First up, Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "Jill FrankenStein"
Sasse will serve as president emeritus, professor and external adviser to the chairman of the school’s board of trustees and be provided with health and other benefits until 2028, according to a contract addendum dated July 18. He will provide “services as the Chair of the Board reasonably requests from time to time,” the document said.
Parker Magid was recently appointed as Vance’s press secretary and his employment history links Vance and his circle to elements of the extremist right far outside the mainstream of American politics.
B&S was founded in 2014, according to statements by its founders, Andrew Beck and Austin Stone. Initial company filings in Florida date from April 2015. Its current Florida filings give an address that is a UPS store in New York City.
Beck, also a Claremont co-founder, is closely involved with the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), a secretive invitation- and men-only fraternal lodge that has been the subject of extensive previous reporting in the Guardian.
There are different explanations for Vance’s unpopularity, but it’s likely that his lengthy record of condemning Americans without children has contributed to his troubles. Unfortunately for the GOP ticket, that record is still growing. NBC News reported:
“You know, so many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids, trying to brainwash the minds of our children,” Vance said at a forum in October 2021, about a year before he was elected to office for the first time.
He added, in reference to the AFT leader, “If she wants to brainwash and destroy the mind of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.”
Such ugly language would be controversial on their own, but they’re made vastly worse by the totality of his record.
As we’ve discussed, during Vance’s first campaign, the then-candidate appeared on Fox News and diagnosed what he saw as a crisis plaguing the United States. The country, Vance told a national television audience, was being run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. It’s just a basic fact.”
The future senator specifically included Vice President Kamala Harris — who has step-children, but no biological children of her own — in his societal condemnation.
What’s more, CNN uncovered related comments from November 2020, when Vance said on a podcast that childless Americans, especially those in the country’s “leadership class,” were “more sociopathic” than those with children and made the country “less mentally stable.” The Republican went on to say that in his experience, the “most deranged” and “most psychotic” people he sees on social media were also typically childless.
Alas, we can keep going. Media Matters, for example, uncovered several additional Fox interviews in which Vance lashed out at “childless” Democrats. Media Matters also found a Breitbart news interview in which the Ohioan claimed that the left’s “next generation leaders,” including “the Kamala Harrises, they don’t have kids. And so there’s this weird way where they want to take our kids and brainwash them so that their ideas continue to exist in the next generation.”
JD Vance just saw:
— Paul Rudnick (@PaulRudnickNY) August 28, 2024
- His poll numbers
- Trump in white pants
- RFK JR shouting, "You and me! We're the same!"
- Millions of cats hissing at him
- A woman voting
- A poem rhyming "beard" with "weird"
- The empty chairs at his rallies
- Something Don Jr left on the front seat pic.twitter.com/xT0TyDIP0C
Republican officials, following Trump's cues, have sought to pass restrictive election laws and purge voter rolls, despite experts noting that voter fraud is exceptionally rare.
Officers conducting the raids seized cellphones, computers and documents from people's homes, including the cellphone of Cecilia Castellano, a Democrat running against former Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin for a state House seat. Castellano told the Times that the raid on her home last Tuesday was "very frightening" and she did not know why she was targeted. “This is all political,” she said.
Another raid brought officers to the home of Manuel Medina, a consultant for Castellano and the chair of Tejano Democrats, a group that advocates for greater Latino representation in the Democratic Party. “I have been contacted by elderly residents who are confused and frightened, wondering why they have been singled out,” Rosales told the Times. “It’s pure intimidation.”
Proaño said one of those targeted was Lidia Martinez, an 87-year-old who lives in San Antonio. Martinez has been a LULAC member for over 35 years and works to expand voter registration among seniors and veterans in South Texas.
She said that last Tuesday, there was a knock on her door in the morning, and she was greeted by nine officers in tactical gear and firearms who said they were executing a search warrant. Martinez was questioned for over three hours about her voter registration efforts in Texas.
Law enforcement seized Martinez's phone, computer, personal calendar, blank voter registration forms and her certificate to conduct voter registration, according to Martinez.
Lidia Martinez, a volunteer and great-grandmother in her 80s, was woken up in the early morning hours on Tuesday. She said nine law enforcement agents searched her home and questioned her for hours.
"After two hours of questioning, they took me outside in front of all of my neighbors for half an hour while they searched the living room where I had been sitting. They continued to question me, asking about LULAC members," Martinez said. "I said, 'what do you want from me? I am an old lady, all I do is help the seniors."
Martinez said she's been politically engaged since she was a little girl growing up in San Antonio. She never imagined to be trapped in such activity.
“I said I feel like I’m in Russia," Martinez said. “I asked them why they were there and they said because of voter fraud. And I said I’m not guilty of that.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced on Monday that the state has removed roughly a million people from its voter rolls since he signed a legislative overhaul of election laws in 2021.
“Illegal voting in Texas will never be tolerated. We will continue to actively safeguard Texans’ sacred right to vote while also aggressively protecting our elections from illegal voting,” he said.
However, election experts point out that both federal and state law already required voter roll maintenance, and the governor’s framing of this routine process as a protection against illegal voting could be used to undermine trust in elections. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 already governs how states should keep their registration rolls accurate and up-to-date, and also includes protections to avoid the inadvertent removal of properly registered voters.
“Year after year, people are taken off the voting rolls for all manner of innocuous reasons,” said Sarah Xiyi Chen, an attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project.
[. . .]
In 2019, Texas officials flagged 95,000 voters whom they identified as “noncitizens” and accused broadly of voter fraud. After review, it turned out that many of the people identified on the rolls were naturalized citizens. The scandal resulted in the secretary of state resigning. The state abandoned the effort after numerous lawsuits, which resulted in the state setting new guidelines for future voter roll clean-ups.
ACLU of Texas attorney Ashley Harris points to the 2019 incident as an example of the state's lack of transparency about how it collects this data.
Signed into law on May 20, 1993, by President Bill Clinton, the National Voter Registration Act opens a new window, also known as the NVRA opens a new window, revolutionized voter registration across the country establishing voter registration requirements and policies to facilitate those requirements. The NVRA required each state to:
It is because of the NVRA that eligible voters can register to vote at their state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) earning the law the nickname “Motor Voter”.
Why is making voter registration more accessible important?
Voter registration is the first barrier to voting. Even with the NVRA and policies like online and automatic voter registrations in some states, approximately 25% of eligible voters remain unregistered to vote, according to 2020 U.S. Census data. The registration gap is greatest among young people, particularly young people of color, young Natives, young people with disabilities and young people from low-income backgrounds. Every year, millions of eligible voters find themselves unable to vote because they miss a registration deadline, do not update their registration, or are unsure how to register.
How did Rock the Vote contribute to the passage of the NVRA?
In the early 1990s, Rock the Vote launched a major national campaign to support the passage of the NVRA. We partnered with the Recording Industry Association of American, MTV, Rolling Stone, major artists and actors of the era, and elected leaders to record and broadcast PSAs, testify at Congressional hearings opens a new window, and conduct public media interviews.
Meta's CEO aired his grievances in a letter Monday to the House Judiciary Committee in response to its investigation into content moderation on online platforms. Zuckerberg detailed how senior administration officials leaned on the company to censor certain posts about Covid-19, including humor and satire, and “expressed a lot of frustration” when the social media platform resisted.
In 2019, before the pandemic began, Facebook announced that they were looking to reduce the influence of anti-vaccination posts on their social media platform.
“We will reduce the ranking of groups and Pages that spread misinformation about vaccinations in News Feed and Search. These groups and Pages will not be included in recommendations or in predictions when you type into Search,” stated Facebook at the time.
“When we find ads that include misinformation about vaccinations, we will reject them. We also removed related targeting options, like ‘vaccine controversies.’ For ad accounts that continue to violate our policies, we may take further action, such as disabling the ad account.”
Facebook already downgrades any posts it doesn’t like the look of regarding the virus, but it’s apparently concerned that some of its users might still interact with the wrong content. It’s not Facebook users’ fault, you see, they’re just hapless plebs with not critical faculties of their own. Thankfully Facebook is on the case.
The social media giant’s VP of Integrity (an Orwellian job title if there ever was one), Guy Rosen, recently provided An Update on Our Work to Keep People Informed and Limit Misinformation About COVID-19. “We’re going to start showing messages in News Feed to people who have liked, reacted or commented on harmful misinformation about COVID-19 that we have since removed,” said Rosen.
On the first point, Zuckerberg criticized the Biden administration for its efforts to get Facebook to address coronavirus misinformation — a political win for his Republican critics.
“Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure,” he wrote. “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”
The line between what Zuckerberg describes as “pressure” and that the decisions were ultimately Meta’s will be blurred. What’s more, the Supreme Court recently rejected the idea that the administration had crossed an unacceptable line. But this is almost exactly what Republicans wanted him to say.
When rumors first swirled about who would replace President Biden if he stepped down, Black women, who have consistently voted for Democrats, warned leadership within the party to not pass over Kamala Harris. Fast forward to July 21 and Biden immediately followed his announcement that he was dropping out of the race with an endorsement for the vice president. Within 12 hours of that announcement, Win with Black Women (WWBW), an intergenerational network of Black women leaders in the United States, kickstarted a new model for digital organizing for the newly announced Harris campaign. With more than 40,000 attendees present at its weekly meeting, WWBW not only changed the meeting capacity limits of Zoom; it also set off a cascade of fundraising calls across the nation among other affinity groups. To date, other groups that have organized around the campaign include White Women for Harris, White Dudes for Harris, Republicans for Harris, and Latinas for Harris—all groups critical for the Democrats to win up and down the ballot in November. In just one month, the Harris-Walz campaign raised a record-breaking $500 million, demonstrating the level of excitement and joy swirling around the vice president.
The enthusiasm has only become more infectious in the past two weeks. After Harris announced her running mate, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, both have continued to build momentum and electrify audiences across the country. Their big test as a joint ticket was the Democratic National Convention—a natural crescendo on their journey to November and another opportunity for Black women to show up and show out for Kamala Harris.