RNC Night 1: Here’s How You Will Die | The Daily Social Distancing Show

This *is* America: See Historian Condemn White Supremacy In Trump Era | MSNBC

Fed up Chris Wallace BLASTS Trump for illegal acts DURING Republican Convention

Trump’s RNC showcases conspiracists, backer of husbands controlling wives’ votes

 https://www.timesofisrael.com/trumps-rnc-showcases-conspiracists-backer-of-husbands-controlling-wives-votes/

 An advocate of “household voting” in which husbands get the final say. A woman who has argued that school sex ed programs are “grooming” children to be sexualized by predators like Jeffrey Epstein. A candidate who has peddled in racist tropes and bizarre QAnon conspiracy theories. US President Donald Trump has long surrounded himself with controversial characters who hold out-of-the-mainstream views. But the decision by the party to elevate some of those figures by featuring them in prime-time spots at the Republican National Convention or inviting them to witness this week’s events is drawing new scrutiny. 

 Monday’s opening night, for instance, featured Rebecca Friedrichs, an elementary school teacher who railed in her remarks against teachers unions. In a July opinion piece in the Washington Times, Friedrichs argued that public schools groom kids for sexual predators like Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, his longtime companion, who stands accused of facilitating the abuse of girls by the now-deceased sex offender, by teaching them basic sex education.

And then there are the invited guests. On Tuesday, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican congressional nominee from Georgia who supports the QAnon conspiracy theory, revealed that she had been invited to the White House to attend Trump’s marquee acceptance speech.

Greene has a long history of bolstering the baseless pro-Trump theory, which centers on an alleged anonymous, high-ranking government official known as “Q” who shares information about an anti-Trump “deep state” often tied to satanism and child sex trafficking. She has also made a series of racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic comments.

CNN reported Tuesday that, before she ran for office, Greene promoted the debunked “Pizzagate” conspiracy and speculated that the deadly 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was an “inside job.”

Trump has praised her as a “future Republican Star.”

Michael Steele: Trump's RNC Filled With Conflicting Moments | The 11th Hour | MSNBC

What Pompeo and Kushner are up to

 https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/25/opinions/pompeo-and-kushner-opinion-miller/index.html

 Secretary of State Mike Pompeo left for Israel and the Gulf on Sunday not with the two-state solution on his mind; but with a focus on what you might call the 22-state solution: how best to use Arab state relationships with Israel to support President Donald Trump's reelection campaign.

 Enamored of Arab money, arms sales and enlisting Arab states in their pro-Israeli and anti-Iranian agenda, the Trump administration's real play was never about the Palestinians or two states. It was always about the Arab nations. And authoritarian Arab regimes eager to please an autocrat-friendly president have been only too happy to follow along with Donald Trump. The only question is how many more will do so.

 In essence, as we've seen recently with the likely sale of F-35 advanced fighter aircraft to the UAE, what the Arab states wanted, they more or less got.

Before we turn Kushner and company into Metternich-like diplomatic geniuses, it's important to point out that much of the foundation for closer Arab state-Israeli ties had been laid well before Trump came to Washington.

 As for a Trump administration desperate to showcase competency and any piece of good news, the image of Arab states making peace with Israel couldn't hurt.

If there were any doubt about the politics here, consider Pompeo's plan to address the Republican National Convention from Jerusalem while on a diplomatic mission to promote the national interests of the United States. That tethers him and his office to the domestic political interests of the President's reelection.

Unprecedented to be sure. But for a secretary of state -- the most politicized in modern American history and arguably the worst -- who appears to have presidential ambitions of his own, it may well be just another day at the office.

Fact Check: Second night of RNC riddled with dishonesty as Melania Trump appeals for 'total honesty'

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/25/politics/rnc-night-two-fact-check/index.html 

 First Lady Melania Trump concluded the second night of the Republican National Convention with a speech in which she said, "Total honesty is what we as citizens deserve from our president."

We certainly haven't received total honesty from President Donald Trump. And we certainly didn't get it on Tuesday night. The convention programming was littered with false or misleading claims, including some from the President's son Eric Trump, as well as a number of other claims that were missing important context.

Here's a look at some of the notable claims from Tuesday night and the facts behind them.

Peace in the Middle East

Eric Trump suggested that his father had achieved peace in the Middle East and brought never-ending wars to an end.

"Moving the embassy to Jerusalem; peace in the Middle East. Never-ending wars were finally ended. Promises made and promises for the first time were kept," he said.

Facts First: This is misleading and lacks context. President Trump did move Israel's US Embassy to Jerusalem. As for peace and ending "never-ending wars," it's unclear exactly which conflicts Eric Trump was referencing, but that's at best debatable and in some cases wrong.

In Afghanistan, US troops have been drawn down despite delays in the intra-Afghan peace talks and the Taliban's failure to distance themselves from al Qaeda.

US intelligence assessed there was an effort by a Russian military intelligence unit to pay the Taliban to kill US soldiers -- an effort that was downplayed by Trump. The US still has more than 5,000 troops in Iraq, although CENTCOM Commander Gen. Kenneth McKenzie said two weeks ago that number would likely decrease in coming months.

 

Don Jr’s girlfriend HUMILIATES herself with off-the-rails speech at GOP convention

Chris Wallace reacts to Trump's White House RNC, Pompeo remarks: ‘All of this has never happened before’

 https://www.foxnews.com/politics/chris-wallace-trump-white-house-rnc-reaction

 Night two of the Republican National Convention featured events that bucked longstanding tradition, "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace said during Fox News' special coverage.

“What stands out to me is that about two or three weeks ago, Donald Trump suggested that he might make his acceptance speech at the White House,” Wallace said Tuesday night. “And there was an uproar in Washington. Republican Senate leaders said, 'That can't happen. We can't have that.' That barrier was completely blown away tonight, for good or for ill.”

 “We do need to point out that secretaries of state have never participated in political speeches,” he said. “In fact, it's a regulation of the State Department that nobody that's in the State Department can attend a political event, let alone participate in it. The State Department said, 'Well, he's operating in his personal capacity.' But I don't know what personal capacity a secretary of state has.”

 “People can think it's a big deal, they can think that's a little deal, but all of this has never happened before,” Wallace added. “And it's worth noting."

A bunch of false claims on RNC night 2, fact checker says

Netanyahu freezing construction in Judea and Samaria

 http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/285960

 Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has frozen new housing construction in Israeli towns in Judea and Samaria, withholding new housing permits for the expansion of Israeli towns for more than half a year.

The Civil Administration’s Higher Planning Committee, which is charged with providing housing permits for construction of new units in Area C of Judea and Samaria, was slated to convene this week, but the meeting was cancelled – the latest in a string of cancellations.

 Settlement leaders from the Yesha Council blasted the repeated delays.

“For more than half a year not a single housing unit has been approved in the area, and we haven’t been given a final date for the convening of the committee. We now find ourselves in the midst of a construction freeze in Judea, Samaria, and the Jordan Valley.”

Trump says Biden will ‘hurt God’. What can he mean by that?

 https://www.jpost.com/opinion/trump-says-biden-will-hurt-god-what-can-he-mean-by-that-639935

 During a campaign speech made from that tarmac at the Cleveland, Ohio airport last week, President Donald Trump said that his presumptive Democratic opponent in the November election, Joe Biden, will “Take away your guns, take away your Second Amendment. No religion, no anything. Hurt the Bible. Hurt God. He’s against God. He’s against guns. He’s against energy.”

One could, of course, dismiss Mr. Trump’s syntactically incorrect statement as a stream-of-consciousness rant – a speech that was meant to convey passion rather than fully developed, concrete ideas. We are, however, talking about the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the United States, an individual who enjoys complete control over the US nuclear arsenal – so let’s give this campaign speech a little more thought.

 

The Ford Administration Rolled Out a Vaccine Program Right Before the 1976 Election. It Backfired—And Not Just Politically

 https://time.com/5882949/trump-coronavirus-vaccine-election-history/

Howard Markel, director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan, remembers getting the shot as a high school sophomore: “Everyone went to school gyms or large areas, and I remember vividly my mother making us go, and waiting in line, and saying ‘this is ridiculous.'”

 “Things like the small increased risk of GBS from the 1976 vaccine become…convenient for post-hoc justification of those pre-existing fears,” says Jonathan M. Berman, author of the forthcoming history of the anti-vaxxer movement Anti-vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement. “Later studies showed that there was likely no link, but already wary parents and anti-vaxxers see it as a justification for the fear.”

On the other hand, the 1976 controversy “does provide important lessons,” Berman argues. “When vaccination decisions appear politically motivated, it can undermine trust.”

The fact that even people who are not generally anti-vaccine are worried about the safety of a COVID-19 inoculation means it’s all the more important that a coronavirus vaccine is not rushed, argues Markel. “This is a very touchy issue,” he says, “so this [vaccine] has to be rolled out exactly right.”

 

Pompeo dives into GOP confab from Jerusalem, defying precedent and possibly law

 https://www.timesofisrael.com/from-jerusalem-pompeo-dives-into-race-defying-precedent-and-possibly-the-law/

 Casting aside his own advice to American diplomats and bulldozing a long tradition of secretary of state non-partisanship, Mike Pompeo plunged into the heart of the US 2020 presidential race Tuesday with a speech from Jerusalem supporting Donald Trump’s reelection. The address was roundly condemned by Democrats and others as an inappropriate breach of decades of diplomatic precedent and a possible violation of federal law prohibiting executive branch employees from overt political activism while on duty. Indeed, Pompeo himself had reminded State Department staffers of those restrictions only last month. Yet he went ahead with the speech, which was recorded in Jerusalem during an official visit to the Middle East, over strident objections, complaints of hypocrisy and the threat of a congressional investigation.