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Sunday, August 16, 2020

Down With Tyranny has some posting about Trump. Trump in a nutshell; not as a terse saga but as a quite accurate one.

 Start here, the meme of the new yellow cap.

Then, the Post Office tampering. Excerpt from the item's ending:

 Petrified of the growing anger of voters-- and his open conference-- Kevin McCarthy lied his ass off, telling the public that Republicans do not support withholding funding from the Postal Service. "The Postal Service will have the funding that it needs. We will make sure of that. We want to make sure we have an accurate election. I think any Republican that gets their ballot in the mail should vote and make sure their vote is counted." People are wise to his word games as he licks Trump's boots, as even members of his own caucus are saying now.

Jessica Piper reported for the Bangor Daily News that Susan Collins-- losing her reelection bid and absolutely desperate to show she isn't joined-at-the-hip to Trump (which she is)-- found something she can oppose him on. Trying to sound like she just woke up and is suddenly on Mainers' side, she said that "efforts by the U.S. Postal Service to cut costs could backfire amid reported mail delays in Maine and across the country and reiterated support to increase funding to the embattled agency." Has she told Trump and McConnell?

Mitt Romney, somewhat more credibly than Collins, broke with Trump on this too, telling the Sutherland Institute that "politicians"-- a reference to McConnell and Trump-- "attacking the vote by mail system are threatening global democracy but stopped short of criticizing President Donald Trump, who has been openly against an expected surge of mail-in ballots. The United States must stand as an example to more fragile democratic nations to show that elections can be held in a free and fair manner, Romney said. He urged the federal government to make every effort to ensure that people are able to vote in the general election this November... Romney said he has seen no evidence that voting by mail has led to fraud and that this voting method may be even more secure than electronic voting because it’s less likely to invite hacking interference by foreign entities. He said he would support providing additional funds to states to strengthen their voting systems."



And this is the letter my friend Rod wrote to each of them this morning. Maybe you want to consider doing one like it too?
Gentlemen of the USPS Board of Governors:

Mr. DeJoy is engaged in a blatantly partisan exercise to cripple the institution you oversee ahead of November 3. With it, he seeks to effectively destroy American democracy. It is incumbent upon you to intervene to halt this treasonous activity.

Please do your job and remove him immediately!

One very concerned citizen,

Rod Colburn

P.S. You each appear to be white males. You don’t look at all like America, do you?!

 

 But wait. There's more. (There always is) Excerpting:

Does Anyone Think Trump Hasn't Been The Worst President In History? And The Most Dangerous?

Slimeball by Nancy Ohanian

[...]  Trump's incompetence and dysfunction are horrific enough on their own. Saturday morning, in a letter to the Democratic conference, Nancy Pelosi wrote that progress on the negotiations for a pandemic relief bill are "complicated by the complete disarray on the Republican side-- as Trump contradicts his own negotiators and his own position." But, alas, there's more to the dire national dilemma than Trump's shortcomings as a party leader.

I think millions of us have been asking exactly the question Ron Brownstein posed in his Atlantic column this week: Just How Far Will Trump Go?.  
Is there another Civil War on the horizon if he feels his personal safety is in jeopardy if he loses? Would he actually steal the election and refuse to leave office even if he loses, even he loses-- as seems likely-- resoundingly?



Brownstein wrote that Trump’s open admission on Friday "that he’s sabotaging the Postal Service to improve his election prospects crystallizes a much larger dynamic: He’s waging an unprecedented campaign to weaponize virtually every component of the federal government to partisan advantage. Trump is systematically enlisting agencies, including the Postal Service, Census Bureau, Department of Justice, and Department of Homeland Security, that traditionally have been considered at least somewhat insulated from political machinations to reward his allies and punish those he considers his enemies. He is razing barriers between his personal and political interests and the core operations of the federal government to an extent that no president has previously attempted, a wide range of public-administration experts have told me. 'There’s always been temptation... but no president in modern times has taken action so explicitly and obviously-- or transparently-- to influence and actually direct these agencies to favor the party in power,' Paul Light, a public-service professor at New York University, told me. 'None. None.'" Maybe when he chose that portrait of Andrew Jackson for the Oval Office we could have figured out where he was heading. J.M. Opal, a historian at McGill University and author of Avenging the People: Andrew Jackson, the Rule of Law, and the American Nation: "Trump is the first president to so openly admire and point to Jackson as a model, and to borrow so clearly and explicitly from the language of Jacksonian 'democracy.'"  

All for now - except - against this walking, talking, scheming disaster - Joe Biden? Joe fucking Biden? Polling shows dissatisfaction worldwide and within our nation. Pew. Gallup. Does that surprise you? If we had more than two parties, each owned by plutocrats, might the mail be delivered efficiently and without putrid politics to it? 

Have a nice Sunday.

_____________UPDATE__________

Sirota explains more about Trump sleaze, post office wise, with disclosure of who this DeJoy tool used to tool for, and then in a separate post Sirota reminds us that slime is bipartisan. There just is more of it attached to Donald J. Trump. Enough for others, but Trump ordered a super-sized portion even in the old days.

Yet, do not forget bipartisanship. Sleaze permeates and pollutes.