I can’t express how much it bugs me to open a Spanish newspaper and find the dumb story about Trump’s comments on Mika’s facelifts. Why are the Spanish readers supposed to care? How can anybody give a flying fuck? And this is after the similarly inane story about doctored Times covers had colonized people’s minds for days.
Journalism is dead. There’s nothing but tabloid gossip any more.
Meanwhile, you’ve got to call your State Secretary of State to tell them not to cooperate because there WILL be fuckery in the next election:
White House Panel Asks States For Their Voter Rolls
A letter from Kris Kobach, the vice chairman of a White House commission looking into voter fraud and other irregularities, is drawing fire from some state election officials. The letter, sent Wednesday to all 50 states, requests that all publicly available voter roll data be sent to the White House by July 14, five days before the panel’s first meeting.
The information requested includes the names, addresses, birthdates, political party (if recorded), last four digits of the voter’s Social Security Number and which elections the voter has participated in since 2006, for every registered voter in the country.
Kobach, who is also Kansas’ Republican secretary of state, did not say how the commission plans to use the data other than to help it “fully analyze vulnerabilities and issues related to voter registration and voting.”
However, Kobach has long advocated comparing state voter rolls with other government databases to identify noncitizens or other illegitimate registrants. Voter advocacy groups say such comparisons are prone to error and worry that the effort will result in legitimate voters being purged from the rolls.
The bipartisan commission — chaired by Vice President Pence — was established by President Trump after he made his widely dismissed allegations that as many as 5 million people voted illegally last November. Its stated purpose is to recommend ways to improve the public’s confidence in the integrity of elections.
Let me remind you who this guy is
Kobach, of course, is no mere functionary. He’s one of the nation’s loudest voices demanding restrictive voting laws. The Yale- and Oxford-educated lawyer has crafted anti-immigration proposals across the country, such as the “show your papers” law in Arizona later largely struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. He’s a rare hybrid: part skilled technocrat, part fuming nativist.
In 2010 he won election as Kansas secretary of State with lurid claims of wide voter fraud. In one instance, he declared sternly he had found evidence of a man voting from the graveyard. Reporters found that the unfortunate fellow was, to paraphrase Monty Python, “not dead yet.” He urges laws to require people to produce a passport, birth certificate, or naturalization papers to register to vote. About 7 percent of eligible voters just don’t have that paperwork. Courts keep striking down the idea. Kobach lashed out at the “communist League of Women Voters” when it challenged one move. (My organization represents the League against Kobach in similar cases.) He won enactment of a new law making him the only secretary of State with criminal prosecution authority. Despite his claims of epidemic fraud, he has convicted nine people all told.
Kobach was the only major official of either party to endorse Trump’s much-mocked notion he really had won the popular vote, when you “subtract” 3 to 5 million illegal voters. He called the claim “absolutely correct” and estimated that “3.2 million aliens voted in the presidential election.”
…Not Trump’s commission. Vice President Mike Pence and Kobach are joined by three other Republicans and only two Democrats. Its themes and work mesh tightly with Republican electoral strategies and support for restrictive laws.
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About Assad, Trump and the state of American Journalism:
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1498813058/
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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