Title
Get New Friends
Good morning! It’s Monday October 26th.
National Pumpkin Day
A day made for a Trader Joe’s.
And now, the news.
A&M Shooting
-via NBC News
We start as we start here in America, with twelve people injured after a shooting near Florida’s A&M University’s Bragg Memorial Stadium. The shooting occurred hours after the homecoming football game and appears to have occurred after an altercation between the shooter and one or two other people.
No arrests have been made yet, but police believe there was only one shooter.
Twelve people… eleven shot and one injured as they were fleeing.
This was one of five mass shootings over the weekend, bringing the number of mass shootings this year to 386. Today is the 299th day of the year.
Kenyan Bus Accident
-via NBC News
In Kenya, at least 22 people were killed after a bus hit a truck on a main highway. The same spot where, just three weeks ago, 17 people were killed in a bus accident.
Passengers were going home after a funeral for their pastor when the accident occurred.
Hey! How many other horrific elements can we add here? It’s like a tragedy-themed Mad Libs.
Speeding and poor road conditions were to blame for the previous accident and appear to be the case here as well.
María Corina Machado
-via NY Times
“I am here. With you all.”
That is how Venezuela’s María Corina Machado announced her return to the country after ten months away. As the opposition leader, Machado would have won the last election, but a Maduro-court voted her ineligible, so Edmundo González Urrutia ran in her place and, by all third-party accounts, won the election, only for Maduro to stay in office. To be clear, many Venezuelans don't even consider him to have been president of Venezuela, a view this podcast shares because I have this crazy habit of listening to people who know more than me.
It’s a habit I should break, frankly.
Anyway, the point is that Machado has returned to Venezuela and is continuing her push to hold a presidential election by July. She has indicated that she wants to run in that race.
Machado said she’s tried multiple times to return to the country, but has been blocked on at least seven occasions by authorities she hasn’t wanted to name. The Trump administration says they never tried to block her return.
Regardless of whether it's true or not, I genuinely can’t say so; I’m not insinuating one way or another, but what is true is that after removing Maduro, Trump elevated Delcy Rodríguez, who was the Executive Vice President under Maduro. She co-signed and, in many ways, helped push forward many of the horrors that Maduro brought to the country.
For many Venezuelans, Rodríguez’s elevation to interim president means that Trump has failed to bring the change he promised to Venezuela.
Following the announcement of her return, our own wordsmith-in-chief had this to say: “I don’t know anything about it, but I think she’s a very nice woman. She gave me her Nobel Prize, so how can I say anything else? And I hope she’s safe, she’s a very nice woman. But we’re doing really well in Venezuela.”
His brain is soup.
Serbian Election
-via PBS News
Staying in international election news… Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic (voo-sick), who served as Prime Minister from 2014 to 2017 before becoming the president… is out.
As president, Vucic supplied military equipment and ammunition to Israel, pursued EU candidate status but refused to Western economic sanctions against Russia, deepened economic ties and free-trade deals with China, promised to tackle the same organized crime that others found him directly tied to, criticized journalists, including calling one woman an “imbecile”, curtailed freedom of press, and oversaw the curbing of civil liberties.
He has been called, by many, a strongman and autocrat.
During his presidency, online trolls surged, praising Vucic and spreading his lies. He even had a few employees run fake accounts, as well as the Facebook page associated with a Serbian branch of Breitbart News.
Sound familiar?
Yeah.
And you know what? Now he’s out. He resigned in September so that he could run as a prime ministerial candidate in snap parliamentary elections. Those were held over the weekend, and he lost so badly that he conceded.
He lost because people decided they were tired of the terrible job he was doing and decided to vote him out.
All over the country, people are celebrating his ousting.
Eight Days
And I want you to be thinking about that last story when I tell you these next little lowlights.
First, in Alaska, where AG Todd Blanche announced that if Republican Dan Sullivan loses the Senate race… someone must have cheated.
If he wins? Everything’s cool.
If he loses? The only possibility is that it’s because someone cheated. Sure sure. Makes sense.
This all stems from the fact that there are two Dan Sullivans on the ballot.
There’s current Senator Dan Sullivan, and then another Dan Sullivan who’s running with no party affiliation.
Blanche says they filed this suit, which would only go through if Sullivan loses, because he believes the lesser-known Sullivan is a Democratic ploy to pull votes from the incumbent. But the incumbent will be listed as a Republican and incumbent, while the other obviously will not. If Sullivan loses, Blanche maintains they’re not trying to overturn the results unless it’s confirmed that enough voters were confused by the two Sullivans to throw the election.
Even then it’s a hard political theory to pass, with legal experts (and local Kims) noting that although the suit cites a clause in the preamble to the National Voter Registration Act that says states have to "protect the integrity" of elections and the Act gives federal courts grounds to overturn state elections, that’s not enough to go against the voters.
Because if their entire legal basis is “protect the integrity” of the election… wouldn’t overturning the will of the voters be in direct contrast to that?
One would assume!
So they can run their mouths all they want, but really the only way this would even be a thing is if the difference between the incumbent Sullivan and Mary Peltola (the Democrat) is however few votes this other Sullivan gets. And even then you could argue that’s just bad campaigning on both Sullivan’s parts. Because they’ll actually be listed as Daniel S. Sullivan (incumbent, registered Republican) and Daniel J. Sullivan (he will have no party affiliation under his name). So that should have been a part of their campaign from the jump.
But of course, before his current gig, Blanche was Trump’s lawyer so being around people that don’t know how to accept when they’ve lost a campaign is nothing new. Get new friends, ya dork.
They’re also trying to muck around in California, as an appeals court took an emergency pretty please from the DOJ, who’s trying to step in and on our midterm counting process.
We’re actually like, super great at counting, thanks. One of many skills that we have here in the poppy state.
And luckily a Trump-appointed judge agrees, saying that California appears to have legal authority to handle its elections on its own (as dictated by the Constitush, which confirms that states run our own elections and some loser insurrectionist doesn’t get to step in… that’s a loose reading of the Constitutsh but I’ve read it enough to be able to quote it in cute little ways like that). The judge also agreed that just because Congress passed a pointless law against noncitizens voting doesn’t mean the Justice Department has authority to regulate California voting.
Why do I say pointless?
Because it hardly happens!
In fact, in all of history since 1982 (so like… barely of history but that’s the year that the Heritage Foundation, a far-right think tank group that is very focused on trying to suppress the vote and so they have a link on their website (which I’m not linking in show notes because while you’re welcome to take a look yourself I’m not going to point traffic to them) showing every single case of voter fraud since 1982).
Anyway, in all of history since 1982, there were only about 19 more causes of fraud by voters then there were people storming the capitol at the motivation of Donald Trump.
Between 1,575 and 1,600 people were arrested for their actions on January 6th.
There are 1,619 cases of fraud by voters on the Heritage Foundation’s website. And not all of those were criminal charges. 138 were clearly accidents and resulted in a diversion program. In that case, more people stormed the capitol in an insurrection at the organization and motivation of the sitting president than have knowingly fraudulently voted.
And that’s number include citizens and noncitizens alike. The American Immigration Council went back and looked into every case of noncitizens voting since the year 2000 (I wasn’t even born yet! I’m SO young) and they found… 68 cases.
Creating a rate of fraud by noncitizens voting 0.0001% in the last 26 years.
That’s a whole 5.5% of the Heritage Foundation’s 1,619 cases.
So yeah, the law against noncitizens voting was pointless because noncitizens can’t vote. And so they don’t.
The fact, the actual fact, is that Republicans are the biggest perpetrators of fraud against voters.
The hearing is ongoing but hopefully the ruling will be swift and correct… the state has already processed more than 300,000 ballots.
Think about that last story. The relief the people of Serbia must be feeling.
Remember November of 2020, when the results finally game through and we knew Trump had lost the election.
We can feel those things again. We can take back the House and Senate.
We CAN.
All we have to do is vote.
And that’s it. That’s the news.
Eight days.
I’m proud of you.