HAPPINESS IS THE WEEKEND

 PUT ASIDE THE GLOOM AND DOOM

Too much Trump, election news and Covid getting you down?

Try discussing something different, like maybe, what is your favorite escape on the weekend?

MUSIC?

A BOOK?

FRIENDS?

OR JUST

IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER

Another anomalous “perfect storm” or an orchestrated, coordinated “rigged storm”?

Consider this: 

Trump and his supporters like to say that if he loses, it’s because the election was rigged.  In light of the latest national polling numbers (and especially the more important individual state polling numbers), I’d submit that if Biden loses, then the election was definitely rigged… but rigged for Trump and against Biden.  How so?  

My evidence:

My evidence is NOT some conspiracy theory made up of surreptitious, under the table, covert tactics. No. I’m talking about right out loud, in your face, takes some major balls of steel, tactics. I’m talking about: 

1. Hacked state/local election systems and “intercepted” ballots by Russia and other foreign actors who favor a Trump presidency 

2. Voter suppression laws

3. USPS antics perpetrated by Trump supporter and contributor, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy

4. Limiting of polling places, especially in “blue” areas

5. Fake / limited / set ablaze / other ballot drop-off boxes 

6. Super long voting lines in non-white areas leading to hours of waiting time

7. The threat of militia-type gun-toting Trump supporters at polling places, intimidating prospective voters

8. The status quo of a country now in shambles and disarray (pandemic, economy, political, climate)

Therefore my conclusion:

The current evidence, some 11 days before the election, points to the conclusion that Biden *should* win.  Barring a Trump “ace up his sleeve” in an act of political desperation, how can Biden NOT win?

If all my evidence is wrong, and if Biden doesn’t win, what can account for the polling discrepancy?  A bipolar electorate? A dishonest polling electorate?  Last minute voter apathy? Incompetent and/or biased pollsters? Can the polling numbers really lie/be skewed to such a degree?

*        *        *

Am I seeing things incorrectly?  Explain it to me.  What am I missing?

(links below)

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8. (personal opinion)

The Radical Right's Plan for Public Education

Context

In the last year or so, I've started using the labels such as 'radical right' or 'radical libertarian right' to describe the ideology of what GOP conservative ideology has morphed into in recent years. The change has been ongoing at least since a 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, that made public school segregation illegal and required desegregation in an attempt to equalize the quality of public education across the entire nation. 

That Supreme Court decision enraged some conservatives who strongly opposed civil liberties and federal government mandated federal or state spending on domestic issues, including public education. That ideology envisioned strong state governments and a weak central government focused on the military and not much else, including civil rights and voting rights.[1] Over the decades since then, that ideology has come to displace the existing conservative ideology. Various events, such as Barry Goldwater's 1964 crushing loss to Lyndon Johnson, spurred the movement and kept it alive. The radical right slowly built influence and power in the GOP over the decades. The final push for power in the GOP was crystallized by the election of Barak Obama in in November of 2008. 

I first became aware of this historical narrative from historian Nancy MacLean's 2017 book, Democracy In Chains: The Deep History Of The Radical Right's Stealth Plan For America (discussed here), and Jane Mayer's 2017 book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (discussed here).[2] MacLean described the origins of the radical right movement based on a trove of forgotten papers on a university campus in Virginia. She was given access to those papers without people understanding their content. Mayer's book includes a detailed discussion of how Obama's 2008 election, once again drove the radical right into a rage and finally crystallized GOP radical right resistance to Obama and more generally the democratic party. Among some other very bad things, that uncompromising opposition remains the basis of (i) America's broken gridlocked state of federal governance today, and (ii) America's state of extreme polarization, and its distrust of government, the mainstream media and political opposition.

The public education plan

A long article at Wall Street on Parade, Charles Koch Should Be on the Presidential Debate Stage Tonight, Not Donald Trump, describes the radical right plan like this:

"Koch Industries and Charles Koch have used nonprofit front groups to further their agenda for at least four decades.

And finally, there is billionaire Betsy DeVos who heads the U.S. Department of Education. Sourcewatch reports that the DeVos family fortune, which comes from Amway household and beauty products, funds school privatization projects, anti-union and pro-school voucher groups. ....

One of the seminal books on the Koch agenda is the 700-page tome by Christopher Leonard: “Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America.” Leonard was interviewed about the Koch’s view of public education on the Podcast, “Have You Heard.” (We highly recommend listening to it.) Leonard explained the Koch view as follows:

"Know what the blueprint is. Koch’s influence machine is multi-faceted and complex and I am just telling you, in a very honest way, there is a huge difference between the marketing materials produced by Americans for Prosperity and the actual behind-the-scenes political philosophy. There’ a huge difference. And here’s the actual political philosophy:

Government is bad. Public education must be destroyed for the good of all American citizens in this view.

So, the ultimate goal is to dismantle the public education system entirely and replace it with a privately run education system, which the operatives in this group believe, in a sincere way, is better for everybody. Now, whether you agree with that or not is the big question, but we cannot have any doubt, there’s going to be a lot of glossy marketing materials about opportunity, innovation, efficiency. At its core though, the network seeks to dismantle the public education system because they see it as destructive. So that is what’s the actual aim of this group. And don’t let them tell you anything different."

Thus, if the president gets re-elected, it is quite possible that he will try to set in motion a plan to dismantle public education and replace it with private schools. That is not to say that the president buys into the radical right agenda. But, being a transactional "what's in it for me" kind of guy, he can be conned and manipulated or bribed into going along with it. Trump does not care about education. Trump only cares about Trump.

Footnotes:

1. My read of the situation is that the radical right wants power shifted from the federal government to state governments because it is easier to subvert, corrupt, and then capture state governments than it is to do that with a federal government. Some states strongly oppose the radical right agenda and those states cannot be so easily bought and captured by this kind of radicalism. In essence, the elites in the radical right movement are multi-millionaires and billionaires. They want to re-establish authoritarian autocratic power in the states they can control. They want to be the aristocrats who control the states just like elites who controlled the states and public education before the 1954 Brown v. Board decision.

2. Conservatives have heavily criticized the books that MacLean and Mayer wrote. The reasons are self-evident. Also, there are some principled, non-political criticisms, but they do not mostly negate the basic story that MacLean and Mayer tell in their books.

 agPress Freedom

Partisan Websites Fill Media Void

By Alan Greenblatt

https://www.voanews.com/press-freedom/partisan-websites-fill-media-void

WASHINGTON - Headlines never tell the entire story, but they do set a tone. That’s certainly the case with some recent coverage of the U.S. presidential race. Consider these examples:

“Lewis says ‘crazy’ urban liberals are driving Minnesotans to Trump.”

“Suburban Moms Are Channeling Their Collective Frustration to Vote for Joe Biden.” 

“Biden Goes to Michigan, Reminds Voters of Trump’s Broken Promises.”

“You cannot be Catholic and a Democrat. Period.” 

The headlines weren’t written by Joe Biden or Donald Trump’s campaigns, or their political parties, although they might well have been. Instead, they’re products of a new generation of websites that present themselves as local news operations, even as they are run by party operatives.

“These are partisan sites – some on the right, some on the left – that are masquerading as news sites, but what they are putting out is basically propaganda for a candidate or a political point of view,” says William Freivogel, a journalism professor at Southern Illinois University.

In this polarized presidential election year, the number of partisan websites that pose as local news outlets has nearly tripled, to about 1,200, according to the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. They are run by activists or political and public relations consultants, and they publish and repurpose content with a narrow partisan point of view.  

VOA attempted to reach several of the sites for interview but only one—the editor-in-chief of a site founded by a Democratic strategist, responded.  

At a time when politicians from President Donald Trump on down disparage mainstream media outlets as peddling “fake news,” media scholars worry that these sites will further pollute the information environment, making it more difficult for voters to tell fact from fiction and spin.

“We have seen in some instances sites pop up and adopt the name of a newspaper that went under in the past,” says Philip Napoli, a Duke University professor who’s written about partisan sites.  “We had a blatant disinformation site here in North Carolina that took stories that happened years ago in completely different states and rewrote them as if they happened here.”

Filling a void

An enormous hole has opened in the U.S. media market when it comes to coverage of local governments and news. More than 1,800 U.S. newspapers have closed since 2004, according to figures from the Pew Charitable Trusts, while many others are shadows of their former selves, with fewer reporters and less coverage. The new sites hope to fill that void – but without the traditional commitment to balance or fairness.

Although there have long been media outlets with an ideological orientation – Mother Jones on the left, for example, and The Wall Street Journal on the right – they make their leanings clear while maintaining independence for news and some distance from political parties.

The new breed of sites do not always advertise their leanings, or sometimes, their true ownership. “If they’re not selling fact-based news, what are they selling?” asks Anne Nelson, the author of Shadow Network: Media, Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. “Do they attempt to represent the other side? Is it fact-based reporting? Do they care about factual errors?”

Researchers at the Tow Center found the majority of these sites are run by networks with conservative ties or leanings, but the left is getting into the game, too. Courier Newsroom, founded last year by Democratic strategist Tara McGowan, runs eight sites, mostly in states considered presidential election battlegrounds.

Lindsay Schrupp, Courier’s editor-in-chief, is upfront about the goal.

“I don’t think a lot of people fully understand that there is now a very robust right-wing media infrastructure filling that [local news] gap and using right-wing propaganda,” she says. “No one else is doing the job of intentionally trying to fight back against the right-wing misinformation.”

Courier's sites are staffed by reporters present in each state that they cover and run only original content. But some of the other sites do little original reporting. These are so-called pink slime sites, meaning part of their content is generated automatically. They reprint press releases directly, without bringing editorial judgment to information from governments or other interested sources.

Although the sites bear the names of the cities or states they are nominally covering, many are virtual clones running identical stories. Others do generate content that is original and quite partisan in nature, featuring stories that are one-sided, cheerleading for one party while routinely bashing the other.  

When Trump appeared in Michigan recently, a conservative site known as Center Square ran a story noting his “avid throng of supporters” and quoting the president touting his own accomplishments while bashing Biden. Coverage of the same event in The Gander, Courier’s Michigan site, criticized Trump for having cut funding for the state’s National Guard that day, while highlighting the coronavirus death toll and noting that Trump supporters were “mostly maskless” and not practicing social distancing.

Center Square is a project of the Franklin News Foundation, which is closely tied to the free-market Illinois Policy Institute. Other sites and networks, including the Local Government Information Services Network and Metric Media have leaders who come from conservative think tanks or Republican Party circles.  

Editors and managers at these sites and others did not respond to VOA requests for comment or interview.

American tradition

For a century after the nation’s founding, most American newspapers were partisan, accepting patronage that included government printing contracts and sometimes displaying the words “Republican” or “Democrat” as part of their titles.  

The rise of the penny press newspapers in the mid-1800s and eventually wire services such as the Associated Press had the effect of pushing journalists onto more neutral ground, since they were tapping bigger markets that could be served by not appealing exclusively to partisans.

Over the past 15 years or so, partisan actors have sought to revive the old model.  

During his tenure as Indiana governor, Vice President Mike Pence flirted with launching  a state-run news site but backed down amid criticism. While Republican Bruce Rauner was governor of Illinois, his allies ran a network of news sites and radio stations that backed his politics while presenting themselves as independent. (Rauner eventually split with the group.)  

Half of the country’s 3,143 counties now have only one newspaper, according to the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, and 200 have none. That’s created so-called “news deserts” and a sense of “desperation” in the journalism business, author Nelson says. The partisan sites are looking to fill the resulting vacuum.

The partisan sites say they are trying to fill the resulting information hole. Metric Media, for example, states that it aims to address the “growing void in local and community news after years of steady disinvestment in local reporting by legacy media." 

Nelson, however, says such sites are seeking more to exploit than fill such voids.

“The problem is that people in these towns who may not want to pay for news may turn to them and be misled about the kind of information that they’re getting,” Nelson says. “If you only use the partisan lens, it doesn’t necessarily give you the full picture.”

In some cases, the sites engage in a sort of propaganda laundering. A story might be barely a rewrite of a politician’s press release. That story, in turn, will be cited by the same politician in a tweet or ad, giving the position credence from a legitimate-sounding news outlet.

For partisan actors, running news sites also gives them a way to potentially skirt campaign finance restrictions and put money into consultant’s pockets. A nonpartisan group connected to Nevada’s former Republican attorney general has called on the Federal Election Commission to brand Courier as a political committee, which would subject it  to greater scrutiny.  

Courier labels itself a progressive news organization but says it does not carry water for any party or candidate. Its majority owner, however, is a digital political consulting group called ACRONYM, which boasts on its website about helping elect 65 progressive candidates in 2018. The group’s political arm is running an anti-Trump digital ad campaign in battleground states.

“They [ACRONYM] are a majority owner of us, but that’s as far as it goes,” Schrupp says. “They have absolutely no editorial influence.”

Although the number of partisan sites is larger, their audiences, in most cases, remain small. The most successful may be The Tennessee Star, a pioneering site on the right, which received more than 2.2 million engagements with readers during the first half of the year, according to NewsGuard, a media watchdog. The Tennessee Star was launched by Michael Patrick Leahy, who helped form the Tea Party movement and is a majority owner of Star News Digital Media, which runs several state-focused sites.

Engagements may include not just a direct visit to a page, but a “like” or share or comment. By rough comparison, large established news sites such as The New York Times and Fox News receive roughly 70 million unique visitors each month.

Local journalists that VOA contacted aren’t giving much thought to these sites as real competition. Several newspaper editors in markets with partisan sites said they weren’t even aware of their existence until contacted for this story.

“I’ve heard of Alpha News, but I don’t know the first thing about it,” says a reporter with the Minneapolis Star Tribune, referring to a local site that receives relatively large traffic for a partisan site. “Never visited the site or seen their coverage.”

Business filings link the site to Alex Kharam, the executive director of the conservative Minnesota Freedom Club, the Tribune has reported previously.  

Credibility and the vote  

Dubious websites and social media misinformation campaigns largely flew under the radar in the 2016 election. Authorities say this year’s presidential vote is no less at risk.

“People are not tied down to a few sources that they find credible,” says Matt Grossmann, director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University. “They’re willing to go in whatever direction their social media feed moves them, and that can be in a pretty partisan direction.”

Another problem: Some voters may become so mistrustful that they won’t believe what any traditional news sites report.

“If people are constantly questioning the motives of the information they encounter, we don’t want them to be so distrustful that they won’t accept legitimate information from reputable sources,” says Brendan Nyhan, who studies media at Dartmouth College.

“[Misinformation] sites weren’t a big concern until almost after the [2016] election, when people realized how much reach they had,” he says. “We don’t want to make the same mistake in 2020.”

What is Voter Suppression?

“There's very little tangible evidence of this whole voter-suppression nonsense that the Democrats are promoting.” -- Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, July 2020

“I don’t want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” -- Conservative activist Paul Weyrich, 1980


Voter suppression is a partisan political strategy to influence the outcome of an election by discouraging or preventing specific groups of people from voting. The goal is to reduce the number of voters who might vote against a candidate or proposition. Over the last few years, conservative states have engaged in massive voter suppression efforts to favor GOP candidates and to try to re-elect the president. The GOP sees no voter suppression, while other observers see it very clearly. The GOP has been actively engaging in nationwide voter suppression at least since the early 1980s.

ProPublica reports on some of the voter suppression tactics the GOP has in place in Georgia to hinder or block voters from voting for Joe Biden. ProPublica writes:

“Why Do Nonwhite Georgia Voters Have to Wait in Line for Hours? Their Numbers Have Soared, and Their Polling Places Have Dwindled. 

The clogged polling locations in metro Atlanta reflect an underlying pattern: the number of places to vote has shrunk statewide, with little recourse. Although the reduction in polling places has taken place across racial lines, it has primarily caused long lines in nonwhite neighborhoods where voter registration has surged and more residents cast ballots in person on Election Day. The pruning of polling places started long before the pandemic, which has discouraged people from voting in person.

In Georgia, considered a battleground state for control of the White House and U.S. Senate, the difficulty of voting in Black communities like Union City could possibly tip the results on Nov. 3. With massive turnout expected, lines could be even longer than they were for the primary, despite a rise in mail-in voting and Georgians already turning out by the hundreds of thousands to cast ballots early.

The metro Atlanta area has been hit particularly hard. The nine counties — Fulton, Gwinnett, Forsyth, DeKalb, Cobb, Hall, Cherokee, Henry and Clayton — have nearly half of the state’s active voters but only 38% of the polling places, according to the analysis.

Georgia law sets a cap of 2,000 voters for a polling place that has experienced significant voter delays, but that limit is rarely if ever enforced. Our analysis found that, in both majority Black and majority white neighborhoods, about nine of every 10 precincts are assigned to polling places with more than 2,000 people. 

Georgia’s state leadership and elections officials have largely ignored complaints about poll consolidations even as they tout record growth in voter registration. As secretary of state from 2010 to 2018, when most of Georgia’s poll closures occurred, Brian Kemp, now the governor, took a laissez-faire attitude toward county-run election practices, save for a 2015 document that spelled out methods officials could use to shutter polling places to show ‘how the change can benefit voters and the public interest.’”  

Clearly, if one defines the public interest as doing whatever cheating and law breaking it takes to keep the GOP in power, then what is going on really is to benefit the public interest. 

Once again, the GOP in its self-righteous lust for political power, ignores existing law and suppresses minority voters as much as they think they can get away with. In Georgia, they can get away with a lot. That poisoned GOP attitude undermines respect for the rule of law, a key trait of demagogues and dictators. Also, as discussed here before, this data accords with the attitudes of GOP activists who are telling republicans and Trump supporters that they should not even worry about voter suppression or the racism inherent in it. As one activist, J. Christian Adams, put it, “Be not afraid of the accusations that you’re a voter suppressor, you’re a racist and so forth.”

There you go, be not afraid to cheat, lie, be a racist and/or break laws. Be comfortable and just let it all hang out.

So, instead of denying that GOP voter suppression is real, as Mitch McConnell does, the on-the-ground GOP soldiers are telling the faithful to just blow the criticisms all off as if the underlying reality does not even exist. That is blind GOP tribalism at work, as Mitch McConnell so adeptly describes it. GOP voter suppression is also deep immorality at work in the name of the tribe. 

If the president wins the election in 2020 it will be, in necessary part, because of the influence of GOP voter suppression. In that case, the president would once again be as illegitimate a president in 2021 as he was in 2017 when he was elected with the necessary help of Russian influence.

Vote For Humanity

 By Best in Moderation

The year was 1940, in the month of June. The Netherlands had suffered a major defeat in the flattening of Rotterdam and surrendered to the German Army a mere five days after the invasion began. My grandmother was pushed out of her family house, which became a Nazi barracks and was later blown up. She and several other younger children were sent to Sweden on some of the last trains that would be allowed to leave the nation not headed for German labor camps.

My grandfather was not so lucky. As a member of the Dutch scouting program and a resident of Haarlem-Heemstede, he was considered a risk and carefully monitored and often brought in for questioning. While in German stations he witnessed families being separated from one another, with men going to labor camps, women going to lock up or serving the soldiers, and children being cast out into the street or orphanages if they were lucky. Many never saw their parents again, and many parents were not reunited with their children in time to save them from the post-war starvation.

I tell you this not to try to Godwin my way into a discussion of politics today, but to give context to the visceral reaction many people have to the forced separation of families with no plan to reunite them that you may hear today. Not a one of us who have experienced this before or have family who has experienced this before can hear this and not shudder. And that’s just from my family history. Try thinking about minorities who were separated and sold for generations. Try thinking of entire generations without families due to religious persecutions and genocides. When it comes to family and the forced separation of them, there is no event in history where the people who did this come out looking like any sort of moral person.

So what then must we think about an entire administration who not only willingly did this, but did this to a zero tolerance degree with no intention of reuniting anyone, no matter the age, circumstance or needs of the people? What can we possibly think of the people who while a pandemic rages through the nation still cram in hundreds of asylum seekers into detention camps, without proper hygiene? What should we think about an administration who ignores or even tries to justify alleged medical experimentation on women, literally mutilating their bodies by removing their ovaries? And what should we think about a group of people who would ignore all those things because it might save them a few dollars somewhere down the line?

Where is the moral outcry over throwing honorable serving soldiers out of the military just because of their gender identity?

Where is the moral outcry over a woman getting shot in her own home because someone thought a door open in the middle of the day was suspicious?

Where is the moral outcry over a woman getting murdered by police in her apartment because of a person she dated?

Where is the moral outcry over all the blatant and useless lies and hypocrisy?

Where is the moral outcry over supporting leaders who imprison, starve, and murder their own people?

None of this is necessary. We do not need to accept any of it. None of it helps our nation one bit. There is no benefit to be had in selling our souls.

This election stopped being about political ideology a long time ago. It was always going to be a referendum on who we are as a people. What we are willing to accept. What we punish. Whether there are consequences and whether those consequences are just.

It’s not a game. It’s not about teams. This is about the basic question of right versus wrong.

Children should not be permanently separated from their families and abandoned. It should never happen to one, let alone 545.

If you cannot agree on this, then you are not a part of any society that is fit to lead. Every single group who accepted this before has gone down as the example of evil in our history.

Don’t support it any longer, or anyone who would push for it.

I would never ask you to abandon your conservative principles. I am pleading with you not to abandon your human principles.

Do not stain your soul for one more day by supporting this kind of thing ever again.