Republicans vote to abolish commission that works to protect integrity of voting machines.

Courtesy of HuffPo: 

This past weekend, hackers gathered in Las Vegas with a simple mission: break into America’s electronic voting machines and take control. Within minutes, some had already succeeded – but that’s a good thing. These hackers were part of a workshop held to identify vulnerabilities so they can be fixed well before any Americans cast actual votes next election. This exercise underscores the very real danger posed by outdated and insecure voting-machine software – as well as the important mission our government must continue undertaking to close these vulnerabilities and safeguard our elections. 

However, in their FY2018 funding proposal, Republicans are going after the small but highly successful agency that protects the integrity of our voting systems: the Election Assistance Commission. In June, House Republicans included a provision in their Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill that would abolish the Election Assistance Commission. 

Many Americans may not have heard of the Election Assistance Commission, a four-member bipartisan agency that Congress established in 2002 as part of the Help America Vote Act, but nonetheless they benefit greatly from its work. Created to address the flaws in our nation’s voting infrastructure, which contributed to the dispute surrounding the 2000 presidential election, the Election Assistance Commission protects Americans’ votes by helping to ensure that state and local authorities adopt best practices and uphold the highest standards of security for voting technology.

Literally the ONLY reason that the Republicans would vote to abolish this commission is because they do not want the the voting machine vulnerabilities to be identified and fixed.

And the only reason I can think of for that is because they need them to remain vulnerable.

Anybody have an alternate theory?

One of the largest counties in Texas is returning to paper ballots. A sign of things to come perhaps?

Courtesy of The Texas Tribune:

Frank Phillips spent last Wednesday staring down 600 boxes of election materials — voted ballots, blank ballots, precinct records — sitting in a warehouse run by Denton County. After sitting in storage for the legally required periods — up to nearly two years in some cases — the roughly 24,000 pounds of paper were finally ready to be shredded. 

Yet despite the hassle — and the significant cost — Phillips, Denton County’s elections administrator, is looking forward to this fall, when he will implement the county’s newest voting plan: a complete return to the paper ballot. 

The unusual move sets Denton, the ninth-largest county in Texas and one of the fastest-growing, apart from the state’s other biggest counties, which all use some form of electronic voting, according to data collected by the Secretary of State’s office. Both Bexar and Harris Counties, for example, have had all electronic voting systems in place for 15 years. 

Denton has been using a hybrid voting system that employs both electronic and paper ballots for about a decade. But county officials recently approved spending just shy of $9 million to buy new voting equipment from Austin-based Hart InterCivic that will return to an entirely paper-based system in time for this year's November elections. Even disabled voters, who will cast their votes on touch-screen machines, will have their ballots printed out and tallied through a print scanner.

Ahh, a return to voting system you can trust. 

Hopefully the rest of the country will follow suit, especially since we now know that the Russians tried to hack state voter data bases and software systems as well in order to change results.

While we are on the subject of voter suppression, you may like to know that so far only Arkansas has complied with Trump's "Election Integrity" commission and provided all of the voter data that they requested.

So, that is two good news stories about voting integrity in only one post.

Not bad for a Sunday morning.

Top State Department officials resign en masse in order to avoid working for a Trump administration.

Courtesy of the Washington Post:  

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s job running the State Department just got considerably more difficult. The entire senior level of management officials resigned Wednesday, part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior foreign service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era. 

Tillerson was actually inside the State Department’s headquarters in Foggy Bottom on Wednesday, taking meetings and getting the lay of the land. I reported Wednesday morning that the Trump team was narrowing its search for his No. 2, and that it was looking to replace the State Department’s long-serving undersecretary for management, Patrick Kennedy. Kennedy, who has been in that job for nine years, was actively involved in the transition and was angling to keep that job under Tillerson, three State Department officials told me. 

Then suddenly on Wednesday afternoon, Kennedy and three of his top officials resigned unexpectedly, four State Department officials confirmed. Assistant Secretary of State for Administration Joyce Anne Barr, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Michele Bond and Ambassador Gentry O. Smith, director of the Office of Foreign Missions, followed him out the door. All are career foreign service officers who have served under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
 ........

“It’s the single biggest simultaneous departure of institutional memory that anyone can remember, and that’s incredibly difficult to replicate,” said David Wade, who served as State Department chief of staff under Secretary of State John Kerry. “Department expertise in security, management, administrative and consular positions in particular are very difficult to replicate and particularly difficult to find in the private sector.”

On the one hand it is a little gratifying to see government employees with too much integrity to work for Putin's puppet, but on the other it is somewhat terrifying as these folks do a very important and challenging job that will now be left undone unless Trump can find equally experienced folks to replace them with.

In other words the job will be left undone.

By the way according to two senior Trump Administration officials these officials were asked to leave and did not resign in protest.

Just so you know my baseline stance on everything that has to do with the Trump administration is that they are established liars, so any contradictory version of events I hear is the one that I am most likely going to accept as true.

This may seem unfair since NOBODY lies all of the time, but to me there is really no choice considering what we know about Trump and his subordinates, so unless they have corroborating evidence provided by a trustworthy source, I am going to assume they are full of shit.

Somebody might want to show this to Alaska Senator, and political coward, Mark Begich.

"I have made a very bad mistake."

Courtesy of Talking Point Memo: 

By supporting a measure that would have expanded background checks on gun buyers, Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Kay Hagan (D-NC) appear to have found a way to please both fellow Democrats and their red state constituents. 

The latest survey released Thursday by Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling showed that Landrieu and Hagan actually bolstered their re-election prospects by supporting the background checks legislation. Facing potentially difficult races next year in a pair of states that were carried by Mitt Romney in 2012, Landrieu and Hagan were two of the final Democrats to ultimately pledge support for the measure, which ultimate failed in the Senate last month. Four other red state Democrats joined most Republicans to vote against the legislation. 

But PPP’s findings, the latest in the firm’s ongoing effort to gauge reaction to the gun bill, suggested that the votes will be more of an advantage than a disadvantage for Landrieu and Hagan. 

In Louisiana, the poll found that 71 percent of voters support “requiring background checks for all gun sales, including gun shows and the Internet.” Forty-four percent of voters there said they are more likely to back Landrieu in 2014 as a result of her vote. Meanwhile, just a little more than a quarter said they are less likely to support her. Another 29 percent said her vote will make no difference on whether they support Landrieu for re-election. 

Conversely, Landrieu’s Republican colleague from Louisiana, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), earned low marks for his opposition to the background checks measure. The poll showed that 40 percent of voters are less likely to support Vitter, who will be up for re-election in 2016. 

An overwhelming majority of Hagan’s constituents in North Carolina — 73 percent — are also in favor of expanding background checks. Fifty-two percent of Tar Heel State voters said they are now more likely to vote for Hagan in 2014 because she supported the bipartisan Senate bill. And much like in Louisiana, Hagan’s Republican counterpart may have committed a political pratfall by opposing the bill. Half of North Carolina voters said they are now less likely to support Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) as a result of his “no” on the background checks legislation. Burr will be up for re-election in 2016.

So by recognizing the mood of the country, and ignoring NRA backed calls to bully them into submission, these two brave women managed to earn the respect of their constituents and help their reelection chances in the process.

Gee it must be nice to have Senators with integrity.

Can somebody please tell me what that's like?

Jon Huntsman all but abandons the Republican party.

Courtesy of The Salt Lake Tribune:

Huntsman, who says he has been at every convention since 1984 when he was a delegate for Ronald Reagan, told The Salt Lake Tribune in a statement that he’s been asked repeatedly whether he would attend the August convention in Tampa, Fla., but noted that he is skipping it.

"I will not be attending this year’s convention, nor any Republican convention in the future," Huntsman said, "until the party focuses on a bigger, bolder, more confident future for the United States — a future based on problem solving, inclusiveness, and a willingness to address the trust deficit, which is every bit as corrosive as our fiscal and economic deficits." 

"I encourage a return to the party we have been in the past," he said, "from Lincoln right on through to Reagan, that was always willing to put our country before politics."

While I completely disagree with Huntsman that Reagan "put country before politics," I do give him mad props for having the integrity to publicly state that his party has essentially lost their minds, and that nothing they are doing is to help their constituents any more.

Apparently, even though he had thrown his support to Mitt Romney after bowing out of the primary, Huntsman has been so upset with the Republican party, and by extension his fellow Mormon, that he was "uninvited" back in March from attending this year's convention for daring to suggest that it is time for the introduction of a  third party in this country.

Huntsman has ALWAYS been, it seems, the one GOP presidential candidate who flatly refused to pander to the paint chip eating mouth breathers who now essentially make up the base of the Republican party. Something that I have always found admirable by the way.