Will do. We always have fun. You enjoy your evening also. I doubt the late counting from CA will influence anything major in the house or senate that will change the balance of anything.

The lies and bigotry never stop...

11/5/18 - at Alternet by Independent Media Institute - (Fair Use)

"Why the GOP Is Truly Terrified of 'Medicare for All' — It Could Destroy the Republican Party as We Know It.

If the national ID system were the key to getting your health care and medications, there’d be no need for “voter registration” and no ability for the GOP to purge voters."

By Thom Hartmann:

Now we know why the GOP is truly terrified of Medicare for All; it will wipe out the Republican Party’s control of the House, Senate, White House, and most state governments. Because it could make it very easy for every citizen over 18 to vote.

Here’s how it works.

In Canada, every citizen has a Canadian government-issued “Health Insurance Card” (you can see Quebec’s card at the link). It’s largely only available to citizens, as all citizens are eligible for the Canadian Medicare system; everybody else has to work out other insurance options (yes, there are insurance companies in Canada). And in most provinces, the card has your photo and works as an ID card as well as a driver’s license or passport.

And the Canadian government also explicitly says right here on Quebec’s elections website that your Medicare card is also your first-choice voter ID card. An American version could work identically, perhaps with a star or hologram or other mark to identify citizens as opposed to Medicare-eligible permanent residents, etc.

As Tarek, a Canadian listener to my radio/TV program, shared with me this week:

“Here in Canada, citizens and permanent residents alike are covered by publicly funded health care that is administrated through the provinces, whereas temporary residents must be covered via other means, namely buying private health insurance.

“Since it is in everyone’s best interest to be have ‘free’ health care coverage, unlike other government issued identifications, such as driver’s license...etc, the vast majority (if not all) Canadians from all socioeconomic backgrounds make sure to obtain their health cards, which can be used as an official photo ID for flying domestically, buying alcohol and more importantly voting!”

Here in the U.S., ever since Jim Crow, racist white “conservatives” have used a variety of means to prevent poor people, people of color, low-income working people, students, and older people from voting. Techniques have varied over the years, starting with poll taxes and so-called “literacy tests,” and now are carefully calibrated by cutting voting sites, reducing early voting, and even disenfranchising North Dakota’s Native American population.

The GOP stepped up their voter suppression game in 1980 when Heritage Foundation, ALEC, and Moral Majority co-founder and Reagan campaigner Paul Weyrich famously said, “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people; they never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

In that, he was following on an old Republican strategy of caging and polling-place intimidation, which earned William Rehnquist his rock-star status in the GOP back in the 1960s.

This is still the GOP game plan, although they’ve turned it into an art form. First, they spent a decade whipping up fear about “voter fraud”—brown people from Mexico voting in our elections, something that happens as often as 5 or 6 times per election cycle nationally (as opposed to over 130 million citizens voting). Then, they use this non-threat to pass voter ID laws that make it hard for people who don’t drive (old age, can’t afford a car, live in a big city and use public transportation, or live on campus) to vote.

For example, in the run-up to 2012, Pennsylvania House Leader, Republican Mike Turzai, declared, “Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to carry the state of Pennsylvania: Done!”

While it didn’t quite work out that way in 2012, the Pennsylvania GOP came back in 2016, along with 26 other Republican-controlled states, to purge over 16 million people from the voting rolls nationally… helping give Pennsylvania (along with Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin, according to Paul Waldman in the Washington Post) to Donald Trump by razor-thin margins far smaller than the number of voters purged and/or turned away at the polls.

Meanwhile, another estimated 2 million Americans tried to vote but were turned away for lack of the proper ID in 2016.

Republican voter suppression is thriving in the U.S.: The Brennan Center documents a 33 percent increase in voters purged during the 2014-1016 election cycle (16 million), compared with the 2006-2008 cycle (12 million purged), as the GOP has made ID and purges (along with fear mongering about brown-skinned people) their main electoral strategy. In just the past year, as many as an additional 14 million voters have been purged from rolls nationwide, while over the past two decades every Republican-controlled state has introduced rigid ID laws.

But with a national ID system in place that’s universally used because it’s the key to getting your health care and medications, there’s no need for “voter registration” and thus no ability for the GOP to purge voters. Voter registration, after all, is a practice we largely got after the Civil War because Southern white politicians warned of “voter fraud” being committed by recently freed black people, and some Northern states used it to prevent poor whites from voting.

In some places in the United States, voter registration just never caught on: North Dakota never bothered to put such a system into place; you just show up at the polls with ID to prove you’re both a citizen and resident, and vote. And with a national Medicare for All ID, every citizen could easily vote, everywhere.

Republicans have aggressively opposed a national health care program for the United States ever since Harry Truman first proposed it in his November 19, 1945 address to Congress. We’re literally the only developed nation in the world without such a system. But its popularity is well over 50 percent in America right now, and growing rapidly among voters across the political spectrum; this is something that’s politically possible in the very, very near future.

In the past, GOP opposition generally revolved around their belief that everything from water to septic to roads to prisons to health care should be run to make somebody rich, and to hell with “the public good.”

But it’s a virtual certainty that the deep-dive think tanks and “wise elders” of the GOP also know how easy it is to vote in Canada and other developed countries, in very large part because of the national ID card that Canada’s (and most of Europe’s) Medicare for All programs provide at great ease and no cost.

Thus, the Medicare system’s threat to GOP voter suppression systems may be the largest reason they’ve spent so many hundreds of millions of dollars fighting single-payer in the U.S.

In most elections, in most states, and nationally in the U.S. House of Representatives, Democrats win more votes, but Republicans remain in charge, because of gerrymandering made possible by voter suppression at the state level. Even the Senate is held in some red states purely because of voter suppression, leaning heavily on restrictive voter ID laws.

And, at the state level, in many—perhaps a majority—of the so-called “red states,” Republicans hold control of state legislatures and governors’ offices only because of voter suppression, ranging from voter-roll purges to voter ID laws.

If all U.S. citizens had a free national ID that could also be used to vote, it wouldn’t take long for both Congress and most states to flip back from red to blue like they were during the Carter presidency, before the GOP started their “voter fraud” hysteria and began passing voter suppression laws.

With the GOP out of power at the state level, Democrats (and the few remaining ethical Republicans) could replace gerrymandering with good-government solutions like the non-partisan district-drawing commission put into place by California.

After that, it’s only necessary to clean up the handful of states that won’t let ex-felons vote (they’ll have a Medicare ID card, after all), to produce a clean, efficient, and fraud-free national elections system.

Then America will have joined the rest of the developed world, in having both a national health care system and a functioning democracy.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/medicare-all-will-destroy-gop-because-voting

**********************************************

The Thom Harmann Program 11/5/18 (video in full)

***********************************************

Rootin tootin trolls...

DianeR,

That's really awesome! Most people in my area have been using at least a rifle since they were kids.

I'm watching somewhat but like I said Ca. counting won't happen for aprox. a week from now.

Have a great evening...and enjoy all those smiles! :)

10/6/18 at Salon - This article was produced by Make It Right, a project of the Independent Media Institute. - (Fair Use)

"7 things the United Daughters of the Confederacy might not want you to know about them.
The organization keeps Confederate statues standing and spreads lies about America’s history of slavery."

By KALI HOLLOWAY:

It’s helpful, in the midst of any conversation about this country’s Confederate monuments, to understand who put these things up, which also offers a clue as to why. In large part, the answer to the first question is the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a white Southern women’s “heritage” group founded in 1894. Starting 30 years after the Civil War, as historian Karen Cox notes in her 2003 book "Dixie’s Daughters," “UDC members aspired to transform military defeat into a political and cultural victory, where states’ rights and white supremacy remained intact.” In other words, when the Civil War gave them lemons, the UDC made lemonade. Horribly bitter, super racist lemonade.

Though the UDC didn’t invent the Lost Cause ideology, they were deeply involved in spreading the myth, which simultaneously contends the Confederacy wasn’t fighting to keep black people enslaved while also suggesting slavery was pretty good for everyone involved. Lost Causers — plenty of whom exist today, their sheer numbers a reflection of the UDC’s effectiveness — argue that Confederate monuments are just innocent statues; that taking them down erases history; that we cannot retroactively apply today’s ideas about the morality of slavery to the past. The response to those ridiculous cop-outs is that Confederate monuments honor and glorify people who fought to maintain black chattel slavery; that they were erected for the explicit purpose of obfuscating history; and that the immorality of slavery was always understood by the enslaved. Excuses, excuses: get better at them.

“In their earliest days, the United Daughters of the Confederacy definitely did some good work on behalf of veterans and in their communities,” says Heidi Christensen, former president of the Seattle, Washington, chapter of the UDC, who left the organization in 2012. “But it’s also true that since the UDC was founded in 1894, it has maintained a covert connection with the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, in many ways, the group was the de facto women’s auxiliary of the KKK at the turn of the century. It’s a connection the group downplays now, but evidence of it is easily discoverable — you don’t even have to look very hard to find it.”

In 2017, after the white nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, UDC President Patricia M. Bryson posted an open letter claiming the UDC’s members “have spent 123 years honoring [Confederate soldiers] by various activities in the fields of education, history and charity, promoting patriotism and good citizenship,” and that members, “like our statues, have stayed quietly in the background, never engaging in public controversy.” But that isn’t true, not by a stretch. The UDC’s monuments, books, education and political agenda have always spoken loudly—in absolutely deafening shouts — on issues from anti-black racism to the historical memory of the Civil War across the South. Today, a shameful number of Americans don’t think slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War—even though the seceding states literally spelled this out in document form — in part because of the UDC’s campaign of misinformation. The most minor of gains made by blacks during the Reconstruction were obliterated nearly as soon as they were obtained, and the UDC backed that disenfranchisement full stop. Even the current UDC has mostly steadfastly refused — with rare exceptions — to take down Confederate monuments. They know the power of those symbols, both politically and socially, and they aren’t giving an inch, if they can help it.

The UDC have had a huge impact on this country, and to pretend they’ve stood “quietly in the background” would be laughable if it weren’t so insulting. The UDC both trained and became the white women of 1950s massive resistance, who author Elizabeth Gillespie McRae writes did “the daily work on multiple levels . . . needed to sustain racial segregation and to shape resistance to racial equality.” They set a precedent for a huge swath of today’s white women voters whose main political agenda is white supremacy — women who in a 2017 Alabama Senate race backed the alleged pedophilewho wistfully longed for slavery and supported the presidency of a man who brags about grabbing women’s genitals when he’s not shouting his racism from the rafters. They have contributed to the construction of a “white womanhood” that has historically been and currently remains incredibly problematic, rendering “white feminism” eternally suspect. With their impact considered, and signs of their handiwork all over society — even carved indelibly into mountain sides — it seems worth understanding a few things about the UDC both then and now. Here are seven things you should know about the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

1. They published a very pro-KKK book. For children.

In 1914, the in-house historian of the UDC Mississippi chapter, Laura Martin Rose, published "The Ku Klux Klan, or Invisible Empire." It’s essentially a love letter to the original Klan for its handiwork in the field of domestic terror in the years following the Civil War, when blacks achieved a modicum of political power.

“[D]uring the Reconstruction period, sturdy white men of the South, against all odds, maintained white supremacy and secured Caucasian civilization, when its very foundations were threatened within and without,” Rose writes.

She goes on to provide a look at the roots of racist anti-black stereotypes and language in this country, a lot of which is still recognizable in modern right-wing rhetoric. For example, she accuses black people of laziness — and wanting a handout — for refusing to keep working for free for white enslavers, and instead trying to find fortune where the jobs were: “Many negroes conceived the idea that freedom meant cessation from labor, so they left the fields, crowding into the cities and towns, expecting to be fed by the United States Government.”

In one section, with pretty overt delight, Rose highlights the methods the KKK used to terrify black people, including posting notes around towns with the “picture of a figure dangling from the limb of a tree,” and exalts the KKK’s lawless, murderous violence:

“In the courts of this invisible, silent, and mighty government, there were no hung juries, no laws delayed, no reversals, on senseless technicalities by any Supreme Court, because from its Court there was no appeal, and punishment was sure and swift, because there was no executive to pardon. After the negro had surrendered to the Ku Klux Klan, which he did by obeying their orders to the very letter, — for they feared that organization more than the devil and the dark regions, — the Invisible Empire vanished in a night, and has been seen no more by mortal man on this earth.”

To be clear, Rose is here gushing about vast extrajudicial violence committed by the KKK against black people. In 1870, a federal grand jury labeled the KKK a “terrorist organization.” In 1871, a congressional committee was convened specifically to address the issue of Klan violence, and the report based on testimony from those hearings estimated “20,000 to as many as 50,000 people, mostly black, died in violence between 1866 and 1872.”

“This book was unanimously endorsed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy” at its general convention in November 1913, Rose notes, and the group “pledged to endeavor to secure its adoption as a supplementary reader in the schools and to place it in the libraries of our land.”

2. Actually, they published at least two very pro-KKK books. . .

. . .and probably many more. Another UDC ode to the KKK was written by Annie Cooper Burton, then-president of the Los Angeles chapter of the UDC, and published in 1916. Titled "The Ku Klux Klan," much like Rose’s aforementioned book, it argues that the Klan has gotten a bad rap just because they terrorized and intimidated black people, not infrequently assaulting and raping black women, murdering black citizens, and burning down black townships. For these reasons, she suggests, the UDC should do even more to show reverence to the Klan:

“Every clubhouse of the United Daughters of the Confederacy should have a memorial tablet dedicated to the Ku Klux Klan; that would be a monument not to one man, but to five hundred and fifty thousand men, to whom all Southerners owe a debt of gratitude.”

By “all Southerners,” Burton clearly means “only white people,” which is also what she means whenever she uses the word “people.”

3. They built a monument to the KKK.

The UDC was busiest during the 1910s and 1920s, two decades during which the group erected hundreds of Confederate monuments that made tangible the racial terror of Jim Crow. This, apparently, the group still considered insufficient to convey their message of white power and to reassert the threat of white violence. So in 1926, the UDC put up a monument to the KKK. In a piece for Facing South, writer Greg Huffman describes a record of the memorial in the UDC’s own 1941 book "North Carolina’s Confederate Monuments and Memorials:"

“IN COMMEMORATION OF THE ‘KU KLUX KLAN’ DURING THE RECONSTRUCTION PERIOD FOLLOWING THE ‘WAR BETWEEN THE STATES’ THIS MARKER IS PLACED ON THEIR ASSEMBLY GROUND. THE ORIGINAL BANNER (AS ABOVE) WAS MADE IN CABARRUS COUNTY.

“ERECTED BY THE DODSON-RAMSEUR CHAPTER OF THE UNITED DAUGHTERS OF THE CONFEDERACY. 1926”

4. Their most intense efforts focused on the “education” of white children.

Historian Karen Cox, author of 2003’s "Dixie’s Daughters," has written that the UDC’s biggest goal was to indoctrinate white Southern children in the Lost Cause, thus creating “living monuments.”

“They had a multi-pronged approach to doing that,” Cox told me. “It involved going into schools and putting up battle flags and portraits of generals. It meant getting schools renamed for famous Confederates. It was creating the Children of the Confederacy, which was their formal youth auxiliary, so that the UDC could draw membership from the group when they became adults…Children were always involved in the unveiling of monuments. They would select one child to pull the cord, and then there’d be cheers when the monument was unveiled. Children in the stands would form what they called a ‘living battle flag.’ Then they sang Southern patriotic songs.”

Cox has also written about the Confederate catechism, a call-and-response style drill written by a UDC “historian” that posed as a history lesson:

“‘What causes led to the War Between the States, between 1861 and 1865?’ was a typical question. ‘The disregard, on the part of the states of the North, for the rights of the Southern or slaveholding states’ was the answer. ‘What were these rights?’ The answer . . . was ‘the right to regulate their own affairs and to hold slaves as property.’”

AP reporter Allen Breed has noted that the wording of the catechism has been “tweaked over the years,” but the version displayed on the UDC website as recently as August 2018 included this line: “Slaves, for the most part, were faithful and devoted. Most slaves were usually ready and willing to serve their masters.”

5. They’re big fans of black chattel slavery from way back.

The UDC were perhaps the most efficient agents making the ahistorical Lost Cause myth go viral. They did this through a number of methods, the most visually apparent being the 700 monuments exalting people who fought for black chattel slavery that still stand. But also, in the rare cases the UDC has “honored” black people with statuary and monuments, it has been in the form of “loyal slave” markers — an actual subgenre of Confederate monuments — which perpetuate the image of content enslaved blacks and benevolent white enslavers.

In 1923, the UDC tried to erect a monument in Washington, D.C., "in memory of the faithful slave mammies of the South.” The Senate signed off on it, but the idea never came to fruition.

More successful was the UDC’s effort at placing a monument in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, that plays fast and loose with the biography of Haywood “Heyward” Shepherd (the UDC didn’t even bother to get his first name right), a free black man whom an inscription depicts as a “faithful negro” who chose slaveryover freedom, as all “the best” blacks did.

The UDC was even given a place in Arlington National Cemetery for a Confederate monument that includes a weeping black “mammy” figure holding a white child and an enslaved black man marching alongside his enslaver into battle. The 1914 marker intentionally included the enslaved figure to propagate the idea that black people were willing, eager soldiers for the Confederacy — a suggestion that would mean the war couldn’t have been about slavery, which wasn’t so bad anyway. As historian Kevin Levin has documented at length, that lie has become a neo-Confederate talking pointin a long list of other neo-Confederate lies.

6. They get tax breaks that help keep their workings financially solvent.

The UDC is a nonprofit. That means it’s a tax-exempt organization. That recent article about the UDC by AP reporter Allen Breed notes that the annual budget of Virginia, where the UDC is headquartered, “awards the state [division of the] UDC tens of thousands of dollars for the maintenance of Confederate graves — more than $1.6 million since 1996.”

7. They continue to exert political and social influence.

For the most part, the UDC has publicly kept pretty mum on the subject of Confederate monument removal, which has led some to conclude that the group is largely inactive, and even obsolete. Their numbers have dwindled since their heyday, but they remain tenacious about keeping Confederate monuments standing, thus continuing their cultural and political influence.

The UDC does this mostly through lawsuits. (The number of Confederate markers on courthouses has always shown the group’s keen interest in the power of the legal system.) When the San Antonio City Council voted in the weeks after the racist violence in Charlottesville to remove a Confederate monument from public property, the UDC filed suit against city officials. The Shreveport, Louisiana, chapter of the UDC has announced it will appeal a federal judge’s 2017 dismissal of the group’s lawsuit to keep up a Confederate monument at a local courthouse. The UDC threatened legal action against officials in Franklin, Tennessee, when city officials announced plans — not to take down a UDC monument to the Confederacy, but to add markers recognizing African-American historical figures to the park, which the UDC claims it owns. The city of Franklin, with pretty much no other option, responded by filing a lawsuit against the UDC.

And then there’s the case of the UDC vs. Vanderbilt University, in which the group’s Tennessee division filed suit after school administrators announced plans to remove the word “Confederate” from one of its dorms. A state appeals court ruled Vanderbilt could only implement the plan if it repaid $50,000 the UDC had contributed to the building’s construction in 1933 — adjusted to 2016 dollars. Vanderbilt opted to pay $1.2 million to the UDC rather than keep “Confederate” in the dorm name, which it raised from anonymous donors who contributed to a fund explicitly dedicated to the cause.

Kali Holloway

Kali Holloway is the senior director of Make It Right, a project of the Independent Media Institute. She co-curated the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s MetLiveArts 2017 summer performance and film series, “Theater of the Resist.” She previously worked on the HBO documentary Southern Rites, PBS documentary The New Public and Emmy-nominated film Brooklyn Castle, and Outreach Consultant on the award-winning documentary The New Black. Her writing has appeared in AlterNet, Salon, the Guardian, TIME, the Huffington Post, the National Memo, and numerous other outlets.

ttps://www.salon.com/2018/10/06/7-things-the-united-daughters-of-the-confederacy-might-not-want-you-to-know-about-them_partner

11/3/2018 at The National Memo - Campaign 2018, Elections, Featured Post - Reprinted with permission from AlterNet - Originally appeared on Independent Media Institute. - (Fair Use)

"Will That High Blue Tide Become A Midterm Wave?"

By Steven Rosenfeld:

With the 2018 midterms days away, the blue voter tide is rising.

That’s according to state-reported numbers on people voting early, compared to 2014’s midterms. How high the blue wave will crest remains to be seen—not just for control of Congress and many state races, but for whether a governing mandate will emerge.

There are several trends those on the democracy beat will be tracking. Here they are:

1. What Kind of Wave?

As of Thursday night, the nation’s leading academic voter turnout tracker made it official: these midterms have entered uncharted territory. As the University of Florida’s Michael McDonald tweeted, “We’ve passed a milestone in that more people (28 million) have voted early in 2018 election (by any means: absentee, mail ballot, in-person) than voted early in 2014 across the entire nation (27 million).”

Who’s voting early? McDonald said, “27 states + DC surpassed their 2014 total #earlyvote: AZ, DC, DE, FL, GA, ID, IL, IN, KS, LA, ME, MD, MN, MO, MS, MT, NC, ND, NJ, NM, NV, OK, SC, TN, VA, WI, and WV 1 state surpassed its 2014 total vote (early + Election Day): TX (in the 30 reporting counties).” Breaking these figures down further, The Economist’s G. Elliott Morris tweeted, “(1) Voters are turning out more like it’s a presidential election than a midterm. (2) Democrats are the ones who are voting early (3) Unaffiliated voters are breaking to the Democrats about 60 to 25%.”

All of this puts Democrats in the big-picture lead, according to the most reliable polls—which are not single polls, but many polls that are averaged, and ask about generic party leanings. Real Clear Politics average of generic congressional candidates put Dems up by 7.5 percent. Of course, elections are local—not generic—and that’s why polls can miss.

So what shape are blue wave voters in? The answer is they appear to have a slight edge—but that’s not too far ahead in the most heavily policed voting locales. Why not? That 7.5 percent blue lead has positive and worrisome elements.

On the positive side, that lead is on top of the partisan edge created in most heavily gerrymandered districts (U.S. House and state legislatures). That’s because pollsters are looking at the finish line popular vote, not the starting line advantages or disadvantages; where gerrymanders slice and dice the electorate when drawing districts. This fall is apparently seeing lots of people, not just registered Democrats, vote blue.)

But on the worrisome or deflating side, the 7.5 percent lead does not include the impact of strict voter ID laws, which can undermine turnout at the finish line by 2-to-3 percent. Nor do they include the impacts of purging infrequent voters or disqualifying ballots for technical reasons, both of which are GOP power plays in some states and may peel off another point or two. So the bottom line here is every vote matters—not just to achieve winning popular votes, but to achieve genuine governing mandates.

2. How Many New Governors?

While most eyes and ears—and newscasters—are talking about the president and control of the U.S. House (the Dems need to pick up 23 seats to retake the majority) and Senate, term limits have led to more open governor’s seats in for the first time in many years.

There are important races with national implications in Florida, Georgia, Ohio and Michigan, where, it appears, according to those averaged polls, that Democrats stand good chances of winning in these otherwise purple states that are become presidential battlegrounds. But that’s not the only reason these governor’s races are key.

These states, which have been dominated by gerrymandered Republican-run state legislatures and U.S. House delegations, have been in the forefront of litigation to challenge reproductive rights, climate change policy, health care safety nets, same-sex marriage and LGBT rights, and other progressive policies.

While it is not likely that 2018’s wave will completely change the political complexion of these red-run states, electing Democratic governors will mean that new gerrymandered political maps in 2021 will face veto pens. Such potential vetoes mean that the 2020s decade would not be as driven by the same partisans as experienced in the 2010s.

3. Freeing Florida’s Ex-Felons?

The most important ballot measure question on the November ballots arguably is in the Sunshine State, where roughly 10 percent of its voting-age population are ex-felons who have served their sentences—but lost their right to vote under state law. This fall’s ballot measure would restore voting rights to 1.5 million Floridians, which is a political game-changer that could turn Florida from a purple state to a politically blue state for years. However, the measure needs 60 percent voter approval to pass, which is a high bar.

In the governor’s race, polling averages on Friday put the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Andrew Gillum, ahead by 2.7 percent, a smaller margin than just a week ago. While it is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison, that polling snapshot suggests that the re-enfranchisement proposal needs a large last-minute surge to pass.

4. Will Voter Suppression Work?

The tricks of the dark voter suppression trade are well-known, and there has been no shortage of press coverage of 2018’s worst offenders—lead by Georgia and North Dakota. (There are other less-covered examples in Arizona, Missouri, Indiana and Kansas.) In all these states, Republicans have turned voter registration and ballot-verifying technicalities into reasons to bar likely Democrats from participating.

Those tactics involved not promptly processing voter registration information, taking infrequent voters off of statewide voter rolls, rejecting mail-in ballots based on how a person signs the outside envelope and designing voter ID requirements that intentionally are harder for Native Americans to satisfy. The good news here is that local voting rights legal defense groups are watching, are organized and are helping people get past hurdles.

The open question is whether these bureaucratic barriers will impede a larger class of voters—as they are made to wait in line while unsuspecting individuals who find they are not being given a regular ballot interact with poll workers and end up casting provisional ballots (which need further certification before being counted). At this stage in the voting wars, the suppressive tactics and legal remedies are known. They question is to what degree will they come into play on Tuesday.

5. Will Cyber-Sabotage Strike?

Put another way, the question is will the Russians—or any domestic cyber-warrior—somehow sabotage the information systems that are used to check in voters and then tally their ballots?

In 2016, Russian intelligence agents hacked into Illinois’ state voter registration database, but didn’t scramble the names and addresses and precinct assignments—the fear there, as that could lead to great frustration and chaos at polling places. Russians did not get near the systems counting votes, according to every congressional and intelligence agency inquiry since. But the Illinois breach has made cyber security a priority in elections as never before (arguably bringing it in line to where it should have always been.)

Experts tracking cyber threats to voting say the public should be confident. As David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, wrote in the Washington Post, “Russia’s efforts have driven an unprecedented response from federal, state and local officials charged with securing our election systems. Time and time again, secretaries of state and state election directors from both parties have made clear that while the threat to our elections is real, they are singularly focused on and prepared to address it in 2018 and beyond.”

Becker is in a position to know what states and counties are doing. While one maxim in the cyber-security world is one should never say never, it is more likely than not voting will not be disrupted by outsiders. That is not to say that there won’t be machinery snafus and other glitches that occur every election, especially as the nation’s fleet of voting machines is well past what’s considered old age for computers.

Wave or Mandate?

The biggest question heading into Tuesday’s finale of the 2018 midterm-voting season is will Democrats see a blue wave or a blue mandate?

The two are not the same. It’s likely the results will be very close in some key races, just as there are likely to be Democratic blowouts and GOP-winning surprises elsewhere. But overall, the foremost question is whether the voters will act with enough collective clout to send a message that the nation’s political agenda and culture must change. That’s what most Americans will be watching for on Tuesday once the results are in.

Steven Rosenfeld is a senior writing fellow of the Independent Media Institute, where he covers national political issues. He is the author of several books on elections, most recently Democracy Betrayed: How Superdelegates, Redistricting, Party Insiders, and the Electoral College Rigged the 2016 Election (March 2018, Hot Books).

http://www.nationalmemo.com/will-that-high-blue-tide-become-a-midterm-wave/

Óinseach hangs with gobbling turkeys ...the kind who voted for Trump.

Midterm Election Ground Reports – 12pm to 3pm ET – What’s Going On?Posted on November 6, 2018 by sundance

The U.S. media always have an agenda on election day and are generally unreliable for factual information. That’s where you come in. Your ground reports are much more reliable barometers of what’s happening in/around your neighborhood on election day.

So, what’s going on?

look here

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/

McCain flips off Gobshite after getting a whiff of her Trump stench...

We all have the right for different opinion. Men and women deserved equal rights!

Chris of www.carpetcleanercolumbia.com