Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp
Credit: AP/John Amis

There are elements of about the current Georgia governor’s race that may fundamentally undermine faith in democracy. If Republican candidate Brian Kemp, the current secretary of state, wins the election, his victory is likely to appear illegitimate. Impartial observers will never be able to tell whether he would have won had every eligible voter in the state been able to cast a ballot. If he loses, there is little question that the victory of Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams will be viewed as an existential threat to the same forces that tried to rig things against her in the first place.

Salon spoke by email with Greg Palast, the journalist who previously tipped Salon off to widespread voter disenfranchisement in Georgia earlier this month. Palast has created a website that can help you learn if you were purged from the rolls.

How many Georgians do you believe have been disenfranchised and what is your evidence?

Brian Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state, purged 550,702 Georgians from the […]

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Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.
Credit: Screengrab from NYU GovLab interview

Republican federal judge has ruled that a video in which Secretary of State Kris Kobach gives a deposition in which he explains efforts to suppress the vote cannot be released. The Kansas City Star reports that Judge Julie Robinson, who was appointed by George W. Bush, ruled that the tape is not part of the “judicial record” and so the American Civil Liberties Union cannot release it in the run-up to the election, where Kobach is running for governor.

The tape would reveal Kobach’s private conversations with President Donald Trump and other members of Congress. The tape was played at a “federal trial earlier this year over Kansas’s proof of citizenship voting law.”

A transcript of the video is public and Robinson ruled that “the public’s interest in viewing the deposition was satisfied by its publication at trial and by unsealing the transcript.”

Sue Becker, the secretary of state’s senior counsel said, “The release of the videotape has nothing to do […]

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SWAT teams outside the Tree of Life Synagogue Credit: Pam Panchak / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette / AP

Robert Bowers, who opened fire at the Tree of Life Synagogue, in Pittsburgh, this morning, killing at least eleven people, was not evasive about his intent. He reportedly made anti-Semitic statements during the shooting, and just beforehand posted on Gab, a right-wing social network, about hias, a Jewish nonprofit that supports refugees. “hias likes to bring invaders in that kill our people,” he wrote. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered.” Earlier, he had suggested that he supported far-right nationalism but believed that President Trump was captive to a Jewish conspiracy. “Trump is a globalist, not a nationalist,” Bowers wrote. “There is no #maga as long as there is a kike infestation.”

American history has been marked by acts of anti-Semitic violence, including the shootings at Jewish community centers in Kansas City, in 2014, and Los Angeles, in 1999. It has been marked, too, by mass murders in houses of worship—in recent […]

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Credit: Michael Tercha/Getty

President Donald Trump on Friday said he was refusing to tone down his rhetoric despite the arrest earlier in the day of one of his supporters who was indicted for mailing pipe bombs to prominent critics of the administration.

CNN, one of the targets of the serial bomber known as the MAGABomber, required security to cover the commander-in-chief’s Friday evening campaign rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, The New York Times reports.

“When Mr. Trump took the stage at the Bojangles’ Coliseum, hours after Cesar Sayoc Jr., a Florida man with a lengthy criminal record, was arrested in connection to sending the devices, chants of ‘Build the wall’ and ‘CNN sucks’ had already rung out repeatedly,” The Times noted.

Sayoc had attended at least one of Trump’s combative “Make America Great Again” rallies, where the suspected bomber waved a “CNN Sucks” sign.

“As they have for months, CNN journalists at the rally on Friday night worked alongside hired security guards,” The Timesreported.

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The world’s new economic center of gravity

When scholars of international relations predict that the 2000s will be a “Chinese century”, they are not being premature. Although America remains the lone superpower, China has already replaced it as the driver of global change.

There is one economic metric on which China already ranks first. Measured at market exchange rates, China’s gdp is still 40% smaller than America’s. However, on a purchasing-power-parity (ppp) basis, which adjusts currencies so that a basket of goods and services is worth the same amount in different countries, the Chinese economy became the world’s largest in 2013. Although China is often grouped with other “emerging markets”, its performance is unique: its gdp per person at ppp has risen tenfold since 1990. In general, poorer economies grow faster than rich ones, because it is easier to “catch up” when starting from a low base. Yet in other countries that were as poor as China was in 1990, purchasing power has merely doubled.

China’s record has exerted a “gravitational pull” on the world’s economic output. The Economist has calculated a geographic centre […]

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