The low expectations of soft majorities The GOP’s psych profile fits a certain… “moral flexibility,” as Martin Q. Blank once put it. Republicans once had rules they enforced about behaviors by their members that brought disrepute to the caucus. Actually, they were more like guidelines, as Dr. Peter Venkman once put it. Steve Benen highlights the history of Republicans’ flexibility in light of the cascade of lies told by freshman Rep. George Santos (if that is his name) of New York. Seriously, the man allegedly scammed $3,000 he’d raised on Go Fund Me page for cancer treatment for the service dog of a disabled, homeless veteran. (The dog died.) He lied about his mother working in the World Trade Towers on 9/11. (She was in Brazil.) The rest of his resume is fabricated. Is he even a U.S. citizen? If so, under what name? Kevin the Spineless just awarded George Santos/Devolder/Zabrovsky committee assignments, arguing that 1) Santos (if that is his name) was duly elected, 2) he may be under investigation but hasn’t been formally charged, and 3) disciplining Santos (if that is his name) is up to the Ethics Committee. How low can the GOP go?
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Oh really? CNN: Newly unsealed transcripts from Donald Trump’s deposition in the E. Jean Carroll case show that the former president mistook Carroll for his ex-wife Marla Maples in a photo. The transcripts show that during his October 2022 deposition, Trump was shown a black and white photo where he is interacting with several people, including with his then-wife Ivana, Carroll and her then-husband. “I don’t know who – it’s Marla,” Trump said when shown the photo. “That’s Marla, yeah. That’s my wife,” he says when asked to clarify. Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, then interjected and said “no, that’s Carroll,” according to the transcript. I’ll just leave this here:
If anyone was thinking (as I was) that the so-called GOP moderates who won in swing districts carried by Biden would sign on to a discharge petition early enough to have it work (it’s a long arduous process) we all need to wake up. They are going to drag out “negotiations” to cut the shit out of government programs that benefit actual humans (that’s what they all live for) and then it will be too late: House Republicans from swing districts are flatly rejecting the White House’s position that there be no negotiations with Congress over raising the national debt ceiling, insisting that they won’t bend to the Democrats’ take-it-or-leave-it approach to avoid the first-ever debt default with no conditions attached. The Republicans, many of whom hail from districts that President Joe Biden won or narrowly lost and are seen as the most likely to break ranks with their party’s leadership, said they are not willing to back a “clean” debt ceiling increase, insisting there must be some fiscal agreement first.
Presos disseram à Polícia Civil que buscaram proteção com os militares quando a polícia chegou – e houve embate entre as forças de segurança.
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A new report has identified how high-powered Russian individuals in Government and business are responsible for human rights violations, Byline Times reports
We barely had time to catch our breath from the wild spectacle of the Republicans finally electing a speaker when their next spectacle started with a bang. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen abruptly announced that the U.S. will hit the so-called debt ceiling on Jan 19, putting the issue immediately on the front burner. The government can move money around to keep paying its bills until some time next summer, but this is already shaping up to be an exhausting, months-long battle royale. It’s probably a good thing that they’re getting an early start since the MAGA House majority seems to need some serious remedial instruction on how the world works. That’s not to say that debt-ceiling standoffs are some core tactic of the MAGA movement. In fact, Republicans raised the debt ceiling three times during the Trump administration with no fuss at all. They never felt it necessary to try to persuade Trump to cut spending, and the Freedom Caucus didn’t utter a peep as he massively increased the deficit. These hostage situations are reserved for times when the GOP holds the House and a Democrat is in the White House. Shocking, I know.
On social media, anyway Feel the magic: Mounting a comeback for the White House, Donald Trump is looking to regain control over his powerful social media accounts. With access to his Twitter account back, Trump’s campaign is formally petitioning Facebook’s parent company to unblock his account there after it was locked in response to the U.S. Capitol riot two years ago. […] “Trump is probably coming back to Twitter. It’s just a question of how and when,” said a Republican who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations with Trump about returning to the platform. “He’s been talking about it for weeks, but Trump speaks for Trump, so it’s anyone’s guess what he’ll do or say or when.” Another Trump confidant who also didn’t want to be identified speaking about conversations with him said that Trump has sought input for weeks about hopping back on Twitter and that his campaign advisers have also workshopped ideas for his first tweet. I’ll never get over the fact that they actually “workshop” tweets.
The Washington Post’s Philip Bump predictably does the best analysis of this “both sides” excuses for the “classified documents” story: Look, when there’s no need for your rhetoric not to be lazy, you land on lazy rhetoric. If you can carry the day — at least with those who you’re most worried about convincing — with little effort or logical consistency, why bother putting in the effort or assembling that consistency? If your target audience hasn’t even heard the nuances that undercut your point, why bother rebutting those nuances? So it is that we enter our second (third? Who can keep track) week of apologists for former president Donald Trump seeking to equate his effort to retain documents sought by the government with a clutch of documents with classification markings found at President Biden’s home and an office he used.
His allies don’t understand anything You all remember anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist, don’t you? The guy who said they wanted to made government so small you can drown it in the bathtub? He hasn’t had much to say the last half decade but suddenly his issue is front and center. Unfortunately, today’s Republicans don’t understand what they’re supposed to be doing because they are very deluded and very stupid. And he’s upset: As part of his deal to become House speaker, Kevin McCarthy reportedly promised his party’s conservative hardliners a vote on legislation that would scrap the entire American tax code and replace it with a jumbo-sized national sales tax. The assurance got relatively little attention at the time, drowned out by the many other concessions McCarthy made to win his gavel. But with Democrats already attacking the proposal, some conservatives see it as a political headache in the making. “This is a political gift to Biden and the Democrats,” Grover Norquist, the dean of D.C. anti-tax activists, said in an interview.
Note that he says he was loyal to America, not to Trump. Trump is no doubt sharpening the shiv as we speak. This was interesting considering the bromance between Trump and Kim: Former Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo wrote in his new memoir that his secret meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jung Un in 2018 began with a “joke about assassination.” “This small, sweating, evil man tried to break the ice with all the charm you would expect from a mass murderer. ‘Mr. Director,’ he opened, ‘I didn’t think you’d show up. I know you’ve been trying to kill me,’” Pompeo’s memoir, which Fox News obtained a copy of, reads. “My team and I had prepared for this moment, but ‘a joke about assassination’ was not on the list of ‘things he may say when he greets you.’ But I was, after all, director of the CIA, so maybe his bon mot made sense,” he added. Pompeo’s memoir, “Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love,” is set to be released on Jan.