Hi Tamar,

>>The Kavanaugh protesters did _NOT_ invade the Senate buildings. They came in following the rules and they did not have weapons... There is a world of difference between non-violent civil disobedience and a violent insurrection.

I thought long and hard on a response, having several cuts at it before settling on the following:

- my post was in response to Thomas's reference to the Beer Hall Putsch and Machtergreifung.

For those who don't know, the Beer Hall Putsch was a violent attempted seizure of power. When it failed, Hitler was sentenced to 5 years jail of which he served 9 months during which he dictated Mein Kampf and made better plans. The Machtergreifung was the devious non-violent but successful seizure of power that followed.

For this context, the relevance of the Kavanaugh protest and the others I mentioned, is the precedent they set that it's OK to invade the seat of government. By definition they were invasions and while you and others may consider some invasions to be noble, others perceive double standard and can never benefit from your viewpoint if their ears are closed to you, just as yours are closed to them. Attitudes harden and people call each other fascists and high-five angry denouncements of straw men on message boards while the powder keg continues to smoulder.

FWIW, Ashli Babbitt once was not so different from people like your son, voting enthusiastically for Obama and lauding his policies on Twitter. She was also unarmed and hadn't assaulted anybody when she climbed through a window in the defended Speaker's Foyer. You can speculate as to why she thought she'd get away with that, but perhaps precedent or anticipation of political approval comes into it.

Plenty more to say, but most of it has little to do with that context I replied to, or to what ought to be expected if people continue as they are.

On the issue of investigating fraud: doctors screen all the time for diseases that otherwise show no evidence until well advanced. Anybody who has an annual check-up or participates in breast, prostate or cervical screening can hardly then turn around and claim there's no need to investigate if there's no evidence. Yet here we are.

IMHO the smartest response from uniparty Congress and presidency would be to mandate integrity screening/audit for all federal elections. Make it bipartisan and invite loudest critics to participate in selection of the cohort for review. Do it as a sign of confidence in election integrity, for unity, to disincentivize those who might be plotting and presumably to comfort millions of fellow citizens that incidence is low and when it does happen, it's caught early. Rather than declaring there's no fraud and demonizing people who believe there is, assemble evidence and invite them to participate.

>>I cannot emphasize strongly enough that the idea of voter fraud has been exploited by the Republican party for nearly 2 decades as a way of making it harder for people to vote, especially people who are more likely to vote Democratic.

If this refers to Voter ID, maybe check how European democracies manage? Even poverty-stricken Mozambique with annual GDP less than $500 per capita can manage a Bilhete de identidade, so perhaps some sort of inverse American Exceptionalism is at work here.