Tuesday, September 14, 2021

Something to Know - 14 September

Today is election day in California.  We really did not need this day to happen.   It appears that Newsom is going to survive the recall, and I say this before the polls are closed.  As I passed on last night, the leading contender to replace is Larry Elder, and his website has already conceded defeat; fraud he claims.   The saddest part is that he, like Trump, is claiming that it was stolen.   Come on now.  The recall process should be taken down or reformulated when this is all over.  Close to $300 million in taxpayer monies going down the drain.   One interesting thing that I see from all the hullabaloo since last night is that there is no mention of the scariest part of Elder's website posting, that is he is resorting to ....well you can read it here: 

 They say that in America, there are four boxes of liberty. The soapbox, the ballot box, the jury box, and the ammo box. When we vote we exercise our rights as Californians and as Americans to make our voices heard via the ballot box, having listened to others make theirs heard through the soapbox. We trust in our elected officials to safeguard that ballot box, such that its results will truly reflect our will as Californian's. However, when those officials, either through laziness or incompetence, allow thieves to steal amidst the dead of night and cheat our ballot box, we can no longer rely on its contents. Will we now have to fight the California jury box, in the hope that the final box — the one most akin to Pandora's – remains closed?

That final box is the "ammo box", which I interpret as being a call for an armed insurrection (sound familiar?).   The actions of the GOP as it morphs through the JIM CROW phase, and boxes itself into the cranky and crazy phase of fascism is both silly and dangerous at the same time.   A convincing win by the Democrats in California will set the tone for the whole nation on the move forward into the 21st Century.   That is why everyone has eyes on California today.   I for one am sick and tired of it all.  I am tired of molly coddling stupidity and ignorance.   If Newson fails to survive, I fear the backlash that would result.   We will know more about all this tomorrow morning.

As the coronavirus continues to burn across the United States, Republicans are maintaining their opposition to President Joe Biden's new requirement that certain groups, including those who work at companies that employ more than 100 people, should either be vaccinated or be tested frequently for the virus. They insist that vaccination should be voluntary, but have no solution to the new spike in coronavirus infections and deaths.

In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis is threatening to sue cities that impose vaccine requirements, saying such mandates will hurt the economy by threatening jobs. More than 11,215 Florida residents are currently hospitalized with Covid-19.

More than 243,000 children tested positive for the virus last week, the second highest number of pediatric cases since the pandemic started. About 2200 are currently hospitalized.

Democrats continue to develop the infrastructure measure they expect to pass through reconciliation, thus being able to steer the bill through the Senate without facing a filibuster (budget reconciliation bills can't be filibustered). A recent poll conducted for CNN by the independent research firm SSRS found that 93% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning Independents think it is important to the party's identity to believe that the federal government should do more to help people.

The price tag on the new measure is currently around $3.5 trillion. As E. J. Dionne points out in the Washington Post, that number covers 10 years of spending, a period of time in which the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), which measures the value of production, is expected to be $288 trillion. So that $3.5 trillion makes up around just 1.2 percent of the economy. It's a big number, but not a large percentage for an investment in childcare, elder care, education, and addressing climate change.

The Democrats propose to fund the bill not with deficit spending alone, as so many of our investments have been funded of late, but by cutting spending elsewhere and by raising revenue by restoring some of the taxes Republicans cut in 2017. The Democrats also propose raising taxes on individuals who make more than $400,000 a year, or couples who make more than $450,000 a year. There is a growing impulse to level the economic playing field in this country as growing inequality makes the news more frequently. As Dr. Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, told Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein, the wealth of the top 400 people in the U.S. has increased by $1.4 trillion since 2019.

While the moderate Democrats and the progressive wing of the party are sparking breathless news stories as they hash out their differences, it's important not to lose sight of the fact that Republicans refuse to participate in this process at all.

Perhaps the biggest breaking news today, although it, too, is a continuation of a longer theme, is that, in California's recall election of Governor Gavin Newsom, the campaign website of challenger Republican Larry Elder, a right-wing talk show host, is already claiming he lost the election because of fraud. "Statistical analyses used to detect fraud in elections held in 3rd-world nations (such as Russia, Venezuela, and Iran) have detected fraud in California resulting in Governor Gavin Newsom being reinstated as governor," the website says. "The primary analytical tool used was Benford's Law and can be readily reproduced."

But the election isn't until tomorrow.

The theme that Democrats win elections only by cheating became popular in Republican circles after the 1993 Motor Voter Act, which made it easier for poor people to vote. Republicans said Democrats, who passed the measure, were simply packing elections with their own voters. There was not then, and there is not now, evidence of widespread fraud in American elections.

Former president Donald Trump harped on the idea that Democrats cheated in the 2016 election—he insisted he would have won the popular vote as well as the vote in the Electoral College if it hadn't been for fraudulent Democratic votes—and that idea is, of course, at the heart of his complaint about Biden's election in 2020. There is no evidence for these accusations; they are lies. And yet, that recent CNN/SSRS poll found that 59% of Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents think believing that Trump won the 2020 election is important to their identity as Republicans.

California has about half as many registered Republicans as it does registered Democrats, and Newsom won in 2018 by almost 24 percentage points, so if Newsom wins tomorrow's election it will hardly be an upset. But Elder is already claiming fraud and refusing to say he will accept the results of the election—the same playbook Trump used in 2016 and 2020. Tonight, a pastor at a rally for Elder prayed: "We don't even look at the polls because we are looking to you, Lord. Lord, we pray that you would take down the current government…. We ask this state will be set free, and you would start with Larry Elder."

If losers in a democracy refuse to accept the legitimacy of elections, the system falls apart.

The growing radicalism of the Republican Party is putting pressure on Democrats to pass a voting rights act to counteract the vote-suppressing measures that Republican-dominated states are enacting. Today, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he hopes to bring a voting rights bill backed by West Virginia Democratic senator Joe Manchin to the floor for a vote as early as next week.

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Notes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/republicans-vaccines-mandate-covid/2021/09/13/751c7bde-14a3-11ec-9589-31ac3173c2e5_story.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/newsom-leads-california-recall-polls-larry-elder-pushes-baseless-fraud-n1279080

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/10/politics/fact-check-republican-claims-recall-rigged-stolen/index.html

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/live-updates/covid-delta-variant/?id=79988274#79994240

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/12/make-or-break-moment-our-democracy/

http://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2021/images/09/12/rel5c.-.partisanship.pdf

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/09/13/democrats-tax-biden-budget/

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Juan
Stupidity and Ignorance based on cultural defiance, hatred, and fear is not, and cannot be, our destiny.
-Anonymous

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