Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

The Republican-Backed Group Behind the Surge of GOP Election Lawsuits
By Caroline Sullivan

A red-tinted cork board with images of Karl Rove and Bill Barr; cutouts of Florida, Arizona, Ohio and Montana; excerpts from an amicus brief; a receipt and a paper that reads Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections connected by thread and pushpins.

In 2021, Republican affiliated groups and individuals filed seven voting and election lawsuits. Within the first eight months of 2022, similar groups had already filed 41 lawsuits, a number that would swell even higher by the end of the year.

Behind this surge in voting and election lawsuits you find elected officials, fringe candidates and more established and well-funded Republican organizations. From Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Winooski, Vermont, from a state trial court to the U.S. Supreme Court, there is another constant: a right-wing legal group looking to tighten voting rules.

This group, Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE), was co-founded in July 2022 by Karl Rove, a high ranking member of former President George W. Bush’s administration. Its top leadership includes the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) chief counsel, a member of the RNC’s Election Integrity Committee and former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr.

While focusing on technical elements of election policies, RITE consistently argues against voters and voting access under the guise of “integrity” and “security.”...

Another day and another bigot. A first-grade teacher in Wisconsin is in the process of being fired because she had her first graders sing a song with the word rainbow in it. The song was Dolly Parton song. The district deemed the song controversial. The song imagines a world where everybody is accepted for who they are. The school superintendent told the teacher he is recommending to the school board she be fired.

Can anybody believe this is America? This is no longer the land of the free and the home of the brave. Political signs are no longer allowed in schools and no doubt a picture of a rainbow will be considered a political sign. Pictures of rainbows appear in several children’s books. I guess they will be banned by the bigots. The very idea that we should not all be accepted for who we are shows the problem. The alternative is that we make everybody conform to what the bigot’s idea of what a human being should be. The bigots are small minded people who live in fear of people that are different. Their solution is conformity, to squelch the differences. Rainbow will be the next dirty word that can’t be said in public. The first steps have been taken.

Remember when Richard Nixon lost the 1960 Presidency because he needed a shave and he sweated on TV during his debate with JFK?

They caught him unawares with no handlers or makeup.

The Checkers speech or Fund speech was an address made on September 23, 1952, by Senator Richard Nixon (R-CA), six weeks before the 1952 United States presidential election, in which he was the Republican nominee for Vice President. Nixon had been accused of improprieties relating to a fund established by his backers to reimburse him for his political expenses. His place was in doubt on the Republican ticket, so he flew to Los Angeles and delivered a half-hour television address in which he defended himself, attacked his opponents, and urged the audience to contact the Republican National Committee (RNC) to tell it whether he should remain on the ticket. During the speech, he stated that he intended to keep one gift, regardless of the outcome: a black-and-white Cocker Spaniel that his children had named Checkers, thus giving the address its popular name.

Nixon came from a family of modest means, as he related in the address, and he had spent his time after law school in the military, campaigning for office, and serving in Congress. After his successful 1950 Senate campaign, his backers continued to raise money to finance his political activities. These contributions went to reimburse him for travel costs, postage for political mailings which he did not have franked, and similar expenses. Such a fund was not illegal at the time, but Nixon had made a point of attacking government corruption which exposed him to charges that he might be giving special favors to the contributors.