Democracy is under vicious attack in Arizona

Rot flourishes in the dark, sunlight kills rot

Only the courts and the law, not morals or fairness, can shine the sun on the rot

Context

The next step I've been expecting the GOP to take in its assault on democracy, including elections, is fabrication of evidence to support their crackpot conspiracy theories. Short of engaging in widespread violence, faking evidence seems to be the only reasonable step the GOP has available to it in view of its poor situation in making its run at establishing some form of a corrupt autocracy-dictatorship. From what I can tell, the GOP did not cross the line in the last president's administration or in the ~64 lawsuits they filed to challenge the 2020 election results. But now that they have no choice, it appears that the GOP legislature in Arizona is desperate enough to take the big step to fake evidence to show that the 2020 election in that state was fraudulent. 

The next step in attacking democracy

MSNBC reported last night that Arizona republican legislators have hired a company called Cyber Ninjas to recount Maricopa county votes from the 2020 election. The attack on democracy lies in the company's lawsuit to do the recount in secret because company trade secrets are involved. The argument for secrecy due to trade secrets is a transparent republican lie. 

There is no trade secret about counting ballots. Most everyone on planet Earth realizes that counting ballots means looking at ballots using eyeballs and/or scanning machines to verify ballot and signature authenticity, count votes and decide what to do about questionable ballot markings. There is no basis for a trade secret(s) in any of that. But, what recounting ballots in secrecy does do is permit ballots to be remarked and rejected, thereby faking evidence that the ex-president won Maricopa county, when he in fact lost.

The rancid stench of republican desperation and duplicity in this is overpowering. Only Maricopa county is being recounted, not the rest of the state where the ex-president won. The court has ordered the company to describe how it is going to do the recount. The company refuses and is fighting against disclosure while continuing to do its "recount" or "audit." During the 2020 election, republicans demanded and received full access to both voting and vote counting in the name of transparency and election integrity. Now republicans demands taxpayers pay (~$150,000) for vote counting in secrecy in the name of pure partisan political bullshit, not election integrity.

Cyber Ninja's sympathies are clear. The company believes the 2020 vote was stolen and it supports QAnon conspiracy crackpottery and lies. It is being or has been hired by some other republican state legislatures for possible vote "recounts" or "audits" in those states. On top of all that anti-democratic partisan sleaze, private donors who demand their names be kept secret are giving Cyber Ninjas money for God only knows what. The company refuses to disclose anything related to that sleaze.

Part of the sleaze in this attack on democracy includes the fact that "reporters" working for OAN news are part of the machinery that is pumping money into Cyber Ninjas. Apparently in return for the cash, the radical right OAN propaganda and lies business will be the only "news" source allowed to report on the vote audit. 

This clearly looks like the time the republican party will officially embrace actual fabrication of evidence to support lies in furtherance of its relentless attacks on democracy. The GOP is on the verge of crossing the line to advance its corrupt, dictatorial political agenda. Moral constraints are not relevant in current republican politics. Maybe the only thing that can stop this attempt at massive vote fraud in Arizona is the courts. 

One can reasonably wonder what rank and file republicans in Arizona and all other states think of this new tactic. Do most who are aware of this approve? If so, what does that make the republican party, mostly democratic and rule of law-based or mostly demagogic, corrupt and tyrannical? Inquiring minds want to know.

Why The Republican Party Isn’t Rebranding After 2020

 

Typically, after losing a presidential election, a political party will undertake an intense intra-party debate over why it didn’t win and how the party needs to change to take back the White House. Democrats did so after losing in 1988, 2000, 2004 and 2016. In fact, even after winning in 2020 — taking control of the White House and U.S. Senate and maintaining control in the U.S. House — Democrats are having an intra-party debate, trying to figure out why they didn’t win more House seats and struggled with Latino voters. Republicans, too, have had such debates, after losses in 1996, 2008 and 2012. 

But not this time.

Despite Republicans losing the White House and Senate in 2020, and thus being totally swept out of power in Washington,¹ there’s been no official “autopsy” or widespread consideration of appointing new leaders or anything else. In the period after the 1988 presidential election, the Republican Party has lost the popular vote in all but one presidential race (2004). It has lost three of the last four presidential elections and allowed itself to be dominated by former President Donald Trump, who was twice impeached for breaking with democratic values. But it is moving forward like none of that really happened.

• Republicans on Capitol Hill and at the state level are returning to their Obama-era strategy of opposing everything the incumbent Democratic president does; 
• Republicans at the state level are adopting laws that make it harder for left-leaning people to vote, just like they did before and during the Trump presidency; 
• Republicans in Washington and at the state level are sticking with the party’s positions on issues of identity and race, which are a big part of the reason that the GOP is struggling among the growing parts of America’s electorate, namely people of color and white college graduates (this marks a change from the post-election periods in 2008 and 2012, when Republicans talked about how to better appeal to nonwhite voters); 
• State-level Republican officials, in particular, are taking other extreme actions, from casting Democratic women as “witches” to trying to bar Democratic-controlled cities from requiring residents to wear masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19; 
• And, perhaps most surprisingly, Republican Party officials are largely continuing to align themselves with Trump, even though the former president was both an electoral drag on the party and also a moral stain, with a string of racist comments and undemocratic actions that culminated in him encouraging his supporters to storm the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election results. 

1. The party’s core activists don’t want to shift gears. 

This is the simplest and most obvious explanation: The GOP isn’t changing directions because the people driving the car don’t want to. 

2. Trump is still a force in the party. 

After the 2012 elections, prominent Republicans sharply criticized Mitt Romney and his campaign. Democrats did the same to Hillary Clinton after 2016 — and sometimes included former President Barack Obama in their criticisms, too. For a political party to change direction, it nearly always has to distance itself from past leaders. 

Or put another way: For there to be an autopsy, there has to be a dead body.

3. Republicans almost won in 2020. 

To torture this “autopsy” metaphor even more: There’s a good argument that the party is still very much alive.

Trump would have won reelection had he done only about 1 percentage point better in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and about 3 points better in Michigan.

4. Republican voters aren’t clamoring for changes. 

5.  There aren’t real forces within the GOP leading change. 

MORE:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-the-republican-party-isnt-rebranding-after-2020/

American entrepreneurialism: The slander industry

Investigative reporter trolls self

This is just too good to not mention. The New York Times writes:

My colleague Kashmir Hill and I [New York Times reporter Aaron Krolik] were trying to learn who is responsible for — and profiting from — the growing ecosystem of websites whose primary purpose is destroying reputations.

So I wrote a nasty post. About myself.

Then we watched as a constellation of sites duplicated my creation.

Egad!! IT'S ALIIIIVE!!!!!

To get slander removed, many people hire a “reputation management” company. In my case, it was going to cost roughly $20,000.

We soon discovered a secret, hidden behind a smokescreen of fake companies and false identities. The people facilitating slander and the self-proclaimed good guys who help remove it are often one and the same.

Part 1:The stain

At first glance, the websites appear amateurish.

They have names like BadGirlReports.date, BustedCheaters.com and WorstHomeWrecker.com. Photos are badly cropped. Grammar and spelling are afterthoughts. They are clunky and text-heavy, as if they’re intended to be read by machines, not humans.

But do not underestimate their power. When someone attacks you on these so-called gripe sites, the results can be devastating. Earlier this year, we wrote about a woman in Toronto who poisoned the reputations of dozens of her perceived enemies by posting lies about them.

One woman in Ohio was the subject of so many negative posts that Bing declared in bold at the top of her search results that she “is a liar and a cheater” — the same way it states that Barack Obama was the 44th president of the United States. For roughly 500 of the 6,000 people we searched for, Google suggested adding the phrase “cheater” to a search of their names.

The unverified claims are on obscure, ridiculous-looking sites, but search engines give them a veneer of credibility. Posts from Cheaterboard.com appear in Google results alongside Facebook pages and LinkedIn profiles — or, in my case, articles in The New York Times.

The NYT interviewed one brave smear site owner, whose credentials include a criminal with a couple of stints in jail, e.g., for making death threats on one occasion and trying to pepper spray police in the face with Sriracha Dorito dust in another. He calmly explained why he does not feel bad about slandering people online. “Teach children not to talk to strangers, then teach them not to believe what they read on the internet.” Apparently, he sees himself as a life coach just trying to help the children of America.

The article is long and heavy with details, but mind-blowing. The astonishing high level of sleaze in this fine American industry arguably rivals that of the ex-president's personal life, business operations and his administration. Once again, the moral values of unregulated markets shine through for all to see. 

COVID in India

Cremating COVID victims in East Delhi 

The New York Times writes about the unfolding pandemic catastrophe in India. There are some similarities with the US, e.g., politicians downplay the death toll, but also some differences, e.g., a new double mutant strain of the virus. The NYT writes:

Fatalities have been overlooked or downplayed, understating the human toll of the country’s outbreak, which accounts for nearly half of all new cases in a global surge.

India’s coronavirus second wave is rapidly sliding into a devastating crisis, with hospitals unbearably full, oxygen supplies running low, desperate people dying in line waiting to see doctors — and mounting evidence that the actual death toll is far higher than officially reported.

Each day, the government reports more than 300,000 new infections, a world record, .... But experts say those numbers, however staggering, represent just a fraction of the real reach of the virus’s spread, which has thrown this country into emergency mode.

The sudden surge in recent weeks, with an insidious newer variant possibly playing a role, is casting increasing doubt on India’s official Covid-19 death toll of nearly 200,000, with more than 2,000 people dying every day.

Interviews from cremation grounds across the country, where the fires never stop, portray an extensive pattern of deaths far exceeding the official figures. Nervous politicians and hospital administrators may be undercounting or overlooking large numbers of dead, analysts say. And grieving families may be hiding Covid connections as well, out of shame, adding to the confusion in this enormous nation of 1.4 billion.

“It’s a complete massacre of data,” said Bhramar Mukherjee, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan who has been following India closely. “From all the modeling we’ve done, we believe the true number of deaths is two to five times what is being reported.”

At one of the large cremation grounds in Ahmedabad, a city in the western Indian state of Gujarat, bright orange fires light up the night sky, burning 24 hours a day, like an industrial plant that never shuts down. Suresh Bhai, a worker there, said he had never seen such a never-ending assembly line of death.

But he has not been writing down the cause of death as Covid-19 on the thin paper slips that he hands over to the mournful families, even though the number of dead is surging along with the virus.

“Sickness, sickness, sickness,” Mr. Suresh said. “That’s what we write.”

When asked why, he said it was what he had been instructed to do by his bosses, who did not respond to requests for comment.

Doctors worry that the runaway surge is being at least partly driven by the emergence of a virus variant known as the “double mutant,” B.1.617, because it contains genetic mutations found in two other difficult-to-control versions of the coronavirus. One of the mutations is present in the highly contagious variant that ripped through California earlier this year. The other mutation is similar to one found in the South African variant and believed to make the virus more resistant to vaccines.

Still, scientists caution it is too early to know for sure how pernicious the new variant emerging in India really is.

Over 13 days in mid-April, Bhopal officials reported 41 deaths related to Covid-19. But a survey by The New York Times of the city’s main Covid-19 cremation and burial grounds, where bodies were being handled under strict protocols, revealed a total of more than 1,000 deaths during the same period.

“Many deaths are not getting recorded and they are increasing every day,” said Dr. G.C. Gautam, a cardiologist based in Bhopal. He said that officials were doing this because “they don’t want to create panic.”

This virus appears to evolve rapidly. If it turns out that a new mutant that arises anywhere can evade vaccines and is equally or more lethal, the world just might be forced to do another pandemic response all over gain. If a bad combination of mutations arises, that new variant could start a whole new pandemic. An October 2020 estimate of the pandemic cost in the US alone is $16 trillion. All of that would seem to be a very good argument for a more intense global effort to get all people vaccinated as soon as possible.