The Banana Republic of America

[firstfloor]

The thing about Bananaists is that only Banana votes count:

President Trump’s persistent attacks on mail-in voting have fueled an unprecedented effort by conservatives to limit expansion of the practice before the November election, with tens of millions of dollars planned for lawsuits and advertising aimed at restricting who receives ballots and who remains on the voter rolls.


The strategy, embraced by Trump’s reelection campaign, the Republican National Committee and an array of independent conservative groups, reflects the recognition by both parties that voting rules could decide the outcome of the 2020 White House race amid the electoral challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic.


Helping drive the effort is William Consovoy, a veteran Supreme Court litigator who also serves as one of Trump’s personal lawyers. Consovoy’s Virginia-based law firm is handling a battery of legal actions on behalf of the RNC, several state GOPs and an independent group called the Honest Elections Project, which is connected to a Trump adviser.


The legal firepower and direct involvement of the national party reflect a major escalation in the conservative battle over voter fraud and voting rights, which until this year had primarily been waged by lesser-known groups with far fewer resources. The tactics of those organizations are now being embraced by new players with connections to influential figures in the president’s orbit.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...d8d_story.html

Watch out for the usual doublespeak.

[Cow Poke]

Maybe the rioters should riot by mail?

[firstfloor]

Maybe the rioters should riot by mail?

You know, I suppose, that criminal types latch on to civil unrest, opportunistically. In these situations it is very hard to discern people’s motives, and a few may be trying to discredit those who have a genuine grievance.

Disarm the police, and be nice to your local black or other minority family. Help to educate the little black kiddies, and give them a job.

Is David Chappell a name to you? Rude but good. The world is a rude place; we must embrace the rudeness, for in that rudeness is truth.

[Cow Poke]

You know, I suppose, that criminal types latch on to civil unrest, opportunistically.

So far, so good.

In these situations it is very hard to discern people’s motives, and a few may be trying to discredit those who have a genuine grievance.

What possible "good" motives could there be for running out of Target with a 50" TV?

Disarm the police, and be nice to your local black or other minority family. Help to educate the little black kiddies, and give them a job.

OK, I thought this was going to be a serious discussion. Silly, Silly me!

Is David Chappell a name to you? Rude but good. The world is a rude place; we must embrace the rudeness, for in that rudeness is truth.

Always good to see you, ff, cause you make the crazy people in my life seem sane.

[firstfloor]

OK, I thought this was going to be a serious discussion.

Yes, we got a little diverted there. The discussion was about how evil Repubs suppress the black and minority vote in order to corruptly remain in power. This will end badly. There may, one day, have to be a revolution.

Chappelle said about gun law reform that the laws would change when blacks and minorities took up legal gun ownership in large numbers. I don’t know if that’s true?

Barr being evil again:

Current and former election administrators said it would be virtually impossible for a foreign country to produce and mail in phony absentee ballots without detection, an issue Attorney General William P. Barr raised as a serious possibility in an interview published Monday.


Barr told the New York Times Magazine that a foreign operation to mail in fake ballots was “one of the issues that I’m real worried about.”


“We’ve been talking about how, in terms of foreign influence, there are a number of foreign countries that could easily make counterfeit ballots, put names on them, send them in,” Barr said. “And it’d be very hard to sort out what’s happening.”


Barr did not offer any evidence of how such a scenario would take place.


Elections officials in multiple states said it would be virtually impossible for a foreign government to achieve what Barr described.


Judd Choate, the elections chief in Colorado, where nearly all voters cast ballots by mail, said “there is zero chance” it could happen in his state because of security precautions in place there.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...482_story.html

[Sparko]

How are they suppressing the black vote? Are you under the impression that blacks only vote by mail or something?

[firstfloor]

An update on Flynn:

The Trump administration’s authoritarian behavior on the streets is being matched by its authoritarian positions in the federal courts. On Monday, as the administration used military force to push peaceful protesters out of Lafayette Square, administration lawyers filed an astonishing brief in the federal appeals court down the street, urging the court to order the trial judge to dismiss the case against Michael Flynn.


The brief represents a remarkable new position by the Trump Justice Department: The doors of federal courthouses should be closed to hearing arguments other than those advanced by the department itself, and federal judges may not even inquire into whether the administration has acted improperly.


When the Justice Department moved abruptly to drop the Flynn case — after he pleaded guilty (twice) and as he was awaiting sentencing — U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan took two steps. He appointed a “friend of the court” to argue the position that the Justice Department had suddenly abandoned; and he called a hearing to scrutinize the department’s about-face.


The Justice Department told the appeals court that it should take the extraordinary step of intervening in the case — before Sullivan has ruled or even held a hearing — to stop him from doing so. “Simply put, the district court has no authority to reject the Executive’s conclusion,” the department said.




In other words: “None of your business, Judge Sullivan.” The Justice Department wants the case dropped, and so that’s it — the case should just go away, no questions asked, before the American people learned what happened.


Remember that this is no run-of-the-mill appeal — the department is demanding emergency relief, relief that the department itself acknowledges is a “drastic and extraordinary remedy.” It’s revealing, in the midst of a pandemic and a national criminal-justice crisis, what the Trump administration sees as an emergency: a federal court hearing legal arguments and discovering the facts. All of that is not merely forbidden, the Justice Department argues — it must be stopped now, before it can take place. And that, for the Trump administration, is the emergency: a court uncovering the facts of what happened and laying them out for the public to learn.


If the goings-on at the federal courthouse seem a world away from protesters facing down rubber bullets and military helicopters, think again: This is the other side of the same coin, if less vicious in form. Courts — real courts, where every legitimate party gets to make every legitimate argument — are the last bastion against authoritarianism.


That’s an American tradition: In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Supreme Court ruled in Ex parte Milligan that U.S. citizens contending they were not belligerents could not be subjected to military tribunals when civilian courts were open and functioning. As President Trump — “your president of law and order” — threatens to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to deploy the military to put down what he sees as an ongoing rebellion, Americans may find themselves needing robust, independent courts more than ever.




And judges like Sullivan. His moves in the face of the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the Flynn case were indeed unusual — but they came in response to what seems an unprecedented decision by the department to abandon a guilty plea it secured.
As Sullivan’s lawyers explain in their brief to the appeals court, “It is unusual for a criminal defendant to claim innocence and move to withdraw his guilty plea after repeatedly swearing under oath that he committed the crime. It is unprecedented for an Acting U.S. Attorney to contradict the solemn representations that career prosecutors made time and again, and undermine the district court’s legal and factual findings, in moving on his own to dismiss the charge years after two different federal judges accepted the defendant’s plea.”


The appeals court, they add, is being asked to consider whether it should “forbid even a limited inquiry into the government’s motion, and order that motion granted. The answer is no. … The government’s motion is pending before Judge Sullivan and could well be granted, so Mr. Flynn can obtain the exact relief he seeks through ordinary judicial process.”
The

Trump administration’s view is that Sullivan erred by not immediately and automatically acceding to the government’s request that the case against Flynn be dismissed. But the federal rule that provides for dismissing indictments provides that it can be done only “with leave of court.” Federal judges are not supposed to be potted plants. This case long ago ceased being about a single judge. It’s about the right of all of us to learn what happened at the Justice Department and avoid a coverup.




It may be inconvenient, at least in Trump’s view, for the administration to have protesters at the White House. And it may be inconvenient, at least in the Trump Justice Department’s view, to have its extraordinary action on behalf of one of the president’s allies scrutinized by a federal court. But that is what our system of free speech and an independent judiciary entails — whether Trump and his enablers like it or not.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...atched-courts/

The Banana Republic gains strength.

[Starlight]

How are they suppressing the black vote? Are you under the impression that blacks only vote by mail or something?

A common Republican tactic is to ensure there are few voting places in black areas, ensuring voting queues are up to 6 hours long and thus discouraging people in those areas from voting. Whereas they aim to put a large number of voting places in white areas, to ensure voting there takes 10 mins or less in order to encourage voters in those areas to vote.

Compounding this is the fact that blacks in the US tend to be far less likely to own a car than whites, and so cannot as easily attend polling stations any significant distance from their homes.

Voting by mail would remove these discrepancies and provide equally easy ballot access for both white and black voters.

[firstfloor]

Blacks are second class citizens to be discouraged from voting by every means possible:

Voter suppression is at the very heart of Republican electoral strategy, and, as the New York Times reports Monday, they plan to go all-out in November:


The Republican program, which has gained steam in recent weeks, envisions recruiting up to 50,000 volunteers in 15 key states to monitor polling places and challenge ballots and voters deemed suspicious. That is part of a $20 million plan that also allots millions to challenge lawsuits by Democrats and voting-rights advocates seeking to loosen state restrictions on balloting. The party and its allies also intend to use advertising, the internet and President Trump’s command of the airwaves to cast Democrats as agents of election theft.


The efforts are bolstered by a 2018 federal court ruling that for the first time in nearly four decades allows the national Republican Party to mount campaigns against purported voter fraud without court approval. The court ban on Republican Party voter-fraud operations was imposed in 1982, and then modified in 1986 and again in 1990, each time after courts found instances of Republicans intimidating or working to exclude minority voters in the name of preventing fraud. The party was found to have violated it yet again in 2004.
“

Voters deemed suspicious” by the GOP is a category that includes black people, Latinos, students, black people, and also black people.


The attempts to intimidate voters on Election Day are best understood as the culmination of a lengthy effort to make voting as cumbersome and difficult as possible for people whom the GOP deems to be the wrong kind of voter. While you can sometimes remove people outright from the voter rolls (and voter purges are a key component in the voter suppression arsenal), you don’t necessarily have to make it impossible for people to vote, as long as you make it hard.


So you pass voter ID laws, because you know poor people and minorities are going to be less likely to have approved IDs. Then you limit early voting and start closing polling places. Then when Election Day comes, you deploy your “ballot security” troops.


Let’s say there’s a polling location in a city like Milwaukee, which Republicans know is going to vote heavily Democratic. They send a few of their ballot security personnel there to challenge the credentials and identity of one voter after another, and since the poll workers have to deal with those challenges, the whole process slows down and the lines grow longer and longer. They don’t have to successfully keep any particular person from voting on Election Day; they just need to throw sand in the gears. Eventually, people start to say “I’m not going to stand here for hours,” and they drift off and go home. Mission accomplished.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...how-stop-them/

[Sparko]

A common Republican tactic is to ensure there are few voting places in black areas, ensuring voting queues are up to 6 hours long and thus discouraging people in those areas from voting. Whereas they aim to put a large number of voting places in white areas, to ensure voting there takes 10 mins or less in order to encourage voters in those areas to vote.

Compounding this is the fact that blacks in the US tend to be far less likely to own a car than whites, and so cannot as easily attend polling stations any significant distance from their homes.

Voting by mail would remove these discrepancies and provide equally easy ballot access for both white and black voters.

How do they do that, star? Who put the republicans in charge of polling places in democrat districts? Where do you get this?

[rogue06]

How do they do that, star? Who put the republicans in charge of polling places in democrat districts? Where do you get this?

Yup. It's the officials at the precinct level who are in charge of running the polls in all of the jurisdictions I'm familiar with. And if an area is overwhelmingly Democrat then the makeup of the officials will be overwhelmingly Democrat.

Then considering that IIRC we still only have an estimate of the vote in the Democrat's Iowa caucus fiasco, that are constant screw-ups in Democrat precincts every election cycle is no longer such a surprise any more.

[firstfloor]

BTW, Huge oil spill in Russkie Arctic is going badly.

Investigators believe the storage tank near Norilsk sank because of melting permafrost, which weakened its supports. The Arctic has had weeks of unusually warm weather, probably a symptom of global warming.

BBC news.

[Cow Poke]

BTW, Huge oil spill in Russkie Arctic is going badly.



BBC news.

Remember the Exxon Valdez? All kinds of apocalyptic warnings..... Mother Earth demonstrates a remarkable ability to heal.

Fear not, ff..... this, too, shall pass.

[Starlight]

How do they do that, star? Who put the republicans in charge of polling places in democrat districts? Where do you get this?

In general state governments have pretty significant control over the state laws governing polling places. Also once Republicans win a swing district they can then be in a position to change the polling places in that district to ensure they maintain control of it.

Unfortunately SCOTUS recently struck down a historic law that required federal pre-approval of proposed changes to polling places that might have racial impacts. Republicans have seized the opportunity to rearrange the polling places to their hearts content:

Sept 2019: Southern U.S. states have closed 1,200 polling places in recent years: rights group:

States across the American South have closed nearly 1,200 polling places since the Supreme Court weakened a landmark voting-discrimination law in 2013, according to a report released by a civil-rights group on Tuesday.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights found http://www.democracydiverted.org that states with a history of racial discrimination have shuttered hundreds of voting locations since the court ruled that they did not need federal approval to change their laws.

The report comes as Republican-led states impose a range of other restrictions, from shorter voting hours to photo-ID requirements. As turnout has surged in recent elections, voters in cities like Phoenix, Arizona and Atlanta, Georgia, have endured hours-long waits to cast their ballots.

Seven counties in Georgia now have only one polling place

March 2020: Texas closes hundreds of polling sites, making it harder for minorities to vote

...places where black and Latino population is growing by the largest numbers experienced the majority of closures...

Last year, Texas led the US south in an unenviable statistic: closing down the most polling stations, making it more difficult for people to vote and arguably benefiting Republicans.

The closures could exacerbate Texas’s already chronically low voter turnout rates, to the advantage of incumbent Republicans. Ongoing research by University of Houston political scientists Jeronimo Cortina and Brandon Rottinghaus indicates that people are less likely to vote if they have to travel farther to do so, and the effect is disproportionately greater for some groups of voters, such as Latinxs...

On a local level, the changes can be stark. McLennan county, home to Waco, Texas, closed 44% of its polling places from 2012 to 2018, despite the fact that its population grew by more than 15,000 people during the same time period, with more than two-thirds of that growth coming from Black and Latinx residents.

...after the county’s transition to vote centers, more voting locations were closed in Latinx neighborhoods than in non-Latinx neighborhoods, and that Latinx people had to travel farther to vote than non-Hispanic whites.

Some counties closed enough polling locations to violate Texas state law. Brazoria county, south of Houston, closed almost 60% of its polling locations between 2012 and 2018, causing it to fall below the statutory minimum...

A Guardian analysis based on that report confirms what many activists have suspected: the places where the black and Latinx population is growing by the largest numbers have experienced the vast majority of the state’s poll site closures.

The analysis finds that the 50 counties that gained the most Black and Latinx residents between 2012 and 2018 closed 542 polling sites, compared to just 34 closures in the 50 counties that have gained the fewest black and Latinx residents.

[Starlight]

Speak of the devil, I've just come across some relevant articles as I peruse today's headlines...

Georgia election 'catastrophe' in largely minority areas sparks investigation

Hours-long waits, problems with new voting machines and a lack of available ballots plagued voters in majority minority counties in Georgia on Tuesday...

Cody Cutting was on a long line at Lang Carson Community Center in Reynoldstown, Atlanta, where the line snaked around the block and some had been waiting to cast their votes for four and a half hours...

Three-quarters of voters who called [into a legal hotline] with [voting] problems identified as African American...

Different article on the subject:
Georgia Is Screaming Out for U.N. Election Monitors - Malfunctioning machines. Absent machines. Six-hour lines.

...for quite deliberate reasons, I might add—Georgia was a mess ever since the polls opened. Malfunctioning machines. Absent machines. Six-hour lines...

'Some voters said they joined the lines after requesting mail-in ballots that never arrived. One state lawmaker, Rep. William Boddie of Atlanta, said there was a “complete meltdown” in Georgia’s largest county, where people of color represent a majority of the population.'

Strange how it always works out that way.

A comment I saw elsewhere on the subject...

Funny, I went to vote in my mostly white, affluent neighborhood in an Atlanta suburb and had no issues today. No lines, machine worked just fine, etc. I wonder why those precincts that serve majority POC [People of color] voters had such a lack of resources. 🤔🤔🤔