September 30, 2020

Nearly 100,000 Defective Absentee Ballots Sent to N.Y.C. Voters

A printing error has left voters scrambling for answers and could undermine their confidence in the New York City Board of Elections.

Nearly 100,000 New York City voters received defective absentee ballots, election officials acknowledged on Tuesday, a massive glitch that raised doubts about the city’s ability to handle a pandemic-era presidential election with millions of mail-in ballots expected.

The problems were mostly confined to Brooklyn, where voters registered outrage and confusion after seeing that their ballots had mismatched names and addresses on the outer and inner mail-back envelopes.



The faulty ballots come as President Trump has made repeated baseless challenges to the accuracy and integrity of mail-in voting; by Monday evening, Mr. Trump had shared four news articles on Twitter describing the absentee ballot issues in New York.

The problems in New York are yet another blemish for the New York City Board of Elections, which is run by a board of Democrats and Republicans, and has a long history of mismanaging elections.

Michael Ryan, the board’s executive director, blamed the problem on the board’s vendor, Phoenix Graphics, a commercial printing company based in Rochester, N.Y., which was hired to mail out ballots in Brooklyn and Queens.



Phoenix Graphics, a family-owned firm that prides itself on its “ability to deliver a high-quality product on time and within budget,” has worked with the city Board of Elections since at least 2010, according to city records, including during the June primaries. The company’s $4.6 million no-bid contract — which the board awarded under an emergency procurement in June — lasts through the end of the year.

Sal DeBiase, the company’s president and chief executive, did not reply to multiple requests for comment.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/nyregion/absentee-ballot-nyc-brooklyn.html

smells like bullshit...

September 28, 2020

Twitter thread: Trump campaign strategy to deter millions of Blacks from voting in 2016

https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1310610613937283072



more: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1310610613937283072.html

September 27, 2020

Does anyone else think more Trump crimes/tax avoidance stories will come out in the coming weeks?

I think there will and they'll be a lot worse than his tax avoidance and that he pays a lot less than his supporters and everyone else for that matter.

September 17, 2020

Local veteran's obituary says he wasn't "a sucker or a loser"

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) — A local man who recently passed away wants to let the President know he wasn’t “a sucker or a loser.”

Posted by Prudden and Kandt Funeral Home, which is based in Lockport, the obituary for Mark Schroeder included a messaged directed at Donald Trump.

The final paragraph reads “Mark Schroeder was a lot of things. He was a father, a hero, a best friend, a teacher, a brother and sometimes, a real son of a b****. But one thing he was not, Mr. Trump, was a sucker or a loser. He was a proud veteran til the day he died.”

This comes after a recent report claimed Trump referred to American war dead at Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France as “suckers” and “losers.”

The President has since denied these claims.

According to Schroeder’s obituary, he served in the U.S. Army from 1969 to 1971, and spent time in Vietnam.

https://www.wivb.com/news/local-news/buffalo/western-new-york/local-veterans-obituary-tells-trump-he-wasnt-a-loser-or-sucker/

September 15, 2020

Sports Radio has to denounce Mass Hysterectomies at ICE Detention Centers

They're tying this to right wing thought Trump's incessant racial arsonism and Aubrey Huff. Has sports radio discussed this?

September 14, 2020

The Economist went to a construction site in Ohio, a key swing state - and this is what they found

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/09/10/how-construction-workers-in-ohio-view-the-election (paywall)

Good luck reaching people like that.

September 13, 2020

He Was the Neo-Nazi Who Inspired 'American History X.' His Nazi Pals Are Now Cops.

In October of 2006, the FBI released an intelligence assessment titled, “White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement.” Though the document—culled from FBI investigations and open sources—was heavily redacted, it reached a number of disturbing conclusions.

The assessment revealed that white supremacists “have historically engaged in strategic efforts to infiltrate and recruit from law enforcement communities”; that many of these white-supremacist infiltrators are known as “ghost skins” who “avoid overt displays of their beliefs to blend in”; and that the KKK have longstanding “ties to local law enforcement.” These firm ties between white supremacists and law enforcement persist to this day. Last year, Reveal published an investigative series exposing the police’s proclivity for Facebook hate groups and racist memes, and in late August, former FBI agent Michael German compiled an exhaustive report detailing the prevalence of “racism, white supremacy, and far-right militancy in law enforcement” and the federal government’s non-existent response to it.

Links between white supremacists and law enforcement have been thrown into sharper relief in recent months following the killing of George Floyd, and numerous instances of curiously chummy behavior between police and far-right militiamen during the ensuing protests for Black lives.

Frank Meeink, once one of the most prominent neo-Nazis in the U.S.—and the inspiration for the character Derek Vinyard, played by Edward Norton in the 1998 film American History X—thinks he knows why.

“I know that there are neo-Nazis who I used to run with who are now cops,” he tells The Daily Beast. “And that’s just in my crew. Imagine how many neo-Nazis and white nationalists have been becoming cops? Three of the people in my crew alone became cops.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/he-was-the-neo-nazi-who-inspired-american-history-x-his-nazi-pals-are-now-cops?

September 13, 2020

LAist Reporter Josie Huang Arrested While Covering Protest

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies arrested KPCC/LAist Correspondent Josie Huang Saturday night while she was covering the ambush shooting of two deputies in Compton.

The incident occurred outside St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, where the two deputies were being treated for gunshot wounds. Huang had just finished covering a 10 p.m. news conference by Sheriff Alex Villanueva.

Huang, an award-winning journalist, allegedly obstructed justice. The department initially refused to provide details of what happened, but later, Deputy Juanita Navarro of the Sheriff's Information Bureau confirmed that deputies took Huang into custody on suspicion of obstruction of justice by "interfering with a lawful arrest." Huang says she was trying to document the arrest of a protester.

Navarro also said Huang "didn't have proper credentials," but she was clearly wearing press credentials around her neck.

Video shows at least five deputies pinning Huang to the pavement, handcuffing her, and placing her in a patrol car.


https://laist.com/latest/post/20200913/80222d039da6e2435bed1e10df36e367457cd4af

September 10, 2020

Trump blabbed to Woodward because thinks of himself as interesting

He reminds me of murderer Robert Spangler, a man who got away with killing his family in Colorado back in 1978. He was later accused of killing two more wives and may have killed his father. The FBI took advantage of his narcissism and got him to confess to his crimes before dying of cancer.

He showed no remorse, saying, "I'm different. I think I am interesting." He said he agreed to confess because he wanted FBI profilers to explain to him why he was so good at killing.

Trump let Woodward interview him because he too thinks he's "interesting" and really good at killing. 190,000 and counting...

https://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=132630&page=1

September 5, 2020

Does Trump feel the same way about most of his supporters as he does the military?