When you’re the Republicans and are trying to really hard to convince America to give you another shot at being in power, it would be a very good idea to stay far away from anything Russia. Particularly right now.
Oops.
NEW: House Republicans just rolled out their official "Commitment to America” plan for 2023 with an inspirational video chock full of scenes presented as exceptional imagery of America -- but that are actually stock footage from Russia and Ukraine. https://t.co/xtQm52WWNp
Or how about misattributing a quote to Abraham Lincoln that actually came from an 1980s Lehman Brothers TV ad? You remember them—the massive financial services firm that went bankrupt in the 2008 financial crisis. How much more perfect does it get than that? So much more.
Like in that same promo video with the Russian oil rig, where the narrator says, “We salute those who paid the ultimate sacrifice in defense of our freedoms,” and they show footage from World War II.
The war where America defeated the Nazis.
Awkward.
This part is good, too. From the “Future that’s built on freedom” part of the platform where they shout, “U.S. life expectancy has decreased for two straight years, representing the biggest drop since 1943.” Gosh, why would life expectancy have fallen in the U.S. during a global pandemic?
It’s also nice that they put the health care portion, such as it is, of their plan in the “Future built on freedom” part when in the future, they plan on a national abortion ban.
The fun just doesn’t end. Here’s the setting for McCarthy’s video introducing the plan. That’s a lot of white bread.
And here’s where he talks about the devastating effects of Joe Biden’s economy.
You really couldn’t make this more ridiculous than it already is. Thanks for the laugh, Kev. But, damn, these people can’t get control of the House back.
Wildfire smoke now exposes millions of Americans each year to dangerous levels of fine particulate matter, lofting enough soot across parts of the West in recent years to erase much of the air quality gains made over the last two decades. From a report: Those are among the findings of a new Stanford University study published Sept. 22 in Environmental Science & Technology that focuses on a type of particle pollution known as PM2.5, which can lodge deep in our lungs and even get into our bloodstream. Using statistical modeling and artificial intelligence techniques, the researchers estimated concentrations of PM2.5 specifically from wildfire smoke in sharp enough detail to reveal variations within individual counties and individual smoke events from coast to coast from 2006 to 2020.
"We found that people are being exposed to more days with wildfire smoke and more extreme days with high levels of fine particulate matter from smoke," said lead study author Marissa Childs, who worked on the research as a PhD student in Stanford's Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER). Unlike other major pollutant sources, wildfire smoke is considered an 'eexceptional event' under the Clean Air Act, she explained, "which means an increasing portion of the particulate matter that people are exposed to is unregulated."
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Boeing agreed to pay $200 million to settle US Securities and Exchange Commission allegations that the company and its former Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg failed to properly disclose safety issues with its 737 Max jetliner. The settlement, which was announced by the SEC on Thursday, follows a probe by the regulator's enforcement division. Investigators examined whether Boeing was adequately forthcoming to shareholders about material problems with its jetliner that crashed in 2018 and 2019.
Without admitting or denying the SEC's findings, Boeing and Muilenburg consented to cease-and-desist orders that include penalties of $200 million and $1 million, respectively. The twin tragedies killed 346 people and prompted one of the longest groundings in aviation history. The SEC enforcement action is one of the last remaining government investigations. Boeing had cautioned in its most recently quarterly filing that the "outcome of which may be material." Boeing paid a $243.3 million fine as part of a $2.5 billion settlement with the US Justice Department to end a criminal investigation in January 2021.
Top congressional Democrats are preparing to address a wave of bans and restrictions on school library materials Thursday with new resolutions that call on local governments “to protect the rights of students to learn,” according to lawmakers and a draft copy of the legislation.
The moves represent urgent statements of concern from President Joe Biden’s party about ongoing controversies that affect as many as 4 million U.S. schoolchildren, according to one recent estimate. The congressional response has won endorsements from the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association labor unions as well as prominent literary and left-leaning educational interest groups.
“The wave of book bans that has swept across our country in recent years is a direct attack on First Amendment rights and should alarm every American who believes that freedom of expression is a fundamental pillar of our democracy,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a sponsor of the House resolution and chair of the chamber’s oversight subcommittee on civil rights and liberties, in a statement.
Both the House and Senate resolutions will face an uncertain path to a vote.
Alarmed Democratic lawmakers have nevertheless convened hearings this year over political organizing and state restrictions against books and curriculum that address gender identity and race. A group of party pollsters and strategists have also sought to draw voter attention to the controversies during fall’s midterm elections as they attempt to depict conservative-led campaigns as extremist and at odds with a significant share of public opinion.
“Efforts to remove books from schools and public libraries simply because they introduce ideas about diversity or challenge students to think beyond their own lived experience is not only anti-democratic but also a hallmark of authoritarian regimes,” Raskin said. Hawaii Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz is sponsoring a Senate resolution.
The draft House measure cites a 1982 Supreme Court decision — Board of Education v. Pico — which ruled the First Amendment limits schools’ discretion to remove books from high school and junior high libraries, and that schools cannot limit content in a “narrowly partisan or political manner.”
The resolution further “expresses concern about the spreading problem of book banning and proliferating threats to freedom of expression in the United States” and “reaffirms the United States’ commitment to supporting writers’ freedom of expression, and the freedom of all Americans to read books without government censorship.”
It finally calls on schools and local governments to offer students opportunities “to read a wide array of books reflecting a multitude of viewpoints and perspectives.”
Efforts to ban or restrict library materials in schools, universities and public libraries are on track to hit new records this year. The American Library Association cataloged 681 efforts to target 1,651 unique titles between January and August, according to preliminary association data that is already surpassing a high-water mark recorded in 2021.
A similar analysis by the PEN America literary advocacy group tabulated efforts in 138 school districts and 32 states to remove book titles from school libraries, prohibit them from classrooms and pull them from circulation amid public disputes or in response to state laws during the past calendar year.
The NRCC on Thursday canceled the entire $960,000 ad buy it had booked in Ohio’s 9th District to defeat Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur, a development that was first reported by the Republican firm Medium Buying and confirmed by Politico and the Democratic firm Amplify Media. The committee's pullout came one day after the Associated Press reported that Kaptur’s Republican opponent, QAnon-aligned activist J.R. Majewski, had lied about serving in Afghanistan. The NRCC has not yet commented on the move, though the committee is still touting Majewski as a featured candidate on its website.
While Senate Republicans have scaled back, or outright canceled, their planned spending in a number of battlegrounds, this appears to be the first time this cycle that either party has retreated in a House contest. Big-money players usually make this sort of move to redirect cash elsewhere either because they feel supremely confident, or because they've concluded their candidate is doomed. It’s unlikely anyone feels supremely confident in Majewski.
Until the May primary, Kaptur, who is the longest-serving congresswoman in history, very much looked like one of the GOP's top targets in the nation, since Republicans had radically transformed her Toledo-area constituency from a 59-40 Biden district to one that Trump would have taken 51-48. But everything changed in the spring when Majewski, who attended the Jan. 6 Trump rally that preceded the attack on Congress and later went to the Capitol grounds, defeated two Republican state legislators to win the nod to take on the 20-term incumbent.
Kaptur and her allies went on to air a litany of ads arguing that Majewski’s presence at the riot proved that he was a danger to law enforcement. (Majewski claims he never actually entered the Capitol building.) They also utilized footage of the Republican speaking favorably of secession and rapping in a video titled “Let's Go Brandon Save America” to make their case that he shouldn’t be in Congress. A recent Kaptur commercial highlighted Majewski’s ties to QAnon, with a narrator saying, “The FBI calls QAnon a domestic terrorist threat … Extremist J. R. Majewski is one of them.”
National Republicans, though, still stuck with Majewski, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy even stumped for him last month. “This is a competitive race,” McCarthy insisted, continuing, “I hope everybody understands we are in this race. Because we have a candidate that understands what Ohio needs.” The NRCC also came to Majewski's aid last week when it helped him air his very first positive commercial of the race.
However, things somehow got worse for the Republican on Wednesday when the AP reported that military documents showed that Majewski, who had previously said he “lost my grandmother when I was in Afghanistan,” had never been stationed in the country. Instead, the self-described "combat veteran" spent six months in 2002 loading planes at an Air Force base in Qatar, far from the front lines. That seems to have been it for the NRCC, which yanked its planned spending the next day.
Majewski likely won’t be the last House candidate to get abandoned as Election Day draws nearer, and while there’s little question the GOP is triaging him because they’ve decided he’s a poor investment, future developments may be more difficult to interpret. That's partly because we have to rely on media reports for data about TV ad bookings, and those sources may not have access to complete information—particularly the motives of those making or canceling reservations.
Groups like the NRCC can also always change their minds and jump back into a race they'd previously given up on—they'll just pay higher rates if they do so. It’s also possible that the committee's allies at the Congressional Leadership Fund will see the race differently and get involved, though FEC reports show that CLF has yet to spend anything here.
By Justin Klawans A group of students in Baton Rouge, Louisiana thought that they were going to a career fair on Tuesday. Instead, they found that they had been sent to an event described as an anti-LGBT church service. According to Baton Rouge-based newspaper The Advocate, over 2,100 students from local high schools in the East Baton Rouge Parish school system were told that they were participating in a districtwide ‘College & Career Fair.’ However, when they arrived at their destination, the students, most of whom were seniors, discovered that they had been dropped off at an event called ‘Da…
Yep, Cannon has gotten quite a smackdown. Seems unlikely even the hacks in black will be inclined to step in at this point.
Former President Donald Trump speaks to supporters at a rally for Pennsylvania candidates on September 3, 2022. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Even Trump’s own appointees had no patience for the rogue judge who sabotaged the DOJ investigation into the former president.
Allow me to summarize a federal appeals court decision gutting a series of pro-Trump orders with a single scene from the 1995 failson comedy Billy Madison: As the appeals court decision makes clear, everyone who read Judge Aileen Cannon’s decisions benefiting Trump is now less intelligent for having done so.
The United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit’s decision in Trump v. United States utterly savages former President Donald Trump’s efforts to slow down a criminal investigation into classified documents that the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence. It is equally dismissive of Cannon, the Trump-appointed federal district judge in Florida who ordered the Justice Department to halt this criminal investigation, at least temporarily.
Notably, the appeals panel includes two other judges who, like Cannon, were appointed by Trump. But these two Trump judges give Cannon no quarter. Their opinion identifies more than a dozen legal errors in Cannon’s decisions, some of them quite obvious and egregious.
One of the central issues in this case, for example, is whether Trump could require the FBI to return more than 100 documents seized from his residence, all of which are marked as classified, because they may be his property.But, as the 11th Circuit notes, the executive order laying out the rules governing classified documents states that such documents are “owned by, produced by or for, or [are] under the control of the United States Government.”
Classified documents, by definition, are not the property of a former government official like Trump.
The upshot of the 11th Circuit’s order is that the FBI may continue its criminal probe into whether Trump violated federal criminal laws governing the handling of national defense information, including the Espionage Act. Trump could conceivably ask the Supreme Court to reinstate Cannon’s original decision, but he is unlikely to prevail there. While the Court’s 6-3 Republican-appointed majority often takes extraordinary steps to ensure that the conservative policies Trump supported during his administration remain in effect, they’ve shown far less personal deference to Trump himself.
Last January, for example, the Supreme Court allowed the US House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol to obtain Trump White House documents against Trump’s objections. Only Justice Clarence Thomas publicly noted his dissent.
It is fairly likely, in other words, that this embarrassing chapter for Judge Cannon — and for the federal judiciary — will come to a close soon.
How we got here
In August, the FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago; among other things, the warrant sought “physical documents with classification markings” that the FBI believed Trump was holding at his residence.
The Constitution does require the FBI to comply with certain restrictions before it can search a private citizen’s home or seize anything from it. Any law enforcement officer wishing to conduct such a search must have probable cause to justify it, and they must obtain a warrant from a neutral magistrate. The FBI complied with both of these requirements before searching Trump’s home — where they recovered several boxes of papers, including the more than 100 classified documents.
Nevertheless, Cannon determined that Trump is entitled to additional protections that are rarely afforded to any criminal suspect, in large part because of Trump’s “former position as President of the United States.” She also ordered the DOJ to halt its criminal investigation into the documents seized at Mar-a-Lago until a court-appointed official known as a “special master” reviews them.
Although this order permitted the DOJ to continue a parallel investigation assessing how Trump’s possession of these documents might have damaged national security, the Justice Department warned Cannon that the two investigations “cannot be readily separated,” in no small part because they are being conducted by the same personnel.
Cannon wasn’t swayed, and last week she appointed Raymond Dearie, a senior federal judge, as that special master to review the documents.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department sought limited relief from the 11th Circuit. The DOJ has not yet challenged Cannon’s order appointing the special master, or instructing him to comb through the non-classified documents seized from Trump. But it did seek the appeals court’s permission to continue its criminal and national security investigations into the classified materials. It also sought an order preventing either the special master or Trump’s lawyers from seeing the classified documents.
On Wednesday evening, a three-judge 11th Circuit panel — which includes Trump appointees Britt Grant and Andrew Brasher — granted both of the DOJ’s requests.
The 11th Circuit’s opinion paints Cannon as a hack, an incompetent, or both
The panel’s opinion is 29 pages long, and about half of those pages are devoted to reciting the facts of the case and summarizing what has happened in this litigation so far. The court doesn’t actually begin its legal analysis of Cannon’s orders until page 15 of the opinion, but it quickly identifies a fatal error in her reasoning.
While there are extraordinary circumstances where a court may need to step in after law enforcement seizes property pursuant to a valid warrant, the 11th Circuit explains, those extraordinary circumstances only arise when the government “displayed a callous disregard” for a criminal suspect’s constitutional rights. But Cannon conceded in her decisions that the Justice Department has not shown such disregard for Trump’s rights.
That alone, according to the opinion, “is reason enough to conclude that the district court abused its discretion” in ruling in favor of Trump.
Having identified this error, the 11th Circuit then spends an additional 12 pages flagging more than a dozen other errors in Cannon’s reasoning. Among other things, the court notes that Trump cannot possibly have a personal interest in retaining classified government documents. It explains that there is “no evidence that any of these records were declassified.” And it holds that Cannon was wrong to order the Justice Department to show these documents to the special master or to Trump’s lawyers.
“The Supreme Court has recognized that for reasons ‘too obvious to call for enlarged discussion, the protection of classified information must be committed to the broad discretion of the agency responsible, and this must include broad discretion to determine who may have access to it,’” the 11th Circuit explains, quoting from the Supreme Court’s decision in Department of the Navy v. Egan (1988).
Again, Trump could conceivably ask the Supreme Court to reinstate Cannon’s original order. But he just lost before a conservative panel dominated by judges that he appointed. So it is unlikely that even this Supreme Court will side with him.
And because the most important parts of Cannon’s order have now been blocked by the 11th Circuit, the Supreme Court’s GOP-appointed majority cannot simply sit on the case for months before eventually reversing Cannon — a tactic the justices have used in the past to leave legally dubious lower court orders reinstating Trump-era policies in place for nearly a year.
It is likely, in other words, that the DOJ will be allowed to continue its criminal investigation into Trump without significant further interference from Judge Cannon — or elsewhere in the judiciary.
Time to stop airing these claims that he refuses to make in Court.
Former President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he had declassified the documents he took with him to his Mar-a-Lago estate that have since become the subject of an extensive Justice Department investigation.
Speaking on Fox News’ “Hannity,” Trump declined to point to specific evidence of that declassification. But, in a pre-recorded interview, he told host Sean Hannity that evidence was not needed.
"There doesn't have to be a process, as I understand it," Trump said. "You're the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying it's declassified, even by thinking about it."
Pressed further, Trump insisted he had declassified the documents in question when he left the White House, again without pointing to proof of such.
"In other words, when I left the White House, they were declassified," Trump said.
The comments came during a discussion of the ongoing criminal investigation of the highly sensitive documents seized by federal agents from Trump's home and resort in Florida. And they were offered as the ex-president’s own legal team has resisted efforts to back up the assertion that the documents in question were declassified.
Trump’s lawyers most recently suffered a rebuke on this front from a federal judge who has been tasked with sifting through the seized documents to sort out privileged files or files pertinent to national security matters.
“My view of it is: You can’t have your cake and eat it,” said Judge Raymond Dearie, the so-called special master, in challenging the Trump lawyers’ assertion that it could not produce evidence of a declassification for fear that doing so could harm them in future court settings.
On Wednesday, a separate panel of judges declined to accept the Trump legal team’s efforts to stop a criminal inquiry of the roughly 100 seized documents marked as classified. In its decision, the three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that Trump “has not even attempted to show that he has a need to know the information contained in the classified documents. … Nor has he established that the current administration has waived that requirement for these documents.”
The panel also said the debate over classification was a “red herring,” in that it did not address “why [Trump] has a personal interest in” those documents.
The Hannity interview — Trump's first sit-down comments since the search — was pre-recorded, seemingly before it became clear on Wednesday evening that the former president’ legal team had encountered the setback before the 11th Circuit.
In the interview, Trump said he did not pack any boxes when he left the White House, instead leaving the task to the General Services Administration, which helps facilitate presidential transitions.
“There was nothing that was hiding,” Trump said of the process.
Despite pressure to do so from conservative circles, Trump said he had not released potential security camera footage of the search on his Florida property because he’d been told it could put FBI agents in danger.
"Most of the people in the FBI, they probably voted for Trump,” the former president said. “I don't want to have anybody hurt. But they came onto the site.”
The agency has faced anger and scrutiny from the right since the search.
A three-judge appeals court panel has granted the Justice Department’s request to block aspects of U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling that delayed a criminal investigation into highly sensitive documents seized from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
The panel ruled that Cannon, a Trump appointee, erred when she temporarily prevented federal prosecutors from using the roughly 100 documents — marked as classified – recovered from Trump’s estate as part of a criminal inquiry.
Trump “has not even attempted to show that he has a need to know the information contained in the classified documents,” the panel ruled in a 29-page decision. “Nor has he established that the current administration has waived that requirement for these documents."
Two of the three judges on the panel, Andrew Brasher and Britt Grant, were appointed to the court by Trump. The third, Robin Rosenbaum, was appointed by President Barack Obama. In the unanimous decision, the judges declared it “self-evident” that the public interest favored allowing the Justice Department to determine whether any of the records were improperly disclosed, risking national security damage.
“For our part, we cannot discern why Plaintiff would have an individual interest in or need for any of the one-hundred documents with classification markings,” the appeals court wrote in an opinion that listed no individual judge as the author.
While Cannon speculated in her ruling that allowing investigators continued access to the documents could result in leaks of their contents, the appeals panel brushed aside that concern.
“Permitting the United States to retain the documents does not suggest that they will be released; indeed, a purpose of the United States’s efforts in investigating the recovered classified documents is to limit unauthorized disclosure of the information they contain,” the appeals judges wrote. “Not only that, but any authorized official who makes an improper disclosure risks her own criminal liability.”
The 11th Circuit’s rules appear to preclude any attempt to ask the full bench of that court to reconsider the government’s motion, but Trump could seek emergency relief from the Supreme Court.
Trump attorney Christopher Kise did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling.
The appeals court’s opinion was unsparing toward Cannon and replete with indications that the appeals judges took a vastly different approach to the document fight than she did.
Trump’s legal team, Cannon and even a senior judge that she appointed as a special master have generally referred to the national-security documents at issue as “marked classified,” deferring at least to a degree to Trump’s claim that he declassified all the records found at Mar-a-Lago, despite a lack of evidence buttressing his assertion. But the appeals court panel took a different approach, often referring without qualification to the records as “classified.”
They also characterized the public dispute over potential declassification of the documents as a “red herring,” contending that even if true, “that would not explain why [Trump] has a personal interest in them.”
Throughout their ruling, the three judges made clear they had little patience for Trump’s freewheeling claims about the status of the 100 documents, noting that he had presented no evidence to support those public assertions. And they noted drily that there’s a common sense reason for documents to include classified markings.
“Classified documents are marked to show they are classified, for instance, with their classification level,” the panel observed.
The timing of the appeals court’s decision, coming less than 24 hours after the parties’ completed legal briefing on the issue, also signaled that the panel viewed the question as straightforward.
Enlarge / Diego Luna returns to the role of Cassian Andor in the newest Star Wars series on Disney+. (credit: Lucasfilm)
At its worst, Star Wars: Andor is a sanded-off PG-13 version of some of the best TV dramas of the past decade. It's easy to see traces of The Wire, Lost, and Breaking Bad in this story of Star Wars-adjacent scum and villainy. However, as you might suspect, such nuanced TV inspirations can only go so far in a franchise that regularly features chirping droids and action figure tie-ins.
At its best, though, Andor plays out like no other Star Wars film or TV entry to date, and it bodes well for the series' post-Skywalker future. Andor flexes its adult-ish aspirations to better resemble the gritty content that has made series sidebars like comics, novels, and video games beloved. While its momentum takes a little too long to kick in, enough quality coalesces by the end of the series' first 100 minutes to make it a worthy recommendation for fans of compelling sci-fi television, let alone Star Wars loyalists.
At Disney+, an initial release of three episodes says a lot
This series "follows" the events of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story the only way Lucasfilm really could: by building a prequel out of its likable anti-hero, Cassian Andor. (Spoiler alert: If this series had been a direct timeline sequel to that film, it would, uh, include far fewer characters.) Since his name's in the title, Andor features as the star, and the events rewind to both his biggest adult and childhood adventures.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Microsoft President Brad Smith said the company won't label social media posts that appear to be false in order to avoid the appearance that the company is trying to censor speech online. From the report: "I don't think that people want governments to tell them what's true or false," Smith said when asked about Microsoft's role in defining disinformation. "And I don't think they're really interested in having tech companies tell them either." The comments are Smith's strongest indication yet that Microsoft is taking a unique path to tracking and disrupting digital propaganda efforts.
Smith said Microsoft wanted to provide the public with more information about who is speaking, what they are saying and allow them to come to their own judgment about whether content was true. "We have to be very thoughtful and careful because -- and this is also true of every democratic government -- fundamentally, people quite rightly want to make up their own mind and they should," he said. "Our whole approach needs to be to provide people with more information, not less and we cannot trip over and use what others might consider censorship as a tactic."
No shit. White grievance highly correlates with this bullshit.
Christian nationalism, a belief that the United States was founded as a white, Christian nation and that there is no separation between church and state, is gaining steam on the right.
Appeals to Christian nationalism have a long tradition in American history, though they have usually operated on the fringes. But the increasingly mainstream appearance of this belief in GOP circles makes sense if you look at new public opinion surveys. Our new University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll suggests that declaring the United States a Christian nation is a message that could be broadly embraced by Republicans in the midterms and 2024 presidential race. But our findings also see limits to its appeal — and over the long-term, Christian nationalism could be a political loser.
Most Republicans Say Christian Nationalism Is Unconstitutional — But Still Support It
Our national poll included 2,091 participants, carried out May 6-16, 2022, with a margin of error of +/- 2.14 percent.
We started by asking participants if they believed the Constitution would even allow the United States government to declare the U.S. a “Christian Nation.” We found that 70 percent of Americans — including 57 percent of Republicans and 81 percent of Democrats — said that the Constitution would not allow such a declaration. (Indeed, the First Amendment says Congress can neither establish nor prohibit the practice of a religion.)
We followed up by asking: “Would You Favor or Oppose the United States Officially Declaring the United States to be a Christian Nation?” The findings were striking.
Overall, 62 percent of respondents said they opposed such a declaration, including 83 percent of Democrats and 39 percent of Republicans. Fully 61 percent of Republicans supported declaring the United States a Christian nation. In other words, even though over half of Republicans previously said such a move would be unconstitutional, a majority of GOP voters would still support this declaration.
Not surprisingly, much of the support for declaring the U.S. a Christian nation comes from Republicans who identify themselves as Evangelical or born-again Christians: Seventy-eight percent of this group support the move compared to 48 percent of other Republicans. Among Democrats, a slight majority of those identifying themselves as Evangelical or born-again Christians also backed such a declaration (52 percent), compared to just 8 percent of other Democrats.
Younger Generations, Including Younger Republicans, Are Less Supportive of Christian Nationalism
Previous research has shown that the youngest generations — millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) and Generation Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) — are less likely to be religiously affiliated and to trust religious institutions. That’s also consistent with the results from our Critical Issues Poll.
We found that members of younger generations are less likely than those of older generations to support declaring the U.S. a Christian nation. Only about a quarter of Millennial respondents (25 percent) and a third of Generation Z respondents (34 percent) favor this declaration. By contrast, a majority of respondents from the two oldest generations — Silent Generation (those born between 1928 and 1945) and baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) support the U.S. being declared a Christian nation (54 percent and 50 percent, respectively).
Within the generations, partisanship also plays a role in shaping attitudes about Christian nationalism.
Most Republicans in every age group favor designating the U.S. a Christian nation, but even more so in older generations. Fully 71 percent of Silent Generation Republicans and 72 percent of Republican baby boomers would like to see the U.S. officially declared a Christian nation, compared to 33 percent of Silent Generation Democrats and 20 percent of Democratic baby boomers. Among the youngest generations, we see that 51 percent of Millennial Republicans and 51 percent of Generation Z Republicans want the U.S. to be declared a Christian nation, compared to 10 percent of Millennial Democrats and 7 percent of Generation Z Democrats.
Along with age, race can also play a factor when it comes to sympathizing with Christian nationalism.
Our polling found that white grievance is highly correlated with support for a Christian nation. White respondents who say that members of their race have faced more discrimination than others are most likely to embrace a Christian America. Roughly 59 percent of all Americans who say white people have been discriminated against a lot more in the past five years favor declaring the U.S. a Christian nation, compared to 38 percent of all Americans. White Republicans who said white people have been more discriminated against also favored a Christian nation (65 percent) by a slightly larger percentage than all Republicans (63 percent).
The rising threat to American democracy was made quite clear during the Jan. 6 insurrection, which featured, not incidentally, significant Christian nationalist imagery. Indeed, as our polling shows, a non-trivial number of Americans want to see the U.S. become a Christian nation— even if they acknowledge that the Constitution prohibits such a designation. Prominent Republican politicians have seized on this sentiment and are openly campaigning on a message of Christian nationalism.
Our poll results demonstrate why this message may be resonating, at least among the most ardent, religious and older base of the Republican Party. However, this strategy may be short-sighted. As our findings demonstrate, there is strong opposition to declaring the U.S. a Christian nation among younger Americans, and even younger Republicans. For that reason, the GOP may want to tread carefully or risk alienating rising generations.
Yes, the Pro models have always-on displays and an oh-so-very-Apple approach to replacing the controversial screen notch. But as nifty as those perks are, they shouldn’t be the reasons you buy these phones.
The cameras are now so prominent—in the Pro models especially—that it’s starting to feel like we should call these devices "smartcameras" rather than smartphones.
This week, the US Department of Energy's Berkeley Lab released its annual analysis of solar energy in the US. It found that nearly half the generating capacity was installed in the US during 2021 and is poised to dominate future installs. That's in part because costs have dropped by more than 75 percent since 2010; it's now often cheaper to build and operate a solar plant than it is to simply buy fuel for an existing natural gas plant.
The analysis was performed before the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which contains many incentives and tax breaks that should expand solar's advantages in the coming years.
Solar, by the numbers
In terms of large, utility-scale solar installs, the US added over 12.5 gigawatts of new capacity last year, bringing the total installed capacity to over 50 gigawatts. Texas led the way, with about a third of the total capacity added (3.9 GW) going online in the Lone Star State. Combined with residential and other distributed solar installations, solar alone accounted for 45 percent of the new generating capacity added to the grid last year.
The record-vying distributed denial-of-service attacks keep coming, with two mitigation services reporting they encountered some of the biggest data bombardments ever by threat actors whose tactics and techniques are constantly evolving.
On Monday, Imperva said it defended a customer against an attack that lasted more than four hours and peaked at more than 3.9 million requests per second (RPS).
(credit: Imperva)
In all, the attackers directed 25.3 billion requests at the target with an average rate of 1.8 million RPS. While DDoSes exceeding 1 million RPS are growing increasingly common, they typically come in shorter bursts that measure in seconds or a few minutes at most.
Sen. Ron Johnson is getting out and about as his very tight election is on the horizon. He has made a grand ol’ career of lying and promoting terrible big business policies that harm not only his constituents in Wisconsin, but every American across the nation. In recent months, Johnson has flipped back and forth on issues so frenetically one could probably use him as an oscillating fan.
Just a few weeks ago, Johnson touted his endorsement from Border Patrol union president and conspiracy theory peddling extremist, Brandon Judd. It wasn’t a surprise that Johnson would be proud aligning himself with racists and xenophobes—it’s the GOP brand these days. On Tuesday, Johnson went on Fox Business to speak with alleged personalities on that network, and accidentally gave the world a grand ol’ slip of the tongue while discussing white supremacy.
In the clip below, you can see Johnson saying that one of his colleagues at Homeland Security used bring up the threat of “white supremacy” all the time, back when Johnson was the chairman of the Homeland Security committee. (He also tries to make it sound like he ran Homeland Security, of course.) Johnson goes on to explain, “And my ranking member would always be bringing up white supremacy which, you know, I condone… I, I mean, I condemn.”
In Ron Johnson’s defense, he’s a crap person, a terrible politician, and shouldn’t have been elected head of a household, let alone the Senate. Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel joked about the clip, calling the Senator’s use of words a “Fraudian slip.” Both work, in my opinion.
Or a natural consequence of literally nominating a Nazi
Axios reports that the conservative Senate Leadership Fund (SLF) has canceled the remainder of its $9.6 million reservation in Arizona, though the super PAC insisted that other groups were simply taking over its mission to help Republican Blake Masters beat Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly. “We’re glad to see Republican outside forces showing up in a big way in Arizona, with millions in new spending pledged to take down Mark Kelly in the final stretch,” said SLF president Steven Law, who added that the money would be redirected towards attacking Democratic senators in Georgia, New Hampshire, and Nevada.
Law doesn’t appear to have mentioned Masters' chief benefactor, billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who has been the subject of much angst in GOP circles. Thiel's own super PAC, Saving Arizona, spent $15 million to help Masters—an employee and protégé—win the Republican primary in August, but the group remained idle in the weeks afterward as every poll showed Kelly ahead. The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) went on to cancel $3.5 million before SLF axed another $8 million just before Labor Day, but both the Washington Post and CNN went on to detail Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s unsuccessful persuasion campaign to get Thiel to take over.
Since then, Thiel has sent very mixed messages about his plans. Saving Arizona in early September launched a $1.7 million ad buy—which includes a 30-minute infomercial premiering Oct. 1, but multiple outlets say that all that money came from other donors. Thiel himself is set to host a fundraiser for Masters at the end of this month, but everyone’s waiting to see if this will be accompanied by another huge donation to his super PAC. SLF, though, appears to have decided that either Thiel and other mega-donors are coming to their rescue, or that it can force Thiel’s hand by pulling out of the state.
People walk out of Trump Tower in Manhattan on August 10, 2022. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images
The suit accuses Trump of fraudulently inflating his wealth to obtain beneficial terms from lenders. Read it here.
New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a civil fraud lawsuit against former President Donald Trump Wednesday, accusing him in a press conference of an “astounding” pattern of financial fraud.
In the lawsuit, James accuses Trump of fraudulently inflating his wealth on several “statements of financial condition” listing his net worth that he assembled from 2011 to 2021. The goal of this, James asserts, was “to obtain beneficial financial terms from lenders and insurers.” The suit also names his children, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and Ivanka Trump; other top Trump organization employees; and Trump’s company itself as defendants.
James says in the suit that she estimates the financial benefits from this “fraudulent scheme” were $250 million. She wants Trump to give up those benefits and be permanently banned from serving as an officer in any New York business entity, and to ban the Trump Organization from buying commercial real estate in the state for five years.
The suit claims that these misrepresentations from Trump and his employees “violated a host of state criminal laws” and “plausibly violates federal criminal law.” However, this is a civil suit, not a criminal one. James’s office does not have the authority to file criminal charges in this matter.
It had once seemed that the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which does have that authority and deeply investigated Trump’s business practices (including these exact matters), might file such charges. But after a change in leadership in that office earlier this year, the criminal investigation stalled and two top prosecutors resigned.
So, James has said she will file a referral to federal prosecutors at the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, laying out her findings so they can decide whether criminal charges are merited. It is unclear at this point what will result from that.
As for James’s civil suit, it will likely to be mired in the courts for some time, potentially for years to come. In a press conference Wednesday, James said that her office had rejected a proposed settlement from the Trumps earlier this year.
The extremist, Trump-packed majority of the U.S. Supreme Court exceeded itself in handing down markedly partisan, out-of-the-mainstream rulings seemingly void of any principle beyond owning the libs. It appears that they have every intention of repeating that performance in the new session that begins Oct. 3.
The degree to which the conservatives have become just another arm of the conservative movement, the ivory tower version of Fox News, is encapsulated in one case from last session, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. That’s the praying football coach case. The one in which the majority played so fast and loose with the facts that Justice Sonia Sotomayor felt compelled to fact-check them in her dissent, including with photographs to show just how perversely the majority twisted the facts of the case.
Where the majority said that the coach, Joseph Kennedy, “prayed during a period when school employees were free to speak with a friend, call for a reservation at a restaurant, check email, or attend to other personal matters,” and ”offered his prayers quietly while his students were otherwise occupied,” Sotomayor included a picture to refute that assertion. “The record reveals that Kennedy had a longstanding practice of conducting demonstrative prayers on the 50-yard line of the football field. Kennedy consistently invited others to join his prayers and for years led student-athletes in prayer at the same time and location. The Court ignores this history.”
What the court was ignoring was the truth, a truth that was inconvenient for the outcome they were engineering.
As Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat documents in a follow-up to the story, Justice Samuel Alito even repeatedly refused to acknowledge that Kennedy’s lawyer was lying in his presentation to the court. “’The record is clear that Coach Kennedy was fired for that midfield prayer,’ lawyer Paul Clement told the nine justices in the first 15 seconds of the oral arguments of the case in April. The words ‘fired,’ ‘fire’ or ‘firing’ were used 16 times in the hour and a half session,” Westneat writes.
But he wasn’t fired. The school district’s lawyers tried to argue over and over again in front of the court. He was suspended with pay toward the end of the 2015, and then didn’t reapply for his job for the 2016. The school district’s lawyers kept trying to correct that record, and Alito finally shut them down, interrupting one lawyer who was trying to present the facts by saying: “I know that you want to make this very complicated.” Alito then proceeded to ask about the coach being fired, six times.
The school district in Washington state was ordered to rehire Kennedy even though he hadn’t been fired in the first place. They’ve been trying, Karen Bevers, spokesperson for Bremerton schools, told Westneat. “He’s had the paperwork for his reinstatement since August 8th, and we haven’t gotten so much as a phone call.”
Kennedy is making a lot more money being a “conflict entrepreneur,” a term coined by Scott Green, the president of the University of Idaho, to describe “those who earn their living by scaring people with such illusions” with these kind of fake stories. One suspects by all the Fox News appearances Kennedy conducted before the decision was handed down that this was his end goal with the stunt from the get-go.
Since the ruling, Kennedy’s been doing the right-wing celebrity circuit, meeting in Alaska with former Vice President Mike Pence and Franklin Graham, the evangelist; being presented an engraved rifle by the American Legion at their Milwaukee convention; even hanging out at Trump’s New Jersey golf course. “‘Place a PR/Publicity Request,’” invites his personal website, where he’s known as Coach Joe,” Westneat notes, because of course he has a PR page.
That’s one of the most blatant frauds of the last session of the Supreme Court. They’ve teed up another for the new session: the “independent state legislature theory,” in a case brought by North Carolina Republicans. A case based on a 200-year old fraud.
Ethan Herenstein and Brian Palmer from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law tell the story of how the most notorious fraud of the Constitutional Convention is being used to potentially upend democracy as we know it.
The story starts at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, when an ambitious young South Carolinian named Charles Pinckney submitted a plan for a new government. We don’t know exactly what was in Pinckney’s plan, because his original document has been lost to history. The Convention records, however, reveal that the framers hardly discussed Pinckney’s plan and, at key moments, rejected his views during the debates.
It transpires that all the documents from the convention were sealed for a few decades, until the government decided to publish them in 1818 as a record for history. Up pops Pinckney with a document he claimed was his original plan, but was actually a barely-altered version of the adopted U.S. Constitution. James Madison debunked the draft, pointing out the many ways in which it was a clear fraud in his own notes and papers from the convention. It has continued to be called out as a fraud, though it’s still out there kicking around.
John Franklin Jameson, an early president of the American Historical Association, observed back in 1903, “The so-called draft has been so utterly discredited that no instructed person will use it as it stands as a basis for constitutional or historical reasoning.” Since then, the document has become, in the words of a modern-day researcher, “probably the most intractable constitutional con in history.”
And yet, the Republican North Carolina legislators have chosen to use this con in their brief, to try to argue that in 1787 the founders intended to give state legislatures the ultimate authority in conducting federal elections. Where the Constitution actually does turn over elections administration to the states, it does so “subject to the ordinary checks and balances found in state constitutions” such as governors and state courts.
The North Carolina legislators’ brief “describes Pinckney’s version of the Elections Clause as the ‘earliest reference to the regulation of congressional elections,’ even though it was clearly drafted 31 years after the curtains fell on the Constitutional Convention and is the product of a well-established falsehood,” Herenstein and Palmer write. Which proves that the North Carolina Republicans are about as discerning as Donald Trump when it comes to hiring lawyers.
What is shocking in all of this, though, is that the U.S. Supreme Court accepted this challenge, and that four of the six conservative justices—Alito, of course, as well as Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh—sitting on the court now have already indicated they support the argument from North Carolina. This could upend elections as we know them, giving Republican-run legislatures free rein to pass even more extreme gerrymanders and voting restrictions.
What it shows is that there is indeed a major legitimacy problem on this court. Chief Justice John Roberts has tried to refute that glaring problem complaining that “simply because people disagree with an opinion is not a basis for criticizing the legitimacy of the court.”
Justice Elana Kagan, however, put the lie to that. “Judges create legitimacy problems for themselves … when they instead stray into places where it looks like they’re an extension of the political process or when they’re imposing their own personal preferences,” she said last week, seemingly in response to Roberts.
This court’s conservative majority has definitely strayed and definitely allowed themselves to become and extension of the right wing. Nothing proves it more than the extent to which they will accept out-and-out, provable fraud as the basis for their wildly out-of-the-mainstream actions. They simply must be thwarted, and expanding the court is the most expedient way to do so.
Hovertext: I had this joke idea about how Kantianism is nihilism because no maxims actually universalize, but apparently that's a centuries-old joke in philosophy.
Morgan Stanley on Tuesday agreed to pay the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) a $35 million penalty for data security lapses that included unencrypted hard drives from decommissioned data centers being resold on auction sites without first being wiped.
The SEC action said that the improper disposal of thousands of hard drives starting in 2016 was part of an “extensive failure” over a five-year period to safeguard customers’ data as required by federal regulations. The agency said that the failures also included the improper disposal of hard drives and backup tapes when decommissioning servers in local branches. In all, the SEC said data for 15 million customers was exposed.
"Astonishing failures"
“MSSB’s failures in this case are astonishing,” said Gurbir S. Grewal, director of the SEC’s enforcement division, using the initials for Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, the full name of the firm. “Customers entrust their personal information to financial professionals with the understanding and expectation that it will be protected, and MSSB fell woefully short in doing so.”
The most common way other Senate Republicans are trying to dodge questions on Sen. Lindsey Graham’s national abortion ban bill is to claim they think abortion is a states’ rights issue. But voters should take those claims as seriously as Graham’s own insistence just last month that he thought abortion was a states’ rights issue. Now, not only is Graham pushing a national ban that would limit abortion rights in states where it is currently legal past 15 weeks, he’s explicitly arguing that it is not a states’ rights issue.
As soon as they think their political risks from banning abortion are in 2024, not 2022, other Republicans will make the same turnabout.
Graham followed his Fox News op-ed pushing his national abortion ban with a live appearance on Fox News to do the same:
Lindsey Graham on August 7: “I've been consistent. I think states should decide the issue of marriage and states should decide the issue of abortion.” Lindsey Graham on Sept 20: “This is not a states’ rights issue.” pic.twitter.com/HdVwn9onC4
“This is not a states’ rights issue. This is a human right issue,” Graham said. “At 15 weeks, a baby sucks its thumb, at 20 weeks, you’re encouraged to sing to a child. … I don’t care what California does on most things. I care here. I am not going to sit on the sidelines in Washington, D.C., and tell the pro-life community Washington is closed for business.”
(Thumb-sucking at or earlier than 15 weeks is not a sign the brain is anywhere close to fully developed: According to What to Expect, “the brainstem, which controls vital functions like heart rate and breathing, isn’t mostly complete until the end of the second trimester, and the cerebral cortex doesn’t take up its duties until the third trimester.”)
Graham went on from there, but it’s all basically lies and an attempt to justify the initial claim that “This is not a states’ rights issue.” You know, that it’s not the thing he said in August it was. That’s quite a fast turnaround, but it’s one that will be replicated by Republican after Republican immediately after the November elections are over—if they win. If they win, as Graham has said, “I can assure you we'll have a vote” to ban abortion. And they won’t blink or pause at the hypocrisy.
By Brad Reed Former President Donald Trump has been explicitly promoting QAnon content on both his Truth Social platform and his campaign rallies — and even some of his allies are reportedly scratching their heads. Rolling Stone reports that some Trump allies are expressing “abject confusion” about his new QAnon kick, with one telling the publication that “f*ck if I know” why he’s been promoting it. Another person close to Trump offered a simple explanation for why Trump likes QAnon content: He really likes that they believe he’s the savior of humankind who will rescue the world from a shado…
By Mia Brett Another week, another totally bonkers ruling out of a federal court in Texas. Earlier this month, Judge Reed O’Connor (the same judge who tried overturning the entire Affordable Care Act in 2018 before we being overruled by the US Supreme Court) decided that employers do not have to offer insurance plans that cover PrEP (drugs that prevent the spread of HIV) if they have religious objections. Apparently providing healthcare to the poor, the sick and the vulnerable can be anti-Christian. Who knew? Kidding – those of us who need reproductive healthcare have known for a while. Republ…
Enlarge / LG announced the Ultra PC 17" (17U70Q) this week. (credit: LG)
LG on Tuesday announced the LG Ultra PC 17" (17U70Q), offering a large screen and an RTX 3050 Ti mobile graphics card in a laptop measuring 0.78 of an inch thick. LG's announcement described it as a "mobile workstation" that's in line with the style of LG's Gram series of ultra-portable laptops; however, there are more powerful competitors out there.
LG announced one configuration for the 17U70Q, and it has 512GB of storage. The laptop is said to have one NVMe PCIe 4.0 slot and one older, slower NVMe PCIe 3.0 slot. More storage would help the machine better compete with other thin workstation-esque clamshells, like the Dell XPS 15 9520. We asked LG if the machine is user-upgradeable and will update this piece if we hear back.
Like the XPS 15, the Ultra PC 17" has an Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti graphics card with 4GB of GDDR6 and 16GB of DDR5-4800 dual-channel RAM.
Enlarge / Time to bust out the checkbook again, GPU lovers. The RTX 4090 is here (and it's not alone). (credit: Nvidia)
After weeks of teases, Nvidia's newest computer graphics cards, the "Ada Lovelace" generation of RTX 4000 GPUs, are here. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang debuted two new models on Tuesday: the RTX 4090, which will start at a whopping $1,599, and the RTX 4080, which will launch in two configurations.
The pricier card, slated to launch on October 12, occupies the same highest-end category as Nvidia's 2020 megaton RTX 3090 (previously designated by the company as its "Titan" product). The 4090's increase in physical size will demand three slots on your PC build of choice. The specs are indicative of a highest-end GPU: 16,384 CUDA cores (up from the 3090's 10,496 CUDA cores) and 2.52 GHz of boost clock (up from 1.695 GHz on the 3090). Despite the improvements, the card still performs within the same 450 W power envelope as the 3090. Its RAM allocation will remain at 24GB of GDDR6X memory.
This jump in performance is fueled in part by Nvidia's long-rumored jump to TSMC's "4N" process, which is a new generation of 5 nm chips that provides a massive efficiency jump from the previous Ampere generation's 8 nm process.
New video from the elections office of rural Coffee County, Georgia, reveals the extent to which data experts hired by Trump operatives have infiltrated Georgia’s voting system, raising questions about how much information the Trump team has been able to access and copy election software and election data from all of the swing states’ elections offices they infiltrated.
Previously released video shows two members of SullivanStrickler, a firm hired by Donald Trump’s attorney Sidney Powell, along with the head of the county Republican Party, entering the Coffee County election office where voting machines were breached. Cathy Latham, the party official, was also one of the 16 fake electors to sign a certificate falsely claiming Trump had won the state of Georgia as part of the Jan. 6 conspiracy.
The video footage was made public as part of a civil suit brought by individual Georgia voters and Coalition for Good Governance, a nonprofit voter advocacy organization challenging the state’s reliance on electronic voting systems. It shows members of the Atlanta-based firm SullivanStrickler handling the county’s poll pads. Those poll pads contain statewide sensitive voter data.
David D. Cross, a lawyer for the coalition, told the judge in the case in a Sept. 9 hearing that “personally identifiable information” for about 7 million Georgia voters could have been copied in the breach. The elections supervisor for Heard County, Georgia, told TheNew York Times that the county’s poll pads “contain every registered voter on the state list.”
We know from subpoenaed information, reported here by Rebekah Sager, that the team had “gained access to voting machines in Georgia and then made copies of reams of the sensitive election documents they found.” With this new video, we have a sense of both the scope and the sensitivity of the materials they obtained.
The secretary of state’s office downplays the sensitivity of the information on potentially every registered Georgia voter included on the poll pads. A spokesman for the office said that the poll pads “have voter information but it’s not accessible because it’s scrambled behind security protocols,” and that Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers were not on the poll pads “at the time.” Small comfort given the amount of information the Trump group probably obtained and the fact that hackers could be at work unscrambling it.
Scott Hall, an Atlanta-area Trump supporter and bail bondsman who was in the group that infiltrated the Coffee County elections office, said “we scanned every freaking ballot” in a recorded phone call previous released in the case. On the call, Hall said that they had “scanned all the equipment, imaged all the hard drives and scanned every single ballot,” with the blessing of the local elections board.
Maybe not just the locals: The videos also feature investigators from Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office hanging around with the Trumpers “investigating” something, which is questionable now that Raffensperger’s office is also involved in investigating what exactly the Trump team was doing in Coffee County that day. The secretary of state’s office has “no idea” why its investigators were there, the same spokesman tells the Times, although he said that at the time of the office breach, the secretary of state’s office was examining “vote-counting procedures when Coffee County was unable to certify the results of their election by the time of the deadline.”
“We are looking into it,” he said about the presence of the state investigators. “Again, we take this very seriously. This investigation is a joint effort between the secretary of state’s office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and if it’s determined that people have committed a crime, they’re going to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
There’s also the little problem for that Republican Party official, Latham, that smacks of perjury. Last month, she testified under oath that she really wasn’t involved in any of this, that she just happened to be at the office in Coffee County that day, and only went as far as the front desk where she spoke with an elections official about something else entirely.
“I didn’t go into the office,” Latham said, TheWashington Postreports based on a transcript of her deposition filed in court. She saw a pro-Trump businessman she knew who was working with the Powell group, she said, and they chatted for “five minutes at most” before she left to have an early dinner with her husband.
Or ... not. This new video places her at the elections office two times that day for a total of four hours. She did greet the businessman—Hall—but she also accompanied him into the back of the building where they met other local election officials and the SullivanStrickler experts. The video also shows, the Post reports, that over the course of the day “she moved in and out of an area where the experts from the data forensics firm, SullivanStrickler, were working, a part of that building that was not visible to the surveillance camera.” Oh, and, “She took a selfie with one of the forensics experts before heading out at 6:19 p.m.”
Latham’s lawyers insist in a comment to the Post that she was not committing perjury in her deposition. “Failing to accurately remember the details of events from almost two years ago is not lying,” they said. They also insist she was not involved in any of the copying of data and systems and that she did nothing improper or illegal. Never mind that she signed a fake certification as a fake elector for Trump. Or that SullivanStrickler’s lawyers put Latham in the middle of the whole project, saying she was “a primary point of contact in coordinating and facilitating” the work, and that she “was on-site in the Coffee County elections office that day while the work was performed.” In a deposition, a company executive said that “Cathy Latham also provided direction on what was required for collection.”
As Mark Sumner noted in his reporting on the initial video release of the incident, the “software copied by Lemberg and Logan could be extremely valuable to hackers seeking to actually control and alter the results of voting. That’s even more critical with the release of the new video showing that they had the poll pads, and potentially personal data for every Georgia voter.”
