The full most-recent early voting report from the state elections board in North Carolina. It is good to see record numbers of people coming out to vote early. https://s3.amazonaws.com/dl.ncsbe.g...aily Absentee Stats Report - 2024 General.pdf
Merely confirming the information from an official election source --- rather than a post from some random person on X/Twitter. Well over 50% of the political posts on X/Twitter are complete bullshiat with no basis in fact.
Trump's surrogates lying again. In rare move, Pentagon denies falsehood about troops allowed to use force during election https://apnews.com/article/election...use-of-force-a553b95097556580dba3b16bcf84480b In a rare move, the Pentagon strongly pushed back Thursday against misinformation spread on social media that falsely suggests U.S. troops have been authorized to use force against American citizens during the election. The misinformation — spread online by former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn and former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., among others — suggests that a Defense Department policy revision released in late September was timed to interfere with the Nov. 5 presidential election. Use of force by federal troops on U.S. soil against U.S. civilians is against the law — except in cases of self-defense — and is outlined in the Posse Comitatus Act. Kennedy, who ended his presidential bid and backed Republican former President Donald Trump, tweeted the false narrative to his 4 million followers. It falsely claims that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, pushed through a Defense Department directive allowing lethal force against Americans who protest government policies. The revision in question is Department of Defense Directive 5240.01, and it does not allow troops to use force on U.S. citizens. The timing of its release was not related to the election, Pentagon spokeswoman Sue Gough said. “The policies concerning the use of force by DOD addressed in DoDD 5240.01 are not new, and do not authorize the DOD to use lethal force against U.S. citizens or people located inside the United States, contrary to rumors and rhetoric circulating on social media,” Gough said in a statement to The Associated Press. The Pentagon regularly updates its directives. This update was intended to align the language on use of force from other policies into 5240.01, which only applies to defense intelligence personnel. It describes what sort of support those personnel can provide to civilian law enforcement in situations where a confrontation or lethal use of force is likely. Defense intelligence personnel can provide intelligence, analysis, training, equipment and even weapons to civilian authorities. But they are still restricted from using force themselves in those situations.
It's amazing that there are people so stupid that they will parrot this bullshiat. But that is what MAGA is all about -- the continuous repetition of lies on an industrial scale. Watch: Trump supporters tell 'The Daily Show' how they think Democrats control the weather https://www.rawstory.com/trump-supporters-weather-control/
Their leader summons the MAGAs to violently riot. ‘It’s Going to Be Interesting’: Trump Warns ‘Bad Things Could Happen’ If He Loses Election https://dailyboulder.com/bad-things...going-to-be-interesting-if-he-loses-election/
MAGA is good with vaccines when Russia puts them out. ‘MAGAs are fine totally with vaccines now’: MAGAs reverse vaccine backlash after Russia’s alleged cancer vaccine is announced https://www.themarysue.com/magas-ar...-russias-alleged-cancer-vaccine-is-announced/ MAGA’s reputation for vaccine skepticism precedes it. Since the days of the Covid-19 vaccine (the same one distributed by their candidate of choice) far-right political pundits made vaccine skepticism part of their political platform. GOP Representative just recently claimed that the Covid-19 vaccine is responsible for “all time high” cancer rates. But on the heels of Russia’s cancer vaccine announcement, MAGA supporters have changed their tune. Software engineer Alex Cole pointed out the irony of the sudden embrace of vaccines, reposting a statement made by Douglas Macgregor – once a Secretary of Defense Advisor in Trump administration – questioning why the media is ignoring a supposedly free cancer vaccine developed by Russia. On Macgregor’s post itself, X shared reader added context the states the media hasn’t reported on the vaccine because there are many like it already in development, and Russia has provided “no data” to support their vaccine claim. However, the Economic Times and Newsweek have covered the story. This isn’t the first time Douglas Macgregor has repeated a dubious claim. He once lent credence to the white supremacist “great replacement” theory popularized by Tucker Carlson, that posits that left-leaning politicians are conspiring to, in Macgregor’s own words, “bring in as many non-Europeans as possible in order to outnumber the numbers of Americans of European ancestry who live in the United States.” Users on X were quick to lampoon Macgregor’s apparent endorsement of Russia’s contested vaccine, calling it a total 180 from past MAGA views surrounding inoculation. The irony is palpable. Considering Trump’s choice for head of the Health and Human Services Department, the hypocrisy is indeed out of this world and halfway across the Solar System. Trump has tapped Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the organization, the same man who recently claimed that the polio vaccine was responsible for killing more people than polio itself. Kennedy has also spread doubt about the HPV vaccine, saying that it “appears to be increasing the risk of cervical cancer” despite accredited medical organizations saying otherwise. He has even repeated the universally debunked claim that vaccines cause autism, and believes that tap water is turning kids gay and the bacterial hotbed that is raw milk is healthier than pasteurized. Whether RFK Jr. will change his tune on vaccination now that Russia apparently has one remains to be seen. If it appears that Douglas Macgregor is warming up to Russia, he’s only taking after his candidate of choice. Donald Trump has broken with political precedent to frequently praise Russian President Vladimir Putin, who Trump has said once called him a “genius.” Trump has since called Putin a “strong leader” and recently called the Russian President in order to discuss the ongoing war in Ukraine. If Macgregor and his party are indeed content to flip flop on vaccines, the decision comes to little too late. According to a report by the National Library of Public Medicine “at least 232,000 deaths could have been prevented among unvaccinated adults” had they been inoculated. If Russia had distributed a Covid-19 vaccine, would MAGA have backed it then? No one can truly say.
The MAGA Right’s Plan to Destroy the Fourteenth Amendment It’s the part of the Constitution that guarantees all Americans something Republicans despise: equal protection under the law. https://newrepublic.com/post/190108/maga-destroy-fourteenth-amendment-trump Another January 6 has come and gone, and with it the furtive remembrances of the day that touched off so much institutional collapse. Not that you’d know anything was amiss in Washington, where Democrats made an elaborate show of underscoring the peaceful transfer of power—seemingly not aware that the very act of melodramatizing something that should simply be background noise in a stable democracy only suggests the papering over of a greater disorder. It’s been fashionable to argue that the 2021 coup plot actually succeeded or, perhaps more accurately, never ended. Either way, the reality is that January 6 may have passed on the calendar but it is not done with us yet. What began on that day was much more than a mere attempt to overturn an election, it was actually a forcible rejection of the principles of democracy that arose out of the post–Civil Rights era. President Barack Obama used to suggest that his election was evidence that the United States was shaping into the “more perfect union” of its dreams. The latest election suggested that what we’re actually rounding into is a mafioso state ruled by a strongman and his affiliated oligarchs. This year, the right will be coming after the strongest bulwark against their corrupt vision for our future. It is one of the most important accomplishments of the Reconstruction era, and one of the most critical safeguards of justice, citizenship, and equal protection under the law: the Fourteenth Amendment. What makes this amendment so important is that it plays an outsize constitutional role in enabling the possibility of a robust multiracial democracy. That also makes it a prime target of those who want to prevent such a thing from coming into being. It makes sense that this battle should kick off with an insurrection. One of the most interesting things about the January 6 attacks is that they were something for which we, the people, had specifically prepared, writing into the Fourteenth Amendment language—which TNR’s Matt Ford described as “thunderous and unequivocal”—barring any person who had sworn an oath of office and subsequently gone on to engage in “insurrection or rebellion” from ever again holding federal office. When Colorado voters sued their secretary of state, Jena Griswold, in an attempt to use this constitutional fail-safe to evict Donald Trump from the ballot, it brought Griswold into conflict with the Supreme Court. Like many observers, I felt the disqualification effort would prove fruitless before that body but that the justices would take safe harbor in the lack of any criminal convictions of Trump to make the more abstruse argument that there was too much doubt about his culpability in the insurrection to deny him a place on the ballot in accordance with the disqualification clause. (More at above url)