DL Open Thread: Saturday, August 7, 2021

Corrupt Postmaster General Steers $120 Mill Contract To His Former (And No Doubt, Future) Company:

DeJoy’s former company, the contractor XPO Logistics, will get that $120 million over the next five years and DeJoy could realize as much as $23.7 million from the company in the next decade. DeJoy and his family foundation, as well companies he controls, have divested somewhere between $65 million and $156 million in XPO shares, filings and tax documents show. But his family businesses still have ties to XPO in the form of four office buildings in North Carolina that they lease to the company. That’s where DeJoy will get those millions from in lease payments.

Seriously, how is this guy still the Postmaster General?  Here’s how. Bipartisanship fans, take note:

Ron Bloom, the chair of the board of governors and Trump’s only Democratic appointee, is sticking by DeJoy and this plan for who knows what reasons. “We do not and will not always agree,” Bloom said, but insists everyone “has the best interest of the Postal Service at heart.” He defended DeJoy’s 10-year plan, saying it “further embeds the Postal Service as a critical part of this nation’s infrastructure, providing reliable and affordable mail and package delivery to 161 million American households six and seven days a week.”

With Bloom backing DeJoy, there’s not much hope of stopping DeJoy from deploying his changes—or the preferred option of firing him and ridding the agency of his corrupt presence.

How RWNJ’s Came To Love Hungary’s Viktor Orban.  A must-read:

When the Hungarian prime minister announced in a July 2014 address to an audience in Bálványos that “the new state that we are building is an illiberal state, a nonliberal state,” his political project had already been in motion for four years. Following Orbán’s return to power in a landslide victory in 2010, Hungary has morphed into what the Hungarian political scientist András Körösényi has appropriately termed a Führerdemokratie, a strongman democracy, the “autocratic exercise of power within the confines of a democratic system.”

Bolstered by an electoral system that allowed him to turn, as was the case in 2018, 48.59 percent of the vote into 66.83 percent of the seats in the Hungarian parliament, Orbán has been able to use the levers of parliamentary democracy to consolidate control over the institutions of the Hungarian state.

Sound familiar?  More:

“I had dinner with Tucker (you know which one) last night in Budapest,” (RWNJ Rod)Dreher wrote in an American Conservative post published Wednesday. “We talked about why American conservatives should be interested in Hungary. We agreed that it is an example of a country where—unlike our own—conservatives have successfully fought against wokeness and other aspects of the liberal globalist agenda.”

The question is, can this movement succeed, or is it a death rattle for Trumpism? TBD.

Police Seek, And Get, Military Gear. Because They Can.  Will Biden change this disastrous policy?:

The documents reveal that hundreds of police departments across the country, in communities of all sizes, are willing to deploy armored vehicles to carry out even the most routine tasks: making traffic stops; serving search warrants; responding to domestic violence; responding to people threatening suicide.

In these requests, law enforcement officials predicted they would roll out these vehicles into their communities 10, 20, 40, 70, or more than 100 times a year, and in situations that are not automatically dangerous. The sheriff of Beaver County, Pennsylvania, went so far as to assert that a police officer could die serving a notice of a civil lawsuit — and so his agency ought to have two armored vehicles.