ELECTION 2020 - Gladiator Style

[5JeepsAz]

GOP Senator Tries To Drag 'Cancel Culture' By Giving The Washington Monument A New Nickname—And People Actually Love It

It seems one Republican Senator accidentally improved the Washington Monument in a way he never expected to.

https://www.comicsands.com/tom-cotton-obelisk-of-wokeness-2646171170.html

'Obelisk of Wokeness'

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Trump may be stuck with awkwardly worded GOP platform

(AP)

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On the national debt, the platform complains that the “current Administration’s refusal to work with Republicans took our national debt from $10 trillion to nearly $19 trillion today.

“Left unchecked, it will hit $30 trillion by 2026,” Republicans wrote in 2016.

In fact, the national debt has exceeded $26 trillion this week and is on pace to surpass the $30 trillion mark well before 2026.

At another point, the platform notes that “the current Administration has abandoned America’s friends and rewarded its enemies.”

Trump has faced criticism from Democrats for his close relationships with strongmen like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Speaking of Kim, Trump famously declared that “we’ve fallen in love.”

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Trump on Friday suggested he wanted the party’s principles spelled out in a more abbreviated form.

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But some conservatives applauded the RNC for carrying forward the 2016 platform.

Colleen Holcomb, president of the conservative organization Eagle Forum, said it had sent a letter to the White House and RNC officials earlier this week raising concerns about news reports that the party was weighing a platform that amounted to a simplified, one-page document that would detail the party’s core values.

“The 2016 Platform reflects the values and priorities of the grassroots, the forgotten men and women that President Trump pledged to represent, and he has clearly used it as a policy guide,” Holcomb said

 

[5JeepsAz]

Dave Chappelle, thank you.

Dave Chappelle - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Chappelle

David Khari Webber Chappelle is an American stand-up comedian, actor, writer, and producer. Chappelle is the recipient of numerous accolades, including two Emmy Awards and two Grammy Awards as well as a Mark Twain Prize.

(LATimes) Dave Chappelle was not funny during his first stage performance in 87 days, an impassioned, 27-minute set that spoke to the cultural reckoning triggered by the killing of George Floyd. But the comedian was in top form.

 

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(Foxnews) The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday approved subpoenas for documents and testimony from top Obama administration officials as part of the panel’s investigation into the origins of the Russia probe during the 2016 presidential election.

The committee voted Thursday to approve a measure giving broad authority to Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., to subpoena more than 50 mostly former Obama administration officials as part of its investigation.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Building ramparts of secrecy around a $600 billion-plus coronavirus aid program for small businesses, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has moved from delay to denial in refusing outright to disclose the recipients of taxpayer-funded loans.

(AP) Faulty software or poorly calibrated vote-tabulation scanners used to count mailed-in ballots in this week’s chaotic Georgia primary may have prevented thousands of votes from being counted, election officials and voting integrity activists say. The issue was identified in at least four counties, DeKalb, Morgan, Clarke and Cherokee, according to officials who discovered them

 

[5JeepsAz]

Fox News removes altered photos of Seattle protest zone

SEATTLE (AP) — Fox News has removed digitally altered photos from its website after the Seattle Times noted misleading images used in the network’s coverage about a Seattle neighborhood that’s become a protest center against police brutality and racial injustice.

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“It is definitely Photoshopped,” Ryder told the Seattle Times. “To use a photo out of context in a journalistic setting like that seems unethical.”

The Seattle Times also reported that Fox’s package of stories on Seattle’s protest zone included a May 30 photo taken by an Associated Press photographer depicting a burning building and car that was in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Fox has also since removed that image.

 

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Supporters of President Donald Trump wave at the hundreds of boats idling on the St. Johns River during a rally Sunday, June 14, 2020, in Jacksonville, Fla., celebrating Trump's birthday. (Will Dickey/The Florida Times-Union via AP)

 

[5JeepsAz]

America’s anachronistic electoral college gives Republicans an edge
Our new election model gives Donald Trump a 11% chance of retaining the White House while losing the popular vote (Economist)

 

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday paved the way for a critical permit for a proposed natural gas pipeline that would cross under the Appalachian Trail, siding with energy companies and the Trump administration.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A House subcommittee investigating billions of dollars in coronavirus aid is demanding that the Treasury Department, the Small Business Administration and several large banks turn over detailed information about which businesses applied for and received federal loans.

The requests come after Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin told Congress last week that the names of loan recipients and the amounts disbursed as part of the $600 billion-plus Paycheck Protection Program are “proprietary information.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — The director of U.S.-funded Voice of America and her deputy resigned Monday following recent clashes with the Trump administration that have sparked fears for its independence.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up a series of new cases seeking to expand gun rights. The court rejected a total of 10 different cases that had piled up at the court in recent months.

Red alert Covid-19 is spreading into Republican-voting areas of America
Infections are rising fastest outside the big cities first afflicted
United States
Jun 14th 2020 (Economist) DURING MOST of the coronavirus period, President Donald Trump has acted as if only part of America has been affected: the Democratic part. Early on, he called the virus the Democrats’ “new hoax”. He claimed that only Democratic states were asking for bail-outs from the costs of it and has sided with the many Republicans demanding the prompt reopening of locked-down states.

And for most of the course of the disease, Democrats have indeed been worse affected. It is a rule of American politics that Democratic control increases with population density. So do coronavirus infections. New York, New Orleans, Chicago and Detroit all had early, large outbreaks; all are Democratic strongholds

 

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The Media Said Trump Didn’t Have a COVID Testing Strategy. The Media Was Wrong.
By RICH LOWRY June 14, 2020 (National Review)

 

[5JeepsAz]

A Presidency Is a Terrible Thing to Waste
By RICH LOWRY June 12, 2020 (National Review)

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"This is one of those moments of peril.

Losing to Biden would mean that all the changes he pursued through administrative action would be subject to reversal.

It would mean, assuming Democrats take the Senate, too, that his judicial appointments would immediately begin to be counteracted.

It would mean that immigration enforcement would be drastically curtailed.

And it would mean that Trump would suffer the highest-profile and most consequential defeat that it is possible to experience in American national life."

 

[5JeepsAz]

Fourth Estate - Definition
www.thoughtco.com/what-is-the-fourth-estate-3368058

In the United States the term fourth estate is sometimes used to place the press alongside the three branches of government: legislative, executive and judicial. The fourth estate refers to the watchdog role of the press, one that is important to a functioning democracy.


Opinion (NYT)

The Court-Martial of Donald J. Trump
The intensifying rift between the military and the president demands attention.

By Frank Bruni Opinion Columnist June 15, 2020

The first time I saw President Trump referred to as “Cadet Bone Spurs” I laughed, the second time I smiled and the third time I cringed. It’s an apt slur, but it lumps him together with all the other politicians whose military huzzahs contradict their personal histories and whose insult to our men and women in uniform can be reduced to dodging the draft.

Trump’s twisted and utterly transactional relationship with America’s armed forces is a bigger insult than that. For all his lip service to military service, his actions reveal a crude take on those who perform it.
And they have led now to a remarkable and remarkably public reappraisal — even repudiation — of him by people in the armed services, their leaders and veterans.

Some are finally coming around to a cleareyed view of a corrupt president. Others are venting a distaste for Trump that they’d previously downplayed or kept to themselves.

Even the most dutiful soldier has a breaking point, and even a culture of deference finds its moment of defiance.

Late last week Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued an extraordinary apology for his participation in that awful presidential photo op made possible by the use of tear gas against peaceful protesters. But as Helene Cooper noted in a story in The Times, that’s just one example of an intensifying friction between the president and military leaders. Many of them don’t share his opposition to renaming bases that honor Confederate officers and disagreed with his push to have armed forces quell demonstrations.

“Trump’s Actions Rattle the Military World” was the headline on a separate story in The Times by Jennifer Steinhauer. Her conversations with members of the military, their families and veterans made clear that they might not back Trump to the extent that they did in 2016.

Then there are the generals and admirals, silent by custom but silent no more. What we’ve seen and heard from them over the past two weeks is unprecedented in my adult lifetime, a jolting departure from their norm of mutely supporting a sitting president, no matter their differences with him.

Trump has been denounced by Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis and reprimanded by Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, both of whom held top jobs in his administration. “I think we need to look harder at who we elect,” Kelly said in an interview for the online platform SALT Talks.

Trump has been upbraided by Navy Adm. Mike Mullen and Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, each of whom served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President George W. Bush. “I’m glad I don’t have to advise this president,” Myers said in a CNN interview.
Together these admonishments amount to a metaphoric court-martial of the commander in chief.

Frank Bruni’s Newsletter: Get a more personal take on politics, newsmakers and more with Frank’s exclusive commentary every week.

Trump campaigned by arguing that presidents before him had abused the military by deploying troops to places — Iraq, Afghanistan — where the justification was suspect, the mission ill-fated and the end point invisible. He promised to avoid such costly entanglements while nonetheless spending more on military equipment. He wanted lots of it and he wanted it to gleam, just like his casinos. He told members of the armed forces that they’d never known a friend like him in the White House.

But what a nasty tongue and temper this friend has. At the start of his candidacy, he grossly mocked John McCain, who had been tortured for years in North Vietnam, by saying that he preferred war heroes who didn’t get captured.

He praised generals, sure, but only to assert his superiority to them. “I know more about ISIS than the generals do — believe me,” he said at one point in his candidacy, a cockamamie coda to his earlier boast that “there’s nobody bigger or better at the military than I am.”

He attacked Gold Star families, rage-tweeting against the father of Army Capt. Humayun Khan, who was killed in Iraq, and the widow of Army Sgt. La David Johnson, who was killed in Niger. They had dared to criticize him, and he put his vanity over their grief.

There’s no reverence in Trump, only convenience and expedience. Nearly two years and a hell of a lot of golf passed between his inauguration and the first time he could rouse himself to visit troops in a foreign combat zone.

During an earlier trip abroad in late 2018, he abruptly canceled his participation in an event at an American cemetery and World War I memorial in France when rain meant that he’d have to drive instead of taking a quicker helicopter flight.

The following year, again in France, he used the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion in Normandy as the backdrop for an interview in which he called Robert Mueller “a fool” and Nancy Pelosi “a disaster.” Everything to Trump is show business, and the graves of warriors are fitting props for a tirade on Fox News.

Trump approaches and appraises the military as he does all else: What’s in it for me? He needlessly sent troops to our southern border in the fall of 2018 because it advanced a narrative, which he contrived to help the Republican Party in the midterms, that America was being threatened by an invasion of migrants.

“My military,” he has said, and it’s no slip of the tongue. He sees the military as a vessel for his own glorification, to which end he openly yearned for a military parade in Washington, a titanic tribute to all the metal and munitions under his control.

“My generals,” he has also said, referring to the bevy of them — Mattis, his first defense secretary; Kelly, his second chief of staff; Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, his first national security adviser; Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, his second — with which he stocked his administration. The phrase is the giveaway that, to him, they were trophies, their stars and medals merely ornaments on his ego.

And they were meant to defer, lest there be doubt of his own dominance. So he lied not only about firing Mattis, who in fact resigned, but also about having given him the nickname “Mad Dog.”

For Trump the military is a commercial enterprise and commodity. His complaints about N.A.T.O. boil down to balance sheets, focusing on the financial disparity between the United States’s military contribution and other countries’, as if our servicemen and servicewomen are service providers.

They rightly see themselves as more than that — and as more than the brutes of Trump’s childish imagination. Last November he cleared three members of the armed forces who had been accused or convicted of war crimes. He did so against the wishes of Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, who worried about the military code of justice being undermined.

Code? Justice? Trump thinks and speaks in the language of wins, losses, brawn and bloodshed. He only pantomimes principle. His supposed reluctance to send troops into foreign lands gave way over recent weeks to his readiness to have them occupy our own land and engage in combat with their fellow Americans.

That he didn’t expect them to push back proves how little he understands them and how far short he sells them. They bring more than muscle to what they do. They bring heart, soul and intellect. Which is more than can be said for their commander in chief.

Frank Bruni has been with The Times since 1995

 

[5JeepsAz]

Trump Writes Campaign Script With Three Big Themes
President hopes to turn around his troubled reelection bid by touting a recovering economy, bashing China and positioning himself as the law-and-order candidate (WSJ)

 

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Scroll right.... ( https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/)

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		DATES	POLLSTER	SAMPLE	RESULT	NET RESULT
President: general election	Ariz.		JUN 13-15, 2020	B/C Civiqs	1,368	RV	Biden	49%	45%	Trump	Biden	+4
President: general election	Ga.		JUN 12-13, 2020	B Public Policy Polling*	661	V	Biden	48%	46%	Trump	Biden	+2
President: general election	N.M.		JUN 12-13, 2020	B Public Policy Polling	740	V	Biden	53%	39%	Trump	Biden	+14
President: general election	Mich.		JUN 9-12, 2020	A/B TIPP	859	LV	Biden	51%	38%	Trump	Biden	+13
President: general election	Mich.		JUN 9-12, 2020	A/B TIPP	907	RV	Biden	50%	37%	Trump	Biden	+13
President: general election	Fla.		JUN 9-11, 2020	A/B TIPP	875	LV	Biden	51%	40%	Trump	Biden	+11
President: general election	Fla.		JUN 9-11, 2020	A/B TIPP	910	RV	Biden	50%	40%	Trump	Biden	+10
President: general election	Mich.		MAY 31-JUN 4, 2020	B+ EPIC-MRA	600	LV	Biden	55%	39%	Trump	Biden	+16
U.S. Senate		Ariz.		JUN 13-15, 2020	B/C Civiqs	1,368	RV	Kelly	51%	42%	McSally	Kelly	+9
U.S. Senate		Mich.		JUN 12-15, 2020	B/C Marketing Resource Group (MRG)	600	LV	Peters	36%	30%	James	Peters	+6
U.S. Senate		Ga.		JUN 12-13, 2020	B Public Policy Polling*	661	V	Ossoff	45%	44%	Perdue	Ossoff	+1
U.S. Senate		N.M.		JUN 12-13, 2020	B Public Policy Polling	740	V	Lujan	48%	34%	Ronchetti	Lujan	+14
U.S. Senate		Mich.		JUN 9-12, 2020	A/B TIPP	907	RV	Peters	47%	35%	James	Peters	+12

 

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https://www.270towin.com/2020-polls-biden-trump/national/


Biden vs. Trump

Source	Date	Sample	Biden	Trump	Other
Poll Averages*	48.3%	38.5%	-
	Morning Consult	6/15/2020	32,138 RV ±1%	48%	39%	13%
	RMG Research	6/15/2020	1,200 RV ±2.8%	48%	36%	16%
	Redfield & Wilton	6/11/2020	1,500 RV ±2.5%	50%	37%	13%
	Yahoo/YouGov	6/11/2020	1,288 RV	49%	40%	11%
	Economist/YouGov	6/10/2020	1,240 RV ±3.4%	49%	41%	10%
	Ipsos/Reuters	6/10/2020	931 RV ±3.7%	46%	38%	16%
	CNN/SSRS	6/08/2020	1,125 RV ±3.6%	55%	41%	4%
	Morning Consult	6/08/2020	32,380 RV ±1%	47%	39%	14%
	RMG Research	6/08/2020	1,200 RV	47%	37%	16%
	NBC News / WSJ	6/07/2020	1,000 RV ±3.1%	49%	42%	9%

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