A speech worth listening to. Here is a snippet. The sad thing is that most of the other GOP Reps refused to stay and listen, or provide any viable counter argument. They chose to stay silent and embolden the liars. :-(
I am a conservative Republican and the most conservative of conservative principles is reverence for the rule of law. The Electoral College has voted. More than 60 state and federal courts, including multiple judges the former president appointed, have rejected his claims. The Trump Department of Justice investigated the former president's claims of widespread fraud and found no evidence to support them. The election is over. That is the rule of law. That is our constitutional process.
Those who refuse to accept the rulings of our courts are at war with the Constitution. Our duty is clear. Every one of us who has sworn the oath must act to prevent the unraveling of our democracy. This is not about policy. This is not about partisanship. This is about our duty as Americans. Remaining silent and ignoring the lie emboldens the liar. I will not participate in that. I will not sit back and watch in silence while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins the former president's crusade to undermine our democracy.
35 comments:
BS. "Courts have ruled," for the most part, without hearing the evidence against the officially-stated results. Now that the evidence is becoming more clear, it is time to question not only the process, but the result itself. If the election was untainted as Democrats claim, why the rabid effort to stop the Maricopa County audit? If thousands of "mail-in ballots" have no creases in them from being mailed, does that raise ANY suspicions in your mind?
The problem is the plaintiffs didn't present evidence, just allegations. Their lawyers, who are officers of the court and who under ethics rules, were unvilling to say in court, what they said outside of court, that there was evidence that fraud had occurred.
Why is the Maricopa investigation problematic? A good question, one deserving of an answer. The reason is that Maricopa votes have been counted multiple times with the same result. We do that, we provide a process for recounts in which both parties have a role so that election results can have credibility and finality. By hiring Cyber Ninjas, what Republicans are trying to do is undermine the credibility of the election, in ways that have nothing to do with the accuracy of the count. It's bad enough that Republicans are doing this in Arizona, but what is really dangerous for our country is that this is just one part of a nation wide effort of Republicans to undermine elections they lose.
I have talked a lot about how disturbing it is that many people believe that political authority in America is based on force, not the consent of the governed. I have never thought that has een true, at least not in my lifetime. I don't think it is true, but I also think that is the direction Republicans want to take us. And I don't know if there is any going back.
--Hiram
The big question is if the voter turnout will stay high in 2022 for those groups that showed up in 2020 after staying home in 2016.
It is kind of sad how low voter turnout still is for Asian and Hispanic Americans.
And of course it is sad that Jerry wants to keep it low...
Republicans are working hard to lower the turnout, but that is sort of a mixed blessing for them. What the outcome of the 2020 election taught us is that while high turnout is good for Democrats in national elections, which had always been the conventional wisdom, it isn't necessarily all that bad for Republicans on local levels.
--Hiram
"What the outcome of the 2020 election taught us is that while high turnout is good for Democrats in national elections"
This may not even necessarily be true, given the fact that Trump outperformed his polling. Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina were thought to be in play, but only NC was close.
United States 66.7%
Minnesota 80%
Colorado 76.4%
Maine 76.3%
Wisconsin 75.8%
Washington 75.7%
Oregon 75.5%
New Hampshire 75.5%
New Jersey 75.3%
Vermont 74.2%
Michigan 73.9%
Iowa 73.2%
Montana 73.1%
Virginia 73%
Massachusetts 72.1%
Florida 71.7%
Connecticut 71.5%
North Carolina 71.5%
Pennsylvania 71%
Delaware 70.7%
Maryland 70.7%
Nebraska 69.9%
Utah 69.2%
Alaska 68.8%
California 68.5%
Georgia 67.7%
Idaho 67.7%
Ohio 67.4%
Illinois 67%
Missouri 66.3%
South Dakota 66%
Arizona 65.9%
Kansas 65.9%
Rhode Island 65.7%
Nevada 65.4%
Kentucky 64.9%
Louisiana 64.6%
Wyoming 64.6%
South Carolina 64.5%
North Dakota 64.5%
District of Columbia 64.1%
New York 63.4%
Alabama 63.1%
Indiana 61.4%
New Mexico 61.3%
Texas 60.4%
Mississippi 60.2%
Tennessee 59.8%
West Virginia 57.6%
Hawaii 57.5%
Arkansas 56.1%
Oklahoma 55%
But what would the results look like if 75+% of their citizens cared enough to vote?
I am not a big fan of polling particularly in an election such as the last one where so many of the assumptions on which it is based were invalid. I look at the bottom line election numbers, the numbers that contribute to the decision of who the president will be. Biden got the most votes in history, and doubled the margin of the popular vote win over Hillary's four years earlier. These numbers explain why Republcans are so committed to vote suppression. The problem they have is, it would be seem, that while vote unsuppression helps them nationally it helps them locally, and while it might not be the case that all politics is local, surely a heckuva lot of it is.
--Hiram
People vote and not vote for all sorts of reasons, and I respect whatever choice they make. My own view, from the trenches, is that when I hear a voter tell me that they don't vote, that both sides do it, and all politicians are the same, I think "This was a victory for Republican messaging". Because of the conventional wisdom, high turnout good for Dems, low turnout good for Republicans, Republicans like to feed into the messaging that government doesn't matter, that people in government don't care and are just in it for the power or fore the money or whatever. The enthusiasm Republicans generate comes very often with social issues, which when you think about it, government has very little with which to do. Whether or not you have Dr. Seuss' more racist tomes to read to your children isn't a decision government makes, or can change. As politicized as the issue has been made, it isn't the government who tells a woman whether or not she should have an abortion. Donald Trump was not kicked off twitter by the government, and I am pretty sure the issue of Potato Head's gender did not come up at the constitutional convention nor was it ever addressed in "The Federalist Papers".
--Hiram
"Maricopa votes have been counted multiple times with the same result." -- Hiram.
HIram, the BALLOTS were counted. But if, for example, there were no folds in the mail-in or absentee ballots, or if stacks of them were found voted identically and only for Joe Biden, should those ballots really be counted? IOW, do those ballots actually represent votes by voters? My guess is that is the big fear of Democrats. Somebody KNOWS they cheated, and thought themselves justified in doing so. Probably still do.
John, the courts did NOT hear the evidence. I know. Highly paid DNC attorneys stepped in across the country and had cases dismissed on technicalities so that the evidence was never heard. In those cases where it is, Trump attorneys prevail about 70% of the time.
As for Ms. Cheney, I think you should say that a person whose job it is to unite the caucus but who persists in dividing it, should not continue. Truth or not, she is not doing the job she is supposed to be doing.
The big concern I have is that the credibility of elections will be undermined. My nightmare scenario is that Republicans will win both houses of Congress in 2022, and will not recognize a Democratic victory in the presidential election victory in 2024 because somewhere in America a ballot was not folded in a way peopole like.
--Hiram
Jerry,
There was no evidence our Trump Etal would have gone straight to the press / congress.
It will be interesting to see if this audit finds anything?
I highly doubt it...
Jerry,
There was no evidence or Trump Etal would have gone straight to the press / congress.
It will be interesting to see if this audit finds anything?
I highly doubt it...
When people are paid a lot of money to find stuff, it's never a bad bet to say stuff will be found. Certainly "questions will be raised" many of which, "The American peoplewill deserve to have answered". Raising questions is one of the easiest things there is to do, both in politics and in life.
The scary thing is doubts about the integrity of 2020, are unreasonable and easily dismissed. Trump lost the popular vote by a huge margin. All the constitutional technicalities which won him the election in 2016 worked against him in 2020, and by sheer luck the order of events played on election night were disadvantageous to him. His planned outcry "Stop the vote" wouldn't work for him when the state of the count on election night had him losing.
But what about 2024? Next time around, we can expect Republicans not Democrats will control both houses of Congress along with a critical mass of state legislatures across the country. I can assure you, just like every other election that has been conducted in the history of humanity, there will anomalies and rumors of anomalies which, if one chooses that path, will allow people to claim the election was stolen. What happens if a Republican state legislature in a state Biden won, chooses the Republican electors to cast their votes in the electoral college instead? What happens if the Republican controlled Supreme Court allows that to happen? How far fetched, exactly, is that scenario?
--Hiram
Apparently Liz's job is to support the lie?
This piece seems pertinent.
"I never thought that I'd be saying, 'Yeah, go Liz Cheney.' But I am. And again, isn't it a sad commentary that we're cheering her on for simply telling the truth and for refusing to be silent when others are not?"
"She is being punished for telling the truth. And I certainly never thought our country would come to that," she added.
Faced with the same problem Republicans are, Hitler set in motion the "Night of the Long Knives". In just being ousted from the number three position in house Republican leadership, the very same postion that gets you fired in "Glengarry Glen Ross", I would say Liz Cheney got off easily.
--Hiram
We’re trapped by the GOP’s commitment to lying. There may be no way out.
I can not access WAPO. Maybe you can copy the interesting parts here. :-)
As I often say, the crazy side of the GOP electorate worries me more than the politicians.
They just cater to the whims of their majority.
When it came to the brazenness and sheer volume of his dishonesty, Donald Trump was unique among politicians in American history and perhaps even in world history. So when he left office and found the vital propaganda pipelines of Twitter and Facebook closed to him, one might have hoped that his party would begin to rebuild its relationship to the truth.
But if anything, the Republican Party today is even more committed to myths, falsehoods and a shared hostility to the very idea of an objective reality on which a democratic debate might be built than they were when Trump was still president.
Things are not getting better. They’re getting worse. And it’s almost impossible to see a way out. A quick rundown of news just from the past couple of days:
. We should lSen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Fox News host Tucker Carlson are vaguely suggesting that Anthony S. Fauci is to blame for creation of the coronavirus, based on a convoluted stew of half-truths and speculation about international virology research and the hypothesis that the virus originated in a lab in China. Carlson has been telling his viewers that covid vaccines have been killing people by the thousands. He’s the highest-rated host on cable news.
Republican members of Congress are trying to recast the Jan. 6 insurrection as a gentle stroll through the Capitol by people who may or may not have been Trump supporters. Meanwhile, the purging of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) shows that the lie that Trump won the 2020 election has become the central organizing principle of the GOP.
The very act of fact-checking work is so offensive to Republicans that a group of GOP state legislators in Michigan have filed a bill called the “Fact Checker Registration Act." It would require fact-checkers to register with the state and acquire a million-dollar insurance policy, and fine them if their fact-checks are displeasing to the government.
Though the GOP may despise fact-checking, Republicans have little to fear from it, and a look at its history helps illustrate why the situation we now confront is so desperate and how we got here.
When the abysmal 1988 presidential campaign ended, journalists felt they had been manipulated into amplifying false and distracting claims, in effect becoming handmaids of a successful effort to deceive the country. So media organizations and academics began developing fact-checking as a distinct enterprise, trying to debunk falsehoods in advertising and stump speeches.
The goal was to correct the record and provide the public with accurate information, but it was also premised in part on the force of shame: If a politician told a lie and it was noted and corrected, they would be less likely to tell the same lie in the future. If it worked, the entire informational ecosystem could become healthier.
But from the beginning, fact-checking ran into challenges. The first was that people are resistant to having their views revised if they have an investment in the lie they believe; pointing out the truth to them isn’t nearly enough. The second was that some politicians can’t be shamed into being honest, because they have no shame.
It was true of George W. Bush and many of those who worked for him; they mounted what may have been the most successful propaganda campaign in U.S. history, convincing the public to support an invasion of Iraq based on the twin lies that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11 and that he posed an imminent threat to the United States with his fearsome arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
But that was nothing compared to Trump, who used attempts to fact-check him as fuel for his campaign to convince every Republican that there was no such thing as objective truth. All that matters is our side and our enemies': Whatever we say is true and whatever they say is false, and every news outlet that is not part of the GOP spin machine is your enemy.
We now confront a situation where one of our two parties still has some shame and is committed to the idea of truth even if some of its members occasionally say things that are false, while the other party not only rejects the idea that they ought to be honest at all but also builds their arguments on almost every issue on obvious, demonstrable lies.
So what’s the way out?
The distressing answer is that there may not be one. In some other world, Republicans would respond to election losses by changing their approach; if, for instance, the biggest liar in our history lost his party control of the White House and Congress, they might try something different.
But they aren’t. All the incentives within the GOP still point in the direction of genuflecting before Trump and reinforcing both his particular lies and the kind of dishonesty he embodied. No Republican politician finds their ambitions thwarted by a reputation for dishonesty; quite the contrary.
So fact-checking doesn’t change their behavior, and neither does losing. The few among them who stand up for truth become pariahs. They depend on a media apparatus committed to lying to its audiences.
If there’s a way any of that could change in the near future, I’d love to know what it might be. But I’ve yet to hear any good ideas.
Read more:
Charlie Dent, Mary Peters, Denver Riggleman, Michael Steele and Christine Todd Whitman: The GOP has lost its way. Fellow Americans, join our new alliance.
Liz Cheney: The GOP is at a turning point. History is watching us.
Henry Olsen: Republicans should be nervous about the proposed third party. Democrats should be, too.
Adam Finn and Richard Malley: As pediatricians, we say please don’t use precious coronavirus vaccines on healthy children
Perry Bacon Jr.: America is having a Black Renaissanceearn from it.
Laurie,
Thanks.
I would love to blame the politicians and parties out there for the US' social dysfunction, but I think "We the People Own This Mess"...
Tribe Right's members live in echo chambers that espouse conspiracy theories. (ie the big lie, evil border crossers, etc)
Tribe Left's members live in echo chambers that espouse conspiracy theories. (ie Evil Police / Justice, CAGW, Evil Capitalists, etc)
I am not sure where our country goes from here... It does not bode well... :-O
Tribe Left's members live in echo chambers that espouse conspiracy theories. (ie Evil Police / Justice, CAGW, Evil Capitalists, etc)
I don't think police are evil, but I am at a loss to explain Chauvin. In terms of conspiracy, I will leave it to others to explain why all the other cops who were there didn't stop him. I have a tough time with the original police statement about what occurred also.
--Hiram
Ah, you have nailed the point... Rational sane people understand that Chauvin and his peers screwed up...
Irrational conspiracy minded people see Chauvin as proof that there is a government conspiracy to keep the Black man down...
It is hardly irrational to think part of what police do is keep black people down. I have never seen anything approaching what happened to George Floyd happen in my neighborhood.
I don't know if there is a better documentary on this that the ESPN documentary on OJ Simpson. It's absolutely brilliant.
--Hiram
Do you have a lot of drug addled counterfeiters in your neighborhood?
There was nothing about the George Floyd incident that happens in my neighborhood. This is why it is so hard to compare my experiences with what happens in Minnesota, why the perspective of people who live there is so different from my own.
My local CVS has a problem with shoplifting. It's a beautiful, well stocked store, just as beautiful and as well stocked as the Walgreen's across the street, and the other CVS a few blocks away. The thing is nobody cares that much. The loser is a vast mult national corporation which is willing to absorb the loss. No local neighborhood shopowner operating on a razor thin profit marging is out the bucks. It happens in a neighborhoold where the police are not regarded as an occupying force. Everything goes smoothly. I would love to project my experience to Minneapolis. But maybe that just isn't realistic.
--Hiram
The irony is that folks likely pay more for products at that CVS store to cover the losses.
Do you live in Crystal then?
The irony is that folks likely pay more for products at that CVS store to cover the losses.
The irony is that even with the shrinkage, prices at my local CVS, across the street from it's competitor Walgreen, are much lower than the prices in George Floyd's neighborhood.
I live in Crystal, but the CVS is in New Hope, and the Walgreen's is in Golden Valley.
--Hiram
You should do a shopping survey.
West Plymouth (101 / 55)
Crystal
N Mpls
We could call it the "Cost of Crime" survey...
I guess I don't know what that means. I am sure they would like to raise the prices to cover theft, but that's hard to do with Walgreens just across the street, with prices published in the Sunday paper, and with Amazon just a mouse click away. The stores in George Floyd's neighborhood are subject to lots of pressures totally absent from Crystal, not to mention the wealthy environs of Plymouth.
--Hiram
Those published prices become loss leaders.
And many businesses simply avoid the crime costs by closing or not opening in those neighborhoods.
Of course then Liberals blame it on racism when it is just accounting.
Those published prices become loss leaders.
Prices are prices.
And many businesses simply avoid the crime costs by closing or not opening in those neighborhoods.
To some extent that's true, which is my experience in buying stuff isn't the same as the experience of buying stuff many people in Minneapolis have. It helps to explain why my perception of the police is different from theirs.
Of course then Liberals blame it on racism when it is just accounting.
I am not blaming anyone. I am talking about problems that need to be dealt with.
--Hiram
What problems?
The problem that in large parts of our cities, the police are viewed as an occupying force. In retrospect, but even at the time, it was evident a problem was coming whent the police union visibily and pointedly endorsed Trump. But that was just a symptom of the deeper problem.
My suggestion is to dissolve the City of Minneapolis and merge the territory of the former city into St. Paul. That would solve a lot of problems.
--Hiram
I am not sure things are any better in St Paul...
When people vote to protect criminals and unions... Bad things happen.
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