Today in Trump

[NoSavingByTheBell]

[TitoFan]

[Kirkland Laing]

If I'm gonna be honest, all this limo business and new witnesses coming forth is only providing cannon fodder for Trump and his minions to detract from the big picture here...

That the POTUS encouraged and enticed a loony mob of protesters to attack the Capitol... and then sat with his thumbs up his ass doing absolutely nothing while all the mayhem was going on.

So really.... WHY have all these distracting sideshows?

She testified about a whole bunch of stuff that shows Trump's criminal intent more and more clearly. He knew there would be people armed with guns and knives and what have you and was fine with it, even wanted armed people marching to the Capitol. He thought Mike Pence deserved to be hanged. Lots of evidence about him pressuring state officials. But when a president tries to strangle the head of the Secret Service it's an unusual event and is inevitably going to generate a lot of media coverage.

This is a slow methodical plod through the whole event with new witnesses coming forward all the time. Unusually for a congressional inquiry there's very little political theatre or hyperbole or outright bullshit. Compare these hearings to the eight Benghazi investigations or the forthcoming Hunter Biden laptop multiyear inquiries for instance. And that's because they've got the goods.

[Kirkland Laing]

Who's 10-year-old puts those whack things together. What speaks volumes is the former traitor in chief took time yesterday to deny throwing his dinner and plates like a toddler, splattering ketchup on the wall and about grabbing the steering wheel...but not a peep about death threats against his VP, about telling them to remove metal detectors, or demanding he be taken to the capital so he can have smoke blown up his arse by his herd of sheep and walk alongside. Or that Chief WH counsel was kept away from advising him in the oval by bootlicker Meadows. Can't believe people still bail water for the incompetent clown being honest. Best scenario and chance Republicans have is to steer into a solid actual conservative and once and for all detox off of the con man and professional grifter.

Trump will not be the Republican nominee come 2024, take it to the bank. For the sake of what's left of the Party more so Republic.

Even if they lock him up he can run from his jail cell. If he does win every Republican will get behind him. This is the greatest scandal in merican history, makes Watergate look like Nixon got a parking ticket and the current GOP position is that it shouldn't even be being investigated. They're not going to stop him because they're terrified of being primaried by his voters and booted out and that means more to them than maintaining a democracy.

This is the current head of the GOP National committee:


https://twitter.com/search?q=rick%20...query&f=videon run from his jhttps://twitter.com/search?q=rick%20scott&src=typed_query&f=videoil


Don't know if you can see the videos but here's some text:


WATCH: Senator Rick Scott proposes raising taxes on 50% of Americans and 5 year sunsets to Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid!

Basically everybody earning over ten thousand starts paying income tax, Medicare phased out and social security privatised. Trump was so popular partly because he wasn't conservative on these issues, promised not to touch Medicare or social security.

Oh, and Rick Scott:


Senator Rick Scott is trying to end SNAP and welfare benefits, while also ending Medicare hoping it will get “spoiled” Americans back to work Scott took the 5th 75 times when he was deposed for committing the largest case of Medicare fraud in U.S history. He is worth $225M.

Can see it now, jumpsuit Donald bribing Deputies for an extra Whopper thru the bars . Won't happen though winning etc. I still believe there's been a crack that started prior to the election. More than a few on the right are willing and wanting the Trump train to careen right off the cliff and just stfu for good already. Though it's cowardly how so few Republicans are putting a face to a stand. But I do believe knives are sharpened because well..he's forever stained and unelectable in the big picture. He goes down, so do they.

Haven't flipped thru Rick Scotts proposals on welfare, medicare and SS but you know what the best part is...they're actual issues! Those things that pre Trump politicians actually did these things like putting plans together, made them public and sought to debate and vote one way or the other. I do know that SS and medicare are in real trouble and on life support before they are set to "go bankrupt" as Scott said or be depleted as studies have shown. SS benifits will be cut just to ensure they are able to continue. Then again Scott is the last person who should be talking on medicare after the shit his ex company pulled and the millions defrauded. How he didn't get charged? Well money and power talk I guess . Specifically on Snap - welfare proposals, well as a voter I do see some meat on the bone there. It's been discussed over decades and personally I think the suspension on minimal work requirement to receive benefits should be lifted. I think they were put into place once covid went like wild fire. If you're single, able bodied and have no dependents there's zero reason you cannot work 20-25 ? hrs as previously required. I'm fuzzy on a lot of it. Bottom line Republicans need to grow some balls and divorce Don the Con. Some are forever lost in the rabbit hole of delusion. But there are more than a few who have seen the light .

Things can change but right now he's crushing any challenger in the polls. If he wins the entire GOP will get behind him. Almost the entire GOP, you may get somebody like Cheney running as a spoiler third party candidate but I bet she wouldn't get more than a few percent of the vote. All the major GOP figures will support Trump. I'm sure they don't want to and they'd love it if he lost or self destructed or got locked up or whatever but ultimately they'll get on board. They did it once, they'll do it again.

Back in 2005 just after Bush 43 got reelected the first thing on the agenda was social security reform. It hadn't had amention during the election campaign and came out of nowhere. Bush had taken a lot of campaign money from Wall Street on the understanding he tried to privatise SS and he was doing what he'd been paid to do. The GOP is still comitted to do it. They know Medicare is a tough sell when people realise that "reform" means ending it and giving retirees a voucher which will cover a fraction of their healthcare costs. SS though is open to bullshit. Wall Street needs a second term prez adept at bullshitting who may be able to convince a critical mass of voters that they'll all become millionaires if they hand six percent of their income over to Wall Street. Can you think of anybody like that who also takes a bundle from Wall Street and would be given a tiny tiny sliver of equity in the new giant government-approved systematic robbery scheme?

Bush 43 would have enriched himself with no fingerprints if he'd succeeded. Trump will do the same. The bottom line with this is the GOP are funded by a bunch of billionaires that want a bigger share of the national income pie and want to keep hold of all of it without having to pay taxes and who are terrified of any lefty redistributive government coming along in the future. They want redistribution too but they want upward redistribution and they've been getting it for over forty years now.

The last two sentences are everything you need to know about GOP politics. They inform and direct every single thing that happens in the GOP. The whole movement is grafted onto that, Second Amendment, pro-life, whatever it takes to win. The billionaires can't win by themselves due to the 99% having more votes than the top 0.00001% so they come up with this endless culture war garbage to effect enough votes to win. So the media is basically this endless parade of culture war inconsequential garbage that basically resembles cartoons more than real life. Nobody at the top spends any time at all talking about whatever shit is in the news, all the talk is about actual consequential stuff like which donors are going to get their hands on SS or, you know, the business of making money. Nothing else matters.

By the way SS and Medicare are just fine. There's a lot of bullshitting with numbers but both programmes are just fine. Here's the thing. They're both just insurance schemes like car insurance. Car owners pay their premiums into a pool every year, the insurance company pays out all the claims and at the end of the year keeps the leftover money as profit. With SS and Medicare today's workers pay in their premiums and today's retirees get paid. There are a lot of retirees at the minute compared to workers due to the Baby Boom generation retiring and Wall Street are using this fact to agitate for privatisation. The SS fund set up to pay out to all the extra Boomer retirees is set to run out of dough in 2034 but the last of the Boomers hit 78 (current average carking age) eight years after that. So the government could just sell bonds (currently being paid to look after investor money rather than paying out real intereest on US bonds) at literally no cost to the US at all for eight years until the Boomers all cark it and then use the surplus in SS revenues once the Boomers are all gone and the worker:retiree ration jumps back to normal to pay the bonds off.

So a total cost free way to end any SS problem. Medicare the same thing, loads of bs with numbers about Medicare and a long explanation needed but this post is huge already so another time.

[Kirkland Laing]

Of course you could always put SS taxes up. SS taxes are six percent but only on the first 150k of income. So if you earn 150k you pay six percent in SS taxes. If you earn $1.5 million you pay 0.6%. $15 million you pay 0.06% and so on.

How about saying that from 150k to 500k you still pay zero but any dollar over 500k you pay six percent SS tax on it? Imagine the outrage from the billionaire community. They'd be hiring private armies to march on the Capitol. The vast majority pay an effective tax rate in the low single digits (or less). Some of them would find themselves paying many times their current tax rate. Some of them might even crack double digits. It would be a hugely traumatic event for them.

It would fund SS and Medicare even in perpetuity though and make up a little bit of the upward redistribution over the last forty years. It would even allow for a big increase in SS payments.

And SNAP payments. The majority of recipients are low income white people. Not even unemployed white people. SNAP before the pandemic was about sixty billion which is buttons in a twenty two trillion dollar economy. Almost all government spending is Medicare, Medicaid, SS and the military. The US government is basically an insurance company with an army.

[TitoFan]

If I'm gonna be honest, all this limo business and new witnesses coming forth is only providing cannon fodder for Trump and his minions to detract from the big picture here...

That the POTUS encouraged and enticed a loony mob of protesters to attack the Capitol... and then sat with his thumbs up his ass doing absolutely nothing while all the mayhem was going on.

So really.... WHY have all these distracting sideshows?

She testified about a whole bunch of stuff that shows Trump's criminal intent more and more clearly. He knew there would be people armed with guns and knives and what have you and was fine with it, even wanted armed people marching to the Capitol. He thought Mike Pence deserved to be hanged. Lots of evidence about him pressuring state officials. But when a president tries to strangle the head of the Secret Service it's an unusual event and is inevitably going to generate a lot of media coverage.

This is a slow methodical plod through the whole event with new witnesses coming forward all the time. Unusually for a congressional inquiry there's very little political theatre or hyperbole or outright bullshit. Compare these hearings to the eight Benghazi investigations or the forthcoming Hunter Biden laptop multiyear inquiries for instance. And that's because they've got the goods.

To each his own, I guess.

IMO, if it isn't enough to throw the book at Trump just for enticing the mob and then doing absolutely zilch about it while the riot was going on, well... what can I say.

Now they're skewering Hutchinson and her credibility... and like or not it becomes a distraction from the big picture.

Time and money being spent on something no one really needs.

But politics in the U.S. stopped being logical and sensible a long time ago.

[TitoFan]

Seriously!!

I feel like I've been watching a bad episode of the Twilight Zone lately.

FACTS:

1. That "sacred", untouchable symbol of democracy... the U.S. Capitol... was overrun by a crazed mob trying to get the elections overturned.
2. The f*cking POTUS didn't do a DAMN thing about it. Just sat on his thumbs and let the whole thing play out.
3. People died in the incident, which by the way immediately made the U.S. into a laughing stock in the eyes of the rest of the civilized world.
4. Consequently, the U.S. lost ANY moral footing to call ANY country in the world a shithole country or a 3rd world country.
5. There are actually ELECTED officials of this country who refuse to call January 6th a riot. They claim it was a (cough) peaceful demostration.
6. Yet here we are, a year and a half later, slogging through the process and fighting over whether Trump tried to strangle a SS agent in the limo or not.

Fuck the Twilight Zone. This is really a fucking circus.

[TitoFan]

On the bright side of things ... there's this:

https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/...015816464.html

"Fox News Potentially Facing Major Financial Damage In Dogged Suit Over Election Lies"





Ever wonder why whenever people are talking about biased/ slanted/ corrupt/ unreliable/ unprofessional news media, it's always only CNN?



Well... it's about time somebody pushed back against these arrogant, equally biased/ slanted/ corrupt/ unreliable/ unprofessional ASSHOLES at Fox News.

Here's hoping the courts rip them a new one.

Even if this goes nowhere, it's the thought that counts.

[NoSavingByTheBell]

[Kirkland Laing]

If I'm gonna be honest, all this limo business and new witnesses coming forth is only providing cannon fodder for Trump and his minions to detract from the big picture here...

That the POTUS encouraged and enticed a loony mob of protesters to attack the Capitol... and then sat with his thumbs up his ass doing absolutely nothing while all the mayhem was going on.

So really.... WHY have all these distracting sideshows?

She testified about a whole bunch of stuff that shows Trump's criminal intent more and more clearly. He knew there would be people armed with guns and knives and what have you and was fine with it, even wanted armed people marching to the Capitol. He thought Mike Pence deserved to be hanged. Lots of evidence about him pressuring state officials. But when a president tries to strangle the head of the Secret Service it's an unusual event and is inevitably going to generate a lot of media coverage.

This is a slow methodical plod through the whole event with new witnesses coming forward all the time. Unusually for a congressional inquiry there's very little political theatre or hyperbole or outright bullshit. Compare these hearings to the eight Benghazi investigations or the forthcoming Hunter Biden laptop multiyear inquiries for instance. And that's because they've got the goods.

To each his own, I guess.

IMO, if it isn't enough to throw the book at Trump just for enticing the mob and then doing absolutely zilch about it while the riot was going on, well... what can I say.

Now they're skewering Hutchinson and her credibility... and like or not it becomes a distraction from the big picture.

Time and money being spent on something no one really needs.

But politics in the U.S. stopped being logical and sensible a long time ago.

Rich white guy crimes have all kinds of elaborate state of mind clauses built in to them to allow rich white guys to escape justice. It's what happens when you can write the laws. For instance the Georgia election investigation. Trump is literally on tape saying things which are the exact definition of what the actual statute says is a felony. The witnesses are the fucking Georgia attorney general and a bunch of his deputies. Trump is bang to rights!

Except there's a state of mind clause built into the law. As long as Trump was genuinely convinced the election had been stolen then he isn't breaking the law even though he most clearly did. All he has to do is assert he really believed he'd been robbed and that's that, not to mention trying to get a unanimous guily verdict in Georgia is going to be somewhat difficult.

So Trump's state of mind in the January the sixth thing is of supreme importance. That's why people like Hutchinson testifying isn't a distraction from the big picture. It's part of the big picture. Her testimony and testimony like it is all necessary to be able to show Trump's culpable state of mind at the time. Without it there's no chance of this even going to trial, never mind an actual guilty verdict at the end of it.

[Kirkland Laing]

Some stuff I found interesting/sickening:


Longtime Florida expert GOP political consultant on DeSantis/Trump:

https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson/st...73377134182402


This guy is bankrolled by Peter Thiel, a tech billionaire who would love to be one of the people getting a golden ticket to set up private firms to manage Americans' six percent and who will be a big donor to the 2024 GOP nominee:

https://twitter.com/KyungLahCNN/stat...73323098652672



And all part of the same terrifying problem:

https://www.justsecurity.org/81898/t...s-from-abroad/



https://twitter.com/nytmike/status/1544807370160750592



https://twitter.com/anelsona/status/1543979834543677441



https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/stat...14004723884032

[palmerq]

The Cassidy Hutchinson testimony wasn't a good look for Trump, some people who are more expert than I think that it makes a good road map for the DOJ to prosecute him though so who knows.. Trump certainly comes across as a gullible mad idiot in these testimonies even if they are from the leftists.....err his own party.

I see the secret service are denying her story about the limo incident and to be fair to her she did not claim to have seen it happen so it could well have been a better idea to leave that out. A second hand story that could easily be denied does set it up for people to doubt the rest of the testimony.

I'd also think unless Trump is not legally allowed to run(although even that might not stop him :S) he'll definitely be the republican nomination if he isn't he'll blow up the whole thing and split the republican vote in half and guarantee Biden a win...although it looks like the Republicans get all they want with the current supreme Court anyway so maybe they don't even need the presidency anymore.

[Kirkland Laing]

The Cassidy Hutchinson testimony wasn't a good look for Trump, some people who are more expert than I think that it makes a good road map for the DOJ to prosecute him though so who knows.. Trump certainly comes across as a gullible mad idiot in these testimonies even if they are from the leftists.....err his own party.

I see the secret service are denying her story about the limo incident and to be fair to her she did not claim to have seen it happen so it could well have been a better idea to leave that out. A second hand story that could easily be denied does set it up for people to doubt the rest of the testimony.

I'd also think unless Trump is not legally allowed to run(although even that might not stop him :S) he'll definitely be the republican nomination if he isn't he'll blow up the whole thing and split the republican vote in half and guarantee Biden a win...although it looks like the Republicans get all they want with the current supreme Court anyway so maybe they don't even need the presidency anymore.

She testified to a bunch of stuff that nobody is disputing and a bunch of people have already corroborated one way or another. The only thing in dispute is the strangulation/lunging thing and the strangulee is the guy denying it but he actually left his secret service job and went to work for Trump and has already made bullshit claims to help Trump out previously:

https://twitter.com/Alyssafarah/stat...47899383402498

https://twitter.com/kbaxter/status/1542327491427086338



It'll be interesting to see whether this guy testifies under oath especially as other secret service agents have come forward and are going to testify they heard the same thing at the time.

[palmerq]

The Cassidy Hutchinson testimony wasn't a good look for Trump, some people who are more expert than I think that it makes a good road map for the DOJ to prosecute him though so who knows.. Trump certainly comes across as a gullible mad idiot in these testimonies even if they are from the leftists.....err his own party.

I see the secret service are denying her story about the limo incident and to be fair to her she did not claim to have seen it happen so it could well have been a better idea to leave that out. A second hand story that could easily be denied does set it up for people to doubt the rest of the testimony.

I'd also think unless Trump is not legally allowed to run(although even that might not stop him :S) he'll definitely be the republican nomination if he isn't he'll blow up the whole thing and split the republican vote in half and guarantee Biden a win...although it looks like the Republicans get all they want with the current supreme Court anyway so maybe they don't even need the presidency anymore.

She testified to a bunch of stuff that nobody is disputing and a bunch of people have already corroborated one way or another. The only thing in dispute is the strangulation/lunging thing and the strangulee is the guy denying it but he actually left his secret service job and went to work for Trump and has already made bullshit claims to help Trump out previously:

https://twitter.com/Alyssafarah/stat...47899383402498

https://twitter.com/kbaxter/status/1542327491427086338



It'll be interesting to see whether this guy testifies under oath especially as other secret service agents have come forward and are going to testify they heard the same thing at the time.

Yes she did, I was listening to it at work.

I was unaware of who the secret service guy is exactly so it's good to know that, I did read he said that him and the driver would testify Under oath, so I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

It is pretty crazy how much people want to defend the obvious coup.

[TitoFan]

If I'm gonna be honest, all this limo business and new witnesses coming forth is only providing cannon fodder for Trump and his minions to detract from the big picture here...

That the POTUS encouraged and enticed a loony mob of protesters to attack the Capitol... and then sat with his thumbs up his ass doing absolutely nothing while all the mayhem was going on.

So really.... WHY have all these distracting sideshows?

She testified about a whole bunch of stuff that shows Trump's criminal intent more and more clearly. He knew there would be people armed with guns and knives and what have you and was fine with it, even wanted armed people marching to the Capitol. He thought Mike Pence deserved to be hanged. Lots of evidence about him pressuring state officials. But when a president tries to strangle the head of the Secret Service it's an unusual event and is inevitably going to generate a lot of media coverage.

This is a slow methodical plod through the whole event with new witnesses coming forward all the time. Unusually for a congressional inquiry there's very little political theatre or hyperbole or outright bullshit. Compare these hearings to the eight Benghazi investigations or the forthcoming Hunter Biden laptop multiyear inquiries for instance. And that's because they've got the goods.

To each his own, I guess.

IMO, if it isn't enough to throw the book at Trump just for enticing the mob and then doing absolutely zilch about it while the riot was going on, well... what can I say.

Now they're skewering Hutchinson and her credibility... and like or not it becomes a distraction from the big picture.

Time and money being spent on something no one really needs.

But politics in the U.S. stopped being logical and sensible a long time ago.

Rich white guy crimes have all kinds of elaborate state of mind clauses built in to them to allow rich white guys to escape justice. It's what happens when you can write the laws. For instance the Georgia election investigation. Trump is literally on tape saying things which are the exact definition of what the actual statute says is a felony. The witnesses are the fucking Georgia attorney general and a bunch of his deputies. Trump is bang to rights!

Except there's a state of mind clause built into the law. As long as Trump was genuinely convinced the election had been stolen then he isn't breaking the law even though he most clearly did. All he has to do is assert he really believed he'd been robbed and that's that, not to mention trying to get a unanimous guily verdict in Georgia is going to be somewhat difficult.

So Trump's state of mind in the January the sixth thing is of supreme importance. That's why people like Hutchinson testifying isn't a distraction from the big picture. It's part of the big picture. Her testimony and testimony like it is all necessary to be able to show Trump's culpable state of mind at the time. Without it there's no chance of this even going to trial, never mind an actual guilty verdict at the end of it.

Trump's state of mind in the Jan 6th thing is that he didn't do jack shit to try and stop what was going on, with his full knowledge.

If it takes hundreds of thousands of tax dollars and many months to figure that out... then I guess the entire justice system is even shittier than I thought.



It wasn't the Democratic Party headquarters that got overrun. It was the U.S. fucking Capitol Building.

Years from now historians are going to shake their heads and chuckle at the whole absurdity of the thing... and wonder out loud how something like this could have happened in the first place, only to have the country putter around a year and a half later talking about limos and strangulations.