Republican political scandals, not involving Trump

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Awrrr
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#2226735 28-Apr-2019 12:43

Donald Trump. The Republican Party, Fox News, and Right Wing Hate Radio cannot be preemptively shut down because that would create a precedent that might be used against liberal, progressive, democratic speech. Oh wait....

Plesse igmore amd axxept applogies in adbance fir anu typos

kingdragonfly

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#2228143 30-Apr-2019 19:18

Twitter reportedly won't use an algorithm to crack down on white supremacists because some GOP politicians could end up getting barred too

By Grace Panetta

A possible algorithm that could allow Twitter to more effectively crack down on neo-Nazi and white-supremacist content could report and suspend accounts of Republican politicians, Motherboard, Vice’s tech-news site, reported.
Twitter has come under intense scrutiny in recent months by critics who say the platform doesn’t do enough to crack down on harmful white-supremacist rhetoric.
While Twitter used an algorithm to flag ISIS-linked content and all but eliminated ISIS propaganda, a similar algorithm for white nationalism could sweep up content tweeted by conservative figures.
A number of prominent Republicans, including President Donald Trump, have publicly accused Twitter of bias against conservatives.

Twitter is holding back from implementing a possible algorithm that could allow Twitter to more effectively crack down on neo-Nazi and white-supremacist content over concerns it could report accounts of Republican politicians, according to a report from Vice News’ tech site, Motherboard.

A Twitter employee told Motherboard that at a recent company-wide meeting, an employee asked why Twitter – which has successfully used a sophisticated algorithm to identify and almost entirely eliminate ISIS-linked content – couldn’t do the same for white-supremacist tweets.

According to the employee, another employee that works on artificial-intelligence (AI) issues said that such a sweeping and wide-ranging algorithm could result in some innocent accounts being flagged by accident, which may not be an acceptable trade-off.

In a separate conversation, Motherboard reported, the AI-focused employee said one concern with a white-supremacist algorithm was that it would inadvertently flag the accounts of some Republican politicians, potentially causing a backlash.
,,,

kingdragonfly

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#2230375 3-May-2019 17:12

Independently confirmed, by many sources, after this article published.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/far-right-smear-merchants-jacob-wohl-and-jack-burkman-try-to-slime-pete-buttigieg-with-bogus-sex-assault-claim

Far-Right Smear Merchants Try to Slime Pete Buttigieg with Bogus Sex Assault Claim

The mayor was briefly accused of assaulting a young man. A GOP source says right-wing operatives Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman approached him to make similarly untrue accusations.

A pair of right-wing provocateurs are being accused of attempting to recruit young Republican men to level false allegations of sexual assault against Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg.

The details of the operatives’ attempt emerged as one man suddenly surfaced with a vague and uncorroborated allegation that Buttigieg had assaulted him. The claim was retracted hours later.

A Republican source told The Daily Beast that lobbyist Jack Burkman and internet troll Jacob Wohl approached him last week to try to convince him to falsely accuse Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, of engaging him sexually while he was too drunk to consent.

The source who spoke to The Daily Beast said Burkman and Wohl made clear that their goal was to kneecap Buttigieg’s momentum in the 2020 presidential race. The man asked to remain anonymous out of a concern that the resulting publicity might imperil his employment, and because he said Wohl and Burkman have a reputation for vindictiveness.

But the source provided The Daily Beast with a surreptitious audio recording of the meeting, which corroborates his account. In it, Wohl appears to refer to Buttigieg as a “terminal threat” to President Donald Trump’s reelection next year.

More details on webpage

kingdragonfly

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#2230381 3-May-2019 17:33

Published after the previous story

https://www.thedailybeast.com

‘Make Sh!t Up’: Inside Jacob Wohl’s Bonkers Investment Plan

The bumbling political operative pitched investors on a scheme to use fake news stories to manipulate political betting markets for profit.

Bumbling conservative provocateur Jacob Wohl pitched investors this spring on a scheme to use fraudulent news stories to manipulate political betting markets, according to a fundraising document obtained by The Daily Beast.

The document indicates that Wohl attempted to raise $1 million to fund the Arlington Center for Political Intelligence, which he claimed would “make sh!t up” to profit from bets on political races and would suppress Democratic turnout in 2020.

“Backers will use ACPI’s insights in order to place profitable bets on political outcomes,” the pitch reads, adding that the group would also place bets themselves to guarantee a source of revenue.

The “confidential brief” makes other ambitious claims—promising to infiltrate 2020 Democratic campaigns and improve on social-media manipulation by Russian troll farms to wreak havoc on Democrats.

It’s not clear how Wohl, who has become notorious for failing at nearly every dirty tricks plot he hatches, would have pulled any of it off.
...

Rikkitic

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#2230401 3-May-2019 18:15

“A man is known by the company he keeps” - Aesop

Plesse igmore amd axxept applogies in adbance fir anu typos

kingdragonfly

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#2236786 14-May-2019 17:13

So in Georgia, no abortions after 6 weeks.

In case of a pregnancy by incest, the woman can only get an abortion if she files a police report first.

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2019/03/228426/abortion-restrictions-41-states-georgia-fetal-heartbeat-bill-report

In the US, 250 Abortion Restrictions Have Been Introduced This Year Alone, Report Says

Amid constant news of unconstitutional abortion bans like Georgia's "fetal heartbeat bill," passed on Friday, a new report found that anti-choice lawmakers in 41 states have introduced over 250 bills restricting access to abortion care in the first months of 2019 alone. The report was released on Wednesday by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Guttmacher Institute.

For years, conservative lawmakers have relentlessly introduced and passed measures such as waiting periods, targeted regulation of abortion providers (TRAP) laws, limits on abortion medication, and restrictions that dictate at which point in their pregnancies women can terminate them. The anti-choice crusade has led to an uptick in abortion deserts, places where people have to travel 100 miles or more to access care. A total of six states has been left with only one abortion provider to serve the entire state.

With the blessing of President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence and the ideological balance of the U.S. Supreme Court having been officially cemented to the right, anti-choice lawmakers are emboldened. "Energized by a new Supreme Court, anti-abortion activists and politicians have kicked into high gear their decades-long agenda to ban abortion through a series of increasingly radical and dangerous abortion bans," Elizabeth Nash, senior state issues manager at Guttmacher Institute, said in a statement. She added: "At their core, abortion restrictions are about exerting control and power over pregnant people. The surge in attempts to ban abortion in the earliest stages of pregnancy drives home that the end goal of anti-abortion politicians and activists is to ban all abortion — at any point during pregnancy and for any reason."

BarTender

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#2236794 14-May-2019 17:26

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/05/11/group-raised-more-than-million-build-wall-now-some-supporters-want-answers/

I'm shocked that it was all a scam.

kingdragonfly

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#2239358 16-May-2019 16:55

25 Republican Men Ban Abortion In Alabama

Alabama Republican controlled Senate passed a near-total abortion ban, posing a challenge to the Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, which allows women to terminate pregnancies.

Alabama medical professionals can get 99 years in prison.

No exceptions for rape or incest.

kingdragonfly

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#2240150 17-May-2019 19:29

Ted Cruz Says Trump’s Space Force Is Necessary To Fight Space Pirates

The Ring of Fire

Republican Senator Ted Cruz may have seen one too many science fictions movies recently, as he warned us during a Senate speech that we need Trump’s Space Force in order to protect us against space pirates. Cruz then got angry at Twitter for highlighting all the criticism of his statements without showcasing his explanation. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains Cruz’s stupid comment and why his full explanation is actually worse.

Fred99

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#2242885 22-May-2019 07:23

The "Lock Her Up" party of hypocrites.

Betsy DeVos joins the list of people in the Trump Administration who use private email for government business.

Mike Pence (as Indiana governor); Jared Kushner; Ivanka Trump; Steve Bannon; Reince Priebus; Gary Cohn; Stephen Miller; K.T. McFarland; James Comey; Kris Kobach and other former members of Trump’s bogus voter fraud commission; John Gore, to correspond with members of the President’s bogus voter fraud commission; and Scott Pruitt (as EPA administrator and Oklahoma attorney general).

kingdragonfly

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#2243230 22-May-2019 17:18

Ben Carson is on Trump's cabinet. Ben is in charge of HUD, which is more-or-less equivalent of public housing / MSD housing.

Ben appears to have zero idea what his department does, or anything about homelessness or public housing at all.

If he looks familiar it's because he was one of the Republican candidates in 2016. If you want to read about his stupidity, check this out

https://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/ben-carson-controversial-quotes-214614

Ben Carson Gave ‘Zero Competent Answers’ In Hearing

The Last Word

MSNBC

kingdragonfly

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#2246058 26-May-2019 18:56

Rough language. Not safe for work

Sex Ed for Senators
Extended Act 1
Full Frontal on TBS

kingdragonfly

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#2246471 27-May-2019 13:25

Finding Rick Perry: The Missing Secretary Of Energy

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

Stephen Colbert assembles a team of experts to investigate the whereabouts of the world's most elusive creature: Secretary of Energy Rick Perry.

kingdragonfly

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#2248014 29-May-2019 20:13

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/28/don-jr-roy-moore-alabama-senate-1346089

Don Jr. warns Roy Moore: Stay out of Alabama Senate race
BY James Arkin

Donald Trump Jr. on Tuesday warned Roy Moore not to run for Senate again in Alabama, calling him the only candidate who could lose the race for Republicans.

Moore lost the 2017 special Senate election to Democrat Doug Jones after the former judge faced allegations of decades-old inappropriate sexual interactions with young girls. He has expressed interest in running again next year, and many Republicans expect him to mount another campaign for Senate, a worst-case scenario for the party’s hopes of winning back the seat.

“You are literally the only candidate who could lose a GOP seat in pro-Trump, pro-USA ALABAMA,” Trump Jr. tweeted at Moore on Tuesday. “Running for office should never become a business model. If you actually care about #MAGA more than your own ego, it’s time to ride off into the sunset, Judge.”

Trump Jr. was responding to a tweet in which Moore taunted Rep. Bradley Byrne, one of the Republicans running to face Jones next fall. Byrne told The Hill that he expects Moore to enter the race soon but didn’t think he could win the nomination because of the baggage from his previous run.

“What is Bradley so worried about?” Moore tweeted. “He knows that if I run I will beat Doug Jones.”

Republicans in Washington have vowed to oppose Moore and think the former judge would put the Alabama race in jeopardy again. Jones won by less than 2 percentage points in 2017 and is the most vulnerable incumbent senator on the ballot in 2020. Earlier this year, Jones taunted Moore about running again, saying, “Let’s just do it again.”

Funny how Trump and kin have changed their minds, since 2017

kingdragonfly

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#2250904 4-Jun-2019 10:06

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-a-large-scale-effort-to-register-black-voters-led-to-a-crackdown-in-tennessee/2019/05/24/9f6cee1e-7284-11e9-8be0-ca575670e91c_story.html

How a large-scale effort to register black voters led to a crackdown in Tennessee

By Amy Gardner
May 24

Last year, an army of paid workers with stacks of voter registration forms fanned out in Memphis, Nashville and other parts of Tennessee to persuade African Americans to vote. They walked the parking lots of grocery stores and laundromats, stood outside church services, and cajoled revelers on party buses and at nightclubs.

By October, the Tennessee Black Voter Project took credit for turning in more than 90,000 voter registration applications — what organizers hoped would be a first step in a broader effort to get more African Americans to be a regular force in elections.

But the surge of forms that landed in the months before Election Day was chaotic and consuming, according to officials in the state’s two largest counties, which include Memphis and Nashville. Thousands of applications had errors or omissions, they said, and their workers were overwhelmed by the task of verifying all the forms.

The state’s top elections official, a former Republican lawmaker named Mark Goins, called the crush of applications and the errors they contained a “dangerous” situation for others who were “properly” trying to register.

He proposed a solution that went further than any other state had: imposing civil penalties on groups that employ paid canvassers if they submit incomplete or inaccurate voter registration forms.

“We want to provide for fair, for genuine — for elections with integrity,” Republican Gov. Bill Lee said when he signed the bill May 2.

The new law, which will take effect Oct. 1 unless the courts intervene, imposes penalties of up to $2,000 for each county where an organization with paid workers submits more than 100 deficient forms. The fine gets much steeper — up to $10,000 per county — where the number of deficient forms exceeds 500.

What played out in Tennessee illustrates the messiness that has accompanied some large-scale efforts to draw new Democratic voters into the electorate, providing an opening for critics to push for stricter rules. The fallout is part of a national clash between the two parties over access to the polls — one fueled by energized efforts on the left to expand the voting pool and new limits backed by Republican lawmakers, who often echo President Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud.

There is no definitive account of what exactly went wrong in Tennessee last year. Republicans, who control all arms of the government — including the state and county election commissions — did not formally investigate the matter before moving to pass the new law. As a result, there is no official account of how many applications were faulty, the source of the problems and whether the Tennessee Black Voter Project was to blame.

Local elections officials said the vast majority of problems were basic omissions, often in a single field on the forms — not the more egregious examples that can raise suspicions of fraud.

Nonetheless, as the issue played out in the legislature, lawmakers focused on forms with fake names, or those of dead people or ineligible felons. They also used unverified and inconsistent figures to emphasize the threat of fraud, which has long been illegal in Tennessee, to further their case to impose new penalties on forms with mistakes and omissions.

The new law has prompted two federal lawsuits accusing Tennessee of voter suppression.

“They have created more administrative hurdles to make it harder to vote,” said Charlane Oliver, a co-founder of the Equity Alliance, one of the partners of the Tennessee Black Voter Project. “And that’s exactly what they want. They don’t want black people to vote.”

Through a spokeswoman, Goins and his boss, Secretary of State Tre Hargett, declined requests for interviews, citing ongoing litigation. The office of Lee, the governor, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

A crush before Election Day

With nearly 1 million residents, more than half of them African American, Shelby County is home to Memphis and Tennessee’s largest concentration of black residents.

Linda Phillips, Shelby County’s election administrator, said she began hearing of issues last summer related to a new and aggressive voter registration drive underway across the city.

There were complaints that canvassers were being paid on a quota system, creating an incentive for them to submit large quantities of forms, even if they weren’t complete or valid, she said. Organizers with the voter project denied that they paid workers on a quota system.

As the state’s Oct. 9 registration deadline approached, Phillips said, thousands of forms were submitted. As her staff worked through them, they discovered that many had problems, she said. Multiple forms featured the same name. Required fields weren’t filled out. Some had only a first name or were missing an address. One said “Melvin” and nothing else, according to a batch reviewed by The Washington Post. About 1,300 were from felons, who are ineligible to vote, Phillips said.

County election officials’ effort to track down voters to fix their applications was challenging because some addresses didn’t exist and others belonged to vacant lots. One phone number led to a man in Nova Scotia, Phillips said.

On the final day, the Tennessee Black Voter Project — the largest third-party registration drive working in the Memphis area, Phillips said — dropped off 10,000 applications.

“We were working 12- to 18-hour shifts,” Phillips recalled. “At one point I and my supervisors didn’t have a day off for 45 days. The burden that it placed on us literally was going to prevent us from doing our job. I thought my assistant was going to crawl under her desk and sob.”

Jeff Roberts, Phillips’s counterpart in Davidson County, home to Nashville, described a similar crush. Every two weeks starting in July, Roberts’s office received a box in the mail with hundreds of forms, many of them containing errors or omissions.

Roberts said his office set up a “triage” system to go through the boxes. But many notices to voters with deficient forms bounced back, he said.

Organizers of the registration drive acknowledged some errors but said they believe that the rate of problems was far lower than what county and state officials claimed — and no different from the error rate among registration forms overall.

The Equity Alliance’s Oliver said the Tennessee Black Voter Project had sought guidance ahead of time from local election officials and warned them of the volume of forms coming.

Under Tennessee law, it is a crime for anyone to discard a completed voter registration form. Oliver said organizers believed they were required to turn in incomplete or inaccurate applications, based on guidance from local election officials.

A 'debacle' in Shelby County

After the election, Goins examined errant forms in Shelby and Davidson counties, he told lawmakers in public hearings this spring, and became convinced that legislative action was needed.

Goins did not request a complete accounting of all the errors. Instead, he offered anecdotal stories to lawmakers about the errors he had seen or heard about.

“It became a situation where it was very dangerous for other individuals who were properly trying to register, because we were so backlogged,” he told lawmakers.

Republican state Rep. Tim Rudd, one of the bill’s sponsors, repeated the claim that some drives were paying canvassers by the form when he introduced the bill in a committee hearing in March. “So they were just signing people up and flooding them,” he said. “So this is an effort to clean that up.”

Republican state Rep. Mike Carter, a lawmaker from the outskirts of Chattanooga, called what played out in Shelby County a “debacle.” In an interview, Carter said the volume of problematic forms prevented “honest voters” from being able to vote but acknowledged that he could not provide an instance of that.

GOP lawmakers also cited examples of the kind of registration fraud that is already a crime under Tennessee law. In one hearing, Goins, the state election coordinator, read an outraged letter from a man who had just received confirmation of his wife’s registration, even though she had died in 2016.

“ ‘Her change of address now is in heaven,’ ” Goins said, reading the letter. “ ‘No Zip code there.’ And so that’s the chaos we were seeing.”

Goins did not say how many attempts to register a dead person occurred in the fall. Phillips said she knew of two or three instances in Shelby County. Roberts, in Davidson County, said he was aware of one dead person showing up on a form. He noted that such instances are not necessarily fraud and could result from using a wrong Social Security number.

To support the contention that canvassers had been paid for each form they collected on a quota system, Goins cited a single anonymous source claiming to have worked for a third-party registration drive under such an incentive program.

But Oliver said that workers for the Tennessee Black Voter Project, which was the largest registration effort in the state last fall, were paid by the hour and that they did not use a quota system. She also said lawmakers never asked about it, and she accused them of targeting paid drives because they typically operate in minority communities.

Intensive voter registration efforts appear to have had an effect in Tennessee: Turnout among black voters rose from 31 percent to 45 percent from 2014 to 2018, according to U.S. Census data.

“This is how they suppress the vote,” Oliver said. “You can’t sit here and tell me this is about election integrity. It’s not. This is about keeping black people in their place. We caught them off guard, and now they have to come up with a law to stifle that energy and that effort.”

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