Thursday, May 23, 2019

Trump Can't Handle Heckling

How can the Democrats beat Cry-Baby Trump? Cenk Uygur and Ben Gleib, hosts of The Conversation, break it down.



https://www.gleib2020.com/

Wednesday, May 15, 2019

Elizabeth Warren Tells Fox "News" To Go Fuck Itself With Roger Ailes's Femur

Fuck yeah, Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is running for president, just went to war with Fox "news." In a series of tweets, Warren told Fox to get the fuck away from her with this town hall bullshit. Apparently, Fox invited her to appear on their network of the damned and Sean Hannity, and she declined, explaining, "Fox News is a hate for profit racket that gives a megaphone to racists and conspirators—it’s designed to turn us against each other, risking life and death consequences, to provide cover for the corruption that’s rotting our government and hollowing out our middle class."

Warren didn't stop there. Ever the professor, she tied Fox's white nationalist propaganda directly to the wallets of its owners and shareholders. "It’s all about dragging in ad money—big ad money," she says, and that a Democrat appearing on a town hall on the network gives cover to the sales team trying to tell skittish advertisers that Fox really, really is fair and balanced, despite the fact that it's so extravagantly biased that Goebbels would watch it and say, "Jesus fuck, tone it down a bit."

Then Warren brings it back to voters: "I won’t ask millions of Democratic primary voters to tune into an outlet that profits from racism and hate in order to see our candidates—especially when Fox will make even more money adding our valuable audience to their ratings numbers." She doesn't shit all over the Democrats who have already appeared at a Fox town hall - Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar - but she sure as hell draws a big damn line in the sand.

"Fox News is welcome to come to my events just like any other outlet," Warren concludes. "But a Fox News town hall adds money to the hate for profit machine. To which I say: hard pass."

And I am so hard right now that I could jackhammer a hole in my wall.

It's about goddamn time one of the Democratic candidates stopped with this whole bullshit idea that they have to "reach" Fox "news" viewers. It turns Fox into the de facto spokes dicks for the mythical "White Working Class," a group that is so much more than Fox-infected assholes (and is also far, far bigger once you remove "white" from the name). And Warren's rejection of Fox turns a spotlight on the "news" network's efforts at stupiding their viewers with a nonstop fecal flow of fear and fuckery. 
Maybe Kirsten Gillibrand and Pete Buttigieg will back out of their scheduled appearances.

Essentially, Warren just declared war on Fox "news." She went far, far further than just declining the town hall. She went for the throat, naming evil where she sees evil. Warren dug up the rotted whale carcass of Roger Ailes, ripped out his femur, and started fucking Tucker Carlson's ass with it.

Look for Fox to react furiously, as Fox will do, likely calling her everything from "Pocahontas" to "Emma Goldman" (actually, Emma Goldman doesn't have a Disney cartoon, so Fox viewers wouldn't understand it). They'll make her seem like Stalin has been reincarnated and that Warren and AOC are gonna be forcing you to eat organic dirt to stay alive while Rashida Tlaib ululates in your ears.

But Warren wouldn't have started this if she didn't know what she was getting into.  She could have politely declined and moved on. This is a war she wants. This shows she knows that you have to kill the troll if you want everyone to be able to cross the bridge.

Sunday, May 12, 2019

Rural Trump voters are in for a major shock

Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist

Economists, reports Politico, are fleeing the Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service. Six of them resigned on a single day last month. The reason? They are feeling persecuted for publishing reports that shed an unflattering light on Trump policies.

But these reports are just reflecting reality (which has a well-known anti-Trump bias). Rural America is a key part of Donald Trump’s base. In fact, rural areas are the only parts of the country in which Trump has a net positive approval rating. But they’re also the biggest losers under his policies.

What, after all, is Trumpism? In 2016 Trump pretended to be a different kind of Republican, but in practice almost all of his economic agenda has been G.O.P. standard: big tax cuts for corporations and the rich while hacking away at the social safety net. The one big break from orthodoxy has been his protectionism, his eagerness to start trade wars.

And all of these policies disproportionately hurt farm country.

The Trump tax cut largely passes farmers by, because they aren’t corporations and few of them are rich. One of the studies by Agriculture Department economists that raised Trumpian ire showed that to the extent that farmers saw tax reductions, most of the benefits went to the richest 10 percent, while poor farmers actually saw a slight tax increase.

At the same time, the assault on the safety net is especially harmful to rural America, which relies heavily on safety-net programs. Of the 100 counties with the highest percentage of their population receiving food stamps, 85 are rural, and most of the rest are in small metropolitan areas. The expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, which Trump keeps trying to kill, had its biggest positive impact on rural areas.

And these programs are crucial to rural Americans even if they don’t personally receive government aid. Safety-net programs bring purchasing power, which helps create rural jobs. Medicaid is also a key factor keeping rural hospitals alive; without it, access to health care would be severely curtailed for rural Americans in general.

What about protectionism? The U.S. farm sector is hugely dependent on access to world markets, much more so than the economy as a whole. American soybean growers export half of what they produce; wheat farmers export 46 percent of their crop. China, in particular, has become a key market for U.S. farm products. That’s why Trump’s recent rage-tweeting over trade, which raised the prospect of an expanded trade war, sent grain markets to a 42 year low.

It’s important to realize, by the way, that the threat to farmers isn’t just about possible foreign retaliation to Trump’s tariffs. One fundamental principle in international economics is that in the long run, taxes on imports end up being taxes on exports as well, usually because they lead to a higher dollar. If the world descends into trade war, U.S. imports and exports will both shrink — and farmers, among our most important exporters, will be the biggest losers.

Why, then, do rural areas support Trump? A lot of it has to do with cultural factors. In particular, rural voters are far more hostile to immigrants than urban voters — especially in communities where there are few immigrants to be found. Lack of familiarity apparently breeds contempt.
Rural voters also feel disrespected by coastal elites, and Trump has managed to channel their anger. No doubt many rural voters, if they happened to read this column, would react with rage, not at Trump, but at me: “So you think we’re stupid!”

But support for Trump might nonetheless start to crack if rural voters realized how much they are being hurt by his policies. What’s a Trumpist to do?

One answer is to repeat zombie lies. A few weeks ago Trump told a cheering rally that his cuts in the estate tax have helped farmers. This claim is, however, totally false; PolitiFact rated it “pants on fire.” 

The reality is that in 2017 only about 80 farms and closely held businesses — that’s right, 80 — paid any estate tax at all. Tales of family farms broken up to pay estate tax are pure fiction.

Another answer is to try to suppress the truth. Hence the persecution of Agriculture Department economists who were just trying to do their jobs.

The thing is, the assault on truth will have consequences that go beyond politics. Agriculture’s Economic Research Service isn’t supposed to be a cheering section for whoever is in power. As its mission statement says, its role is to conduct “high-quality, objective economic research to inform and enhance public and private decision making.” And that’s not an idle boast: Along with the Federal Reserve, the research service is a prime example of how good economics can serve clear practical purposes.

Now, however, the service’s ability to do its job is being rapidly degraded, because the Trump administration doesn’t believe in fact-based policy. Basically, it doesn’t believe in facts, period. 

Everything is political.

And who will pay the price for this degradation? Rural Americans. Trump’s biggest supporters are his biggest victims.

More from Paul Krugman on rural America.
Opinion | Paul Krugman: What’s the Matter With Trumpland?

Friday, May 10, 2019

New York’s State Senate Just Passed Two Major Bills That Have Trump Stressed!

The New York State Senate is taking care of business in the absence of leadership in Congress in Washington D.C.


Wednesday, May 8, 2019

Over 800 Former DOJ Lawyers: Trump Would Be Charged With MULTIPLE FELONIES If He Wasn't Resident!

Yesterday a statement was released (linked below) signed by over 800 former line attorneys, supervisors, special prosecutors, United States Attorneys, and senior officials at the Department of Justice. In this statement, they assert that Donald Trump, in no uncertain terms, would be charged with obstruction of justice... if not for the fact that he is a sitting resident.





https://medium.com/@dojalumni/statement-by-former-federal-prosecutors-8ab7691c2aa1

Resident Donald Trump Business Lost More Than $1 Billion Over 10 Years - WTF!

Trump lost $1.17 billion between 1985 and 1994, according to tax documents obtained by the New York Times.



Resident Donald Trump Is A Criminal Level Tax Cheat

There’s new reporting by the New York Times that Trump lost $1.17 billion between 1985 and 1994 according to documents obtained by the Times. David Cay Johnston says this adds to the mounting evidence against Trump on tax fraud.




Tuesday, May 7, 2019

Democrats Should Be Unrelenting On Trump's Taxes

Posted by Rude One

Look, I get why 75% of Americans, according one poll, haven't read any of the Mueller report. Yeah, part of it is that we're now so fucking stupid and so easily distracted that the very idea of sitting down and facing 400 pages of redacted shit with Russian names and banks and more sounds not just intimidating, but, fate of the nation aside, so goddamn dull. The Starr report on Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky had dicks and pussies and cigars in pussies and dicks in mouths. Of course, people wanted to read that. We're animals, after all.

People like things simple and readily graspable. They don't want your nuance. They don't want your multi-level conspiracies that are like jigsaw puzzles where the last piece is lost under the couch and you just can't reach it.  They like it cut and dried, man, easily digestible and easily spit out.

Donald fuckin' Trump knew that all the way back in 2011 when he started his bat shit crusade against Barack Obama for the crime of being black while president. We all know the birther nonsense, where idiots demanded that Obama produce a birth certificate to prove he was born in Hawaii (and when he did produce one, it wasn't the right one for them). Trump also hopped on the college records bandwagon, too, saying that Obama's university applications and such were big secrets. You can trace the layers and layers of hypocrisy through Trump's Twitter feed, like a mille-feuille of shit.

Like in July 2012, when the dumb orange motherfucker tweeted, "For the sake of transparency, @BarackObama should release all his college applications and transcripts--both from Occidental and Columbia." Or in August of that year, when he implored that Mitt Romney "shouldn't give additional tax returns until @BarackObama gives his passport records, college records & applications."

For the vast majority of us, it was a ludicrous beclowning of the electoral process. But for those who were starting to pay attention to this pathetic reality TV host as a viable candidate and thought, "I like how he sticks it to the Negro," it was fuckin' catnip. And, goddamn, it's so easy to rally behind: Yeah, why won't that Obama prove to us where he came from? (Being racists, they never realized how horribly racist it was.)

Trump even went so far as to say that Obama wouldn't be hiding his records if nothing bad was in them: "Why would @BarackObama be spending millions of dollars to hide his records if there was nothing to hide?" he asked in 2012. He also tweeted on 9/11, our holiest of holy days, "Why won't Obama release his college applications? Is there something 'foreign' about them?"

Obviously, for Donald Trump, refusing to release private information to the public, or, you know, to him, is akin to being guilty. It's right there. The dumb orange motherfucker himself said as much.

So, while they should have been doing this since 2016, Democrats now have a talking point against Trump that is the perfect combination of simple and deadly. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, a man who definitely has had a gerbil or two inserted in his rectum, declined to turn over Trump's federal income tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee, as required by law. This is on top of Trump suing to stop Deutsche Bank from cooperating with congressional investigators, likely because that would involve having his taxes revealed.

The reason that the birther shit had an effect (no, it didn't stop Obama, but it helped Trump's rise), the reason that the Hillary email shit had an effect, the reason why so many aggravatingly simple things have an effect is because they force you to make a decision. Either you want to know about Hillary Clinton's emails or you didn't. And Democrats can use that method to what is inarguably a more noble end: to find out if the resident of the United States is a goddamn criminal.

Every fucking day, every opportunity they have, every interview, every speech, Democrats should be demanding that Donald Trump release his taxes. They should be saying that he must have something to hide. It should be the only fucking thing that anyone can think of. They should get people to show up at Republican town halls to ask why the GOP doesn't care about Trump's taxes.

No, you won't get Trump's idiot hordes or his Republican lickspittles and ass remoras to turn against him (although you might succeed in getting a little creeping doubt in there). But you know that 75% who didn't read the Mueller report ain't just Trump-humpers. There are not only a lot of voters who are on the Democrats' side who need a rallying point, but there are those who aren't paying attention at all, who are disengaged, who might just fucking love the clean and clear either/or on Trump's taxes.

So many of us on the left want Democrats to get savage. But there has to be a cohesive message behind the savagery, one that's not complex or needs more than a bumper-sticker to explain. This idea is a damn start. Get people paying attention so that when the impeachment hearings start, they're already on board.

Monday, May 6, 2019

TRUMP IS FREAKING OUT!!! Robert Mueller To Testify Before Congress On May 15th!

As Jesse Dollemore predicted on February 25th and April 9th, it looks like Robert Mueller will get his turn in the Congressional witness chair to testify directly about the report which bears his name!

Donald Trump Tweeted That He's Owed An EXTRA TWO YEARS In Office Because Of "STOLEN TIME!"

Over the weekend Donald Trump tweeted the anti-Constitutional and anti-democratic idea that he should have two extra years tacked on to the end of this term of office to make up for the 22 months of the Mueller Probe.


Post-truth talking points


Friday, May 3, 2019

Trump's Manservant Bill Barr LIED TO CONGRESS And Then Failed At Covering It Up!

Let's talk about the incontrovertible timeline of sinister behavior which includes Bill Barr's perjury before Congress about whether or not he knew of Robert Mueller's frustration with his March 24th 4 page summary of the 448 page Mueller Report!

Arrest Trump AG Barr If He Resists Subpoena

Former Clinton Labor secretary Robert Reich says Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr should be arrested and put in jail if he refuses to cooperate with Democrats in Congress. Reich tells The Beat, if Barr doesn’t comply with a congressional subpoena the public must think of it as “a constitutional crisis”.


Sinbad On Marriage

Senator Mazie Hirono Lays Into Attorney General William Barr

"The American people know that you are no different from Rudy Giuliani or Kellyanne Conway or any of the other people who sacrificed their once decent reputation for the grifter and liar who sits in the Oval Office," says Sen. Hirono to AG Barr in a contentious exchange.



Wednesday, May 1, 2019

Robert Mueller Blasted AG Barr For Distorting His Report

By Red Painter

Shortly after Barr released his 4 page summary, Mueller wrote a sharply worded letter blasting Barr for completely spinning his findings 



Mueller and his team are clearly livid at how Bill Barr handled the roll out of their 448 report. From his bungled 4 page letter, declaring his client, Donald Trump, cleared of all crimes, to the heavily redacted 448 page report a month later with Barr's press conference, Barr has acted to protect Donald Trump and not as the country's Attorney General.

The Washington Post is reporting that Mueller wrote a letter in late March to Bill Barr complaining that the 4 page letter he wrote “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the Special Counsel's work. The Washington Post reports that they have a copy of the letter and were able to review it.

The letter was written immediately after Barr stated that Mueller had found no conspiracy between Trump and Russia and that Mueller had not reached a conclusion regarding whether Trump had obstructed justice.

The letter was so out of the ordinary and revealed a "dissatisfaction with the public discussion of Mueller’s work that it shocked senior Justice Department officials.".

In the letter, Mueller wrote:
 
“The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions. There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. 
 
This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

The letter also requested that Barr release the entire 448 page report, introductions, and executive summaries.

The Washington Post further reports that DOJ officials were "taken aback by the tone of Mueller’s letter" and that they were surprised he expressed concerns. It is reported that Barr and Mueller spoke the day after Barr received the letter. Officials say that in the call, Mueller expressed concern "that news coverage of the obstruction investigation was misguided and creating public misunderstandings about the office’s work." Barr reportedly "took issue" with Mueller calling his letter a "summary" (it clearly was a summary, but Barr didn't like that word...whatever).

This bombshell could not come at a worse time. Barr is scheduled to appear tomorrow morning before the Republican led Senate Judiciary Committee and Thursday in front of the Democratic led House Judiciary Committee, for what was already going to be a raking over the coals. This news will add an extra layer of intensity that I do not think anyone anticipated.

Congress (Democrats) responded:
It will be interesting to see if Barr even shows up today.