This is a Running Record of Trump & Company Statements and Actions. Hard to Believe, But It's All Real
To search for a term on a page press ctrl/f, enter term, press enter-all instances will be highlighted.
07.25.23-TODAY'S HEADLINES-OMG
07.24.23-TYPICAL MAGA STATE-Indiana is a state of many contradictions — at least, according to CNBC. As part of its annual ranking for the top states for business, the news outlet found that Indiana was the seventh-worst state to live and work in. The Hoosier state garnered a D- for life, health and inclusion, with the lack of available, affordable child care and its anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ laws cited as the driving factors. But despite this damning figure, Indiana still made the top 15 most business-friendly states, at No. 13, moving up one spot from its 2022 ranking. Indiana was even No. 1 in infrastructure last year, with Indiana's strength in the freight-shipping industry a major reason.
07.23.23-GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL, DO NOT PASS GO-It was (yet another) tumultuous week for Trump’s lawyers, with a seemingly endless deluge of setbacks, roadblocks, and full-blown losses, beginning with the target letter Trump received from prosecutors in special counsel Jack Smith's investigation into the 2020 election and Jan. 6, 2021, signaling that a third indictment — and a significant one — could be imminent for the former president. On Tuesday, Michigan's attorney general filed criminal charges against 16 pro-Trump fake electors. In addition to being the first charges of their kind ever filed, the fake electors could be facing both state and federal charges, a development which doesn’t bode well for the former president they were attempting to reinstate. Meanwhile, things weren’t looking much brighter in Georgia where Trump's lawyers tried and failed in spectacular fashion to derail District Attorney Fani Willis’ probe. In Florida, Judge Aileen Cannon set Trump's classified documents trial for May 2024, putting it on a direct collision course with his 2024 campaign calendar. (MSNBC)
07.21-23-ALWAYS HAS BEEN A MOBSTER-THIS REALLY IS AN EXPLICIT THREAT-MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough tore into Trump on Friday after the former president said it would be “dangerous” for special counsel Jack Smith to send him to jail. Trump had told an Iowa radio station this week that the possibility of jail time is a “very dangerous thing to even talk about, because we do have a tremendously passionate group of voters (vicious MAGA freaks mob) — much more passion than they had in 2020 and much more passion than they had in 2016.” Scarborough said Trump was “talking like a mobster.”
07.21.23-SCUM ALERT!-In a video posted Tuesday on Twitter, when gun violence advocates handed Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) a pin of the green Converse a Uvalde victim was wearing when she was murdered in a mass shooting, Boebert threw it away. Brett Cross, whose 10-year-old son Uziyah Garcia was also killed during the Uvalde mass shooting, said on TikTok that Boebert throwing away the pin was “beyond infuriating.” “You people elect these types of people,” Cross said. “Are you fucking serious? She didn’t even have enough couth or wherewithal to even hold on to it until she got to her office to throw it away. She threw it away in plain sight, going to show once again that she does not give a damn.” Maite Rodriguez’s green Converse became a symbol for Uvalde victims when actor Matthew McConaughey, who is from Uvalde, Texas, spoke at the White House about how Maite’s green Converse was the “only clear evidence” used to identify the 9-year-old after the shooting.
07.18.23-A REAL THREAT TO THIS COUNTRY-The New York Times is out with a story sure to simultaneously delight the supporters of former President Trump and strike fear into his critics. The lengthy piece, based on his campaign's public proposals and interviews with insiders, lays out how Trump plans to dramatically increase the power of the presidency should he be elected to a second term. The goal is to "alter the balance of power by increasing the president's authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House," write Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, and Charlie Savage. For example:
07.15.23-WATCH THIS GUY-HE MAY BE INSANE BUT HE IS SMART-Absolutely disgusting and insane. The @nypost
obtained video from a recent RFK Jr. event where he suggested COVID is a Chinese bioweapon “ethnically targeted” to “attack Caucasians and Black people” and to spare “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” people. He then falsely claimed the U.S. has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on labs in Ukraine to develop similar bioweapons that target people by their race.
07.14.23-YES, BUT DANGEROUS-MSNBC guest Eddie S. Glaude Jr. riffed on Nicolle Wallace’s takedown of Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) on Tuesday, drawing cackles from the host. Tuberville has invited scorn for blocking military promotions in the Senate while at the same time reinforcing his support for white nationalists. Wallace accused Tuberville of single-handedly “impeding and harming U.S. military readiness.” “We can’t decide if he’s more stupid or more racist,” she said. “And it’s almost comical and farcical, but he is today the most powerful Republican in the Senate.” “So let’s just stipulate he’s a stupid racist,” said Glaude, an African-American studies professor at Princeton University.
07.14.23-YES, BUT DANGEROUS-MSNBC guest Eddie S. Glaude Jr. riffed on Nicolle Wallace’s takedown of Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) on Tuesday, drawing cackles from the host. Tuberville has invited scorn for blocking military promotions in the Senate while at the same time reinforcing his support for white nationalists. Wallace accused Tuberville of single-handedly “impeding and harming U.S. military readiness.” “We can’t decide if he’s more stupid or more racist,” she said. “And it’s almost comical and farcical, but he is today the most powerful Republican in the Senate.” “So let’s just stipulate he’s a stupid racist,” said Glaude, an African-American studies professor at Princeton University.
07.13.23-ANOTHER FAILED MAGA WITCH HUNT-Gone in 60 seconds: At FBI director hearing, Republican conspiracies about Biden go 'POOF!', Rex Huppke, USA Today. So the Republicans who want to defund and discredit the FBI, the ones who eagerly dragged the FBI director through the mud Wednesday with absurd allegations grounded in zero facts, want you, the American people, to believe this: The nation’s premier law enforcement agency has been weaponized against Republicans under a director who is a lifelong Republican and who reached his current post by being selected and confirmed to positions by two Republican presidents and two Republican-led Senate bodies.
Forget that all this is in defense of former President Donald Trump, a one-term, twice-impeached lifelong con artist who now faces more than 70 felony charges in two cases, with more indictments on the horizon.
Forget that Hunter Biden was actually charged with two misdemeanor tax offenses and a felony firearm offense.
Forget that, despite relentless investigation, Republicans have produced nothing linking President Biden to his son’s activity, or the fact that the person they touted as a key whistleblower was just charged with arms trafficking and acting as an unregistered agent for China.
07.12.23-THIS IS MAGA'S SO-CALLED HUNTER BIDEN WHISTLEBLOWER-U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said: “As alleged, Gal Luft, a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen and co-head of a Maryland think tank, engaged in multiple, serious criminal schemes. He subverted foreign agent registration laws in the United States to seek to promote Chinese policies by acting through a former high-ranking U.S. Government official; he acted as a broker in deals for dangerous weapons and Iranian oil; and he told multiple lies about his crimes to law enforcement. As the charges unsealed today reflect, our Office will continue to work vigorously with our law enforcement partners to detect and hold accountable those who surreptitiously attempt to perpetrate malign foreign influence campaigns here in the United States.” This guy is currently a fugitive. (Huff Post)
07.11.23-KRAZY KAREN-Former Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.) said the emergence of Casey DeSantis on the campaign trail on behalf of her husband, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, could actually backfire. “For many, she’s the brighter side to Florida’s angry governor. To others, she’s become America’s Karen,” Jolly said Sunday on MSNBC.He called her a “more effective messenger” than her husband as he battles for the GOP presidential nomination. The problem is the message itself. “If all she’s doing is amplifying the wrong message, she’s actually clarifying Ron DeSantis’ weaknesses,” he said, pointing specifically to DeSantis’ attempts “to terrify voters” with his culture war rhetoric. “It doesn’t matter if it’s presented in heels or boots, the DeSantis doctrine’s a losing one,” he said. “We’re gonna learn that the more Casey DeSantis gets out there.” (Huff Post)
07.10.23-WHEN TRUMP SPEAKS, HE LIES-Chris Christie pushed back on claims that “tens of thousands” of people still show up to Trump’s rallies, calling estimates for a recent South Carolina event “absurd." “Tens of thousands don’t show up anymore. That’s another one of the big lies that happen. Look, all you have to do is look at the pictures.” Christie was responding to reports, citing a local police chief, that Trump drew a crowd of 50,000 people to a town of 3,400 in South Carolina over the July 4 weekend. That claim has since been called into question. Christie also lambasted Trump’s campaign stop in Iowa last week, where he said the ex-president “droned on for an hour and a half,” “lied” about a farm deal with China, and “spent the rest of the time” discussing his indictment.“This is not somebody who’s fighting for the American people and their future,” Christie concluded. “This is all about his ego.” (Huff Post)
07.09.23-Please Joe, no cluster bombs!
07.08.23-LEAVE THESE PEOPLE ALONE-Republican-and Democratic-appointed federal judges are pushing back against state laws that ban gender-affirming care for minors. Courts are doing so for the reasons these laws should never have been passed in the first place: They are unconstitutional and infringe upon the rights of American citizens. The systematic effort to use the power of government to marginalize transgender people and deny young people health care services based on ideology and against scientific consensus in states such as Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Indiana and Florida has been rebuffed by jurists in the past several weeks. (USA Today)
07.07.23-PRISONER # 123trump-MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell and his panel of legal experts went through some of the claims Trump has been making in his defense as he faces a 37-count indictment in the classified documents scandal. In one clip played by O’Donnell, Trump claimed that charging him under the Espionage Act is “one of the most outrageous and vicious legal theories ever put in an American court of law, there’s never been anything like this.” “Has there ever been anything like this?” O’Donnell asked former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal “Hell yeah,” Katyal replied without hesitation, the immediately cited the recent example of Robert Birchum who was recently sentenced for keeping classified documents at his home. “Notably, unlike Trump, Mr. Birchum ― who was a highly decorated Air Force officer ― expressed remorse for what he did, he took full responsibility, and Lawrence, yet, he still got 3 years in prison just last month.” Katyal also cited several other recent examples of people getting prison time after being convicted on the same charges that Trump is now facing. Trump, he suggested, “should just look at the language of the Espionage Act ― it describes him to a T.”
07.06.23-LOSER NEWS-Longtime Fox News analyst Brit Hume is suggesting that Republicans think twice before supporting Trump in the 2024 GOP presidential primaries. “The case can be made that he’s a loser because, since he got elected in 2016, he’s compiled a string of them,” Hume said. “Either he or his supported candidates have lost too many races.” Hume said Republicans who support Trump are voting for the candidate they feel closest to and not voting strategically to support that candidate with the best chance of winning.“ That may come back to haunt the Republican Party in 2024,” he said. “You look at the Democrats and what they think of the race. They think that Trump is going to win the nomination, and they think Biden will beat him because he did beat him.”
07.05.23-Hot dog eating contests-A disgusting display of gluttony. People are starving. Give them the hot dogs.
07.04.23-Happy Birthday to the country that the MAGA FREAKS are trying to destroy.
07.03.23-1984, AGAIN=DeSantis is pandering to an aging Republican base that wants to roll back the clock to when people like them controlled everything and there were no uncomfortable reminders of the humanity and worth of Black people, brown people, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, and white women who for some inexplicable reason refuse to fit the Casey DeSantis model. It’s telling about the Republican Party that merely calling for the elimination of four federal agencies is not enough, that DeSantis felt he also had to link that to his ongoing high-pitched whine about “woke ideology” and the campaign against an education that allows LGBTQ+ kids and Black kids to see themselves and their histories as legitimate, let alone valued.
07.02.23-SCUM REPORT-Trump Pressed Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey To Overturn 2020 Election Results: Trump is also currently under investigation for telling the governor of Georgia to "find" extra votes for him. Seeing his prospects for a second term rapidly dimming in late 2020, Trump pressed Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) to procure made-up votes that could tip the scales in his favor, The Washington Post reported Saturday citing three people familiar with their call. The now-former president enacted a similar pressure campaign against Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) with an order to “find” votes, which was recorded and is currently the subject of criminal investigations. Ducey did not record his call with Trump, the newspaper said. Trump also tried to use Pence, to coerce Ducey into changing the results of the election, according to the Post, which noted that Pence called Ducey but did not pressure him.
07.01.23-SCREWED-UP JUSTICE-SCOTUS on Friday greatly expanded the rights of people who want to discriminate against same-sex couples in a case involving an amateur website designer who was never even asked to make a website for a same-sex wedding. In 303 Creative v. Elenis, amateur web designer Lorie Smith asked the court to grant her the right under the First Amendment to refuse service to gay and lesbian couples due to her Christian religious beliefs. But Smith’s request was wholly speculative. She had not been hired to make a website for a same-sex couple and, therefore, had never refused such work. In fact, she’s never made a single wedding website.
06.30.23-THIS MAN IS CLUELESS AND OBLIVIOUS TO THE REAL SITUATION-Mike Pence bizarrely pointed to his own white family of college graduates while praising the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Thursday to end affirmative action across most institutions of higher education. “There may have been a time 50 years ago when we needed to affirmatively take steps to correct long-term racial bias in institutions of higher education,” Pence added. “But I can tell you, as the father of three college graduates, those days are long over.”
06.29.23-SHAMEFUL-The administration of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) steered $92 million last year in leftover federal coronavirus stimulus money to a controversial highway interchange project that directly benefits a top political donor, according to state records.The decision by the Florida Department of Transportation to use money from the 2021 American Rescue Plan for the I-95 interchange at Pioneer Trail Road near Daytona Beach fulfilled a years-long effort by Mori Hosseini, a politically connected housing developer who owns two large tracts of largely forested land abutting the planned interchange. The funding through the DeSantis administration, approved shortly after the governor’s reelection, expedited the project by more than a decade, according to state documents.
06.28.23-NOT A BIG FAN OF CHRISTIE, BUT PLAN TO VOTE FOR HIM IN THE PRIMARY, SO AS TO CANCEL ONE TRUMP VOTE. ALL DEMOCRATS SHOULD DO THIS. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie tore into Trump over a report that the former president has been using campaign contributions to pay his personal legal fees. Trump is “the cheapest SOB I’ve ever met in my life,” Christie, who is challenging Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, told Politico. “What Donald Trump is good at is spending other people’s money.” Christie said Trump ― a billionaire ― should be able to pay his own legal fees, and demanded that he stop sticking donors with the bills.“ “He is the richest candidate in this race, yet he is using public money to pay his legal fees. He should be ashamed of himself.”
06.27.23-GOP IS A CULT-Michael Luttig, a retired federal judge, said the GOP may be "beyond saving itself." Once lauded by the right for his conservative legal opinions, he delivered a scathing rebuke of the Republican Party for its continued fealty to Trump. He wrote in a New York Times op-ed that the GOP’s “spineless support” has enabled the former president, despite his role in the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol and his Espionage Act indictment in the classified documents scandal. “Building the Republican campaign around the newly indicted front-runner is a colossal political miscalculation, as comedic as it is tragic for the country,” Luttig wrote, adding that the campaign is essentially one running against the U.S. Constitution. “If the indictment of Mr. Trump on Espionage Act charges — not to mention his now almost certain indictment for conspiring to obstruct Congress from certifying Mr. Biden as the president on Jan. 6 — fails to shake the Republican Party from its moribund political senses, then it is beyond saving itself,” Luttig declared. “Nor ought it be saved.”
06.26.23-SEND HIM TO A RED STATE TO BE AMONG THE CRAZIES-New York, I hear you are happy to have anti-vaxer Rodgers, who criticizes scientists, on your football team. One of then answers: “Disappointed he took a cheap shot vs me this wk. In 2021 during our awful delta wave we were losing 2,000 Americans/day, >80% among unvaccinated, when vaccines were 90% protective vs death/serious illness, I criticized him for his public antivaccine stance. . . . This is so unnecessary, I have no bad thoughts for Aaron, I needed to speak out in 2021 to try and save lives. 200,000 unvaccinated Americans needlessly perished during those delta BA.1 waves in last half of 2021 early 2022.”
06.25.23-COMING TO ALL OF AMERICA UNLESS.....-Ron DeSantis wields near-dictatorial sway over his state, which he has used to grant special interests a breathtaking list of favors. He has helped them evade accountability, steamrolled regulations, funded their pet projects, and foisted bailouts and tax breaks onto ordinary taxpayers. Often he does so quite openly. One day after launching his 2024 presidential campaign in a live event on Twitter with its owner, Elon Musk, he signed a law relieving private space companies like SpaceX, another Musk company, from liability for accidentally killing its employees.
06.24.23-TODAY'S HEADLINES:
--MUSK LIED ABOUT THIS-New video undercuts claim Twitter censored pro-Trump views before Jan. 6. In the internal video call from Jan. 5, 2021, workers were told not to take tougher action against a growing wave of tweets they feared were veiled incitements to violence.
--BONKERS BLACKBURN-Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) has appeared to suggest that an announcement about the fate of the missing Titan submersible was somehow planned to distract from accusations against the president’s son Hunter Biden.
--PRETTY TYPICAL-Fox News analyst Juan Williams dismissed growing claims by GOP lawmakers that whistleblowers have damning evidence on the Bidens. The allegations amount to “a bunch of rumors and innuendo and no hard evidence,”
06.23.23-JACKASS JORDAN-Rep. Jim Jordan states: "Remember, if the FBI can do it to a presidential candidate, they can do it to you too." Rep, Nadler replies: "Absolutely correct, Mr. Chairman. Anyone in this country who steals classified documents and then lies repeatedly to the government about returning them will probably get a visit from the FBI."
06.22.23-WASTED TAX-PAYER MONEY-Follow-up to story below: On Wednesday, America was treated to the incredible spectacle of House Republicans attacking John Durham. The peak moment of that event may have been when Rep. Matt Gaetz, whose own experience comes mainly in the form of being the subject of investigations, told the veteran prosecutor that he didn’t know how to conduct an investigation.
John Durham's investigation found nothing to discredit special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. At no point in his congressional testimony did he take the bait from Republicans to give credence to Trump’s “Russia hoax” rhetoric. If anything, Durham went out of the way to praise his predecessor. Durham confirmed that current Attorney General Merrick Garland didn’t interfere with his investigation or tell him that any potential targets were off-limits. He admitted that the reason that Obama and Hillary Clinton still walk free, no matter how much Trumpworld wants them behind bars, is that there’s simply no evidence of wrongdoing. Of the three measly indictments the report brought forward, two were “slam dunk acquitted,” while the one guilty plea was for something “unrelated to the origins of the FBI investigation.” Johnson further noted that the investigation did not reveal any criminal undertakings to perpetrate a hoax in the hopes of taking down Trump.
06.21.23-TRUMP'S IGNORANT CULT MEMBERS DON'T CARE ABOUT HIS EVIL PERSONALITY OR DEEDS-THEY HAVE A MESSIAH COMPLEX-Ex-Bush Aide Rips Evangelical Trump Supporters For 'Obvious' Hypocrisy. Peter Wehner said evangelical support for Trump is a "tremendous indictment" of that religious community. Peter Wehner accused evangelicals of hypocrisy for their continued support for Donald Trump.“You have in Donald Trump the person who probably most embodies the antithesis of the Sermon on the Mount, the person of Jesus, and the teachings of Jesus,” Wehner, a prominent conservative Christian, said on MSNBC on Tuesday. “And this guy’s a rock star and has been for year after year.”-Wehner, who served in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and as a senior aide to George W. Bush, said evangelicals could have argued in 2016 that they didn’t know who Trump really was. But not anymore.“And by the time we got to 2020 it was so obvious what he was,” Wehner said. “And yet they stayed and it’s a tremendous indictment of them” and of the evangelical movement overall.
06.19.23-THE WORMS ARE TURNING:
--Chris Christie Says Trump Is A ‘Petulant Child’ When Someone Disagrees With Him
--William Barr Labels 'Very Petty' Trump As A 'Defiant' Child In Explosive Remarks
--Staunch Pro-Trump Lawmaker GOP Rep. Mike Turner, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, admits that Mar-A-Lago documents are of 'grave concern.'
06.18.23-All this anti-woke crap is just hate masquerading as morality!
06.17.23-NO SANITY HANNITY-California Gov. Gavin Newsom refused to bow out in defense of his home state as he pushed back at Fox News host Sean Hannity who hit the governor with questions on business in California. Newsom replied we have a 47% increase in business startups this year compared to last year.” Hannity later argued that businesses were “paying that high tax bill” in the state before the California governor went after the host’s take. “This is on its way to becoming the fourth-largest economy in the world. What are you arguing for? Mississippi’s economic policy?” asked Newsom as he spoke over Hannity’s attempts to interject.
“Literally, that’s what you’re arguing for. The great Sam Brownback’s Kansas policy? It was a debacle, no economic growth. Seventy one percent of the GDP in America are [in] blue counties. Seventy one percent of the GDP in America are [in] blue counties. Seventy one percent of the country’s wealth. Seven of the top-ten dependent states are your states. We’re subsidizing your states, Sean, because of your policies.”
06.16.23-TIT FOR TAT-MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan needed just 60 seconds to dismantle one of the most common lines of defense used by Trump and his supporters.It’s the notion that if Trump can be indicted and prosecuted, so can anyone else.“If they can come for President Trump, they can come for you too,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), a Trump loyalist, wrote on Twitter after the former president was indicted on 37 federal charges in the classified documents scandal. Some version of that line has been repeated by many others in Trump’s corner.But Hasan made short work of the argument by listing people the Trump administration sent to prison for the very same charges the former president now faces. And he did it in a minute: Video
06.15.23-AND HE'S FULL OF IT-Former President Donald Trump’s ex-chief of staff said the twice-impeached Republican is intimidated by the possibility he may finally face accountability for his actions. “He’s scared shitless,” John Kelly, the chief of staff from 2017 to 2019, told The Washington Post on Tuesday.
06.14.23-LIBS OVER MAGAS-YES!-The Wall Street Journal, the newspaper that has the same overlord as Fox News, wrote Tuesday that if Republicans nominate Donald Trump again, “they won’t ‘own the libs’ ... The libs will own them.”The editorial sounded the alarm on the impact of Trump’s possible success in the 2024 presidential race.
06.13.23-ANOTHER MAGA SLEAZEBALL-According to Punchbowl News, the House Ethics Committee has reopened an inquiry into one of the ringleaders of the House revolt, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida. The Department of Justice previously asked the committee to back off while it conducted a federal sex trafficking investigation involving underage girls. That investigation concluded without charges against Gaetz, but now the committee has reportedly opened its inquiry back up. The committee announced the investigation in April 2021 to look into public reports that Gaetz “engaged in sexual misconduct and/or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gift.” Expect Gaetz to scream that this is leadership’s retribution against him for his role in shutting the House down.
06.12.23-THAT'S A GOTCHA!-The two indictments filed so far against former President Donald J. Trump — one brought by the Manhattan district attorney, the other by a Justice Department special counsel — charge him with very different crimes but have something in common: Both were based, at least in part, on the words of his own lawyers.
06.11.23-THE ANSWER IS YES! I KNOW SOME OF THEM-Bruce Maiman, Guest Writer for HUFFPOST asks: Are Americans Really That Dumb? People still wrongly believe that Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen, the Parkland shooting victims were crisis actors, and the 2020 election was rigged.
06.10.23-COMMON SENSE PROPOSAL-SO OF COURSE THE MAGA PEOPLE WILL REJECT IT-Our ability to make a more perfect union is literally written into the Constitution,” said Governor Gavin Newsom. “So today, I’m proposing the 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution to do just that. The 28th Amendment will enshrine in the Constitution common sense gun safety measures that Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and gun owners overwhelmingly support – while leaving the 2nd Amendment unchanged and respecting America’s gun-owning tradition.”The 28th Amendment will permanently enshrine four broadly supported gun safety principles into the U.S. Constitution:
06.09.23-OH GOODY!-Trump has been indicted on 37 felony federal charges related to his handling of classified documents after he left the White House, according to the unsealed indictment released on Friday. The charges against Trump include conspiracy to obstruct justice, willful retention of national defense information and making false statements, according to the document, filed in federal district court in Miami.
06.08.23-I AM NOT A CHRISTIE FAN BUT HERE HE SPEAKS THE TRUTH-Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie had news about Trump for attendees of his presidential campaign kickoff event Tuesday night in New Hampshire. "If you think for one minute, when he says, 'I am your retribution'—if you think he wants to be your retribution, forget it," Christie told them, referring to Trump's signature 2024 campaign pledge. "He's going to be retribution for one person and one person only: himself." Trump, he said, was a "bitter, angry man" who wanted to get back in the seat of power so he could look out for No. 1.
AND CHRISTIE ALSO SAID THIS:
The grift from this [Trump] family is breathtaking. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Kushner walk out of the White House and months later get $2 billion from the Saudis. Two billion dollars from the Saudis. You think it’s because he’s some kind of investing genius? Or do you think it’s because he was sitting next to the POTUS for 4 years doing favors for the Saudis?That’s your money. That’s your money he stole, and gave it to his family. You know what that makes us? A banana republic. That’s what that makes us.
06.07.23-BLATANT LYING (WHAT'S NEW?)-Fox News host Harris Faulkner is getting called out on Twitter for uttering a “blatant” falsehood about the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic as she criticized the protective measures imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic.Faulkner, who is getting a tryout in former host Tucker Carlson’s old prime time slot, claimed schools didn’t close in 1918. Much like her predecessor, who became infamous for spreading COVID-19 misinformation, she was wrong. School closures were not only common in 1918, studies have found they were effective in reducing the excess death rate from the so-called Spanish flu ― and so many people responded that a “community note” correcting the misinformation was appended.
06.06.23-DISGUSTING-ONLY MONEY MEANS ANYTHING TO THE GOLF INDUSTRY-In what can only be described as a huge win for the Saudi Arabian monarchy that has so desperately tried to paper over human rights abuses including the assassination of critics, the PGA Tour, the European DP World Tour, and Saudi-owned LIV Golf have announced that they will be merging into a single golf entity. In the short term, that means the flurry of lawsuits between the PGA and LIV Golf are now moot, but that's nothing compared to the long-term results.
06.05.23-LIAR TRUMP ATTACKS LIAR McENANY-FUN TO WATCH-Conservative CNN commentator S.E. Cupp on Thursday suggested right-wing criticism of Trump’s attack on his former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany may be “a canary in the coal mine” moment for the former president. Trump this week accused now-Fox News personality McEnany of understating his poll numbers against 2024 Republican rival Ron DeSantis and insulted her as “milktoast. ”The move drew backlash from conservative figures, who dubbed the comments “insane,” “pathetic” and “unacceptable,” noted Cupp. The pushback suggested the Republican 2024 front-runner was “no longer above reproach” from people who previously applauded his petty cruelty, argued Cupp. Attacking McEnany showed “Trump can go too far in shooting inside the tent,” she added (Couldn't even spell milquetoast correctly)
06.04.23-DON'T BE FOOLED BY THIS GUY-HE IS SOLID RED-Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee’s administration accused the National Rifle Association of wanting to use involuntary commitment laws “to round up mentally ill people and deprive them of other liberties,” according to documents drafted by the Republican’s staffers as part of their initial attempt to pass a gun control proposal earlier this year.The memos, provided by Lee’s office as part of a public records request, reveal a rare criticism of the powerful gun lobby made by the Republican governor. Lee has previously praised the NRA’s efforts to protect the Second Amendment. But he has since faced opposition from the group as he works to pass gun control legislation in response to a deadly Nashville school shooting that took place in late March.
AND THIS:
WHO IS SURPRISED?-In a shock resignation, the ACU/CPAC Treasurer says the organization is riddled with cancer.
06.03.23-THIS IS NOTHING NEW. HORSES DIE ALL OVER THIS COUNTRY DUE TO THE QUEST FOR WINS BY RICH AND POWERFUL HORSE OWNERS. Churchill Downs Racetrack, home of the Kentucky Derby, announced Friday that it’s suspending racing at its facilities following the deaths of a dozen horses.
AND THIS
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee’s administration accused the National Rifle Association of wanting to use involuntary commitment laws “to round up mentally ill people and deprive them of other liberties,” according to documents drafted by the Republican’s staffers as part of their initial attempt to pass a gun control proposal earlier this year.
06.02.23-LOCK HIM UP!-Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who investigated Trump’s role in Russian interference in the 2016 election, told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace it could be “game over” for Trump.“There is no way that he will not be charged,” said Weissmann. The audio differentiated Trump’s classified documents case to those of President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence. Both also were found to have classified materials in their possession, but unlike Trump handed them over when asked, said Weissmann. If reports about the tape are accurate, Weissmann said, “There will be an indictment and it is hard to see how given all the evidence that we’ve been talking about that there will not be a conviction here. I mean, this is a tape recording.”
06.01.23-EVIL TWINS THREATS-Former Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.) on Wednesday jumped feet-first into the debate over which GOP 2024 presidential candidate is more dangerous for America: Trump or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Jolly said DeSantis, his home state governor, poses a much “greater threat.” “Donald Trump is a brutish, transactionalist politician who will walk into a room, try to crush the Constitution, likely fail and be stopped by the courts,” Jolly said on MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House.” “It leads to violence. He is a unique danger himself.” “But in Ron DeSantis, you have somebody who bears the same fragile vanities of Donald Trump, the paranoia and the executive abuse of Richard Nixon, a view of religion and church and state like Pat Robertson, and the discreet methodologies of Attorney General Bill Barr,” the former congressman told anchor Nicolle Wallace.
05.31.23-DUMB AND DUMBER
Nicolle Wallace Literally Laughs Out Loud At Ron DeSantis' (DUMB) bizarre promise. The MSNBC host has a blunt fact-check for DeSantis who has made taking on “woke” a central part of his identity and a key to his 2024 presidential aspirations, even using the word seven times in 20 seconds during an event last month. But she wasn’t having his latest attempt to use it as a talking point. On Tuesday’s “Deadline White House,” she played a clip of DeSantis once again vowing to end “woke” if elected. “I will be able to destroy leftism in this country and leave woke ideology on the dustbin of history,” DeSantis said on Fox News. After the clip, Wallace let out a loud laugh.Then she got serious.“ A woke mob did not storm the U.S. Capitol. A woke mob did not shoot up Uvalde. A woke mob does not represent the threat that domestic violent extremism does, but OK, Ron, you go get the woke mob,” she said,
AND THIS;
Trump (DUMBER) vowed in a campaign video released Tuesday to end birthright citizenship on “Day One” of his presidency if he wins the 2024 election.The former president claimed the constitutional guarantee of U.S. citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil, regardless of their parents’ immigration status, was “not working” in a lengthy, dog whistle-filled screed in which he fearmongered about criminals and people with mental health issues invading the country. Trump, the current GOP front-runner, vowed to nullify the clause of the 14th Amendment via a simple executive order, even though the actual process required to make an amendment is “quite onerous,” per the White House,” and much more complicated.
04.28.23-MCDANIEL IS A DEEP FAKE-The Republican National Committee released an anti-Biden advertisement that featured … computer-generated (i.e. fake) images of a future apocalyptic world run amok, thanks to Joe Biden. They really did that. The choice by the brainiacs at the RNC to concoct something entirely out of thin air is not surprising. It lines up perfectly with the decades-long trajectory of a political party hellbent on minority rule and authoritarianism. On Wednesday, RNC chair Ronna McDaniel took time away from trying to scare parents about “rainbow fentanyl” Halloween candy to go on Fox News and talk about the completely fake attack ad Republicans unveiled the day before. McDaniel explained to the Fox News audience that not only did they not see what they just saw, she was going to tell them what they saw—and they were going to say they saw it. “So first of all it is A.I.-generated. So we’re sharing that up front, ethically, so it’s not a deepfake*. Every single image was A.I., but we are painting a picture of a future Biden America.”
04.26.23-CARLSON'S LEGACY-Some call it conservative populism, or national conservatism, while critics say it’s akin to white nationalism. It’s an ideology that panders to many Americans’ bigoted and xenophobic impulses, their resentments and their grievances. It welcomes in voices denounced by others as racist, and delights in mocking “woke” liberals. It promotes conspiracy theories. It admires foreign leaders denounced by others as authoritarians. It denounces “elites,” the traditional establishments of both parties, and the long-held commitments of US foreign policy.
04.24.23-MAYBE THERE IS A GOD, AFTER ALL-Tucker Carlson is no longer a Fox News host.
04.23.23- MAGA WANTS TO CONTROL HOW VOTING IS PERFORMED-As Neil Vigdor wrote for The New York Times in late March, Republicans nationwide are pushing for laws that are likely to restrict the student vote if and when they're enacted, all while taking measures to suppress other voter groups that often favor Democrats — like Black and Indigenous voters.
04.20.23-NATIONAL DISGRACE-Don't knock on the wrong door, or let your ball roll into someone's yard, or our gun crazy culture will get you killed.
04.19.23-PLEASE, PLEASE UNSEAT THIS WITCH-Far-right Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) raised $1 million less than her 2024 Democratic challenger Adam Frisch in the first three months of 2023, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. Boebert, the Trump-loving firebrand, only narrowly beat former Aspen councilmember Frisch in the 2022 midterms following a recount. She took victory with just 50.06% of the vote. Frisch raised $1.7 million from mainly small donors, and money flowed into his campaign from across the country, reported the Colorado Sun. Boebert, who has caused controversy with a string of stunts, including heckling President Joe Biden during his State of the Union speech, raised $667,000, per the Denver Post.
04.17.23-GET READY FOR THE STORM TROOPERS-Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich warned of the Trump-inspired GOP’s progression “toward becoming the American fascist party” to maintain power in a new essay for The Guardian.Reich, who served as labor secretary in President Bill Clinton’s administration, contrasted the Democratic Party as “still largely committed to democracy” to the GOP as “careening at high velocity toward authoritarianism. OK, fascism.”
04.15.23-THEY DON'T REALLY CARE-After 100 days in office, House Republicans as a party are so disconnected from reality that their governance is entirely useless in the eyes of most Americans. New polling from Navigator Research shows that the priorities of House Republicans are completely out of sync with voters, leading to a brutal assessment of their performance. In terms of overall job approval, House Republicans are 24 points underwater, 35% approve and 59% disapprove. But even more importantly, among independents, House Republicans are 48 points underwater—10 points worse than earlier this year when Republicans first assumed control of the lower chamber. Now, just 18% of independents approve of how they are handling their jobs, while 66% disapprove. In fact, among 17 specific issues tested, congressional Republicans weren't above water with independents on a single one of them. Independents were most dissatisfied with Republicans on abortion (-33), Social Security and Medicare (-31), corruption in government (-28), inflation (-27), and climate change/environment (-26). Bottom line: Republicans are truly living in a different world than roughly two-thirds of the electorate.
04.13.23-THE ONLY ONE CRYING WAS LYING TRUMP-Trump made some of his patented claims at the beginning of an interview with Tucker Carlson. One of those claims described his experience when he was booked for dozens of federal charges against him in New York City. Trump claimed that basically everybody booking him was apologizing and crying; in fact, “tears were pouring down their eyes.” Not only is this an unbelievable story (and also a strange way to describe crying), but Yahoo! News has a source that says this story is “absolute BS.”
04.12.23-SLIMY SYNCOPHANT-Tucker Carlson called Trump a “demonic force,” admitted that he hated him “passionately” and said he couldn’t wait for the day when he could ignore the former president in private text messages. Now, the Fox News host is singing a very different tune with a softball Trump interview in which he hailed the former president as “moderate, sensible and wise.” Carlson’s critics on Twitter were quick to remind him of what he said in private messages released as part of the Dominion lawsuit against the right-wing network — and taunt him for such a brazen turnaround: "a demonic force, a destroyer." "He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong." "We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait." "I hate him passionately."
04.10.23-JACKASS JORDAN-Glenn Kirschner, a former U.S. Army prosecutor and legal analyst for MSNBC, said House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) broke a New York law forbidding “obstructing governmental administration” with his attempt to probe Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Trump. Kirschner slammed Jordan’s efforts in a recent episode of his “Justice Matters” podcast and referred to him as a “man who intentionally violated a congressional subpoena” who has started issuing congressional subpoenas. Jordan, a fierce defender of Trump, defied a House Jan. 6 committee subpoena to testify about the insurrection and was referred to the Justice Department for prosecution. “Boy, does that make a mockery of the Judiciary Committee and of Congress and of the rule of law,” Kirschner said.
04.08.23-FOX IN THE HENHOUSE-Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—one of the most prominent anti-vaxxers in the world and Nazi cavorter, who's been condemned by several members of his own family—declared this week that he will challenge President Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2024. If that wasn’t hilariously pathetic enough, here's the kicker: Kennedy was recruited into the race by Steve Bannon, one of the masterminds of the Trump 2016 campaign, to be a "useful chaos agent." RFK Jr. rocketed from the fringes into the mainstream with the rise of anti-vaxx hysteria during the pandemic and has been derided as a "quack" and "healthcare menace." from Daily Kos.
04.06.23-OF COURSE HE DID-Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas accepted luxury trips around the globe for more than two decades, including travel on a superyacht and private jet, from a prominent Republican donor without disclosing them, according to a new report.ProPublica reported Thursday on an array of trips funded by Harlan Crow, a Dallas businessman. The publication said Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks. It said the justice also has vacationed at Crow’s ranch in East Texas and has joined Crow at the Bohemian Grove, an exclusive all-male retreat in California.
04.04.23-FOX TRASH-Jeanine Pirro's own Fox News producer called her a 'reckless maniac' about Trump's Big election Lie. Pirro has been able to stay on air even though her number one attribute is being a screaming bore and she’s proven to be morally bankrupt.The Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News has exposed the septic tank of personalities that makes up the behind-the-scenes world at the conservative propaganda giant. And while reports of how people like Pirro went on air and knowingly pushed unverified conspiracy theories and in many cases made claims they knew full well not to be true, the details of the conversations going on behind the camera have only recently begun flooding out.
04.02.23-TRUMP STILL OWNS THIS PHONY-In the midst of the frenzy over the news of Trump's indictment, one politician made especially dangerous remarks that would threaten the foundations of American justice, and it wasn't Trump. Ron DeSantis, in a tweet, suggested that he would ignore the extradition law
and his duties as governor in order to help keep Trump from being accountable to the law, a proposition more dangerous than any indictment.
03.31.23-OUR VERY OWN TRAITOR-Trump isn’t shy about which world leaders he got along with best ― and it’s not always America’s allies. He famously sided with Putin when questioned about U.S. intelligence that found Russia interfered on his behalf in the 2016 election, and he got along so well with North Korean dictator Kim that he once said they “fell in love.”At the same time, he didn’t always get along with America’s allies. To the contrary, Trump engaged in a series of petty feuds with the leaders of friendly nations, such as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whom he called a “far left lunatic,” and French President Emmanuel Macron, whom he accused of being “very insulting.” He also reportedly called then-British Prime Minister Theresa May “a fool” and then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel “stupid” in calls with each of them.
03.29.23-WITH A CAPITAL 'C'-California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) went after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) after McCarthy was caught on camera refusing to answer questions about the mass shooting at a school in Nashville, Tennessee. On Tuesday, CNN’s chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju tweeted a video of National Rifle Association-endorsed McCarthy walking away from reporters asking if there’d be a legislative response to the deadly violence at The Covenant School. Three 9-year-old students and three adults were shot to death by a former student at the Christian school. The shooter was killed by police. “Says he’s not answering any questions,” Raju wrote about McCarthy. “Posed for photos with tourists, then went into his office.” Newsom shared the video on his own Twitter account. The governor captioned it with a single word: “Coward.”
03.28.23-BEYOND COWARDICE-Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), Generation Z’s first congressman, slammed GOP House members as “cowards” in a blistering floor speech following the school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, that left three children and three adults dead.“I rise today because I am furious, angry that three kids died today in Nashville, Tennessee,” Frost began. “Angry that hundreds of parents had to cry their eyes out today not knowing if their child would come home from school, and angry that we have to live day after day when we turn on the news and see rampant gun violence claiming life after life.”Frost blamed Republican lawmakers “bought and paid for by the NRA, that put profits over people, over human lives.”
03.27.23-THIS BRUTE IS DESPERATE AND NEEDS TO BE CONTAINED, JUST LIKE A MAD DOG-Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said Sunday that Trump’s current rhetoric has at times been even more “overt and blatant” than it was in the lead-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. “The rhetoric that he’s using today is not dissimilar to the type of rhetoric he used prior to Jan. 6,” said Lofgren, according to a clip recorded by Mediaite. “In fact, in some ways, it’s more overt and blatant than the events leading up to Jan. 6.” Lofgren cited a social media post last week in which Trump targeted Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is reported to be pursuing charges against the former president over his role in a 2016 hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels.Among a stream of menacing comments about Bragg ― including one in which he suggested a potential indictment would result in “death & destruction.”
03.26.23-ANOTHER FASCIST MOVE IN A FASCIST STATE RUN BY A FASCIST AUTOCRAT-BE SCARED! A U.S. government class at Eastern Florida State College was cancelled after a student felt "discomfort" over a discussion of civil rights, seen as an indication of the successful terrorizing of the Florida academic system by Ron DeSantis even with his "Stop WOKE Act" yet to be implemented.
03.23.23-TAKE THAT, YOU DOGMATIC RELIGIOUS NUTS- A Utah school district is considering banning students from reading the Bible after a complaint was made about the holy book containing 'inappropriate and pornographic' content
03.22.23- Tucker Carlson on Wednesday launched an attack on TV hosts who tell “lies” in order to “keep their stupid TV jobs.” And critics say it sounds a lot like the right-wing channel’s star could be talking about himself. Carlson, who has admitted to lying, attacked a new United Nations report on climate change that finds the world is rapidly approaching a dangerous temperature threshold. “You take a collection of dumb, desperate people in middle age hoping to keep on to their stupid TV jobs, you add scripts and some hairspray, and they repeat the lies for you,” he said.
03.21.23-PRICELESS!-Jimmy Kimmel fired back at Trump after the former president urged supporters to protest amid reports he’ll be arrested as soon as this week for paying hush money to porn actor Stormy Daniels.“Protest, take our nation back,” Trump wrote in an all-caps rant on his flailing Truth Social platform. “We already did take it back ― from you!” Kimmel said. “Now go away.”
03.20.23-BECAUSE OF ACTIONS BY CRAZED RIGHT-WING FRINGE CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISTS- “The newly-released 2022 supplement to the PRRI Census of American Religion — based on over 40,000 interviews conducted last year — confirms that the decline of white Christians (Americans who identify as white, non-Hispanic and Christian of any kind) as a proportion of the population continues unabated,” writes Robert P. Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute. “As recently as 2008, when our first Black president was elected, the U.S. was a majority (54%) white Christian country.” By 2014 the number had dropped to 47 percent, and in 2022 it stood at 42 percent.
03.19.23-RAISE YOUR HANDS IF YOU ARE SURPRISED-Trump’s White House has failed to report more than 100 gifts from foreign nations worth more than a quarter-million dollars, and federal officials have been unable to find a life-size painting of Trump given by the president of El Salvador as well as golf clubs from the prime minister of Japan, according to a report Friday from House Democrats. Among the unreported items are 16 gifts from Saudi Arabia worth more than $45,000 in all, including a dagger valued at up to $24,000, and 17 presents from India that include expensive cufflinks, a vase and a $4,600 model of the Taj Mahal. Gifts above several hundred dollars that foreign officials give to the president, vice president and their families are required to be reported to the State Department. Rep. Jamie Raskin said that the committee would “remain committed to following the facts to determine the extent to which former President Trump broke the law or violated the Constitution when he failed to report gifts and took possession of valuable items without paying the fair market price for them.”
03.18.23-LIARS HIDE FACTS-The “Project 2020” report conducted by the Berkeley Research Group has now been obtained by prosecutors investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. A copy was reviewed by The Washington Post, and it shows that Trump’s own campaign paid more than $600,000 for research that undercut many of his most explosive claims. The research was never made public. Despite Trump’s claims of rampant election fraud, most election officials around the country have maintained that such malfeasance is exceedingly rare. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, officials brought only a handful of fraud prosecutions. Even the conservative Heritage Foundation has found fewer than 1,500 instances of “proven voter fraud” — over a 40-year time frame.
03.17.23-HOW MANY DIED BELIEVING THIS FALSEHOOD?-Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo told Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) Thursday that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were effective against COVID-19 ― echoing falsehoods that persisted at the peak of the pandemic. Both conservative-backed drugs sparked controversy as the global health crisis raged and both were deemed ineffective treatments for the virus by several prominent studies. But Bartiromo brought up as if “in a time warp,” one critic on Twitter wrote.“There were also all these lies about the emergency authorization,” Bartiromo said. “They needed the emergency authorization to get the vaccines down everybody’s throats, but in order to do that, they had to prove there was nothing else on the market that could actually treat COVID. We all know ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine were effective, weren’t they?”
03.16.23-SIGNS OF A MADMAN-Trump tried to argue that DeSantis would've lost in 2018 were it not for Trump’s post-election intervention.“[A]fter the Race, when votes were being stolen by the corrupt Election process in Broward County, and Ron was going down ten thousand votes a day, along with now-Senator Rick Scott, I sent in the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys, and the ballot theft immediately ended, just prior to them running out of the votes necessary to win,” he claimed by way of his social media platform. "I stopped his Election from being stolen."In other words, according to Trump, he learned of a secret scheme being hatched by corrupt election officials he failed to identify, which led him to secretly deploy FBI agents and federal prosecutors to the Sunshine State, at which point the secret plot was secretly thwarted without anyone noticing.This was a story he wanted the public to believe and take seriously. There was no indication that Trump was kidding.
03.15.23-WHAT A BUNCH OF CRAP-Conservative commentator Bethany Mandel co-authored a whole book on the “current woke indoctrination” supposedly going on around the country. But when asked to define the term at the very center of it, she flopped.Mandel struggled for half a minute to come up with an answer to what “woke” means during an appearance Tuesday on “Rising,” a web series produced by The Hill. In the end, the author of “Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation” — released earlier this month — offered that “woke is something that’s very hard to define,” and said it had to do with reorganizing society “to create hierarchies of oppression.”“It’s hard to explain in a 15-second sound bite,” she said with an apology.
03.14.23-PENCE THE PUTZ-Chasten Buttigieg, the husband of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, has responded after Pence mocked his husband’s paternity leave. “An honest question for you,” Chasten Buttigieg tweeted, tagging Pence, “after your attempted joke this weekend. If your grandchild was born prematurely and placed on a ventilator at two months old ― their tiny fingers wrapped around yours as the monitors beep in the background ― where would you be?
03.10.23-LET'S FACE FACTS-The Tucker Carlson audience is made of people too gullible to even make it in your average doomsday cult. They'll believe whatever Carlson tells them. He's a white nationalism-boosting pro-sedition hoax promoter. Lying is what he does. Spreading lies and propaganda is why Fox News puts him on the air. He is looking more like Joseph Goebbels in a bow tie every freakin’ day. Carlson is still, by the way, painting Donald Trump's election loss as illegitimate. Even now, even after all the violence, and long after all the hoaxes were disproved as crooked lies. He is a man entirely without shame.
03.09.23-CORPORATE CRAP-After 16 months, three confirmation hearings, more than 1 million letters in support, and a dishonest multi-million dollar smear campaign financed by Comcast, Gigi Sohn, President Biden’s nominee to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), has withdrawn her name from consideration. Sohn, who helped draft landmark net neutrality rules in 2015, may have been the most qualified nominee in FCC history. This is a huge loss for American consumers and a massive win for Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and the detractors they funded to sink her nomination. Most importantly, the fifth and final commissioner's seat on the FCC remains vacant, continuing more than two years of partisan deadlock. Comcast, Verizon, AT&T think they have the right to choose their own regulators. Wealthy phone, cable and broadcast corporations have enjoyed a sweetheart deal since the Trump years and do not want to be held accountable by a pro-consumer watchdog.
But just as it was a mistake to allow railroad barons to dictate their own rules, it is a mistake to allow Big Telecom to keep the FCC in stalemate. A hamstrung FCC comes at a real cost to communities who need equal access and fair service.
03.08.23-R.I.P. FOX News. That is, if there is any justice.
03.06.23-Nikki Haley Spins Heads. The 2024 GOP presidential candidate's comments at the CPAC were slammed as "unspeakable" and "absurd." Haley raised eyebrows with an attack on “wokeness” during a speech. “Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic, hands down,” declared Haley.
Critics on Twitter scratched their heads over the claim.They quickly reminded Haley that COVID-19 has so far killed more than 1.1 million people in the U.S. alone.
03.05.23-AMERICAN FASCISTS-Thousands of conservatives, including prominent Republican lawmakers and presidential hopefuls, flocked to a suburban Washington, D.C., convention center this week to discuss children’s genitals. They were there to call for criminalizing the act of doctors and parents providing minors with gender-affirming care. Sebastian Gorka, an alleged member of a Nazi-collaborating political order in Hungary who served as an advisor to Trump warned the crowd that Democrats are “mutilating boys and girls” and “sacrificing them on the altar of their transgender insanity.”A short time later, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — a featured speaker at a white supremacist conference last year, where her fellow speakers praised Adolf Hitler and cheered on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — took to the stage to make a big announcement. "I’m going to be re-introducing my bill… that will make it a felony to perform anything to do with gender!”
03.04.23-JIM THE JERK-It was last August when Rep. Jim Jordan first referenced a group of FBI insiders, whom he referred to as “whistleblowers.” As he put it at the time, these unidentified individuals had privately shared provocative information with him about the politicization of the bureau, fueling GOP conspiracy theories. Almost immediately, the far-right congressman’s story was, in a rather literal sense, unbelievable. The first three witnesses to testify privately before the new Republican-led House committee investigating the “weaponization” of the federal government have offered little firsthand knowledge of any wrongdoing or violation of the law, according to Democrats on the panel. Instead, the trio appears to be a group of aggrieved former F.B.I. officials who have trafficked in right-wing conspiracy theories, including about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol, and received financial support from a top ally of Trump.
03.03.23-WHAT A CROCK!-Laura Ingraham took a revisionist look back at Trump’s presidency on Thursday, saying he “was in the Oval Office pretty much all day.” The Fox News host had just called President Joe Biden an elected “hologram” who outsources pivotal decisions to “bureaucrats, technocrats or Obama holdovers.” Now contrast Biden with Trump,” she said. “The staff brought proposals to him. He considered them. He brought in opposing points of view. He was in the Oval Office pretty much all day.”The last claim about Trump’s work ethic caught the attention of Twitter users, many of whom remembered No. 45′s frequent golfing getaways. He played at least 289 times while president. He often hit the links at his own resorts, enabling him to profit from his putting. His hobby cost taxpayers more than $151.5 million in travel and security costs, according to HuffPost’s calculations.Trump also admitted spending time watching copious amounts of Fox News, and tweeted more than 100 times a day on occasion — not quite a nose-to-the-grindstone record.
03.01.23-LIAR'S CLUB-Right-wing media outlets are starting to come apart at the scenes. Just take a look at what's been happening:
02.27.23-KEEP IT UP JIMMY-Trump was reportedly so livid over Jimmy Kimmel’s TV jokes that he ordered White House officials to get the late night host muzzled. Rolling Stone reported on Sunday that there were at least two phone calls to a top Disney executive to demand action against Kimmel in 2018. Disney is the parent company of ABC, which airs “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” One unnamed former senior Trump administration official told the magazine that Trump felt Kimmel was being “very dishonest and doing things that [Trump] would have once sued over.” Another unnamed former official told Rolling Stone: “Nobody thought it was going to change anything but DJT was focused on it so we had to do something…It was doing something, mostly, to say to [Trump], ‘Hey, we did this.’” Kimmel said last year that ABC officials at one point asked him to ease off Trump, but he refused. “I just said, ‘Listen, if that’s what you want to do, I understand and I don’t begrudge you for it, but I’m not going to do that,’” he told the “Naked Lunch” podcast. It’s not clear if that conversation came as a result of the White House pressure campaign on Disney. ABC left Kimmel alone, and he continues to mock the former president to this day.
02.26.23-RIDICULE DESERVED-Colin Jost of SNL: “Donald Trump visited East Palestine, the site of the recent train derailment, because Trump usually tries to make himself look better by standing next to a train wreck,” quipped Jost as a photo of Giuliani appeared by his side. “The train that derailed was carrying highly toxic vinyl chloride, which I think is something Trump recommended as a cure for COVID.” He then clowned the former president for distributing his water to residents and noted the Trump administration’s rollback of rail safety regulations.
02.23.23-WE MADE THIS MISTAKE WITH TRUMP-Peter Wehner, a former senior aide to President George W. Bush, warned in a new essay that it’s “unwise” to write off far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) as “an outcast, a fringe figure, deranged but isolated.” Greene is now “a confidante” of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) And the extremist Republican’s call this week for a “national divorce” is “giving voice to a widespread and growing sentiment” in the GOP, he added. Far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has called for a "national divorce." One element of her proposal would see Democrats banned from voting for five years if they moved to a red state. “MAGA Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene have added calls for secession to their corrosive lies about the 2020 presidential election,” Wehner wrote. “More incendiary and treacherous claims will follow.” “Greene and McCarthy — one crazed, the other cowardly — embody a large swath of the modern-day GOP,” Wehner concluded. “Any party that makes room for seditionists and secessionists is sick and dangerous.”
02.22.23-HOW MANY REPUBLICAN LIARS ARE THERE?-Nearly a year after the 2020 election, Arizona’s then-attorney general Mark Brnovich launched an investigation into voting in the state’s largest county that quickly consumed more than 10,000 hours of his staff’s time. Investigators prepared a report in March 2022 stating that virtually all claims of error and malfeasance were unfounded, according to internal documents reviewed by The Washington Post. Brnovich, a Republican, kept it private. In April, the attorney general — who was running in the GOP primary for a U.S. Senate seat -- released an “Interim Report” claiming that his office had discovered “serious vulnerabilities.” He left out edits from his own investigators refuting his assertions.
-ONE DEMON TO ANOTHER-Fox News host Tucker Carlson called Trump “a demonic force” and “a destroyer” in a text to his producer after thousands of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
02.19.23-PENCE, JUST LIKE TRUMP, THINKS HE IS ABOVE THE LAW-Conservative lawyer Andrew McCarthy, called “frivolous” Pence’s reported plan to invoke the Constitution’s “speech or debate” clause, which shields members of Congress from being “questioned in any other Place” for “any Speech or Debate in either House.” Noticeably absent from that clause are vice presidents, the thing Pence was on Jan. 6. But Pence argues that, given his technical role in presiding over the Senate, he should therefore be afforded those same protections. It was noteworthy that a conservative lawyer spoke out against a Republican politician’s legal gambit, what really drew attention to McCarthy’s article was the man who tweeted it out: J. Michael Luttig, the stalwart conservative and former federal judge who advised Pence ahead of Jan. 6 that he couldn’t overturn the 2020 election, despite Donald Trump's claims otherwise.
02.18.23-FOX VIEWERS-WAKE UP!-YOU ARE BEING LIED TO-A brief filed by Dominion Voting Systems as part of its $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News provides the clearest picture ever of the right-wing network’s operations — and the portrait that emerges is not flattering. Wielding internal emails and text messages obtained through discovery, as well as numerous depositions with Fox’s on-air talent and brass, Dominion’s lawyers reveal that the network was feeding viewers information about fraud in the 2020 election that its executives, hosts and producers knew to be false. Out of fear that Fox News’s audience was leaving for its competitors, the brief alleges, the network chose to buttress President Donald Trump’s lie that the election had been stolen from him, helping to set the stage for the Jan. 6 insurrection.
02.16.23-THE BIBLE THUMPERS ARE COMING FOR YOU-Florida laws in place or being considered restrict classroom topics to the book banner’s white, straight, Christian conservative mindset, as Daily Kos’ Laura Clawson aptly put it.
02.15.23-MERCHANT OF DEATH!-As Trump's second re-election bid begins to pick up steamplans have begun to emerge. Rolling Stone alleges Trump has begun polling his advisers on whether he should bring back firing squads, hangings, and even the guillotine should he win in 2024. According to two sources, the former president has even begun exploring the possibility of group executions, with a third person claiming Trump has expressed interest in a government ad campaign to highlight the administration's lethality and, per Rolling Stone's source, "help put the fear of God into violent criminals." A Trump campaign spokesperson denied the former president had plans for an execution ad campaign in a statement to Rolling Stone. As Rolling Stone had previously reported, Trump had ended his first term by executing more than four times as many convicted persons in his final six months in office as the federal government had killed in total over the prior half-century. He also signed an executive order in those last weeks in office that expanded the federal government's ability to conduct hangings and firing squads as methods of execution. And during his campaign launch in November, Trump made a special point to highlight a call to execute "everyone who sells drugs [or] gets caught selling drugs" if given a second term. Oliver Willis, called it the "kind of fascist s--t Republican primary voters love."
02.14.23-ANOTHER REPUBLICAN HYPOCRITE-Nikki Haley announced Tuesday that she is running for president. Haley has shifted her posture toward Trump over the years. She criticized him when he first ran in 2016, before joining his administration the next year and later vowing not to run against him in 2024. In recent months, she has disavowed the pledge as she moved toward a planned announcement speech here in Charleston on Wednesday.
02.13.23-LOONEY TUNES, BUT SCARY!-This week the House Oversight Committee has held a number of hearings related to what Republicans hold as the most important issue confronting America—Twitter’s suppression of Hunter Biden’s dick pics. These hearings have featured some absolutely spotlight moments from Republican lawmakers, including:
02.12.23-WHY DO PEOPLE STILL BELIEVE THIS LIE? Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that Trump’s campaign hired a consulting firm to try to prove that the election had been stolen. The Berkeley Research Group examined the election results in six swing states but could not find anything that would have changed the outcome. “They looked at everything,” a source told Dawsey: “change of addresses, illegal immigrants, ballot harvesting, people voting twice, machines being tampered with, ballots that were sent to vacant addresses that were returned and voted…. Literally anything you could think of. Voter turnout anomalies, date of birth anomalies, whether dead people voted. If there was anything under the sun that could be thought of, they looked at it.” The consultants briefed Trump, chief of staff Mark Meadows, and others on their evidence that Biden’s election was legitimate in December 2020—before the events of January 6—but the Trump camp continued to insist the election had been stolen.
02.11.23-JUST ANOTHER REPUBLICAN GIANT HYPOCRITE-As Gov. Ron DeSantis prepared for an election night party in downtown Tampa last year, city officials received a surprising — and politically sensitive — request.The Republican governor’s campaign wanted weapons banned from his victory celebration at the city-run Tampa Convention Center, a city official said in emails obtained by The Washington Post. And the campaign suggested that the city take responsibility for the firearms ban, the official said — not the governor, who has been a vocal supporter of gun rights.“ DeSantis/his campaign will not tell their attendees they are not permitted to carry because of the political optics,” Chase Finch, the convention center’s safety and security manager said which was conveyed by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), a state police agency led by a DeSantis appointee. Finch further explained that because of “Republicans largely being in support of 2A,” referring to the Second Amendment, “Basically it sounds like they want us to say it’s our policy to disallow firearms within the event space if anyone asks.”
02.10.23-DUMBER THAN MTG-Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) was torn apart on Twitter after she seemed to forget that detail in a tweet about President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday. “Hey Joe, YOU CLOSED THEM!” she tweeted, citing a line from Biden’s speech in which he said: “In the midst of the COVID crisis, when schools were closed and we were shutting down everything, let’s recognize how far we came in the fight against the pandemic itself.” A note appeared below the tweet, pointing out that readers had “added context they thought people might want to know.” It included links to two articles: One about the shutdown of K-12 schools in the spring of 2020, when Donald Trump was president, and a second noting that Trump said decisions about school closures would be up to the governors of each state. (Joe Biden wasn’t President back then.)
02.09.23-BIDEN'S TRUTH-“When I raised the plans of some of their members in the Republican caucus to cut Social Security … Marjorie Taylor Greene and others stood up and said: ‘Liar, liar,’” Biden said. “Well, guess what? … I [will] remind you that Rick Scott from Florida, the guy who ran a U.S. Senate campaign, has a plan. I got his brochure right here!”Biden was referring to Scott’s plan that would require all legislation — including that relating to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare — to be “sunset,” which would require votes every five years to continue them. Republican Ron Johnson, also has expressed support for targeting the two programs in a budget-cutting move.Johnson suggested last August that Social Security and Medicare be eliminated as federal entitlement programs, saying the programs should instead become programs approved by Congress annually as discretionary spending.
02.08.23-A WIN FOR BIDEN-About last night's SOTU speech, Former GOP Chair Michael Steele was blunt. His critique of the Biden speech was on point. “Republicans for a long time have been talking about owning the libs,” Michael Steele said. “They got owned tonight by Joe Biden. He stood his ground. He laid out his agenda. He was very clear. He took the hecklers, and he made America see what he's been trying to convey in a way that they probably had not seen or heard before.” Steele then pointed out the repercussions of the speech. “And I thought for him; it was a very good night,” Steele continued. “I was watching and reading conservatives, and certainly MAGA folks on my Twitter feed just lose their mind over everything. The clarity of laying out what he did. I mean, the moment on Social Security is going to be in a loop.” Michael then honed in on Social Security. “Republicans had a plan that they ran on in 2022 to abolish, to sunset all federal programs, which, guess what? It included Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare. And that was Senator Rick Scott's plan that the party signed on to.” Biden received high marks from Steele and from just about every talking head on the mainstream media.
02.07.23-Comedian Chelsea Handler tore into Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) after the conspiracy theorist complained that her job is “practically year-round” and doesn’t allow lawmakers to be “regular people.” Handler was left in disbelief. “First of all, you’re not a ‘regular person,’ you moron. You’re a congressperson because you campaigned and somehow won, which requires you to work year-round,” she fired back. “I also don’t want to work year-round, and that’s why I don’t.” Greene, who last year spoke at a white nationalist event, also griped that she meets people who tell her “crazy things... that they believe because they read it on the internet.” “Well, if that’s not the pot calling the kettle QAnon,” Handler replied. “This woman thought 9/11 was a hoax, that the Clintons killed JFK Jr. and that Jews are in charge of space lasers. Please, don’t come at her with some crazy ideas ― she might believe them.”
02.03.23-WHAT MORE DO YOU NEED TO KNOW?-Shell-40 billion dollars in profit. Exxon-56 billion. This is disgusting, but the oil companies have always been the most responsible for high gas prices. They are too big fight!
02.01.23-RIGHT WING EXTREMIST ALERT-If there’s any topic that Marjorie Taylor Greene has used to peddle misinformation and foster fear, it’s national security. The second-term congresswoman is the standard-bearer of the wing of the Republican Party that goes deep on misinformation, conspiracy theories, and thinly veiled racist tropes. In the last Congress, Greene’s lack of committees limited the platform she had to push those views. That’s not the case in this Congress, and it’s got national security experts—and particularly alumnae of the larger Homeland Security Committee community—worried.
01.31.23-National Review senior writer Charles C.W. Cooke Trump’s rambling posts on his flailing Truth Social platform show his “deterioration” on “full display.”In a column posted on Wednesday titled “Trump Has Completely Lost His Grip on Reality,” Cook wrote that the former president is “ranting like a deranged hobo in a dilapidated public park” with his messages.
He added: “There was a point in time at which Trump’s unusual verbal affect and singular nose for underutilized wedge issues gave him a competitive edge. Now? Now, he’s morphing into one of the three witches from Macbeth. To peruse Trump’s account on Truth Social is to meet a cast of characters about whom nobody who lives beyond the Trump Extended Universe could possibly care one whit.” Trump is ignoring real-world problems facing the nation and is instead “busy mainlining Edward Lear,” he wrote, referring to the author of “A Book of Nonsense.”
01.30.23-THE POT AND THE KETTLE-Trump, who has already announced he is running for president in 2024, is not happy about the prospect of facing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in the race.“When I hear he might run, I consider that very disloyal,” Trump told reporters Saturday.Trump sought to take credit for DeSantis’ ascent to the governor’s office and questioned polling showing DeSantis defeating him in some of the early primary states. (what does Trump know about loyalty? He is only loyal to himself)
01.15.23-MANIC MAGAS-Republicans are a bit preoccupied. In the first two weeks of the new Congress, MAGA extremists have neutered House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.); gutted the Office of Congressional Ethics; tried to help tax cheats by voting to repeal funding for the IRS; and set up a committee to obstruct criminal investigations and gin up scandals about Biden and his family. Biden has the opportunity to contrast himself with House Republicans, who are living up to Democrats’ characterization as unethical, power-hungry, chaotic and clueless.
01.13.23-SOMETHING WE CAN ALL AGREE ON-Social media users mocked Trump on Thursday after the twice-impeached former president boasted on his Truth Social platform “Importantly, I have single-handedly shown the American Public how Crooked and Corrupt our Government is. NOW WE CAN FIX IT!” What a fool!
01.10.23-DEEP DIVE FOR DEMOCRACY-House Republican leaders on Tuesday announced their picks for powerful committee chairs in the new Congress, and most of them have an inherent character flaw: They voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election results after fueling the lie that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. “Our committee chairs represent the very best of our conference,” House Majority Leader Scalise (R-La.) said when announcing the GOP’s choices for chairmanships. Of the 17 members tapped for chair posts, 11 voted to reject the results of the 2020 presidential election. They defended their decision to do this by telling the same lie about widespread voter fraud that just hours earlier had fueled the deadly insurrection at the Capitol and sent these lawmakers into hiding for their lives.
01.05.23-LYING IS IN HIS DNA-Trump, in a post, says he made a “recommendation for troops” and that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) failed to act on it. But the evidence shows Trump did not issue any formal request — so there was nothing for Pelosi to heed. The committee report says it found “no evidence” to support the claim that he ordered 10,000 troops. Moreover, the committee said that when he referenced so many troops, it was not because he wanted to protect the Capitol. He “floated the idea of having 10,000 National Guardsmen deployed to protect him and his supporters from any supposed threats by left-wing counterprotesters,” the report said. The report says that Trump brought up the issue on at least three occasions but in such vague and obtuse ways that no senior official regarded his words as an order.
01.01.23-THAT'S BECAUSE THERE IS NOT ANY EVIDENCE, YOU LIAR.-Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the conservative activist married to controversial Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, admitted in a deposition held earlier this year that she did not have any evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election, a transcript revealed Friday. Ginni Thomas spent weeks working behind the scenes around the time of the election to boost Trump. Text messages previously released by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack showed how Thomas sowed doubt about the election’s legitimacy in direct conversations with Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff at the time.
To search for a term on a page press ctrl/f, enter term, press enter-all instances will be highlighted.
07.25.23-TODAY'S HEADLINES-OMG
- Colorado Businessman Sentenced For 'We Build The Wall' Fundraiser Fraud
- RFK Jr. vaccinated all his children. Why doesn't he want you to vaccinate yours?
- Ahead of Texas AG's impeachment trial, his PAC donates millions to lieutenant gov. running trial
- Republicans cling to traitorous Confederate names
- Texas A&M suspended professor accused of criticizing Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in lecture
- Vaccine rejection may be linked to excess deaths among Florida, Ohio Republicans
- Biden's Emmett Till monument fights back against GOP whitewashing. The monument was announced on what would have been Till's 82nd birthday, had he not been kidnapped and lynched as a teenager in Mississippi
- Rudy Giuliani has admitted to making false and defamatory statements about Georgia election workers
07.24.23-TYPICAL MAGA STATE-Indiana is a state of many contradictions — at least, according to CNBC. As part of its annual ranking for the top states for business, the news outlet found that Indiana was the seventh-worst state to live and work in. The Hoosier state garnered a D- for life, health and inclusion, with the lack of available, affordable child care and its anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ laws cited as the driving factors. But despite this damning figure, Indiana still made the top 15 most business-friendly states, at No. 13, moving up one spot from its 2022 ranking. Indiana was even No. 1 in infrastructure last year, with Indiana's strength in the freight-shipping industry a major reason.
07.23.23-GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL, DO NOT PASS GO-It was (yet another) tumultuous week for Trump’s lawyers, with a seemingly endless deluge of setbacks, roadblocks, and full-blown losses, beginning with the target letter Trump received from prosecutors in special counsel Jack Smith's investigation into the 2020 election and Jan. 6, 2021, signaling that a third indictment — and a significant one — could be imminent for the former president. On Tuesday, Michigan's attorney general filed criminal charges against 16 pro-Trump fake electors. In addition to being the first charges of their kind ever filed, the fake electors could be facing both state and federal charges, a development which doesn’t bode well for the former president they were attempting to reinstate. Meanwhile, things weren’t looking much brighter in Georgia where Trump's lawyers tried and failed in spectacular fashion to derail District Attorney Fani Willis’ probe. In Florida, Judge Aileen Cannon set Trump's classified documents trial for May 2024, putting it on a direct collision course with his 2024 campaign calendar. (MSNBC)
07.21-23-ALWAYS HAS BEEN A MOBSTER-THIS REALLY IS AN EXPLICIT THREAT-MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough tore into Trump on Friday after the former president said it would be “dangerous” for special counsel Jack Smith to send him to jail. Trump had told an Iowa radio station this week that the possibility of jail time is a “very dangerous thing to even talk about, because we do have a tremendously passionate group of voters (vicious MAGA freaks mob) — much more passion than they had in 2020 and much more passion than they had in 2016.” Scarborough said Trump was “talking like a mobster.”
07.21.23-SCUM ALERT!-In a video posted Tuesday on Twitter, when gun violence advocates handed Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) a pin of the green Converse a Uvalde victim was wearing when she was murdered in a mass shooting, Boebert threw it away. Brett Cross, whose 10-year-old son Uziyah Garcia was also killed during the Uvalde mass shooting, said on TikTok that Boebert throwing away the pin was “beyond infuriating.” “You people elect these types of people,” Cross said. “Are you fucking serious? She didn’t even have enough couth or wherewithal to even hold on to it until she got to her office to throw it away. She threw it away in plain sight, going to show once again that she does not give a damn.” Maite Rodriguez’s green Converse became a symbol for Uvalde victims when actor Matthew McConaughey, who is from Uvalde, Texas, spoke at the White House about how Maite’s green Converse was the “only clear evidence” used to identify the 9-year-old after the shooting.
07.18.23-A REAL THREAT TO THIS COUNTRY-The New York Times is out with a story sure to simultaneously delight the supporters of former President Trump and strike fear into his critics. The lengthy piece, based on his campaign's public proposals and interviews with insiders, lays out how Trump plans to dramatically increase the power of the presidency should he be elected to a second term. The goal is to "alter the balance of power by increasing the president's authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House," write Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, and Charlie Savage. For example:
- Independent agencies such as the FCC and the FTC would operate under the president's control.
- Presidents would be able to refuse to spend money authorized by Congress on programs they don't like—the practice is called "impounding" funds, and lawmakers banned it under Richard Nixon.
- Tens of thousands of civil servants would lose their job protection, making it easier for a president to fire them.
07.15.23-WATCH THIS GUY-HE MAY BE INSANE BUT HE IS SMART-Absolutely disgusting and insane. The @nypost
obtained video from a recent RFK Jr. event where he suggested COVID is a Chinese bioweapon “ethnically targeted” to “attack Caucasians and Black people” and to spare “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” people. He then falsely claimed the U.S. has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on labs in Ukraine to develop similar bioweapons that target people by their race.
07.14.23-YES, BUT DANGEROUS-MSNBC guest Eddie S. Glaude Jr. riffed on Nicolle Wallace’s takedown of Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) on Tuesday, drawing cackles from the host. Tuberville has invited scorn for blocking military promotions in the Senate while at the same time reinforcing his support for white nationalists. Wallace accused Tuberville of single-handedly “impeding and harming U.S. military readiness.” “We can’t decide if he’s more stupid or more racist,” she said. “And it’s almost comical and farcical, but he is today the most powerful Republican in the Senate.” “So let’s just stipulate he’s a stupid racist,” said Glaude, an African-American studies professor at Princeton University.
07.14.23-YES, BUT DANGEROUS-MSNBC guest Eddie S. Glaude Jr. riffed on Nicolle Wallace’s takedown of Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) on Tuesday, drawing cackles from the host. Tuberville has invited scorn for blocking military promotions in the Senate while at the same time reinforcing his support for white nationalists. Wallace accused Tuberville of single-handedly “impeding and harming U.S. military readiness.” “We can’t decide if he’s more stupid or more racist,” she said. “And it’s almost comical and farcical, but he is today the most powerful Republican in the Senate.” “So let’s just stipulate he’s a stupid racist,” said Glaude, an African-American studies professor at Princeton University.
07.13.23-ANOTHER FAILED MAGA WITCH HUNT-Gone in 60 seconds: At FBI director hearing, Republican conspiracies about Biden go 'POOF!', Rex Huppke, USA Today. So the Republicans who want to defund and discredit the FBI, the ones who eagerly dragged the FBI director through the mud Wednesday with absurd allegations grounded in zero facts, want you, the American people, to believe this: The nation’s premier law enforcement agency has been weaponized against Republicans under a director who is a lifelong Republican and who reached his current post by being selected and confirmed to positions by two Republican presidents and two Republican-led Senate bodies.
Forget that all this is in defense of former President Donald Trump, a one-term, twice-impeached lifelong con artist who now faces more than 70 felony charges in two cases, with more indictments on the horizon.
Forget that Hunter Biden was actually charged with two misdemeanor tax offenses and a felony firearm offense.
Forget that, despite relentless investigation, Republicans have produced nothing linking President Biden to his son’s activity, or the fact that the person they touted as a key whistleblower was just charged with arms trafficking and acting as an unregistered agent for China.
07.12.23-THIS IS MAGA'S SO-CALLED HUNTER BIDEN WHISTLEBLOWER-U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said: “As alleged, Gal Luft, a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen and co-head of a Maryland think tank, engaged in multiple, serious criminal schemes. He subverted foreign agent registration laws in the United States to seek to promote Chinese policies by acting through a former high-ranking U.S. Government official; he acted as a broker in deals for dangerous weapons and Iranian oil; and he told multiple lies about his crimes to law enforcement. As the charges unsealed today reflect, our Office will continue to work vigorously with our law enforcement partners to detect and hold accountable those who surreptitiously attempt to perpetrate malign foreign influence campaigns here in the United States.” This guy is currently a fugitive. (Huff Post)
07.11.23-KRAZY KAREN-Former Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.) said the emergence of Casey DeSantis on the campaign trail on behalf of her husband, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, could actually backfire. “For many, she’s the brighter side to Florida’s angry governor. To others, she’s become America’s Karen,” Jolly said Sunday on MSNBC.He called her a “more effective messenger” than her husband as he battles for the GOP presidential nomination. The problem is the message itself. “If all she’s doing is amplifying the wrong message, she’s actually clarifying Ron DeSantis’ weaknesses,” he said, pointing specifically to DeSantis’ attempts “to terrify voters” with his culture war rhetoric. “It doesn’t matter if it’s presented in heels or boots, the DeSantis doctrine’s a losing one,” he said. “We’re gonna learn that the more Casey DeSantis gets out there.” (Huff Post)
07.10.23-WHEN TRUMP SPEAKS, HE LIES-Chris Christie pushed back on claims that “tens of thousands” of people still show up to Trump’s rallies, calling estimates for a recent South Carolina event “absurd." “Tens of thousands don’t show up anymore. That’s another one of the big lies that happen. Look, all you have to do is look at the pictures.” Christie was responding to reports, citing a local police chief, that Trump drew a crowd of 50,000 people to a town of 3,400 in South Carolina over the July 4 weekend. That claim has since been called into question. Christie also lambasted Trump’s campaign stop in Iowa last week, where he said the ex-president “droned on for an hour and a half,” “lied” about a farm deal with China, and “spent the rest of the time” discussing his indictment.“This is not somebody who’s fighting for the American people and their future,” Christie concluded. “This is all about his ego.” (Huff Post)
07.09.23-Please Joe, no cluster bombs!
07.08.23-LEAVE THESE PEOPLE ALONE-Republican-and Democratic-appointed federal judges are pushing back against state laws that ban gender-affirming care for minors. Courts are doing so for the reasons these laws should never have been passed in the first place: They are unconstitutional and infringe upon the rights of American citizens. The systematic effort to use the power of government to marginalize transgender people and deny young people health care services based on ideology and against scientific consensus in states such as Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Indiana and Florida has been rebuffed by jurists in the past several weeks. (USA Today)
07.07.23-PRISONER # 123trump-MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell and his panel of legal experts went through some of the claims Trump has been making in his defense as he faces a 37-count indictment in the classified documents scandal. In one clip played by O’Donnell, Trump claimed that charging him under the Espionage Act is “one of the most outrageous and vicious legal theories ever put in an American court of law, there’s never been anything like this.” “Has there ever been anything like this?” O’Donnell asked former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal “Hell yeah,” Katyal replied without hesitation, the immediately cited the recent example of Robert Birchum who was recently sentenced for keeping classified documents at his home. “Notably, unlike Trump, Mr. Birchum ― who was a highly decorated Air Force officer ― expressed remorse for what he did, he took full responsibility, and Lawrence, yet, he still got 3 years in prison just last month.” Katyal also cited several other recent examples of people getting prison time after being convicted on the same charges that Trump is now facing. Trump, he suggested, “should just look at the language of the Espionage Act ― it describes him to a T.”
07.06.23-LOSER NEWS-Longtime Fox News analyst Brit Hume is suggesting that Republicans think twice before supporting Trump in the 2024 GOP presidential primaries. “The case can be made that he’s a loser because, since he got elected in 2016, he’s compiled a string of them,” Hume said. “Either he or his supported candidates have lost too many races.” Hume said Republicans who support Trump are voting for the candidate they feel closest to and not voting strategically to support that candidate with the best chance of winning.“ That may come back to haunt the Republican Party in 2024,” he said. “You look at the Democrats and what they think of the race. They think that Trump is going to win the nomination, and they think Biden will beat him because he did beat him.”
07.05.23-Hot dog eating contests-A disgusting display of gluttony. People are starving. Give them the hot dogs.
07.04.23-Happy Birthday to the country that the MAGA FREAKS are trying to destroy.
07.03.23-1984, AGAIN=DeSantis is pandering to an aging Republican base that wants to roll back the clock to when people like them controlled everything and there were no uncomfortable reminders of the humanity and worth of Black people, brown people, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, and white women who for some inexplicable reason refuse to fit the Casey DeSantis model. It’s telling about the Republican Party that merely calling for the elimination of four federal agencies is not enough, that DeSantis felt he also had to link that to his ongoing high-pitched whine about “woke ideology” and the campaign against an education that allows LGBTQ+ kids and Black kids to see themselves and their histories as legitimate, let alone valued.
07.02.23-SCUM REPORT-Trump Pressed Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey To Overturn 2020 Election Results: Trump is also currently under investigation for telling the governor of Georgia to "find" extra votes for him. Seeing his prospects for a second term rapidly dimming in late 2020, Trump pressed Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) to procure made-up votes that could tip the scales in his favor, The Washington Post reported Saturday citing three people familiar with their call. The now-former president enacted a similar pressure campaign against Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) with an order to “find” votes, which was recorded and is currently the subject of criminal investigations. Ducey did not record his call with Trump, the newspaper said. Trump also tried to use Pence, to coerce Ducey into changing the results of the election, according to the Post, which noted that Pence called Ducey but did not pressure him.
07.01.23-SCREWED-UP JUSTICE-SCOTUS on Friday greatly expanded the rights of people who want to discriminate against same-sex couples in a case involving an amateur website designer who was never even asked to make a website for a same-sex wedding. In 303 Creative v. Elenis, amateur web designer Lorie Smith asked the court to grant her the right under the First Amendment to refuse service to gay and lesbian couples due to her Christian religious beliefs. But Smith’s request was wholly speculative. She had not been hired to make a website for a same-sex couple and, therefore, had never refused such work. In fact, she’s never made a single wedding website.
06.30.23-THIS MAN IS CLUELESS AND OBLIVIOUS TO THE REAL SITUATION-Mike Pence bizarrely pointed to his own white family of college graduates while praising the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Thursday to end affirmative action across most institutions of higher education. “There may have been a time 50 years ago when we needed to affirmatively take steps to correct long-term racial bias in institutions of higher education,” Pence added. “But I can tell you, as the father of three college graduates, those days are long over.”
06.29.23-SHAMEFUL-The administration of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) steered $92 million last year in leftover federal coronavirus stimulus money to a controversial highway interchange project that directly benefits a top political donor, according to state records.The decision by the Florida Department of Transportation to use money from the 2021 American Rescue Plan for the I-95 interchange at Pioneer Trail Road near Daytona Beach fulfilled a years-long effort by Mori Hosseini, a politically connected housing developer who owns two large tracts of largely forested land abutting the planned interchange. The funding through the DeSantis administration, approved shortly after the governor’s reelection, expedited the project by more than a decade, according to state documents.
06.28.23-NOT A BIG FAN OF CHRISTIE, BUT PLAN TO VOTE FOR HIM IN THE PRIMARY, SO AS TO CANCEL ONE TRUMP VOTE. ALL DEMOCRATS SHOULD DO THIS. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie tore into Trump over a report that the former president has been using campaign contributions to pay his personal legal fees. Trump is “the cheapest SOB I’ve ever met in my life,” Christie, who is challenging Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, told Politico. “What Donald Trump is good at is spending other people’s money.” Christie said Trump ― a billionaire ― should be able to pay his own legal fees, and demanded that he stop sticking donors with the bills.“ “He is the richest candidate in this race, yet he is using public money to pay his legal fees. He should be ashamed of himself.”
06.27.23-GOP IS A CULT-Michael Luttig, a retired federal judge, said the GOP may be "beyond saving itself." Once lauded by the right for his conservative legal opinions, he delivered a scathing rebuke of the Republican Party for its continued fealty to Trump. He wrote in a New York Times op-ed that the GOP’s “spineless support” has enabled the former president, despite his role in the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol and his Espionage Act indictment in the classified documents scandal. “Building the Republican campaign around the newly indicted front-runner is a colossal political miscalculation, as comedic as it is tragic for the country,” Luttig wrote, adding that the campaign is essentially one running against the U.S. Constitution. “If the indictment of Mr. Trump on Espionage Act charges — not to mention his now almost certain indictment for conspiring to obstruct Congress from certifying Mr. Biden as the president on Jan. 6 — fails to shake the Republican Party from its moribund political senses, then it is beyond saving itself,” Luttig declared. “Nor ought it be saved.”
06.26.23-SEND HIM TO A RED STATE TO BE AMONG THE CRAZIES-New York, I hear you are happy to have anti-vaxer Rodgers, who criticizes scientists, on your football team. One of then answers: “Disappointed he took a cheap shot vs me this wk. In 2021 during our awful delta wave we were losing 2,000 Americans/day, >80% among unvaccinated, when vaccines were 90% protective vs death/serious illness, I criticized him for his public antivaccine stance. . . . This is so unnecessary, I have no bad thoughts for Aaron, I needed to speak out in 2021 to try and save lives. 200,000 unvaccinated Americans needlessly perished during those delta BA.1 waves in last half of 2021 early 2022.”
06.25.23-COMING TO ALL OF AMERICA UNLESS.....-Ron DeSantis wields near-dictatorial sway over his state, which he has used to grant special interests a breathtaking list of favors. He has helped them evade accountability, steamrolled regulations, funded their pet projects, and foisted bailouts and tax breaks onto ordinary taxpayers. Often he does so quite openly. One day after launching his 2024 presidential campaign in a live event on Twitter with its owner, Elon Musk, he signed a law relieving private space companies like SpaceX, another Musk company, from liability for accidentally killing its employees.
06.24.23-TODAY'S HEADLINES:
--MUSK LIED ABOUT THIS-New video undercuts claim Twitter censored pro-Trump views before Jan. 6. In the internal video call from Jan. 5, 2021, workers were told not to take tougher action against a growing wave of tweets they feared were veiled incitements to violence.
--BONKERS BLACKBURN-Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) has appeared to suggest that an announcement about the fate of the missing Titan submersible was somehow planned to distract from accusations against the president’s son Hunter Biden.
--PRETTY TYPICAL-Fox News analyst Juan Williams dismissed growing claims by GOP lawmakers that whistleblowers have damning evidence on the Bidens. The allegations amount to “a bunch of rumors and innuendo and no hard evidence,”
06.23.23-JACKASS JORDAN-Rep. Jim Jordan states: "Remember, if the FBI can do it to a presidential candidate, they can do it to you too." Rep, Nadler replies: "Absolutely correct, Mr. Chairman. Anyone in this country who steals classified documents and then lies repeatedly to the government about returning them will probably get a visit from the FBI."
06.22.23-WASTED TAX-PAYER MONEY-Follow-up to story below: On Wednesday, America was treated to the incredible spectacle of House Republicans attacking John Durham. The peak moment of that event may have been when Rep. Matt Gaetz, whose own experience comes mainly in the form of being the subject of investigations, told the veteran prosecutor that he didn’t know how to conduct an investigation.
John Durham's investigation found nothing to discredit special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. At no point in his congressional testimony did he take the bait from Republicans to give credence to Trump’s “Russia hoax” rhetoric. If anything, Durham went out of the way to praise his predecessor. Durham confirmed that current Attorney General Merrick Garland didn’t interfere with his investigation or tell him that any potential targets were off-limits. He admitted that the reason that Obama and Hillary Clinton still walk free, no matter how much Trumpworld wants them behind bars, is that there’s simply no evidence of wrongdoing. Of the three measly indictments the report brought forward, two were “slam dunk acquitted,” while the one guilty plea was for something “unrelated to the origins of the FBI investigation.” Johnson further noted that the investigation did not reveal any criminal undertakings to perpetrate a hoax in the hopes of taking down Trump.
06.21.23-TRUMP'S IGNORANT CULT MEMBERS DON'T CARE ABOUT HIS EVIL PERSONALITY OR DEEDS-THEY HAVE A MESSIAH COMPLEX-Ex-Bush Aide Rips Evangelical Trump Supporters For 'Obvious' Hypocrisy. Peter Wehner said evangelical support for Trump is a "tremendous indictment" of that religious community. Peter Wehner accused evangelicals of hypocrisy for their continued support for Donald Trump.“You have in Donald Trump the person who probably most embodies the antithesis of the Sermon on the Mount, the person of Jesus, and the teachings of Jesus,” Wehner, a prominent conservative Christian, said on MSNBC on Tuesday. “And this guy’s a rock star and has been for year after year.”-Wehner, who served in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and as a senior aide to George W. Bush, said evangelicals could have argued in 2016 that they didn’t know who Trump really was. But not anymore.“And by the time we got to 2020 it was so obvious what he was,” Wehner said. “And yet they stayed and it’s a tremendous indictment of them” and of the evangelical movement overall.
06.19.23-THE WORMS ARE TURNING:
--Chris Christie Says Trump Is A ‘Petulant Child’ When Someone Disagrees With Him
--William Barr Labels 'Very Petty' Trump As A 'Defiant' Child In Explosive Remarks
--Staunch Pro-Trump Lawmaker GOP Rep. Mike Turner, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, admits that Mar-A-Lago documents are of 'grave concern.'
06.18.23-All this anti-woke crap is just hate masquerading as morality!
06.17.23-NO SANITY HANNITY-California Gov. Gavin Newsom refused to bow out in defense of his home state as he pushed back at Fox News host Sean Hannity who hit the governor with questions on business in California. Newsom replied we have a 47% increase in business startups this year compared to last year.” Hannity later argued that businesses were “paying that high tax bill” in the state before the California governor went after the host’s take. “This is on its way to becoming the fourth-largest economy in the world. What are you arguing for? Mississippi’s economic policy?” asked Newsom as he spoke over Hannity’s attempts to interject.
“Literally, that’s what you’re arguing for. The great Sam Brownback’s Kansas policy? It was a debacle, no economic growth. Seventy one percent of the GDP in America are [in] blue counties. Seventy one percent of the GDP in America are [in] blue counties. Seventy one percent of the country’s wealth. Seven of the top-ten dependent states are your states. We’re subsidizing your states, Sean, because of your policies.”
06.16.23-TIT FOR TAT-MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan needed just 60 seconds to dismantle one of the most common lines of defense used by Trump and his supporters.It’s the notion that if Trump can be indicted and prosecuted, so can anyone else.“If they can come for President Trump, they can come for you too,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), a Trump loyalist, wrote on Twitter after the former president was indicted on 37 federal charges in the classified documents scandal. Some version of that line has been repeated by many others in Trump’s corner.But Hasan made short work of the argument by listing people the Trump administration sent to prison for the very same charges the former president now faces. And he did it in a minute: Video
06.15.23-AND HE'S FULL OF IT-Former President Donald Trump’s ex-chief of staff said the twice-impeached Republican is intimidated by the possibility he may finally face accountability for his actions. “He’s scared shitless,” John Kelly, the chief of staff from 2017 to 2019, told The Washington Post on Tuesday.
06.14.23-LIBS OVER MAGAS-YES!-The Wall Street Journal, the newspaper that has the same overlord as Fox News, wrote Tuesday that if Republicans nominate Donald Trump again, “they won’t ‘own the libs’ ... The libs will own them.”The editorial sounded the alarm on the impact of Trump’s possible success in the 2024 presidential race.
06.13.23-ANOTHER MAGA SLEAZEBALL-According to Punchbowl News, the House Ethics Committee has reopened an inquiry into one of the ringleaders of the House revolt, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida. The Department of Justice previously asked the committee to back off while it conducted a federal sex trafficking investigation involving underage girls. That investigation concluded without charges against Gaetz, but now the committee has reportedly opened its inquiry back up. The committee announced the investigation in April 2021 to look into public reports that Gaetz “engaged in sexual misconduct and/or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gift.” Expect Gaetz to scream that this is leadership’s retribution against him for his role in shutting the House down.
06.12.23-THAT'S A GOTCHA!-The two indictments filed so far against former President Donald J. Trump — one brought by the Manhattan district attorney, the other by a Justice Department special counsel — charge him with very different crimes but have something in common: Both were based, at least in part, on the words of his own lawyers.
06.11.23-THE ANSWER IS YES! I KNOW SOME OF THEM-Bruce Maiman, Guest Writer for HUFFPOST asks: Are Americans Really That Dumb? People still wrongly believe that Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen, the Parkland shooting victims were crisis actors, and the 2020 election was rigged.
06.10.23-COMMON SENSE PROPOSAL-SO OF COURSE THE MAGA PEOPLE WILL REJECT IT-Our ability to make a more perfect union is literally written into the Constitution,” said Governor Gavin Newsom. “So today, I’m proposing the 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution to do just that. The 28th Amendment will enshrine in the Constitution common sense gun safety measures that Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and gun owners overwhelmingly support – while leaving the 2nd Amendment unchanged and respecting America’s gun-owning tradition.”The 28th Amendment will permanently enshrine four broadly supported gun safety principles into the U.S. Constitution:
- Raising the federal minimum age to purchase a firearm from 18 to 21;
- Mandating universal background checks to prevent truly dangerous people from purchasing a gun that could be used in a crime;
- Instituting a reasonable waiting period for all gun purchases; and
- Barring civilian purchase of assault weapons that serve no other purpose than to kill as many people as possible in a short amount of time – weapons of war our nation’s founders never foresaw.
06.09.23-OH GOODY!-Trump has been indicted on 37 felony federal charges related to his handling of classified documents after he left the White House, according to the unsealed indictment released on Friday. The charges against Trump include conspiracy to obstruct justice, willful retention of national defense information and making false statements, according to the document, filed in federal district court in Miami.
06.08.23-I AM NOT A CHRISTIE FAN BUT HERE HE SPEAKS THE TRUTH-Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie had news about Trump for attendees of his presidential campaign kickoff event Tuesday night in New Hampshire. "If you think for one minute, when he says, 'I am your retribution'—if you think he wants to be your retribution, forget it," Christie told them, referring to Trump's signature 2024 campaign pledge. "He's going to be retribution for one person and one person only: himself." Trump, he said, was a "bitter, angry man" who wanted to get back in the seat of power so he could look out for No. 1.
AND CHRISTIE ALSO SAID THIS:
The grift from this [Trump] family is breathtaking. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Kushner walk out of the White House and months later get $2 billion from the Saudis. Two billion dollars from the Saudis. You think it’s because he’s some kind of investing genius? Or do you think it’s because he was sitting next to the POTUS for 4 years doing favors for the Saudis?That’s your money. That’s your money he stole, and gave it to his family. You know what that makes us? A banana republic. That’s what that makes us.
06.07.23-BLATANT LYING (WHAT'S NEW?)-Fox News host Harris Faulkner is getting called out on Twitter for uttering a “blatant” falsehood about the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic as she criticized the protective measures imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic.Faulkner, who is getting a tryout in former host Tucker Carlson’s old prime time slot, claimed schools didn’t close in 1918. Much like her predecessor, who became infamous for spreading COVID-19 misinformation, she was wrong. School closures were not only common in 1918, studies have found they were effective in reducing the excess death rate from the so-called Spanish flu ― and so many people responded that a “community note” correcting the misinformation was appended.
06.06.23-DISGUSTING-ONLY MONEY MEANS ANYTHING TO THE GOLF INDUSTRY-In what can only be described as a huge win for the Saudi Arabian monarchy that has so desperately tried to paper over human rights abuses including the assassination of critics, the PGA Tour, the European DP World Tour, and Saudi-owned LIV Golf have announced that they will be merging into a single golf entity. In the short term, that means the flurry of lawsuits between the PGA and LIV Golf are now moot, but that's nothing compared to the long-term results.
06.05.23-LIAR TRUMP ATTACKS LIAR McENANY-FUN TO WATCH-Conservative CNN commentator S.E. Cupp on Thursday suggested right-wing criticism of Trump’s attack on his former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany may be “a canary in the coal mine” moment for the former president. Trump this week accused now-Fox News personality McEnany of understating his poll numbers against 2024 Republican rival Ron DeSantis and insulted her as “milktoast. ”The move drew backlash from conservative figures, who dubbed the comments “insane,” “pathetic” and “unacceptable,” noted Cupp. The pushback suggested the Republican 2024 front-runner was “no longer above reproach” from people who previously applauded his petty cruelty, argued Cupp. Attacking McEnany showed “Trump can go too far in shooting inside the tent,” she added (Couldn't even spell milquetoast correctly)
06.04.23-DON'T BE FOOLED BY THIS GUY-HE IS SOLID RED-Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee’s administration accused the National Rifle Association of wanting to use involuntary commitment laws “to round up mentally ill people and deprive them of other liberties,” according to documents drafted by the Republican’s staffers as part of their initial attempt to pass a gun control proposal earlier this year.The memos, provided by Lee’s office as part of a public records request, reveal a rare criticism of the powerful gun lobby made by the Republican governor. Lee has previously praised the NRA’s efforts to protect the Second Amendment. But he has since faced opposition from the group as he works to pass gun control legislation in response to a deadly Nashville school shooting that took place in late March.
AND THIS:
WHO IS SURPRISED?-In a shock resignation, the ACU/CPAC Treasurer says the organization is riddled with cancer.
06.03.23-THIS IS NOTHING NEW. HORSES DIE ALL OVER THIS COUNTRY DUE TO THE QUEST FOR WINS BY RICH AND POWERFUL HORSE OWNERS. Churchill Downs Racetrack, home of the Kentucky Derby, announced Friday that it’s suspending racing at its facilities following the deaths of a dozen horses.
AND THIS
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee’s administration accused the National Rifle Association of wanting to use involuntary commitment laws “to round up mentally ill people and deprive them of other liberties,” according to documents drafted by the Republican’s staffers as part of their initial attempt to pass a gun control proposal earlier this year.
06.02.23-LOCK HIM UP!-Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who investigated Trump’s role in Russian interference in the 2016 election, told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace it could be “game over” for Trump.“There is no way that he will not be charged,” said Weissmann. The audio differentiated Trump’s classified documents case to those of President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence. Both also were found to have classified materials in their possession, but unlike Trump handed them over when asked, said Weissmann. If reports about the tape are accurate, Weissmann said, “There will be an indictment and it is hard to see how given all the evidence that we’ve been talking about that there will not be a conviction here. I mean, this is a tape recording.”
06.01.23-EVIL TWINS THREATS-Former Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.) on Wednesday jumped feet-first into the debate over which GOP 2024 presidential candidate is more dangerous for America: Trump or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Jolly said DeSantis, his home state governor, poses a much “greater threat.” “Donald Trump is a brutish, transactionalist politician who will walk into a room, try to crush the Constitution, likely fail and be stopped by the courts,” Jolly said on MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House.” “It leads to violence. He is a unique danger himself.” “But in Ron DeSantis, you have somebody who bears the same fragile vanities of Donald Trump, the paranoia and the executive abuse of Richard Nixon, a view of religion and church and state like Pat Robertson, and the discreet methodologies of Attorney General Bill Barr,” the former congressman told anchor Nicolle Wallace.
05.31.23-DUMB AND DUMBER
Nicolle Wallace Literally Laughs Out Loud At Ron DeSantis' (DUMB) bizarre promise. The MSNBC host has a blunt fact-check for DeSantis who has made taking on “woke” a central part of his identity and a key to his 2024 presidential aspirations, even using the word seven times in 20 seconds during an event last month. But she wasn’t having his latest attempt to use it as a talking point. On Tuesday’s “Deadline White House,” she played a clip of DeSantis once again vowing to end “woke” if elected. “I will be able to destroy leftism in this country and leave woke ideology on the dustbin of history,” DeSantis said on Fox News. After the clip, Wallace let out a loud laugh.Then she got serious.“ A woke mob did not storm the U.S. Capitol. A woke mob did not shoot up Uvalde. A woke mob does not represent the threat that domestic violent extremism does, but OK, Ron, you go get the woke mob,” she said,
AND THIS;
Trump (DUMBER) vowed in a campaign video released Tuesday to end birthright citizenship on “Day One” of his presidency if he wins the 2024 election.The former president claimed the constitutional guarantee of U.S. citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil, regardless of their parents’ immigration status, was “not working” in a lengthy, dog whistle-filled screed in which he fearmongered about criminals and people with mental health issues invading the country. Trump, the current GOP front-runner, vowed to nullify the clause of the 14th Amendment via a simple executive order, even though the actual process required to make an amendment is “quite onerous,” per the White House,” and much more complicated.
04.28.23-MCDANIEL IS A DEEP FAKE-The Republican National Committee released an anti-Biden advertisement that featured … computer-generated (i.e. fake) images of a future apocalyptic world run amok, thanks to Joe Biden. They really did that. The choice by the brainiacs at the RNC to concoct something entirely out of thin air is not surprising. It lines up perfectly with the decades-long trajectory of a political party hellbent on minority rule and authoritarianism. On Wednesday, RNC chair Ronna McDaniel took time away from trying to scare parents about “rainbow fentanyl” Halloween candy to go on Fox News and talk about the completely fake attack ad Republicans unveiled the day before. McDaniel explained to the Fox News audience that not only did they not see what they just saw, she was going to tell them what they saw—and they were going to say they saw it. “So first of all it is A.I.-generated. So we’re sharing that up front, ethically, so it’s not a deepfake*. Every single image was A.I., but we are painting a picture of a future Biden America.”
04.26.23-CARLSON'S LEGACY-Some call it conservative populism, or national conservatism, while critics say it’s akin to white nationalism. It’s an ideology that panders to many Americans’ bigoted and xenophobic impulses, their resentments and their grievances. It welcomes in voices denounced by others as racist, and delights in mocking “woke” liberals. It promotes conspiracy theories. It admires foreign leaders denounced by others as authoritarians. It denounces “elites,” the traditional establishments of both parties, and the long-held commitments of US foreign policy.
04.24.23-MAYBE THERE IS A GOD, AFTER ALL-Tucker Carlson is no longer a Fox News host.
04.23.23- MAGA WANTS TO CONTROL HOW VOTING IS PERFORMED-As Neil Vigdor wrote for The New York Times in late March, Republicans nationwide are pushing for laws that are likely to restrict the student vote if and when they're enacted, all while taking measures to suppress other voter groups that often favor Democrats — like Black and Indigenous voters.
04.20.23-NATIONAL DISGRACE-Don't knock on the wrong door, or let your ball roll into someone's yard, or our gun crazy culture will get you killed.
04.19.23-PLEASE, PLEASE UNSEAT THIS WITCH-Far-right Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) raised $1 million less than her 2024 Democratic challenger Adam Frisch in the first three months of 2023, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. Boebert, the Trump-loving firebrand, only narrowly beat former Aspen councilmember Frisch in the 2022 midterms following a recount. She took victory with just 50.06% of the vote. Frisch raised $1.7 million from mainly small donors, and money flowed into his campaign from across the country, reported the Colorado Sun. Boebert, who has caused controversy with a string of stunts, including heckling President Joe Biden during his State of the Union speech, raised $667,000, per the Denver Post.
04.17.23-GET READY FOR THE STORM TROOPERS-Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich warned of the Trump-inspired GOP’s progression “toward becoming the American fascist party” to maintain power in a new essay for The Guardian.Reich, who served as labor secretary in President Bill Clinton’s administration, contrasted the Democratic Party as “still largely committed to democracy” to the GOP as “careening at high velocity toward authoritarianism. OK, fascism.”
04.15.23-THEY DON'T REALLY CARE-After 100 days in office, House Republicans as a party are so disconnected from reality that their governance is entirely useless in the eyes of most Americans. New polling from Navigator Research shows that the priorities of House Republicans are completely out of sync with voters, leading to a brutal assessment of their performance. In terms of overall job approval, House Republicans are 24 points underwater, 35% approve and 59% disapprove. But even more importantly, among independents, House Republicans are 48 points underwater—10 points worse than earlier this year when Republicans first assumed control of the lower chamber. Now, just 18% of independents approve of how they are handling their jobs, while 66% disapprove. In fact, among 17 specific issues tested, congressional Republicans weren't above water with independents on a single one of them. Independents were most dissatisfied with Republicans on abortion (-33), Social Security and Medicare (-31), corruption in government (-28), inflation (-27), and climate change/environment (-26). Bottom line: Republicans are truly living in a different world than roughly two-thirds of the electorate.
04.13.23-THE ONLY ONE CRYING WAS LYING TRUMP-Trump made some of his patented claims at the beginning of an interview with Tucker Carlson. One of those claims described his experience when he was booked for dozens of federal charges against him in New York City. Trump claimed that basically everybody booking him was apologizing and crying; in fact, “tears were pouring down their eyes.” Not only is this an unbelievable story (and also a strange way to describe crying), but Yahoo! News has a source that says this story is “absolute BS.”
04.12.23-SLIMY SYNCOPHANT-Tucker Carlson called Trump a “demonic force,” admitted that he hated him “passionately” and said he couldn’t wait for the day when he could ignore the former president in private text messages. Now, the Fox News host is singing a very different tune with a softball Trump interview in which he hailed the former president as “moderate, sensible and wise.” Carlson’s critics on Twitter were quick to remind him of what he said in private messages released as part of the Dominion lawsuit against the right-wing network — and taunt him for such a brazen turnaround: "a demonic force, a destroyer." "He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong." "We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait." "I hate him passionately."
04.10.23-JACKASS JORDAN-Glenn Kirschner, a former U.S. Army prosecutor and legal analyst for MSNBC, said House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) broke a New York law forbidding “obstructing governmental administration” with his attempt to probe Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Trump. Kirschner slammed Jordan’s efforts in a recent episode of his “Justice Matters” podcast and referred to him as a “man who intentionally violated a congressional subpoena” who has started issuing congressional subpoenas. Jordan, a fierce defender of Trump, defied a House Jan. 6 committee subpoena to testify about the insurrection and was referred to the Justice Department for prosecution. “Boy, does that make a mockery of the Judiciary Committee and of Congress and of the rule of law,” Kirschner said.
04.08.23-FOX IN THE HENHOUSE-Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—one of the most prominent anti-vaxxers in the world and Nazi cavorter, who's been condemned by several members of his own family—declared this week that he will challenge President Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2024. If that wasn’t hilariously pathetic enough, here's the kicker: Kennedy was recruited into the race by Steve Bannon, one of the masterminds of the Trump 2016 campaign, to be a "useful chaos agent." RFK Jr. rocketed from the fringes into the mainstream with the rise of anti-vaxx hysteria during the pandemic and has been derided as a "quack" and "healthcare menace." from Daily Kos.
04.06.23-OF COURSE HE DID-Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas accepted luxury trips around the globe for more than two decades, including travel on a superyacht and private jet, from a prominent Republican donor without disclosing them, according to a new report.ProPublica reported Thursday on an array of trips funded by Harlan Crow, a Dallas businessman. The publication said Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks. It said the justice also has vacationed at Crow’s ranch in East Texas and has joined Crow at the Bohemian Grove, an exclusive all-male retreat in California.
04.04.23-FOX TRASH-Jeanine Pirro's own Fox News producer called her a 'reckless maniac' about Trump's Big election Lie. Pirro has been able to stay on air even though her number one attribute is being a screaming bore and she’s proven to be morally bankrupt.The Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News has exposed the septic tank of personalities that makes up the behind-the-scenes world at the conservative propaganda giant. And while reports of how people like Pirro went on air and knowingly pushed unverified conspiracy theories and in many cases made claims they knew full well not to be true, the details of the conversations going on behind the camera have only recently begun flooding out.
04.02.23-TRUMP STILL OWNS THIS PHONY-In the midst of the frenzy over the news of Trump's indictment, one politician made especially dangerous remarks that would threaten the foundations of American justice, and it wasn't Trump. Ron DeSantis, in a tweet, suggested that he would ignore the extradition law
and his duties as governor in order to help keep Trump from being accountable to the law, a proposition more dangerous than any indictment.
03.31.23-OUR VERY OWN TRAITOR-Trump isn’t shy about which world leaders he got along with best ― and it’s not always America’s allies. He famously sided with Putin when questioned about U.S. intelligence that found Russia interfered on his behalf in the 2016 election, and he got along so well with North Korean dictator Kim that he once said they “fell in love.”At the same time, he didn’t always get along with America’s allies. To the contrary, Trump engaged in a series of petty feuds with the leaders of friendly nations, such as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whom he called a “far left lunatic,” and French President Emmanuel Macron, whom he accused of being “very insulting.” He also reportedly called then-British Prime Minister Theresa May “a fool” and then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel “stupid” in calls with each of them.
03.29.23-WITH A CAPITAL 'C'-California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) went after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) after McCarthy was caught on camera refusing to answer questions about the mass shooting at a school in Nashville, Tennessee. On Tuesday, CNN’s chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju tweeted a video of National Rifle Association-endorsed McCarthy walking away from reporters asking if there’d be a legislative response to the deadly violence at The Covenant School. Three 9-year-old students and three adults were shot to death by a former student at the Christian school. The shooter was killed by police. “Says he’s not answering any questions,” Raju wrote about McCarthy. “Posed for photos with tourists, then went into his office.” Newsom shared the video on his own Twitter account. The governor captioned it with a single word: “Coward.”
03.28.23-BEYOND COWARDICE-Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), Generation Z’s first congressman, slammed GOP House members as “cowards” in a blistering floor speech following the school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, that left three children and three adults dead.“I rise today because I am furious, angry that three kids died today in Nashville, Tennessee,” Frost began. “Angry that hundreds of parents had to cry their eyes out today not knowing if their child would come home from school, and angry that we have to live day after day when we turn on the news and see rampant gun violence claiming life after life.”Frost blamed Republican lawmakers “bought and paid for by the NRA, that put profits over people, over human lives.”
03.27.23-THIS BRUTE IS DESPERATE AND NEEDS TO BE CONTAINED, JUST LIKE A MAD DOG-Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said Sunday that Trump’s current rhetoric has at times been even more “overt and blatant” than it was in the lead-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. “The rhetoric that he’s using today is not dissimilar to the type of rhetoric he used prior to Jan. 6,” said Lofgren, according to a clip recorded by Mediaite. “In fact, in some ways, it’s more overt and blatant than the events leading up to Jan. 6.” Lofgren cited a social media post last week in which Trump targeted Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is reported to be pursuing charges against the former president over his role in a 2016 hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels.Among a stream of menacing comments about Bragg ― including one in which he suggested a potential indictment would result in “death & destruction.”
03.26.23-ANOTHER FASCIST MOVE IN A FASCIST STATE RUN BY A FASCIST AUTOCRAT-BE SCARED! A U.S. government class at Eastern Florida State College was cancelled after a student felt "discomfort" over a discussion of civil rights, seen as an indication of the successful terrorizing of the Florida academic system by Ron DeSantis even with his "Stop WOKE Act" yet to be implemented.
03.23.23-TAKE THAT, YOU DOGMATIC RELIGIOUS NUTS- A Utah school district is considering banning students from reading the Bible after a complaint was made about the holy book containing 'inappropriate and pornographic' content
03.22.23- Tucker Carlson on Wednesday launched an attack on TV hosts who tell “lies” in order to “keep their stupid TV jobs.” And critics say it sounds a lot like the right-wing channel’s star could be talking about himself. Carlson, who has admitted to lying, attacked a new United Nations report on climate change that finds the world is rapidly approaching a dangerous temperature threshold. “You take a collection of dumb, desperate people in middle age hoping to keep on to their stupid TV jobs, you add scripts and some hairspray, and they repeat the lies for you,” he said.
03.21.23-PRICELESS!-Jimmy Kimmel fired back at Trump after the former president urged supporters to protest amid reports he’ll be arrested as soon as this week for paying hush money to porn actor Stormy Daniels.“Protest, take our nation back,” Trump wrote in an all-caps rant on his flailing Truth Social platform. “We already did take it back ― from you!” Kimmel said. “Now go away.”
03.20.23-BECAUSE OF ACTIONS BY CRAZED RIGHT-WING FRINGE CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISTS- “The newly-released 2022 supplement to the PRRI Census of American Religion — based on over 40,000 interviews conducted last year — confirms that the decline of white Christians (Americans who identify as white, non-Hispanic and Christian of any kind) as a proportion of the population continues unabated,” writes Robert P. Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute. “As recently as 2008, when our first Black president was elected, the U.S. was a majority (54%) white Christian country.” By 2014 the number had dropped to 47 percent, and in 2022 it stood at 42 percent.
03.19.23-RAISE YOUR HANDS IF YOU ARE SURPRISED-Trump’s White House has failed to report more than 100 gifts from foreign nations worth more than a quarter-million dollars, and federal officials have been unable to find a life-size painting of Trump given by the president of El Salvador as well as golf clubs from the prime minister of Japan, according to a report Friday from House Democrats. Among the unreported items are 16 gifts from Saudi Arabia worth more than $45,000 in all, including a dagger valued at up to $24,000, and 17 presents from India that include expensive cufflinks, a vase and a $4,600 model of the Taj Mahal. Gifts above several hundred dollars that foreign officials give to the president, vice president and their families are required to be reported to the State Department. Rep. Jamie Raskin said that the committee would “remain committed to following the facts to determine the extent to which former President Trump broke the law or violated the Constitution when he failed to report gifts and took possession of valuable items without paying the fair market price for them.”
03.18.23-LIARS HIDE FACTS-The “Project 2020” report conducted by the Berkeley Research Group has now been obtained by prosecutors investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. A copy was reviewed by The Washington Post, and it shows that Trump’s own campaign paid more than $600,000 for research that undercut many of his most explosive claims. The research was never made public. Despite Trump’s claims of rampant election fraud, most election officials around the country have maintained that such malfeasance is exceedingly rare. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, officials brought only a handful of fraud prosecutions. Even the conservative Heritage Foundation has found fewer than 1,500 instances of “proven voter fraud” — over a 40-year time frame.
03.17.23-HOW MANY DIED BELIEVING THIS FALSEHOOD?-Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo told Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) Thursday that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were effective against COVID-19 ― echoing falsehoods that persisted at the peak of the pandemic. Both conservative-backed drugs sparked controversy as the global health crisis raged and both were deemed ineffective treatments for the virus by several prominent studies. But Bartiromo brought up as if “in a time warp,” one critic on Twitter wrote.“There were also all these lies about the emergency authorization,” Bartiromo said. “They needed the emergency authorization to get the vaccines down everybody’s throats, but in order to do that, they had to prove there was nothing else on the market that could actually treat COVID. We all know ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine were effective, weren’t they?”
03.16.23-SIGNS OF A MADMAN-Trump tried to argue that DeSantis would've lost in 2018 were it not for Trump’s post-election intervention.“[A]fter the Race, when votes were being stolen by the corrupt Election process in Broward County, and Ron was going down ten thousand votes a day, along with now-Senator Rick Scott, I sent in the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys, and the ballot theft immediately ended, just prior to them running out of the votes necessary to win,” he claimed by way of his social media platform. "I stopped his Election from being stolen."In other words, according to Trump, he learned of a secret scheme being hatched by corrupt election officials he failed to identify, which led him to secretly deploy FBI agents and federal prosecutors to the Sunshine State, at which point the secret plot was secretly thwarted without anyone noticing.This was a story he wanted the public to believe and take seriously. There was no indication that Trump was kidding.
03.15.23-WHAT A BUNCH OF CRAP-Conservative commentator Bethany Mandel co-authored a whole book on the “current woke indoctrination” supposedly going on around the country. But when asked to define the term at the very center of it, she flopped.Mandel struggled for half a minute to come up with an answer to what “woke” means during an appearance Tuesday on “Rising,” a web series produced by The Hill. In the end, the author of “Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation” — released earlier this month — offered that “woke is something that’s very hard to define,” and said it had to do with reorganizing society “to create hierarchies of oppression.”“It’s hard to explain in a 15-second sound bite,” she said with an apology.
03.14.23-PENCE THE PUTZ-Chasten Buttigieg, the husband of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, has responded after Pence mocked his husband’s paternity leave. “An honest question for you,” Chasten Buttigieg tweeted, tagging Pence, “after your attempted joke this weekend. If your grandchild was born prematurely and placed on a ventilator at two months old ― their tiny fingers wrapped around yours as the monitors beep in the background ― where would you be?
03.10.23-LET'S FACE FACTS-The Tucker Carlson audience is made of people too gullible to even make it in your average doomsday cult. They'll believe whatever Carlson tells them. He's a white nationalism-boosting pro-sedition hoax promoter. Lying is what he does. Spreading lies and propaganda is why Fox News puts him on the air. He is looking more like Joseph Goebbels in a bow tie every freakin’ day. Carlson is still, by the way, painting Donald Trump's election loss as illegitimate. Even now, even after all the violence, and long after all the hoaxes were disproved as crooked lies. He is a man entirely without shame.
03.09.23-CORPORATE CRAP-After 16 months, three confirmation hearings, more than 1 million letters in support, and a dishonest multi-million dollar smear campaign financed by Comcast, Gigi Sohn, President Biden’s nominee to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), has withdrawn her name from consideration. Sohn, who helped draft landmark net neutrality rules in 2015, may have been the most qualified nominee in FCC history. This is a huge loss for American consumers and a massive win for Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and the detractors they funded to sink her nomination. Most importantly, the fifth and final commissioner's seat on the FCC remains vacant, continuing more than two years of partisan deadlock. Comcast, Verizon, AT&T think they have the right to choose their own regulators. Wealthy phone, cable and broadcast corporations have enjoyed a sweetheart deal since the Trump years and do not want to be held accountable by a pro-consumer watchdog.
But just as it was a mistake to allow railroad barons to dictate their own rules, it is a mistake to allow Big Telecom to keep the FCC in stalemate. A hamstrung FCC comes at a real cost to communities who need equal access and fair service.
03.08.23-R.I.P. FOX News. That is, if there is any justice.
03.06.23-Nikki Haley Spins Heads. The 2024 GOP presidential candidate's comments at the CPAC were slammed as "unspeakable" and "absurd." Haley raised eyebrows with an attack on “wokeness” during a speech. “Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic, hands down,” declared Haley.
Critics on Twitter scratched their heads over the claim.They quickly reminded Haley that COVID-19 has so far killed more than 1.1 million people in the U.S. alone.
03.05.23-AMERICAN FASCISTS-Thousands of conservatives, including prominent Republican lawmakers and presidential hopefuls, flocked to a suburban Washington, D.C., convention center this week to discuss children’s genitals. They were there to call for criminalizing the act of doctors and parents providing minors with gender-affirming care. Sebastian Gorka, an alleged member of a Nazi-collaborating political order in Hungary who served as an advisor to Trump warned the crowd that Democrats are “mutilating boys and girls” and “sacrificing them on the altar of their transgender insanity.”A short time later, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — a featured speaker at a white supremacist conference last year, where her fellow speakers praised Adolf Hitler and cheered on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — took to the stage to make a big announcement. "I’m going to be re-introducing my bill… that will make it a felony to perform anything to do with gender!”
03.04.23-JIM THE JERK-It was last August when Rep. Jim Jordan first referenced a group of FBI insiders, whom he referred to as “whistleblowers.” As he put it at the time, these unidentified individuals had privately shared provocative information with him about the politicization of the bureau, fueling GOP conspiracy theories. Almost immediately, the far-right congressman’s story was, in a rather literal sense, unbelievable. The first three witnesses to testify privately before the new Republican-led House committee investigating the “weaponization” of the federal government have offered little firsthand knowledge of any wrongdoing or violation of the law, according to Democrats on the panel. Instead, the trio appears to be a group of aggrieved former F.B.I. officials who have trafficked in right-wing conspiracy theories, including about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol, and received financial support from a top ally of Trump.
03.03.23-WHAT A CROCK!-Laura Ingraham took a revisionist look back at Trump’s presidency on Thursday, saying he “was in the Oval Office pretty much all day.” The Fox News host had just called President Joe Biden an elected “hologram” who outsources pivotal decisions to “bureaucrats, technocrats or Obama holdovers.” Now contrast Biden with Trump,” she said. “The staff brought proposals to him. He considered them. He brought in opposing points of view. He was in the Oval Office pretty much all day.”The last claim about Trump’s work ethic caught the attention of Twitter users, many of whom remembered No. 45′s frequent golfing getaways. He played at least 289 times while president. He often hit the links at his own resorts, enabling him to profit from his putting. His hobby cost taxpayers more than $151.5 million in travel and security costs, according to HuffPost’s calculations.Trump also admitted spending time watching copious amounts of Fox News, and tweeted more than 100 times a day on occasion — not quite a nose-to-the-grindstone record.
03.01.23-LIAR'S CLUB-Right-wing media outlets are starting to come apart at the scenes. Just take a look at what's been happening:
- Fox News pundits and executives were shown in court documents to have known they were lying to their audience about the 2020 election results to protect their ratings and bottom line.
- Alex Jones, the hate-filled right-wing founder of InfoWars, admitted in court that he repeatedly lied to his listeners that the Sandy Hook mass shooting was nothing more than a hoax.
- Project Veritas, a conservative media organization founded by James O'Keefe over a decade ago has faced numerous legal battles because of their long history of distorting facts. Their own lawyer, in court, described their work as "“deception, deceit, dishonesty and, indeed, lies…"
02.27.23-KEEP IT UP JIMMY-Trump was reportedly so livid over Jimmy Kimmel’s TV jokes that he ordered White House officials to get the late night host muzzled. Rolling Stone reported on Sunday that there were at least two phone calls to a top Disney executive to demand action against Kimmel in 2018. Disney is the parent company of ABC, which airs “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” One unnamed former senior Trump administration official told the magazine that Trump felt Kimmel was being “very dishonest and doing things that [Trump] would have once sued over.” Another unnamed former official told Rolling Stone: “Nobody thought it was going to change anything but DJT was focused on it so we had to do something…It was doing something, mostly, to say to [Trump], ‘Hey, we did this.’” Kimmel said last year that ABC officials at one point asked him to ease off Trump, but he refused. “I just said, ‘Listen, if that’s what you want to do, I understand and I don’t begrudge you for it, but I’m not going to do that,’” he told the “Naked Lunch” podcast. It’s not clear if that conversation came as a result of the White House pressure campaign on Disney. ABC left Kimmel alone, and he continues to mock the former president to this day.
02.26.23-RIDICULE DESERVED-Colin Jost of SNL: “Donald Trump visited East Palestine, the site of the recent train derailment, because Trump usually tries to make himself look better by standing next to a train wreck,” quipped Jost as a photo of Giuliani appeared by his side. “The train that derailed was carrying highly toxic vinyl chloride, which I think is something Trump recommended as a cure for COVID.” He then clowned the former president for distributing his water to residents and noted the Trump administration’s rollback of rail safety regulations.
02.23.23-WE MADE THIS MISTAKE WITH TRUMP-Peter Wehner, a former senior aide to President George W. Bush, warned in a new essay that it’s “unwise” to write off far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) as “an outcast, a fringe figure, deranged but isolated.” Greene is now “a confidante” of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) And the extremist Republican’s call this week for a “national divorce” is “giving voice to a widespread and growing sentiment” in the GOP, he added. Far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has called for a "national divorce." One element of her proposal would see Democrats banned from voting for five years if they moved to a red state. “MAGA Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene have added calls for secession to their corrosive lies about the 2020 presidential election,” Wehner wrote. “More incendiary and treacherous claims will follow.” “Greene and McCarthy — one crazed, the other cowardly — embody a large swath of the modern-day GOP,” Wehner concluded. “Any party that makes room for seditionists and secessionists is sick and dangerous.”
02.22.23-HOW MANY REPUBLICAN LIARS ARE THERE?-Nearly a year after the 2020 election, Arizona’s then-attorney general Mark Brnovich launched an investigation into voting in the state’s largest county that quickly consumed more than 10,000 hours of his staff’s time. Investigators prepared a report in March 2022 stating that virtually all claims of error and malfeasance were unfounded, according to internal documents reviewed by The Washington Post. Brnovich, a Republican, kept it private. In April, the attorney general — who was running in the GOP primary for a U.S. Senate seat -- released an “Interim Report” claiming that his office had discovered “serious vulnerabilities.” He left out edits from his own investigators refuting his assertions.
-ONE DEMON TO ANOTHER-Fox News host Tucker Carlson called Trump “a demonic force” and “a destroyer” in a text to his producer after thousands of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
02.19.23-PENCE, JUST LIKE TRUMP, THINKS HE IS ABOVE THE LAW-Conservative lawyer Andrew McCarthy, called “frivolous” Pence’s reported plan to invoke the Constitution’s “speech or debate” clause, which shields members of Congress from being “questioned in any other Place” for “any Speech or Debate in either House.” Noticeably absent from that clause are vice presidents, the thing Pence was on Jan. 6. But Pence argues that, given his technical role in presiding over the Senate, he should therefore be afforded those same protections. It was noteworthy that a conservative lawyer spoke out against a Republican politician’s legal gambit, what really drew attention to McCarthy’s article was the man who tweeted it out: J. Michael Luttig, the stalwart conservative and former federal judge who advised Pence ahead of Jan. 6 that he couldn’t overturn the 2020 election, despite Donald Trump's claims otherwise.
02.18.23-FOX VIEWERS-WAKE UP!-YOU ARE BEING LIED TO-A brief filed by Dominion Voting Systems as part of its $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News provides the clearest picture ever of the right-wing network’s operations — and the portrait that emerges is not flattering. Wielding internal emails and text messages obtained through discovery, as well as numerous depositions with Fox’s on-air talent and brass, Dominion’s lawyers reveal that the network was feeding viewers information about fraud in the 2020 election that its executives, hosts and producers knew to be false. Out of fear that Fox News’s audience was leaving for its competitors, the brief alleges, the network chose to buttress President Donald Trump’s lie that the election had been stolen from him, helping to set the stage for the Jan. 6 insurrection.
02.16.23-THE BIBLE THUMPERS ARE COMING FOR YOU-Florida laws in place or being considered restrict classroom topics to the book banner’s white, straight, Christian conservative mindset, as Daily Kos’ Laura Clawson aptly put it.
02.15.23-MERCHANT OF DEATH!-As Trump's second re-election bid begins to pick up steamplans have begun to emerge. Rolling Stone alleges Trump has begun polling his advisers on whether he should bring back firing squads, hangings, and even the guillotine should he win in 2024. According to two sources, the former president has even begun exploring the possibility of group executions, with a third person claiming Trump has expressed interest in a government ad campaign to highlight the administration's lethality and, per Rolling Stone's source, "help put the fear of God into violent criminals." A Trump campaign spokesperson denied the former president had plans for an execution ad campaign in a statement to Rolling Stone. As Rolling Stone had previously reported, Trump had ended his first term by executing more than four times as many convicted persons in his final six months in office as the federal government had killed in total over the prior half-century. He also signed an executive order in those last weeks in office that expanded the federal government's ability to conduct hangings and firing squads as methods of execution. And during his campaign launch in November, Trump made a special point to highlight a call to execute "everyone who sells drugs [or] gets caught selling drugs" if given a second term. Oliver Willis, called it the "kind of fascist s--t Republican primary voters love."
02.14.23-ANOTHER REPUBLICAN HYPOCRITE-Nikki Haley announced Tuesday that she is running for president. Haley has shifted her posture toward Trump over the years. She criticized him when he first ran in 2016, before joining his administration the next year and later vowing not to run against him in 2024. In recent months, she has disavowed the pledge as she moved toward a planned announcement speech here in Charleston on Wednesday.
02.13.23-LOONEY TUNES, BUT SCARY!-This week the House Oversight Committee has held a number of hearings related to what Republicans hold as the most important issue confronting America—Twitter’s suppression of Hunter Biden’s dick pics. These hearings have featured some absolutely spotlight moments from Republican lawmakers, including:
- Marjorie Taylor Greene accusing an innocent man of promoting pedophilia and declaring how happy she is about people losing their jobs;
- Republicans speculating that Iran had seized control of the Capitol’s electrical system when the lights went out during the hearing;
- Jim Jordan accusing Twitter of “shadow banning” people who were actually full-on banned for repeatedly violating Twitter’s rules of operation;
- Clay Higgins telling Twitter employees they were going to be arrested for “interfering with the United States of America 2020 presidential election”;
- Every Republican on the committee accusing Twitter employees of working with the FBI to suppress information about Hunter Biden, with absolutely no evidence; and
- Nancy Mace ecstatically declaring, “Thank God for Elon Musk!” followed by Greene also declaring, “Thank God Elon Musk bought Twitter,” followed by Pete Sessions shouting, “God bless Elon Musk!”
02.12.23-WHY DO PEOPLE STILL BELIEVE THIS LIE? Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that Trump’s campaign hired a consulting firm to try to prove that the election had been stolen. The Berkeley Research Group examined the election results in six swing states but could not find anything that would have changed the outcome. “They looked at everything,” a source told Dawsey: “change of addresses, illegal immigrants, ballot harvesting, people voting twice, machines being tampered with, ballots that were sent to vacant addresses that were returned and voted…. Literally anything you could think of. Voter turnout anomalies, date of birth anomalies, whether dead people voted. If there was anything under the sun that could be thought of, they looked at it.” The consultants briefed Trump, chief of staff Mark Meadows, and others on their evidence that Biden’s election was legitimate in December 2020—before the events of January 6—but the Trump camp continued to insist the election had been stolen.
02.11.23-JUST ANOTHER REPUBLICAN GIANT HYPOCRITE-As Gov. Ron DeSantis prepared for an election night party in downtown Tampa last year, city officials received a surprising — and politically sensitive — request.The Republican governor’s campaign wanted weapons banned from his victory celebration at the city-run Tampa Convention Center, a city official said in emails obtained by The Washington Post. And the campaign suggested that the city take responsibility for the firearms ban, the official said — not the governor, who has been a vocal supporter of gun rights.“ DeSantis/his campaign will not tell their attendees they are not permitted to carry because of the political optics,” Chase Finch, the convention center’s safety and security manager said which was conveyed by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), a state police agency led by a DeSantis appointee. Finch further explained that because of “Republicans largely being in support of 2A,” referring to the Second Amendment, “Basically it sounds like they want us to say it’s our policy to disallow firearms within the event space if anyone asks.”
02.10.23-DUMBER THAN MTG-Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) was torn apart on Twitter after she seemed to forget that detail in a tweet about President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday. “Hey Joe, YOU CLOSED THEM!” she tweeted, citing a line from Biden’s speech in which he said: “In the midst of the COVID crisis, when schools were closed and we were shutting down everything, let’s recognize how far we came in the fight against the pandemic itself.” A note appeared below the tweet, pointing out that readers had “added context they thought people might want to know.” It included links to two articles: One about the shutdown of K-12 schools in the spring of 2020, when Donald Trump was president, and a second noting that Trump said decisions about school closures would be up to the governors of each state. (Joe Biden wasn’t President back then.)
02.09.23-BIDEN'S TRUTH-“When I raised the plans of some of their members in the Republican caucus to cut Social Security … Marjorie Taylor Greene and others stood up and said: ‘Liar, liar,’” Biden said. “Well, guess what? … I [will] remind you that Rick Scott from Florida, the guy who ran a U.S. Senate campaign, has a plan. I got his brochure right here!”Biden was referring to Scott’s plan that would require all legislation — including that relating to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare — to be “sunset,” which would require votes every five years to continue them. Republican Ron Johnson, also has expressed support for targeting the two programs in a budget-cutting move.Johnson suggested last August that Social Security and Medicare be eliminated as federal entitlement programs, saying the programs should instead become programs approved by Congress annually as discretionary spending.
02.08.23-A WIN FOR BIDEN-About last night's SOTU speech, Former GOP Chair Michael Steele was blunt. His critique of the Biden speech was on point. “Republicans for a long time have been talking about owning the libs,” Michael Steele said. “They got owned tonight by Joe Biden. He stood his ground. He laid out his agenda. He was very clear. He took the hecklers, and he made America see what he's been trying to convey in a way that they probably had not seen or heard before.” Steele then pointed out the repercussions of the speech. “And I thought for him; it was a very good night,” Steele continued. “I was watching and reading conservatives, and certainly MAGA folks on my Twitter feed just lose their mind over everything. The clarity of laying out what he did. I mean, the moment on Social Security is going to be in a loop.” Michael then honed in on Social Security. “Republicans had a plan that they ran on in 2022 to abolish, to sunset all federal programs, which, guess what? It included Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare. And that was Senator Rick Scott's plan that the party signed on to.” Biden received high marks from Steele and from just about every talking head on the mainstream media.
02.07.23-Comedian Chelsea Handler tore into Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) after the conspiracy theorist complained that her job is “practically year-round” and doesn’t allow lawmakers to be “regular people.” Handler was left in disbelief. “First of all, you’re not a ‘regular person,’ you moron. You’re a congressperson because you campaigned and somehow won, which requires you to work year-round,” she fired back. “I also don’t want to work year-round, and that’s why I don’t.” Greene, who last year spoke at a white nationalist event, also griped that she meets people who tell her “crazy things... that they believe because they read it on the internet.” “Well, if that’s not the pot calling the kettle QAnon,” Handler replied. “This woman thought 9/11 was a hoax, that the Clintons killed JFK Jr. and that Jews are in charge of space lasers. Please, don’t come at her with some crazy ideas ― she might believe them.”
02.03.23-WHAT MORE DO YOU NEED TO KNOW?-Shell-40 billion dollars in profit. Exxon-56 billion. This is disgusting, but the oil companies have always been the most responsible for high gas prices. They are too big fight!
02.01.23-RIGHT WING EXTREMIST ALERT-If there’s any topic that Marjorie Taylor Greene has used to peddle misinformation and foster fear, it’s national security. The second-term congresswoman is the standard-bearer of the wing of the Republican Party that goes deep on misinformation, conspiracy theories, and thinly veiled racist tropes. In the last Congress, Greene’s lack of committees limited the platform she had to push those views. That’s not the case in this Congress, and it’s got national security experts—and particularly alumnae of the larger Homeland Security Committee community—worried.
01.31.23-National Review senior writer Charles C.W. Cooke Trump’s rambling posts on his flailing Truth Social platform show his “deterioration” on “full display.”In a column posted on Wednesday titled “Trump Has Completely Lost His Grip on Reality,” Cook wrote that the former president is “ranting like a deranged hobo in a dilapidated public park” with his messages.
He added: “There was a point in time at which Trump’s unusual verbal affect and singular nose for underutilized wedge issues gave him a competitive edge. Now? Now, he’s morphing into one of the three witches from Macbeth. To peruse Trump’s account on Truth Social is to meet a cast of characters about whom nobody who lives beyond the Trump Extended Universe could possibly care one whit.” Trump is ignoring real-world problems facing the nation and is instead “busy mainlining Edward Lear,” he wrote, referring to the author of “A Book of Nonsense.”
01.30.23-THE POT AND THE KETTLE-Trump, who has already announced he is running for president in 2024, is not happy about the prospect of facing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in the race.“When I hear he might run, I consider that very disloyal,” Trump told reporters Saturday.Trump sought to take credit for DeSantis’ ascent to the governor’s office and questioned polling showing DeSantis defeating him in some of the early primary states. (what does Trump know about loyalty? He is only loyal to himself)
01.15.23-MANIC MAGAS-Republicans are a bit preoccupied. In the first two weeks of the new Congress, MAGA extremists have neutered House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.); gutted the Office of Congressional Ethics; tried to help tax cheats by voting to repeal funding for the IRS; and set up a committee to obstruct criminal investigations and gin up scandals about Biden and his family. Biden has the opportunity to contrast himself with House Republicans, who are living up to Democrats’ characterization as unethical, power-hungry, chaotic and clueless.
01.13.23-SOMETHING WE CAN ALL AGREE ON-Social media users mocked Trump on Thursday after the twice-impeached former president boasted on his Truth Social platform “Importantly, I have single-handedly shown the American Public how Crooked and Corrupt our Government is. NOW WE CAN FIX IT!” What a fool!
01.10.23-DEEP DIVE FOR DEMOCRACY-House Republican leaders on Tuesday announced their picks for powerful committee chairs in the new Congress, and most of them have an inherent character flaw: They voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election results after fueling the lie that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. “Our committee chairs represent the very best of our conference,” House Majority Leader Scalise (R-La.) said when announcing the GOP’s choices for chairmanships. Of the 17 members tapped for chair posts, 11 voted to reject the results of the 2020 presidential election. They defended their decision to do this by telling the same lie about widespread voter fraud that just hours earlier had fueled the deadly insurrection at the Capitol and sent these lawmakers into hiding for their lives.
01.05.23-LYING IS IN HIS DNA-Trump, in a post, says he made a “recommendation for troops” and that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) failed to act on it. But the evidence shows Trump did not issue any formal request — so there was nothing for Pelosi to heed. The committee report says it found “no evidence” to support the claim that he ordered 10,000 troops. Moreover, the committee said that when he referenced so many troops, it was not because he wanted to protect the Capitol. He “floated the idea of having 10,000 National Guardsmen deployed to protect him and his supporters from any supposed threats by left-wing counterprotesters,” the report said. The report says that Trump brought up the issue on at least three occasions but in such vague and obtuse ways that no senior official regarded his words as an order.
01.01.23-THAT'S BECAUSE THERE IS NOT ANY EVIDENCE, YOU LIAR.-Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the conservative activist married to controversial Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, admitted in a deposition held earlier this year that she did not have any evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election, a transcript revealed Friday. Ginni Thomas spent weeks working behind the scenes around the time of the election to boost Trump. Text messages previously released by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack showed how Thomas sowed doubt about the election’s legitimacy in direct conversations with Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff at the time.