Trump campaign is really worried about North Carolina

Because huge voter turnout is frightening, apparently:

Internally, the Trump campaign is increasingly worried that the president's chances of winning North Carolina, a state the team has heavily invested in and views as essential for Trump's path to victory, has all but evaporated. The campaign had viewed the state as "super safe" as recently as just a few weeks ago, sources told ABC News.

Advisers now fear that, because the state counts and reports both day-of and mail-in votes together on election night, losing North Carolina could be a clear white flag.

In other words, counting all the votes is a bad sign for them. As the stink of desperation settles over the Trump family, they are showing up in NC daily. Donald Jr today, Ivanka tomorrow, and the Orange Satan himself on Wednesday:

Amy Coney Barrett flunked the racial bias test

Apparently being called a nigger by your boss is not hostile:

The 2019 case involved a Black Illinois transportation employee who sued the department after he was fired. He said his supervisor had created a hostile work environment and called him the N-word.

The unanimous three-judge panel ruled that the employee had failed to prove that he had been fired because of his race. In her opinion, Barrett wrote that the N-word is an "egregious racial epithet," but she argued that the employee couldn't win by simply proving the N-word was said to him.

If it had been a co-worker, or even a supervisor from a different department, her argument might have merit. But a direct supervisor doing that changes everything. It calls into question previous disciplinary "problems" the employee had on his work record, which is what Barrett used to justify dismissing the case. She ignored the inherent and obvious bias in his chain of command, and then held him responsible for the results of that bias. Forgetting (for the moment) the election results or dangers to Roe v. Wade, this decision proves she can't rule properly on any labor vs. management issue, a substantial portion of the Court's docket.

Analysts: Trump can't win without North Carolina

Which is why we've been "blessed" by so many visits:

President Donald Trump’s frequent visits to North Carolina are a sign: the state and its 15 Electoral College votes are critical to his effort to win reelection. He has made seven appearances here since July 27 — four in September alone.

Biden leads Trump by a slight margin in North Carolina, which Western Carolina University political scientist Chris Cooper called the most-important swing state in deciding the election. “I think there is a path to victory for Biden that doesn’t go down Tobacco Road, but I don’t think the same is true for President Trump,” Cooper said.

While I find it frustrating we still need to worry about Trump winning North Carolina (WTAF, people), it's somewhat comforting to know Biden can still win without us. Just like Obama did in 2012 with 332 Electoral votes. But (once again) it's the suburbs in NC that will determine the outcome:

Today is the last day for voter registration for 2020 Election

Unless you're planning to one-stop early vote:

Applications received after 5 p.m. Friday will be timely if postmarked on or before Oct. 9. If a postmark is missing or unclear, an application will be processed if it’s received no later than 20 days before the election. Otherwise, the application won’t be processed until after the election.

Faxed or emailed applications must be received by 5 p.m. Friday, and hard copies must be delivered to the Board of Elections by 20 days before the election.

Understand, if you have moved since you last registered to vote, even if you're still in the same voting precinct, your registration is no longer valid and must be updated. You can check your voter registration status right here just to make sure. If you miss today's deadline, you can register and vote the same day at an early voting site. But you will need to provide proof of residence when doing so. Here are some other qualifications to consider:

Trump admin specifically targeted migrant children as a deterrent

There is a special place in hell for people like this:

“We need to take away children,” Mr. Sessions told the prosecutors, according to participants’ notes. One added in shorthand: “If care about kids, don’t bring them in. Won’t give amnesty to people with kids.”
Rod J. Rosenstein, then the deputy attorney general, went even further in a second call about a week later, telling the five prosecutors that it did not matter how young the children were.

Aside from the inherent cruelty of Sessions' directive, it's also logically flawed. Who deserves amnesty more than small children? When your moral compass is so fucked up it points directly south, you have no business leading a barbershop quartet, much less the U.S. Justice Department. But while Sessions and Rosenstein deserve their own Nuremberg trials, it's the narcissistic sociopath Donald Trump who drove them to such inhumane actions:

Plague Rats clinging to a sinking ship

Whistling past the graveyard. The irresponsibility is breathtaking, literally.

Posted by Steve Harrison on Monday, October 5, 2020

Trump's voter suppression machine kicks into high gear

And harassing election officials is one of their weapons:

The strategy was on display last week when Trump tweeted about nine “discarded” ballots in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. Then this week the hot spot was a Philadelphia fight over whether Trump campaign poll monitors could be allowed into newly opened satellite election offices.

Trump poll monitors requested entry, but city election offices said neither party's observers had a legal right to access the buildings. Under state law, poll monitors can only observe live, in-person voting and not places where people can register, fill out early ballots and drop them off to be counted weeks later. The campaign sent observers to the sites, and in one case, they were turned away by a Republican on the city election commission. The campaign sued the city Thursday night in an effort to gain access to the sites.

After tearing apart the Postal Service to slow down the mail (and make people fear mailing in their ballots), of course they're going to haunt boards of elections sites where people go to drop off their absentee ballots. All it takes is a few high-profile incidents and people will be afraid to do that, too. Wisconsin's Election Commission developed guidelines for poll watchers in 2018 that is a good model:

Trevor Noah nails it, as usual

Coal Ash Wednesday: Trump's EPA is literally trying to kill us

Andrew Wheeler just made millions for his coal industry pals:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has finalized a rule that revises regulations for coal-fired power plants, a move that will limit the number of generation facilities that could incur costs for failing to comply with pollution limits. The action on Aug. 31 revises a rule established in 2015, when the EPA issued an order that for the first time set federal limits on the levels of toxic metals in wastewater that could be discharged from power plants.

Coal industry executives, critical of the original restrictions which they characterized as costly and burdensome, praised Monday’s changes. Andrew Wheeler, the EPA administrator who is a former coal industry lobbyist, described the revisions as “more affordable pollution control technologies” that would “reduce pollution and save jobs at the same time.”

Bolding mine, because we see this nonsense all the time from Republicans. They are actually increasing pollution, not reducing it, but in this truth-challenged Trump era, casual lies like this are a daily staple. Thankfully, this rule change is on SELC's radar:

The real Deep State: NIH employee was anti-mask author

Now we know what websites Dandy has been reading:

It would have been a dangerous assertion in the middle of a deadly pandemic no matter where it came from: that wearing masks has “little to no medical value” and could do more “harm” than wearing no mask at all.

But it was especially remarkable given the source. Published on the right-wing website RedState, it turned out to have been written under a pseudonym by William B. Crews, a public affairs officer at the National Institutes of Health, promoting the same type of discredited information about dealing with the virus that his employer was working aggressively to beat back.

I no longer find it ironic these guys do exactly the opposite of what we pay them to do. After 3 1/2 years of Kakistocracy, that's what you get. I do find it hard to believe his coworkers and supervisors did not realize what an idiot he actually was. Here are some examples:

BlueNC

Donald Trump