Sep 11, 2024
We must help the aliens break out of jail. They need better then American prisons
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We must help the aliens break out of jail. They need better then American prisons
Dershowitz also attacked Kamala Harris for not being present when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed lawmakers in July.
Kipp Jones at Mediaite:
Lifelong Democrat and famed attorney Alan Dershowitz left the party this week, citing what he said were openly anti-Semitic elements at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last month. During a conversation with radio host Zev Brenner on the YouTube-streamed program Talkline, Dershowitz said he had been considering leaving the party and his breaking point came when he was heard hear pro-Hamas and “anti-Jewish” rhetoric outside of the United Center. Dershowitz said some of the anti-Jewish hatred came from inside the convention from Democratic lawmakers. “They had more anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist people who were speaking, starting with AOC – a miserable, anti-zionist bigot,” he said. “Then of course they had Liz Warren who is one of the most anti-Jewish people in the Senate.”
“I was disgusted at the Democratic National Convention,” he said. “Absolutely disgusted.” [...] “I am no longer a Democrat,” Dershowitz shot back. “I am an independent. I will decide who to vote for at the last minute based on the totality of the circumstances. I want to see how they deal with Iran, I want to see how they deal with Iran’s attacks on the United States, I want to encourage the current administration to support Israel. So I’m not revealing my vote until maybe November 1. I need to hear all the information, all the evidence, but I am no longer a member of the Democratic Party.”
Appearing on the August 23rd, 2024 edition of Talkline Network's Talkline With Zev Brenner, DINO and Israel Apartheid State supporter Alan Dershowitz announced that he was leaving the Democratic Party and becoming independent.
Dershowitz has long hinted in recent years about leaving the Democratic Party, due to the fact that he has regularly defended Donald Trump's legal foibles and the party's increasingly pro-Palestinian turn.
From the 08.23.2024 edition of Talkline Network's Talkline With Zev Brenner:
There is still much we don't know about Trumpworld's authoritarian plans
Don Moynihan at Can We Still Govern?: At the Democratic National Convention, speaker after speaker sought to remind viewers of Project 2025. Jim Clyburn referred to it as “Jim Crow 2.0.” Cory Booker mocked it was “Project 1825” and “Project 1925.” Michigan Senator Mallory McMorrow was one of many speakers who brought an enlarged version of the Mandate for Leadership document published by the Heritage Foundation that serves as the backbone to Project 2025. Trump’s campaign has falsely claimed that Project 2025 is dead, and in mailers to voters he has doubled down on his efforts to distance himself from it. (Note to Forbes and other media outlets who confuse repeating Trump’s lies with reporting: this is what you get — becoming a tool in his disinformation efforts).
Of course, Project 2025 very much remains alive and the most relevant way to understand how Trump would govern. At the convention, Tim Walz invoked Project 2025 when he said that “when somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re going to use it.” The comedian Kenan Thompson gave one of best summaries of the relationship between Trump and Project 2025:
[You know how when you download an app and there are hundreds of pages there that you don’t read. Its just the terms and conditions. And you just click agree, right? Well, these are the terms and conditions of a second Trump Presidency. You vote for him, you vote for all of this.]
Trump dislikes Project 2025 as a brand because it lays out a series of specifics about right wing policy goals, which, it turns out, are unpopular. There has been some schadenfreude in how Project 2025 has become baggage for the Trump campaign, and has in some ways backfired for the Heritage Foundation, who went from energetically promoting their ties to Trump to gingerly defending their efforts from Trump’s own campaign.
We got a glimpse about the scale and nature of these plans when some British undercover journalists performed a sting operation of Russ Vought. Vought is touted as a potential Chief of Staff in a second Trump administration. As a Trump official, he helped to cover up Trump’s withholding of arms to Ukraine, and aggressively pushed Trump’s plan to fire career civil servants. Out of office, he then complains about the weaponization of federal agencies without a trace of irony.
[...]
The Heritage Foundation been portrayed as the central player in Project 2025, deservedly so. But its role reflects a certain continuity of effort — it has been publishing Mandate for Leadership guides since Reagan — that understates the dramatic nature of the change that has taken place on the right. The Conservative Partnership Institute, which has played a less visible role in Project 2025, is more emblematic of the MAGAification of the conservative movement. A recent profile of CPI by Jonathan Blitzer in the New Yorker is eye-opening. CPI was created in 2017 by Jim DeMint, the Heritage Foundation leader who was pushed out for trashing Heritage’s reputation for credible research by making it more partisan and less serious. DeMint also aligned early with Trump, which some Heritage board members never forgave him for. CPI operates less like a think tank, where former Trump officials hang their hat, and more like a venture capital firm providing seed funding for MAGA-aligned organizations, as well as connections to other donors, and physical space to get a foothold in DC. These include:
Russ Vought’s Center for Renewing America
Stephen Miller’s America First Legal
The American Accountability Foundation, which ran attack campaigns against Biden nominees, and is currently compiling an enemies list of career civil servants
Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. CPI had been deeply involved in election denial. It helped to organize efforts to disrupt the vote to confirm Biden’s election on January 6th. Mitchell a Secretary of CPI, was the lawyer who helped Trump with his call to Georgia officials asking them to fine more votes. She is organizing a network of legal challenges to block legitimate election outcomes this year.
The State Freedom Caucus Network, whose goal is to embed state versions of the House Freedom Caucus in every state
An API official said that in a speech at Mar-A-Lago: “Trump complained about his personnel. He said he had these bad generals, bad Cabinet secretaries. That was a big signal to the people there.” This is why there is such an intense focus on Schedule F, to fire civil servants, and building a pipeline of dedicated Trumpists as political appointees. Part of the function of CPI was to alter the incentives for Trump officials. A previous generation of conservative lawyers or other appointees might worry about their long-term career prospects for engaging in a little light treason. CPI has created an ecosystem existed to defend them (they have funded legal defenses for John Eastman, Peter Navarro, Mark Meadows and Jeffery Clark), to and to find them new roles after wrongdoing.
@Don Moynihan nails it: The “next phase” of Project 2025 contains plans we don’t even know about.
This is the first DNC since 2012 not to feature trans speakers, while trans Americans face unprecedented attacks.
Mira Lazine at LGBTQ Nation:
For the first time in over a decade, the Democratic National Convention (DNC) did not feature a single trans speaker. Additionally, the event has been called out for failing to feature discussions of trans people. This came to light when Harvard CyberLaw Clinic instructor and trans activist Alejandra Caraballo posted on X: “This was the first DNC since 2012 to not feature a trans person speaking. ‘We’re not going back’ doesn’t apply to the trans community.” The two prior DNC events were held in 2016 and 2020. In 2016, Sarah McBride, who at the time was national press secretary with the Human Rights Campaign and not yet a state lawmaker, spoke at the convention. In 2020, then-Virginia state Delegate Danica Roem (D) spoke.
McBride was the first out trans primary speaker at a DNC event, and both DNCs had talked in detail about trans issues. However, almost none of the speakers at the DNC this year discussed transgender rights issues. There were only two direct mentions of trans people at a main speaking event: Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, and Sen. Corey Booker (D-NJ) both mentioned trans issues in passing. However, the DNC this year featured the largest number of LGBTQ+ delegates ever. Delegates are the individuals selected to represent their state or territory in order to officially nominate the presidential candidate. Over 800 delegates out of the total 4,700 were members of the LGBTQ+ community. Of that number, only around 50 were trans, according to the Harris-Walz National LGBTQ+ Engagement Director Sam Alleman. This was reportedly the largest number of trans delegates in history, in spite of making up just 1% of total delegates.
[...] Perella also had a brief speaking role during the New Jersey delegate roll call, however this was not a main speaking role and her speech lasted less than a minute. She spoke about making New Jersey and America as a whole a safe place for LGBTQ+ individuals. The Democratic platform this year states the party’s commitment to transgender rights and desire to oppose restrictions on transgender healthcare.
The DNC made a major mistake of not including a trans speaker at the convention in the wake of the GOP’s anti-trans hatred campaign, and only a couple of speakers made passing references to trans people directly.
Montana State Rep. Zooey Zephyr and/or her spouse Erin Reed should have had one, for example.
Matt Gertz at MMFA:
Fox News did not air a second of the speeches from alienated GOP leaders and former Trump officials who endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris at this week’s Democratic National Convention. The DNC speakers included former Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who spoke in prime-time before Harris’ Thursday keynote; former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan; former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham; Olivia Troye, who served as a homeland security aide to former Vice President Mike Pence; and Mesa, Arizona, Mayor John Giles.
MSNBC and CNN treated those speeches as newsworthy, airing each of them in full, according to a Media Matters review of the networks’ convention coverage. But Fox hid the content of all of those speeches from their viewers, often displaying the video on screen without audio as the network’s on-air hosts and guests offered commentary. It’s not hard to figure out why: Fox is a Trumpist propaganda organ that helped the former president purge the GOP of his critics and is working tirelessly to return him to the White House. The network typically shies away from highlighting dissension in the party’s ranks. Fox virtually ignored former Vice President Mike Pence’s refusal to endorse Trump and former House Speaker Paul Ryan’s denunciation of the former president as “unfit for office” — both of which originated in Fox interviews.
Guess which network refused to show speeches from Republicans and former Trump supporters that spoke at the DNC? It’s GOP propaganda outlet Faux “News.”
My takeaways from the DNC.
Gabe Fleisher at Wake Up To Politics:
Last night, one of America’s two political parties gathered in Illinois and heard from a former CIA officer and several military veterans. They waved American flags and chanted “USA” while homage was paid to John McCain and Ronald Reagan. A sheriff spoke about increasing police funding; a Tea Party lawmaker opined on what it means to be conservative. The party’s presidential nominee, a former prosecutor, promised to toughen border security and protect American freedom. No, it wasn’t a Republican convention. Just a new political reality. The Democratic convention in Chicago showed a party finally addressing a core contradiction of the past half-decade. Electorally speaking, the Trump years have been good to Democrats, with victories in 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2023 raining down like manna from heaven. But from a messaging standpoint, the era has been one stumble after another, with the party bouncing around the ideological map in search of a narrative that clicks. The persistent sense has been that the Democrats have won more for being the “not Trump” party than due to any positive association in voters’ minds.
Polls show that the party has a brand problem — one they may be able to overcome while Trump is on the ballot, but which will surely be lurking afterwards. But conventions are nothing if not branding exercises; the Democrats’ this past week reflected a party trying to forge a new identity. So what if it meant pissing off some members of their coalition and cribbing several major Republican talking points? The convention showed a party was a party that wants to win — not just against Donald Trump, but after him too — and is willing to remake itself to do it. The Democrats appeared keenly aware of their worst stereotypes and came prepared with carefully calibrated, poll-tested responses to each one.
Soft on crime? “After decades in law enforcement, I know the importance of safety and security,” Vice President Kamala Harris said, in an acceptance speech that returned repeatedly to her experience as a prosecutor. Weak on national security? “I will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend our forces and our interests,” she declared. Afraid of military might? “I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” Harris said. Judgmental? Nearly ever major DNC speaker took pains to offer grace to conservatives, instead of scorning them, from former President Barack Obama noting that when “a parent or grandparent occasionally says something that makes us cringe, we don’t automatically assume they’re bad people” to Oprah Winfrey promising that “we are not so different from our neighbors.”
Unpatriotic? When Harris walked onto the stage, the crowd didn’t chant “Kamala” or “We’re not going back” or any of the other slogans in their arsenal. They chanted “USA.” In fact, “USA” chants were heard every night of the convention, often during almost every speech. Attendees held aloft “USA” signs and American flags; later, when they were handed long “Kamala” signs ahead of her acceptance speech, many delegates stuck the American flag on top of them, so that when they cheered for Harris, the floor remained a sea of flags. Many of these epithets are labels that have haunted Democrats for decades, stretching back into the 1970s and in some cases even earlier. In that time, Republicans have reliably been the party that has wrapped themselves in the flag and projected a tough image on national defense and law and order, so much so that the scene from the United Center sometimes seemed straight out of an RNC. Harris also seemed to determined to break with the long Democratic tradition of condescension, from “egghead” Adlai Stevenson to “elitist” Hillary Clinton and her “basket of deplorables.” This convention was one of the first times they seemed conscious of it, and actively tried to move in another direction.
The whole event was a far cry from 2020, when Democrats allowed themselves to become the party of “defund the police” and the academic alphabet soup of DEI and CRT. In just four years, the party went from declaring in their platform that “Democrats believe we need to overhaul the criminal justice system from top to bottom,” because “police brutality is a stain on the soul of our nation,” to pledging to put “more police officers on the beat” in the 2024 version. “We need to fund the police, not defund the police,” the party’s platform now reads. Attendees cheered when a sheriff made that same point on Thursday, something that would have sounded unbelievable to 2020 ears. (As would the nomination of a former prosecutor.) It was also a departure from 2016, when identity ruled the day as Hillary Clinton reminded delegates that she was the first woman nominated for the presidency. Harris never once referred to the fact that she was only the second female nominee, and first Black female nominee, allowing the delegates wearing suffragette white to serve as the lone nod to her history-making nomination.
Other typically Democratic elements were airbrushed from the speech as well. Issues that poll well, like abortion, were emphasized. Issues that poll poorly, like climate change and transgender issues, were mentioned once and not at all, respectively, by Harris. (Democratic fears of yet another label — “woke” — were clear.) These decisions angered some activists, as did the exclusion of a Palestinian-American speaker, but after years of attempting to please every segment of their varied coalition, Democrats have made the cold calculation that the voters they truly need to target are the plurality in the middle. Just as they pushed out Joe Biden in service of chasing victory, evincing little emotional attachment to an aging leader, the party seems newly willing to spite its fringes to save its power.
[...] For me, one of the most enduring images of the convention will be the two young men standing near me who looked like they could have been straight out of a Barstool video — a demographic Democrats have struggled with — screaming “USA” with a fierce intensity. In reality, though, these young men are a Democratic minority: only 29% of Democrats told Gallup they are “extremely proud” to be Americans last year; 60% of Republicans did so. I think back to the conference of young Democrats I covered last year, when a speaker asked how many attendees are “patriotic” and only a scattering of hands went up. [...] The Democratic convention showed a party playing to win, unlike the Republican convention in July, which showed a party that believed it already had. The DNC also showed a party preparing for the future — parading its bench, shaving down its harsher edges to position itself for campaigns against post-Trump opponents — in stark contrast to the Trump-centric RNC. At the same time as Trump appears distracted, Democrats have never seemed more laser-focused on pursuing victory.
Gabe Fleisher wrote in Friday’s Wake Up To Politics newsletter on the Democratic Party’s image makeover that was on display at the DNC by taking the freedom and patriotism mantle and ran with it, while jettisoning or downplaying themes prevalent in the 2016 and 2020 editions.
Following Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, some in right-wing media are launching a desperate attack
Gideon Taaffe and Chloe Simon at MMFA:
Following Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, some in right-wing media are launching a desperate attack on Walz, claiming he misrepresented his role as a coach with his high school football team. The attacks tried to minimize Walz’s role in taking a struggling high school football team to state championship by highlighting that Walz was a volunteer and bizarrely claiming he was “never a football coach” but an “assistant coach.”
The attacks on Walz, which started earlier this month, show how little right-wing media know about football
Walz accepted the Democratic nomination for vice president on Wednesday in a speech that highlighted, among other things, his role on the coaching staff at the high school where he taught. At no point did Walz claim to be head coach, and he even alluded to his role as a defensive coordinator in his speech, saying, “I wound up teaching social studies and coaching football at Mankato West High School. Go Scarlets! We ran a 4-4 defense, played through the whistle every single down, and even won a state championship.” [CBS News, 8/22/24]
Right-wing media had previously been attacking Walz for supposedly misrepresenting his coaching role, and then during the DNC, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump attacked Walz with the same claim. Right-wing journalist Raheem Kassam wrote on August 8, “Was Tim Walz even the head coach? Some records suggest otherwise” and called him “Water Boy Walz!” Newsmax’s Bianca de la Garza claimed the same day that Walz “was an assistant coach, a defensive coordinator, actually, not the championship-winning, banner-hanging head coach that the media wants you to believe he is.” Trump ally Laura Loomer posted, “Why is the media allowing this lie to continue? … He was an ASSISTANT COACH.” Then on August 22, Trump posted to Truth Social: “Walz was an ASSISTANT Coach, not a COACH.” [NBC News, 1/14/24; Twitter/X, 8/8/24; Newsmax, Prime News, 8/8/24; Twitter/X, 8/9/24; Truth Social, 8/22/24]
SBNation: “Slamming Tim Walz’s football resume is a weird way to say you don’t know ball.” SBNation pointed out that defensive coordinators are essential to a team’s success, concluding, “We can disagree about a lot of things in the country. We can argue over how government is supposed to operate. We have to be united in giving defensive coordinators the respect they deserve.” [SBNation, 8/22/24]
Trashy right-wingers whine about Tim Walz’s coaching status.
"Donald Trump is an unserious man," she said, "but the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious."
Daniel Villarreal at LGBTQ Nation:
Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris said that her political opponent, former President Donald Trump, and his conservative allies are “out of their minds” for planning to empower extremists, eliminate social programs and ban abortion nationwide. Harris ended the fourth and final night of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) by highlighting Trump’s continued criminal and autocratic ambitions and by providing an overview of her own political agenda, including her continued support of Israel’s right to defend itself while also voicing support for the Palestinian rights to “dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.” Lesbian Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) were among the many who spoke during before Harris. Their speeches are summarized with direct quotes below.
[...] “Consider what he intends to do if we give him power again,” she continued, listing his explicit intentions to set free the Capitol rioters who attacked police officers; to jail journalists, political opponents and anyone he sees as the enemy; to use the military against U.S. citizens; and—per Project 2025—to eliminate the Affordable Care Act; cut Social Security and Medicare benefits; end preschool care programs for children; and ban abortion nationwide. He has even pledged to appoint a national anti-abortion coordinator who would force states to report women’s miscarriages and abortions, Harris said. “Simply put,” she continued, “they are out of their minds.”
Kamala Harris delivered some powerful lines at the DNC on Thursday, rightly stating that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are "out of their minds" if they think they are able to get away with enacting an anti-abortion agenda the majority of America opposes.