Two bits: An opinion on democracy 2024; Bad faith politics: An “election integrity” update

WaPo opinion columnist Jennifer Rubin mentions some pro-democracy possibilities:

Opinion  |  2024 resolution: Save democracy

Second, forget about “Why doesn’t the media … ?” Understand that for-profit media outlets are not in the business of making informed citizens. They are in the moneymaking business, which they think entails hyping horse-race politics and stoking fear of bad things (such as the recession that did not happen). You can write letters to the editor and send concise, polite emails to the culprit to call out whataboutism and false balance.

Better yet, look for and help amplify the instances in which print, cable and online media shed their habit of normalizing four-times-indicted former president Donald Trump and level with voters about the authoritarian threat.

Broaden the pro-democracy coalition. Unless the entire pro-democracy movement cooperates to defeat the MAGA movement and its likely nominee, Trump and his cronies will shred our democracy and change the fabric of American life. They are planning what can only be described as a White Christian dictatorship in which they use the military, Justice Department and executive fiat to punish enemies and ferret out dissent.

Now is no time to be picky about anti-MAGA allies. This person might have once supported the Iraq War; that person’s fantasizing about a magical Democratic nominee might drive you up the wall. None of that matters now. Once our democracy is secured, Americans can return to arguing about issues whose importance fades in the face of a dire threat to American democracy.

During the fight to vanquish the MAGA threat, you’ll have to tolerate differences in tactics and policy with other democracy defenders. Bringing everyone into the big tent for democracy and the rule of law is the singular challenge for 2024.

That seems reasonable to me.

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The WaPo Editorial Board commented on the GOP’s bad faith efforts to build “election integrity”:

Opinion  |  States were cooperating on election integrity. 

Then GOP officials quit.

Since 2022, nine states where Republican officials administer elections have quit a nonprofit, nonpartisan consortium that helps keep voter rolls up to date through interstate data exchange. They did so amid pressure from former president Donald Trump, who claimed in March that the consortium “pumps the rolls” for Democrats. Consequently, voter rolls in those states — Alabama, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, Ohio, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia — are less accurate, and it’s becoming harder to detect the small number of people who improperly vote in multiple states. Indeed, as 2024 begins, these same election officials find themselves spending taxpayer dollars to re-create the very tools that the system they abandoned had provided.

Formed in 2012, the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) grew to include 33 states and D.C. It identified 12.5 million people who moved to a different state from the ones in which they were registered to vote as well as almost 600,000 deceased voters still on the rolls. The database worked excellently, before fringe blogs started calling it part of a plot funded by George Soros to boost Democratic registration. ERIC, whose operating costs are paid entirely by member states, received some seed funding from Pew Charitable Trusts, which previously received support from a foundation backed by Mr. Soros, but he has never been directly involved.  

Some GOP secretaries of state who pulled out of ERIC had publicly defended it quite recently. In February, Iowa’s Paul Pate called it “a godsend” and Ohio’s Frank LaRose described it as “one of the best fraud-fighting tools that we have.” Both announced on March 17 that their states would withdraw.

Radicalized, authoritarian, lying, cynically hypocritical GOP elites were never serious about election integrity. They are dead serious about undermining elections and their integrity. They know they cannot win the White House in fair elections, so they cheat.

News bits: Radical evangelicals rejecting Jesus; Capitalism & child labor; Russian war propaganda

Newsweek reports about a shift among a growing number of Trumpist evangelical Christians who are now openly rejecting some teachings of Jesus because they are liberal talking points:

Evangelicals Are Now Rejecting ‘Liberal’ Teachings of Jesus

An evangelical leader is warning that conservative Christians are now rejecting the teachings of Jesus as “liberal talking points.”

Russell Moore, former top official for the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) who is now the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, said during an interview aired on NPR’s All Things Considered this week that Christianity is in a “crisis” due to the current state of right-wing politics.

Moore has found himself at odds with other evangelical leaders due to his frequent criticism of former President Donald Trump. He resigned his position with the SBC in 2021 following friction over his views on Trump and a sex abuse crisis among Southern Baptist clergy.

In his NPR interview, Moore suggested that Trump had transformed the political landscape in the U.S. to the point where some Christian conservatives are openly denouncing a central doctrine of their religion as being too “weak” and “liberal” for their liking.

“Multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching—‘turn the other cheek’—[and] to have someone come up after to say, ‘Where did you get those liberal talking points?’” Moore said.

“When the pastor would say, ‘I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ’ ... The response would be, ‘Yes, but that doesn't work anymore. That's weak,” he added. “When we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we're in a crisis.”  

During an interview on conservative network Real America's Voice in January, Trump lashed out at certain evangelical leaders that he said displayed a “great disloyalty” by being reluctant to back his 2024 presidential run.

“That’s a sign of disloyalty,” Trump complained. “There's nobody that did more for the movement than I have. And that includes the movement of evangelicals and Christians and the movement very much of ‘right to life.’”

Again one can see the power of decades of authoritarian radical right dark free speech, now crystallized into a focused, potent political force by DJT, to poison what used to be core Christian values. The political radicalization that Moore describes here is undeniably authoritarian. In my opinion, the driving force is a secular wealth and power movement by elites. It is not Christian. This kind of poison has the power of God behind it. Rational discourse and honest accounts of history are simply not going to change minds that think and believe like this. Our democracy is in an existential fight against autocracy, plutocracy, Christotheocracy, Christian Sharia law, and kleptocracy.

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The NYT reports about child labor in the US:

They’re Paid Billions to Root Out Child Labor 

in the U.S. Why Do They Fail?

Private auditors have failed to detect migrant children working for U.S. suppliers of Oreos, Gerber baby snacks, McDonald’s milk and many other products

One morning in 2019, an auditor arrived at a meatpacking plant in rural Minnesota. He was there on behalf of the national drugstore chain Walgreens to ensure that the factory, which made the company’s house brand of beef jerky, was safe and free of labor abuses.

He ran through a checklist of hundreds of possible problems, like locked emergency exits, sexual harassment and child labor. By the afternoon, he had concluded that the factory had no major violations. It could keep making jerky, and Walgreens customers could shop with a clear conscience.

When night fell, another 150 workers showed up at the plant. Among them were migrant children who had come to the United States by themselves looking for work. Children as young as 15 were operating heavy machinery capable of amputating fingers and crushing bones.

Migrant children would work at the Monogram Meat Snacks plant in Chandler, Minn., for almost four more years, until the Department of Labor visited this spring and found such severe child labor violations that it temporarily banned the shipment of any more jerky.

In the past two decades, private audits have become the solution to a host of public relations headaches for corporations.  

In a series of articles this year, The Times has revealed that migrant children, who have been coming to America in record numbers, are working dangerous jobs in every state, in violation of labor laws.

At least among big American companies capitalism seems to be generally without social conscience in its pursuit of profit. Of course private audits by companies auditing themselves are not going to find any human, environmental or other legal problems. Authoritarian radical right politicians have been undermining child labor laws for some time now. Vox reported last March: Child labor protections are the latest Republican target -- Arkansas is leading the charge against laws that protect kids — despite revelations of dangerous child labor nationwide. 

Boosting profits by eliminating labor laws to protect children is a goal of America's authoritarian plutocrats and theocrats. The plutocrats focus on profit without regard for whether the child is on their own or parents are present. The theocrats focus on what God says the parents can do with or to their kids. That focus is also significantly motivated by money. 

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Russia lied about the number of Ukrainian deaths after a dam broke, presumably on Putin’s orders. Russia reported 59 deaths in areas of Ukraine it controlled, while the AP analysis found hundreds. The AP reports: 

MYKOLAIV, Ukraine (AP) — They recognized the TV repairman.

The residents of Oleshky in Russian-occupied southern Ukraine could not identify many of those they buried after a catastrophic dam collapse in June sent water coursing through their homes and shattered their lives. The bodies were too bloated and discolored, volunteer rescuers and health workers said. They described seeing faces that resembled rubber masks, frozen in that last frenzied gasp for air. But to those secretly keeping count of the drowned, Yurii Bilyi was no stranger.

The cheerful 56-year-old was a town fixture. He had serviced many homes and spent his days working from a shop just across the street from the churchyard where he was buried, in a hurriedly dug mass grave, The Associated Press has learned.

Anastasiia Bila, his daughter, remembers his last words clearly over the unstable phone connection. “Nastya,” he affectionately called her, hoping to soothe her anxieties as flood waters rose quickly, inundating 600 square kilometers (230 square miles), submerging entire towns and villages along the banks of the Dnipro River, the majority in Russian-occupied areas. “I’ve seen worse under occupation.”

Over six months since the catastrophic explosion that destroyed the Kakhovka Dam in the southern Kherson region, an AP investigation has found Russian occupation authorities vastly and deliberately undercounted the dead in one of the most devastating chapters of the 22-month war.

Why do evil, murdering butchers like Putin seem to never go away or die? Guess there’s always an amply supply of them. It’s just part of the human condition. They are here in America too. Just waiting for their chance to to their evil.

Snowflake is back!

 Glad to see we didn't lose any "bits" over the Holidays:

News chunk 'n bits

Various bits

Christmas bits

News bits

News bits: A DJT X-mas msg

Gotta admit I was a "bit" distracted, lazy, absent over the Holidays. Germaine wasn't, he took over my channel 😏

Also, I decided it's time. Yup, it really is. Joe Biden MUST step down. Or be prepared for a 2nd Trump term. 

Anyone been reading up on this guy Dean Phillips. He impresses me. AND he doesn't mind socking it to Biden either.

And I don't mind one "bit" if you disagree with me about Phillips. 

News bits: Immigration - the democracy killer; About the failing rule of law; DJT's origin story & evolution

A tried and true and popular tactic of demagogues, dictators and other flavors of authoritarians is to point to the border and the horrors of immigrants. America’s current Demagogue-in-Chief referred to the issue as a matter of immigrants ‘poisoning the blood’ of the nation. Immigration is an issue that could easily be a democracy killer in the 2024 presidential election. The NYT reports about the latest impending border disaster the radical right will demagogue the hell out of:

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken headed to Mexico City on Wednesday to discuss a surge in illegal immigration as thousands of migrants trek through southern Mexico in a mass movement toward the United States.

Mr. Blinken will meet with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador at a time when border crossings have hit record numbers. There have been days this month when the Border Patrol encountered more than 10,000 people at the southern border.  

Republicans have stepped up their attacks on Mr. Biden over the border numbers, a potential [actual, not potential] vulnerability for the president as he seeks re-election next year.

Tapachula, Mexico, last Sunday 

The crowd heading toward the US 

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A WaPo article points out how complex and weak the laws against white collar crimes are. Even prosecutors can’t figure it out:

An appeals court on Tuesday reversed a conviction that led to the resignation last year of former congressman Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.), ruling that he was not tried in the right venue on charges of lying to federal agents about illegal campaign contributions from a foreign billionaire.

The decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit said that Fortenberry’s trial in Los Angeles “took place in a state where no charged crime was committed, and before a jury drawn from the vicinage of the federal agencies that investigated the defendant.”

“The Constitution does not permit this,” the decision said. “Fortenberry’s convictions are reversed so that he may be retried, if at all, in a proper venue.”

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The Undertow is scheduled for release 

March 5, 2024

An interview of investigative journalist Jeff Sharlet by journalist Chris Hedges discusses the origins and sources of the authoritarian Christian prosperity ideology that DJT adopted from three key influencers, his father, Norman Vincent Peale and Roy Cohen. For years Hedges, a presbyterian minister, has been calling this strain of Christianity “fascism” and “an existential threat.” 

At ~1:58 - 9:53, the video summarizes some key points of what Sharlet has pieced together in research for his book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. Sharlet also calls Christian prosperity ideology fascism. He describes DJT’s public manifestations of his thinking as some form of mysticism. He argiues that DJT’s is not exactly grounded in literal belief of QAnon, but instead of his own deranged, impossible conspiracy fantasies, which he firmly believes are literally true.

This aspect of DJT’s origin story and thinking are new to me. But if Sharlet is right, prosperity gospel Christianity is a key source of inspiration for DJT. Thanks to milo for pointing out this video.

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The Christian Post published an article entitled, TD Jakes: ‘If everything was true, all I got to do is repent sincerely from my heart ... but I ain’t got to repent about this’. The article exemplifies the arrogance and ease at which prosperity gospel elites engage in what their ideology says is moral turpitude, including bad sexual behavior. But like TD Jakes says, even if he did what people say he did, it’s no big deal because he can just repent and everything is good. One can argue that ease of sleaze mindset among prosperity gospel elites is at least some form of Christian authoritarianism. TCP writes:

Days after denouncing an unverified report casting innuendo about his sexuality and accusing him of being a frequent participant at sex parties hosted by producer and music mogul Sean Combs, popularly known as Diddy, televangelist T.D. Jakes called his accusers “liars” on Sunday and noted that even “if everything was true, all I got to do is repent sincerely from my heart.”

Jakes, who leads The Potter's House megachurch in Dallas, Texas, directly addressed his congregation for the first time on Christmas Eve and urged them not to worry about him because “I’m good.”

“Would y'all please do me a favor and stop worrying about me and give God some praise and honor and glory? I can feel you. … I am fine. I'm good. I'm good. I'm the man for the job. I'm good,” Jakes declared in a public livestream of his Christmas Eve service on YouTube which has since been made private.

“I can feel you. I can feel you. Relax ... We’re not gonna let the devil take over our service. No, no, no, no, no. We're gonna give God some praise and some honor and some glory, for this is the day that the Lord has made, we shall rejoice and be glad in it,” he insisted. “I'm not going to let the rain stop me. I’m not going to let the weather stop me. And I'm sure not going to let the liars stop me. 

“The worst that could happen, if everything was true, all I got to do is repent sincerely, from my heart. There's enough power in the blood to cover all kinds of sin. I don't care what it is, the blood would fix it. But I ain't got to repent about this,” Jakes declared.