#I had to vote in a republican primary for local elections because no democrats ran at all

[qqueenofhades]

i registered to vote for the first time ( i feel old) now that im an adult but my state has closed primary elections which i was wondering if you have an opinion about. my initial thought was that its bad because i had to register democrat (rather than my states green party which represents my beliefs more) just so i could vote between democrat candidates, which feels like being pressured into supporting the weird pseudo two party system we have. but then i looked it up and apparently a reason for this is so that people from opposing parties wont purposefully mess up the votes just so that their preferred candidates have an easier time winning, and i think that makes sense too. but is that actually the reason theyve closed it or is it just to force us dem/republican?? cause it feels strange

Okay, look. I respect the fact that you're a young person, and I appreciate that you have not only registered to vote, but plan to vote in the primaries, so I don't want to lecture you too much. That said: I am taking you out for coffee, I am sitting you down, I am looking into your eyes, and I am urgently telling you the following:

The Green Party is a scam. It is a scam. It has existed for decades in American politics as an empty shell corporation weaponizing the good intentions of young people like yourself, because all it theoretically stands for "it's good to save the planet maybe." Which is not something that any non-insane person seriously disagrees with, but there is no world in which that cause is actually furthered by registering/voting Green (you mentioned that you did vote for Democrats, which -- good, but listen to me here, youngun, okay?) It ran Jill Stein in 2016 to siphon more votes from HRC, and this election it plans to run Cornel West, a pro-Russian tankie who positively equated Bernie and Trump, as another spoiler candidate. It does not stand for "protecting the planet" or America in any real way. It has never elected a single senator or congressman, let alone a president. It stands for empty performance/grievance political theater by those people who feel too morally superior to vote for/affiliate with Democrats, often because the internet has told them that it's not Cool or Hip or Progressive enough.

If your main priority is climate/the environment, you're doing the right thing by registering as a Democrat and voting for Democrats. (Also: the adjectival form is Democratic. It is the Democratic party and Democratic candidates, otherwise you sound like the Fox News host who wrote a book literally entitled "The Democrat Party Hates America.") They are the only major party who has in fact passed major climate legislation and have made environmental justice a central tenet of their platform. As opposed to the Republicans, whose Project 2025, along with the rest of its nightmare fascist prescriptions, openly pledges to completely wreck existing climate protections and forbid any new ones, just because we weren't all dying fast enough under their death-cult rule already. That's the main logical fallacy I don't get among both the Online Leftists and the American electorate in general: "the Democrats aren't doing quite enough as I'd like, so I'll enable the active wrecking ball insane lunatics to get in power and ruin even the progress we HAVE managed to make!" Like. How does that even make sense?

On a federal level, the Greens have contributed nothing whatsoever of tangible value to American or international climate policy/legislation, environmental justice, or anything else, because as noted, they don't have any elected candidates and mostly focus on drawing voters away from Democrats. There might be plenty of good candidates on the local or city level, which -- great! Vote away for Greens if they're available, or the only other option is a Republican! But on the federal/primary level, please understand: once again, they are a scam. There is no point in affiliating yourself with them. You're welcome to register Green and vote Democratic, if that makes you feel better or if you prefer having another label next to your name, but once again, I'm telling you in my position as a salty Tumblr elder that they have done nothing but harm to the causes they claim to care about, because "environment" is such a nebulous priority and has demonstrably been hijacked to stop the American government entity, i.e. the Democrats, that is actually working to improve on it.

As for your question: nobody is "forcing" or "pressuring" you to vote in primaries. By your own admission, you made a conscious choice to register as a Democrat in order to vote for Democratic candidates. If you were just a regular registered voter of whatever party affiliation, you would vote in the general election for whatever candidate the primary process produced. But if you are sufficiently vested and committed to that process that you would like to have a say in who is running under that party label, it is not unreasonable that you would register as a member of that party. Nobody has twisted your arm behind your back and made you do so; you are taking a considerable level of initiative on your own. Likewise, open primaries can be both a good and bad thing. This falls under the "the political system we have is flawed, but we can't magically pretend it doesn't exist and act according to our own fantasyland versions of reality" thing that I keep saying over and over. So yes, if you want a role in shaping the Democratic candidates who emerge from a Democratic primary process, you will usually register as a Democrat, and nobody has forced you to do that. It's that simple.

Likewise as a general programming note: I'm trying to cut back on politics a bit right now, because I don't have the spoons/bandwidth/mental health to deal with it. I apologize. So if you've sent me a politics-related ask recently and haven't received a response, I'm not deliberately or maliciously ignoring you; I just am not able to handle it as much as usual and will have to put it on pause. However, I feel as if this is important enough to be worth saying, so, yeah.

[mariacallous]

WILKES-BARRE, Pa. — When the Luzerne County Board of Elections finally approved its motion Wednesday night allowing two ballot drop boxes to be placed ahead of the presidential election in 27 days, there was, oddly, little to no reaction from the people who had spent the past several weeks bickering, complaining and even shouting about drop boxes.

That’s because — even after weeks of debate and an hour of public comment this evening alone —“there was never a doubt” the majority Democratic elections board would eventually vote in favor of the boxes, explained Theodore Fitzgerald, a Republican helping lead the effort against the boxes.

“As far as a secure election and all, we’re not confident because we don’t trust a lot of things in Luzerne County,” Fitzgerald told me after the vote.

Fitzgerald oversees an independent group of grassroots Republicans in the county (resulting in the existence of both the Luzerne County Republicans, which he leads, and the official GOP apparatus, the Republican Party of Luzerne County), and he’s one of at least a dozen activists who show up regularly to board meetings to confront members and drag out public comment sessions.

This week’s meeting of the Luzerne County Board of Elections, its final scheduled meeting before the election, was anything but a sleepy municipal gathering.

Across three-and-a-half hours, the meeting featured one public commenter calling the drop-box supporters “militant fascists and socialists”; some grandstanding by a national GOP activist who said he wants to turn Luzerne County “blood red” for Trump, but “peacefully”; and a threat from the Democratic board chair to throw out a speaker who argued that elections employees should have to take lie detector tests.

“I’m embarrassed,” said attendee Andrea Glod, a retired teacher from Wilkes-Barre, the county seat. “I don’t even know who these people are who are talking. And they keep talking about ‘legitimate comment,’ and it’s to stand up there and say Kamala Harris is — I don’t know even what they’re [saying] now, controlling the weather?”

This is what election administration has turned into in top swing states, ever since Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and falsely blamed it on rigged votes in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump’s disproven claims made local elections boards like Luzerne’s ripe for politicization and chaos, especially as Trump suggests he will contest the results of next month’s election like he did four years ago if he loses again.

Luzerne County, which has become a national symbol of the flight of white working-class voters from the Democratic Party after voting twice for Barack Obama and twice for Trump, is unlikely to decide the election in Pennsylvania — and thus, perhaps, the country — by itself. But the county offers a clear example of the confusion and drama that’s plagued the elections process in many places of national political significance since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2020, the county made headlines when nine military ballots were found discarded in the trash several weeks before the election. A year later, a number of GOP primary ballots featured the wrong header, falsely indicating they were Democratic ballots despite listing the correct Republican candidates. And in 2022, more than a dozen polling sites ran out of paper ballots on Election Day, nearly preventing the county from certifying the results of a close election and prompting a congressional hearing.

The district attorney ended up clearing the county of any criminal wrongdoing in the 2022 incident, blaming it on high staff turnover. Luzerne is on its fifth elections director in five years — a woman who took the job at age 26 and described receiving a comment telling her she should be “drawn and quartered.” Elections staff continue to make minor errors that dominate the local news cycle and give fodder to people who want to argue the county’s elections can’t be trusted.

Luzerne County has also caught the attention of right-wing influencers broadly, including Scott Presler, a MAGA gadfly who made a name for himself organizing against Muslims. Presler claims he and his PAC, Early Vote Action, are why Republicans recently surpassed Democrats in countywide voter registration there.

“This board has a history of not making sure that every lawful vote is counted here in Luzerne County. That’s why you’re in the news,” Presler, who identified himself as a county resident, said during a public comment session, which he also used to blame Harris for the war in the Middle East.

“Luzerne County is going to vote Republican this November, and we are going to elect Donald Trump,” he promised.

Earlier this month, the ACLU filed suit against the Luzerne elections board and the county manager after the county manager announced that drop boxes would not be used in the election due to security concerns. That catapulted the issue of ballot drop boxes to the top of the last board meeting’s agenda.

“There are many ways to vote,” said Richard Morelli, a GOP board member who voted against allowing the boxes, suggesting they weren’t necessary. “You go back to before COVID, there was no such thing as disenfranchising. The people went out, they voted, they got it done.”

While Democrats broadly support absentee voting, Trump’s own views on it have been hard to pin down since 2020. Trump had once encouraged his supporters to vote via absentee ballot and drop boxes, before changing his tone and calling it “crooked.” Trump’s campaign, though, now seems to realize the folly in telling voters they shouldn’t take advantage of voting in whatever way they can: At a rally last weekend in Butler, the western Pennsylvania city where a gunman tried to kill Trump in July, Trump’s campaign projected a QR code for requesting an absentee ballot on jumbotrons prior to Trump’s remarks.

Wednesday’s board meeting featured plenty of confusion around how mail voting and the mail in general even works. A county resident, tuning in to the meeting over Zoom, suggested drop boxes are necessary because the U.S. Postal Service and Harris were engaged in a conspiracy to … deliver mail ballots to voters. A Democratic board member brushed off concerns about the catastrophic destruction of a drop box and suggested, improbably, that it would be easy to determine whose ballots had been inside.

Jamie Walsh, a GOP state House candidate, told the board he was against the boxes because both sides, but especially Democrats, regularly cheat in elections — even though widespread ballot fraud has never been proven to have occurred in any modern U.S. elections, and especially not with drop boxes.

“There’s a faction of the Democrat party that wants to cheat. I mean, let’s just face it. Let’s call a spade a spade,” Walsh said.

Denise Williams, the Democratic board chair, pointed out that 20% of people who vote absentee in the county use drop boxes because they’re safe. “That’s a significant number, and they’re not doing it for convenience,” she said. “They want it for the security of their mail ballots.”

Fitzgerald, with the Luzerne County Republicans, described the problem with drop boxes and voting by mail to me using an analogy about domestic violence: “The reason why we don’t like mail-in votes is because of intimidation. There’s a reason why when we vote in person, there’s a drape — because a husband, or wife, whoever could abuse the other, cannot force their spouse, or anybody else, to vote the way they want,” he said.

The county ultimately decided to allow two of the four drop boxes it typically deploys to be used in next month’s election.

It’s not clear there’s an immediate endgame for Fitzgerald and the anti-drop box group. Fitzgerald ticked off some objectives that are unlikely to ever materialize, either because they’re impractical or because they’d violate the law — like making sure there’s a Republican for every Democrat hired as an elections employee. He didn’t share plans to back candidates to replace any of the elections board members, some of whose terms are up as soon as next year.

Fitzgerald and the other agitators seemed to relish their combativeness with the board. “Both parties cheat. All people have hyperbole. All people call each other names. We all do it. It’s not one, it’s not the other,” Fitzgerald said.

At least on the question of how long this battle will last, Fitzgerald and Glod, a drop box supporter, seemed to be in agreement.

“This is going to be going on for the next 40 years,” Glod said on her way out of the meeting.

[wrenseyeview]

I truly don't want to be a doomer. I don't want to be exhausted and full of impotent rage. And I think that state of mind is actually solvable, and in great part due to not having any control or options for action. So, why are so many of the calls to action still exhausting and upsetting?

Going down the line:

Vote! - did that

Volunteer for a political campaign! - did that

Email and call your elected officials! - did that

Donate to relevant groups/funds! - did that

Talk to your family to convince them! - did that, wish I didn't, never ends well

Get informed on the issue! - did that, maybe blissful ignorance would be less depressing? (/j... mostly)

Volunteer for local relevant groups! - pin in that for below

Go to protests! - second pin

Okay. So. Out of that list, I've done most of them and try to continue doing them when able, and this general tidal wave of shit still keeps coming. So how about the last two?

Volunteer has a few issues depending on location. Where I am, I'm an hour drive each way from the little LGBT+ center downtown, and it has kinda limited meetings or offerings. I still want to get involved, but it'll take some planning and a lot of effort to make anything regularly when I'm tired after work, and their events tend to be small group meetings to just chat. The nearest Planned Parenthood, also over an hour away, burned down, so.... the next nearest one is at least 3 hours away. Nearly every community impact type of group I've found through local news and bulletins have been through churches or Republican/conservative clubs. The exceptions are an animal shelter and maybe Habitat for Humanity, though I think that one's also managed by churches here. The most I can have a local impact is probably via the Friends of the Library donations or conservation groups for certain strips of woods. None of which help ensure I get to keep legal rights and access to healthcare.

Protest is... so. I just. Really don't understand how it's effective. There have been protests around here of various things, like a group of maybe 30 people stood in downtown in favor of Ukraine. Okay, I guess? What's our city council gonna do about that?? Do they even care about 30 people with some signs standing outside for a few hours? If it gets to summer 2020 levels maybe, though I actually don't know how much actual action resulted as compared to the harm endured by the protestors (not at all to disparage their efforts or their rage).

Ultimately the entire political landscape feels like job hunting. That complete drudge of putting out effort after effort with no indication of reaction or even receipt, just slowly hitting your head against a brick wall at a steady beat for months on end. It's the same feeling of exhaustion and is this even worth it and what if I just disappeared into the mountains and forsook human society and concepts like money or gender and... yeah, not a great thought cycle. With the extra added bonus of having mostly old white men continually spew diahrettic levels of smug hipocrisy while remaining unfortunately out of nut-kicking range. If he wants to legislate my uturus so badly, I should be allowed to kick Alito in the nuts at least once.

Anyway! Yeah, so it feels like the main issue of doomer-ism around all this comes down to lack of options, lack of control or impact. Which is naturally not helped by these measures being centered around taking away control and options. So what are more options besides those usual ones above that either aren't doing much, or at least not much in immediate view?

Well there's the individual self care kind of level, of doing something small and immediate where you can see the impact and feel those good brain chemicals of having influence on your life. This is the step of stop doomscrolling and go sew something, cook something, color, garden, put out bird seed, feel the results of your will in your hands. Be intimately aware that you are not a passive object in your life.

Okay, so now we're a little more present, a little less a disembodied cartoon cloud of rage and despair, we have hands again. Now we can look past individual present to individual future. What do you personally need to feel insulated at least a little from the danger and uncertainty carried on this tidal wave of shit?

Individually, I can:

Have the locations and approximate budget written down for driving to stay with a friend in a state that protects abortion

Research options and potentially order abortion pills now

Ask my doctor about options for a hysterectomy

Any or all of these may not actually be options, largely depending on cost. Hopefully there's actually more options I'm just not thinking of because that's a short list and there's a lot that's left outside of individual control, but at least having the information is a start. Make plans, know where the fire exits are. If we can establish some level of firmer foundation of individual safety, then we can free up some of that anxiety brain space to think more about community and society options.

So after figuring out my fire exits and a few more laps around the self-care track to maybe eventually get more energy for all this, what are some community-level actions besides that first list? What actions can insulate your community from harm imposed by larger society?

Okay. Let's see.

Keep some money set aside for requests for aid from your specific community (narrowed down to your pride center, religious group, dnd group, something small enough to know the people and feel like you are fostering a community that will also support you in turn, reciprocity rather than charity, and ideally in person)

Make a list of who in your small group can offer what kind of aid (who can drive places, who can babysit, who has medical knowledge, etc.)

Meet with the small group on a regular basis. Foster connections, bring food.

Trade favors, establish the gifting cycle among the group, so no one feels bad having to ask for help. Of course we can pool money to help get you a trip a couple states over, because you helped fix my fence because I watched your kids because you brought soup when I was sick because. Everyone should feel important and like they're not relying on charity if they need help.

So all these ideas come down to what ends up formally as mutual aid, but that often feels a little too expansive and hard to get into as a community rather than charity if you start at the "look up local mutual aid groups" level, hits the same problem as the top list in my experience at least. So this is more of a bottom-up approach of turn your friend group into an informal mutual aid network, aka make friends in real life. Which... is hard, it is, but it's gotta be worth the effort and is really the best starting point, and also good for you.

So after all that, it looks like my steps for getting out of the doom cycle are

Stop doomscrolling

Find my hands again by making stuff

Make some emergency plans to file away

Go find some more in person friends and bring food

As much as I am the kind of person that very happily will stay in my house alone for way longer than the average human being, it's fundamentally necessary to feel the support structure of "there are at least five people within a 30 minute drive of me that would not kill me for a corn chip, and in fact would provably prefer that I not be killed" when it feels like the entire rest of the "doing stuff" arm of society would happily kill you. You spitting at the government isn't going to have any impact you can see, but if you make your friend a scarf, he has a scarf now, and he might be the friend that keeps a stocked medicine cabinet.

[arizonaconservativegal]

Wasn’t John McCain considered more of a middle ground politician rather than typical Republican?

John McCain was... well. It's complicated.

He wasn't a bad guy. Not really. He was a trigger happy war hawk but I get that, considering his history. He was a son of a bitch, no question. If you crossed him, he'd tear you to pieces. But he was also a very generous kingmaker in Arizona, and not just with an endorsement or occasional stump speech. His say-so would bring your campaign a metric fuckton of cash and behind the scenes support. He was a powerhouse. When I say the McCain machine ran Arizona, I don't mean that lightly. He wasn't part of the establishment - he was the establishment.

He wasn't especially conservative - he certainly wasn't Goldwater - but to call him a RINO isn't fair either. If I were going to call him anything, I'd call him a neocon. He wasn't always the most reliable vote on big controversial bills, as you probably recall, but most of the time he was right there with the rest of the party. And he was a good vote on national bills that had a specific local impact on Arizona.

Hardline activists hated him. The thing with that, though, is that they hate everyone. The bulk of the party was fine with him. Was he anyone's perfect first choice candidate? Probably not. But we'd take him over a Democrat any day of the week. Even if there had ever been a primary challenger who could have beaten McCain, they wouldn't have won the general. McCain always could. He was popular among moderates and independents because he didn't do anything crazy and that support was more than enough to offset the 10% of Republicans who hated him.

And what even people in Arizona don't understand about Arizona is that although we usually vote red, we've never been an ultra conservative state. McCain was pretty mainstream for us. If he hadn't passed away, he'd be up for re-election right now and he'd win it easily. And if for those who haven't made the connection yet, that would have given us a 51-49 majority in the US Senate the last couple years. Even if we lost him on a couple votes, we'd have him for most and his sheer existence would have been enough to stop a lot of the Democrats' agenda. I wish he was still there.

He just didn't get along with Trump. And like I said, if you crossed him, McCain would tear you to pieces. Trump is the same kind of guy. Neither one was ever willing to back down, which is a shame. If it weren't for that fight, I think McCain would be remembered quite fondly by Arizona Republicans, even the ones who didn't love him before. Unfortunately, the McCain family seems determined to keep that feud alive and I think that is really tarnishing the senator's memory unfairly. It seems to me that they're using his memory to try to cling to power. If they were smart, they'd be trying to work with people like Kari Lake to usher in this new era of Republicans in his name. Their machine could still be quite powerful with a few adjustments. I think John McCain would have been willing to do that.

[rachelbethhines]

Is that a verified fact? I remember reading an article on Politico about the guy MYG beat - some old school genial conservative doctor type who was pretty shook on how the voters rejected him for her. I mean she didn’t hide how horrible she was when she ran, so why are her voters getting cold feet now? And if they are why the heck can’t the same thing happen to the Flordia and TX governors?

Ok, first off, I was born and raised in the district that Greene ran in so here's some facts for ya.

Only 10% of the population actually votes, maybe 15% at a push when it's a presidential election.

This is because there is no functioning democracy in the area and hasn't been in over 60 years.

The GOP is the mafia of the south. They have all the money, control all the business, and have the local authorities in thier back pocket. No one normal can run. They have to be backed by the Republican party, because the Democrats refuse to invest in running candidates in the area.

So only rich folks, people with connections, can run for office and they don't give a shit about the ordinary folks on the ground because if they got the GOP backing them, there's nothing anyone can do. They are in.

So the only time your vote might matter is during a primary, but, since only hard core Republicans vote in primaries (i.e. rich people and nut cases) then these hopefuls court the donors, most of whom don't even live in the district, rather than thier actual constituents.

So that leaves us with Greene. She phiscally harassed and bullied her primary opponent and, quite literally, ran him out of the district. His wife divorced him because of the harassment. She kicked him out of the house, and he was forced to move. Which meant he had to give up the election, because he could no longer live in the district he was running in.

Without an opponent Greene won the primary by default and then won the main election by default, because no one ever runs against the GOP here.

She literally 'won' an election without needing a single vote cast.

That is how the GOP operates.

They don't win elections. They steal them.

That's the way it's been for over 60 years, and unless the Democrats pull their heads out of their asses and start supporting candidates in rural red areas, then the Republicans will strip away democracy from the entire country... Same as they've done for all the districts they've stolen already.

It took and actual God Damn Nazi, sneaking in and trying to support a coup, before the Dems ever even thought to run here!

They didn't lock her up, where she belongs. No, they saw a money making opportunity by advertising how shit she is and putting someone against her.

Now, the current Dem candidate, Marcus Flowers, is the first Democrat to run in over 50 years! I'm not saying he can't win, but I fear it may be too little to late.

He sure is doing a shit job of actually convincing the voters to get out and vote, yet he's sure got a lot of donations... All from outside the counties he's running in.

We're stuck between two grifters, with no means to actually represent ourselves, so of course no one is going to turn out because if both candidates are screwing you over what does it matter?

Of course, it does matter. I'm doing my best to volunteer for the Flowers campaign and will be voting Dem come election time. However, it's really hard to convince people to care when no one cares about them.

So, always remember. The people who are trapped in GOP controlled areas, are just that... Trapped. They're the Republicans' first victims, not thier 'supporters'.

[chargetheintruder]

My one-year pandemic anniversary.

I likely won't have much time tomorrow, the 17th to actually do much online, to honor my fifty-two weeks of strangeness with COVID-19, beyond mark my calendars with something like:

One Year does not equal two weeks, damn it.

But even so, I should likely post something, even if a day early, just to take note of what happened to me, what I've lost, and so on.

Because you see, I went into 2020 on meds for everything (mood disorder, prostate issues and all that) and with plans. I did. I was still thinking I could recover some clothing and furniture for this penalty box of an apartment I'm half-stuck with, and that I could maybe get some new friends or a girlfriend sometime soon.

Then this pandemic hit. Only at first it was an outbreak and I had gotten it twisted because like a lot of folks early on I was working on partial info at best. I live in a blue state and near a University campus, so I jumped to some conclusions about how this was going to be a "campus illness" and how red staters were just partying it up because no campuses meant no outbreak, right?

Wrong. This was a pandemic, at least partially because a) some 5 million people went to the Wuhan province in the PRC to celebrate the Lunar New Year and many of them likely were Patient Zeroes, and b) because a lot of those people spread the thing to Europe first, insuring further spread.

So really, losing my chance to vote on that Election Day in the Democratic Primaries (because of lockdown) so that someone other than Biden would get chosen was the least of my worries. I had to get used to distancing, abusing my sleeves for coughs and sneezes, THEN masks, and also dealing with crazy people and only those being anti-mask for any reason, while LOTS of people were still against WASHING THEIR HANDS.

And also. . . I had the problems I had with my forced moveout of August 28, 2018, largely because I needed to be IN TOWN, since I had no car, true, but also because I had problems with LACK OF HUMAN CONTACT. Guess what this pandemic, then, shoved down everyone's throat (except for people with very nice internet connections)? Right. And here I was desperately trying to keep it together for the longest time with no internet connections because of outdated equipment, but also because I didn't want to give in to Comcast's monopoly power over this entire damned town (right next door) where I was forced to move. Yeah.

Fast-forward to October of 2020. I didn't like Biden but Trump was hellbent on becoming Hitler Lite, and it was clear everyone with half a brain had to stop Trump. So I took my mail-in ballot, filled out and everything, to a ballot box that I thought would be safe. That entailed a short bus ride on a route I was no longer familiar with. I came masked up. I rode in the center of the bus as usual. An older lady up front was coughing up a lung and not, NOT wearing her mask over her nose, and barely over her mouth.

I got sick about a week later and looking back, I'm pretty sure it was COVID-19. I took no chances and self-quarantined for a month to be safe to everyone else around me. I gave in and had internet by then, even if my access to my own Chromebook was super-limited still (thanks Google, you jerks). I could make it. The virus itself seemed to only give me digestive/GI issues and body aches, no big deal, right?

Problem was, I started coughing and feeling tired and dizzy all the time afterward. Long COVID, made worse by my being in a sick-house of an apartment building where the lease said it was a "no-smoking building" but the tenants and especially my neighbors, just gave no fucks and kept lighting it up in their apartments and polluting my own (under and through the baseboards). And it was all I could do to stay online and push others to vote, and support Georgia, and to be patient with Team Victim in the hopes that something would be done about the bastards who got us into the mess. You know, the landlords and rich bitches, and yes, the local University too, who invited all of the Han Chinese exchange students here to my hometown, had out-of-state, red-state landlords show up and pander to them exclusively, to the point that locals were ran out of town wherever possible? Those guys.

Those red-state, Republican guys. But in the process, I got re-addicted to chatting with my long-distance flirt on the internet, among lots of other things, my health got worse and it got to where I barely got out once a week, then once every 2-3 weeks, because of virus surges. Getting out was rough anyway because of the masks--nobody had a face, which made it hard for me to talk to people and not be freaked out and paranoid. The only uncanny valley issue I really have--facelessness--and it was the one I had to deal with. And I had lost my friends, mostly, except for the last pen-pal I have out-of-state, and she's busy with her husband and family too.

Point is, here I am now. A year into this. Worn-out, ragged, depressed when I already had depression, in bad health when I already had old-fart health issues, nothing to do anywhere outside when I had little to nothing to do inside to begin with. No, really, I don't go out to eat, just to eat out of a bag in the parking lot, or to walk it home and it gets cold, sorry. And ordering pizza and cheesy bread really only does so much. My life and finances were already ruined from the forced move-out and now there's literally nothing, no friends locally, no social contact, nothing, nothing, nothing, thanks to this plague, this plague, this plague, and people get to hurt us again, a thousand-plus times as badly as 9-11-2001 did, and they get to walk, and walk and walk. Meaning the Han Chinese, the landlords from Trumps on down, and also the alt-reich supporting the shit-show.

I hope you can see where this would make a fellow a bit crazy. More so than usual. I would hope the vaccines make things all right again, but even that has problems since it lets people off the hook. And also, since I have a bit of a ruined trash-mouth that's maybe half my fault? *lol* Meaning I might look better with a mask on in perpetuity, ugh, even if I don't feel like it.

What do you do?

[creepingsharia]

Meet Iman Jodeh: Islamist Candidate for Colorado’s House of Representatives

Note: Jodeh had almost 3x the number of votes as her Republican challenger in their respective primaries.

by Ahnaf Kalam

She seems more interested in Palestine’s politics than Aurora’s.

Residents of Colorado's House District 41 are concerned with several perennial issues that resurface every election year. The Aurora suburbs are experiencing crumbling transportation infrastructure, increasing cost of living expenses, and a massive upsurge in homicide and other violent crime.

Promising to tackle these issues, the district's Democratic Party candidate Iman Jodeh is running on a progressive platform of criminal justice reform and minimum wage increases. Yet, Jodeh's involvement with an Islamist mosque and her history of pro-Palestinian activism reveals an alternative agenda that stands starkly at odds with her constituents' values.

Jodeh, who ran unopposed in the primaries, will face off against Republican Bob Andrews for control of the House district, which includes a large portion of the southeast Denver metroplex. According to the Sentinel, Andrews – who is running on a platform of "small government" and "fiscal responsibility" – faces an "uphill battle" to defeat Jodeh after the previous Republican candidate to run for District 41 lost to the Democratic incumbent by 30 points.

Further complicating Andrews chances has been an inability to raise money for his campaign. By late September, Jodeh had collected $58,000 in campaign contributions, compared to a mere $4,000 raised by her opponent.

Jodeh should credit her fundraising success to a series of high-level endorsements, such as from Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Planned Parenthood Colorado. In September, she was among the speakers selected for the Biden campaign's "100 Women for Biden" virtual event. But unbeknownst to her progressive supporters, Ms. Jodeh is the spokesperson for the Colorado Muslim Society (CMS), a mosque with a lengthy history of preaching homophobia, misogyny and intolerance.

In early June, CMS published its guidelines for re-opening during the COVID-19 pandemic, including a provision that restricted women from attending the mosque until further notice -- with no explanation given as to why. This prohibition was subsequently amended days later in an updated posting, but only after this author contacted Jodeh to inquire about the discriminatory policy. She has failed to respond as of this printing.

Jodeh has been the CMS spokesperson for many years, where she represented Muslim clerics such as Karim Abuzaid, the mosque's senior imam between 2010 and 2014. Among the gratuitous bigotry and extremism regularly espoused by the Salafist cleric, Abuzaid once notably preached to a Denver congregation that fornicators should be flogged and adulterers stoned. In the same sermon, he told worshippers that the AIDS virus is a punishment from Allah for practicing homosexuality. More recently, Abuzaid blamed the coronavirus on homosexuality during a live webinar.

In February 2020, CMS hosted an event by the Muslim Legal Fund of America featuring Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour, who used her platform to advocate for convicted Al Qaeda operative Syed Fahad Hashmi and express support for Noor Salman, the wife of slain Pulse Nightclub shooter Omar Mateen. Sarsour is a notorious anti-Semite who was ousted from her position as chairwoman of the National Women's March in 2019 as a result of her inexcusable history of anti-Jewish bigotry.

American Islamists have been quite active in allying with progressive and feminist movements, but below the surface, the beliefs and doctrines to which they adhere are often incompatible.

Still, Jodeh has succeeded in convincing the press that her apparent fundamentalist beliefs have no bearing on her progressive politics. In a recent interview with Arab News, the congressional candidate attempted to clarify her unique brand of feminism by whitewashing Quranic scripture:

"In Islam, there's a chapter in the Qur'an called 'Al-Nisa' or 'The Woman.' There is not a chapter called 'The Man,'" she explained. Yet, Jodeh's interpretation completely neglected to mention the theological reasons why women, unlike men, require a chapter in the Quran prescribing gender-based rules.

Even in the contemporary West, Islamic scripture may yield grotesque abuses of women's rights. For instance, a 2011 study from the Tahirih Justice Center found at least 3,000 cases of forced marriage in the U.S. over the preceding two years, with the majority of cases coming from the Muslim community.

So long as Muslim leaders ignore these regressive practices, which are often legitimized by Islamists, they stand to continue. Such is the case in Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar's district, where the Hennepin County Medical Center reports that 99 percent of Somali women have suffered from the worst category of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). Despite its prevalence among her own constituents, Omar shut down a question about FGM during a Muslim political convention, calling it "appalling" and a "waste" of time.

In addition to her willful ignorance of these issues, Jodeh's constituency should also be concerned with her obsessive focus on the Palestinian resistance, which seems to overshadow her commitments towards climate change, health care, and criminal justice reform. In the same Arab News interview, the Denver-born Palestinian-American said that her love for Palestine is ingrained, and that "she was never just American, she was Palestinian American."

"This is my identity, I will never abandon this narrative, because I feel I have an obligation to all Palestinians everywhere to advocate when I can," she said.

But what about her obligation to the diverse families living in southwest Aurora and Arapahoe County?

Jodeh's activism on behalf of Palestine spans years. In December 2017, she was interviewed while protesting President Trump's decision to declare Jerusalem the official capital of Israel. As she was speaking to a reporter, the crowd of demonstrators could be heard chanting: "From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!", a popular slogan of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and an implicit call for the destruction of Israel.

Moreover, Jodeh founded the nonprofit "Meet the Middle East," purportedly to educate Americans on the region and foster improved relations between two distinct cultures. However, a closer look at Jodeh's curriculum demonstrates that she is truly concerned with a single objective: depicting Palestinians in a positive light, while mostly ignoring other diverse ethnic and religious communities located in the Middle East.

Jodeh should consider that her overwhelming focus on the Arab-Israeli conflict may well be alienating Democrats who do not share her enthusiasm for Palestine. She could learn from the March primaries in Illinois, where U.S. congressional candidate Rashad Darwish's pro-Palestinian activism may have alienated many Arab and Muslim voters – even though portions of his district were situated in the "Little Palestine" of Chicago.

Among other things, residents of Aurora are most concerned with their property taxes, the rising cost of living, and the eternally congested and perpetually under-construction highways in Aurora. While Jodeh has been racking up endorsements from prominent Democratic groups and individuals over the past few months, she doesn't appear to have much experience in addressing any of the larger issues that locals find concerning.

Instead, Jodeh's entire campaign is predicated on her credentials and experience as a pro-Palestinian activist, and as an educator on Islam and the Middle East – issues that most Aurora residents likely consider inconsequential to their personal prosperity.

[livebloggingmydescentintomadness]

reminds me i need to mail in my registration but what happens after that? its my first yr to vote in tx. i also am scared cause idk what to vote after the president.. i know nothing else :/

vote.org will give you a bunch of information, including how to find your polling location.

once they get your registration, you should receive your voter registration card, which is about the size of a postcard. you’ll show that, along with a form of ID (these are the voter ID laws in texas) at the polling location, they’ll mark you down and you’ll go to the voting booth and use a simple machine to cast your votes. 

i’d like to hope that by november we’ll have mail-in ballots for everyone, but currently republicans are fighting that tooth and nail and so far they’re winning. right now you can only get a mail-in ballot in texas if you’re disabled, elderly, or won’t be in-state at the time of the election. people are fighting for it, but i just can’t tell you what’s going to happen in november or what the right choice for you will be if your only option to vote will be to stand in line. i want people to vote, but i understand if people decide they can’t risk their lives to do it. this is voter suppression, pure and simple.

if you’re able to get a mail-in ballot, that will be even easier. it’s a big piece of paper and you just draw x’s in boxes to vote, then put it in a provided envelope, sign your name over the seal, and mail it back. i’ve done it several times, couldn’t be easier.

as for choosing who to vote for, you can either do research on each individual or you can find a voter guide that will instruct you on how to vote based on your principles. this texas ivoterguide gives you an easy-to-understand snapshot of each candidate, like this:

they don’t have the upcoming ballot available yet, but you can give them your email and get it once it’s released. the primaries are over, so there will probably only be one democrat per race, which will make it relatively easy to pick who to vote for.

up until this election, texas had straight ticket voting, which meant you could select an option that automatically voted for all democrats or all republicans, but gov abbot did away with that because he knows it will hurt democrats. republicans tend to be more enthusiastic about voting, so they’re counting on right-wing people putting in the effort to vote for down-ballot races and left-wing people not putting in the effort. so even though it’s tedious, please bring this guide with you (on your phone should be fine) and select each democrat in all of your local elections, even when you don’t know anything more about each candidate.

as an example of how important this is, there was a down-ballot blue wave in 2018 when beto o’rourke ran against ted cruz, and even though he didn’t win, a lot of local democrats did. i voted straight democrat, and because i and others did, we voted out harris county judge ed emmett and voted in a young latina democrat named lina hidago. because of her, we have mask mandates in harris county, an area around houston with 4.7 million people, and we did even when gov abbott was being an absolute shithead and refusing to tell anyone to wear masks. the situation in houston is awful right now, but it would be so much fucking worse if we hadn’t voted out the republican two years ago. down-ballot voting saves lives.

i know this is hard and confusing, but if a trump voter can figure out how to do it, then so can you. any time you’re confused, google it. lots of people want you to vote and they’re happy to provide information. this is important and you will feel great once you’ve done it!

[vettingsanders]

He Did Nothing For Years

The Bernie Sanders Story

I was going to title this post something that more adequately expresses my rage, like “Bernie Sanders is a Grifting Fuck and a Garbage Human,” but then I decided to be classy and paraphrase a quote from Evita instead.  But I’m also petty so consider the subtitle of this rant to be “A Grifting Fuck and a Garbage Human.”

I was going to wait to post this until the primaries are over because if by some unholy hell miracle Sanders wins the nomination, obviously we all have to unite behind even the shittiest, most doomed to fail candidate, but fuck it.  Vote blue no matter who, that goes without being said, but Sanders is the worst possible choice and was even when there were a dozen plus horses in this race, and now y’all are going to hear all the reasons why.

The Early Years: Sanders the Deadbeat

Sanders graduated from the university of Chicago in 1964 with a BA in Political Science and chose not to work until he was elected mayor of Burlington in 1981

I say “chose not to work” because he was fully capable but preferred being a bum.  He had no student debt, he had no health conditions that prevented him from working, and the 1960s were characterized by rapid growth of the workforce, with three out of four college graduates holding high level positions by 1970

Sanders occasionally did some freelance writing and carpentry during these years, according to his resume, probably so he could claim he was trying to work in order to collect unemployment.  Let’s take a look at some of his writings:

At age 28, he wrote an article for alternative newspaper The Vermont Freeman entitled “Cancer, Disease, and Society.”  In the article, he argues that sexual repression can cause cancer, and women who are virgins, have fewer orgasms than their peers, or simply don’t enjoy sex are more likely to develop cancer.  The article includes statements such as “the manner in which you bring up your daughter with regard to sexual attitudes may very well determine whether or not she will develop breast cancer, among other things” and “How much guilt, nervousness have you imbued in your daughter with regard to sex?  If she is 16, 3 years beyond puberty and the time which nature set forth for child-bearing, and spent a night out with her boyfriend, what is your reaction? Do you take her to a psychiatrist because she is “maladjusted” or a “prostitute,” or are you happy that she has found someone with whom she can share love?”  He also argues that the education system contributes to cancer, as does having “an old bitch of a teacher (and there are many of them).”  https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2157403-sanders-cancer.html

In 1969, in another article for The Vermont Freeman, he wrote, “In Vermont, at a state beach, a mother is reprimanded by Authority for allowing her 6 month old daughter to go about without her diapers on. Now, if children go around naked, they are liable to see each others sexual organs, and maybe even touch them. Terrible thing! If we [raise] children up like this it will probably ruin the whole pornography business, not to mention the large segment of the general economy which makes its money by playing on peoples sexual frustrations.”  https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/bernie-sanders-vermont-freeman-sexual-freedom-fluoride/

His resume, incidentally, also lists him as a freelance youth counselor during his period of unemployment, which is just great.  The man who thinks thirteen year olds should be getting pregnant and children should touch each other’s genitals, counseling your kids.  Fantastic.

In the 1970s, Sanders stole electricity from his neighbors rather than paying his own bill.  https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/bernie-sanders-vermont-119927

He stole food from the refrigerator of The Vermont Freeman’s publishers https://newrepublic.com/article/122005/he-was-presidential-candidate-bernie-sanders-was-radical

 He was asked to leave a hippie commune in 1971 due to sitting around engaging in “endless political discussion” rather than working.  Let me repeat, he was too lazy for a hippie commune. https://freebeacon.com/politics/bernie-sanders-asked-leave-hippie-commune/

Now, all of this apart from the theft is arguably okay.  It’s his own life, and if he wants to squander it publishing poorly written essays and doing jack shit, whatever.  Except it wasn’t just his life, because he had a son, Levi.  And he was a deadbeat, paying no child support and causing Levi’s mother, Susan Mott, to rely on welfare, which made her face discrimination when trying to find housing.  https://twitter.com/m_mendozaferrer/status/1093295853907922946

Bernie Sanders is a deadbeat dad.  No respect.

Failing Upwards: Sanders the Politician

In 1971, Sanders joined the Vermont Liberty Union Party, a socialist political group.  From 1971 to 1977, Sanders was the party chief and habitually ran for office, failing every time.  He left the group in 1977, stating that they did not do enough to fight banks and corporations during non-election years.  This is just one example of Sanders decrying everyone else as too impure for him.

In 2016, the Vermont Liberty Union Party voted to brand Sanders as a war criminal.  Their general secretary, Peter Diamondstone, said of Sanders, “ He never was a socialist!"  https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bnjby3/the-vermont-political-party-bernie-sanders-founded-isnt-into-him-anymore  This is just one example in the long list of Sanders alienating his allies.

He finally won the mayoral election for Burlington in 1981, by only ten votes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Burlington_mayoral_election

Sanders was only elected to the US House of Representatives in 1990 because he had the support of the National Rifle Association.  The incumbent Congressman, Republican Peter Smith, advocated for an assault weapons ban, so the NRA flooded Sanders with money.  https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/stickin-to-his-guns-the-nra-helped-elect-bernie-sanders-to-congress-now-hes-telling-a-different-story/Content?oid=27816693

In 2006, 2012, and 2018, when running for the Senate, Sanders ran as a Democrat in the state primaries, then declined the Democratic nomination, and ran as an independent in the general.  This made it basically impossible for any Democrat to run against him.  https://www.politico.com/story/2018/05/21/bernie-sanders-democrat-independent-vermont-601844

After a landslide loss to Secretary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary, Sanders demanded changes to the DNC primary structure that would make the process easier for him to win with just a plurality of delegates instead of a majority.  These rule changes were the reason the 2020 Iowa caucus was such a clusterfuck. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/bernie-sanders-iowa-caucus-winner-trump-democrats-a9317761.html

Despite all his talk of getting out the youth vote and inspiring disenfranchised voters, Sanders planned all along to squeak by with only thirty percent of the delegates in the 2020 primary by provoking infighting among other candidates to split the moderate vote.  The supposed movement he claimed to lead is a sham. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/04/bernie-sanders-thinking-he-will-win-it-all-2020/587326/

“I Never Saw Him”: Sanders and Civil Rights

Sanders touts his participation in the March on Washington in 1963 as proof of his devotion to civil rights activism.  He loves to remind people that he marched with MLK, as seen during the She the People 2019 forum where he repeated that old chestnut for the millionth time and was booed by the attendees. https://www.thedailybeast.com/bernie-sanders-met-with-boos-after-name-dropping-martin-luther-king-at-she-the-people-summit

In actuality, Sanders was one of 250,000 people at the march, along with Mitch McConnell, who is clearly no champion for civil rights. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/7-things-know-about-sen-mitch-mcconnell-r-ky-part-flna6C10621413

Representative John Lewis, an actual civil rights hero who worked with Dr. King and whose skull was fractured by police on Bloody Sunday, said that he “never saw [Bernie Sanders].  I never met him,” during the movement. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/local/2016/02/11/john-lewis-never-saw-bernie-sanders-during-civil-rights-era/80263450/

Sanders was charged with resisting arrest during a segregation protest in Chicago in 1963, and was charged $25.  He later white flighted to Vermont, one of the whitest states in the country. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/02/bernie-sanders-core-university-chicago/

Sanders never bothered to vote during the Civil Rights movement, only putting forth the effort when he himself was running. https://imgur.com/gallery/mmS40Gq#460q6bS

During his speech in Jacksonville on the 50th anniversary of MLK’s death, Sanders rewrote history and tried to claim that King’s real focus was economic justice and not civil rights.  "All of us know where he was when he was assassinated 50 years ago today.  He was in Memphis to stand with low-income sanitation workers who were being exploited ruthlessly, whose wages were abysmally low, and who were trying to create a union. That’s where he was. Because as the mayor just indicated, what he believed — and where he was a real threat to the establishment — is that of course we need civil rights in this country, but we also need economic justice.” https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rubycramer/bernie-sanders-revolution-needs-black-voters-to-win-but-can

In thirty years in Congress, Sanders has not sponsored any bills pertaining to civil rights: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/browse?sponsor=400357#current_status[]=28&enacted_ex=on

Sanders voted for the 1994 crime bill https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/bernie-sanders-has-dodged-criticism-crime-bill-vote-while-others-n1020726

In 1994, he praised the bill and stated that the US needed more jails.  https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/1221468426855755776

He touted his vote for the crime bill on his website at least until 2006, as proof he was “tough on crime” and “strong on the cops” https://web.archive.org/web/20061018180921/http:/www.bernie.org/truth/crime.html

In 2015, during a meeting with police reform activist group Campaign Zero, Sanders responded to being asked why he thought a disproportionate amount of people of color were incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses with “Aren’t most of the people who sell the drugs African-American?”  Those present at the meeting stated, “Even confronted with figures and data to the contrary, Sanders appeared to have still struggled to grasp that he had made an error.” https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rubycramer/bernie-sanders-revolution-needs-black-voters-to-win-but-can 

In 2018, fifteen racial and social justice leaders in Vermont, including multiple NAACP branch presidents, ACLU organizers, and BLM activists, sent an open letter to Sanders and the Sanders Institute to complain that they were “excluded” from the “national progressive movement that Senator Bernie Sanders is trying to foster.”  The letter asks “how could Senator Sanders host what is supposed to be an intersectional, progressive event without inviting the very people whom he serves?”  http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/vpr/files/201812/sanders-letter-2018.pdf

Curtiss Reed, Executive Director of the Vermont Partnership for Fairness and Diversity, stated that the exclusion of Vermont POC from the Sanders Institute’s event was “a catastrophic failure of his sort of tone deafness to marginalized communities in the state of Vermont” and added “I’m tempted to say this is no longer a question of benign neglect on the part of the senator, but willful ignorance on his part not to include marginalized voices in this national conversation on the progressive movement.”   https://www.vpr.org/post/we-find-ourselves-excluded-racial-justice-leaders-ask-bernie-sanders-get-program#stream/0 

Vermont Black leaders stated they were “invisible” to Sanders, and that the senator “was just really dismissive of anything that had to do with race and racism, saying that they didn’t have anything to do with the issues of income inequality.  He just always kept coming back to income inequality as a response, as if talking about income inequality would somehow make issues of racism go away.” https://www.thedailybeast.com/vermonts-black-leaders-we-were-invisible-to-bernie-sanders

In his 1998 autobiography, Sanders repeatedly and needlessly used the n-word. He chose to keep the word in the text when republishing the book in 2015.  https://www.inquisitr.com/5620596/bernie-sanders-under-fire-for-use-of-n-word-in-2015-book-clip-from-audiobook-version-goes-viral-friday/ 

“I Will Not Make It a Major Priority”: Sanders the Ally

During an interview as mayor of Burlington, Sanders said LGBTQ rights were not a “major priority” for him and he would “probably not” support a bill to protect gays from job discrimination.  https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/10/bernie-sanders-on-marriage-equality-hes-no-longtime-champion.html

Also during his time as mayor, Sanders signed a resolution affirming that marriage is between “husband and wife.” https://www.washingtonblade.com/2016/02/06/clinton-surrogates-pounce-on-sanders-over-82-marriage-resolution/

Sanders and his wife stated in 1996 that they opposed the Defense of Marriage Act simply because it would weaken states’ rights.  Only later did he claim his opposition was due to support for same-sex marriage. https://time.com/4089946/bernie-sanders-gay-marriage/

Sanders argued same-sex marriage was a states’ rights issue in 2006. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=57&v=kej9QAsS3uI&feature=emb_logo

In that same year, after same-sex civil unions had been legal in Vermont since 2000, he responded to a reporter asking if same-sex marriage should be legalized in Vermont with “Not right now,” after the “very divisive debate” preceding the civil union legislation. https://web.archive.org/web/20160407064606/http://www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060607/NEWS/606070302/1003/NEWS02

In thirty years in Congress, Sanders has not sponsored any bills pertaining to LGBTQ rights: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/browse?sponsor=400357#current_status[]=28&enacted_ex=on  

Sanders the Warmonger

Sanders loves to tout his opposition to the Iraq War as proof of his moral superiority.  But in 1998, he voted for the Iraq Liberation Act, which states that “it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.”  He also supported Clinton’s airstrike on Iraq.  https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/105-1998/h482

In 1999, Sanders had anti-war protesters at his office arrested. https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/27/bernie-sanders-savior-or-seducer-of-the-anti-war-left/

The Iraq War Bill that Sanders voted against required Bush to first try diplomatic efforts and abide by UN rules of military conduct.  It also required transparency and progress reports.  https://www.congress.gov/bill/107th-congress/house-joint-resolution/114/text

The Authorization for Use of Military Force Act (AUMF), which Sanders did vote for, required none of that and is the reason the Afghanistan War was so much of a clusterfuck.  Bush would have used the AUMF to invade Iraq even if Congress had voted down the Iraq Liberation Act.  The only person to vote against the AUMF was Representative Barbara Lee.  Sanders voted in favor of it.  https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/107/sjres23/text

Sanders claims to oppose the defense industry.  But he brought Lockheed Martin and their 1.2 trillion dollar, over budget, outdated stealth fighters to Vermont. https://www.thedailybeast.com/bernie-sanders-loves-this-dollar1-trillion-war-machine

During his tenure as mayor of Burlington, he fired the assistant city treasurer when she was jailed for an anti-war protest. https://academic.oup.com/publius/article-abstract/21/2/131/1917641?redirectedFrom=PDF 

Sanders the Healthcare Crusader

Sanders was chairman of the Senate Veteran Affairs Committee during a 2014 scandal when dozens of veterans died while waiting for medical care.  During his tenure, Sanders only held seven hearings on VA Oversight, as opposed to the House committee’s forty-two hearings.  Veterans argue that Sanders was too invested in the idea of the VA as a shining example of government healthcare to address its failings.  Despite the scandal and tragedy, Sanders as recently as 2017 bragged that  he was involved with “the most comprehensive VA health care bill in this country.” https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-veterans-scandal-on-bernie-sanderss-watch

He voted against the Clinton plan for universal healthcare in 1993.  https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/3/14/1501210/-Where-Was-Sanders-on-Health-Care-in-93-and-94-Against-the-Clintons

Sanders also voted against CHIP, the children’s health insurance program that AOC relied on to see a doctor in her youth: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/105-1997/h345

Despite campaigning on Medicare for All since 2015, Sanders was unable to explain how much the program would cost during a 2020 60 Minutes interview.  https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/24/politics/bernie-sanders-donald-trump-2020/index.html

When Senator Warren did the math for him and released her detailed M4A plan, Sanders attacked her, calling his plan “more progressive” and saying hers would “have a very negative impact on creating jobs.” https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/03/politics/bernie-sanders-elizabeth-warren-health-care-plan/index.html

Sanders claims that his healthcare plan is standard in other countries.  But his M4A plan would ban private insurance, which is not done in any country but Canada.  In the Scandinavian countries Sanders loves to hold up as an example of government healthcare, the market for private insurance is growing.  https://aapsonline.org/no-bernie-other-countries-do-not-ban-private-care/

“Too Brassy, Too Bitchy”: Sanders the Feminist

In his autobiography, Sanders quoted an article calling his 1996 primary opponent Susan Sweetser “too brassy, too bitchy.” https://books.google.com/books?id=_2YjBm2_JGUC&pg=PA173&lpg=PA173&dq=sanders+too+brassy+too+bitchy&source=bl&ots=SWrIR5Xa8m&sig=ACfU3U2-Hj1-UXIOM0Zz274h6_Nu8juoBg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjHhtObq6LmAhWvUt8KHc8mDVUQ6AEwA3oECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=sanders%20too%20brassy%20too%20bitchy&f=false

 In his Vermont Freeman article “Cancer, Disease, and Society,” Sanders called teachers “old bitch[es]” and blamed them for men developing cancer.  He also said women developed cancer due to sexual repression.  https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2157403-sanders-cancer.html

Referring to their 1986 governor race, his opponent Madeleine Kuhn stated, “When Sanders was my opponent he focused like a laser beam on “class analysis,” in which “women’s issues” were essentially a distraction from more important issues. He urged voters not to vote for me just because I was a woman. That would be a “sexist position,” he declared.”  https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/02/04/when-bernie-sanders-ran-against-vermont/kNP6xUupbQ3Qbg9UUelvVM/story.html

Sanders called Planned Parenthood “a part of the establishment” because they endorsed Secretary Clinton for president.  https://www.politico.com/story/2016/01/planned-parenthood-bernie-sanders-218026

Sanders called Hillary Rodham Clinton, former law firm partner, former First Lady, former Senator, and former Secretary of State, unqualified to be president. https://www.cnn.com/2016/04/06/politics/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-qualified/index.html

In January 2020, leaked phone banking scripts from the Sanders campaign called Warren a candidate of the affluent who wouldn’t bring any new voters to the Democratic base.  https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/11/bernie-quietly-goes-negative-on-warren-097594

In response, members of Warren’s campaign leaked information that, at a dinner in 2018, Sanders had told Warren he did not think a woman could win the presidency.  Sanders and his supporters decried this as a lie, even though reporters knew of the dinner and had been asking Warren if Sanders had discussed women’s electability there for over a year.  https://twitter.com/mlcalderone/status/1104477933886935040?s=19

Sanders supporters then flooded Elizabeth Warren and her supporters’ Twitter mentions with snake emojis.

Sanders said of Secretary Clinton, “It is not good enough for someone to say, ‘I’m a woman! Vote for me!” https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/21/13699956/sanders-clinton-democratic-party

Bending the Knee: Sanders the Dictatorship Fanboy

During a 2020 60 Minutes interview, Sanders inexplicably decided it would be a good idea to start praising Fidel Castro’s genocidal regime, stating, “We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba, but, you know, it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad. When Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program.  Is that a bad thing, even though Fidel Castro did it?” https://www.vox.com/2020/2/24/21147388/bernie-sanders-cuba-60-minutes-nicaragua

He doubled down on this praise at the next debate, whining, “Really?  Really?” when the crowd booed him.  https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article240627047.html

In 2014, Sanders visited Cuban prisoner Alan Gross, who lost over 100 pounds and five teeth during his captivity.  During the meeting, Gross recalls Sanders telling him, “I don't know what's so wrong with this country.”  https://www.npr.org/2020/03/04/811729200/former-prisoner-recalls-sanders-saying-i-don-t-know-what-s-so-wrong-with-cuba

In 1985, Sanders praised bread lines and food rationing.  “American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food.  That's a good thing. In other countries people don't line up for food. The rich get the food, and the poor starve to death." https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/2/21/1920767/-Time-to-switch-out-from-Bernie-he-praised-nations-with-bread-lines-that-s-a-good-thing-Danger

Sanders hung a USSR flag in his office as mayor of Burlington.  https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/feb/24/bernie-sanders-reveals-his-radical-inclinations-ov/

He honeymooned in the USSR, and praised the state of the Soviet Union. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-bernie-sanderss-1988-10-day-honeymoon-in-the-soviet-union/2019/05/02/db543e18-6a9c-11e9-a66d-a82d3f3d96d5_story.html

In the 1980s, Sanders attended a Sandinista rally in Nicaragua where the attendees chanted, “Here, there, everywhere, the Yankee will die.” https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/bernie-sanders-pro-sandinista-past-problem.html

Sanders recently praised China, saying that it has made "more progress in addressing extreme poverty than any country in the history of civilization." https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/458976-sanders-china-had-done-more-to-address-extreme-poverty-than-any-country-in-the

“They Can’t Stop Us”: Sanders the Conspiracy Theorist

Despite conceding the 2016 primary and stating that “Secretary Clinton has won the Democratic nomination and I congratulate her for that” (https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/11/politics/hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders/index.html), he later made the Trump-esque statement “Some people say that if maybe that system was not rigged against me, I would have won the nomination and defeated Donald Trump.” https://www.newsweek.com/bernie-sanders-defeat-donald-trump-2016-rigged-primary-dnc-nbc-kasie-hunt-1446116

 On February 21, Sanders tweeted, “I've got news for the Republican establishment. I've got news for the Democratic establishment. They can't stop us.” https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1231021453270769664

After Super Tuesday, Sanders stated that Buttigieg and Klobuchar were pressed to drop out as part of an establishment plot to defeat him. https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/486503-sanders-klobuchar-and-buttigieg-ended-campaigns-under-great-deal

Sanders has repeatedly attacked the press as “paid by the corporations and billionaires who own the media.”  He’s promoted the conspiracy theory that Jeff Bezos makes The Washington Post write negative articles about him. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/27/bernie-sanders-attacks-media-press-fair-or-trump-2020-democrats

During the Nicaraguan conflict, Sanders accused American reporters of ignoring the truth and told a CBS reporter, “you are worms.” https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/bernie-sanders-pro-sandinista-past-problem.html

Sanders accused The Washington Post of trying to harm him in the Nevada caucus by reporting on Russia’s attempts to boost his campaign. https://www.mediaite.com/tv/bernie-sanders-takes-a-shot-at-washington-post-good-friends-when-asked-about-timing-of-russia-report/

“We Support Them”: Sanders the Spoiler

Robert Mueller’s investigation found that Russian interference sought to boost both Sanders and Trump’s 2016 campaigns, stating “we support them.” https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/02/17/indictment-russians-also-tried-help-bernie-sanders-jill-stein-presidential-campaigns/348051002/

Sanders was well aware of the Russian efforts, stating “What we knew is–well, of course we knew that.  And of course we knew that they were trying to cause divisiveness within the Democratic party.  Uh, that’s no great secret.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDYbHult0Do

When The Washington Post reported on Russia’s efforts to boost Sanders in 2020, Sanders had already known for weeks and said nothing.  After the report came out, he attacked the Post and accused them of trying to tank his performance in the Nevada caucus, stating “I’ll let you guess, about one day before the Nevada caucus. Why do you think it came out?  It was The Washington Post?  Good friends.” https://www.mediaite.com/tv/bernie-sanders-takes-a-shot-at-washington-post-good-friends-when-asked-about-timing-of-russia-report/

The Fish Rots from the Head: The Sanders Campaign

The 2016 campaign breached the Clinton campaign’s voter data and harvested and stored voter information https://time.com/4155185/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-data/

The 2016 campaign received a 645 page letter from the FEC detailing the campaign’s finance violations (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/the-bernie-sanders-donors-who-are-giving-too-much/482418/) and had to pay a $14.5 K fine to the FEC after receiving donations from non-citizens. https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/376373-sanders-campaign-pays-145k-fine-to-settle-fec-complaint

The 2016 Nevada campaign director sought to rig the state’s caucus by urging staffers to buy double-sided coins for tie-breaking coin tosses http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/sanderss-nevada-director-floated-two-sided-coins-for-tiebreaks-report/ar-AAhHiAI?getstaticpage=true&automatedTracking=staticview

The 2016 campaign initially decried superdelegates as “undemocratic” (https://www.cnn.com/2016/02/23/opinions/superdelegates-democratic-party-kohn/) before attempting to persuade them to go against the primary’s outcome and back Sanders instead of Clinton https://www.npr.org/2016/05/19/478705022/sanders-campaign-now-says-superdelegates-are-key-to-winning-nomination

The 2016 campaign was accused by staffers of sexual harassment, demeaning treatment toward women, and pay disparity by gender https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/us/politics/bernie-sanders-campaign-sexism.html

Weeks before the 2016 general election, Jane Sanders retweeted a video from an April town hall of her husband telling an attendee to “make these decisions yourself” regarding whether or not to vote third party if Secretary Clinton won the primary https://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/news/politics/2016/09/26/retweet-bernie-sanders-wife-jane-raises-questions/91140254/

The 2020 Sanders campaign appointed Russian interference denier and Jill Stein 2016 voter Briahna Joy Gray as the campaign’s National Press Secretary https://twitter.com/briebriejoy/status/888555665865814017?lang=en

Following promises to run a civil campaign, Sanders hired David Sirota, a man who’d spent months attacking other primary contenders online, as a speech writer.  The campaign also confirmed that Sirota had already been serving in an advisory role prior to his official hiring https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/03/sanders-promised-civility-hired-twitter-attack-dog/585259/

Press Secretary Briahna Joy Gray called for the doxing of a Sanders critic on Twitter. If there was any repercussion for this behavior, it has never been made public. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/8/14/1879124/-Bernie-Sanders-s-Campaign-Doxed-a-Critic-on-Twitter

The 2020 campaign hired and fired YouTuber Matt Orfalea within 24 hours after being alerted of his sexist, racist, homophobic, and ableist content, suggesting he was not vetted before his hiring https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/bernie-sanders-matt-orfalea-mlk-youtube-video/

Despite his firing and the campaign decrying his behavior in October 2019, in January 2020 Jane Sanders was still retweeting and praising Orfalea.  https://twitter.com/Rob_Flaherty/status/1236861997398048768

In March 2020, Orfalea posed as a Biden volunteer and made calls to voters claiming that Biden has dementia.  https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgeanp/a-man-fired-from-sanders-campaign-is-calling-biden-voters-and-saying-he-has-dementia

They hired and fired Darius Khalil Gordon after two days after being alerted of his sexist, racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, and ableist Tweets https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2019/12/bernie-sanders-new-head-organizer-called-people-fgs-bhes/

The campaign also hired former Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour as a campaign surrogate.  The Women’s March cut ties with Sarsour following anti-Semitic statements. https://nypost.com/2018/11/20/womens-march-founder-calls-on-current-leadership-to-step-down/

Sarsour was also condemned by the Anti-Defamation League for the statement that “a state like Israel that is based on supremacy, that is built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everyone else.” https://forward.com/news/national/435964/bernie-sanders-linda-sarsour-jewish-voters/

Sanders National Campaign Co-Chair Nina Turner claimed that Biden’s strong support among Black voters is due to the voters’ “short memories” and “not a true understanding of the history” https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/473161-top-sanders-officials-hits-biden-over-riding-on-obamas-coattails

The 2020 campaign paid staffers working 60 hours a week an average of 13 dollars per hour despite Sanders campaigning on a 15 dollar per hour minimum wage https://www.vox.com/2019/7/20/20700841/bernie-sanders-minimum-wage-staff-pay

Bernie Bros attacked Biden’s Detroit rally on 3/9/20, striking senior aide Symone Sanders in the head with an iPad and knocking her down. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/10/joe-biden-detroit-protests-sanders-124874

“Nobody Likes Him”: Sanders Himself

In 1996, Congressman Barney Frank said of Sanders, “Bernie alienates his natural allies.  His holier-than-thou attitude—saying in a very loud voice he is smarter than everyone else and purer than everyone else—really undercuts his effectiveness.”  https://www.boston.com/news/politics/2016/04/11/history-barney-frank-bernie-sanders-criticize

In her recent Hulu documentary series, Hillary Rodham Clinton briefly spoke about Sanders, saying “He was in Congress for years.  He had one senator support him.  Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It's all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.” https://twitter.com/Burkmc/status/1235863901813661697?s=09

A former campaign staffer called Sanders “unbelievably abusive.”  Another campaign insider called him an asshole, and a former Senate staffer recounted, "He yelled in meetings all the time.”  https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/anger-management-sanders-fights-for-employees-except-his-own/Content?oid=2834657

One aide stated that Sanders “never makes you feel like you’re good enough to be in the room with him.”  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/us/politics/bernie-sanders-image.html

Sanders voted in favor of dumping nuclear waste on the poor and predominantly Latinx community of Sierra Blanca, Texas https://www.texastribune.org/2016/02/28/Sanders-Nuclear-Waste-Votes-Divide-Texas-Activists/

When asked if he would visit the site in Sierra Blanca, Sanders answered “Absolutely not.” https://archives.texasobserver.org/issue/1998/09/11#page=11

Sanders voted five times against the Brady Act which required universal background checks and a waiting period to buy firearms. https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/oct/13/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-voted-against-brady/o

He also voted against the AMBER Alert System. http://archive.boston.com/news/local/vermont/articles/2006/09/21/sanders_vote_on_amber_alert_emerges_as_key_campaign_issue/

He wanted to primary Obama in the 2012 election cycle. https://www.thenation.com/article/yes-bernie-sanders-wanted-obama-primaried-in-2012-heres-why/

After saying millionaire senators are immoral (https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/24/politics/bernie-millionaire-senators-immoral/index.html) and railing against millionaires and billionaires in his 2016 campaign, Sanders responded to criticism of his millionaire senator status by saying “if you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”  His stump speech now only rants about billionaires. https://theweek.com/speedreads/834228/bernie-sanders-says-millionaire-like-write-bestselling-book 

Upheld a ban on rock concerts as mayor of Burlington like a Footloose villain https://i.redd.it/atpybo1rcwa31.jpg

Despite running on forgiving student loan debt since 2015, when pressed for specifics during an interview with Dana Bash, Sanders responded, “I don't have the plan in my pocket right now,” because, you know, why on Earth should he know the details of his key campaign promises? https://mobile.twitter.com/DanaBashCNN/status/1137779734467792897

Two days before the 2016 general election, Sanders tweeted “I do not believe that most of the people who are thinking about voting for Mr. Trump are racist or sexist.” https://twitter.com/berniesanders/status/794941635931099136?lang=en

 Sanders had a heart attack at age 78, making his continued life expectancy 3.1 years. https://www.cardiovascularbusiness.com/topics/acute-coronary-syndrome/study-65-older-mi-patients-die-within-8-years

He could have dropped out of the race after his heart attack and endorsed Warren, and she could have spent the primary building coalitions with the demographics where she was the weakest, and could well have been the front runner by now.  Instead, he selfishly stayed in the race, screwing her over and knowing full well the odds are against him living through a single term.  He continued to do the only thing he’s good at: fucking everyone over.

Say whatever you want about Biden, it’s not like there aren’t things to say.  But I’ve seen so many posts about how “Sure, Biden’s the worst EVER, but he is EVER SO SLIGHTLY less worse than Trump,” and excuse me, fuck off.  Biden horribly lost his wife and daughter before his 1972 Senate term even started, and instead of dropping out, he continued to serve his constituents while commuting home two hours every night to raise his sons.  Meanwhile, in 1972, Sanders was a deadbeat bum stealing electricity.  There’s no comparison.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

December 4, 2020

Heather Cox Richardson

While coronavirus continues to burn across the country, Trump is focusing instead on continuing to contest the election results and on the Pentagon.

The main story in the country continues to be the coronavirus. As of tonight, according to the New York Times, more than 14,441,700 people in the U.S. have been infected with the virus and at least 278,900 have died. Official daily death counts are well over 2000.

As several states continue to count votes from the November election, President-Elect Joe Biden’s popular vote margin over Trump is now more than 7 million. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, and Michigan, all states in which Trump contested the vote, have already certified their election results for Biden. In all six of those states, judges have ruled that Trump’s lawyers have provided no evidence of fraud. They have used words like “baseless,” “flimsy,” “obviously lacking,” “dangerous,” and “not credible.”

Trump’s obsession with winning an election he has clearly lost has brought into relief the struggle for control over the Republican Party. Trump is clearly trying to turn the party into a vehicle for loyalty to him and him alone. He has always turned on those who no longer serve his interests: Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions was one of the first elected Republicans to support Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy, giving it an air of legitimacy. He left the Senate to become Trump’s first Attorney General, only to have Trump turn against him when he recused himself from the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, because he had lied about his own contacts with Russians. Trump forced Sessions to resign, and when Sessions ran again for the Senate, endorsed his rival and attacked Sessions on Twitter. Sessions lost his primary.

Now Trump has turned on men who similarly sacrificed their careers for his. Three days ago, Trump’s loyalist Attorney General, William Barr, undercut Trump’s election fraud arguments when he said that he had not seen such fraud. This apparently so infuriated Trump that he is considering firing Barr. Then, this morning, Trump turned on loyalist Louis DeJoy at the head of the United States Postal Service, who removed mail sorting machines and changed USPS rules to slow mail-in ballots expected to be for Biden. Trump tweeted that the USPS “is responsible for tampering with hundreds of thousands of ballots” and thus stole the election from him. He called the USPS a “long time Democrat stronghold,” although DeJoy is a major Trump supporter and donor.

While Trump is talking about running again in 2024, his turning against his most loyal supporters in the Republican Party will not inspire others to rally to his banner. Instead, it may simply be that he’s keeping the idea of his candidacy alive because it keeps money flowing in. Since the election, he has raised more than $200 million in donations.

While he is fighting over the election results, Trump has done very little else except to replace civilian employees at the Pentagon with his own hand-picked loyalists. This is unusual in a lame duck period, when presidents usually try to smooth the transition to the next administration.

Far from trying to smooth that transition, Trump is making it as bumpy as possible. His appointee at the General Services Administration delayed the start of the transition for weeks. Now that Biden’s team finally has access to Trump’s people to learn about their planning for the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine, it turns out there hasn’t been much planning. Biden today noted that “There is no detailed plan that we’ve seen, anyway, as to how you get the vaccine out of a container, into an injection syringe, into somebody’s arm…. It's going to be very difficult for that to be done and it’s a very expensive proposition…. There’s a lot more that has to be done.”

Also disturbing is that the Trump administration has denied the Biden team access to U.S. intelligence agencies that are controlled by the Defense Department, including the National Security Agency (which is the nation’s largest U.S. intelligence service), the Defense Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence services with a global reach. The Biden folks have, though, been able to meet with their counterparts at the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The refusal of the Pentagon to meet with Biden’s people comes at a time when Trump has been shaking up personnel there. Immediately after the election, Trump fired his fourth Defense Secretary, Mark T. Esper, and replaced him with an acting secretary of defense, Christopher C. Miller. Miller, in turn, has presided over the installation of a number of Trump loyalists both in the Pentagon leadership and on the Defense Policy Board, a group of advisors who consult with the Defense Secretary on specific issues when asked. Pushed out were about a dozen advisers, including former Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger, as well as former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

Today, there was another major purge at Defense, this time from the Defense Business Board, a nonpartisan group of about 20 volunteers from the business sector who are appointed to give business advice to Pentagon leaders. The White House threw nine people off the board—informing them with a terse email—including its chair, Michael Bayer. Trump replaced them with his former 2016 campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, and that year’s deputy campaign manager, David Bossie, among other loyalists. Both Lewandowski and Bossie are outspoken Trump supporters who have led the fight to contest the election.

So has another Trump nominee for a Pentagon post, Scott O’Grady, who has endorsed the idea that Trump won by a landslide and that Trump should declare martial law. Trump has nominated him to become an assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, overseeing operations in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

Exactly what Trump is doing with this packing of the Defense Department is unclear. There are, though, three major issues on the table right now that may or may not be involved, but are worth keeping in mind.

The first is that Trump is trying to remove many U.S. troops from around the world before he leaves office, and had gotten serious pushback on that from the people he has now purged from the Defense Department. Today, he ordered nearly all of about 700 U.S. troops out of Somalia, where they have been training local soldiers to hold ground against terrorists. They will not come home, though; they are being sent elsewhere in Africa.

There is also still hanging out there the administration’s sudden announcement of a $23 billion sale of arms to the United Arab Emirates, including a number of advanced F-35 fighter jets and Reaper drones. Lawmakers of both parties object to this sale, concerned about risks to Israel and that the UAE could transfer the technology to China and Russia. The Senate will vote next week on banning the sale.

There is also the effort by the White House to force the Pentagon to lease its airwave spectrum to a private company, Rivada Networks, to create a nationwide 5G network. Rivada is backed by major Republican figures, including operative Karl Rove, but established Pentagon officials have little interest in the project, pointing out that there is no proof that Rivada knows what it’s doing or that the plan would be legal. It’s also not clear that the use of this spectrum for private carriers wouldn’t impact its use for national security. The Defense Department spectrum the White House would like to lease to private investors is worth between $50 and $75 billion.

I always believe in following the money, and that’s especially true now as Trump’s years in the White House, which have given him access to huge sums, are drawing to a close.

—-

[FROM COMMENTS]

Scott M. Krasner

I waver between bewilderment and rage when reading these daily summaries. I can almost "understand" his more political moves - installing loyalists, withdrawing troops, even trying to sell access to the Defense Department's wavebands. I don't agree or condone these actions, but they're consistent with his approach to governance to date.

What's comprehensible is ignoring - in any and every way - the coronavirus and its impact. Unconscionable doesn't begin to describe his failure to acknowledge the deaths of 280,000 Americans, or to endorse any means of protecting each other as best possible. It's inhumane. It's devoid of empathy, morally vacuous, and ethically deplorable. It is unequivocally and unalterably wrong.

And yet 74,000,000 thought it acceptable to return him to office. McConnell has personally obstructed any efforts to extend relief for 8 months and counting. It's Hobbseian in its social brutishness. Even Hobbes might be appalled. And Republican leadership is mute.

I'm almost beyond shock. Since the beginning, many thought each of Trump's transgressions would be the last straw, yet nothing happened. The only apparent imposition of accountability is his having lost the election. Court losses haven't swayed him. Our perverse campaign finance laws have given him license to steal despite the misleading fine print. His Cabinet, always incompetent for the task, is asleep, silent, or in on the game. Each day goes by with no visible effort to limit his efforts to salt the earth in advance of his successor. And Republican leadership ignores or enables him to proceed unhindered.

He's unmoored. He's looking to preemptively pardon family and loyalists who are most likely would be criminally liable but haven't yet been charged. His most ardent supporters are almost insane (read Giuliani and Powell) or seditious (read Flynn and Lin Wood). And still the Republican party watches with bloodless faces and dead eyed stares, saying not a word.

What is one to think? How does one explain this to children? How can one reason with any family, friends, or acquaintances who somehow believe Trump is in the right, brought low only by a grand, silent conspiracy of wrong minded citizens and foreign actors?

Perhaps history can look upon Trump's reign of terror more dispassionately. Today, however, I and many others feel like we're helpless, our minds and sensibilities best represented by the visage of horror in Edvard Munch's The Scream.

*

Linda Mitchell

Hannah Arendt's book (based on her reporting for The New Yorker), "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" encapsulates the issues TCinLA and the people who posted replies to it raise. I have read only bits of it but what she presents is a picture of evil that is stripped of glamour and that indicts everyone. As she says about Eichmann, "Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all." If you have access to JSTOR (you can read online for free but not download if you don't have access through a library) there is a great short article in The History Teacher (1981) that discusses Arendt and her book in clear and concise terms. https://www.jstor.org/stable/493684

Miller and most everyone else surrounding the Deranged Cheeto--including the criminal enablers in Congress--fit Arendt's description perfectly. They are not monsters. They are not (most of them) pathological narcissists. They are sterile, unoriginal, uncreative people who have decided that personal advancement through doing terrible things is fine with them. It is actually harder, in our modern world, to be a good person than to be an awful one. Empathy, emotional maturity, awareness, and wisdom all require effort on the part of the individual. One has to engage, one has to become self-aware, one has to be brutally honest with oneself. Evil simply requires reaching down to that lowest common denominator of the id: a desire for self-advancement by any means necessary.

This is why they all seem so petty, so puerile, so childish, so joyless. This is why their tantrums are so infantile. And this is why Biden and Harris seem, by contrast, so refreshingly mature, so willing to allow joy. Both have been radically affected by what Hegel referred to as the "slaughter-bench" of history. The subhumans surrounding the Unelected Ex-President have not got enough imagination to be affected by anything except their own hunger.

[LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN]

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[bountyofbeads]

🚨 BREAKING NEWS ALERT 🚨 🚨

John Conyers Jr., long-serving congressman who co-founded Congressional Black Caucus, dies at 90

By John Otis | Published October 27 at 4:36 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 27, 2019 |

John Conyers Jr., who became the longest-serving African American in Congress, co-founded the Congressional Black Caucus and helped create a national holiday in the name of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. but whose career rapidly crumbled at 88 when he resigned amid sexual harassment allegations, died Oct. 27 at his home in Detroit. He was 90.

His spokeswoman Holly Baird confirmed the death. Additional details were not immediately available.

A liberal Democrat from what is now Detroit’s 13th Congressional District, Mr. Conyers was first elected in 1964, becoming one of five African Americans in the House. His overwhelmingly Democratic constituents reelected him 26 times over a period spanning 10 presidents, from Lyndon B. Johnson to Donald Trump.

As the longest-serving member at the time of his resignation, Mr. Conyers earned the title “dean of the House of Representatives,” and this job security allowed him to promote progressive, sometimes controversial causes that won him a national following.

He co-sponsored the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited discrimination at the ballot box. His fierce criticism of the Vietnam War led to clashes with Johnson and landed him on Richard M. Nixon’s “enemies list” of political opponents.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Conyers voted against the USA Patriot Act because he feared it would roll back civil liberties. He later suggested that President George W. Bush should be impeached, saying he misled the country ahead of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Mr. Conyers’s twilight years were marred by allegations of sexual harassment. According to legal documents published by the online publication BuzzFeed in November 2017, several of his female staff members claimed that he had approached them to request sex and that he had engaged in unwanted touching and other impropriety.

One former staff member received a settlement of more than $27,000 from Mr. Conyers’s office after alleging in 2015 that he fired her for not accepting his sexual advances. The congressman denied any wrongdoing. But after the House Ethics Committee opened an investigation and numerous representatives called for him to step down in November 2017, Mr. Conyers step down from hs post as top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. The next month, he announced his resignation, after 52 years in office.

“My legacy can’t be compromised or diminished in any way by what we are going through now,” Mr. Conyers declared defiantly. “This too shall pass.”

Before the scandal, Mr. Conyers had been an inspiration to African Americans from Detroit to the Deep South and became, in effect, a member of Congress at large.

“In many districts around the country, black voters did not feel represented by their leaders so they would reach out to African American congressmen, like Conyers,” said Michael Fauntroy, who interned for Mr. Conyers in the early 1980s and is now an assistant professor of political science at Howard University.

Mr. Conyers, in turn, urged skeptical African Americans to get involved in politics. One of his early mottos was: “Register, vote, run for office. It’s power that counts.” To better harness that power and secure passage of legislation on poverty, racism, human rights, unfair tax policies and health care, Mr. Conyers and 12 other African American House members founded the Congressional Black Caucus in 1971.

Mr. Conyers strongly backed the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s 1984 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination and was an early supporter of candidate Barack Obama, who was then a Democratic senator from Illinois. Yet Mr. Conyers also could be caustic of fellow Democrats to demonstrate that he was not blindly loyal to anyone.

In 1979, he described President Jimmy Carter as a “hopeless, demented, honest, well-intentioned nerd who will never get past his first administration.” Decades later, Mr. Conyers criticized Obama for making foreign policy too dependent on military muscle. His intention, Mr. Conyers said of Obama, was “to make him a better president.”

He presented himself as an emeritus member of the Washington establishment, and had participated in many high-profile political battles.

Mr. Conyers was the only member of the House Judiciary Committee to take part in impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon in 1974 for the Watergate bugging scandal and coverup, and against President Bill Clinton in 1998 for lying about his affair with White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky.

Mr. Conyers considered Nixon a criminal and helped draft articles of impeachment against the president before he resigned. However, he called the effort to impeach Clinton a Republican coup d’etat and “the most tragic event in my career.” He voted no when the House voted to impeach Clinton. Eight years later, Mr. Conyers became the first African American to chair the Judiciary Committee.

All along, Mr. Conyers was a master of the politics of symbolism. He hired civil rights activist Rosa Parks, who worked in his Detroit office for 20 years. He introduced numerous bills calling for reparations for the descendants of slaves, an issue that resonated among blacks but did not gain traction in Congress. More successful was his 15-year struggle to recognize King, the civil rights defender.

Four days after King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, and with the support of his widow, Coretta Scott King, Mr. Conyers proposed the first of many bills calling for a federal holiday in his honor.

The proposal met resistance from Republicans, notably Sen. Jesse Helms (N.C.), who accused King of Communist sympathies and complained that only one other holiday, Columbus Day, was named after a person.

Mr. Conyers kept pushing, millions of people signed petitions and entertainer Stevie Wonder pitched in with the hit single “Happy Birthday.” President Ronald Reagan in 1983 signed legislation setting aside the third Monday in January as Martin Luther King Jr. Day; the day was chosen because it was near King’s Jan. 15 birthday.

In a 2008 interview, Mr. Conyers called it “far and away the thing I am most proud of.”

But as the Detroit Free Press, his hometown paper, once described it, “For every brilliant move, there’s a dud.” Mr. Conyers was famous for missing votes on the House floor. Critics claimed that his effectiveness was dulled by growing arrogance and a refusal to compromise. He was prone to gaffes, prompting Time magazine political columnist Joe Klein to call him “foolishly incendiary.”

When Mr. Conyers ran for mayor of Detroit in 1989, challenging Democratic incumbent Coleman A. Young, he announced his bid by saying, “Move over, Big Daddy, I’m home.” Mr. Conyers finished third in the primary and then lost again in 1993.

Mr. Conyers could be a demanding boss. In addition to the allegations that he sexually harassed staff members, the House Ethics Committee investigated him for pressuring staff members to babysit for his children and to chauffeur him to private events in government vehicles.

After an investigation that lasted more than two years, the panel announced a deal in 2006 in which it dropped the inquiry in return for Mr. Conyers’s promise that he would not ask his staff members to do nonofficial work for him.

In 2009, Mr. Conyers’s wife, Monica Esters Conyers — a former campaign staff member 36 years his junior — was convicted of bribery while serving on the Detroit City Council and was sentenced to 37 months in prison.

John James Conyers Jr. was born in Detroit on May 16, 1929. He served in the Army Corps of Engineers during the Korean War. With the help of the G.I. Bill for veterans, he graduated from Detroit’s Wayne State University in 1957 and its law school in 1958.

His interest in public affairs was partly because of his father’s position as an international representative for the United Auto Workers and, for a time, Mr. Conyers worked as a labor lawyer. He also was a legislative assistant to Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), one of the few House members to serve even longer than Mr. Conyers.

In the early 1960s, local Democratic Party elders considered Mr. Conyers too young to pursue federal office. Despite their opposition, Mr. Conyers ran in the 1964 Democratic primary for what was then Detroit’s 1st Congressional District and won by a mere 45 votes. He then scored a landslide victory in the general election.

Mr. Conyers had two sons, John III and Carl. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.

In office, Mr. Conyers went on to fend off challenges from candidates who hadn’t yet been born when he was first elected.

[berniesrevolution]

Let’s begin with the good news from last night. In Missouri, voters overwhelmingly rejected (by 2 to 1!) the “right to work” law passed by the state’s Republican legislature. This is very good news indeed. It rebuts the Republican position that American workers want laws banning job contracts requiring union membership. These laws are always touted as expanding people’s “economic freedom” because they prevent businesses from “forcing” their workers to join unions. But even Milton Friedman, in Capitalism and Freedom, pointed out that that was spurious: Actually, the laws themselves are an infringement on the classic conservative idea of “economic freedom,” because they prohibit certain kinds of “freely made” contractual arrangements.

Right-to-work laws don’t come out of a principled commitment to free markets. They’re just an attempt to destroy unions using the power of the state. Missouri voters have indicated that they’re not having it. Now, the left should try to get every other state’s right-to-work laws put up to a democratic vote. We’ll quickly see whether people agree that the “freedom to not join a unionized employer” is more valuable to them than the freedom that comes with having your interests represented at work. This is an important moment, especially because of just how overwhelming public opposition to the law was. And in Missouri of all places!

Another bit of good news from last night: In Michigan, DSA-backed Palestinian state legislator Rashida Tlaib won her primary! She’s in a deep blue district, so she is now almost certain to become the first Muslim woman ever elected to Congress. That’s a historic milestone, and very exciting. She had to defeat the local political establishment in order to pull it off, so it was far from a guaranteed victory. However, she did bring in far more money than her opponents, which may be evidence that it’s very difficult (unless you’re Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) to compete unless you’re well-funded.

Ah, but then there’s the bad news. Abdul El-Sayed did not win. This was very disappointing, because over the last few months I’ve gone from skepticism about El-Sayed to total certainty that he is exactly the sort of candidate the left needs. He had a well thought-out policy agenda, a solid background, a charismatic personality, and a powerful ability to inspire people. So many people who saw Abdul speak developed a sense of hope, and a belief in the possibilities of politics, that they had never felt before. I felt it myself: Abdul made it difficult to feel jaded or cynical about the political system, because he had such clear plans for how to use it to make people’s lives better. The young people who flocked to his campaign did it because he moved them and made them think they could actually achieve something beautiful together. His defeat will be very hard for many of them. It will be hard for me. If you didn’t see him up close, you may not realize just how good he was. But damn, he was good.

Abdul will be back, of course. And I hope that he takes the right lesson from this: not that you should try to appear more “moderate” and disguise your left politics, but that it’s a long struggle and support needs to be built bit by bit. The reason people loved Abdul was that he told the truth, and unlike so many other Democrats, he didn’t seem afraid. It seemed like he’d never back down. And that was just so refreshing. I hope he never, ever changes, and that he keeps on pushing.

What does Abdul’s loss “mean”? The New York Times said it is “a reminder that Democratic primary voters across the country are not necessarily motivated chiefly by liberal ideology.” Well, that’s technically true, but not as meaningful as it seems. The result does mean that Democratic voters don’t just vote automatically for the most progressive candidate. But nobody thinks that anyway; we all know it requires organization and money to win as well. We have to be careful about what lessons we draw from this: Leftists will point out that the other two candidates had far, far more money than El-Sayed. Millionaire businessman Shri Thanedar spent $12 million of his own money on the race, and managed to pull 17.7 percent of the vote. He seemed to be running for purely opportunistic reasons, and pretended to be a Bernie Sanders progressive despite having recently supported Republicans. He was a borderline fraud (and is actually being sued for fraud). He had once tortured a hundred beagles! I mean, Thanedar was an utterly ridiculous candidate, but he had one thing: $12 million. And he flooded the race with advertising. He was everywhere.

The fact that Shri Thanedar got 17.7 percent of the vote tells us something sad but obvious about American politics: It’s driven in large part by money. Money isn’t everything. Shri was never going to actually win. But money can do a hell of a lot. When I visited Michigan, I watched Abdul on the phone trying to convince medium-sized donors to give several hundred dollars so he could afford to run another local TV ad. He had to spend 35-40 hours per week doing this, just to have any television advertising at all. That’s a second full-time job in addition to all the other campaigning, and it’s a full-time job that Thanedar, being self-funded, didn’t need to do. The advantage that money gives you is absurd. If you don’t have it, you have no alternative but to try to build an organization from scratch, hoping you can inspire people enough to work for you for free. If you’re running on a platform that wealthy people aren’t going to like, as Abdul was, it’s going to be extremely difficult to get your word out to voters, because who will fund it? The race certainly proves, to some degree, that our politics is corrupt: A millionaire could simply buy nearly 20 percent of the vote. Others will see the result differently, and think it proves that progressive politics aren’t viable in the Midwest or whatever. I don’t think that’s tenable. Bernie Sanders won Michigan with the exact same political platform as Abdul. The ideas did not change. And let’s remember that Shri Thanedar, fraud that he was, lifted the Sanders platform as well, and ran on single-payer healthcare. If you add the two single-payer candidates together, they got very nearly half the vote.

(Continue Reading)

[apartyofone]

Who is this guy?

Read in the NYT about the mayor of a medium sized town in Indiana who has announced his candidacy for Democratic Primary in 2020.

For President.

Huh?

And then I saw his uncommon name - Pete Buttigieg - and remembered this very memorable post on Medium after 2016:

Take a read. And open your mind to the crazy, longshot possibilities...

https://medium.com/@buttigieg/a-letter-from-flyover-country-5d4e9c32d2ac

A Letter From Flyover Country

Most people have trouble pronouncing my name, so they just call me “Mayor Pete.” My surname, Buttigieg (Boot-edge-edge), is very common in my father’s country of origin, the tiny island of Malta, and nowhere else. Dad came to America in the 1970s and became a citizen; he married my mother, an Army brat and umpteenth-generation Hoosier, and the two of them settled in South Bend, Indiana, shortly before I was born thirty-five years ago. At the age of 29, the city elected me mayor. Being the mayor of your hometown is the best job in America, partly because it’s relatively nonpartisan — we focus on results, not ideology. Yet, precisely because of what it means to my community, I am paying closer attention than ever to national politics and the direction of my party.

The Democratic Party matters more than ever, now that a hostile takeover of the Republican Party has brought to power a thin-skinned authoritarian who is not liberal, nor conservative, nor moderate. Yet the party today stands at its lowest point of national and statewide influence since the 1920s, just when a robust opposition is needed most. Much will depend on whether Democrats can organize and deliver a consistent alternative — principles, proposals, and candidates — in the face of what is about to come out of Washington and various state capitals under unchecked Republican control. They will keep some of their promises and break others. Things they will do, and things they will allow, stand to hurt America and Americans. We need to be ready to put forward a better way.

Among Democrats responding to the last election and organizing for the next one, the conversation, inevitably, is moving in the direction of organizing and tactics. This is vital, but it cannot come before the fundamentals. We need to begin with the values that make us Democrats in the first place. If we don’t talk about values, many Americans will tune us out. Again.

I am a Democrat because I believe in protecting freedom, fairness, families, and the future.

(Emphasis is mine)

First, freedom — not just the thin idea of freedom from overregulation but the freedom to choose our destinies, not to mention our spouses. Freedom from things like crushing medical costs and student debt, from dishonest banking practices and anything else that affects the most basic of freedoms: freedom to live a life of our choosing.

Next, fairness, in the sense Democrats have always cared about deeply, fairness in access to voting and to public accommodations, fairness in the face of discrimination and privilege, fairness in our systems of distributing financial and political power. Donald Trump got elected because, in his twisted way, he correctly asserted that there is great unfairness in our economy and our democracy.

Next, family: because we are made happy or unhappy mostly by what happens in our families, because you can’t raise a family on less than an adequate wage, because shaping our families is a personal right, and because you can’t raise a family at all if your government doesn’t have your back.

And finally, the future: because the national security of our people, and the habitability of our land, almost totally depend on those we elect, their judgment and wisdom and willingness to pay attention to facts and evidence when making decisions that will have consequences for centuries.

None of this is theoretical for me. I didn’t see Afghanistan on the news, I saw it through the armored windshields of the vehicles I drove or guarded on dozens of missions outside the wire, and as a Reservist I could be sent back to war if a reckless president leads us into peril. I don’t think about gun violence as an abstraction, not when I’ve had to attend funerals and console the mothers of victims in my city — and swear in police officers alongside family members who pray they will come home safe every day. Marriage equality isn’t a political rallying cry for me, it is a legal fact without which my future family cannot even exist. Obamacare isn’t a political football for me, it’s a matter of household finance: it’s how my partner pays for his health care and how his mother pays for the chemotherapy on which her life depends. Climate change isn’t about polar bears for me. It’s about the South Bend families whose homes I stood in last summer, their basements flooded with muck and excrement while children wandered around the porch the night before school started, because our city had just experienced one of those unprecedented rainfalls that science kept warning us about.

Commentators have focused on candidates and their antics as though that mattered most. But politics, for our city and for most Americans, isn’t about The Show. Its consequences don’t happen in the Beltway or on Twitter or on television. Politics happens in, and to, our homes, in the lives of the people we care about, like the people in my household, my family, and my community. That’s why this all matters so much. The process matters because of what it means to us voters as human beings, not the other way around.

At home, I ran and won, twice, by telling my blue-collar community that Studebaker was never going to come back and make cars in our city, and that it was all right, because there is a way forward. Now Democrats need to absorb the fact that winning the popular vote is not enough, see that the future trends of the electoral map alone will not save us, and know that it’s all right, because there is a way forward.

Our values are American values, and a values-led strategy (backed by a formidable organization) will prevail if we are true to it, and if we keep it close to the earth. I am not a candidate for a position in the national party, but I am watching closely to see if any of the declared candidates will articulate this message: it is time to organize our politics around the lived experience of real people, whose lives play out not in the political sphere but in the everyday, affected deeply and immediately by how well we honor our values with good policy.

With over 40 per cent of voters in my generation describing themselves as independent, our future as a party will depend on reminding people how their lives have been improved by good Democratic policies, and when a voter thinks that isn’t true in her life, we had better listen closely and try to understand why.

When it comes to my part of the country, we will recover our ability to reach people only when we take them seriously, connecting our plans to their actual, personal lived experience rather than focusing on The Show. We need to invite individual people to assess how their individual lives changed — how their safety, their income, their access to health care, their gun rights, their marriages — have actually been affected, if at all, by what goes on in Washington.

Taking people seriously also means treating the constituency groups that traditionally support Democrats as more than a disconnected patchwork of interests to cater to, served by a great political salad bar of something different for everyone. The various identity groups who have been part of our coalition should be there because we have spoken to their values and their everyday lives — not because we contacted them, one group at a time and just in time for the next election, to remind them of some pet issue that illustrates why we expect them to support us. Laundry lists will not inspire.

Democrats need a true turnaround, just like my city did when I ran for mayor. In the last five years, my “rust belt” city went from being described by Newsweek as one of America’s ten dying communities to seeing its fastest pace of population and investment growth in recent memory. That’s how I got re-elected with 80 percent of the vote last year, in the seat of a county that would split its vote evenly between Clinton and Trump a year later. We earned support from residents on both sides of the aisle, not by becoming ideologically conservative but by listening to people about what matters to them, facing our problems, and delivering results on the ground to earn confidence and trust. In the same way, I am convinced that, for our politics and for our nation, salvation begins with the local.

[clubofinfo]

Expert: It’s more than doors between government and the businesses that they supposedly regulate that go round and round.  One of the other swinging doors is between the Democratic and Republican Parties. A second door Perhaps the best known case is when Al Gore ran for president in 2000, he picked Joe Lieberman as his running mate.  Then, in 2008, Lieberman showed up at the Republican national convention to endorse John McCain for president.  Between those two campaigns, John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, was rumored to be leaning to ask Republican John McCain to be his running mate. Had Al Gore won, Lieberman would most likely have been the subsequent Democratic nominee for president.  Had John Kerry won with McCain on the ticket, McCain would have been the heir apparent to the “Democratic Party” crown.  Whether Lieberman or McCain, Democrats across the country would have been told to bow in reverence to their party’s red-blue nominee for president. This was hardly the first time such a switcheroo blossomed in American politics.  In 1864, Republican Abraham Lincoln dumped his sitting vice-president to ask Democrat Andrew Johnson to be his running mate.  After Lincoln’s murder, US voters, who had selected a Republican to be their president, found him replaced by a Democrat. Though such examples at the presidential level may be enshrined in history books, they happen all the time at the local level.  In 1963, the Texas Young Democrats allowed high school chapters for the first time.  I was 15 years old then and organized the state’s first Young Democrats chapter at Lamar High School in Houston.  We invited a teacher who had been elected to the Texas Legislature to speak to our chapter on “Why Am I a Democrat?”  His answer was simple.  He was a Democrat because that was the only way to get elected in Texas of the early 1960s. The next year, he came out as a Republican.  That was the time of the exodus of southern Dixiecrats from the Democratic to the Republican Party. Fast forward half a century and I was the 2016 Green Party nominee for governor of Missouri.  I participated in the debate with Democrat Chris Koster and Republican Eric Greitens.  Greitens, riding the election on Trump’s wave, has since become internationally infamous for an affair in which he allegedly tied his victim to his basement exercise equipment, hit her, took nude photos of her, threatened to publicize the photos if she ever told anyone what he did, and continued various sex acts without her consent. During the campaign, both the Democrat and Repubican made TV ads showing themselves with automatic weapons.  Besides being partial to gun violence, they had something else in common.  Both had switched parties.  The Republican Greitens was a former Democrat and the Democrat Koster was a former Republican.  Like most others greedy for power, they decided which way the winds were blowing, calculated where they could most effectively hustle votes, and adjusted their public images and party affiliation accordingly.  (Greitens resigned as governor in May 2018.) Flip-flops between the corporate parties are hardly peculiar to Missouri.  Evan Jenkins was the runner-up in the May 2018 Republican primary for the West Virginia US senate seat.  Jenkins had been elected as a Democrat to the West Virginia legislature, but hopped to the Republican side to win the third district US house seat in 2014. During the 2018 race, the former Democrat boasted a perfect rating from the National Rifle Association as well as a 100% “pro-life” record saying, “I am a West Virginia conservative who is working with President Trump each and every day for our shared conservative values.” That was nothing new for the state.  Its billionaire governor Jim Justice started out as a Republican, became a Democrat in 2015 to win the governor’s race and switched again to the Republicans in 2017 to bask in Trump’s glow.  These people are as dedicated to the colors of their party as a chameleon is to staying green when it’s opportune to turn yellow. The original door Do you remember when the “revolving door” was first noticed?  It was due to people like Michael R. Taylor who rotated between regulatory agencies and the corporations they were supposedly regulating.  Taylor began as a Monsanto lawyer.  Then he became a staff lawyer for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and helped it to hassle Amish farmers for selling whole milk while giving companies like Monsanto the green light to sell genetically contaminated products without labeling them.  Then, he cycled back to Monsanto, becoming its Vice President for Public Policy.  In 2010, he flipped back to being the FDA’s Deputy Commissioner for Foods. The scenario was quite a bit different for Richard Gephardt, former speaker of the US House and darling child of business unions and anti-NAFTA coalitions in the early 1990s.  When I was working with Public Citizen to oppose NAFTA, a friend who had just been to Mexico told me that Gephardt had spoken in Monterrey promising to get NAFTA through the US House.  So I spent several afternoons at the Washington University library until I found the Mexican paper Excelsior recording his comments. I documented Gephardt’s statements in an Op-Ed piece in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of June 1, 1993 and reported his two faces during the next Public Citizen conference call.  There was stony silence for several seconds.  Then Lori Wallach let everyone know “Dick Gephardt is the best ally in Washington that we have.” Though Gephardt gave clear warnings of his true colors, leftists paid to lobby politicians had a devout faith that an ally scheming to stab you in the back is better than no ally at all.  A few years later, the left did turn on Gephardt – but only after he publicly displayed his contempt for progressives.  In 2005, he abandoned his distinguished career as public servant and formed Gephardt Government Affairs which allowed him to pocket almost $7 million lobbying on behalf of clients such as Goldman Sachs, Boeing, Visa Inc and Waste Management Inc. Of course, Gephardt was not the typical revolving door guy.  Instead of being an agency bureaucrat      he was elected to public office.  And he did not wait to resign from his governmental post to serve industry because he was apparently working both sides regarding NAFTA at the same time. A third door This brings us to a third way the door revolves  – the way that policies and practices get tossed from one corporate party to the other.  When I was a kid, the saying went “The Democrats bring war and the Republicans bring recession.”  But no more.  With rapacious Wall Street increasing its appetite for expansion as its human host decays, the Democrats and Republicans shadow box to see which can simultaneously be more violent and make the quality of life deteriorate faster. Perhaps the old saying stemmed from the way Woodrow Wilson won the presidency with the slogan “He kept us out of war” and then proceeded to take the US into WWI.  A few decades later Lyndon Johnson ridiculed Barry Goldwater’s threat to bomb Viet Nam back into the stone age.  After LBJ won the election, he did his best to carry out Goldwater’s plan. For about half a century, the Republicans won the reputation of being the most anti-Communist.  Yet, it was John and Bobby Kennedy who tried to invade Cuba, went off their chain to pit bull Fidel Castro, and began the very long series of attempts to assassinate him. Years later, the rapidly anti-Communist Richard Nixon ascended the throne, recognized China, and visited Beijing.  In case you missed it, the right-wing Nixon reversed course and realized a progressive idea.  It was hardly the only positive event that happened during the reign of one of the most degenerate presidents of all time.  The following occurred during his presidency: end to the Viet Nam war, beginning of the Food Stamp Program, creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, passage of the Freedom of Information Act, formal dismantling of the FBI’s COINTEL program, decriminalization of abortion, creation of Earned Income Tax Credits, a format ban on biological weapons, and passage of the Clean Water Act. One of the crowning achievements during the Nixon era was the April 28, 1971 founding of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).  Shaun Richman describes in The Unionist how OSHA “has the authority to promulgate industry-specific workplace safety rules and to fine companies that violate them. The law also provides for workplace safety inspectors, whistleblower protections for workers who report potentially unsafe conditions and legal protections for workers who go on wildcat strikes to put an end to a dangerous situation.” Do Democrats in power provide some sort of assurance because they “call for” more environmental protection than do Republicans?  During the 1990s, St. Louis environmentalists were trying to block the construction of a dioxin incinerator.  There was a Democrat in the White House, a Democratic Governor of Missouri, and a Democratic County Executive.   We persuaded the Democratic majority on the County Council to pass an ordinance requiring dioxin incinerators to operate according to EPA standards, which seemed like a victory since no incinerator can meet those standards. We stopped going to County Council meetings because we thought we had “won.”  Then the Council repealed the ordinance we had lobbied for.  Bill Clinton got his Missouri dioxin incinerator.  When do Democrats stab you in the back?  Whenever your back is turned. In 2018, Donald Trump is justly despised because of his racist hate campaign against people of color, especially his ripping immigrant children apart from their parents and putting them in cages.  But let’s not forget the continuity between Obama and Trump.  As Tina Vasquez writes in Rewire News: When he first announced DACA in 2012, President Obama boasted of ‘putting more boots on the southern border than at any time in our history.’ Obama sought to ‘centralize border security’ on the pretext of deporting violent criminals and gang members—now Trump’s cause … The anti-immigrant zeal that Trump used to get elected is in many ways closely aligned with the history of America’s immigration system, which gave priority to white immigrants and sought to limit entry by other groups. Every administration, Republican or Democrat, has maintained this system’s injustices. A major difference between the two presidents is that press outlets like MSNBC tended to ignore actions by Obama but shrieked in horror when Trump followed suit.  Clearly, the outrage against Trump positively lessens the attacks, but it makes one wonder: If a Democrat replaces Trump and commits the same atrocities against immigrant children, will media again muffle its anger? These examples of Democrats and Republicans swapping platforms and policies do not even scratch the surface.  Their views are so interchangeable that one could write a 10 volume collection of the way they imitate each other and still barely cover the tip of all the stories out there. Progressive Democrats? Does this mean that there is no one running for office as a Democrat who sincerely wishes to move in a more progressive direction?  Of course not.  There are many, many candidates who start out running for local office as a Democrat and stay at the bottom of the Party’s hierarchy because it is structured to keep them there and use them as bait to lure and defang other progressives. Progressive Democrats at the base level do not script the Party’s major directions, which is as firmly controlled by big business as is the direction of the Republican Party.  While they may propose reforms in their communities, they must march in line with candidates for national office if they are to get funding to run at a higher level.  Those higher-up Dems are the ones most skilled at collaborating with Repubs, echoing their policies, and even fluttering over to the GOP side if the time is right. While the Republicans and Democrats are able to twist and turn on any dime lying in the street, there is at least one item for which they have a mind-meld.  The top concern of their corporate benefactors is “How do we reverse the gains of the New Deal?”  Bosses of both parties seek to undo the New Deal – the biggest difference between them is how to pull it off. The Dems generally use finesse with a stiletto, carving out gains one-by-one, weeping and sobbing as they do so.  The public face of the Repubs screams in delight as it whacks off gains with a meat cleaver.  The difference in rhetoric is vastly greater than any difference in the end result.  So many politicians can alternate policies and, at times, party affiliation because they see elections as a thermometer measuring if it is the hour for the delicate blade or the butcher knife. The great virtue of the Democrats is creating hope.  The great virtue of the Republicans is being a bit more honest about their long term goals.  The perception of vice or virtue in either depends on the mood of the observer. Do Democrats and Republicans quarrel with each other in front of TV cameras?  Obviously yes – but it’s merely a mock lovers’ spat crafted for public consumption.  Once the cameras are off, they embrace in excited passion while collapsing onto the bed of cash provided by corporate donations to both parties. In our darkest hour Understanding that the unified goal of both parties is to turn back New Deal gains leads us to ask how those victories were won.  It was because of the massive strikes, exploding labor movement, and unprecedented growth of the Socialist and Communist Parties that made a New Deal necessary.  Key corporate players decided that it was more discreet to allow some demanded changes than to suppress mushrooming mass movements. Hop forward to the Nixon years.  The many accomplishments won during his term were not because that vicious anti-communist fell on his knees, beheld a shining light, and vowed to tread the path of righteousness.  It was due to a strong labor movement, a massive anti-war movement following on the heels of the civil rights movement, and a growing women’s movement demanding reproductive freedom (along with many other more radical movements). Hop forward again to the depravity of the Trump administration.  As humanity faces extermination from increased production of fossil fuels, opposition bubbles up at an equal rate.  Even though Republican state legislatures agreed to continue undermining public schools, in Spring 2018 teachers decided that they had had enough. West Virginia had a Republican governor and a Republican majority in both houses of the legislature.  But West Virginia teachers went on strike anyway and were followed by teachers from Oklahoma and other states likewise dominated by anti-labor Republicans.  Even though illegal, the strike won because teachers stood together with janitors, bus drivers, food service workers and other state employees. As Bruce Dixon laid it out in Black Agenda Report: …successful strikes are possible wherever an overwhelming majority of the workforce is committed to it, whether or not those workers are in a ‘right to work’ state, and whether or not the strike is endorsed by their union if they have a union at all. Neither of West Virginia’s two teachers unions endorsed the strike, and the leaders of both unions initially and repeatedly attempted to ‘settle’ it for far less than the striking workers demanded. The three revolving doors are just other ways that big business manages government while pulling the wool over people’s eyes.  Corporate flunkies transfer between their bosses and agencies to ensure agencies do their bidding.  Professional politicians go back and forth between parties according to their career opportunities.  Parties grab policies from each other to see who can hoodwink the most voters. The Democrats and Republicans are parts of a single gestalt that creates the illusion of meaningful difference when there is none.  If you are part of an organization that gets caught up in the revolving door, don’t keep going around in circles – find another way out.  In times of the darkest despair, solidarity is still the road to victory. http://clubof.info/

[patriotsnet]

What Republicans Are Still Running For President

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-republicans-are-still-running-for-president/

What Republicans Are Still Running For President

What Is A Voter

Republican Lawmakers Are Terrified Of Trump Running For President Again

The Top Two Candidates Open Primary Act, which took effect January 1, 2011, created voter-nominated offices. The Top Two Candidates Open Primary Act does not apply to candidates running for U.S. President, county central committees, or local offices.

Most of the offices that were previously known as partisan are now known as voter-nominated offices. Voter-nominated offices are state constitutional offices, state legislative offices, and U.S. congressional offices. The only partisan offices now are the offices of U.S. President and county central committee.

Withdrew Before The Primaries

The following individuals participated in at least one authorized presidential debate but withdrew from the race before the Iowa caucuses on February 1, 2016. They are listed in order of exit, starting with the most recent.

Name

The following notable individuals filed as candidates with FEC by November 2015.

Name

Additionally, Peter Messina was on the ballot in Louisiana, New Hampshire, and Idaho.Tim Cook was on the ballot in Louisiana, New Hampshire and Arizona. Walter Iwachiw was on the ballot in Florida and New Hampshire.

Death Threats And Conspiracy Theories: Why 2020 Won’t End For Election Officials

Kelley said members of his staff have been followed and videotaped while picking up ballots from drop boxes in recent weeks.

“I’ve been doing this almost 18 years, and I would say the end of ’19 leading into ’20 and then all the way up to today has been the most stressful period of my career,” Kelley said.

Up until now, the fraud claims have been mostly isolated to national campaigns and the occasional statewide race.

But Jamie Shew, who oversees elections in Douglas County, Kan., said he worries the tactic could trickle down to local races, where margins are often extremely thin.

“Even in candidates were going to ‘there was fraud’ rather than it was a bad campaign,” Shew said. But “2020 took it to a whole new level. And I don’t think that’s going to go away.”

In Douglas County last year, for instance, a County Commission race was decided by just three votes. Both candidates running accepted the results after a hand recount, but Shew said he worries next time, they might not be so lucky.

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List Of Registered 2024 Presidential Candidates

The following table lists candidates who filed with the FEC to run for president. Some applicants used pseudonyms; candidate names and party affiliations are written as they appeared on the FEC website on the date that they initially filed with the FEC.

Candidates who have filed for the 2024 presidential election Candidate

Sen Josh Hawley Of Missouri

Though controversial, Hawley, 41, is a fundraising machine and hes quickly made a name for himself. The blowback Hawley faced for objecting to Bidens Electoral College win included a lost book deal and calls for him to resign from students at the law school where he previously taught. His mentor, former Sen. John Danforth of Missouri, said that supporting Hawley was the biggest mistake Ive ever made in my life.

Still, he brought in more than $1.5 million between Jan. 1 and March 5, according to Axios, and fundraising appeals in his name from the National Republican Senatorial Committee brought in more cash than any other Republican except NRSC Chair Sen. Rick Scott of Florida. Just because youre toxic in Washington doesnt mean you cant build a meaningful base of support nationally.

One Republican strategist compared the possibility of Hawley 2024 to Cruz in 2016. Hes not especially well-liked by his colleagues , but hes built a national profile for himself and become a leading Republican voice opposed to big technology companies.

Hawley and his wife, Erin, have three children. He got his start in politics as Missouri attorney general before being elected to the Senate in 2018. Hawley graduated from Stanford and Yale Law.

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Benjamin Harrison Vs Grover Cleveland

In 1888 the Democratic Party nominated President Grover Cleveland and chose Allen G. Thurman of Ohio as his running mate, replacing Vice President Thomas Hendricks who had died in office.

After eight ballots, the Republican Party chose Benjamin Harrison, former senator from Indiana and the grandson of President William Henry Harrison. Levi P. Morton of New York was the vice-presidential nominee.

In the popular vote for president, Cleveland won with 5,540,050 votes to Harrisons 5,444,337. But Harrison received more votes in the Electoral College, 233 to Clevelands 168, and was therefore elected. The Republicans carried New York, President Clevelands political base.

The campaign of 1888 helped establish the Republicans as the party of high tariffs, which most Democrats, heavily supported by southern farmers, opposed. But memories of the Civil War also figured heavily in the election.

Northern veterans, organized in the Grand Army of the Republic, had been angered by Clevelands veto of pension legislation and his decision to return Confederate battle flags..

Roque Rocky De La Fuente

An entrepreneur and businessman whos had a career in car sales, banking, and real estate development, Roque De La Fuente, known as Rocky, is accustomed to running for public office. in 2016, he sought the Democratic party nomination, then ran as Reform Party and self-funded American Delta Party candidate in the same election, coming in eight in the popular vote. In 2018, he sought the nomination in nine senate raceswinning none. In May 2019, De La Fuente announced his candidacy to challenge Trump in the 2020 election.

De La Fuentes name is on the ballot in a dozen states, and he owns businesses and property in several of them. His program reflects the candidate bipartisan inclination. De La Fuente talks about gun control, immigration reform that unites families, not divides them, promises to match immigrants with job shortage, and supports environmental protection and investment in renewable energy.

Age: 65 Years in political office: 0

Who gives him money:;Himself.

Biggest idea for the economy:;Match immigrants with job shortages, invest in renewable energy to create new jobs.;

Social media following: 65,400, : 241,000.

Who will like this candidate: Moderate Republicans, conservative independents.

Who will hate this candidate: Trump supporters.;

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Next Test Of Trumps Influence On The Republican Party: A Crowded Gop Primary Fight For An Ohio House Seat

A GOP primary Tuesday to fill a congressional seat outside Columbus is shaping up to be a test of former president Donald Trumps influence over the Republican Party, coming after his preferred candidate lost a Texas House campaign last week and some of his allies aligned with other candidates in the competitive Ohio race.

Tuesdays contest in which 11 candidates are vying to replace longtime GOP congressman Rep. Steve Stivers has caused serious consternation among the former presidents advisers and even Trump himself, according to people familiar with the private discussions.

Trump railed at aides after Susan Wright, the candidate he backed in a special Texas Congressional race to replace her late husband, Rep. Ron Wright, lost to a state Republican lawmaker last week, they said.

The defeat was an embarrassing setback for the former president, who has sought to flex his hold on the party by making a slew of endorsements since leaving the White House, inserting himself into GOP primaries and going after political enemies.

Trump has made his preference clear, issuing slashing statements in which he has complained that other candidates are suggesting to voters that he supports them rather than Carey, a close friend of Corey Lewandowski, a former Trump campaign manager who advisers say helped secure the endorsement.

Abortion Rights Drinking Age Drugs And More

Republican presidential nomination in 2024 is âTrumpâs for the takingâ

At present, Weld is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Self-described as strongly pro-choice when it comes to abortion rights, he is also said to believe that drug use should not be considered a criminal offense. He feels the drinking age should be lowered but has not stated at what age it should be set.;

When it comes to matters of the military, Weld also draws a conservative line. He feels that America should withdraw its troops from foreign engagements and that the countrys efforts and resources should be refocused on domestic issues, in order to prosper.;According to Aljhazeera.com, Weld previously supported bans on assault weapons in the US.

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Is Mike Pence For President In 2024 Still A Go

Pences actions since the Capitol assault have resurfaced speculations of his 2024 White House bid, as his management during the episode was largely different from Trumps hesitant approach. But despite the presidents mismanagement of the attacks, experts say Pence still has a lot of political hurdles to overcome before positioning himself as a leading contender for the 2024 GOP presidential candidacy.

After an uproarious attack on the U.S. Capitol last week, Vice President Mike Pence split from his commander-in-chief and quickly condemned the mob-like behavior from pro-Trump supportersleadership that was tested as President Donald Trump initially hesitated to act.

Pence has exercised unflinching loyalty towards Trump up until this point, as the president blasted Pences constitutional duty in certifying the electoral college results. Trump and his close allies attempted to push his political partner to reject the vote based on baseless claims of voter fraud, but Pence firmly denied the request and proceeded with his authority over the Senatea job that was abruptly disrupted with dangerous protestors on Wednesday.

The vice president is reportedly very upset that Trump didnt exert more effort in squashing the torpedo that rumbled the Capitol, a source told NBC News, since some protestors voiced support for Pences execution.

Rachel Bucchino is a reporter at the National Interest. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, U.S. News & World Report and The Hill.;

Republican Party Presidential Primaries

;

First place by first-instance vote

;;Donald Trump

e

Presidential primaries and caucuses of the Republican Party took place in many U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and five U.S. territories from February 3 to August 11, 2020, to elect most of the 2,550 delegates to send to the Republican National Convention. Delegates to the national convention in other states were elected by the respective state party organizations. The delegates to the national convention voted on the first ballot to select Donald Trump as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee for president of the United States in the 2020 election, and selected Mike Pence as the vice-presidential nominee.

President Donald Trump informally launched his bid for reelection on February 18, 2017. He launched his reelection campaign earlier in his presidency than any of his predecessors did. He was followed by former governor of MassachusettsBill Weld, who announced his campaign on April 15, 2019, and former Illinois congressmanJoe Walsh, who declared his candidacy on August 25, 2019. Former governor of South Carolina and U.S. representative launched a primary challenge on September 8, 2019. In addition, businessman Rocky De La Fuente entered the race on May 16, 2019, but was not widely recognized as a major candidate.

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Senate Republicans Are Not Going To Convict Trump

It is not likely there are enough votes to convict Trump. President Biden himself said in an interview on January 25 that Democrats did not have the votes in the Senate to convict Trump. Even though Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he was not sure how he would vote, signalling the first significant break between Trump and the most powerful Republican in the Senate, he and 45 Republican senators voted on January 26 in favour of a motion proposed by Kentucky Senator Rand Paul to dismiss the impeachment trial. The strategy behind this motion was to question the constitutionality of convicting a former president, another first in American history. Only five Republicans opposed the measure. This is the most glaring indication that nowhere close to 17 Republicans will vote with the Democrats to convict the former president.

Moreover, Trump has threatened political retribution against those GOP members of Congress who support impeachment. The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump and his closest aides were in discussions about creating a new Patriot Party to challenge Republican candidates. However, Trump recently disavowed these reports and reassured Senate Republicans. Republican Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota relayed to Politico that The president wanted me to know, as well as a handful of others, that the president is a Republican, he is not starting a third party and that anything he would do politically in the future would be as a Republican.

Franklin D Roosevelt Vs Alfred M Landon

In 1936 the Democratic Party nominated President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Vice President John Nance Garner. The Republican Party, strongly opposed to the New Deal and big government, chose Governor Alfred M. Landon of Kansas and Fred Knox of Illinois.

The 1936 presidential campaign focused on class to an unusual extent for American politics. Conservative Democrats such as Alfred E. Smith supported Landon. Eighty percent of newspapers endorsed the Republicans, accusing Roosevelt of imposing a centralized economy. Most businesspeople charged the New Deal with trying to destroy American individualism and threatening the nations liberty. But Roosevelt appealed to a coalition of western and southern farmers, industrial workers, urban ethnic voters, and reform-minded intellectuals. African-American voters, historically Republican, switched to FDR in record numbers.

In a referendum on the emerging welfare state, the Democratic Party won in a landslide27,751,612 popular votes for FDR to only 16,681,913 for Landon. The Republicans carried two statesMaine and Vermontwith eight electoral votes; Roosevelt received the remaining 523. The unprecedented success of FDR in 1936 marked the beginning of a long period of Democratic Party dominance.

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Why Republicans Still Cant Quit Trump

The 2024 GOP presidential nominee is highly likely to be an acolyte of the presidents.

With Donald Trump sagging in the polls against Joe Biden, the internal Republican debate about what a post-Trump GOP might look like is growing louder. And that dialogue is underscoring how hard it may be for Republicans to abandon the confrontational and divisive direction he has set for the party, no matter what happens in November.

The debate obviously will be shaped by whether he wins or losesand if he loses, whether by a narrow margin or resounding one that costs Republicans control of the Senate. But theres no guarantee that even a substantial Trump defeat, which more Republicans are now bracing for, will persuade the GOP to change course.

Almost all observers in both parties that Ive spoken with agree that a Trump loss will embolden the Republicans who have been most skeptical about his message and agenda to more loudly press their case. Yet many remain dubious that whatever happens in November, those critics can assemble a majority inside the party by 2024one thats eager to reconsider the racial nationalism and anti-elite populism that has electrified big segments of the Republican base but alienated young people, minorities, and a growing number of previously Republican-leaning suburbanites.

Barack Obama: Campaigns And Elections

Obamas election to the Senate instantly made him the highest-ranking African American officeholder in the country and, along with the excitement generated by his convention speech and his books , placed him high on the roster of prospective Democratic presidential candidates in 2008. After spending a low-profile first year in office focusing on solidifying his base in Illinois and traveling abroad to buttress his foreign policy credentials as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Obama spent much of 2006 speaking to audiences around the country and mulling whether to run for president. According to annual National Journal evaluations of senators’ legislative voting records, Obama ranked as the first, tenth, or sixteenth most liberal member of the Senate, depending on the year.

From February through early June, Obama and Clinton battled fiercely through the remaining primaries and caucuses. Overall, Clinton won twenty primaries to Obamas nineteen, including victories in most of the large states, notably California, Texas, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Both candidates were bidding to become historic firststhe first African American president or the first woman president.

Midterm Election of 2010

The 2012 Election

Midterm Election of 2014

Postscript on the 2016 Election

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Trumps Role As Republican Party Leader Is Becoming Stronger

This weekends CPAC straw poll results showed that Trumps popularity along with DeSantis in the Republican Party has grown in the last six months, according to Forbes.

In February, only 55% of attendees of a similar CPAC event in Orlando, Florida, said they wanted Trump to lead the ticket in 2024, Forbes reported.

If Trump stayed in political retirement, or at least stayed off the presidential primary ballot in 2024, DeSantis lead the poll with 43% attending Republicans choosing him in Februarys hypothetical presidential primary.

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Trump Will Run For President In 2024 Still Leads Gop: Top Republicans

Donald Trump to decide on 2024 Presidential run| White House | Latest English News | World News

A former Trump administration official said he believes Donald Trump will run for the presidency again in the 2024 election. Sean Spicer, Trumps former press secretary, said that the ex-president has indicated his interest in making another bid for the presidency after watching current President Joe Bidens response to a variety of issues, including immigration.

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[creepingsharia]

Special election results in first Muslim woman "hijabi" in Pennsylvania House of Representatives

As many reader’s regularly point out, it’s no longer creeping.

Source: Movita Johnson-Harrell Becomes Pa.’s First Muslim Woman State Rep

On Tuesday night, Movita Johnson-Harrell, the former interim supervisor of Victim Services for Philadelphia’s District Attorney’s Office, won a highly contested special election for the 190th District seat in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.

At 9:45 p.m., with 75 of 80 precincts reporting, Johnson-Harrell had garnered 66 percent of the vote, with her nearest challenger at 20 percent. The victory makes her the first Muslim woman to be elected as a state representative in Pennsylvania.

“I’m running because I care about my community — I don’t need a job,” Johnson-Harrell told Philadelphia magazine in January when she declared her run. “Many people enter politics looking for a career, money, power, fame — I’ll be personally taking a $20,000 pay cut if I become the next state representative.”

Johnson-Harrell’s platform encompassed several key issues, ranging from socioeconomic opportunity and education reform to making gun violence prevention a top priority in Harrisburg. The longtime West Philly native felt the impact of these issues personally when she lost her son to gun violence in 2013. That tragedy inspired her to create the CHARLES Foundation, a nonprofit founded in her son’s name to empower communities and push for more gun violence prevention.

The path to victory wasn’t easy for Johnson-Harrell. She was a surprise third Democratic nominee for the seat — vacated when state Rep. Vanessa Lowery-Brown resigned following her conviction on bribery and other charges — after two previous Democratic nominees announced but quickly withdrew when each of them faced questions over their residency in the district. The situation opened the doors for Johnson-Harrell, who had run against Lowery-Brown in the 2016 primary, to enter.

“I am grateful that the Democratic party has put their trust in me,” Johnson-Harrell previously told Philadelphia magazine. “I think I can get a lot done in Harrisburg.”

Johnson-Harrell defeated community advocate Amen Brown, activist and clergywoman Pamela K. Williams, and Republican candidate Michael Harvey.

More: It was Democratic corruption that propelled the hijabi into office:

On Sunday night, Movita Johnson-Harrell, former interim supervisor of Victim Services in Philly’s District Attorney’s Office, surprised many when she became the new Democratic nominee for a March 12th special election in the 190th District of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.

Two previous Democratic nominees for the seat — vacated when state Rep. Vanessa Lowery-Brown resigned following her conviction on bribery and other charges — have bowed out after questions emerged surrounding their residency in West Philadelphia. This paved the way for Johnson-Harrell, who ran against Lowery-Brown in the 2016 primary, to be the party’s third nominee.

What are a few things you want voters to know about you that aren’t often asked? If elected, I will be the first Hijabi (covered Muslim woman) to be elected to the State House. It’s my faith that’s got me here and has kept me going. I’m running because I care about my community — I don’t need a job.

It’s telling that her first response to what voters should know about her is that she is a hijabi. What other aspects of sharia will she employ, but not tell citizens, while representing her “community”?

It should also be noted that Philadelphia is now known as “Muslim Town”.  For a closer look at Philly’s Muslim Town, start here:

Philadelphia aka ‘Muslim Town’: A look inside

Then review posts in the Creeping Sharia archives, here.

As we’ve noted before, Muslims are making an aggressive move into elected government positions and it should be no coincidence that the implementation of sharia – specifically Islamic blasphemy laws and silencing those who speak about or question Islam or Muslims – is rapidly advancing.

This number is now up to at least 60 that we’ve posted on but likely higher – Terror-linked CAIR reports at least 57 Muslims elected to local, state, and national positions.