Georgia Indicts trump and his Big Lie

At last.

Stephen Fowler over at NPR has the basics: 

A grand jury in Georgia has indicted Donald Trump for his role in failed efforts to overturn the state's 2020 election results, implicating the former president as the head of a sweeping conspiracy to subvert his defeat.

It's the fourth indictment in as many months for Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. And it's part of a massive case brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis under Georgia's racketeering law, ensnaring a number of defendants that the DA alleges acted as part of a coordinated effort to pressure officials to change the election outcome.

In an indictment handed up Monday, an Atlanta-based grand jury outlined a series of charges against Trump, including violation of the Georgia RICO law and solicitation of a violation of an oath by a public officer.

RICO by the by is a racketeering charge, meaning trump and others engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy to commit multiple crimes. Emptywheel - you know what I need to call her by name, so hello Marcy Wheeler! - has more details on the implications of trump getting hit by RICO:

To explain how, I want to first show that the indictment is, fundamentally, about protecting the integrity of Georgia’s government and elections. To see that, it helps to read counts 2 through 41 before reading the RICO charge, which is laid out in 70 pages describing 161 overt acts, many of which took place outside of Georgia...

LIES TO AND SOLICITATION OF GEORGIA OFFICIALS

Count 2 though Count 7: False claims and illegal requests made, many by Rudy Giuliani, before the fake electors scheme. These were lies told to official bodies of Georgia state government, and charging them is an attempt to prevent corruption in state government.

Count 23 through Count 26 charge Rudy, Ray Smith, and Robert Cheely with false claims and solicitations on December 30 — similar in structure and purpose to Counts 2 through 7.

Count 28 charges both Trump and Mark Meadows for the January 2 call to Brad Raffensperger. Count 29 charges Trump for the lies he told during the call.

Counts 38 and 39 charge Trump with lies and solicitations of Brad Raffensperger on September 17, 2021.

FAKE ELECTORS

Count 8 through Count 19: These are a series of six paired charges tied to various kinds of fraud involved with the fake electors. In each pair, the first count charges David Shafer, Shawn Still, and Cathleen Latham for doing the fraudulent thing, and the second count charges Trump, Rudy, John Eastman, Ken Chesebro, Ray Smith, Robert Cheely, and Mike Roman with soliciting the fraudulent thing. They’re a near parallel to the Michigan charges against the fake electors, except that in Georgia only the three most culpable fake electors are charged, and there’s a mirror charge for Trump’s side of the conspiracy.

ATTEMPTS TO ENTRAP RUBY FREEMAN

Counts 20 and 21 and : These charge two efforts to defraud Ruby Freeman by offering her help when in fact they were an attempt to entrap her.

Count 30 and Count 31 charge aspects of a plot to get Kanye’s publicist to travel from Illinois to Georgia to entrap Ruby Freeman into making false claims.

LIES ABOUT GEORGIA

Count 22 charges Jeffrey Clark for his attempts to get DOJ to claim the Georgia election was fraudulent.

Count 27 charges Trump and Eastman with lying about Georgia’s results in a lawsuit.

TAMPERING WITH COFFEE COUNTY TABULATORS

Count 32 through Count 37 charge Sidney Powell, Latham, and two others for tampering with the Coffee County vote tabulators. Again, this has a parallel in the Michigan charges against Matt DePerno and two others.

LIES DURING THE INVESTIGATION

Count 40 charges David Shafer with false statements told during the investigation.

Count 41 charges Robert Cheely with perjury for false claims made during the investigation.

As I understand it, these are the charges on which the RICO conspiracy is built. The RICO conspiracy gives prosecutors additional tools and penalties with which to prosecute this (similar to the conspiracy law charged at the federal level)...

That's a lot of criming (relax, Spellchecker, we can use slang while blogging), but what are the implications surrounding these particular indictments compared to the other three (and counting) trump and cohorts are facing? Why is this one a bigger deal than most?

One of the common elements in the Georgia indictment is the word "lies". Over and over, DA Willis spells out how trump and company lied and kept lying to other state officials in order to get them to violate the integrity of the 2020 election results. They have trump lying in a lawsuit, they have one underling Robert Cheely charged with straight-up perjury to the grand jury, they had people lying to county-level elections official Ruby Freeman to get her to "confess" to rigging ballots.

All of these lies, serving to the Big Lie that trump pushed and keeps pushing about the 2020 results. trump's Big Lie that the election "was stolen" and he "fairly" won.

I blogged about trump's Big Lie before, and why he can't stop:

Trump has made it clear he views the world in the simplest of terms: That people are divided into Winners and Suckers, and that HE (champion and most excellent of the former group) shall never be lumped in with the latter.

So just on this mindset alone, trump cannot admit – not to others, not to himself – that he lost... 

In one respect, trump lost in 2016: The Popular vote clearly went for Hillary. But due to the broken and anti-democratic nature of the Electoral College, trump squeaked into winning three battleground states with literally mere hundreds of votes that gave him their Electoral Votes instead. It should be noted that trump promptly crowed – against all evidence – that he had won a LANDSLIDE, not just the College but also the Popular vote, and claimed it was the greatest victory in history (ignoring the Electoral and Popular vote blowouts of 1984 and 1932 (we don't count Nixon's 1972 blowout because the cheating exposed by the Watergate scandal negates that)).

Trump can't crow like that this time. The illusion of the Electoral College can't grant him that excuse. So he has to settle on denial. Constant, whining denial that he's the victim of voter fraud and to get us to pity him back into office...

The horrifying thing was how easily trump got fellow Republicans to buy into his Big Lie all because the GOP fears the loss of political power:

The Republicans are stuck with the Big Lie because it happens to fit this One Truth:

The Republican Party cannot and will not share power with a Democratic Party they view as un-American and thus illegitimate.

Somewhere back in time - you can argue happening between the rise of the conservative Southern Strategy in the late 1960s or the rise of Saint Ronnie in the 1980s or the corruption of Newt's Contract On America in the 1990s - the Republican Party bought into the idea that only they were true God-fearing God-chosen Gun-worshiping patriots...

But the Republicans have a problem. Where their One Truth was merely a world-view that did not expose itself to self-destructive implosion (Republicans could keep believing it and still function rationally in polite society), the Big Lie is a direct attack on the Real World that sooner rather than later is going to hit the Brick Wall of Unbreakable Facts. The Big Lie compels trump's believers into direct action - SEE the January 6th Insurrection - and these actions have legal consequences where the Big Lie has not and cannot prevail.

The Republicans are betting on their Big Lie carrying them forward into the future. But it's a Big Lie stuck in the past of a failed 2020 election, pushed constantly by a Big Liar in trump who cannot avoid his impending fate either in civil or criminal courts.

With the Georgia indictments, we are at that moment of Truth for the Republican Party as a whole. DA Willis and her team are making a direct rebuke to trump's Big Lie, confronting it with facts and evidence that not only were the voted counted fairly but that trump and his people intentionally worked to subvert those fair counts.

I am paraphrasing Jean-Luc Picard here, in one of the greatest quotes about the quest for justice. Courtrooms are crucibles: In a courtroom we burn away irrelevancies (the lies and misunderstandings) until we are left with a pure product - the truth (based on fact), for all time. For all of trump's bullshitting at his rallies, for all of the deflection and deception by the Far Right media, for all the spineless quibbling of other Republican leaders who fail to hold trump to the factual truth, in a court of law those lies and deceptions cannot withstand scrutiny. trump will confront - at last - the lies he's been telling to everyone and even to himself, and that those lies have no power to keep him in power.

The reason why I remain so optimistic - giddy, even - about the criminal cases leveled against trump is that these courtrooms are going to be the few places where trump will be held accountable for the ongoing costs of destruction and ruin he has built up over the decades. trump's greed, trump's racism, trump's sexism, trump's rage, trump's delusions of grandeur... All of that finally getting added up and presented as a bill way past due that he has to pay.

Let trump face his lies and failures before the 2024 elections. Let the nation come to terms with the reality that trump should never hold any elected office again.

Let justice be done. Let truth prevail. At last.

Tick Tock trump, On the Clock In Georgia

The current status on the case in Georgia involving trump's various attempts to interfere with the 2020 election results: the Fulton County DA Fani Willis announced she will begin charging decisions with the next court cycle beginning July 11, 2023. We now have a countdown. Details via Blayne Alexander, Charlie Gile and Dareh Gregorian at NBC News: 

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said Monday that she'll announce charging decisions stemming from her probe into possible interference in the 2020 election by former President Donald Trump and his allies as early as mid-July.

Willis said the charging decisions will be revealed during the state Superior Court’s fourth term, which begins July 11 and ends Sept. 1...

“In the near future, I will announce charging decisions resulting from the investigation my office has been conducting into possible criminal interference in the administration of Georgia’s 2020 general election,” Willis wrote in a letter Monday to Fulton County Sheriff Patrick Labat.

She said “the need for vigilance will increase” during that time period.

“Open-source intelligence has indicated the announcement of decisions in this case may provoke significant public reaction,” Willis wrote. “We have seen in recent years that some may go outside of public expressions of opinion that are protected by the First Amendment to engage in acts of violence that will endanger the safety of our community. As leaders, it is incumbent on us to prepare.”

Willis is referring to the ongoing incitement by trump on social media to get his followers to RISE UP and defend him, similar to how he summoned about 2000 of them to riot at the Capitol on January 6th. It may seem odd otherwise that Willis isn't announcing charges now, but giving law enforcement and the judicial security people time to plan ahead for MAGA riots is a sensible move (although she could have done this back earlier in the year when the special grand jury presented their recommendations).

Given what we know from that special grand jury, we should expect a lot of indictments handed out: Not just to donald trump but also to his handlers working on his election fraud schemes, and also the 'Fake Electors' in Georgia who had volunteered to counter the official Electors going to Congress that January.

One of the other reasons for the delay until July is that Willis is trying to offer a lifeline to those fake electors with plea deals, but running into their lawyer blocking all offers. A little more detail from Digby over at Hullabaloo with her quoting tweets from legal expert Lisa Rubin:

Recall that last week, Willis’s office moved to disqualify a lawyer representing 10 of Georgia’s fake electors. They had two grounds: First, that she did not, contrary to representations by her then-co-counsel, communicate immunity offers to certain of her clients.

Second, they revealed that in meetings with prosecutors on 4/12 and 4/14, certain of that lawyer’s clients accused another fake elector — and fellow client — of committing “acts that are violations of Georgia law.”

Because of the “impracticable and ethical mess” the lawyer created, the D.A.’s office has moved to disqualify her from representing ANY of the 10 electors, all of whom were notified last year they were targets of the investigation.

That means 10 people — some of whom remain targets, others of whom are cooperators or exploring cooperation — likely need new lawyers.

I've mentioned before - and others with greater legal experience can as well - that in criminal conspiracy cases like this involving a broad circle of people, prosecutors love to get the lower-rung players to flip and get the eyewitness testimony to go along with the paper trails. The more you get to testify, the harder it is for the higher-ups in the conspiracy to walk away with Not Guilty verdicts. Willis needs a number of those Fake Electors - caught dead to rights with their signatures on illegal paperwork - to flip on the go-betweens who could then get pressured to flip and can give even more details that can convict the top organizers of their criminal intent.

You can flip those Fake Electors because a number of them will have personal considerations - family, business, future ambitions - that can override any loyalty they may have to a trump who wants them to go to jail so he won't have to.

By July, one way or another she'll know how the chessboard looks for her.

It's interesting how July 11 is one week after July 4. Our national day of independence followed by our national day of justice against trump and his handlers who tried to overthrow that independence.

Let the countdown to July 11 begin.

Will 2023 Be The Year trump's Bills Come Due?

China has an animal zodiac for each year on the calendar. I know for example that the European/Christian calendar corresponded 1970 to The Year of the Dog.

China is going to need to update their zodiac, because 2023 is going to be the Year of the Shitgibbon. This is the year a number of pundits and legal experts are claiming donald trump will finally face direct criminal charges for the crimes he's committed both before and during office as President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice).

Over at MSNBC, columnist Jordan Rubin - who has a legal background working as prosecutor for the Manhattan's District Attorney's office (insert Law & Order ding-ding cue here) - makes the case that several ongoing investigations into trump's alleged misdeeds are set to wrap up soon with a lot of credible evidence the Justice Department can use to indict him:

On the one hand, it’s unremarkable to prophesy that a man who’s facing several probes by federal and state prosecutors for conduct that looks pretty unlawful will be charged with crimes.

On the other hand, it’s Trump, whose name hasn’t been synonymous with accountability.

There’s reason to think that will change...

...If anything, the feds’ search and seizure of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida last summer felt like a watershed moment: federal law enforcement action against a former president who had seemingly lived a consequence-free life and might have continued to do so. Even an incremental step toward potential prosecution from the branch of government that can actually bring charges seems more significant than the legislative branch’s asserting Trump’s guilt by way of criminal referrals (both things, of course, can be and are significant).

Plus, the Mar-a-Lago case appears to be more straightforward than the sordid legal maze of January 6 and its tentacles. As former federal prosecutors said in a November memo analyzing the documents case, published at Just Security, “there is a strong basis to charge Trump.” With his special master detour officially crushed — by Trump-appointed judges, no less — he looks a step closer to charges related to his apparent mishandling of classified documents and obstruction.

Rubin does also note the state-level legal trouble trump is facing, but Jacob Shamsian over at Business Insider has more details on that:

Fulton County's district attorney, Fani Willis, launched her investigation shortly after Trump made an infamous call to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, asking him to "find" enough votes to reverse Trump's 2020 electoral loss to now-President Joe Biden.

Court filings indicate the DA's investigation expanded to include Trump's allies who plotted to send fake electors to Congress on January 6, 2021, and hand Trump a second term.

Willis has swiftly moved the investigation forward. Over the past year, she empaneled a grand jury and fought court battles to ensure testimony from Gov. Brian Kemp; the state's Republican Party chairman, David Shafer; Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina; and more than a dozen others who spoke with Trump at the time. Two other high-profile witnesses who fought grand jury subpoenas, Mark Meadows and Newt Gingrich, have their cases before appeals courts.

Trump and the fake electors could face charges of election fraud, improperly trying to influence government officials, and criminal solicitation, according to an analysis from the Brookings Institution.

As of December, Willis has gotten testimony from most of the main players in Trump's plot to overturn election results in Georgia. According to CNN, her office has been negotiating plea deals with participants in the fake-elector scheme.

If she's going to bring indictments, they could come soon...

Even without testimony from the likes of Meadows - who's facing his own legal woes to the point where pleading out is the only way he'll avoid hard time in prison - DA Willis reportedly has enough evidence to indict trump and others. It's just the niceties of getting the smaller fish (the fake electors who don't want jail time on their resumes) to plead out in order to catch the bigger fish (trump) with direct testimony that's slowing up the inevitable announcement.

The grand jury Willis is using now is only an investigatory one, which has to make referrals to a regular grand jury that can actually bring the charges for the DA to use. So there is another step to go through, but according to Georgia rules that regular grand jury has a two-month window to work in. Once the special grand jury is finished (likely February) the regular grand jury should be done late April.

Meaning I get a nice birthday gift in May when Willis issues the arrest warrants.

trump is still facing other legal woes such as the state civil case in New York over tax fraud is set for October 2023. The civil trial between trump and E. Jean Carroll - who accused him of rape and brought defamation charges when he mocked her - is set to begin April 17 (any settlement deal has to be done April 10, I think) this year. Both of these trials are likely to hit trump's wallets in ways that could well bankrupt him forever, as well as paint him a loser before the primary voters in 2024.

In 2016, trump bullied all the other Republican candidates while his opponents had nothing to hit him with - they couldn't attack his business failings because he shamelessly gaslight the public about them - and so they floundered. In 2024, anybody campaigning against trump will have proof on the debate stage that trump is a loser, a tax fraud, breaking laws he was sworn to uphold, and can force trump to be on the defensive instead of offensively attacking everyone else.

trump will be a broken man, one way or another, by the time 2024 rolls around.

Here's hoping trump will be broken sitting in a darkened jail cell for next New Year's.

Who IS This Guy?

So a rather bizarre scandal reared its head this week - in a month, nay a life cycle of utter madness ever since 2016 Gods help us, so this being cray-cray is saying something - when the New York Times started looking at the newly elected people from this midterms cycle, and discovered this George Santos who won a US Congressional seat in the Long Island part of New York was, well, lying about his entire goddamn resume and parts of his personal biography.

Since the Times is definitely behind a firewall for me, I'm pilfering much of the info from Raw Story so do help a blog out and donate or subscribe to Raw Story please and thanks. Oh, the report via Travis Gettys (I can't see who the Times reporters are, my bad):

George Santos, a son of Brazilian immigrants who presented himself as a "seasoned Wall Street financier and investor" who owned 13 properties and operated an animal rescue charity, became the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent, but a New York Times review of public documents and court filings called into question his résumé.

Both Citigroup and Goldman Sachs told the newspaper they had no record of Santos working there, as he had claimed, and Baruch College found no record that he had graduated in 2010, also as he claimed.

The Internal Revenue Service also found little evidence that his animal rescue group, Friend of Pets United, was a tax-exempt organization.

It gets crazier.

Santos loaned more than $700,000 to his campaign and donated thousands of dollars to other candidates in the past two years, but his company, the Devolder Organization, has virtually no online presence and his financial disclosures don't reveal any clients -- which election law experts say could be a problem if those clients actually exist.

The Times also could not find any records of the properties his family allegedly owns.

This part of the story quickly raises a ton of red flags. If Santos doesn't have a verified source of employment or income (if he's not earning money from the properties he claims to have, for example), then where the hell did that $700,000 he "loaned" to his own campaign come from? This reeks of money laundering. I mean, for all of the fakery surrounding trump's questionable finances, at least he actually owns stuff he can use as collateral to get loans. 

All anyone can confirm at the moment is that George Santos was caught committing checking fraud in Brazil back in 2010, and that Santos had been evicted from residences several times for missing rent payments. 

With a hot scandal to follow, there's been denials and recriminations and further exposure of Santos' falsehoods. He claimed he lost employees in the tragic Orlando Pulse mass shooting, but nobody can tie any of the fallen to his alleged businesses.  The latest report is that Santos may be lying about his family's Jewish background that they fled due to the coming Second World War and Holocaust. 

There's open questions now if Santos is really gay. After all, he's lied about everything else about himself. (Update: Santos was married to a woman before divorcing in 2019. It could just mean he was bi/closeted and came out afterward. It happens. But he never mentioned the marriage when he campaigned, so... Lie of Omission.)

This story is exposing a lot of sins right now, and not just Santos'. 

The Republican Party at the New York level has to deal with the reality one of their bright new stars is a goddamn fake, not to mention the thousands of campaign dollars they've gotten from this guy puts everyone's ledgers under scrutiny. The entire GOP party in that state has a lot of answering to do.

The Democratic Party at the New York level is also getting yelled at. In this day and age of extreme partisan politics, Oppo Research should be Campaigning 101. This wasn't Santos' first attempt at elected office, and one thing you're supposed to do is go through your opponent's work history and background to find ANY questionable acts and weak spots in their narratives to exploit. While Santos' opponent reportedly did some digging, and then tried to get the papers to follow up, nobody really paid attention until he'd actually won (and ironically getting the attention as a "future GOP star" in a mostly-Dem state). There's a growing push to remove the current party head in New York - who's floundered at keeping the party organized already, this is one more faux pas on him - and this could get ugly.

This is also a massive indictment of our electoral process, especially for the Congressional and state legislative offices. I've complained about this before, that our choices for candidates are barely - if ever - vetted for qualifications to the jobs we're supposed to elect them to. The parties are so desperate to draft celeb candidates - or too beholden to the religious and cultural extremists to allow the more unhinged and vulgar - that they don't care about actual QUALITY of that candidate until it's too late. You would think a stronger background check would be run on these candidates - especially to make sure you don't get anyone like Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott embezzling from your own party's funds - to guarantee you're presenting the Best and the Brightest to reflect your party's ethos. Guess what Republicans, someone like Santos - and so many others - are proving your party has no ethics at all.

It does not help that the only ones who can even put their names on the ballots for consideration are the only ones who can AFFORD - by clean money or laundered - to run in the first place. It costs money to file for an election primary, it costs thousands of dollars to run any kind of campaign. You can see it with Santos working to buy a win with $700,000 that nobody can confirm came from honest business. Elections have turned into a racket, a billion dollar industry that buys you a lot of political influence that can siphon even more taxpayer money into your own pockets later on. Gods help us with that open scandal.

Everything about Santos demands a full criminal investigation.

Hell, we need to run a criminal investigation to find out who George Santos really IS.

The Ballot Ballad of Bladen County

You wanna know what voter fraud REALLY looks like?

Try what's getting found out in North Carolina's 9th Congressional District (via Vox.com):

There are two major pieces to this puzzle: First, specific allegations of unusual activities related to absentee ballots, made in a series of affidavits submitted to the state board by lawyers for the Democratic Party, and second, analyses by political experts suggesting the number of absentee ballots requested but not returned in the Ninth District was unusually high...

* One voter says a young woman came to her house and asked for her absentee ballot because she was collecting them. The voter had made her choice for only two offices on the ballot, but still gave her ballot to the young woman, who said she would fill out the rest (Note: OMFG THIS IS ILLEGAL AS HELL).
* Another voter also says a young woman came to her house and claimed she was responsible for collecting absentee ballots. The voter filled out her ballot while the young woman waited; the woman then took the ballot, but never asked the voter to sign it and did not put it in a sealed envelope (Note: I've done door-to-door canvassing offering to hand-deliver absentee ballots-by-mail. We *had* to ensure the signatures, put it in envelopes, and leave a receipt. It doesn't seem like this woman did any of that).
* A third voter says she did not request an absentee ballot but received one in the mail anyway.
* A fourth person says she saw unusual activity at a polling site: election results being run after polls closed on the last day of early voting and observed by people who were not elections judges, which she understood to be “improper.” The person said she also helped tabulate absentee ballots after the election that were quite worn and had “coding” written on them.
* A fifth person, Dwight Sheppard, says he overheard people talking outside a polling station on Election Day who said a well-known local operative, Leslie McCrae Dowless, Jr., would be paid a $40,000 bonus if Harris won the election.
* In another affidavit — signed and witnessed, but not notarized — a sixth person said he actually talked to Dowless in April during the Republican primary, in which Harris upset sitting Republican Rep. Robert Pittenger (Note: Hmmmmm), According to this person, Dowless said he was working on the absentee vote for Harris, that he had 80 people working for him, and that he accepted cash payments only from campaigns.

This isn’t the first time Dowless’s name has come up in relation to voting shenanigans: In 2016, several people filed complaints about campaign workers hired by Dowless who were collecting absentee ballots, as WECT reported at the time...

You might notice that at no point did any group of "questionable" or "illegal" voters showed up by the bus-load to stuff ballots. Every tidbit of "questionable" actions were by campaign/party workers. This has nothing to do with illegal voters: it has everything to do with illegal campaigners.

Back to Point Two: A high count of absentee balloting within two counties - Bladen and Robeson - with even higher counts of non-returns.

Most of the attention has focused on two counties in the Ninth: Bladen and Robeson, in the southeast corner of the state near the South Carolina border. Notably, each of the affidavits provided by Democratic attorneys involved voters in Bladen County, and one man said that Dowless himself had stated he was working on absentee ballots for Harris in the county.

Michael Bitzer, a politics professor at Catawba College who obsessively follows North Carolina, documented the unusual trend in those counties: They had a much higher rate of mail-in absentee ballots that were requested but not returned, compared to other counties in the Ninth District...

And at the district level, according to Bitzer’s calculations, the Ninth had a much higher rate of unreturned absentee ballots than any other district in North Carolina...

If you follow the link back to Vox, you'll see the charts showing the discrepancies. The volume of non-returns jumps way out of the scope of statistical norms compared to the other counties.

What makes this matter really striking is how the response has been. The state's Elections Board - the oversight authority - is freaking out:

The state board took these allegations seriously enough to vote unanimously — with four Democratic members, four Republicans, and one unaffiliated member — not to certify the results from the Ninth District earlier this week.

Democrats want further investigation into these various allegations of odd behavior and possible tampering, and the state board seems ready to pursue the matter. At the end of the day, North Carolina law allows the elections board to call for a new election if there is evidence that casts doubt on the basic fairness of the vote. The number of ballots in doubt or in question doesn’t appear to make a difference...

The Harris campaign may yet win the argument that overturning the results shouldn't happen. The statistical oddities may not point to an overall attempt to rig the ballots by messing with the absentee/mail-in voting.

But something is rotten in the State of Denmark Counties of Bladen and Robeson. An honest investigation into what happened in those places and how the entire 9th District may have been subverted needs to take place.

 

Getting Down to the Wire 2018 Midterms

Dear Florida:

Make sure you are registered to vote. Check this link. Make sure you have a valid ID to go with your voter ID.

If you know you are supposed to be registered but have been knocked off the rolls, fight back.

You have the right to request a Provisional Ballot and a receipt for it if you are being challenged from voting.

You have the right to vote early to avoid the long lines that may occur at your precinct. You have the right to stay in line to vote once you get to your precinct before it's supposed to close (this is a major issue in large metros and few working locations).

You need to know when and where Early Voting in your county will take place, for Florida it is October 27 through November 3.

The General Midterms election is Tuesday November 6.

SHOW UP AND VOTE.

Show up and Vote Democratic up and down the entire goddamn ballot. NO REPUBLICANS.

Kick Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott the hell out of here. Keep Bill Nelson in the Senate.

Stop Ron "Slavery Was Great" DeSantis from getting anywhere near the Governor's office. Vote for Andrew Gillum to restore balance and defend the majority's interests for our state.

Vote for every Democrat in the Congressional and State Legislature seats out there. We've had 20 straight years of Republican dominance in this state and all we've got to show for it are broken schools, poisoned waters from our lakes and rivers to the oceans themselves, and a harshly underfunded Family Services program that's harming our children.

Get the damn vote out, Florida.

Don't let this Midterms be another year of no-shows. The interest levels are supposed to be up. Prove those numbers right, do better than what the polls are saying. VOTER TURNOUT BEATS VOTER SUPPRESSION EVERY TIME.

Get the damn vote out, Florida.

AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT VOTE REPUBLICAN.

In Brief: Some Questions I Have for Steve Bannon

So in case you don't get your news from Fark.com you might have missed another Florida Man story:

Florida Man caught registered to vote at an address he doesn't live at, hilarity ensues.

It seems Steve Bannon, recently put in charge of Trump's off-the-rails Presidential campaign, has his voter registration at an abandoned property due for demolition, that there's no evidence he ever really lived there, and that he's been living at places in three different locations - Los Angeles CA, Washington DC (and THAT's got its own questionable issues), and yet another property in Florida - bringing up a question of which place is his real place of residence.

(Note: one reason a lot of well-off people own and claim residency in Florida is that we have very relaxed Homestead Exemptions property laws that make it REAL friendly for tax-dodging Far Right types, so for a guy who does a lot of business in DC and LA, I'm not surprised he calls Florida home... and never shows up here...)

'Cause you see, voter laws may be set by state but even the states agree you can really only call one place home (and have that as a place of voter registration). Voting in one town - even within the same state - but really being a primary resident in another is a form of voter fraud (why hello HYPOCRISY cough cough).

Maybe the reason why Republicans run around claiming Blacks and Latinos commit in-person voter fraud so often is because they seem to do a lot of it themselves.

So I got a few questions for Mr. Bannon if time allows:

1) Which state among your various property holdings is your real primary residence?

2) Have you registered to vote in the other states where you claim home ownership / rental properties? Have you voted in other states while claiming to reside at the address in Miami that you never really lived in?

3) How soon can you go to jail for lying on your voter registration forms (Florida Statutes Title IX, Chapter 104.011(2) covers it) about your address?

I expect a reply within the hour... of hell freezing over. Still, the effort counts.