It’s impressive how often the rats have abandoned the SS Trump. The latest to leave is Kellyanne Conway — she’s leaving the White House to “spend more time with her family”, as is traditional. It’s hard to care much, though, just another liar leaving one grift to move on to another.

Obama is fair game.

Just think, our best possible outcome is to get another pro-banker militarist in office this year!

I hope so.

Ben Shapiro got his start in right-wing media by justifying Trayvon Martin’s death — from there he’s gone on to make countless Islamophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, and all-around hateful remarks. Here’s how the child violin prodigy became a conservative darling 🎙 @JoeMande pic.twitter.com/D5iaaGoGvH

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) August 20, 2020

All he has as a talent is the ability to talk really fast without thinking.

The news has been full of this nonsense about how Kamala Harris may not be a US citizen, prompted by a terrible op-ed in Newsweek. It’s a shitty argument made with absurd confidence/arrogance by a guy installed in a sinecure in a right-wing think tank.

Eastman’s Newsweek article rehashes an argument he has made for years: that American-born children of immigrants only acquire birthright citizenship if their parents were lawful permanent residents at the time of birth. According to Eastman, the children of immigrants who entered the U.S. without authorization, or on a temporary permit, are not American citizens. Rather, they constitute an underclass of (mostly stateless) aliens subject to deportation and denied the rights and privileges of American citizenship. His article is titled “Some Questions for Kamala Harris About Eligibility”—he’s just asking questions!—because he believes her citizenship turns on the immigration status of her parents when she was born. If her parents were “temporary visitors, perhaps on student visas,” Eastman wrote, then Harris lacks American citizenship. Eastman has never fully explained how he intends to strip millions of Americans of their citizenship, though he does suggest that, at a minimum, Harris might need to be expelled from her Senate seat.

That’s garbage, but mission accomplished: the author has successfully made a ludicrous idea a topic of conversation, and it really doesn’t matter that most of the conversation is about how stupid and wrong it is, as long as everyone is talking about it. Like this post.

The real question is how the media willingly swallow this poison in the first place.

Why, then, do outlets like Newsweek and the Washington Post keep publishing articles that promote this lie? A coterie of racists based at the Claremont Institute hope that if they repeat it enough, they can leave the door open for a mass expatriation of second-generation Americans, most of them minorities. Indeed, there are few if any supporters of this falsehood who lack connections to the Claremont Institute. Eastman is a senior fellow at Claremont and the founding director of its Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence. Josh Hammer, the Newsweek editor who commissioned the piece, is a former fellow at the institute. Michael Anton, who manipulated the text of a quote from the Senate debate over the 14th Amendment in a Washington Post op-ed to make this lie seem more credible, is a senior fellow there. (Anton may be best known as the author of “The Flight 93 Election,” published in the Claremont Review of Books, which condemned “ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners.”) Claremont “scholar” Edward J. Erler wrote a book arguing that the American-born children of Mexican immigrants have no right to U.S. citizenship, giving the idea greater exposure.

The Claremont Institute masquerades as an intellectual salon of the right, but it is really just a racist fever swamp with deep connections to the conspiratorial alt-right. It even granted a fellowship to Jack Posobiec, who helped promote the notorious Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Claremont’s resident bigots offer deranged fantasies of violently expelling Americans from their home country because of their ethnic backgrounds. Their work deserves the intellectual weight given to that of David Duke and his Nazi-loving fellow travelers.

Sounds about right. The right-wing has set up all these empty ‘institutions’ with hoity-toity names to create a cadre of assholes with false authority, and these gullible media sites accept that as meaningful. Oh, he’s a Fellow of an Institute. Must be clever and important. Sure, publish him, even if it’s garbage, it must be thoughtful and representative of a legitimate, informed opinion. So it gets out there. The purpose of the think tank is accomplished.

The solution is to treat an association with organizations like the Claremont Institute as the equivalent of a fake diploma, the possession of which ought to automatically disqualify you.

The sitting president of the United States is scheming to steal the next election. This ought to be on the top of our minds as we are all looking forward to exercising our democratic rights, that just as Congress has stood by unwilling (rather, actively participated in the corruption) to act as the executive branch goes wild and as the judicial branch has been poisoned for a generation, Donald Trump is looking at the polls, seeing his only option is cheating.

The US Postal Service has issued a warning that they can’t make the delivery schedule for ballots in two states, so far.

The U.S. Postal Service has warned at least two states — Washington and the battleground state of Pennsylvania — that some mail-in ballots are at risk of not being delivered on time to be counted in the November general election because the states’ deadlines are too tight for its “delivery standards.”

Thomas J. Marshall, general counsel and executive vice president of USPS, expressed the agency’s concern regarding this “mismatch” in two separate letters to Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, and Kim Wyman, Washington’s secretary of state. The Philadelphia Inquirer was the first to report on the letters, which were dated July 29 and July 31, respectively.

Marshall warned in the letters that some of the states’ deadlines concerning mail-in ballots were “incongruous” and “incompatible” with the Postal Service’s delivery standards. “This mismatch,” he wrote, “creates a risk that ballots requested near the deadline under state law will not be returned by mail in time to be counted under your laws as we understand them.”

Trump has openly declared that he won’t support mechanisms to allow continued voting during the pandemic.

President Trump on Thursday said he opposes both election aid for states and an emergency bailout for the U.S. Postal Service because he wants to restrict how many Americans can vote by mail, putting at risk the nation’s ability to administer the Nov. 3 elections.

Trump has been attacking mail balloting and the integrity of the vote for months, but his latest broadside makes explicit his intent to stand in the way of urgently needed money to help state and local officials administer elections during the coronavirus pandemic. With nearly 180 million Americans eligible to vote by mail, the president’s actions could usher in widespread delays, long lines and voter disenfranchisement this fall, voting rights advocates said.

Trump said his purpose is to prevent Democrats from expanding mail-balloting, which he has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, would invite widespread fraud. The president has also previously admitted that he believes mail voting would allow more Democrats to cast ballots and hurt Republican candidates, including himself.

He’s doing this in plain sight. He is brazenly opposing free and fair elections because he knows he would be deposed.

What are we going to do about it?

I remember the helplessness when the Supreme Court handed a presidential election to George W. Bush — we all let it happen because we had faith in the rule of law and democratic institutions. That faith is gone now, completely demolished by the actions of the Republican party and the passivity of the Democrats. Now we have a president who intends to deny huge numbers of people the right to vote, all because a fair election would damage his evil party.

What are we going to do about it when the rule of law fails?