Georgia invites more partisan election bickering with new rule

https://thefulcrum.us/electoral-reforms/georgia-election-board

A new rule invites local Georgia election boards to conduct studies of election results before certifying the election. The author argues that this invites more partisan bickering rather than adding any integrity to the election process. He says the courts are the proper setting in which to settle disputes about vote counts. The local boards have less than a week to complete their work.

[The Washington Post] Insurance lobbyists block federal crackdown on costly retirement advice

Insurance lobbyists block federal crackdown on costly retirement advice

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/08/11/insurance-lobbyists-block-fiduciary-rule/

Siding the end of Chevron deference, a federal court has overturned a consumer protection role designed to prevent the insurance industry and financial advisors from putting elderly clients into securities that are more lucrative for the financial advisor. The Biden administration tried to create a standard of best interest of the investor, but the Court hasn't overturned that. 

 

Jamelle Bouie: J.D. Vance associates oppose democracy

The single most troubling thing about Senator JD Vance — his bizarre understanding of the work of J.R.R. Tolkien notwithstanding — is his close relationship with some of the most extreme elements of the American right.

When asked to explain his worldview, Vance has cited his former boss, Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who has written passionately against democracy ("I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible"), and Curtis Yarvin, a software developer turned blogger and provocateur who believes the United States should transition to monarchy ("If Americans want to change their government, they're going to have to get over their dictator phobia"). Yarvin has also written favorably of human bondage (slavery, he once wrote, "is a natural human relationship") and wondered aloud if apartheid wasn't better for Black South Africans.

While Vance's admirers see him as a uniquely intellectual presence in American politics — a thinker as much as a politician — his right-wing, authoritarian views are largely derivative of the views and preoccupations of Thiel, Yarvin and their community of "postliberal" ideologues and reactionary venture capitalists. Take Vance's view that the United States is in a period of Romanesque decline. "We are in a late republican period," Vance said on a podcast in 2021. "If we're going to push back against it, we're going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with."

Compare this to Thiel's view that "liberalism" and "democracy" are "exhausted," and that to restore the nation "we have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton window." Is this a call for new tax cuts, or does it represent a fundamental hostility toward popular constitutional government in the United States?

In addition to relationships with Thiel and Yarvin, Vance is also in close contact with the bottom feeders on the far right. For nearly two years, according to The Washington Post, Vance was in regular conversation by text message with Chuck Johnson, a notorious Holocaust denier who has spent the better part of a decade promoting right-wing conspiracy theories.

And as my colleague Michelle Goldberg wrote this week, Vance is close enough to Jack Posobiec — an alt-right lunatic who pushed the vile and absurd Pizzagate conspiracy theory and collaborated with online neo-Nazis to spread antisemitic hate — to blurb his latest book, a polemic devoted to the idea that liberals and leftists are Untermenschen who must be stopped lest they destroy civilization. "As they are opposed to humanity itself," Posobiec and his co-author, Joshua Lisec, write, "they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman."

These are the friends and influences that JD Vance brought with him to the United States Senate, and these will almost certainly be the same friends and influences he'll bring to the White House if he is elected vice president.

Dems ' Attorney: Georgia Election Board Passes Rule That Could Delay Election Certification

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/georgia-elections-board-passes-rule-that-could-delay-election-certification/ 

The new rule requires local boards to conduct inquiries to reasonably determine that the vote is correct. This may conflict with statutory requirement to certify the election by the Monday after the election date.

Brennan Center says Musk disseminating election falsehoods

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/elon-musks-grok-spreads-false-election-information

AI chatbot Grok and a Musk-funded Super PAC spread false information via Elon Musk's X social media site:

• Grok: It would be illegal to replace Biden as the Democratic nominee. In reality, he had not yet been nominated.
• America PAC funded by Musk ran ads that led potential voters to enter information on the premise that it would help them register to vote, but it did not direct voters in swing states to actual registration sites.
  

Catalog of crimes a president could commit under Trump v. U.S.A.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/trump-v-united-states-a-foundation-for-authoritarian-actions-an-american-president-can-now-commit-with-impunity/

Reviews the specific crimes mentioned in opinions by dissenting justices. Chilling reading that clarifies that we are living through the most severe constitutional crisis since the Civil War.

Charlie Cooper

Justice Thomas Failed to Disclose More Private Jet Trips, Senate Democrats Say

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/05/us/politics/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-private-jet.html 

Clarence Thomas and his wife flew from Hawaii to New Zealand and a plane paid for by billionaire Harlan Crow. This is yet another undisclosed gift to Justice. Thomas. It raises the question of tax violations as well as ethical violations.