The Midterm Elections

[onekidanddone]

6 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Yay!

Obama to enter midterm ring with ‘pointed’ criticism of Trump

 

Praise be our benevolent and all loving antlered savior. Bless Rufus 

[AmazonGrace]

When Republicans send their candidates they're sending their racistest 

 

[fraurosena]

The only thing about this GOP election fraud is that he got arrested for it.

GOP candidate for Kansas House seat charged with election fraud

Quote

A GOP candidate running for a seat in the Kansas House of Representatives was arrested and charged with election fraud on Thursday.

Adam Thomas is being charged in the Johnson County District Court with election perjury, according to The Kansas City Star. The charge against him alleges that he submitted a falsified document to election officials in May.

The court documents do not provide additional details, according to the Star report.

State Rep. Vic Miller (D) called for the investigation into Thomas this summer, claiming he lied about where he lives in official documents to run for office, the Star reported.

Miller told the Star that he is glad “that the Johnson County district attorney has more political courage than apparently our secretary of State who claims to be so much against election fraud.”

A spokeswoman for Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who is running for Kansas governor and often speaks against voter fraud, declined to comment to the Star. The spokeswoman also said the secretary of State would not comment on his role in the arrest. 

A board that includes the state's lieutenant governor, attorney general and secretary of State are expected to meet Monday to discuss whether to remove Thomas from the November ballot, the newspaper reported.

“We are obviously disappointed with this news, but trust the legal system in place to investigate these serious charges," Kansas House Speaker Ron Ryckman (R) said in a statement.  

 

[AmazonGrace]

Hey Look, it's Voter Suppression Friday

[fraurosena]

Time to inject some new, young blood into Congress, don't you think?

 

[AmazonGrace]

Well it's the Senate and not the Junate

[AmazonGrace]

Evil is as evil does 

 

[fraurosena]

And here it is. Obama's speech.

 

[fraurosena]

Holy sweet lovable Rufus. That speech was incredible. If you haven't seen it, go find it and watch.

I promise you, it will brighten your day. 

[wotdancer]

God, I miss that man. I didn't always agree with him, but he was intelligent, caring, and well-spoken. He still is.

[fraurosena]

Here's the entire speech.

 

[AmazonGrace]

Hey Look, it's Voter Suppression Day again 

 

[CTRLZero]

The US Senate race between former Governor Phil Bredesen (D) and Marsha Blackburn (R) in Tennessee is apparently very close.  I just watched a television ad where Trump (at the recent Blackburn rally probably) mentions "Phil whatever-the-hell-his-name-is" -- did he forget?!?  Anyway, not very impressive, which suits me as it was an ad endorsing Marsha Blackburn.

Here is a link to a Washington Post article on a Koch-funded attack ad regarding the Bredesen-Blackburn race, which garnered three Pinocchios:

Koch attack ad is misleading - surprise!

[fraurosena]

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Gabby Giffords has done an ad against Barbara Comstock, who is one of the most vulnerable Repugs in the house. I hope it helps.

 

[AmazonGrace]

Ron Desantis: Sometimes you gotta be racist

 

[AmazonGrace]

ICE gonna start hounding Dem voters 

 

[AmazonGrace]

 racists gotta racism

[GreyhoundFan]

"GOP Rep. Ron DeSantis, running for Florida governor, resigns from House"

Spoiler

Rep. Ron DeSantis, a conservative Republican running for governor of Florida, has resigned from the House to focus on his campaign, he told House Speaker Paul D. Ryan in a letter delivered Monday.

DeSantis, 39, has represented Florida’s 6th Congressional District since 2013. He faces Democrat Andrew Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee, is a closely watched matchup this November.

“As the Republican nominee for Governor of Florida, it is clear to me that I will likely miss the vast majority of our remaining session days for this Congress,” DeSantis wrote. “Under these circumstances, it would be inappropriate for me to accept a salary. In order to honor my principles and protect the taxpayer, I officially resign from the House of Representatives effective immediately.”

A spokesman for Ryan confirmed receipt of DeSantis’s letter.

DeSantis has missed 43 of 80 House votes cast since July — including all 14 votes cast last week — according to database maintained by GovTrack. In the letter, DeSantis asked that his resignation be made retroactive to Sept. 1 for payroll purposes.

“This is not a decision I make lightly,” he wrote. “It has been an honor to serve the people of Florida’s Sixth Congressional District, and I look forward to serving them and the rest of Florida as our state’s next Governor.”

A member of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, DeSantis has emerged as one of President Trump’s most aggressive defenders on Capitol Hill and has been a critic of the Justice Department and special counsel investigations into Trump.

DeSantis was one of six sitting House members seeking governor’s seats across the country. Gubernatorial candidates remaining in the House are fellow Republicans Kristi L. Noem of South Dakota and Stevan Pearce of New Mexico, as well as Democrats Tim Walz of Minnesota, Jared Polis of Colorado and Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico.

 

[fraurosena]

15 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"GOP Rep. Ron DeSantis, running for Florida governor, resigns from House"

  Hide contents

Rep. Ron DeSantis, a conservative Republican running for governor of Florida, has resigned from the House to focus on his campaign, he told House Speaker Paul D. Ryan in a letter delivered Monday.

DeSantis, 39, has represented Florida’s 6th Congressional District since 2013. He faces Democrat Andrew Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee, is a closely watched matchup this November.

“As the Republican nominee for Governor of Florida, it is clear to me that I will likely miss the vast majority of our remaining session days for this Congress,” DeSantis wrote. “Under these circumstances, it would be inappropriate for me to accept a salary. In order to honor my principles and protect the taxpayer, I officially resign from the House of Representatives effective immediately.”

A spokesman for Ryan confirmed receipt of DeSantis’s letter.

DeSantis has missed 43 of 80 House votes cast since July — including all 14 votes cast last week — according to database maintained by GovTrack. In the letter, DeSantis asked that his resignation be made retroactive to Sept. 1 for payroll purposes.

“This is not a decision I make lightly,” he wrote. “It has been an honor to serve the people of Florida’s Sixth Congressional District, and I look forward to serving them and the rest of Florida as our state’s next Governor.”

A member of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, DeSantis has emerged as one of President Trump’s most aggressive defenders on Capitol Hill and has been a critic of the Justice Department and special counsel investigations into Trump.

DeSantis was one of six sitting House members seeking governor’s seats across the country. Gubernatorial candidates remaining in the House are fellow Republicans Kristi L. Noem of South Dakota and Stevan Pearce of New Mexico, as well as Democrats Tim Walz of Minnesota, Jared Polis of Colorado and Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico.

 

Does this mean there will be another election for his place in the House? Or will this wait until November? Or will someone be appointed to replace him, like McCain was in the Senate? If it's the latter, is this a ploy by the GOP to put someone there that they believe is more electable in the Midterms, i.e. someone whom they believe to be a better opponent against the Dem contester in November?

[Cartmann99]

More jackassery from the Koch brothers:

 

[fraurosena]

I am utterly appalled. You call yourselves a democracy? I just cannot fathom this. In my country even people who are incarcerated are allowed to vote (by proxy). And this poor woman, who was actually in the process of turning her life around, gets five years imprisonment - FIVE - because she voted while under supervision?

And Papadapoulos gets 14 fucking days for being a traitor to his country.

What.the.fuck. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

14 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Does this mean there will be another election for his place in the House? Or will this wait until November? Or will someone be appointed to replace him, like McCain was in the Senate? If it's the latter, is this a ploy by the GOP to put someone there that they believe is more electable in the Midterms, i.e. someone whom they believe to be a better opponent against the Dem contester in November?

It depends. The current governor can appoint someone to fill the seat between now and January. If he doesn't, the seat will be vacant until January. Since DeSantis is running for governor, another repug is running in the November election.

[GreyhoundFan]

"The GOP finds yet another way to suppress the vote"

Spoiler

IT WAS 5 p.m. on a Friday, just as Labor Day weekend was starting, when, without warning, faxes arrived at North Carolina’s state board of elections and 44 county election boards. The faxes contained a demand so outlandish — and so blatantly in violation of state privacy laws — that several officials assumed they were a hoax. A federal subpoena demanded practically every voting document imaginable, going back years. Absentee, provisional and regular ballots. Registration applications. Early-voting applications. Absentee ballot requests. Poll books.

In fact, it was no hoax. The subpoena sought a list of items which, if satisfied, would force state and local officials to produce at least 20 million documents — in less than four weeks. Prosecutors also demanded eight years of records from the state Division of Motor Vehicles, through which voters are allowed to register to vote. No explanation was provided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement or federal prosecutors, who sought the documents. It is a fishing expedition by the Trump administration to support the president’s repeatedly discredited assertions that voting fraud is widespread, especially by noncitizens casting illegal ballots.

The effect of this expedition, led by Robert J. Higdon Jr., the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, is easy to foresee: This is one more in a long line of GOP efforts to suppress the vote. Members of the state board of elections, split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, voted unanimously to fight the subpoena, which would overwhelm local boards’ administrative capacity. It also would intimidate voters who, with good reason, would fear their votes and other sensitive information were being handed over to federal officials.

Faced with an outcry from state and local officials, prosecutors dropped their initial, preposterous demand that the records be handed over by Sept. 25, a deadline that would have played havoc with preparations for the fall elections. They also said state officials could redact voters’ choices on some 2.2 million early and absentee ballots — a clerical task that would consume untold hours of work. (More than 3.3 million regular ballots cannot be traced to the voters who cast them.)

The absurdity of the document demand, and the president’s broader assertion that the U.S. voting system is “rigged” and marred by massive fraudulent voting and the participation of illegal immigrants, was underscored by indictments announced last month, also in the Eastern District of North Carolina. The indictments charged 19 foreign nationals — from Japan, Italy, South Korea, Germany, Poland, Mexico, Haiti, Grenada and several other countries — with voting illegally in the 2016 elections.

Nineteen illegal votes, out of more than 4.5 million ballots cast in North Carolina that year, is minuscule. Far from justifying a demand for millions of documents, it underscores the conclusion by dozens of reputable scholars and other investigators that illegal voting is exceedingly rare. That the administration pursues its crusade to show otherwise is an exercise in unicorn-spotting, but it is also something far more sinister. The real agenda is to discredit American democracy and to scare away Democratic-leaning voters. It represents an abominable misuse of law enforcement powers.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Dear Rufus, I know what I want for my birthday (in early November): "‘Shipwreck’: GOP grows fearful about losing Senate as candidates struggle, Trump support tumbles"

Spoiler

Republicans have grown increasingly worried about losing control of the Senate, as President Trump’s approval rating tumbles and Democrats gain steam in key battleground races.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday sounded some of the most doubtful notes of Trump’s presidency that Republicans will keep the upper chamber of Congress, telling reporters, “I hope when the smoke clears, we’ll still have a majority.”

His comments came as Republican strategists and officials fretted over a fresh round of private polling on the Senate races, while public polls registered further erosion in Americans’ approval of Trump. “Shipwreck” was how one leading strategist described the situation, adding an expletive to underscore the severity of the party’s problems.

One of the most unexpected fights is in reliably GOP Texas, where Sen. Ted Cruz is trying to fend off Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke. Republicans are so fearful about losing the seat that they are diverting resources to Texas, a sore point in the White House after the animosity between Cruz and Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primary.

Beyond Texas, Sen. Joe Donnelly, once seen as perhaps the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent, has opened up a slight edge over Republican businessman Mike Braun in Indiana, while hopes for picking off Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) in a state Trump won by 43 percentage points have faded along with GOP confidence in state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, the Republican nominee.

The developments signaled the most serious peril yet for Republicans’ 51-49 majority. Losing the Senate was once an unthinkable prospect as the GOP looked to gain seats in the midterms, and with the party’s grip on the House in serious jeopardy, the chamber had been seen as the last line of defense.

At the start of Trump’s tenure, some Republicans envisioned enough wins to secure a filibuster-proof majority of 60 seats, confident they could oust many of the 10 Democrats running in states Trump won in 2016. Even a few weeks ago, Republicans were talking more assuredly about flipping seats.

But less than two months till the Nov. 6 election, Republicans barely mention Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — states Trump won — as opportunities to knock out a Democrat, while McConnell reiterated that nine seats, plus Texas, were at stake.

“Arizona, Nevada, Tennessee, Montana, North Dakota, Missouri, Indiana, West Virginia and Florida. All of them too close to call, and every one of them like a knife fight in an alley; I mean, just a brawl in every one of those places,” McConnell told reporters in Louisville.

Republicans could still emerge with an increase in their numbers if GOP candidates eventually prevail in many of these close races, with Democrats seriously concerned about Florida, where Republican Gov. Rick Scott is running about even against Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson.

The dire warnings also could serve as a wake-up call to GOP donors for the final eight weeks of the campaign.

But for the GOP, simply retaining its majority — which was whittled by a seat after a stunning upset in the Alabama special election last year — has looked like a more challenging goal by the day, as controversy swirls around Trump, the public loses confidence in the president and GOP candidates are slow to gain traction.

A Washington Post-ABC News national poll conducted in late August found just 38 percent of voters approved of the job that Trump was doing, compared with 60 percent who disapproved. His approval rating in April was 44 percent.

These difficulties have come into sharp focus in Texas, where Cruz is fighting for political survival against O’Rourke, a rising liberal star who is raising record-setting sums of cash and attracting large crowds across a ruby-red state. At the end of June, O’Rourke had close to $14 million cash on hand to Cruz’s $9 million, according to Federal Election Commission reports.

The tough realities of Texas have prompted an unexpected alliance between Cruz and the Republicans he spent years waging a vendetta against as a senator and as a candidate for president — including Trump and McConnell.

The sudden cooperation underscores how much the GOP fears losing Texas. The shock waves are being felt well beyond the state, as its several expensive media markets could force the party to spend money there that it will have to subtract from GOP hopefuls in other battlegrounds.

“Other campaigns are going to be shorted due to the lackluster nature of the campaign,” said one White House official, speaking of the Cruz operation.

McConnell recently assured Cruz in a private conversation that resources would be there for him, according to people familiar with the talk. Trump is planning to campaign for Cruz in Texas next month.

The Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC helmed by a former top McConnell aide, has recently taken a close look at Texas, conducting polling and summarizing its findings in a memo, according to Chris Pack, a spokesman for the group.

The organization also announced a seven-figure advertising campaign in five other states on Tuesday. The ads mostly target Democratic candidates.

A Cruz-McConnell partnership would have been unimaginable when Cruz called McConnell a liar on the Senate floor in July 2015 over strategy on legislation. A Cruz-Trump alliance would have seemed equally implausible after Cruz labeled Trump a “pathological liar” and declined to endorse him at the Republican National Convention.

Beyond Trump and McConnell, Cruz angered other Republicans with his unsuccessful effort to strip funds from the Affordable Care Act in 2013, which forced a 16-day partial government shutdown, and his support for outside groups that financed primary challengers to GOP senators.

“They are working together for political expediency,” said Rick Tyler, a former Cruz spokesman. “These people don’t like each other.”

Cruz spoke about his plight at a luncheon for Republican senators earlier this summer, according to people familiar with his remarks. One GOP senator said Cruz sought to convince them that he was facing a“real race,” citing polls and noting that O’Rourke was amassing cash.

Like others interviewed for this story, the senator spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

In Texas on Tuesday, Cruz told reporters he was eager to debate O’Rourke five times. “Typically, sitting officeholders don’t suggest that many debates. They don’t want to do any debates. But the reason I proposed that is, I think we owe it to the voters of Texas.”

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), whom Cruz declined to endorse in his 2014 primary, is hosting a fundraiser for Cruz in Washington next month.

Public polls have shown Cruz leading O’Rourke by single digits. David McIntosh, the president of the Club for Growth, an anti-tax group that has long championed Cruz, said donors he has spoken with have been caught off-guard by the tightness of the contest.

“I think, particularly in Texas, it’s like: ‘Oh yeah, I didn’t think it would be a big race. Yes, we need to win it. I’ll help you do that.’ And the same around the country,” McIntosh said.

Speaking to reporters in Louisville on Tuesday, McConnell called the race “competitive” but said he expected Cruz to prevail. One advantage for any Republican in the state is the ability of voters to simply cast a straight-party-ticket ballot.

Despite Trump’s poll numbers, GOP strategists still consider the president their most effective weapon in the fight to keep control of the Senate. They say his trips to red states with marquee contests, like Montana, North Dakota, Missouri and Indiana, have provided boosts for their candidates.

The Senate Leadership Fund’s new Indiana ad begins with footage of Trump praising Braun and Braun pledging to fight for the president.

Whether the bursts of momentum will last is another question party leaders are grappling with as they eye the final two months before the November elections. A steady stream of explosive stories about dissent within Trump’s administration and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation hover over the fall stretch.

Republican strategists are closely watching suburban areas, where they fear that anger with Trump could spark a backlash against GOP candidates. The suburbs loom larger over the battle for the House, with many rural states set to decide Senate contests. But Senate strategists are still mindful of the challenges they may pose.

One bright spot for the GOP has been the nomination of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Republican leaders are confident they will confirm him this month, giving Trump and his party a landmark achievement just before voting begins.

Until then, they will have to weather a political storm that has increasingly stoked private GOP comparisons to 2006, a banner election year for the Democrats. Amid that perceived danger, every competitive Senate race is becoming more critical.

Having Bitch go back to the minority leader would be a wonderful birthday gift.