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Election Day Countdown: 2 Days, 2 Much 2 Go

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Guess who was coughing all day yesterday, to the point I had a sore throat?

However I’m not coughing today, didn’t run a temperature, so no idea if this is allergies, my autoimmune disorder, or an extremely light case of COVID.

The men in my household aren’t showing any symptoms so far, knock on wood.

Can’t rule out symptoms may show up at any time or get worse, though. Another one of my kid’s co-workers tested positive as did two customers who had close proximity to them.

It’s a small cluster. A tiny clusterfuck all thanks to that tangerine asshat in the White House.

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MAGAtroids are ramping up their terror attacks. Today they shut down the Garden State Parkway:

They also swamped the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge in New York City:

Trump supporters basically shut down two of the busiest highways in the New Jersey-New York area, and without advance notice or any permit. Thankfully no other terror attacks took place which might have required the intervention of state and federal law enforcement’s use of these roadways.

They also shut down Colorado state highway C-470 and northbound I-25, a federal highway:

And the media has once again failed to characterize this for what it is — terrorism designed to disrupt infrastructure with intent to interfere with normal operations including the conduct of the election.

This tweet nails it:

If the flags were black and white and covered with slogans in Arabic, Dari, or Pashto, perhaps the media would have a different perception of these events. But because the media is wired to see these as wholly political events and therefore expressions of free speech, they don’t call this terrorism.

No police showed up in either of these two states to force these “parades” to yield part of the roadway to regular traffic.

What exactly are police doing for public safety when, as in North Carolina, they spray teargas at and arrest participants of a march to get out the vote — including children and at least one journalist — because the police claim they were “blocking the roadway”? Yet New Jersey, New York, and Colorado didn’t use teargas or other irritants on participants intent on obstructing traffic.

One clue: note the race of the participants in these events.

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Axios reported earlier that Trump will declare himself the winner if it looks like he’s leading in the polls before the end of the evening on Election Day. Trump has since denied this but he then whined about ballots coming in later (as they always have) and about governors of Democratic persuasion overseeing the conduct of the vote.

Which of course is total bullshit and another means to interfere with the vote. Polls won’t be closed in California, Alaska, Hawaii for at least 3-5 hours after polls in Easter Time Zone, and in Alaska in particular Trump is polling behind Biden.

NPR’s Dominic Montanaro tweeted a thread (click on the link) explaining the vote won’t be final before midnight Eastern:

Historian Michael Beschloss puts it more simply:

Anything Donald Trump says on November 3 before midnight Eastern should be seen as electioneering at best and interference with/suppression of voting at worst. Any media outlet reporting what Trump says without caveats is aiding and abetting him in a “perception hack” meant to undermine our faith in the democratic process.

It’s bad enough that the major broadcast television networks carried this Trumpian scumbucket who propelled this same “perception hack.” What a bloody shame we have to reply on The Lincoln Project to call out this ethics-free chump:

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There are other signs Trump already knows this isn’t going to turn out well for him.

When we fire you, Trump, you’d best believe the eviction notice will be served and executed. We owe to the 231,000 Americans who died of COVID and the 3,000 Puerto Rican Americans who died from your deliberate neglect after Hurricane Maria to remove you, let alone the Americans who will die between now and your exit from the White House.

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Thank you for voting if you’ve voted. Please help others over the next 48 hours to get out the vote. Make sure you touch base with friends and family to ensure they are prepared to vote if they haven’t already.

Breaking Point: Media Finally Reporting on Violence Tied to Right Wing Extremism

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In April of Barack Obama’s first year in office, right wing America had a collective meltdown when the Department of Homeland Security dared to write a report (pdf) on right wing extremism and the domestic terrorists that could be tied to the movement. Michelle Malkin went into a full mouth froth, declaring that the report was an Obama DHS hit job on conservatives. ABC was quick to join in, documenting more of the responses of “conservatives”. Sadly, Obama and the DHS backed down meekly and the concept was quickly scrubbed from public debate.

But attacks carried out by the very types of right wing radicals described in the report have continued. The toll from these attacks appears to have gotten high enough that the media finally has found its voice again and is willing to document the carnage while connecting the dots. After the deadly shootings at a Jewish center in the Kansas City area in April of this year, Peter Bergen and David Sterman penned an op-ed piece carried by CNN. They dared title the piece “U.S. right wing extremists more deadly than jihadists” and produced documentation to back up their damning headline:

In fact, since 9/11 extremists affiliated with a variety of far-right wing ideologies, including white supremacists, anti-abortion extremists and anti-government militants, have killed more people in the United States than have extremists motivated by al Qaeda’s ideology. According to a count by the New America Foundation, right wing extremists have killed 34 people in the United States for political reasons since 9/11. (The total includes the latest shootings in Kansas, which are being classified as a hate crime).

By contrast, terrorists motivated by al Qaeda’s ideology have killed 21 people in the United States since 9/11.

With Sunday’s killing of two policemen and a “good guy with a gun” in Las Vegas by another pair of right wing extremists, Paul Waldman was able to take to the blog pages of the Washington Post to tie these violent attacks to the venom-filled rhetoric of the right:

But what I am saying is this: there are some particular features of conservative political rhetoric today that help create an atmosphere in which violence and terrorism can germinate.

The most obvious component is the fetishization of firearms and the constant warnings that government will soon be coming to take your guns. But that’s only part of it. Just as meaningful is the conspiracy theorizing that became utterly mainstream once Barack Obama took office. If you tuned into one of many national television and radio programs on the right, you heard over and over that Obama was imposing a totalitarian state upon us. You might hear that FEMA was building secret concentration camps (Glenn Beck, the propagator of that theory, later recanted it, though he has a long history of violent rhetoric), or that Obama is seeding the government with agents of the Muslim Brotherhood. You grandfather probably got an email offering proof that Obama is literally the antichrist.

Writing over at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Charles Blair brings us the sobering math on the recent growth of these radical groups: Read more →