Donald Trump Archives - Page 19 of 48

War on the United States Postal Service

Postmaster general Louis DeJoy is an RNC megadonor.

There has been a war on the United States Postal Service. It did not start this year, or with this regime, or even in the past decade.

Back in 2006, the Republican Congress passed legislation to impose extraordinary new financial burdens on the USPS. It required that the entity prepay retirement health benefits 75 years in advance. According to the American Postal Workers Union, the mandate is responsible for more than 90 percent of Postal Service net losses since 2007. It is a threat to its economic viability. Check out John Oliver’s piece from May 2020.

That said, the attack on the USPS has escalated this year. As many outlets have reported, IMPOTUS has confirmed it. He’s killing the Post Office to also destroy the election.

The postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, was appointed in May 2020. He is a megadonor of the regime but has no prior expertise pertaining to the Postal Service. He has disrupted the mission of the United States Postal Service, which is to deliver mail to Americans in a timely fashion.

In the last couple of months, mail delivery has dramatically slowed down. “The efforts to sabotage the United States Postal Service are anything but subtle.” It includes mail sorting machines removed without reason, shelves detached to slow down hand sorting, and postal drop boxes being taken away.” Fortunately, in the short term, due to the outcry, these measures have been temporarily stopped. Still, the handpicked postmaster general isn’t threatening to destroy the Post Office; he’s destroying the Post Office.

Reorganization?

This month, there was a major shake-up at the Postal Service. Twenty-three executives were reassigned or displaced, taking out those who might complain. As The Washington Post reported, Postal Service employees with decades of experience have disappeared from the organizational chart. “DeJoy has created a whole new structure, with all new people, to execute his inside attack on the service.” This isn’t coincidental. Or subtle.

“The reshuffling threatens to heighten tensions between postal officials and lawmakers, who are troubled by delivery delays. The Postal Service banned employees from working overtime and making extra trips to deliver mail.” They are “wary of the administration’s influence on the Postal Service.” As well they should.

Last week, djt “made it clear that he was attacking the Post Office explicitly to destroy its ability to handle mail-in ballots. “They want $25 billion for the Post Office. Now they need that money in order to make the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots. But if they don’t get those two items that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.”

In fact, the United States Postal Service has notified 46 states and the District of Columbia that they may be unable to deliver some ballots cast by mail for the November election in time to be counted. IMPOTUS is publicly opposing any effort to strengthen the Postal Service because he’s afraid it will enable more voters to vote safely by mail in November.

RNC cronies

“This isn’t just a Trump effort… Not only are Republicans meeting with DeJoy to plan the destruction of the Postal Service, but this also isn’t the first time most of these Republicans have met DeJoy.” He was a top National Republican Committee money guy who was actually in charge of fundraising before being handed the keys to one of the nation’s most vital institutions.

The NRC is engaged in a massive campaign to limit mail-in ballots. They are spending tens of millions of dollars on lawsuits to limit the franchise. They fight against states attempting to expand mail-in ballots and for ballot restrictions.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has done nothing to defend the Postal Service, allowing the Senate to fill the board of governors with IMPOTUS appointees. By extension, he has limited Americans’ ability to vote in the most important election of our lifetimes. (Note: he’s yup for re-election in 2020.)

The post office was codified in Article 1. Section 8 of the US Constitution. Why destroy a public service? These efforts delay not only elections but the delivery of checks, bill payments, legal documents, Census forms, and vital medications in the midst of a pandemic. And yes, with millions of people planning to vote by mail, we need to ensure that our ballots arrive and are counted.

An odd sidebar: IMPOTUS Suddenly Urged Florida Voters To Use Mail Ballots. Perhaps he is afraid of losing in his newly-adopted state. He’s done so himself, with some difficulty. “It may be the tactically correct move. But it just comes at the cost of completely undermining his attempt to delegitimize the process. He began with such little credibility outside his support base that he may not care.”

This should happen

I’m happy to see the USPS inspector general is investigating changes at post offices. The story notes: “The Democrats also requested that the IG assess whether DeJoy and his wife – who ‘reportedly own assets worth tens of millions of dollars in Postal Service competitors and contractors have fully complied with ethics requirements.” This is according to a statement from Senator Elizabeth Warren’s office.

Also, Louis DeJoy has agreed to testify at a Congressional hearing on August 24.

The Senate should pass H.R.2382, the USPS Fairness Act. This legislation would specifically repeal the harmful and costly requirement that the U.S. Postal Service prepay retirement health benefits 75 years in advance. This bill would unsaddle the USPS of an immense and unnecessary financial burden.

The USPS board of governors should require the Postmaster General to permanently reverse this assault on America’s Postal Service, or else remove Louis DeJoy from the position.

August rambling: a word with no meaning

keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom

https://wronghands1.com/2020/07/07/rock-classification-table/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 Unported License

The NRA and the Long Con.

There’s No Such Thing as Family Secrets in the Age of 23andMe.

Telehealth Boom Misses Older Adults.

Don’t Blame Colleges for the Coming Fall Debacle. This is just what higher education looks like in a failed state.

Google Voice deserves your attention (again).

The Anonymous Professor Who Wasn’t.

Urban Dictionary TOP Definition: Literally – a word with no meaning in today’s USA.

Webwaste: The Web is Obese.

Vlogbrothers (Hank Green): Ideas are absolutely a kind of magic and It seems like content is now infinite and internalizing the reality that critique is vital…but so is knowing when you think it’s wrong.

A Tale of Two TV Producers and How They Switched Places (Gene Roddenberry and Jack Webb).

Ken Levine interview of Debbie Gibson: Part 1 and Part 2.

Songwriter Ashley Gorley Becomes First with 50 Number One Songs.

Double-O Thoughts.

Octothorpe – another term for the pound, number, or hashtag symbol (#).

Race

John Oliver: US history books and racism.

How Stephen Miller Molded the GOP to His Anti-immigration Agenda.

Pitfalls Black Lives Matter must avoid to maintain momentum and achieve meaningful change.

A Rare Recipe From a Talented Chef, Enslaved by a Founding Father.

A historical reckoning for the global slave trade including the database Legacies of British Slave-ownership.

I’ll have to read Isabel Wilkerson’s important new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. She makes unsettling comparisons between India’s stigmatizing treatment of its untouchables, Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews, and America’s treatment of African-Americans, the social systems that “keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom.”

Now I Know

The Color of Fraud and The Holbrook Holiday and The Horseless Headsman and The TV That Needed Help and Kindergarten Crabs?

https://wronghands1.com/2020/05/26/regency-novel-or-pandemic-life/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 Unported License

IMPOTUS

His Threat to Press Freedom Is Global.

Weekly Sift: The Election: Worry or Don’t Worry?

The Lincoln Project: Wake Up.

Yes, Kanye Is Trying To Help Trump Win By Spoiling Biden’s Chances with some help.

MUSIC

Lookin’ For a Leader 2020 – Neil Young.

Global Warming by Michael Abels.

The Ordering of Moses by Robert Nathaniel Dett.

Stevie Wonder music featuring Rebecca Jade and Leonard Patton on vocals, Tripp Sprague on sax and flute, Mack Leighton on bass, Duncan Moore on drums, and Peter Sprague on guitar. The Prayer featuring Rebecca Jade and Chris Walker.

AGO Organfest: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday

Concerto for Left Hand in D Major by Ravel, performed by Leon Fleischer, who died at the age of 92.

16, Going On 17 – Laura Benanti and Christopher Fitzgerald

You’ll Be Back, priest’s viral ‘Hamilton’ video.

Brandy – Elliot Lurie. and friends, a cappella (and an Evanier story).

Electric Avenue – The Last Bandoleros and SHAGGY.

William Tell Overture finale, played by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.

Coverville 1319: Covers of Public Enemy, RUN-DMC and LL Cool J.

Have I lived the life I wanted?

Canaan’s descendants settled in the land of Canaan!

canaan In the Boston Globe recently, there was an interesting title. “If I die now, have I lived the life I wanted to?” The subtitle: “The pandemic has people examining their lives. Some don’t like what they’re seeing.”

“Spouses are being left, retirements pushed up, friends dropped. People are moving to rural spots and strengthening their faith, and those fortunate enough to have a choice are saying ‘no’ to commuting.”

But I don’t think it’s just the pandemic. As the article noted, “A married couple have taken stock of their lives… They have been hanging out with the wrong people — friends who were nice to their faces, but, they now realize, are selfish. The friends refuse to wear masks or support Black Lives Matter, stances that rule out any further relationship.”

So it’s all of it: IMPOTUS, COVID-19, George Floyd and all of the ramifications of each. It’s certainly true for me.

Let me let you in on a little secret. I hate writing about race and racism in America. The only thing that I hate more is NOT writing about it. There is a hole in my stomach, probably from acid reflux, when I don’t write what I am feeling.

So I have come to a conclusion. There’s a woman in my life who is really upset with me. It is because I told her, in an email discussion in late June, that IMPOTUS was a bigoted person. Therefore, her support of him appeared racist to me. She says she’s “devastated.”

Old Testament

My realization, my culpability in this, is that I held back in the past. For instance, when she laid out to me that black people became slaves in America because of the curse of Canaan. I wrote about this theory five years ago.

From here: “Canaan’s descendants, however, did not settle in Africa, but in the land to which they gave their father’s name—the land of Canaan!… Later, Joshua conquered this land and placed the Canaanites under forced slave labor (Josh. 9:23)…. Thus, the prophetic curse of slavery was literally fulfilled on the Canaanites. The curse, therefore, applies to no ethnic group in existence today. The mistaken idea that Ham’s African descendants are cursed is a myth too often repeated even to this day!” And it’s out there a lot.

When I finally did figure out the absurdity that she was talking about – even assuming that the Bible is literally true, which she does – I might have called her out about it. But I didn’t, in the name of peace. But, as it states in Jeremiah 6:14-15:

They dress the wound of my people
as though it were not serious.
‘Peace, peace,’ they say,
when there is no peace.
Are they ashamed of their detestable conduct?
No, they have no shame at all;
they do not even know how to blush.

My disservice to her, then, was not saying something sooner. It’s not her support for IMPOTUS that is the reason I believe her views are racist; that just codifies it. It’s because of her views on the curse of Ham, and the seeming glee she had sharing this with me five or six years earlier. And some other things too.

Say nothing and close his Twitter

“The American people demand equitable results.”

It is my considered opinion that if the incumbent wants to be reelected to stay in the White House, it wouldn’t be that difficult. All he has to do is say nothing and close his Twitter account. OK, that’s a bit hyperbolic. Still, I do believe that, even in 2020, every time he doesn’t say or tweet something amazingly wrongheaded, he’s accused of finally becoming Presidential.

Fortunately, this appears to be utterly impossible for very long. The item that’s gotten the most play recently is his interview with Axios National Political Correspondent, Jonathan Swan. It was conducted on July 28 but aired on August 3. on HBO It is worse than I could have possibly imagined. The answers were just bizarre. And, as is usually the case any time he speaks, PolitiFact needed to fact-check 22 claims from the interview.

Twitter and Facebook removed recent false claims of his about COVID-19. not for the first time. His assessment of the Beirut explosion seemed to be based on talking through his hat.

Are his recent executive orders even legal? Or actually executive orders? Kevin Drum posits that “the stuff that’s legal is unimportant and the stuff that’s important is illegal.”

Something he has promised, since before Day One, is a better health insurance plan. There is NO plan. He hires people with great hyperbole and fires them with even more.

His record has initiated a series of The Lincoln Project advertisements, often quoting the man’s own words. Chuck Miller describes the evolution of the snake, a story djt told quite frequently. It’s odd; often, what he describes of others is what he does, who he is.

He’s the butt of some pointed satire. Here’s an Honest Government Ad, a “message from the White House.” Borowitz in the New Yorker declares Americans Support Using U.S. Postal Service to Ship Him to Different Address.

Lest We Forget

“Early in [his] term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of his cruelties, collusions, and crimes…

“It felt urgent then to track them, to ensure these horrors — happening almost daily — would not be forgotten. This election year, amid a harrowing global health, civil rights, humanitarian, and economic crisis, we know it’s never been more critical to note these horrors, to remember them, and to do all in our power to reverse them. This list will be updated between now and the November 2020 Presidential election.”

Is This the Beginning of the End of American Racism?

In the September 2020 Atlantic, Ibram X. Kendi posits that IMPOTUS “has revealed the depths of the country’s prejudice—and has inadvertently forced a reckoning.” Hmm.

Back in 2019, “Trump now faced reporters and cameras. Over the drone of the helicopter rotors, one reporter asked Trump if he was bothered that ‘more and more people’ were calling him racist. ‘I am the least racist person there is anywhere in the world,’ Trump replied, hands up, palms facing out for emphasis.” He says that a lot.

Kendi, the author of How To Be An Anti-Racist, suggests the current regime “has paved the way for a revolution against racism.” The “denialism has permanently changed the way Americans view themselves. The Trump effect is real and lasting. The reckoning we have witnessed this spring and summer at public demonstrations transforms into a reckoning in legislatures, C-suites, university-admissions offices.

“On this path, the American people demand equitable results, not speeches that make them feel good about themselves and their country. The American people give policymakers an ultimatum: Use your power to radically reduce inequity and injustice, or be voted out.”

My, Kendi is more optimistic than I. Has America truly embraced an anti-racist agenda for the long term? Or will they have moved on to some other concerns come November? Je ne sais pas.

“Hey, Maybe We Should Postpone The Election”

A crony running USPS

postpone the election.Abe Lincoln Just the other day, I was kvetching to my wife. I said, “You know, I’d rather NOT write about him. But then he keeps doing worse crap.” To wit, suggesting, on Twitter, naturally, that perhaps the United States should postpone the election of November 3 until we can get everyone to the polls safely.

This was so egregiously wrong that Steven Calabresi called for a second impeachment inquiry into him. He is the co-founder of the conservative Federalist Society, This was in a New York Times opinion piece in late July, “where he falsely characterized mail-in voting and proposed the delay of the 2020 presidential election in November, which the executive branch cannot enact.”

Please understand the weight of the complainant. Calabresi has “he’s voted Republican in the presidential election since 1980.” He also “opposed the investigation into Russian election interference by Robert Mueller and was against the impeachment into Trump regarding withholding aid to Ukraine.

As for the Federalist Society, it is “a right-wing organization with 60,000 lawyers, law students and scholars.” It has been “characterized as a ‘conservative pipeline to the Supreme Court'” by the Atlantic. Recently confirmed judge Brett Kavanaugh joined the group while at Yale.

Calabresi wrote, “Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist. But this latest tweet is fascistic. And it is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate.” Which won’t happen, mind you.

Preciscient?

Ed Morrissey in Red State: “Good grief. For months, Donald Trump’s allies and even a few of his critics have blasted Democrats and a handful of media figures for their baseless theories that the president would cancel or delay the national election. [Presumptive Democratic candidate Joe] Biden got ridiculed for saying that in April. ‘Mark my words: I think he is gonna try to kick back the election somehow, come up with some rationale why it can’t be held,’ even though the law and the constitution are clear that presidents can’t do that.

“And then…

“The best that could be said for this tweet is that Trump’s just spitballing, but even that’s an indictment of its own. No president should just be spitballing a suggestion like this, not in public and not even in private, where it would leak to the press quickly enough anyway. The US held an election in the middle of its Civil War in 1864. We can hold an election in the middle of a pandemic, especially when the president himself keeps insisting we can and should reopen for business.

“Rather than recognize those [Constitutional] impossibilities and leave it as a paranoid-conspiracy theory for the Left, he has essentially vindicated Biden and the paranoids. And for what purpose? Trump can’t do what he’s suggesting, Congress wouldn’t entertain the thought for one hot second… and it won’t work anyway. What could possibly be gained from tweeting out this absurd idea, other than perhaps distracting from the bad GDP report everyone was more or less expecting anyway?”

Of course, the tweet was sent the same day it was announced that the U.S. gross domestic product dropped at an annual rate of 32.9%. Reports of polling putting Biden far ahead of him in the November election.

Properly, securely and safely vote

The argument for delaying has to do with people being able to get to the polls without risking their lives. During this primary season, we’ve seen people standing in long lines during a pandemic. Of course, those were almost always DEMOCRATIC primaries, so it didn’t seem to matter to IMPOTUS.

A real problem, even prior to COVID-19, but certainly exacerbated by it, is a dearth of poll workers. There is a national effort to recruit more poll workers. These are healthy people “to ensure that those workers most susceptible to the coronavirus are given the space to take care of their health, while still keeping polling sites open and available for efficient in-person voting.”

“We can also demand change from our local officials, who in most cases can take needed steps without waiting for the federal government to help. New voting technologies, training standards, polling place opening and closing hours, and poll worker recruitment practices are all decided at the state or local levels.

“State legislatures and state secretaries can expand, rather than shrink, the number of polling places, reversing the harmful trend of polling-place closures in recent years. They can also invest in more early voting sites, and keep them open for longer, reducing the number of voters who cast ballots on Election Day itself.”

Undermining the Postal Service

Meanwhile, the US Postal Service is experiencing days-long backlogs of mail across the country. It is after a top djt donor running the agency put in place new procedures “described as cost-cutting efforts, alarming postal workers who warn that the policies could undermine their ability to deliver ballots on time for the November election…

“Postal employees and union officials say the changes implemented by the Trump fund-raiser-turned-postmaster general Louis DeJoy are contributing to a growing perception that mail delays are the result of a political effort to undermine absentee voting.”

One recent study found mail-in voting doesn’t benefit one party over another.

Still, since every state has its own deadline for when you need to request an absentee or mail-in ballot, start looking into the options now. Verify that you’re registered to vote and if you’re not, do so right away.

With more voting options this year, the US Postal Service is encouraging voters to plan ahead. If you wait until the last minute to decide how to vote, you could be cutting it close, or even become disenfranchised. We’re now less than 90 days away from the election – time to make a game plan.

Finally, since IMPOTUS’ bogus call for postponing the election took place on the same day as John Lewis’ funeral, tell your members of Congress to support The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. For it is voter suppression that is the real threat to democracy in the United States.