The Republican party has been hard at work for years protecting the sanctity of your right to vote. At least that’s what they claim with straight faces in front of the camera.

Here’s how you know they’re lying.

Republicans want you to believe that your vote is under attack from fraudulent voters, hundreds, thousands, nay millions! of them. They want you to believe that not only do people vote who have no right to do so,^[1] but that the Democrats are deliberately letting those people^[1] into the country to tip the electoral scales in their favor.

This is a lie, of course. There is no any evidence of voting fraud in any state in the U.S. that has affected any election. Here’s a round-up of voter fraud studies from the Brennan Center for Justice, none of which I expect you to go read. Here’s the pertinent quote:

The report reviewed elections that had been meticulously studied for voter fraud, and found incident rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. [Ed: That’s between 3 to 25 votes out of 10,000.] Given this tiny incident rate for voter impersonation fraud, it is more likely, the report noted, that an American “will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.”

And if the data from multiple studies are not convincing, go look at the Heritage Foundation’s page on voter fraud. The Heritage Foundation is the conservative think tank that is source of much mischief in today’s politics, and — in an ironic twist, the source of key provisions in ObamaCare.^[2]

See the number of PROVEN INSTANCES OF VOTER FRAUD, KENNETH? 1,165!!!!!1!! One thousand, one hundred and sixty-five FRAUDULENT VOTES! PROVEN!!!! Are you not concerned?

No, because you are a sane human being and recognize immediately that the number 1,165 is unaccompanied by any context. Is this in one election? Or is it across the country over a period of years out of hundreds of millions of votes? You can’t tell from their page, nor can you tell if you click on your state: all you get is a list of offenders without which elections they occurred in, nor what years. If you actually download the “report,” you get nothing more than a list of those 1,165 instances, separated out by state. There is no compilation or analysis of data, only dire warnings that this list is a “sampling” of the “many ways” voter fraud occurs.

In other words, complete and utter fuppery.

But let’s back up and pretend that the Republicans are genuinely concerned about voter fraud. Given that the amygdala-based lifeforms that make up the Republican Party need fear and anger to feed their brains, this is not an unreasonable assumption. However, this is not the case.  They’re lying.

Here’s how you know:

Example 1: Here in Georgia, leaving aside Sec. of State Kemp’s documented attempts to purge voters from the roles, we have the example of Randolph County, majority black population. A consultant hired by the county advised them to close seven out of nine^[3] polling places in the county, based on the facts that some of them were underused and others were not ADA compliant.

Example 2: In North Dakota, the (Republican-controlled) legislature passed a “voter-identification law” that “requires that… IDs have street addresses printed on them and specifically bans using a P.O. Box.” And wouldn’t you know it, many Native Americans living on reservations do not have street addresses; they live so far out in the boonies that they have P.O. boxes instead. And in what is an amazing coincidence, Native Americans tend to vote Democratic.

Here’s a photo from our cross-country trip in 2013, taken in Monument Valley, which is not a national park but Navajo tribal land:

See those little white dots in the lower left? Those are trailers. Do they look as if they have street addresses?

So here’s the deal. Sometimes it occurs that after legislation is passed, the Law of Unintended Consequences kicks in and problems that the lawmakers didn’t foresee crawl to the surface. You would hope that we elected smarter people to handle this, but here we are.

If the Republicans’^[4] true concern was legitimate voting, if they had passed that law in good faith, they would react with dismay at the unintended consequences and would quickly and publicly fix the problem. “Oh no, let’s hurry up and get those voting places up to ADA code,” or “Goodness, how could we have missed that? Let’s amend the law to exclude the street address requirement from Native American reservations!”

But they don’t. Indeed, they fight tooth and nail to preserve those unintended consequences.

Because — and follow this closely — these are not unintended consequences. The Republicans pass these laws specifically to exclude certain voters^[5] from voting.

They’re lying if they say otherwise.

Go vote.

—  —  —  —  —

^[1] Brown people.  They mean brown people.

^[2] The individual mandate was the Heritage Foundation’s response to Hillary Clinton’s healthcare proposal back in the 90s. They weren’t about to let all those poor people get free healthcare, so they put in the individual mandate so that everyone would have “skin in the game” (and still allow the insurance companies to feed off our healthcare). After Mittens Romney instituted the plan in Massachusetts and it worked, Barack Obama adapted it for the Affordable Care Act. Suddenly the idea was anathema to the weasels at Heritage because freedumz. Odd, that.

^[3] Seven of Nine? Really, Republicans?

^[4] It. Is. Always. Republicans.

^[5] BROWN PEOPLE, KENNETH!

This popped up on Twitter this morning:

Dinesh D’Souza is of course the right-wing commentator (also convicted felon) who gets his ass handed to him regularly on Twitter by People Who Actually Know Things, but this tweet of his just kind of jumped out at me. (Ocasio-Cortez is the far left congressional candidate in New York, and she’s awfully good at smacking down idiots.)

Ocasio-Cortez’s second comment kind of sums up my reaction to D’Souza, but there’s more to it, I think. His entire attitude — and not just in this tweet — is Ayn Randian to the max: there are weak and there are strong, and the strong are good, vital, and important. The weak are there only to serve the strong.

Look at his language: ‘colony,’ ‘provide resources,’ ‘rule.’  Holy crap, people, it’s unvarnished colonialism, and he means it as a good thing. Remember the TV series V? D’Souza would have sided with the aliens.

That is not a strained metaphor. He is stating pointblank that if our “colony”^[1] has nothing more to provide us — and that is clearly his rhetorical presumption — we should abandon them to their fate now that we’ve stripped them of what we needed. They are of no benefit to us; therefore let them die and decrease the surplus population.

This is a worldview that I cannot understand.  This is a worldview that I cannot “reach out to” or “have a meaningful discussion with.”

This is a worldview that I want to see exterminated.

—  —  —  —  —

^[1] They are not our colony and never were. They were Spain’s colony; they are our territory, and that quasi-legal status is a whole other issue.

So yesterday afternoon, the Current Disgrace tweeted this:

I am not going to get into all the LAW, ORDER [,] and JUSTICE that the Republican Administration is doing all over the place at the moment.^[1] Rather, allow me to address the premise of the direct intravenous shot of fear and anger he’s giving his amygdala-based followers.

Seriously, if you are one of the amygdala-based lifeforms who follow this man, I need you to stop and think about this. This man is telling you that one of the two major political parties in this country has as their policy goals “anarchy, amnesty [,] and chaos.”  He wants you to believe that one of the two major political parties wants gang warfare,^[2] and drug epidemics as their party platform.

And taking “jobs and benefits away from hardworking Americans”? What the hell is he talking about?^[3]

Does any of that make any sense at all, if you stop to think about it? We will all pause to allow you to stop and think about it.

NO, IT DOES NOT MAKE ANY SENSE AT ALL. Whatever the Democratic Party’s political goals are, they do not include destroying this country. THINK ABOUT IT.

Having given it some thought, the amgydala-based lifeform’s brain, in fear of being cut off from its oh-so-intoxicating hit of fear and anger, does a record scratch: “But… OKAY THAT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE BUT IT’S STILL TRUE!! MAGA!!!!!”

::sigh::

—  —  —  —  —

^[1] But I will mention that a man who doesn’t use the Oxford comma is a moral monster who should be shunned in any case.

^[2] Like in Honduras or El Salvador, which REFUGEES ARE FLEEING FROM TO OUR BORDERS, KENNETH? But let that pass.

^[3] I have to assume that he is not talking about his own trade wars — soon to bring job losses near you — or his own party’s budget — which, since it’s ballooned the deficit to trillions, now needs to be “balanced” by cutting your Social Security benefits.

So this popped up on the Facetubes recently:

Honey, please.

This entire attitude that taxation is theft and regulation is totalitarian is bizarre. The tough guy stance that this meme represents is a pose held by people who nevertheless continue to drink their uncontaminated water and eat their safe food.  Yes, Flint, MI, still has unsafe water, but that rather proves the point, doesn’t it? Regulations are necessary for an actual society.

My response to this silliness is to take a page from these people’s playbook — who for some reason are rabid jingoists too (and no, I don’t know how that works) — and say, “Hey, if you don’t like it here…” I hear that life in Somalia is free from all kinds of government interference.

By the way, the DavidAvocadoWolfe at the bottom — he has his own category on Snopes. I can imagine why he thinks government regulation is oppressive.

 

Here’s an article about the GOP infighting over bringing immigration bills to the floor for a vote.  Go read it.

Apparently, it’s just short of open rebellion for representatives to petition for discharge, i.e., override the leadership’s agenda, which apparently in this case is to let the bills die in committee so that the Republicans won’t have to be seen voting to be incredibly cruel to humans — which would please their base but outrage the average voter, here in the year of our lord Midterms.  Indeed, why bring it to a vote when the current administration is doing a bang-up job being incredibly cruel to humans all on its own?

Here’s the quote that makes me shake my head with disgust:

“It would be an approach that would rely on mostly Democratic votes and some Republicans to pass their bill,” Scalise said, “and that’s not the way to solve this problem.”

Let’s be clear about what Rep. Scalise is saying here: we shouldn’t be trying to pass legislation — or even vote on it — using votes from both parties. We shouldn’t try to pass laws using a majority of votes from the entire House of Representatives. Laws cannot be passed with the votes of the people representing all the citizens of the United States. “That’s not the way to solve this problem.”

There are other versions of this gobbledygook all the way up and down the article: “the importance of keeping control of the legislative vehicle and solving the problem on our terms where we focus on solutions, not politics” (because passing the bills is not a solution?); “I think it’s better to use the legislative process” (which apparently does not necessarily include bringing bills to the floor for a vote); “I don’t believe in discharge petitions” (from Steve King, who probably has done a lot to keep any of the bills from being voted on).

It’s all well and good to decry our system as broken and to point fingers at both sides, but at the moment there’s only one party in charge of both chambers of Congress, and this is their attitude towards governing: if we can’t get a bill passed with just our votes, then it’s not going to pass.  They even have a name for it, the Hastert Rule, and if you think “both sides do it,” click on that link and have someone read the first sentence for you.

Naked, obscene lust for power.  That’s my name for it. Your mileage may vary.

Okay, Trump supporters, I need you to do this one little experiment.  No, you don’t have to give up your belief that you’re Making America Great Again; you can peddle that little tricycle all you like.  Just do this one thing.

Yesterday, the president*, speaking to reporters, railed against Robert Mueller’s investigative team, saying:

“So you have all these investigators; they’re Democrats. In all fairness, Bob Mueller worked for Obama for eight years.”

Is this true?

No.

Robert Mueller, for example, is a registered Republican. He was appointed by George W. Bush in 2001 to serve the 10-year term as head of the FBI; Barack Obama asked him to stay on, and he retired two years later in 2013.^[1]

So there’s the one little thing I want you to do.  Trump lied. He is telling you something that is not even close to true and is easily checked out.

What does that information mean to you?

No need to answer.  Just file that away and remember this one simple little lie that Donald J. Trump told to you.^[2]

UPDATE: (in case the above example is too slippery for you)

As everybody is aware, the past Administration has long been asking for three hostages to be released from a North Korean Labor camp, but to no avail. Stay tuned!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 3, 2018

“As everybody is aware…”

2 out of 3 of these hostages were detained in Trump presidency:

Tony Kim (aka Kim Sang-duk) detained 22 April 2017.

Kim Hak-song detained 6 May 2017.

An obvious and demonstrable lie in a tweet that remains up, a monument to how much President Trump doesn’t care about truth. https://t.co/MgWR31I1E2

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) May 4, 2018

—  —  —  —  —

^[1] Math is hard: he worked for Obama for a little over four years.

^[2] You could also consider the attitude so embedded in Trump’s lie that I almost missed it: the idea that because Muller “worked for Obama for eight years” he is obviously personally loyal to Obama and therefore Trump’s enemy. It does not occur to Trump that although men and women like Mueller may serve throughout the Executive branch at the pleasure of the President, they do not actually work for the President. They work for the United States and its citizens.

Trump does not understand this concept in any way.

But I only asked you to do one little thing, so we’re good here.

Yes, it’s been a while since I’ve posted.  There are two reasons for this.  First, most of my creativity posts have been happening over at Lichtenbergianism.com, and I see no reason to double-post.

Second, I have had to face the fact that if I were to rant liberally here, I would soon be reduced to a soggy lump of foaming, impotent fury. The Current Administration is simply a fire hose of corruption, venality, meanness, and double-talk, and no one can keep up. I do not intend to try, at least bloggingwise-speaking.

However, I have just about had it with the aggressive lying that seems to gush forth from anyone allied with the Current Administration whenever they are asked a question by the members of our free press.  The strategy that makes me scream and throw things the most is the ‘pivot,’ wherein the reporter asks a solid question which the liar doesn’t want to answer, and they will pivot to another topic entirely.  Allow me to demonstrate.

Suppose you were a parent, and you wanted to know if your child had taken out the trash.

—  —  —  —  —

YOU:  Bobby, have you taken out the trash?

BOBBY: The fact that you ask that question means you haven’t taken the time to ascertain the facts of the matter here.

 —  —  —  —  —

YOU:  Bobby, have you taken out the trash?

BOBBY: I think the more important question is whether Jill has done her chores at all.  Has she cleaned her room?

 —  —  —  —  —

YOU:  Bobby, have you taken out the trash?

BOBBY: If you were being honest, you’d recognize that I’d already put away my clothes and taken the dog for a walk.

 —  —  —  —  —

Unbelievable. No parent would tolerate such a response to a direct question.  And yet our press is trapped, especially in live media, unable to press their point and get a direct answer.

For our comrades in print, however, I do have a suggestion.  At the moment, you report their non-answer, catapulting their lies straight into the record.  Don’t.  Stop reporting their words.  You asked a question — report on their answer, not with their answer.

In other words, if they don’t answer the question, report that they didn’t answer the question.  Do not report what they said.  Frame your report so that the reader has an idea of what you were trying to get the bottom of, and then report that the liar failed to answer.

Here are some examples:

With two bags of trash standing by the kitchen door, Bobby was asked whether he had done his chore of taking the trash out.  He evaded answering the question directly.

One of Bobby’s chores is to take out the trash.  When asked whether he had done so, he attempted to shift attention to his sister Jill and her chores.

When asked whether he had fulfilled his chore of taking out the trash, Bobby left the question unanswered, instead enumerating other chores he said he had accomplished.

See?  At no point do you repeat Bobby’s misleading words.  You report on his answer and whether he answered the question at all.

Guys in broadcast media, I got nothing at this point other than a mute button or to cut the interview short after the liar attempts to obfuscate the issue and to tell the audience that since the liar had not answered the question, there was no point in continuing.

…or at least that’s the only reasonable explanation for this:

This is the chart Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-Derp) plopped out the other day during the House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing.  They were interviewing Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and some of the lesser-brained were asking/demanding that Sessions launch a special prosecutor to investigate ALL THE CLINTON URANIUM, KENNETH!

Okay. Let’s remind ourselves that a) Hillary Clinton didn’t approve anything, much less the sale of “all our uranium” to Russia; b) eight different federal agencies had to sign off on the deal, which c) involved allowing a Russian company to invest in a Canadian company that mines uranium in the U.S., and d) no American uranium was allowed to leave the country…

… so what the hell is this chart supposed to be telling us?

Actually, this is an easy question to answer.  This chart is telling us LOOK, A CLINTON! so that the amygdala-based lifeforms can get their life-sustaining shot of fear and anger.  There is no logical pattern to the chart.  It does not present any kind of evidentiary trail or connections. It’s just a conglomeration of buzzwords that make the wingnuts buzz.

Gohmert, who is not the sharpest spork in the knife drawer, was probably quite serious in presenting this chart.  If it were someone else, one might suspect him of being cynically manipulative, but Gohmert’s brain  — and the brains of everyone like him — actually works like this: lots and lots of ill-defined code words that swarm around his amygdala, giving him the energy to continue living.

If I were an elected representative in that meeting, I would be tempted to ask my esteemed colleague from Texas to walk us through the chart. On national television. I would probably interrupt to ask him to clarify the connections between items.  I would definitely ask him to state his conclusions in simple, declarative sentences.

Because I’m a mean, mean man.

This is who is voting on tax reform, people.

Whenever we have yet another mass shooting in the country, the usual cry is that because of the Second Amendment we can’t do anything about restricting gun ownership in this country.  Proponents of guns will throw up all kinds of slippery slope arguments about restricting types of guns, numbers of guns, or ammo, and demand that the rest of us answer their unanswerable questions.  Or they throw up smokescreens about “mental health” and “banning cars” and other non sequiturs.

So, no, gun humpers, I am not going to engage in your hypothetical impossibilities.

Instead, let’s try this.  Imagine that this country is largely gun free.  You know, like the rest of the industrialized world.  Don’t pretend we had to have a way to get there.  Just assume that’s where we started, with no “Second Amendment” or other shibboleths that allow anyone to own an arsenal.

Imagine we live in a United States without the gun deaths we now have, a country without guns.

Now, let’s imagine you want to convince me that the country needs to become the United States we now have, with stockpiles of weapons and ammo, and daily gun deaths, and mass shootings every other day.

What are your arguments?  Remember, there is no “Second Amendment.”  You need to convince me that our actual current status is where we want to move towards.

Or if this is too hard, then pretend I’m Australia, and convince me why I need to become the United States.

Take all the time you need.

I haven’t ranted nearly as much as I could, given the opportunities that abound in our nation today.  Part of it is that the opportunities are such a fire hose.  I feel like I’m in one of those money grab booths: I’m being bombarded by all the outrages of the Current Embarrassment and I just can’t seem to grab just one.

Somehow, though, I was completely struck dumb by one of the outrages that flew past yesterday — YESTERDAY, KENNETH! — so you know it had to be spectacular.

For some reason, in the midst of the Mueller indictments/arrests/pleas, John Kelly, chief of staff and supposed “adult in the room,” chose to go on Laura Ingraham’s show and defend the Confederacy.  The topic was Confederate monuments — for some reason — and Kelly said, and I quote, “… the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War.”

Wait, what?

My reaction, and that of the entire internet, can be summed up thusly:

WHAT THE HELL, JOHN KELLY? A lack of compromise caused the Civil War?? A lack of compromise on what, exactly?

I can’t even. Once again I am rendered dumb by the brazenness of this administration.  I will let Ta-Nehisi Coates do the honors.

UPDATE: White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on the kerfuffle, i.e., Robert E. Lee being a dedicated slave-owner and similar niggling details: “All of our leaders have flaws, that doesn’t diminish their contributions to society.”

Wait, what?  She went on to list some of those men: “Washington, Jefferson, JFK, Roosevelt, Kennedy” — niftily giving John F. Kennedy two personæ in the process.

Okay.  Let’s see if we can suss out the problem with Sanders’ statement.  Here’s a quiz:

Sarah, sweetie, I know you’re from Arkansas, but ROBERT E. LEE WAS NOT ONE OF “OUR” LEADERS. This is a very, very hard concept for us Southerners to understand, but IT IS TRUE, KENNETH.

Here’s the answer key to the quiz.  Don’t peek.  I SAID, DON’T PEEK, KENNETH!