Ouch:
Georgia Lt. Gov Geoff Duncan (R) said he did not vote for either Republican Herschel Walker or Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) in the state’s Senate runoff.
“I showed up to vote this morning,” Duncan told CNN’s John Berman on Wednesday. “I was one of those folks who got in line and spent about an hour waiting, and it was the most disappointing ballot I’ve ever stared at in my entire life since I started voting.”
“I had two candidates that I just couldn’t find anything that made sense for me to put my vote behind, and so I walked out of that ballot box showing up to vote but not voting for either one of them,” Duncan added.
Duncan, a frequent critic of former President Trump who blamed Republicans’ worse-than-expected midterm performance on Trump, had previously told the network that Walker had not yet earned his vote.
Also, looks like Walker was caught in another lie. From Abby Vesoulis at Mother Jones:
In 2014, Herschel Walker delivered a speech to a group of National Guard members in Wichita, Kansas, about overcoming hardship to build resilience and achieve success.
Walker, now the Republican nominee for US Senate in Georgia, explained how he sought treatment for Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly called Multiple Personality Disorder, after wanting to kill a man; he bragged of the time he continued to play in the 1981 Sugar Bowl against Notre Dame despite dislocating his shoulder earlier in the game; and he boasted of how he got his wisdom teeth removed without anesthesia.
He also brought up the time he was accepted to law school. “I was going to law school. I was accepted to law school,” Walker said, according to video of the speech obtained by Mother Jones.
But Walker was likely either not telling the truth or leaving out an incredibly important piece of context: It is not possible that Walker was accepted to a nationally accredited law school because he did not complete his college degree, a prerequisite for admission and enrollment. If he was accepted to a law school, and that admission was not revoked, the school was unaccredited—a category of law school whose graduates are not eligible for the bar exam (and thus cannot become practicing lawyers) in most states.
Walker’s campaign did not respond to Mother Jones’ request for an explanation.
The American Bar Association is recognized by the US Department of Education as the sole national accrediting body for US law schools. As such, it establishes minimum acceptance requirements for the schools to which it grants accreditation. These acceptance requirements state that “a law school shall require for admission to its J.D. degree program a bachelor’s degree.”
Walker did not graduate with a bachelor’s. He dropped out of the University of Georgia before the end of his junior year to play professional football in the United States Football League, a fledgling and short-lived professional league that played in the spring and summer. His first game with the New Jersey Generals was March 6, 1983—several months before the University of Georgia’s June finals. Walker went on to play 15 years of football in the USFL and the National Football League. (After years of publicly misrepresenting his academic credentials, Walker admitted to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last year that he did not graduate.)
According to the ABA’s 1983 standards, accredited law schools are permitted to accept applicants who have successfully completed “three-fourths of the work acceptable for a bachelor’s degree,” so long as no more than 10 percent of the remaining credits necessary to graduate were without “substantial intellectual content.” But this exception is intended to allow law schools to accept undergraduate seniors who will have graduated by the time law school begins, according to the ABA. It is not a workaround to completing a bachelor’s.
The fossil fuel industry hasn’t given up on Walker just yet:
IN A LAST-MINUTE bid to shape the composition of the U.S. Senate, fossil fuel energy industry interests are planning to infuse $1.5 million into Georgia in support of Herschel Walker, the Republican facing off with Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., in the runoff on December 6.
The infusions of cash, designed largely for get-out-the-vote efforts, are detailed in documents tied to Run Herschel Run, a super PAC, and the Empowerment Alliance, a nonprofit that says it is devoted to policies to “secure America’s energy independence and, with it, Americans’ prosperity, freedom, and security.”
The effort reflects the consensus view that voter drop-off in the last Georgia runoff after the 2020 election led to Republican defeat, an outcome the outside groups hope to change for the election next week.
“Republicans lost both US Senate runoffs in 2021 because the Republican coalition that voted in November did not turnout in January,” notes a slide deck prepared by the Run Herschel Run political action committee. “Tens of millions of dollars were spent on television ads, but comparatively little on the vital ‘ground game’. This effort fills that gap in 2022 while others still focus on TV.”
The Empowerment Alliance is registered in Kentucky and does not disclose its donors. But the group, launched in 2019, hardly hides its affiliation with the oil, gas, and energy utility industries. The Empowerment Alliance promised when it launched to push a national campaign to promote natural gas while battling renewable energy-focused policies such as the Green New Deal.
Matthew Hammond, the executive director of the group, was previously the president of the Ohio Oil and Gas Association and a registered lobbyist for fracking interests. The Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog group, published documents that show close financial ties, through surrogate groups, between the utility giants Duke Energy, American Electric Power, and Energy to the Empowerment Alliance.
But it might be too little to late:
Barack Obama will campaign for Raphael Warnock in Georgia on Thursday night, as early voting in the US Senate runoff closes and as Herschel Walker, the Republican challenger to the Democratic incumbent, faces yet more controversy.
On Thursday, a former girlfriend told the Daily Beast that in 2005, when she caught Walker with another woman, he “grew enraged, put his hands on her chest and neck, and swung his fist at her”.
“I thought he was going to beat me,” Cheryl Parsa said, adding that she “fled in fear”.
Four other women told the Beast they had relationships with Walker, describing “a habit of lying and infidelity – including one woman who claimed she had an affair with Walker while he was married in the 1990s”.
Parsa, who the Beast said had “composed a book-length manuscript about her relationship with Walker”, called the former college and NFL football star “a pathological liar”.
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