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Why Ossoff Lost |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Wednesday, 21 June 2017 13:47 |
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Pierce writes: "Republicans vote Republican, even when a fresh face like Jon Ossoff steals the headlines."
Jon Ossoff lost to Karen Handel in a special election in Georgia's 6th Congressional district. (photo: Getty)
Why Ossoff Lost
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
21 June 17
Republicans vote Republican, even when a fresh face like Jon Ossoff steals the headlines.
 K, two things before we leave the leafy, tranquil suburbs of rank despair down there in Georgia and hurl ourselves into the heat and desolation of the Hot Take Caldera.
Point The First: Karen Handel, who won the congressional seat previously held by Tom (The Wolf of Wall Street) Price, was not a very strong candidate. She ran for statewide office three times and lost badly. She piled up a resounding 19 percent in the preliminary balloting. Her appeal to that mythical beast, The Independent Voter, was practically nil; on many issues judged to be critical to that critter, from good government to marriage equality, she is an extremist loon. She was nobody's idea of an ideal Republican candidate for that seat, either.
But she won. Know why? Because there was an 'R' next to her name, that's why, and because that's all that matters to Republicans, who get out and vote for anyone with an 'R' next to their name, and who know how to keep their internecine knife fights largely on the down low and, in any case, even while those are going on, they know how to keep their eyes on the prize. They come out. They vote their party, even in what apparently were godawful weather conditions.
Conclusion: I would like the 2016 Democratic primary elections to be over now.
Point The Second: Now that it's open season on Jon Ossoff, I'd like to point out that he came within a whisker of avoiding a runoff entirely in an election for a congressional seat that's been solidly Republican since Jimmy Carter was president. That's not a win, but it's not nothing, either. He was a studied, cautious candidate. (His personal affect was thoughtful to the point of occasionally seeming a bit off-plumb, truth be told.) It's very hard to make a case that a louder, more progressive candidate would have done much better than Ossoff did. (And that's not even to mention that the Democrats ran a former Goldman Sachs executive in a deep red South Carolina district and came even closer to an upset than they did in Georgia. That would have scrambled some brains among the purity police.) It's a fair point to say that, especially when all that Paul Ryan PAC money came flooding in at the last minute to link Ossoff to Nancy Pelosi and, most odiously, to the mass shooting in Alexandria.
(The Pelosi question is an interesting one. Already, there are cries to replace her as the minority leader in the House, almost all of which are based on election results outside the chamber. However, nobody has been better at herding the cats in the Democratic caucus than she's been. And now that the Blue Dogs are apparently having delusions of grandeur again, I'm not sure it's the right time to toss away that essential skill. But I do find compelling the argument that the hyper-nationalization of the Ossoff campaign did it no favors.)
Conclusion: I would like the 2016 Democratic primary elections to be over now.
Yes, it is hard for the Democrats to listen to the mad king cock-a-doodle-doo on the electric Twitter machine. And it probably is almost impossible for them to listen to the thousand voices who Know Better. Some of them will be completely a'skeered and declare themselves open for business with Camp Runamuck. Still others will insist that there is a huge reservoir out there in the boondocks for economic populism detached from the racism and xenophobia into which American economic populism almost always descends.
(Over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, there is a thread dealing with a proposal from one of America's most prominent Berniecrats that the key for Democratic candidates in the South is to follow the example of…Zell Miller.)
All of this will be utterly counterproductive and, worse, futile. The Republicans don't care. They have their vicious primary battles and then, usually, everybody in the choir sings on key. Republicans are remarkably unembarrassed by jettisoning their previous deeply held beliefs for the purposes of winning elections. Ted Cruz's fealty to the current president* is proof enough of that.
The biggest mistake the Ossoff campaign made was relying too heavily on the notion that there were Republican voters in that district that could be broken off from their party. This almost is never the case. Through decades of constant and unrelenting pressure, and through finagling with the franchise in a hundred ways in a thousand places, the Republicans have compressed the votes they need into an unmovable, diamond-hard core that will vote in robotic lockstep for whoever it is that wins a Republican primary. In American politics today, mindlessness is one of the strongest weapons you can have. Republicans vote for Republicans in Republican districts. Period.
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We Led the Wisconsin Senate. Now We're Fighting Gerrymandering in Our State. |
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Wednesday, 21 June 2017 13:43 |
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Excerpt: "Partisan gerrymandering has taken hold in Wisconsin and other states, where politicians and special interests have rigged the system, manipulating voting maps to keep their own political party in power with little regard for the will of the voters."
The Wisconsin State Assembly. (photo: Tom Lynn)
We Led the Wisconsin Senate. Now We're Fighting Gerrymandering in Our State.
By Tim Cullen and Dale Schultz, The Washington Post
21 June 17
 im Cullen is a former Democratic majority leader of the Wisconsin Senate. Dale Schultz is a former Republican majority leader of the Wisconsin Senate. They are co-chairs of the Fair Elections Project, which helped organize the Gill v. Whitford litigation.
As politicians from different parties, we disagree a lot. We vote for different candidates for president, we have very different views on taxes, and we disagree strongly on abortion.
But some things we agree on: We both love our home state, Wisconsin, where we have had long careers in public service, including having led our state Senate. And we’re both deeply concerned that the political system in Wisconsin — as in so much of the country — is broken.
Nothing epitomizes the problem more than the extreme partisan gerrymandering that has taken hold in Wisconsin and other states, where politicians and special interests have rigged the system, manipulating voting maps to keep their own political party in power with little regard for the will of the voters.
That’s why we are supporting the lawsuit from Wisconsin the Supreme Court just agreed to hear that would limit gerrymandering no matter which party does it. In our view — as the old saying goes — absolute power corrupts absolutely. Fighting gerrymandering is about fighting abuse of power, no matter who does it. If our side wins the lawsuit, we will establish a principle that reins in not only Republicans in states such as Wisconsin and North Carolina but also Democrats in states such as Maryland and Illinois.
Our state is divided right down the middle politically. Wisconsinites voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and for Donald Trump in 2016. One of our two U.S. senators is a Democrat and the other is a Republican. And in State Assembly elections, the statewide vote has been close to 50-50, with Democrats securing a narrow majority of the statewide vote in 2012, and Republicans winning slim majorities in 2014 and 2016.
Yet our state legislative maps don’t come close to reflecting that split. For the past three elections, Republicans have controlled between 61 percent and 65 percent of the Assembly, even when they earned fewer popular votes than Democrats statewide. That’s because Republicans used their electoral victories in 2010 to promptly — and secretly — draw legislative district maps that ensured Republican control of the state legislature for a decade, no matter how the people voted. In 2012, they lost the popular vote but still retained a massive majority in the legislature. They even tried to hide their analysis, which revealed that Democrats would have had to secure an almost-unprecedented share of the statewide vote to secure a bare majority in the Assembly.
The Supreme Court will hear arguments for Wisconsin’s case, Gill v. Whitford, this fall. Late last year, a three-judge federal panel ruled that the district maps were unconstitutional. This historic ruling, written by an appellate judge appointed by President Ronald Reagan, marked the first time a legislative map was overturned on the grounds that it was politically discriminatory.
We hope that the high court curtails the practice of fixing elections through gerrymandering so that our country can get back on track. The principle is simple: Elections should be fair and should be designed so that voters choose their elected officials, not the other way around. We believe the majority should rule, and elections should reflect the will of the electorate. But when the maps are rigged, people are left behind.
When we each served as state Senate majority leader, we knew we had to reach bipartisan compromise on key issues. That’s what voters expected, no matter which party was in control. And so we did. Republicans and Democrats compromised on common-sense environmental protections, adequate funding for universities and roads, and tax rates that were sufficient to fund necessary services but not overly burdensome on our residents. When the maps weren’t rigged and politicians had to win votes from the middle — because general elections mattered — we had better results.
Since 2011, we’ve seen a different kind of politics in Wisconsin. With party control pre-decided, most legislators care only about their primary elections. Everyone knows who’s going to win the general election. There’s much less incentive to reach bipartisan compromise. Instead, we see policy decided in partisan caucuses, leaving the minority out in the cold. That’s not what Wisconsin citizens want, but it is the government they are getting.
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FOCUS: Jim Crow GOP Steals Another Election as Brain Dead Democrats and Media Say Nothing |
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Wednesday, 21 June 2017 13:37 |
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Excerpt: "The Democrats and their media cohorts are now beginning to mourn the weakness of the 'Democrat' brand. But they seem unwilling and/or unable to face the simple reality that these elections are being stripped and flipped. Until they do, there will be zero meaningful electoral challenge to the Trump catastrophe"
The two candidates for Georgia Special election in 6th district Karen Handel and Jon Ossoff. (photo: Christopher Aluka Berry/Reuters)
Jim Crow GOP Steals Another Election as Brain Dead Democrats and Media Say Nothing
By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
21 June 17
he Jim Crow GOP has stolen yet another Congressional election, this time in Georgia. As always, the media and Democrats are saying nothing about it.
And now the US Supreme Court will allow secretaries of state to completely trash the ballots of anyone they choose.
So the Trump/GOP domination of American elections is essentially secure for the foreseeable future. Anyone believing the 2018 or 2020 elections will provide realistic opportunities to overthrow Trump/GOP control of the government is living in a dream world.
That dream world fits a historic pattern we outline in our new STRIP & FLIP DISASTER OF AMERICA’S STOLEN ELECTIONS (www/freepress.org). Its latest incarnation has just surfaced in Jim Crow Georgia.
The much-hyped Congressional race between Democrat John Ossof and former Georgia GOP secretary of state Karen Handel was the most expensive in US history, costing more than $50 million.
It has ended with yet another victory for Jim Crow election theft as surely as if the KKK had run rampant through the countryside, lynching potential voters.
When the seat was vacated by a Trump cabinet pick, Ossof apparently won the election. Early reports showed him with well over 50% of the vote. But as usual where electronic voting machines are involved, Ossof’s margin mysteriously fell under the majority as the evening proceeded, forcing a run-off.
Not one major media outlet reported that GOP secretaries of state like Handel have been using the infamous Crosscheck program to strip untold numbers of minority and other suspected Democrats from the registration rolls. As reported by Greg Palast in THE BEST DEMOCRACY MONEY CAN BUY, Crosscheck was developed by Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach to eliminate millions of non-white voters from the registration rolls. In 2016, some 30 GOP secretaries of state used it to help put Trump in the White House.
Trump has since appointed Kobach to a special national commission on elections. Trump also picked J. Kenneth Blackwell, the former Ohio secretary of state responsible for flipping the 2004 presidential election from John Kerry to George W. Bush. The commission will be a perfect weapon to further enhance the Republican apparatus for stealing elections.
Meanwhile, in their endless fundraising emails and public rantings, the corporate Democrats continue to focus on alleged Russian hacking. They avoid any real attention to the Crosscheck program and other forms of homegrown Jim Crow disenfranchisement that helped cost them the presidency and innumerable seats in the state and US legislatures, giving the GOP a growing iron grip on our government.
They fail to mention that a data analytics firm working for the Republican National Committee “accidentally leaked the sensitive personal details of roughly 198 million citizens ... on the web for nearly two weeks.” As Business Insider explained: “This is what you can use to steal an election.”
In Georgia, Greg Palast has reported in that a grassroots citizens’ group recently compiled some 10,000 registration forms for Korean-Americans to vote in the disputed Ossof-Handel district. The completed forms were delivered to GOP election officials, but somehow the names were never entered onto the voter rolls.
When registration activists complained, Georgia authorities claimed to never have received the forms. According to Palast, when the activists told election officials they had photo-copied the forms, the state launched a legal lynching, threatening the activists with criminal prosecution and destroying their voter registration organization.
Those 10,000 disenfranchised Korean-Americans, combined with votes stolen by Crosscheck, could easily have won the first election for Ossof, and the run-off as well.
This is the third consecutive Congressional election the Democrats have lost since Trump took power. They also just lost one in South Carolina.
Pelosi and company are trying to crow about how close they came in heavily Republican districts, many of which re growing increasingly diverse. But those seats still belong to Trump’s Jim Crow GOP. Like Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, and Hillary Clinton in 2016, the party still refuses to even discuss how these critical elections were stripped with massive disenfranchisement and then, where necessary, flipped by electronic means.
To make matters much worse, the Supreme Court has just upheld partisan election stripping in Ohio, refusing to hear a challenge to Ohio’s Jim Crow habit of trashing ballots with minor errors on them.
The process has been perfected by current GOP Secretary of State Jon Husted, who regularly orders that ballots be discarded with tiny variations in details like omitting a zip code, missing a digit in a social security number, writing in legal cursive rather than roman letters.
Like Blackwell before him, Husted swings elections by pitching thousands of provisional, mailed-in, and other suspected Democratic votes into the trash on the slightest pretext. The practice was challenged in court by the Democrats and the Northern Ohio Coalition for the Homeless. But the corporatist Roberts Supreme Court has left this electoral lynch process in place.
In essence this marks the death of the Democratic Party in Ohio and wherever else there’s a Trump/GOP secretary of state. Popular progressive US senator Sherrod Brown, for example, will stand no chance for re-election in 2018 in a balloting where Husted can eliminate as many Democratic votes as he needs to flip the seat to the GOP, no matter who they run for it.
Major stories at Huffington Post, the New York Times and elsewhere make no mention of the trashing of those Asian-American registration forms or of the Crosscheck program stripping untold numbers of registered voters in Georgia.
Endless Democrat harping on Russian meddling, followed by countless fundraising emails signed by Nancy Pelosi, ignore that the party has zero chance of stopping the Trump GOP until registration forms are actually honored and votes are actually counted.
Neither the corporate media nor the corporate Democrats seem able to handle the inconvenient truth that our electoral system is, as Donald Trump says, totally rigged.
He should know. His party is the one doing it, Jim Crow-style, in Georgia and throughout the rest of the country.
The Democrats and their media cohorts are now beginning to mourn the weakness of the “Democrat” brand.
But they seem unwilling and/or unable to face the simple reality that these elections are being stripped and flipped. Until they do, there will be zero meaningful electoral challenge to the Trump catastrophe.
Harvey Wasserman’s America at the Brink of Rebirth: The Organic Spiral of US History can be had via www.solartopia.org. The Strip & Flip Selection of 2016: Five Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft, co-written with Bob Fitrakis, is at www.freepress.org.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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FOCUS: Dreadful Things Are Afoot |
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Wednesday, 21 June 2017 10:44 |
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Keillor writes: "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country."
The Capitol dome in 2014. (photo: Bill O'Leary/WP)
Dreadful Things Are Afoot
By Garrison Keillor, The Washington Post
21 June 17
 am a registered liberal who mostly toes the party line, but I am not devoted to the idea of big government. I loathe the law in New York state requiring gas pump nozzles to not latch. This means that I must stand beside my vehicle, holding the nozzle lever open, instead of latching it and walking into the gas station to use the john which, if you’re an older male and hear gushing liquid, you feel a powerful urge to do, so thanks to legislative overregulation, I am on the verge of humiliating myself.
Liberals believe in universal suffrage, but I don’t think the right to vote should be extended to people walking around with wires going into their ears. If you need to walk through the world in a state of stupefaction, you don’t belong in a democracy. The ballot should belong to people who pay attention.
I have other strong conservative tendencies: I accept limitations, even sometimes futility, as inevitable. I once gave a very funny speech in the chapel of an Ivy League college and my voice went ricocheting around the Gothic arches and came back to me 15 seconds later and it was incomprehensible, even to me whose voice it was. I might as well have been speaking Navajo. Nobody laughed. I did not complain to authorities. I was amused. Stuff happens.
Life is unfair. The National Endowment for the Arts bestows pots of gold on poets, chicken feed on humorists, and so what? The federal government is responsible for the announcement in airports warning you to report to authorities any stranger who asks you to carry an object aboard an aircraft. It’s like telling people to report any sightings of unicorns. But who cares? Not I.
All around Washington stand handsome temples housing the ABA, NEA, AFL-CIO, the Federated Organization of Associations, the Organization of Associated Federations, the American Scatological Society, the National Recidivists Alliance, all of which have marbly lobbies and numerous executive vice presidents whose job is to buttonhole public servants. My group, UNCLE, the United Newspaper Columnists in the Language of English, has no such temple. We are harmless, like the Moose and the Elks, and ask only to be left alone.
Same with my other group, Minnesotans Oppressed by Rather Obsessive Self-Effacement (MOROSE), which, despite our resistance to attitudism, refusing to cheer at football games or join singalongs, has only dug a hole for itself. People regard us as a joke. We are not. We are victims of a self-mortifying culture and dare not ask anything for ourselves such as major defense installations, which go to Texas and California, but what are you going to do?
So there I am, pumping gas in Poughkeepsie, about to wet myself, all because of big government, and it dawns on me that back in my boyhood days, patient and practical-minded men and women got into politics and formed a strong bipartisan bloc that worked for decent mental-health facilities and prisons, made higher education available to children of mail clerks and waitresses, created parks and protected wilderness — all the basic stuff of government. That bloc seems to have evaporated and now we are locked in bitter conflict about which way is up and whether the Earth is round. Crankiness is in the driver’s seat.
Meanwhile, dreadful things are afoot. Powerful people want to put potheads in prison, clamp down on travel to Cuba, let banks mess around however they like, deport the folks who pick the lettuce and slaughter the hogs, and work assiduously to ease the troubles of the very rich, and if one says “Boo” to them, they blame the media or my aunt Sally. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country lest the quick brown fox jump over the lazy dog and President Etaoin Shrdlu endure. Sad! Total loser! You know it, I know it.
Republicans, beware. The tables will turn. We liberals will regain power by the simple method of redistricting. We will incorporate the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and Utah into California, and usher in a hundred years of progressivism. What goes around comes around. Be wise. The Senate majority staffers who are trying to put lipstick on a cruel House health-care bill are spitting into the wind. In 20 years, Obamacare will be gone, replaced by universal Medicare, and you will be employed as carnival workers, running the kiddie rides, and you’ll stop for gas in New York and remember this column and ask yourselves, “Why didn’t we listen to him then?” Well, why don’t you?
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