November 19, 2020

Complaint to unseat Monica Palmer from Wayne Co. Board of Canvassers to be investigated

(Detroit Free Press) The Wayne County Board of Ethics voted to look into a complaint challenging Monica Palmer's standing on the Wayne County Board of Canvassers on Wednesday.

The complaint, initially filed by lawyer Thomas Bruetsch in October, calls for Palmer to step down from the Board of Canvassers for her involvement with the Grosse Pointe Board of Education election. Palmer — who is the founder of Taxpayers for Grosse Pointe Schools, a nonprofit group which advertised what appeared to be support of certain school board candidates — was accused of a conflict of interest in an election she oversees.

"Monica Palmer should resign or be removed for her conflicts of interest as chairperson of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers, which certifies elections," said Bruetsch in October, adding her "involvement in the PAC is incompatible with her public office."

The addressing of the complaint comes one day after a sea of criticism from Black and civil rights leaders who were outraged by an initially split vote Tuesday by the Board of Canvassers that denied certification of election results. Palmer, along with Republican William Hartmann, later changed their votes to favor certification after a barrage of complaints. ............(more)

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/wayne/2020/11/18/wayne-county-board-of-canvassers-monica-palmer-complaint/6339134002/

November 18, 2020

Donald Trump and his supporters seek comfort in conspiracy as election hopes dim

(Independent UK) For a man who often broadcasts shirtless and screaming in between commercials for brain pills, the stage Alex Jones found himself speaking from on Saturday afternoon might have felt like a considerable upgrade. On the steps of the US Supreme Court, no less, the conspiracy theorist had a receptive audience.

“President Trump by every metric won this election!" he bellowed from the podium to cheers from a crowd of thousands of the president’s supporters in Washington D.C.

“That’s why the corporate media including Fox News will not let anybody on to show the proven fraud in Pennsylvania, in Michigan, in Arizona, in Georgia, in Nevada and in Minnesota,” he added, before expanding the list of collaborators to include “paedophile globalists” and "Clinton blackmail rings."

It is perhaps fitting that America’s most infamous conspiracy theorist is stumping again for Donald Trump. In the week since his election loss, the president appears to have all but abandoned the job of governing to focus on spreading false and debunked stories about voter fraud to explain his defeat.

....(snip)....

It should come as no surprise that this is how the Trump presidency ends. Conspiracy theories were the lifeblood of his early political career. His baseless claims about president Barack Obama’s birth certificate, and the dog-whistle racism that accompanied them, helped him on an improbable journey to the highest office in the land. His lies then seemed like a means to an end. Today, as he approaches the end of his one-term presidency, they are all he has left. ............(more)

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/donald-trump-election-voter-fraud-us-election-rigged-b1723139.html

November 18, 2020

Wayne County's would-be election thieves humiliate themselves, expose overt racism of GOP

This article is paywalled, but I tried to excerpt the key graphs


(Detroit Free Press) Donald Trump's brazen campaign to disenfranchise Black voters came to an ugly head Tuesday evening when two GOP apparatchiks refused the certify the results of Wayne County's Nov. 3 election, throwing the fate of Michigan's 16 electoral votes into uncertainty.

The plot fizzled a few hours later — but only after a spontaneous eruption of rage by voters and poll workers watching the spectacle unfold on Zoom, and not before the would-be election thieves had humiliated themselves on national TV and exposed the overt racism at the heart of their party's vote suppression effort.

....(snip)....

Never mind that election veterans in both parties dismissed those discrepancies as products of the human error endemic to large municipal elections, and that not one of the hundreds of independent observers who monitored the Detroit ballot account provided any evidence that a single vote had been falsified.

And never mind that Democratic canvassing board members brushed aside similar discrepancies to certify the 2016 election in which Trump carried Michigan by 10,700 votes, a fraction of Biden's 148,000 victory margin this year.

....(snip)....

And as if the optics of two white suburbanites threatening to negate the votes of the state's largest city weren't cringe-worthy enough — Hartmann is from Wyandotte, and Palmer moved to Grosse Pointe Woods from western Michigan three years ago — Palmer turned up the dial, allowing that she might be willing to certify election results in Detroit's white suburbs if the ballots of the Black-majority city were excluded from the countywide tally.

....(snip)....

But it was too late. Palmer and Hartmann had already expressed their contempt for the electoral process and slandered the integrity of the hundreds election workers who counted Wayne County's ballots. Now the nation knows how far their party was prepared to go to muzzle the voters of Michigan's largest city, and the record of their attempted theft has been burned into the public memory as indelibly as the video images of Alabama police officers turning firehoses on civil rights protesters in the 1960s. .............(more)

https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/brian-dickerson/2020/11/18/canvassers-wayne-county-election-results-certification/6334900002/

November 18, 2020

Enough with "both sides"! Faux-neutral journalism is no way to fight the truth-deniers

Enough with "both sides"! Faux-neutral journalism is no way to fight the truth-deniers
With Trump defeated, journalists can't just retreat back to "objectivity" — not with America's future at stake

By DAN FROOMKIN
NOVEMBER 18, 2020 11:00AM


(Salon) The conventional wisdom among the leaders of our major newsrooms is that the best way to reach people who believe crazy, awful things is to remain neutral.

They maintain that taking sides would actually make news organizations even less credible with that particular population.

"We face an enormous burden of people who think that, if we're from one side or the other, they're just going to tune out and not pay attention to the world's best journalism," Associated Press executive editor Sally Buzbee said in September.

New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet has repeatedly embraced what he calls "sophisticated true objectivity" as a defense against those who would have the Times counter falsehoods more assertively. You don't call it a lie, he has said. "Let somebody else call it a lie."

Countering the reformers' view that balanced criticism is naïve at this stage in American politics, National Public Radio public editor Kelly McBride recently described the dominant newsroom view as believing "that our current experience is particular to the Trump presidency, that American politics will eventually regain equilibrium, and that journalism's attachment to neutrality should remain consistent in order to remain effective over the long run." ......(more)

https://www.salon.com/2020/11/18/enough-with-both-sides-faux-neutral-journalism-is-no-way-to-fight-the-truth-deniers/

November 18, 2020

Tweet about Wayne County decision from Abed Ayoub.....

....
director of Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee and native Detroiter.


https://twitter.com/aayoub/status/1328897394474426370?s=20

November 18, 2020

Crazy "Sovereign Citizens" murder in Florida

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) — A Florida man who questioned government authority over individuals living in the U.S. through an online forum was fatally shot, allegedly by a woman who has espoused similar “sovereign citizen” views, police said Tuesday.

The Marion County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release that Neely Petrie-Blanchard was arrested in Georgia one day after the killing of Christopher Hallett in his Ocala-area home. Witnesses to the shooting said Petrie-Blanchard accused Hallett of working with the government to deny her custody of her children.

Hallett, 50, ran an entity called E-Clause LLC that featured a Facebook page filled with documents, graphics and articles about whether governments have authority in many instances over individuals. This viewpoint is frequently summarized as the “sovereign citizen” movement. .............(more)

https://whdh.com/news/police-man-who-questioned-government-powers-fatally-shot-by-woman-with-sovereign-citizen-views/

November 18, 2020

Black voters in Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Milwaukee decided this election.....

.... despite all the efforts to stop us. You KNOW that strikes at the heart of right-wingers' racial fears and insecurities.
And as their numbers continue to dwindle, and the country becomes increasingly diverse, all they can hear is the scary sound of inevitability.

Cue the orchestra.......

November 17, 2020

Drunk Florida man arrested after doing donuts in Florida Highway Patrol parking lot

FORT MYERS, Fla. – A Cape Coral man was arrested for DUI Sunday after attempting to do donuts in his car in the Florida Highway Patrol’s parking lot.

Dallas Ziemski, 26, was driving his 2016 Dodge Charger around 8:30 p.m. when he turned into the parking lot of FHP’s Fort Myers office, according to FHP. ...........(more)

https://nbc-2.com/news/crime/2020/11/16/man-arrested-for-dui-in-fhp-parking-lot/

November 17, 2020

Florida man hauled stolen I-4 utility pole atop his sedan, troopers say

TAMPA, Fla. - A driver looking to make some quick cash caused quite the spectacle on Interstate 4 through Hillsborough County Monday.

Florida Highway Patrol said a driver picked up a downed metal utility pole, strapped it to the roof of his 1997 Toyota Camry, and planned to sell it to a scrapyard. He didn't get too far. ......(more)

https://www.fox13news.com/news/florida-man-hauled-stolen-i-4-utility-pole-atop-his-sedan-troopers-say

November 17, 2020

Our politics isn't about left vs. right anymore -- it's about reality vs. dreadful fantasy

Our politics isn't about left vs. right anymore — it's about reality vs. dreadful fantasy
More than 73 million Americans just voted for a dangerous, delusional fiction. Our only choice is to defeat them

By BOB CESCA
NOVEMBER 17, 2020 12:00PM


(Salon) There's a visual image I'd like you to embed in your mind, to be wheeled out whenever you might feel even the slightest bit complacent about the incoming Biden administration. For many of us, it's impossible to forget.

Back in April, Columbus Dispatch photographer Joshua Bickel snapped an unforgettable image of Trump supporters — no distancing, eyes vacant and maskless mouths agape — protesting the COVID protocols in Ohio during the first major spike in cases. Bickel stood inside the lobby of the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus while the protesters shrieked and chanted outside, pounding on the locked doors. It looked almost exactly like that scene in "Shaun of the Dead" in which Simon Pegg and the rest of the cast is trapped inside the Winchester Pub with a large gaggle of zombies pressed against the front door.

https://twitter.com/CuprisinCarey/status/1324050006978883584?s=20

Never forget that image.

It's perhaps the best illustration of the political stakes following Joe Biden's decisive and, by Donald Trump's own standards, landslide victory. While the ousting of Trump was fantastic news for the preservation of the American republic and the national values we cherish, it's become abundantly clear that the Red Hat cult isn't going anywhere. In fact, Trump managed to add millions of voters to his army of suckers.

....(snip)....

So, how do the reality-based Normals keep the Red Hats far away from the levers of power in the long run? Exit polls indicate that 14 percent of voters who cast ballots this year had never voted before. Among those first-timers, 64 percent voted for Joe Biden. What's the strategic lesson here? From today forward, we have no choice but to engage in the nation's most aggressive 50-state voter registration drive ever, adding as many Democrats as possible. From there, it's all about getting out the vote: delivering all of those new voters to polling places or making sure they vote by mail. Overwhelm every election: state, local and national. It needs to be unrelenting. The alternative is gathered at the doors, shrieking for another chance to crush American democracy beneath the ungainly bulk of Trumpism. The moment we let up, they'll be back. ..............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2020/11/17/our-politics-isnt-about-left-vs-right-anymore--its-about-reality-vs-dreadful-fantasy/