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.
“Mary Trump exposes SECRETS of the Trump Household that created a MONSTER | Burn the Boats”
I transcribed part of the interview. I make mistakes. James Pitcherella
“Republicans are taking advantage of weaknesses in the system because they have no morality, they have no ethics and they care for nothing beyond their own personal power and the power of the party. They will do everything they can to make sure that the Republicans have permanent minority rule.
The goal for people like Mitch McConnell and five Supreme Court justices is to turn America into a theocratic apartheid state.
So if you look at it as that. Yes everything else is still going on at once but it’s still in the service of that one thing. Then we are fighting against that one thing (theocratic apartheid state). And if we prevail, we’ll prevail in everything else.”
Pretending that we’re playing by the same old rules is going to be fatal to the American experiment. Pretending that the other side is operating in good faith. That really does demoralize this side.
When you have President Biden whom I try not to, I don’t go out of my way to criticize the Biden Administration because we need them to win again in 2024. And right now we are literally looking at a choice between democracy & fascism. So if i disagree with him on policy issues once in a while then I’m going to keep my mouth shut because that’s not the point.
It he’s running in the general election against any of these Republicans President Biden will be the only pro-democracy candidate on the ballot.
So I’m pulling my punches about other things.
But when President Biden calls Mitch McConnell a good friend or says that Kevin McCarthy is an honest man. Who is the audience for those statements. In my view it completely misreads the reality we are dealing with.
The Republicans burned the playbook to ashes. They are not operating in good faith in any way shape or form. So when Democratic leaders seem to fail to understand that it makes it a little harder to stay in the fight the way we need to.
I’m not really sure what else needs to happen in order for Democrats to get that message and understand that you can fight really hard without becoming like your enemy. I know this has been argued to death.
I never interpreted “We go high” as we become doormats. I thought it meant we’re going to do everything in our power to win without lying cheating & stealing like they do.
We need to put on our brass knuckles figuratively speaking and get in the mud with them figuratively speaking. We’ll do that because we are on the right side of this. And that should empower us.
"Washington’s decision not to block allies from sending F-16s comes after Zelensky’s repeated requests for fighter jets, including from the Netherlands, which has the aircraft. In February, Ukrainian officials said they had made significant progress in convincing Dutch officials to send F-16s, but Washington’s approval is necessary given third-party transfer agreements made during the purchase of the U.S.-made jets. The transfer would also require the sign-off of the chairs and ranking minority-party members of relevant U.S. congressional committees.”
“The Pentagon has overestimated the cost of weapons it supplied to Ukraine by at least $3 billion, the Associated Press reported. The miscalculation will allow the Defense Department to send more weapons without requesting more funding from Congress, according to the AP.”
Updated May 19, 2023 at 5:15 a.m. EDT| Published May 19, 2023 at 1:45 a.m. EDT
***
"A new analysis by the Center for European Policy Analysis finds that congressionally approved funds to support Ukraine this year amount to about 5.6 percent of U.S. defense spending, while resulting in a significant degrading of Russia’s military:
Altogether, the Biden administration received Congressional approval for $40bn in aid for Ukraine for 2022 and has requested an additional $37.7bn for 2022. More than half of this aid has been earmarked for defense.
These sums pale into insignificance when set against a total US defense budget of $715bn for 2022. The assistance represents 5.6% of total US defense spending. But Russia is a primary adversary of the US, a top tier rival not too far behind China, its number one strategic challenger. In cold, geopolitical terms, this war provides a prime opportunity for the US to erode and degrade Russia’s conventional defense capability, with no boots on the ground and little risk to US lives.
The Ukrainian armed forces have already killed or wounded upwards of 100,000 Russian troops, half its original fighting force; there have been almost 8,000 confirmed losses of armored vehicles including thousands of tanks, thousands of APCs, artillery pieces, hundreds of fixed and rotary wing aircraft, and numerous naval vessels. US spending of 5.6% of its defense budget to destroy nearly half of Russia’s conventional military capability seems like an absolutely incredible investment. If we divide out the US defense budget to the threats it faces, Russia would perhaps be of the order of $100bn-150bn in spend-to-threat. So spending just $40bn a year, erodes a threat value of $100-150bn, a two-to-three time return. Actually the return is likely to be multiples of this given that defense spending, and threat are annual recurring events."
“Even the wifi password was a signal. Attendees at President Donald Trump’s rally in Dalton, Georgia, on January 4 who wanted to log in to the Make America Great network had to enter the phrase into their devices: “SeeYouJan6!” Trump was in town that night ostensibly to boost two Republican Senate candidates, but he spent much of his speech railing about the “stolen” 2020 election—and inciting supporters to descend on the nation’s capital two days later. “They’re not taking this White House,” he declared, Marine One spotlighted behind him. The crowd roared. “We’re going to fight like hell…
“The description of Trump as a terrorist leader is neither metaphor nor hyperbole—it is the assessment of veteran national security experts. Trump, those experts say, adopted a method known as stochastic terrorism, a process of incitement where the instigator provokes extremist violence under the guise of plausible deniability. Although the exact location, timing, and source of the violence may not be predictable, its occurrence is all but inevitable. When pressed about the incitement, the instigator typically responds with equivocal denials and muted denunciations of violence, or claims to have been “joking,” as Trump and those speaking on his behalf routinelymade."
“The folks who Trump is enlisting to help him with a legislative fix need to be reminded of how easy it is to potentially become part of a cover-up to the American people after the fact,” said former Georgia US attorney Michael Moore. “A prosecutor can easily argue that these continued efforts to generate help are both proof of his guilt and proof that he knows he’s caught.”
Moore added: “Given the status of the multiple inquiries involving Trump, I wouldn’t want to be the one getting the call to help. I’d feel like a fireman answering the alarm yet knowing I was the one likely to get burned.”
Similarly, current and former House members say moves to undermine prosecutors by Trump, his lawyers and House allies are dangerous to US civic life.
“All the attacks on judges, prosecutors and the courts are a thoroughgoing assault on any part of the judicial system that takes up a case related to Trump,” theHouse Democrat Jamie Raskin told the Guardian. “It’s an astounding violation of our proper federal role. It demonstrates the willingness to use any lever of institutional power over other parts of the government to advance Trump-related objectives…
“Not long ago, a savvy legislator would try hard to keep away from pending criminal or civil enforcement investigations, perhaps out of a sense of propriety, perhaps for fear of scandal,” the Columbia law professor and ex-prosecutor Daniel Richman said.
“Maybe this is no longer true, and what otherwise would seem like naked obstruction for partisan gain or out of partisan loyalty can hide behind a claim of fighting the alleged weaponization of the federal government.”
Other justice department veterans are adamant that prosecutors won’t be deterred by political pressures on them.
“The attempted infusion of political influence into the work of DoJ’s career prosecutors rarely if ever benefits the target of such an investigation. It is viewed by prosecutors as an attempt to corrupt and improperly influence their investigation, and that’s a line DoJ’s prosecutors won’t cross,” said Pelletier.”
“Gosar, who pushed the “Stop the Steal” lie that preceded the pro-Trump attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is no stranger to appearing alongside extremists. He has previously stood with white nationalist and antisemite Nick Fuentes at his AFPAC conference.
Moore has a lower profile than Gosar but is also familiar with controversy. The Alabama congressman temporarily deleted his Twitter account in January 2021 after publishing tweets that promoted former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election and appeared to apologize for those who attacked the Capitol in its aftermath. He filed a bill in February to make the AR-15 the “National Gun of America.”
An illiberal coalition
Gosar, Moore and Posobiec will link up with other American reactionaries at the pro-Orbán event. Matt Schlapp, the CPAC leader who has denied allegations that he sexually assaulted a male staffer, will attend. CPAC Hungary also lists election denier Kari Lake, who lost the race for Arizona’s governor in 2022, as a speaker. Michael Anton, a former Trump adviser, will be there too, according to a post on CPAC Hungary’s website. Mark Meadows, Trump’s embattled former chief of staff, will appear before the CPAC Hungary crowd via video conference.
Indiana’s new Secretary of State Diego Morales, who has faced criticism in that state for hiring his brother-in-law to a six-figure job, will speak in person. So will Rick Santorum, the anti-LGBTQ+ former senator who lost his job with CNN in 2021 after making comments appearing to dismiss the cultural impact of Native Americans. Other, lesser-known Americans are also slated to speak.
In addition to members of the Nazi-founded FPÖ, members of far-right groups known for their anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ stances will be at CPAC Hungary. Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, is speaking. Members of such hardline groups as France’s National Rally (formerly National Front), Portugal’s neofascist Chega party, and Im Tirtzu, a Zionist group who paints human rights activists as traitors to Israel, will also speak.
Newsweek again associates with anti-democracy movement
Josh Hammer of Newsweek will also speak at CPAC Hungary, marking another time when that publication’s opinion editor has publicly rubbed shoulders with European radical-right figures. Hammer previously attended the New York Young Republican Club (NYYRC) gala in December 2022 alongside members of FPÖ, Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD), American white nationalists and Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Hammer has courted radical right, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-immigrant and anti-democracy voices while serving as Newsweek’s opinion editor, as Hatewatch previously reported. He has also traveled to Hungary to speak to a state-sponsored group. In February 2022, Newsweek published a glowing dispatch Hammer authored about Hungary without disclosing that connection to Orbán’s government. In addition to Orbán, other extremists who are slated to attend CPAC Hungary promote views hostile to press freedom, and they are listed on a roster next to Newsweek’s name.
In a previous comment to Hatewatch, Newsweek claimed that Hammer “does not share nor endorse the views of those published in the opinion section of Newsweek, nor those who participate in events he attends.” Hatewatch reached out again about Hammer’s scheduled appearance at CPAC Hungary, but the magazine did not respond.
Hammer is joined by contributors to the opinion section he runs, including the extremist Posobiec and Trump loyalist Gavin Wax, the president of NYYRC. Wax staged a protest last month, featuring Posobiec, outside the Manhattan courthouse where the former president pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. While speaking at NYYRC’s gala in December, Wax called for “total war” against his perceived domestic enemies.”
96. For example, Ms. Dunphy was given access to emails from, to, or concerning President Trump, the Trump family (including emails from Donald Trump, Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Eric Trump), Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, former FBI director Louis Freeh, Trump lawyerJay Sekulow, Secretaries of State, former aides to President Trump such as Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, and Kellyanne Conway, former Attorneys General Michael Mukasey and Jeff Sessions,
media figures such as Rupert Murdoch, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson, and other notable figures including Newt Gingrich, presidential candidates for Ukraine, President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan of Turkey, the Ailes family, the LeFrak family, Bernard Kerik, Igor Fruman, Lev Parnas, and attorneys Marc Mukasey, Robert Costello, Victoria Tensing, Fred Fielding, and Joe
DeGenova.
97. Ms. Dunphy understood that she was given access to these emails because she was employed by Giuliani and the Giuliani Companies. Indeed, although Giuliani and his surrogates
132. He also asked Ms. Dunphy if she knew anyone in need of a pardon, telling her that he was selling pardons for $2 million, which he and President Trump would split. He told Ms. Dunphy that she could refer individuals seeking pardons to him, so long as they did not go
through *the normal channels" of the Office of the Pardon Attorney, because correspondence going to that office would be subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.
In 2023 AR rifles have mostly replaced bombs as the weapon of choice of domestic terrorists.
And the Republican Party now supports domestic terrorists.
The next mass shooting attack could be at a polling place near you.
This opinion article by Michelle Goldberg bristling with facts in every sentence should be the headliner of the New York Times:
“The reason that America endures a level of gun violence unique among developed countries, and that we can often do little about it, is so many politicians have views on guns that aren’t far afield from McVeigh’s. As Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, has pointed out, it’s become common to hear Republicans echo McVeigh’s insurrectionary theory of the Second Amendment, which holds that Americans must be allowed to amass personal arsenals in case they need to overthrow the government. As the MAGA congresswomen Lauren Boebert once put it, the Second Amendment “has nothing to do with hunting, unless you’re talking about hunting tyrants.”
The Republican Party’s fetishization of guns and its fetishization of insurrection — one that’s reached a hysterical pitch since Donald Trump’s presidency — go hand in hand. Guns are at the center of a worldview in which the ability to launch an armed rebellion must always be held in reserve. And so in the wake of mass shootings, when the public is most likely to clamor for gun regulations, Republicans regularly shore up gun access instead. In April, following a school shooting in Nashville, Republicans expelled two young Black Democratic legislators who’d led a gun control protest at the Tennessee Capitol. A few days later, the State Senate passed a bill protecting the gun industry from lawsuits…
It’s hard to think of a historical precedent for a society allowing itself to be terrorized in the way we have. The normalization of both right-wing terrorism and periodic mass shootings by deranged loners is possible only because McVeigh’s views have been mainstreamed. “In the nearly 30 years since the Oklahoma City bombing, the country took an extraordinary journey — from nearly universal horror at the action of a right-wing extremist to wide embrace of a former president (also possibly a future president) who reflected the bomber’s values,” wrote Toobin.
As it happens, in the hours after the Oklahoma City bombing, before the authorities knew who McVeigh was, he was pulled over during a routine traffic stop and then arrested for carrying a gun without a permit. In 2019, however, Oklahoma legalized permitless carry. Under the new law, McVeigh would have been let go.”
"A lesser sentence could encourage further abuses not only by these defendants, but by others who disagree with the next elections in our country’s local, state, and federal governments. See Gall, 552 U.S. at 54 (it is a “legitimate concern that a lenient sentence for a serious offense threatens to promote disrespect for the law”
FROM:
"Rightwing election lawyer Cleta Mitchell, a key ally of Donald Trump as he pushed bogus claims of fraud to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 win, is facing intense fire from voting watchdogs and bipartisan criticism for urging curbs on college student voting, same day voter registration and absentee voting.
The scrutiny of Mitchell, who runs the Election Integrity Network at the pro-Trump Conservative Partnership Institute to which a Trump Pac donated $1m dollars, was sparked by recent comments Mitchell made to Republican donors, and a watchdog report criticizing her advisory role with a federal election panel.
Long known for advocating stricter voting rules that are often premised on unsupported allegations of sizable voting fraud, Mitchell last month promoted new voting curbs on students in a talk to a group of wealthy donors to the Republican National Committee, efforts that critics call partisan and undemocratic…
The talk by Mitchell, who has done legal work for Republican committees, members of Congress and conservative groups such as the National Rifle Association, focused on college campuses in key swing states including Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Virginia and Wisconsin, all of which have large college campuses.
In an audio of her remarks obtained by liberal journalist Lauren Windsor, Mitchell slammed college voting procedures.
“What are these college campus locations? What is this young people effort that they do? They basically put the polling place next to the student dorm so they just have to roll out of bed, vote, and go back to bed…”
“Mitchell’s comments behind closed doors give up the game,” said Danielle Lang, the lead voting rights litigator with the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. “The current wave of additional voter restrictions is about only one thing: punishing disfavored populations of voters…”
Mitchell has served for over a year on a bipartisan advisory board for the federal Election Assistance Commission, a post that she’s used to promote curbs on mail in voting, voter registration and student voting, according to an April report from the watchdog group American Oversight…
“Cleta Mitchell played a central role in former President Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election,” said American Oversight executive director Heather Sawyer “So it isn’t surprising that she has used her role as an advisor to the Election Assistance Commission to push an explicitly anti-voting agenda…”
Mitchell was subpoenaed last year, along with several other key Trump lawyers and allies including Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, by a special grand jury in Georgia in awide ranging criminal probe by Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis into efforts by Trump and his allies to thwart Biden’s win in the state.
A major focus of that inquiry is Trump’s hour-long conference call on 2 January 2021, which Mitchell participated in, pressuring Georgia’s Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to just “find” him 11,780 votes to block Biden’s win there…
The Fulton county inquiry is widely expected to lead to several indictments including quite possibly Trump, and Willis has said she will make final decisions about who will be charged this summer.
Just days after the 2021 call with Raffensperger, Mitchell abruptly left her long time law firm Foley & Lardner, and soon joined the Conservative Partnership Institute as senior legal fellow, where she has led its self styled Election Integrity Network and advocated forcurb voting rights.
CPI has flourished financially since Mitchell and Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows, CPI’s senior partner, joined in early2021.
CPI’s tax filings for 2021 showed grants and contributions of $45m up from $7.1m the prior year.
In other conservative circles, Mitchell wields considerable influence as a board member of the right wing Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and as chair of the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s board.
Now though, Mitchell’s latest attacks on student voting rules are viewed by watchdog groups and some members of Congress as badly misguided, and emblematic of her partisan agenda…”
