July 1, 2020

Nearly 600,000 people have voted for candidates who support QAnon

(Washington Post) The overlap of Q supporters with Trump’s base of support is not a coincidence.

snip

Q, also called QAnon, is a sprawling and evolving conspiracy theory centered on the idea that President Trump’s secret mission in the White House is to combat a murky, nefarious web of sex predators woven throughout the political world and celebrity culture. It spirals out into various side theories, for example that John F. Kennedy Jr. wasn’t killed in a plane crash but instead is still living in the United States. Its sacred texts come in the form of anonymous posts from a figure who self-identifies as Q.

snip

Media Matters has documented 59 congressional and Senate candidates who have, at some point, demonstrated some support of the Q movement. Sixteen of the 59 did little more than drop a Q hashtag onto a social media post. Meaning that most, 46 of them, engaged with Q supporters to a greater degree, including promoting the movement or wearing Q-branded clothing. (The Trump campaign, recognizing the problem of being too closely associated with the movement, has in the past asked that attendees at its political rallies cover up pro-Q shirts, according to Q supporters I’ve spoken with.)

The thing that’s remarkable about these Q-adjacent candidates (nearly all of whom are Republican) is that many of them have gone on to win. A Post review of the outcomes of the races in which those 59 candidates have actually been on the ballot and received votes show that 11 of 28 candidates either won their primaries, advanced to a runoff or will be on the ballot in November.

In total, candidates who’ve shown support for QAnon have received more than 580,000 votes, as of this writing, including more than 425,000 votes that have gone to Republicans who were more actively engaged in the Q movement than simply using a Q hashtag on a tweet. This isn’t a sign that those voters were all demonstrating support for Q. It is a sign, though, that Q was not seen disqualifying for Republican primary voters.

(Read More)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/01/nearly-600000-people-have-voted-candidates-who-support-qanon/

July 1, 2020

A Cheap, Race-Neutral Way to Close the Racial Wealth Gap

(The Atlantic) What if a single, cheap, easy-to-administer, and race-neutral policy could help close the country’s chasmic racial wealth gap in less than a generation?

Reader, it exists. It is called a baby-bond program. For something like $80 billion a year—roughly 2 percent of the annual federal budget, less than a tenth of the annual cost of Social Security—the United States could not only end its most pernicious forms of poverty, reduce wealth inequality, improve social mobility, foster self-sufficiency among poor families, and increase family net worth en masse, but also put black and white families on more equal footing.

There is a strong moral case for doing that, and a strong economic case, too. The average white family is 10 times wealthier than the average black family. Black families with kids have a single penny in wealth for every dollar that white families with kids have. And white high-school dropouts have a higher net worth, on average, than black college graduates. Black individuals cannot close this gap on their own. Washington created the wealth gap. Washington needs to fix it.

snip

A little-known but elegant solution is waiting for implementation, a policy suggested by Thomas Paine in Agrarian Justice and rewritten for the modern era by Darrick Hamilton, who leads the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University, and Sandy Darity, the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. Baby bonds are simple. The government would create investment accounts for infants, giving babies born to poor families large seed grants and babies born to rich families small ones. The money would grow, and kids would gain access to it when they reached adulthood, to use for school, a down payment, or a start-up. (Read More)

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/close-racial-wealth-gap-baby-bonds/613525/

June 30, 2020

Carl Bernstein: Trump Was 'Delusional' And Outmatched In Calls With Putin And Erdogan

(HuffPost) One source described the nature of the calls between Trump and Putin as sounding like “two guys in a steam bath.”

President Donald Trump was so unprepared for calls with the leaders of Russia and Turkey that he regularly threatened U.S. national security while boasting about his achievements, CNN’s Carl Bernstein reported Monday.

Over hundreds of calls cited by anonymous sources, Bernstein reports, Trump almost never read briefing material prepared by intelligence agencies and would often take unplanned calls from foreign leaders, flabbergasting top national security advisers.

Two unnamed sources told Bernstein the regularity of the calls and Trump’s behavior led them to believe the president was “delusional” and thought he could charm or bully other leaders into doing what he wanted. At times, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Trump at least twice a week, and there were standing orders to put the calls straight through to Trump. Sources said Trump was almost never prepared and was vulnerable to being taken advantage of.

In regular calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump “mostly talked about himself,” Bernstein reported, while “courting Putin’s admiration and approval.”

“[Trump] gives away the advantage that was hard won in the Cold War,” one official told CNN. “He’s given Russia a lifeline ― because there is no doubt that they’re a declining power. ... He’s playing with something he doesn’t understand and he’s giving them power that they would use [aggressively].”

One source described the nature of the calls between Trump and Putin as sounding like “two guys in a steam bath.”

(Read More) https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-putin-erdogan-cnn-carl-bernstein_n_5efa9d24c5b612083c51d964

June 30, 2020

Supreme Court Decision 5-4 will allow govt funds to go to religious schools

https://twitter.com/search?q=supreme+court+decision&ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Esearch


NPR Politics
@nprpolitics
#BREAKING: In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that Montana’s exclusion of religious schools from a state scholarship program funded by tax credits violates the U.S. Constitution.

June 30, 2020

So Bolton briefed trump March 2019 about bounty and in Sept 2019 he invited Taliban to Camp David?

Ok, so Putin paid the Taliban to kill our soldiers and Trump wanted to invite the very people doing the killing to Camp David on the anniversary of our September 11 Attacks??? My head is spinning.

June 30, 2020

Team Trump wants to kill off Stars and Stripes. Congress isn't likely to let them

*sure, why not - just cancel the soldier's newspaper and maybe they'll never learn you looked away as putin put bounties out on their heads....

(Daily Kos) Trump Defense Secretary Mark Esper may or may not have been feeling some public heat lately from his sycophantic backing of Trump's every norm-breaking move, whether it be Trump reaching down to protect war crimes or Trump tear gassing a protest to go for nice little walkies, but none of it is evident in his behavior. Among Esper's other newly held beliefs: The administration is right to demand the total budgetary zeroing out of Stars and Stripes, the armed forces' own newspaper.

The Washington Post notes Esper's support in a piece describing congressional skepticism for the proposal, with Esper claiming that the military should be spending the $15 million per year on "higher-priority issues." The Defense Department budget is $700 billion per year, though, so it ain't that.

The White House proposal to drop federal support for Stars and Stripes to 0%, which would effectively slash the paper's total budget by half, is transparently part of the wider Republican fascist move to eliminate sources of skeptical journalism. In the case of a newspaper devoted to issues faced by troops throughout the world, it means zeroing out the budget; in the case of Voice of America (VoA), the government broadcast effort aimed at providing neutral and accurate news overseas, it has meant installing far-right toadies while stripping authority from the VoA journalism team. We saw it in Vice President Mike Pence's early order for government health experts to route pandemic news through his office, and in the relentless Republican repetition of the truly insane Trump insistence that all news personally embarrassing to him is actually "fake."

Nobody is proposing the elimination of the military's embedded journalism team because they need that $15 million for new cases of fighter jet wax. It's just another move to kill off an outlet that gets too many embarrassing stories, and has the anti-fascist audacity to write them down.

The Post also notes that Congress isn't likely to go along with this move, just as they have been skeptical of every other Team Trump effort to zero out you-name-it in budgets even when Republicans, rather than Democrats, were in charge. But that doesn't mean we should ignore Team Trump's attempt to do it. There's nothing Trump's underlings have touched that they haven't tried to screw up; it is not governance, but orchestrated sabotage.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/6/28/1955636/-Team-Trump-wants-to-kill-off-Stars-and-Stripes-Congress-isn-t-likely-to-let-them

June 29, 2020

Trump was 'near-sadistic' in phone calls with female world leaders, according to CNN report

(Business Insider via msn) Trump was 'near-sadistic' in phone calls with female world leaders, according to CNN report on classified calls

President Donald Trump's freewheeling and unprepared approach to phone calls with world leaders tended to turn ugly if the recipient was a woman, according to a new CNN report.

Trump was "near-sadistic" when speaking to leaders like former British Prime Minister Theresa May and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, calling them "stupid" and "a fool," according to longtime Washington Post reporter of Watergate fame Carl Bernstein, who reported the story for CNN.

One source called Trump's calls with May "humiliating and bullying," while Merkel reportedly took Trump's antics "like water off a duck's back."

"He'd get agitated about something with Theresa May, then he'd get nasty with her on the phone call," One source told CNN. "It's the same interaction in every setting — coronavirus or Brexit — with just no filter applied."

President Donald Trump was chummy with autocratic male world leaders in phone calls, but turned "near-sadistic" when he was speaking to women in the same positions, according to a new report from Carl Bernstein for CNN.

(Read More) https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-was-near-sadistic-in-phone-calls-with-female-world-leaders-according-to-cnn-report-on-classified-calls/ar-BB167J7X

June 29, 2020

Officials Confirm Man Shouting 'White Power' in Video Shared by Trump Is Retired Miami Firefighter

(NBC Miami) Miami-Dade Fire Rescue has confirmed that the man chanting the racist slogan "white power" in a controversial video retweeted by President Donald Trump Sunday was a retired Miami-Dade firefighter.

The video appeared to have been taken at The Villages, a Florida retirement community, and showed dueling demonstrations between Trump supporters and opponents.

“Thank you to the great people of The Villages,” Trump tweeted along with the video.

Moments into the video clip he shared, a man driving a golf cart displaying pro-Trump signs and flags shouts "white power." The video also shows anti-Trump protesters shouting “Nazi," “racist," and profanities at the Trump backers.

Trump eventually deleted the tweet, and the White House later issued a statement saying the president had not heard "the one statement" on the video. "White power" is a slogan associated with white supremacists.

On Sunday evening, the Miami Firefighters labor union denied a claim made on Twitter that the man was a retired City of Miami firefighter.

By Monday morning, however, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue put out an official statement confirming that the man was indeed a "longtime" retired MDFR employee.

(Read More) https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/officials-confirm-man-shouting-white-power-in-video-shared-by-trump-is-retired-miami-firefighter/2255236/

June 29, 2020

Reddit Is Done Pretending The Donald Is Fine

(The Atlantic) The social platform just banned the president’s most notorious internet fan club, as part of a sitewide purge of forums that “promote hate.”

Reddit is banning one of its most notorious communities today, the subreddit—or forum—dedicated to discussion of President Donald Trump.

The ban comes after years of controversy around r/The_Donald and its promotion of racism, anti-Semitism, conspiracy theories, and violent memes starring a cartoon frog. Reddit is also removing 2,000 other communities today, including the 160,000-member subreddit associated with the popular left-wing podcast Chapo Trap House. And alongside the purge, Reddit is debuting an updated content policy that is significantly more detailed than its previous list of rules—a change that was promised three weeks ago in response to conversations about Black Lives Matter.

The new policy’s preamble states in part that “no community should be used as a weapon,” and that users should not “interfere” with communities they are not a member of—a reference to the long-standing tradition of “brigading,” or coordinated trolling. r/The_Donald, which had 790,000 members at the time of the ban, was well known for this behavior, and Reddit’s bare-bones policies and sporadic enforcement of them often meant that the moderators of targeted subreddits had to come up with their own jerry-rigged tools to prevent harassment. r/The_Donald was quarantined in June 2019—meaning that it would no longer show up in site search results and couldn’t display ads—but Steve Huffman, Reddit’s co-founder and CEO, has vocally resisted calls to remove the subreddit until now.

Read More https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/06/reddit-ban-the-donald-chapo-content-policy/613639/

June 28, 2020

Which one of these servicemembers were killed for their bounty, trump - answer me you coward!

(Stars and Stripes) Afghanistan: Remembering the fallen of 2019
https://www.stripes.com/news/afghanistan-remembering-the-fallen-of-2019-1.613124