Tag: revolution
Wisconsin's Top Election Denier Urges 'Revolution'

Wisconsin's Top Election Denier Urges 'Revolution'

Last week, former Wisconsin state Supreme Court Judge Michael Gableman repeated conspiracy theories and unproven allegations about the 2020 presidential election during a speech at a Republican fundraiser.

He also brought up the specter of "revolution."

Gableman's remarks came during an Outagamie County Republican Party Constitution Day dinner in Appleton, Wisconsin. The keynote speaker was Republican gubernatorial nominee Tim Michels, who is challenging Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in November.

"It's a beautiful world, but it's that very comfort that is keeping us from what our founders knew to be the only way to keep an honest government, which is revolution," Gableman said during his speech last Friday. "Thomas Jefferson said that the Tree of Liberty must be watered by the blood of patriots every generation. I don't think that's going to happen, and our president has gone out of his way to say, 'Don't even think about a revolution, we've got F14s, and you've got...' Who talks like that?"

The speech was recorded by Lauren Windsor, who created the anti-Republican sting operation The Undercurrent.

Gableman, who served on the court from 2008 to 2018, was the subject of an investigation involving a possible breach of ethics in a campaign ad against one of his colleagues. The court deadlocked on disciplinary action before the case was ultimately dismissed.

Last year, Republican Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos hired Gableman to conduct an investigation into alleged fraud in the 2020 election, following intense criticism by former President Donald Trump over what he baselessly claimed were irregularities in Wisconsin's electoral system. A partial recount and a review by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau, among other initiatives, found no widespread election fraud.

Gableman's recommendations included a section on providing a "method" for pre- and post-certification challenges to presidential elections. In this section he suggested that the legislature "might also consider formalizing the ability of candidates to assemble alternative slates of electors, to ratify an already lawful process."

Multiple state Republican state parties formed alternative slates of electors in 2020 in a bid to prevent President Joe Biden's win from being certified.

During his speech, Gableman repeated the outlines of his report, which largely involved what he characterized as a plot by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, to put state election officials on his payroll and have them mobilize Black voters.

"In 2019," Gableman told the audience, "Mark Zuckerberg decided that he did not want Donald Trump to be president anymore and that he was going to use whatever part of his vast fortune was necessary to see to it that Trump was not reelected."

He went on to describe how Zuckerberg spent millions to win Wisconsin for Biden and claimed that he had followed a playbook designed by David Plouffe, a longtime advisor to former President Barack Obama.

Gableman was referring to an $8.8 million grant from the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which is funded in part by Zuckerberg. The grant was distributed to five of Wisconsin's largest cities — Milwaukee, Madison, Racine, Kenosha, and Green Bay — to assist with electoral logistics. This was especially needed during the 2020 election because of restrictions around voting during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Vos fired Gableman in August, ending an investigation that had lasted more than a year and cost Wisconsin taxpayers more than $1 million.

"We're going to continue to be paying for these lies both financially and morally. It is far past time that his lies and misinformation have been put to an end," Democratic state Sen. Melissa Agard told WisPolitics.

Michels himself has taken a page from Gableman's playbook by casting doubt on the 2020 election results.

"Certainly, there was a lot of bad stuff that happened," Michels told conservative radio host Joe Giganti in June. "There was certainly illegal ballots. How many? I don't know if Justice Gableman knows. I don't know if anybody knows."

Michels' campaign website features a "blueprint to restore election integrity," which echoes many of Gableman’s claims and recommendations, including the repealing of all of the Wisconsin Election Commission's guidelines and "freezing the issuance of new guidelines."

"We need to make it easier to vote, harder to cheat," the site says.

Michels has said he would also ban ballot drop boxes, and would require counties to provide judges on short notice to resolve disputes or emergencies at polling places on Election Day.

Ballot drop boxes were relatively uncontroversial before the pandemic. But during the 2020 election, they were used in greater numbers as more people were afraid to vote in person. Republicans have baselessly claimed that the boxes lead to fraudulent votes.

"We're gonna get those bills right, those bills Tony Evers vetoed, and we're going to get election integrity here in the state of Wisconsin. We're gonna stop the Zuckerbucks, stop the ballot harvesting," Michels said at last week's campaign event.

Referring to his service in the U.S. military, he noted that the oath he took to protect the country extended to protecting American democracy.

"We will have election integrity in Wisconsin," he told the audience. "We will lead the way for the United States of America to make sure the cheating stops!"

Michels has been accused of flip-flopping, especially when it comes to supporting Trump's election fraud lies. During a debate in July, he said that he would not make decertifying the 2020 election a priority, the New York Times reported, only to later say that he would consider any legislation supplied by the state legislature.

"Michels and Gableman have staked out the most radical positions on the 2020 election in order to pander to Donald Trump and his MAGA base," Hannah Menchhoff, rapid response director of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, told the American Independent Foundation.

"We can safely say that Tim Michels and Michael Gableman are two peas in a pod when it comes to promoting election conspiracy theories and attempting to illegally overturn free and fair election results. Tim Michels wants to disenfranchise voters and take away their fundamental rights, proving once again that he is too radical for Wisconsin."

Neither Michels nor Gableman returned requests for comment on this story.

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.

Clinton Should Have Exposed Sanders When She Had A Chance

Clinton Should Have Exposed Sanders When She Had A Chance

Here’s my basic problem with Bernie Sanders. To put it bluntly, once a Trotskyite, always a fool. Personal experience of Sixties-style left wing posturing left me allergic to the word “revolution,” and the humorless autodidacts who bandy it about. The Bernie Sanders type, I mean: morally superior, never mistaken, and never in doubt.

I’ll never forget the time in 1970 that several “radical” colleagues my wife had invited for dinner denounced our record collection as racist. Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Flatt and Scruggs. Never mind that we also owned B.B. King, Lightning Hopkins, Beethoven and British rock albums. A taste for country music made us, pardon the expression, politically incorrect.

Also professionally doomed. I needed to resign before they fired me. I had no interest in either of the academic community’s ruling passions: Marxist sentimentalism and real estate.

How Bernie missed becoming an English professor at some picturesque New England college, I cannot understand.

Anyway, here’s where I’m going with this. To me, the Clinton campaign’s high-minded refusal to expose Senator Sanders has been a big mistake, needlessly allowing this unelectable crank to pose as a serious candidate far too long—and enabling Bernie and his impassioned supporters to translate the old GOP anti-Hillary playbook into left-wing jargon.

In consequence, Clinton has found herself in a one-sided fight against her own degraded image. Some of it is  her own damn fault. Accepting preposterous fees to speak to Wall Street bankers and then keeping the speeches secret is no way to run for president.

But realistically, Sanders lost any chance of prevailing after he lost New York and Pennsylvania badly. Word has yet to reach him. Meanwhile, it has become common to see Clinton described as “evil,” a “war-monger” and worse on social media, while the Sanders campaign whines that it was cheated. The damage to progressive chances in November from this kind of poisonous rhetoric is hard to overstate.

In The Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky puts it this way: “The guy who’s going to end up with about 300 fewer pledged delegates and more than 3 million fewer votes doesn’t get to say ‘you beat me, but you must adopt my position.’ It’s preposterous and arrogant, which of course means he will do it.”

Has leading the Children’s Crusade gone to Sanders’ head? No doubt. However, my larger point is that he’s always been this guy, and Democrats have been needlessly polite about it.

Is it impolite to point out, like Slate’s Michelle Goldberg, that in “1980, Sanders served as an elector for the Socialist Workers Party, which was founded on the principles of Leon Trotsky. According to the New York Times, that party called for abolishing the military budget. It also called for ‘solidarity’ with the revolutionary regimes in Iran, Nicaragua, Grenada, and Cuba; this was in the middle of the Iranian hostage crisis.”

No, that’s not objectionable because it’s undeniably true. No doubt Sanders has an explanation for such heterodox, albeit politically poisonous views. Fine — so why hasn’t he been forced make it?

In 1976, Bernie urged the University of Vermont student paper to “contrast what the young people in China and Cuba are doing for themselves and for their country as compared to the young people in America…It’s quite obvious why kids are going to turn to drugs to get the hell out of a disgusting system or sit in front of a TV set for 60 hours a week.”He wrote stern letters to the FCC protesting shows like “Gunsmoke” and “I Love Lucy.”

Ancient history? Perhaps. But also 30 years after George Orwell’s epochal novel Animal Farm, and around the same as Chairman Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” was winding down after giving millions of Chinese youngsters a swell chance to serve their country in slave labor camps.

As I say, show me an American Trotskyite, and I’ll show you a damned fool.

But again, shouldn’t Bernie have had to explain it?

Let’s pass over Sanders’ newspaper columns fantasizing about rape and suggesting that cervical cancer is caused by sexual frustration.

“Basically,” writes Will Saletan “if you were designing the perfect target for Republicans—a candidate who proudly links socialist economics to hippie culture, libertinism, left-wing foreign policy, new-age nonsense, and contempt for bourgeois values—you’d create Bernie Sanders.”

With so distinguished a record of crackpot opinions, maybe it shouldn’t surprise that Bernie has also misjudged the Democratic electorate. Salon’s Amanda Marcotte is correct: Sanders didn’t lose because establishment Democrats cheated. He lost because his Thomas Frank-influenced theory that strong majorities of white working class voters would respond enthusiastically to left-wing economic populism turns out to be wrong. The “revolutionary” turnout Bernie kept predicting never materialized.

He swept the white-bread college campuses and the cow states. End of story. The urban proletariat? Not so much. Who can be shocked? Campus radicals have been trashing “establishment” Democrats and fantasizing about a working class insurrection all Bernie’s life.

The revolution remains imaginary.

Photo: Ariella Reiss (L) poses while dressed as Bernie Sanders before a campaign rally in Santa Monica. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Oh, Susan Sarandon

Oh, Susan Sarandon

Susan, Susan, Susan.

This Democratic primary is starting to feel like the family reunion that should have ended weeks ago in a house full of relatives who refuse to leave.

Earlier this week, actor and progressive activist Susan Sarandon showed up for Chris Hayes’ show on MSNBC to talk about why she supports Bernie Sanders.

Fine. I mean it. I was fine with that. I had already accepted that Thelma’s friend Louise was not going to support the first viable female candidate for president. I’m a teensy bit troubled that, for the first time, I don’t feel that pang of regret when I think of them driving off that cliff, but I’ve been hanging on to that for too long anyway.

Besides, I’ve got friends and people in my own family who are a lot like Susan Sarandon, whom I have long admired. Like her, they go on and on about the purity of their commitment, pausing just long enough to give me an unsolicited tutorial on why my support for Hillary Clinton proves I can’t possibly be a true progressive.

Please. As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up with the Jack and Jesus wall. There they were, Jack Kennedy and Jesus, hanging shoulder to shoulder — a tag-team reminder that every fight for justice starts with a true believer and ends with a pragmatist to hammer out the details.

If you ask me, I’ve been a pretty good sport about this Hillary-Bernie thing. And, no, I don’t think that Facebook photo of our dog Franklin in the Hillary Clinton wig was too far. This is the problem when you’ve got an entire generation of Democrats who never spent time in a union hall. So touchy.

Anyway, back to Susan Sarandon. When Chris Hayes asked her if she’d vote for Clinton over Donald Trump, she said, “I don’t know. I’m going to see what happens.”

A friend whose passion for Clinton makes my support look like a symptom of anemia sent an immediate text quoting Sarandon, along with a few other words we don’t need to get into right now. I texted — is that a verb yet? — my response: “I’m sure you heard her wrong.”

She has sent me a screenshot of that exchange only about 100 times now, always with a link to yet another story about Sarandon’s inexplicably ridiculous comments that followed.

Thank you to Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart for chronicling the ensuing exchange:

HAYES: Right, but isn’t the question always in an election about choices, right. I mean, I think a lot of people think to themselves well if it’s Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and I think Bernie Sanders probably would think this…

SARANDON: I think Bernie probably would encourage people because he doesn’t have any ego. I think a lot of people are sorry, I can’t bring myself to do that.

HAYES: How about you personally?

SARANDON: I don’t know. I’m going to see what happens.

HAYES: Really?

SARANDON: Really.

HAYES: I cannot believe as you’re watching the, if Donald Trump…

SARANDON: Some people feel Donald Trump will bring the revolution immediately if he gets in then things will really, you know explode.

Well, that went about as well as you can imagine, particularly on social media. If you haven’t see any of the tirades, let’s just say Susan Sarandon is either the mighty prophet who will finally conquer Sisyphus or so blinded by her privilege that she can’t picture the visual disconnect of someone like her claiming she needs a revolution.

Sarandon has since denied — via Twitter, of course — ever saying she would vote for Trump.

“Of course I would never support Trump for any reason,” she responded to actor Jamie Lee Curtis. “If you watch the interview you’ll see that’s not what I said.”

When my friend sent along a screenshot of that tweet, I responded with a line from Sarandon’s character Annie Savoy in “Bull Durham”: “The world is made for people who aren’t cursed with self awareness.”

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and professional in residence at Kent State University’s school of journalism. She is the author of two books, including “…and His Lovely Wife,” which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. To find out more about Connie Schultz (con.schultz@yahoo.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM

Republican ‘Takers’ Take Down the Establishment

Republican ‘Takers’ Take Down the Establishment

Just as Donald Trump did a Super Tuesday stomp on the Republican establishment, the establishment showed why it deserved the rough treatment. The Republican Senate leadership yet again announced its refusal to consider anyone President Obama nominates for the Supreme Court until after the presidential election.

It is the job of the U.S. Senate to hold hearings on, and then accept or reject, the president’s choice. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said they will not take on the work — while showing no inclination to forgo their paychecks.

Talk about “takers.”

Yes, talk about “takers.” That’s how Mitt Romney described Americans benefiting from Medicare, Social Security, Obamacare and other government social programs during his failed 2012 run for president. Never mind that most of the “takers” have also paid for some of what they have received.

Working-class Republicans have finally rebelled against the notion that everything they get is beneficence from the superrich — and that making the superrich super-duper-rich would drop some tinsel on their grateful heads. They were done with quiet protest and ready to take down the Republican bastille, stone by stone. And the angrier Trump made the establishment the happier they were.

The Bastille was the symbol of France’s Old Regime. The storming of the prison in 1789 kicked off the French Revolution.

Republican disrupters from Newt Gingrich on down liked to talk about a conservative revolution. They didn’t know the first thing about revolutions. This is a revolution.

Back at the chateau, Republican luminaries were calmly planning favors for their financiers. They assumed their party’s working folk would fall in line — out of both hostility to Democrats and through hypnosis.

So you had Jeb Bush amassing an armory of campaign cash over bubbly and hors d’oeuvres at the family estate in Maine. You had Marco Rubio devising a plan to do away with all capital gains taxes — the source of half the earnings for people making $10 million or more. You had Ted Cruz concocting a plan to abolish the IRS. (Without the IRS, only the working stiffs would be paying taxes, the money automatically deducted from their paychecks.)

Not much here for the alleged takers, who actually see themselves as “taken from.” Unlike the others, Trump wasn’t going after their benefits. He even praised Planned Parenthood, noting it provides a variety of health services to ordinary women.

Trump would be a disastrous president, of course. But he knows how to inspire the “enraged ones.” In the French Revolution, the enraged ones were extremists who sent many of the moderate revolutionaries to the guillotine. (The enraged ones also ended badly.)

As the embers of Super Tuesday still glowed, The Wall Street Journal published the following commentary by one of its Old Regime’s scribes:

“To be honest and impolitic, the Trump voter smacks of a child who unleashes recriminations against mommy and daddy because the world is imperfect,” Holman Jenkins wrote. Take that.

No responsible American — not the other Republicans and certainly not Democrats expecting strong Latino support — would endorse Trump’s nasty attacks on our hardworking immigrants. But large-scale immigration of unskilled labor has, to some extent, hurt America’s blue-collar workers, and not just white ones.

Democrats need to continue pressing reform that is humane both to immigrants already rooted in the society and to the country’s low-skilled workforce. Do that and the air comes whooshing out of Trump’s balloon.

Back in Washington, the Republican leaders will probably continue to avoid work on this issue or a Supreme Court nominee or anything else Obama wants. They should enjoy their leisure. After Election Day, many may have to look for real jobs.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM

Photo: Donald Trump points at a supporter at a polling place for the presidential primary in Manchester, New Hampshire February 9, 2016.   REUTERS/Rick Wilking