Valued commenter rikyrah flagged a ProPublica report in the morning thread about the out-of-proportion influence a handful of right-wing activists play in voter registration challenges in Georgia. An excerpt:
Media outlets have reported on the high number of challenges and numerous cases of voters feeling harassed, impeded or intimidated by being placed into “challenged” status. But the outsized role of the small group of people making the challenges was less clear. ProPublica was able to determine that a vast majority of the challenges since SB 202 became law — about 89,000 of 100,000 — were submitted by just six right-wing activists, including [former undie-maker CFO and MAGA fan Frank] Schneider. Another 12 people accounted for most of the rest. (ProPublica obtained data for all challenges logged in 30 of the state’s 159 counties, including the 20 most populous.) Of those challenges, roughly 11,100 were successful — at least 2,350 voters were removed from the rolls and at least 8,700 were placed in a “challenged” or equivalent status, which can force people to vote with a provisional ballot that election officials later adjudicate.
It’s a long piece but worth a read. The story illustrates the destructive power a small group of kooks and busybodies can wield when a state authorizes private individuals to harass fellow citizens. We’re seeing something similar in Florida with the school library book bans — it’s usually a few cranks in a district who are responsible for submitting most of the complaints.
There’s no real problem with voter fraud in Georgia, just like there’s no genuine porn or “woke” indoctrination issue in Florida school libraries. But right-wing officials and activist groups have an incentive to gum up the works of local governments and school districts with imaginary problems that take real-world time, money and effort to address.
As the citizens who fund the real-world effort to address those imaginary problems, we need to find a way to tell the super-complainer randos to mind their own goddamn business. Right-wing activists are crowd-sourcing voter suppression and censorship.
Open thread.
kindness
It’s absurd that a dozen people can challenge 200K voter registrations. Since Republicans run Georgia I doubt that will change any time soon. Maybe we should get folk on our side to start challenging the voters in Buckhead.
Alison Rose
Busy little bees, aren’t they? If only they could channel this ambition and drive toward something less evil.
HumboldtBlue
Randy Rainbow provides today’s musical accompaniment.
Hoodie
Anyone who has attended a city or county council meeting should know what a bad idea it is to allow just any citizen to trigger government action. It is a guaranteed attractor for every kook out there. It’s bad enough to have to listen to them in a public hearing.
JoyceH
I’m in San Francisco! Got a tie-dyed tee on Haight Street.
Dopey-o
89,000 voters / 6 challengers = 15,000 +/-!
22,000 successful challenges / 100,000 total challenges = 22%
Don’t these people have jobs / families / demands on their time?
SATSQ: Incels!
trollhattan
You’ve gone and done it now, forever in the grasp of Big Hippie.
Enjoy the visit, and be glad you’re where it’s predicted to hit 74 tomorrow whilst scant miles east we’re staring at 110.
Steeplejack
@JoyceH:
Suitably trippy song in honor of your visit.
WV Blondie
@Dopey-o: I agree! My first thought, since they’re Republicans, was “Who’s paying them for their time and effort?”
HumboldtBlue
@JoyceH:
DON’T EAT THE BROWN ACID!
ArchTeryx
@WV Blondie: The devil pays quite well, and so do right wing billionaires. One of a bunch of things different from them and us. They are happy to pay for ratfucking, propaganda, and endless model legislation, not to mention their Federalist Society reactionary judge conveyor belt. Our sugar daddies are only willing to pay for their own silos and refuse to pay too many of our volunteers. We are always and badly outgunned.
rikyrah
You can challenge voters where I live.
But:
None of this bullshyt of challenging people you aren’t even face to face with at a polling place, let alone thousands of people
Chris
For years now I’ve gotten convinced that the ultimate endgoal for them is to effectively deputize the entire Republican voter base so that any Republican anywhere can enforce his will over any Democrat anywhere. Mostly from watching court cases, but outsourcing things like voter suppression to random yahoos counts too.
This is, of course and not by accident, extremely similar to how Southern states ran during Jim Crow. Extremely weak state institutions, crossed with an extremely strong social norms that effectively allowed The Right People to rule through terror regardless of any official status.
prostratedragon
@Chris:
Nailed it.
bbleh
@Chris: exactly so. The root of the problem is not the “kooks” and the “randos”; it’s the legislators and megadonors who wind them up and point them, and they have an agenda.
If you’ve got the state lege against you, you’ve got trouble, because they can legalize (or require) any kind of electoral mischief they want (short, I suppose, of something unconstitutional, and maybe even then if you’ve got the state SC against you).
Dangerman
Roughly 15k each for the 6? That’s pretty impressive actually. Shows initiative. Dememted initiative, but initiative nonetheless.
Sick motherfuckers.
WereBear
The more they’re not caring or competent the more they have to pretend they are so we should get them some virtual reality headsets. I’ll pedal a bike for an hour a day to donate the electricity.
Gretchen
@Dangerman: makes you wonder if some donor is paying them.
H.E.Wolf
Ohio has a great opportunity right now for folks who’d like to take a small, concrete action to push back against voter suppression efforts! Re-posting from the previous thread.
NOTE: Issue 1 is right-wing sponsored voter suppression aimed at making it impossible for the upcoming reproductive-choice initiative to be placed on the ballot this November.
I’m writing “No on Issue 1” postcards through PostcardsToVoters.org – their writers are busting their collective butts to get out the Democratic vote.
If anyone would like to join in, the minimum number of postcards is 4, the number of days to write and mail them is 3 (and if you request addresses on a Thursday, you get a 4th day because there’s no mail pickup on Sunday), and the talking points are provided: 3 brief sentences.
Text JOIN to Abby The Address Bot at 484-275-2229
or
Email [email protected]
gene108
Anyway to try to target Republican voters with random challenges?
These challenge laws seem to only be used by conservative groups to target Democrats.
I don’t know what would happen if Republicans were targeted. Either the laws would be amended or repealed to not disenfranchise voters or the restrictions would be more targeted at Democratic voters.
rikyrah
so, what happens to the movies that are supposed to come out in August, September.
You can’t have any press junkets for promotion. are they now going on hold?
sdhays
@Chris: “The old ways are best.” – Republicans
Martin
Crowd sourced voter suppressions ain’t new. That’s what the 2nd Amendment is there for.
@rikyrah: We go one further in CA:
“A person offering to vote may be orally challenged within the polling place only by a member of the precinct board”
Redshift
@Gretchen:
Doesn’t make me wonder at all, I’m absolutely convinced that it’s an organized effort, not just enabling cranks and hoping they’ll jump on it. I’m on a plane, so I can’t read the article, is there anything about that?
When the bullshit “parents rights” school board harassment got going on Virginia during the 2021 governor’s race, the “concerned parents” were all either career GOP activists or people directly recruited by them. Some of them were actual local parents, but that was just because a bunch of conservative activist groups are based in Northern Virginia.
Alison Rose
@Martin: “orally challenged” is quite the phrase!!
Bill Arnold
From the article, there are statistical suggestions that the challenges were partisan, and given the challengers, probably deliberately so.
This suggests that retaliation in kind is in order, to uhm … fill in the gap in fairness. Could be more efficient, though. E.g. just buy a few Republican mailing lists, and correlate with voter rolls and the same change of address information used by the R activists.
VFX Lurker
Good question. Hollywood still has ways to promote films outside of press junkets (trailers, posters, web ads, product tie-ins). They also can’t reschedule their big-budget films, since the studios agreed with each other in advance which on blockbuster will get released on which weekend. That way Mission Impossible doesn’t stomp on Indiana Jones.
I guess we’ll see.
Martin
Reports are that attendance at Disneyworld is way below normal. July 4 was the 3rd lowest attendance in 12 months and apparently the drop in attendance is accelerating. It’s summer vacation take your kids to Disneyworld season. This is petty catastrophic to Disney. And it’s not just Republicans buying into DeSantis’ bullshit, it’s possibly people boycotting Florida because Universal is seeing a similar fall-off. They’re trying to blame the heat, but only the locals book vacations that close to the date. You usually need at least a few weeks advance planning to get rooms and reservations for tickets in the summer.
I think we got some DeSantis-Sourced Theme Park Suppression going on.
Martin
@Alison Rose: We’re a very liberal state and San Francisco and Porn Valley have reputations to uphold.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Martin: They are getting hammered from both ends of the political spectrum. GOP boycotting Disney. Liberals boycotting Florida.
Alison Rose
@Martin: This is what happens when Democrats run everything in the state.
wmd
Reminds me of SLAPP tactics used by corporations. Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.
Hoodie
@Martin: Any changes in Disneyland or other non-FL theme parks or other family-type attractions (e.g., national parks)? Seems like reductions in FL might show up as increases elsewhere.
Jay
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/13/florida-fines-voter-registration-groups
sdhays
@Martin: Didn’t Betty report tourism is down in Florida in general? Shocking that “Come spend money in Florida, we’re Nazis!” isn’t making people want to visit.
BellyCat
While this is absurd and deeply troubling, 22,000 successful challenges seems a CRAZY HIGH number.
Why so high?
Martin
@Hoodie: Only that Disney’s cruise business is doing better. But a lot of that is outside the US, so hard to know.
Brachiator
@Chris:
State and local governments happily and vigorously enforced Jim Crow laws. Social norms stifled opposition to these vile policies.
Current Supreme Court decisions have allowed red states to use states rights as weapons deployed against citizens.
Jay
https://youtu.be/Ba5-izNEG6Q
Dog smells durian,…………………..
Kay
@Martin:
Vacations are supposed to be fun, not grim and hate-filled. Normies hate politics. When they say they want the “two sides to get along” they actually mean that – they don’t want to hear it.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
Speaking of Florida, this is not parody.
https://floridapolitics.com/archives/622955-ron-desantis-says-insurers-will-return-to-florida-after-hurricane-season/?fbclid=IwAR3zObaUdgEvHBJUNQQmwkHXVVOFx5cDcyVakneDTuI_9uDv6MnJni40FbE_aem_ASrM_KmNIe-gktcvNo8OyvxBhvskthbz48LE9mbvKbLdOVtUN2gdz-km-sO-m9UgQuA
The water at the tip of America’s wang today was 98 degrees – 5 feet down. That’s the temp of urine in the shallow bay from the tip to the northern shores of the Keys. It’s probably high 80s all the way to the Tortugas, which is going to kill off reefs and crash maritime food chains.
Hurricane season is gonna be LIT!
A friend of mine is quitting Florida, in part because her homeowners insurance is going up 40 percent, which way outstrips any tax savings.
Martin
Interesting inflection point. Twitter has cut off a lot of operations that used their old APIs and has new APIs that you can use. The API is what would allow say, Watergirl to write some code to run on the BJ server that would automatically put up a tweet to announce a new post, allowing Twitter to both be a way to bring readership and a way for us to use it as a notification service for new posts.
We’re seeing some companies and services deciding that they’re not going to use the new API because Twitter has so badly abused them in the runup to this point that they don’t think it’s worth the effort to develop for the new API because they’re likely to just get abused further and never get the payoff from the effort they would need.
No one of these things kills a platform, but each of these things helps kill a platform, and I don’t see any effort that is helping to strengthen Twitter – every one of these decision points is going against Twitter recovering.
Jamey
@Martin: On the upside, there’s lotsa elbow room at Personal Space Mountain.
Gvg
@Dangerman: those numbers imply (to me) that they had help, possibly paid help or were paid themselves. Those individuals need to be investigated themselves. Let’s see where their money is coming from, or who they are payin. Where did they get the names of people they challenged? Is someone supplying lists? Are they going down lists of democratic voters?
Splitting Image
@BellyCat:
I think the usual scam is to target people who have likely moved in the past year or so. When a voter is challenged, any notice of this will go to their old address, which will prevent many people from dealing with it properly.
rikyrah
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
And, they have nobody to fix houses damaged by hurricanes, because of the large number of undocumented who have left Florida.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
When your not putting any thought into the challenges and just copying the phone book into the appropriate forms, it’s probably easy. Remember the success rate was about one in five.
Jay
@BellyCat:
Only about 8,000 got pulled from the rolls. Could be dead, could have moved out of State, could have a felony conviction.
The rest have an issue with addresses, ID, all the petty stuff and can only cast a provisional ballot in person, at which point in time an elections worker will either verify they can vote legally, or cast their ballot aside.
EG, we went to our bank, to an appointment, to get me added to T’s credit card account. So after waiting for a couple of weeks for my card to show up. We called the bank. Turns out our application did not go through, ( and the bank did not call, email or text to let us know) because our primary ID’s were expired.
No, they weren’t. Mine expires in 2027 and T’s expires in 2028.
So the “officer” at the bank, screwed up in one place on the computer forms.
So now we have to make another appointment and clear it up.
And these are people who are paid well to dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s, not a volenteer or County Clerk.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@rikyrah:
Fixing your house using paid labor is woke communism.
Far better for heroically bootstrapped midwestern transplants to cover the gaping holes in their homes and businesses with whatever tarp and scrap storm debris they can scrounge.
Betsy
@Chris: Great observation
Gvg
@rikyrah: um, I dunno about that. I prefer my contractors licensed so any work my family or I ever had has always need licensed and insured which means that there is little sign of any undocumented. Mostly a mix of black and white speaking very idiomatic English. Now I am north central and I grew up in central (Orlando] not south Florida, so I don’t know who it it down there.
it’s the crops that use a lot of undocumented. I think the landscapers and road workers do to.
The construction workers that speak Spanish that I have encountered, were legal.
Brachiator
@Martin:
I am seeing mixed reports about Disney World and also Universal Orlando. Also, I don’t know whether foreign tourists care about DeSantis at all.
On one Disney related blog, I see the nonsense about some parents boycotting Disney because of family values. Or prices.
Disneyland in California seems to be doing okay.
I didn’t realize that their are websites and maybe apps that tell you how crowded Disneyland is.
I had a number of coworkers who had annual passes and who would go to Disneyland as often as they could.
Chief Oshkosh
@BellyCat: The article intimates that there are plenty of county election board members who are happy as clams to approve challenges, knowing that overall more Democrats will be denied voting than Republicans.
ETA: And it seems like the GA legislature wrote the laws to be as cumbersome as possible, so the easiest out for boards is to approve challenges and go on about their day.
raven
@Gvg: In the Panama City area most of the construction workers are hispanic.
Betsy
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: “Knock on wood” — wtf kind of policy strategy is that for dealing with hurricanes
These people were not reared on earth, I declare.
rikyrah
@Gvg:
if they were legal, you wouldn’t have all these empty construction sites in Florida.
sdhays
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: And, as everyone knows, there’s nothing that weakens a hurricane more than heat…
sdhays
@Betsy: It all makes sense when you realize that he was born and raised in the Ohio part of Florida.
ETA: (according to his memoire)
Brachiator
@rikyrah:
Good question.
Radio personalities are members of the union, but have a special waiver that lets them keep working.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Betsy:
The current model of whatever the fuck “conservatism” is really consists of mental, physical and institutional sloth – if you do nothing, it will fix itself somehow.
Infrastructure has gone to shit? Do nothing and people will choose different methods of doing things.
City spaces and businesses are collapsing into blight? Abandon ship and move further out.
Police acting out of control? Ignore it.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@sdhays:
Piss-warm seawater five feet down indicates no problem at all…..
Brachiator
@Gvg:
In California, most construction crews I’ve seen included undocumented workers.
In both construction and auto repair industries I know of people who are highly skilled and were sought after in their home countries, but who were looking for better opportunities here.
Omnes Omnibus
@Alison Rose: Something for you from the NATO summit.
Jay
https://nitter.net/Kama_Kamilia/status/1679445762525081606#m
At the First Annual NAFO Conference, NAFO was awarded The Star of Lithuanian Diplomacy Medal, which has only been awarded by Lithuania 20 times.
Roger Moore
@Jay:
I’m not sure those people are well paid to dot all the “i”s and cross all the “t”s. If your bank is anything like most companies today, workers are given more work than they have time to complete. The companies look at stupid metrics of productivity (forms processed) rather than more important but slightly harder to measure metrics (forms processed correctly). The net result is workers who cut corners to get their mountain of work finished, even if that means being incredibly sloppy.
Betty Cracker
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: I hope that absurd and frankly OFFENSIVE happy talk on homeowners insurance is heavily covered by the Florida media. “We did those reforms” — fuck that fucking fuck face straight to fucking hell.
UncleEbeneezer
Baud
@sdhays:
Hurricanes hate this one weird trick…
Roger Moore
@Gvg:
Even if they’re legal, they may be leaving for places that are less overtly bigoted against them. My impression is that most of the people who scream about “illegals” are really angry at anyone who looks different, and the stuff about whether they’re here legally is an attempt to look slightly less bigoted. They certainly won’t bother to check someone’s immigration status before discriminating against them, which means all the anti immigration sentiment winds up spilling over and hurting legal immigrants and naturalized citizens no matter how much people claim to support legal immigration.
Alison Rose
@Omnes Omnibus: I saw that!! There were a few video clips making the rounds on the fan accounts. Awesome :
ETA Oh lord, reading the replies and everyone’s gotta make their little lyrical jokes.
Martin
@The Kropenhagen Interpretation: Yeah, as a data analyst, this is easy stuff. Find anyone who filed a change of address in the last 12 months. Find anyone who had a mail forwarding in that time period. Find anyone who didn’t pay a utility bill during that period. If you can get access to those datasets, you just run a query and export to the form. If you have the dataset you can file thousands of challenges an hour.
The labor to investigate the challenge is wildly disproportionate to the labor to file the challenge and if there is no penalty (or an inadequate penalty) to filing false challenges, then you’ve built a system designed to be abused. And if you can convert your thousands of challenges into headlines and Fox News appearances, that pays for itself. And if a judge blocks my organization, I can tip up a new one in 24 hours and get back at it. And if a judge blocks me personally, I can front some other individual as the principal and do the work on their behalf.
This is why policy is hard – you have to be realistic about the abuse opportunities you’ve created in your system and head them off before the policy lands. Even simple things like slowing down the rate at which you can submit challenges goes a long way to changing the economics of this. Tying the fines directly to the cost of investigating the claims, with treble damages if a judge finds the challenges were filed in bad faith, etc.
Kay
@UncleEbeneezer:
Great. I think that has to be prosecuted or we’ll see it again. The GOP county employees who colluded with the Trumpists to break the law should certainly be held accountable. They cannot be trusted with votes. They’re weak willed and easily led.
Roger Moore
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
That’s unfair. Some of their approach consists of deliberately making things worse in the hope it will encourage people to fix things. That certainly seems to be their approach to poverty, homelessness, etc.
Betty Cracker
Speaking of that fucking fuck face DeSantis, NBC got its mitts on a “confidential” campaign memo that’s supposed to keep donors from jumping ship. A couple of cherce excerpts:
“Lacking the fight” is a novel way to spell “black.” Interesting that Haley is “Nikki.” More:
In other words, his horrible wife will be handling the humaning as best she can.
We’re half-way through July. Will he explain why Florida is the nation’s #1 inflation hotspot or make more pathetic remarks about the insurance crisis that has engulfed the state? Haha, no!
Oh good, the parade of Qanon conspiracy theories and defunding public education — those are sure winners. God I hate that whiny prick.
bbleh
@Roger Moore: of course. IIRC entering the US without proper documentation is a misdemeanor (at least the first time). Compare that to, say, DUI, which probably a double-digit percentage of the country does at least a couple times a month (especially in, ahem, rural areas, where you can’t walk much anywhere).
“Illegal” means Latino like “inner-city” means Black. They’re both racist code-words.
bbleh
@Betty Cracker: … a “confidential” campaign memo that’s supposed to keep donors from jumping shit.
You know, I think the typo actually expresses the reality even better.
ETA: oh heck, you fixed it.
Mai Naem mobileI
@UncleEbeneezer: the AZ GOP party is kinda sorta broke. Hope this FO stage of FAFO helps put them even further in the hole.
Jay
@Roger Moore:
Full time teller clerks at our Bank start at $72k with full benefits.
Officers, who do all the Applications, start at $115k with full benefits.
To get a part time or COOP job at the Bank, you need to be 3rd year in Finance at one of two Universities. Full time teller requires a Graduate Degree, Officer, requires a Masters.
We have had stellar service, but the branch was in the process of moving to a new location. Only the second minor screw up in 8 years.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
Before he got booted from Fox News, Tucker Carlson and his guests were pushing the idea that immigration of non-white people must stop because these people could not be assimilated into American “culture” or were not willing to assimilate, or something equally foolish.
It often sounded like he wanted to go after legal immigrants and undo their status.
bbleh
@Mai Naem mobileI: Ima guess the AZ GOP is a little shell-shocked after that last election. And it doesn’t help (them) that their leader is kinda wack.
Alison Rose
@Betty Cracker: Yeah, when I read “lacking the fight” I was like “did you mean lacking the white”?
Mai Naem mobileI
@Betty Cracker: does he have any ideas for the insurance problems in Floriduh?
I see Chris Christie has qualified for the debate. Since TFG isn’t going to be at the debate, Duhshithead will probably be the first pinata boy for Christie.
Ken
Florida real estate started with beach shacks built out of scrap wood, and it’s damn well going to end that way?
Jay
@Brachiator:
Fucker Fishstick has said it quite openly many times in the past.
bbleh
@Ken: well, maybe the 50-60% (under moderate scenarios) that doesn’t eventually get inundated due to sea level rise.
Betty Cracker
@Alison Rose: Right? Someone should ask him what he meant because it’s not like Tim Scott is a RINO squish. DeSantis is fairly skilled at using racist and antisemitic dog whistles on the down-low to appeal to his Nazi fan base in Florida while also scooping up the distressingly large contingent of hard-right and/or insane POC as supporters and minions. Unfortunately, it works here, but I think the national potential is limited.
Soprano2
@rikyrah: What I’m hoping is that the actors striking will soon motivate the Hollywood poobahs to negotiate and settle all the strikes.
Alison Rose
@Betty Cracker: It’s so aggravating that it’s incredibly obvious what he’s doing, and yet he has plausible deniability because he didn’t just say “LOL we hate Black people”.
Betty Cracker
@Mai Naem mobileI: “Knock wood.” That’s the strategy. Regarding the debate, as much as I despise all those fuckers, I may have to tune in to see Christie devour DeMeatball. His dismemberment of Rubio in 2016 was a thing of beauty and a joy forever!
Baud
@Betty Cracker: I’m out of the loop, but I’m a little surprised Tim Scott got slightly more attention in this memo than the others did.
Chris
@Brachiator:
State and local governments happily stomped down on any people who showed signs of not staying In Their Proper Place. So did private thugs working for whoever the rich of the era were. So did private citizens with memberships in organizations like the KKK, though not necessarily the actual Klan; there were other organizations like it, and even after it was officially disbanded the kind of rule through terror it represented didn’t. And of course the lines between all those groups blurred together a ridiculous amount. (Given how many Klaverns included local law enforcement and the local area’s elites…)
The state institutions, such as they are, are part of the broader machine of repression, but just one part.
Brachiator
@Jay:
RE: restrictions on legal immigrants.
Yuck! I never watched him much at all, but bits of stories about him always mentioned his anti immigration BS.
rikyrah
@Betty Cracker:
While the Florida economy is fast approaching the iceberg. As the economy crashes…can’t wait to see him try and explain that.
Baud
Has Trump confirmed that he’s not attending the debate? Last I heard, he was just threatening. Not that anything he says means anything.
rikyrah
@Brachiator:
Because, that’s exactly what they wanted to do. Did you not pay attention during the Dolt45 years?
Chris
@Roger Moore:
I work at a credit union. Everything you said is 100% accurate. There are barely enough, frankly, not enough of us to do the work, the work we’re given tends to land on our desk at the last minute but can’t be pushed back, and management keeps restructuring and moving around the various roles within the department in ways that make it look like you’re doing something but somehow never actually improves efficiency. And they tend to like to shovel more duties onto the lowest ranking employees that really aren’t or shouldn’t be within those employees’ purview, rather than hire the number of people and the kind of people they need.
Inevitably, there are fuckups.
I’d like to believe that a juggernaut like PNC or Wells Fargo or whoever has the money to not run into the same issues as little old us, but… nah. Who am I kidding. We’ve got the money. It’s just that getting them to use it right is like pulling teeth with blunt tweezers.
Whether we’re “well paid” is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose. I’m certainly much better off than I was during my decade of temp work and internships after graduating college in the Great Recession. The money isn’t terrible, and I get health insurance which is a huge improvement. Still, not sure I’d say I’m well paid so much as I see many unpleasant alternatives to this.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud: Scott is an effective communicator/TV performer, he has a calm, reassuring affect. To be perfectly blunt, if he had a wife and two or three adorable kids for his campaign literature, I think he’d be a force to be reckoned with. In the end, that non-crazy affect wouldn’t cover for his extreme positions on ‘social issues’, to use the usual shorthand. On most issues, he’s pretty much Rick Santorum
Betty Cracker
@Baud: There have been multiple stories recently about DeSantis donors who don’t want Trump to prevail looking at Scott as a potential Plan B since DeSantis is flailing. The Lauder cosmetics heir is one such donor.
Jay
@Soprano2:
There was an article today stating that the Studio’s will start negotiations when the Writers are homeless.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I heard yesterday that their answer to that is to say that Farmers Insurance, the most recent nationwide insurer to back out of Florida, has joined Bud Light and Disney in the ranks of “woke corporations”. I can’t believe this hasn’t yet joined the ranks of “noun/verb/9-11” and “let’s dispel with the notion”, but I can’t imagine it won’t.
MisterDancer
This is so crucial to explaining why Jim Crow worked for so long. Even the most sympathetic-to-Blacks White person lived in a Surveillance State. Acts like Lynching re-enforced the penalties for violating Segregation, and not just for my family:
Jim Crow was such a prefect shitstorm of self-enforced hate that — and yeah, I keep harping on this — even the goddamned Nazis studied it’s implementation in-depth. It so deeply corrupted American governance that we’re dealing with the fallout to this day.
And that’s because it was built on something people were not able to believe, but absolutely eager to do so. It’s hard to imagine, but I think the core is simply that Jim Crow told Whites that — in exchange for just believing they were automatically superior to people like me — they could have all the violence and sense of power they could digest.
And it turned out a lot of people, could consume a lot of violence and hate. And sadly, still can — with a host of additional direct targets like Trans people — to this day.
Baud
@Betty Cracker: Thanks. I am out of the loop.
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Thanks.
Jay
@Brachiator:
he wasn’t at the time talking about “illegal”, (#NobodyIsIllegal), immigrants or asylum seekers,
he was talking about stripping long resident legal immigrants and the naturalized from “other” places of US Citizenship and deporting them.
Brachiator
@Chris:
When Jim Crow laws were in place, state institutions, and disenfranchisement were the primary tools of oppression. The KKK, white citizens councils and other domestic terrorist groups were part of the social background of white supremacy, but was greatly reinforced by a formal legal system of oppression. White citizen councils blossomed after Brown v Board of Education focused federal law on trying to dismantle segregation.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Lucky you! I was doing better on the road to Normieville before DeSantis started getting so much attention. Then I spiraled into doom scrolling…
Hoodie
@Betty Cracker: Saw that Rupert now wants to push Youngkin. That would likely cause him to suffer the same fate as DeSantis because the whole thing of Fox anointing a successor to Trump will alienate the Trump base.
Also saw the Christie met the donation threshold for the debates. Based on what Carville said the other night (DeSantis is cratering because he took a swipe at the king and missed), it’s possible that Christie’s approach might work if the cards fall right, e.g., Trump can’t amass enough early primaries before the other candidates drop out for lack of funds. Maybe some people with money are buying into that. I’d be a bit worried if he somehow got the nomination. Idiot DeSantis thinks that the way to beat Trump is by being more ideologically extreme, which is exactly the wrong thing because Trump’s popularity is not about ideology.
sdhays
@Betty Cracker: Scott seems like a much more…rounded personality than a lot his competition. More “normal”. Nicer on a personal level, though not on a policy level.
Setting aside the obvious, he would be a potentially strong candidate in other times. I am scratching my head as to what makes these donors think they can get Scott across the finish line in a Republican primary. With or without DT.
sdhays
@Hoodie: I guess that means Trump
is going tuck his tail and hidedecide not to participate in the debates.Alison Rose
I mean…of course he fucking knew.
Prosecutors Ask Witnesses Whether Trump Acknowledged He Lost 2020 Race (NYT gift)
And of course Jared “maintained that it was his impression that Mr. Trump truly believed the election was stolen” because the little twerp is no better than his daddy-in-law.
Dorothy A. Winsor
So De Santis’s idea for fixing the Florida home insurance market is to sit tight because it will fix itself?
UncleEbeneezer
Speaking of Jim Crow and White Supremacy, I just listened to the first episode of Drapetomaniax podcast* and it is really informative and funny:
* Before anyone chimes in with the predictable, knee-jerk response: No, nobody cares that you don’t like podcasts!
Baud
@Betty Cracker: I realized that my transition to full normieness cannot succeed unless I give up Balloon Juice, which I am unwilling to do.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I am not really kidding when I say I hope their renegotiated pre-nup addenda are subject to FOIA requests. I can’t imagine she’s only getting $150K
ETA: Speaking of Normie-ville, do people there know about, care about, the great White House Cocaine Story? Here in Poljunkietown, I live in the neighborhood that thinks it was a Secret Service agent who dropped his own supply and it got found by some stick-in-the-mud who doesn’t get invited to the cool hooker’n’blow parties
Matt McIrvin
@MisterDancer: Right, in that connection, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the trans hate really exploded nationally when Pushaw specified that, not just trans people, not just LGBT people, but all people opposing DeSantis’s hate laws are “groomers” ie child molesters. The point is to make it unbearable even to be a public supporter of the hated group.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I expect the culprit, if they catch them, will be a visitor or low-level staffer, or perhaps SS. If an employee, they’ll be fired, probably. Beyond that, I don’t care about it.
UncleEbeneezer
@Alison Rose: The Civil Defamation case against Giuliani includes a bunch of stuff in the Privilege Logs that could be very useful to Jack Smith in his criminal investigations. Including a 12/16/20 email titled “POTUS Findings.” Giuliani has been withholding sharing them with Shay Moss, the attorney representing Ruby Freeman but there should be a ruling soon forcing them to be handed over. At which point, a copy will likely go to Jack Smith. My guess is that “POTUS Findings” will show that everyone knew Trump lost and that there was no voter fraud and that he was informed as such multiple times. Maybe there will even be evidence that he admitted such to others.
Brachiator
@UncleEbeneezer:
Yeah. This was a thing. Some slave owners could not believe that enslaved people might actually want to run away, and would be able to formulate a plan to escape.
Great title for a podcast. I will check it out.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: I am attaining near normieness where American politics is concerned. Thank Ceiling Cat for Biden
I have a sneaking suspicion that Hindutva zealots in this country are among Avivek Cringeswamy’s backers. Hindu American Foundation ( One head of the RSS hydra in the US)’s executive head came out in support of VR
There is an overlap between MAGA Indian-Americans (numerically about 20to 25% of Indian-Americans vote R) and BJP diehards.
Shana
@rikyrah: CNN was reporting that the actors walked the red carpet and then left when the strike was announced for the London premier of Oppenheimer.
brantl
@BellyCat: Because they can.
UncleEbeneezer
@Brachiator: It’s hilarious.
Kay
The federal reserve says Taylor Swift single-handedly benefitted the Philadelphia economy
lol
I get such a kick out of this fan phenom culture of hers – there doesn’t seem to be any downside
Brachiator
@Shana:
Wow. Impressive. I imagine that people were kept in the loop about what to do if a strike was authorized.
But damn. This is a highly anticipated summer film.
Gvg
@raven: that does not mean they are undocumented in Florida. They may have been here for generations. They may have voted Republican. This is stupid, because the fear rage Fox white Republican will see them and assume they are illegal based on their looks, as we know. But Florida’s Hispanic population has a large number of legals who are really anti illegal and think “those” immigrants are taking their jobs etc.
Anyway the problem is the hysteria and bad judgement caused by indulging some peoples taste for othering. It is not just whites who do it.
A lot of nearby countries know the US immigration laws quite well and get here legally, and others were here before Florida was a state.
Companies with licenses and permits do a better job and don’t take your money and disappear with a bad job. They are also more likely to have legal workers even if they are Hispanic. Not guaranteed but more likely. And my current part of Florida still has more obviously American black or white than Spanish speaking in the limited amount of work we have happened to need done in the last decade. It is not a huge sample size.
Brachiator
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
The home insurance mess also affects new California homes. Variations of this may become a national issue.
I’m curious how DeSantis would respond if this is brought up during the debates.
Jackie
Looks like Gaetz is back in the hot seat:
“Investigators from the House Ethics Committee have begun reaching out to witnesses as part of a recently revived investigation into Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, focused on allegations that he may have engaged in sexual misconduct, illicit drug use or other misconduct,” CNN reports.”
🤞🏻🤞🏻
JPL
@Brachiator: He’ll say it’s due to the woke. I’d bet on that.
Gvg
@rikyrah: yeah well Florida is huge. In my part it’s still sort of medium townish and I have not seen empty construction sites. In fact the boom the last few years was amazing. I will watch and see. This area has never been typical. It is a University town, completely.
The hard hit areas are probably south Florida which is hundreds of miles from me, I hardly ever go there. Could impact Orlando, which I might go to sometime soon. This kind of stupid policy should hurt. DeSantis is an idiot. I am only saying the state has variations and assuming all the workers were illegal Hispanics is a mistake. There was a nationwide labor shortage in pretty much all areas before DeSantis started showing off how “mean” he could be. A little more shortage would be terrible and they can all find other jobs…which is another reason DeSantis is stupid. His whole party’s timing is stupid.
Martin
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Apparently it was found where WH visitors leave their personal devices, so it could have been a load of people. But they’ve got a lead.
Martin
@Kay: I do too. Her music isn’t quite my style, but she seems like a good person and more power to her. In a just world she’d sue Ticketmaster so hard they’d have to give her the company.
JPL
@Martin: That was good!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Martin: @JPL: They’ve done a few of those. I think they’re great. One where “Biden” explains why he won’t do their podcast
Martin
This story is great.
Jay
If you are planning on coming up to BC for a vacation, be aware:
https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2023/07/13/BC-Ferries-Cancelling-Sailings-Jobs/
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Baud: I think it is basically DeSantis trying to take the tactic, act racist but don’t sound racist, so you have plausible deniability. It’s the equivalent of him saying he has no problem with a black man president, just not THAT black man, even though he’d say that about every single qualified black man who tries to run for office.
Steeplejack
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Melania also got $1.5 million in speaker’s fees from somewhere. That was included in Trump’s filing today.
Belafon
I’m not going to claim that we’re not overspending, but the war the US is preparing to fight is the one in Asia. What that money did allow us to do is tell the world that Russia was going to invade and make the world believe it.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
“I really don’t care. Do you?”
that’s like a quarter-million a word!
JAFD
Good morning and Happy Bastille Day to all jackals, friends, fellow travellers, groupies ….
The sky over New Jersey is lightening, tho forecast is ‘showers and thunderstorms are likely’, 87F and humid. Have a load of white stuf to wash. Wonder if they’ll need two trips through dryer ?
My “Reference Guide for Poll Workers” haz a page and a quarter on ‘Challengers and Challenge Process’ Most important points: challenges have to be _In Person_, and,
“Vald grounds for challengers:
a, Age
b, Citizenship
c, Residence
d, … moved out of county more than 30 days before the election
IT IS A CRIME TO CHALLENGE VOTERS ON GROUNDS OF
a, Expected manner of voting
b, Race
c, Ethnic origin
d, Residence in a particular ward, dousing complex or section of a municipality or county”
(Thot ‘Poll Worker Reference Guide’ might be on website, but seems not to be there.)
Hope all of youse have a great weekend. Stay healthy, happy, and cool !
mardam
2350 removed from voter rolls out of approximately 100,000 challenges. That’s a lot, isn’t it? What if this were true in 2020? How many votes would have been removed? Surely enough to put Trump over the top!!!
These people are getting exactly what they want. And exactly what they said was happening. 2% is a big fucking number.
Amirite? Or am I missing something?