Tip of the hat to EarlG on democraticunderground.com

As if the words of Republicans that were cited in the previous article weren’t bad enough, we also have the actions that Republicans do or try to do that show a real arrogance and contempt for laws and norms.

The first example is a repeat from the previous story. That is the former president who held a real contempt for laws and people. His disdain for regulations led directly to train derailments last week not only in Ohio but also other Staes including Arizona near Tucson

In this section Iowa has an entry. Our own governor, Corporate Kim Reynolds, frequently shows her disdain for people and laws in Iowa. This week in an on going battle to stiff Iowa’s open records law, Reynolds claimed she was too busy to comply with such a request.  

State law requires public records to “be provided promptly upon request unless the size or nature of the request makes prompt access infeasible.” The law requires an initial response to a request within 20 days but doesn’t dictate a deadline for ultimately providing the records.

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Because of that, Wessan said Wednesday, a clearly articulated refusal by the governor to provide the records was needed for the lawsuit to proceed. He has insinuated that the delays were caused, at least in part, by the coronavirus pandemic.

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Thomas Story, an attorney for the ACLU of Iowa, which filed the suit on behalf of Iowa Capital Dispatch and the other plaintiffs, said the lawsuit must go forward to determine whether the governor supplied all of the public records and whether the plaintiffs can recoup attorneys’ fees, which requires a determination of whether the governor violated the law.

“These journalists repeatedly and politely inquired about their pending requests and, unfortunately, were often simply ignored,” Story said in a press conference after the Wednesday court hearing. “After we sued, it took them only 18 days to provide almost all of the missing documents to our clients and every other reporter with pending open records requests. There was no lawful justification to ignore the requests for 18 months.”

Down in Florida, wannabe president Ron DeSantis is pushing through a bill where he could sue and or jail journalists who say disparaging things about him. This law is the right wing autocrat’s wet dream. It would sure seem to be in direct opposition to the first amendment, but a future dictator has got to try, doesn’t he?

A statement by Seth Stern, director of advocacy for Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) and a First Amendment lawyer, is below:

Gov. DeSantis continues to make clear his disdain for freedom of speech and the press and to prioritize censoring dissent over governing. This bill would do nothing for ordinary Floridians but would allow government officials and celebrities to harass and even bankrupt their critics with expensive litigation. It would stifle investigative reporting by presuming any statements attributed to anonymous sources to be false despite that (or, given DeSantis’ ambitions, maybe because) confidential sources have literally brought down presidents in this country.

The Florida legislature should reject this political stunt and Floridians should not tolerate their governor’s experiments in authoritarianism in their name and at their expense. The U.S. Congress should safeguard the First Amendment by codifying Sullivan and ensuring that the press and public are protected from politically-motivated defamation lawsuits.

Down in Arizona we have the case of Attorney General Mike Brnovich who just couldn’t let anyone know of the reality that there was no voting fraud. According to Heather Cox Richardson:

The Republican narrative to attract voters, as warped as it has become, has now begun to drive the government itself. Today, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Isaac Stanley-Becker of the Washington Post reported that after the 2020 election, Arizona’s then–attorney general, Mark Brnovich, concealed a report produced after 10,000 hours of investigation by his own staff, that said virtually all the claims of fraud leveled against the 2020 Arizona election were unfounded.

And let’s end with a quick statement on Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems. Fox is for all practical purposes the propaganda arm of the Republican Party. They flat out lied knowingly about Dominion. There is nothing fox won’t do in service to their ideologies.

The whole purpose of this exercise in exposing the lies and abnormal behavior of Republicans in just the past couple weeks is to show they know what they are doing and they are doing it on purpose. They are telling you what they are, mean spirited people who care little about democracy and less for people. When they tell you what they are, BELIEVE THEM!