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Wednesday, March 18, 2026

THE SAVE ACT ISN'T JIM CROW -- IT'S MORE DELUSIONAL

In a column about the SAVE Act -- Donald Trump's top domestic priority -- Jamelle Bouie writes:
For reasons of both ego and ideology, Trump does not believe that he can legitimately lose an election. He is, to his mind, the living embodiment of the nation. If he doesn’t win, then the system must be broken. In that sense, the SAVE Act is far less about American elections as they exist than it is about the president’s vision of American society. The basic premise of Trumpism is that the people of the United States are not the collected citizens of the United States, naturalized and natural born, but a particular caste and class of Americans, defined by race, religion and nationality and united by their devotion to Trump.

The SAVE Act is an attempt to make that distinction a political reality by removing as many mere Americans from the voting pool as possible and elevating the true people of the United States — who just so happen to support Trump and the Republican Party — as the only legitimate players in American political life. The goal, then, is to nationalize something akin to what many Americans experienced in the Jim Crow South: a one-party state, backed by the threat of violence, where the law ensures that most people cannot hope for meaningful political representation.
This isn't exactly right. The people who put Jim Crow voting laws in place knew that the Blacks they were disenfranchising were real people born in America who would be allowed to vote if the federal government were able and willing to force the issue. It's my belief that Donald Trump -- influenced by a couple of decades' worth of Republican propaganda -- believes that there simply aren't enough legitimate Democratic voters in America to make the Democratic Party a competitive party. When he says of Democrats, as he did in a speech earlier this month, "They're doing everything possible because they know if we get this, they probably won't win an election for 50 years and maybe longer," I think he legitimately believes that the large number of voters purged from the rolls by the SAVE Act will (a) be overwhelmingly Democratic and (b) be on the rolls fraudulently.

Trump believes this -- believes that all these voters are non-citizen immigrants or dead people or nonexistent people or people otherwise ineligible to vote, possibly because they live on dementia wards or in mental institutions and votes are cast for Democrats in their names -- because he's a Fox News grandpa who's been told over and over again that Democrats cheat in elections on a industrial scale. Millions of other Fox News grandpas and grandmas also believe this.

Here's a video from 2010.



It was produced by an organization called True the Vote, which I've written about many times. After the 2020 election, True the Vote was behind the Dinesh D'Souza "documentary" 2000 Mules, which is so rife with disinformation that even D'Souza himself has had to apologize for its dishonesty. Here's the first claim in the 2010 video, from the late right-wing propagandist David Horowitz:
The voting system is under attack now. Movements that are focused on voter fraud and the integrity of elections are crucial at this point. This is really -- I mean, this is a war! A Democratic Party consultant once told me that Republicans have to win by at least three percent in order to win any election.
The next speaker says:
There are people who are deceased who have shown up as voting. I've actually gone out and taken pictures of the tombstones.
The third speaker -- Catherine Engelbrecht, co-founder of True the Vote -- says:
One lady asked the presiding judge, she looked at him and she goes, "I forget who I'm supposed to vote for," and so he went over there and he actually turned the dial. She pressed Enter. He turned the dial. She pressed Enter.
Trump thinks this is routine. Your Fox-watching relatives think so too. They believe all this happens and they believe that millions of immigrants cross the border and are immediately signed up to vote (always Democratic) and they believe that Democrats slip fake ballots in among the real ones during vote counting and they believe Democrats tamper with voting machines so Republican votes flip to Democratic and...

Jim Crow vote suppressors knew that there were real Americans who would vote against them if they were allowed to. Millions of Republicans seem to believe that there are no legitimate Democratic votes, or very, very few.

They believe this even though they can never produce evidence of this fraud. They believe it the same way they believe that every anti-Trump protestor is a paid agent of the Soros family.

So Trump and his supporters don't exactly believe, as Bouie writes, that "the people of the United States are ... a particular caste and class of Americans, defined by race, religion and nationality and united by their devotion to Trump," excluding Trump critics -- they believe there simply aren't very many sincere Trump critics, or very many Democrats at all, citizens who oppose Trump and his party sincerely and legitimately.

All this, of course, requires them to ignore large chunks of objective reality. But the propaganda they consume has taught them that what everyone outside their bubble portrays as reality must be a lie because people outside their bubble do nothing but lie. Everything they don't want to believe is "fake news." And everything they want to believe is the gospel truth.

I think Trump sincerely believes all this. I'm sure his most fervent fans do. They think the SAVE Act won't disenfranchise a single legitimate voter. It will only disenfranchise Democrats, who are illegitimate voters by definition.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:11 AM 0 comments

Friday, September 27, 2024

J.D. VANCE TO APPEAR WITH PASTOR WHO SAYS KAMALA HARRIS IS PRACTICING WITCHCRAFT

What advice did Nicholas Kristof give liberals late last month?
... since 2016, the liberal impulse has been to demonize anyone at all sympathetic to Donald Trump as a racist and bigot. This has been politically foolish, for it’s difficult to win votes from people you’re disparaging.

It has also seemed to me morally offensive....

By all means denounce Trump, but don’t stereotype and belittle the nearly half of Americans who have sided with him....

Since the Obama presidency, Democrats have increasingly become the party of the educated, and the upshot has often been a whiff of condescension toward working-class voters, especially toward voters of faith.
Kristof quoted Bill Clinton's Democratic convention speech, in which the former president said, “I urge you to meet people where they are.”

Do you know "where they are," these "voters of faith" Kristof and Clinton urge us not to "demonize"? These Trump voters are cheering as Democrats are literally being demonized, especially the Democratic nominee for president.

Here's some news about an upcoming campaign stop in Pennsylvania:
U.S. Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, is scheduled to appear in Monroeville on Saturday at a town hall meeting hosted by Christian broadcaster Lance Wallnau. The event is scheduled for the Monroeville Convention Center....
That would be this Lance Wallnau:
Shorty after President Joe Biden announced in July that he would not be running for reelection and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, self-proclaimed Christian nationalist and unabashed Trump cultist Lance Wallnau immediately began posting videos in which he warned that Harris represents “the spirit of Jezebel” and declared that she is “the devil’s choice.”

“What you’re seeing now is a real Jezebel,” Wallnau declared. “When you’ve got somebody operating in manipulation, intimidation and domination—especially when it’s in a female role trying to emasculate a man who is standing up for truth—you’re dealing with the Jezebel spirit. ... So, with Kamala, you have a Jezebel spirit, a characteristic in the Bible that is the personification of intimidation, seduction, domination and manipulation.”

“She can look presidential,” he continued. “That’s the seduction of what I would say is witchcraft. That’s the manipulation of imagery that creates an impression contrary to the truth, but it seduces you into seeing it. So that spirit, that occult spirit, I believe is operating on her and through her.”
When Harris triumphed in her debate with Trump, Wallnau said witchcraft was the reason:


And it's not just Harris and ABC that are tools of the devil (and comparable to Hitler's Nuremburg rallies):


Wallnau is
a strategist and the public face of the revolutionary movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, is best known for his advocacy of the 7 Mountain Mandate, which is the idea that Christians are called to conquer seven “mountains” of society to achieve religious and political dominion: government, family, religion, arts & entertainment, media, education, and business.

Wallnau says he’s engaged in “the battle for the mountain of government.”
Wallnau's allies include Charlie Kirk, Steve Bannon, and the folks behind that discredited 2000 Mules documentary your right-wing relatives never stop quoting, Catherine Engelbrecht and True the Vote.

The mainstream media won't tell you much about Wallnau, even though Wallnau believes the media is full of demons and comparable to the Nazi regime.




Maybe a reporter will ask Vance about some of Wallnau's more incendiary statements, although the response will undoubtedly be Vance's stock evasion whenever it's pointed out that he's consorting with extremists: Just because I talk to someone doesn't mean I agree with everything they say. It would be better just to quote what Wallnau says at length.

Sixteen years ago, John McCain rejected the endorsement of a preacher named John Hagee after anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic statements by Hagee were widely reported in the media. By 2018, Hagee, who insists he's a friend of the Jews and Israel, was delivering the benediction at the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, which had been moved there by Donald Trump, and the media barely said a word. Five years later, Hagee spoke at Nikki Haley's campaign kickoff, and Haley said, “Pastor Hagee, I still say I want to be you when I grow up.” Again, nothing from the media. So don't expect The New York Times or The Washington Post to quote Wallnau at length anytime soon.
Posted by Steve M. at 9:26 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, September 12, 2023

REPUBLICANS HAD DOUBTS ABOUT AMERICAN DEMOCRACY LONG BEFORE TRUMP

Michelle Goldberg tells us that the authors of How Democracies Die were surprised by the January 6 assault on democracy:
One of the most influential books of the Trump years was “How Democracies Die” by the Harvard government professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Published in 2018, it served as a guide to our unfolding ordeal....

Because that volume was prescient about how Donald Trump would try to rule, I was surprised to learn, in Levitsky and Ziblatt’s new book, “Tyranny of the Minority,” that they were shocked by Jan. 6. Though they’ve studied violent insurrections all over the world, they write in this new book, “we never imagined we’d see them here. Nor did we ever imagine that one of America’s two major parties would turn away from democracy in the 21st century.”
And Isaac Chotiner reminds us that while Ross Douthat may loathe Donald Trump, he predicted there'd be no insurrection:
Several weeks before the 2020 election ... Douthat wrote a column titled “There Will Be No Trump Coup.” According to Douthat, Trump was “a feckless tribune for the discontented rather than an autocratic menace.” A year later, Douthat wrote that he stood by his assessment of Trump but admitted that he had underestimated the mob: “I didn’t quite grasp until after the election how fully Trump’s voter-fraud paranoia had intertwined with deeper conservative anxieties about liberal power.”
But Republicans "turn[ed] away from democracy" long before Donald Trump entered politics. How did Levitsky and Ziblatt not know that? How did they not realize that Republicans have been obsessed with (non-existent) Democratic voter fraud since the George W. Bush years, whewn U.S. attorneys were fired because they wouldn't prosecute Democrats for electoral cheating? How have these scholars and Ross Douthat missed the waves of laws in Republican-controlled states that have been intended to make it more difficult for Democrats to vote, an effort that began well before Trump became a presidential candidate? Republicans have been casting suspicions on our elections for a couple of decades now -- as I regularly point out, Hugh Hewitt's book If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends on It was published in 2004.

Also, Republican politicians and operatives have inflicted tremendous damage on democracy in purple states for many years, with unwavering support from their voters, as Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria remind us:
Gerrymandering is not unique to Wisconsin. But, for more than a decade, Wisconsin Republicans have gerrymandered the state's legislative maps so aggressively that it is effectively impossible for Democrats to gain control of the state legislature.

In 2018, for example, Democrats swept statewide contests for Governor, Attorney General, U.S. Senate, State Treasurer and Secretary of State. That year, 54% of Wisconsin voters selected a Democrat to represent them in the state assembly, with Democratic candidates collecting 200,000 more votes than Republican candidates. And yet, Republicans won 63 of 99 seats in the state assembly — nearly a two-thirds majority.
The current wave of gerrymandering in Wisconsin began in 2011, under then-governor Scott Walker. The 2011 gerrymander was made possible by a Republican program called REDMAP:
REDMAP targeted 107 local state legislative races in 16 states, including swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida.... With the intention of flipping Democratic-majority state legislatures and Democrat-held state governorships for the express purpose of controlling redistricting, REDMAP funded negative ads in lower-profile state legislative races.... This helped to give Republicans control of 10 of the 15 states that would be redrawing their districts in 2010.... They then used sophisticated software ... to devise districts favorable to the Republican party, for example by clustering Democratic voters into a handful of districts and ensuring the rest were drawn to include Republican majorities.
Rank-and-file Republicans have been told for decades that Democrats only win elections when they cheat. They've been told that we routinely allow undocumented immigrants to vote. The advocacy group True the Vote is now best known for providing the "research" behind 2000 Mules, Dinesh D'Souza's fact-challenged documentary about the 2020 election, but I've been blogging about True the Vote since 2012, when The New York Times expressed skepticism about the group's claims:
It might as well be Harry Potter's invisible Knight Bus, because no one can prove it exists.

The bus has been repeatedly cited by True the Vote, a national group focused on voter fraud. Catherine Engelbrecht, the group's leader, told a gathering in July about buses carrying dozens of voters showing up at polling places during the recent Wisconsin recall election.

"Magically, all of them needed to register and vote at the same time," Ms. Engelbrecht said. "Do you think maybe they registered falsely under false pretenses? Probably so."

Weeks later, another True the Vote representative told a meeting of conservative women about a bus seen at a San Diego polling place in 2010 offloading people "who did not appear to be from this country."

Officials in both San Diego and Wisconsin said they had no evidence that the buses were real. "It's so stealthy that no one is ever able to get a picture and no one is able to get a license plate," said Reid Magney, a spokesman for the Wisconsin agency that oversees elections. In some versions the bus is from an Indian reservation; in others it is full of voters from Chicago or Detroit. "Pick your minority group," he said.
Republicans have engaged in legalized electoral cheating for quite a while, even as they've accused Democrats of being the real cheaters. No one should have been surprised on January 6 when a demagogue inspired a Republican mob to act on those long-held beliefs.
Posted by Steve M. at 12:53 PM 0 comments

Friday, January 06, 2023

GATEWAY PUNDIT USES THE IDAHO MURDER CASE TO TRY TO PROVE ... THAT THE 2020 ELECTION WAS STOLEN

If you write for Gateway Pundit, everything that happens in the world can be offered as proof that right-wing paranoia is justified. Here's GP's Patty McMurray writing about the recent multiple murder in Idaho. How, you ask, could that case possibly be tied to right-wing conspiracy theories? Like this:
Detectives Used Cell Phone Ping Data To Catch Idaho Murder Suspect “Fact-Checkers” Called “Not precise enough” When “2000 Mules” Investigators Used Same Technology To Catch Ballot Traffickers

... Detectives in the brutal murder case of four University of Idaho college students used cell phone ping data to help find 28-year-old Bryan Kohberger, the suspected Idaho murderer.

... A Latah County Sheriff’s deputy pulled him over on August 21 at 11.37 pm as part of a traffic stop – in which he provided his number.

During the stop, which was recorded on the officer’s body cam, Kohberger was driving his white Hyundai Elantra.

Because of the series of traffic stops, officers were able to link both the car and the phone number to Kohberger – and look up each time his device pinged the tower closest to the property.

The dishonest corporate media blasted [True] the Vote after providing their ping data to Dinesh D’Souza, which was used in his 2000 Mules documentary. The geo-tracking data from 5 key swing states was purchased by True the Vote from various brokers and was used to show patterns of ballot traffickers who made at least ten trips to ballot drop boxes and to various stash houses during the 2020 election.

Fake news “fact-checkers,” who social media giants use to help create or craft narratives by discrediting legitimate news sources which report the news the corporate media won’t, quickly debunked the theory that cell phone ping data could be used to reliably determine the location of ballot traffickers in the 2020 election.

[They] almost immediately attacked the data used to produce the “2000 Mules” movie, calling the ping data used by True the Vote unreliable or “not precise enough.”
But in the Idaho murder case, the police have cellphone data and DNA evidence and eyewitness accounts and visual matches to the car and tracking information on the car. The propagandists behind 2000 Mules have ... what exactly? Factcheck.org tells us:
True the Vote says it created virtual “fences” around drop boxes and unnamed nonprofit organizations to capture people who visited them. It then aggregated lists of people who were in the vicinity of 10 or more drop boxes and five or more of the nonprofits (none of which is named). True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht alleges that the so-called “mules” picked up ballots from a “stack house” (one of the unidentified nonprofit organizations) and ran them to drop boxes....

Gregg Phillips of True the Vote says that in Atlanta, the group identified 242 “mules” who went to an average of 24 drop boxes and made an average of eight stops at one of the nonprofits during a two-week period. The group says it proves “coordinated, systematic fraud in all key states where the election was decided” and that the number of alleged illegal votes was enough to swing the 2020 presidential election in Biden’s favor....

But some experts say the data prove nothing....

Cooper Quintin, a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ... said ... GPS data from apps on cellphones are only accurate to around 40 feet....

“That’s not accurate enough to tell if someone stopped at a ballot box, or if someone simply walked near the box,” Quintin said. “If it is a high-traffic area, I can think of any number of legitimate reasons why someone would be in the vicinity of a ballot box.”

Delivery drivers, poll workers, election officials — all might have reason to be in the vicinity of numerous drop boxes, he said. Certainly, he said, it doesn’t provide enough evidence to uphold the group’s claims about 2,000 mules, he said....

But stuffing fraudulent ballots is not the only reason to be in the vicinity of a drop box. For example, Pennsylvania state Sen. Sharif Street told the AP that he was probably counted as a so-called mule because he attended numerous drop box rallies and stopped by nonprofit offices. And, he said, he likely accounted for several of the signals, as he carries a cellphone, a watch with a cellular connection, a tablet with a cellular connection and a mobile hotspot, and he has a staffer who typically travels with him and carries two devices.

“I did no ballot stuffing, but over the course of time, I literally probably account for hundreds and hundreds of their unique visits, even though I’m a single actor in a single vehicle moving back and forth in my ordinary course of business,” Street said.
Where were the dropboxes? At city halls. At courthouses. At boards of elections. At community centers. At libraries. They were in places many people visit in the course of a day.

Now here's the Idaho house where the murders took place:


It's a residential dwelling in Moscow, Idaho (population 25,435). There's not much reason for your cellphone to be pinging there apart from the house and maybe another house or two nearby. There's nothing commercial or governmental within 40 feet; there aren't any social services. And the authorities have lots of other evidence.

Regrettably, there are idiots in America who are likely to find this persuasive. And they vote.
Posted by Steve M. at 8:46 AM 0 comments

Friday, September 23, 2022

CARLOS LOZADA'S "BIG JOKE" IS DEAD SERIOUS TO RIGHT-WING BILLIONAIRES

Yesterday, The New York Times published a long opinion piece by Carlos Lozada that blamed America's crisis of democracy on politicians and political operatives who know that what they say and do is fraudulent:
... the lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election has grown so powerful because it is yoked to an older deception, without which it could not survive: the idea that American politics is, in essence, a joke, and that it can be treated as such without consequence.

The big lie depends on the big joke. It was enabled by it. It was enhanced by it. It is sustained by it.

When politicians publicly defend positions they privately reject, they are telling the joke. When they give up on the challenge of governing the country for the rush of triggering the enemy, they are telling the joke. When they intone that they must address the very fears they have encouraged or manufactured among their constituents, they are telling the joke. When their off-the-record smirks signal that they don’t really mean what they just said or did, they are telling the joke.
This isn't wrong exactly, but it's reductionist and incomplete. It implies that everyone who's actively destroying democracy is doing it for kicks: thrill-killers of the democratic order. And it suggests that these functionaries and flunkies are acting on their own.

They aren't. The fish stinks from the head:
Fossil fuel giant Koch Industries has poured over $1m into backing – directly and indirectly – dozens of House and Senate candidates who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s win on 6 January 2021.

Koch, which is controlled by multibillionaire Charles Koch, boasts a corporate Pac that has donated $607,000 to the campaigns or leadership Pacs of 52 election deniers since January 2021, making Koch’s Pac the top corporate funder of members who opposed the election results, according to OpenSecrets, which tracks campaign spending.

In addition, the Super Pac Americans for Prosperity Action to which Koch Industries has given over $6m since January 2021, has backed some election deniers with advertising and other communications support, as well as a few candidates Donald Trump has endorsed who tried to help him overturn the 2020 election, or raised doubts about the final results.
Republicans have been lying to us about "election integrity" at least since the days of George W. Bush, when U.S. attorneys who wouldn't pursue cases of nonexistent voter fraud were fired. Partisan fraudsters such as Catherine Engelbrecht's True the Vote organization -- source of the misinformation in Dinesh D'Souza's fake documentary 2000 Mules -- have been lying for years, and avoiding consequences because they have prominent defenders, like the opinion section of The Wall Street Journal.

Are they doing this for the lulz? No. They're doing it because right-wing billionaires want the U.S. government to be in the permanent control of the Republican Party, which reliably votes to cut rich people's taxes and loosen corporate regulations. Republicans can't win elections by promoting their actual agenda, which is extremely unpopular, so in addition to manipulating the voting system for years in order to gain structural advantages, they've been selling their party to voters with lies and conspiracy theories. Some of the politicians and operatives who tell these lies and peddle these conspiracies know they're absurd, and while they may tell themselves it's all a joke, it's dead serious to the people directly or indirectly bankrolling them.

If loyalty to the GOP now means believing that the 2020 election was stolen, then of course the Koch network wants to bankroll election deniers. Koch World wants whatever it takes to put its preferred politicians in power. That's no joke.
Posted by Steve M. at 2:24 PM 0 comments

Saturday, June 11, 2022

JOE BIDEN: BOTH A BUMBLING OLD COOT AND AN ALL-POWERFUL SUPERVILLAIN

Here's one common right-wing perspective on the president: a National Review piece by Rich Lowry titled "Biden Is an Old Man Overwhelmed by Events."

Here's another: a poll telling us that nearly 80% of Republicans believe Biden is a fiendish supervillain deliberately raising gas prices as part of a dastardly program of social engineering:
The survey asked, “Do you believe the Biden Administration is intentionally letting gas prices rise to make Americans use less fossil fuels?”

Most, 53 percent, said “yes,” they believe the Biden administration is allowing it to happen purposely to force Americans to use less fossil fuel. Another 39.6 percent, however, do not believe that is the case, and 7.4 percent are unsure.

Opinions are divided along party lines. Over three-quarters of Republicans, 77.3 percent, and 56.5 percent of independents believe the Biden administration is deliberately allowing gas prices to rise for those purposes. Most Democrats, 68.7 percent, disagree and do not believe the administration is doing so.
The survey was conducted by the Trafalgar Group, a right-leaning firm that accurately predicted many of the tight state races in the 2020 presidential election, which led FiveThirtyEight to give the firm an A-minus rating. Trafalgar, which says it uses techniques to elicit responses from right-wingers who are reluctant to share their true opinions with other pollsters, is often less successful in surveying races where there are few angry, suspicious right-wing voters -- for instance, the firm thought Gavin Newsom would survive his recall election last year by 8 points. (His victory margin was 24 points.) Nevertheless, I think Trafalgar is measuring right-wing sentiment accurately. The right thinks Biden is a dementia-addled bumbler who wanders aimlessly around the White House, but also believes Biden is singlehandedly capable of remaking the energy and transportation mix in America by force and without resorting to legislation.

Another person who seems to believe this is Donald Trump's ambassador to Denmark, Carla Sands:


Sands has been mocked for this tweet in Denmark, as a reporter for a Danish English-language news outlet tells us:
“Hello this is Denmark speaking”, a ... user tweeted.

“Sounds like your embassy driver should have been paid more. Most of us can afford cars, but public transportation is cheap(ish), greener and often more convenient. Which Denmark did you go to?”, they said.

Former Minster of Transport Benny Engelbrecht wrote that “I can assure you that using the bike for urban mobility is a question of choice, not economy for most Danes. This is for instance me in my time as minister — and don’t worry, we could afford a car.”

... For what it’s worth as anecdotal evidence: the author of this article lives in Denmark and owns, and frequently drives (despite rocketing fuel prices), a car whilst living in a three-person household (two adults, one child), and has done so since 2020. Until recently, the household’s income consisted of a journalist’s salary and the basic state grant for students, SU.
Sands is a MAGA socialite who violated the Hatch Act during her time as ambassador by using an official Twitter account for partisan tweets:
Donald Trump’s ambassador to Denmark, Carla Sands, violated federal law when she urged Americans to donate to her boss’s campaign using her official Twitter account.

She did it again when she tweeted — once more from her official account — an article questioning whether Kamala Harris, the daughter of immigrants, was eligible to be vice president.

And yet again when she tweeted that Joe Biden was using the coronavirus pandemic for politics.
Sands recently finished fourth in the Republican Senate primary in Pennsylvania.

On the other hand, when Biden announced that we were tapping into the strategic petroleum reserves, Sands opposed the move:


I'm not sure how she squares that with Biden's evil plot to make people stop driving. And, of course, maybe it would be good if the government were, in a more benign way, helping people transition to a post-fossil-fuel world. But the right believes it's villainous behavior, a massive societal transformation by a guy who can't even find his way to the bathroom.
Posted by Steve M. at 10:13 AM 0 comments

Thursday, June 09, 2022

WE PROBABLY NEED A LOT OF COMMITTEES

I don't have to tell you that I expect the January 6 hearings to change very few minds. Nevertheless, I think it's a public service for the House committee to try to report what it knows in a lively and compelling way. I think David Brooks is right about the hearings' likely impact, but he seems not to believe that the information should even be publicly aired:
Using the events of Jan. 6 as campaign fodder is small-minded and likely to be ineffective. If you think you can find the magic moment that will finally discredit Donald Trump in the eyes of the electorate, you haven’t been paying attention over the last six years. Sorry, boomers, but this is not the Watergate scandal in which we need an investigation to find out who said what to whom in the Oval Office. The horrors of Jan. 6 were out in public. The shocking truth of it was what we all saw that day and what we’ve learned about the raw violence since.
The shocking truth could also be how much planning went into the riot and who planned it. We didn't see that on January 6. I dobn't expect it to matter to many people who aren't already outraged, but why does Brooks seem to believe that putting this information on display is bad for the country?

But Brooks has a point when he writes this:
We don’t need a committee to simply regurgitate what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. We need a committee that will preserve democracy on Jan. 6, 2025, and Jan. 6, 2029. We need a committee to locate the weaknesses in our democratic system and society and find ways to address them.

The core problem here is not the minutiae of who texted what to chief of staff Mark Meadows on Jan. 6 last year. The core problem is that there are millions of Americans who have three convictions: that the election was stolen, that violence is justified in order to rectify it and that the rules and norms that hold our society together don’t matter.

Those millions of Americans are out there right now. I care more about their present and future activities than about their past. Many of them are running for local office to be in a position to disrupt future elections. I’d like the committee to describe who they are, what motivates them and how much power they already have.
On Tuesday I wrote that Democrats should "link [January 6] to issues that are in the news now." This would have been an excellent way to do it. Brooks sets up an either-or choice, but maybe the hearings should have been about 2021 and the ongoing anti-democracy movement.

Or maybe that's too much for one committee. In addition, I don't agree with Brooks that this a problem only once every four years -- as I often say, democracy at the state legislative level is already dead in many purple states, because Supreme Court-sanctioned gerrymandering prevents Democrats from ever winning legislative majorities no matter how many overall votes they get. Republicans increasingly claim that state legislatures have the constitutional right to overrule voters and choose presidential election winners in large part because gerrymandering ensures that giving that power to the legislature means giving it to the GOP in perpetuity.

Maybe we need hearings about that as well. And maybe the public would benefit from learning the deep roots of the Big Lie. Yesterday, Reveal published a very good story about Catherine Engelbrecht, the head of True the Vote, who claims to have solid evidence that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election. She gets regular shout-outs from Donald Trump and her work was the basis of the Dinesh D'Souza film 2000 Mules, but she's never shown anyone her evidence, and the Reveal story makes clear that she's used election scaremongering to line her own pockets and the pockets of her partner and boyfriend, Gregg Phillips.

But while the story tells us that Engelbrecht has been a pro-GOP activist since the Tea Party era, it doesn't mention that she's been making unsubstantiated and scurrilous allegations about Democrats and elections all along. I've written about her many times, most recently last month. She's been whining about nonexistent illegal Democratic voters for more than a decade. The Reveal story quotes National Review editor John Fund suggesting that she went off the rails recently:
During a private meeting of the Council for National Policy in August 2020, a group of panelists was asked what they thought about True the Vote. Conservative journalist John Fund said he was the one who’d given Engelbrecht her first national publicity.

“I like Catherine, but she has gone astray. She has hooked up with the wrong associates. And I have to say this with the greatest of sadness, because I have to be honest with you, because you’re the people who actually have to make decisions on your own about who to support. As much as I like Catherine personally, I would not give her a penny,” he said, according to a recently leaked video obtained by Documented. “She’s a good person who’s been led astray. Don’t do it.”
So when she was claiming in 2010 that a bus full of probably illegal voters was spotted (but not photographed) in Wisconsin -- or was it San Diego? -- she hadn't gone astray? What anout when she allowed her nakedly partisan group to be the poster child for alleged IRS bias against supposedly apolitical nonprofits during the Obama years? (That IRS "scandal" was fake, but it was taken very seriously.)

And why should we regard John Fund as respectable in any case? He's written obsessively about alleged Democratic election fraud -- a 2008 book called Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, a 2009 book called How the Obama Administration Threatens to Undermine Our Elections, a 2012 book called Who's Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk, a 2021 book called Our Broken Elections: How the Left Changed the Way You Vote. Republicans have been baselessly crying fraud for years -- long before Trump. If you want to understand why the Big Lie is so widely believed, this is the reason. We probably should have had hearings on this many years ago, but it's probably far too late to do anything about this now.
Posted by Steve M. at 2:41 PM 0 comments

Monday, May 09, 2022

THE BIG LIE: MAINSTREAM REPUBLICANS, YOU BUILT THIS

Your right-wing relatives are probably obsessed with the new, Trump-endorsed Dinesh D'Souza movie 2000 Mules. If they're certain it's scrupulously accurate, maybe you should show them this brutal AP fact-check.
... the movie ... paints an ominous picture suggesting Democrat-aligned ballot “mules” were supposedly paid to illegally collect and drop off ballots in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

But that’s based on faulty assumptions, anonymous accounts and improper analysis of cellphone location data, which is not precise enough to confirm that somebody deposited a ballot into a drop box, according to experts.

The movie was produced by conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza and uses research from the Texas-based nonprofit True the Vote....

True the Vote has said it found some 2,000 ballot harvesters by purchasing $2 million worth of anonymized cellphone geolocation data ... in various swing counties across five states. Then, by drawing a virtual boundary around a county’s ballot drop boxes and various unnamed nonprofits, it identified cellphones that repeatedly went near both ahead of the 2020 election.

If a cellphone went near a drop box more than 10 times and a nonprofit more than five times from Oct. 1 to Election Day, True the Vote assumed its owner was a “mule” — its name for someone engaged in an illegal ballot collection scheme in cahoots with a nonprofit.

... experts say cellphone location data, even at its most advanced, can only reliably track a smartphone within a few meters — not close enough to know whether someone actually dropped off a ballot or just walked or drove nearby....

CLAIM: In Philadelphia alone, True the Vote identified 1,155 “mules” who illegally collected and dropped off ballots for money.

THE FACTS: No, it didn’t. The group hasn’t offered any evidence of any sort of paid ballot harvesting scheme in Philadelphia. And True the Vote did not get surveillance footage of drop boxes in Philadelphia, so the group based this claim solely on cellphone location data, its researcher Gregg Phillips said in March in testimony to Pennsylvania state senators.

Pennsylvania state Sen. Sharif Street, who was there for the group’s testimony in March, told the AP he was confident he was counted as several of the group’s 1,155 anonymous “mules,” even though he didn’t deposit anything into a drop box in that time period.

Street said he based his assessment on the fact that he carries a cellphone, a watch with a cellular connection, a tablet with a cellular connection and a mobile hotspot — four devices whose locations can be tracked by private companies. He also said he typically travels with a staffer who carries two devices, bringing the total on his person to six.

During the 2020 election season, Street said, he brought those devices on trips to nonprofit offices and drop box rallies. He also drove by one drop box up to seven or eight times a day when traveling between his two political offices.

“I did no ballot stuffing, but over the course of time, I literally probably account for hundreds and hundreds of their unique visits, even though I’m a single actor in a single vehicle moving back and forth in my ordinary course of business,” Street said.
It's all like this. True the Vote claims there was cheating because people were dropping off ballots wearing gloves. Were they trying to conceal fingerprints? No. They were probably cold (it was fall) or worried about catching COVID (many of us thought we could easily catch it from surfaces back in 2020).

If you're a longtime reader of this blog, you might recognize the name of the organization generating this crackpottery. True the Vote is a Republican organization that pretends to be an apolitcal nonprofit, and it was a major player in the so-called IRS scandal during the Obama years. Republican politicians ginned up outrage -- funny how they're always doing that -- by claiming that the IRS was targeting right-wing groups that had applied for tax-exempt status, even though a partisan political organization shouldn't be eligible for that status.

True the Vote was and is clearly partisan:
A 2010 video announcing True the Vote's launch begins with right-wing activist David Horowitz telling the camera that "Republicans have to win by at least three percent in order to win an election," since Democrats are likely to case fraudulent votes....

At the time of True the Vote's "poll watching" activities in Harris County, Texas during the November 2010 elections the organization was described as a "project" of the Houston-based Tea Party group the King Street Patriots. As a result of a 2010 lawsuit filed against the King Street Patriots by the state Democratic Party, a Texas judge ruled that the organization was an unregistered PAC rather than the nonprofit corporation that it claimed, and that it unlawfully provided in-kind donations to the state Republican Party....

In fact, in 2012, True the Vote contributed $5000 to the Republican State Leadership Committee....

True the Vote's website portrays voter fraud as largely a Democratic party problem. It routinely runs stories on election fraud being perpetrated by "liberals," or "Democrats" but has, to date, never run a story on Republican or Conservative instances of voter fraud.
The New York Times reported on the group quite skeptically in 2010:
It might as well be Harry Potter's invisible Knight Bus, because no one can prove it exists.

The bus has been repeatedly cited by True the Vote, a national group focused on voter fraud. Catherine Engelbrecht, the group's leader, told a gathering in July about buses carrying dozens of voters showing up at polling places during the recent Wisconsin recall election.

"Magically, all of them needed to register and vote at the same time," Ms. Engelbrecht said. "Do you think maybe they registered falsely under false pretenses? Probably so."

Weeks later, another True the Vote representative told a meeting of conservative women about a bus seen at a San Diego polling place in 2010 offloading people "who did not appear to be from this country."

Officials in both San Diego and Wisconsin said they had no evidence that the buses were real. "It's so stealthy that no one is ever able to get a picture and no one is able to get a license plate," said Reid Magney, a spokesman for the Wisconsin agency that oversees elections. In some versions the bus is from an Indian reservation; in others it is full of voters from Chicago or Detroit. "Pick your minority group," he said.
Yet Peggy Noonan, who's now a critic of Donald Trump and the Big Lie, wrote a sob story about Engelbrecht and True the Vote in 2013:
But the most important IRS story came not from the hearings but from Mike Huckabee’s program on Fox News Channel. He interviewed and told the story of Catherine Engelbrecht -- a nice woman, a citizen, an American. She and her husband live in Richmond, Texas. They have a small manufacturing business. In the past few years she became interested in public policy and founded two groups, King Street Patriots and True the Vote.

In July 2010 she sent applications to the IRS for tax-exempt status.... The U.S. government came down on her with full force....

All this because she requested tax-exempt status for a local conservative group and for one that registers voters and tries to get dead people off the rolls. Her attorney, Cleta Mitchell, who provided the timeline above, told me: “These people, they are just regular Americans. They try to get dead people off the voter rolls, you would think that they are serial killers.”

This week Ms. Engelbrecht, who still hasn’t received her exemptions, sued the IRS.
The IRS scandal preceded Trump's entry into electoral politics. The Republicans who were outraged include people now regarded as anti-Trumpers, like Paul Ryan.

And as Jonathan Chait noted in 2017, there was no scandal:
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration reviewed a decade of IRS handling of political organizations. It found that scores of liberal groups were subject to the same heavy scrutiny that conservative groups faced. This merely certified what had been perfectly clear all along....

And yet the scandal has lived on and on in the conservative mind....

Fervently anti-Trump conservatives like Michael Gerson, George Will, Noah Rothman, and many others continue to cite the nonexistent scandal as if it were a real thing.
And now True the Vote is feeding tinfoil-hat Big Lie dinformation for one of Dinesh D'Souza's godawful movies. Mainstream Republicans, this was your doing. You built this.
Posted by Steve M. at 7:00 PM 0 comments

Sunday, April 04, 2021

RIGHT-WINGERS LOVE STORIES ABOUT MYSTERIOUS VEHICLES TRANSPORTING PEOPLE FOR SINISTER (LIBERAL) REASONS

Tomi Lahren, a Fox News commentator who's now a host at the streaming service Fox Nation, tweeted the following last night:

There are a couple of reasons why this is obvioudly nonsense. First, no vaccine is approved by U.S. authorities for children. Second, even if there were a sinister plan to prioritize the vaccination of "illegal kids" before American adults, why wouldn't the perpetrators simply ship the vaccine to the kids instead of the other way around?

But right-wingers love stories about mystery vehicles doing sinister things on behalf of their evil enemies. Years ago, many of the rumors involved voter registration and voting. True the Vote, a Texas-based, Tea Party-affiliated organization that complained loudly during the Obama years about mistreatment from the IRS, and recently was sued by a wealthy donor because he felt he didn't get any return for the $2.5 million he donated to the group in the hopes of backing Donald Trump's election challenge, used to tell many stories about buses full of election fraudsters, as The New York Times noted, with great skepticism, in 2012:
It might as well be Harry Potter’s invisible Knight Bus, because no one can prove it exists.

The bus has been repeatedly cited by True the Vote, a national group focused on voter fraud. Catherine Engelbrecht, the group’s leader, told a gathering in July about buses carrying dozens of voters showing up at polling places during the recent Wisconsin recall election.

“Magically, all of them needed to register and vote at the same time,” Ms. Engelbrecht said. “Do you think maybe they registered falsely under false pretenses? Probably so.”

Weeks later, another True the Vote representative told a meeting of conservative women about a bus seen at a San Diego polling place in 2010 offloading people “who did not appear to be from this country.”

Officials in both San Diego and Wisconsin said they had no evidence that the buses were real. “It’s so stealthy that no one is ever able to get a picture and no one is able to get a license plate,” said Reid Magney, a spokesman for the Wisconsin agency that oversees elections. In some versions the bus is from an Indian reservation; in others it is full of voters from Chicago or Detroit. “Pick your minority group,” he said.
A few months before that Times story appeared, an earlier version of Fox Nation -- a Free Republic-style message board overseen by Fox News -- reported on a phantom bus said to be ferrying voters from Michigan to Wisconsin to vote for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in the Wisconsin recall election, which then-governor Scott Walker survived.
On WMAL’s The Chris Plante Show today a Michigan resident by the name of "Mike" called in to discuss how he had infiltrated a Michigan Union's organized bus convoy, en-route to vote in the Wisconsin recall election for Democrats.

The caller claimed that Michigan’s “Democrat Unions” had organized a convoy of 4 buses, filled with Michigan Democrats, with the intention of voting for Tom Barrett in the Wisconsin recall election.

Caller “Mike” describes “Greyhound size buses, filled to capacity” with a good amount of “freebies” available, “They treated me to lunch!”
It's not clear why "Mike" -- allegedly riding on a bus from Michigan to Wisconsin -- called in to a right-wing radio show based in Washington, D.C. (the caller's explanation: "I drive [a] tractor trailer and I know your number. I'm always in DC, Virginia..."). "Mike" claimed that he, personally, wasn't going to vote for the Democrat -- though he was planning to vote illegally in a state where he didn't live.
PLANTE:

You're on a bus full of people going from Michigan to Wisconsin and you believe that most of the people on the bus..other than yourself..you believe that ALL of the people other than yourself are going there to vote for Tom Barrett

CALLER MIKE:

Most of them are Democrat..it's a Democratic union..its actually a Democratic union organized by Democrats. But I'm not goin on there to vote for the Democrat. I'm going on there to vote for Scott Walker. Once I heard about it I- I was thinking, hey..this is an opportunity to sabotage what they always do to Republicans.
At the end of the call, Plante asked for "Mike's" number, but -- funny thing -- Mike never provided it. So this totally legitimate story couldn't be verified. What a shame!

This is one of the right's favorite narrative structures. I have no idea why.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:34 AM 0 comments

Friday, November 27, 2020

A REMINDER THAT THE GOP WAS FALSELY SHOUTING "ELECTORAL FRAUD!" YEARS BEFORE TRUMP BECAME PRESIDENT

A headline at HuffPost reads:
Donor In Trump’s Election ‘Fraud’ Fight Sues To Snatch Back His $2.5 Million Contribution
But the contribution in dispute didn't go directly to Trump, or to an organization created by Trump affiliates. Here's the story:
A major contributor to a group backing President Donald Trump’s fight to overturn the presidential election sued to recover $2.5 million in donations after the campaign failed in several court cases and was unable to prove any fraud.

The lawsuit filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas by North Carolina venture capitalist Fred Eshelman argued that the nonprofit group True the Vote promised to keep him informed of how his millions were being used in what was pitched as a strong case against alleged election fraud. Instead, the suit alleged, he was fed “vague responses, platitudes and empty promises of follow-up” that never occurred.

He was kept in the dark when weak cases filed in Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania were voluntarily withdrawn in a decision the investor claimed was made in “concert with counsel for the Trump campaign,” the suit said.
If the name "True the Vote" sounds familiar, it's because the group was one of several right-wing organizations that whined incessantly during Barack Obama's presidency about the IRS's reluctance to grant them tax-exempt status as non-political profits. These complaints led to sob stories even in the non-conservative media. This is from a 2013 McClatchy article:
Concerned about government regulation of her family’s manufacturing business, [Catherine Engelbrecht] became dissatisfied with the political process and particularly the 2008 presidential choices....

After witnessing what she called voter irregularities in the Houston area, Engelbrecht formed a group called True the Vote. With a paid staff of five, it aims to educate 1 million poll workers nationwide on spotting election fraud. Liberal groups view it as a conservative effort aimed at restricting minority participation, a claim that True the Vote officials deny.
Gosh, it's hard to imagine where liberal groups got the idea that True the Vote is "a conservative effort aimed at restricting minority participation"....
In 2010, before most reporters had heard of True the Vote, the group put out a video introducing itself. As epic battle music plays, far-right activist David Horowitz comes on screen. "The voting system is under attack now," he says. "Movements that are focused on voter fraud, on the integrity of elections are crucial. This is a war." ...

"The left has been focused on this now for decades," says Horowitz, as photographs of black voters lining up to cast ballots flash by. "Obama's very connected to ACORN, which is a voter-fraud machine. ACORN is the radical army." ...
More:
A group trying to register voters in Houston received threats and emails containing racist slurs after being targeted by a local tea party group accusing it of “voter fraud.”

In emails obtained by TPM, the group Houston Votes was accused of being “a bunch of white guilt ridden assholes, NIGGERS and greasy mexican spics,” “fraudulent Marxist pigs,” and “American hating A-holes.”...

Houston Votes was targeted by the Texas Tea Party group King Street Patriots in their so-called anti-voter fraud effort “True The Vote.”
Engelbrecht referred to the Houston Votes office as the “New Black Panthers’ office.” A video put out by the group featured a doctored photo showing a Black woman holding a protest sign that read, "I ONLY GOT TO VOTE ONCE!"

The group's claims of non-partisanship are also laughable:
[The] 2010 video announcing True the Vote's launch begins with right-wing activist David Horowitz telling the camera that "Republicans have to win by at least three percent in order to win an election," since Democrats are likely to case fraudulent votes.

... in 2012, True the Vote contributed $5000 to the Republican State Leadership Committee.... This overtly political statement would legally, according to tax lawyers specializing in election law, disqualify a nonprofit from 501(c)3 tax-exempt status.

... True the Vote's website portrays voter fraud as largely a Democratic party problem. It routinely runs stories on election fraud being perpetrated by "liberals" or "Democrats" but has, to date, never run a story on Republican or Conservative instances of voter fraud.
And yet we were told that True the Vote was being persecuted by the IRS, and that Engelbrecht was a fine, upstanding American. Peggy Noonan -- who now regards Trump as extreme and dangerous -- lamented that Engelbrecht was "a nice woman, a citizen, an American" who was being pilloried for running a civic-minded organization that "tries to get dead people off the rolls."

The only difference between what Trump is doing now and what True the Vote has done for years is scale. Right-thinking citizens regard Trump's efforts as beyond the pale, but they were fine with the activities of True the Vote and similar organizations when most Americans weren't paying attention.

If right-wingers as well as left-wingers had denounced electoral-fraud witch hunts over the past decade, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in today. But they backed those efforts then. So here we are now.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:34 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, January 25, 2017

THESE CLOWNS WILL RELEASE ACTUAL VOTE-FRAUD DATA WHEN TRUMP RELEASES OBAMA'S KENYAN BIRTH CERTIFICATE

The thing is, I think Trump actually believes this:
In an exclusive interview with ABC News, President Trump insisted there is “a lot to look into” as he said he will call for an investigation into alleged voter fraud following his unsubstantiated claim that millions of people illegally cast ballots during the 2016 election.

“You have people that are registered who are dead, who are illegals, who are in two states. You have people registered in two states. They're registered in a New York and a New Jersey. They vote twice. There are millions of votes, in my opinion,” Trump told "World News Tonight" Anchor David Muir during an interview today at the White House.

The president later added, “When you look at the people that are registered: dead, illegal and two states, and some cases maybe three states -- we have a lot to look into.”
He believes it because he'll believe any suspicion-confirming wingnut tale, however absurd. And he says there's "a lot to look into" because the people feeding him this tale -- Greg Phillips and his allies at the Koch-affiliated True the Vote -- swear they can prove that all this fraud took place, but just not yet, though any day now they will, they totally swear:
Gregg Phillips, the ... apparent source for President Trump's unsupported claim that 3 million or more "illegal voters" cost him the popular vote, says he might be changing his mind about releasing the names of those voters to everyone on the internet.

“If I had my druthers, and they said, ‘Gregg, you can release your list or you can give it to [the Department of Justice],’ I’d instantly agree to give it over to DOJ. They could bump it up against the Homeland Security file,” Phillips told The Daily Beast on Tuesday. “There’s a group of us who don’t think we should release the names at all.”

As of right now, however, releasing the names is the plan, said Phillips, who identifies himself on Twitter as the founder of a voter-fraud reporting app....

Here’s the problem: No one has seen any of the data, nor the algorithm Phillips and his group have put it through, let alone confirmed if it’s even possible for any part of it to be true....

Phillips claims his group, a band of volunteers loosely affiliated with a right-wing organization called True the Vote, has “184 million voting records we’ve collected over time.” ...

He said his team has “worked on various projects and analysis and plenty of different methodologies on key components on the valuations such as verifying identity and verifying citizenship.” ...

Phillips said he doesn’t want to accuse someone of felony voter fraud who isn’t a felon.

“That’s exactly what’s taking so long. Rather than publishing things that might be wrong, we not only just want to do a quality check on our own algorithm, we want to do an internal audit, if you will,” he said.

Still, at the beginning of his conversation with The Daily Beast, he insisted he’d release the data and algorithm to the public once he was sure the data was fine-tuned. (He didn’t give a timeline for any of this when pressed.) ...

In the meantime, though, he’s mostly gone dark.
There are two possibilities here: (1) these folks have no data whatsoever; (2) they have data that will turn out to be riddled with errors if it's ever released -- and if it's ever released, you're going to find innocent people being harassed and threatened by right-wing goons for allegedly committing voter fraud that they never actually engaged in. Did you live with an dying parent who cast an absentee ballot and then died before Election Day? These folks will get you and your dead parent accused of fraud by anonymous harassers. Or maybe that'll happen just because the last state you lived in never took you off the rolls. Or for no reason at all except that these clowns need to pad their stats.

Assuming there ever have been any stats.

I've written about True the Vote several times, most recently in November, when Phillips's claim first surfaced. As I explain in that post, the group, headed by a Texas Republican activist named Catherine Engelbrecht, is nakedly partisan -- it categorically describes voter fraud as a Democratic problem -- yet right-wing media outlets have regularly published sob stories about how the poor dears couldn't get tax-exempt status as a non-partisan group from the allegedly evil Obama IRS. And not just the low-rent outlets -- Peggy Noonan and John Fund at The Wall Street Journal have shed tears over Engelbrecht's heroic suffering. This is a crock, but it's a crock that might end up in a mass doxxing of mostly innocent people -- that is, if there's anything at all behind these claims apart from smoke and mirrors.
Posted by Steve M. at 6:41 PM 6 comments

Monday, November 28, 2016

TRUMP'S BASELESS VOTE FRAUD CLAIM, PARTLY SUBSIDIZED BY YOUR TAX DOLLARS

Donald Trump is claiming that Hillary Clinton's popular-vote lead in the presidential election is the result of 3 million ballots cast illegally by immigrants. The Washington Post has located the source of this conspiracy theory:
In fact, this claim that millions of illegal immigrants voted is itself the result of a random tweet.

On Nov. 13, Gregg Phillips, a former Texas Health and Human Services Commission deputy commissioner, tweeted about there being 3 million votes that were cast by noncitizens.

Phillips operates under a bewildering number of organization names -- JumpVote, VoteFraud.org, Election Night Gatekeepers -- but he is regularly identified (for instance, in this story at Right Wing News) as "the founder of Votestand, a voter fraud reporting app." VoteStand was brought to you by a group called True the Vote, as Breitbart noted in October:
Texas-based election integrity organization True the Vote has released a smartphone app that allows users to report voter fraud and irregularities.

VoteStand, available for both iPhone and Android users, is advertised to be the “first online election fraud reporting app” available to voters across the country “to quickly report suspected election illegalities as they happen,” according to True the Vote....

“VoteStand can be used to capture your voting experience,” True the Vote Founder Catherine Engelbrecht said. “A picture is worth a thousand words.”
Go to the iTunes store and you'll see that the vendor for VoteStand is True the Vote, Inc. The Post notes that Gregg Phillips claims to be a True the Vote board member. And you can see in the tweet above that he says he'll be joining True the Vote "to initiate legal action."

Does the name True the Vote ring any bells for you?

Back in 2013, the group, headed by a woman named Catherine Engelbrecht, got a lot of publicity because the IRS under Lois Lerner wouldn't approve its tax-exempt status. Peggy Noonan wrote this sob story:
But the most important IRS story came not from the hearings but from Mike Huckabee’s program on Fox News Channel. He interviewed and told the story of Catherine Engelbrecht -- a nice woman, a citizen, an American. She and her husband live in Richmond, Texas. They have a small manufacturing business. In the past few years she became interested in public policy and founded two groups, King Street Patriots and True the Vote.

In July 2010 she sent applications to the IRS for tax-exempt status.... The U.S. government came down on her with full force....

All this because she requested tax-exempt status for a local conservative group and for one that registers voters and tries to get dead people off the rolls. Her attorney, Cleta Mitchell, who provided the timeline above, told me: “These people, they are just regular Americans. They try to get dead people off the voter rolls, you would think that they are serial killers.”

This week Ms. Engelbrecht, who still hasn’t received her exemptions, sued the IRS.
John Fund, a Noonan colleague on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, wrote this:
At least two donors told me they didn’t contribute to True the Vote, a group formed to combat voter fraud, because after three years of waiting the group still didn’t have its [tax-exempt] status granted at the time of the 2012 election.
True the Vote was seeking 501(c)(3) tax status, which required it not to support political candidates. But True the Vote's partisanship is obvious, as I noted in 2013. I quoted this, from Sourcewatch:
True the Vote's website portrays voter fraud as largely a Democractic party problem. It routinely runs stories on election fraud being perpetrated by "liberals," ... or "Democrats" ... but has, to date, never run a story on Republican or Conservative instances of voter fraud.

... in 2012, True the Vote contributed $5000 to the Republican State Leadership Committee.... This overtly political statement would legally, according to tax lawyers specializing in election law, disqualify a nonprofit from 501(c)3 tax-exempt status....
More:
True The Vote ... put together a video raising the threat of voter fraud which features soaring music. "Think it can't happen in your town? Think again!" reads one message. "Our elections are being manipulated. By the RADICAL LEFT," the video says.

The video originally featured a doctored photo of an African-American voter holding a poorly photoshopped sign -- featuring Comic Sans font -- that read "I only got to vote once." That part of the video has since been edited out.
And there was a story in The New York Times in 2012 about a suspicious RV:
Driving down the Interstate in Florida, you may see an R.V. wrapped with a picture of Abraham Lincoln.

These eye-catching vehicles are mobile command centers for registering and energizing voters. They are part of a citizen effort to "defeat Obama, hold the House and win the Senate in November," Fred Solomon, a retired Alabama businessman, said in an e-mail to fellow Tea Party supporters.

Mr. Solomon is a coordinator for Code Red USA, the plan to flood swing states with conservative volunteers. "Partnering with True the Vote, a nonprofit, nonpartisan watchdog group, we will train and put election observers in polling places in the swing states to reduce voter fraud," Mr. Solomon said in his e-mail.

Code Red USA is financed by the Madison Project, a political action committee whose chairman is former Representative Jim Ryun, a Kansas Republican who was regarded as among the most conservative members of Congress. The provocative video promoting Code Red accuses Democrats of "a clear intent to commit massive voter fraud."

Despite Mr. Solomon's e-mail and the video, which identifies True the Vote as a participant, Ms. Engelbrecht said her group has no role in the effort.
Gosh, I can't imagine why the IRS had questions about True the Vote's non-political status.

True the Vote issued a statement today:
“True the Vote absolutely supports President-elect Trump’s recent comment about the impact of illegal voting, as reflected in the national popular vote. We are still collecting data and will be for several months, but our intent is to publish a comprehensive study on the significant impact of illegal voting in all of its many forms and begin a national discussion on how voters, states, and the Trump Administration can best address this growing problem.”
The statement adds:
True the Vote (TTV) is an IRS-designated 501(c)(3) voters’ rights organization, founded to inspire and equip voters for involvement at every stage of our electoral process. TTV empowers organizations and individuals across the nation to actively protect the rights of legitimate voters, regardless of their political party affiliation.
Yes, those last six words are a joke -- on us, the taxpayers.

Posted by Steve M. at 8:34 AM 9 comments

Friday, February 26, 2016

TRUMP'S AUDIT COMPLAINT TAPS A DEEP WELL OF WINGNUT RESENTMENT

Under pressure to release his tax returns, which might reveal that he's not as rich as he claims, Donald Trump changes the subject, implausibly but brilliantly:
Donald Trump’s disclosure that his tax returns have been under review by the Internal Revenue Service for the past 12 years reflects a “very unusual” level of scrutiny by tax authorities, according to a former Internal Revenue Service agent who now works as an accountant for wealthy people.

... Alan Olsen, the managing partner of Greenstein Rogoff Olsen & Co. LLP, an accounting firm in Fremont and Palo Alto, California that caters to wealthy Silicon Valley clients ... said that Trump’s revelation about 12 years of audits is something of a bombshell itself. “If the IRS examines your tax return and finds no issues they will not audit your return again for two years,” he said. “If returns are properly prepared, the IRS typically goes away.”
Mitt Romney, as I'm sure you know, has been baiting Trump on this subject:
The issue moved to the top of the agenda this week after Mitt Romney ... said in an interview with Fox News that Trump’s tax returns may contain a “bombshell.” Romney speculated that Trump’s personal tax documents might show that he is not as wealthy as he has claimed. On Thursday night, Romney needled Trump again, posting on Twitter: “No legit reason @realDonaldTrump can’t release returns while being audited, but if scared, release earlier returns no longer under audit.”
(National Review is now citing a business writer's claim that Trump is worth only $150 to $250 million.)

But Trump, instead of merely stalling for time, has decided -- apparently for the first time -- to claim persecution. That's what's brilliant:
Trump’s disclosure, which emerged during a contentious GOP debate on Thursday in Houston, Texas, was a departure from prior statements about his tax returns. He has previously suggested to interviewers that his campaign was working on preparing the returns for release and that the process was time-consuming because of their complexity.

“For many years, I’ve been audited every year,” Trump said Thursday night. “Twelve years or something like that.”

After the debate, Trump suggested to CNN interviewer Chris Cuomo that there might be an unsavory reason the IRS has targeted him -- because he’s a “strong Christian.”
Rank-and-file right-wingers hate the IRS -- and I mean they hate the IRS much more than even the average American hates the IRS. Wingers especially despise the IRS because they've been goaded to do so by the conservative movement and the right-wing media. Recall that last fall a resolution was actually introduced in the House to impeach the IRS commissioner:
House lawmakers have moved to impeach IRS Commissioner John Koskinen over accusations he obstructed investigations into the IRS targeting scandal that consumed the agency in 2013.

Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz on Tuesday filed articles of impeachment against Koskinen, accusing him of stonewalling the probe into the agency's alleged targeting of conservative groups ahead of the 2010 and 2012 elections.

Conservatives have been clamoring for the White House to fire Koskinen, who was not at the IRS during the alleged targeting but has been in charge of the agency since December 2013....

The filing came just hours after Koskinen faced off with Senate lawmakers over the targeting scandal, and just days after the Justice Department announced it would not bring charges against Lois Lerner or any of the other IRS officials involved in the processing of applications for tax-exempt status.

Lerner admitted to directing her division to use search terms such as "tea party" to help identify organizations to devote extra scrutiny to, and blamed budget cuts for not being able to do an even and thorough review of all applications. The officials also filtered for terms like "progressive," but not with the same frequency.
Rabble-rousing organizations on the right -- the people who for years have believed that they could stir up high levels of resentment among conservative voters without turning those voters into an angry, uncontrollable mob (i.e., the Trump base) -- have been pushing for Koskinen's impeachment. I'm talking about Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform and other Kochite organizations:









Hatred of the IRS has also been ginned up in the Obama years by mainstreamers like Peggy Noonan, who wept for Catherine Engelbrecht -- "a nice woman, a citizen, an American" -- whose organization True the Vote ran into trouble with the agency when it sought tax-exempt status despite its naked partisanship.

And yes, the right thinks the IRS has targeted Christians in the Obama years. Here's Tucker Carlson in 2014 claiming an "assault on people of faith" because the IRS was asked by the Freedom from Religion Foundation to ensure that candidates weren't endorsed from pulpits in tax-exempt churches. (Headline at AllenBWest.com: "Atheist Non-Profit Group Colludes with IRS to Crack Down on Churches.") Here's Fox's Todd Starnes declaring in 2013 that "Several well-known religious organizations say they were targeted by the Internal Revenue Service, including the ministry founded by famed evangelist Billy Graham and a 180-year-old Baptist newspaper." Here's a 2013 Breitbart story: "James Dobson: IRS Stonewalled Christian Family Org for Being 'Critical of the President.'"

That's what Trump is claiming, too -- and if you're a right-winger, you're probably already primed to believe every such story already, so why not?

Trump claims his audits go back twelve years -- all the way back to the Bush administration, in other words. But I bet angry right-wingers won't do the math, and even if they do, he's gotten away with being critical of George W. all this time, so why stop now? Transcending both parties is part of his brand.

I bet Trump will never release additional tax documents. And I bet he'll get away with it.
Posted by Steve M. at 1:59 PM 8 comments
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