Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Re: blatham (Post 7375460)

Walz was very impressive in Philly.

that rally gave me hope for the future of this country, a genuine feeling of optimism i haven't had since 2017...

Yes. There's something very delicious in seeing a black female heading up the ticket. And now with a seemingly rather perfect fellow as her VP pick. The enthusiasm these two are inspiring is really something. And, yup, the GOP will play dirty right through the election and afterwards. But I think it's likely now that we'll win this thing. With Trump and Vance as the figureheads of the modern GOP, the contrast between the good guys and the bad guys is made absolutely clear. Now, if we can just get majorities in the House and Senate as well, then we can even hope for a real blow to the modern right.

From your lips to God's ear.

{wink}

In Walthamstow in north east London, thousands of locals, antifascist activists and others have gathered near the area’s central shopping area.

Police maintained a significant but discreet presence close to Hoe Street as 8pm, the time designated for a Far Right ‘protest,’ passed without incident. There was no sign of any Far Right supporters.

Those gathered on Hoe Street included Kristine Pommert, a German who has been living in the UK since 1992, and came carrying a placard reading: “We are one human race.”

“I am from a place where people did not stand up against fascism when it was really necessary and for that reason I feel that we have to be here,” she said. “What’s been happening in England over the last few days is something that I recognises and I can see echoes of the past in Germany, whether that’s the 30s or the attacks on people in Rostock in the eastern part of Germany in the 1990s.”

Daniel Goldman@danielsgoldman
Before Trump and Republicans lecture Jews about which party is more friendly to us, let’s look at which party actually elects Jews:

26 Jewish Members of Congress
Dem: 24
GOP: 2

9 Jewish Senators
Dem: 8
Ind: 1
GOP: 0

So please spare me the patronizing lectures.

From @RadioFreeTom in the Atlantic
...

At the national level, GOP commentators seem especially flummoxed about the Walz rollout. They are, for now, trying mightily to make it seem as if Harris opting for Walz over Shapiro is evidence of roiling anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party. Scott Jennings, who seems to be vying for the Jeffrey Lord Chair of Republican Sycophancy at CNN, mumbled that Harris chose Walz because the Democrats are “awash in anti-Semitism,” a smear that even his network colleagues on the panel wouldn’t let pass. Other Republicans have tried with increasing churlishness to make the charge stick online, and Trump himself has called Walz’s selection “insulting to Jewish people,” which, of course, makes no sense.....

The Democratic presidential ticket of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota governor Tim Walz continues to gain momentum, with people flocking to their events and pouring money into the Democrats’ campaign: in the first 24 hours after Walz joined the ticket, the party raised $36 million from more than 450,000 donors, more than a third of them giving for the first time. In contrast, the Republicans seem to be imploding. For years, people have noted that the party seemed to be painting itself into a corner, but it’s very odd to watch it now seem to be trapped.

Yesterday afternoon, after Harris’s selection of Walz had hit social media and enthusiasm was building, Trump posted on his social media company an elaborate and bizarre fantasy that President Joe Biden would suddenly try to take back the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination.

“What are the chances that Crooked Joe Biden, the WORST President in the history of the U.S., whose Presidency was Unconstitutionally STOLEN from him by Kamabla, Barrack HUSSEIN Obama, Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Shifty Adam Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, and others on the Lunatic Left, CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination, beginning with challenging me to another DEBATE. He feels that he made a historically tragic mistake by handing over the U.S. Presidency, a COUP, to the people in the World he most hates, and he wants it back, NOW!!!”

Aside from Trump’s obvious yearning to go back to running against Biden, on whom his personal attacks seemed to stick, and his attempt to find some nickname that will stick to Harris, this rant shows that the Republicans seem unable to counter popular Democratic policies.

The heart of their policies were in Project 2025, the extremist vision of a country ruled by a strongman who took the civil service, the Department of Justice, and the military under his own control in order to slash the popular, secular parts of the government and replace them with Christian nationalism. Right-wing evangelicals liked what was outlined in the project, but when the majority of Americans began to understand what was in it, they were quite clear they wanted no part of it. Trump then tried to distance himself from it, although he had publicly praised it, his political action committee had called it his plan, and more than 100 of its architects were people who had served in his administration.

And then it turned out that Trump’s vice presidential pick, J. D. Vance, had written the introduction for a book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, the chief author of Project 2025. The original publication date for the book, which calls for “a peaceful ‘Second American Revolution,’” was in September, shortly before the election, but today the publisher announced it would put off publication until November, after the election.

But advance reader copies of Roberts’s book are already in the hands of reviewers, and Madeline Peltz of Media Matters is posting some of the content online. In it, she notes, Roberts “rails against birth control, in vitro fertilization, abortion, and dog parks. He says that having children should not be considered an ‘optional individual choice,’ but a ‘social expectation,’” and that reproductive choice is a “snake strangling the American family.” It is no accident that Vance’s numbers with women continue to fall.

And the Roberts book is only one of Vance’s recent unpopular steps: it turns out that he also wrote a glowing blurb for a book written by ghostwriter Joshua Lisec under the name of far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec. The book, titled “Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them),” calls for purging their enemies from society. “In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags,” Vance wrote. “Today, they march through HR, college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people… In ‘Unhumans,’ Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.”

Without popular policies, MAGA Republicans are simply falling back on the old narrative techniques they used in the past. This morning, Trump called into Fox & Friends, where he fell back on the old argument that Democrats are essentially communists who are undermining American culture. Of Harris-Walz, he said, “This is a ticket that would want this country to go communist immediately if not sooner.” Trump also tried to hit on the culture wars Republicans have fallen back on since the 1970s, warning that Walz is “very heavy into transgender. Anything transgender he thinks is great.”

Trump also tried to push the idea that Harris’s choosing of Walz over Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro proves that the Democrats are antisemitic. “I think it's very insulting to Jewish people,” Trump said. This is a hard sell considering that of the 26 members of Congress who are Jewish, 24 are Democrats, and of the 9 Jewish senators, 8 are Democrats and 1 is an Independent. And then, of course, there is the fact that Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff is himself Jewish.

When the stock market tumbled Monday, Trump tried to pin the slide on Harris—calling it the Kamala Crash—and Vance seemed to bet against the United States, predicting that “[t]his moment could set off a real economic calamity around the globe.” When the market rebounded Tuesday, the two remained silent.

Indeed, Trump is largely off the campaign trail, raising suggestions that his handlers don’t want him in public out of concern about what he will do—not a frivolous concern after his angry performance last week before the National Association of Black Journalists.

Meanwhile, Vance is traveling around to the sites where Harris and Walz are speaking. His crowds are embarrassingly small compared to theirs, and he seems perhaps to be trying to intimidate his opponents as Trump tried to do when he loomed behind his 2016 Democratic opponent, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Today Vance and a phalanx of his team approached reporters near Harris’s plane to attack her, only to discover she wasn’t around, at which point he boasted the plane would soon be his.

But rather than seeming intimidating, he came across as so desperate for attention that he had to stalk a more popular figure across the tarmac. Former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) apparently thought so: she reposted Vance’s photo of his group of about nine people walking away from Harris’s plane and commented: “Looks like [Vance] brought all his rally attendees to the airport with him today.”

MAGA Republicans also appear to be reaching to their past by attacking Walz with the sort of “swift boat” smear campaign attacking his military service they launched against decorated veteran John Kerry when he ran for president in 2004. Indeed, the Republican operative widely thought to be behind the attacks on Kerry, Chris LaCivita, is now in charge of the Trump-Vance campaign. Vance today suggested that Walz is engaging in “stolen valor.” Vance served for four years as a Marine, including as a military journalist in Iraq, where he did not experience combat. Walz served in the Army National Guard for 24 years, during which he deployed in response to natural disasters in the United States and served in Europe in support of U.S. operations in Afghanistan.

A number of observers are saying that part of the genius of the Walz pick is that he seems to many people to be the dad and grandfather stolen away by the right-wing rage machine of talk radio and the Fox News Channel and replaced with frightened, angry people who suspect their neighbors and insist the country is going to hell. It seems unlikely that doubling down on that narrative will attract the voters the MAGA ticket needs to win a majority of votes in 2024.

Yesterday the Republican-dominated Georgia State Election Board passed a rule that could delay the certification of an election until “after reasonable inquiry that the tabulation and canvassing of the election are complete and accurate and that the results are a true and accurate accounting of all votes cast in that election.” In a rally on Saturday, Trump thanked the three Republican members of the board—Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares, and Janelle King—by name, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.”

In 2020, Trump tried to get Georgia to throw out its certification of Biden’s victory there, claiming the vote had been marred by fraud, especially among the state’s Black population. He told Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to “find” him 11,780 votes—one more than the 11,779 that had given Biden the state.

Yesterday, news broke that former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis, who was indicted in Arizona for her participation in the scheme to replace the state’s real electors for Biden with fake ones for Trump, has agreed to a plea deal. In exchange for the state dropping its charges against her, she has agreed to provide information and materials about the scheme and to testify “at any time and place.”

Billionaire social media boss Elon Musk has launched another attack on the British authorities attempting to tackle far right hate riots in the UK.

The owner of X (formerly Twitter) posted “woke stasi” this morning in response to the director of public prosecutions Stephen Parkinson promising to prosecute people who post or report material that incites racial hatred on social media platforms.

Thousands of anti-racism protesters take to streets across England to counter far-right rallies
Demonstrators form human shields in towns and cities, after 6,000 police drafted in to tackle disorder

Thousands of anti-racism protesters gathered across England and formed human shields to protect asylum centres after police warned of unrest from more than 100 far right-led rallies.

Holding placards saying “refugees welcome” and “reject racism, try therapy”, people took to the streets in towns and cities nine days after the country was shaken by the fatal stabbing of three girls in Merseyside and the rioting that followed. But there was little sign of the unrest seen over the past week.

Police staged their biggest mobilisation to counter disorder since the 2011 riots on Wednesday, saying many of the planned gatherings had the potential to turn violent.

Lawyers’ offices shut down, high street shops were boarded up, GP practices closed early and MPs were told to consider working from home as 41 of the 43 local police force areas in England and Wales braced for potential disorder.

About 6,000 riot-trained officers were drafted in to tackle the expected rallies and an estimated 30 counter-protests after immigration law firms and refugee centres were listed as potential targets in a far-right chat group on the encrypted messaging app Telegram.

But instead, thousands of counter-protesters took to the streets of Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol, Brighton and London to protect their communities.

At 7pm in Liverpool, hundreds of people formed a human shield outside a targeted church that hosts an immigration advice centre while women held banners saying: “Nans against Nazis”.

Similar scenes were witnessed in Hackney and Walthamstow, both in east London, and Finchley in the north of the capital, as thousands of local people and anti-fascist activists came together and held placards saying “we are one human race” and “unite against hate”.

In Brighton, the handful of anti-immigration protesters who gathered outside a targeted law office were surrounded by police for their own protection after they were outnumbered by about 500 counter-protesters who chanted: “Off our streets, Nazi scum.” Later, the gathering took on a street carnival atmosphere with a samba band and loud singing.

But tensions flared in Aldershot in Hampshire after a group chanting “stop the boats” clashed with protesters holding “stand up to racism” placards who had been chanting “refugees are welcome here”. Dozens of police officers rushed onto the road to stop the groups from getting too close to each other. There were also reported skirmishes in Blackpool.

Northamptonshire police said three people had been arrested for public order offences in Northampton, and were in custody, and no members of the public or police had been injured.

The Metropolitan police said 15 people were arrested across the capital, including 10 in Croydon for assaulting emergency workers, possession of offensive weapons and other offences after about 50 people gathered “to cause disruption and fuel disorder”. “They’ve dragged and thrown objects down the road and thrown bottles at officers. This is not linked to protest, this appears to be pure anti-social behaviour,” the force added on X.

But by 9pm few far-right protesters were seen at the alleged targeted sites, although counter-protesters remained on the streets.

Despite the fears of violence and disorder scarring Britain on a scale not seen since the 2011 riots, in the end counter protestors outnumbered those supporting the far right led protests. In some places counter protestors found that no one else on the other side had turned up.

A police source with knowledge of the national picture said there were believed to have been small, far right led gatherings in Durham, Blackpool, Norwich, Northampton, Sheffield and Brighton.

The source said: “It appears the swift justice being meted out to those involved in rioting over the last week has made people think twice. Forces were fully prepared for what may have come at them in terms of disorder. However, we have seen the evening pass with minimal to no violence.

“The law abiding public have no time for the mindless criminality we have seen, and last night proves that … We must thank our communities for standing united against wanton thuggery.”

Police feel their intelligence justified a national mobilisation, the biggest to combat feared disorder in over a decade, and the employment of 6000 riot officers, one third of the total in England and Wales.

Earlier Earlier Nick Lowles, a long standing expert on the British far right, and who now leads Hope Not Hate, told the Guardian that he was sceptical there would be widespread trouble on Wednesday evening.

The expectation was triggered by a list of targets found on social media. Lowles, speaking before this evening said: “I think it’s a hoax, designed to spread fear and panic.

“The list has been compiled by one man in Liverpool, who simply googled immigration law firms etc. No-one is organising the local protests and there is very, very little chatter about it on the forums and WhatsApp groups that have been key over the past week.”

Police expect the next couple of days to be relatively quiet and more so called protests are expected this weekend.

Some 15 events across England and Wales were known of by police, mostly involving counter protesters. It was believed some far right led gatherings were taking place, though on a much smaller scale than expected.

Earlier, Sir Mark Rowley, the head of the Metropolitan police, said threats against immigration lawyers were “at the centre of our planning tonight”, adding: “We will not let the immigration asylum system be intimidated.”

The director of public prosecutions, Stephen Parkinson, added that publication of targets could be considered a terrorism offence as he revealed that one case of alleged terrorism was “actively under consideration” following the unrest across England and Northern Ireland in the last week.

Britain’s head of counter terrorism, assistant commissioner Matt Jukes, also confirmed for the first time that counter terrorism detectives were investigating some of the violence which erupted after the killing of the three young girls at a Taylor Swift-inspired dance class in Southport last Monday.

The Guardian understands that counter terrorism police are interested in an alleged attempt to set fire to a mosque near the scene of the atrocity, barely 36 hours after Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine were killed. They are also also looking into the attempt to set fire to a Rotherham hotel housing more than 200 asylum seekers on Sunday.


Parts of England went into effective shutdown on Wednesday with shops boarded up in the centre of Manchester, the Jewellery Quarter of Birmingham, Aldershot town centre and Westcliff-on-Sea in Essex ahead of the rumoured protests. Cases being heard at an immigration tribunal were also abandoned on Wednesday following concerns that far right agitators could target the building. Staff, lawyers and claimants at Hatton Cross Tribunal Hearing Centre, near Heathrow Airport, were ordered to leave at around lunchtime. Some hearings could not be completed.

Those inside the court building were told that there was far right activity in the area. A Whitehall source said the decision to abandon the court was precautionary. It is understood that other immigration tribunals have also been closed early because of fears of violence.

It came as Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons speaker, wrote to MPs suggesting they review their security in the wake of the threat of further riots and suggested some might want to consider working from home.


So far 428 arrests across 26 forces have been made and more than 140 people have been charged since the riots erupted last Tuesday, but that number is expected to increase, police said.

Disorder-related sentencing hearings are scheduled for 26 people over the next two days, the Ministry of Justice added on Wednesday evening. Offences covered by the hearings will include violent disorder, publishing written material to stir up racial hatred, and racially aggravated threatening behaviour.

Chief Constable BJ Harrington, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for public order, said that police and the Crown Prosecution Service would seek to minimise the number of suspects released on bail, as a deterrent to further rioting, and that even defendants with no previous convictions had already been remanded in custody after a first appearance in court.

Keir Starmer said the government was taking “swift action” against rioters after three men were jailed at Liverpool crown court on Wednesday for their parts in the disorder.

Fifty years ago, on August 9, 1974, Richard M. Nixon became the first president in U.S. history to resign.

The road to that resignation began in 1971, when Daniel Ellsberg, who was at the time an employee of the RAND Corporation and thus had access to a top-secret Pentagon study of the way U.S. leaders had made decisions about the Vietnam War, leaked that study to major U.S. newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post.

The Pentagon Papers showed that every president from Harry S. Truman to Lyndon B. Johnson had lied to the public about events in Vietnam, and Nixon worried that “enemies” would follow the Pentagon Papers with a leak of information about his own decision-making to destroy his administration and hand the 1972 election to a Democrat.

The FBI seemed to Nixon reluctant to believe he was being stalked by enemies. So the president organized his own Special Investigations Unit out of the White House to stop leaks. And who stops leaks? Plumbers.

The plumbers burglarized the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in California, hoping to find something to discredit him, then moved on to bigger targets. Together with the Committee to Re-elect the President (fittingly dubbed CREEP as its activities became known), they planted fake letters in newspapers declaring support for Nixon and hatred for his opponents, spied on Democrats, and hired vendors for Democratic rallies and then scarpered on the bills. Finally, they set out to wiretap the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, in the fashionable Watergate office complex.

Early in the morning of June 17, 1972, Watergate security guard Frank Wills noticed that a door lock had been taped open. He ripped off the tape and closed the door, but on his next round, he found the door taped open again. Wills called the police, who arrested five men ransacking the DNC’s files.

The White House immediately denounced what it called a “third-rate burglary attempt,” and the Watergate break-in gained no traction before the 1972 election, which Nixon and Vice-President Spiro Agnew won with an astonishing 60.7% of the popular vote.

But Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, two young Washington Post reporters, followed the sloppy money trail back to the White House, and by March 1973 the scheme was unraveling. One of the burglars, James W. McCord Jr., wrote a letter to Judge John Sirica before his sentencing claiming he had lied at his trial to protect government officials. Sirica made the letter public, and White House counsel John Dean immediately began cooperating with prosecutors.

In April, three of Nixon’s top advisors resigned, and in May the president was forced to appoint former solicitor general of the United States Archibald Cox as a special prosecutor to investigate the affair. That same month, the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, informally known as the Senate Watergate Committee, began nationally televised hearings. The committee’s chair was Sam Ervin (D-NC), a conservative Democrat who would not run for reelection in 1974 and thus was expected to be able to do the job without political grandstanding.

The hearings turned up the explosive testimony of John Dean, who said he had talked to Nixon about covering up the burglary more than 30 times, but there the investigation sat during the hot summer of 1973 as the committee churned through witnesses. And then, on July 13, 1973, deputy assistant to the president Alexander Butterfield revealed the bombshell news that conversations and phone calls in the Oval Office had been taped since 1971.

Nixon refused to provide copies of the tapes either to Cox or to the Senate committee. When Cox subpoenaed a number of the tapes, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire him. In the October 20, 1973, “Saturday Night Massacre,” Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, refused to execute Nixon’s order and resigned in protest; it was only the third man at the Justice Department—Solicitor General Robert Bork—who was willing to carry out the order firing Cox.

Popular outrage at the resignations and firing forced Nixon to ask Bork—now acting attorney general—to appoint a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, a Democrat who had voted for Nixon, on November 1. On November 17, Nixon assured the American people that “I am not a crook.”

Like Cox before him, Jaworski was determined to hear the Oval Office tapes. He subpoenaed a number of them. Nixon fought the subpoenas on the grounds of executive privilege. On July 24, 1974, in U.S. v. Nixon, the Supreme Court sided unanimously with the prosecutor, saying that executive privilege “must be considered in light of our historic commitment to the rule of law. This is nowhere more profoundly manifest than in our view that 'the twofold aim (of criminal justice) is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer.'... The very integrity of the judicial system and public confidence in the system depend on full disclosure of all the facts….”

Their hand forced, Nixon’s people released transcripts of the tapes. They were damning, not just in content but also in style. Nixon had cultivated an image of himself as a clean family man, but the tapes revealed a mean-spirited, foul-mouthed bully. Aware that the tapes would damage his image, Nixon had his swearing redacted. “[Expletive deleted]” trended.

In late July 1974, the House Committee on the Judiciary passed articles of impeachment, charging the president with obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress. Each article ended with the same statement: “In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.”

And then, on August 5, in response to a subpoena, the White House released a tape recorded on June 23, 1972, just six days after the Watergate break-in, that showed Nixon and his aide H.R. Haldeman plotting to invoke national security to protect the president. Even Republican senators, who had not wanted to convict their president, knew the game was over. A delegation went to the White House to deliver the news to the president that he must resign or be impeached by the full House and convicted by the Senate.

In his resignation speech, Nixon refused to acknowledge that he had done anything wrong. Instead, he told the American people he had to step down because he no longer had the support he needed in Congress to advance the national interest. He blamed the press, whose “leaks and accusations and innuendo” had been designed to destroy him. His disappointed supporters embraced the idea that there was a “liberal” conspiracy, spearheaded by the press, to bring down any Republican president.

(CNN
Michele Morrow, the Republican nominee to run K-12 public education in North Carolina, filmed a video after attending the January 6 riot at the US Capitol urging then-President Donald Trump to put “the Constitution to the side” and use the military to stay in power.

In a deleted Facebook livestream she filmed from her hotel room, Morrow called for mass arrests of anyone who helped certify the 2020 election. “And if the police won’t do it and the Department of Justice won’t do it, then he will have to enact the Insurrection Act,” said Morrow. “In which case the Insurrection Act completely puts the Constitution to the side and says, now the military rules all.”

Morrow was at the Capitol as the attack occurred, according to public videos reviewed by CNN that show her in a restricted area on the northwest side of the Capitol. CNN has seen no evidence that Morrow entered the Capitol building that day or that she engaged in violence, and she was not charged with any crimes.

In March’s Republican primary, Morrow defeated the incumbent North Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction, a job that manages the state’s $11 billion budget for K-12 public schools and helps set education priorities and implement curriculum standards.

That same month, CNN’s KFile reported Morrow had previously called for the public execution of Barack Obama and the death of Joe Biden and other prominent Democrats in comments on a since-deleted X account.

“I prefer a Pay Per View of him in front of the firing squad,” Morrow wrote in a since-deleted post from May 2020 about Obama. “I do not want to waste another dime on supporting his life. We could make some money back from televising his death.”

It’s unclear when the Facebook video was deleted, but the candidate has purged past extremist posts since running for office in North Carolina...