[News] Post a Political News Story

Ongoing discussion of the political news of the day. This thread is for 'smaller' stories that don't call for their own thread. If a story blows up, please start a new thread for it.

OG_slinger wrote:

And what's a Tennessee teacher supposed to do when a zoomer brings up something they saw on TikTok in class? The kid is just asking a question, but the teacher will know that even acknowledging it could be interpreted as promoting one of the "prohibited concepts" the law established which could result in their teaching certificate getting yanked or a large chunk of their schools' already inadequate funding disappearing.

"Thank you for the question. Due to restrictions put in place by fearful Republican legislators, I am not allowed to answer that."

The Big Money Behind the Big Lie

It was tempting to dismiss the show unfolding inside the Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, as an unintended comedy. One night in June, a few hundred people gathered for the première of “The Deep Rig,” a film financed by the multimillionaire founder of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, who is a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump. Styled as a documentary, the movie asserts that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen by supporters of Joe Biden, including by Antifa members who chatted about their sinister plot on a conference call. The evening’s program featured live appearances by Byrne and a local QAnon conspiracist, BabyQ, who claimed to be receiving messages from his future self. They were joined by the film’s director, who had previously made an exposé contending that the real perpetrators of 9/11 were space aliens.

But the event, for all its absurdities, had a dark surprise: “The Deep Rig” repeatedly quotes Doug Logan, the C.E.O. of Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based company that consults with clients on software security. In a voice-over, Logan warns, “If we don’t fix our election integrity now, we may no longer have a democracy.” He also suggests, without evidence, that members of the “deep state,” such as C.I.A. agents, have intentionally spread disinformation about the election. Although it wasn’t the first time that Logan had promoted what has come to be known as the Big Lie about the 2020 election—he had tweeted unsubstantiated claims that Trump had been victimized by voter fraud—the film offered stark confirmation of Logan’s entanglement in fringe conspiracies. Nevertheless, the president of the Arizona State Senate, Karen Fann, has put Logan’s company in charge of a “forensic audit”—an ongoing review of the state’s 2020 Presidential vote. It’s an unprecedented undertaking, with potentially explosive consequences for American democracy.

Approximately 2.1 million Presidential votes were cast in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and accounts for most of the state’s population. In recent years, younger voters and people of color have turned the county’s electorate increasingly Democratic—a shift that helped Biden win the traditionally conservative state, by 10,457 votes. Since the election, the county has become a focus of ire for Trump and his supporters. By March, when Logan’s company was hired, the county had already undergone four election audits, all of which upheld the outcome. Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican and a former Trump ally, had certified Biden’s victory. But Trump’s core supporters were not assuaged.

As soon as the Fox News Decision Desk called the state for Biden, at 11:20 p.m. on November 3rd, Trump demanded that the network “reverse this!” When Fox held firm, he declared, “This is a major fraud.” By the time of the “Deep Rig” première, the standoff had dragged on for more than half a year. The Cyber Ninjas audit was supposed to conclude in May, but at the company’s request Fann has repeatedly extended it. On July 28th, the auditors completed a hand recount, but they are still demanding access to the computer routers used by Maricopa County and also want to scrutinize images of mail-in-ballot envelopes. The U.S. Department of Justice has warned that “private actors who have neither experience nor expertise in handling” ballots could face prosecution for failing to follow federal audit rules. Trump, meanwhile, has fixated on Arizona’s audit, describing it as a step toward his “reinstatement.” On July 24th, he appeared in Phoenix for a “Rally to Protect Our Elections,” and said, “I am not the one trying to undermine American democracy—I’m the one trying to save American democracy.” Predicting that the audit would vindicate him, he rambled angrily for nearly two hours about having been cheated, calling the election “a scam—the greatest crime in history.”

In June, I stood in the bleachers at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, where the audit was taking place, and witnessed people examining carton after carton of paper ballots cast by Arizonans last fall. Some inspectors used microscopes to investigate surreal allegations: that some ballots had been filled out by machines or were Asian counterfeits with telltale bamboo fibres. Other inspectors looked for creases in mail-in ballots, to determine whether they had been legitimately sent in envelopes or—as Trump has alleged—dumped in bulk.

As the audit has unfolded, various violations of professional norms have been observed, including inspectors caught with pens whose ink matched what was used on ballots. One auditor turned out to have been an unsuccessful Republican candidate during the election. As I watched the proceedings, black-vested paid supervisors monitored the process, but their role was cloaked in secrecy. The audit is almost entirely privately funded, and a county judge in Arizona recently ordered the State Senate to disclose who is paying for it. Last week, Cyber Ninjas acknowledged having received $5.7 million in private donations, most of it from nonprofit groups led by Trump allies who live outside Arizona, including Byrne.

I was joined in the bleachers by Ken Bennett, a former Arizona secretary of state and a Republican, whom the State Senate had designated its liaison to the audit. He acknowledged that, if the auditors end up claiming to have found large discrepancies, “that will of course be very inflammatory.” Indeed, a recent incendiary claim by the auditors—that the vote had tallied about seventy thousand more mail-in ballots than had been postmarked—prompted one Republican state senator to propose a recall of Arizona’s electoral votes for Biden. (In fact, the auditors misunderstood what they were counting.) Nevertheless, Bennett defended the audit process: “It’s important to prove to both sides that the election was done accurately and fairly. If we lurch from one election to another with almost half the electorate thinking the election was a fraud, it’s going to rip our country apart.”

Many experts on democratic governance, however, believe that efforts to upend long-settled election practices are what truly threaten to rip the country apart. Chad Campbell, a Democrat who was the minority leader in the Arizona House of Representatives until 2014, when he left to become a consultant in Phoenix, has been shocked by the state’s anti-democratic turn. For several years, he sat next to Karen Fann when she was a member of the House, and in his view she’s gone from being a traditional Republican lawmaker to being a member of “Trump’s cult of personality.” He said, “I don’t know if she believes it or not, or which would be worse.” Arizona, he added, is in the midst of a “nonviolent overthrow in some ways—it’s subtle, and not in people’s face because it’s not happening with weapons. But it’s still a complete overthrow of democracy. They’re trying to disenfranchise everyone who is not older white guys.”

Arizona is hardly the only place where attacks on the electoral process are under way: a well-funded national movement has been exploiting Trump’s claims of fraud in order to promote alterations to the way that ballots are cast and counted in forty-nine states, eighteen of which have passed new voting laws in the past six months. Republican-dominated legislatures have also stripped secretaries of state and other independent election officials of their power. The chair of Arizona’s Republican Party, Kelli Ward, has referred to the state’s audit as a “domino,” and has expressed hope that it will inspire similar challenges elsewhere.

Ralph Neas has been involved in voting-rights battles since the nineteen-eighties, when, as a Republican, he served as the executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. He has overseen a study of the Arizona audit for the nonpartisan Century Foundation, and he told me that, though the audit is a “farce,” it may nonetheless have “extraordinary consequences.” He said, “The Maricopa County audit exposes exactly what the Big Lie is all about. If they come up with an analysis that discredits the 2020 election results in Arizona, it will be replicated in other states, furthering more chaos. That will enable new legislation. Millions of Americans could be disenfranchised, helping Donald Trump to be elected again in 2024. That’s the bottom line. Maricopa County is the prism through which to view everything. It’s not so much about 2020—it’s about 2022 and 2024. This is a coördinated national effort to distort not just what happened in 2020 but to regain the House of Representatives and the Presidency.”

I remain unsure of where, we, as a country go, when a large chunk of the electorate is going all-in on total subversion of democracy.

What explains, then, the hardening conviction among Republicans that the 2020 race was stolen? Michael Podhorzer, a senior adviser to the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., which invested deeply in expanding Democratic turnout in 2020, suggests that the two parties now have irreconcilable beliefs about whose votes are legitimate. “What blue-state people don’t understand about why the Big Lie works,” he said, is that it doesn’t actually require proof of fraud. “What animates it is the belief that Biden won because votes were cast by some people in this country who others think are not ‘real’ Americans.” This anti-democratic belief has been bolstered by a constellation of established institutions on the right: “white evangelical churches, legislators, media companies, nonprofits, and even now paramilitary groups.” Podhorzer noted, “Trump won white America by eight points. He won non-urban areas by over twenty points. He is the democratically elected President of white America. It’s almost like he represents a nation within a nation.”
What explains, then, the hardening conviction among Republicans that the 2020 race was stolen?

They are spineless cowards who go where right-wing grifters point their constituents. It's not rocket science, grift recognizes grift.

"Where there's smoke, there's fire!" - Smoke-machine spokesman.
"People keep talking about it so there must be something to it!" - People that keep talking about it.
"I would never be on the losing side so they must have cheated." - Idiots
"Fake it till you make it." - Too many grown ass-adults.
"Common sense says that the opinion worthy of TV time is the correct one." - Idiots given TV time by Smoke-machine manufacturers.
"I'm pissing off people you've decided aren't worth respecting. Buy my merch." - Buttery Males.

"I forgot where I was going with this..." - Rezzy

Is the bi-partisan infrastructure bill down to $1T? For weeks I saw it at $1.2T, and now most news sources are saying only a trillion. Maybe I missed the update where the Republicans were successful in knocking off another $200 billion.

Prederick wrote:

I remain unsure of where, we, as a country go, when a large chunk of the electorate is going all-in on total subversion of democracy.

Unfortunately we all know, deep down, where this is going to go: political violence and, likely, a Second Civil War.

A significant chunk of White America is never going to accept being governed by people it doesn't even believe are real Americans. Instead, they are going to further embrace the MAGA mentality and illegitimate paths to political power.

The only real question is will the violence first come from White Americans who are frustrated that their attempts to steal power and subvert elections aren't as successful as they want and decide to take an authoritarian shortcut or will it come from the rest of the country who would rather not wait another four or five generations until all the electoral shenanigans of White America can't hold back the will of the people (not that White America wouldn't spend those generations re-writing laws to ensure their stranglehold on power could never be challenged).

OG_slinger wrote:
Prederick wrote:

I remain unsure of where, we, as a country go, when a large chunk of the electorate is going all-in on total subversion of democracy.

Unfortunately we all know, deep down, where this is going to go: political violence and, likely, a Second Civil War.

A significant chunk of White America is never going to accept being governed by people it doesn't even believe are real Americans. Instead, they are going to further embrace the MAGA mentality and illegitimate paths to political power.

The only real question is will the violence first come from White Americans who are frustrated that their attempts to steal power and subvert elections aren't as successful as they want and decide to take an authoritarian shortcut or will it come from the rest of the country who would rather not wait another four or five generations until all the electoral shenanigans of White America can't hold back the will of the people (not that White America wouldn't spend those generations re-writing laws to ensure their stranglehold on power could never be challenged).

Delaying actions (such as Dems winning elections) could help in, well, delaying the inevitable until the Boomers at least die out.

OG_slinger wrote:

The only real question is will the violence first come from White Americans who are frustrated that their attempts to steal power and subvert elections aren't as successful as they want and decide to take an authoritarian shortcut...

I mean, the first violence already happened - on 1/6. It just didn't work, and so far no other major incidents have happened because of it. But the train has already started rolling down the track, and nobody's really making any serious moves to stop it (although some are definitely trying to speed it up).

While unlikely at this moment, I’ve been wondering about a potential under-housed uprising. You can only kick a bunch of folks so many times before they fight back. This would sort of be the antithesis of 01/06.

Prederick wrote:

“Trump won white America by eight points. He won non-urban areas by over twenty points. He is the democratically elected President of white America. It’s almost like he represents a nation within a nation.”

So make him f*cking grand dragon of the KKK then. That's not good enough to be president of the rest of us, including white people who aren't racist bigots.

Hungary Is No Model for the American Right: The new right's infatuation with Viktor Orbán places the culture war over the common good.

Orbán, however, is a very effective culture warrior. Much more effective, in the eyes of many on the right, than the hated “GOP Establishment.” Hungarian press freedom is far more constrained than in the United States. Its press is among the least free in Europe. The regime doesn’t recognize gay marriage. Only heterosexual couples may adopt. And the regime just passed a law sharply limiting any promotion of homosexuality or gender transition to children. He has banned gender studies programs at Hungarian universities.

While Hungary’s policies would be flatly unconstitutional in the United States, they’re consistent with the new right philosophy of wielding government power to aggressively confront your culture war opponents—and with the new right's fascination with such power even when it’s entirely unattainable in the United States.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Hungary Is No Model for the American Right: The new right's infatuation with Viktor Orbán places the culture war over the common good.

Orbán, however, is a very effective culture warrior. Much more effective, in the eyes of many on the right, than the hated “GOP Establishment.” Hungarian press freedom is far more constrained than in the United States. Its press is among the least free in Europe. The regime doesn’t recognize gay marriage. Only heterosexual couples may adopt. And the regime just passed a law sharply limiting any promotion of homosexuality or gender transition to children. He has banned gender studies programs at Hungarian universities.

While Hungary’s policies would be flatly unconstitutional in the United States, they’re consistent with the new right philosophy of wielding government power to aggressively confront your culture war opponents—and with the new right's fascination with such power even when it’s entirely unattainable in the United States.

I think it was a CNN article that made the observation that people like Tucker Carlson, who fawn over Orbán, wouldn't be allowed to exist under a rule like Orbán's. The hypocrisy would be delicious if it wasn't so terrifying.

Nevin73 wrote:

Delaying actions (such as Dems winning elections) could help in, well, delaying the inevitable until the Boomers at least die out.

Unfortunately I don’t think we have the luxury of time. Things are going to get very bad unless the people currently in charge actually do something. We are facing multiple serious and some even unprecedented stressors that the government (collectively) really doesn’t seem to be that concerned about. Just the millions of people rendered homeless by the end of the eviction moratoriums and the food cost increases due to supply and production interruptions alone will cause massive unrest over the next couple years.

“How did they sleepwalk into (insert disaster here)?”

JC wrote:

I think it was a CNN article that made the observation that people like Tucker Carlson, who fawn over Orbán, wouldn't be allowed to exist under a rule like Orbán's. The hypocrisy would be delicious if it wasn't so terrifying.

Carlson would be just fine as long as he parroted the official government stance on every topic. It is, after all, what he did while Trump was president.

I nominate this guy for president or attorney general:

Nevin73 wrote:

Delaying actions (such as Dems winning elections) could help in, well, delaying the inevitable until the Boomers at least die out.

Average age of the 1/6 insurrectionists was about 41.

White America will still be an absolutely horrible group after the last Boomer dies. Case in point, about 30% of Gen Z supported Trump and about the same voted for him.

Gen Z is the most racially diverse generation America's ever had. While Gen Z members who identify as Republican or conservative (who are going to be overwhelmingly White) have a much more realistic view of race relations as compared to Republicans and conservatives from older generations, their views are still f*cking pathetic. Only 43% of conservative Gen Z members say that Blacks are treated worse than Whites as compared to 20% of Boomer conservatives. Conservative Gen Z member have, by far, the most enlightened views of race and diversity among conservatives of other generations. But at the end of the day that's not really saying much and we'll still have generations of racists to deal with when the Boomers are gone.

fangblackbone wrote:

I nominate this guy for president or attorney general:

I haven’t laughed that hard in a long time!

South Dakota has proposed new social studies standards that will kick in on 2022.

The state says that one of the goals of the new standards is to "build unity among students, acknowledging that all are created equal and have equal value under our Constitution and the law and are members of a national community brought together by founding principles."

To help achieve the first goal South Dakota has decided the first time its students will hear about slavery is when they're in the 8th grade where they'll "investigate how the abolition of slavery affected the lives of Black Americans in the U.S."

I'm very curious how teachers are supposed to support the idea that "all are created equal and have equal value under our Constitution" when Article 1, Section 2 clearly states that there are "free Persons" and "other Persons" and a state's representation will be based on the number of free Persons plus three fifths the number of other Persons. You literally cannot discuss the formation of our country and, especially, our government without explaining how they both were based on slavery and how most of the compromises baked into our Constitution were done so to protect the power and influence of slave states.

Accuracy isn't the point. The point is churning out people dumb enough to vote for Republicans.

I don't know I think it is pretty open minded all things considered

"they'll "investigate how the abolition of slavery affected the lives of Black Americans in the U.S."" as phrased can clearly include jim crow, and subsequent issues.

Now will they let them? I can't say but at least the law's language doesn't explicitly prevent it.

Former Acting Attorney General Testifies About Trump's Bid to Subvert the Election

New York Times wrote:

Jeffrey A. Rosen, who was acting attorney general during the Trump administration, has told the Justice Department watchdog and Congressional investigators that one of his deputies tried to help former President Donald J. Trump subvert the results of the 2020 election, according to a person familiar with the interviews.

Mr. Rosen had a two-hour meeting on Friday with the Justice Department’s office of the inspector general and provided closed-door testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Saturday.

The investigations were opened following a New York Times article that detailed efforts by Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division, to push top leaders to falsely and publicly assert that ongoing election fraud investigations cast doubt on the Electoral College results. That prompted Mr. Trump to consider ousting Mr. Rosen and installing Mr. Clark at the top of the department to carry out that plan.

Mr. Trump never fired Mr. Rosen, but the plot highlights the former president’s desire to batter the Justice Department into advancing his personal agenda.

Mr. Clark, who did not respond to requests for comment, said in January that all of his official communications with the White House “were consistent with law,” and that he had engaged in “a candid discussion of options and pros and cons with the president.”

Mr. Rosen did not respond to requests for comment. The inspector general’s spokesman declined to comment.

Mr. Rosen has emerged as a key witness in multiple investigations that focus on Mr. Trump’s efforts to undermine the results of the election. He has publicly stated that the Justice Department did not find enough fraud to impact the outcome of the election.

Mr. Rosen on Friday told investigators from the inspector general’s office about five encounters with Mr. Clark, including one in late December during which his deputy admitted to meeting with Mr. Trump and pledged that he would not do so again, according to a person familiar with the interview.

Mr. Rosen also described subsequent exchanges with Mr. Clark, who continued to press colleagues to make statements about the election that they found to be untrue, according to a person familiar with the interview.

He also discovered that Mr. Clark had been engaging in unauthorized conversations with Mr. Trump about ways to have the Justice Department publicly cast doubt on President Biden’s victory, particularly in battleground states that Mr. Trump was fixated on, like Georgia. Mr. Clark drafted a letter that he asked Mr. Rosen to send to Georgia state legislators, wrongly asserting that they should void Mr. Biden’s victory because the Justice Department was investigating accusations of voter fraud in the state.

Such a letter would effectively undermine efforts by Mr. Clark’s colleagues to prevent the White House from overturning the election results, and Mr. Rosen and his top deputy, Richard P. Donoghue, rejected the proposal.

As details of Mr. Clark’s actions emerge, it is unclear what, if any, consequences he could face. The Justice Department’s inspector general could make a determination about whether Mr. Clark crossed the line into potentially criminal behavior. In that case, the inspector general could refer the matter to federal prosecutors.

farley3k wrote:

I don't know I think it is pretty open minded all things considered

"they'll "investigate how the abolition of slavery affected the lives of Black Americans in the U.S."" as phrased can clearly include jim crow, and subsequent issues.

Now will they let them? I can't say but at least the law's language doesn't explicitly prevent it.

Yeah. I agree. Can we tell kids about the 40 acres and a mule situation? Talk about a pivotal point in history where the United States got it wrong.

Mixolyde wrote:

https://www.wonkette.com/usa-celebra...

USA #1!

Most accurate line of the article for our country.

Americans are perfectly happy with it until something bad happens to them, personally.

I think what a lot of these articles miss is that the American healthcare system is not only functioning as intended, it’s functioning far better than intended.

Most countries’ healthcare systems are designed to extend the quality and quantity of life for citizens. America’s healthcare system is explicitly designed to extend the fortunes of billionaires.

I think there will be a lot of these:
Rightwing radio host and anti-vaxxer dies of Covid: Dick Farrel was a vociferous critic of Dr Anthony Fauci and urged people not to get vaccinated

I had to laugh at this:

His partner, Kit Farley, said: “He was known as the other Rush Limbaugh. With a heavy heart, I can only say this was so unexpected.
Nevin73 wrote:
His partner, Kit Farley, said: “He was known as the other Rush Limbaugh. With a heavy heart, I can only say this was so unexpected.

Really? Wow, I sort of thought many of these folks were just doing all this cynically. It really is just stupid tribal allegiance in their thinking.

We're f*cking doomed as a nation.

firesloth wrote:
Nevin73 wrote:
His partner, Kit Farley, said: “He was known as the other Rush Limbaugh. With a heavy heart, I can only say this was so unexpected.

Really? Wow, I sort of thought many of these folks were just doing all this cynically. It really is just stupid tribal allegiance in their thinking.

We're f*cking doomed as a nation.

Eh. Cull the morons. These people are actively promoting not getting a vaccine that could literally save someone's life who is simply misinformed due to family pressure.