🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️👎🏻POLITICS: Without Ideas, Achievements, Or Humanity, GOP Turns To Trump’s Platform Of Hate! — FAIR Deserves Its “Hate Group” Designation By SPLC!

Colfax Massacre
Gathering the dead after the Colfax massacre, published in Harper’s Weekly, May 10, 1873

Former Klan leader David Duke once famously urged his fellow Klansmen to “get out of the cow pasture and into hotel meeting rooms” if they hoped to accomplish their goals.

The message was clear: A hate group with a mainstream veneer can get much further than a hate group that looks like one. It’s a lesson the radical right seems to have heeded as more hate groups monitored by the Southern Poverty Law Center present a mainstream face to the public as they peddle academic racism, white nationalist immigration policy or other beliefs that are every bit as corrosive to our nation as the beliefs spouted by someone in Klan or neo-Nazi garb.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) is one such hate group masquerading as a public policy think tank. Inspired by a recent resolution by the Republican National Committee that was aimed at giving the Trump administration cover for its racist and bigoted policies, FAIR decided to attack the SPLC’s hate group designations, claiming the SPLC is the “godfather” of “cancel culture” and is willing to attack any group that is not “woke” enough.

These allegations are nothing more than the latest fearmongering dog whistles that have been used by white supremacists to silence organizations and people – particularly people of color – when they speak out against injustice.

FAIR maintains that it “advocates mainstream immigration policy views.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, the group has long advocated upending the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, a law that ended a decades-long, racist quota system limiting immigration mostly to northern Europeans. In 1994, FAIR President Dan Stein said supporters of the act wanted to “retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance.” In 2011, FAIR launched an effort to end birthright citizenship provisions of the 14th Amendment, which is how most Americans become citizens.

Kris Kobach, who worked for FAIR’s legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, helped write Arizona Senate Bill 1070. Known as the “papers, please” law, the anti-immigrant law forced police officers to detain people they suspected of being undocumented immigrants and made it a misdemeanor for noncitizen immigrants to fail to carry their immigration papers.

Kobach also helped other states and communities across the country enact nativist laws designed to punish those who aid and abet “illegal aliens.” Those laws often proved to be massive financial burdens to the governments that passed them and, in many cases, sparked racial strife.

FAIR’s demonization of immigrants was laid bare in April 1999 when the group attacked then-U.S. Sen. Spencer Abraham, a Michigan Republican, for supporting more visas for foreign workers with technology skills. A FAIR newspaper ad placed a picture of Abraham, an Arab American, alongside a photo of Osama bin Laden and asked, “Why is a U.S. Senator Trying to Make It Easy for Osama bin Laden to Export Terrorism to the U.S.?”

What’s more, Donald A. Collins Sr., a member of FAIR’s advisory board and board emeritus, has written for VDARE, an anti-immigrant hate site that has a long history of publishing the works of white nationalists and antisemites. The site is named after Virginia Dare, said to have been the first English child born in the New World. Joe Guzzardi, a FAIR advisory board member, has worked as a VDARE editor.

Read more here.

In solidarity,

The Southern Poverty Law Center

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It’s not “rocket science” to figure out FAIR isn’t a “woke” group. Nor is it rocket science to acknowledge that Kris Kobach, Stephen Miller, Jeff Sessions and others like them are White Nationalist racists!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

09-05-20

CONGRATS: Kansas Removes Racist Grifter Kris Kobach From State-Funded Welfare Rolls, Ending Years Of Abuse Of Public Funds!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/11/kris-kobach-loses-kansas-governors-race.html

Mark Joseph Stern write in Slate:

THE SLATEST

Notorious Vote Thief and Incompetent Gubernatorial Candidate Kris Kobach Loses in Kansas

By

Failed Republican gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach speaks at a rally with President Donald Trump in Topeka, Kansas.
Scott Olson/Getty Images

The nation’s most notorious vote thief has gone down in flames.

On Tuesday night, Kansas Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach lostthe governor’s race to Democrat Laura Kelly. Kobach built his career on voter suppression, whipping up nativist fervor by claiming that a large number of noncitizens are casting ballots. (They aren’t.) He led Donald Trump’s failed voter-fraud commission, then eked out a victory in the Republican gubernatorial primary against current GOP Gov. Jeff Colyer. But even in deep-red Kansas, voters appear to have rebelled against his brand of paranoid, xenophobic conservatism.

Although Kobach built up a national profile as a formidable politician, he is, in fact, deeply incompetent. He spent years promoting Crosscheck, a program that ostensibly detected double voting but actually had an error rate of 99.5 percent. He pushed a law that compelled Kansans to provide proof of citizenship in order to register to vote, then defended it himself at trial—at which point it became clear that he doesn’t understand basic rules of civil procedure. A federal judge repeatedly reprimanded him during the hearings, then ruled against him and held him in contempt of court.

As Kobach struggled to defend his signature law, he led Trump’s voter-fraud commission right off a cliff. His own co-commissioners openly criticized him for lying about the existence of fraud. One sued him for concealing key documents from him; after a federal judge demanded that Kobach turn over the documents, he disbanded the commission instead. To save face, Kobach claimed he would take his work to the Department of Homeland Security—a claim that the DHS swiftly rebuked.

Then there was the 2018 Republican primary in Kansas. From an administrative standpoint, the election was an absolute disaster. Officials failed to predict major turnout, leading to endless lines and delays. A number of new voting machines, on which the state spent millions of dollars, also failed. The blame fell upon Kobach, who spent his tenure as secretary of state pursuing phantom voter fraud instead of doing his job and ensuring that elections ran smoothly.

Now Kobach has faced the biggest humiliation of them all: He lost to a Democrat, in Kansas. All his voter suppression schemes—his proof-of-citizenship measure, his poll closures—could not pull him over the finish line. Kobach alienated much of the Republican establishment during his brawl with Colyer, and his flagrant maladministration of the voter fraud commission seems to have hurt his relationship with Trump. There is simply no clear path forward for his political career after Tuesday’s defeat. Kobach has always been a loser. Now he is a loser out of a job.

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For years, Kobach has been misusing his (largely ministerial) position as Kansas’s Secretary of State as a cover for his nationwide effort to implement a bogus White Nationalist agenda that encourages voter suppression and invidious discrimination against Latinos and other individuals of color in various states and localities.

Judges throughout the country have largely slammed his efforts, leaving taxpayers holding the bag with huge legal bills. As noted by Stern, Kobach, a congenital liar who operates in an “ethics free zone,” has been held in contempt of court. Also as noted by Stern, he has royally screwed up his minor, yet potentially significant, job as Kansas Secretary of State.  That’s the kind of  “expertise” and “leadership” that has spawned the Trump-Sessions racist White Nationalist takeover of the GOP.

Thanks and congratulations to Kansas voters for having the wisdom and decency to “just say no” to this toxic dude, and force him to go out an earn an honest living. Something for which to date he has shown little aptitude. All goes to show that a Yale Law Degree isn’t proof against being a biased incompetent idiot.

PWS

11-09-18

REGIME OF HATE: SPLC Highlights How Trump Administration “Biggies” Cozy Up To Groups Pushing Messages Of Hate, Intolerance, & Exclusion!

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FIGHTING HATE // TEACHING TOLERANCE // SEEKING JUSTICE
SEPTEMBER 22, 2018
Weekend Read // Issue 98

Good morning, Cathryn.

The Family Research Council (FRC) uses discredited research and junk science to attack and vilify LGBT people. It claims they’re incestuous and “violent,” for example, a danger to children and society.

The FRC is an anti-LGBT hate group. And today, it’s hosting some of the most extreme anti-LGBT groups in the country at its annual Values Voter Summit.

Joining them is none other than Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

The news that such a high-ranking member of the Trump administration — one charged with representing the United States to the rest of the world — is choosing to attend an FRC event certainly “raises eyebrows,” as Nahal Toosi wrote for Politico.

As a former George W. Bush administration official told Toosi, “It’s unusual for a secretary of state to be at an event with ‘voter’ in the title.”

It’s much worse than that, in fact.

Pompeo, though, might feel right at home appearing with such far-right extremists. He’s spoken at numerous conferences hosted by ACT for America and Center for Security Policy, both anti-Muslim hate groups. And he’s not the only one from the Trump administration.

Just last month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions delivered remarks at a summit on “religious liberty” hosted by anti-LGBT hate group Alliance Defending Freedom.

Days later, a speechwriter for President Trump, Darren Beattie, was fired after revelations that he had spoken at a conference alongside Peter Brimelow, founder of the white nationalist website VDARE.

The Trump administration has opened its doors to the radical right. Not only are high-ranking officials speaking at events hosted by hate groups, they’re inviting extremists to consult on the administration’s policies, set its agenda and shape its rhetoric.

We saw another clear example this week with the news that it was Stephen Bannon and Kris Kobach who were behind the addition of a question about citizenship to the 2020 Census questionnaire.

Both have ties to extremists who would like to see exactly such a policy out of the White House. Bannon, of course, is Trump’s former chief strategist, a man who has boasted of transforming Breitbart News into “the platform for the alt-right.” Kobach, now the secretary of state in Kansas, is a longtime lawyer for the anti-immigrant hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform. He is also one of the nation’s leading proponents of state laws that suppress the votes of the poor and people of color.

We’ve been tracking instances of extremism in the White House. In less than a year, we’ve found 160 incidents, with at least 15 different hate groups involved in some way.

That’s unacceptable. And it’s why last weekend, we went to Washington to talk to residents who — like us — won’t stand for the bigotry on display at today’s so-called Values Voter Summit.

It’s overwhelmingly clear that the “values” Pompeo will be supporting – tacitly, at the very least –will not be those of LGBT people.

They won’t be the values of the DC residents who are standing with us to say #Y’allMeansAll.

They won’t even be the values of the majority of Americans, whose government should represent their interests rather than the interests of a hate group.

Heather Nauert, a spokeswoman for the State Department, told Politico that Pompeo’s message today is “not political. It’s not a Republican or Democrat message.”

That makes no difference. He has already sent a clear message by agreeing to even appear at the summit. And we’ve all heard it.

The Editors

P.S. Here are some other pieces that we think are valuable this week:

White people are still raised to be racially illiterate by Robin DiAngelo for NBC News

Hate-Crime Acquittal Roils LGBTQ Community in West Virginia by Yawana Wolfe for Courthouse News

Bad paperwork by Lucas Iberico Lozada for Popula

Americans want to believe jobs are the solution to poverty. They’re not. by Matthew Desmond for The New York Times Magazine

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Yup! If you don’t believe in the White Nationalist agenda of hate, false narratives, and intolerance, vote for regime change in November!

PWS

09-23-18

 

BLACK HISTORY MONTH: LET’S TAKE A LOOK AT TWO STORIES FROM THAT “GREAT ERA OF AMERICA” THAT TRUMP, SESSIONS, MILLER, COTTON, AND THEIR WHITE NATIONALIST PALS LOVE SO MUCH – When White Men Were Supreme, The Law Was There To Keep African Americans in Their Place, Blacks Who Stood Up For Their Rights Were Murdered By The White Police, And Latinos & Women Were “Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind!”

From “John Kelly’s Washington” in the Washington Post:

Stuck on a shelf or locked in a safe, D.C.’s ‘Lost Laws’ still packed a punch

 
Before the Supreme Court upheld the District’s “Lost Laws” in 1953, activists such as Mary Church Terrell (center) picketed in front of segregated restaurants.

Columnist February 14

Martin Luther King Jr. said “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

He could have added: “eventually, and after plenty of detours.”

In 1872 and 1873, two laws were passed in Washington that forbade racial discrimination in the city’s restaurants. Then, somehow, the laws vanished.

Just imagine the reaction when they were “rediscovered” in the 1940s. It must have been as if someone had opened a vault sealed when Ulysses Grant was president and found an airplane inside, a television, penicillin … .

Could Washingtonians from 70 years ago really have been so advanced? What had happened to those people?

What amazed me when I looked into the events of the 1870s and 1880s was how similar things were to the Jim Crow era. Restaurateurs used some of the same excuses for refusing to serve African Americans: Black customers were “boisterous,” white patrons would stay away, the government shouldn’t meddle.

To fight discrimination, black activists used methods that are familiar to us now. Lawyer E.M. Hewlett deliberately visited restaurants to see if he would be served. Hewlett looked to see if owners had posted price lists, as required by law to prevent black customers from being gouged. When he spotted a violation, he took the establishment to court.

In the end, none of it did any good. Why?

“During Reconstruction, D.C. was really on the leading edge of racial change in America,” said Chris Myers Asch, co-author, with George Derek Musgrove, of “Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital.”

Said Asch: “D.C. was a very progressive city. You had remarkable progress being made toward racial equality in a very brief space of time. Black men in D.C. were the first black men in the country to be granted the right to vote after the Civil War.”

Such efforts, Asch said, were a priority for radical Republicans in Congress.

“The backlash from white conservatives is really substantial,” Asch said. “First you eliminate self government all together in 1874. Then you slowly roll back those Reconstruction-era gains. This is part of a regionwide effort to enforce white supremacy. By 1901, when city commissioners decide to compile the D.C. Code, they simply don’t include those Reconstruction-era statutes.”

They didn’t include them, but they didn’t repeal them. The Lost Laws were not dead. They were like a long-dormant seed, ready to spring to life after a refreshing rain.

I don’t know who found them. Asch thinks it was A. Mercer Daniel, who oversaw the library at Howard University’s law school. They gained fame in 1948 with the publication of “Segregation in Washington,” a scathing report that mentioned the laws.

Civil rights activists wondered: Could the laws be used to fight segregation?

Annie Stein, a white woman from Southwest D.C. who was a member of the Progressive Party, invited Mary Church Terrell to chair the Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of the D.C. Anti-Discrimination Laws of 1872 and 1873. When Terrell, the octogenarian co-founder of the NAACP, was denied service at a downtown cafeteria called Thompson’s in 1950, it set the stage for a test case.

District of Columbia vs. John R. Thompson Co. went first to the old Municipal Court, where Judge Frank Myers ruled that the Lost Laws had “been repealed by implication” and, thus, could no longer be enforced.

Terrell and company appealed. In May of 1951, the Municipal Court of Appeals ruled 2-to-1 that the anti-bias laws were still valid. Among the points raised by Judge Nathan Cayton was that another so-called lost law had been enforced in 1908, even though it, too, had been omitted from the 1901 D.C. Code.

It was an animal cruelty law. Animals, it seemed, had more rights than black Washingtonians.

The game of legal ping-pong continued. The next stop was the U.S. Court of Appeals. In a 5-to-4 decision, it ruled that the laws of 1872 and 1873 could not be enforced.

One judge, Barrett Prettyman, wrote the statutes were “neither mentioned again nor enforced for a period of 75 years.” Thus the laws “must be deemed by the courts to have been abandoned.”

If you’ve been reading my columns this week, you know that wasn’t true. African Americans did mention them and did try to get them enforced.

In April of 1953, the case finally reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Chester H. Gray of the District’s corporation counsel’s office asked the court not to blame his staff. They hadn’t known of the laws until someone found them in the corporation counsel’s safe.

“You mean you have to go to a locked safe to find laws of the District of Columbia?” Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson joked.

In June, the court ruled unanimously that the laws were still in effect. Laws passed by long-dead Washingtonians had helped their descendants.

Five days after the Supreme Court ruling, Terrell went to eat at Thompson’s with the mixed-race group who had been denied a meal three years earlier. They were treated, Terrell said, with courtesy.”

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Sound all too familiar? It should! The claptrap coming from yesterday’s racists is pretty much the same as the garbage coming out of the mouths of some GOP pols these days. Here’s my “rewrite” of a paragraph of Kelly’s account in “today’s context.”

The backlash from Sessions, Bannon, Kobach, Miller and their White Nationalist pals to the diversification of America and growing political power of African-Americans, Hispanics and other non-Whites was substantial. First, they used gerrymandering and intentional mis-constructions of Civil Rights and Voting Rights statutes intended to protect minorities to instead suppress and minimize the minority vote. This is part to a nationwide effort by the far right to restore White Supremacy and prevent African-Americans and Hispanics from eventually obtaining political power commensurate with their demographics and overwhelming contributions to America. Then, when supposedly in charge of administering the laws equally, they simply refuse to recognize the rights of African-Americans to be free from police violence and the rights of Hispanics and asylum seekers in the United States to be treated with respect and dignity and to be given full Due Process under our Constitution. They even invent false narratives, bogus statistics, and demonize hard-working law-abiding citizens, residents, and great and deserving young people known as “Dreamers” in a desperate effort to restore exclusive White (preferably “pseudo-Christian”) power. To add insult to injury, they carry out this anti-American, anti-Constitutional campaign under the boldly false rubric of “Restoring the Rule of Law.”

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Now let’s move over to the Post’s Sports Section. Here’s an account of what happened to courageous African-American athletes who stood up for their rights and the rights of others during the “glory days” of White Supremacy that Trump, Sessions, & Co. so cherish and honor.

Remembering the Orangeburg massacre, and the athlete-activists who took a stand 


Two black demonstrators killed in the Orangeburg Massacre lie on the ground at the edge of South Carolina State College in Orangeburg, S.C., on Feb. 8, 1968. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
February 13

Robert Lee Davis found himself lying in blood next to his teammate Sam Hammond. At least one bullet had struck Davis in the back. Another went in Hammond’s neck.

Davis recalled in an oral history that Hammond, a running back at South Carolina State, asked him, “Do you think I’m going to live?” Davis, a linebacker, said he answered, “Sam, you are going to be all right, buddy.”

Hammond was the first of three young black men to die that night 50 years ago in Orangeburg, S.C. Davis was one of several football players at historically black South Carolina State to survive a hail of police fire with injuries.

What brought them together that Feb. 8, 1968, evening was not a team meeting or the training table. Instead, it was a call to confront a wrong, an affront, an act of overt racial discrimination in Orangeburg at a bowling alley that refused would-be black bowlers just like the state was denying black citizens their human rights.

As a result, Davis and Hammond became athlete-activists long before we created the suddenly ubiquitous, if not trite, alliterative phrase these days to describe football and basketball players, almost all of color, who have, by comparison, merely sported sloganeering T-shirts, or employed histrionics, to demonstrate against racial injustice.

It is a noble and laudable effort, of course. But what we’ve come to champion of athletes today pales juxtaposed to what so many did in the cauldron of the late ’60s civil rights movement. Davis and Hammond, for example, dared to physically confront the very embodiment of the South’s recalcitrant racists — scores of carbine rifle-toting, all-white state troopers — for which Hammond forfeited not just his career but his life.

They were among at least 30 victims of what became known as the Orangeburg massacre.

I was reminded of it three years ago as a presenter at the annual Media and Civil Rights symposium at the University of South Carolina. It included a mesmerizing panel featuring a demonstrator that night, civil rights icon and scholar Cleveland Sellers, and a reporter who became legendary for his fearless coverage of the massacre and other civil rights movement era violence, Jack Bass. With Jack Nelson, awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the civil rights movement, Bass authored “The Orangeburg Massacre” in 1970.

And I took note that the panelists, particularly Oliver Francis, a one-time baseball player at Voorhees, another historically black South Carolina college, pointed out that black male athletes in particular stepped to the fore in Orangeburg’s deadly confrontation with white supremacy, and in others. Francis wound up convicted and sentenced to prison for 18 to 24 months as an organizer in an armed black student takeover in 1969 of the Voorhees administration building.

It all reminded that black athletes played not just pivotal roles in the civil rights movement, like the muscle North Carolina A&T football players provided for their classmates engaged in sit-ins to desegregate the Greensboro, N.C., Woolworth’s lunch counter. Or in Rock Hill, S.C., where 10 black Friendship College students were detained by police for trying to desegregate a town lunch counter in 1961 but became known as the Rock Hill Nine after one among them wasn’t booked so he could maintain his athletic scholarship. Chicago Bears running back Willie Galimore was the test black registrant at the Ponce de Leon Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Fla., that became a flash point for desegregation fights in 1964.

And as was evidenced in Orangeburg, black athletes sometimes were even in the vanguard of protests. Samuel Freedman underscored as much in recounting the Orangeburg massacre in his 2014 book, “Breaking the Line: The Season in Black College Football That Transformed the Sport and Changed the Course of Civil Rights.”

Freedman wrote: “Shortly after the 1967 football season ended, many of the politically engaged members of the South Carolina State team joined in protests against a segregated bowling alley near the campus in Orangeburg.” On Feb. 6, 1968, Freedman reported, Davis and several of his teammates went on their own to the bowling alley and not only were denied admittance but were threatened with arrest by city police for disturbing the peace. Other students eventually joined the football players, objected to the police threats and wound up defending themselves from swinging billy clubs.

Two nights later, Freedman stated, “an all-white force of state troopers opened fire on the student demonstrators, killing three and wounding twenty-eight. Among the dead was one football player . . . Hammond. Several other players were injured by gunfire, one of them temporarily paralyzed.”

Davis was that temporarily paralyzed victim.

The student survivors of the massacre refused, however, to be deterred and allow the killings of Hammond, fellow student Henry Smith and high school football player Delano Middleton to be in vain. They organized a march from campus to the state capital 42 miles away to demand justice. Athletes decided to lead the march by running the distance.

“The four young men who approached me about the run were all track and field distance runners,” Willis Ham, a South Carolina State baseball player at the time, told the (Orangeburg, S.C.) Times and Democrat five years ago. “Three of the young men were not of American descent, and they simply wanted to express their disgust for the way Americans ‘treat their own,’ with the one tool that they had to their credit [the ability to run].

“We wanted our fellow students to know how deeply we felt about their determination to go to Columbia [S.C.], and express to state officials how they really felt about the lack of support in the days leading to the massacre.”

“It gave us a chance to say that our spirits and drive for freedom from depression would never be destroyed,” Ham explained.

The white troopers who fired on the students were exonerated in a trial a year later. The lone conviction from the incident was of Sellers for incitement. He spent seven months in prison. He was pardoned in 1993.

But what Hammond, the football player, first fell for is forever remembered on South Carolina State’s campus. Its basketball arena that opened that fateful day, Feb. 8, 1968, was renamed the Smith-Hammond-Middleton Memorial Center.

Kevin B. Blackistone, ESPN panelist and visiting professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, writes sports commentary for The Post.”

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We should all be appalled that in the 21st Century, folks like Trump, Sessions, Miller, Cotton, and others who think that it’s “OK” and “permissible” to whip up false anti-Hispanic fervor with bogus narratives about rampant crime, imaginary “stolen” jobs, and phantom “adverse effects” of legal immigration have weaseled their way into positions of national power and prominence.

They seek to take America backwards to a bygone era of racial injustice and manufactured hate. Don’t let them get away with it! Ballot boxes were made to “retire” the Trumps, Sessions, and Cottons of the world and send them off to try to make an honest living.

PWS

02-16-18

WASHPOST: Voter Fraud Is Not a Threat, But Kris Kobach is Both A Fraud & A Threat To Our Democracy!

The Editorial Board writes:

“Aha, says Mr. Kobach, writing at Breitbart, the right-wing website, “now there’s proof” of fraud: “It seems that they never were bona fide residents of the State.”

In fact, when New Hampshire Public Radio examined the data earlier this year, it found that more than two-thirds of 5,900 day-of-election registrants who had out-of-state driver’s licenses lived in college towns, indicating most were students voting perfectly legally. Again, on most of the state’s biggest residential campuses, a majority of students — usually a sizable majority — are from out of state. That’s true at the University of New Hampshire, Dartmouth College, Keene State College, Franklin Pierce University and others.

 

It’s also true at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., where on Tuesday Mr. Kobach attempted to defend his baseless claim at a meeting of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Under fire for his tendentious claims, which he used to cast doubt on the narrow victories in New Hampshire of Hillary Clinton and now-Sen. Maggie Hassan, both Democrats, he said: “Until further research is done, we will never know the answer regarding the legitimacy of this particular election.”

That’s Mr. Kobach at his most insidious, using innuendo, but never actual evidence, to impugn and subvert American democracy.”

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Kobach is a long-standing racist, White Nationalist, and xenophobe whose mission is to promote a primarily anti-Hispanic agenda that includes suppressing the votes not only of Hispanics but of other minorities and the poor because he and his cronies deem them to be “unsuitable” for the franchise. What greater proof of unsuitability can there be than that many of the foregoing are thought to vote for Democrats.

Kobach is out to insure that a minority of White Nationalists and their GOP “fellow travelers” (which would be virtually every other GOP pol and voter who consistently refuse to stand up and expose Kobach’s charade) maintain control over the rest of us in the majority. And no lie, fabrication, or misrepresentation is too low for him to go.

But, in the end, it’s the GOP electorate (particularly in Kansas), President Trump, and the “establishment” GOP pols (like Mitt Romney and Mike Pence) who have enabled this toxic anti-American dude. The rest of us need to come up with a strategy to “retire” Kobach to the fringes of alt-right “fake radio” where he belongs. He certainly is totally undeserving of a voice on the national political scene.

PWS

09-18-17

 

 

WASHINGTON POST: VOTING RIGHTS ARE THE CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUE OF OUR AGE — AS USUAL, JEFF SESSIONS IS SQUARELY ON THE WRONG SIDE OF HISTORY!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/voter-suppression-is-the-civil-rights-issue-of-this-era/2017/08/19/926c8b58-81f3-11e7-902a-2a9f2d808496_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-b%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.1bfaa722c738

“Yet even if all 1,500 Confederate symbols across the country were removed overnight by some sudden supernatural force, the pernicious crusade to roll back voting rights would continue apace, with voters of color suffering its effects disproportionately. Pushing back hard against those who would purge voter rolls, demand forms of voter ID that many Americans don’t possess, and limit times and venues for voting — this should be a paramount cause for the Trump era.

In statehouse after statehouse where Republicans hold majorities, the playbook is well established, and the tactics are becoming increasingly aggressive.

Mr. Trump’s voter fraud commission is at the vanguard of this crusade, and the fix is in. Its vice chairman, Kris Kobach, is the nation’s most determined, litigious and resourceful champion of voter suppression. Under his tutelage, the commission is likely to recommend measures whose effect will be that new obstacles to voting would be taken up in state legislatures. Millions of voters are at risk of disenfranchisement from this effort, and the knock-on effects of such a mass act of disempowerment are dizzying.

 

The events in Charlottesville and the president’s apologia for the right-wing extremists there should mobilize anyone passionate about civil rights. There would be no better target for their energies than the clear and present danger to the most fundamental right in any democracy: the vote.”

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Read the complete article at the link.

Sessions and his Civil Rights Division are supposed to be out there defending the right of citizens, particularly minorities, to vote. Instead, he has thrown the weight of the Justice Department to those GOP hacks seeking to suppress the vote. Meanwhile the Civil Rights Division is thinking of perverse ways to abuse Civil Rights laws by using them to promote white privilege and white supremacy.

Sen. Liz Warren was silenced by McConnell when she told the truth about Sessions’s continuing racism. She was right.

PWS

08-20-17

“LACKS CREDIBILITY” — That’s A Federal Judge’s Verdict On KRIS KOBACH, The White Nationalist Kansas Elected Official Leading The Trump-Pence Voter Suppression Effort!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kris-kobach-sanctions_us_595d4d60e4b0d5b458e7ce73

Sam Levine reports in HuffPost:

“In a Wednesday ruling, [Judge James P.] O’Hara denied Kobach’s request for a motion for reconsideration because he was introducing new arguments he hadn’t used before.

“Significantly, defendant never represented, as he does now, that his misstatements were the result of editing errors. The court declines to grant reconsideration based on this explanation ‘that could have been raised in prior briefing.’ In any event, this new excuse lacks credibility based on its late assertion (which appears to be an attempt at a second bite at the apple) and lack of supporting documentation,” O’Hara wrote.

Kobach is the vice chair of a commission that Trump convened to investigate elections. He is also running for governor of Kansas.”

[emphasis added]

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Read the complete article and a copy of Magistrate Judge O’Hara’s order at the link.

It’s no wonder that 44 states, including a number of so-called “Red States,” are declining Kobach’s request for information, in whole or in part, in connection with a bogus commission (and taxpayer financed boondoggle) to investigate what all credible experts and prior studies have shown to be a non-problem. Read the latest article from the Washington Post below:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/trump-voter-commission-discloses-names-of-members-plan-to-store-data-at-white-house/2017/07/06/74e454ae-625d-11e7-84a1-a26b75ad39fe_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-more-top-stories_voterdata-650pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.644cd6cad0db

Kobach’s career marked by consistent xenophobia, white nationalism, and the squandering of public resources speaks for itself.

Oh, and another thing: Judge O’Hara’s finding that Kobach’s motion to reconsider “lacks credibility” was issued in connection with a previous order sanctioning Kobach for unethical conduct. http://immigrationcourtside.com/2017/07/02/smelling-a-rat-named-kobach-many-states-decline-to-provide-voter-info-to-bogus-trump-commission-looking-for-voter-fraud-gops-well-known-voter-suppression-efforts-turn-off-many/

You can’t make this stuff up, folks!

PWS

07-06-17

 

SMELLING A RAT (NAMED KOBACH), MANY STATES DECLINE TO PROVIDE VOTER INFO TO BOGUS TRUMP COMMISSION LOOKING FOR VOTER FRAUD — GOP’S WELL-KNOWN VOTER SUPPRESSION EFFORTS TURN OFF MANY!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/trumps-voting-commission-asked-states-to-hand-over-election-data-theyre-pushing-back/2017/06/30/cd8f812a-5dce-11e7-9b7d-14576dc0f39d_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_voterintegrity-625pm:homepage/story&utm_term=.5cd2f8de9d8d

The Washington Post reports:

“President Trump’s voting commission stumbled into public view this week, issuing a sweeping request for nationwide voter data that drew sharp condemnation from election experts and resistance from more than two dozen states that said they cannot or will not hand over all of the data.

The immediate backlash marked the first significant attention to the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity since Trump started it last month and followed through on a vow to pursue his own unsubstantiated claims that voter fraud is rampant and cost him the popular vote in the presidential election. The White House has said the commission will embark upon a “thorough review of registration and voting issues in federal elections,” but experts and voting rights advocates have pilloried Trump for his claims of widespread fraud, which studies and state officials alike have not found. They say that they fear the commission will be used to restrict voting.

Those worries intensified this week after the commission sent letters to 50 states and the District on Wednesday asking for a trove of information, including names, dates of birth, voting histories and, if possible, party identifications. The letters also asked for evidence of voter fraud, convictions for election-related crimes and recommendations for preventing voter intimidation — all within 16 days.

While the Trump administration has said it is just requesting public information, the letters met with swift — and sometimes defiant — rejection. By Friday, 25 states were partially or entirely refusing to provide the requested information; some said state laws prohibit releasing certain details about voters, while others refused to provide any information because of the commission’s makeup and backstory.

President Trump signed an executive order on May 11, initiating an investigation into voter suppression and election fraud. Here’s what we know so far. (Patrick Martin/The Washington Post)

“This entire commission is based on the specious and false notion that there was widespread voter fraud last November,” Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) said in a statement. “At best this commission was set up as a pretext to validate Donald Trump’s alternative election facts, and at worst is a tool to commit large-scale voter suppression.”

California, a state Trump singled out for “serious voter fraud,” also refused to participate. Alex Padilla, the California secretary of state, said providing data “would only serve to legitimize the false and already debunked claims of massive voter fraud.”

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Read the complete article at the link.

Gee whiz, why would anyone think that a Commission led by notorious white nationalist, racist, xenophobe Kris Kobach, in behalf of the GOP, which has been on the forefront of voter suppression efforts, formed because The Donald can’t face the fact that Hillary was more popular than he was, would have any ulterior motives up its sleeve! Oh yeah, and did I mention that Kobach recently was sanctioned by a Federal Judge for unethical behavior? See http://immigrationcourtside.com/2017/06/24/federal-judge-sanctions-kobach-for-misconduct-in-ks-voting-rights-case/

Just one more way the Trump Administration wastes taxpayer money while attacking American democracy.

PWS

07-02-17

 

 

TEXAS AG PAXTON, OTHER GOP RACIST POLITICOS MOUNT ATTACK ON YOUNG PEOPLE OF COLOR!

http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/30/politics/trump-daca-bind/index.html

Tal Kopan reports for CNN:

“Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump has let a controversial Obama-era immigration policy continue — and conservative states are running out of patience.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was joined by his counterparts in nine other states in a letter Thursday warning Attorney General Jeff Sessions that if the Trump administration does not move to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, they will file a court challenge to the program.
At the heart of the threat is ongoing litigation over a related program — giving the attorneys general an opening to squeeze the administration on DACA.
Despite explicitly pledging during the campaign to “immediately” rescind DACA, a program that gives undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children protection from deportation and the ability to work and study in the US, the Trump administration has continued to honor the program and issue new permits under it.
With its efforts, the administration appears to want to have it both ways, continuing the program and pledging to protect its participants while saying the situation isn’t necessarily permanent and arresting those who officials say have lost their DACA status. But that position has angered activists on both sides of the issue, who in a rare moment of agreement have expressed similar frustrations that the administration won’t clearly articulate its long-term plans for DACA.
At issue is pending litigation in Texas that has challenged an Obama administration program that’s similar to DACA but geared toward parents of childhood arrivals as well as an extension of the childhood arrivals program, both of which were never allowed to go into effect by the courts.
The Trump administration formally abandoned the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents program, known as DAPA, earlier this month to avoid having to defend it in court. But it left DACA on the books despite similar criticism of that program — namely that both programs were an overreach of executive authority.
Asked by CNN about that decision, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly at the time called it “house cleaning,” saying the program for parents was blocked by the courts while the one for those who came to the US was children wasn’t.
But Paxton wrote that if the administration doesn’t end DACA by September 5, Texas will amend its complaint in the case to include that program — which would force the administration to defend the program in litigation or abandon it.
“We respectfully request that the Secretary of Homeland Security phase out the DACA program,” Paxton wrote in the ultimatum. “Otherwise, the complaint in that case will be amended to challenge both the DACA program and the remaining Expanded DACA permits.”
The Department of Justice and DHS did not respond to a request for comment on the letter. Sessions was asked about it on “Fox and Friends” on Friday and seemingly praised the states.
“The DAPA law has already been withdrawn,” Sessions said when asked what changes could be coming. “That was a big victory, and we’ll be looking at that. But I’ve got to tell you, I like it that our states and localities are holding the federal government to account, expecting us to do what is our responsibility to the state and locals, and that’s to enforce the law.”

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Trying to throw 800,000 American young people — basically America’s future — out of the country and sow fear in local ethnic communities has nothing whatsoever to do with law enforcement. But, it has lots to do with racism and white nationalism. The real target here is Hispanic Americans and other ethnic Americans from immigrant roots.

Paxton, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Kansas Secretary State Kris Kobach and their followers are the George Wallaces, Lester Maddoxes, and Orval Faubuses of our time. Yeah, white racists might be giving it one more go. But, like the Trump victory, it is the last gasp. Eventually, the screw will turn as it did for prior generations of racist politicians.

To point out the obvious, with 600,000 pending cases in U.S. Immigration Court, the Trump Administration could not actually remove another 800,000 individuals any time in the foreseeable future. So, it’s all about meanness, fear, racism, white nationalism, and trying to prevent these young people from fully participating in our society. In other words, to make them a permanent underclass. Sound familiar?

The Dream Act to protect these young people should have become law years ago. But, then Senator Jeff Sessions and other GOP right wingers blocked its passage, even though it had the support of the majority of Senators. So, although legislation would be the logical solution, I wouldn’t count on it under today’s polarized conditions.

And, today’s GOP has become the home of racists and white supremicists.  Something that anyone who runs on the GOP ticket or pulls the lever for a GOP candidate should consider.

PWS

07-01-17

FEDERAL JUDGE SANCTIONS KOBACH FOR MISCONDUCT IN KS VOTING RIGHTS CASE!

 

https://www.lexisnexis.com/legalnewsroom/immigration/b/immigration-law-blog/archive/2017/06/24/kobach-sanctioned-for-39-deceptive-conduct-39-in-proof-of-citizenship-lawsuit-fish-v-kobach.aspx

Dan Kowalski reports from LexisNexis Immigration:

“Fish v. Kobach, June 23, 2017 – “[D]efendant’s deceptive conduct and lack of candor warrant the imposition of sanctions. … [D]efendant made patently misleading representations to the court … The court cannot say that defendant flat-out lied in representing the content of the disputed documents. … “Most attorneys, of course, try to convey evidence in the best possible light for their clients. But there is a difference between putting evidence in the best possible light and blatantly misstating the evidence.” … When counsel’s false references in a brief indicate “that he has been either cavalier in regard to his approach to this case or bent upon misleading the court,” sanctions are appropriate. … [P]laintiffs are permitted to take the deposition of Secretary Kobach with respect to non-privileged information and evidence pertaining to the draft amendment and the photographed document. … The undersigned will preside over the deposition and contemporaneously resolve any disputes that arise.”

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Go to the link for the full decision.

Gee, Kris, the rules in Federal Court apply even to guys like you!

PWS

06-24-17

NYT: Meet The White Nativist, Anti-Democracy Politician Kris Kobach — If You’re Non-White, He’s Out To Restrict Or Eliminate Your Right To Shape America’s Future — “implementing policies that protect the interests and aims of a shrinking white majority.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/magazine/the-man-behind-trumps-voter-fraud-obsession.html?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&module=Trending&version=Full®ion=Marginalia&pgtype=article

Read Ari Berman’s shocking profile of a minor politician who wields outsized influence within the GOP and is out to put a “White’s Only” sign on the American Dream. For Kobach, the “Jim Crow Era” was the glory day of the “rule of law” in the U.S. When Kobach talks about the “rule of law” it’s code for using the legal system to cement the rule of a disproportionately white GOP minority over the rest of us, and particularly Americans of color. Will the “sleeping majority” wake up before we’re all disenfranchised by this racist in a suit hiding behind his Yale law degree and ability to spin legal gobbledygook? Kobach isn’t just “the ACLU’s worst nightmare,” as he smugly touts himself. He’s American Democracy’s worst nightmare!

Here’s a sample of what Kobach has in store for the rest of us:

“Kobach’s plans represent a radical reordering of American priorities. They would help preserve Republican majorities. But they could also reduce the size and influence of the country’s nonwhite population. For years, Republicans have used racially coded appeals to white voters as a means to win elections. Kobach has inverted the priorities, using elections, and advocating voting restrictions that make it easier for Republicans to win them, as the vehicle for implementing policies that protect the interests and aims of a shrinking white majority. This has made him one of the leading intellectual architects of a new nativist movement that is rapidly gaining influence not just in the United States but across the globe.”

Read Berman’s lengthy article, and think about what YOU can do to put the kibosh on the plans of this self-proclaimed “fanatic” and his dream of turning America into a “White GOP Folks Only Club.” Even Republicans who might remember enough to know that the GOP in the far, far distant past was the “Party of Lincoln” might want to rethink their party’s support of and association with this dangerous extremist. Act before it’s too late and Kobach steals YOUR American Dream and turns it into a nightmare!

PWS

06-13-17

 

 

 

 

WashPost Political Analysis: More Lies & Obfuscation From Stephen Miller — Like His Boss, Miller Makes It Up As He Goes Along — But, He Does (Inadvertently) Reveal The Real Reason For The Bogus “Fraudulent Voter” Offensive: Lower The Turnout Among Those Groups Of Citizens Who Normally Vote For Democrats!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/02/12/mixed-into-his-falsehoods-on-voter-fraud-stephen-miller-did-hit-on-one-truth/?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_milleranalysis-135pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.34ef3ee8f935

Phillip Bump writes in the Washington Post:

“There’s a theory under which some people operate which holds that presidential advisers appear in the news media to provide insight into what the president is doing for the American people. Governance broadly, and the White House specifically, can be inscrutable to outsiders, but since our democracy depends on an informed populace, it has historically been important to shed as much light as possible on what’s happening. Politicians and their allies don’t always like to shed that light, but they’ve generally acquiesced to participating in the effort.

On ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, President Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller wasn’t interested in shedding light on reality. If anything, he was running around turning lights off. Inadvertently, though, he did offer one bit of insight into what’s happening at the White House.

. . . .

Three claims here. First, that there are millions of people who are registered in multiple states. Second, that dead people are still registered. Both of those things are true. (Among those registered to vote in two places, by the way, are Trump’s son-in-law, treasury nominee, daughter and press secretary.) But that’s not voter fraud. It’s a sloppy registration system — and indifference from people whose first instincts when relatives die is not to ensure that the registrar of voters is informed.

The third claim is that 14 percent of noncitizens are registered to vote, which is based on an academic analysis released several years ago. It has been subsequently shown to be problematic. [In fact, it earned the coveted “Four Pinocchio Award” from the Post’s “Fact Checker” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/10/24/no-eric-trump-14-percent-of-noncitizens-are-not-registered-to-vote/?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.3c0bdd64fa0c ] As anyone paying attention to the issue should know.

. . . .

Kobach is the secretary of state in Kansas, in charge of the state’s electoral process. He has held that position since 2011, the year the state passed new restrictions on voting in the name of preventing fraud.

The net effect? A report from the Government Accountability Office determined that turnout fell by several percentage points in the 2012 election relative to comparable states. And the populations that saw the biggest drops in turnout?
Young people, newly registered voters and black people. Populations that tend to vote more heavily Democratic.

That’s almost certainly the point. Miller was trying to mislead people with his false arguments about voter fraud. But he ended up offering some insight after all.”

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Miller and Steve Bannon are among the remarkably unqualified guys that are pulling the strings from the Trump White House.

PWS

02/12/17

 

WSJ: Tension Between Gen. Kelly & White House As DHS Secretary Resisted Effort To Appoint Kris Kobach As Deputy Secretary!

http://www.wsj.com/articles/homeland-security-chief-and-white-house-clash-1485823301

The WSJ reports:

“WASHINGTON—Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly has clashed with the White House over staffing and other decisions in recent days, people familiar with the matter said, leaving the agency without a second-in-command as it tried to institute a new travel ban during a chaotic weekend at the nation’s airports.

When President Donald Trump selected Mr. Kelly, the pick won broad support from Republicans and Democrats in part because they believed the retired Marine general would be willing to speak up and challenge Mr. Trump.

That tension didn’t take long to materialize. Mr. Kelly hasn’t been able to name the deputy he wants at the agency, people familiar with the matter said, and he fought off attempts by the White House to put Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state known as a hard-liner on immigration, into the position.
Mr. Kelly was also frustrated at not knowing the details of the travel ban earlier, so he could prepare his agency to respond, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Trump signed the executive order that created the ban late Friday afternoon. Mr. Kelly was only informed of the details that day as he was traveling to Washington, even though he had pressed the White House for days to share with him the final language, the people said.”

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According to the article, President Trump has now decided to nominate Elaine Duke, a former Bush Administration official, to the #2 job at DHS. Have to wonder how long Kelly, a former Marine and a reputed “straight shooter” (in more ways than one) will last in “the circus.”

PWS

01/31/17