Congress

Pete Hegseth’s Lawyer: His Misconduct Was Due to Stress, So Let’s Make Him Secretary of Defense

Posted by on December 27, 2024 at 4:07 pm. 0 Comments :

The Cabinet of Donald Trump is shaping up to be an even more frightening version of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, with all of the twists and turns of that psychological horror story populated by inmates of an asylum.

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Pete Hegseth with Drunk Emoji

If Trump gets the Republicans in Congress to capitulate to his commands, the U.S. government will be run by incompetents and sycophantic flunkies who have little to no experience for the jobs they are tasked to perform. They include Kash Patel at the FBI, Tulsi Gabbard heading Intelligence, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, in charge of healthcare, and a madhouse of MAGA minions who have scant relationships with the lives of average Americans.

SEE THIS: Trump’s Nominees Are Largely Fox News Alum, Mar-a-Lago Patrons, and Billionaires

Featured in this cast of circus psychos is Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense. Hegseth has zero experience managing anything on the scale of the Pentagon. But he has had a presence on Fox News where Trump found and recruited him. He also has a history of managerial failure, excessive drinking, and alleged sexual assault. Which makes him an ideal candidate for a job in the Trump administration. They have so much in common.

On Friday morning Hegseth’s lawyer, Tim Parlatore, was interviewed by Pamela Brown on CNN. It was a revealing discussion during which Parlatore offered up a peculiar defense of his client in the following exchange…

Parlatore: The FBI background check is really going to strip away the false allegations and focus on just what the evidence is. And the evidence is he didn’t do any of these things that he’s been accused of.
Brown: But he’s also openly admitted he’s a changed man from several years ago. So how does that square? If you’re saying he didn’t do any of it, but he’s a changed man?
Parlatore: I’m saying he didn’t commit any of the misconduct they’re alleging. The sexual assault, totally false. All of this stuff at CVA (Concerned Veterans for America) where they said that he was climbing on the stage at a strip club. Yeah that happened, but it was somebody else. […] The fact that earlier in his life when he was a young recent combat veteran who came home and dealt with the demons by drinking too much, that’s not uncommon.

In order for Parlatore’s denials to be valid, you would have to dismiss the testimony of the woman who filed the police report against him, as well as all of Hegseth’s colleagues and coworkers who witnessed his shenanigans at the strip club, and suffered through his mismanagement of organizations like the CVA, that he brought to near bankruptcy.

The core argument that Parlatore is making is that Hegseth behaved badly because of the stress he encountered during his military deployment. He goes on to say that Hegseth overcame his problems because “that which drove him to drink is not driving him anymore.” Perhaps that’s because he’s been a weekend host on a Fox “News” program for the past eight years. So the stress of combat wasn’t affecting his behavior.

However, if his duties in the military were sufficiently stressful to result in years of drunken depravity, how might the stress produced by running the entire Pentagon – with an $850 billion budget and the responsibility of millions of soldiers and civilians, none of which he has any experience with – affect his ability to cope emotionally and to refrain from the deviancy of his past? Surely there’s no stress involved in any of that, right?

Parlatore also claimed that Hegseth’s excessive drinking wasn’t a “drinking problem.” Which is reminiscent of the Tom Waits lyric “I don’t have a drinking problem. Except when I can’t get a drink.” Although he did promise to abstain if he were to be confirmed. Which suggests that he is still drinking, but is willing to stop if he’s handed the nuclear codes. That should not fill any senator with confidence that Hegseth would be up to the job. The question is: Will Republicans vote to confirm him anyway?

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Steve Bannon is Right? Matt Gaetz Should Return to Congress and Expose All the Sexual Depravity

Posted by on December 24, 2024 at 1:23 pm. 1 Comments :

In the few short weeks since the election, Donald Trump has been working at breakneck speed to assemble his Cabinet. His haste and aversion to properly vetting his nominees serves as an object lesson in incompetence. Already three of his first choices have been bumped from consideration. And several others are teetering on the ledge of political exile.

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Matt Gaetz

The most high profile of Trump’s losers has to be Matt Gaetz, his first pick to be Attorney General. It was a profoundly bold move for Trump to nominate someone whose only prior experience in criminal law was having been a criminal. At least Gaetz and Trump have criminality and sexual deviancy in common. They also share an obsession with exploiting the media to grab attention for themselves…

SEE THIS: Matt Gaetz is Taking His Moral Decrepitude to One America News Network

When Gaetz dropped out of the running for Attorney General, he likely thought that he would avoid the embarrassment produced by the House Ethics Committee releasing its report on his misconduct in Congress. The report concluded that Gaetz had violated “standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress.” And this was Trump’s top choice to be Attorney General? What does that say about the rest of his nominees?

Unfortunately for Gaetz, he not only resigned his seat in Congress, and was axed as Trump’s AG nominee, but the Ethics Committee released the report anyway. Under ordinary circumstances, a decent person with a smidgen of self-respect would scurry away to his ignominious obscurity. But decency is not a trait that is associated with Trump or his MAGA minions. Consequently, Gaetz has spent the last few days whining about how unfairly he was treated considering the abundance of deviants that he claims are present among his former colleagues.

Now Gaetz also has a key supporter backing up his allegations. Trump whisperer Steve Bannon went on his podcast with a hearty endorsement and a suggestion, proclaiming that…

“I’m strongly urging Matt Gaetz to return to Congress and on its first day next year, take a page from that old song ‘The Harper Valley PTA’ and expose all the hypocrites in the House who have used tax money to cover up their sexual depravity.”

Hear, hear! Gaetz should take Bannon’s advice and reclaim his seat in the House. From there he can point his bony finger at his fellow perverts and see to it that they are held to the same standards of accountability that he is. He would be doing a sort of penance for his own misconduct by ridding the People’s House of sleazeballs like himself. In fact, after asserting that he knows of such slime in the House, if he doesn’t expose them he is protecting them and is an accomplice in their continuing malfeasance. And is anyone surprised that Gaetz knows these pervs personally?

In the same program, Bannon proposed that Trump get behind an effort to have Gaetz become the next Speaker of House. That’s another great idea by Bannon that would make Gaetz, now known for his sex and drug crimes, the face of Republicans in Congress. And also a wholly inept legislator who would doom the GOP’s agenda to failure.

Needless to say, this would all be great news – for Democrats. So good that it might just be too good to hope for. Although, Gaetz himself posted a comment endorsing the idea, suggesting that he might indeed return and “File a privileged motion to expose every ‘me too’ settlement paid using public funds (even of former members).” And on behalf of all Democrats, I say “Go for it, Matt!” Let’s clean the House up from filth like you. It’s a safe bet that most of them will be Republicans anyway.

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UH-OH: Even Fox News Calls Out the Unelected Billionaire ‘Calling the Shots’ in Place of Trump

Posted by on December 19, 2024 at 2:31 pm. 0 Comments :

After weeks of tense negotiations, Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives agreed on a bipartisan bill to fund the government and avoid a devastating shutdown that would cause severe harm to millions of Americans. So naturally, that effort was sabotaged by the two most divisive and destructive dimwits in American politics, Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

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Fox News Sad

The torpedoing of the Continuing Resolution was aided and abetted by the spine-deprived GOP Speaker of the House, MAGA Mike Johnson, who obediently nixed his own bill at the behest of his puppet masters. As a result, he will maintain his record of having presided over the most unproductive Congress in modern times.

SEE THIS: DO-NOTHING CONGRESS? The Republican House of Representatives is the Least Productive Ever

The spectacle of a couple of billionaires bullying Congress into abandoning its obligation to the Constitution and the people is a nauseating devolution of the great expectations for American democracy. It most resembles the melodramatic inanities of reality TV wherein pathetic contestants vie for supremacy by playing idiotic games. And in this season it appears that the Celebrity Apprentice will be Trump, who is now noticeably subservient to his financial benefactor, Musk.

This swapping of roles is not something that has been observed only by Democrats and other Trump critics. On Thursday morning Stuart Varney of Fox News delivered a commentary that could have been composed by Bernie Sanders. He said in part…

“Think about this: Nobody voted for Elon Musk. But with the support of Donald Trump he called the shots on shutting down the government, and he’s calling the shots on trimming the fat in government. In fact, he has influence on just about every aspect of policy, including who should take which job in the Cabinet.

“We have never seen anything like this before. No previous administration has allowed an unelected outsider this degree of power. Of course it’s all a function of Musk’s relationship with the president-elect. They’ve been inseparable for months. He practically lives at Mar-a-Lago. And they seem to be in agreement on everything. It doesn’t hurt that he’s the richest man in the world, and threw over $200 million into Trump’s campaign.”

What Varney is describing is the undermining of democracy by an unelected, foreign-born, oligarch with the resources to buy a weak narcissist who is desperately trying to stay out of prison and retain some measure of perceived power. Musk is not constitutionally able to be president, so he’s settling for the next best thing: controlling the president. That relationship, however, could make things complicated for Trump’s former significant other. And that isn’t Melania…

What was once the Republican Party is now fully indoctrinated into the Musk/Trump Cult. Some GOP members of Congress are even suggesting that Musk be elected Speaker of the House. So if the GOP is not satisfied with the level of idiocy that is presently in place, they have options. A competent Speaker must be someone with extensive knowledge of how the House operates. Musk doesn’t have a clue. So while Johnson has proven to be a disaster, Musk would be even worse.

While the rules of the House do not require the Speaker to be an elected member, there are other concerns that are being neglected. For instance, the Speaker is second in the presidential line of succession, after the vice-president. But the Constitution would not permit Musk to be promoted to the presidency. So the job would fall to the president pro tempore of the Senate. And if Democrats were to regain the majority in 2026, that would be Democratic Sen. Patty Murray. If not, it would be 91 year old Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley.

In the meantime, the nation is being run by billionaires who couldn’t care less about the government shutting down because it won’t affect them in the slightest. And what they do care about – getting richer, lowering their own taxes, and eliminating pesky regulations that protect the environment, workers, and America’s middle and lower income families – would be theirs for the taking. Congratulations MAGA. This is what you voted for. I hope you like being subservient to the oligarchs.

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GOP Oversight Chair Excuses Trump’s Corruption Unless Bank Records Prove It – Well, Guess What?

Posted by on December 18, 2024 at 2:05 pm. 2 Comments :

As Donald Trump prepares to reoccupy the White House, every American that hasn’t been indoctrinated into the MAGA cult is aware that he is setting new precedents as the first president to be a convicted felon and an adjudicated rapist, who has advocated terminating the Constitution, and incarcerating his political foes.

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Trump Penthouse Phone

That’s not exactly a record that would instill pride in either the officeholder or the people he purports to represent. To the contrary, it’s a resume of shame that would, and does, produce nausea in patriotic citizens. It would also spur responsible public officials to keep a tight rein on a leader who is as disposed to criminality as Trump has been.

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

On Wednesday morning the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, James Comer, was interviewed by Pamela Brown on CNN. Comer is the prime antagonist in the long-running persecution of President Biden and his family. After years of sensationalized probes that failed to produce a shred of evidence of any wrongdoing, Comer is now dismissing any inquiry into Dear Leader Trump’s blatantly unlawful enterprises, as he affirms in the following exchange..

Brown: Do you have any concern if [Trump] doesn’t divest about present future President Trump using public office to enrich himself and his family? I mean, if he doesn’t divest, would that concern you?
Comer: I think the most important thing is transparency. And with respect to tax records, I come from a banking background. Tax records don’t mean anything. If you want to know whether someone’s doing something corrupt or not, get their bank records because bank records don’t lie. People cheat on their taxes all the time. Most important thing is the bank records. And I think as long as President Trump is transparent, I think the American people will give him a pass on honest business activity. But if it ever comes out that they’ve got secret deals or whatever, then that that could potentially be a problem, obviously.”

It’s interesting that Comer warns against using Trump’s tax records because “People cheat on their taxes all the time.” Is he implying that Trump cheats and, therefore, his tax records should be ignored?

More to the point, Comer asserts that nothing Trump does should be investigated because he’s such a pure paragon of transparency, and that his bank records would confirm that. However, in 2020 the New York Times reported that Trump had a secret bank account in China that he failed to reveal in his official financial disclosure forms. The Times discovered the account in his tax returns that they got from an undisclosed source because Trump repeatedly refused to make them public like every other president in modern times…

“President Donald Trump’s tax records show he has pursued expansive business projects in China for years and even maintains a Chinese bank account, The New York Times reported […] An analysis of Trump’s tax records by the Times shows that the President holds a previously unreported bank account in China that was not included on his public financial disclosures.”

So according to the criteria specified by Comer, there should be immediate hearings into Trump’s finances by Comer’s Oversight Committee. Trump has obviously not been as transparent as Comer implied. And that’s been the case for many years. Here are a couple other examples of Trump’s deceit with regard to his finances…

NOPE! Eric Trump Lies that Daddy Gave All Foreign Money Made at His Hotels to the Treasury
As reported by NPR last year… “Documents released by the House Oversight and Reform Committee show extravagant spending from foreign leaders at former President Donald Trump’s luxury hotel in Washington, D.C., which the committee says could have violated his oath of office by distorting U.S. foreign policy for personal financial gain.

“Government officials from Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and the People’s Republic of China collectively spent over $750,000 at the Trump International Hotel during his presidency.”

[And…]

Trump earned as much as $160 million dollars from foreign sources while president. A more expansive investigation by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) found that… “Throughout his time in office, President Trump, his family and his Republican allies repeatedly assured the public that his refusal to divest from his businesses wouldn’t lead to any conflicts of interest […] When it came to foreign conflicts of interest, Trump and his company pledged to pause foreign business. They did not.”

Not surprisingly, the most frequent contributors to Trump’s coffers were from the Middle East and China.

Lest anyone think that Trump’s fiscal malfeasance is all in the past, take a look at his latest vehicle for enriching himself via shady self-dealing…

The Grifter-In-Chief: Will Donald Trump Divest From His Bribery Platform, Truth Social?
“Surely he is not planning to divest from any of the businesses that he didn’t divest from last time. […] Trump’s Truth Social, via its parent corporation, Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange. It is therefore available for any crooked scheme-ster to shovel shiploads of cash into, enriching the other shareholders, of which Trump is the biggest.

No one should expect Trump to change his nefarious ways now. And Comer’s hypocrisy amounts to the willful wearing of blinders in the hopes of avoiding observing Trump’s illegal activities. But he knows. And so does everyone else whose eyes – and minds – are not glued shut. The only question that remains is whether others in Congress or the press will seek to bring him to justice.

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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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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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GOP Leaders in Congress are OUTRAGED at Kamala Harris (But Not Trump) for Talking About Fascism

Posted by on October 25, 2024 at 3:57 pm. 3 Comments :

The unprecedented cowardice of Republicans in Congress has been among the most disappointing developments of the Era of Donald Trump. Despite the fact that many of them righteously condemned Trump during and immediately after the January 6th insurrection that he incited, most have relapsed into the catatonic state of worship that is mandated by cult leaders.

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Kamala Harris, Donald Trump baby

The blindly obsequious members of America’s Legislative branch of government include its GOP leaders Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, and Mitch McConnel, Republican minority leader in the Senate. They are the standard bearers of the Republican Party’s far-right MAGA wing who have managed to achieve new records of incompetence at their respective jobs.

SEE THIS: DO-NOTHING CONGRESS? The Republican House of Representatives is the Least Productive Ever

Now these extraordinarily inept so-called “leaders” have sent out a furious press release expressing their seething displeasure at recent remarks by Vice-President Kamala Harris. She was asked by a reporter whether she agreed with some of Trump’s former White House staffers that he is a fascist, and she replied in the affirmative. That triggered the missive by Johnson and McConnell (whom we shall henceforth refer to collectively as “JoMac”) calling on Harris to “End The Dangerous Rhetoric.” It said in part that…

“[Harris] has only fanned the flames beneath a boiling cauldron of political animus. Her most recent and most reckless invocations of the darkest evil of the 20th century seem to dare it to boil over. […]

“Vice President Harris may want the American people to entrust her with the sacred duty of executive authority. But first, she must abandon the base and irresponsible rhetoric that endangers both American lives and institutions. […]

“And we call on the Vice President to take these threats seriously, stop escalating the threat environment.”

So JoMac are accusing Harris, in flamboyantly colorful terms, of having “fanned the flames beneath a boiling cauldron of political animus.” Never mind that it was actually a group of close Trump associates who were minding the political crock pot. They include Trump’s White House Chief of Staff, Gen. John Kelly, his Defense Secretary, Gen. James Mattis, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley. All of these respected military officers who were appointed by Trump now agree that he is a fascist. And they oughta know.

What’s more, the position that Trump is a dangerous, aspiring dictator is shared by Trump’s former National Security Advisor, John Bolton, another one of his Defense Secretaries, Mark Esper, and more than 700 national security officials who have endorsed Kamala Harris for president.

JoMac went on to demand that Harris, who was merely agreeing with Trump’s people, “abandon the base and irresponsible rhetoric” and “stop escalating the threat environment.” However, JoMac never bothers to make the same request of their Dear Leader Trump. They must not have heard him say that “Joe Biden and the fascists that control him are a threat to democracy.” Or that “Every time the Radical Left Democrats, Marxists, Communists, and Fascists indict me, I consider it a GREAT BADGE OF HONOR.” Or that “We are going to WIN BIG and take our Country back from the Radical Left Losers, Fascists, and Communists.”

JoMac neglected to mention the countless times Trump has referred to Harris as a “communist, Marxist, fascist.” CNN documented a few of those attacks that took place recently. Such as Trump saying that “She’s a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist” at an Arizona rally. Or that “This is a radical-left, Marxist, communist, fascist,” which Trump said at a news conference. Or that “We have a fascist person running who’s incompetent,” which Trump told his glassy-eyed rally-goers at a Virginia campaign stop.

JoMac also must have missed it when Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, said that Trump might be “America’s Hitler.” Which is a sentiment that millions of Americans share. According to a new ABC News/Ipsos poll, “Nearly half of Americans say they view former President Trump as a fascist.” That includes “46 percent of independents and 12 percent of Republicans.”

All in all, there is an astonishingly strong consensus, across a broad range of Americans, that Trump is a threat to democracy, with authoritarian aspirations, who must never be permitted to hold any office of power again. But JoMac are incapable of seeing this reality. They are as indoctrinated into the Trump cult as the rubes who attend his rallies wearing desecrated flag fashions.

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Weaponizing Congress? GOP Hack Comer Launches Phony Probes Into Both Kamala Harris and Tim Walz

Posted by on August 16, 2024 at 1:14 pm. 4 Comments :

If anyone is wondering why the American people have a such a poor opinion of Congress, it might have something to do with how little it has done on their behalf under the current – albeit slim – GOP majority. They actually seem to be proud of their ineffectualness. It’s hard to argue that they haven’t been purposefully determined to be political slackers.

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Donald Trump, Congress, Mike Johnson

The Republican “leaders” of the House of Representatives have spent the past two years utterly ignoring their responsibilities to advancing the interests of the citizens they are supposed to be serving. In fact, they have succeeded only at achieving a new record for passing fewer bills than any Congress in modern times. Congratulations.

SEE THIS: DO-NOTHING CONGRESS? The Republican House of Representatives is the Most Productive Ever (LOL)

There are many Republican members who can shar the blame for this deliberate neglect. At the top of the list is the GOP Speaker, MAGA Mike Johnson, who has exhibited no management aptitude whatsoever. He only got the job when no else could muster enough votes following the ouster of the previous GOP Speaker, Kevin McCarthy.

And right below Johnson in the congressional Dereliction Derby is the chair of the House Oversight Committee, James Comer. He has made it his personal mission to devote all of his time to presiding over ludicrous investigations of Democrats, particularly President Biden and his family. And all to no avail. After wasting months of hearings, and millions of taxpayer dollars, Comer hasn’t found a shred of evidence of any wrongdoing. He’s been so inept that even Fox News took him to task…

SEE ALSO: Fox News is Steaming Mad at GOP Chairman Comer for Being an Incompetent Biden Persecutor

Now that President Biden has passed the torch to Vice-President Kamala Harris, Comer & Co. have abandoned the pitiful failures that they have been obsessed with for so long. But that doesn’t mean that he is taking a rest. Nope. Comer has already initiated investigations of both Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz. Last week he posted this announcement…

This is Comer’s contribution to the brazen lie that Harris was a “Border Czar” (she never was), and that there must be some impropriety that he can manufacture with regard to that lie.

In addition to Comer’s grossly partisan attack on Harris, this week he added Gov. Walz to his hit list.

It’s ironic that Republicans are trying to falsely associate Walz with some sort of collusion with China, when it is Donald Trump and his family who have been doing business there for decades, including while he was occupying the White House. The truth about Walz is that he had a purely educational role in China, as reported by Newsweek…

“Following his graduation, the Minnesota governor and former Congressman spent approximately one year teaching high school in China as part of Harvard University’s WorldTeach program.”

These blatant attempts to weaponize Congress by using it to attack their political foes is a reprehensible perversion of their sworn duties. But it is consistent with their past misbehavior. In the past couple of years they introduced more preposterous articles of impeachment (for Biden, DHS Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas, FBI Director Chris Wray, U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves, and Attorney General Merrick Garland) than any session of Congress ever.

And now they are turning their aim toward Harris and Walz in the final months of this election year. The good news is that Comer and his cohorts are too feeble-minded to succeed at anything other than humiliating themselves. They inherited that mental defect from their Dear Leader Trump. And in the end all of them will wind up achieving the only outcome that they are capable of: FAILURE!

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Justice Sotomayor’s Blistering Dissent to the Supreme Court’s Gift of Immunity to King Trump

Posted by on July 1, 2024 at 1:25 pm. 3 Comments :

After an interminable, deliberate, and unwarranted delay, the MAGA majority on the Supreme Court has finally ruled that convicted felon Donald Trump has some measure of immunity for so-called “official” conduct as president. It was a 6-3 ruling on predictably ideological lines.

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Donald Trump, Constitution

What this means in practice is that the president is now unbound by the rule of law and may commit crimes at will with little to no consequences. In other words, what was once the office of the presidency is now the throne of a king. The court did not so much decide on immunity as impunity. And they did so with an election coming up that could return a recidivist criminal (Trump) to office.

SEE THIS: Don’t Even Try It? Trump Issues Threat to ‘Anyone Considering Doing Anything’ Before He’s Elected

The majority opinion delivered to Trump almost everything that he hoped for. And he thanked them in a series of posts on his floundering social media scam, Truth Social.

However, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent that not only shredded the brazenly biased opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, it also sounded the alarm for the imminent danger that the nation faces in the event of the election of a president who takes advantage of the new totalitarian license provided by a court whose own members (Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito) are themselves legally and/or ethically tainted. Sotomayor wrote (with emphasis added) that…

“Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency. It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law. Relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom about the need for ‘bold and unhesitating action’ by the President, the Court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more.” […]

“The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.

“Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.

“Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”

So what now? First and foremost, Trump must be soundly defeated in November. If reelected he has promised to exact “retribution” on his political foes. That means anyone who is less than unflinchingly loyal to him among members of Congress, judges and prosecutors, state officials, business leaders, private citizens, and journalists and media organizations.

Secondly, Congress must act to undo the atrocity that the Supreme Court has imposed. They must pass laws that explicitly hold the president accountable for crimes that he commits. They must reform the Supreme Court by adding new members, placing term limits on them, and enacting a code of ethics with real consequences for violators.

Finally, they should proceed to impeach Trump for the third time. That’s right. There is nothing that prohibits an impeachment for a former president. And if successful in the House, it can proceed to the Senate, giving them another opportunity to convict Trump and forbid him from holding any federal office. That would at least provide some protection from this particular criminal from becoming president again and committing more crimes under the Court’s now rules.

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Fox News Admits that the GOP is Demanding Tapes of Biden So They Can Mock Him for Stuttering

Posted by on June 16, 2024 at 1:01 pm. 3 Comments :

Among the tediously repeated lines that Trump delivers in his traveling cult rallies is a new one wherein he declares that the 2024 presidential election is “the most important election in the history of the United States.” And for once, he isn’t wrong. But he also isn’t right for the reasons that he thinks.

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Fox News, Joe Biden, Fake News

On November 5, 2024, the American people will choose between President Joe Biden, a dedicated, patriotic, statesman, and family man, or Donald Trump, a twice impeached, serial adulterer, who has been adjudicated as a rapist and fraudster, and been convicted of 34 felonies. Inexplicably, there is still a small but noisy contingent of Trump cultists who remain irredeemably devoted to their Dear Leader despite all the evidence of his moral decrepitude. The good news is that most voters won’t have a particularly difficult time making their decision.

SEE THIS: LOCK HIM UP: After Guilty Verdicts, Poll Finds that More Americans Say Trump Should Go To Prison

In the meantime, the Trump-fluffers at Fox News are hard at work spreading lies, right-wing propaganda, and malicious insults that would embarrass an eight year old. Which is what they’ve always done, so that isn’t exactly news. A recent example of this comes from Kayleigh McEnany, a former Trump press secretary who is now doing essentially the same job, but with a bigger paycheck from Fox.

In a segment of Fox’s Sean Hannity show, McEnany addressed a wholly contrived controversy over Attorney General Merrick Garland, who has declined to turn over some audio tapes of Biden to the rabidly biased Republicans in the House of Representatives. Garland advised the GOP that such requests violate precedent when there is an objection on the basis of executive privilege. But in a fit of petulant rage, the GOP voted to hold Garland in contempt of Congress anyway.

To the surprise no one with a functioning cerebellum, Garland decided not to prosecute himself. Not out of personal interest, but because there is no crime to prosecute. This exacerbated the already unhinged anger of the GOP and Fox News. McEnany lashed out saying that…

“This is of great public interest. As congressmen have pointed out, the transcripts were edited to keep out the ‘ums,’ the ‘ahs,’ ‘the stutters. The American people deserve to hear this President in long form.”

So McEnany is admitting that the only purpose of releasing the audio tapes would be to embarrass the President who has had a lifelong problem with stuttering. It’s a sickening request that seeks only to mock an otherwise irrelevant speech impediment. What she is asking is akin to demanding the videotapes of the President’s colonoscopy because the American people “deserve” to see the President’s long intestine.

The tapes do not provide any substantive information that would be useful for any legislative purpose. Congress has the full transcripts of the tapes, and such transcripts always remove extraneous pauses and fillers. But McEnany and her confederates at Fox News don’t have any coherent criticisms to make of Biden, so they are desperate for petty things like this that they can exploit to attack him.

McEnany is not alone on this. The Republican Speaker of the House, MAGA Mike Johnson, is also weighing in on the matter. He has announced that Congress is going to sue the Justice Department in an attempt to get the tapes. Johnson is, once again, proving that he believes the role of Congress is to serve as Trump’s private law firm. Rather than pass any bills that actually benefit the nation or its citizens, Johnson focuses entirely on partisan political attacks on behalf of Trump. That’s why this session of Congress has been the least productive in decades.

SEE ALSO: DO-NOTHING CONGRESS? The Republican House of Representatives is the Most Productive Ever (LOL)

What’s more, the goal of disparaging Biden’s mental acuity by Fox News and the MAGA GOP, is one that fails miserably in contrast to Trump’s own cognitive problems. Trump provides frequent evidence of his Acute Psychobabble Disorder (APB). It ranges from rants about succumbing to electrocution or sharks, to ridiculously inflating the size of the crowds at his cult rallies, to claiming to have the solution to every world problem that he can only reveal if he’s elected.

However, the pièce de résistance is Trump’s alleged proof that he is mentally superior to most mortals because he supposedly “aced” a cognitive test given to him by a disgraced former doctor, now Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson, wherein he was asked to identify an elephant and count backwards. However, in Trump’s latest attempt to brag about this “accomplishment,” the “stable genius” couldn’t even remember the doctor’s name…

So it is with the backdrop of Trump’s inability to retain information that he refers to frequently, along with his Bizarro World yammering that no one can decipher, that Fox News and the GOP want to get their hands on some tapes of Biden stammering during a five hour long interview, in order to prove that he’s unfit for office. That is how pitifully desperate they are to find anything to dirty up Biden with.

While this might work on the already indoctrinated Trump disciples, it is going to fall flat for everyone else. And the best forum within which to prove that is the upcoming Biden/Trump debate. That is, if Trump doesn’t chicken out.

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