#VoteVets

[whatareyoureallyafraidof]

[geezerwench]

To put it biblically because he claims to be a "christian," JD Vance is bearing false witness against Tim Walz and will burn in the Hell of his own making.

Have some facts.

[porterdavis]

[tomorrowusa]

A veterans group is running this ad in Alabama aimed at Sen. Tommy Tuberville – who the narrator calls "Senator Trouble".

Tuberville is holding up Senate confirmation of senior US military commanders to protest abortion.

GOP splits further over Tuberville’s military blockade as it stretches through summer

Tuberville's grandstanding is putting US national security at risk – and he just doesn't care. While some Republicans disagree with Tuberville, they are unwilling to do anything to break the logjam.

Just as Republicans can no longer be regarded the party of law and order, they have also forfeited cachet of being strong on defense. Staying on the good side of anti-abortion extremists is more important to the GOP than protecting the American homeland.

[sjerzgirl]

How can people who claim to truly love America vote for someone who does this?

~~~~~~~

The Trump campaign just put a statement up on the official Trump website in response to our (VoteVets) ad, “Gold Star Parents.” They can’t deny that Trump called fallen Americans “suckers” and “losers” so instead, the Trump campaign is attacking families who have made the ultimate sacrifice. Brian Mast, the Chair of “Veterans for Trump,” just insulted Gold Star Families. Trump and his campaign called Gold Star Parents “shills.” He called their ad “vile.”

We cannot let Trump get away with this. We must make sure Trump is never again our Commander in Chief.

[oldbearal-c-a]

EXPOSED: Trump & Musk’s Secret Plan to Gut VA Care & Veteran Jobs – Subm...

[dchan87]

[darkeagleruins]

So, Rachel Vindman is using different addresses with the FEC for her recurring contributions to ActBlue, her husband's money laundering PAC "VoteVets", and donations to the Harris campaign. Is she circumventing contribution limits and concealing the source of those funds?

Not good!

Time to start combing through her "situation."

[misfitwashere]

November 12, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

NOV 13

The backdrop for today’s news is that Republicans in the Senate will vote by secret ballot tomorrow for a new Senate majority leader. That person will control the Senate calendar, deciding what measures will be taken up by the Senate for consideration and thus wielding power over Trump’s legislative plans. 

Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk, along with MAGA leaders and influencers, are backing Florida senator Rick Scott, who has signaled a willingness to do whatever Trump wants. Senators John Thune (R-SD) and John Cornyn (R-TX) are also staunch party members but are not as closely associated with the MAGA faction of the party.

MAGA control of the Senate is at stake, and Trump and his team are pushing their extremist agenda so aggressively it will be impossible for Senate Republicans to pretend they didn’t know what was at stake if they vote to empower the MAGAs. 

Today the Trump transition team floated the idea that Trump could sign an executive order creating a board of retired senior military personnel that would review high-ranking officers and recommend removing any they deemed unfit for leadership. Vivian Salama, Nancy A. Youssef, and Lara Seligman reported in the Wall Street Journal that such a board would enable Trump to purge the military of the generals whom he considers insufficiently loyal to him. Generals who refused to carry out what they considered unconstitutional orders—including using the military against U.S. civilians—infuriated Trump during his first term.

The chairman of VoteVets, retired major general Paul Eaton, warned that such a plan would turn the U.S. military into Trump loyalists. Eaton also warned military personnel what that would mean for the troops, suggesting that folks should “take a look at Stalin’s officer purges in early WWII that resulted in the Soviet, now-Russian Army, enduring incompetence and the use of its rank-and-file troops as cannon meat. The American military is the envy of the world’s militaries, given its efficiency for military effect and stunningly low casualty count. Probably a good model to keep.”

Transition spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said, “[T]he American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver.” But Trump’s claims of a mandate are wrong. As vote counts continue to come in, it appears that Trump’s margin of victory was actually quite slim. 

Trump has also vowed to eliminate the Biden administration’s policies to address climate change, promising to “drill, baby, drill” and make the U.S. energy independent by increasing production of fossil fuels. In fact, the production of oil and gas hit an all-time high during the Biden administration and the U.S. exports those products, but so long as the U.S is tied to fossil fuels, it will likely always import them because the oil it exports is a different kind than it uses. 

It is not clear that even MAGA Republicans want to kill the green energy initiatives in the Inflation Reduction Act that have brought new factories and good jobs to more Republican-dominated states than Democratic-dominated states.

Today, chair and chief executive officer of ExxonMobil Darren Woods asked the incoming administration not to change Biden’s climate policy dramatically, saying that the lack of consistency on climate change is bad for the economy. “I don’t think the challenge or the need to address global emissions is going to go away,” he said. “Anything that happens in the short term would just make the longer term that much more challenging.”

Exxon has invested heavily in the carbon capture industry. In 2023, Woods predicted that the company’s low-carbon business could generate more money than its traditional oil and gas products in as little as a decade, telling investors he expects carbon capture to be a multitrillion-dollar business.

Trump and his team, apparently led by Elon Musk, have begun to float names for different administration posts, all of whom appear to be picked to replace nonpartisan federal experts with right-wing culture warriors.

For secretary of homeland security, Trump has proposed loyalist Kristi Noem, currently governor of South Dakota. Noem had been under consideration for vice president, but fell out of the running after boasting that she had shot her dog for misbehaving. Earlier this year, Noem appeared to suggest that Texas, which became a state in 1845, was one of the original signatories to the Constitution. She has been a Trump loyalist focusing on the border.

For U.S. ambassador to Israel, Trump has picked former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian who denies Palestinian rights to the West Bank, instead supporting Israeli settlements in that land and saying that “Israel has title deed” there, calling the area by the biblical name “Judea and Samaria.”  

For secretary of defense, Trump has tapped Fox News Channel host Pete Hegseth, a combat veteran and host of the weekend edition of Fox & Friends, a show Trump reportedly enjoys. As national security expert Tom Nichols points out, the Secretary of Defense has access to the nuclear command-and-control procedure. The secretary oversees about 1.3 million active-duty troops and another 1.4 million in the National Guard and employed in Reserves and civilian positions, as well as a budget of more than $800 billion.

Hegseth lobbied Trump to intervene in the cases of service members accused of war crimes, and he cheered on Trump’s January 6, 2021, rally. He became popularly known after accidentally hitting a man with an ax on the Fox & Friends show in 2015. Then, in 2019, he regained notoriety when he volunteered that he had not washed his hands in ten years because he does not believe germs are real. Hegseth has said women do not belong in combat and has been vocal about his opposition to the equity and inclusion measures in the military that he calls “woke.”

Lolita C. Baldor and Tara Copp of the Associated Press reported that the news that Trump has tapped the inexperienced Hegseth to run the world’s largest and most powerful military “stunned the Pentagon and the broader defense world.” While some Republicans say they look forward to getting to know him better, others appear to share the Pentagon’s concerns. 

But the news that Trump wants a Fox News Channel host in one of the most important positions in the United States government got overtaken quickly by Trump’s announcement that “the Great Elon Musk, working in conjunction with American Patriot Vivek Ramaswamy,” an entrepreneur who challenged Trump for the presidential nomination, will lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency” under his administration. Their advice will, Trump announced, “pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.” 

Their project is nicknamed “DOGE,” an apparent reference to Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency and meme coin, known as “Dogecoin.” That cryptocurrency surged after the announcement of the new DOGE under Trump, adding to the gains of 153% since Election Day. 

By law, a president does not have the power to create a new department or agency, and participating in one would require Musk and Ramaswamy to get rid of their conflicts of interest.

Trump’s announcement said that Musk and Ramaswamy would “work together to liberate our Economy, and make the U.S. Government accountable to ‘WE THE PEOPLE.’ Their work will conclude no later than July 4, 2026—a smaller Government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy, will be the perfect gift to America on the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. I am confident they will succeed!” 

Trump appears to see himself as the founder of a new United States of America while, ironically, the real winners of the chaos he is ushering into the government will be Russia, China, and the other autocratic states eager to dismantle American democracy.

Trump’s demonstration of his plans just before Senate Republicans have to choose their leader seems an attempt to jam those who might stand against him into his camp. And yet, the Framers of the Constitution believed that the Senate would be the key guardrail to stop the rise of an autocrat who would destroy democracy and install himself as a king. They expected that the determination of senators to guard their own power would protect the nation. 

Almost two hundred and fifty years into their experiment, we’re about to find out if they were right.  

—

[izooks]

🔥🔥SPARE JUST 2 MINUTES to watch U.S. Air Force Veteran Bruce Babcock DISMANTLE MAGA extremists and call on @HouseGOP leadership to step up. It's time to bring Ukraine aid to a vote – and do it NOW.

"Letting MAGA extremists control our foreign policy and reneging on our commitments to our friends undermines every American's security."

[nudeartpluspoetry]

VOTEVETS - GOLD STAR PARENTS (30 sec)

[jaywinaustin]

Woo hoo! Got my new yard sign courtesy of VoteVets.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Sanjana Karanth at HuffPost:

The Gold Star families who invited former President Donald Trump to Arlington National Cemetery issued a statement defending the Republican nominee’s controversial visit and claiming it is Vice President Kamala Harris, not Trump, who is politicizing fallen members of the U.S. military. On Sunday, the Trump campaign released the statement made by relatives of some of the 13 American military service members who were killed in a suicide bombing during the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. The statement is the latest in what has now been a weeklong spat between Trump and Harris in relation to the former president’s conduct at the cemetery.

“President Trump was invited by us, the Gold Star families, to attend the solemn ceremonies commemorating the three-year anniversary of our children’s deaths,” the statement read. “He was there to honor their sacrifice, yet Vice President Harris has disgracefully twisted this sacred moment into a political ploy.” The Republican faced public backlash on Monday after NPR reported that his campaign staff “verbally abused and pushed” a cemetery official who was trying to stop them from filming and taking photographs at the gravesite while the candidate participated in a wreath-laying ceremony at the personal invitation of some Gold Star families. The cemetery official has reportedly declined to press charges over the matter.

Harris accused Trump on Saturday of staging a “political stunt” at the cemetery that “disrespected sacred ground” where hundreds of thousands of U.S. service members, veterans and their families are buried. She also mentioned the many examples of her 2024 opponent, who himself evaded the military draft, disparaging service members, including those who are dead.

[...] Federal law prohibits “political campaign or election-related activities” within Army National Military Cemeteries, according to a statement from ANC. Defense officials also maintained that Trump’s campaign team was informed of those rules, which include no photo or video around a section specifically reserved for those recently killed. Despite those rules, Trump’s campaign still distributed photos and video from the visit, including a TikTok video of the ceremony that shows the former president making clear political statements. Trump also posted video testimonials on social media from some of the Gold Star relatives who signed the Sunday statement. “Disgusting. Donald Trump, the grave markers veterans and military families drop a knee to are not your political props,” the narrator in a fiery ad by progressive veterans group VoteVets said. “They represent the heroes we’ve served alongside, men and women you could never measure up to, friends who lived and died by the oath we all swore to uphold.” In a post on Sunday, the former president thanked the families for thanking him and wanting to “take pictures, that it was your request, not mine, but it was my Great Honor to do. I WILL NEVER FORGET!” He also inserted politics into the post by saying that the families’ service member relatives are dead because of Harris and Biden.

Some of the Gold Star Families who invited Donald Trump to Arlington National Cemetery defend him in the wake of Trump’s grotesque disrespect of the sacred ground by doing filming and photography for campaign purposes in Section 60 of the cemetery.

See Also:

The Guardian: Trump shares posts of Gold Star families praising cemetery visit and criticizing Harris

[progressivepower]

Image from votevets, here is their act blue. #VetSquad. https://act.votevets.org/go/2927?c0=vv-c4-june23-

[conniejoworld]

Veterans Group (@votevets) Exposes Trump in AMAZING VIRAL AD!!!