Nicker on 24/9/2020 at 12:43
Just throwing the Trump ball back in from the sidelines.
A video of choice Trump lies under oath with regards to the fraud committed with Trump University. This was sealed to prevent it from coming to light during the 2016 election.
[video=youtube;HLMr2Ck9KVo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLMr2Ck9KVo[/video]
demagogue on 27/9/2020 at 06:22
My right wing contacts are all sharing (
https://pjmedia.com/election/matt-margolis/2020/09/24/military-ballots-found-in-the-trash-in-pennsylvania-all-were-trump-votes-n964614) this story. I guess this is how it happens, in plain view, just as Trump "predicted" it would happen, no questions asked.
Who knows how many 100,000s of people will be galvanized to toss aside the legal bounds of democracy over nine misplaced ballots from BFE USA that were recovered anyway? I'm sure 90%+ of them never read the story, just the headline. The system worked, the ballots recovered, and they're still crying bloody murder, ready to do anything it takes to ignore the vote and keep Trump in power.
Quote:
Military Ballots Found in the Trash in Pennsylvania—All Were Trump Votes1
Mail-in ballots from the military serving overseas were found in the trash in Pennsylvania. The ballots were discovered during an investigation into election issues in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. They were all votes for President Trump.
The U.S. Attorney's Office Middle District of Pennsylvania released a statement on the situation on Thursday:
On Monday, September 21, 2020, at the request of Luzerne County District Attorney Stefanie Salavantis, the Office of the United States Attorney along with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Scranton Resident Office, began an inquiry into reports of potential issues with a small number of mail-in ballots at the Luzerne County Board of Elections.
Since Monday, FBI personnel working together with the Pennsylvania State Police have conducted numerous interviews and recovered and reviewed certain physical evidence. Election officials in Luzerne County have been cooperative. At this point we can confirm that a small number of military ballots were discarded. Investigators have recovered nine ballots at this time. Some of those ballots can be attributed to specific voters and some cannot. All nine ballots were cast for presidential candidate Donald Trump.
While nine ballots have been recovered, it is not clear how many were actually discarded.
Edit: It's even worse than I thought. That should be my go-to reflex at this point.
AP News: (
https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-local-elections-pennsylvania-elections-campaigns-07ab572103d67a3341011a691118f696) Probe into ‘discarded' ballots becomes campaign outrage fuel
As one commentator summarized it:
Quote Posted by Scott Horton
This might be the best demonstration so far of how cynical and hypocritical the entire GOP-Fox outrage machine is. Let's unpack this story a bit. (1) The Pennsylvania GOP sues and wins, in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, a ruling that "naked ballots" (ballots in which an insufficient number of envelopes are used) cannot be counted. (2) Implementing this ruling, authorities in Luzern Co (who for good measure are all Republicans) discard nine ballots which were "naked." (3) GOP activists fish these ballots out and create an immense scandal over the ballots which were thrown out by Republicans and not counted because of the GOP lawsuit. How's that for faux outrage?
And from the article itself:
Quote Posted by AP News
The news release from a U.S. attorney in Pennsylvania was provocative: Nine mailed-in military ballots had been “discarded” by the local election office in a swing county of one of the most important presidential battleground states.
All of them were marked for President Donald Trump, it said. Then came another news release with key details changed — the presidential choice was unknown on two of the ballots because they had been resealed — but still little explanation of what had happened and whether investigators believed a criminal act had occurred.
Despite the information vacuum, the White House press secretary told reporters “ballots for the president” had been “cast aside.” The Trump campaign's rapid response arm pushed out the release from Trump's own Justice Department under the headline “Democrats are trying to steal the election” — ignoring the fact that the local government, Luzerne County, is controlled by Republicans. Conservative voices used the news release as rocket fuel to amplify the investigation on social media.
Thursday's kerfuffle and accompanying internet outrage over a handful of ballots is likely a taste of what's to come in the month left before the presidential election, which is being held amid a global pandemic that has triggered a wave of absentee ballot requests as Trump continues to launch unsubstantiated attacks on mail voting.
It was Trump, after being briefed on the case by Attorney General William Barr, who first revealed publicly that the discarded ballots had been cast for him. He did so in an interview earlier Thursday with Fox News Radio in which he used the investigation to further sow doubt about mail-in voting. The radio interview was hours before the U.S. attorney's office in Pennsylvania issued its news release about the probe to reporters.
“If past is prologue, we will see more,” said Wendy Weiser, an elections expert and director of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “We are in an unprecedented situation where a sitting president of the United States and a candidate for reelection is and has long been actively seeking to undermine the election and discredit it.” [...]
Starker on 28/9/2020 at 02:11
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the COVID:
Quote:
(
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/25/trump-hhs-ads-coronavirus-421957)
The health department is moving quickly on a highly unusual advertising campaign to "defeat despair" about the coronavirus, a $300 million-plus effort that was shaped by a political appointee close to President Donald Trump and executed in part by close allies of the official, using taxpayer funds.
The ad blitz, described in some budget documents as the "Covid-19 immediate surge public advertising and awareness campaign," is expected to lean heavily on video interviews between administration officials and celebrities, who will discuss aspects of the coronavirus outbreak and address the Trump administration's response to the crisis, according to six individuals with knowledge of the campaign who described its workings to POLITICO.
Senior administration officials have already recorded interviews with celebrities like actor Dennis Quaid and singer CeCe Winans, and the Health and Human Services Department also has pursued television host Dr. Mehmet Oz and musician Garth Brooks for roles in the campaign.
The public awareness campaign, which HHS is seeking to start airing before Election Day on Nov. 3, was largely conceived and organized by Michael Caputo, the health department's top spokesperson who took medical leave last week and announced on Thursday that he had been diagnosed with cancer. Caputo, who has no medical or scientific background, claimed in a Facebook video on Sept. 13 that the campaign was "demanded of me by the president of the United States. Personally."
"The Democrats — and, by the way, their conjugal media and the leftist scientists that are working for the government — are dead set against it," Caputo told his Facebook followers in the Sept. 13 video. "They cannot afford for us to have any good news before November because they're already losing. ... They're going to come after me because I'm going to be putting $250 million worth of ads on the air."
[...]
Nicker on 28/9/2020 at 23:00
Death and Taxes. (
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/27/politics/trump-income-taxes-new-york-times-report/index.html) Donny Small Hands gets tax-outed by the NYT.
Quote:
Washington (CNN)Donald Trump paid no federal income taxes whatsoever in 10 out of 15 years beginning in 2000 because he reported losing significantly more than he made, according to an explosive report released Sunday by the New York Times.
In both the year he won the presidency and his first year in the White House, Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes, the Times reported.
Detailing payments gleaned from more than two decades of tax information, the Times report outlines extensive financial losses and years of tax avoidance that deal a blow to the business-tycoon brand Trump has built his political career on.
At a White House briefing Sunday, Trump denied the New York Times story and claimed that he pays "a lot" in federal income taxes.
Starker on 29/9/2020 at 00:06
Quote:
At a White House briefing Sunday, Trump denied the New York Times story and claimed that he pays "a lot" in federal income taxes.
Well, there's an easy way to prove the NYT wrong.
Renzatic on 29/9/2020 at 00:42
I'm surprised no one has posted anything about this until now. Though it hasn't done anything to show us what we haven't already known since the 80's, that he's all image, no substance.
Starker on 29/9/2020 at 02:56
Well, three major scandals before noon is just your average Monday now. Best save your energy for the case he wins ((
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/what-if-trump-refuses-concede/616424/) or, more likely, loses and refuses to concede) and you'll have 4 more years of the fun, except this time with the things the administration has refrained from doing that they thought were unpalatable to even their own potential voters.
Just a couple of excerpts from the lengthy Atlantic piece linked above that laid out all kinds of possibilities for Lord Dampnut to stay in office when he loses:
Quote:
[...]
Trump's behavior and declared intent leave no room to suppose that he will accept the public's verdict if the vote is going against him. He lies prodigiously—to manipulate events, to secure advantage, to dodge accountability, and to ward off injury to his pride. An election produces the perfect distillate of all those motives.
Pathology may exert the strongest influence on Trump's choices during the Interregnum. Well-supported arguments, some of them in this magazine, have made the case that Trump fits the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy and narcissism. Either disorder, by its medical definition, would render him all but incapable of accepting defeat.
[...]
Just under a year ago, Justin Clark gave a closed-door talk in Wisconsin to a select audience of Republican lawyers. He thought he was speaking privately, but someone (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am0egba-KNQ) had brought a recording device. He had a lot to say about Election Day operations, or “EDO.”
At the time, Clark was a senior lieutenant with Trump's re*election campaign; in July, he was promoted to deputy campaign manager. “Wisconsin's the state that is going to tip this one way or the other ... So it makes EDO really, really, really important,” he said. He put the mission bluntly: “Traditionally it's always been Republicans suppressing votes ... [Democrats'] voters are all in one part of the state, so let's start playing offense a little bit. And that's what you're going to see in 2020. That's what's going to be markedly different. It's going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program, and we're going to need all the help we can get.” (Clark later claimed that his remarks had been misconstrued, but his explanation made no sense(
https://apnews.com/article/af2f0ede054d8baebbe1bb6ca47b4895) in context.)
Of all the favorable signs for Trump's Election Day operations, Clark explained, “first and foremost is the consent decree's gone.” He was referring to a court order forbidding Republican operatives from using any of a long list of voter-purging and intimidation techniques. The expiration of that order was a “huge, huge, huge, huge deal,” Clark said.
His audience of lawyers knew what he meant. The 2020 presidential election will be the first in 40 years to take place without a federal judge requiring the Republican National Committee to seek approval in advance for any “ballot security” operations at the polls. In 2018, a federal judge allowed the consent decree to expire, ruling that the plaintiffs had no proof of recent violations by Republicans. The consent decree, by this logic, was not needed, because it worked.
The order had its origins in the New Jersey gubernatorial election of 1981. According to the district court's opinion in Democratic National Committee v. Republican National Committee, the RNC allegedly tried to intimidate voters by hiring off-duty law-enforcement officers as members of a “National Ballot Security Task Force,” some of them armed and carrying two-way radios. According to the plaintiffs, they stopped and questioned voters in minority neighborhoods, blocked voters from entering the polls, forcibly restrained poll workers, challenged people's eligibility to vote, warned of criminal charges for casting an illegal ballot, and generally did their best to frighten voters away from the polls. The power of these methods relied on well-founded fears among people of color about contact with police.
This year, with a judge no longer watching, the Republicans are recruiting 50,000 volunteers in 15 contested states to monitor polling places and challenge voters they deem suspicious-looking. Trump (
https://factba.se/transcript/donald-trump-interview-hannity-fox-news-august-20-2020) called in to Fox News on August 20 to tell Sean Hannity, “We're going to have sheriffs and we're going to have law enforcement and we're going to have, hopefully, U.S. attorneys” to keep close watch on the polls. For the first time in decades, according to Clark, Republicans are free to combat voter fraud in “places that are run by Democrats.”
[...]
demagogue on 29/9/2020 at 03:34
I think you all know this, but evidence that he paid almost no taxes is not what Trump was worried about. That's actually the part he was most proud of, and he gloated about it in the 2016 debates, something like: yeah, paying almost no taxes shows why I'm smart and people that pay them are dumb.
The reason I think he didn't want the tax returns released, I think, is because they show how much money he's been losing and how deeply in debt he is. That's also something everybody already knew anyway, but you have to start getting into cluster b personality thinking and see why it's so catastrophic for Trump's ego because it hints at a "loss" (or anything hinting at being anything short of the richest man or greatest president in US history), not coming from the "fake" NYTimes but written down authoritatively in black letters. That flirts with the total collapse of his ego, if he's confronted with it, in a special way. So that's why I think he went so ballistic about it.
But that's not what anybody else really cares about. So we get this weird situation where people are paying obsessive attention to these tax returns as if they're some kind of "bombshell". Of course for neurotypical people there's nothing particularly special about them, except as a brief footnote about something Trump is actually very proud of (that he paid so little taxes). And strategically speaking, it only helps boost his case to pretend their something special. (All my Trumper contacts are already recycling the meme that all they show is how smart he is to avoid taxes.) And the part about his loss is something that was old news already in the 1990s, so people thinking neurotypically just aren't going to get it.
I think generally it's a good lesson to how cluster b moon logic (defense of a snowflake-fragile ego at all costs, scorch the earth before a single sentence of it stands in black ink) works so much differently than neurotpyical logic, which is something I think most people still haven't come to terms with in understanding what makes Trump tick. But most of all, it just dramatizes what a different planet Trump is living on, and why it's so absurd to take him at his own level. Well, it also helps explain the concept of "fleas", where people get so lost in his moon logic that they start thinking in moon logic terms themselves. Well, so it goes.
Pyrian on 29/9/2020 at 19:18
Quote Posted by demagogue
All my Trumper contacts are already recycling the meme that all they show is how smart he is to avoid taxes.
You have a better breed of Trump-pets. Mine have gone all-in on the notion that he "actually" paid $5.2m in 2016-2017, and anybody who doesn't realize that is uninformed with poor reading comprehension. (He paid $5.2m in quarterly
estimated taxes in those two years, but the actual tax bill was a total of $750, meaning the $5.2m can be applied as a tax credit or simply refunded. Quarterly estimated taxes are basically the business equivalent of paycheck tax withholding.)
Starker on 29/9/2020 at 20:25
So, apparently, Lord Dampnut's previous
campaign Death Star manager has been involuntarily committed:
Quote:
(
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/28/former-trump-campaign-manager-brad-parscale-hospitalised-after-threats-to-harm-himself)
Donald Trump's former campaign manager Brad Parscale has been hospitalised after he threatened to harm himself, according to Florida police and campaign officials.
Police were called to the home in Desota Drive in the Seven Isles community of Fort Lauderdale late on Sunday afternoon. The home is owned by Bradley and Candice Parscale.
“When officers arrived on scene, they made contact with the reportee (wife of armed subject) who advised her husband was armed, had access to multiple firearms inside the residence and was threatening to harm himself,” Fort Lauderdale police said in a statement.
[...]
A police report on Monday noted that officers were called by a woman reporting that Parscale had been heard “ranting and raving about something” before a gunshot was fired.
Candice Parscale told police that she ran from the house because she was alarmed by her husband's behavior, local TV station WPLG reported.
According to the report, Parscale began to barricade himself inside the home, hanging up on callers, the police report said, adding that he later spoke to police negotiators.
“I initiated a double leg take down,” wrote Sgt Matthew Moceri, a responding officer, noting that the 6ft 8in Parscale towered over him and would not get on the ground.
When officers initially arrived, Candice Parscale said the couple had argued and Brad pulled out a handgun and loaded it.
She said he had post-traumatic stress disorder and had recently become violent, showing police bruises on her arms from an argument two days prior. Police photographed the injuries, they said, and the Miami Herald reported.
