House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Eliot Engel said he has learned Linick was investigating the Saudi arms sale at the time of his firing — raising further troubling concerns about Pompeo’s motives for ousting him.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/18/state-dept-ig-trump-fired-was-investigating-saudi-arms-sale.html
https://twitter.com/RepEliotEngel/status/1262424072316751873
https://twitter.com/RepEliotEngel/status/1261730985567272961
The House told the Supreme Court that it needs secret Mueller grand jury materials to determine if there is new evidence of impeachable offenses involving Trump. "The Committee's impeachment investigation related to obstruction of justice ... is ongoing."
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/18/politics/house-supreme-court-mueller-grand-jury/index.html
Today, American Oversight sued the State Department for records regarding the Trump administration’s Middle East policies, including Jared Kushner-led delegations to foreign countries as well as escalating U.S.-Iran tensions and the possibility of military conflict. | Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner has taken a lead role in handling Middle East policy issues, maintaining a notoriously close relationship with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — even reportedly exchanging direct WhatsApp and text messages with the prince. Kushner has led several delegations to the region, ostensibly to advance a Middle East peace plan, the progress of which has repeatedly stalled. The trips included events in Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia — all nations in which Kushner retains financial interests. Few details about the delegations have been released to the public, but Kushner’s trips have, reportedly, at times sidelined overseas U.S. embassy staff, and have had apparently minimal State Department involvement besides the participation of Brian Hook, the special representative for Iran. (Hook recently made headlines for personally emailing captains of foreign vessels, offering large amounts of cash to persuade them not to work with Iran — an unusual role for such a senior official.) The delegations have relied heavily on White House Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt, who this week announced his departure, and Kushner assistant Avi Berkowitz, who is expected to take on a larger role after Greenblatt’s exit. American Oversight filed two Freedom of Information Act requests in April and July for communications — sent through both email and WhatsApp — from State officials during Kushner’s initial February delegation, as well as Hook’s WhatsApp messages and communications with Kushner, Berkowitz, and outside entities during four of this year’s delegations. The State Department’s failure to provide records in response to these requests prompted today’s lawsuit. | In May, Pompeo sent a letter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee saying “that an emergency exists” requiring the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan to “deter Iranian malign influence.” He also announced that the Trump administration would employ a little-used provision of the Arms Export Control Act to waive congressional review requirements for the sale. The emergency declaration is particularly significant because it allows defense contractor Raytheon to partner with the Saudis to assemble sensitive weapons parts in Saudi Arabia, rather than in the U.S. as is traditionally done for national security reasons. During a closed-door briefing for Congress on Iran threats just three days before the emergency declaration, Pompeo and then-Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan did not mention the emergency, raising questions about whether the State Department purposefully concealed the plan from Congress. Press reporting suggests that Charles Faulkner, the former acting assistant secretary and deputy assistant secretary for legislative affairs, may have played a lead role in crafting the emergency declaration approach before being reportedly pushed out of the State Department on May 10 because of his involvement in the effort. A former lobbyist for Raytheon, Faulkner had a history of advocating for arms sales during his tenure — including having encouraged Pompeo to certify that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were taking steps to reduce civilian casualties in the Yemen war so as not to jeopardize future arms sales. American Oversight submitted multiple FOIA requests to State seeking records related to the emergency declaration and Faulkner’s role, and today’s lawsuit includes requests for his ethics records and external communications with former clients and employers.
https://www.americanoversight.org/new-lawsuit-seeks-state-department-records-of-foreign-policy-and-jared-kushners-middle-east-trips
https://www.americanoversight.org/document/complaint-american-oversight-v-state-jared-kushners-delegation-to-the-middle-east
https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/17/politics/jared-kushner-saudi-ties-jamal-khashoggi/index.html
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/06/jared-kushner-middle-east-avi-berkowitz-1484339
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/us/politics/trump-middle-east-plan.html?module=inline
https://www.businessinsider.com/jared-kushner-real-estate-100-million-investment-saud-uae-2018-5
https://www.thedailybeast.com/embassy-staffers-say-jared-kushner-shut-them-out-of-saudi-meetings
https://www.ft.com/content/20188064-cefb-11e9-99a4-b5ded7a7fe3f
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/us/politics/jason-greenblatt-middle-east-peace.html
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/06/jared-kushner-middle-east-avi-berkowitz-1484339
https://www.americanoversight.org/document/foia-to-state-seeking-communications-sent-by-state-officials-during-the-february-2019-delegation-to-the-middle-east
https://www.americanoversight.org/document/foia-to-state-for-email-communications-and-whatsapp-messages-during-kushner-delegations-to-the-middle-east
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-invokes-emergency-arms-sales-authority-to-counter-iran-11558721927?mod=article_inline
https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/1109-pompeo-memo-arms-sales/0300852ef550787be7dc/optimized/full.pdf#page=1
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/07/us/saudi-arabia-arms-sales-raytheon.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/12/us/politics/arms-sales-saudi-arabia.html
https://www.wsj.com/articles/state-dept-forces-out-official-who-worked-on-plan-that-led-to-ex-employers-arms-deals-11559772745
https://theintercept.com/2018/09/21/mike-pompeo-yemen-war-raytheon/
https://www.americanoversight.org/document/foia-to-state-requesting-ethics-documents-for-former-acting-assistant-secretary-of-legislative-affairs-charles-faulkner
https://www.americanoversight.org/document/foia-to-state-seeking-all-communications-between-former-acting-assistant-secretary-charles-faulkner-and-external-groups
[From the January/February 2016 issue: Can Hobby Lobby buy the Bible?]
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/01/can-hobby-lobby-buy-the-bible/419088/
- Intelligence IG Michael Atkinson - April 3, 2020
- Acting Defense Department IG in charge of covid relief oversight - Fired April 7, 2020
- Acting HHS IG Christi Grimm signed off on a report highlighting the risks and dangers faced by frontline hospital personnel - fired May 2, 2020
- State department IG Steve Linick investigating weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and using staff for personal errands - fired May 15, 2020
- You dont fire 4 IGs in 6 weeks because you're on the up'n'up....
(This is the real Obamagate: Obama telling it like it is, calling Trump and Republicans out as pure fucking evil people) Doing what feels good, what's convenient, what's easy - that's how little kids think. Unfortunately, a lot of so-called grown-ups, including some with fancy titles and important jobs, still think that way - which is why things are so screwed up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPYZdgZ6Xzg
I like how he specifically phrased in in terms Trump might actually be able to understand.
Blagojevich officially disbarred by Illinois Supreme Court
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/498362-blagojevich-officially-disbarred-by-illinois-supreme-court
Joe Biden’s campaign promised Monday to rip up U.S. President Donald Trump’s approvals for the Keystone XL pipeline if the former vice-president succeeds in taking over the White House next year. Campaign officials finally ended the presumptive Democrat nominee’s months of self-imposed silence on how he would handle the politically sensitive expansion project, an ambitious, 1,900-kilometre heavy-oil line that would move 830,000 barrels of Alberta bitumen each day over the Canada-U.S. border to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast. It wouldn’t be the first time that Biden has stood in the way of the Calgary-based TC Energy expansion. As vice-president, he was a key member of Barack Obama’s administration, which slow-walked the project _ championed by the former Conservative government _ throughout Obama’s second term before finally blocking construction outright shortly after the Liberals were elected in 2015. “Biden strongly opposed the Keystone pipeline in the last administration, stood alongside President Obama and Secretary (of State John) Kerry to reject it in 2015, and will proudly stand in the Roosevelt Room again as president and stop it for good by rescinding the Keystone XL pipeline permit”′ policy director Stef Feldman said in a written statement to Politico.
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/biden-keystone-xl-alberta_ca_5ec2d1b7c5b61148e5fd6342
Trump says he's been taking hydroxychloroquine for a 'few weeks
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-taking-hydroxychloroquine-coronavirus-vaccine-medicine-a9521151.html
No one will notice or care that the difference on our side is we tried him and jailed him rather than naming a street after him and paying him a salary.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-palestinians-duma-verdict/israeli-settler-found-guilty-of-murder-in-arson-attack-on-palestinian-family-idUSKBN22U0L5
Vegan Miso Ramen 🤤
https://i.redd.it/fyhlydfq4lz41.jpg
FDA on Hydroxychloroquine: "adverse events were reported from the hospital and outpatient settings for treating or preventing COVID-19, and included QT interval prolongation, ventricular tachycardia and ventricular fibrillation, and in some cases death.”
https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-and-availability/fda-cautions-against-use-hydroxychloroquine-or-chloroquine-covid-19-outside-hospital-setting-or
After his finances, the thing Trump probably lies most about is his health and his medical regime.
https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1262497861155127298
If elected, Trump will be the healthiest president ever! astonishingly excellent test results! extraordinary stamina!
https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1262497861155127298
In ten seconds Trump goes:
- many are taking it
- I'm taking it!
- when? right now!
- in fact, I started it weeks ago!
There’s a very good chance White House doctors are giving Donald Trump sugar pills or, Flintstones vitamins and telling him it’s hydroxychloroquine. Last week, Justice Kavanaugh and the House Dems' counsel struggled to think of a valid legislative reason for Congress to request the president's medical records. That was before Trump claimed to be taking potentially dangerous medication against FDA recommendations.
Pursuant to ongoing Cultural Property, Arts & Antiquities investigations by ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) New York, a civil complaint was filed Monday to forfeit a rare cuneiform tablet bearing a portion of the epic of Gilgamesh, a Sumerian epic poem considered one the world’s oldest works of literature. Known as the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, it originated in the area of modern-day Iraq and entered the United States contrary to federal law. The tablet was later sold by an international auction house (the “Auction House”) to Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (“Hobby Lobby”), a prominent arts-and-crafts retailer based in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma for display at the Museum of the Bible (the “Museum”). Despite inquiries from the Museum and Hobby Lobby, the Auction House withheld information about the tablet’s provenance. The tablet was seized from the Museum by law enforcement agents in September 2019. | HSI has recovered and returned approximately 12,500 artifacts to more than 30 countries since 2007, including paintings from France, Germany, Poland and Austria; cultural artifacts from China and Cambodia; dinosaur fossils from Mongolia; and illuminated manuscript left from Italy; a pair of royal Korean seals, ancient Peruvian ceramics, an ancient gold coffin repatriated to Egypt, and most recently, more than 500-year-old copy of Christopher Columbus’ letter describing his discoveries in the Americas to the Government of Italy.
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/civil-action-filed-forfeit-rare-cuneiform-tablet-hobby-lobby
Even if Trump isn't being honest about taking hydroxychloroquine, there
could easily be an avalanche of negative repercussions from his claim.
___________________________
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/why-the-uncle-joe-cant-internet-criticism-is-mostly-malarkey
To state the obvious: Of course Biden is losing the internet. Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, Andrew Yang, and Kamala Harris would all be losing the internet to Trump too, especially in the fog of a global crisis. Trump is an incumbent president who has been building a reelection campaign for almost four years. His strengths, online and off, flow from the political asymmetry he’s created for himself. Trump has little interest in the facts or decorum to which most Democrats and members of the press are still bound. His deliberate provocations lend themselves perfectly to the clickbait of the platforms and the outrage porn of cable news. Trump is such brain poison for the media that CNN prime-time hosts now devote their entire A-blocks to breathless anti-Trump harangues, which are gleefully spun by the Trump campaign into base-rallying cries of “Fake News,” email blasts, and Facebook fundraising ads that can be tested and reoptimized thousands of times over. The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee have combined to raise over $700 million so far this cycle, more than Obama did at this point in his 2012 reelection campaign. In 2016, the Trump campaign was held together by duct tape, Facebook ads, and a megaphone handed to them by TV news executives. But to their credit, Trump aides took a groundbreaking risk by devoting nearly half of their advertising budget to digital rather than TV ads, which proved themselves rather useless in a campaign defined by earned media controversies. In 2020, with a huge staff at his disposal, Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale can afford to do much more, experimenting and expanding his online reach far beyond the field of view of most Beltway-dwellers.
Trump has more than 1.5 million followers on Snapchat, where his campaign test-drives messaging and regularly bumps his Snapchat followers across platforms into near-daily YouTube livestreams. His supporters are so loyal that they create low-grade content on their own and share it with their own networks, through podcasts, memes, or just old-fashioned handmade signs. Trump’s knack for weaponizing culture and turning politics into a contact sport means that everyone on his team wants a red jersey: The Trump campaign sold $4 million worth of MAGA merchandise in March and April alone, according to CBS News. Parscale even previewed a new Trump–Pence 2020 COVID-19 face mask on Twitter, which was promptly mocked by the blue-checkmark crowd, ensuring that Parscale will sell thousands of them. Biden’s armchair quarterbacks point worriedly to the Trump campaign’s bombastic fundraising texts and his app, which can feel like being inside a Las Vegas casino, with its point-collecting contests and huge fonts. But Trump’s digital program—indeed his entire campaign—works because it mirrors who Trump is.
Biden and his campaign are thinking about their digital campaign in the same way. “The job of a person who runs a digital team is not to be in the room saying, Use every gadget and gizmo possible,” Flaherty told me. “The job of a digital person is to build the program that is a reflection of the person they work for. The best programs that exist are the ones that do that. Trump is scammy as hell. He’s controversial and just sort of brazen. His program looks like that. Bernie’s program reflected his organization. Pete’s did too. Those campaigns have built programs to look like their candidate. For us, we’re trying to build a program that reflects the V.P.’s values, that is empathetic, that connects people in a moment when people are looking for connections. Those are things that the data show are the things that people are craving. They are also the things that the V.P. uniquely has to offer. Not every clever idea is a good idea in that framework.”
The North Star for Biden’s campaign is the normie voter—the person who might not have the most sophisticated taste or the smartest opinion but lives in an economy removed from the one occupied by most of the media. Obama won because he reached low-information voters, and Biden will have to do the same. “There were so many times throughout the primary where the internet—and by the internet I mean political reporters in the Beltway and a group of very engaged Twitter users—are talking about a specific thing,” said Symone Sanders, a senior adviser to the Biden campaign. “And then we go to places like South Carolina, we would go to Detroit, we would go to Iowa. And nobody else would be talking about what the internet was talking about.” The median primary voter in South Carolina, for instance, was a 50-something black woman who didn’t have a college degree and went to church weekly. That person is almost completely without voice in the national media. Instead, cable networks beam in highly paid pundits from their open-concept kitchens and seek opinions from a rotating cast of “experts,” harvested from Twitter, who probably haven’t shopped at a Piggly Wiggly lately.
There are plenty of tactics to borrow and advice to be had, but Biden will lose in November if he chases virality and follower counts that don’t actually grow support among voters, and he’ll lose if he tries to Xerox another candidate’s playbook. Biden isn’t Trump, nor is he Obama, Sanders, or Clinton. Biden can win if he understands that he doesn’t need to “win the internet” to win the White House—and that Trump is actually losing in the polls despite being an omnipresent force online. He can win if he understands that there isn’t even much of a distinction between online and offline anymore. Everything now is just media, no matter the screen, and the pandemic represents something of an opportunity, accelerating the need to reach voters on their phones and in their feeds, rather than through door knocks or rallies. Like any successful candidate, Biden must not lose sight of his key strengths, and the message that won him the primary in the first place, and has him leading Trump in the polls. Every strategy, every tactic, flows from that starting point. “To the Biden campaign’s great credit in the primary, they were pretty damn good at tuning out the noise,” said Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s former communications director in the White House. “The challenge gets harder in a general election because the stakes get higher, and the pressure gets greater from the outside because now you are the vessel for an entire party’s existential anxiety about the future of the planet. But they don’t have to win the Twitter conversation about how effective they are. They just have to be effective, and win the election. And if you win the election, your strategy was brilliant. And if you didn’t win the election, America’s got much bigger problems than the state of your digital strategy.”
----- ----- ----- ----- -----
Biden had Instagram stickers and a relational organizing tool, but he won the Democratic nomination because he was already known to the public and he made the right bet about Democratic primary voters—that they were wildly detached from the daily spasms of political Twitter and wanted a comfort blanket, not radical upheaval. He ran up the score with black voters and boring white suburbanites, most of them over 40, and surfed a dominant victory in South Carolina into an earned media bonanza, helped along by some old-school endorsement dealmaking. “In an era when information about presidential politics is all-consuming, many of the political tactics that matter in other races just aren’t that important,” said Tim Miller, a Never Trump columnist for The Bulwark who saw firsthand on Jeb Bush’s campaign how Trump won without much investment in field or tech. “Biden won the primary because of his brand and positioning, not because he had a great email program or lots of door knockers.” It’s true that Biden sometimes feels like he’s on safari when he talks about the internet, and his cash-strapped primary campaign did little in the way of innovation. But did any campaign? Few Democrats, including the ones freely sharing their wisdom on Twitter, pioneered a genuinely new way of digital campaigning during the primary cycle, an entirely different enterprise than a general election campaign. “What worked in the primary is not what’s going to work in a general election,” Pfeiffer said. “Reaching Democratic primary voters is a very different proposition than reaching general election voters, with general election voters being persuadable voters and drop-off voters, not like, people who watch Rachel Maddow or go to a caucus.” Sanders expanded on the “distributed organizing” model he pioneered in 2016, empowering volunteers to lead voter-contact programs remotely through Google sheets, Slack, and virtual phone banks. Mike Bloomberg built a massive new voter file from scratch, called Hawkfish, and funded a creative team that understood meme culture as an actual language of the internet—but only because Bloomberg had a vast personal fortune to fiddle with. By March, though, Biden had defeated his tactically savvier rivals without even a whiff of a muscular digital or field program.
Biden can’t count on the same kind of scrappiness as he builds a national campaign. But it’s already becoming clear he isn’t. The campaign is in the process of doubling the size of its digital team, including the hire of BuzzFeed’s former director of video, and O’Malley Dillon announced last week the campaign is deploying 600 organizers to battleground states. Biden and the Democratic National Committee raised a combined $60.5 million in April—barely trailing the Trump campaign’s fundraising total in the same month. The campaign said they’ve outspent Trump on Facebook and Google since March. Along with organizing Facebook groups and subreddits, they’re also building a “Content Creators Corps” and say they’re organizing Biden influencers into something called “the Soul Squad,” a gesture to Biden’s hazy message of “restoring the soul” of America even if it sounds like a Spinners cover band. They’re launching a new livestream platform, called BrandLive, so Biden and surrogates can host sign-in-based live events, with supporters having the ability to start watch parties and chat privately with their friends. O’Malley Dillon will begin to release weekly video updates for supporters, akin to the popular videos released regularly by Obama advisers Jim Messina and Stephanie Cutter during the 2012 campaign. Biden’s website and logo are also undergoing a redesign. Most of these updates are tactical moves, important but not decisive. What’s the bigger strategy to reach voters? Flaherty, who worked on the Clinton campaign in 2016, said the biggest change he’s seen online in the four years since is the “smallification” of the internet, a shift from broadcast-oriented nature of social media to a more inward-facing experience, where peer-to-peer influence in text threads and Facebook groups carry immense political weight. In other words, you trust your friends more than the media, a politician, or any paid advertisement. That’s precisely what has Obama worried: a funny meme or TikTok mocking Biden, sent to you by a friend, isn’t just more powerful than any TV ad, it’s also far more likely to include disinformation or outright lies.
What works for Joe, in many ways, is not what works for political insiders who, time and time again in the Trump era, have failed to grasp what resonates with the people Democrats need to win: persuadable and drop-off voters, not just the highly engaged. Biden aides, current and former, like to point to the time he went on Jay Leno’s Garage and drove his 1967 Corvette Stingray, as the kind of format that works perfectly for Biden. Lame? Sure, if you’re a millennial who spends all day on Twitter debating Alison Roman’s shallot pasta. But you’re not a target voter. A 55-year-old man in Georgia who likes vintage cars might be. Biden needs to shore up his support among younger voters and Hispanics, but his coalition in the primary strongly overlaps with the kinds of voters he needs to beat Trump: black voters and white suburbanites with a college degree, especially women and people over the age of 40 who actually go to the polls. “When you look on Facebook, the plurality viewer of videos from our page on Facebook is a 65-year-old woman. Those are people who vote too. Those are people who share our content and engage with our content and love our shit,” said Flaherty. The Biden campaign—and Biden himself—takes special glee in pointing out that those voters, like the overwhelming majority of the U.S. population, are not on Twitter and not taking their cultural cues from the Times Style Section. “A lot of Joe Biden’s strengths are often dismissed by the Washington Beltway elite group that is on Twitter and is very online,” said TJ Ducklo, Biden’s press secretary. “Look at that moment he had during a CNN Town Hall in South Carolina with the pastor, sharing a moment of grief. A lot of people vote on those kinds of feelings. [Compassion], empathy. That speaks to people in a way that is often underestimated and dismissed by the Beltway. Joe Biden knows what suffering is like. He knows what a lot of people in the country are going through. And that resonates with people in a way that I think Twitter, or writers for certain woke online publications, don’t necessarily respect or understand the power of.” Twitter has only two gears: cynicism and outrage. Those sentiments have infected prestige journalism, detaching it from much of the country’s daily information experience and emotional touchpoints. The media spaces occupied by journalists and pundits often feel immune to what Bengtson called Biden’s “superpower”—“relating to people, being warm, and caring about people.”
I first wrote about the Biden campaign’s preoccupation with “empathy moms” in early March, as Biden was cleaning up on Super Tuesday. They are the suburban women the campaign is targeting on Facebook who have been the surge voters in every election since Trump took office, powering Democratic victories in race after race. In the campaign’s telling, they identify with Biden’s tragic family story, his vulnerability, and raw emotion, and yes, the fact that he was Obama’s wingman for eight years. They are black and white. But they aren’t necessarily swiping and sharing on the hottest new platforms, or watching the same prestige dramas as the elites who have been throwing darts at Biden from the outset. Nor are they only on Facebook. Obama understood that even as he won critical acclaim for doing things like Spotify playlists and appearing on Between Two Ferns, he also needed to advertise on bus stop benches in Cleveland and Hispanic radio in Miami-Dade, to talk to people who aren’t dialed in to politics every second of every day. “Putting Biden on something like The View, black radio shows, daytime mom shows…. They have massive daytime audiences, and just because it’s not what the Twitter peanut gallery watches, doesn’t mean it’s not valid,” Bengtson told me. Biden is doing local television in battleground states almost every day, but almost one in Washington sees it.
----- ----- ----- ----- -----
Jason Goldman, the former tech executive who ran Obama’s Office of Digital Strategy in the White House, recently wrote on Medium that Biden’s political strengths don’t run easily through the currents of the internet. “Vice President Biden has not valued or used his own online channels as his primary means of reaching people during the campaign,” he wrote. “Trump’s online presence is intrinsically tied to not just his communications strategy but his identity as a politician. The Biden campaign won’t catch the Trump juggernaut, and, yes, progress can be made, but why accept a scoreboard you can’t win?” he wrote. Goldman’s advice—more advice!—was not to Do More Internet. “Good digital strategy is not about having clever people who have smart ideas about how to make things go viral online,” he said. “That’s fun too. But ultimately it doesn’t really matter if you get out the well-timed dunk tweet. The number of retweets doesn’t matter. The number of followers doesn’t matter.” Goldman’s advice was simply to embrace Biden’s strengths—“his empathy, his ability to console, his proven ability to lead”—and push them out relentlessly through as many channels as possible, to use analytics to reach as many segmented audiences as possible. You can tweak the content, use a surrogate, clip a local news segment and repurpose it elsewhere, he said. But never stray from what’s most important: Biden’s core brand.
Ever since Obama’s first victory in 2008, the Democratic Party abided by a mythology that it was the party of innovation, of digital and data, a myth that became a burden as elections from 2010 to 2014 to 2016 demonstrated that tactics were no match for raw emotion and political waves. I’ve covered the digital side of political campaigns since 2006, and not once has an operative been able to prove that machinery made the decisive difference in a campaign, House, Senate, presidential, or otherwise. Even in 2008, Obama won in a political landslide, fueled by economic upheaval and a hunger for change, not because he had the best digital team or the most sophisticated field ops. Fundraising and machinery are lifeblood of political campaigns, but if they work, they are an outgrowth of a candidate’s persona and vision, not an end in themselves. Unlike the early Obama era, much of the Democratic tech infrastructure today exists outside the cauldron of boom-and-bust campaign cycle, owned by private companies like MobilizeAmerica, Outvote, and Avalanche Strategy and funded by accelerators like Higher Ground Labs. Any campaign, from a mayoral to a presidential, can use these platforms to text, poll, connect with organizers, or raise money. After Democrats lost in 2016, Guy Cecil, the chief strategist for the super PAC Priorities USA, memorably told me that “Democrats have micro-targeted ourselves into oblivion,” prizing the science of campaigns above the gut instincts and human texture of politics. If Democrats win in November, it won’t be because they optimized their digital tool kit or did a TikTok or modeled a thousand different voter universes out of large-scale data surveys. They’ll win because they did those things with a nominee whose message was right for the moment, a politician who has always held faith in the idea that emotional connection is a more powerful political weapon than any poll, product, or script of code.
___________________________
The gunman who killed three U.S. sailors at a military base in Florida last year repeatedly communicated with al-Qaida operatives about planning and tactics in the months leading up to the attack, U.S. officials said Monday, as they lashed out at Apple for failing to help them open the shooter’s phones so they could access key evidence. Law enforcement officials discovered contacts between Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani and operatives of al-Qaida after FBI technicians succeeded in breaking into two cellphones that had previously been locked and that the shooter, a Saudi Air Force officer, had tried to destroy before he was killed by law enforcement.
https://apnews.com/934b704a5906e86452319a3bb174dc0c
FBI director Chris Wray said the months-long delay in accessing the phone was a costly setback for the investigation since, without the devices, agents didn’t have a full picture of what to ask about or look for.
Trumps Still on the Hook for Promoting Pyramid Scheme
https://www.courthousenews.com/trumps-still-on-the-hook-for-promoting-pyramid-scheme/
He is a pathological liar. Get a medical professional to hand him an actual real hydro pill and tell Trump to take it. See how fast runs from the room.
40 years ago today, Ian Curtis, Joy Division's frontman, left us. He was 23 years old.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhEm4S-4v_U
Nancy Pelosi: 'Morbidly obese' Trump shouldn't be taking hydroxychloroquine
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/may/18/nancy-pelosi-donald-trump-morbidly-obese-shouldnt-/
Here’s the video — I can’t stop watching this.
https://twitter.com/aravosis/status/1262546619704147971
Live shot of Pelosi
https://twitter.com/AOTPRadio/status/1262550193758777344
Welcome to the girther movement, Speaker Pelosi. We must demand to see his girth certificate! Will he ever release his long form KFC receipt?: He’s our president and I would rather he not be taking something that has not been approved by the scientists, especially in his age group and in his, shall we say, weight group, morbidly obese, they say. So, I think it’s not a good idea.
https://twitter.com/AC360/status/1262548699051364354
Fuck the Republican Party from its voter on the street to the leader of
its party for being evil fuckers. Never vote Republican ever again and
make sure to shun Republicans whenever you suspect they exist. Do not
repeat Republican talking points, no matter how trustworthy the person
repeating them is and never EVER EVER do anything that advances the
interests of the Republican Party. All American policy should be decided
by non-Republicans and its your duty and privilege to make that happen.
Air pollution in China has already bounced back from astounding lows during the country's coronavirus shutdown to monthly levels exceeding those recorded during the same period last year
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-china-lockdown-over-air-pollution-already-spiking-industry-dirty-economic-rebound/
"He's morbidly obese...as they say": she's using Trump's language ("as they say") to speak directly to him
There is no way he’s taking it, he's a compulsive liar and will say anything to protect his ego and bank account. Good thing he isn't taking it. By saying he was, you know he isn't.
Release the long form BMI results.....
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo openly admitted Monday that he asked Trump to fire the State Department inspector general - an official who is supposed to be independent from political influence - because he refused to stop investigating Trump's and Pompeo's crimes. IG Steve Linick was reportedly investigating at least two State Department matters, including whether Trump violated the law with his emergency declaration last year approving billions of dollars in U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia, which Pompeo approved. Linick was "in the final stages" of the probe when Trump announced his firing on Friday, the New York Times reported. The IG was also looking into whether Pompeo unlawfully required a State Department staffer to perform personal errands, such as walking Pompeo's dog and picking up his dry cleaning. Pompeo idiotically said he was not aware that he was under investigation when he requested that Trump fire Linick: it's a lie that Pompeo would not know about an IG investigation *of himself* until “24 to 48 hours” before it’s done because the target of an investigation would be notified and interviewed either right before the investigation started or right when it began.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/pompeo-says-he-didnt-know-fired-inspector-general-was-investigating-him/2020/05/18/3ab08dca-9923-11ea-b60c-3be060a4f8e1_story.html
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/05/18/ousted-inspector-general-was-also-probing-possible-illegal-pompeo-trump-effort-force
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/05/16/slow-moving-coup-outrage-after-trump-quietly-fires-state-department-inspector
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/18/us/politics/pompeo-trump-linick-inspector-general-firing.html
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/05/18/more-naked-corruption-inspector-general-ousted-trump-was-investigating-whether
All Michigan voters will get absentee ballot applications at home
https://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/05/19/all-michigan-voters-get-absentee-ballot-applications-in-mail/5218266002/
Trump is refusing to unveil Obama's portrait at the White House, breaking a 40-year tradition
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-refusing-to-unveil-obama-portrait-at-the-white-house-2020-5
The state of Georgia was supposed to hold an election Tuesday to fill a seat on the state Supreme Court. Justice Keith Blackwell, a Republican whose six-year term expires on the last day of this year, did not plan to run for reelection. The election, between former Democratic Rep. John Barrow and former Republican state lawmaker Beth Beskin, would determine who would fill Blackwell’s seat. But then something weird happened: Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and the state’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, canceled Tuesday’s election. Instead, Kemp will appoint Blackwell’s successor, and that successor will serve for at least two years — ensuring the seat will remain in Republican hands. On May 14, the state Supreme Court handed down a decision that effectively blessed this scheme to keep Blackwell’s seat in the GOP’s hands. The court’s decision in Barrow v. Raffensperger is unusual in many regards — among other things, six of the state’s regular Supreme Court justices recused from the case, and they were replaced by five lower court judges who sat temporarily on the state’s highest court. The court’s decision in Barrow turns upon poorly drafted language in the state constitution, which does suggest that Blackwell, Kemp, and Raffensperger’s scheme was legal.
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/19/21262376/georgia-republicans-cancel-election-state-supreme-court-barrow-kemp-blackwell
https://www.gasupreme.us/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/s20a1029.pdf
https://www.ajc.com/news/local/georgia-supreme-court-kemp-can-appoint-justice-blackwell-successor/UrF91MCmfGkELsbhSO8jfK/
If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy. - David Frum
This administration is lead by a criminal president who extorted Ukraine with tax payer money to investigate a political opponent, who obstructed justice 10 times according to the Mueller report, who was labeled as "Individiual-1" and committed campaign finance felonies with Michael Cohen, and who committed tax fraud according to the NYT.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html
In addition, these are the other criminals that were hired or affiliated with this president:
- His National Security Advisor pled guilty twice
- His campaign chairman was convicted on 8 counts. 10 counts were a mistrial. A Trump supporter on the jury, Paula Duncan, convicted Manafort on all 18 counts.
- His deputy campaign chairman, Rick Gates, pled guilty
- His personal lawyer pled guilty
- His foreign policy advisor on his campaign has pled guilty
- His long time advisor and associate, Mr Stone, was found guilty on 7 counts
It’s a criminal administration led by a president that has already committed multiple felonies himself.
➡️ "The Maryland Department of Health reported 1,784 newly confirmed COVID-19 cases Tuesday, setting a new high mark just four days after the state began reopening its economy."
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/19/858837518/maryland-reports-largest-rise-yet-in-coronavirus-cases-4-days-after-reopening
Gee, why would anyone think Trump is a racist.....THREE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE CITATIONS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Donald_Trump
Mary Poppins would probably call him a super callous fragile racist sexist classless POTUS.
A deadly attack at a Toronto erotic massage parlour three months ago is now being treated as an act of terrorism after police allegedly uncovered evidence it was inspired by misogynist incel ideology.
https://globalnews.ca/news/6910670/toronto-spa-terrorism-incel/
Canada accelerates its deforestation beyond replacement rate, with 40,000 football fields of boreal forest logged every year in Ontario alone
http://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/canada-under-reporting-deforestation-amp-carbon-impacts-by-forestry-826007673.html
A Georgia church closes two weeks after reopening as families come down with coronavirus.
https://www.christianpost.com/news/georgia-church-closes-two-weeks-after-reopening-as-families-come-down-with-coronavirus-236899/
Barber Defied Rules and Cut Hair From Home. Now He Has the Virus. | The barber in Kingston, N.Y., is under investigation for giving haircuts during the shutdown. He lashed out at Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, saying, “Is he going to feed my family?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/nyregion/barber-virus-kingston-ny.html
On the flip side, there was never any chance of Trumo doing the Obama portrait ceremon) graciously. Can you imagine if he had shown up? 20 minute speech about Obamagate, to Obama's face, infront of the portrait. Really, I think we got the best case scenario with him just not showing up. I don't think anyone, anywhere in the world, gets told "Trump isn't coming," and isn't happy about it.
The Fairness Doctrine: every study shows that you will only see what you want and disregard what you don’t. It's unconstitutional and moot.
Ford Motor is backpedaling from a policy that every visitor to its factories wear masks ahead of Trump’s tour of a plant that it converted to a ventilator-making facility
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-19/ford-says-trump-will-be-expected-to-wear-a-mask-on-plant-tour
Texas Federal Court holds that any voters who fears COVID-19 transmission must be allowed to vote absentee. Best quote from a great opinion.
https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1262870235327102981
Here is @GovRonDeSantis walking out on his own press conference after questions about forced resignation of #COVID19 tracker & blaming unemployed for unemployment claims crisis. Reporter (@Fineout): "The Governor is a Yale lawyer, I thought he could answer his own questions."
https://twitter.com/KevinCate/status/1262865575044362246
Trump and Republicans today ILLEGALLY fired Inspector General Mitch Behm, who has 17 years of experience with OIG, who was investigating Mitch McConell's criminal scumbag wife Elaine Chao, whom has been under investigation for 3+ years now for using her position for personal financial gain (she gained hundreds of millions of dollars in loans for her father's company), insider trading, illegally redirecting aid to her husband's "special projects", repeatedly violating the Hatch Act, etc.
https://www.citizensforethics.org/trump-removed-watchdog-investigating-elaine-chao-mcconnell-vetted-replacement/
https://www.citizensforethics.org/elaine-chao-mitch-mcconnell-inspector-general/
Nationwide, covid hospitalizations are largely flat in the past week after showing a sustained decline in the prior two weeks.
https://twitter.com/ScottGottliebMD/status/1262897869822058503
What Happened to Kroger’s “Hero Pay”? Workers at the grocery chain are being asked to return emergency pay or face legal action, even as company revenue and stock prices climb upward.
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/what-happened-to-krogers-hero-pay
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EYVV6v0WAAgXuGg.jpg
Oregon State Primary Election Results 2020, All Mail-In Ballots
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/19/us/elections/results-oregon-primary-elections.html
“My fingernails are breaking, I’ve got hangnails, I’ve been getting my nails done for 14 years … I’m very much into yoga, I can’t go to my Bikram yoga studios, I can’t go get my eyelashes done...”
https://www.brooklynpaper.com/williamsburg-anti-lockdown-protest/
The NYT has decided it's a better use of its media critic's time to critique a single MeToo reporter (in some cases, for things that didn't make it to print), rather than focusing on why the NYT is treating ObamaGate as if it's a thing.
https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1262720178116333569
Pompeo, who said he had no idea he was under investigation when he asked Trump to fire IG Steve Linick, Declined Interview Request From Inspector General About Saudi Arms Sales
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/19/us/politics/mike-pompeo-state-department-inspector-general-saudi-arabi.html
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