<....Below are those 32 US cities where single-family homes got cheaper in the fourth quarter compared to the prior year, according to the NAR. Along with each market is its year-over-year home-price change and the median home price in the third and fourth quarters of 2023, as well as the fourth quarter of 2022.

Correction on February 12, 2024: The slides below were updated to reflect that the final number in each is the median home price from Q4 2022, not Q4 2023 as was stated previously.

Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at real-estate listings and research site Redfin, disagrees.

"The reason housing costs are so high is straightforward, a lack of supply," Fairweather said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, replying to a user who shared a clip of Vance's interview. "I wish pundits would get to the point and ask candidates, 'How do you plan to increase the supply of housing?'"

Housing experts overwhelmingly agree with Fairweather's assessment.

The US is facing a severe housing shortage years in the making that has driven up rents and home prices. Home prices soared more than 40% across the US between the end of 2019 and mid-2021, long before the Federal Reserve began hiking interest rates in 2022.

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the housing market crash, the construction of new homes plummeted and hasn't kept pace with demand.

Further, restrictive land-use policies dominate American communities. These policies include single-family zoning laws that generally ban anything other than traditional unattached houses, including townhomes and apartment buildings that could house more people. They're a huge part of why more — and denser — housing isn't getting built.

According to research firm Ned Davis Research, the US is short of 2.2 million homes, while Zillow estimates the shortage is closer to 4.5 million homes.

The situation is aggravated by a mortgage rate lock-in effect, which is causing existing homeowners to hold onto their properties instead of selling them. There's also a slowdown in homebuilding.

Without enough new inventory hitting the market, home prices will likely remain elevated for the foreseeable future.

Vance's comments on Fox News weren't the first time he's linked immigration and housing.

In June, Vance posted a message on X responding to the allegation that conservatives have few plans to address rising housing costs. The senator argued that deporting millions of immigrants would bring prices down by reducing demand for housing.

"Not having 20 million illegal aliens who need to be housed (often at public expense) will absolutely make housing more affordable for American citizens," Vance wrote.

The senator, who hadn't yet been selected as former President Donald Trump's running mate, was echoing the Trump campaign's promise to deport between 15 and 20 million people, in part to address the nation's housing affordability crisis.

In the past, Vance has blamed the housing affordability crisis largely on high interest rates.

"The thing about the affordable housing crisis is, it is fundamentally a function of higher rents, higher mortgage payments, which are dependent on interest rates," he told Business Insider last year.

Many economists disagree with Vance's argument about the source of the housing affordability crisis and his solution to it.

Deporting millions of people and restricting new immigration could actually slow the pace of new housing construction by reducing the immigrant labor force that makes up a disproportionate portion of construction workers.

Reducing immigration — in addition to other Republican-proposed economic policies like imposing new tariffs and cutting taxes — would likely increase the cost of housing and a slew of other goods, many economists say.

Still, many Republican leaders, including Trump and Vance, have repeatedly blamed the Biden administration, including Harris, for high inflation, despite strong evidence that the pandemic and Russia's war in Ukraine are major causes of elevated prices.

They've also blamed the current administration for relatively high interest rates, which are determined by the independent Federal Reserve and designed to control inflation.>

Note to <wuckfadius moronicus>: don't like the content? Simple solution: stay away.

<....Those coddling thoughts of MC are interesting, and totally different than mine. For example, I detest pervicious; I'd beat his contemptuous ass every chance I could get. I'd beat him w/a wooden toothpick, a cotton ball, a rubber duckie, a silver spoon, a dirty sock, a Lego, his Yu-Gi-Oh cards, a beam of light, a wet noodle, a cork from his bottle, a feather from his cap. I'd beat him to a pulp, again and again and again. Like poker, he'd be forced to lie, cheat, and steal potato chips as usual to have any chance of survival.

Give up my #1 chair??? Not on his unfulfilled life....>

Pro tip: wrong game, wrong opponent, <fredthecarbuncle>.

Capisce, <contemptible whore>?

<Folks, I think Vice President Kamala Harris has broken Donald Trump.

I mean, it’s fair to say he was already broken – in all ways, really – but since Harris became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee July 21, the GOP’s favorite felon and presidential nominee has been crumbling before our eyes.

Following up his leaning-hard-into-racism moment at last week’s National Association of Black Journalists convention, where he bizarrely suggested Harris only recently “happened to turn Black,” Trump held a Saturday rally in Atlanta that was a festival of ranting and raving, arguably the worst display of Trump’s snarling id we’ve seen in some time.

Kamala Harris has already reduced Donald Trump to a quivering pile of hate and insults He called his opponent – a woman who is the sitting vice president of the United States, an accomplished prosecutor and a former U.S. senator – “Crazy Kamala” and a “lunatic” and “a radical left freak.”

He said, falsely, “She happens to be really a low-IQ individual,” and then added, without a hint of self-awareness: “We don’t need a low IQ.”

Vice President Kamala Harris campaigns for the presidency on July 30, 2024, in Atlanta. Then he babbled this gem: “The two words are 'Merry Christmas.’ She doesn’t want anybody saying Merry Christmas.”

At a 2017 news conference, after then-President Trump announced he was ending Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) for children brought here illegally, then-Sen. Harris said: “And when we all sing happy tunes, and sing Merry Christmas, and wish each other Merry Christmas, these children are not going to have a Merry Christmas. How dare we speak Merry Christmas. How dare we? They will not have a Merry Christmas.”

Trump went so far off the rails at his Atlanta rally that he started attacking Republicans And then he aimed his drunk-uncle-inspired rhetoric at Georgia’s popular – and Republican! – governor, Brian Kemp, whom Trump hates because he wouldn’t help him overturn the state’s election results in 2020.

“Atlanta is like a killing field, and your governor ought to get off his a-- and do something about it,” Trump boomed.

Will Trump and Harris debate? Trump supporters want him to debate Kamala Harris. They told me why.

He attacked Kemp’s wife, saying she once thanked him for endorsing her husband but has now turned on Trump.

“Now she said two weeks ago that I will not endorse him because he hasn’t earned my endorsement,” the former president said. “I haven’t earned her endorsement? I have nothing to do with her.”

Then Trump went back to bad-mouthing Kemp who, two years after Joe Biden won Georgia, beat Democrat Stacey Abrams soundly: “He’s a bad guy, he’s a disloyal guy, and he’s a very average governor. Little Brian, Little Brian Kemp.”

Vice President Harris, what have you done to this already very unstable man? The cheese has somehow slid farther off his cracker.

Trump is so shook that he backed out of a planned Sept. 10 presidential debate on ABC News, instead demanding a Sept. 4 debate at his network safe space – Fox News – with "a full arena audience."

It's the presidential candidate equivalent of throwing a temper tantrum before taking your ball and going home.>

<Has Donald Trump become President Panic and hit a grievance ceiling?

The confidence the world saw at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee after Trump survived a terrifying assassination attempt is suddenly gone. The rallying cry of “Fight, fight, fight!” has been replaced with “whine, whine, whine,” a transformation encapsulated in feverish social media posts Trump is sending from his baroque bunker in Mar-a-Lago.

Clearly caught off guard by Biden’s exit, the former president is struggling to find a way to frame Kamala Harris’ sudden surge in momentum. After Harris picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate and held a series of massive rallies, Trump released what ranked as one of his most bizarre social media posts. (OK, it’s not on the RFK Jr. level of “After falconing with my pals, I picked a dead bear cub off the highway to skin it and eat it but instead decided to secretly dump it in Central Park and stage a fake crime scene by pretending the bear was killed by a cyclist,” but then, what is? Hold RFK’s animal cruelty beer, Gov. Kristi Noem!)

In any case, Trump just posted a panicky theory that Biden is going to fight Harris to reclaim the nomination. “What are the chances that Crooked Joe Biden, the WORST President in the history of the U.S., whose Presidency was Unconstitutionally STOLEN from him by Kamabla, Barrack HUSSEIN Obama, Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Shifty Adam Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, and others on the Lunatic Left, CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination, beginning with challenging me to another DEBATE,” he wrote. “He feels that he made a historically tragic mistake by handing over the U.S. Presidency, a COUP, to the people in the World he most hates, and he wants it back, NOW!!!”

Hard to decode any of this, but let’s try. Does Trump know anything about the inner workings of the Biden circle? No. Was Biden’s presidency “unconstitutionally stolen”? No. Biden is still president, and he decided — under great pressure to be sure — not to run again. Both Johnson and Truman did the same thing, so it can happen. It was not a “COUP,” as Trump later called it, though the irony was not lost on anyone that Trump is the one accused of trying to unconstitutionally steal an election and stage a coup on Jan. 6, 2021.

The post also descends into his usual litany of name-calling, from “crooked” for Biden and “shifty” for Schiff to “crazy” for Nancy Pelosi. He notably changed “Kamala” to “Kamabla” — and has done so a few times — which no one understands.

There does not seem to be a coherent Trump strategy yet to combat Harris or Walz, except for trying to find the juvenile name that sticks, à la Sleepy Joe. “Laughing Kamala” — is that a thing? Nope. Is laughter now a liability in America? No. Crazy Kamala? It’s a classic one — but doesn’t it already belong to Pelosi?

When the name-calling fails, there is always the fallback on race, a strategy Trump used against Barack Obama with the birther theory. At the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week, Trump alleged that Harris had recently “turned Black,” dismissing her biracial identity. This made no sense, especially since his running mate, JD Vance, has biracial children. But Trump has doubled down on it anyway, bundling it with calling Harris a “DEI hire,” even though her record in politics is much longer than either his own or Vance’s.

This week, Republican pollster Frank Luntz said that Harris is now the front-runner and blamed the turn of fortunes on Trump’s empty personal attacks. “He’s losing it with speeches that have the same sort of ad hominem attacks to a public that has had enough and wants to look for something different, something new,” he told Vinnews.

In any election, a candidate has a floor of support — the base that will never leave them which, in Trump’s case, is the MAGA crowd that makes up about 43%-48% of the voting population — and a ceiling, the place they need to grow to win over swing states like Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, or Nevada. A new survey conducted by Marquette Law School shows Harris leading Trump among likely voters by 50% to 42%, when third-party candidates are included, and by 47% to 41% with registered voters.

The goal is to recruit new voters, independents, suburban women, unions, the Black, Latino, Jewish, or Arab-American voters. It appears as if there may be a kind of “grievance ceiling” or an “anger ceiling” in US politics, and Trump might have just hit it.

Trump’s strategy of unhinged personal insults, race-baiting, grievance-fueled conspiracy theories, and self-pity might have made his floor the same as his ceiling, which is fatal for a campaign. How does he put new things on the menu to attract new customers if he keeps cooking with the same old sauce?....>

<....One of the things Harris and Walz have done remarkably well is find a tone that makes the Trump personal attacks seem old, out of touch, and ineffective. Walz in particular has owned the happy warrior role, dismissing the entire Trump campaign as “weird,” a deft response that allows Democrats to take Trump seriously without admitting that he’s actually serious about anything.

They smile, they laugh, and they appear unaffected by the personal attacks. But they are hitting back too, rejecting Michelle Obama's maxim: “When they go low, we go high.” Walz and surrogates like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro love fighting on the low ground and have taken to spicing up their speeches with the truffle sauce of four-letter profanity that lends the out-of-touch elitist Democrat image a folksy touch. “Hey, we can swear too,” they seem to say. Shapiro’s maxim of GSD or “Get S*** Done” is now a crowd chant. Democrats are fighting MAGA mud with their own mud, and they are enjoying it, which used to be Trump’s secret weapon.

Luntz’s point is that Trump needs to stop panicking and start talking about substance, policy, and record. Harris and Walz are vulnerable on lots of issues: the faltering economy, the porous border, and the bloody Middle East. But Trump can’t seem to focus on substantial issues long enough to make this stuff stick. That explains why he has become President Panic.

There are still over 90 days left in this volatile, wild campaign, so if there is one lesson, it’s that the past is not prologue. The election is still very much up for grabs. Harris and Walz have started strong, but it ain’t about the start. It’s about the finish. In politics, as in baseball, being the closer is a hard job that few can pull off. Is Harris a closer? Will she wilt under the barrage of Trump attacks — he will find a more coherent strategy — as so many others have? Will divisions inside her party over say the policy on Israel, Hamas, and Gaza undermine the Democrats’ momentum in key states like Michigan? And what about the economy and the stock market meltdown? That is the hard test ahead.

Harris and Walz are still popping corks at their sudden change of fortune, but elections can make a candidate’s bubbly go flat before the second sip. For now, however, they are watching President Panic hit the grievance ceiling, and they are drinking it up.>

<ursus banalus>, this content a problem? Stay the f*** away!

<Before Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, you weren’t hearing quite as much talk as usual about Republicans scheming to overturn the presidential election results for the simple reason that most Donald Trump fans thought the White House was in the bag. Now with Kamala Harris leading Trump in all the national polling averages, and with Democrats giving rave reviews to their new nominee and her running mate Tim Walz, there’s less buzz over the size of Trump’s landslide in November and more anxiety about the GOP’s erratic warrior king and his weird sidekick, J.D. Vance.

So Republicans may have to pursue Trump’s many threats to overturn another “rigged election” after all. Here’s how they’re laying the groundwork.

Trump says there’s already reason to overturn a 2024 defeat.

Obviously, Trump and his supporters will jump on any election irregularities that favor Harris as they arise (or are fabricated). But Trump has already accused Democrats of committing “election interference,” which in his eyes makes any Harris victory illegitimate. Chief among these alleged dirty tricks are Trump’s many legal problems, including his felony conviction in New York; according to MAGA gospel, these cases are all completely made up for the sole purpose of keeping Trump from becoming president again.

This means that no Trump defeat, however overwhelming, need be accepted, no matter what happens between now and November 5. The case for a “rigged election” is already closed in the court of Donald Trump’s fever dreams.

Republicans are continuing their voter-suppression efforts.

One arm of Republican election preparations involves ongoing efforts to prevent a Democratic victory by suppressing potentially pro-Democratic votes. Trump has not revived the wholesale attacks on voting by mail that drove many Republicans to abandon “convenience voting” in 2020 and served as a principal rationale for his efforts to overturn the results of the last presidential election. But Republicans are still fighting in courts and in state legislatures to restrict the practice, at least where it might help Democrats.

Some of the early-voting rules and practices adopted in 2020 by both Republican and Democratic jurisdictions were dropped once the COVID-19 pandemic abated. But 17 states (plus D.C.) have adopted or retained one relatively novel rule: the acceptance of mail ballots postmarked by Election Day and received afterwards (usually by a specified date). Republicans are fighting to stop post–Election Day ballot receipt altogether, based on the belief that late voters-by-mail tend to skew Democratic (a hypothesis sometimes called the “blue shift” since it can produce Democratic gains as the last-cast mail ballots are counted). NPR reports:

So far the Republican National Committee and others have filed ballot return challenges in Nevada, Illinois, Mississippi and North Dakota.

Early this year, the North Dakota case was thrown out of court. And last month, judges in Mississippi and Nevada also threw out the lawsuits filed by the RNC aiming to disqualify ballots that arrive after Election Day.

Republicans base these challenges on the legal theory that the receipt of ballots after the general-election date abrogates the federal law specifying that date. They are appealing the Mississippi and Nevada decisions in hopes of finding a conservative appeals court that will agree with them. Nevada, of course, is a key battleground state where 40,000 ballots were received and counted after Election Day in 2020. In Pennsylvania, another battleground state, there’s a federal court battle over a state-legislative mandate that mail ballots include an accurate date indicating when they were filled out; an estimated 10,000 ballots could be affected.

In 15 state legislatures they control, Republicans have been tightening voter ID laws that tend to trip up entirely qualified voters who don’t have the requisite documentation handy; they tend to skew low-income and Democratic.

Perhaps the most rapidly growing technique of voter suppression this year has been citizen-initiated challenges to the eligibility of likely Democratic voters, particularly by the hoary vote suppressors of the Texas-based True the Vote organization. As Wired recently reported, the organization has been racing to purge as many voters from the rolls as possible prior to the federal August 7 deadline for voter challenges in federal elections.....>

<.....Catherine Engelbrecht, the founder of True the Vote, has argued for more than a decade that mismanaged voter rolls have led to widespread voter fraud. Recently, she wrote in her newsletter that True the Vote’s revamped IV3 tool, designed to automate the process of challenging voter registrations, was used by more than 35,000 volunteers. “To date, 6,937 citizens have completed 645,610 challenges across 1,322 counties,” she wrote. In a later interview on the right-wing War Room podcast, Engelbrecht said the number of challenges facilitated by IV3 was now more than 700,000.

The Georgia Republican Party was recently fined by the Federal Election Commission for illegally coordinating with True the Vote.

Some Republican-controlled states are trying to restrict or inhibit voter-registration drives. One typical example is in Florida, which now imposes serious fines on canvassers for even minor mistakes in registration forms. One important 2020 resource for both voter assistance and election office administration will largely just go away: The Mark Zuckerberg–founded Center for Tech and Civic Life will greatly ratchet down the grants it offered in 2020 to small and midsize communities for election administration, a practice Republicans demonized as “Zuckerbucks” on grounds that it tended to support Democratic-controlled jurisdictions (which also happened to be the neediest jurisdictions).

All these efforts may or may not reduce Democratic voting enough to make a difference, but by and large, Team Trump is leaving nothing to chance or to actual voter preferences.

The GOP is working to slow down election certification.

Aside from the end of pandemic conditions, the most important change in circumstances since 2020 was the passage of the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022. This law made the kind of end-game coup Donald Trump’s campaign attempted last time around significantly more difficult, principally by clarifying the process for the state certification of winners and thus electoral-vote slates. But on the other hand, we won’t see a repeat of Team Trump’s highly improvised 2020 election-litigation strategy; his legal beagles have had nearly four years to examine where Rudy Giuliani’s lawyers went wrong.

It appears from activities in various states that a principal Trump strategy for setting up and even executing election challenges will be to slow down the certification of the results at the local level from the get-go, as the Washington Post reported in June:

When a member of Georgia’s Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections refused to join her colleagues as they certified two primaries this year, she claimed she had been denied her right to examine a long list of election records for signs of fraud or other issues.

Now the board member, Julie Adams, an avowed believer in the false theory that the 2020 election was stolen from former president Donald Trump, is suing the board, hoping a judge will affirm that right and potentially empower others in similar positions elsewhere to hold up the outcome of elections.

In addition to Georgia, local officials in at least four other battleground states have made pushes to seize control of the certification process, heightening worries that pro-Trump forces will try similar moves in the fall.

In Georgia, the Republican majority on the state election board is giving potential certification footdraggers a big boost, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported:

A new Georgia election rule approved Tuesday requires an undefined “reasonable inquiry” before certifying results, potentially giving partisan county election board members more discretion to reject the outcome.

The Georgia Election Board voted 3-2 to finalize the rule, which was supported by the same three Republican members that Donald Trump praised at a rally Saturday in Atlanta. A crowd of mostly Republican voters at the meeting cheered when the rule passed....>

<....And in Pennsylvania, Republican legislators very deliberately threw sand in the election-certification gears by refusing to modify an archaic law that prevents the counting of mail ballots before Election Day, which was a major reason the count in that state was so slow in 2020.

What will Team Trump do with the flammable raw material of delayed election certification? Well, for one thing, the former president himself will almost certainly repeat what he did on Election Night in 2020 and prematurely claim victory even if the trends foretell defeat. But this time around, the violence we saw on January 6, 2021, could occur much earlier in the process, perhaps as understaffed local election offices struggle to count and certify the votes. For that to happen, Republicans would need to ramp up the paranoia and the sense of urgency about obstructing normal procedures.

Trump supporters are raising alarms about (imaginary) widespread voter fraud.

Aside from Trump’s claim that this election has already been fatally tainted by Democratic “interference,” his allies can be expected to ramp up the unsubstantiated allegations that Democrats are systemically cheating, which makes cheating right back almost a moral obligation. Donald Trump Jr. already accused Kamala Harris of being a massive fraudster in a Fox News op-ed published last weekend:

[Democrats] have put America last, and non-citizens first, by opening our borders, dismantling election safeguards and embracing non-citizen voting. We deserve a secure system where our future is decided by our citizens, not this anti-American version of the Democrats. Led by Vice President Kamala Harris, they have undermined our country at every turn, welcomed the invasion at the border and encouraged non-citizens to cancel the voice of Americans.

This is entirely imaginary, since there’s no evidence of widespread noncitizen voting (the best available study found 30 incidents in the entire 2016 election), and it’s already a crime punishable by prison and deportation. But the claim that Democrats have deliberately engineered an “open border” (also a lie) in order to harvest illegal votes has been embraced not only by Donald Trump but by Speaker Mike Johnson and many other Republicans. And lest we forget, in 2016, even in victory Trump insisted that “millions” of illegal votes were cast by noncitizens, principally in California — that’s right, Kamala Harris’s California. So we are going to hear a lot on this subject between now and November 5.

If you don’t think a fired-up MAGA base convinced that Harris is letting “illegal aliens” steal the presidency will take extraordinary measures to keep that evil plot from being consummated, then you have extraordinary confidence in the ability of Trump’s warriors to lay down the weapons they brandished on January 6.>

<Every year, about 2 million Americans serve in the armed forces, either full time or one weekend a month. These people come from all walks of life and serve in different ways.

Many serve as Sen. JD Vance of Ohio did. After high school, Vance signed up for a four-year enlistment in the Marines including six months in Iraq doing public affairs. Then he was honorably discharged.

That’s a bit of a rarity among politicians. Most served as officers after college, which means better pay and benefits. But there is an even rarer experience: Among the tiny fraction of Americans who enlist, a much smaller share make a career of it — serving 20 years or more, with multiple deployments. And only a small fraction of those stay in the service after being disabled on the job.

Walz continued to serve for the next 24 years under four commanders in chief.

One of them is Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, an enlisted soldier in the National Guard for nearly a quarter of a century. A journey that began on a Nebraska farm as soon as he was eligible to join.

“My father served during the Korean War. And the day after I turned 17, he took me down to an Army National Guard recruiter and I raised my hand and signed up,” Walz said of his enlistment.

That was in 1981 when Ronald Reagan was president. Walz continued to serve for the next 24 years under four commanders in chief.

He spent most of that time as an artillery soldier, which took a toll on his hearing. In 2002, after Walz had already done 20 years and qualified for retirement, a medical board considered discharging him because of his hearing loss. Instead, he convinced them to let him complete his final enlistment, which began after 9/11.

Walz achieved the highest enlisted rank in the Army, command sergeant major. But rather than stay in and complete the schooling for that rank, he retired in 2005 at the rank of master sergeant.

In part, he says, because he wanted to speak freely about political injustices, including the Iraq War. The following year, he was one of more than 60 anti-war veterans running for Congress as the “Fighting Dems,” a group that included Sen. Tammy Duckworth, now former Sen. Jim Webb and now former Rep. Patrick Murphy.

Following his surprise victory in a traditionally conservative district, Walz became the highest-ranking enlisted soldier ever to serve in Congress. There he worked to help end the military’s anti-gay “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

After Donald Trump was elected president, Walz became the ranking Democrat on the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, where he fought the White House over privatizing veterans’ health care. He also used his own experiences with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to help other veterans get their benefits.

Walz’s experience in the armed forces is an atypical one for most Americans, and particularly for politicians. There’s literally no one like him.

Walz’s experience in the armed forces is an atypical one for most Americans, and particularly for politicians. There’s literally no one like him.

But now that Walz is running with Vice President Kamala Harris against Trump and Vance, Republicans are trying to “Swift-boat” him — denigrating his service the way they did with Vietnam veteran John Kerry 20 years ago.

They claim Walz stole valor and left the Army to avoid going to Iraq. It’s a playbook Republicans also used against Walz when he ran for governor of Minnesota.

And it failed then. As it turns out, when voters hear about the quarter century Walz spent as a citizen soldier and the time he has spent since, fighting for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans to get the benefits they deserve, they don’t see what Republicans do.

Instead, they see a rare kind of veteran in politics who can cut through the self-serving B.S., rather than adding to it.>

<Obscure, unelected state government panels aren’t usually a hot election topic. But the Georgia State Election Board has drawn well-deserved national attention with its outrageous actions on Tuesday to pass antidemocratic changes to the battleground state’s election rules. It has provided fodder for Donald Trump, earning sharply partisan praise at his recent Atlanta rally. Now Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp should reverse its rogue actions.

The board used to be a sleepy bipartisan backwater that kept well away from controversy. But earlier this year, the GOP-controlled state Legislature appointed two new members to the five-person panel, transforming it into a Trump-aligned government body. Three of the board’s five members have expressed doubts that President Joe Biden won the state in the 2020 election. The board’s meetings have become a haven for false election conspiracy theories, many based on Trump’s 2020 election lies. Now the board’s MAGA majority is trying to change Georgia’s election rules just ahead of the contest. Its first attempt came last month, only to be reversed after a lawsuit accused the three members of holding an unlawful meeting to ram through the changes. This week, though, they resumed their headlong charge for the Republican nominee.

One of the two new rules passed by the board on Tuesday lets local elections officials halt vote-counting and delay or even outright refuse certification if they contend there are any irregularities, essentially making the certification of election results discretionary. (Georgia law states in multiple places that local election board officials shall perform their duties — meaning their duties are mandatory, not discretionary). Other proposed changes would increase workload demands on overburdened election workers, which could overwhelm county elections offices and ultimately slow down or stop certification.

These eleventh-hour changes are supported by Republican Party officials, GOP operatives at the Republican National Committee and MAGA-connected "election integrity" activists. These include local elections officials and GOP officials who most likely believe Trump was cheated out of the 2020 election.

And all this builds on similar efforts in 2020, when a Coffee County elections official delayed certification of Biden’s Georgia victory and refused to validate the recount results, citing MAGA-backed election conspiracies. The same official allegedly helped Trump campaign operatives breach Coffee County’s voting data days before Jan. 6. According to CNN, Coffee County was specifically cited in draft federal executive orders for seizing voting machines that were presented to Trump in a chaotic Oval Office meeting on Dec. 18, 2020. In the same meeting, Rudy Giuliani alluded to a plan to gain “voluntary access” to Georgia voting machines.

The foundation for obstructing certification of the 2024 election results is being laid in Georgia. These newly passed rules changes, along with other proposed changes still being considered by the board, follow refusals from Republican county election board members in Georgia to certify election results in the 2023 local elections and the 2024 primary even though there is no legitimate doubts [sic] about the results.

And it doesn’t stop there. After Fulton County’s 2024 primary, Fulton County Election Board member Julie Adams filed a suit challenging a badly needed law that prevents local officials from refusing certification. Adams is represented by the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute and belongs to the Election Integrity Network, whose founder, Cleta Mitchell, joined Trump’s infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger....>

<....Trump’s 2020 election interference playbook hasn’t changed, but the MAGA operation has become more sophisticated. Now, there are election deniers holding local elections positions in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania (in addition to Georgia). GOP officials have resisted certifying results in Arizona, Michigan and Nevada.

But Georgia elections are facing an attack from Trump’s operation that seems more intense than any of its other efforts across the country. The state’s current lieutenant governor signed a certificate saying Trump won Georgia in 2020 and certifying himself as a false elector. After failing to overturn his 2020 loss, it seems Trump aims to win Georgia by any means, aided by the State Election Board. Trump may be hinting at this strategy, recently claiming he “didn’t need the votes,” an odd statement for a presidential candidate.

Trump’s remarks could be a hint to the re-use of his operation’s 2020 playbook, only better planned and executed. The person best positioned to stop this is Gov. Brian Kemp. Though Kemp has continued to sign voter suppression bills inspired by Trump’s “big lie” into law, he received bipartisan praise for refusing to go along with Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Will Kemp step up again to defend Georgia’s elections from MAGA sabotage? Or will he continue to egg them on as he has in the past couple of Georgia’s legislative sessions?

Georgia law gives Kemp the authority to investigate members of the election board and remove and replace them if they’ve violated Georgia law, which it certainly seems they did by holding an unlawful meeting. Even though Kemp supports Trump’s run for president, he should agree: Trump must win Georgians’ votes fair and square.

But the response doesn’t stop with the governor, of course. Others have an important role to play, as well. In the last presidential cycle, pro-democracy activists like Georgia’s Fair Fight (for which one of the co-authors, Groh-Wargo, serves as CEO) built voter protection operations in every crucial battleground state, exposed Trump’s callous voter suppression scheme and helped turn out the vote in 2020 that secured Biden’s Georgia win and delivered control of the U.S. Senate for Democrats. The pro-democracy ecosystem is once again working to protect voters’ ability to stay on the rolls, access the ballot, vote and have their votes counted in 2024.

Voters are the last and ultimately most critical line of defense. The best way to ensure election results are certified in a timely manner is with large turnout and decisive margins. Voters everywhere should also check their voter registration status regularly and get their friends and family registered today. It’s also not too early to make a plan to vote, sign up to be a poll worker in your community or get involved with your state Democratic Party’s voter protection team. If we exercise our freedom to vote, we can stop the MAGA election sabotage scheme.>

<Concerned about Donald Trump’s prospects of winning the presidential election, some right-wing influencers are lashing out over what they feel has been a weak campaign.

Laura Loomer, a bigoted conspiracy theorist and social media troll whom Trump has praised repeatedly, sounded the alarm on X on Thursday.

“President Trump needs to make some serious changes in his campaign ASAP,” she wrote in part.

“The ground game is not sufficient.

“The offense is lacking.

“The communication is dismal.

“The momentum is crashing.

“Why are people who want to assist being pushed away instead of being embraced?”

I don’t know precisely what Loomer means about people who want to assist being pushed away, though her outlandish behavior has, at times, made her a tad too toxic for some Trump supporters to associate with. Lately, however, Trump has had no problem sharing her bigoted, baseless attacks concerning Kamala Harris’ biracial identity, as he and other conservatives have falsely questioned the vice president’s Blackness.

In the replies and quote tweets on Loomer’s post about Trump’s ground game, there was some pushback. But a number of popular MAGA enthusiasts were in agreement with her.

That includes white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who wrote on X that his former dinner mate’s campaign is in a “death spiral” and listed his grievances. In the comments replying to his post, Fuentes faced a deluge of angry backlash.

More criticism came from popular conservative pundit John Cardillo, who claimed on X that far-right activist group Turning Point USA and other pro-Trump groups are out of their depth.

“Guys, we do not have a ground game,” he wrote in part.

“Outsourcing that most critical function to TPUSA Action and two other untested PACs are not the actions of a campaign serious about winning.

“Frankly, it’s insane.”

Predictably, Cardillo faced blowback from TPUSA members and affiliates, who insisted that their efforts to help Trump have been moving swimmingly along. We’ll know in just a few months.

But for the time being, there’s clearly discontent and division in MAGA world, with many Trump supporters worried about a campaign they think is primed to lose.>

<Momentum appears to be swinging in favor of Kamala Harris’ campaign in the Grand Canyon State.

Although I’m not one who places a whole lot of stake in poll numbers, some of the recent numbers in Arizona have been favorable to the Democratic nominee. But there are other signs that Donald Trump’s electoral prospects could be dimming in the desert.

One piece of evidence is the budding Republican support for Harris. John Giles, the Republican mayor of Mesa, recently endorsed the Harris campaign and agreed to co-chair an advisory committee for the national “Republicans for Harris” effort.

But there are other signs that Donald Trump’s electoral prospects could be dimming in the desert.

Giles’ endorsement underscores two things in particular. First, it speaks to Arizona’s trend toward Democrats over the past decade. For instance, Mesa has gone from one of the most conservative cities in the country to one with more liberal leanings. And the endorsement also shows that a strain of anti-Trump conservatism remains in Arizona, where Trump’s attacks on the late Sen. John McCain have undermined his standing with some Republicans in the state.

Senate candidate Kari Lake, another high-profile Republican on the Arizona ballot this fall, has garnered intraparty backlash herself for her attacks on McCain and fellow Republicans. Many in Lake’s own party are backing her Democratic opponent, Ruben Gallego. In fact, she might even be a drag on Trump’s election chances.

And on top of that, on Friday, the Harris campaign received a historic endorsement from the League of United Latin American Citizens, the nation’s oldest and largest advocacy group for Latinos. That could prove very helpful in Arizona, where Latinos make up about a third of the population. Recent data on Latino voters indicates that Harris is attracting and energizing these voters in Arizona — where Latinos were vital in helping Joe Biden flip the state in 2020 — and other battleground states.

Trump’s campaign and its surrogates have sought to make gains with Latino voters — albeit in some rather dubious ways. But if Harris is able to maintain the Latino support Biden received in 2020, or even expand it, that could prove calamitous for Trump’s electoral hopes in Arizona.

Beyond that, Arizona residents will be voting on a ballot initiative that would enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution. With voters in other states siding with abortion-rights supporters on similar measures in recent years, this could create yet another hurdle for Trump in Arizona.

None of this means Trump can’t win the Grand Canyon State. But he certainly hasn’t made it easy on himself.>

<The list of lies Donald Trump told during his long and meandering Mar-a-Lago press conference isn’t short, but NBC News highlighted one of the most striking: the former president’s rhetoric about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“You know, with Hillary Clinton, I could have done things to her that would have made your head spin. I thought it was a very bad thing. Take the wife of a president of the United States and put her in jail,” he said. Trump said he was “very protective” of Hillary Clinton and falsely suggested that he would tamp down chants by his supporters to have her locked up.

As part of the same remarks, the Republican nominee said Clinton — who, as a former senator and Cabinet secretary, was more than simply the wife of a former president — was “pretty evil,” but in Trump’s version of events, he nevertheless responded to “lock her up” chants by telling his followers, “Just relax, please. We won the election.”

For now, let’s not dwell on the fact that it was rather creepy to hear Trump declare that he could have “done things” to Clinton “that would have made your head spin.” Instead, let’s consider the underlying point of the rhetoric. The subject is on my mind in part because I talk about this in my new book — which comes out in just a few days — but Trump is rewriting history with a specific goal in mind. In the GOP candidate’s counternarrative, he was “very protective” of his 2016 rival after the election, in part because of his deep commitment to propriety, and in part because he believed it was wrong to use the levers of governmental power to pursue a political rival.

As part of the same story — a counternarrative he’s pushed before — voters are also supposed to believe that those rascally Democrats, however, abandoned these principles and prosecuted him after his 2020 defeat, failing to follow the magnanimous example he established a few years earlier.

There’s just one fairly obvious problem: Trump’s version of reality is utterly bonkers.

As regular readers know, Trump publicly and privately begged prosecutors to charge Clinton. Ahead of Election Day 2020 — nearly four years after Clinton’s defeat — the then-Republican president again publicly called for the Democrat’s incarceration and lobbied then-Attorney General Barr to prosecute the former secretary of state for reasons unknown.

None of this was kept secret. It happened out in the open. We all saw it play out in public — all of which makes it a strange thing for the presumptive GOP nominee to keep lying about.

As for the idea that Trump was uncomfortable with his followers’ “lock her up” chants, and he graciously told them to “just relax,” reality tells a very different story. He not only spent four years in the White House trying to prosecute Clinton — the opposite of “relaxing” — a recent Washington Post report noted, [T]here are several instances in which Trump called explicitly for Clinton’s jailing and others in which he agreed with his supporters’ chants.”

What’s more, it’s also worth emphasizing for context that Clinton didn’t deserve to be prosecuted, because there was no evidence of her committing any crimes. A jury, on the other hand, recently examined evidence and found Trump guilty of 34 felonies.

To be sure, I understand why the former president is trying to rewrite history. Trump now wants the public to believe he took the high road against his former rivals, unlike those Democratic meanies who insist on holding him accountable.

In reality, however, Trump desperately tried to weaponize federal law enforcement against his perceived foes — especially Clinton.>

<fredthestalker>, this is <your president>, <little wuckfad>!!

<Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) criticized CNN’s Brianna Keilar on Thursday for saying he was an “imperfect messenger” when it comes to attacking Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s (D) military record.

Keilar on CNN’s “Inside Politics” discussed the ongoing debate about Walz’s military record since he was chosen this week to join Vice President Harris on the Democratic ticket. She noted Vance’s title was “combat correspondent” during his deployment as a Marine in Iraq.

“But when you dig a little deeper into that, he was a public affairs specialist, someone who did not see combat, which certainly the title ‘combat correspondent’ kind of gives you a different impression. So he may be the imperfect messenger on that,” Keilar said.

Luis Agostini, a public information officer at the Drug Enforcement Agency’s Chicago office, called out Keilar for the comments in a post on the social platform X. Vance responded to Agostini’s thread, saying it was “shameful” for Keiler to slander an “entire MOS,” or Military Occupational Specialty.

“It’s easy to sit in the comfort and safety of a @CNN studio and trivialize the service of countless men and women who risked their lives,” Vance wrote.

The Hill has asked CNN about Vance’s criticism.

Mediaite noted Keilar is a military spouse herself; her husband is an active-duty Green Beret. She questioned Vance’s ability to go after Walz, who served 24 years in the National Guard.

“But then at the same time, you have this argument going on where it seems to be, ‘Did you really serve your country if you weren’t shot at a lot?’” she said. “And I just think that’s a very, kind of, gross place to be, because there is so much service and sacrifice that goes on in the military.”

Walz and Vance are the first veterans on national tickets since then-Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) ran for president in 2008, and would be the first veteran to serve as president or vice president since President George W. Bush, a former lieutenant in the Texas Air National Guard.

Vance has accused Walz of “stolen valor” amid Republicans attacks on Walz allegedly inflating his rank in retirement and claiming that he carried a weapon in war, when he hasn’t actually served in combat.

“I wonder, Tim Walz, when were you ever in war?” Vance said at a campaign stop in Michigan on Wednesday. “He has not spent a day in a combat zone. … I’d be ashamed if I was him and I lied about my military service like he did.”>

<Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is asking the Tesla board if it's looked into CEO Elon Musk's use of company resources to benefit his other ventures, including SpaceX and xAI.

"Tesla's Board of Directors appears to be failing to meet its fiduciary duties to Tesla's shareholders by neglecting to address company CEO Elon Musk's apparent conflicts of interest," Warren wrote in a 10-page letter to Tesla Chairwoman Robyn Denholm on Thursday. Musk also operates Neuralink and The Boring Co.

Warren sits on both the Senate's Banking and Armed Services committees, and has expressed similar concerns in the past, including requests to the SEC to investigate Musk and Tesla. She also sent correspondence to Denholm in late 2022 after Musk sold billions of dollars worth of his Tesla shares in part to finance a leveraged buyout of Twitter, which he later rebranded X.

Musk has targeted Warren with criticism for years. He's been referring to her as "Senator Karen" since at least 2021, and bristled at her calls to increase taxes for the very wealthy, to close tax loopholes for corporations and billionaires, and to crack down on corporate "greedflation."

The concerns Warren listed in the letter include Musk's forming an artificial intelligence startup, xAI, outside of Tesla even as the automaker bills itself as an AI company, his threats to work on robotics and AI outside of Tesla if he didn't receive a higher level of voting control at the automaker, his encouraging Tesla shareholders to approve a $5 billion investment by Tesla into xAI, and his redirecting a shipment of costly Nvidia AI chips to X that were originally slated for Tesla.

Warren's letter comes two months after CNBC reported that correspondence from Nvidia staffers also indicated that Musk diverted a sizable shipment of AI processors that had been reserved for Tesla to X. Warren is also asking about xAI's poaching of employees from Tesla, and the departure of a director from Tesla reportedly because the board operated "like a family company with fiefdoms, rather than a public company with stringent rules and regulations."

Warren has asked Denholm and Tesla to provide answers to the questions concerning the board's oversight of Musk and the "entanglements" between his various businesses by Aug. 23.

A spokesperson for the senator's office confirmed that Tesla and Denholm have never answered Warren's previous letters. Tesla didn't respond to a request for comment.>

<On Wednesday, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order cementing election security protocols in the state, noting that since he took office Virginia has discovered and removed more than 6,000 noncitizen registered voters from voting rolls.

With the national presidential election less than 90 days away, the GOP is pushing for stricter voter regulations to safeguard election integrity. Voting in a federal election without citizenship is a federal crime that is punishable by imprisonment and fines. There is no significant evidence of widespread noncitizen voting.

After signing the order, Youngkin said, "The Virginia model for Election Security works. This isn't a Democrat [sic] or Republican issue, it's an American and Virginian issue. Every legal vote deserves to be counted without being watered down by illegal votes or inaccurate machines."

Executive Order 35 mandates a "documented chain of custody for paper ballots," the format in which all Virginians must cast their vote. Youngkin emphasized in the order, "Virginia does not use 'voting machines,' just paper ballot counting machines." The order also stipulates that those paper ballots must be retained by court clerks for 22 months.

In addition, absentee ballots "may not be counted until the last four digits of a voter's Social Security number and year of birth provided on the envelope are matched to the voter's record in the statewide voter registration system." The governor stated earlier in the order that Virginia is one of the few states that require "those registering to vote to provide their full 9-digit Social Security number for registration."

It also establishes a "triple-check of election result accuracy," requiring officials to check the results at the precinct level on election night, followed by a post-election review by the Electoral Board at the locality level, and finally, a check by the Department of Elections staff at the state level prior to certification.

Youngkin outlined the criteria for maintaining accurate voter lists, noting that an earlier executive order allowed the state to remove 6,303 noncitizens from the voter rolls since he has been in office, from January 2022 to July 2024.

He said that this was through data sharing between the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and the Department of Elections, which allowed the state to "scrub existing voter rolls and remove noncitizens who may have purposefully or accidentally registered to vote."

In interviews on Thursday, Youngkin said, "We give everyone who was removed from the voter roll 14 days to come back and demonstrate that they are a citizen. And they should be on the voter roll, and that's a very important process."

He added, "This is a very transparent process."

Newsweek reached out via email to Youngkin's press secretary for further comment on Friday.

The new order says it will "remove individuals who are unable to verify that they are citizens to the DMV from the statewide voter registration list" as well as referring them to the state's attorney for "this alleged unlawful conduct."

The order requires the Commissioner of the Department of Elections to inform the governor annually that the aforementioned election security procedures are "in place."

Former President Donald Trump applauded Youngkin's order, writing in a Truth Social post, "The beautiful Commonwealth of Virginia, superbly led by Governor Glenn Youngkin, IS TAKING A STRONG LEAD IN SECURING THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER — PROTECTING EVERY LEGAL VOTE AND KEEPING ILLEGAL ALIENS THAT HAVE BEEN LET INTO OUR COUNTRY FROM VOTING."

He added, "We must work hard to make sure the Election is FAIR and SECURE!!! EVERY STATE SHOULD FOLLOW VIRGINIA'S LEAD."

Trump has repeatedly claimed the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud.>

<A video of Michele Morrow — the far-right conspiracy theorist that North Carolina Republicans nominated to be their general election candidate for public schools superintendent — has resurfaced in which she called on former President Donald Trump to initiate a military coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.

On Friday, CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski tweeted the video of Morrow that she posted to her Facebook page in the days following her attendance at the January 6, 2021 rally that led up to the attack on the U.S. Capitol. In the video, Morrow insists that Trump is still the president of the United States, and urged him to subvert the rule of law in order to forcibly seize power from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who were president-elect and vice president-elect at the time.

"President Trump is still president until the 20th [of January]," she said. "And now, he has every player that participated in his sights. And they can all be arrested for treason."

"And, if the police won't do it, and if the Department of Justice won't do it, then he will have to enact the Insurrection Act," she continued. "In which case, the Insurrection Act completely puts the Constitution to the side and says now, the military rules all... so as long as he invokes the Insurrection Act before the inauguration, then he's going to be re-inaugurated. He's going to be put back in."

This isn't the first extreme statement Morrow has made: Earlier this year, she called for former President Barack Obama to be executed via firing squad on live television, in response to someone else's tweet calling for the 44th president to be incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay. She's also called for Biden to be assassinated in a tweet proclaiming: "KILL all TRAITORS!!!"

When CNN reporter Shimon Prokupecz confronted Morrow about her past statements, she notably didn't walk back her comments. She then snapped at Prokupecz for continuing to press her after she initially said "no comment."

"I have a question: Do you vote in North Carolina? Then keep your eyes on your own paper." Morrow said, despite CNN being a broadcast network and not a newspaper.

Morrow has no prior experience as an elected official, and is a registered nurse who homeschools her children. She's running on a platform of opposing critical race theory, and has referred to public schools as "socialism centers" and "indoctrination centers." If she wins in November, she will be the top official for all public schools in North Carolina, and will supervise an agency with a budget of roughly $12 billion.

Her only previous experience in politics was in her work for the Liberty First Grassroots PAC, where she served as spokesperson. The group has baselessly accused Obama of being a descendant of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, that some of the most notorious school shootings were "false flag" attacks staged in order to gin up support to pass gun reform laws and that the U.S. government somehow played a role in perpetrating the 9/11 terror attacks.>

<....If Carlsen goes to bed sober and on time that week, he'll likely defeat Niemann with solid play that waits for Niemann to recklessly throw his pawns forward....>

Nice projection, <fredfradiavolo>. If you become any more unhinged as you engage in your latest bout of inutile schizophrenic crowing, a propos de rien, you will be fitted with a jacket which has no sleeves.

QED

chessgames.com chessforum (kibitz #41640)

<My report will be a short one.

The same crap is still going on.>

<George Orwell wrote plenty of biting, memorable lines in his career as a novelist, journalist, and critic.

"Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent."

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever."

"Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket."

But one phrase from an essay exploring why H.G. Wells—one of Orwell's boyhood heroes—could never adequately grapple with the true nature of totalitarianism remains among the most resonant and most chilling.

"Because [Wells] belonged to the 19th century," Orwell wrote in August 1941, "he was, and is still, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity. Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present, and if they are ghosts, they are at any rate ghosts which need a strong magic to lay them."

Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present. Anyone aware of what was happening not only in England but across Europe, North Africa, and Asia in the summer of 1941—and indeed for years before that—knows exactly what Orwell was on about.

To make it plain, he follows up that "Dark Ages" line with another: "The people who have shown the best understanding of Fascism are either those who have suffered under it or those who have a Fascist streak in themselves."

Today, creatures from the Dark Ages have undeniably marched straight into the heart of the Republican Party, and if calling the GOP "fascist" might not be altogether accurate, with former President Donald Trump as its autocratic and undisputed leader the party of Lincoln has devolved with dizzying speed into a bleak cult of personality and never-ending grievance.

And how has Trump's GOP, and more specifically the bitter MAGA core of the party, embodied its own American version of the Dark Ages? Let us count the ways.

Today's Republican Party candidly proposes to control what women can and cannot do with their own bodies—even women (and children) who are victims of sexual violence and incest.

Today's Republican Party pledges fealty to an adjudicated rapist, a draft dodger, a lifelong grifter, and a convicted felon—a fine example of that "feudal loyalty" cited by Orwell. After all, serfs accepted that the Lord of the Manor was above the law, even as he openly fleeced them, brutalized them, and lived large off their labor. Sound familiar?

In governors' mansions and state houses across the country, today's Republican Party is tirelessly battling the scourge of free meals for hungry children—because if history has taught us anything, it's that well-nourished, well-educated kids often grow up to be reliable defenders of democracy and freedom, and what a blow that would be to these United States.

Today's Republican Party is making voting more and more difficult for pretty much everyone in America ... except white rural voters. Those voting rights are sacred, and always shall be.

Not content to see Biblical language, imagery, and messaging on our currency, in the courts, and in countless other aspects of our lives, today's Republican Party is determined to shove the foundational concepts of Jewish and Christian theology down the throat of every Protestant, Catholic, Presbyterian, Muslim, Hindu, Jew, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Satanist, agnostic, and atheist in America.

In line with that patently unconstitutional scheme, today's GOP has vowed, in its 2024 party convention platform, to "use existing Federal Law to keep foreign Christian-hating Communists, Marxists, and Socialists out of America."

Whether Republicans plan to embrace Christian-loving Communists, Marxists, and Socialists—hello, Senator Sanders!—is unclear....>

<....The list of ways in which today's GOP mirrors debased, crude, joy-destroying authoritarian regimes all over the world goes on and on. But to accurately gauge just how out of step with mainstream America the Republican Party really is, pay heed to what the former president and his allies plan to put in place if Trump regains the White House.

In a move right out of the authoritarian playbook, Trump has stated, more than once, that he "has every right" to use the Department of Justice to go after his political enemies.

Another anarchic MAGA man, Steve Bannon, has been even more specific. "Of course [Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg] should be—and will be—jailed," he told Axios.

Not to be outdone, the architects of the infamous Project 2025 "presidential transition" initiative promise to "take down the Deep State and return the government to the people" by remaking America's political and civic life along "conservative" (translation: extremist) lines.

What will that look like? How about abandoning the government's efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Or eliminating the Department of Education. Or severely cutting Medicaid and Medicare. Or replacing President Joe Biden's Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force with a dedicated "pro-life" agency.

All of these plans are animated by a core ethos, Christian nationalism, which seeks to blunt, and perhaps do away with entirely, America's most striking and dynamic characteristic: its ever-evolving pluralism.

If, at this point, you don't feel the hot breath of creatures out of the Dark Ages at your back—well, at the risk of sounding preachy, you're just not paying attention.>

Content here a problem, <fredwuckfad>, perpetual victim? Sit on it and rotate, then stay away!

<Former President Trump is setting off alarms among critics as he pushes the claim that Vice President Harris’s ascent to become the Democratic nominee is somehow unconstitutional, with some warning he could be laying the groundwork to contest an electoral defeat as he did in 2020.

Trump has repeatedly sought to cast Harris replacing President Biden as the Democratic nominee as nefarious, likening it to a “coup” and in recent days claiming it may be unconstitutional because she was not atop the ballot in the primary process.

Biden and other Democrats, as well as some Republican Trump critics, have suggested the former president’s rhetoric is intended to cast doubt on November’s results should Harris prevail.

“We know one thing for sure. Trump never loses. And so if he’s not the winner of 2024 as in 2020, it must be because he was treated unfairly, yet again,” former Trump national security adviser John Bolton said on CNN.

“This is why people need to start thinking more now about how to deny Trump the ability the day after the election, if he loses, to try and throw the process into chaos again,” Bolton added.

Biden announced July 21 he would not seek reelection. Democrats quickly rallied behind Harris, who this week was officially certified as the party’s nominee following delegate voting.

Trump, who was leading Biden in the polls and appeared on track for victory in November, has repeatedly said the president was forced out and called it a “coup.” More recently, he has questioned whether Democrats replacing Biden with Harris somehow violated the Constitution, particularly after recent polls show Harris closing in on him.

In a Truth Social post this week, Trump claimed Biden’s presidency was “Unconstitutionally STOLEN from him.”

“From a constitutional standpoint, from any standpoint you look at, they took the presidency away,” Trump said at a Thursday press conference.

Asked for his analysis of what made it unconstitutional, Trump pointed to Harris’s lack of support in a Democratic primary, including when she ran in 2020.

“The fact that you can get no votes, lose in the primary system – in other words you had 14 or 15 people, she was the first one out – and then you can then be picked to run for president. It seems to me actually unconstitutional. Perhaps it’s not,” Trump said.

David Axelrod, a former senior adviser in the Obama White House, posted on X that Trump was “laying the predicate to reject the results of an election he now fears he may lose” with his comments....>

<....Some Republicans had suggested in July that any effort to replace Biden on the ballot could face legal challenges, but experts said any such effort would be unlikely to go anywhere in the courts.

The Canton Repository reported this week that an Ohio man who said he is voting for Trump filed a lawsuit seeking to prevent Harris from replacing Biden on the ballot. But the Ohio secretary of state’s office said parties have until Sept. 1 to nominate their candidate.

Sonia Gipson Rankin, a professor of law at the University of New Mexico, said Trump is alluding to the idea that because voters cast ballots for Biden in the primary process and he won’t be on the ballot, they aren’t getting a say.

She noted that Democratic delegates never formally backed Biden to be the party’s nominee in a roll call vote, and his name was not put on any ballots.

“Another issue will be who has standing to sue, and the RNC or former President Trump will have to decide if they want to pour resources toward this issue during this condensed campaign timeframe,” Rankin said. “Federal courts have particularly strict requirements for standing, while state courts have their own rules, which often ensure that major party nominees automatically appear on the ballot.”

Trump’s rhetoric will be closely watched in light of what happened after he lost the 2020 election. Trump spent much of 2020 sowing doubt about the reliability of mail-in and absentee ballots, and he spent the weeks after Election Day claiming the result was fraudulent or rigged. He pursued numerous legal challenges, including up to the Supreme Court, but they were rejected for lack of evidence.

Trump’s claims culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, riots at the Capitol, when protesters violently clashed with law enforcement and stormed the building in an attempt to stop the certification of Biden’s victory. Trump has been criminally charged over his efforts to subvert the 2020 election.

The former president has said during the 2024 cycle that he will accept the results if he deems the election to be “honest.”

“Of course there will be a peaceful transfer, and there was last time,” Trump said Thursday. “And there’ll be a peaceful transfer. I just hope we are going to have honest elections.”

Biden, in his first sit-down interview since opting not to run for reelection, said he’s “not confident at all” there will be a peaceful transfer of power next January if Trump loses.

“If Trump wins, no, I’m not confident at all. I mean if Trump loses I’m not confident at all,” Biden told “CBS Sunday Morning,” initially misspeaking before correcting himself.

“He means what he says,” Biden added. “We don’t take him seriously. He means it.">

<Late one night in July 2022 when she was House speaker, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) got word that House Republicans had pulled support for a bipartisan bill to reenergize America’s semiconductor industry.

Some liberal Democrats were also squeamish about providing corporate welfare, so some of her advisers suggested pulling the bill from the next day’s schedule. me do it my way,” Pelosi recalled, giving instructions to her staff. “Go tell the Republicans to go to hell. We’re going to go without them. We’re going to go without them.”

Not a single Democrat voted against the bill. Once it was clearly passing and heading to President Joe Biden’s desk for his signature, a couple dozen Republicans voted for what would become a popular piece of legislation.

Now the former House speaker, Pelosi recounted that story in a 100-minute interview Wednesday with a half-dozen veteran reporters and columnists who chronicled her 20-year reign as the Democratic leader. The long sit-down was part of her book tour promoting “The Art of Power,” which includes many of these tales of her rise, then fall, and then rise back up to the most powerful post in Congress.

The book, which she started planning many years ago, serves as a lesson in how she wielded power more effectively than most of the other 55 speakers — all White men. It also published just in the wake of another illustration of Pelosi’s continuing influence, even as she has rejoined the rank-and-file without even a seat on a legislative committee.

Many media appearances over the past week have focused on Pelosi’s behind-the-scenes role in helping advise fellow Democrats in their effort to push Biden to step aside from his reelection effort.

While she says she did not call anyone, Pelosi acknowledged receiving “hundreds” of messages from concerned Democrats. She believes the outpouring of support for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign has validated the actions to persuade Biden to step aside, but it’s left her more than four-decade-friendship with the president upended.

“History’s in a hurry. We’re right in the center of it all here. At some point, I will come to terms with my own piece, my own role in this,” she told reporters Wednesday.

Pelosi intended to write this book many years ago and focus on four key issues that framed her first stint as House speaker: her battles with China over human rights abuses; her opposition to the Iraq War; her critical help to the Bush administration in passing the 2008 financial relief package; and passing the 2010 Affordable Care Act.

But by the time she got around to writing after leaving her leadership post at the end of 2022, Pelosi had experienced the Donald Trump presidency, the 2021 Capitol insurrection and the brutal attack on her husband in October 2022 — all topics that had to be addressed.

In the preface she writes about “Know Your Why,” a slogan she has cited for years as advice to those who want to run for elective office so that they can be grounded by the right principles in the job. Her “why” has always been a three-word mantra — “for the children” — signifying leaving the planet cleaner and safer with a bottom-up economy.

But throughout the Wednesday discussion, and after her actions last month, it is clear that Pelosi has a new “why” in this epilogue phase of her career: defeating Trump.

She pounded a table nine times as she explained that her motivation in opposing Biden’s continued campaign was solely about stopping Trump. “My goal in life was that that man would never set foot in the White House again,” she said.

There’s an echo in her second stint as speaker, which began with the last two years of Trump’s presidency, of her first tenure, beginning with George W. Bush’s final two years in the Oval Office.

Each of those congressional terms, 2007-09 and 2019-21, included strong clashes with the GOP president but then also included major bipartisan deals on global crises that ended up being a political burden for Democrats and not Republicans.

In the fall of 2008 as the financial system collapsed, Pelosi’s Democrats provided the vast majority of votes for the $700 billion bailout, stabilizing the system and avoiding an economic depression. But once President Barack Obama took office with massive Democratic majorities, Republicans blamed his administration and Pelosi for the lingering Great Recession and its high unemployment.

Voters recoiled as the titans of Wall Street avoided any criminal liability as millions of homes were lost and the unemployment rate topped 10 percent. “Nobody paid a price,” Pelosi lamented.>

You understand what evil is, do you not, <fredremf>? You embody it.