Let’s
make Rep. Randy Weber, congressman from Texas, the poster boy for the cruel and
unusual punishments being unnecessarily inflicted upon undocumented immigrants,
only a fraction of whom are hardened criminals, or real threats to this
country. Recently, Rep. Weber showed up for a radio interview and started cracking a few jokes.
In
homage to his beloved president’s plan to pay illegal immigrants $1,000 to self-deport,
Weber suggested flying them back to their home countries, but with a twist.
Once overhead, he said, you could open an exit door and offer them a choice:
money or a parachute.
Funny,
right!
Enough
to make Adolf Hitler laugh.
A regular comedian - Congressman Weber.
___
Reasons not to approve of ICE tactics:
1. An illegal
immigrant in Colorado attacks a pro-Israel demonstration with a homemade
flamethrower. Eight people are injured, including six with burns. One victim later
dies of her injuries.
(MAGA types insist this proves all undocumented persons should
get the boot.)
(The liberal blogger considers his crime heinous – but it’s his
crime, no other’s.)
___
2. A Minnesota man, and
sometimes evangelical Christian preacher kills one Democratic politician, her husband,
and wounds two others.
(MAGA types don’t insist this proves all evangelicals are
dangerous.)
(The blogger knows it is stupid to blame entire groups.)
___
3. An
Alabama couple finds out the hard way that Trump immigration policies
aren’t going to be nuanced or humane. Morgan Karimi voted for Donald, believing
ICE would go after criminal scumbags. Sadly, ICE grabbed her husband Ribvar, 26,
who had fled Iran. Mrs. Karimi says she and her family no longer support
Donald.
___
4. ICE agents
decide to waste time and resources arresting a “dangerous” Massachusetts high
school student, who has been living in this country, and going to school since age
six. On his graduation weekend!
(Do you feel safer, America?)
___
5. The
blogger thinks ICE should focus more on the flamethrower guys (See: #1) and not high school
kids, who could be deported to countries they hardly know. Or to South Sudan – a hell hole.
The
astute American would quickly realize that sending deportees, particularly
deportees with no criminal record, to South Sudan would be “cruel and unusual
punishment.”
7. Narciso
Barranco has sent three sons to the United States Marines.
Two are currently serving. ICE just chased down their dad, who was doing
landscaping work in Santa Anna, California. When agents pinned him to the
ground, one started pummeling him in the head.
(Across the U.S. Armed Forces, 19.5% of all personnel identify
as Hispanic.)
Alejandro
Barranco, Narciso’s oldest son, says his family feels “betrayed.” Part of his
time in the Marines was spent on duty in Kabul, when Afghanistan fell, and
thirteen Marines (like him) were killed by a suicide bomber.
(“Thank you for your service.” Isn’t that what MAGAs say?)
___
8. Federal
agents nab a “dangerous mother” of three, including a five-year-old daughter
with severe autism, and prepare to ship her to whatever country Donald Trump might choose.
“Goodbye,
mama.”
The
children are U.S. citizens.
___
9. ICE
agents strike fear in the hearts of dangerous criminals everywhere by arresting a former U.S. Army interpreter
who helped our fighting men and women (and trans soldiers) in Afghanistan.
“I came
here to make a better life,” the Afghan-born refugee can be heard saying in
video of his arrest. “I didn’t know that this would happen… I worked with the
U.S. military.” His name has been withheld for fear of Taliban retaliation, if
he is denied asylum.
___
10. On
Truth Social, on June 12, Mr. Trump changes course, regarding ICE enforcement. He’s
like a moose learning to ice skate.
“Our
great farmers and people in the hotel and leisure business have been stating
that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good,
long-time workers [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted] away from them,
with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” he explains. “We must
protect our farmers,” he continues, “but get criminals out of the U.S.A.
Changes are coming.”
___
11. According
to The New York Times, the next day an email goes out. ICE is ordered to
stop acting like ICE until further notice (unless enforcement operations can be
used to stir up blue cities like Los Angeles).
“Effective today,” Tatum King, a top ICE
official writes, “please hold on all work site enforcement
investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat
packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels.”
Agents are also told to stop arresting “non-criminal
collaterals,” or people who might be here illegally, but not criminals.
___
12. According
to U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates, as recently as 2022, 42% of farm workers in
this country were undocumented, with another 19% authorized foreign workers or
green card holders.
(What happened to the Biden-caused “invasion” of illegals???)
___
13.
Extreme MAGA types and born haters in the Trump administration react with fury
to the news of planned enforcement changes (#10).
___
14. The
moose on ice skates tries to change direction again but runs into the skating
rink wall and breaks a leg. On Monday, June 17, The Washington Post
reports that ICE agents have been told they must continue conducting
immigration raids at agricultural businesses, hotels and restaurants. The first
clarifications were already in the works on Sunday, and the “new instructions
were shared [on Monday] in an 11 a.m. call to representatives from 30 field
offices across the country.
___
15. Sometimes
you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear dresses up as an ICE agent, stops your
A+ Roofing van, and drags away five of your “criminal” employees. This
is funny (except for the workers) because Vincent Scardina, the owner of said
Florida company, is a big Trump supporter.
(Criminals captured: 0.)
___
16. “Thank
you for your service,” as they say. Adrian Clouatre, who says he “gave up the
best five years” of his life to serve with the Marines, is now short one wife. U.S.
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents snatched her up when she showed
up for a green card interview.
The
former Marine isn’t asking for much. “At the very least, I would
like to be able to keep my wife,” he told a reporter. He and his spouse, Paolo,
have two children, a 1-year-old boy, and a nine-week-old daughter.
(Criminals captured: 0. American family members deprived of a
loved one: 3)
___
17. Glenn
Valley Foods’ plant in Omaha, Nebraska is shut down, as ICE agents take away 76
undocumented employees and employees suspected of using false papers. (That
would be 35% of the plant workforce.)
___
18. Again,
many of the workers taken have been in this country for years and have children
who are citizens.
___
19. Once
again, the ICE guys who wear masks so we can’t figure out who they are, have
snagged a “dangerous” illegal immigrant, this time, right here in Cincinnati, where the blogger lives. In
this case, the wilily “killer” is Emerson Colindres, a 19-year-old high school
graduate and soccer star.
In fact,
Colindres must have been secretly plotting a strike by not having a criminal
record, as if to make himself look unthreatening, and cleverly showing up for a
routine check-in with immigration authorities at their office in Blue Ash.
No
doubt, this “monster” has been waiting patiently, preparing to strike, having
come here from Honduras at the age of eight.
Clearly,
as President Trump could explain, Emerson, is a threat to all of us, every day
of our lives, just waiting to kick us to death with his soccer cleats.
In fact,
he comes from a nest of “vipers,” as Channel 19 explains:
Fleeing
persecution from gangs, Colindres’ mother, Baquedano Amador, has said she
applied for asylum when she arrived in this country with her son and
now-16-year-old daughter in 2014.
A judge
denied her application, and the family was given a final order of removal in
2023.
ICE
officials recently told his mother that she and her daughter must leave the
country within 30 days.
Catholic
charities have been trying to help the family – but I think this means all
Catholics hate America and oppose the rule of law.
___
20. Deporting
criminals who want to slit our throats, that’s fine. The problem is that ICE
recently grabbed Maria Isidro, wife of a Florida pastor, who had been living in
this country for almost thirty years and shipped her back to Mexico.
That
arrest was announced on Facebook recently, by her daughter Daniella,
who has now been deprived of her mom.
“She’s
just being treated as though she’s not a human,” a family friend says.
(And this is exactly what Stephen Miller wants.)
___
21. Florida Attorney
General James Uthmeier announces a brilliant new plan for how to help
ICE do God’s work. He will build a detention center in the middle of the
Everglades, and surround it with “gators, crocs and snakes,” what he describes
as a “low-cost” solution for detaining “criminal aliens.”
___
22.
Right-wing haters are ecstatic. “Alligator Alcatraz” merch goes on sale, kind
of like if the Nazis had “Make Auschwitz Great Again” gear for sale, because
what could be funnier than escapees being torn apart by hungry beasts!
Or “undesirables”
gassed.
___
23.
Leading hater, Laura Loomer, gets aroused just thinking about the fact that the
Trump administration may soon deport 65 million illegals – which just so happens
to be the number of all Latino individuals currently living in this
country.
(Loomer is also a big hater of Muslims, including Muslim
Americans.)
___
24. Striking
swiftly, to protect us all from killer illegals, ICE arrests Moises Sotelo-Casas, described as “a
popular Oregon vineyard owner,” who was caught in the act of going to church.
His daughter, Alondra, told KGW8 NEWS, “He was in chains at his feet...
everything was taken from him.”
According
to a GoFundMe set up by his family, the prisoner is a husband, father of three
and a grandfather.
In 2020,
he was awarded the annual Vineyard Excellence Award by the Oregon Wine Board.
So, I think we can all agree, his arrest now keeps us safe from corkscrews.
Something like that.
(Also: Killer grandpas.)
___
25. ICE sweeps
up another killer nursing school graduate off the streets, after Caroline
Dias Goncalves, 19, is caught in the act of driving too close behind a truck in
Colorado. Let off by the officer who stopped her, he notifies ICE, and another “horrible”
human being is taken away.
(As the MAGAs love to say, “I voted for this.”)
___
26. If
you did, you are kind of a giant asshole, I would say. Heretofore, Goncalves was
protected by the DACA program – and for that reason, for now, she has been able
to retain a lawyer and has been released from detention.
Are we
sure we need to be protected from her?
And not ICE?
Goncalves - a danger to others?
___
27. In
another raid, ICE agents arrest four restaurant workers in San Diego, who are
doubtless intent on poisoning the food of unsuspecting MAGA diners – which, of
course, has never happened before. They also chased down a worker at a car
wash, where I think the danger was, he might have scratched cars’ paint. Also,
they showed up at an LA Fitness gym, ready to grab any illegals who might drop
dumbbells on patrons’ heads; and, best of all, they keep showing up for
immigration court hearings and handcuffing dangerous illegals who have come
to court as required.
___
28. The
men and women (but no transgenders!) of ICE have grabbed another killer off the
streets. This time they arrest the wife of a Ayssac Correa, a sergeant in the
U.S. Army, and deport her.
By one
estimate, as many as 80,000 undocumented spouses and parents of active-duty
personnel may be living in this country.
Wouldn’t
it be great if one of the Marines Trump sent to Los Angeles to help ICE, ended
up helping deport his or her own parents!
(Laura Loomer would be thrilled, as would be White House advisor
Stephen Miller.)
___
29.
After ginning up anti-immigrant terror for years, Donald Trump is slowly coming
to the realization that Donald is a dope. (We
could have told him that in 2015, as soon as he and Melania came floating down that
golden escalator.)
Suddenly,
he realizes that all Mexicans aren’t “killers” and “rapists,” and he’s changing
deportation strategy again!!
On Friday,
June 20, he announces his latest plan. He wants farmers to know they might be
able to keep employing undocumented migrant workers without
fearing ICE will come grab them before they can load all the lettuce on the
trucks.
“We’re
looking at doing something where in the case of good, reputable farmers, they
can take responsibility for the people that they hire, and let them have
responsibility, because we can’t put the farms out of business, and at the same
time, we don’t want to hurt people that aren’t criminals,” Trump tells reporters.
___
30.
Really, President Moron? You “don’t want to hurt people that aren’t criminals?”
Really!!!
Tell the
pastor’s wife (above).
Or the
soccer kid who was here in Cincinnati (above).
But now
he’s gone.
Fuck!
Who the fuck thinks President Moron really knows what the fuck he’s doing at
this point?
___
31. The
agents from ICE move swiftly, once more, to make America safe from 64-year-old
criminal immigrants working in their garden with sharp gardening tools.
Such as trowels. Madonna “Donna” Kashanian has lived in this country for 47
years, since fleeing Iran – and has no known criminal record. But now, maybe we
can deport her back to Iran, so bombs can fall on her head.
As The
Guardian reports, the ever-dangerous Kashanian “often shared Persian
recipes on YouTube and was active in her daughter’s schools.” Reporters add
that arrests of illegal immigrants who do not have criminal records have
increased by 807% since Donald and his heartless pals have taken over.
___
32. When
ICE catches real murderers and rapists and that type, it’s a win. So good job, at
least part of the time! In the case of Edvin Giovanni Ceron-Reyes, 37, an
illegal alien and Guatemalan citizen who had previously been convicted of
attempted murder, they now have him in custody and are set to deport his ass.
(Of
course, he wasn’t much of a threat at the time, as he was already serving 20
years in prison.)
___
33. It
would appear that ICE sucks at catching real threats. According to Arthu Sahakyan,
“[President] Trump is not trying to do anything bad,” when it comes to undocumented
immigrants. No.
“He
wants the best for the country.”
Meanwhile,
ICE has grabbed his wife, Arpineh Masihi, now in her 40s, who came to the U.S.
when she was three. Until now, the couple had supported the president, and Arthu
says…he still does!
He’s
going to keep flying the Trump flag at their home. He just won’t be able to
talk to his wife every evening.
___
34. On
the other hand, ICE continues to gobble up high school students, this
time putting the cuffs on Alan Junior Pierre. The latest detainee arrived
legally from Haiti and has no criminal history, which is more than the
President of the United States can say. His father, Dutan, is an American
citizen himself, and filed the paperwork necessary for his son to be admitted
to this country.
But,
hey, screw that kid.
___
35. And
screw the 6-year-old with leukemia too. The unnamed child, his
sister, age nine, and their Honduran mother entered this country legally last
fall and asked for asylum. ICE busted up their dangerous “gang” and they have
been in custody since May.
37.
Finally, we need to face the truth: Even Donald Dumpling doesn’t know what he
wants ICE to do. On July 3, during a speech in Iowa, Ol’ Dumpling said he
wanted to save the farmers – who need all those invading illegal immigrants to
help plant and harvest and ship the crops.
With
Homeland Security Fashion Babe Kristi Noem in attendance, Donald assured his Iowan fans:
If a
farmer’s willing to vouch for these people, in some way, Kristi, I think we’re
going to have to just say that’s going to be good, right? You know, we’re going
to be good with it. Because we don’t want to do it where we take all of the
workers off the farms. We want the farms to do great like they’re doing right
now.”\
In
another one of his rambling brag-a-thons, the president kept blabbing, about
how he loved farmers for sure.
We’re
working with Kristi and we’re going to do something that we’re going to sort of
put the farmers in charge. And if somebody, if a farmer’s been with one of
these people that works so hard, they bend over all day. We don’t have too many
people who can do that, but they work very hard and they know them very well.
And some of the farmers are literally, you know, they cry when they see this
happen.
In fact,
it wasn’t just farmers, Donald wanted to show love, and so he rambled on:
Farmers,
look, they know better. They work with them for years. You had cases where, not
year, but just even over the years where people have worked for a farm, on a
farm for 14, 15 years, and they get thrown out pretty viciously, and we can’t
do it. We gotta work with the farmers, and people that have hotels and leisure
properties, too.
So,
might a liberal blogger ask? If we can trust farm workers not to cut our
throats and hotel workers not to suffocate us with pillows while we sleep, and
we need these millions of people to work – what happened to all the invader
talk? And, frankly, all that racist talk about illegals eating our pets?
Only two presidents have ever pushed this country toward civil war. Donald Trump and Jefferson Davis.
AUGUST 2022.
August
1, 2022: If you like democracy, you could say that August is off to
a good start. Guy Reffitt, a recruiter for the right-wing “Three Percenters,” brought
a gun to the January 6 riot. He came dressed in a tactical helmet with camera –
and said he wanted to see Nancy Pelosi dragged out of the Capitol and down the
stairs. He hoped to hear her head knock on every step.
Today, U.S.
District Judge Dabney Friedrich gave Mr. Reffitt the next 87 months in prison to
ponder what a colossal fool he was to believe the 2020 election was stolen from
Donald J. Trump.
__________
“Trump deserves life in prison if my father is
in prison for this long.”
Peyton Reffitt
__________
In handing
down the sentence, the longest given to any rioter yet, Friedrich torched the
idea that the rioters were patriots. “And I want to be very clear ... under no legitimate definition
of the term ‘patriot’ (does) Mr. Reffitt’s behavior on and around January 6 fit
the term. It is the antithesis of the word.”
He added, “Not only are they not
patriots, they’re a direct threat to our democracy and will be punished as
such.”
*
This
blogger was going to celebrate Mr. Reffitt’s incarceration until he heard what the
defendant’s daughter, Peyton, had to say. I doubt I’d want to spend time
talking politics with her dad, but there’s a good chance he did truly believe
he wasa patriot. We do know he believed blindly in Donald J. Trump –
the fakest patriot in America history. Scott MacFarlane, of CBS News, was in
attendance as Reffitt was sentenced. That’s when Peyton Reffitt spoke up. “Trump deserves life in prison if my
father is in prison for this long,” she said.
MacFarlane has been to many of these riot-related
proceedings, and said he had never “heard anything close” to what Ms. Reffitt
said. “I’ve never heard a defendant or a relative say Donald Trump should be
sent to prison, jail, that was a unique and distinctive moment right there.”
As the years of jail time continue to pile up,
14 days for one rioter, 60 for another, a recommended sentence between 47-56
months for a third, and now, plus-seven years behind bars for her father – one needs
ask. Does Trump care about these people? They answered his call to come
to D.C. when he promised it would be “wild.” He filled their heads with lies.
He kept telling followers that the election was stolen – when his last two different
attorneys general assured him it wasn’t. Does the former president deserve jail
time for stirring up the attack on Capitol Hill?
Peyton
thinks so.
Her
father and her family have paid a steep price, because the patriarch believed Trump’s bullshit.
*
9/11 Planner Killed.
In other
good news, Mr. Biden ordered a drone strike
today, targeting an apartment building in a neighborhood of Kabul,
Afghanistan, called by locals “Choorpur,” or “town of thieves.” Killed in that
strike, after twenty-one years on the run, was Ayman al-Zawahiri, the last
surviving planner of the 9/11 attack.
When BBC
reporters tried to reach the scene, they were warned off before they got close.
“If you don’t listen to me, I’ll speak to you through my gun,” a Taliban guard
said.
In fact, the
villa where al-Zawahiri had been hiding, is said to be owned by the Afghan
Minister of the Interior.
For real.
August is off to
a good start.
___
8/2/22: The
Attorney General of Arizona, Mark Brnovich, has issued his final report on
voter fraud in 2020, in that state.
__________
“Surprised to learn that they
were allegedly deceased.”
Attorney General Mark Brnovich
__________
Ever
since Trump’s defeat, his cult followers have insisted that in Arizona, dead
people trooped to the polls by the trillions – as cemeteries emptied their
crypts. Brnovich, who’s a Republican, examined every claim put forward by
partisans of Ex-President Blubber, as he explained.
Our agents
investigated all individuals that Cyber Ninjas [an investigating team put to
work and paid for by Team Trump] reported as dead, and many were very surprised
to learn that they were allegedly deceased. In addition, we received dead voter
reports from other sources that were also reviewed. Three reports were
submitted to the [Election Integrity Unit] that combined alleged 409 dead
voters. One additional report, making no distinction between dead voters and
dead registrants, included 5,943 registrations. Once again, these claims were
thoroughly investigated and resulted in only a handful of potential cases.
Brnovich went on to say of such claims, “Some
were so absurd the names and birthdates didn’t even match the deceased, and
others included dates of death after the election.”
So, there you had it. R.I.P. “stolen election”
lie. The story of dead voters in Arizona had been laid to rest. Save for the
fact that a slate of election deniers is on the ballot in the Republican
primary today, all endorsed by the delusional Donald J. Trump.
“While our office has successfully prosecuted
other instances of dead voters, these cases were ultimately determined to be
isolated instances,” Brnovich added. The claims of significant fraud in the
State of Arizona were “insufficient and not corroborated.”
___
8/3/22:
Someday – when Donald Trump is dead and gone – or this blogger is – I can stop worrying
about his return to the White House.
Today is
not that day, because Trump is still lying and breathing, and Mr. Blogger is
still typing.
__________
Kansas voters clobber Republican amendment plan.
__________
Mr.
Blogger is not delusional. He is a student of opinion polls, which in aggregate
are rarely wrong. So, he understands that Trump could still come roaring back
in 2024, and up and pardon himself.
Meanwhile,
let’s consider a few important developments, starting with Kansas. In that deep
red state, Republican lawmakers were pushing for a chance to amend the state
constitution – and take away abortion rights. That effort was clobbered by voters in yesterday’s election, with
59% giving thumbs down to the move.
Kansas voters sent a clear message.
Elsewhere,
a number of far-right candidates prevailed in GOP primairies, including a
delusional crew of election deniers in Arizona. All are endorsed by the most
delusional Republican of them all, Fat Donald, himself.
Plus, if
a Trump loyalist loses – or even wins – they now automatically claim their elections
were rigged – even by other Republicans. In Michigan, Ryan Kelly
finished fourth in the GOP gubernatorial primary. He claimed it was a
“predetermined outcome.”
In Kelly’s
mind, the fact he had been arrested for his role in the January 6 riot was
definitely not part of the problem! The sap lost by 25 points.
In another “nail-biter,” Michigan Senate candidate Mike Detmer,
who carried the coveted Trump endorsement into the contest, posted on social
media that he was “not buying” election results. And, oh, so close! Detmer lost his primary to incumbent Sen. Lana Theis, by 16 percentage points.
Conspiracy
theories abounded. Tina Peters, a Colorado candidate for secretary of state,
lost her primary by a “razor thin” margin of 14 points. Not long after, Ms. Peters
washed up on Steve Bannon’s podcast, and claimed that there had been “extensive malfeasance” in
the race, and demanded a recount.
What did she get for $256,000? She gained one (1) vote in a test county
– but the winner gained two, as did the third-place finisher. So, Peters got nothing
but heartbreak for her money.
(Actually, “their” money – from the silly folks who believed
her, and regularly believe in Steve “I Got a Pardon” Bannon.)
Nor was Peters the only GOP kook to demand and pay for a recount
and still end up getting toasted. In Colorado, there were three. Dr. Rae Ann
Weber picked up five votes – but not enough to close the 31-point victory
margin for the winner in her race. Peter Lupia picked up three votes, but his
opponent gained two. So he still lost by 28 points. And yet another Republican candidate
offered up the now-formulaic “stolen election” claim. Zamora Wilson gained zero
votes (0) in her recount.
And her opponent
notched a gain of one, padding his 32-point win.
*
The first chapter of the current Republican playbook.
To be honest,
it’s the first chapter of the current Republican playbook for losers in
elections to claim fraud, often before votes are held – sometimes even when
they win – and even if elections are run by other Republicans. In Nevada, a
loser in the GOP primary for governor, paid big money for a recount, even
though his Trump-endorsed foe prevailed by 11 points.
When the recount
showed he lost again, he did his
best version of Fat Donald losing an election. “All they’re doing is using the same fixed and cooked ballots, putting
them through the same, broken machines,” Joey Gilbert exclaimed in a video
filmed outside the Clark County elections office. “So, do I expect much to come
from this? No. But it’s part of the process.”
(Irony abounded, when, the day after the
primary, Nevada’s Republican Party chair, Michael McDonald – who had called the
2020 election rigged – rebuked Gilbert for insisting his contest
was rigged.)
Meanwhile, the winning GOP nominee for secretary
of state prepped voters beforehand – in case he lost. In a February candidates’
forum, Jim Marchant warned his audience that their vote “hasn’t counted in decades.”
The same warping could be seen in South
Carolina – a deep crimson state, where GOP officials control voting. Two primary
challengers, gubernatorial candidate Harrison Musselwhite and attorney general
candidate Lauren Martel, claimed something was fishy in how they went
down to defeat. Musselwhite, who goes by the nickname “Trucker Bob,” and
campaigned on a promise to end “medical tyranny,” and
conduct a “forensic audit of the 2020 presidential election” in the state, lost
by 66 points.
Martel ran a closer race – but
still got doubled up by the incumbent, who outpolled her, 168,330 to 82,085.
My favorite election denier.
Conspiracy nuts abounded, until it began to
look like the modern GOP was a pecan tree. In Florida, Jason Mariner got thumped
in a special election to fill a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Even
before all the votes were counted, he had filed suit, complaining about how the vote was being run.
He lost by 60 points.
In
Arizona, Trump-endorsee Kari Lake, running on the idea that the state’s 2020 election
results were fraudulent, predicted more fraud might be coming in her primary. She suggested that
shady operators “might be trying to set the stage for another steal.” On
Election Night, Lake claimed her campaign was “already detecting some
stealing going on,” but disdained
providing evidence. She told reporters that changing election laws was her top
priority.
“This is
why we’re in this race,” she exclaimed. “This is why we have this movement
right here.”
And, lo,
did, the fraudsters prevail…and…Kari Lake piled up a 12,000 vote lead, with 82% of results counted.
My favorite election denier, however, is still Kandiss
Taylor, who suffered crushing defeat in her race to be the next Republican
nominee for governor of Georgia. Even if she had pulled a Trump, and called
election officials, demanding they “find” the 11,780 votes she needed – and
even if they did agree to commit election fraud – she was going to come up a
bit short.
Incumbent Brian Kemp piled up 73.7% of the total vote. Trump-endorsed David Perdue, finished second,
with 21.8%. Ms. Taylor garnered a mere 3.4% of the votes – meaning she lost by
70.3 points.
Taylor remained unbowed, not to be disheartened
by actual math. “I want y’all to
know that I do not concede,” she announced in a video posted to social media. “I do not. And if
the people who did this and cheated are watching, I do not concede.”
This, then, is the legacy of Donald J. Trump.
___
8/4/22: We
already mentioned that August is off to a good start and that start keeps
getting better. Not for Alex Jones, though. But when Jones is having a bad
month, humanity writ large is thriving.
__________
“I
unintentionally took part in things that did hurt these people’s feelings, and
I’m sorry for that.”
Alex Jones, host of Infowars, feigning empathy.
__________
In an
epic blunder, Jones’s lawyers forwarded the entire contents of his phone to attorneys for Neil Heslin
and Scarlett Lewis, parents of one of the children lost in the Sandy Hook
Elementary School massacre. Heslin and Lewis are suing him for defamation, one
of three such cases filed by Sandy Hook parents. Having won by default in all
three, the parents have advanced to the settlement stage.
Jones spent
years spreading conspiracy theories about the slaughter, insisting it had all been
staged.
Now, he
says he believes the killings were “100% real,” and who would
ever have been dumb enough to believe what they had heard on his show?
What other
news has come out of the trial? For pure fun, child pornography turned up on
Jones’s phone – materials which his lawyers claimed had been buried in emails
sent to the Infowars host, and which he would never have viewed in a
million years. What Jones definitely saw, however, were emails and texts he
said he never saw – some of which he himself sent to friends. In one he noted
that his website was making $800,000 per day, selling male enhancement pills,
bogus COVID cures, and Doomsday prep supplies. We also learned that Jones sent a naked picture of Erika Wulff-Jones, his wife, to
seven-time felon Roger “I Got a Pardon Too” Stone.
As one
might expect, Mrs. Wulff-Jones was less than happy to learn this news.
“Honestly I was unaware that
this occurred,” Wulff-Jones told [reporters]. “I’m sure this was some type of
brag exchange, look how hot my wife is type thing.”
“I am upset that he took
privilege to send the image to someone without my knowledge. However, that’s
really the least of my problems right now,” Wulff-Jones added.
The fun
continued when the court was shown a clip of Jones, in a recent video from his
show, red-faced, and pounding a table. He was shouting that the lawyer for the
parents, Chris Mattei, was trying to frame him. Not to mention, Jones posted a
photo of the judge in the case (a civil matter) going up in flames.
“That’s
justice burning,” he offered lamely, in defense, when asked about it during the
trial.
*
Seeking $150 million in damages.
As far
as his attacks on the Sandy Hook parents, he wanted them to know he felt bad
about stirring up his listeners, so that they sent the plaintiffs, who had
already endured the loss of their six-year-old child, threatening texts, emails,
and phone messages. He was equally sad to learn that they had been repeatedly e He accosted
by angry Infowars fans on the street, and that gunshots had been fired
at their home.
Jones called the Parkland massacre, in which 17 students and
teachers were killed, a “deep state false flag operation.” He put David Hogg, a
17-year-old survivor of that attack, and a leading voice in the demand for gun
control, at risk. He insisted Hogg wasn’t a student at the school, but instead a
“crisis actor.” Once again, he managed to animate his followers to make threats
against Hogg’s life.
And if
you were going to threaten the other side’s lawyer, and the judge, why not go for the trifecta. As The New
York Times explains:
In another
broadcast, Infowars falsely linked the judge to pedophilia and human
trafficking; in another, Mr. Jones questioned the intelligence of the jurors in
the case, implying that his political enemies had handpicked “blue-collar”
people who “don’t know what planet they’re on,” and were ill-equipped to decide
what monetary damages he must pay [the parents] Ms. Lewis and Mr. Heslin. In
written questions submitted to Mr. Jones, jurors took immediate issue with that
characterization.
“Are you aware
that this jury consists of 16 intelligent, fair-minded citizens who are not
being improperly influenced in any way?” one wrote to Mr. Jones.
“I don’t think
that you are operatives,” Mr. Jones replied.
The
parents in just this one case are asking for $150 million in damages.
Jones’s
lawyer suggested $8, instead, one for each of the eight compensation charges
the jury was considering. Poor Alex, himself, has claimed that even a damage
award of $2 million would sink him.
And good
riddance if it did. (See: 8/5/22.)
___
8/5/22:
Well, that didn’t take long.
In the first trial for damages in a defamation
case against Alex Jones, the jury found for the plaintiffs, Neil
Heslin and Scarlett Lewis. They ordered the host of Infowars to pay the
plaintiffs $4.1 million in actual damages.
__________
Good job, American judicial system!
__________
Then the
jury deliberated again – this time to determine punitive damages. In other words, they had to decide whether
or not to punish Mr. Jones if they believed his damaging actions were
intentional, willful, or wanton.
(This,
of course, requires the blogger to look up “wanton,” which takes only a moment,
due to the glories of the internet. “Wanton” is defined as being “(of a cruel or violent action)
deliberate and unprovoked.”
The jury decides Jones is a soulless bully,
with a nationwide megaphone, spreading hate behind a veneer of First Amendment free
speech. Alex Jones knew he was lying when he said the Sandy Hook Elementary
School massacre was faked – and that parents like Heslin and Lewis, who lost a son
– were part of “a hoax.” He knew his listeners were tormenting the plaintiffs,
and other parents who lost their children that bloody day. And he didn’t care.
With that, the jury awarded Heslin and Lewis $45.2
million in punitive damages.
Good
job, American judicial system!
(For further reading – which this blogger is much too lazy to
complete, see the 107-page document titled “Punitive Damages as Societal Damages,”
by Catherine M. Sharkey in the Yale Law Review.)
___
8/6/22: Both
Exxon and Chevron have announced record profits in the second quarter of this year.
Yay, Big
Oil!
After
expenses, Exxon had $17.9 billion left to bank. Chevron had $11.6 billion, with
both companies tripling profits, compared to the same quarter last year.
__________
Fresh evidence of climate change.
__________
Speaking
of Big Oil, we have fresh evidence that climate change is real and will increasingly
wreak havoc on humanity. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, last year’s record-breaking coastal flooding was a harbinger of
what’s to come. “King tides,” as high tide floodings are called, have already become
more frequent in recent years. These tides, defined as rising more than two
feet above the daily average, mean waters often
“cascade over streets and bubble up from storm drains.” Such tides used
to occur only during storms. Now NOAA says they can happen if the moon is full,
or result from a shift in the wind.
Slowly
rising sea levels, driven by climate change, are the main cause.
*
Charging $20,000 per day for legal work.
August
is also starting off to be a bummer for Rudy Giuliani, thrice-divorced lawyer
pal of twice-divorced, three-time adulterer Donald J. Trump. Not only is Rudy one
of several Trump lawyers and Trump-loving news media outlets named in a damage
claim of $1.3 billion in a defamation case filed by Dominion Voting Systems. Now he’s being
sued by ex-wife #3. Judith Giuliani says her ex has failed to pay her $262,000 that the court says he owes. (See:
8/10/22.)
He's also
a target of the January 6 Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, looking
into a scheme to create fake electoral votes in 2020. Those votes were then to
be submitted to Vice President Mike Pence. Then Rudy and Don could sit back on
January 6, 2021, and watch Mr. Pence overturn the real electoral vote. (See
also: 8/10/22.)
Anyone
else involved in that scheme? Yes. Alex Jones – who has other legal woes – would
be one. (See: 8/4/22 and 8/5/22).
And
let’s not ignore Dr. John Eastman, the alleged mastermind of the fake electoral
votes plot. We know that while Eastman and Giuliani, and a host of others close
to then-President Trump, had dinned in his ears claims of epic election fraud, that
even they understood were weak.
On
January 20, 2021, just hours after Joseph R. Biden was inaugurated, Eastman
sent Rudy a request. He wanted help collecting $270,000 he was owed by Team
Trump for his efforts to subvert democracy. Eastman knew he and like-minded
conspiracy kooks had failed to prove their case. He suggested looking into the
special elections for U.S. Senate in Georgia, which had taken place on January
5.
“A lot of us have now staked our reputations on the claims of election fraud,” he admitted,
“and this would be a way to gather proof.” So far, Eastman realized, they had little.
“If we get proof of fraud on Jan. 5, it will likely also demonstrate the fraud
on Nov. 3, thereby vindicating President Trump’s claims and serving as a strong
bulwark against [a] Senate impeachment trial.”
The invoice Eastman sent included $10,000-per
day charges for eight days in January 2021. That included efforts on January 4,
and January 5, when Dr. Eastman and President Trump pressed Vice President
Pence to throw out all the electoral votes that Mr. Trump didn’t like.
Rudy also sent in a bill for services. In his
case, he was charging the Trump campaign $20,000 per day.
More recently, both Rudy and Dr. John have been
telling congressional investigators that they would really like “to plead the
Fifth.” (See also, Donald J. Trump: 8/10/22.)
___
8/7/22: If you drive north, up
I-71, on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio you see what looks like a long, high
ridge on your left. A fence surrounds the site, and pipes stick out in places
like porcupine quills. Often, a bulldozer or large dump truck or two can be
seen working near the top.
__________
“Over-heated
birds fell from the sky.”
April
heat wave in India
__________
It’s the city dump, of course, growing
larger every day. And for those who don’t believe in climate change, you wonder
why not. Starting with the simplest possible point: Shouldn’t deniers ask:
“Where does my toaster go when it dies?” Is there a heaven for old water
heaters? When we put out trash every week, is our garbage reincarnated somehow?
I was thinking about this recently when I
saw that experts predict the world
population will pass eight billion on or about November 15 of this
year. I remember, when I was just starting my teaching career, in 1975, having
seen a story that the world had passed four billion people the year before.
And I knew that in the lifetime of my
parents, the planet had first totaled two billion residents.
Which meant more and more dead toasters keep
ending up in the world’s mushrooming dumps.
Then a story in the August 1, 2022, issue of
The New Yorker caught my eye. In the opening scene, in a story focused on climate change, called “Fahrenheit
121,” we met the people who worked in and lived near the Bhalswa landfill, on
the outskirts of Delhi, India. Last March was the hottest March on record in
India. The same with April; and on April 26, the dump caught fire. It burned
for weeks, clouding the city in toxic black smoke. But what most caught my eye
was the size of the landfill, rising seventeen stories into the sky.
The moral of this story isn’t difficult to
comprehend. World population will continue to grow. The Columbus dump and the
Delhi dump will rise inexorably higher into the sky. And the planet will keep
warming – unless we act very wisely – and if we fail, we’ll our children and
grandchildren will all be screwed.
“The heat is rising rapidly and much earlier
than usual,” Prime Minister Narenda Modi explained this spring. Extreme heat in
India was melting glaciers in the Himalayas, drying out forests, and damaging
crops on the plains. “On a particularly hot day in May,” reporters for The
New Yorker said, “the high in Delhi hit a hundred and twenty-one, and
overheated birds fell from the sky.”
*
The
hottest day in 350 years.
In England, we had further warning, again
noted by a writer for The New Yorker. Bill McKibben explained:
The
longest-maintained temperature readings of any location on earth are in the
Midlands of England. A monthly tally began in 1659, and the daily record dates
back to 1772. One can imagine mutton-chopped clerics and ruddy-faced retired
colonels, in the centuries since, tromping out to take those readings; some
days it was hot and some days it was cold, but, until last month, the highest
daily mean ever measured there was 25.2 degrees Celsius, or about 77.4 degrees
Fahrenheit, in August of 2020. Then, on July 19, as an epic heat wave
swept across the British Isles, the mark was reset at 28.1 Celsius, or 82.6
Fahrenheit. If that hadn’t happened, topping the previous high by a full 5.2
degrees Fahrenheit would have seemed statistically impossible. The fact that it
did happen is frightening – a sign of a world coming unstuck.
The growing danger should be clear – as
clear as the burgeoning dumps outside cities worldwide.
___
8/8/22: NEWS
FLASH: F.B.I. agents, armed with a search warrant, have arrived at Donald J.
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Or as Ex-President Blubber puts it in a statement on
Truth Social, his website:
These are dark times for our Nation, as my
beautiful home, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided,
and occupied by a large group of FBI agents. Nothing like this has ever
happened to a President of the United States before. After working and cooperating
with the relevant government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not
necessary or appropriate. It is prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of
the Justice System and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t
want me to run for president in 2024, especially based on recent polls, and who
will likewise do anything to stop Republicans and conservatives in the upcoming
Midterm Elections. Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World
Countries. Sadly, America has now become one of those Countries, corrupt at a level
not seen before. They even broke into my safe! What is the difference between
this and Watergate, where operatives broke into the Democratic National
Committee? Here, in reverse, Democrats broke into the home of the 45th
president of the United States.
Trump
went on to call the raid “political persecution,” and supporters started
howling with rage, even before any details were known.
For
today, this blogger will only say: Can someone help the former president with
the rules of capitalization?
Can
someone also tell him he is no longer “President of the United States?”
Technically, he’s just some orange dope, who used to be president. He has no
more protection under the law than you or me.
Third,
just because he’s having a bad day, that doesn’t mean the country is. Mr.
Blubber and America are not one and the same.
Finally,
Watergate? Is Trump really that clueless? Good Lord. The Watergate burglars had
no warrant. They were not working for any legitimate government agency, not CIA
or F.B.I. They were burglars. They broke into the Democratic Party offices in
the Watergate building and tried to steal documents and bug phones.
Today,
at Mar-a-Lago, F.B.I. agents made zero attempt to hide their search. We also
learn that previous to that search they had subpoenaed sixty days’ worth of
security tapes for Mar-a-Lago. They had been tipped by someone inside that
highly classified documents were still present at the former president’s club.
And they
had watched people moving boxes of suspected classified materials from one
location to another, with minimal security, or none, observed.
President Richard M. Nixon.
___
8/9/22: August
was already off to a good start, with the stock market rebounding, and gas
prices going down. Democrats in Congress had agreed on an important, albeit imperfect
plan to address climate change – which virtually every scientist in the world
knows to be a critical threat.
Then news
broke yesterday that the F.B.I. had raided Ex-President Blubber’s Mar-a-Lago
estate. And cracked open his safe!
__________
“This. Means. War.”
Gateway Pundit
__________
Generally
speaking, we don’t know what was involved. Blubber was up at Bedminster, New
Jersey, at one of his other private clubs. We do know multiple carloads of
agents arrived at Mar-a-Lago, dressed in suits. They showed their warrant,
which would mean a federal judge had signed off on the search.
We know
that a warrant would require, at minimum, a finding of “probable cause.” That
is, a judge would have to believe the F.B.I. had reason to search the premises because
evidence of a crime, or a plot to commit further crimes, would be found. We
don’t know what crime or plot might be involved.
There
might not turn out to be anything there at all.
This
state of not knowing could not stop Trump fans and Trump allies in the GOP
from erupting in paroxysms of fury. So far, however, no one has dared say the
former president is innocent of all crimes. Trump daughter-in-law Lara Trump issued
dark warning, “If this is what they’re able to do to a former
president of the United States, imagine what they can do to you.”
(I tried my best to imagine – but I don’t have a safe.)
Rep.
Marjorie Taylor Greene barked in all caps: “DEFUND THE FBI!” and, for once,
didn’t mangle the English language in a tweet.
So,
progress, I guess?
Rep.
Elise Stefanik called it “a dark day in American history,” described the free
press as “mainstream media accomplices,” and managed to throw in a reference to the ”deadly
limo crash in Schoharie County,” in her district. That crash took place in 2018. When Donald J. Trump was in office.
House
Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, famous for once saying he believed there were
two people Putin paid – one being Donald J. Trump – went with a threat aimed at Attorney General Merrick Garland:
Rude
partisans on the left responded with mockery in multiple flavors, shapes, and
sizes. One dredged up an old Trump tweet, noting that on June 7, 2017, President
Trump had reported, “I will be nominating Christopher A. Wray, a
man of impeccable credentials, to be the new Director of the FBI. Details to
follow.”
Wray, a
lifelong Republican, had to have signed off on the Florida raid.
Who else
was having a tough time handling the truth? The actor Randy Quaid was ranting,
all in caps, “THE
BIDEN ADMINISTRATION RAIDED TRUMPS HOME. UN-F*CKING BELIEVABLE. BIDEN IS A
THUG!! GET RID OF HIM AND HIS POLICE STATE ADMINISTRATION!! LET’S GO
BRANDON!!!!” Leo Terrell, a dependable ass-kisser for Trump, tweeted, “I am
angry as hell. The FBI broke into President Trump’s private safe,” as if,
“private safe” somehow sounded more sinister.
(Who else’s safe would they have broken into during a raid?) Tomi Lahren referred to everyone at
the F.B.I., and responsible for the raid, as “snakes.” Congressman Paul Gosar,
last seen asking then-President Trump to set him up with a pardon, went with: “I will
support a complete dismantling and elimination of the democrat brown shirts
known as the FBI. This is too much for our republic to withstand.”
In fact, the
“law and order” crew was suddenly no longer in favor of either “law” or
“order?”
Sen. Marco
Rubio couldn’t know what might have been in Trump’s safe or hidden under the
Mar-a-Lago beds. But Rubio was damn sure he didn’t want the legal system to
complete its work. “Using government power to persecute political opponents is
something we have seen many times from 3rd world Marxist dictatorships[,]” he tweeted: “But never
before in America[.]”
Slipping in the
word “Marxist,” must have seemed slick to Rubio, an extra effort to scare the Trump
base. From where I sit, if he wanted to scare his right-wing pals, I would have
suggested he mention Vladimir Putin having had critics poisoned, and thrown off
fifth-floor balconies, instead.
You know.
Trump’s pal.
Richard Grenell
went with the “Big Scare.” In his tweet, he echoed the
fearmongering of Lara Trump. “Trump 2024,” he said. “Because the government is
out to get you,” he warned.
I thought his
tweet merited response. “I’m not worried,” I assured Mr. Grenell. “I’ve never
taken classified documents out of the White House, and I haven’t lied to three
wives in a row, proving I can never be trusted in any respect.”
Monica Crowley
tiptoed closer to a line, where violence might seem to the loons in the Trump cult
to be the rational choice. “The most
dangerous threat we face,” she howled, “is the weaponization of our own
government against us. We are at the tipping point.”
Perhaps my favorite tweet came from
Florida state representative Anthony Sabatini, who really wants to be elected
to Congress in the fall:
It’s time for
us in the Florida Legislature to call an emergency legislative session &
amend our laws regarding federal agencies. Sever all ties with DOJ immediately.
Any FBI agent conducting law enforcement functions outside the purview of our
State should be arrested upon sight.
So,
let’s be clear. Again. No one knows what the F.B.I. was searching for – or if
they found what they hoped. As Mr. Blogger has said repeatedly, he never liked
it when Trump fans at rally after rally would bay like football fans watching
their favorite team in the Super Bowl, screaming “Lock her up!”
Or:
“Lock him up!”
Or:
“Lock them up!”
We don’t
know what was in the safe – or in all the boxes of documents federal agents
removed.
*
Could Sen. Lindsey Graham’s manhood turn up?
We don’t
know what we don’t know; but if we were the QAnon type, we could simply start making
shit up about what was inside the safe.
Sen.
Lindsey Graham’s manhood, perhaps? A DNA test, proving that Barron Trump was a
half-alien-lizard child? Blueprints for the Jewish space lasers, signed by Stephen
Miller himself? The desiccated head of Hunter Biden – meaning that the Hunter
Biden walking around now is really JFK Jr. in disguise! If you believe in
QAnon-type conspiracies, any nonsense will suffice.
We do
know this. Steve Crowder, a conservative commentator with nearly two million
followers announced, “Tomorrow is war. Then he followed,
incongruously, with “Sleep well.” At Gateway Pundit, a Trump-friendly website, editors
went with what they must have thought was a punchy version of a call for one
group of Americans to kill another group. “This. Means. War,” they said.
Not to
be left out, Joe Kent, a Trump-endorsed candidate from Washington State, showed
up on Steve “I Got a Pardon” Bannon’s podcast. Bannon asked Kent what he
thought of the raid. “This just shows everyone what many of us have been saying
for a very long time,” his guest replied. “We’re at war.”
Against
whom? There’s the rub. Ex-President Blubber has done more than any other
American politician, since Jefferson Davis, to stir up support for a civil war.
Last time we tried this route, 600,000 Americans were killed.
POSTSCRIPT: For an
example of the kind of hatred coursing like poison through the veins of Trump fans,
listen to the threatening phone call received by Congressman Eric
Swalwell of California.
___
8/10/22: If you haven’t been following the
story of the raid on Donald Trump’s garish Mar-a-Lago pleasure dome, you may
not realize how violently those on the right are reacting to the news. Almost
without exception, the loudest voices in the “law and order” Republican Party are
furious to find out that F.B.I. agents obtained and executed a search warrant,
as per the rules that pertain under the American judicial system. (See also:
8/9/22.)
At least
no one busted down the door, yelled “police,” and immediately opened fire, as
so often happens in darker-skinned neighborhoods.
See: Breonna
Taylor.
__________
Only the mob – and Donald J. Trump – take the Fifth.
__________
Without
a doubt, Team Trump has been taking a series of conks on the legal noggin’ of
late. First, a unanimous decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District
of Columbia found in favor of Congress. Investigators may now have a peek at Donald’s
back taxes.
Meanwhile,
the former president had to show for a deposition in New York City today,
related to possible financial shenanigans involving the Trump Organization.
So, how did that go?
Let Mr.
Trump tell the story: “Under the advice of my counsel ... I declined to answer the
questions under the rights and privileges afforded to every citizen under the
United States Constitution.”
This would be fine if you
were a fan, as is Mr. Blogger, of the U.S. Constitution and the rights guaranteed
to defendants under the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Amendments. We don’t
want innocent people to be dragged into court and convicted unfairly.
(See:
Trump and the Central Park Five.)
Sadly,
if you have kept your wits about you – as has this blogger – you may recall a happier
time when Candidate Trump, in 2016, repeatedly barked at rallies about how, if people
who worked for Hillary Clinton were innocent, “Why were they taking the Fifth?”
In those days, Trump scoffed at the rights of individuals under investigation.
“Only the mob takes the Fifth,” he loved to say.
With
that, his fans would start chanting. “Lock her up!” Then the howl would build.
“Lock her UP! LOCK HER UP!”
It was
the roar of a mob – and Trump enjoyed it immensely – and he promised, as soon
as he was president, he would lock Hillary up. (Don’t forget that whenever you
hear Republicans whining now about how Biden has politicized the Justice
Department. That was Trump’s plan.)
This might
be funny now, were Trump’s loyal fans not so impenetrably clueless, regarding
how the U.S. justice system works. So. Trump showed up in NYC, partly under
threat of a criminal contempt order. And, lo, did he decide that he was
innocent. And the investigation was a “witch hunt.” And he would prove it by
“pleading the Fifth,” to every question, save one. Had he been asked, “Were you
ever President of the United States?” he would have invoked his constitutional
right not to incriminate himself.
In fact,
he reportedly took the Fifth on more than 440 questions, over a span of four hours.
Meanwhile,
at Mar-a-Lago, the guessing game has begun. If the F.B.I. knew Trump was still
hiding classified documents at his club – that by law, he should have returned
to the National Archives – how did they know? How did they know where to look? What
current Trump aide, or Mar-a-Lago butler or maid, ratted out Donald “The
Fifth?”
*
Democracy in action – or maybe Uber.
Donald
wasn’t the only member of Team Trump to take a judicial crack on the skull this
week. Rudy Giuliani suffered several. “America’s Mayor” has been served a
subpoena himself – to show up for deposition in Fulton County, Georgia. In his
case, a grand jury is considering indictments in a possible Republican conspiracy
to commit election fraud. Rudy fought the subpoena and lost. Then he informed
the judge that he couldn’t make it to Atlanta on August 17, as required.
Why?
He
claimed he was too sick at 78, to fly. The judge told Rudy to hire an Uber and
make the drive if he must.
Mr.
Blogger, ever ready to perform his civic duties, hereby makes this outstanding one-time
offer. He will pick Rudy up at his home, and drive him to Georgia, charging
only for gas and meals along the way.
As we
liberals like to call it: “Democracy in action.”
FUN FACT: We
would be remiss if we failed to mention Congressman Scott Perry, of
Pennsylvania. Rep. Perry was stopped Tuesday by federal agents – while traveling with
his family. The Republican lawmaker is allegedly involved in the samevoter
fraud conspiracy as Rudy – the one that hinged on sending fake electoral votes
to Congress and gifting Donald an unearned second term. Under yet another court-ordered
search warrant, he was forced to give up his phone.
___
8/11/22: We
continue to learn more about the raid on Mar-a-Lago. For example, it turns out investigators
submitted a subpoena and received a copy of sixty days of security camera footage from Ex-President
Blubber’s estate.
In a
separate matter, we learn that under New York State law, if a defendant in a civil case takes the Fifth, as did Donald
J. Trump a “mere” 440 times yesterday, a jury can draw the inference that the
defendant is liable.
As, for
example: 440 times!!!
__________
A felony, punishable by up to five years in prison.
__________
In the richest
of ironies, we are reminded that on January 19, 2018, President Trump signed
into law a little-noticed bill. The new law increased penalties for federal
officials who knowingly removed classified materials from their proper place with
intent to retain them at an “unauthorized location.”
Yes!
Trump
did it to himself! It was already a felony, but he upped the punishment from one year in
jail to five.
Then we
had this. Newsweek reported that two high-level government officials had
confirmed that the raid on Ex-President
Blubber’s abode was based on a “confidential informant,” working inside the
estate. That informant told agents what Blubber was hiding and where.
(I, for one, am hoping it turns out to have been Melania.)
Two
Trump lawyers, who were present during the search have said that the warrant
was partially sealed.
Behind
that seal may lurk additional danger to any and all lawbreakers living and/or
working at Mar-a-Lago.
*
Trump is fine with the Russian system of justice.
Finally,
a few odds and ends. Rejected-President Don said recently that if it were up to
him, he wouldn’t bother to win Brittney Griner, the WNBA star currently locked
up in a Russian jail, her freedom. You know. Griner – who was just sentenced to
spend the next nine-and-a-half years in a Siberian labor camp. Yeah. An American
citizen. Donald didn’t care. He would let her rot. For some reason, he saw
nothing wrong with the Russian justice system – whereas he has repeatedly called
the U.S. system a “disgrace.” He called the basketball star a “potentially
spoiled person,” who entered Russia “loaded up with drugs.”
Those Russians! They were really great when it
came to law and order, Trump implied. “They don’t like drugs. And she got
caught. And now we’re supposed to get her out – and she makes, you know, a lot
of money, I guess.”
By contrast, the Biden administration is trying
to work a deal to free Griner and Paul Whelan, a former marine convicted on
espionage charges, detained by the Putin regime on December 28, 2018.
While Trump was sitting on his fat fanny in the
White House.
___
8/12/22:
Donald J. Trump’s no-good, rotten, terrible month still isn’t getting any
better. He loses another staunch supporter when Ricky Shiffer shows up
at the F.B.I. office in Cincinnati, ready to defend the freedoms all Americans
love by killing federal agents – because he’s angry that other F.B.I. agents
got a search warrant and entered Donald’s Florida home.
__________
[The World War II generation…fought against fascism…fought against Nazism …fought against extremism. … You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against. And I cannot be a party to that. It is with deep regret that I hereby submit my letter of resignation.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Miley, letter to President Trump.
__________
In a vain attempt to breach security, Shiffer
fires a nail gun, believing he has figured out a way to break bullet-proof
glass. He hasn’t. The nail gun doesn’t do the trick, and the dope can’t get
past the front door.
Shiffer leaps back into his car and flees,
heading north on I-71. Units from the Ohio Highway Patrol pursue. Shiffer
defends the Constitution by shooting at them from his car. Blue lives matter, right!
He is chased off the interstate forty miles north, cornered in a field, and a
gun battle ensues. Shiffer is wearing body armor, and wielding an AR-15, which
helps him defend freedom, but he is finally shot and killed.
The deceased had previously bragged about
taking part in the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. But no evidence
had been found and he had never been charged. He was a huge fan of Trump’s new
social media site, Truth Social, where he posted about the need for good
Americans to prepare for “combat,” and protect freedom, by killing those of us
who didn’t vote for Trump. Shiffer was allegedly a member of that Constitution-loving
group known as the Proud Boys. That was the group Trump once urged during a
presidential debate to “stand back, but stand by.”
Shiffer was standing by. And the search at
Mar-a-Lago set him off. “We must not tolerate this one,” he wrote in one post. In another, he urged people to kill F.B.I. agents “on sight,
and be ready to take down other active enemies of the people and those who try
to prevent you from doing it.”
If you were driving along I-71, while law enforcement was in
pursuit, and Shiffer’s shots hit you or your passengers – well, that’s the
price of fighting to keep Donald J. Trump in office, right?
*
“Doing great and irreparable harm to my country.”
In other news, we learn that in the summer of
2020, then-Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, General Mark Milley, wrote a scathing resignation letter to then-President Trump – but decided not to
send it.
(And the reason he didn’t
is chilling.)
Milley’s concerns had been building for months,
when, on June 1, 2020, Trump ordered peaceful protesters in Lafayette
Square, just across the street from the White House, cleared by force.
Trump had also talked openly about using troops
to crush Black Lives Matter protests. At one point he mused, “Why can’t they
just shoot them?”
(Kind of the same idea as
Shiffer!)
Now, on June 8, the general made it clear. He had
had his fill. Milley penned the following letter of resignation, which should
tell us all we need to know about what kind of leader Trump was.
I regret to inform you that I intend to
resign as your Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Thank you for the honor
of appointing me as senior ranking officer. The events of the last couple weeks
have caused me to do deep soul-searching, and I can no longer faithfully
support and execute your orders as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It is
my belief that you were doing great and irreparable harm to my country. I
believe that you have made a concerted effort over time to politicize the
United States military. I thought that I could change that. I’ve come to the
realization that I cannot, and I need to step aside and let someone else try to
do that.
Second, you are using the military to create
fear in the minds of the people – and we are trying to protect the American
people. I cannot stand idly by and participate in that attack, verbally or
otherwise, on the American people. The American people trust their military and
they trust us to protect them against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and
our military will do just that. We will not turn our back on the American
people.
Third, I swore an oath to the Constitution
of the United States and embodied within that Constitution is the idea that
says that all men and women are created equal. All men and women are created
equal, no matter who you are, whether you are white or Black, Asian, Indian, no
matter the color of your skin, no matter if you’re gay, straight or something
in between. It doesn’t matter if you’re Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jew, or choose
not to believe. None of that matters. It doesn’t matter what country you came
from, what your last name is – what matters is we’re Americans. We’re all
Americans. That under these colors of red, white, and blue – the colors that my
parents fought for in World War II – means something around the world. It’s
obvious to me that you don’t think of those colors the same way I do. It’s
obvious to me that you don’t hold those values dear and the cause that I serve.
And lastly it is my deeply held belief that
you’re ruining the international order, and causing significant damage to our
country overseas, that was fought for so hard by the Greatest Generation that
they instituted in 1945. Between 1914 and 1945, 150 million people were
slaughtered in the conduct of war. They were slaughtered because of tyrannies
and dictatorships. That generation, like every generation, has fought against
that, has fought against fascism, has fought against Nazism, has fought against
extremism. It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order.
You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many
of the principles that we fought against. And I cannot be a party to that. It
is with deep regret that I hereby submit my letter of resignation.
The
general’s disgust was clear; but in the end, Milley decided to remain at his
post and do his best to mitigate any further damage Trump might do. He had
joined a lengthening list of those who had worked with Trump – people Trump chose for their
jobs – who came to understand that the President of the United States was a clear
and present danger to the republic.
Among
those who were called to serve, and who came away repulsed by what they had witnessed,
we now add Gen. Milley’s name.
We have,
then, Milley. We have General James Mattis, Trump’s first secretary of defense.
and Mark Esper, his second. We include Richard V. Spencer, who served as Trump’s
secretary of the Navy, Gen. John Kelly, who took the job of White House chief
of staff, and John Bolton, Trump’s second National Security advisor. Add Bolton’s
top lieutenant, Dr. Fiona Hill. Add Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first secretary of
state, and Ambassador Bill Taylor (and a slew of other diplomats.) Don’t forget
Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified against Trump under oath in regard to his
first impeachment – and who never once had to plead the Fifth. Add his last
attorney general, Bill Barr, and Barr’s replacement, Jeffrey Rosen, who served
as acting attorney general, and Rosen’s top two aides, Richard Donoghue, and
Steve Engle, all four of whom told Trump the 2020 election was never stolen.
You
don’t have to take some poor blogger’s word for it – although this blogger did
serve in the Marines, and did teach American history, and does possess a solid understanding
of the rule of law. Trump is, and remains, for now, the most dangerous
politician in the history of this nation.
POSTSCRIPT: A
brief word to any Trump fan who might stumble upon this blog and not want to
start loading his or her gun, and mumbling about “libtards,” and pondering
“civil war.” You do know that the Director of the F.B.I., who had to sign off
on the warrant to search Mar-a-Lago was a Republican, too, don’t you? And that
Trump chose him for his position?
These
are the people who have been serving as a bulwark, doing what they could to
guard the American people from the authoritarian.
That is:
the man who hired them.
___
8/13/22: When this
blogger was a Marine, he and his comrades used to say that a person who f**ked
up in some unforced fashion, had “stepped on his dick.”
__________
Trump sycophants accuse the F.B.I. of planting damaging documents at Mar-a-Lago – which Trump later admits were actually there!
__________
In
recent days, Trump supporters have been trampling on their dicks. Let us count
the ways.
1.The right-wing chorus has been howling about the
F.B.I. and other federal agencies, and how they’re attacking the U.S.
Constitution, because agents raided the home of former President Trump. The
level of calls online to “kill the feds” has ramped up – as Trump fans talk
more and more seriously about killing other Americans. Trump could call off the
dogs.
2.He hasn’t. Because he’s Trump.
3.On Fox News, Brian Kilmeade tried to tarnish the image of the judge who granted the search warrant
for Mar-a-Lago. Viewers were shown a photo of Judge Bruce Reinhart “having his
feet massaged by convicted sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell, and holding Oreo
cookies and beer on a plane.” (Viewers were led to assume it was notorious sex
offender Jeffrey Epstein’s plane, the “Lolita Express.”) That photo turned out
to have been doctored, and Kilmeade had to apologize for what you’d have
to say was honest-to-gosh “Fake News.”
4.No member of Team Trump wanted to remind the
Trump base that it was Alex Acosta, Secretary of Labor in the first Trump
cabinet, who cut Epstein a sweet deal that saved him from spending a
decade or more in prison.
5.Assorted Trump enablers stumbled over their
dicks, trying to make the F.B.I. raid sound like a frontal assault on all Americans’
freedoms. Sen. Marco Rubio claimed an “Obama judge” had granted the search warrant.
That led freedom-loving Trump fans to decide it would be a fine idea to start
making anti-Semitic comments about Reinhart, who is Jewish, and then sweeten
the deal by threatening to attack him, and the synagogue where he worships.
6.Garrett Zeigler, loyal Trump aide last seen
posting racist, misogynistic posts himself, dug up information on two F.B.I. officials who
signed off on papers related to the search. He thought it would be a terrific
way to “Make America Great Again,” if he posted their pictures and home
addresses – and links to their children’s social media accounts – online. “Hope he doesn’t
get a good night’s sleep for the rest of 2022,” Zeigler fumed, in regard
to one official.
7.And also, let his wife and kids live in fear. Right, Garrett?
8.Rejected-President Trump hinted in a flurry of social media posts that
the F.B.I. had come into his home – and planted the damaging documents
they were supposedly searching for to begin. This QAnon-style conspiracy spread
far and wide in the world of right-wing fools.
9.That fish tale was undercut when Trump’s lawyer, Christina
Bobb, admitted that he and assorted Trump family members were able to watch the
search on closed-circuit TV. Bobb herself was present at Mar-a-Lago, which spoilt
the right-wing claim that no one from Team Trump was allowed to be present during
the search.
10.The story
of the “planted evidence” was killed for good when Ex-President Blubber admitted there
were highly-classified documents present at Mar-a-Lago all along. (We have
since learned that at least some of these materials were related to America’s
nuclear weapons.) Well, no harm, no foul! Because now Blubber claimed he had declassified
them all.
11.F.B.I.
agents found multiple folders filled with secret documents, none of which were
marked “declassified” as required by law. In fact, they carried away twenty-seven
more boxes of documents – to add to the fifteen boxes other agents took away
earlier this year.
12.We
learned that a Trump lawyer had signed a letter in June, promising that no more classified materials remained at Mar-a-Lago. And if
you can’t trust a lawyer – working for Donald J. Trump – who can you trust?
13.That
lawyer may now be in serious legal jeopardy. (See also: Rudy Giuliani and
John Eastman, 8/6/22.)
14.Having
painted himself into a corner, the former president tried next to claim that if
he kept highly-classified materials in an unsecured location, it wasn’t so bad,
because Obama did it! Blubber made a special effort to refer to
his predecessor as “Barack Hussein Obama. (Did you know that many Trump
supporters still believe Obama is a Muslim – and still think he wasn’t born in
America – even though Blubber has long since admitted he was?) Trump claimed
Obama took 33,000,000 pages of documents, many classified, with him to Chicago
when he departed the White House. (Note the clever use of “33” – as in
Hillary’s 33,000 missing emails.) Trump also wondered aloud, “How many of them were nuclear? Word is,
lots!”
15.“Word
is,” is not actual evidence. But it works for Blubber, and it always seems to
work with his fans.
17. The National
Archives and Records Administration also blows that claim to bits, using the
kind of language one might use if talking to a small child. As the Washington
Post explains, NARA said it had obtained “exclusive legal and physical
custody” of Obama’s records when he left office in 2017. Officials estimated
that about thirty million pages of records were transferred to a facility in
the Chicago area and that they were maintained “exclusively by NARA.”
18.There
are indications that some documents found at Mar-a-Lago carried “Special Access
Programs” designation. Such documents could include details about highly
sophisticated technology used in – for instance – the top secret new B-21 stealth bomber. The U.S.
Air Force would in no way want such details to leak to China, Russia, or Iran. And
these were not exactly the kind of documents you want lying around at the Mar-a-Lago
Club, where rich doofus friends of Ex-President Blubber come to hang out and
talk about golf and B-21s.
19.Marjorie
Taylor Greene and an array of Republican fools have kept themselves occupied by
attacking President Biden – even though there’s no evidence he knew about the search
beforehand. Thankfully, a few sensible GOP voices have been raised. “It’s
incumbent upon everybody to act in a way that’s becoming of the office they
hold,” said Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a former F.B.I. agent, “And that’s not
casting judgment on anything until you know all the facts.” Fitzpatrick said he
hoped that transparency about the search would help restore the credibility of
the F.B.I. “There’s nothing I want more than the American public to love the F.B.I.”
20.Rep.
Chris Stewart also commented: “I mean, if [Trump] had actual Special Access
Programs – do you know how extraordinarily sensitive that is? ... If that were
actually at his residence, that would be a problem.”
21.Yep.
22.Finally,
we would be wise to remember something Susan M.
Gordon, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence from 2017 to 2019,
once said. She suggested that the incoming president, Mr. Biden, should no longer provide security updates to the
exiting leader of the Free World, because of “the potential national security
risk posed by Donald Trump, private citizen.” Trump, she warned, would be “unusually
vulnerable to bad actors with ill intent.”
*
Meanwhile,
in court, Team Trump suffered another kick in the legal nuts, when a judge in
New York City ruled that the criminal fraud case against the Trump Organization,
and Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg could proceed. The fifteen-count
indictment includes tax evasion charges, and also charges for grand larceny.
Also
facing fresh legal problems, we have Alex Jones. After his lawyer in one case
blunders and sends the entire contents of his phone to the lawyer for the other
side, it turns out Jones had had somehow obtained the medical and psychiatric records of
several of the parents who lost children in the Sandy Hook Elementary School
massacre. These were the same parents who were suing them in three defamation cases.
This is almost certain to be a violation of all kinds of laws.
___
8/15/22: Today,
it’s time for fun facts! This morning, we learned that Rudy Giuliani has been notified.
He is now a targetof the grand
jury investigation in Fulton County, Georgia, involving possible conspiracy
to commit election fraud. Finally! Courts are taking efforts to steal the
2020 presidential election seriously – by Rudy and Donald J. Trump and their feloniously-inclined
Republican pals. In related news, Sen. Lindsey Graham, who may have played a supporting
role, has been ordered by a federal
judge
to show up and testify before the same grand jury.
Now, the real
question! Can either Lindsey or Rudy come close to Donald’s record-setting
effort last week? When forced to give a deposition in a New York civil case,
Ex-President Blubber set a Mt. Everest-high bar. He “took the Fifth” more than 440
times.
Think about that.
More than four
hundred and forty times. (See: 8/10/22.)
We should also
note, that since the investigation in Fulton County involves violations of
Georgia state law, a president could not pardon his pals. That would
mean Rudy and (less likely) Lindsey could be looking at jail time.
*
In other crime news
(alleged), Donald has called on the F.B.I. to return documents they took during
the recent search of his Mar-a-Lago club. This is interesting because Trump originally
claimed, through his lawyer, that no more classified
documents
remained at his home. Then he claimed that any classified documents that turned
up during the search were planted by the
feds. Then he said,
well, it didn’t matter. The top secret documents were there all along – even
though he said they weren’t – but he had used his authority while president to declassify
everything
agents found, because “everyone ends up having to bring home their work from
time to time.”
If you thought
Trump was lying from the start, you were not wrong.
*
We also know
that Trump and his allies have spent the last 24 hours demanding that the
Justice Department release the affidavit, explaining why the Mar-a-Lago club
was searched to begin. DOJ offered the following explanation for why it could
not.
Reading between
the lines, there would seem to be serious legal danger involved for persons
unnamed.
In short, DOJ
does not:
·Want the
identity of cooperating witnesses revealed.
·Want to
discourage other witnesses from coming forward with information that might help
with the investigation.
·Want to provide targets
of this, or any other investigation, a “roadmap” of the government’s case.
·Want to divulge
“future investigative steps.”
·Want to reveal “other
high-profile investigations.”
In closing, the
Justice Department adds, “The fact that this investigation implicates highly
classified materials further underscores the need to protect the integrity of
the investigation and exacerbates the potential for harm if information is
disclosed to the public prematurely or improperly.”
The threats of
violence directed at F.B.I. officials, the judge who granted the warrant for
the search, and Democratic leaders, also lead DOJ officials to say they want to
keep the identity of cooperating witness secret for now.
*
And we’re still
not done with the court news for today! The New York Times is reporting
that the Chief Financial Officer of the Trump Organization has reached some
sort of plea deal. Andrew
Weisselberg is expected to cop to a felony, but spend only five months behind
bars. Hefty fines also seem likely.
Weisselberg is refusing
so far to implicate anyone else in this case (such as his boss, Donald J.
Trump) but we will soon be adding another convicted felon to the Team Trump “Wall
of Shame.”
We’re going to
need a bigger wall.
*
Since both the
F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security have issued warnings of increasing
risks of attack – by Trump supporters on federal agents – judges – and
Democratic leaders – we have to wonder what Ex-President Blubber will have to
say about this. After all, any ordinary president or former president would
hope that Americans would not kill other Americans. Am I right? On Fox News, Monday
morning, what Blubber said was this: “People are so
angry at what is taking place. Whatever we can do to help – because the
temperature has to be brought down in the country. If it isn’t, terrible
things are going to happen.”
To fans of Fox
News, it sounded like Don wanted to help.
To most
Americans, it sounded like a threat. Nor did Donald help bring the temperature
down any, when he posted this screed on Truth Social, his social media ap,
later in the day:
The fact is,
“America” wasn’t suffering as a result of the search at Mar-a-Lago, any more
than “America” suffered when Bill Clinton did have sex with that woman in the
White House and got impeached for lying, or when Richard M. Nixon had to resign
for sending burglars to the Watergate.
No one is above
the law in this country.
Simple concept.
*
In unrelated,
but amusing news, we learned that Lions Not Sheep, a Utah apparel company that loves
to sell shirts and hats and probably sexy underwear, supporting Trump, has been
busted.
We all know how
much Trump supporters hate China, Chinese people, people who look Chinese – as
for example, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Asian Americans – and companies that
ship good American jobs overseas.
So, what sin did
Sheep Not Lions commit? The company has been fined $200,000 for ripping out
“Made in China” tags, in MAGA gear it sells, and proudly substituting “Made in
America” tags, instead.
Check your red
MAGA hat!
In other hat-related
news, Hillary Clinton decided to troll Ex-President Blubber in the wake of the
raid on his Florida home. She posted the picture below, and reminded supporters
that profits from sales of hats and t-shirts, carrying the slogan, “But Her
Emails,” would go towards fighting for democratic causes.
This is fun –
because Mr. Braillard is former First Lady Melania Trump’s fashion consultant.
And he was paid for “consulting services.” You can’t fight voter fraud if
you’re not dressed in style.
Also: No real voter
fraud has been found.
*
We also
have fresh evidence to prove that right-wing types will never lose another election
without claiming to have seen Bigfoot the Illegal Voter trooping through the
woods, on his way to the polls. In Kansas voters blew up a GOP bid to amend the
constitution and take away abortion rights. The margin of victory, for the
pro-choice side was a whopping 165,000.
Nothing
daunted, Melissa Leavitt, an anti-abortion activist, has asked for a recount,
insisting in a social media post that she has seen “data…that there were
irregularities” on election night.
This is
Kansas, folks, a bright red state where sensible Republicans control all the levers
of power.
But Leavitt has her pet conspiracy theory, and started a campaign to raise the $275,000 required
to pay for a recount of all 922,000 ballots. As of Saturday afternoon, she had
raised $4,000. “I’m just going to say the next 48 hours is going to have a lot
to do with God moving in people’s lives,” Leavitt said in a TikTok video. “And if it’s going to happen it’s going to
happen and if it doesn’t it doesn’t. But I’m praying. I’m praying that we get
it.”
It may be true that God works in mysterious ways,
but ballots aren’t loaves and fishes. There’s no chance the results of the vote
will be overturned, even if Jesus returns to count them all by Himself.
(Clearly, Jesus would never
cheat when counting.)
*
If you still believe in the “Stolen 2020 Election” myth, as the
delusional former president still does, you are probably going to feel even
sadder at news coming out of Wisconsin. State Assembly Leader Robin Voss, a
Republican, has officially ended a review of that state’s 2020
voting results.
After more
than a year devoted to looking for election fraud, at a cost to taxpayers of $1
million, Voss pulled the plug, since nothing worth note had been discovered.
Trump
allies had been pushing to “decertify” the Wisconsin results from 2020. So,
mark it down as another defeat for Ex-President Blubber. We rarely quote
Democrats on this blog – preferring to let sensible Republicans, and
non-partisan voices bolster our points. In this case, Democratic state Rep. Mark Spreitzer will have to
suffice. “This sham investigation
should never have started. It’s a shame it took so long for it to come to this
pathetic end,” he said.
*
Finally, in news that’s not even remotely fun, armed Trump supporters showed up in body armor, carrying AR-15 style
weapons, outside the Phoenix office of the F.B.I. Because nothing says, “We
believe in free and fair elections, and the Constitution,” like showing up and
threatening to kill other Americans.
___
8/16/22: Yesterday,
Rejected-President Trump talked about the need to “bring the temperature” down,
since his fans have been talking increasingly loudly about civil war.
__________
Talking “civil war:” Americans killing Americans.
__________
That is:
Americans killing other Americans.
Just
before midnight, Trump changed his mind. On Truth Social, he started bellowing his
rage once more:
There is no way to justify the unannounced RAID
of Mar-a-Lago, the home of the 45th president of the United states (who got
more votes, by far, than any sitting president in the history of our Country!),
by a very large number of gun toting FBI agents, and the Department of “Justice”
but, in the interests of TRANSPARENCY, I call for the immediate release of the
completely Unredacted Affidavit pertaining to this horrible and shocking BREAK
IN. Also, the judge on this case should recuse!
With that, he
did his best to raise the temperature level even higher.
*
Meanwhile, down in Georgia, Congresswoman
Marjorie Taylor Greene is always good for a laugh. Rep. Greene showed up recently
to talk to constituents about how much she loves washers, and driers. She
wanted it to be clear. She loves them. And probably hair dryers and
microwaves and electric toothbrushes, too. She warned her audience that wind
power and solar energy were going to kill air conditioning and appliances by increasing
our supply of electricity. “I’m going to be really pissed off about that,” she
told her fans, to general laughter.
“I like the lights on,” she continued. “I like to stay up late at night. I don’t want
to have to go to bed when the sun sets.”
Green energy, she grumbled, was “insane.”
Clearly, Greene was not staying up late at
night to study the issues that face not only Georgia voters, but all Americans
– and all humanity. Researchers from Finland have been studying satellite
reports, going back to 1979. Generally, it has been believed that temperatures
in the Arctic have been increasing at two or three times the rate in lower
latitudes. Mika Rantanen, a researcher at the Finnish
Meteorological Institute, toldThe New
York Times, “But when you look at the data, you can easily
see that it is close to four.” The Barents Sea, between Russia and
Alaska, she continued, was heating up seven times as fast.
At the opposite pole, NASA scientists
are focused on equally worrisome developments. Ice
sheets in Antarctica are crumbling twice as fast as it was thought. As Time
explains, “Since 1997, 12
million metric tons [of ice] have been lost, the data shows, as opposed to the
six million previously estimated.”
Chad Greene (no relation to the clueless congresswoman),
co-author of a recent NASA study, warns, “Antarctica is crumbling at its edges.”
That’s bad news not just for Antarctica, but
for the rest of the world. Floating shelves act as buttresses for the ice
covering the Antarctic continent itself, and the more of the shelving that is
lost, the more of the land-based ice is able to be lost too, contributing
significantly to the rise of sea levels worldwide.
What led to the just-released findings were satellite
measurement techniques that use altimeters not to measure the vertical sprawl
of the ice, but the horizontal elevation. The height of the ice, the
instruments found, has lowered, indicating that the warming ocean is melting
them from below, making them thinner, more brittle, and more prone to calve
away.
Even worse, ice loss is expected
to accelerate in decades to come. According to NASA, “Antarctica’s largest ice shelves all appear to be
headed for major calving events in the next 10 to 20 years.”
Rep. Greene doesn’t know any of
this, because if she were given chocolate pudding for brains, it would be a
noticeable improvement. She spends her time talking about how green energy will
mean we all have to go to bed at sundown. Can we just chip in and buy her a kerosene
lantern?
FUN FACT: In other news, we can
also report that Rupert Murdoch, billionaire owner of Fox News, pillar of
conservative values – such as family, flag, and tax cuts for fat cats – has finalized his divorce from wife #4.
Which is why I think we can all agree: The
problem in America is that gays and lesbians can marry whomever they choose.
FUN FACT #2: If you missed this on Monday, President Trump offered a glowing
book recommendation for Paul Manafort.
Yes.
As in, “Paul Manafort, the ten-time-convicted
felon, who worked with Russians during the 2016 Trump campaign.”
Trump took the side of this
sleazebag – over U.S. law enforcement. You cannot make this kind of story up.
___
8/17/22: Team Trump takes
another hit when it is learned the chief financial officer of the Trump
Organization, Allen H. Weisselberg, is ready to plead to – not one felony – not
two – not three.
Try FIFTEEN!!
He will admit he committed tax fraud. He
will admit he committed grand larceny. He will admit he falsified business
records. Finally, he will admit to having taken part in a conspiracy.
In other words, the guy is a one-man crime wave. Now, get this. He’s expected
to serve only five months in jail.
“WTF,” you are thinking.
Don’t despair. Weisselberg was conspiring to
commit a variety of crimes. Now he will be required to spill the beans on how
the Trump Organization operated. Weisselberg will admit he managed to hide $1.76
million in income, as part of a complicated, years-long tax avoidance scheme.
Prosecutors must believe he can spill some
beans on other tax cheats linked to the scheme.
Who else was in on the conspiracy? I wonder.
Could it be…
Mr. Trump? Maybe Mr. Trump Jr.? And the
other adult Mr. Trump? Maybe Ivanka, as well?
*
Also on Wednesday, Rudy Giuliani showed up
to give testimony in a grand jury probe in Fulton County, Georgia. That probe
is investigating a possible conspiracy to commit election fraud – organized by
Joe…
Ha, ha, no. Rudy is allegedly a target of
the investigation – and is suspected of helping organize a plot to steal the
2020 election in that state – and hand over sixteen unearned electoral votes to
Donald J. Trump. According to news reports, he was grilled for more than six hours.
So, what do we know for sure? Should we
start drooling like Trump supporters at a rally, and start chanting, “Lock him
up!”
Rudy could be innocent. We don’t know. Trump
could be innocent; but I’ve listened to his call to the Georgia secretary of
state, where he asked him to “find” him 11,780 votes.
I’m not going to start chanting till the
courts act; but I’ve listened to that call, and you should too. If it
doesn’t sound to you like then-President Trump was suborning election fraud,
you need to check your ears for wax buildup.
Finally, let’s remind our readers (if any)
of how many members of Team Trump have proved prolific when it comes to
committing felonies.
Allen H. Weisselberg: For now, he moves into
first place, as the member of Team Trump with the most felonies to his name.
He’s going to be tough to beat.
Paul Manafort drops into second – eight felony convictions – but an admission of guilt in
ten more cases! Then he racked up another felony for witness-tampering. I can never
remember how many total felonies Manafort had, because he also got a few for
tax evasion.
Konstantin Kilimnik – zero felony convictions – because this
Manafort pal escaped to Russia before he could be
arrested.
Roger Stone – lied to Congress about meeting with Russians during
the 2016 campaign. Charged with seven felonies, including one for witness intimidation, and convicted on
all counts.
You can kind of see a trend.
___
8/21/22: This
seemed like a long time coming (see our posts for 2/4/19 and 7/29/19), but Tom Barrack, another Trump crony,
joins the roster of arrestees who worked with the former president during his
2016 campaign, or palled around with “45” while he was in office.
____________________
Barrack put U.S. foreign policy up for sale.
____________________
In a
numbskull nutshell, the billionaire businessman and longtime friend of Loser
Don is accused of conducting foreign policy to benefit the United Arab Emirates
(and to a lesser degree Saudi Arabia), rather than serving the interests of…um…this
country right here.
Barrack
has been shady for years – which makes him a perfect walk-on character in the history
of Donald J. Trump. He has also been charged with obstructing justice, the go-to move of every
alleged Trumpian crook in every episode in the last five years.
In one
email, Barrack refers to the UAE as the “home team,” when in fact, the United
States is the home team.
Here are
just a few of the questionable connections and actors in this story. Start with
Barrack. Throw in Matt Grimes, also indicted, who reported directly to Barrack
at Colony Capital, the firm Barrack founded. And what country has invested
heavily with Colony? You will never guess.
Okay.
You guessed. The United Arab Emirates.
Then
toss a third indicted co-conspirator – by the name of Rashid
Sultan Rashid Al Malik Alshahhi, a.k.a. Rashid Al Malik and Rashid Al‑Malik,
43, a U.A.E. businessman, into the mix.
In the
indictment against him, prosecutors allege that Barrack put U.S. foreign policy
up for sale. Both the UAE and Saudi Arabia were intent on winning a battle for
influence in the Persian Gulf, against rival Qatar. So, if they could gain
access to or influence with Trump, they were ready to pay.
As the Washington
Post explains:
“The defendant is charged with
extremely serious offenses based on conduct that strikes at the very heart
of our democracy[emphasis added],” prosecutors wrote in a court
filing. Barrack, they said, “capitalized on his position of significant
influence as an outside advisor to the Campaign and the Administration and as a
national media figure with regularly televised interviews on major news
networks to further the interests of the UAE as directed by senior UAE
officials and their intermediaries.”
There
are plenty of other fishy details to this story – including Barrack’s work with
the 2016 Trump campaign, as alluded to by prosecutors. Barrack was in charge of
the Trump Inaugural Committee. That committee is also under investigation for
questionable spending practices, including vastly overpaying for use of Trump Hotel
facilities in D.C. during the festivities. That included spending $300,000 to
pay for a party for the Trump children.
But
wait, there’s more! Rick Gates worked on the Inaugural Committee with Barrack, too.
Even after he ran into trouble – for working with Paul Manafort – who was collaborating
with Russian agents during the campaign – Barrack kept Gates on his payroll, to
the tune of $20,000 monthly. Gates ended up pleading guilty to multiple felonies,
got sentenced to 45 months in jail, and agreed to cooperate with
the Mueller investigation. Manafort refused tocooperate,
got convicted on eight counts of fraud – then got convicted again in a
case of witness tampering – then got charged in state
courts with mortgage fraud – and then got a pardon from President Trump, which
he assuredly did not deserve.
Barrack
also worked with Elliott Broidy to advance the interests of
the United Arab Emirates. Broidy’s reward was a deal worth, by one account, as
much as $600 million, to organize intelligence work for the U.A.E. Broidy then got
indicted – for crimes similar to those with which Barrack is charged. Last
October, Broidy plead guilty to one felony, again, basically for selling
U.S. foreign policy, with so many sleazy side deals, we’ll just say you
should read the Department of Justice charging document about it. Then, in December, he
got a pardon too.
But
wait, again! There’s still more. Because now we have to throw in the guy who
got busted for sex-trafficking a minor. Both Barrack and Broidy had worked in
concert with George Nader, who was working for the U.A.E. to facilitate their interests.
He ended up ensnared in the Mueller investigation and got nailed – and not for
the first time – for dabbling in child pornography and having sex with minors.
And, since we know Republicans hate homosexuals – we should note his victim was
a 14-year-old boy. Nader’s already spending the next ten years behind bars.
BLOGGER’S NOTE (12/2/22): Fair is fair, and the blogger might have had
this one wrong. Well, not counting the parts where Gates and Broidy and Nader
all get sent to prison – or nearly, not couting Broidy’s highly suspicious
pardon.
We do know now that Barrack and Grimes were both acquitted in court in November
2022.
So: Nobody new is getting locked up.
Still, you have to wonder why the third defendant, Rashid
Sultan Rashid Al Malik Alshahhi fled the country shortly after being interviewed
by the F.B.I.
He hasn’t
been seen in these parts since 2018.
___
8/25/22: The
world waits with bated breath for the release of the redacted search warrant related
to the F.B.I. visit to the Trump estate at Mar-a-Lago.
Until
tomorrow, we will have to be happy with other developments. Such as, real voter
fraud!!!
__________
The nation wasn’t shocked at all.
__________
Yes.
Bigfoot and Yeti and Elvis Presley have all been spotted heading to the polls
to cheat Republicans out of victories they deserved. Elvis, still spry at 87, did
a little hip shake before entering the polling place – despite the fact he had
been declared dead and taken off the voter rolls in 1977.
This past
Tuesday, once again, a Republican loser in an election cried “voter fraud wolf!”
This
time it was Laura Loomer – disdained in decent GOP circles (which still exist!)
as a hateful white nationalist and proud Islamophobe – who lost a GOP
primary in Florida. In other words, the crazy Republicans continued to eat the
sane Republicans whenever they could.
“I’m not conceding, because I’m a winner!” Loomer cried, even
though a count of the votes showed she wasn’t. “And the
reality is, this Republican Party is broken to its core,” she continued.
(This blogger
could not agree more – albeit for different reasons.)
“What we have done tonight is really, honestly shocked the
nation,” she said through tears.
In fact, the nation wasn’t shocked at all. Not even miffed or
perplexed. The vote went as follows:
Webster: 43,471 (51.2%)
Loomer: 37,612 (44.2%)
The rest of the ballots were marked for a third
candidate – or ended up scattered for other dark horse choices. (Did you know
Mickey Mouse often gets votes? Also, random people like to vote for themselves.)
“Loomer the Loser” wasn’t having it. “We have further exposed a
corruption within our own feckless, cowardly Republican Party. And that is
exactly the reason why, right, I decided to go against the RINO Republican
Daniel Webster, do-nothing Daniel Webster,” she claimed.
“We are losing our country to big-tech election
interference,” she added – without offering a morsel of evidence – which isn’t
even required in right-wing circles today. “And I am pleading with the
Republican Party to please start taking this issue seriously, because the
American people deserve representation.”
Which in fact, the “American people” (at least a
chunk of people who voted in a GOP primary in a Florida congressional district)
got by sending Webster back to Congress and sending Loomer home to do more hating
of minority groups.
Then again, I suppose those of us on the
Democratic and liberal side should start taking voter fraud more seriously –
because Republicans keep accusing other Republicans of rigging the game. Since Governor
Ron DeSantis runs the show in Florida, we just start howling, “Lock him up!” (See:
8/3/22 for a list of other Republican election deniers who have accused
Republican winners of cheating.)
*
“The
kind of leader we need today.”
Since we’re talking sore losers and racist creeps,
let’s add Carl Paladino to our post. The Buffalo, New York businessman also
suffered defeat in a GOP primary in New York, to select a candidate to run for
a congressional seat. Even before polls closed, a spokesperson for his campaign
warned, “We are seeing a number of
statistical irregularities in a number of counties that we will be looking
[into] in the coming days. We want every single legal vote to count.”
Mr. Paladino’s official Twitter
account also commenced seeding the field with conspiracy theories.
Stories of “irregularities” were shared, and voters were urged to call his “electoral
integrity hot line.”
I had to restrain myself from
dialing and swearing I saw the Loch Ness monster swimming in Lake Erie.
Paladino’s chances were no doubt
harmed when he suggested recently that Adolf Hitler was “the kind of leader we
need today.”
And if America should have been
shocked, as Loomer the Loser claimed, it might be by the fact that Paladino
(who once said Michele Obama should go back to Africa, live in a cave, and mate
with gorillas), got 47.9% of the vote (22,283) in a GOP primary,
losing to Nick Langworthy, who had 52.1% (24,275 votes).
*
In other right-wing news, Rejected-President
Trump lashed out this week at his former Secretary of Transportation, Elaine
Chao – who just happened to serve in his cabinet for almost four years. Trump
picked her and kept her around until she resigned in disgust after the January
6, 2021, attack on Capitol Hill.
Now, he says she was “crazy,” and
claims she and her family were “out to
get rich on China.”
Which, if true, you wonder why
Trump had nearly four years in the White House and never figured it out.
Chao is, of course, the wife of
Sen. Mitch McConnell, and Trump decided to blast the top Republican leader in
the Senate, as well. When McConnell told reporters that he feared the GOP would
not recapture the Senate in 2022, and cited the questionable quality of some of
the candidates (including several endorsed by the former president), you knew Donald
was going to lash out.
Don called Mitch “a broken down
hack,” and said he should be working harder to drag the bums that Trump backed
over the finish line.
*
“If
he were any dumber, he’d be a tree.”
We would
be remiss if we failed to mention one of the worst Republican candidates of
all. That would be Herschel Walker, who wants to represent Georgia in the U.S.
Senate and is now running for the job. He was asked his opinion on climate
change not long ago. The sharp-eyed candidate scoffed at the
need for action to address the issue, telling a laughing, equally clueless
right-wing audience, “We’ve got enough trees. Don’t we have enough trees around
here?”
As Barry
Goldwater once said of another politician (and here it fits perfectly as a
description for Mr. Walker), “If he were any dumber, he’d be a tree.”
And
don’t we have enough trees already?
(Rep.
Jim Jordan, for example.)
We have
already highlighted Mr. Walker’s incredible explanation for good air and bad
air, which sounded like it might have spilled from the lips of second grader –
and not the sharpest student in class. Suffice to say, Herschel is even more obtuse
than Mr. Trump, who had four years in office to figure it out, yet could never
discern the difference between weather and climate.
To
reprise, in July, Walker was asked to comment on climate change and offered this response – which
is not a parody: “Since we don’t
control the air, our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air,” the
former NFL star explained. “So when China gets our good air, their bad air got
to move. So it moves over to our good air space. Then, now, we got to clean
that back up.”
Some aide
might want to prod the candidate in the posterior with a sharp stick and tell
him that most of the Western United States is locked in the worst drought in
1,200 years, made much worse by climate change. Tell him that this
summer most of Europe is suffering from epic drought – with rivers dropping lower than at any time in at least 500 years. And
that China – yes, China – is cooking under an unprecedented 70-days-long
heatwave, one without parallel in modern-day record keeping. As of August 22,
260 all-time high temperatures were set, mostly across Southern China. And it
has nothing to do with whose air was floating where. In Mianyang, the old high
was broken by four degrees. The city of Chongqing, set a nighttime record no
one wants to endure. Even with the sun having set, the temperature never fell below
94.8 F – meaning that the night was hotter than the averageAugust day
for the city, and left nine million people sweltering. More than one
hundred million have endured temperatures of at least 104 F during the ten-week
period.
FUN FACT
– IDIOTS: It may be a sign of both the violence that could be coming
our way – and the idiots that we suspect will be behind it. Today, and angry
American (we assume) scaled the six foot fence surrounding the F.B.I.
headquarters in Chicago and started throwing rocks.
Unfortunately,
the next idiot will probably be carrying something more deadly than a pocketful
of stones.
___
The fetus fails to develop a brain.
8/26/22: In
today’s red state world, Louisiana officials refused to allow a mother to end her
pregnancy, even after doctors notified her that her unborn baby had acrania. It’s
a rare condition, where the fetus fails to develop a brain. After nine months,
that child will be born and die, usually within hours.
To the right-wing
religious zealots, it makes perfect sense to force the woman to carry the pregnancy
to term. Because that’s what the Bible demands in 2022, even though, in Biblical
Times, the birth of such a horridly deformed child would surely have been
attributed to witchcraft.
“Basically, they said I had to carry my baby to
bury my baby,” Nancy Davis explained at a press conference Friday. “I want you
to imagine what it’s been like to continue this pregnancy for another six weeks
after this diagnosis. This is not fair to me and it should not happen to any
other woman.”
In Justice Clarence Thomas’s world, however, it will.
___
Fox brings the “Fake News!”
8/27/22: It’s not
“Fake News,” if the free press helps expose political corruption. No matter which
party (or none) the crooks if office represent, honest Americans should rejoice
when they’re exposed.
Former Tennessee Speaker of the House and
current State Rep. Glen Casada has been indicted,
along with his former chief of staff, Cade Cothren. The pair came up with the novel
plan to create a company to bilk the state out of a few thousand dollars every
year. The scheme involved funneling money – for legitimate legislative mailing
costs – to a political consulting firm run by “Matthew Phoenix,” despite the fact
that Mr. Phoenix did not exist.
You don’t need to know where these two dudes fit
on the political spectrum to understand that you don’t want them making
important government decisions in your name. (They’re Republicans, in this
case.)
As ABC explained, the two gentlemen are “charged
with bribery and kickbacks concerning programs receiving federal funds, honest
services wire fraud; and conspiracy to commit money laundering.”
We also want the free press to do a good job,
and, as a liberal blogger, I would argue that as long as Fox News is
functioning, even if it attacks Biden daily, we should be happy to live in a
country with a functioning democracy, where differing political opinions cannot
be suppressed. Even the unhinged Alex Jones may occasionally serve a useful
purpose – so long as he doesn’t lie.
(And, of course, he often
does.)
We do know that Fox News may need to clean up its
business model. The massive $1.6 billion defamation suit filed against the
company and some of its biggest names continues to move forward in the courts. Dominion Voting Systems, boogie
man of countless stories about a “stolen election” on Fox, has asked the courts
to punish the media giant for making baseless allegations that Dominion helped
rig the 2020 election, causing Donald J. Trump’s demise.
The following Fox hosts (and ex-hosts) have already
been ordered to appear in the matter and give depositions:
Tucker Carlson
Lou Dobbs (his claims were so nutty, Fox had to
fire him to shut him up)
Steve Doocy
Sean Hannity
Jeanine Pirro
According to The New York Times, the chief
executive of Fox News media, Suzanne Scott, may also be deposed, along with the
president of Fox News, Jay Scott. Laura Ingraham is also named in
the lawsuit. Dominion would appear to have a compelling case – since zero election
fraud of any significance has been found – and none of the marginal fraud so
far discovered has anything to do with Dominion systems. Both Rupert Murdoch,
and his son Lachlan, who own and run Fox, may be required to put up or shut up
(and pay) by the courts.
As the Times explains:
The suit accuses Fox of pushing false and
far-fetched claims of voter fraud to lure back viewers who had defected to
other right-wing news outlets. In its initial complaint,
Dominion’s lawyers framed their lawsuit as a matter of profound civic
importance. “The truth matters,” they said, adding, “Lies have consequences.”
The judge overseeing the case allowed Dominion in
late June to expand the suit to include the cable news network’s parent
company, Fox Corporation, potentially broadening the exposure of both Murdochs.
Shortly after, Fox replaced its outside counsel on the case and hired one of
the nation’s most prominent trial lawyers, Dan Webb.
There are First Amendment issues at stake and Fox
may prevail. But it’s worth noting, several recent defamation cases show that the
courts still consider sustained lying out of bounds. Alex Jones has been held
liable, in one defamation suit, for $49.2 million in damages. (He’s lost three,
and awaits news of further damage in days and months to come.) Newsmax already
agreed to settle with Dominion, and paid an undisclosed sum, because they had
no chance of backing up all the lies that they had been spreading.
Hannity and Fox have paid before. Back in 2016, Hannity
pushed hard on the idea that Seth Rich, a young Democratic operative, had been
killed by kingpins in the party, after he supposedly leaked their damaging emails
to Wikileaks, which promptly published them in the run-up to the 2016 presidential
election. Fox news had to retract a good chunk of its related “reporting” – which
in this case we can definitely describe as “Fake News.”
With Hannity and Dobbs both scheduled to be
deposed by lawyers for the Rich family, and embarrassing details sure to be
revealed in court, Fox agreed to pay “millions” and settled in 2020.
One oddity of the agreement? Fox, which would be
talking endlessly about the coming election that year, did not want viewers to
start wondering about the veracity of their reporting. As part of the settlement,
the Rich family agreed that nothing about the deal would be revealed until
after November 3, when voters would have already gone to the polls, many of
them swayed by the ridiculous stories they had heard and believed on Fox News.
The liar on the left, with the other liar.
___
Former Attorney General Realizes
Trump Was Nuts.
8/28/22: Former
Attorney General Bill Barr has finally figured out what
most human beings figured out in the summer of 2015 or early 2016. Or if they
knew Donald J. Trump personally, long before. The guy is a terrible human
being.
And he’s nuts.
(My wife, for one, rightly pegged Donald as suffering from Narcissistic Personality
Disorder in early 2017.)
Asked recently in an interview about his “most
awkward” moment working for the former president, Barr responded – in apparent
reference to a meeting on June 1, 2020: “The
president was bellowing at a number of his Cabinet secretaries and especially
the military guys, the DoD secretary and chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and
calling all of us ‘f-cking losers’ at the top of his lungs.”
This was around the same time that an unhinged,
vengeful president was asking why he couldn’t call out active duty U.S. troops,
and clear peaceful protesters outside the White House. “Why can’t you just
shoot them, just shoot them in the legs, or something?” he mused.
When rational individuals resisted, President Maniac
lost his sh*t.
Barr took his usual shots at Democrats and
left-wing types in the interview; but if we filter out the partisan lines,
we’re left with this. Barr went after his old boss
and gave him the kind of roasting he deserved.
Taking note of the former president’s business
career, Barr expressed surprise. “One would think that an executive would have
a better idea how to operate with people and manage people.” Trump did not.
Barr called him “a poor manager of people,” and his “own worst enemy.”
(This blogger would change
that to “America’s worst enemy”).
Barr told his interviewer that he was “disgusted,”
“mortified,” and “angry” while watching the January 6, 2021, attack on Capitol
Hill. He said Trump was “morally responsible” for the
attack. It was “a shameful episode. It was a shameful
riot,” he continued. “And the president certainly precipitated it.”
“In fact, he’s incorrigible,” Barr said of
Trump. He “doesn’t take advice from people and he does his own thing, and you’re
not going to teach an old dog new tricks. So I was under no illusion when I
went in, but I felt there was a chance he would rally to the office and be more
disciplined in his behavior.”
Barr would not be Barr without attacking the Left,
and accusing those of us who cherish the U.S. Constitution and long feared
Trump, of suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
I’d argue that we figured out, starting with
the pussy-grabber tape, if not before, that Donald J. Trump had no business
setting foot in the White House. Not even as visitor. Electing Trump in 2016, was
like electing Bill Clinton in 1992, if he had campaigned on a promise to
force White House interns to provide blow jobs under his desk.
Barr told a reporter that he warned Trump at
the beginning of 2020 that he would lose the election if he failed to “adjust”
his behavior. His words were wasted, and the president “continued to be
self-indulgent and petty, and turned off key constituents [sic] that made the
difference in the election.”
Even worse, Barr claimed, was what Trump was doing
to the Republican Party. “The tactic that Trump is using to
exert this control…is extortion,” he said. “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. He’s all
about himself.”
Barr
did have hope. “There’s never been more consistent conservatism within the
Republican Party than there is today,” he said. “The idea that there are RINOs,
people that really don’t support Republican principles, is simply not true. What the
president is defining as RINOs are people who are true-blue Republicans and
conservatives but who just have a problem with Trump personally,” he continued.
“This is all personal to Trump.”
Yeah.
Classic Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Like I said, my wife had that
figured out, and I posted my agreement no later than October
25, 2017.
___
Life Expectancy Drops – Guns, Drugs and COVID.
8/29/22: My wife is making a grocery list. “What would
you like from the store?” she asks.
“Chips,” I
reply, as if there’ ever any doubt. She says she’s going to buy spinach,
yogurt, and other healthy junk.
As she heads
out the door, I reminder her: “Be sure you’re packing heat.”
In Oregon, this
weekend, we had another grocery store attack. Once again, a man with an AR-15 style rifle
walked into a store in Bend, and went aisle to aisle, shooting at people. He
killed two, wounded one, and then killed himself.
*
Down in Texas,
where everyone has a gun tucked in a purse, strapped to a hip, or carried
over a shoulder in a sling, we also had a mass shooting. (Texas had a lot of
mass shootings.) This time a man set fire to an apartment building, and
ambushed people as they ran out. He was reportedly dressed in black, and used a
shotgun to kill three. Police report that he had recently been evicted – but they
did at least manage to kill him at the scene.
*
Finally, it turns out President Trump’s last year
in office was worse for our health than we realized. Life expectancy dropped
in all fifty states and Washington D.C. Nice work, Donald.
And thanks for setting such a good example by
refusing to wear a mask in public. The drop averaged out to 1.8 years per person, mostly due to COVID, and a steady increase in drug
overdoses. If we multiply “lost years” by the estimated U.S. population, rounding off to 335 million, Americans suffered
a loss of 603,000 millennia under Dr. Trump’s guiding care.
COVID? Remember when Dr. Trump told us, “It’s
just a flu.”
Speaking of lost lives, schools in Uvalde, Texas will
be back in session soon, as a ravaged community tries to heel from last
spring’s deadly school massacre. Around town, murals have been painted to honor
the nineteen dead children and their two teachers.
According to a new report, last school year there were 193
shootings inside and around America’s schools.
That means it’s time to purchase a bulletproof backpack for your
child and send them off to school.
POSTSCRIPT: No
sane person would truly blame Ex-President Blubber for the bulk of the steep drop
in life expectancy, particularly in regard to drug overdoses. But Trump’s refusal
to address gun violence in any way and his bumbling approach to the COVID threat
didn’t help.
Still, it’s fun to mock the dope, because “Ol’ Blubs”
did hog credit when drug overdose deaths dropped one of the four years he was in office.
___
“Have a new Election, immediately!”
8/30/22: If you
missed it yesterday, Trump went on a rampage on Truth Social, his media site. He posted eighty-eight
times, including one truly bonkers idea. Claiming yet again that he had
prevailed in the last election – although he hadn’t – he insisted he should be
reinstated as president! “Declare
the rightful winner or – and this would be the minimal solution – declare the
2020 Election irreparably compromised,” he demanded, “and have a new Election,
immediately!”
Since there are no provisions in the U.S.
Constitution, or in federal law, that would allow this to happen, you have to
assume one or all of the following statements are true:
1.Trump has been
drinking heavily, or abusing hallucinogens.
2.Trump is
certifiably insane.
3.Trump doesn’t care
what the Constitution says, and wants to be president again at any cost.
(Several of his other posts
were almost as nutty, or dishonest, or dangerous, but we can’t possibly keep up
with every twisted idea the man has.)
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