Trumps in trouble, time to play race card!

JoeBlow5823 said:

Comparing Canada to USA.... wow. The amount of travel and size of major cities in USA dwarfs Canada so many times over. Yeah, a country that is sparsely populated and vastly spread out is not as heavily impacted by a highly contagious virus. No shit. Compare the number of flights from China to Canada and China to USA and then get back to me.

Again, compare Canadian travel to USA travel.

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zeddd said:

The Trump era has confirmed that the US is a moribund concept. To outsiders at least.

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JoeBlow5823 said:

I see ive been blocked from the thread. You lot are something else.....

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Ten minutes into a virtual town hall meeting with voters on Monday, Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-Conn.) heard someone on the Zoom broadcast shout a racist slur.

The congresswoman’s team muted the offending user, and Hayes resumed telling the attendees about her legislation. Then, she was interrupted again, this time with the same slur repeated on a loop, set to music.

“Go pick your cotton,” someone repeatedly copy and pasted into the Zoom chat in all capital letters, alongside the n-word.
Whenever Hayes’s team shut out one person hijacking the town hall with hate speech, another quickly picked up the harassment. The

“Zoombombing” attack lasted for six minutes, Hayes wrote in a Medium post recounting the experience on Tuesday.

Eventually, Hayes’s staff was able to block all of the offending parties and resume the meeting. But the racist disruption had already taken its toll.

“I am tired, completely and utterly tired,” Hayes wrote. “I am not ok that this happened. I am not ok, that this is not the first time this has happened in my life or that I’ve had to explain that this happens.”

Hayes is the first Black woman and the first Black Democrat, to represent Connecticut in Congress. Her district encompasses 41 cities and towns in the state’s northwest corner. A former high school teacher who was previously recognized as National Teacher of the Year, Hayes was elected in 2018 with nearly 56 percent of the vote.

She was a teen mother who became teacher of the year. Now, Jahana Hayes wants to become Connecticut’s first black Democratic member of Congress.

Although Connecticut’s 5th District has been held by a Democrat since 2007, Hayes, 47, is currently in a contested race to keep her seat in the House of Representatives. Her Republican opponent, David X. Sullivan, denounced the slurs that disrupted Hayes’s event.

“It is appalling that a bigoted coward would direct insults at Congresswoman Hayes, interfere and disrupt a legitimate campaign activity, and besmirch the reputation of the good people of the 5th District of Connecticut,” Sullivan said in a tweet Tuesday.

Monday’s disrupted town hall was just one in a series of virtual events in her reelection campaign, which has turned to using Zoom conference calls to help prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. It is hardly the first public Zoom meeting to be hijacked since the start of the pandemic.

Many Zoom calls have been disrupted by pornography, offensive music and videos, and even people shouting racial slurs and spamming the public chat with similarly disturbing language.

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said in April that the company was not prepared for the massive influx of users who flocked to the software to meet for school, work and virtual gatherings while social distancing this year. The company committed to significantly expanding its security measures after widespread violations that exposed children and other users to offensive content. Breaches also left some sensitive Zoom videos viewableon the Internet, including private therapy sessions and elementary school classes.

Thousands of Zoom video calls left exposed on open Web

Racist interruptions have been especially common at public meetings, campaign events and even anti-racism town halls. Trolls have spewed slurs and showed Nazi imagery during events in Georgia, Florida and Michigan, among other places. Several Black public officials and candidates have been targeted by hate speech on the platform.

“Black women are expected to press on, to ignore this behavior; to not talk explicitly about it because it is uncomfortable, divisive or does not reflect the sentiments of most people,” Hayes wrote Tuesday. “We have become numb to this behavior, instinct kicks in and we just move on.”

On Monday evening, Hayes shared screen shots of the public chat from her Zoom meeting. The photos showed the n-word repeatedly pasted into the chat, while multiple people also spammed the conversation with messages supporting President Trump.

On Tuesday, Zoom responded to Hayes’s tweet, saying it would investigate the incident.

“We are deeply upset to hear about this and we take the privacy of Zoom Meetings very seriously,” the company said. “Can you please share the details of this meeting via DM? We will escalate to our trust and safety team.”

Hayes wrote in her reflection on the attack that she had personally called the only other Black person who had been on the call. She also said she instructed her campaign’s communications director to report the incident.

“The most painful part of it all is that no matter what you achieve in life, no matter how many degrees you earn or how good of a person you try to be- all some people will ever allow themselves to see is a N-word,” Hayes wrote. “The only way we can cut the cancer of racism out of our communities is by calling it out when we see it and raising our collective voices to get rid of it.”

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Melanie Campbell would love to be in Georgia, where a diverse coalition of activists has never been closer to flipping the state from red to blue. Or Florida, her home state, one of the top battlegrounds in the fierce fight for the presidency.

Follow the latest on Election 2020

Instead, after a rough bout with covid-19, Campbell will spend this consequential election at home in Northern Virginia, directing and supporting Black female activists working to turn out Black voters across the South and in the critical swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Campbell is the convener of the Black Women’s Roundtable, one of the largest networks of women focused on using civic engagement to improve the lives of Black women, their families and their communities — improving access to health care, ending systemic racism, reforming the criminal justice system, lifting people out of poverty. The Roundtable was prepared to do double duty this year, making sure Black people participated in both the census and the national election. But the pandemic has created new challenges.

Instead of mobilizing voters by going door to door, the Roundtable is connecting with voters digitally on smartphones and tablets. When in-person early voting began, the women donned masks and worked the long lines at polling places, passing out water and snacks to keep people comfortable while they waited to cast their votes.


The youngest of six children, Campbell followed her older brothers and sisters to Atlanta, where she enrolled in Clark Atlanta University and took a corporate job upon graduation. But she soon found herself missing the action of the movement, and went to work for Maynard Jackson, then the mayor of Atlanta and one of the country’s highest-profile Black political leaders. While running the mayor’s office of youth services, she hired an outspoken student leader from Spelman College named Stacey Abrams, who had publicly questioned Jackson’s understanding of the frustrations of young people.

By 1995, Campbell had moved to Washington to work for the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, where she found a mentor in Dorothy I. Height, a founding board member. Campbell became the coalition’s executive director in 2000 and president and CEO in 2011.

“My mission in life is to do my part, but also to lift others along the way, make sure Black women are not invisible,” Campbell said.

Once again, Black women had flexed their political muscle. They were eager to talk about next steps.

Within days, however, the nation began to shut down in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. Like many organizations, the Roundtable was forced to move its operations online.

Through the summer, Campbell joined forces with other Black women leaders to push Biden to select a Black woman as his running mate.
When Harris gave her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in August, Campbell celebrated with friends at a virtual watch party.

Then Campbell attended a family funeral over Labor Day weekend. Despite taking precautions, she was infected with the coronavirus. After she struggled to get admitted to a hospital, a close friend connected her with a doctor who was able to get her into George Washington University Hospital, where she spent most of September.

Salandra Benton, a Roundtable convener and executive director of the Florida Coalition on Black Civic Participation, has lost eight relatives to covid-19. She was terrified when she learned that Campbell, who she has known for more than 20 years, had fallen ill.

With Campbell’s support, Benton had been able to help restore voting rights for Florida felons who had been released from prison. Last month, Benton partnered with the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition to host “Free the Vote” rallies around the state, aimed at encouraging felons to take advantage of their newly restored right to vote.

“We’re doing everything we possibly can do, so that when Election Day comes we can say we left nothing on the table,” Benton said.

Latosha Brown, a Georgia organizer who also grew up under Campbell’s wing, said Black women are being asked to do too much. Brown is co-founder of the organization Black Voters Matter, which had to sue the state of Alabama to expand absentee voting so people could safely cast ballots during the pandemic.

“Black women are out here leading the charge of registering people to vote. Comforting voters at the polling sites. Advocating to make sure people are not being marginalized in the process — all those things that a government in a functioning democracy would normally have,” Brown said.

“If Black women ever decide we don’t believe in democracy anymore, it’s over for this country,” she added. “It’s a wrap.”

On Sunday, Campbell held a virtual gospel hour, featuring music, prayer and a call to arms.

“We know what’s up, we hear the drumbeat. We know what they’re trying to do,” she told the gathering. “So many of us are so worn out and tired. We needed this moment — I know I did — to remind ourselves that we are not in this alone. God is in control.

“But He told us to work, work, work,” she said. “And that’s what we’re going to do.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Sen. Tim Scott accused Democrats on Wednesday of dividing the country and suggested they’re wielding race as “a political weapon,” using the official Republican response to President Joe Biden’s maiden speech to Congress to credit the GOP for leading the country out of its pandemic struggles and toward a hopeful future.

Scott, R-S.C., in his nationally televised rebuttal of Biden’s address, belittled the new president’s initial priorities — aimed at combating the deadly virus and spurring the economy — as wasteful expansions of big government.

“We should be expanding options and opportunities for all families,” said Scott, who preaches a message of optimism while remaining a loyal supporter of former President Donald Trump, “not throwing money at certain issues because Democrats think they know best.”

Citing the partisan battle over Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill, which Congress approved over unanimous GOP opposition, Scott said: “We need policies and progress that bring us closer together. But three months in, the actions of the president and his party are pulling us further apart.”

But the Senate’s only Black Republican saved some of his sharpest comments for the fraught subject of race. Scott recounted his rise from a low-income family and “the pain” of repeatedly being pulled over by police while driving but said, “Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country.”

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Asked Thursday about Scott’s comment, Vice President Kamala Harris told ABC’s “Good Morning America, “No, I don’t think America is a racist country but we also do have to speak truth about the history of racism in our country.”

She added: “One of the greatest threats to our national security is domestic terrorism manifested by white supremacists. These are issues that we must confront, and it does not help to heal our country, to unify us as a people, to ignore the realities of that”

Biden and other Democrats have cited institutional racism as a major national problem.

While acknowledging that “our healing is not finished,” Scott suggested that Democrats and liberals have turned the race issue upside down.

“It’s backwards to fight discrimination with different discrimination,” he said, without providing examples of what he meant. “And it’s wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present.”

He added, “Race is not a political weapon to settle every issue the way one side wants.”

Biden’s address came three months into a presidency that’s seen Republicans repeatedly accuse him of abandoning his campaign pledge to seek bipartisan compromises. While Biden cited a rosy roster of accomplishments and goals in his own speech — “America is on the move again,” he said — Scott said it was Republicans who had bolstered the economy and began to tame the pandemic.

“This should be a joyful springtime for our nation,” said Scott, citing the Trump administration’s role in helping spur vaccine development and beginning a revival of the staggered economy. “This administration inherited a tide that had already turned. The coronavirus is on the run!”

The address also came as Scott, a 10-year veteran of Congress who usually keeps a low profile, has found a spotlight leading his party in a bipartisan effort to overhaul police procedures. That drive was prompted by last May’s slaying of George Floyd, a Black man, and energized anew by this month’s conviction of a white former Minneapolis police officer for the killing.

“I’m still working. I’m still hopeful,” he said of the talks.

Scott criticized many school systems’ decisions to halt or limit in-person classes during the pandemic as a safety measure. Those closures, which were recommended by public health officials, have drawn fire from Republicans as an overreaction and become part of the GOP’s culture war with Democrats.

“Locking vulnerable kids out of the classroom is locking adults out of their future,” Scott said.

Scott cited low unemployment rates for minorities before the pandemic struck last year, calling it “the most inclusive economy in my lifetime.” And he praised GOP efforts including tax breaks to encourage business investments in low-income communities.

“Our best future won’t come from Washington schemes or socialist dreams,” he said, echoing the GOP’s oft-repeated theme that Democrats are pushing far-left plans. “It will come from you — the American people.”

Scott has long embraced themes of opportunity and a cheerful optimism that were conservative calling cards during the Reagan era. He retold the story of a grandfather who left grade school to pick cotton and led a lifetime of illiteracy, his own childhood living in a single bedroom with his single mother and brother and nearly failing out of high school.

Scott said his family went “from cotton to Congress in one lifetime. So I am more than hopeful — I am confident — that our finest hour is yet to come.”

Those messages could make Scott a positive messenger for the GOP in what could otherwise be a divisive 2022 election campaign, when the party has high hopes of winning control of the House and perhaps the Senate. Scott is strongly favored to be reelected next year.

Over the years, Scott at times called out Trump in measured tones over some of his racially offensive broadsides. Yet he’s remained a strong supporter of the former president and opposed Trump’s removal from office after the House impeached him for inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

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https://www.rollitup.org/t/fair-for-all-black-people-in-the-usa-to-be-held-responsible-pay-reparations-for-violent-acts-of-some-black-people-ople-against-asians.1055200/

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WASHINGTON — The House Judiciary Committee is poised to question former White House counsel Don McGahn behind closed doors on Friday, two years after House Democrats originally sought his testimony as part of investigations into former President Donald Trump.

The long-awaited interview is the result of an agreement reached last month in federal court, and a transcript will be publicly released within a week. House Democrats — then investigating whether Trump tried to obstruct the Justice Department’s probes into his presidential campaign’s ties to Russia — originally sued after McGahn defied an April 2019 subpoena on Trump’s orders.

That month, the Justice Department released a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the matter. In the report, Mueller pointedly did not exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice but also did not recommend prosecuting him, citing Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president. Mueller’s report quoted extensively from interviews with McGahn, who described the Republican president’s efforts to stifle the investigation.

While the Judiciary panel eventually won its fight for McGahn’s testimony, the court agreement almost guarantees its members won’t learn anything new. The two sides agreed that McGahn will be questioned only about information attributed to him in publicly available portions of Mueller’s report.

Still, House Democrats kept the case going, even past Trump’s presidency, and are moving forward with the interview to make an example of the former White House counsel. House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said the agreement for McGahn’s testimony is a good-faith compromise that “satisfies our subpoena, protects the Committee’s constitutional duty to conduct oversight in the future, and safeguards sensitive executive branch prerogatives.”

It is unclear what House Democrats will do with the testimony, which they sought before twice impeaching Trump. The Senate acquitted Trump of impeachment charges both times.

As White House counsel, McGahn had an insider’s view of many of the episodes Mueller and his team examined for potential obstruction of justice during the Russia investigation. McGahn proved a pivotal — and damning — witness against Trump, with his name mentioned hundreds of times in the text of the Mueller report and its footnotes.

McGahn described to investigators the president’s repeated efforts to choke off the probe and directives he said he received from the president that unnerved him.

He recounted how Trump had demanded that he contact then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to order him to unrecuse himself from the Russia investigation. McGahn also said Trump had implored him to tell the deputy attorney general at the time, Rod Rosenstein, to remove Mueller from his position because of perceived conflicts of interest — and, after that episode was reported in the media, to publicly and falsely deny that demand had ever been made.

McGahn also described the circumstances leading up to Trump’s firing of James Comey as FBI director, including the president’s insistence on including in the termination letter the fact that Comey had reassured Trump that he was not personally under investigation.

And he was present for a critical conversation early in the Trump administration, when Sally Yates, just before she was fired as acting attorney general as a holdover Obama appointee, relayed concerns to McGahn about new national security adviser Michael Flynn. She raised the possibility that Flynn’s conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak — and his subsequent interview by the FBI — left him vulnerable to blackmail.
Trump’s Justice Department fought efforts to have McGahn testify, but U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in 2019 rejected Trump’s arguments that his close advisers were immune from congressional subpoena.

President Joe Biden has nominated Jackson to the appeals court in Washington.

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Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick attacked Black Texans to deflect from criticism of GOP attacks on public health measures.

"Well, Laura," Patrick said to Fox News personality Laura Ingraham, "The COVID is spreading, particularly — most of the numbers are with the unvaccinated."

"And the Democrats like to blame Republicans on that, well, the biggest group in most states are African Americans who have not been vaccinated. Last time I checked, more than 90% of them vote for Democrats in their major cities and major counties," he said, hinting at why Texas Republicans are pursuing voter suppression bills.

He argued it was "up to the Democrats" despite the state of Texas being controlled by Republicans.

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