Amber Phillips reported in The Washington Post that the Michigan Republican Party selected a Trump-chosen person for the role of Secretary of State—the official who oversees and certifies elections. She sounds like a true believer in conspiracy theories:
Until the 2020 election, secretaries of state — at least at the state level — worked mostly under the radar, overseeing state elections and certifying the results. But then an election in a pandemic, combined with efforts by the sitting president to call into question the results, suddenly made the job a politically charged one.
That’s still true for the 2022 midterm elections. Donald Trump and his allies have recruited, supported and endorsed candidates who have denied the results of the 2020 election to run for secretary of state in key swing states. That has election-integrity experts worried that people who haven’t recognized basic election facts could be in charge of deciding who wins the 2024 presidential contest.
In Michigan, one of those candidates just got nominated to be on the ballot in November. Kristina Karamo is one of the loudest provocateurs among a dozen or so secretary of state candidates running on false election-fraud claims. She has Trump’s endorsement.
This weekend, in a sign of how much the grass roots of the Republican Party is with Trump on election fraud, the Michigan GOP voted to nominate her. In addition to denying election results without evidence, she has called schools “government indoctrination camps,” opposes the teaching of evolution and opposes coronavirus vaccines and childhood vaccines.
Thinks Trump won in 2022: check.
Hates public schools: check.
Opposes teaching about evolution: check.
Opposes COVID vaccines: check.
Opposes all childhood vaccines (polio, measles, mumps, smallpox, diphtheria, etc.): check.
No one asked about the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus.
Wrap all those issues into one candidate and you gotta worry about the future of our democracy.
A
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The problem is: This is happening in Republican states across our nation and there is nothing other than complaining that can be done about it — and it could have a huge impact on this November’s elections: They can refuse to certify any election that they lose.
This can create chaos unlike any our nation has seen before, except for the Civil War…in fact this IS civil war.
Agreed. This is a war on democracy. And a great many Republicans, including elected Senators and Representatives at the federal level, are just fine with that. See my note about what we have been able to do about this so far, below.
and so little reporting on the BIG money sources behind the game: so much of the moment we are in can be laid at the very feet of the Koch Brothers’ organization for example
The GOP is a threat to democracy. Trump travels across the country holding rallies in which he still lies about a supposedly stolen election and contends that he is the real president. The crowds cheer him on and a huge number of GOP politicians support this garbage. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the GOP is the fascist anti-democratic party; not just fascistic but crazy off the wall fascistic.
The truly shocking thing is six Republicans in the Senate and 121 in the House voted not to certify Arizona’s electoral outcome, while seven Senate Republicans and 138 House Republicans supported an objection to certifying Pennsylvania’s electoral outcome. These are sitting Senators and Representatives!!!! And they have no problem with tossing out election results until those results go their way.
This is what happens in banana republics.
Hello Diane: Yesterday, PBS FRONTLINE aired the second of three programs on BIG OIL and the systematic downplaying of the human cause of climate change over the years. In this second program they focused on the KOCH brothers (when they both were alive) and Koch Industries’ huge influence on that movement . . . precisely because of how much of their industry depends on oil. they did their own studies on it and made a plan to head off policy changes that would change their status-quo. Really eye-opening.
But the outtake for education is how the CONSISTENT introduction of DOUBT into the narrative yielded influence on government policy, in the case of oil, cap and trade limitations that had a full head of steam at first (remember Al Gore), and then were pretty much abandoned in early 2000 complements of Dick Cheney and George Bush, et al.
And now they have interviews with executives and even some scientists who are older and retired, sitting in their really nice houses, saying things like, “GEE, I think I was mistaken.” Whereupon hearing . . . I puked. CBK
The Koch network plans to limit what executive power can do to combat climate change. They only care about their profit. https://www.vice.com/en/article/epx357/koch-brothers-epa-supreme-court-climate-change?utm_source=vicenewsfacebook
Our bulwark against these nutcases has been the courts. But if the Republicans capture it all by 2025, they can with a simple majority vote expand the Supreme Court into an Extreme Court and end that protection. This is how the Greying Old Party rises phoenixlike from the ashes of democracy in America.
I know I’ve commented along these lines before, but it bears repeating….we are headed to a second Revolutionary War. Only this time it won’t be against the regime across the sea, but in our own backyard.
It’s really looking that way. These are scary times, and the upcoming elections–the midterms and the presidential election of 2024 will therefore be the most important in our history.
I think that the thing that makes this almost inevitable, Susan, is that given the views of young people on all the major issues, as revealed by polling, and the changing demographics of the country, the Republicans know that unless they create mechanisms for suppressing and overturning votes, they will in a couple decades go extinct. Even Trump, as dense as he is, as spoken of this in his rallies. I suspect that he was repeating something that he heard from an adviser like Propaganda Minister Stephen “Goebbels” Miller. At any rate, he and Carlsen have both given a lot of their bloviation platforms to “white replacement theory.”
The courts always bear watching. The idea that the court is not a political entity is a fond dream. Courts are very heavily influenced by the winds of politics. If they were not, we would not study Plessey v Ferguson, Brown v Board, or Dred Scott.
The legislative deadlock makes the courts even more important, which suits the far right just fine. After all, appointment for life makes the courts much less answerable to the voting public.
My solution to some of these problems:
To cure gerrymandering: Any state that does not return a balance of representatives reflective of its electorate will be required to seat representatives that yield that balance. The proper balance would be determined by the votes received in presidential and senatorial elections. This would give the party that knows it does not have a prayer in a state a motivation to pay attention to the minority electorate.
To cure court extremism: expand the Supreme Court to 25 people so that one position does not mean as much. To please the right, we could seat Roger Taney forever, stuffed by a taxidermist.
To cure insanity: Create laws governing how crazy a person can be and still sit in the congress. For example, a statement suggesting that the earth is flat or that there were 4500 species of dinosauers on the ark might disqualify someone.
I don’t think the founders imagined that a lot of folks running for these offices would be utterly ignorant idiots. A pretty significant oversight, that.
I suggest a test to determine worthiness: Place a certain proverbial and disgusting substance in one box, and shinola in another. See if the candidates can discern the difference.
Country wisdom.
And while you are at it ask the tooth fairy for a quarter under the pillow.
We can’t even up the minimum wage,insure voting rights…. and you want to expand the court, want taxation with representation.
Wake me when Putin’s successor releases the piss tape in full living color. I don’t even care if it is a good fake.
Mr. Shepherd.
It has come to our attention that you have been using the words freedom, liberty, and truth in your posts and comments on posts. These are jointly registered trademarks, under the alternate legal code of the rightful Trump Government in Exile (TGE), of The Repugnican Party, The House Freedumb Caucus, Faux News, and The Trump Organization RICO. Wiretaps in our possession (thanks, Vlad!) also reveal that you have been spreading facts, rather than alternative facts, and practicing “freedom of speech,” properly called truthing, without a license from the Government in Exile of Glorious Leader Who Shines More Orange Than Does the Sun. It goes without saying that “Trump Says Law” properly applies here because it is WELL KNOWN that Extraterrestrial Socialist Venus-uelans used voting machine software to steal the 2020 election. Be advised that unless you cease and desist, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law as rightful president Donald J. Trump conceives of it yesterday, today, tomorrow, or whenever because he has “an Article 2 that says [he] can do whatever [he] wants as president.”
–Toady, Finkle, and Skank, Esqs.
Well Bob I may not have the stomach to comment but at least you occasionally make me laugh. Pray for the comet.
Don’t Look Up!!!!
Thanks, Joel. Very much appreciated!
What ‘democracy’?
If you want proof concerning the demise of the ‘will of the people’, one need only look at the ‘Princeton Study’ concerning what legislation gets passed. Money talks, the People walk. Until the People stop watching their ‘screens’ and hit the streets, (as Biden said) nothing will essentially change.
Today, indeed all last week and this week, school is disrupted by testing. Just as we need to be closing out school with regularity and schedule to tamp down the end of the year crazies, we have to give state tests. It struck me today that the only way we will ever get this changed is to organize a massive breaking of state testing law in front of the TV cameras.
Hit the streets (or the roads, in our case)
The unions could do this. Until they do, they are complicit in child abuse.
Hey, let us not forget John Bennett, GOP chairman in Oklahoma running for Congress, 2nd Congressional district who said “we should try Anthony Fauci and put him in front of a firing squad” during a campaign speech under the campaign slogan “conservative to the core.” Sounds like the new “compassionate conservatism” to me.
If you or I did that, we would be in jail charged with felony threatening.
The Republican Plot to Steal the 2024 Election
https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/27/opinions/gop-blueprint-to-steal-the-2024-election-luttig/index.html