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RSN: WARNING to DEMOCRATS! Do NOT Concede!! |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36753"><span class="small">Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Tuesday, 06 November 2018 09:33 |
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Excerpt: "Nobody 'officially' losing by less than ten percent, or while winning the exit polls, should walk away."
'This year scores of federal, state and local offices will be stolen ... unless YOU and your candidates finally fight.' (photo: Andrew Stefan/RSN)
WARNING to DEMOCRATS! Do NOT Concede!!
By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
06 November 18
 onald Trump is in power in large part because Democrats have repeatedly conceded elections they really won. On Tuesday, that MUST change.
Anyone deemed a close loser MUST fight. Every tally must be contested, every denial challenged, all missing ballots found, every provisional ballot honored.
What could bury our democracy? Stripped voter rolls, erased precincts, lies about where to vote, voting stations moved out of town, intimidated voters, impossible-to-get ID, street addresses required on reservations, lies about eligibility, unsent absentee ballots, suppressed registrations, hacked electronic machines, hidden source codes, trashed provisionals. It’s all been happening since at least 2000.
Highly qualified teams of election protection specialists all over the country (www.freepress.org and many more; the state and national Democratic parties have hotlines) are ready to fight.
Nobody “officially" losing by less than ten percent, or while winning the exit polls, should walk away.
Tell your candidates: DO NOT CONCEDE!!
Anyone working on this election MUST contact your candidate and DEMAND an “I will not concede pledge” BEFORE Tuesday.
Why?
In Florida 2000, Governor Jeb Bush stripped at least 94,000 mostly black/Hispanic voters from registration rolls. Electronic machines flipped the count. The infamous “Brooks Brothers Terror Mob” (supported by Brett Kavanaugh) stopped the recount, which the Supreme Court buried.
Rightful winner Al Gore then killed a Congressional challenge to Florida’s Electoral College delegation, handing George W. Bush the presidency.
In 2004, John Kerry conceded Ohio with 250,000 votes uncounted while officially losing by less than 120,000. VP candidate John Edwards demanded he not concede. But at noon, Kerry handed W a second term, then went wind surfing.
Hillary Clinton beat Trump by some 3 million votes but ignored massive irregularities in Michigan,Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida. She, Gore, Kerry and the corporate Democrats have done little to stop election theft or end the Electoral College, which could re-enshrine Trump in 2020.
Democrats did not scrutinize six US Senate races in 2014 and 2016 in which they won exit polls and/or lost by very tight official margins. Those seats let Trump control the judiciary, cut taxes for the super-rich, and so much more.
This year, scores of federal, state and local offices will be stolen … unless YOU and your candidates finally fight.
Until every registration is defended, every ballot counted, every electron scrutinized … Tell your candidates: DO NOT CONCEDE!!!!
Harvey “Sluggo” Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis saw Ohio 2004 up close and personal. Their Strip & Flip Disaster of America’s Stolen Elections is at www.freepress.org and www.solartopia.org where The Life & Death Spiral of US History: From Deganawidah to the Trumpocalypse to Rebirth will soon appear.
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How to Make Sure Your Vote Gets Counted on Election Day |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=44165"><span class="small">Tim Johnson, McClatchy DC</span></a>
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Tuesday, 06 November 2018 09:32 |
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Johnson writes: "Don't be surprised by mischief on Election Day. That's the advice experts give about last-minute text messages, robocalls or emails purporting to instruct people (falsely) on where or when to vote."
Voters at a polling precinct. (photo: John Sommers II/Getty Images)
How to Make Sure Your Vote Gets Counted on Election Day
By Tim Johnson, McClatchy DC
06 November 18
on’t be surprised by mischief on Election Day. That’s the advice experts give about last-minute text messages, robocalls or emails purporting to instruct people (falsely) on where or when to vote.
Bogus text messages and a fake robocall have already popped up in Georgia and Florida, one of many states afflicted by attempts to skew the vote in the run-up to Tuesday’s midterm elections.
Early voting has been fraught with problems, including an investigation into alleged hacking of Georgia voter registration systems on Sunday and court battles in the state over who should be allowed on voter rolls, and snafus with antiquated voting machines in Texas. In Kansas, a federal judge upheld Dodge City’s decision to move the only polling place to what one resident called “the middle of nowhere” outside of town.
There are tougher ID rules for voters in North Carolina and Kansas, passed by Republican officeholders who want to keep their majorities. In North Dakota, where officials require a residential address in order to vote, thousands of Native Americans faced a scramble to obtain new state-issued or tribal IDs with street addresses, rather than P.O. boxes, even though their homes often lack numbers and their streets lack names.
Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and 16 other states saw their voter databases turn up for sale last month on the Dark Web, the murky underground internet. Combined, the databases contain names, genders, voter IDs, addresses, citizenship status and phone numbers for 81.5 million U.S. citizens.
All U.S. elections face a level of misbehavior. But the nation is on edge, given the Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election, followed by President Donald Trump’s false claims of massive voter fraud, which prompted some states to crack down with tough identification laws and concentrated polling places.
Digital weapons amplify the fear.
“People are more attuned to and worried about election security,” said John Fortier, director of the Democracy Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank that promotes bipartisanship.
Federal authorities have enhanced security cooperation with state and local election offices, and even granted temporary security clearances to scores of election officials across the country to keep them informed in the event of a major cyber-disruption.
President Trump warned Monday that the government should be vigilant for “illegal voting,” and said in a tweet that, “Anyone caught will be subject to the Maximum Criminal Penalties allowed by law.”
While the federal posture is indeed stronger, it may be of little consequence to U.S. voters facing intimidation.
Near Charlotte, N.C., a black Republican volunteer at a Mecklenberg County polling place reported being confronted with a gun and a string of racial slurs on Oct. 24. A 28-year-old man was later arrested for intimidation.
Bullying broke out in Texas.
“We are definitely getting a lot of reports of intimidation out of Dallas County,” said Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of the Texas branch of the nonpartisan lobby Common Cause. At one precinct, he added, “people are just kind of yelling at voters as they are trying to approach the polls.”
Election officials sometimes brushed off criticism when it reached their desks.
When the American Civil Liberties Union wrote to Debbie Cox, clerk of the county that surrounds Dodge City in southwest Kansas, over the move of the only polling place to a site half a mile outside the city limits, inaccessible by public transit, she forwarded the email to a state official with the comment, “LOL.”
In Okaloosa and Taylor counties in northern Florida, reports arrived of voters getting text phone messages that their absentee ballots had not been received, when in fact they had, said Liza McClenaghan, board chair for Common Cause Florida.
Scare tactics — and repudiation of them — came from both parties.
Facebook ads from the North Dakota Democratic-Non-Partisan League tried to discourage hunters from voting, saying they would forfeit their out-of-state hunting licenses if they cast votes at home, a claim that no state official would verify.
“This is false #ND don’t let these liar democrats get away with it,” tweeted Donald Trump Jr.
It was in Georgia, though, where the electoral waters were most turbulent. Openly racist robocalls were reported that mimicked Oprah Winfrey offering free cars to supporters of Stacey Abrams, the Democrat who strives to become the nation’s first black female governor.
Other charges flew, and they involved alleged hacking and voter suppression. On Sunday, Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the Republican candidate for governor, announced that he had opened a probe into the state Democratic Party over what his office said was “a failed attempt to hack the state’s voter registration system.” Kemp said the FBI was involved but offered no details about the alleged hacking. The FBI’s Atlanta field office declined to comment.
On a separate matter, Kemp was sued last month over his decision to put 53,000 voter registration applications on hold, most of them minorities. In a partial setback for Kemp Friday, a federal judge ruled that 3,141 recently naturalized citizens who were among the larger group must be allowed to vote. Kemp is in a tight race with Democrat Abrams.
Kemp put the registrations on hold under Georgia’s “exact match” law, passed by the Republican-led legislature last year, that orders authorities to match the name on a prospective voter’s government-issued ID with the one on his or her voter registration card. A typo or a missing hyphen can throw an application into “pending” status.
What tripped up Whitney McGinniss was a similar issue involving absentee balloting — and it has shaken her confidence in a democratic process that she never doubted before.
McGinniss, 35, a resident of Decatur, east of Atlanta, submitted an absentee ballot. When she went online later and checked the website of the Secretary of State’s Office, she saw that her ballot had been “challenged” due to a non-matching signature. That led to a back-and-forth with Dekalb County election employees.
“You look at them side by side and there are slight differences, but it’s my signature either way,” McGinniss said.
“I have an email thread with 20 emails on it. That’s not how you’re supposed to vote,” McGinniss said. “This is horrible. This is outrageous. … I’ve spent hours on this. That’s not an exaggeration.”
Early voting has proven bumpy. A North Miami voting location ran out of ballots Sunday due to malfunctioning printers. Voters endured lines up to three hours.
It is Election Day itself that experts say could bring new problems. They urge voters to beware of any digital communication purportedly guiding them on voting — but perhaps misleading them.
“They need to be skeptical, especially if it’s related to anything of a procedural nature — how to vote, where to vote, you know, a sample ballot,” said Steve Grobman, senior vice president at McAfee, a global computer security firm in Santa Clara, California.
Malicious text messages can send voters to the wrong polling places, wasting their time and perhaps discouraging them from voting at all.
Setting up mass robocalls for Election Day that purport to be from election offices but actually give voters wrong information is “very easy, very straight-forward” to do for those with malicious intent, said John Dickson, principal at Denim Group, a cybersecurity firm in San Antonio, Texas.
“It might say, ‘Hey, we’re calling from the Tarrant County voter administrator … Your precinct is now at so-and-so mall.’ Something like that. It would be enough to confuse people,” Dickson said.
Dickson said foreign hackers could interfere in specific congressional districts, using social media to spread lies about a potential terror attack or zapping targeted election districts with denial-of-service attacks.
Attackers may target voter registration databases, causing voters to find their names missing when showing up to vote. Or they could attack websites of county election offices, which are surprisingly vulnerable. McAfee found in a survey of 1,273 county-level election websites in 20 states last month that 80 percent did not use the .gov domain name that heightens security and 74 percent didn’t use the encryption tool that is the most basic firewall.
“The number of avenues that a bad actor has … is almost infinite. Identifying exactly the scenario that somebody would choose is extremely difficult,” Grobman said.
Election districts in all but five states now use voting machines that leave a paper trail in the event of a cyber incident. Election watchdogs say tallying ballots properly should take precedence over getting results rapidly.
“We want our election results right, not quick,” said Susan Greenhalgh, policy director at the National Election Defense Coalition.
Even if no major events unfold, Americans should not necessarily feel relief.
“Do we know that there hasn’t been tampering? I don’t know that we would necessarily know,” Grobman said.
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Trump Isn't Inciting Violence by Mistake, but on Purpose. He Just Told Us. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=10204"><span class="small">Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Tuesday, 06 November 2018 09:28 |
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Chait writes: "At a weekend rally, President Trump launched a riff that, even by the feverish standards of his closing campaign argument, stands out for its brutal authoritarian overtones."
Donald Trump speaks to supporters at a rally. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Trump Isn't Inciting Violence by Mistake, but on Purpose. He Just Told Us.
By Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
06 November 18
 t a weekend rally, President Trump launched a riff that, even by the feverish standards of his closing campaign argument, stands out for its brutal authoritarian overtones. The president mocked Antifa demonstrators: “You see these little arms, these little arms,” he shouted, forming his fingers into tiny circles to illustrate their puny biceps. And then he invited his supporters to imagine these weaklings having to fight against Trump’s own militant cadres. “Where are the Bikers for Trump? Where are the police? Where are the military? Where are — ICE? Where are the border patrol? No,” he continued, lamenting the restraint his sentries have displayed, “we’ve taken a lot, we’ve taken a lot.”
This is a revealing setpiece of authoritarian theater. There is, first of all, the evocation of strength as a moral signifier. Trump’s people are strong and good, and his opponents weak and bad, a classically fascist ethos. Second, he conflates his private political militia, “Bikers for Trump,” with government agencies that are not supposed to operate as a political arm of the president (police, military, ICE.) Trump, of course, has always believed the government’s law enforcement apparatus should be at his personal command, and has in fact deployed the military to the border for the benefit of his party’s campaign messaging.
Third, as he has done throughout his presidency, he also conflates Antifa (the miniscule faction operating totally outside of, and frequently at odds with the Democratic Party) with the opposition as a whole. “If the radical resistance — and that’s what they are, radical resistance — they will move immediately to reverse America’s progress.” The term “radical resistance” treats the political opposition writ large as a dangerous, violent, and essentially illegal movement.
And finally, Trump is tantalizing his supporters with the prospect of bloodshed. Their side has been set upon, and yet despite all their strength, he imagines some form of excessive restraint has held them back from administering to their tormentors the beating they so clearly deserve. He is wafting into the air the scent of blood.
The Republican Party as a whole has echoed versions of this theme by Trump, depicting Democrats as a “resistance mob.” Trump’s forays against violence play exactly the same role as his denunciations of corruption. He is magnifying marginal features of politics (Hillary Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street) in order to justify violations several orders of magnitude larger (Trump running a private, undisclosed business empire in office). Trump fixates on the negligible threat posed by Antifa not because he wants to build up the value of nonviolence but because he wishes to tear it down. Political violence is not the problem, it is the solution.
Trump’s rhetoric about the non-party-controlled news — “fake news,” “enemies of the people” — reveals this strategy in a way that is far more insidious than even his critics in the media seem to grasp. Reporters have treated his rhetoric as a dangerous game with unintended consequences. The consequences seem to be very much Trump’s intent.
A recently aired interview with Jim Vandehei of Axios perfectly illustrates the incomprehension that has greeted the president’s dark threats. Vandehei pleads with Trump to understand the dangers he might be unleashing.
“What scares the crap out of me is that, when you’re saying ‘enemy of the people, enemy of the people,’ … what happens if all of a sudden someone gets shot, somebody shoots one of these reporters?” Vandehei pleads. Trump replies, “It is my only form of fighting back.”
Watch the entire exchange, and take note of what Trump does not say here. The easiest answer Trump could give would be to deflect the concern as overblown. But at no point does he reassure the palpably frightened Vandehei that he is not inciting violence, and that his supporters understand that they should refrain from radical acts. Instead Trump lets the threat hang in the air, and justifies it as his only weapon against the slanders against him.
This intent was even more clearly visible last Friday, when Trump parried a reporter’s question about whether he was instigating violence. “You know what, you’re creating violence by your question. You are creating. You,” Trump insisted. “The fake news is creating violence … I’ll tell you what, if the media would write correctly and write accurately and write fairly, you’d have a lot less violence in the country.”
There is very little ambiguity about his point. Trump is warning the media that its critical coverage is provoking violence. His proposed remedy is not a cessation of violence but instead a cessation of critical coverage. Reporters seem to think that Trump will tone down by rhetoric if he can be made to understand that it is goading his supporters to violence.
It’s not that he doesn’t understand. Trump understands the connection between incitement and response perfectly well. It’s not even that he doesn’t care. Trump calculates that the threat of bombs and bullets will force reporters to bend the knee. This is what he means by “fighting back.”
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No, Athletes Will Not 'Shut Up and Dribble' - and They Never Have |
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Tuesday, 06 November 2018 09:26 |
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Holmes writes: "The point of the series is to demonstrate that in the case of black athletes, holding the game at a distance from the society in which it's played is not only contrary to history but impossible."
The idea that athletes - or actors, or writers - shouldn't be politically active in the public sphere is surprisingly widely held. (photo: Christian Petersen/Getty Images)
No, Athletes Will Not 'Shut Up and Dribble' - and They Never Have
By Linda Holmes, NPR
06 November 18
 he new documentary series Shut Up and Dribble, which premiered the first of its three parts this weekend on Showtime, is a response to commentator Laura Ingraham's dismissive February 2018 sneer in the direction of LeBron James, one of the series' executive producers. Don't take my word for it that it's a direct response: watch the opening sequence in which Ingraham, disgusted by James and other black athletes speaking out against President Donald Trump, says that nobody elected them, nobody wants to hear from them, and they should, yes, just "shut up and dribble."
The idea that athletes — or actors, or writers — shouldn't be politically active in the public sphere is surprisingly widely held. The point of the series is to demonstrate that in the case of black athletes, holding the game at a distance from the society in which it's played is not only contrary to history but impossible. And, perhaps, that it would be irresponsible.
Narrated by writer Jemele Hill and directed by Gotham Chopra, Shut Up And Dribble uses its first installment to chronicle several of professional basketball's early standouts who collided with the wider world in different ways: Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Oscar Robertson, and Isaiah Thomas. It follows the NBA through a period in the 1970s when some worried that the increasing number of black players was alienating white audiences — a crisis the end of which it credits to the hugely popular rivalry between Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. To that picture, Shut Up and Dribble adds the story of the Detroit Pistons and of Thomas, whose comments on how racism influenced the perception of Bird became very controversial, to the point where the broader observation he was making — about who is considered simply a "natural talent" and who is considered a "smart player" — was lost.
People who have watched a lot of NBA documentaries, or who have watched projects like O.J.: Made in America that try to look at the intersection of sports and the world at large, will know a good number of these stories, maybe including the stories of Russell and Robertson, and how Bird was called "the great white hope" whether he wanted to be or not, and how his rivalry with Johnson had — as one commentator wildly understates it — a "tinge" of racial dynamics in it. But there are good segments in the first installment that might be less familiar about the way the ABA and the NBA presented basketball very differently, the way labor issues among players were (and are) inextricably linked to race, and the way Abdul-Jabbar — now a columnist, a comic book writer, and a writer on the upcoming revival of Veronica Mars — decided to decline to try out for the 1968 Olympics.
The next two installments follow the NBA through later phases, up to the present. They consider the era of Michael Jordan and the explosion of endorsement deals — which, the film's interviewees suggest, tamped down public discussions of politics as protection of each athlete's personal brand became critical. They examine the career of Allen Iverson, whose path to the NBA — and his clothes and hair and tattoos and connections to hip-hop — made him a beloved figure to a lot of fans who perhaps didn't relate to Michael Jordan or Magic Johnson.
Critically, the series at one point turns its attention to the 2004 Pacers-Pistons fight — the one that spilled into the stands — that led to long suspensions, including for Metta World Peace (who then went by Ron Artest). It's a necessary chapter in part because it's impossible to consider the public activism, and the significance of public activism, of black athletes without recalling how easily after this incident commentators slipped into calling players "thugs," and how that fight seemed to surface ugly attitudes about players that had been simmering in sports media and in the NBA itself. Again, players have never had the option of shutting up and dribbling; they, like everyone, live and work in a particular social context. And it's a context in which racism affects the way they're talked about, the way they're treated, and the way their behavior is received.
And yes, we eventually reach the Obama years, and then the 2016 election. We reach Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner, and we learn that LeBron James' decision to go to the Miami Heat — not the ill-advised TV special, but the choice itself — may have affected the power balance between players and owners in a way that's made activism for players safer. That, of course, goes back to Oscar Robertson's fight for free agency chronicled in the first episode, too.
This is what good documentaries do: they provide an overview, but they also make interesting connections between specific pieces of the story. While it's about activism and racism, much of this series is about power. Power accumulated by players, whether it's the economic power of endorsements or the bargaining power of free agency, directly enables them to use their platforms without worrying that they'll be, for instance, let go from their teams and unable to get new jobs because a political stand they consider crucial proves to be unpopular, or makes them targets. An unspoken thesis of the series is that the concept of athletes not belonging in politics is about discomfort with, and resentment of, that considerable power.
It's a strange idea, this expectation that players must entertain and not speak. The NBA is a business that makes ridiculous money for mostly white owners from the work of many black athletes. It's fed by the NCAA, which makes ridiculous money for schools from the work of many black athletes. It's covered by a disproportionately white sports media, and it's regulated by a mostly white political system. Shut Up and Dribble is a good exploration of all the ways that black athletes couldn't remain apart from racism or politics even if they wanted to — which, as it happens, many of them don't.
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