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After spending years telling their members that increased voting access was a bad thing because something, Republicans in Arizona are now frantically urging voters to get to the polls early after they concluded their previous strategy was really stupid.

According to the Washington Post, Arizona GOP leaders are looking at early vote totals and realize their campaign to stifle early voting and push people to vote only on Election Day may suppress voter turnout because people don’t want to stand in lines.

While literally everyone who investigated voting tallies in Arizona found no significant fraud, manipulation or fake ballots after at least a half dozen done around the state after the 2020 election, state GOP leaders have continued to stoke doubts about the validity of the vote count and the legitimacy of early voting to the point that their cult members are camping out, armed, watching ballot drop boxes to prevent non-existent “mules” from dropping off non-existent fake ballots.

DeSantis is an extremely effective conservative governor who has had real policy wins and real cultural wins. Trump isn’t going to be able to take this one down with a dumb nickname. He better have more than that up his sleeve. https://t.co/dOpugSGEBP

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) November 6, 2022

The final 2022 NBC News national survey finds Democrats statistically tied with Republicans, 48% to 47% on the question of “What is your preference for the outcome of this November’s Congressional elections – a Congress controlled by Republicans or a Congress controlled by Democrats?”

Respondents were also tied on the enthusiasm question at 73% each for Dem and GOP voters, an improvement for Dems over October’s survey which found Republicans leading 78 to 70 percent.

Russian bots and trolls have been hitting the digital bricks to help get Republicans elected ahead of the midterms, this time seeing a clear link between GOP control of Congress and getting an edge on the battlefield in Ukraine, the New York Times reports. “It’s clear they are trying to get them to cut off aid and money to Ukraine,” said former Pentagon Army info ops official Alex Plitsas, now with Providence Consulting Group. Other consultants say the effort is smaller scale than the 2016 Russian disinfo campaign, probably owing to the fact that plenty of American right wingers are saying pretty much the same shit. It’s also mainly focused on MAGA social media networks like Gab, Parler, GETTR, and Truth Social. “The audiences are much, much smaller than on your other traditional social media networks. But you can engage the audiences in much more targeted influence ops because those who are on these platforms are generally U.S. conservatives who are maybe more accepting of conspiratorial claims,” said intel analyst Brian Liston.

At one point last week, more than 2,000 barges filled with hundreds of millions of dollars of cargo sat idle on the Mississippi River as Army Corps of Engineers dredgers cleared a navigable course.  In some areas of the river, cargo loads have been limited because heavier barges would ground in shallow channel draught.

According to a report in USA Today, the low water levels in the Mississippi River have caused 25 separate closures to traffic since October 11th.  Each stoppage is estimated to cost $300 million per day to the US economy, and could devastate some markets:  60% of the nation’s corn and soybean exports rely on the Mississippi to get to customers.

Barges are instructed to carry just 65% of their capacity to navigate available channels.  Areas that previously had 30 or 40 feet of water now have ten.  At capacity, a barge can carry around 70 tractor-trailers’ worth of products. 

While the job is frequently left off his resume, Republican Florida Governor and Tweedledum seeking a Tweedledee Ron DeSantis spent a year as a history teacher and sports coach at a pricey Georgia boarding school where he would party with underage students, according to a New York Times report.

DeSantis, then 23-years-old, spent the 2001-2002 school year at Darlington School, a private school for both boarding and local students in Rome, Georgia that currently has tuition and fees for non-boarding students at more than $23,000 for the 2023-24 school year.  Having graduated from Yale in Spring 2001, DeSantis taught there prior to going to law school at Harvard in 2002.

Students remember DeSantis showing up at local student parties, where beer was served, on more than one occasion with at least one person interviewed saying he wondered why a grown man would socialize with underage teenagers.  He also taught that the Civil War was a struggle between two different economic systems–one of which relied on human property–not a war to eliminate slavery (though he reportedly taught that slavery was a bad thing).  His lessons were so biased, students openly challenged them in class, and his Civil War lesson became fodder for a satiric take in a “video yearbook” in which a student voicing DeSantis said the Civil War wasn’t about slavery.

“We’re going to impeach Joe Biden.  That’s how we’re going to impeach Merrick Garland,” overused Stretch Armstrong Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-Georgia) threatens.  “That’s how we’re going to impeach Secretary [of Homeland Security Alejandro] Mayorkas, and I’m going to continue to call for it and push for it ’cause that’s what the American people want.  The polling is there, Steve.  It is there.”

There is no polling showing Americans want anyone impeached, let alone the Secretary of Homeland Security…unless you’re only polling MAGAts at Trump rallies, which is totally something Trafalgar would do.  And besides, shouldn’t officials be impeached because of–oh, I don’t know–actually impeachable acts, not polling?

Democrats made a solid comeback in the Nevada early vote on Friday, state election egghead Jon Ralston reports. “Big mail win for Dems moves Clark firewall to about 29,000,” Ralston wrote just after midnight on Saturday. Ralston followed up later with “Clark Dem firewall up to 28.5K, Washoe Dem lead down to 400. No new rurals yet but Dem statewide lead likely about 6-7K.”

Like something out of a 1930’s European fascist state, the Trump Administration’s Department of Homeland Security compiled dossiers on thousands of anti-racism protesters in an effort to tie them to a fictitious domestic terrorist organization the Department created out of thin air to support a claim made by then-President Donald Trump, Gizmodo reports.

During the summer of 2020, as the nation was swept with demonstrations against racism and police brutality in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, DHS Secretary Chad Wolf directed hundreds of millions of dollars to track hundreds of people participating in the largely-peaceful protests that happened in cities around the nation.

Solely to give Trump political fodder to spew about an organized left-wing group planning the protests, DHS personnel assembled dossiers on anti-racist protestors primarily in the Portland, Oregon area–where white nationalists had been staging demonstrations, marches and attacks for months–to falsely give the impression that a wide-ranging, national liberal group was organizing the protests, which were organic, grassroots efforts.  According to an internal report, DHS compiled background information on the individuals such as their past movements and associations, as well as lists of known associates and family members.  Many of the people had been arrested on federal charges during Portland protests.

Support for third-party spoiler candidate Betsy Johnson has collapsed in the final Emerson College survey of the Oregon governor’s race, putting Democrat Tina Kotek ahead of Republican Christine Drazan 44 to 40 percent, with Johnson polling at 8 percent.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard on Saturday launched a new satellite-carrying rocket as the regime there tries to demonstrate its power amid civil unrest, the AP reports citing state TV, which did not actually show any footage of the supposed successful launch. The IRNA state news agency reported that the rocket would be able to put a satellite weighing 176 lbs into a 310 mile orbit.

• The race I’m watching on Election Night:  Maryland’s 1st Congressional District.  Heather Mizeur (D) v. Andy Harris (R).  A pro-Trump sedition supporter, Harris was comfortable in the Eastern Maryland district, but Mizeur is making a well-funded push that challenges Harris’s dominance.  I don’t expect Mizeur to win–Maryland’s Eastern Shore is as red as Nebraska–but a narrow race will be a big early bellwether for elections across the country.
• Just 21 months into office, Biden has the sixth-highest job creation total of any post-war president.  The only Republican above him on the list:  Ronald Reagan.
• We could potentially lose our Republic because some people are more upset that a gallon of gas costs 50¢ more than they are about a Party who wants to nullify people’s votes.
• They’re targeting migrants, the LGBTQ community, intellectuals and Jews.  Sound familiar?
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume XCIV”

The House January 6th Select Committee on Friday confirmed to the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell that disgraced former President Trump blew through the morning deadline to produce records sought by the committee’s subpoena but they were in continued talks with Donald’s lawyers and have set a new deadline for him to answer. “We have informed the former President’s counsel that he must begin producing records no later than next week and he remains under subpoena for deposition testimony starting on November 14th,” a committee source told Lowell.

Alcoholic white nationalist scumbag Steve Bannon on Friday appealed his conviction in July on a single count of criminal contempt of Congress, Politico’s Kyle Cheney reports.

North Carolina officials are investigating fourteen cases of voter intimidation, voter interference or interference with elections officials around the state, information obtained by Reuters reports, as incidents across the country increase thanks to Republican election denialism.

The North Carolina State Board of Elections is tracking eight instances of potential voter intimidation, one of potential voter interference and five of potential interference with election workers during early voting, according to Reuters.  The incidents, reported on the county level, are spread across nine counties, including the home of Charlotte, Mecklenburg County.

A Mecklenburg County report says a group of self-appointed observers harassed election workers returning to their office, taking their photos and recording their license plate numbers.  In Columbus County, an election worker reported being followed home from work.

Joel M. Koskan, a 44-year-old Republican candidate for the South Dakota state senate, allegedly sexually abused a girl he and his wife adopted, and though the girl told state child welfare officials, she remained in the house, KELO CBS-10 in Sioux Falls reports.

The girl, who was adopted by the couple in 2014 when she was 12-years-old and the abuse started almost immediately.  She didn’t understand Koskan’s touching was abusive until she attended a sexual abuse seminar at a summer camp.  She told camp counselors, who informed state child services officials, but the girl would not talk to state officials because she feared being put back into the state’s foster care system.

Camp counselors kept her at the camp for an additional two weeks, but she eventually had to return to her family home, where her mother accused her of trying to tear the family apart.  Though her mother monitored contact between Koshan and the girl, Koshan installed a video camera in her room so he could monitor her 24/7 on his cell phone.  When she objected to the camera, her parents called her “disrespectful.”

Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell of the US District Court in Washington, DC reacted less-than-optimistically after lawyer John Pierce asked for a delay until October 2023 for the trial date of his client, John George Todd III, a 33-year-old man from Blue Springs, Missouri, the Kansas City Star reports.

“Oh, come on,” she said, noting that she was proposing a December start date. “This case has been pending now for some time. This court’s going to be very, very busy with what we’re anticipating to be a number of new cases being filed by the government.  So I think this case needs to be tried as soon as possible.”

Howell’s comment likely stemmed from the fact that Pierce, while recently retained by Todd, isn’t new to these cases.  The Woodland Hills, California lawyer, a darling of the right-wing, has more clients accused of committing crimes during the January 6th Republican-led domestic terrorist attack on Congress, at least 22, than any other single attorney.

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett on Friday again blocked a challenge to the Biden Administration’s student debt relief program, Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports. It’s not clear who the plaintiffs were because Gerstein fucked up the link to the order.

We’re going to go ahead and openly question if Barrett really is blocking this on the “merits” or if she just wants Republicans to take the L on this issue for fear of aggravating 22 million would-be relief recipients with just days to go before the midterms. It’s like not ACB and the other five assholes couldn’t simply make up a “constitutionally valid” reason to hold up and then squash Biden’s order if they really wanted to. Easier to just let it slide rather than risk it for Republicans at the polls.

It’s sad. @adl used to combat anti-Semitism.

Now they are just a wholly-owned subsidiary of the DNC. https://t.co/BGRhWRU3Cg

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) November 4, 2022