Trump – R&R – Reachout and Rebuild

“Hyper-partisan and hypocritical nonsense” (Katie Vincentz, Zeldin Spokesperson)

David Posnett — Sat, 30 Jan 2021 22:36:34 +0000

Excellent reports on the topic:

Rep. Zeldin’s Backtrack on Fraud Claims Fails to Silence His Critics
EH Star: Attorneys urge investigation of ZELDIN.
Twenty-two lawyers file ethics complaint against Zeldin in connection with presidential election:

By Denise Civiletti – Jan 26, 2021, 8:29 am. RIVERHEAD LOCAL

Lee Zeldin speaking on the House floor during debate on objections to Arizona election results. Image: C-Span screenshot

Twenty-two New York lawyers have filed a complaint against Rep. Lee Zeldin, accusing him of violating “the most fundamental ethics rules, including participating in frivolous litigation, making false statements regarding the presidential election, and committing, arguably, a criminal act that reflects on his trustworthiness.”

The complaint asks the Attorney Grievance Committee of the Supreme Court, Appellate Division, Third Department, where Zeldin was admitted to the New York Bar in 2004, to initiate an “immediate investigation of Rep. Zeldin’s actions and consider sanctions for his conduct, up to and including revocation of Rep. Zeldin’s license to practice law in New York.”

The complaint says Zeldin participated in “frivolous” litigation and engaged in “professional misconduct” involving “dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation” by signing on to an amicus brief in support of a lawsuit brought in the U.S. Supreme Court by the State of Texas Dec. 8 that sought to invalidate the election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — four battleground states won by Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

Zeldin was one of 126 House Republicans who signed the amicus brief in support of the Texas lawsuit, which was rejected by the Supreme Court on Dec. 11 for lack of standing, the legal right to sue.

The complaint to the grievance committee, a copy of which was obtained by RiverheadLOCAL Monday night, says Zeldin signed on to the brief “despite the fact that numerous courts in eight different states, including the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, had already dismissed such meritless claims.”

Beyond that, the complaint states, “In the absence of any evidence of systemic malfeasance or fraud, he made public statements questioning the results of the presidential election and has spent weeks undermining confidence in the credibility and integrity of our election process.”

Zeldin — a staunch, outspoken supporter of President Trump — continued to question the presidential election results “without proof,” despite the Electoral College’s ratification of the results, the complaint states.

The Trump campaign and Trump supporters brought a series unsuccessful legal challenges to the results of the election in those states.

In a series of about two dozen tweets since Election Day, Zeldin has questioned the election results, calling changes to election procedures in battleground states “unconstitutional irregularities.” He has tweeted frequently — most recently two days ago — about the need to protect “ballot integrity,” criticizing, as Trump has, mail-in voting.

Some states, including New York, changed voting procedures in 2020 to allow, as Zeldin put it in his tweet on Monday, “no excuse mail in balloting” because of the pandemic. Some of those changes, including New York’s, were made by executive orders during the state of emergency declared in the states in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Zeldin and others object to changes made to voting procedures established by state legislature — by what they characterize “executive fiat” and settlements of “friendly lawsuits” — as unconstitutional.

On Jan. 2, Zeldin tweeted: “Some insist everything President Trump & his supporters claim about the 2020 election is ‘evidence free’. That lie may be easy to rattle off, but it’s still a massive, destructive lie that will haunt them on Jan 6th & far into the future.”

On the afternoon of Jan. 6, the lawyers’ complaint states, Zeldin announced on Twitter that he would formally object to the Electoral College’s determination.” By making that announcement, according to the complaint, “Zeldin not only engaged in dishonest conduct, but also contributed to the incitement of the Jan. 6 insurrection.”

On the House floor on Jan. 6, Zeldin spoke in support of objections to the election results in Arizona in a statement he labeled in a Jan. 6 tweet was made “in defense of the republic.” He voted to sustain objections to the election results in both Arizona and Pennsylvania.

His statement and both votes came on Jan. 6 after a large mob of Trump supporters violently attacked the Capitol while Congress was in a joint session to certify the Electoral College, as required by the Constitution.

The mob stormed the Capitol following a 90-minute “Save America” rally in the Ellipse park at which Trump aired his grievances about the election he claimed was stolen by Democrats and “weak” Republicans. Trump urged the crowd to go to the Capitol, where Congress was beginning to count and certify the Electoral College ballots.

The Trump mob stormed the Capitol, breaching barricades, overwhelming Capitol Police, breaking doors and windows and entering the building as lawmakers met in both chambers. The sessions were cut short as the mob could be heard in the corridors. The lawmakers were evacuated and staff members and reporters barricaded themselves in offices.

The chaotic scenes were broadcast live on television and circulated on social media, capturing Trump supporters chanting “Hang Mike Pence” — someone had erected a gallows outside the Capitol during the riot — and searching for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats. Members of the mob broke into offices and into both chambers of Congress.

Zeldin issued a statement that afternoon urging “everyone to please cooperate with the Capitol Police who need to gain control of this situation immediately.” He said the violence being witnessed by America “should never be the scene at the US Capitol” and said there should be “ZERO tolerance for violence in any form!”

The riots resulted in the deaths of five people, including a uniformed Capitol Police officer who was beaten to death by the mob. Scores of other officers were injured, some seriously.

Seven hours later, after the building was secured and the crowd was dispersed, Congress resumed its constitutionally mandated count. Some shaken Republican senators withdrew their support for objections after the riot, which left only two objections supported by senators to be brought to the floor of each chamber for a vote. (Without support in the Senate, there is no vote in either chamber.) A planned objection to Georgia’s results was withdrawn, and no senators signed onto the House’s objection to results in Michigan and Nevada.

“Even after the bloodshed and terror at the Capitol, Rep. Zeldin again asserted his baseless objections to the election results,” the lawyers complaint to the grievance committee states.

“He took to the floor of the House of Representatives, and in a speech riddled with misinformation and misrepresentations, challenged the results of the Arizona and Pennsylvania elections…” the complaint states.“Disregarding the will of the people, Rep. Zeldin sought to disenfranchise tens of millions of voters, which is particularly egregious conduct for an attorney who has been elected to high office and sworn an oath to uphold the constitution,

In a brief interview Monday following a news conference he held in Manorville, Zeldin said he had not heard anything about the complaint and could not comment on it.

Asked if he was willing to state that the 2020 presidential election was a free and fair election and constitutionally valid, Zeldin replied, “This was a free election. And we did go through the entire constitutional process.” That process includes a certification of the Electoral College vote, he said.

“After every Republican presidential win over the last generation, there have been objections that have been followed,” Zeldin said.

“At the end of that constitutional process, the first thing I did was put out a statement that says, regardless of whether you supported President Biden or or President Trump, regardless of your the opinions and passions everyone has, once Congress certifies the results, it’s over,” Zeldin said.

On the evening of Jan. 7, Zeldin issued a statement acknowledging Biden’s election.

“Moving forward, there will be continued debate and there will be disagreement, but out of that must be a healthy, guarded and even thriving republic,” he said in the Jan. 7 statement. “Right now, I am not going to dwell on any doubt, but to recommit to working towards a vigorous defense of lady liberty at all costs, and the pursuit of unity whenever possible,” he said.

The congressman reiterated Monday he still has “an issue with” changes made by executive order or otherwise to the electoral process established by state legislatures.

The lawyers’ complaint was filed with the court in Albany, where Zeldin was admitted to the New York bar in January 2004. The Shirley resident earned his law degree at Albany Law School in 2003.

The lawyers in the complaint urge the New York bar to “send a powerful message to the public that the legal profession is committed to the defense of our democratic institutions and will not tolerate the conduct of attorneys who seek to subvert the will of the people, undermine our elections, and recklessly contribute to the incitement of violence.”

RiverheadLOCAL provided Zeldin’s office with a copy of the complaint Tuesday morning, seeking additional comment from the congressman. Tuesday night, Zeldin spokesperson Katie Vincentz dismissed the complaint as a partisan attack.

“Nearly every single one of these attorneys is a registered Democrat and half have donated to Congressman Zeldin’s opponents,” Vincentz said in an email. “One even ran as a Democrat in the Town of Brookhaven and another was chairman of the East Hampton Town Democratic Committee for almost 20 years,” she said.

“The eagerness of these partisan Democrats to further divide our community and country is despicable,” Vincentz wrote.

She reiterated Zeldin’s statements Monday that Democrats have raised objections to Electoral College vote counts after the election of Republican presidents.

“It’s an incredible double standard that if Republicans object as well on the same date in the same place as part of the same process, then that makes them all seditious traitors,” Vincentz said.

“Anyone who wants to call out a Congressional Republican for supporting an objection on January 6th needs to put up their past statements calling out every Congressional Democrat who objected in the past,” she said. “If those public calls don’t exist, their calls now are just hyper-partisan and hypocritical nonsense.”

Editor’s note: This article was amended post-publication to add further comment from Rep. Lee Zeldin’s office provided Tuesday night.

Encouraged

David Posnett — Wed, 04 Nov 2020 23:58:12 +0000

I just got back from PA: Dauphin county (Harrisburg), where we were assigned to be poll watchers. The county went D by 8 points. Yay. PA is important.

This graph is from Nate Cohn’s article in the NYT and shows that the majority of outstanding votes are likely to be “by mail” votes that are predicted to go heavily to Biden. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/upshot/pennsylvania-election-results-ballots.html.

“If anything, the pre-election estimates suggest that Mr. Biden might be expected to do better, because the areas with remaining absentee votes are ever so slightly more Democratic than the state as a whole.”

Here is the big picture from the Associated Press:

Note:

Biden needs 22 electoral votes to reach 270
Trump needs 56 electoral votes to reach 270
Michigan has just been called in the Biden column, so Biden needs 22-16 = 6 electoral votes
Nevada has 6 electoral votes!

With 75% of votes counted in Nevada this is what it looks like:

That is a difference of just 8000 votes. BUT, the bulk of the ballots left to be counted come from the state’s Democratic stronghold of Clark County (Las Vegas area). This is according to VOX reports from 5:30pm today.

Hold on! We could have a winner announced tonight.

What are Trump’s chances?

David Posnett — Sat, 03 Oct 2020 13:48:27 +0000

What are the chances of hospitalization, ICU admission, and death in a COVID-19 patient like Donald Trump?

There is a ton of data relating to age of the patient, sex of the patient, obesity, pre-existing conditions, etc. There are important caveats, however: there may be different outcomes depending on the quality of the medical care, availability of new treatments, but also different outcomes depending on the timing of the infection within the course of the pandemic. Much of the data available on the web are analyses from Feb. through April 2020, early in the course of the pandemic. Current observations suggest that the case fatality rate (deaths per total diagnosed cases) is changing for the better. Much of the data is also different depending on the country or region selected for analysis. F. ex. in Southern and Western states of the US patients are younger than in the North Eastern states, according to recent trends!

For patients like D. Trump (74 yo; obese; male) the chances are:

hospitalization	about 30%
ICU admission	about 10-15%
death	about 5-10%

NB: obesity, with a BMI (Body Mass Index) of just over 30 in Pres. Trump’s case, increases the death rate by perhaps about 2-fold.

In one study from Georgia of 305 Covid-19 patients that were hospitalized, 39% were admitted to the ICU, but among those older than 65, 54% were admitted to the ICU. Of those in the ICU 37-48% died.

DT is already hospitalized. He now has perhaps a 1:2 chance of being admitted to the ICU and if he is admitted to the ICU, maybe a 1:3 or greater chance of death.

Here are some graphs to illustrate:

Death rates in the Spring of 2020 in various countries

Overall Case Fatality Rate (death rate) in the US over time

And here is a related article on the likely reasons for hospitalizing DT.

SPLC under attack

David Posnett — Mon, 24 Aug 2020 17:28:53 +0000

This past weekend, the Republican National Committee caved to white supremacist and other hate groups by adopting a resolution titled Refuting the Legitimacy of the Southern Poverty Law Center to Identify Hate Groups.

https://www.splcenter.org/what-we-do

The focus of the resolution is that “the SPLC is a radical organization” that harms conservative organizations and voices through our hate group designations.

This attack on our work is an attempt to excuse the Trump administration’s pattern and practice of working with individuals and organizations that malign entire groups of people — immigrants, Muslims and the LGBTQ community — while promoting policies that undermine their very existence. It comes from the same vein as Trump’s claim that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

Simply put, it’s an audacious attempt by Trump and the GOP to paper over the bigotry and racism that has been allowed to infect their policies.

This resolution comes at a moment when Trump will argue at the Republican National Convention that he will combat hate and bigotry, despite welcoming the support of QAnon. It also comes days after the indictment of Stephen Bannon, reminding us that Bannon was once the White House chief strategist and senior counselor and CEO of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. And it comes just after our special investigation shined a light on One America News Network’s Jack Posobiec, a reporter at Trump’s favorite network who is aligned with white supremacy and has used his platform to further hate speech and propaganda.

Trump should sever these ties to hate groups and extremists instead of doubling down through this RNC resolution.

The Trump administration has filled its ranks and consulted with alumni and allies from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an anti-immigrant hate group that has ties to white supremacist groups and eugenicists. They include Julie Kirchner, Kris Kobach, Jeff Sessions and, most notably, Stephen Miller.

The Trump administration has worked with hate groups like the Family Research Council (FRC) to roll back LGBTQ rights. FRC was designated an anti-LGBTQ hate group for decades of demonizing LGBTQ people and spreading harmful pseudoscience about them. Over the years, the organization has published books, reports and brochures that have linked being LGBTQ to pedophilia, claimed that LGBTQ people are dangerous to children and claimed that LGBTQ people are promiscuous and violent.

Anti-Muslim groups have also been welcomed into the administration, including the Center for Security Policy (CSP). Fred Fleitz, a longtime staffer, was appointed the executive secretary and chief of staff of the National Security Council. For decades, CSP has peddled absurd accusations that shadowy Muslim Brotherhood operatives have infiltrated all levels of government.

These extremists are seeking a license to continue spreading their bigotry and will do anything to undermine those — like the SPLC, which tracks and monitors hate groups — who expose their extremist views and oppose their attacks on communities. With this resolution, Trump and members of the GOP (including Lee ZELDIN*) have shown the extent to which they will carry their water.

This past weekend, the RNC also released a resolution titled Resolution to Conserve History and Combat Prejudice – Christopher Columbus. It’s a remarkably transparent statement that hate and bigotry stem from Black Lives Matter protesters. The RNC and Trump did not denounce organizations that promote antisemitism, Islamophobia, neo-Nazis, anti-LGBTQ sentiment or racism. It only criticized the SPLC for challenging those groups.

Outraged? Here are two ways to take action today:

Sign up for our next Power Hour Virtual Phone Bank on August 27. We’ll be calling likely unregistered voters of color in Georgia to share information on how they can register to vote.
Listen and subscribe to our new podcast, Sounds Like Hate. Episode 2 is about the connections between extremists and the Trump administration.

Onward,

Margaret Huang
SPLC President & CEO

added by D. Posnett

Finally, Biden speaks out

David Posnett — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 00:32:38 +0000

Watch the video on YouTube!

The Trump agenda:

Let’s make America poor again.
Let’s make America sick again.
Let’s make America jobless again.
Let’s make America the laughing stock of the world.
Let’s make America powerless again. (Putin’s goal!)

Zoom Time

David Posnett — Sat, 11 Apr 2020 18:32:04 +0000

I am not sure why, but for the first time, each day this past week found me on multiple Zoom conference calls. Each of these was for a different group that I belong to, from my local Southampton Democratic Club to the national grassroots women’s group, SuperMajority. It is as if we all collectively woke up to the reality that this lockdown is going to be a long haul and this is the new normal not just for a few weeks but for a few months.

Like everyone, I am shaky with anxiety over this pandemic, worried that the people I know and love could become a statistic of this disease. I live in the suburbs outside of New York City where we have our own rising cases, though nothing like the five boroughs of the city. I lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for 25 years and my heart is breaking for what I will always consider “my city.” But my worst, chest-tightening moments of panic come when I think of my family members who are nurses on the front lines of this crisis. How can it be that in the United States, a healthcare provider is now taking his or her life in their hands just going to work? Every single one of these heroes deserves more than thanks from a grateful nation, they deserve wartime hazardous duty-pay. In lieu of that, the least this government can do is have their student debt wiped off the books for the job they are doing, risking their lives to save ours. We need to all start a movement to make this a reality. What would be a great hashtag for this mission, #thanksarenotenough?

Two weeks ago my anxiety reached a maximum level when my husband, son and I all came down with a cold. How surreal that the common cold induced frantic days obsessively taking my temperature and sleepless nights of pure dread, kept awake by coughing that I could not determine if it was wet or dry. It was hard to get through to the primary care physician’s office, the line was always busy, but once I did speak to a nurse my question was, “at what point should we worry?” Since there was no fever, chills or shortness of breath, she told me it was probably exactly what it appeared to be, a simple cold, but if any of those three symptoms appeared, to call right back. Call right back, I thought? It took me hours to get through this time when I didn’t have fever, chills and shortness of breath. But each day the cold lessened and by week’s end had passed as colds are wont to do. But this simple cold left a residue of fear in its wake that made me reluctant to even go outside for a socially-distant walk.

So, I have asked myself if in the midst of this once-in-a-century public health and economic crisis, should I take a break from politics, if only to help maintain my sanity? On our Democratic Club call the focus was on how can we reach out and help those in our township who are really suffering because they can no longer afford to buy food. It felt good to be helping out with something that was not political. I also gave up watching my MSNBC line-up at night. I listen to music while riding my exercise bike rather than watching Rachel Maddow. Some nights we watch movies, particularly movies that make us laugh. I still read the newspaper each morning but I skim through a lot and I have tried not reading headlines on my phone all day. It has helped quiet some of the panic.

But even digesting a much lighter diet of news, I cannot escape one undeniable fact, that this crisis, all of it, from the number of infected and dead, to the dire shortage of personal protective equipment for our healthcare providers, to the shuttering of businesses and skyrocketing unemployment, to the food shortages for low-income families, every bit of this trauma the country is now enduring, has been made much worse by the incompetence, selfishness and corruption of the Trump administration. And this inescapable fact sits in the pit of my stomach and emits a rage so white-hot that I can’t ignore it. And because of that, I can’t stop worrying about politics and in particular, the election this fall.

The Washington Post put together a complete accounting of just how much of a mess the Trump administration has made of our preparedness for this crisis. The April 4^th article is entitled “The U.S. was beset by denial and dysfunction as the coronavirus raged: From the Oval Office to the CDC, political and institutional failures cascaded through the system and opportunities to mitigate the pandemic were lost.” It is a big, investigative deep-dive into the dysfunction. It is gut-wrenching and infuriating but maybe the most important article every single American needs to read.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/04/04/coronavirus-government-dysfunction/?arc404=true

On March 30^th the Editorial Board of The Boston Globe, put the blame for this failure of leadership squarely where it belongs. The title of the editorial says it all: “A President Unfit for a Pandemic. Much of the Suffering and Death Coming was Preventable. The President Has Blood on His Hands.”

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/03/30/opinion/president-unfit-pandemic/

To quote the editorial: “As the American public braces itself for the worst of this crisis, it’s worth remembering that the reach of the virus here is not attributable to an act of God or a foreign invasion, but a colossal failure of leadership.”

Much like The Washington Post article, the editorial goes through the entire timeline of failure on the part of the Trump administration and ends with the statement, “But come November, there must be a reckoning for the lives lost, and for the vast, avoidable suffering about to ensue under the president’s watch.”

It is this need for a reckoning that mandates we stay focused on politics and keep our eyes on the November election, despite the pandemic that rages around us. When Trump was elected, our outrage sparked the Women’s March and created the anti-Trump Resistance. That movement powered the blue wave in 2018. Despite the fears that now haunt our days and plague our nights, we must not lose sight of what has always been our prime directive, to make sure Trump is a one-term president. Our work in the Resistance was how we channeled our rage then and it must be how we channel our rage now.

But unlike the last three years, we cannot organize and attend rallies, we cannot knock on doors and speak directly to voters, we cannot even be together in a planning meeting or a Happy Hour social event. All last week, on every Zoom call with every organization, we struggled to answer the same question, “How are we going to get the public engaged when we are stuck in our homes?”

In an article on, April 5^th, The New York Times addressed this dilemma from a campaign’s point of view. “With Campaigns in Remote Mode, Pandemic Upends Battle for Congress: As retail campaigning has become all but impossible amid the public health crisis, candidates tread carefully in an uncertain political environment.”

This article did not address the dilemma from the non-candidate point of view, meaning how are we in the grassroots going to function this year if we cannot go outside? The next day, April 6^th, The New York Times corrected that oversight with an article looking at the impact on progressive campaigns and on the grassroots movement from the pandemic. “Progressives Built an Organizing Juggernaut for 2020. Then the Virus Hit: After a disappointing turn in the presidential race, grass-roots progressive groups focused on congressional races and down-ballot campaigns. In weeks, the coronavirus has destroyed their plans.”

To quote from that article: “The grim picture may have a profound political impact for the general election and beyond. Democrats were poised to have an organizing juggernaut ready for the 2020 election, with the goal of both reaching new voters and helping reverse the state and local losses they experienced during President Barack Obama’s years in power. Even more, liberal groups hoped this election cycle would formalize their political infrastructure, so the activism that erupted in response to Mr. Trump’s election could be harnessed going forward. That may still happen, but it will require creative financial and digital solutions, according to interviews with several leaders of progressive political organizations and left-wing candidates running for office in states like New York and Ohio. Optimists have called it a time for political innovation, while others worry the structural barriers could stymie the progressive movement at a critical crossroads.”

The article zeroed in on the bind we are all in. We spent 2017 learning how to get out of our houses and speak in person to voters. Then in 2018 we utilized that knowledge and those skills to propel the largest voter turnout for a midterm election in 40 years. Now we have to learn how we are going to be effective without person-to-person contact.

Below are a few initiatives that are trying to address that need. The first is an app called Outvote that is mentioned in this article. Here is the description on their website: “Outvote is an app that makes it easy to support the causes and campaigns you care about. The goal of the app is to promote voter participation within progressive campaigns. Our larger mission is to build a community of organizers that remain active between election cycles. By partnering with the biggest campaigns, advocacy organizations, and nonprofits, the Outvote community will be able to mobilize around current events, elections, and critical moments in policy formation for social equality and justice.” https://www.outvote.io/

But Outvote seems to be primarily for organizers, a valuable resource but not really a direct conduit to voters. Indivisible has an ongoing project with a direct line to voters that activists can participate in from their homes. It is called VoteFWD and involves writing letters to voters in swing states. Here is the description from the Indivisible website: ‘Want to get out the vote in key states from the comfort of your own home?Indivisible is excited to be partnering this election cycle with VoteFWD. VoteFWD provides activists with names, addresses and a data-driven proven template to write letters to voters in important states. Letter writers will save their letters and send them right before the election so that voters receive them at the perfect, most-strategic moment.”https://indivisible.org/resource/write-letters-voters-votefwd

On my Zoom call with SuperMajority, which joined with Pantsuit Nation, I heard about two projects. The first is called Turnout Tuesday where they are asking their members to call their state Secretaries of State and press them on how they are going to use the federal funds to make sure the vote in November is secure, particularly if they are going to invest in mail-in ballots. The second is text messaging to voters and they have been conducting training seminars to teach members how to do “rapid response textbanking” to alert voters about important issues. https://supermajority.com/

At my local Indivisible group, East End Action Network (EEAN), we were already planning postcard-writing parties, creating and mailing personal postcards to voters in our district, as we did in 2018. This will be a joint project with Indivisible North Fork. These events will begin in July, after the New York primary on June 23^rd when we have a Democratic congressional nominee. While it is certainly more fun to party together (you can read the descriptions of these events in my book, The Resistance and Me, available on Amazon), we can convert this initiative to home-based postcard writing rather than in groups if we are still not able to gather together by the summer. The end goal of getting the postcards out there can still be achieved.

These are all good ideas. But they don’t go far enough. The voter suppression outrage by the GOP in Wisconsin underscores the extreme lengths the Republicans will go to keep people from voting. We are going to need bigger and bolder ideas to take the place of speaking to voters in person if we are going to be able to counter those GOP schemes. Possibly because they are aware of this challenge, Indivisible will be hosting a series of training webinars in April for Indivisible leadership on how to better use the virtual space during this lockdown period. If you are a member of an Indivisible group, someone in your leadership has probably already received an email about signing up. If not, reach out to your Indivisible contact. I tried to find a link for these webinars on their general website and could not find one. I look forward to whatever ideas come out of these webinars and will include them in later blog posts.

I am particularly worried what happens to voter registration. Normally the spring and early summer are key periods to focus on voter registration but how can that be done digitally and from our homes? I have been wondering if it is at all possible to conduct a virtual voter-registration drive and I would love to hear back if anyone has any ideas about this. How can we reach residents in the district who are not registered to vote? Is that even possible? They wouldn’t be in MiniVAN but would there be a way to cross reference residents with voter registration rolls to determine constituents who aren’t registered? We could mail them personal letters including the voter registration form if they cannot register online through the state motor vehicle department. Is there any way at all we could create such a list?

Along with my fear that we are not going to be able to register new voters, is a concern that our digital efforts are not going to reach the Independents and Unaffiliated voters we need to win in November. Maybe we should think about sending postcards right now to these voters with the facts about how the Trump administration has mishandled the pandemic, facts that would break through the fog of misinformation that Trump and his propaganda machine at Fox News are spewing out. These postcards could also have contact information for services that many constituents need during this crisis, such as food banks and how to file for unemployment benefits. And these voters are in MiniVAN. We would have to figure out how to pay for printing the postcards and the postage since these would not be funded by the campaigns.

We know from the midterm election how much time, effort and boots on the ground it took to power the blue wave. It is a process that starts months before with voter registration, educating the public, supporting primary candidates and then getting-out-the-vote. We do not have the luxury of waiting for the crisis to pass, waiting until we are able to knock on voters’ doors, not while Trump and the right-wing media saturate the airwaves with lies about this pandemic while at the same time erecting barriers to voting. If we are going to hold Trump and the GOP accountable in November, we need to act now and to do that we need bigger and bolder ideas of how we are going to reach voters, counter the lies and protect the ability for every American to vote.

By Barbara Weber-Floyd

Author, The Resistance and Me: An Insider’s Account of the Two-Year Mission to Stop the Trump Agenda and Take Back the House

(Available on Amazon and at Canio’s Books, Sag Harbor)

Blog post also on:

https://sites.google.com/view/theresistanceandme

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/4/10/1936191/-Zoom-Time

Where Were You Lee Zeldin?

David Posnett — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 19:20:54 +0000

In the March 19 issue of the Western Edition of The Southampton Press, the A section is devoted to articles about the coronavirus pandemic and the impact on Suffolk County and Southampton Town. There are quotes and statements from Governor Andrew Cuomo, Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone, Southampton Town Supervisor Jay Schneiderman, mayors, school superintendents and hospital administrators. Conspicuously missing is any statement from Congressman Lee Zeldin.

On the congressman’s Facebook page and in his appearances on Fox News, from January through early March of this year, his comments included supporting President Trump against impeachment, criticizing New York for bail reform, insinuating that Democrats want to enable voting by undocumented residents, and the highlighting the danger of MS-13. But not one word about the growing epidemic.

Now that the pandemic has been declared a national emergency, his website has information for the public about the virus and his office has issued a series of press releases. But we know that Congress was informed by our intelligence services in January that the novel coronavirus that began in China at the end of 2019 had the potential to be a global pandemic. China released the genetic code for the virus at the beginning of January to help scientists in other countries prepare test kits and institute procedures to contain the virus. We did neither.

Instead, President Trump called it a Democratic hoax, Fox News repeated this misinformation campaign, and Zeldin focused on spreading lies about bail reform. Countries like Australia and South Korea that immediately implemented policies to test and contain the virus are in far better shape today.

No resident of the district should be surprised. Zeldin has not stood with protecting the public health of his constituents at any time in his tenure in Congress. He voted repeatedly to repeal the Affordable Care Act, voted for the GOP deficient replacement bill in 2017, and lied about that vote in the 2018 midterm election, pretending he supported protections for pre-existing conditions.

The constituents of the 1st District are now facing a grave danger to both the public health and economic health of our district. Our hospitals in Suffolk County are facing overwhelming numbers of emergencies. And our shuttered businesses and their employees are facing ruin.

We, the taxpayers of this district have the right to know why we are on a COVID-19 case accrual curve closer to Italy than to South Korea. Where was Congressman Zeldin when this threat was building? Why was he busy spouting right-wing talking points and propping up a president who was calling this a hoax rather than raising the alarm about the threat to our district and getting us the necessary resources?

We need answers.

By Barbara Weber-Floyd

Westhampton Beach

Trump thinks we are gullible!

David Posnett — Sat, 09 Nov 2019 15:14:35 +0000

No Charitable Thought for Donald Trump (NY TIMES, NOV 8 2019)

Fined $2 million after admitting his foundation was his piggy bank, the president shows he always comes first.

By The Editorial Board

Credit…Illustration by Nicholas Konrad; photograph by Doug Mills/The New York Times

On Monday, President Trump will kick off the 100th New York City Veterans Day Parade, at which he is likely to boast, as is his wont, of his devotion to the men and women who have served in the military.

But a legal settlement announced on Thursday reveals that for Donald Trump, personal interest outranks even the needs of veterans. Under the agreement, a New York judge ordered the president to pay $2 million in damages after Mr. Trump admitted that his now-defunct Donald J. Trump Foundation largely benefited Donald J. Trump….

More here: Judge rules that Donald Trump must pay $2 million to charities. Published Nov 8th by Michael Collins Dennis Wagner Kevin McCoy in USA TODAY

The lawsuit, filed last year by then-New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood, outlined a wide array of mismanagement by Trump and his three eldest children.

Chief among them: allowing Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign to orchestrate a televised fundraiser in Des Moines, Iowa, for the foundation, which then distributed $2.8 million to veterans’ charities that were also chosen by the campaign.

Charities are prohibited by New York law from supporting political candidates or campaigns.

Trump staged the fundraiser on Jan. 28, 2016, days before the Iowa caucuses, rather than participate in a Republican presidential debate.

According to the lawsuit, Trump’s campaign staff, not the foundation, chose the veterans’ groups that would get the money. That violated New York’s charity laws.

The Attorney General’s Office and the Trump Foundation reached an agreement last year to dissolve the foundation and distribute its remaining $1.8 million in assets to a variety of charities, including the Army Relief Fund and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

And this:

The Trump Foundation was a sham.

By Dylan Matthews @dylanmatt dylan@vox.com Nov 8, 2019, 9:40am EST

The New York State attorney general’s case against the Trump Foundation — Donald Trump’s nonprofit that a court shut down earlier this year — has concluded. The Trumps have agreed to pay a $2 million fine, the attorney general’s office said in a press release on Thursday.

The deal follows years of incredible, careful reporting by a number of reporters but most of all the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold. As Fahrenthold discovered, the Trump Foundation often operated as a slush fund for the Trump family and Trump’s businesses. It bought Trump an autographed Tim Tebow helmet, a portrait of himself, and money for various lawsuit settlements. Less entertainingly but perhaps more importantly, he also used a foundation fundraiser, which was nationally televised a few days before the Iowa caucuses, to promote his presidential bid in 2016.

I would be mad as hell as a veteran…

See more here:

Inside Trump’s VA – Investigating Trump’s Promises to America’s Veterans

Trump Spurns Nobel Prize Winners—and the Feeling Is Mutual

David Posnett — Tue, 14 Nov 2017 22:59:10 +0000

Published in Daily Kos November 13

By Mark Sumner

In a White House as radically anti-science as this one, it’s no surprise that scientists are being denied the usual honors.

President Trump, breaking a tradition that stretches back nearly two decades, will not personally greet the eight American Nobel laureates this year before they travel to Sweden in December to receive their prizes.

Considering that the Trump regime has censored scientists studying health effects of coal mining, removed vital scientific data from public sites, purged scientists from its scientific advisory boards, selected an anti-science nominee to head NASA, and that Republicans in Congress have joined them in blocking research into climate change, it’s not surprising that there would be a reluctance to welcome American scientists into the White House.

But then, several of those scientists weren’t exactly thrilled about the prospect of meeting such a science-hostile group in the first place.

Two American Nobel Prize winners, when contacted by STAT, indicated they would not have attended a White House event even if invited. Columbia biophysicist Joachim Frank, awarded a Nobel in chemistry for his work in microscopy, said in an email he was “very relieved” when he learned there was no chance of an encounter with the president.

Any Nobel Winners who wander up to Washington will be thrilled to find that Michael Kratsios— assistant to Trump supporter, Silicon Valley money man, and vampire Peter Thiel—will be there to greet them. Because nothing says “we value science” like sending the deputy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology to show what this crew thinks a Nobel is worth. But then, Kratsios does have a BS in science. Political science.

Zeldin & Bigotry

David Posnett — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 12:59:55 +0000

Published in the Village Times (East Setauket)

To the Editor,

No, Representative Zeldin, it is not enough to pay lip service against the KKK and Nazism as you do in your August 17 letter to the editor. You then go on to parrot Mr. Trump’s false assertion that “there is evidence that the violence came from multiple groups and multiple sides” and “For any of the protesters on either side with extremist views and violent purposes, you are 100 percent completely in the wrong.”

No, Representative Zeldin, let us be perfectly clear that there is no moral equivalence between marchers waving swastikas and chanting anti-semitic slogans – and those who came to protest this hatred. The counter-protesters were there to defend American values against the “Unite the Right” rally’s message of hate.

Mr. Trump is being broadly condemned by both Republicans and Democrats for blaming the violence on “both sides.” You need to join them in holding him accountable for preaching hate from the White House. It is not good enough for you to speak out against white supremacists – you need to speak out against this president who enables and emboldens them with his hate-filled rhetoric and policies. It is time for you to join people in Congress and in the business and arts world who have spoken out against Mr. Trump’s bigotry. You need to demand that he fire the rest of his alt-right advisors in the White House, including Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka. You need to join the brave people in Congress who have called for censure of Mr. Trump.

Anything less is just empty words.

Terry S. Shapiro, D.M.D.