Sound The TRUMPets! A Thread for Presidential Pondering 2016-2020(?)

[SimonNZ]

Brian Kemp Just Engaged in a Last-Minute Act of Banana-Republic Level Voter Manipulation in Georgia

"In perhaps the most outrageous example of election administration partisanship in the modern era, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who is running for governor while simultaneously in charge of the state's elections, has accused the Democratic Party without evidence of hacking into the state's voter database. He plastered a headline about it on the Secretary of State's website, which thousands of voters use to get information about voting on election day.

It's just the latest in a series of partisan moves by Kemp, who has held up more than 50,000 voter registrations for inconsistencies as small as a missing hyphen, fought rules to give voters a chance to prove their identities when their absentee ballot applications are rejected for a lack of a signature match, and been aggressive in prosecuting those who have done nothing more than try to help those in need of assistance in casting ballots.

But the latest appalling move by Kemp to publicly accuse the Democrats of hacking without evidence is even worse than that: Kemp has been one of the few state election officials to refuse help from the federal Department of Homeland Security to deter foreign and domestic hacking of voter registration databases. After computer scientists demonstrated the insecurity of the state's voting system, he was sued for having perhaps the most vulnerable election system in the country. His office has been plausibly accused of destroying evidence, which would have helped to prove the vulnerabilities of the state election system.

[...]

"WhoWhatWhy issued a report early on Sunday morning that seemed to explain what was going on.

Just before noon on Saturday, a third party provided WhoWhatWhy with an email and document, sent from the Democratic Party of Georgia to election security experts, that highlights 'massive' vulnerabilities within the state's My Voter Page and its online voter registration system. According to the document, it would not be difficult for almost anyone with minimal computer expertise to access millions of people's private information and potentially make changes to their voter registration — including canceling it.

If this is true, it doesn't show Democrats "hacking" to manipulate election results. It shows Democrats, like many others, pointing out the glaring security flaws in Georgia's voting system. To turn this around and blame Democrats is an act of political chutzpah by an election official on par with nothing else I've seen."

[SimonNZ]

'No Blame'? ABC News finds 17 cases invoking 'Trump' in connection with violence, threats or alleged assaults

"President Donald Trump has repeatedly refused to accept any responsibility for inciting violence in American communities, dismissing critics who have pointed to his rhetoric as a potential source of inspiration for some citizens acting on bigoted beliefs.

Little more than a week ago, he insisted he deserves "no blame" for what he called the "hatred" seemingly coursing through parts of the country, and outside of the White House on Friday, Trump accused news outlets of fomenting the very violence they have been asking him about.

But a nationwide review conducted by ABC News has identified at least 17 criminal cases where Trump's name was invoked in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence, or allegations of assault.

Nearly all — 16 of 17 — cases identified by ABC News are striking in that court documents and direct evidence reflect someone echoing presidential rhetoric, not protesting it. ABC News was unable to find any such case echoing presidential rhetoric when Barack Obama or George W. Bush were in the White House.

The perpetrators and suspects identified in the 17 cases are mostly white men, as young as teenagers and as old as 68, while the victims represent an array of minority groups — African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims and gay men.

Federal law enforcement authorities have privately told ABC News they worry that — even with Trump's public denunciations of violence — Trump's style could inspire violence-prone individuals to take action against minorities or others they perceive to be against the president's agenda.

Cesar Sayoc's van is seen in Boca Raton, Fla. on Oct. 18, 2018 in this picture obtained from social media.more +
While asserting that "fake" media coverage is exacerbating divisions in the country, Trump has noted that "a fan" of former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders opened fire on Republican lawmakers playing baseball in a Washington suburb two years ago.

"Nobody puts ... 'Bernie Sanders' in the headline with the maniac," Trump said last week. But the shooter in that case attacked Republicans while Obama was still in office, there's no indication he mentioned Sanders while launching his attack, and no criminal case was ever brought because he was fatally shot during his assault.

In identifying the 17 Trump-related cases, ABC News excluded incidents where charges were never brought and incidents of Trump-inspired vandalism.

In conducting its review, ABC News did find several cases where pro-Trump defendants were charged with targeting minorities, or where speculation online suggested the defendants were motivated by Trump, but in those cases ABC News found no police records, court proceedings or other direct evidence presenting a definitive link to the president. So those cases were also excluded in the ABC News tally.

ABC News found at least one case out of Chicago featuring anti-Trump rhetoric in connection with violence.

On Thursday, ABC News sent a list of the cases it identified to White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders for comment. As of Sunday evening, three days later, she had yet to respond. Trump has previously told reporters he's "committed to doing everything" in his power to not let political violence "take root in America."

Here are the cases identified by ABC News:

(continued in link)

[71 dB]

I don't remember where zb lives.  I live in Florida, and yes, that is freezing for us.

I think zb lives in Texas.

I think Florida had snow once in 1984.  I was in Florida (Belleair Shore) back in 1982 when I was 11. It was warm.

For southern Finns -15°C (+5°F) is freezing and -25°C (-13°F) is damn cold! For northern Finns (in Lapland) -25°C starts to be freezing and -40°C (-40°F) is damn cold!  Also, we Finns find saunas under 70°C (158°F) freezing. 

[amw]

"In perhaps the most outrageous example of election administration partisanship in the modern era"

I still gotta give the prize to Bush v. Gore

[Karl Henning]

U.S. militia groups head to border, stirred by Trump's call to arms

Enabling the nutjob ammosexuals.

[Sydney Nova Scotia]

Maybe they should just use Trump as the barricade, he is enough to repel anything........

[Ghost of Baron Scarpia]

Maybe they should just use Trump as the barricade, he is enough to repel anything........

Sadly, he is very attractive to some.

I just read the Fox News has refused to continue airing Trump's racist ad about immigration.

They have limits, now?

[SimonNZ]

Seen elsewhere:

"When Rachel Maddow talked about the Pentagon reaction to "the caravan" on her show, she mentioned that the document not only dismissed any threat from the people in the caravan - that past experience shows perhaps 1500 people will finish the journey, that past experience shows there will be little or no violence when they arrive, and that simple geography says they won't arrive for two months unless they can somehow all get a ride - but also that the Pentagon really doesn't want the militias there. Partly that's for the obvious reasons - they have no organization or discipline, they don't listen to orders, and they at best get in the way and at worst cause incidents that didn't have to happen. But it's also because when the self-described Minutemen show up, equipment goes missing. They steal shit from real soldiers so they can go play soldiers."

and a reply:

"Only, in their heads it isn't really stealing. See, they think they personally paid for those guns with their much protested tax dollars (if they paid their taxes that is) so they are entitled to those weapons and anything else they want. Because their sense of entitlement knows no bounds..."

[SimonNZ]

Trump's new immigration ad was panned as racist. Turns out it was also based on a falsehood.

""Democrats let him into our country," the ad's script reads. "Democrats let him stay."

Just one problem: It doesn't appear to be true.

Bracamontes, who had been deported multiple times before his crime rampage, appears to have last entered the country while George W. Bush was president, sometime between May 2001 and February 2002, when there is a record for his marriage in Arizona, according to the Sacramento Bee.

He lived near Salt Lake City until 2014, when a methamphetamine-fueled road trip ended with him murdering two Sacramento-area deputies, according to the newspaper.

The ad also failed to mention that in 1998, Bracamontes was arrested on drug charges in Phoenix, then released by the office of then-Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio "for reasons unknown," the Bee reported.

The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office did not respond to a request for comment.

But in 2014, after Bracamontes surrendered in Northern California, Arpaio acknowledged that the killer had been arrested in his county, according to the Arizona Republic.

"He was booked into the jails I run for drug-related convictions," Arpaio said at the time, according to the Republic. "He was evidently turned over to ICE and had been deported on two occasions."

Bracamontes was deported under both Democratic and Republican presidents.

He was first arrested on charges related to marijuana possession in Phoenix in 1996 and sentenced to four months in jail, the Bee reported. He served his time and was deported in 1997, when Bill Clinton was president — only to reenter the country and then be deported again in 2001, soon after being arrested on more marijuana charges, according to the Bee.

But the Bee reported that Bracamontes had also been arrested in Phoenix in 1998, and that after that arrest, he was released.

In discussing Bracamontes in 2014, shortly after his killings, Arpaio did not address the 1998 incident. Instead, he lamented federal immigration law.

"Once again we are faced with another tragedy on our hands because of a form of 'backdoor amnesty,' " he said, according to the Republic.

He added, "I hate that we are finding out about this man because of the deaths of these deputies."

Arpaio, a close Trump ally who has made waves for his hard-line immigration policies and rhetoric, was convicted in 2017 for ignoring a federal judge's order to stop detaining people on the suspicion of being undocumented immigrants. He was later pardoned by Trump.

Bracamontes has been sentenced to the death penalty in the murder case."

-

reminds me of Sideshow Bob's campaign ad when running against Mayor Joe Quimby saying that Quimby was the kind of guy who let deranged madmen like Sideshow Bob run free

[SimonNZ]

Their Soybeans Piling Up, Farmers Hope Trade War Ends Before Beans Rot. North Dakota's soybean crops are flourishing. But China has stopped buying.

"This is harvest season in the rich farmlands of the eastern Dakotas, the time of year Kevin Karel checks his computer first thing in the morning to see how many of his soybeans Chinese companies have purchased while he was sleeping.

Farmers here in Cass County have prospered over the last two decades by growing more soybeans than any other county in the United States, and by shipping most of those beans across the Pacific Ocean to feed Chinese pigs and chickens.

But this year, the Chinese have all but stopped buying. The largest market for one of America's largest exports has shut its doors. The Chinese government imposed a tariff on American soybeans in response to the Trump administration's tariffs on Chinese goods. The latest federal data, through mid-October, shows American soybean sales to China have declined by 94 percent from last year's harvest."

[JBS]

Sadly, he is very attractive to some.

I just read the Fox News has refused to continue airing Trump's racist ad about immigration.

They have limits, now?

It managed to get an airing this morning...on Morning Joe on MSNBC of all things.


Given how it implies that all Central Americans are depraved copkillers that must be kept out of the US, and that the "caravan" is a mob whose only goal is to commit violence, I would say racist is too nice a word for it.

[SimonNZ]

Paul Krugman: Last Exit Off The Road To Autocracy

[JBS]

Paul Krugman: Last Exit Off The Road To Autocracy

The appropriate term for that column is hysteria.  Or at least, a suitable reminder that Krugman has turned out to be wrong on a lot of things even in his own sphere of economics.

[Ghost of Baron Scarpia]

It managed to get an airing this morning...on Morning Joe on MSNBC of all things.


Given how it implies that all Central Americans are depraved copkillers that must be kept out of the US, and that the "caravan" is a mob whose only goal is to commit violence, I would say racist is too nice a word for it.

Not to mention the disingenuousness of claiming that Democrats have an explicit plan to bring murders into the country, presumably because murders vote Democrat.

[JBS]

Not to mention the disingenuousness of claiming that Democrats have an explicit plan to bring murders into the country, presumably because murders vote Democrat.

Well,  I hope that ad turns off enough voters from the GOP that it backfires. 
I voted for all the Democrats I could, but that has much more to do with the fact that the GOP has dominated state politics here in Florida for almost 20 years, and  needs to be reined in.   Trumpian bootlicking was a very subsidiary factor in that decision.

[SimonNZ]

The appropriate term for that column is hysteria.  Or at least, a suitable reminder that Krugman has turned out to be wrong on a lot of things even in his own sphere of economics.

Which parts were hysteria?

I'd like to believe things were rosier than he paints them.

[JBS]

Which parts were hysteria?

I'd like to believe things were rosier than he paints them.

Well this

But ugly as the scene will be if Democrats win, it will be far worse if they lose. In fact, it's not hyperbole to say that if the G.O.P. holds the line on Tuesday, it may be the last even halfway fair elections we'll ever have.

And this

The lesson we learn from all these abuses of power is that today's Republicans are just like their fellow white nationalists in Hungary and Poland, who have maintained a democratic facade but have in reality established one-party authoritarian regimes. Everything we've seen says that Republicans will do anything they can to take and hold power, and Tuesday's elections may be the last chance to stop them from locking in permanent rule.

[amw]

First big Election Day scalp seems to be Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Democratic incumbent. I was pretty sure he would win, until he decided to go full Trump and throw his support behind the border wall and sending thousands of troops to stop a caravan that will probably never reach the border in the first place. Predictable result: Democrats not voting, because why bother if the two candidates support the exact same thing, or leaving the top of the ticket blank. I wish him luck for his likely post election career as a Lockheed Martin lobbyist.

[JBS]

Donnelly was behind the curve to begin with, just by being a Democrat.

Here in Florida the Governor and Senate races are very close, but the GOP candidates hold a slight lead, and the areas not reporting yet are mostly GOP friendly, so I expect GOP mismanagement here to go on unchecked for another four years.

[amw]

Donnelly was leading in the polls until he started on the anti-immigration bend last week. He likely could have won by keeping his head down and being a "generic Democrat"; this seems almost like a conscious decision to blow it.

The only good thing I'm hearing out of Florida is that you passed an amendment to restore voting rights to ex-convicts, which will re-enfranchise something like one and a half million people because of Florida's ridiculously draconian carceral system and/or large for-profit prison industry (not sure which). Everything else seems like typical bad news, Cubans apparently coming out strongly against Gillum because anything to the left of Hillary Clinton reminds them too much of that time Castro took away their slave plantations.