Category: 2020 Election

Biden eyes inroads with evangelical voters

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Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is seeking to make inroads with evangelical voters, a demographic that overwhelmingly sided with President Trump during the 2016 election.

Team Biden doesn’t think it can win over all evangelicals or even a majority, but it does think it can slice off some of them from Trump’s coalition by emphasizing the former vice president’s personal faith and values.

At the Democratic National Convention, Biden’s campaign will hold an interfaith service on Aug. 16, and a Believers for Biden watch party ahead of the candidate’s acceptance speech is set for Aug. 20, according to a Biden adviser. Continue reading.

USPS Removes Mailboxes, Shuts Down Letter-Sorting Machines As Mail-In Voting Looms

As Trump’s postmaster thwarts the Postal Service, the USPS warns 46 states that mail-in ballots may not be delivered on time, potentially canceling out those votes.

The U.S. Postal Service removed mail collection boxes in at least four states and is eliminating automatic letter-sorting machines that speed delivery ahead of an expected surge of mail-in ballots in the Nov. 3 elections.

As the Postal Service began to dismantle its own process for speedy mail delivery, it sent a letter to 46 states warning that voters could be disenfranchised because their mail-in ballots may not be delivered in time to make vote deadlines, The Washington Post reported Friday. Some states are quickly moving up deadlines, forcing voters to request or cast ballots sooner.

The startling actions appear to support accusations by Democratic lawmakers and voting rights groups that Postal Service management — now headed by major Donald Trump contributor Louis DeJoy — is sabotaging mail delivery before Election Day. Continue reading.

GOP senator draws fire from all sides on Biden, Obama-era probes

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Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) is coming under fire from all sides for his investigations into the Obama administration and the Bidens.

Months into his probes, Johnson is facing increasing public pushback from Democrats, the Biden campaign and aligned outside groups who believe he is trying to undercut presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and might inadvertently spread Russian disinformation in the process.

But he’s also taking criticism from high-profile conservatives who argue the probes are moving too slowly, while some fellow GOP senators appear worried about the appearance of the investigation just months before the election. Continue reading.

120 Children Remain in ICE Detention Despite Court Order For Them to Be Released Due to COVID-19 Concerns

t least 120 children remain in detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), more than two weeks after the July 27 deadline set by a court order requiring the agency release them because of the health risk posed by COVID-19.

ICE has had a month to plan for the release of the children, after the court order was issued on June 26 by California Judge Dolly Gee, who oversees the Flores Settlement Agreement, a 23-year-old class action settlement that laid the ground work for children’s rights in immigration detention. Per the Flores settlement, federal immigration officials cannot detain children for longer than 20 days. Despite that ruling, many children are detained for much longer periods—at one Texas facility alone, 47 kids have been detained for longer than 300 days. On June 26 Judge Gee ordered ICE to release all detained children because of increasing cases of COVID-19 at ICE detention centers, facilities she previously described as “on fire.”

A month later, the children are still detained. “It seems a month has been squandered not doing much of anything,” Gee said at an Aug. 7 hearing, according to Law360. At the hearing, both parities—ICE and the lawyers representing the children—explained to Gee that they had not yet reached an agreement as to how to safely and humanely remove children from custody. Continue reading.

When Trump Calls a Black Woman ‘Angry,’ He Feeds This Racist Trope

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President Trump’s use of the word to describe Joe Biden’s vice-presidential pick, Kamala Harris, plays off a hurtful stereotype with a decades-long history.

Kamala Harris may become the first Black woman elected as vice president, but for now she’s still being slotted into a well-worn mold, as President Trump and his allies seek to cast her as “a mad woman.”

Within hours of her joining Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket on Tuesday, Mr. Trump branded her “extraordinarily nasty,” and then “so angry,” as the rhetoric ratcheted up. By Thursday, a Trump campaign fund-raising email called her “the meanest” senator.

All of it played on a racist trope that goes back generations in American culture, and has a complicated history in forging gender identity, power and class. The “angry Black woman” remains a cultural and social fixture, a stereotype that has been used to denigrate artists, athletes and political figures. Continue reading.

Postal service warns states it might miss some mail-in ballot deadlines

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The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has warned state election officials of “inconsistencies” between its delivery service and state deadlines for receiving and counting mail-in ballots, raising the possibility that many votes may not arrive in time to be counted.

The warnings were delivered in letters to state election officials by USPS general counsel and executive vice president Thomas Marshall.

“The letters advised election officials to be mindful of the potential inconsistencies between the Postal Service’s delivery standards, which have been in place for a number of years and have not changed, and the provisions of state law,” Martha Johnson, a spokesperson for the Postal Service, said in a statement. Continue reading.

Pence brags of jobs he and Trump ‘created’ as unemployment remains at 10%

Analysts say those ‘new’ jobs are mostly from people returning to jobs they lost during the lockdown.

Mike Pence claimed on Wednesday that he and Donald Trump had created more jobs during the coronavirus pandemic than the previous administration created during its entire tenure. In reality, some of the businesses that temporarily closed during the pandemic have reopened, bringing back some of the jobs that lost during the historic unemployment that is still decimating the U.S. economy.

On Fox News, Pence bragged that he and Trump had “made this country stronger, more prosperous in our first three years” and that Trump “has seen us through the worst pandemic in a hundred years.”

“We’ve already created more jobs in the last three months than Joe Biden and Barack Obama created in their eight years in office. I’m excited to tell the story,” Pence said. Continue reading.

No Payroll Tax, No Social Security — And That’s The GOP Scheme

By the time you read this, President Donald Trump’s latest economic stimulus plan may be largely forgotten. But it has revived an unpleasant idea that the right fringe has been peddling for years: killing Social Security and Medicare.

We speak of an executive order that would cut payroll taxes. Payroll taxes fund virtually all of Social Security and much of Medicare. Without this money, Americans would have neither.

Oh, but Trump says these taxes wouldn’t exactly be cut. Rather, they’d be “deferred” through Dec. 31 for workers making less than $100,000. Workers would be on the hook for the taxes at some later date.

Can you imagine slapping low- and middle-income workers with a bill for the back taxes? Neither can I. Continue reading.

Michael Cohen says he was ‘active and eager participant’ in ‘tax fraud’ in book

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In the 3,700-word foreword from his forthcoming memoir, “Disloyal,” Michael Cohen, the former personal lawyer and “fixer” of President Donald Trump, describes his life working for his former client in terms of organized crime, comes clean about “screaming threats” on his client’s behalf and admits to being an “active and eager participant” in some of the most notorious and salacious episodes involving the future leader of the free world.

“From golden showers in a sex club in Vegas, to tax fraud, to deals with corrupt officials from the former Soviet Union, to catch and kill conspiracies to silence Trump’s clandestine lovers, I wasn’t just a witness to the president’s rise — I was an active and eager participant,” Cohen writes in the foreword, dated March 11, 2020, which he says he began penning on legal pads in the early morning hours at the white-collar Otisville Federal Prison located about an hour and a half drive from his former Manhattan high-rise apartment.

Cohen had earlier been furloughed from that prison amid concerns over the spread of COVID-19. However, he was soon remanded, apparently for writing this book. His book’s website directly quotes federal Judge Alvin Hellerstein: Continue reading.

Mary Trump: The president ‘understands he is not the person he pretends to be’

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This is the fifth and final installment of DCReport’s “Inside the Mind of Donald J. Trump: The World’s Most Dangerous Man.” You can read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

Lee tells DCReport: It feels as if the contributors to “The Dangerous Case” have come full circle with Mary Trump’s book: Our independent public health analysis at the beginning of the presidency meets her intimate household observations at the end of this term, in a seamless expert consensus. But it was dismay at the lack of focus on her expertise that got me started. This was the impetus of our DCReport series, “Inside the Mind of Donald J. Trump.”

Mary Trump is the antithesis of her uncle in almost every respect. To the extent that he is a superficial con man, she is deeply authentic and brave in examining herself. To the degree that he inflates himself to an unreal demigod status at the slightest granting of power, she remains humble and grounded, no matter her sudden catapult as a towering figure in the literary world and perhaps in the history of nations (for what other leader’s outspoken family member was also a psychological expert?). Most exceptionally, she is willing to step up to do what is right, in spite of her natural inclinations.

Continue reading “Mary Trump: The president ‘understands he is not the person he pretends to be’”