Showing posts with label BRIAN K. PRITCHARD. Show all posts

Saturday, March 30, 2024

Journalism isn't a crime—but Russia's still detaining this US reporter

March 29, 2024

Today marks exactly one year since Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested in Russia on what American officials say are false charges of espionage.

He's been in jail ever since.

His employer—as well as other journalists, his family, and the US government—have gone to great lengths to keep his name in the headlines and the pressure on Russia to release him. Today, the Wall Street Journal left a huge space blank on its front page, under the headline, "His story should be here," alongside other stories on Gershkovich's detention and the threats authoritarians pose to journalists around the world. (More than 520 journalists are imprisoned worldwide, according to the group Reporters Without Borders.) It's worth checking out the paper's full package of coverage, published today, on what it calls his "stolen year": 365 days of missed soccer games, friends' weddings, planned vacations...and, of course, a crazy year in Russia, including the death of Aleksei Navalany, Putin's most prominent critic within Russia, in a remote prison near the Arctic Circle in February.

Check out my full post for everything to know about Gershkovich's arrest and detainment, and how he's being remembered today. And remember: Journalism is not a crime.

—Julianne McShane

Wall Street Journal Marks One Year Since Evan Gershkovich’s Arrest in Russia

Journalism is not a crime.

BY JULIANNE MCSHANE

FROM MOTHER JONES

Mother Jones and Grist team up for an Earth Week event!

Join Mother Jones, Grist, and the Tishman Environment and Design Center at The New School on April 23 at 7:30 p.m. ET as leaders in the environmental justice space discuss equity, infrastructure, jobs, and the urban energy transition. Featuring the “father of environmental justice,” Dr. Robert Bullard (Texas Southern University, Bullard Center for Environmental & Climate Justice), Jade Begay (Indigenous rights advocate and climate researcher), and Leah Thomas (intersectional environmentalist), we’ll dig into the issues, opportunities, and solutions driving an equitable transformation for America. For tickets, click this link.

A GOP official and election denier voted illegally nine times. That's not even the worst part.

BY INAE OH

It’s easy to see the glaring hypocrisy of Brian Pritchard, the Republican official in Georgia and outspoken election denier, who was found guilty this week of voting illegally nine times. A judge apparently did not buy Pritchard’s claims that he had been unaware that his probation from felony forgery charges had not ended when he illegally cast his vote. All this is ironic considering voter fraud is an enduring conservative boogeyman despite scant evidence that such rampant fraud exists.

Yet any schadenfreude that might be derived from Pritchard’s voting violations, which resulted in an order on Wednesday to pay a $5,000 fine and receive a public reprimand, is short-lived. It seems stunted by another piece of headline-making voter fraud news this week: A Texas court of appeals reversed a five-year prison sentence for Crystal Mason, a Black woman who voted illegally in 2016 after unintentionally casting her ballot while technically still a felon under Texas law. (The state bars convicted felons from voting until a supervised release has been completed.)

In the simplest terms, the reversal is good news; it’s hard not to feel emotional reading Mason’s statement celebrating that she will remain a “free Black woman.” But the wildly disparate punishments handed to Mason and Pritchard—a white man—over incredibly similar offenses once again underscores the deep flaws of a system borne out of a push to fix a virtually nonexistent problem. That Mason’s ordeal happened under the watch of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who led the war on voter fraud while under indictment for securities fraud, adds to the dissonance. But for conservatives who have long relied on voter fraud fears to block ballot access, that whiplashing dissonance is precisely the point. As my colleague Pema Levy wrote in 2019:

Raising fears of fraud in order to make it harder for people—particularly people fitting certain demographic profiles—to vote didn’t start with [the Trump] administration, or even in the past 100 years. As Harvard University historian Alexander Keyssar lays out in his 2000 book, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, the tactic dates back to the early decades of the 19th century. Throughout US history, politicians and activists ginned up stories about fraud in order to keep their opponents from the polls. “Legislative debates were sprinkled heavily with tales of ballot box stuffing, miscounts, hordes of immigrants lined up to vote as the machine instructed, men trooping from precinct to precinct to vote early and often,” he writes.

Put another way, these laws were never meant to hurt Brian Pritchard. This week, we were reminded of that once again.

Does “and” really mean “and”? Not always, the Supreme Court rules.

BY DANIEL KING

Surge of US-led fossil fuel projects could blow up Paris climate goals

BY OLIVER MILMAN

Will RFK Jr. and other third-party candidates help doom democracy?

It’s tough to break the partisan duopoloy without empowering spoilers.

BY DAVID CORN

MOTHER JONES MEMBERSHIP UPDATE

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Friday, March 29, 2024

Georgia Republican Party Vice Chairman Brian K. Pritchard is determined to have voted illegally nine times

MAGA! ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION?
HOW COME THE VOTER FRAUDS ARE REPUBLICANS?
A SLAP ON THE WRIST?

REPEAT AFTER ME:

Georgia Republican Party Vice Chairman Brian K. Pritchard is determined to have voted illegally nine times Georgia Republican Party Vice Chairman Brian K. Pritchard is determined to have voted illegally nine times Georgia Republican Party Vice Chairman Brian K. Pritchard is determined to have voted illegally nine times

LOL: Georgia Republican official voted illegally...NINE TIMES

WHILE SERVING PROBATION FOR FELONY CHECK FORGERY CHARGES