#terminate constitution

[hale-nathan]

Trump Weird News - Violating Oath!

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Thanks Derek Plummer

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 14, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Oct 15, 2024

As the two presidential campaigns position themselves for the final sprint to the election on November 5, the difference between them is dramatic. 

Trump is hunkering down behind what has always appeared to be a plan not to attract voters but instead to create chaos on Election Day. Creating confusion around the election could enable his loyalists to put in place the plan the Trump team concocted in 2020 to throw the election into the House of Representatives or get it before the Supreme Court, stacked as it is with Trump loyalists. 

A central piece of that plan appears to be to rile up his supporters to violence, and a few of them have been delivering. News broke yesterday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had advised federal emergency workers to evacuate Rutherford County, North Carolina, which was hit hard by Hurricane Helene, because of concerns about their safety after Trump and MAGA Republicans spread the false rumor that federal agents are forcing people off their land to start lithium mining projects. The alert came after the U.S. Forest Service sent an email to federal responders saying that National Guard troops had encountered armed militia saying they were “hunting FEMA.” FEMA officials will no longer go door-to-door with disaster assistance, but instead will stay in fixed locations. 

A man has been arrested and charged with threatening FEMA workers with an assault rifle. He was released on a $10,000 bond.

To the extent Trump or his running mate Ohio senator J.D. Vance talks about them, their policies are promises to repair what they insist is the damage caused by President Joe Biden (although the stock market hit record highs again today), or threats that reinforce an authoritarian Christian nationalist worldview. Today, Bill Barrow of the Associated Press explored the extensive overlap of Project 2025 from the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing groups and the plans that Trump and Vance have set out. 

Both promise to cut taxes for the wealthy, but Project 2025 has more detail about how. Both plan to cut off immigration and to fire federal workers, replacing them with loyalists. Both say the president can decide not to use the money Congress has appropriated (in 2019, Trump refused to disburse the money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine until Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky agreed to smear Trump’s chief Democratic rival for the presidency, Joe Biden). Both call for slashing government regulations and getting rid of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs as well as protections for LGBTQ+ individuals and programs addressing climate change. 

But perhaps most revealing of both Trump’s ideology and his plan for the election was his statement to Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday that he would like to use the military against what he called “the enemy from within…radical left lunatics" to guard the election. While this is a threat to use the power of the government against his political opponents if he is elected—he mentioned California representative and Senate candidate Adam Schiff by name—it also seems likely his loyalists will hear this as a call for violence at election sites. 

Trump’s statement has not gone unnoticed. 

Tonight, CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper posted a dictionary definition of the word “fascism”: “A populist political philosophy, movement…that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition.” 

On the show, Tapper pressed Republican Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin to comment on Trump’s statement that as commander-in-chief, he would use the military against political opposition. When Youngkin denied that Trump had said any such thing, Tapper replied: “I’m literally reading his quotes to you.” Youngkin’s willingness to deny what was right in front of him did not exactly quell talk of fascism, since in his dystopian novel 1984 about authoritarianism, George Orwell famously wrote: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

If Trump is hunkering down, Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Minnesota governor Tim Walz are still pushing ahead, pressing Trump on both his personal weakness and his now open embrace of fascism. Harris’s advisor Ian Sams went on the Fox News Channel today to note that it’s been a month since Trump “did a mainstream media interview, and we got to wonder why. We called this weekend for him to release his medical records…. Donald Trump’s team, I heard him on your air last hour insisting that everything is okay and that…there’s nothing to see here. And your anchor rightly asked, ‘Well, if that’s true, why not just put them out?’” 

At 1:12 this morning, Trump posted on his social media site: “I believe it is very important that Kamala Harris pass a test on Cognitive Stamina and Agility. Her actions have led many to believe that there could be something very wrong with her.” Sams hit that as well, noting that in the middle of the night, Trump felt obliged to write about Harris and a cognitive test “[a]s he refuses to release his medical records, sit with 60 Minutes, or debate her again—instead retreating solely to rambling rallies where he’s increasingly making no sense[.] Is he okay?” 

In Erie, Pennsylvania, today, Harris outlined how her proposals for an “opportunity economy” will help Black men, calling for business loans for entrepreneurs, more apprenticeships, rules for cryptocurrency exchanges, and study of diseases that disproportionately affect Black men. 

She also continues her outreach to Republicans. Today, former Trump friend and talk show host Geraldo Rivera endorsed her. So did former Wisconsin Republican state senate majority leader Dale Schultz. “I tell people, ‘Look, I didn’t leave the party. The party left me,’” he said. “This is a critically important race, and…Donald Trump should never be allowed in the Oval Office again.”

Today Harris’s campaign announced she will be sitting down with Fox News Channel reporter Bret Baier for an interview on Wednesday from the battleground state of Pennsylvania. The Fox News Channel is scheduled to tape a town hall with Trump in front of an audience of women on Tuesday. It is supposed to air on Wednesday morning, while the Harris interview will air Wednesday night.  

At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, tonight, Harris reiterated Trump’s refusal to talk to any but the right-wing media and recalled his promise to terminate the Constitution. And then she used Trump’s own words against him, playing a video montage of Trump’s calls for violence, his threats against “the enemy within,” and his call for using the military against his political opponents. 

“You heard his words, coming from him,” she told the audience. “[H]e considers anyone who doesn’t support him or who will not bend to his will an enemy of our country…. He’s saying that he would use the military to go after them…. And we know who he would target because he has attacked them before. Journalists whose stories he doesn’t like. Election officials who refuse to cheat by…finding extra votes for him. Judges who insist on following the law instead of bending to his will. This is among the reasons I believe so strongly that a second Trump term would be a huge risk for America, and dangerous…. Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged. And he is out for unchecked power, that’s what he’s looking for.”

In Oaks, Pennsylvania, tonight, Trump was supposed to take questions from preselected attendees at a town hall with South Dakota governor Kristi Noem. He did, at first, although his answers were all over the place and he urged people to vote on January 5. But then, in the hot and crowded space, two people needed medical attention. Slurring, Trump then said: “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” And then he stood on stage and swayed for 39 minutes of songs from his personal playlist before seeming to recall that he was supposed to be talking about the election, which he suddenly told the confused crowd was “the most important election in the history of our country” before turning back to the music.

Rob Crilly of the U.K.’s The Daily Mail wrote: “I was at Trump's golden escalator launch, flew out of Washington with him in 2020 and have probably been to 100 rallies, give or take. Have never seen anything like tonight.” The headline over Marianne LeVine’s Washington Post story about the event read: “Trump sways and bops to music for 39 minutes in bizarre town-hall episode.

“The scene comes as Vice President Kamala Harris has called Trump, 78, unstable and called into question his mental acuity.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[sheepsheeples]

Going outside and talking to and existing around just like normal ass people who look like normal ass people is so good for my body image issues actually.

[crimeronan]

trump shouting the quiet part into a megaphone two days before the georgia runoffs is KILLING me. like this is clearly a very sad very old very rapidly neurologically deteriorating man who has been surrounding himself exclusively with people who just nod indulgently with "ok sure that's all definitely true granpa now let's get you to bed" to everything for so long that he Actually Fully Believes that he has been cheated. and also that the general public loves hearing him Say Things and is on his side. and it is. DELIGHTFUL. i know the actual thing he said was serious and scary and should not be downplayed but that's Why this is so fun. it's so inexcusable and antithetical to not just average american culture but also Specifically Republican Values that it's wreaking HAVOC on the party atm. the way i KNOW that the repubs who play the game properly are shitting their pants and sobbing and suffering migraines and throwing up over twitter calls-to-action and making desperate phone calls screaming "WHO LET HIM HAVE ACCESS TO A PHONE, WHO LET THAT HAPPEN, TAKE IT AWAY, TAKE IT AWAY!!!!!!!" to whichever strategists will listen.... oh my god. oh my god. oh my god. i am basking in it. soaking it all in. i love this song

i do take the little joys where i can get them.

[tomorrowusa]

Hunter Biden’s laptop is the new Hillary Clinton email server of the House GOP.

They want to spend the next two years talking about it in the vain hope that voters will forget that their leader instigated an attempted coup which included a terrorist assault on the US Capitol, totally botched the federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic, hung out with Nazis, and alienated most of America’s allies while kissing up to Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin and other tyrants. 

[jonostroveart]

Terminator

[nebulouscoffee]

Thinking about Her... (my Dax fic I haven't updated since last July which I really need to bring back from the war)

[spiderlegsmusic]

He’s a fascist. Fascists have no need for a constitution. That just gets in the way of Trump being a dictator. If you vote for Trump, you’re voting for one of the worst people born in the 20th century, who was already the worst president in US history, to be put in a position of power to terminate the constitution because he’s still butthurt about losing what his own election czar said “was the cleanest least fraudulent election in US history.”

Trump is an asshole, a wannabe dictator and a dumb fucking cunt. If you elect him, he’ll die before 2 years goes by anyway. the way his own people keep shooting at him—twice within a few months—you gotta think one these nut jobs will take him out. Or he’ll just die from a heart attack from health issues caused by his obesity and love for Big Macs.

My favorite thing is he’s so completely dishonest that his whole campaign is against fact-checking. Because when you fact-check Trump, it’s all lies. He can’t even tell the truth if you aimed a third rifle at him and told him “don’t lie or I’ll shoot you.”

[nakeddeparture]

The Fight, Constitution River Terminal, Barbados. Barbadians MUST remember that TOURISM is Number One to their economy!

https://youtu.be/dYxqyP2nS2g

Your behavior in public matters. Please provide Johnny’s last name and advise, if you can, why he wasn’t arrested. Naked!!

Like. Share. Subscribe. Comment on YouTube.

[ikusayu-no-hana]

that bbc documentary released at the perfect time they were like we're gonna destroy this man's entire career !! and the man in question, self-admittedly terrible at media control, proceeds to unintentionally confirm exactly that in the worst way possible

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Prison-tech company bribed jails to ban in-person visits

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!

Beware of geeks bearing gifts. When prison-tech companies started offering "free" tablets to America's vast army of prisoners, it set off alarm-bells for prison reform advocates – but not for the law-enforcement agencies that manage the great American carceral enterprise.

The pitch from these prison-tech companies was that they could cut the costs of locking people up while making jails and prisons safer. Hell, they'd even make life better for prisoners. And they'd do it for free!

These prison tablets would give every prisoner their own phone and their own video-conferencing terminal. They'd supply email, of course, and all the world's books, music, movies and games. Prisoners could maintain connections with the outside world, from family to continuing education. Sounds too good to be true, huh?

Here's the catch: all of these services are blisteringly expensive. Prisoners are accustomed to being gouged on phone calls – for years, prisons have done deals with private telcos that charge a fortune for prisoners' calls and split the take with prison administrators – but even by those standards, the calls you make on a tablet are still a ripoff.

Sure, there are some prisoners for whom money is no object – wealthy people who screwed up so bad they can't get bail and are stewing in a county lockup, along with the odd rich murderer or scammer serving a long bid. But most prisoners are poor. They start poor – the cops are more likely to arrest poor people than rich people, even for the same crime, and the poorer you are, the more likely you are to get convicted or be suckered into a plea bargain with a long sentence. State legislatures are easy to whip up into a froth about minimum sentences for shoplifters who steal $7 deodorant sticks, but they are wildly indifferent to the store owner's rampant wage-theft. Wage theft is by far the most costly form of property crime in America and it is almost entirely ignored:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/15/wage-theft-us-workers-employees

So America's prisons are heaving with its poorest citizens, and they're certainly not getting any richer while they're inside. While many prisoners hold jobs – prisoners produce $2b/year in goods and $9b/year in services – the average prison wage is $0.52/hour:

https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html

(In six states, prisoners get nothing; North Carolina law bans paying prisoners more than $1/day, the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution explicitly permits slavery – forced labor without pay – for prisoners.)

Likewise, prisoners' families are poor. They start poor – being poor is a strong correlate of being an American prisoner – and then one of their breadwinners is put behind bars, taking their income with them. The family savings go to paying a lawyer.

Prison-tech is a bet that these poor people, locked up and paid $1/day or less; or their families, deprived of an earner and in debt to a lawyer; will somehow come up with cash to pay $13 for a 20-minute phone call, $3 for an MP3, or double the Kindle price for an ebook.

How do you convince a prisoner earning $0.52/hour to spend $13 on a phone-call?

Well, for Securus and Viapath (AKA Global Tellink) – a pair of private equity backed prison monopolists who have swallowed nearly all their competitors – the answer was simple: they bribed prison officials to get rid of the prison phones.

Not just the phones, either: a pair of Michigan suits brought by the Civil Rights Corps accuse sheriffs and the state Department of Corrections of ending in-person visits in exchange for kickbacks from the money that prisoners' families would pay once the only way to reach their loved ones was over the "free" tablets:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/jails-banned-family-visits-to-make-more-money-on-video-calls-lawsuits-claim/

These two cases are just the tip of the iceberg; Civil Rights Corps says there are hundreds of jails and prisons where Securus and Viapath have struck similar corrupt bargains:

https://civilrightscorps.org/case/port-huron-michigan-right2hug/

And it's not just visits and calls. Prison-tech companies have convinced jails and prisons to eliminate mail and parcels. Letters to prisoners are scanned and delivered their tablets, at a price. Prisoners – and their loved ones – have to buy virtual "postage stamps" and pay one stamp per "page" of email. Scanned letters (say, hand-drawn birthday cards from your kids) cost several stamps:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

Prisons and jails have also been convinced to eliminate their libraries and continuing education programs, and to get rid of TVs and recreational equipment. That way, prisoners will pay vastly inflated prices for streaming videos and DRM-locked music.

The icing on the cake? If the prison changes providers, all that data is wiped out – a prisoner serving decades of time will lose their music library, their kids' letters, the books they love. They can get some of that back – by working for $1/day – but the personal stuff? It's just gone.

Readers of my novels know all this. A prison-tech scam just like the one described in the Civil Rights Corps suits is at the center of my latest novel The Bezzle:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

Prison-tech has haunted me for years. At first, it was just the normal horror anyone with a shred of empathy would feel for prisoners and their families, captive customers for sadistic "businesses" that have figured out how to get the poorest, most desperate people in the country to make them billions. In the novel, I call prison-tech "a machine":

a million-­armed robot whose every limb was tipped with a needle that sank itself into a different place on prisoners and their families and drew out a few more cc’s of blood.

But over time, that furious empathy gave way to dread. Prisoners are at the bottom of the shitty technology adoption curve. They endure the technological torments that haven't yet been sanded down on their bodies, normalized enough to impose them on people with a little more privilege and agency. I'm a long way up the curve from prisoners, but while the shitty technology curve may grind slow, it grinds fine:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

The future isn't here, it's just not evenly distributed. Prisoners are the ultimate early adopters of the technology that the richest, most powerful, most sadistic people in the country's corporate board-rooms would like to force us all to use.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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[geezerwench]

[tomorrowusa]

^^^ Trump having a one person constitutional convention. 

Of course Trump was not alone in wanting to do bad things to the US Constitution. Three days before Trump was due to leave office, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC-05) suggested that he invoke “Marshall (sic) Law” to prevent Joe Biden from taking office. Marshall Law sounds like the name of a country singer; it’s “martial law”, Ralph.  

As Rachel Maddow indicated, Rep. Norman will be part of the GOP majority in the upcoming 118th Congress. Trump may be out of power for now but his minions and lickspittles will be in control of the US House of Representatives.

h/t @jaspersboy

[komsomolka]

Women in the GDR were the largest group to lose out through unification. They may now have access to material goods not available before, but they have been pushed back into dependence by a dominant ideology of women serving men. In the GDR, 88% of all adult women worked and another 8.5% were in full-time education, which meant that 96.5% took an active part in the wider social context outside the home and they also had their own income. Work was the basis for economic independence, a sense of self-worth, a place for communication and social interaction, not just a source for additional household income or, as some critics have argued, a state-imposed, obligatory activity.

Women were highly skilled - only 6% had no qualification at all, as against 24% of West German working women. In the GDR, 50% of all jobs in medicine and law were carried out by women and a third of women worked in technical professions.

Given the great importance that work represented to women in terms of their identity, unemployment on the scale, that happened after unification, had a devastating effect. Even after 20 years, on the territory of the former GDR, two thirds of the unemployed were women (in agriculture it was as much as 75%) and they made up at least 70% of the long-term unemployed. Post-unification, the labour market was biased against women; men had a better chance of finding alternative work. [...]

Although gender discrimination was by no means completely abolished in the GDR, this blatant disparaging of women as a group appeared like history going into reverse. This perception is underlined by the fact that, in the general hunt for jobs, children are now deemed to represent a problem. It is well-known that the GDR had excellent childcare facilities which made it possible to combine work and parenthood without financial hardship. In 1989, 68% of working women in the GDR had children under the age of 18, whereas in the Federal Republic it was only 25%. [...]

Unification brought another considerable change for women: the abolition of their right to an abortion on demand. In the GDR, since 1972, women had had the legal right to terminate their pregnancy free of charge within the first 12 weeks. West Germany has a penal code (paragraph 218) which states that abortion is unlawful and those who attempt to abort face up to three years in prison or a fine. After unification it became necessary to bring West German and East German law on this issue into alignment. In 1992, paragraph 218 was amended to adopt GDR legislation, but a compulsory consultation prior to the procedure was added. After protests from the CDU/CSU and the Bavarian state government, which wanted abortion itself to remain illegal, even this amendment was declared null and void by Germany’s Constitutional Court only one year later. [...]

Even after 25 years since unification there still exists a very different perception of equal rights among women in the territory of the former GDR. According to an investigation undertaken in 2008, 80% of East German women wanted an equal division of labour in the family, but only 50% of West German women, among whom traditional family models still exerted a strong force. In fact, the more emancipated consciousness of GDR women has increasingly influenced women in the West, even though they often appear to be unaware of where their new confidence has come.

Stasi State or Socialist Paradise? The German Democratic Republic and What Became of It by Bruni de la Motte & John Green with Seumas Milne (Contributor), 2015.

[truth-has-a-liberal-bias]

When Catherine Crews’ doctor told her in May that she had six months to live, she cried.

Then she asked her husband to call the courthouse.

A politically active Democrat, Crews had been watching the presidential election closely and was looking forward to voting for President Joe Biden in November. But diagnosed with a terminal illness, she wanted to know: How soon could she vote?

...

The election was still six months away, so Crews wanted to know her options. From the hospital, she had her husband call the Lafayette County circuit clerk’s office to see how soon she could vote.

Not until Monday, Sept. 23, when absentee voting would begin in Mississippi, came the reply.

Her heart sank.

“I said to myself: ‘I don’t think I’ll make it,’” she recalled.

Mississippi residents who are 65 or older are allowed under state law to cast an absentee ballot. Inside the courthouse, Crews stepped behind the small electronic voting booth that had been set up for people wanting to mark their absentee ballot in person. She marked her choice for president, Democrat Kamala Harris. She then gave her ballot to the clerk, who placed it in a sealed envelope. Only one more thing was left to do: Crews signed the ballot, and then she and Billy walked home.

Back at her house, Crews logged onto her computer and posted a Facebook message that she had written a week earlier in anticipation of this day.

“I cast the last vote of my lifetime to preserve Democracy in the United States of America and around the world,” she wrote.

She voted to protect the Constitution, she said. She voted for honesty, decency and integrity. She voted for loving her neighbor, regardless of their race, religion or who they love. She voted for immigrants who she said want to live and contribute to the country but who have been the targets of political rhetoric and hate. She voted for women to have the right to make decisions about their own bodies and for building up the poor and the middle class.