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babylonsister

babylonsister's Journal
babylonsister's Journal
May 26, 2020

Jaime Harrison Wants You To Watch Him Win

https://www.essence.com/feature/jaime-harrison-south-carolina-senate-race-lindsey-graham/

Jaime Harrison Wants You To Watch Him Win
By Tanya A. Christian · May 26, 2020
The Democratic candidate running to unseat Lindsey Graham is ready to send the three-time Republican incumbent packing.


“I’m Jaime Harrison and I’m running for the United States Senate here in South Carolina.”

When I sat down with Harrison, the 44-year-old Democrat looking to replace Lindsey Graham in the United States Senate, it’s obvious he’s spent some time perfecting his pitch — at least I’m sold. As quickly as he states his name for the camera I’ve brought in to capture our exchange, he begins to explain why he’s so vested in defeating his three-term Republican incumbent and the long-serving member in Congress who, as of late, is less known for his stance on a strong national defense than he is for doing a complete 180 on his feelings toward Donald Trump.

Posturing ourselves at a quiet table on King Street in Charleston, South Carolina, Harrison shares with ESSENCE that Graham’s decision to put his relationship with the impeached president over his commitment to his constituents is exactly why he decided to enter the race. “Lindsey Graham is just rolling over to do whatever Donald Trump wants,” Harrison chides. “I’m going to give him an opportunity to be a full-time pundit on Fox News while I go to Washington, DC and do the work of the people.”

Though the nature of politics requires that Harrison point out his competitor’s flaws, he graciously admits that the former South Carolina Congressman wasn’t always that way. “I like to say there are two Lindsey Graham’s; there’s Lindsey Graham 1.0 and 2.0. Lindsey Graham. The 1.0 version used to get support from Democrats and Independents and Republicans” Harrison asserts, laying the groundwork for the reasoning as to why he’s attempting to win in a deep red state. “This new Lindsey Graham is not getting that type of support. And it’s because people want to send him home. They are tired of the pandering.”

Though the former Congressional aide to House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn is clear about why Graham should no longer remain on Capitol Hill, he’s even more clear on why he’s the best person to fight for South Carolina. Harrison is a native of Orangeburg, the son of a teen mom who was raised by working-class grandparents and understands all too well the struggles of rural Americans. But beyond that, he’s in love with the state that reared him, developed his passion for people and then called him back home to help serve its interests.

snip//

“They told me I couldn’t go to law school, and I went to Georgetown. They told me I would just be a regular staffer on Capitol Hill and I ended up being one of the top ones there. Right now they’re saying, once again, ‘You can’t win in the United States Senate.’ And I’m telling them — watch me.”
May 26, 2020

S.E. Cupp: How Trump haunts the dead: Our terrible president's awful habit of attacking people...

https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-how-trump-haunts-the-dead-20200526-o453ynqe6zcbhdb53tu5xncq7y-story.html

How Trump haunts the dead: Our terrible president’s awful habit of attacking people who can’t defend themselves
By S.E. Cupp
New York Daily News |
May 26, 2020 | 12:01 PM


“Punch up, not down.” Whether in comedy or politics, the consensus precept has provided helpful parameters in which to acceptably swing at rivals or targets. The idea is, pick on someone your own size.

I can think of no better — meaning worse — example of punching down than one of the most powerful men on the planet picking on the dead and harassing their surviving family members in the process. Even someone with just a modicum of decency and awareness of social mores would know better than to drag the deceased and their relatives through the muck for no good reason at all.

The president of the United States has neither decency nor awareness, quite obviously
. In the midst of a global pandemic that has nearly claimed 100,000 American lives, and over Memorial Day Weekend, when we’re meant to soberly honor our fallen soldiers, Donald Trump was tweeting deranged conspiracy theories about a cable news host and his former staffer.

snip//

Months after Democratic Rep. John Dingell died at 92, Trump joked at a rally in Dingell’s home state of Michigan that he might be “looking up” on the crowd — implying he was in hell, not heaven.

And of course, during the 2016 campaign, Trump publicly attacked the parents of a fallen soldier, Capt. Humayun Khan, who had been critical of the candidate’s anti-immigration proposals. Trump used anti-Muslim gender tropes to mock Khan’s father and mother. “If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say.”

While Sen. John McCain was dying from cancer, Trump continued his feud with his longtime rival. His eventual death did not put a moratorium on the attacks, with Trump petulantly complaining that he gave McCain “the funeral he wanted, and I didn’t get a thank you.”

Punching down — even at the dead — isn’t the mark of a strong, secure, courageous man. It’s the mark of a small, weak, insecure coward with no impulse control, compassion or common decency. That’s our president.
May 26, 2020

Pentagon watchdog sidelined by Trump resigns

34 mins ago - Politics & Policy
Pentagon watchdog sidelined by Trump resigns
Jacob Knutson


Glenn Fine, the Pentagon's principal deputy inspector general, submitted his resignation on Tuesday.

Why it matters: President Trump removed Fine as the Pentagon's acting inspector general in April 7 after a group of independent federal watchdogs selected him to lead the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, which was set up to oversee the rollout of the $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill.

The move effectively sidelined Fine from serving as chair of the panel, since the law only allows sitting inspectors general to fill the role.


The big picture: His ouster as the Defense Department's acting inspector general came amid Trump's continuing crackdown on inspectors general across his administration, including at the State Department, Department of Health and Human Services and the intelligence community.

Trump said in a press conference last week that he offered to fire any Obama-appointed inspector general.

more...

https://www.axios.com/pentagon-inspector-general-glenn-fine-c7e4037f-f360-4220-ab76-f9e93ab48739.html
May 26, 2020

Ocasio-Cortez challenger drops out of GOP primary


Ocasio-Cortez challenger drops out of GOP primary
By Rebecca Klar - 05/26/20 07:48 AM EDT



A Republican candidate seeking to challenge Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) dropped out of the congressional GOP primary race late Monday.

“I am very grateful to the constituents in NY-14 and citizens from across this great nation for their support and words of encouragement,” Scherie Murray, a Jamaican immigrant and businesswoman, said in a statement.

“As long as avowed socialists are legislators, you can rest assured I will use my platform to advocate for the kitchen table issues of the toughest, hardest working New Yorkers. This is not the end for Scherie Murray because I will continue to work hard,” she added.


Murray suspended her campaign just days after she had filed a lawsuit against a contractor for allegedly making errors while tasked with getting signatures on Murray’s behalf.

Her campaign said she faced “hurdles” including “a corrupt political establishment working to silence her.”

more...

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/499462-ocasio-cortez-challenger-drops-out-of-gop-primary
May 26, 2020

Seniors will make Donald Trump a one-term president

One man's opinion, but I like it!

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/499451-seniors-will-make-donald-trump-a-one-term-president


TheHill.com
Seniors will make Donald Trump a one-term president
By Kevin Walling, opinion contributor — 05/26/20 11:30 AM

snip//

Despite being a “senior citizen” himself, many Americans in the president’s age group have recently soured on him, especially in light of his administration’s response to COVID-19. Back in mid-March, Americans over 65 years old “approved of Trump’s handling of the outbreak at a higher rate than any other age group,” according to Morning Consult. Just a month later, that specific COVID-19 response approval rating dropped 20 points and is now lower than any other age group, except for 18 to 29-year-olds.

By a 6-to-1 margin in that same survey, older Americans say that government should prioritize the coronavirus health response and mitigation of the virus above the economic focus. This makes total sense when you consider that, of the more than 90,000 people in the United States who have succumbed to the disease, the vast majority of victims have been over the age of 65. Every day brings new stories from across the country detailing truly tragic conditions in America’s nursing homes, from Arkansas to Pennsylvania, Louisiana to Texas. In Minnesota, nursing homes have been the site of 81 percent of the state’s COVID-19 deaths.

snip//

Clearly these polls have spooked Trump’s White House and campaign teams. Earlier this month, the administration hosted an “Older Americans Month” proclamation event, hoping to showcase the president’s commitment to the nation’s seniors. In previous administrations, this kind of proclamation was just issued to the press without much fanfare.

While these kinds of events are strong in terms of optics and might provide some kind of short-term gain among senior voters, Trump will face a major challenge with winning these disaffected older Americans back to his column. With early predictions that the United States may face a second wave of Coronavirus infections in the Fall, the incumbent president will likely struggle again in terms of messaging and mounting a comprehensive federal response.

In 2020, President Trump will also have something else to grapple with for the first time in his political career: a record. Running as a businessman in 2016, without any political or governmental experience provided then-candidate Trump the luxury of not having to defend positions or policies. Trump’s FY 2021 federal budget released in February, before the real impacts of COVID-19 were being felt by Americans, already promised over $750 billion in cuts to Medicare and $844 billion in cuts to Medicaid over the next decade. There is no doubt the Biden campaign will make these drastic cuts to social safety net budgets — as well as Trump’s response to COVID-19 — a centerpiece of his message and media campaign come November.



Kevin Walling (@kevinpwalling) is a Democratic strategist, Vice President at HGCreative, co-founder of Celtic Strategies, and a regular guest on Fox News and Fox Business and Bloomberg TV and Radio.

May 26, 2020

WHO Warns First Wave Not Over

https://politicalwire.com/2020/05/26/who-warns-first-wave-not-over/

WHO Warns First Wave Not Over
May 26, 2020 at 6:27 am EDT By Taegan Goddard


“The risks of reigniting coronavirus outbreaks are complicating efforts to fend off further misery for the many millions who have lost jobs, with a top health expert warning that the world is still in the midst of a ‘first wave’ of the pandemic,” the AP reports.

Said WHO executive director Mike Ryan: “Right now, we’re not in the second wave. We’re right in the middle of the first wave globally. We’re still very much in a phase where the disease is actually on the way up,”
May 26, 2020

Florida Republicans Would 'Welcome' Convention

Oye!

https://politicalwire.com/2020/05/26/florida-republicans-would-welcome-convention/

Florida Republicans Would ‘Welcome’ Convention
May 26, 2020 at 6:08 am EDT By Taegan Goddard


Florida Republicans said they would “welcome” the Republican National Convention if President Trump makes good on a Twitter threat Monday to pull the party’s seminal political event from North Carolina, the Miami Herald reports.
May 25, 2020

Hundreds participate in, watch South Carolina boat parade in support of Trump



Hundreds participate in, watch South Carolina boat parade in support of Trump
By Aris Folley - 05/25/20 05:21 PM EDT


A boat parade held in support of President Trump in South Carolina over the Memorial Day weekend drew hundreds of boaters and viewers.

According to local CBS-affiliate WCSC, the event, dubbed the “MAGA” boat parade in reference to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan, was held in Charleston harbor on Sunday.

A Facebook page set up for the event said over 700 people indicated plans to attend the parade.

In footage of the event that has emerged online, scores of boaters, many whom were not wearing masks, could be seen sailing with “Trump 2020” flags. One boat had what appeared to be a life-size cut-out of the president.

Some boaters also held signs reading phrases like, “If we followed rules, we’d still be British. Liberty is essential.”


more...

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/499443-hundreds-participate-in-watch-south-carolina-boat-parade-in
May 25, 2020

Trump sees a 'rigged election' ahead. Democrats see a constitutional crisis in the making.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/25/donald-trump-rigged-election-talk-fears-274477


Trump sees a ‘rigged election’ ahead. Democrats see a constitutional crisis in the making.
The president’s increasingly amped-up rhetoric surrounding the integrity of the November elections has many wondering how he might respond to a defeat.
By DAVID SIDERS
05/25/2020 12:21 PM EDT


First he lit into Michigan and Nevada, threatening to withhold federal funding because of his assertion that both states were preparing to commit voter fraud through mail-in ballot applications. Then President Donald Trump followed up Sunday with two more broadly-worded warnings that November would be “the greatest Rigged Election in history.”

“The Democrats are trying to Rig the 2020 Election, plain and simple!” the president claimed.

Trump’s increasingly amped-up rhetoric surrounding the integrity of the November election is beginning to bring to center stage a previously muted conversation. With the president lagging behind Joe Biden in public opinion polls six months before the general election, his opponents are becoming increasingly anxious that Trump may attempt to undermine the results of the election if he loses — or worse, might attempt to cling to power regardless of the outcome.

"He is planting the seeds for delegitimizing the election if he loses," Vanita Gupta, a former head of DOJ’s civil rights division under President Barack Obama and now president of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said on Twitter on Sunday in reaction to Trump's "rigged election" claim. "It’s from the playbook. It’ll get more intense as he gets more freaked out."


snip//

“There’s a lot of people that need to do something to hold and implement the results of an election,” said David A. Super, a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center who has analyzed scenarios in which Trump could attempt to hold onto power. “None of them is named Donald J. Trump … There’s absolutely no authority for cancelling or overriding an election in the Constitution or in the statutes. And it would require the president to get multiple people to fairly blatantly disregard their oaths to uphold the Constitution.”

The concerns about Trump’s intentions are reminiscent to some Democrats of the anxiety they felt in the 1970s, when the net was closing around Richard Nixon and some feared he may not go easily.

The difference, said Les Francis, a former deputy White House chief of staff in the Carter administration, is that Nixon made an “institutional decision” to resign, while “one thing we know about Trump, for sure, is he’s not an institutionalist by any stretch of the imagination.”

“I don’t think there’s any depth to which he will not go,” Francis said. “I don’t think there are any rules that he thinks apply to him. As his behavior grows worse, I think people become more alarmed at the possibilities.”
May 25, 2020

"Each of those names was allowed half a sentence to describe them...."



Jacqueline Kamel
13 hrs


When I saw an image of this front page on the internet, I thought it was from 100 years ago.
And then I got my copy.

Every year on the date, the 3,000 victims of September 11th are read aloud at the World Trade Center.
It takes 3 hours. If we were to read the names of each person who has died of Covid-19 so far, it would take over 4 days, without stopping. It would cover each Sunday issue for over the next two years.

Today I read 1% of those names.
Each of those names was allowed half a sentence to describe them.
Half a sentence for a lifetime on the front page of The New York Times.

I picked out some of my favorites:

-“We called him the grand Poobah”

-her backyard birds ate right from her hand

-could fix almost anything

-first black woman to graduate Harvard Law school

-quick with his fists in the ring

-her will was indomitable

-he could spit a watermelon seed halfway across a double lot

-agent who turned on the CIA

-her favorite quote was ‘I am as good as you are, and as bad as I am’

-cancer survivor who lived as a deacon

-nothing delighted him more than picking up the bill

-saved 56 Jewish families from the Gestapo

-could be a real jokester

-thought it was important to know a person’s life story

-maestro of a steel-pan band

-saw friends at their worst and made them their best

-engineer behind the first 200mph stock car

-discovered his true calling when he started driving a school bus

-made the best Baklava ever

-emergency room doctor who died in his husband’s arms

-leader in integrating schools

-architect behind Boston’s City Hall

-shared his produce with food banks and neighbors

-family believed she would have lived the traditional Navajo lifespan of 102 years.

-loved his wife and said ‘yes dear’ a lot

-mother to a generation of AIDS patients

-worked long hard hours and still made time for everyone

-walked across the Golden Gate Bridge on opening day

-liked his bacon and hash browns crispy

-more adept than many knew

-would stay awake the whole night shift because she didn’t want anyone to die alone

-freed from life in prison

-her last words were ‘thank you’

.

Seven small towns I thought no one else had heard of.
Six women who reminded me of my mother.
Five people my age.
Four holocaust survivors.
Three 9/11 responders.
Two couples who died together.
One person I’ve met.
And a 5 year old girl.

They didn't get a funeral.
They didn't get to say goodbye.

I've been in my apartment for 71 days. I've cried four times.
Three of those times, was while I read this.

Have fun at your barbecue.



https://www.facebook.com/jackiekamel?__tn__=C-y.g&eid=ARAZOTzyQiSqWAyXXcykQM0JH33Ila-9CsXj7zFSf_Cun8WWV6P8bv-NUoccJ6Ua10l7aXbcTYvz0PlK&hc_ref=ARTm1mLNAZNgthvspt97e4pn5JoJFPecaMyBpD5nUsV5FXYgruKYmJvgDxoR8u9WL-c&fref=nf&__xts__[0]=68.ARAKr0LZU5Tq3eQu_vvGlIZsZHWNWhoYUh7yLAfGYfJs2jOmWDzRxo6CNk3xp5LTyyLSuuM_ba-2gz0zfnZd3oKKCW0PSpTzpPvlGUeVcvQuaIuVBIujHkBJMNBkEZ1XSxC3RfWI14RTiRhOHljoVgWyM1aafI2kzAT3HoGAGs0Eq1DOEKYM5cYmWt6g-TiC78vApWOoQnGW0Fv0nd92HyfOyc6KiGAHO09th4OCPFBH

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Hometown: NY
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Current location: Florida
Member since: Mon Sep 6, 2004, 09:54 PM
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