Last Call For Listen Up Y'All It's Sabotage

The Trump regime is burning down everything so that Joe Biden and the Democrats will have an impossible task ahead of them come January.  They've burned down the economy, they've burned down the public health system, they're now in the process of burning down the Postal Service.

President Trump’s yearslong assault on the Postal Service and his increasingly dire warnings about the dangers of voting by mail are colliding as the presidential campaign enters its final months. The result has been to generate new concerns about how he could influence an election conducted during a pandemic in which greater-than-ever numbers of voters will submit their ballots by mail.
In tweet after all-caps tweet, Mr. Trump has warned that allowing people to vote by mail will result in a “CORRUPT ELECTION” that will “LEAD TO THE END OF OUR GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY” and become the “SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES.” He has predicted that children will steal ballots out of mailboxes. On Thursday, he dangled the idea of delaying the election instead.

Members of Congress and state officials in both parties rejected the president’s suggestion and his claim that mail-in ballots would result in widespread fraud. But they are warning that a huge wave of ballots could overwhelm mail carriers unless the Postal Service, in financial difficulty for years, receives emergency funding that Republicans are blocking during negotiations over another pandemic relief bill.

At the same time, the mail system is being undercut in ways set in motion by Mr. Trump. Fueled by animus for Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and surrounded by advisers who have long called for privatizing the post office, Mr. Trump and his appointees have begun taking cost-cutting steps that appear to have led to slower and less reliable delivery.

In recent weeks, at the direction of a Trump campaign megadonor who was recently named the postmaster general, the service has stopped paying mail carriers and clerks the overtime necessary to ensure that deliveries can be completed each day. That and other changes have led to reports of letters and packages being delayed by as many as several days.
Voting rights groups say it is a recipe for disaster.

“We have an underfunded state and local election system and a deliberate slowdown in the Postal Service,” said Wendy Fields, the executive director of the Democracy Initiative, a coalition of voting and civil rights groups. She said the president was “deliberately orchestrating suppression and using the post office as a tool to do it.”

Trump will burn down the Census next month.

The Census Bureau is cutting short critical door-knocking efforts for the 2020 census amid growing concerns among Democrats in Congress that the White House is pressuring the bureau to wrap up counting soon for political gain, NPR has learned.

Attempts by the bureau's workers to conduct in-person interviews for the census will end on Sept. 30 — not Oct. 31, the end date it indicated in April would be necessary to count every person living in the U.S. given major setbacks from the coronavirus pandemic. Three Census Bureau employees, who were informed of the plans during separate internal meetings Thursday, confirmed the new end date with NPR. All of the employees spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of losing their jobs.

"It's going to be impossible to complete the count in time," said one of the bureau employees, an area manager who oversees local census offices. "I'm very fearful we're going to have a massive undercount."

Asked why and when the decision was made to move up the end of door knocking, the Census Bureau replied in a written statement Friday: "We are currently evaluating our operations to enable the Census Bureau to provide this data in the most expeditious manner and when those plans have been finalized we will make an announcement."

About 4 out of 10 households nationwide have still not participated in the constitutionally mandated count of every person living in the U.S., and self-response rates are even lower in many communities.

This month, the bureau began deploying door knockers to visit unresponsive homes in certain parts of the country. Door-knocking efforts are expected to roll out nationwide Aug. 11.

It's unclear how much longer households can submit census responses on their own by going online, over the phone and by mail. The bureau's website — which as recently as Thursday still listed Oct. 31 as the end of the "self-response phase" that began in March — now reads that phase will last until the end of field data collection.  

Kim Wyman, the Republican secretary of state in Washington, one of five states where mail-in balloting is universal, said Wednesday on NPR’s “1A” program that “election officials are very concerned, if the post office is reducing service, that we will be able to get ballots to people in time.”

It's straight-up sabotage of the government, and it helps Trump disenfranchise voters for years to come.  It may not save him in 2020, but it will be a massive obstacle to Democrats in 2022 and 2024, and with a massive Census undercount, it could be a decade-long disaster.

If Trump can;t control and profit from the government, then he will destroy the country to the point where misery will wreck everything.

We'll be fighting this for years.

The State Of The Police State, Con't

In Portland, Trump's Brownshirts are now going after the press as "national security threats" for exposing the use of military contractors for his private army.

The Department of Homeland Security has compiled “intelligence reports” about the work of American journalists covering protests in Portland, Ore., in what current and former officials called an alarming use of a government system meant to share information about suspected terrorists and violent actors.

Over the past week, the department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis has disseminated three Open Source Intelligence Reports to federal law enforcement agencies and others, summarizing tweets written by two journalists — a reporter for the New York Times and the editor in chief of the blog Lawfare — and noting they had published leaked, unclassified documents about DHS operations in Portland. The intelligence reports, obtained by The Washington Post, include written descriptions and images of the tweets and the number of times they had been liked or retweeted by others.

After The Post published a story online Thursday evening detailing the department’s practices, the acting homeland security secretary, Chad Wolf, ordered the intelligence office to stop collecting information on journalists and announced an investigation into the matter.

“Upon learning about the practice, Acting Secretary Wolf directed the DHS Intelligence & Analysis Directorate to immediately discontinue collecting information involving members of the press,” a department spokesman said in a statement. “In no way does the Acting Secretary condone this practice and he has immediately ordered an inquiry into the matter. The Acting Secretary is committed to ensuring that all DHS personnel uphold the principles of professionalism, impartiality and respect for civil rights and civil liberties, particularly as it relates to the exercise of First Amendment rights.”

Some of the leaked DHS documents the journalists posted and wrote about revealed shortcomings in the department’s understanding of the nature of the protests in Portland, as well as techniques that intelligence analysts have used. A memo by the department’s top intelligence official, which was tweeted by the editor of Lawfare, says personnel relied on “FINTEL,” an acronym for financial intelligence, as well as finished intelligence “Baseball cards” of arrested protesters to try to understand their motivations and plans. Historically, military and intelligence officials have used such cards for biographical dossiers of suspected terrorists, including those targeted in lethal drone strikes.

The DHS intelligence reports, which are unclassified, are traditionally used for sharing the department’s analysis with federal law enforcement agencies, state and local officials, and some foreign governments. They are not intended to disseminate information about American citizens who have no connection to terrorists or other violent actors and who are engaged in activity protected by the First Amendment, current and former officials said.

You can bet this order came from the White House, and Acting Brownshirt Coordinator Chad Wolf is pleading plausible deniability, but there's no way that federal agents willingly make more work for themselves like this unless they were told to do so.

And yes, it gets worse.  They are going to start putting journalists in jail by the boatload.

Federal officials responding to the long-running protests in Portland are asking that a court order protecting journalists be lifted on the grounds that some of those engaged in violence are masquerading as members of the press. 

Justice Department lawyers leveled the claims of misconduct by purported journalists in filings submitted Thursday to U.S. District Court Judge Michael Simon, who issued a temporary restraining order last week forbidding federal authorities from targeting the press. 

His order also requires law enforcement to allow individuals claiming to be journalists to remain in place even when crowds are ordered to disperse.

The federal government’s drive to dissolve the injunction came just one day after the Trump administration struck a deal with Gov. Kate Brown (D-Ore.) to try to quell unrest and violence around the federal courthouse in Portland. 

Under the pact, Oregon State Police agreed to set up a security perimeter around the building, while federal law enforcement agents dispatched from around the country would retreat and eventually leave town. 

However, the feds’ bid to rescind the restraining order signals their desire to maintain maximum flexibility in responding to the unrest if they again assume a front-line role or if the state police arrangement proves inadequate. 

“Individuals are abusing the TRO to masquerade as members of the press and evade lawful orders, or actively participating in protest activities and even illegal acts while holding themselves out to be members of the press under the protection of the TRO,” Justice Department lawyers wrote. “Even individuals who are not expressly taking advantage of the TRO are often within crowds of protesters or between officers and active protesters making it incredibly difficult and dangerous to observe the restrictions while implementing crowd control measures.” 

“Savvy protesters abuse the TRO to evade lawful orders, impede law enforcement, and perpetrate crimes. The TRO has become ‘an instrument of wrong,’ and must be dissolved,” DOJ attorneys argued.

We got that?

The press is covering for terrorists, and we get to determine who the terrorists are. If they happen to be the press, well...

Again, this is the White House quite literally treating journalists as terrorists.  They are building intelligence files on the men and women covering the Trump regime's test run in Portland.  It absolutely will be rolled out to every major city in advance of the election.

We're a few months away from losing the country unless Trump is removed from office, and I no longer believe an election will do the job.

Tales Of The Trump Depression, Con't

Second-quarter GDP estimates are in and they are heart-stopping: the United States economy is on track to shrink by one-third by year's end.

The coronavirus pandemic sent the U.S. economy plunging by a record-shattering 32.9% annual rate last quarter and is still inflicting damage across the country, squeezing already struggling businesses and forcing a wave of layoffs that shows no sign of abating.

The economy’s collapse in the April-June quarter, stunning in its speed and depth, came as a resurgence of the viral outbreak has pushed businesses to close for a second time in many areas. The government’s estimate of the second-quarter fall in the gross domestic product has no comparison since records began in 1947. The previous worst quarterly contraction — at 10%, less than a third of what was reported Thursday — occurred in 1958 during the Eisenhower administration.
Soon after the government issued the bleak economic data, President Donald Trump diverted attention by suggesting a “delay” in the Nov. 3 presidential election, based on his unsubstantiated allegations that widespread mail-in voting will result in fraud. The dates of presidential elections are enshrined in federal law and would require an act of Congress to change.

So steep was the economic fall last quarter that most analysts expect a sharp rebound for the current July-September period. But with coronavirus cases rising in the majority of states and the Republican Senate proposing to scale back aid to the unemployed, the pain is likely to continue and potentially worsen in the months ahead.
The plunge in GDP “underscores the unprecedented hit to the economy from the pandemic,” said Andrew Hunter, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics. “We expect it will take years for that damage to be fully recovered.”

Years.

An unknown number of years to recover.

Just to get back to 4th quarter 2019.

And so many of us will not make it.