Here’s one I really don’t get. Trump claims to be a mega-successful billionaire business genius. We know that’s a lie by how many millions of dollars he lost every year (take for example the $916 million in business losses he wrote off on his 1995 taxes), how virtually all of his ventures failed and/or were shut down for fraud, and how many times he declared bankruptcy. We all know he’s the most “transactional” president of all-time. He claims to be worth many billions.
He took cartons full of valuable classified documents down to his gaudy Florida resort after being dragged kicking and screaming out of the White House. Putin would have gladly paid a billion for a pile of military secrets, so would Muhammed Bin Salman, or Trump’s North Korean BFF, or, for that matter, Hitler, if he was still alive. Trump would have had no hesitation to make deals with any of them, since everything is simply a transaction with him.
What happened to the money?
If he made the lucrative business deals anyone would assume he would have by selling the valuable government secrets, he wouldn’t be scrambling to put up bond for the over one half billion he owes as the result of recent court verdicts against him. He’d peel off that money from a fat billfold, announce confidently that he was going to win on appeal, and tell everybody to fuck off.
Leading to the obvious question: what happened to the money, Trumpie?
A great one by Paul Krugman. We can talk about yesterday’s vote by at least four unaccountable, craven, fake Christian, extremist judicial fraternity member lockstep fascists later, this one is much more fun to consider.
OK, I have to admit it: I’m enjoying the spectacle of Donald Trump begging for a delay in the $454 million fine he’s required to pay for fraudulently inflating his net worth, for two reasons.
First, his inability to come up with the cash basically confirms the charges: He isn’t as rich as he claims to be. Second, his evident inability to get anyone to lend him the money is poetic justice for a man who has a history of bilking gullible investors.
One small addition to the Trumpenfreude: A GoFundMe set up to help Trump pay his bills has so far managed to raise about a third of 1 percent of the amount he owes.
You do have to wonder about how this will affect his psychological state. Trump’s speeches have become increasingly incoherent lately — a trend that has attracted sufficient attention that a few days ago he felt compelled to respond, telling an audience: “There’s no cognitive problem. If there was, I’d know about it.”
Most people are so concerned with being normal [1], working and playing in the recognized world of reward and achievement that everybody exists in, that when people start breaking down from the stress, even when they become fragile as glass and barking mad, they will insist that they understand everything perfectly and that it’s other people who are fucking insane. You can trust me on this, or you can take a breath and look around.
[1] normal- for the thoughtful details of what this means in practice, see The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate.
Project 2025, written by the far-right ideologues of the influential Heritage Foundation, sister think tank to the rightwing judicial fraternity the Federalist Society, The Institute for Humane Studies, The American Legislative Exchange Council and dozens more funded by Charles Koch and every fascist billionaire in the country, begins with these words:
It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day One of the next conservative Administration.
see footnote
Winning elections, at this apocalyptic moment in human history, against the “Radical Left” already in control, due to the irreversibly rising tide of ignorant majoritarian hordes, is simply not enough to preserve their sacred values of unlimited wealth and uncheckable power for the privileged.
Also, they cannot win honest elections anymore and they know this very well. Hence, Project 2025, a plan to go for all the marbles, once and for all.
Charles Koch learned in 1980 that his “libertarian” beliefs could not win elections, at best, his brother and his presidential running mate were barely able to get one percent of the national vote, which was appropriate since those were the only interests they represented. The far right’s project, seeing they could never prevail through fair democratic elections, became to capture the religious extremist vote, and the vote of every angry, lost soul, to make the vote look competitive, and to seize power by extra-electoral means.
Brilliant, privileged, covetous men like Charles Koch understood their ideas would never win elections, being of benefit only to a tiny fraction of the top 1% of Americans. So they began the long game of Making America Great Again (for Robber Barons, Monopolists and families of inherited wealth) by funding strong rightwing candidates in local elections, taking control of state houses, gerrymandering to keep control of state legislatures, churning out political philosophy and propaganda from “think tanks,” generating model legislation like Stand Your Ground and other gun protection laws, anti-voting, anti-labor, anti-environment and anti-abortion laws and bringing carefully constructed ideological lawsuits that would be heard in captured federal courts and ultimately decided by graduates of their far right, religious extremist judicial fraternity, the Federalist Society.
Their bigoted, polluting, oligarch-empowering ideas cannot win democratically, so their project is to destroy democracy with a very firm-handed minority rule, enforced by carefully vetted loyalists to a strong leader. They are authoritarians, or, as I always see it, regular ambitious folks always ready to go full Nazi on the citizenry.
Heather Cox Richardson lays out the connection between Putin, Trump, the forces of global authoritarianism and its angrily righteous partner, religious extremism, tying together recent events and a little bit of recent history, which is worth noting again, including this:
The use of Russian disinformation to destabilize democracy in the U.S. looks much like the information warfare Russia has used to establish Ukrainian leaders that worked for the Kremlin. It was the ouster of one of those leaders, Viktor Yanukovych, in the 2014 Maidan Revolution ten years ago that prompted Russian president Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine later that year. Yanukovych won office with the help of American political consultant Paul Manafort, who advised and, briefly, chaired the Trump campaign in 2016, when it weakened the Republican party’s platform plank that supported arming Ukraine against Putin after his 2014 invasion.
Seeding lies about corruption that came from Russian-linked Ukrainians was central to Trump’s 2019 impeachment: his phone call to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky demanding Zelensky announce an investigation into Burisma and Joe Biden’s son Hunter was part of an attempt to create dirt on the Bidens. That call happened after Trump’s advisor Rudy Giuliani went to Ukraine, where he talked to “an active Russian agent,” according to the FBI. FBI agents warned Giuliani that he was a target of Russian disinformation.
That poison has now spread from Trump’s rogue team in the White House to the Republican Party itself, which has apparently been carrying water for Putin at the very center of our government.
The whole piece is here, very much worth reading in its concise entirety, and thinking about as we prepare to preserve democracy and prevent Project 2025, the billionaire funded plan to make Bill Barr’s theocratic worldview the permanent government of our nation of immigrants.
Trump was impeached the first time for making an improper political demand as he held up American arms and extorted the new Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. He told him on a perfect call that many people heard, and that Bill Barr subsequently tried to hide, that all Zelensky needed to do before Trump would release military aid to Ukraine was announce an investigation into Biden corruption, and that he and his allies in Congress would do the rest. No need to actually open an investigation, America’s Greatest Liar assured Zelensky, the main thing is just to announce it, on American television, so we have a big Benghazi-type scandal to run with before the election.
Zelensky turned out to be a man of principle and a skillful politician with a bit more mettle than Trumpie counted on. Barr was still Trump’s most ardent and capable legal enabler and, after trying unsuccessfully to bury all records of the perfect call, he appointed a diehard rightwing DOJ official (who had refused to serve under a Democrat but came back to be appointed by Trump) to dig more deeply into the scandalous sounding matter that Rudy, Igor and their crew were trying to stir up in Ukraine.This DOJ investigation led to FBI informant Smirnov (now in prison awaiting trial for peddling Kremlin lies to the FBI), who took the bull by the horns and planted the entirely false Russian story that both Putin and Trump wanted out there about Biden’s corruption and bribe taking from corrupt, lying, Nazi Ukraine. Then they could let Trumpie’s myrmidons in Congress do the rest. And they have been doing the rest relentlessly. Incoherently, much of the time, but with characteristic blustering Nazi-style vigor.
Recall that after losing the election in 2020, incessantly transactional Trumpie told the DOJ just to announce that the election had been corrupt and leave the rest to him and his henchmen in Congress. You remember that one, right?
WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump sought inside help from the Justice Department to execute his campaign to reverse the 2020 election, according to evidence presented by the House Jan. 6 committee Thursday.
“Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump implored top Justice officials in a Dec. 27, 2020, conversation memorialized in then-acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue’s contemporaneous notes.
Counting on the disgusted exhaustion of people of average intelligence to prevent them from keeping a thousand hideous details in mind and the angry credulity of people of below average intelligence, the Nazi machine grinds on, doing exactly what it always does — marching behind the insane, iron will of the infallible narcissistic Leader who believes that he alone has the right to decide who gets rich, who gets lynched and who goes to the death camp with Rosie O’Donnell, Mike Pence, Bill Barr and the rest of the gutless pigs who have defied, insulted, betrayed and misunderestimated [1] him.
[1] With a tip of the yarmulke to eloquent language stylist George W. “Dubya” Bush
65,000 forced births, and counting, in 14 MAGA states, by women and girls impregnated by rapists, since the June 2022 Supreme Court decision striking down a female’s constitutional right to reproductive autonomy.
Gavin Newsom goes off, beautifully, on the recent Alabama Supreme Court decision stating that Jesus Christ decreed that a fertilized egg is a human being and that mishandling such microscopic humans can subject the offender to prosecution for wrongful death.
Alabama, of course, being #3 in the nation for highest infant mortality rate…
The longest lasting relationship in Donald Trump’s life appears to be his strong bond with Russian strongman, murderer and war criminal Vladimir Putin. The KGB began cultivating Trump as a Useful Idiot back in the late 1980s when they found out he had presidential ambitions and that he was supremely vulnerable to flattery.
Just call Trump a genius and you become his best friend at the moment, do this decade after decade and you’ve made a lifelong friend of a man so insecure that he spends most of his time bragging about his (inherited) wealth, his brilliance, the size of his enormous, virile member (contrary description by Stormy Daniels is just another hateful, jealous lie!) and his claim that the laws don’t apply to someone as great and special as him.
On the second anniversary of Putin’s old-style total war invasion of a neighboring democracy, which he justified as liberating Ukraine from Nazis, and in which he called for the killing of Ukrainian government officials who had thrown out his puppet Yanokovich eight years earlier, Trump‘s handpicked Speaker of the House, a cherub faced hard right Christian fundamentalist theocrat who loves the taste of the big orange guy’s ass, has lawmakers on vacation.
Every effort to keep the Ukrainian military armed and fighting Putin has been blocked by the Trump/Putin MAGA faction in the House. Every MAGA member of Congress takes their orders directly from Trump, as evidenced over and over, and the rest of the GOP is too spineless and afraid of violent retribution against them to vote with the hated Democrats, even after they announce they’re not running for reelection.
No money has been allocated for the continued defense of Ukraine by Ukrainians, even as Putin continues to kill his political rivals and anyone else who disobeys him. These billions of dollars in American military aid, by the way, go directly to American munitions manufacturers, and the people that work for them.No humanitarian aid to the people being slaughtered, and starved in Gaza, in the Israeli far right’s righteous Jihad against terrorism.Trump simply doesn’t care about Muslims, or anyone else, frankly.
Global Nazi types like Steve Bannon, and white Christian Dominionists, assorted fascists and haters of every stripe are united beyond national borders. They slyly use the word “globalist” to refer to the time honored slur against Jews, who they claim control the world to the extreme detriment of good Christians everywhere. This popular Q-Anon-like theory is fleshed out in the 120 year old Czarist forgery The Protocols of The Elders of Zion, still a brisk international seller. But today globalist more accurately describes a worldwide coalition of authoritarians and religious fundamentalist bigots, Putin, Trump, Xi, Orban, Modi, Netanyahu and their ilk. Their propagandists energetically wield their high-pressure fire hoses of excrement, spraying random shit everywhere to keep everybody disgusted, distracted, overwhelmed and trying to clean clingy fecal matter off of themselves.
And so today, after the second anniversary of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, we find ourselves talking about the latest instance of Christian Dominionist Idiocy, Jesus Christ ruling in Alabama (according to a theocratic state Supreme Court) that a fertilized egg is a child. Ukraine is under renewed siege by a modern day Stalin, or Hitler, take your pick, close to 30,000 Gazans are dead as the rightwing/religious coalition in Israel continues its righteous, civilian slaughtering War on Terror, and the US government can offer no help to Ukrainians, Gazans, or anyone else, blocked by the will of one man, Putin’s best ally in the West.
Meanwhile Trumpie hawks a line of Chinese-made gold spray painted sneakers, brags about his luxuriant head of golden hair and praises a leader like Putin who can boldly kill anyone he fucking wants to. And lines up mega-wealthy fascists to pay the almost $500,000,000 he now owes to New York State. Elon Musk was his guest just a few days ago, but there’s also Putin, or Mohammed Bin Salman. There is no shortage of immense piles of shit with billions of dollars to burn to serve their own rabid egos, who might, someday, want Trump to do them a favor, though.
The sordid history of the ignorant yet calculated movement of bigoted political domination by America’s most militant white Christians (sometimes called Christian Dominionism) is laid out here by the great Heather Cox Richardson . I’m just adding a few telltale stats that should be noted in relation to the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision that a fertilized egg that is then frozen is human life and anyone who destroys such a human life maybe held criminally liable, essentially for murder. If a state like Alabama leads the way in enforced so-called Christian morality, heaven help us!
Alabama ranks third in the nation for highest infant mortality rates. The only two states with higher infant mortality rates are number two Arkansas, and America’s greatest state, Mississippi, in the number one position as far as most deaths of newborns. In fairness to both sides, it must be said, of course, that this is according to the CDC, a government agency that Jesus Christ himself long ago warned is full of lying commie cucks, who will do anything to make good Christians look bad. infant mortality rates US states
Alabama ranks fifth in the nation for highest rates of child poverty.Once again, Mississippi leads the pack.child poverty by state
In terms of education, Alabama does much better, coming in at #44 out of 50, a respectable sixth from the bottom. In this case, Mississippi, at #41, beats them, being nine from the bottom. Education by state
Per capita murder in the state of Alabama, which is double the rate of rootin’ tootin’ Texas, is the third highest in the country. Once again, Mississippi makes them look a little better by comparison. Murderby state
In terms of executions, Alabama kicks Mississippi’s ass, by a margin of two to one!Executions by state.
A word to out of state men visiting Alabama: avoid jerking off in your motel room. While killing a spurt of sperm cells might not technically qualify as murder, it could be seen as assault with a deadly weapon.I would advise you to consult with a pious Christian expert like MAGA Mike fucking Johnson about this before randily reaching for the old johnson. Peace out.
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