Tag: romney

The Past 24 Hours or So – Protests/Racial & Social Issues, Trump Administration, and Presidential Campaign Updates

Read Time: 6 Minutes

Protests/Racial & Social Issues

  • Police body camera footage released on Wednesday shows Rochester officers handcuffing Daniel Prude, placing a hood over his head and pressing his face into the pavement until he is silent. In the video, medics performed CPR on Prude before he was loaded into an ambulance. Prude died seven days later on March 30, with an autopsy report from the Monroe County Medical Examiner’s Office saying his cause of death included “complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint.” His brother, Joe Prude said he initially called police for help because Daniel was having a mental health incident.
  • Joe Biden will meet with the father of Jacob Blake, the Black man shot by police multiple times in Kenosha, Wisconsin, when the former vice president travels to the city on Thursday. The visit comes after President Trump went to the state and did not meet with Blake’s family.
  • A business owner in Kenosha, Wisconsin accused President Trump of using his destroyed store for political gain during a visit to the city on Tuesday.

Tom Gram, the owner of a century-old store called Rode’s Camera Shop that burned to the ground last week amid protests following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, told local outlet TMJ4 that he declined the White House’s request to be part of Trump’s tour of the damage.

He also said he was stunned to see the store’s former owner, John Rode, who sold the family business to Gram eight years ago, participating in the tour with the president.

  • Elvis Presley’s iconic Graceland estate in Memphis, Tennessee was graffitied with messages in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and defunding the Memphis Police Department.
  • Texas prosecutors have dropped charges against a Black man who was arrested while out on a run after being mistaken for a domestic-violence suspect. Officers still charged the man with assault claiming he had kicked them during the arrest, even though eyewitnesses say he cooperated peacefully.
  • Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) is the only Republican who has condemned President Trump’s recent comments about Black Lives Matter protesters, saying that trumps “comments and tweets over the past few days, including a retweet of a 2019 video clearly intended to further inflame racial tensions, are simply jaw-dropping.”
  • Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) said that systemic racism doesn’t exist and there’s “more to the story” of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody in late May.
  • Facebook has removed a post by Republican Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins for breaking its policies against inciting violence. The post in question was about protests in his city, and warned that officials will “eliminate the threat” of aggressive demonstrators adding “if we recognize threat… you won’t walk away.”
  • Charles Andrews defeated incumbent Sandy Smith and is set to be sworn into office on Nov. 2., officially becoming the first Black mayor of Monroeville, the Alabama town that inspired “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
  • Fast food chain McDonald’s was hit with a $1 billion class action lawsuit this week accusing the company of racial discrimination. Fifty-two former Black franchise owners allege that company officials steered them into economically depressed and high-crime areas, setting them up to fail.
  • A Washington, DC task force recommended renaming a slate of government buildings, parks and public schools after determining their namesakes —including some Founding Fathers and former presidents Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe — have ties to “slavery, systemic racism and other biases.”

Trump Administration

  • The Social Security Old Age and Survivors Insurance fund, which pays out retirement benefits, is on track to run out in 2031. 
  • The federal deficit is expected to reach a record $3.3 trillion this year, will amount to 16 percent of GDP, the largest since 1945 and more than twice the level on record, according to new Congressional Budget Office projections.
  • Controversial oil drilling projects in Alaska’s pristine reserves are among those that benefitted from a June order from President Trump waiving environmental reviews to speed construction — a move he said would aid the economy in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. There are now 21 fossil fuel and mining projects that have been approved as well as 70 other construction projects.

Presidential Campaign

  • President Trump suggested supporters in North Carolina should illegally attempt to vote both by mail and in person, saying doing so would test the integrity of the system.
  • Carlos Enrique Gavidia, 53, is slated to appear in court on Wednesday to face a felony charge of written threats to kill or do bodily harm. An avid supporter of President Trump who organizes boat parades in Florida and attended the Republican National Convention last week, Gavidia is accused of sending threatening messages to his neighbor that allegedly included: “fuck you, you fucking little Jew…. You fucked with the wrong guy I’m coming for you you’ll see you will see you little fucking piece of shit… I’ve got nothing to lose but you have plenty like your life.”
  • Attorney General William Barr played up the risks of the widespread use of mail-in ballots during the coronavirus pandemic, echoing President Trump’s attacks and claiming without evidence that foreign actors will counterfeit ballots to illegally vote and sway the election. Pressed in the interview on his claims, Barr said he had no evidence but was basing it on “logic.”
  • More than 1 million ballots were delivered to voters late during the 2020 primaries, according to the Postal Service’s Office of the Inspector General. The investigation found that ballots mailed the week before an election were “high risk” for not making it to election officials on time.
  • Eighty-one Nobel Prize winners endorsed Joe Biden for president in an open letter on Wednesday, citing the former vice president’s “willingness to listen to experts” and his “deep appreciation for using science to find solutions.”
  • The presidential debates between President Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden will be moderated by journalists from Fox News, C-SPAN and NBC, with CNN being shut out of the debates for the first time since 2008.
  • Joe Biden suggested there should be a live fact-check feature during his upcoming debates with President Trump: “What I’d love to have is a crawler at the bottom of the screen, a fact-checker as we speak. If we really wanted to do something, I think that would make a great, great debate if everything both of us said was instantly fact-checked.”
  • Joe Biden directly addressed President Trump in a new speech, scolding his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and telling him to “get off Twitter” and strike a stimulus deal.

“You always talk about your ability to negotiate. Negotiate a deal, a deal for somebody other than yourself.”

  • Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s campaign released a new ad that condemns rioting and violence as President Trump’s campaign continues to frame a Biden presidency as one that would lead to more turbulence and unrest.

“I want to make it absolutely clear rioting is not protesting, looting is not protesting. It’s lawlessness, plain and simple, and those that do it should be prosecuted.”

  • The Department of Homeland Security in July reportedly withheld an analysis meant for its federal, state and local law enforcement partners that warned Russia would attempt to push “allegations about the poor mental health” of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
  • State officials in Georgia are alleged to have wrongfully purged approximately 200,000 people from its voter rolls in 2019, with officials incorrectly concluding they had either moved, died or not participated in recent elections.
  • Model Karlie Kloss, the sister-in-law of White House adviser Jared Kushner, will appear at a campaign event this week with Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden as she and her husband openly speak out against President Trump. 
  • President Trump overtook Democratic rival Joe Biden on European-based betting exchange Betfair as the favorite to win the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

Sources:  ABC News, Associated Press, The Atlantic, Axios, Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, Chicago Tribune, Financial Times, Forbes,  Fox News,The Hill, Independent, MSNBC, NBC News, NJ.com, NPR, NY Times, Politico, Reuters, Salon, Slate, Vanity Fair, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post

The Past 24 Hours or So

Read Time: 7 Minutes

Protest News

  • Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf argued that the U.S. doesn’t have a “systemic racism problem” with its police.
  • Congressional Democrats are expected to roll out sweeping police reform legislation Monday, following nearly two weeks of sustained protests sparked by George Floyd’s killing in police custody.

The legislation, called the Justice in Policing Act of 2020, includes an array of measures aimed at boosting law enforcement accountability, changing police practices and curbing racial profiling, according to an outline circulated on Capitol Hill.

  • Ben Carson says Colin Kaepernick and black NFL players who protest police brutality would not be criticized for kneeling if they just said they love America.

NOTE: “I love America. I love people. That’s why I’m doing this. I want to help make America better.” Colin Kaepernick Sept. 2, 2016

  • Attorney General Bill Barr defended his decision to forcibly remove protesters from outside of the White House last week, claiming on CBS that the media is lying about the protesters being peaceful.

Barr used painstaking distinctions to defend the use of force against protesters

“Pepper spray is not a chemical irritant. It’s not chemical.”

  • In a break from other GOP lawmakers who have largely aligned behind President Donald Trump’s militarized response to nationwide unrest, Sen. Mitt Romney on Sunday marched in a Washington, DC.

Romney told a Washington Post reporter that he was participating in the demonstration “to make sure that people understand that black lives matter.” The Utah senator later tweeted a photo of himself at the protest with the caption “Black Lives Matter,” becoming one of the most prominent GOP figures to do so.

  • The Committee to Protect Journalists and the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker are currently investigating at least 280 reports of anti-press violence since May 26, a number never before seen in the United States. The majority of those reports involve police officers acting against journalists, who describe being shot with rubber bullets or other projectiles, sprayed or gassed with chemical irritants, or smacked, shoved, or pushed to the ground.

This is not a question of a few isolated missteps. These reports have come from 53 different communities across 33 states.

  • Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she’s “grateful” to protesters: “As somebody who grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, Jim Crow Alabama, when if a black man was shot by a policeman, it wouldn’t have even been a footnote in the newspaper”

Rice said she’d “absolutely advise against” Trump’s call to send active duty military into U.S. streets saying the military “isn’t trained” to handle such issues. “This isn’t a battlefield.”

  • The president has tried to portray the protesters and looters with a broad brush as “radical-left, bad people,” ominously invoking the name “antifa,” an umbrella term for leftist militants bound more by belief than organizational structure.

The Associated Press analyzed court records, employment histories, social media posts and other sources of information for 217 people arrested last weekend in Minneapolis and the District of Columbia, two cities at the epicenter of the protests across the United States.

85% of those arrested were local residents. Of those charged with such offenses as curfew violations, rioting and failure to obey law enforcement, only a handful appeared to have any affiliation with organized groups.

Those charged with more serious offenses related to looting and property destruction – such as arson, burglary and theft – often had past criminal records. But they, too, were overwhelmingly local residents taking advantage of the chaos.

  • The AP obtained copies of daily confidential “Intelligence Notes” distributed to local enforcement by the Department of Homeland Security that repeat, without citing evidence, that “organized violent opportunists — including suspected anarchist extremists — could increasingly perpetrate nationwide targeting of law enforcement and critical infrastructure.”

“We lack detailed reporting indicating the level of organization and planning by some violent opportunists and assess that most of the violence to date has been loosely organized on a level seen with previous widespread outbreaks of violence at lawful protests,” the assessment for Monday says.

The following day, the assessment noted “several uncorroborated reports of bricks being pre-staged at planned protest venues nationwide.”

“Although we have been unable to verify the reporting through official channels, the staging of improvised weapons at planned events is a common tactic used by violent opportunists,” the Tuesday assessment says.

But social media posts warning that stacks of bricks have been left at protest sites in Atlanta, Boston and Los Angeles have been debunked by local officials who have explained that the masonry was out in the open before the protests or was for use in construction projects.

  • Mayor Bill de Blasio lifted New York’s citywide curfew he had ordered last week after a spree of looting and other violence. And he pledged for the first time to cut the city’s police funding and redirect some of the money to social services.
  • White House officials are deliberating a plan for President Trump “to address the nation this week on issues related to race and national unity.
  • President Trump on Sunday sounded off on the resignation of the editorial page editor of The New York Times following the publication of an incendiary op ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) calling for a military assault against anti-racist protesters.

Editor James Bennett admitted Friday that he had not read Cotton’s piece before it was published last Wednesday.

Trump hailed Cotton’s op-ed, which characterized protests over George Floyd’s death during a brutal arrest as an “orgy of violence” by “insurrectionists.”

Trump tweeted: “Opinion Editor at @nytimes just walked out. That’s right, he quit over the excellent Op-Ed penned by our great Senator @TomCottonAR. TRANSPARENCY! The State of Arkansas is very proud of Tom. The New York Times is Fake News!!!”

Administration News

  • Former secretary of State Colin Powell joined the list of high-profile Republicans, including George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, who are not voting for Donald Trump in 2020 as the president’s own party is turning against him in the midst of nationwide turmoil.

Powell told CNN on Sunday morning: “I cannot in any way support President Trump this year.” Powell explained his reasoning had to do with the way the president treats people and has reacted to the coronavirus pandemic race riots.

‘We have a Constitution and we have to follow that Constitution and the President has drifted away from it,’ Powell said regarding the treatment of protesters who took to the streets after George Floyd’s death.

“I have worked with [Joe Biden] for 35, 40 years. And he is now the candidate, and I will be voting for him.”

  • Donald Trump blasted Colin Powell as ‘overrated’ and a ‘stiff’ on Sunday after the former national security adviser and secretary of State said he would not be supporting the president’s reelection in November.

“Colin Powell, a real stiff who was very responsible for getting us into the disastrous Middle East Wars, just announced he will be voting for another stiff, Sleepy Joe Biden,” Trump charged in a Sunday morning tweet. “Didn’t Powell say that Iraq had ‘weapons of mass destruction?’ They didn’t, but off we went to WAR!”

  • Trump clapped back on Twitter shortly after the interview aired and asserted that electing Biden or any other Democrat would lead to the defunding of police and military in the U.S.

“Not only will Sleepy Joe Biden DEFUND THE POLICE, but he will DEFUND OUR MILITARY! He has no choice, the Dems are controlled by the Radical Left.”

“Sleepy Joe Biden and the Radical Left Democrats want to ‘DEFUND THE POLICE’. I want great and well paid LAW ENFORCEMENT. I want LAW & ORDER!” Trump continued in another tweet.

  • Former national security adviser John Bolton is planning to publish his tell-all memoir about his tenure in the Trump administration later this month, despite the White House’s efforts to block its publication.

Sources familiar with Bolton’s plans told The Washington Post that the book, “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” will be published on June 23, while the former Trump administration official will give interviews promoting it the weekend before.

“As of now, the White House has not formally signed off” on John Bolton’s book, a source told Kylie Atwood. But he is coming out with it on June 23 regardless.

Sources:  ABC News, Axios, CBS News, CNN, Financial Times, Fox News,The Hill, NBC News, NPR, NY Times, Politico, Reuters, Salon, Slate, Vanity Fair, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post