DL Open Thread: Saturday, October 12, 2024
Trump Comes Out For Full-Fledged Fascism. Not bothering to hide it:
Donald Trump wants to immediately invoke a more than 200-year-old wartime law that grants the president unilateral authority to deploy federal law enforcement for rounding up and deporting immigrants as soon as he enters office.
The former president, speaking from Aurora, Colorado on Friday, told supporters that he plans to revive the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which would give the president unprecedented ability to target foreigners for removal, without a hearing or due process, based solely on their place of birth or citizenship.
His “Operation Aurora” — named after the Colorado city he has denigrated as a “war zone” from “migrant crime” — would also dispatch “elite squads of ICE, border patrol, and federal law enforcement officers to hunt down, arrest, and deport every last illegal alien gang member until there is not a single one left in this country,” he said.
The law states that the president may order the arrests and removal of noncitizens during times of “declared war” or during an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” by “any foreign nation or government.”
Well, if he declares war against immigrants, I guess it’s a war, right? He’s normalizing fascism and the press is not calling him out on it.
Former Chair Of The Joint Chiefs Of Staff Calls Trump ‘Fascist To The Core’:
Mark Milley, the US Army general who Donald Trump appointed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, now says the current Republican presidential nominee is a “fascist to the core” and says no person has ever posed more of a danger to the United States than the man who served as the 45th President of the United States.
Rethugs Continue Politics of Disenfranchisement. Do I need to mention fascism again? Oh, I just did.
The Justice Department on Friday sued Virginia over a state program that prosecutors said systematically sought to remove people from voting rolls too close to the Nov. 5 elections and improperly included some citizens who are eligible to cast a ballot.
In Virginia, prosecutors say Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) signed an executive order in early August directing the state Elections Department to make daily updates to state voter rolls. The process included comparing lists of people identified as noncitizens by the Department of Motor Vehicles to lists of people who had registered to vote.
According to the federal lawsuit, the program, which continued at least until late last month, violated a federal law restricting local jurisdictions from purging voter rolls within a 90-day “quiet period.” That statute exists, officials said, because such actions are often error-prone and can cause voter confusion with too little time to fix any mistakes or problems.
As early voting for the November election begins and Wisconsinites receive their absentee ballots, they have choices on how to return them. Mail them. Deliver them in person to the municipal clerk. Or, in some communities, deposit them in a drop box, typically located outside a municipal building, library, community center or fire station.
Though election experts say the choices are designed to make voting a simple act, the use of drop boxes has been anything but uncomplicated since the 2020 election, when receptacles in Wisconsin and around the country became flash points for baseless conspiracy theories of election fraud. A discredited, but popular, documentary — “2000 Mules” — linked them to ballot stuffing, while a backlash grew over nonprofit funding that helped clerks make voting easier through a variety of measures, including drop boxes.
With all that fuss in the background, Wisconsin’s conservative-leaning Supreme Court outlawed the boxes in 2022. But then this summer, with the court now controlled by liberals, justices ruled them lawful, determining that municipal clerks could offer secure drop boxes in their communities if they wished.
This year, four of Wisconsin’s largest cities are using drop boxes — Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay and Racine. But numerous locales that offered drop boxes in 2020, including Kenosha, the fourth-largest city in the state, have determined they will not this year.
Voters have been getting mixed messages from right-wing activists and politicians about whether to use drop boxes, as the GOP continues to sow distrust in elections while, at the same time, urging supporters to vote early — by any means.
…Wisconsin’s GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate, Eric Hovde, has urged citizen surveillance brigades to watch the boxes. “Who’s watching to see how many illegal ballots are being stuffed?” Hovde told supporters in July, according to a recording of his remarks obtained by The Washington Post. “Look, we’re probably going to have to have — make sure that there’s somebody standing by a drop box everywhere.”
‘Citizen Surveillance Brigades’. Sound innocuous to you? Sounds like voter intimidation to me.
Trump ‘Outsourced God To China’. You didn’t think the Trump bibles were published here, did you?
Tim Walz is the latest politician to tear into Donald Trump over his “God Bless The USA” Bibles.
During a rally in Michigan on Friday focused on American labor and manufacturing, the Minnesota governor and vice presidential candidate pointed out that Trump outsourced the production of his patriotic scripture to China.
“Trump had his branded Bibles printed in China. This dude will even outsource God,” Walz joked. “I don’t blame Trump for not noticing the ‘Made in China’ sticker. They put them on the inside, a part of the Bible that he’s never looked at.”
Possible Automation At Edgemoor Port Big Issue In Labor Negotiations. Karl Baker also sheds light on the secrecy surrounding how this proposal is being paid for:
In May, Gov. John Carney announced that he would pull $195 million out of a little-known pot of public money to fund about one third of the construction cost for the Edgemoor terminal.
With the announcement, state officials pledged that the new terminal would be a “green” facility that largely operates on electric, rather than internal combustion, power. They notably did not make similar pledges about automation.
A spokesman for the Port of Wilmington newest operator, Enstructure, did not return a call Monday seeking comment about the prospect of automation at Edgemoor.
Insights into how the private operator of Delaware’s taxpayer-owned port would seek to develop its future port are tough to come by. The concession agreement signed by Enstructure – obtained by Spotlight Delaware via a Freedom of Information Act request – only requires the company to hire all existing ILA employees at the time they took over the Port of Wilmington from Gulftainer.
A two-page section regarding the development of the future Port of Edgemoor is almost entirely redacted.
Yet another item for a legislative transparency agenda.
What do you want to talk about?
Fascism has a long history in America, and we will not be rid of it just by the end of Trump, as noted he and many others in the Republican party (Denial or not) are pro Fascism and would welcome the end of the constitution and democracy. Project 2025 is the culmination of what the Republicans have wanted for over 40 years.
Just remember that the entire reason we throw hundreds of millions into the port is so a few hundred people have jobs. That’s it. There’s no economic advantage to anyone shipping cargo to offload it in Wilmington instead of Philadelphia.
As always, it would be much cheaper to just give them the money and let them find other jobs. There are too many ports along the Delaware River now, and they spend billions competing with each other for no good reason – do Delaware’s brain-dead ruling class think they’re going to outspend Pennsylvania expanding the Philadelphia facilities?
To think that we’re going to keep paying people to do what machines can do instead is absurd. The machines will come anyway, and for the simplest of reasons – businesses can depreciate machines. They can’t depreciate hired labor.
While that may be true, that’s not how Carney, Bullock, et al, see it.
They couldn’t care less about a few hundred people having jobs. In fact, their vision almost certainly revolves around automation of the port. They really think that Wilmington can be a major player. Cut out of that discussion has been the public.
C’mon, there’s no chance of Wilmington ever being anything but a niche player, and Bullock is smart enough to know that even if Carney isn’t. I don’t buy that they’re deluded. Self-interested, maybe, and that includes keeping a key constituency happy. Closing the port would be treated as a disaster, so good money after bad it is.