Let’s talk about the REAL border crisis. Hear me out… Would it surprise you to know that 90% of people that try to cross our border end up in the hands of Customs and Border Protection? There is no open border flood of undocumented immigrants crossing into the U.S. 📌 Many… pic.twitter.com/nKGTb4AkZI — Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline) February 1, 2024 The media is not telling the real story, as usual. It’s just a “crisis” or a “caravan” or a “catastrophe” without any context or nuance. They have been doing this for years. I know they aren’t this incompetent. They can’t be.
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If you think the Republicans in the Senate are the more sane members of the MAGA GOP, think again. They’re just as cravenly partisan as the nuts in the House. Remember Thom Tillis, the “brave” Senator who has been criticizing the House Republicans for refusing to even consider the border and Ukraine deal? Well… The House passed its $78 billion, bipartisan tax bill with a lopsided 357-to-70 vote on Wednesday, in which the measure attracted slightly more Democratic than Republican support as it overcame opposition from hardline conservatives. Now comes the hard part: Winning over GOP senators. Republicans in the upper chamber are already expressing deep skepticism toward the legislation, which combines several business deductions with an expansion of the Child Tax Credit that would all sunset at the end of 2025. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said Wednesday that he’s been advising Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other GOP Senate leaders that it would be “a mistake” to pass the bill.
Speaking of suckers and losers, let’s consider just how dumb you have to be to give money to a billionaire for legal fees to fight his massive number of lawsuits and criminal cases? Former President Trump‘s political fundraising apparatus spent more than $50 million on legal costs last year as he faced a barrage of lawsuits and criminal charges in multiple jurisdictions. The stunning new campaign finance reports reveal the financial damage the GOP presidential frontrunner has sustained while facing a colliding campaign and courtroom calendar. The mounting legal costs have drained large sums from Trump’s campaign coffers as he gears up for what’s expected to be another tight race against President Biden. Overall, Trump’s fundraising brought in less than his campaign spent in 2023, Politico reported. Trump’s Save America PAC spent roughly $47 million on legal consulting last year, according to the group’s latest financial report. That includes $25 million in the last six months of the year, the Federal Election Commission data shows.
As MAGAs pitch hissy fit over Taylor Swift and immigration Axios reports this morning that our Biden-led, post-pandemic U.S. recovery is outpacing other G7 economies: The largest federal investments in infrastructure and manufacturing in decades, championed by the Biden administration, contributed significantly. Growth in the U.S labor force also helped, Axios adds, “both due to more Americans choosing to enter the workforce and a surge in immigration.” Read that again. Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics (no, not that one) tells Axios: Meantime, House Republicans refuse to do productive legislative work for which you and I are paying them. The GOP-led House Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday passed two articles of impeachment against Alejandro N. Mayorkas, Biden’s homeland security secretary, the New York Times reports, despite lack of evidence “of a crime or acts of corruption.” Republicans on the panel argue “that the Biden administration border policies he implemented ran afoul of the law.
It’ usually the debt ceiling or the budget. This time it’s the border. Can this ritualized GOP stunt make Democrats pay this time? Generally, it’s always fair to assume that the American right wing is 100% hypocritical in all things. They do not practice what they preach and they preach a lot. So, I think we would all have thought that while they desperately want to give Donald Trump dictatorial power, it’s the last thing they would want to grant President Joe Biden. And yet as these negotiations over immigration have played out, it’s clear they want Biden to seize dictatorial powers as well, at least on that issue. I guess we can say that they have some consistency after all. After years of insisting that the congress must act to “protect the border” and browbeating the Democrats for their alleged failure to do it, they are now giving Joe Biden the green light to use executive orders the way Donald Trump used them. They once railed against such supposed usurpation of congressional prerogatives when a Democrat was in the White House but now they argue that they have no role to play and it’s all up to the president.
Heartbreaking. Now recall: Trump had the nerve to criticize Biden over the deaths of the three US soldiers from the done attack over the weekend. And his brainwashed cultists are all saying that he never lost a life while he was president. Oh, and he’s also claiming that only he can bring world peace.
Michigan are you listening? Supposedly Fox viewers are working class Joe’s who just can’t stand the coastal elites who are ruining their livelihoods. Yet these people have never been particularly union friendly. But it’s a good thing for a union leader to go on Fox and make the case that Trump was bad for the working man, just in case some retired auto workers in Michigan might be watching. You never know …
It continues to let us down These numbers appear to be promising: The Bloomberg News/Morning Consult survey found that among voters in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, 53 percent of respondents said they were unwilling to vote for the former president if he is convicted in one of his multiple criminal cases. Forty-six percent of respondents said they are “very unwilling” to cast their ballot for Trump if he is found guilty, while 7 percent said they are “somewhat unwilling.” Twenty-nine percent of respondents said they were “very willing” to vote for Trump if he is convicted of a crime, and 11 percent said they are “somewhat wiling.” The survey found that female voters, voters over 65 and voters with a bachelor’s or post-graduate degree were more likely to say they were unwilling to vote for the former president if he is convicted. Black and Asian voters were also more likely to say they would not vote for Trump if he is convicted.
They’ve already seceded… Scott Rosenberg’s Hopium Chronicles today provides a vivid description of what’s happened to the right wing in this country, beginning with the descent of Fox News into a full-blown propaganda machine that actually communicates in a discrete language spoken by the MAGA cult: My friend Greg Sargent once referred to this fictional world as Foxlandia. It’s a place they go where Trump is a strong leader, the economy is in recession, eggs cost $27 a piece, inflation is still raging, Putin is an ally and the West is sinister, antifa is ISIS, dozens of American cities burned to the ground in 2020, vaccines give you COVID, insurrectionists are hostages, children carrying their rapist’s babies is a blessing, assault weapons bring freedom, etc. It is, to borrow from one of my favorite TV shows, Stranger Things, the upside down. […] In thinking about it today what I am describing perhaps should be understood as a form of succession from the United States and our democratic heritage.
“The election was rigged, I won in a landslide!” This is how Trump convinces his cult that up is down and black is white. He just says something that’s outrageously false, the polar opposite of the truth, with total confidence, over and over again. In fact, his deluded followers often tell reporters that the thing they admire about him the most is that he always tells the truth. Has there ever been a demagogue in history who was so willing to lie so blatantly about clear, observable facts? They always lie, of course. And they are outrageous in their rhetoric. But this brazen defiance of reality seems to me to be pretty unique. I think religious cult leaders do this and get away with it with their flock. But I don’t know that political leaders have been able to get away with it like this. Obviously, it takes a supporting propaganda infrastructure and a monstrously stupid following. But still, give Trump his due. I think he may be the most flagrant, obvious liar in world political history and he’s succeeded in making tens of millions of people believe everything he says.