December 12, 2021 / Newsletter 254

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‌ The HCDP Committee will hold its quarterly business meeting on Dec. 18, 2021. Committee members: If you haven't replied to the email with details, please do it today! If you did not receive the email, please contact Denise at dadavieslee@gmail.com. We will NOT have a general party meeting in December. Watch for information about our January 2022 meeting coming soon.

Blue To Dos

Weekly Thoughts from the Chair: Useful Idiots

It is supposed that Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, employed the term “Useful Idiots” to describe those who, wittingly or unwittingly provided support for communism, though not fully understanding it. Donald John Trump is a “useful idiot” to Putin. Trumpian Republicans are using useful idiots to perpetrate the authoritarian revolution Republican leaders hope to create. Mere stupidity cannot explain why Americans are willing to surrender freedom to the fascist system that the Republicans are planning. That our fellow Americans can become full blown ‘useful idiots’ is disturbing. Perhaps they are searching for meaning in an ever changing world. Still, do not accept nonsense that these would-be fascists say about having to break some eggs to make an omelette. We are the eggs that they plan to break. Trumpians do not have the right to destroy our democracy as they trudge toward some powerful authoritarian state they have imagined. The Republicans have become power worshipers. They don’t even pretend to care about our vanishing freedoms. Donald John and other useful idiots have absolutely no concern for those they use and abuse. Conservatively, Trump, his Republican acolytes, and Fox News, have caused the unnecessary deaths of 400,000 Americans to Covid 19. The naked evil of Marjory Taylor Greene and Andrew Clyde is embraced by their useful idiot supporters. The ‘alt-right’ pays tribute to Vladimir Putin! Useful idiots. Putin, like Trump and his Republicans, are only concerned with themselves and power. While it is obvious to any objective observer that these people are destructive to the very essence of America, the acolytes appear oblivious. The acolytes flock to these fascists like flies to a decomposing corpse. Only congenital fools can be unconcerned as our democracy falls under the hobnail boot of authoritarian control. We have a clear image of the enemy: those who would destroy our American democracy. We Democrats are organizing, planning, and delivering on our support for democracy and our rejection of all things authoritarian and fascist. We are going to make 2022 the year that fascism died in the United States! Mike

MEET OUR NEW INTERN!

Hello! I’m Ellie Smith the new intern for Hall County Dems. I'm excited to have the opportunity to intern for Hall County Democrats and learn more about politics in my hometown while contributing to the Democratic party. Previously I've had the privilege to intern for local campaigns, most recently Devin Pandy's Mayoral Campaign and before that for Leigh Miller's campaign for GA House District 30. I gained invaluable knowledge and relationships from the team, and it helped solidify my future plans for my education. Three things I want people to know about me: 1. I’m a current high school senior at Cherokee Bluff (Go Bears!), and I’m very excited to be attending college next fall with with a major in political science!  2. When I’m not talking politics you can usually find me with kids, babysitting or working at summer camps. I love spending time with them, as well as teaching them!  3. I love binging TV series and my all time favorites are West Wing and Friends! I'm grateful for the chance to continue working within politics, and gain as much knowledge as possible from my mentors!

Laura Colaninno meets with Cherokee Bluff Young Politicians Meeting made possible by our new intern, Ellie Smith

Our new intern Ellie Smith from Cherokee Bluff High School is now working hard for the Hall County Democrats. You might know her from campaigning for Devin Pandy and Leigh Miller. Now she has turned her attention to the HCD and is looking forward to working us until she goes off to college in the fall of 2022. She is going to major in Political Science and wants to get as much experience as possible. Already Ellie has helped me to connect with Cherokee Bluff students interested in politics, via Mr. Purdy, who is the AP Government teacher and the sponsor of the Young Politicians club at CBHS. I was a guest speaker on Monday December 6. I got to give a speech to both groups and I am invited to come back after the Holidays to speak again to the Young Politicians club. Mr. Purdy said he will promote my two PowerPoints --The Math of Politics and Why Georgia Had to Get New Voting Machines--to other AP Government teachers in Hall County. I am looking forward to Ellie’s help on the HCDP website. Ellie is organizing information about all Democratic candidates running for statewide offices. This information is under construction, but you can see what is done so far on the website under Election 2022. She also wants to work at Headquarters once a week. Ellie is wonderful but we are going to need more help this coming year. Hall County Dems, you did wonderful at Getting Out The Vote for Warnock and Ossoff in 2021, but we need to do it again. Think about how you can help. Remember HCD has done a great job over the past six years, helping to raise the percent of Democratic votes in Hall County from 20.96% in 2014 to 27.65% in 2020. We helped turn this State BLUE. Go Hall County Dems. We can do it again and seat a Democratic Executive Branch of Government here in Georgia. Make your New Year’s Resolution to be, “Georgia is a BLUE State and I will help to keep it that way.”  Laura Colaninno

Threats to democratic elections come from federal and state level

With so much in this issue of our newsletter, I had planned to keep our elections spotlight article short this week. But after several stories related to threats to the elections process broke—many of them focused on elections in Georgia— I felt compelled to highlight them, and their significance. I hope this information serves to inspire each of you to work even harder to elect Democrats in Georgia this year. Denise Lee, HCDP Secretary Reuters published two bits of breaking news about Georgia elections in the past few days. The first was how the new Georgia voting law is already impacting local elections boards. You may recall that the new law gives the state elections board (SEB)— dominated by Republicans— new powers over county elections boards. While most news outlets have focused on the contentious relationship between the GOP and Fulton County’s elections board, Reuters tells how the SEB has quietly been reshaping elections boards in other Georgia counties. In Spalding County (Griffin), the majority Democratic board is now a Republican majority board, and a Black elections superintendent has been replaced by a white Republican. The new superintendent “has endorsed former president Donald Trump’s false stolen-election claims on social media.” Of course, the state GOP denies this manipulation is to better their chances of staying in power. Butch Miller claims the state takeover of local boards is "to make sure is that we have election integrity.” What else would Butch say? The truth, that this change in the law is to make sure Republican's don't lose power because of pesky voters? The other story from Reuters dropped yesterday, when they broke the news about how Kanye West's publicist and Trump supporter Trevian Kutti traveled from Chicago to Cobb County on January 4th of this year to try to intimidate a Cobb County elections worker to falsely "confess" to elections fraud. Fortunately, Rose Freeman, who had been bombarded with death threats after Trump called her out by name in that infamous call to Brad Raffensperger, wouldn't let the strange woman into her house and instead called the police. Freeman went to the police station before agreeing to meet with Kutti. There an officer's bodycam recorded some of the surreal exchange, which involved threats to Freeman and her family and a call to someone (not that one) named "Harrison Ford." There's no easy way to summarize the bizarre events, so please read the article linked below. Just be aware that without Freeman's smart move to involve police, we probably would never know about this, yet another effort to undermine the 2020 election. Then there is the PowerPoint presentation apparently used to brief some, as yet unnamed, Republican members of Congress the day before the January 6th insurrection, which lays out all the conspiracy theories, misinformation and lies in an effort to claim the election was stolen. Mark Meadows, Trump's chief of staff and toady, has apparently turned the PowerPoint file over to the special Committee investigating January 6th, claiming he never acted on any of it while now refusing to testify. Mark Bowman (author of Black Hawk Down) and Matthew Teague have a new book coming out on January 4, 2020, titled The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped It . The link below is to an excerpt from this book, focusing on Trump's attempts to subvert the Georgia elections.  The final article below is a sobering read from Brandon Gelman of The Atlantic, about the relentless campaign the GOP is waging against free and fair elections. "For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters."

Georgia Republicans purge Black Democrats from county... Protesters filled the meeting room of the Spalding County Board of Elections in October, upset that the board had disallowed early voting on Sundays for the Nov. 2 municipal election. A year ago, Sunday voting had been instrumental in boosting... Read more www.reuters.com Kanye West publicist pressed Georgia election worker to... Weeks after the 2020 election, a Chicago publicist for hip-hop artist Kanye West traveled to the suburban home of Ruby Freeman, a frightened Georgia election worker who was facing death threats after being falsely accused by former President... Read more www.reuters.com

Election denier who circulated Jan. 6 PowerPoint says he ... A retired U.S. Army colonel who circulated a proposal to challenge the 2020 election, including by declaring a national security emergency and seizing paper ballots, said that he visited the White House on multiple occasions after the election,... Read more www.washingtonpost.com Stealing Georgia: Trump Gets Desperate, Kanye's... The following is an excerpt from The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped It by Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague which will be published by Atlantic Monthly Press on January 4th. Read more lithub.com

January 6 Was Practice Donald Trump is better positioned to subvert an election now than he was in 2020. Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its ... Read more www.theatlantic.com

State & Local News (Some links may require a subscription)

In Georgia, Stacey Abrams relies on new voters to buck... WASHINGTON - As Stacey Abrams builds her second gubernatorial campaign in four years, she is looking at a Georgia electorate that is far larger, younger and less white than the one that handed her a narrow defeat four years ago, according to an... Read more www.nbcnews.com Why does a longtime white supremacist think he can win... Running as a Republican in a deeply conservative district, the former KKK leader believes he can win election to the county board of commissioners. Others with checkered pasts have recently won elections amid the hyperpolarized political... Read more www.ajc.com Gov. Kemp on David Perdue: He's making promises to... 'I'm a governor that's doing something about the problems that exist,' Kemp said Thursday. ATLANTA - Gov. Brian Kemp took a jab at former Sen. David Perdue on Thursday, saying his his campaign to mount a primary challenge to Kemp is about trying... Read more www.11alive.com Bookman: Perdue's candidacy 'a continuation of the coup... Let's say it straight: Every Georgia Republican who votes for former Sen. David Perdue in next year's gubernatorial primary is voting to strangle American democracy and replace it with an arrangement in which elections can be overturned on a... Read more georgiarecorder.com

Despite state's division, Stacey Abrams has a plan for... Since losing the Georgia governor's race in 2018, Stacey Abrams has become a national figure and Democratic rising star. But she promises her second campaign to lead the state is still down to earth and focused on improving the lives of all... Read more www.gpb.org The Jolt: Reality check on GOP proposals to eliminate... The Morning Jolt political newsletter for Thursday, Dec. 9, 2021. Read more www.ajc.com The Gerrymandering Went Down To Georgia with Bee Nguyen... Redistricting efforts are underway across the country, but it's become a contentious process. The Department of Justice, for example, filed a lawsuit against the newly drawn maps in Texas on Monday, arguing that the maps discriminate against... Read more crooked.com BREAKING NEWS: Lumpkin County Elections Manager charged... Lumpkin County's Chief Registrar and Elections Manager has been arrested after an investigation revealed her involvement in the theft of more than $400,000 worth of funds designated for charity, according to a release from the Georgia Bureau of... Read more www.thedahloneganugget.com

National News (Some links may require a subscription)

Opinion | Mark Meadows's new effort to cover up Trump's... Mark Meadows, who recently revealed that Donald Trump tested positive for the coronavirus before the first 2020 debate without telling its organizers, is frantically atoning for his momentary lapse of loyalty. Trump's former chief of staff just... Read more www.washingtonpost.com The Supreme Court Is Poised to Turbocharge "Religious... The Supreme Court appears poised to reject a fundamental principle of constitutional law: the proposition that states have a compelling interest in keeping religion out of public schools. Six Republican-appointed justices indicated on Wednesday... Read more slate.com Weekly jobless claims fall to 184,000, the lowest level... Weekly jobless claims tumbled last week, reaching a fresh 52-year low as the U.S. jobs market climbs out of its pandemic-era hole, the Labor Department reported Thursday. Initial filings for unemployment insurance totaled 184,000 for the week... Read more www.cnbc.com

Appeals court rules against Trump in fight over Jan. 6... A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that former President Donald Trump cannot prevent the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack from getting hundreds of documents created when he was in the White House. Trump's lawyers will most... Read more www.nbcnews.com Starbucks workers form 1st U.S. union in Buffalo, N.Y.,... Starbucks workers have voted to form their first U.S. union. Workers from at least one store near Buffalo, N.Y., voted to unionize, in a watershed moment for Starbucks, which operates 8,953 stores in the U.S. Three Buffalo-area stores held... Read more www.npr.org How Biden Is Reshaping The Courts When former President Donald Trump left office in January, one of the most formidable aspects of his legacy was his imprint on the federal courts. In Trump's four years in the White House, he appointed three Supreme Court justices, 54 appeals... Read more fivethirtyeight.com

If you have news, photos, or announcements for the newsletter, please email them to kccopeland1@hotmail.com or dadavieslee@gmail.com. The deadline for including in Sunday’s email is noon on the preceding Friday.