I've been at this for a little more than 20 years and it's a wonderful journey.
I tried my best to fact check and offer
commentary (with an attitude, as one friend told me early on) in order to
clear the political haze that constantly surrounds us.
And yet, here we are.
It's just too overwhelming right now. I need some time off and I have no idea how much.
Until I come back, I won't be blogging any more.
Best of luck to you all.
David
PS: The blog will remain on line.
Some text highlights (from Lincoln's SOTU, 1862):
Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.... The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility.
And (this is from the Lincoln-Douglas debate):
It is the eternal struggle between two principles, right and wrong, throughout the world. It is the same spirit that says 'you toil and work and earn bread, and I'll eat it.' No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation, and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.
And (this is from the Gettysburg Address):
That from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. That this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.
Vote for Harris. Vote Against Trump (and every one of Trump's enablers).
Save the country.
We'll start with these names from Time:
And add these names from CBS:
Add these names from The Washington Post:
And so on.
From CBS News:
Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday night delivered her closing argument against former President Donald Trump at the same site he encouraged his supporters to "fight like hell" on Jan. 6, 2021, before they marched to the U.S. Capitol and tried unsuccessfully to halt the certification of President Biden's victory.
"We know who Donald Trump is," Harris said. "He is the person who stood at this very spot nearly four years ago and sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol to overturn the will of the people in a free and fair election, an election that he knew he lost."
"America, we know what Donald Trump has in mind. More chaos. More division. And policies that help those at the very top and hurt everyone else. I offer a different path. And I ask for your vote," she said.
Good enough for me.
First, from JD Vance:
Vance: I have heard about the joke… Maybe it's a stupid, racist joke.. Maybe it is not. But we have to stop getting so offended at every little thing can a United States of America. I’m so over it pic.twitter.com/I93s68plT8
— Acyn (@Acyn) October 28, 2024
Message: To all the easily offended snowflakes out there, just get over it.
Second, from the Archbishop of Puerto Rico:
The Archbishop of Puerto Rico formally rebukes Donald Trump, demanding that he personally apologize: “It is not sufficient for your campaign to apologize. It is important that you, personally, apologize for these comments.” pic.twitter.com/fK1qR9Vukg
— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) October 29, 2024
If you have a chance, head over to The NY Times and read this article.
Here's how it starts:
In the aftermath of Donald J. Trump’s defeat in 2020, one of his election lawyers set out to keep the lies about his loss alive.
The lawyer, a well-connected conservative named Cleta Mitchell, knit together grass-roots activists, Republican lawyers, party officials and deep-pocketed advocacy groups into a vast national network. The aim was nothing less than remaking American elections.
Over the past four years, Ms. Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network has done more than any other group to take Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about corruption in the democratic system and turn them into action.
As is usually the case in stories like these, I read them to see if they mention any of the usual suspects I track at this blog - or if there any sorts of connections to those usuals.
Found one - that well-connected conservative lawyer, Cleta Mitchell.
Page 4-5 of the Senate Judiciary's Staff report, Subverting Justice:
FINDING 4: Trump allies with links to the “Stop the Steal” movement and the January 6 insurrection participated in the pressure campaign against DOJ. In addition to Trump White House officials, including the President himself, outside Trump allies with ties to the “Stop the Steal” movement and the January 6 insurrection also pressured DOJ to help overturn the election results. They included:
- U.S. Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District, who led the objection to counting Pennsylvania’s electoral votes on the House floor in the hours immediately following the January 6 insurrection. Perry has acknowledged introducing Clark to Trump, and documents and testimony confirm that he directly communicated with Donoghue about his false Pennsylvania election fraud claims.
- Doug Mastriano, a Republican State Senator from Pennsylvania who participated in Rudy Giuliani’s so-called election fraud “hearings,” spent thousands of dollars from his campaign account to bus people to the January 6 “Save America Rally,” and was present on the Capitol grounds as the insurrection unfolded. Documents show that, like Perry, Mastriano directly communicated with Donoghue about his false election fraud claims.
- Cleta Mitchell, a Trump campaign legal adviser, early proponent of Trump’s false stolen election claims, and participant the January 2, 2021 call where Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes.” Mitchell emailed Meadows a copy of Trump’s lawsuit against Raffensperger and offered to send DOJ 1,800 pages of supporting exhibits; Meadows sent the materials to Rosen, asking DOJ to investigate.
The Times piece spends some time on Trump's "fake electors" scheme:
Ms. Mitchell and others who played pivotal roles in Mr. Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election, including the former law professor John Eastman, the architect of the fake electors scheme, advised the ranks of activists as they sought to remove thousands of voters from the rolls and pushed to reimagine how elections are certified.
And later:
Ms. Mitchell had been a prominent Republican election lawyer for decades, a veteran of the long-running debates over tightening voter ID requirements and cleaning up voter rolls.
But in 2020, working as a lawyer for Mr. Trump, she took her work in a different direction. She supported the plan to send Trump electors to Congress from states where he lost the vote. She was on the call with Mr. Trump as he badgered Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” the votes he needed to win.
Since we already know that:
As they organized the fake elector scheme, lawyers appointed a “point person” in seven states to help organize those electors who were willing to sign their names to false documents. In Pennsylvania, that point person was Douglas V. Mastriano, a proponent of Mr. Trump’s lies of a stolen election...
So I gotta ask, was Pennsylvania State Senator Doug Mastriano (or anyone on his staff, or attached to his campaigns or anyone else connected to him) in on any of these meetings of the Cleta Mitchell's so-called Election Integrity Network?
An attempted coup happened. It's kinda important to get to the bottom of it and hold all those responsible accountable. No one should get a pass.
First, the speech itself:
And this is how The New York Times framed it:
Michelle Obama issued an impassioned plea to American voters on Saturday — and, in particular, American men — anchored in a searing and intimate depiction of women’s bodies and reproductive health, and what she described as the life-or-death stakes of returning former President Donald J. Trump to power.
In her first appearance on the campaign trail during this election, Mrs. Obama, long reluctant to engage in the political arena, described the far-reaching consequences of the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion, in the concrete terms of personal tragedy.
“If your wife is shivering and bleeding on the operating room table during a routine delivery gone bad, her pressure dropping as she loses more and more blood, or some unforeseen infection spreads and her doctors aren’t sure if they can act, you will be the one praying that it’s not too late,” Mrs. Obama said. “You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something.”
And:
And she castigated the media and many voters for holding Ms. Harris to a higher standard than her opponent, for “choosing to ignore Donald Trump’s gross incompetence, while asking Kamala to dazzle us at every turn.”
“We expect her to be intelligent and articulate, to have a clear set of policies, to never show too much anger, to prove time and time again that she belongs,” Mrs. Obama said. “But for Trump, we expect nothing at all, no understanding of policy, no ability to put together a coherent argument, no honesty, no decency, no morals.”
The crowd roared in approval.
Let's remember that Donald Trump is a convicted felon, a criminal who owes a half billion in fines for real estate fraud and for defaming a woman he sexually assaulted.
No understanding of policy, no ability to put together a coherent argument, no honesty, no decency, no morals.
And here's a view from the other side of the Atlantic:
With the race virtually deadlocked, Obama said she was in the Midwestern battleground heeding her own advice to “do something” to support Harris bid to be the country’s first female president. In raw and strikingly personal terms, she asked why Harris was being held to a “higher standard” than her opponent. Trump’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and his failed attempt to cling to power after losing the 2020 election should alone be disqualifying, Obama argued. But now the people who worked closest with him when he was president – his former advisers and cabinet secretaries – had stepped forward with a warning that he should not be allowed to return to power.
And:
Abortion bans, she argued, affected men as well. If something happened during a pregnancy or a delivery and the doctor was prevented from providing care, “you will be the one praying that it’s not too late. You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something, and then there is the tragic but very real possibility that in the worst-case scenario, you just might be the one holding flowers at the funeral,” she said.
Meanwhile, Trump is still lying about his 2020 election loss. This time it's with moon-unit Joe Rogan.
This recently bubbled up again:
You can find the study
here.
CNN reported at the time:
Tens of thousands of pregnancies have resulted from rape in states where abortion is not a legal option, researchers estimate in a new study.
In the study, published Wednesday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers from Planned Parenthood, Resound Research for Reproductive Health and academic institutions across the US used a combination of federal surveys on crime and sexual violence to estimate that there were about 520,000 rapes that led to 64,565 pregnancies in the time since abortion bans have been enacted in 14 states – ranging by state from four to 18 months ago.
Other research has found that there have been fewer than 10 abortions each month in states with bans, suggesting that most, if not all, victims were not able to get abortions in the states where they live, even those where the law allows exceptions for rape.
“Restricting abortion access to survivors of rape can have particularly devastating consequences,” the medical journal’s editors wrote in a note about the new research. “Whether these survivors of rape had illegal abortions, received medication abortion through the mail, traveled to other states, or carried the child to birth is unknown.”
And:
“Like many exceptions written into abortion bans, an exception for rape victims may appear to be a reasonable solution but in practice can create more trauma and danger for patients who have already experienced a traumatic event,” said Dr. Sami Heywood, an ob/gyn in Illinois and fellow with the advocacy group Physicians for Reproductive Health who was not involved in the new research.
“No other health care is reserved only for people who can prove a crime took place. That’s not an ethical way to practice medicine. It is cruel to force people who have already been victimized to jump through legal and logistical barriers that cause further harm.”
But as we've seen in most other MAGA forced-birth realities, the cruelty is the point.
And if you want to take a peek into a possible future, Project 2025 lets you have it, right between the eyes:
Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method. It should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion. In addition, CDC should require monitoring and reporting for complications due to abortion and every instance of children being born alive after an abortion. Moreover, abortion should be clearly defined as only those procedures that intentionally end an unborn child’s life. Miscarriage management or standard ectopic pregnancy treatments should never be conflated with abortion.That last point is moot, however, as there are those who would not allow any sort of abortion (or abortion adjacent) health care procedures to be utilized to protect the life of the pregnant woman.
Why? Because to them, the women don't matter. Not enough, anyway.
Or as was stated so much more wisely than I ever could:
[A woman's right whether or not to bear a child] is something central to a woman's life, to her dignity. It's a decision that she must make for herself. And when Government controls that decision for her, she's being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices. Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg at her Senate Confirmation Hearing, 1993
The cruelty is the point - to keep 'em in their place.
From The Atlantic:
Former generals who have worked for Trump say that the sole military virtue he prizes is obedience. As his presidency drew to a close, and in the years since, he has become more and more interested in the advantages of dictatorship, and the absolute control over the military that he believes it would deliver. “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” Trump said in a private conversation in the White House, according to two people who heard him say this. “People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”
Of course Trump's spokesface, Alex Pfeiffer, denies this ever happened.
You'll note, however, that what Trump was interested in was (total) loyalty in his generals. That was the important part - not that they had to be Nazis or whatever.
The fact that at least some of Hitler's generals were, in fact, Nazis (and I have no idea how many of them were) did not invalidate Trump's admiration for them. Or desire to replicate the total loyalty scenario he so obviously desired.
The man is a fascist.
From The New York Times.
The frame:
Few top officials spent more time behind closed doors in the White House with President Donald J. Trump than John F. Kelly, the former Marine general who was his longest-serving chief of staff.
And now the goods:
He said that, in his opinion, Mr. Trump met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law.
He discussed and confirmed previous reports that Mr. Trump had made admiring statements about Hitler, had expressed contempt for disabled veterans and had characterized those who died on the battlefield for the United States as “losers” and “suckers” — comments first reported in 2020 by The Atlantic.
Details:
Kelly said Trump chafed at limitations on his power.
“He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government,” Mr. Kelly said.
Mr. Trump “never accepted the fact that he wasn’t the most powerful man in the world — and by power, I mean an ability to do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted,” Mr. Kelly said.
And:
Trump told him that “Hitler did some good things.”
Mr. Kelly confirmed previous reports that on more than one occasion Mr. Trump spoke positively of Hitler.
“He commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too,’” Mr. Kelly said Mr. Trump told him.
And:
He said Trump called service members who were injured or killed “losers and suckers,” despite denials from Trump and some aides.
Confirming a statement he gave to CNN last year, Mr. Kelly said that on multiple occasions Mr. Trump told him that those Americans wounded, captured or killed in action were “losers and suckers.”
“The time in Paris was not the only time that he ever said it,” Mr. Kelly said, referring to reports that Mr. Trump told him that he did not want to visit a cemetery where American service members killed during World War I were buried.
Donald Trump.
Let's start with some reporting that the Trump campaign wants the world (MAGA and otherwise) to see.
From (of course) Fox "News":
Former President Donald Trump took on a new role as he cooked and served french fries to customers at McDonald's on Sunday afternoon in Pennsylvania, while dishing out plenty of jabs at Vice President Kamala Harris.
"Hello, everybody. It's my first day at McDonald's, I'm looking for a job," Trump said as he entered the establishment and shook hands with the owner.
Thousands of Trump supporters surrounded the McDonald's restaurant as Trump spent the afternoon working as a fry cook after accusing Harris of lying about working at the fast food restaurant.
And so on. He worked the frier, he worked the drive-through window and so on.
Here's what was left out.
From The NYTimes:
Donald J. Trump walked into one of his favorite restaurants on Sunday and declared he was “looking for a job.”
He certainly is, though not the one that he occupied during the photo op that followed. Mr. Trump’s stop at the McDonald’s in suburban Philadelphia, which was closed to the public during his visit and where he briefly worked the fryer and handed bags of food to preselected drive-through customers, was a play meant to attack his opponent and give the billionaire candidate some credibility with the working-class voters he needs to win back the White House. [Emphasis added.]
See that? It was a pre-arranged, pre-selected photo op.
Proof:
So the place wasn’t even open. It was all staged and fake. He didn’t work for real at a McDonalds. It was a staged fraud just like every other event. pic.twitter.com/FLEqnrZ7Tw
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) October 20, 2024
Look at the signature on the statement. Now let's travel back to Fox:
The owner of the Feasterville McDonald's shared a statement with Fox News Digital, highlighting the importance of the former president's visit.
"As a small, independent business owner, it is a fundamental value of my organization that we proudly open our doors to everyone who visits the Feasterville community. That’s why I accepted former President Trump’s request to observe the transformative working experience that 1 in 8 Americans have had: a job at McDonald’s," owner and operator Derek Giacomantonio said.
"As a former crew member, I can attest this job is more than burgers and fries, but a meaningful pathway to opportunity. Local Pennsylvania franchisees like me are proud to provide more than 25,000 jobs across the state and I'm honored to showcase my restaurant and the incredible impact of the franchise business model here today," Giacomantonio continued.
His statement to Fox comes very close to being word for word from the statement. Did Fox "News" know that the store was closed for the Trump event? If not, then why not? If so, then why didn't they report so that we can decide?
This was first posted in 2020. Then tweaked a year later.
Here's the original:
I'd like to take a break from watching our slow-motion Trump-led social suicide and talk a little about this:
The Pittsburgh Art Commission unanimously voted on Wednesday to schedule a special hearing for the public to voice their opinions on the potential removal of the Christopher Columbus statue in Schenley Park.Mayor Bill Peduto asked the commission in a letter Tuesday to begin a public review to determine the future of the statue.
The statue, which was erected in Schenley Park in 1958, was vandalized in 2010, 2017 and most recently again in June and July as part of nationwide protests against monuments honoring Columbus.
After the statue was vandalized in June, an online petition was created calling for its removal.
Let me say as a proud Italian-American that it's probably time for the statue to be removed. As a cultural signifier, "Columbus" has way too much negative baggage to support it's continued presence in Oakland.
But instead of talking about the statues, let's talk about Columbus Day - something with similar calls for removal. What does "Columbus Day" mean? Evidently, different things to different people at different times.
From The New York Times:
Few who march in Columbus Day parades or recount the tale of Columbus’s voyage from Europe to the New World are aware of how the holiday came about or that President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed it as a one-time national celebration in 1892 — in the wake of a bloody New Orleans lynching that took the lives of 11 Italian immigrants. The proclamation was part of a broader attempt to quiet outrage among Italian-Americans, and a diplomatic blowup over the murders that brought Italy and the United States to the brink of war.
It began with the murder of David Hennessy. A popular police chief, Hennessy was shot down by gunmen while walking home from work. As he lay dying, a witness asked him who did it. “Dagoes,” he reportedly whispered, using a slur for Italians.And so, more than a few Italians were rounded up and put on trial. The trial ended in a way that the public didn't like (six not guilty verdicts and 3 mistrials) and then:
In response, thousands of angry residents gathered near the jail. Impassioned speakers whipped the mob into a frenzy, painting Italian immigrants as criminals who needed to be driven out of the city. Finally, the mob broke into the city’s arsenal, grabbing guns and ammunition. As they ran toward the prison, they shouted, “We want the Dagoes!”
A smaller group of armed men stormed the prison, grabbing not just the men who had been acquitted or given a mistrial, but several who had not been tried or accused in the crimes. Shots rang out—hundreds of them. Eleven men’s bodies were riddled with bullets and torn apart by the crowd.
It's not surprising that the crowd rejoiced. The Italian government, evidently, did not.
Back to The Times on President Harrison's proclamation:President Harrison would have ignored the New Orleans carnage had the victims been black. But the Italian government made that impossible. It broke off diplomatic relations and demanded an indemnity that the Harrison administration paid. Harrison even called on Congress in his 1891 State of the Union to protect foreign nationals — though not black Americans — from mob violence.
Harrison’s Columbus Day proclamation in 1892 opened the door for Italian-Americans to write themselves into the American origin story, in a fashion that piled myth upon myth. As the historian Danielle Battisti shows in “Whom We Shall Welcome,” they rewrote history by casting Columbus as “the first immigrant” — even though he never set foot in North America and never immigrated anywhere (except possibly to Spain), and even though the United States did not exist as a nation during his 15th-century voyage.Seems obvious that the establishment of Columbus Day was initially intended to appease an angry Italian government in light of a brutal Southern lynching and not necessarily a celebration of Columbus himself, who, let's remember, was a man of his time and thus could scarcely be seen today as anything but ignorant and vicious.
Harrison was also a calling for patriotism. From the proclamation:
Now, therefore, I, Benjamin Harrison, President of the United States of America, in pursuance of the aforesaid joint resolution, do hereby appoint Friday, October 21, 1892, the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America by Columbus, as a general holiday for the people of the United States. On that day let the people, so far as possible, cease from toil and devote themselves to such exercises as may best express honor to the discoverer and their appreciation of the great achievements of the four completed centuries of American life.
Columbus stood in his age as the pioneer of progress and enlightenment. The system of universal education is in our age the most prominent and salutary feature of the spirit of enlightenment, and it is peculiarly appropriate that the schools be made by the people the center of the day’s demonstration. Let the national flag float over every schoolhouse in the country and the exercises be such as shall impress upon our youth the patriotic duties of American citizenship.
In order to push the patriotism of the moment, Harrison had to shoe-horn Columbus into something he definitely (and absurdly) wasn't: an enlightenment-age "pioneer of progress." But what about all those who have since felt that the day is not about the misery brought by Columbus (and many others after him) but cultural pride in being written into the American origin story? The day means one thing if you see it as a celebration (or commemoration) of the beginnings of what turn out to be some very bad long-term abuses and another if you see it as a de facto Italian American heritage day and not a celebration of the misery and pestilence that followed Columbus' "discovery" of Hispaniola.
So we're at odds. What does "Columbus Day" mean? Who gets to define its meaning for everyone else? Those pushing for the "heritage day" risk offending those focusing on the very real abuses and those focusing on those abuses risk offending the cultural pride of a large swath of the population.I don't know the solution.
Here's my domanda piuttosto pericolosa: is an Italian-American Heritage Day even necessary at this point? The fact of the matter is that every ethnic/cultural group deserves recognition for its unique contributions to The American Experience.
Perhaps it's time retire the day and use the temporal space it inhabits to make election day a national holiday instead. Perhaps we can all celebrate the American Experience that way.
From The Washington Post:
Federal emergency response personnel on Saturday had employees operating in hard-hit Rutherford County, N.C., stop working and move to a different area because of concerns over “armed militia” threatening government workers in the region, according to an email sent to federal agencies helping with response in the state. Want to know how your actions can help make a difference for our planet? Sign up for the Climate Coach newsletter, in your inbox every Tuesday and Thursday.
Around 1 p.m. Saturday, an official with the U.S. Forest Service, which is supporting recovery efforts after Hurricane Helene along with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, sent an urgent message to numerous federal agencies warning that “FEMA has advised all federal responders Rutherford County, NC, to stand down and evacuate the county immediately. The message stated that National Guard troops 'had come across x2 trucks of armed militia saying there were out hunting FEMA.’”
And The NYTimes:
A meteorologist based in Washington, D.C., was accused of helping the government cover up manipulating a hurricane. In Houston, a forecaster was repeatedly told to “do research” into the weather’s supposed nefarious origins. And a meteorologist for a television station in Lansing, Mich., said she had received death threats.
“Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes,” wrote the forecaster in Michigan, Katie Nickolaou, in a social media post. “I can’t believe I just had to type that.”
And:
Last summer, Chris Gloninger, the chief meteorologist of a television news station in Iowa, left his job after he received a string of harassing messages — including a death threat — for his on-air discussions of climate change. He began incorporating the topic into his forecasts after being stunned by Hurricane Sandy.
Back to The Post on how damaging this is:
The heightening tension has resulted in residents harassing federal employees, said Riva Duncan, a former Forest Service official who lives in Asheville.
Duncan, who is also a representative with the Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, said people have been yelling at federal employees delivering aid or showing up to do repairs, saying, “We don’t want your help here.”
One Forest Service employee, she said, was pulling into a gas station when someone yelled at him to leave, saying “We don’t want the government here.”
“It’s terrible because a lot of these folks who need assistance are refusing it because they believe the stuff people are saying about FEMA and the government,” Duncan said. “And it’s sad because they are probably the ones who need the help the most.”
Yea. And then what happens next? They complain that they're not being helped.
Claim: The federal government isn’t helping Republican areas of western North Carolina.
“They’re being treated very badly in the Republican areas,” Trump said in a Fox News interview on September 30. “They’re not getting water, they’re not getting anything.”
Reality: FEMA administrator Criswell has described these allegations as “frankly ridiculous and just plain false.”
And so on.
So Trump lies to his flock, the flock believes the lies and then refuses guv'ment help - or worse threatens the lives of those delivering it.
We'll start here:
🚨 At Moonies gun cult Rod of Iron Ministries, Flynn Org terrorist Ivan Raiklin announces plan to interfere with electors in PA, including a plan to confront state legislators echoing J6 — on 12/1/24 at the State Capitol, in Harrisburg, PA 🚨
— Jim Stewartson, Counterinsurgent 🇺🇸🇺🇦💙🎈 (@jimstewartson) October 12, 2024
This is criminal seditious… https://t.co/E3oE5hejZV pic.twitter.com/UY5ryYuJpT
For those who've forgotten about "Rod of Iron" here's some background.
I found a few RoI FB pages announcing how PA State Sen Doug Mastriano was set appear there.
But what about this Ivan Raiklin guy?
There's ties to Doug, too.
Especially this:
Election fraud conspiracy theorist and GOP nominee for PA Gov Doug Mastriano celebrating his win tonight with decertification memo author Ivan Raiklin, who says:
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 18, 2022
“20 electoral votes!”
Curious … pic.twitter.com/liYB77NJFV
Yep. That's Ivan Raiklin.
And then this:
Ivan Raiklin posted to his Telegram from the Dog Mastriano rally.
— Gal MF (@gal_suburban) January 8, 2022
Next to him sits the leadership of the Patriot Caucus, which @EverettStern1 has pointed to as a group willing to commit acts of political violence and chaos to advance their goals.
H/t @clayberg pic.twitter.com/2bOjbo8wwo
Yep. That's Ivan Raiklin, too!
Does Doug Mastriano have any comment about how his friend Ivan Raiklin was speaking before a crowd at the Rod of Iron ministries urging them to interfere with the 2024 election?
BTW, Raiklin is the source of the so-called "Operation Pence Card."
That was the part of Trump's coup to pressure VP Pence into not certifying the electors.
And let's remember what happened the night before Trump's mob stormed the Capitol:
The committee also released call logs from the days leading up to January 6, 2021 painting a fuller picture of who the former president was speaking to as he and his allies were plotting for him to stay in office, the first time the panel is releasing White House call logs in their entirety.
The logs have been crucial to the panel’s investigation in piecing together a timeline of events. While the log for January 6 has a seven-hour gap, the committee has gone to great lengths to fill in that part of the timeline through witness interviews and other records.
The day before the US Capitol attack, Trump spoke to then-Vice President Mike Pence. After that conversation, Trump spoke with Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, who helped fuel Trump’s election lies in the state, and then the switchboard operator left a note “that Senator Douglas Mastriano will be calling in for the Vice President.”
What did they talk about?
Has Doug Mastriano EVER explained this to the people of Pennsylvania?
>/center>This moment from @BarackObama 🔥 pic.twitter.com/UbKo7g0sif
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 11, 2024
You can read it here.
From the Factual Proffer:
When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office. With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (the “targeted states”). His efforts included lying to state officials in order to induce them to ignore true vote counts; manufacturing fraudulent electoral votes in the targeted states; attempting to enlist Vice President Michael R. Pence, in his role as President of the Senate, to obstruct Congress’s certification of the election by using the defendant’s fraudulent electoral votes; and when all else had failed, on January 6, 2021, directing an angry crowd of supporters to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification. The throughline of these efforts was deceit: the defendant’s and co-conspirators’ knowingly false claims of election fraud. (p. 3)
See that? It says, "knowingly false claims of election fraud."
And now with some facts:
Although his multiple conspiracies began after election day in 2020, the defendant laid the groundwork for his crimes well before then. Leading into the election, the defendant’s private and Campaign advisors, including [P6] (then a private citizen) and [P2] (the defendant’s Campaign manager), informed him that it would be a close contest and that it was unlikely to be finalized on election day—in part because of the time needed to process large numbers of mail-in ballots prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic. They also told the defendant that the initial returns on election night might be misleading—that is, that he might take an early lead in the vote count that would diminish as mail-in ballots were counted because his own supporters favored in-person voting, while supporters of his opponent, Joseph R. Biden, favored mail-in ballots.
Privately, the defendant told advisors—including [P6] Campaign personnel, [P7] (a White House staffer and Campaign volunteer), and [P8] (the Vice President’s Chief of Staff)—that in such a scenario, he would simply declare victory before all the ballots were counted and any winner was projected. (p. 5)
And then:
By October 2020, [P1] a private political advisor who had worked for the defendant’s 2016 presidential campaign, began to assist with the defendant’s re-election effort. Three days before election day, [P1] described the defendant’s plan to a private gathering of supporters: “And what Trump’s going to do is just declare victory. Right? He’s going to declare victory. That doesn’t mean he’s the winner, he’s just going to say he’s the winner.” After explaining that Biden’s supporters favored voting by mail, stated further, “And so they’re going to have a natural disadvantage and Trump’s going to take advantage of it—that’s our strategy. He’s going to declare himself a winner." (p. 7)
Immediately following election day on November 3, the defendant did exactly that.
According to Newsweek, P1 is Steve Bannon.
They knew they'd lost.
So what? I can hear the deniers say.
But let's look at how the fake elector scheme shows in the filing:
Shortly after election day, the defendant began to target the electoral process at the state level by attempting to deceive state officials and to prevent or overturn the legitimate ascertainment and appointment of Biden’s electors. As President, the defendant had no official responsibilities related to the states’ administration of the election or the appointment of their electors, and instead contacted state officials in his capacity as a candidate. Tellingly, the defendant contacted only state officials who were in his political party and were his political supporters, and only in states he had lost. The defendant’s attempts to use deceit to target the states’ electoral process played out in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, as well as across these and other states that used certain voting machines. (p. 16)
And so on.
And now onto Pennsylvania:
Two days after the election, on November 6, the defendant called [P46] the Chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party—the entity responsible for supporting Republican candidates in the commonwealth at the federal, state, and local level. [P46] had a prior relationship with the defendant, including having represented him in litigation in Pennsylvania after the 2016 presidential election.' The defendant asked [P46] how, without fraud, he had gone from winning Pennsylvania on election day to trailing in the days afterward.'? Consistent with what Campaign staff already had told the defendant, [P46] confirmed that it was not fraud; it was that there were roughly 1,750,000 mail-in ballots still being counted in Pennsylvania, which were expected to be eighty percent for Biden. Over the following two months, the defendant spread false claims of fraud in Pennsylvania anyway. (p.37)
And:
On the defendant’s behalf, [CC1] too spread patently false claims about Pennsylvania. On November 25, [CC1] and [P12] attended an unofficial hearing with Republican state legislators in a Gettysburg hotel conference room. The defendant called in, claimed to have been watching, and demanded that the election in Pennsylvania “has to be tumed around.” During the event, [CC1] falsely stated that Pennsylvania issued 1.8 million absentee ballots and received 2.5 million in return. The claim was rooted in an obvious error—the comparison of the number of ballots sent out in the primary election to the number of ballots received in the general election. After seeing [CC1] make this claim, [P43] the RNC’s Chief Counsel, tweeted publicly, “This is not true.” In the following days, Campaign staff internally confirmed that [CC1] was lying: when one Campaign staffer wrote in an email that [CC1] claim was “Just wrong” and “[t]here’s no way to defend it,” [P3] responded, “We have been saying this for awhile. It’s very frustrating.” Likewise, in late November or December, [P9] informed the defendant directly that a claim [CC1] was spreading, that “Pennsylvania received 700,000 more mail-in ballots than were mailed out,” was “bullshit” and explained the error.
This would be Doug Mastriano's hearing on November 25, 2020.
Oh, and from the context it's obvious that CC1 is Rudy Giuliani and P12 is Jenna Ellis.
Rudy Giuliani has been disbarred for spreading misinformation.
Jenna Ellis pled guilty in Georgia for lying to the legislature. She was disbarred for 3 years in Colorado. She was also Mastriano's "Senior Lead Counsel" for his failed gubernatorial campaign.
Does Doug Mastriano have any comment on Jack Smith's filing?
Gov. Walz: Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 2, 2024
Vance: I’m focused on the future
Walz: That is a damning non-answer pic.twitter.com/h1MXP2fGY8
ABCNews has some context:
As the debate winded down, Vance was asked if he would seek to challenge the 2024 election even if every governor certified the results. However, the senator sidestepped the question and pivoted to what he claimed was Harris and tech companies censoring people. He also brought up the endorsements of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.
And then there's this from The NYTimes:
“What President Trump has said is that there were problems,” Mr. Vance said when asked about his own past assertion that he would not have certified the 2020 election. “We should fight about those issues, debate those issues, peacefully in the public square. And that’s all I’ve said. And that’s all that Donald Trump has said.”
His debate opponent, Tim Walz, stared at him, unblinking, and then looked down at his lectern.
“Remember,” Mr. Vance said of Mr. Trump, “he said that on January the 6th, the protesters ought to protest peacefully. And on January the 20th, what happened? Joe Biden became the president. Donald Trump left the White House.”
Yea, he left out a lot of stuff, didn't he? But it's basically, this:
“We need to tell the story,” Mr. Walz said. “I mean, [Donald Trump] lost this election and he said he didn’t.”
That's when the above happened:
Mr. Walz had a question for his counterpart.
“He is still saying he didn’t lose the election,” Mr. Walz said of Mr. Trump, turning grandly to Mr. Vance. “Did he lose the 2020 election?”
“Tim,” Mr. Vance replied, “I’m focused on the future.” He swerved to a point about Covid and censorship.
“That,” Mr. Walz said, “is a damning non-answer.”
A damning non-answer.
From The NYTimes:
A panel of judges on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals on Thursday barred Rudolph W. Giuliani from practicing law in Washington because of false statements he made about the 2020 election results while he was former President Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer.
You can read the order here:
On consideration of the certified order from the state of New York disbarring respondent from the practice of law; this court’s July 25, 2024, order maintaining respondent’s suspension pending final disposition of this proceeding and directing him to show cause why reciprocal discipline should not be imposed; and respondent’s D.C. Bar R. XI, § 14(g) affidavit filed on August 9, 2021; and it appearing that respondent has not filed a response, it is
ORDERED that Rudolph W. Giuliani is hereby disbarred from the practice of law in the District of Columbia, nunc pro tunc to August 9, 2021.
That July 25, 2024 order can be found here.
You know what I'm gonna do next, right?
Yep:
The Referee found that on November 25, 2020, in violation of rules 4.1, 8.4(c), 8.4(d), and 8.4(h), respondent falsely and dishonestly claimed to Pennsylvania state legislators that in Philadelphia during the 2020 Presidential election, many thousands of votes were cast in the names of dead people.
Respondent stipulated that “[m]any thousands of votes were not cast in the names of dead people in Philadelphia during the 2020 election.” Further, the Referee found that respondent knew, or should have known, that on November 11, 2020, Philadelphia Commissioner Al Schmidt, a Republican, made a televised statement in which he criticized the allegations of fraud as having no basis in fact and specifically concluded that the investigations regarding dead voters had led nowhere.
The date of the violation: November 25, 2020.
Again, yep. That was Pennsylvania State Senator Doug Mastriano's hearing on election irregularities:
The hearing on election irregularities in Gettysburg was historic. @PASenateGOP @SenatorArgall pic.twitter.com/DouU5fbkLs
— Senator Doug Mastriano (@SenMastriano) November 26, 2020
Interesting thing, if you go to Sen Mastriano's official page and look for the link to the meeting, you get this:
Oops! That page can’t be found.
And searching for the name "Giuliani" also comes up empty.
Perhaps I am looking in the wrong place, perhaps it's a glitch.
But if neither is the case, did Doug Mastriano scrub the references to the disbarred Giuliani and that November 2020 hearing from his webpage?
Any comment (or corrections) for the blog, Senator?
Thanks to Trump's SCOTUS overturning Roe v Wade, women are now dying.
From Propublica:
Candi Miller’s health was so fragile, doctors warned having another baby could kill her.
“They said it was going to be more painful and her body may not be able to withstand it,” her sister, Turiya Tomlin-Randall, told ProPublica.
But when the mother of three realized she had unintentionally gotten pregnant in the fall of 2022, Georgia’s new abortion ban gave her no choice. Although it made exceptions for acute, life-threatening emergencies, it didn’t account for chronic conditions, even those known to present lethal risks later in pregnancy.
And:
Miller ordered abortion pills online, but she did not expel all the fetal tissue and would need a dilation and curettage procedure to clear it from her uterus and stave off sepsis, a grave and painful infection. In many states, this care, known as a D&C, is routine for both abortions and miscarriages. In Georgia, performing it had recently been made a felony, with few exceptions.
Her teenage son watched her suffer for days after she took the pills, bedridden and moaning. In the early hours of Nov. 12, 2022, her husband found her unresponsive in bed, her 3-year-old daughter at her side.
And finally:
Her family later told a coroner she hadn’t visited a doctor “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions.”
She died and it was preventable and it was all because of Georgia's ban on abortions, a law made possible by Trump's SCOTUS overturning Roe v Wade.
Not the first time this has happened.
More from Propublica:
In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.
She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.
But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.
Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.
It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.
She died and it was preventable and it was all because of Georgia's ban on abortions, a law made possible by Trump's SCOTUS overturning Roe v Wade.
Then there's this from Oklahoma:
The molar pregnancy Jaci Statton had would never become a baby. It was cancerous, though.
At the last hospital in Oklahoma she went to during her ordeal last month, Statton says staff told her and her husband that she could not get a surgical abortion until she became much sicker.
"They were very sincere; they weren't trying to be mean," Statton, 25, says. "They said, 'The best we can tell you to do is sit in the parking lot, and if anything else happens, we will be ready to help you. But we cannot touch you unless you are crashing in front of us or your blood pressure goes so high that you are fixing to have a heart attack.'"
Oklahoma has three overlapping abortion bans, with different and sometimes contradictory definitions and exceptions. A study published Tuesday along with a commentary in the Lancet medical journal shows hospitals all over Oklahoma are struggling to interpret the laws and create policies that comply with the state's abortion bans. The resulting confusion is having dangerous consequences for women like Statton.
She didn't die. She was just made to suffer.
It was preventable. It was cruel. And in Trump's America, the cruelty is the point.
From NOAA:
The August global surface temperature was 1.27°C (2.29°F) above the 20th-century average of 15.6°C (60.1°F), making it the warmest August on record. This was 0.01°C (0.02°F) above the previous August record set last year, and the 15th consecutive month of record-high global temperatures. August 2024 marked the 46th consecutive August (since 1979) with temperatures at least nominally above the 20th-century average.
Science.
And then there's this:
The June 2024–August 2024 global surface temperature was the warmest June–August period in the 175-year record, 1.24°C (2.23°F) above the 20th-century average of 15.6°C (60.1°F). The past eleven June–August seasons have been the warmest such periods on record.
More science.
Of course Project 2025 calls for the end of NOAA:
Break Up NOAA. The single biggest Department of Commerce agency outside of decennial census years is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which houses the National Weather Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, and other components. NOAA garners $6.5 billion of the department’s $12 billion annual operational budget and accounts for more than half of the department’s personnel in non-decadal Census years (2021 figures). (pg 674) [Bolding in original.]
But not because the science is wrong but for this reason:
Together, these form a colossal operation that has become one of the main
drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future
U.S. prosperity.
Of course.
It's getting warmer out there. It'll still get warmer if NOAA is broken up and no one knows but that's ok because business is boomier!
VP Kamala Harris could have started every rebuttal with:
Nothing Donald Trump just said is actually true.
In short:
If you support the guy who said so during the debate, you're supporting a guy with little (if any) contact with reality.
So when our right wing friends claim that Biden/Harris/Walz has politicized/is going to politicize the DOJ, just mention this:
A new report from Rolling Stone claims that former President Donald Trump wanted to use the United States Department of Justice to go after late-night comedians who made fun of him.
In a lengthy report on Trump's second-term ambitions, sources told the publication that Trump believed that comedians who mocked him on television were guilty of giving what amounted to illegal campaign contributions to Democrats.
And:
"During his 2024 campaign, according to a source with direct knowledge, Trump has raised this topic again, venting about the need to punish late-night comedians for giving “illegal” campaign contributions to the Democratic Party — in the form of jokes and on-air satire."
Free speech, anyone?
The story was mentioned in The NYTimes:
An article in Rolling Stone said that while Trump was president, he tried to persuade Justice Department officials to use campaign finance laws and equal-time broadcast regulations to rule that anti-Trump jokes on late-night shows were illegal. Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel were among those on Trump’s list of targets.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
And, since all those late-night jokes are regarding politics and/or a politician positioning himself in a political arena, isn't political speech kinda sorta uber-protected?
Well, yes. From The Congressional Research Service:
The Court has long considered political and ideological speech to be at the core of the First Amendment, including speech concerning “politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.” This speech can take forms beyond the written or spoken word, such as funding or symbolic acts.
So, next time our MAGA friends warn about how Biden has politicized DOJ, gently remind them that the felon Trump has already looked into it.
And this is how I started here at 2PJ.
It's good to be here. Now there are truly 2 political junkies present.
If memory serves, it would be some time before I was posting here exclusively.
My first post here, as I see it now in 20/20 hindsight, was perhaps a tad optimistic as it was about how the reporting at the time burst the bubble of George W. Bush's military heroism.
In case you missed it, Dubya won that election.
Oh well.
It's right here:
CEASE & DESIST: I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 8, 2024
Except there was no evidence of of any of this happening in 2020.
Look, for example, here:
The various claims of evidence alleging a stolen 2020 election have been exhaustively investigated and litigated. Judges heard claims of illegal voting and found they were without merit. (Learn more about how the changes that have happened since 2020 will affect the 2024 election and beyond.)
Rep. Liz Cheney, the former chair of the House Republican Conference, stated on February 23, 2021: "The president and many around him pushed this idea that the election had been stolen. And that is a dangerous claim. It wasn't true," she said. "There were over 60 court cases where judges, including judges appointed by President Trump and other Republican presidents, looked at the evidence in many cases and said there is not widespread fraud."
Or here:
After the 2020 US presidential election Donald Trump refused to concede, alleging widespread and unparalleled voter fraud. Trump’s supporters deployed several statistical arguments in an attempt to cast doubt on the result. Reviewing the most prominent of these statistical claims, we conclude that none of them is even remotely convincing. The common logic behind these claims is that, if the election were fairly conducted, some feature of the observed 2020 election result would be unlikely or impossible. In each case, we find that the purportedly anomalous fact is either not a fact or not anomalous.
Or here (this one has ties to Pennsylvania):
Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are seri-
ous. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations
and then proof. We have neither here.The Trump Presidential Campaign asserts that Pennsylvania’s 2020 election was unfair.
But as lawyer Rudolph Giuliani stressed, the Campaign “doesn’t plead fraud. . . . [T]his is
not a fraud case.”
And so on.
So when a Republican (any Republican) complains about how President Biden has "politicized" the DOJ - they're just projecting their Trump wet dreams.
First there's the former member of the House, Liz Cheney:
Republican former Rep. Liz Cheney will vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in November, she said during remarks at Duke University, according to audio obtained by CNN.
The former Wyoming congresswoman noted the importance of voting for Harris in states like North Carolina, where she appeared on Wednesday.
“I think it is crucially important for people to recognize, not only is what I just said about the danger that Trump poses something that should prevent people from voting for him, but I don’t believe that we have the luxury of writing in candidates’ names, particularly in swing states,” Cheney said.
She made the announcement in North Carolina specifically because it is a battleground state, according to a source close to Cheney.
“And as a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this, and because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris,” she continued.
Then there's her dad, the former Vice President:
First, the statement itself:
In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.
As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.
For those who perhaps don't remember Dick, here's the Times' one paragraph bio:
Mr. Cheney served as White House chief of staff under President Gerald Ford; secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush and vice president under President George W. Bush, when Mr. Cheney was the architect of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He was viewed by Democrats as such a force of darkness that he earned the nickname Darth Vader.
This is how far into teh crazie Trump's MAGA party has become. It's too dangerous even for the guy who okayed this:
It is now well established that following the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operated a global, state-sanctioned program in which it abducted scores of people throughout the world, held them in secret detention—sometimes for years—or “rendered” them to various countries, and tortured or otherwise ill-treated them. While the program officially ended in 2009, the cover-up of these crimes appears to be ongoing.
Many detainees were held by the CIA in pitch-dark windowless cells, chained to walls, naked or diapered, for weeks or months at a time. The CIA forced them into painful stress positions that made it impossible for them to lie down or sleep for days, to the point where many hallucinated or begged to be killed to end their misery. It used “waterboarding” and similar techniques to cause near suffocation or drowning, crammed detainees naked into tiny boxes, and prevented them from bathing, using toilets, or cutting their hair or nails for months. “We looked like monsters,” one detainee said of his appearance while in CIA custody.
Dick Cheney thinks Donald Trump is such a threat to democracy that he's now voting for VP Kamala Harris.