US Politics

[Tracker]

Here are 6 signs Trump may use DHS stormtroopers to stop Democrats from voting

Last night I wrote about Trump’s use of ICE and Border Patrol stormtroopers under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security to detain and intimidate peaceful protesters. In that piece I speculated that Trump was not only testing the waters of creating his own personal paramilitary domestic security force and attempting to please the most sadistic elements of his base, but also that he was taking the natural actions an executive might take if he actually believed the dystopian propaganda about America’s cities being promulgated every day on Fox News.

But there is another deeply alarming possibility to consider. This November will be the first since the expiration of  a 1982 consent decree in which the Republican National Committee will be freed to conduct voter suppression and intimidation en masse.

As Andy Kroll recently explained at Rolling Stone:

The result of the suit was a 1982 consent decree between the Democratic and Republican parties. Even though the RNC refused to admit wrong-doing in New Jersey, the group agreed to stop harassing and intimidating voters of color, including by deputizing off-duty law-enforcement officers and equipping those officers with guns or badges. Over the next three decades, Democrats marshaled enough evidence of ongoing Republican voter suppression to maintain the consent decree until 2018, when a federal judge lifted the order.

The 2020 presidential election will be the first in nearly 40 years when the RNC isn’t bound by the terms of the 1982 decree. Clark, the Trump campaign lawyer, told the group of Republicans at the private meeting last November that the end of the consent decree was “a huge, huge, huge, huge deal,” freeing the RNC to directly coordinate with campaigns and political committees on so-called Election Day operations. The RNC is sending millions of dollars to state Republican parties to vastly expand these measures, which include recruiting 50,000 poll observers to deploy in key precincts.

So consider the following facts:

1) The Republican National Committee under Trump is set to deploy tens of thousands of likely armed, unbadged goons to try to intimidate voters of color from exercising their right of suffrage;

2) Both Border Patrol and ICE are functioning as largely unaccountable enforcers of the president’s personal whims and interpretations of law, detaining citizens for hours without explanation or formal charges, and operating in direct conflict with local mayors and governors;

3) Border Patrol and ICE both have stridently bigoted, conservative organizational cultures hostile to most people of color and more liberal, urban areas generally–and they are well aware that their powers will likely be curtailed under a possible future Democratic administration;

4) Trump continues to ramp up rhetoric against nonexistent “voter fraud” in liberal areas. His focus has primarily been on vote-by-mail as a result of the COVID pandemic, but imaginary in-person voter impersonation fraud among communities of color in Democratic-leaning cities has long been a Republican obsession. A senior legal adviser to the Trump campaign recently declared that Trump would win even California if voting were “fair,” showing just how deeply the conspiratorial thinking around this issue runs in top GOP circles.

5)  Acting Department of Homeland Security chief Chad Wolf appears to have no constraints on his behavior or his overheated rhetoric, and that the Trump Administration is planning to scale up the use of border patrol agents as a conservative paramilitary nationwide.

6) Donald Trump and his campaign team know by now that absent some explosive scandal around Biden or other unpredictable event to change the fundamentals of the race, the president’s only path to victory lies not in persuading a majority of voters but in choosing his own electorate by suppressing the votes of the majority of Americans who despise him.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/here-are-6-signs-trump-may-use-dhs-stormtroopers-to-stop-democrats-from-voting/

[Tracker]

42 minutes ago, Mr Dee said:

Imagine that, Desantis falsifying figures! 

 

And reports out of Texas say that the governor there is fudging the numbers as well. Truly, America is a failed nation and verging on an idiocracy.

[rebusrankin]

So I noticed on Twitter this morning that Hank Hill was trending. Yep, people are debating whether a cartoon character would be a Trump voter. Similar discussions on Al Bundy and Ron Swanson.

[do or die]

17 minutes ago, Tracker said:

And reports out of Texas say that the governor there is fudging the numbers as well. Truly, America is a failed nation and verging on an idiocracy.

Some reports about this kind of stuff from Georgia, as well....

[Tracker]

NYTimes investigation finds Trump administration was desperate to shift blame for a crisis of its own creation

Conducting over two dozen interviews with senior administration and public health officials, and consulting a cache of previously unavailable documents, the New York Times has uncovered what now seems obvious to everyone except perhaps Trump’s dwindling and ignorant base of supporters: the Trump administration deliberately sought to shift blame for its botched handling of the Covid-19 pandemic to the states, in what the Times authors aptly characterize as a “catastrophic policy blunder” and “one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations.”

A team in the White House led by President Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, met daily on the crisis, but the ultimate goal was shifting responsibility. “They referred to this as ‘state authority handoff,’ and it was at once a catastrophic policy blunder and an attempt to escape blame for a crisis that had engulfed the country — perhaps one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations,” write Michael D. Shear, Noah Weiland, Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman and David E. Sanger.

Other than Trump himself, two of the officials taking a lead role in causing this catastrophe, according to the Times, were Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House Coronavirus Task Force leader Deborah Birx. Birx’s role in delivering deliberately upbeat information to Trump (in the face of dire negative news directly to the contrary) played a major role in Trump’s decision-making, according to the Times, which refers to her as the “chief evangelist” portraying the threat from the virus as “fading.” (The Times article in fact contains an entire, devastating segment explicating Birx’s influence on the policy; she declined to be interviewed for the article).

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/nytimes-investigation-finds-trump-administration-was-desperate-to-shift-blame-for-a-crisis-of-its-own-creation/

[Tracker]

Trump Won't Say Whether He Will Accept 2020 Election Results: 'I Have To See'

During an interview with "Fox News Sunday," the president claimed again without evidence that mail-in voting will "rig" the election. President Donald Trump wouldn’t say whether he will accept the results of the general election in November during an interview with “Fox News Sunday,” claiming again without evidence that the process is rigged before any votes have been cast.

Host Chris Wallace asked Trump if he was a good loser, to which the president responded that he is not. “But are you gracious?” Wallace pressed.

“You don’t know until you see,” Trump said. “It depends. I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election. I really do.”

Asked if he’s suggesting he might not accept the results of the election, Trump said, “I have to see.”

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/trump-fox-news-sunday-accept-election-2020_n_5f1459e9c5b6d14c33686eab?ri18n=true

[bustamente]

1 hour ago, Tracker said:

And reports out of Texas say that the governor there is fudging the numbers as well. Truly, America is a failed nation and verging on an idiocracy.

Sneaky graphs for the hillbillies to ingest

 

[Tracker]

 

 

 

                                      

[blue_gold_84]

7 hours ago, bustamente said:

Ladies and Gentlemen the POTUS, just so sad what the people of the United States elected.

 

Oof.

5 hours ago, Tracker said:

....America is a failed nation and verging on an idiocracy.

Verging...? It's already there.

[bustamente]

 

[Mark H.]

So, apparently their income threshold for the first round of stimulus cheques was $99 000.  How on earth does someone with almost 100K income need a stimulus cheque? 

[Mr Dee]

 

An attempt to scare Texans through Cruz control..

[GCJenks]

1 hour ago, Mark H. said:

So, apparently their income threshold for the first round of stimulus cheques was $99 000.  How on earth does someone with almost 100K income need a stimulus cheque? 

I am not 100% sure but as I understand that was the threshold for the $1200 payout. Over $100 000 got more... They have also added all kinds of other smaller packages including one for livestock producers that paid a certain amount / head of cattle etc.

 

 

[FrostyWinnipeg]

23 minutes ago, Mr Dee said:

 

 

And then what would I do?

[Fred C Dobbs]

Quote

 

 

[Tracker]

 

Armed ‘Volunteers’ Defend White Supremacy in Charlottesville

The TV cameras left but the white supremacists dug in, with law enforcement’s tacit approval, to “defend” the same Confederate statues that inspired the Unite the Right rally.
In the pre-dawn hours of Monday, July 13, an anti-racist activist in Charlottesville, Virginia, awoke to find that someone, in the dark of night, had planted a flaming tiki torch on their front lawn. About half an hour later, another local anti-racist organizer would discover a blazing tiki-torch had also been placed, in his words, “very carefully and deliberately next to my mailbox.” Later in the day, another tiki-torch was found—this one unlit and abandoned by the side of a road, along with a bottle of a fuel, near the home of a third activist. The message was clear.

“Tiki torches are irrevocably linked to August 11th and 12th,” one of the targeted activists told me, referring to the mob of neo-Nazis and Trumpists who descended on Charlottesville in 2017. “And so for us here, it's impossible to see this as anything other than intimidation, and I would say you'd have to be incredibly naive not to think of it as a threat of violence… It's clearly an effort to get myself and others to stop the work we do and to frighten us.”

Three years after the Unite the Right rally, the national spotlight has moved on from Charlottesville but the white nationalists have not. Instead, openly armed “volunteers” are now posting themselves in public parks—making those parks feel much less safe, or public, to many—to protect monuments to racism. 

https://www.thedailybeast.com/armed-volunteers-defend-white-supremacy-in-charlottesville?ref=home

[Tracker]

FINALLY, A GLIMPSE OF SANITY IN THE GOP:

 

Lincoln Project co-founder details how the conservative group will deal with Trump-enabling Republicans after the president is ousted

In an interview with the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, one of the founders of the Never-Trumper Lincoln Project said he is personally seeking “atonement” for some of the Republicans he once helped into office, and that the group is making plans to eliminate all traces of Trumpism once the president is gone. Lumped in with those “traces” are the GOP lawmakers who have enabled the president.

According to John Weaver — who admitted that he helped get former GOP Senator Jeff sessions elected — the group has no plans to disband should Trump go down to defeat in November.

With Sargent writing, “The Lincoln Project’s declared mission is ‘defeating Trump and Trumpism at the ballot box.’ That includes a pledge to elect Democrats over Republicans who, like Trump, do not ‘support the Constitution,’ he went on to point out that the group has been notable for the inclusion of Kellyanne Conway’s husband George, and longtime GOP strategist Rick Wilson known for his hard-hitting attacks on Democrats.

Asked whether “the Lincoln Project is breaking permanently with the GOP embrace of voter suppression, gerrymandering and other anti-democratic tactics,” Weaver said absolutely, adding they are commited to ensuring the “drive-by Jim Crowism in many parts of the country is put to an end.”

Asked about his work for Sessions, Weaver replied, “I have my own atonement to do every day about that. Did I contribute to putting a brick in the road to where we are today? Yeah, I did.”

The political strategist pointed out that the group plans to release get-out-the-vote ads to go with the blunt-talking ads they have already aimed at Trump and GOP senators like Lindsey Graham (SC) and Susan Collins of Maine. Which brought up what the group plans to do after the election.

Pressed whether the Lincoln Project will run “ads attacking President Biden for raising taxes on oil companies in early 2021,” Weaver said ‘no.’

“We’re not gonna do that,” he explained. ““He [Biden] will have a mandate to clean up the mess that Trump has created with the help of his enablers. That shouldn’t be held up. We intend to do all we can to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“Indeed, in Weaver’s telling, binding the ‘wounds’ of Trump, as the group’s mission puts it, includes working against Republicans who try to prevent Biden from addressing our deep crises, particularly among Trumpist Republicans such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) who use this to position themselves for 2024,” Sargent wrote, adding that Weaver told him, "We will not stand on the sidelines if an attempt to bind the wounds is held up. We plan on participating in that debate.”

[Mr Dee]

Perfect response

 

 

[Tracker]

Netflix Exposes Trump’s Shady Mob Ties in ‘Fear City: New York vs. The Mafia’

In the 1970s and 1980s, New York City was controlled by five major mob outfits—the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese families—that not only ran the region’s various illegal rackets, but also effectively operated the billion-dollar construction industry that was transforming the metropolitan landscape. Fear City: New York vs. The Mafia is the true story of the law enforcement and prosecutorial efforts to take down those kingpins, which played out in a manner eerily reminiscent of The Wire. And unsurprisingly, at least for those who lived in or around the five boroughs during that era, it’s a tale of crime and vice that invariably involves Donald Trump.

The current commander-in-chief factors into the final episode of director Sam Hobkinson’s three-part Netflix miniseries (debuting July 22), since his Fifth Avenue Trump Tower was one of countless projects the mafia had a hand in completing. “So I told him that there’s jobs in here that did count, like Trump. Nineteen million,” says a gangster on a federal wiretap recording, thereby directly linking the future president to the shady mobsters who governed New York’s concrete and cement unions (and businesses). These crooks regulated which of eight chosen firms would get contracts and, in the process, kickback points from the gigs to their criminal superiors. As Fear City makes clear in just a few short minutes, anyone like Trump, who was knee-deep in the real estate scene, was invariably a bedfellow (either directly or indirectly) with the mafia.

[Tracker]

Trump Congratulates Self for Wearing Mask After Months of Refusing to Wear One

A week after he publicly donned a face mask for the first time following months of refusal, President Donald Trump—who still opposes a nationwide mask mandate—posted a photo of himself with a face mask while declaring that “many people say” that it’s “patriotic” to wear a mask.

“We are United in our effort to defeat the Invisible China Virus, and many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance,” he wrote. “There is nobody more Patriotic than me, your favorite President!”

In an interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace, the president—who has only publicly worn a mask once and defied mask guidelines in the past—said he was a “believer in masks” while stopping short of endorsing a federal mandate, saying he’ll leave it up to the governors. On Monday morning, meanwhile, U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams literally begged Fox News viewers to wear masks to stem the spread of the virus that’s killed over 140,000 Americans.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-congratulates-self-for-wearing-mask-after-months-of-refusing-to-wear-one?ref=home

(Aaaand...Trump falls back to using racist terms again)

[Tracker]

Trump Threatens to Send Federal Law Enforcement Into New York, Chicago

President Donald Trump on Monday threatened to send federal law-enforcement officials into cities like New York and Chicago following his deployment of such forces to Portland, Oregon, over the weekend to crack down on protesters.

“New York and Chicago and Philadelphia, Detroit, and Baltimore and all of these—Oakland is a mess—we are not going to let this happen in the country, all run by liberal Democrats,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office. “We’re going to have more federal law enforcement, that I can tell you.”

In defiance of both state and local governments, Trump over the weekend escalated operations against protesters in Oregon, with Customs and Border Patrol agents snatching demonstrators off the streets and putting them into unmarked vans for detentions. The state’s attorney general filed a lawsuit against the feds, accusing them of unlawfully detaining protesters. The ACLU has also sued federal agents and local law enforcement, calling the situation a “constitutional crisis.”

Nevertheless, Trump on Monday cheered the feds’ encroachment into Portland while threatening to do the same in other cities: “They’ve done a fantastic job, been there three days, and they have done a fantastic job in a very short period of time, no problem. A lot of people in jail, these are anarchists. These are not protesters. These are people that hate our country. We are not going to let it go forward.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-threatens-to-send-federal-law-enforcement-into-new-york-chicago

(If this doesn't sound like dictatorial law enforcement, I don't know what it)

[Fred C Dobbs]

Trump won Ohio in 2016 but it's now a toss up between him and Biden. This can't be good news for his campaign:

Quote

 

 

[17to85]

On 2020-07-19 at 7:35 PM, blue_gold_84 said:

 

On 2020-07-19 at 2:19 PM, Tracker said:

....America is a failed nation and verging on an idiocracy.

Verging...? It's already there.

at least in idiocracy they had a president who was willing to listen to the smartest person in the world. 

[Mr Dee]

The courts will likely have the final say...

 

 

[do or die]

Trump holding a "Coronavirus press conference".....without any of the medical people from the Coronavirus Task Force, present

While listening to him rattle off some"facts" in rapid fire fashion, I learned that

US doing better than the EU
Numbers are actually going down, across the deep South
Economy becoming very strong - tremendous success story
US Number 2 in the World in testing
He (Trump) saved millions of lives by doing the initial shut down
As far as PPE ..."We have zero unfulfilled requests'"

He didn't get around to mentioning any federal strategy for testing, PPE or tracing,  Just ran out of time, I guess....