Also on today’s menu:
Preserving Democracy
Broadband Partnership
The article on Tuesday 12/14/21 about incriminating Trump is a joke and you are promoting and supporting it. I could say the same thing about you in a text for example. “Hey Tom, stop all the lying before riots start and people gets hurt” see, now you are causing the riots and you are a liar without me having any proof you had anything to do with them. People can say anything they want to get headlines, but, one day they will stand before God who knows the truth.
— John Sellers
As Trump’s fixer, Michael Cohen, testified before Congress, Trump was famous for never texting, never using email, and never actually saying he wanted criminal actions taken; rather, he would suggest a course of action that others carried out. As Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey, and Jacqueline Alemany of the Washington Post pointed out today, this puts Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in a tight spot, since he was the one standing between his boss and the world, the one people would call and text with messages for the president, whose fingerprints stayed off damning material.
— Heather Cox Richardson
Two valid positions on the accusations against Donald Trump. Of course communications with Mark Meadows do not guarantee that Meadows ever forwarded those messages to Trump … but how likely is that when, as chief of staff, he had the president’s ear? Does anyone really believe that Trump was not paying attention to what was happening at the U.S. Capitol during the three hours before he made any effort to quell the violence?
It’s about “credible deniability”. For all his other shortcomings, Trump knew how to play the game. He was, after all, a reality TV personality. He conducted the nation’s business as if he were in a reality TV show, creating alliances with people he despised in order to accomplish his goals, then turning on them when they were no longer useful to him. Like the “villains” on Survivor, he has his admirers because of how well he played the game, and those he hasn’t turned against are still supporting him.
The Republican National Committee’s executive committee voted “overwhelmingly” last summer to spend $1.6 million of donors’ money to cover Trump’s private legal bills as he fights investigations of his business practices in New York. Experts say this use of donors’ money is legal, but it is “highly unusual” because “the spending has nothing to do with promoting the GOP’s policy agenda or political priorities, dealing with ongoing party business, or campaigning — and relates to investigations that are not about Trump’s time as president or his work in the White House.”
Protecting Democracy
U.S. Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH) has come out in favor of changing the filibuster rule in order to pass laws protecting voting rights. “Without free, fair, and impartially-administered elections, the United States of America as we know it would cease to exist,” she said. “But right now, our right to vote is under attack. We must change the rules, to allow a simple majority of this body, as our Founders intended, to pass laws that will protect the right to vote and protect American democracy.”
Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) also urged her colleagues not to go home for the holidays until they protect voting rights. Speaking for the Freedom to Vote Act, she called for changes to the filibuster to allow the Senate to act in the face of Republican efforts to stall the bill. She said that voting, the “fundamental right that is the very foundation of our system of government[,] is under attack.… Our nation was founded on the ideals of democracy, and we’ve seen for ourselves in this building how we can’t afford to take it for granted…. We must stand up for the salvation of our democracy, and each day that we delay, it gets harder and harder to undo what is being done.”
Many of the changes that states have made to voting laws will likely have negligible impact on election results, despite liberals’ widespread outcry against them, but there is a real danger that efforts to replace nonpartisan election officials with partisans who can overturn the vote of the people will actually destroy democracy in this country. That is why President Joe Biden has put his controversial Build Back Better initiative on the back burner, focusing instead on preserving the integrity of the election process.
Broadband Partnership
The New Hampshire Electric Cooperative has entered into a partnership agreement with Conexon, a national fiber-to-the-home rural broadband provider that works exclusively with electric cooperatives, to deliver high-speed internet to NHEC members in 118 communities that now lack it.
According to a press release from the Plymouth-based company, the partnership will enable NHEC’s new subsidiary, NH Broadband, to take the next steps in providing access to affordable, reliable high-speed internet.
The project builds upon NHEC’s current project, scheduled to go online in early 2022, to serve nearly 1,800 homes and businesses in two of the cooperative’s communities, Acworth and Sandwich. Last year, NH Broadband connected its first customers, in Lempster, Colebrook, Stewartstown, and Clarksville, to fiber-optic networks utilizing a grant from the Connecting NH Emergency Broadband Expansion Program. Those networks are currently providing more than 1,000 previously unserved NHEC members with access to high-speed internet service.
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