THE WORLD enjoyed a monumentally satisfying series of moments recently, moments that don’t come often enough, of watching a key far-right figure get their comeuppance.
Under Cover: In Australia Van Badham went undercover digitally and successfully In America an effort to join MAGA was eventually found out.
“These are people who are undermining elections. They are working to ensure that we never have anything resembling the kind of free and fair elections that we previously had,” describing, with a note of frustration, conversations she witnessed and right-wing organizers she met. “They’re literally killing people. They’re telling people to take ivermectin, to not get vaccinated. They’re encouraging people to leave their children behind, to leave their spouses behind, if that’s what it takes. They hate people who are not like them. These are people who were straight-up saying, ‘We should have repatriation. If you’re Black or brown, you should leave the country.’ And it’s like, is it unethical for me to hear them say that and report it?”
A newly released memo shows that Trump told the acting attorney general: ‘Just say the election was corrupt [and] leave the rest to me and the [Republican] congressmen’
Washington: Former US president Donald Trump suffered twin setbacks on Friday, local time, when the Justice Department cleared the way to release his tax records and disclosed a memo showing he urged top officials last year to falsely claim his election defeat was “corrupt”. The department, reversing course from the stance it took when Trump was in office, paved the way for the Internal Revenue Service to hand over the Republican businessman-turned-politician’s tax records to congressional investigators – a move he has long fought.
Traitor Trump continued his madness by performing his carnival treason act in Arizona Saturday night. The man who caused an insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6th is still doing his grievance shtick with Charlie Kirk’s disgusting Turning Point USA (aka brownshirt) event.
if you listen to him long enough — no easy chore — Donald Trump will tell you all his secrets. Witness this line from his July 3 speech in Sarasota, Florida: “If you say it enough and keep saying it, they’ll start to believe you.”
An Insult to Democracy trying to be delicate when Trump certainly wasn’t.
On Tuesday morning, a new Senate report revealed even more of what is increasingly obvious: The January 6 Capitol insurrection was both surprisingly predictable and yet widely ignored by the people who had the power to stop it. “The U.S. Capitol Police had specific intelligence that supporters of President Donald Trump planned to mount an armed invasion of the Capitol at least two weeks before the Jan. 6 riot,” the Washington Post reports, “but a series of omissions and miscommunications kept that information from reaching front-line officers targeted by the violence.” The report itself is incredibly bureaucratic and, being bipartisan, overly delicate with the fragile feelings of Republicans who continue to support Trump despite his overt incitement of the insurrection. But the most important and remarkable aspect of the report is how it lays out that Capitol intelligence officials downplayed the threat of violence, even though, to quote the report author Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., “The attack was, quite frankly, planned in plain sight.”
Email Sometimes people refuse to ask a question when they know the answer will be painful. Instead, they convince themselves that not asking the question will make the underlying reality change. Donald Trump and his regime committed many criminal, evil and otherwise despicable acts in plain sight. Those include, with no attempt to be comprehensive:
Author and director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law Karen J. Greenberg summed up the background recently, writing: In his second term, [former President Barack] Obama did try to put some limits and restrictions on lethal strikes by [remotely piloted aircraft], establishing procedures and criteria for them and limiting the grounds for their use. President Trump promptly watered down those stricter guidelines, while expanding the number of drone strikes launched from Afghanistan to Somalia, soon dwarfing Obama’s numbers. According to the British-based Bureau for Investigative Journalism, Obama carried out a total of 1,878 drone strikes in his eight years in office. In his first two years as president, Trump launched 2,243 drone strikes. The document’s release follows a fall court order saying the Trump administration could no longer keep the rules secret or deny their existence.
Ted Boutrous, a constitutional law expert, told CNN, “The 1st Amendment provides strong protections for statements of opinion, but what Dominion is pointing to is the fact that Ms. Powell was declaring that she had evidence of this fraud and this election malfeasance and she was declaring that as a matter of fact. The 1st Amendment doesn’t protect knowingly false statements of fact.”
Totally NOT shocking: the universe of domestic right-wing extremists who came together on Jan. 6 has grown massive, is constantly expanding, and now poses a greater threat to American society than overseas jihadists.
Amid the pandemic, lockdown orders, and nationwide protests against police violence, a historically large increase in murders occurred in 2020. Previously, the largest recorded one-year rise in murders in U.S. history was a 12.7 percent increase in 1968. Last year, meanwhile, data from nearly 12,000 law enforcement agencies released by the FBI, running through September, shows murders up 21 percent nationally. This matches data we collected from a sample of agencies from 60 large cities showing a 36 percent increase in murders in those cities, as well as a Council on Criminal Justice analysis from 34 cities finding a 30 percent increase in 2020 compared to 2019.
While White Right-Wing Domestic terror has increased under Trump
Crime, too, has dramatically fallen in the United States in the past 20 years, but Trump wants people to believe the opposite. Again, only if there is a crisis of brown and black crime will das Volk be willing to surrender their rights to the Great White Trump.
Republican officials at the highest level support insurrection, terrorism and treason. They have presided over a political culture that, for many years, has inculcated seditious desires within millions of expertly programmed citizens. The consequences became manifest on Jan. 6 when a rabid mob of neo-Confederates, fascists and associated psychotics took the Capitol by force, perhaps hoping to murder duly elected members of Congress — not to mention the vice president — and install Donald Trump as dictator.
You cannot reason with a psychopath, you cannot shame such a person or appeal to their better instincts. There is no point in writing open letters to them. The usual way of dealing with politicians who develop some wild ideas in the course of their search for voters and campaign funds will not work.
Donald Trump’s presidency has had plenty of low points, but none as low as the past week. With barely two weeks left, many of the president’s Cabinet members are distancing themselves or outright resigning. Twitter—the social media megaphone that he’s used for years to peddle conspiracy theories and incite hatred—has permanently suspended his account. And even his allies can’t defend his legacy as the only president in modern history to incite a riot against the US government.
Lord Beaverbrook is at a cocktail party conversing with an attractive woman, and the conversation turns to ethics. He asks her if she would sleep with someone for a million pounds. She says that she would. He asks her, “Would you sleep with someone for five pounds?” She says, “Certainly not, what sort of woman do you think I am?” He observes drily, “Madame, we have already established that. Now we are just haggling about the price.” I have some questions for the resignees:
‘Delighting in causing complete chaos’: what’s behind Trump supporters’ brazen storming of the Capitol‘Delighting in causing complete chaos’: what’s behind Trump supporters’ brazen storming of the Capitol
Additional arms deals this week include $4 billion in helicopters to Kuwait, $169 million in military equipment to Egypt, and $65 million in drones and fighter jets to UAE.
Trump said on December 9 that he “might” invoke the Korea War-era act, which allows the US government to direct companies to produce urgently needed goods necessary to national security. The US government pays the companies to do this, so it isn’t socialism and doesn’t involve a government take-over. It just delays receipt of other goods by other customers. Trump has repeatedly said he is reluctant to invoke the act because it is socialist in character and would make us like Venezuela. He did use it to compel GM to produce ventilators last spring, paying $489 million for 30,000 ventilators. It was a relatively minor use of the act given the scale of the national emergency.
It seems increasingly clear that the 21st century will be the Chinese century. And, China is going to get there sooner thanks to a new isolationism and a paroxysm of ignorant reality-denial for which Donald J. Trump has been the cheerleader and chief implementation officer. The BBC reports that a British think tank predicts that China will overtake the US as the world’s largest economy in 2028 instead of 2033, as a result of its deft handling of the pandemic and as a result of outgoing president Trump’s monumental screw-up, the largest public health disaster in American history.
When Donald Trump announces his intention to run again for president, tens of millions of Americans will flock to his side. If he ultimately doesn’t run, they will throw their support behind anyone that the disgraced ex-president selects as his successor. They will do so despite all the harm Trump has caused the United States and the world. For the United States, at least, that might prove to be the most dangerous denialism of them all.
Trump’s Role Model was always Putin and he tried to do it like Putin
Those living in the bubble created by right-wing news hear Trump’s lies repeatedly from multiple sources, making them appear credible. This is the underpinning of all propaganda. That firehosing lacks a commitment to consistency and objective reality can seem counter intuitive. But as Masha Gessen of the New Yorker explains, that is because the goal of firehosing is not persuasion but power. The immediate reaction of the media and others to a firehose of lies is to fact-check. That turns the lies into a political fight. What shouldn’t be up for debate becomes a partisan tit for tat. As Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born British journalist and author, wrote about Putin’s information warfare in 2014: “insisting on the lie, the Kremlin intimidates others by showing that it is in control of defining ‘reality.’ This is why it’s so important for Moscow to do away with truth. If nothing is true, then anything is possible.”
Despite the fact that herd immunity failed in Sweden and the hospitals are now unable to cope. Trump wants chaos th reign and COVID-19 is a perfect ploy. (ODT)
Trump appointee at HHS, Paul Alexander, urged other health officials to “flood the zone” with coronavirus and infect “kids and young people” in order to develop herd immunity.
Look at the statistics: At the time of publication, this is the stark situation worldwide: Cases: 72 million Recovered: 47 million Deaths: 1.6 million In the US alone, the figures are startling: Cases: 16.3 million Deaths: 300,000, equivalent to the entire population of Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. The US now records more daily deaths from COVID-19 than occurred on the day of that infamous terrorist assault on the US – September 11, 2001.
Sedition is a serious charge, but it’s the right word. Most House Republicans and 17 state attorneys general are standing against the right of Americans to choose their own leaders. As elected officials, they are using the power granted to them by the people to declare that the people should not have such power. Even if they lose this case, this time around, the fact that so many traitors hold elected office in America is a major crisis all by itself.
Congress may be close to a deal on another coronavirus bailout, but Senate Republican demands for liability protections for businesses remain a major obstacle.
Seventeen American states, all run by Republicans, have decided to join Texas in its seditious and frivolous quest to have the U.S. Supreme Court throw out the votes of 81,282,896 citizens and declare Donald Trump the winner of the 2020 election. Those states: Missouri, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia.
A significant epidemiological and statistical analysis shows a major factor in liklihood of death among the 300,000 that have died and contracted COVID-19 is 1) Race and 2) Postcode. and Trump thinks that’s just TERRIFIC
Donald Trump has said it is “terrific” that nearly 15 per cent of Americans have contracted the coronavirus since the outbreak began in the US, citing the “powerful vaccine” of herd immunity.
Business befor Politics as far as National Security is concerned for Trump
U.S. intelligence agencies received reports indicating that one of the U.S.’s closest Middle Eastern partners had signed a collaborative agreement with a sanctioned Russian mercenary group operating in Libya, according to a current U.S. intelligence official and two former officials with knowledge of the matter. U.S. intelligence agencies have been looking into whether the United Arab Emirates is helping to finance the Libya operations of the Russian Wagner Group. Both the UAE and Wagner have intervened to support Libyan strongman Khalifa Haftar, who has tried to overrun the United Nations-backed government in Tripoli.
Latin American Politics jumped the WALL and is locked in the USA
Trumpism is at this point nothing more than a blend of cultism and fascism, a violent, nihilistic howl against the pillars of American democracy unparalleled in presidential history. Donald Trump and his acolytes know their gig is up; they can file lawsuits till they are blue in the face, but they’re not going to overturn the election results in multiple states simultaneously. They have reached a fork in the road: Accept the results and move on, or attempt to flex the presidential muscle in a way that launches America into an experiment with dictatorship. They have decided, at least rhetorically, to opt for the latter. And while they almost certainly don’t have the bite to match their bark, the very fact that people surrounding Trump are calling for dictatorship ought to send a chill up all Americans’ spines.
I think Washington can show good faith by lifting sanctions prior to opening negotiations. Then both sides could work out such details as destroying the excess enriched uranium and arranging frequent international inspections. Iranians are waiting for Biden to make the first move after his Inauguration on January 20, 2021. Lifting unilateral US sanctions is the key to foiling Trump’s attempt to handcuff the new administration. We’ll see if Biden finds a good locksmith.
there is a lack of outrage over a far more significant matter: the death of more than a quarter-million Americans. On Wednesday, the United States set a new record for COVID-19 deaths: 2,804. This is just 173 shy of the death toll of 9/11—that cataclysmic event that reordered elements of American society. The United States is looking at that level of loss on a daily basis. Yet there is little uproar.
180,000 more deaths by February and McConnell keeps stalling
This is garbage. It comes at the absolute worst point in the pandemic with an unprecedented surge in cases nationwide and with months ahead before the vaccine helps get us out of the pandemic. Millions are going hungry. And McConnell’s focus is on letting businesses get off scot-free for endangering, even killing, their employees. Oh, and free business meals. Because he is a fucking monster.
American security experts are concerned that Donald Trump will be unable to keep state secrets when he leaves the White House, and should be barred from receiving future intelligence briefings, according to reports.
At the end of this past June, the most recent Federal Reserve data point available, the nation’s poorest half held less than 1 percent of the nation’s stock holdings, just 0.6 percent. The nation’s poorest 90 percent, all combined, now hold just 11.8 percent of the nation’s stocks.
The incoming administration has its job cut out restoring faith in the process and in the nation`s leader to repair the damage reaped by four years of inglorious damnable conduct. The Republican Party also has some fence-building to do. The lights in the party room need to be burning late into many nights analysing the last four years; what worked, what didn’t and what needs to happen to ensure the Democrats only get one term (when Biden is likely to hand the baton on to his Vice President for 2024). Should their outgoing fellow decide he wants another tilt, do they support him or send him on gardening leave, or do they quietly hope that the agony of loss will fry his addled brain completely? Time will tell. Maybe he will retire to his golf courses, sorry, country clubs. Memo to anyone competing with the club owner; let him win, he doesn’t like losing … in case that fact eluded you.
A trillion dollars could maintain wages at pre-crisis levels for all workers in America, enabling people to stay home and stop the spread of the virus, for four months. Instead, it’s gone into the personal piggy banks of a handful of billionaire owners and investors.
During his four-year tenure in the White House, President Donald Trump packed powerful federal regulatory agencies with dozens of right-wing loyalists who are well-placed to stall or undermine the agenda of President-elect Joe Biden from the moment he takes office.
Bolton noted that the Trump campaign has so far lost all but two of more than 30 legal challenges in various states. “Right now Trump is throwing rocks through windows, he is the political equivalent of a street rioter,” Bolton said.
One of his legal advisers, Jenna Ellis, claimed it paved the way for “Republican state legislator[s] [to] select the electors” — an open invitation for the Republican-led legislature to hand the state to Trump, not Biden, in defiance of the will of the people. This was a state that Biden won by almost 150,000 votes.
Source: 
olddogthoughts 