By Friday, all the mainstream news organizations will be explaining why Attorney General Barr is in Italy and has been in contact with Australia. They will probably be doing it in a way that maximizes credence in the bonkers conspiracy theory that the Trump regime is furthering as their counterattack against Congress and the Rule of Law.

The conspiracy theory begins with the assumption that the Deep State (that is, the intelligence community and the Civil Service) are executing a coup against the “duly elected President”. The specific purpose of Barr’s counterinvestigation is to prove that the Mueller Report was an unfair slander that should never have been inflicted on The Autocrat, from whom all blessings flow. To this end, they are trying to discredit the Australian intelligence operative who reported on George Papadopoulos. They are in Italy to meet the obscure academic Joseph Mifsud, a one-person think tank with no obvious source of support thought to be someone’s secret agent. Simplest to understand are two ways in which Ukraine is implicated. The first is that Ukraine faked the evidence that Putin-ally Yanukovych paid off Paul Manafort. Or, perhaps, the evidence is not fake, as the amounts correspond to sums he deposited offshore without paying taxes, but that given Manafort’s friendship with the Autocrat, it should have been suppressed. The second association with Ukraine, which may be the strangest claim of all, is that the compromised DNC server is in Ukraine. This is the server Trump mentioned on his phone call with Zelensky. There is no reason whatsoever to believe the server, or the hackers, were Ukrainian (Mueller indicted Russians for this act and laid out evidence).

Tying the loose ends together is the Steele Dossier. Much of the dossier has been proven to be true. Some still seems rather far-fetched, as its own redactor agreed. But in Trumpland, its very existence is an Original Sin, not yielding before the Autocrat. People who should know better insist it couldn’t be used as evidence for warrants because it was paid for by Trump’s opponents. If so, our prisons will soon be emptied when felons learn the police can no longer use evidence obtained from tips given by professional rivals, jilted lovers, and others who don’t like them.

The big hole in the theory is why this Deep State waited until after the election, while before the election their main accomplishments were (1) announcing an additional inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s email server less than two weeks before the election; (2) letting Moscow Mitch McConnell bully them into silence about Russian interference in the election; and (3) keeping completely silent about the connections between Russia and the Trump campaign, involving Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and others, that they already knew about. But like other conspiracy theories, the point is not the plausibility, the point is the shared membership in the club. In fact, believing the impossible is a strong attraction (see also: miracles in religion). So, the question is how to fight the Trump counternarrative. We don’t need to persuade everyone: we just need to keep the believers to the irreducible minimum core. The floor is open.

We still have about 90 postcards left to write (addresses from Noemi), and not all postcards have been returned to us for sending. Election Day is coming… We need them by the next meeting.

By the way, we spent a good half-hour with Mr. Campa-Najjar. He is probably the most flippable of the seats still in Team Orange Red hands, especially if Hunter is the Republican candidate. Former Rep. Darrell Issa has also filed to run. (Ever notice how the DC swamp-hating Republicans all want to go back there after a brief stay at home? See also—Paul Ryan.) He will need both cash and postcarding.

You may recall, he ran against future jailbird Duncan Hunter in 2018, coming close but not quite. He will be at our house this Friday 9/27 at 9:00 am. We are supporting his second try as part of a non-Indivisible commitment we made to J Street. (By the way, Washington, DC does not have a J Street. The grid goes from I Street to K Street.)

RSVP to us if you would like to meet him here.

Posting this for Noemi:

On Naomi’s porch are TWO sets of postcards: Askew-specific postcards for Askew, and generic postcards for Nancy Guy. Please work on one set at a time. We have one set of alphabetical names and addresses for each. I will send them to you in sections, e.g. Askew A-C, depending on how many you want.

We will send out images of the Askew and Turpin cards with the addresses. The wording has to be exactly what is in the Askew cards in the image. We’re not doing Turpin yet; this is just how the images came. Nancy Guy will use the same format. Askew is House of Delegates – District 85 (see his postcard) while Guy is House of Delegates – District 83. (Normally I would use the abbreviation HD, but I’m going by our Askew example.)

Do not address these to generic voters; they are going to specific people who haven’t voted yet. Do not affix stamps! We will send the stamps as part of the package of postcards we’re sending to Virginia. Bring your finished postcards with your loose stamps (if you don’t have stamps, we’ll donate ours) to the meeting at Naomi and Andy’s on October 6.

If you can’t make that meeting, put them through Naomi and Andy’s door slot on or before October 6. (We don’t want completed postcards mixed up with blank postcards on Naomi and Andy’s porch.)

Again, use Askew-specific postcards for Askew: generic postcards for Nancy Guy. Keep them separated! Do not affix stamps; just include loose stamps with your postcards. Do not put completed postcards back in the box. Bring them to the meeting or put them through the door slot. Deadline is Sunday, October 6. Thanks, Noemi

Attendance:

Naomi
Steve
Mary
Andy
Jeff
Noemi
Jane
Alice
Babette
Bruce
Bill

Education:

Gerrymandering – Bruce will post information about this.

Voter Suppression – Andy discusses the ways various states are making it difficult for people to register to vote. Wisconsin has a Voter ID card but makes it nearly impossible to get. In Georgia you can get something at the DMV office but there are no DMV offices in Atlanta. Some states are using felon disenfranchisement to prevent people from voting, and some legislatures are trying to overturn voter initiati ves that limit disenfranchisement. In some cases having the same name as a convicted felon can trigger this.
Steve says good places working on voter suppression in case you want to give some money: The Brennan Center at NYU, the ACLU, and Campaign Legal Center. Abrams in Georgia and Gillum in Florida are working on this, too, but their websites are skeletal.
Naomi says The Future is Female is working on the Senate rather than the House.

Action Items:

We finished the last postcards. Sister District is requesting a final push on the three campaigns in Virginia. Sister District will have very specific instructions for these. They will be on Naomi and Andy’s porch, but don’t start these until Noemi and/or Jeff post the instructions. They will make Tony the Democrat’s instructions look like a piece of cake, but we’ll need all of you we can get on this. The deadline for returning these is our next meeting, October 6.

If you want to fax representatives, Naomi and Andy have a fax machine you can take advantage of. You can also text RESIST to 50409 (note: Noemi tried that and was able to send only to her own rep and senators).

Future Actions:

We’re waiting for Lauren Underwood to get back with us about a fundraiser.

Steve says a WaPo study says it’s most effective to target districts that the Democrats won.

Bruce says SB1 has still not been signed or vetoed by Governor Newsom.

Michael Altschul is giving out cards saying “Elmwood Indivisible invites you to support democracy” if you want to pass some of those to your neighbors.

Next Sunday is a dim sum event. Naomi will post info about this.

Thanks to all of you who dropped off postcards while Andy and I returned once more to DC. We are looking forward to seeing many of you at our next meeting this Sunday, Sept 22, 4:30-5:45 at our house. We have been given a fairly complicated postcarding task for Virginia. We will go over in some detail at the meeting as well as educate ourselves about voter suppression. Please bring any info you all have about the best groups fighting voter suppression.

The California Indivisible statewide call Wednesday emphasized an urgent need for phone calls to Gavin Newsom from as many Indivisible members as possible asking him to abandon his announced plan to veto SB-1. The bill, authored by Senate President pro Tem Toni Atkins, would ensure California’s authority to preserve our clean air, clean water, biodiversity and safe workplaces in the face of unprecedented threats and rollbacks from the Trump administration. On Friday, Newsom signaled he was giving in to big agriculture and other SB-1 opponents.  Multiple environmental groups, including the NDRC, Nature Conservancy, and the Sierra Club are urging him to reverse course, and with enough additional flak from Indivisibles, he might just do that. So…

Call Governor Newsom’s office at  (916) 445-2841 and insist that he sign SB-1 and not veto it! 

The ask: Go to Virginia the weekend before the 11/5/19 election (or more days if they can).

Our discussion of gerrymandering became a discussion of voter initiatives, since that is generally the only way that states adopt nonpartisan redistricting commissions–legislatures don’t do it, usually.  There are a lot of states that allow voter initiatives, but they are mostly in the west.  An excellent source of information on which states allow them, with a state by state compilation of the rules that apply to them, is a website published by the University of Southern California Initiative & Referendum Institute . There is also a useful Wikipedia article.