Tag: 2020 election

Televangelist Jim Bakker Warns His Flock That Christian Leaders And Republicans Will Die If Trump Loses In 2020

Jim Bakker, otherwise known as half of disgraced ’80s televangelist power couple Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker — pictured above with his current wife, Lori — has spent the past decade and a half quietly rebuilding his empire after serving nearly five years of a 45-year prison sentence (for fraud and conspiracy-related charges) from 1989 to 1994. (Not to be confused with the drugging and rape allegations from actress Jessica Hahn which had previously derailed his career in 1987.)

In the present, it should come as very little surprise that the “reformed” Bakker is back on his bullshit, now as a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump and spewing dangerous rhetoric. In a sermon recently flagged by Right Wing Watch, Bakker told his followers that if Trump doesn’t get reelected in 2020, that “leaders of the gospel and the political conservative leaders” are going to be murdered. By who? Presumably AOC and the other women in Congress who Trump supporters chant “send them back” at rallies about? Dark lord Nancy Pelosi? Satan? Your guess is as good as ours! Continue reading “Televangelist Jim Bakker Warns His Flock That Christian Leaders And Republicans Will Die If Trump Loses In 2020”

Secret donors and Trump allies: Inside the operation to push noncitizen voting laws in Florida and other states

Washington Post logoA network of out-of-state political consultants, secret donors and activists with close ties to President Trump is behind an effort to change the Florida constitution to explicitly state that only citizens may vote in elections, a measure that would amplify the issue of immigration in the 2020 battleground state.

In recent months, organizers said they have collected nearly twice the signatures needed to qualify for the ballot next year — and more than any other ballot initiative in Florida state history, they said.

The exact legal effect the amendment would have remains unclear. While federal law explicitly bars noncitizen voting, the language in the Florida constitution — like that of many states — says that “every” citizen who is 18 may vote. The proposed amendment would change the language to say “only” a citizen may vote.

View the complete July 22 article by Amy Gardner and Alice Crites on The Washington Post website here.

Trump forces ‘staffing up’ to end GOP losing streak in Minnesota

NOTE:  The 2018 voters may have supported Democratic candidates, but we can’t assume that will be the case next year. And, we can’t allow ourselves to not stay engaged and make certain our family and friends are aware of what the Republicans and President Trump truly stand for.

After the narrow loss in 2016, Republicans are pulling out all the stops.

Days after President Donald Trump officially announced his 2020 re-election bid, Minnesota Republican Party Chairwoman Jennifer Carnahan attended a picnic on the White House lawn. As they posed for a selfie, the state GOP leader thanked the president for making three visits to the state since taking office.

“I told him, ‘We appreciate you coming and we hope to see you here at least as many times before the election next year,’ ” Carnahan said.

The president’s response: “I will be there.”

View the complete July 14 article by Torey Van Not on The Star Tribune website here.

Michael Moore was right about Trump in 2016 — and he now has a dire warning for Democrats about 2020

AlterNet logoIn 2016, progressive activist and filmmaker Michael Moore predicted that Donald Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton and pull off an upset in some Rust Belt states that ordinarily go Democratic — including Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Sure enough, Trump won those states, achieving a victory in the Electoral College even though Clinton won the popular vote. And Moore is giving fellow liberals and progressives a stern warning for 2020: Trump’s base is every bit as excited now as it was in 2016.

Democrats, Moore is stressing, shouldn’t underestimate the “enormity of the fight” they will be facing in the 2020 election. The 65-year-old Flynt, Michigan native, who is famous for documentaries that range from 2007’s “Sicko” to 1989’s “Roger and Me” to 2009’s “Capitalism: A Love Story,” warned on Twitter that the president “hasn’t lost one inch of his fired-up insane base.”

View the complete July 10 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

Trump Campaign Creates Fake ‘Supporters’ With Stock Images On Facebook

The Trump campaign is spending millions on Facebook ads for his 2020 reelection bid. But embarrassingly, according to a report from NBC News, the images of Trump supporters in those ads aren’t real Trump supporters — they’re images purchased from a stock photo service.Some of the images come from overseas. One of the stock models featured in Trump’s Facebook ads is identified as “Tracey in Florida” — but her video clips come from a French company that filed her stock video clips under “Young woman smiling and walking on the beach,” according to NBC News.

Another fake supporter, identified as “Thomas from Washington,” comes from stock video footage from a Turkish company that filed the clip under “bearded and tattooed hipster coffee shop owner posing,” NBC News reported.

View the complete July 7 article by Emily Singer on the National Memo website here.

Republicans Fear NRA Turmoil Will Hurt Trump’s Re-Election Chances

Republicans are concerned that the seemingly never-ending parade of scandals at the National Rifle Association could seriously hurt Trump’s reelection efforts.

This week Politico reported on GOP concerns about the NRA, which has been a pivotal part of the Republican right’s vote mobilization efforts in the past.

“The turmoil is fueling fears that the organization will be profoundly diminished heading into the election, leaving the Republican Party with a gaping hole in its political machinery,” Politico noted.

The outlet reported that Republicans are already raising alarms and asking the NRA to come clean with its plans for 2020 so they can address possible deficiencies before the race begins in earnest.

View the complete July 6 article by Oliver Willis on the National Memo website here.

It’s Not Just the White House in 2020. The Power to Draw Maps Is Also at Stake.

New York Times logoDALLAS — Only hours after the United States Supreme Court said it could do nothing to stop partisan gerrymandering of the nation’s political maps, Eric H. Holder Jr. had a message for his fellow Democrats in downtown Dallas.

“Texas is a place where we have to win,” Mr. Holder, who served as attorney general during Barack Obama’s presidency, said last week. “This is doable. This is possible.”

Mr. Holder was not talking about the 2020 presidential election. He was not talking about a congressional race. He was talking about the nine seats Democrats would need to flip to wrest control of the Texas House of Representatives and gain a voice in the redistricting process.

View the complete July 5 article by Mitch Smith and Timothy Williams on The New York Times website here.

Record advertising wave heading for swing states in 2020

Spending on political advertising is projected to smash all-time records in 2020 as President Donald Trump and his Democratic opponent battle for control of the White House.

Advertising Analytics, a political ad-tracking firm, expects the total cost of TV and digital ads for the next election to hit over $6 billion — a 57 percent increase over the total in last year’s hotly contested and expensive midterm elections, driven by a huge jump in digital video advertising.

Over one-quarter of the $6 billion total, $1.6 billion, will be spent on digital video platforms, primarily Facebook and Google, while broadcast and cable TV stations will take in a whopping $4.4 billion — more than twice as much as Democrats and Republicans spent on TV in the last presidential elections.

View the complete July 2 article by Elena Schneider on the Politico website here.

Detecting deepfakes by looking closely reveals a way to protect against them

Deepfake videos are hard for untrained eyes to detect because they can be quite realistic. Whether used as personal weapons of revenge, to manipulate financial markets or to destabilize international relations, videos depicting people doing and saying things they never did or said are a fundamental threat to the longstanding idea that “seeing is believing.” Not anymore.

Most deepfakes are made by showing a computer algorithm many images of a person, and then having it use what it saw to generate new face images. At the same time, their voice is synthesized, so it both looks and sounds like the person has said something new.

Some of my research group’s earlier work allowed us to detect deepfake videos that did not include a person’s normal amount of eye blinking – but the latest generation of deepfakes has adapted, so our research has continued to advance.

View the complete June 25 article by Siwei Lyu, Professor of Computer Science; Director,Computer Vision and Machine Learning Lab, University at Albany, State University of New York, on the Conversation website here.

Of course Trump might reject a 2020 loss. He still rejects the results of a race he won.

Washington Post logoAs the presidential 2016 election wound down, a low rumble formed. Should Donald Trump lose the race, people wondered, would he accept the election results? Or, instead, would the country be ripped apart by a candidate and his fervent base of support refusing to accept what actually happened? In the third and final debate, Trump demurred on a question centered on that issue.

“I will look at it at the time,” he said of accepting the election results. He added that “what I’ve seen is so bad,” what with the media being “dishonest and so corrupt” and with the existence of “millions of people that are registered to vote that shouldn’t be registered to vote.”

This wasn’t a new claim by Trump. He seized upon a 2012 report from the Pew Center on the States that noted that state voter rolls often included people who’d died or moved because registrars were slow to update their records. As we reported at the time that Trump made this claim, there was no evidence that votes were actually cast on behalf of many — or, really, any — of these dead people. (An author of the report made the rounds after Trump’s comments to note that there was no suggestion of fraud in his work.) The report simply served as a comfortable sort of gray area into which Trump could slot suggestions about how the system was stacked against him.

View the complete June 24 article by Philip Bump on The Washington Post website here.