What do you think?

 

In a media press conference on Friday, President Biden said he’s ‘convinced’ Russia will invade Ukraine, based on advice from U.S. intelligence agencies.

But so far, so good… no Russian-Ukrainian war yet.  Seems we’re still trying to give peace a chance.

Based on media reports, we are getting a lot of mixed messages such as: Troops being ‘put in place’ and ‘at the ready’; Russian military commanders being given the ‘go-ahead’ by Putin; a summit between Biden and Putin being agreed to ‘in principle’, according to French President Macron; Ukrainian President Zelensky pushing for ‘preemptive sanctions’ to be put in place as a deterrent; etc.  It really is hard to know what’s actually going on.  But such can be expected in the fog of a pre-war.  So, here’s the question:

Do you think Russia will invade Ukraine?  If yes, how soon?  If no, why not?

Republican election subversion: Update 3

The New York Times reports on Rusty Bowers, speaker of the Arizona House. Bowers killed a state bill that would have given the Republican-controlled Legislature the power to unilaterally overturn the results of an election. Arizona Republican radical right autocrats are very unhappy with Bowers and want him out of power. The NYT writes:

The bill’s sponsor, John Fillmore — who boasts of being the most conservative member of the Arizona State Legislature — told us in an interview that Bowers’s tactics amounted to saying: “I am God. I control the rules. You will do what I say.”

Fillmore’s bill would have eliminated early voting altogether and mandated that all ballots be counted by hand.

Bowers did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, but his public comments indicate a deep unease with how Trump and his base of supporters have promoted wild theories about election fraud and have pushed legislation that voting rights groups say amounts to an undemocratic, nationwide power grab.

“We gave the authority to the people,’’ Bowers told Capitol Media Services, an Arizona outlet, earlier this week. “And I’m not going to go back and kick them in the teeth.’’

Bowers’s resistance to the shifting currents of Republican politics has made him a frequent target of the pro-Trump right.

Last year, when he survived an attempt to recall him from the Legislature, he complained about the aggressive tactics of the Trump supporters behind it.

​​“They’ve been coming to my house and intimidating our family and our neighborhood,” Bowers said, describing how mobile trucks drove by his home and called him a pedophile over a loudspeaker.

Fillmore, who insisted he was willing to bargain over any aspects of his bill, said he was “disappointed that members of my caucus do not have the testicular fortitude” to stand up to Bowers.

But he hinted at moves afoot to remove the speaker, whom he accused of sabotaging what he said was a good-faith effort to rein in voting practices that, in his view, have gone too far.

“I’m an old-school person. I do not go calmly. I do not go quietly,” Fillmore warned. “I believe Republican voters are solidly in line with me.” (emphasis added)

This is more evidence of the aggressive authoritarianism and detachment from reality and reason of most Republicans. The autocratic-plutocratic-Christian theocratic GOP is dead serious about subverting elections and installing radical right Republicans in elected offices. 

Republican election subversion: Update 2

This is from the New York Times today:

MADISON, Wis. — First, Wisconsin Republicans ordered an audit of the 2020 election. Then they passed a raft of new restrictions on voting. And in June, they authorized the nation’s only special counsel investigation into 2020.

Now, more than 15 months after former President Donald J. Trump lost the state by 20,682 votes, an increasingly vocal segment of the Republican Party is getting behind a new scheme: decertifying the results of the 2020 presidential election in hopes of reinstalling Mr. Trump in the White House.

Wisconsin is closer to the next federal election than the last, but the Republican effort to overturn the election results here is picking up steam rather than fading away — and spiraling further from reality as it goes. The latest turn, which has been fueled by Mr. Trump, bogus legal theories and a new candidate for governor, is creating chaos in the Republican Party and threatening to undermine its push to win the contests this year for governor and the Senate.

The situation in Wisconsin may be the most striking example of the struggle by Republican leaders to hold together their party when many of its most animated voters simply will not accept the reality of Mr. Trump’s loss.  

“This is a real issue,” said Timothy Ramthun, the Republican state representative who has turned his push to decertify the election into a nascent campaign for governor. Mr. Ramthun has asserted that if the Wisconsin Legislature decertifies the results and rescinds the state’s 10 electoral votes — an action with no basis in state or federal law — it could set off a movement that would oust President Biden from office.

“We don’t wear tinfoil hats,” he said. “We’re not fringe.” 

Wisconsin has the nation’s most active decertification effort. In Arizona, a Republican state legislator running for secretary of state, along with candidates for Congress, has called for recalling the state’s electoral votes. In September, Mr. Trump wrote a letter to Georgia officials asking them to decertify Mr. Biden’s victory there, but no organized effort materialized.

State Representative Timothy Ramthun of Wisconsin, is running for 

governor on a platform of decertifying the 2020 election and 

reinstalling Donald J. Trump as president

Things are shockingly bad when tinfoil hat wearing, reality-detached, freak politicians claim they are not fringe. That is arguably true for most of the Wisconsin Republican Party. It depends on how one defines fringe. 

The NYT reported that Wisconsin’s Democratic incumbent governor, Tony Evers, commented recently, “Republicans now are arguing over whether we want democracy or not.” Evers correctly states the situation with the GOP there. 

Republican politicians who understand that efforts at decertification are tinfoil hat drivel are speaking out of both sides of their mouths. They know their base is enraged, or as one enraged politician correctly put it, “foaming at the mouth” about the solen election. But those GOP politicians who know the election was not stolen nonetheless do not say that in public. This is evidence that for most Republican politicians nationwide, re-election is more important than defending democracy or truth.

The Republican election fraud lie with its intentionally fomented anti-election rage and hate is not going to go away. That is the case for most Republican states and for most rank and file Republicans in all states. This is rock solid evidence of the anti-democratic, autocratic-theocratic mindset that now dominates the morally rotted GOP.[1] 

Footnote: 

1. Opinions will differ, but my definition of political moral rot includes denying inconvenient facts and reality and rejecting sound but inconvenient reasoning. Deceit, lies and crackpot reasoning are immoral, or if malice is in it, evil.

Update on Republican election subversion

The Republican Party has been intent on subverting elections since the 2020 election. The rank and file are fine with all of this. Poll data indicates that over 80% of them sincerely but falsely believe the election was fraudulent and Biden is an illegitimate president. Continuously spreading the lie and arguing that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent is a core Republican propaganda talking point these days. 

To deal with this faux problem, Republicans have been passing laws and doing things to (i) suppress votes in non-Republican areas, (ii) intimidate non-Republican voters, (iii) intimidate honest election officials, (iv) rig elections and (v) outright overturn results that Republicans do not like. The election subversion effort in about 18 red states is multi-pronged and complicated. As early 2022 voting starts, it is of great interest to see how Republican election subversion efforts are playing out. The 2022 elections could be the first in modern times that are sufficiently subverted to make it impossible for one party to control congress and legislatures. This applies to many red states. The effects of successful election subversion could last for decades or even much longer, which is the Republican dream of single-party rule.

The New York Time writes in an article, Texas Voting Law Leads to Jump in Ballot Application Rejections, about how the Republican subversion plan is playing out in Texas:

Texas Republicans said the state’s new voting law would make it “easy to vote, hard to cheat.” County election officials say it’s sowing confusion ahead of next month’s primaries.

Thousands of Texans have had their absentee ballot applications denied as a result of regulations put in place under the state’s new election law, a jump in rejections that could force many older and disabled voters to either vote in person or not at all in primary elections early next month.

With a Friday deadline, election officials in the state’s most populous counties have rejected 10 percent — or 12,000 — of the absentee ballot applications received as of Thursday, according to voting data obtained by The New York Times. Officials said the rejection rate reflected a significant increase from past years, and most often because a voter failed to satisfy the new identification requirements.

“It’s high, there’s no question,” Bruce Sherbet, the election administrator for Collin County, northeast of Dallas, said of the number of rejections. Mr. Sherbet said his county typically rejects a handful of applications. This year, that number was roughly 300.

The Times tallied rejected applications in 12 of the 13 Texas counties with more than 400,000 residents. Bexar County, home to San Antonio, did not disclose its numbers. The total of rejected ballots could still change as applications were still arriving ahead of the Friday night deadline.

As they prepare for the March 1 primary, election officials say the new law is sowing confusion among voters and further burdening already taxed local election offices.

As one of 18 states to pass more restrictive voting laws after the 2020 presidential election, Texas’ rocky rollout could provide a preview of what could come elsewhere.

Confusion over absentee ballot applications has a more limited impact in Texas than in many other states, however. Texas only allows voters who are over 65 or who have a verified disability to vote by mail. During the 2020 election, more than 1 million Texans voted by mail, although that number is expected to fall, as turnout regularly dips in the midterm elections.  

There are signs that the problems, particularly with new identification rules, may extend beyond applications to processing ballots. With less than a week of data on returned ballots, Harris County said its ballot rejection rates were as high as 34 percent, and Dallas County had rejected about 20 percent of ballots.

“We’re seeing an alarming number of mail ballots being rejected and local officials are left scrambling to protect voter access as the deadline looms,” Isabel Longoria, the elections administrator of Harris County, said in a statement.  

Some rejections stemmed from layering the requirements of the new law atop a byzantine electoral bureaucracy.  

 

Dr. Larry Schoenfeld, professor emeritus at UT Health San Antonio, and Heidi Schoenfeld, Democratic Party Precinct Chair in Bexar County, had their initial absentee ballot applications rejected 

“The system is designed for failure,” said Ms. Schoenfeld [a voter who tried and failed twice to get the paperwork right]. “It’s designed to make it very, very difficult for people to vote.” (emphasis added)

Note that one county refuses to provide data about rejected ballots. Going forward, it is reasonable to expect less and less election subversion information to be released for propaganda and deceit purposes. Probably less data will be officially collected, making it easy to claim faux ignorance. The less the public knows about how effectively elections have been corrupted and subverted, the easier it is to sell false narratives. 

The profoundly mendacious Republican Party and its lying politicians and propaganda organs (Fox News, etc.) will lie and tells us that all the massive (non-existent) vote fraud has been wrung out of the process by valiant Republicans passing patriotic election-cleaning laws. The public will be lied to and deceived with a vengeance.