Wisconsin Scott Walker is running scared from the Blue Wave.

Courtesy of CNN: 

On Tuesday night, it happened again. 

Democrat Patty Schachtner beat Republican Adam Jarchow for a western Wisconsin state Senate seat that had been held by a Republican since 2000 and in a district that President Donald Trump won handily in 2016. 

Schachtner's win marked the first Republican-to-Democrat switch at the state legislative level of 2018 but it is the 34th state legislative seat pickup for Democrats since the start of 2017. That trend is beginning to rightly alarm smart Republicans.

I don't know if you could actually put Scott Walker in the smart category, but he is certainly deep into the alarmed category.

Tonight’s results show we are at risk of a #BlueWave in WI. The Far Left is driven by anger & hatred -- we must counter it with optimism & organization. Let’s share our positive story with voters & win in November.

— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) April 4, 2018

Big government special interests flooded Wisconsin with distorted facts & misinformation. Next, they'll target me and work to undo our bold reforms. We need to keep moving #WIForward & make sure a #BlueWave of outside special interest money doesn’t take us backward.

— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) April 4, 2018

Damn! You can almost smell the panic.

Walker's policy decisions have been devastating for the people of Wisconsin, and he was so afraid of this voters that he tried to change the law to get out of holding two special elections.

So yes, he has every reason to fear the Blue Wave.

Hey, maybe he IS in the smart category.

Wisconsin Federal judge tells Governor Walker that she doesn't care if his party is going to lose, he still has to hold special elections.

Courtesy of Think Progress:  

A judge ruled Thursday that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) must “promptly” hold special elections for two vacant seats in the state legislature — elections that he refused to call because he was afraid his party would lose. 

According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Dane County Circuit Judge Josann Reynolds ruled that state law requires Walker, a two-term governor and former presidential candidate, to hold the elections in order to give residents of the two districts representation in the state legislature. The seats have been vacant since December, when Walker appointed the two representatives to serve in his administration. 

“To state the obvious, if the plaintiffs have a right to vote for their representatives, they must have an election to do so,” said Reynolds, who Walker appointed to the court in 2014. 

Walker claimed he didn’t need to fill the seats because the legislative session will be ending soon, and planned to keep the seats open for more than a year. Wisconsin voters named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit called that decision unlawful. 

“We have nobody representing the interests of our Senate district right now and that upsets me,” Jennifer Meyer, one of the named plaintiffs, testified in court. “We’re entitled to representation.”

Damn! I have seen some desperate Republicans lately but absolutely refusing to hold elections because your party will be defeated is pretty fucked up.

Scott Walker reminds me of the kid that suddenly "accidentally" upends the Monopoly board when he realizes he is about to lose.

And really all he has done here is to ensure an insane Democratic turnout and definite defeat for the GOP candidates.

Doesn't anybody in this party understand the concept of "fair play" anymore?

Overwhelmingly voters want to elect politicians that will stand up to Donald Trump.

Courtesy of USA Today: 

Americans are mad, and that is putting Republicans at risk. 

A new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll finds voters looking toward the midterm elections are overwhelmingly unhappy with the country's direction, dissatisfied with its political leadership, and interested in electing a Congress that will confront President Trump. 

By close to 2-1, 58%-32%, those surveyed say they want to elect a Congress that mostly stands up to the president, not one that mostly cooperates with him. 

The level of voter unrest is rare at a time of prosperity, when a 55% majority rate the economy as being in a recovery. Even that assessment has a partisan cast: Republicans are twice as likely as Democrats to say the economy is growing. 

Seven in 10 Republicans say the country is headed in the right direction. But more than eight in 10 Democrats say it's off on the wrong track, and seven in 10 independents agree with them.

This of course reinforces what we have already witnessed in these special elections where Democrats are emerging victorious in places that have traditionally been GOP strongholds.

That blue wave is definitely coming, and it is being driven by women, minorities, and the newly energized young people of this country.

This could be a bloodbath.

Metaphorically speaking of course.

NSA Chief says that Donald Trump STILL has not directed them to protect the country from the Russian cyber threat.

WATCH: NSA Director Rogers on Russian cyberattacks: "I believe that President Putin has clearly come to the conclusion there's little price to pay here, and that therefore I can continue this activity." pic.twitter.com/3c5gGLvrAS

— NBC News (@NBCNews) February 27, 2018

Courtesy of CNN: 

US Cyber Command chief Adm. Mike Rogers told lawmakers on Tuesday that he has not been granted the authority by President Donald Trump to disrupt Russian election hacking operations where they originate. 

Asked by Democratic Sen. Jack Reed if he has been directed by the President, through the defense secretary, to confront Russian cyber operators, Rogers said "no I have not" but noted that he has tried to work within the authority he maintains as a commander.

While he did not agree with Reed's characterization that the US has been "sitting back and waiting," Rogers admitted that it is fair to say that "we have not opted to engage in some of the same behaviors we are seeing" with regards to Russia. 

"It has not changed the calculus or the behavior on behalf of the Russians," Rogers said about the US response to Russia's cyber threat to date. 

"They have not paid a price that is sufficient to change their behavior," he added.

In other words we have not adopted any of the same aggressive tactics that Sweden utilized recently, and let's keep in mind that WE were actually attacked and the outcome of our last election possibly altered.

I am going to say it again, and I might actually say it every day until somebody listens, the ONLY reason the leader of our country would not to take steps to protect ourselves from foreign interference is because that interference is beneficial to the leader of our country.

And once again for the slow kids, THAT IS TREASON!

Sweden moves swiftly to deal with Russian election interference, while America sits on its hands.

Courtesy of WaPo: 

Hundreds of local election workers have been trained to spot and resist foreign influence. The country’s biggest media outlets have teamed up to combat false news. Political parties scour their email systems to close hacker-friendly holes. 

The goal: to Russia-proof ­Sweden’s political system so that what happened in the United States in 2016 can never happen in this Nordic country of 10 million people. 

Although the general election isn’t until Sept. 9, officials say their preemptive actions may already have dissuaded the Kremlin from interfering. In Washington, meanwhile, the FBI says it has received no White House orders to secure the 2018 midterms against Russian influence.

The ONLY reason that an administration would not push to protect the country from interference by foreign agents, is because their interference benefited them directly.

The Trump Administration, and the Republican party itself, is trading our election security for the possibility that foreign interference will elect more of their people.

No matter how you look at it, THAT is treason.

Ted Cruz warns that the Republicans are in deep trouble in 2018.

Oh God, we are so screwed.

Courtesy of Raw Story: 

Traveling the state for GOP events this weekend, Cruz portrayed an uncertain midterm environment that could go down as disastrous for Republicans if they don’t work to counteract Democratic energy throughout the country. Cruz has spent previous election cycles airing similar warnings against GOP complacency in ruby-red Texas, but this time it hits much closer to home for him — he is facing a well-funded re-election challenge from U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-El Paso. 

Addressing the Fort Bend County GOP on Friday night, Cruz warned of an “incredible volatility in politics right now,” calling Democrats “stark-raving nuts” in their opposition to Trump. He pointed to Trump’s recent State of the Union address and Democrats’ reluctance to applaud, saying the scene “underscores the political risk in November.” 

“Let me tell you right now: The left is going to show up,” Cruz said, delivering the keynote address at the party’s Lincoln Reagan Dinner. “They will crawl over broken glass in November to vote.” Cruz is feeling the heat in his own bid for a second term. O’Rourke, who has sworn off money from political action committees, outraised 

Cruz in the last three months of 2017, $2.4 million to $1.9 million. It was the second quarter in which O’Rourke’s haul was bigger than that of Cruz, who still maintains a healthy cash-on-hand advantage.

I think Ted Cruz is confusing "stark raving nuts" with  "demonstrably patriotic" in our opposition of Putin's puppet.

Remember that Ted Cruz was carried to his victory by Tea Party anger at an imagined assault on our democracy, and yet he is surprised by the Left's very appropriate response to a very real assault on our democracy?

Methinks that somebody needs to step outside of the Fox News and right wing talk radio bubble.

The Koch brothers are planning to throw massive amounts of money at the 2018 midterms.

Courtesy of Axios:

The Koch network will spend 60% more on the 2018 cycle than it did on the 2016 presidential election, the largest midterm investment it's ever had, Tim Phillips of Americans for Prosperity told reporters Saturday. This includes up to $20 million on “communicating the benefits of tax reform," along with other policy and politics efforts. The network spent about $250 million on policy and politics in the 2016 cycle.

I would REALLY like to say this won't work because Americans are too smart to be manipulated by money and advertising, but we all now know, without a shadow of a doubt, that that is simply not true. 

This most certainly WILL have an effect, so it is up to all of us to focus on strong grassroots organizing and a huge get out the vote campaign.

Right now these elections are ours to lose.

Let's not give these assholes the satisfaction.

"I am woman hear me roar." And also watch me run for office.

Courtesy of NBC News:  

Now, a new flood of women — many of them Democrats who watched the election of Donald Trump with horror and disbelief — are raising their hands to run for office in 2018, signaling a potential reprise of a “Year of the Woman” that could make 1992’s election of two dozen new women to the U.S. House pale in comparison. 

They’re on track to break almost every record on the books. As of last week, 325 women were non-incumbent candidates for the United States House, along with 72 female members seeking reelection, according to data compiled by Walsh’s organization. Thirty-eight women not currently serving in the United States Senate are aiming for the upper chamber, along with 12 incumbents running again. And 75 women have set their sights on the nation’s governorships — plus four female incumbents fighting to keep their seats. 

In 2016, a high water mark for female candidates overall, there were 167 female major party nominees for the United States House and 16 for the Senate — well fewer than half the number of candidates vying for one of those spots now.

This is part of what is really terrifying the Republicans right now, and also shaking the foundations of the patriarchal hierarchy in this country.

The election of Donald Trump may have felt like a victory for the anti-feminists and misogynists, but what it has really done is to energize a blue wave of women who are determined to wash away the stench of the Trump agenda, and lift this nation up to reach its highest aspirations.

Personally I can hardly wait.

Donald Trump's now defunct Commission on Election Integrity seemed to really focus on Texas Hispanic voters.

Courtesy of WaPo: 

President Trump’s voting commission asked every state and the District for detailed voter registration data, but in Texas’s case it took an additional step: It asked to see Texas records that identify all voters with Hispanic surnames, newly released documents show. 

In buying nearly 50 million records from the state with the nation’s second largest Hispanic population, a researcher for the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity checked a box on two Texas public voter data request forms explicitly asking for the “Hispanic surname flag notation,” to be included in information sent to the voting commission, according to copies of the signed and notarized state forms. 

White House and Texas officials said the Texas voter data was never delivered because a lawsuit brought by Texas voting rights advocates after the request last year temporarily stopped any data handoff.

Gee, it's almost as if this whole commission was created simply to prove that Donald Trump lost the popular vote because of illegal immigrants who voted against him.

But that can't be right, can it?

You bet your ass it can. 

While Donald Trump pretends there is nothing to see here, Russia expands its troll factory.

Courtesy of Unian:  

As the city’s leading business daily Delovoy Peterburg reports in an investigative article published just before New Year, the 4,000 square meters of their previous address on 55, Savushkina Street have been replaced by 12,000 square meters in St Petersburg’s Lakhta business district, according to the Euromaidan Press. 

The impressive threefold increase of workspace is a testimony to the success of the “factory”. As Russian RBC Daily’s investigation in April 2017 showed, the trolling activities have now branched out into a conglomerate of at least 16 different online outlets, all of which voice strong support for Kremlin’s policies, while systematically linking to each other’s products. At the same time, they carry little or no advertisement. 

The owner of the “troll factory”, businessman and billionaire Yevgeny Prigozhin, has also become known as “Putin’s chef” because of his success in providing catering services for, among other clients, the Kremlin and other branches of the Russian government. Mr Prigozhin has been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for providing financial support for Russia’s military occupation of Ukraine. Delovoy Peterburg’s investigation also reveals that the owners of the new premises are contributors to President Putin’s election campaign. 

The infamous Russian troll factory also known as Internet Research Agency (IRA) has been reportedly run by Putin’s ally Yevgeny Prigozhin in the Russian city of Saint-Petersburg. For years, the agency has been pushing pro-Russian narratives to promote the Kremlin’s interests in the world attempting to influence domestic policy and public opinion in the EU, U.S., Ukraine, and other countries, or just supporting opposite extreme opinions to sow chaos in target countries. 

And while this is happening the Trump Administration has not really lifted a finger to keep us safe.

At least the FBI is doing something.

Courtesy of Business Insider:  

The FBI plans to alert U.S. companies and the public about efforts by Russia or other nations to use disinformation and social media manipulation to interfere in upcoming elections, while being careful not to upset free speech and constitutional rights, a top law enforcement official said. 

The direction that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s “foreign influence" task force is heading could dramatically reshape the relationship between government and social media companies in order to address vulnerabilities that enabled Russia to meddle in the 2016 election. 

“We’ve been reluctant in some instances to share the amount of information of what we know about what’s happening," said Jeffrey Tricoli, a top FBI official heading the task force. “You can’t stay with the same strategy if you think there needs to be changes. So going forward there’s going to be opportunities for us to share information in better ways.” 

FBI Director Christopher Wray announced late last year that the task force had been created. But almost everything about it has been secretive to date. Tricoli provided the first extensive public comments about it during an FBI conference in New York Wednesday co-sponsored by Fordham University.

Does that seem a little too tentative to anybody else? 

You know if this were a conventional war I do not think the FBI would simply be telling people not to stand right there because there might be a bomb coming. They would be fighting back.

I think we all know that if Hillary Clinton had won that 2018 election that there would be a far more aggressive campaign to deal with Russian interference.

Since Donald Trump is abdicating his responsibilities, the Democrats have released a report on Russia's continued interference in Western democracies around the world.

Today I'm releasing a #RussiaReport documenting Vladimir Putin's 20-year attack on democratic institutions in his own country and Europe. To protect against what the Kremlin did to the U.S. in 2016, we need to first understand Putin's pattern. https://t.co/93mMMbGEgV

— Senator Ben Cardin (@SenatorCardin) January 10, 2018

Courtesy of the AP:

A new report by Senate Democrats warns of deepening Russian interference throughout Europe and concludes that even as some Western democracies have responded with aggressive countermeasures, President Donald Trump has offered no strategic plan to bolster their efforts or safeguard the U.S. from again falling victim to Kremlin meddling. 

The report commissioned by the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is the first from Congress to comprehensively detail Russian efforts to undermine democracies since the 2016 presidential election. It wastes no time in calling out Trump personally for what it describes as a failure to respond to Russia’s mounting destabilization activities in the U.S. and worldwide. 

“Never before has a U.S. president so clearly ignored such a grave and growing threat to U.S. national security,” the report released by Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland warns. 

Sen. Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the committee, didn’t sign on to the report. But even without formal GOP backing, the recounting of Russian operations in 19 European nations foreshadows the still-unpublished findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan inquiry into Russia’s role during the U.S. election. 

Cardin said the roughly 200-page report is built on both Republican and Democratic ideas, and he commissioned it to show Americans the scope of efforts by Russian President Vladimir Putin to undermine democracy.

And yet Donald Trump does nothing.

Gee, it's almost as if he were working for the Putin agenda, instead of the American agenda.

But that can't be right, can it?

Russia warns the United States against meddling in their election. Yeah, you heard that right.

Maria Zakharova

Courtesy of USA Today: 

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on Wednesday rejected U.S. criticism over opposition leader Alexei Navalny's blocked presidential bid, saying it amounted to "meddling in the Russian elections." 

"This statement by the U.S. Department of State, which I'm sure will not be the only one, is a direct interference into the electoral process and the state's domestic affairs," Zakharova said in comments carried by state-owned TASS news agency. 

A State Department spokesman expressed concern over the "restrictions on independent voices" in response to the vote by Russia's top electoral body to formally bar Navalny from participating in the 2018 presidential election. 

"The funniest thing about it is that this statement was made by the same people who put the foreign agent label on RT and Sputnik, persecuted Russian media worldwide and invested vast sums in 'countering Russian propaganda,'" Zakharova said.

Can you believe the balls on these guys? 

They use Facebook and social media to spread misinformation, hack a number of government and personal computers, and then attempt to manipulate their asset in the White House to repeal sanctions against their country, and they have the audacity to bitch about the State Department pointing out that they are rigging an election to reelect Vladimir Putin?

I can't even.

Big night for Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey. Update!

BREAKING: Democrats will sweep in Virginia, claiming victories in the governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general races, CNN projects #CNNElection https://t.co/BARA8oQvDR

— CNN (@CNN) November 8, 2017

Of course this defeat did not sit well with the Twitler, who desperately needed to deflect any blame that might be coming his way.

Ed Gillespie worked hard but did not embrace me or what I stand for. Don’t forget, Republicans won 4 out of 4 House seats, and with the economy doing record numbers, we will continue to win, even bigger than before!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 8, 2017

Ed Gillespie meet the under carriage of Trump's bus.

Those were not the only victories in Virginia however, there was also this.

JUST IN: Danica Roem elected as first transgender state legislator in Virginia https://t.co/enrHTTlFno pic.twitter.com/G00ewI4hgA

— The Hill (@thehill) November 8, 2017

Damn! Look at Virginia getting all progressive and everything.

And then there was New Jersey.

Democrat Phil Murphy is elected governor of New Jersey https://t.co/acu67R5KRe pic.twitter.com/RTf7aQcosp

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) November 8, 2017

I personally would blame Trump less for this defeat of the Republicans, and lay that blame directly at the tremendously overburdened feet of Chris Christie.

I thought I was finished blogging for the day, but these Democratic victories seemed too important to put off until tomorrow.

Update: And the hits keep coming.

#BREAKING: Bill de Blasio elected to second term as NYC mayor https://t.co/1aNqjHbrrg pic.twitter.com/7t7eSJfAb1

— The Hill (@thehill) November 8, 2017

Update 2: And coming.

Democrat Vi Lyles is projected to win the race for Charlotte, NC mayor.

She will become the first African-American woman to lead the city.https://t.co/qgqYl32uor

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) November 8, 2017

Update 3: And coming still.

Jenny Durkan was just elected Seattle’s first lesbian mayor. She is also Seattle’s first woman mayor since the 1920s. https://t.co/UZ52y22MGW

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) November 8, 2017

Uncle Gryphen knows just what you need, here is a little Barack Obama to soothe your troubled brow.

I swear after the last nine months the man's voice is like a soothing balm for the soul.

And the hopefulness in his voice.....I had almost forgotten how good that sounds.

Here is how GQ Magazine described it: 

Yesterday President Barack Obama re-emerged on the scene like Han Solo coming back at the end of Star Wars: A New Hope. Okay, maybe that's overstating it a little, but what can I say, we've been severely lacking in hope and here we have Mr. Hope himself back on the national political scene campaigning and reminding us what it was like to have an actual honest-to-God adult speaking to Americans. He campaigned for Democrats in both New Jersey and Virginia and in the process threw some political elbows at his successor and the depressing state of the American political landscape. You know how when you used to wake up and check Twitter, it was kind of fun, but now it just feels like someone spitting directly into your face first thing in the morning? Yeah, these speeches were the first things in a while that don't make me feel that way.

Exactly!

In the first part of this speech you can hear the crowd shouting "Four more years!"

And just for a minute did you not find yourself wishing that such a thing were possible?

Fake News creator, who believed he helped get Donald Trump elected, found dead in Arizona.

Courtesy of the New York Post:  

Paul Horner, who penned debunked articles about Bill Murray running for president and President Barack Obama opening a Muslim museum, was discovered unresponsive in his bed Sept 19. 

There were no signs of foul play, according to the Maricopa County medical examiner, and there was evidence the death could be due to an “accidental overdose.” 

During the 2016 presidential election, Horner created a list of websites that appeared to be legitimate news sites to spread false information. 

One article that claimed protesters who disrupted Donald Trump rallies were paid $3,500 went viral on the internet and fueled endless rumors about the alleged conspiracy. 

Despite the fact that no evidence existed, Trump repeated the charge about the paid protesters while on stage during one of his rallies. 

Horner told the Washington Post last November that although the information was clearly fabricated, he made thousands of dollars each month from them because Trump’s supporters were “easy to fool.” 

In the same interview, Horner said he thought Trump won the White House because of him.

Man I am not going to go all Alex Jones here, but damn this is convenient. 

Horner was the face of 2016 fake news, but he was by no means alone.

Without the Russians helping to push his fake news stories, and without Donald Trump himself actually repeating at least one of them to his audience, he would have had virtually no impact at all. 

This guy made "thousands of dollars each month." Let me tell you, THAT is not easy to do.

In order to pull that off you have to have a lot of help from others who also want your articles to be spread far and wide.

And now that this guy is gone, I have a feeling that this is one investigative channel that is going to be a lot harder to explore.

Damn, I did go a little Alex Jones there, didn't I?

Hillary Clinton calls for the end of the Electoral College.

This was a few days ago, but I just saw it today and wanted to put my two cents in as well.

I DEFINITELY think that it is time for us to discard the Electoral College as it has now cost the Democrats two separate presidential elections and clearly does not adequately represent the will of the people.

What's more I think that doing away with the Electoral College will inspire more people to vote, since their vote will CERTAINLY count and they will not be disenfranchised by the knowledge that no matter who they vote for their state ALWAYS goes for either the Republican or Democratic candidate.

It will also make it MUCH more difficult for foreign nations (I'm looking at you Russia.) to hijack our elections, or for machines to change enough votes to steal victory away from the candidate with the most support.

The downside of course is that it will certainly take longer to tally the votes and in fact we may not be able to determine a clear winner for several days.

However I would much rather practice my patience and KNOW that the person who throws the victory party a few days late had the most votes, rather than wonder for months who had actually chosen the person preparing their inaugural address.

In response to Russian hacking Virginia to do away with touchscreen voting machines.

Courtesy of The Hill: 

The Virginia State Board of Elections moved Friday to do away with touchscreen voting machines in the state by November’s election, a move aimed at boosting security. 

The board decided to phase out the machines this year after the Virginia Department of Elections recommended that the touchscreen voting machines be decertified. The recommendation came after security experts breached numerous types of voting machines with ease at the DEF CON cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas in July, according to The Richmond Times-Dispatch. 

The move comes amid heightened concerns over foreign interference in future elections, in light of the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia used cyberattacks and disinformation to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. 

Yes, yes, yes!

This is EXACTLY what needs to happen all over this country in order to regain our voting integrity.

We have known since 2000, that these voting machines can be hacked and it is WAY past time that we shit can them and go back to paper ballots.

The Russians will be back, and dammit we need to be ready.

One of the largest counties in Texas is returning to paper ballots. A sign of things to come perhaps?

Courtesy of The Texas Tribune:

Frank Phillips spent last Wednesday staring down 600 boxes of election materials — voted ballots, blank ballots, precinct records — sitting in a warehouse run by Denton County. After sitting in storage for the legally required periods — up to nearly two years in some cases — the roughly 24,000 pounds of paper were finally ready to be shredded. 

Yet despite the hassle — and the significant cost — Phillips, Denton County’s elections administrator, is looking forward to this fall, when he will implement the county’s newest voting plan: a complete return to the paper ballot. 

The unusual move sets Denton, the ninth-largest county in Texas and one of the fastest-growing, apart from the state’s other biggest counties, which all use some form of electronic voting, according to data collected by the Secretary of State’s office. Both Bexar and Harris Counties, for example, have had all electronic voting systems in place for 15 years. 

Denton has been using a hybrid voting system that employs both electronic and paper ballots for about a decade. But county officials recently approved spending just shy of $9 million to buy new voting equipment from Austin-based Hart InterCivic that will return to an entirely paper-based system in time for this year's November elections. Even disabled voters, who will cast their votes on touch-screen machines, will have their ballots printed out and tallied through a print scanner.

Ahh, a return to voting system you can trust. 

Hopefully the rest of the country will follow suit, especially since we now know that the Russians tried to hack state voter data bases and software systems as well in order to change results.

While we are on the subject of voter suppression, you may like to know that so far only Arkansas has complied with Trump's "Election Integrity" commission and provided all of the voter data that they requested.

So, that is two good news stories about voting integrity in only one post.

Not bad for a Sunday morning.

So does the Constitution have a provision to deal with a fraudulent presidential election? The short answer is "no."

Courtesy of FiveThirtyEight:  

For all the headlines about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, no hard evidence has come to light, at least publicly, showing that President Trump or his team were involved. But suppose that such evidence did come to light — what would happen if it became clear that Trump or his advisers colluded with the Russians?1 This isn’t the only type of wrongdoing the investigations could uncover, but it’s among the most serious because it would cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2016 result. So, is there a process for dealing with a finding that in essence invalidates an election? 

When it comes to presidential elections, the answer is: not really. The laws and processes around national elections have grown up in a piecemeal fashion over time, with state and local laws governing the administration of presidential elections. And the Constitution itself focuses more on ensuring stability than on administering elections. As a result, there aren’t clear procedures for how to handle questions of legitimacy after the fact — especially when those questions involve the presidency.

FiveThirtyEight dives deep into the whys and why nots, that the framers of the Constitution took into consideration when creating the document that is at the heart of our democracy.

However for the purposes of this post I will skip all of that detail and just get to the rather disappointing punchline:

In most of the historical cases, the main question was how the Electoral College votes would be allocated in each state. Once those have been cast, the case for questioning a presidential election or gauging which side really won becomes a lot more difficult. Of course, the Constitution does have one mechanism for undoing the results of an election: impeachment. That process, however, is focused on individual wrongdoing (or, through a separate process, inability), not electoral irregularities. In that sense, even if collusion revelations did lead to Trump’s impeachment and removal from office, the process wouldn’t really address the question of whether his election had been legitimate in the first place. 

The lack of an established process for reviewing elections points to a larger issue: The structures established by the Constitution assumed a world in which the presidency and the Electoral College were not fully absorbed into a contentious national party system. That vision has long since been replaced by one in which presidential elections are national contests over policy agendas and ideas. The text of our Constitution has never been changed to reflect this reality. Instead, the Electoral College remains the final word on who gets to be president. When it comes to the possibility that the winning side colluded with a foreign power to influence the election outcome, the Constitution doesn’t offer much in the way of a plan.

This is probably something that Vladimir Putin understood better than your average voter.

There are no do overs in presidential politics.

Once into the Oval Office a bad president can be like an intestinal parasite latching on firmly, too far out of reach for easy removal.

Perhaps we can impeach Donald Trump, that does not mean that we can replace him with anyone better, or that we can stop the destructive policy decisions that he and the Republicans are putting in place as we  speak.

We often hear that elections have consequences, and perhaps that has never been more true than the election of 2016.

Associated Press analysis proves that gerrymandering has given the GOP an unfair advantage in many state elections.

Courtesy of AP: 

The AP scrutinized the outcomes of all 435 U.S. House races and about 4,700 state House and Assembly seats up for election last year using a new statistical method of calculating partisan advantage designed to detect potential political gerrymandering. 

The analysis found four times as many states with Republican-skewed state House or Assembly districts than Democratic ones. Among the two dozen most populated states that determine the vast majority of Congress, there were nearly three times as many with Republican-tilted U.S. House districts. 

Traditional battlegrounds such as Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and Virginia were among those with significant Republican advantages in their U.S. or state House races. All had districts drawn by Republicans after the last Census in 2010. 

The AP analysis also found that Republicans won as many as 22 additional U.S. House seats over what would have been expected based on the average vote share in congressional districts across the country. That helped provide the GOP with a comfortable majority that stood at 241-194 over Democrats after the 2016 elections — a 10 percentage point margin in seats, even though Republican candidates received just 1 percentage point more total votes nationwide. 

"The outcome was already cooked in, if you will, because of the way the districts were drawn," said John McGlennon, a longtime professor of government and public policy at the College of William & Mary in Virginia who ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Democrat in the 1980s. 

A separate statistical analysis conducted for AP by the Princeton University Gerrymandering Project found the extreme Republican advantages in some states were no fluke. The Republican edge in Michigan's state House districts had only a 1-in-16,000 probability of occurring by chance; in Wisconsin's Assembly districts, there was a mere 1-in-60,000 likelihood of it happening randomly, the analysis found.

The Republicans have old fashioned, anti-progressive policy ideas, and they are facing a growing demographic that rejects their party out of hand.

The only way they can compete is by cheating.

And that has now become the go to strategy for both local and national elections.

No wonder they are not bothered by the knowledge that their party's nominee only won the presidency with the help of a foreign government that despises everything for which America stands.