7/31/21: We learned a great deal about Donald J. Trump and his misfit band this month. We learned that the DOJ, no longer controlled by Trump-sycophants, has okayed release of his taxes to Congress. This simple blogger is ready to bet that in some years he himself paid higher income taxes than the man who would later be elected president did. In other words, this liberal blogger paid more to support the U.S. military, to keep the parks open, and to pay the salaries of border agents, trying to keep us safe.
F---, I paid more to help build the damn wall that Mexico was
supposed to pay for! Think about that.
____________________
“What Rudy and Jenna are doing is a joke and they are getting laughed out of court. They are misleading millions of people who have wishful thinking that the president is going to somehow win this thing.”
Justin
Reimer, chief counsel for the Republican National Committee,
in an
email debunking claims of a stolen election
____________________
*
WE LEARNED in July, that 33% of Republicans in a new poll said they were “pessimistic” about the future of their party. It doesn’t help them to know that only 37% of all Americans have a “favorable” view of the man that most Republicans (63%) still believe won the last election.
Ron DeSantis, one of the favorites for Republican candidate for president in 2024, assuming someone shoots Trump with a tranquilizer dart in time, is viewed “favorably” by a whopping 27% of Americans.
This tops Sen. Mitch McConnell (22%), Rep. Kevin McCarthy (18%) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (16%).
The fact that one out of every six Americans has a favorable opinion of Rep. Greene, tells you our education system has failed in grievous fashion.
Hell, our churches have failed. Greene is disgraceful.
*
WE LEARNED life expectancy fell in 2020 to 77.3 years for all Americans, the lowest since 2003.
Since Donald J. Trump took credit anytime anything went good (including a decrease in drug deaths his second year in office, and a year he claimed no Americans were killed in commercial plane crashes because of him) let’s blame this decline on Grim Reaper Don.
Since he blew off the whole pandemic, while president, he
really does deserve a healthy share of the discredit.
*
SPEAKING OF discredit, Trump repeatedly said that climate change was a hoax. Evidence has piled up this summer, indicating it’s not. The Denmark Meteorological Institute warned that between Sunday, July 25 and Friday, July 30, Greenland saw 18.4 billion tons of ice melt. CNN reported on the story – which doesn’t make it fake news. It makes it reporting.
(Greenland
is part of the Kingdom of Denmark if you didn’t know.)
“It’s a significant melt,” Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, told CNN. “July 27 saw most of the eastern half of Greenland from the northern tip all the way to the southern tip mostly melted, which is unusual.”
The World Meteorological Organization also posted a map that might have gotten Donald J. Trump’s attention – if he wasn’t so busy raging about the “stolen election” and listening to the MyPillow guy tell him he’s going to be reinstated as president in two weeks.
Yes,
right-wing dopes, the WMO is an arm of the United Nations. That doesn’t mean
their scientists can’t read thermometers and study satellite images. On July
28, the areas in red on this map were melting.
That blue line, pointing straight up, is a “holy shit”
indicator that climate change is a growing threat to mankind.
*
SCIENTISTS ALSO report that the Great Salt Lake, the largest natural lake west of the Mississippi River, is at its lowest point ever. Increasing heat and drought, exacerbated by climate change, have dried it up. This record comes long before the point, in a normal summer, when the lake falls to its lowest mark. Pelicans are dying. The brine shrimp industry is cratering. Arsenic-laced dust, once mud at the bottom of the lake, is blowing into populated areas. This is not good.
As in: Arsenic.
*
IT’S PROBABLY not a good sign that researchers in Great Britain decided to rate nations for ability to withstand the collapse of civilization in the wake of environmental damage. As the Guardian, a British newspaper, reported, New Zealand, Iceland, the United Kingdom (yay for them!), Tasmania and Ireland are tops on the list of places “best suited to survive a global collapse of society.”
Professor Aled Jones, with the Global Sustainability Institute, at Anglia Ruskin University, in the United Kingdom, said researchers weren’t surprised New Zealand topped the list. He noted that civilization was “in a perilous state” due to the highly interconnected and energy-intensive society that has developed and the environmental damage we have all helped to cause.
He mentioned that billionaires were buying up land in New
Zealand, where they could build bunkers to wait out the apocalypse.
*
TOMORROW, I’m flying to Oregon to see my daughter and her husband, in that beautiful state. And…
WTF!
Drought along the Oregon-California border has harmed not only farmers, but caused wells at hundreds of homes to dry up. In Malin, Oregon, Jim and Judy Shanks tell ABC News they will never forget June 24, the moment their water ran out.
Bone-dry forests in Oregon are going up in smoke. According to KOIN News, the Bootleg Fire has charred more than 400,000 acres and at one point was so large it spawned “fire tornadoes,” with winds of up to 111 mph.
(We’ve already covered the drought and fires at length in
previous posts. See, for example: 7/17/21, 7/20/21 and 7/22/21.)
*
WHAT ELSE have we learned this month? We learned that the United Kingdom issued
its first ever “Extreme Heat Emergency,” on July 19, after all four nations
recorded their hottest days of the year over the weekend.
*
WE LEARNED that a weather station in Finland registered 31 successive days with highs of 77° and above. That was easily the longest streak in that country since at least 1961, and probably far longer.
Prime Minister Sanna Marin has been warning that Finland, not to mention the rest of the countries round the world, will soon be forced to meet the challenge as best it can. “Climate change and biodiversity loss are the most pressing challenges of our time,” she said last May. “So all responsible political leaders must offer long-term policies for confronting them effectively.”
Or you can be
Donald J. Trump who once announced he was a big, big fan of “good
climate.”
*
WE LEARNED that historic rainfall in Germany, Belgium and The Netherlands caused catastrophic flooding and at least 205 people were dead, another 176 missing and likely drowned.
German officials cite changing rainfall patterns…as a direct result of climate change. “Climate Change has arrived in Germany,” as one official put it.
Yeah, Trump fans.
Duh.
*
WE LEARNED that even a conservative radio show host who told listeners not to bother with vaccinations for coronavirus can catch a glimpse of reality once he gets infected and ends up in intensive care.
According to brother Mark, Phil Valentine regrets telling
people not to worry about signing up for shots. Filling in for his sick
sibling, Mark told a radio audience, “First of all, [Phil’s] regretful that he wasn’t a more vocal
advocate of the vaccination. For those listening, I know if he were able to
tell you this, he would tell you, ‘Go get vaccinated. Quit worrying about the
politics. Quit worrying about all the conspiracy theories.’”
*
WE LEARNED this month that you don’t have to be a scientist to play NFL football, as several coaches and numerous players made plain. Star wideout DeAndre Hopkins, who can catch a ball much better than he can catch the drift of the science, said he’d “question” his place in the NFL if he had to get a vaccine shot.
*
WE LEARNED that if Coach Dennison was stupid, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene made him look like a Rhodes scholar. The benighted congresswoman continued to spew ignorance the way infected, non-masked COVID-19 sufferers spew germs.
Greene made it clear she believed the NFL was “discriminating” against players who wouldn’t get shots – likely the first time in her life that Greene ever cared about discrimination.
We learned that according to a July 19 survey 1 in 5 Americans said they believed it was definitely or
probably true that shots for COVID-19 contained government-issued computer
chips.
*
WE LEARNED that at least one frontline doctor was fed up with disinformation being spread by right-wing media stars. As Dr. Rob Davidson, an emergency room physician, put it:
What’s truly
tragic is that the disinformation my patients and their families hear from
their favorite commentators and pundits is dangerously, life-threateningly
wrong. They should listen to their family doctors for medical advice, not Sean
Hannity — whom researchers have connected to higher infection rates — or Tucker
Carlson, who suggested with zero evidence that Covid-19 vaccines don’t work.
*
WE LEARNED that the spreading coronavirus was disrupting Nike’s supply chain – in Vietnam – where more than half of all Nike products are made.
Because nothing says, “capitalism is the perfect economic system” so much as producing just under half your over-priced t-shirts and basketball shoes in a communist country. And paying foreign workers slave wages.
This is also why the CEO of Nike deserved pay and compensation totaling $18.2 million last year.
We learned (again) that Republicans in Congress have never met a multi-millionaire or billionaire they’d like to tax. Not even the CEO of Nike, for god’s sake.
Then again, we learned that Nike CEO Mark G. Parker has had a string of tough years. After earning $47.6 million in 2016, his pay started to shrink. He was forced to scrape by, earning only $13.9 million in 2017, a paltry $9.5 million in 2018, and rebounding slightly to $14 million in 2019.
But
thank god for the Trump tax cuts, which allowed the Parker family to keep a
little bread on the table.
*
WE LEARNED that
threats to federal judges have increased by 400% in five years. Or roughly: The Age of Donald J. Trump. On July
16, Frank Caparusso was sentenced to 18 months in prison for threatening the
life of Judge Emmet Sullivan, who had been overseeing the case of Gen. Michael
T. Flynn.
*
WE LEARNED that even red-state lawmakers sometimes realize that black lives matter, if they stare at a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest for a hundred years. Forrest, whose bronze visage graced the Tennessee State Capitol, was famous not only for his quick-hitting cavalry attacks during the Civil War, but for letting troops slaughter 300 Union soldiers who surrendered after his men surrounded their fort.
Those soldiers being African American.
And:
For founding the Ku Klux Klan!
His bust has finally been removed.
*
THEN AGAIN, we learned that Arizona lawmaker Wendy Rogers, also a Republican, got confused while tweeting about our country’s history. What got her going (in the wrong direction) was the decision by the Cleveland baseball team to change its name to “Guardians.”
This led the lawmaking dolt to tweet: “I like Indians and I like Redskins. I like Aunt Jemima and I like Uncle Ben. I like Robert E Lee and I like Stonewall Jackson. I don’t like traitors who hate America. Stand up for our culture!”
Twitter users quickly pointed out that Lee and Jackson, despite their skill in conducting military operations, were in fact “traitors,” trying to destroy the United States. Also, I think Ms. Wendy really should have said, “I like genocide,” since we wiped out Native American cultures left and right.
Might
as well throw in, “I like slavery?” or “I like racial stereotypes?” if you’re
fired up about Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben.
*
WE LEARNED that the U.S. Senate is considering passing a bill that would require all 18-year-olds to register for the draft. Currently men, including immigrants over 18, must register. New language would mean that women would have to register. (I am assuming transgender individuals, too.)
Sen. Josh Hawley, who was 21 on 9/11, and could have put on the uniform in response, has never served his country. Still, he’s furious at the idea of making women register for the draft. Even though, in 2018, one in every six members of active duty U.S. forces was female.
(Also,
the Israeli Defense Force, which tends to kick ass every time there’s a war, requires women to
serve.)
*
WE LEARNED that the town of
Oakley, Utah has run so low on water, as drought grips the western U.S., that
it is banning the construction of new homes.
*
WE KNOW Republicans are getting nervous, after spending time telling people not to get vaccinated, because it’s all part of a communist plot to set up a “surveillance state,” and control people. So said – for example – Sen. Hawley of Missouri, last seen trying to overturn the results of the November election. Then you had Nazi comparisons, (which we previously covered), and a random claim that President Biden’s idea of sending medical people door-to-door to vaccinate people was some kind of “KGB-style” operation. As for Sen. Rand Paul, he spent a recent Senate committee hearing yelling at Dr. Anthony Fauci.
And with leadership like that, as the Kaiser Health News explained on July 21, Missouri was #1 out of all fifty states, in infection rates, adjusted for population, the previous week.
In Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has been working hard to keep local governments from ordering new mask mandates, and where he signed a bill to block all “vaccine passports,” Florida piled up 24,000 new infections on July 20. That figure seemed so mind-blowing, I checked it three times.
Now, with his state being swept by another wave of virus, DeSantis (who dreams of running for president in 2024) changed his tune. “Here’s, I think, the most important thing with the data: if you are vaccinated, fully vaccinated, the chance of you getting seriously ill or dying from COVID is effectively zero,” he told reporters. “If you look at the people who are being admitted to hospitals, over 95 percent of them are either not fully vaccinated or not vaccinated at all. These vaccines are saving lives. They are reducing mortality.”
DeSantis blamed
people like Biden and Fauci for “hectoring” poor innocent knuckleheads who
didn’t want to get the vaccine because it might magnetize them, or because
President Trump (who DeSantis loves) convinced them the coronavirus was no
worse than ordinary flu.
*
REP. STEVE SCALISE, the #2 Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives was finally vaccinated on July 18.
Asked when he might get vaccinated in April, he said, “Soon.”
Same answer in May.
Now, like the laziest student in any classroom, he finally did a little homework. Asked by reporters, “Why now?” he replied, “When you talk to people who run hospitals, in New Orleans or other states, 90% of people in hospital with delta variant have not been vaccinated. That’s another signal the vaccine works.”
In any case, Republicans had
no choice – given the fact that the Kaiser Family Foundation reported in June
that 86% of Democrats were vaccinated, vs. 52% of Republicans – than to
blame Democrats for the fix they’re in.
According to Rep. Scalise, the real problem was that Biden and his kind were “bullying” people into getting shots. This was why Kaiser also noted, “two-thirds of Democrats report living in all-vaccinated households while four in ten Republicans (39%) report living in all-unvaccinated homes.”
Damn those Democrats!
*
WE LEARNED two right-wing nuts in California were charged with plotting to blow up the Democratic Party headquarters in Sacramento.
Per an ABC News report:
“According to the indictment,
the defendants planned to use incendiary devices to attack their targets and hoped
their attacks would prompt a movement,” the [prosecutor’s] statement said.
Ian Benjamin Rogers, 45, and
Jarrod Copeland, 37, each face multiple charges including conspiracy to destroy
by fire or explosive a building used or in affecting interstate commerce,
prosecutors said.
Rogers, of Napa, is charged with
additional weapons violations, including one count of possession of
unregistered destructive devices, and three counts of possession of machine
guns. Copeland, of Vallejo, is charged with an additional count of destruction
of records.
*
WE LEARNED, because we now have a copy of the email, what Justin
Reimer, chief counsel for the Republican National Committee said last November
28, about the “Stolen Election” myth being trumpeted daily by other lawyers for
Mr. Trump. “What Rudy and Jenna are doing is a joke and they are getting
laughed out of court,” he wrote to Liz Harrington, a former party spokeswoman, referring
to Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis. “They are misleading millions of people
who have wishful thinking that the president is going to somehow win this thing.”
*
WE KNOW that only 45% of Republicans now have either “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in science.
They would rather place their faith in QAnon, a
magical healthcare plan that no one has ever seen, and the idea that if they
wait long enough, trickle-down economics will work for them and not just the
Top 1%.
*
WE KNOW that the idea that Big Business folks can always be trusted, and capitalism always works like a charm is repeatedly proven to be a sad joke.
Example #1: Johnson & Johnson and three large drug distributors have agreed to pay damages amounting to $26 billion for their role in aggressively marketing opioid painkillers – which worked to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans.
As CNBC explains,
The distributors
were accused of lax controls that allowed massive amounts of addictive
painkillers to be diverted into illegal channels, devastating communities,
while J&J was accused of downplaying the addiction risk in its opioid
marketing.
The companies have
denied the allegations.
Drug overdose deaths in the United States were up
29% last year, and 93,331 lives were lost.
*
Example #2: Pfizer agrees to pay a $345 million fine for fixing prices on EpiPens. As Reuters explains, “The EpiPen is a handheld device that treats life-threatening allergic reactions by automatically injecting a dose of epinephrine.”
The pens are most commonly used to save the lives of children suffering from bee stings, food allergies, etc.
From 2008 to 2016, the price of a pair of the devices rose, mysteriously, from $100 to $600.
Pfizer and other
makers of the pens got rich.
*
Example #3: Patrick Nwaokwu, 50, and Musa Bangura, 62, operators of nursing schools in Virginia and Florida, have been arrested. After their school in Virginia was shut down – for violating state regulations – they allegedly hatched a plan to keep graduating students. The F.B.I. claims Nwaokwu and Bangura sold bogus transcripts and certifications, backdating them to when the school was open.
Agents also investigated
allegations that the pair worked with people in Florida to sell fake degrees
for licensed practical nurses and registered nurses at a school established
by Johanah Napoleon, 45. The Florida Board of Nursing shut down that school in
May 2017 for having a low passing rate on licensure exams.
*
Example #4: A homeopathic doctor in California decides that the best way to deal with the pandemic is to meet the demand for…fake vaccination cards. That way unvaccinated, mask-less dopes can cough on clerks in stores and customers waiting in checkout lines and spread the germs.
Dr.
Juli A. Mazi is also alleged to have sold fake “immunization pellets” to
unwitting patients, which would protect a person just about as much as eating a
can of beets.
*
Example #5: Back in the day, Loser Don went to Ohio and bragged about all the jobs he was creating – in this case at the Lordstown Motors plant in Youngstown, where electric trucks would soon be pouring off the assembly line. So far, only a handful of trucks have been produced, although one did make it to the White House lawn back in September 2020. That gave the president a chance to brag about all his success saving jobs by backing the new truck manufacturer.
“Well, the area was devastated when General Motors moved out, and then we worked together, and we made the deal on the plant. But beyond the plant — I mean, it’s incredible what’s happened to the area. It’s booming now. It’s absolutely booming and really great,” he claimed.
Now the company is being
investigated for manipulating stock prices by claiming to have $1.4 billion in
pre-orders for their vehicle. Actually, Lordstown admits it has zero binding orders.
*
WE ALSO LEARNED that Loser Don had finally met a cop he wouldn’t blindly defend. Since Trump has said he believes 99.9 percent of cops are good, it’s a surprise when he comes up with any he doesn’t want to kiss and hug. Now he insists the officer who shot Ashli Babbitt during the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill had “no reason” to shoot her.
He wants the officer’s name released, so that all the right-wing extremists can go after him and his family, online, at least.
“The person that shot Ashli Babbitt — boom,
right through the head,” Trump said recently. “Just, boom. There was no reason
for that. And why isn’t that person being opened up, and why isn’t that being
studied? They’ve already written it off. They said that case is closed. If that
were the opposite, that case would be going on for years and years, and it
would not be pretty.”
*
IN OTHER NEWS, Congress can’t even get something simple done – like enacting legislation to curtail robocalls. Americans are set to receive one billion calls per week, or three for every man, woman, and child in the nation.
Every week.
For all eternity.
*
JASON ROE, the executive director of the Michigan Republican Party tells Politico what he thinks of the “Big Lie,” that the 2020 election was stolen from a deserving Donald J. Trump. Then he steps down from his post:
The unfortunate
reality within the party today is that Trump retains a hold that is forcing
party leaders to continue down the path of executing his fantasy of overturning
the outcome – at their own expense. Frankly, continuing to humor him merely
excuses his role in this. The election wasn’t stolen, he blew it
[emphasis added]. Up until the final two weeks, he seemingly did everything possible
to lose. Given how close it was, there is no one to blame but Trump.
In fact, during a recent hearing, L. Lin Wood, one of the lawyers responsible for pushing for decertification of the vote in Michigan, decided it might be smart to pretend to be blind, deaf, and dumb.
Who me? Did I claim the election was stolen? If Wood had known how to use American sign language, he might have come to court in dark glasses, and sporting a white cane, in hopes of faking out the judge. Sure, he admitted, his name was on the affidavit filed to overturn the vote. No. It wasn’t his idea. Sidney Powell and other lawyers working in then-President Trump’s name were to blame! They filed a pile-of-s--- case.
“I do not specifically recall
being asked about the Michigan complaint,” Wood told U.S. District Court Judge
Linda Parker.
To say Her Honor was less than impressed with the slapdash work of Powell and the rest of her crew, would be to do an injustice to justice. In reference to the court filing in support of decertification of the Michigan vote, Parker marveled, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen an affidavit that has made so many leaps. How could any of you as officers of the court present this affidavit?”
Parker described the filing as “layers of hearsay,” “obviously questionable,” “fantastical,” “speculative,” and offered in “bad faith.”
Powell, who was also involved in the hearing, pointed out that the pile of s--- was 960 pages long.
Judge Parker replied, “Volume,
certainly for this court, doesn’t equate with legitimacy or veracity.”
The lawyer for the lawyer (that tells you something about the nature of this mess) Emily Newman, who also signed onto the decertification petition, decided it would be best if he pointed out that his client spent only five hours on preparing the petition. Why, Ms. Newman hardly stuck her hands in that pile at all! Her role was “de minimus,” he argued, or as defined by the dictionary: “Too trivial or minor to merit consideration, especially in law.”
These have been challenging
times for lawyers who worked for President Trump. Wood is also facing
investigation in Georgia for pushing the same “stolen election” lies. The
conduct of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is being investigated in the same
regard. Jenna Ellis, who worked with Rudy Giuliani to advance the same fable,
got so disgusted with the fact that sensible Republicans weren’t coming to her
defense she quit the party.
*
MEANWHILE, we learned that when Rudy Giuliani set up an election fraud hotline and asked for tips on how the last election was stolen, the site was inundated with “dick pics” and “animal porn.”
Rudy also lost his license to practice law in Washington D.C.
Lev Parnas, his old business pal (already indicted) made fun
of him on Twitter, and rubbed it in.
*
LAST, BUT NOT LEAST, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (a Democrat) has asked Attorney General Mark Brnovich (a Republican) to open a criminal investigation into alleged efforts by Loser Don, Rudy, and other Trump allies, to influence Maricopa County supervisors as the ballots were still being counted last November.
Hobbs argues that some of the communications “involve clear efforts to induce supervisors to refuse to comply with their duties.”
That would be a violation of Arizona law.
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