8/23: Redistricting: It's Not for Smoke-Filled Rooms Any More

8/23/20

Both parties are already gearing up for a fight when redistricting is next underway. 

On one side, there is the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee and its National Democratic Redistricting Committee. On the other, there's the Republican State Leadership Committee and the National Republican Redistricting Trust. Both sides, TheHill.com reports, are raising gobs of money.

District 22 in southeast Texas. There are also fully-encircled 
pockets of land in District 22 that are in other districts. 

Redistricting is a kingmaker. When the majority party draws up a congressional map so that it creates a sure-win district for itself, it disenfranchises every member of the other party who lives there. 

For years, gerrymandering was outside voters' notice. That changed after the 2010 Census, when these de facto power grabs were too egregious to ignore, particularly by Republicans in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Texas. 

Democrats were similarly accused of drawing wayward district lines in Illinois and Maryland. Numerous court battles forced some redistricting during the rest of the decade, but they were hard-won, expensive battles. As a result, some states have instituted redistricting via bipartisan committee.

As a result of the lopsided redistricting, Democratic majorities in vote totals were emasculated. In 2012, TheHill.com says, Democratic House candidates won 49.6 million votes, outdoing Republican House candidates by 1.4 million votes. Nevertheless, Democrats won 201 seats to the Republicans' 234 seats.

If that's not disenfranchisement, you can call it something else: Under any other name, it would smell just as sweet.

You'll recall, too, that current round of redistricting started many months ago. The Census is the basis for drawing districts based on population, and the administration tried for months to force the Census Bureau to serve the Party of Trump. The administration tried and failed to add a citizenship question, which, along with threats of stripping naturalized immigrants of their citizenship, would have intimidated immigrants. 

The president leaned hard, too, into skipping homeless and undocumented residents, who have been included in previous counts. One of those groups rarely votes and the other can't, but their presence still affects the population counts used for redistricting. It was another attempt to shear Democrats of full representation under the law.

We'll have to keep on eye on this. Fortunately, this time around, a lot more eyes will be watching too.

Has redistricting been kind to your preferred candidates since 2010? How do you think the redistricting system could be changed to be more fair to all parties? Will you be able to follow redistricting proceedings as an individual citizen?

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/512836-redistricting-control-on-the-line-in-state-elections?fbclid=IwAR3Sl4lCVv-jtLZeEGL4tv2j0xa0G6e8Wam_pUlQ6PVYrY8ovW5GfdYOm6Q

9/8 Defamation suit

 9/8/20: The US Wants to Take Over Defending Trump in His Personal Lawsuit

The U.S. Department of Justice wants a state-level defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump to be turned into a federal lawsuit so they can dismiss it altogether, according to reports published Tuesday. This idea marks a new extreme in the DOJ's willingness to defend Donald Trump's personal interests.

The lawsuit is for remarks Trump made after being accused of rape in a memoir by the victim, Jean Carroll, who was a long-time columnist for Elle Magazine. In June 2019, New York Magazine published an excerpt from that memoir, titling the article "Hideous Men: Donald Trump assaulted me in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room 23 years ago. But he's not alone on the list of awful men in my life."

Trump reacted angrily. "I have no idea who this woman is. This is a woman who's also accused other men of things, as you know. It is a totally false accusation," Trump said. "I think she was married, as I read. I have no idea who she is." He went on to accuse her of making it up for publicity. "It's just as bad for people to believe it, particularly when there is zero evidence. Worse still for a dying publication to try to prop itself up by peddling fake news -- it's an epidemic."

In response, Jean Carroll filed a lawsuit for defamation, asking to depose Trump, and for a DNA sample that she could match to the dress she was wearing.

The idea is that Donald Trump made his remarks in his capacity as POTUS, which is just the same as the United States, and nobody can sue the United States for defamation. That is, it's saying Trump and the US Government are the same entity, for one thing -- and it would mean that the US Government would pay Trump's legal bills instead of the expense coming from Trump's own pocket. Finally, making the case a federal one will render the entire case moot.

What do you think? Is there any reason this case should be in Federal Court?

Is the DOJ just tying to remove the case from a state court because Trump and successor Presidents can’t pardon Trump from state crimes?

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/515583-justice-department-moves-to-assist-trump-in-e-jean-carroll-lawsuit?fbclid=IwAR2P7mExmRtDIqH_5vm768WKnl-RadFcGzM_fl3PeTbHT1TQj7w8LsayQgM

8/20: Lies, D*mned Lies, and Trumpers

8/20/2020

You expect spin from politicians. If they spin wide, we roll our eyes. But when it's a Trumper-level lie, we have to pick our jaws up off the floor.

These guys seem to think that no one follows the news.

Steve Bannon in 2017. He was released on $5 million bail yesterday after his
arrest for fraud. He allegedly took money raised to fund the border wall.  

Today's howlers include: VP Mike Pence saying he didn't know that Trump was embracing QAnon. He says he heard Trump saying "I heard the president talk about how he appreciates people that support him."

Postmaster General DeJoy, in a House hearing, saying it's "unfair and false" to suggest that he is trying to suppress mail-in voting. He never even talked to Trump about it. DeJoy says it's an "outrageous claim." He clarified later, saying he never talked about operations with Trump.

Steve Bannon says his arrest for fraud when he took money from a fundraiser that was supposed to support building a border wall on the U.S. border with Mexico. He says his arrest was a "fiasco," but not for him: He says it's designed "to stop people who want to build the wall." 

And that's just one day.

How anyone can say such things with a straight face is beyond me. This is cynicism beyond belief.

These aren't QAnon members assembling a false reality from hints and fictions. They're people in the highest positions in the land.

Maybe they intuitively know their supporters right down to the pig knuckles, and know their fans won't care. Or maybe these liars understand that their fans enjoy seeing people get away with lying, as if it were some kind of a prank being played on the A students they hated in high school.

Spin is normal for politicians. Nobody is questioning the level of shock and anger that Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) expressed Friday upon learning that the local USPS in San Antonio, TX cleared away big piles of mail to create a kind of Potemkin Post Office for his visit. The man's grandstanding, but not lying. Eye roll.

But when the President lies about voter fraud in mail-in ballots, when he tells Americans that COVID-19 is going to go away, when he sends a private federal army to assault peaceful protesters, when he puts flunkeys into positions of trust, when he refuses to listen to intelligence briefings, when he's willing to commit fraud to be re-elected, and when he lies about all of it --

I have no words that can encompass how awful it is.


Clearly Trump and his henchmen are the biggest liars. But beyond them, are regular Republican politicians kind of lying, too, when they don’t call out Trumper lies? What would it take for regular Republican politicians to denounce actions like Trump’s and DeJoy’s destruction of the Post Office? Will any of the Republican politicians ever step away from Trump and stick up for their constituents? What could possibly change to make that happen?

"White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon at CPAC 2017 February 24th 2017 by Michael Vadon" by Michael Vadon is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Pence: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/21/mike-pence-trump-qanon-embrace-399917

Bannon: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12464548/steve-bannon-arrest-fiasco-stop-wall-released-bail/
DeJoy: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/21/dejoy-postal-service-hearing-399659
Castro: https://www.texastribune.org/2020/08/20/san-antonio-post-office-joaquin-castro/

ReplyForward

8/20: Another Smackdown for Trump Efforts to Keep Financial Records Private

8/20/2020

Donald Trump has fought tooth and claw to keep from having his tax records made public. On Thursday, a federal judge struck down another attempt to protect his records from a subpoena.

It's just one more battle in an ongoing war. Trump's case against the subpoena went to the US Supreme Court, which ruled against him in July in regards to a criminal inquiry underway in New York. SCOTUS said that the President doesn’t have "absolute immunity" to prosecution. 

Trump has tried to have the courts toss the annoying subpoena.
 

The inquiry appears to involve fraud that took place before Trump was elected.

(As you may recall, the second part of that SCOTUS ruling said that the House could not have Trump's tax returns, because the information they needed was available elsewhere.)

After the Supreme Court ruling, Trump's lawyers found two more fig leaves in the law that allowed them to appeal -- again -- to block the subpoena for Trump's financial records. The records are held by his accounting firm, Mazars USA, so the subpoena is called the Mazar Subpoena. Technically, a grand jury requested the subpoena, which was issued in September of 2019.

(As you'll recall, Trump fired New York's Federal Court Southern District attorney general, Geoffrey Berman, in June when rumor held that Berman was close to pursuing charges against Trump. Berman's deputy took over his post.)

The current inquiry -- including the Mazar subpoena -- is not a Federal case. Instead, it is led by New York County (i.e., Manhattan) District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., and involves violations of state law.

The Federal judge in Thursday's ruling, US District Judge Victor Marrero, drove his point home with strong language. The appeal, he wrote, was

"...as unprecedented and far-reaching as it is perilous to the rule of law and other bedrock Constitutional principles on which this country was founded and by which it continues to be governed."

WITHIN AN HOUR, Trump's lawyers had filed another appeal, this time with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, asking for emergency help to stop the subpoena from being enforced next week.

One can only conclude that whatever is in those records must be awfully bad for Trump.

"Donald Trump" by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/20/politics/donald-trump-new-york-tax-records/index.html?fbclid=IwAR1WUR5xAHO0DniHlyQfxh_piy7z41PBn21l_G7eKNphAZ9Y8zYi364PkLI

8/13: An Old Hollywood Hand, Emhoff Creates a New Role

8/13/2020

Outgoing, easygoing, and soon going (fingers crossed) to One Observatory Circle, the official Vice President's home, Douglas Emhoff will be the very first Second Gentleman if Biden and Harris are elected in November.

Emhoff has an upbeat personality; he talks like a happy man. He'll continue his entertainment law practice in Washington, DC. "It's something I love and that I'm good at it," he told The Hollywood Reporter in March, according to Fox News.

Supporter: Emhoff cradles Kamala Harris after she
withdraws from the 2020 presidential race.

Harris was California's Attorney General when they met, at the suggestion of a client. Crisette Hudlin, whose husband Reginald Hudlin was a producer for Django Unchained, advised Harris not to look Emhoff up on Google before she met him. "Don't overthink it," Hudlin said.

It was not precisely a "blind date." Emhoff phoned Harris to set it up. An old hand in Hollywood, Emhoff was nonetheless star-struck enough to leave Harris a comically long, rambling phone message that Harris kept. They listen to it on anniversaries. August 22 -- Saturday -- will be their sixth. Harris and Emhoff are both age 55.

Emhoff has two grown children who call Harris "Momala." The Jewish Telegraphic Agency says the pronunciation is identical to the Yiddish word mamele ("Little Mama.")

Emhoff is Jewish and Caucasian, while Harris' parents were from India and the Caribbean. When Emhoff and Harris married, Harris gave him a necklace of flowers, part of a traditional Indian wedding, and Emhoff stepped on a glass, part of a traditional Jewish wedding.

Like any Hollywood insider, Emhoff knows what it means to "create" a role. He'll have to meet expectations that are not fully known. He'll have to prove that he's his own person, rather than some kind of masculine arm candy. He'll have to endear himself to the public and to Harris' political associates. He'll need to show his personality, but not so much that he steals Harris' scenes.

I think we can be hopeful.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/kamala-harris-husband-doug-emhoff-what-to-know Jewish nickname pronounced Momala:  https://www.jta.org/2020/08/13/united-states/kamala-harris-yiddish-nickname-shows-how-close-she-is-with-her-jewish-family Date of wedding: https://www.brides.com/story/kamala-harris-husband-douglas-emhoff Indian wedding traditions: https://www.manhattanbride.com/insights/indian/ ReplyForward

8/20: How QAnon Hooked its Claws into Religious Believers

A QAnon motto, spelled WWG1WGA, means Where We Go 
One, We Go All. Another catchphrase: The Storm is Coming.

8/20/2020

On Wednesday, Facebook announced that it's banning QAnon groups and accounts.  How many? Almost 800.

They may be nuts, but they're everywhere. QAnon, the bizarre far-right conspiracy movement that touts Trump and racism, has morphed not-so-subtly into a proto-religion, in part by co-opting religious belief in the Apocalypse.

"It is a movement united in mass rejection of reason, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values," wrote Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic. "The way it breathes life into an ancient preoccupation with end-times is also radically new."

Personally, I've always avoided Revelations, the last chapter of the New Testament. The story is an incomprehensible mash of memorable scenes, such as God opening seven seals, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a river of blood, a sun dark as night and a moon red as blood, etc., with the whole dominated by a vision largely interpreted as nuclear war. It's scary as hell.

Still, a sub-group of Christians loves to speculate about how the prophecies will play out. They're constantly trying to interpret real-life events for their place in the end-times story. "The storm is coming," a QAnon catchphrase apparently plucked from the last scene of The Terminator (1984), fits right into the narrative. It's a petri dish for conspiracy thinking -- perfect for cultivating the sickness that is QAnon.

QAnon also exploits conservative Christians' tendency to meld theology with an unholy resistance to change, which encourages clinging to the mindset of a less tolerant age. The American tradition of religious separatism makes it easier for believers to cold-shoulder outsiders' opinions and beliefs.

"Q," the person or entity who, since October 2017, has posted incoherent clues that QAnon followers treat like golden raindrops from heaven, has no trouble quoting the Bible, either. In April, he quoted Ephesians: “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might. Put on the full armor of God so that you will be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil.” By "the devil," of course, he means the pedophile ring that runs the world.

Rather comical, that. The theories "require the government to be one-minded, singularly-minded, and perfectly efficient," wrote Morgan Lee in the May issue of Christianity Today. "Anybody who's been in the military or worked with CIA, DEA, U.S. Customs, etc., we always used to consider it a minor miracle when a plane would land and not fall apart." Lee's belief is that the QAnon conspiracies are a test of believers' ability to discern which messages are from God and which are not.

We can discern one thing about the mysterious "Q," and that is that Q is no friend to the United States. Nevertheless, QAnon is probably at least as contagious as COVID19, and it will be harder to treat. The group rejects the view of reality that most of us share, and they do not respond to reason.

Wrote LaFrance, "To look at QAnon is to see not just a conspiracy theory but the birth of a new religion."



Does the spread of QAnon beliefs amuse you or scare you? Or both? What difference could the group make in the upcoming election? If we ignore it, will it go away?

"File:QAnon in red shirt (48555421111).jpg" by Marc Nozell from Merrimack, New Hampshire, USA is licensed under CC BY 2.0

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/psychology-qanon-why-do-seemingly-sane-people-believe-bizarre-conspiracy-ncna900171

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/19/politics/donald-trump-qanon/index.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/qanon-nothing-can-stop-what-is-coming/610567/

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/may-web-only/conspiracy-theories-qanon-bible-christians-jesus.html

8/18: Senate Intelligence Report Says What We Already Knew

8/18/2020:  

It was Vladimir Putin who ordered hacks to damage then-candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016, a Senate Intelligence Committee report concluded Tuesday.

Under Putin's command, Russian hackers broke into computer networks and accounts related to the Democratic Party and made several moves to combat Clinton's campaign. The report stated that the Russians intended to undermine the U.S. democratic process.

In a conclusion that some of us would have expected only on Saturday Night Live, Republicans of the bipartisan committee found that even though:

—Trump operative Paul Manafort was a "grave counterintelligence threat" busily sharing Democratic polling and campaign intelligence with Russian intelligence agents and employees of a Russian oligarch, and

--Manafort created "opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over...the Trump Campaign," and

--Trump associate Roger Stone orchestrated the timing of a Wikileaks release of emails potentially damaging to Clinton's campaign, and

--Trump's personal attorney Michael Cohen had several meetings in 2015 and 2016 in Moscow about Trump's business interests, primarily in building a Trump Tower there, and later lied to Congress, and

--Donald Trump, Jr. actively sought information damaging to Hillary's campaign during a 2016 meeting over Trump Tower Moscow

...that there was still no evidence that President Trump actually COLLUDED with Moscow. Robert Mueller's 2017 report came to that conclusion as well.

The word "evidence" apparently means "proof" in lawyerland. Smoke is evidence of fire, but because in rare instances it could also be evidence of tear gas, one can't draw conclusions.

Democratic senators who have been part of the three-year-long committee probe, including Kamala Harris, disagreed that there was no collusion in an annex to the report.



What now? One hopes that Trump supporters will pay closer attention to the long, long history of Trump's transcontinental brotherhood with Vladimir Putin & Co.

TheHill.com offers a fuller account of the report.

Do you think that collusion took place? What can be done with the information now that Trump has been impeached but remained in office? Will this Senate report affect the Election in any way? 

"Vladimir Putin - Caricature" by DonkeyHotey is licensed under CC BY 2.0

https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/512613-five-takeaways-from-final-senate-intel-russia-report?fbclid=IwAR0gJqYkXOXyK_L_XYkeV1L-0nWSm-NDvuXlF1vaIg6drmo__WIR5-sM7_8

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-18/putin-ordered-2016-democratic-hack-bipartisan-senate-panel-says