I say YES. YOU say NO....Numero Tre! Enjoy!
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There's an eye opener for Reps. women. This is want men are willing to do to you.
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My apology, trishyla for bringing back a nightmare experience for you, but I love that song and feel it should be our anthem.
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Some of the good ones.
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Not to make too much of a joke, but boy did she step in it.
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ChiSandy, great to “see” you, and love the added relgions and their shit! Lol.
Heather Cox Richardson’s post from Sunday is worth a read:April 28, 2024 (Sunday)
On Friday, in an interview with CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins, Trump’s former attorney general William Barr brushed off the recent news that Trump, furious that the story he had taken refuge in a bunker during the Black Lives Matter protests in summer 2020 had leaked, called for the White House leaker to be executed.
“I remember him being very mad about that. I actually don’t remember him saying ‘executing,’ but I wouldn‘t dispute it, you know,” Barr said to Collins when she asked him about it. “The president would lose his temper and say things like that. I doubt he would’ve actually carried it out.”
Collins followed up, asking if Trump would call for executions on other occasions. “He would say things similar to that on occasions to blow off steam. But I wouldn’t take them literally every time he did it,” Barr answered.
Why not? Collins asked.
“Because at the end of the day, it wouldn’t be carried out and you could talk sense into him,” Barr said. “I don’t think he would actually go and kill political rivals and things like that.” Barr said he intends to vote for Trump.
“Just to be clear,” Collins said, “you’re voting for someone who you believe tried to subvert the peaceful transfer of power, that can’t even achieve his own policies, that lied about the election even after his attorney general told him that the election wasn’t stolen.… You’re going to vote for someone who is facing 88 criminal counts?”
“The answer to the question is yes,” Barr said. “I think the real threat to democracy is the progressive movement and the Biden administration.”
The contention of the former attorney general—who had been responsible for enforcing the rule of law in the United States of America—that a man who has demanded the execution of people he dislikes is a better candidate for the presidency than a man who is using the power of the federal government to create jobs for ordinary people, combat climate change, protect the environment, and promote health and education, illustrates that Republican leaders have abandoned democracy.
In November 2019, in a speech to the right-wing Federalist Society, Barr ignored the Declaration of Independence, which is a list of complaints against King George III, to argue that Americans had rebelled in 1776 not against the king, but rather against Parliament. In the modern world, Barr argued, Congress has grown far too strong. The president should be able to act on his own initiative and not be checked by either congressional or judicial oversight.
That theory is known as the theory of the “unitary executive,” and it says that because the president is the head of one of the three unique branches of government, any oversight of that office by Congress or the courts is unconstitutional, although in fact presidents since George Washington have accepted congressional oversight.
The theory took root in 1986, when Samuel Alito, then a 35-year-old lawyer for the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice, proposed the use of “signing statements” to take from Congress the sole power to make laws by giving the president the power to “interpret” them. In 1987, president Ronald Reagan issued a signing statement to a debt bill, declaring his right to interpret it as he wished and saying the president could not be forced “to follow the orders of a subordinate.”
In 2004, when Congress outlawed the newly-revealed U.S. torture program at remote sites around the world, President George W. Bush issued a signing statement rejecting any limitation on “the unitary executive branch.” In April 2020, to justify his demands for states to reopen in the face of the deadly pandemic, Trump told reporters, “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total….” Now, in 2024, Trump’s lawyers are in court arguing that the president has criminal immunity for his behavior in the White House, possibly including his right to order the executions of those he sees as enemies.
As Republicans have embraced unlimited power for the president, they have also turned against the right of American citizens to have a say in their government. Beginning with so-called ballot integrity measures in 1986, they embraced methods to knock voters off the voting rolls. That policy intensified after Democrats passed the so-called Motor-Voter Law in 1993, making it easier to register to vote.
After voters nonetheless elected Democrat Barack Obama in 2008, the Supreme Court handed down the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, permitting unlimited donations to political campaigns, and corporate money flowed into them. In that same year, Republican operatives launched Operation REDMAP to elect Republicans to state legislatures ahead of the redistricting required after the 2010 census. Operation REDMAP resulted in extreme partisan gerrymandering that would make it virtually impossible for Democrats to win elections even if they won a majority of the vote.
Then, in 2013, the Supreme Court decided Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That law had required states with a history of racial discrimination to get clearance from the Department of Justice before they changed their voting laws. The court said that preclearance was no longer necessary. Within hours of the decision, Republican-dominated states proposed new laws that discriminate against voters of color.
In 2019, Barr explained to an audience at the University of Notre Dame the ideology behind the strong executive and weakened representation. Rejecting the clear words of the Constitution’s framers, Barr said that the U.S. was never meant to be a secular democracy. When the nation’s founders had spoken so extensively about self-government, he said, they had not meant the right to elect representatives of their own choosing. Instead, he said, the founders meant the ability of individuals to “restrain and govern themselves.” And, because people are willful, the only way to achieve self-government is through religion.
Those who believe the United States is a secular country, he said, are destroying the nation. It was imperative, he said, to reject those values and embrace religion as the basis for American government.
The idea that the United States must become a Christian nation has apparently led Barr to accept the idea that a man who has called for the execution of those he sees as enemies should be president, apparently because he is expected to usher in an authoritarian Christian state, in preference to a man who is using the power of the government to help ordinary Americans.
Saturday night, journalists, politicians, and celebrities gathered for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, an annual fundraiser for the White House Correspondents’ Association, which protects press passes for journalists who regularly cover the White House, assigns seats in the briefing room, funds scholarships for aspiring journalists, and gives awards for outstanding journalism. It is traditionally an evening of comedy, but last night, after a humorous speech, President Joe Biden implored the press to take the threat of dictatorship seriously.
“I’m sincerely not asking of you to take sides but asking you to rise up to the seriousness of the moment; move past the horse race numbers and the gotcha moments and the distractions, the sideshows that have come to dominate and sensationalize our politics; and focus on what’s actually at stake,” he said. “Every single one of us has…a serious role to play in making sure democracy endures…. I have my role, but, with all due respect, so do you.”
George Stephanopoulos of ABC’s This Week apparently took this reminder to heart. “Until now,” he said in the show’s opener on Sunday, “[n]o American president had ever faced a criminal trial. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment for retaining and concealing classified documents. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment or a state indictment for trying to overturn an election, or been named an unindicted co-conspirator in two other states for the same crime. No American president ever faced hundreds of millions of dollars in judgments for business fraud, defamation, and sexual abuse….
“The scale of the abnormality is so staggering, that it can actually become numbing. It’s all too easy to fall into reflexive habits, to treat this as a normal campaign, where both sides embrace the rule of law, where both sides are dedicated to a debate based on facts and the peaceful transfer of power. But, that is not what’s happening this election year. Those bedrock tenets of our democracy are being tested in a way we haven’t seen since the Civil War. It’s a test for the candidates, for those of us in the media, and for all of us as citizens.”
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Sorry for being away so long (if I followed this forum enough I'd never get offline), but sometimes I have to get something off my mind…and I suspect it will anger many progressives here:
I am a liberal. I am a "progressive," but in the traditional Bob LaFollette sense of the term. I deplore Hamas' Oct. 7 massacre in Israel—although I understand its motivation I do not condone, much less celebrate, it. I realize that Hamas must be eradicated to prevent it from carrying out another one, which it vows it will continue to do until they not only get all the land "from the river to the sea" but exterminate all my fellow Jews from the face of the earth. But Netan-yahoo stupidly gambled that Hamas would be a better steward of Gaza and be mollified—by financial aid—out of aiding Iran against Israel, and the IDF's intelligence arm was even more stupidly asleep at the switch as to the Hamas training camps openly operating just over the border.
And yes, though Hamas deserves and needs to be taken out, the boat has long since sailed on that. It is too well embedded within Gaza and has propagandized its way into not just the sympathies of the inhabitants but (calculatedly) of the nations of the world, thanks to its callous use of the population as human shields and unconsenting martyrs. Many Gazans are beginning to realize they're being played by Hamas.
I also don't approve (to put it mildly) the Israeli gov't's relentless development of settlements (its own version of "from the river to the sea") and displacing more Arabs than the 1948 "Nakba" did. At least in the latter Israel did pay (albeit arguably inadequately) to acquire homes and land. But to lump every Muslim, Druze and Maronite Christian resident of the Holy Land* into the false ethnic construct "Palestinian" (*"Palestine" being the name for the region first bestowed by first-century Rome) and condemn ZIonism in its purest form—the establishment of a state, delineated by the post-Ottoman-Empire British mandate and codified by the UN, where Jews could finally be assured of their safety rather than be temporarily "tolerated" and then persecuted and massacred as they were for 2000 years—as "colonization" and "racism;" and to project whatever sins the Israeli gov't has committed against the region's non-Jews onto world Jewry as a whole is beyond reprehensible. (Was going to say "beyond the pale" but the literal "Pale of Settlement" in the Russian Empire was where most of the post-Inquisition/pre-Nazi pogroms & massacres in Eastern Europe occurred).
I am posting here because I am sorely disheartened by the anti-Israel pro-"Palestinian" demonstrations carried out by students & other Gen-Z'ers ever since Oct. 7. Yes, Israel's reponse in Gaza has been wildly disproportionate, with its cruelty & sheer numbers having the effect of an atrocity. But it's neither "genocide" nor "ethnic cleansing:" neither of which definitions hinge on the numbers nor even the uniform ethnicity of the victims. Those terms require a specific intent and goal to eradicate an ethnic group purely for who and where they are—"ethnic cleansing" of a given area (the "where") and "genocide" the permanent extermination of an ethnic group (the "who"). Israel, however inept and cruel it has been of late, did not target Gazans for being Muslims or Palestinians, wherever they happen to live. Collateral damage is just as cruel and damaging, but it is not "genocide." (Oct. 7 was "genocide," just as the Holocaust, what the Turks did to Armenians, Burma to Rohyngia, Rwanda, etc).
(And Israel is not committing apartheid: Muslims living within the official 1967 borders have full voting rights as citizens, sit as legislators in the Knesset, even on the bench of Israel's large Supreme Court, and establish global businesses & corporations (e.g, Chobani & Sodastream). By contrast, racial minorities had none of this in white-controlled apartheid-era South Africa).
These younger demonstrators (and alas, their professors) are displaying almost a herd-mentality, of being anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian as requirements for membership in the progressive fold. I am disturbed by the blindly binary nature of their sentiments and thinking (sadly, far beyond the Vietnam Era "if you're not part of the solution, you're the problem"). I cringe when I see the kaffiyehs and face coverings—reminiscent of the garb of 1970s PLO, Al Fatah & Black September terrorists that these kids (and I use the term advisedly) don't even realize they're emulating but instead naively believe they're just being in solidarity with Palestine. We marched and sat in to protest the Vietnam War but we didn't set up tent cities and harass—much less physically attack and call for the death of—those who disagreed with us. We didn't paralyze cities, airports and roads. We didn't dress in black pajamas in solidarity with the VietCong. Protests are supposed to disrupt, even inconvenience perhaps those who are not responsible for the conduct being protested. But they cross the line when they shut down all of a society.
Too many of these protesters are engaging in cosplay and unthinkingly chanting catchy rhyming slogans in order to display their "progressive" bona fides. (Yeah, we chanted "hey hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" but we knew what it meant and readily acknowledged it was hyperbole). Celebrating Oct. 7 and sympathizing with Hamas is disgusting, but that's what these protesters feel is necessary to establish their cred. And—like many 1968 Columbia and later Chicago DNC protesters now concede they did—they participate to be "cool" or because it would be meaningful or even fun.
I don't know which is sadder: the need to find "meaning" by unquestioningly choosing a side and explicitly or tacitly calling for reciprocal destruction of an ethnic group (to which may of these students even belong); or the gaping hole in their generation's history education, which they fill with social media slogans and TikTok garbage in lieu of news, history books or even archival photos & footage.
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Democrats Have Had Enough Of Media Trump Apologists
Nancy Pelosi's calling out of Katy Tur as a Trump apologist shows that with democracy on the brink Democrats are done playing.
A Very Telling Exchange Between Nancy Pelosi And Katy Tur
Pelosi said, “Donald Trump has the worst record of job loss of any president. So we just have to make sure people know.”
Tur said, “There was a global pandemic.”
Pelosi responded, “He had the worst record of any president. We’ve had other concerns in our country. If you want to be an apologist for Donald Trump, that, that may be your role, but it ain’t mine.”
Tur said, “I don’t think anybody could accuse me of that.”
Video:
Katy Tur obviously doesn’t pay attention to viewer feedback because a lot of viewers think that she is a Trump/Republican apologist.
In fact, the point that Tur responded to Pelosi with was a Republican talking point. Under Donald Trump, the country had already slipped into a recession before COVID arrived. It is common for Republicans to blame the pandemic for all of the Trump job losses, but that is not accurate.
The point of this segment goes a lot deeper than Tur being called out for being a Trump apologist. However, the corporate media’s habit of normalizing and apologizing for Trump is a topic that we have tackled before and will do so again in the future.
Pelosi’s comment back to Tur suggested something much deeper.
Democrats are not treating the corporate media like a neutral broker anymore and are not afraid to call out their worst behaviors, such as apologizing for Donald Trump.
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Jackie, good for Pelosi for calling Katy Tur a Trump apologist! Even if Tur said she didn’t think anyone could accuse her of that, it’s exactly what she is! I mean, when even the media cannot see themselves for what they are, it must be called out! Even the friggin’ media is captured by the evil spell the Orange fat ball has cast on this nation! Wake up, journalists and reporters!!!!!
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Sandy, THANK YOU!!!!! You echoed my thoughts exactly on the protestors! When it first started, I was supportive because I was, and still am, furious that Netanyahu decided killing thousands of innocent Palestinians was the answer to the horror that Hamas created on Oct 7th!
Then, several weeks ago I heard the chants of NY students "death to Israeli soldiers" and that ended my support! I am against ALL loss of innocent life no matter the ethnicity or religion!
I always think I heard the worst of human atrocities, like the Khmer Rouge throwing infants up in the air, then impaling them with their swords, or the LRA in Uganda, chopping up people alive, but then something happens, and it is more horrific, as Hamas did on Oct 7th. Unspeakable horror!
I am furious at the students! First, telling a university to "change who they invest in or else" is called BLACK MAIL! It is one's choice after acceptance to any University or College, to attend or not. The students are free to go wherever they want to if they are not happy. I say, GO to those who are protesting!
Also, when professional protestors enter the picture, and they always do, you know things are not going to go well!
The students have a right to protest, but they DO NOT have a right to endanger other students, prevent them from attending classes and graduations they deserve, or interfere with the campus in any way!
Anyone participating in these protests after their voice is heard and they told what they can and can't do, who then violate the University rules, should be expelled. The Ivy League schools have lines waiting to get in! The protestors are only a fraction of the student body, yet they are stealing education from their peers. Just because they think their desires are more important than classes doesn't mean they have a right to disrupt the education of students who have a different goal.
BTW, remember Kent State? History repeating itself, as it did the Boston Massacre.
As for Trump, hopefully he will be convicted and sentenced before the election and will either not be able to run, or will lose! Barr is an asshole so who is surprised by his support of Trump? Trump has a whole lineup of ass kissers, we know that, so what?
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Divinity is not something supernatural that ever and again invades the
natural order in a crashing miracle. Divinity is not in some remote heaven,
seated on a throne. Divinity is love. . . . Wherever goodness, beauty,
truth, love, are--there is the divine.
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I am in agreement with Sandy and MM. about the student protests. I have nothing to add, other than if handled well some protests can be a good thing that enables the government better perception. In this case, Pres. Biden and our government are not the problem. I think it is always negative (even when things are not going on) to separate people too strongly as in Jewish or non-Jewish — Methodist or Baptist and even Republican or Democrat. We are the human race and if we keep finding ways to separate each other it is going to cause harms we don't need. We have likes and dislikes and personal choices and we can honor those without losing basic touch.
The media does remain a huge thorn. They encourage errant thoughts and information for ratings. Although I often watch CNN as well as MSNBC and sometimes FOX, I came to find myself so often annoyed with CNN. They were bending over so far to present both sides and it was maddening when there was so little comparison going on and they tried so hard to display that appearance. Even when I get upset with some of my favorites on MSNBC I at least know that they will inform you of the other side — they just color our side a bit more dramatically then I think necessary. I would love to think some will have paid some attention to what Pres. Biden said at the Correspondents Dinner when he pointed out the need for honest reporting rather than ratings reporting.
Reading that even though the Loon had a lot of time off he did not go out and campaign. He uses his trial as an excuse, but I think his handlers hate to send him out and even though he has two rallies scheduled we will see if he does them.
I will have to delve into it deeper, but I heard something (I'm not watching and only listening with half as ear, if that) something on tv news that made it sound like the Loon wants to dump one or more of his lawyers now. Well that would definitely cause a delay. It sounded like the lawyers aren't causing enough drama and commotion for the Loon and getting him courtroom attentions in that way. Whether that ties into in any way, his finally getting his gag order penalties I don't know.
It does seem that Trump is losing more of himself and unable to show anything much of any strength. His call for maga people to gather flat-lined right away and is staying that way. This person has always been way more of a loser in life events than anything else, but he has used flashy living and OP'sM for so long that people don't see the REAL Donald Trump. He had the bravado of the WH for four years and has tried to keep hold of that, but he has to his chagrin become Mr. Ordinary Citizen in a lot of ways. He still comes by far more breaks and perks than anyone else, but to someone who was # 1, front and center, to be a bit of a needy outcast now has done a real number on him. He is finished although we will be treated to, for as long as possible a giant propping up until the ratings crash. If he thinks it is bad now — just wait till then.
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Donald Trump Is Pissed At His Trial Lawyer, Maggie Haberman ReportsJosephine HarveyTue, April 30, 2024 at 10:11 AM CDT·2 min read45
Donald Trump Is Pissed At His Trial Lawyer, Maggie Haberman Reports
Donald Trump is not happy with his lead defense attorney, Todd Blanche, according to The New York Times.
The former president has been frustrated with Blanche since the early days of his criminal hush money trial, four people familiar with the situation said, according to New York Times political reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.
He has reportedly complained that Blanche, a former federal prosecutor, has not been aggressive enough. Trump wants his lawyer to attack witnesses, the judge, and what he “sees as a hostile jury pool,” the Times reported.
The sources said the former president, notorious for ducking bills, has also complained about the price of his attorneys’ legal fees.
Jason Miller, senior advisor to the Trump campaign, told the Times that Trump and his team are focused on fighting the “ridiculous” case and that “anonymous comments from people who aren’t in the room are just that.”
Trump is currently in court for the third week of trial on charges of falsifying business records.
Prosecutors say Trump engaged in a “catch and kill” scheme to suppress negative stories about himself ahead of the 2016 election and then fudged records to hide the true nature of payments made as reimbursements to his then-attorney, Michael Cohen. Cohen had paid $130,000 to porn star Stormy Daniels in exchange for her silence about an affair she says she had with Trump a decade earlier.
Blanche has apparently sought to placate Trump to some extent, using strategies in court that some analysts have characterized as “terrible” and bizarre.
Legal experts have suggested that Trump is hurting his own defense by forcing his attorney to spout falsehoods and push political rhetoric that does not hold up in court.
Last week, Judge Juan Merchan told Blanche he was “losing all credibility with this court” after he argued that his client was trying hard to comply with a gag order preventing him from attacking people involved with the case.
Merchan ruled Tuesday that Trump had violated the gag order and warned him he could face jail time if he continued to do so. He was fined $9,000 for nine violations and ordered to delete the offending posts on his Truth Social account.
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One more thing I'd like to add about the näiveté of today's "progressive" protesters—which in retrospect applies to many of us, myself included, back in 1968: their inflexible idealism, untempered by logic & foresight, ultimately does far greater damage than the good they aim (and miss) to achieve. Until I saw the writing on the wall, when Wallace began to peel support away from the Dems, I wholeheartedly supported Gene McCarthy, reasoning that Humphrey was merely the continuation of LBJ's disastrous support and conduct of the Vietnam War. And as I was only 17, I couldn't yet vote to mitigate that damage. That came to pass, with 6 years of Nixon's escalation of the war and persecution of protesters (I ended up being wiretapped because my name was on the roster of "Senators for Peace" rally volunteers; and we, because of our donation to McGovern, wound up on his "enemies list," which followed me all the way to federal job applications such as VISTA after law school). These kids (and that's what most of them are) fail to realize (or refuse to listen to reason) that they—with their refusal to vote for Biden and even their support for West or RFK Jr—are practically guaranteeing a Trump victory. And the result—plunging us into a vindictive dictatorship—will be the end of democracy (or to split hairs, even federal republic) forever.
In part, I blame the past 20+ yrs' obsession with STEM education having kicked the humanities to the curb. Gen-Z and even younger millennials have this gaping hole in their educations: not just of history (they never learned about the Holocaust, millennia of anti-Jewish persecution, and Gen-Z'ers were born too late to remember 9/11) but of civics. If they'd learned the latter, they'd know that Presidential elections are decided not by nationwide popular vote but by the Electoral College—where except for ME and NE, each state is winner-take-all. And even that it isn't just who gets the most EC votes, but it has to be a majority, at least 270. This had been drummed into us since grade school, but these kids never even learned it in high school or college, nor by many of their parents.
They have never heard the expression "the perfect is the enemy of the good," and believe that ideological perfection is even achievable.
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If he bothers to go he will make it about himself and not the son. Speaking of which someone on the side opined that they wondered who Baron's dad really was. I did find that interesting to a degree since there is such a height difference as well as the fact that there is not a whole lot of resemblance either. Oh well — something for us not to know and there are a lot of those things still.
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My hand therapist opined that based on Barron's behavior and the fact that Melania is so protective of him, that this may be her way of hiding that he is on the Autism spectrum. I have observed him and felt that his demeanor doesn't reflect that of others his age but I have no opinion on her statement.
As far as the Israel-Gaza war, there have been atrocities on both sides and the innocent on both sides are suffering. The hostages need to be released before any attempt at settling this war but I feel strongly that Netanyahu needs to go and that his leadership leans more to retribution.
The protestors do lack fundamental history knowledge and this is to the detriment of not only the colleges where they protest but also to the political arena. Failure to vote for Biden or voting for that whack job RFK, Jr. is a vote for Trump and if they do not, or cannot realize that the oppression they are protesting about will occur here by their failure to foresee the future based on the history of WWI and WWII cause and effect. This is not a WASP nation, it was never intended to be one and Christianity is only one of the many religions practiced here. The Constitution clearly states separation of church and state but the SC Justices have violated that tenet. We need to return to Constitutional law and not the law pushed by the privileged.
I do not think I could mentally survive 4 more years of the Loon's terror reign.
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"Netanyahu needs to go and that his leadership leans more to retribution"
In an ideal universe, he and Trump would be cellmates.
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Sandy,
I like how you think!
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Cellmates.…on Mars.
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Yesterday’s post from Heather Cox Richardson:
April 30, 2024 (Tuesday)
This morning, Time magazine published a cover story by Eric Cortellessa about what Trump is planning for a second term. Based on two interviews with Trump and conversations with more than a dozen of his closest advisors, the story lays out Trump’s conviction that he was “too nice” in his first term and that he would not make such a mistake again.
Cortellessa writes that Trump intends to establish “an imperial presidency that would reshape America and its role in the world.”
He plans to use the military to round up, put in camps, and deport more than 11 million people. He is willing to permit Republican-dominated states to monitor pregnancies and prosecute people who violate abortion bans. He will shape the laws by refusing to release funds appropriated by Congress (as he did in 2019 to try to get Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to smear Hunter Biden). He would like to bring the Department of Justice under his own control, pardoning those convicted of attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and ending the U.S. system of an independent judiciary. In a second Trump presidency, the U.S. might not come to the aid of a European or Asian ally that Trump thinks isn’t paying enough for its own defense. Trump would, Cortelessa wrote, “gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.”
To that list, former political director of the AFL-CIO Michael Podhorzer added on social media that if Trump wins, “he could replace [Supreme Court justices Clarence] Thomas, [Samuel] Alito, and 40+ federal judges over 75 with young zealots.”
“I ask him, Don’t you see why many Americans see such talk of dictatorship as contrary to our most cherished principles?” Cortellessa wrote. No, Trump said. “‘I think a lot of people like it.”
Time included the full transcripts and a piece fact-checking Trump’s assertions. The transcripts reflect the former president’s scattershot language that makes little logical sense but conveys impressions by repeating key phrases and advancing a narrative of grievance. The fact-checking reveals that narrative is based largely on fantasy.
Trump’s own words prove the truth of what careful observers have been saying about his plans based on their examination of MAGA Republicans’ speeches, interviews, Project 2025, and so on, often to find themselves accused of a liberal bias that makes them exaggerate the dangers of a second Trump presidency.
The idea that truthful reporting based on verifiable evidence is a plot by “liberal media” to undermine conservative values had its start in 1951, when William F. Buckley Jr., fresh out of Yale, published God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom.” Fervently opposed to the bipartisan liberal consensus that the federal government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, protect civil rights, and promote infrastructure, Buckley was incensed that voters continued to support such a system. He rejected the “superstition” that fact-based public debate would enable people to choose the best option from a wide range of ideas—a tradition based in the Enlightenment—because such debate had encouraged voters to choose the liberal consensus, which he considered socialism. Instead, he called for universities to exclude “bad” ideas like the Keynesian economics on which the liberal consensus was based, and instead promote Christianity and free enterprise.
Buckley soon began to publish his own magazine, the National Review, in which he promised to tell the “violated businessman’s side of the story,” but it was a confidential memorandum written in 1971 by lawyer Lewis M. Powell Jr. for a friend who chaired the education committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that insisted the media had a liberal bias that must be balanced with a business perspective.
Warning that “the American economic system is under broad attack,” Powell worried not about “the Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system.” They were, he wrote, a small minority. What he worried about were those coming from “perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.”
Businessmen must “confront this problem as a primary responsibility of corporate management,” he wrote, launching a unified effort to defend American enterprise. Among the many plans Powell suggested for defending corporate America was keeping the media “under constant surveillance” to complain about “criticism of the enterprise system” and demand equal time.
President Richard Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court, and when Nixon was forced to resign for his participation in the scheme to cover up the attempt to bug the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel before the 1972 election, he claimed he had to leave not because he had committed a crime, but because the “liberal” media had made it impossible for him to do his job. Six years later, Ronald Reagan, who was an early supporter of Buckley’s National Review, claimed the “liberal media” was biased against him when reporters accurately called out his exaggerations and misinformation during his 1980 campaign.
In 1987, Reagan’s appointees to the Federal Communications Commission abandoned the Fairness Doctrine that required media with a public license to present information honestly and fairly. Within a year, talk radio had gone national, with hosts like Rush Limbaugh electrifying listeners with his attacks on “liberals” and his warning that they were forcing “socialism” on the United States.
By 1996, when Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch started the Fox News Channel (FNC), followers had come to believe that the news that came from a mainstream reporter was likely left-wing propaganda. FNC promised to restore fairness and balance to American political news. At the same time, the complaints of increasingly radicalized Republicans about the “liberal media” pushed mainstream media to wander from fact-based reality to give more and more time to the right-wing narrative. By 2018, “bothsidesing” had entered our vocabulary to mean “the media or public figures giving credence to the other side of a cause, action, or idea to seem fair or only for the sake of argument when the credibility of that side may be unmerited.”
In 2023, FNC had to pay almost $800 million to settle defamation claims made by Dominion Voting Systems after FNC hosts pushed the lie that Dominion machines had changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, and it has since tried to retreat from the more egregious parts of its false narrative.
News broke yesterday that Hunter Biden’s lawyer had threatened to sue FNC for “conspiracy and subsequent actions to defame Mr. Biden and paint him in a false light, the unlicensed commercial exploitation of his image, name, and likeness, and the unlawful publication of hacked intimate images of him.” Today, FNC quietly took down from its streaming service its six-part “mock trial” of Hunter Biden, as well as a video promoting the series.
Also today, Judge Juan Merchan, who is presiding over Trump’s criminal trial for election fraud, found Trump in contempt of court for attacking witnesses and jurors. Merchan also fined Trump $1,000 per offense, required him to take down the nine social media posts at the heart of the decision, and warned him that future violations could bring jail time. This afternoon, Trump’s team deleted the social media posts.
For the first time in history, a former U.S. president has been found in contempt of court. We know who he is, and today, Trump himself validated the truth of what observers who deal in facts have been saying about what a second Trump term would mean for the United States.
Reacting to the Time magazine piece, James Singer, the spokesperson for the Biden-Harris campaign, released a statement saying: “Not since the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today—because of Donald Trump. Trump is willing to throw away the very idea of America to put himself in power…. Trump is a danger to the Constitution and a threat to democracy.”
Tomorrow, May 1, is “Law Day,” established in 1958 by Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as a national recognition of the importance of the rule of law. In proclaiming the holiday today, Biden said: “America can and should be a Nation that defends democracy, protects our rights and freedoms, and pioneers a future of possibilities for all Americans. History and common sense show us that this can only come to pass in a democracy, and we must be its keepers.”
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Those college campus protestors never learned about Kent State, apparently.
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All of nature offers lessons on living, free of charge. One morning
I noticed a dead tree supporting many living things--fungus, vines,
lichen--which taught me that even after death we can continue to
support those who live on. Living trees on our property teach other
lessons. One tree has grown around a barbed wire fence. Another
has grown around a nail, and a third through a chain link fence.
These trees teach me how to accept irritation, absorb the pain and
grow around problems. Nature teaches me how to find my place,
grow toward the sunlight and bypass obstacles. To survive, we must
be able to change in response to whatever is required by the
challenge of the moment. Our bodies know this, but our
minds often rebel when change is necessary.
Bernie S. Siegel0 -
She's a goner now. Being raked over the coals by everyone even in her own Reps. party. Besides, the Loon only has a sham campaign anyway. She was going to use him just like he uses everyone else. Typical of the Reps.
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How boring w/o our conspiracies.
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