Former Douglaston office of NY Congressman Thomas Suozzi, who retired rather than run in 2022, and whose name was still on the office, on a large sign, just a couple of weeks back. It is now the office of hard-working Congress distraction George Whatever his name is, working tirelessly for his constituency, even as they call on him to resign, while keeping the lowest of low profiles in Douglaston.
To his credit, he’s trying his best to make the AR-15 the official gun of the USA! USA!!
The Democrats on Jim Jordan’s House committee to prove that the Democrats are actually the lying traitors who have weaponized the government against decent, good Americans (like the innocent political prisoners who legally protested at the Capitol on January 6th and were viciously treated as rioters) wrote a report on three sketchy whistleblowers, all former FBI employees, who seem to have received some payments, or employment, from Trump-related entities in exchange for their candid, partisan whistleblowing. The New York Times reports:
The Democratic report includes excerpts from depositions and evidence of conspiratorial social media posts.
It also details the ties between Mr. Trump’s inner circle and the witnesses. For instance, Mr. Patel found Mr. Friend his next job, working as a fellow on domestic intelligence and security services with the Center for Renewing America, which is run by Russ Vought. The center is largely funded by the Conservative Partnership Institute, which is run by Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, and former Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina.
Yes, Russ Vought is the current advisor to the MAGA House on how to use the debt ceiling to hold the country hostage (see previous post). He is Trumpie’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget. The guy who oversaw a $1 trillion increase in the national debt in his first great year and another $4 trillion in his second.
Or as they say in MAGAland — FUCK YOU!
Republicans, now MAGA (they virtually all vote with MAGA, every time, out of “fear of the base”) have been trying to cut back the hated government “entitlements” that protect many tens of millions of vulnerable Americans, at the expense of the corporate bottom line and vast, untouchable hereditary wealth.
The entitlements of the superwealthy, of course, are never on the table, since the table is owned by the rich and powerful. As God and Jesus both intended. The drive to limit, eliminate or “privatize” programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, The Affordable Care Act, public education, regulation of toxic pollution, has been a constant in conservative politics, and vocally, ever more loudly expressed, since at least 1980 (“The Reagan Revolution” — it’s cool to be greedy as sin, if you’re filthy rich).
The theory is that government spending is exactly like a family’s spending. You have to prioritize and budget, to spend every one of your hard earned dollars wisely. If you need, say, an extensive arsenal of deadly weapons to defend your home, you may have to cut back on things like medicine and a slightly more expensive healthy diet, even if the doctor has prescribed it. If, the analogy goes, the country needs the largest military budget in human history every year, well, poor people and old people who can’t afford their own things have to suck it up and tighten their belts a bit more.
Also, key to this pisspoor analogy is the denial that raising income — for government spending tax revenue, something an elected majority could increase at any time by imposing a fair tax system — has anything to do with a family’s ability to buy things, (except, in the case of government spending) things that poor people or old folks might need.
Because the US is the only civilized country that requires a 50+% majority to vote to fund allocations made the year before (the “Debt Ceiling”) a tiny majority of say five in the 435 seat House can hold the US credit rating, and the world’s economy, hostage by making big demands.
What is the razor thin MAGA majority demanding, in return for this generally automatic bipartisan approval to increase the “debt ceiling” to cover current financial commitments? At first it seemed to be cuts to the social safety net. Biden called them out on it during his State of the Union, and they have squirmed away from that obvious plan of attack. Their latest “proposal” in the hostage standoff is reported by Heather Cox Richardson:
Now that Republicans have committed to taking cuts to Social Security and Medicare off the table, Vought has a plan to cut $9 trillion from domestic programs over the next ten years by cutting more than $400 billion from food stamps, cutting hundreds of billions from education, cutting in half the State Department and the Labor Department, and cutting $2 trillion from Medicaid and more than $600 billion from the Affordable Care Act.
source
“America cannot be saved unless the current grip of woke and weaponized government is broken,” Vought says in his proposal. “That is the central and immediate threat facing the country—the one that all our statesmen must rise tall to vanquish…. The battle cannot wait.”
Russell Vought, Heather informs us, was Trumpie’s former budget director. Of course he was. Heather continues:
But, as Jeff Stein, Josh Dawsey and Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post point out, Vought’s stand is a little awkward, since he oversaw the explosion of the national debt as director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump. In his first year as director, the debt grew by $1 trillion; in his second, by $4 trillion. Now he claims that the Biden administration is abusing its power by arresting people who participated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and so must be reined in.
Vought’s proposal promises to balance the budget in ten years, but it also predicts the number of working people in the U.S. will increase by 14.5 million more people than the Congressional Budget Office says will enter the workforce. That surge—if it were to come—would push the economy to grow faster, thus reducing the deficit by an additional $3.8 trillion. But where the people will come from is a mystery.
Who says MAGA, who always unconditionally protects its own (until they need to be thrown under the bus to protect their loyal leader) is not led by the nation’s greatest intellectual giants? You act like lying and magical thinking are bad things, you egghead, elitist prig!
In four years Trump and his appointees appear to have increased the national debt by 25% [1]. So?!
Yet Heather Cox Richardson continues to quote Biden, a president who 25% of Americans believe was illegitimately inserted into office by a powerful secret cabal of cannibalistic child abusers who hate our freedom and everything white Christians stand for:
Biden noted that Republicans have voted more than 50 times to change or repeal the Affordable Care Act since it passed 13 years ago. He also pointed to the fact that the chief budget consultant for the House Republicans is Trump’s former budget director Russell Vought.
[1] Given the current debt is just over $31.4 trillion, Jolly’s self-described “rough” 25 percent figure claimed by Jolly is imprecise based on Treasury data; it is actually 22.3 percent of the current total. source
abso fucking lutely
Robert Reich, hitting the nail on the head, again.
Heather Cox Richardson puts Kevin McCarthy’s craven, nasty, dangerous deal with the MAGA fringe into grim perspective.
Carlson has repeatedly challenged the official accounts of the riot, blaming the federal government for launching the attack and claiming that FBI agents were behind it. Carlson is also one of the key conspirators in the Fox News Channel promotion of the Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 election, even though they dismissed that notion privately. The expectation is that Carlson will hack whatever videos he can into a version of the Republican narrative.
But there is more: McCarthy is fundraising off his release of the videos to Carlson, claiming he is delivering “truth and transparency over partisan games” and asking “patriots” to “chip…in” to help House Republicans.
from Julia Claire & Crooked Media—
Kevin McCarthy fascism update!! House Speaker McCarthy has granted Fox News host Tucker Carlson exclusive access to all of the Capitol security footage from the January 6 insurrection. This is…uhhh…a highly unusual (and unethical) move. (Imagine Nancy Pelosi bypassing House committees and the public to show oversight materials exclusively to, say, her daughter’s documentary-production company, so it could be turned into Democratic Party propaganda, and you’ll see the issue.) But it’s also a crystal-clear statement from McCarthy about where the GOP comes down on the Big Lie and the insurrection. Just last week, Dominion Voting Systems exposed Carlson’s efforts within Fox News to suppress accurate reporting about the 2020 election and intentionally feed the network’s audience lies. McCarthy’s here to say, Republicans love it! Carlson’s still their guy, systemic lying about the 2020 election is still their jam, and the insurrection is still all cool with them. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said he was not consulted on the release of the footage, and another source says neither was the rest of the GOP leadership. Just a big ole’ “Fuck you!” to us all from McCarthy. Meanwhile, his special pal Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) was really On One™ this weekend (even more so than usual), committing low-key sedition by calling for a “national divorce” between Republican and Democratic states, apparently angling to be a modern-day John C. Calhoun without bothering to update his talking points. Even Gov. Spencer Cox (R-UT) denounced this rhetoric as, “destructive and wrong and—honestly—evil.” Couldn’t have said it better ourselves!
Ari Melber puts it pretty well in this report:
We all know that a desperate person with no scruples, feeling cornered and about to lose something they need, is capable of atrocious behavior. Even if the person has some scruples, when badly wounded and in great pain they may become capable of terrible acts.
Donald Trump’s brain, politically speaking, is an apparently very disturbed man named Steve Bannon. Sloppy Steve fancies himself a modern day strategist of international nationalism (which rings like National Socialism), right-wing oligarchic authoritarianism. He speaks of Vladimir Lenin’s “fire hose of mendacity”, the idea of flooding the marketplace of ideas with a constant high-powered flood of incendiary lies, like spraying diarrhea out of a high pressure nozzle. People get so overwhemed, so worn out, so sickened, that they turn away, while many others, less capable critical thinkers, are convinced by the constant stream of verifiable horseshit that comes too fast to fact check.
The transactional Trump was arguably the most corrupt, and one of the most insane, presidents who ever won the Electoral College. He was said to constantly push against the guardrails, as the New York Times styled it “bending and sometimes breaking them“. Most of the time he would just take a greasy shit on them, “here are your fucking norms, asshole.“
By design, according to Bannon’s Leninist strategy and Trump’s own penchant for chaos, it would take hours to list all of the destructive, corrupt and despicable acts committed by this administration (ask any of the remaining 900+ of the almost 4,000 children seized from asylum seekers who will never see their parents again).
Here’s a disgusting one that just jumped out at me, nicely encapsulating the destructive psychopathy of the GOP’s leader and the moral tone of its lynch mob caucus. I was reminded of it when I saw a photo of the supremely spineless Mike Pence wearing his special Vice President of the United States Covid mask.
Trump tested positive for Covid a day or two before the first 2020 presidential debate, and lied about it, claiming his retest was negative. It would have been a political disaster for him to admit that he was so weak and mortal that he got Covid, the hoax virus that Biden invented to defeat him in a rigged election. So the usually punctual president showed up late for the debate, too late to take the Covid test he’d agreed to take, and immediately took the stage with no mask barking at Biden from close range. Biden was, fortunately, wearing a mask.
Trump mocked Biden’s mask and within a day or two was medevacced to one of the greatest hospitals in the world to have every one of the new million dollar Covid treatments available.
Trump demanded an early release from the hospital and forced his secret service detail to drive around with him in a closed car so he could wave to his fans while his agents contracted Covid from him during his strongman photo op right out of his boyfriend Kim jong-un’s playbook. Then he immediately bragged about how easy it was to defeat Covid, that it was mind over matter, that if you were strong you had nothing to fear from this so-called pandemic.
Then the insane, highly infectious prick skirts the agreement he made to be tested before he took the debate stage. On the honor system the infamous and prolific liar lyingly told the corrupt, sick, dangerous, biased libtard cucks who were running the unfair debate that he had tested negative for Covid. His fucking family sat in the first row hissing and coughing throughout the debate with no masks on. Biden, fortunately, was wearing a mask. Which is probably what saved his life, or at least saved the senior citizen a bad case of a deadly pandemic.
Hard to even untangle the many strands of that transgression. He’d been lying for months about Covid, first claiming it would go away in a few weeks, saying it was the Kung Flu, blaming Hunter Biden, China and corrupt Ukraine for Covid-19, then appointing his imbecile son-in-law to be the czar of Covid, because Jared had done such a wonderful job fixing the opioid crisis and had also successfully brought peace to the Middle East (not including the Palestinians who he called ungrateful idiots).
Now if Biden had died of Covid that he contracted from Trump at that debate, could Trump go to prison for manslaughter based on his demonstrable depraved indifference to human life?
LOL!!!
17 seconds of Donald Trump’s former gunsel, Bagpiper Bill Barr, describing “one of the greatest travesties in American history” as he appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the oringes of Trump’s confident insistence that he never fucking did anything wrong in his life, in spite of all the sick, dangerous haters who blame him for everything.
Barr is the same corrupt pile of shit who insisted that mail-in voting obviously was an invitation to massive election fraud (during the lead up to the 2020 election). He testified that there was good reason to believe that Obama had spied on Trump during his campaign. He told a law enforcement crowd that Black Americans had better start respecting the police if they expected the protection of the completely non-racist American police force.
So not only a corruptly lying sack of shit, but a racist corruptly lying sack of shit.
A short summary of Barr’s career as the MAGA Attorney General.
gratuitousblahg 