The Daily Parker

By now you may have heard that Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who oversees elections in Georgia, and who is running for governor of Georgia this coming Tuesday, claims the Democratic Party hacked the voter registration database.

No. What happened is, when the state Democratic Party's voter protection director reached out to his office directly after being alerted to a gaping data vulnerability, he turned his own malfeasance into an attack on his opposition:

By the time Democrats reached out to the experts, Kemp’s office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had already been alerted to the problem on Saturday morning by David Cross of the Morrison Foerster law firm. Cross is an attorney for one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Kemp and other elections officials concerning cyber weaknesses in Georgia’s election system.

A man who claims to be a Georgia resident said he stumbled upon files in his My Voter Page on the secretary of state’s website. He realized the files were accessible. That man then reached out to one of Cross’s clients, who then put the source and Cross in touch on Friday.

The next morning, Cross called John Salter, a lawyer who represents Kemp and the secretary of state’s office. Cross also notified the FBI.

WhoWhatWhy, which exclusively reported on these vulnerabilities Sunday morning, had consulted with five computer security experts on Saturday to verify the seriousness of the situation. They confirmed that these security gaps would allow even a low-skilled hacker to compromise Georgia’s voter registration system and, in turn, the election itself. It is not known how long these vulnerabilities have existed or whether they have been exploited.

In this election and during the primaries, voters have reported not showing up in the poll books, being assigned to the wrong precinct, and being issued the wrong ballot.

All of that could be explained by a bad actor changing voter registration data.

Kemp's incompetence at securing voter registration data should be criminal. If he were a corporate executive, he could personally be sued in the EU and in other parts of the world for his negligence.

But, see, if you're running in a state where the majority of voters want your opponent to win, and you're a Republican, and you have the means and opportunity, you just bollocks up data security so badly that the entire registration process looks suspect. Then you either win, because the opposition can't vote, or you lose, and start bogus investigations to call the election's legitimacy into doubt.

This has been the Jim Crow strategy for a century and a half. That Kemp's opponent is an African-American woman with clear support from a majority of Georgians only makes Kemp's behavior more brazen.

The Republican Party can't win on the merits in most of the country, so they're throwing the game where they can. And the fact that their behavior undermines the legitimacy of elections in general is a feature, not a bug.

I've said this for 30 years: the Republican Party doesn't want to govern; they want to rule. And they are not going to give up their losing battle quietly. Nihilism doesn't care, after all.

Vote on Tuesday, if you haven't already. Enough of this shit. We have real problems to solve, and we need real people to solve them. Don't let the nihilists win.

Writing for New Republic, Garret Keizer argues that nihilism, not racism or anger at elites, really drives Trump voters:

A nihilist is someone who dedicates himself to not giving a shit, who thinks all meanings are shit, and who yearns with all his heart for the “aesthetic pleasure” of seeing the shit hit the fan. Arguing with a nihilist is like intimidating a suicide bomber: The usual threats and enticement have no effect. I suspect that is part of the appeal for both: the facile transcendence of placing oneself beyond all powers of persuasion. A nihilist is above you and your persnickety arguments in the same way that Trump fancies himself above the law.

[I]t’s probably a mistake to view nihilism as “an explanation apart” from the common analyses of the Trump phenomenon. Economic dispossession and virulent racism stand in relation to nihilism not as alternative theories but as reciprocal causes and effects. In other words, all three flourish in a moral vacuum.

A sense of radical incredulity, spectacularly typified by Trump’s refusal to believe his own intelligence services, is but one manifestation of the nihilism that brought him to power. What makes him “the real deal” in the eyes of his most ardent admirers is largely his insistence that almost everything else is fake. Like him, they know that the news is fake, the melting ice caps are fake, the purported citizenship of certain voters is fake, science is fake, social justice is fake, the whole notion of truth is fake. Whatever isn’t fake is so relative that it might as well be fake; “true for you,” maybe, but that’s as far as it goes. Among those who call themselves “believers” and are thus at least technically not nihilists, one frequently finds an obsession with apocalypse, a gleeful anticipation of the living end that will destroy the inherent fakery of all things. The social teachings of the Gospels need not trouble the Christian conscience so long as the troubles predicted in Revelation come to pass.

Another pertinent factor is envy, a basic human emotion that rising social inequality can only exacerbate. To put it in cruder terms: “The world sucks for me, so I am going to make it suck for you too. I have lost my job, my status as a white male, and may even lose my gun. So you, my smug, privileged friend, are going to lose your civil liberties, your faith in social progress, your endangered species, your affirmative action, your reproductive freedom, your international alliances, your ‘wonderful’ exchange student from Syria.” The rationale is probably not too distant from that of the jealous husband who shoots his wife, her lover, and himself. Enjoying ourselves, are we? We will enjoy nothing!—which is to say, we will enjoy the only thing a nihilist can enjoy.

It's a slightly depressing essay, but probably accurate. Sigh.

Washington Post political reporter Philip Bump lays it out:

[T]he effects of the increased heat are much broader than simply higher temperatures. In an effort to delineate what scientists expect to see as the world warms, I spoke with Alex Halliday, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

Direct effects of higher temperatures

Increased health risks. One of the most immediate effects of higher temperatures is an increased threat of health risks such as heat stroke. As noted above, this is probably the most easily understood risk.

Drought. There will be more droughts. For one thing, higher temperatures will lead to faster evaporation of surface water. For another, they will mean less snowfall, as precipitation will be more likely to fall as rain. In some regions, like much of the Southwest, flows of water through the spring and summer are a function of snow melting in the mountains. Reduced snowpack means less water later in the year.

Wildfires. Higher temperatures and drier conditions in some places will also help wildfires spread and lengthen the wildfire season overall.

It gets better from there. So its nice to know that the world's second-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases plans to reduce regulations to allow even more emissions.

Paul Krugman highlights how the politics of the Republican party are mainly about privileged white men feeling like they're losing their privilege:

There have been many studies of the forces driving Trump support, and in particular the rage that is so pervasive a feature of the MAGA movement. What Thursday’s hearing drove home, however, was that white male rage isn’t restricted to blue-collar guys in diners. It’s also present among people who’ve done very well in life’s lottery, whom you would normally consider very much part of the elite.

In other words, hatred can go along with high income, and all too often does.

At this point there’s overwhelming evidence against the “economic anxiety” hypothesis — the notion that people voted for Donald Trump because they had been hurt by globalization. In fact, people who were doing well financially were just as likely to support Trump as people who were doing badly.

I very much ran with the nerds during my own time at Yale, but I did encounter people like Kavanaugh — hard-partying sons of privilege who counted on their connections to insulate them from any consequences from their actions, up to and including abusive behavior toward women. And that kind of elite privilege still exists.

But it’s privilege under siege. An increasingly diverse society no longer accepts the God-given right of white males from the right families to run things, and a society with many empowered, educated women is finally rejecting the droit de seigneur once granted to powerful men.

And nothing makes a man accustomed to privilege angrier than the prospect of losing some of that privilege, especially if it comes with the suggestion that people like him are subject to the same rules as the rest of us.

This basic dynamic explains almost every revolution in history, including the American one in the 1770s. This time it's white men, but it could be any elite group who start losing power. The Post makes a similar point:

Jennifer Palmieri, a Democratic strategist and author of “Dear Madam President,” a book about reimagining women in leadership roles, said the nation’s fast-changing culture can be unsettling and indeed frightening to men in power.

“A lot of white men don’t know what it’s like to feel threatened, powerless and frustrated,” said Palmieri, former communications director for Clinton’s campaign. “As we go through the reckoning of this lopsided power balance, there’s going to be a lot more of this.”

The Republican Party has long identified with more traditional white males, such as former presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. But strategists say it is now turning more toward combative male candidates in the mold of Trump, with allegations of misconduct interpreted by many within the party not as liabilities but as unfair political attacks.

“We’re a party of angry, older white men at a time when our country is going through tremendous demographic change,” Republican strategist John Weaver said, predicting that the GOP would suffer the consequences in future elections.

So when white voters tell pollsters and reporters that they fear a tide of "those people" coming over the border, they feel afraid of losing their birthright. Not the traditions and culture, necessarily, but the parts of those things that put them on top because of the accident of birth.

The American Bar Association had concerns about Brett Kavanaugh 12 years ago:

Democrats for three years had been blocking President George W. Bush’s 2003 nomination of Kavanaugh to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. They argued he was biased, as shown by his work as a lawyer for Bush’s presidential campaign, for an independent counsel’s investigation into President Bill Clinton and for other conservative causes.

Republicans kept pushing to make Kavanaugh a judge on the powerful appeals court, year after year. In his defense, they cited multiple reviews by the ABA’s judicial review committee that found him “well qualified” — the big attorney association’s highest possible endorsement, meaning Kavanaugh had outstanding legal abilities and outstanding judicial temperament.

But in May 2006, as Republicans hoped to finally push Kavanaugh’s nomination across the finish line, the ABA downgraded its endorsement.

The group’s judicial investigator had recently interviewed dozens of lawyers, judges and others who had worked with Kavanaugh, the ABA announced at the time, and some of them raised red flags about “his professional experience and the question of his freedom from bias and open-mindedness.”

But the GOP hasn't been in favor of unbiased judges since...well, let's see, they're really only in favor when Democrats hold the White House. Interesting.

I fear they're going to get uglier before they're out of power. It's human nature.

Brett Kavanaugh's hearing yesterday dominated the news. Here are some reactions:

• My favorite: Alexandra Petri demanding HOW DARE YOU DO THIS TO BRETT KAVANAUGH.
• My least favorite: Mona Charen correctly identifying it as a show trial but incorrectly identifying the aggrieved party.
• Sarah Holder makes the case for a local investigation of Kavanaugh's conduct.
• Emma Green found herself baffled by Rachel Mitchell's questions.
• Andrew Sullivan notes that everyone lost yesterday.
• Aaron Blake says the GOP's nightmare might not be over.
• Chris Jones called it a circus of human pain.
• Josh Marshall points out that Kavanaugh is still a very powerful judge.
• The Guardian also weighed in, as did The Economist, 

Then, today, the committee voted along party lines to advance Kavanaugh to the whole Senate; Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) demanded the FBI investigate the allegations; and protesters confronted Flake in the Capitol.

Republican David Brock, who worked with Judge Brett Kavanaugh on the Clinton impeachment, urges the Senate to vote "No" on Kavanaugh's nomination:

Twenty years ago, when I was a conservative movement stalwart, I got to know Brett Kavanaugh both professionally and personally.

A detailed analysis of Kavanaugh's own notes from the Starr Investigation reveals he was cherry-picking random bits of information from the Starr investigation — as well as the multiple previous investigations — attempting vainly to legitimize wild right-wing conspiracies. For years he chased down each one of them without regard to the emotional cost to [Vince] Foster’s family and friends, or even common decency.

Kavanaugh was not a dispassionate finder of fact but rather an engineer of a political smear campaign. And after decades of that, he expects people to believe he's changed his stripes.

I can promise you that any pretense of simply being a fair arbiter of the constitutionality of any policy regardless of politics is simply a pretense. He made up his mind nearly a generation ago — and, if he's confirmed, he'll have nearly two generations to impose it upon the rest of us.

Meanwhile, it looks a lot like the Christine Blasey Ford held her own against what Josh Marshall calls "Grassley's Catastrophe."

We're 40 days from the mid-terms.

The two most prominent Republican women who write for left-leaning major newspapers are not happy with the Brett Kavanaugh saga. First, Michelle Goldberg says the current GOP elite are "pigs all the way down:"

Let’s start with Kavanaugh’s high school, Georgetown Prep, also the alma mater of Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first Supreme Court pick. There’s now a wealth of reporting painting the private school as a bastion of heedless male entitlement. Kavanaugh’s high school friend Mark Judge — who Christine Blasey Ford, Kavanaugh’s first accuser, says was in the room when Kavanaugh allegedly assaulted her — has written extensively of his drunken teenage debauchery.

There’s no equivalent culture in which girls reap social capital for misbehaving. You rarely see women in politics or law who flaunt college reputations as party girls; the women who make it are expected to show steely self-control. In the rarefied social world that produces so many of our putative leaders, a young man who frequently gets blackout drunk, as Kavanaugh reportedly did, is a fun guy. A young woman who does so is a mess.

Watching all this unfold is radicalizing for reasons far beyond Republican mistreatment of Kavanaugh’s accusers. His story shows, in lurid microcosm, how a certain class of men guard and perpetuate their privileges. Women who struggle ceaselessly to be smart enough, attractive enough, ambitious enough and likable enough have been playing a rigged game. As they realize that, their incandescent fury is remaking our politics. We’ll know things have changed when palling around with sexual abusers carries more stigma than being abused does.

Over at the Post, Jennifer Rubin says, if Kavanaugh is a partisan hack, he should be questioned like one:

Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh shed any hint of judicial temperament on Monday night. He went right to the most partisan outlet, Fox News, which has been likened to “state TV.” He seemed a bit ill at ease in his role as victim during the softball interview. He teared up. He said he wouldn’t be chased out of the confirmation process. In doing so, he debased himself and the highest court.

By going to Fox News before appearing again before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he sank to the level of political partisan. As he claimed his growing list of accusers were . . . were what? — All loons? All partisans? — he made clear that he is not acting like an innocent man nor a judge. An innocent man and one of fine judicial temperament would demand an investigation to clear his name. An innocent man and a man steeped in due process and fair play would denounce reprehensible stunts such as trying to blame a completely innocent person using nothing but an old yearbook and Zillow. Such a man would not make a mawkish plea for sympathy, but rather, insist on a rigorous investigation of the facts.

Democrats should make clear that, in his hunger to sit on the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh has further politicized an already broken confirmation system and has done damage to the court. His indifference to transparency and fact-finding in favor of hardball political theatrics alone should be grounds for rejecting his nomination.

Because it turns out, making blatant partisanship part of the nominating process for a lifetime appointment makes the body itself blatantly partisan. We have the Republicans to thank for that, more than the Democrats, whose partisanship extended to bouncing Robert Bork because—wait for it—he was too partisan to sit on the Court.

The Republican Party can barely get through a morning without demonstrating their disdain for the voters who put them in office. And in their desperation to stay in power, they're destroying the system they're sworn to "protect and defend." Which may be part of their plan.

Lots of stuff crossed my inbox this morning:

• Researchers at Northwestern University believe they have evidence of four distinct personality types.
• Other researchers have found "huge perceptual differences [of Chicago] based on age, education level and especially race and ethnicity."
• Via Schneier, a look at the effects of publicly shaming companies for bad security.
• With 50 days to go until the election, James Fallows adds a time capsule about Brett Kavanaugh.
• Josh Marshall wonders whether Christine Ford will get better treatment than Anita Hill.

Back to my wonderful, happy software debugging adventure.

James Fallows says the Republican effort to put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court without adequately weighing some key evidence risks a multi-generational error:

During his confirmation hearings for the D.C. Circuit Court 12 years ago, Kavanaugh denied under oath that he had participated in certain specified partisan fights. Two senior, hyper-cautious Democratic senators – Patrick Leahy, and Dianne Feinstein – have, along with others, now come out with statements that Kavanaugh was lying under oath in 2006, and is doing so again now.

Was he? This matters.

Every modern-era judicial nominee has mastered the art of dissembling, and pretending to have a completely open mind and a “I just call the balls and strikes” objectivity about every controversial issue.

But actual lying is something different. Clarence Thomas’s interlocutors believed that he was lying about Anita Hill, and the intervening years makes it more likely they were right. This is the first time I’m aware of, since the Thomas hearings, in which Senators opposing the nomination have come out to say: this nominee is lying under oath. It is worth knowing the truth before the now-or-never vote is cast.

The second question involves finances.

Brett Kavanaugh has some major financial gray-areas in his recent past. The very large credit-card debts, suddenly paid off?

Maybe this all is nothing. But the Senate is ramming through a vote before anyone knows what’s there.

Only 51 days until the election.