July 27, 2018

Voting by mail

Is it safer? More hack proof?

I'm hoping some of the good minds here on DU can give me arguments for or against.

My husband and I vote by mail, have been doing so for years.

I'm volunteering as a canvasser and we encourage people to sign up to vote by mail.

I personally feel safer, especially in Florida.

But is it really safer?

July 27, 2018

Trump finally feels gravity's unforgiving pull

<<<snip>>>
Trump’s stunning victory created such disorienting shock waves across Washington that neither Democrats nor Republicans understood what the accidental president admitted to me a month after his win.

“The election could have been held 20 different times, but that was probably the one day I would have won,” the president-elect said in December 2016. “Everything came together at once.”

The resulting political horror show produced daily by Trump has left journalists and politicians reeling but has failed to alter a few basic rules of politics:

First, presidents with approval ratings in the low 40s lose their majorities in Congress. Second, kowtowing to ex-KGB agents erodes support with registered independents. Third, lying about payoffs to a porn star and a Playboy model rarely helps with swing-state voters.

Like the multitude of mere mortals who faced voters before him, Trump may finally be feeling gravity’s unforgiving pull as one summer scandal bleeds into another. A recent Quinnipiac University poll put the president’s approval rating at 38 percent. More troubling for Trump’s quislings in Congress should be the political beating Midwest voters are dishing out on the politician they helped elect president. According to an NBC News-Marist poll, only 28 percent of registered voters in Michigan believe Trump deserves to be reelected, while only 30 percent of those surveyed in Minnesota and 31 percent in Wisconsin believe he deserves reelection. Republicans are also trailing badly in generic ballot tests, and Democrats’ prospects for taking over the House and Senate continue to rise.

The political news for Republicans is so bad that even Trump is blinking. Vladimir Putin will not be coming to the White House this year; the president has put major pieces of his trade war on hold and has shelved any plans to shut down the government this fall. But Republicans hoping to save themselves from the political storm that will soon wipe away their congressional majorities would be well served to speak out against Trump’s most destructive policies, which are anti-conservative, illiberal and sure to bring doom to the once-Grand Old Party.

<<<snip>>>

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-finally-feels-gravitys-unforgiving-pull/2018/07/26/ae92e542-910c-11e8-bcd5-9d911c784c38_story.html?utm_term=.3901e5782eea

June 19, 2018

Senate Republicans Move to End Trump Policy on Child Separation Video

Source: New York Times

WASHINGTON — Republican senators moved on Tuesday to defuse a political crisis by seeking passage of legislation that would swiftly bring an end to President Trump’s practice of separating children from their parents when families cross into the United States illegally.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said that “all of the members of the Republican conference support a plan that keeps families together,” endorsing an approach that would provide legal authority to detain parents and children together while their legal status in the country is assessed by the courts.

Asylum claims would be expedited by adding more immigration judges or allowing families to be processed before others, Republican senators said.

Mr. McConnell said he planned to reach out to Democrats to support the effort, hoping to stanch the political damage from an administration policy that led to heartbreaking stories of children separated from their mothers and brutal images of children in makeshift detention camps.



Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/us/politics/trump-immigration-children-separated-families.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=a-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

June 19, 2018

The story behind the photo of the little girl, crying as her mother is searched at the border

[link:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/06/18/i-wanted-to-stop-her-crying-the-image-of-a-migrant-child-that-broke-a-photographers-heart/?utm_term=.4e91d85ed66b|

<<<snip
“It was very quick,” he recalled. The mother set the girl down, and an agent began to run gloved hands across her body.

Immediately, the girl began to scream.

“I wanted to stop her crying,” Moore said. He imagined the guards might have wanted that, too; he had seen them joke with other children during searches, to distract from what was happening to their parents.

But it all happened so quickly, and the girl’s despair was so complete in those few seconds.

“The mother stoically had her hands against the vehicle, and the girl was crying,” Moore said. “Neither were saying words. Nothing could be said with her. She needed to be with her mother.”

He took two shots, moments apart. He understood at once that they were the photos he had been waiting for — for hours, if not years. Both images would become symbols of what the U.S.-Mexico border has become under President Trump.
>>>snip

April 8, 2018

I lost my best friend this week

The subject of this old thread.

[link:https://www.democraticunderground.com/10026975514#post20|

We were friends for about 45 years and there is no one else who influenced me as much as she did. My taste in music, my attitudes about life and volunteerism, and even the way I dress! She was my mentor when we were 13. My teenage life would have been sad and boring if not for her. She had such a wonderful sense of fun, which she never lost as we got older.

Except . . . she had gotten friendly with a guy from our high school days who was a rabid racist. She had never married and she saw him as her last chance. He poisoned her . . .

She turned into someone I didn't recognize. A Fredo loving confederate flag waving racist nut.

We last argued over Sally Yates and she unfriended me on FB.

Monday she was hospitalized for complications of diabetes and the flu. She's gone now.

I never loved her any less for all her awful racist rants because how could I stop loving someone who gave me my life when we were teenagers?

She was dead wrong, but now she's just dead.

This is our country now. Best friends pitted against each other, family pitted against each other, hatred tearing apart everything we hold dear about our country and what it stands for.

I want to know how we will all heal from this monstrosity Trump has created. How can we just ignore the 35% of this country who still think Fredo is good for the country? W've gone back to 1977 or even decades earlier.

April 2, 2018

The hacked emails at the center of Muellers Russia investigation

[link:https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/2/17164266/trump-russia-mueller-email-hackings-dnc-clinton|

<<<snip>>>
The Trump Tower meeting: It was on June 3, 2016 — a little more than a month after Papadopoulos’s tip, but still before any news broke about Democrats having been hacked — that publicist Rob Goldstone emailed an acquaintance of his, Donald Trump Jr. Goldstone described some news from his clients Aras and Emin Agalarov, a father-son pair of real estate developers who’d done business with the Trumps:

The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.

This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump - helped along by Aras and Emin.

Don Jr. enthusiastically accepted the offer, and Goldstone arranged a meeting six days later, on June 9. The Trump delegation included Don Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner. They met Goldstone, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, Agalarov company executive Ike Kaveladze, Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, and translator Anatoli Samochornov.

Once the existence of the meeting became public, all parties involved claimed it was a dud, resulting in nothing of consequence. But the timing of the meeting is strange. Three days later, Assange announced he’d received emails related to Hillary Clinton. Two days after that, the DNC announced it had been hacked and blamed Russia.

Goldstone saw an article about that and emailed it to Emin and Kaveladze, writing that the news was “eerily weird” considering what they’d just discussed at the Trump Tower meeting. Guccifer 2.0 began posting the day after that.

<<<snip>>>

February 18, 2018

Prominent Republican Donor Issues Ultimatum on Assault Weapons

It's a start. I hope many more will do the same.

[link:https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/us/prominent-republican-donor-issues-ultimatum-on-assault-weapons.html|

A prominent Republican political donor demanded on Saturday that the party pass legislation to restrict access to guns, and vowed not to contribute to any candidates or electioneering groups that did not support a ban on the sale of military-style firearms to civilians.

Al Hoffman Jr., a Florida-based real estate developer who was a leading fund-raiser for George W. Bush’s campaigns, said he would seek to marshal support among other Republican political donors for a renewed assault weapons ban.

“For how many years now have we been doing this — having these experiences of terrorism, mass killings — and how many years has it been that nothing’s been done?” Mr. Hoffman said in an interview. “It’s the end of the road for me.”

Mr. Hoffman announced his ultimatum in an email to half a dozen Republican leaders, including Jeb Bush and Gov. Rick Scott of Florida. He wrote in the email that he would not give money to Mr. Scott, who is considering a campaign for the Senate in 2018, or other Florida Republicans he has backed in the past, including Representative Brian Mast, if they did not support new gun legislation.

May 28, 2017

DONALD TRUMPS WORST DEAL

I thought this was one of the most interesting articles on Trump yet and I am amazed I didn't come across it earlier. I wondered what others on DU might think. I hope this isn't a duplicate post.

Link:
[link:http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/13/donald-trumps-worst-deal|

Snip>>
The Azerbaijanis behind the project were close relatives of Ziya Mammadov, the Transportation Minister and one of the country’s wealthiest and most powerful oligarchs. According to the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index, Azerbaijan is among the most corrupt nations in the world. Its President, Ilham Aliyev, the son of the former President Heydar Aliyev, recently appointed his wife to be Vice-President. Ziya Mammadov became the Transportation Minister in 2002, around the time that the regime began receiving enormous profits from government-owned oil reserves in the Caspian Sea. At the time of the hotel deal, Mammadov, a career government official, had a salary of about twelve thousand dollars, but he was a billionaire.

The Trump Tower Baku originally had a construction budget of a hundred and ninety-five million dollars, but it went through multiple revisions, and the cost ended up being much higher. The tower was designed by a local architect, and in its original incarnation it had an ungainly roof that suggested the spikes of a crown. A London-based architecture firm, Mixity, redesigned the building, softening its edges and eliminating the ornamental roof. By the time the Trump team officially joined the project, in May, 2012, many condominium residences had already been completed; at the insistence of Trump Organization staffers, most of the building’s interior was gutted and rebuilt, and several elevators were added.
<<Snip

Snip>>
In recent months, American officials have expressed concern that Trump Administration figures might be blackmailed by foreign entities. U.S. law-enforcement investigators and congressional staffers have probed claims that Russian government officials possess compromising information about President Trump, which might be used to blackmail him. (The President maintains that there is no such information.) In January, the Department of Justice informed the White House that Michael Flynn—then the national-security adviser—was vulnerable to being blackmailed by the Russians because he had lied about having spoken with the Russian Ambassador. Flynn subsequently resigned.

In Azerbaijan, the power and the influence of the Mammadovs has declined sharply. Elton lost his seat in parliament in 2015. In February, Ziya was abruptly removed from his ministry. Anar has settled in London, an associate of his told me, and is living on a fraction of his former wealth. Meanwhile, in Iran, government officials are likely facing additional sanctions on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. If the Mammadovs or powerful Iranians have evidence that the Trump Organization broke laws, they might be tempted to exploit it.

The best way to determine if a crime was committed in the Baku deal would be a federal investigation, which could use the power of subpoena and international legal tools to obtain access to the contracts, the due diligence, internal e-mails, and financial documents. The Department of Justice routinely sends investigators to other countries to pursue possible F.C.P.A. and sanctions violations.

Senator Sherrod Brown, of Ohio, who is the ranking Democratic member of the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, said, in an e-mail, that a federal investigation was warranted: “The Trump Organization’s Baku project shows the lack of ‘extreme vetting’ Mr. Trump applied to his own business dealings in corruption-plagued regimes around the globe. . . . Congress—and the Trump Administration itself—has a duty to examine whether the President or his family is exposed to terrorist financing, sanctions, money laundering, and other imprudent associations through their business holdings and connections.”

More than a dozen lawyers with experience in F.C.P.A. prosecution expressed surprise at the Trump Organization’s seemingly lax approach to vetting its foreign partners. But, when I asked a former Trump Organization executive if the Baku deal had seemed unusual, he laughed. “No deal there seems unusual, as long as a check is attached,” he said. ♦
<<Snip

Rachel's video on the topic:
[link:

|

July 15, 2015

Heart breaking facebook email from an old friend

One of my dearest friends until now, she wrote among other awful things:

People don't hate Obama because he's black. Haven't you heard? He supports ISIS. He sends reps to funerals of people he wants to use to his advantage and ignores the death of those who don't. His wife is a racist instigator and uses her power for her agenda not Americas. Is he even trying to snuff out this raging fire of discord? No. He is not an American President. Obama Husain Binladin supports terrorists. Ooops, I mean Barak Husain Obama.

I'm shattered. I know I rarely post here anymore but I had to come get some sympathy. I knew my old DU friends would understand.

This girl was my loyal side kick from the age of 13. We are separated by several states now, and only keep in touch via facebook and (very) occasional visits.

I have seen some wing nut posts of hers and scolded her but I just had no idea . . .

I think I may have to unfriend her. I think some beautiful childhood / teenage memories just became tainted forever. I swear she was not like this when we were kids. Not at all.

October 19, 2013

C. W. Bill Young, Longtime Florida Congressman, Dies at 82

This is my rep.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/19/us/politics/c-w-bill-young-longtime-florida-congressman-dies-at-82.html?_r=0


Representative C. W. Bill Young, Florida’s longest-serving member of Congress and a Republican hawk on military spending during his 43 years in Washington, died Friday in Bethesda, Md. He was 82. His chief of staff, Harry Glenn, said Mr. Young died at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where he had been hospitalized with back problems stemming from a 1970 small plane crash.

On Oct. 9, Mr. Young, who represented a district in the Tampa Bay area, announced from his hospital bed that he would not seek another term in 2014. As one of the strongest military supporters in Congress, Mr. Young made headlines in 2012 when he said that the United States should withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, reflecting a growing weariness with the war.

Mr. Young was considered the elder statesman of Florida’s Republican Party and in the House, where he served 22 terms, beginning in 1970. Charles William Young was born Dec. 16, 1930, in Harmarville, Pa., and later moved to Indian Shores, Fla., a Gulf Coast community in Pinellas County. He served in the Army National Guard and was an aide to Representative William Cramer from 1957 to 1960. From 1961 to 1971, he served in the Florida Senate.

He was a longtime member of the House Appropriations Committee, where he focused on military spending. He and his wife, Beverly, frequently visited ailing service members at hospitals in the Washington area. Mr. Young brought hundreds of millions of dollars in earmarks back to the Tampa Bay area, and built up a military contracting industry in the region, creating jobs and lifting the economy.

His district, which covers much of populous Pinellas County, was already expected to be up for grabs in 2014. Republican voters hold a slight edge over Democrats in the district, 37.7 percent to 35.2 percent, the Florida secretary of state’s office said; 23.2 percent are independents. A special election will be held to finish Mr. Young’s term.

President Obama carried the district 52 percent to 46 percent in the 2012 presidential race, while Mr. Young beat the Democratic challenger, Jessica Ehrlich, 58 percent to 42 percent. Ms. Ehrlich has declared her candidacy for 2014. Beverly Young has told the local media that she would run for the seat if Ms. Ehrlich’s name is on the ballot.

Mr. Young was married twice and had three sons.