Tell the truth or your three kids will be fatally shot,” Al Schmidt, a Republican city commissioner on the Philadelphia Board of Elections, quoted one such threat to him.

“RINO stole election, we steal lives,” read another threat.

Another said: “Cops can’t help you. heads on spikes, treasonous Schmidts.”

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, the state’s top election official and a Democrat, testified that “armed protesters” gathered in front of her house, chanting, “Katie come out and play. We are watching you,” after Trump lied that his loss in the state was due to election fraud.

“As an elected official, I expected that sometimes I would have constituents who were unhappy with me,” Hobbs said. “But I never expected that holding this office would result in far-right trolls threatening my children, threatening my husband’s employment at a children’s hospital or calling my office saying I deserve to die and asking, ‘What is she wearing today, so she’ll be easy to get.’”

Today's hearing before the Senate Rules Committee was designed to gather testimony from state and local election officials about the torrent of harassment and death threats that followed Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. The hearing was part of Democrats’ push to pass voting rights legislation that includes new protections for election officials.

The bill introduces new felony crimes for threatening, intimidating and disclosing personal information of election workers. It also expands the number of those workers who qualify for such protection.

Since Trump’s various attempts to overturn his loss, state and local election officials, in areas of all political stripes, have faced a torrent of constant harassment and death threats.

One in three election officials now feel unsafe in their job, and one in five believe death threats to be a main job concern, according to a report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit that backs voting rights legislation.

The Trump-inspired threats specifically followed officials targeted by the former president. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and those in his office faced constant death threats after the Republican election official refused Trump’s request that he “find” enough votes to reverse the state’s election outcome.

“You would think there might be some folks on the left who would say, ‘This just proved this is the guy we wanted to put in there,’ ” a former Justice Department lawyer, who served during part of the Trump administration, told me. “It’s amazing how people jump from ‘Merrick Garland, centrist hero, fair-minded judge, who was unfairly denied a chance to be on the Supreme Court’ to” accusing him of a “cover up” for Trump and Barr. “That’s what he has to struggle against.”

During a hearing in June, Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy asked Garland about the memo and the defamation suit. “I know about the criticisms,” Garland said. “Look, the job of the Justice Department in making decisions of law is not to back any administration, previous or present. … Sometimes it means that we have to make a decision about the law that we would never have made and that we strongly disagree with as a matter of policy.”

Of course, all the criticism from the left hasn’t bought Garland any goodwill among Trumpist conservatives. In June, when Garland announced the administration’s new domestic terrorism strategy — with its finding that the top violent extremist threat comes from white supremacists — Laura Ingraham of Fox News displayed a collage portrait of Garland and the accused Capitol rioter known as the QAnon Shaman with the headline, “Who’s Really Terrorizing America?”
Later that month, after Garland announced the department was suing the state of Georgia over voting rights, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp fumed: “The Biden administration is weaponizing the Department of Justice to serve their own partisan goals.”

The thankless predicament of any attorney general in 2021 is that it’s become the default position of partisans on both sides to see the Justice Department as a political institution. Even worse, any move to fix that perception is itself viewed with deep suspicion.

.... It isn’t yet clear whether Garland will go as far as many observers — both on the left and in the center — want him to go in pushing new institutional safeguards and reforms. When Garland invokes [Ford's AG, Edward Levi's] name in speeches, it’s usually to imply that everything will be better if the department simply rededicates itself to the norms Levi espoused. He doesn’t suggest that, after Trump, those norms might need reinforcing or updating with new standards.

It’s early in his tenure, but thus far, Garland has only tiptoed into this realm. In the wake of revelations that the Trump Justice Department had subpoenaed reporters’ phone records in leak investigations, Garland promised to prohibit the collection of reporters’ records and to work with Congress on legislation to address the issue. But beyond that, he has been vague about what he thinks needs fixing. ... When evidence of a problem emerges, he routes the matter to Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Horowitz is looking into the collection of reporters’ records and congressional accounts; whether Justice Department officials improperly tried to overturn the presidential election; and the circumstances of a U.S. attorney in Georgia abruptly resigning after Trump pressed officials there to question the vote count.

Garland’s reliance on the inspector general frustrates reform advocates who want to see a more hands-on effort by the attorney general himself. I spoke to a number of people who have proposals that they say could help build bipartisan confidence in the department.

Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, is planning this summer to reintroduce the Protecting Our Democracy Act, which he co-sponsored in the fall. The original version of the bill would require, among other measures, the attorney general to keep a log of communications with the White House, and the inspector general to report to Congress any improper political interference...

...“I’m very fond of and a great admirer of Attorney General Garland,” Whitehouse added. “But he comes out of an ivory tower judgeship, far away from a lot of the political mischief. And I’m not sure how much situational awareness he has about the forces that are operating … around the department and operated through the department, it appears, during the Trump administration.”

Even supporters of Garland’s approach so far want bold action — at least in the realm of norm-building. In their book “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency,” Bob Bauer, a former White House counsel to Obama, and Goldsmith, the veteran of the George W. Bush administration, propose numerous ways to buck up Justice Department norms to reduce the opportunity for political meddling.
The ideas include reinforcing the so-called 60-day rule that bars disclosure of major decisions related to investigations too close to Election Day; making clear the attorney general should obey the same strictures against discussing investigations in public that line prosecutors follow; formalizing the factors that trigger counterintelligence investigations of political candidates; and adding language to internal manuals and training to ensure that improper partisan motivations do not guide actions. They also propose legislation, such as a statute clarifying the circumstances under which the department could charge a president with obstruction of justice.

“Even if we can be confident that … the administration will stay on the right path under Merrick Garland, the point here is to establish standards that other administrations are going to have to confront,” Bauer told me.

Following Levi's example of engaging the public in the discussion could also help. “The reason for him to speak publicly to these issues at some point in adopting some of these measures is to underscore that this is institutional reform,” Bauer continued. “It’s not just a moment of shift in policy at the Department of Justice, it’s an institutional moment in which a marker is laid down and other administrations are going to have to confront it in the future.”

"In Glasgow, the United States will showcase President Biden's whole-of-government approach to tackling the climate crisis," a White House official told CNN.
They will demonstrate the strength of the entire US government working in lock-step to reduce emissions and achieve our international climate commitments
-- and that the countries who take decisive action on climate will reap the economic and jobs benefits of the clean energy future.

Refreshingly Honest Billionaire Says Media Purchase Will Be Used For Propaganda

The billionaire CEO of the multibillion-dollar corporation that recently purchased the news media outlet POLITICO has said that its newly acquired employees will be required to support Israel and the capitalist world order.

In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mathias Döpfner, CEO of the German publisher Axel Springer, said that Politico staffers will be required to adhere to a set of principles which include "support for a united Europe, Israel’s right to exist and a free-market economy, among others."

“These values are like a constitution, they apply to every employee of our company,” Mr. Döpfner told WSJ. People with a fundamental problem with any of these principles “should not work for Axel Springer, very clearly,” he said.

I mean, how refreshing is that?
How often does a billionaire corporation buy up a media property and just straightforwardly tell you they're going to be using it to push propaganda? They even say what the propaganda will be. It makes you feel like your intelligence is being respected.

FBI ... raided the Washington home of the billionaire Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, as part of what media reports described as a “court-authorised search”... They sealed off the driveway with yellow tape. It said: “Crime scene – do not enter.”...


In June, a judge at a district court in Washington rejected a lawsuit he had filed against the US treasury department, which sanctioned him in 2018.

Deripaska has made no secret of his support for the president, Vladimir Putin, and has declared he has no interest separate from those of the Russian state. He has also travelled on a Russian diplomatic passport, including during visits to the US.

The treasury department imposed sanctions in response to Russia’s sweeping campaign in 2016 to meddle in the US election, and to various cyber-attacks. It said Deripaska had acted “on behalf of … a senior Russian government official” – code for Putin – and had claimed to represent the Kremlin in other countries.

The treasury said then: “Deripaska has been investigated for money laundering, and has been accused of threatening the lives of business rivals, illegally wiretapping a government official, and taking part in extortion and racketeering.”

...

I remember it like yesterday, even though it was twenty-six years ago.

I had just finished giving a lecture at Kansas City Community College in which I examined the intersection of racism and heterosexism and some of the connections between organized racist movements and the homophobic religious right.

That’s when it happened.

A woman in the audience jumped to her feet during the Q&A, insisting that she had every right to teach her children that homosexuality was immoral and that gays and lesbians were going to Hell.

How dare I, she bellowed, challenge her right as a parent to raise her children as she wished. After all, she explained, using precisely these words: they were her property.

Seriously, she went all the way there — in effect, equating her children with the ottoman in her living room or perhaps her bedside table.

She did so without hesitation, without misgiving, and without the tiniest bit of self-awareness as to how ridiculous it made her sound.

If you listen carefully, you hear notes of the same tune in the cacophony of craziness playing out around the country regarding anti-racist education or mask mandates in the face of COVID.

“These are my children,” they scream. “How dare you teach them about racism in America.”

“How dare you mask the precious faces that God gave them!”

“How dare you use books in elementary or middle school that have gay characters or same-sex couples. That goes against our family’s values!”

And here’s the best one of all:

“How dare you indoctrinate them!”