I know that it is hard to believe that these—let’s just say, people—are this evil, but do it anyway, especially when they say the formerly quiet parts out loud. Our freedom depends on it. For far too many, our lives depend on it, too. And lives all around the world. For example,
Rachel Maddow talked with Clyburn last night about following this story all from the beginning, but said that this report shows that it was way worse than we knew. Clyburn confirmed that there was way more damage done than we knew before.
Obama
There was another episode last night. We should be able to get the recording today.
Steve Kornacki at the Big Board
Republicans started this cycle with a lead in the generic ballot. Then Ds drew even. Now, Rs are up 2.2 points. That assumes a lot, of course. Who was polled? Are the younger, less-White voters being represented correctly? Are women in Republican families planning to vote D, but telling everyone they are Rs? What October Surprises are the Rs going to pull on themselves in the next three weeks. Remember,
Don’t believe everything you think.
Why Your Thinking Is The Beginning & End Of Suffering (Beyond Suffering), by Joseph Nguyen
Kornacki used polls of the top ten Senate races from Real Clear Politics, which has a known R bias. Ds have consistently higher than margins in these polls
Debates
Warnock is now 7 points up on Walker after their debate. He has been leading Walker in the FiveThirtyEight polling average since July.
Initial coverage of yesterday’s debates on the late news yesterday. Much more today. Here are the videos and some Twitter pointing and laughing.
GA Abrams-Kemp
OH Ryan-Vance
IA DeJear-Reynolds
UT McMullin-Lee
Justice and Human Rights
Rep. Eric Swalwell Premieres Ad ‘Lock Her Up’ On What's At Stake As Abortion Bans Are Enforced
Swallwell was on The REIDout last night to talk about it.
R talking point: Investigating police shootings should take time. Past fact: In inordinate amount of time. And in the end, do nothing.
But this case took only a little over a week to result in a warrant.
A now ex-police officer is charged after shooting a teenager eating in a parking lot
A now-former San Antonio police officer was charged Tuesday with two counts of aggravated assault by a peace officer for shooting and gravely wounding a teen eating a hamburger in his car in a McDonald's parking lot. The teen had begun driving away when the officer opened fire.
James Brennand, 25, was charged in the Oct. 2 shooting of Erik Cantu, 17, according to a police statement. He turned himself in to police Tuesday night and remained in custody, said Police Chief William McManus.
Cantu is still unconscious and on life support, his family said Tuesday.
The Oath Keepers seditions conspiracy trial has been chugging along for three weeks, but today prosecutors got to the sexting part.
Politico: Sex, guns and sedition: Prosecutors describe Oath Keeper road trip to D.C.
Among the new details: Surveillance footage taken from the Comfort Inn showing Watkins, Caldwell and another Oath Keeper, Donovan Crowl, saluting each other hours after returning from the mob riot at the Capitol. The footage showed members of the Oath Keepers hauling large carts of cases that prosecutors say contained weapons into their hotel rooms.
Prosecutors also showed the jury a new series of text messages sent among leaders of the group as they traveled to Washington in the days before Jan. 6. It showed them carefully coordinating their locations and plans as they converged on Washington, with some stopping at prearranged outposts outside Washington on the way.
Amid that travel, prosecutors revealed messages between Rhodes and Kellye SoRelle, an attorney who Rhodes has claimed served as the group’s general counsel — but who prosecutors say did not act in that capacity — engaging in sexually explicit banter.
“If you need some come over,” Rhodes wrote to SoRelle on Jan. 2, 2021. SoRelle replied that she couldn’t but after a lengthier exchange said, “You’re too good at what you do. Whole bad boy thing. I am a damn moth to a [flame emoji]. I really am replaying my teenage years.”
Oath Keepers who have already pleaded guilty are up next.
Voter Suppression
The only state without election deniers on the ballot is North Dakota. I take it that the Rs in the other 49 states are scared witless [sic].
Supreme Court declines to consider challenge to racist citizenship laws
The Supreme Court on Monday refused to reconsider the so-called "Insular Cases," a series of cases decided in the early 1900s that are infamous today for their racist foundation.
The court's action dashes hopes of American Samoans who were seeking birthright citizenship. It also leaves intact a Tenth Circuit decision that has been seen as "breathing new life" into constitutional distinctions between U.S. states and territories — which former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal said establish "a second-class of unequal Americans."
Politico: Arizona AG’s office asks feds to investigate conservative nonprofit True the Vote
The group propagated claims of vote fraud by relying on geolocation data, which became the central focus of the movie “2000 Mules.”
This is Republican AG Mark Brnovich.
IMDB: 2000 Mules
Using cellphone geo-tracking data, the documentary purports to show evidence of thousands of discrete cellphone users who allegedly made dozens of trips each to multiple drop boxes where they deposited mail-in ballots in key swing states such as Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan.
Wikipedia: 2000 Mules
2000 Mules is a 2022 American debunked conspiracy theory[4][5] political film from right-wing political commentator Dinesh D'Souza that falsely[6] claims unnamed nonprofit organizations paid "mules" associated with the Democratic Party to illegally collect and deposit ballots into drop boxes in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin during the 2020 presidential election. D'Souza has a history of creating and spreading false conspiracy theories.[7]
The Associated Press (AP) reported that the film relies on "faulty assumptions, anonymous accounts and improper analysis of cellphone location data" provided by conservative[8] non-profit True the Vote.[9] FactCheck.org found the film's "supposed evidence is speculative."[10] National Public Radio (NPR) reported True the Vote "made multiple misleading or false claims about its [own] work".[11] AP reported that the film's assertion that True the Vote identified 1,155 paid mules in Philadelphia alone was false. The film presented a single unverified anonymous witness who said she saw people picking up what she "assumed" were payments for ballot collection in Arizona; no evidence of such payments was presented in any of the other four states.[9] The film characterizes the alleged operation as "ballot trafficking" with "stash houses", but presents no evidence that ballots were illegally collected to be deposited in drop boxes.[9][12][13][14]
Yesterday was Day One of early voting in Georgia, and the first practical test of the Georgia voter suppression law that made it illegal to offer food or water to those in line to vote. Voters started showing up at polling places at 5 am.
Gov. Kemp points to these incredibly long lines to say that the law couldn’t possible have been meant to suppress the vote.
Get out there and tell him
Nohow, No Way, Contrariwise, Nuh-uh!
Tell your friends. Volunteer to work the polls or watch for election meddlers, record them on your phones, and send them to the authorities and the InterWebz.
Nazism
Rachel Maddow has been covering American Nazi history in her podcast Ultra. She went into the sorry history of Nazism in the US, specifically plots to murder Jews, yesterday. But that’s not a surprise, or shouldn’t be if you read history. But see the “eye-popping”
- Hollywood’s Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Lost Angeles, by Laura B. Rosenzweig
- Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America, by Steven J. Ross
She is sorry to be freaking everybody out, but here we are again. Thing0 is threatening Jews for not supporting Israel as much as Evangelicals do.
Bah! Twitter snowflakes! Humbug! Telling the truth isn’t “potentially sensitive content”.
That isn’t Whatsit tweeting. It’s on Falsehood Anti-Social [sic].
Kanye West said he will go ‘death con 3’ on Jewish people in a now-removed Tweet
as soon as he wakes up.
Vice: Elon Musk Spoke to Putin Before Tweeting Ukraine Peace Plan: Report
Peace Appeasement Plan: Let the orcs keep everything they stole.
Vice: The world’s richest man spoke directly with Vladimir Putin, Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer reported. Musk denied the report in a tweet.
WaPo: Racist GOP appeals heat up in final weeks before midterms
Paywalled.
The toxic remarks appear to be receiving less pushback from Republicans than in past years
So...they reckon they can fire up their Base more than they activate ours? Let’s prove them dead wrong.
What is new is after years in which it was clear that to be credible in public life politicians had to reject prejudice, it’s now been normalized in ways that are really quite breathtaking. I don’t know if it’ll be very easy to put the genie back in the bottle.
Jonathan Greenblatt, Chief Executive of the Anti-Defamation League, quoted by WaPo.
Aladdin did it in the tale by appealing to the genie’s vanity, so that it went in by itself just to show that it could. In the present case, we find that the would-be MAGAlarchy is forcing the insufficiently racist RINOS, and especially millions of their children, into the outer darkness, as they see it.
People stand in their own shadows, and wonder why it is dark. Only they can turn around.
Zen koan
Democrats
We continue to offer the best of everything available to everyone. They continue to refuse all of it that they can because Those People will start to get their fair share.
- Hearing aids available over the counter
- Pardons for possession of marijuana
- A plan to end poverty in the US
- Advancing human rights, starting with voting, which gives us all of the others
- Protecting women’s health rights
- Protecting health care and human rights for trans people
Not electing paskudnyaks is the basis for all of this. Cue paskudnyak screaming and caterwauling.
It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the publick to be the most anxious for its welfare.
Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation (1769)
Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none.
Speech on the Bill for the Relief of Protestant Dissenters (7 March 1773)
Edmund Burke, once the Father of Conservatism, but today just another lousy knee-jerk, bleeding-heart, tax-and-invest, woke Liberal.
Calls out Mark Finchem, R election denier and Oath Keeper, running for Secretary of State in order to overturn 2024 elections.
January 6
DoJ filing on Bannon’s imminent sentencing.
For his sustained, bad-faith contempt of Congress, the defendant should be sentenced to six months’ imprisonment—the top end of the Sentencing Guidelines range—and fined $200,000—based on his insistence on paying the maximum fine rather than cooperate with the Probation Office’s routine pre-sentencing financial investigation.
So, can we get a search warrant here?
Iran
Ukraine
Ignoring the enemy’s forces is not a military strategy.
China
Environment
