Federal Judge Finds Georgia County Violated Civil Rights Act by Rejecting Ballots

13 November 18

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Andy Borowitz | Trump Warns That Florida Recount Could Set Dangerous Precedent of Person With Most Votes Winning 

Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "Calling for an 'immediate end' to the recount in Florida, Donald J. Trump warned on Monday that it could set a dangerous precedent of the person with the most votes winning."
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Democratic candidate for Georgia's governor Stacy Abrams. (photo: John Bazemore/AP)

Federal Judge Finds Georgia County Violated Civil Rights Act by Rejecting Ballots
Aris Folley, The Hill
Folley writes: "A federal judge on Tuesday found that Gwinnett County violated the Civil Rights Act in its handling of absentee ballots during last week's midterm elections, a ruling that will likely delay the overall vote tally in the state's tight gubernatorial race."
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Matthew Whitaker. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Maryland to Challenge Legality of Whitaker's Appointment as Acting US Attorney General
Ann E. Marimow, The Washington Post
Marimow writes: "Maryland's top lawyer asked a federal judge Tuesday to block Matthew G. Whitaker from serving as acting U.S. attorney general contending the appointment is illegal."
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Democrat Kyrsten Sinema is projected to win the Arizona Senate race, according to the Associated Press. (photo: Christian Petersen/Getty Images)

Democrat Kyrsten Sinema Wins Arizona Senate Race, Flipping Second GOP Seat
Jessica Taylor, NPR
Taylor writes: "Democrat Kyrsten Sinema has defeated Republican Martha McSally to win the Arizona Senate race, the Associated Press projected Monday evening."
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CNN journalist Jim Acosta before the November 7, 2018 news conference at the White House. (photo: Evan Vucci/AP)

CNN Is Suing Donald Trump Over His Treatment of Jim Acosta
Rafi Schwartz, Splinter News
Schwartz writes: "CNN announced on Tuesday that it was filing a lawsuit against President Donald Trump and five other administration officials, after the White House revoked correspondent Jim Acosta's 'hard pass' press credentials last week."
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Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is pictured during a visit to the Pentagon on March 22, 2018. (photo: Cliff Owen/AP)

Khashoggi Killing: Strongest Evidence Linking Murder to MBS
Middle East Monitor
Excerpt: "A message captured in the audio record of the killing of Jamal Khashoggi is widely believed to be an instruction to notify the Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman that the operation to slay the Washington Post journalist had been carried out successfully."
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Chris and Nancy Brown embrace Monday while looking over the remains of their burned residence after the Camp Fire tore through the region in Paradise, California. Dozens of people have been killed in the latest fires to hit the state. (photo: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images)

Megafires More Frequent Because of Climate Change and Forest Management
Christopher Joyce and Ashley Westerman, NPR
Excerpt: "Strong, dry winds are expected to continue through the early part of this week in California as the state battles several wildfires."
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Frank Rich | Trump Won't Change Course - He Thinks He Won

09 November 18

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Frank Rich | Trump Won't Change Course - He Thinks He Won 

Frank Rich, New York Magazine
Rich writes: "The notion that 'the party' might rethink anything is a non sequitur. The only question is whether Trump would rethink anything, and the answer is a resounding no."
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Democrat Bill Nelson, Republican Marco Rubio, and Republican Rick Scott. (image: The Daily Beast)

Republicans Freak Out as New Ballots Threaten Florida Senate Win
Will Sommer, The Daily Beast
Sommer writes: "New ballots in Broward County have conspiracy theorists - including the state's top elected officials - calling for an investigation of Democrats."
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CNN's Jim Acosta. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

The Backstory on the Altered Acosta Video
Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker
Rothman writes: "For all its crudeness, the video gives us a glimpse of the future. In the coming years, as technology advances, we'll have good reason to grow more skeptical about the videos we see."
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Supporters attend a Get Out the Vote Rally for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum and other Florida Democrats at the University of Central Florida, CFE Arena on October 31, 2018, in Orlando, Florida. (photo: Jef J. Mitchell/Getty)

ALSO SEE: As Florida Races Narrow, Trump and Scott Spread
Claims of Fraud Without Evidence

"We Will Never Concede to Bigotry": Florida Organizers Sound the Alarm Over Voting Discrepancies
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "Every vote remains to be counted in Broward County. Many of our votes have not yet been tabulated. And Andrew Gillum is now within what is triggered for an automatic machine recount."
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U.S. troops. (photo: Getty)

The Death Count in 'War on Terror' Has Reached Over Half a Million People
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Between 480,000-507,000 people were killed in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq in the wake of 9/11 attacks, study says."
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Border Patrol helicopter and ground operations in the Sonoran desert of southern Arizona, outside Arivaca. (photo: Sophie Smith)

The Desert of Asylum: From Internment to Disappearance on the US-Mexico Border
Sophie Smith, NACLA
Smith writes: "When state-sanctioned practices of child kidnapping, family internment, and indefinite detention cut off the possibility of seeking asylum at official ports of entry, Central American refugees are increasingly forced to take ever-more dangerous paths into the United States."
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Canyonlands National Park. (photo: Dconvertin)

How the Trump Administration Is Putting Our National Parks at Risk
Daria Bachmann, The Revelator
Bachmann writes: "Experts fear oil and gas development could permanently damage millions of acres of ecologically and culturally important public lands."
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Chris Hayes: "Donald Trump Is Cornered And Dangerous" | All In | MSNBC

Fact Checker: Trump claims ‘big victory’ as GOP loses the House

Democracy Dies in Darkness

The truth behind the rhetoric

Trump claims ‘big victory’ as GOP loses the House President George W. Bush called it a “thumping" when Democrats took the House in the 2006 midterms. President Barack Obama called it a “shellacking” when Republicans won the House back in the midterms in 2010. President Trump called it a “big victory” after his party lost the House in this week’s midterm elections. In an after-action news conference, Trump gave a flurry of statistics about the Senate, which the GOP held, and patted himself on the back for campaigning in battleground states. His statistics were wrong or based on Senate results that are still up in the air. This was an 87-minute news conference, so there was plenty more to fact-check, including some of Trump’s well-worn claims about how his tax returns wouldn’t reveal much new information (false), how his support has soared among African Americans (nope), and how Obama allowed Russia to annex part of Ukraine (false). Magic numbers from DHS on criminals in the migrant caravan The Department of Homeland Security claims there are as many as 500 people with criminal records along the same route as the migrant caravan traveling from Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border. How do they know? That’s a great question that they can’t answer at all. Not only has the total magically evolved — first it was 300, then DHS said in response to our questions that 200 more had been identified — the way they describe this figure is so vague it could include people who are not part of the caravan and are just passing through Mexico on their own. It wouldn’t be the first time the administration comes up with fishy statistics to back up some eye-popping claim from President Trump. “We’re getting a lot of heat because, I was saying, there were some bad people in that caravan. Right? So we checked, 300 people," Trump said at a recent rally. At another rally, he said, “They gave you 300 names yesterday.” Actually, there were no names. There’s just a vague news release issued Nov. 1 titled “Myth vs. Fact: Caravan.” We gave it Three Pinocchios.

Sarah Sanders smears CNN reporter with a video doctored by conspiracy theorists 

The White House press secretary never had a stellar track record of telling the truth, but this is a new low.

Here’s a play-by-play: Trump holds a news conference and CNN’s Jim Acosta asks his usual, combative questions. Trump calls him a “rude, terrible” person. A female White House intern tries once to take Acosta’s microphone; he holds onto it. The intern tries again, forcefully reaching and tugging at the mic, but Acosta holds onto it and uses his free arm to block her reach. Acosta says, “Pardon me, ma’am," and keeps questioning Trump.

An indignant Sanders later announced that Acosta’s press pass had been yanked because the White House would “never tolerate a reporter placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as a White House intern.” Gaslighting the public about an encounter everyone could see on video is nothing new for the Trump White House.

But Sanders tweeted out a video that made Acosta look much worse — since it appears to have been edited for dramatic effect. A close look at the video shows someone sped up Acosta's arm movement and appears to have inserted duplicated frames at the moment of contact with the intern, which made Acosta’s parry seem much more like a karate chop. The video was first shared by Paul Joseph Watson, known for his conspiracy-theory videos on the far-right website Infowars. (Watson claims he made the video out of a GIF, which could achieve the same effect as duplicating frames.)

There’s a real lesson for the public in this clumsy attempt by Sanders at Orwellian propaganda. As our Washington Post colleague Drew Harwell wrote, it highlights “how video content — long seen as an unassailable verification tool for truth and confirmation — has become as vulnerable to political distortion as anything else.” Viewer beware. We’re always looking for fact-check suggestions. Scroll down for this week’s Pinocchio roundup. — Salvador Rizzo

Trump’s Four-Pinocchio claim: ‘Democrats let him into our country’ The president's campaign ad ignores the fact cop-killer Luis Bracamontes was deported when Bill Clinton was president. He snuck back in under George W. Bush. By Glenn Kessler  •   Read more »  The Trump administration’s fuzzy math on ‘criminals’ in the caravan President Trump claims there are 300 "rough, rough people" in the caravan of migrants traveling through Mexico. But the administration won't explain how that figure is calculated. By Glenn Kessler  •   Read more »  Fact-checking President Trump’s post-election news conference Here's a look at ten claims made by President Trump at his post-election news conference. By Glenn Kessler and Salvador Rizzo  •   Read more »  The Fact Checker’s crash course for the 2018 elections We rounded up 47 fact-checks of Democrats, Republicans and outrageous campaign ads. By Salvador Rizzo  •   Read more »