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Four years ago, Steve Bannon watched Donald Trump declare victory in the small hours of election night in 2016, a victory for which Bannon assigned himself much of the credit and which he thought would make him historically powerful.

I am Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors, Bannon notoriously told the journalist Michael Wolff in an interview after Trumps win.

Cromwell, Henry VIIIs adviser who played a key role in the English state in the 1500s, eventually fell out of favor with the king and was beheaded, the 16th-century version of Bannons banishment from the White House and Trumps good graces in the summer of 2017. Four years later, as Trump loses the presidency while clinging desperately to false claims of a stolen election, it is Bannon who wants to do the beheading. Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci, Bannon said on his livestream web show Thursday of the current FBI director and top infectious diseases official. I'd actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. I'd put the heads on pikes, right. I'd put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. Bannons cohost mused about how traitors used to be hung, and Bannon remarked, That's how you won the revolution. No one wants to talk about it. The revolution wasn't some sort of garden party, right? It was a civil war. (Twitter swiftly imposed a permanent ban on Bannons shows account, and YouTube removed the video.)

Bannons call for the execution of federal officials deemed insufficiently supportive of Trump was certainly an escalation for him though not much of one, coming the day after he urged the attorney general to send federal agents to arrest Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. But hes far from alone among certain segments of the MAGA hardcore who have been crossing new rhetorical lines in their desperation to keep Trump in office.

An important divide has arrived on the right in the immediate aftermath of the election over how far to go in following Donald Trump, and how far people are willing to go to destroy others who dont follow along. At the heart of the divide is a gap between those triangulating for a future without Trump and those who are refusing to imagine one.

Those that were important before Trump like Fox News and certain elected Republicans have walked a fine line, softly entertaining Trumps wild lies about rigging while focusing more on the need for further transparency or proof and making loaded remarks about the elections processes in Democratic cities like Philadelphia.

Those that owe their influence to Trump the network of far-right Internet personalities, websites, and independent TV channels that gained popularity by riding his coattails, or figures who remodeled themselves in Trumps image have hewed to or exceeded Trumps claims.

As the days dragged on and it became increasingly clear that Trumps path had closed, influential figures such as the members of the Fox News primetime lineup began to shift their emphasis, testing out attacks on the incoming Biden administration and offering glowing praise of Trumps tenure in office. Trumps attempt to contest the results continued, but true hope that it would be successful had waned on all but the fringe.

Steve Bannon exits the Manhattan Federal Court on August 20 in New York City.

The MAGA diehards efforts to throw out the election will be futile. But their influence on the Trump-supporting base is important, and affects both the future of the conservative media and the way the Republican Party will handle Trumps most adoring fans going forward. Trumps supporters have spent the last four years being told that the president is the victim of a huge conspiracy to undermine him, and many will never believe that this election was legitimate a fact that hasnt been lost on Republicans deciding how to react to this crisis. The closest parallel could be to the Tea Party a decade ago, a movement fueled by hard-right conservative media that demanded ideological purity from establishment Republicans and threatened their seats in Congress.

The fragmentation of conservative media has empowered the loudest voices calling to stop the steal and weakened any possibility that reality will intrude on those who are consuming their news through the hodgepodge of fringe sources popular on the Trump right these days.

On the final weekend of the campaign, I asked voters at Trump rallies where they got their news. Some did mention Fox News, but I was surprised that nearly everyone I talked to emphasized other sources just as much or more. The Parrishes, a retired couple who went to Trumps rally in Hickory, North Carolina, told me they didnt like Fox News apart from Tucker Carlson, finding the hosts too egotistical and arrogant, said Mary Ellen Parrish, and that theres a lot of deception, her husband Chuck said. The couple mostly get their information online: Mary Ellen from Twitter and Chuck from YouTube, where he has discovered the "flat Earth" conspiracy theory, to which he ascribes.

Jerry Senn, 82, at Trumps rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina, mentioned One America News Network and Newsmax as his favorites, though he likes Fox too. He goes online to read Bill OReilly and Dennis Pragers websites. Jennifer Justice, 34, at the same rally, said, I don't watch mainstream news. I follow a lot of people on YouTube and on alternative media, but I don't watch Fox. I don't watch MSNBC. I dont watch CNN. Some of her favorites include Steven Crowder, Ben Shapiro, and Candace Owens. Multiple voters mentioned how much news they get from Facebook.

Already, Trump family members and some of the new wave of Trump-like politicians are using Trumps popularity with the base to threaten any Republican who doesnt publicly agree with the fraud allegations. The total lack of action from virtually all of the 2024 GOP hopefuls is pretty amazing. They have a perfect platform to show that theyre willing & able to fight but they will cower to the media mob instead. Dont worry @realDonaldTrump will fight & they can watch as usual! Donald Trump Jr. tweeted on Thursday. The implicit threat of Trumps wrath worked, kind of: Shortly after Trump Jrs tweet, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton weighed in, tweeting, All votes that are *legally* cast should be counted. There is NO excuse not to allow poll watchers to observe counting, and including a link to donate to Trumps campaign to support its legal challenges in various states.

Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who served as Trumps ambassador to the United Nations, struck a more cautious note on Twitter, emphasizing Republican wins in the House and Senate. We all owe @realDonaldTrump for his leadership of conservative victories for Senate, House, & state legislatures. He and the American people deserve transparency & fairness as the votes are counted. The law must be followed. We have to keep the faith that the truth will prevail. This was not enough for Trump purists. Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, an archetypal member of the MAGA wave, sniped at Haley, accusing her of eulogizing Trump.

Bannons maximalist position is shared by other former Trump officials, including those of the populist intellectual variety who had been part of the effort to reframe Trumpism as a movement with a clear ideological basis. Former White House speechwriter Darren Beattie who lost his job after it was revealed that he had spoken at a white nationalist conference tweeted on Thursday, Screw Biden... if they take this from Trump it's war on the GOP that has sabotaged Trump from the beginning even as they rode his coat tails and kissed his ass. While lacking the eloquence that perhaps was exhibited in Beatties speechwriting work, the language and the message is the same: This is a war, which must be won at any cost.

Michael Anton, Trumps former National Security Council spokesperson who had gained notoriety as the author of the incendiary Flight 93 Election essay in 2016, wrote for the pro-Trump website American Greatness casting the situation as a coup.

Anton appeared on Tucker Carlsons Fox News show on Thursday to discuss the situation. Carlson like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, the other two hosts who command huge audiences during Fox News primetime has devoted his show to openly sowing doubt in the legitimacy of the election, giving valuable airtime to the misinformation spreading through the right about the validity of the counting process. While none of the three have matched Trumps stolen language, they have heavily implied it.

But something else began happening on Fox News. During the daytime, the news division hasnt indulged Trumps election claims as much as might have been expected; another News Corp property, the New York Post, has run articles mocking the Trump familys reaction to the election.

And in the evenings, the primetime opinion hosts have also provided potential rhetorical pathways for Trump to back off.

On Wednesday night, Ingraham made a point of praising Trumps accomplishments and casting him as a martyr whose influence would only increase if the Democrats win. If they manage to succeed, how powerful is Donald Trump in the next two- and four-year period? she said. People arent going to take it. Trump and his movement, she said, would be made much more powerful, and Democrats were making a huge mistake. He will be bigger, agreed her guest Newt Gingrich. By Friday, Ingraham was all but admitting that Trump had lost. During an opening monologue that seemed designed to cheer up Trump himself, Ingraham warmly listed his first-term accomplishments and assured viewers that If there is no path for Donald Trump's second term, it doesn't mean the end of the America First movement."

Fox News host Tucker Carlson

The same night, Carlson also acknowledged that Trump might lose and focused his show on an attack on Biden as a lackey of Big Tech and a hologram who is merely a cutout for corporate interests. Carlson also previewed the kind of intra-Republican infighting that could be on the agenda, attacking Sen. Lindsey Graham despite Graham groveling to Trump for years, and pledging to give $500,000 in support of his postelection litigation for saying he is open to compromising with Democrats on immigration.

These lines signal a path forward for the right, and for Trump supporters, that is absent in the rhetoric of the dead-enders like Bannon. If you insist that Trump has won, period, and will be inaugurated on Jan. 20, period, theres nowhere to go from there.

But where is there to go for people like Bannon without Trump?

On election night, Bannons War Room show hosted a livestream atop a building across from the Capitol.

Four broadcasts were taking place from a large white tent on the rooftop: his show, Americas Voice News, The John Fredericks Show, and GTV, a Chinese-language media company owned by the Chinese dissident billionaire Guo Wengui, for whom Bannon has worked since shortly after leaving the White House. The big, brightly lit tent contained a few rows of tables, technical equipment for the livestreams, catered food and drinks, and couches arranged in front of TVs showing Bannons broadcast. Bannon and his cohosts, Jack Maxey and former Breitbart London editor Raheem Kassam, sat side by side at a table with the Capitol dome in the back of the shot. GTV was in a separate area, broadcasting in Chinese.

Two years ago, Bannon had hosted a similar event as midterm results came in; that time, his gathering had attracted bigger names in MAGA world and a clutch of reporters. This year, I hardly recognized anyone in the large white tent housing the event; the real VIPs were at the White Houses election night party, and the tier below at least got an invite to a gathering hosted by the campaign at the Trump International Hotel.

That these were not the MAGA A-list didnt reduce their enthusiasm. With my friend and former colleague who was also there to write about the event, the Atlantic writer McKay Coppins, I spoke with Harlan Hill, a right-wing personality who had carved out a niche for himself as a Bernie Sanders supporter who had switched to Trump. Hill, like nearly all of the guests, wore no mask, and when we introduced ourselves he shook our hands jovially. He was fully confident in Trumps reelection and eager to discuss it. Oh, he's gonna win, Hill declared. A hundred percent. He added, If it goes the other way, Ill eat my shoe."

Outside the tent, we encountered Kassam on a break from the livestream. Kassam had left Breitbart News in 2018 and had gone on to work for Bannon during Bannons failed effort to influence European politics. Upon seeing us, he demanded that Coppins leave, insisting that he wouldnt be fair, without being able to provide a single example of why that would be when pressed. Kassam unleashed a string of insults on the dark rooftop. We were psychopaths, he said, who actually make shit up. Though his ire was initially directed towards Coppins, he turned on me as soon as I argued with him, demanding that I leave too. I told him I found his behavior unnerving, to which he remarked cryptically that there were cameras around thus, I supposed, no reason to be unnerved. (I still dont know what he was implying might have happened in the absence of cameras.)

We explained to Kassam that Bannon and his spokesperson Alexandra Preate had both said it was fine for us to come, and he promptly turned heel and fetched Preate, who told us she was sorry but she had no choice but to back his insistence that we leave, since it was his party. Before leaving, we reminded the two of them that wed attended the event in a journalistic capacity and had never agreed to any off-the-record ground rules, which prompted Kassam to turn on his phones camera (with flash) and follow us out as we left while filming us and shouting that we were not there as reporters!

Kassams behavior was more surprising than scary. Id never seen him blow up like that in person, and, because of my work covering the right, I have known him for several years. It seemed as though a pressure valve had been released by the bitter election and the prospect of Trumps power slipping away, destroying the normal boundaries between Twitter and real life.

Later this week, both Hill and Kassam were in Philadelphia, agitating against the vote-counting there as Trumps chances of winning the election grew more and more remote. Im going to Philly tomorrow with a team, Hill tweeted on Thursday. This is war.

By Saturday, the war was lost. Along with the other networks, Fox News called the election for Biden.

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The MAGA Movement Is Splintering Between Those Preparing For A Future Without Trump And Those Refusing To Imagine One - BuzzFeed News

By Dorany Pineda| Los Angeles Times

The political battle for universal health care within the White House was long, epic and personal.

"Each time I met a parent struggling to come up with the money to get treatment for a sick child, I thought back to the night Michelle and I had to take three-month-old Sasha to the emergency room for what turned out to be viral meningitis," former President Barack Obama recalled in an excerpt from "A Promised Land," the first volume of his memoirs of his time in the White House. The excerpt was published recently in the New Yorker.

"I remembered the terror and the helplessness we felt as the nurses whisked her away for a spinal tap, and the realization that we might never have caught the infection in time had the girls not had a regular pediatrician we felt comfortable calling in the middle of the night," he continued. "Most of all, I thought about my mom, who had died in 1995, of uterine cancer."

The chapter which offers an inside look into the passage of Obamacare at the end of the former president's first year in office comes at a crucial moment for his signature piece of legislation, as its future could be threatened by the confirmationof Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.

"In the middle of a pandemic, this administration is trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act in the Supreme Court," Obama said on Twitter recently while presenting the excerpt. "Here's how Joe and I fought to expand healthcare, protect millions of Americans with preexisting conditions, and actually get it done."

The journey toward passage was messy and prone to second-guessing, particularly from Obama's closest allies: David Axelrod, his adviser, and Rahm Emanuel his chief of staff, who warned him of the political hazards: "[This] can blow up in our faces."

Emanuel warned Obama that the process of getting the bill passed would lead to unpleasant compromises and a potentially huge backlash. "Making sausage isn't pretty, Mr. President," he told his boss. "And you're asking for a really big piece of sausage."

In another passage, Obama writes about the rise of the Tea Party movement, which became harder for him to ignore, especially when it resurrected an old rumor from Obama's campaign days: that he was Muslim and born in Kenya, which would have barred him from serving as president. This lie would eventually be used by Donald Trump to consolidate the base that would help make him Obama's successor.

"At the White House, we made a point of not commenting on any of this and not just because [Axelrod] had reams of data telling us that white voters, including many who supported me, reacted poorly to lectures about race," Obama writes. "As a matter of principle, I didn't believe a President should ever publicly whine about criticism from voters it's what you signed up for in taking the job and I was quick to remind both reporters and friends that my white predecessors had all endured their share of vicious personal attacks and obstructionism."

Obama also writes about how his administration tackled the H1N1 flu outbreak just as they were dealing with two wars, a financial crisis and a push for healthcare reform.

"My instructions to the public-health team were simple: decisions would be made based on the best available science, and we were going to explain to the public each step of our response including detailing what we did and didn't know," he writes.

"A Promised Land" will be published Nov. 17, two weeks after the presidential election. The memoir will offer personal accounts of multiple landmark moments that occurred during the first term of Obama's presidency. The first of two planned volumes, it will end with the killing of Osama bin Laden.

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What Barack Obama's memoir reveals about his long battle for health care reform - Utica Observer Dispatch

BEDFORD, Texas Deep in the suburbs northeast of Fort Worth, Democrats trying to win the Texas House for the first time in years have been getting help from a surprising source.

Republicans.

For 16 years, until he left office in 2013, Todd A. Smith was a Republican representing these suburbs in the Texas House of Representatives. His district covered a fast-growing hub of middle-class and affluent communities next door to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.

When it came time to decide whom he would support for his old seat, Mr. Smith said he had no hesitation he threw his endorsement to the Democrat in the race, Jeff Whitfield.

This is no longer my Republican Party, Mr. Smith said last week while sitting outside his house, which has a Republicans For Biden 2020 sign on the front lawn.

This is the Trump party, he said. If you give me a reasonable Republican and a crazy Democrat, then I will still vote for the Republican. But if you give me a lunatic Republican and a reasonable Democrat, then Im going to vote for the Democrat, and that applies in the presidential race, and it applies in the Whitfield race.

After a generation under unified Republican control, Texas is a battleground at every level of government this year. President Trump and Senator John Cornyn are fighting for their political lives, and five Republican-held congressional seats are in danger of flipping.

But some of the most consequential political battles in Texas are taking place across two dozen contested races for the Texas State House, which Republicans have controlled since 2003. To win a majority, Democrats must flip nine of the chambers 150 seats the same number of Republican-held districts Beto ORourke carried during his 2018 Senate race, when he was the first Texas Democrat to make a competitive run for Senate or governor in a generation.

Mr. ORourke has organized nightly online phone banks that are making about three million phone calls a week to voters during the campaigns final stretch. His organization helped register about 200,000 Texas Democratic voters in an attempt to finish a political transformation of Texas that began with his Senate race.

I actually won more state House districts than Ted Cruz, Mr. ORourke said in an interview last week. Its just that the candidates in nine of those, the Democratic candidates, didnt end up winning.

Control of the Texas House comes with huge implications beyond the states borders. A Democratic state House majority in Texas would give the party one lever of power in the 2021 redistricting process, when the state is expected to receive as many as three new seats in Congress. It would also give them a voice in drawing Texas state legislative lines for the next decade.

Keep up with Election 2020

Officials from both parties said the difference between the current unified Republican control of the Texas state government and Democrats controlling the state House could be as many as five congressional seats when new maps are drawn.

Flipping the Texas House this year can be the key that unlocks a Democratic future in Texas, said John Bisognano, the executive director of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. With fair maps, Democrats will be able to compete all over the state and build a deep bench of candidates who can run and win statewide.

Nowhere in the country has there been a surge of voting to match the one in Texas. Through two weeks of in-person early voting, more than 6.9 million Texans have voted a figure that accounts for more than three-quarters of the entire 2016 turnout.

The turnout is highest in the states biggest metropolitan areas, which are the core state House battlegrounds and are six of the 10 fastest-growing counties in the country. There are five competitive state House seats in Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth, five more in other Dallas suburbs, and eight in greater Houston.

Ive always been political my whole life, said Gina Hinojosa, a state representative from Austin whose father is the chairman of the Texas Democratic Party. Now, suddenly, everybody is so political. The last election has had the result of engaging everyday people in our political process.

Texas Republicans have sought to tie Democrats running for the state House, who are campaigning on issues like health care and increasing school funding, to the most liberal proposals in their party. Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday launched a digital advertisement attacking Mr. ORourkes past statements on police funding, gun control, tax policy and the Green New Deal.

This week, the governor and other Republicans jumped on former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.s pledge during the presidential debate on Thursday to transition away from the oil industry, a bedrock of the Texas economy, saying that such a move would cost the state hundreds of thousands of jobs and shrink revenues that pay for schools.

He is an albatross around the neck of down-ballot candidates in Texas, said Jared Woodfill, a Houston conservative activist and lawyer who is a former chairman of the Harris County Republican Party. Biden just lost Texas.

Democrats said they were not worried, calling the outcry over Mr. Bidens remarks an attempt to distract voters from more pressing issues, including the continued spread of the coronavirus in Texas.

Oct. 24, 2020, 10:30 p.m. ET

Suburban voters do not appear to be buying Republican arguments during the Trump era that Democrats will turn their communities socialist. Polling in 10 targeted Texas state House districts shows Mr. Biden gaining an average of 8.6 percentage points, while Democratic state House candidates have gained 6.5 points since March in surveys conducted by the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which has invested more than $1 million in Texas over the last two years.

The suburban voters of 2020, said Steve Munisteri, a former Republican Party of Texas chairman who worked in Mr. Trumps White House, have far more in common with urbanites than they do with the more conservative voters who used to populate the outer edges of Texas metropolitan areas.

Because of urban growth, many of what are considered traditional suburbs in Texas metropolitan areas really are just extensions of the urban areas, Mr. Munisteri said.

Collin County, a suburban area 20 miles north of Dallas, has two competitive state House districts that Mr. ORourke carried in 2018. In six years, the county has added 200,000 people. It now has a population of more than 1 million people and has gone from a Democratic wasteland to one teeming with liberal volunteers.

In 2014, when John Shanks moved to Collin County, there were about 20 dedicated Democratic Party volunteers. Now Mr. Shanks, the executive director of the countys Democratic Party, has several hundred so many that he has trouble finding work for them all.

Weve had about four years of people getting used to the idea that their vote really can matter, Mr. Shanks said. Weve grown into realizing that you can make a difference. And as they realize that and wake up, things become more competitive.

Bedford sits in a part of the Dallas-Fort Worth region that has been deeply conservative for decades. Republicans have held the regions state House seat since 1985, and the Northeast Tarrant Tea Party was one of the most influential Tea Party groups during the Obama era.

The outgoing state representative, Jonathan Stickland, is a bearded Cruz-style firebrand who supported gun rights and wore his .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol at the Texas Capitol. In 2015, The Texas Tribune called him the chambers antagonist-in-chief.

Mr. Stickland apologized in 2016 after an online posting he made in 2008, before he ran for elected office, was unearthed by a political opponent. In the posting on a fantasy football site, he responded to a mans request for sex advice by writing: Rape is non existent in marriage, take what you want my friend!

Yet after years of sending conservatives to Austin, the district has changed. In just two years, the Republican advantage shrunk from 9,100 votes for Mr. Trump in 2016 to 1,167 when Senator Ted Cruz defeated Mr. ORourke in 2018.

When youre hearing people whove spent a lifetime voting Republican and they say, The party has left me, I dont know that weve ever heard that before, Mr. Whitfield, the Democratic state House candidate, said as he stood in a parking lot outside the Bedford Public Library, an early-voting site.

Steps away in the same parking lot, Mr. Whitfields Republican opponent, Jeff Cason, disputed any notion of a widespread Republican defection.

Im a man of faith, and I just believe the doors are opening for us, and if the Lord wants us in Austin, well be there, Mr. Cason said. Im not getting any sense of Republicans leaving our camp.

Julie McCarty, who was the president of the Northeast Tarrant Tea Party and is now the chief executive of the group it transformed into, the True Texas Project, attributed the Democratic gains in the region to Republicans not being conservative enough.

Republicans want to be left alone. We want smaller government. When we cant get that, we move where we can, she said. Therein lies the answer to what causes Tarrant to turn purple.

For Mr. Smith, the former Republican legislator, 2020 has been a year to split his ballot. In addition to the Biden sign and his support for Mr. Whitfield, he has a yard sign for Jane Nelson, a Republican state senator running for re-election. And he voted for Senator John Cornyn, the Trump ally locked in a tough re-election fight with M.J. Hegar, a Democrat and former Air Force helicopter pilot. Years ago, Mr. Smith threw Mr. Cornyn a fund-raiser at his house.

I have mixed feelings about it, he said of his vote for Mr. Cornyn. But I trust what I believe to be his honest convictions.

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Democrats Hope 2020 Is the Year They Flip the Texas House - The New York Times

c(Photo: c)

I need to apologize. I was wrong.

I drank the kool-aidthe President was dishing out so freely back in March about the coronavirus " being a little like the regular flu... how it's going to disappear, like a miracle...how everything was under control, no need to be concerned at all, because he was not." I believed him and even continued with my family's mid-March spring break trip to California -- and it was ground zero for the corona virus!

Then, unabashedly, I wrote about "surviving" our vacation to Disneyland even as cases in the U.S. increased despite the reality being that Disneyland was shutting down the week-end we flew home. To all the families and friends who have lost loved ones to the virus, I am truly sorry about that.

If I had only known on February 7 howPresident Trump had told writer Bob Woodward that he was "playing it down because you just breathe the air and thats how it's passed and so that's a very tricky one. That's a very delicate one. It's also more deadly than even your strenuous flus," I would never have been so flippant or disrespectful of your loss.

I know, I know. There was a learning curve, but why is it I still feel like Alice, the little girl who falls through a rabbit hole, lands in Wonderland, and discovers a fantastical place where nothing is quite what it seems and everything seems to work backwards? Being forced to unravel the mysteries and understand this disease and all the problems it is causing should not be my job!

So much of what is going on in our world today leaves me as confused and mystified as Alice when she found herself at the Madhatters Tea Party. Now, since Lewis Carroll's great literary classic became a hit Disney movie, one might think Alice in Wonderland is just a playful children's story, but it is so much more.

In the 1860's, this book was a biting commentary on England's Victorian Age, a period in history when social norms and cultural rules were totally out of whack-- much like they are in our country today.

The Madhatter's Tea Party is probably one of the most remembered moments in the book; a perfect illustration of the madness. If you can, imagine the spinning tea cup ride at Disneyworld colliding with "high tea" at The Russian Tea Room in NYC, The Fairmont Empress in Victoria, The Claridge in London or The Shangri-La in Paris, and that would give you a really good idea of what happens to the rules of society when civil behavior and social politeness fall by the wayside.

Sadly, it seems we are witnessing more and more of such bad behavior on a regular basis as our leaders and society, in general, discard, abuse or use to their own advantage the social norms we have always accepted as part of a civilized society. At the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, nothing was what it seemed or as it should be, and that is what led the very smug Cheshire cat to proclaim himself and all the curious creatures at the tea party "to be mad."

Surprised when he included her in the mix, Alice challenged him and asked how he knew she was mad,too. The Cheshire cat simply replied she must be, because she is here! Well, slap my face! As parents, don't we tell our kids to be careful who they hang out with or where they go because you are known by the company you keep? Did we look the other way whenever they ignored our rules and kept going down the rabbit hole time and again?

Certainly not, but that seems to be what is happening today. America is our Wonderland, and, right now, it seems to me and, especially to some of my travel friends from around the world like tour operators, hotel managers, and guides, that everything about our country is bizarro.

It's Alice's story! Up is down and down is up.Like me, they are angry the doors to travel have been shut down simply because we have been so careless about the virus.They even make comments about us not being good global citizens.

Actually, it was at the suggestion of Jared Kushner, the President's son-in-law, that I was inspired to read the allegoricalAlice in Wonderland for the first time. In Bob Woodward's Rage, Kushner was quoted as saying the best way to understand our President is to study the Cheshire Cat. Other than the "we are all mad" quote, the cat's most significant piece of advice in Alice's quest for truth was simply: "If you don't know where you're going, any path will get you there."

Whereas, I am not really sure if that analogy was intended as a compliment from one of the President's favorite cheerleaders, but it does help me understand our President's consistently changing -- and sometimes chaotic -- management style.No one can deny we have certainly followed him down a rabbit hole and run around Wonderland looking foranswers to the strange and unconventional things happening around us.

There is no doubt our leaders have had a thankless and difficult task, but attending the funeral of a dear friend who died of COVID-19 last week was my wake up call. I am tired of covid. It is time to get real, folks; we must get together. Our country needs us to do so, and, quite selfishly, so many small businesses like mine need you to do so, too. We must figure out a way to stop this virus, the division and the heartbreak it has left us struggling with.

The sooner we get on the same page, the sooner we will be able to enjoy the wonder in our world again! I am so ready to go.Aren't you, too?

Dianne Newcomer is a travel agent at Monroe Travel Service. Due to the pandemic,our staff is working remotely, so, for help with your vacation plans, please call 318 323 3465 or contact us at info@monroetravel.com.

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COVID-19 must be defeated to get back to normalcy - Shreveport Times

Representatives of a tax-recall petition committee responded Friday to allegations in Jefferson County circuit court that organizers altered voter information to help the petition gain certification by the Jefferson county clerks office. Judge Brian Edwards decision will determine whether votes cast on tax-levy question will be counted.

Organizers of the tax-recall petition do not deny they altered names, addresses and birthdates entered on an online petition to recall a 9.5% property tax increase. Organizer and Louisville Tea Party president Theresa Camoriano says she was just trying to clean up data signers had entered through a website, fixing typos and making sure all necessary info was there.

People had a hard time, Camoriano told attorneys during her deposition.

Camoriano said she used a Republican Party database to fill out missing information, or sometimes change information. She said she got the database log-in from Rep. Jason Nemes (R-Louisville), who has been endorsed by the Jefferson County Teachers Association (JCTA).

Petitioner and Louisville Tea Party member Michael Schneider, who helped develop the website, said the group of tax-opponents anticipated challenges with an online platform.

We realized that a good portion of our Tea Party group is elderly, Schneider told the court Friday. So, we tried very carefully to make it as user friendly as possible so that older folks wouldnt have trouble entering their information.

But they did have trouble, Schneider said, especially since there were a number of quirks with the website. At first, Schneider said, the field for birthdate required voters to use the European format, with the day of the month first. Then they changed it to a drop-down menu, which Schneider said created more problems.

Asked if he was uncomfortable with Camoriano changing the data voters entered, Schneider said no.

Im comfortable with that. I think the main thing was to just identify that the person was a voter and intended to sign the petition, he said.

Camoriano said she did not always reach out individually when she altered voters entries.

Jim Sprigler, a web developer hired by JCTA, found 1,110 instances in which it appeared committee members had altered the original data voters entered into the website. Attorneys for the teachers union have said its possible that voters were signed up by others, who knew their name and address, or even name and block. JCTA says they have contacted 12 people whose names were on the petition without their knowledge.

Schneider maintained he was not comfortable with Camorianos decision to add voters signatures to the website who had submitted her written requests to do so. Camoriano said she only did this a handful of times.

Camoriano also admitted to adding an alternate address and birth date for at least one person who signed the handwritten version of the petition.

Finally, according to her deposition and emails provided to the court, Camoriano encouraged hundreds of voters to sign the petition a second time in order to make sure they entered all necessary information.

We have discovered a problem with your entry on the petition that will prevent it from being counted. We are sending this notice to ask you to re-submit your entry on the petition at https://nojcpstaxhike1.com/sign-the-petition/ to be sure that your signature counts, she wrote in a mass email.

Rest assured, we will delete duplicate signatures before we submit the petition to the Jefferson County Clerk, the email reads.

Camoriano told attorneys she tried very hard to get rid of duplicates, throwing out thousands of signatures. But Sprigler found at least 928 duplicates in the signatures that were accepted by the county clerk. That does not include duplicates that were found by the county clerk.

An attorney for the petitioners, Dana Howard, has called into question whether some of the alterations Sprigler identified were truly alterations made by the committee. She found one entry where the change in some unusual characters used in a name could have been caused by importing the data from one program into another.

Petitioners and the teachers union offered competing calculations as to how many signatures are valid, should the court decide to throw out those with errors and alterations. Petitioners needed 35,517 signatures certified by the county clerks office to put the tax question on the ballot. They submitted around 40,000, and the clerk certified 38,507, putting them above the threshold needed.

However, the clerks office accepted 2,376 signatures in which deputy clerks found errors, including wrong birthdays or addresses. It is not clear why the clerks office accepted some of these errors, and not others. The clerks office had about 20 different deputy clerks going through different pages of the signatures, and were supposed to be following certain uniform guidelines, according to depositions with Jefferson County Clerk Government Affairs Executive Frank Friday.

Attorneys for the teachers union argue those 2,376 should be thrown out, along with the other errors and altered signatures identified in Spriglers analysis. That would leave petitioners with 33,196 not enough signatures for a ballot measure. Attorneys offered the following visual:

Attorneys for the JCTA offered this visual showing the signatures they believe should be thrown out.

Meanwhile, attorneys for the petitioners have their own math. Howard said the starting point should be the total signatures the clerk certified, including those with errors. They argue that even if duplicates and unregistered voters identified by Sprigler were thrown out, petitioners would still have 36,356 signatures, which exceeds the threshold. Howards math however, left in records with erroneous birthdates, addresses and some duplicates identified by Sprigler. She presented the following chart:

An attorney for the petitioners says there are still enough signatures if some of the signatures with errors or alterations are thrown out.

WFPL News also did an analysis, using data provided by attorneys for JCTA. We subtracted all of the errors, duplicates and altered records found by Sprigler from the total number of signatures certified by the county clerks office. We left in the 2,376 errors the clerk found and certified anyway. Heres what we got:

38,507 total signatures certified by the clerk

-192 unregistered signers

-928 duplicates

-1,312 birth date errors

-1,110 altered electronic entries

-75 altered handwritten entries

_________________________________

34,008

Thats 1,509 signatures below the threshold needed to put the referendum on the ballot.

The judge says hell issue a ruling by the end of next week. His decision will determine whether votes cast on the tax levy question will be counted.

Read the original here:
Tax-Recall Petitioners Respond To Allegations They Altered Voter Information - 89.3 WFPL News Louisville