The controversy over Georgia’s election security law has all the earmarks of the kind of sterile hysteria that is unlikely to produce genuine gains for electoral integrity.
The substack link provided by PS ends with a Youtube video about an Alabama lynching in 1981 — subtle!
Greg Palast claimed dropping off an absentee ballot for one’s grandmother was criminalized by the bill. (Not true, if anyone is interested in what is true.)
Nowhere will anyone find an analysis of why Fulton County has had three-hour lines to vote and what should be done to end that travesty. Lots on how mean Republicans do not want anyone handing a voter a donut while in that three-hour line.
Some notable ones include greatly reducing the number of drop boxes for early votes:
For the 2020 election, there were 94 drop boxes across the four counties that make up the core of metropolitan Atlanta: Fulton, Cobb, DeKalb and Gwinnett. The new law limits the same four counties to a total of, at most, 23 drop boxes, based on the latest voter registration data. The number could be lower depending on how many early-voting sites the counties provide.
There won’t just be fewer drop boxes. Instead of 24-hour access outdoors, the boxes must be placed indoors at government buildings and early-voting sites and will thus be unavailable for voters to drop off their ballots during evenings and other nonbusiness hours.
New restrictions on early voting hours:
These new strict rules on early voting hours are likely to curtail voting access for Georgians who work daytime hours or have less flexible schedules and who may be unable to return an absentee ballot.
The provision requires counties to hold early voting during weekday working hours — 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. — and says it may be held for longer but may not take place before 7 a.m. or after 7 p.m. on those days. The early voting period will begin four weeks before an election. The previous iteration of the law called only for early voting during “normal business hours” and left it up to counties to determine those hours.
Making it a crime to offer food or water to people standing in line to vote:
Perhaps no provision in the Georgia law has received more attention than this one, which effectively bars third-party groups or anyone else who is not an election worker from providing food and water to voters waiting in line. Republicans defended the provision, saying it is enforceable only within a 150-foot radius of polling places. Civil rights groups note that it also prevents assistance “within 25 feet of any voter standing in line to vote at any polling place.”
Long lines for voting in Georgia are an unfortunate reality, and are often found in the poorer, densely populated communities that tend to vote Democratic. During the primary election last June, when temperatures hovered above 80 degrees with high humidity, multiple voting locations across the state had lines in which voters waited more than two hours.
Numerous studies have shown that long lines deter people from voting. According to research by the Bipartisan Policy Center, an independent research group, over 560,000 voters did not cast ballots in 2016 “because of problems related to polling place management, including long lines.” In 2014, Stephen Pettigrew, then a Ph.D. candidate in Harvard’s department of government, conducted a study that found that more than 200,000 voters did not vote in the midterm elections that year because they had faced long lines during the 2012 election.
And lots of other restrictions. Basically, it’s the standard Republican playbook of making it as hard as possible for people to vote.
I am sure we should expect to see more backhanded racist defenses of the Georgia voting law. As we all know the Republicans are deeply and sincerely concerned about voter integrity, LOL, especially if it makes it a lot harder for black and brown people to vote.
Racists used to disenfranchise black and brown voters with poll taxes and literacy tests. Their voter integrity drive is just the latest version of these.
It’s intentional disenfranchisement and it’s disgusting. Bruce is right that the long lines themselves aren’t being adequately addressed. Showing concern for people in line is a kindly act, a spiritual/religious act, a practical commonsense act – a very human act. But the line itself is the problem.
The substack link provided by PS ends with a Youtube video about an Alabama lynching in 1981 — subtle!
As subtle as Kemp and his fellow KKK members signing the Jim Crow redux legislation beneath a painting, handpicked and placed by Kemp and his wife Marty procured from none other than a Russian artist with a fondness for the Antebellum South, of the Callaway plantation where hundreds of slaves toiled under the yoke of the master and his overseers.
The long lines are also because of voter suppression by the same cast of characters. Monica and bruce are implying it’s blacks’ fault. Pathetic. Bruce is right nothing when it comes to topics like this, Monica, and I mean NOTHING.
The Supreme Court is racist too. Claiming federal oversight is no longer relevant and as soon as it rules this, Georgia and the other states that were under federal oversight are right back at it proving it’s still as relevant today as it ever was.
Racists used to disenfranchise black and brown voters with poll taxes and literacy tests. Their voter integrity drive is just the latest version of these.
And yes, Bruce, some were lynched for daring to vote or trying to vote. This is not some innocent revision to the voting rules, nor is it intended to be. The Georgia laws, like many others passed or in the pipeline, are intended to restrict the ability of voters to cast their ballots and simultaneously prevent easing voter restrictions. The point is ultimately to limit voting to only the worthy as defined by Rs.
The US electoral process is one of the most screwed up in the world. These restrictive laws don’t fix anything.
So was Herman Cain. Now he’s dead. Herman, were he alive, would support the Georgia legislation and also would have referred to the reaction to the legislation as “hysteria.” I’m sure next you’ll tell us you’re a woman.
Local PBS station summarizes the law’s numerous provisions in a more neutral tone than the NY Times. Readers of both will notice the addition of a mandatory Saturday to early voting. That dropoff boxes are a novelty. And, provisions requiring large precincts to have provision of resources for surges in arrivals as well as a requirement large precincts be split after a poor performance in coping with numbers.
A general theme of the law’s provisions seems to be a concern with administrative deadlines and windows that contribute to inefficiency and the appearance of chaos.
The most racist provisions have to do with Georgia’s voter id requirements, which were pre-existing. These have been applied more systematically to absentee voting. And, there is a suspicious provision to enable the State Board of elections to take up to 4 local authorities into state receivership.
The onerous ID requirements, imposed several years ago, are somewhat obnoxious, but that argument was lost and the obvious way forward is to get voters IDs — an effort that would help marginalized people in a variety of ways to access resources and participate in society.
Some of the concerns reflected in the bill — food and drinks for those waiting in line for example or limits on who can collect and deliver absentee ballots and ballot applications — are not foreign to election law in other states. A reporter who was not deliberately nurturing hysteria would try to sort out the legitimate concerns. Yes, absentee ballotting can be open to fraud and abuse — shocking I know! Most states strictly limit any solicitation near polls. This is nothing new. I can well imagine that white legislators were entertained by lurid tales of Atlanta machine politics and its doings, but it is not as if no one ever thought of “walking around money” in GOTV. Many of the administrative standards introduced seem to be aimed squarely at reducing the paranoid suspicions raised by irregularity and seeming chaos. Is that wrong to do? Is denying that problems manifested really an effective argument?
“Leaked Texts From Israeli Consulate Employee Show More Details In Gaetz-Levinson Funding Scheme” @ theAmericanconservative.com is described, on populist.press, as “Israeli embassy in New York just admitted attempting to extort Gaetz”
Could this have anything to do with recent updates of Ghislaine Maxwell case?
Maybe Maxwell and Gaetz are collateral damage in some bigger conflict?
I’m basically spitballing here, but thesaker.is frequent commenters who seem knowledgeable are half expecting a conflict in Ukraine to break out.* Ukraine and Syria are targets of western imperial intrigues, with Israel exercising its own interference in Syria, perhaps at cross-purposes with the US….
see comments by Auslander and Larchmonter455 @ “Drums of war in the Ukraine: OPEN THREAD”
So it’s the old they were already doing all this stuff in Georgia or in other state. So nothing to see here, move along.
Absentee voting has been done for years in various states without fraud. So we get wheeled out the wheezy, vague b-b-but it could happen. Not that it is happening. More solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Because it does disenfranchise non-Republican voters. Because that’s the point.
No, Hugh, my point is that some of these provisions are quite conventional responses to well-known problems.
And, yes, absentee-voting can be subject to fraud and abuse; nothing about it is just naturally secure. There was a very well-publicized case in North Carolina a couple of years ago — an election had to be re-run and felony charges were brought against a Republican operative. But, you have the memory of a mayfly, so never mind.
Well-known problems apparently means black and brown people voting and Republicans losing. Like white Georgia Republicans only coincidentally decided they needed to act just after Trump lost the state and two Democrats got elected to the Senate. Oh no, it was because they were so stand-up that when they awoke after a couple of years they suddenly realized a crooked Republican in North Carolina who got caught, it was that that made them act. That Kemp has a history of this and another Southern state Florida seem to have no problems with mail-in voting, forget that.
There is always some idiotic dogma attached to the talking points associated with these hysterical partisan controversies, a demand to believe some clearly untrue things combined with moral black-and-white assignment of unmixed motive worthy of Christian Allegory.
The biggest problem with the trans thing is that it confuses a person “self-identifying” as a female human (or vice versa) with being a female human. This denies basic biological reality.
Human beings are mammals. We don’t get special exemptions from observable reality only because we have self-reflective consciousness and a propensity for self-delusion.
Only a society that has seriously lost its way would make reality denial a centerpiece of its ideology.
This brings us to western liberalism itself. It is an ideology that thinks it isn’t an ideology but reality itself. That’s why liberals go purple with outrage when any of its tenets are challenged.
Western liberalism is so convinced of its own inherent righteousness that it has become sclerotic and moribund and unable to honestly reflect on itself and admit that it is a fallible human creation.
The “trans thing”, which denies observable biological reality, is the perfect encapsulation of western liberalism’s extreme tendency to confuse liberal ideology with universal reality.
It has become an unpleasantly dogmatic secular religion.
Well, I do disagree that the standard sexual binary is the only biological reality. There is a biological basis for transgender.
That said, the foregrounding of it as a top social concern comes from the same dishonest strategy that all identity politics does. They keep us riled up over divisive trifles so we won’t notice their real game.
I think Thomas Frank is so good he has reached the George Carlin level of excellence. In this piece, he absolutely nails the problem with the allegedly liberal Democrats and the PMC.
There is always some idiotic dogma attached to the talking points associated with these hysterical partisan controversies, a demand to believe some clearly untrue things
This evening I was listening to Douglas Murray, author of the “Madness of Crowds” interviewed, and he addressed the question of why, in Communist regimes, people were expected to claim they believed things that they knew to false. His answer (in whole, or in part) was to demoralize people (I’ll assume he meant anybody who might resist the regime, pending a closer re-listen).
The idpol fanatic Commie-Nazis in the West are also making such demands. And they sure do seem to hold much more sway over Democrats, than Republicans.
Following 911, I was struck by the frequency of absurd claims and allegations made by the US government about threats which, not coincidentally, justified a “war on terror”, and used to wonder why. Recall one of the wildest ones was that Saddam Hussein would send Cessna airplanes across the Atlantic, to drop weapons of mass destruction. I didn’t bother looking up the range of a Cessna, figuring that if they had that sort of range, the ubiquitous Cessna owners would not have kept it a secret.
I recall, also, Scott Horton of antiwar.com saying something along the line of the Bush Administration not even seeming to care if their hysterical lies were soon rebutted, as long as they lasted about a week in the news cycle, to be replaced with fresh lies.
My conclusion was that the government manipulators weren’t just whipping up war hysteria, but they were also deliberately demoralizing their own population, and in fact inflicting a sort of feeling of unreality, almost like the state of consciousness when awakening from a dream, when you first seem to realize that you are dreaming. Except, the lovely Bushies were sending us in the other direction, towards unreality.
=======================
I might add that some success has been reported (e.g., on War Room Pandemic) pressuring Republican state legislators to tighten up voting laws, as well as authorizing forensic audits of the 2020 election. This process is just beginning, and no reasonable person would expect that corrupt RINOs have been largely rooted out of office, though spreading the word that the one thing elected officials do fear are credible primary challenges might be having an effect*. So, maybe some corrupt RINOs are contributing to honest changes, even if they are still enabling tricks to suppress voter turnout.
* As Pam Popper revealed, in her interview with Spiro Skouras.
Maybe Hugh should get hip to toxic environmental factors that cause physical and mental abnormalities. Do a bit of self reflection/introspection. Get off the high horse. Or not. Better to think yourself righteous on the right hand side of god—a genius in your own mind.
Well, getting the vaccine next week. Better than doing nothing, but not happy about it. I would prefer Ivermectin or one of the vaccines from Cuba, but I’m an American and we don’t actually do freedom around here, we just bullshit about it.
Here’s the funny thing I just realized. I shop at Trader Joe’s to avoid genetically modified foods. Now, after next week, I will be genetically modified. I guess that makes it even more important to avoid it in my food supply.
Damb, Antibody made me laugh out loud, knows nothing at all about how humans and other creatures can and do have ambiguous genders and cannot necessarily be assigned a correct gender at birth. The ignorance is astonishing. As for those who face gender dysphoria later, really try to read at least one paper on the topic.
Provable voter fraud cases are surpassingly rare (Note: it was once ridiculously frequent as any review of 19th century elections will show) and the only ones trying to get away with it are Rs. But these restrictive laws are not about fraud, they are about strictly limiting access. The kinds of fraud the Rs like to engage in can still take place — which is also the point.
With solar and wind power the giant reservoirs we build in the west and now all over the world are obsolete. We no longer need them because we can use wind and solar generated electricity to pump ground water. The ground would have a lot more water in it if theses reservoirs didn’t trap it behind their dams. This would reduce the depth wells had to be. The water would be distributed by gravity, naturally. Using the ground where the water is actually needed as the reservoir has huge benefits. It is less damaging to the biologically productive and beautiful riparian, littoral, river bank habitat. The land consumed by reservoirs is left useless because of the bathtub ring of erosion around the fluctuating water level is often a dead zone. It massively reduces evaporation. The flood control aspect of a reservoir is redundant because they are always kept as full as possible anyway. When they are actually needed as flood control they have to spill uncontrolled to protect the dam. This is what happened at Shasta reservoir in northern California a few years ago when the spill way washed out and towns along the upper Sacramento river were at risk of inundation.We need to start removing the big dams. The benefits will be enormous. Under the current system the main beneficiaries are the massive farming corporations who get the public to pay for their water security.
I suspect that he was already being blackmailed by Zionist intelligence entities because his dad was apparently paying millions of dollars to “rescue” CIA asset Bob Levinson, who was kidnapped in 2011 while on the trail of Russian-Jewish mobman Mogilevich and is reportedly dead. The payments for the “rescue” of Levinson, probably a high profit low expenditure operation, would be a cover for the blackmail if this financial arrangement ever saw the light of day. Mogilevich, by the way, had ties with Ghislaine Maxwell’s very Mossad connected father Robert Maxwell. Apparently, from the article (https://www.theamericanconservative.com/state-of-the-union/leaked-texts-from-israeli-consular-official-show-more-details-in-gaetz-levinson-funding-scheme/), Jake Novak, media director of the Israeli consulate in New York City, knew about the payments being made by Gaetz’s father and Gaetz’s current legal predicament. Jake Novak, by the way, is also a CNBC contributor.
Gaetz’s pal Greenberg, who Gaetz probably shares an affinity for amphetamines with, appears to have been involved in a smaller, but similar operation as Epstein was and he may gotten overconfident that the Mossad had his back like they had Epstein’s and got grandiose and sloppy in his corruption and the local authorities and the FBI got onto him and the Mossad couldn’t pull them off. Once Greenberg turned on Gaetz, Gaetz may have decided that his best chance to get off was to point the matter back at the blackmail hoping that the U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies would do anything to keep focus off of the similarities to the Epstein situation and let him off easy like they did Epstein back in 2008.
We’ll see where it goes from here. It’s just a theory of mine, of course.
By the way, apparently Gaetz was being blackmailed for having sex with a 17 year old. That’s the way that I always thought they got Clinton too, with a girl who probably could pass for 19 or 20 and had the experience and confidence around men at that point to pull it off. As much as I don’t like Clinton, I could never see him getting involved in hardcore pedophilia.
Gaetz is rumored to be gay too and there are reports that he was involved in a death involving sex with a man years ago that his father bailed him out of.
“toxic environmental factors that cause physical and mental abnormalities”
I have seen some recent articles on declining sperm counts but I have been seeing those for the last 20 years. And sperm counts do not equate to sexual identity. Nor do they explain why the Greek and Roman world would look on our concentration on male/female heterosexuality as just weird.
I just do not see what the payoff is for you guys with your approach of conclusions first, forget or make up “facts” as needed.
The vast majority of the conversation going on now isn’t about intersex people, it’s about people who feel they are born in the wrong body. It’s fine that they want to claim a different identity than what their biology dictated (though why draw the line at gender and not race or species or planetary origins?) but the trans activists are overreaching by denying that biology is really there and biology dictatrs things like who can gestate children and have greater physical strength and deeper voices and differing incidents of diseases.
Maybe Hugh should get hip to toxic environmental factors that cause physical and mental abnormalities. Do a bit of self reflection/introspection. Get off the high horse. Or not. Better to think yourself righteous on the right hand side of god—a genius in your own mind.
This applies equally to Bruce. They’d make great lovers. The tension, the passion…
Bruce, my bad, I didn’t mean to confuse you by including the opening sentence in the quote.
Do a bit of self reflection/introspection. Get off the high horse. Or not. Better to think yourself righteous on the right hand side of god—a genius in your own mind.
This applies to you and Hugh equally. Eh, maybe you a bit more. Best.
Renee – Bruce is one of the people who makes the comment section here worth spending time in. I suppose you are probably a decent person in various ways, but right now you are just being a really annoying troll.
I haven’t read/won’t be reading the book. I learned about it by listening to the author on Joe Rogan for a couple of hours.
It sounds like, as usual, the problem is not the issue per se. As Ian points out, this has been a non-problem for other cultures that handled it without any fuss.
The problem is the way the matter is being processed through our oh-so-dysfunctional culture. It sounds like parents, psychologists, and even doctors are being pressured to stifle their doubts and do this for teenagers without proper oversight. That’s the problem.
I assume all of this fuss and bother is being gleefully picked up by our misleaders because it serves their purposes on a couple of levels. The first level is that it is wildly successful at spreading fear and distrust among people. The second level is that anyone who transitions is a financial goldmine for the medical profiteers for the rest of their lives.
“Unexpected Voter enthusiasm” was only a partial cause of Georgia’s long lines in 2020. Shelby v. Holder meant Georgia officials got more control over their own voting procedures and staffing. If most black voters vote D, then this suggests that Georgia is definitely turning blue:
Obviously, Party R does not want this to happen. But Party D in Georgia is also involved with the polling conditions decision making. Does anybody know any other realistic reasons for 5-7 hour long polling lines, for a population which was obviously determined to vote?
Do you believe ‘male’ and ‘female’ are simply human created constructs that only exist in our minds and can therefore be done away with on a whim? If a person who is born a man (or a woman) decides they want to live their life as a member of the opposite sex, that is one thing, but to say they then are that sex is where the reality denial comes in.
Woke influenced magazines like Teen Vogue now write “person with a vagina/penis” when referring to female/male humans. When they discuss pregnancy related issues they talk about “person with a cervix.” All references to men/boy and women/girls have been scrubbed.
Does biological sex now only apply to non-human animals? Do you think this new “reality” will become a widely accepted universal norm?
See my response to Hugh above. I’m not denying that intersex people or gender dysphoria exist. I’m saying that taking on the social characteristics of the opposite gender or feeling like you were born in the wrong body (if you were born biologically male or female) doesn’t make you a member of your preferred sex, even after gender reassignment surgery. Gender can be fluid, sex, not so much.
Antibody, as I said, when this discussion began in another post, sex and gender form a spectrum. That spectrum can be defined genetically, developmentally, hormonally, psychologically, and culturally. The distribution is not smooth or continuous, but neither is it binary. That is people may tend to clump more in certain areas of the spectrum. But again this is not binary. And as I pointed out above, it isn’t fixed. Historically and culturally, there has been a lot more variability than we have now. At the same time, our knowledge of biology shows that fast and hard definitions simply don’t cover everyone.
“The ground would have a lot more water in it if theses reservoirs didn’t trap it behind their dams. This would reduce the depth wells had to be. The water would be distributed by gravity, naturally. Using the ground where the water is actually needed as the reservoir has huge benefits. It is less damaging to the biologically productive and beautiful riparian, littoral, river bank habitat. The land consumed by reservoirs is left useless because of the bathtub ring of erosion around the fluctuating water level is often a dead zone. It massively reduces evaporation. The flood control aspect of a reservoir is redundant because they are always kept as full as possible anyway. When they are actually needed as flood control they have to spill uncontrolled to protect the dam. This is what happened at Shasta reservoir in northern California a few years ago when the spill way washed out and towns along the upper Sacramento river were at risk of inundation.We need to start removing the big dams. The benefits will be enormous. Under the current system the main beneficiaries are the massive farming corporations who get the public to pay for their water security.”
Joe’s comment is certainly something important to think about.
I wonder if it is correct in some but not all cases.
Since water fall thinly distributed over a whole expanse of land before it ever reaches a river to begin with, I wonder if better-sponge-ifying the land it falls on, so more of it can soak vertically downward in place, might raise the amount of groundwater building up in place by preventing any of that water from even reaching a river/reservoir to begin with.
metamars
Why can’t I be this cool?
Norwegian Man Slides Down Snowy Hill While Drinking Coffee | Like a Boss
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLEX5Msmtxk&ab_channel=Next9NEWS
Plague Species
https://furry.substack.com/p/if-it-crows-like-a-crow
bruce wilder
The controversy over Georgia’s election security law has all the earmarks of the kind of sterile hysteria that is unlikely to produce genuine gains for electoral integrity.
The substack link provided by PS ends with a Youtube video about an Alabama lynching in 1981 — subtle!
Greg Palast claimed dropping off an absentee ballot for one’s grandmother was criminalized by the bill. (Not true, if anyone is interested in what is true.)
Nowhere will anyone find an analysis of why Fulton County has had three-hour lines to vote and what should be done to end that travesty. Lots on how mean Republicans do not want anyone handing a voter a donut while in that three-hour line.
NR
Here is a list of the restrictions in the Georgia voting law, if anyone wants to see what they are:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/us/politics/georgia-voting-law-annotated.html
Some notable ones include greatly reducing the number of drop boxes for early votes:
New restrictions on early voting hours:
Making it a crime to offer food or water to people standing in line to vote:
And lots of other restrictions. Basically, it’s the standard Republican playbook of making it as hard as possible for people to vote.
Hugh
I am sure we should expect to see more backhanded racist defenses of the Georgia voting law. As we all know the Republicans are deeply and sincerely concerned about voter integrity, LOL, especially if it makes it a lot harder for black and brown people to vote.
Racists used to disenfranchise black and brown voters with poll taxes and literacy tests. Their voter integrity drive is just the latest version of these.
Monica
It’s intentional disenfranchisement and it’s disgusting. Bruce is right that the long lines themselves aren’t being adequately addressed. Showing concern for people in line is a kindly act, a spiritual/religious act, a practical commonsense act – a very human act. But the line itself is the problem.
Plague Species
As subtle as Kemp and his fellow KKK members signing the Jim Crow redux legislation beneath a painting, handpicked and placed by Kemp and his wife Marty procured from none other than a Russian artist with a fondness for the Antebellum South, of the Callaway plantation where hundreds of slaves toiled under the yoke of the master and his overseers.
Plague Species
The long lines are also because of voter suppression by the same cast of characters. Monica and bruce are implying it’s blacks’ fault. Pathetic. Bruce is right nothing when it comes to topics like this, Monica, and I mean NOTHING.
https://www.npr.org/2020/10/17/924527679/why-do-nonwhite-georgia-voters-have-to-wait-in-line-for-hours-too-few-polling-pl
The Supreme Court is racist too. Claiming federal oversight is no longer relevant and as soon as it rules this, Georgia and the other states that were under federal oversight are right back at it proving it’s still as relevant today as it ever was.
Ché Pasa
And yes, Bruce, some were lynched for daring to vote or trying to vote. This is not some innocent revision to the voting rules, nor is it intended to be. The Georgia laws, like many others passed or in the pipeline, are intended to restrict the ability of voters to cast their ballots and simultaneously prevent easing voter restrictions. The point is ultimately to limit voting to only the worthy as defined by Rs.
The US electoral process is one of the most screwed up in the world. These restrictive laws don’t fix anything.
Monica
Monica and bruce are implying it’s blacks’ fault.
???
I am black.
Q Jackson
Don’t worry Monica baby. PS is a little unhinged. I’m out.
Plague Species
So was Herman Cain. Now he’s dead. Herman, were he alive, would support the Georgia legislation and also would have referred to the reaction to the legislation as “hysteria.” I’m sure next you’ll tell us you’re a woman.
bruce wilder
https://www.gpb.org/news/2021/03/27/what-does-georgias-new-voting-law-sb-202-do
Local PBS station summarizes the law’s numerous provisions in a more neutral tone than the NY Times. Readers of both will notice the addition of a mandatory Saturday to early voting. That dropoff boxes are a novelty. And, provisions requiring large precincts to have provision of resources for surges in arrivals as well as a requirement large precincts be split after a poor performance in coping with numbers.
A general theme of the law’s provisions seems to be a concern with administrative deadlines and windows that contribute to inefficiency and the appearance of chaos.
The most racist provisions have to do with Georgia’s voter id requirements, which were pre-existing. These have been applied more systematically to absentee voting. And, there is a suspicious provision to enable the State Board of elections to take up to 4 local authorities into state receivership.
The onerous ID requirements, imposed several years ago, are somewhat obnoxious, but that argument was lost and the obvious way forward is to get voters IDs — an effort that would help marginalized people in a variety of ways to access resources and participate in society.
Some of the concerns reflected in the bill — food and drinks for those waiting in line for example or limits on who can collect and deliver absentee ballots and ballot applications — are not foreign to election law in other states. A reporter who was not deliberately nurturing hysteria would try to sort out the legitimate concerns. Yes, absentee ballotting can be open to fraud and abuse — shocking I know! Most states strictly limit any solicitation near polls. This is nothing new. I can well imagine that white legislators were entertained by lurid tales of Atlanta machine politics and its doings, but it is not as if no one ever thought of “walking around money” in GOTV. Many of the administrative standards introduced seem to be aimed squarely at reducing the paranoid suspicions raised by irregularity and seeming chaos. Is that wrong to do? Is denying that problems manifested really an effective argument?
metamars
Matt Gaetz scandal weirdness just got weirder.
“Leaked Texts From Israeli Consulate Employee Show More Details In Gaetz-Levinson Funding Scheme” @ theAmericanconservative.com is described, on populist.press, as “Israeli embassy in New York just admitted attempting to extort Gaetz”
Could this have anything to do with recent updates of Ghislaine Maxwell case?
Maybe Maxwell and Gaetz are collateral damage in some bigger conflict?
I’m basically spitballing here, but thesaker.is frequent commenters who seem knowledgeable are half expecting a conflict in Ukraine to break out.* Ukraine and Syria are targets of western imperial intrigues, with Israel exercising its own interference in Syria, perhaps at cross-purposes with the US….
see comments by Auslander and Larchmonter455 @ “Drums of war in the Ukraine: OPEN THREAD”
Q Jackson
Monica, damn bitch, you got slapped. I’m out.
Hugh
So it’s the old they were already doing all this stuff in Georgia or in other state. So nothing to see here, move along.
Absentee voting has been done for years in various states without fraud. So we get wheeled out the wheezy, vague b-b-but it could happen. Not that it is happening. More solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Because it does disenfranchise non-Republican voters. Because that’s the point.
Ven
This is perhaps the most important exposes of the last few years, on China. For a change, an example of real journalism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZkxaEC1xjY
bruce wilder
No, Hugh, my point is that some of these provisions are quite conventional responses to well-known problems.
And, yes, absentee-voting can be subject to fraud and abuse; nothing about it is just naturally secure. There was a very well-publicized case in North Carolina a couple of years ago — an election had to be re-run and felony charges were brought against a Republican operative. But, you have the memory of a mayfly, so never mind.
Hugh
Well-known problems apparently means black and brown people voting and Republicans losing. Like white Georgia Republicans only coincidentally decided they needed to act just after Trump lost the state and two Democrats got elected to the Senate. Oh no, it was because they were so stand-up that when they awoke after a couple of years they suddenly realized a crooked Republican in North Carolina who got caught, it was that that made them act. That Kemp has a history of this and another Southern state Florida seem to have no problems with mail-in voting, forget that.
bruce wilder
There is always some idiotic dogma attached to the talking points associated with these hysterical partisan controversies, a demand to believe some clearly untrue things combined with moral black-and-white assignment of unmixed motive worthy of Christian Allegory.
Do you never tire of this, Hugh?
Hugh
Thank you, bruce, for your deeply felt gibberish. But that’s what you get when you try to put a happy face on racism and defend the indefensible.
Antibody
Re the trans thing
The biggest problem with the trans thing is that it confuses a person “self-identifying” as a female human (or vice versa) with being a female human. This denies basic biological reality.
Human beings are mammals. We don’t get special exemptions from observable reality only because we have self-reflective consciousness and a propensity for self-delusion.
Only a society that has seriously lost its way would make reality denial a centerpiece of its ideology.
This brings us to western liberalism itself. It is an ideology that thinks it isn’t an ideology but reality itself. That’s why liberals go purple with outrage when any of its tenets are challenged.
Western liberalism is so convinced of its own inherent righteousness that it has become sclerotic and moribund and unable to honestly reflect on itself and admit that it is a fallible human creation.
The “trans thing”, which denies observable biological reality, is the perfect encapsulation of western liberalism’s extreme tendency to confuse liberal ideology with universal reality.
It has become an unpleasantly dogmatic secular religion.
Hugh
Antibody, maybe you could read a chapter or two on sexual development in a physiology text before you get back to me on “biological reality.”
someofparts
Well, I do disagree that the standard sexual binary is the only biological reality. There is a biological basis for transgender.
That said, the foregrounding of it as a top social concern comes from the same dishonest strategy that all identity politics does. They keep us riled up over divisive trifles so we won’t notice their real game.
I think Thomas Frank is so good he has reached the George Carlin level of excellence. In this piece, he absolutely nails the problem with the allegedly liberal Democrats and the PMC.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/19/rightwing-misinformation-liberals
metamars
This evening I was listening to Douglas Murray, author of the “Madness of Crowds” interviewed, and he addressed the question of why, in Communist regimes, people were expected to claim they believed things that they knew to false. His answer (in whole, or in part) was to demoralize people (I’ll assume he meant anybody who might resist the regime, pending a closer re-listen).
The idpol fanatic Commie-Nazis in the West are also making such demands. And they sure do seem to hold much more sway over Democrats, than Republicans.
Following 911, I was struck by the frequency of absurd claims and allegations made by the US government about threats which, not coincidentally, justified a “war on terror”, and used to wonder why. Recall one of the wildest ones was that Saddam Hussein would send Cessna airplanes across the Atlantic, to drop weapons of mass destruction. I didn’t bother looking up the range of a Cessna, figuring that if they had that sort of range, the ubiquitous Cessna owners would not have kept it a secret.
I recall, also, Scott Horton of antiwar.com saying something along the line of the Bush Administration not even seeming to care if their hysterical lies were soon rebutted, as long as they lasted about a week in the news cycle, to be replaced with fresh lies.
My conclusion was that the government manipulators weren’t just whipping up war hysteria, but they were also deliberately demoralizing their own population, and in fact inflicting a sort of feeling of unreality, almost like the state of consciousness when awakening from a dream, when you first seem to realize that you are dreaming. Except, the lovely Bushies were sending us in the other direction, towards unreality.
=======================
I might add that some success has been reported (e.g., on War Room Pandemic) pressuring Republican state legislators to tighten up voting laws, as well as authorizing forensic audits of the 2020 election. This process is just beginning, and no reasonable person would expect that corrupt RINOs have been largely rooted out of office, though spreading the word that the one thing elected officials do fear are credible primary challenges might be having an effect*. So, maybe some corrupt RINOs are contributing to honest changes, even if they are still enabling tricks to suppress voter turnout.
* As Pam Popper revealed, in her interview with Spiro Skouras.
mago
Maybe Hugh should get hip to toxic environmental factors that cause physical and mental abnormalities. Do a bit of self reflection/introspection. Get off the high horse. Or not. Better to think yourself righteous on the right hand side of god—a genius in your own mind.
someofparts
Well, getting the vaccine next week. Better than doing nothing, but not happy about it. I would prefer Ivermectin or one of the vaccines from Cuba, but I’m an American and we don’t actually do freedom around here, we just bullshit about it.
Here’s the funny thing I just realized. I shop at Trader Joe’s to avoid genetically modified foods. Now, after next week, I will be genetically modified. I guess that makes it even more important to avoid it in my food supply.
Ché Pasa
Damb, Antibody made me laugh out loud, knows nothing at all about how humans and other creatures can and do have ambiguous genders and cannot necessarily be assigned a correct gender at birth. The ignorance is astonishing. As for those who face gender dysphoria later, really try to read at least one paper on the topic.
Provable voter fraud cases are surpassingly rare (Note: it was once ridiculously frequent as any review of 19th century elections will show) and the only ones trying to get away with it are Rs. But these restrictive laws are not about fraud, they are about strictly limiting access. The kinds of fraud the Rs like to engage in can still take place — which is also the point.
joe
With solar and wind power the giant reservoirs we build in the west and now all over the world are obsolete. We no longer need them because we can use wind and solar generated electricity to pump ground water. The ground would have a lot more water in it if theses reservoirs didn’t trap it behind their dams. This would reduce the depth wells had to be. The water would be distributed by gravity, naturally. Using the ground where the water is actually needed as the reservoir has huge benefits. It is less damaging to the biologically productive and beautiful riparian, littoral, river bank habitat. The land consumed by reservoirs is left useless because of the bathtub ring of erosion around the fluctuating water level is often a dead zone. It massively reduces evaporation. The flood control aspect of a reservoir is redundant because they are always kept as full as possible anyway. When they are actually needed as flood control they have to spill uncontrolled to protect the dam. This is what happened at Shasta reservoir in northern California a few years ago when the spill way washed out and towns along the upper Sacramento river were at risk of inundation.We need to start removing the big dams. The benefits will be enormous. Under the current system the main beneficiaries are the massive farming corporations who get the public to pay for their water security.
Z
This Gaetz matter is getting very interesting.
I suspect that he was already being blackmailed by Zionist intelligence entities because his dad was apparently paying millions of dollars to “rescue” CIA asset Bob Levinson, who was kidnapped in 2011 while on the trail of Russian-Jewish mobman Mogilevich and is reportedly dead. The payments for the “rescue” of Levinson, probably a high profit low expenditure operation, would be a cover for the blackmail if this financial arrangement ever saw the light of day. Mogilevich, by the way, had ties with Ghislaine Maxwell’s very Mossad connected father Robert Maxwell. Apparently, from the article (https://www.theamericanconservative.com/state-of-the-union/leaked-texts-from-israeli-consular-official-show-more-details-in-gaetz-levinson-funding-scheme/), Jake Novak, media director of the Israeli consulate in New York City, knew about the payments being made by Gaetz’s father and Gaetz’s current legal predicament. Jake Novak, by the way, is also a CNBC contributor.
Gaetz’s pal Greenberg, who Gaetz probably shares an affinity for amphetamines with, appears to have been involved in a smaller, but similar operation as Epstein was and he may gotten overconfident that the Mossad had his back like they had Epstein’s and got grandiose and sloppy in his corruption and the local authorities and the FBI got onto him and the Mossad couldn’t pull them off. Once Greenberg turned on Gaetz, Gaetz may have decided that his best chance to get off was to point the matter back at the blackmail hoping that the U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies would do anything to keep focus off of the similarities to the Epstein situation and let him off easy like they did Epstein back in 2008.
We’ll see where it goes from here. It’s just a theory of mine, of course.
By the way, apparently Gaetz was being blackmailed for having sex with a 17 year old. That’s the way that I always thought they got Clinton too, with a girl who probably could pass for 19 or 20 and had the experience and confidence around men at that point to pull it off. As much as I don’t like Clinton, I could never see him getting involved in hardcore pedophilia.
Gaetz is rumored to be gay too and there are reports that he was involved in a death involving sex with a man years ago that his father bailed him out of.
Z
Hugh
“toxic environmental factors that cause physical and mental abnormalities”
I have seen some recent articles on declining sperm counts but I have been seeing those for the last 20 years. And sperm counts do not equate to sexual identity. Nor do they explain why the Greek and Roman world would look on our concentration on male/female heterosexuality as just weird.
I just do not see what the payoff is for you guys with your approach of conclusions first, forget or make up “facts” as needed.
Astrid
Che,
Intersex exists but is exceedingly rare https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
The vast majority of the conversation going on now isn’t about intersex people, it’s about people who feel they are born in the wrong body. It’s fine that they want to claim a different identity than what their biology dictated (though why draw the line at gender and not race or species or planetary origins?) but the trans activists are overreaching by denying that biology is really there and biology dictatrs things like who can gestate children and have greater physical strength and deeper voices and differing incidents of diseases.
edmondo
Monica and bruce are implying it’s blacks’ fault.
???
I am black.
The comments section here is funnier than anything I used to pay good money for. I am amazed that this many stupid people all read trhe same blog.
Monica
would support the Georgia legislation and also would have referred to the reaction to the legislation as “hysteria.”
I don’t support the legislation and never referred to the reaction to the legislation as “hysteria.”
Your angry diatribes are all about you. Get a life.
eduardo
I am amazed that this many stupid people all read the same blog.
Look in the mirror.
Renee
Maybe Hugh should get hip to toxic environmental factors that cause physical and mental abnormalities. Do a bit of self reflection/introspection. Get off the high horse. Or not. Better to think yourself righteous on the right hand side of god—a genius in your own mind.
This applies equally to Bruce. They’d make great lovers. The tension, the passion…
bruce wilder
I should “get hip” to toxic environmental factors? Huh? This would make me a great lover!??
I am so confused.
Renee
Bruce, my bad, I didn’t mean to confuse you by including the opening sentence in the quote.
Do a bit of self reflection/introspection. Get off the high horse. Or not. Better to think yourself righteous on the right hand side of god—a genius in your own mind.
This applies to you and Hugh equally. Eh, maybe you a bit more. Best.
Z
The person primarily responsible for the Biden Administration’s better than expected economic policies is probably Kamala Harris.
Z
someofparts
Renee – Bruce is one of the people who makes the comment section here worth spending time in. I suppose you are probably a decent person in various ways, but right now you are just being a really annoying troll.
someofparts
Oh, and this is what I came here to share before getting sidetracked by a troll (my bad).
https://mtracey.substack.com/p/yes-there-is-such-thing-as-gender
This is a deep dive into trans politics. It’s not pretty. It’s scary.
I’m also lifting this, and my remarks about it, from the trans thread below.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreversible_Damage
I haven’t read/won’t be reading the book. I learned about it by listening to the author on Joe Rogan for a couple of hours.
It sounds like, as usual, the problem is not the issue per se. As Ian points out, this has been a non-problem for other cultures that handled it without any fuss.
The problem is the way the matter is being processed through our oh-so-dysfunctional culture. It sounds like parents, psychologists, and even doctors are being pressured to stifle their doubts and do this for teenagers without proper oversight. That’s the problem.
I assume all of this fuss and bother is being gleefully picked up by our misleaders because it serves their purposes on a couple of levels. The first level is that it is wildly successful at spreading fear and distrust among people. The second level is that anyone who transitions is a financial goldmine for the medical profiteers for the rest of their lives.
Willy
“Unexpected Voter enthusiasm” was only a partial cause of Georgia’s long lines in 2020. Shelby v. Holder meant Georgia officials got more control over their own voting procedures and staffing. If most black voters vote D, then this suggests that Georgia is definitely turning blue:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/12/15/black-eligible-voters-have-accounted-for-nearly-half-of-georgia-electorates-growth-since-2000/
Obviously, Party R does not want this to happen. But Party D in Georgia is also involved with the polling conditions decision making. Does anybody know any other realistic reasons for 5-7 hour long polling lines, for a population which was obviously determined to vote?
Antibody
@Hugh
Do you believe ‘male’ and ‘female’ are simply human created constructs that only exist in our minds and can therefore be done away with on a whim? If a person who is born a man (or a woman) decides they want to live their life as a member of the opposite sex, that is one thing, but to say they then are that sex is where the reality denial comes in.
Woke influenced magazines like Teen Vogue now write “person with a vagina/penis” when referring to female/male humans. When they discuss pregnancy related issues they talk about “person with a cervix.” All references to men/boy and women/girls have been scrubbed.
Does biological sex now only apply to non-human animals? Do you think this new “reality” will become a widely accepted universal norm?
Antibody
@Ché Pasa
See my response to Hugh above. I’m not denying that intersex people or gender dysphoria exist. I’m saying that taking on the social characteristics of the opposite gender or feeling like you were born in the wrong body (if you were born biologically male or female) doesn’t make you a member of your preferred sex, even after gender reassignment surgery. Gender can be fluid, sex, not so much.
Hugh
Antibody, as I said, when this discussion began in another post, sex and gender form a spectrum. That spectrum can be defined genetically, developmentally, hormonally, psychologically, and culturally. The distribution is not smooth or continuous, but neither is it binary. That is people may tend to clump more in certain areas of the spectrum. But again this is not binary. And as I pointed out above, it isn’t fixed. Historically and culturally, there has been a lot more variability than we have now. At the same time, our knowledge of biology shows that fast and hard definitions simply don’t cover everyone.
stefan
Most important comment:
“The ground would have a lot more water in it if theses reservoirs didn’t trap it behind their dams. This would reduce the depth wells had to be. The water would be distributed by gravity, naturally. Using the ground where the water is actually needed as the reservoir has huge benefits. It is less damaging to the biologically productive and beautiful riparian, littoral, river bank habitat. The land consumed by reservoirs is left useless because of the bathtub ring of erosion around the fluctuating water level is often a dead zone. It massively reduces evaporation. The flood control aspect of a reservoir is redundant because they are always kept as full as possible anyway. When they are actually needed as flood control they have to spill uncontrolled to protect the dam. This is what happened at Shasta reservoir in northern California a few years ago when the spill way washed out and towns along the upper Sacramento river were at risk of inundation.We need to start removing the big dams. The benefits will be enormous. Under the current system the main beneficiaries are the massive farming corporations who get the public to pay for their water security.”
Thanks joe.
different clue
Joe’s comment is certainly something important to think about.
I wonder if it is correct in some but not all cases.
Since water fall thinly distributed over a whole expanse of land before it ever reaches a river to begin with, I wonder if better-sponge-ifying the land it falls on, so more of it can soak vertically downward in place, might raise the amount of groundwater building up in place by preventing any of that water from even reaching a river/reservoir to begin with.