Category: Voting Rights

Monday Wake Up Call – February 15, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Nauset Light, Cape Cod, MA  – February 2021 photo by Michael Blanchette photography

The impeachment trial is behind us, but the Big Lie of the 2020 election, that there was massive voting fraud, remains with us. That Lie is propelling Republicans in many states to try to minimize, or end entirely, mail-in voting.

Republicans have reason to worry. Mail-in voting alone constituted nearly half the votes cast in the 2020 election, a significant increase from previous years. This chart from 538 shows the remarkable decline in same-day voting in America:

Traditional same day, in-person voting has dropped from more than 90% of ballots cast in the 1990s to 60% in 2016, to just 28% in 2020. Early in-person and vote-by-mail now accounts for 71% of total voting.

Overall, despite the Big Lie, early and by mail voting was a remarkable success. It was less prone to errors than expected, and had almost zero documented fraud. As expected, 538 reports that absentee votes broke blue, Election Day votes, red. They only have data for 15 of the 50 states, but it is consistent:

“Biden won the absentee vote in 14 out of the 15 states (all but Texas), and Trump won the Election Day vote in 14 out of the 15 as well (all but Connecticut).”

Trump used this historic change in voting patterns to claim that Democrats used mail ballots to steal the election. Now, in a backlash to the historic trends in voter turnout, Republicans are again looking to make it more difficult to vote.

A new report by the Brennan Center for Justice shows that legislators in 33 states have introduced 165 bills to restrict voting rights. The proposals primarily seek to: a) limit mail voting access; b) impose stricter voter ID requirements; c) slash voter registration opportunities; and d) enable more aggressive voter roll purges.

Many of these bills parrot the same lies Trump used to claim the election was stolen. And they’re sponsored by the same state officials who backed Trump’s efforts to reverse the results of the election.

Remember how narrow the Biden win was: he won three states by a combined margin of 43,560 votes: Arizona (10,457 votes), Georgia (12,636 votes), and Wisconsin (20,467 votes). These three states have 37 electoral votes, and had Trump won all three, the Electoral College would have been tied, 269 to 269. Then the House would have determined the winner, with each state delegation getting one vote. Since the Republicans hold a majority of state delegations, Trump would have won a second term.

It was worse. The WaPo reports that

“Republicans came, at most, 43,000 votes from winning each of the three levers of power.”

Just 32,000 votes would have flipped control of the House to Republicans, while 14,000 votes would have kept control of the Senate in Republican hands. The Republicans have a built-in structural advantage in all three political levers of power: In the House it’s gerrymandering; in the Senate it’s the population imbalance favoring rural states; and in the White House, it’s the Electoral College.

So, beating back voting restrictions has to be a top priority.

Republicans have been restricting voting for years. We were lucky that state and local election officials acted in the best interests of the people and the country. That may not happen next time, so these anti-democratic pieces of legislation must be highlighted publicly and fought tooth-and-nail.

Think for a minute about last week’s impeachment trial: 34 GOP senators representing just 14.5% of the US population can block the conviction of an impeached president. Said another way, the 57 senators who voted to convict Trump represent 76.7 million more Americans than the 43 senators who voted to acquit him.

We should also remember that every state sets its own rules when it comes to voting and counting the votes. And we’ll soon see the impact of Republican gerrymandering, once the 2020 census is complete. The long-term solution is a Constitutional amendment that finally establishes that all citizens have the right to vote, and describes the approved methods of voting.

Time to wake up America! Voting reform must be a top priority just behind beating the Coronavirus and getting kids back in school. To help you wake up, listen to John Fogerty perform his newest, “Weeping In The Promised Land“, released this January:

Partial Lyrics:

Forked-tongued pharaoh, behold he comes to speak

Weeping in the Promised Land

Hissing and spewing, it’s power that he seeks

Weeping in the Promised Land

With dread in their eyes, all the nurses are crying

So much sorrow, so much dying

Pharaoh keep a-preaching but he never had a plan

Weeping in the Promised Land

Weeping in the Promised Land

This is another very powerful video, a must-watch.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Monday Wake Up Call – MLK Jr. Day -January 18, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Third Selma March, 1965 – photo by Charles Fentress Jr  shows Frank Calhoun, 16, of Meridian, MS, his face smeared with white suntan lotion and the word “VOTE” written on his forehead.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. helped lead marchers on March 21 to March 25 from Selma, Alabama to the state capital in Montgomery. It was their third attempt after a brutal crackdown by police on their first try on March 7, that caused the injuries that resulted in calling the first march “Bloody Sunday.”

On Aug. 6, President Lyndon Johnson signed the national Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the VRA, with its decision in Shelby County vs. Holder.

Since Martin Luther King Jr delivered his iconic “I have a dream” speech in August 1963, the number of Black Americans elected to the US Congress has dramatically increased. But it took until 2019, more than 54 years later, for the share of Black members serving in the House of Representatives to equal the percentage of Black Americans in the US population (12%).

To date, only seven states have sent a Black representative to the US Senate, and many states have never elected a Black representative to either House of Congress.

Here’s a look at Black representation in every US Congress since 1963:

A few words on the Voting Rights Act of 1965: Since the Voting Rights Act was gutted in 2013, 1,688 polling places have been shuttered in states previously bound by the Act’s preclearance requirement. Texas officials closed 750 polling places. Arizona and Georgia were almost as bad. Unsurprisingly, these closures were mostly in communities of color.

In December 2019, the House passed HR 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, now named the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act, to restore the safeguards of the original VRA. It’s been collecting dust on Mitch McConnell’s desk ever since. He and his GOP colleagues continue to sit idly by as Republican state officials suppress the vote with no accountability.

If your vote didn’t count, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to suppress it. There’s no telling what change we’ll be able to make once we win the battle for voting rights.

So, time to wake up America! Change has to come. The fight didn’t start with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and it didn’t end with John Lewis. The fight continues. To help you wake up, listen again to Sam Cooke’s “A Change Gonna Come”. It was released as a single in December 1964.

Cooke was inspired by hearing Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind”, and was also moved by Dr. King’s August 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. But it was Cooke’s experience in October 1963, when he and his entourage were turned away from a whites-only Holiday Inn in Shreveport, Louisiana, despite having reservations – that directly triggered him to write “A Change is Gonna Come.”

“Change” was released as a single two weeks after Cooke’s murder at age 33 on Dec. 11, 1964. It was quickly embraced by civil rights activists.

Still relevant, in so many ways, it’s possible to see it as a comprehensive review of the Trump administration. The linked video is as powerful to watch as the lyrics to Cooke’s song are to hear:

 

Facebooklinkedinrss

Monday Wake Up Call – 24 Hours to Go, November 2, 2020

(There will not be a column on Election Day or Wednesday unless something huge happens. Normal posting will resume on Thursday.)

The Daily Escape:

BREAKING! Investigation by the Wrongologist confirms Trump’s claims about voter fraud!

24 hours to go, fingers crossed. The next few days are going to have plenty of emotional ups and downs.

Even if the result is a Biden victory, waiting for it is going to be nearly unbearable. The alternative outcome? A disaster. Voters’ opinions always tighten in the last few days, so there isn’t a ton of reassurance to take from the last minute polls.

Wrongo wrote 25 posts in October, containing about 18,000 words, mostly about national politics. It seems like there shouldn’t be much more to say, but here goes.

With early voting nearly over, more than 91 million Americans have already cast their ballots. If the current rate holds, more than 100 million ballots will have been cast before Tuesday. That massive early turnout will equal about 72% of the 139 million votes cast in 2016, and for the first time in history, a majority of ballots will have been cast before Election Day.

Some slightly encouraging news. A new NYT/Sienna poll (November 1) shows Biden leading in several battleground states:

In Pennsylvania, Siena College says that only about 33% have voted early. Those who’ve already voted favor Biden 79%-16%. But among the two-thirds yet to vote, Trump has a 57%-34% lead. The math says that if those numbers hold, Biden will get 48.4% to Trump’s 42.9% of the vote, with ± 7% undecided. Trump would have to take all of the PA undecideds to come out on top, so Biden seems to have the advantage.

Again, this sounds good, but Republicans aren’t going to lay down in their efforts to steal the election.

For one piece of proof, the WaPo says that it reviewed an email in which Trump’s camp sought ballot security information from Cumberland County in Pennsylvania: They wanted the names of people who transport the ballots after the polls close, the names of people who have access to the ballots afterward, and precise information about where ballots are stored, including room numbers.

We know this because of an alarmed commissioner. You can bet this is going on across the US, and Trump is actively encouraging it. Here’s a 3am tweet:

“If Sleepy Joe Biden is actually elected President, the 4 Justices (plus1) that helped make such a ridiculous win possible would be relegated to sitting on not only a heavily PACKED COURT, but probably a REVOLVING COURT as well. At least the many new Justices will be Radical Left!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 30, 2020

Trump is making it clear not only that he is planning to contest the results of the election all the way to the Supreme Court, but that he fully expects the Court to hand him the win.

Think about this: Two years after Obama won in 2008, helped by an unprecedented small donor campaign, John Roberts writes the majority opinion in Citizens United which allows GOP donors to tip the scales going forward.

A year after Obama won in 2012 with record minority turnout, John Roberts wrote the majority opinion striking down key parts of the Voting Rights Act which immediately led GOP-run states to enact barriers to minority voting.

And now SCOTUS, with three Justices (including Roberts) that were part of the Republican team in 2000 in Florida that helped GW Bush win at the Supreme Court, is poised to disqualify millions of legitimate votes to keep the GOP in power.

Robert Kagan in the WaPo had a great article on Friday:

“We kept counting on others to save us — our institutions, our political leaders, our courts — but help never arrived…And as we waited for someone, anyone, to do the right thing, we moved closer to the end….Now all we have left is the people. The voters, for all their failings, may prove more trustworthy than their supposed guardians. They may deliver us by delivering an irrefutable landslide to Biden. Or, failing that, by going out into the streets in an American version of “people power” to foil the plot against their democracy.”

Will the system work? That we even have to ask the question is the answer.

It may come down to mass demonstrations, just like we’ve seen in dictatorships. Sometimes the guns are aimed at the people; sometimes they’re aimed at the despot.

Wake up America, it comes down to us. At the ballot box, or if necessary, in the streets. To help you wake up, listen to “I Wanna Be Sedated” from the Ramone’s 1978 album “Road to Ruin”. Being sedated for the next few days doesn’t sound so bad:

Chorus:

Twenty, twenty, twenty, four hours to go

I wanna be sedated

Nothing to do, nowhere to go,

Oh I wanna be sedated

Facebooklinkedinrss

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – 48 Hours to Go Edition, November 1, 2020

Just 48 hours to go.

Has anyone else noticed that since his impeachment, Trump has lost a step? He no longer speaks about fighting the system, or his accomplishments. It’s all about how he’s been ganged up on, and mistreated. Maybe impeaching him wasn’t a complete failure after all.

We’ll see in two days if the blame game was a winning strategy:

It may be hopeful news or maybe just a deep fake, but several outlets are reporting that Trump has canceled his election night party. The party was to be held at the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC, but instead, he’ll party at the White House.

But here’s a good reason to be nervous. Forbes reports that the Post Office is failing to deliver on time in key places:

“Battleground states in the presidential election are suffering from some of the worst ballot delivery delays in the country….and with state laws or court rulings requiring mail-in ballots to be received by Election Day, several states face a particularly high risk of voters having their ballots arrive too late to count, potentially impacting close races.”

Every Vote should be counted! Shouldn’t the Supreme Court support that?

Since January, the GOP has filed more than 230 lawsuits about voting:

Not all the gravestones are about Halloween:

The ghost of elections past:

Facebooklinkedinrss

Four Days to Go

The Daily Escape:

Full color at Smugglers Notch, Jeffersonville, VT – October, 2020 photo by Kyle Seymour Photography

Four days to go. Lots of people want to check out, to stop thinking about the election or about the Coronavirus. People are fatigued by the partisanship, by the tsunami of misinformation on social media, and the incessant and repetitive commercials.

Wrongo was texted nearly 20 times yesterday by various candidates begging for money. His email is flooded with all caps scare messages from the Parties or from specific candidates. Unsubscribing is fruitless, they will worry about that next month, if ever.

Who can blame people for wanting it to be over? The fact is, this whole Covid-45 presidency has been stressful, with little or no downtime for a break.

Here’s some frightening information: The NYT reports that the stress of presidential elections may increase the incidence of heart attacks and strokes: Scientists tracked hospitalizations for acute cardiovascular disease in the weeks before and after the 2016 presidential election, among about three million adults who were enrolled in the Kaiser Permanente Southern California health care system:

“The study, in PNAS, found that hospitalizations for cardiovascular disease in the two days following the election were 61% higher than in the same two days of the preceding week. The rate of heart attack increased by 67% and of stroke by 59% in the two days following the election. The results were similar regardless of the age, race or sex of the patients.”

Wow, we knew that Trump has been bad for the health of all Americans. But more heart attacks and strokes just because America holds an election?

So try and relax over the next few days. Protect yourself: Maybe go out to dinner on Election Night. Get a massage. Turn off notifications on your mobile phone, and don’t turn on your TV before 9pm.

There were two election cases decided by the Supreme Court on Wednesday. One was in North Carolina. From the AP:

That led to this tweet from Adam Sewer:

The other case was in Pennsylvania, where the Court refused a plea from Republicans that it decide before Election Day whether election officials can continue receiving absentee ballots for three days after Nov. 3. While the PA order was unsigned, it was apparently unanimous, though three justices (Alito, Thomas and Gorsuch) said the court might return to it after Election Day.

In the North Carolina case, the same three Justices, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, said they would have granted requests from Republican lawmakers and the Trump campaign to block lower court rulings allowing the longer deadline.

The two cases involved similar issues. In Pennsylvania, the question was whether the state’s Supreme Court could override voting rules set by the state legislature. In North Carolina, the question was whether a state election board had the power to alter voting rules set by the legislature.

On Wednesday, Justice Alito said he thought that the election would be “conducted under a cloud”:

“I reluctantly conclude that there is simply not enough time at this late date to decide the question before the election….Although the court denies the motion to expedite…[the petition] remains before us, and if it is granted, the case can then be decided under a shortened schedule.”

This is the Supreme Court saying that the election is proceeding under a cloud, and that they reserve the right to revisit their opinion!

They just gave Trump a green light to protest the election.

We should never normalize how bizarre it is that we are all having to expend an inordinate amount of energy making sure that our votes get counted. Even the Supreme Court isn’t clearly on the correct side of making certain that all votes count. That shouldn’t be normal.

America’s in the midst of changing how we vote, from largely in-person on Election Day, to largely In advance, either by mail or through in-person early voting. States and counties need to adapt to this revolutionary change, and that will take time to get it right.

We should designate Election Day as a National Holiday.

America actually holds 50 state elections for president, not a national election. We need to change state and local laws to allow for counting the early voting before Election Day. All states should count all ballots so long as they are postmarked on Election Day. After all, the IRS accepts your tax return without penalty based on the postmark, not when it is opened.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Associate Supreme Court Justice Amy Barrett

The Daily Escape:

Cape Cod pond  with red shack – October 2020 by Michael Blanchette Photography

Amy Coney Barrett is now a Supreme Court Associate Justice.

It is the first time in 151 years (since Edwin Stanton in 1869) that a justice was confirmed by the Senate without the support of a single member of the minority party. Even Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WVA), who backed Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 (and Barrett for her circuit court seat three years ago), didn’t support her this time.

As Marsha Coyle noted on PBS, the Supreme Court went 11 years until 2005 without a change in Justices. In the next four years, the Court saw seven new Justices. Now we’ve seen three more in just four more years.

Justices are staying on the Court longer. In the 19th Century, the average tenure of a Justice was less than 10 years, due mainly to shorter life expectancy. Now that it’s becoming increasingly common for them to serve into their 80s, Justices are serving for 25 years, or more.

All of this is background to what we’ll have to get used to from Amy Barrett in the next few decades, including this quasi-campaign event:

There were understandably a few negative reactions:

Whatever happens going forward, please, please let’s not call her “ACB” as if she is some great legal mind akin to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Barrett is to RBG what Clarence Thomas is to Thurgood Marshall; a facsimile of a Supreme Court Justice.

The NYT has a series of articles on How to Fix the Supreme Court that are worth your time. In one article, Emily Bazelon says this:

“….Republican dominance over the court is itself counter-majoritarian. Including Amy Barrett, the Party has picked six of the last 10 justices although it has lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections…”

The Republican Party doesn’t represent the majority of Americans. So it tries to achieve its goals by other means, even if that means perverting the intent of our Constitutional system.

We know that clear majorities of Americans favor reproductive rights, limiting political donations, stricter gun control and reversing climate change. But since the GOP controls the courts, it hopes to prevent these viewpoints from ever becoming law.

Movement conservatives are using a theory of judicial construction (Originalism) that didn’t exist until about 40 years ago. And they’re using it to overturn long-standing precedents, while also inventing novel constructions not found in the Constitution when it suits them (see Shelby County vs. Holder).

Among the options addressed in the Times’ article are: (i) Dividing the work of the Supreme Court into two parts, Constitutional issues and all others that concern interpretation of existing laws and statues. This would establish a Constitutional Court, an idea that several other countries have instituted (among them, France, Germany, and South Africa); (ii) Term limits for Supreme Court Justices; (iii) Adding more Justices to the Supreme Court; and (iv) Expanding the lower Federal Courts.

The Framers rejected the idea of a judicial retirement age. It was envisioned that a lawyer would need a lifetime of experience to become fully versed in the precedents that would govern their decisions as a Supreme Court Justice. But now, we have Amy Barrett serving as a Justice at age 48. The youngest Supreme Court judge ever was Republican Joseph Story, who was 32 when James Madison appointed him.

OTOH, term limits almost certainly require a Constitutional Amendment, since it would create an involuntary retirement from the Court.

Biden has said he will convene a commission to study Supreme Court reform. That kicks the can down the road. This is probably a good idea for now, until we see the decisions made by the current conservative majority in a few of the signature cases coming up this term. There is now a 6-3 MODERATE conservative majority on the Court, and depressingly, a 5-4 REACTIONARY majority on the Court.

For now, all we can do to change the Court is vote out of power those Republicans who denied Obama an appointment, only to cram three Justices through on Trump’s watch. We start by flipping the Senate in November.

Republicans are doing everything they can to lay the groundwork to overturn the election in the courts. The good news is that stopping them is easy: VOTE.

May the confirmation of Barrett be the last thing that the national Republican Party ever accomplishes.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Monday Wake Up Call – October 5, 2020

The Daily Escape:

Fall on the T Lazy B Ranch. Ennis, MT – October 2017 photo by Ed Coyle photography

Lost in the noise on Trump’s COVID diagnosis Friday was that the US Supreme Court agreed to hear two Arizona cases that could end the Voting Rights Act, and hurt the prospects of the Democratic Party. Ian Millhiser wrote the linked article for Vox, and he calls it the biggest threat to voting in decades:

“The specific issue in the Democratic National Committee (DNC) cases concerns two Arizona laws that require certain ballots to be discarded. One law requires voting officials to discard in their entirety ballots cast by voters who vote in the wrong precinct (rather than simply not counting votes for local candidates that the voter should not have been able to vote for).

The other law prohibits “ballot collection” (or “ballot harvesting”) where a voter gives their absentee ballot to a third party, who delivers that ballot to the election office. (Arizona is one of many states that impose at least some restrictions on ballot collection.)”

These cases are being brought under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, (VRA) signed by LBJ, which prohibited racist voting laws that were prevalent at the time. In 2013, the Supreme Court in Shelby County vs. Holder effectively deactivated the Act’s preclearance regime that required states with a history of racist voting practices to “preclear” new election rules with officials at the DOJ.

And the Court’s decision in Abbott v. Perez (2018) held that lawmakers enjoy a strong presumption of racial innocence so that it is now extremely difficult to prove that lawmakers may have acted with racist intent (for example, in gerrymandering a district) except in the most egregious cases.

These two Arizona DNC cases involve a different element of the VRA, the so-called “results test” that prohibits many election laws that disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color.

Now that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear these cases, the Court’s Republican-appointed majority could potentially dismantle the results test. It might water down that test to such a degree that it no longer provides a meaningful check on racism in elections.

As a federal appeals court said in an opinion striking down the two laws:

“…uncontested evidence in the district court established that minority voters in Arizona cast [out of precinct] ballots at twice the rate of white voters.”

Sound racist to you? Of course!

One reason that people in Arizona may vote in the wrong location is that some Maricopa County voters, for example, must travel 15 minutes by car to vote in their assigned polling location, having passed four other polling places along the way.

In addition, many Arizona voters of color lack easy access to the mail and are unable to easily travel on their own to cast a ballot. As the Arizona appeals court explained:

“…in urban areas of heavily Hispanic counties, many apartment buildings lack outgoing mail services,”

And only 18% of Native American registered voters in Arizona have home mail service. The appeals court also said that Black, Native, and Hispanic voters are:

“…significantly less likely than non-minorities to own a vehicle and more likely to have inflexible work schedules.”

Thus, their ability to vote might depend on being able to give their ballot to a friend or a canvasser who will take that ballot to the polls for them. In any event, a majority of the appeals court judges who considered Arizona’s two laws decided that they violated the Voting Rights Act.

So, now it is appealed to the Supreme Court. More from Vox:

“As a young lawyer working in the Reagan administration, Chief Justice John Roberts unsuccessfully fought to convince President Reagan to veto the law establishing this results test; some of his memos from that era even suggest that the results test is unconstitutional. And Roberts is, if anything, the most moderate member of the Supreme Court’s Republican majority.”

This case will be decided by the Court without Amy Coney Barrett. That means it will take at least two conservative justices to side with the three remaining liberal justices, a tall order in these times. Of course, a four-to-four decision would let the appeals court decision stand.

Time to wake up America! Nothing we can do now will change the decision on these cases. That chance was lost in 2016. And the rights of voters of color to cast their ballots is in greater peril now with Ginsburg off the bench.

What we can do today and most importantly on November 3, is to stop the right wing in its tracks.

There can be no further gutting of voting rights in the future.

 

Facebooklinkedinrss

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – July 19, 2020

RIP Rep. John Lewis. He was Wrongo’s contemporary. On our bookshelves, we have Lewis’s memoir, “Walking with the Wind”, autographed to Ms. Right, with Lewis saying to her, “Keep the faith”. And we’ve tried to do just that.

There was no fight for Black civil rights in which John Lewis was not on the front lines. How it must have pained him to witness the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act by the John Roberts-led Supreme Court.

He was among the first Freedom Riders. A leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He was one of the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington.

Lewis was drawn to Dr. King’s theme of “redemptive suffering” to describe his willingness to sacrifice life and well-being for the sake of justice, described by MLK as a suffering that “opens us and those around us to a force beyond ourselves, a force that is right and moral, the force of righteous truth that is at the basis of human conscience.”

At the March on Washington, the-then 23 year old Lewis read a speech that had been heavily revised by Dr. King, Jr. and others who thought it too pugnacious. After editing, Lewis said:

“By the force of our demands, our determination and our numbers, we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces and put them together in the image of God and democracy. We must say: ‘Wake up, America. Wake up!’ For we cannot stop, and we will not and cannot be patient.”

Lewis had his skull fractured at the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma in 1965. That bridge became a touchstone in Lewis’s life. He returned there often during his decades in Congress, bringing lawmakers from both parties to see where “Bloody Sunday” happened. He spent 34 years representing Atlanta and the state of Georgia in the US Congress, and as of now, remains on the ballot in Georgia’s 5th district.

John Lewis is the last of the March on Washington organizers to die, and as Charlie Pierce says:

“…he died at a time when the Voting Rights Act lies in ruins, and when Florida has found a clever way to bring back a poll tax. He died at a time of bad trouble, when the country is desperately in need of the “good trouble” he always recommended to his fellow citizens. He boycotted the inauguration of this president….”

Speaking of good trouble, a phrase that is irrevocably tied to Lewis, he tweeted this recently:

On to cartoons. Let’s hope he causes as much trouble as heaven allows:

Lewis crosses the bridge:

Finally, the school reopening debate continues. 71% of Americans say reopening the schools is risky:

Facebooklinkedinrss

Saturday Soother, July 3, 2020

The Daily Escape:

Blue Camas bloom, Missoula MT – June 2020 photo by Kurt Kohn. Camas is a plant in the asparagus family, and its bulb was a food staple for Indigenous peoples in the American West.

(Wrongo is taking a break for the July 4th holiday. Blogging will resume on Tuesday 7/7.)

Good morning fellow disease vectors! Welcome to the holiday weekend.

The legal separation of the 13 Colonies from Great Britain occurred on July 2, 1776, when the Second Continental Congress voted to approve a resolution of independence that had been proposed in June by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, declaring the United States independent from Great Britain.

After voting for independence, the Continental Congress created a Committee of Five  to write a Declaration of Independence, with Thomas Jefferson as its principal author. Congress debated and revised the wording of the Declaration, approving it on July 4. John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail:

“The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival
 “

Adams’s prediction was off by two days. From the outset, Americans celebrated independence on July 4, the date the resolution of independence was approved in a closed session of Congress, rather than on July 2.

Coincidentally, both Adams and Jefferson, the only signers of the Declaration of Independence who later served as US presidents, died on the same day: July 4, 1826. James Monroe, a founder, but not a signatory of the Declaration, became the third president to die on July 4th in 1831.

Yale Historian David Blight had a short audio piece on NPR on Friday talking about Frederick Douglass. Blight won a 2019 Pulitzer for his book, “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.”

In his NPR talk, Blight recalls a speech by Douglass in July, 1852 to about 600 abolitionists gathered in Rochester, NY. Douglass had been born enslaved. He’d secretly taught himself to read and write. He became one of the best-known abolitionists and thinkers in the world. The speech that Douglass gave before that crowd in Rochester was called “What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July?”

Blight says it was one of Douglass’s most riveting and compelling speeches. He goes on to quote from it:

“The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. The Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice. I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand, illuminated temple of liberty and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.”

Blight closes by saying that today, we may be seeing the third great reckoning about race in our history: (brackets by Wrongo)

“The first was the Civil War and Reconstruction. The second was the civil rights movement of the ’50s and ’60s. And now we’re probably having a third one – whatever we’re going to end up calling this…..And he’d [Douglass] warn us that the whole world is watching to see whether this thing called an American republic can really survive.”

Blight also has a series of video lectures on the Civil War that you can watch for free as part of the Open Yale program. Wrongo highly recommends them.

Here’s a fantastic and touching video in which five young descendants of Frederick Douglass read excerpts of Douglass’s famous speech. You can’t do better today than to listen to these young kids speak the words of their famous ancestor.

Time to let go of the world of politics, economics and policy for a few days. We all want a slice of normalcy: A cold beverage, burgers on the grill, fireflies after dark, and family and friends nearby. Although we want all of that right now, we’ll most likely have to settle for just some of it.

Let’s begin the Saturday Soother by brewing up a Cafe Del Sol Cold Brew Coffee ($15.99/12oz.) from San Diego CA’s Bird Rock Coffee Roasters.

Now, settle back at an appropriate physical distance and listen to Mickey Guyton’s new song, “Black Like Me”. Guyton is a young black female country music singer/songwriter, one of the very few succeeding in the country music idiom. She’s decided to speak out about the subject of racism. That takes courage, even in today’s Nashville scene. Highly recommend the video, which contains the lyrics of her song:

Sample Lyric:

If you think we live in the land of the free
You should try to be black like me

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Could Trump’s Anti Vote-by-Mail Stance Cost Him the Election?

The Daily Escape:

Genesee River, Letchworth State Park, 60 miles southeast of Buffalo NY – photo by Donnelly585

Trump’s crusade against Vote by Mail is hard to explain. He of course, votes by mail. And, there’s every reason to believe that in the battleground states, he might benefit from it. From the Washington Monthly: (brackets by Wrongo)

“According to the Florida Department of State’s Division of Elections, [in 2016] 1,080,808 Republicans cast their votes by mail compared to 1,053,254 Democrats– a net advantage of 27,554.”

Trump ultimately won Florida by about 113,000 votes, not a truly significant margin going into 2020.

Trump world is taking what their leader says about vote by mail very seriously. The Detroit News reported that this happened last Friday:

“People burned letters informing them that they can vote by absentee ballot in future elections during a protest near Grand Rapids. The applications were burned…during an event called Operation Incinerator….Many people had flags, shirts and signs showing support for President Donald Trump and Republicans.”

The protestors were offended that Michigan’s Secretary of State mailed absentee ballot applications to all registered voters. They may have been misled by Trump’s false claim that actual ballots were mailed instead of what was mailed: applications for ballots.

But, it’s widely believed on the Right that making voting easier benefits Democrats.

Many Republicans also believe it will make it easy for the Democrats to commit voter fraud. This belief has also been stoked by Trump. And yet, Pennsylvania voters got mailers from the Republican National Committee encouraging them to apply to vote by mail. The flyers described the option as “convenient and secure.”

At stake for both Parties is what an expansion of mail-in voting this summer means for the November election. If more people vote by mail now, they will likely prefer to vote the same way in the fall. Trump has said:

“Mail ballots, they cheat. People cheat.
 Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country because they’re cheaters.”

Nonpartisan voting experts have found that states that conduct entirely mail-in ballot elections report very little fraud.

Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are all vital to Trump’s reelection, and he is sabotaging himself in each of them. It’s important to remember that Trump won those states by a total of just 77,000 votes. Those states all have subsequently amended their election laws to be more permissive for absentee ballots.

Floridians may be less influenced because so many there are already used to voting by mail.

It seems to be an article of faith on the Right that voter suppression is a key to victory, but that seems to have backfired in Georgia. Urban polling stations were subject to serious problems. So you’d think that making urban voters wait several hours to vote would discourage them, that many would give up and leave.

But it didn’t work out that way: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Democratic turnout in Georgia’s primaries skyrocketed — with three times as many votes cast in the Senate primary as in 2016. With 91 percent of the vote in as of Friday, nearly 960,000 voters had cast ballots in the Democratic Senate primary race won by Jon Ossoff, compared to 310,000 who voted in the Senate primary in 2016.”

It appears that for every Georgia vote the Republicans tried to suppress through active and passive means, they somehow created several more actual votes! This result doesn’t make their tactics any less odious, but it calls into question whether as constituted, they actually will work in November.

Still, Republicans are spending $10 million this year on legal battles against attempts to expand voter access in Michigan, Florida, Arizona, and Minnesota.

It’s hard to see a scenario where Trump’s campaign against vote-by-mail won’t make it harder for him to win, particularly since he seems at cross-purposes with many local Republican organizations.

If his lying messaging helps to limit him to one term, please proceed Mr. Trump.

Facebooklinkedinrss