MoCo Popo Changes Being Discussed
If you do the math, you see that approximately half the adult men in the United States have a criminal record, meaning they have at least been arrested. Generally those are not the ones who are running things, they are not politicians, business executives, lobbyists. Our society is two-tiered, where one tier locks the other tier up. If you're on the locking-up side of it, you may be unaware of this.
It is not news to note that the Black community is especially targeted by law enforcement. In 2010, one-third of Black men were reported to have a felony conviction, and the percentage was growing. Black Lives Matter protests across the country are largely about police bias and violence.
Montgomery County is mostly known as a wholesome suburban community, diverse and affluent. Occasionally a police problem reaches the public eye, but generally we are a peaceful, liberal place. The county recently released a Report on Local Policing Data and Best Practices, and the results reveal some issues.
I should note that Montgomery County, Maryland, is probably more self-aware and less racist than many places. We are an extremely diverse county, progressive, welcoming. So as you read results from this report, remember that a whole lot of the country is a whole lot worse. Montgomery County has begun studying the extent of their problem, at least, and is discussing solutions where problems are found.
The report is really about data, especially data that focuses on "constitutional" policing practices (bias-free policing and use of force) and police-community relations (police satisfaction, trust in police, and police legitimacy). It contains a number of tables and a lot of discussion of datasets and links to them. I did not open any and analyze but it could be a fun quarantine activity. We are not necessarily interested here in databases so much as what the data can tell us about our county.
Most of the results in the report have been broken down to highlight differential treatment of ethnic groups, broadly defined. TL;DR : the cops are harder on Black people than anybody else.
The county has data on traffic stops but not on pedestrian stops or street stops that are not done in response to 911 calls. That is, stop-and-frisk and ordinary hassling remain off the record. For traffic stops, 2018 data shows (percents in parens calculated by me):
Why would you search somebody at a traffic stop in the first place -- to see if they're hiding their registration sticker in their pocket? If they are breaking a traffic law, then ticket them for that. If there is contraband in plain sight, well that's just dumb and no search is necessary. Otherwise, all of these searches mean that a traffic cop "suspected" something.
The county is planning to automate more traffic enforcement, so if you're speeding with a bag of weed in the glove compartment you get a ticket for speeding. I hate traffic cameras myself but you have to admit they are blind to privilege.
"Hassling" should be a legal term.
Traffic stops resulted in arrests of 2.2 – 2.3 percent of Latino and Black drivers compared to 1.3 percent of White drivers and less than one percent (0.9%) percent of Asian drivers. These are people who are pulled over for a traffic offense and end up going to jail. Unless there is an active warrant for the driver, this should almost never happen. (BTW, note that arrests correlate with searches. This is a time when it is actually true that "if you do more testing you're going to find more cases.")
BTW if you are thinking, well those white people just weren't doing anything wrong, I can't help you.
How about the use of force?
Looking at traffic violations, Black drivers were ticketed in 2019 at the rate of 321 per 1,000 population -- nearly a third of Black drivers got pulled over and ticketed in one year. The rate for white people was less than half that, at 132 per 1,000. Latinos were in-between, at 215/1,000, and Asians at the bottom of the list, a common thread here, at 70 violations per 1,000 population. Oddly, the "Other" group got a lot of tickets, at 319 per 1,000. I don't know what that is.
Another table in the report shows that Latino and Black drivers were more likely to earn six or more violations during a single traffic stop than any other racial and ethnic group. Are you seeing a trend here? Black and Latino drivers, especially males, are subjected to searches at higher rates than other groups. In 2019, 27 percent of Black adults in the county experienced a traffic stop compared to 17 percent of Latino adults, 14 percent of White adults, and 7 percent of Asian adults -- Blacks nearly twice as likely as whites. Further, 4.4 percent of Black drivers were searched in 2018 compared to 3.3 percent of Latino drivers, 2.0 percent of White drivers, and 1.3 percent of Asian drivers -- Blacks more than twice as likely as whites. Black men were three times as likely to receive any violation, to receive a citation, or to receive a repair order as white men, and twice as likely to receive a warning. This is in diverse, liberal Montgomery County.
The report details and links to a number of databases but acknowledges frequently that particular variables are not collected, or that data from various databases has not been linked. So for instance if someone is in a traffic accident, they do not record the race or ethnic group of the driver. It's on their license, but apparently they cannot connect the two.
Most of the recommendations in this report had to do with getting better data. We can tell enough from this to start working on an obvious problem, but the county needs better metrics and better ability to analyze them. The Washington Post says:
Again, if you think he was getting stopped for doing something wrong -- I'll give you six of those. What about the other forty times he was stopped? As this county report shows, Black citizens are targeted by police compared to white people, even here in progressive, prosperous Montgomery County.
It is not news to note that the Black community is especially targeted by law enforcement. In 2010, one-third of Black men were reported to have a felony conviction, and the percentage was growing. Black Lives Matter protests across the country are largely about police bias and violence.
Montgomery County is mostly known as a wholesome suburban community, diverse and affluent. Occasionally a police problem reaches the public eye, but generally we are a peaceful, liberal place. The county recently released a Report on Local Policing Data and Best Practices, and the results reveal some issues.
I should note that Montgomery County, Maryland, is probably more self-aware and less racist than many places. We are an extremely diverse county, progressive, welcoming. So as you read results from this report, remember that a whole lot of the country is a whole lot worse. Montgomery County has begun studying the extent of their problem, at least, and is discussing solutions where problems are found.
The report is really about data, especially data that focuses on "constitutional" policing practices (bias-free policing and use of force) and police-community relations (police satisfaction, trust in police, and police legitimacy). It contains a number of tables and a lot of discussion of datasets and links to them. I did not open any and analyze but it could be a fun quarantine activity. We are not necessarily interested here in databases so much as what the data can tell us about our county.
Most of the results in the report have been broken down to highlight differential treatment of ethnic groups, broadly defined. TL;DR : the cops are harder on Black people than anybody else.
The county has data on traffic stops but not on pedestrian stops or street stops that are not done in response to 911 calls. That is, stop-and-frisk and ordinary hassling remain off the record. For traffic stops, 2018 data shows (percents in parens calculated by me):
- Black people accounted for 18 percent of all residents v. 32 percent of MCPD traffic stops (177% of equity rate)
- White people accounted for 44 percent of all residents v. 35 percent of MCPD traffic stops (79.5% of equity rate)
- Latino people accounted for 19 percent of all residents v. 20 percent of MCPD traffic stops (100.5%, about what is expected)
- Asian people accounted for 15 percent of all residents v. 7 percent of MCPD traffic stops (46.7% of equity rate)
Why would you search somebody at a traffic stop in the first place -- to see if they're hiding their registration sticker in their pocket? If they are breaking a traffic law, then ticket them for that. If there is contraband in plain sight, well that's just dumb and no search is necessary. Otherwise, all of these searches mean that a traffic cop "suspected" something.
The county is planning to automate more traffic enforcement, so if you're speeding with a bag of weed in the glove compartment you get a ticket for speeding. I hate traffic cameras myself but you have to admit they are blind to privilege.
"Hassling" should be a legal term.
Traffic stops resulted in arrests of 2.2 – 2.3 percent of Latino and Black drivers compared to 1.3 percent of White drivers and less than one percent (0.9%) percent of Asian drivers. These are people who are pulled over for a traffic offense and end up going to jail. Unless there is an active warrant for the driver, this should almost never happen. (BTW, note that arrests correlate with searches. This is a time when it is actually true that "if you do more testing you're going to find more cases.")
BTW if you are thinking, well those white people just weren't doing anything wrong, I can't help you.
How about the use of force?
- Black people accounted for 18 percent of all residents v. 55 percent of use of force incidents (305% of equity)
- White people accounted for 44 percent of all residents v. 26 percent of use of force incidents (59%)
- Latinx people accounted for 19 percent of all residents v. 18 percent of use of force incidents (94.7%)
- Asian people accounted for 15 percent of all residents v. 1 percent of use of force incidents (6.7%)
Looking at traffic violations, Black drivers were ticketed in 2019 at the rate of 321 per 1,000 population -- nearly a third of Black drivers got pulled over and ticketed in one year. The rate for white people was less than half that, at 132 per 1,000. Latinos were in-between, at 215/1,000, and Asians at the bottom of the list, a common thread here, at 70 violations per 1,000 population. Oddly, the "Other" group got a lot of tickets, at 319 per 1,000. I don't know what that is.
Another table in the report shows that Latino and Black drivers were more likely to earn six or more violations during a single traffic stop than any other racial and ethnic group. Are you seeing a trend here? Black and Latino drivers, especially males, are subjected to searches at higher rates than other groups. In 2019, 27 percent of Black adults in the county experienced a traffic stop compared to 17 percent of Latino adults, 14 percent of White adults, and 7 percent of Asian adults -- Blacks nearly twice as likely as whites. Further, 4.4 percent of Black drivers were searched in 2018 compared to 3.3 percent of Latino drivers, 2.0 percent of White drivers, and 1.3 percent of Asian drivers -- Blacks more than twice as likely as whites. Black men were three times as likely to receive any violation, to receive a citation, or to receive a repair order as white men, and twice as likely to receive a warning. This is in diverse, liberal Montgomery County.
The report details and links to a number of databases but acknowledges frequently that particular variables are not collected, or that data from various databases has not been linked. So for instance if someone is in a traffic accident, they do not record the race or ethnic group of the driver. It's on their license, but apparently they cannot connect the two.
Most of the recommendations in this report had to do with getting better data. We can tell enough from this to start working on an obvious problem, but the county needs better metrics and better ability to analyze them. The Washington Post says:
County council member Hans Riemer (D-At Large) has commissioned a study to figure out whether – and how — Montgomery might be able to move certain traffic enforcement functions out of the police department and into other government agencies...
County Executive Marc Elrich (D) said he is “more than concerned” about the racial inequities in traffic enforcement and will consider the possibility of reallocating resources.
Montgomery appears to be the only jurisdiction in the Washington metro region targeting traffic enforcement in policing, though the District last year moved automated enforcement from police to the transportation department...
Officials say the differences signal discriminatory policing, though the police union and Police Chief Marcus Jones dispute this.
“There are many factors that need to be considered beyond simple census data to determine if racial bias exists in law enforcement,” Jones said in a statement. Should police be in charge of traffic enforcement? In a suburb beset by racial inequities, lawmakers aren’t sure.The US has been struggling lately with the concept of democracy, of providing rights and security to all its citizens, and bias in policing is central to the problem. Many Americans leave their house not knowing if they will make it back again, because of the police. Philandro Castile had been stopped by police forty-six times before they finally killed him. As NPR noted, "only six of them were things a police officer would notice from outside a car — things like speeding or having a broken muffler."
Again, if you think he was getting stopped for doing something wrong -- I'll give you six of those. What about the other forty times he was stopped? As this county report shows, Black citizens are targeted by police compared to white people, even here in progressive, prosperous Montgomery County.
posted by JimK at 10:35 AM
222 Comments:
I was born and raised in the conservative Christian home schooling movement. It is tailored to men's egos and fetishes. Men own it, control it, and are the only ones who have power in it. Conservative Christianity is a cesspool of lies, manpower, slavery, perversion, incest, child rape, and wife beating.
These men never believe they have enough attention or power. This dolt reminds me of Voddie Baucham. A man who blames unsubmissive daughters for their fathers cheating. Do these girls have to flirt with their fathers? Yes. Maybe give them lap dances also.
Christian men are constantly showing the world what gross sick nightmare perverts they are. They want to bring their incest, child rape, female slavery, pervert crap over to our side. They have total control of their side. But, they hate looking over here and seeing free, safe, happy women and little girls who can tell men no!.
"Voddie Baucham has creepily stated, “A lot of men are leaving their wives for younger women because they yearn for attention from younger women. And God gave them a daughter who can give them that. And instead they go find a substitute daughter….you’ve seen it, we’ve all seen it. These old guys going and finding these substitute daughters.” The original source video has since been deleted but multiple blogs documented the quote while the video was still online.
http://disq.us/url?url=http%3A%2F%2Fthatmom.com%2F2009%2F11%2F19%2Fvoddie-baucham-explains-the-video-clip-on-older-men-yearning-for-younger-women%2F%3A_yEGDm_8EEF1uDyxtJgK4SLHFfw&cuid=908272
https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhomeschoolersanonymous.org%2F2014%2F12%2F01%2F6-things-you-should-know-about-voddie-baucham%2F%3Ad52UvoGbVdqnNzGgJaBm_QH3qc0&cuid=908272
https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Frethinkingvisionforum.wordpress.com%2F2011%2F08%2F14%2Fvoddie-baucham-on-fathers-and-daughters%2F%3ALC4vZeDstYL7GVlyHUAKeqMWXpE&cuid=908272
https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ashleyeaster.com%2Fblog%2Fmacarthur-and-bauchman%3AFSHoTLkVDsYxYgOkxbH9Xs71_iQ&cuid=908272
I once read a story about a thing within evangelical Christian culture known as "Father/daughter purity dances". One of the most disturbing things I'd ever heard of.
Wyatt/Regina, you two want to end the relationship I have with my husband because you consider us two gay men. You still haven't answered the question:
How are my husband and I better off splitting up?
Why should you get to force me to live according to your whims?
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "here are the reasons why the virus has spread so widely in America:
1. Anthony Fauci lied to Americans back in March and told them wearing masks was ineffective. Had he not done that, masks would have been the strategy to stopping the spread back when people were still taking expert advice seriously, and would have slowed its spread dramatically."
So, now that we know masks are effective why are conservatives still fighting tooth and nail not to wear them? You can't keep blaming Fauci for your continued opposition to masks, he started advising everyone wear them months ago and there is unanimity in the medical community that masks are effective.
Medical experts say that if everyone started wearing masks right now the pandemic would be well under control in eight weeks and yet conservatives still condemn mask usage and refuse to wear them. Republican governors are even preventing local governments from mandating mask usage.
This sort of dishonesty out of Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous is non-stop. The reason the pandemic is still out of control is due to Republicans' refusal to social distance and wear masks. Look at Democratic New York, its well under control because they shutdown socially distanced and wore masks.
Why economists don't like the idea of a payroll tax cut
A proposal to suspend Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes for employees and employers through the end of the year is a "very high priority" in any new stimulus deal, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said Wednesday.
Yes, but: Economists largely agree it would do little to help the economy.
What they're saying: "The White House’s latest economic policy trial balloon leaves out the most important solutions and floats some policies that are diametrically opposed to what the country needs," Amy Hanauer, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, said in a recent analysis.
"The proposal re-ups tax breaks for the wealthy and fails to laser focus on vulnerable families that need the most help."
"A payroll tax cut does more for those who are paid (and paid more) than for those who’ve lost jobs in this downturn. It would likely send at least two-thirds of benefits to the richest fifth of Americans and about a quarter to the top 1 percent."
Trump has put his lackey in place at the USPS to disrupt and possibly destroy the Post Office in order to prevent it from delivering mail in ballots prior to the election.
This is the sort of thing dictators do. The new head of the Post Office has fired 23 top managers and implemented a vast array of measures to slow down and disrupt mail delivery under the excuse of "cost cutting". In years past Republicans forced the post office to pay the health benefits of retirees for 75 years in the future, a burdensome financial obligation no private business has to deal with. Republicans have forced the Post Office to close key distribution centres in order to make mail delivery take a more circuitous and less efficient route, making it less able to compete with the private sector.
The aspiring dictator has floated the idea of ordering the Post Office not to deliver mail in ballots at all.
Wyatt and Regina Hardiman ask where has Trump's behaviour been dictatorial. Right there sweethearts, right there.
"Philandro Castile had been stopped by police forty-six times before they finally killed him."
As a white person it boggles my mind to think someone could be harassed by the police to this degree.
Hear him make his promises out loud for yourselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SKXQeD_nOs
And now he aims to starve Medicare and Social Security by removing their payroll tax funding bases.
What a liar!
Does he realize how much of his base relies on these programs?
Apparently not.
What fool.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Biden wrote that payroll tax cuts will fuel the economy, "spurring growth and creating jobs." One would think such a fervent believer in the miracles of payroll tax cuts would be over the moon with the president's executive order. Instead, Biden now opposes payroll tax cuts, saying the president's deferral undermines the solvency of Social Security".
When Biden proposed payroll tax cuts he also proposed tax increases on the wealthy which would have more than offset the payroll tax cuts.
Republicans would never go for an increase in taxes on the rich to offset the payroll tax cuts Trump proposes - that's why Trump's plan will destroy Medicare and Social Security.
"Black citizens are targeted by police compared to white people, even here in progressive, prosperous Montgomery County."
"even here"?
try ESPECIALLY here
MC is full of white "progressives" who think of minorities as their fortunate wards, not their equals
for those of you not from the area, log in to googlemaps
look at the neighborhood bounded by Plyers Mill Road, St Paul Street, University Blvd, and Connecticut Avenue
they once sent their kids to Albert Einstein High School, a short three blocks away
problem: whites are a minority at Einstein
so these woke progressives worked real heard and had their kids re-assigned to Walter High School
97% white
look how long the bus ride is
blatant racism
to add insult to injury, they station off-duty police to harass any parents who cut through their neighborhood to take their kids to Einstein
will that stop if cops are taken off traffic duty?
or will they still be able to use their badge and police cars to harass people as a side gig paid for by white liberals?
"So, now that we know masks are effective why are conservatives still fighting tooth and nail not to wear them?"
all conservatives I know wear masks
"You can't keep blaming Fauci for your continued opposition to masks, he started advising everyone wear them months ago and there is unanimity in the medical community that masks are effective."
I don't oppose wearing masks
when Fauci lied, the masks could have prevented the spread out of Manhattan
the total deaths would likely be a fraction of what it is now
right now, it is spreading among younger people and the death rate isn't anywhere near where it was when Fauci lied
the only American responsible for more COVID deaths is Andrew Cuomo, the grim reaper of assisted living
"Medical experts say that if everyone started wearing masks right now the pandemic would be well under control in eight weeks and yet conservatives still condemn mask usage and refuse to wear them. Republican governors are even preventing local governments from mandating mask usage."
outliers elevated by a press that is part of the problem
most conservatives across America are wearing masks when in public indoor spaces
those not wearing them are generally young people who feel they are not high risk
"Look at Democratic New York, its well under control because they shutdown socially distanced and wore masks."
yes, you could get rid of mosquitoes in your back yard by detonating an atom bomb
Manhattan, despite low numbers, hasn't even opened indoor dining at any capacity
anyone could stop the virus that way
it's called economic suicide
"Economists largely agree it would do little to help the economy."
the economists are right
it's too little and comes too slow
"Trump has put his lackey in place at the USPS to disrupt and possibly destroy the Post Office in order to prevent it from delivering mail in ballots prior to the election.
This is the sort of thing dictators do."
can you give us one example of a dictator that prevented mail-in ballots from being delivered?
we'll wait....
"When Biden proposed payroll tax cuts he also proposed tax increases on the wealthy which would have more than offset the payroll tax cuts."
there is no social security lock box
every cent of payroll tax collected was immediately spent and replaced with an IOU
there is no connection between the tax and the benefits
the benefits will be paid unless Congress stops payment
I had no idea Randy was white
I assumed he was a sickly green with puke-yellow polka dots!
a description of how great things are in DEMOCRATIC NEW YORK!
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/new-york-citys-downward-spiral/
"Trump has put his lackey in place at the USPS to disrupt and possibly destroy the Post Office in order to prevent it from delivering mail in ballots prior to the election."
USPS has delivered mail to my home twice this month, Monday, August 3, 2020, and Saturday, August 8, 2020.
"new-york-citys-downward-spiral/"
The US's downward spiral is clear for everyone with a USPS mailbox these days.
"I assumed he was a sickly green with puke-yellow polka dots!"
Nope, that's your reflection in the mirror.
Of the 14 masks and other coverings tested, the study found that some easily accessible cotton cloth masks are about as effective as standard surgical masks, while popular alternatives such as neck gaiters may be worse than not wearing a mask at all.
Conservative columnist Max Boot explained in his latest column in The Washington Post why the GOP “doesn’t deserve to have a future” if its best alternative to Donald Trump is four senators who’ve enabled the president every step of the way.
Boot, a vocal critic of the Trump administration, recalled a column by The New York Times’ David Brooks that suggested “a high-minded debate to define the nature of the GOP is underway” among Republican Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.), Josh Hawley, (Mo.), Tom Cotton (Ark.) and Ben Sasse (Neb.).
“But I’m sorry, I can’t take any of their high-minded blather seriously,” Boot wrote in his op-ed Monday. “Not when they have spent the past four years acting as enablers for the worst president in U.S. history — or at least the worst in the past 151 years.”
Boot asked “what is conservative about” multiple Trump scandals, policies and controversies that the four senators either endorsed or remained silent about.
“Trump’s entire presidency has been an affront to what conservatives used to think their movement was all about,” Boot wrote. “And yet at every step of the way, Rubio, Hawley, Cotton and Sasse have been Trump’s willing accomplices.”
Boot concluded: “I cannot take seriously anything Rubio, Hawley, Cotton and Sasse have to say about the future of the Republican Party because they have shown that, like Trump, they are in office to serve themselves rather than the American people. If they are the leaders who will define the future of the Republican Party, the party doesn’t deserve to have a future.”
"Trump has put his lackey in place at the USPS to disrupt and possibly destroy the Post Office in order to prevent it from delivering mail in ballots prior to the election.
This is the sort of thing dictators do."
still waiting to hear all the examples of dictators who prevent mail-in ballots from being delivered
Maryland governor Hogan has the best idea
don't send out mail-in ballots to everyone
send them all an application
that will prevent Dems from voting for dead people
(a Dem tradition that goes back to JFK's victory over Nixon)
btw, the Chinese are arresting people who lead dissent and say they are "colluding with foreigners"
This is the sort of thing dictators do.
it's also how Dems try to overturn elections they lose
people who don't believe in democracy love to accuse their opponents of colluding with foreigners
The pandemic has people turning to food pantries now more than ever. Demand has remained steady this summer and it is not expected to taper off anytime soon.
“Everyone is experiencing just numbers that are skyrocketing. I mean, it’s just unheard of,” said Brenda Shaw, Chief Development Officer for the Lowcountry Food Bank.
Before the pandemic, Lowcountry Food Bank was feeding 140-150 people a month, on average. It spiked to more than 1,000 in April during the first wave of unemployment. Shaw said it’s leveled off to around 700 people since then, but adds they’re bracing for another uptick since federal unemployment benefits ended last week.
“I think the bigger issues for us is that we’re having to purchase more food right now than we’ve ever had to purchase,” Shaw said. “A typical month we would probably spend about $75,000 to $80,000 on purchased food and then in the month of June, we actually spent close to half a million dollars on food.”
Lowcountry food bank serves 10 coastal counties and partners with about 300 agencies, including many food pantries like those housed in churches, community and senior centers. However, Shaw said about 15-percent of those agencies have had to close their doors recently.
“Primarily because they are staffed by volunteers and for one reason or another, they’ve not had the ability to open up because volunteers (many) they don’t feel comfortable working, a lot of the volunteers are more elderly and I’m sure that there’s been some exposure in some of the agencies as well,” she said. “About 40% of the people they are serving are new, they’ve never been to a food pantry before, and you know that’s been pretty consistent across the entire 10 county area.”
Shaw said they are keeping a close eye on the pending HEALS Act legislation, which does not include a continuation of the 15% addition to SNAP benefits.
“When you think about the average person gets $32 per week in SNAP benefits. Trying to eat for an entire week on $32 a week is pretty tough,” Shaw said. “15 percent of that is not a lot, but 15 percent is better than nothing.”
Lowcountry Food Bank is relying heavily on monetary donations, along with a variety of grants.
"people who don't believe in democracy love to accuse their opponents of colluding with foreigners"
Yep, like Rump's bogus accusations and attempts to smear the Bidens in Ukraine.
He'd rather help out his buddy Putin.
"Yep, like Rump's bogus accusations and attempts to smear the Bidens in Ukraine."
good point
Dems would never accuse their opponent of colluding with a foreign government
they have too much integrity to lie like that!
Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul, New York, and other major cities are experiencing a breakdown of order — violence and conflict that is a mixture of left-wing revolution, racial unrest, and old-fashioned crime. Whatever else they might have in common, all are governed by progressive Democrats, and all owe their current disorder in some part to the failure of progressive Democratic policies on the issue of public safety.
That will be an advantage for a Republican president running for reelection.
What has been striking to many observers of the rioting following the May 25 death of George Floyd has been the degree to which local officials allowed — and sometimes seemingly encouraged — the forces of disorder to run wild in their cities.
In early June, a crowd in St. Paul looped a rope around the neck of a statue of Christopher Columbus near the state Capitol and pulled it to the ground. Looking at a video of the event, the question is natural: Where are the police? Certainly, no one tried to stop the destruction. In the wake of Floyd's death in police custody, the City Council, following the phrase popular on the Left, instead voted to defund the police.
Scenes of unrest erupted around the country. In Seattle, after several nights of violent protests, an anarchist group took over a police precinct building and then a six-block section of the city, which they renamed the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ. (It later became known as CHOP, for Capitol Hill Organized Protest.)
Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan did nothing to stop it. Durkan said the occupation had a "block party atmosphere" and might turn into a "summer of love." Media coverage followed her lead.
Now, emerging accounts of CHAZ/CHOP show that life in the zone was more dystopian hell than summer of love. There was violence. Looting. Property destruction. Armed men demanding protection money. Businesses disappearing, with years of work lost. The disaster lasted for 24 days until the rioters showed up at Durkan's house, and the mayor finally took action to shut it all down.
But that did not stop the disorder in Seattle. On July 24, weeks after the zone was closed, the city's police chief sent a message to residents and businesses. The City Council has outlawed pepper spray and other crowd-control tools, the chief said, so police would have "no ability to safely intercede to preserve property in the midst of a large violent crowd." The unspoken message from the city to its residents: You're on your own.
The situation in Portland has become a national issue — and embarrassment. For more than 70 nights, rioters have attacked the substance and symbols of the rule of law: the U.S. courthouse in the city and various police facilities.
For weeks, armed officers of the Department of Homeland Security protected the federal courthouse. Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler condemned federal law enforcement and claimed repeatedly that the presence of those forces, ordered there by Trump, was responsible for the mayhem.
Then the authorities left, and the riots continued, mostly targeting city police. Wheeler recently lost his temper with the rioters, telling them, "You are not demonstrating, you are attempting to commit murder."
But who encouraged them in the first place?
In the end, even after all the violence, the worst thing Wheeler could say was that the disorder might help to reelect Trump.
New York has not had nightly Portland-style demonstrations. But Mayor Bill de Blasio's policies of slashing the police budget, weakening police crime-investigating abilities, and freeing prisoners has resulted in a horrendous crime wave that has people fleeing the city. "Shootings were up 201 percent in the four-week period ended August 2, compared with the same period in 2019," the Wall Street Journal reported, "while the number of shooting victims rose 165 percent, and the number of homicides climbed by 50 percent." Increases like that have not happened in decades.
Chicago has seen its already-horrendous violent crime rate spike again — murders up 55% since this time last year. And then, on Monday, hundreds of looters attacked the city's Miracle Mile shopping area, smashing windows, stealing anything they could carry, and at one point, getting into a shootout with police. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot pronounced herself "shocked" by the violence, although it is not clear why she would have been. Lightfoot has said she would welcome federal help to go after licensed gun dealers; other than that, she wants federal law enforcement to stay out.
Other cities with progressive leadership are discussing proposals to defund the police. They often deny that they actually want to "defund" the police; they simply propose to "redirect" police funding to other purposes, such as mental health treatment or affordable housing. But the bottom line is, as progressives discuss weakening police forces around the country, the threat of violence and disorder grows.
This is an election year. Election years are times for partisan arguments. They don't have to be nuanced.
They don't have to be subtle. And one Republican message this year is: The people who are tolerating and even cheering on the forces of disorder are Democrats.
What will the presumptive Democratic candidate for president, Joe Biden, do about that?
Probably not much.
Do not look for Biden to have what in the 1990s was called a Sister Souljah moment — to take a stand against extremists on his own side. Instead, Biden, who has apologized for his role in the Bill Clinton-era crime bill, is trying to play both sides of the street. For example, he has said that he does not support defunding the police, but when interviewed by progressive activists who asked whether he would support redirecting funds away from police, he agrees.
The failure of progressive governance to ensure public safety around the country has given Trump an opportunity to make this a landslide
Black Lives Matter Chicago said early Monday's looting of stores was a form of 'reparations' as the group held a protest Monday night in support of the more than 100 people arrested after an evening of violence.
Downtown Chicago was otherwise an eerie barricaded fortress after authorities cut off access, with drawbridges leading into the city pulled up and freeway exits blocked after riots sparked by a false rumor of a child shot by police.
At least 13 police officers were injured as the violence claimed an estimated $65 million in property damage.
one of the lowest positivity rates in the country and Manhattan is dying
Cuomo botched the pandemic explosion in the Spring and he's botching the recovery now
hope the Trump hatred is worth it
NYC may never be the same
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/nyregion/nyc-economy-chain-stores.html?smtyp=cur&smid=fb-nytimes&fbclid=IwAR3V0khWp7-r5Vg2y5LmpS8G6NfToLtqzMrgwKLx-Dimmu1yneKb5YT7MsI&fbclid=IwAR1EshqfdWaDt3Of3vXNED8I4wNpKXB-Ic0CiaCW4Tq8I2mLieBxqPSO1NQ
"they have too much integrity to lie like that! "
As Sally Yates' testimony showed, the Dems were not lying about collusion between Flynn and Kislyak:
1) The Trump transition team was not being surveilled, nor was Flynn. While she could not say why because of national security concerns, it was obvious that then-Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak was the one being monitored. Flynn wound up being recorded when he spoke with Kislyak; 2) Flynn was attempting to undercut sanctions (per Yates’s testimony: “General Flynn had essentially neutered the U.S. government’s message of deterrence”); 3) Flynn lied to the vice president about his calls; 4) The FBI’s investigation was a counterintelligence — not criminal — investigation; 5) The investigation was not closed on Jan. 4 precisely because the FBI learned of Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak; 6) Flynn’s lying to the FBI was material and indeed at the core of the counterintelligence investigation, contrary to Attorney General William P. Barr’s assertion in trying to undo Flynn’s guilty plea by dismissing the case; and 7) It was highly abnormal and unprecedented for the attorney general to step in to rescue a friend of the president in this way, an action that damages the Justice Department’s credibility.
"NYC may never be the same"
You think so small.
Manhattan? The the entire world, including the US, may never be the same.
But you apparently will never end your hatred for God's LGBTIQ creations.
Even though christians believe He doesn't make mistakes!
And tee hee, you must be so proud Rump is finally getting his wall!!
Rump's wall is being built by every country in the world that will not allow Americans to enter because America has the worst coronavirus outbreak caused by Rump's magical thinking that the can play all the golf he wants because he believes one day the virus will just disappear.
"The United States has more coronavirus cases than many countries have people. With over 5 million confirmed cases, more people have been infected in the U.S. than the total population of places like Ireland, New Zealand, Panama, Croatia, Jamaica and numerous other countries.
The U.S. has had more confirmed cases and more deaths from the virus than any nation in the world, with over 163,000 lives lost in the U.S. (Several other countries had a higher death rate per capita, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.)
California and Florida have each had over half a million cases, while the totals in New York and Texas aren't far behind. However, New York — a major hotspot early in the pandemic — has managed to "flatten the curve" and reduce the spread of the virus, even as numbers keep climbing in many other states.
Cases spiked in Texas and Florida in July, and cases are continuing to rise in at least 11 states. According to data from Johns Hopkins University, Florida, Texas, California, Georgia and Louisiana saw the biggest daily increases on August 9...."
"To the lying, hate-filled troll"
Randy hasn't been commenting today so let's leave him out of it
"As Sally Yates' testimony showed, the Dems were not lying about collusion between Flynn and Kislyak"
actually, they lied about the Trump campaign colluding with Russians in exchange for assistance in winning the election
that's a lie
just like the dictators in China tell
"1) The Trump transition team was not being surveilled, nor was Flynn. While she could not say why because of national security concerns, it was obvious that then-Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak was the one being monitored. Flynn wound up being recorded when he spoke with Kislyak;"
the election was over at that point
Flynn was discussing, with Russian officials, what relations with Russia would be like in the new administration
Trump won the election and he was straight with the voters about how he would deal with Russia
FBI officials, who are not elected, are not in the position to impose their own views on a duly elected administration
the whole idea is preposterous
"2) Flynn was attempting to undercut sanctions (per Yates’s testimony: “General Flynn had essentially neutered the U.S. government’s message of deterrence”);"
the transition period is nebulous
the Obama administration has no right to interfere with the new administration's foreign relations
"3) Flynn lied to the vice president about his calls;"
he may have been confused about who to discuss things with
you are expected to lie about national security matters that you are aware of
Harry Truman, for example, knew nothing about the atom bomb when he was VP
if he asked what's going on in New Mexico, they would have lied to him
"4) The FBI’s investigation was a counterintelligence — not criminal — investigation; 5) The investigation was not closed on Jan. 4 precisely because the FBI learned of Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak;"
it was a misguided investigation
"6) Flynn’s lying to the FBI was material and indeed at the core of the counterintelligence investigation, contrary to Attorney General William P. Barr’s assertion in trying to undo Flynn’s guilty plea by dismissing the case;"
actually it wasn't material, by definition, because they already knew the answer to the question they were asking
"7) It was highly abnormal and unprecedented for the attorney general to step in to rescue a friend of the president in this way, an action that damages the Justice Department’s credibility."
it was highly abnormal for an outgoing administration to spy on their successors
an action that damages the integrity of our democratic processes
"You think so small.
Manhattan? The the entire world, including the US, may never be the same."
no, the rest of the world, and the US, will be fine because when they have deths as low as Manhattan's, they reopened
NYC is committing suicide over their hatred of Trump, who is basically a product of their streets
"But you apparently will never end your hatred for God's LGBTIQ creations."
oh, I like many QBILTG people
as a group, I don't make judgments
"Even though christians believe He doesn't make mistakes!"
well, Christians would say God didn't a tendency to sexual immorality
"America has the worst coronavirus outbreak caused by Rump's magical thinking that the can play all the golf he wants because he believes one day the virus will just disappear."
so, you think that the coronavirus outbreak is caused by Trump playing golf?
do you also believe every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings?
"The U.S. has had more confirmed cases and more deaths from the virus than any nation in the world, with over 163,000 lives lost in the U.S."
the US, one of the most populous countries in the world, has tested more citizens than any other country
everyone who dies and tests positive for COVID is assumed to have died from it
as far as cases, we have no idea how widespread asymptomatic cases in other countries are
they haven't tested widely for it
August 11, 2020 at 12:39 PM EDT - Updated August 11 at 12:59 PM
(CNN) - The struggle for millions of Americans to put food on the table is very real. A clear example: Some Texans lined up at a food bank in Dallas before sunrise on Tuesday to get essentials.
In the middle of the night, a fleet of trucks carrying more than 10,000 boxes of food arrived in a desolate Dallas parking lot. Valerie Hawthorne of the North Texas Food Bank is making sure all crates are perfectly lined up.
The last time the North Texas Food Bank sponsored a drive-through food giveaway was in May, and Hawthorne knows that life has only become more desperate for millions of people struggling through the pandemic.
“These distributions truly reveal what the need is and how many of our community members are just one paycheck away from hunger. So we have to be out there to support them during this time,” she said.
First people in line were Pauletta Johnson and Arthur Ferrazas, who arrived three hours before the food giveaway even started.
Johnson is on a fixed-income and cares for her grandchildren. Ferrazas is a handyman who says work has dried up in recent months.
“It helps feed the grandkids, when they’re here, when they over and it just, it just means a lot,” Johnson said. “I don’t really have the money. I’m on a fixed income, and I don’t have the money to buy some of the things that I need to get. So that’s why I’m here this morning.”
“It means a lot. It’s a little bit of help. I think it’s going to help us a lot. I got two kids at the house. My wife is kind of just sick right now, but not with the virus. So that’s why I’m here,” Ferrazas said.
At this food delivery event, about 100 volunteers will distribute more than 10,000 boxes of food for nearly 8,000 people.
The images of long lines at food bank distributions are a searing reminder of the economic toll inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic. The images taken over recent months span the country.
That’s why it doesn’t surprise Hawthorne to see thousands line up before the sun comes up just days after millions of people have lost their $600-a-week unemployment benefits. Since March, about 3.1-million Texans have filed unemployment claims.
“We know that the need is out there. We know that it’s great. And what this pandemic has done has just shown, shine a light on poverty and hunger and our communities that are in desperate need,” Hawthorne said.
From a warehouse, the north Texas food bank is distributing more than a million pounds of food per week.
Jesus Baca, a disabled former law enforcement officer, said the boxes can feed him for up to three weeks. He describes himself as “really financially strained. I got house payments, doctor bills and so forth I got to pay.”
The organizers say they’re giving away about $50 worth of food per person, which will feed a family of four for about a week.
Former Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich told CNN Monday he "had to search my conscience" before agreeing to speak at next week's Democratic National Convention in support of presumptive nominee Joe Biden.
CNN anchor Burnett disclosed that Kasich had written in then-Sen. John McCain's name for president in 2016, "which is a far cry from actually supporting the Democratic candidate for president.
You were anti-Trump but you were not taking that extra step. What changed?" she asked.
"Conscience, Erin," Kasich responded. "The reason I didn't support Trump the last time is I was afraid that he would be a divider and not a unifier -- and our best leaders historically have been unifiers, Republicans and Democrats. But unfortunately, as I've watched him over the last three-and-a-half years now, he's continued to do that and I don't think the country does well when we're divided.
"And so, I had to search my conscience. When the Democrats asked me to speak, I had to think about it, and I believe that we need a new direction. We just can't keep going the way that we're going," he added.
When Burnett asked him about potential blowback, Kasich said leaders should be "prepared to walk a lonely road."
[Followers clump in unsafe, unmasked crowds.]
"If you're not prepared to walk a lonely road and do the things that your conscience tells you to do, then how do you think about yourself when you look in the mirror?" Kasich asked.
"I mean, I'm comfortable with the decisions I make," he added. "Of course, there's blowback ... This is not an unusual place for me to be. I've been a reformer almost all of my life. I've been very independent and I'm a Republican but the Republican Party has always been my vehicle but never my master. You have to do what you think is right in your heart and I'm comfortable here."
The number of coronavirus cases has reached 20 million worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University. It took six months to reach 10 million but just six more weeks for that number to double.
August 11, 2020: Florida and Georgia report highest single-day death tolls since start of coronavirus pandemic
June 17, 2020: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis vows to keep state open as cases surge
May 7, 2020: Smartphone data shows out-of-state visitors flocked to Georgia as restaurants and other businesses reopened
A Georgia district returned to school last week. More than 900 students and staff are now quarantined.
QAnon conspiracy theory believer wins GOP congressional runoff in Georgia
Congressional Republicans came a step closer Tuesday to welcoming into their ranks a promoter of the QAnon conspiracy theory, whose adherents believe President Trump is battling a cabal of “deep state” saboteurs who worship Satan and traffic children for sex.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has endorsed the baseless theory and made a slew of other racist remarks on video, won a Republican primary runoff in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, according to the Associated Press. Her victory, in a northwestern swath of the state that has favored Republicans by wide margins, sets her up to become QAnon’s first devotee in Congress.
Greene, who owns a construction company jointly with her husband, defeated John Cowan, a neurosurgeon. She will face Democrat Kevin Van Ausdal, an IT specialist, in November.
GOP leaders, whose standard-bearer rose to political prominence on the basis of a conspiracy theory about Barack Obama’s birthplace, have watched her ascent with some unease. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), the House Republican whip, endorsed her primary opponent. Republican members of Georgia’s delegation privately urged the party’s House leader, Kevin McCarthy of California, to do more to intervene in the race, according to multiple GOP aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the conversations.
“There are a lot of members livid at McCarthy for sitting back and doing nothing to stop this woman from being elected while the entire Georgia delegation, Scalise and some moderates tried” to help her opponent, said one House Republican aide closely monitoring the race. A spokesman for McCarthy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, rebuked Greene for racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic remarks that came to light in June, but a spokesman for the House Republican fundraising arm declined to say Tuesday whether the group would back its nominee.
The elevation of Greene to federal office would mark a watershed for adherents of QAnon, which the FBI has identified as a potential domestic terrorism threat. The convoluted pro-Trump philosophy took shape on Internet message boards in the fall of 2017, with posts from a self-proclaimed government insider identified as “Q.” The worldview has been core to numerous violent acts, according to law enforcement, including two killings, a kidnapping, vandalism of a church and a heavily armed standoff near the Hoover Dam...
[Birther conspiracist ]Rump congratulates Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon [conspiracist] who won GOP congressional nomination in Georgia
New jobless aid will be less than what Trump described, White House says
President Trump’s senior aides acknowledged on Tuesday that they are providing less financial assistance for the unemployed than the president initially advertised amid mounting blowback from state officials of both parties.
On Saturday, Trump approved an executive action that he claimed would provide an additional $400 per week in expanded unemployment benefits for Americans who have lost their jobs during the pandemic.
By Tuesday, senior White House officials were saying publicly that the maneuver only guarantees an extra $300 per week for unemployed Americans — with states not required to add anything to their existing state benefit programs to qualify for the federal benefit.
The clarification came as the odds of a bipartisan stimulus package grew increasingly dim and state leaders clamored for the White House and Congress to approve legislation that would more directly address the expiration of unemployment benefits.
"New jobless aid will be less than what Trump described, White House says
President Trump’s senior aides acknowledged on Tuesday that they are providing less financial assistance for the unemployed than the president initially advertised amid mounting blowback from state officials of both parties.
On Saturday, Trump approved an executive action that he claimed would provide an additional $400 per week in expanded unemployment benefits for Americans who have lost their jobs during the pandemic.
By Tuesday, senior White House officials were saying publicly that the maneuver only guarantees an extra $300 per week for unemployed Americans — with states not required to add anything to their existing state benefit programs to qualify for the federal benefit.
The clarification came as the odds of a bipartisan stimulus package grew increasingly dim and state leaders clamored for the White House and Congress to approve legislation that would more directly address the expiration of unemployment benefits."
you must not have read closely
Trump's announcement on Saturday clearly said 300 would be provided from disaster funds and states would be encouraged to provide the other 100
while it would be nice to get Congress a bill, the Executive Order can not possibly "directly address the expiration of unemployment benefits" any more
it is completely addressed
it is 300 from the US Treasury
Trump has repeatedly said he wants to terminate the payroll tax. And yes, he may be too stupid to realize that it means he’s eliminating the funding stream for Social Security and Medicare, but his Freedom Caucus Tea Party henchmen, led by Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, certainly aren’t. They know exactly what they’re doing, filling his head with this nonsense.
Sure, he will say “don’t worry, I’m going to take care of the Seniors” and all his accomplices will have to tell him is that they’ll find the money somewhere else in the budget, but we know that’s impossible. He doesn’t.
Anyway, he’s said it over and over again:
Last night, Trump doubled down on his plan to make the payroll tax cut permanent if he’s reelected.
TRUMP: “After the election, on the assumption that it would be victorious for an administration that’s done a great job, we will be ending that tax. We will be terminating that tax.”
On Saturday, Trump vowed three times to make the payroll tax cut permanent if he won reelection.
TRUMP: “If I’m victorious on November 3rd, I plan to forgive these taxes and make permanent cuts to the payroll tax. So I’m going to make them all permanent.”
TRUMP: “But if I win, I may extend and terminate. In other words, I’ll extend it beyond the end of the year and terminate the tax.”
TRUMP: “And this is deferral payroll tax obligations. So this is your payroll tax obligations, which we’re going to end up terminating eventually, right?”
In April, Trump said twice that he wanted to permanently cut the payroll tax.
TRUMP: “I would love to see a payroll tax cut. There are many people that would like to see it as a permanent tax cut — payroll tax cut.”
TRUMP: “I mean, there are a lot of people — I’m one of them — that would have liked to have seen the payroll tax cut as a permanent cut.”
In March, Trump was privately encouraging Republican lawmakers to permanently eliminate the payroll tax cut.
Wall Street Journal: “Following the meeting, Mr. Trump told reporters he had discussed stimulus measures with Republicans, but offered few details. Mr. Trump wants to suspend the payroll tax through Dec. 31, an administration official said, though he has also said privately he wants the tax to be permanently eliminated.”
"Trump has repeatedly said he wants to terminate the payroll tax. And yes, he may be too stupid to realize that it means he’s eliminating the funding stream for Social Security and Medicare, but his Freedom Caucus Tea Party henchmen, led by Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, certainly aren’t."
when SS was created, it was a myth that the government would take the money and later use it to pay SS
there is no connection
he government can still pay SS, if they choose, regardless of whether there are payroll taxes
Dems have promoted payroll tax cuts in the past because payroll taxes ae regressive
but, alas, now they have Trump Derangement Syndrome
"Infertile couples never have kids. what kind of fool calls that marriage? I do, don't you?"
if they are heterosexuals, I'm just the kind of fool that calls that marriage
heterosexuality is how our species is reproduced
supporting and promoting heterosexuality furthers that even if some can't have kids
Shameless influence peddling by the Biden family:
The Ukrainian natural gas firm that appointed Vice President Joe Biden's son Hunter to a lucrative board seat relentlessly pressured the State Department throughout the 2016 election in an effort to get corruption allegations against it dropped and its badly damaged reputation rehabilitated, newly released government memos show.
"They keep trying through every channel they can," a State Department official lamented in summer 2016, describing a nonstop lobbying campaign by Burisma Holdings and its American representatives.
The memos add new significance to a long-running Senate investigation into the Bidens' activities and conflicts of interest in Ukraine.
For instance, they show far more contact between Burisma and the U.S. embassy in Kiev than was acknowledged by witnesses during President Trump's impeachment proceedings earlier this year. One issue in that trial was the more than $3 million Hunter Biden's firm collected from Burisma while his father supervised Ukraine policy for President Obama.
The memos were withheld from Senate investigators, who learned of their existence from a FOIA lawsuit.
"We have been so frustrated in our attempt to get the documentation that we need before we can sit down and interview people, and as I understand it, the documents you just obtained in your FOIA request we haven't received unbelievably," Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson said.
"I cannot tell you how frustrated and ticked off, I'll use that word, ticked off about where we are here. So yeah, I subpoenaed the FBI. And, you know, expect additional subpoenas to be forthcoming,” Johnson (R-Wisc.) added.
The memos show Burisma's lobbying efforts were led by a Democratic firm called Blue Star Strategies and aided by the nonprofit Atlantic Council foreign policy think tank, stretching from the State Department's executive suite in Washington at the start of the election to the U.S. embassy in Kiev in the waning days of the Obama administration.
Burisma representatives repeatedly pressed for meetings, at times invoking Hunter Biden's name, starting with a Blue Star conversation with then-Undersecretary of State Catherine Novelli in January 2016 before turning their attention to U.S. diplomats on the ground in Kiev, the memos show.
By summer 2016 — their mission to clear Burisma's name still incomplete — Blue Star officials pigeonholed the new U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, during her Senate confirmation hearing and then attended a private reception where she was honored, according to the memos.
State officials at times chafed at the Burisma campaign, concerned Hunter Biden's role at the gas firm was undercutting his father's anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine, according to the memos and interviews
that's just shameless
remember when Hunter started dating Beau's widow?
Tara, Kamala, Beau, Hunter...the whole family's a freakin' mess!
Beau's death was devastating to every member of the Biden family.
How christian of you to belittle them for their reactions to it.
Enough of rump's crudity.
Biden/Harris will bring back civility to America.
The United States divorce rate is dropping, thanks to millennials
"Young people in the United States are rebelling against their parents’ generation, though not in a way that you might expect.
New research suggests Americans in their late 20s have a less than 50% chance of getting divorced. Meanwhile, their chances of staying married are increasing."
Changing Views of Same-Sex Marriage
"Support for same-sex marriage has increased substantially across virtually all demographic and partisan groups over the past decade. At the same time, there continue to be sharp differences in opinions about this issue – by generation, partisanship and ideology, race and religion."
"Beau's death was devastating to every member of the Biden family.
How christian of you to belittle them for their reactions to it."
and by "reaction", you mean hitting on your dead brother's widow?
outside of trailer trash who have appeared on the old Jerry Springer show, how often do you hear about something like that?
"Enough of rump's crudity."
well, we can never enough of the Dems and media attacking Trump's children with all kinds of vile accusaions
"Biden/Harris will bring back civility to America."
oh, we all remember the civil Dem debate where Harris berated Biden as a racist for his position on busing decades ago
turned out his position was the same as hers
that was when her campaign cratered
are continual unfounded accusations of racism the kind of "civility" we'll see?
President Trump and Republican leaders’ embrace of a House candidate who has made racist statements and espoused the QAnon conspiracy theory is again highlighting the party’s willingness to tolerate extreme and bigoted positions.
Trump on Wednesday tweeted that Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won her Georgia primary Tuesday evening, was a “future Republican Star,” who was “strong on everything and never gives up — a real WINNER!” The office of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) — who ignored multiple pleas from his members to wade into the primary to stop Greene — has said that he will seat her on congressional committees.
The decision has left many House Republicans privately griping about irresponsible leadership, even as they do little publicly to challenge the party’s position or to state their opposition to Greene’s joining their conference if she is elected in November, as is expected, in a reliably Republican district.
Greene promotes the QAnon conspiracy theory, whose followers believe Trump is battling a cabal of “deep state” saboteurs of his administration who worship Satan and traffic children for sex. She has also made racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic comments, asserting that Black people are “held slaves to the Democratic Party,” likening the election of the first two Muslim women to Congress to an “Islamic invasion of our government” and calling George Soros, the liberal Jewish donor and Holocaust survivor, a “Nazi himself trying to continue what was not finished.”
Some retiring members spoke out against the party’s accepting Greene into its ranks, but those seeking reelection were reluctant to do so.
“How can we warmly receive someone that’s publicly stated some of the things she stated in her videos?” asked retiring Rep. Paul Mitchell (R-Mich.). “You can’t dismiss people because of their religious beliefs and their ethnicity. You can’t. . . . It’s just wrong.”
The rise of Greene shines a spotlight on the GOP’s internal debate over how to handle fringe groups and candidates who support Trump and whom he often supports in return. Republicans privately acknowledge that there is no future for a party that antagonizes people of color and has members who make statements or take policy positions supported by white supremacists. But they also have done little to stand up to Trump, a president who embraces such rhetoric, and candidates who make those remarks.
Greene’s emergence comes during a summer of protests that have sharpened questions about how to address racial discrimination after the death of another Black man, George Floyd, in police custody. Democrats have embraced the calls for greater racial justice, and on Tuesday, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden announced his selection of Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) to be his running mate. She is the first Black woman and first Asian American to run on a major-party presidential ticket.
McCarthy’s decision to welcome Greene into the Republican conference also comes against the backdrop of party leaders’ last year stripping Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) of his committee assignments after he publicly wondered how white nationalism and white supremacy had become “offensive.” The move followed years of pressure for the party to disown King, who lost a primary this year. Some House Republicans have been left scratching their heads over the quick acceptance of Greene...
For more info see: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/624581-rnc-autopsy.html
"and by "reaction", you mean hitting on your dead brother's widow?"
I pray you never have to feel the pain of losing a sibling or a spouse to a horrible death like cancer like so many of us have.
The lead sentence in an article in The New York Times on Tuesday was a bizarre, if fitting, encapsulation of the state of American politics today: "Conspiracy theorists won a major victory on Tuesday...."
That's because a Republican supporter of QAnon, a fringe group of quacks who believe President Donald Trump is under constant attack by deep-state, satanic child molesters, won her House primary runoff election in Georgia's 14th Congressional District, one of the country's reddest, where she is likely to triumph in November.
Welcome to the United States Congress, Q.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is not alone in her quackery. There are currently more than a dozen QAnon supporters running for Congress, the Times reports.
Nor is Greene's QAnon support even her worst quality. In June, she was rebuked by some members of the Republican Party for racist remarks about Blacks, Jews and Muslims on Facebook.
The corruption and co-opting of the Republican Party by conspiracy theorists, anti-science promoters, White nationalists and kooks is becoming more total with every passing day.
As CNN K-FILE reporter Andrew Kaczynski pointed out in a Tweet on Wednesday:
"The nominee for the Pentagon #3 said Obama was a Muslim terrorist.
The nominee to head OPM (Office of Personnel Management) said John Podesta took part in Satanic rituals.
The nominee for head of BLM (Bureau of Land Management) said there wasn't a hole in the Ozone layer."
This is all in no small part thanks to President Trump, the Conspiracy Theorist in Chief.
From his promotion of Obama birtherism, to his continued and baseless belief that Covid-19 will miraculously disappear, to his praise for a doctor who's pushed theories on alien DNA and "demon sperm," he's worked very hard to normalize what would otherwise be known as utter lunacy. And it's had the intended effect down-ballot.
In some ways, it's as if the inmates are now running the asylum. Trump effectively turned the GOP into a padded-cell madhouse where up could be down, left could be right and blue could be green...if he decided so. And now the fringiest adherents have swiped the keys from the few remaining guards that were hoping to keep the place in order.
That Trump has been able to do this falls squarely on the shoulders of the Republican Party, which allows these baseless theories to run rampant and unchecked -- and has refused to prevent its party from being transformed into a safe haven for quacks, bigots and ignoramuses.
The GOP's tacit and in many cases explicit support of these kinds of candidates and political appointees -- not to mention the President -- has stripped all meaning away from the party name.
Being a Republican today is more synonymous with White nationalism, anti-science, and conspiracy theories than any clear set of principles or policies. So long as you suck up to Trump, today's "Republican" doesn't have to really believe in or support anything else.
So, to echo the President, "Congratulations to future Republican Star Marjorie Taylor Greene...."
I have no doubt, she will absolutely be one.
good news: in battleground states, Trump is ahead of where he was in 2016 at this point:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/trump-vs-biden-top-battleground-states-2020-vs-2016/
as for Greene, I had not heard of the QAnon conspiracy theory before yesterday
your assertion that she "promotes" it needs more documentation
what specifically did she promote?
"She has also made racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic comments, asserting that Black people are “held slaves to the Democratic Party,”"
it's not racist to note that the Dem Party has taken advantage of black people, more concerned about their vote than their welfare
"likening the election of the first two Muslim women to Congress to an “Islamic invasion of our government”"
it's not an unjustified concern
if they are observant Muslims, they may have views of justice that are antithetical to our Constitution
they are entitled to their religious vi4ews
they are not entitled to suppress discussion of how their religious views inform their political views
"and calling George Soros, the liberal Jewish donor and Holocaust survivor, a “Nazi himself trying to continue what was not finished.”"
Dems accuse others of being "Nazis" all the time
it's offensive and overstated but not out of the ordinary, unfortunately
"Greene also gained attention over comments in which she expressed support for QAnon, a conspiracy theory that posits that President Trump and his allies are working together to expose and arrest an underground cabal of global elites who control the government.
"He is someone that very much loves his country, and he’s on the same page as us, and he is very pro-Trump," she said of "Q," the mysterious figure at the center of the conspiracy theory, in a YouTube video from 2017.
"I’m very excited about that now there’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it," she continued."
--https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/511396-qanon-backer-marjorie-taylor-greene-wins-georgia-gop-runoff
Hear her for yourself at her YouTube.com video page: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYfpODnmxKs0aE5-Jx--wIg/videos
"as for Greene, I had not heard of the QAnon conspiracy theory before yesterday"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2020/06/20/eric-trump-promotes-qanon-conspiracy-on-instagram-while-plugging-tulsa-rally/#104a1cd43198
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/12/trump-tweeting-qanon-followers-357238
https://www.tampabay.com/florida-politics/buzz/2018/08/01/dozens-of-trump-supporters-championed-the-qanon-conspiracy-at-his-tampa-rally-heres-what-you-need-to-know/
https://archive.thinkprogress.org/trump-michigan-rally-qanon-supporters-f96d723d4bed/
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/08/qanon-groups-on-facebook-reportedly-have-millions-of-members.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/team-trump-wrestles-with-its-2020-qanon-problem
"if they are observant Muslims, they may have views of justice that are antithetical to our Constitution"
The same can be said about Christians, especially those that keep trying to push their religious ideologies into to government law - not allowing gay marriages for example, or in general using government coercion to enforce treatment of LGBTQ people as second-class citizens.
So far it has been fundamentalist Christians that have been the biggest threat to our Constitution - especially when it comes to separation of Church and State, not Muslims.
President Trump has admitted to intentional voter suppression. The Post reports, “President Trump said Thursday that he does not want to fund the U.S. Postal Service because Democrats are seeking to expand mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic, making explicit the reason he has declined to approve $25 billion in emergency funding for the cash-strapped agency.” There is no nuance, no joke. Republicans are firmly opposing free and fair elections — unless they do something about this.
Trump and Republicans have been successful in imposing a raft of measures designed to deter voting (voter ID requirements, limits on early voting, closing poll locations in poor areas, purging voter rolls), but they have usually disguised their activities under the bogus heading of “fraud prevention.” Voter fraud is exceptionally rare, whether in person or by mail. (In recent cases, such as the attempt at fraud by Republican operatives in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, the suspects were caught.) Perhaps Trump forgot that just the other day he was praising voting by mail in Florida. Now, he is apparently content to make it difficult if not impossible for millions of people concerned about their health in the pandemic to vote from home.
The irony, of course, is that Republicans are now spooked about absentee ballots and thereby risk losing out when their own voters cannot get to the polls (or face long lines) on Election Day. That is why many state and local Republican groups are pulling their hair out in response to Trump’s anti-absentee vote rhetoric.
Asked about Trump’s comments at her news conference on Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said that Trump is “afraid of the American people. He’s been afraid for a while. He knows that on the legit, it’d be hard for him to win. So he wants to put obstacles of participation.” She vowed, “But we do not agonize, we organize.”
Trump’s war on the U.S. Postal Service is not just un-American and anti-democratic, but foolish. A great many people, including veterans and the elderly (especially in rural areas), depend on mail. VoteVets, a progressive veterans group, put out an ad making this point:
VoteVets
@votevets
After five draft deferments Donald Trump has finally found a war he wants to fight - against the USPS!
If he had served, he'd know veterans rely on the USPS for voting, medication, and employment.
We take this VERY personally, and so should you.
#TrumpYouLose
Great video
Democrats should not shy from hardball here. Why does Trump hate vets and the elderly? Why is Trump afraid of voting?
Former vice president Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) surely can raise the visibility of the issue, since it goes to the heart of the Trump plague. He would rather destroy government or co-opt it than put the interests of the people over his own (getting dirt on an opponent from a foreign government, using his office to promote hotels, refusing to protect U.S. troops rather than confront his BFF Vladimir Putin). He would rather shift blame to others or simply lie than use the powers of the federal government to set up a national testing and tracing system to address the pandemic. He would rather endanger children by returning them to classrooms in hopes of improving the economy than spend money, if local conditions require, to have them attend school virtually or through a hybrid system.
This is anti-government animus at a whole new level. It is a deliberate scheme to wreck the operation of government so he can stay in power. This is the conduct of tin pot dictators...
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy -- who has up to $75.3 million invested in the Postal Service's competitors -- announced a massive leadership reshuffling that left 23 executives reassigned or displaced and instituted a managerial hiring freeze.
"that will prevent Dems from voting for dead people
(a Dem tradition that goes back to JFK's victory over Nixon)"
Wow, cherry picking all the way back to 1960 huh?
Groovy.
In modern times the GOP has been busted for voter frauds The biggest case recently was How Republicans Tried to Rig an Election in North Carolina (And Almost Got Away With It)
[The voter fraud was perpetrated by] "Leslie McRae Dowless Jr., a longtime fixture of Bladen County politics who worked as a contractor for Mark Harris’s campaign. And Dowless, it turned out, paid a team to go door-to-door in mostly rural areas, collect unfinished absentee ballots from unsuspecting voters, and bring them to him for completion. In a series of sworn affidavits, witnesses stated that Dowless described himself as “doing absentee” for Harris, and bragged that he was being paid in cash."
It appears that Dowless ran versions of this grift in previous contests, too. Since 2010, officials received at least a half-dozen complaints about his shady practices in the region, according to the AP. In the 2016 GOP primary, the candidate for whom Dowless worked won 98 percent of Bladen County absentee-by-mail votes, as documented by WSOC-TV reporter Joe Bruno. Two years later, when Harris won the 2018 primary, he took home 96 percent of absentee-by-mail votes in—where else?—Bladen County. (In retrospect, it is good for democracy that officials eventually uncovered Dowless’s operation, but kind of embarrassing that it took them this long to do it.)"
The 10 year delay in discovering Dowless' grift is probably due to the same willful blindness that infects the TTF troll.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmzsWxPLIOo
Rump continues this disgusting GOP scheme and is literally planning to kill Americans by refusing to fund USPS or the voting rights plan during this pandemic.
Kudlow says White House won’t accept ‘voting rights’ provisions in virus aid bill
"...It is unclear what provisions related to voting rights, a keystone of American democracy, Kudlow believes are a priority only for Democrats. A White House spokesman did not immediately identify the specific voting plans Kudlow was criticizing.
His comments fueled growing fears that Trump will stifle efforts to make it easier for Americans to vote on his reelection during the coronavirus pandemic. The president has fought attempts to inject $25 billion into a cash-crunched U.S. Postal Service to ensure smooth mail-in voting during a year when casting ballots in person is hazardous due to the virus.
Trump has also opposed Democratic plans to give states $3.6 billion to promote election security and mail-in voting during the once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. A Republican pandemic aid bill unveiled late last month did not include additional money for elections beyond the $400 million in emergency funds approved earlier this year.
The president has repeatedly made unfounded claims that mail-in ballots are not secure and ripe for fraud. He suggested Thursday morning that he opposes USPS funding because the money would promote voting by mail. ..."
Postal workers are raising the alarm that Trump's sycophant has removed mail sorting machines in key distribution hubs to inhibit the post office from delivering mail in ballots.
This is what dictators do, they use the power of government to try to prevent them from being removed from power.
This dictatorial move by Trump couldn't be more blatant and no doubt he's going to take it even farther before election day.
Trump and Republicans are doing everything in their power to keep people from voting and choosing someone other than Trump as president. This is American democracy facing the most serious attack in history.
Check to make sure you're still on the voting rolls, vote as early as possible, deliver your ballot to drop off boxes (those Republicans haven't already removed) and if need be be prepared to wait in line for hours to cast your vote on election day. This is your last chance to save your democracy!
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "it was highly abnormal for an outgoing administration to spy on their successors".
No one spied on the Trump administration. This was all investigated by the Inspector General who ruled the investigation was properly predicated, carried out and had no involvement by senior Obama administration officials.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "most conservatives across America are wearing masks when in public indoor spaces"
A childish knee jerk lie.
Look at any of the meetings/gatherings Trump's been to - virtually no one there is wearing a mask. Look at Republican governors banning mayors and counties from requiring masks. Conservatives have been irrationally opposed to wearing masks from the beginning and still are.
Sad!
But no, he doesn't regret one bit of it and he's already trying to ignite another conspiracy theory like his birther bullshit.
The novel coronavirus is surging back into U.S. nursing homes, where it killed tens of thousands at the start of the pandemic and now once again threatens some of the people most vulnerable to covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.
The development is a discouraging result of widespread community transmission of the virus in many parts of the country and in hot spots where it is even less controlled. With staff — and in some cases patients and visitors — entering and leaving facilities, the community-acquired infection almost inevitably finds its way inside.
“The strongest predictor of whether or not we’ll see cases in [a particular setting] is community spread,” said David C. Grabowski, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School, who studies long-term care. “We saw that in the Northeast and now, unfortunately, we’re seeing it in the Sun Belt states.”
Federal data cited by two long-term care associations this week show that the number of new cases in nursing homes bottomed out at 5,468 during the week of June 21 and has climbed steadily upward to 8,628 for the week of July 19, the last week available. That is a 58 percent increase that roughly parallels the rise in U.S. cases overall during that time.
Deaths in nursing homes from covid-19 dropped sharply to 1,324 for the week of June 28 before leveling off over the next three weeks, according to the American Health Care Association and the National Center for Assisted Living, which represent long-term care facilities. But a rise in deaths usually lags several weeks behind an increase in cases, and officials are watching for signs of increased fatalities.
On Thursday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) spoke directly to that issue, warning that more covid-19 deaths at nursing homes and assisted-living facilities may be on the way, even as total caseloads have begun to decline. Florida has suffered a huge outbreak of coronavirus cases in recent months and has a sizable population of elderly residents.
“Over the next couple weeks, I’m concerned of seeing kind of a tail where we start to see some of these long-term-care deaths,” DeSantis said Thursday at a forum in Tallahassee.
A separate analysis of 35 states released July 21 by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that cases in long-term care facilities jumped 11 percent in the two weeks ending July 10. But in 23 hot spot states, they rose 18 percent, compared with just 4 percent in 12 states that had the virus under better control. That review included nursing homes, assisted-living facilities and other kinds of long-term care...
QAnon: What Is The Storm? And Is There About To Be An Awakening???
Marjorie Taylor Green - Qanon - The Vid She Wants To Forget.. Nov 26 2017
Rasmussen Reports
White House Watch
Biden Lengthens Lead
Wednesday, August 12, 2020
Hot on the heels of announcing Kamala Harris as his running mate, likely Democratic nominee Joe Biden has taken a six-point lead over President Trump in the latest Rasmussen Reports’ weekly White House Watch survey.
The new national telephone and online survey finds Biden with 49% support among Likely U.S. Voters to Trump’s 43%. Four percent (4%) prefer some other candidate, while another four percent (4%) remain undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
A week ago, Biden had a 48% to 45% advantage. The former vice president has led Trump in every weekly survey to date.
Wyatt and Regina Hardiman won't acknowledge Trump is a dictator. Trump said publicly he didn't want to fund the post office to prevent people from voting by mail. His sycophant running the Post Office has removed 671 mail sorting machines in urban areas that typically vote Democratic. He's also removing Post Office boxes from poor black communities, as many as 50% of them in some cases.
Trump is destroying the Postal Service to prevent poor black people from voting. This is what a dictator does, uses government to prevent the people from removing him from power.
Trump's Post Master has told 46 states the Post Office will not deliver all election mail as those states have planned on.
One of the other changes Trump's Post Master made is reclassifying all election mail as bulk mail instead of first class. With first class mail the Post Office takes all kinds of steps to make sure it gets delivered. With bulk class mail they make a half hearted effort and then destroy that which can't be easily delived - Trump is destroying people's ballots before they can be counted.
Dictators do everything they can to prevent themselves from being removed from power. Clearly that's what Trump is doing and co-conspirators Wyatt and Regina Hardiman are helping him do it by denying what he's doing is dictatorial and an attack on democracy.
Donald is a loser. He's cheating because if he doesn't cheat he knows he will lose.
Sabotaging NATO.
Sabotaging civil rights enforcement.
Sabotaging the EPA.
Sabotaging the census.
Sabotaging the pandemic response
Sabotaging the Post Office.
Sabotaging the election.
The greatest existential threat to the USA and democracy is sitting in the Oval Office.
The Republican party for quite some time has actively tried to discourage people's votes from counting in all kinds of ways; whether it's voter ID laws, or blatant gerrymandering, making it difficult for people in certain precincts to find their polling places. All that stuff is contrary to American democracy, but I think the Republicans' view has been "It's all fair game as long as it help's us gain power.".
What we've never seen before is a President say ,"I'm going to try to actively kneecap the Postal Service to [discourage] voting and I will be explicit about the reason I'm doing it." That's sort of unheard of.
"Hot on the heels of announcing Kamala Harris as his running mate, likely Democratic nominee Joe Biden has taken a six-point lead over President Trump"
it's similar to the temporary boost that Sarah Palin gave John McCain
Harris is an actual living human being with a definable views and an estimable capability to advocate for those views
not so for Biden, who is merely a figurehead trying desperately to represent a Democratic Party that is not united, other than that they all have an unreasoned case of Trump Derangement Syndrome
"Trump said publicly he didn't want to fund the post office to prevent people from voting by mail."
he thinks voting my mail will make the election susceptible to fraud and think we should protect the integrity of the election
"Trump is destroying the Postal Service to prevent poor black people from voting."
poor black people are welcome to come vote in person like every else
being poor and black is not a disability that needs special accommodation
Dems will likely take their usual insulting and paternalistic approach to blacks and set up centers to fill their ballots out for them and even drop them in the mail for them
that's fraud
"This is what a dictator does, uses government to prevent the people from removing him from power."
Poor Randy...he made this unfounded claim weeks ago and then disappeared when challenged on it
we're still waiting for an example of a dictator that blocked mail-in voting to stay in power
LOL! what a moron!
"Anonymous Mary Trump said...
Donald is a loser."
Mary, losers are people who write books about their families confidential relationships for a few bucks and some attention
Trump is a billionaire who is currently occupying the highest office in the land
so, between you to, most would say he's a winner and you're a loser
"He's cheating because if he doesn't cheat he knows he will lose."
he won fair and square last time out
defeated people such as Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, who had every advantage of connections and money
"The greatest existential threat to the USA and democracy is sitting in the Oval Office."
Bradley, the Dems have spent the last three years desperately, desperately trying to overturn the results of the last election by non-democratic means
they are the greatest existential threat to the USA and democracy
Former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith has agreed to plead guilty to a false statement charge, marking the first criminal action in an investigation centered on how intelligence agencies gathered information involving the Trump campaign and Russia four years ago in the waning months of the Obama administration.
Clinesmith had been identified in an earlier report by the Justice Department inspector general.
He doctored an email used as part of a process to secure court approval to renew surveillance on a onetime Trump campaign junior adviser, Carter Page. The Justice Department's inspector general, Michael Horowitz, referred the matter for criminal review.
"Kevin deeply regrets having altered the email," his attorney, Justin Shur, said in an email. "Kevin understands what he did was wrong and accepts responsibility."
The charge against Clinesmith represents the first significant public action by John Durham, U.S. attorney in Connecticut, who was named to examine problems with the FBI, the Justice Department and other agencies' approach to an investigation that came to define much of President Trump's first term in office.
"Dems will likely take their usual insulting and paternalistic approach to blacks and set up centers to fill their ballots out for them and even drop them in the mail for them
that's fraud"
Sure is and you GOPers know all about it.
Don't forget it was "Leslie McRae Dowless Jr., a longtime fixture of Bladen County politics who worked as a contractor for Mark Harris’s campaign. And Dowless, it turned out, paid a team to go door-to-door in mostly rural areas, collect unfinished absentee ballots from unsuspecting voters, and bring them to him for completion. In a series of sworn affidavits, witnesses stated that Dowless described himself as “doing absentee” for Harris, and bragged that he was being paid in cash."
It appears that Dowless ran versions of this grift in previous contests, too. Since 2010, officials received at least a half-dozen complaints about his shady practices in the region, according to the AP. In the 2016 GOP primary, the candidate for whom Dowless worked won 98 percent of Bladen County absentee-by-mail votes, as documented by WSOC-TV reporter Joe Bruno. Two years later, when Harris won the 2018 primary, he took home 96 percent of absentee-by-mail votes in—where else?—Bladen County. (In retrospect, it is good for democracy that officials eventually uncovered Dowless’s operation, but kind of embarrassing that it took them this long to do it.)"
"we're still waiting for an example of a dictator that blocked mail-in voting to stay in power"
Just because there isn't a precedent, doesn't mean there can't be a first.
It is clear that Rump is behaving like a tin-pot dictator, and he clearly has no moral qualms about destroying the US Postal System if he thinks it will help keep him in power.
All of your protestestations about "Constitutional Originalists" are completely undermined by your support of so blatant an attack on the single most important part of our Democracy - voting.
Like Rump, you have absolutely no qualms about suppressing the votes of people on the opposite side of the aisle.
But this is not a surprise, as you have consistently shown that you're not really that interested in Democracy, unless it can help you push forward your Christian dominionist agenda. Once that's in place, it's quite clear you'd be happy with dictatorial regime oppressing all the LGBT people you don't like, and favoring the Christian sharia laws you support.
"Sure is and you GOPers know all about it."
glad you agree since several TTFers here have jumped up and down shouting that there is no chance of fraud resulting from mail-in voting
it's settled then
let's have in-person voting with safety protocols to make it as safe as possible
people in highly vulnerable categories can apply for an absentee ballot
"Fundamentalist Christians are Fundamentally a Threat to our Constitution"
here's a idea: why don't you post your definition of "fundamentalist Christian"
"Just because there isn't a precedent, doesn't mean there can't be a first."
well, there could....
but the TTFer has been incessantly saying it is a typical activity of dictators
if so, this wouldn't be a first
truth is, it's easier to think of ways a dictator could use mail-in voting to keep himself in power and subvert the will of the electorate
"It is clear that Rump is behaving like a tin-pot dictator, and he clearly has no moral qualms about destroying the US Postal System if he thinks it will help keep him in power."
there has been much talk about eliminating the Postal System in recent year
it loses money and many of its functions have been made obsolete by private business and the internet
so, preserving it would hardly be a moral issue
"All of your protestestations about "Constitutional Originalists" are completely undermined by your support of so blatant an attack on the single most important part of our Democracy - voting."
I'm completely in favor of voting
I don't want anyone's vote diluted or negated by the fraud that would be inevitable with large scale mail voting
mail is not a new concept, indeed it has become quaint and dated
there's a reason we didn't go to mail voting long ago
"your Christian dominionist agenda"
could you define "Christian dominionist" as well?
I have a definition of my own but I don't hink it's what you mean
"dictatorial regime oppressing all the LGBT people you don't like"
unfortunately, I think you mean that a government that doesn't protect the social status of homosexuality is oppressive
but the government doesn't force people to interact with anyone else regardless of their behavior
btw, I like some LGBT people and dislike others
, and favoring the Christian sharia laws you support.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Trump is a billionaire"
Not a chance that Trump is a billionaire. He likely owes more money than he has, making his net worth less than my own. And my net worth is about $30,000
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "I'm completely in favor of voting I don't want anyone's vote diluted or negated by the fraud that would be inevitable with large scale mail voting"
Voter fraud is virtually non-existent. Trump's "voter fraud" commission disbanded in disgrace when they were unable to find any. You're obviously not in favour of people freely voting. Vote by mail has been going on in several states for decades without a hitch.
Good anonymous said "But this is not a surprise, as you have consistently shown that you're not really that interested in Democracy, unless it can help you push forward your Christian dominionist agenda. Once that's in place, it's quite clear you'd be happy with dictatorial regime oppressing all the LGBT people you don't like, and favoring the Christian sharia laws you support."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "unfortunately, I think you mean that a government that doesn't protect the social status of h*sexuality is oppressive"
A society that doesn't give gays the same social status as christians IS oppressive.
And that's what you seek. That's what comes from a person who advocates assaulting, imprisoning, and executing harmless lgbt people.
“Bait and Switch”: Youth Ministry Hides Anti-LGBTQ Ideology to Sell God to Gen Z
On the website for Young Life Ministries, curious browsers can find a list of the organization’s values. Inclusion, ecumenism, diversity, health, and stewardship are all mentioned.
Honesty is not.
Take a look at HuffPo’s recent ‘Queer Voices’ article covering the ministry, and you’ll see why.
In it, journalist Carol Kuruvilla unravels the stories of several young people formerly involved with Young Life, all of whom say they were drawn into the ministry under the banner of inclusiveness — and then kicked out when they discovered they were queer.
These former participants, along with many others, are sharing their painful stories under the hashtag #DoBetterYoungLife. They want to see the organization change its approach to include, if not less homophobia, at least more transparency about what they actually believe.
But as Kuruvilla shows, it’s hard to interpret Young Life’s stance as anything but deliberate.
Here’s the problem: For any youth ministry, turning unchurched young people into lifelong Christians is the ultimate goal. But Gen Z tends to disapprove of bigotry and discrimination, and most Christian denominations are still rife with anti-LGBTQ sentiment.
Young Life solved that problem by building their brand around the idea that every kid will be embraced exactly as they are. Their website is peppered with cheerful proclamations of positivity and acceptance:
"Young Life starts with concerned adults who spend time building bridges of authentic friendship with teens — where they are, as they are. Because their leaders believe in them unconditionally, teenagers begin to see that their lives have great worth, meaning, and purpose. Young Life offers teens adventure, hospitality, and unconditional friendship.
Young Life staff and leaders build relationships with teenagers, inviting them to various activities, meetings called ‘club’ and camp. Here teens can be themselves, have fun, and consider some of life’s biggest questions like, “How can we best live our lives?” and “Why are we here?”"
The trouble is, some teens end up taking Young Life at their word. Then they find themselves deeply wounded when they come out as LGBTQ only to find that the “unconditional friendship” they were promised has some serious strings attached.
The #DoBetterYoungLife campaign is the brainchild of former staff member Kent Thomas, who first encountered the organization as a student, drawn in by promises of inclusion, enjoyment, and spiritual meaning. Over time, he became deeply invested in the organization and the Christian spiritual path it promoted. In a series of tweets, which he reposted on Instagram, he describes concealing his queer identity for years while he prayed to be healed of it. The rejection he experienced when he was forced out of the closet still haunts him five years later.
It’s that pain that motivated his involvement in raising awareness of Young Life’s manipulative practices. He wanted to draw attention to the harm they cause LGBTQ youth by drawing them in with promises of unconditional love, only to ultimately reject them after they come out:
"Young Life says all queer kids are welcome, but partial “inclusion” at arm’s length is even worse than overt exclusion. It’s like making eye contact with someone and saying “I love you, I love you, I love you” while gently, slowly shutting the door in their face."
It’s the same worn story that so many ministries tell when they want to seem welcoming: LGBTQ people are welcome, but only if they’re willing to carry the mantle of shame evangelical Christianity often attaches to queer identities. They can have unconditional acceptance, as long as they’re working hard to change some of the most fundamental parts of themselves.
It’s a strategy that leaves LGBTQ participants trapped in a cycle Kuruvilla says she saw over and over again as she researched the story:
"Former participants and employees who are queer described a pattern of damaging behavior to HuffPost — being recruited as children, finding community and belonging in the group, being encouraged into volunteer and staff positions, and ultimately, being pushed away after coming out. They said they lost their jobs at the ministry, were told to just “stop being gay,” were outed to co-workers without consent, and were treated like a threat to children simply for being queer."
When asked directly, Young Life was willing to own their exclusionary beliefs in a carefully worded statement:
"Sexuality is a gift from God… God guides us in how to use this gift, including that intimate sexual activity should occur within a marriage covenant between a man and a woman. We recognize that some thoughtful and committed Christians have different views, and we are committed to being in conversation with these and others — both inside and outside Young Life."
But that commitment to conversation only applies to the teenage participants who they’re hoping to convert. Ministry leaders who come out as LGBTQ lose their jobs on the grounds that they fail to uphold Young Life’s theological values — even the special secret ones they prefer to conceal from the children they’re trying to indoctrinate.
(Recall the controversial website Church Clarity, which simply lets people know what various churches actually believe about gayness, female preachers, etc. despite those churches’ best efforts to conceal those answers.)
Maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised. Dishonesty is built into the fundamental DNA of Young Life, which presents itself first as a fun, neutral hang-out before dropping their religious agenda on the students:
"According to former participants, Young Life leaders target and befriend “key” kids, usually “popular” kids, at public schools to ensure that Young Life comes across to the student population as a “cool” thing to participate in… Thomas said that leaders aren’t immediately upfront with new kids or their parents about the ministry’s conservative religious mission. At club, leaders sometimes have kids sing along to secular songs before switching over to worship songs at the end, he said."
Once Young Life has them hooked on Christianity, students are encouraged to transition into members of the organization, first as volunteers and then as paid faith leaders, who are expected to set a positive (heterosexual) example for the youth.
Young Life claims to adhere to the laws regarding religious proselytizing in schools and church-state separation. They say they only participate in schools with permission, and work closely with administrators to work out what will and won’t be allowed on campus. On their website, they make a point of mentioning their “strict compliance with the First Amendment.”
But that’s the trouble with being disingenuous in one area of their ministry; it leaves their other claims open to doubt. And it’s fair to ask how compliant they’re really being in a climate where so many religious groups invoke the First Amendment to protect themselves rather than the targets of their preaching.
But for the people asking Young Life to do better, it isn’t about whether they have the legal right to offer the program as it exists. It’s a moral question. Will Young Life do the right thing — either by becoming inclusive, or being more transparent about its unwillingness to accept LGBTQ people?
There’s always hope, but to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it’s difficult to get an organization to choose the right thing when its business model depends on the wrong one.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "btw, I like some LGBT people and dislike others"
Another childish knee-jerk lie.
When you encourage the assault, imprisonment and execution of lgbt people and fight to make us second class citizens its clear you hate ALL innocent lgbt people with a passion. Unjustifiably so.
Its justified to hate those who harm the innocents. It is not justified to hate lgbt people who harm no one.
As Rachel Maddow says "Watch what they do, not what they say.".
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous have worked for over two decades to try to force lgbt people to "live in society's shadows". That's not something you do to people you "like".
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous call lgbt people "a virus" and "a gangrene on society". Those are things you say about people you wish in your heart were tortured and killed.
Make no mistake about it, Wyatt and Regina take delight in the christian fantasy of lgbt people being tortured eternally. If it was in their power they absolutely would torture and kill every lgbt person on the planet.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "he won fair and square last time out"
America's intelligence communties said Russia intervened in a pervasive and systematic multi-pronged effort to help Trump win. Republicans closed most polling places in urban areas dominated by black populations. Trump cheated in multiple other ways as well.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said ""your Christian dominionist agenda" could you define "Christian dominionist" as well?"
The agenda is to as Tony Perkins put it "make sure christians are at the head of the government and not at the tail." or as I put it "Christians are using the first amendment as a weapon to entrench in law their legal superiority over all others.". The highest priority of attaining that legal superiority is to persecute harmless lgbt people - that's obvious in you two.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "the government doesn't force people to interact with anyone else regardless of their behavior"
Of course it does. If I owned a business in the states I'd be obligated to serve you regardless of the behaviours you exhibit because of your christianity. Plus it isn't just "behaviour" - christians discriminate against celibate gays and lesbians as well. Christians have special rights in the USA and Tony Perkins and evangelicals are trying to give themselves as much legal power over all of us as they can grab by any means possible.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "let's have in-person voting with safety protocols to make it as safe as possible"
It can't be done. Especially with Republicans closing polling places in urban areas to force ultra long line-ups that are ideal for spreading the virus and which is secondary to their goal of preventing people who vote mostly democratic from voting. Many black people can't afford to leave their job to wait in line for 12 hours, they just won't vote. That's a dictator move.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "people in highly vulnerable categories can apply for an absentee ballot"
And what good will that do them when Trump is destroying the post office which is now stating it won't deliver all mail in ballots? Another dictator move.
Wyatt and Regina have a never ending supply of glib responses because they're afraid to admit the obvious - Trump is using the government for his personal benefit and to help re-elect himself against the will of the people.
That's straight out of the Dictator's Handbook.
""Sure is and you GOPers know all about it."
glad you agree since several TTFers here have jumped up and down shouting that there is no chance of fraud resulting from mail-in voting"
Dowless didn't let voters mail in their ballots you idiot.
He sent his crews around to collect voters' ABSENTEE ballots, filled out what he could and probably trashed any ballots that didn't vote the way he wanted them to vote, hence "the candidate for whom Dowless worked won 98 percent of Bladen County absentee-by-mail votes, as documented by WSOC-TV reporter Joe Bruno. Two years later, when Harris won the 2018 primary, he took home 96 percent of absentee-by-mail vote"
REMINDER: Dowless cheated for years with ABSENTEE MAIL-IN VOTING -- the kind Rump will be using and he thinks is fine.
Sure, you are fine with GOP cheating and twisting words into lies.
We get that.
Cheating and twisting words is what the Rump GOP does!
Here are more FACTS about some even more recent GOP 2020 stinking lying election tricks:
A Connecticut Congressional candidate was arrested on domestic violence charges just days ago -- but GOP insiders knew of the allegations against him for months
"The arrest of Connecticut Congressional candidate Thomas Gilmer on the eve of this week’s Republican primary threw the race into disarray. But details of his alleged violent domestic assault were known in Republican circles for more than two months before anyone contacted authorities.
Gilmer’s primary opponent, Justin Anderson, spent weeks showing a graphic video of the alleged attack to his fellow Republicans as he worked to defeat the party-backed Gilmer. The state party chairman, J.R. Romano, acknowledged he knew about the allegations as early as May.
Anderson did not report the matter to the police until whispers of Gilmer’s past behavior spilled onto social media in late July -- two months after the party’s nominating convention. Other Republicans who were shown the video or informed of the allegations also did not contact the police, nor did party leaders alert rank and file Republicans, who selected Gilmer as the nominee.
At a time when the #MeToo movement has triggered a national reckoning on sexual harassment and violence against women, top Republicans are facing strong criticism for failing to take decisive action as Gilmer continued to seek the Republican nomination for Connecticut’s 2nd Congressional District.
The victim -- who asked to remain anonymous because of concerns about her safety -- said Republican party officials had several opportunities to vet the allegations against Gilmer, but did not seem interested in taking action.
“They had multiple opportunities to make this situation right but they turned a blind eye,’' she said. “This is exactly why people don’t come forward to report these things.”.."
Domestic abusers are OK with the GOP!
Good luck finding something so despicable and recent for the Democrats.
The lying party of Rump, AKA the GOP, stinks because it's full of shit!
"truth is, it's easier to think of ways a dictator could use mail-in voting to keep himself in power and subvert the will of the electorate"
I see you have been thinking about this for a while... probably just like the rest of your autocratic friends.
Why am I not surprised?
"so, preserving it would hardly be a moral issue"
Given that mail-in voting is going to be important to some people's health this year, as well as our democracy, getting rid of it now it clearly an anti-democratic move. It's also clear that you don't consider people's health a moral issue, but that's another discussion entirely.
"I don't want anyone's vote diluted or negated by the fraud that would be inevitable with large scale mail voting"
Right, just like you didn't want the hoards of women and girls getting raped in restrooms when gender identity got added to the non-discrimination classes. That just never happened.
You and Rump are blowing up the threat of voter fraud WAY out of proportion so you can easily undermine and contest the outcome of the vote when it doesn't go your way. With no major evidence of voting fraud now, you've sowing the field to make it (fraud) believable in November, so that when you lose, you'll have nearly half the country ready to overturn the election results, and give Rump an excuse to stay in office.
"mail is not a new concept, indeed it has become quaint and dated
there's a reason we didn't go to mail voting long ago"
5 states have had permanent automatic mail in ballots for years:
https://ballotpedia.org/All-mail_voting
Somehow they've managed to avoid the "inevitable fraud" problems the "very stable genius" is whining about. Go figure. We're not talking rocket science here. It can be easily done... unless of course the Rumpster's lackey takes out a whole bunch of letter sorting machines... hey, wait a minute!
"but the government doesn't force people to interact with anyone else regardless of their behavior"
Actually it does. Religion is one of the protected classes of people in anti-discrimination law. The only distinguishing differences between people of different religions is their beliefs and behaviors -- whether they take communion, pray 5 times a day, drink wine and pretend it's Jesus' blood, baptize new babies, or baptize people who have been dead for decades. A person's religious beliefs drives their behaviors.
The government imposes penalties for those who discriminate against Jews, Catholics, Mormons, Voodoo doctors, and many other religions, no matter how strange or odd they may seem or how some of those people behave.
LGBT people need government protections because religious people have spent decades marginalizing them, conflating them with pedophiles, passing laws to criminalize their relationships, keep them out of the workforce, and curate an atmosphere where it was acceptable to verbally and physically abuse LGBT people in the open. In fact, they're still doing these very same things. If they would just STOP doing it, we wouldn't need the government to step in and protect LGBT people from all the anti-social and damaging treatment by the religious people.
You guys brought these kinds of laws on yourselves by insisting on behaving in ways that damage the lives of innocent people. You got away with it for centuries because the majority of the population was inculcated in the same kind of damaging religious dogma.
Fortunately, as science and general knowledge has progressed, more and more people have come to recognize the often backwards and malignant philosophies espoused by the worst of religious dogmatics, and we've slowly started shaking them off on moving on to a better and more inclusive society.
"btw, I like some LGBT people and dislike others"
Do you really think anyone here believes that, or even cares?
Hear Hear, Good Anonymous!
Even devout Christians should fear these influential leaders' refusal to separate church and state.
Though it’s seldom mentioned by name, it’s one of the major forces in Texas politics today: dominion theology, or dominionism. What began as a fringe evangelical sect in the 1970s has seen its influence mushroom — so much so that sociologist Sara Diamond has called dominionism “the central unifying ideology for the Christian Right.” (Italics hers.) That’s especially true here in Texas, where dominionist beliefs have, over the last decade, become part and parcel of right-wing politics at the highest levels of government.
So, what is it? Dominionism fundamentally opposes America’s venerable tradition of church-state separation — in fact, dominionists deny the Founders ever intended that separation in the first place. According to Frederick Clarkson, senior fellow for religious liberty at the non-profit social justice think tank Political Research Associates, dominionists believe that Christians “have a biblical mandate to control all earthly institutions — including government — until the second coming of Jesus.” And that should worry all Texans — Christians and non-Christians alike.
Dominionism comes in “soft” and “hard” varieties. “Hard” dominionism (sometimes called Christian Reconstructionism), as Clarkson describes it, explicitly seeks to replace secular government, and the U.S. Constitution, with a system based on Old Testament law.
The father of hard dominionism, the late Presbyterian theologian R.J. Rushdoony, called for his followers to “take back government … and put it in the hands of Christians.”
Rushdoony’s legacy has been carried on by his son-in-law, Tyler-based economist Gary North, an unapologetic theocrat who in 1982 called for Christians to “get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.”
Mainstream Texas political figures don’t go quite that far. Instead they trade in “soft” dominionism. While soft dominionists do not advocate replacing the Constitution with biblical law, they do believe that Christians need to regain the control over political and cultural institutions that they (supposedly) lost after the Founding period.
Top Texas political figures have had links to dominionism for years. In 2011, the Observer covered then-Governor Rick Perry’s ties to a branch of the movement, the New Apostolic Reformation. Since then, the relationship between dominionism and right-wing politics has become even cozier.
Case in point: Ted Cruz. Although Cruz is too politically savvy to openly endorse dominionism, key figures on his team are explicit dominionists.
The most important may be his father, evangelist Rafael Cruz, a frequent surrogate for Cruz on the political stage.
Cruz père espouses Seven Mountains Dominionism, which holds that Christians must take control of seven “mountains,” or areas of life: family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business and government. Speaking at the Texas GOP Convention in Dallas in May, Rafael Cruz claimed that God inspired the Founders to produce the Constitution, and declared that “biblical values” have made America the greatest country on earth. He encouraged Christian pastors to run for public office at every level, and called upon all Christians to exercise their “sacred responsibility” to vote for candidates who uphold biblical values.
As for what Thomas Jefferson famously called America’s “wall of separation between Church & State,” Cruz claimed in a 2016 sermon that it was meant to be a “one-way wall” — preventing government from interfering in religion but allowing the Church to exercise dominion over government. (I have to wonder whether a “one-way wall” is really a wall at all.…)
Another Seven Mountains Dominionist active in Cruz’s failed presidential bid was David Barton, who managed one of Cruz’s super PACs. On a 2011 radio program Barton said that Christians need to “be able to influence and control” the “mountains” in order to “establish God’s kingdom.” An amateur historian, outspoken Christian Americanist, and long-time Texas GOP activist, Barton runs WallBuilders, an Aledo group that seeks to “exert a direct and positive influence in government” and to assist public officials in developing “policies which reflect Biblical values.” (Barton also played a key role in incorporating Christian Americanism into the Texas curriculum standards.)
Perhaps the most powerful dominionist in Texas politics is Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick. In a 2012 sermon and again at the 2015 Texas Tribune Festival, he said that the United States was founded on the Bible. Patrick has also made it clear he believes the Bible should determine public policy. In 2014, Patrick said that elected officials must look to Scripture when they make policy, “because every problem we have in America has a solution in the Bible.” (Where the Bible addresses problems like greenhouse gas emissions or cybersecurity, I’m at a loss to explain, even with 20 years of biblical study behind me.) His call for a “biblically-based” policy mindset “doesn’t mean we want a theocracy,” he insisted. “But it does mean we can’t walk away from what we believe.” For Patrick, not “walking away” seems to mean basing policy on his own religious beliefs — as he showed when he opposed same-sex marriage on biblical grounds.
Another dominionist active in Texas politics is conservative firebrand-slash-medical-doctor Steven Hotze. Hotze is linked to Gary DeMar, a dominionist writer and lecturer. DeMar has called for the United States to be governed by Old Testament law, including instituting the death penalty for gay/lesbian sex. As recently as 2013, Hotze was an officer of DeMar’s dominionist think tank American Vision; its mission is “to Restore America to its Biblical Foundation.”
Hotze also heads the influential (and hate-group certified) Conservative Republicans of Texas (CRT). In a promotional video, Hotze explains that CRT “is committed to electing Republicans” who will “defend the constitutional liberties that arose from the Christian heritage of our Founding Fathers.”
In short, dominionism has risen from an obscure fringe movement to the highest reaches of government here in Texas. No doubt Rushdoony would be pleased. The rest of us, however, have good reason to be troubled.
The dominionist goal of having Christianity shape law and policy amounts to the very governmental establishment of religion that the First Amendment explicitly prohibits. It would also appear to violate the Texas Bill of Rights, which states that “no preference shall ever be given by law to any religious society or mode of worship.”
Of course, dominionists insist that none of this matters, because the Founders intended to create a “Christian nation.”
Even if some of the Founders did mean for Christianity to be normative for law and policy, the question today is: Which Christianity? Christians disagree sharply on a whole host of issues, and dominionists simply don’t speak for many Texas Christians. For example, Hotze’s CRT supports capital punishment and wants to eliminate entitlement programs, and would deny marriage to same-sex couples, while Patrick would deny Texans reproductive choice and transgender people access to appropriate public restrooms. Those positions directly oppose the gospel as many Christians, myself included, understand it. And in seeking to make law and policy conform to the Bible, dominionists don’t speak for the growing number of non-Christians and religious “nones” — those who are religiously unaffiliated, including atheists and agnostics.
To be clear, I’m not saying that religion has no place in the public square. Far from it: religious persons have just as much right as anyone else to advocate laws and policies that line up with their beliefs and values. Government officials, however, are in a different position. No, they don’t have to “walk away from what they believe,” as Patrick puts it. Their religious beliefs can inform their personal morality in office — don’t lie, don’t steal, and so on — and give them comfort and hope or motivate them to serve others. But they can’t make policy based on those beliefs. Government officials have a duty to uphold the Constitution, not to enact their personal religious convictions. They are obliged to serve all of the people, not just members of the officials’ own religious community.
Ironically, for all their talk about what those Founders intended, it seems that dominionists have failed to heed the wisdom of two of the most prominent, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Madison warned that when government prefers one religion over others, religion suffers. A government that can make Christianity the official religion, he observed, can just as easily prefer one form of Christianity over others — for instance, Catholicism over evangelicalism.
For his part, Jefferson appealed to history. Whenever government officials “have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible” (my emphasis), he wrote, they have ended up creating “false religions.”
Christians who seek political domination would do well to heed those wise words.
Has anyone mentioned that the new ambassador to Canada is the wife of the Post Master General that's trying to sabotage the USPS?
“Gosh almighty.” Those words from former Vice President Joe Biden sum up plenty about the announced criminal plea by former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith. Of course, Biden was not referring to the implications of the FBI lawyer who lied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court for the efforts to continue the surveillance of an adviser to the campaign of Donald Trump. Nor was he referring to growing evidence that the Russia investigation was launched based on false and flawed evidence.
Biden was referring to the federal investigation by United States Attorney John Durham that led to the criminal plea by Clinesmith. Like most other Democrats, Biden previously denounced the investigation and the effort to look into criminality. Now that criminality has been found, Democrats and commentators still insist there are no reasons to continue it.
From the start, Democrats overwhelmingly condemned the investigation despite admitting Durham is a respected prosecutor. Leaders like House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff deemed the investigation “tainted” and “political.” Biden mocked the very idea of an “investigation of the investigators” and added, “Give me a break. Gosh almighty.”
These are the same figures who repeatedly cited plea agreements in the special counsel investigation by Robert Mueller as proof that real crimes were waiting to be found. When the plea by former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn was announced, it was cited as the critical development even though FBI agents said they did not believe Flynn had intentionally lied about his conversations with Russian diplomats.
Many in the media cited the plea by Flynn to disprove the insistence by Trump that the Mueller investigation was a hoax. But they are not citing the plea by Clinesmith to disprove the statement by Biden. Indeed, they have barely covered it. It does not appear to matter that Clinesmith said “viva la resistance” after the 2016 election or that, after claiming he was devastated by the victory of Trump, he lamented that “my god damned name was all over those legal documents investigating his staff.”
But several Democrats and commentators maintained there was never a targeting of the campaign before the special counsel appointment. That was untrue. Declassified documents show that an agent was used with a national security briefing of Trump and his aides during the campaign to gather information for the Russia investigation. Who did the agent report to? Clinesmith and Peter Strzok at the FBI, who infamously referred to his own “insurance” with the chance that Trump might be elected.
This is a plea agreement so it is not known what information Clinesmith may have shared. Moreover, this is just the first public move by Durham, just as Flynn was the early salvo for Mueller. But the date of this criminal false statement is key. In September 2016, administration officials leaked the existence of the classified investigation in the midst of the campaign and suggested Trump adviser Carter Page was a Russian agent.
This secret surveillance started the next month, based on that allegation against Page, when he was in fact an American asset. The FISA court was never told that information in the surveillance application was derived in part from the dossier, or that it was paid for by the opposition campaign. Nor was it told that at the time, FBI agents challenged both the bias and credibility for the dossier author and past British spy Christopher Steele, who was known to have given interviews for the media and claimed that he was trying to defeat Trump and assist the Clinton campaign.
In January 2017, Trump was inaugurated and FBI agents had sought to end their investigation of Flynn, citing no evidence of a crime. However, Strzok evidently wanted the collusion investigation to remain open and, later that month, Clinesmith also sought to renew that surveillance order over Page. His FISA application expressly cited the Steele dossier and described it as credible, despite knowing the different findings by FBI agents.
In February 2017, there were more leaks about alleged collusion by Trump officials with the Russians, a claim that even Strzok said was unsupported. The FBI was finding no evidence of collusion, while there was pressure to end the investigation. In June 2017, Clinesmith falsified an email in a third FISA application. What he was able to hide from the court was incredible. The court was told that Page might be a Russian asset for a conspiracy to influence the election as Clinesmith was told that Page was an American asset who was working by meeting with Russians. Clinesmith altered one critical email to state otherwise and extend the investigation.
When Clinesmith took this criminal action, the Russia collusion theory had already fallen apart. Both former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates declared they would never have signed off on all the surveillance applications if they knew then what they know today. Rosenstein called for the Durham investigation to finish, while Yates called for accountability for all of the misconduct.
With news of the criminal plea by Clinesmith, one might expect the media and our members of Congress to demand the same vigorous investigation from Durham as they did from Mueller. The collusion allegations that were noted to launch the Russia investigation were after all ultimately rejected. Durham is by contrast investigating the bias and misconduct.
So we have a collusion investigation that was shown to be based on false or unreliable information. It was launched and maintained by officials who were accused by an inspector general of misconduct, false statements, or procedural errors. Today we have the actual criminal guilty plea. However, many voices in Washington continue to insist that there are no reasons for Durham to continue digging. As Biden says, “Gosh almighty.”
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump continues to trail Democratic challenger Joe Biden nationally as more than 60 percent of voters say America’s response to the coronavirus has been unsuccessful and just one-in-five believe the U.S. economy is on solid footing.
Those are the major findings from the latest national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, which was conducted as the presidential race enters a new phase, with the party conventions beginning on Monday just days after Biden's selection of Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., as his running mate.
According to the survey, Biden leads Trump nationally by 9 points among registered, but not likely, voters, 50 percent to 41 percent.
However, the poll shows Kamala Harris with a higher net personal rating than Biden.
And Trump maintains his lead over Biden on the economy — which the poll finds is voters’ top issue heading into the election — and the president’s overall numbers have improved from last month.
“Clearly, Biden is in the lead.” said DEMOCRATIC pollster Peter Hart.
But Hart stresses that the election is “not a done deal,” especially with a majority of voters saying they’re either uncertain or pessimistic about the job Biden would do as president.
“Biden is well-known, but not known well, and people are looking for direction on that,” Hart said in previewing the upcoming Democratic convention
Republicans will be aggressively harassing voters at the polls. They call it ‘ballot security’
By now, it’s painfully obvious that Donald Trump and the Republicans are blatantly sabotaging the U.S. Postal Service in order to deliberately delay mail-in ballots for this upcoming election, despite an ongoing pandemic. Trump even admitted to it. His administration is literally collecting mailboxes. But they also have plans for those who want to vote in-person as well.
The 2020 election will be the first in almost 40 years where Republicans will be allowed to engage in a massive, nationwide coordinated effort for a so-called “ballot security” campaign. During those 40 years, Republicans were under a federal consent decree to curb their poll “monitoring” efforts because, back in 1981, Republicans sent armed, off-duty police officers to patrol the polls in minority neighborhoods for a gubernatorial race in New Jersey. The chief strategist for the Republican in that race was a man you might have heard of: convicted felon Roger Stone.
The Democrats sued and won, and the Republican National Committee (RNC) promised to behave. The courts kept the Republicans more or less in line, although the Republicans always tried to work around it. Unfortunately, 2020 will be much different. A federal judge allowed the federal consent decree to expire in 2018. Free from any judicial oversight, the RNC will be able to conduct their dream voter intimidation campaign, and the Republicans are already planning on taking full advantage of this in November.
It’s going to be very, very ugly.
How ugly? Well it would help to know what the GOP did to require decades-long oversight to begin with.
Roger Stone and conservative leaders at the time insisted that unregistered people of color were going to steal the New Jersey election. Sound familiar? A plan was hatched at the RNC to create a phony “task force” to patrol polling stations located near African American and Latino neighborhoods. The RNC said they would challenge voters whose names were not on a list of registered voters they’d obtained, despite the fact that election officials told them the list they were using was outdated.
The task force was made up of armed, off-duty law enforcement personnel who sported armbands with the words “National Ballot Security Task Force” on them; that official-sounding name was completely made up by the RNC. They also put up intimidating posters in certain polling places, and proceeded to harass and intimidate lawful voters.
Once the poll monitors had set up shop, they soon began, in the language of the complaint, “disrupting the operations of polling places, harassing poll workers, stopping and questioning prospective voters, refusing to permit prospective voters to enter the polling places, ripping down signs of one of the candidates, and forcibly restraining poll workers from assisting, as permitted by state laws, voters to cast their ballots.”
You have to see it to believe it.
As recently as 2016, Roger Stone was ready to “help” again with a Trump-supporting group called “Vote Protectors,” who planned to send volunteers into nine cities with large populations of color, purportedly to “monitor” polling places. Volunteers were encouraged to make fake badges, conduct fake exit polls, and even videotape voters as an intimidation tactic. They accused black voters of "improper voting" and threatened them with arrests and fines. The scheme fell apart when the Huffington Post found out about it and confronted Stone. [Black people have a long history of being illegally harrassed and abused by authorities and police. This type of intimidation makes many feel its too risky to vote and they leave without doing so. This is what dictators do.]
But now that the federal consent decree has been lifted, the Republicans are going all-in on voter intimidation.
Republicans are recruiting an estimated 50,000 volunteers to act as "poll watchers" in November, part of a multimillion-dollar effort to police who votes and how.
That effort, coordinated by the Republican National Committee and President Donald Trump's re-election campaign, includes a $20 million fund for legal battles as well as the GOP's first national poll-patrol operation in nearly 40 years.
Trump has a lot more to lose in this election than he did in 2016. He knows the shroud of protection from multiple lawsuits disappears once he leaves office, and that the GOP has no interest in protecting someone not in power. Do not anticipate Trump planning on making this election anything close to peaceful.
Disturbingly, Trump has really leaned into the message and imagery that his supporters are part of an “army” sworn to protect Trump and “go to battle” against their fellow Americans who want him defeated. “Your life depends on it,” as James Woods tweeted this week. Trump has infamously been encouraging violence among his more violent supporters and paramilitaries. Camouflage-clad military contractors were sent into cities to terrorize Black Lives Matter protesters with random violent assaults and literal kidnappings (referred to by invalid Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf as “proactive arrests.”)
Republicans will be aggressively harassing voters at the polls. They call it ‘ballot security’
Much more at this link
Wyatt/Regina, its been over a year, and you still haven't answered the question:
How are my husband and I better off apart?
You two want society to prevent relationships like ours, you need to answer how this benefits us or stop trying to split us up.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous posted "“Clearly, Biden is in the lead.” said DEMOCRATIC pollster Peter Hart.
But Hart stresses that the election is “not a done deal,”"
Very often when Wyatt/Regina cut&paste an article like this they change the words, sometimes in ways that make the text say the exact opposite of what it originally did, but always in a way that deceives or makes things look better for Republicans than they are.
Let's look at the words they left out of their "quote" of the article - they're bolded:
“Clearly, Biden is in the lead. Clearly, Trump has a lot of problems,” said Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who conducted this survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff.
But Hart stressed that the election is “not a done deal,”"
Wyatt and Regina never fail to try to distort reality, even if its just a little bit.
"How are my husband and I better off apart?"
He hasn't answered because he doesn't have an answer.
He just says that kind of stuff just to annoy you.
The more annoyed you appear to be, the happier he is.
That is all the motivation a troll needs... mainly because he has nothing of more value or interest in his own life to keep him motivated to do more interesting things.
I recommend starving the troll.
"He hasn't answered because he doesn't have an answer."
I like to regularly remind them of that.
A few weeks ago Trump said that he was going to throw the first pitch at the New York Yankees game on August 15th.
Then when the Yankees themselves queried this he said he had to cancel on account of the busy meeting schedule at the White House on the day.
August 15th came and went.
Trump's brother, Robert, has died, while Donald spent the day playing golf. And there was not a single White House meeting.
Trump lies. People die.
"By now, it’s painfully obvious that Donald Trump and the Republicans are blatantly sabotaging the U.S. Postal Service in order to deliberately delay mail-in ballots for this upcoming election, despite an ongoing pandemic."
this is what's known as a conspiracy theory
Randy picks up a lot of them talking to other residents at the nuthouse
here's a ten-point breakdown of the fallacious crap story:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1295027814786387974.html
Dem's dream of going into neighborhoods where people tend not to vote and filling out their ballots for them and taking them to the post office for them is not going to come true
studies show that happens with a significant number of mail-in ballots
frequently enough to swing a close election
and Dems need all the help they can get
legit- or otherwise!
"this is what's known as a conspiracy theory"
No. THIS is a conspiracy theory:
"Dem's dream of going into neighborhoods where people tend not to vote and filling out their ballots for them and taking them to the post office for them"
The lame excuses you found in the link simply don't account for all the facts. Like the fact that I've been able to mail my credit card bills 4-5 days before the due date for years and they have always been credited on time. Not last month - it arrived over a week late and I got charged interest and penalties. If all the problems the link tries to explain away as having been present for years was the case, that problem would have cropped up years ago - or perhaps even a few months ago during the peak of the pandemic - it didn't until Rump started screwing with the mail system.
If Rump wanted to save money or make the USPS more efficient, he could have started right after he got elected and not raised any concerns at all. Instead he waited until he started falling behind in the polls at time when mail-in ballots are going to be more important than ever... and when he's gone on major propaganda campaign to undermine mail-in voting.
I've never seen a president screw up the mail system this badly before. Despite its problems, it ran for decades without major negative impacts on US citizens. It's not a coincidence that has changed now.
Rump shouldn't believe he can get away with it.
Trump is a dictator posted "By now, it’s painfully obvious that Donald Trump and the Republicans are blatantly sabotaging the U.S. Postal Service in order to deliberately delay mail-in ballots for this upcoming election, despite an ongoing pandemic.""
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "this is what's known as a conspiracy theory"
No, its what's known as a fact - Trump admitted to it.
Trump installed a new Post Master General who fired or reassigned the top 23 managers in charge of the mail to centralize power in his control. Since then he's had the Post Office remove 671 mail sorting machines in large urban black neighbourhoods. In some cities they've removed as many as 50% of the Post Office boxes.
This is what dictators do, they use the levers of government to sabotage democracy and prevent the people from voting them out.
Wyatt/Regina, you claim people are better off not being in same sex relationships and you consider my husband and I two gay men. That being the case, how are my husband and I better off apart? In what possible way does ending our relationship benefit us?
Good people must have a valid reason for infringing on others freedoms, what's yours?
Wyatt and Regina are afraid to try to answer these questions because they know in their hearts they've been needlessly harming innocent people all their lives and they can't admit that to themselves. They'd much prefer to just keep on lying and harming innocent people.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "studies show [Dem's dream of going into neighborhoods where people tend not to vote and filling out their ballots for them] happens with a significant number of mail-in ballots".
You've been utterly unable to provide any proof of this because its a lie. Voter fraud is literally less than one in a million, it is no threat to this election and has never been. This is a Republican excuse to prevent black people from voting by mail. This is what dictators do.
Several states have been doing entirely vote by mail for decades without a hitch. People don't need to die to vote in person.
"This is a Republican excuse to prevent black people from voting by mail."
there is no justification for the idea that black people can only vote if they can mail it in
if you seriously think they can't afford to take a hour off work, which is a dubious notion, make it a national holiday
btw, the idea that voting is dangerous is ludicrous
every Costco in America has lines to get in
voting is more important than a multi-pack of apple sauce
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "there is no justification for the idea that black people can only vote if they can mail it in"
When Republican governors close 90% of the polling places in black neighbourhoods and move the remaining polling places 20 miles away where there is no bus service, you're damn right tons of black people can only vote if the mail it in - Republicans have intentionally made it that way.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "if you seriously think they can't afford to take a hour off work, which is a dubious notion, make it a national holiday"
An hour!? You m-f'ers have made it so black people have to wait in line 8 to 12 hours to cast a vote. You're damn right they can't afford to go vote, Republicans intended it that way.
And the idea that people shouldn't vote by mail in 2020 because at some point in the distant future it might be a national holiday is just plain stupid.
Wyatt/Regina, you two say my husband and I are better off apart. I can't see how, why don't you tell us how seeing as nothing is more important to you?
How are my husband and I better off apart?
You don't seem to have an reasons, do you?
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "trangenderism is sexist and anti-woman"
Nonsense. Tell us who has been harmed by me living as a woman and society treating me as a woman.
Trump's calculated dismantling of USPS proves one thing clearly:
He is WELL AWARE that we do not want him as our president. He's chosen to blatantly cheat and put millions of Americans' lives at risk in an effort to hold on to power.
Donald Trump's ineffective leadership gravely worsened the crisis that we are in and he is now taking advantage of it to subvert and destroy our right to vote and vote safely. Request a ballot early. Vote early.
"I've been able to mail my credit card bills 4-5 days before the due date for years and they have always been credited on time. Not last month - it arrived over a week late and I got charged interest and penalties."
do what the rest of America does - pay online
and stop blaming the government because you aren't paying your bills on time!
"If Rump wanted to save money or make the USPS more efficient, he could have started right after he got elected"
Trump has been working on changes to the inefficient and superfluous mail system for years
"Instead he waited until he started falling behind in the polls at time when mail-in ballots are going to be more important than ever... and when he's gone on major propaganda campaign to undermine mail-in voting."
actually, he opposed mail-in voting from the moment Dems started pushing it
Dems want to obtain ballots from people who don't ordinarily vote and vote for them
it's just as safe to vote in person as it is to stand in line waiting to get into Costco
mail-in voting is an opportunity for fraud and is unnecessary
"No, its what's known as a fact - Trump admitted to it."
Trump said he is opposed to mail-in voting, and is acting to prevent it
he didn't say that is a policy aimed at preventing blacks from voting
there is no reason blacks can't vote in person, like everyone else
no one is proposing different rules for blacks than anyone else
Dems, as usual, are trying to promote racial tension
and yet, they have done noting to improve black neighborhoods, despite being in power there for decades
the economy there is horrible, crime is horrendous, schools are dangerous hellholes that teach nothing..
"Trump installed a new Post Master General who fired or reassigned the top 23 managers in charge of the mail to centralize power in his control. Since then he's had the Post Office remove 671 mail sorting machines in large urban black neighbourhoods. In some cities they've removed as many as 50% of the Post Office boxes."
boxes that are not used much are being removed
that started long before the election year
public transportation is abundant in large urban areas
"This is what dictators do, they use the levers of government to sabotage democracy and prevent the people from voting them out."
you haven't provided any examples of dictators blocking mail to stay in power
you'd almost think you were making it up!
LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!
"Good people must have a valid reason for infringing on others freedoms, what's yours?"
has someone infringed on your freedom?
I know you've had a history of being institutionalized for insanity but do really think that wasn't for your own good?
"Voter fraud is literally less than one in a million, it is no threat to this election and has never been. This is a Republican excuse to prevent black people from voting by mail. This is what dictators do."
You've been utterly unable to provide any proof of this because its a lie.
Black people don't have any need to vote by mail.
There are no examples of dictators blocking the mail to prevent people from voting.
"People don't need to die to vote in person."
You've been utterly unable to provide any proof of this because its a lie.
People have been waiting in line to do all kinds of things during the pandemic
If they consider voting important, they will wait in line to do it
"This is a Republican excuse to prevent black people from voting by mail."
there is no justification for the idea that black people can only vote if they can mail it in
Dems are rushing back from vacation to try to save mail-in voting
they can make the election a national holiday instead
btw, the idea that voting is dangerous is ludicrous
every Costco in America has lines to get in
voting is more important than a multi-pack of apple sauce
"When Republican governors close 90% of the polling places in black neighbourhoods and move the remaining polling places 20 miles away where there is no bus service, you're damn right tons of black people can only vote if the mail it in"
you're damn wrong
"""""you're damn wrong"""""""
what a succinct zinger!
And why shouldn’t Trump welcome this QAnon wing nut to his party? She [Marjorie Taylor Greene] fits right in. Media Matters for America found that 53 congressional candidates have promoted QAnon this year. Besides Greene, they include Lauren Boebert, who defeated a Republican incumbent in a congressional primary in Colorado, and Jo Rae Perkins, who won the Republican Senate primary in Oregon. NBC News wasn’t kidding when it suggested Congress could soon have a “QAnon caucus.”
When the Republican Party was under assault from the conspiracy-minded John Birch Society in the 1960s, responsible conservatives such as Richard Nixon and William F. Buckley Jr. marginalized them. That isn’t happening today. Trump has regularly retweeted QAnon accounts, his son Eric posted a giant “Q” as well as the group’s slogan (“Where we go one, we go all”) on his Instagram account, and Donald Trump Jr. has echoed the group’s deranged claims that Joe Biden is a pedophile.
The president might not be a full-fledged QAnon adherent, but he is a racist and a conspiracy-monger in his own right. The conspiracy theories that he has promoted — Joe Scarborough is a murderer, former president Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States, Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Tex.) father killed John F. Kennedy, etc. — are nearly as nutty as the ones promulgated by QAnon. And Trump is appointing officials with similarly noxious beliefs: His choice for a senior Pentagon post said that Obama is a sleeper agent for Hamas and a “terrorist leader.” His choice for ambassador to Germany said that country has been overrun by “Muslim invaders.” And his choice to run the Office of Personnel Management said Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta took part in satanic rituals. Trump’s first national security adviser — Michael Flynn — has even pledged allegiance to QAnon.
The president might not be a full-fledged QAnon adherent, but he is a racist and a conspiracy-monger in his own right. The conspiracy theories that he has promoted — Joe Scarborough is a murderer, former president Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States, Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Tex.) father killed John F. Kennedy, etc. — are nearly as nutty as the ones promulgated by QAnon. And Trump is appointing officials with similarly noxious beliefs: His choice for a senior Pentagon post said that Obama is a sleeper agent for Hamas and a “terrorist leader.” His choice for ambassador to Germany said that country has been overrun by “Muslim invaders.” And his choice to run the Office of Personnel Management said Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta took part in satanic rituals. Trump’s first national security adviser — Michael Flynn — has even pledged allegiance to QAnon.
Trump is also becoming increasingly blatant in his appeals to White bigots. He tweeted on Wednesday that “the ‘suburban housewife’ will be voting for me,” because under a Biden presidency “low income housing would invade their neighborhood.” Trump claimed that the person in charge of this plot would be African American Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.). This isn’t a racist dog whistle; this is a wolf whistle.
Under Trump, the GOP has become a party of white nationalists and conspiracy-mongers. I had feared that the Republican swing to the far right would lead the Democrats to go to the far left — and Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) brief run as the Democratic front-runner had confirmed my concerns. But the ticket of Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.) is as mainstream and moderate as you can get. Trump & Co. can bellow all day long that they are lackeys for Sanders and “the Squad,” but it’s simply not credible. The Republican Party, by contrast, isn’t just catering to extremists — it’s led by one.
a lot of demagoguery without basis, but let's focus on this one:
"Trump’s first national security adviser — Michael Flynn — has even pledged allegiance to QAnon."
let's see some proof
Tue July 7, 2020
In a video posted online over the weekend, President Donald Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, is seen using phrases and slogans that are hallmarks of the baseless QAnon conspiracy movement. He also tagged his post with a QAnon hashtag.
Followers of QAnon believe there is a "deep state" within the US government that is controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. According to the conspiracy, the cabal is largely run by Democratic politicians and liberal celebrities -- and Trump is trying to take them down.
Flynn posted the 53-second clip to Twitter on Saturday, which was the July Fourth holiday. In the video, Flynn leads a small group in reciting a generic oath of office, the same oath taken by members of Congress. After finishing the oath, Flynn says, "Where we go one, we go all!" His post included the hashtag #TakeTheOath, which he recently added to his Twitter bio as well.
These elements of Flynn's post -- the oath, paired with the catchphrase and hashtag -- are distinctive to the QAnon movement and are used widely by its followers, experts say. Flynn never explicitly mentions QAnon in the video, and his lawyer claims his phrasing is innocuous.
"This is absolutely pro-QAnon," said Mike Rothschild, who recently published a book examining and debunking some of the most prominent conspiracy theories. "It's the same version of the enlistment oath that Q followers have been filming themselves taking for the last week. And the phrase at the end, 'Where we go one, we go all,' is a key catchphrase in the Q mythology."
There are more than 10,500 replies to Flynn's tweet, many from self-identified QAnon supporters who thanked Flynn for his comments, used the same hashtag or posted clips of their own oaths. Flynn's video had been viewed 1.8 million times as of Tuesday, according to Twitter data.
Flynn -- the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and a retired Army lieutenant general -- is now the most prominent former US official to publicly stoke QAnon conspiracies, even though the movement is based on lies and has been linked to several violent incidents.
Got your eyes open??
"there is no justification for the idea that black people can only vote if they can mail it in"
First of all no one said "ONLY vote if they can mail it in."
Second it is well known that black people in the US are fairing much worse than their white counterparts, and it behooves them to take extra steps to be safe:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/hospitalization-death-by-race-ethnicity.html
They have a 4.7X hospitalization rate, and a 2.1X death rate, according to the CDC. They have very good reasons to want to vote by mail. You would think the "pro-life" side of the aisle would understand that. But this pandemic has really brought out their true colors - they are quite willing to talk about sacrificing people's lives for the sake of the economy. So it's not like they're really "pro-life" -- they are just "pro-birth." After that you're on your own kid.
"There are no examples of dictators blocking the mail to prevent people from voting."
Just because it may not have happened before, doesn't mean Rump isn't going to do it this November. He's never been one to pay close attention to history. He doesn't need a precedent - he just needs an excuse.
"every Costco in America has lines to get in"
So people are lining up at a place known for cheap bulk food... and the lines are because they've limited the number of people in the stores at one time to limit the spread of CV-19. What do you expect them to do - grow all their own food in their apartment? People still need to eat.
President Trump has this bizarre notion that if he can show how chaotic, dysfunctional and dangerous things have become, Americans will reelect him. He sent federal law enforcement into Portland, Ore., seemingly with the purpose of stoking violent confrontations with protesters that could be used to create ad footage for his campaign. He is the only thing standing between you and carnage! Well, except that he caused it. This is on his watch. It is evidence of his inability to maintain order.
If there are assaults on federal property (statues, for example), if the president is forced to retreat to a bunker and if certain crimes have increased in locations around the country, then one has to ask how Trump took a peaceful country with declining crime rates and turned it (in his own telling) into a dystopian nightmare. Law-and-order presidents (or as Trump likes to tweet, LAW & ORDER!) do not preside over crime and disorder. His handiwork is proof that we need someone new.
So it is with the U.S. Postal Service. Trump has been attempting to discredit voting by mail and, to that end, seems intent on wrecking the most popular federal agency. In doing so, he sows fear in voters (especially his own) about casting ballots by mail. But recent mail slowdowns caused by policies enacted by the new USPS head — a major Trump donor — can mean disrupted delivery of medicine to veterans and millions who receive prescriptions by mail, unemployment checks to laid-off workers and Social Security checks to retirees. U.S. business owners are not pleased when their invoices do not reach customers and when their customers’ payments are delayed. The bipartisan outcry suggests blowing up the agency that Trump is ultimately responsible for running is not a winning strategy. (His criticism of the USPS as a money-loser is downright strange: Government agencies providing vital services to Americans are not-for-profit operations.)
The presidential sabotaging of the USPS — the one federal agency that touches the lives of virtually every American — fits Trump’s unique ability to wreak havoc on his fellow Americans. The pandemic that exploded and the economy that collapsed on his watch, and a revolt against racial injustice unlike any since the 1960s, provide the rationale for kicking out the incumbent president. Many schools are closed, and civic life has ground to a halt. Through incompetence or deliberate destructiveness, Trump has obliterated the case for giving him four more years. What will be left of America after four more years of Trump-induced devastation?
In this regard, the Republican Senate is equally deserving of blame for the unraveling economy and societal chaos. It refuses, over the objections of the Federal Reserve, business leaders, economists and voters, to pass a meaningful stimulus bill (which would include money for testing and tracing to fight the coronavirus, money to reopen schools safely or conduct virtual classrooms, $25 billion for the USPS and an economic lifeline to tens of millions of unemployed Americans).
When you hold the reins of government, you are tasked with its smooth running and navigation around obstacles. Trump has dropped the reins, jumped from the saddle and shot the crippled steed. He can holler that the vote this fall will be fixed, but responsibility for the path of destruction leading to November is obvious.
Two months ago, a CNN poll showed Trump trailing Joe Biden by 14 points.
On Monday morning, Trump cited the very same poll as evidence that the 2020 campaign is closer than people think.
“Although, crazy CNN, as bad as they are — I guess it was a poll that I was 14 down and I picked up 10 in the last month,” Trump said on “Fox and Friends.” He added later, “That’s why my polls have gone up 10 or 12 points. I don’t believe there were ever there, by the way; I think they’re phony polls.”
The CNN poll issued over the weekend did indeed turn a head or two. After many polls, including from CNN, repeatedly showed Biden leading by as much as double-digits, it showed Trump way up since April. And for a Democratic Party still twitchy about its unexpected 2016 loss, the panic button is constantly at-the-ready.
It's panic time in Delaware!
The CNN polls have been having wild swings so this one poll, more so than usual, means very little. You need to look at the average of polls over at least a couple of weeks to see any trends.
And when you do you see Biden has been ahead by an average of 8-9 percentage points since the race started. This is significantly more than Hillary's average lead over Trump.
There is not going to be a Comey announcing a pointless investigation into nothing burger emails that tips the balance this time. And even if there was, the public isn't going to be fooled a second time after seeing what a disaster Trump has become.
Trump is a dictator posted "By now, it’s painfully obvious that Donald Trump and the Republicans are blatantly sabotaging the U.S. Postal Service in order to deliberately delay mail-in ballots for this upcoming election, despite an ongoing pandemic.""
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "this is what's known as a conspiracy theory"
I posted "No, its what's known as a fact - Trump admitted to it."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "mail-in voting is an opportunity for fraud and is unnecessary"
Voter fraud is virtually non-existent. With the pandemic and Republicans creating lines miles long, that makes it critical that people vote by mail to save lives.
Wyatt/Regina quoted me "No, its what's known as a fact - - Trump admitted to it."
Then they said "Trump said he is opposed to mail-in voting, and is acting to prevent it he didn't say that is a policy aimed at preventing blacks from voting"
Of course he didn't admit he was destroying the post office to prevent blacks from voting, that's too obviously illegal. Instead he said it is to prevent mail in voting, also illegal but less obviously racist. He's removing mail sorting machines and post office boxes in urban black neighbourhoods to and closing polling stations in black neighbourhoods to prevent primarily black people from voting.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "there is no reason blacks can't vote in person, like everyone else"
They can't vote in person because Republicans have closed polling places making for 10-12 hour line-ups requiring them to take a day off work which they can't afford and to risk getting a deadly disease that disproportionately is killing black people.
I posted "Trump installed a new Post Master General who fired or reassigned the top 23 managers in charge of the mail to centralize power in his control. Since then he's had the Post Office remove 671 mail sorting machines in large urban black neighbourhoods. In some cities they've removed as many as 50% of the Post Office boxes."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "boxes that are not used much are being removed".
That's a lie. They have removed up to 50% of the post office boxes in some cities and they've removed the ones most heavily used by black people.
Wyatt/Rgina/bad anonymous said "that started long before the election year"
That's a lie. It didn't start until Trump saw he was losing and most democrats want to vote by mail while most republicans don't. Trump totally ignored the post office until three months before the election and now suddenly he's put a sychophant in charge who is implementing massive delays in deliveries to prevent what they expect to be mostly democratic mail in ballots from being counted. This is what dictators do.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "public transportation is abundant in large urban areas"
Yes, which is why when possible Republicans have moved polling places from black urban areas out into the sticks where there is no public transportation. Its one move after another to put roadblocks in the way of black people voting. Republicans have introduced 80 laws since the last election to make it harder to vote. This is an attack on democracy.
I posted "This is what dictators do, they use the levers of government to sabotage democracy and prevent the people from voting them out."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "you haven't provided any examples of dictators blocking mail to stay in power"
That's irrelevant, its obvious on the face of it when you block people from voting by mail and most of them are democratic voters you are acting like a dictator. There's no debate about that.
I posted "Good people must have a valid reason for infringing on others freedoms, what's yours?"
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "has someone infringed on your freedom?"
You seek to end my relationship with my husband, force us to live in society's shadows, prevent me from living as a woman, and advocate assaulting, imprisoning, and executing people like me. What justification do you have for this? How is this in mine and society's best interests?
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous claim I'm in a same sex relationship and that this is bad for us and society.
Let's just examine that assertion for a minute:
Prior to marrying my husband I lived on welfare costing the state 6k per year. Now that we're married, my husband supports me. We are both happier, the state is saving 6K per year - everyone has benefited.
Its bad for society and bad for my husband and me to try to split us up. And that is what Wyatt and Regina Hardiman have made the primary goal of their lives, making things worse for everyone. Shame.
The number of daily COVID-19 cases across the United States has now been on the downward trajectory for almost a month.
Just over 42,000 coronavirus infections were reported on Sunday across the US, down from the 66,000 infections being reported per day just last month after the Sunbelt states were seeing a summer surge of infections.
Cases have been declining nationally for almost a month now, which has been driven mostly by a drop off in cases in the Sunbelt states.
Former Chief of Staff of Trump's DHS is the newest Republican Voter Against Trump
Miles Taylor served as the Chief of Staff of Trump's Department of Homeland Security. What he saw firsthand terrified him, and now he will be voting for Joe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgQZExTciQM
So why in the world does Rump believe he has "magical authorities?"
"People who are still serving in this administration have said to me, 'just wait until the second term. It'll be no holds barred, it'll be shock and awe, we'll do what we want.' Given what I've experienced in the administration, I have to support Joe Biden for President. And even though I'm not a Democrat, even though I disagree on key issues, I'm confident that Joe Biden will protect the country. And I'm confident he won't make the same mistakes as this president."
-- Miles Taylor
Wyatt and Regina Hardiman are afraid to discuss morality with me.
Because they know they can't make a moral case for persecuting harmless lgbt people.
After the outcry the Post Master General said he would stop removing mail boxes. Instead he's now putting locks on them.
This is what dictators do.
As Christians define anything that their god wants as "good", Trump defines anything he wants as good . . . "so on earth as it is in heaven".
"Nice post office you got there. Shame is something were to happen to it."
When conservatives find out they can't win elections they won't abandon conservatism, they'll abandon democracy.
Ex-DHS Chief Of Staff Eviscerates Trump, Backs Biden
From an op-ed published by the Washington Post:
"After serving for more than two years in the Department of Homeland Security’s leadership during the Trump administration, I can attest that the country is less secure as a direct result of the president’s actions.
Like many Americans, I had hoped that Donald Trump, once in office, would soberly accept the burdens of the presidency — foremost among them the duty to keep America safe. But he did not rise to the challenge. Instead, the president has governed by whim, political calculation and self-interest.
I wasn’t in a position to judge how his personal deficiencies affected other important matters, such as the environment or energy policy, but when it came to national security, I witnessed the damning results firsthand."
That’s just the opening. Read it in full. And watch the clip.
Trump appointed the head of the post office Lous Dejoy's wife as ambassador to Canada.
Trump's sycophantic Post Master Gerneral Louis Dejoy was a big Trump donor. He also has business interests in companies that compete with the United States Post Office.
That's why he wants to kill the USPS, so he can reap millions in profit... I thought cabinet or administration appointee's are supposed to divest themselves of conflicts of interest??????? Ethics probe anyone?
The U.S. Postal Service is NOT a business.
You don't see this administration demanding the military pay its own bills or face bankruptcy.
"Cases have been declining nationally for almost a month now, which has been driven mostly by a drop off in cases in the Sunbelt states. "
Then by all means, head south for your summer vacation.
In fact, why not move to some sleepy southern red state permanently?
Maybe you can try Rump's disinfectant cure if you get sick.
Rump's very good brain came up with this bullshit:
“Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light ... and then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re gonna test that,” Trump said, addressing William Bryan, undersecretary for Science and Technology at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). “And then I see disinfectant, where it knocks it [coronavirus] out in a minute — one minute — and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that. So, that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.”
But if you come back to MD, you should know:
"MARYLAND DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH
NOTICE - OUT OF STATE TRAVEL AND PUBLIC TRAVEL ADVISORY (JULY 29, 2020)
Any Marylander returning from out-of-state or any out-of-state traveler should either get tested for COVID-19 promptly upon arrival in Maryland or within 72 hours before travel to Maryland. A list of test sites can be found here: (https://coronavirus.maryland.gov/pages/symptoms-testing).
We encourage out-of-state visitors to be tested within 72 hours prior to arrival and to cancel travel if they receive a positive result. Visitors waiting for their test results should stay at home between the time of their test and their arrival in Maryland or to self-quarantine at their hotel...."
MORE AT: https://phpa.health.maryland.gov/Documents/07.29.2020%20-%20MDH%20Notice%20-%20Out%20of%20State%20Travel%20Advisory.pdf
Because travel increases your chances of getting infected and spreading COVID-19, staying home is the best way to protect yourself and others from getting sick.
"are afraid to discuss morality with me"
it's pointless to discuss such a thing with Randy
he lies, takes things out of context, and continually asserts that people really think things that they haven't stated
it takes endless hours to debunk these lies before any rational conversation can take place
note that he spent years saying morality means "everyone can do whatever he wants as long as they don't hurt anyone"
he eventually admitted he was wrong but it took a long time to get there
and it's off-topic
the theme of this blog is the misuse of scientific expetise
"After the outcry the Post Master General said he would stop removing mail boxes. Instead he's now putting locks on them.
This is what dictators do."
no example of a dictator doing this has been presented here
because it has never happened
"When conservatives find out they can't win elections they won't abandon conservatism, they'll abandon democracy."
you mean like when Dems lost in 2016 and have spent years focusing on overturning the election rather than merely trying to win the next one?
"Like many Americans, I had hoped that Donald Trump, once in office, would soberly accept the burdens of the presidency — foremost among them the duty to keep America safe. But he did not rise to the challenge. Instead, the president has governed by whim, political calculation and self-interest.
I wasn’t in a position to judge how his personal deficiencies affected other important matters, such as the environment or energy policy, but when it came to national security, I witnessed the damning results firsthand."
hoe best to provide national security is a matter of opinion
Trump, unlike most Presidents, discussed his ideas before his election and stuck with them
Americans, hearing his ideas, elected him
Miles Taylor wasn't elected to anything
he has no mandate to expect to unilaterally judge what's best for America
"The U.S. Postal Service is NOT a business.
You don't see this administration demanding the military pay its own bills or face bankruptcy."
the Post Office charges fees to those who use it and is expected to break even
the military is a common shared expense covered by taxes
"Then by all means, head south for your summer vacation."
already back
"In fact, why not move to some sleepy southern red state permanently?"
Maryland is south of the Mason Dixon line
"Miles Taylor wasn't elected to anything"
He was one of "only the best people" that Rump hires to work for him. He got to see the Orange Menace up close and personal - and how poorly he is able to work, and how dangerous he is to our country.
"he has no mandate to expect to unilaterally judge what's best for America"
No one said he did have a mandate. He gets to share his opinion just like everyone else in this country. Given his position, he is far more qualified to present an opinion than some random, anonymous, obsequious Rump toadie desperately inventing excuses for him in the comment section of a little-known blog.
"the Post Office charges fees to those who use it and is expected to break even"
Funny, that's not in the Constitution, where the Post Office was established. You would think someone who keeps going on about "Constitutional Originalism" would be more aware of that.
Wyatt/Regina/Bad anonymous said "h*sexuality is inherently sado-masochistic"
If that's true then tell me how my husband are better off apart than together. You've been utterly unable to do so so far.
I posted "Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous are afraid to discuss morality with me"
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "it's pointless to discuss such a thing with Randy"
Because you can't morally defend your persecution of harmless lgbt people.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "he lies, takes things out of context, and continually asserts that people really think things that they haven't stated"
And conveniently you haven't given a single example of this, because you're lying.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "note that she spent years saying morality means "everyone can do whatever he wants as long as they don't hurt anyone, she eventually admitted she was wrong but it took a long time to get there"
I still say that and I most certainly never said I was wrong about it.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "and it's off-topic the theme of this blog is the misuse of scientific expetise"
LOL, like you ever concerned yourself with staying on topic! And you've already asserted gayness is bad on this thread - again we see the rules are for the liberals and not the conservatives. Its just another dishonest way to avoid debate on reality.
I posted "After the outcry the Post Master General said he would stop removing mail boxes. Instead he's now putting locks on them. This is what dictators do."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "no example of a dictator doing this has been presented here"
Irrelevant. Its obvious on the face of it this is a dictatorial move. You just make this baseless assertion to try and send me off for hours tallying this while you spread more lies.
David Frum said "When conservatives find out they can't win elections they won't abandon conservatism, they'll abandon democracy."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "you mean like when Dems lost in 2016 and have spent years focusing on overturning the election rather than merely trying to win the next one?"
The entire American intelligence community and the Inspector General said Russia interfered in the election in a massive pervasive multi-pronged effort to elect Trump, Trump colluded with Russia, and the investigation into it was proper and normal procedure. Asking Ukraine to open fake investigations to help get Trump elected is abandoning democracy.
Miles Taylor said "Like many Americans, I had hoped that Donald Trump, once in office, would soberly accept the burdens of the presidency — foremost among them the duty to keep America safe. But he did not rise to the challenge. Instead, the president has governed by whim, political calculation and self-interest.
I wasn’t in a position to judge how his personal deficiencies affected other important matters, such as the environment or energy policy, but when it came to national security, I witnessed the damning results firsthand."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "hoe best to provide national security is a matter of opinion"
And the vast majority of opinions are that Russia is the USA's biggest foreign foe and it harms the national security of the United States to give Putin everything he wants while attacking allies. There's no serious debate about this.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Trump, unlike most Presidents, discussed his ideas before his election and stuck with them Americans, hearing his ideas, elected him"
That's a lie. During the campaign Trump never once mentioned he was going to attack and try to destroy NATO while enabling the world's most dangerous dictator. This turns on its head 75 years of foreign policy under both Republican and Democratic presidents
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Miles Taylor wasn't elected to anything"
That in no way refutes the truth of what he's saying - Trump has harmed the USA with his foreign policy of fawning over Putin and giving Putin everything he wants in return for nothing.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "he has no mandate to expect to unilaterally judge what's best for America"
Its far from unilateral, all manner of prominent Republicans have turned on Trump because he's hurting the country and helping Russia. Based on his disastrous actions Demented Trump is certainly in no position to judge what's best for America.
The ACLU said "The U.S. Postal Service is NOT a business.
You don't see this administration demanding the military pay its own bills or face bankruptcy."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "the Post Office charges fees to those who use it and is expected to break even"
The Constitution says no such thing. No government service is expected to turn a profit, its for the benefit of the people.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "the military is a common shared expense covered by taxes"
So is the post office. And Trump admitted he's trying to block funding for it to prevent people from mailing in their ballots as the law allows - this is a dictator move.
The essence of morality is "Do whatever you want, but harm no one".
There is no moral justification for persecuting harmless lgbt people.
Brazilian Religious Fundamentalists Blocked a 10-y.o. Rape Victim from Getting an Abortion
There's your "biblical sexual morality" for you.
The bible is a goddamn disgrace.
A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that voters strongly oppose Trump’s push to block funding for the United States Postal Service in order to hinder universal mail-in voting, which states have sought to expand for safety reasons during the pandemic.
According to the survey, which was conducted Aug. 14 and 15, 61 percent of voters disapprove of Trump’s USPS gambit, with a full 50 percent disapproving “strongly.” Less than half that many (28 percent) approve.
A majority of registered voters share Trump’s oft-stated concern that fraudulent ballots will be cast via mail, with 54 percent saying they are either very or somewhat worried about this issue. But far more voters worry that people will be prevented from voting (65 percent), that legitimate mail ballots will not be counted (75 percent) — and that one of the candidates will not accept the outcome of the election (64 percent).
There are signs that Trump has already hurt himself with persuadable voters by seeking to undermine mail-in voting and the legitimacy of the election. Not only do nearly a quarter of Republicans (23 percent) disapprove of the president’s effort to block USPS funding, but independents disapprove by a 2-1 margin (58 percent to 29 percent). Among non-leaning independents — that is, independents who don’t yet express even a slight preference for Joe Biden or Trump — that margin is larger (65 percent to 21 percent). And voters who say they are undecided or could still change their minds oppose Trump’s stance on the USPS by a staggering 51 percentage points (68 percent to 17 percent).
Non-leaning independents and undecideds tend not to express intensity of opinion on political issues. Yet the USPS is an exception, with 54 percent of the former and 39 percent of the latter saying that in this case, they “strongly” disapprove of what Trump is trying to do.
In fact, Trump is on the wrong side of every issue related to the election. Sixty-four percent of registered voters say the Postal Service should be provided with funding to ensure there are no delays in mail delivery during the election. Only 21 percent say it should not get such funding. A mere 15 percent of registered voters say it was appropriate for Trump to suggest delaying the 2020 election; 68 percent say the opposite. And 80 percent of registered voters think it is more important to wait for mail-in ballots to be counted so we are sure which candidate won, even if the process drags on for some time. Just 20 percent think it’s more important to determine the outcome of the election quickly, even if many mail-in ballots have not been counted — Trump’s preferred scenario.
Voters largely reject Trump’s view that the election will be “rigged” against him, with only 41 percent saying the president “legitimately fears that fraudulent postal-voting will cost him the election” and the rest (a full 59 percent) saying instead that Trump is “trying to delegitimize the outcome because he doesn’t think he will win a majority of votes.” Sixty-three percent of voters think Trump is more likely to try to “steal” the election than Biden. And even more Americans than two weeks ago — 57 percent, up from 52 percent — now believe that Trump will not “accept” the result if he loses a close race in November. Just 28 percent say the same about Biden.
A Fox News panel had high praise to offer after former first lady Michelle Obama’s address at the Democratic National Convention Monday night.
In her nearly 19-minute speech, Obama denounced President Donald Trump for creating chaos and division and failing to lead with empathy and competence. She also urged Americans to bring his presidency to an end and elect former Vice President Joe Biden.
Many right-wing figures, including some Fox News contributors, criticized the address online. Fox News chose not to air much of the first portion of the convention, opting instead to show Sean Hannity interviewing Donald Trump Jr. Nonetheless, the conservative network’s panel for the convention was apparently impressed by Obama’s speech.
“It’s very difficult to try to connect with an audience without an actual audience there with you but she has the ability to connect with people through the screen,” Fox News anchor Dana Perino said. “You got the sense when you talk about authenticity, she has it in spades.”
“She has that voice, she has clarity, and she knows what she is out there wanting to do,” Perino added. “She was trying to get everybody to really focus and then she had a call to action. Ask for your ballot tonight. I think that the DNC if they look over the course of the night, the first virtual convention of our history, I think they would say that Michelle Obama stuck the landing.”
Fox News host Chris Wallace agreed, saying Obama’s speech was a “heck of a contribution” to Biden’s campaign.
“She really flayed, sliced and diced Donald Trump, talking about the chaos and confusion and lack of empathy, especially coming from this president and from this White House,” he said.
Juan Williams, a network co-host and political analyst, said he believed Obama’s address outdid her rousing “When they go low, we go high” speech in July 2016. He compared the tone she took with viewers as something like that of a mother addressing her family.
″‘This is who we are in this family. This is our identity. We have empathy. We understand compassion,’” he said. “I am surprised at how penetrating I felt it to be. I really thought that was a great speech.”
Even conservative analyst Brit Hume had mostly positive notes to offer.
“She was very good, she’s a very good speaker, for someone who doesn’t like politics she certainly is good at it,” he said. However, Hume also claimed Obama’s remarks were “laced with distortions and exaggerations.”
Former DNC chair Donna Brazile, now a Fox News contributor, said she was disappointed that Obama didn’t mention Biden’s historic running mate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.).
Watch the full panel discussion about the speech below
https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1295558615122587652?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1295558615122587652%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffpost.com%2Fentry%2Ffox-news-panel-michelle-obama-dnc_n_5f3b5f24c5b61100c3aba3f1
or
https://tinyurl.com/y2ln9un4
Senate Report: Extensive Web Of Trump/Russia Contact
The New York Times reports:
The Senate report said that the unusual nature of the Trump campaign — staffed by Mr. Trump’s longtime associates, friends and other businessmen with no government experience — “presented attractive targets for foreign influence, creating notable counterintelligence vulnerabilities.”
The Senate investigation found that two other people who met at Trump Tower in 2016 with senior members of the Trump campaign — including Mr. Manafort, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son — have “significant connections to Russian government, including the Russian intelligence services.”
The report said that the connections between the Russian government and one of the individuals, Natalia Veselnitskaya, “were far more extensive and concerning than what had been publicly known.”
Read the full article.
Read the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election
When Donald Trump entered the political arena some five years ago, reporters floundered for a way to cover his candidacy. Then, sensing a ratings boom from the chaos the businessman and former reality TV star injected into the primary, the left-leaning press quickly converted to covering all things Trump, benefitting both their bottom line and their sense of schadenfreude.
Following Trump’s surprise election in 2016, the press faced a different challenge: How to cover a president they despised? Unfortunately, their answer was to abandon any semblance of journalistic integrity. They pushed fake news while ignoring huge stories that might accrue to Trump’s benefit. As a result, Americans are sorely uninformed about news stories which, at any other time and under any other presidency, would deservedly flood airways and the print media.
Here are seven important stories from just the last year that the press should have — and would have — covered in detail, or differently, but for their disdain for Trump.
1. Spygate
While the Spygate scandal spans many years, some of the most newsworthy developments broke over the last several months, although you would not know it if you read corporate media. Just Friday, the Department of Justice released information charging Kevin Clinesmith with making a false statement in an email he altered concerning Carter Page. Clinesmith inserted “was not a source” in the email addressing Page’s relationship with an intelligence agency, and that false statement led to a fourth FISA surveillance order on Page.
Now, the MSM did “cover” this story, if you count the spin peddled as news coverage. After telling readers “Ex-F.B.I. Lawyer Expected to Plead Guilty in Review of Russia Inquiry,” The New York Times twisted the story to slam Trump, sub-heading its article, “Prosecutors did not reveal any evidence of the kind of broad anti-Trump conspiracy among law enforcement officials that the president has long alleged.” The Times then hit Attorney General William Barr and defended the Robert Mueller investigation while minimizing Clinesmith’s misconduct.
Coverage of the charge against Clinesmith is already receding, but the story deserves relentless investigative reporting. Clinesmith was deeply involved in the Crossfire Hurricane surveillance of Trump, including in the FBI’s decision to task Joe Pientka with spying on the Trump campaign during an intelligence briefing. Further, Clinesmith altered the email while a member of Special Counsel Mueller’s team and the special counsel’s office then obtained the fourth and final FISA surveillance order on Page.
That a member of the supposedly independent special counsel’s office falsified a document to get a surveillance order and allegedly committed a felony should burn up the wire for weeks. But instead, we get misdirection and minimization from the press, because heaven forbid the public to learn that Trump was right:it was a witch hunt.
A couple of weeks ago, another Spygate-related development was also sidestepped by the press. The Department of Justice announced its results from sampling FISA applications, telling Americans that the analysis of 29 different applications to the secret foreign intelligence surveillance court showed they “all contained a sufficient basis for probable cause” and that there were “only two material errors, neither of which invalidated the authorizations granted by the FISA Court.”
That conclusion starkly contrasts the 17 significant errors Inspector General Michael Horowitz found in just the FISA applications submitted to surveil former Trump campaign advisor Page. Unlike the 29 randomly reviewed FISA applications which, notwithstanding an array of errors, were found to be supported by probable cause, the DOJ concluded probable cause did not exist for at least two of the four applications submitted to surveil Page—and in turn the Trump campaign and administration.
The media, however, made scant mention of the DOJ’s findings, even though when IG Horowitz revealed in late March that initial results from an audit of FISA applications revealed “errors in every FBI application” the press pushed that news as evidence that the FISA abuse uncovered in the Page case wasn’t the result of politics, but of “broad, institutional weaknesses.”
The DOJ’s announcement earlier this week decimated that spin and a press interested in the truth would realize the significance of the findings of the audit. While 29 randomly pulled FISA applications contained only two material errors in total, none of which rendered the warrants invalid, there were 17 significant errors or omissions in FISA applications involving one person—the Trump-connected Page. But admitting the truth would help Trump, so the media remained silent.
The press has likewise ignored the stunning developments in the Michael Flynn criminal case, including revelations that the special counsel’s office withheld exculpatory evidence from Flynn’s attorneys, including notes suggesting FBI agents had attempt to either get Flynn fired or caught in a perjury trap and evidence establishing that the FBI agents did not believe Flynn had lied. Any other defendants would have been beatified a martyr by the media over this. And any other prosecutor would have been excoriated.
But instead, the press villainized Barr, who directed the charges against Flynn be dismissed based on that evidence and the recommendation of Missouri-based U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen, following Jensen’s independent review of the Flynn prosecution.
These latest developments showcase but a sliver about the worst political scandal of our country’s history: The Obama administration obtained an illegal court order to conduct surveillance on a political enemy, using evidence paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Then, following Trump’s election, holdovers continued to spy on the president-elect’s team and later plotted to oust their new boss’ national security advisor. This is a story for the ages. Just not the age of Trump.
2. Israel and United Arab Emirates Normalize Relations
Last week also showed the press skimming over news that should make peace-seeking nations cheer: The normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. Again, the media covered the news, even acknowledging its historic nature, but with a pivot playing the achievement as a culmination of a decade of outreach between the two Middle Eastern countries. The Trump administration’s leadership received short shrift.
Is there any doubt that any other American president who helped bring about this promising leap forward in the Middle East—whether Democrat or Republican—would be heralded? A month of in-depth interviews would follow. Specials on the Middle East would air. The history of the conflict would be retold and Trump’s close relationship with Israel highlighted. Then Americans would learn the inside story of how this achievement came to be.
But not with a President Trump.
3. Big News on Terrorism Sponsor Iran
Likewise, the media has ignored or downplayed several significant stories involving Iran that would vindicate Trump’s hardline stance against the Islamic regime. While the press had no problem regurgitating the propaganda Ben Rhodes created in the D.C. echo chamber to sell President Obama’s 2015 disastrous Iran deal, with Trump corporate media has opted to limit coverage of Iran’s horrific human rights abuses.
Few Americans know of Iran’s plans to execute those involved in a 2017 uprising, with one execution taking place earlier this month. “The silence of the international community about [that] execution,” Mahmoud Amiri-Moghaddam, the director of the Oslo-based Iran Human Rights group, said, “can be considered a green light for more executions.”
In contrast, earlier this year, the press played the U.S. military operation that killed Qassem Soleimani, a terrorist responsible for the death of scores of American soldiers and innocent civilians in Iraq, as an unnecessary escalation of tensions with Iran. Then, when the Iranian regime killed 200-plus passengers on Ukrainian Flight 752, the media responded with far less outrage and scant coverage of the protests overtaking the authoritarian country.
On Friday, there were two new developments about Iran. How the media plays these stories will be telling. Will the press highlight the Trump administration’s failed bid to extend a UN arms embargo on Iran? Or will the media provide detailed reporting on the news that the Department of Justice seized the “largest-ever” “fuel shipments from Iran,” which headed to Venezuela on four Iranian fuel tankers?
By week’s end, we’ll know whether the media opts to focus on the former while downplaying Trump’s recent success in pressuring the Iranian regime.
4. Major News on China
Over the last year, the press has also sidestepped several significant stories about China, starting with COVID-19. The press downplayed Trump’s success in negotiating a new trade deal with China, and once Trump branded COVID-19 the Chinese virus, the media threw objectivity to the wind, as this Washington Post headline established: “Trump views China’s Communist Party as a threat. Young Chinese see it as a ticket to a better future.”
Beyond publishing propaganda-laced fluff pieces, the press proved its hatred of Trump by providing only scant coverage of three stories: China’s takeover of Hong Kong, its persecution of Uighurs, and its use of TikTok and WeChat to spy on Americans.
While the media has touched on these topics, the coverage is neither representative of their significance nor near the coverage it dedicated to faux scandals harmful to the president, such as when Michael Avenatti repeated Julie Swetnick’s lies about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The media’s coverage of the Kavanaugh confirmation circus shows its strength in pushing a narrative, but sadly, journalists have failed to use their power to unite the world in opposition to China’s sickening persecution of Uighurs and Hong Kong citizens.
While Trump’s impending ban on TikTok and WeChat may be a lesser story, the media’s downplaying of these apps’ threats to Americans’ privacy and national security is par for their so-called reporting on China. Corporate media cannot provide the coverage warranted by these stories because it would prove Trump’s position that China’s Communist Party is a threat. Therein is all you need to know for why the press remains at best hushed and at worst a propaganda arm for the communist country.
5. COVID-19
Corporate reporting on COVID-19 provides another stark example of the Trump litmus test it constantly applies to news: Does the story help the president or hurt him?
Coverage of hydroxychloroquine as a possible therapeutic provides the clearest proof of this, as best illustrated by the national coverage of the death of a man who “ingested” fish tank cleaner, spun as a Trump-induced death. But more subtle bias by omission is prevalent as well.
For instance, under other circumstances, the harm widespread school closings cause to especially low-income and at-risk children would be the nightly news narrative. Personal interest stories featuring single moms, unable to work and supervise the online schooling of their children, would run. Special-needs children struggling without individualized educational plans would be profiled. Heartstrings would be pulled, and pressure would be brought to bear on leaders refusing to open schools.
But because Trump wants the schools open, the coverage has focused instead on the risk to children and teachers of returning to the classroom.
The deaths of the elderly in states like New York that forced nursing homes to take in COVID-positive patients would also be a national scandal if it didn’t counter the liberal narrative that Trump is to blame for COVID deaths. Likewise, the Centers for Disease Control’s antiquated flu surveillance system would be the stuff of investigative reporting, but for the vindication it would provide to Trump, who directed the CDC to create an entirely new system to track COVID.
American pharmaceutical companies might have even been championed for their record-breaking efforts to develop an effective vaccine for COVID. However, highlighting the promise of a late-year vaccine would only provide a dual-edged plus for the president by both showcasing his strong leadership and prompting Americans to sense a quick economic recovery. So the story stays muted.
6. 2020 Elections
While the media has long been biased towards Democrats, this year the press seems uninterested in even hiding this preference. The bias shows both by what the media covers and what it doesn’t.
One taboo topic, of course, is Joe Biden’s health. Here the press is repeating its performance in 2016, which The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway exposed four years ago. Then, the press was ignoring concerns over Hillary Clinton’s health, including coughing spells, memory lapses supposedly caused by a concussion and a brain clot, and then a fainting spell caught on camera.
Is Biden a racist? A sexual predator? Harris said as much during the primaries. What changed?
Now it is Biden’s bizarre behavior, forgetfulness, and word salads served on those few occasions he emerges from his basement in unscripted exchanges. A media less concerned about possibly assisting Trump’s re-election bid would expose these disconcerting episodes. They also would not tolerate Biden’s refusal to engage with the press.
Also ignored are the many stories that should have spun from Biden’s announcement that Kamala Harris is his choice for vice president. Is Biden a racist? A sexual predator? Harris said as much during the primaries. What changed? But other than late-night comedy, the press has already moved on. To paraphrase Biden, “Come on, media.”
And in no sane world is Harris a moderate, but that is how the New York Times cast her in its continuing delusional coverage of the election.
The media’s handling of the mail-in-voting story is likewise telling, and again reminiscent of 2016, when fears of hacking concerned both parties—until Trump raised the issue. We’re seeing the same dynamic today, with the press pushing back against concerns that universal mail-in-voting creates the risk of both fraud and foreign interference.
The media pivots from this legitimate concern by conflating mail-in-voting with absentee voting. To date, it also has remained relatively silent while USPS sabotage conspiracy theories go viral.
7. Riots? What Riots?
The media also finds itself struggling to cover the riots occurring throughout our country. The “mostly peaceful protests” spin remains strong because any acknowledgment of the violence confirms Trump’s criticism of Democratic-run cities and his decision to use federal law enforcement officials to protect federal property. So the press bypasses or shades these major stories.
At any other time and under any other president, the media would have descended on the Portland federal courthouse to report the insurrection taking place. Reporters would have infiltrated the autonomous zone and covered the rampant crime and violence occurring. Profiles of the small business owners whose livelihoods were destroyed by the riots would run.
Yes, covering these stories may help Trump, but it would also help Americans, who at best are ignorant and at worst are brainwashed.
"A Fox News panel had high praise to offer after former first lady Michelle Obama’s address at the Democratic National Convention Monday night."
FOX is the last remaining of objective news on cable
"No one said he did have a mandate. He gets to share his opinion just like everyone else in this country."
yes, he has a right to his opinion
but he says he took a job in the administration, knowing he would try to undermine the elected President
and then he whines he was unsuccessful
odd that you don't see the problem
"And conveniently you haven't given a single example of this,"
don't need to
everyone here has read your rants
"You just make this baseless assertion to try and send me off for hours tallying this while you spread more lies."
you're the one who said it
and if it were, you would know what you're talking about
"The entire American intelligence community and the Inspector General said Russia interfered in the election in a massive pervasive multi-pronged effort to elect Trump,"
everyone knows that
so what?
happens every election
right now, China is trying to elect Biden
that's why he's soft on China
"Trump colluded with Russia,"
according to Mueller, this is a lie
Remember that horse's ass called Al Franken?
He was caught grabbing women's breasts while they slept.
Did you know he only won his Senate seat by mail-in fraud?
That's right!
Sometimes a few votes make all the difference. Just ask former Senator Norm Coleman. On the morning after the election in November 2008, the official tally showed him with a 725-vote lead out of 2.9 million total votes cast. Coleman claimed victory. But Democrats flooded the state with lawyers to challenge the outcome. After the first recount, his lead was down to 206 votes, but things were just getting started.
Caches of ballots showed up late. Eight months later, the resulting litigation finally ended when Al Franken was declared the winner by 312 votes. He was sworn in July 2009. A subsequent study found that 1,099 felons had illegally voted.
The election mattered, not just to Sen. Coleman and his bid to retain his seat, but for a Republican party trying to maintain a razor-thin bloc of votes necessary to sustain its filibuster power. With Coleman defeated, Senator Al Franken provided the pivotal 60th vote that gave America Obamacare. And so, a group of 312 votes out of a nation of over 300 million people changed the course of history.
There’s not much intelligence on the Senate Intelligence Committee. It’s one of those oxymorons so endemic in Washington.
It took the committee three years to figure out the obvious.
Its report released Tuesday said there is “absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election.”
Maybe next week the geniuses on the bipartisan committee will announce that the Earth is round.
You’d have to be intolerably ignorant not to have recognized long ago that the whole Trump-Russia collusion narrative was a deviously contrived fiction — a collection of politically driven fables designed to defame and discredit Trump.
A year-and-a-half ago, the report by then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller found no collusion conspiracy.
Two-and-a-half years ago, the House Intelligence Committee (the so-called “Nunes Memo”) reached the same conclusion.
But let’s not stop there. It turns out that then-FBI Director James Comey’s agency knew it was all a hoax as early as January 2017 — the very month Trump was inaugurated.
That was three-and-a-half years ago.
So, excuse me for mocking the Senate Intelligence Committee. But their report is like the mailman who delivers a draft notice years after the war is over.
https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/elections/election_2020/white_house_watch_aug12
White House Watch
Biden Lengthens Lead
Wednesday, August 12, 2020
Hot on the heels of announcing Kamala Harris as his running mate, likely Democratic nominee Joe Biden has taken a six-point lead over President Trump in the latest Rasmussen Reports’ weekly White House Watch survey.
The new national telephone and online survey finds Biden with 49% support among Likely U.S. Voters to Trump’s 43%. Four percent (4%) prefer some other candidate, while another four percent (4%) remain undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
A week ago, Biden had a 48% to 45% advantage. The former vice president has led Trump in every weekly survey to date.
"Remember that horse's ass called Al Franken?
He was caught grabbing women's breasts while they slept."
Of course I remember him. He left office after that info came out. Democrats thought that kind of behavior should disqualify him from holding office.
On the other hand Republicans thought "just grab 'em by the pussy" guy was just the man to push their pro-family agenda.
Given all the fear mongering conservative do about "guys dressing up as women and violating girls in restrooms," you'd think they'd be rather adverse to the Cheeto Benito - preferring perhaps to see him on a registered sex-offender list.
But apparently putting on orange makeup and a business suit makes sexual assault acceptable.
Who knew?
'Did you know he only won his Senate seat by mail-in fraud?'
Mail-in fraud is a crime, one GOP operative, Mr. Dowless, has been indicted for, among others including Social Security fraud.
"A grand jury indicted Dowless on charges that he received thousands of dollars more in Social Security benefits than he was entitled to because he allegedly concealed more than $100,000 he was paid for campaign work.
Dowless is accused separately in state court of illegally “harvesting” mail-in ballots while working for a Republican congressional candidate."
Do tell in regard to your fictional statement above, who was indicted for mail-in fraud in the Franken/Coleman election.
You might want to read this first, before you prove yourself to be nothing but a liar:
https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/campaign/126789-the-truth-about-the-2008-minnesota-senate-recount-a-response-to-democratic-party-still-disenfranchising-and-oppresing-votes
With the political world focused on the Democratic convention Monday night, President Trump looked to steal some of the limelight by saying that he will seek a third term if he wins re-election.
During a rally in Wisconsin, the president lied to a cheering crowd, telling them that he deserves eight additional years in office because, he falsely claimed, his campaign was spied on in 2016 — an assertion his own FBI refuted in a detailed report.
“We are going to win four more years,” Trump said. “And then after that, we’ll go for another four years because they spied on my campaign. We should get a redo of four years.”
But Trump has one problem: the Constitution. The 22nd Amendment says, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”
During the same rally, Trump went on a bizarre rant about how well the economy was performing before the pandemic, touting the success of students who attended “crummy colleges” and “dumb people.”
The president’s manic Monday did not stop there. During a stop in Michigan, Trump told the assembled crowd a bullshit story he often repeats.
“I was ‘Man of the Year’ 11 years ago in Michigan. I don’t know why but they picked me,” the president said.
Trump doesn’t know why he was chosen for this honor because it’s a lie. According to a 2019 report in the Detroit News, the president has told the fabricated story at least six times — make that seven after today.
“Since 2016, Trump has claimed that he received Michigan’s ‘Man of the Year’ award, and no one in Michigan seems to know what he is talking about,” the report said.
When then-candidate Donald Trump carried his 2016 party banner, some Republicans worried he could become a Barry Goldwater 2.0 on the issue of race and Hispanics. Goldwater obliterated GOP relations with African-American voters, and some worried Trump might destroy relations with Latinos.
African-American support of the GOP was a solid 39 percent in 1956 and 32 percent in 1960. But after opposing the Civil Rights Act, Republican nominee Goldwater garnered a mere 6 percent, and black support fell to single digits or low teens ever since.
Yet despite mainstream media predictions to the contrary, Trump actually beat predecessor John McCain's 2008 bid among black voters in 2008 and Mitt Romney's 2012 effort among Latino voters. McCain earned 4% of the black vote to Trump's 6%. Romney earned 27% of the Latino vote to Trump's 28% (Romney tied Trump's 6% of the black vote).
Trump still fell short of George W. Bush's 11% with black voters and 44% with Hispanic voters in 2004.
But CNN polling released Sunday shows Trump has narrowed Democratic rival Joe Biden's lead by 10 points since June, mainly by what appears to be growing support for the GOP president among what CNN described as "people of color" in swing states.
The new poll shows the Biden-Harris ticket leading the Trump-Pence ticket 50% to 46%, compared to early June when the numbers were 55% to 41%.
Trump's rise among people of color has occurred even in the midst of nationwide, racially-charged protests, riots and chaos in inner cities. The question remains whether left-leaning activists fueling the protests and riots are creating a backlash among minority communities.
Harmeet Dhillon, national co-chair of Women For Trump, Lawyers For Trump and the Republican National Lawyers Association, said she wouldn't put too much stock into just one poll but wasn't surprised by its direction.
"I do think it's an encouraging the trend that we're seeing in that poll," Dhillon told Just the News in an interview Monday. "And so what people of color who are paying attention know from before the COVID time is that the president has done an amazing job of boosting job numbers for Americans across the board, particularly some of those minority communities, people of color as well as women, as well as other segments. He's opened up opportunity for small business owners, a lot of whom are women and people of color."
Dhillon said eight years of an African-American president in the White House did not produce Trump's criminal justice reform, pardons and commutations of people who have minor offenses in their backgrounds that disproportionately affect African-Americans
"So I think if you're being honest that you would look at that and you would see, then you would also pair that with the fact that Joe Biden has had a fairly racist series of remarks over the years dating back to the 70s, calling integration basically how he did not want his children to grow up in a racial jungle--making racist remarks about Indian Americans and comparing them to only 7-11 owners and taxi drivers and those types," she said.
Dhillon also cited Biden's claim to radio host Charlamagne tha God that if black voters did not support him, then they weren't black.
"If you were from the African-American community, these are shocking, racist remarks," Dhillon said. "And I think a lot of African-Americans, you look at Kanye West and some other prominent leaders in that community. They are tired of being taken for granted by the Democrat Party. The Democratic Party has, has treated them as people on a plantation as their as if their property they're not property, they're up for grabs, and many of them are choosing to leave and vote with their feet and join our party, where they are welcome and where they are respected and where they are a big part of this administration."
Gregory Cheadle, the black man President Donald Trump once described at a rally as “my African American,” is fed up.
After two years of frustration with the president’s rhetoric on race and the lack of diversity in the administration, Cheadle told PBS NewsHour he has decided to leave the Republican party and run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representative as an independent in 2020.
Now, the 62-year-old real estate broker, who supported the Republican approach to the economy, said he sees the party as pursuing a “pro-white” agenda and using black people like him as “political pawns.” The final straw for Cheadle came when he watched many Republicans defend Trump’s tweets telling four congresswomen of color, who are all American citizens, to go back to their countries, as well as defend the president’s attacks on Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., and his comments that Cummings’ hometown of Baltimore is “infested.”
“President Trump is a rich guy who is mired in white privilege to the extreme,” said Cheadle, of Redding, Calif., who switched from being an independent to a Republican in 2001. “Republicans are too sheepish to call him out on anything and they are afraid of losing their positions and losing any power themselves.”
Thursday afternoon, when asked by NewsHour on the White House lawn about Cheadle leaving the Republican party, President Trump claimed he has a lot of support from African American voters.
“We have tremendous African American support,” Trump told NewsHour. “I would say I’m at my all-time high. I don’t think I’ve ever had the support that I’ve had now. I think I’m going to do very well with African Americans. African American support has been the best we’ve had.”
When pressed about whether he thought Cheadle was wrong to say Trump was pursuing a “pro-white” agenda, Trump said he didn’t know who Cheadle was. After NewsHour recalled the 2016 moment to Trump, the president continued to tout his popularity among African American voters. “I think this–it’s very simple,” Trump said. “We’ve had the best numbers we’ve ever had for African Americans in terms of employment and unemployment. So I think we’re going to do very well.”
President Trump faced fierce backlash after he tweeted in July that Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., should leave the United States.
“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” Trump wrote. “Then come back and show us how it is done.”
That same month, Trump said Cummings’ Maryland district which includes parts of Baltimore was “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”
The White House and Trump have fiercely defended the president’s comments as fair criticism of the lawmakers’ liberal policies. But for Cheadle, the incidents were too much. A few weeks ago, he was scrolling through posts written by fellow Republicans, who are his Facebook friends, and reached a breaking point.
“They were sidestepping the people of color issue and saying that, ‘No, it’s not racist,’” he said. “They were saying these people were socialists and communists. That’s what they were saying. And I thought this is a classic case of whites not seeing racism because they want to put blinders on and make it about something else.”
Cheadle became widely known in June 2016 when Trump, then a presidential candidate, pointed to him at a rally in Redding, Calif. and said, “Look at my African American over here. Look at him. Are you the greatest?”
At the time, Cheadle took the president’s comments as a joke and laughed along with the president and the crowd of largely white supporters. Now, his view of that moment has changed. “I’m more critical of it today than I was back then because today I wonder to what extent he said that for political gain or for attention,” he said.
Cheadle said he understands some will think he waited too long to leave the Republican party, even accepting those assertions as “correct.” He said he had held out hope that the Republican party would move to work on challenges specifically facing African Americans like healthcare disparities or black families having less wealth than white families. But, he no longer expects that.
Cheadle said he is especially unhappy with the racial makeup of the president’s judicial nominations. Trump often gets loud applause at campaign rallies for touting how many judges his administration has been able to get confirmed by the Senate. But an Associated Press analysis has found that 91 percent of Trump’s nominees are white, and 81 percent are male.
Cheadle said he wouldn’t use the term “racist” to describe the president but believes he has a “white superiority complex.”
“When you look at his appointments for the bench: White, white, white, white white, white, white,” Cheadle said. “That to me is really damning to everybody else because no one else gets a chance because he’s thinking that the whites are superior, period.”
As a black Trump supporter, Cheadle was part of a small club. The majority of African American voters have overwhelmingly supported Democrats for decades. President Trump won the support of just eight percent of black voters in 2016, while Hillary Clinton won 88 percent of them.
Trump’s overall approval rating sits at 41 percent, while 45 percent of people “strongly disapprove” of the job he’s doing, according to the latest PBS NewsHour, NPR and Marist poll released this week. Among Republicans, he is much more popular. Another poll by PBS NewsHour, NPR and Marist from earlier in the summer found that 90 percent of Republicans approve of the job he is doing, while the president’s approval rating with independent voters was 42 percent and his disapproval was 53 percent.
Cheadle said he is open to voting for candidates in any party and will evaluate how their platforms will help African Americans when deciding who to support in the future.
This will be Cheadle’s fifth time running for Congress, though he has yet to win. He most recently ran in 2018–vying for the same seat to represent California’s first congressional district. As part of his platform, he will be advocating balancing the federal budget and providing zero interest student loans.
When asked what he would say to critics who think he is leaving the Republican party for publicity, Cheadle said he understands the potential criticism, but that he believes running as an independent is even harder than as a Democrat or Republican because of the lack of party structure. In the end, his decision came down to being disgusted with the president’s words.
“We just haven’t had people called the names publicly that we have had with this administration,” he said. “To stay on this ship now, as a black Republican, I couldn’t do it.”
Women-led countries handled the coronavirus pandemic 'systematically and significantly better' than those run by men, study says
- Countries led by women have responded to the coronavirus pandemic better than those led by men, according to a new study.
- The study of 194 countries found that "being female-led has provided countries with an advantage in the current crisis." The research has not been peer reviewed.
- Male-led countries like the US, Italy, Brazil, and the UK have recorded far higher death tolls than female-led countries like Germany, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Finland.
- The authors say this is no coincidence, arguing that women leaders communicated better and locked down faster, and therefore experienced far fewer fatalities overall.
- The argument that women make for more compassionate, effective leaders has grown in popularity during the pandemic, as many male leaders face criticism for taking unneeded risks.
Countries with female leaders have handled the coronavirus pandemic "systematically and significantly better" than those run by men, according to a new research paper.
A study of 194 countries by Supriya Garikipati, of the University of Liverpool, and Uma Kambhampati, of the University of Reading, found that "being female-led has provided countries with an advantage in the current crisis."
On the face of it, male-led countries like the US, Spain, Italy, Brazil, and UK have fared extremely badly in the pandemic, recording some of the highest death tolls in the world.
Meanwhile, women-led countries like Germany, Denmark, New Zealand, Taiwan, Iceland, and Finland have recorded far fewer deaths and lower death tolls. (It is worth noting that some male-led countries, like the Czech Republic and Greece, have recorded lower deaths as well.)
The authors studied death and case tolls, whether leaders took decisive action to lock down, and whether "clear communication styles" were deployed. They concluded that women-led countries are measurably better off.
"Our findings show that COVID-outcomes are systematically and significantly better in countries led by women and, to some extent, this may be explained by the proactive policy responses they adopted," they wrote in their World Economic Forum blog post.
For instance, New Zealand imposed a lockdown long before cases began to spin out of control, with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern saying on March 15 it was time to "go hard and go early."
"Controlling for GDP per capita, population, size of urban population and of elderly, female-led countries perform significantly better than male-led countries," they said.
Evidence suggesting women make for better, more compassionate leaders has come to the forefront of political discourse in recent years, and even more so during the pandemic.
In June 2020, former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said there was "a correlation" between women-led countries and positive responses to the coronavirus.
Former President Barack Obama also said in December 2019 that he was "absolutely confident that for two years if every nation on earth was run by women, you would see a significant improvement across the board on just about everything."
Since the paper was completed on June 3, the coronavirus pandemic has raged on, but countries with female leaders have still kept their outbreaks under relative control.
Earlier this month New Zealand recorded a new outbreak after more than 100 consecutive days of zero new coronavirus. Ardern immediately reimposed tight restrictions in Auckland, the city where the cases were found, and postponed elections for a month.
The authors noted in the blog post that while no inferences can be drawn from coronavirus death tolls alone, "female-led countries have fared better in terms of absolute number of COVID-cases and deaths, with male-led countries having nearly double the number of deaths."
Black babies are more likely to survive when cared for by Black doctors, study finds
N'dea Yancey-Bragg, USA TODAY
Black newborns are more likely to survive during childbirth when cared for by Black doctors, according to a new study.
In the United States, Black babies die at three times the rate of white newborns during their initial hospital stays, according to a peer-reviewed study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But when Black doctors cared for Black babies, their mortality rate was cut in half.
About a year ago, I finished writing a book in which I posited that race was the original sin of the modern Republican Party and that the rise of President Donald Trump is based more on white grievance than any other factor. It was a conviction I had come to after over 30 years of working in Republican politics, including five presidential campaigns. To me it seemed an inescapable if depressing reality.
My first campaign was for a congressional seat in Mississippi among a white Republican (my client), a white Democrat and a Black Independent. I quickly realized anything we could do to increase the profile of the African American would help divert votes from the Democrat to the Independent. It was our best play, since there was little we could do to attract African Americans to our own campaign.
That was a long time ago, and Republicans are still failing to win Black voters in substantial numbers. For decades, the party admitted that was in fact a failure and at least attempted to change. But now it has settled into a comfortable embrace of white grievance and Trump is running as the Yankee George Wallace.
Trump is proving my thesis
I’ve worked with a lot of candidates, and for all the hocus-pocus mystique about consultants pulling strings controlling campaigns, I’ve found that ultimately candidates do what they most want to do. This is never truer than when a candidate and campaign are under stress. It’s a natural instinct, the same phenomena of when someone who is multilingual reverts to his native tongue when most angry.
Even so, I never expected Trump to base his reelection campaign around proving my thesis.
There are times when elections are, to borrow Jerry Seinfeld's description of his show, campaigns about nothing. For obvious reasons, this tends to happen in times of peace and prosperity, with an electorate generally satisfied with the status quo.
That’s not this election. One recent poll shows only 18% of the country believes we are headed in the right direction, and others aren't much higher. This 2020 campaign does not lack for big issues that impact every American: the worst public health crisis in 100 years, the highest unemployment since the Great Depression. This is a moment that uniquely calls out for strong presidential leadership. Most presidents would grasp that their fate lay with the public’s view of their response and act accordingly.
Not Donald Trump. It’s clear his instinct is to make the 2020 election a cultural war, which in his interpretation is just a socially acceptable term for a race war. Why? How does this make any political sense?
The answer is that it doesn’t but it is what Trump wants to do. Steve Bannon liked to say of Trump, “Dude, he’s Archie Bunker,” but that seems overly generous. Archie had Meathead, who strongly disagreed with him and would argue. Trump has his children and a son-in-law who serve the same purpose in a Trump administration as the devoted Waylon Smithers does for his boss in "The Simpsons."
There is a need in Trump world to describe his erratic behavior and lack of discipline as some kind of brilliant hidden strategy because otherwise, you are left with the conclusion that he is a blithering idiot. Which, of course, Trump is, but he’s an idiot with deep racial animosity that dates back decades. Now with his reelection campaign crumbling around him, Trump is lashing out trying to divide the country along racial lines.
This isn’t surprising. We shouldn’t forget that Trump still says that the falsely convicted Central Park Five, African Americans he had said deserved the death penalty, are guilty despite exoneration. But what is shocking, if not surprising, is that the Republican Party is going along with Trump’s strategy to model his campaign after Wallace’s 1968 run for president. It reveals a combination of moral failure and political stupidity rarely evidenced by a major party.
Whenever I tell my Republican friends that I think racial animosity is the root of Trump’s appeal, the inevitable and often angry rejoinder is, “Are you saying that 63 million Americans are racists?” What I try to point out to them is that you don’t have to consider yourself a racist (and, of course, most racists don’t consider themselves racists) but you do have to be willing to accept that having a racist president is less important than something else you are getting from that president.
That might be conservative judges, that might be tax cuts, that might be increased tariffs on Chinese goods (since anti-free trade is apparently the new Republican standard). From defending Confederate monuments to attacking Black NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace, Trump seems determined to make it impossible to deny he’s a racist.
I’m a seventh generation Mississippian who has worked on winning Republican races for governor and Senate across the South, and I’ve never seen Trump’s level of direct racist appeal work. While there is still an angry racist constituency, not just in the South but in every state, it is small and growing smaller. Your average white teenager in the South looks to Black rap stars as cultural icons more than Robert E. Lee.
What baffles me is the reluctance of Republicans to speak out and challenge Trump on race. With the exception of Utah's Mitt Romney, has any Republican senator or House member even uttered the words "Black lives matter"? What does it say about the future of the Republican Party when my home state of Mississippi finally lowered the Confederate battle flag just as a Republican president tries to raise it? It leaves me deeply pessimistic about the future of the Republican Party — while deeply hopeful about America.
Trump is trying to refight the Civil War. He’ll discover in November that it’s over. And America won.
Stuart Stevens, a senior adviser to the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, was chief strategist for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012. His latest book, "It Was All A Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump," will be published Tuesday.
Pelosi: Postmaster Won’t Commit To Reversing Changes
August 19, 2020 Trump Administration, Trump Corruption
Axios reports:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called out Postmaster General Louis DeJoy on Wednesday, saying his alleged suspension of operational changes and cost-cutting “is wholly insufficient and does not reverse damage already wreaked.”
Pelosi said that a conversation with DeJoy revealed the USPS has no intention of replacing the sorting machines, mailboxes and other mail infrastructure that has already been removed. On Tuesday, DeJoy promised to halt changes until after the 2020 election, a move Pelosi criticized as “misleading.”
“The Postmaster General frankly admitted that he had no intention of replacing the sorting machines, blue mailboxes and other key mail infrastructure that have been removed and that plans for adequate overtime, which is critical for the timely delivery of mail, are not in the works,” Pelosi said in a statement.
Like the dictator he is, Trump just said "The only way I can lose is if the election is rigged".
Any honest observer can see with Biden having an average lead of 8 points its highly unlikely Trump can win a fair and free election.
The truth is the exact opposite of what Trump is claiming - the only way Trump can win is if the election is rigged.
Trump's authoritarianism is getting bolder and bolder. The knee-capping of the post office is just the beginning.
NY Daily News: New Senate Report Confirms Collusion
From the editorial board of the New York Daily News:
A major reason Donald Trump doesn’t deserve re-election: The suspected original sin of this presidency — cheating to win with Russian collusion — has mostly proven true. So says near-1,000-page fifth and final bipartisan report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence detailing a wide web of contacts between Russian intelligence operatives and the 2016 Trump campaign.
Key findings: Vladimir Putin personally directed the weaponizing of hacked Democratic campaign emails. The Trump campaign received assistance from various Russian pass-throughs, most significantly Roger Stone via his Julian Assange WikiLeaks back-channel. Yes, Trump’s campaign cronies solicited and accepted foreign interference in 2016. He got away with it then. He mustn’t again.
There has been a lot of cheating in this election, all of it being done by Republicans with the help of the foreign interference of the United States #1 adversary - Russia.
Trump cannot win without massive cheating.
"the help of the foreign interference of the United States #1 adversary - Russia."
Russia isn't our #1 enemy
China is
and they are working to elect Sleepy, Slow Joe Biden
U.S.-China Trade Facts
U.S. goods and services trade with China totaled an estimated $737.1 billion in 2018. Exports were $179.3 billion; imports were $557.9 billion. The U.S. goods and services trade deficit with China was $378.6 billion in 2018.
China is currently our largest goods trading partner with $659.8 billion in total (two way) goods trade during 2018. Goods exports totaled $120.3 billion; goods imports totaled $539.5 billion. The U.S. goods trade deficit with China was $419.2 billion in 2018.
Trade in services with China (exports and imports) totaled an estimated $77.3 billion in 2018. Services exports were $58.9 billion; services imports were $18.4 billion. The U.S. services trade surplus with China was $40.5 billion in 2018.
According to the Department of Commerce, U.S. exports of Goods and Services to China supported an estimated 911,000 jobs in 2015 (latest data available) (601,000 supported by goods exports and 309,000 supported by services exports).
Exports
China was the United States' 3rd largest goods export market in 2018.
U.S. goods exports to China in 2018 were $120.3 billion, down 7.4% ($9.6 billion) from 2017 but up 72.6% from 2008. U.S. exports to China are up 527% from 2001 (pre-WTO accession). U.S. exports to China account for 7.2% of overall U.S. exports in 2018.
The top export categories (2-digit HS) in 2018 were: aircraft ($18 billion), machinery ($14 billion), electrical machinery ($13 billion), optical and medical instruments ($9.8 billion), and vehicles ($9.4 billion).
U.S. total exports of agricultural products to China totaled $9.3 billion in 2018, our 4th largest agricultural export market. Leading domestic export categories include: soybeans ($3.1 billion), cotton ($924 million), hides & skins ($607 million), pork & pork products ($571 million), and coarse grains (ex. corn) ($530 million).
U.S. exports of services to China were an estimated $58.9 billion in 2018, 2.2% ($1.3 billion) more than 2017, and 272% greater than 2008 levels. It was up roughly 997% from 2001 (pre-WTO accession). Leading services exports from the U.S. to China were in the travel, intellectual property (trademark, computer software), and transport sectors.
the fact that China is an economic power makes them much more a threat than Russia, a virtual third world equivalent whose only valuable resource is energy
China is using advanced technology to create a horrific Orwellian regime unlike anything the world has ever known and is aggressively pushing it outside its own borders
they are Nazi Germany in the 1930s with quantum capabiities
"Any honest observer can see with Biden having an average lead of 8 points its highly unlikely Trump can win a fair and free election."
honest researchers have concluded that polls before the last week are meaningless
the only meaningful poll is who voters expect to win, not who they want to win
that's why Dems so desperately try to create the impression they are waaaay ahead...
polls at this point always show the Dem cruising to a landslide
sometimes it turns out to be right, sometimes not
it's a toss up
and in this day when the media has completely abandoned any pretense of objectivity, their polls are irrelevant
the polls also always tighten up about a week before the election
The morning after Trump gave a major boost to the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) called it “nuts” and said, “Real leaders call conspiracy theories conspiracy theories.”
“If Democrats take the Senate, blow up the filibuster, and pack the Supreme Court — garbage like this will be a big part of why they won,” Sasse, a Republican who speaks his mind about Trump more freely than most, said in a statement.
On Wednesday, Trump said he appreciated the support of QAnon followers, calling them “people that love our country.”
Pressed at a White House briefing about the online movement, which the FBI has identified as a potential domestic terrorist threat, he claimed not to know anything about it other than the affection its adherents have for him. But when a reporter outlined the erroneous claims underlying the theory — “that you are secretly saving the world from this satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals” — Trump seemed to embrace that role for himself.
“I don’t know much about the movement; I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate,” Trump said. “I heard these are people that love our country.”
“QAnon believes you are secretly saving the world from this cult of pedophiles and cannibals. Are you behind that?” a reporter pressed.
“I haven’t heard that. Is that supposed to be a bad thing or a good thing?” Trump responded. “If I can help save the world from problems, I am willing to do it. I’m willing to put myself out there. And we are actually, we’re saving the world.”
QAnon took root on Internet message boards in the fall of 2017 with posts from someone who claimed to be a government insider identified as “Q.” The pseudonymous figure posted cryptic clues about Trump’s impending conquest over the “deep state,” spawning an elaborate far-right worldview that came to absorb many other debunked ideas.
Other Republicans who criticized Trump’s remarks included Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), who called QAnon “Complete BS” in a tweet on Wednesday, and former Florida governor Jeb Bush.
“Why in the world would the President not kick Q’anon supporters’ butts?” Bush tweeted on Wednesday. “Nut jobs, rascists, haters have no place in either Party.”
New unemployment claims top one million. Again.
Rump was told that QAnon believes he’s saving the world from a satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals and he asked if that’s supposed to be a bad thing. He believes they are fine people who love our country. Honestly, if Charlie Manson were alive and he endorsed Trump, Trump would call him a good guy who disdained Hollywood elites.
By the way, no Republican officials have anything to say, other than congratulating all the QAnon candidates that are winning their party primaries.
Russian Opposition Leader Alexei Navalny In A Coma After Drinking Tea Laced With Poison, Spokesperson Says
“We assume that Alexei was poisoned with something mixed with his tea. That’s the only thing he drank this morning.”
MOSCOW, Aug 20 (Reuters) - Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was in a coma in a Siberian hospital on Thursday after drinking a cup of tea that his spokeswoman said she believed was laced with poison.
Navalny, 44, was in intensive care and on an artificial lung ventilator, spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said on social media.
A fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin, Navalny started feeling ill when returning to Moscow from Tomsk in Siberia by plane on Wednesday morning, Yarmysh said.
“We assume that Alexei was poisoned with something mixed into his tea. It was the only thing that he drank in the morning. Doctors say the toxin was absorbed faster through the hot liquid. Alexei is now unconscious,” Yarmysh said.
She did not say who she believed may have poisoned Navalny, but said police had been called to the hospital.
However, one of the doctors there said it was not certain that he had been poisoned. Doctor Anatoly Kalinichenko said “natural poisoning” was one of several diagnoses being considered and tests were being carried out.
Navalny, a lawyer and anti-corruption activist, has served many stints in jail in recent years for organizing anti-Kremlin protests and has been physically attacked in the street by pro-government activists.
He has helped investigations into what he has said are outrageous examples of official corruption.
Russia holds regional elections next month and Navalny and his allies have been preparing for them, trying to increase support for candidates which they back.
Tatyana Shakirova, a spokeswoman for the regional health ministry in Omsk, said: “We confirm that Alexei Navalny has been hospitalized in Omsk and that doctors assess his condition as serious...Doctors are doing everything possible to stabilize his condition.”
“The poisoning version is one of several versions being considered. It’s not possible now to say what the reason was.”
Passenger Pavel Lebedev posted an account of what he saw on social media.
“At the start of the flight he went to the toilet and didn’t come back. He started feeling really sick. They struggled to bring him round and he was screaming in pain.”
Navalny had drunk a cup of tea at a Tomsk airport cafe before boarding his flight, Yarmysh said. The Interfax news agency quoted the cafe’s owners as saying they were checking CCTV cameras to try to establish what had happened.
Yarmysh drew a parallel with an incident last year in which Navalny suffered an acute allergic reaction that one doctor said could have resulted from poisoning with an unknown chemical.
“Obviously the same has been done to him now,” Yarmysh said.
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Russia’s arrests and detention of Navalny in 2012 and 2014 were politically-motivated and violated his human rights
"that's why Dems so desperately try to create the impression they are waaaay ahead."
Hey, who are you calling a Dem?
Biden IS way ahead and "has led Trump in every weekly survey to date."
"China is using advanced technology to create a horrific Orwellian regime unlike anything the world has ever known and is aggressively pushing it outside its own borders
they are Nazi Germany in the 1930s with quantum capabiities [sic]"
And yet American corporations still prefer to build many of their products there rather than bring their manufacturing capabilities back here to the United State and hire American workers.
Why do we keep giving these corporations huge tax breaks while they do that?
Seems to me we should be taxing them extra for moving American jobs over there.
Conservative commentator S.E. Cupp on Wednesday said the “goodness” of Joe Biden was “enough of a reason” to convince her to vote for the Democratic nominee over President Donald Trump in the 2020 election.
Cupp on her CNN show said it became “really clear to me” following Jill Biden’s emotional address Tuesday at the Democratic National Convention, in which the former second lady linked her husband’s personal grief to his mission for public service, that “these are fundamentally good people.”
“For me, all the hand-wringing over this policy or that policy, this vote or that vote, sort of faded into the background,” Cupp explained. “Biden’s goodness, his character, his love for this country and for other people suddenly felt so much more important.”
“It felt like enough, enough of a reason to give him my vote,” Cupp continued. “And then it wasn’t if I could vote for Joe Biden, but how could I not?”
“After four years of a corrupt, unethical, narcissistic, racist, sexist, bullying, shaming, vengeful, spiteful, greedy, needy, lying jerk in the White House, goodness has been gone for too long,” she added.
Cupp acknowledged there’s “a lot” of issues on which she and Biden disagree, “but we need to make America good again and I know Joe Biden wants to do that too.”
“Biden’s goodness is enough for me,” she added. “That’s why he’s getting my vote.”
At the encouragement of evangelical christians Trump has waged an all-out war on harmless lgbt people.
The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation lists 167 anti-gay actions by the Trump administration.
You can judge the quality of a civilization by the way it treats its most marginalized citizens. The United States is failing badly because of Trump and American evangelicals.
Ex-White House adviser Steve Bannon arrested in fraud scam"
NEW YORK (AP) — Former White House adviser Steve Bannon was arrested Thursday on charges that he and three others ripped off donors to an online fundraising scheme “We Build The Wall.”
The charges were contained in an indictment unsealed in Manhattan federal court.
Federal prosecutors alleged that Bannon and three others “orchestrated a scheme to defraud hundreds of thousands of donors” in connection with an online crowdfunding campaign that raised more than $25 million to build a wall along the southern border of the United States.
A phone at the office of Bannon's lawyer went unanswered Thursday morning. A spokeswoman for Bannon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Susan B. Anthony museum rejects Trump pardon, says how he can really honor her
The museum dedicated to the memory of Susan B. Anthony has, on her behalf, declined President Donald Trump’s pardon of the late women’s suffrage leader.
The National Susan B. Anthony Museum and House in Rochester, New York, explained in a lengthy Twitter thread Tuesday why it objected to Trump’s pardon for Anthony, who was arrested and charged in 1872 for voting illegally.
It also suggested some other ways that Anthony could be honored.
Trump announced the pardon Tuesday on the 100th anniversary of the passing of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote.
Critics accused Trump of performing an empty gesture with the pardon, given his recent attacks on mail-in voting and bids to cast doubt on the result of the 2020 election.
Trump has claimed he’ll only lose to Democratic nominee Joe Biden in November if the vote is “rigged.”
The museum, where Anthony lived and was arrested, noted how she’d been “outraged to be denied a trial by jury” and proposed “if one wants to honor Susan B. Anthony today, a clear stance against any form of voter suppression would be welcome.”
“Support for the Equal Rights Amendment would be well received,” it continued. “Advocacy for human rights for all would be splendid.”
“Anthony was also a strong proponent of sex education, fair labor practices, excellent public education, equal pay for equal work, and elimination of all forms of discrimination,” the museum said.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Russia isn't our #1 enemy China is and they are working to elect Sleepy, Slow Joe Biden".
Not true. The American intelligence community just reported that Russia has again unleased a massive multi-pronged attack on the election. They said China wants Biden to win but aren't engaged in a massive underground attack to do so.
This has been the overwhelming position of the intelligence community over the past several years but now Trump is squeezing them and threatening to fire them if they don't tone down how vocal they've been that Russia is in a class of its own when it comes to hacking the American election.
The Senate just released a report saying the Russian attack on the 2016 election was even larger than previously believed (and they believed it large before) and said that the Trump campaign collusion was also more extensive than first believed.
Robert Mueller released a 12 count indictment of Trump for obstruction of justice and referred it to Congress to prosecute. Republicans refused to hold Trump accountable and his authoritarian moves have gotten increasingly bolder, bringing us to the point where he has handcuffed the Post Office to, in his own words, prevent them from delivering mail in ballots.
Trump may well "win" by massive voter suppression and with the help of Russia, but there is no reason to believe he can actually win a free and fair election. Now with his handcuffing of the Post Office and its policy changed to throw out ballots mailed in if they can't be delivered immediately, Trump has ensured the election will not be free and fair...as dictators do.
Trump lackey Postmaster General Dejoy has over $30 million invested in competitors to the United States Postal Service. He stands to make millions of dollars if the Postal Service fails.
In the past this sort of blatant conflict of interest would have ended a president's administration. Now with Trump this is basically a daily occurrence, the daily onslaught of corruption intended to numb the American people to it and make them give up.
Republicans have released a plan to break up the Post Office and sell off its assets despite the 91% approval rating the public has for the Post office (the highest of any government agency). Over and over Republicans gaslight the American public and ignore its wishes.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "polls at this point always show the Dem cruising to a landslide sometimes it turns out to be right, sometimes not it's a toss up".
You have to be willingly blind to reality to think this race is "a toss up". Like in 2016, Trump will need massive voter suppression and help from Russia to win. No rational person thinks Trump has a significant chance of winning a free and fair election. Even Trump knows that, that's why he's instituted huge backlogs and slowdowns at the Post Office and had them change election mail from First Class to Bulk which requires them to throw out any mail in ballots that aren't immediately delivered.
The American public overwhelmingly wants all ballots counted, even if that takes a while. Dictators like Trump try to prevent that.
"You have to be willingly blind to reality to think this race is "a toss up"."
I didn't say it was
what level of education did you attain?
did you get a high school diploma?
it's hard to detect much evidence of education at all
what's a toss-up is how reliable polls are
at least twice in the last dozen years, Dems have been willing to sacrifice the well-being of Americans for political purposes
once was the recession of 2008
when the economy has problems, public confidence is the key to recovery
the Dems did everything they could to undermine confidence, and the recession took longer to bounce back from than any in a generation
then, there's now
Dems are trying everything they can to keep the economy as shut down as possible for as long a possible
this is causing widespread suffering but that is of no concern to Dems
they have an election to win
of course, the other election during that time, they didn't need to undermine the economy
they had the incumbency in 2012 and used the IRS to stop their opposition from forming groups to oppose Obama
he didn't win by much and that likely made the difference
Nixon resigned for misusing the IRS
Obama jetsets around
It’s kind of amazing. The Democratic Party has at its disposal pretty much all of the talent in Hollywood and yet their boring infomercial of a national convention makes watching tomatoes turn red look like the Super Bowl. Calling it boring is an insult to boring people who can at least be calm and soothing. The DNC is just flat out unwatchable. I’ve been wondering why, and I think I figured it out.
Among the myriad jobs I had in my 20 years doing theater, one of my favorites was being a stage manager. It’s a great job. I wrote a joke about it once. How many stage managers does it take to screw in a light bulb? One. Said with deadly seriousness. It is the stage manager who makes everything happen when it is supposed to happen. A live event is fraught with potential mishaps. The stage manager gives everyone five and makes sure the lights come up. The problem with the DNC? They made it a movie when a convention needs to be a theater production.
So here is a little free advice for the Republicans. First of all, in the name of all that is good and holy, there needs to be some kind of audience. I don’t care if it’s 10 people sitting in a Dairy Queen parking lot, we need to see actual people reacting to speeches and nominations in real time. I get it, Democrats are dedicated to the idea that we all have to live in hermetically sealed households with masks on until Trump is defeated. The GOP must send the opposite message.
Feature the fan base. Elections are about the American people more than they are about candidates. Speeches shot two weeks ago in some Falls Church, Virginia studio won’t cut it. It feels old, it feels prepackaged, it feels like turning the channel. Part of what people love about a live performance is that things can go wrong. An actor can go up on their lines, a gun (that’s what we call lights) can flash out, an audience member’s cell phone can go off at some critical moment. That is the titillating nature of live entertainment.
Just because there can’t be big crowds and balloon drops, although frankly at this point there probably should be, doesn’t mean the Republican convention can’t pop. Do live Q and A’s with voters, feature socially distanced watch parties, bring us in. We are a body politic, not a nation of pod people who order from Amazon and are careful not to touch our faces. We need a little action, man.
We also need some joy. The Democrats’ convention message thus far has pretty much been America sucks, but it will suck slightly less if Joe Biden is elected president. That should not be hard to top. Let us be proud of our country, show us a way forward that gives a glimpse of all of us in each other’s arms again. Give us music, dancing, empty champagne bottles, and black bow ties undone hanging from bright white collars.
The Democrats’ convention, I’d call it a sad spectacle except it isn’t a spectacle at all, it is a bet they are making. The bet is that we are all terrified to go outside, so we are meant to take comfort in sleepy old Joe Biden telling us everything will be OK someday. Not only should Republicans take this bet, they should double down on the courage of the American people and their desire to let down their hair down, pandemic or not. Donald Trump is a showman, he’s proved that time and again, and if he is to serve a second term in the White House he needs to put on a show.
More than anything else, the Republicans must make this election that feels like no other feel more like all the others. We need fun surprises; we need smiles and people all dressed up with silly hats. What we don’t need is John Kasich standing in an empty field lecturing us about how pure he is. Have Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham compete in a drinking contest, have Nikki Haley lead the country in a giant game of Pictionary. Something. Anything.
Woody Allen once said of audiences, “these people’s lives are straight lines, they’re waiting for a punch line.” And that’s right. The Democrats’ convention has been the bat mitzvah of the niece you don’t like with a cash bar and a bland chicken dinner. The GOP can do better; it would actually be hard not to better. So let’s do this. The country is ready for some fun.
I said "You have to be willingly blind to reality to think this race is "a toss up"."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "I didn't say it was"
Yes you did, you said, and I quote "polls at this point always show the Dem cruising to a landslide sometimes it turns out to be right, sometimes not it's a toss up".''
If the election were held today and all the votes counted Biden would win in a historic landslide.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "what's a toss-up is how reliable polls are"
Wrong. The polls have been pretty accurate. Just before the election in 2016 they said Hillary was up a couple percentage points and she won the popular vote by a couple of percentage points. Trump won on a technicality.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "they had the incumbency in 2012 and used the IRS to stop their opposition from forming groups to oppose Obama"
That's a lie. At the insistence of Republicans this was investigated and the claim found to be without merit. There was no bias in how the IRS treated conservative and liberal groups.
"Yes you did, you said, and I quote "polls at this point always show the Dem cruising to a landslide sometimes it turns out to be right, sometimes not it's a toss up".''"
Look at Randy lie by creative punctuation
he lies all the time
"If the election were held today and all the votes counted Biden would win in a historic landslide."
probably not
polls are usually wrong at this point in the election
"Wrong. The polls have been pretty accurate. Just before the election in 2016 they said"
another lie
I said they are wrong until the last week before the election
how stupid could Randy be to think people won't notice his lies?
"Hillary was up a couple percentage points and she won the popular vote by a couple of percentage points."
we didn't have a popular election so nobody knows if Hillary would have won one
if people had thought there was going to be one, more might have shown up to vote
you know that, Randy
why did you lie?
"Trump won on a technicality."
"technicality" is a TTF euphemism for something they truly detest: the Constitution
"That's a lie. At the insistence of Republicans this was investigated and the claim found to be without merit."
no, it wasn't
the perpetrator took the fifth
why would she do that if the claim was without merit?
was she in the mafia?
"There was no bias in how the IRS treated conservative and liberal groups."
there was
that's why Lois Lerner took the fifth
Joe Biden is the most racist Presidential candidate since LBJ, another Senate vet
in 2008, he said Obama was "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean."
of course, last fall Kamala made the case that Biden is racist
she should know
here's what he said about Indians:
“You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.”
last summer, Biden informed America that “poor kids are just as bright and talented as white kids.”
he also has talked warmly how much he misses working with segregationist Senators
he opposes school choice for black people
he sponsored a crime bill that incarcerated a generation of black men until President Trump eliminated it
but Randy doesn't care if America gets messed up with a racist President
Randy's country, Canada, is run by a little twerpy racist
A group of 70 Republican national security officials - spanning the administrations of Ronald Reagan through Donald Trump - have released a scathing letter criticizing President Trump's leadership and endorsing Joe Biden.
There's been a long and steady stream of Republicans condemning Trump and endorsing Biden. You Republican voters, this means there's something seriously wrong with him and his actions.
Wyatt/Regina, I don't believe a damn thing you claim about the investigation into whether the IRS unlawfully targeted conservative groups and no one else should believe you either.
This was investigated and found to be without merit - there was no bias against conservative groups at the IRS.
You never let go of your favourite lies and its the same way with Russia's broad and intense attack on the 2016 election. The Senate just released a report saying the Russian attack on the election and Trump's collusion with them was far more extensive than had been previously thought but you're just going to keep lying about it because anything, any lie in pursuit of unchecked power is fair game to Republicans like you and Trump.
Vladymir Putin has poisoned his only real opponent in Russia's elections. The United States used to consider itself the leader of the free world and now, silence out of the White House. Its unforgivable.
The United States used to be a defender of democracy.
"A group of 70 Republican national security officials - spanning the administrations of Ronald Reagan through Donald Trump - have released a scathing letter criticizing President Trump's leadership and endorsing Joe Biden.
There's been a long and steady stream of Republicans condemning Trump and endorsing Biden. You Republican voters, this means there's something seriously wrong with him and his actions."
there's a wealthy privileged elite in this country who has taken advantage of the ordinary working man in America for decades
Trump took them down and created an economy that works for everyone
that wealthy privileged elite is circling the wagons - Dems and Repubs
it doesn't matter, they have to protect their privileges
"I don't believe a damn thing you claim about the investigation into whether the IRS unlawfully targeted conservative groups"
you don't have to believe me
there's a historical record
Lois Lerner took the fifth
just like Al Capone
"This was investigated and found to be without merit"
no, the witnesses stonewalled
"there was no bias against conservative groups at the IRS."
oh yes, there was
"Russia's broad and intense attack on the 2016 election."
yeah, like buying facebook ads
how devious!
how can Joe Biden possibly win?
the all-powerful Kremlin is throwing everything at him, including the kitchen sink, AND FACEBOOK ADS!!!!!!!!!
LOL!
there is really no hope for Joe Biden...
for one thing, he dithered for weeks on who to ask to be his VP
and best he could find is someone who is on tape saying he is racist
that can't end well...
for another thing, every time he leaves the house and people meet him, they all say: "you know what? I don't like that guy!"
they also say why does such an old guy keep putting his hands all over women?
but the biggest reason he can't win: Russia is planning to buy a lot of Facebook ads to hypnotize Americans into voting Trump!!!!!!!!!!
"just curious: why does TTF think any minority would vote for a guy Kamala Harris called a racist less than a year ago?"
Quit your GOPer lies.
If you believe you are not lying, then let's see the videotape of Kamala Harris calling Joe Biden a racist a year ago.
In the meantime, learn some facts here:
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/08/harris-hasnt-called-biden-a-racist-or-a-rapist/
"they also say why does such an old guy keep putting his hands all over women?"
Ask your pussy grabber in chief.
"how can Joe Biden possibly win?"
By getting more votes.
Rasmussen Reports:
White House Watch
Biden Leads by Four Convention Week
Wednesday, August 19, 2020
With the Democratic National Convention in full swing and a new running mate by his side, Joe Biden holds a slightly narrower lead over President Trump in the latest Rasmussen Reports’ weekly White House Watch survey.
The new national telephone and online survey finds Biden with 48% support among Likely U.S. Voters to Trump’s 44%. Four percent (4%) prefer some other candidate, while another four percent (4%) remain undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
A week ago, Biden led by six points – 49% to 43%. The former vice president has bested Trump in every weekly survey to date, with support as high as 50%. The president has never earned more than 45% of the vote.
L.A. officials blast 'callous’ bystanders who filmed attack on trans YouTube star and her friends
Armed with a crowbar, a man in a black tank top approached Joslyn Allen on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles just after 2 a.m. on Monday, spewing hateful slurs. “He literally grabs my hand and pulls me,” Allen, who is a transgender woman, told KABC. “He’s like ‘We’re going to find your friends because I’m going to beat y’all up.' ”
Allen got away. But the man soon found her friends, Jaslene Busanet and Eden Estrada, who has a large following on YouTube as Eden the Doll. He hurled hate speech at the women, who are also transgender, and hit Busanet over the head with a bottle, knocking her to the ground, according to police.
The Los Angeles Police Department said on Thursday that they had found the man responsible for the crime, which inspired dozens to march in support of the victims and led city officials this week to slam the bystanders for failing to help the women.
Police arrested 29-year-old Carlton Callway on robbery and assault charges, calling Callway’s actions a hate crime. Authorities said in a news conference Thursday that the suspect bragged about the assault on social media. Police also identified two other men allegedly involved in the incident, charging Willie Walker, 42, with extortion. Police are still searching for a third suspect, Davion Williams, 22, who is wanted for assault.
In a news conference on Thursday, deputy chief Justin Eisenberg called the witnesses to the scene “callous” and Los Angeles City Councilman Mitch O’Farrell said he was outraged by the footage.
All the while, a crowd of onlookers stood by, watching and recording the repeated verbal and physical assaults, with many yelling their own transphobic insults at the women.
“When I saw the video, like anyone who has seen it who believes in human decency, to see this level of violence celebrated gleefully, so much so that the perpetrator himself posted on social media, is like a sucker punch to all of us who believe in civilized behavior,” O’Farrell said.
Violence against trans people is on the rise nationwide, according to the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ rights organization. So far this year there have been “at least 26 transgender or gender-nonconforming people fatally shot or killed,” according to the HRC. There were at least 27 deaths in 2019.
Allen, Busanet, and Estrada had been shopping on Hollywood Boulevard early on Monday morning when Callway allegedly began harassing them for being trans women. He found them again as they were waiting for an Uber, Estrada told WJLA. He then continued berating the women as a group of onlookers surrounded them.
“They started throwing rocks, lighters, they started calling us men,” Estrada said.
Callway then allegedly threatened Allen with a crowbar and robbed her. Not long after Allen escaped, the suspect found Busanet and Estrada. A video of the incident, which was filmed and streamed live by a spectator, shows Callway running toward them and knocking Busanet on the back of her head and running away. Police said he’d attacked her with a bottle...
Fox News Hosts Lavish Praise On Biden’s DNC Speech: ‘Best He’s Ever Been’
Chris Wallace, Bret Baier, Dana Perino and Karl Rove all gave the former vice president high marks.
Fox News hasn’t been friendly territory for former Vice President Joe Biden, but many of the conservative network’s personalities offered praise for the Democratic presidential candidate’s acceptance speech on Thursday night.
Although President Donald Trump has tried to portray Biden as “not all there” and “mentally shot” as well as a captive of the far left, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace said the president will have a tough time with that argument after Biden’s speech at the Democratic National Convention.
“I thought that he blew a hole, a big hole, in that characterization,” Wallace said. “It seems to me that after tonight, Donald Trump is going to have to run against a candidate, not a caricature.”
Fellow Fox News personality Bret Baier was similarly effusive about Biden’s performance.
“He’s not known for his public speaking, but this ― I’ve been seeing him speak on the stump many, many times ― was the best he’s been as far as his delivery,” Baier said.
Fox News host Dana Perino said Biden “hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth.”
“He had pace, rhythm, energy, emotion and delivery,” she said. “I think if he looks back, he’s gonna say, that’s probably the best speech of his life.”
Even Fox News contributor Karl Rove offered praise, saying Biden portrayed himself as a unifier.
“He did so very effectively and if I were a Republican strategist in the Trump campaign, I’d be worried about how long and how effectively he carries that theme forward,” Rove said. “Because that’s the thing that will keep the swing voters in his camp ― if they are in his camp ― or bring them to him.”
President Donald Trump expanded his “birther” conspiracy theories on Thursday to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, telling a crowd in Pennsylvania that Biden “wasn’t born” in the state because he moved to Delaware with his family when he was a child.
“He’d say he was born here,” Trump told listeners in Scranton. “But he left when he was like 8, 9 or 10. So he left 68 years ago, he left — a long time ago. So I view it differently. He wasn’t born here. He abandoned Scranton!”
Trump conceded: “His family had something to do with that, you know, his parents. But he left Scranton.”
Biden was born in Scranton in 1942 and moved from the state to Mayfield, Delaware, with his family when he was 13, according to his biography. Trump didn’t name the state he believes counts as Biden’s birthplace.
Trump repeatedly pushed the false and racist conspiracy theory that former President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. He has also recently questioned the citizenship of Biden’s running mate Kamala Harris, saying she may not “meet the requirements” to run as vice president because her parents were immigrants — even though she was born in California. Everyone born in the U.S. is an American citizen under the Constitution.
Apparently the "very stable genius" has no idea what it means to "born" somewhere.
Not sure if it's because of his ongoing problems with English... or geography.
Anyone got a Sharpie so they can draw it on a map for him?
Now that the Democrats have finally finished inflicting their excruciating “virtual convention” on us, it’s useful to consider what they inadvertently revealed about their biggest worry as the November election looms.
Nowhere was that angst more obvious than in Wednesday’s soporific speech by Kamala Harris accepting the party’s vice presidential nomination.
She began by invoking 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, failing to mention that it was passed and shepherded through the ratification process by the Republican Party, then segued to a desperate plea: “It’s not about Joe or me.… It’s about you … and getting out the vote.”
Translation: “The Biden presidential campaign suffers from a deadly enthusiasm deficit.”
In 2016, it was Hillary Clinton’s inability to motivate these voters that cost her Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And, as the CBC’s Eric Grenier points out, Biden is doing even worse than Clinton in these states.
That deficit is, of course, why Harris was rescued from the rubble of her failed presidential campaign and installed on the Democratic ticket.
The Biden campaign is desperate to increase enthusiasm among the minority voters whose support for his candidacy remains so tepid that it threatens his already shrinking chances of winning in November.
The Biden campaign clearly believes that putting a woman of color on the Democratic presidential ticket will convince this portion of the electorate to ignore his well-documented opposition to desegregation and long history of hobnobbing with white supremacists.
The Harris nomination confirms that Biden believes minority voters are idiots.
He and his handlers believe they will forget that Harris achieved her highest poll numbers last year by attacking him for his record on race and effusive praise of notorious segregationists such as Sens. James Eastland (D-Miss.) and Herman Talmadge (D-Ga.).
During a Democratic debate Harris berated Biden as follows: “It was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and careers on the segregation of race in this country.”
This may have endeared Harris to the Democratic National Committee.
Nonetheless, her addition to their presidential ticket has damaged the longtime loyalty the party has enjoyed among minorities, according to a new Rasmussen poll:
Democrats overwhelmingly like the California senator and have their eye on her to hold the top spot in 2024 if the Democratic ticket loses this time around, but a third of black voters say the announcement makes them less likely to throw their support behind the Democratic ticket
Among all voters, nearly half (49%) view Harris favorably and 44% view her unfavorably, with 28% who say Very Favorable and 33% who say Very Unfavorable.
That the addition of Harris to the Democratic ticket makes it less appealing to black voters shouldn’t be surprising. A recent Economist/YouGov survey found that only 51 percent of them answered “Yes” when asked if Biden should select an African-American to be his party’s nominee for vice president. There is more bad news in the American University Black Swing Voter Project, as reported in The Conversation: “Our new survey of 1,215 African Americans in battleground states — Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, North Carolina and Georgia reveals … [o]nly 47% of those Black Americans under 30 years old that we surveyed plan to vote for the presumed Democratic presidential nominee.” And it gets worse:
In our poll, 31% of Black Americans under 30 say they probably won’t vote in this election. That may sound pretty good, given the average U.S. voter turnout of around 60% in recent elections.
But survey respondents of all stripes tend to wildly overestimate their intention to vote.
Indeed, about half of our Black survey respondents under 30 say they don’t often vote … providing a somewhat more realistic estimate of the percentage.
These respondents, remember, are from swing states Biden must win.
They are concentrated in large cities that any Democrat has to carry to offset the rural and suburban areas that usually lean Republican.
In 2016, it was Hillary Clinton’s inability to motivate these voters that cost her Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
And, as the CBC’s Eric Grenier points out, Biden is doing even worse than Clinton in these states: “His margin with Trump is two points lower than Clinton’s was at this point in 2016 in Iowa and Pennsylvania, three points narrower in Michigan and Minnesota and four points tighter in Wisconsin and Ohio.”
Moreover, the RealClearPolitics average shows Biden’s thin lead in these states shrinking.
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