Starting with the efforts of the GOP to Rig The Vote in 2024. Ken Paxton is the Attorney General of Texas. He has launched a series of raids targeting Latinos for being . . . pillars of the community. These are solid citizens who do more than is required. They give back to the community through unpaid public service such as voter registration. At a time when Democratic Party presidential nominee is polling very well in Texas as is Senatorial candidate Colin Allred (also a Democrat), the Republican Paxton sends armed officers to search and rummage through the homes of Latinos in what appears to be an attempt at armed intimidation.
The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), one of the nation's oldest Latino civil rights organizations, is asking the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate a series of raids ordered by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that have targeted Latino voting activists and political operatives, The New York Times reported. Paxton, a Republican who sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election, ordered the raids be carried out as part of a larger inquiry against alleged voter fraud. In a statement last week, he said that the raids were part of an “ongoing election integrity investigation” into allegations of election fraud and vote harvesting, a specter raised by former President Donald Trump as an excuse for his 2020 loss. Republican officials, following Trump's cues, have sought to pass restrictive election laws and purge voter rolls, despite experts noting that voter fraud is exceptionally rare.
But LULAC and other civil rights organizations and activists said that the raids disproportionately targeted Democratic leaders and volunteers, suggesting that they are meant not to uncover actual fraud but to suppress Latino voters.
Officers conducting the raids seized cellphones, computers and documents from people's homes, including the cellphone of Cecilia Castellano, a Democrat running against former Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin for a state House seat. Castellano told the Times that the raid on her home last Tuesday was "very frightening" and she did not know why she was targeted. “This is all political,” she said.
Another raid brought officers to the home of Manuel Medina, a consultant for Castellano and the chair of Tejano Democrats, a group that advocates for greater Latino representation in the Democratic Party. “I have been contacted by elderly residents who are confused and frightened, wondering why they have been singled out,” Rosales told the Times. “It’s pure intimidation.”
In a letter first obtained by CBS News, LULAC requested that the Justice Department investigate Paxton's office for Voting Rights Act violations. The organization is accusing Paxton's office of carrying out illegal searches premised on voter fraud.
[. . .]
"Attorney General Paxton is using his position of authority to harass and intimidate Latino non-profit organizations like LULAC, Latino Leaders and LULAC members," Juan Proaño, LULAC's CEO told CBS News, calling the state AG's effort "point-blank" voter intimidation. "It is evident through his pattern of lawsuits, raids, searches, and seizures that he is trying to keep Latinos from voting."
Proaño said one of those targeted was Lidia Martinez, an 87-year-old who lives in San Antonio. Martinez has been a LULAC member for over 35 years and works to expand voter registration among seniors and veterans in South Texas.
She said that last Tuesday, there was a knock on her door in the morning, and she was greeted by nine officers in tactical gear and firearms who said they were executing a search warrant. Martinez was questioned for over three hours about her voter registration efforts in Texas.
Law enforcement seized Martinez's phone, computer, personal calendar, blank voter registration forms and her certificate to conduct voter registration, according to Martinez.
"This is a free country, this is not Russia," Martinez said Monday during a press conference denouncing the raid.
Lidia Martinez, a volunteer and great-grandmother in her 80s, was woken up in the early morning hours on Tuesday. She said nine law enforcement agents searched her home and questioned her for hours.
"After two hours of questioning, they took me outside in front of all of my neighbors for half an hour while they searched the living room where I had been sitting. They continued to question me, asking about LULAC members," Martinez said. "I said, 'what do you want from me? I am an old lady, all I do is help the seniors."
Martinez said she's been politically engaged since she was a little girl growing up in San Antonio. She never imagined to be trapped in such activity.
“I said I feel like I’m in Russia," Martinez said. “I asked them why they were there and they said because of voter fraud. And I said I’m not guilty of that.”
Paxton, who has vowed to investigate "every credible report we receive" pertaining to criminal activity tied to elections, argued that citizens have the ability to register to vote when renewing or registering for a driver's license with the DPS, "so there is no obvious need to assist citizens to register to vote outside DPS offices — calling into question the motives of the nonprofit groups."
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced on Monday that the state has removed roughly a million people from its voter rolls since he signed a legislative overhaul of election laws in 2021.
“Illegal voting in Texas will never be tolerated. We will continue to actively safeguard Texans’ sacred right to vote while also aggressively protecting our elections from illegal voting,” he said.
However, election experts point out that both federal and state law already required voter roll maintenance, and the governor’s framing of this routine process as a protection against illegal voting could be used to undermine trust in elections. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 already governs how states should keep their registration rolls accurate and up-to-date, and also includes protections to avoid the inadvertent removal of properly registered voters.
“Year after year, people are taken off the voting rolls for all manner of innocuous reasons,” said Sarah Xiyi Chen, an attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project.
[. . .]
In 2019, Texas officials flagged 95,000 voters whom they identified as “noncitizens” and accused broadly of voter fraud. After review, it turned out that many of the people identified on the rolls were naturalized citizens. The scandal resulted in the secretary of state resigning. The state abandoned the effort after numerous lawsuits, which resulted in the state setting new guidelines for future voter roll clean-ups.
ACLU of Texas attorney Ashley Harris points to the 2019 incident as an example of the state's lack of transparency about how it collects this data.
Signed into law on May 20, 1993, by President Bill Clinton, the National Voter Registration Act opens a new window, also known as the NVRA opens a new window, revolutionized voter registration across the country establishing voter registration requirements and policies to facilitate those requirements. The NVRA required each state to:
It is because of the NVRA that eligible voters can register to vote at their state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) earning the law the nickname “Motor Voter”.
It is also why eligible voters who submit an application by their state’s deadlines can vote in the upcoming election because it required states to process applications in a timely manner. The passage of the NVRA made registering to vote more accessible.
Why is making voter registration more accessible important?
Voter registration is the first barrier to voting. Even with the NVRA and policies like online and automatic voter registrations in some states, approximately 25% of eligible voters remain unregistered to vote, according to 2020 U.S. Census data. The registration gap is greatest among young people, particularly young people of color, young Natives, young people with disabilities and young people from low-income backgrounds. Every year, millions of eligible voters find themselves unable to vote because they miss a registration deadline, do not update their registration, or are unsure how to register.
How did Rock the Vote contribute to the passage of the NVRA?
In the early 1990s, Rock the Vote launched a major national campaign to support the passage of the NVRA. We partnered with the Recording Industry Association of American, MTV, Rolling Stone, major artists and actors of the era, and elected leaders to record and broadcast PSAs, testify at Congressional hearings opens a new window, and conduct public media interviews.
The whole point was to make it easier for people to vote by making registration easier. That's why at any county fair in the fall you will find a table set up for voter registration. We say we want more voter participation but the actions of the GOP make clear that they do not want greater participation. That's probably due to the fact that the statistical model shows that greater turnout tends to mean Democratic Party victories.
This is a major story. I didn't want to write about it. Because I'm not there, I didn't know the whole story and I'm tired and didn't want to learn. So when I learned of it Monday night, I thought, "Okay, I'll grab coverage. There will be in depth coverage from DEMOCRACY NOW! and from IN THESE TIMES and from . . ." And there's really nothing.
What Paxton is doing is outrageous. He's abusing his governmental power to order raids on citizens' homes in an effort to scare them off of voting and voting registration. This should land him in hot water.
But apparently our left can't see beyond Gaza. Yeah, I went there. Because I'm out there talking to groups of people and I'm hearing over and over the same message of anger and frustration that a US election can't be addressed with US issues but instead needs to be framed in Gaza.
I warned over a month ago that if you want to help the Palestinians you better pay attention to your presentations. But too many aren't. That's true on YOUTUBE and it's true in our left media.
We'll come back to it.
Paxton was indicted in 2015 on state securities fraud charges relating to activities prior to taking office; he has pleaded not guilty. The case was delayed over various procedural issues, but in October 2023 his trial was scheduled for April 2024.[12][13][14] In October 2020, several high-level assistants in Paxton's office accused him of "bribery, abuse of office and other crimes."[15][16] Paxton was impeached with bipartisan approval in May 2023 by the Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives by a vote of 121–23, leading to his suspension.[17] The articles of impeachment included allegations that Paxton gave preferential treatment to a political donor who bribed him, misapplied public resources and made false statements against whistleblowers, obstructed justice in the securities fraud trial against him, and made false statements regarding his financial interests.[21] In September 2023, the Texas Senate voted to acquit Paxton of all articles of impeachment, ending his suspension from office.[22][23] Paxton is separately being investigated by federal prosecutors for the same legal issues on coinciding federal statutes.[24]
We could go into all of his raging homophobia but, again, he reads gay and he especially reads bottom with humiliation kink. I'm not interested in helping him get off.
Paxton himself has little, if any, credibility for any of the allegations he makes. He has piggybacked on the right-wing anti-trans panic by calling gender-affirming health care “child abuse.” His raids against Texas Democrats follow punitive measures even against Republican critics. And then there’s the fact that his own party tried to impeach him last year. If anything, Paxton taking up the “Democrats are getting noncitizens to vote” myth gives it even less credibility.
Mark Zuckerberg says he regrets that Meta bowed to Biden administration pressure to censor content, saying in a letter that the interference was "wrong" and he plans to push back if it happens again.
Meta's CEO aired his grievances in a letter Monday to the House Judiciary Committee in response to its investigation into content moderation on online platforms. Zuckerberg detailed how senior administration officials leaned on the company to censor certain posts about Covid-19, including humor and satire, and “expressed a lot of frustration” when the social media platform resisted.
FACEBOOK started as garbage. Sorry, I never had a FACEBOOK account. But you do see the lie don't you?
Twitter Inc., Facebook Inc. and Google’s YouTube have all removed posts shared by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro for including coronavirus misinformation that violates the social media companies’ rules against posting harmful content.
So FACEBOOK was censoring post on COVID in March 2020. Per Mark's testimony -- if you believe the liar -- that's due to the White House. Again, Joe Biden wasn't president in 2020. He's sworn in January of the following year.
Facts is hard for garbage like Zuckerberg. He wanted to endorse Donald a few months back but he was told it would be bad for the shares in the company -- so he claimed he wasn't endorsing despite calling Donald "bad ass." This is his way of endorsing him: Lying to Congress that FACEBOOK only censored COVID posts due to Joe Biden's White House.
Lie.
Liar.
Trash.
In 2019, before the pandemic began, Facebook announced that they were looking to reduce the influence of anti-vaccination posts on their social media platform.
“We will reduce the ranking of groups and Pages that spread misinformation about vaccinations in News Feed and Search. These groups and Pages will not be included in recommendations or in predictions when you type into Search,” stated Facebook at the time.
“When we find ads that include misinformation about vaccinations, we will reject them. We also removed related targeting options, like ‘vaccine controversies.’ For ad accounts that continue to violate our policies, we may take further action, such as disabling the ad account.”
Again, Joe was president in 2021. However, he wasn't president in 2019. That was Donald Trump. So if Zuckerberg was having his arm twisted to censor by a White House, in 2019 that would have been Donald.
Under mounting pressure to counter misinformation around the COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook is increasingly dictating what its users should see and think.
Facebook already downgrades any posts it doesn’t like the look of regarding the virus, but it’s apparently concerned that some of its users might still interact with the wrong content. It’s not Facebook users’ fault, you see, they’re just hapless plebs with not critical faculties of their own. Thankfully Facebook is on the case.
The social media giant’s VP of Integrity (an Orwellian job title if there ever was one), Guy Rosen, recently provided An Update on Our Work to Keep People Informed and Limit Misinformation About COVID-19. “We’re going to start showing messages in News Feed to people who have liked, reacted or commented on harmful misinformation about COVID-19 that we have since removed,” said Rosen.
Again, that would be when Donald Trump was president.
Legal idiot Jonathan Turley felt the need to Tweet:
Fox posted my column on Mark Zuckerberg's admission that Facebook did censor Americans under pressure from the Administration. He wants people to know that they are really regret now their role. It is the feigned regret that comes with forced exposure...
No, you fool, the censorship began under Donald -- as we took the time to document above. Jonathan, you're a damn liar and a bigger disgrace and disappointment than even Robert Kennedy Junior. Matt Taibbi and Glynneth Greenwald are equally stupid.
Deliver us from the idiots, please.
Again, Zuckerberg made statements that are being spun as truth but it is public record that the censorship began long before Joe was president.
I know Jonathan, Glynneth, Matt and FOX "NEWS" love to spin and lie. But facts are facts.
The actions of technology companies became a centerpiece of right-wing criticism, without a countervailing defense in the public conversation from the left. It is probably not surprising, then, that on Monday Zuckerberg responded to a request from the hard-right-Republican-led House Judiciary Committee with a letter broadly ceding the debate.
In his letter, Zuckerberg addressed three issues: Facebook’s approach to covid misinformation, the decision to limit sharing of the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the foundation’s contributions to the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) aimed at backstopping resources for elections administrators.
On the first point, Zuckerberg criticized the Biden administration for its efforts to get Facebook to address coronavirus misinformation — a political win for his Republican critics.
“Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure,” he wrote. “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”
The line between what Zuckerberg describes as “pressure” and that the decisions were ultimately Meta’s will be blurred. What’s more, the Supreme Court recently rejected the idea that the administration had crossed an unacceptable line. But this is almost exactly what Republicans wanted him to say.
[. . .]
It’s ironic: To alleviate pressure he’s felt from government actors, Zuckerberg once again sought to give them what they want.
Black women have long understood the assignment in organizing for a cause, especially when the stakes are high. And we’ve always ensured that movements are a multigenerational and multiethnic effort; collective organizing is our superpower, especially when we are outnumbered and outspent.
Which is why as the unsung heroes of the Democratic Party, Black women didn’t miss the opportunity to showcase our fortitude and influence in Chicago last week. After all, Black women not only set the stage for Kamala Harris’s rise; the policies we have long pushed for are now an integral part of the national conversation.
When rumors first swirled about who would replace President Biden if he stepped down, Black women, who have consistently voted for Democrats, warned leadership within the party to not pass over Kamala Harris. Fast forward to July 21 and Biden immediately followed his announcement that he was dropping out of the race with an endorsement for the vice president. Within 12 hours of that announcement, Win with Black Women (WWBW), an intergenerational network of Black women leaders in the United States, kickstarted a new model for digital organizing for the newly announced Harris campaign. With more than 40,000 attendees present at its weekly meeting, WWBW not only changed the meeting capacity limits of Zoom; it also set off a cascade of fundraising calls across the nation among other affinity groups. To date, other groups that have organized around the campaign include White Women for Harris, White Dudes for Harris, Republicans for Harris, and Latinas for Harris—all groups critical for the Democrats to win up and down the ballot in November. In just one month, the Harris-Walz campaign raised a record-breaking $500 million, demonstrating the level of excitement and joy swirling around the vice president.
The enthusiasm has only become more infectious in the past two weeks. After Harris announced her running mate, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, both have continued to build momentum and electrify audiences across the country. Their big test as a joint ticket was the Democratic National Convention—a natural crescendo on their journey to November and another opportunity for Black women to show up and show out for Kamala Harris.
Supposedly, Black women are valued on the left. Supposedly. Racism and sexism aren't supposed to exist on the left. But they do. And whether its a student group, a woman's group or an elderly group that I'm speaking with -- and I'm doing a minimum of six groups a day (that extends into the evening) every day and will be doing that up until the day before the election, I'm hearing over and over the reality: That a very vocal part of the left wants to steal people's joy.
Those old enough to remember Barack Obama's two runs for the presidency point at how the left rallied around Barack. They include the whore Jill Stein in that. She never called out Barack and when he was on the ropes in 2012, she immediately attacked Mitt Romney. Today, she attacks Kamala Harris non-stop.
People are excited by Kamala and by what a Kamala presidency could mean.
And Americans are getting damn sick of everything needed to run through the Gaza Purity Filter.
You're overplaying your hand and you're pissing off the people you're going to need after the election regardless of the outcome.
You've become a group of spoiled brats because you're highly uneducated and fail to grasp that not everyone's as ignorant as you.
The country does not need another YOUTUBE video on the 'poor' -- ugly faced -- state official who is Palestinian-American that was 'denied' from the DNC stage.
You're really stupid for pimping that to begin with.
Reality, you don't wait until weeks before a convention to push for someone to speak.
And if you're going to push for someone to speak, they are either a rising star or an established one. Otherwise, they're not getting on the stage. Barack got on the stage in 2004 because he was a rising political star.
He also got on because he was a man.
Or do you idiots not know the story as you pimp for Polly Palestinian to be on the stage?
Hillary Clinton spoke at the 2004 convention. She was a US senator. She was the party's biggest fundraiser. And in December of 2004, it was announced she wouldn't be speaking.
Why?
Because she was a woman. Let's not play around. We don't have the time. She was a nationally known figure, she brought in tons of donations and she wasn't going to be allowed on stage. So the push began. And the DNC after a bit said she could introduce her husband. And the push continued and Hillary became an official speaker.
That took months and months of pressure.
And, again, Hillary was a political star. She brought in the donations. She was in the US Senate, she was nationally known.
And you crazies thought you could wait until a few weeks before the convention to start tossing out names. And then you thought that less than two weeks of work on this political nobody was going to get her and your pet issue on the national stage at the DNC?
You're ignorant beyond belief.
One e-mail Ty passed along had a good question: "So are you saying people shouldn't dream?"
No, that's not our intent and my apologies if it came off that way to anyone.
We can't create a better world without dreams.
But you need to know what's possible to expand past that. And you need to grasp that most change is incremental. If people knew just the 2004 story regarding Hillary, they would have known how difficult it was going to be to get anyone up on that stage. They could have then shifted to someone nationally known -- didn't have to be a politician -- and spend a couple of months advocating and making the case. The DNC's dates didn't change. The nominee did.
The assault on Gaza didn't start in June.
These are things that should have been aware and working on for months.
And there is growing sense of outrage over the attacks on Kamala Harris.
It's not what we've seen before. And it's even worse than it was for Joe Biden.
And maybe you're so gleeful in your attacks that you don't realize that your attacks are coming off sexist and racist.
But now she's supposed to ignore her country's needs, her own needs and just vote based on what some zealot for Gaza says?
As she points out, she's a woman, she's Black and she's a lesbian. She's the first one Donald and Project 2025 are going after. And where is that understanding or recognition in Katie Halper's garbage or any of the rest of the crap ass YOUTUBERS?
The crap ass set all broadcasts as though they're straight White men and only understand straight White men.
Maybe that's why you don't get how much damage you're doing.
Marcia's an out and proud lesbian and she didn't let the homophobia of a lot of Gaza supporters stop her from calling out the genocide.
But as she votes to protect her wife, her marriage, her family, these jerks aren't going to support her?
Again, you're destroying your cause.
You're attacking Kamala but you're destroying chances for Palestinians.
This was a once in a lifetime moment. For the first time in large numbers, Americans got what the Palestinians went through. And that was something to build upon. Instead, you're destroying support and, honestly, this has gone on so long that the average person was already looking for a reason to check out on it. Fatigue had set in.
But apparently no one told you -- either they were too lazy to or they preferred you ignorant.
I had hoped to cover Gaza (despite e-mails to the public account, the attack you're speaking of in your e-mails did not take place in Gaza -- and Gaza supporters, there's something you can work on -- educating people that the West Bank is not in Gaza) and to cover James Carville's latest (greatest?) stupidity as well as Iraq. We'll try to pick those up tomorrow. But voter suppression and the refusal to note the very real differences between Kamala Harris and Donald are stories that are not getting covered in the US left media.
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