Twisting twisting twisting the night away (ODT)
Supporters at a campaign rally in North Carolina suspect a liberal hoax as police hold avowed Trump supporter Cesar Sayoc
via ‘I bet $500 they are lying’: Trump fans sceptical about pipe bomb arrest | US news | The Guardian
Yesterday’s bomb threat showed yet again that Trump is the most prominent enabler of domestic terrorism in the US.
Under this presidency, racial dog whistles have been normalised. Even worse, white supremacist ideology has been validated, and Nazi protesters are regarded as “very fine people”. When Trump recently proclaimed he is a nationalist, which is understood as white nationalist – white supremacists such as former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke heralded the announcement. Trump’s Republican Party has undergone its full-scale descent into fascism, complete with Brownshirts such as the Proud Boys – a gang of Republican-affiliated street brawlers who thrive on toxic masculinity, Islamophobia and racial violence, and seek broader public acceptance at a time when their man is the most powerful person in America. This, as white nationalist hate group Identity Evropa plots its infiltration into the Republican Party to mainstream their white supremacy and ban nonwhite immigration.
via Fake news, racism and bombs: Fear and loathing in Trump’s America | USA | Al Jazeera
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Trump proudly says he is a “nationalist.”
He is, of course, saying this to shore up support among white nationalists. The Nazi sites on the web were all having wet dreams in the aftermath.
From the 1990s, polling has found that about 10% of Americans support far right militias. These are the white nationalists. Trump came to power by mobilizing that 10% and combining it with Republicans and independents.
It is not an accident that Benito Mussolini called his party “Nationalist Fascism.” The two go together. Trump performs the “fascist” part of this two-part term every time he does a rally, so he doesn’t have to say “I am a Nationalist Fascist,” i.e. a Mussolini-ist. But that is what he is.
via “I am a Nationalist” – Donald Trump apes Mussolini in Drive to destroy America
History repeats itself, observed Karl Marx, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
In the 1950s the “red scare” warned of communists sympathetic to the Soviet Union lurking around every corner of the US. On Tuesday, the White House was back at it, this time raising the spectre of Marx, Bernie Sanders and working mothers in Sweden.
A pre-election report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers sounds the alarm: “Coincident with the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth [May 1818], socialism is making a comeback in American political discourse. Detailed policy proposals from self-declared socialists are gaining support in Congress and among much of the electorate.”
The paper also just happens to be “coincident” with the 2018 midterm elections. It does not take a wild leap of imagination to foresee a feedback loop in which the Fox News host Sean Hannity cites the study as evidence of socialism posing an existential threat, after which Donald Trump talks and tweets about the issue.
Entitled Opportunity Costs of Socialism, the report struck many observers as an attempt by Republicans to neutralise what could be the winning issue for Democrats – healthcare – cloaked in academese about Das Kapital and the follies of “Maoist China, Cuba, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)”.
via The socialists are coming! White House sounds alarm at rise of the left | US news | The Guardian
The woman had just settled into her plane seat and fallen asleep when she was awoken by an unwanted touch – a hand from behind her grabbing the right side of her breast.
And the man authorities say is responsible allegedly cited President Donald Trump’s past lewd language about women as justification for his alleged sexual assault.
via ‘The President of the United States says it’s OK to grab women by their private parts’
After President Donald Trump fired off a hysterical tweet this weekend warning of mass “voter fraud”—a right-wing bogeyman for which there is virtually zero evidence—and threatening violators with severe punishment, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law condemned the president for deploying Jim Crow-era scare tactics to suppress minority voter turnout just two weeks before the midterm elections.
“We are going to terminate the agreement and then we are going to develop the weapons” unless Russia and China agree to a new deal, Trump said on Saturday.
via Trump ‘confirms’ he’s pulling US out of nuclear deal with Russia — RT US News
“You have scientists on both sides of it. My uncle was a great professor at MIT for many years, Dr. John Trump,” the president said. “And I didn’t talk to him about this particular subject, but I have a natural instinct for science, and I will say that you have scientists on both sides of the picture.”
via Trump says he has ‘natural instinct for science’ when it comes to climate change – POLITICO
Trump boasted that he could shoot someone down walking in the street on 5th Avenue and his fan base would not care. Strong men around the world heard him joking about murdering political opponents.
Trump urges crowds to menace journalists, calls them the ‘worst people,’ and just praised Montana congressman Greg Gianforte for body-slamming a young journalist, Ben Jacobs, and breaking his classes, for which Gianforte was fined by a court.
Trump wants to introduce political libel laws into the US, such that a politician could sue anyone who crticizes him for defamation. The Saudis don’t do anything so formal as instituting court proceedings, but political libel is very much a crime in Saudi Arabia and it is used to silence critical voices and journalists.
When asked about Putin’s own notorious assassinations of his critics, Trump gave the Russian strong man a pass, saying that the US also whacks people. Well no doubt it does, but not Washington Post journalists, or at least not openly and regularly.
When Trump made a state visit to Saudi Arabia in May of 2017, he said to his audience there, “We are not here to lecture you. We are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be or how to worship.” You couldn’t find a clearer mandate for strongman rule in the Arab world or a clearer promise that
via Top Five Ways Trump Enabled MBS Murder of Journalist Khashoggi
The Trumps were typically way more than mere licensors or bystanders in their often-troubled deals. They were deeply involved in these projects. They helped mislead investors and buyers — and they profited handsomely from it.
via Trump Reportedly Duped Investors and Profited Handsomely for Years
The globally renowned journalist was writing about the circumstances in his homeland, and in other Arab states. But he could have been writing about much of the world, where freedom of expression, and the democratic promises that extend from it, are under murderous assault. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calculates that 57 journalists who were employed by media outlets (including six in the United States) have been killed so far this year, along with 10 citizen journalists and four media assistants. At the same time, 167 journalists, 150 citizen journalists, and 19 media assistants are imprisoned—including 28 Saudi Arabians.
via Donald Trump is Putting Every Journalist in Every Country at Risk | The Nation
US President Donald Trump says “rogue killers” may have been behind the disappearance of prominent Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Georgia Democratic Gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams takes the stage to declare victory in the primary during an election night event on May 22, 2018 in Atlanta, Georgia. If elected, Abrams would become the first African American female governor in the nation. (Photo: Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)
Civil rights groups have filed a new lawsuit in order to stop a statewide voter suppression effort in Georgia after the GOP gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp—who just happens to be the state’s Attorney General as well—led an effort to purge more than 50,000 voter registrations, predominately of black voters, from the rolls just weeks before the November 6 election.
A White House spokesperson this week promised to “look into” a Fox News decision to cease broadcasting of Trump campaign rallies in full.
According to The Daily Beast, the White House is concerned about losing a key platform just before the midterms. Instead of airing the rallies in their entirety, the network has taken to showing abbreviated clips of the events.
Rallies in recent days have drawn significantly lower ratings, Politico reported. In some cases, Trump rallies have fewer viewers than regular Fox News programming.
A senior White House official reportedly said that White House Communication Director Bill Shine, a former Fox News executive, was expected to be in talks with the network about the decision to nix live Trump rallies.
The officials said that Shine would “look into that.”
via Trump Furious About Fox News’ Decision Not To Air His Rally Live | Crooks and Liars
News Corp Australia follows are we now no longer going to shirtfront Putin?(ODT)
On Sept. 26, 2018, President Donald Trump made an extraordinary accusation against China during his remarks to the United Nations Security Council, saying, “Regrettably, we found that China has been attempting to interfere in our upcoming 2018 election coming up in November against my administration.” He made the claim without offering any evidence, but he did speculate about China’s motivation: “They do not want me, or us, to win because I am the first president ever to challenge China on trade.”
As Georgia’s Democratic candidate for governor, Stacey Abrams, called for voters in her state to fight Republican efforts at voter suppression by showing up at polls in large numbers in next month’s election, a national grassroots group reported Secretary of State Brian Kemp—also the GOP’s gubernatorial candidate—to the Justice Department late Wednesday night for blatantly violating the Voting Rights Act in order to swing the upcoming election in his own favor.
As of September 1, The Washington Post’s fact-checkers had identified 5,001 untruths over the 601 days of his presidency — an average of 8.3 a day, with the trend accelerating. When Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale watches Trump’s rally speeches, he chronicles the lies in real time on Twitter. The president’s former personal lawyer reportedly wouldn’t allow Trump to testify in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe because he knows Trump is “a fucking liar” who could not help but perjure himself.
It’s not, of course. George Soros isn’t handing out wads of cash to women on the street and the Clintons aren’t organising some massive behind-the-scenes retribution. The anger voiced by American women is deeply felt.
Far from scaling back its snooping after Snowden pulled the curtain on PRISM, the US has multiplied its efforts. Citing ‘national security’, lawmakers renewed the NSA’s sweeping spying powers this year. Domestic phone surveillance tripled last year, user data requests to Apple doubled, and user data requests to Google were at an all-time high.
And just recently, the ‘Five eyes’ powers – the US, the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia – issued a memo demanding that tech giants implement ‘backdoors’ to allow governments direct access to users’ encrypted data.
The entire narrative of cyber threats to the “good guys” US is a smokescreen to hide the unenviable fact: it’s the US that’s the apex predator of the digital ocean.
What follows is a list of people and organizations that have opposed Brett Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court of the United States:
Letter signed by 2,400+ law professors
40 Harvard law professors
900 female law school faculty members
160 Maine lawyers and law professors
Alaskan female attorneys
47 Yale faculty
Yale Law School alumni and students
Retired Justice John Paul Stevens
Three former Kavanaugh clerks
88 Maine writers
The National Council of Churches
Mormon Women for Ethical Government
America Magazine
Kavanaugh’s former Yale classmate
Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe
Alumni of Georgetown Prep
Benjamin Wittes — “I Know Brett Kavanaugh, but I Wouldn’t Confirm Him”
1,600 men in a full-page New York Times ad
Evangelical minister Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
“The most notable part of this report is what’s not in it,” Feinstein told reporters, adding that Kavanaugh, his accuser Christine Blasey Ford and several witnesses had not been interviewed by investigators.
However, Chuck Grassley, the Republican chair of the Judiciary Committee, said the FBI report found “no hint of misconduct”.
President Donald Trump gave the FBI a week to look into the matter and said publicly that the law enforcement agency had free rein. But Democrats accused the administration of restricting the probe behind the scenes.
Not interviewing Kavanaugh, Ford and other key witnesses raises “serious concerns that this is not a credible investigation and begs the question: what other restrictions has the White House placed on the FBI?” Feinstein said before the report was completed.
via Brett Kavanaugh
Both groups have chronicled and challenged Trump’s conflicts and violations throughout his presidency. Lisa Gilbert, vice president of legislative affairs for Public Citizen, noted that “no president has pushed the ethical boundaries like Trump.”
“Many of the unprecedented ethical problems we see with this administration,” Bookbinder explained, “stem from President Trump’s failure to divest from his businesses.”
The report’s forward-looking proposals, which largely rely on congressional action, have four overarching goals:
Preventing conflicts of interest;
Improving financial disclosure of candidates and office holders;
Enhancing rules on gifts to candidates and public officials; and
Strengthening the integrity of government.
“There you have it: Donald Trump is no self-made man, he was a millionaire at age eight and only survived on his daddy’s money.”
Undermining the narrative President Donald Trump has aggressively promoted of his success as a “self-made” billionaire—the platform upon which he has built his success as a business mogul as well as his campaign for president in 2016—the New York Times released an explosive in-depth report on Tuesday detailing schemes which allowed Trump to avoid paying taxes on wealth that was transferred from his parents to himself and his siblings.
The “dubious tax schemes” Trump helped coordinate include cases of “outright fraud,” according to the Times.
Trump has for years been fond of telling audiences that through hard work and financial know-how he was able to transform a single $1 million loan from his father, Fred Trump, into a $10 billion fortune—a tale that made him a popular figure with those who voted for him in 2016.
In a move to chill speech critical of Israel, a former Israel lobbyist who is now the Trump administration’s top civil rights enforcer has said that the Department of Education will apply standards that conflate criticism of Israel and Zionism with anti-Jewish bigotry.
The announcement was made without public or congressional notification or debate, and reportedly took current and former investigators in the education department “by surprise.”
via Trump administration moves to curb campus criticism of Israel | The Electronic Intifada
Conscientious people applying appropriate methodology are always at risk of ridicule from right-wingers — it’s an extension of the right’s anti-science, anti-expertise bias. Conservatives regularly suspect researchers and experts of bad faith and political bias — see the climate change debate, or the smearing of the inspectors who correctly determined that Iraq lacked weapons of mass destruction in 2003.
Trump is wrong and the George Washington researchers are right — but they’re researchers, so of course they’re an easy target for conservative know-nothings.
and
Senior Tyler Linfesty hammed it up, doing double takes or smiling knowingly when Trump told one of his famous whoppers. Trump’s handlers, alarmed by the insufficiently beatific expression on Linfesty’s face, came and got all three of the young students. They appear to have replaced them with Trump staffers. Then the staffers and the secret service agents took Linfesty to a room and kept him there for ten minutes before releasing him.
It is the kind of thing that happens in dictatorships all the time, though of course with worse consequences. But the difference is one of degree, not of kind.
Trump tries to divide Americans by ethnic group and social class and set them fighting one another in hopes of dividing and ruling. He is nasty. Having put his hands all over women’s bodies all his life without their consent and buying off the ones who objected or might blab, he is now reshaping the Supreme Court so that women entirely lose control over their own bodies to 5 male justices. Brett Kavanaugh admitted that there are no Federal laws governing any aspect of men’s bodies.
“The Times should never have done that, because really what they’ve done is virtually, you know, it’s treason,” the president said in an interview with Fox News broadcast earlier Friday.
Asked on Air Force One whether action should be taken against the Times, Trump said “I’m looking at that right now.”
via Trump Demands Attorney General Sessions Probe Anonymous Op-Ed, despite No Crime
Washington, DC – It is becoming a near-daily occurence. Leaks from inside US President Donald Trump’s White House have both riled and undermined its current occupant and his administration.
That report, from the pro-Trump Washington Examiner columnist Paul Bedard, was about the unified Republican government managing to avoid the disagreements over spending that were common in the past 20 years, when the White House and Congress were often controlled by different parties.
Trump’s blatant disregard for the actual text of the article he held up for reporters to photograph did contribute to one record he is on pace to set: as the first president to be caught lying more than 10,000 times during a four-year term.
via Trump Shows Reporters an Article Praising Him, Then Lies About What It Says
With President Donald Trump reportedly “volcanic” over the authorship of an anonymous op-ed by a “high-ranking” White House official in the New York Times, the game being played far and wide after the publication of the explosive and deeply troubling column is, of course: which of the many jerks hired, elected, (or born) into the president’s inner-circle wrote it?
And that quote tells you everything you have to know. This author supported the tax scam passed by the GOP last February, which cut government services for most people and gave the super wealthy a huge and wholly undeserved tax cut.
The author supports “deregulation” of a sort that has gutted the environmental regulations that had reduced poisons in our air, soil and water. This regime is literally trying to poison babies. This guy thinks that is great.
Trump raised the US war budget to $700 bn. even though the US has no peer enemy. We spend as much on our military as the next 14 countries combined. All together, the US probably spends $1 trillion a year on military-related expenses. Military spending creates few jobs, and about half of that money is given out to private contracting firms, so that it is welfare for the rich. The money could have gone to student debt relief or rebuilding Puerto Rico. This guy thinks that the bloated military budget is an accomplishment.
via Trump’s Enablers boast of Saving Nation but Reveal they’re Looting the Nation
“Trump has betrayed America’s workforce, sacrificing lives at the altar of industry profits.”
TRICKLE UP EFFECT (ODT)
“President Trump pushed through a tax scam that gave unprecedented handouts to billionaires and corporations—but believes it’s too expensive to pay hardworking federal workers a reasonable wage.”
The land of the free where all citizens aren’t equal (ODT)
Fort Worth is suffering a crisis of democracy – just 6% of electors voted in the last midterms – so why is it aggressively pursuing those who mistakenly cast ballots?
Ed PilkingtonCrystal Mason, who is facing five years in Texas prisons because she mistakenly cast a provisional ballot when she was not allowed to do so.
Crystal Mason, who is facing five years in Texas prisons because she mistakenly cast a provisional ballot when she was not allowed to do so. Photograph: Ed Pilkington for the GuardianWhen Crystal Mason appears in federal court in Fort Worth, Texas, this week she has been warned by her lawyers to be prepared for the worst. Pack a bag, they told her, talk to your children, be ready to go to prison.
As the clock ticks down to her court hearing on 30 August, she finds herself unable to take that advice. “No, I’m not prepared! I can’t go to prison. I’m not leaving my kids,” she said.
Mason, a 43-year-old mother of three, has been sentenced to five years in Texas state penitentiary – with extra time pending in federal lock-up. All because she committed the crime of voting.
On 8 November 2016, as the world waited with bated breath for the outcome of the Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton election, she walked to her local Fort Worth polling station to perform her civic duty as a US citizen. To her surprise, her name wasn’t registered on the voting rolls, so she cast a provisional ballot pending further checks.
Sign up to receive the top US stories every morningIn the small print of the form it read: “I understand that it is a felony of the 2nd degree to vote in an election for which I know I am not eligible.” She didn’t read those words, focused as she was on correctly entering her personal details.
via US voter suppression: why this Texas woman is facing five years’ prison | US news | The Guardian
Polling results released Wednesday by Politico/Morning Consult show that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who is widely speculated to make another run for the Oval Office in 2020, would beat President Donald Trump by double digits.
In a face-off between Sanders and Trump, the senator garnered a 12-point lead, with 44 percent of respondents favoring Sanders, 32 percent who said they would vote to re-elect the president, and 24 percent who didn’t know or had no opinion.
via By Double-Digit Margin, Poll Shows Sanders Mopping the Floor With Trump in Latest 2020 Matchup
All’s not smooth sailing inTrumpland
After the Kochs said they would not back the Republican in a key Senate race, Donald Trump duly took aim at the conservative billionaire brothers, calling them “globalists” and a “total joke” with a “highly overrated” political network.
The midterm elections, in which many analysts expect a “blue wave” to place the House and possibly the Senate under Democratic control, are less than 100 days away.
Republicans across the US will be alarmed by such loud shots in a fight between a president hugely popular with party members and Charles and David Koch, the libertarian industrialists who have poured money into achieving rightwing legislative priorities.
via Trump turns against ‘total joke’ Koch brothers after North Dakota snub | US news | The Guardian
In the nearly four months since FBI agents raided his office, home and hotel room, Cohen has felt wounded and abandoned by Trump, waiting for calls or even a signal of support that never came. Cohen got frustrated when Trump started talking about him in the past tense, panicked last month when he thought the President no longer cared about his plight, and became furious when Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani contradicted some of his accounts, according to his associates.
via From ‘punching bag’ to hitting back: inside Cohen’s break with Trump
High-level talks between the United States and North Korea have appeared to hit a snag as Pyongyang said a visit by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had been “regrettable” and accused Washington of making “gangster-like” demands to pressure the country into abandoning its nuclear weapons.
![The fallout from the anonymous opinion piece in The New York Times is reverberating through Washington, DC [Evan Vucci/AP]](https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2018/9/6/a31b988a164544f6af71bf0d6a09ebfe_18.jpg "The six biggest Trump leaks")
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