We Resist: Day 273

One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.

So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.

Stay engaged. Stay vigilant. Resist.

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Here are some things in the news today:

Earlier today by me: Trump's Relentless Malice and One Million Puerto Ricans Still Lack Drinkable Water.

[Content Note: Racism; disablism; classism] Ari Berman at Mother Jones: Rigged: How Voter Suppression Threw Wisconsin to Trump — and Possibly Handed Him the Whole Election. I cannot stress enough how the entirety of this piece is a must-read, but here are some excerpts:

Three years after Wisconsin passed its voter ID law in 2011, a federal judge blocked it, noting that 9 percent of all registered voters did not have the required forms of ID. Black voters were about 50 percent likelier than whites to lack these IDs because they were less likely to drive or to be able to afford the documents required to get a current ID, and more likely to have moved from out of state.

...After the election, registered voters in Milwaukee County and Madison's Dane County were surveyed about why they didn't cast a ballot. Eleven percent cited the voter ID law and said they didn't have an acceptable ID; of those, more than half said the law was the "main reason" they didn't vote. According to the study's author, University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Kenneth Mayer, that finding implies that between 12,000 and 23,000 registered voters in Madison and Milwaukee—and as many as 45,000 statewide—were deterred from voting by the ID law. "We have hard evidence there were tens of thousands of people who were unable to vote because of the voter ID law," he says.

...US District Judge James Peterson, who oversaw the implementation of the voter ID law, had found that Wisconsin's process for issuing IDs was a "wretched failure" that "has disenfranchised a number of citizens who are unquestionably qualified to vote." Eighty-five percent of those denied IDs by the DMV were black or Latino, he noted in his ruling. The roster of people denied IDs bordered on the surreal: a man born in a concentration camp in Germany who'd lost his birth certificate in a fire; a woman who'd lost use of her hands but was not permitted to grant her daughter power of attorney to sign the necessary documents at the DMV; a 90-year-old veteran of Iwo Jima who could not vote with his veteran's ID. One woman who died while waiting for an ID was listed as a "customer-initiated cancellation" by the DMV.

...It wasn't just poor African Americans who were disenfranchised. Most college IDs were not accepted under the law because they didn't require signatures or have the state-mandated two-year expiration date—a criterion that made little sense at four-year schools. Only 3 of the 13 four-year schools in the University of Wisconsin system had IDs compliant with the new law.

That meant many schools, including UW-Madison, had to issue separate IDs for students to use only for voting, an expensive and confusing process for students and administrators. To register to vote, students had to bring their new IDs and proof of enrollment. There were more than 13,000 out-of-state students at UW-Madison alone who were eligible to vote but couldn't do so without going through this byzantine process if they lacked a Wisconsin driver's license or state ID.

Between Russian interference in the election and Republican interference in the election, this presidency is illegitimate as fuck.

Meanwhile, Trump's "election integrity commission" being run by Mike Pence and Kris Kobach is essentially going to replicate this unconstitutional horseshit all over the country. Because they can.

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[CN: Threats; video may autoplay at link] Carey Codd at CBS Miami: Rep. Wilson's Office Says She's Getting Threats over Blasting Trump's Call to Widow. "Rep. Frederica Wilson's office claims multiple threatening phone calls directed at congresswoman came into her D.C. office on Wednesday. The congresswoman's staff said they alerted the Capital Police, Miami Garden Police, and the threat division of the U.S. House of Representatives. Codd was told she is safe and that she is being protected at this point. All this comes as [Donald] Trump refutes Wilson's claim that he made an insensitive comment to the widow of a Miami Gardens soldier killed in action." Deplorable.

Esme Cribb at TPM: White House: Kelly Thought Trump's Call to Soldier's Widow Was 'Respectful'. "White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Wednesday said [Donald] Trump's chief of staff John Kelly thought Trump's phone call to the widow of a U.S. soldier killed in Niger was 'respectful' and 'completely appropriate.' ...Trump on Tuesday cited Kelly's son, Second Lt. Robert Kelly, who died in Afghanistan in 2010, when asked whether he had called the families of the soldiers killed in Niger. 'You could ask General Kelly,' Trump said. 'Did he get a call from Obama?' ...Sanders did not say whether Trump consulted Kelly before deploying the talking point, but claimed he was 'disgusted' by the politicization of the soldiers' deaths. ..Pressed on whether Trump's remarks about Second Lt. Robert Kelly's death themselves amounted to a politicization, Sanders said, 'He was responding to a question and stating a fact.'"

Washington Post Editorial Board: Trump Trivializes the Deaths of Four Soldiers.

[Staff Sgt. Bryan C. Black, 35; Staff Sgt. Jeremiah 'J.W.' Wayne Johnson, 39; Staff Sgt. Dustin M. Wright, 29; and Sgt. La David T. Johnson, 25] are the four soldiers who were killed Oct. 4 when their unit was ambushed by Islamist extremists in West Africa. Their lives, their brave service and the sacrifice of their grieving families should be discussed and honored. Instead — thanks to a president with a compulsive need to be the center of attention — their deaths have been trivialized. [Donald] Trump reduced condolences to a political competition and treated the grieving families who received them as pawns in a game.

Having failed to publicly acknowledge the deaths for 12 days, Mr. Trump on Monday boasted about reaching out to family members of slain military personnel while falsely accusing his predecessors of not doing so. His whining about how hard the calls are on him — and the apparent hash he made of a conversation in which he allegedly told one widow her husband "must have known what he signed up for" — underscored his cluelessness about being commander in chief.

And his cluelessness about being a decent human being.

My condolences to the families, friends, and colleagues of Sgts. Black, J.W. Johnson, Wright, and La David Johnson.

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Betsy Woodruff, Ben Collins, Kevin Poulsen, and Spencer Ackerman at the Daily Beast: Trump Campaign Staffers Pushed Russian Propaganda Days Before the Election. "Some of the Trump campaign's most prominent names and supporters, including Trump's campaign manager, digital director, and son, pushed tweets from professional trolls paid by the Russian government in the heat of the 2016 election campaign. The Twitter account @Ten_GOP, which called itself the 'Unofficial Twitter account of Tennessee Republicans,' was operated from the Kremlin-backed 'Russian troll farm,' or Internet Research Agency, a source familiar with the account confirmed with The Daily Beast. ...The discovery of the now-unavailable tweets presents the first evidence that several members of the Trump campaign pushed covert Russian propaganda on social media in the run-up to the 2016 election."

Yeah, well, I'm not surprised. I bet you're not surprised, either. I wonder what this confirmation of what we all suspected will get us, though? Accountability? Unlikely. Reassurance it won't happen during the next time? Nope. Anything meaningful at all? Doubtful.

All of this reporting comes to nothing because the Republicans hold the Congressional majority and won't do anything about any of it.

Which is why I keep saying that the time to care about all this stuff, which we first knew about 18 months ago, was before the election. Now it's too late. The coup is already complete. What we're witnessing now is just the building of the new order.

And I honestly don't know that there's anyone with enough power to do something about it who will.

I've never wanted to be wrong more than I want to be wrong about that.

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Asked how he would grade the White House's Puerto Rico response, Trump says, "I give ourselves a 10." pic.twitter.com/WVr8IL2Lx4

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 19, 2017

This is NOT middle class first. @SpeakerRyan, why are you putting corporations before families? https://t.co/PSc7VHtVMO

— Ways and Means Dems (@WaysMeansCmte) October 19, 2017

Republicans can't embrace Alexander-Murray bc it would expose lies they've told about the ACA -- @ThePlumLineGS https://t.co/DwVPzbipTF

— Jonathan Cohn (@CitizenCohn) October 19, 2017

And finally, in case you needed something else to worry about... Damian Carrington at the Guardian: Warning of 'Ecological Armageddon' After Dramatic Plunge in Insect Numbers. "The abundance of flying insects has plunged by three-quarters over the past 25 years, according to a new study that has shocked scientists. Insects are an integral part of life on Earth as both pollinators and prey for other wildlife and it was known that some species such as butterflies were declining. But the newly revealed scale of the losses to all insects has prompted warnings that the world is 'on course for ecological Armageddon,' with profound impacts on human society." Cool.

What have you been reading that we need to resist today?