Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
William Rivers Pitt at Truthout writes—Get Ready for the Longest Days of Our Lives:
At long last, it stands before us: the Last Week, the longest week, 40 miles of bad road between what we don’t know and what we will find out once the 2020 election deal goes down. Every second drops with the bone-cracking slowness of a cat’s long, insouciant yawn. I find myself staring off into space for moments at a time, snapping back to the jittery stew of anticipation and dread roiling my gut. I am simply terrified, for a thousand reasons.
One year ago, former FBI Director James Comey had just ripped the scab off the “But Her Emails” Benghazi “scandal” that had followed Hillary Clinton with the sound of someone banging a hollow gourd with a stick. Said someone, of course, being Mike Pompeo, or Trey Gowdy, or Jim Jordan, or any of a retinue of jabberjaws who obligingly put the ball on the tee for Comey. Comey did not miss the fairway, and here we are. [...]
[Seven] days before the vote, and any lingering illusion that Trump and his people have even the vaguest handle on this thing, which is now daily breaking infection records across the country, has fallen to dust. The truth is too huge for even professional liars like Meadows to keep behind their teeth.
I believe Trump and his inner circle want COVID to be as bad as possible now, so as to dampen voter turnout next week and further damage the country if Biden should take the reins this year. No other explanation fits the evidence. I believe this whole nightmare is a falling dagger of fascism that must be turned aside before it lands a mortal blow.
It comes to this: I wish everyone involved nothing but health and long life, but if Pence and that planeful of Fox News notables have become infected due to Trump’s deliberate negligence, we very much may all bear witness next week to the president of the United States metaphorically dragging the sick or dead bodies of his vice president and most loyal media supporters across the finish line with him as he shrieks, “They’re fine, everything’s fine, rounding the turn!”
That is where we’re at, and these will be the longest [seven] days of our lives. Stout hearts.
THREE OTHER ARTICLES WORTH READING
“The true nature of a democracy is its ability to say yes when even the powerful say no”
~~Colum McCann, Translantic (2014)
At Daily Kos on this date in 2016—Pro-Trump group planned to 'monitor' the polls by donning fake IDs, videotaping voters:
Donald Trump has repeatedly asked his supporters to go out and "monitor" polling places in suspiciously non-Trump districts (he means places where Not White People live), and Trump ally Roger Stone is happily helping to oblige with some characteristically unsubtle efforts. One is called "Vote Protectors," which plans to "protect" the vote by 1.) issuing fake ID badges, 2.) videotaping voters at the polls to make sure everything's on the up-and-up and 3.) interviewing voters to create their very own Trump-friendly "exit polls." After the Huffington Post caught wind of these efforts, the group is backing down on two of the three.
Stone’s group created an official-looking ID badge for its volunteers to wear, and its volunteers planned to videotape voters and conduct fake “exit polls,” efforts that election experts say risks intimidating and confusing voters. Or at least that’s what the group was planning to do before The Huffington Post asked Stone about it on Tuesday.
So you could print out an "ID badge" with any ol' name you wanted and you were given detailed instructions on how to upload videos of the voters you ran across. Those two schemes have, after Stone was asked about it, been pulled from the site: Stone called both of them "bad ideas" that he claimed not to have known about.