I believe an unlikely mix of alleged drug trafficking related politicos and alleged white nationalist related politicos united to elect the infamous “Bloc of Four” in the abysmal voter turnout election of 2005. During their four year term the drug business was good again and white nationalists used Coatesville as an example on white supremacist websites like “Stormfront”. Strong community organization and support from law enforcement, in particular Chester County District Attorney Joseph W. Carroll has begun to turn our community around. The Chester County drug trafficking that I believe centers on Coatesville continues and I believe we still have public officials in place that profit from the drug sales. But the people here are amazing and continue to work against the odds to make Coatesville a good place to live.
"John came home from his year away, and we had moved on with our lives. Not because we couldn’t talk about it; not because we were hiding anything. Except for a few mortar rounds that had been tossed across the wire, there was no carnage and horror that everyone seemed to assume he had seen. In fact, my experience as a teacher in Baltimore had a higher body count than John’s deployment to a war zone…
“I don’t see race”: It’s such an easy, well-meaning, but dismissive thing that white people say. The truth was, after five years of teaching in Baltimore City, I saw race and the intersection of race and poverty every day with increasing clarity. My students told me about the times they had been followed by shop clerks around stores until they left. That police cars would tap their bikes from the back, sending them careening to the ground on busy streets. A handful had been incarcerated. Others saw their parents through glass windows. And I wept in my apartment after a student had confronted me, asking me why the high school the next county over had French and drama classes and a brand-new building and our school had none of those things…
When DeyQuawn was left to bleed out on his kitchen floor, he was the 250th homicide victim in Baltimore in a year that ended with 344. During that same year, 22 U.S. service members are listed as in-theater fatalities."
For the purpose of representation in Congress slaves were considered three fifths of a man. African women were animals for breeding.
There was no need to count women for representation, about one half the population of the United States:
Unmentioned but understood was women were considered animals for breeding.
“The court has for a long, long time said: Look, if we define liberty only in terms of what was permitted at the time of ratification of the Bill of Rights or the 14th Amendment, then we’re stuck in time,” said Scott Skinner-Thompson, an associate professor of law at the University of Colorado Boulder. “Because in the 18th and 19th centuries, this country was not very free for many, many people — particularly women, particularly people of color.”
Although Thomas’s concurring opinion did not mention it, the ruling could even imperil the right to interracial marriage, which the Supreme Court recognized in its 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia, Skinner-Thompson said. (Thomas, who is Black, is married to a White woman.)
Thomas’s “potential retort would be that that violates the Equal Protection clause, because it’s race-based discrimination,” Skinner-Thompson said. “The problem is that if you take the originalists’ interpretation at face value and say: ‘What were the practices of this country at the time of the ratification of the 14th Amendment after the Civil War?’ Guess what? There was race discrimination all over the place. Separate but equal — it continued apace for over a century.”
"The question is not, and has never been, when or whether a fetus counts as a person. The question is if women do. And the answer, clearly, is no. We do not."
“I think this is a perfect decision for the 18th century,” Rosalie Abella, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School who retired last summer from the Supreme Court of Canada, told the Globe and Mail on Friday. In her interview with the Canadian newspaper, the former justice likened the new ruling to other infamous Supreme Court verdicts that deprived Americans of fundamental rights — such as Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857, which said Americans of African descent could never become citizens.
“That to me is as inconceivable as what they did today,” Abella said. “And yet they did it. It’s a frightening precedent, and delegitimizes the integrity of a court.…”
The conservative majority on the Supreme Court is now in the spotlight. The court’s weaponization by the American right is the end goal of decades of concerted effort and campaigning. “The conservative movement’s control of the Supreme Court, its success in skewing the electoral process through voting restrictions and gerrymandering, and the Democrats’ likely collapse in the coming midterms have bolstered Republicans’ confidence that they can drastically reshape American society on their terms without losing power,” wrote the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer.
It is clear now, Serwer added, that “the Supreme Court has become an institution whose primary role is to force a right-wing vision of American society on the rest of the country.”
In that regard, the United States finds itself in rather unflattering company. Analysts point to Poland, whose illiberal nationalist ruling party has spent years re-engineering the judiciary in its favor, much to the consternation of the European Union leadership in Brussels. Last year, Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal issued a ruling that made abortion, or abetting an abortion, a criminal act, with exceptions only for rape, incest and to protect the mother’s life.
Some Poles, like many Americans, saw its determination as an ideological act. “Many people in both countries perceive judicial institutions to be politicized,” said Courtney Blackington, an American Fulbright scholar affiliated with the Polish Academy of Sciences and the University of Warsaw, to The Post’s Retropolis blog. “When the new abortion ruling came out last year, there were activists who told me that they could not respect it because they felt it emanated from an institution that no longer respected the law.”
If the hearings end and Trump is not charged as many others were charged, the J6 Hearings are political.
To not be just a political exercise to win elections Donald Trump needs to be charged as others in the insurrectionist coup who invaded Capital Hill were charged.
TO PRESERVE DEMOCRACY DONALD TRUMP MUST BE REMOVED FROM POLITICS.
“Donald Trump is sending the most dangerous signal of his post-presidency, with a promise that if he returns to power he will be prepared to pardon January 6 insurrectionists. His message is a promise of impunity that does not merely propose to let violent political allies and supporters of the former president off the hook for their past lawlessness. It provides none-too-subtle encouragement for the next wave of insurrectionist violence.”
“Freeman told the committee that after being named by Giuliani and Trump, she had to leave her home for two months after the FBI said it was not safe.
“I’ve lost my name and I’ve lost my reputation. I’ve lost my sense of security all because a group of people starting with number 45″ — a reference to Trump — “and his ally Rudy Giuliani decided to scapegoat me and my daughter,” she said, in taped testimony played by the committee.
Moss, who testified live, explained to the committee that she had worked as an elections official for 10 years, taking satisfaction in helping elderly and disabled people vote. She had learned from her grandmother to treasure the right to vote, particularly since it had been withheld from many Black voters.
“It’s turned my life upside down,” said Moss, adding, “I don’t want anyone knowing my name. I don’t want to go anywhere with my mom because she might yell my name out over the grocery aisle or something. I don’t go to the grocery store at all. I haven’t been anywhere at all. … I second-guess everything I do. It’s affected my life in a major way — in every way. All because of lies, for me doing my job, the same thing I’ve been doing forever.”
Moss and Freeman filed defamation lawsuits last year against Giuliani, as well as pro-Trump media outlets One America News and the Gateway Pundit. They settled with OAN in May for undisclosed terms. As part of the settlement, OAN aired a segment reporting that Georgia officials had concluded there was “no widespread voter fraud by election workers” at the State Farm Arena and that neither Moss nor Freeman engaged in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct.”
As he prepares for an expected 2024 presidential bid, Trump is stealing whole sections from the authoritarian playbook of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and other fascists who have used political violence as a tool to create and extend their grip on power…
Scholars who have studied the rise of fascist strongmen have long compared Trump’s words and deeds to those of authoritarians such as Mussolini, who ruled Italy with an iron fist from the mid-1920s to 1943, and who aligned that country with German dictator Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime. Not all of these scholars have gone so far as to label Trump a fascist, arguing for a narrow definition of the term that recognizes the distinct character of one-party states and the fervor for territorial conquest that characterized dictatorships of the 1930s and ’40s. But there are many who see the former president as following “the authoritarian playbook first written by Mussolini,” as Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, has put it.
“Benito Mussolini created the world’s first Fascist dictatorship not just as a counter to the powerful Italian left—that’s a well-known story—but also as a desperate act to avoid prosecution,” explained Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present, in 2018. As they were grasping for power, Mussolini and his fascist allies used pardons of supporters to strengthen their position.
When Mussolini served as Italy’s prime minister in the mid-1920s, a leading Socialist member of the Italian Parliament, Giacomo Matteotti, was preparing to reveal evidence of financial impropriety on the part of Mussolini and his fellow fascists. In June of 1924, Matteotti was kidnapped and murdered by Mussolini’s secret police. It was an international scandal, with Time magazine reporting on protests against “the crime itself and the ruthless methods of suppressing the scandal adopted by Fascismo,” which initially threatened to topple Mussolini from his position as prime minister.
“A special investigation was soon launched to determine Mussolini’s role in the murder. By December 1924, rumors circulated that the Italian leader would be impeached or arrested, while Fascist loyalists floated the idea of pardons,” Ben-Ghiat recalled in her 2018 essay.
To save himself, Mussolini took the plunge into dictatorship, announcing in January 1925 that he and his party were above the law. “If Fascism has been a criminal association, I am the head of that criminal association,” he told Parliament, letting them know that the window to unseat him had closed. Amid the slew of repressive legislation that followed, Mussolini pardoned all political criminals and fired the two magistrates overseeing the investigation, replacing them with loyalists who issued a verdict of involuntary rather than willful murder. He ruled without limits to his power for 18 more years.
Reflecting on Trump’s authoritarian excesses, Ben-Ghiat noted at that time that “some rules of strongman behavior haven’t changed.”
Knowing Bannon’s proclivity to fascism many people on social media thought Bannon got the year wrong. They assumed he meant 1933 when Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany by Hindenburg and the 1000 Year Reich took root.
“On Wednesday, Bannon claimed without substantiation that the US will soon see a "populist uprising" of "Hispanics, African Americans, and working class people," and that MAGA-linked candidates will clinch government positions at the state and federal level.
"We're winning everywhere, we're gonna get 55 to 60% of the Hispanic vote this November, we're gonna get 50% of the African American male vote this November," Bannon said.
He added that he thought the MAGA movement will win an "80 to 100 seat pickup in the House of Representatives."
Bannon also made the baseless claim that MAGA candidates will sweep wins in the Senate, school boards, and state legislatures, and take the seats for "all the Secretaries of State."
"You're witnessing right now a political realignment like 1932. And we will govern for a hundred years after we win a hundred seats," Bannon said.
Bannon may have been referring to the 1932 event that the Senate's history archives describe as a "political tidal wave," in which Franklin Roosevelt won the presidency and the Democratic Party gained 97 seats on Capitol Hill, beating the Republicans three to one.
Bannon was asked by an off-screen individual if he wanted to "govern as a one-party government."
"I believe that we will destroy the Democratic Party as a national political institution," Bannon replied, railing against Republican Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who he described as "neoliberal neo-cons."
“In the 1932 presidential election, Roosevelt defeated Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover in one of the largest landslide victories in US history. The Roosevelt presidency began in the midst of the Great Depression and during the first 100 days of the 73rd U.S. Congress, he spearheaded unprecedented federal legislative productivity. Roosevelt called for the creation of programs designed to produce relief, recovery, and reform. Within his first year, he began implementing these policies through a series of executive orders and federal legislation collectively called the New Deal. Many New Deal programs provided relief to the unemployed such as the National Recovery Administration. Several New Deal programs and federal laws such as the Agricultural Adjustment Act provided relief to farmers. Roosevelt also instituted major regulatory reforms related to finance, communications, and labor. In addition to the economy, Roosevelt also sought to curtail the rising crime fueled by Prohibition.[5] After campaigning on a platform to repeal it, Roosevelt implemented the Beer Permit Act of 1933 and enforced the 21st amendment. Tax revenue collected from alcohol sales would go to public works as part of the New Deal. Roosevelt frequently used radio to speak directly to the American people, giving 30 "fireside chat" radio addresses during his presidency and became the first American president to be televised. The economy improved rapidly from 1933 to 1936, and Roosevelt won a landslide re-election in 1936. Despite the popularity of the New Deal, many within the US Supreme Court maintained their conservative bent and frequently struck down New Deal initiatives. Following his re-election, Roosevelt sought to counter this by lobbying for the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937 (or "court packing plan"), which would have expanded the size of the Supreme Court. The bill was blocked by the newly formed bipartisan Conservative Coalition, which also sought to prevent further New Deal legislation; as a result, the economy began to decline, which led to the recession of 1937–1938. Other major 1930s legislation and agencies implemented under Roosevelt include the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Act, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Social Security, and the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Knowing Bannon’s proclivity to fascism many people on social media thought Bannon got the year wrong. They assumed he meant 1933 when Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany by Hindenburg and the 1000 Year Reich took root.
“In terms of Nazi political success, the year 1933 was pivotal. Traditionally, the leader of the party who held the most seats in the Reichstag was appointed Chancellor. However, President Paul von Hindenburg was hesitant to appoint Hitler as chancellor. Following several backroom negotiations—which included industrialists, Hindenburg's son, the former chancellor Franz von Papen, and Hitler—Hindenburg acquiesced and on 30 January 1933, he formally appointed Adolf Hitler as Germany's new chancellor. Although he was chancellor, Hitler was not yet an absolute dictator.
The groundwork for the Nazi dictatorship was laid when the Reichstag was set on fire in February. Believing the communists were behind the arson, Paul von Hindenburg passed the Reichstag Fire Decree, which severely curtailed the liberties and rights of German citizens. Using the decree, Hitler began eliminating his political opponents. In Hitler's eyes the decree was insufficient and he proposed the Enabling Act of 1933. This law gave the German government the power to override individual rights prescribed by the constitution. The law also gave the Chancellor (Hitler) emergency powers to pass and enforce laws without parliamentary oversight. By April, Hitler now held de facto dictatorial powers and ordered the construction of the first Nazi concentration camp at Dachau for communists and other political opponents. Hitler's rise to power was completed in August 1934 when President Paul von Hindenburg died. Hitler merged the Chancellorship with the Presidency and became the Führer of Germany.
In retrospect, Hitler's rise to power was aided in part by his willingness to use violence in advancing his political objectives and to recruit party members willing to do the same. Furthermore, Hitler went out of his way to seek financial support from wealthy businessmen, without whose support his assumption of power would have been impossible.[2] Hitler framed their partnership as an essential factor in defeating the rising threat of communism. The party engaged in electoral battles in which Hitler participated as a speaker and organizer. Street battles and violence also erupted between the Communist'sRotfrontkämpferbund and the Nazis' Sturmabteilung (SA).
Once the Nazi dictatorship was firmly established, the Nazis themselves created a mythology surrounding their rise to power. German propaganda described the period that roughly corresponds to the scope of this article as either the Kampfzeit (the time of struggle) or the Kampfjahre (years of struggle).”
In 1932 fascism was growing in Europe. Mussolini controlled Italy. Francisco Franco brought fascism to Spain with the Spanish Civil War July 1936 – 1 April 1939. Francisco Franco would rule Spain from until his death in 1975.
“Mussolini was originally a socialist politician and a journalist at the Avanti! newspaper. In 1912, he became a member of the National Directorate of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI),[7] but he was expelled from the PSI for advocating military intervention in World War I, in opposition to the party's stance on neutrality. In 1914, Mussolini founded a new journal, Il Popolo d'Italia, and served in the Royal Italian Army during the war until he was wounded and discharged in 1917. Mussolini denounced the PSI, his views now centering on Italian nationalism instead of socialism, and later founded the fascist movement which came to oppose egalitarianism[8] and class conflict, instead advocating "revolutionary nationalism" transcending class lines.[9] On 31 October 1922, following the March on Rome (28–30 October), Mussolini was appointed prime minister by King Victor Emmanuel III, becoming the youngest individual to hold the office up to that time. After removing all political opposition through his secret police and outlawing labor strikes,[10] Mussolini and his followers consolidated power through a series of laws that transformed the nation into a one-party dictatorship. Within five years, Mussolini had established dictatorial authority by both legal and illegal means and aspired to create a totalitarian state. In 1929, Mussolini signed the Lateran Treaty with the Holy See to establish Vatican City.
On 10 June 1940, Mussolini decided to enter the war on the Axis side. Despite initial success, the subsequent Axis collapse on multiple fronts and eventual Allied invasion of Sicily made Mussolini lose the support of the population and members of the Fascist Party. As a consequence, early on 25 July 1943, the Grand Council of Fascism passed a motion of no confidence in Mussolini; later that day King Victor Emmanuel III dismissed him as head of government and had him placed in custody, appointing Pietro Badoglio to succeed him as Prime Minister. After the king agreed to an armistice with the Allies, on 12 September 1943 Mussolini was rescued from captivity in the Gran Sasso raid by Germanparatroopers and Waffen-SScommandos led by Major Otto-Harald Mors. Adolf Hitler, after meeting with the rescued former dictator, then put Mussolini in charge of a puppet regime in northern Italy, the Italian Social Republic (Italian: Repubblica Sociale Italiana, RSI),[11] informally known as the Salò Republic, causing a civil war. In late April 1945, in the wake of near total defeat, Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci attempted to flee to Switzerland,[12] but both were captured by Italian communist partisans and summarily executed by firing squad on 28 April 1945 near Lake Como. The bodies of Mussolini and his mistress were then taken to Milan, where they were hung upside down at a service station to publicly confirm their demise.[13]”
"Ben is a writer, political commentator, former Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications and Speech Writing under President Obama. He also co-hosts the internationally acclaimed Pod Save the World podcast, along with former White House National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vittorio. Ben’s latest book is called After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made."
Democratic campaign strategists just don't understand that the old Republican Party is dead. Campaigning styles of the 1990s do not work. Democrats are running against a Republican Party and Republican base voters that do not accept rule of law and democracy.
SEE article from the Southern Poverty Law Center's The Year in Hate & Extremism 2021 below:
“Nancy Pelosi is once again showing why she’s one of the worst politicians in the country right now by petitioning for a “stronger Republican Party to take back the party”. Pelosi also called on Democrats to try harder in persuading Republicans instead of defeating them, even though Congressional Republicans will NEVER concede on anything to Democrats, especially on women’s rights and environmental issues. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian discuss on The Young Turks.” Watch LIVE weekdays 6-8 pm ET. http://youtube.com/theyoungturks/live
“Democratic groupsare buying ads touting some of the most extreme pro-Trump candidates in Republican primaries around the country — meddling in GOP contests to set up more favorable matchups in November.
Why it matters: The risky gambit assumes general-election voters will reject candidates who embrace conspiracy theories or lies about the 2020 election. But it could dramatically backfire by vaulting fringe Republicans into national office.
Driving the news: Ahead of last week's primaries, the Nancy Pelosi-affiliated House Majority PAC funded a 30-second TV ad promoting self-declared "Trump Conservative" Chris Mathys against moderate Republican Rep. David Valadao in California's 22nd District.The group has reserved at least $1.49 million in TV ad slots across Colorado over the next few weeks.
In the Pennsylvania governor's race, the state Democratic Party used campaign resources to boost Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano — who has been subpoenaed by the House Jan. 6 committee for his involvement in the pro-Trump "Stop the Steal" campaign.
Mastriano won the GOP nomination over former Rep. Lou Barletta (R-Pa.), prompting Cook Political Report to shift its forecast for the general election from "toss up" to "lean Democrat."
But Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign shows how the strategy can backfire in devastating fashion: The team sought to elevate Donald Trump in the GOP primaries, believing he would be an easier general election matchup.”
Democratic campaign straights just don't understand that the old Republican Party is dead.
***
"Shapiro narrowly leads Mastriano
Perhaps the most surprising result of the early poll is how close the governor’s race appears to be, given that Shapiro signaled he wanted to run against Mastriano and Republicans mounted a last-minute bid to stop the far-right election denier, fearing he couldn’t win a general election.
“He wants to end vote by mail and he led the fight to audit the 2020 election,” an ad said. “If Mastriano wins, it’s a win for what Donald Trump stands for.”
The ad buy suggested Shapiro hoped to face Mastriano in the general election, and many Democrats have speculated that such a match-up is their best chance at holding the governor’s mansion.
But with a lead of just 4 percentage points and a margin of error of just over plus or minus four points, Mastriano and Shapiro are essentially tied in the first poll of the race.
The governor’s race could have huge implications for abortion rights, voting rights, and myriad other issues. Republicans currently control the state legislature, and Gov. Tom Wolf’s veto pen has been a consistent line of defense for Democrats. The man who succeeds him will be able to sign or block conservative legislation if Republicans hold the statehouse.
Plenty of voters are still making up their minds. About a quarter of independent voters polled said they were still undecided in the governor’s race. Of those who leaned toward a candidate, Shapiro was beating Mastriano by about 5 percentage points.
Half of voters said they wanted their vote in November to change the direction in which Biden is leading the country. A quarter said they wanted their vote to support Biden’s agenda, and another quarter said their vote had nothing to do with Biden’s policies.
For Democrats, running ahead of those headwinds will be key. Fetterman is already pitching himself as someone outside the Democratic establishment, while embracing most Democratic positions. Shapiro, who ran unopposed in the primary and has a more traditional political profile, could have a tougher time distinguishing himself from the party."
"In late April, the Southern Poverty Law Center and Tulchin Research conducted a poll of 1,500 Americans to examine the extent to which the extremist beliefs and narratives that mobilize the hard right have been absorbed by the wider American public.
We found that the ideas underpinning the white nationalist “great replacement” narrative recently cited by an alleged white supremacist terrorist in Buffalo, New York, have become thoroughly mainstream on the political right. Nearly 7 in 10 Republicans surveyed agree to at least some extent that demographic changes in the United States are deliberately driven by liberal and progressive politicians attempting to gain political power by “replacing more conservative white voters.” Across the political spectrum, we found substantial support for threatening or acting violently against perceived political opponents."
