Donald Trump admitted on Thursday he opposed additional funding for the United States Postal Service (USPS) in order to make it more difficult to deliver mail-in ballots.
Trump’s comments lend evidence for critics who say the president is deliberately trying to hamstring the USPS in advance of the November elections to help his re-election bid.
via Trump admits he is undermining USPS to make it harder to vote by mail | Donald Trump | The Guardian
It doesn’t take a legal expert to know that what’s happening in Portland, Oregon is an abuse of power. When unidentified federal forces dressed as soldiers pull people off the streets into unmarked vans, something is gravely wrong. What’s less apparent is that this abuse is part of an ongoing effort by the administration to get around “posse comitatus”: the principle that the president cannot use the military as a domestic police force. The implications for the rule of law — and potentially for the 2020 election — are staggering.
via The President’s Private Army
It has taken America’s 45th president almost four self-serving and destructive years to reach this point, but in pulling the trigger on withdrawing troops from Germany, one-third of the total stationed in the country, he has signaled an end to what Franklin D. Roosevelt, America’s 32nd president, conceived as a post-World War II order based on common interest and collective aspirations.
via Germany US troops pullout: Trump’s last gift to Putin before the election? – CNNPolitics
“The recovery has been very strong,” Donald Trump said on Monday. Then the commerce department reported the US economy contracted between April and June at the fastest pace in nearly three-quarters of a century, which is as long as economists have been keeping track. The drop wiped out five years of economic growth.
But pesky facts have never stopped Trump. Having lied for five months about the coronavirus, he’s now filling social media and the airwaves with untruths about the economy so he can dupe his way to election day.
(WASHINGTON) — Thousands of protesters streamed into the nation’s capital Saturday for what was expected to be the city’s largest demonstration yet against police brutality while George Floyd was remembered in his North Carolina hometown, where hundreds of mourners lined up to pay their respects.
Military vehicles and officers in fatigues closed off much of downtown Washington to traffic ahead of the planned march, which authorities estimated would attract up to 200,000 people outraged by Floyd’s death 12 days ago at the hands of police in Minneapolis.
Large protests also took place across the U.S. and in major cities overseas, including London, Paris, Berlin and Sydney, Australia.
via Protesters Rally in D.C. for City’s Largest Demonstration | Time
Mattis had a scathing description of Trump’s walk to a historic nearby church Monday to pose with a Bible after law enforcement forcibly cleared Lafayette Square of mostly peaceful protesters.
He said he never dreamed troops “would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens — much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.”
via Ex-Defense Chief Mattis Rips Trump for Dividing Americans – The New York Times
“President Trump incited insurrection Friday against the duly elected governors of the states of Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia,” McCord begins. “Just a day after issuing guidance for re-opening America that clearly deferred decision-making to state officials — as it must under our Constitutional order — the president undercut his own guidance by calling for criminal acts against the governors for not opening fast enough.”
The op-ed’s subtitle notes: “Federal law bans advocating the overthrow of government.”
via Legal expert: Trump’s ‘liberate’ Tweets ‘incite insurrection’ – and that’s ‘illegal’ – Alternet.org
Here in Canada, we can breathe a sigh of relief that our federal political system is, for the most part, rising to the occasion of the global COVID-19 pandemic.
That is not so much the case in the great (and constantly self-aggrandizing) republic to our south.
There, the political dialogue is dominated by a person who not only openly aspires to be an absolute dictator, but who appears, more and more each day, to suffer from an actual, clinically diagnosable personality disorder: infantile narcissism.
via Canada boosts aid for workers; reckless insanity rules in the U.S. | rabble.ca
Donald Trump lost an estimated $1bn of his paper fortune in the past month as the coronavirus lockdown forced the closure of offices, shopping centres, hotels and golf courses he owns.
The US president’s fortune has fallen from an estimated $3.1bn (£2.5bn) on 1 March to $2.1bn on 18 March (at the height of stock market panic caused by the coronavirus pandemic) according to Forbes magazine’s annual billionaires list.
Wonder why he wants to put people at risk by opening up early?
via Donald Trump ‘lost $1bn in a month’ from coronavirus lockdown | Business | The Guardian
When the COVID-19 outbreak first appeared in Iran on Feb. 19, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei proclaimed it a hoax, a conspiracy from the country’s enemies.
There were reports the regime tried to cover up the number of fatalities, until cellphone videos appeared that showed bodies being hurriedly buried in a graveyard in the northern city of Qom by workers wearing masks and hazmat suits.
When President Hassan Rouhani finally acknowledged the outbreak on Feb. 26, he said it did not warrant a mass quarantine.
Iranian-American journalist Borzou Daragahi, who covers Iran for the Independent in the U.K., said the regime flips back and forth between two explanations for the outbreak.
“One is it was propaganda … to besmirch Iran and China. And the other is that it’s some sort of bio-weapon, and you hear that from loonies on all sides around the world, including in Iran.”
Old unionist 