Etiquette



DP Etiquette

First rule: Don't be a jackass.

Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.

Saturday, December 9, 2023

Thank you, AGAIN, science and technology…

CRISPR, the gene editing tool

“Regulators on Friday approved two new gene therapies for sickle cell disease that doctors hope can cure the painful, inherited blood disorder that afflicts mostly Black people in the U.S.

The Food and Drug Administration said the one-time treatments can be used for patients 12 and older with severe forms of the disease. One, made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics, is the first approved therapy based on CRISPRthe gene editing tool that won its inventors the Nobel Prize in 2020. The other is made by Bluebird Bio and works differently.”

[Google for more info and links.]

An example of how humanity could function; constructive, rather than destructive.

No questions today, but feel free to comment.

Thursday, December 7, 2023

To serve or not to serve, that is the question.

I understand that Judge Tanya Chutkan, the judge overseeing the “election interference and conspiracy” case against Donald Trump, has already initiated the jury selection process in next year's D.C. trial of DJT (i.e., questionnaires are currently being mailed out to potential jurists).

Got a lot of questions for you today:

  1. So, if you were presented with the opportunity, would you agree to be on a jury prosecuting DJT? 
  2. Do you think you could be unbiased?  Or, do you have too much emotional DJT baggage? In other words, have you already made up your mind as to his guilt, regarding all the various and sundry indictments?  Or rather, 
  3. To be on the case, while believing he is already guilty, would you see yourself/cast yourself in the role of a “Never Trumper” counterpart, to negate against a MAGA Trump-loving advocate coming in predisposed to Trump's innocence, like you would be coming in predisposed to his guilt?  A kind of "compromising of your integrity" with a heroic "fighting fire with fire" bent, in the name of "keeping democracy alive?"  (Remember, it only takes one “not-guilty” to let him off the hook.)  (Wordy question, sorry about that.)
  4. Would a politically "low-info person," for whom politics and voting is more an inconvenience in their life rather than a staple of it, make for a good juror in a political case? IOW, someone who doesn’t follow/is not tainted with too much nasty politics under their belt?
  5. Here's a toughie.  So, what would you consider the “qualified person” to handle such an historic challenge? Must they be a “professional” type, with a lot of higher education and/or tech skills?  Profile (demographic) your ideal of what would make “the perfect juror” in these DJT cases. 



News bits: Republicans and racism; GOP is killing Ukraine; How dictators and kleptocrats see idiocy



Republicans are more likely to say White people experience racism than Black people. That’s not true.

There were obvious effects [of the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement]. One was that people became much more likely to point to discrimination as the central cause of economic differences between White and Black Americans. Another is that this shift occurred only among Democrats and independents; among Republicans, there was no change. Instead, the rhetoric from Republican leaders rejected the idea that there existed systemic racism in the country. Suggesting that it did was cast as unpatriotic and ahistoric.

This is another instance of ARR (authoritarian radical right) dark free speech deceiving millions of people, leading them to false beliefs. ARR elites know full well what the real racism situation in the US is. But because the fact of racism directed against non-Whites is an inconvenient truth, it gets denied and distorted into a big, immoral lie. When the ARR kills truth, there is not a shred of shame, or a twinge of moral qualm.
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Congressional ARR Republicans appear to be willing to kill Ukraine. The kleptocratic dictator Putin loves it and them. The WaPo writes:
Senate Republicans block procedural vote 
for Ukraine aid package

Senate Republicans on Wednesday blocked a procedural vote to advance a national security bill that includes billions of dollars in Ukraine aid because it includes no changes to border security policy. Every Senate Republican voted against advancing the resolution.  
Schumer said Democrats were willing to debate a Republican counteroffer, but he had urged his colleagues on the other side of the aisle to vote with Democrats to begin debate on the existing proposal and to bring the counteroffer as an amendment to advance talks. The Republicans’ last proposal, Schumer noted, was “far away from what anyone could accept on our side.”
Once again, the importance of immigration and border control becomes a major issue. As long as the situation remains about like it is now, this could be an issue necessary to put DJT in the White House in 2024. Immigration policy is a major weakness that could easily kill both the Dems and democracy. And, at the same time, immigration could give Ukraine to Putin. Once that happens, the mass murder will be on a scale with what Hitler and the Nazis did. 
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Bannon calls Hannity an ‘idiot’ for asking Trump 
if he would be ‘dictator’

“Sean Hannity actually thought he was helping Trump,” with the question, Bannon said on a recent episode of his “War Room” podcast. “Even to ask that question shows you’re an idiot. And we don’t have time for idiots bro. This is a war and we don’t have time for sunshine patriots and this nonsense.”
As we all recall, Steve Bannon coined the phrase “flood the zone with shit” to describe how ARR dictators and kleptocrats should fight the dark free speech war against democracy, civil liberties, the rule of law and inconvenient truth. Just overwhelm political opposition and inconvenient truth with divisive lies, slanders, crackpottery and demagoguery. It works.

One has to wonder if DJT might pick Bannon as his VP. Bannon is an excellent fit by his vulgar temperament and tactics, his support of dictatorship and corruption, his shameless mendacity and complete moral bankruptcy and his proven track record of criminality and kleptocracy.
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From the Brass Knuckles Capitalism Files:  The AP reports about Amazon’s planned brass knuckles capitalist propaganda tactics for southern California:
Amazon’s internal plans to advance its interests in 
California are laid bare in leaked memo

An internal Amazon memo has provided a stark look at the company’s carefully laid out plans to grow its influence in Southern California through a plethora of efforts that include burnishing its reputation through charity work and pushing back against “labor agitation” from the Teamsters and other groups.

The eight-page document — titled “community engagement plan” for 2024 — provides a rare glimpse into how one of American’s biggest companies executes on its public relations [propaganda or dark free speech] objectives and attempts to curtail reputational harm stemming from criticisms of its business. It also illustrates how Amazon aims to methodically court local politicians and community groups in order to push its interests in a region where it could be hampered by local moratoriums on warehouse development, and it is facing resistance from environmental and labor activists.

The memo was leaked to the nonprofit labor organization Warehouse Worker Resource Center and posted online this week. The Associated Press independently verified its authenticity.  
In the memo outlining Amazon’s goals for next year, the company says it plans to “earn the trust” of community groups and nonprofits, such as the San Bernardino Valley College Foundation, Children’s Fund, and Feeding America, to push back against state bills “that will continue to threaten the region’s economy, and Amazon’s interests.” The two bills cited include a state legislation that, if passed, would prohibit companies from building large warehouses within 1,000 feet (300 meters) of private homes, apartments, schools, daycares and other facilities.

 



Note the campaign contribution tactic to cultivate politicians:

Perris Mayor Marty Vargas is an influential elected leader that we have cultivated through PPE donations to support the region, touring him and his team, and ongoing engagement.  He also influences the governing body of the San Bernardino regional air-hub (KSBD). 


IE means Inland Empire

IE = San Bernardino and Riverside counties (in red)
San Diego county, bottom left (yellow), 
pop. ~3.3 million


Wednesday, December 6, 2023

GOP propaganda, lies and secrecy tactics

Context
CNN
House Speaker Johnson wants to blur January 6 footage to protect Capitol rioters

House Speaker Mike Johnson said Tuesday that before publicly releasing footage of the US Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, the faces of the mob will be blurred to protect them from the Justice Department.

“We’re going through a methodical process of releasing them as quickly as we can,” Johnson said. “As you know, we have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ and to have other, you know, concerns and problems.”
That is an example of the ARRRP (authoritarian radical right Republican Party) openly manipulating evidence to try to protect the criminals and traitors who participated in DJT’s 1/6 coup attempt.


Propaganda and secrecy tactics
A WaPo analysis discussed tactics that ARRRP politicians are using to deceive the American people while trying to hide their attacks on democracy and political opposition: 
Giuliani had handed over to the New York Post material purportedly obtained from a laptop that had belonged to Joe Biden’s son Hunter and was asked about doing so by the New York Times.

He turned to the right-wing tabloid because he didn’t want the information in his possession to be vetted for authenticity or offered in a broader context. He wanted it presented in a way that would do the most damage to Joe Biden. As he put it to a radio interviewer in the same period, “even if it isn’t accurate, the American people are entitled to know it.” [this is the crux of the analysis here, i.e., the American people are “entitled” to hear lies presented as truths]
For years — and particularly since Trump reshaped the standard of acceptability for unfounded allegations — the right-wing media has operated as a bubble, a self-contained universe of argument and evidence where claims are reinforced far more often than they are undercut. (One of the central rhetorical tenets of that universe, of course, is that it’s traditional media outlets that have a blinkered, limited understanding of the world — which is true, in the sense that we are constrained by the boundaries of reality.)

Consider House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) announcement Tuesday that the release of footage captured by security cameras at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, would blur the faces of those shown. This wasn’t a new declaration; he’d made this point previously. But this time, Johnson framed the move as being centered on ensuring that those inside the Capitol wouldn’t be “retaliated against and be charged” by the Justice Department.

This doesn’t make much sense. The Justice Department’s had the video for years and used it to charge various actors. Instead, as Johnson spokesman (and former White House communications staffer and former Fox News executive) Raj Shah clarified, the real goal was to “prevent all forms of retaliation against private citizens from any nongovernmental actors.” In other words, to prevent groups like Sedition Hunters from developing new leads on participants in the riot that occurred that day and which has, on multiple occasions, helped the Justice Department build cases against rioters.  
Johnson seemingly wants to release the footage because the Republican base has called for it, believing that the footage will allow them to construct an argument that the riot was a function not of Trump supporters but government actors or leftists. It will allow them to do that, of course, since the bar for “proving” this untrue thing is so low. (We’ve already seen them try it.) But Johnson wants the evidence this footage constitutes to be used only in a context that’s helpful to his base, not harmful. So it gets blurred.

A different lens on this effort to control evidence and rhetoric comes from Johnson’s allies who are leading the Republican effort to build a case for impeaching President Biden. As with the Capitol riot, there is already a broadly accepted belief on the right: namely, that Biden is a corrupt actor who benefited from his son’s business deals. .... people like House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) are trying to backfill evidence in support of that belief. At a news conference Tuesday, Comer again tried to present this debunked argument as though it was still viable.

“This week, we revealed how Hunter Biden’s corporate entity, Owasco PC, made direct monthly payments to Joe Biden,” Comer said. “Owasco PC is under investigation by the Justice Department for tax evasion and other serious crimes. Chinese and other foreign entities funneled millions of dollars into Hunter’s Owasco PC, and some of this money landed in Joe Biden’s bank account.”

By extension, if a criminal has a subscription to this newspaper, I am culpable for his activity when The Post pays me my salary.

“These direct monthly payments to Joe Biden,” Comer continued, “are part of a pattern revealing Joe Biden knew about, participated in, and benefited from his family’s shady business schemes.”

Again, the “benefit” was “being repaid money he was owed.” The “knew about” and “participated in” claims, meanwhile, remain unproven. But they are treated as factual by Comer and by the right-wing media ecosystem, because they are the tenets of the conclusion to which they’ve all seemingly already agreed.

The news conference ended with Comer and his colleagues taking no questions. Comer would not be forced to defend his exaggerations and misinformation. Instead, he joined right-wing commentator Benny Johnson’s podcast where he simply reiterated those same claims. 
Johnson and his colleagues are rapidly approaching a difficult point in their impeachment push, though. At some point, they will need to decide whether to file articles of impeachment against Biden. It’s clear that a lot of Republicans are worried about what happens with the unstoppable force of demand for impeachment reaches the immovable object of reality. I guess we’ll see.

Meanwhile, the New York Post continues to do what Giuliani had hoped for back in 2020, presenting right-wing claims without doing anything to try to contradict them. The paper’s front page on Tuesday morning, after Comer’s claims about the payments to Biden had been debunked, declared that “[a]fter being paid by foreign companies, Hunter’s law firm gave Joe Biden monthly fees.”

Reality kept out of the bubble for another 24 hours, at least.
The lengths that the ARRRP will go to “prove” their lies and slanders are truths has crossed into the realm of fabricating evidence and protecting traitors. There’s no rational doubt about that. That has been the case for some time now, at least a few years. This kind of lying to the public by manipulating evidence is now a standard authoritarian radical right and ARRRP dark free speech tactic. The tactic, along with everything else morally and otherwise rotten in the ARRRP, arguably crosses a line from some ill-defined authoritarianism and makes the authoritarian radicals a modern American version of old-fashioned fascism.

Note added: 
Daily Beast reports that Johnson changed his initial reason for blurring the 1/6 traitor’s faces and now says he did it for the reason the WaPo analysis asserts: 
Mike Johnsons Office Walks Back Reason 
For Blurring Insurrectionists' Faces 

After saying faces were blurred in security footage to shield alleged Jan. 6 rioters from prosecution, a spokesperson confirmed the DOJ already has access to the unedited clips.

Raj Shah, a spokesperson for Johnson, wrote in a statement that his boss was mistaken on the reasoning for the blurred faces, insisting that the decision to conceal identities was to protect rioters from harassment by the public—not from prosecution by the DOJ, who already has the raw footage.

“Faces are to be blurred from public viewing room footage to prevent all forms of retaliation against private citizens from any non-governmental actors,” he said.

Tuesday, December 5, 2023

News chunks: AGW truth vs lies; The dictator warning floodgates are wide open!

A NYT article updates the COP28 AGW (anthropogenic global warming) meeting in staunchly pro-pollution and pro-propaganda Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The meeting is boiling down to a knife fight between now freaked-out climate science experts and cynical wealthy, lying, climate science denying oil elites and their gigantic lying corporations with more than human rights, i.e., super human rights. The NYT writes:
It’s Big Oil vs. Science at the U.N. Climate Summit

Five days into the two-week conference, known as COP28, the talks have become consumed by an intense debate over the future of fossil fuels.

The president of the event is under fire for having suggested that it is not necessary to phase out oil, gas and coal, the burning of which is dangerously heating the planet. At least 1,300 fossil fuels lobbyists, a record, are participating in the talks. And Saudi Arabia has said it opposes any agreement that calls for an end to fossil fuels — significant because, under U.N. rules, any single country can scuttle a deal.

At the same time, scientists, activists and dozens of world leaders are growing more adamant in their calls for a rapid reduction in oil, gas and coal, arguing that, without a pivot away from fossil fuels, the planet is destined for catastrophe. Agreement on a phaseout would be historic; Past U.N. climate deals have shied away from even including the words “fossil fuels.”

Against this backdrop, negotiators from more than 170 countries are frantically working to hash out an agreement that can be approved by every nation by next Tuesday.

“The COP presidency has brought baggage to this process, and far too many oil lobbyists,” said Tzeporah Berman, a Canadian activist who is chairwoman of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. “He has also brought a chance for a real conversation on how to phase out fossil fuels.”  
Tensions over the decision to hold the event in the Emirates have swirled for months and burst into view on Monday, when Sultan Al Jaber, the oil executive presiding over the climate talks, came under fire for saying there is “no science” behind the idea that fossil fuels must be phased out in order to keep average global temperatures from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. 
“I don’t think we are going to leave Dubai without some clear language and clear direction about moving away from fossil fuels,” said David Waskow, director of the international climate initiative at the World Resources Institute, an environmental research group.

But several Gulf state leaders and top oil executives have indicated they are not open to such language.

“Absolutely not,” the Saudi energy minister, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, said when asked during a television interview in Riyadh whether his country would support an agreement that called for the phase-down or phaseout of fossil fuels.  
Aaron Padilla, the vice president of corporate policy at the American Petroleum Institute, which represents some of the biggest oil and gas companies in the United States, called the effort to demand a fossil fuel phaseout “misguided.”

The Sultan: A happy, filthy rich, cynical liar 

There we have it, we hear the science denial argument from a lying, filthy, oil rich, morally rotted, jackass Sultan and staunch opposition from a cynical, filthy oil rich, lying Saudi Prince, and a lying American dark free speech jackass. The Sultan is especially shameless when he lies, telling us that climate science experts have “no science” behind their climate projections. That says everything we need to know about this fight. Cynical human elites and gigantic corporate defenders of pollution, global warming and species extinction are immoral liars who fight dirty and shamelessly. 
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In the last month or two, something changed. It’s sort of like a switch flipped. All of a sudden dire warnings about a second DJT term in office are popping up all over the place. Liz Cheney’s books full of dire warnings just came out. The NYT and WaPo are publishing a major warning every couple of days. What happened to flip the switch from asleep to not? People got woke, but it's not clear to me what woke ’em up. Maybe DJT’s increasingly explicit threats about what he plans to do once he gets back in power was a hard kick in the groin that caught people’s attention. Some of us have been woke from a long time. regardless of the cause, this awakening is cause for celebration.

Celebrating!

Among the long-time aware people issuing warnings is former Russian journalist Masha Gessen, who reported the fall of Russian democracy to Putin’s kleptocratic dictatorship. She has first hand experience with the fall of democracy. She wrote this a day or two after DJT was elected in Nov. 2016, commenting of the piss poor, clueless concession speech Hillary made after she lost:
“Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. We have lost. We have lost, and this is the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. The president-elect has made his intentions clear, and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. We must band together right now to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which our country is based.” 
That, or something like that, is what Hillary Clinton should have said on Wednesday [in her concession speech to Trump].
Donald Trump’s threats for another presidency are deeply alarming, historians and legal experts say.
DJT has promised to use the powers of the federal government to punish people he perceives to be his critics and opponents, including the Biden family, district attorneys, journalists and “the deep state.” He has suggested that Mark Milley, a retired top general, deserves the death penalty. Trump has called President Biden “an enemy of the state” and Nancy Pelosi “the Wicked Witch.” He has accused former President Barack Obama — “Barack Hussein Obama,” in Trump’s telling — of directing Biden to admit “terrorists and terrorist sympathizers” into the U.S. 
Trump’s threats, often justified with lies, are deeply alarming, historians and legal experts say. He has repeatedly promised to undermine core parts of American democracy. He has also signaled that, unlike in his first term in the White House, he will avoid appointing aides and cabinet officials who would restrain him.
The warnings of a DJT kleptocratic dictatorship are so bad that some radical authoritarian Republicans are actually abandoning the KYMS (keep your mouth shut) propaganda tactic and starting to respond with the usual barrage of lies, slanders and cynical elitist bullshit. For example:
“All of these articles calling Trump a dictator are about one thing: legitimizing illegal and violent conduct as we get closer to the election,” Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), a Trump ally, wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Everyone needs to take a chill pill.”

“It’s August 2016 all over again. Skyrocketing cost of health care has millions worried. President Trump’s Dem. opponent off the campaign trail & hiding from the press,” senior Trump adviser Jason Miller wrote on X.

“Dems & their media allies have given up on debating issues & have shifted to name-calling & rhetorical fearmongering,” he added. “This is nothing more than another version of the media’s failed and false Russia collusion hoax,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said of The Atlantic project, claiming the magazine “will be out of business soon because nobody will read that trash.” 

Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), addressing The Atlantic piece, accused the left of using “the same hysterical scare tactics from 2016 & 2020 to attack Trump.”

Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-Texas), referencing The Washington Post column, claimed the left had gone into “FULL PANIC Mode” and suggested another Trump term would mean “the end of dictators in America, NOT the beginning.”
That is sooo satisfying. Fear of radical right kleptocratic dictatorship is now so loud that its defenders feel they have to actually respond. That is amazing.

Well, now I feel fully vindicated in my warnings, which some people confidently told me were overblown, exaggerated, lies, stupidity, brainwashed BS, blithering nonsense, etc. According to me (an expert on me), I've been harping on the DJT threat for quite a while. This is from Feb. 2020
Since February or March of 2017, I've been arguing that the president wants to convert America from a rule of law democracy into some kind of kleptocratic tyranny-oligarchy-theocracy. Before then, I believed that is what the president wanted to do, but thought it made sense to see how he would speak and otherwise behave once in office. Early on, most Americans, but not all, would have dismissed the Trump tyrant-kleptocrat argument as nonsense, hyperbole, a lie or whatever was needed to make the argument go away. That was dismissed here as recently as a couple of weeks ago, with the argument that any tyrant-kleptocrat argument was gross hyperbole and such a thing as a kleptocratic tyranny didn't even exist. As usual, citation of contrary evidence changed absolutely nothing.

News bits: Abortion & GOP dirty tricks; The dictator’s policies; GOP attacks on voting

Rolling Stone reports about radicalized, authoritarian GOP efforts to keep voters from voting about abortion. They have to do that because they know they will lose at the ballot box and because they are authoritarians who absolutely, positively do not care about or support majority opinion when it is inconvenient to them or their dogmas. RS writes:
The Dirty Tricks the GOP Is Using to Keep Abortion 
Off the Ballot in 2024

Republicans are getting killed on reproductive rights, and they're taking desperate measures to prevent their constituents from having a say next year

Since the Supreme Court struck down Roe in June of 2022, the reproductive rights movement has gone seven for seven at the ballot box, defeating efforts to restrict abortion in states like Kansas, Kentucky, and Montana, and enshrining protections in swing states like Michigan and Ohio. It’s hardly a wonder why Republicans are emptying their bag of dirty tricks to make sure it doesn’t work: inventing astronomical “costs,” conspiring with anti-abortion groups to change the ballot language, and fighting to ban petition collectors from public spaces, among other strategies.

In South Dakota, anti-abortion activists, with assists from GOP officials, have tried out a variety of tactics in recent months. Activists have been harassed, videotaped and repeatedly called the police on petition collectors, while local officials have sought to pass ordinances banning them from collecting signatures in public places. Most recently, the attorney general warned in a letter that he was in possession of “video and photographic evidence” that could allow opponents to challenge the signatures that have been collected so far.

“The organized opposition is more aggressive than I’ve encountered in any of these fights in the past,” says Adam Weiland, who has worked on various ballot measures in the state for years. “It’s the first time I’ve ever encountered people who don’t even want you to get on the ballot and let the voters vote. That’s the whole focus of their campaign.”  
The same stories are playing out in battleground states and Republican-controlled states around the country. (GOP tyranny tricks in Arizona, Florida, Nevada and Missouri are discussed)
This is the new normal for the radicalized, kleptocratic authoritarian Republican Party. It is ruthless, shameless, vicious and, among some other nasty things, virulently opposed to democracy, voting rights, inconvenient fact or truth, civil liberties and inconvenient majority public opinion.
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The Atlantic reports about a policy that DJT would implement if he is re-elected in 2024:
TRUMP WILL ABANDON NATO

“I don’t give a shit about NATO.” Thus did former President Donald Trump once express his feelings about America’s oldest and strongest military alliance. Not that this statement, made in the presence of John Bolton, the national security adviser at the time, came as a surprise. Long before he was a political candidate, Trump questioned the value of American alliances. Of Europeans, he once wrote that “their conflicts are not worth American lives. Pulling back from Europe would save this country millions of dollars annually.” 

But during Trump’s time in office, the withdrawal never happened. That was because someone was always there to talk him out of it. Bolton says he did; Jim Mattis, John Kelly, Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo, and even Mike Pence are thought to have done so too.

But they didn’t change his mind. And if Trump is reelected in 2024, none of those people will be in the White House. All of them have broken with the former president, in some cases dramatically, and there isn’t another pool of Republican analysts who understand Russia and Europe, because most of them either signed statements opposing him in 2016 or criticized him after 2020. In a second term, Trump would be surrounded by people who either share his dislike of American security alliances or don’t know anything about them and don’t care. This time, the ill will that Trump has always felt toward American allies would likely manifest itself in a clear policy change. “The damage he did in his first term was reparable,” Bolton told me. “The damage in the second term would be irreparable.”
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A major unknown for the 2024 elections is how effective the pro-tyranny Republican Party will be in suppressing non-Republican votes while trying to protect Republican votes. If the election is close as it now appears it will be, a small effect might be sufficient to subvert the election and put DJT back in the White House. CBS News writes:
Eligible voters are being swept up in anti-democracy 
activists' efforts to purge voter rolls

Voters eligible to cast ballots are already being swept up in a grassroots effort to purge the nation's registration rolls ahead of the 2024 presidential election, a CBS News investigation has found.

The undertaking, which includes the involvement of a lawyer tied to former President Trump's alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, tends to affect minority or younger voters who may be statistically more likely to vote Democrat, according to local election officials.

Georgia became ground zero for the movement after Republicans in the state pushed through a law in 2021 allowing citizens to file an unlimited number of challenges against fellow voters within their own county. In the two years since the law passed, a CBS News investigation found more than 80,000 challenges have been filed against Georgia voters — many of them by a loose network of about a dozen conservative activists.

Public records reveal a local Republican Party activist in Virginia who attended a March strategy session, then filed a slate of 43 voter challenges in August, ahead of the November election. Activists have also recently filed challenges in Washington state and Michigan, where a public records request revealed a GOP official conducted a "field investigation," going to dozens of homes to check if voters were registered to the correct address.

Gail Lee is one of scores of Georgia volunteers who scours the rolls, looking for voters registered at P.O. boxes, those who appear in the rolls multiple times, or those who list birthdays so old that the voter may be deceased. She then compiles a dossier on each challenged voter and sends it to the county election board.

"I believe it's what God wants me to do," Lee said. "He knows what's right and what's wrong and there's things that need to be fixed in the voter rolls."
 
Gail Lee knows the 2020 election was stolen 
and Biden is illegitimate, so she works God
will to purge the evil from voter rolls
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Headlines ’n bits:

Liz Cheney warns that Trump won't leave office if he's elected to a second term and says voting for him ‘may mean the last election that you ever get to vote in’ -- “There's no question. Absolutely. He’s already done it once. ... He's already attempted to seize power, and he was stopped, thankfully, and for the good of the nation and the republic. But he said he will do it again. He’s expressed no remorse for what he did.”

Fox News interrupts Trump speech to fact-check his “many untruths” -- “The 2020 election was not rigged. It was not stolen,” said anchor Arthel Neville (this is strange)

Can’t even bring themselves to denounce neo-Nazis”: Texas GOP's internal war over Hitler apologists -- Texas Republicans called it “Marxist” to bar members from associating with Holocaust deniers. Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan declared that this was no “casual misstep” but a sign “of the moral, political rot that has been festering in a certain segment of our party.” (moral rot?? MAGA!! to that)

‘Donald Trump will never leave office voluntarily’: Rep. Schiff on the threat of a second Trump term -- Congressman Adam Schiff discusses Donald Trump calling President Biden the “destroyer” of democracy despite his own efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the new warnings of Trump’s threat to democracy.
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