Tracker

Because.....Alberta.

Trump Won't Say Whether He Will Accept 2020 Election Results: 'I Have To See' During an interview with "Fox News Sunday," the president claimed again without evidence that mail-in voting will "rig" the election. President Donald Trump wouldn’t say whether he will accept the results of the general election in November during an interview with “Fox News Sunday,” claiming again without evidence that the process is rigged before any votes have been cast. Host Chris Wallace asked Trump if he was a good loser, to which the president responded that he is not. “But are you gracious?” Wallace pressed. “You don’t know until you see,” Trump said. “It depends. I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election. I really do.” Asked if he’s suggesting he might not accept the results of the election, Trump said, “I have to see.” https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/trump-fox-news-sunday-accept-election-2020_n_5f1459e9c5b6d14c33686eab?ri18n=true

NYTimes investigation finds Trump administration was desperate to shift blame for a crisis of its own creation Conducting over two dozen interviews with senior administration and public health officials, and consulting a cache of previously unavailable documents, the New York Times has uncovered what now seems obvious to everyone except perhaps Trump’s dwindling and ignorant base of supporters: the Trump administration deliberately sought to shift blame for its botched handling of the Covid-19 pandemic to the states, in what the Times authors aptly characterize as a “catastrophic policy blunder” and “one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations.” A team in the White House led by President Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, met daily on the crisis, but the ultimate goal was shifting responsibility. “They referred to this as ‘state authority handoff,’ and it was at once a catastrophic policy blunder and an attempt to escape blame for a crisis that had engulfed the country — perhaps one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations,” write Michael D. Shear, Noah Weiland, Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman and David E. Sanger. Other than Trump himself, two of the officials taking a lead role in causing this catastrophe, according to the Times, were Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House Coronavirus Task Force leader Deborah Birx. Birx’s role in delivering deliberately upbeat information to Trump (in the face of dire negative news directly to the contrary) played a major role in Trump’s decision-making, according to the Times, which refers to her as the “chief evangelist” portraying the threat from the virus as “fading.” (The Times article in fact contains an entire, devastating segment explicating Birx’s influence on the policy; she declined to be interviewed for the article). https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/nytimes-investigation-finds-trump-administration-was-desperate-to-shift-blame-for-a-crisis-of-its-own-creation/

Col. Sanders must be doing about 5000 rpm in his grave.

Sad, just sad and a condemnation of the American mentality.

Apparently there are night spots on Corydon which have been utterly ignoring all COVID restrictions, and one has been fined twice already to little effect. We seem to have our share of covidiots.

And reports out of Texas say that the governor there is fudging the numbers as well. Truly, America is a failed nation and verging on an idiocracy.

Here are 6 signs Trump may use DHS stormtroopers to stop Democrats from voting Last night I wrote about Trump’s use of ICE and Border Patrol stormtroopers under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security to detain and intimidate peaceful protesters. In that piece I speculated that Trump was not only testing the waters of creating his own personal paramilitary domestic security force and attempting to please the most sadistic elements of his base, but also that he was taking the natural actions an executive might take if he actually believed the dystopian propaganda about America’s cities being promulgated every day on Fox News. But there is another deeply alarming possibility to consider. This November will be the first since the expiration of a 1982 consent decree in which the Republican National Committee will be freed to conduct voter suppression and intimidation en masse. As Andy Kroll recently explained at Rolling Stone: The result of the suit was a 1982 consent decree between the Democratic and Republican parties. Even though the RNC refused to admit wrong-doing in New Jersey, the group agreed to stop harassing and intimidating voters of color, including by deputizing off-duty law-enforcement officers and equipping those officers with guns or badges. Over the next three decades, Democrats marshaled enough evidence of ongoing Republican voter suppression to maintain the consent decree until 2018, when a federal judge lifted the order. The 2020 presidential election will be the first in nearly 40 years when the RNC isn’t bound by the terms of the 1982 decree. Clark, the Trump campaign lawyer, told the group of Republicans at the private meeting last November that the end of the consent decree was “a huge, huge, huge, huge deal,” freeing the RNC to directly coordinate with campaigns and political committees on so-called Election Day operations. The RNC is sending millions of dollars to state Republican parties to vastly expand these measures, which include recruiting 50,000 poll observers to deploy in key precincts. So consider the following facts: 1) The Republican National Committee under Trump is set to deploy tens of thousands of likely armed, unbadged goons to try to intimidate voters of color from exercising their right of suffrage; 2) Both Border Patrol and ICE are functioning as largely unaccountable enforcers of the president’s personal whims and interpretations of law, detaining citizens for hours without explanation or formal charges, and operating in direct conflict with local mayors and governors; 3) Border Patrol and ICE both have stridently bigoted, conservative organizational cultures hostile to most people of color and more liberal, urban areas generally–and they are well aware that their powers will likely be curtailed under a possible future Democratic administration; 4) Trump continues to ramp up rhetoric against nonexistent “voter fraud” in liberal areas. His focus has primarily been on vote-by-mail as a result of the COVID pandemic, but imaginary in-person voter impersonation fraud among communities of color in Democratic-leaning cities has long been a Republican obsession. A senior legal adviser to the Trump campaign recently declared that Trump would win even California if voting were “fair,” showing just how deeply the conspiratorial thinking around this issue runs in top GOP circles. 5) Acting Department of Homeland Security chief Chad Wolf appears to have no constraints on his behavior or his overheated rhetoric, and that the Trump Administration is planning to scale up the use of border patrol agents as a conservative paramilitary nationwide. 6) Donald Trump and his campaign team know by now that absent some explosive scandal around Biden or other unpredictable event to change the fundamentals of the race, the president’s only path to victory lies not in persuading a majority of voters but in choosing his own electorate by suppressing the votes of the majority of Americans who despise him. https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/here-are-6-signs-trump-may-use-dhs-stormtroopers-to-stop-democrats-from-voting/

Think of Trump's behaviours this way: his bullying, lying, racism and fascism has gotten him to be the head of an overvalued but large corporation, the presidency and trophy wives with few consequences for 60 years. Why would he change now?

(sounds of crickets)

Don't Blame Protesters For The Rise In Violent Crime. The president is peddling a debunked myth about the relationship between police morale and homicide rates. Since the start of the protests ignited by the police killing of George Floyd in May, cities across the country have seen an alarming spike in violent crime. In New York, 64 people were shot over the Fourth of July weekend. Brooklyn’s Canarsie neighborhood had three drive-by shootings in a single day. In total, the recent shootings in New York City represent a 210% increase over the same time period in 2019. Other cities are showing similar trends. In Dallas, violent crime has increased more than 14% since April. Philadelphia has already logged 210 homicides in 2020, the highest death toll since 2007. Police and politicians have blamed protesters for the rise in violence. “There is a feeling on the street that the police are handcuffed, that they are not out there as aggressively as we were in the past,” New York Police Department Chief Terence Monahan said on a local radio show this week. “All the rhetoric of ‘Defund the police,’ get rid of the police, abolish the police, that’s got to end. That has to stop” President Donald Trump claimed this week that Chicago, where shootings have also increased, was “worse than any war zone” and that a “vicious assault” on police officers was to blame for the rise in crime. But while the increase in crime is real, there is no evidence to suggest that the protests are to blame. https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/dont-blame-the-rise-in-violent-crime-on-protesters_n_5f122c8bc5b6cec246c294f3?ri18n=true

Trump is desperate now and resorting to anything that holds a possibility of turning his fortunes around. He is convinced that destroying Obamacare (the ACA) will do it. Whenever Trump is cornered, he doubles down and lies.

Unfortunately, in this instance, Trump was correct, but for all the wrong reasons. He has screwed up so many things.

I Was a Military COVID Planner. Trust Me: Texas Is in Deep, Deep Trouble Things are pretty bad right now in the Lone Star State. But the real pain is likely to come during hurricane season, when as many as 19 named storms are projected to hit. Like many of my fellow Texans, I was shocked when Senator Ted Cruz was recently spotted not wearing a mask on a flight from Dallas to Houston as COVID-19 cases were spiking across the state. Pandemic petulance is pretty on brand for the junior senator, but his latest fit of obstinacy comes at a particularly dangerous time: hurricane season. This is a personal issue for me. Up until my recent retirement from the Army, I served as a COVID-19 crisis planner at NORTHCOM in Colorado Springs. I was part of the team managing this crisis since January, when we first started evacuating U.S. citizens out of China. Further, my active duty military career was bifurcated by a stint in the Army Reserves. During that time, I worked in Emergency Management at the state and local level in Texas. I was in the Texas Emergency Operations Center on Sept. 11, and I’ve worked disasters all over, including several hurricanes. And a hurricane in the middle of a pandemic was very much on our minds at NORTHCOM. We started calling it the COVICANE. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is calling for an above-average Atlantic Hurricane Season this year with a possibility of 19 named storms. We based some of our planning off Hurricane Harvey, which struck Cruz’s hometown of Houston in 2017. Typically, the National Guard and some active duty forces respond to hurricanes to provide things like search and rescue, engineering, and medical support. Rooftop helicopter rescues make for dramatic footage, but the truth is that the military does not do the bulk of the work. Instead, volunteer organizations like the Red Cross lead the effort by managing shelters, feeding the hungry, and processing displaced families. My team looked at how COVID-19 might impact volunteers. What we found was scary. https://www.thedailybeast.com/i-was-a-military-covid-planner-trust-me-texas-is-in-deep-deep-trouble?ref=home

WORKS FOR ME!

I watched the Rider-RedBlacks replay last night and really enjoyed it, but it reminded me how much I miss CFL games. Dammit.

And a darned good blocker, too.

Barr has shown that he will implement actions based on a very flimsy interpretation of law or convention.

A chiiling thought has occurred to me: what if Trump and his sycophants have decided to let the current pandemic build into a nation-wide acute crisis so that they can "delay" the pending election indefinitely by declaring a national state of emergency. No doubt there is this sort of contingency built into US law and Barr would support this.

That says all you need to know about the Cheeto in chief in the White House.

The problem with Viagra is that if you swallow it too slowly, you get a stiff neck.

Police Union Boss Won’t Talk About That QAnon Mug He Keeps Putting On TV The FBI considers the far-right QAnon conspiracy movement to be a potential domestic terrorism threat. Ed Mullins, president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, appears Thursday on Fox News with a black "QAnon" coffee mug behind him. The head of one of New York City’s largest police unions appeared on Fox News twice this week with a “QAnon” coffee mug but claims to have no knowledge of the extremist cult. Ed Mullins, president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, was invited on Fox News on Monday and Friday to discuss crime in New York City. During both appearances, Mullins could be seen speaking from the same office where, sitting on what looks like a printer or scanner behind him, is a black coffee mug bearing a giant red-white-and-blue “Q.” The mug is also inscribed with the word “QAnon,” as well as the letters “WWG1WGA,” an acronym for “Where We Go One, We Go All,” the signature slogan of QAnon, a far-right conspiracy movement. https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/ed-mullins-qanon-mug-fox-news-police-union-boss_n_5f1228fbc5b6cec246c2920e?ri18n=true

.No, no, no. The dwarf was for sale on the darkweb.

It is just a matter of time until Trump erupts. It will be explained by his lackeys as a reasonable response to all the attacks and unfair treatment he has been getting.