Last Call For It's About Suppression, Con't

The New York Times's Nick Corasaniti and Danny Hakim document the Trump regime's triple play to steal Pennsylvania (and possibly the election) by disenfranchising potentially hundreds of thousands, if not millions of voters.

President Trump’s campaign in the crucial battleground of Pennsylvania is pursuing a three-pronged strategy that would effectively suppress mail-in votes in the state, moving to stop the counting of absentee votes before Election Day, pushing to limit how late mail-in ballots can be accepted and intimidating Pennsylvanians trying to vote early.

Election officials and Democrats in Pennsylvania say that the Trump effort is now in full swing after a monthslong push by the president’s campaign and Republican allies to undermine faith in the electoral process in a state seen as one of the election’s most pivotal, where Mr. Trump trails Joseph R. Biden Jr. by about six percentage points, according to The Upshot’s polling average.

Mail-in votes in Pennsylvania and other swing states are expected to skew heavily toward Democrats. The state is one of a handful in which, by law, mail-in votes cannot be counted until Election Day, and the Trump campaign has leaned on Republican allies who control the Legislature to prevent state election officials from bending those rules to accommodate a pandemic-driven avalanche of absentee ballots, as many other states have already done.

At the same time, the campaign has pushed litigation to curtail how late mail-in votes can be accepted, as part of a flurry of lawsuits in local, state and federal courts challenging myriad voting rules and procedures. On Wednesday evening, the Supreme Court refused to hear a fast-tracked plea from Pennsylvania Republicans to block a three-day extension of the deadline for receiving absentee ballots. But Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat who is Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, advised counties to segregate ballots received after 8 p.m. on Election Day, as the issue remains before the court.

The Trump campaign has also dispatched its officials to early voting sites, videotaped voters and even pressed election administrators in the Philadelphia area to stop people from delivering more than one ballot to a drop box.

The Trump campaign’s on-the-ground efforts in Philadelphia have already drawn a rebuke from the state attorney general, who warned that the campaign’s foot soldiers risked being charged with voter intimidation. But the Trump campaign has defied local leaders and is running a similar operation in Delaware County, one of the suburban “collar” counties around Philadelphia that have become increasingly Democratic since the 2016 election.

The campaign’s strategy is backed up by public statements from the president, who barnstormed the state on Monday and repeatedly made false claims about the security of voting in Pennsylvania along with ominous warnings.

“A lot of strange things happening in Philadelphia,” he said during a stop in Allentown. “We’re watching you, Philadelphia. We’re watching at the highest level.”

The president’s comments drew an angry response on Wednesday from Lawrence S. Krasner, the city’s district attorney.

“The Trump administration’s efforts to suppress votes amid a global pandemic fueled by their disregard for human life will not be tolerated in the birthplace of American democracy,” Mr. Krasner said. “Philadelphians from a diversity of political opinions believe strongly in the rule of law, in fair and free elections, and in a democratic system of government. We will not be cowed or ruled by a lawless, power-hungry despot. Some folks learned that the hard way in the 1700s.”

 

Trump himself keeps giving this plan away at his rallies, declaring that he hopes "the courts stop states counting ballots after Election Day". He's said something along these lines at least a half-dozen times at rallies and events in the last month. 

States regularly count ballots after Election Day. It takes them that long. California, New York, Illinois, Texas, Florida all do it. Arizona's Kyrsten Sinema came from behind to win her Senate race against Martha McSally because of mail ballots in 2018, and it took a week.

And if Pennsylvania is critical, that is, Biden doesn't get more than 290+ EVs, then the scenario does get pretty grim as Eliza Griswold at the New Yorker laments.

The playbook that Republicans could put to use in Pennsylvania this year was partially developed in 2000, in the aftermath of the Presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore. That year, the election was close, and the contest came down to Florida, where the candidates were separated by only a few hundred votes. After the initial count, a swarm of attorneys and poll watchers descended on the state to catalogue small mishaps that might serve as grounds to challenge the results. Most notably, they found that some voters had failed to fully perforate their punch-card ballots, creating what came to be known as “hanging chads.” Legal disputes about whether to continue tallying ballots, and which to count, wound their way to the Supreme Court, which eventually halted further recounts, leaving Bush in the lead. Gore conceded on December 13, 2000. But, even if the Supreme Court hadn’t intervened, Gore still might have lost the state. In Tallahassee, the Republican legislature had already begun the process of choosing a set of Republican electors who were going to vote for Bush regardless. This year, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Michigan all have conditions that would allow for such an eventuality. (G.O.P. lawmakers around the country have denied any such plans. Andrew Hitt, the G.O.P. chair in Wisconsin, recently said that he’d heard of “no such discussion.”) But Pennsylvania seems most vulnerable. “Harrisburg in 2020 could be Tallahassee in 2000,” Ari Mittleman, a political analyst with Keep Our Republic, told me.

There are many issues with Pennsylvania’s election infrastructure that could leave it exposed. In 2018, the Department of State ordered all counties to introduce new voting machines with paper trails. The change is likely to cause confusion for voters and poll workers, as well as mechanical mishaps. During an election in 2019, a failure to properly calibrate new voting machines led to large-scale dysfunction in Northampton County, in the northeastern part of the state. If that kind of error is sufficiently widespread during the 2020 election, it could give Republicans an opening to contest the vote. Human error could also cause trouble. During the primaries, Erika Bickford, an elections judge in Lehigh County, was charged with interfering with ballots; she claimed that she was darkening the bubbles and trimming ballots so that they could fit into a scanner. Such a mishap could also lead to votes being challenged. “Elections are run by human beings,” Adam Bonin, a Democratic election lawyer, said. “When you’re dealing with millions of ballots, what you have to hope for is that there are always enough eyes on a question, and levels of review, to make sure that things are as standardized as possible.”

Republicans could also exploit the state’s mail-in voting system. The pandemic has led people to vote by mail in unprecedented numbers: to date, Pennsylvania has sent out more than 2.6 million ballots, and gotten back five hundred and eighteen thousand. Mail-in voting was only introduced to the state this year, and all sixty-seven counties have different procedures for receiving and counting mailed ballots, which is itself worrisome: in 2000, procedural discrepancies between counties served as part of the basis for Bush v. Gore, the lawsuit that challenged the validity of the election results. In Pennsylvania, under-resourced election boards, inexperienced voters, and exacting technical procedures could also introduce dysfunction into a system under strain. For example, in Allegheny County, the home of Pittsburgh, a printing mistake caused nearly twenty-nine thousand mail-in ballots to be sent out twice, and many voters aren’t certain which to complete. “I’m a lot less worried about voter fraud and suppression than I am about voter-system failure,” Charlie Dent, a former Republican representative from Pennsylvania, told me.

Any idiosyncrasy will come under intense scrutiny. This month, the Trump campaign called for fifty thousand supporters, a group dubbed the Army for Trump, to descend on polling places and the offices of election officials in Pennsylvania and other states and observe voting. The tactic seems designed to intimidate voters, as well as to encourage allegations of voter fraud. (The effort is led by Mike Roman, who has a history of challenging votes on behalf of Republicans: in 1993, he helped overturn the results of a local election by convincing a judge that there were irregularities among the ballots of Latino voters.) So far, the plan has been stymied: earlier this month, a federal court in western Pennsylvania upheld a provision that banned out-of-county poll watchers. “Corruption!!!” Trump tweeted in response. “Must have a fair Election.” But even without Trump’s “army,” right-wing attorneys and local poll watchers are likely to surveil ballot-drop-off locations, looking for ways to invalidate votes. (Such surveillance occurred in the primary.) Dropping off a ballot for someone else, unless the voter is disabled or hospitalized, is called ballot harvesting and can cause the vote to be invalidated. In an article in The Atlantic, Barton Gellman detailed an internal memo written by J. Matthew Wolfe, a Republican operative and attorney in Pennsylvania, who catalogued other problems that he had noticed with mail-in ballots in the primaries, and noted that Republicans could exploit these issues in the general election. Some voters, for example, had appended partial signatures, or had forgotten to sign entirely. (On Friday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that ballots cannot be invalidated because a voter’s signature does not match the one on file.)

Pennsylvania is also one of a handful of states that require a mail-in ballot to be sealed within a second “secrecy” envelope, another provision demanded last year by state Republicans, which was recently upheld by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. If a ballot is received without the secrecy envelope, it is termed a naked ballot and is discarded. In the state’s primary, six per cent of ballots were thrown out because they did not arrive in that second, sealed envelope. A recent investigation conducted by “Frontline,” USA Today Network, and the Columbia Journalism School showed that, nationwide, naked ballots could lead to the rejection of as many as 2.15 million votes in the Presidential election, a number equal to the population of New Mexico. Lisa Deeley, the Democratic chairwoman of the Philadelphia city commissioner’s office, warned that, in Pennsylvania, a hundred thousand votes could be invalidated. (In 2016, Trump won the state by only forty-four thousand votes.)

More Democrats than Republicans have requested mail-in ballots in the state, by a margin of two-to-one. This means that in-person returns on Election Day are almost certain to favor Trump, an advantage that he will likely exploit, however falsely, to claim victory. “There’s value in controlling the early narrative,” Christopher Borick, a professor of political science at Muhlenberg College, told me. “Republicans can start building public consensus about what happened.” It also means that subsequent efforts to contest mail-in ballots will primarily invalidate Democratic votes. Trump has a history of calling for mail-in ballots to be thrown out mid-count. In the middle of the 2018 Florida governor’s race, he tweeted, “An honest vote count is no longer possible—ballots massively infected. Must Go With Election Night!”

 

Trump is basically saying he wants ballot counting stopped at midnight local time on Election Day, nationally, but especially in Pennsylvania. He's been telling people for months now that continuing to count ballots in a normal election process that takes a couple of days to certify in even the best of conditions is illegal.

And on top of that, he's trying to get the courts to toss those ballots, and he's sending in "poll watchers" to intimidate voters trying to vote early in person.

If there's a silver lining, it's that Trump has crashed so badly here in the last month of the campaign that Biden can definitely win without Pennsylvania, as I explained earlier today.

But let's not forget that the official policy of the GOP is to disenfranchise as many voters as they can, and to pick and choose who gets to vote, rather than voters picking and choosing them as a party.

 

Biden, His Time, Con't

With days to go until Election Day, Cook Political Report's Amy Walter and crew move Texas into the Toss-up category, if you're still wondering how the presidential race is "tightening in the final moments".

Less than a week out from Election Day and President Donald Trump is playing catch-up. In 2016, he won 30 states (and Maine's 2nd Congressional District) and their 306 electoral votes. Today, just 20 states, worth 125 electoral votes, are safely in his column. Former Vice President Joe Biden is holding 24 states worth 290 electoral votes in his column.

To win the election, Trump will need to win every state we currently have in the Toss Up column: Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Iowa, Ohio, Maine's 2nd CD, as well as the newest addition, Texas. Even then, Trump would be 22 electoral votes short of 270. He would need to win at least two of the seven states currently sitting in Lean Democrat: Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada and New Hampshire. Trump carried all but Minnesota, Nevada and New Hampshire in 2016.

At this point, Ohio and Maine's 2nd District are probably the most promising for Trump, followed by Texas and Iowa. If he were to win all of those, he'd be at 188 electoral votes, still 82 votes shy of 270. Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina are pure Toss Ups with Biden ahead by anywhere from 1 to 2 points in those states.

Even if Trump were to win all of those states, he'd then need to move into the Lean Democratic territory where Arizona, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania offer the best opportunities. If you just looked at polling averages, Arizona would be the best opportunity for Trump. Biden has a small — but steady — 3 point lead. Even so, given Trump's unpopularity among suburban voters, it's hard to see how he makes up needed ground in Maricopa (Phoenix).

In Wisconsin, a huge spike in coronavirus cases and hospitalizations has led state health officials to plead with residents to leave home only when absolutely necessary. That COVID is the dominating issue in these final days of the campaign is a problem for the president. Charles Franklin, the Marquette University Law School poll director, told the AP recently that "approval of his handling of COVID is the next-strongest predictor of vote choice, behind voters' party affiliation and their overall approval of Trump's performance as president." In the most recent Marquette poll in early October Trump had an anemic 41 percent approval rating on his handling of the virus.

Picking up Arizona and its 11 electoral votes would get Trump to 259 electoral votes, 11 shy of 270. Picking up Wisconsin (10 EV) or Minnesota, where the Trump campaign is spending time and effort (10 EV), would leave both candidates stuck at 269.

This is where Pennsylvania becomes even more critical.

In Pennsylvania, the conventional wisdom, as well as the Trump campaign, see a tightening race. The FiveThirtyEight polling average puts Biden ahead by 5 points. But, congressional district polling paints a different — and more difficult — picture for the president. These polls find Biden expanding Clinton's margins in suburban Philadelphia, but also find Trump failing to put up the same kind of numbers he did in 2016 in central, western and northeastern Pennsylvania.

But, while Trump has a narrow path to 270, Biden is looking at several different pathways to 270. Biden can afford to lose states in Toss Up like Georgia, North Carolina or Iowa and still have plenty of different options to get to an electoral college victory. Of course, all three are hosting competitive Senate races that could tip the balance of power in the upper chamber. Notably, Biden is spending the final week of the campaign traveling to Iowa and Georgia.

Texas is a state that Biden doesn't need to win, but it is clear that it's more competitive than ever. Texas' shift from Lean Republican to Toss Up shouldn't come as a surprise. Recent polling in the state — both public and private - shows a 2-4 point race. That's pretty much in line with the hotly contested 2018 Senate race in the state where Sen. Ted Cruz narrowly defeated Rep. Beto O'Rourke 51 percent to 48 percent.

 

A Biden win in Texas and the race is over, full stop.  Georgia or Florida too. 

See, all Biden has to do in order to blow a hole in the side of the Trumptanic is pick up one of these three states in particular. He'll probably get five or six and he has a good shot of winning nine or ten of the 13 battleground states (PA, MI, WI, NC, FL, GA, NH, MN, AZ, TX, OH, IA, NV). If Biden even splits these, he wins easily.

Trump on the other hand has to run the board on basically nine out of 13 of them.

I still think the most likely scenario with a Trump victory is that it's the 2016 map but Biden picks up WI, MI, PA and one other state, probably Arizona, and either ME-2 or NE-2 and ends up winning 289-249, in which case Trump moves to steal Pennsylvania with SCOTUS, make it 269-269, and force a House delegation vote, a basic nightmare scenario, Bush v Gore II, one that would wreck the country for decades.

This is Trump's best case scenario.

Granted, it's a nightmare for America and it could lead to years of violence, but if Biden can take one more state besides PA in that scenario (and get to 290+) he wins outright and the odds of Biden getting at least one other state besides PA, MI, WI, AZ, and one of the two single-point districts (out of IA, GA, NC, FL, TX and OH) is probably a good 80% or so.

That's the difference from 2016, and Trump is just about out of time.

Jared Kushner Goes Viral

Turns out Trump's scumbag son-in-law and his role on the COVID-19 taskforce are both examples of terrible failures, because if you thought for a second that these soul-sucking revenants gave a damn about America as this pandemic rages worse than ever into month nine, you've got disappointment coming. 

President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner boasted in mid-April about how the President had cut out the doctors and scientists advising him on the unfolding coronavirus pandemic, comments that came as more than 40,000 Americans already had died from the virus, which was ravaging New York City.

In a taped interview on April 18, Kushner told legendary journalist Bob Woodward that Trump was "getting the country back from the doctors" in what he called a "negotiated settlement." Kushner also proclaimed that the US was moving swiftly through the "panic phase" and "pain phase" of the pandemic and that the country was at the "beginning of the comeback phase."

"That doesn't mean there's not still a lot of pain and there won't be pain for a while, but that basically was, we've now put out rules to get back to work," Kushner said. "Trump's now back in charge. It's not the doctors."

The statement reflected a political strategy. Instead of following the health experts' advice, Trump and Kushner were focused on what would help the President on Election Day. By their calculations, Trump would be the "open-up president."

 CNN has obtained audio of two separate interviews with Kushner, which were conducted in April and May as part of Woodward's reporting for his book "Rage." In the wide-ranging conversations, Kushner described the President's relationship with his public health advisers in adversarial terms.

If this were a movie, Kushner would be the jackass adviser to the president who eventually gets killed by the alien virus and melts into goo and you'd cheer while it happened because he spent the entire movie being terrible and blackmailing the harried scientist/doctor protagonist.

As it is, 230,000 + Americans are dead and the pandemic is in its most infectious and potentially deadly third wave after ten months, and unless we evict these villains we'll be dealing with deadly surges of the virus every four months or so with a correspondingly exponentially higher death count until everyone can get vaccinated, and probably half of Americans will refuse the vaccine anyhow.

Seriously though, Kushner needs to cool his heels in prison for a while. The entire regime does, and the grim reality is even if Biden wins, they'll still have a good three months wo kill more Americans through inaction or actual interference with states taking measures. Don't be surprised if Trump orders the states that voted against him cut off from any government help in the months ahead.

And Kushner will cackle while it happens.

StupidiNews!

• In a pair of 5-3 decisions the US Supreme Court has once again passed on PA Republicans wanting to cut off counting ballots received after Election Day, and allowed NC to continue to count them.
• Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas are all reeling after a two-day ice storm that has cut power to more than half-million people.
• Germany and France are joining the growing number of European Union countries going into another round of COVID-19 lockdowns as the virus is once again rampaging across the continent.
• Government pandemic expert Dr. Anthony Fauci says a COVID-19 vaccine won't be ready until at least the new year as clinical testing continues.
• Former Daily Show host Jon Stewart will return to television with an hour-long weekly current affairs show on Apple TV+.

Last Call For Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

With days to go until Election Day, Trump's terrorist allies are openly calling for attacks on polling places and against Democratic voters, publicly vowing to take Trump's enemies "into custody" and "drawing their weapons if needed" at polling places in order to stop Joe Biden from winning.

 

Oath Keepers militia leader Stewart Rhodes said members of his militia will be at polling locations on Election Day to “protect” Trump voters during an appearance on far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ program.

After making that claim, Rhodes made a number of unhinged statements, including saying Oath Keepers would follow directives from President Donald Trump to take members of the “deep state” into custody and “do what we have to do,” that Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act before the election, that Oath Keepers will “be in range” of Washington D.C., to stop a “Benghazi-style” attack on the White House on election night, and that a war will have to be fought against Democrats on the West Coast who are “bought” by the Chinese government. Rhodes also hyped the possibility of a second civil war where his “battle-hardened” supporters kill the “street soldiers” and “command and control” of “the radical left.” He later claimed the United States is already in a civil war because “you have sitting politicians who are part of the enemy’s ranks.”

Disturbingly, Rhodes telegraphed how he will interpret election results, saying that he would consider a win by Democratic nominee Joe Biden illegitimate and evidence the election had been stolen, presaging how he and his militia might react to that outcome.

Rhodes’ Oath Keepers militia, which is comprised of “former law enforcement officials and military veterans,” is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “one of the largest radical antigovernment groups in the U.S. today.” The Los Angeles Times reported Rhodes has indicated that some Oath Keepers “have signed up as poll watchers, while others plan to monitor the election armed and ‘undercover,’ drawing their weapons if needed.”

During an October 27 appearance on The Alex Jones Show, Rhodes said members of his militia are going to “stand up and protect people on Election Day” at the polls because opponents of Trump will be supposedly “coercing and threatening” his supporters as part of an effort by Democrats to steal the election.

 

Stewart Rhodes is a terrorist group leader, and Oath Keepers are flat-out white supremacist terrorists supporting Trump and his white supremacist regime. These guys are going to shoot up a bunch of polling places at this rate, and get a lot of folks killed.

And frankly, it just may be the start of a new era of violence.

A priority of the Biden administration has to be dealing with these seditious assholes and terrorist before they kill, because it seems pretty clear to me that we've got a terrorist leader gladly shouting to the rooftops that he's going to have his goons kill voters at the polls.

 

If there is violence at the polls next week, and I believe there is a very chance there will be, you can place the blame at Trump's feet.

 

Then you can toss his ass out into the street on Tuesday.

Lock them up.

Orange Meltdown, Frozen Huskers Edition

The Trump Traveling Snake Oil And COVID-19 Road Show went to Omaha last night as Trump tries to stave off oblivion in Nebraska's 2nd District where Joe Biden has a small lead. Even one electoral vote is too much for the Noxious Narcissist to lose, and in the freezing winds of a Nebraska October night, Trump literally left hundreds of his supporters out in the cold.

By the time President Trump finished speaking to thousands of supporters at Omaha’s Eppley Airfield on Tuesday night and jetted away on Air Force One, the temperature had plunged to nearly freezing.

But as long lines of MAGA-clad attendees queued up for buses to take them to distant parking lots, it quickly became clear something was wrong.

The buses, the huge crowd soon learned, couldn’t navigate the jammed airport roads. For hours, attendees — including many elderly Trump supporters — stood in the cold, as police scrambled to help those most at-risk get to warmth.

At least seven people were taken to hospitals, according to Omaha Scanner, which monitors official radio traffic. Police and fire authorities didn’t immediately return messages from The Washington Post early Wednesday and declined to provide reporters on the scene with precise numbers of how many needed treatment.

The Trump campaign said it had provided enough buses but traffic on the two-lane road outside the airport was throttled to one direction after the rally, tweeted Aaron Sanderford, a political reporter at the Omaha World-Herald. The campaign didn’t immediately respond to a message from The Post early on Wednesday.

The confusion and the freezing weather added to the health risks that accompany every Trump rally during the novel coronavirus pandemic. In Omaha, an estimated crowd of more than 6,000 people jammed into risers outside the airport. Though the campaign checked temperatures and provided masks, many people didn’t wear them, the World-Herald reported.

In the lead-up to the rally, police warned that parking lots were full. With buses taking a half-hour to ferry people more than three miles away to the rally site, hundreds of attendees were late to get inside, reported Iowa Starting Line, a liberal news site.

After Trump’s speech, where he promised “we’re making that final turn” on covid-19 in a state where positivity rates exceed 20 percent, per the World-Herald, Trump flew away on Air Force One around 9 p.m. Attendees began lining up for buses to return to their cars.

By nearly 10:30 p.m., though, they were still waiting.

 

Hypothermia and COVID-19, a two-for-one deal for Husker Seniors!

Seriously, if this isn't the perfect metaphor for the entire Trump disaster over the last four years, I really can't think of a better example.

Hope people got a Runza or three to warm up.

 

Pompeo Pays The Piper, Potentially

Trump regime Foreign Minister Mike Pompeo is under investigation again, this time for his Hatch Act violations in delivering a speech at Dear Leader's National Convention two months ago.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is under investigation for potentially violating a federal law that forbids federal employees from engaging in political activity while on duty or while inside federal buildings over his address to the Republican convention in August. 

The Office of the Special Counsel, an independent federal investigative agency, launched a probe into Pompeo's speech to the Republican National Convention while on a taxpayer funded trip to Jerusalem on August 25, according to two House Democrats. 

It is the second investigation into potential Hatch Act violations that the OSC has opened into Pompeo, whose use of resources and decision-making at the State Department, along with his wife's, have triggered a series of investigations by the agency's inspector general. 

"Our offices have confirmed that the Office of Special Counsel has launched a probe into potential Hatch Act violations tied to Secretary Pompeo's speech to the Republican National Convention," Rep. Ellot Engel, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and Rep. Nita Lowey, chairwoman of the House Committee on Appropriations, wrote in a joint statement. 

"This information comes on the heels of reporting that OSC is also looking into Secretary Pompeo's stated commitment to rush out more of Hillary Clinton's emails by Election Day and as the Secretary has misused State Department resources on his speech tour of swing states," the Democrats said. 

"As we get closer to both this year's election and his own inevitable return to electoral politics, Mike Pompeo has grown even more brazen in misusing the State Department and the taxpayer dollars that fund it as vehicles for the Administration's, and his own, political ambitions," the lawmakers said. 

The State Department did not return requests for comment.

 

Pompeo may be one of the most corrupt members of Trump cabinet (and that's really saying something in this rogue's gallery) and keep in mind Pompeo hasn't even been on the job the full four years, taking over for the disastrously incompetent former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson in early 2018.

 

Of course, getting rid of various inspectors general and replacing them with cronies is only one reason Trump ripped up protections for civil service employees last week.  Expect a lot more corruption -- and for the office investigating Pompeo to be curiously understaffed to zero -- should Trump win a second term.

StupidiNews!

• The Los Angeles Dodgers won Game 6 3-1 over the Tampa Bay Rays to take the World Series four games to two, it's the first championship for the Dodgers since 1988.
• CBS has hired 24-hour security for 60 Minutes anchor Lesley Stahl after receiving "credible" death threats in the wake of Sunday's interview with Donald Trump.
• NXIVM cult leader Keith Raniere was sentenced Tuesday to 120 years in prison and a $1.75 million fine after his conviction earlier this year on multiple sex trafficking crimes.
• Early voting in the US has already exceeded half of 2016's total turnout, according to the US Elections Project tracking numbers, more than 70 million ballots have already been cast.
• Pharma giant Pfizer says it will not have preliminary COVID-19 vaccine data ready before the end of the month as planned, CEO Albert Bouria is asking Americans to be "very patient".
  

Kushner's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Trump's scummy son-in-law Jared Kushner is making the final pitch to Black voters ahead of Election Day, and like most rich bigot white guys who inherited millions from his family and married wealthy, he doesn't understand why lazy Black folk simply don't choose to be not poor anymore.

 

President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner said Black people must “want to be successful” in order for his father-in-law’s policies to help them.

“One thing we’ve seen in a lot of the Black community, which is mostly Democrat, is that President Trump’s policies are the policies that can help people break out of the problems that they’re complaining about,” Kushner said Monday on “Fox & Friends.” “But he can’t want them to be successful more than they want to be successful.”

Kushner’s remarks drew criticism on Twitter, where Democrats said he was implying that many Black people don’t want to be successful.

Trump’s campaign believes he’s drawing more Black support for his re-election than in his 2016 run, thanks to policies including a law he signed reducing prison sentences for nonviolent offenders, increased spending for historically Black colleges and universities and new tax benefits for investors in low-income communities.

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany issued a statement saying “internet trolls” had taken Kushner’s remarks out of context.

“From criminal justice reform and record HBCU funding to record low Black unemployment and record high income increases, there is simply no disputing that President Trump accomplished what Democrats merely talked about,” McEnany said.

Trump lost among Black voters by about 82 percentage points in 2016 but has closed the gap in support to about 71 points this year, according to an analysis of polling data FiveThirtyEight.com published last week. He’s improved particularly with Black men, cutting his disadvantage from 72 to 57 percentage points.

 

Unfortunately, as the article indicates, there's evidence Trump could get 12-15% of the Black vote this time around instead of 8%.  That alone would be enough to give Trump the electoral college victory by assuring Trump wins in NC, Florida, Arizona, and Michigan. The same goes for Trump doing better than he did in 2016 with Latinx voters as well.

 

Fortunately for Biden, he's doing much better than Clinton did in 2016 with white college-educated voters, seniors, and women overall. And there's plenty of evidence Biden has cut into the huge margins Trump had with white non-college voters too. That will more than make up for Trump's gains with Black and brown voters.

The point remains though that Trump regime's years of bashing Democrats and telling Black voters that the Democrats have done nothing for you (which Trump and Mitch McConnell have all but made sure is the case) is working to some extent.

Even though, as Jared Kushner demonstrates, they hold us in contempt, well beneath them.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

His name was Walter Wallace, Jr. and he was murdered in front of a dozen witnesses, shot ten times by two Philly cops, killed in the street in front of his family by monsters who made no effort to de-escalate the situation, and it was all caught on video.

Police officers fatally shot a 27-year-old Black man armed with a knife during a confrontation Monday afternoon in West Philadelphia, an incident that quickly raised tensions in the neighborhood and sparked a standoff that lasted deep into the night.

Late Monday into early Tuesday, police struggled to respond to vandalism and looting along the commercial corridor of 52nd Street, an area that was the scene of clashes between police and protestors earlier this summer. At least one police vehicle was set on fire Monday night and destroyed

By morning, an officer was hospitalized in stable condition with a broken leg after being struck by a pickup truck, police said. About 29 other officers suffered mostly minor injuries from being struck by rocks, bricks, and other projectiles, police said in a preliminary report.

Authorities detained 10 people overnight near 55nd and Pine Street, police said, and those people were set to be released pending possible charges of assaulting police or rioting. Police said officers arrested about 20 people in relation to looting at various stores in West Philadelphia, University City, Overbrook Park, and Center City, some of which were not near the protest.

Hours earlier, shortly before 4 p.m., police said, two officers responded to the 6100 block of Locust Street after a report of a man with a knife. Family members identified him as Walter Wallace Jr.

A video posted on social media showed Wallace walking toward the officers and police backing away. The video swings briefly out of view at the moment the gunfire erupts but he appeared to be multiple feet from them when they fired numerous shots.

Police spokesperson Sgt. Eric Gripp said the officers had ordered Wallace to drop the weapon, and he “advanced towards the officers.” Gripp said investigators are reviewing footage of what happened. Both officers were wearing body cameras.

He said both officers fired “several times.” After the man was shot, he fell to the ground, and Gripp said one of the officers drove him to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where he died.

Walter Wallace Sr., the man’s father, said his son appeared to have been shot 10 times.

The video shows the cops drawing down on Wallace as he comes around between two parked cars. They back away and when Wallace continues forward they empty their clips into him from 15 feet away.

He had a knife though, so I guess that means summary execution, since apparently no cop has ever received training on how to handle a knife without going into full murder mode. And it wasn't just one cop, both of them blasted him like he was a video game villain.

I'm tired of this. I'm tired of people saying "But he had a knife and should have listened to the cops, oh well another dead n-----" and laughing while they scroll on past the story.

We've learned nothing as a country since George Floyd.

Black Lives Still Matter, though.

 

StupidiNews!

• Senate Republicans have confirmed Amy Coney Barrett to the US Supreme Court with a 52-48 vote, all Democrats and Susan Collins of Maine voted no.
• Virginia Military Institute Superintendent Gen. JH Binford Peay has resigned from leading the military college after Black students and graduates shared incidents of racism on campus.
• In a 5-3 decision, the US Supreme Court has sided with Wisconsin Republicans to block a request by Democrats to extend the state's vote-by-mail ballot acceptance deadline past Election Day.
• British PM Boris Johnson is facing a revolt by northern Tory lawmakers demanding a plan to end the lockdown in the UK, along with a major economic recovery plan for jobs and businesses.
• A new study finds link preview messages on your mobile device messaging apps could be major security risks for your data, especially Facebook Messenger and Instagram.
  

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

The Trump regime is throwing as much poop at the walls as it can crap out, and none of it is sticking to Joe Biden or the Democrats as even Rupert Murdoch's boys are bailing on the Tangerine Trashmaster.

By early October, even people inside the White House believed President Trump’s re-election campaign needed a desperate rescue mission. So three men allied with the president gathered at a house in McLean, Va., to launch one.

The host was Arthur Schwartz, a New York public relations man close to President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr. The guests were a White House lawyer, Eric Herschmann, and a former deputy White House counsel, Stefan Passantino, according to two people familiar with the meeting.

Mr. Herschmann knew the subject matter they were there to discuss. He had represented Mr. Trump during the impeachment trial early this year, and he tried to deflect allegations against the president in part by pointing to Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine. More recently, he has been working on the White House payroll with a hazy portfolio, listed as “a senior adviser to the president,” and remains close to Jared Kushner.

The three had pinned their hopes for re-electing the president on a fourth guest, a straight-shooting Wall Street Journal White House reporter named Michael Bender. They delivered the goods to him there: a cache of emails detailing Hunter Biden’s business activities, and, on speaker phone, a former business partner of Hunter Biden’s named Tony Bobulinski. Mr. Bobulinski was willing to go on the record in The Journal with an explosive claim: that Joe Biden, the former vice president, had been aware of, and profited from, his son’s activities. The Trump team left believing that The Journal would blow the thing open and their excitement was conveyed to the president.

The Journal had seemed to be the perfect outlet for a story the Trump advisers believed could sink Mr. Biden’s candidacy. Its small-c conservatism in reporting means the work of its news pages carries credibility across the industry. And its readership leans further right than other big news outlets. Its Washington bureau chief, Paul Beckett, recently remarked at a virtual gathering of Journal reporters and editors that while he knows that the paper often delivers unwelcome news to the many Trump supporters who read it, The Journal should protect its unique position of being trusted across the political spectrum, two people familiar with the remarks said.

As the Trump team waited with excited anticipation for a Journal exposé, the newspaper did its due diligence: Mr. Bender and Mr. Beckett handed the story off to a well-regarded China correspondent, James Areddy, and a Capitol Hill reporter who had followed the Hunter Biden story, Andrew Duehren. Mr. Areddy interviewed Mr. Bobulinski. They began drafting an article.

Then things got messy. Without warning his notional allies, Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and now a lawyer for President Trump, burst onto the scene with the tabloid version of the McLean crew’s carefully laid plot. Mr. Giuliani delivered a cache of documents of questionable provenance — but containing some of the same emails — to The New York Post, a sister publication to The Journal in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Mr. Giuliani had been working with the former Trump aide Steve Bannon, who also began leaking some of the emails to favored right-wing outlets. Mr. Giuliani’s complicated claim that the emails came from a laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned, and his refusal to let some reporters examine the laptop, cast a pall over the story — as did The Post’s reporting, which alleged but could not prove that Joe Biden had been involved in his son’s activities.

 

Hanlon's Razor -- "Never attribute to malice that which can adequately explained by stupidity" -- in the era of Trump requires Zandar's Addendum: "Sometimes it's both." The Trump White House had an orderly plan to sell the Hunter Biden garbage dump to the Wall Street Journal, and then Rudy Giuliani got wind of it and crashed through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man.

Needless to say, the story fell apart over the weekend, with the NY Times delivering the final blow on Sunday night.

There is no evidence in the records that Mr. Biden was involved in or profited from the joint venture.

Encrypted messages, emails and other documents examined by The New York Times do not show Hunter Biden or James Biden discussing any role for the former vice president in the project.

Mr. Biden’s tax returns, which he has released, show no income from any such venture. There is nothing illegal about doing business in China or with Chinese partners; Mr. Trump long pursued deals in China, had a partnership with a government-controlled enterprise and maintained a corporate bank account there.

The Biden campaign has rejected all assertions that the former vice president had any role in the negotiations over the deal or any stake in it.

Andrew Bates, a Biden campaign spokesman, said the former vice president never had any stake in the project. “Joe Biden has never even considered being involved in business with his family, nor in any overseas business whatsoever,” he said.

At the second presidential debate on Thursday, Mr. Biden said, “I have not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my life.”

The messages produced by Mr. Bobulinski appear to reflect a meeting between him, the former vice president and James Biden in May 2017 in Beverly Hills, Calif. The messages do not make clear what was discussed.

Mr. Bates did not answer questions about Mr. Bobulinski’s claim that he met with the former vice president. But Mr. Bates said the Chinese deal never was discussed by Mr. Biden with members of his family. “He never had any conversations about these issues at all,” Mr. Bates said.

One email sent on May 13, 2017, by another member of the venture discusses how the various partners in the deal could theoretically split up the equity and makes reference to whether “the big guy” might get 10 percent. The document does not specify who this person is, saying only “10 held by H for the big guy ?”

Mr. Bobulinski has said the reference was clearly to the former vice president.

Mr. Bates said Mr. Biden “has never held stock in any such business arrangements nor has any family member or any other person ever held stock for him.”

 

And what makes this easy to confirm is that Joe Biden has openly released his tax returns for decades. The evidence is clear that there's nothing there, and this story is just as bogus as it was ten months ago when the Trump regime tried to cover up their Ukraine quid pro quo by screaming HUNTER BIDEN and taking a huge dump on the carpet.

It didn't work then. It's not working now.

That's the biggest difference from 2016.

Retribution Execution, Con't

A Trump second term means the replacement of much of his cabinet with yes men who will aid the republic's transition to a fascist autocratic police state, starting with law enforcement, intelligence services, and the military.

If President Trump wins re-election, he'll move to immediately fire FBI Director Christopher Wray and also expects to replace CIA Director Gina Haspel and Defense Secretary Mark Esper, two people who've discussed these officials' fates with the president tell Axios.

The big picture: The list of planned replacements is much longer, but these are Trump's priorities, starting with Wray. Wray and Haspel are despised and distrusted almost universally in Trump's inner circle. He would have fired both already, one official said, if not for the political headaches of acting before Nov. 3.

Why it matters: A win, no matter the margin, will embolden Trump to ax anyone he sees as constraining him from enacting desired policies or going after perceived enemies. Trump last week signed an executive order that set off alarm bells as a means to politicize the civil service. An administration official said the order "is a really big deal" that would make it easier for presidents to get rid of career government officials. 

There could be shake-ups across other departments. The president has never been impressed with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, for example. But that doesn't carry the urgency of replacing Wray or Haspel. The nature of top intelligence and law enforcement posts has traditionally carried an expectation for a higher degree of independence and separation from politics.

Be smart: While Trump has also privately vented about Attorney General Bill Barr, he hasn't made any formal plans to replace him, an official said. Trump is furious that Barr isn't releasing before the election what Trump hoped would be a bombshell report by U.S. Attorney John Durham on the Obama administration's handling of the Trump-Russia investigation. 

Durham's investigation has yet to produce any high-profile indictments of Obama-era officials as Trump had hoped. "The attorney general wants to finish the work that he's been involved in since day one," a senior administration official told Axios.

Behind the scenes: "The view of Haspel in the West Wing is that she still sees her job as manipulating people and outcomes, the way she must have when she was working assets in the field," one source with direct knowledge of the internal conversations told Axios. "It's bred a lot of suspicion of her motives." 

Trump is also increasingly frustrated with Haspel for opposing the declassification of documents that would help the Justice Department's Durham report. A source familiar with conversations at the CIA says, "Since the beginning of DNI's push to declassify documents, and how strongly she feels about protecting sources connected to those materials, there have been rumblings around the agency that the director plans to depart the CIA regardless of who wins the election.”

As for Wray, whose expected firing was first reported by The Daily Beast, Trump is angry his second FBI chief didn't launch a formal investigation into Hunter Biden's foreign business connections — and didn't purge more officials Trump believes abused power to investigate his 2016 campaign's ties to Russia. 

Trump also grew incensed when Wray testified in September that the FBI has not seen widespread election fraud, including with mail-in ballots. A senior FBI official tells Axios: "Major law enforcement associations representing current and former FBI agents as well as police and sheriff's departments across the country have consistently expressed their full support of Director Wray's leadership of the Bureau."

Trump soured on Esper over the summer when the Defense secretary rebuffed the idea of sending active-duty military into the streets to deal with racial justice protests and distanced himself from the clearing of Lafayette Square for a photo op at St. John's church. 

Trump indicated to Axios then that he "really wasn't focused on" firing Esper. One senior official cautioned that others who want the Pentagon job could be driving speculation to undercut Esper. But one source, who discussed options with Trump, told Axios he urged the president to wait until post-election to replace him. Chief Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said in a statement that Esper "has always been and remains committed to doing what is best for the military and the Nation.”

 

Both Trump and Bill Barr will have free reign to start arresting Democrats in a second term, especially if Mitch McConnell keeps control of the Senate.  The decent to fascism will come quickly should Trump prevail in the election.

For the first time, I think Biden will win, he's held on to a big lead for long enough and there's just too many battleground states for Trump to play defense in right now for him to win them all like he did in 2016, when he was on offense, and Biden's leads in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania continue to be statistically significant, and Biden is above 50% in all three states.  That's all he needs to pick up from 2016 in order to top 270 electoral votes, and the odds are he'll win at least one or two of the other six battleground states (GA, TX, OH, NC, AZ, and FL) on top of those three.

Trump is running out of time to win this, but if he does, America is absolutely out of time.

We're done as a free nation if Trump wins.

I implore you to vote if you haven't already.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

Even Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal can no longer hide the multiple abject failures of the Trump regime on COVID-19, as the atrocities are documented. Remember the $250 million CDC advertising plan to "instill hope in America" on the virus, which was widely panned as a quarter-billion dollar slush fund for the government to campaign for Trump? It failed even worse that we could have imagined, turns out...

 

A federal health agency halted a public-service coronavirus advertising campaign funded by $250 million in taxpayer money after it offered a special vaccine deal to an unusual set of essential workers: Santa Claus performers.

As part of the plan, a top Trump administration official wanted the Santa performers to promote the benefits of a Covid-19 vaccination and, in exchange, offered them early vaccine access ahead of the general public, according to audio recordings. Those who perform as Mrs. Claus and elves also would have been included.

The Department of Health and Human Services said Friday the Santa plan would be scrapped. The deal was the brainchild of the official, Michael Caputo, an HHS assistant secretary, who took a 60-day medical leave last month. The rest of the campaign now is under an HHS review.

The Santa “collaboration will not be happening,” and HHS Secretary Alex Azar had no knowledge of Mr. Caputo’s outreach discussions, an HHS spokesman said. Mr. Caputo didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Ric Erwin, chairman of the Fraternal Order of Real Bearded Santas, called the news “extremely disappointing,” adding: “This was our greatest hope for Christmas 2020, and now it looks like it won’t happen.”

 

In fact, the White House has now completely given up on containing the pandemic, and wants all of America to know that you're all on your own, and whatever happens, it's not Donald Trump's fault, so deal with it.

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows conceded that the Trump administration had given up in containing the coronavirus crisis that has killed over 225,000 Americans, admitting on Sunday morning that the White House is “not going to control the pandemic” and instead going to just hold out hope for a vaccine. 

Amid another COVID-19 outbreak at the White House, this time in Vice President Mike Pence’s office, Meadows appeared on CNN’s State of the Union, and anchor Jape Tapper immediately pressed the chief of staff on reports that he tried to keep news of the positive coronavirus tests from going public.

“Why would you do that? Is it because it’s another sign the way the White House has failed to contain the virus?” Tapper wondered aloud, prompting Meadows to falsely claim that wasn’t reported.

“That was in the New York Times story,” Tapper shot back.

Meadows, meanwhile, justified the attempt to keep the outbreak under wraps by saying that “sharing personal information is something we should do” before claiming that the White House also has an “obligation to let people know to contact trace” when there is a positive case.

Tapper reminded the chief of staff that the administration didn’t do that during the previous outbreak that resulted in President Donald Trump’s hospitalization, noting that Chris Christie said he was never contacted despite his own battle with the virus.

The CNN anchor went on to press Meadows on Vice President Chief of Staff Marc Short’s diagnosis, asking why Pence isn’t quarantining and out on the campaign trail considering his close contact with Short in recent days. Meadows dismissed the need for Pence to follow CDC guidelines, saying Pence is an essential worker and “he’s not just campaigning, he’s working.”

After asserting that Pence is wearing masks in public and socially distancing when possible, Meadows then expressed doubt that large gatherings cause the spread of the virus, citing recent reports that small groups and family events are leading to an increase in infections. Tapper pointed out that the virus is coming from many different places because the pandemic is out of control.

“Here is what we have to do,” Meadows declared. “We are not going to control the pandemic. We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics, and other mitigation areas.”

Tapper, for his part, pressed Meadows on why we couldn’t get control of the pandemic, prompting the chief of staff to respond that it was due to it being a “contagious virus just like the flu.”

“Why not make efforts to contain it?” Tapper retorted.

“Well, we are making efforts to contain it,” Meadows insisted.

“By running all over the country and not wearing a mask? That’s what the vice president is doing,” the CNN anchor shot back.

 

Got that? Containment and mitigation are no longer options. Millions, perhaps tens of millions will get sick and hundreds of thousands will die, but as soon as the Trump regime gets that vaccine, everything will be fine.

Also, the Trump regime has no real vaccine plan either. They were going to use mall Santas to demonstrate the vaccine if they had it in time, which of course was never going to happen.

Most likely it will be another six months before a viable, effective vaccine is ready, and thanks to the Trump regime, half of America will refuse to take it anyway and scream about MAH FREEDUMBS.

The larger, more immediate problem is the White House Chief of Staff just went on live TV a week before Election Day and admitted there's no regime plan to contain a pandemic that has already sickened millions and has killed 230,000 Americans, and that they just do not care.

 

They never cared about America, they never cared about you or your family, they never cared about anyone or anything except grifting as much money from the gig as they could and helping the rest of the GOP burn down the country. 

And the country is burning already. El Paso is in lockdown for two weeks. Utah is now moving to triage, like Arizona did in the first few months of the pandemic.

With new coronavirus cases shattering records on a daily basis, Utah’s hospitals are expected to begin rationing care in a week or two.

That’s the prediction of Greg Bell, president of the Utah Hospital Association, who said administrators of the state’s hospitals confronted Gov. Gary Herbert on Thursday with a grim list: Criteria they propose doctors should use if they are forced to decide which patients can stay in overcrowded intensive care units.

Under the criteria, which would require Herbert’s approval, patients who are getting worse despite receiving intensive care would be moved out first. In the event that two patients' conditions are equal, the young get priority over the old, since older patients are more likely to die.

‘We told him, ‘It looks like we’re going to have to request those be activated if this trend continues,’" Bell recounted, “'and we see no reason why it won’t.'"

Hospitalizations normally rise after the number of new cases increases, and Utah repeatedly set new records for daily case totals last week. At least two Utah hospitals have opened overflow ICUs this month.

The state’s hospitals can shift patients around to free up bed space, Bell said, and the state has long planned to open a field hospital at the Mountain America Expo Center in Sandy if necessary.

But one of the defining features of intensive care is access to doctors and nurses with specialty training — and opening new beds does not mean those health care workers can staff them.

Bell said it’s now all but inevitable that hospitals will need to enact their triage protocols, known as “crisis standards of care.”

“I haven’t said, ‘It’s gonna happen’ — until [Thursday] night,” Bell said. “I told the governor, ‘It’s gonna happen. We’re going to be back here asking for crisis standards.’ ”

 

Expect more cities to go into lockdown and more states to follow hospital crisis triage protocols in November after the election.

If Donald Trump wins, we will have COVID-19 with us for every day of his second term.

And millions of us, maybe tens of millions, won't make it through to the end.

StupidiNews!

• The US Navy has confirmed two female aviators were killed in an aircraft training accident in southern Alabama on Sunday, no civilians were injured by the crash.
• The Trump campaign is counting on local TV news owned by Republican-friendly corporate donors in order to make up for advertising as Democrats continue to outraise the GOP in 2020. 
• The White House is petitioning the Supreme Court to block North Carolina's COVID-19 vote-by-mail ballot extension as Amy Coney Barrett could be confirmed by the Senate GOP Monday.
• Pope Francis has named Wilton Gregory as the first Black cardinal in the Church's US history, Gregory was the Archbishop of Atlanta's diocese and has openly supported Black Lives Matter.
• The FDA has approved remdesivir for treatment of COVID-19 just days after the World Health Organization's largest global study on the drug found no benefit for patients.