So-Called ‘Christian’ Mike Johnson Does the ‘Weave’ When Asked if Morality Matters to the GOP

Posted by on November 17, 2024 at 2:54 pm. 4 Comments :

As Donald Trump unveils the principle personnel of his upcoming administration, it is becoming clearer every day just how bereft of principles, knowledge, and experience will be available in some of the most critical positions in the United States government.

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Donald Trump, Congress, Mike Johnson

Unfortunately, it isn’t just a problem of ignorance and incompetence, but one of downright malice by nominees who have expressed ideas and intentions that are contrary to American policies and values.

Among those nominees are an accused sex trafficker (Matt Gaetz) for Attorney General, a health conspiracy crackpot (Robert Kennedy Jr) for Secretary of Health and Human Services, a TV host who has defended war criminals (Pete Hegseth) for Secretary of Defense, and a suspected Kremlin sympathizer (Tulsi Gabbard) for Director of National Intelligence. What they all share is an unwavering devotion to Trump, whose own values are wanting and/or warped.

SEE THIS: Trump’s Refusal to Sign the Required Ethics Agreement is His Virtual Promise to Violate It

America’s founders designed a system of government that anticipated some of the potential pitfalls that we face now. However, that system of checks and balances doesn’t work if the equal branches of government are run by lily-livered supplicants to an aspiring totalitarian. Which is precisely the situation we find ourselves in today as revealed in an interview of Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson by Jake Tapper of CNN…

Tapper: You’re a man of faith. You’re a man of God. You’re a man of family. With some of these nominees, Gaetz, Hegseth, RFK Jr., I wonder does it matter anymore for Republicans to think of leaders as people who are moral in their personal lives? Is that still important to the Republican Party?
Johnson: Sure. It’s an important issue for anyone in leadership. This is what I’ll say about the nominees that the president has put forward, is that they are persons who will shake up the status quo. And I think what the American people have believed, and what they’ve delivered with the mandate in this election, is a demand that we shake up the status quo. […] Any president has the right to name their own cabinet to nominate persons that they think the people that will fulfill their agenda. And the people that are on this list will do that.

First of all, Tapper was exceedingly generous in his description of Johnson’s alleged piety. There has been little of that demonstrated in his public life, outside of vacant rhetoric.

More to the point, Johnson conspicuously avoided any coherent response to Tapper’s question. After a perfunctory concession that morality matters, he “weaved” (as Trump might describe it) into a lengthy, but unrelated, discourse on “shak[ing] up the status quo.” He further claimed that Trump had an electoral mandate that is a figment of his – and Trump’s – imagination. He won by one of the smallest margins in history, and failed to get a majority of votes.

Johnson’s justification for supporting the morality deprived candidates nominated by Trump is that “Any president has the right to name their own cabinet.” That’s true. But it is the Senate’s right to confirm those that the president names, or to decline to do so. And there has never been better justification to refuse confirmation than with the cretins Trump has named.

Will Johnson take a principled stand on these nominees? Don’t hold your breath. To the contrary, he has already stated his intention to object to the release of a report by the House Ethics Committee detailing their investigation of Gaetz for sexual misconduct and illicit drug use. And he made his announcement of that objection after visiting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago where he likely got his marching orders from Dear Leader.

That’s about all that can be expected by Johnson as Speaker of the House, as well as by Sen. John Thune as GOP leader of the Senate. Hopefully there will be a few Republicans with the minimum measure of morality to join with Democrats and block Trump’s worst nominees. But that may be a thin lifeline to cling to. Time will tell.

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Trump’s Cabinet Picks Make it Hard to Tell the Difference Between Russian State TV and Fox News

Posted by on November 16, 2024 at 2:30 pm. NO Comments :

Forty years ago in 1984, with some measure of prescient irony, a song called “Nobody Told Me (There’d Be Days Like These)” by John Lennon was posthumously released that included the lyric “Strange days indeed.” Which is an apt description of current times considering how, less than two weeks ago, America was thrown into turmoil when a twice-impeached, convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, and aspiring dictator, was elected president of the United States. And that’s just the short list. Here’s a more comprehensive enumeration of Donald Trump’s noxiousness

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Donald Trump Vladimir Putin

In the intervening days, Trump has revealed a motley crew of candidates to populate his Cabinet that includes an accused sex trafficker (Matt Gaetz), a health conspiracy crackpot (Robert Kennedy Jr), a TV host who has defended war criminals (Pete Hegseth), and a suspected Kremlin sympathizer (Tulsi Gabbard). What they all have in common is a blatant absence of any requisite skills or experience to do the jobs they’ve been tapped for, and a cult-like reverence for their Dear Leader Trump. Also, close ties to Trump’s Ministry of Propaganda, Fox News.

SEE THIS: Trump is Stacking His Cabinet with Fox News Trump-Fluffers

Making this White House of Ill Repute even worse is that they have been sanctioned by the spin proctors of Vladimir Putin’s empire. Russian state TV has fully embraced Trump’s choices as noted in this report from Moscow by CNN…

Anchor Erin Burnett: Tonight celebrations on Russian state television after Trump picked Matt Gaetz and Tulsi Gabbard for highly sensitive national security roles.
Correspondent Fred Pleitgen: Kremlin controlled TV praising some of president-elect Trump’s cabinet picks, calling designated attorney general Matt Gaetz ‘a Trump loyalist,’ and also speaking favorably about Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard for repeatedly parroting Kremlin talking points on the war in Ukraine.

“‘She, from day one, clarified the reason for the special operation in Ukraine,’ the Russian anchor said, criticizing the actions of the Biden administration. Gabbard’s words in 2022, right after Russia launched it’s invasion of Ukraine, caused even panelists on Russian state TV to cynically ask whether she’s a Kremlin agent.

And if that weren’t enough, another Russian media analyst, Julia Davis, reported that “Russian state TV propagandists and government officials expressed their delight with Trump’s selections, saying that ‘All of them are totally wonderful!‘”

The similarity of these glowing appraisals of Trump’s Cabinet comrades with those by Fox News anchors and contributors is unmistakable. They are all equally impressed by his ability to recruit unflinchingly faithful flunkies who are utterly devoid of qualifications. Fox News hosts Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, and others, have greeted Trump’s nominees with the very same drooling adoration. And despite their obvious character deficiencies, the Fox crew is all in on their appointments, even as Trump maneuvers to avoid actual background checks and confirmation hearings.

SEE ALSO: Dictator on Day One! Trump Nixes FBI Background Checks for his Unqualified, Anti-American Cabinet

This isn’t just a coincidence that Fox News and the Kremlin have such well aligned and positive views of Trump and his sub-par team. It is an unambiguous indication of where Trump’s loyalties lie. He has a long history of praising Putin and defending his crimes against humanity. While at the same time Trump has disparaged the U.S. as corrupt, filthy, failing, and a third world nation that is a garbage can for the rest of the planet. What’s more, Trump incessantly insults American leaders as liars and criminals who are bent on destroying the country.

The American people must not dismiss the coordinated messages that Trump and Putin are delivering. We must be vigilant and committed to resisting their assaults on our republic and to preserving democracy. The next four years are going to be challenging. And part of that challenge is to remain aware of the threats posed by anti-American propagandists both foreign and domestic.

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Dictator on Day One! Trump Nixes FBI Background Checks for his Unqualified, Anti-American Cabinet

Posted by on November 15, 2024 at 1:32 pm. 5 Comments :

In the heat of the 2024 presidential election season, Donald Trump sat for one of his many tongue bathing “interviews” with Sean Hannity on Fox News. On one particular occasion, Hannity sought to handhold Trump through a controversy wherein he had been accused of aspiring to be a dictator. But true to form, Trump was oblivious to the answers that Hannity tried to pass to him in his questions.

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Donald Trump

Despite Hannity’s repeated attempts, Trump insisted on expressing his abhorrent authoritarian aspirations. He stubbornly affirmed his deep desire to be a “dictator on day one.” And the limitation of his tyrannical reign to a single day provides little comfort to those who know that dictators never relinquish power voluntarily once they assume it.

SEE THIS: Trump Cloddishly Dodges Hannity’s Softball Questions About Whether He Would Be a Dictator

Validating Trump’s totalitarian tendencies, it is now being reported that he intends to bypass the routine FBI background checks that are conducted on prospective presidential Cabinet candidates. According to CNN…

“President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team is?bypassing traditional FBI background checks for at least some of his Cabinet picks while using private companies to conduct vetting of potential candidates for administration jobs, people close to the transition planning say.

“Trump and his allies believe the FBI system is slow and plagued with issues that could stymie the president-elect’s plan to quickly begin the work of implementing his agenda, people briefed on the plans said. Critics say the intrusive background checks sometimes turn up embarrassing information used to inflict political damage.

“The discussions come as Trump has floated several controversial choices for high-level positions in the US government – including Matt Gaetz for attorney general and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence.”

There are reasons that the FBI has been tasked with these background checks for decades. The positions that Cabinet heads hold grant them access to sensitive national security information. If they are compromised in any way it could make them vessels for foreign agents to acquire classified data, or even make them vulnerable to blackmail attempts. And that’s presuming that they aren’t purposefully acting on behalf of enemy regimes.

So why would Trump want to forego background checks on his nominees? Does he know something about them that we don’t? Are his own motives suspect? Even if they are not themselves foreign assets, do they have connections that would be concerning? Could they be unwitting dupes?

These are all questions that take on extraordinary significance when Trump himself has been so chummy with foreign despots like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Viktor Orbán, and Kim Jong Un. Will those questions be asked? Will Trump be able to delay the process until he is able to install his own nominee for FBI director (possibly Trump flunky, Kash Patel)?

Many of Trump’s nominees to date have glaring issues that would raise red flags in any probe for security clearances. His attorney general nominee, Matt Gaetz, has been credibly accused of sex trafficking of a minor and illicit drug use. His Health and Human Services nominee, Robert Kennedy Jr, is a serial adulterer with a dead worm in his brain who holds crackpot conspiracy theories regarding medicine and vaccines. His nominee for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has advocated bombing Iran and North Korea and argued in support of war criminals. His nominee for director of national security, Tulsi Gabbard, has ties with Putin and Russia.

What they all have in common is a worshipful cult attachment, and unwavering loyalty, to Trump, and no experience whatsoever in the jobs that he is proposing they fill. If it were Trump’s mission to undermine the stability of the United States, he couldn’t have picked a better team. So naturally, he wouldn’t want any of his co-conspirators to be subject to scrutiny.

Trump has been angling to give his nominees “recess appointments” so that they can bypass the Senate hearings as well. Hopefully Republicans in the Senate will grow a spine and insist that these nominees be required to submit to both background checks and Senate hearings. But resting our hopes on the strength of GOP spines is not exactly reassuring.

This leaves any hopes of preserving our democracy to Democrats, who are in the minority in both houses of Congress, and the media, who have been grossly deficient in their duty to inform. Which means that the only remaining path to salvation rests with the people. Are we up to it? We better be!

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Trump’s Election Triggers Big Selloff of His Truth Social Stock – By Company Executives

Posted by on November 14, 2024 at 11:10 am. NO Comments :

Among the egomaniacal delusions of Donald Trump is his insistence that whatever he touches turns to gold, and that positive news about anything is only due to his divine intervention. Conversely, he wants people to believe that any catastrophe (Ukraine, Gaza, Hurricanes) would never have happened if he were in charge. It’s a symptom of the malignant narcissism that he has been suffering from for decades.

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Donald Trump Pacifier Fox

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump countered the fact that the stock market was booming by claiming that it was only because investors were anticipating his return to the White House. Never mind that the market hit record highs throughout the four years of President Biden’s administration. Also, unemployment hit record lows, the GDP soared, inflation was cut in half, and numerous other indicators showed gains that Trump could not have had any effect on. He was even called out about this by his Ministry of Propaganda, Fox News…

SEE THIS: Fox News Host Neil Cavuto Interrupts Trump’s Lying to Note ‘He’s Not Entitled to His Own Facts’

However, it would be difficult now for Trump to explain how the perception of his magnificence is turning the putrid pile of manure known as Truth Social into a bouquet of fragrant roses. Since election day on November 5, the stock of Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), the corporate parent of Truth Social, has declined about 40%, from an intraday high of $45.00 to it’s current value of about $27.00.

So does Trump now believe that, since the world revolves around him, his election is responsible for the selloff and investors nervousness about its continued viability? Not likely. He is protected by a perverse psychological defense mechanism that is triggered whenever he is exposed to bad news about himself. This makes him immune from harm because all he can perceive is his own greatness.

However, others with actual money on the line obviously feel differently. And those others happen to be principle executives of TMTG who are cashing out before the stock descends to its actual value of next to nothing. CNBC is reporting that…

“The chief financial officer of Trump Media and two other corporate insiders sold more than $16 million worth of company stock in the week following the presidential election, according to new disclosures.

“Most of the stock was sold by CFO Phillip Juhan, who in August adopted a trading plan that revealed his intention to sell 400,000 DJT shares by December 2025.

“Trump Media director Eric Swider and Scott Glabe, the company’s general counsel, each sold fewer shares of the company, whose majority owner Donald Trump was elected president on Nov. 5. […]

“Juhan, who is also Trump Media’s treasurer, sold 320,000 shares on Friday at a price of $30.65 per share, or a total of $9.8 million worth of stock according to a Form 4 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

“On Monday, Juhan sold another 64,000 shares at $32.97 per share, another $2.11 million worth, the same filing said.”

The CNBC report also noted that TMTG “report[ed] revenue of slightly more than just $1 million in the third quarter of this year,” with “losses of $19.2 million for the quarter.” So the rush to bail out is a smart move by the company’s insiders and other investors. Trump himself, however, insists that he is not selling. We’ll see.

For a some background on the financial and legal disaster that is Truth Social, see the following…

Trump’s Truth Social Scam Crashes as He Brags that It’s Booming Because He’s Winning (He’s Not)
TMTG makes a relative pittance and is losing millions. Were it to be valued according to its earnings it would be a penny stock. Its current value is entirely the result of the rubes who invest because they are indoctrinated members of the Trump cult.

Trump Media is Purging Those Too Weak to Keep Up the Crumbling Truth Social Scam (ProPublica)
An investigation of TMTG by ProPublica has just uncovered yet another example of the company’s corruption. The report found that “people with knowledge of the company” have confirmed that several top executives of the company appear to have been ousted following an internal investigation by a lawyer that the company hired to examine allegations of “mismanagement” and “misuse” of funds by it’s CEO, and Trump flunky, Devin Nunes.

LOSER Trump’s Truth Social is Well on its Way to Becoming His Next Bankruptcy
TMTG reported its earning for the second quarter of 2024. And it was not a pretty sight. As reported by Investor’s Business Daily, “Trump Media reported net sales of $836,000, down 30% vs. a year earlier. Operating costs soared to $19.5 million vs. $4.9 million a year earlier.”

Trump’s Truth Social is Shedding Users Like a Miserable Childless Woman’s Mangy Cat
The Donald Trump-controlled Truth Social platform recorded its third straight month of declining traffic. Truth Social attracted 2,112,000 unique visitors, down 38% compared to June 2023 when the site generated 3,407,000 unique visitors. It was the platform’s second worst traffic performance since June 2022 when Truth Social had only 1,891,000 unique visitors.

Trump Crime Syndicate: Investors Arrested for Insider Trading in Failing Truth Social Scam
Trump’s associates in his truthless, anti-social media venture were arrested and charged with insider trading. Reports indicate that “the three individuals together made more than $22 million in illegal profits.”

Truth Social Disease: Ads on Trump’s Twitter Ripoff are Mostly Scams and Trump-Fluffing Merch
Advertisers are afraid of their ads being juxtaposed with hate speech and other noxious content. Consequently, the only advertisers who are willing to shell out are sketchy scammers, conspiracy theorists, and junk peddlers.

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Fox News Asks Biden’s Press Sec if He Apologized to Trump for Saying He’s a Threat to Democracy

Posted by on November 13, 2024 at 2:57 pm. NO Comments :

The unfortunate outcome of the presidential election last week is already sending spine-chilling reverberations across the political landscape as the ghastly consequences of another Donald Trump occupation of the White House become impossible to ignore.

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Fox News, Joe Biden, Fake News

The shape of Trump’s Cabinet has become deplorably clear in the past few days. His nominees so far reflect his inherent corruption, ignorance, aspirations of autocracy, and the shallowness of a former reality TV game show host. Most of his picks are closely associated with his Ministry of Propaganda, Fox News.

SEE THIS: Trump is Stacking His Cabinet with Fox News Trump-Fluffers

Trump has not yet named his choice to be his press secretary. But rest assured that it will be a brazenly dishonest purveyor of self-serving falsehoods. In the meantime, we should appreciate the press secretary currently serving President Biden, Karine Jean-Pierre.

At Wednesday’s daily White House press briefing, the noxious odor of Fox News wafted into the room as a reporter from their business network, Edward Lawrence, was called upon to ask a question. True to form, it was a preposterous question that had nothing to do with any matter of concern to the American people. Instead, he sought to manufacture a melodrama out of the morning meeting that Biden had with Trump…

Lawrence: We saw a unified front related to a transition in the Oval Office meeting. But a lot was said on the campaign trail like ‘Trump is a dangerous threat to our country and our democracy. Was there an apology today?
Jean-Pierre: I’m sorry? Apology from whom? I’ve answered this a couple of times with respect to democracy in the past week. The President is always going to feel obligated to be honest with the American people. What he says still stands. And it’s not just him. You heard this from former [Trump] staffers.

Biden had nothing to apologize for. He told the truth about Trump. And as Jean-Pierre went on to note, is was Trump’s own close associates who were the ones that raised the question of his threat to democracy. It was his White House Chief of Staff, Gen. John Kelly, his Defense Secretary, Gen. James Mattis, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, and others who said that Trump was a fascist who praised Hitler. Trump himself made statements that were overtly threatening to democracy, such as branding his critics as “the enemy within.”

Lawrence’s question also neglected to mention that Trump used the very same language aimed at Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris, who he said, without a shred of evidence, were threats to democracy. But Lawrence didn’t bother to ask whether Trump apologized. Unrattled by Lawrence’s purposeful provocation, Jean-Pierre gave a calm and coherent response…

Jean-Pierre: What we also want to be very clear about is listening to the will of the American people. There was an election. It is important to respect our institution. It is important to respect the free and fair election. And that’s what this President is doing.

America needs to prepare itself for what’s to come in the White House Press Briefing room. Axios is reporting that Trump is expected to “shake it up.”

“Trump’s first administration tried to ban outlets it saw as unfavorable from off-camera press briefings. That included the New York Times, Politico, CNN and BBC.” […]

“Any efforts to expand access to daily press briefings to pro-Trump outlets, such as Steve Bannon’s War Room, would need to come at the expense of existing outlets.”

So get ready for briefings that feature folks like Bannon, Alex Jones, and Laura Loomer. The “mainstream” media reporters from the New York Times and CBS and NPR will all be banished as “fake news.” And Trump’s press secretary is likely to be someone like his former attorney Alina Habba or his daughter Tiffany. Which means the rest of the media had better grow a spine and be prepared to protect the very notion of a free press.

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Trump is Stacking His Cabinet with Fox News Trump-Fluffers

Posted by on November 12, 2024 at 1:14 pm. 3 Comments :

Donald Trump isn’t wasting any time putting together his White House regime. And true to form, it is shaping up to be an assembly of cult disciples devoted to Dear Leader who will place his egomaniacal priorities above the welfare of the United States and its citizens.

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Donald Trump, Fox News

Among the common characteristics of the first batch of Trump nominees are their unflinching loyalty to Trump, their commitment to bending to whatever is the MAGA agenda of the hour, their uniform whiteness, and their extremist views that align with his utter lack of ethical principles.

SEE THIS: Trump’s Refusal to Sign the Required Ethics Agreement is His Virtual Promise to Violate It

There is, however, another distinction that is shared by Trump’s early nominees. They all have a close relationship with Trump’s Ministry of Propaganda, aka Fox News. They are frequent guests who have reliably disseminated the MAGA doctrine for years on the network that features such unabashed Trump flunkies as Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, and Maria Bartiromo. Media Matters compiled the stats on the bookings of these new nominees to be government officials, and reported the number of times they have recently appeared…

  • Michael Waltz (National Security Adviser): 569
  • Stephen Miller (Deputy White House chief of staff): 374
  • Lee Zeldin (Environmental Protection Agency administrator): 307
  • Marco Rubio (Secretary of State): 263
  • Kristi Noem (Homeland Security secretary): 135
  • Elise Stefanik (Ambassador to the United Nation): 108
  • Tom Homan (Border “Czar”): 80
  • Mike Huckabee (Ambassador to Israel): Former Fox News host
  • LATE ADDITIONS:
  • Sean Duffy (Secretary of Transportation)
  • Tulsi Gabbard (Director of National Intelligence)
  • Sebastian Gorka (Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Counterterrorism)
  • Janette Nesheiwat (Surgeon General)
  • Monica Crowley (Assistant Secretary of State and Chief of Protocol)
  • Kimberley Guilfoyle (Ambassador to Greece)

Also added… Pete Hegseth (Secretary of Defense): Co-host of Fox and Friends.
While all of the nominees in the list above have little experience or qualifications for the jobs they have been nominated for, Hegseth is particularly egregious.

He attained only the rank of Major in the Army. He has no experience in broad command of military operations, developing strategy, or administration. He has never led a large organization like the Pentagon with more than 3.4 million people, including soldiers and civilian employees.

What Hegseth does have is experience in disseminating propaganda. He also has something in common with Trump – Being a serial adulterer and financial fraudster. He has been a full time Fox News talking head since 2014. In that time he has attacked the military and veterans. For Instance…

And then there’s this…

This is not unlike Trump’s first occupation of the White House. During that time he also relied on poaching people from Fox News to staff his administration. They included his National Security advisor John Bolton, State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert, Director of the National Economic Council Larry Kudlow, and many more.

No one should be surprised by these ties. Despite how often Trump complains about Fox News, they are still his best source of positive propaganda. For instance, just this Tuesday morning the “Curvy Couch” potatoes of Fox and Friends discussed the differences between how Democrats were handling their losses this year, and how Republicans handled them in 2020…

Steve Doocy: Here’s the thing. Those people are all entitled to their opinion and they can feel how they feel. But, he is going to be president for four years. He won a four-year term. Just deal with it.
Lawrence Jones: I don’t remember Republicans acting out like this, cutting their hair and all of this after Donald Trump lost in 2020. You’re sad, you’re demoralized, but you move on.

Exactly! Republicans didn’t do anything crazy on January 6, 2021, like cut their hair. They just calmly stormed Congress, beat police officers, threatened representatives and their staff and VP Mike Pence, and vandalized the seat of American democracy. All in an attempt to overthrow a free and fair election. You know…they “dealt with it.” And Trump hasn’t stopped whining about it for four years.

The only “moving on” that is being done now is Trump’s Fox News mouthpieces into his administration. What’s. next? Jeanine Pirro for Attorney General? Maria Bartiromo for Treasury Secretary? Jesse Watters for Labor Secretary? How about Peter Doocy for Press Secretary? He is already auditioning for the post…

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Trump’s Refusal to Sign the Required Ethics Agreement is His Virtual Promise to Violate It

Posted by on November 11, 2024 at 2:41 pm. 1 Comments :

The Presidential Transition Act was established to effect an orderly transition between succeeding terms of presidents. Among its features is a code of ethics that the president-elect is required to agree to before being permitted access to classified materials and briefings.

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Donald Trump WTF

No one should be surprised that Donald Trump has, so far, refused to sign the ethics agreement. Which is entirely in character for Trump whose record in business, politics, and even his personal life, is rife with deliberate and nefarious ethical failings. He is a walking monument to corruption, deceit, and immorality. Especially troubling are his legal lapses in ethics that have resulted in dozens of felony charges and convictions.

SEE THIS: Here’s a Summary of the Crimes Trump’s Lawyer Tells the Supreme Court He Has Immunity to Commit

According to reports, one of the factors holding up Trump’s signature is that the agreement would require him to abstain from any conflicts of interest. That would be a nearly impossible burden for Trump to uphold, considering his broad array of businesses that he has already exploited unethically in his previous occupation of the White House. Now CNN is reporting that…

“President-elect Donald Trump has not yet submitted a series of transition agreements with the Biden administration, in part because of concerns over the mandatory ethics pledge [which is required by law under the Presidential Transition Act] vowing to avoid conflicts of interest once sworn in to office, CNN has learned.

As president, Trump repeatedly came under fire from ethics groups for potential conflicts of interest relating to his businesses and brands.” […]

“Trump’s most recent financial disclosures as a candidate showed that he has continued to make millions off his properties, books and licensing deals. He and his family recently launched a new cryptocurrency business. […] A sizable share of his net worth, meanwhile, is tied to the publicly traded parent company of Truth Social, the conservative social media network. Trump is the dominant shareholder.”

Every president other Trump has complied with the ethic laws for the office by either relinquishing the potentially conflicting enterprises, or putting them in a blind trust. Trump did neither of those. And it appears that he isn’t interested in doing any of that in his upcoming term either.

By refusing to sign the ethics agreement, Trump is virtually promising to violate it. Why else would he hesitate? And those violations could include activities that are far more serious than improperly enriching himself financially. He could reveal sensitive intelligence information to his pals Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. He could abuse his authority in order to intimidate or control both domestic and foreign politicians. He could funnel funds to himself or to others with whom he has shady deals.

Trump is also preparing to evade any accountability for crimes he may commit while in office. He is stacking his Cabinet with unwavering loyalists who will support whatever crimes he commits. And to insure that he gets his way, he is also plotting to evade constitutional checks and balances in order to install his team of sycophants without Senate oversight or confirmation.

Speculation of Trump appointments of cultists such as Kash Patel to head the CIA, or Mike Davis as Attorney General, would essentially serve as guardians of Trump’s mob operation to shield the boss from accountability. And he needs all the help he can get considering the length of his rap sheet.

UPDATE: Trump finally signed a transition agreement, however, he did so only after altering it so that he “is still refusing to accept several typical trappings of the presidential transition process, including federal funding, equipment and office space — as well as official government background and security checks for his transition staff. The agreement does not include an ethics pledge for the president-elect, required by the Presidential Transition Act.”

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MAGA GOP Reps Deny that Donald ‘I Am Your Retribution’ Trump Has an ‘Enemies List’ (He Does)

Posted by on November 10, 2024 at 2:07 pm. 2 Comments :

It has been less than a week since since Donald Trump eked out a miniscule 2% victory over Vice-President Kamala Harris. But it didn’t take long for the Trump apologists in Congress to begin crafting their reality-defying accounts of his nefarious intentions to launch a reign of terror targeting Democrats, journalists, and anyone else who failed to kowtow to him and kiss his…let’s say ring.

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Donald Trump

The deliberate distortions of what Trump has actually said and done over the course of his campaign amount to a bald-faced effort to gaslight the gullible rubes who were naïve enough to vote for him.

It apparently wasn’t sufficient to tell flagrant lies exalting him while viciously maligning his opponent. They must now try to convince voters that what they clearly saw and heard were all figments of their feeble imaginations. This resulted in the election of a convicted felon, serial sexual abuser, and aspiring dictator, with a resume replete with ill repute.

SEE THIS: What Is America? Who Votes For This?

So naturally Trump’s supplicants in Congress are endeavoring to whitewash his wayward past by blatantly contradicting what everyone witnessed in recent history. For example, on Sunday morning Rep. Jim Jordan insisted that Trump will not go after his political opponents. “‘He didn’t do it in his first term,’ Jordan told CNN ‘State of the Union’ host Dana Bash on Sunday.”

Of course Jordan is adamant that Trump wouldn’t go after his political opponents. Because that’s Jordan’s job. As chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Jordan has conducted numerous, meritless probes of Democrats and other Trump critics, including President Biden and his family. Here are a few others on Trump’s enemies list that CNN confronted Jordan with…

What’s more, Jordan is lying about Trump not going after political opponents in his first term. He did so repeatedly. But he wasn’t able to get anywhere because he had no hint of evidence of any wrongdoing. Even his own staff couldn’t justify the sham persecutions. As for Trump, his enemies list was well documented – mostly in his own words – and quite long. Politico published a collection of some of the targets of Trump’s wrath, including “critics and members of the media to be prosecuted, locked up, deported and even executed…”

  • Joe Biden
  • Kamala Harris
  • Barack Obama
  • Hillary Clinton
  • Nancy Pelosi
  • NY Attorney General Letitia James
  • Liz Cheney
  • Special counsel Jack Smith
  • Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg
  • Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mark Milley
  • James Comey
  • Hunter Biden
  • And dozens more…

Jordan was not alone in his fictionalization of Trump’s yearning for revenge. Byron Donalds (FL-MAGA) also tried to disseminate the lie that Trump was not out for vengeance, telling Fox News that “For the American people who have been listening to these lies from the Democratic left, I will tell you…There’s no enemies list.”

What’s next? Trump and his MAGA cult will try to claim that he never questioned the outcome of the 2020 election; or that he never incited a violent insurrection; or that he never downplayed the deadly effects of COVID; or that he never praised authoritarian tyrants like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un (and Hitler); or that he never sought mass deportations of migrants; or that he never promised to impose inflationary tariffs on all imported goods; or that he never said women must be punished for seeking abortions.

This sort of truth mangling is what Americans can look forward to for the next four years. And all because some voters were more worried about paying more for eggs, than about destroying democracy. And, of course, because the media was too afraid and/or complicit to report accurately about the existential risks the nation faced by returning Trump to the White House.

Unfortunately, we will all share in the regrets – and suffering – that was caused by a small minority of ill-informed, selfish, and gullible cultists who embraced Trump’s transparent dishonesty and egomaniacal ambitions.

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Trump’s Prospective CIA Director [Now FBI Director], Kash Patel: We’re Gonna Come After the People in the Media

Posted by on November 9, 2024 at 1:00 pm. 4 Comments :

The nightmare scenarios that were contemplated prior to Donald Trump prevailing on Tuesday were never given the proper consideration that they deserved. Most politicians and pundits downplayed the most serious consequences of a second occupation of the White house by Trump. And the media engaged in new reality-distorting shenanigans that came to be known as “sanewashing,” the practice of cleaning up Trump’s spine-chillingly abhorrent, and mind-numbingly incoherent, commentaries to make them appear to be almost rational.

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Donald Trump, Constitution

However, the grim truth always emerges eventually. And as Maya Angelou said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Trump showed us who he is repeatedly during his last term in office and throughout this year’s campaign. And who Trump is is a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, financial fraudster, pathological liar, and aspiring dictator. But despite the abundance of evidence, many people managed to gloss over it and vote him in anyway.

SEE THIS: What Is America? Who Votes For This?

Among the atrocious concepts that clog Trump’s cranium, are his yearnings to impose on America the visceral animosity he harbors toward the free press that he has maligned, in Stalinist terms, as “the enemy of the people.” He has filed innumerable, meritless lawsuits against a variety of news organizations, and threatened to revoke the licenses of the networks. Licenses that, by the way, do not exist, so therefore, cannot be revoked.

Given the current state of affairs, this would be a good time to recall what Trump flunky, Kash Patel, articulated in December about what would become the agenda for the press if Trump were to be reelected. In an episode of Steve Bannon’s “War Room” plodcast, Bannon and Patel shared the following exchange…

Bannon: Kash, I know you’re probably gonna be head of the CIA. But do you believe that you can deliver the goods on this in a pretty short order the first couple of months so we can get rolling on prosecutions?
Patel: Yes. We got the bench for it Bannon. And you know those guys – I’m not gonna go out there and say their names right now so the radical left-wing media can terrorize them. But the one thing we learned in the Trump administration the first go round is we gotta put in all America patriots, top to bottom. And we got them for law enforcement. We got them for intel collection. We got them for offensive operations. We got them for DOD, CIA, everywhere. […]

We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we’re gonna come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re gonna come after you.”

And there you have it. Patel is explicitly declaring his intention to use national security government agencies to assault the media. He is unabashedly proclaiming a policy to “come after” journalists and their employers who were critical of Trump, particularly on matters related to his “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was “rigged and stolen” from him.

Patel held a number of national security posts in the previous Trump administration, including Chief of Staff to Trump’s acting Secretary of Defense, Christopher Miller. He is now considered to be on Trump’s short list of nominees to be his CIA Director. [UPDATE: Patel was later named FBI Director] This makes his threats the all more disturbing. The CIA is prohibited from conducting operations against American citizens on American soil. So in addition to these threats breaching the Constitution’s First Amendment protection of the free press, they would be violations of federal law regarding intelligence operations.

Not that Patel or Trump give a whip about breaking the law. Trump has already been convicted of 34 felonies and has 54 more pending. Patel was compelled to testify before Congress where he took the Fifth Amendment to avoid incriminating himself. And Trump’s plans for his Injustice Department are just as bad as those for national security…

SEE ALSO: Trump AG Prospect Savors ‘Glorious’ Plans to ‘Put Kids in Cages’ and Migrants ‘In the DC Gulag’

The trepidation that at least half of the American people feel about Trump reoccupying the White House is well founded. His proposals to implement the biggest mass deportation operation in history, slap inflationary tariffs on all imported goods, and cozy up to foreign tyrants, is not idle blather. He is showing us who he is. And his Cabinets appointments will validate the horrific regime that he intends to reign over.

Which makes it all the more imperative for Americans who cherish the privileges of our constitutional democracy to be ready to resist and fight back against Trump’s attempts to impose an autocracy with him sitting atop it in a golden throne. These may be seem like dark days, but we are the source of a brilliant light if we choose to be.

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Trump AG Prospect Savors ‘Glorious’ Plans to ‘Put Kids in Cages’ and Migrants ‘In the DC Gulag’

Posted by on November 8, 2024 at 2:38 pm. 4 Comments :

The warnings about the existential dangers of another occupation of the White House by Donald Trump were abundant and horrifying. They came from Democrats, Republicans, and a broad assembly of non-partisan government experts, academics, historians, and veterans of public service. Notably, many of Trump’s closest associates were among the most fervent in their forecasts of doom and gloom.

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Donald Trump, Immigrant, Child

Trump’s most passionate detractors included his White House Chief of Staff, Gen. John Kelly, his Secretary of Defense, Gen. Jim Mattis, his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, and dozens of his Cabinet staffers who refused to support his candidacy. Unfortunately, there were just barely enough deluded and gullible MAGA cult disciples who didn’t care that Trump is a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, and an unabashed fascist, because they thought their eggs were too expensive.

SEE THIS: What Is America? Who Votes For This?

Only a few days have have passed since the election, but Trump’s allies. and potential officials in his next administration, are already earning their totalitarian stripes. Case in point, Mike Davis has been identified as a possible Attorney General in the coming Trump regime. He appeared on the podcast of Russian “useful idiot” Benny Johnson where he discussed a variety of issues central to Trump’s Project 2025 agenda. And it didn’t take long for him to unleash some of the repulsive rhetoric that characterized the Trump campaign.

For instance, Davis declared that “We’re gonna indict. We’re gonna indict Hunter Biden and Joe Biden and James Biden. And every other scumball and sleazeball Biden.” Note that he’s already using the inclusive “we” to describe what is being plotted post-inauguration. Davis also promised that “Every January 6th defendant is gonna get a pardon.” Which is an indication of how the Trump administration will adhere to the principles of law and order.

Meanwhile, Davis threatened New York Attorney General, Letitia James – an honest and reputable prosecutor – saying “I dare you to try to continue your lawfare against president Trump in his second term, because… Listen here, sweetheart, we’re not messing around this time. And we will put your fat ass in prison.” Davis has learned well from Trump to couch his threats in condescension, profanity, and misogyny.

However, perhaps the most despicable commentary by Davis on Russkie Benny’s program came up during a discussion of immigration. Davis unleashed a furious rant targeting both undocumented and naturalized immigrants. He raged that…

“We’re going to deport a lot of people, 10 million people and growing. Anchor babies, their parents, their grandparents. We’re gonna put kids in cages. It’s gonna be glorious. We’re gonna detain a lot of people in the D.C. gulag and Gitmo.”

HOLY CR&P! The veil is off the turd. Davis is asserting that millions of migrants will be rounded up and incarcerated in “gulags.” and it doesn’t even matter if they are citizens or not. Grandparents, children, everyone will be “put in cages” for an undetermined amount of time before they are banished to some undetermined countries. And in his grotesque view it will be “glorious.” What he is proposing is a flagrant abuse of human rights and an abomination of decency.

For the record, his plan – which is Trump’s plan – is both illegal and inhumane. But it is also bad for the U.S. economy, and will result in extraordinary harm and suffering of the American people. A report by the American Immigration Council studied Trump’s proposals and came to the following conclusions…

  • “Deporting one million immigrants per year would incur an annual cost of $88 billion, with the majority of that cost going towards building detention camps. It would take over ten years, and the building of hundreds to thousands of new detention facilities, to arrest, detain, process, and remove all 13.3 million targeted immigrants…The total cost over 10.6 years (assuming an annual inflation rate of 2.5 percent) would be $967.9 billion.”
  • “The U.S. would lose out on key contributions undocumented households make to social safety net programs annually, including $22.6 billion to Social Security and $5.7 billion to Medicare. [And] Overall, mass deportation would lead to a loss of 4.2 percent to 6.8 percent of annual U.S. GDP, or $1.1 trillion to $1.7 trillion”
  • “Deporting undocumented immigrants would separate 4 million mixed-status families, affecting 8.5 million U.S. citizens with undocumented family members.’

In short, it would cost over a trillion dollars to implement, lose billions in revenue for the general budget, as well as Social Security and Medicare, depress the nation’s gross domestic product, and cruelly separate families, including those of legal residents and citizens.

For his part, Trump remains as ignorant as ever of the harm his proposals would impose. When asked about the cost of his plan, Trump was unable to provide a coherent answer, saying only that “There is no price tag.” Well, that’s comforting, isn’t it?

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Fox Nation vs. Reality:
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