We Resist: Day 279

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Wednesday, October 25, 2017
a black bar with the word RESIST in white text

One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.

So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.

Stay engaged. Stay vigilant. Resist.

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Here are some things in the news today:

Earlier today by me: The Russia Reversal, Continued.

And in other Russia Reversal news:

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and ranking member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) have broken up over Russia.

The committee's once bipartisan investigation into whether [Donald] Trump obstructed justice or his campaign colluded with Russia has hit a partisan wall, with Republicans and Democrats saying they will now conduct their own probes.

"We made the decision to go and carry it out ourselves," Feinstein told Mother Jones on Tuesday. "They can go ahead and do whatever it is they wanted to do." A Grassley spokesman also said the chairman had decided to proceed with a Republican-only investigation.
And remember, this is after Grassley tweeted, as I noted just this morning: "Whoever in DOJ is capable w authority to appoint a special counsel shld do so to investigate Uranium One 'whoever' means if u aren't recused."

It is clear that Congressional Republicans are now fully on board with turning heralds of Russian meddling into the traitors. This is incredibly worrisome. This is the stuff of authoritarian regimes consolidating power.

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Betsy Woodruff at the Daily Beast: Trump Data Guru: I Tried to Team Up with Julian Assange.
Alexander Nix, who heads a controversial data-analytics firm that worked for [Donald] Trump's campaign, wrote in an email last year that he reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange about Hillary Clinton's missing 33,000 emails.

Nix, who heads Cambridge Analytica, told a third party that he reached out to Assange about his firm somehow helping the WikiLeaks editor release Clinton's missing emails, according to two sources familiar with a congressional investigation into interactions between Trump associates and the Kremlin. Those sources also relayed that, according to Nix's email, Assange told the Cambridge Analytica CEO that he didn't want his help, and preferred to do the work on his own.

If the claims Nix made in that email are true, this would be the closest known connection between Trump's campaign and Assange.
As you may recall, Jared Kushner has previously bragged about working with Cambridge Analytica and he is potentially being investigated for leveraging the campaign's data operation to help select Facebook targets for the Russians.

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Donald Trump again calls Myeshia Johnson a liar:


Twice.


I will never stop boiling with rage about this. Never.

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It's not only that local broadcasts are a critical safety resource, although that is no small thing in and of itself. It's also that local broadcasts provide coverage of local elections. Airing local debates. Informing people on local issues.


This is as close to state-run media as we have ever come.

By way of reminder, during the campaign, Kushner announced that the Trump campaign had "struck a deal with Sinclair Broadcast Group during the campaign to try and secure better media coverage."

Then the FCC, operating under the oversight of the Trump administration, voted "to ease a media ownership rule that prevents greater consolidation of broadcast television stations," paving the way for the Sinclair Broadcast Group to acquire Tribune Media in a $3.9 billion cash-and-stock agreement, "a deal that will bring more than 200 TV stations under one roof and vault Sinclair into the big leagues of national TV."

And now the FCC has voted to do away with a requirement that local radio and TV must be locally operated, so Sinclair can beam in their Trump propaganda to every community from any place.

We are so fucked.

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[Content Note: Bigotry; abuse; violence; murder.] Brandy Zadrozny at the Daily Beast: YouTube Trumpkin and Former Milo Intern Kills His Own Dad for Calling Him a Nazi. The subhead to this story reads: "Lane Davis was a prolific poster on the Donald Trump subreddit, a former intern for Milo, and an editor for a prominent GamerGater's conspiracy site. Then, one day, he snapped." WHAT THE FUCK. Davis was a Trump supporter on a subreddit where the aggressively unstable participants refer to Trump as a god, an intern for a Nazi, and a manager on a site dedicated to harassing women and marginalized men. He didn't just "snap" one day. He was a dangerous, abusive shitheel for a very long time who was radicalized by toxic masculinity and escalated to interpersonal violence. Stop doing this.

What have you been reading that we need to resist today?
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