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

[Tami]

Republican Arizona election official says Trump “unhinged”

PHOENIX (AP) — The Republican who now leads the Arizona county elections department targeted by a GOP audit of the 2020 election results is slamming former President Donald Trump and others in his party for their continued falsehoods about how the election was run.

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer on Saturday called a Trump statement accusing the county of deleting an elections database “unhinged” and called on other Republicans to stop the unfounded accusations.

“We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer. As a party. As a state. As a country,” Richer tweeted.

Richer became recorder in January, after defeating the Democratic incumbent.

The former president’s statement came as Republican Senate President Karen Fann has demanded the Republican-dominated Maricopa County Board of Supervisors come to the Senate to answer questions raised by the private auditors she has hired. The Senate took possession of 2.1 million ballots and election equipment last month for what was supposed to be a three-week hand recount of the presidential race won by Democratic President Joe Biden.

Trump’s statement said, in part, that “the entire Database of Maricopa County in Arizona has been DELETED! This is illegal and the Arizona State Senate, who is leading the Forensic Audit, is up in arms.”

Richer and the board say that statement is just plain wrong. In recent days, both he and the board have begun aggressively pushing back at what they see as continuing falsehoods from Republicans who question Trump’s loss.

“Enough with the defamation. Enough with the unfounded allegations,” Richer tweeted Thursday. “I came to this office to competently, fairly, and lawfully administer the duties of the office. Not to be accused by own party of shredding ballots and deleting files for an election I didn’t run. Enough.”

The board, led by Republican Chairman Jack Sellers, have been aggressively using Twitter in recent days to push back, firing off a series of messages slamming the private company doing the audit. The board plans to hold a public hearing Monday to further to refute lies and lay out facts about these issues.”

[worstblogever]

Republican Arizona election official says Trump “unhinged”

If Trump can't hold sway over loons like we have in the Arizona state legislature, his star is truly fading.

And if that miscalculation is correct, given that the GOP's entire messaging now centers around the Big Lie and the hypocritical take on "cancel culture" they have... 2022 ain't gonna go so well for them.

[Tami]

Puerto Rico's new tipping point: Horrific femicides reignite fight against gender violence

Andrea Ruiz did what she could to protect herself from an ex-boyfriend who was constantly following her, harassing and even threatening to publish intimate photos of her on social media.

The terrified 35-year-old woman appeared in court virtually a month and a half ago to file a complaint against Miguel Ocasio, 40, under Puerto Rico’s domestic violence intervention and prevention law.

Ruiz pleaded for Ocasio’s arrest after she was unable to get the court to issue a protection order against the man, whom she had dated for eight months. In a leaked audio of the court appearance, she can be heard describing the pattern of emotional abuse and persecution she endured at his hands before and after they were dating. But the judge said she found “no cause” to arrest Ocasio, who a month later would go on to kill Ruiz.

Her burned body was found on the side of a road in the town of Cayey on April 28, so disfigured that Puerto Rico's Institute of Forensic Science had to use dental records for identification. The agency determined her death was a homicide. Ocasio confessed to the crime shortly after the body was found. Police said he mortally assaulted Ruiz by using physical force and a knife. Ocasio remains in prison on charges of first-degree murder and destruction of evidence, among others.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Republican Arizona election official says Trump “unhinged”

And in other news of the day, water is wet.

If Trump can't hold sway over loons like we have in the Arizona state legislature, his star is truly fading.

And if that miscalculation is correct, given that the GOP's entire messaging now centers around the Big Lie and the hypocritical take on "cancel culture" they have... 2022 ain't gonna go so well for them.

You might be right. However, he still has enough followers in the upper echelon of the GQP still willing to believe the "Big Lie" if it'll keep Trump happy and, by extension, his base so they'll vote Qpublican next year. That's what this is all about.

[Tami]

If Trump can't hold sway over loons like we have in the Arizona state legislature, his star is truly fading.

And if that miscalculation is correct, given that the GOP's entire messaging now centers around the Big Lie and the hypocritical take on "cancel culture" they have... 2022 ain't gonna go so well for them.

The whole thing is one big circular feeding frenzy. Politicians tell the lies, voters believe the lies, politicians fear losing those voters so they keep telling more lies, voters keep believing those lies, and so on. All made even worse by infusion of more lies and misinformation by news media designed for the sole purpose of generating and perpetuating those lies and social media where people interact with others who belive the lies and the lies grow even bigger. Trump, of course, is in the middle of all of this.

There is some shrinkage going on, but that could just make those who remain even more dangerous.

It could end up being like a dying star.

1. Some stars grow bigger, hotter, and redder while the core shrinks. Eventually, the outer atmosphere drifts away, leaving only the core behind - in Trumpian terms, as more Trumpian core members and politicians get into trouble or leave for other reasons, the Trumpian Core shrinks and the Trumpian supporters begin drifting away, leaving just Trump.

2. Some stars contract, then explode into a supernova before dying out - If only hardcore Trumpian Far-Right loyalists remain, we may see more acts of violence like on January 6th, only worse.

[Mister Mets]

We're now several months away from that, if you are going to trot out gut responses and feelings from months back, I need something to back it up. Otherwise, it's just bad.



1) Activism isn't a popularity context. After all, Gandhi and MLK and Mandela qualified as "unpopular activists" for decades.
2) Black Lives Matter are not unpopular activists. Not when their name dots major city streets at any rate.

I mean "Defund the Police" is actually painted on the streets of DC, at Black Lives Matter plaza (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter_Plaza).

And contrary to Jim Clyburn, John Lewis never spoke against it when he was alive and visited the place insisting that activists be heard:
https://www.fox5dc.com/news/its-very...s-matter-plaza

I don't believe anyone here had opinions months ago about the Colonial Pipeline Cyberattack, considering it started on May 6.

On the point of activism not being a popularity contest, there are also activists for terrible causes.

In addition, what works in DC doesn't necessarily work with swing voters in Pennsylvania. It is worth noting that about 80 percent of African-Americans polled don't want any reduction in policing in their area. When African Americans who have had a poor encounter with police in the last twelve months are polled, a majority still prefer the same or a greater police presence in their neighborhood. When African Americans have had a positive encounter with police in the last twelve months are polled, an overwhelming majority prefer the same or a greater police presence in their neighborhood.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/...gn=syndication

Granted, there is some misinformation out there, which complicates the discussion. A recent poll commissioned by Eric Kaufmann of the University of London suggests "Eight in 10 African-American survey respondents believe that young black men are more likely to be shot to death by the police than to die in a traffic accident; one in 10 disagrees. Among a highly educated sample of liberal whites, more than six in 10 agreed. In reality, considerably more young African-American men die in car accidents than are shot to death by police."

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/...-united-states

True. It wouldn't be a good look for Israel if that was the intent.

I think that's what it comes down to: whether it was a legitimate military target, or whether they were targeted because of the media presence.

There's a legal principle that the use of an otherwise-civilian building for military purposes converts it into a military target. In that case, the blame for the attack on the target thus rests with the entity that converted it into a military target. The rationale is that we do not want to reward forces for bad behavior. There should be no military benefit for using human shields.

If it was not a legitimate military target, Israel deserves blame.

If it was a legitimate military target, the major question is whether Hamas should benefit for putting journalists at risk. Personally, I think they should not.

[shooshoomanjoe]

Republican Arizona election official says Trump “unhinged”

Cyber ninja's audit found that some election files were deleted. But that's all that information I could find. Nothing on what the files are or how they are related to the election and trump supporters citing this as proof of election fraud.

[Tami]

G.O.P. Pursues Harsher Penalties for Poll Workers in Voting Crackdown

AUSTIN, Texas — Anita Phillips has been an election judge in Texas for 17 years, responsible for managing a precinct in Waco, a city of roughly 135,000 people. But over the last four years, the civic duty she prized has become arduous. Harassment by partisan poll watchers has grown increasingly caustic, she has found, and helping voters is ever more treacherous amid a thicket of new rules.

Those regulations are likely to grow stricter: Republican lawmakers in Texas, following in the footsteps of their counterparts across the country, are pressing forward with a voting bill that could impose harsh penalties on election officials or poll workers who are thought to have committed errors or violations. And the nationwide effort may be pushing people like Ms. Phillips to reconsider serving their communities.

“It’s just so taxing,” Ms. Phillips said. “And if me — I’m in my 40s, and I’m having this much stress — imagine every election worker and election judge that is 65 and over with severe health issues. This is supposed to be a way for them to give back. And it’s supposed to be something that makes them feel good about what they’re doing, but now they’re starting to feel like, ‘Are we going to be safe?’”

That attitude has seeped into new voting laws and bills put forward by Republican-controlled legislatures across the country. More than two dozen bills in nine states, either still making their way through legislatures or signed into law, have sought to establish a rash of harsh new penalties, elevated criminal classifications and five-figure fines for state and local election officials who are found to have made mistakes, errors, oversteps and other violations of election code, according to a review of voting legislation by The New York Times.

The infractions that could draw more severe punishment run the gamut from seemingly minor lapses in attention or innocent mistakes to more clearly willful actions in defiance of regulations. In Texas, taking any action that “would make observation not reasonably effective” for a poll watcher would carry new penalties. In Florida, failing to have an election worker continuously supervise a drop box would result in major fines. Willfully flouting new laws, like ones in states including Iowa and Texas that ban sending absentee ballots to voters who have not requested them, would also lead to tougher penalties.

[Kirby101]

G.O.P. Pursues Harsher Penalties for Poll Workers in Voting Crackdown

According to Mets, these are all reasonable laws passed to ensure fare elections and has nothing whatsoever to do with voter suppression.

[Ragged Maw]

According to Mets, these are all reasonable laws passed to ensure fare elections and has nothing whatsoever to do with voter suppression.

At the very least, I suspect bad faith involved even if, at face value, these proposed regulations do effectively prevent or tighten against certain fraudulent practices. If there happens to be just-as-effective methods to prevent voter fraud that DON’T “coincidentally” make voting in general more challenging for more people (especially if the GOP knew about it the whole time), then I’d call that a smoking gun.

[Malvolio]

“I Put On My Helmet. And I Ran.” How One Journalist Experienced Israel’s Destruction Of A Media Tower

Fares Akram grew up in Gaza city. As a reporter for the Associated Press, he worked in the building that Israel destroyed with airstrikes.

**********

Facebook Was Right To Ban Trump For ‘Egging On’ Violent Capitol Mob, Says Board Member

Trump “put himself in this bed, and he can sleep in it,” former federal judge Michael McConnell told Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.” And yet, Facebook might reactivate his account. Mindblowing! Meanwhile....

**********

Donald Trump Bashes 2020 Presidential Election As ‘Crime Of The Century’

The former president once again claimed the election was stolen from him, and argued that political polling was rigged as well. I've said this a few times here, Trump, never willing to accept he lost ANYTHING in his life will go to his grave believing he had been cheated out of a second term.

**********

Jim Crow Ballot ‘Purity’ Phrase Yanked From Texas Vote Suppression Bill At Last Minute

GOP lawmakers ultimately decided not to advertise the segregationist nature of the voting measure. I wonder why they even bothered.

**********

America’s Deadly Domestic Extremism Worst In 24 Years, Reveals New FBI Report

Most extremist killings in 2019 were committed by white supremacists. And that crazy train has only started rolling, but Qpublicans whine and bleat that the REAL menace is BLM and Antifa. Yeah, right.

**********

Rep. Eric Swalwell Blew His Top When Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Aide Told Him To Remove Mask

“I’ve just frankly had enough with these marauding goons in the Marjorie Taylor Greene crowd,” said the Democrat, who admitted using some “choice” language.
At this point, I fear it's only a matter of time before someone loses his (or her) **** and decks Trashy Greene or one of her sycophants.

Zuckerberg is counting on it all blowing over by the end of October and then quietly reinstating Trump's facebook account. Of course it will only blow over if Trump keeps his mouth shut for six months. But Trump has trouble keeping his mouth shut for six minutes.

[Mister Mets]

Charles CW Cooke of the National Review looked at publicly available data on Rebekah Jones, the data scientist claiming the Ron DeSantis administration fudged the numbers on Covid. He says she has made demonstrably false claims.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/...wer-who-wasnt/

https://www.nationalreview.com/corne...-of-deception/

Initially, she was placed on an internal counseling program after numerous violations, including potentially exposing personnel data, and changing data in infographics meant to be released officially.

Jones’s bad behavior was first formally reported on May 6, 2020, when the IT director at the FDOH, Craig Curry, emailed the department’s labor-relations consultant, Tiffany Hicks, “looking for guidance” on “properly documenting actions of one of my employees and to get guidance on proper preparation in case action needs to be taken.” Among the “actions” that Curry sought to “document” were that the employee—Rebekah Jones—had written “posts on website [sic] and social media regarding data and web product owned by the Department that she works on without permission of management or communications”; that she had released infographics that “should have been identical to data published by our communication department” but were not; and, most seriously, that she had possibly exposed “personnel data” in the process. Asked to clarify the problem by Hicks, Curry confirmed that between April 9 and April 30, 2020, he had verbally told Jones to stop talking to the press without permission, and, more specifically, that he had told her to stop releasing health-department data or representing her employer without consent.

In her response to Curry, sent later that day, Hicks proposed one of two actions: that Jones should either be “separated” (i.e., fired) or else be put through a “Management Counseling” procedure that would “address and document the recent incidents.” The latter process, Hicks explained, “would be informal and would not be placed in the employee’s personnel file.” But “if similar behavior continues,” she added, “it is a [sic] management’s decision to move forward with termination.” Apparently, the department chose the second action, because, by the end of the day, Jones was still working at the FDOH, albeit in a slightly altered role. In his notes, Curry records that, having been “instructed by management to replace Ms. Jones as primary on the COVID Dashboard,” he called her “to notify her that she was being removed from her duties as primary GIS [geographic information system] developer on the department’s COVID-19 dashboard.” Again: This was not a termination. As Curry explicitly noted, Jones “was informed that she was maintaining her role as GIS team manager and was to resume normal day to day responsibilities, but she was to cease any duties and administrative roles associated with the COVID-19 GIS dashboard.”

Before she was fired, she crashed the Florida Department of Health online dashboard while trying to copy confidential information, and locked the manager's administrative privileges.

The next day, on May 7, 2020, Jones crashed the dashboard.

Without telling a single person what she was doing, Jones created a new account within the GIS system and moved a tranche of data into it. This both broke the setup and sincerely confused the department’s IT staff. “Because the team was not informed,” Curry wrote, it “began troubleshooting the issue as if it were a system issue”—which, of course, it was not. In the process, the FDOH asked Chris Duclos, a GIS manager and the only other person besides Jones who had “full administrative right [sic] in our system[,] to help.” This Duclos did, primarily “by modifying ownership of objects to return the process to the previous state”—that is, to roll back the system to how it had been when it was working. At 1:00 p.m. that day, aware that Duclos was reversing her power grab, Jones locked Duclos out of his account.

By 1:35 p.m. on the same day, Jones had been instructed to restore Duclos’s full administrative access. Six and a half hours later, at 8:08, she responded by saying that she would, and then, at 8:28, added that she intended to leave Florida to spend some time with her family in Mississippi. Except . . . she didn’t. Instead, as Curry recorded, Jones set Duclos’s permissions to a lower level than administrator, and left herself as the sole person within the FDOH who had administrator status. In response, Duclos emailed the state’s GIS vendor and re*quested that his full permissions be restored. This was done.

Then came a lull. Having been asked what on earth she was doing, Jones claimed that she had set herself up as the sole administrator as the result of “security concerns,” and, under the impression that this excuse had been accepted by the department, she started playing nice. Two days later, Curry reported, “the entire team seemed to be getting along and moving forward.” At 9:30 a.m. on May 15, encouraged by the improvement in Jones’s behavior, and having got the dashboard back up and running, the FDOH decided that “Manage*ment Counseling was still the correct option for previous occurrences.” That decision would last for only a few hours: At 1:46 p.m., Jones sent a mass email to everyone who used the dashboard—many of whom were external to the department—explaining that she was no longer assigned to the dashboard and suggesting that she had been removed because she had refused to manipulate data. Within minutes, the press began crawling all over the story. Three days later, Jones was fired.

She lied about an encounter with the police, claiming they pointed at guns at her and her children, information contradicted by bodycam footage. Police wanted to question her about a data breach, traced back to her IPv6 address.

Late last year, the police did indeed execute a search warrant on Jones. But they did so because a data breach at the FDOH—in which the personal information of 19,000 employees was stolen—was traced back to the IPv6 address that Comcast had assigned to Jones’s house. Governor DeSantis had nothing to do with it. The search warrant—which alleges that Jones committed a felony by not only temporarily accessing personnel data she had no right to access but permanently stealing it—was initially signed by Judge Joshua Hawkes, a Republican appointee, but subsequently upheld by Judge John Cooper, an elected judge in heavily Democratic Leon County. (Florida does not have explicitly partisan judicial elections.)

Jones now claims that she was “terrified” by the police’s visit. But even this seems to be highly questionable. Not only did she prepare for the visit by creating a made-for-the-cameras sign that read “Biden hire me!”—hardly the instantaneous work of someone who is surprised that the cops are at the door—but she subsequently spread a host of extraordinary claims about the conduct of the police that, after festering online for a while and spawning a swiftly dropped lawsuit from Jones, were flatly disproven by the release of the body-camera footage. As the Tampa Bay Times recently noted, despite Jones’s having “claimed on Twitter that the agents ‘pointed a gun in my face. They pointed guns at my kids,’” the bodycam video “does not appear to show police pointing their guns at anyone in the house.” On the contrary: It shows the police waiting outside patiently for 22 minutes; it shows them trying to minimize the disruption to her children by encouraging her to come and talk to them at the door; and it shows them repeatedly calling Jones to find out why she wasn’t cooperating. After the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) had released the footage, a spokesman confirmed what anyone who watches it can see: that at no point during the search did the agents point their guns at anyone in the house.

There were some red flags in her background, including a willingness to blame others for her misdeeds.

One is almost left impressed by the strange alchemy with which Jones manages to transmute her own bad behavior into lucrative victimhood. A 342-page “manifesto” that Jones penned in 2019 gives example after example of this tendency. She manages to cast herself as the injured party in the passages in which she describes violating a no-contact order to engage with an ex-boyfriend, damaging his car, and harassing his mother. She also manages to cast herself as the victim in the parts in which she records being fired from Florida State University for having sex with a student in her office and for lying to her employer about her criminal record. She even presents herself in defensive terms in a now-removed part of the document that contains explicit text messages between her and her ex-boyfriend, as well as close-up photographs of the man’s genitals. (A misdemeanor stalking case against Jones, filed by Florida in 2019, is ongoing, although the cyber-harassment and cyber-stalking charges have been dropped or narrowed, as were earlier charges, relating to the same individual, of trespass, felony robbery, and contempt of court.) Everywhere Jones goes—whether it’s Louisiana State University (where she got her master’s), Florida State, or the Florida Department of Health—she seems always to leave a trail of wreckage. And somehow, it’s always someone else’s fault.

Rebekah Jones has come up a few times in this thread.

https://community.cbr.com/search.php?searchid=11359224

[Mister Mets]

According to Mets, these are all reasonable laws passed to ensure fare elections and has nothing whatsoever to do with voter suppression.

Mets has not commented on this particular Texas law, or yesterday's New York Times article about it.

What do you think should be done with elections officials or poll workers who commit violations?

If Trump can't hold sway over loons like we have in the Arizona state legislature, his star is truly fading.

And if that miscalculation is correct, given that the GOP's entire messaging now centers around the Big Lie and the hypocritical take on "cancel culture" they have... 2022 ain't gonna go so well for them.

Do you think 2022 goes worse for Republicans if Trump's star fades among conservatives?

[GindyPosts]

Gaetz associate expected to plead guilty in federal case

Man, I really wouldn’t want to be Matt Gaetz right now....

Gaetz not only was the village idiot pretending to be a Rhodes scholar, but he's a diddler & part of the very system folks like him "care" about stopping but not really.

I am not surprised.

[Gray Lensman]

Liz Cheney has a big problem if she wants to return the Republican Party back towards conservative principles. The battle is already over. It was lost years ago.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...?ocid=msedgdhp