Tag: Trump

Republican Party candidate for 2024

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“…The GOP is a not a collective babe in the woods led astray by a Big, Bad Orange Wolf. That such a repulsive company of anti-science, anti-intellectual hooligans … mean(s) that the party has chosen aforethought to take the path through the briars of conspiracy, lies, untruths and authoritarianism.

All their palaver about personal rights and liberty notwithstanding, the GOP are intent on enacting a regime of some bizarre and terrifying hybrid of libertarianism, anarchy and fascist authoritarianism wherein the population is left to its own resources, unassisted and unaided by a government which is wholly unresponsive to the needs or wishes of the people.

The Party of Lincoln is dead but it refuses to be buried. It refuses to be interred in sanctified ground. The GOP is a zombie hungering for brains and power.”

Trump’s end-of-campaign money bomb was “unfair, unethical and inappropriate”

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Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign used pre-checked boxes and obscure design on fundraising emails to wring millions of dollars out of unwitting supporters, detonating a “money bomb”…The practice, pursued by the campaign and WinRed, a for-profit company, was detailed in an extensive report by the New York Times on Saturday. It is legal, but Ira Rheingold, executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates, told the paper it was “unfair, unethical and inappropriate”…

The “money bomb” did not bring victory, as Trump lost the electoral college by 306 votes to 232. He also lost the popular vote by more than 7 million ballots…

The Times reported that the practice was used for the Georgia Senate runoffs in January and continues to be used by the Republican party…It also detailed distressing experiences affecting Trump donors hit by surprise deductions and consequent trouble with banks and credit card companies.

I don’t know why the courts haven’t (yet) ruled this kind of activity as criminal fraud. Trump and his Republican bubbas had to refund over $64 million after the voting season ended. No one did any jail time.

“The work continues…”

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Cyrus Vance, Jr
Widline Cadet/NewYorker

On February 22nd, in an office in White Plains, two lawyers handed over a hard drive to a Manhattan Assistant District Attorney, who, along with two investigators, had driven up from New York City in a heavy snowstorm. Although the exchange didn’t look momentous, it set in motion the next phase of one of the most significant legal showdowns in American history. Hours earlier, the Supreme Court had ordered former President Donald Trump to comply with a subpoena for nearly a decade’s worth of private financial records, including his tax returns. The subpoena had been issued by Cyrus Vance, Jr., the Manhattan District Attorney, who is leading the first, and larger, of two known probes into potential criminal misconduct by Trump. The second was opened, last month, by a county prosecutor in Georgia, who is investigating Trump’s efforts to undermine that state’s election results.

Vance is a famously low-key prosecutor, but he has been waging a ferocious battle. His subpoena required Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars U.S.A., to turn over millions of pages of personal and corporate records, dating from 2011 to 2019, that Trump had withheld from prosecutors and the public. Before Trump was elected, in 2016, he promised to release his tax records, as every other modern President has done, and he repeated that promise after taking office. Instead, he went to extraordinary lengths to hide the documents. The subpoena will finally give legal authorities a clear look at the former President’s opaque business empire, helping them to determine whether he committed any financial crimes. After Vance’s victory at the Supreme Court, he released a typically buttoned-up statement: “The work continues.”

Sock it to him, Cy!

One of Trump’s lawyers tries dodging lawsuit for voter fraud lies. She says, “no reasonable person” would have believed her…

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Jacquelyn Martin/AP

A former lawyer for Donald Trump who made several false claims of voter fraud in regard to the 2020 presidential election is now arguing that “no reasonable person” would have believed her conspiracy theories.

Lawyers for Sidney Powell make the argument in a court filing in hopes of getting a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit filed against her by Dominion Voting Systems dismissed…

Powell claimed that Dominion voting machines were rigged to switch votes for Trump to Joe Biden, his Democratic challenger, during the election. There is no evidence any vote-switching occurred in what experts have called the most secure election in U.S. history.

Cripes! If you were a “reasonable person”, someone of sound mind, a decent education…I doubt you would have had anything to do with Trump’s re-election campaign. He’d already proven himself incompetent, venal in his neo-fascist ideology.

Public health, public policy in the Trump era

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This report by the Lancet Commission on Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era assesses the repercussions of President Donald Trump’s health-related policies and examines the failures and social schisms that enabled his election.

Trump exploited low and middle-income white people’s anger over their deteriorating life prospects to mobilise racial animus and xenophobia and enlist their support for policies that benefit high-income people and corporations and threaten health.

His signature legislative achievement, a trillion-dollar tax cut for corporations and high-income individuals, opened a budget hole that he used to justify cutting food subsidies and health care. His appeals to racism, nativism, and religious bigotry have emboldened white nationalists and vigilantes, and encouraged police violence and, at the end of his term in office, insurrection. He chose judges for US courts who are dismissive of affirmative action and reproductive, labour, civil, and voting rights; ordered the mass detention of immigrants in hazardous conditions; and promulgated regulations that reduce access to abortion and contraception in the USA and globally…

Click through to the article. Registration is free and gives you access to the complete report.

How many people must die?

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The first deaths from COVID-19 were assumed to be in the end of February, 2020. Further testing projected that number was earlier by several weeks.

No matter. Today, we reached over a half-million deaths from this public health disaster. The sort of disaster the United States was long presumed capable of showing the world how to resolve. Unfortunately, American voters had placed a charlatan, a fraud, an incompetent in charge of leading this nation before COVID-19 struck.

Today, we arrived at a number of deaths from this disease greater than the sum of American lives taken in World War 1, World War 2. and that travesty of murder called the VietNam War. And who is truly responsible for this carnage? If you voted for Trump…if you voted for what masquerades as American conservatism, nowadays…you know who you are.

I would hope, I do hope you’ve learned something about the misleaders of America, the “leaders” of most American politics. I doubt many will ever change. I won’t try to forecast how many American voters will reflect upon this result…and change. It’s your decision.

Eideard