January - March 2023 - Fat Donald Won't Go Away

 

FAT DONALD WON’T GO AWAY      

In two-plus years since the last presidential election, Donald Trump has failed to prove in any local, state, or federal court, that significant voter fraud cost him a second term as President of the United States. 

When he insists that he won in a “landslide,” he’s lying. Or he’s suffering from a delusional disorder, that would be layered over a narcissistic personality disorder, which is the core of his amoral character. In any case, he should never be allowed to set foot in the White House again. 

Not even as a visitor on a guided tour.

I'm going to keep saying I won. You can't dump me.

 

* 

January 1, 2023: A New Year dawns. Americans everywhere are polishing their Christmas guns. 

With ammo as stocking stuffers. 

 

“At the top of the testosterone food chain.” 

As of today, an estimated 25 million AR-15 style assault weapons have found their way into private hands. That would be enough to arm every U.S. soldier, sailor, Marine, and Air Force member twenty times over. 

The gun companies love it. They’ve piled up $1 billion in sales in the last decade, pushing this kind of military-grade weaponry. They even encourage what they like to refer to as a “tactical lifestyle.” Put yourself “at the top of the testosterone food chain,” says one gun advertisement. Some of the loot then goes into paying lobbyists. From 1989 to 2022, the gun manufacturers donated $50.5 million to politicians, with 99% of that pile going to Republicans. 

Month after month, Americans add close to two million pistols, rifles, and shotguns to the private arsenal. 

And we’re still not safer. 

Ready in case...zombies?

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1/2/23: I often note on this blog that the former president who now resides at Mar-a-Lago is the only person ever elected to our nation’s highest office, who ended up hating more than half of the people he was elected to serve. Today, he decided to hate on other Republicans. 

 

“I think January 6 really disqualifies him for the future.” 

“Josh Hawley is 100% right about Mitch McConnell, who is a Complete and Total Disaster for the Republican Party and our Nation,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The only one worse may be his wife, Coco Chow, whose relationships and subservience to China is a catastrophe for our Country.” 

That last line is particularly amusing – save for the racism – since “Coco” was his Secretary of Transportation – and served in his cabinet from January 31, 2017 until January 6, 2021. 

In other words, Donald would be partly to blame for any catastrophe that Elaine Chao might unleash. 

(Speaking of catastrophe, Ms. Chao resigned in protest over the violence that President Trump helped fuel on Capitol Hill, just two weeks before he got the boot from the White House.)

 

* 

THIS MORNING, former GOP Governor Asa Hutchinson made an appearance on ABC’s “This Week.” He made it clear where he saw the real danger to America, at the start of the New Year. 

“I do not believe that Donald Trump should be the next president of the United States. I think he's had his opportunity there,” Hutchinson said. “I think January 6 really disqualifies him for the future. And so, we move beyond that. And that’s what I want to be focused on.”

 

FUN FACT: The New York Times runs a lengthy piece on Elise Stefanik, now one of the ranking members of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives. As part of that piece, they acquire an email in which Stefanik refers to then-President Trump as a “whack job.” 

 

“Whack job.” 

In that story, former GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan warns, “It’s crystal, crystal, crystal clear. We lose with Trump if we stick with Trump. If we dump Trump, we start winning.” 

Among other “issues” Stefanik now stands for: chocolate milk. After the Democratic mayor of New York City suggested banning chocolate milk in schools – because it’s more fattening and one out of every four American kids is obese – Stefanik was ready to do battle. “I’ve been proud to be the leader standing up for chocolate milk,” she told constituents. 

Also: standing up for obesity! 

In the meantime, Stefanik and her party have endorsed fine candidates for Congress, like Sandy Smith in North Carolina. In a post-election tweet, after Trump got sent packing by voters in 2020, Ms. Smith called for Trump’s reinstatement as president. She wanted the Dominion machine impounded – and – we suspect – blown up. And she called for “trails and executions” for those responsible for cheating Trump out of a victory. Yes. “Trails.” 

In order to rise in the GOP, Rep. Stefanik had to go to the dark side. On Twitter, she started attacking journalists and political opponents as “sick” or “sickening,” just like Donald. As the 2020 election approached, ProPublica noted that she had delete two tweets praising Dr. Anthony Fauci. One from March 2020, had read, “America loves Dr. Fauci!” 

A year later, she was tweeting, “Fire Fauci. Save Christmas!”

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1/3/23: The sun rises over Washington D.C. Lawmakers meet to organize the two houses of Congress. Matters go smoothly in the Senate, where Democrats have a one-vote majority. 

In the House, Republicans try to pick a new Speaker. Kevin McCarthy is so confident of victory that he moves all his files and personal items into Nancy Pelosi’s old office. He gets 212 votes. 

Six short of a majority. 

A second vote. He still doesn’t have the 218 he needs. 

A third vote – still not enough. 

Republicans keep stepping on their own wieners, so to speak (including the women). No Speaker is elected for the day. This kind of ineptitude and dysfunction has not been seen in more than a century.

___ 

 

1/4/23: Republican lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives try again to elect a Speaker of the House. 

They vote once. And can’t do it. 

They vote twice. 

They vote thrice. They still can’t do it. In fact, they barely manage to get enough votes late in the day to adjourn. 

Watching this fractious crew actually govern over the next two years is sure to be amusing. Expect the vaunted GOP healthcare plan, promised as a replacement for Obamacare in 2016, to be passed on the fifteenth day of Never.

___ 

 

1/5/23: The comedy in the House of Representatives continues. All that’s needed is a laugh track. On the seventh vote, Kevin McCarthy again fails to get the required 218 votes. Rep. Matt Gaetz actually casts his vote for Donald J. Trump. 

An eighth vote fails. A ninth fails. A tenth. Finally, they vote again – eleventh time is a charm. 

And fail. 

Personally, when they try again on Friday, I am hoping to see fisticuffs. Even a challenge to a duel!

___ 

 

1/6/23: The jobs report is out for December, and it’s another good one for Joe Biden: 223,000 jobs added. 

Unemployment drops to 3.5%, as good as Trump ever did, during his four impeachment-festooned years in office. 

We now have nearly two years of records on which to judge Mr. Biden. From February through December of 2021, the U.S. economy added 6,223,000 million jobs. 

This past year, with November and December figures subject to revision, the Biden economy has added: 

4,117,000 jobs.

 

That’s nearly twice as many as Trump added in his best year (of four). During his entire time in office, the economy suffered a net loss of jobs. 

The Labor Participation Rate – 62.3% – ticks up only slightly, as new hires are matched by a continued wave of Baby Boomers hanging it up at work. 

In an average year, more than two million Boomers hit retirement age and pull the plug. In 2020, with COVID rampaging, 3.2 million called it quits, according to the Pew Research Center.

 

* 

DAY FOUR OF GOP “control” of the U.S. House of Representatives opens with a walloping bang. No doubt, all kinds of great bills are being passed for the benefit of constituents … such as tax cuts for suffering billionaires. 

Republicans try to get out of their own way and elect a Speaker of the House. They vote a twelfth time. 

Can’t do it. Vote #12 fails. Also vote #13 and vote #14. 

I almost get my wish for fisticuffs, as Rep. Mike Rogers has to be held back from punching the eminently punchable Rep. Matt Gaetz. 

And then you had this dick, who played a joke on his Republican colleagues (watch on Twitter). 

Rep. Matt Rosendale being a dick.

 

With the clock approaching midnight, and Kevin McCarthy’s gilded coach about to turn into a pumpkin, the party gets its act together – as much as you can say this group of misfits ever does – and elects…

___ 

 

1/7/23: …Kevin! The vote comes, finally, at 12:29 a.m., Saturday morning. Kevin gets to grab the gavel, and play Speaker. 

Yay, Kevin! 

Speaking of Kevin, this blogger is always going to remember the times Kevin told the truth – but then thought better of his blunders. 

There was, of course, the time Kevin rightly blamed President Trump for the rioting on January 6, 2021. 

Truth seemed so unnatural to Kevin, that almost as soon as the words spilled from his lips, he relented and decided Trump was the best leader America ever had – assuming you couldn’t win elections the old fashioned way, by counting ballots. 

But my favorite truth, told by McCarthy, back in the day when Trump was first campaigning for office was when this occurred: 

 

Led by Trump, the most colossal liar in American political history, the GOP is now guided in the U.S. House of Representatives by a man who lies simply because he lacks courage to stand by the truth and hopes you’ve forgotten he ever told it.

 

* 

IN OTHER NEWS, Donald the Loser has been diddling away his days at Mar-a-Lago,  ranting about mail-in voting, and battering the “caps” button on his phone. 

On Truth Social this week, he posted: 

All Republican Governors should immediately begin the process of ENDING MAIL IN BALLOTS (which are fraught with corruption, and always will be!) EXCEPT FOR FAR AWAY MILITARY AND PEOPLE WITH A PROVEN ILLNESS, GETTING VOTER I.D. AND SAME DAY VOTING WITH ALL PAPER BALLOTS. This effort should be all out and start immediately. Governors have the power and authority to do this. GET IT DONE, or we will never have honest elections in our Country again!

 

Apparently, Donald forget he voted by mail in Florida, and that worked out fine. 

And here in Ohio, we could vote by mail, and millions of Ohioans did, and Donald won the state with ease. 

(He only hates voting by mail in states where he loses.)

___ 

 

1/9/23: It turns out the Paycheck Protection Program, launched with good intentions by the Trump administration, as the pandemic battered the economy, was badly run – which is no surprise. 

This was the Trump administration. 

NPR reports, 

“The PPP program seems to have resulted in billions of dollars of fraudulent loans that have ultimately turned into grants,” said Samuel Kruger, an assistant professor of finance at the University of Texas at Austin who co-authored a paper estimating that $64 billion of the nearly $800 billion in loans issued show signs of fraud, such as suspiciously high payrolls and multiple businesses listed at the same home address.

 

The Small Business Administration challenged those figures, but did admit 70,000 loans showed signs that they were fraudulent. 

It is unlikely that the money will ever be recovered.

 

* 

IF YOU missed it, the longtime partner of Officer Brian Sicknick, who died of a heart attack, the day after being assaulted by rioters on January 6, 2021, has filed a lawsuit seeking damages. 

The sum in question, sought by Sandra Garza: $10,000,000. 

The three defendants: Julian Khater, George P. Tanios, and former President Donald J. Trump. 

 

Trump, “100% responsible,” needs “to be in prison.” 

The suit accuses “Defendant Trump” of endorsing and ratifying “the violent actions of the mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol, including Defendants Khater and Tanios.” The president – who had been lying about a stolen election every day, leading up to the riot – and still is – instructed supporters to “fight like hell” and declared that “you’re allowed to go by very different rules,” calling upon them “to show strength,” the complaint alleges. Defendant Trump clearly intended these words to be “taken literally.” According to lawyers for Ms. Garza, then-President Trump “intentionally riled up the crowd and directed and encouraged a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol and attack those who opposed them.” The injuries that resulted to Officer Sicknick and others were, therefore, the “foreseeable consequences of Defendant Trump’s words and conduct.” 

Sicknick was a Trump supporter, when not on duty, and so was Garza. Now, she says Trump has never spoken about his death. “He knew that Brian was devoted to him,” she said, but Trump “did not once reach out to me ... he didn’t even send a letter of condolences.” 

Even more bluntly, Garza said, “He did absolutely nothing.” 

Garza told “PBS NewsHour,” as the first anniversary of the riot approached, that she holds Trump “100% responsible” for her partner’s death. She later insisted that he needed “to be in prison” for his role in provoking the deadly assault.

 

* 

KHATHER AND TANIOS have both plead guilty for their parts in the riot, and both have admitted they came to D.C. to support President Trump. 

On a separate list of rioters, this blogger has created, their cases are briefly explained, as follows: 

 

The man with the can…of bear spray. 

243. JULIAN KHATER:  Khater, 32, was charged with using some unknown toxic substance – since identified – to spray at least three police officers in the face. His targets included Officer Brian Sicknick, who experienced a debilitating reaction, and died the next day. According to one report, in days following the attack, Khater touted the virtues of then-President Trump, criticized Capitol security – ballsy for sure – and referred to President-elect Joe Biden as an “idiot.” 

When not rioting and spraying police officers with chemicals, Khater runs (or did) a smoothie shop near the campus of Penn State. 

(In September 2022, he reaches a plea agreement, and admits to assaulting and injuring police with a deadly weapon – namely bear spray. He was scheduled for sentencing in December 2022, and faced between 78 and 97 months in prison. He had already been incarcerated for 17 months at the time. 

Sentencing was delay, but on January 27, 2023, Khater drew a sentence of 80 months behind bars, including 22 months already served.) 

Gladys Sicknick, who attended the sentencing, spoke about her son Officer Brian Sicknick, who died from heart failure the day after the riot, likely as a result of the stress he suffered under brutal attack. In regard to President Trump and his “stolen election” complaints, she could not resist asking the defendant, “How does it feel to be headed to jail because of a bald faced lie?” 

Then she added angrily, “You, among all the other crazies – you are the reason Brian is dead, Mr. Khater.” 

 

* 

“Malignant, self-important egomaniac.” 

244. GEORGE PIERRE TANIOS: A friend of Khater, Tanios operates a sandwich shop in Morgantown, W. Va. On social media he calls himself the “Sandwich Nazi” and the “King of the Fat Sandwich.” 

When a dissatisfied patron left a one-star review, Tanios proudly posted it because he liked the comparison. His critic noted: “If Donald Trump was a restaurant manager, this is who he would be.” 

To Tanios, such words were praise to right-wing ears. “To [sic] epic not to share,” he said on Instagram. 

In the indictment against the pair, Department of Justice officials charge them with working in concert on the day of the riot. 

During the investigation, law enforcement discovered open source media video of the incident from January 6, 2021. On the video, KHATER is seen making his way towards TANIOS. KHATER then states, “Give me that bear shit,” and reaches into the backpack on TANIOS’ back. TANIOS then states, “Hold on, hold on, not yet, not yet… its [sic] still early.” KHATER is then seen emphatically telling TANIOS, “They just fucking sprayed me,” and KHATER is seen holding a white can with a black top that appears to be a can of chemical spray.

 

Video evidence shows Khater spraying three officers, who “retreat” to wash out their eyes, including Sicknick. 

Tanios pleads guilty in July 2022. 

In evidence to support a finding of guilt (which Mr. Tanios admits), prosecutors note that prior to their trip to D.C., Tanios “purchased two cannisters of Frontiersman brand bear spray, and two additional cannisters of pepper spray.” One cannister of pepper spray, he turned over to Khater before their arrival in Washington. 

Only Khater, however, used bear spray on officers, and so Tanios was able to plead guilty to two misdemeanors and in January 2023, to get sentenced only for time already served – which amounted to five months. He must also perform 100 hours of community service, and successfully avoid further trouble during a year on probation. He is also required to pay an unspecified fine – equal to all the money that remains in a GoFundMe account he created to raise cash in support of his legal defense. 

The judge in his case spoke of Tanios and Khater having been influenced by, and agents of, the “lynch mob mentality.” 

The guy who brought the rope: Donald J. Trump. 

Or, as a relative of Officer Sicknick put it during the trial, the former president was a “malignant self-important egomaniac.” 

___ 

 

1/10/23: Yay!!! According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, experts say the year just ended was only the fifth hottest on record. 

See! We’re cooling off!! Last year wasn’t as hot as 2021. Nothing to fear, Trump fans, but fear itself. 

 

“Ignorance is the softest pillow.” 

And science. Science is a bitch. Also logic. Logic is a real bitch! Experts predict that by 2034, the earth will have warmed by 1.5° Celsius, or 2.7° Fahrenheit. At that point, major disasters are cooked in the books. 

Last year, the oceans of the world warmed to their hottest level ever. Yeah. Hottest ever. And did you know that oceans have been absorbing 90% of the excess heat generated since the dawn of the Industrial Era? 

Otherwise, we’d all feel like we were living in Florida – only without Governor Ron DeSantis peering over our shoulder, and waiting to give us a wedgie if we try to discuss racism. 

Listen to what climate scientists had to say this week, when The Guardian, a British newspaper, interviewed them. 

Reporters! “Fake News!” Am I right, Trump fans? Ignorance, profound ignorance, that’s the ticket. “Ignorance,” as someone (but definitely not Mike Lindell) once  said, “is the softest pillow upon which to lay your head.” 

So fluff the pillows, Trump fans. 

As The Guardian explains: 

The international team of scientists that produced the new ocean heat analysis concluded: “The Earth’s energy and water cycles have been profoundly altered due to the emission of greenhouse gases by human activities, driving pervasive changes in Earth’s climate system.”

 

Prof John Abraham, at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota and part of the study team, said: “If you want to measure global warming, you want to measure where the warming goes, and over 90% goes into the oceans.

 

“Measuring the oceans is the most accurate way of determining how out of balance our planet is.

 

“We are getting more extreme weather because of the warming oceans and that has tremendous consequences all around the world.”

 

Prof Michael Mann, at the University of Pennsylvania, also part of the team, said: “Warmer oceans mean there is more potential for bigger precipitation events, like we’ve seen this past year in Europe, Australia, and currently on the west coast of the US.”

 

He said the analysis showed an ever-deeper layer of warm water on the ocean surface: “This leads to greater and more rapid intensification of hurricanes – something we’ve also seen this past year – since the winds no longer churn up cold sub-surface water that would otherwise dampen intensification.”

 

Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association also served up fresh warning. Eighteen climate-related disasters struck the U.S. in 2022, causing $165 billion in damages. That doesn’t mean some of those disasters wouldn’t have hit, anyway. It does mean they were all more likely to hit and were all going to be worse when they did. Or, as NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said at a press conference on Tuesday, “With a changing climate buckle up. More extreme events are expected.” 

 

In a recent CBS poll, 71% of Americans said they supported efforts by their representatives to fight climate change. 

Naturally, young people, who have the most to fear, are most anxious – with 55% saying they hope Congress will make fighting climate change a “high priority.” 

Still, we can count on one everlasting roadblock. Blockhead Republicans. Like Donald Trump. Across the nation, 64% of Democrats, and 46% of independents want Congress to take the threat seriously. Among self-described Republicans, that number falls to 23%. In fact, when the question was posed another way: Did respondents want lawmakers in Congress to even fight climate change, 53% of Republicans said they would oppose such efforts. 

F**k. This explains how so many fools can still support Rejected-President Trump, and want to give him another shot in the White House.

 

POSTSCRIPT: Scientists at NASA also released their climate findings today. The year just ended was tied, with 2015, for “hottest year” ever recorded. The last nine years are the nine hottest. 

And hotter years are still to come. 

“The reason for the warming trend is that human activities continue to pump enormous amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and the long-term planetary impacts will also continue,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of GISS, NASA’s leading center for climate modeling.

___ 

 

1/11/23: Paula White-Cain (I am not making that name up), Donald Trump’s former “spiritual advisor,” has been accused of dipping her sticky hands into the bank account of the rock band Journey. 

(She is married to one of the band members, but is not authorized to access that account – but allegedly has.) 

Two cease-and-desist letters have been sent.

 

FUN FACT: Paula and her second husband (doesn’t it figure that Trump’s one-time spiritual advisor would have been married three times) were accused of bilking church members, and investigated by the IRS. 

Paula has also been of having multiple affairs – sometimes with other married Christian pastors.

___ 

 

1/12/23: Republicans have been celebrating control of the U.S. House of Representatives this week, by gearing up for an investigation into Hunter Biden and his laptop. Also, they want to criminalize abortion nationally and send doctors who perform such procedures to prison. 

Or bring back the guillotine! 

 

Fresh lies by Rep. George Santos revealed by…the free press. 

Newly elected Rep. George Santos, however, may not have long left to enjoy his career in the U.S. House of Representatives. It is now reported that among his many sins, he paid a staffer $100,000 for, among other duties, during fund-raising phone calls, impersonating the chief of staff of then-Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. 

Fresh lies have been revealed by The New York Times and are now widely reported. We already know Santos lied about how his mother died (supposedly during the 9/11 attack). Now we learn he said he compiled a 3.89 GPA at Baruch College, and finished in the “Top 1% of class,” despite – ahem – never technically attending. 

Other fun claims: That while working at Goldman Sachs he doubled a revenue stream for the firm, by hundreds of millions, from “300m to 600m.” Which is quite the feat – since he never actually worked there. 

Of course, you would expect this kind of amazing success from a man like Santos, who claimed to have scored a 710 (in the top 9%) on the Graduate Management Admission Test. It turns out, Santos’ imaginary friend must have taken the test for him. Because there is no evidence Santos ever took the test himself. 

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1/13/23: Yesterday, our topic was Republican liars of the epic style. Today we pick up on the topic – and focus on Donald J. Trump. In a deposition released today, we learn that Donald can’t remember what he said during the infamous Hollywood Access tape that should have sunk his first bid for office. 

You remember: Trump said he just started kissing women, and they let him get away with it because he was rich and famous. That tape helped fuel a rash of accusations from more than twenty women, alleging that Donald had done to them just what he said he had – if not more. 

Under New York law, E. Jean Carroll, is now suing the former president for defamation, because he had called her a liar, when she first brought up a story that he had raped her in a dressing room on Fifth Avenue. Trump was forced to give a deposition. And it did not go well. The accusation, he claimed, was a “hoax.” A lawyer for Ms. Carroll asked Trump, for comparison purposes, about climate change. Trump said, yes, that too “was largely a hoax.” (In recent news, we learned that scientists have found that large parts of Greenland are the warmest they’ve been in at least a thousand years.) 

Trump also suggested that he wouldn’t have raped the plaintiff – because she was “not his type.” Then he mixed up a picture of Ms. Carroll, which also featured Donald himself, and identified her as Marla Maples, his second ex-wife – who most assuredly was his type, until Melania came along. 

Then, to top it off, a lawyer for the plaintiff asked Donald if he had ever kissed or touched a woman without her permission. 

“The answer is no,” he replied. 

Here, at this fine blog, we have already provided a list of the more than two dozen women who have accused Donald of inappropriate touching, kissing, and worse.

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1/14/23: For those of us on the liberal end of the political spectrum, Rep. George Santos is the gift that keeps on giving. 

He has now been accused by a former roommate of showing up for a “Stop the Steal” rally, wearing a scarf he stole from said roommate. 

Santos and the scarf.

 

By the way, at that rally, Santos claimed, “They did to me what they did to Donald J. Trump, they stole my election.” 

The roommate – and a second former roommate of Rep. Santos – provided screenshots of a conversation in which the two men discuss Santos’ theft of phones, dress shirts and checks from a checkbook. 

In a recent poll, 60% of constituents in his district want Santos to be ousted from Congress, even though he has hardly had time to warm his seat. That includes 34% of voters who supported him. 

The other 66% like liars.

 

* 

THE DEDICATED, but slightly daft blogger has spent the last two years, looking high and low, and under the beds for evidence of election fraud great enough to change the results of the 2020 presidential election. 

Or, frankly, any other U.S. election. 

So far, nothing but dust bunnies. Under pressure to prove that Donald J. Trump defeated Joe Biden in Pennsylvania, Republican officials in Lycoming County decided to spend a pile of taxpayer cash and conduct a recount. For three days, ten two-person teams of county employees sifted through 59,374 ballots, hand-counting them all. And how much massive fraud did they find? 

At a cost of  sixty days’ wages? 

In a beet-red county, where Trump garnered 69.8% of the vote, the incumbent was found to have received seven (7) fewer votes than initially reported. Mr. Biden’s tally dropped by fifteen (15). If we figure an error of +8 for Joe Biden, that would be an error rate of .000013 per cent. 

 

VOTER FRAUD: ADDENDUM. 

This hard-charging blogger does his best to report honestly. But if you can find verified proof of massive voter fraud, you are doing better than him. He was excited (in the sense he wants to be fair) to read a headline about a Democratic official in Alabama convicted for voter fraud last week. 

How many votes were we talking? Fifty thousand for Joe Biden? 

Sadly, when the blogger clicked on the story, he learned that the dastardly Albert Turner Jr., of Perry County, was accused of voting multiple times in a Democratic primary. And then harvesting votes in the midterm general elections. Turner has denied the charge – but if he were to be found guilty, lock him up a while. As for massive fraud, the Alabama Attorney General reports that there have been seven (7) convictions for voter fraud in that state in…the last eight (8) years. 

And that would be spread across multiple elections, national, state, county, and even school board elections. 

So, the blogger keeps checking. Out in Iowa, a worse case turned up, but, sad to say, if you were hoping to prove Democrats were scumbags, the alleged perpetrator was a Republican. Kim Phuong Taylor was arrested and charged with 52 felonies,. Authorities say she filled out dozens of false forms, and submitted illegal ballots in an effort to help her husband win a primary race to be elected to Congress. 

That would indicate that if vote fraud does occur, it’s not just Democrats who try it, and that it is almost never significant enough to affect the outcome of an election. The blogger is getting desperate for proof of massive fraud – even if it were to be the work of aliens from another planet. He decides to google, “Texas man convicted of voter fraud” and “Texas woman convicted of voter fraud.” (Should I do “Texas person,” to adjust for transgender norms?) 

I mean, if Democrats wanted to steal an election, Texas in 2020, would have been the biggest prize of all. 

First, I get “Hervis Rogers,” arrested for voting while on parole. That scuzbag! No. Wait. His case was dismissed. 

Monica Mendez got nailed on 26 felony counts – after harvesting votes to influence the outcome of…a utility board election. She was sentenced to five years busting up rocks in the state peniten… No. She was sentenced to probation. 

Then there was the case of Crystal Rogers, who thought she had the right to vote, and cast a provisional ballot in 2016. She had voted before, at the same voting place, but had just been released from prison on a tax fraud case. She was charged and convicted and sentenced to five years more in prison. 

Next, I saw that KXAN television in Austin was reporting that 150 people in Texas had been charged with voter fraud. That sounded promising if you wanted to prove something big about American elections. But that was spread over all the elections in Texas, starting with 2004. 

The story of Rogers led me to the story of an Iowa woman, Terry Lynn Rote, who voted twice, absentee, for Donald Trump, in the same election. She explained that she broke the law because she believed the election was going to be rigged – and she decided to do her part to boost Donald’s chances. She got two years’ probation, and had to pay a $750 fine. 

Of course, she was white, and lived in Iowa. And Rogers was black, and lived in Texas. 

Then you had the case of Justice of the Peace Russ Casey, called a “rising star in the Republican Party,” of Tarrant County – also in Texas. After he became ensnared in an office sex scandal, he had trouble garnering support to run for reelection in 2018. So he forged more than a hundred signatures on a petition in order to be able to run. And lost anyway. Punishment: Five years’ probation, community service, and a $1,000 fine. Another white guy gets off easy. 

Finally, I found a story from this past October: “Verify: 171 People Have Been Investigated for Voter Fraud in Texas since 2018.” KHOU 11 in Houston decided to do a little checking. So I won’t have to. They asked the Texas attorney general to provide records – and got the 171 cases. 

Those could be reduced to 61 convictions, with 41 cases pending. (That would mean 69 cases were dismissed in some fashion or resulted in “not guilty” determinations.) The reporter for KHOU gets a bit lazy, noting that ten million Texans voted in 2020. She calls that level of fraud “far less than 1%.” I decide to be more precise. Even if the state gets 41 more convictions, you have only one hundred and two (102) convictions in 11,000,000 votes (The reporter had the total vote wrong.)  That would = 1 illegal vote for every 107,843 ballots. 

Only the math would be much worse. We’d have to add in all the votes cast in the 2018 midterms. We’d have primary elections, and elections for sheriff, and county elections. Texas has a lot of counties: two hundred and fifty-four, to be exact. People could cheat while voting for county coroners, and mayors of cities, and members of village councils. The attorney general – who guards against election fraud – is elected for god’s sake. Let’s see how the vote turned out in that race. Ken Paxton won a second term in 2018 (he won again in 2022), and another 8.2 million votes were cast. And we’re not even counting primaries in 2018. If we counted all the elections for seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018, that would be another eight million chances for a voter to cheat (and I’m not figuring in voters who chose neither a Republican or a Democrat). Then we can toss in all the votes from Loving County, Texas (pop. 117!) In 2018, 66 voters turned up at the polls, with that figure rising to 79 in 2020. 

Now we’re up to 27,200,145 chances to cheat – and we’re not done. 

Sometimes I just can’t help myself when it comes to revealing how absurd claims of massive voter fraud have been. Theoretically, you could commit fraud in any election for any office. So, I decide to try Midland, Texas, because that’s where George W. Bush lives. (I think.) To name just a few, you get votes for city and county positions, including the Eleventh Court of Appeals, Place 2 (66,293), Railroad Commissioner (19,019), District Attorney (19,251), County Commissioner, Precinct 1 (4,198), and County Sheriff (15,855). 

That gives Texans 27,324,761 chances to cheat. A Republican voter in Midland could cast a bogus vote for County Sheriff. A Democrat in Loving County could try to mail in a fraudulent ballot in the race for governor. So, we have 61 proven cases of fraud, and at best 102 cases that will be proven. Now the math shows, at most, 1 (1) illegal vote for every 267,890 votes tallied.

___ 

 

1/19/23: Election denial has become a Republican sport, but no denier has been quite so dedicated to the game as Solomon Pena. His political career was snuffed out by New Mexico voters in the 2022 midterms. 

And it wasn’t close, either. 

In the battle for a seat in the New Mexico House of Representatives, from District 14, Pena tallied a measly 2,005 votes – or 26.4%. His Democratic opponent piled up 5,558, or 73.6%. 

Pena didn’t take losing well. He’s alleged to have paid several accomplices to shoot into the homes of Democratic lawmakers , and election officials who certified his loss. In one case, bullets broke up plaster in a 10-year-old girl’s room. And Pena is said to have complained to the shooters – asking them to strike earlier in the evenings when people were still up and about. He also wanted them to shoot lower into the homes. Now police are also looking into the possibility that drug traffickers donated to his campaign. José Trujillo, who invested $5,155 in the Pena campaign, was recently arrested – and is thought to have done some of the shooting. When busted, police found 893 fentanyl pills in his car, two guns, and $3,036 in cash. According to police, one of those guns was tied to the shooting at a Democratic lawmakers’ home.

 

* 

IF PENA was dangerous with guns, Donald Trump ended his sixth year in politics, doing damage with his thumbs. 

On Truth Social, the man inclined to fascism made plain his anger after the U.S. Supreme Court failed to uncover the person responsible for leaking the rough draft of the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade. 

The Supreme Court has just announced it is not able to find out, even with the help of our “crack” FBI, who the leaker was on the R v Wade scandal. They’ll never find out, & it’s important that they do. So, go to the reporter & ask him/her who it was. If not given the answer, put whoever in jail until the answer is given. You might add the publisher and editor to the list. Stop playing games, this leaking cannot be allowed to happen. It won’t take long before the name of this slime is revealed!

 

For Trump fans, let’s spell this danger out: 

1.     Trump is adept at dehumanizing those he hates – and those he wants you, his loyal followers, to hate (above: “slime”). 

2.     Dehumanizing others is a tactic favored by, for example, Hitler and his crew, who referred to Jews as “vermin.” 

3.     At no point in history has dehumanizing one’s enemies led to more humane treatment of those enemies. 

4.     Reporters often make good use of information gleaned from leaks. For example, rightwing outlets say they have leaks providing evidence against Hunter Biden. If any president – or man who wants to be president again – can start jailing people to stop leaks – then you have handed excessive power to the politicians currently in power. 

5.     If Trump could plug leaks by arresting publishers and editors, along with reporters, then so could Joe Biden. 

6.     Nixon could have done it, too. So could presidents A, B,C, and X, Y and Z, in the future. 

7.     Many “leakers” are protected by whistleblower laws – and you couldn’t arrest them, or their editors and publishers, without trampling on the First Amendment. 

8.     If you are too dumb to understand any of this, you are definitely too dumb to be voting. 

9.     Or to be running again for president.

___ 

 

1/20/23: Once again, Fat Donald gets a shellacking in court. This time a judge sanctions the former president and his lead attorney, Alina Habba, for filing a “frivolous” lawsuit against Hillary Clinton. 

 

A “continuing pattern of misuse of the courts.” 

“This case should never have been brought. Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start. No reasonable lawyer would have filed it,” Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks explained  in his ruling. 

You can look it up if you want to know what the suit was about. We’ll merely note that the judge has ordered Don and Alina to cough up $937,989 and hand over the dough to Mrs. Clinton and her lawyers. 

Judge Middlebrooks also cited, in his ruling, a “continuing pattern of misuse of the courts” by Trump and his lawyers.

___ 

 

1/22/23: If we have any brains in or skulls, we should understand by now that Trump will lie about anything, lie daily, lie hourly, babble lies for practice, and lie while talking in his sleep. 

 

Trump wins at golf again – using putter and time-traveling skill. 

In this case the fat dope – whose idea of a workout is hauling his lard ass onto a golf cart and going for a ride – claims to have won the championship at one of his courses. 

This was a neat trick – since Donald didn’t play the first round of the tournament – and simply showed up for the second, claiming a five-shot lead. He insisted he had had an excellent score several days earlier – and since he missed the Saturday opening round to attend the funeral of “Diamond,” one of his most loyal and idiotic supporters, that should count. 

Trump may be a pretty good golfer, especially for his age; but top players scoff at his claims. He says, for example, that he has won championships at eighteen of the courses he owns, round the world. He even claims he won a tournament at Trump International in West Palm Beach in 1999. In that case he apparently used his time travel skills to go back to a point when the course wasn’t even open. 

His most recent win would have been at least his nineteenth at one of his courses. But he had been fact-checked before on his first eighteen claims. For example: two wins in tournaments at Trump Westchester in 2001 and 2002. “Well, no, I know for a fact that’s not true,” Ian Gillule, a former executive at the club told a reporter in 2019. “He never won any in the eight years I worked there. I mean, I loved working for Mr. Trump, but you know, some people take a certain license with the truth.” 

(For instance: lying to Melania about his affair with Stormy Daniels.)

The big orange chunk can't lose.

 

 

“He’d kind of been a dick the whole day.” 

Even more revealing, Donald claimed to have won the 2007 Westchester Mens’ Club Championship – when in fact, he was defeated by a 15-year-old named Adam Levin in the first round. 

True, the two “men” had to go to sudden death after tying in eighteen holes, with Levin winning on the second extra hole. As he remembered twelve years later, Trump “didn’t even say ‘Congratulations’ or ‘Good match.’ He didn’t look me in the eye. He just shook my hand and walked off. He’d kind of been a dick the whole day. We were together for five or six hours, so there was plenty of time for conversation with me or my parents, but all he ever said was, ‘Isn’t this course fantastic?’ and ‘Aren’t these facilities the best?’ He’s a total asshole with no character.” 

True that. In fact, Rick Reilly authored an entire book, Commander in Cheat, about how the president always managed to win at golf. If you’d like to know more about how Trump always “wins” on the links, Golf Digest has highlighted ten of the former president’s most outlandish claims.

___ 

 

1/23/23: Not content to spend his time lying about golf, Trump decides to dabble in racism and insults on Monday. Why not blast his former Secretary of Transportation, Elaine Chao, and her husband, Senator Mitch McConnell! (Chao served in his administration for nearly four years – until, in the wake of the attack on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, she had her fill and resigned. 

Suddenly feeling the heat – after classified documents by the dozens were found carelessly stashed away at his home in Mar-a-Lago, Trump decided to question the loyalty of an American citizen, and a woman whom he kept in his cabinet for just a little less than four f**king years. 

___ 

 

1/24/23: I’m not sure what point Mike Pompeo – who wants to run for president if Fat Donald has the decency to get indicted in Georgia – was trying to make in his new book. Now on sale! For some reason he thought it important to note that Jamal Khashoggi was not really so much a “journalist” as an “activist” when the Saudis had him grabbed inside their embassy in Turkey in October 2018, and cut to pieces with a bone saw. 

As an aspiring journalist, myself, I will insert a “STOP” at every point where Pompeo should have stopped writing, on the theory that he possessed normal human emotions – such as empathy, for starters. 

Of the victim, Pompeo opines: 

“He didn’t deserve to die [STOP], but we need to be clear about who he was ― and too many in the media [STOP] were not,” Pompeo writes in “Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love,” according to NBC News.

 

The news media “hammered the story extra hard [STOP] because Khashoggi was a ‘journalist,’” he says, per the Guardian.

 

“To be clear, Khashoggi was a journalist to the extent that I and many other public figures are journalists. We sometimes get our writing published, but we also do other things. The media made Khashoggi [STOP] out to be a Saudi Arabian Bob Woodward who was martyred for bravely criticizing the Saudi royal family [STOP] through his opinion articles in the Washington Post,” he writes, referring to the famous Watergate reporter.

 

Pompeo says the killing ― which he calls “outrageous, unacceptable, horrific and despicable” ― was not “surprising” [STOP YOU ACURSED FOOL] to him because he had “seen enough of the Middle East to know that this kind of ruthlessness was all too routine in that part of the world.

 

Let’s be clear. The media told the story because the Saudis, on the orders of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, cut up a human being with a bone saw. And then President Trump tried to pretend it never happened. 

And Pompeo was Secretary of State when it did.

___ 

 

1/25/23: It seems doubtful that any other president has ever hated so many of the people he hired. 

Today, Fat Donald blasted another one of his former medical advisors, Deborah Birx. He’s really not a happy man: 

___ 

 

1/26/23: In today’s news, the U.S. government is sending M1A1 tanks to Ukraine. NATO allies are sending German-made Leopard tanks too. 

Trump insists winning the war should be easy. So, like his healthcare plan, we wait with bated breath to hear his plan.

 

* 

ELECTION-DENIER Kari Lake – who claims to be the real Governor of Arizona, has now been slapped on one cheek and then the other. Twice the Arizona Supreme Court has turned down her request to have her declared winner of the 2022 election. Which doesn’t faze Kari for one minute. 

She’s already claimed multiple times she is the winner (despite the fact her opponent got 17,000 more votes). 

Kari now says she’s willing to allow Governor Katie Hobbs, who defeated her, to “play governor for a while.” 

(I am guessing for the next four years.)

 

* 

FINALLY, I would like to note that while I rarely defend anything Fat Donald does or says, I’m glad justice triumphed today. 

Pascale Ferrier, a French-Canadian woman, has pled guilty to mailing then-President Trump a letter filled with ricin. 

My rule of thumb, in all such cases, is to sympathize with the target of an unjustified attack, (such as the entire country of Ukraine) and to condemn the attacker. 

 

FUN FACT: Like an umpire with eagle-eye vision, this blogger calls ‘em as he sees ’em. So, on the rare occasion that we uncover real election fraud, we note it. And today, we finally have a Democrat breaking the law! Kathy Funk, the Flint Township clerk in Michigan, deliberately broke the seal on a ballot box after she won a primary election in August 2020, because she would have had to face a recount. 

She won the primary by 79 votes out of 5,300. 

That’s a felony, tampering with ballot boxes – but Funk avoided jail time by pleading “no contest.” With that her clerkship came to an inglorious end. And I say, “good riddance.”

___ 

 

1/27/23: It’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Rep. Jim Jordan goes with this classless tweet: 

What’s next? Plastic straws, wasn’t that one? Or Christmas ornaments? Or granny, who’d be taken to the death panels. 

So, this was Rep. Jordan’s pathetic “take” on the famous poem about Nazis, by Pastor Martin Niemöller. 

First They Came… 

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

___

 

1/28/23: President Trump kicks off his third campaign to become President of the United States at a rally in Salem, N.H. 

At one point, he jokes that he checked with White House aides to see if he had the power to award himself the Congressional Medal of Honor. 

(Every veteran – if not every American – should be appalled.)

 

Trump’s listeners, however, laughed heartily. 

Conservative commentators have been whining regularly in recent months about the decline of the “alpha male,” in America. This is self-defeating, of course, since whining isn’t “alpha” at all. But as Trump kicks off his campaign, here he is. The ultimate picture of the 2023 version of the “alpha male.” 

The ultimate "alpha" chunk of blubber.

 

Trump also explains during his first speech of the campaign that the Taliban are “very good fighters,” kind of like if FDR had praised Nazi troops in 1944. But he says they don’t fight so good at night because they don’t have “binoculars.” But we have “given them, brand new, thousands of binoculars, better than what we have, far better, because they’re brand new, they’re the best,” he complains.

___ 

 

1/29/23: On Fox News, Rejected-President Trump is asked how he’d handle the situation in Ukraine. He responds, semi-coherently: “Well what I would do, is I would, we would, we have tremendous military capability and what we can do without planes, to be honest with you, without 44-year-old jets, what we can do is enormous, and we should be doing it and we should be helping them to survive and they’re doing an amazing job.”

___ 

 

1/30/23: You may have heard Republicans warning that “commies” (formerly known as Democrats) are coming for our kitchen appliances. 

Obama’s “War on Christmas,” in which we were all going to have our ornaments smashed flat, while our children wept bitter tears, has now been superseded by Biden’s “War on Gas Stoves.” 

 

A new drug to patent. 

In the meantime, The New York Times has published a lengthy report on how Big Pharma folks are coming for our wallets. For real. The focus of that report was on a drug called Humira, used to treat people with severe arthritis. The drug was patented – but the patent was scheduled to expire in 2016. 

At the time, Humira was costing either insurance companies, Medicare, or patients, more than $50,000 per year. 

So, what was a good drug maker to do? 

Using a tactic increasingly popular with Big Pharma, AbbVie began making minor alterations to the drug – in a sense claiming they had a different drug to patent. Then they sued competitors for violations of “intellectual property rights,” and stalled them in court for seven years. That allowed AbbVie to continue jacking up the price – by 60% – and in that period, to vacuum up an additional $114 billion. 

There really wasn’t any “new” drug to patent. The company simply paid a bunch of lawyers to help them game the system and rip off consumers in new and creative ways. 

 

“Insulin belongs to the world.” 

Nor is AbbVie the only company to realize that paying lawyers tens of millions to gum up the works – and make tens of billions extra in profits – is good for patients, doctors, taxpayers, humanity … Big Pharma! Companies like Bristol Meyers Squibb and AstraZeneca have tinkered with patents, and then hired phalanxes of lawyers to keep the cash coming – even if people dying from cancer can’t pay their bills. And my “favorite” example – because I have a daughter who is a type-1 diabetic – is how Big Pharma manages to keep the price of insulin sky high. 

Insulin was discovered in 1921. It was first used to save the life of a type-1 diabetic in 1922. The following year, the three scientists who shared credit for the discovery sold their rights for $1 each. 

“Insulin,” they said, “belongs to the world.” 

But in America, Big Pharma has a different view of the matter. If they can squeeze out a few more dollars, they don’t care if people who have to have insulin to live can’t afford it, or have to “ration” their supply to barely get by. In September 2022, NPR noted that prices for insulin in the U.S. had gone up 600% in twenty years. Democratic lawmakers managed to get a cap on insulin prices in a recent bill – but only for patients on Medicare. (As taxpayers, we all help pay their bills.) According to one estimate, it takes $6 to produce a vial of the life-saving drug; and the Big Pharma guys sell it for $300. 

And if you don’t like it, you can fight their lawyers – or their pals in Congress, who love Big Pharma campaign donation checks. 

During one stretch, Medicare records show that “We the Taxpayers” were covering 42,000 patients who took Humira, and in three years it cost $2.2 billion. 

Or: $52,380.95 per annum per patient.

___ 

 

1/31/23: It’s official. Joe Biden is to blame for high gas prices at the pump. The Big Oil guys are powerless to do anything to help us. 

This is why Exxon managed to set a record for profits in 2022, piling up $56 billion. Damn Biden! 

Also watching the president jack up prices at the station nearest you: Chevron with $35 billion in profits for the year. 

Meanwhile, Exxon has decided to help bring prices down, by not pumping more oil – which it could. Exxon plans to keep production flat. Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, want to know why Mr. Biden is keeping oil production down, by not leasing more rights to companies like Exxon, so they can drill. 

Also reporting record profits in 2022 – and I think we all know this has something to do with Hunter Biden’s laptop – Shell and ConocoPhillips.

___

2/2/23: It’s surprising anyone would actually need to ask. But conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt did. During an interview, he asked Fat Donald if he would support another Republican candidate in 2024, if Trump didn’t win the party nomination to run for president again. 

 

“He’s all about himself.” 

This is Donald Trump we’re talking about. Donald “F-ing Narcissistic Personality Disorder” Trump. 

He refused to commit. “It depends,” he said. “It would have to depend on who the nominee was.” 

Bill Barr, Trump’s former Attorney General, saw this coming last August. He knew Trump wouldn’t back anyone else – and called his old boss’s efforts to grab the nomination, no matter the cost, “extortion.” 

“What other great leader has done this? Telling the party, ‘If it’s not me, I’m going to ruin your election chances by telling my base to sit home. And I’ll sabotage whoever you nominate other than me.’ It shows what he’s all about,” Mr. Barr said. “He’s all about himself.” 

Trump? The guy who has cheated on all three of his wives, so far. “All about himself?” Who hadn’t figured that out long ago?

 

* 

GOOD NEWS: Team Biden says it has managed to reunite six hundred additional children, separated from their families under the Team Trump “zero tolerance” policy at the southern border. This was the policy that separated young children from parents who tried to enter the U.S. illegally. Another 1,000 children remain, with 148 families already undergoing the process, and 183 families notified. 

Say what you want about the policy itself. Team Trump, as blundering a bunch as ever ran a government, lost track of hundreds and hundreds of … parents … and couldn’t figure out how to return the children. 

As The Hill reports: 

“Today we recognize the dedication of those who have helped reunite these families, and we reaffirm our commitment to work relentlessly to reunite the other families who suffered because of the prior cruel and inhumane policy — a policy that did not reflect the values of our nation,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement.

 

A total of 2,926 children have now been returned to their families. That is: a win for humanity.

 

* 

WE EVEN HAVE good news to report, regarding Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Really! Joseph Morelli, a New York man, who phoned in threatening messages to her congressional office, saying he would show her “what true violence is,” has pled guilty to three charges and could spend up to five years in prison. 

At this blog, we do not like threats being made to anyone – even the reprehensible Rep. Greene – who uses inflammatory language with alarming regularity. 

So, justice served – regarding Mr. Morelli. 

Rep. Greene is no less disgusting a human being; but no one should be threatening to break her skull with a baseball bat. 

Rep. Greene, right, the galoot, left.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: In similar fashion, Aaron Thompson, an Indiana man, threatens Rep. Jim Banks, another Republican, because he disagrees with him politically. “Here’s the choice,” Thompson allegedly offers during one recorded phone call. “Your daughters grow up without their dad. Or you grow old without your daughters. How you like that? Let me know what your opinion is. I’ll make the decision,” the defendant reportedly said in an April 11 voicemail. 

If Thompson is proven to be guilty, he deserves to spend time in a federal lockup, just as do the January 6, 2021, rioters who threatened democracy.

___ 

 

2/3/23: I’ll be honest. If I had to choose between Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump for president, I’d be too busy vomiting into a toilet to cast a ballot. Still, I’ve been saying this for going on eight years: Fat Donald is the most prolific liar ever to plunk down a fat fanny in the Oval Office. 

 

“Tears coming down from his eyes.” 

I don’t think Ron could match him, even if Ron stopped worrying about transgenders invading Disney World, and gave it a try. 

Thursday, Donald trotted out one of his favorite kinds of lies – claiming that people he doesn’t like once “begged” for his help. 

Only this time, in an attempt to trash Ron, Don added a twist to the tale. In a radio interview with Hugh Hewitt, he claimed DeSantis, then running to become Florida’s governor, came to him for help in 2018. “He was dead, he was leaving the race,” Trump said. “He came over and he begged me, begged me for an endorsement. ‘If you endorse me, I’ll win’ and there were tears coming down from his eyes.” 

Trump has, at various times, claimed that Sen. Bob Corker begged him for help. Others he says “begged,” would include: Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who “would do anything” for his help, Mitt Romney, who begged two different times, and “would have dropped to his knees,” President Obama, who begged Kim Jong Un for a meeting, which Donald (of course) got, Donny Deutsch, who begged to be on The Apprentice, Anthony Scaramucci (Trump’s own choice for White House press secretary, who got fired after eleven days), a “loser who begged to come back,” and John Bolton, who begged for a job. Those who begged Trump for various reasons include Omarosa, who got a White House job, but got fired because Trump said she was “a dog,” “Sloppy Steve Bannon,” who cried when he lost his White House gig, Sen. John McCain, who wasn’t a hero, Brent Bozell, who “cried for money like a dog,” Rick Perry, who needed “support and money,” Dana Perino, who wanted an endorsement for her book, and Sen. Bill Cassidy, who Trump called “whacky.”

 

* 

IN OTHER NEWS, Trump also claimed he could end the war in Ukraine “within 24 hours” if he were still president. 

“It should have never ever happened, but it did happen,” Trump told a reporter. “With that being said, it can be negotiated, I think, within 24 hours.” 

(Trump, of course, once famously said he thought Russia should be allowed to keep Crimea, which greatly pleased Mr. Putin.) 

 

Gun rights for domestic abusers. 

Last, but not least, Rep. Andrew Clyde has announced. He is the lawmaker who has been handing out little AR-15 lapel pins to fellow GOP congress members. Because in a nation awash in blood from gun violence, what says so much, “We are serious about seeking remedies,” as little gun-shaped pins. 

If I ran the world, I would require Rep. Clyde and his buds to start wearing lapel pins with pictures of slaughtered children – and keep adding pictures every time another mass murder occurs. 

Meanwhile, a federal appeals court has struck down a Texas law that banned domestic abusers the right to possess firearms. Quoting a line from the U.S. Supreme Court in the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen case, the lower court ruled that such a ban was “an outlier that our ancestors would never have accepted.” 

The gun owner in question was under a “civil protective order that banned him from harassing, stalking or threatening his ex-girlfriend and their child,” when police searched his home, found firearms, and arrested him. 

(Again.) 

All three judges involved in the ruling were Republican appointees, two of them elevated to the bench by President Trump.

___ 

 

2/4/23: Remember when Donald Trump bragged about being the greatest jobs creator in U.S. history? 

Fat Donald claimed to have added jobs at a prolific pace – until, finally, every American had the perfect job they wanted, and unemployment fell to 3.5%. This was the lowest rate in fifty years. Everyone was happy – even people too dumb to realize that Fat D added jobs at a slower monthly pace in his first three years in office than Thin Barack in his last six years in the White House. 

You can look that up. 

Then Old Joe showed up, post COVID, and the U.S. added jobs at an even better pace. Not just his first year in office – when the country was bouncing back from the COVID pandemic. Also his second. Then, to start his third year as president, Old Joe added 517,000 jobs in January 2023. 

Republicans were baffled. How did Old Joe do it? When he took office, the unemployment rate was 6.3%. (That compared to 4.7% when Trump took over – and whined nonstop about “inheriting a mess.”) Then Old J helped the economy rebound and ten million jobs, in just two years, were added or recovered. 

Now, in January 2023, the unemployment rate stands at 3.4%, topping Fat D’s best rate ever. 

We have had fun doing this math before. But, for Trump fans, let’s do it again. If we take jobs added during Trump’s good stretch (pre-pandemic), we find that he added: 

1,901,000 jobs in 2017 (February-December)

2,292,000 jobs in 2018

1,968,000 jobs in 2019

   715,000 jobs in 2020 (January-February)

_________

6,876,000 jobs

 

Those were the jobs added in his first thirty-seven full months in office, before he started telling everyone that COVID-19 was like the flu, and would magically go away. 

That would average out to 185,838 jobs added per month. It was a good record – but not as good as Obama’s in his last six years in office. Then Old J took over and blew Fat D out of the water. 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: The jobs number for February 2023 are later revised slightly, as per Bureau of Labor Statistics practice. The official total: 472,000 jobs added. The unemployment rate, however, remained pegged at 3.4%. 

 

* 

WHILE OLD JOE was busy adding jobs, Republican leaders were demanding he do something about the huge Chinese balloon floating across America. Biden, they said, was weak. He should have ordered it shot down over Montana, even if debris did rain down on the kind folk in Bozeman. Trump insisted if he had still been in office, the Chinese would not have dared send a balloon into U.S. air space. Although somehow, he also believes they purposely dared to infect us all with COVID. 

Then Pentagon officials admitted that Chinese balloons had floated over the U.S. before – they just hadn’t noticed. According to Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck, head of NORAD, and the man in charge of responding to domestic air threats, this occurred three times when Trump was actually president; and it happened once before, after Biden took over. But Republicans didn’t care – they only wanted to score points in politics. No one on their side wanted to admit that, like the United States, and several other countries, China has long deployed sophisticated satellites that can see about anything they want to see anywhere on earth. 

And we’ve got Google Maps, ourselves. 

What, exactly, a massive balloon can do that a satellite can’t, is a bit of a mystery. At any rate, today, once the balloon floated out over the Atlantic, Team Biden had it shot down with a missile. 

As for Trump, he reacted to reports out of the Pentagon, as he always reacts to any story that makes him look bad. He said it was “fake disinformation.” No balloons ever flew anywhere when he was in office. 

Not even helium-filled birthday balloons. 

Then again: if “disinformation” were “fake,” wouldn’t that make the fake disinformation actually real??? 

Mr. Smith, my excellent English teacher, back at Revere High in 1966, would surely say it was.

___ 

 

2/6/23: Monday, F.B.I. agents arrested two individuals, Brandon Russell and Sarah Clendaniel, who were allegedly plotting to blow up the Baltimore power grid. As NBC explains: 

Russell, 27, is a founder of the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group bent on “ushering in the collapse of civilization,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil rights activist organization. According to the Anti-Defamation League, the group admires Charles Manson and supports “the idea of lone wolf violence.” 

 

Clendaniel dressed for combat.

___ 

 

2/7/23: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene showed up for the State of the Union Address, holding a giant helium-filled balloon, and enjoyed yelling while the president spoke, calling him a “liar.”

 

Marjorie should be required to inhale helium. 

I’ll be honest. I didn’t watch the speech; but if I ran this country, I’d require all the really crazy politicians (and Greene is as crazy as anyone in either party) to inhale helium before speaking. 

That’s the only time I’d ever want to hear Rep. Greene say anything. Greene, of course, is a huge fan of Rejected-President Trump. So lying clearly isn’t what irks her. He’s been lying on a daily basis, since November 3, 2020, insisting he won a second term in the White House. And by a “landslide.” 

That claim won Mr. Trump one of dozens of “Pants on Fire” awards from PolitiFact, which keeps tabs on the veracity of what politicians say. 

What specifically bothered Greene? President Biden scored a couple of solid political points when he noted that Republicans had plans to kill Social Security and Medicare. (See: 2/9/23 and 2/17/23, for example.)

___ 

 

2/9/23: Having had to listen to the shills at Fox News spouting off about how Republicans would never want to privatize Social Security, the White House strikes back today. They play an old radio clip of Sen. Ron Johnson, in 2009, calling Social Security a “legal Ponzi scheme,” and suggesting, yes, it should have been privatized all along. 

You can listen on Twitter.

___ 

 

2/10/23: Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes you’re a clueless dipsh*t who also happens to be Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. 

Ken is famous for claiming in 2019, that 58,000 undocumented immigrants had voted in Texas and then failing to prove it. 

And for suing to prove that Trump really won the 2020 election – and didn’t. 

And for retaliating against and firing several employees after they accused him of bribery and abuse of office in 2020. Paxton was sued by four employees – fought them in court – and now has agreed to apologize publicly. 

Plus “pay” them $3.3 million. As it stands, the former employees will get the cash; but it will come from state coffers. 

 

FUN FACT: When Paxton first claimed that 58,000 undocumented immigrants had voted in Texas, and that 95,000 were registered, his office sent out lists of lawbreakers to all 254 Texas counties. Local officials started checking the lists of who had been naughty and nice and who had voted illegally. Even twice. 

President Trump, who couldn’t tell the difference between a toaster and a voting machine, immediately joined the fray. “These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg,” he tweeted. “All over the country, especially in California, voter fraud is rampant. Must be stopped. Strong voter ID!” 

At the time, Paxton promised his office would “spare no effort” in finding those 58,000 criminals. 

At any rate, to give you a sense of what a fine job AG Paxton ended up doing, the lists his office sent out were so stuffed with errors that all efforts fell apart. In McLennan County, for instance, the iceberg proved not to be even an ice cube. The state sent county officials a list of 366 names of undocumented persons registered to vote. A check of those names soon revealed that all 366 were legal voters – an impressive 100% error rate – and the hunt for Big Foot the Illegal Voter fizzled in Texas. 

Paxton was soon reduced to hoping no one would notice. Naturally, President Trump and his perpetually ill-informed supporters didn’t.

Paxton, left, impeached once; Trump, right, impeached twice.

___

 

2/12/23: The Super Bowl is history, and if you’re like this blogger, you don’t care, because you’d be a Bengals fan and know you got screwed on the referees’ calls two weeks ago. Or your team would still be playing. 

 

“Meatball Ron” and other insults. 

Also not enjoying the game: Rejected-President Donald J. Trump, and a healthy chunk of the Trumplican base. You might think Donald would have something better to do than hate on the halftime entertainer. Like: Finally turning up evidence to prove he was robbed in the 2020 election. 

Anyway, he hated Rihanna’s performance – probably because Rihanna once criticized him – and, let’s face it, Trump is an emotionally stunted man-child. On Truth Social, during the game, Trump lashed out. 

He could have used his time, as one British newspaper noted, to ask supporters to donate to a worthy cause, perhaps disaster relief for victims of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria. There, the death toll has passed 36,000. He could have spent his day reading the Bible, since he has portrayed himself as a deeply Christian fellow. 

(What kind of dolt do you have to be to believe that!!!)

 

Or he could attack the pregnant lady – who sang from a glass platform dangling a hundred feet above the gridiron. 

“EPIC FAIL: Rihanna gave, without question,” he barked, “the single worst Halftime Show in Super Bowl history – This after insulting far more than half of our Nation, which is already in serious DECLINE, with her foul and insulting language. Also, so much for her ‘Stylist!’” 

Of course, this is who Trump is. He’s a hater. 

We also learned this week that he’s trying out new and petty insults to unleash on other Republicans, who might run against him in the 2024 primaries. According to various sources, he’s leaning toward tagging Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as “Meatball Ron.” 

This, from a 76-year-old golfing fool, who, when out on the links, looks like someone dressed a sack of potatoes in khakis. 

Still, Donald will always have the right-wing-killer demographic locked up. Recently, he posed with Kyle Rittenhouse and Bo Loudon at a shindig in Mar-a-Lago. 

Rittenhouse, Trump, Loudon.

___ 

 

2/13/23: Can we call it “progress” if people start lying about being Jewish and insist that they are when they aren’t? 

 

To pretend to be Jewish, or not to be. 

It’s a philosophical question, but one the GOP is going to have to wrestle with eventually. A good part of their base is definitely antisemitic. (See, for example: QAnon fans, Nick Fuentes, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, etc.). Then you have Rep. George Santos who claimed he was Jewish, when running for Congress from a district in New York, and, when it was proven he wasn’t, said he meant he was “Jew-ish.” Now we have Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who represents a Florida district in Congress. 

Rep. Luna really wanted to win a seat in that esteemed body. So she told voters she had been “raised as a Messianic Jew by her father.” 

Messianic Jews are Jews who believe, like Christians, that Jesus was the Messiah. They are often linked with Evangelical Christians – the most loyal chunk of the GOP base. A smart move, then, if you want to appeal to your voter demographic. 

Sadly, several members of Luna’s family informed reporters that her father identified as Catholic. None remembered him engaging in Judaism. Luna’s grandfather was also a Catholic and moved to Canada after World War II. He wasn’t a Nazi – thank god – but he certainly wasn’t Jewish.

 

He fought for Germany during the war.

 

We can report, however, that Congresswoman Luna is kind of a hot number, sort of the equivalent of Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez for Democrats.

 

Anytime we have lawmakers who don’t look like dried prunes, it’s a win for the U.S. Constitution.

 

Rep. Luna - looking kind of transgender?

___

 

 

2/14/23: The former president who currently plays golf at Mar-a-Lago gets a special Valentine when a New York court upholds a $110,000 fine assessed against him. Trump had originally been found in contempt for failing to do an adequate search of his records in a tax fraud case filed against him.

 

The court also ruled that the fine shall grow by $10,000 daily until Fat Donald finally gets the picture.

___

 

 

2/15/23: Nikki Haley held her first campaign rally today, after announcing a run for the presidency. To kick off her campaign right she decided to have the invocation delivered by Rev. John Hagee. At one point she turned to him and said, “To Pastor Hagee, I still say I want to be you when I grow up.”

 

Since Haley is 51 (a youth by today’s political standards) you might think she’s already grown up.

 

And this blogger isn’t sure who would really want to be like Pastor Hagee. In the past, he has produced the following gems:

 

1.     He called the Roman Catholic Church the “great whore.”

 

2.     He claimed Hitler had both Jewish and Catholic backgrounds.

 

3.     He said God used Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for its plans to hold a gay pride parade.

 

4.     He initially said that Jesus Christ was the only vaccine for Covid-19. (He did clarify later that he would be receiving the shots.)

 

Praise Jesus!

___

 

 

2/16/23: A judge releases nine pages from the Georgia grand jury report, looking into election fraud – possibly perpetrated by Fat Donald and his pals.

 

 

“Total exoneration.”

 

Former President Donald J. Trump, apparently lacking basic reading skills, “truths” on Truth Social: “Thank you to the Special Grand Jury in the Great State of Georgia for your Patriotism & Courage. Total exoneration. The USA is very proud of you!!!” (That post comes at 3:21 p.m. today.)

 

Sadly, Trump’s total exoneration lasts only hours.

 

After someone else explains what the nine pages really mean, Trump “truths” once more. This time, he’s not so cheery:

 

The Georgia case is ridiculous, a strictly political continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt of all time. Now you have an extremely energetic young woman, the (get this!) “foreperson” of the Racist D.A.’s Special Grand Jury, go going around and doing a Media Tour revealing, incredibly, the Grand Jury’s inner workings & thoughts. This is not JUSTICE, this is an illegal Kangaroo Court. Atlanta is leading the Nation in Murder and other Violent Crimes. All I did is make TWO PERFECT PHONE CALLS!!!

 

We also learn that a majority of the grand jury members believed that “one or more” witnesses likely committed perjury during testimony. As for the idea, still trumpeted by Trump, that the Georgia election was stolen, the jurors (there were 23, plus 3 alternates) voted unanimously “that no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2020 presidential election that could result in overturning that election.”

In all, jurors heard from seventy-five witnesses – some, like Sen. Lindsey Graham, compelled to testify.

In a statement on Thursday, Trump insisted that his calls to Georgia officials, beseeching them to “find” just enough votes for him to win the state were “perfect,” and no one had any reason to imagine he was asking them to commit election fraud. It was his “constitutional duty to ensure election safety, security and integrity,” he claimed, and during his calls “no one objected, even slightly protested, or hung up.”

But if you listened to the call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and two others – all three listeners were loyal Republicans – you know they repeatedly told the president that he had his facts all f**ked up.

(That’s how I’d put it.)

Indeed, Raffensperger later wrote that “for the office of the secretary of state to ‘recalculate’ would mean we would somehow have to fudge the numbers. The president was asking me to do something that I knew was wrong, and I was not going to do that.”

 

Indictments have now been recommended. The question being: Who will be the lucky individuals on the receiving end?

 

*

 

GUNFIRE in America: A shooting at an El Paso mall leaves one person dead, three others wounded.

 

Shootings in malls are the latest “fad” in this blood-soaked nation.

___

 

 

2/17/23: Senator Rick Scott amends his plan to sunset all federal legislation every five years. This comes after President Biden blasts GOP plans to kill Social Security and Medicare. GOP leaders claim they never!

 

 

Sunsetting Social Security and Medicare – a losing plan.

 

Then GOP leaders realize that the Scott plan would do just that – and that voters consider it poison.

 

None of the Republicans who shouted “liar” at Biden during his State of the Union Address – when he said that was the GOP plan – have apologized. Even former President Fat Donald has now called the Scott plan a loser.

 

To quote Mr. Biden, during his speech, he correctly noted: 

Some of my Republican friends want to take the economy hostage unless I agree to their economic plans. All of you at home should know what their plans are. Instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share, some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset every five years.

 

The president had to raise his voice over loud boos, adding, “Anybody who doubts it, call my office, I’ll give you a copy of the proposal.” 

 

* 

ALSO sunsetting: Republican strategist Jesse Benton. He will be watching the next eighteen months of sunrises and sunsets from inside a comfy jail. Benton has been convicted of soliciting illegal campaign donations – from a Russian business tycoon. For a cool $100,000 the Ruski would get a ticket to a Republican National Committee event in 2016, and be photographed with the Trumpster himself. 

Benton had also been convicted of campaign finance violations related to the 2012 election; but President Trump pardoned him before leaving office. 

 

FUN FACT – FLASHBACK: It can be fun to look back a few months, to a time when Republicans were busy floating ideas to keep Social Security and Medicare afloat – none of which involve raising taxes on gazillionaires. 

One “popular” proposal: raise the retirement age, to qualify for Social Security, to 70. You had to wonder why GOP leaders didn’t just suggest 80. 

A second: require people on Medicare to pay more for healthcare. Could you require drug makers to negotiate drug prices, instead? Nope. According to Republicans, that would be communism. 

[Sen. Ron] Johnson has proposed subjecting Social Security and Medicare to annual congressional spending bills instead of operating essentially on autopilot as they do now.

 

Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm … has proposed subjecting nearly all federal spending programs to a renewal vote every five years. Like Mr. Johnson’s plan, that would make Medicare and Social Security more vulnerable to budget cuts.

 

The conservative Republican Study Committee in the House, which is poised to assume a position of influence if the party claims the majority, has issued a detailed plan that would raise the retirement age for both programs and reduce Social Security benefits for some higher-earning retirees. The plan would increase premiums for many older adults and create a new marketplace where a government Medicare plan competes with a private alternative, in what many Democrats call partial privatization of the program.

 

The trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds estimate that a key Medicare trust fund will run out of money in 2028 and the main Social Security Trust Fund will be insolvent in 2034, potentially forcing cuts in benefits if Congress does not act to avoid them.

 

In the 2020 campaign, Mr. Biden proposed raising payroll taxes on high earners to help fund Social Security, while also making the program’s benefits more generous for many workers. 

 

As Bloomberg has noted: 

Social Security and Medicare need to be addressed in the near future, some of the lawmakers said. “Our main focus has got to be on nondiscretionary — it’s got to be on entitlements,” Carter said.

 

A bipartisan negotiation on Social Security and Medicare would likely start with Democrats pushing for more revenue, while “Republicans have a list of eligibility reforms, and we don’t like the tax increases,” [Jodey] Arrington [Texas] said. He said an increase in the eligibility age for both programs would be a commonsense change.

 

Reducing benefits for wealthier Americans could also cut costs, [Rep. Lloyd] Smucker [R- Pa.] said. “We should ensure that we keep the promises that were made to the people who really need it, the people who are relying on it … So some sort of means-testing potentially would help to ensure that we can do that.”

 

The Republican Study Committee, the largest group of House Republicans, released a budget plan in June that called on lawmakers to gradually raise the Medicare age of eligibility to 67 and the Social Security eligibility to 70 before indexing both to life expectancy. It backed withholding payments to those who retired early and had earnings over a certain limit. And it endorsed the consideration of options to reduce payroll taxes that fund Social Security and redirect them to private alternatives. It also urged lawmakers to “phase-in an increase in means testing” for Medicare.

 

And, of course, it was fun watching an old video of Sen. Mike Lee, of Utah, back in 2010. As Lee once explained, he was running for office with one overarching purpose: 

“I’m here right now to tell you one thing you probably have never heard from a politician: It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up from the roots and get rid of it,” Lee said during a campaign stop February 23, 2010, in Cache Valley, Utah. “People who advise me politically always tell me it’s dangerous and I tell them, ‘In that case it’s not worth my running.’ That’s why I’m doing this, to get rid of that. Medicare and Medicaid are of the same sort, they need to be pulled up.”

 

So it is. In a perfect GOP World, you can just keep working till age 70, even if your knees and back are killing you. 

And guys like Donald J. Trump can keep using byzantine tax rules to avoid paying any taxes at all.

___

 

  

2/19/22: Today, Red McCombs answered the Final Call from Father Time. Red was 95. If you’ve never heard of him, in this life he was a Texas billionaire, owner of NFL and NBA teams and a mega-power in the radio broadcast industry. Red got his start in car sales (which figures), prospered greatly, and in 1972 founded Clear Channel Communications. Along with partner Lowry Mays, he kept buying stations – branched off into TV – and made Clear Channel a colossus.

 

 

The kind of news that Red McCombs was paying for.

 

McCombs became a major donor to the Republican Party, and his stations (at one point he and Lowry owned 1,200) kept broadcasting stories about how only commies thought you should raise taxes on billionaires. In 2008, Clear Channel signed Rush Limbaugh to an eight-year contract extension worth $400 million. This allowed Rush to bash Hollywood elites who, he insisted, controlled our minds by including gay characters in movies. Whereas billionaires from Texas would never try to control what we thought by dominating right-wing radio and television.

 

That same year, Clear Channel agreed to syndicate Sean Hannity’s radio show – so that the suffering dopes out in the sticks could hear “real news,” the kind of news that Red McCombs was paying for.

 

*

 

STILL ALIVE AND KICKING: Yes indeed, it’s the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare.

 

This was the act President Trump was going to replace easily and more cheaply, but never did because he never concocted a plan of his own – because he was too lazy to dig into complicated policies.

 

Enrollment in Obamacare jumped by two million this year, with 16.3 million Americans now covered. As of this date, 39 states and Washington D.C. have adopted the Affordable Care Act. Holdouts include Wyoming – where cowboys who get bucked off their horses and fracture their skulls are out of luck unless they have private insurance – Wisconsin (surprisingly), Kansas, and most of what used to be known as the Confederate States of America. Namely: Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina (of course), Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida.

 

For pure fun, we can rate states by life expectancy, to see where the eleven holdouts land. We have bolded names of ACA holdouts below, and colored states red or blue, depending on whether or not they voted for Trump in 2020.

 

Coming in worst:

 

50. Mississippi (71.9 years), a Trump state

49. West Virginia (72.8).

48. Louisiana (72.8)

47. Alabama (73.2)

46. Kentucky (73.5)

44. (tie) Tennessee and Arkansas (73.8)

43. Oklahoma (74.1)

42. New Mexico (74.5)

41. South Carolina (74.8)

40. Indiana (75)

39. Ohio (75.3)

38. Georgia (75.6), but Trump still claims it’s a red state

37. Michigan (76), again, Trump claims he won it

36. North Carolina (76.1)

33. (tie) Arizona, Nevada, Wyoming (all 76.3), with Trump claiming he won all three

32. Kansas (76.4)

31. Texas (76.5)

 

The only states that have held out – and don’t fall into the bottom twenty – are Wisconsin (77.7), also claimed by Trump, and Florida (77.5), where rich old northerners go to ripen in the sun.

 

Good job, Republican governors! Generally speaking, you kill your citizens faster than blue state governors.

___

 

 

2/20/23: President Biden makes a surprise visit to Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, after traveling secretly by train, from Poland. There he announces America’s “unwavering support” for the effort to halt the Russian invasion. 

Mr. Biden  met with President Volodymyr Zelensky after a 10-hour overnight trip through Ukraine. Later, The New York Times noted, “the two stepped out into the streets of Kyiv even as an air-raid siren sounded, a dramatic moment that underscored the investment the United States has made in Ukraine’s independence.” Biden promises Ukraine another $500 million in armaments and ammunition.

Russian attacks on civilian targets have been widespread.

 

*

 

REP. Marjorie Taylor Greene has hatched a new plan to help Donald Trump “Make America Great Again,” by blowing America to bits.

 

 

“We can disagree without hate.”

 

Here is her plan, just released on Twitter:

 

We need a national divorce.

 

We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government.

 

Everyone I talk to says this.

 

From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous America Last policies, we are done.

 

I believe this is what she’s hoping for:

 

 

Sometimes, with screwball Republicans like Greene, Matt Gaetz and Paul Gosar getting all the publicity, we forget there are normal members of the GOP out there, pushing for sensible conservative policies.

 

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, for one, wanted no part of Greene’s idea. “This rhetoric is destructive and wrong and – honestly – evil,” he tweeted shortly after Greene spouted. “We don’t need a divorce. We need marriage counseling. And we need elected leaders that don’t profit by tearing us apart. We can disagree without hate. Healthy conflict was critical to our nation’s founding and survival.”

 

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: A survey in March will indicate that 1 in 5 Americans agrees. We need a “national divorce.”

 

For Republicans only, that percentage rises to 25%.

 

And if you listened to Fox News, the figure rose to 32%. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have to love this trend.

___

 

 

2/21/23: The National Snow and Ice Data Center (a government agency most people have never heard of – and no Trump fan ever) reports that for a second year in a row, Antarctic ice hit a record low.

 

 

Anomaly, not anomaly?

 

This year’s coverage was reduced by more than 50,000 square miles – kind of like not having a sheet of ice covering Alabama.

 

Scientists admit this development could be an anomaly. (They’re still worried.) And no, the much more noticeable trend lines in the Arctic aren’t an anomaly. (Scientists are very, very worried.)

 

Arctic ice has been dwindling since 1980.

 

We also know that on February 15, ice coverage on the Great Lakes hit an all-time low for the date: 6 percent.

 

Normal coverage is 41 percent.

 

Those figures come from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory.

 

 

 

*

 

GUN NEWS: Because there’s always gun news in America! In California, authorities arrest a man on the prohibited list, based on felon status, for gun ownership. During a home visit to confiscate one pistol, search warrant in hand, they find:

 

four machine guns, seven assault weapons, a short-barreled rifle, four suppressors/ silencers, six handguns, one shotgun, four rifles, 54 lower receivers/frames, 41 standard capacity magazines, 87 large-capacity magazines and approximately 35,000 rounds of miscellaneous ammunition[.]

 

And more gun news: Because there’s always more gun news in America! A fifth grader was removed from school after suggesting in a group chat with classmates that someone should “pop some bullets” and “shoot up the class.”

 

 

The “bad guy” with the gun was six.

If this rings a bell, it’s because the fifth grader attended Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Virginia. That’s the same school where Abby Zwerner was shot and badly wounded in January – by a “bad guy” with a gun.

Only the shooter in her case, the bad guy with a gun, was a six-year-old boy in Zwerner’s class.

Zwerner was in the middle of a lesson when the boy pulled a weapon from his bookbag and aimed directly at her. Zwerner threw up a hand. The child fired – as planned. The bullet passed through her hand and struck her in the chest. A second teacher (not armed), heard the commotion, entered the room, and calmly disarmed the boy. Zwerner had the presence of mind to lead her class out of the room, go to the main office, and tell staff to call 9-1-1. Then she collapsed.

As for right-wing thinkers in America today, we all know how much they love to talk about “good guys” with guns stopping bad guys, proving that the more guns we carry, the safer we become.

If only Zwerner had been armed! She could have returned fire – or fired first – and stopped that six-year-old dead in his tracks.

Just as God and the Founding Fathers, and the lobbyists for the big gun manufacturers intended.

*

 

IN SAD NEWS, for election deniers everywhere, the U.S. Supreme Court turns down a legal challenge in Brunson v. Adams, asking justices to have Donald J. Trump reinstated as president. This is the second time the high court passed on the chance, in a suit filed by three Utah brothers, Raland, Deron, and Loy Brunson. Raland says they’re not giving up, however, and it’s on to “Plan C.”

 

*

 

WE CAN ALSO REPORT that the Republican Party in Montana has been reduced in size by one member, after current leaders decided to revoke the membership of former two-term Gov. Marc Racicot, who also served in a happier era as chairman of the Republican National Committee.

 

That is: Racicot was for many years a Republican, when Trump was just a schlub who liked to cheat on his wives for fun.

 

Racicot’s sins included saying he would support Joe Biden in 2020, because “character” and “conscience” mattered.

___ 

 

2/23/23: You may have heard. A train has derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, and, having caught fire, is spewing toxic fumes into the air. Donald J. Trump has appeared at the scene to claim that if he were still president, the train would not have derailed, and East Palestine would smell like fresh-baked bread and roses on Valentine’s Day. 

 

Trump water! 

Trump even brought along a pallet of bottled water – Trump Water – promised truckloads more to come – gave his product a plug, while talking about himself, and what a great president he was – and reminisced about those glory days, back before Joe Biden stole the election. 

And, oh, that water! That Trump Water (also sometimes known as “water” in a plastic bottle, costing quite a bit more than tap water) – Don promised, “We’re bringing thousands of bottles of water - Trump Water, actually. Most of it. Some of it we had to go to a much lesser quality of water. You want to get those Trump bottles.” 

This seems like a fun time to remember exactly who Trump was, in office, regarding protecting the environment. 

1.     1.     He never visited a single train derailment during his four years in the White House. 

2.     He said repeatedly that climate change was “a hoax.” 

3.     He proved unable to differentiate between climate and weather. 

4.     His first choice for head of the Environmental Protection Agency left office under the cloud of thirteen investigations. 

5.     His second choice to head EPA had previously been a lobbyist for the coal industry. 

6.     His first choice for Secretary of the Interior also left Washington after he was accused of corruption. 

7.     A combination of 170 environmental groups, from the Audubon Society to the Sierra Club, graded Donald out at an “F” for his non-efforts to protect the environment. That included the nation’s water and air, soil and plants, birds and bees, fish and fowl, newts and humans.

East Palestine wreck.

___

 

2/24/23: Dastardly illegals keep sneaking across our border – and Pedophile President Joe Biden does nothing to stop them! 

 

Undocumented workers showing up in red states! 

Okay, that’s the GOP line. So why do undocumented workers keep showing up in red states, where they end up holding down jobs? In today’s news, the undocumented in question not only turn out to be undocumented but they turn out to be children. 

Working for a Hyundai plant in Alabama! You know, a deep red state where everyone votes Republican every chance they have. 

Some of the workers were as young as twelve. Further investigation turned up children in two other Hyundai plants in the same state, and at least ten factories, including some supplying parts to Kia, were also raided. 

I don’t think Biden hired any of these workers. 

The Labor Department has also completed another investigation – this time, turning up 102 children, ages 13-17, working in a Nebraska slaughterhouse, and in other states, in dangerous conditions. The company that hired them, mostly to do cleanup work, has been fined $1,544,076. 

“Duties,” for the children, “included cleaning backsaws, brisket saws and head splitters and using hazardous chemicals. The department says at least three children were hurt while at work.” 

And another investigation found 302 underage children working at 62 McDonald’s restaurants in Kentucky and several other states. That included two 10-year-olds, doing unpaid labor until 2 a.m. in the morning at one Kentucky location. “The two children prepared and distributed food orders, cleaned the store, worked at the drive-thru window and operated a register, investigators found.” 

One was also allowed to operate a deep fryer, “a task prohibited for workers under the age of 16 under federal law.”

 

* 

FORMER Vice President Mike Pence was asked today if he would support his old boss in another run for the presidency. He said he thought the GOP would have “better choices than my old running mate.”  

Mr. Pence (who does at least have the advantage of being a decent Christian gentleman) suggested that voters would like a return to Trump-Pence policies, but they also “want to see us and our politics return to the kind of civility and respect that Americans show one another every day.” 

I think this was Pence’s way of saying what I’ve been blogging about for seven long years. 

Donald is an asshole.

___ 

 

2/25/23: Today, I was trying to track down what I thought was a brand new story, about a 15-year-old bringing an AR-15 to school. But it appeared the story was from November – when a teen did bring an AR-15 pistol to school – and did have 32 rounds of ammunition. That was in Fayette County, Ga. 

 

Teens, guns, schools. 

I kept searching for the recent story, but all I found was this: Another 15-year-old pointed a loaded pistol at a classmate in a school bathroom. That took place in Jonesboro, Arkansas. 

Of course, when it comes to teens with guns, it can be easy to mix up examples. There was the girl, 15, who brought a gun to school and threatened to shoot a classmate. That was in Grafton, Ohio, on February 3. There was the other boy, 15, arrested after he was found sleeping with a loaded AR-15, perhaps dreaming of mayhem. That was in Hyattsville, Maryland. And the kid, 15, arrested for bringing a gun to a high school basketball game in Newton, N.C. – which was not the same as the kid, 15, who had a loaded gun at his high school in Lumberton, N.C. (That was the twelfth gun found on school campuses in Lumberton, in the eighteen months.) Then, you start getting stories about teens with AR-15’s, because Google notices you had “15” in your search. That means the senior at a Cleveland, Ohio high school, who brought an AR-15 style pistol, described as a “tactical weapon,” and ammo to school, pops up next. Then there were the two older teens who showed up outside Bowser High, in Toledo, Ohio, during a homecoming event. They came not with corsages – or dates – but AR-15s. 

Since the blogger believes we can do more to control the flood of guns, and the inevitable violence, it becomes a quest. How many examples can he find, proving that more guns don’t make us safer? Sticking more closely with the “armed 15-year-old” motif, you have the accidental shooting of one teen by another, at a Memphis, Tennessee school. That was at Freedom Prep on December 5, 2022. And there was the kid who got arrested for bringing a gun to school in St. Petersburg, Florida. That was on January 24, this year. Not to be confused, of course, with the 15-year-old who brought a gun to South High in Columbus, Ohio. Or the boy, 15, arrested near his old school in Montgomery County, Maryland, after an earlier altercation. Or the kid with the loaded gun at his school in Lakeland, Florida, last October. Or the other 15-year-old, last October, with a gun at Godby High School in Tallahassee. Or the boy, 15, with a loaded weapon at St. Pauls High School. Or the 15-year-old with the gun in the Orlando school. Or the kid with the loaded gun in his school in Marion County. Or the nearly identical story out of Blythewood High School, in Columbia, South Carolina. And the gun. And the kid. And the school. Only at Spring Valley High, in Richland County. And at the school in Lexington, Kentucky. And at the school in Coconut Creek, Florida. And the two 15-year-olds charged with bringing a gun to Woodbridge High School in Virginia. 

Finally, I found the original story I was looking for: Millbrook High School. Raleigh, North Carolina. 15-year-old with an AR-15. 

Brought to a high school basketball game. 

If I didn’t know better, I’d say we had a gun problem in America, and we could do something about it. 

 

FUN FACT: In December, a convicted New Jersey felon tried to sneak an AR-15 onto a plane scheduled to depart Newark Liberty International Airport. A routine baggage check turned up not only that weapon, but also a .308 caliber rifle, a .40 caliber Glock pistol, a Taser, a spring-loaded knife, an expandable baton, and “United States Marshal” credentials with his name and picture appended. The felon also had a fake badge, two magazines, each loaded with fifteen rounds, for the Glock, and a ballistic vest carrier which displayed the words, “U.S. Marshall.” 

This is not to be confused with the other fool, who tried to bring an AR-15, loaded with 30 rounds, aboard a plane departing from Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport last week. The passenger also had five magazines and a total of 163 rounds of ammunition. You know. In case the passenger in the adjacent seat tried to hog the armrest.

Weapon of choice for mass murderers.

___ 

 

2/27/23: This may be a story that can’t be traced to a source. Still, if you follow Donald Trump, you know it sounds exactly like something he’d try to do. According to Rolling Stone, in 2018, then-President Thin Skin was so upset with Jimmy Kimmel poking fun at him, that he decided to act. 

Against free speech – and jokes. 

 

“President Karen demanded to speak to my manager.” 

Trump demanded that White House staffers call up people who ran the Disney corporation, which owns ABC, which broadcasts the Kimmel show. 

One of the people who was allegedly called within the Disney corporation was former top lobbyist Richard Bates. There were also several other executives from the corporation who were approached about getting Kimmel “to tone down his anti-Trump humor,” but no one took the calls very seriously. Staffers apparently were somewhat weirded out by his request and the rumors spread quickly throughout D.C..

One political insider noted, “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.’” With Donald Trump running a third time for office, viewers already know Kimmel isn’t backing off his jabs at the former president — he’s likely leaning in even harder this time around.

 

At least two calls were reportedly made, in an attempt to “convey the president’s anger regarding Kimmel’s monologues and jabs.” 

As for Mr. Kimmel, when he heard the reports, he joked, “President Karen demanded to speak to my manager.” 

“Usually, when he wants someone to stop talking about him,” Kimmel added, “he pays them $130,000.” 

In one episode, on January 31, 2018, Kimmel had invited Stormy Daniels to come on as a guest. At one point, he presented her with carrots of varying sizes, and asked her to pick the one that best represented “the president’s junk.” 

Still concerned with conditions imposed upon her under a Non-Disclosure Agreement, the former porn star abstained.

 

* 

IN OTHER NEWS, more than three-fourths of Rep. George Santos’s constituents want the prolific liar to resign. 

 

The free press works to expose wrongdoing. 

And that includes 71% of Republicans – the people who elected him, before the free press started revealing his prodigious lying. 

Even more fun: Santos isn’t the only brand new GOP member of Congress to have fudged his resume. 

Rep. Andy Ogles, from Tennessee, has acknowledged that he does not have the college degrees he claimed he had. He said he had a degree in international relations. But didn’t. He now says he didn’t know he didn’t, until he got a college transcript because he wanted to verify the claim he had already made. 

“I previously stated that my degree from MTSU [Middle Tennessee State University] was in International Relations. When I pulled my transcript to verify, I realized I was mistaken. My degree is in Liberal Studies. I apologize for my misstatement,” he admitted. And who doesn’t forget what their degree in college was! 

Ogles also claimed to be a “trained economist,” which sounded promising for voters who hoped Congress might come up with ways to trim the federal deficit. Alas, his credentials in that area proved depressingly thin. He took one class in economics and earned a “C.” 

In fact, a third Republican lawmaker, Rep. David Dobos, who held a seat on the Higher Education Committee, in the Ohio General Assembly, was forced to step down from his position. He had long claimed he was a graduate of MIT – despite the inconvenient truth that he wasn’t. 

 

FUN FACT – RECYCLING: Dow Inc. and the government of Singapore recently announced an initiative to recycle old tennis shoes and turn them into running tracks and playgrounds for kids. 

You know – cut down on waste and pollution and help save the world. 

Reuters decided to do a test. Tracking devices were hidden in eleven pairs of old shoes to see where they went after they were donated. 

A grand total of zero pairs ended up being recycled, whereas eleven pairs ended up being sold by second-hand dealers in Indonesia.

___ 

 

2/28/23: You can’t say Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene isn’t on guard, protecting America’s borders. 

On Tuesday, she jumped in her time machine and went back to 2020 to stop the troubles caused by President Biden. 

During a House Homeland Security Committee hearing, Rep. Greene lambasted the current administration for stopping more fentanyl at the border than was stopped previously, proving (somehow) that Team Biden didn’t care about stopping the fentanyl that has been coming across the border in massive quantities for years. But she topped herself when she posted a link to a video on Twitter, explaining: “Listen to this mother, who lost two children to fentanyl poisoning, tell the truth about both of her son’s murders because of the Biden administration’s refusal to secure our border and stop the Cartel’s from murdering Americans everyday by Chinese fentanyl.” 

First, can we get the congresswoman a lesson in the proper use of the apostrophe? 

Second, can someone tell the poor dolt that the video of Rebecca Kiessling, a Michigan mother telling a really sad story (and the fentanyl carnage is real), came from 2020? You know. When Donald was president.

 

* 

SINCE border security is today’s hot topic, consider a typical night in Grand Rapids, Michigan. A factory worker named Caroline, stationed beside a conveyor belt, is stuffing bags of Cheerios into yellow cartons. Caroline is fifteen. It’s past midnight. But the teen is an undocumented worker. 

So the company can hire her cheap. 

She’s just one of many at the factory. At other nearby plants, all run by Hearthside Food Solutions, other underage, undocumented children are tending ovens to make Chewy and Nature Valley granola bars. 

The New York Times reports on the growing exploitation of underage migrant workers, many of whom came to this country without parents: 

“Sometimes I get tired and feel sick,” Carolina said after a shift in November. Her stomach often hurt, and she was unsure if that was because of the lack of sleep, the stress from the incessant roar of the machines, or the worries she had for herself and her family in Guatemala. “But I’m getting used to it.”

 

Fanning out across the country, reporters found widespread abuse. There were 12-year-olds doing roofing work in Florida and Tennessee. In Delaware, Mississippi, and North Carolina, young workers toiled in slaughterhouses, and no one bothered about enforcing child labor laws. Girls as young as thirteen washed hotel sheets in Virginia. A teacher in Miami told reporters some of her middle school students were working twelve-hour shifts after school ended. No one paid the young overtime. In Los Angeles, children stitched “Made in America” tags into J. Crew shirts. “As recently as the fall, middle-schoolers made Fruit of the Loom socks in Alabama,” reporters noted. “In Michigan, children make auto parts used by Ford and General Motors.” 

The companies – or their subcontractors – didn’t trouble to pay into Social Security, because the young workers were undocumented. So the companies profited handsomely, and people like Rep. Greene focused cluelessly on the “crisis” at the border. 

Meanwhile, Hearthside blamed a staffing agency for sending them children to put to work on their product lines. 

“It’s the new child labor,” explained one high school teacher, who had seen many of his students suffering. “You’re taking children from another country and putting them in almost indentured servitude.” 

 

FUN FACT: Former president and lifelong fool, Donald J. Trump, has revealed his secret plan to end the war in Ukraine. It’s a surefire winner. “You have to knock heads and you have to get it done,” he tells a friendly radio interviewer. “That would mean saying things to Putin and saying things to Zelensky that they’re not gonna want to hear and getting them into a room and getting it done.” 

Almost as good as his plan to get North Korea to give up all its nuclear weapons – a deal which Trump claimed he got done. 

But didn’t.

___

March 1, 2023: Mark Muffley, of Lansford, Pennsylvania, has been arrested and charged with attempting to sneak an explosive device onto a flight scheduled to depart (possibly forever) from Lehigh Valley International Airport. 

ABC reports: 

The device hidden in the bag’s lining was a circular compound, about 3 inches in diameter, that had two fuses and powder concealed in wax paper and plastic wrap, according to the criminal complaint.

The “powder is suspected to be a mixture of flash powder and the dark granulars that are used in commercial grade fireworks,” the complaint said. “The black powder and flash powder are susceptible to ignite from heat and friction and posed a significant risk to the aircraft and passengers.”

First: Innocent until proven guilty. 

Second, I don’t mean to judge a possible terrorist by his cover, but Mr. Muffley, if charges are true, looks like the prototype, right-wing crazy. 

(Personally, I will start worrying about drag shows, when some person in drag tries to blow up a plane on which I am passenger.)

 

  

Nor was Muffley the only nut arrested this week and charged with terroristic behavior. Four men and one woman in Fresno, California were busted by police and charged in a series of pipe bombings. Scott Anderson, 44, the alleged ringleader of the group, faces seven felony charges, including one for possessing firearms, despite his status as a convicted felon. 

To give you a sense of where Anderson stands, politically speaking, here’s a shot of evidence used in charges against him:

The packages, lower right, allegedly contain methamphetamine.

* 

SPEAKING of worries: Eight Republican lawmakers in Iowa have put forward a proposal to ban same-sex marriage in that state. An amendment to the Iowa Constitution would read: “In accordance with the laws of nature and nature’s God, the state of Iowa recognizes the definition of marriage to be the solemnized union between one human biological male and one human biological female.”  

Personally, I’m a little concerned about the phrase “nature’s God,” which sounds like the Gang of Eight is promoting Druidism. 

In other “marriage news,” Rupert Murdoch is considering a fifth marriage, figuring that his four previous divorces should not be discouraging. 

Always a romantic, even at 91, the man who runs Fox News, where you can hear right-wingers talking about how liberals want to trample the sanctity of marriage, is considering “putting a ring on it,” yet again.

 

* 

THE PENTAGON has also announced that Iran has enough nuclear material to build a bomb in twelve days, if the Iranians desire. 

We all recall when President Trump tore up the nuclear deal with Iran, which kept them from getting a nuclear weapon for the entire eight years Obama was in office. The Biden administration has tried to restart the deal; but Iran has balked, and negotiations remain “on ice.” 

Trump, of course, promised he could get a better deal. 

In four years in office, he failed.

 

* 

IN MUCH BETTTER NEWS, 41% of U.S. electricity is now generated from zero-carbon sources, the highest rate ever. 

Also: Eli Lily is wilting under pressure – in particular from the Biden administration. After jacking up the price of insulin for years (even though it was first invented a century ago, and the original patent sold for $1) the company has agreed to cap out-of-pocket prices for type-1 diabetics at $35 per month, after insurance. 

Type-1 diabetics, of course, must have insulin…to live. But, until the Biden administration pressed the company, patients were sometimes paying as much as $1,000 per month, out-of-pocket. 

Just as God and the GOP intended.

___

 

 3/2/23: Good news – sort of. The mayor of College Park, Maryland was arrested (the good news) and charged with 56 counts of child pornography (definitely not good news). This blogger is always willing to admit that his side, politically, has its share of disreputable persons. 

Patrick Wojahn is a Democrat. And no. Not all Democrats or any but a minute percentage are pedophiles. 

If Mr. Wojahn is proven guilty, he deserves a long spell in the slammer. At this blog, we don’t chant, “Lock him,” or “Lock her,” or even, “Lock they, up,” if the suspect is transgender – until courts have ruled. 

As for Donald Trump, the court news continues to come thick and fast where he’s concerned. The Department of Justice has ruled that it does not believe the former president is immune from lawsuits filed by police officers injured during the January 6, 2021, riot on Capitol Hill. If his words, after he lost the 2020 election – but insisted (and still insists) he won – were found to have been an “incitement of imminent private violence” he could be liable for damages.

___ 

 

3/6/23: Texas lawmaker, Rep. Bryan Slaton, has filed a bill calling for a referendum, in 2023. Labeled “Texit,” Slaton’s brilliant idea is to have the people of his state vote on withdrawing from the United States. “After decades of continuous abuse of our rights and liberties by the federal government,” he argues, “it is time to let the people of Texas make their voices heard.” 

Well, good riddance, if they go. We can kick the Dallas Cowboys out of the National Football League.

For real fun, check out the story for May 9, about Slaton and his harassment of young female interns.

Last time Texas tried to leave the Union, it got bloody.
Battle of Antietam, 1862.

___ 

 

3/10/23: At a rally for Governor Ron DeSantis in Iowa today, a “fan” gave him a snowflake card – which by his grin you can see how much he likes. Only later did Team Ron realize what hidden message was included therein.

___ 

 

3/12/23: Saudi oil giant Aramco posts a record profit for 2022: $161 billion dollars, roughly $20 for every man, woman, and child on earth. Republicans continue to blame President Biden for soaring prices at the pump.

___ 

 

3/13/23: The Texas Senate advances a bill to make illegal voting a felony, punishable by up to 20 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. 

This comes four years after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton scared the pants off MAGA Americans, claiming that 95,000 undocumented individuals were registered to vote in his state, and that 58,000 had. 

That claim soon proved to be vastly in error (see: 2/10/23) – just like  the time North Carolina said 10,000 suspected non-citizens had voted, and then checked again and found out the number was 11. 

Or when Florida said 180,000 people voted illegally – and then discovered only 85 names needed to be removed from voter rolls.

___ 

 

3/14/23: South Carolina lawmakers – at least 21 Republicans – are proposing a bill that would make women who have abortions liable under state homicide law. That is: a fertilized egg would be defined as “a child,” and a woman who had an abortion could receive the death penalty.

*

FAT DONALD is in Davenport, Iowa today, gearing up for another run for the presidency. Reporters ask him about his biggest challenger, so far, Republican governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis.

Trump responds with his typical lack of class:

“Remember this: If it weren’t for me, Ron DeSanctimonious would right now be working probably at a law firm or maybe a Pizza Hut, I don’t know,” Trump said.

At his speech later that day, Trump compared DeSantis to former House Speaker Paul Ryan, whom he called a “RINO loser,” and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT).

If we are not totally clueless, we realize that both Ryan and Romney were Republicans long before Trump joined the party. 

And did you know? Romney got a higher percentage of the popular vote in 2012, than Donald garnered in either 2016 or 2020. 

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: The idea of exposing South Carolina women to murder charges – and a possible death sentence if they have an abortion – proves so unpopular that just three days after floating the proposal, nine of the original twenty-one GOP sponsors back down. In other words, they want to “protect the lives of the unborn.” 

They want to protect their seats in the legislature more.

___ 

 

3/16/23: It can be nearly impossible to talk sense to Trump supporters these days because they have their prophets telling them what’s going to happen. And who gave these prophets the news? 

God did. 

The most recent case would be God talking to Julie Green, which he does quite often. Sometimes twice daily. 

And how does God do it? He tells her to turn on certain recordings and speaks to her through music “frequencies.” 

 

God tells Green that Trump will not be indicted. 

In one interview, she claims she’s been hearing from the Lord for years, but with increasing regularity lately. She says He will give her detailed information about Hunter Biden’s laptop, with Green saying she had heard “tons of words about that,” adding that “He’ll call out government officials.” Sometimes, God just gives her a word or phrase, like “firefly, “monkey” or “rapid fire.” Then it’s all over the news. In the latter case, she says it’s because Mr. Biden has been confirmed as “a rapid fire gaffe machine.” She often wakes up “with a song in [her] heart,” and she plays it when she jumps out of bed… And … okay, she sounds like a fraud, to me. 

Alas, God misfired badly in 2022. It was then that Green promised Doug Mastriano, running for governor of Pennsylvania, that He would not forsake him in his quest to ensure that “the great steal [of the 2020 election] be overturned.” 

Mr. Mastriano was so excited by the news he asked Green to make a custom video for his campaign. 

Sadly, the voters in Pennsylvania did forsake Mastriano. Last November he got smoked by a godless Democrat named Josh Shapiro, who garnered 56% of the vote, compared to God’s chosen one, at 41%. Not only did God not anoint Mastriano to lead the Keystone State, God has not yet revealed proof in court that the 2020 election was stolen. Which, I guess, is the Lord working in mysterious ways. 

(Maybe we’ll finally get the proof on two stone tablets, like Moses.)

 

In any case, Green now assures us that Trump is out of the legal woods and retribution is nigh. God says He will not allow Trump to be indicted. Referring to Trump as the “rightful president,” she tells her podcast viewers not to “worry about the things you see.” “There will be no indictment of My son,” God has assured her. Instead, those trying to indict Trump will be indicted, “because this is a time of seedtime and harvest.” 

That’s a promise, God tells Green: “I am the end to their plans, because I am the great I am.”

 

FUN FACT: According to Green (although she hasn’t figured this out yet) no matter what shows up on Hunter Biden’s laptop, Joe Biden can’t possibly be charged with any crimes! 

Says who? Says God! 

Because Green claims He told her Joe is dead – and he’s being played by an actor controlled by Barack Obama.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (6/13/23): We now know, God, or Green, or both, were in error. Fat Donald Trump has definitely been indicted, in Florida, on 37 felony counts, related to hiding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home. 

Goddam! That’s a lot!

___ 

 

3/17/23: At times, we can get a sense of who Donald J. Trump really is, simply by the company he keeps.

 

__________ 

“He that lieth down with dogs shall rise up with fleas.” 

Ben Franklin

__________ 

 

Our latest example comes when a judge orders Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran to appear before a grand jury for a second time, and answer additional questions – under what is known as the “crime-fraud” exception. 

Under ordinary circumstances anything Corcoran and Trump discussed would be protected client-attorney privilege. 

But where evidence of intent to commit new crimes or perpetrate fresh frauds may be found, testimony can be demanded. 

Meanwhile, Trump has released a video, positing the idea that if prosecutors come after him, they’re coming after you (if you love Trump) next. I doubt that very much, but I have some really nice neighbors who voted for Trump, and even a son-in-law whom I cherish. If the feds come after them, I will hide them in my attic annex; because they are good, decent folk, whereas I am a well-known liberal. 

No one could possibly  suspect me.

___ 

 

3/18/23: Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon has signed into law a bill banning medical abortion pills. (According to the Food and Drug Administration, the most effective pills are approved for use only in the first ten weeks of pregnancy.) 

Wyoming becomes the first state to do so.

___ 

 

3/19/23: When in American history has a former vice president ever accused his former president of endangering his life? 

Well – 2023 would now be your answer.

Mike, and the guy who nearly got him killed.

 

 

Killed, maimed, or defenestrated. 

Mike Pence said again today that Donald Trump “let him down” on January 6, 2021, when he stirred up a mob (with lies) and almost got his VP killed, maimed or, at the very least, defenestrated. 

On ABC’s This Week, this morning, Mr. Pence explained what went wrong. In the wake of defeat at the hands of Joe Biden, Donald refused to accept the loss. 

“I had actually hoped that he would come around in time,” Pence said, “that he would see the cadre of legal advisers that he surrounded himself with led him astray, but he hasn’t done so.” 

Pence then added: “There’s no excuse for the violence that took place at the Capitol on January 6, and I’ll never diminish it, as long as I live.”  

Former President Trump (“Fat Donald,” as we sometimes like to call him here at this blog) “still hasn’t come around,” Pence admitted. “It’s one of the reasons why the country wants a fresh start.”

___ 

 

3/21/23: Eight hundred, sixty-eight days have passed since the last presidential election. No evidence has ever been proven in court to show that the election was stolen. Meanwhile, Fox News has run into serious turbulence in its defense against a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems. 

 

Coaxing prior to her deposition. 

Abby Grossberg, a producer who worked with both Tucker Carlson and Maria Bartiromo, has filed suit against the company. She accuses Fox officials coaxing her in “a coercive and intimidating fashion,” prior to her deposition in the lawsuit. According to Ms. Grossman, she was expected to protect the on-air talent. 

(Blogger scratches cranium: “Talent?” For what? Lying?)

 

Lawyers for Fox News spent today trying to convince a judge not to allow Grossberg’s suit to go forward.

 

* 

IN RED-STATE OKLAHOMA, the State Supreme Court finds that the right to an abortion in cases where the mother’s life is at stake does exist. 

You would have thought this wasn’t hard to find, but nine justices barely found it themselves, overturning a law that banned abortions to save a mother except in cases of “medical emergency.” On a 5-4 vote, the court ruled that waiting until a “medical emergency” was an idiotic way to treat patients. 

But the vote against idiocy was only 5-4!

___

 

3/22/23: If you were born in 2020, according to the United Nations, you are screwed. By climate change, that is. By the time you are 70, the global temperature could be as much as four degrees centigrade warmer than during the pre-industrial era. 

Or: 7.2 degrees hotter, Fahrenheit. 

Last week, Tucker Carlson argued that climate change might not be so bad! It would have “upsides to it and downsides,” he explained. 

First, Tuck made the case that there was nothing we could do. “And of course, the climate does change. It has always changed. In fact, the landscape we live in now is formed by climate change,” he said. “The glaciers are a product of climate change. The climate is changing now. It never stops changing. That’s a process that we didn’t cause and can’t control to any great degree.” 

So, screw our kids and grandkids. 

In fact, Carlson looked at the positives. “By the way, if Earth is indeed getting warmer and seems to be, well then that will make more arable land in places like Canada and northern Europe,” he said. 

“So, like everything in this life and the temporal world, it’s a mixed blessing,” he explained to his viewers, who were apparently too dumb to figure out the problem with the scenario Tucker had just laid out. “You only hear the downsides, which tells you a lot,” he insisted. “It tells you this is not science, it’s manipulation. These aren’t reports from the experts, these are threats.” 

Only he just admitted the world was warming – and that wasn’t a threat.

___ 

 

3/25/23: “Don’t say COVID fraud!” Joseph Harding, the lawmaker most responsible for Florida’s “don’t say ‘gay’” law, has been busted for scamming COVID relief funds. 

Harding is accused of misappropriating $150,000 in federal funds.

 

* 

SPEAKING of fraud, the Big Orange Fraud was speaking in Waco, Texas today. During another one of his hour-long rants, Rejected-President Trump insisted the U.S. Supreme Court “didn’t have the courage” to right the Great Wrong. He won the 2020 election he claimed – for the ten thousandth time. “They knew what was going on,” he added. But somehow, they didn’t care. 

Trump goes on to say that lawyers used to be “considered above reproach,” but now, in this dystopian universe, somehow his lawyers get treated in court like a bunch of bozos who can’t make a case stick. 

Okay, he put differently than that; but if Team Trump’s lawyers were a baseball team, they’d be the equivalent of the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, the worst team in major league history, which finished with a final record of 20 wins and 134 losses.

___ 

 

3/31/23: Finally, we have a dose of real voter fraud to confirm – in court – in a trial. With a jury! Douglass Mackey has been found guilty of depriving voters of their right to vote and could face a decade in prison. 

 

Real voter fraud to report – finally! 

Politico explains: 

In 2016, Mackey had about 58,000 Twitter followers and was ranked by the MIT Media Lab as the 107th-most important influencer of the then-upcoming presidential election, prosecutors said. He had described himself as an “American nationalist” who regularly retweeted Trump and promoted conspiracy theories about voter fraud by Democrats.

 

So…oops…a Trumpster was the crook.

 

Prosecutors told jurors during the trial that Mackey urged supporters of then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to “vote” via text message or social media, knowing that those endorsements were not legally valid votes.

 

At about the same time, prosecutors said, he was sending tweets suggesting that it was important to limit “black turnout” at voting booths. One tweet he sent showed a photo of a Black woman with a Clinton campaign sign, encouraging people to “avoid the line” and “vote from home,” court papers said.

 

Using social media pitches, one image encouraging phony votes utilized a font similar to one used by the Clinton campaign in authentic ads, prosecutors said. Others tried to mimic Clinton’s ads in other ways, they added.

 

By Election Day in 2016, at least 4,900 unique telephone numbers texted “Hillary” or something similar to a text number that was spread by multiple deceptive campaign images tweeted by Mackey and co-conspirators, prosecutors said.

 

Twitter has said it worked closely with appropriate authorities on the issue.