August 6, 2024

Tuesday, August 6, 2024. Annette’s News Roundup.

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The essence of the Harris campaign.

The seven day tour. With early voting dates for each state.

Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
Varies by county. Pennsylvania does not offer early voting, but counties may make absentee and mail-in ballot applications available to voters in person up to 50 days before Election Day… September 16.
Wisconsin, Eau Claire, October 21
Michigan, Detroit October 26
North Carolina, Durham October 17
Georgia, Savannah October 4
Arizona, Phoenix October 9
Nevada, Las Vegas October 19

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Hope in Georgia. Danger in Georgia.

Do you remember the Kamala crowd in Georgia last Tuesday?

Trump was at the same gymnasium in Atlanta on Saturday.

Touch to watch. 👇

Trump attacked Georgia Republican Governor Brian Kemp and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Saturday too.

Trump also praised 2020 election deniers who are hard at work to steal Georgia in 2024.

Trump Reveals Plan To Subvert Georgia’s Elections

On Saturday, Donald Trump went to Georgia to rally with his faithful. Like a washed-up Vegas performer, Trump offered his audience what they came for — his greatest hits of hate, lies and bizarre digressions.

Between praise for real dictators and admiration for fictitious serial murders, Trump managed to do a bit of business.

Calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory,” Trump name-checked three members of the otherwise obscure Georgia State Election Board.

Notably, Trump did not mention that the Election Board has a total of five-members – four of whom were appointed by Republicans. Nor did he explain why he singled out three of the four. Perhaps it was because three who Trump mentioned from the stage: Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares and Janelle King have refused to acknowledge that Joe Biden won Georgia in 2020.

Omitted by Trump was the board’s chair — an executive at Waffle House appointed by Gov. Brian Kemp (R). In a sign of the divide between them, the three Trump-approved board members recently staged a coup of sorts; they attempted to conduct business without the chair or the lone Democrat being present.

Targeting the people responsible for overseeing rules of elections has become a familiar tactic among election deniers. In 2020, Donald Trump and Ronna McDaniel tried to block the certification of election results in Wayne County, Michigan — home to Detroit.

The night the county voted to certify the results, the then-sitting president of the United States and the chair of the Republican National Committee called the two local Republican election officials to convince them not to sign the certification documents. Sounding like a mob boss, McDaniel was recorded telling them: “If you can go home tonight, do not sign it. … We will get you attorneys.” Trump added: “We’ll take care of that.”

When that failed, Republican officials tried to convince the two Republicans on the statewide canvassing board to reject the results from the entire state. One did his legal duty and certified Joe Biden as the winner, in the face of enormous pressure from his own party. Republicans refused to submit his name for renomination in 2021.

Since then, we have seen election deniers refuse to certify the accurate results of free and fair elections around the country. In Cochise County, Arizona, the board’s failure to certify the results led to civil lawsuits and ultimately criminal charges. In Pennsylvania, New Mexico and elsewhere this problem has grown and spread.

Not mentioned by Trump at his rally is another proposed rule that could have even more profound impacts on elections in Georgia. The GOP-controlled Election Board wants to broaden the discretion local election officials have to review results as a part of the certification process. Rather than a ministerial role of arithmetic, the new rule would empower local election deniers to conduct their own reviews of underlying election documents. A lawsuit seeking the same results was filed earlier this year in Fulton County.

While Trump and those loyal to him bear the blame for this attack on democracy, the nature of the problem has often been misunderstood. Many in the pro-democracy movement desperately want a simple narrative in which the election officials are the heroes of the story. In this telling, hardworking election officials find themselves standing up to partisans and to protect the sanctity of our elections.

Unfortunately, the reality is much more complicated. Rolling Stone recently reported that there are more than 70 election deniers in office in key swing states. After four years of infiltration, the actual number is almost certainly in the hundreds if not thousands.

The nonpartisan desire to lift up election officials obscures a critical characteristic of these election deniers. While not all Republicans are election deniers, all election deniers are Republicans. And many Republican election officials operate along on an uncomfortable continuum between voter suppression and outright election subversion.

As we have seen in Georgia, this difference is smaller than many people want to believe, and it is converging as we approach November. While Kemp signed Joe Biden’s election certificate in 2020, he later admitted that part of what motivated his support for Georgia’s 2021 voter suppression law was the frustration he felt that Biden and other Democrats had won.

Though Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) refused to “find” 11,780 votes in 2020, he has championed legislation to allow for mass voter challenges — a tactic increasingly used by the right-wing to disenfranchise citizens. In that vein, he recently unveiled a website that allows the submission of names to be removed from the voting rolls via the internet.

The real heroes of democracy are the voters. The people who overcome the obstacles Republicans put in their way to register to vote. The citizens who wait in long lines at polling places to cast their ballots. The voters who navigate the series of arbitrary objections to ensure their votes count.

The pro-voting, pro-democracy movement needs to spend the months ahead centering on their needs and protecting their rights. Where election officials are pro-voter, we need to support them. Where they are not, they deserve only our scorn and condemnation. (Democracy Docket).

One more thing. Or two.

This is the form for anyone who wants to work on voter protection for Kamala. Just fill it out if you want to volunteer. Then share it with every lawyer you know.

https://forms.monday.com/forms/19c091ab89714b750b6ecd68e92ba533?r=use1&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=

The petty, malignant, evil thing couldn’t even be respectful and happy for the freed detained prisoners or our nation. He can only sneer, and praise Putin.

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Black Americans and the 2024 Election.

Howard University poll of Black Voters

https://gs.howard.edu/sites/gs.howard.edu/files/2024-07/Black_Voters_Harris_Poll_7_25_24.pdf

Must Read Bonus.

The most important analysis on race in America I’ve read in months and how it affects Kamala and Trump. By Nikole Hannah-Jones

The Willful Amnesia Behind Trump’s Attacks on Harris’s Identity

When I was a child, my dad sat my older sister and me down in our living room and explained to us the rules of race in America. A Black man born into a Mississippi where Black boys could be lynched for merely standing too close to a white woman, he met my white mom in 1972. That was just a few years after the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia finally struck down 300 years’ worth of laws prohibiting people who descended from slavery from marrying people whose ancestors had enslaved them. In other words, Dad held no illusions about how race worked in our society and felt it was his duty as a parent to prepare us. Our mother might be white, he told us, but in this country, that fact was irrelevant to how we would be seen and treated. She might be white, but we were Black.

What my dad said that day when I was an elementary school student merely confirmed an understanding that I already had. I grew up surrounded by aunts, uncles, cousins and my grandmama from my dad’s side as just another child in a big Black family, my mom most often the only white person at family events. Several times a year, we’d travel about an hour out of town to rural Iowa, where we’d spend time with my white grandparents, who loved us dearly but who existed in a completely white world that we were never quite fully a part of.

I cannot say exactly how I knew I was Black before my dad sat us down, but I knew. Everyone knew. With my white family I was not white but part white. With my Black family and in the rest of America, I was Black. In American society, this race rule is so embedded that it is not even questioned.

Last week, former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, told a room full of Black journalists that Vice President Kamala Harris, whose mother was Indian and whose father is Jamaican, “was always of Indian heritage” and “now wants to be known as Black.” When he did so, he was embracing a convenient historical amnesia about the country he seeks to lead.

By suggesting that there was something nefarious or politically contrived about a mixed-race person claiming Blackness as her identity, he was acting as if that choice hadn’t been made for Harris when she was born to a Black father. We saw this same orchestrated amnesia when Barack Obama set out to become the first Black president. It seems that when a mixed-race Black American appears to be ascending to the pinnacles of American power, some white Americans suddenly forget the race rules that white society created.

Trump’s questioning of Harris’s Black bona fides was swiftly denounced because Harris has long identified as Black, recounting a similar story to mine about her Indian mother explaining Harris’s Blackness to her as a child. In her 2019 autobiography, Harris wrote: “My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters. She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.” And of course, Harris would go on to graduate from one of the most prestigious historically Black universities where she had joined the nation’s oldest Black sorority.

But that is almost beside the point. The reality is, the belief that Blackness is an immutable, genetic racial category that transcends all other identities is in fact the American way — an idea that has been forced upon and enforced upon people with African ancestry by those who have racialized themselves as white since the 1600s.

It was then that European colonists, seeking to codify who could be enslaved and who would be free, began drafting systems of racial classification and the rules of race that still govern our society. These laws determined not only that people of African ancestry were inherently enslavable, but also that the children of European men and enslaved African women would also be enslaved. Their “whiteness” would not be recognized, and they would be entitled to none of the rights the white colonists were crafting for themselves.

We are taught to think of race as being our physical characteristics or our ancestral connection to a certain geography, but European colonists were inventing race rules that were about more than ancestry. They were a means of divvying up power, resources and social status. Under these rules, a person whose ancestors were mostly European — and who looked European — was categorized as Black and could be enslaved and denied rights merely because he or she had a single known or suspected African ancestor. To cement this racial order, colonists passed laws prohibiting marriage between people that the colonial legal and social systems had categorized as Black and those they had categorized as white. Whiteness, rather than being a genetic reality as many people still believe, was and is a social construct.

With the abolition of slavery in 1865, white Americans were determined to maintain the architecture of white supremacy and the exclusive white rights it entailed, even as the pervasive rape and sexual coercion of enslaved Black women had produced large numbers of Black Americans with European ancestry. So as white Americans passed apartheid laws to keep millions of newly freed Black people from political, social and economic equality, they also had to pass laws to determine who would be considered white and could therefore enjoy the spoils of the constructed racial hierarchy.

When Harris’s parents immigrated here in the early 1960s, they entered a pre-existing racial caste system and the classifications that undergirded it. When the couple fell in love, so-called antimiscegenation laws prohibiting Black people from marrying white people still existed in 16 states. Those laws were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the Loving v. Virginia decision, which struck down the state’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act. That law had banned interracial marriage, set out rigid and strict racial classifications, and criminalized people whom the state considered to be falsely claiming to be white on official documents in order to access white schools or to marry someone white.

The head of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics was a eugenicist named Walter Ashby Plecker, who believed that maintaining white supremacy depended upon maintaining white racial purity. He was pivotal in drafting the act, which defined a white person as someone “with no trace of the blood of another race.” It enshrined into Virginia law the belief that African ancestry was so tainted that it would overpower any other ancestry. The premise of the so-called “one-drop rule” is that any person who has even a drop of Black blood is Black. Under this law, despite Harris’s being of both Jamaican and Indian heritage, she would have legally been considered Black.

Despite the overturning of the Racial Integrity Act almost 60 years ago, most Americans, no matter their race, still believe in racial notions dictating that having a Black parent makes you Black.

When Trump chose the National Association of Black Journalists convention to argue that this racially mixed Black woman was not in fact Black, he did so in front of an audience of journalists whose complexions reflect every shade of brown. The sexual legacy of slavery means that Black Americans by definition are a racially mixed people who have never had the luxury of demanding racial purity.

The irony of the moment was sharp: the head of a party that has justified a four-year campaign seeking to attack and ban books and school curricula about Black people and this nation’s history of racism by arguing that Democrats are obsessed with racial identity was now attacking Harris for her racial identity.

Or that even as Trump was denying Harris’s Blackness, his surrogates had spent the weeks since she became the presumed Democratic presidential nominee engaging in racist anti-Black tropes of Harris as an incompetent, lazy, “low IQ” diversity hire who, in the tradition of the Black Jezebel, had slept her way to the top.

In doing so, Trump and some in the Republican Party are engaging in an age-old American tradition that dictates that only white power gets to define race and racial categorization, and that those who wield that power can create rules or abandon them so long as those rules benefit whiteness.

For Trump and his compatriots, race is the wild card that can be held in their hand, to be denied for political expediency or exploited when it suits them. Six years ago, Trump relentlessly mocked Elizabeth Warren, then a presidential candidate, for having claimed Native American heritage, leading her to take a DNA test to prove her ancestry.

And last week, Trump once again attempted to be the arbiter of racial categorization. When he questioned Harris’s racial identity under the belief that it might somehow persuade a room full of Black journalists, and therefore Black America writ large, that she is not like us, he showed that he respects neither the history of this country nor the Black voters he claims he is courting.

When Obama insisted he was a biracial Black man, when Harris insists she is a biracial Black woman, when I do the same, it is an assertion that powerful white people do not get to define the rules of race anymore, to force identities and categories upon us, or to withdraw them, when it suits them.

Whether or not Harris accepted her Black identity, she lives in a country where four centuries of race law predetermined how the nation would see her and treat her. Her Black identity, like mine, is based in both a pragmatism about how our society works and a conscious decision to proudly and lovingly choose an identity that has been so denigrated and maligned. Black Americans did not have a say in this system of racial classification. This nationalized one-drop rule was thrust upon Black people, this is true, but it is in embracing this expansive view of Blackness that Black Americans have found their power. (New York Times).

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Lawrence Tribe and Dan Rather praised this MSNBC report on Trump and 10 million dollars from Egypt.

Said it is a must see.

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Yes, Robert Kennedy, Jr. is nuts.

He also hangs out with weird Trump people.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admits he left a dead bear in Central Park.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate, confessed on Sunday that he had left a dead bear cub in Central Park in Manhattan in 2014 because he thought it would be “amusing.”

Mr. Kennedy posted a video detailing the bizarre story on social media ahead of an article in The New Yorker that mentions the incident.

“Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one,” he said, tagging the magazine.

In the video, Mr. Kennedy appears to be seated in a kitchen as he casually tells the actress Roseanne Barr about the ordeal. He says that he was driving through the Hudson Valley when he saw a woman in a van hit and kill a young bear.

“I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was going to skin the bear,” he says. “It was very good condition and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator.”

Mr. Kennedy then details how he had to attend a dinner at Peter Luger Steak House in New York City and then head to the airport, which meant he had to get rid of the bear. He decided to leave the bear in Central Park with an old bicycle to make it look like it had been hit by the bike.

Mr. Kennedy says that he was worried when officials investigated the crime scene, “because my prints were all over that bike.”

Ms. Barr listens closely to the story, laughing and looking shocked. Mr. Kennedy tells her that fact checkers from The New Yorker asked him about the story: “It’s going to be a bad story.”

Indeed, the bear cub caused quite a stir when it was found in the park in 2014, as reported in The New York Times in an article coincidentally written by Tatiana Schlossberg, a reporter for The Times at that time, and the daughter of Mr. Kennedy’s first cousin Caroline Kennedy. A woman was walking her dog in Central Park when she noticed it lying under some bushes, partly concealed by an abandoned bicycle. The cub was 6 months old and 44 pounds.

The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation later found through a necropsy that the cause of death was “blunt force injuries consistent with a motor vehicle collision.”

Ms. Schlossberg said on Sunday evening, “Like law enforcement, I had no idea who was responsible for this when I wrote the story.”

Mr. Kennedy did not appear to confess that he was behind the incident until now. He tried to explain the unusual circumstances to Ms. Barr in the video: “This was a little bit of the redneck in me.” (New York Times).

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As we wait to hear from Liz Cheney, other Republicans joined the Kamala momentum.

Touch to watch. 👇

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Beyoncé make clear she is on Team Kamala.

First she gave the Vice President and First Gentleman tickets to her concert. Then she gave the campaign the song “Freedom.” Now, her commitment and generosity continue.

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Your daily reminder.

Trump is a convicted felon.

On May 30th, he was found guilty on 34 felony counts by the unanimous vote of 12 ordinary citizens.

The Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was scheduled to be sentenced on July 11. He will now be sentenced sometime around September 18th.

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Olympics update.

Once again, Joe is always busy.

The Olympics have long been a place with “black jobs.”

Russia is ostracized by the family of nations. Ukraine is welcomed.

Simone Biles finishes her Paris Olympics with three golds and a silver 🥇🥇🥇🥈 (source. ESPN).

She now has 11 career Olympic medals, tied for the second most all time by a women gymnast 👏

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This morning, we will have a new Vice President nominee.

Wake up and smile.

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