into conspiracy claims and stoking a culture war

Joe Biden at the Democratic National Convention this week plans to pledge to "build back better" if he is elected to serve as the 46th US president.

Biden's pitch is to renew and unify a nation devastated by the coronavirus and, he says, years of bungling by the administration of President Donald Trump.

Trump, in contrast, is doubling down on wedge issues of immigration and race, stirring the grievances essential to the "culture wars" that loomed large in his 2016 victory.

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Trump and the GOP hope to make their conference next week a showcase for ordinary Americans they say are the victims of left-wing cancel culture and mob violence.
They will include the Covington High School student Nick Sandmann, who sued a slew of publications over their coverage of his encounter with a Native American protester in 2019, and the McCloskeys, a couple who threatened anti-racism protesters near their St. Louis mansion with weapons during June's anti-racism protests.

With the convention season in full swing, the contrast between the candidates seeking to lead the US through its gravest crisis in recent history could not be starker.

https://www.businessinsider.com/analysis-trump-stirs-culture-wars-as-biden-touts-unity-renewal-2020-8

Ugh ... get ready for even uglier. Hard to imagine.

Julián Castro, the lone Latino to run for the Democratic presidential nomination this year, has warned at the outset of the party’s convention Democrats risk losing Latino support if they do not make greater efforts at inclusion.

“I think that we could win the battle and lose the war,” Castro told Axios, of the fight to defeat Donald Trump. “We could win in November, but you could see a potential slide of Latino support for Democrats.”

Castro spoke as activists directed a welter of criticism at the Democratic National Committee for inviting only three Latino politicians to speak independently during the four-day convention.

[link:https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/18/julian-castro-democrats-latino-support|

This is great to see.

Biden’s campaign advisers scouted his house for a suitable location where he could film campaign (and proof-of-life) appearances. They quickly settled on an out-of-the-way spot in his basement in front of a bookshelf adorned with family photos and personal artifacts, including the American flag that flew over the United States Capitol in honor of his late son Beau. Over the course of two hectic days, a video-production crew installed the wiring, lighting and camera necessary for a full-fledged TV studio. On March 23, standing behind a lectern affixed with his campaign logo, Biden prepared to address the nation via live­stream for the first time.

In the subsequent weeks, the lectern has been replaced with a chair, and Biden, who as vice president became accustomed to having interviewers come to him, has tried to acclimate himself to the remote setup. Now rarely a day goes by that the candidate — sometimes in a suit, sometimes in a sweater, always in front of that bookshelf — doesn’t pop up on Morning Joe or Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show, the local news in Detroit or his own Facebook page, to let Americans know he’s still out there.

[link:https://politicalwire.com/2020/04/30/running-for-president-during-a-pandemic-2/|

[link:https://m.|

Let’s get this straight if you’re gonna pray: Satan is tRump; tRump IS sAtan.

Part of the problem with the constant flow of news out of the White House — from offensive tweets to potentially disastrous policies — is that acts that would have seemed outrageous in previous administrations slip past, hidden by the smoke of the Trumpster fire. The administration’s plan to effectively gut the Washington-based Bureau of Land Management is a case in point.

Some Trump administration policymakers, as well as some influential members of Congress, are philosophically opposed to the federal government owning public lands …. All told, the federal government owns about 28% of the country’s acreage (most of it originally stolen from native tribes, but that’s another issue), and in some cases has done so for more than two centuries. The largest player in the management of non-marine federal lands is the Bureau of Land Management, which controls 248 million acres of public land and administers some 700 million acres of federal subsurface mineral rights.
….

And now the Trump administration — propelled by those who believe the federal government should cede much of its Western lands to state and local governments — wants to move nearly all of the BLM’s headquarters out of Washington and relocate the jobs mostly to Western states. It couches the reorganization as an effort to put more BLM workers closer to the lands they manage … But public lands advocates argue persuasively that they are mere pretexts for undercutting an agency Trump advisers dislike. The vast majority of BLM jobs — 97%, according to the Public Lands Foundation — are already dispersed around the country, mostly in the West, and the bulk of the jobs to be moved out of Washington are top-level administrators and policy staffers who craft regulations and provide national oversight to regional offices.
….

Scattering those jobs around the country will in all likelihood result in massive turnover among senior officials unwilling to upend their lives and careers in Washington. And there is evidence to support that: The Agriculture Department is shifting two agencies, the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, from Washington to Kansas this fall. About 250 of the 395 employees — more than 60% — refused the transfers, a potentially crippling brain drain from the highly respected statistics department and the research agency.

Moving BLM will similarly rob that department of institutional memory and weaken its ability to work with Congress and other agencies — which, in fact, may be the point for the Machiavellians in Trump’s White House who want to cede public lands that we, as Americans, all own to states and local governments anxious to turn it over to developers and extractive industries. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt recently appointed William Perry Pendley, who through the conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation has pushed for the federal government to turn public lands over to states, as acting BLM director. The petroglyph on the wall couldn’t be clearer.
…..

More at:
[link:https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-08-18/trumps-blm-jobs-west-environment-public-lands-congress?fbclid=IwAR0qEptgnuaeuLafqrtIqcVDAwZDgO5w3B0aV2jmPyg4RHC7BOwr70j9f9w|

“We all knew this move made no sense and was driven by ideology over science,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md. “Now, thanks to this new inspector general report, we also know that it was potentially illegal. Secretary [Sonny] Perdue has some serious questions to answer, and this fight is not over.”

Rep. Sanford Bishop, D-Ga., chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that advanced the Agriculture Department’s appropriations bills, including the provision demanding committee approval of any relocation, called the inspector general’s findings “troubling.” ...
“As I have said before, there are many reasons this move does not add up. Now that the report has raised several troubling concerns, I again ask why only the Trump administration thinks this relocation is a good idea.”
.....
Casting a pall over the proceedings this week were recent comments by acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney suggesting the department’s justification for relocating ERS and NIFA employees was merely a pretext for encouraging them to quit.

“Now, it’s nearly impossible to fire a federal worker,” Mulvaney told attendees of a Republican party event in South Carolina last weekend. “I know that because a lot of them work for me. And I’ve tried. And you can’t do it. But simply saying to the people, you know what, we’re going to take you outside the bubble, outside the Beltway, outside this liberal haven and move you out into the real part of the country, and they quit. What a wonderful way to streamline government and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time.”
....
In a statement Monday, AFGE National President J. David Cox blasted what he called anti-federal employee rhetoric. “Mick Mulvaney’s comments confirm what our union has been saying all along: the administration’s decision to transfer hundreds of USDA jobs from D.C. isn’t about helping federal employees do their jobs better or delivering better services to the American taxpayer,” Cox said. “Their goal is to drive out hardworking and dedicated civil servants and silence the parts of the agencies’ research that the administration views as inconvenient.”
....

More at: https://www.govexec.com/oversight/2019/08/lawmakers-watchdog-agency-questions-usda-rationale-countering-ig-report/159012/

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There's hope.

The US central bank has cut interest rates for the first time since 2008 but not won over President Donald Trump.

Mr Trump, who had demanded a big rate cut, was unimpressed with the Federal Reserve's 0.25 percentage point cut that took the federal funds target range to 2-2.25%.

In a tweet, the president scorned Fed chair Jerome Powell, saying: "As usual, Powell let us down."

The main stock market indexes on Wall Street all closed more than 1% lower.

Analysts cited uncertainty over how many rate cuts the market should expect.
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[link:https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49183329|

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The depths of this moron's idiocy never fail to amaze me. Buttigieg was exactly right, "Like a rooster [this moron] thinks he caused the sun to rise."

Anyone who doesn't vote straight D up and down the ticket in 2020 is officially now my enemy.

Former White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah has joined Fox Corporation as a senior vice president, forming yet another link between President Donald Trump’s administration and the conservative media empire.

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[Shah] follows in the footsteps of former White House communications director Hope Hicks, who joined Fox Corp. in October to run their public relations department.

Both Shah and Hicks report to Viet Dinh, chief legal and policy officer of Fox Corp.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/raj-shah-fox-corporation-trump_n_5d345190e4b020cd9944c4ee

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Not saying it is, but shouldn't this be an ethics violation? Not that it would really mean anything with this tRump cabal.

When the president spews racism or violence, true believers respond with more. Experts say it resembles something like a cult or totalitarianism.

President Donald Trump’s rally in Greenville, North Carolina, this week made scholars of fascism sit bolt upright. ... Trump has long stoked bigoted grievances among his followers, but the Greenville rally saw him act as a more overt radicalizer than ever before. And with a portion of Trump’s fanbase now openly clamoring for the physical removal of several prominent Democrats of color, experts are questioning whether the country can repair the damage—even if Trump loses in 2020.

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It’s possible very little will bother his most devoted fans, Janja Lalich, a professor studying cults and totalitarian leadership, said. “There’s this intense devotion and the inability to question or criticize or doubt. ... They seem to be in a state of what we call cognitive dissonance, where what they believe doesn’t match reality. People in that state tend to cling to their beliefs over reality. They dig themselves even deeper. I think the things we see at the rallies, where people get into these cheers and adore everything he says, is very typical of what we see in run-of-the-mill cults. There’s what we might call blind obedience or blind followership.”

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Mary Beth Altier, an assistant professor at New York University specializing in radicalization, cautioned that some Trump supporters might act out should his rallies stop. “While people saying these things is awful and they may radicalize other people, if we quash their ability to say them, my research shows they may become more violent because they can’t express those grievances. It’s a catch-22,” she said.

And even if Trump leaves office, it’s no guarantee that Trumpism will end. “I think it’s only going to intensify,” Neiwert said, citing fears that Trump would not lead a peaceful transition.

It’s a concern Lalich shares. “I think he can still remain their leader. He doesn’t need to have office,” she said. “He’s already threatened that it’s going to be rigged and that his people will rise up. I think that’s not going to change very much because he has reawakened such hatred in this country.”

[link:https://www.thedailybeast.com/can-trumps-hard-core-fans-be-deradicalized?ref=scroll|

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Wonderful!