Nebraska can’t even play football well anymore.
Warren Buffet needs to speak up about these types of neo - Nazi actions.
TrumpReich in action
Re: TrumpReich in action
Arizona Proud Boy:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/senate-gop-c ... 26665.html
Mississippi GOP leadership imperils 82% Black State Capital:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/30/us/jacks ... index.html
https://www.yahoo.com/news/senate-gop-c ... 26665.html
Mississippi GOP leadership imperils 82% Black State Capital:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/30/us/jacks ... index.html
Re: TrumpReich in action
In addition to Lindsey Graham’s recent incitement to riot, and GOP silence or endorsement, we now have Hitler wannabe Trump unhinged:
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-sho ... -rcna45526
I disagree with the post, to the extent that GOP and its supporters ARE enemies, having been given every opportunity to prove otherwise.
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-sho ... -rcna45526
I disagree with the post, to the extent that GOP and its supporters ARE enemies, having been given every opportunity to prove otherwise.
Re: TrumpReich in action
They are certainly enemies of democracy.Rach3 wrote: ↑Tue Aug 30, 2022 5:52 pmIn addition to Lindsey Graham’s recent incitement to riot, and GOP silence or endorsement, we now have Hitler wannabe Trump unhinged:
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-sho ... -rcna45526
I disagree with the post, to the extent that GOP and its supporters ARE enemies, having been given every opportunity to prove otherwise.
Never forget.
Re: TrumpReich in action
From Axios today:
Republican candidates around the country are trying to disappear hardline anti-abortion stances they took during their primaries, in an effort to put a more moderate foot forward for November.
Some GOP nominees are also softening their focus on 2020 voter-fraud conspiracies and other far-right or Trump-centered topics.
Why it matters: Candidates in both parties sand down their rhetoric for general-election audiences. But this year's GOP backtracking is next-level, Axios' Alexi McCammond and Andrew Solender found.
The big picture: Democrats have been emboldened by big wins on a Kansas abortion referendum + a House special election last week in New York, where Rep.-elect Pat Ryan made abortion a centerpiece.
Republicans initially argued that abortion wouldn't significantly boost Democrats.
But in battlegrounds races in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, Arizona and North Carolina, GOP nominees are scrubbing abortion language from their campaign websites and moderating their rhetoric on the trail.
Zoom in: Blake Masters, the GOP Senate nominee in Arizona, removed language that said, "I am 100% pro-life," NBC News found.
House candidates Tom Barrett of Michigan, Christian Castelli in North Carolina and Barbara Kirkmeyer in Colorado also removed language from their websites. (Kirkmeyer's campaign said it "recently completed a complete redesign of Barb's website. Instead of addressing many issues, we are focused on the ... issues in which voters express the most interest.")
Minnesota's GOP nominee for governor, Scott Jensen, changed the copy on his website to water down his abortion message. He removed a line saying he "believes in the sanctity of human life, from conception to natural death."
In Oregon, GOP gubernatorial candidate Christine Drazan scrubbed her website's issues page, which had previously touted pro-life bonafides. Her campaign says she has not "shied away from her views."
Zoom out: Abortion isn't the only issue Republicans are trying to send to the back burner between now and November.
Pennsylvania's GOP gubernatorial nominee, Doug Mastriano, deleted 14 videos from his Facebook page in which he touted far-right positions, including referring to climate change as "pop science."
Republican candidates around the country are trying to disappear hardline anti-abortion stances they took during their primaries, in an effort to put a more moderate foot forward for November.
Some GOP nominees are also softening their focus on 2020 voter-fraud conspiracies and other far-right or Trump-centered topics.
Why it matters: Candidates in both parties sand down their rhetoric for general-election audiences. But this year's GOP backtracking is next-level, Axios' Alexi McCammond and Andrew Solender found.
The big picture: Democrats have been emboldened by big wins on a Kansas abortion referendum + a House special election last week in New York, where Rep.-elect Pat Ryan made abortion a centerpiece.
Republicans initially argued that abortion wouldn't significantly boost Democrats.
But in battlegrounds races in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, Arizona and North Carolina, GOP nominees are scrubbing abortion language from their campaign websites and moderating their rhetoric on the trail.
Zoom in: Blake Masters, the GOP Senate nominee in Arizona, removed language that said, "I am 100% pro-life," NBC News found.House candidates Tom Barrett of Michigan, Christian Castelli in North Carolina and Barbara Kirkmeyer in Colorado also removed language from their websites. (Kirkmeyer's campaign said it "recently completed a complete redesign of Barb's website. Instead of addressing many issues, we are focused on the ... issues in which voters express the most interest.")
Minnesota's GOP nominee for governor, Scott Jensen, changed the copy on his website to water down his abortion message. He removed a line saying he "believes in the sanctity of human life, from conception to natural death."
In Oregon, GOP gubernatorial candidate Christine Drazan scrubbed her website's issues page, which had previously touted pro-life bonafides. Her campaign says she has not "shied away from her views."
Zoom out: Abortion isn't the only issue Republicans are trying to send to the back burner between now and November.Pennsylvania's GOP gubernatorial nominee, Doug Mastriano, deleted 14 videos from his Facebook page in which he touted far-right positions, including referring to climate change as "pop science."
Re: TrumpReich in action
The same Judge earlier:Rach3 wrote: ↑Wed Sep 07, 2022 12:20 pmTexas Judge of course strikes against AIDS:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/07/politics ... index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/28/politics ... index.html
Re: TrumpReich in action
From Investigate Midwest today:
"Pretending to be something you are not has dire consequences.
It's a lesson that Tyson Foods Inc. is learning the hard way.
Back in 2020 in response to the novel Coronavirus, the Trump administration, working secretly hand-in-glove with Big Meat, schemed to keep meat packer plants open with little regard for the safety of employees.The back-room conversations between Big Meat and USDA were in response to the April 2020 temporary shutdown of Smithfield Foods’ Sioux Falls, South Dakota, facility where hundreds of workers were COVID-19 positive.
In the span of eight days following the shutdown:
Smithfield CEO Ken Sullivan contacted the president and CEO of Tyson Noel White suggesting the president should issue an executive order to keep meat plants open.
Sullivan made an email pitch to National Beef, JBS and Cargill: “Positive cases, fear-driven absenteeism, and disincentives to work are threatening the country’s protein supply.” Sullivan called for “a Presidential Executive order invoking the Defense Production Act as a mechanism to manage public perception and state/local interdiction.”
Tyson Foods and Smithfield Foods sent the feds what they wanted, including specific language for the executive order.
On April 28 – a week and a day after the Sioux Falls shutdown, POTUS signed the executive order:
“Under the delegation of authority provided in this order, the Secretary of Agriculture shall take all appropriate action under that section to ensure that meat and poultry processors continue operations consistent with the guidance for their operations jointly issued by the CDC and OSHA.”
The executive order by and large kept meat packer plants operational despite the avoidable loss of life to COVID. Investigate Midwest reports since April 2020 there have been at least 423 meat plant worker deaths spanning 67 plants in more than half the states in the nation. In all, there have been more than 86,000 reported meat worker cases of COVID-19.
Not surprising, it wasn't long before survivors and families of deceased workers began to sue Tyson in state courts. In Buljic v. Tyson Foods, Inc., Hus Buljic said Tyson knowingly lied to workers resulting in five deaths and more than 1,000 COVID infections.
For its part, Tyson wanted no part of a state jury trial and moved to relocate the trial to federal courts because the presidential executive order meant Tyson was acting “at the direction of a federal officer.” Tyson claims that because former President Donald Trump declared meatpacking plants critical infrastructure during the COVID pandemic, Big Meat could invoke the Federal Officer Removal Statute, which would shut out the filing of COVID wrongful death cases in state courts.
But Tyson hasn't had any success in making its case in either district or appellate courts that the executive order protected it from worker liability lawsuits filed in state courts.
Last December, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled Tyson was, in fact, not acting at the direction of a federal officer.
“Tyson argues that from the earliest days of the pandemic, the federal government enlisted it to fulfill a basic governmental task — ensuring that the national food supply would not be interrupted — and thus Tyson was acting under federal direction while operating its Waterloo facility in March and April 2020...The record, however, tells a different story. For one, Tyson conflates the federal government’s designation of the ‘food and agriculture’ sector as critical infrastructure with a finding that Tyson was fulfilling a basic governmental task. In arguing that its work constituted such a task, Tyson cites a 2013 Presidential Policy Directive, which identified sixteen critical infrastructure sectors (including food and agriculture), delegated regulatory authority over those sectors to specific agencies, and stated that critical infrastructure security and resilience are shared responsibilities among various private entities and the federal government.
“Tyson points out that the federal government invoked this critical infrastructure framework to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic in March and April 2020. Relevant here, the President’s Coronavirus Guidelines described the ‘special responsibility’ of critical infrastructure workers to maintain normal schedules, and CISA included ‘meat processing’ employees on the list of suggested critical infrastructure workers that it sent to state and local officials. But the fact that an industry is considered critical does not necessarily mean that every entity within it fulfills a basic governmental task or that workers within that industry are acting under the direction of federal officers.”
And for good measure the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued similar decisions in a pair of cases – Glenn v. Tyson Foods, and Chavez v. Tyson Foods.
Now Tyson is asking the Supreme Court to save its bacon. Tyson's July 22 writ of certiorari is asking the justices to overturn the Eighth Circuit Decision:“The issue here is profoundly important. In the midst of a national crisis, the federal government demanded the assistance of companies like Tyson to maintain the food supply. When state and local regulations began to interfere with that national imperative, the President issued an Executive Order exhorting continued operations in conformity with federal guidance, despite contrary state and local direction. If companies like Tyson now face liability in state court based on the retroactive imposition of state law requirements that would have frustrated federal objectives, the promise of the Executive Order and the informal directions that preceded it will have proven illusory. And the incentives for the next crisis will be perverse.”Well. Interference is in the eye of the beholder. State health departments’ primary concern was for the safety of meat processing employees. Tyson's primary concern was to keep the lines running at all costs.Plant closure, even temporarily, amounted to interference. And Tyson shouldn't be allowed to create alternative facts to pretend it was acting at the direction of a federal officer to avoid state jury trials.
Hey, Supreme Court, tell Tyson that pretending something you're not has dire consequences. Deny the writ of certiorari."
"Pretending to be something you are not has dire consequences.
It's a lesson that Tyson Foods Inc. is learning the hard way.
Back in 2020 in response to the novel Coronavirus, the Trump administration, working secretly hand-in-glove with Big Meat, schemed to keep meat packer plants open with little regard for the safety of employees.The back-room conversations between Big Meat and USDA were in response to the April 2020 temporary shutdown of Smithfield Foods’ Sioux Falls, South Dakota, facility where hundreds of workers were COVID-19 positive.
In the span of eight days following the shutdown:
Smithfield CEO Ken Sullivan contacted the president and CEO of Tyson Noel White suggesting the president should issue an executive order to keep meat plants open.
Sullivan made an email pitch to National Beef, JBS and Cargill: “Positive cases, fear-driven absenteeism, and disincentives to work are threatening the country’s protein supply.” Sullivan called for “a Presidential Executive order invoking the Defense Production Act as a mechanism to manage public perception and state/local interdiction.”
Tyson Foods and Smithfield Foods sent the feds what they wanted, including specific language for the executive order.
On April 28 – a week and a day after the Sioux Falls shutdown, POTUS signed the executive order:
“Under the delegation of authority provided in this order, the Secretary of Agriculture shall take all appropriate action under that section to ensure that meat and poultry processors continue operations consistent with the guidance for their operations jointly issued by the CDC and OSHA.”
The executive order by and large kept meat packer plants operational despite the avoidable loss of life to COVID. Investigate Midwest reports since April 2020 there have been at least 423 meat plant worker deaths spanning 67 plants in more than half the states in the nation. In all, there have been more than 86,000 reported meat worker cases of COVID-19.
Not surprising, it wasn't long before survivors and families of deceased workers began to sue Tyson in state courts. In Buljic v. Tyson Foods, Inc., Hus Buljic said Tyson knowingly lied to workers resulting in five deaths and more than 1,000 COVID infections.
For its part, Tyson wanted no part of a state jury trial and moved to relocate the trial to federal courts because the presidential executive order meant Tyson was acting “at the direction of a federal officer.” Tyson claims that because former President Donald Trump declared meatpacking plants critical infrastructure during the COVID pandemic, Big Meat could invoke the Federal Officer Removal Statute, which would shut out the filing of COVID wrongful death cases in state courts.
But Tyson hasn't had any success in making its case in either district or appellate courts that the executive order protected it from worker liability lawsuits filed in state courts.
Last December, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled Tyson was, in fact, not acting at the direction of a federal officer.
“Tyson argues that from the earliest days of the pandemic, the federal government enlisted it to fulfill a basic governmental task — ensuring that the national food supply would not be interrupted — and thus Tyson was acting under federal direction while operating its Waterloo facility in March and April 2020...The record, however, tells a different story. For one, Tyson conflates the federal government’s designation of the ‘food and agriculture’ sector as critical infrastructure with a finding that Tyson was fulfilling a basic governmental task. In arguing that its work constituted such a task, Tyson cites a 2013 Presidential Policy Directive, which identified sixteen critical infrastructure sectors (including food and agriculture), delegated regulatory authority over those sectors to specific agencies, and stated that critical infrastructure security and resilience are shared responsibilities among various private entities and the federal government.
“Tyson points out that the federal government invoked this critical infrastructure framework to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic in March and April 2020. Relevant here, the President’s Coronavirus Guidelines described the ‘special responsibility’ of critical infrastructure workers to maintain normal schedules, and CISA included ‘meat processing’ employees on the list of suggested critical infrastructure workers that it sent to state and local officials. But the fact that an industry is considered critical does not necessarily mean that every entity within it fulfills a basic governmental task or that workers within that industry are acting under the direction of federal officers.”
And for good measure the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued similar decisions in a pair of cases – Glenn v. Tyson Foods, and Chavez v. Tyson Foods.
Now Tyson is asking the Supreme Court to save its bacon. Tyson's July 22 writ of certiorari is asking the justices to overturn the Eighth Circuit Decision:“The issue here is profoundly important. In the midst of a national crisis, the federal government demanded the assistance of companies like Tyson to maintain the food supply. When state and local regulations began to interfere with that national imperative, the President issued an Executive Order exhorting continued operations in conformity with federal guidance, despite contrary state and local direction. If companies like Tyson now face liability in state court based on the retroactive imposition of state law requirements that would have frustrated federal objectives, the promise of the Executive Order and the informal directions that preceded it will have proven illusory. And the incentives for the next crisis will be perverse.”Well. Interference is in the eye of the beholder. State health departments’ primary concern was for the safety of meat processing employees. Tyson's primary concern was to keep the lines running at all costs.Plant closure, even temporarily, amounted to interference. And Tyson shouldn't be allowed to create alternative facts to pretend it was acting at the direction of a federal officer to avoid state jury trials.
Hey, Supreme Court, tell Tyson that pretending something you're not has dire consequences. Deny the writ of certiorari."
Last edited by Rach3 on Thu Sep 08, 2022 8:24 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Re: TrumpReich in action
More from the Okies ; WAPO today:Rach3 wrote: ↑Thu Sep 08, 2022 5:11 pmFrom MAGA Oklahoma, another arm-pit:
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/white-p ... 43640.html
Oklahoma’s enthusiasm for capital punishment has been a cruel trauma not only for some inmates it has put to death in recent years but also for the state itself. Such is its track record for botched and excruciatingly painful executions using supposedly humane lethal injections — ordeals that have left condemned people writhing and moaning on a gurney, and, in one case, a man saying his body was “on fire” — that the state paused the procedure for nearly seven years, until last year, in an effort to avoid another instance of what many regarded as torture.
Ignoring that barbarous history, officials are now ramping up for what would be a state-sponsored killing spree with few modern antecedents in this country, except in Texas. When James Coddington was put to death last month for a murder he committed in 1997 — despite a clemency recommendation by the state’s Pardon and Parole Board — it marked the first of 25 executions Oklahoma has scheduled over the coming 28 months.
That grim timetable reflects the zeal of Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor, who requested the dates, and other state Republicans despite the increasing rarity of capital punishment across the country. Nationwide, the number of executions plummeted to just 11 in 2021, from 85 at the turn of the century. At the same time, death sentences across the United States have plunged by more than 90 percent over the past two decades; just 18 were imposed last year.
In Oklahoma, Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt ignored demands even from some in his own party that he grant clemency to Mr. Coddington on grounds he had changed and felt remorse. He has postponed, but only for several months, the execution of another man, Richard Glossip, whose guilt has been questioned based on new evidence. A law firm that reviewed the case at the request of state lawmakers from both parties concluded that another man was likely solely responsible for the murder of which Mr. Glossip was convicted.
In justifying the state’s ambitious execution agenda, Mr. Stitt cited a 2016 referendum in which Oklahomans voted nearly 2 to 1 to preserve the death penalty, an outcome the governor said was driven by “justice and safety.” If safety was one goal, however, keeping capital punishment intact did little to advance it — in the first four years after the vote, the latest for which data is available — the state’s homicide rate crept higher, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As for justice, Americans hold divergent views on the death penalty. There is little doubt, however, that even many advocates were shocked by a tableau of ghastly recent executions in Oklahoma. They included the 2014 death of Clayton Lockett, who writhed and moaned for 43 minutes when he was subjected to lethal injection; he finally had a heart attack and died.
Last October, when executions resumed after a years-long hiatus, a condemned man, John Grant, vomited and experienced full-body convulsions.
This stomach-turning history compelled the state to halt executions once. Even after nearly seven years, its officials should not be so grotesquely eager to embrace an inherently inhumane form of punishment.
Re: TrumpReich in action
From various news today, the cowardly, craven,and/or possibly criminal in action , ie the GOP:
U.S. Senate delays same-sex marriage vote until after midterm elections
A drive to get at least 10 GOP senators to support legislation to secure marriage equality for millions of Americans appears to have fallen short, leading to a delay on the vote until after the midterm elections, bipartisan negotiators announced Thursday.
-------------
After winning the New Hampshire Republican Senate primary on Tuesday, Don Bolduc said the 2020 presidential election “was not stolen” — despite having repeatedly claimed that it was.
--------------
Never-before-seen text messages show former Gov. Phil Bryant tried to shepherd a proposal to use welfare funds on the construction of a new volleyball stadium for retired NFL player Brett Favre – a project prosecutors have called a scheme to defraud the government.
https://mississippitoday.org/2022/09/13 ... dium=email
U.S. Senate delays same-sex marriage vote until after midterm elections
A drive to get at least 10 GOP senators to support legislation to secure marriage equality for millions of Americans appears to have fallen short, leading to a delay on the vote until after the midterm elections, bipartisan negotiators announced Thursday.
-------------
After winning the New Hampshire Republican Senate primary on Tuesday, Don Bolduc said the 2020 presidential election “was not stolen” — despite having repeatedly claimed that it was.
--------------
Never-before-seen text messages show former Gov. Phil Bryant tried to shepherd a proposal to use welfare funds on the construction of a new volleyball stadium for retired NFL player Brett Favre – a project prosecutors have called a scheme to defraud the government.
https://mississippitoday.org/2022/09/13 ... dium=email
Re: TrumpReich in action
Echoing Trump, These Republicans Won’t Promise to Accept 2022 Results
Six Republican nominees for governor and the Senate in key midterm states, all backed by Donald Trump, would not commit to accepting the November outcome. Five others did not answer the question.
By Reid J. Epstein
Sept. 18, 2022
Updated 9:17 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON — Nearly two years after President Donald J. Trump refused to accept his defeat in the 2020 election, some of his most loyal Republican acolytes might follow in his footsteps.
When asked, six Trump-backed Republican nominees for governor and the Senate in midterm battlegrounds would not commit to accepting this year’s election results, and another five Republicans ignored or declined to answer a question about embracing the November outcome. All of them, along with many other G.O.P. candidates, have pre-emptively cast doubt on how their states count votes.
The New York Times contacted Republican and Democratic candidates or their aides in 20 key contests for governor and the Senate. All of the Democrats said, or have said publicly, that they would respect the November results — including Stacey Abrams of Georgia, who refused to concede her 2018 defeat to Brian Kemp in the state’s race for governor. Mr. Kemp, now running against her for another term, “will of course accept the outcome of the 2022 election,” said his press secretary, Tate Mitchell.
But several Republicans endorsed by Mr. Trump are hesitant to say that they will not fight the results.
Among the party’s Senate candidates, Ted Budd in North Carolina, Blake Masters in Arizona, Kelly Tshibaka in Alaska and J.D. Vance in Ohio all declined to commit to accepting the 2022 results. So did Tudor Dixon, the Republican nominee for governor of Michigan, and Geoff Diehl, who won the G.O.P. primary for governor of Massachusetts this month.
The candidates and their aides offered an array of explanations. Some blamed Democratic state election officials or made unsubstantiated claims that their opponents would cheat. In Alaska, a spokesman for Ms. Tshibaka pointed to a new ranked-choice voting system that has been criticized by Republicans and already helped deliver victory to a Democrat in a House special election this year.
An aide to Ms. Dixon, Sara Broadwater, said “there’s no reason to believe” that Michigan election officials, including Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic secretary of state, “are very serious about secure elections.”
To some degree, the stances by these Republican candidates — which echo Mr. Trump’s comments before the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections — may amount to political posturing, in an effort to appeal to G.O.P. voters who do not believe the former president lost in 2020. An aide to one Republican nominee insisted that the candidate would accept this year’s results, but the aide declined to be publicly identified saying so.
And unlike Mr. Trump two years ago, the candidates who suggest they might dispute the November results do not hold executive office, and lack control of the levers of government power. If any were to reject a fair defeat, they would be far less likely to ignite the kind of democratic crisis that Mr. Trump set off after his 2020 loss.
But they do have loud megaphones in a highly polarized media environment, and any unwarranted challenges from the candidates and their allies could fuel anger, confusion and misinformation.
“The danger of a Trumpist coup is far from over,” said Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown University who in early 2020 convened a group to brainstorm ways Mr. Trump could disrupt that year’s election. “As long as we have a significant number of Americans who don’t accept principles of democracy and the rule of law, our democracy remains in jeopardy.”
The positions of these Republican candidates also reflect how, over the last two years, some of those aligned with Mr. Trump increasingly reject the idea that it is possible for their side to lose a legitimate election.
“You accept the results of the election if the election is fair and honest,” said John Fredericks, a syndicated talk radio host who was a chairman of Mr. Trump’s campaigns in Virginia in 2016 and 2020. “If it’s not fair and honest, you don’t.”
Still, many Republican candidates, including several who have cast doubt on the 2020 outcome, said they would recognize this year’s results. Darren Bailey, the Republican nominee for governor of Illinois — who said in a June interview that he did not know if the 2020 election had been decided fairly — responded that “yes,” he would accept the 2022 result.
In Nevada, the campaign of Adam Laxalt, the Republican nominee for Senate, said he would not challenge the final results — even though Mr. Laxalt, a former state attorney general, helped lead the effort to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 defeat in the state, spoke last year about plans to file lawsuits to contest the 2022 election and called voter fraud the “biggest issue” in his campaign.
“Of course he’ll accept Nevada’s certified election results, even if your failing publication won’t,” said Brian Freimuth, a spokesman for Mr. Laxalt.
How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.
And Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, who said during his successful Republican primary campaign for Senate that “we cannot move on” from the 2020 election, promised to uphold voters’ will.
“Yes, Dr. Oz will accept the result of the PA Senate race in November,” Rachel Tripp, an Oz spokeswoman, wrote in a text message.
Three other Republican Senate candidates — Herschel Walker in Georgia, Joe O’Dea in Colorado and Senator Lisa Murkowski in Alaska — committed to embracing their state’s election results. So did several Republicans running for governor, including Mr. Kemp, Joe Lombardo in Nevada and Christine Drazan of Oregon.
Aides to several Republican nominees for governor who have questioned the 2020 election’s legitimacy did not respond to repeated requests for comment on their own races in November. Those candidates included Doug Mastriano of Pennsylvania, Kari Lake of Arizona, Tim Michels of Wisconsin and Dan Cox of Maryland.
Ms. Lake was asked in a radio interview this month whether she would concede a defeat to Katie Hobbs, her Democratic rival and Arizona’s secretary of state. “I’m not losing to Katie Hobbs,” Ms. Lake replied.
Ms. Hobbs’s spokeswoman, Sarah Robinson, said her candidate “will accept the results of the election in November.”
Aides to Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Don Bolduc, the Republican Senate nominee in New Hampshire, declined to answer questions about acknowledging the results. Mr. Johnson has been a prolific spreader of misinformation about the 2020 election and the Capitol riot. Mr. Bolduc claimed that the 2020 contest was stolen from Mr. Trump until Thursday, when he announced two days after winning his primary that President Biden had won legitimately.
During a Republican primary debate in Michigan in June, Ms. Dixon would not commit to honoring the results of the primary — which she went on to win — or the general election, pre-emptively accusing Ms. Benson, the secretary of state, of election fraud.
“If we see the secretary of state running a fair election the way she should be, then that’s a different story,” Ms. Dixon said. “We have to see what she’s going to do to make sure it’s going to be a fair election.”
In a statement, a representative for Ms. Benson said she and her staff “work tirelessly to ensure the state’s elections are secure and accurate, and expect every candidate and election official to respect the will of the people.”
In Arizona — where Republicans spent months on a government-funded review of 2020 ballots that failed to show any evidence of fraud — Mr. Masters, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for Senate, baselessly predicted to supporters in July that even if he defeated Senator Mark Kelly, the incumbent Democrat, enough votes would somehow be produced to flip the result.
“There’s always cheating, probably, in every election,” Mr. Masters said. “The question is, what’s the cheating capacity?”
A Masters aide, Katie Miller, sent The Times an August article in The Arizona Republic in which Mr. Masters said there was “evidence of incompetence” but not of fraud in the state’s primary election. Ms. Miller declined to say if Mr. Masters would respect the November results.
Mr. Kelly “has total trust in Arizona’s electoral process,” said a spokeswoman, Sarah Guggenheimer.
An aide to Mr. Vance, Taylor Van Kirk, cited the candidate’s primary-season endorsement from Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose. At the time, Mr. Vance predicted “a successfully run primary election.” But Ms. Van Kirk would not say if Mr. Vance would recognize the November outcome. Mr. Vance did not respond to messages.
Mr. Vance’s Democratic opponent, Representative Tim Ryan, “will accept the results of the election,” said his spokeswoman, Jordan Fuja.
In Alaska, Republican hesitancy to accept election results centers on the new ranked-choice voting system. After losing an August special election for the House, Sarah Palin warned baselessly that the method was “very, very potentially fraught with fraud.”
Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for Ms. Tshibaka, who is challenging Ms. Murkowski, a fellow Republican, said his candidate would not commit to honoring the race’s outcome. Mr. Murtaugh said — not without merit — that the new voting system “was installed to protect Lisa Murkowski.”
Ms. Murkowski’s spokesman, Shea Siegert, said that “the Alaskan people can trust” the state’s elections.
Jonathan Felts, a spokesman for Representative Ted Budd of North Carolina, the state’s Republican nominee for Senate — who in Congress voted against certifying the 2020 election — declined to say if Mr. Budd would uphold the state’s results and claimed without evidence that Cheri Beasley, the Democratic nominee and a former State Supreme Court justice, might try to disenfranchise voters.
Ms. Beasley said, “I trust that our 2022 election will be administered fairly.”
Officials on other Republican campaigns expressed worries that if voters heard too much skepticism about the validity of this year’s elections, it could lead to a replay of the Georgia Senate races in January 2021, when Democrats eked out two narrow victories after Mr. Trump spent weeks railing falsely about election fraud.
“The most important thing is to not get depressed about the elections and say, ‘Oh, it’s going to be stolen, so what’s the point of doing this?’” Mr. Diehl, the Republican nominee for governor of Massachusetts, said in a recent radio interview.
Mr. Diehl’s spokeswoman, Peggy Rose, replied “no comment” when asked if he would agree to the outcome of the November election.
His Democratic opponent, Maura Healey, the state’s attorney general, said, “We will always accept the will of the people.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/18/us/p ... sults.html
Six Republican nominees for governor and the Senate in key midterm states, all backed by Donald Trump, would not commit to accepting the November outcome. Five others did not answer the question.
By Reid J. Epstein
Sept. 18, 2022
Updated 9:17 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON — Nearly two years after President Donald J. Trump refused to accept his defeat in the 2020 election, some of his most loyal Republican acolytes might follow in his footsteps.
When asked, six Trump-backed Republican nominees for governor and the Senate in midterm battlegrounds would not commit to accepting this year’s election results, and another five Republicans ignored or declined to answer a question about embracing the November outcome. All of them, along with many other G.O.P. candidates, have pre-emptively cast doubt on how their states count votes.
The New York Times contacted Republican and Democratic candidates or their aides in 20 key contests for governor and the Senate. All of the Democrats said, or have said publicly, that they would respect the November results — including Stacey Abrams of Georgia, who refused to concede her 2018 defeat to Brian Kemp in the state’s race for governor. Mr. Kemp, now running against her for another term, “will of course accept the outcome of the 2022 election,” said his press secretary, Tate Mitchell.
But several Republicans endorsed by Mr. Trump are hesitant to say that they will not fight the results.
Among the party’s Senate candidates, Ted Budd in North Carolina, Blake Masters in Arizona, Kelly Tshibaka in Alaska and J.D. Vance in Ohio all declined to commit to accepting the 2022 results. So did Tudor Dixon, the Republican nominee for governor of Michigan, and Geoff Diehl, who won the G.O.P. primary for governor of Massachusetts this month.
The candidates and their aides offered an array of explanations. Some blamed Democratic state election officials or made unsubstantiated claims that their opponents would cheat. In Alaska, a spokesman for Ms. Tshibaka pointed to a new ranked-choice voting system that has been criticized by Republicans and already helped deliver victory to a Democrat in a House special election this year.
An aide to Ms. Dixon, Sara Broadwater, said “there’s no reason to believe” that Michigan election officials, including Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic secretary of state, “are very serious about secure elections.”
To some degree, the stances by these Republican candidates — which echo Mr. Trump’s comments before the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections — may amount to political posturing, in an effort to appeal to G.O.P. voters who do not believe the former president lost in 2020. An aide to one Republican nominee insisted that the candidate would accept this year’s results, but the aide declined to be publicly identified saying so.
And unlike Mr. Trump two years ago, the candidates who suggest they might dispute the November results do not hold executive office, and lack control of the levers of government power. If any were to reject a fair defeat, they would be far less likely to ignite the kind of democratic crisis that Mr. Trump set off after his 2020 loss.
But they do have loud megaphones in a highly polarized media environment, and any unwarranted challenges from the candidates and their allies could fuel anger, confusion and misinformation.
“The danger of a Trumpist coup is far from over,” said Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown University who in early 2020 convened a group to brainstorm ways Mr. Trump could disrupt that year’s election. “As long as we have a significant number of Americans who don’t accept principles of democracy and the rule of law, our democracy remains in jeopardy.”
The positions of these Republican candidates also reflect how, over the last two years, some of those aligned with Mr. Trump increasingly reject the idea that it is possible for their side to lose a legitimate election.
“You accept the results of the election if the election is fair and honest,” said John Fredericks, a syndicated talk radio host who was a chairman of Mr. Trump’s campaigns in Virginia in 2016 and 2020. “If it’s not fair and honest, you don’t.”
Still, many Republican candidates, including several who have cast doubt on the 2020 outcome, said they would recognize this year’s results. Darren Bailey, the Republican nominee for governor of Illinois — who said in a June interview that he did not know if the 2020 election had been decided fairly — responded that “yes,” he would accept the 2022 result.
In Nevada, the campaign of Adam Laxalt, the Republican nominee for Senate, said he would not challenge the final results — even though Mr. Laxalt, a former state attorney general, helped lead the effort to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 defeat in the state, spoke last year about plans to file lawsuits to contest the 2022 election and called voter fraud the “biggest issue” in his campaign.
“Of course he’ll accept Nevada’s certified election results, even if your failing publication won’t,” said Brian Freimuth, a spokesman for Mr. Laxalt.
How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.
And Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, who said during his successful Republican primary campaign for Senate that “we cannot move on” from the 2020 election, promised to uphold voters’ will.
“Yes, Dr. Oz will accept the result of the PA Senate race in November,” Rachel Tripp, an Oz spokeswoman, wrote in a text message.
Three other Republican Senate candidates — Herschel Walker in Georgia, Joe O’Dea in Colorado and Senator Lisa Murkowski in Alaska — committed to embracing their state’s election results. So did several Republicans running for governor, including Mr. Kemp, Joe Lombardo in Nevada and Christine Drazan of Oregon.
Aides to several Republican nominees for governor who have questioned the 2020 election’s legitimacy did not respond to repeated requests for comment on their own races in November. Those candidates included Doug Mastriano of Pennsylvania, Kari Lake of Arizona, Tim Michels of Wisconsin and Dan Cox of Maryland.
Ms. Lake was asked in a radio interview this month whether she would concede a defeat to Katie Hobbs, her Democratic rival and Arizona’s secretary of state. “I’m not losing to Katie Hobbs,” Ms. Lake replied.
Ms. Hobbs’s spokeswoman, Sarah Robinson, said her candidate “will accept the results of the election in November.”
Aides to Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Don Bolduc, the Republican Senate nominee in New Hampshire, declined to answer questions about acknowledging the results. Mr. Johnson has been a prolific spreader of misinformation about the 2020 election and the Capitol riot. Mr. Bolduc claimed that the 2020 contest was stolen from Mr. Trump until Thursday, when he announced two days after winning his primary that President Biden had won legitimately.
During a Republican primary debate in Michigan in June, Ms. Dixon would not commit to honoring the results of the primary — which she went on to win — or the general election, pre-emptively accusing Ms. Benson, the secretary of state, of election fraud.
“If we see the secretary of state running a fair election the way she should be, then that’s a different story,” Ms. Dixon said. “We have to see what she’s going to do to make sure it’s going to be a fair election.”
In a statement, a representative for Ms. Benson said she and her staff “work tirelessly to ensure the state’s elections are secure and accurate, and expect every candidate and election official to respect the will of the people.”
In Arizona — where Republicans spent months on a government-funded review of 2020 ballots that failed to show any evidence of fraud — Mr. Masters, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for Senate, baselessly predicted to supporters in July that even if he defeated Senator Mark Kelly, the incumbent Democrat, enough votes would somehow be produced to flip the result.
“There’s always cheating, probably, in every election,” Mr. Masters said. “The question is, what’s the cheating capacity?”
A Masters aide, Katie Miller, sent The Times an August article in The Arizona Republic in which Mr. Masters said there was “evidence of incompetence” but not of fraud in the state’s primary election. Ms. Miller declined to say if Mr. Masters would respect the November results.
Mr. Kelly “has total trust in Arizona’s electoral process,” said a spokeswoman, Sarah Guggenheimer.
An aide to Mr. Vance, Taylor Van Kirk, cited the candidate’s primary-season endorsement from Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose. At the time, Mr. Vance predicted “a successfully run primary election.” But Ms. Van Kirk would not say if Mr. Vance would recognize the November outcome. Mr. Vance did not respond to messages.
Mr. Vance’s Democratic opponent, Representative Tim Ryan, “will accept the results of the election,” said his spokeswoman, Jordan Fuja.
In Alaska, Republican hesitancy to accept election results centers on the new ranked-choice voting system. After losing an August special election for the House, Sarah Palin warned baselessly that the method was “very, very potentially fraught with fraud.”
Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for Ms. Tshibaka, who is challenging Ms. Murkowski, a fellow Republican, said his candidate would not commit to honoring the race’s outcome. Mr. Murtaugh said — not without merit — that the new voting system “was installed to protect Lisa Murkowski.”
Ms. Murkowski’s spokesman, Shea Siegert, said that “the Alaskan people can trust” the state’s elections.
Jonathan Felts, a spokesman for Representative Ted Budd of North Carolina, the state’s Republican nominee for Senate — who in Congress voted against certifying the 2020 election — declined to say if Mr. Budd would uphold the state’s results and claimed without evidence that Cheri Beasley, the Democratic nominee and a former State Supreme Court justice, might try to disenfranchise voters.
Ms. Beasley said, “I trust that our 2022 election will be administered fairly.”
Officials on other Republican campaigns expressed worries that if voters heard too much skepticism about the validity of this year’s elections, it could lead to a replay of the Georgia Senate races in January 2021, when Democrats eked out two narrow victories after Mr. Trump spent weeks railing falsely about election fraud.
“The most important thing is to not get depressed about the elections and say, ‘Oh, it’s going to be stolen, so what’s the point of doing this?’” Mr. Diehl, the Republican nominee for governor of Massachusetts, said in a recent radio interview.
Mr. Diehl’s spokeswoman, Peggy Rose, replied “no comment” when asked if he would agree to the outcome of the November election.
His Democratic opponent, Maura Healey, the state’s attorney general, said, “We will always accept the will of the people.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/18/us/p ... sults.html
Re: TrumpReich in action
From Axios today:
"Activist investor Vivek Ramaswamy wants companies to stay asleep when it comes to social issues, Hope writes.
In a letter to Disney yesterday, he suggested the company stay quiet on controversial issues unrelated to its core business to "avoid being conscripted into political warfare."
Separately, Ramaswamy also targeted Apple — calling on it to cancel plans to conduct a racial-equity audit of its business and to stop considering diversity and inclusivity in its hiring practice.
Why it matters: There's now a growing faction of investors pushing back against corporate ESG initiatives, just as anti-ESG sentiment is rising among Republican lawmakers.
The big picture: The number of anti-ESG proposals filed this proxy season (52) is twice that of last year, Bloomberg reports.
Ramaswamy's energy ETF gathered at least $250 million in assets.
Separately, in 2020, the American Conservative Values ETF (ACVF) launched and had $30 million in net assets as of the end of June."
"Activist investor Vivek Ramaswamy wants companies to stay asleep when it comes to social issues, Hope writes.
In a letter to Disney yesterday, he suggested the company stay quiet on controversial issues unrelated to its core business to "avoid being conscripted into political warfare."
Separately, Ramaswamy also targeted Apple — calling on it to cancel plans to conduct a racial-equity audit of its business and to stop considering diversity and inclusivity in its hiring practice.
Why it matters: There's now a growing faction of investors pushing back against corporate ESG initiatives, just as anti-ESG sentiment is rising among Republican lawmakers.
The big picture: The number of anti-ESG proposals filed this proxy season (52) is twice that of last year, Bloomberg reports.
Ramaswamy's energy ETF gathered at least $250 million in assets.
Separately, in 2020, the American Conservative Values ETF (ACVF) launched and had $30 million in net assets as of the end of June."
Re: TrumpReich in action
WAPO Op Ed today:
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. government and many Americans have treated it as a given that we are deeply invested in this conflict, in practical and moral terms. But there are some dissenters, many aligned with Donald Trump’s right wing nationalist project, who for numerous reasons have been deeply skeptical of the Ukrainian cause and our support for it.
Now, with Congress debating a new round of funding for Ukraine, a question has arisen: If Republicans take back one or both houses of Congress, could they turn off the spigot of military and even humanitarian aid?
Sen. Chris Murphy just put this possibility squarely on the table. In an interview, the Connecticut Democrat warned that increased GOP control over Congress might halt military aid to Ukraine.“If Republicans win control of the House or the Senate, I think there’s a likelihood that they will hold up any additional aid," Murphy told us.
As of now, Senate Republicans appear supportive of the Biden administration’s most recent request, for $12 billion to be added to a continuing resolution funding the government through September. But if Republicans were to win the House (let alone the Senate), that could change everything.
“I think there’s a real risk that the continuing resolution will be the last time we supply funding to Ukraine,” Murphy said, noting that this is more of a threat in the House, because its members are more beholden to Trump.
Trump himself has been all over the place on the topic. Sometimes he attacks the idea of sending aid. Other times he takes credit for sending aid that Ukraine has used successfully against Russia. But his admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin seems undimmed.
“Trump always talks out of both sides of his mouth,” Murphy said. “But his lieutenants in charge of disseminating the message online are kicking the crap out of Ukraine aid.”
That a GOP House might cut off aid is not a fear confined to Murphy. The publication Defense News recently reported that senior members of the House GOP leadership won’t commit to keeping aid flowing if Republicans take control of the House.
The House does seem like the more plausible future obstacle. Republicans are more likely to win the lower chamber, and the House is where more tacit (or even overt) sympathizing with Putin and Russia is concentrated.
Much GOP rhetoric on this is couched in fiscal terms, saying we shouldn’t spend so much on Ukraine when needs are unmet at home. Traditional conservative groups such as Heritage Action for America have urged Republicans to vote against Ukraine aid packages, and 57 Republicans in the House voted no in May on a $40 billion aid package.
But some of the most direct pledges to cut off aid come from far-right Trumpists such as Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who are forthright about their sympathies. As Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.) once said, “Ukraine is not our ally. Russia is not our enemy.”
“The MAGA wing of the party, which is the dominant wing, says and thinks a lot of nice things about Putin,” Murphy said to us.
If Republicans found themselves in a position to actually cut off aid, pressure to do so from the conservative media might increase.
After all, in addition to everything else, a cutoff would be a defeat for the Biden administration.
The pro-Putin sentiment is already there. Tucker Carlson, the highest-rated host on cable TV, has so enthusiastically offered pro-Russian spin that his segments frequently re-air on Russian state TV.
He declared just three weeks ago: “By any actual reality-based measure, Vladimir Putin is not losing the war in Ukraine. He is winning the war in Ukraine.”
All this raises the question of whether the Trumpist nationalist takeover of much of the GOP will create a kind of expanded Putinist axis in the House. As political scientist Francis Fukuyama recently noted, Western democracies are seeing the development of domestic political movements that sync up globally with what you might call a growing right wing authoritarian Internationale.
This Internationale, as Fukuyama observed, is aligned to one degree or another with leaders such as Viktor Orban in Hungary, Éric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen in France and Putin in Russia. And of course there’s Trump.
It’s widely expected that the block of Republicans loyal to MAGA in the House will grow. And if that translates into opposition to future funding of the Ukraine conflict, the MAGA bloc’s influence could end up having real geopolitical consequences.
“The Ukrainians are making serious progress and are likely to continue to make progress into next year,” Murphy told us. “If Republicans win the House, and word starts to leak out that they’re done funding Ukraine, that has potentially catastrophic impacts on Ukrainian morale and their ability to carry the fight.”
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. government and many Americans have treated it as a given that we are deeply invested in this conflict, in practical and moral terms. But there are some dissenters, many aligned with Donald Trump’s right wing nationalist project, who for numerous reasons have been deeply skeptical of the Ukrainian cause and our support for it.
Now, with Congress debating a new round of funding for Ukraine, a question has arisen: If Republicans take back one or both houses of Congress, could they turn off the spigot of military and even humanitarian aid?
Sen. Chris Murphy just put this possibility squarely on the table. In an interview, the Connecticut Democrat warned that increased GOP control over Congress might halt military aid to Ukraine.“If Republicans win control of the House or the Senate, I think there’s a likelihood that they will hold up any additional aid," Murphy told us.
As of now, Senate Republicans appear supportive of the Biden administration’s most recent request, for $12 billion to be added to a continuing resolution funding the government through September. But if Republicans were to win the House (let alone the Senate), that could change everything.
“I think there’s a real risk that the continuing resolution will be the last time we supply funding to Ukraine,” Murphy said, noting that this is more of a threat in the House, because its members are more beholden to Trump.
Trump himself has been all over the place on the topic. Sometimes he attacks the idea of sending aid. Other times he takes credit for sending aid that Ukraine has used successfully against Russia. But his admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin seems undimmed.
“Trump always talks out of both sides of his mouth,” Murphy said. “But his lieutenants in charge of disseminating the message online are kicking the crap out of Ukraine aid.”
That a GOP House might cut off aid is not a fear confined to Murphy. The publication Defense News recently reported that senior members of the House GOP leadership won’t commit to keeping aid flowing if Republicans take control of the House.
The House does seem like the more plausible future obstacle. Republicans are more likely to win the lower chamber, and the House is where more tacit (or even overt) sympathizing with Putin and Russia is concentrated.
Much GOP rhetoric on this is couched in fiscal terms, saying we shouldn’t spend so much on Ukraine when needs are unmet at home. Traditional conservative groups such as Heritage Action for America have urged Republicans to vote against Ukraine aid packages, and 57 Republicans in the House voted no in May on a $40 billion aid package.
But some of the most direct pledges to cut off aid come from far-right Trumpists such as Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who are forthright about their sympathies. As Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.) once said, “Ukraine is not our ally. Russia is not our enemy.”
“The MAGA wing of the party, which is the dominant wing, says and thinks a lot of nice things about Putin,” Murphy said to us.
If Republicans found themselves in a position to actually cut off aid, pressure to do so from the conservative media might increase.
After all, in addition to everything else, a cutoff would be a defeat for the Biden administration.
The pro-Putin sentiment is already there. Tucker Carlson, the highest-rated host on cable TV, has so enthusiastically offered pro-Russian spin that his segments frequently re-air on Russian state TV.
He declared just three weeks ago: “By any actual reality-based measure, Vladimir Putin is not losing the war in Ukraine. He is winning the war in Ukraine.”
All this raises the question of whether the Trumpist nationalist takeover of much of the GOP will create a kind of expanded Putinist axis in the House. As political scientist Francis Fukuyama recently noted, Western democracies are seeing the development of domestic political movements that sync up globally with what you might call a growing right wing authoritarian Internationale.
This Internationale, as Fukuyama observed, is aligned to one degree or another with leaders such as Viktor Orban in Hungary, Éric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen in France and Putin in Russia. And of course there’s Trump.
It’s widely expected that the block of Republicans loyal to MAGA in the House will grow. And if that translates into opposition to future funding of the Ukraine conflict, the MAGA bloc’s influence could end up having real geopolitical consequences.
“The Ukrainians are making serious progress and are likely to continue to make progress into next year,” Murphy told us. “If Republicans win the House, and word starts to leak out that they’re done funding Ukraine, that has potentially catastrophic impacts on Ukrainian morale and their ability to carry the fight.”
Re: TrumpReich in action
(CNN)Tudor Dixon, the Republican challenging Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, made light of the 2020 kidnapping plot against Whitmer on Friday, telling a crowd that the Democratic governor "sure is good at taking business hostage and holding it for ransom."
During a pro-Dixon super PAC event in Troy, Michigan, Dixon criticized Whitmer for what the Republican characterized as burdensome business regulations. She said Whitmer is "not a businesswoman" and is a "politician with a law degree," and then invoked the kidnapping plot.
A federal jury in August convicted two men of conspiring to kidnap Whitmer at her vacation home in 2020. They were also convicted of one count of conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction after prosecutors detailed their plans to blow up a bridge to prevent police from responding to the kidnapping of the governor. The men now face a maximum sentence of life in prison.
"The sad thing is that Gretchen will tie your hands, put a gun to your head, and ask if you're ready to talk," Dixon said at the event, which was hosted with Kellyanne Conway, a former Trump White House aide. "For someone so worried about being kidnapped, Gretchen Whitmer sure is good at taking business hostage and holding it for ransom."
Whitmer's campaign and Democratic groups condemned Dixon's remarks Friday.
"Threats of violence and dangerous rhetoric undermine our democracy and discourage good people on both sides of the aisle at every level from entering public service," Whitmer campaign spokesperson Maeve Coyle said in a statement.
"Governor Whitmer has faced serious threats to her safety and her life, and she is grateful to the law enforcement and prosecutors for their tireless work," Coyle said. "Threats of violence -- whether to Governor Whitmer or to candidates and elected officials on the other side of the aisle -- are no laughing matter, and the fact that Tudor Dixon thinks it's a joke shows that she is absolutely unfit to serve in public office."
After her comment drew backlash, Dixon joked again about the kidnapping plot at a second event Friday, this time with Donald Trump Jr., the son of the former President.
She told a crowd that, at a stop with President Joe Biden at the Detroit Auto Show last week, Whitmer looked like she'd "rather be kidnapped by the FBI."
"Yeah, the media is like, 'Oh my gosh, she did it again,'" Dixon said, anticipating the reaction to her second reference of the day to the 2020 kidnapping plot.
As she told the crowd that her earlier remarks had been characterized as a joke about the plot to kidnap Whitmer, Dixon said: "I'm like, 'No, that wasn't a joke.' If you were afraid of that, you should know what it is to have your life ripped away from you."
The 2020 plot was foiled in part because FBI agents had infiltrated the group as it planned the effort to kidnap Whitmer."Show of hands -- how many feds in the crowd? I just wanted to make sure there wasn't some sort of, you know, federal kidnapping plot," Trump Jr. said."You know, Gretchen Whitmer knew about it months in advance. But you know what, if we can get good PR from it, we can pretend like it's real," Trump Jr. said. "You know, the FBI can try to entrap a couple of meth heads somewhere and run with that narrative now."
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/23/politics ... index.html
During a pro-Dixon super PAC event in Troy, Michigan, Dixon criticized Whitmer for what the Republican characterized as burdensome business regulations. She said Whitmer is "not a businesswoman" and is a "politician with a law degree," and then invoked the kidnapping plot.
A federal jury in August convicted two men of conspiring to kidnap Whitmer at her vacation home in 2020. They were also convicted of one count of conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction after prosecutors detailed their plans to blow up a bridge to prevent police from responding to the kidnapping of the governor. The men now face a maximum sentence of life in prison.
"The sad thing is that Gretchen will tie your hands, put a gun to your head, and ask if you're ready to talk," Dixon said at the event, which was hosted with Kellyanne Conway, a former Trump White House aide. "For someone so worried about being kidnapped, Gretchen Whitmer sure is good at taking business hostage and holding it for ransom."
Whitmer's campaign and Democratic groups condemned Dixon's remarks Friday.
"Threats of violence and dangerous rhetoric undermine our democracy and discourage good people on both sides of the aisle at every level from entering public service," Whitmer campaign spokesperson Maeve Coyle said in a statement.
"Governor Whitmer has faced serious threats to her safety and her life, and she is grateful to the law enforcement and prosecutors for their tireless work," Coyle said. "Threats of violence -- whether to Governor Whitmer or to candidates and elected officials on the other side of the aisle -- are no laughing matter, and the fact that Tudor Dixon thinks it's a joke shows that she is absolutely unfit to serve in public office."
After her comment drew backlash, Dixon joked again about the kidnapping plot at a second event Friday, this time with Donald Trump Jr., the son of the former President.
She told a crowd that, at a stop with President Joe Biden at the Detroit Auto Show last week, Whitmer looked like she'd "rather be kidnapped by the FBI."
"Yeah, the media is like, 'Oh my gosh, she did it again,'" Dixon said, anticipating the reaction to her second reference of the day to the 2020 kidnapping plot.
As she told the crowd that her earlier remarks had been characterized as a joke about the plot to kidnap Whitmer, Dixon said: "I'm like, 'No, that wasn't a joke.' If you were afraid of that, you should know what it is to have your life ripped away from you."
The 2020 plot was foiled in part because FBI agents had infiltrated the group as it planned the effort to kidnap Whitmer."Show of hands -- how many feds in the crowd? I just wanted to make sure there wasn't some sort of, you know, federal kidnapping plot," Trump Jr. said."You know, Gretchen Whitmer knew about it months in advance. But you know what, if we can get good PR from it, we can pretend like it's real," Trump Jr. said. "You know, the FBI can try to entrap a couple of meth heads somewhere and run with that narrative now."
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/23/politics ... index.html
Re: TrumpReich in action
And, GOP House Rep., ie. a..h..e , Chip Roy (TX) vows to shut down the Government:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kevin-mc ... s-politics
Roy dishonors the defenders of the Alamo.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kevin-mc ... s-politics
Roy dishonors the defenders of the Alamo.
Re: TrumpReich in action
NYT today.Arizona's neo-Nazis cant even agree among themselves how wretched to be:
A judge on Friday ruled that a near-total abortion ban written before Arizona became a state must be enforced, throwing abortion access into question one day before the start of a 15-week ban that passed the Legislature this year.
The stricter ban, which can be traced to 1864, was blocked by a court injunction in 1973 shortly after the Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade, determined that there was a constitutional right to abortion.On Friday, Judge Kellie Johnson of Pima County Superior Court lifted that injunction, noting that Roe had been overruled in June and that Planned Parenthood’s request for the court to “harmonize the laws” in Arizona was flawed.
The 1864 law, first established by the state’s territorial legislature, mandates a two- to five-year prison sentence for anyone who helps a woman obtain an abortion. In 1901, the state updated and codified the law.
“No archaic law should dictate our reproductive freedom,” Brittany Fonteno, the president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood Arizona, said in a statement after the judge’s ruling.
In an interview, Ms. Fonteno said the organization had stopped providing abortions in Tucson, at the sole Planned Parenthood location in the state where women were still getting them. “I cannot overstate how cruel this decision is,” she said. “It feels like we’re back to square one.”
Even though abortion remained legal in Arizona after the Supreme Court’s decision this year, it has been all but unavailable, as doctors and abortion clinics have tried to sort out confusion about which law would ultimately take effect. Even politicians disagreed on the relationship between the laws, which each include exceptions in the case of a medical emergency.
Gov. Doug Ducey has said that the 15-week ban he signed in March would supersede the century-old ban, but Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a fellow Republican, has argued that the older ban should take precedence. Mr. Brnovich filed the motion to vacate the injunction from 1973.
“I have and will continue to protect the most vulnerable Arizonans,” Mr. Brnovich said in a statement after the ruling. Mr. Ducey’s spokesman, C.J. Karamargin, said that the governor was proud to have signed the 15-week ban and that “Arizona remains one of the most pro-life states in the country.”
lanned Parenthood Arizona had argued that the state’s conflicting laws should be reconciled so licensed physicians could continue providing abortions under the 15-week regulation, with the much earlier law only applying to others performing the procedure.
Judge Johnson, who was appointed by the governor, disagreed. “The court finds that because the legal basis for the judgment entered in 1973 has now been overruled, it must vacate the judgment in its entirety,” she wrote. “The court finds an attempt to reconcile 50 years of legislative activity procedurally improper.”
A judge on Friday ruled that a near-total abortion ban written before Arizona became a state must be enforced, throwing abortion access into question one day before the start of a 15-week ban that passed the Legislature this year.
The stricter ban, which can be traced to 1864, was blocked by a court injunction in 1973 shortly after the Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade, determined that there was a constitutional right to abortion.On Friday, Judge Kellie Johnson of Pima County Superior Court lifted that injunction, noting that Roe had been overruled in June and that Planned Parenthood’s request for the court to “harmonize the laws” in Arizona was flawed.
The 1864 law, first established by the state’s territorial legislature, mandates a two- to five-year prison sentence for anyone who helps a woman obtain an abortion. In 1901, the state updated and codified the law.
“No archaic law should dictate our reproductive freedom,” Brittany Fonteno, the president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood Arizona, said in a statement after the judge’s ruling.
In an interview, Ms. Fonteno said the organization had stopped providing abortions in Tucson, at the sole Planned Parenthood location in the state where women were still getting them. “I cannot overstate how cruel this decision is,” she said. “It feels like we’re back to square one.”
Even though abortion remained legal in Arizona after the Supreme Court’s decision this year, it has been all but unavailable, as doctors and abortion clinics have tried to sort out confusion about which law would ultimately take effect. Even politicians disagreed on the relationship between the laws, which each include exceptions in the case of a medical emergency.
Gov. Doug Ducey has said that the 15-week ban he signed in March would supersede the century-old ban, but Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a fellow Republican, has argued that the older ban should take precedence. Mr. Brnovich filed the motion to vacate the injunction from 1973.
“I have and will continue to protect the most vulnerable Arizonans,” Mr. Brnovich said in a statement after the ruling. Mr. Ducey’s spokesman, C.J. Karamargin, said that the governor was proud to have signed the 15-week ban and that “Arizona remains one of the most pro-life states in the country.”
lanned Parenthood Arizona had argued that the state’s conflicting laws should be reconciled so licensed physicians could continue providing abortions under the 15-week regulation, with the much earlier law only applying to others performing the procedure.
Judge Johnson, who was appointed by the governor, disagreed. “The court finds that because the legal basis for the judgment entered in 1973 has now been overruled, it must vacate the judgment in its entirety,” she wrote. “The court finds an attempt to reconcile 50 years of legislative activity procedurally improper.”
Re: TrumpReich in action
Republicans get more and more bizarre every day.Rach3 wrote: ↑Fri Sep 23, 2022 5:53 pmAnd, GOP House Rep., ie. a..h..e , Chip Roy (TX) vows to shut down the Government:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kevin-mc ... s-politics
Roy dishonors the defenders of the Alamo.
They don't want to govern, they want to rule.
Michael Moore was on Bill Maher's show last night, and he's predicting a blue wave this November. With his finger on the pulse of things, he feels that we are fed up with the nonsense and the constant feeling of a threat to democracy. Women are registering to vote in record numbers, as are young people, according to Moore. His exhortation was that we should all vote, and bring 5 people with us when we show up at the polls. A similar "throw the bums out" wave has happened before in both England and Australia, as well as here, so why not?
I'm really tired of feeling sick to my stomach, and I suspect lots of other people feel the same way around the country.
This has to stop.
Re: TrumpReich in action
Yes, I read that before I posted the above. That's why we have to overwhelm them at the polls.
I'm just sick of this constant survival threat.
Re: TrumpReich in action
Can’t miss: MyPatriotSupply.com
Re: TrumpReich in action
Activists Flood Election Offices With Challenges
By Nick Corasaniti and Alexandra Berzon
Sept. 28, 2022, 3:00 a.m. ET
Activists driven by false theories about election fraud are working to toss out tens of thousands of voter registrations and ballots in battleground states, part of a loosely coordinated campaign that is sowing distrust and threatening further turmoil as election officials prepare for the November midterms.
Groups in Georgia have challenged at least 65,000 voter registrations across eight counties, claiming to have evidence that voters’ addresses were incorrect. In Michigan, an activist group tried to challenge 22,000 ballots from voters who had requested absentee ballots for the state’s August primary. And in Texas, residents sent in 116 affidavits challenging the eligibility of more than 6,000 voters in Harris County, which is home to Houston and is the state’s largest county.
The recent wave of challenges have been filed by right-wing activists who believe conspiracy theories about fraud in the 2020 presidential election. They claim to be using state laws that allow people to question whether a voter is eligible. But so far, the vast majority of the complaints have been rejected, in many cases because election officials found the challenges were filed incorrectly, rife with bad information or based on flawed data analysis.
Republican-aligned groups have long pushed to aggressively cull the voter rolls, claiming that inaccurate registrations can lead to voter fraud — although examples of such fraud are exceptionally rare. Voting rights groups say the greater concern is inadvertently purging an eligible voter from the rolls.
The new tactic of flooding offices with challenges escalates that debate — and weaponizes the process. Sorting through the piles of petitions is costly and time-consuming, increasing the chances that overburdened election officials could make mistakes that could disenfranchise voters. And while election officials say they’re confident in their procedures, they worry about the toll on trust in elections. The challenge process, as used by election deniers, has become another platform for spreading doubt about the security of elections.
“It’s a tactic to distract and undermine the electoral process,” said Dele Lowman Smith, chairwoman of the DeKalb County Board of Elections in Georgia. Her county is among several in Georgia that have had to hold special meetings just to address the challenges. The state’s new Republican-backed election law requires that each challenge receive a hearing, and the process was taking up too much time in regular board meetings.
The activists say they are exercising their right to ensure that voter rolls are accurate.
“If a citizen is giving you information, wouldn’t you want to check it and make sure it’s right?” said Sandy Kiesel, the executive director of Election Integrity Fund and Force, a group involved in challenges in Michigan.
But in private strategy and training calls, participants from some groups have talked openly about more political aims, saying they believe their work will help Republican candidates. Some groups largely target voters in Democratic, urban areas.
It is not unusual for voter rolls to contain errors — often because voters have died or moved without updating their registrations. But states typically rely on systematic processes outlined in state and federal law — not on lists provided by outside groups — to clean up the information.
Still, groups have submitted challenges before. True the Vote, a Texas group behind the misinformation-laden film “2,000 Mules,” challenged more than 360,000 voters in Georgia before Senate runoff elections in 2021.
The new tactics and types of challenges have spread wildly since, as a broad movement has mobilized around former President Donald J. Trump’s lies that the election was stolen. An influential think tank with close Trump ties, the Conservative Partnership Institute, has distributed a playbook that instructs local groups on how to vet voter rolls. Another national group, the America Project, backed by Michael Flynn and Patrick Byrne, influential members in the election denial movement, have helped fund a Georgia outfit that has challenged ballots across the state. America Project’s support was first reported by Bloomberg News.
In mid-September, another Georgia group, Greater Georgia, co-sponsored a Zoom training session about how to file challenges with roughly a dozen activists. The group, which was founded by former Senator Kelly Loeffler, said the goal was protecting “election integrity.”
The areas it focused on — counties in the metro Atlanta area — have the highest concentration of Democratic voters in the state. The leader of the training, Catherine McDonald, who works for the Voter Integrity Project, told participants she believed Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, both Democrats, won their Senate races in 2021 in part because judges refused to hear cases challenging what she considered illegal voting.
“There were more than enough illegal votes,” Ms. McDonald said at the outset of the training, according to a transcript of the event obtained by The New York Times. “None of the judges in Fulton or DeKalb would take the case.”
Greater Georgia declined to comment on the training.
Of the challenges brought in Gwinnett County in Georgia, 15,000 to 20,000 were rejected, while a further 16,000 or so remained undecided. In many cases, the methodology was found to be flawed or misguided. In Forsyth County, Ga., 6 percent of the 17,000 voters challenged were removed from the rolls, according to county records, after election officials determined that the submissions either did not meet necessary requirements or were factually incorrect.
In Michigan, the secretary of state’s office said an attempt to challenge 22,027 ballots at once was invalid — state law says challenges must be submitted one at a time rather than in bulk, Jonathan Brater, director of the state’s Bureau of Elections, wrote in a letter to local officials.
How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.
Mr. Brater highlighted other issues with the group’s work. The activists used the U.S. Postal Service’s change of address system as evidence indicating a voter’s registration isn’t valid. But many people in that system, including students and members of the military, are still eligible to vote at their previous address, he wrote. Other challenges were based on a glitch that listed Jan. 1, 1900, as a place-holder registration date for people registered before new software was introduced.
In interviews with The Times, leaders with the group behind the effort, Election Integrity Fund and Force, said they did not have clear evidence that the voters listed were ineligible. They were simply prompting elections officials to make a closer examination of some potential errors, they said.
They weren’t aware of any voters removed from the rolls as a result, they said.
Election Integrity Fund and Force has been working in Michigan since the 2020 election, promoting skepticism about the election’s legitimacy. This month, it sued the governor and secretary of state in an attempt to decertify President Biden’s win in the state. It has also sent volunteers knocking on doors to survey residents about the registered voters in their homes. They presented their results to election officials as evidence of problems with the voter rolls.
But officials who reviewed the group’s findings said they were riddled with errors and leaps in logic. “They don’t have a grasp of how things actually work,” said Lisa Brown, the county clerk for Oakland County in the Detroit suburbs.
Ms. Brown said a colleague found a friend on the group’s list of problematic registrations because the friend forwards her mail. “She’s a snowbird. So, yeah, she forwards her mail to Florida when she’s down there, but she still lives here,” Ms. Brown said.
Ms. Kiesel, the group’s executive director, said her group planned to send lists of names to Michigan election officials before the November election. The lists will also go to poll workers, she said.
If voters are challenged at polling places, their ballots would be immediately counted. But the ballots would also be marked and could be reviewed later if a candidate or group sued, officials said.
Ms. Kiesel has shared her group’s plans with various coalitions of election activists in Michigan, including one with ties to the Conservative Partnership Institute, according to audio of conference calls obtained by The Times. A lawyer who aided Mr. Trump in his effort to overturn the 2020 results, Cleta Mitchell, is leading the institute’s effort to organize activists.
“We learned a lot by the challenges,” Ms. Kiesel said on one call with the coalition in August. “We need people to help us to do the same thing in the November election.”
Chris Thomas, a former elections director for Michigan now working as a consultant for Detroit, said he did not expect the challenges to succeed. But one concern is that activists will use rejections to sow doubt about the legitimacy of elections if they don’t like the results.
“They can’t get over the fact they lost,” Mr. Thomas said. “They are just going to beat the system into the ground.”
Another canvassing operation fanned out across Harris County, Texas, over the summer. Volunteers with the Texas Election Network, a group with ties to the state Republican Party, went door to door, clipboards in hand, to ask residents if they were the voters registered at those addresses. The canvassing effort was first reported by The Houston Chronicle.
Soon after, 116 affidavits challenging the registration of thousands of voters were filed with the Harris County Election Office, according to data obtained through an open records request by The New York Times. Each affidavit, sent by individual citizens, was written exactly the same.
“I have personal knowledge that the voters named in this affidavit do not reside at the addresses listed on their voter registration records,” the affidavits said. “I have personally visited the listed addresses. I have personally interviewed persons actually residing at these addresses.”
Each affidavit failed to meet the state’s standards, and after a quick investigation, all were rejected by the election administrator of Harris County.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/28/us/p ... enges.html
By Nick Corasaniti and Alexandra Berzon
Sept. 28, 2022, 3:00 a.m. ET
Activists driven by false theories about election fraud are working to toss out tens of thousands of voter registrations and ballots in battleground states, part of a loosely coordinated campaign that is sowing distrust and threatening further turmoil as election officials prepare for the November midterms.
Groups in Georgia have challenged at least 65,000 voter registrations across eight counties, claiming to have evidence that voters’ addresses were incorrect. In Michigan, an activist group tried to challenge 22,000 ballots from voters who had requested absentee ballots for the state’s August primary. And in Texas, residents sent in 116 affidavits challenging the eligibility of more than 6,000 voters in Harris County, which is home to Houston and is the state’s largest county.
The recent wave of challenges have been filed by right-wing activists who believe conspiracy theories about fraud in the 2020 presidential election. They claim to be using state laws that allow people to question whether a voter is eligible. But so far, the vast majority of the complaints have been rejected, in many cases because election officials found the challenges were filed incorrectly, rife with bad information or based on flawed data analysis.
Republican-aligned groups have long pushed to aggressively cull the voter rolls, claiming that inaccurate registrations can lead to voter fraud — although examples of such fraud are exceptionally rare. Voting rights groups say the greater concern is inadvertently purging an eligible voter from the rolls.
The new tactic of flooding offices with challenges escalates that debate — and weaponizes the process. Sorting through the piles of petitions is costly and time-consuming, increasing the chances that overburdened election officials could make mistakes that could disenfranchise voters. And while election officials say they’re confident in their procedures, they worry about the toll on trust in elections. The challenge process, as used by election deniers, has become another platform for spreading doubt about the security of elections.
“It’s a tactic to distract and undermine the electoral process,” said Dele Lowman Smith, chairwoman of the DeKalb County Board of Elections in Georgia. Her county is among several in Georgia that have had to hold special meetings just to address the challenges. The state’s new Republican-backed election law requires that each challenge receive a hearing, and the process was taking up too much time in regular board meetings.
The activists say they are exercising their right to ensure that voter rolls are accurate.
“If a citizen is giving you information, wouldn’t you want to check it and make sure it’s right?” said Sandy Kiesel, the executive director of Election Integrity Fund and Force, a group involved in challenges in Michigan.
But in private strategy and training calls, participants from some groups have talked openly about more political aims, saying they believe their work will help Republican candidates. Some groups largely target voters in Democratic, urban areas.
It is not unusual for voter rolls to contain errors — often because voters have died or moved without updating their registrations. But states typically rely on systematic processes outlined in state and federal law — not on lists provided by outside groups — to clean up the information.
Still, groups have submitted challenges before. True the Vote, a Texas group behind the misinformation-laden film “2,000 Mules,” challenged more than 360,000 voters in Georgia before Senate runoff elections in 2021.
The new tactics and types of challenges have spread wildly since, as a broad movement has mobilized around former President Donald J. Trump’s lies that the election was stolen. An influential think tank with close Trump ties, the Conservative Partnership Institute, has distributed a playbook that instructs local groups on how to vet voter rolls. Another national group, the America Project, backed by Michael Flynn and Patrick Byrne, influential members in the election denial movement, have helped fund a Georgia outfit that has challenged ballots across the state. America Project’s support was first reported by Bloomberg News.
In mid-September, another Georgia group, Greater Georgia, co-sponsored a Zoom training session about how to file challenges with roughly a dozen activists. The group, which was founded by former Senator Kelly Loeffler, said the goal was protecting “election integrity.”
The areas it focused on — counties in the metro Atlanta area — have the highest concentration of Democratic voters in the state. The leader of the training, Catherine McDonald, who works for the Voter Integrity Project, told participants she believed Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, both Democrats, won their Senate races in 2021 in part because judges refused to hear cases challenging what she considered illegal voting.
“There were more than enough illegal votes,” Ms. McDonald said at the outset of the training, according to a transcript of the event obtained by The New York Times. “None of the judges in Fulton or DeKalb would take the case.”
Greater Georgia declined to comment on the training.
Of the challenges brought in Gwinnett County in Georgia, 15,000 to 20,000 were rejected, while a further 16,000 or so remained undecided. In many cases, the methodology was found to be flawed or misguided. In Forsyth County, Ga., 6 percent of the 17,000 voters challenged were removed from the rolls, according to county records, after election officials determined that the submissions either did not meet necessary requirements or were factually incorrect.
In Michigan, the secretary of state’s office said an attempt to challenge 22,027 ballots at once was invalid — state law says challenges must be submitted one at a time rather than in bulk, Jonathan Brater, director of the state’s Bureau of Elections, wrote in a letter to local officials.
How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.
Mr. Brater highlighted other issues with the group’s work. The activists used the U.S. Postal Service’s change of address system as evidence indicating a voter’s registration isn’t valid. But many people in that system, including students and members of the military, are still eligible to vote at their previous address, he wrote. Other challenges were based on a glitch that listed Jan. 1, 1900, as a place-holder registration date for people registered before new software was introduced.
In interviews with The Times, leaders with the group behind the effort, Election Integrity Fund and Force, said they did not have clear evidence that the voters listed were ineligible. They were simply prompting elections officials to make a closer examination of some potential errors, they said.
They weren’t aware of any voters removed from the rolls as a result, they said.
Election Integrity Fund and Force has been working in Michigan since the 2020 election, promoting skepticism about the election’s legitimacy. This month, it sued the governor and secretary of state in an attempt to decertify President Biden’s win in the state. It has also sent volunteers knocking on doors to survey residents about the registered voters in their homes. They presented their results to election officials as evidence of problems with the voter rolls.
But officials who reviewed the group’s findings said they were riddled with errors and leaps in logic. “They don’t have a grasp of how things actually work,” said Lisa Brown, the county clerk for Oakland County in the Detroit suburbs.
Ms. Brown said a colleague found a friend on the group’s list of problematic registrations because the friend forwards her mail. “She’s a snowbird. So, yeah, she forwards her mail to Florida when she’s down there, but she still lives here,” Ms. Brown said.
Ms. Kiesel, the group’s executive director, said her group planned to send lists of names to Michigan election officials before the November election. The lists will also go to poll workers, she said.
If voters are challenged at polling places, their ballots would be immediately counted. But the ballots would also be marked and could be reviewed later if a candidate or group sued, officials said.
Ms. Kiesel has shared her group’s plans with various coalitions of election activists in Michigan, including one with ties to the Conservative Partnership Institute, according to audio of conference calls obtained by The Times. A lawyer who aided Mr. Trump in his effort to overturn the 2020 results, Cleta Mitchell, is leading the institute’s effort to organize activists.
“We learned a lot by the challenges,” Ms. Kiesel said on one call with the coalition in August. “We need people to help us to do the same thing in the November election.”
Chris Thomas, a former elections director for Michigan now working as a consultant for Detroit, said he did not expect the challenges to succeed. But one concern is that activists will use rejections to sow doubt about the legitimacy of elections if they don’t like the results.
“They can’t get over the fact they lost,” Mr. Thomas said. “They are just going to beat the system into the ground.”
Another canvassing operation fanned out across Harris County, Texas, over the summer. Volunteers with the Texas Election Network, a group with ties to the state Republican Party, went door to door, clipboards in hand, to ask residents if they were the voters registered at those addresses. The canvassing effort was first reported by The Houston Chronicle.
Soon after, 116 affidavits challenging the registration of thousands of voters were filed with the Harris County Election Office, according to data obtained through an open records request by The New York Times. Each affidavit, sent by individual citizens, was written exactly the same.
“I have personal knowledge that the voters named in this affidavit do not reside at the addresses listed on their voter registration records,” the affidavits said. “I have personally visited the listed addresses. I have personally interviewed persons actually residing at these addresses.”
Each affidavit failed to meet the state’s standards, and after a quick investigation, all were rejected by the election administrator of Harris County.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/28/us/p ... enges.html
Re: TrumpReich in action
NYT today ( you can access at this link) :
Violent political speech has increasingly crossed into the realm of in-person confrontation for members of Congress in both parties, raising the prospect of a disastrous event.
https://tinyurl.com/2p8bazej
Violent political speech has increasingly crossed into the realm of in-person confrontation for members of Congress in both parties, raising the prospect of a disastrous event.
https://tinyurl.com/2p8bazej
Re: TrumpReich in action
Yeh, I know, another " hateful " post from me, via WAPO today:
"Former president Donald Trump is facing blowback for an inflammatory online message attacking Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that many viewed as a threat.
“He has a DEATH WISH,” Trump posted late Friday on his Truth Social platform, criticizing McConnell for agreeing to a deal to fund the government through December. He also disparaged McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, who served as Trump’s transportation secretary and was born in Taiwan, in racist terms, calling her “his China loving wife, Coco Chow!” ....
A Trump spokesman said it was “absurd” to interpret the post as a threat or call for violence, suggesting the reference to a death wish was “political” rather than literal.
“Mitch McConnell is killing the Republican Party through weakness and cowardice,” spokesman Taylor Budowich wrote in a statement. “He obviously has a political death wish for himself and Republican Party, but President Trump and the America First champions in Congress will save the Republican Party and our nation.”
"Former president Donald Trump is facing blowback for an inflammatory online message attacking Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that many viewed as a threat.
“He has a DEATH WISH,” Trump posted late Friday on his Truth Social platform, criticizing McConnell for agreeing to a deal to fund the government through December. He also disparaged McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, who served as Trump’s transportation secretary and was born in Taiwan, in racist terms, calling her “his China loving wife, Coco Chow!” ....
A Trump spokesman said it was “absurd” to interpret the post as a threat or call for violence, suggesting the reference to a death wish was “political” rather than literal.
“Mitch McConnell is killing the Republican Party through weakness and cowardice,” spokesman Taylor Budowich wrote in a statement. “He obviously has a political death wish for himself and Republican Party, but President Trump and the America First champions in Congress will save the Republican Party and our nation.”
Re: TrumpReich in action
Looks like the hate is coming from the losing side of the argument.
As usual.
As usual.
Re: TrumpReich in action
Food for the next insurrection packed in a handy re-useable ammo cannister so you can eat and pass the ammunition at the same time 
https://mypatriotsupply.com/collections ... y-ammo-can
https://mypatriotsupply.com/collections ... y-ammo-can
Re: TrumpReich in action
The Okie menace.Children are not welcome there:
https://s2.washingtonpost.com/camp-rw/? ... linktot=40
https://s2.washingtonpost.com/camp-rw/? ... linktot=40
Re: TrumpReich in action
In Trump Case, Texas Creates a Headache for Georgia Prosecutors
A Texas court is thwarting Georgia prosecutors’ attempts to compel testimony from Texas witnesses as part of a criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump.
By Danny Hakim and Richard Fausset
Oct. 8, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET
ATLANTA — Witnesses called to testify in a Georgia criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and his allies have not always come willingly.
A number of them have fought their subpoenas in their home-state courts, only to have local judges order them to cooperate. That was the case with Trump-aligned lawyers John Eastman in New Mexico, Jenna Ellis in Colorado and Rudolph W. Giuliani in New York; Mr. Giuliani was also told by an Atlanta judge that he could come “on a train, on a bus or Uber” after his lawyers said a health condition prevented him from flying.
But the state of Texas is proving to be an outlier, creating serious headaches for Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, who is leading the investigation into efforts by Mr. Trump and others to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia.
Last month, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court, thwarted Ms. Willis’s effort to force Jacki L. Pick, a Republican lawyer and pundit, to testify in Atlanta, saying that her subpoena had essentially expired. But in a pair of opinions, a majority of the judges on the all-Republican court went further, indicating that they believed the Georgia special grand jury conducting the inquiry may not have the legal standing to compel testimony from Texas witnesses.
After the court’s ruling, two other pro-Trump Texans, Sidney Powell and Phil Waldron, did not show up for their scheduled court dates in Atlanta. And while there may be workarounds for Ms. Willis — experts say the Atlanta prosecutors could go to Texas to depose the witnesses — it looks to some Georgia observers like a pattern of Texas Republicans meddling with Georgia when it comes to the fate of Mr. Trump.
“It does seem like there’s a substantial resistance from Texas and Texans to forcing people to cooperate in ways that we haven’t seen from any other jurisdiction,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a constitutional law professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta.
Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, has also weighed in, filing an amicus brief late last month along with other Republican attorneys general that supported efforts by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to avoid testifying in the Atlanta investigation. Mr. Paxton, in a statement accompanying his brief, assailed the investigation for what he said were its “repeated attempts to ignore” the Constitution.
Mr. Paxton, who is running for re-election this year despite having been indicted and arrested on criminal securities-fraud charges, has sought to intervene in Georgia before. After the 2020 election, he sued Georgia and three other swing states that Mr. Trump lost, in a far-fetched attempt to get the Supreme Court to delay the certification of their presidential electors.
By refusing to compel the three Texas residents to testify in Georgia, the court is breaking with a long tradition of cooperation between states in producing subpoenaed witnesses. All 50 states have versions of what is known as the Uniform Act, which was created in the 1930s to establish a framework for one state to compel testimony from a witness residing in another.
Ms. Willis, in a statement, said, “We expect every state to abide by the Constitutional requirement to ensure that full faith and credit is given by them to the laws and proceedings of other states. That requirement includes abiding by the interstate compact to produce witnesses for other states’ judicial proceedings.”
Ms. Willis is weighing potential conspiracy and racketeering charges, among others, and is examining the phone call that Mr. Trump made on Jan. 2, 2021, to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, imploring him to “find” nearly 12,000 votes, or enough to reverse the outcome of the Georgia vote.
On Friday, her office filed paperwork seeking to compel testimony from three more witnesses, The Associated Press reported: former House Speaker Newt Gingrich as well as Michael T. Flynn, a former national security adviser, and Eric Herschmann, a lawyer who worked in the Trump White House.
Nearly 20 people, including Mr. Giuliani, have already been informed that they are targets of Ms. Willis’s investigation and could face criminal charges. Ms. Pick, a radio host and former lawyer for House Republicans whose husband, Doug Deason, is a prominent Republican donor and Dallas power broker, has also been told she is among the targets of the investigation, according to one of her lawyers, Geoffrey Harper.
She played a central role in one of two December 2020 hearings before Georgia lawmakers that were organized by Mr. Giuliani, who advanced a number of falsehoods about the election. During a hearing before the Georgia Senate, Ms. Pick narrated a video feed that showed ballot counting taking place at a downtown Atlanta arena where voting was held.
At the hearing, Ms. Pick said the video “goes to” what she called “fraud or misrepresentation,” and the implication of her presentation was that something improper was taking place. She was immediately challenged by Democrats at the hearing. The office of Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican, has also long refuted the idea that anything nefarious took place in the counting of votes at the arena.
Mr. Harper said his client had done nothing wrong.
“She didn’t suggest there was fraud, she didn’t suggest something untoward had happened,” he said. “She simply said here is a video, here’s what it shows, we’d like to investigate further. Her testimony is the most innocuous thing you’ve ever seen.”
Fulton County prosecutors are also seeking the testimony of Ms. Powell, who like Ms. Pick lives in the Dallas area. She is a lawyer and conspiracy theorist who played a high-profile role in efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power. In Georgia, she helped put together a team of Trump allies and consultants who gained access to a wide range of voter data and voting equipment in rural Coffee County; they are currently being investigated by Mr. Raffensperger’s office, as well as the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Ms. Willis’s office.
In an email, Ms. Powell said, “GA has no need to subpoena me. My involvement in GA issues has been significantly misrepresented by the press including your outlet.”
She did not answer questions about her legal strategy with respect to Fulton County’s attempt to make her testify, or say whether she had been informed that she is a target of the investigation or merely a witness.
Mr. Waldron, a former Army colonel with a background in information warfare, also advanced a number of conspiracy theories after the 2020 election, and he made a virtual appearance at one of the legislative hearings in Georgia. He could not be reached for comment. He lives outside of Austin, Texas, and the district attorney in the county where he lives said he was not aware of any legal challenge to Ms. Willis’s effort to compel Mr. Waldron’s testimony.
The body overseeing the Fulton County investigation is known under Georgia law as a special purpose grand jury. It can sit for longer periods than a regular grand jury and has the ability to subpoena targets of the investigation to provide testimony, though it lacks the power to indict. Once a special grand jury issues a report and recommendations, indictments can be sought from a regular grand jury.
A majority of judges on the Texas court expressed the view that the Georgia grand jury was not a proper criminal grand jury because it lacks indictment authority, and thus likely lacks standing to compel the appearance of witnesses from Texas.
“I am inclined to find such a body is not the kind of grand jury envisioned by the Uniform Act,” wrote Judge Kevin Yeary. “And if I may be wrong about that, I would place the burden to show otherwise on the requesting state.”
His view was essentially backed by four other judges on the nine-member court.
The question of whether the Fulton County special grand jury is civil or criminal in nature came up in late August, when lawyers for Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, unsuccessfully sought to quash a subpoena demanding that he testify. The governor’s lawyers argued that the special grand jury was civil, and that Mr. Kemp would not have to testify in a civil action under the doctrine of sovereign immunity.
But in a written order on Aug. 29, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert C.I. McBurney rejected the idea that the special grand jury was civil, noting that none of the paperwork establishing the grand jury mentioned that it would be considering civil actions.
“That a special purpose grand jury cannot issue an indictment does not diminish the criminal nature of its work or somehow transmogrify that criminal investigation into a civil one,” Judge McBurney wrote. “Police officers, too, lack the authority to indict anyone, but their investigations are plainly criminal.”
Ronald Wright, a law professor at Wake Forest University who studies the work of criminal prosecutors, said that the Texas court’s decision, based on its interpretation of the special grand jury’s purpose, appeared unusual. “I haven’t heard anything about one state saying categorically, ‘No we read your statute, that doesn’t apply here, you can’t get this witness,’” he said.
The nine members of Texas’ Court of Criminal Appeals are elected and are all Republicans. But they have not always been in sync with Gov. Greg Abbott and Mr. Paxton, both vociferous Trump supporters.
Mr. Harper said his reading of Georgia law is that the special grand jury is a civil proceeding. He believes that witnesses living in other states can challenge efforts to compel their testimony, at least if it is in person.
“Civil cases can get testimony from out-of-state witnesses, but they have to do it by deposition,” he said. “I believe that if pressed on the issue, it would be a unanimous ruling by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals that a special grand jury in Georgia cannot subpoena live testimony from witnesses outside of Georgia.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/08/us/t ... orgia.html
A Texas court is thwarting Georgia prosecutors’ attempts to compel testimony from Texas witnesses as part of a criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump.
By Danny Hakim and Richard Fausset
Oct. 8, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET
ATLANTA — Witnesses called to testify in a Georgia criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and his allies have not always come willingly.
A number of them have fought their subpoenas in their home-state courts, only to have local judges order them to cooperate. That was the case with Trump-aligned lawyers John Eastman in New Mexico, Jenna Ellis in Colorado and Rudolph W. Giuliani in New York; Mr. Giuliani was also told by an Atlanta judge that he could come “on a train, on a bus or Uber” after his lawyers said a health condition prevented him from flying.
But the state of Texas is proving to be an outlier, creating serious headaches for Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, who is leading the investigation into efforts by Mr. Trump and others to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia.
Last month, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court, thwarted Ms. Willis’s effort to force Jacki L. Pick, a Republican lawyer and pundit, to testify in Atlanta, saying that her subpoena had essentially expired. But in a pair of opinions, a majority of the judges on the all-Republican court went further, indicating that they believed the Georgia special grand jury conducting the inquiry may not have the legal standing to compel testimony from Texas witnesses.
After the court’s ruling, two other pro-Trump Texans, Sidney Powell and Phil Waldron, did not show up for their scheduled court dates in Atlanta. And while there may be workarounds for Ms. Willis — experts say the Atlanta prosecutors could go to Texas to depose the witnesses — it looks to some Georgia observers like a pattern of Texas Republicans meddling with Georgia when it comes to the fate of Mr. Trump.
“It does seem like there’s a substantial resistance from Texas and Texans to forcing people to cooperate in ways that we haven’t seen from any other jurisdiction,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a constitutional law professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta.
Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, has also weighed in, filing an amicus brief late last month along with other Republican attorneys general that supported efforts by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to avoid testifying in the Atlanta investigation. Mr. Paxton, in a statement accompanying his brief, assailed the investigation for what he said were its “repeated attempts to ignore” the Constitution.
Mr. Paxton, who is running for re-election this year despite having been indicted and arrested on criminal securities-fraud charges, has sought to intervene in Georgia before. After the 2020 election, he sued Georgia and three other swing states that Mr. Trump lost, in a far-fetched attempt to get the Supreme Court to delay the certification of their presidential electors.
By refusing to compel the three Texas residents to testify in Georgia, the court is breaking with a long tradition of cooperation between states in producing subpoenaed witnesses. All 50 states have versions of what is known as the Uniform Act, which was created in the 1930s to establish a framework for one state to compel testimony from a witness residing in another.
Ms. Willis, in a statement, said, “We expect every state to abide by the Constitutional requirement to ensure that full faith and credit is given by them to the laws and proceedings of other states. That requirement includes abiding by the interstate compact to produce witnesses for other states’ judicial proceedings.”
Ms. Willis is weighing potential conspiracy and racketeering charges, among others, and is examining the phone call that Mr. Trump made on Jan. 2, 2021, to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, imploring him to “find” nearly 12,000 votes, or enough to reverse the outcome of the Georgia vote.
On Friday, her office filed paperwork seeking to compel testimony from three more witnesses, The Associated Press reported: former House Speaker Newt Gingrich as well as Michael T. Flynn, a former national security adviser, and Eric Herschmann, a lawyer who worked in the Trump White House.
Nearly 20 people, including Mr. Giuliani, have already been informed that they are targets of Ms. Willis’s investigation and could face criminal charges. Ms. Pick, a radio host and former lawyer for House Republicans whose husband, Doug Deason, is a prominent Republican donor and Dallas power broker, has also been told she is among the targets of the investigation, according to one of her lawyers, Geoffrey Harper.
She played a central role in one of two December 2020 hearings before Georgia lawmakers that were organized by Mr. Giuliani, who advanced a number of falsehoods about the election. During a hearing before the Georgia Senate, Ms. Pick narrated a video feed that showed ballot counting taking place at a downtown Atlanta arena where voting was held.
At the hearing, Ms. Pick said the video “goes to” what she called “fraud or misrepresentation,” and the implication of her presentation was that something improper was taking place. She was immediately challenged by Democrats at the hearing. The office of Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican, has also long refuted the idea that anything nefarious took place in the counting of votes at the arena.
Mr. Harper said his client had done nothing wrong.
“She didn’t suggest there was fraud, she didn’t suggest something untoward had happened,” he said. “She simply said here is a video, here’s what it shows, we’d like to investigate further. Her testimony is the most innocuous thing you’ve ever seen.”
Fulton County prosecutors are also seeking the testimony of Ms. Powell, who like Ms. Pick lives in the Dallas area. She is a lawyer and conspiracy theorist who played a high-profile role in efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power. In Georgia, she helped put together a team of Trump allies and consultants who gained access to a wide range of voter data and voting equipment in rural Coffee County; they are currently being investigated by Mr. Raffensperger’s office, as well as the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Ms. Willis’s office.
In an email, Ms. Powell said, “GA has no need to subpoena me. My involvement in GA issues has been significantly misrepresented by the press including your outlet.”
She did not answer questions about her legal strategy with respect to Fulton County’s attempt to make her testify, or say whether she had been informed that she is a target of the investigation or merely a witness.
Mr. Waldron, a former Army colonel with a background in information warfare, also advanced a number of conspiracy theories after the 2020 election, and he made a virtual appearance at one of the legislative hearings in Georgia. He could not be reached for comment. He lives outside of Austin, Texas, and the district attorney in the county where he lives said he was not aware of any legal challenge to Ms. Willis’s effort to compel Mr. Waldron’s testimony.
The body overseeing the Fulton County investigation is known under Georgia law as a special purpose grand jury. It can sit for longer periods than a regular grand jury and has the ability to subpoena targets of the investigation to provide testimony, though it lacks the power to indict. Once a special grand jury issues a report and recommendations, indictments can be sought from a regular grand jury.
A majority of judges on the Texas court expressed the view that the Georgia grand jury was not a proper criminal grand jury because it lacks indictment authority, and thus likely lacks standing to compel the appearance of witnesses from Texas.
“I am inclined to find such a body is not the kind of grand jury envisioned by the Uniform Act,” wrote Judge Kevin Yeary. “And if I may be wrong about that, I would place the burden to show otherwise on the requesting state.”
His view was essentially backed by four other judges on the nine-member court.
The question of whether the Fulton County special grand jury is civil or criminal in nature came up in late August, when lawyers for Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, unsuccessfully sought to quash a subpoena demanding that he testify. The governor’s lawyers argued that the special grand jury was civil, and that Mr. Kemp would not have to testify in a civil action under the doctrine of sovereign immunity.
But in a written order on Aug. 29, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert C.I. McBurney rejected the idea that the special grand jury was civil, noting that none of the paperwork establishing the grand jury mentioned that it would be considering civil actions.
“That a special purpose grand jury cannot issue an indictment does not diminish the criminal nature of its work or somehow transmogrify that criminal investigation into a civil one,” Judge McBurney wrote. “Police officers, too, lack the authority to indict anyone, but their investigations are plainly criminal.”
Ronald Wright, a law professor at Wake Forest University who studies the work of criminal prosecutors, said that the Texas court’s decision, based on its interpretation of the special grand jury’s purpose, appeared unusual. “I haven’t heard anything about one state saying categorically, ‘No we read your statute, that doesn’t apply here, you can’t get this witness,’” he said.
The nine members of Texas’ Court of Criminal Appeals are elected and are all Republicans. But they have not always been in sync with Gov. Greg Abbott and Mr. Paxton, both vociferous Trump supporters.
Mr. Harper said his reading of Georgia law is that the special grand jury is a civil proceeding. He believes that witnesses living in other states can challenge efforts to compel their testimony, at least if it is in person.
“Civil cases can get testimony from out-of-state witnesses, but they have to do it by deposition,” he said. “I believe that if pressed on the issue, it would be a unanimous ruling by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals that a special grand jury in Georgia cannot subpoena live testimony from witnesses outside of Georgia.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/08/us/t ... orgia.html
Re: TrumpReich in action
Seem to be related.Dumb + money = GOP elections.From Axios today:
Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel has told the McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund he is willing to make a multimillion-dollar investment in the Arizona race on the condition the super PAC finds matching funds, Axios has learned.
The 30,000-foot view on education loss: The average ACT test score for students in the class of 2022 dropped to its lowest level in more than three decades.
Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel has told the McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund he is willing to make a multimillion-dollar investment in the Arizona race on the condition the super PAC finds matching funds, Axios has learned.
The 30,000-foot view on education loss: The average ACT test score for students in the class of 2022 dropped to its lowest level in more than three decades.
Re: TrumpReich in action
From Investigate Midwest today :
Worker productivity and meatpacking
Two of the country’s biggest meat companies have invested in a smartwatch app designed to let workplaces more closely monitor their employees’ movements.
Other companies — most notably Amazon — have used software to track worker productivity. Experts say this increases stress among workers, especially when they can be punished for the app showing poor performance.
Meatpacking is one of the most dangerous industries in the country. The CEO of Mentore, the company that developed the app, told Investigate Midwest it hopes its technology will first improve safety, and that higher productivity will follow.
— Madison McVan, reporter
https://investigatemidwest.org/2022/10/ ... s-workers/
Rach3:Safety first ??!! If there were any land left in Florida that is not already swamped by climate change and hurricanes, these guys would offer to sell you some.
Worker productivity and meatpacking
Two of the country’s biggest meat companies have invested in a smartwatch app designed to let workplaces more closely monitor their employees’ movements.
Other companies — most notably Amazon — have used software to track worker productivity. Experts say this increases stress among workers, especially when they can be punished for the app showing poor performance.
Meatpacking is one of the most dangerous industries in the country. The CEO of Mentore, the company that developed the app, told Investigate Midwest it hopes its technology will first improve safety, and that higher productivity will follow.
— Madison McVan, reporter
https://investigatemidwest.org/2022/10/ ... s-workers/
Rach3:Safety first ??!! If there were any land left in Florida that is not already swamped by climate change and hurricanes, these guys would offer to sell you some.
Re: TrumpReich in action
The war on Native Americans continues in the West:
https://www.postalley.org/2022/10/14/mo ... le-voters/
https://www.postalley.org/2022/10/14/mo ... le-voters/
Re: TrumpReich in action
I don't know why you continue to worry about this; Trump is as dead as last year's Christmas (am I allowed to use that word?) turkey!! The few who attend his rallies are the last remaining supporters and, looking at those crowds, they seem like average Americans to me. I watched some of the rallies 2 years ago - for entertainment value - and many of those groups were raising money for charities.
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jserraglio
- Posts: 11954
- Joined: Sun May 29, 2005 7:06 am
- Location: Cleveland, Ohio
Re: TrumpReich in action
The plague of GOP elected officials 2020 deniers:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/22/us/p ... 693bc7595b
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/22/us/p ... 693bc7595b
Re: TrumpReich in action
Deep in the heart of Trump Country.From the Cedar Rapids Gazette:
Iowa’s prestigious Grinnell College this fall has seen a rash of racist and white supremacist graffiti on campus signs and vehicles, with community members also reporting slurs shouted from moving vehicles, prompting the campus and city to issue statements, increase security and call on the public for help.
“Anti-Black speech and actions cause harm to Black students, faculty, and staff, and directly challenge Grinnell College’s values,” according to a statement last week from Grinnell President Anne Harris and Interim Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion Marc Reed. “They spread division, fear, and hate and damage the culture we strive to create on campus, one that supports, includes, and fosters a feeling of safety and belonging.”
Although the college hasn’t publicly detailed the acts of racism and harassment, some community members have posted photos on social media depicting racial slurs written on campus property.
The Scarlet & Black — Grinnell’s student newspaper — covered a Black Student Union call to action Oct. 13, at which students listed demands, including: more cameras on campus; legal accountability for hate crimes; self-defense training for Black students; mental health and wellness resources; recovery days for those who’ve experienced racial trauma; and paid time off for Black student workers after racist attacks.
‘One of its most diverse’
The 176-year-old, highly-selective, top-ranked private liberal arts college boasts about 1,700 students in the town of Grinnell, which reported a population of about 9,000 in 2020. In U.S. News & World Report’s 2022-23 best college rankings, Grinnell tied for No. 15 among national liberal arts colleges and No. 6 for “best undergraduate teaching.” That was down from 2019, when Grinnell tied for No. 11 among national liberal arts college and No. 2 for best undergraduate teaching.
In August, the college announced it was welcoming “one of its most diverse, highly-qualified classes in history.”
“Grinnell’s commitment to recruiting highly qualified students from populations that have been historically underrepresented in higher education has led to increased enrollment of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) students,” according to a fall enrollment news release.
Among the first-year class of 441 new students, 29 percent identified as “domestic BIPOC students, including the largest proportion of Latinx students of any entering class in Grinnell’s history,” according to Grinnell. BIPOC stands for (Black, Indigenous and people of color. Looking at its total student population, 19 percent identify as international students and 24 identify as people of color, according to Grinnell.
‘We call on the citizens of Grinnell’
In the statement denouncing recent acts of racism, Harris and Reed said, “Black students, faculty and staff are justifiably feeling and expressing anger, outrage, frustration, emotional exhaustion, disappointment, fear, and sadness. Many are concerned about their personal safety. Others face daily challenges in the form of surveillance and microaggressions.”
Harris and Reed announced steps the campus and community are taking including a neighborhood watch; transportation and escorts; installed cameras; and more outdoor lighting.
“The college is working to immediately install additional temporary lighting in locations where many of these incidents have occurred,” according to the message.
The next day, the student newspaper reported, “14 vehicles vandalized among a series of other recent racist incidents at Grinnell.”
Three weeks earlier, on Sept. 22, the Grinnell Police Department reported participating in a “community partners meeting” with Grinnell College involving a “discussion on race-based student harassment on and off campus.”
With incidents continuing, Mayor Dan Agnew on Oct. 16 issued a joint statement with Harris “about racist harassment in Grinnell.”
“We call on the citizens of Grinnell to mobilize against the acts of racist harassment that continue to happen in the city of Grinnell and the campus of Grinnell College,” according to the joint statement. “Black citizens, students, and community members are being harassed, and we need your help; we need our community to step up and make this harassment stop.”
They announced the college is working with local law enforcement to “hold those responsible accountable.” And they provided actionable steps community members can take to help, including calling police and photographing the license plates of offenders.
“There is more, longer-term work to be done,” according to the message. “To make a difference, we must all act together. We ask you to think of what motivates you — human dignity, neighborliness, what it means to live in Grinnell — and to act on that for the good of this community and its citizens.:
Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com
Iowa’s prestigious Grinnell College this fall has seen a rash of racist and white supremacist graffiti on campus signs and vehicles, with community members also reporting slurs shouted from moving vehicles, prompting the campus and city to issue statements, increase security and call on the public for help.
“Anti-Black speech and actions cause harm to Black students, faculty, and staff, and directly challenge Grinnell College’s values,” according to a statement last week from Grinnell President Anne Harris and Interim Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion Marc Reed. “They spread division, fear, and hate and damage the culture we strive to create on campus, one that supports, includes, and fosters a feeling of safety and belonging.”
Although the college hasn’t publicly detailed the acts of racism and harassment, some community members have posted photos on social media depicting racial slurs written on campus property.
The Scarlet & Black — Grinnell’s student newspaper — covered a Black Student Union call to action Oct. 13, at which students listed demands, including: more cameras on campus; legal accountability for hate crimes; self-defense training for Black students; mental health and wellness resources; recovery days for those who’ve experienced racial trauma; and paid time off for Black student workers after racist attacks.
‘One of its most diverse’
The 176-year-old, highly-selective, top-ranked private liberal arts college boasts about 1,700 students in the town of Grinnell, which reported a population of about 9,000 in 2020. In U.S. News & World Report’s 2022-23 best college rankings, Grinnell tied for No. 15 among national liberal arts colleges and No. 6 for “best undergraduate teaching.” That was down from 2019, when Grinnell tied for No. 11 among national liberal arts college and No. 2 for best undergraduate teaching.
In August, the college announced it was welcoming “one of its most diverse, highly-qualified classes in history.”
“Grinnell’s commitment to recruiting highly qualified students from populations that have been historically underrepresented in higher education has led to increased enrollment of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) students,” according to a fall enrollment news release.
Among the first-year class of 441 new students, 29 percent identified as “domestic BIPOC students, including the largest proportion of Latinx students of any entering class in Grinnell’s history,” according to Grinnell. BIPOC stands for (Black, Indigenous and people of color. Looking at its total student population, 19 percent identify as international students and 24 identify as people of color, according to Grinnell.
‘We call on the citizens of Grinnell’
In the statement denouncing recent acts of racism, Harris and Reed said, “Black students, faculty and staff are justifiably feeling and expressing anger, outrage, frustration, emotional exhaustion, disappointment, fear, and sadness. Many are concerned about their personal safety. Others face daily challenges in the form of surveillance and microaggressions.”
Harris and Reed announced steps the campus and community are taking including a neighborhood watch; transportation and escorts; installed cameras; and more outdoor lighting.
“The college is working to immediately install additional temporary lighting in locations where many of these incidents have occurred,” according to the message.
The next day, the student newspaper reported, “14 vehicles vandalized among a series of other recent racist incidents at Grinnell.”
Three weeks earlier, on Sept. 22, the Grinnell Police Department reported participating in a “community partners meeting” with Grinnell College involving a “discussion on race-based student harassment on and off campus.”
With incidents continuing, Mayor Dan Agnew on Oct. 16 issued a joint statement with Harris “about racist harassment in Grinnell.”
“We call on the citizens of Grinnell to mobilize against the acts of racist harassment that continue to happen in the city of Grinnell and the campus of Grinnell College,” according to the joint statement. “Black citizens, students, and community members are being harassed, and we need your help; we need our community to step up and make this harassment stop.”
They announced the college is working with local law enforcement to “hold those responsible accountable.” And they provided actionable steps community members can take to help, including calling police and photographing the license plates of offenders.
“There is more, longer-term work to be done,” according to the message. “To make a difference, we must all act together. We ask you to think of what motivates you — human dignity, neighborliness, what it means to live in Grinnell — and to act on that for the good of this community and its citizens.:
Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com
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jserraglio
- Posts: 11954
- Joined: Sun May 29, 2005 7:06 am
- Location: Cleveland, Ohio
Re: TrumpReich in action
Election interference goes local.From Axios today:
https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios ... are#story0
https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios ... are#story0
Re: TrumpReich in action
GOP-controlled Iowa's new voting law restrictions having their intended effects.From Iowa Public Radio tonight:
" The number of Iowans voting early this year appears to be down across the board just one day before the 2022 midterm election. An IPR analysis of data from the Iowa Secretary of State’s office found that the number of absentee ballots the state has received as of Monday is nearly 40% lower than the total number of absentee ballots received in the 2018 midterms."
" The number of Iowans voting early this year appears to be down across the board just one day before the 2022 midterm election. An IPR analysis of data from the Iowa Secretary of State’s office found that the number of absentee ballots the state has received as of Monday is nearly 40% lower than the total number of absentee ballots received in the 2018 midterms."
Re: TrumpReich in action
From a dissent in a recent decision by SCOTUS not to take up an appeal, Justice Gorsuch reveals his bias against Federal agencies and his belief Judges are all knowing in all things and need not defer to expertise of agencies especially when Judges dont like the agency policy , a biashe did not reveal during his confirmation hearings:
" From the beginning of the Republic, the American people have rightly expected our courts to resolve disputes about their rights and duties under law without fear or favor to any party—the Executive Branch included. See A. Bamzai, The Origins of Judicial Deference to Executive Interpreta- tion, 126 Yale L. J. 908, 987 (2017). In this country, it was “well established” early on that courts are not “bound by . . . administrative construction[s]” of the law and those con- structions may “be taken into account only to the extent that [they are] supported by valid reasons.” Burnet v. Chi- cago Portrait Co., 285 U. S. 1, 16 (1932).
To be sure, as the administrative state ( Rach3:Emphasis added )spread its wings in the 1940s this Court toyed with the possibility of “de- part[ing] from [this] longstanding tradition of independent, non-deferential judicial determination of questions of law,” at least when it came to “so-called mixed questions of law and fact.” E. Bernick, Envisioning Administrative Proce- dure Act Originalism, 70 Admin. L. Rev. 807, 814 (2018)."
Gorsuch sounds like Steve Bannon or QANON here.
" From the beginning of the Republic, the American people have rightly expected our courts to resolve disputes about their rights and duties under law without fear or favor to any party—the Executive Branch included. See A. Bamzai, The Origins of Judicial Deference to Executive Interpreta- tion, 126 Yale L. J. 908, 987 (2017). In this country, it was “well established” early on that courts are not “bound by . . . administrative construction[s]” of the law and those con- structions may “be taken into account only to the extent that [they are] supported by valid reasons.” Burnet v. Chi- cago Portrait Co., 285 U. S. 1, 16 (1932).
To be sure, as the administrative state ( Rach3:Emphasis added )spread its wings in the 1940s this Court toyed with the possibility of “de- part[ing] from [this] longstanding tradition of independent, non-deferential judicial determination of questions of law,” at least when it came to “so-called mixed questions of law and fact.” E. Bernick, Envisioning Administrative Proce- dure Act Originalism, 70 Admin. L. Rev. 807, 814 (2018)."
Gorsuch sounds like Steve Bannon or QANON here.
Re: TrumpReich in action
And later in his dissenting opinion calls for a precedent to be overruled ( surprise,surprise) , and dons his populist hat against the imagined ills of the deep state, none of which was suggested by his answers at his confirmation hearing.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/2 ... 2_mkhn.pdf
Re: TrumpReich in action
Lies and betrayal of the Constitution is a disease infecting the SCOTUS. This is no surprise.Rach3 wrote: ↑Tue Nov 08, 2022 4:56 pmAnd later in his dissenting opinion calls for a precedent to be overruled ( surprise,surprise) , and dons his populist hat against the imagined ills of the deep state, none of which was suggested by his answers at his confirmation hearing.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/2 ... 2_mkhn.pdf
Credibility: 0%
Re: TrumpReich in action
From Axios today about the Iowa GOPReich:
"
The Republican Party of Iowa blocked KCRG-TV9 from its election rally in Des Moines last night.The station alleges it was retribution for critical coverage. The GOP said the decision was based on capacity."
KCRG is the ABC affiliate in Cedar Rapids serving a metro of about 300,000, Cedar Rapids also the home to its newspaper The Gazette, both of which media were heatedly criticized by top GOP leaders during their campaign stops in the area earlier this week. " Capacity" ? DUH !
"
The Republican Party of Iowa blocked KCRG-TV9 from its election rally in Des Moines last night.The station alleges it was retribution for critical coverage. The GOP said the decision was based on capacity."KCRG is the ABC affiliate in Cedar Rapids serving a metro of about 300,000, Cedar Rapids also the home to its newspaper The Gazette, both of which media were heatedly criticized by top GOP leaders during their campaign stops in the area earlier this week. " Capacity" ? DUH !
Re: TrumpReich in action
Enemies of the people, eh?Rach3 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 09, 2022 10:17 amFrom Axios today about the Iowa GOPReich:
"
KCRG is the ABC affiliate in Cedar Rapids serving a metro of about 300,000, Cedar Rapids also the home to its newspaper The Gazette, both of which media were heatedly criticized by top GOP leaders during their campaign stops in the area earlier this week. " Capacity" ? DUH !
Never forget.
Re: TrumpReich in action
GOP releases new ad after Colorado mass shooting:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/202 ... om-vpx.cnn
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/202 ... om-vpx.cnn
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