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How To Explain Georgia And Herschel Walker

Thursday, October 6th, 2022

In mid-January of 2016, at a campaign stop at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa, Donald Trump said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”

He might have been more right than wrong. His followers seem to be able to forgive, no ignore, anything he does, no matter how vile. Remember the October 2016 surprise of the Access Hollywood tape? That made a lot of difference, didn’t it? “But her emails!”

Why did voters not fly like winged Mercury from such a morally challenged person? And should we be surprised they didn’t?

With that in mind, I have been struggling with what to make of the current senatorial contest in Georgia.

On the one hand, there is the Reverend Raphael Warnock, the junior United States senator from Georgia since 2021. Warnock is also the senior pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, Martin Luther King Jr.’s former congregation. He is the fifth and the youngest person to serve as Ebenezer’s senior pastor since its founding in 1886.

Warnock has always been a civil rights activist and has been arrested twice for his efforts. In March 2014, he led a sit-in at the Georgia State Capitol to press state legislators to accept the expansion of Medicaid offered by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Obamacare. He and other leaders were arrested during the protest, and the state, to this day, has refused to expand its Medicaid program.

His first arrest, in the early 2000s, is instructive. Warnock was serving as senior pastor at Douglas Memorial Community Church in Baltimore, Maryland, when Police arrested him and an assistant minister charging them with obstructing an investigation into suspected child abuse at a summer camp run by their church. Warnock had strongly protested police not allowing lawyers to be present to assist camp counselors whom they had accused of covering up the suspected child abuse. According to the Police, Warnock was “extremely uncooperative and disruptive.” Interestingly, the charges were later dropped with the deputy state’s attorney acknowledging there had been a “miscommunication,” adding that Warnock had aided the investigation and that prosecution would be a waste of resources.

Warnock espouses a number of typically democratic policies:

Regarding abortion, he labels himself a “pro-choice pastor;”
In 2021 he was the main sponsor of S.278 — The Emergency Relief for Farmers of Color Act of 2021, a bill that would provide assistance to historically disaffected minority groups in the agriculture sector;
He is against capital punishment;
The National Rifle Association Political Victory Fund gave him a grade of “F” during his Senate campaign, because he loudly objected to parishioners being able to bring concealed weapons to church. For that, they labeled him “anti 2nd amendment;”
On immigration, he has supported keeping Title 42 expulsions, saying, “We need assurances that we have security at the border and that we protect communities on this side of the border;”
Warnock is a proponent of Welfare. He opposed New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s workfare reforms while he was assistant pastor at Abyssinian Baptist Church in 1997, telling The New York Times, “We are worried that workfare is being used to displace other workers who receive respectable compensation. We are concerned that poor people are being put into competition with other poor people, and in that respect, we think workfare is a hoax;” and,
Regarding voting rights, In his maiden speech on the U.S. Senate floor, Warnock said one of his primary goals upon assuming office was to oppose voting restrictions and support federal voting reforms. He has said that passing legislation to expand voting rights is important enough to end the Senate filibuster.

Warnock and his wife divorced in 2021. They have two children.

The man appears to be an open book. If you vote for Raphael Warnock, you know what you’re going to get, a God-fearing, decent human being who is a liberal democrat, but not one of radical persuasion.

On the other hand, we have Warnock’s opponent Herschel Walker, whose main claim to fame seems to be winning the Heisman Trophy in his junior year at the University of Georgia and going on to enjoy a Hall of Fame caliber professional football career.

If Raphael Warnock’s life is a relatively virtuous straight line, Herschel Walker’s is a labyrinth worthy of Theseus, but without the guiding ball of twine.

Given that he’s running for the US Senate, Walker’s personal and professional lives are worthy of investigation.

Herschel Walker suffers from one of the many character flaws Donald Trump has artfully cultivated over a lifetime of trying: He exaggerates accomplishments, minimizes failures and repeatedly denies he does either. In everything. A few examples:

In his autobiography, Breaking Free: My Life With Dissociative Identity Disorder (Simon & Schuster, 2009), Walker describes his struggles with his mental health in a praiseworthy and open manner. However, in this commendable work he also wrote that during his schooling at Johnson County High School, he was the Beta Club president (which required a grade average of “A”) and class valedictorian.

Trouble is, he wasn’t. He was in the Beta Club, but not its president, and the school didn’t even begin having valedictorians until six years after Walker graduated. This is a small point. Many people embellish like this, but it sets the tone for the rest of Walker’s life to this point.

Walker has said in speeches and on his website he graduated from the University of Georgia in the top 1% of his class.

Trouble is, this isn’t true. He left college at the end of his junior year to play professional football. The false claims about Walker’s degree and class stranding are lodged in a range of webpages, including his Amazon author site, his Speaker Booking Agency page and his New Georgia Encyclopedia entry. Additionally, in 2017, he told Sirius XM radio, “I also was in the top 1% of my graduating class of college.” When called out on this by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Walker said, “I was majoring in Criminal Justice at UGA when I left to play in the USFL my junior year. After playing with the New Jersey Generals, I returned to Athens to complete my degree, but life and football got in the way.” Walker has also denied on numerous occasions ever saying he graduated from UGA. According to a CNN investigation, “This is flat out false.”

Walker’s business career following his sporting one has been spotty at best. In 1999, he created Renaissance Man Food Services, which distributes chicken products. He told the Dallas Morning News in 2009 that Renaissance Man Food Services employed more than 100 people and grossed $70 million a year. In a more recent interview, Walker told Fox News that the company employed 600 people.

Trouble is, it doesn’t. During the pandemic, Renaissance Man Food Services reported just eight employees on applications for two Paycheck Protection Program loans from the federal Small Business Administration totaling $180,000. The first loan in April 2020 amounted to $111,300 and has since been forgiven.

On top of that, over the past two decades Walker and various business partners have defaulted or fallen behind in payments on at least eight loans totaling $9 million, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution review of hundreds of pages of court documents, Securities and Exchange Commission filings and other public records that detail these financial issues.

Walker has many times claimed he “worked in law enforcement.” Prior to his political career, he has, at various times said he was an FBI agent, or “a certified peace officer.”

Trouble is, he wasn’t. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Patricia Murphy, Greg Bluestein and Tia Mitchell thoroughly debunked these claims in June of this year.

Then their is the spousal abuse. Cindy DeAngelis Grossman, Walker’s wife from 1983 until their divorce in 2002, claims Walker was violent with her and had “evil in his eyes.” She says, “He held the gun to my temple and said he was gonna blow my brains out.”

Walker has not denied Grossman’s allegations, telling ABC News’ Bob Woodruff in a 2008 interview that he “probably did it,” but did not remember.

And now for the biggest problem, the new one.

Herschel Walker has embraced the anti abortion plank. His position makes no accommodation for rape, incest or the life of the mother. It is as hard a line as one could draw. Walker says he believes abortion should never be a “choice.” “There’s no exception in my mind,” Walker told reporters in May. “Like I say, I believe in life. I believe in life.”

Trouble is, he doesn’t. At least, not for him, according to what appears to be a well-documented report from The Daily Beast this week. According to the report:

A woman who asked not to be identified out of privacy concerns told The Daily Beast that after she and Walker conceived a child while they were dating in 2009 he urged her to get an abortion. The woman said she had the procedure and that Walker reimbursed her for it.

She supported these claims with a $575 receipt from the abortion clinic, a “get well” card from Walker, and a bank deposit receipt that included an image of a signed $700 personal check from Walker.

The woman said there was a $125 difference because she “ball-parked” the cost of an abortion after Googling the procedure and added on expenses such as travel and recovery costs.

Additionally, The Daily Beast independently corroborated details of the woman’s claims with a close friend she told at the time and who, according to the woman and the friend, took care of her in the days after the procedure.

The woman said Walker, who was not married at the time, told her it would be more convenient to terminate the pregnancy, saying it was “not the right time” for him to have a child. It was a feeling she shared, but what she didn’t know was that Walker had an out-of-wedlock child with another woman earlier that same year.

Walker has denied everything about this. He claims he doesn’t even know the woman even though he sent her that “get well” card with a check for $700 inside it. He said, “I send money to a lot of people.” Yesterday morning, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade asked him whether he has discovered who this woman is? “Not at all,” Walker replied. “And that’s what I hope everyone can see. It’s sort of like everyone is anonymous, or everyone is leaking, and they want you to confess to something you have no clue about.”

This is an amazing statement, because the unidentified woman claims, in addition to Walker paying for her abortion, she subsequently bore his child, a child The Daily Beast reports he has acknowledged as his.

This has proven too much for Walker’s adult son, Christian Walker, who lashed out on Twitter—in defense of The Daily Beast’s abortion story and against his father.

“Every family member of Herschel Walker asked him not to run for office, because we all knew (some of) his past. Every single one,” Walker tweeted.

“He decided to give us the middle finger and air out all of his dirty laundry in public, while simultaneously lying about it.

Following The Daily Beast’s scoop, Walker’s fundraising has soared, and Republicans have remained steadfast in their unwavering support. Moreover, despite his checkered past and these latest allegations, the senate race remains neck and neck. Why is that so?

I suggest it has nothing to do with Herschel Walker and everything to do with taking control of the US Senate. Even if Walker proved to be the second coming of Jack The Ripper, hard core Republicans in Georgia and around the country would continue to support him. It’s not that they don’t believe the latest allegations, they just don’t care about them. Controlling both the House and the Senate overrides everything. Power is quite the aphrodisiac.

Donald Trump, the man who could shoot people on 5th Avenue and get away with it, is a big Walker supporter, as is every Republican leader who’s been asked about him (with the exception of Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who won’t say a word about him).

I’m no psychologist, but I think Walker is a very troubled man with mental health issues needing serious help. It is reprehensible that Republicans are doing all they can to exploit this damaged person for their own ends. If he wins the election and falls off the face of the earth the day after, they wouldn’t mind. They’d have what they wanted, and that would be all that mattered. His is a truly sad story.

At his inauguration in 1861, Abraham Lincoln, pleading for a unified country, appealed to “the better angels of our nature.”

There are no “angels” here, better or otherwise. The mid-term election is less than a month away. In that month, there will be more charges, denials, and countercharges. It grieves me to believe that rising above to find Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature” may no longer be possible deep in the cesspool that now passes for American Democracy.

Tags: elections, Georgia, Herschel Walker, Raphael Warnock
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The Georgia Election Integrity Act: A Desperate Attempt By The Republican Party To Retain Power

Monday, March 29th, 2021

There was already a perfectly fine election statute in the state of Georgia. Perfectly fine. Chapter 2 of Title 21 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated had just completed governing the November election for President and the January election for two US Senate seats. The Presidential election had withstood lawsuits and multiple audits and been judged to have been exemplary on all counts. It was a perfectly fine statute, except for one thing: The wrong people won. And they were Democrats.

The Republican elites, who currently hold the key to the Governor’s office, as well as majorities in both the Georgia House of Representatives and Senate, could not abide that. Something had to be done. And something was. Senate Bill 202 amended the perfectly fine Chapter 2 of Title 21 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated. It became the Election Integrity Act.

The Election Integrity Act was signed into law last Friday by Governor Brian Kemp behind locked doors, no reporters allowed, in the presence of six other aging white guys (and a photographer, for whose presence and work we are grateful) and in front of a painting of the Calloway Plantation, where, in the mid-19th century, more than 100 Black Slaves toiled day and night to make the very white Calloway family ever so comfortable and rich.

As Governor Kemp, who, ironically, served as Georgia’s Secretary of State from 2010 to 2018, was getting ready to sign this obviously much-needed legislation, State Representative Park Cannon, who is Black, knocked on the locked door asking to be let in to observe. For her trouble, she was arrested by three burly state troopers and hauled off in handcuffs, and now faces two charges: willful obstruction of law enforcement officers by use of threats or violence and preventing or disrupting general assembly sessions. Video taken at the time showed none of that.

After the unfortunate interruption, Kemp signed the amended legislation, shook hands with the six aging white guys, and that was that.

That was that, that is, until certain people, including the current President of the United States, upset with the whole thing, noticed the wording in lines 1,872 through 1,881, which is this:

So, unless you have a 26 foot pole with a drink on the end of it, you’re not giving water to anyone standing in the Georgia Sun patiently waiting to cast a ballot. If you do, you’ll share Representative Cannon’s fate. In his nationally broadcast press conference, President Biden called this provision of the law, “sick.”

A new national study led by economist Keith Chen of the University of California, Los Angeles, found voters in predominantly black neighborhoods waited 29 percent longer, on average, than those in white neighborhoods. They were also about 74 percent more likely to wait for more than half an hour.

The new food and drink prohibition quite understandably got a lot of press attention. It oozes racism. But throughout the amended statute one will find other instances of intentional voter suppression. For example:

Drop boxes: Created by emergency rule due to the pandemic, these proved extremely popular during the two elections in question. In heavily democratic Fulton County, alone, 146,000 votes were made by absentee ballots placed in drop boxes. Republicans noticed immediately.

“As soon as we may constitutionally convene, we will reform our election laws to secure our electoral process by eliminating at-will absentee voting,” the Georgia Senate Republican Caucus wrote in an 8 December email. “We will require photo identification for absentee voting for cause, and we will crack down on ballot harvesting by outlawing drop boxes.”

The result in the Election Integrity Act: No more than one drop box per county. Officials, at their discretion, may place others, but no more than one per every 100,000 voters.

Voter challenges: In Georgia, voters are called “electors.” Prior to the new legislation, any elector could challenge the qualifications of anyone applying to register to vote or could challenge anyone whose name appeared on a list of registered electors. The Election Integrity Act added the following sentence: There shall not be a limit on the number of persons whose qualifications such elector may challenge. One can imagine an entire group of people being challenged.
Mobile Voting Buses: Under the old legislation, groups could use buses, approved by the Secretary of State, as mobile voting centers. Two were used in predominantly minority Fulton County (I cite Fulton County again, because in his infamous call with Secretary of State Raffensperger, President Trump mentioned the County 11 times in his quest to get Raffensperger to find him 11,780 votes). The Election Integrity Act prohibits Mobile Voting Buses.
Absentee Ballots: The Election Integrity Act, which is 2,427 lines long, devotes more than 1,450 to redesigning Georgia’s entire absentee ballot system. It is obvious Georgia’s Republican Party abhors the very thought of absentee ballots, even though a significant number of Republicans vote by absentee ballot. The law prohibits no-excuse absentee ballot application, as well as the universal sending of absentee ballot applications to all registered voters. Absentee ballot violations are considered felonies by the new legislation.
The Secretary of State: Until Brian Kemp signed the Election Integrity Act, the Secretary of State, as in most U.S. states, was responsible for conducting elections. But Raffensperger and those in his office angered many fellow Georgia Republicans during the presidential and senate races, because, after exhaustive audits, they found no fraud significant enough to change anything. The new law strips him of his authority by creating an Elections Board, whose chairperson will be elected by the legislature. The Secretary of State is now an ex-officio, non-voting member of the Board.

It is understandable why Georgia republicans are going to such lengths to suppress minority voting. Consider this from statistics from Georgia’s Secretary of State:

Since 2000, the percentage of white voters in Georgia has decreased from 68% to 58%. At the same time, the Black voting percentage has increased from 27% to 33% of total voters.
From 2000 through 2019, Georgia’s eligible voting population grew by 1.9 million; 48% were Black. White growth was only 26%.
The majority of single-race Blacks live in the South – 59%

As the proportion of white voters in the nation continues to shrink, the Republican Party is shrinking right along with it. It is unmovably the Party of Barry Goldwater and his small tent, Ronald Reagan and his “welfare queen,” and, of course, Donald Trump and his racist white supremacy. It is exhibiting all the characteristics of the self-cannibalistic rat snake that cannot stop itself from eating itself. Georgia’s Election Integrity Act is nothing more than a desperate attempt by the aforementioned aging white guys to blunt the impact of an irresistible demographic force.

In the end, it will fail. Democracy will prevail.

Tags: elections, Georgia
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Sidney Powell’s “No Reasonable Person” Nutty Defense

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2021

In early February, 2021, an Associated Press-NORC* poll found 65% of Republicans believed Joe Biden was not legitimately elected President of the united States. One week ago, a Monmouth University National Poll found exactly the same thing. Nothing had changed in a month and a half. Why do you suppose that is?

You don’t have to be Albert Einstein to know that since the election, in fact since well before it, authority figures in the Republican Party, including the President, insisted the only way Donald Trump could lose the election would be through massive fraud. One of the leaders of this disinformation campaign is the lady pictured here: Attorney Sidney Powell, Trump’s on-again off-again lawyer in his attempt to overturn the election result.

Powell manufactured far-fetched claim after monstrously far-fetched claim of election fraud beginning two days after the election. Powell and her team of conspiracy theorists filed more than 60 lawsuits around the country that all died in court. But that didn’t stop her and her sidekick Rudy Giuliani from sharing their bird-brained ideas from the stage of the Republican National Committee in a November press conference carried on C-Span. Neither did it stop them from doing the same dozens of times on Fox News and Fox Business, never challenged by anybody from the network.

When none of that worked, Powell went for the big time and won the Gold Medal for the craziest claim of 2021 (thus far). To wit, Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems conspired with Venezuela’s communist leadership, ditto with Cuba, and “likely” China to create software to fix the election for Joe Biden against Donald Trump. On 8 November on Fox Business she was interviewed by Maria Bartiromo and claimed Dominion created a secret “algorithm to calculate the votes they would need to flip. And they used the computers to flip those votes from Biden to—I mean, from Trump to Biden.”

In late January, after the Dominion Voting Systems leaders had heard this lie a few thousand times, they had enough and sued Powell, Giuliani and others for $1.3 billion for defamation. That’s billion.

Yesterday, Powell’s defense team responded to the lawsuit. It’s 90-page filing can be summarized in two words: Just kidding.

In legalese, what her lawyers said was, “no reasonable person would conclude that [Powell’s] statements were truly statements of fact.” Moreover, her high-priced defense team writes that Dominion itself “characterize(s) the statements at issue as ‘wild accusations’ and ‘outlandish claims,’” and that “Such characterization of the allegedly defamatory statements further support Defendants’ position that reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact…”

In otherwords, if the company she defamed considers the accusations off-the-chart lunacy, then nobody else could ever possibly believe them.

Finally, the Powell team claims she never knew her accusations were false. “In fact,” they write, “she believed the allegations then and she believes them now.” So, she’s not guilty; she’s just crazy.

This would all be riotously funny if it weren’t so deadly serious. Deadly, as in five people died and more than 140 were injured at the Insurrection of 6 January, a day, to quote Franklin Roosevelt, “that will live in infamy.”

But notwithstanding the Insurrection, could Sydney Powell’s defense team actually be right? Would no one believe her claims, as well as all the other ridiculous claims made by Trump apologists, because they are all so nutty? The early February AP-NORC and the mid-March Monmouth University polls, as well as the Insurrection itself, appear to give the lie to that defense. Sixty-five percent of Republicans still believe Biden cheated his way to the Oval Office. They’re getting that belief from somewhere. And unless we figure out how to disconnect this significant faction of the American public from the Big Lie, it will continue as a grotesque cancer on our society.

In the 1930s, Joseph Goebbels made famous the Big Lie.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

We have seen this movie before. And it never ends well.
________________
* The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, founded in 1941 whose name is now officially NORC.

Tags: conspiracy theorist, elections, lawsuits, reports
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Election day special – a guide to resources, polls, results & more

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010

In the interests of doing our part to foster good citizenship, we’re providing some election day resources to help you with last minute voting preparation and tracking results. While there are only two ballot initiatives involving workers comp that hit our radar (let us know if you are aware of others), electing public officials has a downstream effect on both employers and employees. We’ve compiled a list of some of our favorite online voting resources.
Google Election Center – or simply enter “vote” into the Google search box.
Facebook Polling Place Locator
Vote 411 is a non-partisan source that offers a polling place finder. You can also select by state to find out about your state ballot and the election rules and process in your state.
Ballot Measures – a database from the National Conference of State Legislators
Guide to state ballot measures – from Stateline.org, a nonprofit, nonpartisan online news site.
Ballotpedia is a free, collaborative, online encyclopedia that focuses on state elections and ballot measures that typically receive less attention.
Open Secrets is an independent research tool that tracks the influence of money on U.S. politics. The site sheds light on who is paying to finance a candidate or an issue.
Election Forecasts: Five Thirty Eight – we like to follow statistician Nate Silver, who achieved acclaim in the 2008 election for correctly predicting the winner of 49 of the 50 states and all 35 Senate races that year.
Election Polls: Real Clear Politics – is an aggregation of the latest polls from various sources, which can be sorted by Senate, House or Governor races.
Watching results
All the major TV news and cable stations and their online websites will be providing coverage of the election results. Here are a few less obvious resources:
C-Span Politics will provide live election coverage beginning at 7 PM. This is our choice for bipartisan viewing without high drama.
NY Times Election Results will have live updates, including state-by-state and county-by-county maps, and exit polls.
Twitter Vote Report – voters can share and map their experiences and resources with one another. Learn more about how to participate. We’re not sure how this will actually play out, but it’s a real-time initiative that looks interesting.
Workers Comp on the ballot
Washington – Initiative 1082 would privatize workers comp. The state is one of four in the US that offers workers comp through a government agency. Business groups, insurers and agents support this privatization while attorneys and labor unions oppose it, and local news sources report there is sharp divide among voters. Fact Check Washington reports on the initiative’s top funders. You can also find more information at BallotPedia’s page on Initiate 1082.
Louisiana – Proposed Amendment No. 9 – Act 1051 of the 2010 Regular Legislative Session
“To provide that, in civil matters only, when a court of appeal is to modify or reverse an administrative agency determination in a workers’ compensation claim and one judge dissents, the case shall be reargued before a panel of at least five judges prior to rendition of judgment, and a majority shall concur to render judgment. (Amends Article V, Section 8(B))”
Labor & employment initiatives – Labor and Employment issues – Go to the center column and select “Labor and employment” and then search either “all” or select your state. This will call up any labor and employment related ballot initiatives.
State legislative activity – The Insurance Information Institute tracks many significant state initiatives on their workers compensation page, which is updated several times a year. This is a good resource to bookmark!