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US Professor Who Called Trump’s victory now predicts he will be impeached


The article  below falls in line with my own perception of the looks and actions of the establishment Dupublicans. After condemning Donald Trump, the Ryan- McConnell coalition are waiting for The New President to step on his tie so to speak and then pounce on him like the rabid dogs they are. MA 
Rediff.com  » News »
November 12, 2016 15:24 IST

A United States-based professor, who was among the few prognosticators who had predicted Donald Trump’s victory, has made another stunning prediction that he will be eventually impeached by a Republican Congress and replaced by a leader who can be trusted and controlled.

Professor Allan Lichtman has predicted that if elected, Trump, 70, would eventually be impeached by a Republican Congress that would prefer a President like Mike Pence — someone whom establishment Republicans know and trust, the Washington Post reported.

“I’m going to make another prediction. This one is not based on a system; it’s just my gut. They don’t want Trump as president, because they can’t control him. He’s unpredictable. They’d love to have Pence — an absolutely down-the-line, conservative, controllable Republican,” Lichtman said.

He said he is “quite certain” Trump will give “someone grounds for impeachment, either by doing something that endangers national security or because it helps his pocketbook.”

The stunning prediction is similar to what an op-ed columnist for the New York Times David Brooks said about Trump’s future within the next year.

“Trump’s bigotry, dishonesty and promise-breaking will have to be denounced. We can’t go morally numb. But he needs to be replaced with a program that addresses the problems that fuelled his ascent. After all, the guy will probably resign or be impeached within a year. The future is closer than you think,” Brooks said in an NYT column.

The Washington Post report said few prognosticators had predicted a victory for Trump and polls had shown Hillary Clinton comfortably ahead with much of America failing to anticipate the wave of pro-Trump support that propelled him to victory.

Lichtman, however, had insisted that Trump would win due to the idea that elections are “primarily a reflection on the performance of the party in power.”

Lichtman uses a historically based system of what he calls “keys” to predict election results ahead of time. He had outlined how President Barack Obama’s second term set the Democrats up for a tight race, and his keys tipped the balance in Trump’s favour

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The Constitution Is Built To Protect The Losers


The founding fathers were not as naïve as you may think. Remember the Constitution is a living document and possibly many Congress members do not understand that even now after serving multiple terms. MA 
Nov 9, 2016 9:56 AM EST
( Updated
Nov 9, 2016 1:52 PM EST)
By
Noah Feldman
It’s all about the Constitution now. Republicans will control the White House and both chambers of Congress. They will be able to pass — or repeal — their preferred laws, because that’s democracy. But to the Donald Trump opponents worried about what his presidency will bring, know this: There will still be limits to congressional or executive action, limits dictated by the Constitution and enforceable by the courts. The Constitution is designed to resist the tyranny of the majority. James Madison’s machine of constitutional protection is about to kick into gear.
The Bill of Rights and the principle of equal protection give the main limits on government action, but the list of enumerated rights alone doesn’t capture the purpose of the system. Most crucially, free speech and equal protection are supposed to preserve the capacity of electoral losers — Democrats this time around — to continue to participate in government.
That means Trump and the Republican Party can’t stop their political opponents from expressing their views. They can’t jail opponents in violation of habeas corpus. And they can’t adopt laws that discriminate on the basis of race or sex or religion or national origin.
The good news is that the courts as presently configured are overwhelmingly likely to enforce these restrictions. Start with the First Amendment jurisprudence. Today’s judicial conservatives are more likely to be free-speech absolutists than judicial liberals. I have great confidence that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, would continue to apply his strongly speech-protectionist reading of the free-speech clause against laws passed by a Republican Congress, and that he would have no trouble getting a majority for his approach.
As for equal protection, the deepest judicial divisions for several decades have been over affirmative action, which conservatives say amounts to prohibited discrimination. There’s been much less disagreement about whether laws that facially discriminate on the basis of race are permitted: The consensus is that they are not unless justified by a compelling interest and narrowly tailored to it. A Republican-passed law that discriminated overtly would almost certainly be struck down.
True, the justices have sometimes divided about whether laws that are facially race-neutral are actually discriminatory. It might be hard to get consensus about such laws. But once the Supreme Court is back to full strength with the appointment and confirmation of a conservative to fill Antonin Scalia’s seat, the swing vote is going to be Justice Anthony Kennedy once again. And as the gay-rights cases demonstrated, Kennedy is acutely attuned to the value of human dignity. He’s also made it extremely clear that he has no interest in reversing Roe v. Wade.
If Trump gets to replace a liberal justice — Ruth Bader Ginsburg (age 83) or Stephen Breyer (78) — then the court would have an outright conservative majority. Conceivably, that could lead to revisiting decisions like Roe v. Wade or the gay-marriage decision, Obergefell v. Hodges.
But it’s extremely unlikely that the court would fundamentally roll back either of these rights. Despite its unpopularity, Roe has proved stunningly durable over the 43 (!) years since it was decided. Reversing it at this point would mark the court as wildly disrespectful of precedent. Chief Justice John Roberts has repeatedly signaled that he considers such extreme activism to be distasteful. And as a practical political matter, a reversal of Roe would fuel backlash against Republican candidates.
Gay marriage is, of course, a much newer right, and it would be easier for a conservative majority to overturn Obergefell, which has not yet acquired the patina of precedent. Yet the small-c conservative aspect of the Obergefell decision, with its celebration of the bourgeois institution of marriage, renders it much safer than might otherwise be thought. There would also be the tremendous practical problem of what to do about thousands of gay people who are already married — not to mention the further practical difficulties associated with gay marriage being recognized in some states but not others.
This is not to deny that a conservative Supreme Court could render strongly conservative decisions on a wide range of issues. It could, and it would.
Rather, the point is that even a conservative court would police the boundaries of legislation to preserve the basic structures of fundamental democratic rights. It might not do so aggressively, but it would still impose limits on Congress and the president.
Why am I so confident the courts would play their designated role of protecting the minority from the tyranny of the majority? The answer lies in the power of the institutional culture of the judiciary and of the rule of law.
There are many controversial issues in American legal thought, and there exist strongly conservative views on all of them. But even the most conservative judges and lawyers believe today that one purpose of the Constitution is to protect against majority oppression and that it’s the job of judges to make it do so.
There is good reason for legal conservatives to celebrate the election results and for legal liberals to deplore them. And if the court goes conservative, there will be plenty of opportunities for conservative justices to push their agenda.
The crucial takeaway, however, is that the basic rights and the rule of law aren’t going to disappear because Donald Trump was elected. The Constitution was built for our situation. It will endure, whatever challenges it may face.
(Corrects age of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in seventh paragraph. Corrects first paragraph to remove inaccurate reference to the last time Republicans controlled the House, Senate and White House.)
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story:
Noah Feldman at nfeldman7@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Stacey Shick at sshick@bloomberg.

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Congressional Republicans



Mitch McConnell is elated(?) or does he now have the foil he needs to continue his divisive and self serving ways. As an aside : would you trust this person with your children’s future? MAERICA WERNER
Associated Press November 9, 2016

More Elated congressional Republicans pledged swift action Wednesday on President-elect Donald Trump’s agenda as they heralded an extraordinary new era of unified GOP control in Washington.
“He just earned a mandate,” House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin declared of Trump. “We are going to hit the ground running.”
Said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky: “We would like to see the country go in a different direction and intend to work with him to change the course for America.”
Republicans saw their majorities in the House and Senate reduced, but not by much, as Democrats’ hopes of retaking Senate control vanished. And though Ryan and McConnell both had well-publicized reservations about Trump, both were quick to declare that the newly elected president deserved the credit.
“Donald Trump pulled off an amazing political feat. He deserves tremendous credit for that,” said Ryan, who initially refused to endorse Trump and only last month declared he’d no longer defend him. “It helped us keep our majorities, but it also showed the country that people don’t like the direction we were going.”
First up would be repealing President Barack Obama’s health care law, something Republicans have already shown they can get through Congress with just a narrow Senate majority. What they haven’t done is unite around a plan for ensuring that the 20 million who achieved health care coverage under the landmark law don’t lose it.
Republicans also celebrated the opportunity to fill the existing Supreme Court vacancy, and potentially more to come, with “constitutional conservatives.” McConnell was being widely praised for his strategy, once seen as risky, of refusing to act on Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who died last February.
And Republicans pledged to try to unwind any number of executive moves by Obama, including tougher clean air rules on power plants, looser restrictions on travel to Cuba, and tougher rules on sleep for long-haul truckers, among others — “Every single one that’s sucking the very life out of our economy,” GOP Sen. David Perdue of Georgia said in an interview.
That threatened to wipe away key areas of progress highlighted by Democrats under the Obama administration.
Some of Trump’s goals could be harder to achieve. A wall on the southern border is estimated to cost $10 billion to $20 billion, money that Congress may be unlikely to provide given that cooperation from Democrats would be necessary.
Indeed the Senate Democratic minority stood as the only legislative barrier to Trump’s goals, since 60 votes are required for most consequential moves in the Senate.
Republicans were poised to end up with 52 Senate seats after Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., conceded to Democratic Gov. Maggie Hassan in their close race. That assumes the GOP wins a December runoff in Louisiana, as expected. Democrats managed to pick up only one other GOP-held Senate seat, in Illinois, a devastating outcome for a party that went into Election Day with high hopes of holding the White House and winning back Senate control.
In the House, Republicans were on track to lose a maximum of nine seats, an unexpectedly modest reduction to a wide GOP majority that now stands at 247-188, including three vacant seats.
“We kicked their tails last night,” said GOP Rep. Greg Walden of Oregon, head of the Republicans’ House campaign committee.
Trump’s extraordinary win appeared to be going far to heal divisions within the GOP, as even Republicans who’d long harbored doubts about him offered warm pledges of support.
Here and there, notes of caution were sounded, as a few Republicans made clear that Congress would be asserting its constitutional prerogatives as a check and balance on the executive, following what Republicans viewed as overly expansive use of executive power by Obama.
“It’s just our constitutional duty to keep the executive branch in check,” GOP Rep. Todd Young, the newly elected Republican senator in Indiana, told reporters in Indianapolis.
Yet McConnell appeared to invite executive action by Trump, suggesting he should be exploring what kinds of “unilateral action” he could take — to undo unilateral actions by Obama.
___
Associated Press writers Brian Slodysko in Indianapolis and Matthew Daly and Andrew Taylor in Washington contributed to this report.

Waking up to President Trump


The possible outcome  of a Trump win is explained below. MA

Henry Blodget, Business Insider Fri, Nov 4 6:41 AM PDT

In a few days, Americans may wake up to learn that they’ve elected President Trump.
The reality of this would likely come as a shock — just as the reality of Brexit came as a shock in the UK, where some people were apparently startled to realize what they had voted for. (Recent polls also suggest that, now that they’ve realized it, they regret it).
What would the consequences of electing Donald Trump president actually be? What would happen? What would President Trump actually do?
Given that a Trump presidency is now a very real possibility, it’s worth thinking through.
Based on what we’ve heard from Trump and his campaign over the past 18 months, as well as a close reading of experts like Evan Osnos of The New Yorker — who wrote a great article on the topic — here are some of my assumptions about a theoretical Trump presidency.
The smaller stuff:
President Trump will sign executive orders “erasing” as much of Obama’s presidency as possible and tossing other bones to his supporters. These will likely include withdrawing the US from the Paris emissions accord, loosening background checks on people buying guns, restarting the Keystone Pipeline process, ordering investigations of trade practices, halting the flow of Syrian refugees, and more. (See Evan Osnos for more.)
President Trump will reinstate methods considered torture under international laws as intelligence-gathering tools. He will not call it “torture.” He will describe it as the US finally getting tough (“an eye for an eye”). Trump will likely get pushback on this from senior intelligence and military officials. If the officials refuse to follow his order, Trump will fire them and replace them with generals and officials whose primary value is loyalty to Trump. President Trump will also appoint loyalists to as many of the 4,000 appointed positions he controls as possible.
President Trump will immediately “bomb the hell out of ISIS” — somewhere. This bombing may be no different than the bombing the US has been doing for years. President Trump will tout it as a major new offensive and extol its effectiveness and toughness. He will boast about this show of strength compared with the weakness and stupidity of the Obama administration. He will come to enjoy having the power to command the world’s most powerful military.
President Trump will quickly work with Congress to “repeal Obamacare.” If Congress blocks him on this, he will attack, shame, and bully key members publicly, while cutting deals behind the scenes. If President Trump is smart, he and his GOP allies will not actually repeal Obamacare because Americans like many features of it and because they have nothing to replace it with. They will just make changes to it that begin to fix some of its problems.
President Trump will continue to use the same rhetorical style he has used throughout the campaign. Namely, he will lie, bully, shame, exaggerate, insult, and otherwise throw prior concepts of acting presidential into the dumpster. After a few months of disgust and alarm, Americans and other citizens of the world will get used to this, just as they have his campaign rhetoric.
President Trump will also maintain the relationship to the truth that he has had throughout his campaign. Namely, he will cite actual facts and truth only when they help him. When the truth is inconvenient, President Trump will lie, deny, attack and threaten truth-tellers, speak in platitudes, and change the subject. The Trump administration will likely be one of the most secretive, most dishonest, and least transparent in modern history.
President Trump will reward “terrific” people and punish “terrible” people. The common attribute of “terrific” people will be that they support President Trump. The common attribute of the “terrible” people will be that they oppose President Trump. After a bruising election, President Trump will have lots of rewards to provide and scores to settle.
President Trump will announce that he is renegotiating NAFTA and other key US trade agreements and suspend potential participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He will make minor changes to these trade deals and announce that he has replaced them with “great deals.” He will tout any job growth that follows these changes as a direct result of these deals. President Trump will also likely slap high tariffs on Chinese imports to show that he is serious about “winning” and bringing jobs back. China will retaliate. The resulting limited trade war will likely be disruptive and bad for business in both countries. President Trump will say it is working great.
President Trump will personally unveil plans for his southern border wall. He will deliver the press conference announcing it and show scale models of it. Some sections of this wall may eventually be built. American taxpayers will pay for them. Trump will boast about how the wall is responsible for job creation and reduced crime. He will also increase the size of America’s deportation force and tout the number of people it deports.
President Trump will propose $1 trillion of new spending on US infrastructure. Congress will support at least some of this. These projects will be unambiguously good for the country, even as they increase US federal debt. President Trump will also maintain Social Security and Medicare. He will pass a tax cut, of which most of the benefits will go to the wealthy. He will close the “carried interest tax loophole,” which is one of the most egregious tax loopholes in the whole tax code. With the exception of the tax cut and deficit increase, all of these moves will be good for America.
President Trump will never release his tax returns.

The bigger stuff:
President Trump will mishandle a tricky geopolitical or military situation — with grave and potentially catastrophic consequences. Three obvious candidates involve the Middle East, North Korea, and China. The most likely candidate, meanwhile, is Russia. Trump will consider his personal relationship with Putin a higher priority than stopping Russia’s territorial advances or supporting US allies. Putin already knows this and will take advantage of it. At some point, Putin will likely make a move into the rest of Ukraine or the Baltics. President Trump will either not respond, thus undermining NATO, or respond slowly or unwisely. He might also be so enraged by this personal betrayal by Putin that he might do something crazy, like nuclear saber rattling.
President Trump will try to modify the First Amendment and restrict freedom of the press. He will initially do this by rewarding supportive news organizations and reporters and savaging critical ones. If this does not stifle criticism of him or his administration, Trump will increase his harassment of critics by ordering investigations and encouraging supporters to boycott them. President Trump will call on his attorney general to threaten news organizations with criminal indictments and force them to turn over their sources. He will also do this on behalf of allies in Congress and organizations and people who support him, thus increasing support for actual changes in law.
President Trump will respond to terror attacks by barring Muslims from entering the country and increasing surveillance and profiling of Muslims in the US. If the attacks continue, President Trump will take another step, creating Muslim registration and/or camps in the US. President Trump will also respond to attacks by obliterating cities in Syria, Iraq, and other countries to punish “radical Islamic terrorists” and their families (and hundreds of thousands of other people). More broadly, President Trump’s bigoted rhetoric will likely inflame racial and religious tensions in the US, leading to more violence and protests. For many Trump supporters, making America “great” again means making America “white and Christian” again, and even if President Trump does not actively support this, he’ll do little to discourage it. (If the attack is just the usual generic US gun massacre, meanwhile, President Trump will extol the need for more guns for self-defense and tougher policing.)
President Trump will get impatient with the “checks and balances” on presidential power and try to expand the power of the presidency. If the economy stays solid and there are no major terrorist attacks or geopolitical crises, this will be difficult to do. If the economy deteriorates or there is a crisis, however, it will be easier. It is important to remember that, if elected, Trump will already have far more power and public support than famous dictators had when they came to power. (For example, see: “How Hitler went from a fringe politician to a dictator.”)
Other consequences:
The stock market will drop 10-20% (for starters). A Trump presidency will significantly increase risk and uncertainty. That unnerves investors and business decision-makers. US companies will temporarily “freeze” plans while they try to figure out what President Trump is likely to do. This will likely temporarily slow economic growth. President Trump will blame the Obama administration for this and use it to demand emergency action from Congress. Trump’s explicit attacks on many American companies — Ford, Amazon, Macy’s, Nabisco, Apple — and promises to force some of these companies to move some manufacturing back to America will also unnerve decision-makers. Almost no major CEOs have supported Trump, and many have spoken out against him. These CEOs know that Trump will take this personally.
The fiscal deficit and debt will balloon. Trump’s proposed tax cuts for the rich will not stimulate growth, just as the Bush tax cuts did not stimulate growth (because taxes on the wealthy are not actually stifling growth — what is stifling growth is the lack of middle-class spending power). The tax cut will, however, increase the deficit and accelerate the growth of federal debt. President Trump will blame this on Congress and the Obama administration.
At some point in President Trump’s first term, there will be a major recession, and the stock market will drop 30-50% from the peak. President Trump’s policies may well trigger this recession. Trade wars, for example, generally hurt economies and lead to job losses. Whatever happens, President Trump will blame it on his opponents and use it to try to expand his own power (see above). Widespread economic misery will make this easier.
Personally, I hope most of this doesn’t happen. I hope that President Trump would be the president that some of his smarter supporters expect him to be — not the mean, petty, reckless, and uninformed proto-tyrant he sounds like, but a reasonable, effective pragmatist who just enjoys entertaining crowds by saying outrageous and offensive things and otherwise acting like a boor.
But given how consistent Trump has been in his actions and pronouncements over the past 18 months, I think it’s more likely that what we’ve seen is what we would get.

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When It Comes to Baskets, We’re All Deplorable


A well stated look into the poorest folks in America who support Trump in singular ways. MA
The Opinion Pages | Contributing Opinion Writer
By J. D. VANCESEPT. 22, 2016
Credit Angie Wang
It was the awkward comment heard round the world. At a fund-raiser earlier this month, the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, divided the supporters of her Republican opponent Donald J. Trump into two even groups. One consisted of good, if alienated and dispossessed, people. But the other half goes into a “basket of deplorables,” she said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.”
The ensuing reaction to her comments is a case study in everything wrong with our political discourse. Mr. Trump — who still hasn’t apologized for suggesting that a disproportionate share of Mexican immigrants are rapists and criminals — demanded an apology. Meanwhile, many on the left came to her defense: The remark might have been politically inept, many said, but it was true.
These commentators often base their arguments on polls that paint many Republicans in an unflattering light: About one-third of conservatives believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim, and more than half doubt whether he was born in the United States. According to one Reuters poll, about half of Mr. Trump’s supporters say that blacks are “more violent” than whites, while approximately 40 percent see blacks as “lazier” than other races.
These views are undoubtedly deplorable, and we all have a responsibility to confront them. But if Mrs. Clinton had said that half of Mr. Trump’s supporters hold some prejudicial views and left it there, we probably wouldn’t be talking about the comment today. Her sin was to collapse millions of people — from former Klansmen like David Duke to a struggling coal miner with some unacceptable opinions — into the same group of social outcasts.
It’s difficult in the abstract to appreciate that those with morally objectionable viewpoints can still be good people. This perhaps explains why Mrs. Clinton showed considerably less charity than did Mr. Obama as a candidate in a widely praised 2008 speech on race. In one particularly personal passage, he spoke about his white grandmother — an imperfect, but fundamentally good, woman, “a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”
If a pollster had called Mr. Obama’s grandmother and asked her questions about race, religion and sexuality, she almost certainly would have proffered at least one prejudicial view. The data tells us that she wouldn’t be alone. In a recent poll, about 40 percent of Democratic voters supported temporarily barring Muslims from entering the country. Large shares of black voters express some uneasiness with homosexual behavior, an opinion common among religious people of all races but undoubtedly unwelcome in cosmopolitan elite circles of the Democratic Party. The same poll that found that 40 percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters viewed blacks as lazier revealed that 25 percent of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters believed the same thing. Perhaps these people should also join Mrs. Clinton’s deplorable basket.
There’s no reason to limit basket-worthiness to those with explicit prejudices. For decades, scholars have studied the ways in which implicit biases affect how we perceive other people in this multiethnic society of ours. The data consistently shows that about 90 percent of us possess some implicit prejudices — and, unsurprisingly, people typically favor their own group. Layer on top of that the many people unwilling to speak about their prejudices with a pollster, and a picture emerges of a nation where a significant majority of the country harbors some type of bias.
There are many ways to confront the people of that nation in all its complexity. We can ignore that these biases exist, and pretend that our uniquely diverse society need never address the difficult questions posed by that diversity. This is the path chosen by far too many of my fellow conservatives.
We can deem a significant chunk of our populace unrepentant bigots, which appears to be the strategy of Mrs. Clinton and much of the left.
Or we can recognize that most of us fall into another basket altogether: One where prejudice — even implicit — coexists with incredible compassion and decency. In that basket is the black preacher who may view homosexuality as a little icky even as he lovingly ministers to struggling gay members of his church. The adoptive parent of a child born in Asia, who pours her heart and soul into her child’s well-being even as she tells a pollster that she doesn’t much care about America’s experience with Japanese internment. And in that basket is a white grandmother who speaks ill of black people even as she gives her beloved African-American grandson the emotional support and love that enable him to become the president of all Americans.
We can and should recognize the bad in that basket even as we celebrate the good. We must have the courage to confront dreadful views even in the people we love the most. But that’s difficult to do when we cast large segments of our fellow citizens into a basket to be condemned and disparaged, judging them even as we ignore that many of their deplorable traits exist in us, too.
J. D. Vance is the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” and a contributing opinion writer

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The Election is Rigged After All — Against African Americans


Unfortunately the Dupublicans are in the camp of old time segregationists and racists. They have supported and Implemented voting restrictions to suppress the Non white vote . What if they spent as much time doing their jobs instead? MA

Eliza Newlin Carney

October 27, 2016

Voting rights advocates have won a string of court battles, but state election officials have found ways to restrict early voting anyway—often at the behest of GOP leaders

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

People stand outside the Supreme Court before the start of a rally during arguments in the Shelby County, Alabama, v. Holder case on Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2013, in Washington.

 

In the face of Donald Trump’s declarations that this election is “rigged” and his requests to his backers to watch the polls in “certain areas,” voting rights advocates have labored to set the record straight that voter fraud is a myth and that “ballot security” often adds up to intimidation.

But as early voting gets under way in states around the country, the election is starting to look rigged after all—against voters of color. From Georgia to Texas and Wisconsin, election officials are asking voters for IDs where none are required, failing to process thousands of voter registrations, and limiting early voting so drastically that voters are standing in line for hours. Invariably, the voters affected are African Americans or Latinos, who tend to be more likely to cast their ballots in favor of Democrats.

It’s exactly what voting and civil rights advocates predicted three years ago, when more than a half-dozen states mostly controlled by Republicans enacted a slew of sweeping new voter ID and other limits on voting. GOP legislatures around the country sprang into action within days of the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder to toss out key Voting Rights Act protections.

At the time, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented that weakening the Voting Rights Act was “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” Now it’s raining all over African American voters, despite a string of recent voting rights court victories.

Having convinced several lower courts to nullify strict state voting curbs as discriminatory, voting rights advocates have discovered that winning lawsuits is not enough. In many states, election officials have either directly flouted orders handed down by the court, or have found other ways to sabotage access to the polls—often at the direction of Republican Party leaders.

In Texas, a federal appeals court in July explicitly blocked the state from enforcing its voter ID requirement, one of the most stringent in the nation. (The state had approved only a driver’s license or a gun license for voting.) A federal court agreement specified that voters without IDs may still cast ballots if they sign a declaration and show an alternate ID, such as a utility bill.

But this week, civil rights advocates reported hundreds of complaints from voters turned away from the polls for lack of an ID, and provided documentation of polling places that display signs and flyers incorrectly stating that voters must have IDs. Part of the problem is the nation’s notoriously ill-trained army of mostly volunteer poll workers. But it probably doesn’t help that some Texas GOP officials exhorted election workers in at least one email “to make sure OUR VOTER ID LAW IS FOLLOWED.”

“Across Texas we are seeing local election officials undermine the weight of the Fifth Circuit’s ruling striking down the state’s photo ID law as discriminatory,” said Kristen Clarke, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, in a statement. “Instead of changing the rules, some counties across Texas continue to impose the strict photo ID law and are posting signs that suggest to voters that the photo ID law remains in effect. This is simply unacceptable.”

In North Carolina, another July federal appeals court ruling struck key provisions of a far-reaching state law that had restricted early voting, limited registration, and imposed new ID rules. But the North Carolina GOP’s executive director nonetheless encouraged Republican election officials to reduce early voting hours, limit polling sites and close the polls on Sunday.

Now that early voting has begun in North Carolina, the impact on voters is measurable.

Now that early voting has begun in North Carolina, the impact on voters is measurable. A half-dozen counties have cut early voting, prompting a 50 percent decline in early balloting compared to the 2012 election, according to Liz Kennedy, director of democracy and government reform at the Center for American Progress, which has put out a series of state-by-state issue briefs on preventing problems at the polls.

In Guilford, a county of 517,600 people where 42 percent of the residents are nonwhite, election officials cut early voting sites from 16 in 2012 to one this year, according to Michael P. McDonald, a voting expert at the University of Florida. The upshot is an 85 percent decrease in the number of in-person Guilford County voters on the first Thursday and Friday of early voting this year, compared with the same window in 2012.

In Georgia, a recent Washington Post report pointed to several particularly egregious voter suppression efforts. Election officials in Georgia have failed to process as many as 100,000 voter registration applications. As in North Carolina, one of the state’s largest counties made early voting available only at a single polling place, forcing voters to wait up to three hours to cast ballots. And in Macon-Bibb County, local officials moved a polling place in a largely African American region from a gymnasium that was under renovation to the sheriff’s office.

“When we complained, we were told if people weren’t criminals, they shouldn’t have a problem voting inside of a police station,” Nse Ufot, executive director of the New Georgia Project, a progressive group, told the Post. After activists objected, the polling site was moved to a church.

Led by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, voting rights advocates have set up an election protection hotline and deployed volunteers to monitor voting irregularities around the country, as they do every year. But many new voting laws are still being fought out in court, potentially confusing election officials and voters alike. And the number of polling place watchdogs deployed by the Justice Department will be much smaller this year. That’s because the Shelby ruling concluded that states with a history of discrimination no longer need special federal oversight. As this year’s early voting demonstrates, that finding was woefully premature

Uncovered: Bill O’Reilly’s code of journalistic ethics


Mr. O’Reilly’s resume aside from being a contributor to Faux news is a writer dedicated to writing book about “killing” Famous people. the post below gives his outline for production of these books.MA

By Erik Wemple October 24 at 3:11 PM

Bill O’Reilly. (Richard Drew/Associated Press)
Over the past 10 days, the Erik Wemple Blog has written two posts questioning a key passage in the 2015 book by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard, “Killing Reagan.” The passage posited that then-ABC News correspondent Sam Donaldson confronted President Ronald Reagan at a photo op on Aug. 1, 1984, at his Rancho del Cielo in California. In classic “Killing”-series hyperbole, the authors wrote that after Reagan stumbled a bit on a question, Donaldson “smells blood” and then moves to “full confrontational mode.”
An Oct. 15 post on this blog noted that Donaldson claims he wasn’t there for this alleged confrontation. Instead, he was in Santa Barbara with other members of the press corps; a small pool of journalists were at the ranch for the photo op. Charles Bierbauer, who covered Reagan for CNN, told this blog that he was the fellow asking these “confrontational” questions of Reagan. Then, last Thursday, we posted another item with video of the incident plus an ABC News transcript from 1984 supporting Donaldson’s recollection that he wasn’t there for the Q & A session, let alone its protagonist.
On Friday night, O’Reilly addressed the matter on his Fox News program “The O’Reilly Factor,” a moment that was paired with a written response from co-author Dugard on the website of the book’s publisher. Through it all, the Erik Wemple Blog was able to glean a full-fledged Bill O’Reilly Code of Journalistic Ethics. Here goes:
Rule No. 1: Deprive your viewers of details, the better to keep them in the dark. On his show Friday night, O’Reilly said the following about this issue:
And finally tonight, “The Factor” “Tip of the Day”: Recently I told you, it’s better to ignore small, annoying stuff. Remember that? So now, I’m following my own advice. The Washington Post pays a guy to blog who simply attacks Fox News all day long. All right? They pay the guy to do that. But the problem is, sometimes his garbage — and it’s garbage — [gets] picked up by other outlets. Latest is an attack on “Killing Reagan.” And I’m ignoring it but Martin Dugard, my co-author is not ignoring it. So, if you care it all, and I’m sure you don’t, you can go to BillOReilly.com, and link on over to the Marty’s response which is publishers website.
Who’s this “guy”?
Rule No. 2: Stonewall for as long as possible. We began seeking comment from O’Reilly & Co. on Oct. 14. No response. We published the first post on Oct. 15. No response. Five days later, we published a new post with the video. Other outlets picked up on it. Finally, O’Reilly responds, though not directly to the Erik Wemple Blog. The pattern? Ignore unwelcome and unflattering attention until it becomes impossible.
Rule No. 3: Conspiracy theories always beat actual reporting. In his letter to O’Reilly responding to the allegations, Dugard supposes that the Erik Wemple Blog is doing the bidding of Washington Post Publisher Fred Ryan Jr., who is chairman of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, “a body dedicated to the veneration of Ronald Reagan.” “Killing Reagan” argues that the March 1981 assassination hobbled the president for the rest of his life, a contention that Reagan scholars and backers have contested. Accordingly: Dugard writes of this blog’s motivations: “No doubt the focus of his reportage is either directed by, or an attempt to pander to” Ryan.
Had Dugard contacted the Erik Wemple Blog, he might have discovered the real provenance of this blog post: A phone chat with Donaldson that started out with a focus on coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign, only to drift into “Killing Reagan” territory.

Rule No. 4: One anonymous source is more reliable than two on-the-record sources and documentary evidence. We have two on-the-record sources plus an ABC News transcript to show that Donaldson was, in fact, not the fellow who was asking questions of Reagan on that long-ago summer day. Here’s the sourcing for “Killing Reagan,” as articulated in Dugard’s letter: “As for who asked the questions, I take full responsibility for naming Sam Donaldson as the interviewer. My source is a well known veteran journalist. I will not drag this individual into this, knowing Mr. Wemple will only utilize that to further pursue an attack on Killing Reagan that is trivial at best, and at least a year past its expiration date,” writes Dugard.
As for the bolded part, don’t worry, Dugard: O’Reilly & Co. generate enough idiocies every week to keep this blog plenty occupied.
Rule No. 5: Obfuscate. In the session with journalists, Reagan had no answer for Bierbauer’s questions, at which point Nancy Reagan suggested one sotto voce. A mic picked up her words, and Reagan repeated them verbatim. This part of the episode is explained accurately in “Killing Reagan,” and this blog has never taken issue with that aspect of things; we’ve only contested the assertions in “Killing Reagan” that Donaldson was asking the questions and that it was an out-for-blood exchange. Even so, Dugard attempts to cloud the issue: “To be clear: This incident occurred. I am not sure if Mr. Wemple is trying to prove President Reagan did not have a slip, or that the moment never took place, but the video is irrefutable proof.”

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Outside Influence?


Why Netanyahu Suddenly Wants a Deal on U.S. Aid
GERSHOM GORENBERG JULY 28, 2016
The prime minister, in an attack of good sense, realizes that a GOP
victory may not be good news for Israel.

Here’s one more twist to the Year of Bizarre Politics: Benjamin
Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel and Republican-in-all-but-name, has
recognized that the best deal on American aid he can get is from Barack
Obama.

The timing of this decision, just after the GOP formally nominated a
certain oft-bankrupt businessman and racist agitator for president, may
be a coincidence. People running out of a house just as smoke starts
coming out the windows, I suppose, could also be due to some
coincidence. The more logical explanation is that like many of his
conservative ideologue friends, Netanyahu has concluded that a
Republican victory in November will not bring salvation.

Here’s the plot line up to now: The current 10-year U.S.-Israel
memorandum of understanding on military aid will expire in 2018. It
provides for $3.1 billion per year in American aid for Israel. Congress
has allocated additional funds each year for missile defense, which
creates an opening for ongoing Israeli lobbying.

Negotiations on a new 10-year memorandum of understanding (MOU) began
back in 2013, broke off, and resumed late last year. The administration
has offered a more generous package than the last one, even though the
negotiations are taking place after the Iran accord was signed—and
therefore after Netanyahu threw away the bargaining chip of acquiescing
in the agreement.

But Netanyahu has pressed for better terms. Key points of contention:
Israel originally sought a steep increase to $5 billion per year, in
part to compensate for Iran having more money for conventional weapons
after the agreement ending its nuclear program. According to reports
here in Israel, the administration offer runs between $3.7 billion and
$4 billion annually—including funds for missile defense, and with the
proviso that there will be no additional allocations from Congress and
no lobbying. The administration wants to phase out the provision that
allows Israel to spend over a quarter of the aid in Israel and another
eighth on fuel. In line with the terms of American aid to other
countries, the money would have to be spent in the United States.
Netanyahu opposed the change.

The talks stalled. Back in February, Netanyahu told his cabinet that if
Israel’s needs weren’t met, “perhaps we will … need to come to an
agreement with the next administration.” It was a comment meant to be
leaked, meant to be a threat. This was fairly extraordinary. The leader
of the client state getting the aid portrayed himself as being in the
stronger negotiating position. And he essentially adopted the GOP
position that there’s no need to deal with this president. Real business
could wait till next year, when a Republican might be in the White House.

Let’s note that in February, when Netanyahu said this, the conventional
wisdom was that a reality TV star couldn’t win the Republican
nomination. Netanyahu is all too closely tied in with the Republican
establishment, and I’m sure this is what his friends told him. The
interloper would fade, and one of the mainstream GOP conservatives would
become the nominee.

Oh well, so much for that.

Suddenly, hours before the Republican convention began last week,
Netanyahu said in the Knesset that he hoped to reach an agreement with
the United States “within a few weeks.” A week later, after the last
Republican revolt was suppressed and the reality TV star accepted his
party’s nomination with a dark rant, a statement from Netanyahu dropped
into the inboxes of Israeli journalists. It said that his negotiator,
acting National Security Council head Jacob Nagel, would fly to
Washington this coming Sunday, “for meetings with his White House
counterparts, for the purpose of signing a new MOU between the two
countries as soon as possible.” Meanwhile, reports attributed in ways
that usually mean, “someone senior in the Prime Minister’s Office,” said
that Netanyahu had decided to fold on “most” of the remaining issues and
accept the administration’s conditions. There are still details to work
out, including how many years it will take to phase out Israeli use of
the aid outside the United States. But Netanyahu definitely wants a deal
in a hurry.

Now it’s true that some of Netanyahu’s senior coalition partners thought
he was daft to delay the agreement, and said so publicly. But the timing
suggests that Netanyahu’s shift has a lot more to do with American
politics than Israeli politics.

The Republican nominee is running on the isolationist,
anti-Semitism-stained slogan, “America First.”
The Republican nominee is running on the isolationist,
anti-Semitism-stained slogan, “America First.” He has said that Japan
and South Korea should build their own nukes rather than depending on
America to spend money on helping them. He didn’t mention the Middle
East, but the same pro-proliferation logic could apply to Egypt or other
countries in the region. Vladimir Putin’s favorite American politician
has questioned whether the United States should take action to protect
Estonia, a NATO member. This has to make one wonder what the nominee
thinks of keeping commitments to other allies.

At a press conference in March, He Who I Will Not Name said that Israel
was among the “countries that can pay and they can pay big league” for
American defense. The same day, of course, he reversed himself. He does
that. But it’s not hard to figure out that he’s not a guy you should
count on for an aid package.

Netanyahu’s sudden switch suggests that he can, indeed, work this out.
It seems he has also figured out that Hillary Clinton is likely to be
his negotiating partner if he waits till next year, and that she has no
reason to reward him for blowing off Obama.

Actually, Netanyahu and the Republican nominee have been keeping their
distance. At this time four years ago, Mitt Romney was about to touch
down in Israel, to be so warmly received by Netanyahu that it was
virtually an endorsement. An Israeli official (I hate vague
attributions, but that’s what the source asked for) told me this week
that he was “not aware of any upcoming trips of [American] candidates to
Israel.”

Does this mean that Netanyahu is on the outs with his billionaire
American backer, Sheldon Adelson? In May, Adelson was reported to have
promised up to $100 million to the campaign of his less-successful
fellow casino mogul. More recently, though, it’s been reported that
Adelson has “put his plans on hold.” For now, it’s unclear where he stands.

I won’t make any predictions on how fast Netanyahu and Obama will reach
a deal on aid, or whether the prime minister’s current attack of good
sense will last. Right now, though, it seems that even Benjamin
Netanyahu, who has spent the last seven and a half years publicly
tangling with the president, has realized that he, too, will miss Obama.
Truly, this is a year of unfathomable events.

#######
Prospect Senior Editor Eliza Newlin Carney contributed information to
this story.

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Breaking the Black Box What Facebook Knows About You


All of you who spend a lot of time on Facebook, be warned that this site will create information about you that could be hacked and put more junk in your inbox.  You must remember the world is not as safe as pre internet days, so be careful what you out there since it is instantly everywhere.MA

 

by Julia Angwin, Terry Parris Jr. and Surya Mattu, ProPublica September 28, 2016

We live in an era of increasing automation. Machines help us not only with manual labor but also with intellectual tasks, such as curating the news we read and calculating the best driving directions. But as machines make more decisions for us, it is increasingly important to understand the algorithms that produce their judgments.

We’ve spent the year investigating algorithms, from how they’ve been used to predict future criminals to Amazon’s use of them to advantage itself over competitors.

All too often, these algorithms are a black box: It’s impossible for outsiders to know what’s going inside them. Today we’re launching a series of experiments to help give you the power to see inside.

Our first stop: Facebook and your personal data.

Facebook has a particularly comprehensive set of dossiers on its more than 2 billion members. Every time a Facebook member likes a post, tags a photo, updates their favorite movies in their profile, posts a comment about a politician, or changes their relationship status, Facebook logs it. When they browse the Web, Facebook collects information about pages they visit that contain Facebook sharing buttons. When they use Instagram or WhatsApp on their phone, which are both owned by Facebook, they contribute more data to Facebook’s dossier.

And in case that wasn’t enough, Facebook also buys data about its users’ mortgages, car ownership and shopping habits from some of the biggest commercial data brokers.

Facebook uses all this data to offer marketers a chance to target ads to increasingly specific groups of people. Indeed, we found Facebook offers advertisers more than 1,300 categories for ad targeting — everything from people whose property size is less than .26 acres to households with exactly seven credit cards.

We built a tool that works with the Chrome Web browser that lets you see what Facebook says it knows about you — you can rate the data for accuracy and you can send it to us, if you like. We will, of course, protect your privacy. We won’t collect any identifying details about you. And we won’t share your personal data with anyone

This is the same information that Facebook itself offers users — buried deep in its site. (It’s in a section of its settings called “Ad Preferences.”) It’s not clear if this data represents all that Facebook knows about a person. For instance, we haven’t yet seen anyone with credit card or property ownership listed. Which is why we’re particularly interested in hearing what you found out.

You can help us examine whether what Facebook says it knows matches up with the categories it sells.

Also, as part of a collaboration with WNYC’s Note to Self podcast, we’re asking people to tell us how they feel about what Facebook knows about them. To join that experiment, sign up and we’ll email you with the results of our very-unscientific audit of Facebook’s personal dossiers. Thanks for your help!

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Trump didn’t create the “rigged election” rhetoric. Republicans did.


Being smart in voting begins with reading and understanding what the respective parties do to get your vote, including legislating against you for their purposes. MA

Trump is only amplifying what Republicans have been saying for years.

Updated by German Lopez @germanrlopez german.lopez@vox.com Oct 17, 2016, 4:30p

 

Donald Trump is very publicly freaking out about election fraud. He has tweeted multiple times about it, complaining that the election will be rigged against him — conveniently, as Hillary Clinton’s lead in the polls continues to grow.

It’s really no mystery where all this bluster — with no evidence of actual voter fraud to back it up — came from: the Republican Party.

Over the past few years, Republicans in many states took an opportunity — enabled by a 2013 Supreme Court ruling — to pass a series of new restrictions on voting. Critics said the restrictions disproportionately hurt minority voters. But Republican backers, at least in public, have pointed to a single issue to defend the measures: voter fraud.

A previous report by the US Department of Justice captured the sentiment among many Republicans: Rep. Sue Burmeister, a lead sponsor of Georgia’s voter restriction law, told the Justice Department that “if there are fewer black voters because of this bill, it will only be because there is less opportunity for fraud. [Burmeister] said that when black voters in her black precincts are not paid to vote, they do not go to the polls.” Other Republicans, such as North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory and Iowa Rep. Steve King, have similarly warned about the dangers of voter fraud.

Trump isn’t even the first Republican presidential candidate to raise concerns about voter fraud. Back in 2008, many Republicans, with the support of conservative media outlets like Fox News, pushed concerns that ACORN — a community organization that focused in part on registering African-American voters — was engaging in mass-scale election fraud. At the time, Republican nominee John McCain warned that ACORN “is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”

Touting these concerns, 14 states have passed new voting restrictions — from strict photo ID requirements to limits on early voting — in time for the 2016 election: Alabama, Arizona, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Other states passed restrictions, but they’re currently tied up in court battles.

Trump himself has referenced voter ID laws when pushing his claims that the election is rigged. He told Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly, “I’m looking at all of these [court] decisions coming on down from the standpoint of identification, voter ID. And I’m saying, ‘What do you mean, you don’t have to have voter ID to now go in and vote?’ And it’s a little bit scary. … People are going to walk in, they are going to vote 10 times maybe.”

So there is a long history here. As unusual as Trump is in many ways, the idea of large-scale voter fraud is something that Republicans were perpetuating before Trump was their nominee for president.

There’s just one problem: As much as Republicans and now Trump have freaked out about voter fraud, the evidence suggests it’s extremely rare — and it’s never swung a presidential election.

Voter fraud is nearly nonexistent

Republicans’ voting restrictions tend to require a photo ID to vote — and what kind of photo ID is eligible can be strictly defined to not allow, for example, a school ID. Some laws also eliminate some or all early voting days. And they might limit when someone can register to vote, particularly so they can’t register and vote on the same day.

These restrictions can significantly hinder some people’s ability to vote. Fewer early voting days and narrower windows to register to vote limit when a voter, especially someone with a busy work or family schedule, can sign up to vote and cast a ballot. And for some, an eligible photo ID may be too costly, or they might not have the time or means to make a trip to a DMV to get the only form of ID that’s allowed.

The justification for all of this, supposedly, is to limit voter fraud.

But the type of voter fraud these initiatives target is nonexistent to extremely rare. Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt has tracked credible allegations of in-person voter fraud for years. He found 35 total credible allegations between 2000 and 2014, when more than 800 million ballots were cast in national general elections and hundreds of millions more were cast in primary, municipal, special, and other elections.

There are other kinds of voter fraud, such as vote buying, insider ballot box stuffing, double voting, and voting by people who turn out to be ineligible. All of these are also extremely rare, and there’s no evidence they have swung national elections, according to experts (and even Breitbart, a pro-Trump outlet).

But the focus is mainly on in-person voter fraud. By requiring a photo ID and limiting voting times, Republican lawmakers claim they want to stop fraudulent voters before they can even cast their ballots.

Trump has taken it a step further, arguing that beyond new laws, he wants his supporters to monitor elections for suspicious activity. His website, for example, provides a form to sign up to become an “election observer” to help “Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!”

This is all part of the same message: If Republicans and their supporters really believe that a lot of people who aren’t eligible to vote are nonetheless voting on Election Day, why wouldn’t they try to check out polling booths to make sure nothing bad is going on?

The voter fraud myth is dangerous — especially for minority voters

Republicans have long been playing with fire with this rhetoric. Claims of widespread voter fraud challenge the legitimacy of American democracy. Healthy democracies rely on people trusting the results of an election. But if people don’t feel that their voices are being heard or that they’re being treated fairly, they’re much more likely to try to take matters into their own hands — by intimidating other voters, inciting violence, or worse.

But there’s another potential consequences: New voting restrictions — and so-called “election monitors” — may target minority voters.

One widely cited 2006 study by the Brennan Center found voter ID laws, for instance, disproportionately impacted eligible black voters: 25 percent of black voting-age citizens did not have a government-issued photo ID, compared with 8 percent of white voting-age citizens. And a study for the Black Youth Project, which analyzed 2012 voting data for people ages 18 to 29, found 72.9 percent of young black voters and 60.8 percent of young Hispanic voters were asked for IDs to vote, compared with 50.8 percent of young white voters.

For civil rights groups, the restrictions hark back to the days of poll taxes, literacy tests, and other rules that were imposed to block minorities from voting until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 effectively banned such laws. Like modern voting restrictions, the old laws didn’t appear to racially discriminate at face value — but due to selective enforcement and socioeconomic disparities, they disproportionately kept out black voters.

Trump’s call for “election observers” may produce the same kind of disparities. For example, here is how one Trump supporter explained his Election Day plans to the Boston Globe:

“I’ll look for … well, it’s called racial profiling. Mexicans. Syrians. People who can’t speak American,” he said. “I’m going to go right up behind them. I’ll do everything legally. I want to see if they are accountable. I’m not going to do anything illegal. I’m going to make them a little bit nervous.”

In other words, Trump voters expect that the fraudulent voters will be nonwhite. So they’ll target nonwhite voters to make sure they don’t break the law.

Just like voting restrictions, then, selective enforcement and “monitoring” could put extra hurdles mostly on minority voters.

This essentially puts the lie to voter restrictions and Trump’s claims. The real concern does not seem to be voter fraud, but rather that minority voters may swing elections in Democrats’ favor.

Some Republicans have admitted to this. In 2012, ousted Florida Republican Party Chair Jim Greer told MSNBC that concerns about voter fraud are just a “marketing tool” to justify the suppression of minority voters. “Never one time did we have any discussions where voter fraud was a real issue,” Greer claimed. “It’s simply been created as a marketing tool here in Florida for the right wing that is running state government now to convince voters that what they’re doing here is right.”

For Trump, though, there may be another reason for fostering fears about voter fraud: It gives him an easy explanation for justifying his loss in November. Trump has never taken defeat well, based on everything we know about his public persona. Claiming that the election is rigged gives him an easy out: “I didn’t really lose. The whole thing was just skewed!”

Whatever the reason, Trump’s claims of a “rigged election” are merely latching onto the myth that Republicans have built up to pass new voting restrictions — a natural extension of the rhetoric Republicans have fanned for years. So if that rhetoric leads to trouble, it can’t be pinned solely on Trump.

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