Suspicious Timeline Shows DeJoy’s Massive Donations Just Before Trump Made Him Postmaster

How did Louis DeJoy, the first Postmaster General to have never worked in the Postal Service to ever serve in the job, get that plum position? Could it have been, oh, I don’t know, buying his way in? DeJoy donated more than $600,000 to the Trump campaign and to the Republican National Committee from the time the job opened up and getting the nod. Lisa Graves, executive director of True North Research, which investigates the influence of money on public policy, testified to Congress Monday detailing the depth of DeJoy’s spending with the GOP.

In just this 2020 cycle, he’s given more than $1.5 million to Republicans, most to Trump’s reelection and to Republican Senate races. He invested almost $80,000 in Republican Senate races since December, when the Postmaster job opened up. “This level of partisanship,” Graves said in written testimony, “undermines public trust in the Postal Service as an institution.” Why yes, yes it does. It also resurfaces all the questions that emerged about just why Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin took a detour from his day job to get DeJoy this job. Whatever motivated him, it clearly wasn’t DeJoy’s qualifications.

Ahead of Monday’s hearing, Virginia Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly, chairman of the oversight subcommittee, stated the obvious. “We have a crony at the helm of our nation’s Postal Service, a man rife with conflicts of interest and potential violations of law.” The potential violations of the law are the alleged campaign finance violations in which he used a straw donor scheme to raise over $1 million for Republicans from 2000 to 2014 from his former employees. Allegedly. He faces potential criminal liability for that in the state of North Carolina, which does not have a statute of limitations on felonies and where his company was headquartered. Continue reading.

DHS says it won’t make officials available for questioning in House probe of Portland protests

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The Department of Homeland Security has said it will not agree to a congressional panel’s request to interview official witnesses as part of an investigation of the department’s response to protests in Portland, Ore. The congressional investigation has been fueled by allegations from a top DHS official, who has accused the White House of trying to skew intelligence reports to match President Trump’s claims that far-left extremist groups are behind nationwide protests against police violence.

The House Intelligence Committee’s request to interview several DHS officials “will not be accommodated at this time,” Assistant Secretary Beth Spivey wrote to the committee chairman Monday, arguing that the committee had unreasonably broadened its scope after receiving a whistleblower complaintfrom Brian Murphy, who until recently was in charge of the department’s intelligence office.

Murphy has alleged that senior DHS officials, acting on orders from the White House, have tried to color intelligence reports in ways that favor Trump’s campaign rhetoric. Murphy claimed in a complaint filed last week with the DHS inspector general that the department’s acting secretary, Chad Wolf, instructed him in May to stop reporting Russian interference in the election and to focus his office’s efforts on China and Iran, two countries Democratic lawmakers briefed on intelligence say are not engaged in the same aggressive attempts to influence the elections as Russia. Continue reading.

Why is the GOP taking medical advice from Dr. Pepper?

As COVID-19 ravages the country, for most Republicans, fealty to Trump still comes first

To be charitable, there is a glimmer of a political rationale behind Donald Trump’s decision to resume indoor political rallies.

So what if mask-wearing in Henderson, Nevada, on Sunday was as rare as donning Hermès ties for Zoom meetings? So what if the Republicans seem to have forgotten 2012 presidential contender Herman Cain, who died of COVID-19 about a month after attending a June indoor Trump rally in Tulsa?

The red-hatted, jam-packed Nevada rally presumably satisfied Trump’s ego needs for 2016-style adulation. It also attempted to foster the political illusion that the virus belonged to the Jurassic period of history when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Barack Obama was responsible for everything. Continue reading.

In the Know: September 17, 2020

Days Until the Election: 47

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47 Days OUT – Let’s get to work!
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Agriculture 
BRAZIL’S SOY FRONTIER TO GROW AT FASTEST PACE IN FOUR YEARS, Successful Farming

Attorney General Keith Ellison
AG Ellison Shuts Down Alleged Sham Charity Fundraiser, CBS Minnesota

Continue reading “In the Know: September 17, 2020”

Trump says there are 25 ‘witnesses’ disputing the Atlantic. Nope.

“They have some sleazebag reporter from a third-rate magazine having some source quoting me saying, I won’t even use the term, but saying bad things. … We had 25 people that were witnesses that are on the record already that have said that never took place. It never took place — what they said.” 

— President Trump, at a campaign rally in Minden, Nev., Sept. 12

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Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic published an article Sept. 3 that was at once both surprising and not surprising: “Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers.’” The president had famously attacked the late senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), saying he wasn’t a war hero, because “I like people who weren’t captured.” But Goldberg provided what he said were new accounts of Trump’s private remarks disparaging soldiers who died in service of the United States.

The people who recounted these remarks were not identified. In trying to refute the article, the White House has focused on its first anecdote — that Trump canceled a visit to Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018 because he did not believe it was important to honor American war dead.

“In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, ‘Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers,’” Goldberg wrote. “In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as ‘suckers’ for getting killed.” Continue reading.

As Trump Again Rejects Science, Biden Calls Him a ‘Climate Arsonist’

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The president visited California after weeks of silence on its wildfires and blamed the crisis only on poor forest management, not climate change. “I don’t think science knows” what is happening, he said.

WASHINGTON — With wildfires raging across the West, climate change took center stage in the race for the White House on Monday as former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. called President Trump a “climate arsonist” while the president said that “I don’t think science knows” what is actually happening.

A day of dueling appearances laid out the stark differences between the two candidates, an incumbent president who has long scorned climate change as a hoax and rolled back environmental regulations and a challenger who has called for an aggressive campaign to curb the greenhouse gases blamed for increasingly extreme weather.

Mr. Trump flew to California after weeks of public silence about the flames that have forced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, wiped out communities and forests, burned millions of acres, shrouded the region in smoke and left at least 27 people dead. But even when confronted by California’s governor and other state officials, the president insisted on attributing the crisis solely to poor forest management, not climate change. Continue reading.

Postal police union sues USPS, DeJoy over limits to mail theft enforcement authority

The union argues that this unilateral change by USPS managers violates their collective bargaining agreement

The Postal Service last month abruptly ordered its police officers to stop investigating mail theft that occurs away from post office property, the Postal Police Officers Association alleged Monday, suing Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to block a change they say could erode the safety of mail carriers and delivery.

“The Postal Service’s sudden change is unwarranted, impermissible, and contrary to the language of the statute and also to collective bargaining promises it has made to the officers’ union,” the association said in its lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Washington D.C.

Per the union, USPS implemented the change on Aug. 25, a day after DeJoy testified to Congress amid mounting concerns that policy changes he implemented were delaying mail service and could jeopardize record numbers of mail-in ballots expected in the presidential election. Continue reading.

‘We Weren’t Alarmist Enough’: Experts Warn Trump And GOP Could Destroy Democracy

They rang alarms about the rise of authoritarianism in America in 2018. It’s only gotten worse since then.

When Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt sounded the alarm four years ago that President Donald Trump posed a threat to American democracy, some critics treated their fears as absurd. 

“Joe Scarborough ridiculed it on TV, saying, ‘These guys are alarmists,’” Levitsky told HuffPost recently, recalling the MSNBC host’s criticism of a New York Times opinion piece that eventually blossomed into “How Democracies Die,” the book the two professors released in early 2018. 

“It turns out we weren’t alarmist enough,” Levitsky said. Continue reading.

The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That’s Made the U.S. Less Secure

Like many of the virus’s hardest hit victims, the United States went into the COVID-19 pandemic wracked by preexisting conditions. A fraying public health infrastructure, inadequate medical supplies, an employer-based health insurance system perversely unsuited to the moment—these and other afflictions are surely contributing to the death toll. But in addressing the causes and consequences of this pandemic—and its cruelly uneven impact—the elephant in the room is extreme income inequality.

How big is this elephant? A staggering $50 trillion. That is how much the upward redistribution of income has cost American workers over the past several decades.

This is not some back-of-the-napkin approximation. According to a groundbreaking new working paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation, had the more equitable income distributions of the three decades following World War II (1945 through 1974) merely held steady, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone. That is an amount equal to nearly 12 percent of GDP—enough to more than double median income—enough to pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $1,144 a month. Every month. Every single year. Continue reading.

Trump Has Head-Scratching Solution For California Wildfires : ‘It Will Start Getting Cooler’

“I wish science agreed with you,” California official Wade Crowfoot told the president.

President Donald Trump touched down in California on Monday to survey the wildfire damage and immediately launched into his usual talking points about poor forest management while denying the role of climate change. 

Trump arrived in Sacramento as more than two dozen major wildfires burned across the state. More than 2 million acres in the state have burned this year, a nearly 2,000% increase in land burned compared to this time last year.

At a roundtable discussion about the wildfires, California Secretary for Natural Resources Wade Crowfoot said Trump’s focus on forest management was obscuring the grim reality that climate change was behind the historically high temperatures and years of drought. Continue reading.