From the grossly excessive nails in the coffin files: The 2020 election was not stolen

According to the AP, a detailed analysis of all the fraudulent votes in the 2020 election indicates that Biden won fair and  square. An article, Far too little vote fraud to tip election to Trump, AP finds, lays the evidence out.

The AP notes that its review of every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by the fascist Republican Party and our treasonous ex-president found fewer than 475 instances. That would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election even if all those 475 votes went to Biden. Some of the fraudulent votes were for the traitor and most of the fraudulent votes were caught and not actually counted.

The AP commented that its review of the evidence that took months and included more than 300 local election offices. That makes it one the most comprehensive examinations so far of suspected voter fraud in 2020 presidential election.

Questions: Should the ex-president and the Republican Party be called out as domestic terrorists? Or, is the AP lying and millions of fraudulent votes were cast and counted, making Biden an illegitimate president as the ex-president and many or most Republicans still claim? 

1/6 Traitor sentenced to 28 months

The Washington Post reports that one of the traitors at the 1/6 coup attempt who threatened to kill Pelosi received a paltry 28 month sentence. He took at least two guns and 2500 rounds of ammo to the 1/6 GOP party in D.D. This murderous thug, 53 year old Cleveland Meredith repeatedly texted treasonous sentiments to his family and friends. One message that said he was “gonna collect a … ton of Traitors heads.” Another said “he [Trump] wants HEADS and I’m gonna deliver.” He also texted twice that he was considering “putting a bullet in her [Pelosi’s] noggin on live TV.” 

In other activities, Meredith is a devout follower of the QAnon religion. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene and other Republican luminaries in congress will probably want to give this fine patriot the Congressional Medal of Honor or something like that. Meredith deserves celebration of his resistance to tyrannical Democratic Party democracy and the evil Democratic Party rule of law and their stolen election.

The traitor's guns

The traitor's gun accessories and ammo

In court, the judge read the text messages, many of them vulgar. She wanted to emphasize her belief that “the level of discourse in this country has become so debased and degraded.” Really? Nah, can't be.

Meredith pretended to be contrite, commenting “I know what I did was wrong. It was political hyperbole that was too hyper. … I’m very embarrassed about the whole situation. It’s not who I am and it’s not who I want to be remembered as.”

Political hyperbole. That is all it was. Just innocent Republican patriots with guns doing their patriotic thing.

Questions: Should the Republican Party be named as a domestic terrorist group? QAnon?

Supreme Court Conservatives grope for “non-political” rationales to overturn Roe v. Wade

It appears that Chief Justice John Roberts is looking for a way that appears to be “non-political” to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision on abortion. A recent paper by a legal scholar points out that in the oral arguments about a Mississippi abortion law a couple of weeks ago, Roberts focused on what the parties in Roe asked the court to do. In a master stroke of misdirection, Roberts shifted attention from what the Roe court held in 1973, to what the parties involved argued in that case. That is a new angle on attacking settled precedent (stare decisis). The New York Times writes:

A new study traces a trend at the Supreme Court: looking to what the lawyers had argued in assessing whether to follow a precedent. 

A decision in the Mississippi case is not expected until late June. If the court overrules Roe, an increasingly real possibility, it will have to explain why it is departing from the principle of stare decisis, which is legal Latin for “to stand by things decided.”

At his 2005 confirmation hearings, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the Supreme Court should be wary of overturning precedents, in part because doing so threatens the court’s legitimacy.

“It is a jolt to the legal system when you overrule a precedent,” he said, listing various factors the court must consider before it takes the momentous step of discarding a precedent. They include, the court has said, “the quality of the decision’s reasoning.”

At the argument in the Mississippi case, concerning a state law that bans most abortions after 15 weeks, the chief justice refined that factor in an apparent attempt to dampen the jolt to the system.

He suggested that the fetal-viability line established in Roe was not a crucial part of the decision’s reasoning. “Was viability an issue in the case?” he asked. “I know it wasn’t briefed or argued.”

In shifting the focus from what the court had done to what the parties in the case had asked it to do, the chief justice was trying to justify upholding a 15-week line while stopping short of overruling Roe entirely, which would allow states to make all abortions illegal.

Richard J. Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard, explored this mode of argument in a recent article in The Supreme Court Review called “Advocacy History in the Supreme Court.”

The article makes the sensible point that a full understanding of a Supreme Court decision requires consideration of how the parties had framed the case.  

Chief Justice Roberts’s question about Roe was in a sense irrelevant, as the significance of fetal viability had been thoroughly argued in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that reaffirmed Roe’s core holding.

That made Roe a “super-duper precedent,” Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania said at Chief Justice Roberts’s confirmation hearings. The chief justice did not adopt Mr. Specter’s terminology, but he did not quarrel with the senator’s larger point.

The NYT article points out that legal arguments in a prior decision can be relevant, so lawyers review those briefs and arguments. Another legal expert the NYT spoke with asserted that the opinion in a decided case can sometimes be less helpful than the prior briefs and arguments. But here Roberts’s inquiry went farther. His reasoning clearly suggested that the meaning and weight of a decision may depend on the arguments that had been presented to the court in Roe.

The NYT went on to point out that Roberts pulled a similar stunt in 2007. There, to limit race as a factor in assigning students to public schools to achieve integration Roberts cited a key precedent, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that banned public school racial segregation. In that 2007 case, Roberts wrote that his opinion was “faithful to the heritage” of Brown by quoting from the original briefs in the case and from the oral argument in 1952. The NYT comments on that clever tactic: “Lawyers who had worked on the Brown litigation called the chief justice’s analysis ‘preposterous’ and ‘100 percent wrong.’”

Whether it is preposterous or 100 percent wrong, it is clear that the Republicans on the Supreme Court are desperate to overturn Roe. The other Republicans are less concerned with the appearance of being political than Roberts, but it is clear that he wants the same outcome as the other Republican justices. 

This analysis reflects a criticism that for decades critics have directed at the court. They criticize the practice of deciding a case first and then trying to figure out how to make it look grounded in legal principle and not personal ideology or bias. Clearly, the Republicans on the court are rigid ideologues who are heavily biased to overturn Roe. That is a major part of why they were picked. 

Overturning Roe is probably what the Republicans are going to do, maybe with a ~65% or ~75% chance. They will do that at the end of next June, or maybe a month, two or three earlier if that is deemed politically helpful for Republicans running for office in the 2022 elections.

For some people, but not most Republicans, the harder Roberts tries to make the Supreme Court look non-political, the more political it looks. 

Questions: 

1. Is it the case that the harder Roberts tries to make the Supreme Court look non-political, the more political it looks? 

2. Is Roe a super-duper precedent, or is its precedent status irrelevant in view of the Republican judges’ (i) socially hyper-conservative political ideology, (ii) Christian nationalist dogma, and (iii) radical right political agenda for American society, government and law?

The Republican Party’s Leviathan of lies poisons American society

A campaign email from third ranking House Republican Representative Elise Stefanik 

of New York lied when it claimed that the Justice Department was targeting parents

as “domestic terrorists” for challenging critical race theory teaching

Credit...

A new York Times article focuses on blatant lies that at least some Republican candidates now routinely employ to help them raise money for campaigns. The NYT writes:

A few weeks ago, Representative Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican, falsely claimed that the centerpiece of President Biden’s domestic agenda, a $1.75 trillion bill to battle climate change and extend the nation’s social safety net, would include Medicare for all.

It doesn’t, and never has. But few noticed Mr. Crenshaw’s lie because he didn’t say it on Facebook, or on Fox News. Instead, he sent the false message directly to the inboxes of his constituents and supporters in a fund-raising email.

Lawmakers’ statements on social media and cable news are now routinely fact-checked and scrutinized. But email — one of the most powerful communication tools available to politicians, reaching up to hundreds of thousands of people — teems with unfounded claims and largely escapes notice.

The New York Times signed up in August for the campaign lists of the 390 senators and representatives running for re-election in 2022 whose websites offered that option, and read more than 2,500 emails from those campaigns to track how widely false and misleading statements were being used to help fill political coffers.

But Republicans included misinformation far more often: in about 15 percent of their messages, compared with about 2 percent for Democrats. In addition, multiple Republicans often spread the same unfounded claims, whereas Democrats rarely repeated one another’s.

At least eight Republican lawmakers sent fund-raising emails containing a brazen distortion of a potential settlement with migrants separated from their families during the Trump administration. One of them, Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, falsely claimed that President Biden was “giving every illegal immigrant that comes into our country $450,000.”

Campaign representatives for Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Crenshaw did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The Republican House and Senate campaign committees also did not respond to a request for comment.

The people behind campaign emails have “realized the more extreme the claim, the better the response,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster. “The more that it elicits red-hot anger, the more likely people donate. And it just contributes to the perversion of our democratic process. It contributes to the incivility and indecency of political behavior.”

The messages also underscore how, for all the efforts to compel platforms like Facebook and Twitter to address falsehoods, many of the same claims are flowing through other powerful channels with little notice.

[One expert commented to the NYT:] “Politicians and the consulting firms behind them, they know that this kind of messaging is not monitored to the same extent, so they can be more carefree with what they’re saying.” 

Mr. Luntz, the Republican pollster, runs frequent focus groups with voters and said they tended to accept misinformation uncritically.

“It may be a fund-raising pitch, but very often people look at it as a campaign pitch,” he said. “They think of it as context, they think of it as information — they don’t necessarily see this as fund-raising, even though that’s what it is. And so misleading them in an attempt to divide them from their money is pure evil, because you’re taking advantage of people who just don’t know the difference.”

The NYT article comments that one democrat they contacted about false information responded by saying it was a mistake and future emails would be more carefully fact checked. At least there is some respect for truth in that. By contrast, Republicans and the GOP refused to comment to the NYT about lies by Republicans. That probably means the Republicans are not going to stop lying. The Republican Party leadership arguably is in a state of full-blown moral rot, with respect for inconvenient facts and truths almost completely gone. 

Winning, power and wealth are the only moral values left in the GOP leadership now that the moral rot has finished its job. All that is left is a stinking husk of what used to be a reasonably principled political institution. 

Question: Is it pure evil as Mr. Luntz said to deceive people by enraging them or instilling terror in them with lies (emotional manipulation[1]) to raise money for campaigns, or for that matter anything else?

Footnote: 

1. I constantly use the phrase emotional manipulation here. It is useful to understand what I mean by that phrase. I mean it to refer to an emotional state of mind, most commonly from unwarranted fear and anger, but also from unwarranted distrust, moral outrage and disgust. The reason that propagandists appeal to negative emotions is because an emotional state of mind is well-known in cognitive science to cause minds to be more open to the messages that accompany emotion triggers. These emotional states of mind are fact and reason killers and all professional propagandists and high-level politicians know it. Speaking to emotional minds is much a more effective way to get what one wants, including money and votes. Making up anger- or fear-inducing lies is usually the best way to establish the pliant emotional state of mind that propagandists need to do their dirty work. Sometimes truth can establish fear and/or anger, but truth and reality is usually less effective.

A post here from last February focused on this issue in the context of emotions in preaching to Evangelical Christian congregations. To increase congregation size and cash donations, pastors are told to instill fear and anger. The emotional manipulation tactic is not limited to just politics.  It also causes moral rot in religion, commerce and probably most everything else. 

Trump’s next coup attempt has begun

Tweet describing some of the plan high-level Republicans 

were circulating before the 1/6 coup attempt

Republican attacks on democracy are not close to over. They are expanding and building the infrastructure to put the ex-president back in power in 2024. The Atlantic writes in a long, discouraging Dec. 6, 2021 article:

January 6 was practice. Donald Trump’s GOP is much better positioned to subvert the next election.

Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified president-elect.

The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means. Given the opportunity, they will act. They are acting already.

Who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today. It is not even apparent who will try. Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real. Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have taken passing rhetorical notice, but their attention wanders. They are making a grievous mistake.

“The democratic emergency is already here,” Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at UC Irvine, told me in late October. Hasen prides himself on a judicious temperament. Only a year ago he was cautioning me against hyperbole. Now he speaks matter-of-factly about the death of our body politic. “We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024,” he said, “but urgent action is not happening.”

For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.

By way of foundation for all the rest, Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is a legitimate response.

As we near the anniversary of January 6, investigators are still unearthing the roots of the insurrection that sacked the Capitol and sent members of Congress fleeing for their lives. What we know already, and could not have known then, is that the chaos wrought on that day was integral to a coherent plan. In retrospect, the insurrection takes on the aspect of rehearsal.

Even in defeat, Trump has gained strength for a second attempt to seize office, should he need to, after the polls close on November 5, 2024. It may appear otherwise—after all, he no longer commands the executive branch, which he tried and mostly failed to enlist in his first coup attempt. Yet the balance of power is shifting his way in arenas that matter more.  

Trump is successfully shaping the narrative of the insurrection in the only political ecosystem that matters to him. The immediate shock of the event, which briefly led some senior Republicans to break with him, has given way to a near-unanimous embrace.  

Trump has reconquered his party by setting its base on fire. Tens of millions of Americans perceive their world through black clouds of his smoke. His deepest source of strength is the bitter grievance of Republican voters that they lost the White House, and are losing their country, to alien forces with no legitimate claim to power. This is not some transient or loosely committed population. Trump has built the first American mass political movement in the past century that is ready to fight by any means necessary, including bloodshed, for its cause.  

“It’s the community’s support that is creating a mantle of legitimacy—a mandate, if you would, that justifies the violence” of a smaller, more committed group, Pape said. “I’m very concerned it could happen again, because what we’re seeing in our surveys … is 21 million people in the United States who are essentially a mass of kindling or a mass of dry wood that, if married to a spark, could in fact ignite.”

Democracy will be on trial in 2024. A strong and clear-eyed president, faced with such a test, would devote his presidency to meeting it. Biden knows better than I do what it looks like when a president fully marshals his power and resources to face a challenge. It doesn’t look like this.

The midterms, marked by gerrymandering, will more than likely tighten the GOP’s grip on the legislatures in swing states. The Supreme Court may be ready to give those legislatures near-absolute control over the choice of presidential electors. And if Republicans take back the House and Senate, as oddsmakers seem to believe they will, the GOP will be firmly in charge of counting the electoral votes.

Against Biden or another Democratic nominee, Donald Trump may be capable of winning a fair election in 2024. He does not intend to take that chance.

The article goes on at length about deceived believers, increased openness about willingness to resort to violence to get justice and defend democracy as they see those things. The delusions and false beliefs come this authoritarian political movement come out loud and clear. The article discusses other deeply troubling aspects of this toxic, anti-democratic pro-Trump movement.  

Questions: How many Americans believe this narrative? Does Biden or the Democratic Party? How can one apportion blame for this, assuming one sees any blame to apportion, e.g., ~55% Trump, ~45% the Republican Party leadership and its rank and file supporters? 

Nov. 6, 2020 Stop the Steal protest in Detroit --

the rage and hate is palpable, and so is the delusion

Time Person of the Year - Elon Musk?

 

Elon Musk named Time magazine's 2021 Person of the Year

https://www.today.com/news/time-2021-person-year-elon-musk-t242943

EGADS! Seriously?

Time's Person of the Year, 1927-Present

https://public.opendatasoft.com/explore/dataset/times-person-of-the-year/table/?sort=year

Elon Musk? Don't say it is so!!

OK, so - what would YOUR choice have been?

Fauci? Pelosi? Why an American? How about Angela Merkel? She was legendary in her time as Chancellor for Germany and for the EU. A nice honor for her on her parting politics?

My idea? There is precedence for my choice:

2014

Person of the Year

The Ebola Fighters

So why not the Health Care Workers of the World for 2021? THAT would have been my choice.