Fascism and the Republican Party

DIY-HP-LED said:

Lots of minorities and women in the military these days.

Wisconsin lawmaker sues to prevent counting of military ballots in the state

Wisconsin state Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R) filed a lawsuit on Friday to temporarily block the counting of military ballots in the state after an election official sent her absentee ballots bearing fa…

thehill.com

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SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem described the U.S. border with Mexico as a “war zone” last year when she sent dozens of state National Guard troops there, saying they’d be on the front lines of stopping drug smugglers and human traffickers.

But records from the Guard show that in their two-month deployment, the South Dakota troops didn’t seize any drugs. On a handful of occasions, they suspected people of scouting for lapses in their patrols, but mission logs don’t contain any confirmed encounters with “transnational criminals.” And a presentation from the deployment noted that Mexican cartels were assessed to be a “moderate threat” but were “unlikely” to target U.S. forces.

Some days, the records show, the troops had little if anything to do.

“Very slow day. No encounters. It has been 5 days since last surrender,” wrote one Guard member whose name was redacted from a situation report created as the deployment neared its end in September 2021.

For Noem, who is up for reelection Tuesday amid speculation she could be a 2024 White House contender, the deployment was an eye-catching jump into a political fight more than 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) from her state. Noem justified the deployment — and a widely criticized private donation to fund it — as a state emergency. Dangerous drugs, she said, made their way to South Dakota after coming over the southern border.

But the documents obtained by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington through an open records request cast doubt on whether the deployment was effective at stopping drug trafficking, even as Noem claimed that Guard members “directly assisted” in stopping it.

Most drugs don’t come through unwatched expanses of the border or the Rio Grande where the Guard members were stationed, said Victor Manjarrez, a former Border Patrol senior officer who is now a professor of criminal justice at the University of Texas at El Paso. They are smuggled into the United States at established border checkpoints, he said.

South Dakota Guard members were stationed at observation posts where they parked Humvees or other military vehicles alongside the Rio Grande. They watched for groups of migrants to report to Border Control, which would then take them into custody. On several occasions, they reported groups of hundreds of people migrating, and at one point, a Guard member performed CPR on a child who had drowned.

During the two-month deployment, the Guard logged 204 people who were turned back to Mexico and 5,000 others who were apprehended by the Border Patrol to evaluate for asylum claims. Those apprehensions were a small fraction of the over 162,000 encounters Border Patrol reported during July and August in the Rio Grande Valley Sector — the 34,000-square-mile swathe where the Guard was stationed.

“Like any operation there are going to be busy days and some slow days, that is expected in all operations,” Marshall Michels, a spokesman for the South Dakota Department of the Military, said in an email response to questions on the records from AP.

Noem last year joined with seven other Republican governors to harden the border through Texas’s Operation Lone Star. The state-backed mission sought to discourage migrants by making arrests under Texas laws.

The mission gave Republicans occasion to deride President Joe Biden’s border policies, but the operation has not curbed the number of people crossing the border. It has also faced criticism for being a rushed mission that gave members little to do while potentially running afoul of federal law.

Noem’s decision to send 48 Guard members was met with particularly harsh criticism because she covered most of its cost with a $1 million donation from a Tennessee billionaire who has often donated to Republicans. Top brass from the National Guard Bureau and an aide to South Dakota U.S. Sen. John Thune, a fellow Republican, questioned what legal authority the state had to accept a donation to fund the deployment, the recently released emails show.

CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) sued the South Dakota Guard and the U.S. Army after they refused a Freedom of Information Act request for records on the deployment and communication between the National Guard, the governor’s office and the Department of Defense. Under that legal pressure, the agencies turned over the documents, which CREW shared with The Associated Press.

Noah Bookbinder, CREW’s president, said they wanted to bring transparency to a donation that he called “a particularly craven example of how money can drive not just politics but how governments operate and how military forces can be used.”

Congress later banned such private donations for Guard deployments.

Noem’s administration has insisted that the National Guard, with its military training, was best-suited to tackle what she called “a national security crisis.”

“It literally is a war zone,” she told reporters this July.

Noem’s office referred questions on the deployment to a statement last year when she called Biden’s border policy an “utter disaster” that facilitated illegal border crossings and said that Mexican cartels were using the surge in migrants as a “distraction for their criminal activities.”

“The scope of the drug smuggling and human trafficking taking place has been made clear to us, and it is staggering,” she said.

During the two-month deployment, Guard members reported spotting 11 people they deemed to be scouting for lapses in surveillance. On another occasion recorded in the logs, Guard members pointed flashlights at five people with backpacks crossing the Rio Grande who then retreated. Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Marlette, the head of South Dakota’s Guard, later told a South Dakota legislative committee they were likely carrying drugs.

Those were the only times the Guard members reported suspected drug trafficking. The South Dakota National Guard said it accomplished its mission by supporting Texas’s Operation Lone Star and referred questions on its success to the Texas National Guard.

Texas’s 17-month operation has recorded 21,000 criminal arrests with most of those resulting in felony charges, Gov. Greg Abbott’s office recently reported. The Texas National Guard also said it has been responsible for 470,000 migrant detections, apprehensions and turnbacks, as well as the construction of 114 miles of fencing and barriers.

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DIY-HP-LED said:

Guess who's side he's on? What republicans has he given money to in past elections and are eager for more?

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1589628820251967489

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News broke early Friday: The Republican minority on the House Judiciary Committee was releasing a “1,000 Page Report” on alleged politicization of the FBI and the Justice Department. The length was mentioned in the group’s tweet and in its press release, reinforcing the heft that 1,000 pages of documentation would obviously convey.

There’s just one problem with this assertion: The report itself was less than 50 pages. Most of the rest of the document was letters sent by the minority members of the committee to various people. In fact, there were more than 1,000 pages of material that wasn’t the report itself, instead mostly those letters.

Included were pages with nothing but signatures on the letters: There were more than seven times as many pages that had nothing of substance on them except signatures than there were pages in the report.

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The report gets off to a traditional start. A cover page, three pages of executive summary. Then an unusual but pertinent page calling on potential whistleblowers to reach out to the committee. After that come 43 pages of the report itself, documenting alleged complaints from within the Justice Department about the department’s culture.

That’s where the meat of the document ends. What follows first is an eight-page appendix identified as “Attacks on Pro-Life Facilities,” most of which are incidents of vandalism. Then a nine-page appendix that serves as a subindex of the scores of letters that make up the rest of the document.




Notice that many of the letters — 725 of the 1,050 total pages — consist of dozens of duplicates of the same two letters. One centers on a public letter signed by former intelligence officials in October 2020 questioning the legitimacy of the New York Post’s story that month about Hunter Biden. It appears that each signatory was sent a letter from the Judiciary Republicans. The second of the two letters was sent to dozens of U.S. attorneys, centered on the idea — popular in conservative media last year — that the Justice Department had broadly targeted school parents as violent threats. (It didn’t.)

Of those 725 pages, 290 included nothing but signatures.



This is an intentional tactic, of course. Conservative media outlets like the Daily Caller (“ ‘Rotted At Its Core’: House Judiciary GOP Releases Massive 1,000-Page Report On Alleged FBI Misconduct”) and Fox News (“House Republicans release 1,000-page report alleging politicization in the FBI, DOJ”) included the purported length of the document in their article headlines. The idea is that the Judiciary Republicans either have 1,000 pages of analysis to share with the country or, at least, 1,000 pages of evidence to bolster their claims. At most, they have about two dozen.

This ploy was a favorite of Donald Trump’s. Shortly before the 2020 election, for example, he gave an interview to CBS News’s Leslie Stahl. At the end of the interview, his team presented Stahl with a thick binder that they contended was an articulation of his health-care plan.

It was not a health-care plan but, instead, a mish-mashed compilation of other documents.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1320516604216643584

Again, the point was to seem like there was some heft there. To use physical scale as a proxy for importance. It worked a bit better on television than in a downloadable PDF, certainly, but the Judiciary Republicans’ version of the ploy at least managed to snooker their conservative-media allies.



One final bit of data. If we pick a name at random — say, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) — we can tally that his signature appears on 173 pages alongside his colleagues. In other words, there are four times as many pages with Chip Roy’s signature as there are actual pages in the report.
Not quite the hefty bombshell the committee’s allies are suggesting.

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hanimmal said:

View attachment 5223031

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BudmanTX said:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2022/11/07/gop-sues-reject-mail-ballots/

here they go, i won't how many repugs are gonna call foul if they lose......

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DIY-HP-LED said:

Mail in voting is secure and popular among voters, making it harder to vote or restricting it is a long-term losing strategy driven by desperation. The cheating, lying, stealing and whining is all motivated by the fact that they know deep down they are losing and on the wrong side of history, they can slow change down, but they can't stop it. These are desperate and dangerous people driven by fear and hate, or they are idiots who go along with it when they vote.

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BudmanTX said:

i know it is, the gop side doesn't think so, this election is gonna be interesting to watch and to watch the fall out of it too..

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BudmanTX said:

so basically and 1000 pages of BS.....am i right

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hanimmal said:

At least the illusion of 1000 pages of BS. The actual BS was about 50 pages.

The Twitter video is funny, it is the time Trump walked off (60 minutes I think) in a huff and trolls the reporter at the end.

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