the internet and would provide paper backups. The bill was blocked by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who had also blocked multiple Senate election security bills before agreeing to back a bill that would provide $250 million — less than half the amount budgeted in the House version — to improve states’ election security.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called McConnell’s announcement a “start” but added that the bill doesn’t provide “all the money we requested” and “doesn’t include a single solitary reform that virtually everyone knows we need.”

“If Americans don’t believe their elections are on the up-and-up,” he said, “woe is us as a country and as a democracy.”

...

an 1219

Bloomberg and Steyer have spent six times as much on TV ads as all of the other Democratic candidates combinedJoshua Holland

an 1219

no lnx

Corporate media’s mantra is ‘anyone but Sanders or Warren’ — and they’re doing the work of the extremely wealthy

Written by Norman Solomon / Common Dreams December 2, 2019

Anyone who’s been paying attention should get the picture by now. Overall, in subtle and sledgehammer ways, the mass media of the United States—owned and sponsored by corporate giants—are in the midst of a siege against the two progressive Democratic candidates who have a real chance to be elected president in 2020.

Some of the prevalent media bias has taken the form of protracted swoons for numerous “center lane” opponents of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The recent entry of Michael Bloomberg has further jammed that lane, adding a plutocrat “worth” upwards of $50 billion to a bevy of corporate politicians.

The mainline media are generally quite warm toward so-called “moderates,” without bothering to question what’s so moderate about such positions as bowing to corporate plunder, backing rampant militarism and refusing to seriously confront the climate emergency.

Critical reporting on debate performances and campaign operations has certainly been common. But the core of the “moderate” agenda routinely gets affirmation from elite journalists who told us in no uncertain terms four years ago that Hillary Clinton was obviously the nominee who could defeat Donald Trump.

This year, Sanders has taken most of the flak from reporters and pundits (often virtually indistinguishable), serving as a kind of “heat shield” for Warren. But as Warren gained ground in polling this fall, the attacks on her escalated—to the point that she now has a corporate media bullseye on her political back.

The disconnect between voters and corporate media is often huge. Meanwhile, with fly-on-the-wall pretenses, media outlets that have powerfully distorted proposals like Medicare for All are now reporting (with thinly veiled satisfaction) that voters are cool to those proposals.

The Washington Post, owned by one of the world’s richest people Jeff Bezos, has routinely spun Medicare for All as some sort of government takeover. In a prominent Nov. 30 news story that largely attributed Warren’s recent dip in polls to her positioning on healthcare, the Post matter-of-factly—and falsely—referred to Medicare for All as “government-run healthcare” and “a government-run health plan.”

Such pervasive mass-media reporting smoothed the way for deceptions that have elevated Pete Buttigieg in polls during recent weeks with his deceptive “Medicare for All Who Want It” slogan. That rhetoric springboards from the false premises that Medicare for All would deprive people of meaningful choice and would somehow reduce coverage.

In late September, with scant media scrutiny, Buttigieg launched an ad campaign against Medicare for All that has continued. Using insurance-industry talking points, he is deliberately confusing the current “choice” of predatory for-profit insurance plans with the genuine full choice of healthcare providers that top-quality Medicare for everyone would offer.

Mainstream media outlets are ill-positioned to refute such distortions since they’re routinely purveying such distortions themselves. Warren’s backtracking step on Medicare for All in mid-November was a tribute to media pressure in tandem with attacks from centrist opponents.

The idea of implementing some form of a substantial “wealth tax” has also been denigrated by many corporate-employed journalists. Countless pundits and political beat reporters have warned that proposals like a wealth tax, from Warren and Sanders, risk dragging Democrats down with voters. The truth is that such proposals are unpopular with the punditocracy and the extremely wealthy—while it’s a very different matter for most voters, who strongly favor a wealth tax.

On the same day this fall, the New York Times and the Washington Post published stories on Democratic elites’ “anxiety” about the presidential election.The Post wrote that Democrats “fret” Warren and Sanders “are too liberal to win a general election.” (With disdain, the article made a matter-of-fact reference to “the push for liberal purity.”) The Times similarly wrote of “persistent questions about Senator Elizabeth Warren’s viability in the general election.” Contrary voices were absent in both news stories.

Assessing those articles, FAIR.org media analyst Julie Hollar pointed out: “The pieces interviewed a number of big donors and centrist party leaders, who fretted about their preferred candidate’s struggles and expressed hope for someone more corporate-friendly than Warren to enter the race and challenge her rise.”

Hollar added: “The thinking of powerful people in the Democratic Party is worth writing about. But it’s crucial not to just take their claims at face value. . . . What establishment Democrats are really worried about, of course, is their own power in the party, which is threatened by a surging left wing. Don’t look to their establishment media counterparts to report on that transparently.”

Part of the problem is the TV network that many Democrats (mistakenly) trust. MSNBC is becoming notorious for its hostility to Bernie Sanders, often expressed through egregious omission or mathematical fib if not direct antipathy.

Ongoing media analysis is crucial, but even more important is activist pushback against the 24/7 onslaught of corporate-minded propaganda, often couched as common sense and incontrovertible reality. Among the needed counterpunches are these:

Support progressive media outlets as they provide independent coverage of the presidential campaign

Widely share, via email forwarding and social media, online pieces that you like. (Hopefully including this one.)

Recognize, challenge, and organize against the corporate-media echo chamber that affects so many voters

You shouldn’t have to be an active supporter of Bernie Sanders (as I am) or of Elizabeth Warren to voice outrage about corporate media biases. What’s at stake includes democracy—the informed consent of the governed—and so much more.

History is unfolding in real time. It’s not a product on the media shelf, to be passively bought and consumed. As Bernie 2020 campaign co-chair Nina Turner says, “All that we love is on the line.”

Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” and “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State.” He is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

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an 1119 wishful?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/economic-woes-in-the-rust-belt-could-doom-trump-in-2020-heres-how/

===

Open S GOP > dems $ 11/14/19

The GOP mass exodus just picked up another major figure. Prominent and powerful U.S. Rep. Peter King, Republican of New York, has announced his retirement after 14 terms. King, who was twice chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, says he will not seek re-election.

King is the 20th House Republican who will not seek re-election. King is a frequent guest on all the major cable television shows. A strong supporter of President Trump, he included in his statement Monday, “I intend to vote against President Trump’s impeachment and will support the President’s bid for re-election.”

King serves the people of New York’s 2nd congressional district, which includes densely-populated section of Long Island. The district was strongly Democratic, voting for Barack Obama twice, and for John Kerry and Al Gore over George W. Bush. But in 2016 King’s constituents voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, 53–44

yikes, does not bode well for 2020?

10/19

https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/supreme-court-vacates-ruling-finding-michigan-unconstitutionally-gerrymandered-congressional-districts

United States Supreme Court on Monday cancelled a federal court’s decision, which found Michigan’s congressional voting districts were unconstitutional because they were gerrymandered to such a degree that it violated voters’ First Amendment rights and the Constitution’s Equal Protection clause.

Gerrymandering is the setting of electoral boundaries to favor the political interests of the party in power.

A three-judge panel on the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Michigan ruled in April that 34 of the state’s voting districts were specifically designed to disadvantage Democratic voters, deliberately diluting the power of their vote to ensure a particular partisan outcome. The panel’s ruling ordered the state to redraw the voting district maps, calling partisan gerrymandering a “pernicious practice that undermines our democracy.”

The order was expected in light of the Justices June decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, a landmark decision which greatly reined in federal court’s ability to intervene in political gerrymandering cases. The Court ruled that the partisan gerrymandering issue was “beyond the reach of federal courts.”

In a 5-4 vote along ideological lines, Chief Justice John Roberts invoked the court’s Political Question doctrine in finding it constitutionally permissible for voting districts to be drawn with the specific intent to disadvantage voters of a particular political ideology. The ruling was seen as a severe blow to voting rights advocates challenging the disproportionate impact gerrymandering can have on voting power.

Roberts reasoned that the question before the court– “determining when political gerrymandering has gone too far”– could not be grounded in a “limited and precise rationale” because the issue “lacks judicially discoverable and manageable standards for resolving.”

He conceded that the ruling may enable increasingly inequitable political representation, but said that such a result does not violate any constitutional mandate where no standard for determination exists. Roberts did not prevent the court from intervening in cases of racial gerrymandering.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote a scathing dissent in which she called the majority’s decision a low-point for democracy.

“I think it important to underscore that fact: The majority disputes none of what I have said (or will say) about how gerrymanders undermine democracy. Indeed, the majority concedes (really, how could it not?) that gerrymandering is ‘incompatible with democratic principles,’” she said from the bench.

Scotus Orders by Law&Crime on Scribd

...

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/not-how-we-defeat-trump-says-sanders-campaign-after-biden-opens-door-to-super-pacs/

no lnx

‘Not how we defeat Trump,’ says Sanders campaign after Biden opens door to super PACs

Written by Eoin Higgins / Common Dreams October 25, 2019

Former Vice President Joe Biden’s 2020 Democratic presidential campaign on Thursday announced that they would accept support from super PACs, a reversal of a stance that had lasted through the primary season and is shared by his top rivals.

In response to the news, Faiz Shakir, campaign manager for the democratic presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), sounded a note of disappointment.

“The former Vice President has been unable to generate grassroots support, and now his campaign is endorsing an effort to buy the primary through a super PAC that can rake in unlimited cash from billionaires and corporations,” said Shakir.

As Common Dreams reported Thursday, plans are underway by Biden allies to start a super PAC for the beleaguered front-runner. Biden has struggled to raise money; a CNN report Thursday showed the former vice president has less than $9 million cash on hand. Sanders has $33.7 million.

Biden deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield told NBC in a statement Thursday afternoon after the CNN story broke that the campaign was still oppposed to super PACs—at least ideologically. She left the door open to accepting their support due to fears of running against President Donald Trump in a hypothetical general election match-up.

“Until we have these badly needed reforms, we will see more than a billion dollars in spending by Trump and his allies to re-elect this corrupt president,” said Bedingfield. “And let’s be clear: Donald Trump has decided that the general election has already begun.”

Bedingfield did not explain why Biden would need a super PAC in the primary, where he will not face Trump. Instead, the Biden aide focused on the future.

“In this time of crisis in our politics, it is not surprising that those who are dedicated to defeating Donald Trump are organizing in every way permitted by current law to bring an end to his disastrous presidency,” said Bedingfield. “Nothing changes unless we defeat Donald Trump.”

Shakir, in his statement, strongly disagreed with that interpretation of how to defeat the Republican incumbent. Super PACs, said Shakir, are a recipe for disaster.

“That’s not how we defeat Trump,” said Shakir. “It’s a recipe to maintain a corrupt political system which enriches wealthy donors and leaves the working class behind.”

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i have not been able to figure her TG out; many ads on AN

no lnx

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested that she thinks Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, is being “groomed” by Russia to run as a third-party candidate in 2020.

Clinton made the allegations during an interview with David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s former campaign manager. During the interview, Clinton alleged that Russia used 2016 Green Party nominee Jill Stein as an “asset” and suggested that Gabbard would play a similar role in the upcoming election without mentioning her name.

“They’re also going to do third-party again,” Clinton said. “I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on someone who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.”

Clinton went on to label Stein a “Russian asset.”

“And that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset,” Clinton said. “Yeah, she’s a Russian asset — I mean, totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. So I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most needed.”...

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/how-duplicitous-trolls-are-using-tulsi-gabbards-candidacy-to-foment-disruption-and-chaos/

nolnx

ous trolls are using Tulsi Gabbard’s candidacy to foment disruption and chaos

Written byNancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly August 23, 2019

Tulsi Gabbard is not going to be the Democratic nominee for president in 2020. At this point, her polling average at Real Clear Politics is 1.4%. Nevertheless, conservative media celebrated the fact that Gabbard won the online poll sponsored by Drudge Report after the first round of debates. Similarly, Gabbard won polls from both Breitbart and Drudge after her performance in the second debate. Those results were not replicated by any reputable polling firm.

Not long after the first debate, we learned what had prompted Gabbard’s success in those online polls.

Users from pro-Trump communities on 4chan and Reddit implored fellow members to vote for lower-polling candidates in online polls, specifically Tulsi Gabbard and Bill de Blasio, in the hours after Wednesday’s Democratic debate — a sign that digital manipulation efforts related to U.S. politics and elections remain very much alive....

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pendley

...icn

BLM Shuffles Staff

Shifting power to the states is also a longtime goal of some conservative groups. The Trump administration has moved in that direction with the Shared Stewardship forest program, for instance, and beefing up the presence of local government on the Bears Ears National Monument management council. Recent proposals in Congress would also put state and local government in charge of energy management and law enforcement on federal lands.

Martin Nie, director of the University of Montana's Bolle Center for People and Forests, said the BLM reorganization is the administration's latest nod to Sagebrush Rebels and states' rights conservatives.

"We have seen an unprecedented transfer of management authority from the federal government to the states," he said, counting the BLM reorganization as the latest example.

Could It Influence Western Voters?

Empowering states, reducing the role of the federal government, expanding public lands energy development—while those ideas resonate in western states, what might be even more important to conservatives is the role the BLM reorganization can play in shoring up the conservative vote in 2020.

Republicans stand to lose Senate seats in Colorado and Arizona if their voters don't turn out. In the U.S. House, the GOP sees winnable Democratic seats in Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada. Montana's sole House seat, held by a Republican now, is considered a tossup. Meanwhile, Nevada and Arizona are both considered swing states in 2020 presidential race.

With the reorganization shifting BLM headquarters and staff to their states, it could appear to conservative voters that the Trump administration is listening to their pleas to give states more influence over federal land.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/trump-unleashes-his-twisted-2020-strategy-of-grievance-and-racism/

no lnx

Trump unleashes his twisted 2020 strategy of grievance and racism

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly October 11, 2019

Having only lost Minnesota by 1.5 percentage points in 2016, the Trump campaign has made it clear that they think they can win the state in 2020. That’s what Thursday night’s rally in Minneapolis was all about. Peter Nichols wrote about the strategy.

One Republican operative close to the White House, speaking anonymously to discuss campaign strategy, told me that Trump is convinced of the old political adage “Therace will hinge on turnout.” If he can mobilize and excite his base voters, they’ll show up in force, much as they did in 2016, impeachment be damned…

“His message is so edgy, and his core support is so intense and enthusiastic, and the rallies are so unlike anything we’ve seen in the modern era,” the strategist told me. “Arithmetically speaking, this election is about jacking up turnout of your own supporters on the theory that no one on their side of the ball excites them the way Trump excites us,” he said, referring to the Democrats.

If that’s the plan, then we can look at Thursday night’s speech to see how Trump plans to excite his supporters in order to get them to show up in force.

As Nichols pointed out, the first half of Trump’s speech was all about his personal grievances. He mocked FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, said that Joe Biden was “only considered a good vice president because he understood how to kiss Barack Obama’s ass,” called Ilhan Omar an “American-hating socialist,” and referred to congressional Democrats as “sick” for pursuing an impeachment inquiry.

Then Trump engaged in his second strategy for exciting his voters: racism. Because Minnesota is home to the largest concentration of Somalis in the country, they became his target.

Same old playbook: racism https://t.co/4OuUA1Hvya**

— Nancy LeTourneau (@Smartypants60) October 11, 2019

He then went on to say that “we will always protect American families first” and that hadn’t happened in Minnesota. He said that he would not “allow a violent ideology to take root in our country on our shores” like had happened in Europe. Equating the Somali community in Minnesota with a “violent ideology” is not only a racist lie, it is the same kind of rhetoric that inspired the gunman in El Paso.

This is, however, merely a repeat of what Trump did in 2016 when he visited Minnesota two days before the election and told the crowd that they had “suffered enough” as a result of “filthy refugee vetting” that had allowed an influx of Somalis into the state.

When it comes to this part of Trump’s strategy, Elad Nehorai, who describes himself as a “proud progressive Orthodox Jew,” put it best. He wrote that “This is the kind of hate rally seen in authoritarian and fascist countries. We Jews have seen this before, as have countless other minorities. This is the powerful hurting the vulnerable to empower themselves.” Senator Amy Klobuchar echoed that statement.

The President just attacked Somali Americans in his rally in Minnesota. Immigrants and refugees have helped make our state a wonderful place to live and work — which is far more than this President has done. Stop using immigrants and refugees as political pawns!

— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) October 11, 2019

I have often been proud to point out that, when it comes to the economy, my home state of Minnesota consistently performs better than the national average. One of the reasons why is because of the very immigrant community the president attacked. Here is the data from the Federal Reserve Board of Minneapolis.

With high levels of labor force participation and employment, African immigrants brought in $2.5 billion in earnings during 2015. These households paid $419 million in federal taxes and $222 million in state and local taxes, leaving African immigrants an estimated $1.8 billion in spending power. Despite its relatively small size, the African immigrant population makes significant contributions to the Minnesota economy.

At the end of his speech on Thursday night, Trump threw out a couple of lines about health care and a promise to end childhood cancer. But as Nichols wrote, “he read those parts without any particular vocal affect, perhaps because he doesn’t truly believe they’re the way to win.” It could also be because he doesn’t really give a shit about things like health care. In the end, the plan is to excite his base of supporters with a combination of grievance and racism, because that is exactly what excites him. But the truth is, that’s all he’s got.

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opensecrets

democrats’ rejection of fossil fuel money marks shift from previous presidential races

The oil and gas industry has always favored Republican candidates over their Democratic opponents. Now, Democrats are pledging to break away from fossil fuel money for good. As climate change takes center stage at political debates, a Democrat-controlled House is pushing for legislation to combat the crisis and reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. **Read More**

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/ohio-to-purge-more-than-200000-voters-using-list-flagged-with-numerous-errors/

no lnx

Ohio to purge more than 200,000 voters using list flagged with numerous errors

Written by Igor Derysh / Salon September 9, 2019

Ohio is set to purge nearly a quarter-million people from its voter rolls Friday despite journalists and voting rights groups finding repeated mistakes on the state’s list.

Republican Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose published a list in August targeting 235,000 voters the state says are inactive, meaning voters who have not voted for the past six years that the state was unable to contact.

The list of voters was fraught with errors. The secretary of state’s office announced hundreds of changes to the list almost immediately. Two weeks later, voting rights groups discovered that 4,000 people had been erroneously added to the list, the Columbus Dispatch reported. The paper reported days later that another 1,600 people had been incorrectly added to the list because of an error by a software vendor.

The list also included thousands of people who were apparently unaware they had been targeted for removal, even though the state is required to attempt to contact them. More than 11,800 people included on the list have updated their voter registrations so they won’t be canceled, HuffPost reported.

Ohio removes people from the rolls if the state suspects they have moved or died. The list includes people who have not responded to an address confirmation mailing and people who have not voted or participated in any board of elections activity for six years. But voting rights groups say the purge lists are filled with errors that could disenfranchise thousands of legitimate voters. Ohio has already purged 265,000 voter registrations this year, and at least 17 million people have been purged from voter rolls around the country since the 2016 election, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

The Ohio Democratic Party sued to try to stop the state from carrying out the purge, citing the repeated errors on the list. LaRose’s office argued that the errors had been fixed and that the office was taking additional steps to contact people on the list. A federal judge on Tuesday rejected the Democrats’ lawsuit seeking to halt the purge, despite acknowledging problems with past purges. The Supreme Court last year ruled that Ohio’s “supplemental process” that targets voters it suspects have moved or died was legal despite putting eligible voters at risk.

“As we prepare to finalize this process, we’re confident that there has never been a more intensive review of Ohio’s voting rolls, and we’re satisfied that the proper safeguards are in place to ensure any eligible voter will have the opportunity to have their voice heard,” LaRose spokeswoman Maggie Sheehan said in a statement to HuffPost.

But Democrats say that the dubious process all but guarantees that eligible voters will be removed.

“Someone asked me on a call today, ‘Well, what’s the margin of error that’s acceptable in this purging?’ And I said, this isn’t a poll. This is voting. You should not ever be limiting people from the rolls by government error,” Ohio Democratic Party chairman David Pepper told WOSU.

The party’s executive director, Greg Beswick, told Cleveland.com that it was “disturbing” that LaRose planned to go forward with the purge despite admitting to “errors that resulted in thousands of Ohio voters being improperly … and unlawfully flagged to be removed from the rolls.”

“The specter that any active voters are purged due to government error, and no fault of their own, is unacceptable,” he added.

With no legal recourse left, voting rights groups like All Voting is Local are scrambling to contact as many people as possible to encourage them to update their registrations.

“Thousands of voters at risk of being purged have already alerted the state that they are still very much alive and wish to vote,” Mick Brickner, the group’s Ohio state director, said in a statement. “This shows how deeply broken the purge process is and the need for voter registration modernization now.”

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Trump tweets from his alternate universe about a windfall for famers as farm loan delinquencies surge in Wisconsin

Kerry Eleveld / Daily Kos

As reports surface of farm loan delinquencies surging in Wisconsin, Donald Trump dispatched some news for farm country from his alternate universe. “Billions pouring into USA,” Trump tweeted Friday morning in defense of his trade

no lnx

Trump tweets from his alternate universe about a windfall for famers as farm loan delinquencies surge in Wisconsin

Written by Kerry Eleveld / Daily Kos September 6, 2019

As reports surface of farm loan delinquencies surging in Wisconsin, Donald Trump dispatched some news for farm country from his alternate universe.

“Billions pouring into USA,” Trump tweeted Friday morning in defense of his trade war. “Targeted Patriot Farmers getting massive Dollars from the incoming Tariffs!”

Meanwhile, back on Earth, U.S. News & World Report notes that Wisconsin’s community banks saw a record high number of delinquencies on farm loans in June. The percentage of past-due loans at community banks hit 2.9% in June, reaching rates that are comparable to those back in 2001.

The rate of Wisconsin farm loan delinquencies has doubled since Trump took office, soaring higher than in any of the other top-producing farm states. Nationwide, June saw some 1.5% of farm loans at FDIC-insured banks that were either 90 days past due on their payments or no longer accruing interest due to doubts of repayment.

Wisconsin farmers have been hit particularly hard because their crops had found markets in multiple countries impacted by Trump’s trade standoffs, including China, Canada, and Mexico.

Trump won Wisconsin in 2016 by a narrow margin of less than one percentage point. Democrats are aiming to win it back in 2020.

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gov sanford primary

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/this-republican-is-launching-a-primary-challenge-against-trump/

Democratic Party staffers are raising red flags about new voting technology for the coming primaries

Steven Rosenfeld / Independent Media Institute

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Georgia GOP senator will resign at end of year, setting off a crucial 2020 special election

Jeff Singer / Daily Kos

In huge news for the battle for the Senate , Georgia Republican Johnny Isakson announced Wednesday that he would resign from the chamber at the end of 2019 because of health reasons.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/trump-might-actually-get-a-serious-challenger-from-the-right-wing/

weld chafee and sanford app trail

voter suppress

n Louisiana, Republicans are trying to win a supermajority in the legislature so that even if the state’s Democratic governor is re-elected this fall, he won’t be able to veto future GOP gerrymanders.
In Mississippi, they want to maintain the state’s lifetime ban on voting for people convicted of any of a long list of felonies, even those who’ve completed their sentences—a relic of Jim Crow that makes the state one of just a few to do so.
And in Kentucky, they’re eager to flip the office of secretary of state—currently held by a Democrat—so that they’ll have complete control over how elections are run when Mitch McConnell seeks an eighth term next year

Democratic presidential candidates declare war on anti-union ‘right-to-work’ laws

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icn

Debate’s Attempt to Show Division on Climate Change Finds Unity Instead

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/the-dnc-confederacy-of-dunces-is-back-at-it-for-2020-and-the-consequences-could-devastate-the-us-and-the-world/

true dat

DNC confederacy of dunces is back at it for 2020 — and the consequences could devastate the US and the world

Written by John Atcheson / Common Dreams August 8, 2019

The Democratic debates turned into exactly what they should have — a war between the progressives and the neoliberal centrists (aka corporatists).

Guess which side the corporate media, the pundits, the think tanks, foundations, the DNC, and the rest of the Democratic establishment is lining up behind?

You got it. The corporatists. Not surprising when you consider most of the mainstream media is owned by corporations, and corporations fund the rest of the neoliberal institutions supporting the party.

These are the same folks who, back 2016, assured us Hillary would win and that Trump couldn’t. Undaunted by their complete failure to predict Trump’s victory and undaunted by the fact that they have no satisfactory explanation for why they were so wrong, they’re busy dispensing advice and issuing dire warnings against progressivism once again.

The problem is, their advice is likely to result in the same outcome as it did in 2016—a Trump victory.

...

Or consider the Green New Deal (GND). In the face of a climate crisis that is literally an existential threat, the GND calls for laying out a blueprint designed to tackle climate change in a way that makes it an economic opportunity, not an economic burden. Yes, it calls for some fundamental restructuring of our economy, but that’s exactly what’s needed to avoid an ecological Armageddon. And that’s not hyperbole—that’s the scientifically accurate description of the path the “realists” want us to stay on. To the extent the realists have a climate policy, it amounts to trying to jump the Grand Canyon in ten-foot increments. Yeah, that’s “practical.”

So why are centrist Democrats ridiculing the GND? Again, the answer is simple—they are reluctant to take on the fossil fuel industry. In fact, the DNC overturneda party policy not to take campaign contributions from fossil fuel companies. Turns out, it’s more “practical” to keep the corporate spigots open that it is to protect our life support systems.

Or consider trade. While the corporate centrists would like to continue with the business-first strategy that has allowed corporations to export jobs and capital in order to avoid taxes, pay lower wages, avoid environmental laws, and do an end run around worker safety, food safety and product safety laws, progressives are advocating trade agreements that force corporations to consider those things. This would mean fewer jobs going overseas, higher tax revenues, and better lives for both domestic and international workers.

...

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/why-we-need-the-2020-democratic-debates-to-probe-candidates-us-attorney-picks/

gop house bail

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Over the past few days, several prominent House Republicans have announced they will not seek re-election in 2020: Reps. Paul Mitchell (R-MI), Martha Roby (R-AL), Rob Bishop (R-UT) and Pete Olson and Mike Conaway (R-TX).

In some ways, this is deja vu — 2018 also saw a massive flood of Republicans retiring. But there is a key difference. A lot of the representatives who ran for the exits in 2018 were in competitive suburban seats that they likely would have lost if they had run for again. With the exception of Olson, all the Republicans above represent safe red districts — Conaway’s West Texas seat voted for President Donald Trump by 59 points. There is virtually no question that any of these Republicans could have another term if they wanted.

So why don’t they want another term? Writing for MSNBC, Steve Benen offered three key reasons.

First of all, while these Republicans don’t expect they would lose their seats, they also don’t expect their party to take back the House. Control of the House has not flipped in a presidential year since 1952, and has not flipped in two consecutive elections since 1954. Moreover, Democrats have made gains in the House in five of the last six presidential elections. All of this, combined with the fact that the National Republican Congressional Committee’s leadership team is widely viewed as incompetent, mean these Republicans expect they’ll be stuck in the House minority for at least another cycle — and being in the House minority is impotent, thankless, and frustrating in the best of times.

Second, Benen noted, Republicans are getting tired of having to defend Trump’s constant lies and racist behavior on social media. Whenever the President makes a controversial rant, Republicans on Capitol Hill are dogged with questions from reporters that — for the sake of partisanship — they just can’t answer. This, too, is a degrading routine, to say nothing of how it might affect their prospects in a post-Trump political landscape.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/democratic-2020-strategy-must-be-gloves-off-and-abandon-all-subtletytrump-will-kill-your-dog/

Democratic 2020 strategy must be gloves off and abandon all subtlety: ‘Trump will kill your dog!’

Written by Lucian K. Truscott IV / Salon July 27, 2019

When he’s finished putting down your dog, Trump is going to take away your health care, raise your taxes, eliminate your job, take away your right to an abortion, limit your right to vote, turn your air and water brown, cut your Social Security and Medicare, and tell you if you don’t like it, you can leave.

It doesn’t matter who’s the nominee. This is the message Democrats have to carry to the country in 2020. Is it an exaggeration? A scare tactic? Are you kidding? We already know all this stuff is true, and we don’t need “facts” to surmise that if given half a chance Trump and his minions will find some way to make euthanizing shelter animals easier and more profitable. For Donald Trump and the Republican Party he leads, money and cruelty is who they are. It’s what they do.

Democrats had better wake up to the fact that the 2020 campaign, on every level from the presidential race on down, is going to take place in the gutter. It’s long past time to take the gloves off. Republicans never put them on. They’ve been out there stealing, lying and cheating their way into office for decades. They don’t have a concept of playing fair. They play dirty. They play to win. They’ll do anything it takes to do it.

They’ve already gerrymandered electoral districts so that Democrats get a majority of the vote and a minority of House seats like they do in states like Wisconsin and North Carolina. They’ve passed laws restricting the right to vote in 25 states since 2010, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks voting laws. Fifteen states have more restrictive voter ID requirements, and ten have passed laws making it harder for citizens to register to vote. Every state with new voting restrictions is controlled by Republicans, and a Republican-backed lawsuit succeeded in defenestrating the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. And I hardly need to go into what they’ve done to campaign finance laws. Mitt Romney’s cri de coeur in 2012, “Corporations are people too!” is all you need to know.

Now they’re floating shit like this: all Democrats are Socialists. That whiny little Trump-pilot-fish Lindsey Graham recently asserted that AOC and the rest of the “Squad” are communists. Every other time Trump opens his mouth he’s chirping that Democrats are for “open borders.” They’re out there daily pushing the lie that Democrats want to come right into your homes and take away your guns. And don’t you know that they’ll get around to some bullshit about how Democrats want ISIS to win in Syria and Iraq and then they’ll turn Afghanistan over to the Taliban.

Do you think Republicans care if it’s all complete bullshit? Hell no. They’re going to run on this crap, and anything else they can think up over the next 15 months, and they’re going to laugh all the way to the ballot box. You want to know what else Trump and his lily-livered bunch of chicken hawks are going to do? They’re going to sell the idea that Donald Trump, who had five draft deferments, skipped out of Vietnam with his bone spurs, capitulated to Vladimir Putin at Helsinki, writes “love letters” to Kim Jung Un, ripped babies out their mothers arms along the southern border, and has been charged by multiple women with rape as well as sexual assault is a tough guy.

I’ll wait for you to reach down and pick your jaw up from the floor on that one. You okay now? Is your jaw reattached?

Here’s why Republicans are pushing the lie that Trump is a tough guy. Because it works. Historian Rick Perlstein, author of a series of books on the rise of Republican conservatism, was interviewed in The New Yorker last week and said something I think the Democratic Party has forgotten over the last decade or so. “Toughness is a core primary value,” Perlstein said, referring to red states that Democrats have failed to carry in recent elections. “All of us remember 2004, when George W. Bush won reelection explicitly on this rationale of saying we know people disagree with his issue positions, but we are going to position him as the guy who sticks with his gut no matter what.”

Sound familiar? Bush, who famously avoided Vietnam by joining the Air Force National Guard and then failed to show up for duty during the war years, was sold as “tough.” Ronald Reagan was awarded the Bronze Star for Toughness when he yelled out that he “paid for this microphone” at some long-forgotten debate in New Hampshire in 1980. And now we’ve got Donald Trump, whose boasting about grabbing women “by the pussy” on the infamous Access Hollywood tape is what passes for Republican toughness today.

The appearance by a real-life tough guy on Capitol Hill got me thinking about what the Democrats’ problem has been when it comes to this “toughness” thing. Robert Mueller, a Marine veteran of Vietnam who earned a Bronze Star medal and a Purple Heart, has been roundly criticized for his halting and seemingly imprecise testimony before the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees this week. The contrast between the serious, taciturn Mueller and such bellowing “bomb throwers” as Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio couldn’t have been starker.

Mueller’s problem on Wednesday is the same as the problem Democrats have when they run for office. Mueller was careful, nuanced, and he stuck to the facts. His testimony, when it came right down to it, was imperfect in the way that any sane person must be if he or she is bound by a sense of duty, propriety, and an urge to abide by accepted norms. He came across as a somewhat reluctant, hesitant witness, while if you read his testimony, he was anything but. He was measured, he was accurate, and he was truthful.

Republicans on the two committees were almost uniformly the opposite. Their speechifying and questioning was impertinent, premised on lies, and intended to distract from the truth. In short, they conducted themselves at the Mueller hearings in the manner that they run for office.

There is a lesson Democrats running for office can learn from the Mueller hearings. It does you little good to stick to the rules of good order and behavior when the other side has abandoned both. I’m not saying that Democrats should adopt Republican ways by joining them in lying, cheating and stealing. But I am saying that Democrats can learn something from Republican imprecision.

Take health care as just one example.Ever since the debates over Obamacare, Democrats have been lost in a blizzard of confusing and often contradictory details about how to handle the nation’s healthcare crisis. Obamacare was an imperfect compromise, and now they’re torn between defending a muddled status quo or going for one variation or another on Medicare for all, and nobody really understands one plan from another. Meanwhile, Republicans have spent the last several decades firing potshots at Democrats and proposing no plan of their own.

How about this: what if Democrats took a page out of the Republican playbook and simply said, “Don’t worry, you can trust us. We’re going to take care of your health care.” That’s the plan, the whole thing. It would have the advantage of being both simple and true. They could apply this approach across the board. Here’s what we’re going to do: we’re going to lower your taxes, raise your pay, protect your jobs, reduce your student loan payments, protect Social Security and Medicare, maintain your right to an abortion, reform the immigration laws, and protect the southern border. And we’re going to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What plan do we have for all of this? You know us, we’re on your side, and we’re going to do what we say....

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/a-disinformation-hurricane-is-coming-in-2020-as-other-adversaries-emulate-russias-model/

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A ‘disinformation hurricane’ is coming in 2020 as other adversaries emulate Russia’s model

This article was paid for with reader donations to Alternet 2020.

Written by Matt Osborne July 16, 2019

Shortly after the first debate between Democratic presidential contenders, trolls from the message board 4Chan boosted Tulsi Gabbard to the top of some online polls, earning credulous press attention with this sudden surge of support. At the same time, real and fake Andrew Yang supporters complained of supposed unfairness to their candidate, trending #LetYangSpeak on Twitter. While this is unlikely to make either longshot candidate the nominee, anyone looking to disrupt the Democratic Party has two new potential wedges.

After the 2016 primaries were decided, Russia exploited discontent among Bernie Sanders’ supporters to divide and distract Democrats. In 2020, there are several failing candidates whose supporters can be targeted with memes and fake news promoting conspiracy theories about party apparatchiks secretly conspiring against them. The potential scale of the spoiler problem is therefore much bigger and more fractured this time around. Gabbard is already a clear Kremlin favorite for this strategy, as her foreign policy leanings are quite friendly to Russia’s interests, but why stop at just one foil to the eventual nominee? Why not turn Joe Biden supporters against Elizabeth Warren, or Warren supporters against Sanders?

As the experts predicted months ago, adversaries are already hard at work attacking the 2020 election, and this time it won’t only be Russia that we have to worry about. The early signs of interference are already visible, and as we get deeper into the campaign, these threats are almost certainly going to come from new directions. Having seen Russia intervene in 2016, and win, and then get away with it, everyone from North Korea to China to Saudi Arabia will want to shape American electoral politics to their liking.

China has clearly ramped up their electioneering capabilities. In Taiwan, celebrity businessman Han Kuo-yu was elected mayor of Kaohsiung last year with help from Facebook groups “created, managed, and nurtured by what looks very much like a professional cybergroup from [mainland] China,” according to reporter Paul Huang at Foreign Policy. Now a favorite to run for Taiwan’s presidency in 2020, Han Kuo-yu is everything that Beijing could want in a Taiwanese politician. Would they hesitate to insert themselves in an American election in the midst of a high-stakes trade-war?

It is likely that these new players will attack from both sides of an issue the way Russia did in 2016 when, for example, Americans saw “separate ads, launched simultaneously, [that] would stoke suspicion about how police treat black people in one ad, while another encouraged support for pro-police groups.” About half of all the Facebook material put out by the Internet Research Agency, the Kremlin-backed “troll farm” in St. Petersburg, in 2016 was aimed at stoking racial animus this way. Then after the election, the IRA tried to organize simultaneous pro- and anti-Trump rallies in New York City. This is a standard element of all information warfare doctrine: always pit both sides against the middle.

We can also expect to see an even higher level of Twitter bot activity than ever before, as every new player will have their own army of fake accounts. They will do this because the evidence shows that these tactics are effective. A new study released earlier this month found that Russian bot activity had a greater impact than Trump’s own tweets in 2016, driving up his support among undecided voters in the last, critical days of the race. It is important to note that these activities did not reduce support for Clinton. Instead, they drove negative partisanship among potential Trump voters, appealing to baser emotions and stirring antagonism towards the Democrat in order to boost his turnout.

This is perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of what Russia’s Internet Research Agency did in 2016. Much of the material uncovered by congressional investigators was not explicitly political; instead of calls to vote, there was a lot of symbolism—eagles and flags and patriotic quotes. Yet there was an insidious program at work in those seemingly non-partisan materials. By promoting memes designed to appeal to right wing voters, the IRA created large echo chambers that amplified their messages on Facebook. Rather than change minds, they wanted people to ‘dig in’ and get whipped into a fury, making them more likely to turn out and vote.

Some have a hard time understanding that individual persuasion, while possible, is rarely an effective communications strategy. It’s much easier to turn out your own voters than convince new ones, and studies show that social media pressure is even more effective at firing up your base than organized canvassing or other traditional, in-person techniques. It is also far cheaper, and because social media incentivizes negative partisanship, such messages are much more “viral” than the positive messaging that Democrats prefer. Psychologists have long observed that people tend to be more responsive to bad news than good — they call it “negativity bias.”

The Clinton campaign made an error in 2016 by trying to persuade moderate Republicans rather than focusing on turning out her base. We’ve seen other examples of it since then. For example, when Beto O’Rourke challenged Ted Cruz in the 2018 midterm elections, his Facebook ad targeting was simplistic, and designed mainly to maximize views and clicks instead of drawing anyone into a community. Cruz, on the other hand, used Facebook ads to radicalize his base with disinformation and build on a set of shared values contrary to O’Rourke’s liberal message. Whereas O’Rourke disdained the Clinton campaign model of “triangulation and data-driven microtargeting,” he fell into the exact same trap of emphasizing positivity and “going high” in a medium that simply does not reward this type of material. Beto may have captured Democratic hearts but the Cruz campaign, which has always had a sophisticated digital GOTV machine, eked out a narrow victory thanks to high conservative turnout.

Russia has also played a major role in the Texas disinformation game. One secessionist Facebook group, Heart of Texas, reportedly received 4.8 million shares by November 2016—the most of any IRA account–through precision targeting and by emphasizing negative partisanship. The IRA is just one of a dozen The Kremlin’s campaign to influence US elections, known as ‘Project Lakhta,’ has been operational since 2014and Texas is a favorite target. Between these foreign and domestic disinformation schemes, there’s little hope for anyone to win a major election with a purely-positive, issues-based campaign on social media.

Unfortunately, we can’t expect Facebook or Twitter to take any effective actions to stop the flow of divisive content. Such measures as they have already taken are unlikely to stop anyone from abusing their platforms in new ways, or with new variations of the same techniques used in 2016. According to Robert Mueller’s indictments, more than a dozen Russian disinformation agents broke the law by purchasing identities to use within the United States. Now that there are Trump supporters who understand what happened and fully approve of the outcome there is nothing to stop the Russians, Chinese, North Koreans, Iranians, or anyone else from laundering their social media activity through willing, paid accomplices found in the United States.

And as The New York Times reported last year, during the 2018 midterms there was “a shift in the flow of online disinformation [and] falsehoods meant to mislead and inflame,” with more homegrown American groups emulating the model Russia demonstrated in 2016.

Neither Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg nor Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey will detect or prevent this activity because it is not in their interest to be proactive. The Federal Elections Commission will not get ahead of it either, defanged as they are by decades of Republican regulatory capture. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has systematically quashed all attempts to shore up American cyberdefenses, and Donald Trump is openly hostile toward any mention of beefing up our election security.Because there is no one in Washington tasked with this enforcement job, it simply will not happen. Multiple players will seek new avenues to hit Americans from all sides with the objective of reelecting Trump and keeping the Senate in Republican hands and there will be few cops on the beat to stop them.

Democrats are not ready to weather this storm. There are some free counter-disinformation tools available out there, but campaigns are too afraid of potential campaign finance violations to use them. The paid tools available are often unproven, inspiring little confidence that they will work. Vendors who offer to build up counter-disinformation capacities tell me that their proposals are often misconstrued as voter suppression, which of course is anathema to Democrats. So in the face of what is sure to be a disinformation hurricane in 2020, they seem resigned to their fate.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/a-shadow-digital-campaign-may-prove-decisive-in-2020-and-donald-trump-has-a-clear-advantage/

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A shadow digital campaign may prove decisive in 2020–and Donald Trump has a clear advantage

This article was paid for with reader donations to Alternet 2020.

written by Steven Schmidt July 11, 2019

Steven Schmidt was president of interactive digital at Aspen Marketing, now a division of Epsilon/Publicis.]

I think for the first time in history, the data operation ran everything from TV buying to where we were on the ground to all of the different operations. And so, having that data right there, we could start to where the persuadable targets are, [Get out the Vote], everything we needed to know.

Pennsylvania and Michigan… I started to see data and started to track it. We were making thousands of live calls, web tracking… and it was building and it’s building what’s called models and universes. What we can start to see is, ‘we’re in play in Pennsylvania’ and ‘in play in Michigan’. Let’s buy in these areas…. And by the Friday before the election, I had predicted that we were going to win 305 electoral results.”

-Trump Campaign Director Brad Parscale, interviewed on Fox News, November 16, 2016]

Marketing is big business in the U.S. and the Trump campaign is positioned to have the biggest digital marketing operation in history.

Today, with a reported database of 20 million active supporters, Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager and digital guru, is confident. Parscale is predicting that the campaign will raise $1 billion, three times as much as they were able to raise in 2016, when Trump claimed to be self-financing his campaign and fundraising only became a coordinated Republican effort late in the game.

As Parscale explained on Fox News shortly after the election, his strategy began and ended “with the data.” The campaign decided to spend its limited resources in swing states late in the race, arguably pushing them over the top. Months later, Trump rewarded Parscale with the top job for 2020. The president, a self-described marketing genius, had found his own marketing genius in Parscale. And Parscale succeeded personally beyond his wildest dream when he took his little marketing company and hitched it to Trump.

Digital marketing has become ubiquitous in Americans’ lives as the age of Madison Avenue relying on TV and print advertising has given way to smarter, more narrowly targeted internet campaigns. Republicans appear to understand this shift well while Democrats have yet to show that they really ‘grock‘ how digital marketing targets and delivers messages to targeted audiences.

Reaching, Acquiring, Engaging and Converting Voters

Hillary Clinton’s team made 66 thousand visual ads. My team made 5.9 million ads. Those are ads targeted directly to people the way they want to consume them. I stopped looking at people as demographics, groups, personas. I said: let’s look at people as individuals, how do they act. Because two people who look the same, might act differently.

– Brad Parscale on ‘Micro-targeting’

As a former president of one of the largest marketing services companies in America, I can tell you that the Democratic party is far behind the curve. While the Democrats continue to rely heavily on old-school techniques of grassroots organizing, union get-out-the-vote drives and appealing to people with ad hoc causes, the Republican playbook has leaped ahead.

Today’s political battles are fought largely through interactive social media. Digital life has become almost indistinguishable from real life, especially for those who grew up with the internet. Every move we make in this world creates valuable data waiting to be harvested. Personal patterns emerge. Political beliefs are packed into your profile. All of this allows marketers like Parscale to finely tune their pitches for specific groups of voters.

When your angry old uncle or MAGA-loving grandpa attends a Trump rally or answers a text message, their contact information is being harvested for Parscale’s sprawling database. When they surf the web, visit popular conservative news sites or click on trending topics about hot button issues for the right, their personal data are, thanks to lax privacy standards across the industry, sifted, sorted and grouped into preferences for targeting.

This is the world of psychographics–a qualitative approach to defining consumers psychological attributes. Psychographic profiles –measures of an individual’s activities, interests and opinions, or AIO variables in industry-speak–were once used to sell sneakers and deodorants but have now become a potent tool for voter outreach and persuasion.

This is marketing 101 and the Democrats are only beginning to get into this high stakes game. Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean has been given the task, as of early 2019, to launch a new voter database. Dean called it “a big breakthrough” that will aim to compete with what the Republicans have spent years putting in place. “I’d sort of given up that we could get it done,” Dean told the Associated Press.

The Guru

Brad Parscale is a six foot, eight inch balding libertarian out of Topeka, Kansas via San Antonio, Texas. Before becoming Trump’s digital 2016 campaign director, he was a hungry young businessman and digital marketing whiz. When the opportunity of his life sat down next to him on a flight to New York in the person of Eric Trump, Parscale jumped on the opportunity to move up.

In early 2015, Donald Trump asked Parscale if his firm, Giles-Parscale, could build a website for $1500. When Trump launched his campaign in June 2015, he paid Parscale $10,000 to build out of his campaign’s site.

“I just made up a price,” Parscale later told The Washington Post. He promised Eric Trump that the money would be refundable if the work proved unsatisfactory.

Parscale realized that there was some real upside potential here. Trump, a tall man, had to look up to talk to Parscale, which seemed to impress him. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, soon asked him what he could do with Facebook and its marketing platform. Parscale Strategy, a spinoff of Giles-Parscale, kicked into high gear on the Facebook front.

Facebook: A Game-Changer

Earlier this year, during a talk to a Romanian audience titled, “Let’s Make Political Marketing Great Again,” Parscale hinted at how he plans to leverage his experience from 2016 to run a billion-dollar campaign during the 2020 cycle.

Forbes reported that:

The Trump team gained access to the Republican National Committee’s Data Trust, a collection of more than 200 million voter files gathered through a massive operation begun in the wake of Romney’s 2012 Presidential defeat. It was like a “Christmas present”, Parscale remembers. The team now had a way to “know what Americans think”. But Parscale and his team still needed an efficient way to target them. “And this other Christmas present showed up: these guys from Facebook walked to my office and said: ‘we have a beta … it’s a new onboarding tool … you can onboard audiences straight into Facebook and we will match them to their Facebook accounts’.”

Parscale’s strategy aligned perfectly with Facebook’s algorithms, importing lists of supporters gleaned from Trump rallies and those ubiquitous on-line ads. In his world, data–voters’ contact info–was gold. In 2016, Cambridge Analytica mined millions of users’ Facebook data after acquiring them from a researcher who told the social media giant that he would use it exclusively for academic purposes.

The Associated Press reported last year that Data Propria, “a company run by former officials at Cambridge Analytica,” has “quietly been working for President Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election effort.” But Parscale’s operation no longer relies on such vendors. It has become a multi-platform, multi-app shop utilizing direct, one-to-one communications, interactive messaging, mobile content and live events. In 2020, one might call this database-coordinated marketing campaign the ‘Secret Sauce 2.0’.

Some of Parscale’s techniques are proprietary, but others are simply industry best practices. “I always wonder why people in politics act like this stuff is so mystical,” Parscale told reporters in 2016. “It’s the same shit we use in commercial, just has fancier names.”

While the Republicans romped online, the Democrats stalled out in 2016. Hillary Clinton’s email travails became the ‘whatabout’ attack line of the campaign. Unfortunately for the Democratic Party, Hillary and Bill had an aversion to hiring Obama’s successful digital team and brought in their own consultants–young, inexperienced, and lacking a firm grasp of important security practices. An email server was set up in a closet. It would later be breached. The results were disastrous.

The Coming Onslaught…

What we need to do is create technology, an app on your phone [that] will help execute any type of volunteer programs… once we have data back. The volunteer app would be powered by and fed into the campaign’s data-gathering operation through the use of a large scale machine learning system. So, when knocking on a door, the team already knows what issues the person cares about, and the takeaways from their discussion will help improve the campaign’s advertising program.

—Parscale on ‘Individual ad targeting’

Opposition research on whomever emerges from the Democratic primary are yet to come, but it is already clear that the party is not prepared to fight back with its own state-of-the-art political marketing apparatus.

Parscale revealed to the Palm Beach Post that in 2016, he created as many as 100,000 ads a day, testing different images, colors and wording to see which were the most effective for particular voters. “We will continue to make content that is tailored for you and the message you need to hear from the president,” he said, promising that during the course of the campaign, millions of personalized messages from the president will be arriving daily on cell phones, in emails, and via news feeds.

This time around, Parscale’s systems are mostly ready to go at this very early date. They’ve been engineered and tested. His team will use various performance metrics to track their successes, optimize their programs as they go, and maximize their spending clout.

They’re running their plan right now.

Via the Palm Beach Post:

At a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on March 28, Parscale walked onto the stage, raised his cell phone above his head and asked the audience to pull out their phones and text TRUMP to 88022. In a video clip of the rally, Trump supporters behind Parscale can be seen taking their phones out and texting.

“The power of bringing our party together is in that phone,” Parscale told the crowd in Miami. Recently, the campaign has been relentlessly texting supporters, asking them to sign a digital birthday card for the president. However, signing requires turning over your contact information and cell phone number.

“The whole game will be different” in 2020, said Parscale. Back in 2016, “the most people [the Republican National Committee] could contact to show up [to vote] without using television, advertising or some kind of mass media was 2 million people.” By 2020, “we’re gonna have 50-60 million… that’s a gigantic advantage, because the Democrats can’t do that.” Parscale expects to have a least 50 million personalized direct voter contacts in their database (62 million voted for Trump in 2016).“We will have a formidable ground game, one volunteer for every 13 swing voters, and a data operation that cannot be replicated,” Parscale told Face the Nation earlier this year.

According to The New York Times, in the first five months of this year, the Trump campaign had already pumped $4.9 million into Facebook ads, triple the figure of Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic candidate who spent the most.

But swing voters aren’t the only ones being targeted by the Trump campaign. The numbers from 2016 tell us those who stayed home in 2016–40 percent of eligible voters–represent a huge untapped source of votes for Parscale and his team to win over.

Those non-voters are being identified and targeted right now by the GOP’s marketing operations. Their data are being mined and put into Parscale’s databases in preparation for the next phase of the campaign. They will be flattered, told of Trump’s many awe-inspiring achievements and repeatedly warned about the horrors that will occur should Democrats get back in power.

It was recently revealed that part of Team Trump’s Facebook strategy to convert users into supporters is a series of targeted ads depicting members of various demographic groups that tend not to be supportive of Trump—among them bearded hipsters, young women and people of color–gushing over how great he is. These testimonials by “real Americans,” it turns out, are not only stock photos but some of them are Turkish stock photos.

Already, those in the database–core Republican voters, persuadables, and non-voters–are getting messages from the campaign. They’re being told to believe in America, keep the economy growing, protect their pocketbook, protect their family and protect the nation.

Brad Parscale is on his way, as he says, to make “political marketing great.” The database politics of the future is here now. Dems need to catch up.

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https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/06/2020-democrats-stands-on-campaign-finance

As the primary kicked off this week with 20 candidates taking part in the first debates in Miami, OpenSecrets is breaking down how each of the 2020 Democrats promise to change the campaign finance system.

There’s broad consensus that the 2010 Supreme Court decision in *Citizens United v. FEC* needs to be undone, with most supporting a constitutional amendment to undo the court’s majority opinion that independent political expenditures are free speech and cannot be subjected to spending limits.

Thirteen candidates have publicly said they want to expand public financing of federal elections, raise limits of public matching of private donations or ban large private, corporate or PAC donations entirely.

The candidates who currently serve as members of Congress have all backed campaign finance reform and ethics bills like the For The People Act, which proposes a ban on contributions from companies with significant foreign investments, a disclosure requirement for dark money groups and a six-to-one matching system for small dollar donations to federal elections. The bill passed the House with on a party-line vote and was blocked by Republican leadership in the Senate.

All of the candidates are rejecting contributions from corporate PACs in what is mostly asymbolic gesture [?]to reject corporate influence as they lay out their policy proposals. Every 2020 contender is hoping to capture small-dollar contributions in part to help bolster the image that they are not beholden to wealthy donors.

Some candidates go beyond these measures to introduce changes to campaign finance law related to dark money groups, lobbying and foreign money. Here’s what each candidate is proposing, with the candidates listed in alphabetical order.

Sen.**Michael Bennet**(D-Colo.)The Colorado senator’s plans for campaign finance reform are shared by many of his Democratic rivals — he’s seeking a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United as well as a lifetime ban on former members of Congress lobbying and greater oversight of super PACs.

What he claims makes him unique, though, is that he’s “putting these plans at the center of his campaign.”

Bennet has made campaign finance reform the centerpiece of his presidential pitch, arguing there is no way to move the country forward if powerful interests are pulling political strings. He attributes his emphasis on campaign finance reform to his disappointment over the Citizens United decision.

Former Vice President**Joe Biden**The former vice president has long decried the role of wealthy interests in political campaigning and governing. As early as 1973, Biden was calling for public financing of elections, with a 1974 Washingtonian profile quoting the then-senator as saying, “I believe that public financing of federal election campaigns is the only thing that will insure good candidates and save the two-party system.”

Biden aggressively fought for campaign finance reform throughout his Senate tenure, voting for the 1974 post-Watergate legislation that created the Federal Election Commission and co-sponsoring the Clean Money, Clean Elections Act, which set forth guidelines for elections funded mainly by small donors and entitling clean candidates to free media time, in 1997. He has co-sponsored three proposed constitutional amendments to allow Congress or the states to set campaign contribution limits.

His presidential campaign has called for a constitutional amendment overturning the 2010 Citizens United decision and measures to disclose contributors to dark money groups.

According to his official site, “the public has the right to know who is contributing to which advertisements and campaign initiatives.”

Sen.**Cory Booker**(D-N.J.)A little over a week before announcing his campaign for the presidency, Booker marked the ninth anniversary of Citizens United with a tweet castigating the decision, saying, “It’s been 9 years since the Supreme Court handed down its disastrous 5-4 #CitizensUnited ruling. Since then, countless corporate campaign contributions have flooded our elections drowning out the voices of millions of voters—we must overturn Citizens United.”

Booker has condemned the current campaign finance system as “broken” and swore to reject corporate PAC contributions as a senate candidate in February 2018. He supports a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United and an expansion of public financing of elections.

Gov.**Steve Bullock**, Mont.

The governor of Montana has centered his political career and his presidential campaign around fighting dark money and shadowy political spending. His announcement video talked of the “need to defeat the corrupt system that lets campaign money drown out the people’s voice” and ends with the rousing declaration, “we will take our democracy back.”

Bullock rose to prominence defending Montana’s strict campaign finance laws against the standard set by the Citizens United decision. While his victory in the Montana Supreme Court was ultimately overturned by the Supreme Court, Bullock continued to fight for additional campaign transparency, signing an executive order as governor that required Montana contractors to reveal all political contributions, including to dark money groups.

Bullock’s “one big idea” is to add a question to IRS and FEC forms asking filers, under penalty of perjury, to affirm that noforeign money was spent in their electioneering materials. It’s part of his six-part plan to get money out of politics. That plan includes a total ban on super PACs, empowerment of watchdogs to enforce campaign laws, passage of federal disclosure laws to expose dark money, an executive order to “crack down” on dark money, and the eventual overturning of Citizens United.

Bullock did not qualify for the Miami debates.

South Bend, Ind., Mayor**Pete Buttigieg**Buttigieg’s platform calls for a small-donor matching system of public financing and “common-sense campaign finance rules that clearly establish that corporations do not have the same political rights as people.”

His platform calls for strengthening the FEC, which has been marred by ideological gridlock that prevents the agency from enforcing campaign finance laws. In addition to calling for Citizens United to be overturned, Buttigieg also calls for overturning *Buckley v. Valeo*, which struck down the aggregate amount an individual can contribute during an election cycle and cleared the way for powerful joint fundraising committees.

Former HUD Secretary**Julián Castro**, TexasThe former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development told supporters at his announcement rally that he would support aconstitutional amendment overturning Citizens United. Castro has not released specific policy proposals and his campaign did not respond to a request for comment, but like his fellow 2020 contenders, Castro has decried the influence of PAC money.

New York City Mayor**Bill de Blasio**In his 2020, the New York City mayor pledged to “not rest until the government serves working people.” His 2018 ballot initiative cut the maximum donation in citywide elections to $2,000 from $5,100 while increasing public campaign contribution matching in an attempt to control undue influence.

De Blasio has not yet revealed his presidential platform detailing a policy on campaign finance reform. When he served as New York City’s public advocate in 2010, he penned an article in The Nationcondemning Citizens Unitedand called on state and local leaders across America to join him in The Coalition for Accountability in Political Spending, a group of public officials dedicated to persuading corporations to be transparent regarding their political spending.

Former Rep.**John Delaney**(D-Md.)Like most of his competitors, the former Maryland congressman is backing a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. His campaign website warns, “Unlimited corporate money has made our democracy pay-to-play.”

As a congressman, Delaney backed H.R. 20, an ultimately unsuccessful House bill that proposed an expansion of public financing of federal elections and provided additional tax credits for small political contributions.

Rep.**Tulsi Gabbard**(D-Hawaii)

The Hawaii congresswoman has not yet revealed her campaign finance platform for her 2020 presidential bid, but as a representative, she supported the 2014 and 2017 versions of the Government By the People Act, which proposed a public financing system with a six-to-one match for small donors and additional restrictions on foreign lobbying.

Her congressional campaign endorsed measures to crack down on coordination between candidates and super PACs and create a new agency to identify and punish campaign violators.

Sen. **Kirsten Gillibrand**(D-N.Y.)

Gillibrand is proposing a national system of public financing, similar to the “Democracy Dollars” system currently in practice in Seattle. Her plan would give each American $200 to spend on federal election cycles in an effort to increase the power of small donors over large contributors. Candidates would be allowed to accept these dollars only if they swore off all contributions larger than $200. Her plan would also restrict voters from giving to races outside of their own state.

“It will change who has a seat at the table and who gets elected in this country within one election cycle,” Gillibrand said in an interview with NBC.

Sen.**Kamala Harris**(D-Calif.)

The California senator tweeted her support for campaign finance reform in 2017, saying, “Special interests & big corporations have spent millions to buy elections. This is wrong—we must reform our broken campaign finance system.”

The Harris campaign has not yet outlined their campaign finance reform policy for her 2020 candidacy, though Harris has said she is in favor of a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United and an expansion of public financing.

Former Gov.**John Hickenlooper**, Colo.

The former Colorado governor has condemned the Citizens United decision while maintaining that lobbyists are “good, honest people” under pressure to deliver to their respective groups. He signed a bill in 2017 that allowed Colorado candidates to fix mistakes on campaign finance forms without incurring fines, a measure endorsed by ethics officials.

The Hickenlooper campaign doesn’t appear to list campaign finance proposals on its issues page and did not respond to requests for comment.

Gov.**Jay Inslee**, Wash.

The Washington governor’s main campaign focus is combating climate change and shifting national efforts toward sustainability and green energy. As a congressman, Inslee co-sponsored the 2012 DISCLOSE Act, which would have required the disclosure of independent expenditures by outside groups. He also voted for landmark legislation banning soft money contributions in 2002.

He has not laid out a policy on campaign finance reform for his presidential campaign. The Inslee campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

Sen.**Amy Klobuchar**(D-Minn.)

The Minnesota senator supports a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and “get dark money out of our politics” as well as establish a public financing system with public matching for small political contributions.

On the fifth anniversary of the Citizens United decision, Klobuchar released a statement condemning the decision, saying it caused a massive influx of money into the political process.

Klobuchar was also a lead sponsor of the Honest Ads Act in both 2017 and 2019, which would mandate disclosure of those paying for online political ads.

Former Rep.**Beto O’Rourke**(D-Texas)

The former Texas congressman has proposed a significant overhaul of campaign finance law, forbidding PAC contributions to campaigns, publicly matching campaign contributions up to $500, and restricting contribution limits to inaugural committees, post-retirement funds and single-issue PACs to $2,000.

O’Rourke’s plan would also mandate that PACs disclose all donors regardless of amount, that most companies reveal all political spending and lobbying, and that large donations over $1,000 be disclosed within 48 hours of receipt. He also proposed preventing U.S. companies with substantial foreign ownership from “inappropriately spending money to affect our elections,” among other proposed changes.

Rep.**Tim Ryan**(D-Ohio)

The Ohio representative has repeatedly condemned the Citizens United decision, remarking that the appointments of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court would only uphold the 2010 decision and “allow an unlimited flow of money into our political system.”

Ryan is also co-sponsoring a constitutional amendment in the House of Representatives that would overturn Citizens United. He has not laid out a policy regarding campaign finance for his 2020 presidential run.

Sen.**Bernie Sanders**(I-Vt.)

With a long history of fighting for campaign finance reform, Sanders centered both his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns on a populist platform condemning what he sees as an unjust concentration of influence among the very rich.

In 2014, Sanders co-sponsored a constitutional amendment that would have given Congress the power to regulate all aspects of campaign finance, shifting power from the Supreme Court to Congress. The amendment would have effectively overturned Citizens United but predictably did not survive the 114th Congress.

Sanders’s 2020 campaign platform includes overturning Citizens United and moving all federal elections to a public financing system, eliminating super PACs and large private donations.

Rep.**Eric Swalwell**(D-Calif.)

The California representative’s campaign confirmed to OpenSecrets that Swalwell supports a constitutional amendment to undo Citizens Unitedand measures to require dark money groups and online political advertisers to reveal their backers.

In an email to OpenSecrets, Swalwell press secretary Caitlyn McNamee said, “Americans have reached consensus on many important issues, but our voices are silenced by the dirty maps and dirty money polluting our government.”

Sen.**Elizabeth Warren**(D-Mass.)

Warren has emphatically decried the influence of monied interests in the political process, branding herself as “The Best President Money Can’t Buy.”

Speaking at a campaign event in Virginia May 16, Warren blasted wealthy donors and the politicians who accept their contributions, saying, “Whatever issue brought you here today, I guarantee if there’s a decision to be made in Washington, it’s been touched, pushed, massaged, tilted over, just a little, so the folks with money do better than everyone else.”

Warren’s presidential platform calls for a complete ban on lobbying by foreign governments and retired members of Congress. She supports overturning Citizens United, eliminating super PACs and barring political contributions from PACs and federal lobbyists. She has also pledged to crack down on shadow lobbying, forcing anyone who lobbies to register as a lobbyist, and to require all federal candidates to release their tax returns.

**Marianne Williamson**

A self-help author and activist, Williamson’s website warns that “our democracy is under assault by combined forces of corporatism and autocracy” and that our entire system of government has been subverted by large multinational corporations seeking profit alone.

She proposes a constitutional amendment to establish public financing of federal campaigns and measures to hold lobbyists accountable, although she has not detailed what this would entail.

**Andrew Yang**

“Money has overrun our politics, and that needs to change,” the candidate’s website says.

Andrew Yang joins the other Democratic candidates in calling for a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United and a system of public financing for federal elections. While waiting for this amendment, Yang would create a system of “Democracy Dollars” where every American gets $100 annually to contribute to federal candidates, a model similar to what Gillibrand is proposing.

Four other candidates, Rep. Seth Moulton (D- Mass.), Miramar mayor Wayne Messam, former Representative Joe Sestak (D- Penn.), and former Senator Mike Gravel (D- Alaska), will not appear in the debates. Messam and Gravel have both voiced their support for overturning Citizens United.

The 2020 Democrats’ campaign finance proposals will likely face fierce opposition from Republican members of Congress, complicating a candidate’s ability to implement their proposed policies should they become president.

===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/trump-and-the-gop-are-blatantly-encouraging-foreign-dictators-to-hack-the-2020-election/

It looks like Donald Trump and the leadership of the GOP are encouraging other countries to hack our upcoming 2020 election.

Donald Trump is sucking up to dictators, strongman oligarchs, and autocrats around the world, while Mitch McConnell is using political brute force to prevent individual states from hardening their election systems. Why?

Looking at the entire picture in context, consider Karl Marx’s favorite question: “Who benefits?”

Who benefits when the leaders of countries with sophisticated internet hacking capabilities (North Korea, Saudi Arabia) and no democratic oversight are told by Trump that as long as he’s in office he has their backs?

Might Trump and McConnell hope they’ll intervene in our election to keep in power a political party that now disdains democracy and a free press, and embraces dictatorial behavior like calling for the imprisonment of Trump’s political rivals, and of individuals in the intelligence agencies who have investigated him and the GOP?

Who benefits when countries with world-class internet hacking capabilities and less-than-democratic (Russia) or highly corrupted and oligarch-dependent (Netanyahu, Duterte, Modi) leaders become “good friends” of Trump and/or help Trump build or brand properties in their countries?

Might they intervene in our election directly or indirectly to keep in power an administration that both openly disdains the concept of “liberal democracy” and disrespects leaders of the largely European countries that practice it?

Why would Trump joke with Putin in front of the world about the possibility of Russians hacking American voting systems in the 2020 election? Is he expecting it, or just hoping for it?

Who benefits when mostly “red” states keep their voting systems’ defenses down and continue to use 17-year-old technology running on Windows XP operating systems?

Who benefits when McConnell, Pence and Trump work together to make sure that, as CBS News reported this year, “Tens of thousands of voting machines in the United States [will continue to be] vulnerable to hacking” by refusing to fund upgrades?

Who benefits when repeated Democratic Party efforts to harden voting systems are blocked by Republican governors?

There’s no ideological argument to be made for America having easily hacked voting systems; it’s not something that conservatives like George Will or liberals like Robert Reich would reasonably disagree about.

So what could possibly be motivating Mitch McConnell and the Republicans in the Senate, other than the hope that hackers will produce another “red shift” miracle for them?

We already know that the GOP and their partisans on the Supreme Court have done and are doing everything they can to make it hard for Americans—particularly those with darker pigmented skin—to vote or otherwise participate in the political arena.

But that’s probably not enough to guarantee the reelection of a man as reviled and unpopular as Trump, and thus keep the parade of corporatist-friendly right-wing judgesmoving through the Senate into lifetime appointments on the federal bench. They need more—a little help from their friends.

Republicans have been caught manipulating voter rolls; engaging in now-legalized “political” gerrymandering that magically corresponds to race; running ads in social media filled with deception and outright lies; encouraging right-wing violence; and threatening treason charges against American law enforcement officials who’ve investigated foreign manipulation of our elections.

But it’s not working so far. Democrats—particularly progressive Democrats—were the big winners in the 2018 midterms. The GOP needs more help from their friends if they’re to reelect Trump and hold the Senate.

Reagan turned the GOP into the Party of the Billionaires, complete with a phony “supply-side” and “trickle-down” story about fantasy economics to sell their merger of state and corporation. But by the end of the Clinton administration, most Americans had figured out Reagan’s and the GOP’s scam and, since 2002, there’s been a curious “red shift” disconnect between exit poll results and the reported totals from hackable voting machines.

There aren’t enough really rich Americans to win elections, so Lee Atwater and his business partners Roger Stone and Paul Manafort helped Reagan and Bush bring in the white racist vote. But even with all the American racists, Trump and McConnell must think they need foreign help again.

Jerry Falwell Jr. (and his pool boy?), Franklin Graham, and other multimillionaire “Christian” hustlers brought in the people televangelists have exploited for a generation. But are there enough religiously gullible voters to tip the election to Trump and McConnell? They seem to think not.

Add the homophobes, the xenophobes, the religious bigots, and sexually insecure white men (from incels to gun fanatics), and the GOP may have almost enough votes to win a national election—but they’re still haunted by Trump losing the last election’s popular vote by 3 million; plus, they no longer have Scott Walker and Rick Snyder to throw Wisconsinites and Michiganders off the voting rolls just before the election.

Trump and the GOP will still need a little help from their overseas friends, just as Trump Jr. reached out to or tried to take help from the Russians, Saudis and Emiratis in 2016. They (and Trump’s American billionaire backers) benefited more from what President Carter correctly called Trump’s “illegitimate” presidency than anybody else in the world.

Which is why Trump and McConnell are working as hard as they can to make sure those foreign oligarchs and autocrats know how much they’ll appreciate that help, should it be forthcoming.

All they need is a little help from their friends, and they’re making sure their friends know in advance who will benefit.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment and more than 25 other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.

This article was produced by the :{Independent Media Institute}:.

===

retro report 1: Climate change barely discussed at first Democratic debates

The Democratic Party has so far refused to schedule a presidential debate focused on climate change, saying it would unfairly favor candidates centering their campaigns on the issue.
(Which is to say one candidate, Wash. state Gov. Jay Inslee, although several others among the two dozen hopefuls back the idea.)
So perhaps it's not surprising that climate questions were in short supply at the first two-evening debate, held last week in Miami. While “the first two Democratic presidential debates for the 2020 election this week devoted more attention to climate change than in all the 2016 debates combined,” reports Vox,“the climate crisis got just 15 minutes across four hours of airtime.”
The news-for-the-news-industry outlet Poynter gave the debate moderators a rare rave: “NBC moderators played it right, asking the pertinent questions with topics including the economy, climate, gun control, immigration, Iran and health care.”
The dead-center political news outlet The Hill noted the welter of critiques by “green groups and politicians alike…for failing to ask enough substantive climate change questions” during the first debate evening.
The progressive-of-center outlet HuffPost was also critical, noting that the first climate question appeared 82 minutes into the first 120-minute evening of debate. “When hosts Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow finally gave the topic airtime, they asked questions that climate experts roundly criticized as badly framed and uninformed,” reports HuffPost. “After about seven minutes of meandering discussion from just four candidates, the moderators moved on.”
“At a debate held in a sinking city, only four candidates were directly asked about the climate crisis,” writes Emily Atkin in The New Republic.“Over the course of two hours, approximately seven minutes were devoted to the top existential threat facing humanity.”
Inslee is calling for a rules change that would allow him to put on a climate-centered debate (independently of the official Democratic National Committee event schedule) without being barred from subsequent official debates.
Inslee, who polls at or below 1 percent according to The New York Times, may be calculating that creating an intra-party climate controversy will boost his nomination chances, since lately Democratic voters put climate change up there with health care and jobs as a priority.
While he’s seen as a national leader among governors on climate policies, Washington State climate activists say they’re skeptical about Inslee’s claims to be the “climate candidate,” reports Pacific Standard.
“Inslee has scored tangible victories that demonstrate his competency in climate leadership” but “hasn’t always been an ideal legislator on environmental issues in his state,” activists tell PS. Inslee was for building a liquid natural gas facility and a methanol plant in the port city of Tacoma before he was against them, they note, and focused too much on trying to get an “outdated, ineffective” carbon tax policy through the state legislature.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/the-nra-is-in-total-meltdown-and-making-folks-nervous-about-trumps-2020-campaign-report/

no lnx

henderson

NRA ‘is in total meltdown’ — and making ‘folks nervous’ about Trump’s 2020 campaign: report

Michael Vadon

written by Alex Henderson July 3, 2019

It isn’t hard to figure out why President Donald Trump has been claiming that Democrats are hell-bent on destroying the 2nd Amendment: he realizes that the National Rifle Association (NRA) is one of the top supporters of the Republican Party. But the NRA’s recent problems have been well-documented, and a Politico report published on July 3 stresses that turmoil and instability within the NRA are a major worry for Trump’s 2020 campaign.

In Politico, journalist Alex Isenstadt explains that the NRA “is in total meltdown” thanks to “everything from a failed coup attempt to the departure of its longtime political architect to embarrassing tales of self-dealing by top leaders.” And GOP leaders, according to Isenstadt, fear that if the NRA is “profoundly diminished heading into the election,” the GOP will be facing “a gaping hole in its political machinery.”

Gregg Keller, former executive director of the American Conservative Union, explained to Politico why the NRA’s problems “have folks nervous” in the Republican Party — asserting, “No organization has been more important to conservative voter education and engagement than the NRA.We all hope they’re able to mount the kind of effort in the 2020 cycle they have in the past. But in case they can’t, given their current situation, I hope they’re being forthright about that within the movement so others can pick up the slack.”

Republican strategist Chris LaCivita told Politico that the “infighting and accusations” troubling the NRA will “have an impact in the NRA’s ability to raise money, which would be used in elections to turn out its membership.”

Isenstadt notes that following the recent resignation of Chris Cox (who had been in charge of NRA lobbying since 2002), it remains to be seen “who will oversee the NRA’s 2020 strategy.” Steven Law, who heads the Senate Leadership Fund (a right-wing political action committee with close ties to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell), described Cox as “the guy everybody dealt with” in the GOP.

@realDonaldTrump

People are fleeing New York like never before. If they own a business, they are twice as likely to flee. And if they are a victim of harassment by the A.G. of the state, like what they are doing to our great NRA, which I think will move quickly to Texas, where they are loved.....

If the NRA’s problems harm Republican fundraising in 2020, the burning question is: who would fill the void? And Isenstadt points out that other possible worries for the Trump campaign include less spending by the Chamber of Commerce and a recent announcement by the Koch Brothers-affiliated Americans for Prosperity that it is open to the possibility of supporting centrist Democratic candidates in some cases.

Former Republican Rep. David McIntosh, now president of the right-wing Club for Growth, expressed concerns over Americans for Prosperity’s announcement of possible support for some Democrats.

Interviewed by Politico, McIntosh said of the GOP, “Right now, the party is functioning. But if you see another collapse or if we lose the White House, I think you’re going to see Republicans frankly in a world of hurt without a major funding group like that.”

===

also scotus on gerrymander

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/supreme-court-sends-census-citizenship-case-back-to-lower-court-after-bombshell-evidence-reveals-gops-true-motives/

no lnx

Supreme Court sends census citizenship case back to lower court after bombshell evidence reveals GOP’s true motives

STEPHEN WOLF / DAILY KOS

27 JUN 2019 AT 15:30 ET

In a surprise decision that will help preserve fair political representation, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Trump administration from adding a question to the 2020 census asking U.S. residents about their citizenship status, instead sending the case back to lower court for it to explore explosive new evidence behind the GOP’s motives for including the question.

The addition of this citizenship question would have likely had a chilling effect, intimidating millions of people in immigrant communities into not participating in the census. That in turn would haveturbocharged a new wave of hyperpartisan Republican gerrymandering nationwide, since census data is the bedrock of redistricting.

This impact was in fact the entire rationale behind this question: In a recent bombshell report, based on newly unearthed documents from a deceased GOP political consultant, Thomas Hofeller, Republicans admitted that rigging the census would eviscerate the political power of Democrats and voters of color.

The Constitution mandates that every person in the U.S. be counted in the decennial census, without regard to their legal status. A question on citizenship hasn’t been included in the census since 1950, and even when it has appeared, it has never been asked of every single participant, as the Trump administration intended it to be in 2020. Furthermore, multiple lower courts had ruled that Trump’s attempt to add the question violated both federal law and the Constitution.

Those courts uniformly dismissed the Trump administration’s claim that the Justice Department needed data on citizenship to enforce the Voting Rights Act as a bogus pretext that masked their true motives. Hofeller’s document trove revealed the GOP’s racist and partisan intent: allowing mapmakers to use citizenship statistics result in “a disadvantage to the Democrats” and to be “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.”

Although the Census Bureau had planned to print millions of census forms in July, plaintiffs argued that it could delay printing until October to give the courts time to resolve the case. Now, the case will go back to the federal district court in New York that originally heard the matter. That will allow the judge to conduct an in-depth review of the new evidence and craft a ruling that addresses the Trump administration’s racial and partisan animus. In the likely event that the lower court once again blocks the question, the Supreme Court may let such a ruling stand following its latest decision.

Given the blatant display of partisan and racial bigotry behind the GOP’s plans, this ruling averted a major blow to democracy that would have rivaled the harms of both 2000’s Bush v. Gore decision and the 2013 ruling that crippled the Voting Rights Act. Although the Supreme Court’s Republican majority has advanced an increasingly partisan agenda that undermines the rule of law, Trump’s malicious effort to weaponize the census simply proved to be too extreme for the court to accept.

1st debate 69 icn bios/ positions

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24062019/election-2020-climate-change-presidential-debate-questions-candidate-profiles

see swing states

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/why-many-2020-swing-states-are-on-track-for-another-massive-recount-crisis/

===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/voters-candidates-and-activists-all-want-a-democratic-debate-on-climate-why-are-tom-perez-and-the-dnc-refusing/

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/fox-friends-completes-transformation-into-official-trump-media-headquarters-by-shamelessly-airing-exclusive-sneak-peak-into-2020-political-campaign

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619

at least seven 2020 Democratic candidates have serious climate plans — and they’re not bowing to fossil-fuel interests

Carl Pope / Salon

**===**

A bad Democratic senator is a whole lot better than a Republican one’: If Joe Manchin leaves the Senate, his GOP successor will be even worse

Alex Henderson

On Thursday, The Hill reported that West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, feeling fed up with the bitter partisanship in Congress, is considering leaving the U.S. Senate — and some of…

Colorado senator and 2020 hopeful Michael Bennet introduced his plan to combat climate changeMonday, in the first major policy rollout of his campaign. Bennet's plan calls for the establishment of a "Climate Bank," using $1 trillion in federal spending to "catalyze" $10 trillion in private spending for the U.S. to transition entirely to net-zero emissions by 2050.

The plan also calls for a state "climate challenge," providing federal funds for states to slash emissions by 2030, as well as conservation of 30 percent of the country's lands and oceans by 2030.

The plan is short on specific policies to curb emissions, like a carbon tax or renewable energy mandates, which the Bennet campaign says would come during the first days of his administration.

For a deeper dive:

Politico, Denver Post, CBS, AP, Reuters

McConnell's 2020 Plan: Cast GOP As 'Firewall' Against Socialism

:{April 11, 2019 • :(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell acknowledged that Republicans need to regain support with women and college graduates in the suburbs — which he said led to loss of the House in 2018.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/fk-capitalism-report-shows-democratic-socialists-of-america-are-on-the-rise-in-iowa/

Although President Donald Trump has been using the word “socialist” to tar and feather the Democratic Party and rally his base, “socialist” is a label that most Democrats reject. Nonetheless, there has been a lot of discussion of “socialism” and what it does or doesn’t mean—and an article written by Elaine Godfrey and published in the Atlantic on Friday takes a close look at the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in, of all places, Iowa.

Iowa is much more of a swing state than its deeply Republican neighbor to the west, Nebraska. President Barack Obama won Iowa in both 2008 and 2012, while Trump carried the midwestern state in 2016. Iowa, Godfrey acknowledges, seems an unlikely place for the DSA to be making inroads, yet she notes that Iowa native Caroline Schoonover heads a DSA chapter that “has about 160 members” and “didn’t exist before” 2016. In fact, Godfrey writes, “none of Iowa’s DSA groups did.”

For her article, Godfrey interviewed Schoonover and other DSA activists in Iowa and found that they were motivated by issues like “climbing rents and high student-loan debt” and have concluded that “the cause of their financial woes is capitalism.” Their “solution,” Godfrey writes, is to “replace” capitalism “with something else.”

There are some caveats in Godfrey’s article, however. DSA members in Iowa, she writes, don’t necessarily have an across-the-board view of exactly what “socialism” means—and “under the DSA umbrella,” she says, “one can expect to find all types of political philosophies, including Marxists, Leninists, communists and even libertarian socialists.”

But if all of these DSA members have something in common, according to Godfrey, it is that “socialism, to them, means a fairer world—one where every person is born with a guaranteed right to things like health care and education.”

A few members of the Democratic Party who were elected in the 2018 midterms openly identify with the term “socialist,” including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—who has been a member of the DSA. And her ally, Sen. Bernie Sanders, describes himself as a “democratic socialist.” But as Godfrey points out in her article, most Democrats don’t identify as socialists—even liberal Sen. Elizabeth Warren has described herself as “capitalist to my bones.” And the DSA members that Godfrey spoke to in Iowa consider themselves to be quite separate from the Democratic Party.

Schoonover, for example, told Godfrey, “We don’t talk about Bernie. He’s not a factor in our organizing at all…. We’re not a Bernie Sanders fan club just waiting for our chance to finally knock doors for him.”

Godfrey shows a contrast between Warren’s liberalism and DSA members. Warren is vehemently critical of crony capitalism and abuses in the banking sector but doesn’t consider capitalism itself to be the problem. And in contrast to Warren’s “capitalist to my bones” comment, Godfrey quotes Iowa-based DSA activist Rob Shaw as saying, without hesitation, “Fuck capitalism.”

===

https://thinkprogress.org/washington-governor-jay-inslee-running-for-president-climate-change-6cd8755ed1d7/

no lnx

For the first time ever, a presidential campaign is putting climate change front and center

Washington Governor Jay Inslee announces his 2020 bid for president.

KYLA MANDEL

MAR 1, 2019, 10:13 AM

Jay Robert Inslee, governor of Washington, speaking at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change - UNFCCC - COP23. (Photo by Fotoholica Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)]

JAY ROBERT INSLEE, GOVERNOR OF WASHINGTON, SPEAKING AT THE UNITED NATIONS FRAMEWORK CONVENTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE - UNFCCC - COP23. (PHOTO BY FOTOHOLICA PRESS/LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES)

For the first time in history, a major presidential candidate is putting climate change center stage in their campaign.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) announced on Friday he will seek to challenge President Donald Trump in 2020. “This is our moment, our climate, our mission — together, we can defeat climate change. That’s why I’m running for president,” Inslee said on Twitter.

In a video announcing his presidential campaign, he called climate change “the most urgent challenge of our time,” adding, “we’re the first generation to feel the sting of climate change. And we’re the last that can do something about it.”

Embedded video

Jay Inslee

@JayInslee

VIDEO: This is our moment, our climate, our mission — together, we can defeat climate change. That's why I'm running for president. Join #OurClimateMoment today https://jayinslee.com/join

Making climate change the signature issue of a presidential campaign is unprecedented. And it shows how far the conversation on this policy issue has shifted. During the 2016 campaign, for instance, not a single question about climate change came up during the presidential debates.

But calls for climate action have grown since the November midterm elections, and the Green New Deal introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) — which has strong support from youth activists — has required lawmakers to grapple with climate change as a top political issue.

The Green New Deal draws on decades of scientific findings. In particular, the resolution cites a 2018 report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that warns of catastrophic consequences — from mass migrations and deadly heat stress to economic losses — if global temperatures rise past 2ºC above pre-industrial temperatures.

Over the past two years, the effects of climate change have become more visible to the public, as people across the country have suffered devastating hurricanes and wildfires — weather events made more intense due to the warming of the planet.

At least six other presidential hopefuls have voiced support for the proposal to rapidly decarbonize the economy. This includes Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Kamala Harris (D-CA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and independent candidate Bernie Sanders (VT).

Beyond voicing support for climate action, however, it’s unclear how the different presidential candidates specifically plan to tackle climate change on a policy level — a question they’ll need to address as their campaigns progress.

Inslee has a long history of pushing environmental efforts, with mixed success. In 2006, for instance, as one of Washington’s 10 U.S. representatives, he helped lead an effort to set up a renewable portfolio in his state.

In 2009, he helped launch the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition in the House of Representatives. That year, he also co-sponsored the failed Waxman-Markey bill, an ambitious cap-and-trade proposal that marked the last time climate action was meaningfully pursued on a federal level.

Inslee also founded the U.S. Climate Alliance in 2016. The bipartisan coalition boasts 20 states and Puerto Rico, which have all committed to achieving the Paris climate goals despite Trump’s pledge to withdraw the country from the agreement. He has also worked to fight fossil fuel infrastructure including a local coal-export terminal and oil-by-rail facility.

And most recently in December, he announced an ambitious legislation package including eliminating fossil fuels from Washington’s electricity supply by 2045.

But Inslee isn’t without his opponents. During the 2018 midterm elections, Washington state’s proposal to put a price on carbon failed — it would have been the first in the nation to impose a carbon fee on polluters. The oil industry notably spent $31 million to oppose the ballot initiative.

And last February, 13 young people sued Washington state, alleging that by failing to tackle carbon emissions, Inslee and his agencies violated their constitutional rights to a safe climate.

Inslee faces an uphill battle in a race that’s shaping up to include many candidates with high name recognition. To gain traction with voter’s across the country, he’ll have to also tackle other critical policy areas such as health care and the economy.

But he appears to be using the platform of a Democratic presidential candidate to further a consistent message about the urgent need for climate action. As he said earlier this year in his State of the State speech: “This is the 11th hour, but it is Washington’s hour to shine. It’s a time of great peril, but also great promise.”

Referring to climate change, he continued: “I don’t know of any other issue that touches the heart of things so many of us care about: our jobs, our health, our safety, and our children’s future.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/democratic-primary-candidates-targeted-by-sustained-and-ongoing-disinformation-campaign-report/

Wednesday, POLITICO reported that several politicians floated as challengers to President Donald Trump are being targeted by a “sustained and ongoing” propaganda campaign on social media designed to divide the Democratic Party — possibly of foreign origin.

The most aggressively targeted figures are Sens. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT), all of whom are running for president in 2020, as well as former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX), who is currently deciding between running for president and a second campaign for Senate. All of them are being targeted on Twitter and other platforms, with the apparent goal of damaging their reputations before the primary can begin:

The cyber propaganda — which frequently picks at the rawest, most sensitive issues in public discourse — is being pushed across a variety of platforms and with a more insidious approach than in the 2016 presidential election, when online attacks designed to polarize and mislead voters first surfaced on a massive scale.

Recent posts that have received widespread dissemination include racially inflammatory memes and messaging involving Harris, O’Rourke and Warren. In Warren’s case, a false narrative surfaced alleging that a blackface doll appeared on a kitchen cabinet in the background of the senator’s New Year’s Eve Instagram livestream.

According to information analyzed by Guardians.ai on behalf of POLITICO,much of the activity around these candidates on Twitter is being driven by 200 accounts, both organic and likely automated — during a recent 30 day period, these accounts were responsible for 2 to 15 percent of all mentions of these four politicians on the site.

The most targeted politician seems to have been Harris, who is currently the tentative frontrunner in polls of declared candidates. She has been subject to a barrage of sexist attacks on her youthful relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. If this activity is part of a disinformation campaign by foreign state actors, it would not be the first time. There is strong evidence that Russia created several of the accounts in 2016 that were responsible for spreading rhetoric meant to divide supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, who had very similar platforms but ended up in a toxic primary battle that left Clinton wounded ahead of the general election. Moreover, there is a consensus that the stolen Democratic emails distributed through WikiLeaks and propagandized out of context in the 2016 cycle originated with Russian hackers.

But that is not the whole story, because at least some of the energy to poison the primaries appears to be coming from fringe troll sites like 4chan and 8chan, where users have taken up explicit calls to attack Democratic candidates from the left (one user explicitly told fellow posters to spread information about how Warren was a Republican until 1996). It is unclear how many of these users are foreign state actors from places like Russia or Iran, versus organic right-wing activists in the United States, but data experts believe it is a mixture of the two.

It is clear that social media is still a place where toxic attacks and partisan propaganda can spread rapidly — and those who make it a part of their media diet should be on guard.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/07022019/green-new-deal-alexanria-ocasio-cortez-ed-markey-climate-change

The backers of a Green New Deal introduced a resolution in Congress on Wednesday to launch an all-out, decade-long mobilization aimed at transforming the economy to carbon-free energy.

They said their radically ambitious goal would restore America's global leadership on climate change, build national prosperity and protect the most vulnerable.

The non-binding joint resolution, initially sponsored by Democratic House newcomer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Democratic Senate veteran Edward Markey of Massachusetts, has already become an instant political sensation.

Embraced by a coalition of environmental and social justice activists, the idea is also questioned by many in the energy and climate policy establishment. Scorned by influential Republicans and powerful industry lobbyists, it has been endorsed by several early Democratic presidential candidates, including co-sponsors Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren(D-Mass.). Ocasio-Cortez's political mentor, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has not yet announced whether he will make another presidential run, also is a co-sponsor.

"This is an incredible moment," said Markey at a news conference. "Never have the interests of all Americans been as united on a single issue. From the air we breathe, to the jobs that employ us, to the neighborhoods we live in, to the economy we operate in, climate change defines our existence."

...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/11/25/john-kasich-2020/2108618002/

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https://www.alternet.org/what-we-know-about-donald-trumps-2020-opponent-top-democrats-evaluate-their-bench

Any woman who throws her hat into the ring will certainly have an advantage, as opinion poll analysis site FiveThirtyEight pointed out in August, "all else being equal, being a woman has been worth an additional 10 percentage points over being a man in the open Democratic primaries we looked at."

Non-politicians who throw their hats into the ring may also have an edge, since Donald Trump's election in 2016 marked the first time that an American was elevated to the presidency without any political or military experience.

In terms of certainties about who the Democrats will field against Trump (or Pence) in 2020, this is pretty much the sum of what we know for sure. Sure, we also know that Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Vice President Joe Biden are the frontrunners in the latest polls, but that doesn't mean very much considering that they're also the two candidates with the most name recognition. They also have an age problem: If elected, both men would be in their late 70s when starting office and in their 80s through most of their terms.

Yet does the Democratic Party has an unrecognized star waiting on its bench, someone with the personal charm of a Biden and the inspiring vision of a Sanders? When you take those names and those of the third candidate to consistently do well in national polls, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts (who will also be in her 70s by 2020), off of the list, you are left with a parade of obscurities: Sens. Kamala Harris of California, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana and former Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts; and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, to name just a few.

Is there something wrong with the current Democratic field? Considering that polls at this stage usually reflect the eventual choices of the electorate, is it ominous that the only viable options are septuagenarians and that the rest are enigmas to the general public?

I think the real question needs to be this: What should Democratic primary voters be looking for in 2020?

"I think there'll be a premium on people that have some real proven chops when it comes to governance, solving problems, being creative, and tough-minded," Will Marshall, president and founder of the center-left think tank the Progressive Policy Institute, told Salon. "So that's one qualification that I think will be… voters who have it in the back of their minds. But the most important is for an inspiring theory of change, and big change. People are not looking for incrementalism, as Washington plays the game. For the split, the different solutions as the choices are framed in Washington. I think they're looking for outside of the box thinking cliché, but they're looking for something fresh and original and big, big change."

Former Gov. Martin O'Malley of Maryland, a Democrat who remained a third option along with Sanders and Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primaries (and a rumored contender for 2020), expressed a similar thought, at least when it came to focusing on a vision for the future.

"The next successful candidate for president from our party in 2020 needs to be able to articulate and put forward a credible story as to how America wins this third industrial revolution," O'Malley told Salon. "In other words, how we take advantage of the tremendous assets we have in this time of fast change to make sure that our children are winners in this big economic change and not losers. The great fear still gripping our country, even with low unemployment, is that everybody's working harder but we're not getting ahead, and most people are worried that we won't be able to give our kids a better life than we had. And that's we need to address, straight up and head on."

O'Malley also drew from his own experience during the 2016 cycle — particularly being shortchanged during the presidential debates between himself, Clinton and Sanders — to remind the Democratic Party leadership about the importance of giving all of the candidate a voice, so that the voters can have the most thorough possible range of options.

"I think there's a lot of people in our party who are excited by the promise of being able to actually have an open and fair debate and actually being able to evaluate and hear from new voices. So I think at the end of the day, that will be a very good thing for our party," O'Malley explained. "This is an aberrational presidency and it's a very strange time in the evolution of our democracy. What people have beaten over the heads with 24/7 for the last few years is Donald Trump morning, noon and night. So it's understandable that in that atmosphere that these newer voices are not being heard. But I believe in due course that they will be and I hope the party will learn from its mistakes in the past and have more debates and have them frequently so people can see and decide."

Gov. John Hickenlooper, the center-left governor of Colorado and another possible contender for 2020, emphasized that the next Democratic candidate needs to strike a balance between appealing to the left and speaking to Americans whose careers depend on policies that won't alienate the business community.

"They have to understand business," Hickenlooper explained. "They don’t necessarily have to be an entrepreneur or worked in restaurants or any of that stuff. They have to understand business. I think they have to be able to demonstrate that their concern includes everyone. That they’re really invested and have been invested in creating opportunities for everyone."

Hickenlooper also emphasized that the government needs to own up to its past negligence — namely, in not looking out for Americans who have been economically left behind.

"I think that the economy is going to be a big issue for the people, obviously in the midterms but I think also in 2020," Hickenlooper said. "I think we left a lot of people behind. In the 1990s when globalization took place, we outsourced so many of our businesses. Our corporations outsourced so many jobs that whole profession disappeared. People who got laid off, we gave them a little kit on how to write a resume. We told them to make five phone calls a week and they could get their own employment for six months. That was pretty much all we did. That was government malpractice."

One of the biggest flaws of Clinton's 2016 campaign is that, regardless of whether you believe she was treated unfairly, millions of Americans wound up believing that she didn't speak to their concerns. If Democrats are going to pick a successful nominee in 2020, they'll need to focus not just on who that candidate will be, but on how that candidate will communicate a positive vision that can energize their party's base while converting independent voters. That candidate could be a frontrunner like Sanders, Biden and Warren, or it could be a dark horse like O'Malley and Hickenlooper.

Regardless of who is selected, however, the acid test will be presenting the American people with a positive alternative rather than simply being the anti-Trump candidate.

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https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/supreme-court-decides-let-political-extremists-run-wild-key-election-case

U.S. Supreme Court on Monday all-but dismissed one of the most-watched election law cases in recent years, saying those in Wisconsin filing a lawsuit that sought to show how extreme partisan gerrymandering was anti-democratic had no basis to sue.

It also took no action on a second partisan gerrymandering case from Maryland.

“The Court has not found that this presents an individual and personal injury of the kind required for Article III standing,” the majority said in the Wisconsin case, sending it back to a lower court. “A citizen’s interest in the overall composition of the legislature is embodied in his right to vote for his representative. The harm asserted by the plaintiffs in this case is best understood as arising from a burden on their own votes.”

The Wisconsin case sought to show how the state’s GOP-led legislature in 2011 segregated each party’s reliable voters by party to draw legislative districts after the 2010 Census to create a red super-majority. In the Maryland case, those suing said a Democratic-led legislature had overreached to erase a GOP-held House seat.

The Wisconsin suit was the most carefully watched of the two gerrymandering cases, because it involved statewide jockeying of political districts, as opposed to a single congressional seat. It was also the platform for advanced analysis that showed how the use of technology was able to tilt the electoral playing field to game political advantage based on voter turnout patterns.

The decision will reverberate on many political and cultural levels. Seen from a partisan standpoint, the Court is saying that the plaintiffs’ efforts to demonstrate that Wisconsin’s Republican mapmakers were able create a structural head start in the likely popular vote was fair game—even if it led to one-party rule for most of this decade. Beyond the technicalities of how the GOP nullified their opposition’s ability to win in typical election cycles (2018 is not a typical year), the Court’s majority is saying that rebalancing elections to create greater equality among voters is not a constitutional priority.

Going deeper, the Court’s action is likely to signal that ruling parties in supermajority state legislatures are free to tinker with the rules of voting and elections as they see fit—to preserve their power. (Wisconsin was one of more than a dozen red states that drew extreme gerrymandered maps after the 2010 census, leading to super majorities in their state legislatures and House delegations. Those ultra-red majorities then passed many of this decade’s voter suppression, anti-union, anti-abortion, anti-LGBT and anti-safety net laws.

On a cultural level, the Court is signaling that American democracy will remain a deeply uneven system, where governing classes can advantage themselves and take steps to undermine the participation and power of their opponents or under-represented constituencies.While there is a tendency among the judiciary to keep a certain distance from the political process—as a co-equal branch of government and separation of powers—the fact remains that the Court is not seeking to rebalance the most glaring anti-democratic features in the fundamentals that shape the electoral process.

Inequality in elections is going to remain a formidable obstacle. Only last week, in purple North Carolina, did the Republican-led legislature propose anew series of election rules that would disadvantage a key Democratic voting block—African Americans who voted on the weekend before the Tuesday general election. The state’s GOP proposed, among several measures, to eliminate the early voting option used by 200,000 citizens in 2016.

That move came despite a federal appeals court in 2016 rejecting an earlier slate of anti-participatory election reforms, saying those measures targeted the state’s black voters “with almost surgical precision.” But now, with the Supreme Court not acting on the partisan gerrymandering cases, the political process will be freer to revert to more aggressive tactics to advantage one side—where partisan power apparently carries more constitutional weight than equality among the electorate.