Crooked Media - What A Day: All hands on deck

BREAKING: Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died, at age 87. She dictated this statement before her death: “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.” Amen, and fuck.

Republicans’ multimillion-dollar legal effort to prevent people from voting by mail hasn’t found much success in court, but with fewer than 50 days left until the election, a critical mass of confused voters would be a solid consolation prize. 
 

• The Trump campaign and the RNC allotted $20 million for election-related litigation, and by god, they’re gonna spend it. The campaign has sought to intervene in at least 11 cases over state and local policies that affect how people vote remotely, and that’s in addition to a string of lawsuits Republicans have filed themselves to block states from expanding mail-in voting.
   
• While the Trump campaign has successfully elbowed its way into some key legal battles over policies like signature-matching, drop boxes, and extended deadlines, and managed to make mail-in voting more of a headache in a few places (godspeed, Iowa), Trump’s own efforts to block universal mail-in voting have largely come up empty. His attempt in California was circumvented by the state legislature, and his lawsuits in Nevada, New Jersey, and Montana are still tied up in court. Some New Jersey counties have already begun sending out ballots, and Nevada will start any day now.
   
• Thus far the most tangible impact of Trump’s crusade against mail-in voting has been to scare away his own supporters: polling shows that Republicans are now deeply freaked about remote voting, and they’ve been requesting absentee ballots at much lower rates than Democrats in key swing states. That’s something of a double-edged sword. Trump’s constant screaming about fictional mail-in voter fraud might depress GOP turnout, but could also give us a scenario in which many more Republicans vote in person on election day, setting Trump up to falsely declare victory before all the ballots have been counted. 

And here we arrive at the project’s more attainable goal: setting the stage for chaos.
 

• Today Trump blurted the not-even-that-quiet part out extra loud, lamenting that election officials would want to count all the ballots before declaring a winner even when “somebody’s leading” on November 3. On Thursday he tweeted about mail-in voting nine times, earning multiple Twitter warning labels for lies like: “Because of the new and unprecedented massive amount of unsolicited ballots which will be sent to ‘voters’, or wherever, this year, the Nov 3rd Election result may NEVER BE ACCURATELY DETERMINED, which is what some want.”
   
• The scary thing is, the base he’s convinced to distrust mail-in voting will be primed to believe that a Joe Biden victory is proof of fraud, and the right-wing media has enthusiastically amplified that idea. The hopeful thing is, we have a very real shot at turning out voters in high enough numbers to make them look extremely silly. 
   

We’re officially in the thick of it. Early voting began today in Minnesota, Virginia, South Dakota, and Wyoming. A veritable buttload of absentee ballots have already been mailed. Donald Trump’s only path to re-election is to sow confusion and cynicism, and he can’t do it wherever voters are informed and inspired. So: whatcha up to this weekend? 

A huge thank you to everyone who has supported the Every Last Vote Fund! You helped us raise $750k for PowerPac.org to support on-the-ground efforts to mobilize Black, brown, indigenous, and other marginalized communities that are routinely victims of targeted voter disenfranchisement efforts.

Next up, the Every Last Vote Fund is supporting Register2Vote to help get new voters registered. For every $2 you donate, Register2Vote will be able to reach one new voter by first class expedited mail → votesaveamerica.com/everylastvote

What do you know, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been using this downtime of peace and prosperity to jam more Trump judges into lifetime appointments. While continuing to block another round of coronavirus stimulus, Senate Republicans have confirmed 13 judicial nominees in the last two weeks—six of them in the span of 30 hours. Another six nominees are on deck to be confirmed next week. Meanwhile, today McConnell “warned” that if Democrats take power, they’ll (checks notes) provide political representation to people unlikely to elect Republicans, and (does spit-take) pack the Supreme Court. It would be a real shame if all of his worst fears came true → votesaveamerica.com/getmitch

• Julian Assange’s lawyer confirmed in court that Assange was offered a pardon to help “resolve the ongoing speculation about Russian involvement” in the DNC email hack.
   
• The Trump administration will ban TikTok and WeChat from U.S. app stores starting Sunday night. Gen-Z-ers of legal voting age, assemble. 
   
• In a bizarre speech at the National Archives, Trump called for “patriotic education” to defend against “left-wing indoctrination in our schools”—a pretty convoluted way to tell his base that he’s still their racist white friend.
   
• The White House had nearly reached a deal with the pharmaceutical industry to lower drug prices, until Mark Meadows insisted that drug companies pay for $100 cash cards to be mailed to seniors before the election. 
   
• The CDC has dropped its shady guidance that asymptomatic people who have been exposed to coronavirus don’t need to get tested, which was a) not written by CDC scientists and b) published over their strenuous objections. 
   
• A firefighter has died in the California wildfire sparked by a gender-reveal party.
   
• Two drug companies have released their vaccine roadmaps to gain public trust, and Dr. Anthony Fauci has confirmed that he would tell us all if something about the process was suspect.
   
• It’s no news that Jared Kushner is a dumb piece of shit, but this Vanity Fair report includes the incredible detail that he sits in a taller chair than everyone else in meetings, while saying horrifying things like: “Cuomo didn’t pound the phones hard enough to get PPE for his state...His people are going to suffer and that’s their problem.”
   
• Eric Trump is totally on board to answer questions in New York’s investigation of the Trump Organization’s financial dealings, so long as it’s after the election.
   
• Scott Atlas’s lawyers have threatened to sue dozens of Stanford doctors and researchers who signed an open letter denouncing his dangerous coronavirus claims.
   
• Airlines have begun offering “flights to nowhere,” for the well-heeled freak whose favorite part of travel is sitting on an airplane.
   
• The awful Melania statue is dead. Long live the awful Melania statue. 

North Carolina voters have begun returning their absentee ballots, and Black voters’ ballots are already being rejected at more than four times the rate of white voters. Only a tiny portion of ballots have been returned so far, but of the 13,747 ballots that Black voters have sent in, 642 (or 4.7 percent) were rejected, compared to only 681 (1.1 percent) of white voters’ 60,954 ballots. The vast majority of those ballots were rejected because voters made a mistake or didn’t fill out the witness information, and North Carolina has a process to notify voters and give them a chance to fix their ballot. But not at all states have such a process, and the racial gap in ballot rejections is a common problem—likely (at least in part) because many Black voters casting mail-in ballots are doing so for the first time, and are less familiar with the requirements. Just one more barrier to entry for underrepresented voters, and one more reason to fight for every last vote → 

Watch ALL IN: THE FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY now, only on Prime Video.
 
In anticipation of the 2020 presidential election, this timely film examines the often overlooked, yet insidious issue of voter suppression in the United States. It interweaves personal experiences with current activism and historical insight to expose a problem that has corrupted our democracy from the very beginning. With the perspective and expertise of Stacey Abrams, the former Minority Leader of the Georgia House of Representatives, the documentary offers an insider’s look into laws and barriers to voting that most people don’t even know is a threat to their basic rights as citizens of the United States.

Click here to watch now, only on Prime Video.

A Michigan judge ruled that absentee ballots mailed by November 2 must be counted.

New Jersey is poised to become the first state to adopt a millionaires tax, to help fund the state’s pandemic recovery and provide an annual rebate to lower-income families. 

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee raised a record $26.9 million in August, 86 percent of which came from grassroots donations. 

People are ready to fucking vote.