Replies to post #351766 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[DrContango]

MY EARS ARE STILL RINGING
but the puking has stopped!


I tried to create a meme with this photo but my image editor would not allow me to use a smaller font size...

In President Trump’s America we light things up, we don’t dim them down. We build things up, we don’t burn them down. We kneel in prayer and we stand for our flag!”

“President Trump is the leader who will rebuild the promise of America and ensure that every citizen can realize their American dream!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “Ladies and gentlemen, leaders and fighters for freedom and liberty and the American dream, the best is yet to come!”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/kimberly-guilfoyle-shouts-unhinged-rnc-speech-at-the-top-of-her-lungs




Doc

[DrContango]

ABSENCE OF GOD AT DNC...

In watching some of the @DemConvention on TV, it's been interesting to see the absence of God. I don’t believe America’s finest hours will be in front of us if we take God out of gov't & public life. It's God who set the standards we're to live by. https://t.co/4acCbnbkUP

— Franklin Graham (@Franklin_Graham) August 21, 2020

Doc

[BOREALIS]

AP FACT CHECK: Trump, GOP distort on health care, vote fraud

By HOPE YEN, AMANDA SEITZ and CALVIN WOODWARD today

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump made a dizzying array of misleading claims about voting fraud and health care as fellow Republicans opened their convention with speeches distorting the agenda of his Democratic rival, Joe Biden. .. https://apnews.com/f54a020371addfa13b24027dec03007c

Trump falsely asserted that he was the one who ensured that people with preexisting medical problems will be covered by health insurance; actually that was Democratic President Barack Obama. Several speakers accused Biden of proposing to defund police, ban fracking, take over health care and open borders — none of that true.

A look at statements Monday at the Republican National Convention:

HEALTH CARE

TRUMP: “We protected your preexisting conditions. Very strongly protected preexisting ... and you don’t hear that.”

THE FACTS: You don’t hear it because it’s not true.

People with preexisting medical problems have health insurance protections because of Obama’s health care law, which Trump is trying to dismantle.

More Fact Checks:
– Can mosquitoes spread the coronavirus?
https://apnews.com/f97e764bd59304462c10e483036bef73

– AP FACT CHECK: Trump's baseless claim of 'deep state' at FDA
https://apnews.com/d976ab2b204ac14b220d5bf6dc565b2d

– AP FACT CHECK: What the Dems didn't say, and what Trump did
https://apnews.com/e86b701ff234ec507f8e4059547a680b

One of Trump’s alternatives to Obama’s law — short-term health insurance, already in place — doesn’t have to cover preexisting conditions. Another alternative is association health plans, which are oriented to small businesses and sole proprietors and do cover preexisting conditions.

Neither of the two alternatives appears to have made much difference in the market.

Meanwhile, Trump’s administration is pressing the Supreme Court for full repeal of the Obama-era law, including provisions that protect people with preexisting conditions from health insurance discrimination.

With “Obamacare” still in place, preexisting conditions continue to be covered by regular individual health insurance plans.

Insurers must take all applicants, regardless of medical history, and charge the same standard premiums to healthy people and those who are in poor health, or have a history of medical problems.

Before the Affordable Care Act, any insurer could deny coverage — or charge more — to anyone with a preexisting condition who was seeking to buy an individual policy.

Democratic attacks on Republican efforts to repeal the health law and weaken preexisting condition protections proved successful in the 2018 midterms, when Democrats won back control of the House.

___

VOTING FRAUD

TRUMP, on mail-in voting: “Absentee — like in Florida — absentee is good. But other than that, they’re very, very bad.”

THE FACTS: He’s making a false distinction. Mail-in ballots are cast in the same way as absentee mail ballots, with the same level of scrutiny such as signature verification in many states.

In more than 30 states and the District of Columbia, voters have a right to “no excuse” absentee voting. That means they can use mail-in ballots for any reason, regardless of whether a person is out of town or working.

In Florida, the Legislature in 2016 voted to change the wording of such balloting from “absentee” to “vote-by-mail” to make clear a voter can cast such ballots if they wish. So there is no “absentee” voting in that state, as Trump alludes to.

More broadly, voter fraud has proved exceedingly rare. The Brennan Center for Justice in 2017 ranked the risk of ballot fraud at 0.00004% to 0.0009%, based on studies of past elections.

Only nine states currently have plans for “universal” mail-in voting, where ballots are sent automatically to registered voters. Five of those states relied on mail-in ballots even before the coronavirus pandemic raised concerns about voting in person.

___

TRUMP, on the November vote count and Democrats: “We have to be very, very careful and this time they are trying to do it with the whole post office scam. They will blame it on the post office. You can see them setting it up.”

THE FACTS: No postal scam has emerged from the Democrats. Instead Trump has given credence to suspicions that he wants to suppress mail-in voting to help his chances in the election.

Full Coverage: AP Fact Check

He’s said as much. In an interview this month, .. https://apnews.com/14a2ceda724623604cc8d8e5ab9890ed .. he admitted he’s trying to starve the U.S. Postal Service of money in order to make it harder to process an expected surge of mail-in ballots, which he worries could cost him the election.

Trump explicitly noted funding provisions that Democrats are seeking in a relief package that has stalled on Capitol Hill. Without the additional money, he said, the Postal Service won’t have the resources to handle a flood of ballots from voters who are seeking to avoid polling places during the coronavirus pandemic.

“If we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money,” Trump told Fox Business Network. “That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting; they just can’t have it.”

Over the weekend, the House approved legislation that would reverse recent changes in postal operations and send $25 billion to shore up the agency before the November election, but the White House has said Trump would veto it.

During a House hearing, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy acknowledged that Trump’s repeated attacks on mail-in ballots are “not helpful,” but he denied that recent cuts were linked to the election.

___

TRUMP, on defective ballots in an election: “What does defective mean? It means fraud.”

THE FACTS: No, defective ballots do not equate to fraud. The overwhelming majority aren’t.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, the vast majority of ballots are disqualified because they arrive late, a particular worry this year because of recent U.S. Postal Service delays and an expected surge in mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic.

Ballots also are deemed defective if there is a missing signature — common with newer voters unfamiliar with the process — or it doesn’t match what’s on file. In addition, some states require absentee voters to get a witness or notary to sign their ballots.

“None of those are fraud,” said Wendy Weiser, director of Brennan’s democracy program at NYU School of Law. When suspected cases are investigated for potential fraud, studies have borne out the main reason for defects is voter mistake, she said.

Defective ballots also disproportionately impact voters of color, .. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/digging-georgia-primary .. and recent lawsuits have successfully challenged some requirements as posing health risks or disenfranchising voters. Earlier this year, for instance, a federal judge ruled that a South Carolina requirement to have witnesses to mail-in ballots could put voters’ health at risk and suspended it for the June primary. Others states including Minnesota and Rhode Island have also suspended that requirement due to the pandemic.

While the rates of defective ballots are unacceptable, “people should still feel confident in their votes, and they should follow-up,” Weiser said. “People should know these problems are being fought over and hopefully many will be mitigated and addressed before November.”

___

POLICE

REP. STEVE SCALISE of Louisiana on the police: “Joe Biden has embraced the left’s insane mission to defund them.”

THE FACTS: No, Biden has explicitly rejected the call by some on the left to defund the police. He has proposed more money for police, conditioned on improvements in their practices.

Biden’s criminal justice agenda, released long before the protests over racial injustice, proposes more federal money for “training that is needed to avert tragic, unjustifiable deaths” and hiring more officers to ensure that departments are racially and ethnically reflective of the populations they serve.

Specifically, he calls for a $300 million infusion into federal community policing grant programs. That’s more money, not less.

___

BIDEN AGENDA

NIKKI HALEY, former ambassador to the United Nations, on the Democrats: “They want a government takeover of health care. They want to ban fracking and kill millions of jobs.”

REP. JIM JORDAN of Ohio on the Democratic agenda: “Defund the police, defund border patrol and defund our military.”

RONNA McDANIEL, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee: “You deserve to know that they would ban fracking and eliminate fossil fuels, which would kill millions of good-paying jobs and raise the cost of driving our cars and heating our homes. You deserve to know that they want a complete government takeover of our health care system, so moms like me won’t be able to take our kids to the same pediatrician they’ve been seeing for years.”

THE FACTS: Those aren’t Biden’s positions. A number of Republican speakers seized on proposals of the Democratic left, in some cases distorting those positions, and assigned them to Biden, who doesn’t share those views.

He does not favor a government takeover of health care; instead he proposes building on “Obamacare,” which preserves the private insurance market while expanding Medicaid.

He also did not endorse proposals to cease border enforcement or even to decriminalize illegal crossings.

Biden supports banning only new oil and gas permits, fracking included, on federal land. But most U.S. production is on private land — the U.S. Bureau of Land Management says production on federal land accounted for less than 10% of oil and gas in 2018.

In a March 15 primary debate, Biden misstated his energy policy, suggesting he would allow no new fracking. His campaign quickly corrected the record. Biden has otherwise been consistent on his middle-of-the-road position, going so far as to tell an anti-fracking activist that he “ought to vote for somebody else” if he wanted an immediate fracking ban.

___

PANDEMIC

DONALD TRUMP JR. on the coronavirus response: “The president quickly took action and shut down travel from China.”

THE FACTS: He didn’t shut down travel from China. He restricted it. Dozens of countries took similar steps to control travel from hot spots before or around the same time the U.S. did.

The U.S. restrictions that took effect Feb. 2 continued to allow travel to the U.S. from China’s Hong Kong and Macao territories over the past five months. The Associated Press reported that more than 8,000 Chinese and foreign nationals based in those territories entered the U.S. in the first three months after the travel restrictions were imposed.

Additionally, more than 27,000 Americans returned from mainland China in the first month after the restrictions took effect. U.S. officials lost track of more than 1,600 of them who were supposed to be monitored for virus exposure.

Dr. Anne Schuchat, the No. 2 official at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also told The Associated Press that the federal government was slow to understand how much coronavirus was spreading from Europe, which helped drive the acceleration of outbreaks across the U.S. in late February. Trump didn’t announce travel restrictions for many European countries until mid-March.

___

DONALD TRUMP JR.: “The president acted quickly and ensured ventilators got to hospitals that needed them most. He delivered PP&E to our brave front-line workers.”

THE FACTS: No, not all hospitals and front-line workers got the ventilators and personal protective equipment they needed. States were left scrambling in the early weeks of the pandemic, while Trump scoffed at some of their requests, calling them inflated.

New York acquired a shipment of 1,000 ventilators from the Chinese government .. https://apnews.com/24b8b30cbc11c43a19e7e7aff69e4044 .. and 140 from the state of Oregon. Massachusetts borrowed the New England Patriots’ jet to pick up 1 million masks from China.

While California Gov. Gavin Newsom was tracking down 10,000 ventilators for his state, he got 170 broken ones from the national stockpile. And a federal shipment of 300,000 N95 masks that Illinois was supposed to receive in March turned out to be less-effective surgical masks instead, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said at the time.

___

ECONOMY

DONALD TRUMP JR, on his father: “So if you’re looking for hope, look to the man who did what the failed Obama-Biden administration never could do and built the greatest economy our country has ever seen.”

THE FACTS: That’s false. The economy was healthy before the coronavirus pandemic hit but not the best in U.S. history.

Economic gains largely followed along the lines of an expansion that started more than a decade ago under Obama. And while posting great job and stock market numbers, Trump never managed to achieve the rates of economic growth he promised in the 2016 campaign, nor growth rates seen in the past.

The Obama-Trump years yielded the longest economic expansion in U.S. history, but not the greatest,

___

McDANIEL: “You deserve to know about their plans to raise taxes on 82% of Americans.”

THE FACTS: That’s not the plan. Biden says he won’t raise taxes on anyone making under $400,000.

An analysis of Biden’s tax plan .. https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2020/3/10/the-biden-tax-plan-updated .. by the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model in March found that the bottom 90 percent of income earners would not pay more in federal income taxes under Biden’s proposal.

___

TRUMP JR. on his father: “He’s pledged to repeal the Trump tax cuts, which were the biggest in our country.”

THE FACTS: Trump’s tax cuts are nowhere close to the biggest in U.S. history.

It’s a $1.5 trillion tax cut over 10 years. As a share of the total economy, a tax cut of that size ranks 12th, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 cut is the biggest, followed by the 1945 rollback of taxes that financed World War II.

Post-Reagan tax cuts also stand among the historically significant: President George W. Bush’s cuts in the early 2000s and Obama’s renewal of them a decade later.

Biden has pledged to raise taxes on wealthy people and not the middle class and working class.

___

Seitz reported from Chicago. Associated Press writers Matthew Daly and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in Washington and Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.

___

EDITOR’S NOTE — A look at the veracity of claims by political figures.

___

Find AP Fact Checks at http://apnews.com/APFactCheck

Follow @APFactCheck on Twitter: https://twitter.com/APFactCheck

https://apnews.com/7c6c47ba0bef4fb26ca667e4ea15e131

[fuagf]

The gun-toting McCloskeys said they feared death. They survived to fight the culture wars.

"Nominating Trump, Republicans Rewrite His Record
"The Grand Old Meltdown""


Mark and Patricia McCloskey spoke addressed the Republican National Convention Monday
via video. (Daniel Acker/Bloomberg)

By Dan Zak

August 26, 2020 at 1:30 a.m. GMT+10

Speaking to the nation from what appeared to be one of the 52 rooms of their palatial St. Louis home — a marble palazzo with a 45-foot-high rotunda dome and a 3,000-square-foot ballroom of Portuguese tile — Mark and Patricia McCloskey delivered a prime-time address about their disadvantagement.

“What you saw happen to us could just as easily happen to any of you, who are watching from quiet neighborhoods around our country,” Patricia said in a video that aired Monday as part of the Republican National Convention’s opening-night program. “And that’s what we want to speak to you about tonight.”

What happened to the McCloskeys to bring them to this prominent spot? You might have seen the pictures and video. On June 28 they emerged barefoot from their home, armed with guns, to scare off Black Lives Matter protesters on their private street in the central west end of St. Louis. Patricia had a pistol and was wearing black capris. Mark had an AR-15 and was wearing khakis and a light-pink polo shirt from Brooks Brothers.

Although the McCloskeys said the protesters threatened to invade their property, a video from one participant shows the startled couple brandishing their guns and yelling as the marchers passed by the palazzo en route to the mayor’s nearby house. “Nobody wants to hurt you,” one person is heard yelling, but the McCloskeys were spooked by violence elsewhere in the city and the breach of a nearby gated barrier, next to a historic guard tower, on privately owned Portland Place. Whether the protest “happened” to the McCloskeys or vice versa is a matter of debate; the couple viewed the march as a threat to their safety and property, and the marchers seemed to view the couple as reckless instigators.

Not long ago, the McCloskeys might have seemed a bizarre addition to a political convention. At the 2020 GOP convention, with the Republicans doubling down on President Trump, they were a natural fit. The McCloskeys, both personal-injury lawyers, had given interviews that accorded with the opinions of this summer’s protests expressed by the president and his allies. Their four-minute spot on the convention schedule was between the father of a mass-shooting victim, who said the media turned his daughter’s killing into a “coordinated attack” on Trump, and Trump surrogate Kimberly Guilfoyle .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/kimberly-guilfoyle-was-once-compared-to-jackie-kennedy-now-shes-basically-a-trump/2018/08/22/eed842f0-9756-11e8-810c-5fa705927d54_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_16&itid=lk_inline_manual_9 , who decried the “cosmopolitan elites” who want to simultaneously “destroy” the country and “control how you live.”

The McCloskeys, cosmopolitan elites themselves, have come to represent the flashy collision of class, race, privilege, public safety, and the First and Second Amendments. They feared death that day, they said, but they survived to join the culture wars.

“I thought that we’d be overrun in a second,” Mark said June 30 to Tucker Carlson, who referred to the McCloskeys as “folk heroes.”

“I’m still scared,” Mark said July 2 on “Good Morning Britain.”

“I thought we were going to die,” Mark said July 17 on a Trump campaign livestream.


In June, Mark and Patricia McCloskey emerged from their St. Louis mansion with guns after
protesters walked onto their private street. (Laurie Skrivan/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via AP, File)

The McCloskeys have been through it. They were each charged with one felony count of unlawful use of a weapon. They were ridiculed on social media as bourgeois vigilantes; a 2018 St. Louis Magazine article .. https://www.stlmag.com/design/a-decades-long-renovation-returns-a-midwestern-palazzo-to-it/ .. on the painstaking restoration of their extravagant home was recirculated to fuel the mockery. Their long history of petty legal battles was aired by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch .. https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/portland-place-couple-who-confronted-protesters-have-a-long-history-of-not-backing-down/article_281d9989-373e-53c3-abcb-ecd0225dd287.html#tracking-source=home-top-story . Neighbors tsk-tsked.

“We condemn the behavior of anyone who uses threats of violence, especially through the brandishing of firearms, to disrupt peaceful protest,” said an open letter signed by 38 residents of Westmoreland Place, the private street adjacent to the Mc­Closkey’s.

Westmoreland resident Tim Noonan had a different perspective on the events. The protest passed peacefully through the area, he says, and neighbors later reached out to organizers to listen and let them know they had been heard.

These twin streets — lined with Tudors, Georgian revivals and Richardsonian Romanesques — “express a well-ordered and graceful stability which was undoubtedly intended to oppose the prevalent chaos and activity of the surrounding urban milieu,” according to their 1974 nomination to the National Register of Historic Places. It is this architecture of exclusivity, and the real and imagined threats to it, that the McCloskeys spoke about with vague foreboding Monday.

“No matter where you live,” Patricia said, “your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats’ America.”

“At this moment in history,” Mark said, “if you stand up for yourself and for the values our country was founded on, the mob — spurred on by their allies in the media — will try to destroy you.”

The McCloskeys were seated on a tufted settee the color of chocolate, hands crossed on their laps, with a backdrop of glowing, carved wainscoting. One of their attorneys had previously likened them to “rugged individualists” from the “heartland of America,” and said that they invested in St. Louis during a period of White flight, made careers out of representing the vulnerable and lawfully defended their property from an angry mob. The McCloskeys, whose first court appearance is scheduled for Aug. 31, were not available Tuesday to comment on their appearance at the convention, according to Joel J. Schwartz, their criminal legal counsel.

“I advised them against their appearance, among many others that they’ve done,” Schwartz told The Washington Post, but “they believe this issue is bigger than them. They believe that individual Second Amendment rights are being stripped away.”

Schwartz said the McCloskeys had every right, under Missouri’s castle doctrine, to brandish their weapons once protesters entered the private street.

St. Louis has been at a boiling point all summer, with citizens anxious for overdue changes in crime prevention and law enforcement, says Heather Navarro, the alderwoman of Ward 28, where the McCloskeys have lived for 32 years. She points to the murder rate of children in St. Louis, which is quadruple that of comparable cities such as Indianapolis and Kansas City, according to the Post-Dispatch, and says it’s important to focus on which residents experience threats and violence as a way of life.

“When we look at the neighborhoods facing the highest levels of crime, it’s not where the McCloskeys live,” Navarro said in an interview, and “when you look at who is suffering from disparities in the city of St. Louis, it’s not the McCloskeys.”

You wouldn’t know it from their four minutes Monday night, during which these city dwellers seemed determined to scare a certain voter demographic with hyperbole about how Joe Biden supposedly is going to “abolish” the suburbs via zoning changes that would “bring crime, lawlessness and low-quality apartments into now-thriving suburban neighborhoods.”

“The Marxist liberal activist leading the mob to our neighborhood stood outside our home with a bullhorn screaming, ‘You can’t stop the revolution,’?” Mark told the convention, as a photo of a Black woman with a bullhorn lingered on-screen. “Just weeks later, that same Marxist activist won the Democrat nomination to hold a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.”

This was a reference to Cori Bush, a Black Lives Matter activist who won her primary Aug. 4, ending a Democratic family dynasty’s 50-year hold on Missouri’s 1st Congressional District. “The McCloskeys tried to villianize [sic] me @ the RNC tonight,” Bush tweeted 90 minutes after their appearance. “They can call me whatever they want — I’m used to it. People have called us everything you can imagine since we started protesting in Ferguson. It didn’t stop us then & it won’t stop us now.”

For their intended audience, the McCloskeys’ speech was a warning about a perceived threat just beyond the gate, a forecast that someone is coming to take something away, a stand against lawlessness and chaos. By invoking Bush, though, their remarks described a functioning democracy — albeit one with a strong sense of irony. The 1st District of Missouri is reliably Democratic, which means that, come January, the woman brandishing the bullhorn will probably be the McCloskeys’ congresswoman.

Jenna Johnson contributed to this report

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-gun-toting-mccloskeys-said-they-feared-death-but-they-survived-to-fight-the-culture-wars/2020/08/25/f94f1238-e65d-11ea-970a-64c73a1c2392_story.html