"Democrats were denied a much needed spectacle in pivotal Wisconsin this week. Here’s why that matters" by Jess Bidgood Globe Staff, August 21, 2020
MILWAUKEE — The coronavirus pandemic left this city with only bits of what became a virtual convention at the Wisconsin Center, with the main sign of its physical presence a temporary black fence and shuttered streets cutting it off from the rest of the city — making the site seem more like a black hole than the big party Democrats once planned to boost their chances in this crucial battleground state.
“It almost makes you forget it’s an election year,” said Martha Collins, 41, on Thursday, ruing how the same health crisis that pared back an on-site convention has made many physical hallmarks of campaign season — canvassers going door to door, volunteers venturing to community gatherings or college campuses to register voters — vanish as well.
“What makes me terrified and concerned,” Collins said, “is that people won’t turn out to vote.”
Not only that, after the whole week was over it was revealed that the traditional bounce the nominees get actually went to Trump! The polls have tightened after that dysfunctional display they put on. It was all identity politics and not geared to the average citizen, whatever color, creed, or gender they be, and was a real turn off!
Long before the virus forced both parties to ditch elaborate, in-person conventions due to safety concerns, Democrats decided to bring their quadrennial celebration to Milwaukee in an effort to win back Wisconsin and to demonstrate their commitment to a city where voters of color could be the key to that victory. Donald Trump won the state by fewer than 23,000 votes after Hillary Clinton failed to campaign there in person.
Even if Biden shows up there I still think Trump holds Wisconsin, and likely flips Minnesota after what has happened in Minneapolis.
Recent polls show Democratic nominee Joe Biden with a small lead, but even as Democrats here sought to rev up voters, the week underscored the strangeness and risk of a campaign season destined to unfold largely virtually. It left some of the very Democratic voters the party was trying to target by coming here wanting more and anxious about the possibility of another Election Day loss, even as they acknowledged the necessity of scaling down.
“It does not feel like there is a convention going on a couple blocks down,” said Angelo Bruscato, 21, as he looked up from a book on American foreign policy at Marquette University on Thursday morning. He expressed surprise that he hadn’t spotted any kind of in-person presence at the school from the Biden campaign or other Democrats. Democrats say they are fiercely competing for this state, and that they have replaced in-person campaign events, organizing, and the convention with a vast virtual operation.
Then they can have a virtual presidency if they declare victory and leave the rest ion us alone!
Their strategy is different from Trump’s, who campaigned in the state this week and whose supporters have resumed knocking on doors, but Democrats believe voters will ultimately reward them for their caution and willingness to move the convention and most campaign organizing operations online.
Then they are delusional!
Just as someone from a campaign calling voters on the phone is more effective than not, showing up in person and socializing is far more effective at winning people over.
“It wasn’t what we thought it would be, but none of this year was what anybody thought it would be,” said Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes to about 500 viewers during a virtual event for Wisconsin Democrats before the final night of the convention on Thursday. “We’re going to have to be creative, we’re going to have to be innovative, we’re going to have to continue to build power in the safest way, however possible.”
Too bad politics is an old-style, retail type of business!
Democrats in Wisconsin say they have already hit the ground running with extensive digital organizing, in part because the presidential primary on April 7 — held in the early days of the pandemic after Republicans opposed Democrats’ efforts to move it — forced them to adapt.
Digital is like trying to occupy a country from the air, and has that ever worked?
You eventually need boots on the ground, no?
“It’s about calling and texting and reaching out through social media and contacting people where they are, which is generally at home,” said Ben Wikler, the chair of the state Democratic Party. The party has beefed up its organizing staff over the past year and is working closely with the Biden campaign, which did not announce its key staff hires in the state until the end of June.
Well, WhereTF else they going to be after all your lockdowns, and with all due respect, the call will be resented.
Now that the Chump change checks are no longer coming, people will blame the campaign at the other end of the line!
The Biden campaign has organized numerous virtual events designed to convene the same groups of local Democrats who might once have gathered in a high school cafeteria or a union hall and mobilized volunteers who recently made hundreds of thousands of calls in a single weekend. Biden himself has appeared at virtual events for this state’s voters, and the campaign is advertising in all five of the state’s media markets.
They will be sick of him by election day.
Still, the scene in Milwaukee this week, which unfolded under five days of pristine blue skies, was nothing like what they had first planned. Major Goolsby’s, a sports bar right by the Wisconsin Center, reopened after months of pandemic closure in the hopes that its prime spot might bring in some business. A chalkboard outside hinted at the fading hopes. “Welcome DNC! Media! Protesters! If you’re here, we love you!”
There were just two customers drinking Miller High Life on the patio Monday evening — and they were using FaceTime to show another friend how empty everything was.
“This was a night where there was supposed to be an electricity, an energy in the city,” said Kirby Wachniak, 57, the bar manager, whose shift for the following day had already been cut because of the lack of a crowd. “It’s no one’s fault, it’s just the state of where we’re at right now.”
It's either Trump's or your governor's, take your pick.
Trump’s campaign has tried to use the Democrats’ absence to its advantage. As Wachniak worked his quiet bar, Trump touched down in Oshkosh, about 90 minutes northwest, for a campaign speech.
“This November, the voters of Wisconsin will not surrender their state to the radical left-wing mob,” Trump declared. “We’re going to win the state of Wisconsin and we’re going to win four more years.”
Democrats have been forced to adjust their strategies to win the state as the pandemic upended the well-laid plans that activists and elected officials had made to engage more voters in this city. After Trump’s victory, Angela Lang founded a group called Black Leaders Organizing for Communities, which sent canvassers into minority neighborhoods that were often passed over. The goal was to engage deeply with voters who were sometimes passed over by the Democratic party.
“Communities of color — we’re going to be the margin of victory,” she said.
Trump has more support among Blacks than any Republican president has had in over 50 years, and the chaos in the Democrat-run cities only helps him!
When the pandemic hit, she switched her 50 canvassers — people used to having long face-to-face conversations with voters and following up in person — to texting and phone banking. In the two weeks before the state primary in August, her group made 35,000 phone calls and sent over 85,000 text messages, but she knows her canvassers are yearning to return to the field.
Another group called Leaders Igniting Transformation, a civic engagement program aimed at youth, would normally be registering voters on college campuses now — sometimes with the help of a dairy cow they bring along. Instead, they are running digital training and considering using location-based programs to send text messages to college students’ phones.
Edit, delete, won't be showing up at polls.
“We started off this year with an ambitious goal to knock 750,000 doors, and we’re not doing that anymore,” said Dakota Hall, the group’s executive director. “For us, it’s about putting safety first.”
Safety second, getting rid of Trump first!
Hall was alarmed by a Monday poll conducted for the Alliance for Youth Action that found 39 percent of “young swing-state progressives” had not been contacted by the Biden campaign in the past month.
“They need to step it up if they want young people in communities of color to be voting for them,” he said.....
Angela Montgomery is “fired up anyway because of Trump,” but who is she voting for?
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The police are literally above the lawmakers(?) despite the television coverage:
"As police overhaul bill lingers, unions flex their political muscles" by Milton J. Valencia Globe Staff, August 19, 2020
The mandate from community advocates, policy makers, and protesters who took to the streets earlier this summer was clear: It’s time for Massachusetts to pass comprehensive police reforms, but as a sweeping bill that would do just that lingers on Beacon Hill, the state’s historically powerful police unions are flexing their political clout, launching a forceful lobbying movement that has now made the outcome of the reform effort anything but clear.
Not only that, they will all be voting Trump this time.
Union members — from big cities such as Boston and Worcester, and even those representing the smallest suburbs — have marshaled resources and voiced their opposition to the two versions of the bill passed by the House and Senate. They’ve hosted “Back the Blue” rallies, embarked on social media campaigns, sent mailings, and taken out ads to squash what is in their view an anti-police sentiment taking hold in their communities. One union even took its case to the White House.
The Globe obviously doesn't approve of this movement.
“The unions are sticking together, working very hard, and hopefully, we can curb some of this,” Scott Hovsepian, a Waltham officer who’s president of the Massachusetts Coalition of Police (MassCOP), told President Trump in a White House meeting two weeks ago. He said the unions were urging Governor Charlie Baker to “slow the process down.”
Community advocates and legislators say they expected opposition — unions have stalled policy changes before, but they also expressed worry that the unions’ political clout will derail efforts to push through long-awaited changes that both residents and police officers should be embracing. One legislator called the letter-writing campaign “bully-ish.”
Tell that to the city sackers and the bullying left, and this is the perfect time for you to stand up to them and set an example, right?
“Massachusetts lawmakers have the opportunity and responsibility to side with those demanding racial justice and police reform, and to stand against racism and bigotry,” said Carol Rose, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.
Why isn't the ACLJU filing lawsuits against the liberty destroying lockdowns?
The union published a full-page advertisement in The Boston Globe urging voters to contact their state representatives and senators and push for thoughtful legislation, saying legislators “are trying to rush a police bill that would harm, not reform, policing. It’s time to stand up for Boston’s finest . . . our officers are some of the best in the world,” the advertisement said. “Given these turbulent times, the last thing Massachusetts needs is hasty overreaction.”
The Globe has often claimed they are a model department for the world, and I'll bet they greedily took the adverti$ing loot.
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Of critical importance in November will be whom does the Black vote trust?
Related:
Georgia police investigating white officer using a stun gun on a Black woman
"At least two federal buildings in Portland have been closed and the FBI is investigating after a car bomb threat was made, officials said Friday. The threat, which was received Thursday, warned of the intention to use a car bomb to target federal property in Portland, according to two law enforcement officials. Investigators are trying to determine whether the threat is credible, the FBI said in a statement. Demonstrators have taken to the streets of Oregon’s largest city nightly since the May police killing of George Floyd and clashed repeatedly with federal agents dispatched to protect the courthouse. Protesters this week have focused their ire on the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Portland. People in a group of about 100 late Thursday and before dawn Friday sprayed the building with graffiti, hurled rocks and bottles at agents, and shined laser lights at them, Portland police said in a statement....."
Since when is a threatened car bomb not a threat?
No patsy set-up this time?
Sort of exposes the theater and illusion of the hand-in-glove effort between government and the leftists destroyers who are helping to advance the billionaire's Great Re$et.
S.C. athletes urge renaming of site named for Thurmond
They aren't protesting the theft of their careers via shutdown?
Bias cited as Fla. officer is removed from his position
He hated women and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
At least we know whom not to trust:
"At least 3 nations aim to influence US vote" by Shane Harris and Ellen Nakashima Washington Post, August 21, 2020
At least three, but maybe/probably more?
WASHINGTON — When the nation’s top intelligence officials last spoke publicly together, in January of last year, they said that foreign adversaries were eyeing the 2020 elections as an opportunity to launch ‘‘online influence operations’’ that seek to undermine public confidence in democratic institutions and influence public opinion in the United States.
As if the politicians and the Deep State hadn't and weren't doing enough of that.
They don't need any outside help, and why would they waste their time?
Now, the storm that the officials forecast in their annual 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment is bearing down on the final phase of the presidential campaign, according to US officials and experts.
At least three countries — Russia, China, and Iran — have taken aim at the campaigns themselves and tried to stir the passions of voters, with a mix of covert ‘‘information laundering’’ and some ham-handed propaganda.
Yes, enemies all!
I suppose they are only getting even for decades worth of f**king around in theirs!
Besides, the greatest purveyors of propaganda in world history are what I'm reading every morning!
Russia may pose the most direct challenge to this year’s election. Officials and experts also say it has reprised its 2016 seeding of social media with misleading content and is trying to amplify stories in the US press that cast former vice president Joe Biden in a negative light, officials and experts say.
Lord knows petto Joe doesn't need any help in that department.
An exhaustive bipartisan Senate report issued Tuesday revealed in disturbing detail the extensive web of contacts between Kremlin operatives and Trump campaign members in 2016 as Moscow attempted to sway the election in Trump’s favor, and noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally directed the hack-and-leak campaign aimed at damaging Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
They are a toxic poison on our $y$tem!
The truth is, the Senate report was a big nothing and the Putin directing a hack-and-leak campaign is a flat-out lie.
The now disappeared Assange has stated that the hack was a leak, and the guy that did it was later gunned down on a Washington D.C. street.
What this Deep State propaganda is doing is setting the stage for a contested election should Trump prevail in a landslide.
Russia may not have to work as hard this time to undermine voter confidence. On a near-daily basis, President Trump asserts, falsely, that mail-in voting is rife with fraud and insists that if he loses it will be the result of unprecedented corruption.
I resent the idea from the pre$$ that the American voter is an empty receptacle that will believe anything that is poured into it. That is obviously not true given the level of distrust for our lying, looting leaders and its mouthpiece media, and look who is hollering falsity when everyone knows Democrats plan to forge and bundle the mail-in ballots for those who are dead or don't vote.
In a recent broadside, Trump said he opposes election aid for states and an emergency bailout for the US Postal Service because he wants to restrict how many Americans can vote by mail.
The postal union is also pro-Biden.
A senior intelligence official said this week that his concern is potential interference efforts after Election Day when a surge in mail-in voting delays a final outcome. ‘‘We need to prepare as a nation that the election will not be decided on Nov. 3,’’ William Evanina, the top counterintelligence official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), said during an online session sponsored by the US Chamber of Commerce.
Talking to the all-important bu$ine$$ community so he must be telling the truth, thus adding more chaos to the coming winter.
‘‘I’m frankly more concerned about domestic players this time around,’’ said Bret Schafer, who studies disinformation at the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Should have been looking there all along.
Should have started with Comey's FBI!
ODNI has spoken to lawmakers and the campaigns on the landscape of threats and has provided nearly 20 classified briefings.
Officials familiar with the intelligence said that many of the techniques are familiar, but the persistence and pervasiveness of the foreign efforts is alarming, the officials said.
‘‘The warning lights are flashing red. America’s elections are under attack,’’ Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, wrote in a Washington Post editorial earlier this month.
By some more than others, right, Dick?
Ever notice people are their name?
On Aug. 7, Evanina publicly stated for the first time that Russia was using ‘‘a range of measures to primarily denigrate former vice president Biden and what it sees as an anti-Russia ‘establishment.’ ” China, meanwhile, wants ‘‘to shape the policy environment in the United States,’’ Evanina said, and has deployed more-rhetorical methods. China would prefer that Trump lose in November, finding him ‘‘unpredictable,’’ Evanina said, but the country hasn’t actively taken a side in the race.
HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!
Did he say that with a straight face and try to sell you a bridge?
Evanina described Iran’s efforts as undermining democratic institutions and Trump, but they appear aspirational compared to those of Russia and China. Iranian and Chinese hackers have attempted to penetrate the Gmail accounts of staffers for the Trump and Biden campaign, but there were no indications they were successful, Google announced in June, and it’s not clear that the efforts were preludes to a release of e-mails aimed at disrupting the campaign, as happened in 2016.
After the failure to hack Gmail and Facebook, they turned to Twitter where some of the biggest names in politics, entertainment and technology, including Joseph R. Biden Jr., Kanye West, Bill Gates and Elon Musk, appeared to have had their Twitter accounts hacked. Twitter later said the hack that compromised the accounts of some high-profile users targeted 130 people, and the affected world leaders, celebrities, and tech moguls appeared to be victims of a combination of financial incentive, technical bragging rights, challenge, and disruption, and a loosely organized group of serial fraudsters, but it still raised questions about Twitter’s ability to secure its service against election interference and misinformation even though Twitter reported a second straight quarter of record user growth as people joined the service for news and entertainment during the global coronavirus outbreak with the real $cam the billion dollar vaccine boondoggle that has the billionaires on the run.
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If Trump prevails, that world war will get off the ground, yay!
Thus, as the president prepares for the Republican National Convention next week, he has begun to brag about the core of his coming campaign: honoring heroic first-responders (hot enough without a mask) with a highly personal assault on Biden and his running mate who has an estranged father as the Deep State lines up with Biden.
Meanwhile, Democrats are preparing to release videos each day of the RNC, showing that they fail to learn from their biggest failures."
No ju$tu$, no peace!
"Authorities in Belarus detained a leader of striking factory workers and threatened demonstrators with criminal charges Friday in a bid to stop the massive post-election protests challenging the country's authoritarian president, who accused the United States of fomenting the unrest. Investigators also summoned several opposition activists for questioning as part of a criminal probe into a council they created with the goal of coordinating a transition of power for the ex-Soviet nation that President Alexander Lukashenko has ruled with an iron fist for 26 years. Protesters are demanding that Lukashenko resign, accusing him of stealing a sixth term in office by rigging the country's Aug. 9 presidential election. Many are fed up with sinking living standards and the lack of opportunities under Lukashenko, and their disgust grew deeper as he dismissed the coronavirus pandemic and refused to order a lockdown. The 65-year-old leader blamed the U.S. for instigating the protests that started on election night and intensified after officials declared him the winner with 80% of the vote. Lukashenko bluntly rejected Western offers to mediate between his government and the opposition, telling the U.S. and the EU to mind their own business. Belarus' Interior Ministry said Friday that Yevgeny Bokhvalov, who organized a strike at the huge Minsk Automobile Plant, was detained, but gave no further details....."
There are a lot more details at the Star Tribune source, and the U.S. plays no favorites when it comes to toppling governments they don't like:
"The military officer who declared himself in charge of Mali after leading a coup that ousted the West African nation's president this week received training from the United States, the Pentagon said Friday. Col. Assimi Goita, who emerged Thursday as the head of the junta in power, worked for years with U.S. Special Operations forces focused on fighting extremism in West Africa. He spoke regularly with U.S. troops and attended U.S.-led training exercises, said officers from both countries, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. Goita, who also received training from Germany and France, according to the officers, headed Mali’s special forces unit in the country’s restive central region, where fighters linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have established a stronghold that has alarmed global leaders. “By making this intervention, we have put Mali first,” Goita said in a broadcast Thursday alongside top government officials. “Mali is in a sociopolitical and security crisis. There is no more room for mistakes.”
Gone rogue or following orders?
I'm told, “the act of mutiny in Mali is strongly condemned and inconsistent with U.S. military training and education,” and that the Malian military will receive no more support from the United States until further review, but seeing as everything that comes out of that building is a damnable lie..... sigh.
DeJoy tells senators election mail will be delivered ‘fully and on time’
It will be net loss for Trump, but maybe a boost for Morse as long as they are hand-delivered(?).
A final love letter:
"Disgraced Hollywood film mogul and convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein is asking a bankruptcy judge in Delaware to allow him to pursue arbitration in New York over what he claims is his wrongful termination from the company he co-founded. An attorney for Weinstein submitted a court filing this week asking the judge who is presiding over The Weinstein Co. bankruptcy to lift the automatic stay that halts outside legal proceedings involving Chapter 11 debtors so he can pursue the arbitration case he filed in 2017. “Newly discovered information and facts, gleaned during the course of investigation and discovery in collateral matters, have yielded evidence that corroborates the wrongful termination claim that is subject of the arbitration,” Weinstein attorney Julia Klein wrote. Klein also said there has been no willful delay in seeking to lift the bankruptcy stay in order to proceed with the arbitration."
A picture is worth a thousand words!
Related:
Depraved Hollywood: pedophile actresses’ deleted tweets
Some male Hollywood pedophiles were outed in 2017-2018, and who is Antonio Gramsci?
