Tracker

Retail giant Walmart has removed guns and ammunition from its U.S. sales floors out of concern for theft amid “civil unrest” over the killings of Black people by police. Guns will remain available for purchase upon request, said the company, which sells firearms in about half of its 4,750 U.S. stores. Walmart has pulled guns off its shelves in the past ― most recently in June, amid the summer’s protests over police killings. The shooting death of Walter Wallace Jr. by Philadelphia police on Monday has touched off another wave of demonstrations as a contentious election season comes to a head. “We have seen some isolated civil unrest and as we have done on several occasions over the last few years, we have moved our firearms and ammunition off the sales floor as a precaution for the safety of our associates and customers,” Walmart said in a statement first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Yhis is past the point where it can be ignored in any way. Australia, with 25 million people is in a far better position - 583 nation-wide deaths. 550 were in long-term care facilities. The reasons are very simple and doable but right-wingers will foam at the mouth. 1. There are national standards for care facilities as to staffing, housing and care models, whether the facility is public (almost all are), for-profit or non-for-profit. 2. There must be inly one resident per room. 3. All care facilities were locked down for two weeks at the start of the pandemic- no visitors and no staff moving from one facility to another. 4. All visitors to these are checked at the door before entry, and are required to advise if they become ill after visiting. 5. there was a severe lockdown overall in the country for two weeks with no non-essential travels leaving or coming in, and even after the initial lockdown, all incoming travelers had to checked upon entry and isolate following entry.

This is the beginning of the scorched-earth policy that the GOP and Trump are instituting to punish America for voting them out and it is only going to get worse from here on. They will scramble to enrich themselves and try to shield themselves from criminal charges. It will escalate after the election and then the violence and threats will reach heights not seen in America since their last civil war. Canada will probably have to restrict Americans from flooding over the border even further.

An open question, but I think so.

There is some reason for optimism regrading the SCOTUS. Firstly, it has emerged that Justice Clarence Thomas has comitted perjury several times and can be impeached, leaving the door open for a progressive, and the Democrats are actively considering an 18 year term limit for justices, which would remove another judge or two.

The "accordion motion" is Trumps "tell"- he ises it when he is lying and wants to really sell his crap.

Here are the purported facts to the laptop story: apparently Hunter Biden, who lives in Los Angeles, has a problem with his expensive Apple laptop, so he flies to New Jersey and gives his laptop which has all kinds of damaging stuff on it to a small computer shop, which has little experiences with Apple computers and is run by a blind technician to be repaired. No, wait. there are two, no three laptops. Why would anyone disbelieve this story?

FBI statistic: killings attributed to right-wingers in past 10 years- 519, killings attributed to left-wingers: ONE

"******* Cold-Blooded’ GOP Operatives Accused of Running Ohio’s Largest Ever Bribery Scheme A cross-reference of details in Ohio’s bombshell criminal complaint involving top state Republicans reveals a scandal that stretches from Columbus to Arizona to Washington. In September 2019, Matt Borges, an Ohio lobbyist and former chairman of the state Republican Party, reached out to a canvasser working to collect petition signatures to roll back a massive bailout of Ohio’s nuclear energy industry. According to federal prosecutors, he offered the canvasser $15,000 to be a double agent and provide the opposition with inside information. The canvasser initially recoiled at the prospect, and immediately after the meeting contacted the FBI. The FBI wired him up and told him to circle back with Borges and accept the offer. According to criminal complaints handed down this week, the canvasser—referred to as Confidential Human Source 1—reconnected with Borges, got that $15,000 payment, and proceeded to provide extensive, damning details to investigators about what the U.S. attorney in Ohio’s Southern District called “likely the largest bribery [and] money-laundering scheme ever perpetrated against the people of the state of Ohio.” Borges was one of five people arrested Tuesday; another was Larry Householder, the Republican speaker of Ohio’s state house of representatives. Prosecutors accuse them of orchestrating a massive bribery and racketeering scheme to funnel money from Ohio utility FirstEnergy into the pockets of Householder, his allies, and a sprawling network of interest groups, political action committees, and consulting firms. In exchange, the feds say, Householder, Borges, and their co-conspirators spearheaded successful legislative efforts to bail out FirstEnergy’s struggling nuclear-power business to the tune of $1.5 billion. https://www.thedailybeast.com/*******-cold-blooded-gop-operatives-accused-of-running-ohios-largest-ever-bribery-scheme?ref=home

If he is not clearly better than Medlock, he might develop a painful hangnail or such that would sideline him for the season.

https://samsandmore.ca/index.php

This just might be the year Medlock is challenged by that guy from Quebec.

It might be due to a phallus measuring contest.

Not sure if anyone actually lives in the Yukon, or just tries to survive there.

FYI: Did you know that of the 10 worst weather events in Canadian recorded history, five of them happened in the Calgary area? Weird. Maybe karma?

If Ambrosie is able to squeeze the 45 million out of the feds, the other pieces ought to fall into place. I am cautiously optimistic that it will happen. God knows, we need some good news to distract us.

Trump’s Now Claiming He Got ‘Extra Points’ on Cognitive Test. ‘I'M COGNITIVELY THERE’ Haltingly repeating the phrase “person, woman, man, camera, TV” to show off his memory, the president claimed he left doctors in awe and received “extra points” on the test. Amid renewed criticism of his COVID-19 response and new controversy over his decision to sic federal forces on Democratic-led cities, President Trump on Wednesday night resurrected his story about a 2018 cognitive test he insists he got a “perfect mark” on, now claiming he also got “extra points” for a particularly impressive feat. The feat? Repeating the words “person, woman, man, camera, TV” in the right order. In recent weeks, the president has repeatedly called on former Vice President Joe Biden to take the Montreal Cognitive Assessment while bragging that he left doctors “very surprised” that he scored perfectly on the exam. Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, however, pointed out to Trump that the exam isn’t actually hard, as it is meant to test cognitive impairment. “They have a picture and it says ‘what’s that’ and it’s an elephant,” Wallace said to Trump on Sunday. Trump insisted at the time that other questions were much harder and Wallace “couldn’t answer many of the questions” while claiming he personally “answered all 35 questions correctly.” https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-now-claiming-he-got-extra-points-on-cognitive-test?ref=home

NYU fascism expert explains the next moves in Trump’s ‘authoritarian playbook’: He’s ‘a fundamental break from American tradition’ At the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, there’s a poster which identifies “The 12 Early Warning Signs of Fascism.” Here are the criteria: Powerful and continuing nationalism Disdain for human rights Identification of enemies as a unifying cause Rampant sexism Controlled mass media Obsession with national security Religion and government intertwined Corporate power protected Labor power suppressed Disdain for intellectuals and the arts Obsession with crime and punishment Rampant cronyism and corruption This in too many ways is America in the Age of Trump. Trump and his regime are engaged in a white supremacist counterrevolution against the civil rights movement, in which the human rights of nonwhite people are being revoked. This includes a recent effort to circumvent the Constitution by deeming that undocumented immigrants (overwhelmingly Black and brown people) should be erased from the population for purposes of congressional representation. Trump and his regime are criminalizing dissent. He has gone so far as to explicitly state that people who disagree with him are akin to Nazis and should be imprisoned or worse. https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/nyu-fascism-expert-explains-the-next-moves-in-trumps-authoritarian-playbook-hes-a-fundamental-break-from-american-tradition/

Trump’s Joint Chiefs vice chairman said the president ‘is an idiot’ who only cares about money — according to a retired Army Colonel A Washington Post profile on a retired Army Colonel reveals President Donald Trump’s Joint Chiefs vice chairman, Gen. John Hyten, thinks his boss is an “idiot,” and the First Lady is “smarter than the president.” Col. Kathy Spletstoser, who retired from the Army in 2019 after serving for 27 years, “has accused Hyten of sexually assaulting her more than half a dozen times while she was under his command,” The Washington Post reports, “and then retaliating against her — accusations that he has vigorously denied during a military investigation and in front of the Senate.” Spletstoser is trying to gain access to records she believes will help her case against Hyten. To support her point, she revealed to The Washington Post a conversation she says Hyten had with her, after he attended a dinner with the president and First Lady in October 2017. “The president is an idiot,” Spletstoser says Hyten told her. “He is just a businessman without the basic understanding of national security. Everything is a business transaction for him and making money is winning to him and the only thing that matters.” https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/trumps-joint-chiefs-vice-chairman-said-the-president-is-an-idiot-who-only-cares-about-money-according-to-a-retired-army-colonel/

Trump And Barr Expand Surge In Federal Officers To Chicago, Albuquerque. WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr announced Wednesday that federal agents will surge into Chicago and Albuquerque to help combat rising crime, expanding the administration’s intervention in local enforcement as Trump runs for reelection under a “law-and-order” mantle. Hundreds of federal agents already have been sent to Kansas City, Missouri, to help quell a record rise in violence after the shooting death of a young boy there. Sending federal agents to help localities is not uncommon. Barr announced a similar surge effort in December for seven cities that had seen spiking violence. Usually, the Justice Department sends agents under its own umbrella, like agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives or the Drug Enforcement Agency. But this surge effort will include at least 100 Department of Homeland Security Investigations officers working in the region who generally conduct drug trafficking and child exploitation investigations. DHS officers have already been dispatched to Portland, Oregon, and other localities to protect federal property and monuments as Trump has lambasted efforts by protesters to knock down Confederate statutes. Trump has linked the growing violence in the streets with protests over racial injustice, though criminal justice experts say the spike defies easy explanation, pointing to the unprecedented moment the country is living through — a pandemic that has killed more than 140,000 Americans, historic unemployment, stay-at-home orders, a mass reckoning over race and police brutality, intense stress and even the weather. And compared with other years, crime is down overall. Local authorities have complained that the surges in federal agents have only exacerbated tensions on the streets. The decision to dispatch federal agents to American cities is playing out at a hyper-politicized moment when Trump is trying to show he is a “law-and-order” president and painting Democratic-led cities as out of control. With less than four months to go before Election Day, Trump has been serving up dire warnings that the violence would worsen if his Democratic rival Joe Biden is elected in November, as he tries to win over voters who could be swayed by that message. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-expands-federal-surge-chicago_n_5f189cd4c5b6128e68202876 (And so it begins. Trump is doing what he said he would do- use a private militia to promote his power and ego)

Sadly, this is what happens all too often when a ruling party sees that there is no real opposition. Mark Twain said that governments, like babies, ought to changed often, and for the same reasons.

And they allow heavily armed anti-maskers to occupy public buildings but arrest nuns protesting children in cages and peaceful remostrators sitting on the lawn of a state attorney general.

Here’s why the White House is sending stormtroopers into Portland In one of the most alarming developments of Trump’s presidency, dozens of federal agents in full camouflage seized protesters and threw them into unmarked cars, taking them to locations unknown without specifying a reason for arrest. It appears that at least some of the agents involved belonged to the US Customs and Border Protection (colloquially known as Border Patrol), an organization that obviously has no business whatsoever conducted counterinsurgency tactics against peaceful American protesters in Portland, Oregon. Neither the mayor of Portland nor the governor of Oregon wanted them there; in fact, they specifically requested that they leave. And now a U.S. Attorney for the State of Oregon is calling for an investigation into the arrests, even as the Acting head of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, is vowing to ramp up these actions both in Portland and reportedly elsewhere. Needless to say, this is a chilling step toward police state authoritarian rule in the United States, one that was presaged by Attorney General Barr’s approval of an pre-curfew assault on protesters instigated in Lafayette Square to clear the way for a presidential campaign photo op. Few took it seriously when leftist organizers were warning that the border patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were being culturally and structurally converted into stormtroopers for the Trump regime, equally ready to be deployed against politically inconvenient American citizens as against undocumented immigrants seeking a better life. Those warnings should be heeded now. We should not allow ourselves to become numb to this. It is helpful psychologically–even if tired and stale as a rhetorical device–to remind ourselves what the reactions would be if a Democrat were acting similarly. Imagine if President Obama had sent in in military-garbed federal stormtroopers to round up Tea Party protesters into unmarked cars, over the top of the objections of local governors and mayors. It’s unthinkable. It’s the sort of thing that drove bizarre right-wing conspiracy theories like Jade Helm, but that if any shred of them were true would instantly have embroiled the country in a civil war. So why is Trump doing it? Many theories abound—none of them entirely convincing on their own, but all of them deeply disturbing.\ One explanation is that it’s a trial run for future police state actions, partly to push the window of the possible, partly to desensitize the public to further abuses, and partly to see precisely what they can get away with and what Americans will tolerate. This is no doubt true to a certain extent, but the challenge is that it also carries enormous downside risk. If Trump doesn’t win re-election he has less than six months left in his presidency–hardly time enough for a deeply unpopular and divisive president to engineer a police state coup. And just as with the outrage in Lafayette Square, the mere action itself will likely make Trump even more unpopular with the few undecided voters who remain. Another convergent explanation is that making a show of supposed toughness in conducting military counterinsurgency in Democratic-controlled cities that want no part of it will thrill Trump’s base. This is reasonable to assume, since Trump’s base takes no greater joy than in seeing authoritarian cruelty exercised against their political enemies. And it’s likely true, since Trump is obsessed with his base to the exclusion of all else beyond his own personal profit. But the problem is that almost everyone in the Trump campaign’s immediate orbit beyond the president himself knows that Trump must expand beyond his shrinking base to have any chance of winning re-election. The more Trump gives aging bigots dopamine hits, the more the rest of the country falls away from him. Camouflaged stormtroopers used against American citizens will almost certainly lose him more votes than he gains. But there is a third explanation, simultaneously dumber and yet more convincing: the Fox News effect. Trump spends endless hours watching garbage cable television, specifically One America News (OAN) and Fox News. Judging from Trump’s tweets, his entire political universe revolves around Fox News–and, more recently, the even more bizarrely propagandistic OAN when even Fox News fails to adequately toe the line. Ever since the beginning of the protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd, Fox News has been portraying liberal American cities as hellscapes of violence in which the police and the Trump Administration played the role of hero against rampaging hordes. Most Americans, of course, didn’t see it that way. But if you live entirely in the Fox News bubble, then this narrative is as self-evident a truth as the rising of the sun in the east. Most recently, Fox News has been describing Portland in particular, in the words of former Media Matters for America contributor Oliver Willis, as if it were Baghdad circa 2003. This is not the case, of course. Crime rates in Portland have been on a steady decline for decades, with the last month being no significant exception. In fact, the worst Acting HHS Secretary Wolf could point to was literally a few instances of graffiti. But if Fox News were the sum of your reality, you would believe that emergency action needed to be taken before the residents started to erect a Thunderdome and the services of Snake Plissken would be required. You would send in the troops despite the potential cost out of a belief that relieved Americans would be desperately grateful for your embrace of “law and order” (even if it were heavy on the “order” and light on the “law.”) You would do whatever it took to bring the situation to heel, and figure the public approval would follow from the new Pax Trumpiana. After all, Fox News declared it must be so. This last scenario is admittedly ridiculous. But it’s also likely closest to the truth. While figures like Stephen Miller no doubt have a laser focus on instituting an authoritarian apartheid regime to save white supremacist Republican rule the demographic tsunami preparing to overwhelm them, they are not the president. Donald Trump is. Trump is a man of impulse, not of plans. His head is not set on the next 20 years of power, but on tomorrow’s cable news ratings. The constructed reality of Fox News is his reality. The rest of the authoritarian project follows from there. And that more than anything else likely explains why the president is precipitating a constitutional crisis by sending stormtroopers into Portland.