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.
“Moderate GOP Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska told NBC News on Monday night that if the GOP Conference can't agree on electing McCarthy or any other Republican as speaker on the House floor, then he would be willing to work with Democrats to elect a moderate Republican for the top post.
"I will support Kevin McCarthy, but if we do get to that point, I do want the country to work and we need to govern. We can't sit neutral; we can't have total gridlock for two years," Bacon said in an interview just off the House floor…
Later on Bannon’s “War Room,” Gaetz mocked Greene — one of his closest friends and allies — for trusting McCarthy. Gaetz referred to a conspiracy theory Greene previously promoted that blamed wildfires in California on Jewish space lasers.
“Whatever Kevin has promised Marjorie Taylor Greene, I guarantee you this: At the first opportunity, he will zap her faster than you can say Jewish space laser,” Gaetz said.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy is expected to secure the GOP nomination for speaker in Tuesday's leadership elections, but conservatives say he can't get the votes needed on the House floor without their help.
Nov. 14, 2022, 8:13 PM EST / Updated Nov. 14, 2022, 10:07 PM EST
The Libertarian dreams of Charles Koch nearly came to being fulfilled with the “Red Wave” that was to put Republicans in control of the House & Senate
"The Libertarian Party platform on which Koch ran in 1980 was unambiguous. It included the following:
We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs.
We oppose any compulsory insurance or tax-supported plan to provide health services. . . .
We favor the repeal of the . . . Social Security system. . . .
We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes.
We support the eventual repeal of all taxation.
As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately.
We support repeal of all . . . minimum wage laws. . . .
Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended. . . .
We support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency. . . .
We call for the privatization of the public roads and national highway system. . . .
We advocate the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration. . . .
We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and “aid to the poor” programs.44
The list went on from there, including ending government oversight of abusive banking practices by ending all usury laws; privatizing our airports, the FAA, Amtrak, and all of our rivers; and shutting down the Post Office. In a bone they threw to the white supremacist, white evangelical, and Catholic Christian movements, they also called for an end of all tax-supported abortions (although the Hyde Amendment had already banned this in 1976)…
You might remember Pat Sellers for his “Referendum” designed to protect the “Saha Farm” from eminent domain and as a rigorous campaigner for the infamous “Bloc of Four” Coatesville City Council. Pat Sellers allegedly has a connection to Larry Pratt.
For years it worked like a charm, at least from the 1980s until around 2016. Even when Democrats did win elections, they had to eschew labels like “liberal” and take positions like Bill Clinton’s infamous “the era of big government is over,” as was “welfare as we know it.” President Barack Obama’s signature piece of legislation, the Affordable Care Act, added billions to the coffers of big insurance and drug companies and continued to legally prevent Americans who were under 65 (and not disabled) from accessing Medicare.
And then, in 2015, a real estate mogul and reality TV star burst onto the scene, blowing up the carefully crafted Potemkin village that his fellow billionaires had built over two generations.
The Republican Party was corrupt, Trump said, lying to get Americans into phony wars for political gain, cutting taxes on rich people like himself at the expense of the average guy, and fawning over phony war heroes like John McCain and low-energy hustlers like Jeb Bush and Rick Perry. The Democratic Party was rigged, too, Trump pointed out, sympathizing with Bernie Sanders, who had been almost entirely ignored by corporate media for nearly a year even as he was drawing crowds of 5,000 to 30,000 at nearly every stop.
Trump talked about giving people the universal health care they’d been yearning for since the 1940s (when the GOP first shot down Harry Truman’s single-payer plan) and said he’d do so at a “lower cost” and with “better benefits” than either Obamacare or Medicare. Union jobs were going to flood back into the country. Billionaires were going to be crippled by higher Trump taxes—“I’ll take a huge hit,” he solemnly proclaimed.
Most of the conservative billionaire class was horrified, and the Koch network (which holds a semiannual get-together for billionaires to raise hundreds of millions to spend on politics) declined to support Trump in 2016. But a few, among them Sheldon Adelson and Robert Mercer, threw in with Trump, and with a little help from oligarchs in Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, Trump ended up in the White House.
Within a year of Trump’s taking over the Oval Office, and the GOP taking over both the House and the Senate, Americans began to realize that the entire thing was just another Reaganesque scam. Trump was able to hold together his base mostly by using race-based fear tactics about invading brown hordes from south of the border. He kept Republicans generally on his side by threatening to support Republican primary challengers if they didn’t swear fealty.
But it wasn’t enough, and the professionals in the Republican Party knew it. They could see the wipeout of 2018 coming, and it scared them to their core. Demonizing unions and universal health care didn’t work anymore, because candidate Trump had called them both out as benefits. The 2017 tax cut was widely seen as a $1.5 trillion gift to the billionaire class, put on the credit card of the nation’s children and grandchildren.
Even their fear tactics about black crime and invading Mexicans were backfiring, and the Supreme Court had had the gall to end the debate over gay marriage by simply legalizing it nationwide.
There was only one serious path left: figure out a way to prevent the wrong people from voting or, if they voted, to make sure their votes weren’t counted.
Voter suppression and election fraud became the principal method of ensuring electoral success, buttressed by hundreds of millions of dollars in TV advertising and sophisticated online influence operations."
Every Sunday I share with you a chapter or two from one of my books. This is a serialization of the entire book, done a chapter or two every Sunday for the next few months, of The Hidden History of the War on Voting.
***
The Libertarian dreams of Charles Koch nearly came to being fulfilled with the “Red Wave” that was to put Republicans in control of the House & Senate
McCarthy outed his plan to kill Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security if Republicans take the house. Senator Rick Scott plans to end Social Security and Medicare:
As I write this Democrats retained control of the Senate. Elections determining control of the House are not yet over.
"Top House Republicans are being increasingly open about their plans to hold the debt limit hostage to force through their extreme plans to slash Medicare and Social Security.
In a new interview with Punchbowl News, Minority Leader McCarthy indicated his support for House Republicans’ increasingly open plotting to threaten a catastrophic economic meltdown in order to force wildly unpopular cuts to the bedrock of American seniors’ financial security.
November 7, 2022- at USW 1165 – 650 Charles Street Coatesville, PA
Like Bernie Sanders John Fetterman is a populist and old style Franklin Delano Roosevelt progressive.
Like Bernie, John is unencumbered by offers that can’t be refused from pharmaceutical, defense contractors and fossil fuel billionaires. Bernie Sanders & John Fetterman showed Democrats how it’s done.
John is brilliant & charismatic. He can win the presidency.
I expect mob boss president 45 will be on his way to prison by 2024. The Republican Party will implode like leaderless rats.
This election proved to me that the United States of 2022 is not a re-run of Germany in 1938.
The beacon of hope for humanity in New York Harbor is alive and well in the United States of America.
The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
"Jon Stewart started as a stand-up comedian, but through the years, he has become a prominent figure in entertainment and media. He is not only a comedian, but he is also a television host, producer, writer, director, actor, singer, and political commentator."
"They are the faces we see every day—from the time we wake up until we go to bed. Sometimes, they join us during meal times through television. Each day, they deliver the news we need to know and the biggest breaking stories all over the world. We trust TV reporters to give us the latest, credible news, whether it’s good or bad. They are people we cannot live without because we simply need to know what is going on around us, from international crises to the economy to sports and entertainment."
“Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, played a key role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. He was the “point person” for the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania as lawyers put together fake slates of electors for Trump, according to emails obtained by the New York Times. He also organized an event with Rudy Giuliani after the 2020 election in which speakers spread misinformation about the 2020 election. He hired buses and offered rides to the US Capitol on January 6 and was there himself. He has supported the idea of decertifying the presidential race in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state, which is not possible.
If elected, Mastriano would wield considerable power over elections in Pennsylvania. The state is one of a handful where the secretary of state, the chief election official, is appointed by the governor. Mastriano has said he has already picked someone, but hasn’t said who. The Philadelphia Inquirer has speculated he could pick Toni Shuppe, an activist who has spread voting misinformation and false theories linked to the QAnon movement. Mastriano has also said he would decertify election equipment and cause all voters in the state to re-register to vote.”
#amanpourpbsThe White Power Movement: A Direct Line Between Vietnam and Jan. 6 | Amanpour and Company
"The white power movement in America wants a revolution. Its soldiers are not lone wolves but highly organized cadres motivated by a coherent and deeply troubling worldview made up of white supremacy, virulent anticommunism, and apocalyptic faith. In Bring the War Home, Kathleen Belew gives us the history of a movement that consolidated in the 1970s and 1980s around a potent sense of betrayal in the Vietnam War and made tragic headlines in Waco and Ruby Ridge and with the Oklahoma City bombing and is resurgent under President Trump.
Returning to an America ripped apart by a war they felt they were not allowed to win, a small group of veterans and active-duty military personnel and civilian supporters concluded that waging war on their own country was justified. They unified people from a variety of militant groups, including Klansmen, neo-Nazis, skinheads, radical tax protestors, and white separatists to form a new movement of loosely affiliated independent cells to avoid detection. The white power movement operated with discipline and clarity, undertaking assassinations, armed robbery, counterfeiting, and weapons trafficking. Its command structure gave women a prominent place and put them in charge of brokering alliances and birthing future recruits.
Belew’s disturbing and timely history reminds us that war cannot be contained in time and space: grievances intensify and violence becomes a logical course of action. Based on years of deep immersion in previously classified FBI files and on extensive interviews, Bring the War Home tells the story of American paramilitarism and the birth of the alt-right."
#amanpourpbsTracking the Threat: The Trump World’s Assault on U.S. Election Workers | Amanpour and Company:
I was called to break up fighting at Precinct 110 in Coatesville, PA. Bob Saucier was a former high school wrestler who JBS Chapter Leader Pat Sellers used as muscle in elections. I could talk down Bob.
Bob would sit in the path of voters, put out and immediately retract his foot in an apparent effort to make them fall. I witnessed voters walk up to the polls then turn around when they saw Bob. I don’t know if they came back to vote later.
John Birch Society members Pat Sellers & Bob Saucier began their political careers as school board members in the Coatesville Area School District in Pennsylvania.
Pat Sellers influenced elections in Coatesville using Bob Saucier as muscle at the polls with West Chester Attorney Andrew Lehr moving Bob from precinct to precinct.
When my wife was judge of elections in Precinct 110 in Coatesville PA at the close of the Election Day Bob came into the polls put his hands on the table and demanded to vote. Many years before Bob lived on Olive St. in Precinct 110 but because Bob abused her (her neighbors witnessed Bob dragging her down the sidewalk by her hair.) she got a divorce. There was a court order for Bob to stay 75 feet away from the house. Bob lived in Downingtown.
There was no state constable available. My wife called Voter Services. They told her to let him vote illegally. His vote would not be counted.
In the 2022 primary election in Precinct 110 where my wife was judge of elections for 10 years Voter Services filled in as judge of elections. Long time election officers are leaving in Chester County just as they are across the nation.
Sellers also ran for the 6th Congressional District twice.
July 20 (Reuters) - A coalition of rightwing “constitutional sheriffs,” who claim legal power in their jurisdictions that exceeds U.S. federal and state authorities, has a new calling: investigating conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was rigged against former President Donald Trump.
The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association has teamed with True the Vote, a Texas nonprofit and purveyor of debunked voter-fraud claims, to recruit like-minded sheriffs nationwide to investigate 2020 stolen-election allegations and to more aggressively police future voting.
On Friday night, two armed and masked men wearing tactical gear surveilled a drop box outside the Maricopa County Juvenile Court building in Mesa. Maricopa County Election Department said that the police had been called, and that the armed individuals departed the scene.
However, in a statement to VICE News, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office said that after deputies responded, they “were able to determine that the individuals were not breaking any laws and were more than 75 feet away from the ballot box, as required by law.”
On Saturday night, at least one of the men returned to monitor the drop box again.
This time local sheriffs were captured on camera trying to intervene in a standoff between the armed individuals monitoring the drop boxes and those who came to observe the watchers.
The sheriff’s office did not respond to a request for comment about Saturday night’s incidents.
Maricopa County became ground zero for the efforts to overturn the 2020 election when the Senate sanctioned a bogus recount that eventually determined that President Joe Biden won by more votes than was originally thought. Now, as the midterms loom, Arizona is set to be one of the main flashpoints of the efforts to undermine democracy promoted and popularized by former President Donald Trump over the last two years."
"Election denier Melody Jennings — a supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory — has been organizing a national effort harass and intimidate voters by recruiting fellow conspiracy theorists to “monitor” ballot drop boxes, which they falsely claim are susceptible to voter fraud. Jennings has acknowledged that QAnon influencers, who she has partnered with, have been instrumental in her efforts.
Jennings founded the organization behind the effort to monitor drop boxes, Clean Elections USA. According to Jennings, she was inspired by 2000 Mules, conservative figure Dinesh D’Souza’s widely debunked movie claiming the 2020 presidential election was stolen via ballot stuffing at drop boxes by so-called “mules.” Jennings said that “teasers about 2000 Mules … stuck with me and I said, ‘You know, why can’t we just go put 10 people around a box, you know, in shifts around boxes?’”
Since then, Jennings has taken credit for people monitoring an Arizona drop box during the state’s primaries — which she called a “dry run” for the midterm general elections — and members of her organization have recently been reported staking out a drop box in Maricopa County, including targeting a supposed “mule” and photographing voters’ license plates. Her efforts have since been promoted by former President Donald Trump on Truth Social.
The Arizona secretary of state’s office has already received multiple complaints of alleged voter intimidation at drop boxes in Arizona, including incidents connected to Clean Elections USA. In one case, armed men in camouflage have reportedly staked out a drop box in Maricopa County wearing tactical gear, which Jennings has defended. As Jennings’ organization continues encouraging people to monitor drop boxes, a temporary restraining order has been sought against the organization."
