Last Call For Climate Of Destruction, Con't

The worst wildfire season in West Coast history is torching millions of acres across multiple states and Californians are facing the prospect that the Golden State's golden days are permanently over.

This is the latest iteration of the California Dream, a Gold Rush-era slogan meant to capture the hopeful migration of an old nation to a new, rich West. For generations, the tacit agreement for California residents resembled a kind of too-good-to-be-true deal. Live in the lovely if often drought-plagued Sierra, or beneath the beachfront Pacific Coast cliffs, and work in an economy constantly reinventing itself, from Hollywood to the farms of the San Joaquin to Silicon Valley.

But for many of the state’s 40 million residents, the California Dream has become the California Compromise, one increasingly challenging to justify, with a rapidly changing climate, a thumb-on-the-scales economy, high taxes and a pandemic that has led to more cases of the novel coronavirus than any other state.

During the course of his term, President Trump has singled out California, a state he lost by 30 percentage points, as an example of Democrat-caused urban unrest, irresponsible immigration policy and poor forest management, even though nearly 60 percent of the state’s forests are managed by the federal government. Several are burning today, with millions of acres already scorched.

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has responded specifically in some cases, but in others, he has invoked the California Dream, an aspirational noun attached to no other state. In his January 2019 inaugural address, Newsom warned that “there is nothing inevitable about” that dream.

“And now more than ever, it is up to us to defend it,” he said.

As the state’s climate has shifted to one of extremes, soaking wet seasons followed suddenly by sharp, dry heat and wind, no region has been safe from fire. This year — even before peak fire season has gotten underway — widespread fires have forced evacuations, from San Jose in Silicon Valley to the distant hamlet of Big Creek along the western slopes of the Sierra.

More than two dozen major fires are burning around the state and have consumed a record 3.1 million acres of land, more than 3,000 homes and at least 22 lives. Los Angeles has reported the worst air quality in three decades as a result of fires surrounding that city, already notorious for orange air and seasonal dry cough.

Wine Country has burned four straight years, with a number of vineyards lost. Homes have been destroyed far to the south in San Diego County, and more than 200 campers had to be airlifted to safety amid the Creek Fire, still burning hot and fast between Fresno and Mammoth Lakes.

The mountains behind Santa Barbara County, which gave way after being burned bare by the Thomas Fire three years ago, have turned a worrisome gray-brown tinder in recent weeks.

Those slopes, prepared by one of the state’s largest fires in history at the time, slid during rain-saturated mudslides in January 2018. Twenty people were killed in the wealthy enclave of Montecito, sweeping some from inside their foothill homes all the way to the sea.

The mandatory evacuation orders issued then included the home recently bought by Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, newcomers to Santa Barbara’s shifting climate.

“Hopefully, this is a wake-up call,” said Anne-Marie Bonneau, who two decades ago left her home in Ontario, Canada, for the Bay Area but misses the clean air and less-fractious political environment beyond the northern border. “What is it going to take for this country to do something about the climate crisis? Millions of people are affected by this.”

She sees what is happening in California as just the beginning of what is to come across the continent.

The Trump regime's response?  Climate change doesn't exist, and California can go extinguish itself.

David Legates, a University of Delaware professor of climatology who has spent much of his career questioning basic tenets of climate science, has been hired for a top position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Legates confirmed to NPR that he was recently hired as NOAA's deputy assistant secretary of commerce for observation and prediction. The position suggests that he reports directly to Neil Jacobs, the acting head of the agency that is in charge of the federal government's sprawling weather and climate prediction work.

Neither Legates nor NOAA representatives responded to questions about Legates' specific responsibilities or why he was hired. The White House also declined to comment.

Legates has a long history of using his position as an academic scientist to publicly cast doubt on climate science. His appointment to NOAA comes as Americans face profound threats stoked by climate change, from the vast, deadly wildfires in the West to an unusually active hurricane season in the South and East. 

A second Trump term will continue to make the effects of climate change worse as the regime will actively pollute more, burn more carbon, and spend less money on mitigation and prevention. Ironically, it's rural Trump voters who operate farms and ranches who will be the hardest hit, but they've already shown they will vote for him even as he continues to destroy their livelihoods.

It's a death cult, and we're all going to be put to the torch.

Biden, His Time, Con't

"I can't stand it, I know you planned it
I'mma set it straight, this Watergate
I can't stand rockin' when I'm in here
'Cause your crystal ball ain't so crystal clear
So while you sit back and wonder why
I got this fuckin' thorn in my side
Oh my god, it's a mirage
I'm tellin' y'all, it's sabotage"

--Beastie Boys, "Sabotage"

If somehow we get to the point where Joe Biden is declared the winner of the election, I'm glad that his planned transition team understands that the Trump regime will do everything in its power to sabotage the country and hold America hostage in order to force the Biden administration and their allies to spare the Trumps from justice.

Joe Biden’s transition team has expanded its fundraising goal far beyond what Hillary Clinton raised in 2016, anticipating that, should they prevail in November, the Trump administration could actively work against their efforts and that the coronavirus pandemic will make a presidential changeover more difficult than ever.

The Biden transition team is aiming to raise at least $7 million by Election Day and build a staff of at least 350 people by Inauguration Day, according to a person familiar with the transition’s planning, while another person said the total fundraising goal is $7 million to $10 million.

The budget far exceeds the $2.1 million that Clinton raised for her transition planning by Election Day 2016, or the $6.5 million Trump’s transition raised before he assumed the presidency. Mitt Romney in 2012 raised $8.9 million for what is considered the most robust prior effort to plan a transition hand-off between two different parties.

Several people involved in raising money for Biden’s transition said the pitch to potential donors leans on fears that President Donald Trump will not ease the handover process if he loses. That possible complication, along with the dueling health and economic crises hitting the country, will require more staffing and resources for a Biden administration-in-waiting.
“They’re quietly organizing people to say, this is going to be a very, very difficult transition,” said a California-based strategist who advises Democratic donors and requested anonymity to detail the fundraising pitch and other sensitive conversations about the Biden transition. “Trump is going to make this extremely difficult, so we need to be prepared.”

The Biden transition team has to not just "hit the ground running".  They can't afford to move at ground speeds at all, they have to be moving at rocket speed to have a chance to even begin to correct things come January.  Trump will ruthlessly try to wreck everything in order to save his own ass. If Biden's people aren't ready to stop him and to make it clear that this may not be a peaceful transition of power in any way, we're facing a disaster.

I don't know what Trump will try, but we need every contingency plan in the book, and more importantly the resources to execute all those plans.

We'll need everything we can get to survive the next six months.

That starts with your vote for Joe Biden.

Sunday Long Read: Breonna Taylor's Life Mattered

New York Times investigative reporter Rukmini Callimachi takes a critical look at the Louisville Metro Police Department's numerous failures, the failures of Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer and City Council, the failures of state Attorney General David Cameron, that still have failed to give anyone justice for the murder of Breonna Taylor here in Kentucky in March.

Breonna Taylor had just done four overnight shifts at the hospital where she worked as an emergency room technician. To let off some steam, she and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, planned a date night: dinner at a steakhouse, followed by a movie in bed.

Usually, they headed to his apartment, where he lived alone and she had left a toothbrush and a flat iron. But that night, they went to the small unit she shared with her younger sister, who was away on a trip. It was dark when the couple pulled into the parking lot, then closed the door to Apartment 4 behind them.

This was the year of big plans for the 26-year-old: Her home was brimming with the Post-it notes and envelopes on which she wrote her goals. She had just bought a new car. Next on the list: buying her own home. And trying to have a baby with Mr. Walker. They had already chosen a name.

She fell asleep next to him just after midnight on March 13, the movie still playing. “The last thing she said was, ‘Turn off the TV,’” he said in an interview.

From the parking lot, undercover officers surveilling Ms. Taylor’s apartment before a drug raid saw only the blue glow of the television.

When they punched in the door with a battering ram, Mr. Walker, fearing an intruder, reached for his gun and let off one shot, wounding an officer. He and another officer returned fire, while a third began blindly shooting through Ms. Taylor’s window and patio door. Bullets ripped through nearly every room in her apartment, then into two adjoining ones. They sliced through a soap dish, a chair and a table and shattered a sliding-glass door.

Ms. Taylor, struck five times, bled out on the floor.

Breonna Taylor has since become an icon, her silhouette a symbol of police violence and racial injustice. Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris spoke her name during their speeches at the Democratic convention. Oprah Winfrey ceded the cover of her magazine for the first time to feature the young Black woman, and paid for billboards with her image across Louisville. Beyoncé called for the three white officers who opened fire to be criminally charged. N.B.A. stars including LeBron James devoted postgame interviews to keeping her name in the news.

In Louisville, demonstrators have led nightly protests downtown, where most government buildings and many businesses are now boarded up. As outrage mounted, the city fired one of the officers, pushed out the police chief and passed “Breonna’s Law,” banning “no-knock” warrants, which allow the police to burst into people’s homes without warning. Protesters say that is not enough.

Nearly six months after Ms. Taylor’s killing, the story of what happened that night — and what came before and after — remains largely untold. Unlike the death of George Floyd, which was captured on video as a white police officer in Minneapolis knelt on his neck, Ms. Taylor’s final moments remain in shadow because no such footage exists.

But a clearer picture of Ms. Taylor’s death and life, of the person behind the cause, emerged from dozens of interviews with public officials and people who knew her, as well as a review of over 1,500 pages of police records, including evidence logs, transcripts of jailhouse recordings and surveillance photos. The Louisville Metro Police Department, citing a pending investigation, declined to answer simple questions about the case or make anyone available for interviews.

The daughter of a teenage mother and a man who has been incarcerated since she was a child, Ms. Taylor attended college, trained as an E.M.T. and hoped to become a nurse. But along the way, she developed a yearslong relationship with a twice-convicted drug dealer whose trail led the police to her door that fateful night.

Sloppy surveillance outside her apartment in the hours before the raid failed to detect that Mr. Walker was there, so the officers expected to find an unarmed woman alone. A failure to follow their own rules of engagement and a lack of routine safeguards, like stationing an ambulance outside, compounded the risks that night.

While the department had gotten court approval for a “no-knock” entry to search for evidence of drugs or cash from drug trafficking, the orders were changed before the raid to “knock and announce,” meaning that the police had to identify themselves.

The officers have said that they did; Mr. Walker says he did not hear anything. In interviews with nearly a dozen neighbors, only one person said he heard the officers shout “Police!” a single time.

Sam Aguiar, a lawyer representing Ms. Taylor’s family, blames “catastrophic failures” by the police department for the young woman’s death. “Breonna Taylor,” he said, “gets shot in her own home, with her boyfriend doing what’s as American as apple pie, in defending himself and his woman.”

The biggest clue here is that the investigation has already taken six months and no arrests or charges have been filed. It's pretty clear that Louisville Metro PD and Mayor Fischer want this to go away, and that State AG Daniel Cameron will do nothing.

I guarantee that the grand jurt won't return an indictment, and after that is anyone's guess.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

Another career prosecutor is quitting their role with the Barr "Justice" Department, as St. Paul prosecutor John Choi is ending his role on a DoJ advisory group over the group being pressured to attack local government prosecutors and district attorneys for using discretion to combat the systemic racism of federal minimum sentencing guidelines.

An elected prosecutor who took a role in Donald Trump’s presidential commission on law enforcement has resigned, telling Attorney General William Barr that he is concerned the commission was “intent on providing cover for a predetermined agenda that ignores the lessons of the past” and will issue a final report that “will only widen the divisions in our nation.”

Trump formed the Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice late last October, announcing its formation at the International Association of Chiefs of Police’s annual meeting. Trump’s order mandated that the commission issue a report within one year ― a deadline that falls just days ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

The commission is stacked with members of law enforcement, and the American Civil Liberties Union has questioned whether it is a “sham commission formed only for the purposes of advancing a ‘Thin Blue Line’ law and order agenda.”

John Choi, the elected prosecutor in Ramsey County, Minnesota, served as a member of the commission’s criminal justice system personnel intersection working group. But Choi, whose county includes the city of St. Paul, wrote in a letter to Barr that he was quitting his role on one of the commission’s 17 working groups because he worries the final report “will vilify local prosecutors who exercise their well settled prosecutorial discretion consistent with their community’s values and the interests of justice.”

The Justice Department struck back at Choi, with one official telling HuffPost that Choi didn’t really resign because the working groups had already completed their work. The two chairs of the working group ― former U.S. Attorney Jay Town and Cook County Judge William O’Brien ― also criticized Choi’s work in interviews with HuffPost. Town said Choi offered “very little in substance,” while O’Brien said his opinions “didn’t have a lot of depth.” 

Choi wrote in his letter to Barr that he previously tried to communicate to the commission that it “needed to listen to those who have been negatively impacted by policing and the criminal justice system.” But he said it is now clear that engaging communities to help bridge the divide between communities and law enforcement “was never the intended goal.”
“Rather than examine how decades of over-policing in communities of color have created that deficit of trust, the Commission was instead encouraged to study ‘underenforcement’ of criminal laws and ‘refusals by State and local prosecutors to enforce laws or prosecute categories of crimes’,” Choi wrote.

“At the very beginning of this process, President Trump said the Commission would ‘have [the recommendations] soon because most of them know many of the answers before they begin.’ It is now patently obvious that he was correct ― that this process had no intention of engaging in a thoughtful and open analysis, but was intent on providing cover for a predetermined agenda that ignores the lessons of the past, furthering failed tough-on-crime policies that led to our current mass incarceration crisis and fueling divisions between our communities and our police officers,” Choi wrote.

Choi called the commission “a missed opportunity to seriously deliberate in regard to areas for improvement in law enforcement and develop thoughtful solutions to address longstanding problems in the criminal legal system.”

In hindsight it's obvious now that Choi is correct, and was correct from the moment Bill Barr became Attorney General.  Barr exists to preserve Trump's power by any means necessary.

On the Durham report, “the president wants it released before Election Day and he wants more indictments to come out of it... He has put the pressure on his attorney general here to do that.“ pic.twitter.com/Zg4BQHg4Bn

— Robert Costa (@costareports) September 12, 2020

Trump wants this to hit essentially within the next 30-40 days.  Can you imagine the headlines?

"Former Obama Officials Indicted For 'Spying' On 2016 Trump Campaign"

"Mueller Probe 'Based On Lies', Evidence 'Falsified', Durham Says"

"Durham Confirms Biden Under Investigation Days Before Election"

"Trump Demands Biden To Drop Out Of Race, 'Pay' For


Underestimate what he will do in the next five months at your own peril.

Roger Stone is making baseless accusations of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election and is urging Donald Trump to consider several draconian measures to stay in power, including having federal authorities seize ballots in Nevada, having FBI agents and Republican state officials “physically” block voting under the pretext of preventing voter fraud, using martial law or the Insurrection Act to carry out widespread arrests, and nationalizing state police forces.

Stone, a longtime confidant of the president, made the comments during a September 10 appearance on far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars network. On July 10, Trump commuted a 40-month prison sentence that was handed down to Stone after he was convicted of lying to Congress and tampering with witnesses as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into 2016 election interference. Namely, Stone lied to Congress about his contacts with WikiLeaks, which released hacked emails with the aim of boosting Trump’s prospects. In the weeks leading up to the commutation, Stone made a number of media appearances where he asked Trump to grant him clemency and said that in exchange, he could be a more effective campaigner for the president’s 2020 reelection efforts.

Stone’s efforts are now underway, and his aim appears to be to spread conspiracy theories about voter fraud and call for actions that would likely intimidate potential Joe Biden voters.

During his September 10 appearance on The Alex Jones Show, Stone declared that the only legitimate outcome to the 2020 election would be a Trump victory. He made this assertion on the basis of his entirely unfounded claim that early voting has been marred by widespread voter fraud.

 You want to bet Trump will play fair when he loses?

Many Trump allies say the president’s concerns about mail-in voting are valid — primarily his claim that unsolicited ballots and ballot applications will be sent to millions of people ineligible to vote. But they argue that in a pandemic when many people are expected to avoid the polls, it’s more important to get Republicans to vote however they can.

Four additional Republicans familiar with the situation said this point was made early on to Trump, with advisers urging him to state that he does trust some forms of remote voting. And in August, the message appeared to be sinking in — sort of.

Trump started drawing a distinction between requesting an absentee ballot and universal remote voting. And he suddenly started imploring supporters in Florida to request mail-in ballots, insisting back-to-back Republican governors had cleaned up the process in the crucial battleground state.

But Trump simultaneously continued his almost daily rants about massive election fraud and rigged elections in tweets, interviews and speeches. And then last week, while on another tirade about remote voting, Trump appeared to encourage North Carolina residents to illegally cast two ballots — by mail and in person — prompting a fresh spate of worries by his allies. Despite pointed condemnations from even some Republican election officials, Trump is still urging his supporters to go to polling stations on Election Day to see if their mail-in ballot was received, exacerbating confusion.

Already this year, about 1,000 people attempted to vote twice in Georgia’s primary and runoff elections. Another 40 did the same in Pennsylvania’s primary.

"But Trump won't possibly be allowed to do that."

"You will see a backlash the likes of which you haven't seen in many, many years" -- here's the president encouraging his supporters, many of them armed, to take matters into their own hands to stop alleged left-wing violence in cities like Chicago and Portland pic.twitter.com/CLqcLs5fWR

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 13, 2020

Oh really?

Who's going to stand up to him and say "No"?

Violence is guaranteed at this point.  Real, ugly, mass casualty violence.

You willing to be your country, your neighborhood, your family and your life on that bet?

Because frankly, by not demanding Trump's immediate ouster years ago, we already have made that bet.

And Trump controls the casino.

Last Call For Trump Goes Viral, Con't

The Trump regime is now demanding the right to openly rewrite CDC COVID-19 reports in order to help keep Trump in power, because this is what fascist regimes do.

The health department’s politically appointed communications aides have demanded the right to review and seek changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly scientific reports charting the progress of the coronavirus pandemic, in what officials characterized as an attempt to intimidate the reports’ authors and water down their communications to health professionals.
In some cases, emails from communications aides to CDC Director Robert Redfield and other senior officials openly complained that the agency’s reports would undermine President Donald Trump's optimistic messages about the outbreak, according to emails reviewed by POLITICO and three people familiar with the situation.

CDC officials have fought back against the most sweeping changes, but have increasingly agreed to allow the political officials to review the reports and, in a few cases, compromised on the wording, according to three people familiar with the exchanges. The communications aides’ efforts to change the language in the CDC’s reports have been constant across the summer and continued as recently as Friday afternoon.

The CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports are authored by career scientists and serve as the main vehicle for the agency to inform doctors, researchers and the general public about how Covid-19 is spreading and who is at risk. Such reports have historically been published with little fanfare and no political interference, said several longtime health department officials, and have been viewed as a cornerstone of the nation's public health work for decades.

But since Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official with no medical or scientific background, was installed in April as the health department's new spokesperson, there have been substantial efforts to align the reports with Trump's statements, including the president's claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or stop the reports altogether.

Caputo and his team have attempted to add caveats to the CDC's findings, including an effort to retroactively change agency reports that they said wrongly inflated the risks of Covid-19 and should have made clear that Americans sickened by the virus may have been infected because of their own behavior, according to the individuals familiar with the situation and emails reviewed by POLITICO.

Caputo's team also has tried to halt the release of some CDC reports, including delaying a report that addressed how doctors were prescribing hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug favored by Trump as a coronavirus treatment despite scant evidence. The report, which was held for about a month after Caputo’s team raised questions about its authors’ political leanings, was finally published last week. It said that "the potential benefits of these drugs do not outweigh their risks."

In one clash, an aide to Caputo berated CDC scientists for attempting to use the reports to "hurt the President" in an Aug. 8 email sent to CDC Director Robert Redfield and other officials that was widely circulated inside the department and obtained by POLITICO.

"CDC to me appears to be writing hit pieces on the administration," appointee Paul Alexander wrote, calling on Redfield to modify two already published reports that Alexander claimed wrongly inflated the risks of coronavirus to children and undermined Trump's push to reopen schools. "CDC tried to report as if once kids get together, there will be spread and this will impact school re-opening . . . Very misleading by CDC and shame on them. Their aim is clear."

This has been going on for months now.

Understand that our entire executive branch, the federal agencies under its control, all exist now with the priority to keep Donald Trump in power. It's not the only job for all these agencies, but it is the top priority. Trump has successfully suborned the entire federal apparatus to serve his interests, and the people running these agencies and Cabinet departments are there to make sure that happens.

It's horrific. The American public is secondary, if not tertiary, to the goals of Trump and the money he's making for his friends and allies.

We've got to get rid of him before more Americans die.

It's About Suppression, Con't

 I did warn everyone that the Florida state constitutional amendment battle to restore voting rights to felons would end badly for Black Floridians, and Friday's 11th Circuit ruling has just restored the Poll Tax for felons.

In a significant reversal, the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta ruled on Friday that a Florida law requiring people with serious criminal convictions to pay court fines and fees before they can register to vote is constitutional.

The decision overturned a ruling by a lower court in May that found the law discriminated against the majority of felons, many of whom are indigent, by imposing an unlawful “pay-to-vote system.”

The ruling, if upheld, will put new hurdles in place for people convicted of crimes who are seeking to vote, after Florida’s voters had amended the state’s Constitution in 2018 to end the disenfranchisement of those convicted of felonies, except for murder and sexual offenses. And with Florida a perennially close state in presidential elections, the decision could help shape the outcome this year.

The appeals court sided with the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, and found that the felons who sued had failed to prove the law violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. It reversed the prior ruling by the United States District Court in Tallahassee.

“If a State may decide that those who commit serious crimes are presumptively unfit for the franchise,” the 11th Circuit ruled, “it may also conclude that those who have completed their sentences are the best candidates for re-enfranchisement.”

At issue was a Florida law passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature and signed by Mr. DeSantis last year that required those convicted of felonies to settle their financial obligations to court before having their voting eligibility restored.

The law was passed after an overwhelming majority of Florida voters in 2018 approved Amendment 4, a landmark measure that automatically restored voting rights for people who have completed their sentences for felonies other than murder and sex crimes.

Lawyers for the DeSantis administration argued at trial that voters knew that felons would first have to pay their outstanding debts before becoming eligible to vote, a notion civil rights groups dismissed, countering that the state had no centralized system to let people know how much they might owe.

With Florida elections frequently decided by tiny margins, the restoration of felons’ voting rights was seen as a way to expand the electorate in the nation’s biggest presidential battleground state. An expert for the American Civil Liberties Union and the other civil rights groups testified at trial that more than 774,000 felons in the state owe legal financial obligations. Most criminal defendants are indigent when they are arrested.

“This ruling runs counter to the foundational principle that Americans do not have to pay to vote,” said Julie Ebenstein, a senior staff attorney with the A.C.L.U.’s Voting Rights Project. “The gravity of this decision cannot be overstated. It is an affront to the spirit of democracy.”

Again, the real issue here is that the vast majority of felons who are too poor to pay their court fines are Black or Latino, and Florida Republicans are completely okay with restoring voting rights to rich, white-collar felons who can pay while leaving non-white felons disenfranchised permanently.

The state doesn't even have a system to track exactly how much felons owe, but if they owe even a dollar, they can't vote. Effectively, the burden is placed on the felon to get their rights back even after serving their time. It's a poll tax, period.

But Trump of course packed the 11th Circuit over the last four years and now it's paying off.  Republicans will continue to rule Florida for the foreseeable future.

Trump's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Black community leaders who approached Trump in order to get help for Black America have not only found that Trump kept none of his promises and used every Black person he could get close to as a photo op, but that Trump is actively eliminating what Barack Obama did to help Black America, one checklist point at a time.

On Martin Luther King’s Birthday in January 2017, Donald J. Trump, then the president-elect, welcomed a group of civil rights leaders, led by Dr. King’s eldest son, into his office in Trump Tower.

After a tour of Mr. Trump’s celebrity curio collection (Shaquille O’Neal’s sneakers, size 22, were a highlight), the visitors presented him with a proposal intended to prevent state voter identification laws from disenfranchising people of color.

The delegation had low expectations. Mr. Trump had championed the lie that President Barack Obama was not born in America and, in their view, played to racial fears during the 2016 campaign. He quickly dashed even those modest hopes. Low turnout among Black voters, Mr. Trump declared, had helped him defeat Hillary Clinton.

“Many people didn’t go out — many Blacks didn’t go out — to vote for Hillary because they liked me. That was almost as good as getting their vote,” Mr. Trump said, lowering his voice to say the word “Blacks,” on a recording provided by a meeting participant and confirmed as authentic by three others. (A White House spokesman did not dispute the veracity of the recording.)

Mr. Trump promised he would seriously consider their proposal. It went nowhere.

“I will be better to the African-American people than anybody else in this room,” he declared just before heading down the elevator to appear before the cameras with his guests, according to the recording, which was shared with several news organizations last month.

To Mr. Trump, this was little more than a photo op: Two former aides recalled that he wanted to be seen with a group of Black leaders to rebut an assertion made by Representative John Lewis, the late civil rights paragon, who at the time had said he did not “see this president-elect as a legitimate president.”

As the 2020 campaign hits the homestretch, Mr. Trump has been claiming that he is the best president for Black Americans since Abraham Lincoln and papering over his history of racist remarks by having Black supporters at the Republican convention back his boast that he “is the least racist person in the world.”

In fact, Mr. Trump has hired very few Black officials to positions of authority in the White House and for his re-election effort. And his campaign has stoked racial divisions to an extent not seen since George Wallace’s run in 1968. He has tried to block or hamper efforts to expand ballot access. He has said Black people were “too stupid” to vote for him, according to his estranged former attorney, Michael Cohen.

When asked about Mr. Cohen’s charge, a White House spokesman emailed a statement by Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany calling Mr. Cohen, “a disgraced felon and disbarred lawyer, who lied to Congress.”

And as the 2017 meeting illustrates, many of Mr. Trump’s interactions with Black leaders have followed a similar pattern: He has turned opportunities for reconciliation, or even to debate policy differences, into empty-calorie encounters in front of the cameras, according to interviews with more than 30 Black officials, civil rights leaders, and former and current administration officials.

Trump campaign officials told reporters last week that they were working hard to slightly exceed their performance with Black voters in 2016 when they won about 8 percent of their vote. The president has also tried to mollify white moderates who might be turned off by his racial rhetoric.

The result is a jarring, split-screen approach: The president talks up his friendships with Black Americans (often famous ones like Kanye West) while running a campaign whose objective is to frighten white suburban voters into thinking a Biden presidency will bring problems from inner-city America to their front lawns.

What Trump wants is worship, adoration, and fear. Those he cannot control, he destroys. He asked us what we had to lose by supporting him. Obviously, the answer is everything.

When we told America this, we were dismissed as hysterical, hyperbolic, and crazy. The system wouldn't allow anyone as racist as "The Trump in our heads" to become President.

The system has obviously failed.  We have one chance left to correct it.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

It's becoming more and more apparent that the Trump regime is counting on a massive October Surprise that involves the possible indictment of several Obama administration officials, and the people responsible for it, Attorney General Bill Barr and US Attorney John Durham, are now facing pushback from their own people who see the writing on the wall.

Federal prosecutor Nora Dannehy, a top aide to U.S. Attorney John H. Durham in his Russia investigation, has quietly resigned from the U.S. Justice Department probe - at least partly out of concern that the investigative team is being pressed for political reasons to produce a report before its work is done, colleagues said.

Dannehy, a highly regarded prosecutor who has worked with or for Durham for decades, informed colleagues in the U.S. Attorney’s office in New Haven of her resignation from the Department of Justice by email Thursday evening. The short email was a brief farewell message and said nothing about political pressure, her work for Durham or what the Durham team has produced, according to people who received it.

Durham’s office, who has never even acknowledged that Dannehy was in Washington working for him, had no immediate comment on the resignation.

Durham recruited Dannehy to join his team after he was appointed by Attorney General William Barr more than a year and a half ago to examine the the FBI’s legal justification for a disputed counterintelligence investigation that looked for ties between President Donald J. Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian efforts to meddle in the election.

Dannehy is a career prosecutor who worked closely with Durham before leaving the U.S. Attorney’s office about a decade ago for a corporate position in the defense industry. Durham persuaded her to return to the justice department and, withing weeks, join his team in Washington in the spring of 2019.

Colleagues said Dannehy is not a supporter of President Donald J. Trump and has been concerned in recent weeks by what she believed was pressure from Barr - who appointed Durham - to produce results before the election. They said she has been considering resignation for weeks, conflicted by loyalty to Durham and concern about politics.

Durham is notoriously circumspect and neither he nor members of his team have revealed anything about the direction of their work. But Durham associates, none of whom have specific knowledge of the investigation, have said recently that it is their belief he is under pressure to produce something - perhaps some sort of report - before the presidential election in November.

The fix is in, folks. The Durham investigation is a sham. 

This is somebody John Durham went out of his way to get back on to his team, and 18 months later she has resigned knowing exactly what the appearance of her doing so would mean. She could have stuck around and said nothing in order to support her boss.

But she resigned.

This is a message, and the message is Bill Barr is planning to use the Durham investigation to win the election in the next few weeks.

Florida Schools Go Viral

Several school districts in Florida are outright defying GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis's executive order to remain silent on COVID-19 infections among schoolchildren as parents, teachers, and school administrators realize they could never keep this under wraps.

Florida school districts are defying Gov. Ron DeSantis and publicly reporting new Covid-19 cases among students and staff that the state government considers confidential.

The state Department of Health has tried to directly quash reporting on the virus in some instances, after DeSantis said K-12 testing data “needs to be put in the right context.”

With no statewide standard, local leaders are left to decide on their own how and when to report Covid-19 cases in their districts. The result is a mix of differing daily and weekly reports and digital dashboards at school districts across Florida, with some counties not reporting any data to the general public.

In Bay County, for instance, school officials are aiming to produce three coronavirus reports a week. The district initially held off reporting anything to parents and the community as it watched the Department of Health’s response to counties that had built online dashboards to track the virus.

“We don’t want to get into any trouble, but we think transparency is the best way to go,” Bay County Superintendent Bill Husfelt said in an interview.

In a message to his school district, Husfelt noted that the Department of Health had asked some districts to take down their Covid-19 dashboards. In northeast Florida, Flagler County said the state forbid its local health department to release coronavirus data tied to schools. The DeSantis administration delivered a similar message to other counties, leading the state’s largest teachers union to blast the Republican governor in ads airing in Orlando and Tampa.

The state and local showdown over coronavirus messaging is the latest example of how state health officials have aided in the Republican governor’s plan to keep schools open during the pandemic. The state health department was “notably absent” when local school boards sought advice for closing classrooms during the pandemic, essentially forcing them to reopen, a circuit court judge wrote in an Aug. 24 ruling.

DeSantis and the Florida Education Association, a teachers union, have tangled in court over the state’s hardline school reopening policy. About 1.6 million students have returned to school for in person classes, while some 1.4 million students are beginning the year online, according to the state.

It's the week after Labor Day and schools are now open across America, but it's only a matter of time now before COVID-19 cases skyrocket in the weeks ahead and schools are forced to shut down campus instruction and go to all virtual classes later this fall.

It's possible that the infections can be contained by masks and measures in place, but I just don't see it holding as flu season gets underway.  We're going to have a lot of sick kids, sick parents, teachers and educators, and we're going to then have a lot of casualties as a result, heading into the election.

This could have been prevented six months ago.  Trump knew and actively chose not to do it.

Now we have to actively choose.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Looks like Rudy Giuliani is being hung out to dry as the Trump regime has designated his main source of Ukranian evidence against Joe Biden as a Russian agent.

The U.S. Treasury Department on Thursday placed sanctions on a member of Ukraine’s parliament for running an “influence campaign” against former vice president Joe Biden, dubbing the lawmaker “an active Russian agent for over a decade” who has maintained “close connections with Russian intelligence services.”
The sanctions against Andriy Derkach — who in an attempt to tarnish the Democratic nominee for president released pilfered and edited phone conversations that Biden had years ago with Ukraine’s leadership — come less than two months before the 2020 presidential election and mark the most aggressive public action the U.S. government has taken to date to stanch foreign interference ahead of the vote.

President Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani has met at least three times with Derkach since late last year and publicized the Ukrainian lawmaker’s claims on his podcast and elsewhere, elevating what the Treasury Department has now characterized as a foreign interference campaign by an active Russian agent aimed at influencing the 2020 election. Giuliani met Derkach in Kyiv late last year, just as the House prepared to impeach Trump over a pressure campaign orchestrated by Giuliani to induce the Ukrainian government into announcing probes of Biden. Derkach later visited Giuliani in New York, months before he began releasing the tapes of Biden at news conferences in Kyiv.
Derkach “and other Russian agents employ manipulation and deceit to attempt to influence elections in the United States and elsewhere around the world,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement. “The United States will continue to use all the tools at its disposal to counter these Russian disinformation campaigns and uphold the integrity of our election system.”

The Treasury Department said Derkach had “directly or indirectly engaged in, sponsored, concealed or otherwise been complicit in foreign interference in an attempt to undermine the upcoming 2020 U.S. presidential election.”

“Today’s designation of Derkach is focused on exposing Russian malign influence campaigns and protecting our upcoming elections from foreign interference,” the department said in a statement. “This action is a clear signal to Moscow and its proxies that this activity will not be tolerated.”

Adam Silverman over at Balloon Juice explains the scam.

What the Treasury Department’s press release does not say is who, exactly, Mr. Derkach is partnered with in his activities against the United States as a Russian Intelligence Services officer. We know the answer to that because Derkach and his American accessories have been very up front about their activities. Derkach’s two main partners in his endeavors, which The Department of the Treasury has now stated unequivocally are the endeavors of the Russian Intelligence Services, are Rudy Giuliani and Chanel Rion, the far too credulous reporter from One America News Network (OANN).

Rion has her own issues, which I won’t get into here, but quite simply she is the poster girl for the counterintelligence concept of MICE: Money, Ideology, Compromise, and Ego. Rudy Giuliani is definitely one of the poster boys for MICE! He’s constantly chasing money to maintain his lavish lifestyle and pay alimony; his ideology has been all over the map for years, but basically comes down to whatever benefits Rudy Giuliani; he’s carried on multiple affairs and tries to keep them secret and he’s constantly chasing shady security consulting contracts in the post-Soviet states and the Middle East, so there’s a lot of compromising information on him out there; and his ego is ginormous!

What the Treasury Department makes clear today in their press release announcing the imposition of sanctions on Derkach, is that both Rudy Giuliani, who is the President’s personal lawyer, and Chanel Rion, who is one of his favorite reporters, have both been compromised by a Russian Intelligence officer and are being used by him to interfere in the 2020 US election to the benefit of Russia. It is important to keep in mind that both Giuliani and Rion most likely believe that they are using Derkach, not being used by Derkach, though the reality is the direction of control runs the other way. The Russians have watched and assessed exactly what bait they needed to use to attract Giuliani and Rion, as well as others like Congressman Nunes and his catspaws Derek Harvey and Kash Patel, the latter of whom is now embroiled in the new DHS whistleblower allegations just as he got himself wrapped up in the Ukraine phone call when Nunes placed him on the National Security Staff during 2019. All of these people are convinced of their own superior intelligence and the righteousness of their cause and they are desperate to be important and be world changing figures, which makes them ripe for manipulation and easy to control.

It also means that the cornerstone of the President’s impeachment defense was supplied by the Russian Intelligence Services via Derkach to and through Giuliani as the President’s pro bono personal lawyer and Rion and her reporting. And which is also being used by Senators Johnson, Grassley, and Graham in their attempts to use their Senate committees to dirty up VP Biden prior to the election.

Rudy Giuliani – America’s Mayor, Mr. a Noun, a Verb, and 9-11, the first name in cybersecurity, coveter of the position of Secretary of State, and the President’s pro bono personal lawyer – is being run as an asset by Andrii Derkach, a US identified Russian Intelligence officer who is overseeing an ongoing, active measures campaign to subvert the 2020 US election to the advantage of Russia in a war that Putin believes Russia has been fighting against the US since at least 2014. Rudy Giuliani has betrayed his country. Rudy Giuliani is currently acting against the United States on behalf of Russia’s Intelligence Services. Rudy Giuliani is a clear and present danger to the safety and security of the United States.

Keep in mind also that this is happening on the same week as 9/11, where Rudy comes out of his gopher hole every year and reminds everyone that he's really famous for being in charge when thousands of people died 19 years ago.

He's also a Russian agent's pawn and active traitor, in a clear plot to interfere with the election, one so obvious that even the Trump regime is putting an end to it.

This should be the absolute end of Trump's camapign and a Biden landslide, but of course it won't be.

We've fallen that far in four years.  We have to climb out in November with Joe Biden, or we're all lost.

StupidNews!

• CEO Jean-Sebastien Jacques of mining giant Rio Tinto has resigned in the wake of the destruction of a 46,000-year-old indigenous cultural heritage site in Australia to expand an iron mine.
• A federal judge has rejected the Trump regime's plan to exclude undocumented immigrants from the US Census as a violation of "constitutional responsibility" to count all persons in a district.
• Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be in Pennsylvania and New York today to commemorate the 19th anniversary of the September 11th attacks on America.
• Voters in Russia go to the polls for regional elections this week as Moscow is demanding access to Putin critic Alexey Navalny in Germany, insisting the regime can prove he was not poisoned.
• Donald Trump says Chinese social media app TikTok will not get an extension from its Tuesday deadline to be sold to an American firm or to be banned in the US as a national security risk.

Last Call For Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

The good news is the Breonna Taylor murder case is finally going before a grand jury. The bad news is, KY GOP Attorney General Daniel Cameron is running this show, and there's every reason to believe he's going to purposely sandbag the case.

A decision on possible charges in the Breonna Taylor case is expected soon, WAVE 3 News Troubleshooters have learned.

Multiple sources confirmed the case will be presented to a grand jury at an undisclosed location.

Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s office has been investigating the shooting death of Taylor, who was killed when LMPD narcotics officers served a warrant at her Louisville home in March.

The presentation was expected to take at least two days. The grand jury will then have time to deliberate whether any of the officers involved should face criminal charges.

Former Commonwealth’s Assistant Attorney Brian Butler said he would expect the Taylor presentation to take longer than a regular case.

“Historically in Jefferson County those cases have been presented in detail to grand juries,” said Butler, who is not involved in the case. “The grand jury can ask questions, the grand jury can interview witnesses themselves, they can ask to see additional evidence if they want to.”

Butler said grand jury members are selected randomly, and a judge usually asks questions to see if there’s any reason why they shouldn’t serve.

“In officer-involved shootings, it’s not uncommon at all to have multiple people testify,” he said.

Again, the bad news is Cameron himself. He has every reason to make this case vanish right now, and "The grand jury did not find enough evidence to go to trial" is his ticket to Trump's side in a second term, God forbid.

President Donald Trump has announced 20 people he'd consider to be on the U.S Supreme Court if he has to fill another vacancy, and among them is first-term Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron.

Cameron is 34 years old and the first Black person to independently hold statewide office in Kentucky. He is a protégé of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and worked as general counsel in his Senate office.

Trump's announcement reprises a tactic from his 2016 campaign when he provided a list of potential justices amid controversy over a Supreme Court vacancy.

"Should there be another vacancy on the Supreme Court during my presidency, my nominee will come from the names I have shared with the American public, including the original list and these 20 additions," Trump said on Wednesday.

Cameron has rocketed to public prominence over the last year — becoming the first Republican Kentucky attorney general since the 1940s and speaking at the Republican National Convention last month.

Trump also endorsed Cameron when he came to Kentucky last fall to stump for the state's Republican slate of statewide candidates.

Cameron is also overseeing the investigation into the death of Breonna Taylor, which has dragged on since May.

Now it's possible the grand jury will come back with indictments and Cameron will have to go to trial, well after the election. But there's every reason to believe the prosecution will be less than rigorous if that's the case.

Unfortunately, I expect the grand jury to come back with nothing, and I expect more protests with national focus, and I expect bad things will happen as a result.

Cameron is going to wave a wand and trash this case, and it's going to be a terrible time here in the commonwealth.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

The Trump/Russia interference in the 2016 and 2020 elections isn't going away anytime soon, and a new Homeland Security whistleblower complaint alleges that a senior intelligence official was told by the regime specifically to stop Russian all counterintelligence analysis on it.

A senior Department of Homeland Security official alleges that he was told to stop providing intelligence analysis on the threat of Russian interference in the 2020 election, in part because it “made the President look bad,” an instruction he believed would jeopardize national security.

The official, Brian Murphy, who until recently was in charge of intelligence and analysis at DHS, said in a whistleblower complaint that on two occasions he was told to stand down on reporting about the Russian threat.
On July 8, Murphy said, acting Homeland Security secretary Chad Wolf told him that an “intelligence notification” regarding Russian disinformation efforts should be “held” because it was unflattering to Trump, who has long derided the Kremlin’s interference as a “hoax” that was concocted by his opponents to delegitimize his victory in 2016.
It’s not clear who would have seen the notification, but DHS’s intelligence reports are routinely shared with the FBI, other federal law enforcement agencies, and state and local governments.

Murphy objected to Wolf’s instruction, “stating that it was improper to hold a vetted intelligence product for reasons [of] political embarrassment,” according to a copy of his whistleblower complaint that was obtained by The Washington Post.

Murphy also alleges that two months earlier, Wolf told him to stop producing intelligence assessments on Russia and shift the focus on election interference to China and Iran. He said Wolf told him “that these instructions specifically originated from White House National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien.”

Murphy said he would not comply with the instructions, which he believed would “put the country in substantial and specific danger,” according to the complaint, which was filed Tuesday with the DHS inspector general.

The White House and DHS did not respond to requests for comment.

“Mr. Murphy followed proper lawful whistleblower rules in reporting serious allegations of misconduct against DHS leadership, particularly involving political distortion of intelligence analysis and retaliation,” his attorney, Mark Zaid, said in a statement. “We have alerted both the Executive and Legislative Branches of these allegations and we will appropriately cooperate with oversight investigations, especially in a classified setting.”

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that Murphy’s complaint “outlines grave and disturbing allegations that senior White House and Department of Homeland Security officials improperly sought to politicize, manipulate, and censor intelligence in order to benefit President Trump politically. This puts our nation and its security at grave risk.”

When I said seven months ago after the Senate GOP refused to convict and remove Trump that Trump now had free reign to do whatever he wanted to do, this is exactly what I meant. Of course the politicization of intelligence was going to be total heading into the 2020 election. Of course Russia was going to get a free pass to do whatever it takes to keep Trump in power, as Trump would make sure our counter-intelligence folks were blinded on purpose.

Murphy will be testifying later this month, or maybe not, I'm sure the White House will block it. But at this point there are too many cracks in the dam to cover up every single thing.

The caveat on all this is that Murphy was fired last month after gathering intelligence on journalists.

The Department of Homeland Security official who oversaw the intelligence division at the department is being reassigned after it was revealed his office had gathered intelligence reports on two US journalists, according to a source familiar with the matter. 

Brian Murphy, who served as the acting under secretary for the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis, was summoned to acting Homeland Secretary Chad Wolf's office Friday night, as speculation grew that he would be moved out of his role, according to another source familiar. 

Murphy is a career official who filled the position after the Senate-confirmed Under Secretary David Glawe left DHS earlier this year. It's unclear what Murphy's next role will be. The Washington Post was first to report on Saturday that Murphy had been removed from his job. 

On Thursday, The Washington Post reported that DHS had sent Open Source Intelligence Reports to federal law enforcement agencies summarizing tweets sent by two journalists -- New York Times reporter Mike Baker and Benjamin Wittes, the editor-in-chief of the blog Lawfare -- who had published leaked unclassified government documents while covering the unrest in Portland, Oregon. 

The collection and dissemination of information on journalists was carried out by lower level officials acting on broad guidance, the source told CNN, adding that Murphy was not fully aware until after the fact. 

Wolf, who has led the department in an acting capacity since last November, sought to distance himself from the incident.

So is this retribution from a corrupt DHS official taking down as many people as he can, or was Murphy preemptively reassigned because he threatened to go public about the Russian intelligence?

Adam Schiff and the House Intelligence Committee needs to have a little chat with him ASAP. We'll see if it happens.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

Attorney General Bill Barr continues to serve as Donald Trump's legal bag man as he is having the Justice Department step in on the state defamation case filed against Trump by E. Jean Carroll.

The Justice Department moved on Tuesday to replace President Trump’s private legal team with government lawyers to defend him against a defamation lawsuit by the author E. Jean Carroll, who has accused him of raping her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s.

In a highly unusual legal move, lawyers for the Justice Department said in court papers that Mr. Trump was acting in his official capacity as president when he denied ever knowing Ms. Carroll and thus could be defended by government lawyers — in effect underwritten by taxpayer money.

Though the law gives employees of the federal government immunity from most defamation lawsuits, legal experts said it has rarely, if ever, been used before to protect a president, especially for actions taken before he entered office.

“The question is,” said Steve Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor, “is it really within the scope of the law for government lawyers to defend someone accused of lying about a rape when he wasn’t even president yet?”

The motion also effectively protects Mr. Trump from any embarrassing disclosures in the middle of his campaign for re-election. A state judge issued a ruling last month that potentially opened the door to Mr. Trump being deposed in the case before the election in November, and Ms. Carroll’s lawyers have also requested that he provide a DNA sample to determine whether his genetic material is on a dress that Ms. Carroll said she was wearing at the time of the encounter.

Ms. Carroll’s lawyer said in a statement issued Tuesday evening that the Justice Department’s move to intervene in the case was a “shocking” attempt to bring the resources of the United States government to bear on a private legal matter.

“Trump’s effort to wield the power of the U.S. government to evade responsibility for his private misconduct is without precedent,” the lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, said, “and shows even more starkly how far he is willing to go to prevent the truth from coming out.”

Ms. Carroll herself accused the president of siccing Attorney General William P. Barr against her. “TRUMP HURLS BILL BARR AT ME,” she wrote on Twitter.

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment on the motion.

It's the "effort to shield Trump from disclosure during the campaign" that is the real driver of this idiotic notion that federal taxpayers should fund Trump's defense in a case like this, but the fact of the matter is Trump being in the Oval Office now gives him a lot of power.

Trump can keep things tangled up in the courts as long as he remains in the office.  Once he's out, however...

We all know that Trump will not leave power willingly. He will face a bevy of immediate indictments in January. Democrats still don't seem to understand this key factor.  He will do anything to stay in power.

Anything.

Be ready now for that, and vote early.

StupidiNews!

• Trump campaign rallies in Nevada this weekend have been cancelled after local officials refused to sign off the events over COVID-19 mass gathering limits of 50 in the state.
• Maine GOP Sen. Susan Collins is facing allegations of corruption after reports surfaced showing Collins and her husband benefited financially from the 2017 GOP tax bill.
• Microsoft security officials have informed the Biden campaign that a major advisory firm has been targeted by Russian state-sponsored hackers.
• Senate Republicans will vote today on a limited COVID-19 bill that doesn't provide any direct help for Americans, the vote is expected to fail over objections from Democrats.
• A new Commerce Department report finds climate change to be a "major risk to the stability of the US financial system" that "urgently and decisively" requires federal action to mitigate.