Welcome 😄 to Friday’s Roundup of Good News!
Gosh, our folks are fabulous, aren’t they? Michelle Obama. AOC. The Bidens. When I watched the roll call nominating Joe, so many tears came I had to hit pause. Good tears, cathartic tears, even hopeful tears. But also tears because the last few years have been so damned hard.
No matter how we’re feeling — buoyed up or anchored down — we need to push those feelings aside. We have work to do, serious work, to save our country and even the planet. Our actions, not our feelings, are what will count in the next few months, these 70+ days leading to the election and the possible days/weeks/months of chaos beyond.
Make sure you’re registered to vote. Makes sure all the blue-leaning folk in your circles are registered to vote. Make sure you have a plan to vote, and a couple of back-up plans as well. Help the blue-leaning folk in your circle do so as well.
Got more energy? Need to do something with that anxiety? Check out your local dems, or any of Yosef52’s diaries.
For more information, see VOTE.ORG.
Whether you’re confident or desperate or somewhere in between, roll up your sleeves and get to work. Do whatever you can to make them go.
Are you worried about what happens afterwards? See Protecttheresults.com to learn what you can do if it comes to that (more on this below).
If there are other things that need to be done, then we need to do them.
Ideas? Actions you’re taking? Post them in the comments.
Regular Scheduled Programming
No one here is naïve; we are aware of the very bad stuff that is happening. Some of us expected it: the cheating, the lying, the chaos, and yes, even the attempts to cling to power despite the clear will of the people. But we are here to read the efforts and the positive results of those (including us and our fellow gnus) who are working so hard to save our country from those very bad people. We are furious with them for what they are doing and we are letting them know. Remember:
💚 There are more of us than there are of them.
💛 They are terrified when we organize. THERE IS LOTS OF EVIDENCE THAT THEY ARE TERRIFIED!
💔 They want us to be demoralized. We have to keep demoralizing them. Name, blame and shame! IT IS WORKING! WE HAVE EVIDENCE THAT THEY ARE DEMORALIZED!
💙 The best way to keep up your spirits is to fight. So, take the time to recharge your batteries, but find ways to contribute to the well-being of our country and our world.
💙 Toxic 🍄 Trump Matters 👎
So many crimes being showcased, with the promise of more to come. The Russians. Michael Cohen. Steve Bannon. People who served in the tRump administration.
Senate Intelligence Report, which is confirming all we knew about Russia and tRump in 2016 and even a whole lot more. I don’t want to go into it; you can read about it here.
Still, we’re all wondering why the hell only a single R had the courage to convict. They have known this all along. For years.
Disloyal. This is the book by the tRump’s fixer. And currently in the top 10 on Amazon, even though it won’t be available until September 8. (Hope NNNE reads and reports, so we don’t have to.) You can listen to the forward, however, here:
The one comforting thing is that tRump, although vicious and dishonest, may not be all that smart. He’s still extremely dangerous, however.
People are preparing for tRump’s attempted election theft New York Intelligencer
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist or a Trump-hater to recognize that the president of the United States has been hinting very broadly that he might contest an election defeat as “rigged” if, as is virtually certain, Joe Biden’s vote will consist of a lot of ballots cast by mail. Indeed, many journalists and academicians have laid out a scenario whereby Trump, having convinced his own supporters to vote in person on election day, takes an early lead that evening, declares victory, and then attacks any reversal of his lead by subsequent mail ballots (generally counted later because they must be opened and authenticated) as fraudulent.
What happens then could depend on how audacious Team Trump (and perhaps state legislatures aligned with it) becomes in seeking to overturn popular vote results, and how much assistance it gets from the courts. But are American citizens expected simply to stand by quietly and watch with equanimity the unfolding of what amounts to a coup d’etat? Maybe not, as New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg reports:
Progressive organizers are preparing for this eventuality. They’ve seen Trump tweet about postponing the election, spread lies about voter fraud and try to sabotage the Postal Service. Many of them remember the 2000 presidential election, when rowdy Republican operatives physically stopped the vote count in Florida while hapless Democrats put their faith in the courts. (One of the instigators of the so-called Brooks Brothers Riot was none other than the criminal Trump adviser Roger Stone.)
So a coalition of progressive groups, as well as some anti-authoritarian conservative ones, is organizing under the rubric Protect the Results to get people into the streets if Trump tries to cheat in November. “It’s a pretty massive effort that’s underway,” said Rashad Robinson, executive director of Color of Change, which is part of the coalition. Activists all over the country, he said, are “really gearing up for this fight.”
If you’re interested in participating, click on the protect the results link in the quote above.
🐊 Draining the Swamp 🐊
Some things still work:
And there’s this:
In case you missed what this is about, here’s a link to the Washington Post. Here’s what they have to say:
Federal prosecutors in New York on Thursday unsealed criminal charges against Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, and three other men they alleged defrauded hundreds of thousands of donors using an online crowdfunding campaign that was advertised as raising money to build a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico.
In a news release, prosecutors said Bannon and another organizer of the campaign, Air Force veteran Brian Kolfage, claimed that they would not take any compensation as part of the campaign, called “We Build The Wall,” but that was a lie. Bannon, prosecutors alleged, received more than $1 million through a non-profit he controlled, and Kolfage received more than $350,000.
Prosecutors alleged they and two others routed payments from the campaign through the non-profit and another shell company and disguised them with fake invoices to help keep their personal pay secret. All four were arrested Thursday and are expected to make court appearances later in the day. They are charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering.
We also should thank Geoffrey Berman who protected SDNY.
Mauritius arrests captain of oil spilling boat EcoWatch
The captain of the ship that ran aground off Mauritius and caused an environmental crisis when oil began leaking close to the island nation's unique marine ecosystems was arrested, both police and the captain's lawyer said on Tuesday.
The captain, 58-year-old Sunil Kumar Nandeshwar of India, was charged with endangering safe navigation, BBC News reported. Chief officer Tilak Ratna Suboda of Sri Lanka was also arrested, according to The New York Times.
"We have arrested the captain of the vessel and another member of the crew. After having been heard by the court they have been denied bail and are still in detention," Inspector Siva Coothen told Reuters.
💙 Democrats Are Great 🌊
Republicans 🐘 Got Nothing 👎
I confessed to tears in my introduction, then switched to the importance of action. No matter how you feel, I do think action is what is important right now. On the other hand, I want to praise the Democratic convention. The roll call was inspired! The speakers were inspirational! I am so proud to be a Democrat!
💙 Here are some bits from Joe Biden’s speech Washington Post
America faces four converging crises, he said, a global pandemic, an economic crisis, racial injustice and climate change. “This will determine what America is going to look like for a long, long time,” Biden said. “Character is on the ballot. Compassion is on the ballot. Decency, science, democracy. They’re all on the ballot.” ✂️
“The president keeps telling us the virus is going to disappear. He keeps waiting for a miracle. Well, I have news for him. No miracle is coming." ✂️
If elected, Biden said, he would be “an ally of the light, not the darkness.” That, he added, would mean quickly reaching beyond his own party. Though he is a “Democratic candidate,” Biden said, he vowed to be an “American president.”
“I’ll work hard for those who didn’t support me,” he pledged, before quoting his old partner in the White House, who famously said at the party’s 2004 convention, “We’re not red states and blue states; we’re all Americans, standing up together for the red, white, and blue.”
Even the other side has confessed to admiration. For Jill...
And for Joe…
Of course, since the Rs have been spreading nonsense about Biden’s cognitive decline, their expectations may have been really low… In fact that seems to be it.
Chris Wallace The Daily Beast
Chris Wallace was even more effusive, calling it an “enormously effective” speech. But most importantly for Biden, Wallace said it “blew a hole” in President Donald Trump’s attempts to paint him as feeble or even demented in some way.
“Remember, Donald Trump has been talking for months about how Joe Biden is mentally shot, a captive of the left,” the Fox News host continued. “And yes, Biden was reading from a TelePrompter, from a prepared speech. But I thought he blew a hole, a big hole in that characterization.”
“It seems to me that after tonight, Donald Trump is going to have to run against a candidate, not a caricature,” the Fox News host declared. “The Democrats have had a good convention. Now it’s the Republicans’ turn.”
Echoing Wallace, the conservative commentator Brit Hume called it a very good speech” delivered with “force and clarity” by Biden. “He showed no sign of the times when his memory seems faint and his grasp has seemed weak,” Hume said, caveating that you “wouldn’t expect that in a prepared speech.”
If you missed this…
More signs supporting Biden Washington Post
probably not the sign in PA, although I think it would work well
High above a bend in the Susquehanna River, a half-dozen Trump campaign signs sprouted from the tidy green lawns of West Nanticoke in 2016. A solitary Clinton sign offered the only evidence of the competitive election raging across Pennsylvania — and nationwide.
On Thursday, Michael Wolfkiel walked his local streets, chatted with neighbors about the latest from the Democratic National Convention and scoured front yards to tally the score. “Sixteen for Biden, four for Trump,” said the 62-year-old. “I thought this must be a pretty red neighborhood. Apparently not.” ✂️
“We’ve been absolutely overwhelmed by requests for those yard signs,” said Kathy Bozinski, the Democratic Party chair in Luzerne. “At this point in the 2016 campaign, there was not even a fraction of the enthusiasm that we’re experiencing now.”
Some tweet responses point out that the Ds always had these qualities; the Rs just claimed they didn’t.
Chris Wallace of FOX news thinks the Rs are going to have a hard time attacking Kamala Harris The Daily Beast
When Fox’s Sandra Smith attempted to paint Harris as a “flip-flopper,” asking if her party will “struggle to defend” her evolution on certain issues, Wallace pushed back.
“I don’t think they’re going to have to struggle at all,” he said of the Democrats. “I mean, let’s think of who else Joe Biden could have picked.” If he had picked Susan Rice, then the Trump campaign “would have been all over her” on Benghazi and the Russia investigation. Now “they don’t get to do any of that,” he said. If he had picked Elizabeth Warren, Wallace said they could have much more easily characterized the ticket as “far-left.” ✂️
“Despite the president saying yesterday that Kamala Harris was his number one draft pick, that she’s the one he wanted the most, I promise you that there were a lot of people he would have liked to be running against much more,” Wallace said. Given the other women on his shortlist, he marveled at the fact that the “daughter of an immigrant from India and an immigrant from Jamaica” ended up being the “safe choice” for Biden.
And just because forces on the right are calling her too far left doesn’t change that, he added. “The fact that Liz Cheney and The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal editorial page don’t like her, who among the Democrats would they have liked?” Wallace asked, laughing. “The answer is they’re kind of struggling.”
Reminding Fox News viewers that as a prosecutor Harris was actually “pretty tough on crime,” he said, “That’s going to make it a little bit harder for the Republicans to say that this is a far-left, Defund the Police ticket. Again, think of who he could have chosen and how much easier it would have been for Republicans to make that case.”
You know, I don’t think Chris Wallace will be voting for tRump.
h/t hpg:
BEYOND THE BELTWAY
North Carolina’s 💙 Governor Roy Cooper announces grants for businesses Asheville Citizen Times
Gov. Roy Cooper announced Aug. 13 a new grant program to help employers deal with the coronavirus pandemic and said new data shows the state’s COVID-19 numbers are improving.
“As you see, we’re making progress, and I’m encouraged,” Cooper said at the beginning of a news conference to discuss the COVID situation. “But we have to keep working to fight the disease and make our schools strong and rebuild our economy.”
The new program will help for-profit and nonprofit employers. It’s called the Job Retention Grant Program, and it’s designed to help employers keep their workers on the payroll, Cooper said.
Governor Sisolak signs bill to protect both businesses and workers in the time of pandemic.
I am still putting this in the “too good to be true category...” but we can hope! AND work our butts off!
This probably is true:
🐍 Schadenfreude 🍎
This guy has gotten in a lot of trouble lately...
You know some Rs really do work hard. Too bad they never use their powers for good.
Oh, remember Kanye West?
📣 Let’s Honor Truth ☀️
We need to honor Kimberly Karol, and all the other postal workers who have been speaking out against the atrocities. Forbes
Postal workers on the ground have been speaking out against DeJoy’s changes, saying the cost-cutting measures are directly impeding their ability to do their jobs efficiently. “I grew up in a culture of service where every piece was to be delivered, to be delivered every day,” Kimberly Karol, president of the Iowa Postal Workers Union, told NPR, adding that the new policies are “not allowing us to deliver every piece every day, as we've done in the past.” Scott Adams, president of American Postal Worker Union Local 458, told Reuters thousands of letters have been delayed in southern Maine alone as a result of the changes, and the outlet reports delays have been seen in at least 18 other states. Karol noted that the new policies are also making operations perhaps even less efficient; new requirements permit workers to only embark in the morning with mail sorted the night before, requiring them to double back and pick up new batches of mail in the middle of their shifts. “I see this as a way to undermine the public confidence in the mail service,” Karol told NPR. “It's not saving costs. We’re spending more time trying to implement these policy changes, and it's, in our offices, costing more overtime.”
Some of us have brought this up before (I contacted one of my senators back in May of this year). But it is Ms. Karol whose voice was finally heard.
We also have to honor Miles Taylor, a former DHS employee, who told the truth about the horrors of the tRump administration. Washington Post
The president has tried to turn DHS, the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, into a tool used for his political benefit. He insisted on a near-total focus on issues that he said were central to his reelection — in particular building a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico. Though he was often talked out of bad ideas at the last moment, the president would make obviously partisan requests of DHS, including when he told us to close the California-Mexico border during a March 28, 2019, Oval Office meeting — it would be better for him politically, he said, than closing long stretches of the Texas or Arizona border — or to “dump” illegal immigrants in Democratic-leaning sanctuary cities and states to overload their authorities, as he insisted on several times.
Trump’s indiscipline was also a constant source of frustration. One day in February 2019, when congressional leaders were waiting for an answer from the White House on a pending deal to avoid a second government shutdown, the president demanded a DHS phone briefing to discuss the color of the wall. He was particularly interested in the merits of using spray paint and how the steel structure should be coated. Episodes like this occurred almost weekly.
The decision-making process was itself broken: Trump would abruptly endorse policy proposals with little or no consideration, by him or his advisers, of possible knock-on effects. That was the case in 2018 when then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced, at the White House’s urging, a “zero tolerance” policy to prosecute anyone who crossed the border illegally. The agencies involved were unprepared to implement the policy, causing a disastrous backlog of detentions that ultimately left migrant parents and their children separated.
🌹 Let’s Celebrate Love ❤️
Dr. Jill Biden & Joe Biden Axios
Jill Biden said in her speech at the Democrats' virtual convention Tuesday night from a Wilmington, Del., school at which she once taught that Democratic nominee Joe Biden would bring the U.S. "together and make us whole."
The big picture: She spoke of the grief her husband had faced, with him losing his first wife and infant daughter in a car crash in 1972 and his son Beau to brain cancer in 2015. But she said his "strength of will is unstoppable" and his faith "unshakable," adding that "his faith is in you — in us." Trump loyalist Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) joined Democrats and others in praising Jill Biden for her personal speech.
"How do you make a broken family whole? The same way you make a nation whole. With love and understanding-and with small acts of compassion. With bravery. With unwavering faith."
— Jill Biden
📎📎Odds & Ends 📎📎
Smog-eating mural in Warsaw Good News Network
There’s a sunflower in the mural
Warsaw, Poland became the latest city to feature public art projects that also clean city air, as a giant mural made of special, sun-activated, smog-cleaning pigments was painted by local artists.
Organized by the sportswear company Converse as part of their City-Forests campaign, the mural was produced using photocatalytic paint with titanium dioxide that attracts airborne pollutants before converting them into harmless nitrates through a chemical process involving sunlight.
Through this process the mural reportedly purifies the surrounding air equal to 720 trees, and when the campaign is finished, the murals spread across several countries should be doing the work of 3,000.
A reminder many of us need, that sometimes you just gotta have fun:
Montana may be cleaning up its oil wells EcoWatch
Not in Montana, but in Oklahoma.
Unplugged wells in Montana and across the country leak thousands of metric tons of greenhouse gases each year. They can also leach toxins into groundwater and surface water systems, contaminating aquifers. More often than not, these wells simply aren't being cleaned up. That's in part because a lack of funding and political will has stymied the state's cleanup efforts, and in part because there's uncertainty around ownership. "I didn't know they were actually abandoned," Stewart says of the multiple orphaned wells on his property. "I thought the oil company was responsible."
A foundation formed in 2019 could finally help clean up some of these abandoned oil wells, including those on Stewart's property. "The operator who is responsible is long gone," says Curtis Shuck, founder of the Well Done Foundation. "Our focus is doing the right thing, leaving it better than the way we found it." ✂️
Just over a year after that first trip north, the Well Done Foundation plugged its first three wells and expanded beyond the Montana pilot program into dozens of other states. Shuck says that he hopes the foundation can also gather the concrete data that the government lacks, such as the number of orphaned wells and their emissions, which makes it difficult to develop solutions.
Shuck says he can acknowledge the state's shortcomings in their cleanup efforts while building relationships with those who make regulatory decisions. The "state fund is grossly underfunded," Shuck says, but "why should the public bear the burden of this orphaned well issue?"
I do a lot of other writing. Most recent offering: Hunters of the Feather, a story about a thinker-linker crow who wants to save birdkind from extinction. (It’s really good! It’s really cheap! Buy it!) My less recent stories, based on Jane Austen novels and others on Greek mythology, can be found here.
💙 What You Can Do to Rescue Democracy 💙
It turns out that participation in democracy is not just an every-four-years event but requires active participation, like, whenever you can find time. However, given that we have taken back the House, the tactics moving forward need to be different. Indivisible has ideas to share.
Indivisible 2.0
This Guide is for what comes next. The 2016 Indivisible Guide was about using constituent power to defend our values, our neighbors, and our democracy. This Guide is about using our constituent power to go on offense.
Offense is exciting, but it’s more complex than defense. We have the opportunity to use congressional oversight to hold Trump and his cronies accountable. We can set the legislative agenda with a bold progressive vision rooted in inclusion, fairness, and justice. But none of this is automatic — we have to demand it of Congress.
And some other ideas:
You can relax and recharge.
You can join protests and freeway blog.
You can help register new voters.
You can smile.
You can get out the vote for special elections.
You can reach out to upset Republicans. Remember, a lot of them crossed over in the midterms! Get them to feel good about being blue.
You can share your ideas below.
🌻
🍀 “My experience has been that work is almost
always the best way to pull oneself out of the depths.” 🍀
Eleanor Roosevelt
🔥 If you’re going through hell, keep going! 🔥
Winston Churchill
🌹 🌹 🌹
TRUTH MATTERS. LOVE MATTERS.
