In an interview this morning with CNN’s Dana Bash, Arizona Republican nominee for governor Kari Lake refused to say that she would accept the results of the upcoming election-- unless she wins. Former president Trump said the same in 2020, and now more than half of the Republican nominees in the midterm elections have refused to say that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election because, they allege, there was voter fraud. This position is an astonishing rejection of the whole premise on which this nation was founded: that voters have the right to choose their leaders.
That right was established in the Declaration of Independence separating the 13 British colonies on the North American continent from allegiance to King George III. That Declaration rejected the idea of social hierarchies in which some men were better than others and should rule their inferiors. Instead, it set out a new principle of government, establishing that “all men are created equal” and that governments derive “their just power from the consent of the governed.”
Republicans’ rejection of the idea that voters have the right to choose their leaders is not a new phenomenon. It is part and parcel of Republican governance since the 1980s, when it became clear to Republican leaders that their “supply-side economics,” a program designed to put more money into the hands of those at the top of the economy, was not actually popular with voters, who recognized that cutting taxes and services did not, in fact, result in more tax revenue and rising standards of living. They threatened to throw the Republicans out of office and put back in place the Democrats’ policies of using the government to build the economy from the bottom up.
So, to protect President Ronald Reagan’s second round of tax cuts in 1986, Republicans began to talk of cutting down Democratic voting through a “ballot integrity” initiative, estimating that their plans could “eliminate at least 60–80,000 folks from the rolls” in Louisiana. “If it’s a close race…, this could keep the Black vote down considerably,” a regional director of the Republican National Committee wrote.
When Democrats countered by expanding voting through the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, more commonly known as the Motor Voter Act, a New York Times writer said Republicans saw the law “as special efforts to enroll core Democratic constituencies in welfare and jobless-benefits offices.” While Democrats thought it was important to enfranchise “poor people…people who can’t afford cars, people who can’t afford nice houses,” Republicans, led by then–House minority whip Newt Gingrich of Georgia, predicted “a wave of fraudulent voting by illegal immigrants.”
From there it was a short step to insisting that Republicans lost elections not because their ideas were unpopular, but because Democrats cheated. In 1994, losing candidates charged, without evidence, that Democrats won elections with “voter fraud.” In California, for example, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s opponent, who had spent $28 million of his own money on the race but lost by about 160,000 votes, said on “Larry King Live” that “frankly, the fraud is overwhelming” and that once he found evidence, he would share it to demand “a new election.” That evidence never materialized, but in February 1995 the losing candidate finally made a statement saying he would stop litigating despite “massive deficiencies in the California election system,” in the interest of “a thorough bipartisan investigation and solutions to those problems.”
In 1996, House and Senate Republicans each launched yearlong investigations into what they insisted were problematic elections, with Gingrich, by then House speaker, telling reporters: '“We now have proof of a sufficient number of noncitizens voting that it may well have affected at least one election for Congress,” although the House Oversight Committee said the evidence did not support his allegations.
In the Senate, after a 10-month investigation, the Republican-dominated Rules Committee voted 16 to 0 to dismiss accusations of voter fraud in the election of Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu that cost her $500,000 in legal fees and the committee $250,000. Her opponent, whose supporters wore small socks on their lapels with the words “Don’t Get Cold Feet. Sock It To Voter Fraud,” still refused to concede, saying that “the Senate has become so partisan it has become difficult to get to the truth.”
There was nothing to the cases, but keeping them in front of the media for a year helped to convince Americans that voter fraud was a serious issue and that Democrats were winning elections thanks to illegal, usually immigrant, voters. Amplified by the new talk radio hosts and, by the mid-1990s, the Fox News Channel, Republicans increasingly argued that Democrats were owned by “special interests” who were corrupting the system, pushing what they called “socialism”—that is, legislation that provided a basic social safety net and regulated business—on “real” Americans who, they insisted, wanted rugged individualism. If Democrats really were un-American, it only made sense to keep such dangerous voters from the polls.
In 1998, the Florida legislature passed a law to “maintain” the state’s voter lists, using a private company to purge the voter files of names believed to belong to convicted felons, dead people, duplicates, and so on. The law placed the burden of staying on the voter lists on individuals, who had to justify their right to be on them. The law purged up to 100,000 legitimate Florida voters, most of them Black voters presumed to vote Democratic, before the 2000 election, in which Republican candidate George W. Bush won the state by 537 votes, giving him the Electoral College although he lost the popular vote.
Voting restrictions had begun, but they really took off after the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision gutted the provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act requiring preclearance from the federal government before states with a history of racial discrimination changed their election laws. Now, less than a decade later, Republican Florida governor Ron DeSantis has been open about suppressing Democratic votes, easing voting restrictions for three reliably Republican counties devastated by Hurricane Ian but refusing to adjust the restrictions in hard-hit, Democratic-leaning Orange County.
Open attacks on Democrats in the lead-up to this year’s midterms justify that voter suppression. Last week, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) suggested that Black Americans are criminals who “want to take over what you got,” and Republican candidates are running ads showing mug shots of Black men. Today, Trump chided American Jews for not sufficiently appreciating him; he warned them to “get their act together…[b]efore it’s too late.” Republican lawmakers have left those racist and antisemitic statements unchallenged.
Those attacks also justify ignoring Democratic election victories, for if Democratic voters are undermining the country, it only makes sense that their choices should be ignored. This argument was exactly how reactionary white Democrats justified the 1898 coup in Wilmington, North Carolina, when they overthrew a legitimately elected government of white Populists and Black Republicans. Issuing a “White Declaration of Independence,” they claimed “the intelligent citizens of this community owning 95 percent of the property” were taking over because those elected were not fit to run a government. Like the Wilmington plotters, Trump supporters insisted they were defending the nation from a “stolen” election when they attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to cancel the results of the 2020 Democratic victory.
It was not so very long ago that historians taught the Wilmington coup as a shocking anomaly in our democratic system, but now, 124 years after it happened, it is current again. Modern-day Republicans appear to reject not only the idea they could lose an election fairly, but also the fundamental principle, established in the Declaration of Independence, that all Americans have a right to consent to their government.
A Woburn police officer resigned Monday amid allegations he participated in and helped plan the violent 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., an event that included neo-Nazi groups and claimed the life of a counterprotester.
Officer John Donnelly, who was placed on paid leave last week after the allegations surfaced, submitted a letter of resignation to Woburn police Chief Robert Rufo Jr. and Mayor Scott Galvin on Monday, and it was “promptly accepted,” Rufo and Galvin said in a statement.
Donnelly could not be immediately reached for comment on Monday.
Despite his resignation, Donnelly remains the focus of an internal affairs investigation by the Police Department, the statement said.
“A thorough finding of fact is necessary in this situation, and our investigation shall continue,” Rufo said in the statement. “For decades, police chiefs across the commonwealth have called for a statewide certification process to ensure that allegations of misconduct are thoroughly investigated, and bad actors are held accountable. That will be our focus moving forward. The men and women of the Woburn Police Department are united in disavowing hate in all its forms.”
Galvin said hate has no place in Woburn or its Police Department.
“The City of Woburn stands together in its opposition to hate and violence, and we will emerge stronger as a community,” he said in the statement.
Donnelly also lost his job as a real estate agent for Century 21 last week, according to a Friday statement from the company.
Rufo will report the findings of the department’s investigation to Galvin and the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission, the statement said. The department opened the investigation and placed Donnelly on leave after “serious allegations were brought” to the department indicating Donnelly was involved in the rally, the statement said.
On Friday, a day after the Police Department announced the allegations against Donnelly, Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan’s office said it was reviewing all cases that he was involved in.
The Aug. 12, 2017, rally in Charlottesville, which involved members of neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, turned violent and led to the death of antiracism activist Heather Heyer, one of several counterdemonstrators who were struck by a car driven by avowed white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr.
Fields was sentenced to life plus 419 years for fatally striking Heyer.
Donnelly was a reserve officer at the time of the rally, officials said last week.
Republicans want midterm voters to believe lies about crime, inflation and taxes. This is what they’re claiming – followed by the facts
Republicans are telling three lies they hope will swing the midterms. They involve crime, inflation, and taxes. Here’s what Republicans are claiming, followed by the facts.
1. They claim that crime is rising because Democrats have been “soft” on crime
This is pure rubbish. Rising crime rates are due to the proliferation of guns, which Republicans refuse to control.
Here are the facts:
While violent crime rose 28% from 2019 to 2020, gun homicides rose 35%. States that have weakened gun laws have seen gun crime surge. Clearly, a major driver of the national increase in violence is the easy availability of guns.
The violence can’t be explained by any of the Republican talking points about “soft-on-crime” Democrats.
Lack of police funding? Baloney. Democratic-run major cities spend 38% more on policing per person than Republican-run cities, and 80% of the largest cities increased police funding from 2019 to 2022.
Criminal justice reforms? Wrong. Data shows that wherever bail reforms have been implemented, re-arrest rates remain stable. Data from major cities shows no connection between the policies of progressive prosecutors and changes in crime rates.
Research has repeatedly shown that crime is rising faster in Republican, Trump-supporting states. The thinktank Third Way found that in 2020, per capita murder rates were 40% higher in states won by Trump than in those won by Joe Biden.
Let’s be clear: it’s been Republican policies that have made it easier for people to get and carry guns. Republicans are lying about the real cause of rising crime to protect their patrons – gun manufacturers.
2. They claim that inflation is due to Biden’s spending, and wage increases
Baloney. The major cause of the current inflation is the global post-pandemic shortage of all sorts of things, coupled with Putin’s war in Ukraine and China’s lockdowns.
The major domestic cause of the current inflation is big corporations that have been taking advantage of inflation by raising their prices higher than their increasing costs.
Here are the facts:
Inflation can’t be explained by any of the Republican talking points.
Biden’s spending? Rubbish again. That can’t be causing our current inflation because inflation has broken out everywhere around the world, often at much higher rates than in the US.
Besides, heavy spending by the US government began in 2020, before the Biden administration, in order to protect Americans and the economy from the ravages of Covid-19 – and it was necessary.
American workers getting wage increases? Wages can’t be pushing inflation because wages have been increasing at a slower pace than prices – leaving most workers worse off.
The biggest domestic culprits are big corporations using inflation as an excuse to raise prices above their own cost increases, resulting in near-record profits.
US corporate profits are at the highest margins since 1950 – while consumers are paying through the nose.
Let’s be clear: the biggest domestic cause of inflation is corporate power. Republicans are lying about this to protect their big corporate patrons.
3. They say Democrats voted to hire an army of IRS agents who will audit and harass the middle class
Nonsense. The IRS won’t be going after the middle class. It will be going after ultra-wealthy tax cheats.
Here are the facts:
The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in July, provides funding to begin to get IRS staffing back to what it was before 2010, after which Republicans diminished staff by roughly 30%, despite increases since then in the number of Americans filing tax returns.
The extra staff are needed to boost efforts against high-end tax evasion – which is more difficult to root out, because the ultra-wealthy hire squads of accountants and tax attorneys to hide their taxable incomes.
The treasury department and the IRS have made it clear that audit rates for households earning $400,000 or under will remain the same.
Let’s be clear: the IRS needs extra resources to go after rich tax cheats. Republicans are lying about what the IRS will do with the new funding to protect their ultra-wealthy patrons.
None of these three lies is as brazen and damaging as Trump’s big lie. But they’re all being used by Republican candidates in these last weeks before the midterms.
Vineyard Wind project making progress in Barnstable
Heather McCarron
Cape Cod Times
On a recent morning in Charlestown, state Rep. Jeffrey Roy stood, amazed, as he watched a giant wind turbine paddle put through the paces at the Wind Technology Testing Center.
"They were testing the blades that are going to be used in the Vineyard Wind project," he said, in a telephone interview afterwards. "They're 170 meters. They're really huge."
To put that into perspective, 170 meters is equivalent to nearly 558 feet — longer than the standard 360-foot NFL football field.
"They're bending them, moving them, and pulling them, looking for any signs of fatigue," said Roy, a Democrat from Franklin.
As House chairman of the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy, Roy has been at the front of Massachusetts' pioneering off-shore wind wagon train. He has long been an advocate for sustainable, clean energy, and is excited to see Massachusetts taking the lead with Vineyard Wind, the nation's first commercial-scale, off-shore wind project.
"This is a huge moment for Massachusetts in the development of the wind industry," said Roy.
The official groundbreaking on the project was at Barnstable's Covell's Beach on Nov. 18 last year — an occasion Roy said was a "huge moment" in state history.
He and the rest of his committee are regularly briefed on the project's progress, which Roy said has been moving along well, with parts moving at the Charlestown testing facility; in New Bedford, where the turbines will be constructed, and in Barnstable, where Vineyard Wind will land its two submarine transmission cables.
Andrew Doba, director of communications for Vineyard Wind, said everyone working on the project shares the same sense of excitement as state and local leaders.
"It's not often you get a front-row seat for the launch of a brand new industry," he said.
Over last winter, conduits were tunneled several feet under the beach to receive the cables that will eventually transport energy generated at the wind farm 35 miles out to sea — the company's lease site is about 15 miles south of Martha's Vineyard, in shallow waters just west of the Nantucket Shoals.
As of now, Doba reported, "we have completed the horizontal directional drilling under the beach."
Work was put on hold during the summer, which is the town's busy beachgoing season. The project resumed in mid-September with staging and construction work within the Covell's Beach parking lot. Parking is limited as a result, but a portion of the lot will remain open to the public throughout the project, which will continue into the spring.
At Covell's Beach, the two major submarine cables will be split into six transmission lines, which will be run under public roadways following a carefully selected route that avoids sensitive habitats.
"The cables will run for about 10 miles from the beach to the substation," said Doba.
Digging under town roads to install duct banks for the transmission lines has started as well. Duct banks, comprised of conduits encased in reinforced concrete, provide protected pathways for the buried cables.
Town saving $4M on sewage pipe installation
In tandem with the duct bank work, Barnstable is installing sewer lines, which is saving the town close to $4 million, Doba said. Vineyard Wind is footing the bill to place the sewer lines along with the transmission cables, as well as to repave the roads, curb to curb.
In Hyannis, work is also ongoing on the on-shore substation which will receive the transmission cables and distribute power from there, Doba said.
"That's made a ton of progress," he said.
Vineyard Wind expects to begin generating power by the end of next year, with a projected total completion of the project in 2024.
Eventually, 62 wind turbines will also be erected out beyond the Vineyard, each spaced one nautical mile apart. Originally, Vineyard Wind considered building 84 turbines, but during the three-year permitting process technology advanced, allowing the switch to fewer turbines, Doba said.
Plans now call for using General Electric Haliade-X turbines, which can each generate 13 megawatts of electricity. When it's fully operational, Vineyard Wind it will generate 800 megawatts each year, according to Doba. This will power more than 400,000 homes, an equivalent of removing 325,000 vehicles from roadways.
Components of the turbines should arrive in New Bedford for assembly sometime next year, Doba said.
New Bedford's role in project
Roy said New Bedford is a key player in getting the pieces put together. Each turbine, he said, weighs 50 tons. Since a typical port can't handle that kind of weight, a new port is planned.
"Right now it's an empty lot and it's huge," Roy said. "But once they get this thing up and running, and you see some of the activity, it will be incredible."
The process will include building the turbine towers, which come in sections, and attaching the enormous blades.
"Then they have to transport them out to the site," Roy said.
He already has an idea of what it all will look like, having traveled to Denmark earlier this year with the Alliance for Business Leadership to view the Middlegrunden Offshore Wind Farm in the Oresund between Denmark and Sweden, as well as to visit the Port of Esbjerg — a leading port in Europe for handling and shipping out wind-generated electricity.
"Esberg gave me a glimpse of what we can expect," Roy said, noting Denmark is a world leader in the off-shore wind industry.
Massachusetts, he said, is set to be like the "Saudi Arabia of wind power" in the United States. Besides Vineyard Wind, which is the trailblazer, other companies are pursuing projects south of the Vineyard.
"There are seven lease areas out there," Roy said. "Right now we've got Vineyard Wind. Mayflower Wind is coming in right after them, and then we have a third company that's bid came in. That would be Avangrid."
New York is dipping its toe in the off-shore wind industry as well. The state recently held an auction for lease areas off its shores, Roy said.
"You're going to see lease areas all up and down the East Coast, all the way up to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and down to the Carolinas," he said.
National goal for wind power
President Biden has set a goal of generating 30 gigawatts of wind power by 2030.
"The lease areas of Massachusetts have a capacity of 11 gigawatts," Roy noted. "So we alone have over a third of the national goal. It's simply amazing."
He said waters south of the Vineyard are shallow, which can accommodate fixed towers into the ocean floor.
"It's also the most robust wind in the entire contiguous United States, so it's a perfect conflation of location and wind speed," Roy said.
And that's why in his role as a chairman of the state committee charged with looking at energy and utilities he has been pushing to take advantage of "this incredible capacity that we have."
"The potential is enormous. It's a robust source of clean energy, a robust source of new jobs, and it's clean and green," he said. "I am truly excited by what I see."
Right-wing anger over a defamation judgment reflects disgust at seeing the rules applied to them.
Too many on the right, Alex Jones is a free-speech martyr. On Wednesday, the conspiracy theorist was hit with a nearly $1 billion defamation judgment, after having smeared the families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre as “crisis actors” in a government plot to ban guns. Twenty first graders and six teachers were killed in the shooting.
In response to the verdict, the second time a court has found Jones liable, prominent conservative-media figures began insisting that Jones’s free-speech rights had been violated. The right-wing personality Charlie Kirk tweeted, “This isn’t about calculating real damages from Alex Jones. This is about sending a message: If you upset the Regime, they will destroy you, completely and utterly, forever.” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia called Jones a victim of “political persecution” because “all he did was speak words.”
Defamation typically involves words, and defamation is a long-recognized exception to the First Amendment’s protections. There is no dispute about the falsehood of Jones’s conspiratorial statements regarding the Sandy Hook massacre, that “the whole thing was fake,” that it was “completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured.” After all, during the first defamation trial in Texas, Jones acknowledged that the massacre was “100% real.” There is also no dispute about whether he made the statements. As a result of Jones’s false claims, the families of those slain in Sandy Hook were subjected to years of online harassment from malicious idiots who believed his lies. Reasonable people can disagree about the size of the monetary award, but Jones’s liability seems a foregone conclusion. For his part, Jones faced default judgments because he refused to fully cooperate with the process, while also attacking the proceedings as “show trials.”
Tellingly, there were very few defenses of what he actually said, and more reputable conservative outlets simply posted news of the verdict without much commentary. Most of the time, conservatives argue that it is not easy enough to sue for defamation. The standard for defamation of public figures in the United States is high in order to protect freedom of speech in general and political debate in particular. Altering that standard would make speech in America less free. But the response of many right-wing figures to the Jones verdict shows that rather than “freedom of speech,” what they actually have in mind is an arrangement in which liberal speech is chilled by exacting legal standards that do not apply to conservatives. Although few conservative elites explicitly hold this position, the story of the Republican Party in the last decade is one of ideas from the fringe migrating to a position of dominance within the party.
While running for president in 2016, Donald Trump declared his intention to “open up the libel laws.” Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have voiced support for overturning the landmark 1964 case New York Times Company v. Sullivan, which set the legal standard for defamation high for those deemed to be “public figures.” Under that standard, known as “actual malice,” a public figure typically has to prove that the person they are suing either knew what they said to be false or held a “reckless disregard” for whether it was true. Thomas’s call has been echoed by a chorus of conservative pundits, including the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky, who complained that thanks to Times v. Sullivan, “the media can get away with printing or saying just about anything they want, no matter how false or malicious.”
The verdict against Jones proves that’s actually not true, that even with the admirably high bar set by Times v. Sullivan, it is possible for powerful media figures to be held accountable for deliberately spreading blatant falsehoods. And although Jones appears to make most of his money cynically hawking snake-oil supplements to the gullible, his popularity means that he qualifies as a powerful media figure. In fact, to the extent conservatives believe that the law should protect ordinary citizens without important media platforms from those who have and wield them maliciously, a popular fabulist held liable for smearing people whose loved ones were murdered in order to sell dietary supplements would seem to be an example of the system working properly.
Given all that, you would think that conservatives would be rejoicing over the Sandy Hook verdict, rather than engaging in hysterics about being silenced by the “regime.” But they’re not, because lowering the bar for defamation lawsuits was never about countering falsehoods in the press; it was about silencing criticism of conservatives. Both Trump and his supporters imagined that if the actual-malice standard were overturned and defamation standards eased, they would have an easier time intimidating mainstream media outlets with legal threats, forcing them to provide Republicans with more positive coverage.
Trump’s recent lawsuit against CNN provides a useful example. In it, Trump’s attorneys complain that CNN has aired segments where individuals have used “ever-more scandalous, false, and defamatory labels” such as “‘Russian lackey,’ ‘insurrectionist,’ and ultimately ‘Hitler.’” Whether you think these remarks are stupid or accurate, they are obvious statements of opinion, just as the lawsuit’s description of CNN as the “stuff of tabloids” is a statement of opinion. It’s unlikely a single American president since World War II hasn’t been compared to Hitler by someone who doesn’t like him very much.
Nevertheless, Trump’s attorneys argued, citing the late federal judge Laurence Silberman, that the actual-malice standard should not apply, because “ideological homogeneity in the media—or in the channels of information distribution—risks repressing certain ideas from the public consciousness just as surely as if access were restricted by the government.” In other words, speech critical of conservatives should be held to a different legal standard than conservative speech. Indeed, Silberman contemplated overturning Sullivan as a means to punish the media for, in his view, being too liberal, itself a form of unconstitutional state retaliation against speech.
This is the true force behind the right-wing reaction to the Jones verdict, and the campaign to overturn Times v. Sullivan. Even under the current exacting standard, Jones was held liable in multiple lawsuits. But when conservatives defend him as a free-speech martyr while demanding Sullivan be overturned, they are really saying that only their speech should be protected. Conservatives like Jones should be able to defame without consequence, but harsh criticism of powerful right-wing politicians should be subject to legal sanction.
In the most rosy possible scenario, abandoning the actual malice standard would make it easier for wealthy and powerful people of any political stripe to silence their critics. Applied neutrally, it could be far more dangerous for many conservative outlets than mainstream ones. But that is not the society these conservatives imagine when they defend their own right to defame others while insisting that the law itself should be changed to make it easier for powerful political figures to silence their critics. What they conceive of is a society, backed by right-wing control of the federal judiciary, in which they have a right to say whatever they want about you, and you have a right to shut up and like it.
