Supporters of former President Donald Trump — fueled by Trump’s false claim that he did not lose the 2020 election — are behind a new push to review the results in states including Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The new drive is worrying state election administrators, who say the efforts will further inflame conspiracy theories and erode faith in the American democratic system. The burden of these reviews could fall on the shoulders of state and local election officials, further complicating a field where many are worried about a brain drain due to exhaustion and threats workers faced in the aftermath of the 2020 election. “We’re wasting a lot of taxpayer money.
We're wasting a lot of people's time,” said Jennifer Morrell, a former elections administrator and consultant who served as a nonpartisan observer for the Arizona secretary of state during the Arizona review. “We're sucking a lot of energy from the folks that need to be preparing and working on the next election.”
If someone could explain to me why the dumbest conspiracy theory ever floated (that Trump was a Russian asset who conspired with Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election) was not equally dangerous, wasteful, and a problematic issue with election "faith" - I would love to hear it.
The only thing that makes sense to me is that it didn't erode election "faith" because it was so outlandish that nobody credibility believed it? Perhaps the idea that the questions about the 2020 election are actually not giant conspiracy theories about foreign governments, or suggestions that a few thousand dollars in facebook advertising flipped the entire election, makes it more realistic and therefore examining it will erode confidence?
The reality is that the only manner that auditing or examining ANYTHING makes the outcome any less credible or believable is if the audit or examination actually finds problems. If an audit or examination of events turns out to reinforce the original conclusions, then it actually works the opposite. People will have "more" faith in the process.
Perhaps these people are not worried about these audits so much. Perhaps they are actually worried about what the audits might turn up?
20 comments:
TDS
They are traitors again and again.
Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia
They believe
What is being done about the "private," voter information, currently sitting up at the log cabin in Montana?
Are we to sit idly by and wait for our information to be sold on the Dark Net? What is the going price? $15 per packet?
→ What is your cut of the proceeds?
They have his tax returns he said that he would release them when the audit was done.
He is probably individual 1.
Perhaps the idea that the questions about the 2020 election are actually not giant conspiracy theories about foreign governments were really a scheme by the United states government.
The Revolver has volumes of evidence.
Law @ Order websites.
Charging two Trump Organization-related entities along with Weisselberg, prosecutors also make reference to an “unindicted co-conspirator 1″—suggesting the offices of Manhattan District attorney Cyrus Vance (D) and New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) may not yet be done. The attorney general confirmed as much in a statement.
“Today is an important marker in the ongoing criminal investigation of the Trump Organization and its CFO, Allen Weisselberg,” James wrote. “In the indictment, we allege, among other things, financial wrongdoing whereby the Trump Organization engaged in a scheme with Mr. Weisselberg to avoid paying taxes on certain compensation. This investigation will continue, and we will follow the facts and the law wherever they may lead.”
The charges ratchet up pressure on Weisselberg, whose cooperation is widely seen as crucial to any potential prosecution of former president Donald Trump.
Leaving the policts.
Weisselberg has been working for his company for decades. Second degree tax evasion can carry up to 15 years in prison.
He's 73 years old. If it looks like he's going to get convicted, they can offer a deal.
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/trump-organization-cfo-allen-weisselberg-pleads-not-guilty-to-grand-larceny-fraud-and-other-charges-in-alleged-15-year-tax-scheme/
Wanna feel old Debbie Harry is 76.
Damn
We must follow the path of Dr Martin Luther King's peaceful path.
In the long run, the experts argue, the United States could soon become a country of “extended minority rule,” which calls “into question whether the United States will remain a democracy” since majority opinion will be increasingly unable to shape government decisions. And without aggressive federal intervention, Republicans could “reverse the outcome of a free and fair election,” making the sloppy attempt by Trump and his backers to overturn the 2020 results look amateurish by comparison.
This is bleak stuff for a country that democracy experts have already labeled a “civil oligarchy” in a Cambridge University Press study, where “economic elites” and “business interests” enjoy massive influence over policy “while average citizens…have little or no independent influence.”
The success of the Republican Party depends on banishing voters they don’t like from the political landscape. The reason is straightforward: they know that, essentially, no one likes their ideas. The GOP has failed to persuade a lasting majority of Americans that corporations should answer to no one, that inequality is a natural phenomenon, and that weaker nations must be strong-armed into obediently serving American interests. The only remaining option then, as the country becomes increasingly repellent to Republicans’ ideas, is to make sure that the majority who oppose them can’t govern. As the New York Times’ Ezra Klein says, “Republicans are setting off a ‘doom loop’ for democracy.”
Experts ring the alarm.
As nearly 200 scholars of democracy warned in a dire letter for the think tank New America in June, “our entire democracy is now at risk” as hundreds of Republican-sponsored bills in states across the country threaten to either block or exhaust voters to the point of surrender. The letter’s authors warn that “the recent deterioration of U.S. elections” means that “several states…no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections.”
They go on to highlight examples in nearly every corner of the country. Harsh limits to voting rights have either already been adopted, will soon be adopted, or are under serious consideration in Republican-run states including Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Montana and Texas, to name a few.
In the long run, the experts argue, the United States could soon become a country of “extended minority rule,” which calls “into question whether the United States will remain a democracy” since majority opinion will be increasingly unable to shape government decisions. And without aggressive federal intervention, Republicans could “reverse the outcome of a free and fair election,” making the sloppy attempt by Trump and his backers to overturn the 2020 results look amateurish by comparison.
This is bleak stuff for a country that democracy experts have already labeled a “civil oligarchy” in a Cambridge University Press study, where “economic elites” and “business interests” enjoy massive influence over policy “while average citizens…have little or no independent influence.”
The success of the Republican Party depends on banishing voters they don’t like from the political landscape. The reason is straightforward: they know that, essentially, no one likes their ideas. The GOP has failed to persuade a lasting majority of Americans that corporations should answer to no one, that inequality is a natural phenomenon, and that weaker nations must be strong-armed into obediently serving American interests. The only remaining option then, as the country becomes increasingly repellent to Republicans’ ideas, is to make sure that the majority who oppose them can’t govern. As the New York Times’ Ezra Klein says, “Republicans are setting off a ‘doom loop’ for democracy.”
The shaky path forward.
Democracy’s defenders can defeat today’s attempts to subvert the will of the people by using the same tool used to overthrow its Jim Crow forefather: “federal action to protect equal access of all citizens to the ballot and to guarantee free and fair elections,” the scholars write.
That will also require abolishing (or at least reforming) the filibuster — the Senate rule that makes it essentially impossible to pass anything without a 60-vote majority, and an artifact of the days when open, chest-thumping segregationists ruled Congress.
A federal bill to protect American democracy already exists. It is called the For the People Act and its main provisions are wildly popular. Polls show that 80 percent of Americans support the steps the bill takes to get unlimited corporate money out of politics. And 60 percent support its expansions of early voting, same-day voting and automatic voter registration. Perhaps most importantly, voters back the bill’s creation of nonpartisan redistricting commissions so that no party can weasel their way into unearned power. In 2012, for example, Democrats won 51.1 percent of the national vote and all they had to show for it was 46 percent of the seats in Congress, thanks to Republicans’ crafty manipulation of the congressional map-drawing process.
So there is a bill in Congress that expands voting rights, enjoys wide popular support and has already passed through both the House and, as of last month, a version of it was voted for by 50 senators who caucus with the Democrats. So why isn’t it heading straight to President Biden’s desk? Because Republicans filibustered it.
It’s long been obvious that the GOP would never consider serious voting rights legislation. As Vox reported in 2019, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell “openly mocked” the bill the second it was introduced, calling it a “terrible proposal” that “will not get any floor time in the Senate.”
Facing this obstruction, building support to alter or abolish the filibuster is inescapable. Democrats only have (at best) 51 votes, meaning that the party must remove the filibuster in order to shield democracy from the people (and party) dedicated to destroying it. But there’s at least one thing standing in the way: Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who has long voiced opposition to ending the filibuster.
In a June 6 op-ed for the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Manchin portrays his filibuster defense as a noble crusade to protect “the already weakening binds of our democracy.” It could be hard to imagine any path to changing the mind of a senator who writes an article that “might as well be titled, ‘Why I’ll vote to preserve Jim Crow,’” as progressive Rep. Mondaire Jones (D‑N.Y.) says.
But those who think Manchin is immovable forget that he’s still a politician who responds to prevailing political winds. His own history proves it. As Manchin’s 2011 support for filibuster reform shows, he is clearly willing to change positions. If Biden wanted to force Manchin’s hand, he could take him into his office and demand to know what he wants in order to get back to that position — and then make it happen.
The other reliable way to change the political terrain, and how policy makers behave, is by taking demands to the streets. That’s the path the Poor People’s Campaign took this month when they led a “Moral March on Manchin” in West Virginia, with hundreds of residents calling on the senator to support both filibuster reform and the For the People Act.
As Rev. William J. Barber II, co-founder of the Poor People’s Campaign, put it: “We are here to bring street heat and moral heat to the legislative processes. The voices of the people in West Virginia will be heard.”
The Poor People’s Campaign is a part of a growing web of grassroots groups organizing to pass robust voting rights protections. Black Voters Matter, a national advocacy group, recently wrapped up a “Freedom Ride for Voting Rights” bus tour, curving through the South before its grand finale in Washington, D.C. this month.
And ahead of the 58th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom this August, a coalition of labor and civil rights groups, including Service Employees International Union and the National Action Network, plan to host commemorative “March On for Voting Rights” rallies across the country.
The tyranny of the filibuster
As writer Adam Jentleson argues in his new book Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy, the filibuster was created nearly a century after the country’s founding by Southern senators “driven to create a new means of obstruction by one overriding goal: preserving white supremacy.”
John C. Calhoun, South Carolina senator and champion of slave labor camps and elite minority rule, first used what would become the modern filibuster in 1841 “as part of a white supremacist mission to preserve slavery” at the time the abolitionist movement began to grow. He did so using the familiar invocation of “minority rights,” which was really “a cloak for the interests of the wealthy, the powerful” and “the white supremacist,” as Jentleson writes. That racist use of the filibuster continued in the decades that followed.
Far from being wielded in defense of grand principles like “minority rights” and “deliberation,” as Calhoun faked, the filibuster was and continues to be a blunt weapon that “guarantees a minority of predominantly white conservatives the ability to impose their will.” In “the 87 years between the end of Reconstruction and 1964” Jentleson writes, “the only bills that were stopped by filibusters were civil rights bills.”
If Democrats don’t quickly change the filibuster rule to pass voting rights legislation, Republican state legislatures will continue to extinguish democracy, entrench extended minority rule, and use their power to enact a broadly unpopular agenda across the country.
It’s no surprise that GOP politicians and their corporate backers tremble at the thought of genuine democracy. But every time progress has been achieved, it’s because popular movements have exerted enough pressure to make elites comply.
With the axe swinging over the head of democracy, it’s clear that massive and organized public pressure is fast becoming the only pathway to political change. There’s no time to waste.
https://inthesetimes.com/article/democracy-gop-filibuster-manchin-voting-rights
Opinion by Joshua A. Douglas
Jul 1, 2021
Editor's Note: Joshua A. Douglas is a professor at the University of Kentucky
(CNN) - Eight years ago, the US Supreme Court gutted a major portion of the Voting Rights Act in its infamous Shelby County v. Holder decision, making it easier for states with a history of voter discrimination to enact new onerous voting rules. States like Georgia and Texas took notice, passing strict new voter ID laws, absentee ballot rules and a host of other provisions that make it harder for some people to vote.
The Court just doubled down on that attack on the right to vote.
The specific Arizona laws at issue in the Brnovich case, which the Court just decided by a 6-3 vote that fell on predictable ideological lines, are less momentous than the rule the Court laid down for future Voting Rights Act cases. Still, while upholding the Arizona laws, the Court made it much harder for voting rights advocates to protect against racial discrimination.
Voting rights plaintiffs had filed suit against two Arizona laws: one says that a vote will not count if a voter goes to the wrong precinct and then, finding their name not in the poll books, fills out a provisional ballot. The other limits who can collect and return completed ballots, also known to opponents as ballot harvesting. The plaintiffs argued that the laws violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting rules that have the effect of making it harder for minority voters to cast a ballot that will count.
As expected, the Court upheld both laws, reversing the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The question wasn't whether the voting rights advocates would lose this case; it was how badly they would lose.
They lost the whole ballgame.
To be sure, the Court did not completely gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Instead, the majority opinion, delivered by Justice Samuel Alito, is more subtle, offering five "guideposts" to construe the landmark civil rights statute. But each of those guideposts place significant hurdles on voting rights plaintiffs going forward -- spelling bad news for equality in the right to vote.
Put simply, it's death by a thousand cuts.
Alito said that, in analyzing whether a law results in vote denial on the basis of race, courts should consider (1) the overall burden on voters, (2) whether the voting rule has been around for a long time, (3) the size of the impact on minority voters, (4) the state's overall election scheme, and (5) the state's interest in combating election fraud.
None of this is within the text of the Voting Rights Act. Section 2 simply says that a law is invalid if voting is "not equally open" to racial minorities and if it provides "less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process." As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her powerful dissent, the majority "founds its decision on a list of mostly made-up factors, at odds with Section 2 itself."
For instance, whether a state has an interest in combating voter fraud -- miniscule as it is -- should have little bearing on the question of whether a law discriminates among voters. Whether some states have used the same rule for years should also be irrelevant under the law. A law that currently produces a discriminatory effect harms voters in every election.
Alito's opinion may also impact claims that a legislature passed a law with a discriminatory intent, which is the issue raised by Attorney General Merrick Garland's lawsuit, filed last week, against Georgia's new onerous voting law. Alito indicated that "partisan motives are not the same as racial motives," meaning that a court could potentially reject the argument that race was Georgia's key motivation by focusing on the politics of the debate in the state legislature.
There is no easy solution to this conundrum. Congress was considering the For the People Act, which would require easy voting access across the country, but even though it passed the US House of Representatives, it stalled at the US Senate. Congress is also still considering the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, but it is unclear if the bill has enough votes.
State courts are still open to claims that voting laws violate state constitutions. And even after the Court's decision, Section 2 is still available to ferret out the worst voting laws, though the standard is now a lot tougher to meet.
The Court's decision is a stark reminder that it is no fan of voting rights. The thumb is firmly on the side of the states to regulate their elections as they wish, which in many places is bad news for American democracy.
Defund the FBI
Republicans need to abandon their longtime, reflexive loyalty to the FBI.
By Julie Kelly
July 1, 2021
It’s been a gold star week for the men and women of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Nearly six months after the events of January 6, the FBI, under the direction of Joe Biden’s vengeful Justice Department, is accelerating the nationwide manhunt for anyone involved. Since June 23, agents have arrested 17 people from Florida to California. Charges range from assaulting police officers and criminal trespassing to something called “destruction of property in special maritime and territorial jurisdiction and aiding and abetting.”
The dragnet is part of the nonstop campaign of terror unleashed by the Biden regime against the political Right. Attorney General Merrick Garland, who compares January 6 to the Oklahoma City bombing and Capitol protesters to terrorists, pledged the “Capitol breach” probe would be his top priority. Garland last week bragged in a press release that his department reached the “benchmark” of arresting 500 people and warned he would “hold all January 6 perpetrators accountable” for their actions that day. His prosecutors routinely ask the courts to keep the accused behind bars awaiting trials that won’t start until late this year or perhaps even 2022; dozens have been held for months in a D.C. jail that specifically houses January 6 defendants.
Waiting is unbearable’: Biden consoles Surfside families
By ALEXANDRA JAFFE and JONATHAN LEMIREyesterday
SURFSIDE, Fla. (AP) — President Joe Biden drew on his own experiences with grief and loss to comfort families affected by the Florida condo collapse, telling them to “never give up hope” even as the search for survivors paused early Thursday, a week after the building came down.
Addressing some of the families touched by the tragedy, Biden spoke in deeply personal terms as he offered his prayers and support in the private meeting.
“I just wish there was something I could do to ease the pain,” he said in a video posted on Instagram by Jacqueline Patoka, a woman who was close to a couple and their daughter who are still missing. .
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Few public figures connect as powerfully on grief as Biden, who lost his first wife and baby daughter in a car collision and later an adult son to brain cancer. In the first months of his term, he has drawn on that empathy to console those who have lost loved ones, including the more than 600,000 who have died in the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a quiet voice freighted with emotion, Biden on Thursday described his own despair at having to wait to find out about how family fared after a crisis like the one experienced in Surfside. He spent more than three hours privately speaking with those grieving, addressing the group first and then moving family to family to listen to their stories. Biden spoke of wanting to switch places with a lost or missing loved one and lamented that “the waiting, the waiting, is unbearable.”
“The people you may have lost — they’re gonna be with you your whole life,” he told the families. “A part of your soul, a part of who you are.”
Biden told the families that it can be “harder to grieve in public than it is in private, so I know there’s an extra burden on you all.”
“But I promise you: I still believe in prayer,” he said. “You’re in my prayers.”
The president, whose remarks were translated into Spanish, urged the families to “never give up hope,” even as the search and rescue operation paused early due to structural concerns with the remaining portion of the building.
Attendees could be seen with tears in their eyes as Biden closed out his remarks, and he and wife, Jill, spent the next few hours visiting privately with the families. He later told reporters that he was amazed by the families’ “resilience, their absolute commitment, their willingness to do whatever it took to find an answer” as to what happened.
He said the families asked him the most “gut-wrenching” questions, including whether there was any hope of finding survivors or whether they would be able to recover the bodies of loved ones.
Recalling the car accident that killed his wife and daughter and badly injured his two sons, Biden spoke about his boys’ uncertain fate, saying “it’s bad enough to lose somebody but the hard part, the really hard part, is to not know whether they’ll survive or not”
Biden, responding to what appeared to be the deadliest single-day calamity of his young presidency, also met first responders hunting for survivors in the rubble in Surfside before the pause in the search. Later, he and the first lady stopped by a memorial wall covered in flowers and photos of the missing, placing a bouquet next to a crayon drawing that read “I love you.”
After all the suspicion and anticipation, it was not a conspiracy involving Russia, widespread money laundering or a sweeping allegation of racketeering and corruption.
Instead, it was an investigation that uncovered the alleged abuse of run-of-the-mill perks — like car leases, apartments and school tuition — that transformed Donald J. Trump’s family business from real estate branding empire to criminal defendant.
On Thursday, prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office announced charges against the Trump Organization and its chief financial executive, Allen H. Weisselberg, alleging a scheme lasting over a decade in which Mr. Weisselberg failed to pay taxes on close to $2 million worth of perks and bonuses as the company benefited from helping him do so.
While there is no indication that Mr. Trump himself will face criminal charges anytime soon, the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., has said that “the work continues,” and the former president will remain the focus of the investigation as prosecutors exert pressure on Mr. Weisselberg to cooperate. Mr. Trump has escaped numerous law enforcement inquiries over the better part of three decades, and he could well do so again. Even so, the case brought by Mr. Vance on Thursday has already struck at the heart of Mr. Trump’s public image — the business of the businessman — in a way no other investigation has done.
Donald Trump has spent his political career spouting conspiracy theories.
But in the court of law, it doesn't matter.
---
Trump and his team already appear to expect that the law will be against him. They are counting on that fact not to matter very much—not enough to overcome the political hullabaloo they hope to raise in Trump’s defense.
Trump worked all his life on the theory that law can be subordinated to political favors and political pressures. That theory has carried him this far—and it’s pretty far, all things considered. We are now about to see a mighty test, before the country and the world, of whether that theory will carry him the rest of the way home.
David Frum
If Mr. Weisselberg agrees to cooperate, Mr Trump will be shouting with his last breath "I won in a landslide "
July 2nd Right wing nutary continues below.
Democrats don’t mind seeing crime erupt in cities because that may increase their power. So what if they hobble law enforcement while dragging out an irrelevant gun issue? Such policies need not turn off black voters while heightening the party’s popularity among anti-gun activists. The demonstrable surge in violent crime, in which blacks have been both the perpetrators and the victims, can be blamed on the usual whipping boy, “systemic white racism.” Criminals supposedly have been driven to violent acts because of systemic white supremacy; and so the solution to this violence must begin with racial reparations, more active support for BLM and a better-financed war against “white privilege.”
Admittedly the black urban masses may turn their backs on such narratives and follow wiser counsels. But it’s entirely possible they won’t. Inner-city blacks may continue to support politicians who blame “whitey,” that is, poor whites as opposed to those rich leftist elites who happily incite crime with their antiwhite propaganda.
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