Americans are increasingly encountering barriers to exercising their most fundamental of democratic rights during this 2020 presidential election – the right to vote.
The Guardian's Sam Levine looks at how voter suppression has been unfolding across the US, four key tactics being used in attempts to block votes, and how president Donald Trump is trying delegitimize November's election
Joe Biden spoke about his meeting with the family of Jacob Blake, a Black man who was gravely wounded after a white police officer shot him in the back, on his way to visiting Kenosha, Wisconsin. 'He talked about how nothing was going to defeat him,' Biden said. 'How, whether he walked again or not, he was not going to give up.'
Continue reading...Joe Biden said he sought common ground while Trump, he said, stoked division and was actively obstructing racial progress
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on Thursday warned that Donald Trump’s behavior “legitimizes the dark side of human nature”. He made the remarks during a visit to Wisconsin, where he spoke by phone to Jacob Blake, a Black man whose shooting by a white police officer renewed nationwide protests against systemic racism.
Related: Joe Biden meets privately with Jacob Blake's family amid protests over shooting
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The Guardian’s Kenya Evelyn reports:
Joe Biden will meet Jacob Blake’s father, Jacob Blake Sr, later today as well as other members of the family of the 29-year-old who is gravely wounded and still fighting for his health in a local hospital in Kenosha after being shot in the back by a white police officer on August 23.
Trump and his advisers are trying to walk back his comments encouraging North Carolinians to vote twice in the November elections.
The president said yesterday, “Let them send it in and let them go vote. And if the system is as good as they say it is then obviously they won’t be able to vote” in person.
Trump yesterday: “If you get the unsolicited ballots ... send it in early, and then go and vote.”
Trump in May:
“If you told a Republican to vote twice, they'd get sick at even the thought of it."pic.twitter.com/bjWMotfXrP
From me and Joan E Greve:
A Bay Area police officer has been charged with voluntary manslaughter in the shooting of a Black man in a Walmart store in April.
The district attorney in California’s Alameda county announced the charge against officer Jason Fletcher, 49, in the killing Steven Taylor, 33. Responding to a call about a possible shoplifter with a baseball bat at a Walmart, Fletcher fired first his taser and then his pistol at Taylor, killing him.
Lee Merritt, an attorney for Taylor’s family, said Taylor was going through a mental health crisis on Saturday afternoon, and that he has previously suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar depression. “He was shot after he had become completely helpless and no longer represented a threat,” Merritt told the Guardian on Monday.
Merritt said he wasn’t sure yet whether police shot Taylor with a Taser or bullet after he was already down, and that an autopsy was under way.
Related: 'Don't shoot him no more!' California police face backlash over killing of man in Walmart
Continue reading...Democratic candidate sought to put virus at heart of the campaign as rivals gave duelling speeches on Wednesday
Joe Biden attempted to regain the narrative in the US presidential election on Wednesday, telling Donald Trump to “get off Twitter” and focus on safely reopening schools during the coronavirus pandemic.
Related: Covid cases could surge in battleground midwest during Labor Day holiday
Continue reading...Joe Biden has described school closures as a ‘national emergency’ as he sought to put the coronavirus pandemic back at the heart of the US election campaign, after two weeks of Trump seeking to capitalise on sporadic scenes of violence in cities to push a ‘law and order’ theme
Continue reading...Make no mistake: this is Trump’s America, where protesters are shot by vigilantes as police look on
Donald Trump took a trip to a place called Biden’s America on Tuesday. It is a strange land where the president of the United States is a helpless guest, a doomed corner of his own country that is somehow ruled by a former vice president.
It is a topsy-turvy place, this Biden’s America. Occasionally, the president can regain his magical ruling powers by summoning assorted minions in uniforms and incanting a spell with his thumbs to tweet the words LAW AND ORDER.
Continue reading...As many as 75% of Biden voters worry that if Trump loses election he will refuse to concede defeat, triggering a constitutional crisis
Three in four supporters of Democratic challenger Joe Biden are worried about the prospect of Donald Trump rejecting the US presidential election result if it goes against him, an Opinium Research poll for the Guardian shows.
The survey underlined fears that the president will not accept the outcome of November’s race, triggering a constitutional crisis. Last week two congressional Democrats wrote to the Pentagon seeking assurance that the military would ensure an orderly transfer of power.
Continue reading...Analysis: For the president, loyalty is paramount – those on his team will not be chastened, even for alleged murder
Donald Trump has the blind devotion of a rabid sports fan. His team can do no wrong. The opposition are liars and cheats.
So maybe no one was surprised on Monday when he appeared to defend an accused murderer.
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Joe Biden has responded to Trump’s refusal to condemn Kyle Rittenhouse:
In a statement, he said:
Tonight, the President declined to rebuke violence. He wouldn’t even repudiate one of his supporters who is charged with murder because of his attacks on others. He is too weak, too scared of the hatred he has stirred to put an end to it.
So once again, I urge the President to join me in saying that while peaceful protest is a right — a necessity — violence is wrong, period. No matter who does it, no matter what political affiliation they have. Period.
If Donald Trump can’t say that, then he is unfit to be President, and his preference for more violence — not less — is clear.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is seeking a communications firm to “defeat despair and inspire hope,” bidding out a $250m contract, Politico reports.
Ahead of the elections, with 180,000 Americans dead from coronavirus, HHS wants a firm to help “deliver important public health and economic information the administration can defeat despair, inspire hope and achieve national recovery.”
Several weeks ago, the department sent out to a number of communications firms a “performance work statement,” which lays out what work will be expected of the winning firm. The document says that the vast majority of the money will be spent from now until January.
The document also lists the goals of the contract: “defeat despair and inspire hope, sharing best practices for businesses to operate in the new normal and instill confidence to return to work and restart the economy,” build a “coalition of spokespeople” around the country, provide important public health, therapeutic and vaccine information as the country reopens and give Americans information on the phases of reopening.
Continue reading...The president has shown a lifelong penchant for inflaming racist hatreds and fears – expect much more of this before November
Six months into the coronavirus pandemic, Donald Trump tweeted a rare statement of condolences, as the confirmed death toll in the US climbed past 183,000.
Related: Biden to accuse Trump of stoking violence in US after Portland clashes
Continue reading...The Democratic and Republican national conventions offered two radically different diagnoses of the problems confronting America
One version told of a president who is callous and cruel. “My dad was a healthy 65-year-old,” said Kristin Urquiza, whose father voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and died from Covid-19 in June. “His only pre-existing condition was trusting Donald Trump – and for that he paid with his life.”
The other spoke of a president blessed with compassion. Kayleigh McEnany recalled taking a phone call as she recovered from a preventative mastectomy. “It was President Trump, calling to check on me,” she said. “I was blown away. Here was the leader of the free world caring about me.”
Continue reading...Film-maker says enthusiasm for president in swing states is ‘off the charts’ and urges everyone to commit to getting 100 people to vote
The documentary film-maker Michael Moore has warned that Donald Trump appears to have such momentum in some battleground states that liberals risk a repeat of 2016 when so many wrote off Trump only to see him grab the White House.
“Sorry to have to provide the reality check again,” he said.
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Donald Trump is holding a rally for supporters in New Hampshire. He will speak any minute now. If you care to tune in you can here - if not, I will be blogging it here so stand by for updates.
The crowd at Trump’s NH rally just booed an announcement telling people to put on their masks
Germany chancellor Angela Merkel laughed off a question during a Friday press conference of whether she had been “charmed” by Donald Trump.
The question was in response to a statement made this week by Richard Grenell, the former US director of national intelligence and ambassador to Germany, who claimed Trump had smoothed over the historically strained relationship between German and the US by enchanting Merkel.
This is one of my new favourite Merkel moments. A journalist asks her about Richard Grenell's claim that Trump "charmed" Merkel. You don't need to speak German to enjoy her reaction:pic.twitter.com/RSjHSNXXtX
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Here’s a rundown of Sunday’s events. We’ll be back tomorrow for all Monday’s news.
More a campaign-style press announcement than traditional news conference, Trump abruptly ends the proceedings after taking only three questions, including one from One America News Network.
The US president insisted today’s announcement, which comes one day after he accused “the deep state, or whoever, over at” the FDA of deliberately slowing coronavirus vaccine and therapy development, “has nothing to do with politics” despite its conspicuous timing on the eve of the Republican national convention.
Continue reading...Presidential frontrunner quotes Irish wordsmith in his nomination acceptance speech
Joe Biden is not the first nor is he likely to be the last politician to summon political spirits with poetry, but choosing verse from The Cure at Troy, Seamus Heaney’s free translation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, for his Democratic party nomination acceptance speech on Thursday had scholars of the poet’s work and the political class eating out of his hand.
Biden pulled out Heaney’s lines close to the end of an address that also won over conservative pundits and Fox News anchors – “an enormously effective speech”, said Chris Wallace – and left Donald Trump, for once, without response on Twitter. Biden quoted Heaney saying: “History says, Don’t hope / On this side of the grave. / But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up / And hope and history rhyme.”
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New York governor Andrew Cuomo said the state will give voters a chance to correct missing signatures and other clerical errors so their absentee ballots can be counted in anticipation of a wave of mail-in voting for the November election.
Election officials are expecting an even bigger flood of mail-in votes in November than for the June primary, after which results were delayed for six weeks.
Cuomo said late Friday he’d sign yet temporarily tweak legislation that calls for notifying voters about such problems and provides for fixing them.
Under the version that passed the Legislature last month, the voter would have seven business days to file a form to fix the problem after a notice was mailed, in many situations.
The Associated Press has more from Portland, Oregon, where protesters against police brutality and structural racism clashed again with federal agents and law enforcement officers overnight. Such confrontations were the subject of a Trump tweet this morning, in which the president once again expressed his willingness to send in the national guard:
About 200 people marched to a police precinct station on yet another night of violence for Oregon’s largest city.
Demonstrators hurled bottles and rocks at officers and pointed lasers at them, damaging police cars and causing minor injuries for several officers, Portland police said.
Continue reading...Monroe county in Michigan was an important part of Trump’s victory four years ago, as swing voters turned their backs on the Democrats
It took General George Armstrong Custer to get Katybeth Davis on the ballot this November.
For years, Davis passed a statue of the vanquished US cavalry commander perched imperiously on his horse outside her church in the heart of Monroe county, Michigan. She was angered at the place of honour given to a man she describes as a genocidal killer of Native Americans and a rapist.
Continue reading...Republican pundits accept success of Biden’s convention address as Trump’s bid to portray Democratic rival as radical leftist falls flat
Under pressure on the last day of the Democratic convention, Joe Biden “hit a home run” with an “enormously effective” speech that blew “a big hole” in Donald Trump’s efforts to paint him as a mentally faltering captive of his party’s left wing.
And that was to hear Fox News hosts Dana Perino and Chris Wallace tell it.
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