A group of anti-abortion evangelicals on Friday endorsed Joe Biden, saying that in areas other than abortion, the former vice president is more "pro-life" than President Trump.

"We believe that on balance, Joe Biden’s policies are more consistent with the biblically shaped ethic of life than those of Donald Trump," the group said in a statement. "Therefore, even as we continue to urge different policies on abortion, we urge evangelicals to elect Joe Biden as president."

The group, which includes several pastors formerly involved in Republican politics, former Christianity Today chairman John Huffman, and Jerushah Duford, the granddaughter of conservative evangelical leader Billy Graham, emphasized that while they remain opposed to abortion, Democratic policy proposals, such as "accessible health services for all citizens, affordable childcare, a minimum wage that lifts workers out of poverty" will reduce the number of abortions.


[link:https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/biblically-balanced-agenda-anti-abortion-evangelicals-endorse-biden-over-trump?fbclid=IwAR3bGF86cNBHhSWzGeEGHcWx8lVP-bGmvyp-FJ0mqU9iIG4r0uEjCu226rM|]

I posted a while ago that in our small, rural, red town my still very Republican ex-GOP-county-chair and ex-GOP-County-Commissioner neighbor has been flying Biden and Vote Blue signs. They are now behind barbed wire. But since then...

Our house has been flying Biden banners on all sides of the corner.

Our neighbor’s daughter from across the street the other way came to thank us for doing it, saying all these Biden signs make her feel like she’s in a good neighborhood.

More Biden signs - and Wendy Davis signs - are popping up all over. There are a few more Dump signs, but The Side Of Light is well ahead.

Today, our banners temporarily went down for porch painting. But wonder of wonders, our GOP neighbor made up for it. HE PUT UP A BLACK LIVES MATTER FLAG SIGN, Y’ALL!!!!

*sniffle*

Source: Slate

We already knew that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's profile in Republican circles grew on the back of big campaign donations. The North Carolina businessman who became the first postmaster general in almost two decades to get the job without being a career postal employee, built a reputation as a superstar Republican bundler, which came with numerous benefits, including presidential and gubernatorial appointments for his wife. But it turns out at least part of that success in fundraising had to do with pressuring employees to donate to GOP candidates and then reimbursing them through bonuses, reports the Washington Post.

At least five former employees who worked for DeJoy's former business, New Breed Logistics, said they were not-so-subtly pressured to write checks and attend fundraisers. DeJoy would then personally direct that bonus payments be made to certain staffers that would make up for the cost of their financial political contributions. "He asked employees for money. We gave him the money, and then he reciprocated by giving us big bonuses," David Young, who as director of human resources had access to payroll records from the late 1990s to 2013, said. An unnamed former employee said DeJoy didn't hide his requests: "He would ask employees to make contributions at the same time that he would say, 'I'll get it back to you down the road'."

Read more: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/09/louis-dejoy-reimburse-employees-republican-donations.amp

---

I do believe the correct terms are "money laundering" and "election fraud."

Edit: another great article on the laws broken:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/09/07/legal-lines-louis-dejoys-alleged-campaign-contribution-reimbursements-may-have-crossed/?hpid=hp_convention-tt-1_fix-dejoy-715am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans

His campaign has put up a gross poll for his acceptance speech at:
https://forms.donaldjtrump.com/landing/2020-convention-prep-survey?utm_medium=sms&utm_source=ta_djt_audience0002_nd&utm_campaign=20200821_na_convention-prep-survey-b-na-nd_gop_djt_na_na_audience0002&fbclid=IwAR29TzUAMcjSpsufHc3E7UASCFg-pEXsULUY-k7q5RGVn1s-Su4gl5QyWxo

Make sure you vote often to tell him what scum he is. They want a name and email address. Make sure you pick a few good return spam addresses out of your email, like a few "Nigerian widows" and such. Make sure they feel the love back from endless Dump emails in the future.

Folks, I live in rural Texas. Not THE most rabid area, but still. My neighbor is a former GOP county commissioner. He was a recent GOP county chair, for years. The local GOP met at his house.

Today his garden-club prizewinning yard is sporting two signs:

Biden 2020.

Vote Blue No Matter Who.

Damn.

Yo! Join a fabulous national crowd-sourced political art installation AND have 50% of your payment go to Joe Biden and the NAACP. It's simple - buy (or make for free, if you want to) these itty bitty Trump hate letters. Then do what twerps that post Chick tracts do - put them anywhere that will piss off the conservative thugs. They aren't stickers (unless you want them to be), so you aren't defacing anything. Be creative! Add your own "love notes" to messages already printed on Hair Hitler's effigy, and even order blanks to make your own personalized hate notes.

You can get pre-made ones here: https://maketrumptiny.com
They also have DIY templates there.

Though it's not a new thing, let's make it a big thing now. Nasty little Anti-Trump messages everywhere, all day, every day.

All y'all have seen whatever stupid meme of the day that seems to be going around. Yesterday, it was "My boyfriend's sister's uncle's ex-wife, who I know is TOTALLY a reliable source, has seen tanks running in the streets in <insert city just close enough that people seeing the meme won't go personally look>." The day before, it was "OMG, what will be do when the trucks stop running?!?!?!?" (Pro-tip: they won't.) Fundamentally, we have a lot of dumb and/or scared people, and they let that anxiety out by telling each other scary stories. Today's has been, "OMG, we're realistically going to have to do this for a YEAR!"

No. No, we're not. First, please stop making up scary stories. Second, if you think this social distancing/lockdown crap is going to last a year, you aren't thinking straight. Here's why.

1) We're all going to get COVID-19. The game we're playing is to kill as few people as possible, quell dangerous hot spots, and remove reservoirs for this virus to play in. Mathematically, the first wave is about 24 days (based on infection, days until symptoms become apparent, and then either getting over it or dying in the hospital). If we all do this distancing for 24 days, we will stop the majority of the epidemic, just like China and South Korea. There will be a smaller wave, so add up to another 24 days to that, because we will have smaller case groupings - unfortunate medical personnel who are going down themselves even as the initial hospital hit dies down, and people in other necessary jobs who get unlucky with the wrong person coming face to face. Most of us won't get it, though, until (a) the initial waves are down, and (b) hopefully there's a vaccine or an antiviral available to make the course milder or virtually undetectable.

2) In that reality, we're all planning to survive. Most of us will make that goal. Civilization has high hopes of surviving. But if civilization is to survive, this level of containment must end about the time of the first waves, say 48-60 days from now. Simply put, this virus will get anywhere it isn't right now, in that time. There are no places and no industries that will be untouched. Governments MUST shore up their people's ability to buy food and survive NOW, but if it keeps up more than about 60 days, it won't work. Governments can basically print money, but that's about how long they can keep it up before creating runaway inflation because there are just not enough people working, and not enough economic activity, to keep up the pretense that the money means anything. Bread that costs $1,000/loaf in monopoly money won't be feeding the vast majority of the people. The joke is, some nearsighted analysts are urging people to buy health care stocks. Do they really believe that in 60+ days, that industry isn't going to be flattened by unpaid bills that NEVER will be paid? So, after the initial waves, people and businesses and entire economies are going to have to get back to it.

3) That means we're going to lose a lot of businesses, and change a lot of industries, in the near term - say 1-3 years. We're going to be doing a lot more telecommuting. A lot of malls will close - permanently. Much of our buying will remain online. Restaurants, bars, libraries, schools, and smaller festivals and venues will cautiously reopen. Larger ones may not, say state fairs or the largest music festivals, for at least a year. When festivals and concerts restart, possibly even when mere theaters reopen, it will be with additional rules and security. Rather than the foolish current security theater of cursory bag checks, there will be contact questions and fever checks. The airline (and travel, generally) industry will be the last to crawl out of the rubble. I don't think we're going to be flying domestically or internationally in any number until at least 2021 (assuming the current timelines for a vaccine and other trials), and even then it will look a lot like flying post-911. It'll look rather like the hodgepodge of additional security checks from place to place, but rather than pat downs it'll be the same questions and tests as going into a large venue, plus reporting requirements if anyone gets sick.

Bottom line: we are not going to be in lockdown for some long, indefinite period. We may see some returns to more stringent distancing measures before we all fight to get the vaccine, much like we saw in the 1950s.

Which brings me to this: We know how this works. This is NOT unique. The Spanish Flu epidemic, by the way, is completely the wrong analogy to COVID-19, except to the extent that we can take direct lessons from the spread in areas that distanced, versus those that didn't. No, to look at COVID-19, we have to take our lessons from Ebola. That disease was fully capable of going worldwide, highly contagious, and not susceptible to seasonal cycles. (The big difference is because Ebola kills so thoroughly and so fast, it had a self-limitation built in.) Unlike the situation in Africa, most people around the world have been quick to ditch the "It's a hoax!" stupidity, and to stick pretty decently to quarantine principles. Also, look to the waves of polio in the early 1950s. Like COVID-19, there were multiple strains, but only 1 strain caused severe and deadly response. About 1% of victims died or had permanent disability. Polio tended to be seasonal, because of higher levels of the virus in sewage in the summer - which led to some permanent changes in how we deal with sewage. But more importantly, there was a short-term protective effect discovered, with gamma-globulin, that could provide some protection, and then the Salk vaccine in 1955. If you look at the history of how the vaccine was created, we are literally years ahead of that process, in a matter of 3 months.

We're going to have a lot of changes for now, but not as drastic as people think, and not as long. But we do have to stop scaring each other, and ourselves. We need to fight back against all the tall tales on the Internet. If you see something, say something, to borrow the odious phrase. If there's a scary tall story, call it out. If there's outright misinformation like some of the sites touting gargling with salt water, report it, get it taken down, scrag it with fire in the comments, whatever you need to do. And above all, spread both truth and kindness to people who are in desperate need of it.

Source: Washington Post

A federal appeals court in California halted the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” immigration policy on Friday, a blow to the president’s restrictive immigration agenda that cripples one of the government’s approaches to curbing migration across the U.S. southern border.

The program — officially known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP — called for pushing asylum seekers back into Mexico to await their U.S. asylum hearings, part of an effort to limit migrant access to U.S. soil and to lessen a record migration surge among Central American families. More than 470,000 parents and children crossed into the United States last fiscal year, and most were quickly freed into the country to await U.S. immigration court hearings after they claimed asylum.

The Trump administration has claimed that the migrant families have been exploiting loopholes in U.S. law to secure their release, knowing of the court-mandated 20-day limit for detaining children. The MPP program was designed to prevent families from entering the United States and later skipping their court hearings to avoid deportation; instead, families have been sitting on the Mexico side of the border.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 to uphold a lower-court’s injunction on MPP, saying that the policy “is invalid in its entirety due to its inconsistency with” federal law, and “should be enjoined in its entirety.”

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/trump-remain-in-mexico-halted-federal-court/2020/02/28/87bbf85e-e481-11e9-b403-f738899982d2_story.html?fbclid=IwAR0lbOcHN16KJHrPeRfdHjmyIJm1i_k0XBqnn8-R0psO4B4aNDbkYwpalZQ

The Democratic Party is not "unified" behind a candidate after 3 state contests.
The Democratic Party has half a dozen candidates still in the race.

This is literally how it's supposed to work. Unity comes from testing candidates across all the primaries and caucuses, until the convention. If only one is left standing much earlier, fine. If not, fine.

You can not cause people to "unify" behind one candidate by begging for unity. The magic wish fairy doesn't do political races.

"Unity" is a hypocritical dog whistle.

A plea for "unity" actually means, "OMG, I can't stand candidate X, but my second and third favorites are Y and Z. But a lot of people like candidate X and **I** WON'T UNIFY BEHIND X! I'm going to try to get people to abandon X for Y or Z, asserting that, like, *EVERYONE* won't unify behind X... like me." It's childish, not to mention selfish.

If you don't like a candidate, argue about why you don't like what they stand for. Moaning about "unity" means you have nothing better to argue. Or, you don't want to reveal why you really hate candidate X. Hmm.

We unified pretty early in 2016. You know who didn't? The Republicans. A huge slate of candidates nigh unto forever, all of them hating Trump. All of their supporters hating Trump. The bloviating, demented bankruptcy-monkey reality show rapist was the most divisive they'd had in forever. Guess who won? Guess who unified themselves into insanity?

Unity is a double-edged sword. Pressure to unify on a plan leads to groupthink as the plan starts going awry but the united can't let go of the plan because... unity.

So let unity happen as it will. Stop begging for it, threatening for it, fetishizing it. It's not the end - it's a means.

In the spirit of honesty, who will YOU, PERSONALLY not unify behind if they became the nominee?

The prevailing argument about “electability” is all wrong. Dems win when they fire up their base, with people like Obama (and this year, Liz or Bernie). They lose when they try to aim for the meek middle, believing they can pick up swing voters, while deprecating the issues that excite people and bring them to the polls (Kerry, Gore, Hillary).




https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/02/06/rachel-bitecofer-profile-election-forecasting-new-theory-108944