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FOCUS: Trump Picks Al Capone of Vote Rigging to Investigate Federal Voter Fraud |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=13834"><span class="small">Greg Palast, GregPalast.com</span></a>
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Saturday, 13 May 2017 10:57 |
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Palast writes: "Kris Kobach was spooning down vanilla ice cream when I showed him the thick pages of evidence documenting his detailed plan to rig the presidential election of 2016."
Donald Trump. (photo: AP)
Trump Picks Al Capone of Vote Rigging to Investigate Federal Voter Fraud
By Greg Palast, GregPalast.com
13 May 17
Kris Kobach is the GOP mastermind behind a secretive system that purged 1.1 million Americans from the voter rolls.
 ris Kobach was spooning down vanilla ice cream when I showed him the thick pages of evidence documenting his detailed plan to rig the presidential election of 2016.
The Secretary of State of Kansas, sucking up carbs at a Republican Party Fundraiser recognized the documents – and yelled at me, "YOU'RE A LIAR!" then ran for it while still trying to wolf down the last spoonful.
But documents don't lie.
That was 2015 (yes, the ballot heist started way back). Today this same man on the run, Kris Kobach, is now Donald Trump’s choice to head the new “Voter Integrity Commission.”
It’s like appointing Al Capone to investigate The Mob.
How did Kobach mess with the 2016 vote? Let me count the ways—as I have in three years of hunting down Kobach’s ballot-box gaming for Rolling Stone and Al Jazeera.
Just two of Kobach’s vote-bending tricks undoubtedly won Michigan for Trump and contributed to his “wins” in Ohio, North Carolina and Arizona.
First, Interstate Crosscheck.
Kobach is the GOP mastermind behind this secretive system which purged 1.1 million Americans from the voter rolls.
When Trump said, “This election’s rigged,” the press ignored the second part of his statement: “People are voting many, many times.” Trump cited three million votes illegally cast.
The White House said Trump got this information from Kobach. Indeed, it specifically comes from a list of 7 million names—or, as Kobach describes it, a list of 3.5 million “potential double voters.” How did Kobach find these three million double voters?
He matched their names, first and last. And that’s it.
Here’s an unedited screen-shot of a segment of his list:
James Edward Harris Jr. of Richmond, Virginia, is supposed to be the same voters as James R. Harris (no Jr.) of Indianapolis, Indiana. Really? Note that not one middle name matches.
And here’s the ugly part. Both James Harris (in fact, hundreds of them) are subject to getting scrubbed off the voter rolls.
And these are Kobach’s lists, tens of thousands of names I showed Kobach, falsely accused of the crime of double voting.
And that’s why Kobach was stunned and almost dropped his vanilla, because he and his GOP colleagues kept the lists of the accused strictly confidential. (The first of the confidential lists was obtained by our investigative photojournalist, Zach D. Roberts, through legal methods—though howling voting officials want them back.)
In all, about 1.1 million voters on that list have been scrubbed already—and they don’t know it. They show up to vote and they’re name has simply vanished. Or, the voter is marked “inactive.” “Crosscheck” is not marked on the victim voter’s record. It’s a stealth hit.
And it’s deadly. Doubtless, Crosscheck delivered Michigan to Trump who supposedly “won” the state by 10,700 votes. The Secretary of State’s office proudly told me that they were “very aggressive” in removing listed voters before the 2016 election. Kobach, who created the lists for his fellow GOP officials, tagged a whopping 417,147 in Michigan as potential double voters.
And not just any voters. Mark Swedlund, a database expert who advises companies such as Amazon and eBay on how not to mis-match customers was “flabbergasted” to discover in his team’s technical analysis, that the list was so racially biased that fully one in six registered African-Americans were tagged in the Crosscheck states that include the swing states of Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Arizona and more.
The effect goes way beyond the Trump v. Clinton count. I spoke to several of the targeted voters on the list in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional district where the Democratic candidate fell just short of the margin to win a special election. Especially hard hit in the northern Atlanta suburbs were Korean-Americans, like Mr. Sung Park, who found he was tagged as voting in two states in 2012 simply because he had a name that is as common in Korea as James Brown.
And Kobach, in fact, tagged 288 men in Georgia named James Brown on his Crosscheck blacklist.
As Crosscheck spreads—and it was just signed into law in New Hampshire in the last days of a lame-duck Republican governorship—it will undoubtedly poison the count in the fight for Congress in 2018.
And that’s why Trump needs Kobach on his “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity”: To spread Crosscheck with an official federal endorsement and, likely, Congressional legislation.
And if Crosscheck isn’t enough to scare you, Kobach is also pushing Trump to require voters to prove their citizenship.
At first blush, it seems right to demand people prove they are US citizens to vote. But here’s the rub: We are not Red China and don’t carry citizenship cards. Resident Aliens holding Green Cards have, indeed are required to have, Social security cards and drivers’ licenses, if they drive or work.
The readiest proof of citizenship is a passport. And what is the color of the typical passport holder, their income—and the color of their vote?
The other form of proof, besides naturalization papers, is your original birth certificate.
And there’s the rub: the poor, minorities and especially new young voters do not have easy access to a passport or their birth certificates. Kobach took his citizenship proof requirement out for a test drive in Kansas. The result: 36,000 young voters were barred from voting… that is, until a federal judge, citing the National Voter Registration Act, told Kobach that unless he could produce even one alien among those 36,000, she was ordering him to let them vote.
Kobach’s response: a private meeting with Trump at Trump Tower where he proposed changing the Act.
All of this to eliminate a crime which does not occur. Besides Trump’s claims of alien voters swimming the Rio Grande to vote for Hillary, I have found only two verified cases of votes cast by aliens in the US in the last decade. (One, an Austrian who confessed to voting for Jeb Bush in Florida.)
Don’t laugh. The threat of “alien voters” – long a staple claim by Kobach on his appearances on Fox TV – will be the Kobach Commission’s hammer to smash the National Voter Registration Act’s protections. Based on the numbers from Kansas, and its overwhelming effect on young – read “Democratic” – voters, this shift alone could swing the election of 2018.
Indeed, Kobach’s Crosscheck con together with his “alien” voter attack,could mean the choice of the electorate in 2020 may already be trumped.
Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie.
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The GOP Takes Women's Health Hypocrisy to a New Level |
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Saturday, 13 May 2017 08:35 |
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Dunlap writes: "The American Health Care Act, which passed in the House last week, is a cornucopia of Republican hypocrisies. Republicans claimed the problem with Obamacare was that premiums were too high and government subsidies to purchase insurance too low, but their replacement would allow insurers to charge older and sicker people higher premiums, while providing substantially less financial assistance to pay them."
Activists gather for a rally and march marking International Women's Day. (photo: Justin Lane/EPA)
The GOP Takes Women's Health Hypocrisy to a New Level
By Bridgette Dunlap, Rolling Stone
13 May 17
 he American Health Care Act, which passed in the House last week, is a cornucopia of Republican hypocrisies. Republicans claimed the problem with Obamacare was that premiums were too high and government subsidies to purchase insurance too low, but their replacement would allow insurers to charge older and sicker people higher premiums, while providing substantially less financial assistance to pay them. Republicans have been whining for years that Obamacare's passage was rushed (though it was debated for seven months), but they passed their slapped-together bill without holding a single hearing, just weeks after introducing it. And after howling that the Obamacare process lacked transparency, House Republicans not only voted on Trumpcare without waiting for a CBO score estimating what it will cost and how many people will lose insurance – they voted without even making the full text of the bill public.
But nothing illustrates the Trumpcare Republicans' willingness to abandon the principles they claim to hold so dear quite like what the bill does to women's health care. Let's set aside the fact that the party whose official platform advocates making abortion a crime just voted to allow insurers not to cover maternity care and to allow states to give fewer pregnant women and children Medicaid. Republican advocacy for policies preventing women from ending pregnancies but against policies protecting the health and economic stability of women who wish to bring their pregnancies to term may be the height of hypocrisy – but it's old news.
There is a less obvious truth about Republican values exposed by the Trumpcare provisions concerning women's health care: Their commitment to free markets and federalism is a farce.
Obamacare upended the status quo of insurers assuming the male body to be the default, and treating normal health care for women as something exotic to be had at extra charge. Obamacare forbids charging women higher premiums than men, and mandates that certain essential services be covered.
But anti-Obamacare Republicans reject the idea that individuals should have to pay into a system that covers services they may not ever need – that is, they reject the basic premise of insurance – or much of any role for government in making sure citizens have health care. Instead, they favor the idea that we should let insurers competing in the markets decide what services are covered, or at least let states rather than the federal government determine what the coverage requirements are.
So Trumpcare allows states to seek waivers to free insurers from various Obamacare requirements, including those mandating coverage for essential health services. The criteria for qualifying for a waiver are quite loose, so we can expect Trump's HHS Secretary Tom Price to give one to every state that asks, regardless of whether they take any meaningful steps to offset the harm to patients. That means women in red states who don't have employer plans that are more comprehensive than required or qualify for Medicaid will have to either anticipate getting pregnant and pay higher premiums, or pay many thousands of dollars out of pocket. The message from Republicans is that they must stop federal regulation to protect women's health in order to vindicate the sacred federalist principle of state control and the free-market notion that if consumers want quality products, they can pay more for them.
But within the very same bill, Republicans demonstrate what fair-weather freemarketers and federalists they are. Despite their opposition to regulations protecting health services for women, they are happy to interfere in order to stop states from requiring insurers to cover abortion and to keep insurers from covering it voluntarily.
Trumpcare would replace the Obamacare subsidies that moderate-income purchasers of individual health plans currently receive with much smaller tax credits of $2,000 to $4,000. Those already meager tax credits would not be available to anyone whose health plan covers abortion, which, for instance, includes everyone in the states of New York and California.
GOP Rep. Dan Donovan raised this issue before last week's House vote, explaining he couldn't support a bill that denied everyone in his state tax credits. But his fellow House Republicans blew him off. As a spokeswoman for the House Ways and Means Committee put it, "it will be incumbent on states to adapt as federal law changes." In other words, Republicans want to force states to change their laws in order to prevent women from being able to afford abortion services.
That strategy requires a complete reversal of the "states' rights" argument Republicans used to get a portion of Obamacare struck down by the Supreme Court. Obamacare opponents argued that Obamacare's Medicaid expansion, which originally required states to expand their Medicaid programs with federal funds or lose all Medicaid funding, was unconstitutionally coercive. That argument was a bit of a stretch at the time, because the Court had generally allowed the federal government to put conditions on the funding it provides to states. But the Obamacare opponents won, strengthening the legal precedent that prevents the federal government from commandeering the states to implement its policies.
That anti-Obamacare ruling is the basis of a recent court decision blocking Trump's anti-sanctuary city executive order, and would also likely underpin any decision striking down the provision of Trumpcare depriving individuals with abortion coverage of tax credits. California's health insurance commissioner, who is running for attorney general, has said he would sue if the de facto abortion coverage ban went into effect – and because courts aren't anywhere as quick as Republicans to abandon principles they have recently upheld, California would likely win.
Republicans' willingness to meddle with markets and state laws to prevent women from accessing reproductive health care is part of a larger pattern. Anti-regulation zealots like Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee are all in favor of regulating abortion clinics out of existence. Purported supporters of patient choice voted to bar Medicaid patients from receiving any kind of health care at Planned Parenthood. And numerous red states already prohibit private insurers from covering abortion.
The bottom line from Republicans is this: They won't regulate to guarantee women access to health care, but they're happy to use regulation as a weapon to deprive them of care that states or free markets would otherwise provide.
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The Dakota Pipeline Is Already Leaking. Why Wait for a Big Spill to Act? |
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Saturday, 13 May 2017 08:26 |
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NoiseCat writes: "Energy Transfer Partners' not yet operational Dakota Access pipeline leaked 84 gallons - or about a bathtub-full - of shale oil at a pump station in Spink County, South Dakota, on 4 April. The station stands roughly 100 miles south-east of the site of indigenous protest encampments along the Missouri river, where for months in 2016 the Standing Rock Sioux's stand against Dakota Access captivated the world."
Activists on Standing Rock Sioux sacred ancestral grounds. (photo: Rob Wilson)
The Dakota Pipeline Is Already Leaking. Why Wait for a Big Spill to Act?
By Julian Brave NoiseCat, Guardian UK
13 May 17
The leaks prove that the water protectors have been right all along. The pool of tar it left behind is also a warning of what’s to come
 nergy Transfer Partners’ not yet operational Dakota Access pipeline leaked 84 gallons – or about a bathtub-full – of shale oil at a pump station in Spink County, South Dakota, on 4 April. The station stands roughly 100 miles south-east of the site of indigenous protest encampments along the Missouri river, where for months in 2016 the Standing Rock Sioux’s stand against Dakota Access captivated the world.
Despite enduring controversy over the Dakota Access pipeline, the South Dakota department of environment and natural resources did not issue a press release about the mishap because the department deals with pipeline leaks all the time. The department only issues a press release when a detected leak threatens drinking water, fisheries or public health. It logged the Dakota Access incident in its database, but the spill remained unknown to the public for over a month until local reporter Shannon Marvel broke the story for Aberdeen, South Dakota’s American News on Wednesday.
The relatively minor leak demonstrates the risk of technological and human failure inherent in crude oil pipelines. Just a few months earlier, on 5 December 2016, a North Dakota landowner discovered a massive, undetected 176,000-gallon oil leak polluting a creek 150 miles north of Standing Rock.
A month after that, a pipeline farther north in the Western Canadian province of Saskatchewan leaked over 52,000 gallons of crude on the territory of the Ocean Man First Nation. As indigenous peoples, ranchers and environmentalists have repeatedly stated, the question is when and where pipelines will leak – not if.
As Donald Trump and the oil industry gear up to push forward Keystone XL and other pipelines across the US, we can expect talking heads to take to the press and cable networks to tell us that pipelines are safer than trains for the transport of crude, that regulations have stolen jobs in the heartland and that energy independence from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries is paramount to our national economic and security interests.
From corporate offices in Houston and Dallas and network headquarters in midtown Manhattan, these snake oil salesmen will tell us not to worry – the benefits of pipelines far outweigh the costs. Drill, baby, drill, and America will be great again.
To them, the benefits of pipelines look pretty sweet. Energy Transfer Partners CEO Kelcy Warren – who has a reported net worth of $4.4bn – lives in a 23,000-square-foot home on 10 acres in Dallas’s elite Preston Hollow neighborhood, where houses sell for tens of millions of dollars and where Warren’s six-bedroom, 13-bath home features a four-lane bowling alley, a chip-and-putt green, a pole-vault pit and a 200-seat private theater. When his Dallas mansion isn’t cutting it, Warren escapes to an 11,000-acre ranch north-west of Austin, where giraffes, peccaries and Indian bison roam the property. America is awfully great if you’re Kelcy Warren.
But who is forced to live with the costs of pipelines and the lavish wealth they build?
Not the predominantly white residents of the city of Bismarck, North Dakota – the pipeline was rerouted from upriver of their settlement out of concern that it threatened the city’s water supply.
No, instead the Dakota Access pipeline – not yet operational but already leaky – crosses under the Missouri river just north of the Standing Rock Sioux Indian reservation. There it threatens the water supply of a community where 41% of citizens live in poverty. In Standing Rock, adequate homes, schools and hospitals are few and far between, but a brand-new $3.8bn pipe, which costs $1bn more than the entire Bureau of Indian Affairs budget, is now in the ground. At any moment, a leak might contaminate the water supply of Standing Rock and the 17 million people downstream who rely on the Missouri river.
What conservatives and centrists and even some liberals really mean when they say that we need pipelines in order to achieve “energy independence” is that in the dogged pursuit of the last drops of the planet’s oil wealth, some people are expendable.
In the short term, the expendables are the indigenous communities, ranchers and workers forced to live under the constant threat of petroleum poisoning. In the long-term, the expendables include all future generations condemned to a planet cooked by greenhouse gas.
Rerouting pipelines might protect a few expendables in the short term, but it cannot save our planet and its peoples in the long run. To protect the planet and future generations from a world superheated by fossil fuel, we must stand with indigenous peoples, ranchers and environmentalists against pipelines that lock-in even more emissions into the global economy.
A few dozen gallons of oil spewing from a pump in South Dakota doesn’t just prove that the water protectors have been right all along. The pool of tar it left behind is also a warning of what’s to come if more black snakes slither into the ground.
We need a just transition now more than ever. Not just for our leaky pipelines, but for our failing moral infrastructure, which has unequivocally defined indigenous peoples, the poor and our children as collateral so that a few men can frolic in palaces, safari with giraffes on their own properties and become unfathomably wealthy.
As the Trump administration attempts to ham-fist the Keystone XL pipeline down the throats of indigenous peoples, ranchers and the mother earth we all share, we must stand and say no. A better world is possible and indeed deeply necessary right now. Let’s fight for it.
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Donald Trump Acts Like an Illegitimate President for a Reason |
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Friday, 12 May 2017 14:03 |
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Feingold writes: "The American people did not really choose Donald Trump. His presidency exists without the support of the majority of voters and, in turn, without a true mandate from the American people."
'We are a nation at risk of the Trump-Pence administration becoming a catastrophic precedent.' (photo: David McNew/Getty)
Donald Trump Acts Like an Illegitimate President for a Reason
By Russ Feingold, Guardian UK
12 May 17
In the firing of FBI director James Comey, the US president seems not to care about how Americans view him. Is that because most didn’t vote for him?
he American people did not really choose Donald Trump. His presidency exists without the support of the majority of voters and, in turn, without a true mandate from the American people. Trump walks and talks instead like an authoritarian, and seems to believe he is above the people and the law, and need not answer to either. He wants to be untouchable. He behaves with impunity and acts as if legal standards like obstruction of justice don’t apply to him.
Firing the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey, demonstrates a whole new level of defiance of the rule of law and our foundational system of checks and balances. More bluntly, it proves just how dangerous an illegitimate president is to our democracy. His actions do not only undermine the legitimacy and credibility of his presidency; they are a direct threat to our constitutionalism and our democratic legitimacy.
Our democratic legitimacy comes from the “power of the people”. When a president is duly elected by the people, that person is accountable to those people. After a president is elected by a majority of the people, it is self-evident that the people who gave them power can also take it away. But when a president wins the White House while losing the popular vote, this accountability to the people is lost.
The president took power in defiance of the people, and expects to be able to do so again. So the will of the people becomes irrelevant in the mind – and decision making – of an illegitimate president. An illegitimate president can fire the FBI director in order to impede an investigation into his own campaign, and believe there will be no consequences. If he can fire the head of the FBI, what else can he do?
This seems like an obvious demand at this point, but it’s worth stating clearly that now, more than ever, we need a special prosecutor appointed to look into the continuing drip, drip, drip revelations about Russia. But even more than that, the United States must regain our democratic legitimacy by ensuring that no citizen, president or otherwise, is above the law or above the American people.
The case for obstruction of justice by the Trump administration is being built right now, and we must demand that Republicans and Democrats join together so that the grave danger to our democracy is called out for what it is and remedied – and not swept under the rug.
We also must not lose sight of the larger fight at hand. Tuesday’s events stem directly from our own illegitimate electoral system, which produced Trump the president. They are the result of voter suppression, dark money in politics, and the esoteric electoral college – all of which serve to silence the American people. To restore our democratic legitimacy, together, we must overcome these more entrenched challenges that strengthen those elected officials who opt to be silent when it is time to speak out.
We must make the national popular vote determinative, Congress must pass a 21st-century Voting Rights Act and we need to keep up the pressure in favor of comprehensive campaign finance reform. If we fail to do this, we are a nation at risk of the Trump-Pence administration becoming a catastrophic precedent, rather than a one-time phenomenon that our democracy overcame.
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tunning,” “a Constitutional crisis,” “the beginning of the unraveling of his presidency.” What else can we journalists come up with to avoid, as almost all of us are, reporting outright that President Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey smashes down into the middle of Congress’s agenda the tabooable but nevertheless overriding issue of whether to impeach Trump for — just most recently — his abuse of his power by obstruction of justice in the FBI’s criminal investigation of his presidential campaign.
