On Thursday, Politico reported that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos plans to move ahead with federal standardized testing mandates — even though the coronavirus pandemic is still raging and schools don't have a clear plan for how to administer tests safely.
On Thursday, The Daily Beast reported that Joanne Rogers, the widow of Presbyterian minister and children's television personality Mr. Rogers, unloaded furiously on President Donald Trump as he paid a visit to their hometown of Latrobe, Pennsylvania.
"I think he’s just a horrible person," said Rogers. She added that if the president is re-elected in November, "I will probably go into mourning. I can't even imagine. I would feel so badly."
"I think maybe the fact that Mr Trump seldom tells the truth," she added. "If he does, it's just a fluke, I think. But the fact [is] that I can't believe anything he says, not even the simplest thing ... This man is pathologically ill. Mentally ill."
In Latrobe on Thursday, Trump aired out a number of his grievances, including denying that his visit to Walter Reed hospital was for a "mini-stroke" and repeating his advice to his supporters to illegally vote twice.
On Thursday, the Tampa Bay Times released a multi-part investigation detailing how a Florida sheriff created a predictive algorithm to identify people who would supposedly commit crimes in the future — then sent deputies to their homes to look for excuses to fine or arrest them.
"Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco took office in 2011 with a bold plan: to create a cutting-edge intelligence program that could stop crime before it happened," reported Kathleen McGrory and Neil Bedi. "The department created a 30-person intelligence department and devised an algorithm to predict who was likely to commit crimes in the future. But the machine Nocco built has turned into a system of organized harassment. Deputies swarm homes in the middle of the night. They write tickets for missing mailbox numbers and overgrown grass. They come again and again, making arrests for any reason they can."
One of the people caught up in this system was 15-year-old Rio Wojtecki, who was identified as a future crime risk for stealing motorized bicycles.
"Those were the only charges against Rio, and he already had a state-issued juvenile probation officer checking on him. Yet from September 2019 to January 2020, Pasco Sheriff’s deputies went to his home at least 21 times, dispatch logs show," said the report. "They showed up at the car dealership where his mom worked, looked for him at a friend’s house and checked his gym to see if he had signed in." Even after acknowledging he wasn't getting in trouble or doing anything suspicious, they continued to harass him.
In another case, said the report, "Deputies gave the mother of one teenage target a $2,500 fine because she had five chickens in her backyard. They arrested another target’s father after peering through a window in his house and noticing a 17-year-old friend of his son smoking a cigarette inside. As they make checks, deputies feed information back into the system, not just on the people they target, but on family members, friends and anyone else in the target’s orbit."
The Pasco County Sheriff's Office stands behind this system, denying any of this is improper and claiming the checks are "basic law enforcement functions." However, the Times gathered body camera footage from deputies who made these visits, showing officers threatening people who were doing nothing wrong.
On Thursday, The Atlantic revealed that President Donald Trump called the 1,800 U.S. Marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood in World War I "suckers" for getting killed.
Trump's comments exploded across social media, with commenters beside themselves with shock and anger.
Joe Biden called out the "underlying racism" in America Thursday as he sought to soothe the protest-scarred Midwestern city of Kenosha, where the presidential hopeful spoke with a black father shot in the back by a white policeman.
Biden sat down for a private talk with Jacob Blake's father and other relatives, and revealed later that he had spoken for about 15 minutes by telephone with Blake as the 29-year-old was recovering in hospital.
"He talked about how nothing was going to defeat him, how whether he walked again or not, he was not going to give up," Biden said of Blake, whose lawyers say he is likely paralyzed from the waist down.
Describing himself repeatedly as an optimist, Biden -- speaking through a face mask -- told a small community gathering in Kenosha that the majority of Americans support the Black Lives Matter movement for racial equality.
But he also warned that President Donald Trump has fueled the racial animus which has roiled the nation in recent months.
"Not all his fault," but Trump's heated and racially charged language "legitimizes the dark side of human nature," Biden said at Grace Lutheran Church, where a crowd of mostly-masked supporters gathered outside.
The president's rhetoric has exposed "the underlying racism that is institutionalized in the United States, and still exists, and has existed for 400 years," he added.
"I promise you, win or lose... I'm going to go down fighting the good fight for racial equality," Biden said, adding: "We're not going to go down."
The optics in Wisconsin offered a contrast from two days earlier when Biden's Republican rival brought his law-and-order message to Kenosha, where he survey damage and met law enforcement and business owners.
Unlike Biden, Trump did not speak with Blake or his family, and he visited in defiance of pleas by the mayor and state governor, both Democrats, who feared that his presence would stoke tensions.
During Trump's meeting with police, he equated the demonstrations demanding racial justice with "domestic terror" by violent mobs.
- Campaign turning point -
Biden's visit, his first major trip since June due to months of coronavirus-driven lockdown and restrictions, marks an intensification of his presidential campaign two months before the US election.
The campaign has announced Biden trips to battlegrounds Michigan next Wednesday and Pennsylvania on September 11.
As the Democrat emerges more from his Wilmington, Delaware home, Trump is already barnstorming across battleground states, warning voters that a Biden administration would leave them less safe and repeating his baseless attacks on the integrity of mail-in voting.
In recent weeks Trump has visited Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Arizona, New Hampshire and North Carolina, with a rally scheduled for Thursday evening in Pennsylvania.
Trump mocked Biden's foray into Wisconsin, pushing a new nickname for the challenger that presumably refers to lower recent profile on the campaign trail.
Until now Biden has hesitated to hit the road, rigorously adhering to local pandemic health guidelines and campaigning through webcasts, advertising and television.
"Joe Hiden' gets off his airplane, grabs and shakes a rather stunned man’s hand (like in the old days), then touches his (Joe's) face and mask with the same hand," the president tweeted.
"No crowd, no enthusiasm for Joe today. Law & Order!"
Biden leads Trump in national polling but the gap is closer in swing states including Wisconsin, which Trump narrowly flipped from Democrats in his improbable 2016 election victory.
He is no doubt using security fears to hammer home his law-and-order message.
Demonstrations in Kenosha began peacefully the night Blake was shot, but descended into violence for several nights running.
It culminated August 25 when two people were shot dead. A 17-year-old white Trump supporter has been arrested and charged with murder.
The president has refused to condemn the killings or the growing presence of armed vigilantes at protests, and during his visit he equated the demonstrations demanding racial justice with "domestic terror" by violent mobs.
Community leader Tim Mahone, who moderated the roundtable, applauded Biden for presenting a more optimistic vision.
"We're hurting right now," he told Biden. "Your leadership is important, in Kenosha and in our country."
On Thursday, The Atlantic reported that President Donald Trump lost his temper when he noticed that flags had been lowered to half-mast out of respect for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) as he was being laid to rest — and demanded to know why the government was honoring a "f*cking loser."
"Trump remained fixated on McCain, one of the few prominent Republicans to continue criticizing him after he won the nomination," reported Jeffrey Goldberg. "When McCain died, in August 2018, Trump told his senior staff, according to three sources with direct knowledge of this event, 'We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,' and he became furious, according to witnesses, when he saw flags lowered to half-staff. 'What the f*ck are we doing that for? Guy was a f*cking loser,' the president told aides. Trump was not invited to McCain’s funeral."
John McCain was famous for his military service, being tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Trump has repeatedly disdained McCain's sacrifice, saying in 2015, "He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured."
Also, according to the report, when Trump canceled his visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, a French memorial to American soldiers killed in World War I, he privately told aides, "Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers," and added that the troops who perished at Belleau Wood were "suckers." The White House's official explanation for the cancellation was that they had been rained out.
A recent Military Times poll showed active-duty servicemembers disapprove of Trump by double digits, and are backing Joe Biden by 4 points — highly unusual for a demographic that tends to vote Republican.
You can read more here.
A new anti-Trump ad from the Really American PAC shows the violence in Donald Trump's America, violence fueled by President Trump's words.
The video shows Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden repeatedly denouncing violence.
It also shows then-nominee Donald Trump from his 2016 nomination address, saying: “The irresponsible rhetoric of our President, who has used the pulpit of the Presidency to divide us by race and color, has made America a more dangerous environment than frankly I have ever seen.”
Those words, it turns out, were prophetic. Or a promise.
And it shows candidate Trump fueling the fires of violence.
"Part of the problem is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore," Trump is shown saying.
"Knock the crap out of 'em, would you?" Trump is shown saying.
It also reminds voters there have been dozens of documented acts of hate violence where the perpetrators directly pointed to Donald Trump as their motivation.
Take a look at the ad that's already garnered close to 200,000 views in just 90 minutes:
President Donald Trump's rhetoric were linked to violent crimes being committed by his supporters in a new campaign ad by the group Really American.
The ad features news coverage of racist attacks, juxtaposing the news clips with comments from Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden.
The ad features images of violence, with Confederate Flags and a burning swastika featured in the ad.
Watch:
Former Republican strategist-turned Never-Trumper antagonist Steve Schmidt called out the followers of the president who are trying to push greater unrest in the United States because they want another Civil War.
"It's a lie we're seeing Donald Trump project from a point of weakness, trying to convince people of this alternate reality that there's very little resemblance to actual reality," said Schmidt. "Where the country is cruising towards 200,000 dead from coronavirus, a shattered economy, escalating foreclosures, and eviction crisis. But it's important to note that Trumpism is no longer a haphazard and accidental set of pathologies that have come together that define because it's hard to explain this moment in American life and American politics."
"You take idealogy now, and it's taken root," he went on. "It's important to understand what it is so we can do something about it. And what it is is an illiberal, autocratic idealogy that bout 30 percent of the country, roughly, are enamored with. They are full-on 100 percent committed to the cult of personality that is at the core of Trumpism. A cult of personality built around Donald Trump. When you look at the convention, what you saw was breathtaking lying, utter lawlessness, and the seizure of symbols in the American republic to become partisan totems for Donald Trump's tribe to make them symbols of authority over the rest of the country."
"So, in essence, what Trump is saying is, 'I am the truth, I am the law, I am the state,'" said Schmidt. "And we're required to oppose this as Americans because that idealogy is fundamentally unamerican. It's not what the country is about. It's contrary to the American idea and ideal, contrary to the concepts of democracy and the great progress the country has made over the last 50 years. So it has to be opposed. It has to be confronted."
Wallace jumped in to ask him about defeating such ideology.
"Is the idealogy weakened by removing the levers of the state?" she asked. "Because I think what you're saying is absolutely right, and that's why the Barr comments are so remarkable. He's now pulling the levers for the idealogy of Trumpism, and I think that even his most ardent partisan detractors thought he would come in and pull the levers for the state. He's coming and pulling the levers that you're describing. Let me ask you about Mr. Barr and whether taking away the levers of the state on its own sort of takes care of the ecosystem."
Wallace called it the most illogical thing uttered between Trump and Barr this week, despite the "thugs on a plane" conspiracy theory.
"Let me put the question this way: that is the country's most senior law enforcement official trotting out BS about counterfeit ballots," said Wallace. "There is nothing that has been briefed to any of the intelligence committees. There's been nothing that's declassified. There's been no bulletin sent to law enforcement, be on the lookout for counterfeit ballots. What does exist is a bulletin that was buried that we learned from ABC News this week that said watch out for alignments with Russia to denigrate the candidates. We also have the ODNI disseminating to Congress a Russian interference, that they are looking to knock down Biden. The things that are actually happening are contradicted or pushed aside or ignored."
Schmidt described it as Barr being the Interior Minister from Poland in the early 1980s.
"He does not represent any attorney general that has come before him," he explained. "He is an accomplice in Donald Trump's lawlessness and you saw the cleverness of his answers as you saw him spin his way through to try to delegitimize the election and cause chaos and confusion. And remember, at the heart of the lying and dishonesty is conspiracy, and the Republican Party is now festooned with conspiracy theorists."
"One of the things we know, also, is these movements all around the world, that they team with menace and violence. No mistake that the Hawaiian shirt-clad fetishists want to see a second Civil War in this country. They are all supporting Trump and Trump has encouraged all of them," he went on.
He closed by saying that these moments call for confrontation and that burden falls heavily on Joe Biden every day to defend the laws and ideals of America.
See the full conversation below:
On Thursday, Bloomberg News reported that President Donald Trump is planning to attend a high-dollar fundraiser in Las Vegas — and elite donors can pay $50,000 for the privilege of having their picture taken with him.
"Details of the event, including its exact location, are still being organized," reported Bill Allison and Jennifer Jacobs. "One person familiar said couples would be asked for $150,000 to attend a roundtable with Trump at the event, and $50,000 for a photo with him. The people asked not to be named because the event hasn’t been finalized."
"Trump, who once enjoyed a huge financial advantage over Democratic nominee Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee, has seen it erode over the summer," said the report. "Biden and the DNC raised $364.5 million in August, shattering the previous record of $193 million that Barack Obama raised in September 2008. Trump and the Republican National Committee have yet to release August fundraising totals."
The Bloomberg report did not specify what, if any, measures will be taken by the Trump campaign or the venue to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Trump's has come under criticism in recent months for lax public health measures, from his rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma to his nomination acceptance speech at the White House.
President Donald Trump on Thursday paid tribute to golf legend Arnold Palmer before departing for a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
"I’m going to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, the home of the late, great Arnold Palmer - There was nobody like him. I got to know Arnold well, played golf with him, and miss him," Trump posted on Twitter.
He included an ad for "Donald J. Trump's Fabulous World of Golf" -- which aired for two season on the Golf Channel.
Sportswriter Rick Reilly covered Trump's relationship with Palmer in his 2019 book Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump.
"Trump use to tell people he and the King were tight; Palmer told golf writer James Dodson 'It was more like this,' with Palmer crossing his hands and putting them on his own throat," Golf Digest reported in a review of the book. "Palmer's daughter, Peg, also recalled a moment during the 2016 campaign before Palmer passed away. 'My dad made a sound of disgust—like 'uck' or 'ugg'—like he couldn't believe the arrogance and crudeness of this man who was the nominee of the political party that he believed in. Then he said, 'He's not as smart as we thought he was.'"
The book also reported caddies gave Trump the nickname "Pele" due to how often he would kick his ball from the roughs to the fairway.
The book also noted that Trump may face legal difficulties with his courses.
"On his financial-disclosure declaration during the presidential campaign, according to Reilly, Trump valued the Trump Westchester course, and every course he owned, at $50 million. However, Trump is currently suing the town of Ossining for its $11 million tax valuation of Westchester, as Trump's lawyers insist the course was only worth $1.4 million. Trump is facing similar issues with Trump Los Angeles (missed and late tax payments), and his Scottish properties at Turnberry and Aberdeen have failed to deliver the profits the Trump Organization promised to the government," the magazine reported.
The National Hockey League and its players union announced a number of anti-racism and inclusion initiatives Thursday, including league-wide days off to allow employee voting in US and Canadian elections.
The measures follow up an earlier two-day shutdown of the Stanley Cup playoffs as part of a major stoppage in the wake of the NBA Milwaukee Bucks walkout to protest the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
The NHL Players Association and the league are partnering with the Hockey Diversity Alliance on several measures.
"We applaud NHL Players for recognizing the importance of this moment and for coming together as part of a genuine movement for change," NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said. "We look forward to working with all voices of change to fight for equality and broaden access to the game we all love.
"The initiatives we're announcing are the result of that recommitment to making the NHL more inclusive and welcoming and to using the privilege of our platform to fight racism."
Bettman acknowledged efforts by the league, especially in conjunction with Willie O'Ree, the first black player in the NHL, but "we know we can and must do more. And we will."
NHLPA executive director Don Fehr said: "Everyone should be able to live and work in an environment that is inclusive, and one that is free from racism and discrimination in any form. In our sport, from the NHL to youth programs, we must take actions to achieve that goal."
The league and union plan mandatory inclusion and diversity training for all NHL players and NHLPA staff members during training camp and the start of the 2020-21 season.
NHL employees will take part in an inclusion education program focused on anti-racism, unconscious bias, dimensions of identity, micro-aggressions and cultural competency.
The NHL will support the Center for Justice Research at Texas Southern University to improve the criminal justice system.
The NHL vowed to build a more diverse business pipeline to engage more minority-owned organizations with the NHL and its teams.
The league formed an Executive Inclusion Council (EIC) comprised of Owners, former players and team and NHL executives. Bettman and Buffalo Sabres co-owner Kim Pegula will co-chair the council, whose goal is to identify tangible steps for inclusion.
The NHL will fund programs to support more minority participation in ice hockey at all levels.
Several clubs have already set up using their home arenas as polling places. Other such measures will be pursued with local officials in NHL markets to focus on voter education.
© 2020 AFP
Progressive activist and actor George Takei on Thursday informally offered his support for a new organization being started by The Lincoln Project, the growing group of never-Trump Republicans who have unleashed devastating ads attacking President Donald Trump. The group is unveiling a "grassroots Facebook Army" called The Lincoln Project Digital Coalition.
Citing Lincoln Project spokesperson Keith Edwards, CNBC reports the group's plan for the new get out the vote project "is to have thousands of Lincoln Project Facebook members reach out to Republican voters who have previously backed Trump to try to convince them to vote for Democratic nominee, Joe Biden. They have over 50,000 members on Facebook, he added."
Takei, who is extremely well-known on social media and has 9,982,901 Facebook likes and 9,322,789 Facebook followers, responded to a tweet from political finance reporter Brian Schwartz:
The Lincoln Project has been a steadfastly partisan enterprise whose attack ads frequently go viral. Takei is the first Democrat to offer bipartisan assistance, however informal it may be.
TLPDC will target GOP voters in the battleground states of Arizona, Texas, Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
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