Open Thread | The Democratic Party Convention is Over: Do You Have A Voting Plan?

Posted on August 21, 2020 by rikyrah

The adorableness😍😍😍🤗🤗

Well, the Democratic Convention is over.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the team that we need to be in the White House come January 2021.

Now, it’s time for us to do the work.

We must vote.
I don’t care how you vote.

Mail Voting.
Early Voting.
Election Day Voting.

DO what you think is best for you.
But, VOTE.


MAKE YOUR VOTING PLAN NOW.

And, ask all your family and friends if they have their own Voting Plan.

 


Make no mistake – the entire criminal enterprise that composes the Republican Party is going all out with voter suppression.

Their silence as Dolt45 and his crony try and destroy the United States Post Office – speaks volumes.

The Post Office doesn’t just handle ballots.

It handles medicines for MILLIONS.

SOMEONE HAS DIED BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T GET THEIR MEDICINE ON TIME.

It handles packages for millions of SMALL BUSINESSNES.

During a pandemic, while many small businesses are barely hanging on by a thread, the Post Office is sabotaging them.

It handles important documents – checks for livelihoods. Checks for bills. The personal correspondence of millions of Americans.

The Post Office has been a stepping stone to the middle class for many.

The Post Office has a large segment of veterans in its employ.

The Post Office for many in rural America is the LIFELINE for the community to the outside world.

And, the SILENCE of the GOP while the USPS is under attack speaks volumes.

It’s not just Dolt45 who must be defeated; it’s everyone with an R next to their name – up and down the line.

VOTE THEM ALL OUT.

👏👏👏

This entry was posted in 2020 Elections, 2020 Presidential Campaign, Black Voter Suppression, Black Voters, Current Events, Open Thread, Politics, Rikyrah's Rant, Vice President Joe Biden, Voter Suppression, Voting Rights and tagged , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

34 Responses to Open Thread | The Democratic Party Convention is Over: Do You Have A Voting Plan?

  17. eliihass says:
    August 21, 2020 at 7:19 pm

    “…Presidential sit-downs were the pinnacles of many news anchors’ careers.

    No more. Just as he has bulldozed so many political norms, Donald Trump has turned the presidential TV interview into a joke. Fox News lets him call in for talk radio-style rant sessions, the length of which are a punch line among rank-and-file Fox staffers who secretly despise him despite working for his media machine. “When Trump was booked for 8:10, and we had an assignment for 8:40, we didn’t bother writing it, because we knew he’d talk until the end of the hour,” a producer for Fox & Friends told me.

    He called the “Friends” and Jeanine Pirro and Sean Hannity and Maria Bartiromo. Every so often he’d consent to an on-camera chat, but he liked the phone. It made him seem busy when he wasn’t. The interviews, if they can really be called that, were subject to his whims, causing no small amount of competition among the Trump bootlickers at Fox. Stars were known to slip ratings reports to the president to make their own shows look more impressive than those of their in-house rivals. Sometimes interviews were suddenly offered to hosts when Trump heard them say something flattering on TV. One personality rushed to the airport for a cross-country flight when a sit-down suddenly materialized. Other times the bookings were simply a product of who had bent Trump’s ear most recently: There were side deals brokered during stopovers at his golf club and pitches made during strategy calls.“Why don’t you call in tomorrow?”

    More often than not, he did just that. Trump needed Fox to a degree that almost no one understood. He depended on propagandists like Hannity to keep the walls of his alternative reality intact. …The power imbalance was something to behold: He had the joint chiefs and the cabinet and any number of world leaders at his beck and call. He could talk to any scientist or public health expert he wanted. But when it came to a Fox interview, he was just another caller waiting to be patched into the control room.’

    “Mr. President!” Hannity exclaimed. “Thank you…” And they were off. Trump began by flattering Hannity, claiming he’d postponed a critical call with Chinese President Xi Jinping just to get on air.

    The day after their televised chat, the president called Hannity with a question: “How’d we do?”
    Hannity knew his real meaning was, “How did we rate?” In the midst of a crippling pandemic, on a day when another 400-plus Americans would die, the president wanted to know about his ratings.

    Hannity was the most powerful person at Fox in the Trump age. When people asked who was in charge of the channel, he said, “Me.” And most people at the channel agreed with him.

    He worked from home most days, long before it was required due to the pandemic, thanks to a state-of-the-art studio in the basement of his $10.5 million mansion, 38 long miles from Manhattan, in a village on the North Shore of Long Island. There was only one way in and one way out of his village, and a police station that kept track of every car that drove by. Billy Joel lived half a mile down the road. Hannity was close to his favorite fishing spots and the airstrip where he kept his private jet. He had no trouble affording all this; he banks an estimated $43 million per year.

    Hannity’s Long Island mansion and his oceanfront Naples, Florida, penthouse were two über-expensive symbols of how Roger Ailes changed his life. I viewed Hannity as a living connection to Fox’s past, the only prime-time host who was there on launch day and is still there nearly 25 years later. But he definitely wasn’t one to dwell on the past. Every day was a new war.

    Hannity played his part masterfully. But his friends told me he was burnt out for long stretches of the Trump presidency. Being the president’s “shadow chief of staff,” as he was known around the White House, could be a thrill, but it was also a serious burden. Hannity counseled Trump at all hours of the day; Hannity’s producers marveled at his influence and access. “It’s a powerful thing to be someone’s consigliere,” one producer said. “I hear Trump talk at rallies, and I hear Sean,” a family friend commented.

    “Hannity would tell you, off-off-off the record, that Trump is a batshit crazy person,” one of his associates said. Another friend concurred: “Hannity has said to me more than once, ‘he’s crazy.’”

    But Hannity’s commitment to GOP priorities and to his own business model meant he could never say any of this publicly. If one of his friends went on the record quoting Hannity questioning Trump’s mental fitness, that would be the end of the friendship.

    Early on in the Trump age, Hannity gained weight and vaped incessantly, which some members of his inner circle blamed on Trump-related stress. “If you were hearing what I’m hearing, you’d be vaping too,” Hannity told a colleague. He was sensitive to trolls’ comments about the extra weight, especially from his chest up; that’s all viewers saw of him most nights, when he was live from his palace. He doubled up on his workouts and slimmed back down.

    Hannity swore that no one knew the truth about his relationship with Trump. He lashed out at people, like yours truly, who reported on it. And he certainly didn’t disclose his role in Trumpworld the way a media ethicist would recommend. But once in a while the curtain slipped and his own colleagues pointed out the extraordinary position he held. As the coronavirus crisis deepened in March, Geraldo Rivera said to Hannity on the air, “I want you to tell the president, when you talk to him tonight, that Geraldo says..

    Needless to say, that’s not how Hannity’s calls with Trump actually went. They were instead a stream of grievance and gossip. Trump was a run-on sentence, so prone to rambling that “I barely get a word in,” Hannity told one of his allies. He sometimes spoke with the president before the show and again afterward, usually in the 10 p.m. hour, when Trump rated his guests and recommended talking points and themes for the following day. Trump was just like the rest of Hannity’s viewers: He wanted more of Gregg Jarrett on the show, more of Dan Bongino, more of Newt Gingrich—the toadiest toads possible.

    In the Trump age, left-wing blogs filled up with stories about families torn apart by a loved one’s Hannity addiction. I heard those stories from Fox staffers too: Some of their relatives resented what they did for a living. They made excuses, mumbling that they were simply giving the people what they wanted. “I feel like Fox is being held hostage by its audience,” a veteran staffer said. “The audience has been RADICALIZED,” a longtime commentator texted me..

    Hannity deserved a big share of the blame for this state of affairs. But despite that, and despite the fact that he was rarely at headquarters, Hannity was well-liked around Fox. Colleagues described him as a big-hearted family guy. He paid bonuses to his staff out of his own deep pockets. He ordered meals and care packages to the homes of colleagues who lost loved ones. He even offered to hire a private investigator when an acquaintance died in a mysterious crash. When the network descended on New Hampshire for primary election coverage, Hannity footed the bill for the open bar. A member of Sean’s production crew, a Democrat, told me, “I want to fucking hate him so bad. But he’s so nice to me.”

    I struggled to square Hannity’s reputation with the man I saw on TV and occasionally in person. ..in December 2019, I ran into Hannity at a holiday party hosted by Mediaite. We were upstairs at the Lambs Club, a stately Manhattan restaurant wrapped with red leather banquettes on 44th Street. Hannity greeted me by putting both his hands on my shoulders and exclaiming: “Humpty!” His nickname for me was Humpty Dumpty. I asked if he ever felt bad about the name-calling. “No,” he said. He took his hands off my shoulders and moved toward the bar.

    It was eight o’clock, and Hannity worked the room like a pro, dressed down in a Fox-branded hoodie. He hugged CNN’s Alisyn Camerota and chatted with media reporters and even said hi to Trump antagonist George Conway. This room was the embodiment of the so-called “media mob” he attacked every weeknight—and he looked like he didn’t want to leave it. I wondered what Hannity’s viewers would think. At 8:30 his P.R. person pushed him toward the door, insisting he had to get to the studio for his nine o’clock show. I later realized that the P.R. person had lied—he had pretaped his show before coming to the party.

    Ailes made everyone paranoid and punished those he suspected of leaking. That same fear of retribution was still very real in the post-Ailes years. Employees suspected their work phones were tapped and assumed their emails were monitored by management…”

    https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/08/sean-hannity-fox-news-staffers-feel-trapped-in-trump-cult

    Reply
  19. Liza says:
    August 21, 2020 at 10:54 am

    Good article. And where’s the lie? Progressives have a right to be ticked off, but I guess we’ll see how much influence Nancy Pelosi has in Massachusetts.
    https://twitter.com/commondreams/status/1296564683764314112

    Reply
  24. rikyrah says:
    August 21, 2020 at 5:51 am

    Good Morning,Everyone 😊😊😊

    Reply

Leave a Reply to eliihassCancel reply