All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[Jack Dracula]

This is nuts, very immature

GOP senator plans to introduce FAUCI Act after clash at hearing

Take note Republicans. This is the degree of representation you have in Washington now.

[Jack Dracula]

An article linked in the twitter thread Tendrin posted. I'd urge people to read it and share it with others.

The Insurrection is Only the Tip of the Iceberg

The coup was hardly Trump’s full-blown brainchild. It was packaged for him. It was adapted, enhanced and intensified from longstanding Republican strategies for voter suppression. The coup was a variation on the theme from a well-worn playbook. Trump eagerly grasped for the plan handed to him.


More than a year before the election of 2020, in August 2019, conservative operatives in closely connected rightwing organizations began preparing a strategy for disputing election results. A “Political Process Working Group” focused on “election law and ballot integrity” was launched by Lisa Nelson, the CEO of the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), heavily funded by the Koch brothers’ dark money syndicate, the Donors Trust.

Nelson is also a member of the secretive Council on National Policy (CNP), composed of more than 400 rightwing Republican leaders, a roster that includes Ginni Thomas, the ubiquitous rightwing zealot and wife of supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, and Leonard Leo, vice-president of the conservative Federalist Society and the Judicial Crisis Network, “a $250m dark money operation” to pack the federal courts and deny Democratic appointments to the bench, according to the Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse.

The investigative reporter Anne Nelson, in her book Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, describes the CNP as a nexus of “the manpower and media of the Christian right with the finances of western plutocrats and the strategy of rightwing Republican political operatives”.

A board member of the CNP, Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer at the center of a host of rightwing groups, assumed control over the Alec-originated project and moved it forward. She is also a board member of the Bradley Foundation, which is a major funder of conservative organizations, including Alec and the CNP. Most importantly, she has directed the Bradley Foundation to serve as the chief funder of a group of which she is chairman, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (Pilf), a principal conservative organization seeking to purge voter rolls of minorities and immigrants, file suits that accuse local election officials of “fraud”, and attempt to overturn election results. At a February 2020 meeting of the CNP devoted to election tactics, the Pilf president, J Christian Adams, advised: “Be not afraid of the accusations that you’re a voter suppressor, you’re a racist and so forth.”

Mitchell was instrumental in devising the blueprint for the coup. On 10 December 2020, 65 leading members of the CNP signed a succinct step-by-step summary of the completely elaborated plot that went little noticed except on the coup-friendly rightwing website Gateway Pundit:
The evidence overwhelmingly shows officials in key battleground states – as the result of a coordinated pressure campaign by Democrats and allied groups – violated the constitution, state and federal law in changing mail-in voting rules that resulted in unlawful and invalid certifications of Biden victories. There is no doubt President Donald J Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect. Accordingly, state legislatures in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada and Michigan should exercise their plenary power under the constitution and appoint clean slates of electors to the electoral college to support President Trump. Similarly, both the House and Senate should accept only these clean electoral college slates and object to and reject any competing slates in favor of Vice-President Biden from these states. Conservative leaders and groups should begin mobilizing immediately to contact their state legislators, as well as their representatives in the House and Senate, to demand that clean slates of electors be appointed in the manner laid out in the US constitution.”

[Malvolio]

I could be wrong about this, but it sounds like someone close to him, maybe Ivanka, reminded him that Biden is getting all the praise for the vaccines instead of Trump. It's possible that his ego couldn't handle it so now he's pushing the Vaccines so that he can have his name associated with them.

Maybe.

Oh yeah. That's probably it. That's what I mean when I say he's doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Another recent example was when Trump blasted bit-coin and other digital currencies as a scam. Of course they're a scam, but Trump isn't saying it to try and protect the life's savings of people who might be bilked by the scam. He's saying it because he's not in on the scam. If he owned a piece of bit-coin or any of the others, he'd be on television every day hawking it to anyone who would listen.

[Xheight]

True the Vote investigation into ballot trafficking and ballot harvesting operations in Georgia through a FOIA request -

video that captures 240 ballot traffickers in Georgia. Each of the traffickers averaged 23-24 drops where they would empty backpacks into the ballot boxes. True The Vote was able to take cell phone ping data on a mass wide-scale and piece together that several people—suspected ballot harvesters—were making multiple trips to multiple drop boxes, raising potential legal questions in a number of these states

John Fredericks reports that a whistleblower in Georgia came forward. "On the tapes they identified 240 of the same people going around the state stuffing ballot drop boxes between 2 and 5 AM… where they were emptying backpacks out and they were dropping 50, 100 ballots into a dropbox. This is totally illegal…"

https://justthenews.com/politics-pol...arvesting-2020

According to interviews and documents reviewed by Just the News, Raffensperger's office received a detailed complaint from conservative voter integrity group True the Vote on Nov. 30 saying it had assembled evidence that scores of activists worked with nonprofit groups to collect and deliver thousands of absentee ballots, often during wee-hour operations, to temporary voting drop boxes distributed around the state during the pandemic.

The group informed the secretary its evidence included video footage from surveillance cameras placed by counties outside the drop boxes as well as geolocation data for the cell phones of more than 200 activists seen on the tapes purportedly showing the dates and times of ballot drop-offs, according to documents reviewed by Just the News.

The group also said it interviewed a Georgia man who admitted he was paid thousands of dollars to harvest ballots in the Atlanta metropolitan area during the November election and the lead-up to Jan. 5, 2021 runoff for Georgia's two U.S. Senate seats, which were both captured by Democrats and ended GOP control of Congress. The group has yet to identify the cooperating witness to state authorities, referring to him in the complaint simply as John Doe.

[Mister Mets]

Sometimes. Also there may be a problem with the Voting records not having that information on file or not having the correct information. One missing or mistyped digit could be enough to get a application thrown out.

State's failures led to voter ID problems in 2016 - May 2, 2017



What You Should Know About Voter ID in Texas - November 5, 2018



Texas voter ID: What to know for the 2020 election - August 12, 2020



Texas must pay $6.8 million in legal fees to parties who challenged voter ID law, federal appeals court says - Sept. 3, 2021

It seems the problem of states lacking data or having faulty data could be resolved without a national overhaul that forbids all voter ID laws.

Someone on Twitter commented on how Trump, in his rally in AZ, told his followers that they were being discriminated against by not being allowed to get the vaccine. How whites were being forced to the end of the line.

It just hit me, he's tapping into their psychology to convince them to get vaccinated by framing it as a White Grievance. Can't say if this is intentional or not, but if it disarms the antivaxxers and convinces more people to get the vaccine.. .

I'm curious to see how Faux News covers it.

Referring to their priors may be a more effective method to get them to do the right thing than anything else.

There is an element of truth in the idea that some government agencies prioritize Covid treatments for ethnic minorities before these would be made available to white people, although there is no indication this matters when it comes to vaccines, as the country has no shortage of vaccines to all who want it.

https://thehill.com/changing-america...-considered-in

Or you may have been overlooking the bigger picture.

We could evaluate earlier arguments to determine whether anyone is correct or incorrect regarding what we currently know about January 6.

[Tendrin]

An article linked in the twitter thread Tendrin posted. I'd urge people to read it and share it with others.

The Insurrection is Only the Tip of the Iceberg

It's almost like the only thing the GOP cares about is securing minority rule and will endorse any means by which to achieve that end.

[Tendrin]

It'S nOT VoTER SuPREssIOn

But both words matter. "Autocracy" matters, as these states are hacking away at pillars of democracy that could lead to autocracy. But the "laboratories" part matters too, because they're always learning, they're always improving. So they are functioning as laboratories. Until you start adding some accountability and pushing back, they'll just keep going. So my hope is that "autocracy" wakes people up, but "laboratories" is a really important part of that title because it explains how they operate.

The first story you tell in your book is about a horrendous traffic jam caused by an Ohio secretary of state who tried to make voting more difficult in 2020 by limiting ballot drop-boxes to one per county. Why begin there?

I've been fighting the voting rights battle in Ohio for a number of years. The worst is still the purging of voters, but to have a secretary of state intentionally cause long traffic jams for the form of voting that he knew minorities and Biden voters were using, and lying over and over again about what the law actually, was such a troubling thing. And this was not your right-wing, Trump-type secretary of state. He had held himself out as more moderate.

So I tell the story because you look at the traffic jams that his one-drop-box-per-county policy created, and anyone with a commonsense response would say, "Don't ever do that again." But in a world of "laboratories of autocracy," as I tell in the story, the state legislature of Ohio, seeing those jams, began pushing for bills to have traffic jams forever by making that not just a policy decision, but state law. And what do we see at the same time? States around the country looked at those traffic jams and saw the effect on — let's be clear — Black voters waiting in long lines. So now we have the same effort in other states to minimize drop boxes and to do what happened here: Put the drop boxes where people are already voting early in person, which creates the maximum congestion possible. So it's a great example of how they behave as laboratories against democracy.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opini...?ocid=msedgntp

[Agent Z]

Remember when we learned that Amy Coney Barrett signed a 2006 ad calling Roe v. Wade barbaric when she was walking out of church and got confirmed for a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court anyway?

The group behind that ad, Right to Life Michiana, publishes a list of abortion providers and where they work on its web site—a move that invites threats and harassment. In one instance, a doctor was alerted by the FBI of a threat to kidnap her daughter, The Guardian reports.

The RTLM site lists the names and educational backgrounds of abortion providers in South Bend, Indiana, under its “Take Action” section and a subsection called “Local Abortion Threat.” RTLM told The Guardian that the group published “publicly available information” and that it “does not condone or encourage harm, threats or harassment towards anyone.”




A doctor whose name was published on the RTLM site testified in an unrelated case about Indiana abortion restrictions last year that she traveled to the Whole Woman’s Health clinic in South Bend once a month to provide abortions. (The Guardian is not naming the doctor.) She said that Planned Parenthood told her the FBI had alerted them of a kidnapping threat made against her daughter online. The doctor said she temporarily stopped providing abortions at the clinic out of fear that the regular swarm of anti-abortion protestors might identify her.

https://jezebel.com/fbi-warns-aborti...ugh-1848360203

[Tendrin]

https://jezebel.com/fbi-warns-aborti...ugh-1848360203

Stochastic terrorism at its finest.

[worstblogever]

Stochastic terrorism at its finest.

One of the GOP party planks, at this point.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, as well as 2021, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” posted profiles of Bo Watson, the President Pro Tempore of the Tennessee State Senate, and bowtie-clad extremist of the highest order. We noted that among the bills Watson supported were failed or often unconstitutional conservative staples like drug-testing welfare recipients, arresting transgendered citizens for using the "wrong" bathroom, allowing creationists to challenge evolution when its taught in school classrooms, blocking the Medicaid Expansion, bringing the electric chair back as a form of the death penalty, and to see to the creation a public list of "abortion statistics" that included the names and addresses of women who had sought out an abortion, presumably so they could be harassed or attacked by hard-right pro-life terrorists. He also is noteworthy for saying he would rather a local Volkswagen factory move to Mexico than have their employees join a union, which is one of the most jaw-droppingly stupid and petty anti-union statements you will ever hear a member of the GOP say.

Watson also was calling for the University of Tennessee at Knoxville to be investigated because the Director of UT's Office of Diversity and Inclusiveness website offered up the idea of using the pronoun "ze" to professors with transgendered students to use, as an alternative to "he" or "she", and during the initial roll call in their first class, to find out which pronoun students preferred, and outrage that the school had a “Sex Week” to educate its students about safe sex and the prevention of STDs.

By no means, is that the dumbest argument Bo Watson has ever unleashed, as we told the story of the time the Tennessee state legislature was talking about lifting a ban on mothers breastfeeding children in public over the age of one, and he started rambling on about people aged 14 or 35 with weird fetishes still being breast-fed in bars, because he's so terrified of a mother's nipple.

In September of 2018, Watson flipped out when finding out Nike had released a new ad campaign with Colin Kaepernick, and wanted to rescind the contract the University of Tennessee’s athletic department had with Nike in retaliation, because this ***hole just cannot go a year without finding a new battle in the culture wars.

Bo Watson was up for re-election in 2018, and since the 2014 elections, when he actually founded his own SuperPAC to extend his own electoral fortunes, Watson easily won re-election with 65% of the vote. In the past term, we’ve seen Watson:

• Make it a point to sponsor legislation to try and allow adoption agencies to discriminate against gay people and assure they can’t adopt children into loving families.
• Vote for a bill to allow schools and other students to discriminate against transgender students in school bathrooms and locker rooms.
• Sponsor a bill to try to ban abortion if a fetal heartbeat is detected (in other words as early as 6 weeks, when most women don’t realize they’re pregnant).
• Vote for a bill to require aborted remains to be buried or cremated.
• Vote for a bill to prohibit the use of Covid-19 vaccine passports (that weren’t being issued or required).
• Prioritize preventing Critical Race Theory from being taught in schools (even though it isn’t being taught, anyway).

Again, he’ll keep trying to fight the culture wars, even while a pandemic rages. Watson has confirmed he’s running re-election for his seat in 2022, and it seems unlikely that anyone can overcome a SupeerPAC funded state senator to bounce him from office.

[Tami]

This is a little different

Video shows Florida police sergeant grabbing fellow officer by her throat

Police officers were arresting a "verbally and physically resistive" suspect, accused of a violent felony, when the unidentified sergeant arrived and became aggressive with him, Sunrise Police Chief Anthony W. Rosa said in a statement.

The sergeant engaged in a verbal altercation with the suspect sitting inside a patrol vehicle and “escalated” the encounter, according to the chief.

The police body camera footage showed the sergeant ducking his head inside the patrol vehicle to talk to the suspect and holding a can of pepper spray, though he did not deploy it.

A concerned officer ran toward the sergeant and pulled him by the back of his duty belt, Rosa said.

The video footage shows the sergeant turn around while backpedaling as he was pulled by the officer. He then momentarily places his hand at the throat of the officer and pushes her backward, until her back hits a nearby police vehicle, according to the clip and the statement from the chief. The sergeant then walks away.

[Tendrin]

This is a little different

Video shows Florida police sergeant grabbing fellow officer by her throat

No surprise that a cop would assault a woman, even a female officer, given that 40% of cops in at least two studies self-reported having engaged in domestic violence within the last year.

[shooshoomanjoe]

Take note Republicans. This is the degree of representation you have in Washington now.

IMO, majority of republicans approve of the craziness from their elected officials.

[shooshoomanjoe]

True the Vote investigation into ballot trafficking and ballot harvesting operations in Georgia through a FOIA request -



John Fredericks reports that a whistleblower in Georgia came forward. "On the tapes they identified 240 of the same people going around the state stuffing ballot drop boxes between 2 and 5 AM… where they were emptying backpacks out and they were dropping 50, 100 ballots into a dropbox. This is totally illegal…"

https://justthenews.com/politics-pol...arvesting-2020

Don't go around believing in the manipulation from conservative media.

The viral video footage of poll workers moving ballots into containers is authentic. That said, when taken out of context the video footage may inaccurately suggest wrongdoing. Officials later conducted a complete review of how the election transpired and found that the site’s poll workers did not engage in any wrongdoing. A mandated audit of the election results as well as a recount requested by the Trump campaign also found no wrongdoing.

"The secretary of state and members of his staff have denounced accusations of election fraud as misinformation. We rate this claim MISSING CONTEXT because, without additional context the video clip could be misleading."