2020 Elections - Trump FIRED

[dislaxxic]

Rupert Murdoch Predicts a Landslide Win for Biden

..

[seacoaster]

More on Dear Leader crossing boundaries:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/1 ... ars-429487

More on how Trump supporters don't care because he says he's a Republican? Sure.

"Each of those initiatives have two things in common: They’re paid for with taxpayer money, and they are plainly intended to help Trump’s flagging reelection campaign. The actions are just the latest examples of how the president has eviscerated the traditional boundaries separating politics from government.

His heavy reliance on federal resources and his own executive powers to win reelection come as Trump has fallen more than $100 million behind Joe Biden in TV ad spending, and slipped to a double-digit deficit in national polls.

As the election approaches, Trump has moved beyond using his control over federal resources to deploying government officials to carry out his political messaging. Last week, Trump suggested that his attorney general prosecute some of his political enemies. Days ago, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo vowed he would release Hillary Clinton’s emails “before the election,” moving to resurrect a volatile issue from the 2016 race. And Attorney General William Barr has put the weight of the Justice Department behind Trump’s unfounded allegations of voter fraud.

“The president is increasingly using all the levers he’s got for political purposes,” says Donald Ayer, a former deputy attorney general under George H.W. Bush who has endorsed Biden. “You can wonder whether he’s getting a bit desperate … It appears to me that the president is making increasingly outrageous demands and comments as time goes along.”

Presidents of both parties have regularly used the power of incumbency to their advantage during election years. Jimmy Carter made political ads from the Oval Office. Ronald Reagan was seated behind the Resolute Desk when he announced he was running for reelection. Bill Clinton invited political supporters to spend the night at the White House. And George W. Bush delivered his Republican National Convention speech from the White House, saying his duties overseeing the response to a looming hurricane kept him in Washington.

But Trump has taken the use of the federal government for politics to another level. And the pace and intensity of his maneuvers have increased as his poll numbers have dropped and his campaign war chest has dwindled, according to government watchdog groups.

“I do firmly believe that Trump has blended his personal business and the functioning of government in a way we’ve seen perhaps never in United States history,” said Nick Schwellenbach, a senior investigator with the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight.

Trump’s boldest display was the Republican National Convention ceremony on the South Lawn in August, replete with fireworks and an opera singer. He trampled over government and political boundaries by issuing a pardon and holding a naturalization ceremony during the convention. At the same time, Pompeo broke with longtime tradition by delivering a convention speech from Jerusalem, and Ivanka Trump, a White House aide, gave remarks from the White House.

“Nobody outside of the Beltway really cares,” Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows said in August when asked about potential violations of the Hatch Act, which bars the use of government resources for political purposes. “They expect that Donald Trump is going to promote Republican values, and they would expect that Barack Obama, when he was in office, that he would do the same for Democrats.”

In August, Trump fell behind Biden’s fundraising. Then, Biden and the Democratic National Committee outraised Trump and the RNC by a staggering $154 million and for the first time overtook the president’s long held cash-on-hand advantage. In September, Biden raised $383 million.

At the same time, Trump went dark on TV in several battleground states. He was outspent on TV by more than 2-to-1, according to media tracking firm Advertising Analytics. From April to last week, Biden has spent $312 million on ads compared to Trump's $188 million.

More recently, Trump held what amounted to a political rally on the White House grounds last weekend. Hundreds of Trump supporters donned MAGA hats as Trump spoke to them from the White House balcony about his campaign.

A White House spokesperson said it wasn't a Hatch Act violation because it was organized by the White House and not the campaign.

“The White House takes the Hatch Act very seriously and ensures its events, and the government employees participating in them, comply with the law,” White House spokesperson Judd Deere said in a statement Wednesday.

But Kedric L. Payne, general counsel at for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, said Trump's Saturday rally is a sign he's emboldened after facing no repercussions for the convention in August.

“There is an escalation,” Payne said of Trump's behavior. “The danger is: what becomes the new normal? They have created new norms.”

Democrats are calling attention to Trump's actions, but there's nothing they can do to stop him.

House Democrats are looking into the administration's plan to tap $300 million from the Health and Human Services budget to fund a “giving America hope” TV ad campaign. Democrats are also requesting an investigation into whether government employees violated federal law prohibiting them from some political activities, but Trump has ignored violations of the law before.

And they are calling for a probe of Trump's attempts to rush drug-discount cards to 39 million seniors before the Nov. 3 election, arguing in a letter to HHS Secretary Alex Azar that it was intended to “buy votes just weeks before the election using taxpayer dollars.”

What’s perhaps most alarming to watchdogs and Trump critics is the politicization of the Department of Justice.

In September, DOJ moved to intervene in a defamation case involving E. Jean Carroll, who accused Trump of raping her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s. DOJ argued that Trump acted in his official capacity as president when he denied ever knowing the New York writer.

Taxpayers are now underwriting Trump’s defense. Moreover, DOJ’s involvement slowed down the case just as Trump faced a ruling from a New York judge requiring him to provide a DNA sample and sit for a deposition, which could have occurred just before the election.

“Trump’s effort to wield the power of the U.S. government to evade responsibility for his private misconduct is without precedent," Carroll's lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, said in a statement, "and shows even more starkly how far he is willing to go to prevent the truth from coming out.”

Separately, Barr, speaking at an official event, echoed Trump’s talking points on unfounded claims of fraud stemming from mail-in voting.

“There’s no more secret vote,” Barr said at an Arizona news conference in September. “Your name is associated with a particular ballot. The government and the people involved can find out and know how you voted. And it opens up the door to coercion.”

Last week, Trump pressed his attorney general to criminally prosecuting Biden and former President Barack Obama after accusing the Obama administration without evidence of spying on his campaign. “Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes — the greatest political crime in the history of our country — then we’re going to get little satisfaction," Trump told Fox Business.

Bob Bauer, the former White House counsel to Obama who is now helping to lead Biden’s voter protection effort, contended that Trump has politicized his authority to a degree unparalleled by his predecessors.

Trump’s behavior is “a frontal assault" on the line "between normal political puffery in an administration, some flexibility under the Hatch Act and a clear misuse of government resources to advance a campaign’s objectives,” Bauer said in an interview. “Trump is openly saying, ‘I get to use this office, the authority and resources that come with it, to just advance my political interests in the most raw terms.’"

Jason Miller, senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said all of the president's actions have been performed with input from lawyers beforehand.

"The American public sees them and calls them out for constant drama,” Miller said of Trump's critics on the left."

[Peter Brown]

Rupert Murdoch Predicts a Landslide Win for Biden

..

If I was Head of Twitter Safety, I'd have to remove disslaxx' post, since in fact Rupert Murdoch explicitly denied what a journalist says 'people close to him' said he said. So not only is no one who said he said it on the record, but the one guy on the record is the guy accused of saying it and he denies it. Shouldn't we remove this post? Am I doing this right?

[RedFromMI]

Rupert Murdoch Predicts a Landslide Win for Biden

..

If I was Head of Twitter Safety, I'd have to remove disslaxx' post, since in fact Rupert Murdoch explicitly denied what a journalist says 'people close to him' said he said. So not only is no one who said he said it on the record, but the one guy on the record is the guy accused of saying it and he denies it. Shouldn't we remove this post? Am I doing this right?

But you are not for good reason. Just because a person denies something you would not remove a story.

The NY Post story yesterday was clearly in the realm of disinformation (clearly a lie). The Murdoch story is not the same thing.

[Typical Lax Dad]

Rupert Murdoch Predicts a Landslide Win for Biden

..

If I was Head of Twitter Safety, I'd have to remove disslaxx' post, since in fact Rupert Murdoch explicitly denied what a journalist says 'people close to him' said he said. So not only is no one who said he said it on the record, but the one guy on the record is the guy accused of saying it and he denies it. Shouldn't we remove this post? Am I doing this right?

But you are not for good reason. Just because a person denies something you would not remove a story.

The NY Post story yesterday was clearly in the realm of disinformation (clearly a lie). The Murdoch story is not the same thing.

It should be up to the people to decide if it is a lie!

[Peter Brown]

Rupert Murdoch Predicts a Landslide Win for Biden

..

If I was Head of Twitter Safety, I'd have to remove disslaxx' post, since in fact Rupert Murdoch explicitly denied what a journalist says 'people close to him' said he said. So not only is no one who said he said it on the record, but the one guy on the record is the guy accused of saying it and he denies it. Shouldn't we remove this post? Am I doing this right?

But you are not for good reason. Just because a person denies something you would not remove a story.

The NY Post story yesterday was clearly in the realm of disinformation (clearly a lie). The Murdoch story is not the same thing.

I'm curious how the story was a "lie". I can understand if you are saying the information was gotten via nefarious ways, but even the Biden campaign does not deny the Hunter work emails. Are you confusing two stories? There is the story of Joe forcing the Ukrainians to fire a prosecutor, but that was not the NYPost story on the emails of Hunter Biden (interrelated, but not the story itself).

The NY Times posted to its Twitter & Facebook accounts its story on Trump’s taxes based on unnamed sources and documents it could not produce. But the NY Post cannot post its story on Biden based on documents it produced.

Confused? Don’t be. It’s political censorship.

[RedFromMI]

Rupert Murdoch Predicts a Landslide Win for Biden

..

If I was Head of Twitter Safety, I'd have to remove disslaxx' post, since in fact Rupert Murdoch explicitly denied what a journalist says 'people close to him' said he said. So not only is no one who said he said it on the record, but the one guy on the record is the guy accused of saying it and he denies it. Shouldn't we remove this post? Am I doing this right?

But you are not for good reason. Just because a person denies something you would not remove a story.

The NY Post story yesterday was clearly in the realm of disinformation (clearly a lie). The Murdoch story is not the same thing.

I'm curious how the story was a "lie". I can understand if you are saying the information was gotten via nefarious ways, but even the Biden campaign does not deny the Hunter work emails. Are you confusing two stories? There is the story of Joe forcing the Ukrainians to fire a prosecutor, but that was not the NYPost story on the emails of Hunter Biden (interrelated, but not the story itself).

It is a lie because there is no verification that anything is authentic. And the story has so many red flags that it is laughable. Most likely the product of the guy in Ukraine that has been feeding BS Russian disinformation to Giuliani for some time now (and BTW is banned from coming to the US).

Besides, the impetus to fire the prosecutor was very widespread, with R support and plenty more from within our allies in Western Europe.

The NY Times posted to its Twitter & Facebook accounts its story on Trump’s taxes based on unnamed sources and documents it could not produce. But the NY Post cannot post its story on Biden based on documents it produced.

Confused? Don’t be. It’s political censorship.

Sources it declined to name, and documents it declined to produce. That is a huge difference you are overlooking.

NY Post is not claiming it has anything except PDFs of the emails, minus any metadata which might possibly authenticate them.

Censoring obvious fake news is NOT political censorship.

[wgdsr]

Rupert Murdoch Predicts a Landslide Win for Biden

..

takeaways to this part of the ongoing enthralling october surprise...
has biden's camp now denied the meeting took place?
murdoch is married to jerry hall? where have i been? she knows her way around the circuit.

[Peter Brown]

Rupert Murdoch Predicts a Landslide Win for Biden

..

If I was Head of Twitter Safety, I'd have to remove disslaxx' post, since in fact Rupert Murdoch explicitly denied what a journalist says 'people close to him' said he said. So not only is no one who said he said it on the record, but the one guy on the record is the guy accused of saying it and he denies it. Shouldn't we remove this post? Am I doing this right?

But you are not for good reason. Just because a person denies something you would not remove a story.

The NY Post story yesterday was clearly in the realm of disinformation (clearly a lie). The Murdoch story is not the same thing.

I'm curious how the story was a "lie". I can understand if you are saying the information was gotten via nefarious ways, but even the Biden campaign does not deny the Hunter work emails. Are you confusing two stories? There is the story of Joe forcing the Ukrainians to fire a prosecutor, but that was not the NYPost story on the emails of Hunter Biden (interrelated, but not the story itself).

It is a lie because there is no verification that anything is authentic. And the story has so many red flags that it is laughable. Most likely the product of the guy in Ukraine that has been feeding BS Russian disinformation to Giuliani for some time now (and BTW is banned from coming to the US).

Besides, the impetus to fire the prosecutor was very widespread, with R support and plenty more from within our allies in Western Europe.

The NY Times posted to its Twitter & Facebook accounts its story on Trump’s taxes based on unnamed sources and documents it could not produce. But the NY Post cannot post its story on Biden based on documents it produced.

Confused? Don’t be. It’s political censorship.

Sources it declined to name, and documents it declined to produce. That is a huge difference you are overlooking.

NY Post is not claiming it has anything except PDFs of the emails, minus any metadata which might possibly authenticate them.

Censoring obvious fake news is NOT political censorship.

Sure, Jan.

[RedFromMI]

Oh BTW, the Biden camp says no such meeting took place, and they have reviewed his official schedules.

If you want a complete rundown of why this story is so bogus:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/fivepoint ... s-so-bogus

[Typical Lax Dad]

Rupert Murdoch Predicts a Landslide Win for Biden

..

takeaways to this part of the ongoing enthralling october surprise...
has biden's camp now denied the meeting took place?
murdoch is married to jerry hall? where have i been? she knows her way around the circuit.

I am pretty sure one of my college teammates dated her too.

[CU88]

Another r voting against IMPOTUS o d = LEADERSHIP

He slammed the President's "bitterness, combativeness and self-interest" in the wake of nationwide protests following the police killing of George Floyd.

"I heard what the President said today about dominating and fighting. I know I should be surprised when I hear incendiary words like this from him, but I'm not,"

"At so many times during these past several weeks when the country needed compassion and leadership the most, it was simply nowhere to be found."


https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/14/politics ... index.html

[Peter Brown]

Another r voting against IMPOTUS o d = LEADERSHIP

He slammed the President's "bitterness, combativeness and self-interest" in the wake of nationwide protests following the police killing of George Floyd.

"I heard what the President said today about dominating and fighting. I know I should be surprised when I hear incendiary words like this from him, but I'm not,"

"At so many times during these past several weeks when the country needed compassion and leadership the most, it was simply nowhere to be found."


https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/14/politics ... index.html

Baker will vote for Trump behind closed doors.

[wgdsr]

Oh BTW, the Biden camp says no such meeting took place, and they have reviewed his official schedules.

If you want a complete rundown of why this story is so bogus:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/fivepoint ... s-so-bogus

seems kinda murky.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/1 ... ost-429486
in any event... hopefully, they never met. that would be awful. we'd be doomed.

[MDlaxfan76]

Welcome aboard. There are least a few of us in fan lax land that have been griping about the debt for years. No need to worry, if Joe wins our debt wont be a problem anymore. It will magically vanish from the headlines. Hell we might have people start telling us again that this massive debt load is actually a very good thing for the country. I could not run my household finances in such an irresponsible manner. Nobody I know of has ever accused the US government of ever being responsible.

I have seen hardly any headlines about the deficit and debt since the tax bill was passed. The most I hear about it is around here. We've had a few other things in the news since then

Don't worry though, if Biden squeaks this out, it will be the leading headline on day 2 from Fox.

The business owner forum I visit is getting concerned about controlled and uncontrolled inflation, especially if we get another COVID relief bill. .GOV would potentially be happy to see it to help alleviate the debt issue. And there are some pretty big (and very smart) fish in there compared with my small hill of beans company.

The subject comes up at least once a week on Drudge. The hypocrisy among Republicans is embarrassing. They opined forever about out of control spending. I understand Covid has created big problems trying to control spending. The Republicans had gone spending crazy long before Covid became an issue.

Yup.
The Tea Party (of which my basement dweller was a proud, marching member) was mostly a sham, a cover for other resentments.

I know that some readers consider the notion of being 'moderate' as meaning 'unprincipled' or 'soft' or some worse description, but what that meant in fiscal matters was that money can be either 'spent' or 'invested'. When 'spent' it should be covered by current revenue. When 'invested' it should generate an ROI, returning more over time than was spent.

Republican and Democrat moderates could disagree on the margins about what constituted spending versus investment, and how to prioritize, but there was generally a sense that a 'deficit' was justified by the investment aspects. But they agreed on the principles and could compromise to achieve movement forward.

Somehow, the hard line conservative position became this notion of a 'balanced budget' in current terms, that none of the outflow was investment generating a return. Just stupid on its face.

And married to that hard line view was the notion, disproven through time, that lowering taxes on wealthy taxpayers would result in growth in revenue overall, or at least not loss of revenue. Nope, just doesn't work at the rates necessary. And this was sold to middle class voters as tax cuts to them, and of course who doesn't like lower taxes on themselves...but doesn't work enough to make up for the loss of tax revenue.

And last, the hard line conservatives made common cause with the military-industrial complex...more money to military, whether during a time of war or not, was always a good thing, rather than looking at the efficiency of such spend. From that perspective, military spending simply didn't count as 'spending'. Staying within the spending versus investment construct, the pro-military folks saw all military funding as 'investments'.

Net, net, deficits and debt have risen more over the past 40 years when the Republicans have had the most influence on budgets, not the Dems. And all restraint has been blown out the window these past 4 years.

[Typical Lax Dad]

Oh BTW, the Biden camp says no such meeting took place, and they have reviewed his official schedules.

If you want a complete rundown of why this story is so bogus:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/fivepoint ... s-so-bogus

seems kinda murky.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/1 ... ost-429486
in any event... hopefully, they never met. that would be awful. we'd be doomed.

We wouldn’t want a father and son(s) to be involved in businesses together.

[CU88]

“I was born during the Great Depression to a Milwaukee family that had owned a tannery for nearly a century. My family was well off and Republican. They hated FDR, whom they considered a socialist. Starting when I was in grade school, my parents instilled in me the belief that, when the masses found that they were a majority, they would "vote themselves a living," doing so with our money.

As I reached voting age in the late 1950s, I saw the Republicans as not only the keepers of these ideals <defenders of liberty and the rule of law> but also as defenders of the environment and fiscal responsibility. They invoked their historic leader, Abraham Lincoln, to give them cover as leaders in the cause of racial justice. This stuff was pretty attractive as a political perspective and it seemed to reflect history as I knew it.

Later elections turned to pocketbook issues. Ordinary Americans struggled with the burdens of inflation, high-interest rates and unemployment. Republican stances on economic issues; anti-unionism and opposition to public welfare, pitted them against the poor. Eventually, they realized that to grab the votes of the less-well-off they needed a better weapon than "trickle-down economics."

Republicans found their solution in the “Dixiecrats,” loyal Democrats who despised the racial policies of both parties. To get the Dixiecrat vote, Republicans only had to sacrifice a few values; like racial equity, the right to privacy and separation of church and state. And while their strategic revision represented a departure from historical values, the party got its money’s worth. This alliance rendered changes in the electoral map that gave the Republicans every election they were to win thereafter. The Southern strategy was a grand slam.

During his two terms, President Ronald Reagan followed the Republican script admirably, but he endorsed the sacrifice of a couple of causes that were beginning to fall under siege when he first came into office; gun safety and protection of the environment. From a standing start in 1980, the Republicans had fallen totally into the hands of the National Rifle Association by the time of the Columbine shooting in 1999.

As far as the environment was concerned, Republicans had possessed a good record going back to Teddy Roosevelt, and more recently, President Richard Nixon had established the Environmental Protection Agency. But despite these credentials, starting with Reagan, and especially after 2000, the Republicans always sided with business over the environment.

George H. W. Bush executed the job of president with clarity of Republican values, overseeing the fall of the Soviet Union and building an unchallengeable coalition for the first Gulf War. But he violated his promise of “no new taxes,” when taxes were required for fiscal integrity. He was evicted for the “sin ” of balancing the budget.

As a candidate, Georg W. Bush abandoned his father’s fidelity to financial discipline right out of the box. He went on to cut taxes twice and to leave the next administration with a deep operating deficit. What was more important, he led us into a needless war. By the time he left office, the Republicans had sacrificed two more values: fiscal integrity and opposition to foreign adventurism.

My falling away from the Republicans was largely a function of the complete abandonment of their traditional values.

After President Donald Trump won, I thought Republicans would reject him as they observed his foolish and often criminal acts. But they never did, and the wise soon left the party. The acquiescence of the Senate to Trump’s corruption makes all the Republican senators still holding office as guilty as the president himself. They had the authority to stop him but chose not to.

Having replaced honesty and integrity with hypocrisy, the Republicans have only one remaining value, that of staying in power.

I am not asking you to become a Democrat, as I have done. I am asking you to think hard about candidates in this particular election and whether the Republican Party as it is currently configured, and particularly its candidate for president, truly represents the party and values you signed on for.”

Richard A. Gallun- a longtime Wisconsin businessman who has served as a fundraiser for many charitable causes.


https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/sol ... 5XN39kDcRA

[MDlaxfan76]

Rupert Murdoch Predicts a Landslide Win for Biden

..

If I was Head of Twitter Safety, I'd have to remove disslaxx' post, since in fact Rupert Murdoch explicitly denied what a journalist says 'people close to him' said he said. So not only is no one who said he said it on the record, but the one guy on the record is the guy accused of saying it and he denies it. Shouldn't we remove this post? Am I doing this right?

But you are not for good reason. Just because a person denies something you would not remove a story.

The NY Post story yesterday was clearly in the realm of disinformation (clearly a lie). The Murdoch story is not the same thing.

Wait a second, as I read the story Murdoch says no comment to the current story, not denying it. He does deny a 2018 story saying that he called Trump an "idiot" plus expletive, but that's not the current story. The DB makes clear that he denies the earlier story. He was provided an opportunity to deny the current one, but didn't. The DB says they have three, not one, sources on the story...which isn't denied by Murdoch, at least to them.

Has Murdoch since denied it?

[Peter Brown]

Rupert Murdoch Predicts a Landslide Win for Biden
..

If I was Head of Twitter Safety, I'd have to remove disslaxx' post, since in fact Rupert Murdoch explicitly denied what a journalist says 'people close to him' said he said. So not only is no one who said he said it on the record, but the one guy on the record is the guy accused of saying it and he denies it. Shouldn't we remove this post? Am I doing this right?

But you are not for good reason. Just because a person denies something you would not remove a story.

The NY Post story yesterday was clearly in the realm of disinformation (clearly a lie). The Murdoch story is not the same thing.

Wait a second, as I read the story Murdoch says no comment to the current story, not denying it. He does deny a 2018 story saying that he called Trump an "idiot" plus expletive, but that's not the current story. The DB makes clear that he denies the earlier story. He was provided an opportunity to deny the current one, but didn't. The DB says they have three, not one, sources on the story...which isn't denied by Murdoch, at least to them.

Has Murdoch since denied it?

The article is less coherent than even your posts. It ends by saying Fox News wants Tucker Carlson to run for POTUS in 2024...

Libs have lost their minds. Trump merely revealed who they are.

[CU88]

A pretty good and fair read on FL 2020 vote

http://steveschale.com/blog/2020/10/12/ ... yself.html