News bits: Abortion & GOP dirty tricks; The dictator’s policies; GOP attacks on voting

Rolling Stone reports about radicalized, authoritarian GOP efforts to keep voters from voting about abortion. They have to do that because they know they will lose at the ballot box and because they are authoritarians who absolutely, positively do not care about or support majority opinion when it is inconvenient to them or their dogmas. RS writes:

The Dirty Tricks the GOP Is Using to Keep Abortion 

Off the Ballot in 2024

Republicans are getting killed on reproductive rights, and they're taking desperate measures to prevent their constituents from having a say next year

Since the Supreme Court struck down Roe in June of 2022, the reproductive rights movement has gone seven for seven at the ballot box, defeating efforts to restrict abortion in states like Kansas, Kentucky, and Montana, and enshrining protections in swing states like Michigan and Ohio. It’s hardly a wonder why Republicans are emptying their bag of dirty tricks to make sure it doesn’t work: inventing astronomical “costs,” conspiring with anti-abortion groups to change the ballot language, and fighting to ban petition collectors from public spaces, among other strategies.

In South Dakota, anti-abortion activists, with assists from GOP officials, have tried out a variety of tactics in recent months. Activists have been harassed, videotaped and repeatedly called the police on petition collectors, while local officials have sought to pass ordinances banning them from collecting signatures in public places. Most recently, the attorney general warned in a letter that he was in possession of “video and photographic evidence” that could allow opponents to challenge the signatures that have been collected so far.

“The organized opposition is more aggressive than I’ve encountered in any of these fights in the past,” says Adam Weiland, who has worked on various ballot measures in the state for years. “It’s the first time I’ve ever encountered people who don’t even want you to get on the ballot and let the voters vote. That’s the whole focus of their campaign.”  

The same stories are playing out in battleground states and Republican-controlled states around the country. (GOP tyranny tricks in Arizona, Florida, Nevada and Missouri are discussed)

This is the new normal for the radicalized, kleptocratic authoritarian Republican Party. It is ruthless, shameless, vicious and, among some other nasty things, virulently opposed to democracy, voting rights, inconvenient fact or truth, civil liberties and inconvenient majority public opinion.

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The Atlantic reports about a policy that DJT would implement if he is re-elected in 2024:

TRUMP WILL ABANDON NATO

“I don’t give a shit about NATO.” Thus did former President Donald Trump once express his feelings about America’s oldest and strongest military alliance. Not that this statement, made in the presence of John Bolton, the national security adviser at the time, came as a surprise. Long before he was a political candidate, Trump questioned the value of American alliances. Of Europeans, he once wrote that “their conflicts are not worth American lives. Pulling back from Europe would save this country millions of dollars annually.” 

But during Trump’s time in office, the withdrawal never happened. That was because someone was always there to talk him out of it. Bolton says he did; Jim Mattis, John Kelly, Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo, and even Mike Pence are thought to have done so too.

But they didn’t change his mind. And if Trump is reelected in 2024, none of those people will be in the White House. All of them have broken with the former president, in some cases dramatically, and there isn’t another pool of Republican analysts who understand Russia and Europe, because most of them either signed statements opposing him in 2016 or criticized him after 2020. In a second term, Trump would be surrounded by people who either share his dislike of American security alliances or don’t know anything about them and don’t care. This time, the ill will that Trump has always felt toward American allies would likely manifest itself in a clear policy change. “The damage he did in his first term was reparable,” Bolton told me. “The damage in the second term would be irreparable.”

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A major unknown for the 2024 elections is how effective the pro-tyranny Republican Party will be in suppressing non-Republican votes while trying to protect Republican votes. If the election is close as it now appears it will be, a small effect might be sufficient to subvert the election and put DJT back in the White House. CBS News writes:

Eligible voters are being swept up in anti-democracy 

activists' efforts to purge voter rolls

Voters eligible to cast ballots are already being swept up in a grassroots effort to purge the nation's registration rolls ahead of the 2024 presidential election, a CBS News investigation has found.

The undertaking, which includes the involvement of a lawyer tied to former President Trump's alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, tends to affect minority or younger voters who may be statistically more likely to vote Democrat, according to local election officials.

Georgia became ground zero for the movement after Republicans in the state pushed through a law in 2021 allowing citizens to file an unlimited number of challenges against fellow voters within their own county. In the two years since the law passed, a CBS News investigation found more than 80,000 challenges have been filed against Georgia voters — many of them by a loose network of about a dozen conservative activists.

Public records reveal a local Republican Party activist in Virginia who attended a March strategy session, then filed a slate of 43 voter challenges in August, ahead of the November election. Activists have also recently filed challenges in Washington state and Michigan, where a public records request revealed a GOP official conducted a "field investigation," going to dozens of homes to check if voters were registered to the correct address.

Gail Lee is one of scores of Georgia volunteers who scours the rolls, looking for voters registered at P.O. boxes, those who appear in the rolls multiple times, or those who list birthdays so old that the voter may be deceased. She then compiles a dossier on each challenged voter and sends it to the county election board.

"I believe it's what God wants me to do," Lee said. "He knows what's right and what's wrong and there's things that need to be fixed in the voter rolls."

 

Gail Lee knows the 2020 election was stolen 

and Biden is illegitimate, so she works God’s 

will to purge the evil from voter rolls

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Headlines ’n bits:

Liz Cheney warns that Trump won't leave office if he's elected to a second term and says voting for him ‘may mean the last election that you ever get to vote in’ -- “There's no question. Absolutely. He’s already done it once. ... He's already attempted to seize power, and he was stopped, thankfully, and for the good of the nation and the republic. But he said he will do it again. He’s expressed no remorse for what he did.”

Fox News interrupts Trump speech to fact-check his “many untruths” -- “The 2020 election was not rigged. It was not stolen,” said anchor Arthel Neville (this is strange)

“Can’t even bring themselves to denounce neo-Nazis”: Texas GOP's internal war over Hitler apologists -- Texas Republicans called it “Marxist” to bar members from associating with Holocaust deniers. Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan declared that this was no “casual misstep” but a sign “of the moral, political rot that has been festering in a certain segment of our party.” (moral rot?? MAGA!! to that)

‘Donald Trump will never leave office voluntarily’: Rep. Schiff on the threat of a second Trump term -- Congressman Adam Schiff discusses Donald Trump calling President Biden the “destroyer” of democracy despite his own efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the new warnings of Trump’s threat to democracy.

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