~ Personal Commentary
This story is not sexy and it is long but it is a very important story for two reasons: 1.) It pauses us for just a minute so we can get a grasp of the scope of GOP voter suppression efforts past and present and; 2.) It busts the myth that Democratic Nominee for President Hillary Clinton lost because she's an unlikable policy wonk and a corporate whore!
Focused Read in 3-5 minutes
Andrea Anthony:
Excerpted from ⬇ ⬇ ⬇
“Rigged: How Voter
Suppression Threw Wisconsin to Trump
And possibly handed him
the whole election.”
“... The lesson from
2016 is terrifyingly clear: If voter suppression can work in a state
like Wisconsin, with a long progressive history and a culture of high
civic participation, it can work anywhere. And if those who believe
in fair elections don’t start to take this threat seriously,
history will repeat itself.
Jason Kander—the former
Missouri secretary of state and Afghanistan veteran known for his
2016 Senate campaign ad in which he assembled a rifle while
blindfolded—agrees that the case against voting restrictions can’t
just be made in court. “The approach in the past has been nearly
exclusively a legal strategy,” says Kander, who founded Let America
Vote, a voting rights nonprofit, after the election. “Now with Jeff
Sessions in charge of the Justice Department and Trump appointing
judges, it means there’s an urgency to engage in a political
argument. We need to expand our argument beyond the court of law into
the court of public opinion. It has been a politically
consequence-free exercise for vote suppressors. That has to change.”
Let America Vote plans to
open field offices in Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, and
Tennessee in 2018 and to focus on electing pro-voting-rights
candidates for state legislature, secretary of state, and governor.
The group has signed up more than 65,000 volunteers and placed more
than 100 interns and staffers in Virginia, which has a strict voter
ID law, for the 2017 gubernatorial and legislative elections, with a
goal of contacting half a million voters. “We’re saying, ‘If
you’re going to make it harder to vote, we’re going to make it a
lot harder for you to get reelected,'” Kander says.
An expanded electorate should help
candidates who pledge to promote voting rights. But it’ll take an
army of McGraths (Molly McGrath first became a voting rights
advocate)
to get it done. “There’s a lot
of opportunity to expand this work,” she says. Ho (Dale Ho,
director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights
Project) likes to quote former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood
Marshall: “The legal system can force open doors, and sometimes
even knock down walls. But it cannot build bridges. That job belongs
to you and me.”
You can read more here
Focused Thought in 15 seconds
Focused Actions in 30 seconds
You can share my Tweet here
( You
can watch that 2-hour-plus hearing here, if you'd like – it's
actually a great example of what the current administration is
bringing to the table around this critical issue -- here )
Focused Point of Interest in 3-5 minutes
"The Danger of President Pence
Trump’s critics yearn for his exit. But Mike Pence, the corporate right’s inside man, poses his own risks.
“... Nevertheless, in
2016, political insiders in Indiana began hearing that Pence would
welcome a spot on the Trump ticket. “There was no doubt he’d say
yes,” Tony Samuel, the vice-chair of the Trump campaign in the
state, who was a lobbyist for Centaur and other companies, told me.
Paul Manafort, who was Trump’s campaign chairman at that point,
arranged for Trump to meet Pence, and urged Trump to pick him. Pence
was seen as a bridge to Christian conservatives, an asset in the
Midwest, and a connection to the powerful Koch network. Kellyanne
Conway, who had done polling work for the Kochs, pushed for Pence,
too, as did Stephen Bannon, although private e-mails recently
obtained by BuzzFeed indicate that he considered the choice a
Faustian bargain—“an unfortunate necessity.”
Still, Trump remained
wary. According to a former campaign aide, he was disapproving when
he learned how little money Pence had. In 2004, the oil firm that
Pence’s father had partly owned had filed for bankruptcy. Mike
Pence’s shares of the company’s stock, which he had valued at up
to a quarter of a million dollars, became worthless. In 2016,
according to a campaign-finance disclosure form, Pence had one bank
account, which held less than fifteen thousand dollars.
But in July Pence found a
way to please Trump when he played golf with him at Trump’s club in
Bedminster, New Jersey. Recognizing that Trump was susceptible to
flattery, he told the media that Trump “beat me like a drum.”
… Pence exceeded
expectations in the Vice-Presidential debate, and traversed the
Midwest tirelessly. “He did an amazing job,” Bannon said. “Lots
of conservative groups had questions about Trump. He answered those
questions.” The Kochs were delighted that one of their favorite
politicians had joined the ticket, although, because of Trump’s
stance against wealthy donors, Pence and the Kochs agreed to cancel a
speech that he had been scheduled to give at their donor summit that
August. The Kochs continued to withhold financial support from Trump,
but Short, the former Koch operative, became a top adviser to Pence
on the campaign. Some billionaires in the Kochs’ donor network—such
as the hedge-fund manager Robert Mercer, who has also financed
Bannon’s ventures—began backing Trump.
Trump began to appoint an
extraordinary number of officials with ties to the Kochs and to
Pence, especially in positions that affected Koch Industries
financially, such as those dealing with regulatory, environmental,
and fiscal policy. Short, who a few months earlier had tried to
enlist the Kochs to stop Trump, joined the White House as its
director of legislative affairs. Scott Pruitt, the militantly
anti-regulatory attorney general of Oklahoma, who had been heavily
supported by the Kochs, was appointed director of the Environmental
Protection Agency. Pruitt, in turn, placed Patrick Traylor, a lawyer
for Koch Industries and other fossil-fuel companies, in charge of the
E.P.A.’s enforcement of key anti-pollution laws. As the Times has
reported, a document called “A Roadmap to Repeal,” written by
Koch operatives, has guided the E.P.A.’s reversal of Obama
Administration clean-air and climate regulations. Don McGahn, who had
done legal work for Freedom Partners, became White House counsel.
Betsy DeVos, a billionaire heiress, who had been a major member of
the Kochs’ donor network and a supporter of Pence, was named
Secretary of Education. The new director of the C.I.A. was Mike
Pompeo, the congressman who represented Charles Koch’s district, in
Wichita, Kansas; before Pompeo ran for office, the Kochs had invested
in his aerospace business. Pompeo, the former transition-team member
said, “wasn’t even on Trump’s radar, but he was brought in to
meet him and got appointed, like, the next day.” A recent analysis
by the Checks & Balances Project found that sixteen high-ranking
officials in the Trump White House had ties to the Kochs. The pattern
continued among lower-level political appointees, including in
Pence’s office, which was stocked with Koch alumni. Pence
reportedly consulted with Charles Koch before hiring his
speechwriter, Stephen Ford, who previously worked at Freedom
Partners.
... Pence soon delivered a
series of misleading statements about Flynn. On January 15th, as
questions about Russian manipulation of the election were mounting,
Pence went on CBS and assured the public that, during the transition,
Flynn had not discussed the topic of sanctions with the Russian
Ambassador. But then the Washington Post reported that the
Justice Department had wiretaps of Flynn doing just that. The Justice
Department had informed the White House counsel about this well
before Pence made his statement. On February 13th, Trump fired Flynn,
ostensibly for deceiving Pence, who looked like either a liar or a
chump.
Three months later, Trump
fired James Comey, the F.B.I. director, who had opened the federal
investigation into the Trump campaign’s Russian ties. Pence
declared that Comey’s firing had nothing to do with Trump’s
displeasure at the Russia investigation. Trump, he said, had merely
followed the Justice Department’s recommendation. But Trump
contradicted Pence within hours, telling NBC’s Lester Holt that his
anger over the Russia probe led him to dismiss Comey. Further
damaging Pence’s credibility, the Times revealed that,
before Comey’s dismissal, Pence had attended a White House meeting
where Trump discussed his intention to fire Comey and devised a plan
to get the Justice Department to support the move.
Several law professors
have argued that the Vice-President could be vulnerable to charges of
obstructing justice, or “misprision of a felony,” for
participating in a meeting about shutting down the federal
investigation and then providing a false cover story to the public.
Pence has hired an outside lawyer, Richard Cullen, and has further
strengthened his political armor by hiring Nick Ayers as his chief of
staff. Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, tweeted, “The VP
appears to me to be in what we lawyers have been known to call deep
doo-doo.”
Unlike most
Vice-Presidents, Pence has been given no particular portfolio of
issues or projects. He’s continued to serve as the key contact for
conservative groups and campaign donors, and he has tried to help
Trump contend with Congress.
... In private, however,
Pence has become a back channel for government figures who are
frustrated by the impulsiveness and inattention of a President who
won’t read more than a page or two of bullet points. Erick
Erickson, a conservative commentator who admires Pence, told me,
“Everyone knows that Mike Pence can get the job done, and the
President can’t, but no one can say it.”
... At the White House,
Pence has been hosting a Bible-study group for Cabinet officers, led
by an evangelical pastor named Ralph Drollinger. In 2004, Drollinger,
whose organization, Capitol Ministries, specializes in proselytizing
to elected officials, stirred protests from female legislators in
California, where he was then preaching, after he wrote, “Women
with children at home, who either serve in public office, or are
employed on the outside, pursue a path that contradicts God’s
revealed design for them. It is a sin.” Drollinger describes
Catholicism as “a false religion,” calls homosexuality “a sin,”
and believes that a wife must “submit” to her husband. Several
Trump Cabinet officials have reportedly attended the Bible-study
group, including DeVos, Pompeo, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
In a recent interview with the Christian Broadcast Network,
Drollinger said that Pence “has uncompromising Biblical tenacity”
and “brings real value to the head of the nation.”
You
can read more here
.
.
.
→ Direct sources for Democrats:
* ( Personal favored and most informative follows are shared here with the understanding that readers will always apply their own critical thinking to any information provided anywhere by anyone. #StrongerTogether does not share sources of information lightly but -- no one is perfect! -- so always #DistrustAndVerify I am using a star rating that is strictly based on my situational experience with the work of the media personality specifically in relation to issues of interest to me. )
The Democratic Party Website
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Website
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee Website
Also
C-SPAN (a good place for speeches & hearings direct source (s))
→ Some of my favorite, most informative
follows on Twitter include:
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ US Intelligence | Author | Navy Senior Chief | NBC/MSNBC
⭐⭐⭐ Federal Government Operations | Vanity Fair | Newsweek | MSNBC Contributor | Author
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Voting Rights/Voter Suppression | Author | Mother Jones
→ Some of the most credible media -- at the moment:
📰📰📰 Mother Jones
→ Some of the most credible Talking Heads -- at the moment -- and their Twitter handles:
Thank you for Networking for Democrats today!
.
.
.
(Linked) "...is our 2016 platform...a declaration of how we plan to move America forward. Democrats believe that cooperation is better than conflict, unity is better than division, empowerment is better than resentment, and bridges are better than walls.
Focused Monthly Inspiration
(Remember 2018...)
*
Curated by Gail Mountain, with occasional personal commentary, Network For #StrongerTogether ! is not affiliated with The Democratic Party in any capacity. This is an independent blog and the hope is you will, at a glance, learn more about the Party and you will, with a click or two, also take action on its behalf as it is provided!
( You can also find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/GKMTNtwits )
*
You can find Vote411 here
Thank you for focusing!
g., aka Focused Democrat
...Committed to Staying Focused
✊ Resisting "Fake News"
No comments:
Post a Comment