babylonsister
babylonsister's JournalSo iq45 used the "n" word and disparages Jews.
This is not a revelation at all, it is not a surprise. So please, talking heads, don't act like it is.
20,000 People Attend NASCAR Race
We're never getting out. 
https://politicalwire.com/2020/07/16/20000-people-attend-nascar-race/
20,000 People Attend NASCAR Race
July 16, 2020 at 3:53 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard
The event was moved from Charlotte because North Carolina would not authorize spectators for the race.
kos: Donald Trump isn't serious about being reelected
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/7/16/1961027/-Donald-Trump-isn-t-serious-about-being-reelectedDonald Trump isn't serious about being reelected
kos
Daily Kos Staff
Thursday July 16, 2020 · 11:28 AM EDT
Donald Trump wants to win reelection.
He’s not serious about winning reelection.
How do you square those two statements? You look at what vestiges of a “campaign” he’s running and you realize that there’s nothing in what he says or does to suggest he’s actually doing what is necessary to get to 50% of electoral college votes.
Fundamentally, Trump is in deep electoral trouble. His map is … quite impossible at this point with states like Alaska, Montana, and Texas competitive, and new states like South Carolina creeping into unexpected contention. His campaign is bleeding money on nonsensical expenses like advertising in places like Ohio, which will not decide the election, and insanely high legal expenses as he tries to sue his critics (and reality, at times) into silence. His attempts at generating a white backlash against the movement for Black Lives is going nowhere. His campaign is incompetent, and yet the same people who delivered Trump’s Tulsa humiliation (speaking in front of 6,000 when he had promised 1 million) are still in charge of the joint.
The Trump campaign truly is a disaster. But, we are warned, don’t be complacent! He can still turn things around!
There are reasons not to be complacent: We have a second historic opportunity (after 2018) to utterly annihilate the GOP and reshape American politics for a generation. No one took it easy in 2018 despite polling predicting big Democratic gains. No one is relaxing this year.
But it’s not being “complacent” to simply realize that absent some impossible-to-imagine event, Trump isn’t turning anything around. And the reason is because he’s not trying to turn things around. He is in the mess that he is now because of the very things he can’t stop doing. And it starts with the words that come out of his mouth.
All campaigns have a message. It’s literally the bedrock of any electoral effort: “You should vote for me because _______.” But what is Trump’s?
He had that whole “Hunter Biden in the Ukraine” thing that went nowhere except for the history books as a rare presidential impeachment. There was an aborted attempt to create a thing called “Obamagate.”
Then he was really into protecting Confederate statues, but that has seemingly been set aside as Salvadoran MS-13 gangs make a cameo after their abject failure to deliver Republican victories in 2018. And don’t forget that we were supposed to vote for him because presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden was “sleepy” and “hiding in his basement.” Except, of course, that it was Trump himself who was literally hiding in his basement.
ScreenShot2020-05-28at11.42.10AM.png
There’s a lot of whining about poor him and presidential harassment mixed in with whatever loony Q-inspired theories emerge from the Twitterverse or Fox and Friends. There’s calling the Black Lives Matter movement a “symbol of hate” while blaming Dr. Anthony Fauci for his continued indifference to actually doing something about a national mass death event that has killed 140,000 and counting.
What else? There’s attacking Joe Biden for wearing a mask because that was somehow a thing, as well as repeated unsupported attempts to tie Biden to the Chinese Communist Party. Why he, in the pocket of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, would want to bring attention to the issue of foreign involvement in the election is beyond any rational attempt to explain.
And this week’s masterstroke of political communication?
Obviously Trump and the GOP were never going to win core Democratic constituencies: youth, voters of color, single women, and urban whites. But the Republican Party finds itself in dire straits because of defections among college-educated suburban white women.
And tell me, what, of that list above, is going to win a single college-educated suburban white woman? Quite the opposite, in fact—every single one of those items merely reinforces the very reasons those women fled from Trump and his party in the first place: his idiocy, his inability to handle a national crisis (much less several of them), his refusal to listen to science and the experts, the racism, the sexism, and his boorish bullying behavior.
And as that tweet from Ivanka shows, their unserious and shallow base impulses. Quite clearly, the tweet was designed to “own the libs” who have been organizing a boycott of Goya products after the company’s CEO publicly lavished praise on Trump. I’m sure their cheering section of deplorable dead-enders cheered along with it. But that’s not winning them any elections! And at this late stage of the campaign, everything they say or do should be laser-focused on winning votes.
But they can’t do it! They can’t run a disciplined, focused, and appeal-building campaign because the person at the top, Donald Trump, has zero interest in broadening his appeal, much less being disciplined and focused.
In 2016, Trump lucked into the “but her emails” bullshit narrative the GOP had spent years building. It was simple enough and stupid enough for him to repeat ad nauseam. But he doesn’t have the benefit of any pre-laid right-wing narratives this year, and he’s made it impossible for the Republican machine to singularly focus on or even create any of their typical manufactured outrages. Huntergate? Obamagate? Yeah, nice try, a--holes.
So that’s where we are.
Donald Trump wants COVID-19 to go away, but he won’t do anything to make that happen. He certainly can’t sic his lawyers on the virus to either threaten it into oblivion or pay it off for its silence.
In that same way, Trump wants to be president for four more years, but he won’t do what he needs to do to make that happen.
He’s failed upwards too many times in his unjustly charmed life. But too many people now know how dangerously incompetent he is. His luck has finally run out.
Nicholas Kristof: We Interrupt This Gloom to Offer ... Hope
Opinion
We Interrupt This Gloom to Offer … Hope
Yes, America is suffering needlessly. That may save us.
By Nicholas Kristof
Opinion Columnist
July 16, 2020
snip//
The last time our economy was this troubled, Herbert Hoover’s failures led to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election with a mandate to revitalize the nation. The result was the New Deal, Social Security, rural electrification, government jobs programs and a 35-year burst of inclusive growth that built the modern middle class and arguably made the United States the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world.
snip//
Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, who for six decades has been battling for a more just society, told me, “I’m very optimistic. I think we have a chance of getting something done.”
Like others I spoke with, she said that one reason for hope is, paradoxically, President Trump and the way he has become the avatar of failed “let them eat cake” policies and narratives. “Mr. Trump is the perfect opposition to have,” Edelman said. “He represents the implosion of the American dream, and we can’t go down his road much farther.”
“If we can’t get something done now,” she added, “then shame on us.”
Betting markets like PredictIt expect Joe Biden to sweep into the presidency in January with a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate. By then we may have lost a quarter million Americans to Covid-19 and remain mired in the worst economic downturn of our lifetimes, with racial antagonisms inflamed by a president whom a majority of Americans regard as a racist. I’ve known Biden since he was a senator, and he’s no radical — but that reassuring, boring mien may make it easier to win a mandate and then use it to pivot the United States onto a new path.
So perhaps today’s national pain, fear and loss can also be a source of hope: We may be so desperate, our failures so manifest, our grief so raw, that the United States can once more, as during the Great Depression, embrace long-needed changes that would have been impossible in cheerier times.
more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-blm-america-hope.html
Trump's New Campaign Manager Was Fired By Chris Christie Over "Bridgegate"
He should fit right in. 
Posted on Thu, Jul 16th, 2020 by Darragh Roche
Trump’s New Campaign Manager Was Fired By Chris Christie Over “Bridgegate”
Donald Trump has removed Brad Parscale as campaign manager for his reelection bid. His replacement is Bill Stepian, a central figure in the “Bridgegate” scandal.
Stepien worked for former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie until the Republican distanced himself from Stepien in the wake of “Bridgegate” – lane closures of the George Washington Bridge as political retribution.
Stepien was never charged with a crime and denied knowledge of the plan at the time. However, Christie took a dim view of his former aide in the aftermath of the events.
“I was disturbed by the tone and behavior and attitude of callous indifference that was displayed in the emails by my former campaign manager, Bill Stepien,” Christie said.
more...
https://www.politicususa.com/2020/07/16/trumps-new-campaign-manager-was-fired-by-chris-christie-over-bridgegate.html
Maryland's GOP Gov. Larry Hogan brutally rips Trump's 'hopeless' response to COVID-19
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/07/marylands-gop-gov-larry-hogan-brutally-rips-trumps-hopeless-response-to-covid-19/Maryland’s GOP Gov. Larry Hogan brutally rips Trump’s ‘hopeless’ response to COVID-19
Published 40 mins ago
on July 16, 2020
By Travis Gettys
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan excoriated President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic in a new Washington Post op-ed.
The Republican governor famously enlisted his wife, who was born in raised in South Korea, to ask that country’s president Moon Jae-in for help securing COVID-19 test kits in the early days of the pandemic, a month after Trump insisted anyone who wanted one could get tested.
“Eventually, it was clear that waiting around for the president to run the nation’s response was hopeless,” he added. “If we delayed any longer, we’d be condemning more of our citizens to suffering and death. So every governor went their own way, which is how the United States ended up with such a patchwork response. I did the best I could for Maryland. Here’s what we saw and heard from Washington along the way.”
Hogan, who had considered challenging Trump in the 2020 GOP primary, then laid out in painstaking detail damning evidence of the president’s dereliction of duty.
“Meanwhile, instead of listening to his own public health experts, the president was talking and tweeting like a man more concerned about boosting the stock market or his reelection plans,” he added.
Democratic group plans to send 13 million hand-written postcards to voters in swing states
I remember receiving a hand-written card 2 years ago and was duly impressed. 
Democratic group plans to send 13 million hand-written postcards to voters in swing states
By John Bowden - 07/16/20 08:00 AM EDT
Democratic group plans to send 13 million hand-written postcards to voters in swing states
A left-leaning group announced plans on Thursday to send 13 million hand-written postcards to swing-state voters around the country in an effort to boost Democratic voter turnout in the 2020 election.
The Progressive Turnout Project (PTP) said in a press release that it was investing $500,000 in the initiative begun in conjunction with Indivisible Chicago Alliance, and they have already distributed around 3.5 million hand-written postcards to volunteers for mailing.
Voters in 10 states are being targeted, according to the press release including Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
“Research from the 2018 election shows that personalized, hand-written messages boost turnout, so this year we’re investing big in reaching voters on the door and through their mailbox. That’s how we’ll beat Donald Trump and flip the Senate.”
more...
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/507521-dem-group-plans-to-send-13-million-hand-written-postcards-to-voters-in
Ex Hawaii Cop Gets Four Years in Prison for Forcing Homeless Man to Lick Urinal
There are some truly sick people out there.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/john-rabago-ex-hawaii-cop-gets-four-years-for-forcing-homeless-man-to-lick-urinal?ref=home
Ex Hawaii Cop Gets Four Years in Prison for Forcing Homeless Man to Lick Urinal
‘YOU TOOK HIS DIGNITY’
Jamie Ross
Published Jul. 16, 2020 6:32AM ET
Reuters / Hugh Gentry
Team Trump Plots New Ways to Make Him Feel Good
Beyond pathetic. 
https://politicalwire.com/2020/07/16/team-trump-plots-new-ways-to-make-him-feel-good/
Team Trump Plots New Ways to Make Him Feel Good
July 16, 2020 at 7:44 am EDT By Taegan Goddard
“They tell him tales of his sagging poll numbers being fake. They’ve concocted ways of convincing him that the adoring crowds he loves on the campaign trail are still there and ready. They’ve pledged that the social, racial, and economic crises ravaging the nation are ephemeral. And they’ve carried his water as he seeks to reassert his authority over situations falling beyond his control.”
Fauci's wife speaks out about criticism: 'They are making things up'
Fauci's wife speaks out about criticism: 'They are making things up'
By Aris Folley - 07/15/20 09:33 PM EDT
Christine Grady, wife of the country’s leading infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, spoke out this week about the criticism her husband has faced as he has in recent days drawn scrutiny from Trump administration officials over his public health recommendations.
In an interview with InStyle published on Wednesday, Grady – the head of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center – discussed her husband’s commitment to public health and said when “he gets criticized, it feels unfair to me because he is working so hard for the right reasons.”
Pressed further by the journalist Norah O’Donnell about her comments, Grady said she it feels unfair to her that “people are looking for things to criticize — I mean, for anything.”
more...
https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/507595-faucis-wife-speaks-out-about-criticism-they-are-making-things
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