trump Normalizing Terror

While my part of the world of Central Florida is recovering from the wreckage of Hurricane Milton, other states are still recovering from the damage left by the previous storm Helene. Places like upper Georgia and the mountain regions of North Carolina and Tennessee were ravaged by mass flooding and erasure of entire towns.

At least, some of those places ought to be recovering with help from the federal government, except that recovery officers are avoiding efforts in areas suddenly swarming with so-called "militias" convinced that FEMA is a threat to "their liberty and property" (via Gary D. Robertson and Sarah Brumfield at AP News):

Federal disaster workers paused and then changed some of their hurricane-recovery efforts in North Carolina, including abandoning door-to-door visits, after receiving threats that they could be targeted by a militia, officials said, as the government response to Helene is targeted by runaway disinformation.

The threats emerged over the weekend. The Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement Monday that it received a call Saturday about a man with an assault rifle who made a comment “about possibly harming” employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency working in the hard-hit areas of Lake Lure and Chimney Rock, in the North Carolina mountains.

Authorities got a description of a suspect’s vehicle and license plate and later identified him as William Jacob Parsons, 44, of Bostic, a small community about 60 miles west of Charlotte. Sheriff’s officials said in a statement that Parsons — who was armed with a handgun and a rifle — was charged with “going armed to the terror of the public,” a misdemeanor. He was released after posting bond.

Threatening harm with firearms is a MISDEMEANOR???

FEMA confirmed in a statement Monday that it adjusted operations. It emphasized that disaster-recovery centers remain open and that FEMA continues “to help the people of North Carolina with their recovery.”

Workers from the agency’s disaster-assistance teams — who help survivors apply for FEMA aid and connect them with additional state and local resources — have stopped going door to door and instead are working from fixed locations while the potential threats are assessed, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because they could not publicly discuss details of the operations...

The Washington Post reported Sunday that the U.S. Forest Service, which is supporting hurricane recovery work, sent a message to multiple federal agencies, warning that FEMA had advised all federal responders in Rutherford County to leave the county immediately.

The message stated that National Guard troops had encountered “armed militia” saying they were “out hunting FEMA.”

Which begs the question "WHY are they hunting federal agents who are working on RECOVERING devastated communities in their literal neck of the woods?"

Because those "militias" are getting hit by "runaway disinformation" coming directly from donald trump himself (via Barbara L. McQuade at Bloomberg): 

Shortly after the storm, presidential candidate Donald Trump told rallygoers in Michigan that the Biden administration “stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season.” This is not true (and undocumented immigrants can’t vote). Yet these claims have been amplified on social media by billionaire Elon Musk, Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. and former Trump adviser Stephen Miller. A scroll through the replies to FEMA’s posts on the Musk-owned social media platform known as X shows a slew of ugly insults and statements echoing their lies.

In addition, Trump has also baselessly alleged that the Biden-Harris administration has failed to communicate with the affected states, a claim refuted by their governors, both Democrats and Republicans. Trump has also said without evidence that Biden and North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, denied relief to Republican communities...

trump is lying because he knows enough members of his wingnut voting base already believe the worst about federal support - thanks to decades of anti-government narratives pushed by conservative Republicans from Goldwater to Reagan to Gingrich to today's GOP leadership - and will believe whatever he says they're doing is criminal even without any proof to his allegations.

trump wants his followers angry: Angry enough to make vile insults and threats on social media and government websites; Angry enough to arm themselves and go "hunting" for those agency workers to commit whatever level of violence they wish to inflict.

trump's objective with demonizing federal relief efforts - more than just trying to weaken those efforts to make Biden (and Harris by proxy) look bad to the national voter base - is to normalize violence towards our government. he's making it easier for these self-appointed "revolutionaries" to go on the warpath should he lose this November.

trump is trying to terrorize us. To make us cower or whimper for his mercy. To make us too afraid to do anything to stop him.

The only honest response is to stop him, and deny his effort to bully and steal his way back into the White House. These threats of violence are acts of desperation: trump cannot appeal to the broad base of American voters and so he's lashing out the only way he can. He's more afraid of us than we need to be of him.

The MAGA factions are already riled up to the point where they will attack their fellow neighbors, their communities, their fellow Americans - in victory, convinced trump will sanction their violence towards Latinos, Blacks, and women; in defeat, convinced they need to force insurrection and ruin - no matter what. In some respects, there's no stopping the wave of violence that's about to hit our communities.

But we need to be ready. We need to prepare to stand up for what we know is right and true about America, to deny trump's angry mobs any power over us.

You want to help people affected by the hurricanes? Provide aid to the recovery efforts as best you can. And get the vote out for Democrats from Harris on down who will deny trump and his ilk any future chance to threaten us again. 

I Survived Hurricane Milton But

Milton tore the roof off of Tropicana Field.

 

Image from CNN

The hurricane took the tarp cover but left behind the damned catwalks! NOOOOOOO.

LOOK HOW THEY MASSACRED MY BOY.

Seriously, Milton's caused a lot of damage, there's a number of horrifying deaths - most from a tornado that spawned on the Atlantic coast (Palm Beach Gardens) when the outer bands reached there - and as of Friday afternoon a lot of Hillsborough and Polk Counties are out of power.

Especially where I live. I'm doing this from my library workplace - Bartow had their grid back pretty quick this time - and part of me doesn't want to go home right now because they'll be no air conditioning or Internet access waiting for me.

Gotta go feed the kitties though.

Hopefully by tonight they'll have the power fixed. Hoping.

Florida 2024 General Election Ballot: LET'S EFFING GOOOOO

So here I am coping with the outer bands of Hurricane Milton crossing overhead, finding the Sample Ballot for the 2024 general election sitting in my mailbox.

I don't do mail-in, I tend to vote on Election Day itself, but in the meantime here's the information my fellow Polk County residents need and for my fellow Floridians to consider whenever they submit their votes to the ballot boxes.

(The nine regular readers of this blog probably already know how this is gonna play, but it doesn't hurt to refresh)

President

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AMERICA APPLE PIE AND EVERYONE YOU HOLD DEAR: do NOT vote trump. Considering everything I've written in the past eight years, my tune has not changed. trump is the most dangerous, self-absorbed, greedy, wrong-headed, racist, sexist, hate-driven son of a bitch this nation ever produced.

On the positive side, Kamala Harris has a record and reputation for competency, empathy, focus, commitment, sheer will. There is every GOOD reason to vote for Kamala.

Ballz to the Walz, people.

Meanwhile, RFK Jr is noticeably not on the ballot - which is funny in its own way - but he is on the ballot in other states, desperately trying to draw votes away from the Democratic tickets. Pay him no mind: His anti-vaxxing stance and his troubling personal misdeeds make him unlikeable to the liberal base. I'm asking all the independent voters (or the ones thinking to hold a protest vote re: Israel's genocide of Gaza) to just don't. The primary objective is to not give trump any advantage. HE'S the real threat.

Senate

There is a Senate seat open this cycle, the one occupied by Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott who is most deserving to get kicked out of it. Partly because it'll be funny to watch his ambitions to become the Senate Republican caucus leader crumble to ash; Mostly because Scott has been a terrible Senator and a destructive presence in Floridian politics.

Running against him on the Democratic ticket is Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a one-term congresswoman (who had won as part of the 2018 Blue Wave) with a background in academics and social work. She's mostly focused on gun background checks and relief efforts for Venezuelan refugees. She's solid and she's cool. VOTE FOR HER.

Congress

There's 28 House seats up for election in the state of Florida and 20 of those districts are ridiculously gerrymandered towards Republicans (Go FUCK yourself, DeSantis) so it would be an absolute delight if enough Democratic and Indy voters turned out the vote to where Democratic candidates can win about 14 or 15 of those seats to give DeSatan BOTH middle fingers. Please and Thank You.

If there's good news, it's that state party leader Nikki Fried worked to get a Democratic challenger in every congressional district, giving local voters incentives to show up and vote. So let's do that, Florida. Flip the Sunshine State Blue.

State Legislature

I know it's hard going at the state level, but with every House seat up for vote and half the state Senate seats up for vote, it sure would be nice for Democratic turnout to break the near-absolute hold the Republicans have held on Tallahassee since the 1990s. Given all the lobbyist corruption and calcification - the failures by the GOP to fix our homeowner insurance regulations and lowering of costs has become painful to residents and HOAs across the state - we need a shift in the power alignments to force through needed reforms that one-party rule will never seek. This is serious, Floridians. Pay attention to the state officials who need to get swept out of the legislature for failing to serve our needs.

State Supreme Court

Our state uses a retention voting process for appellate and Supreme Court positions, and in this cycle two state Justices - Renatha Francis and Meredith Sasso - are up for consideration after being on the bench one year (retention will earn them a six-year term). 

Both Francis and Sasso are DeSantis appointees: On that alone, voting them out would be a huge - and deserved - black mark on DeSantis' standing. Francis in fact was denied an earlier appointment to the high bench back in 2020 (!) but it was more procedural - she hadn't been on the state bar for the 10-year requirement - than political. However, Francis has had a troubled history as a circuit judge even before her appointment in 2023, and she was clearly a partisan hire.

Both Francis and Sasso were part of the ruling upholding a horrific "six-week ban" - which is medically impossible - and dissented on the decision to allow the Abortion referendum - which would codify women's rights to get the health care they need, undoing that six week ban and requiring more sensible state laws - so their position on abortion rights are pretty clear. Kick them off the bench, vote No. While it's likely DeSantis will replace them with other Far Right appointees, the signal needs to be sent to the Republicans that Floridians want their rights over our own persons upheld.

County Sheriff

For Polk, it means Grady Judd is up for re-election (where are the damn term limits?) but at least this cycle he's facing a challenger in Theodore Murray. Judd, I swear, is more of a media hog than DeSantis, and whether he's good at his job or not he's been in that seat for too long (five terms since 2004!). Vote for Murray. It's time for fresh leadership.

Supervisor of Elections

Well, Lori Edwards does such a good job of mailing out notices and providing information and offering proper electoral services. Also she's NPA and the other choice is a Republican. Keep up the good work, Lori!

State Amendments

I've posted about the 2024 referenda earlier, but here's a recap:

Amendment One is allowing Partisan School Board elections. I'm of a mind to allow it because it means we'll see who the Far Right Republicans support, but the common consensus is that this will make an already fraught electioneering for vital community offices - especially as the wingnuts are warring on teen reading and trans students - more combative. I was leaning the other way - not because I'm pro-Party but because I'm pro-:Let's See Who The Crooks Are" - but by now I've decided to vote No on this.

Amendment Two is over the Right to Hunt and Fish, which would open up more hunting seasons - and hunting targets - across Florida. This would be a massive disruption to already fragile ecosystems and a severe threat to many of the endangered animals still in our open lands. This ought to be a huge No from all us voters.

Amendment Three is to Legalize Marijuana for recreational use. We had a medicinal use amendment pass earlier, but now - especially as the federal government is looking to reschedule pot as a lesser banned substance - there's the need to reduce the criminalization and incarceration that's become a gross injustice in our War on Drugs. Again, I don't encourage drug use, but I also don't see why we're over-pursuing punishments for a non-lethal drug like marijuana. We should be treating pot use as a health issue, not a criminal one. I'm a Yes on this one.

Amendment Four is the biggie: Protecting Abortion Rights for women. This would enforce the right of access to the medical procedure for women at-risk and ensure the bans are set at more appropriate time limits (say 23 weeks instead of 6). DeSantis and the other hard-liners are fearmongering like crazy to stop this one from passing, but it's polling above the 60 percent supermajority needed to pass and in order to save the lives of thousands of at-risk women we need to vote Yes for this.

Amendment Five is another Homestead Exemption bill, this time to Adjust exemptions to Annual Inflation. It'll basically use the Cost of Living Index to increase tax cuts to homeowners with dire impact to city and county governments that NEED property tax revenues to balance their budgets. This is a hard No, even coming from a Florida homeowner, because I'm tired of these Republican tricks to gut tax revenues.

Amendment Six offers to Repeal Public Financing for Statewide Campaigns, which would essentially allow PACs and dark money to overtake the costly campaigning at the state level where candidates who can't afford to run will be shit out of luck. We need to go the other way and require public financing for ALL campaigns, to get the goddamn corrupt forces of lobbyists and the uber-rich dominating our electoral choices. This should be a hard No, everyone.

Polk County Amendments

There is one item for the county Charter - Merging the Efficiency Commission to the Charter Review Commission - which would clear out some of the committee requirements and extend the Efficiency commission's work cycle from 8 years to 12 years. I don't know, this doesn't seem all that efficient to prevent the commission from working in closer cycles to keep up with the constant changes and demands on county services and resources. This could increase the bureaucratic logjam instead of lessening it. I'm inclined to vote No unless someone can show me honest projections of costs and improvement.

Pasco County Mosquito Control Board

You know, when I lived in Pasco County this was a big deal. I even had people show up on this blog because it was the only thing posting any information about the choices. Well, alas, I don't live there anymore so I can't be sure. I do know there's two seats open (One and Three), all of the candidates are from New Port Richey (seriously, Land O Lakes?) this cycle and the best I would suggest is voting for the candidates with the coolest names (owstophittingme).

--

As I wrap this up, the hurricane weather is picking up, I'm hearing thunderstorms in the distance, and I know damn well the local McDonalds is closed. Gods help me, Milton is coming.

If I don't make it out: Promise me. PROMISE ME NED. Promise you will vote Kamala Harris and Democratic party straight down the ballot. Promise me, Floridians, to vote Yes on Amendment 4 to save women's lives.

I hope to see you at the ballot this November.

The Oncoming Milton

As I write this, a hurricane formed off the coast of Mexico and is projected to do something few hurricanes do: head straight east towards Florida. The models all predict Milton will hit the Tampa Bay area - between St. Petersburg and Bradenton - by Wednesday night. It's already a Category 5 and threatening to be one of the strongest storms we've ever seen (thank you, decades of climate denialism!). Even if an incoming northern front can break Milton into a lesser Cat, we're talking devastating storm surges along the Tampa Bay shoreline to where everything south of Clearwater and half the landmass in Tampa itself gets washed away forever.

I am living right in the path of that monster. And yet, I have my duty to my workplace: I have to stay and prep the library with my coworkers for any possible damage. By the time we're done with that, I won't have time to get out of the way of Milton. I'll have to do what I've done before: Hunker down with my cats, pray that my place doesn't get destroyed by high winds and that the flooding won't happen in my area, and wait for the power to come back on.

This is going to be a stressful week.

I'll try to blog once or twice before the power goes, but if I don't make it... If you don't hear from me by next week... Promise me you'll vote for Kamala Harris and every Democratic candidate across the board and stop that Shitgibbon once and for all.

(muttering) why the fuck won't that Weather Space Laser flatten the hell out of Mar-A-Lago, huh...?

What Trump Threatens

Update: Thank you Steve In Manhattan for including this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. I hope to see you all on the other side of Hurricane Milton as I'll be hunkering down in central Florida. If I don't make it... PLEASE get out all the votes for Harris/Walz and make sure trump goes away for good. And if I do make it... PLEASE get out all the votes for Harris/Walz and make sure trump goes away for good! Peace.

The hope is that the popular vote support for Kamala Harris - much like for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 - outpaces the vote for donald trump and that Kamala's numbers are strong enough like Joe's to win in convincing fashion with the Electoral College. trump has done nothing in his 2024 campaign to boost his standing with voters - he remains incredibly unpopular as of October 4th - to where it's unlikely he will ever win the popular vote.

What's troubling is how broken the Electoral College system is, to where trump can either repeat the upset he gained in 2016 or worse create enough chaos disrupting vote-counting to crash the election altogether.

American voters need to understand what's at stake here. People need to remember how disastrous trump was in the White House between 2017 through January 2021. We need to realize how trump threatens to be so much worse if he ever regains the presidency.

I know this will get long-winded, but know this:

trump threatens the entire concept of the Rule of Law. Just by his very existence. Never in our history - should trump bully, cheat, and lie his way into the White House - has a convicted felon reached the high office of the presidency. We had Eugene Debs running for it back in 1920 but he never stood a chance. We've had bad men, men with questionable morals at best - Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, LBJ, Nixon - as President but never before someone with 34 guilty counts from a New York jury and facing more felonies once the election passes. We will have a lawless criminal in a position to avoid legal judgment, willing to break even more laws - now that the Supreme Court made sitting Presidents virtually untouchable - to ensure he never answers for his crimes.

And trump will extend that lawlessness to exact revenge on his enemies, whomever he feels was responsible for "humiliating" him with these charges and convictions. he turned the Department of Justice - especially under William Barr - into an instrument of his vengeance, seeking any means to bring Hillary Clinton to trial over her accusing him of illegal ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign. In his second term, trump will go after everyone - Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Hillary again, Obama, even Republicans like Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney who opposed trump in the public arena - he thinks wronged him. trump will even use the presidency to destroy the prosecutors, judges, and juries who held him liable in civil trials and guilty in the New York criminal trial. E. Jean Carroll will be the target of his darkest ire. 

trump will do everything he can to wipe clean the documented history of his sins, and will punish everyone to do so.

trump threatens the rights and welfare - the very lives - of women across the board. Thanks to trump's tenure between 2017 to 2021, the Republicans placed three Far Right anti-abortion Justices on the Supreme Court, the culmination of their 50-year war to undo the Roe V Wade ruling in 2022. They did this to appease their Culture War supporters, but doing so was an unpopular move. This 2024, the Republicans - trump included - are trying to hide their responsibility for taking away women's personal rights, but it's an open secret the Far Right want a total national ban on abortion - and even all forms of birth control - and trump will happily sign that kind of legislation for them.

You can tell trump is still eager to push for stricter abortion bans because he's spreading bald-faced lies about "post-birth abortions" happening in Democratic-led states that he conveniently won't name. You know his campaign is looking to curtail women's rights with his Vice Presidential pick JD Vance out there attacking "childless cat ladies" and insisting women should be at home in the kitchen birthing babies.

trump back in the White House means more women will find themselves punished in some form or another - hit with "childless" taxes, pushed out of the workplace, squeezed out of higher education grants/scholarships, gods help us even directly attacked by wingnut community groups looking to punish and conform - in order to force women - White and Young (even high-school age!) - into life roles they didn't want.

trump and his Republican allies will take away women's rights. This is not fearmongering: This is fact.

trump threatens the rights and safety of Latino / Black / Asian / Arab communities, even the ones who are citizens and legal residents. We know this already: trump has been openly racist and unapologetic about it for decades. We also know what trump did during his tenure: One of the first official acts of his administration was imposing a travel ban on people from the Middle East, creating a massive outcry and incredible burdens on families and foreign allies. We know trump created harsher policies dealing with illegals crossing the southern border, pushing a family separation policy that ruined thousands of families, and led to the disappearance of hundreds of children (did we ever find ALL of them?).

A second trump administration will be worse. It's already public that trump's strongest anti-immigration ally Stephen Miller wants to deport 20 million alleged illegals and migrants, something on a scale beyond even previous attempts by hardline administrations (I will not repeat the name of that operation here, it was blatant racism). The horrifying thing is that based on reports there's not 20 million illegals - it might not even be 11 million - so if trump implements this agenda he will be forcing our government - trump wants to use military force to do it as well, an unconstitutional abuse - into rounding up thousands if not millions of legal U.S. residents all because of their skin color and lack of ID (and for those with ID the accusation those records are fake). We will be seeing the most vulnerable group of that getting targeted: Our children, our teens, our young adults rounded up and punished for trump's nativist rage. This will be the Republican Party - no, worse, the United States because we let this happen - at their our most cruel.

trump threatens to undo our nation's economic stability with his obsession to shift from income taxes to massive tariffs. Even after all the shocks to American industries and markets that trump's tariffs caused during his tenure, he's obsessed with the (false) belief that tariffs worked wonders in our nation's history - he's been pumping up the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890 as a (bad) example - and wants to make it so that all the taxation is done via tariffs. In spite of all the evidence - and basic understanding of economics - that tariffs place higher burdens on the poor while the rich get richer even as products get scarcer and more expensive. 

trump and his lackeys do not care that the last time we had massive tariffs put in place - the Smoot-Hawley Act - it made the economic crisis in 1930 go from a standard panic to THE GREAT DEPRESSION. Never mind the trade wars trump will trigger with other nations (depending on if trump uses the threat of tariffs to make those nations or industries pay him off). all trump cares about is ending taxes on incomes and dividends for the uber-rich. Everyone else will lose jobs, lose homes, lose lives.

And that's just on tariffs. trump's threatening to shift our reliance on the US dollar to cryptocurrency (his, no doubt). 

trump threatens to undo the federal government itself. Do some reading on "Project 2025," which had public ties to trump's presidential campaign until people took notice and recoiled in horror (forcing them to hide from the spotlight). trump's railing against the "Deep State" and proposals to "Drain the Swamp" will all lead to undoing the civil service merit system that's been in place since Garfield's assassination. Replacing around 50,000 workers throughout the federal government - who oversee regulations, enforce policy, deal with vendor contracts, provide public services - with trump loyalists who will ignore policy and procedure and do whatever trump tells them. It'll promote corruption - especially with contract biddings and deregulation of workplace safety and protections - on a scale we haven't seen since the Spoils System.

For all the griping by conservatives and libertarians, the federal agencies overall provide good - if slow or bureaucratic - services to the public at large. I've had people come to my library needing help with Social Security disability filings, and they've told me the local SSA offices treated them well and got them on the right programs. Our national parks are beloved and enjoyed. Travelers may gripe about the TSA but we know it's a price to pay for airline travel security. For all the complaints about the IRS, most Americans accept the responsibility of paying taxes and few are ever burdened with audits or accounting errors. There's 100 other agencies in the Executive branch and most of them function as intended because they tend to hire the right people for the jobs.

All of that would go away if trump and his lackeys purge the civil service and install their own cronies. Good customer service - yes, it's practiced by federal agencies - will disappear. Access to funds and grants will fall into a rabbit hole feeding to trump's pockets (or the pockets of corrupt allies). People who were hired based on actual experience and merit will get replaced by those without relative experience or even interest in doing the job properly.

The Far Right has been looking to take a sledgehammer to a federal government they hate because it doesn't play favorites - meaning it doesn't favor only themselves - when doling out funds to poor farmers regardless of race, aiding small businesses regardless of race, or regulating business practices to reduce consumer fraud (also affecting people by race, age, and gender). trump will be willing to swing that sledgehammer at our nation's foundation just so he can profit from the ruins.

trump threatens to end American diplomacy and strong ties to Western (aka anti-Russian) republics / democracies. trump will do this not only to appease his idol/BFF Vladimir Putin, he will do this to punish our European and Asian allies he knows mocked and derided him during his tenure.

It won't be like last time, when trump tried to shakedown NATO members to pay the United States - to pay himself - like a protection racket. If trump returns to the White House, he will exact revenge not only with his tariff wars but through acts of retaliation through breaking treaties and mutual pacts (trump loves to break existing deals because he can then force people to renegotiate with him directly, increasing his chances of personal profit). Given trump's open love for Putin and Russia, we can well expect trump to follow through on forcing the United States to leave NATO, exposing nations like Poland, Germany, and the Baltic states to Russian hegemony.

If trump does force us to leave NATO, he could force our military and State Department to forge ties to Russia as a new "ally" but in truth expose us to Russian takeover of foreign policy and military capability. Anything Putin wants - even some of our best technology and resources - trump will hand over without question. Granted, there will be massive pushback by everyone - even fellow Republicans - horrified by such moves, but if trump succeeds in corrupting the civil service with loyalists the debates will be short-lived and silenced.

We need to remember how trump's mishandling of classified information - a lot of it shared from and with our allies - was a major scandal even before he was caught with boxes of high-level intel at his Mar-A-Lago residence. If trump returns to the Oval Office, he can and will demand every classified document pass through his hands because he will believe he owns those materials, to the horror and disgust of our intelligence personnel if any survive the civil service purge. Our allied nations - NATO and otherwise, even Israel - will refuse to share any further intel with us, straining our foreign relations to where the unthinkable - the end of once-strong centuries-old alliances that provided trade, travel, and trust - will happen. Isolationism wouldn't even begin to define it.

No matter what, trump in office will mean Ukraine is screwed against Russia's invasion. 

In short: trump threatens everything and everyone - even his own followers - because trump only wants to serve himself at our expense. It will be American Fascism - all in service to Overlord TRUMP and his handlers/lackeys/brute squads.

I know I keep saying this, but for the LOVE of everything - God, America, Freedom, Mom and Apple Pie - do not vote for donald trump or his Republican allies. Please vote for Kamala Harris as President, please vote for every Democratic candidate on the ballots, please vote for every Pro-Women amendment referendum in the states offering them.

Do not let trump and his kind threaten us any longer.

"Make Them Riot": trump Needs to Answer for his Insurrection

On the personal notes, mom's doing okay in the hospital but she's stressed out because dad's in hospice care and she feels she needs to be at home taking care of him. Mom, you're the one with the cracked skull and broken wrist... 

While donald trump won't face the criminal trial before the November general election, the court case focused on his role in the January 6th Insurrection is still proceeding; and got to the point where the special prosecutor Jack Smith presented evidence that's going to be used in that trial. To say that's it damning is an understatement (via Carrie Johnson and Ryan Lucas at NPR):

In a newly unsealed court filing, special counsel Jack Smith provides the most detailed picture yet of his criminal case against Donald Trump for allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election and why the former president isn't immune from prosecution.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over the case, released the filing, with minor redactions, on Wednesday.

A link to the court documents is here. The redactions for what they're worth are mostly hiding names of trump and his alleged co-conspirators/handlers... which hasn't stopped people from matching them based on the evidence that's already out there.

The special counsel uses the 165-page document to make his case that Trump's actions around the election were made in a private capacity and not in his official role as president.

The filing comes after the Supreme Court ruled this summer that presidents enjoy broad immunity for official acts while in office, but not for unofficial acts as a candidate or a private citizen.

"When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office," the special counsel's team writes. "With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost..."

The broad strokes of the special counsel's allegations against Trump have long been known. The filing, though, adds some new details, including sensitive testimony from witnesses and notes taken by former Vice President Mike Pence...

Getting into those details highlighted the lengths to which trump and his cohorts attempted to sabotage, hinder, or destroy the 2020 general election results. The Politico website counted multiple seriously deranged and illegal acts (via Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein):

According to prosecutors, at one point during Trump’s bid to overturn the results, a Trump White House aide overheard Trump tell his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner: “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.” The comment was allegedly made on Marine One.

Prosecutors said they would prove at trial that Trump and his allies often made up statistics about voter fraud “from whole cloth.” For example, Trump and allies alleged that 36,000 noncitizens had cast ballots in Arizona, changing the figure to “a few hundred thousand” five days later, eventually revising it back to “bare minimum … 40 or 50,000,” then to 32,000 and back up to the original number of 36,000.

One week after Election Day in 2020, Trump told then-Gov. Doug Ducey (R-Ariz.) that he was “packaging up” fraud evidence to share with him, prosecutors wrote. But Trump never provided it. Ducey told Trump that Arizona was all but lost, comparing it to being in “the ninth inning, two outs, and [the defendant] was several runs down,” Smith’s brief recounted...

Never mind that there's already laws to ensure non-citizens can't vote, trump was still using his fearmongering over immigrants to justify overturning legit election results. He and his team kept fibbing the numbers to whatever they needed in that moment to claim whatever victory trump could. And when it came time to present evidence, they never did. Because it was never real. Goddamn him.

Prosecutors, who had more access to telephone records and emails than the congressional committee that investigated Jan. 6, allege that Trump spoke to ally Steve Bannon by phone on Jan. 5 less than two hours before Bannon issued a prescient and provocative prediction on his War Room podcast that “all hell is going to break loose” on Jan. 6...

Well before Jan. 6, an unidentified Trump campaign employee enthusiastically spoke of the potential for a riot in Michigan. The employee, whom prosecutors described as a co-conspirator, allegedly sought to “create chaos” at a polling center in Detroit when it became clear a batch of election returns favorable to Biden was legitimate. “Find a reason it isn’t,” the alleged co-conspirator said to a colleague, prosecutors wrote. When the colleague said an outbreak of violence appeared imminent, the campaign employee replied: “Make them riot” and “Do it!!!”

These are the tidbits that prove trump and his people wanted a riot, all the riots across battleground states as well as the Capitol, in order to disrupt and destroy the results, so he could steal the election and stay in power. trump's "rally" on January 6th was never going to be peaceful: It was a call to violence.

It's terrifying that trump is not going to sit in a courtroom and answer for his misdeeds before the November 5th election day. It's insane that the Republican Party refused to stop trump from forcing himself back atop their ballot, because now we're facing the possibility trump can steal (he can't win the popular vote, at best he can skew the Electoral College or at worst throw the results into chaos) the presidential election.

If trump gets back into the Oval Office he will squash this and every other criminal investigation into his actions. trump will deny New York the 34-count felony conviction and destroy the entire concept of "justice for all" for the nation for all time. We will have a confirmed felon and sex offender as President and he will inflict his criminal passions upon the nation and the world.

This isn't up to the courts anymore: Chief Justice Roberts made certain of that.

This is up to us voters, all of us from Democrats to Independents to even Republicans who respect the rule of law and despise trump and what he stands for.

For all the efforts to suppress voters - for all the lies about who's voting - the Republicans can't win if everyone shows up to vote and NOT vote for them. If the numbers are overwhelming in favor of Democrats - in favor of the pro-choice referendums on many state ballots - the Far Right wingnuts trying to sabotage the results won't have any legal leg to stand on. They would - and should - fail in many of the courtrooms even to the point where trump's own compliant Supreme Court can't save him.

Get the vote out, America. Every single one of us who sees trump for what he is - a failed, corrupt criminal - and who sees Republicans for what they are - broken, fear-driven rage merchants living in their own conspiracy bubbles desperate to rule or ruin - need to show up this election cycle. Be it by mail-in ballot, be it by early voting, be it by standing in line this Tuesday November 5th: We need to show up and vote. Our vote matters. Our vote is our power.

We need to stop trump from committing more crimes, and our vote for Harris/Walz and the Democrats across every seat on the ballots will do that.

Good luck.

Need to Step Back For a Moment or Twelve

Just got a call from dad.

Mom had a bad spill at the grocery store. She's in the hospital and getting transferred to another facility to get checked for head trauma. She's able to text on the phone but still... this is NOT good.

I can't cope with the political shit at the moment.

Hug everybody.