MAGA Nazis Running For Local Election Positions! Hey What If Democrats ... RAN AGAINST THEM?
Doing Something is the new Not Doing Something.
Reading coverage of this November's elections, a lot of it sounds like, "Oh well, you know how things are, it's inevitable and also the law that the president's party must get massacred in the midterms, so we should probably just get ready to give the Nazis another chance to do Good Government." And we're also reading all these warnings about how in the midterms and especially in the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump and his co-conspirators are laying the groundwork for a much more professional coup, one where state governments are stacked with all the fascists they need to have in place to overthrow the will of the people much more quickly and efficiently. As in, if he needs a secretary of state to find him 11,780 votes, they're working to make damn sure a willing secretary of state will be ready to start searching the couch cushions.
NO BIG! No Big, Just Trump Begging Georgia Secretary Of State To ‘Find’ Him 11,780 Votes
And sometimes, in reading all of that, it can be tempting to ask what Democrats are doing to stop these things, precisely. Anything? Joe Manchin's Congress obviously can't be bothered. Are we just gonna fuck around and wonder how we got here in 2028 when Trump announces he's miraculously been granted a third term by all 50 states in the Electoral College, springboarding off the permanent GOP Congress's passage of its federal "Don't Say Gay" law, a hybrid of Florida's and Russia's "Don't Say Gay" laws?
Well, here's something, from the good folks at Run For Something. Politico reports on a new three-year effort to put 5,000 people who love America into elections posts around the country, in order to stop Trump's garbage anti-American white fascists.
The program would recruit candidates in 35 states for everything from county probate judges in Alabama to county clerks in Kansas and county election board members in Pennsylvania — all offices that handle elections and will be on voters’ ballots between now and 2024. Spearheading the effort is Run for Something, a Democratic group that launched soon after Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential victory to recruit candidates for local elections. Now, the group plans to raise $80 million over the next three years for this push, which would include at least a hundred staffers to support those candidates in-state, according to details and donor memos first shared with POLITICO.
Doing Something! It's the new Not Doing Something!
They're calling it Clerk Work, because it's about putting some fuckin' clerks in who are competent and believe in democracy. Run For Something co-founder Amanda Litman explains to Politico that the 2024 GOP fascist coup is going to look different from 2020:
“Election subversion in 2024 is not going to be a mob storming the Capitol, it’s going to be a county clerk in Michigan or a supervisor of elections in Florida who decides to fuck the whole thing up,” Litman said. “The only way to make long-term democracy protection is by electing people who will defend democracy.”
Politico says this project will be everywhere election workers are elected, which makes sense. It also mentions how Steve Bannon has been inserting his pockmarked grundle stump into this particular chicken for a while now, pushing for his fans to "take this back … precinct by precinct.” It's called the "precinct strategy," and Wonkette has written about it previously, as we are on top of all the things.
PREVIOUSLY! Won't Have To Have An Insurrection If You Let The Trumpists Count All The Votes
Here's a tweet from back when Run For Something started quietly getting this effort going, featuring Mr. Grundle Stump himself:
Steve Bannon is recruiting people to run for local election administrator. \n\nSo are we. (But, you know, *for* democracy.) If you want to run for a position like city or county clerk or any other local position, we want to help. http://runforwhat.net\u00a0pic.twitter.com/J6kFAXqoQd— Run for Something (@Run for Something) 1640046948
The rest of the Politico piece has more details on how this is working, how it's already worked, and what the group's next goals are. It also has some grumbling about how it might have been nice if the Democratic National Committee had done something like this in the first place. We probably agree but don't feel like typing a whole bunch about it.
We are just glad somebody is doing something. So follow them on Twitter and help out however you can.
Hey maybe you should run for something! And then if you win and Donald Trump says "find me 11,780 votes" you can say "sure thing buddy, but first how about you find my balls instead?" and democracy will be saved.
[Politico]
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Florida GOP Redistricting Plan About As Florida As You'd Expect From A Florida
Racist. We mean it's racist.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday presented the Florida Legislature with a redistricting proposal that will build in a greater advantage for Republicans than the state already has and eliminate at least two districts currently held by Black Democrats. The maps will almost certainly pass easily in the Republican-dominated legislature, after which everybody and their uncle will sue the state over the blatant gerrymandering and elimination of minority representation.
Why, yes, this is precisely the democracy-eroding shit that the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would prevent, if only Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema weren't more concerned about Noble Traditions of the Senate than about having a functional Republic.
The Tampa Bay Times summarizes the electoral butcher's bill:
The map would create 20 Republican-performing districts and eight Democrat-leaning districts and is expected to be quickly approved by the Republican-controlled Legislature next week when it meets in a special session called by the governor. The current split of the Florida congressional delegation is 16 Republicans and 11 Democrats, and the state gets an additional district because of its population growth.
And remember, the minute the special session approves the new maps, the lawsuits will be filed to challenge them in both state and federal court. The Florida constitution has a provision that's supposed to prohibit gerrymandering, and the federal Voting Rights Act bars district maps that harm minority representation, although the current US Supreme Court tends to think of the Voting Rights Act as a quaint relic of long ago more than an actual federal law these days.
Read More: Ron DeSantis Delivers MLK Day Gift Of Racially Gerrymandered Congressional Map
Florida Republicans Let Ron DeSantis Have His Jim Crow Congressional Maps
This is actually DeSantis's third try at forcing through a redistricting map, despite the tiny detail that the maps are supposed to be drawn by the Lege in accordance with that quaint old "separation of powers" thing, and in Florida's case, voters in 2010 passed a constitutional provision requiring fair redistricting, as if DeSantis would give a rat's ass about that. So in January, DeSantis submitted his own maps, which the Lege went and rejected out of concern that they violated that "Fair Districts" part of the state constitution. The amendment is pretty clear in prohibiting new maps that give incumbents a boost, that unfairly give one party an advantage, or that water down the votes of minority groups.
Or as translated into Republican, the majority party has to keep a straight face while insisting its maps are perfectly fair.
The Lege — again, with GOP majorities in both houses — then drafted new maps that preserved a Black-majority district in Jacksonville, but in March, DeSantis vetoed his own party's map under the creative theory that it was an unconstitutional "racial gerrymander" that was totally unfair by allowing Black people to have an advantage in even a single district. Mind you, the Fair Districts amendment literally requires that minority voters have the chance to “elect representatives of their choice,” but we suppose DeSantis thinks that's only allowed when said minorities manage to overcome the electoral hurdles of being divided into white-majority districts, so they'll appreciate all the hard work it requires.
Unfortunately, the Tampa Bay Times reports, this time around it looks like the Lege will knuckle under to DeSantis, because "fairness" is such an old-fashioned idea:
The new map was drawn after the governor’s staff consulted with the Senate’s redistricting staff and “reflects standards the Senate can support,” said Senate Reapportionment Committee chairperson Ray Rodrigues, R-Estero, in a memo to senators. Rodrigues added that he will submit the map as a bill to be considered by the Senate.
Through some weird circumstance, Florida still has some Democrats — an actual majority of registered voters, as if that mattered — and they seem to think that everyone should be allowed to vote, even people who aren't white Republicans, if you can imagine such hubris. State Democratic Party chair Manny Diaz seemed to think that allowing Black majorities in two whole districts, out of 28, isn't generous enough of the benevolent DeSantis.
Diaz promised a lawsuit if the map is adopted, as did Democratic elections lawyer Marc Elias, so this is far from the last word, at least until the case reaches the Supreme Court, which will surely rule (a week before the election?) that letting the state's Democratic majority have eight seats out of 28 is outrageously partisan. The Supremes will no doubt demand that be reduced to five or fewer, since DeSantis wasn't really trying.
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Texas Gov Gets Very Own Blockade By Pissed Off Mexican Truckers, Good Job Well Done
A tit for a tat.
Last week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced a number of measures that are absolutely vital to keep his name in the news with the primary coming up, and also ostensibly to protect Texas from Joe Biden's allegedly open borders. In addition to a stunt that would involve busing and flying asylum seekers to to dump them in Washington DC so Biden can have them (ha! ha!), Abbott ordered Texas state police to start performing "safety inspections" on every single commercial truck entering the US from Mexico.
When he announced the harsher "safety" inspections, Abbott said he knew they would "dramatically slow" cross-border traffic, but by golly it was worth it to keep Texas "safe." This week, it turns out that Abbott was more right than he knew: The inspections have led to hours-long delays for trucks entering Texas, and have sparked blockades of official border crossings by Mexican truckers angry at Abbott's policy.
The Texas Tribune reports that at the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge near McAllen, Texas — normally one of the busiest ports of entry — no commercial vehicles crossed the border at all Monday or Tuesday because Mexican truckers had blocked both north and southbound lanes of the the highway on the Mexico side, in protest of Abbott's inspection order.
Crossings have also slowed to a fraction of normal in El Paso and at other ports of entry, and the New York Times reports that delays of up to 14 hours have led some truck drivers to skip Texas altogether, and to take the longer drive to cross the border in New Mexico or Arizona.
No big deal, it's only around $12 million a day in produce alone that's being held up. If the slowdowns continue, that's certain to lead to higher prices and possible shortages in grocery stores across the US, which of course will be blamed on Joe Biden and Democrats regardless of the fact that Abbott caused them.
Mind you, Abbott's enhanced inspections come after the trucks have already made it through the regular border inspections done by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Under US law, searches for narcotics or undocumented immigrants at the border are entirely a matter of federal responsibility. After the trucks are screened by CBP, they're perfectly legal to travel on into the US. On a typical day, one trucker told the Texas Tribune, the process of getting through the El Paso port of entry only takes about a half hour. Tuesday, he said, the traffic backups and extra inspections delayed him six hours on his trip to pick up office supplies in El Paso, bound for Juárez.
Texas's Department of Public Safety (DPS) does have the authority to check commercial trucks for compliance with safety laws. Normally, such safety checks are performed randomly on a few of the thousands of trucks crossing into Texas daily. But Abbott ordered that all trucks be inspected, to save Texans from that Biden policy that hasn't gone into effect yet. In his press release announcing the crackdown, Abbott insisted he would "use any and all lawful powers to curtail the flow of drugs, human traffickers, illegal immigrants, weapons, and other contraband into Texas."
Which, again, ain't his job.
As of yet, the escalated inspections don't seem to have netted any huge caches of drugs or disrupted any cartel human trafficking operations, the Tribune reports; for that matter, it's not even clear what exactly the long, slow DPS inspections are even looking at. (They're looking at staying in the governor's good graces.)
The Tribune notes that the normal CBP screening process is anything but lax, with agents performing detailed, even invasive searches of commercial vehicles, to the degree that the ACLU complains that the ports of entry are effectively "a Constitution-free zone," according to former CBP commissioner Gil Kerlikowske, who headed the agency from 2014 to 2017.
“The number of K-9 [dogs] they have to look for drugs, the X-ray machines, they got really good at this — you’ll see them be able to tap the sides of cars, panels of vehicles and locate whether there’s a false panel or something’s been concealed,” Kerlikowske added.
There's little reason to think that CBP really need's Texas DPS to help with any of that, but of course, if Abbott can create some chaos at the border, he can scream about "chaos at the border" and blame Joe Biden without much chance of suffering electoral consequences. After all, any fool knows that Republicans are all about enforcing the laws, so any chaos can't be their fault.
Texas truckers and businesses, however, are starting to hurt because of Abbott's policy, and they don't seem to have any trouble seeing who's fucking around with their profits, as the New York Times reports:
“This has national ramifications,” said John D. Esparza, the chief executive of the Texas Trucking Association. “This is trade going to Ford Motor Company. This is trade going to Minnesota. It’s not just about the city of Laredo trying to get stuff to their local H-E-B,” he said, referring to the Texas grocery chain.
The association endorsed Mr. Abbott for re-election in February, and Mr. Esparza said he immediately got in touch with the governor’s office after the order to express his concerns. “I haven’t had a response, quite frankly,” he said.
Mexico is the state’s largest trading partner, with more than $100 billion in imports in 2019, according to a report from the Texas Department of Transportation. At one of the busiest crossings, in Laredo, 16,000 trucks ordinarily pass through on a given day, Mr. Esparza said.
CBP has noticed too, and says that in just the first week, Abbott's inspections have resulted in a 60 percent drop in commercial traffic across the Texas-Mexico border. In a written statement, CBP said,
The longer than average wait times – and the subsequent supply chain disruptions – are unrelated to CBP screening activities and are due to additional and unnecessary inspections being conducted by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) at the order of the Governor of Texas.
As the Texas Tribune also points out, it's not just Mexican truckers who are being harmed by those "unnecessary" inspections, since most Mexican truckers make several runs a day across the border, bringing Mexican goods and produce to US border cities, where American trucks and drivers haul the loads out to the rest of Texas and beyond.
Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, a Republican first elected to that office in 2014, also had harsh criticism for what Abbott is doing to Texas bidniss, saying that Abbott should “cease his truck inspection project,” and that Abbott's “inspection program is turning a crisis into a catastrophe.” In an open letter to Abbott, Miller called the inspections "political theater" and warned that it could result in "untold losses" for businesses across the state.
“Your inspection protocol is not stopping illegal immigration,” Miller said in his letter. “It is stopping food from getting to grocery store shelves and in many cases causing food to rot in trucks — many of which are owned by Texas and other American companies. … The people of Texas deserve better!”
Miller is among the first Republicans to call for Abbott to knock this the hell off, noting that CBP agents already "conduct extensive inspections of commercial vehicles" and that the state should use law enforcement resources where illegal border crossings actually take place, "not to create a crisis where they do not," which we'd just point out is still CBP's job, not Texas DPS's.
Mind you, Miller's criticism isn't merely a call for good government; he's also a rightwing ally of Donald Trump seeking a third term as Ag Commissioner, so he has plenty of reason to poke at Abbott. Isn't democracy a fun game?
[Texas Tribune / NYT / Texas Tribune / Image: KHOU-TV]
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Steve Bannon, The Chinese Billionaire, And hUnTEr bIDeN's LApToP!!1!
But $2 billion for Jared Kushner from the Saudis for services rendered? Well does it have a laptop???
Republicans have been crying crocodile tears for upwards of a year about Hunter Biden's laptop. Why isn't the mainstream media covering it? Why are conservatives being censored? Why is the media protecting Joe Biden? No fair!
What they never mention is how totally shady this story has been from the jump. There's a reason that this thing got throttled on social media when the New York Post let Sean Hannity's 25-year-old former booker vomit it into the news cycle on October 14, 2020, and that reason is that it bore every indication of being a foreign influence operation. And new reporting from Mother Jones makes it clear that it kind of was — although not in the "Russia, if you're listening" way we all thought at the time.
To recap, here's the supposed origin story of that laptop, as we covered it at the time:
In April of 2019 someone brought a "water-damaged MacBook Pro" to a computer repair shop somewhere in Delaware. The laptop had a sticker on it from the Beau Biden foundation, and, knowing that Beau Biden was Joe Biden's dead son, the shop owner made a copy of the hard drive before calling the FBI. As one does.
On said hard drive he discovered emails to Hunter Biden from a Ukrainian businessman thanking him for an introduction to Joe Biden, and also videos of Hunter Biden smoking crack and having sex. You know, just stuff you leave on your laptop which you then abandon at some rando computer store without any kind of password protection.
A grand jury in Delaware seized the laptop back in December, but the computer store owner turned his copy of the hard drive over to Rudy Giuliani's lawyer Robert Costello — the same guy who tried to be the back channel to Michael Cohen after he flipped on Trump. Whom the computer dude just happens to know because ... reasons.
Rudy Giuliani, who had been palling around with literal Russian spies, attempting to launder faked documents, and flogging cartoonishly ridiculous stories about Joe Biden and his son looting Ukraine, wouldn't let anybody examine the device to authenticate it. He just wanted everyone to take him at his word that it contained child pornography and evidence against "the Biden crime family." And Rudy's word being what it is, the story went nowhere until Steve Bannon swanned in and talked the Post into running it.
Which is where the MoJo piece picks up, since Bannon appears to have been coordinating with his patron Guo Wengui (AKA Miles Kwok), an expat Chinese tycoon who built his own misinformation media ecosystem from the safety of US America. In 2017 Bannon helped Guo set up a network of Chinese-language sites to pump out propaganda attacking the Chinese Communist Party, which sought Guo's extradition on tax and rape charges, as well as American liberals.
As MoJo reported at the time:
Much of [Steve] Bannon's work for Guo is related to media companies Guo has launched. A one-year contract between Guo and Bannon inked in 2018 reportedly paid the former Breitbart executive $1 million to introduce Guo's media company to "media personalities" and advise the company on "industry standards." Bannon is also listed as director of GTV Media, a media company launched in April by Guo.
Guo, who played fairy godmother to Jason Miller's GETTR and then denied it, also denied responsibility for the wild allegations about Hunter Biden running on his own sites.
“They are not platforms whose content is managed or directed by Mr. Guo or any single individual or company,” his spokesman told the Washington Post in May 2021.
Except MoJo got its hands on a whole passel of Guo's WhatsApp messages where he exhorted his associates to make totally false claims about what the laptop contained and where it came from, insisting that the material was being used by the Chinese government to blackmail then-presidential candidate Joe Biden.
While he orchestrated the publication of the Hunter Biden material, Guo encouraged supporters to make a false, vile claim. He instructed them to say the laptop included videos that showed Hunter Biden having sex with underage Chinese girls, according to messages he sent and people who communicated with him. Guo also asserted, baselessly, that the Chinese government had created or obtained the compromising videos and images and used them to blackmail the Bidens. Wang Dinggang repeated both of those claims in his September 25 broadcasts. They were later parroted on GNews. No evidence whatsoever supports these allegations.
Guo went so far as to give advice on the translation used in the subtitles and level of pixelation of the videos of Hunter Biden using drugs and having sex. He was also adamant that the videos only be shown overseas, lest he be sued in America. But his highest priority was to highlight the false claims about Joe Biden being a puppet of the Chinese Communist Party.
Guo also dictated a message that later appeared as text attached to a video of Hunter Biden that was posted on GTV: “U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden, who is 100% absolutely controlled by the Communist Party, is one of the most important politicians in the United States with the most successful BGY plan of the CCP,” Guo said. “He is one of the important plotters of the CCP’s 3F plan in the United States: foment weakness, foment chaos and foment the destruction of America.” BGY and 3F are plans Guo has claimed China has deployed to use hacking, bribes, and blackmail to influence Western lawmakers and weaken the US.
By the end of October, Bannon, Giuliani, and Guo were flogging a supposed Biden-China dossier publicized by a "researcher" named Martin Aspen who turned out to be a CGI avatar of a person who did not exist. (Holy shit 2020 was weird.)
Eventually, the Post did authenticate many of the emails as genuine, but that was long after Fox News started airing videos of Hunter Biden having sex during the dinner hour. Meanwhile, Sean Hannity is still yelling about the laptop story being suppressed, conveniently leaving out all of the above information which made it look extraordinarily suspect back in October 2020, and still does.
We may never know what portion of the information on that hard drive is genuine, and what is fake — and Rudy's carrying it around it in his pants pocket for months doesn't make it any easier. But we do know that much of the information supposedly found on the laptop was floating around Ukraine with a $5 million price tag on it back in 2019. And Rudy may not be smart enough to move $5 million around Europe without it getting traced, but it's pretty clear that Steve Bannon's buddy is.
In short, the whole thing reeked to high heaven, and the stench has not abated. Meanwhile, Jared Kushner walked out of the White House and got handed $2 billion by the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund for services rendered. But no sex tape, so LOL whatever, right?
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