U.S. National

The hand count of 2.1 million paper ballots from 2020’s presidential election in Arizona’s most populous county has reached a turning point. Inside Phoenix’s Veterans Memorial Coliseum, the last boxes of ballots—said by observers to hold the final votes that lifted Joe Biden to a 2020 victory in Maricopa County and statewide—have been manually tallied.

Now the process moves to assessing and working with the data from 70,000-plus hand count tally sheets; from verifying it was accurately entered into spreadsheets on computers in the arena, to the most consequential question. Are the reported results credible? If so, why? If not, why not?

Mexico once had a problem with a local provincial government promoting illegal immigration from the United States into Mexico in order to engage in the illegal slavery of illegally trafficked people. The locality involved was called Texas. For years, Mexico let Texas get away with its lawlessness and immorality, including not paying taxes, and including killing Mexican soldiers. Then it sent an army to lay down the law. Texans warned each other that soldiers were coming “to give liberty to our slaves, and to make slaves of ourselves” (meaning to end the actual enslavement of anyone and to require that people abide by laws and pay taxes).

Ballots to restructure along professional/democratic lines from the New Day Pacifica movement began being distributed June 7, 2021. 

If the Pacifica Network does not remake itself into something workable, its relevance and survival are doubtful.  

With its treasured history and powerful broadcast signals in America’s biggest media markets, the Pacifica Network should be a core electronic flagship for America’s vital pro-democracy movements.  

Instead:

* FOE Pacifica has chased away all but a tiny, tenuous audience;

* It’s in a deep financial abyss;

* Its management, and many of its most crucial meetings, are profoundly dysfunctional; 

* Its recent KPFK-Los Angeles fundraiser was a major disaster, portending even deeper disarray;

* For years FOE Pacifica has failed to produce a passable audit, costing the network millions; 

When Democrats were handed the U.S. Congress in 2006 to end the war on Iraq, and they escalated it in order to “oppose” it in the 2008 elections, it’s possible some of them were not being completely forthright and respectful toward you, their loyal supporters.

When the Democratic legislature in California passes single-payer healthcare whenever it can count on a Republican governor to veto it, but never during Democratic governorships, or when the U.S. Congress ends the war on Yemen when it can count on a Trump veto but not when Biden is in, it’s possible that certain politicians’ expressions of concern for people lacking healthcare or people lacking bomb-free skies are less than completely sincere.

The GOP Trump Cult has lost the American public.

So now it’s denying citizens of youth and color the right to vote.

That war now rages in the US Congress and in states gerrymandered for White Supremacy.

It’ll soon light up the US Supreme Court.

Whoever wins will run America for a long time to come.

It goes like this:

Yesterday (Wednesday, March 3rd) the Democrat-controlled House passed (220-210) the most sweeping omnibus voting rights bill in US history.

HR-1 codifies and protects many of the key procedures by which Americans voted in 2018 and 2020, and in the Georgia US Senate runoffs of 2021.

Those elections were swung by huge turnouts among voters of youth and color. They could cast ballots – and have them counted – thanks to protections prompted by the pandemic and by America’s powerful grassroots Election Protection movement, which has exploded since the stolen vote of Florida 2000.

Waiting in the wings is HR-4, inspired by the recently deceased Rep. John Lewis.

Undaunted, the pandemic can’t stop the Pan African Film Festival and in that immortal show biz tradition, the show must go on! Albeit virtually, as this year in order to stay cinematically safe, America’s largest and best yearly Black-themed filmfest since 1992 is moving online and starting later than usual, kicking off on the last day of Black History Month. 2021’s 29th annual Pan African Virtual Film + Arts Festival is taking place from Feb. 28 – March 14.

Co-directors Royal Kennedy Rodgers and Kathy McCampbell Vance’s Hollywood’s Architect: The Paul R. Williams Story is a nonfiction biopic about the African American talent who rose to become the so-called “Architect of the Stars” when Jim Crow was still the scourge of the land. Born 1894 in L.A., Paul Revere Williams’ real-life story, overcoming adversity, is remarkable, even if it is unremarkably told in this conventionally albeit professionally made documentary.

The governors of New York and California—the most populous states led by Democrats—now symbolize how slick liberal images are no substitute for genuinely progressive priorities.

After 10 years as New York's governor, Andrew Cuomo is facing an uproar over revelations that his administration intentionally and drastically undercounted the deaths from COVID in nursing homes. Meanwhile, in California, the once-bright political glow of Gavin Newsom has dimmed, in large part because of personally hypocritical elitism and a zig-zag "middle ground" approach to public-health safeguards during the pandemic, unduly deferring to business interests.

he Republican Party’s post 2020 state-by-state assault on voting rights has begun with the demand that all mailed-in paper ballots include photo ID.

The Jim Crow racism is beyond obvious. Instead of having to guess, mailed-in photo ID lets election officials quickly identify which ballots came from citizens of color … and then pitch them on the spot. By banning student IDs, they can also eliminate ballots coming from college campuses.

Thus the Nixon-Trump/Atwater-Rove-Bannon Republicans have picked up the KKK burning cross straight from hands of the Jim Crow Democrats.

They’re flooding at least 28 state legislatures with more than a hundred laws meant to undermine American democracy. 2020 taught them that, in Trump’s own words, if people of youth and color could cast ballots and have them reliably counted, “you’d never have another Republican elected again.”

Hours after President Biden declared that “democracy has prevailed” during his inaugural address, longtime Republican strategist Karl Rove urged Republicans to pressure GOP election officials and legislators to create “a model election code” to reconsider the laws surrounding 2020’s two voting options that lead to the presidential election’s record turnout.

“Republicans should also encourage GOP secretaries of state and state lawmakers to develop a model election code,” Rove wrote in a January 20 commentary for the Wall Street Journal entitled, “The Republican Future Starts Now.”

“The job of proposing electoral reforms shouldn’t be based on the unsupported claims of widespread fraud peddled by Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell,” Rove continued. “Instead, the goal should be to suggest measures that restore public confidence in our democracy. How do states with extensive mail-in and early voting like Florida and Texas get it right?”