Donald Trump began Veterans Day weekend in Paris, refusing to attend a ceremony honoring fallen American soldiers on the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, due to rain, and he ended it back in Washington, attempting to disenfranchise members of the US military who live overseas, and still want to participate in the American democracy that they are putting their lives on the line to protect, Lindsay Gibbs noted at ThinkProgress (11/12).
Trump was supposed to go to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, which contains the graves of 2,289 war dead, most of whom fought in the vicinity and in the Marne Valley in the summer of 1918, including US Marines who fell during the battle of Belleau Wood, but he canceled the trip (11/10) because the weather was too “nasty” for his helicopter.
David From, a Trump critic and former speechwriter for George W. Bush, noted the cemetery is less than 50 miles from central Paris and could be reached by motorcade in an hour.
Nicholas Soames, a grandson of former British prime minister Winston Churchill and Conservative member of Parliament, ripped Trump on Twitter: “They died with their face to the foe and that pathetic inadequate @realDonaldTrump couldn’t even defy the weather to pay his respects to The Fallen.”
Then, back in the White House on Monday morning, Trump declined to make a trip to Arlington Cemetery but tweeted that it was time to call the Florida election in favor of the Republican governor candidate, Ron DeSantis, and the Republican Senate candidate, Rick Scott, because their leads kept shrinking as votes continued to be counted.
Trump said that “large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere” and that “many ballots are missing or forged.”
“Must go with Election Night!” the misleader of the free world tweeted.
That’s bad news for the military. Ballots from overseas citizens and military voters had to be postmarked by Nov. 6. But as long as the ballots arrive by Nov. 16, the law mandates that they must be counted.
“A 10-day extension exists for overseas voters. The overseas voter’s vote-by-mail ballot must be postmarked or dated by Election Day and received within 10 days of the election in order to be counted, provided the ballot is otherwise proper,” according to the official website of the Florida Division of Elections.
Trump and many of his allies in the GOP have been in full meltdown mode since Election Day, as votes in key races in Florida, Arizona, Georgia and other states have continued to trickle in and close the gap in races that appeared to be victories for the Republican Party.
Trump said (11/10) there should be a new election in Arizona because of “fraud,” despite no evidence of fraud; the Associated Press (11/12) called the race in favor of Rep. Kyrsten Sinema (D) over Trump ally Rep. Martha McSally (R), who conceded.
Because of the tightened margins, both the governor and senator races in Florida are in a recount.
None of this is unusual. It often takes weeks for vote counts to be finalized and made official — as of Sunday night (11/11), only one of the 50 states certified its final election results. Typically, the public isn’t invested in that process because the vote counts aren’t close enough for it to matter.
This is lost on Trump, though. “An honest vote count is no longer possible—ballots massively infected,” he tweeted.
WHITE HOUSE SCREAMS ‘FRAUD’ IN FLORIDA WHILE REPUBS AWAIT FINAL COUNTS IN OTHER STATES. While Republicans have been screaming bloody murder about “voter fraud” as Republican candidates in Florida watched their leads shrink, Republican candidates in other states are hoping late ballots will close the gaps in their races, Adam Peck noted at ThinkProgress (11/11).
The shifting margins are owed, as always, to the delayed tabulation of tens of thousands of absentee and mail-in ballots which cannot be counted as quickly as the automated votes cast on Election Day.
And because a high percentage of outstanding ballots are coming from Florida’s most populous counties along the southeast coast, which tend to lean heavily Democratic, the two challengers — Sen. Bill Nelson and gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum — have been the main beneficiaries of updating figures.
Naturally, Republicans are once again distraught at the idea of having every legitimate ballot counted. Gov. Scott has publicly accused Sen. Nelson of fraud, and Trump has suggested Democrats are trying to “steal” the elections. Neither have produced a single piece of evidence to suggest even one vote that has been counted is fraudulent.
But although Republicans are demonizing efforts to count every vote in Florida, a handful of GOP congressional candidates around the country are themselves insisting every vote be counted in their own races, hoping to make up deficits against their Democratic opponents. For example, Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., one of Donald Trump’s closes allies, was trailing Democratic challenger Harley Rouda by more than 8,500 votes in one of the most closely watched congressional districts in the country, but the 30-year incumbent refused to concede the election until every vote is counted, a process that the local registrar said could take another two weeks. Neither Democrats nor the Rouda campaign have accused Rohrabacher of voter fraud.
Tom MacArthur, R-N.J., refused to concede his race to Democratic challenger Andy Kim, who was leading MacArthur by 3,424 votes, with at least 6,400 provisional ballots yet to be counted. Neither Democrats nor the Kim campaign have accused MacArthur of voter fraud.
Yvette Herrell, R-N.M., went so far as to give a victory speech, before her campaign was informed that there were still several thousand ballots that had yet to be counted. Her small lead subsequently became a small deficit in favor of Democratic candidate Xochitl Torres Small that has remained even as the state counts more provisional ballots. Herrell has refused to conced, but as a guest on Fox News (11/10), she and host Jeanine Pirro joked about how to pronounce the name of Torres Small — an attorney and the district’s first woman elected to Congress — before accusing Democrats of conspiring to steal the election, without a shred of evidence to support their claim. Neither Democrats nor the Torres Small campaign have accused Herrell of voter fraud.
Mia Love, R-Utah, ended election night trailing her Democratic challenger, Ben McAdams, by nearly three percentage points, but was optimistic the ongoing counting of mail-in ballots would narrow the gap. Heading into the weekend, she still trailed McAdams by nearly 5,000 votes. Love refused to concede, saying she would “wait until every vote is counted.” Neither Democrats nor the Ben McAdams campaign have accused Love of voter fraud. In fact, McAdams’ campaign manager Andrew Roberts thanked election officials for working to ensure a fair and accurate count of the vote, even as McAdams’ margin narrowed.
VA SECRETARY PLANNING BUDGET CUTS TRUMP REQUESTED. Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie said (11/9) he is forming a plan to cut the VA’s budget, as President Trump requested in October. Wilkie refused to go into specifics about his thoughts on reducing the VA’s budget, saying he had yet to share them with Trump, Stars and Stripes reported.
“I have been asked to offer ideas,” Wilkie said during a speech at the National Press Club. “I can’t tell you because I haven’t presented it to the president.”
Trump made the budget request of each secretary in his Cabinet during an October meeting, citing an increase in spending in his first two years as president. He told Cabinet secretaries to “get rid of the fat” and suggested the cuts could be as much as 5% of each department’s budget.
Though Wilkie, who was appointed to head the VA in July, came up with ideas to reduce costs, he said he still believed next year’s budget could be bigger than the last one. In September, Congress appropriated $209 billion for the VA in fiscal year 2019, which began Oct. 1. The budget was another in a series of increases during the last decade for the agency, which had a spending plan of $90 billion in 2009.
Meanwhile, because there has been little progress in upgrading the VA off antiquated record-keeping systems, housing allowances are being cut off to veterans that were supposed to be getting them.
At the end of August, the Veterans Benefits Administration had nearly 239,000 pending claims — 100,000 more than at the same point in 2017. As school began, thousands of students faced dire circumstances and some faced eviction, getting kicked out of school or taking on loan or credit card debt, NBC News reported (11/11).
It is an ongoing catastrophe, “Hunter” noted at (11/12). The new bill calculates a veteran student’s housing allowance based on the location of the school, not the home address of the veteran attending it; this change in zip code processing was enough to cripple the whole system, creating a backlog of claims that has meant tens of thousands of veterans haven’t received those housing stipends even now, near the close of the current semester.
Shelley Roundtree left the US Army in 2013 after a combat tour in Afghanistan. He enrolled in Berkeley College in New York City to study marketing with tuition and housing benefits he’d earned under the GI Bill. But the technology glitches have caused GI Bill benefit payments to be delayed or — in the case of Roundtree — never be delivered.
“I’m about to lose everything that I own and become homeless,” Roundtree said. “I don’t want to be that veteran on the street begging for change because I haven’t received what I was promised.”
Without the GI Bill’s housing stipend, Roundtree was kicked out of his apartment and is now living on his sister’s couch, miles from school, where he feels like a burden on his family. The new living situation required him to move all his belongings into a storage container, which he can no longer afford. Now all of his possessions are in danger of being auctioned off by the storage facility.
FBI: NEO-NAZI MILITIA IN UKRAINE TRAINS US WHITE SUPREMACISTS. American white supremacists allegedly received training from Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which receives funding from the US through the government of Ukraine, Whitney Webb reported in the MintPress News (MintPressNews.com, 11/9). The Azov Battalion has also received weapons from the Israeli government.
In a criminal complaint, filed in federal court in Los Angeles, Calif., in October, an FBI agent asserts that four American members of the “Rise Above Movement” (RAM) — RAM co-founder Robert Rundo as well as Robert Boman, Tyler Laube and Aaron Eason — had “violently attacked and assaulted counter-protestors” at several white nationalist and white supremacist events throughout the US, including the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., last year.
The named individuals are alleged to have “used the Internet to coordinate combat training in preparation for the events” and to have celebrated “their acts of violence in order to recruit members for future events.”
Court documents refer to RAM as a “white supremacy extremist group” while the group self-represents as “a combat-ready, militant group of a new nationalist white supremacy/identity movement.”
The FBI became aware that one of the individuals with whom Rundo had met during this trip was Olena Semenyaka, a leader of the International Department for the National Corps, a Ukrainian political party that was formed as an offshoot of the Azov Battalion in 2016.
The affidavit detailing Rundo’s meeting with Semenyaka, signed by FBI agent Scott Bierwirth, states that “the Azov Battalion is a paramilitary unit of the Ukrainian National Guard which is known for its association with neo-Nazi ideology and use of Nazi symbolism.” It then adds that Azov Battalion “is believed to have participated in training and radicalizing United States-based white supremacy organizations,” such as RAM.
Despite the merging of Azov Battalion with the Ukrainian government, the US has continued to support Ukraine’s military with hundreds of millions of dollars in “security, programmatic, and technical assistance,” largely in the name of combatting “Russian aggression.”
BETO NARROWS GAP IN TEXAS, BUT CAN’T CLOSE IT. Beto O’Rourke made a valiant effort but came up short in his attempt to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. The El Paso congressman’s remarkable campaign may have finally revitalized the Texas Democratic Party, which has not elected a statewide official since 1994 and has been relegated to junior status in the Texas Legislature since 2002, when Republicans finally gained control of both chambers. In 2003, Republicans proceeded to pass a severely gerrymandered redistricting plan gained six new Republican congressional seats for the 2004 elections, giving them a majority of the state’s delegation for the first time since Reconstruction.
O’Rourke worked tirelessly to mobilize an electorate that usually sits out mid-term elections, and he made gains but obviously needed more as he finished with 48.3% of the vote, nearly 223,000 votes behind Cruz’s 50.9%. But Cruz first won his Senate seat in 2012 with 56% (when Mitt Romney carried Texas with 57.2%).
Exit polls show O’Rourke got 90% of black voters, 69% of Latino voters, 69% of voters aged 18-29, 53% of voters aged 30-44 and 54% of women (but only 42% of men and 31% of white voters), but the big prize is Latino turnout, believed to be about 22% in the election, compared to 30% of Latino voting-age citizen population. That was up from past mid-term elections but continued to lag black and white voter turnout.
However, O’Rourke’s coattails not only got other statewide Democratic candidates into the low-to-mid-40s; he also helped Democrat Collin Allred defeat Republican Congressman Pete Sessions in Dallas suburbs and Lizzie Fletcher beat Republican Congressman John Culberson in Houston suburbs. Twelve Democrats also replaced Republicans in the state House while two Dems unseated Republican state senators.
FLORIDA NARROWS GAP, AND ENFRANCHISED CONVICTS MIGHT CLOSE IT. Beto O’Rourke finished nearly 223,000 votes behind Ted Cruz, and he got 616,000 votes fewer than re-elected Gov. Greg Abott, so Texas Democrats still have a way to go to reach parity. National Democrats might find it easier to block Trump’s re-election if they work on mobilizing the estimated 1.5 million convicted felons who are newly enfranchised by Florida’s Amendment 4, which passed Nov. 6 with about 65% of the vote. Florida, with 29 electoral votes, is a purple state where the top candidates for governor were split by less than 34,000 votes and the candidates for governor were split by less than 13,000 votes — and Trump carried the state in 2016 by only 112,911 votes. Re-enfranchised convicts in Florida — many of whom served time for relatively minor crimes such as marijuana and other drug trafficking — could well swing the 2020 presidential election.
TRUMP TOPS 6,420 FALSE OR MISLEADING CLAIMS AS PRESIDENT. In the seven weeks leading up the midterm elections, Donald Trump made 1,419 false or misleading claims — an average of 30 lies a day. Combined with the rest of his presidency, that adds up to a total of 6,420 faulty claims through Oct. 30, the 649th day of his term in office, according to the Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president, the Washington Post reported (11/2).
The flood of presidential misinformation has picked up dramatically as the president has barnstormed across the country, holding rallies with his supporters. Each of those rallies usually yields 35 to 45 suspect claims. But the president often has tacked on interviews with local media (in which he repeats the same false statements) and gaggles with the White House press corps before and after his trips.
So that adds up to 84 claims on 10/1, when he held a rally in Johnson City, Tenn.; 83 claims on 10/22, when he held a rally in Houston; and 78 claims on 10/19, when he held a rally in Mesa, Ariz.
Put another way: September was the second-biggest month of the Trump presidency, with 599 false and misleading claims. But that paled next to October, with almost double: 1,104 claims, not counting Oct. 31.
Fact Checkers Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelley explained, “The burden of keeping track of this verbiage has consumed the weekends and nights of The Fact Checker staff. We originally had planned to include Oct. 31 in this update, but the prospect of wading through 20 tweets and the nearly 10,000 words Trump spoke that day was too daunting for our deadline.”
PEOPLE SICKENED BY LARGEST COAL ASH SPILL MAY FINALLY GET JUSTICE. A US District Court jury spent five hours deliberating before returning a verdict (11/7) in favor of hundreds of blue-collar laborers who say they were sickened during the clean-up of the nation’s largest coal ash spill, the Knoxville, Tenn., News Sentinel reported (11/8). More than 30 workers who cleaned up the December 2008 spill at the Tennessee Valley Authority Kingston Fossil Fuel Power Plant in Roane County are dead, and more than 250 are sick or dying. They sued Jacobs Engineering, a global contractor TVA put in charge of cleaning up its mess and keeping workers safe. TVA ratepayers paid the firm more than $64 million. Jurors deciding the first phase of the workers’ toxic tort lawsuit in Chief US District Judge Tom Varlan’s courtroom heard three weeks of testimony before returning its verdict.
This means the workers, or their surviving heirs, can now sue the engineering company for taking $64 million from the state while not implementing even the most rudimentary safety standards for its workforce, Charles Pierce noted at Esquire com (11/9).
Coal ash, a by-product of burning coal to produce electricity, is filled with a concentrated stew of toxins, including arsenic, radioactive material, mercury and lead. TVA makes millions each year from selling it for industrial uses, including mixing it in concrete. When a dike at the Kingston plant gave way just before Christmas 2008, smothering 300 acres of land in the Swan Pond community, construction workers from East Tennessee and across the nation responded–without any protection or training. Not only was the spill the nation’s worst but the clean-up itself represented the country’s largest worker exposure to coal ash, the News Sentinel reported.
“Beautiful clean coal,” Pierce noted.
Testimony showed Jacobs began watering down both safety testing procedures and worker safety rules as soon as the EPA allowed the TVA to put the firm–which has a long history of worker safety lawsuits and even criminal charges–in charge of the Kingston site. The workers were falsely assured coal ash exposure was safe and were misled about its dangers, testimony showed.
As many grew sick while working more than 60 hours weekly unprotected, Jacobs’ safety managers, including Tom Bock and Chris Eich, continued to insist coal ash exposure was not the cause. Testimony showed Bock ordered dust masks kept on site for the workers destroyed and refused to provide them any protective gear. Jacobs refused an EPA directive to provide the workers showers and changing rooms and instead provided them a cat litter box filled with ash-contaminated water to clean up.
The USA Today Network found evidence showing the EPA wanted the workers protected with respirators and Tyvek suits, but both TVA and Jacobs pressured the agency into allowing the laborers to work without protection. The news organization is currently investigating what happened to video footage that would have revealed the conditions in which the laborers toiled. Jacobs representative Jack Howard has testified TVA has the footage, but a letter obtained by USA Today Network-Tennessee revealed TVA “no longer has” it. TVA won’t say why.
Pierce added, “Right now, the Supreme Court has scheduled itself to hear a case regarding whether coal ash spillover into groundwater is covered by the 1972 Clean Water Act. (I am not optimistic.) Given the fact that resuscitating the dying coal industry is one of this administration’s primary fantasies, we’re all going to be hearing more about coal ash over the next couple of years, but Kingston remains the ultimate nightmare in which environmental disaster and corporate recklessness and deceit cooperate in sweeping away lives and property like trees marching ahead of a toxic flood.
“This is a nightmare. But it probably comes as no surprise to the families of the workers who labored on ‘the pile’ at the site of the World Trade Center. The average American corporation these days has the essential civic conscience of a flamethrower. I hope these people in Tennessee get some sort of justice, but I’m not betting on it either way.”
FIRST PRIORITY FOR HOUSE DEMS: STRENGTHENING DEMOCRACY AND ENSURING VOTING RIGHTS. Incoming House Democrats have reserved the designation, House Resolution 1 for a bill to reclaiming our democratic republic, starting with establishing automatic voter registration and restoring the Voting Rights Act, NPR reported (11/12).
“It’s three very basic things that I think the public wants to see,” said Rep. John Sarbanes (D-MD): making voting easier, closing government ethics loopholes, and reducing the influence of money in politics.
Sarbanes, who leads campaign finance and government ethics efforts for the House Democratic Caucus, says the bill “demonstrate that we hear that message loud and clear.”
In addition to automatic voter registration, it would take redistricting power away from state legislatures in favor of independent commissions. It would include provisions to require more campaign finance disclosure and create a public financing match to encourage small contributions. It would close the loophole that exempts the president from the ban on conflicts of interest and require presidential candidates release their tax returns to public scrutiny.
Sarbanes admits the bill is just a first step. Republicans, who control the Senate, are unlikely to pass the bill and Trump is unlikely to sign it. “Give us the gavel in the Senate in 2020 and we’ll pass it in the Senate,” Sarbanes said. “Give us a pen in the Oval Office and we’ll sign those kinds of reforms into law.”
From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2018
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