Mike Pence just signed a double book deal with Simon and Schuster, announcing that the first one will be an autobiography. The question is, who is going to want to read these? MAGAites hate him and wanted to lynch him for not interfering in the certification of the electoral vote, and normal people think he’s a moron.
All we have to say is that this deal is going to generate a lot of toilet paper.
Matt Gaetz is spinning so fast he’s going to fall down. After deny, deny, deny didn’t work, he’s now saying that the DOJ investigation into sex trafficking and crossing state lines with a minor for sex is all a Democratic plot to take him down. The little detail he left out? The investigation was begun last year when Trump and Bill Barr were still in office. Oops. Oh, and it gets worse. While Gaetz continues to dig a deeper hole for himself, the NY Times is reporting that he had petitioned the Trump WH for a blanket preemptive pardon for himself a some unnamed associates for crimes they may have committed during his term in office. Mercifully, WH counsel determined that request to be a non-starter. Apparently, he did not disclose to the WH that he was under federal investigation at the time of the pardon request. Oops, again.
Trump is a crook – we all know that (at least normal people do); he played his supporters from chumps and they fell for it. A television game show host who wears heavy makeup, a weird hair weave, and has 5 kids from 3 wives, is accused of 2 dozen incidents of sexual assault, has 4,000 lawsuits against him and who’s being investigated by the NY AG, NYC DA, and the feds for everything from financial fraud, to tax fraud, to cooperating with foreign powers, and even inciting insurrection is not the ideal guy to lead the free world. His followers, though, were actual chumps and we all paid for it with economic disaster, half a million pandemic deaths, and being labeled a pariah on the world stage.
As bad as all that is, it actually hit Trump’s supporters directly in the wallet, and I’m not talking about just the economy. During the 2020 campaign, Trump’s fundraising actually grifted his most loyal followers. Trailing far behind the Dems in fundraising, Trump’s campaigned CHANGED the giving option on its website to default to recurring rather than one time. What that meant was that if a donor wasn’t paying attention, whatever donation they made to Trump, the same amount was charged each week until the election, draining thousands of people’s bank accounts and running up credit card bills. The only way to opt out was to wade through all the fine print and then check the box for one time donation. That’s right, folks, Trump actually drained the bank accounts of supporters, using the money to pay for his campaign.
AND, if it’s even possible, it got worse. Late in the campaign, the opt out box was made more opaque, and even buried another pre-checked box that DOUBLED the contribution. This scheme snagged scores of people including retirees, military veterans, and people couldn’t afford to donate thousands of dollars to anything, much less Trump. One veteran donated $900, only to have his account drained by $8,000.
The effort was clearly intentional. Trump grifted money from loyalists in the waning days of the campaign to prop up his spending. Even worse, after his election loss, Trump’s disinformation campaign where he falsely claimed massive election fraud raised tens of millions of dollars that he then used to refund the money to donors he had defrauded before the election. The total he had to refund? Over $122 million.
As if anyone needed more evidence of Trump’s criminality and utter disregard for anyone but himself, this is it. By deception, Trump shook down his unwitting loyalists for over $122 million to fund his own charade to cling to the presidency. I’m just thankful the effort ultimately failed.
It’s all so clear, now, ain’t it?
Matt Gaetz has been the loyalist of the Trump loyalists. No matter how low Trump went, Gaetz stood there with a grin on his face and a shovel in his hand to help dig a deeper hole. It all makes sense now that we know the latest accusations about Gaetz and his inability to keep it in his pants.
Here is what they have in common:
Don Gaetz made his fortune by convincing the government to allow Medicare and Medicaid to cover hospice services – that his non-profit provided. Once the government started covering these hospice services, he switched the company to for-profit and built the largest hospice company in the country. He made millions using government health care. He then used those millions to buy his son a seat in Congress, which the son is now using to rail against government-run health care. Now he’s using those millions on getting his son a lawyer.
We all know, of course, how Donald Trump’s daddy made his money. Real estate, including government-subsidized housing, like this building in Brooklyn that still nets the Trumps $5 million a year.
The night before Michael Cohen testified before Congress, Gaetz sent this tweet, meant to intimidate a federal witness:
“Hey @MichaelCohen212 – Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she’ll remain faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot…,”
There are about a million other examples of Gaetz being a horses ass on Twitter for you to read if you’re a masochist, and I certainly don’t need to prove that Trump is a giant windbag.
This Wikipedia page lists 26 credible accusations against Trump, most of which you’re already aware, no doubt.
The best proof on this Earth of a devil is that Donald Trump gets away with literally everything he does with no repercussions ever, and the only way that this is possible is that he sold his soul to El Diablo.
Of course, it is this week that the Gaetzgate scandal began to unfold. In my estimation, he just finally pissed off the wrong person. Mr. or Mrs. pissed off leaked the investigation that had been secret from the media for half a year. For six months, the Justice Department has been investigating whether Gaetz flew a 17-year-old child across state lines and paid her for statutory rape. Within hours of the story breaking, GOP Congressmen and women lined up to give the media anonymous accounts of Gaetz sharing naked photos of women on the floor of the U. S. House of Representatives.
He is accused of having a sex contest when he was in the Florida state legislature involving . . . Harry Potter. Lawmakers got points for sleeping with married women, sorority girls, and virgins. The ultimate prize of this contest was one specific woman who they nicknamed “The Snitch” – as in Quiddich, whoever got her to sleep with them won the game outright.
Alright, alright, the Daily Mail reported the last bit there but it’s too damn juicy not to talk about at the beauty salon.
Trump’s long documented and often photographed friendship with Jeffrey Epstein allowed him free and full access to many of these women who later accused him of sexual assault. Epstein died in prison after being indicted for running a sex-trafficking ring wherein he abused dozens of underage girls, flying them on his private plane to his private island where they could be abused without the fear of authorities coming to the aid of the children.
Gaetz’s Epstein is named Joel Greenberg. Joel Greenberg is under indictment for a whole host of unbelievably nasty crimes, from posing as a student and writing a letter that he hoped would disgrace his political rival, to using Florida state government offices to print Fake IDs for the underage girls he was sleeping with so he could fly them across state lines. That sounds familiar.
There sure is an awful lot of smoke around these folks.
Alright, jury, I’ve presented my case. Gaetz is Trump’s biggest defender because they’re the same guy. Given every advantage in life, able to purchase anything they’d ever want from women to political office, they openly flaunt their crimes and laugh at the dummies around them that play by the rules and don’t have nearly as many followers on social media as they do. They’re both full of horse shit. We can only hope that the Feds take down Gaetz before he becomes the next President Trump.
Louis DeJoy, Trump’s appointee to Postmaster General is pretty much the last person who should be in that position except for maybe Screwy Louis Gohmert, who has his own issues. Here’s why:
So it’s no surprise that he’s under fire after being nominated by Trump and then confirmed by a board of governors that is dominated by Trump appointees. Historically, the Post Office was strictly non-partisan, including the board of governors, since it served all Americans. In recent years, though, boards have been hyper-partisan, including the FEC and others. Not to be naive, many mega donors are given cush positions in both Dem and Repub administrations after writing big checks; they get ambassadorships, committee seats, even cabinet positions, BUT, and it’s a big BUT, they all go away when their President vacates the WH. Hence the problem. Trump attempted, and in the case of DeJoy succeeded, in appointing partisan supporters to permanent staff positions.
Let’s be honest here; the Post Office has been a target for privatization by Republicans for decades. Where else could you find a multi-billion market that has over 300 million Americans held hostage to it? The independence of the Post Office has been whittled away for years, and the last nail in the coffin was driven in 2006 when the Congress required it to pre-fund 75 years of retiree health obligations. There was no reason to do that except to make it permanently lose money so Republicans could demand that it be privatized to fix it after they broke it.
The problem here is that demanding that the Post Office be cashflow positive is just as silly as demanding that the defense department turn a profit. It’s not set up that way. Unlike Fedex and UPS, the Post Office is mandated to serve ALL Americans, which include those in sparsely populated areas of the country. In fact, if you order anything delivered by Fedex or UPS and you live in a rural area, it’s most likely the Post Office will deliver that package. Just try to drop off a Fedex package in Valentine Texas, population 217. You can mail it, but you can’t Fedex it without driving over 35 miles to Van Horn. Why? Fedex can’t make money having a presence in Valentine. The Post Office doesn’t (and shouldn’t) have that luxury. The amazing thing, though, is that Valentine, and much of rural Texas, is serious Trump country. They rabidly support the guy and his party who’s actively sabotaging their way of life. Go figure.
The worst part of DeJoy being postmaster general is that he’s actively sabotaging the Post Office. During the election, he slashed spending, shortened hours, took out sorting machines in busy hubs, and slashed personnel. Add that to the challenges of the COVID outbreak, and within 3 months the Post Office was delivering over 80% of the mail late, much not at all. Millions of packages were delayed, destroyed, or just plain lost. I believe this effort was to undermine confidence in mail in voting, and in large part that worked. Like many, I decided to return my mail in ballot and vote in person to make sure my vote counted.
There’s simply no excuse for a radical partisan like DeJoy to be within 100 miles from the Post Office, much less running it while shooting the finger to the Congress. He’s cemented in, though, until Biden can get enough governors on the board to fire him. That’s not good enough. DeJoy should be immediately removed for conflicts of interest and gross mismanagement. The fact that Biden (who, unlike Trump, plays by the rules) can’t fix this problem shows just how broken our government is, and it’s long past time to fix it.
Last week, Trump sent a cease and desist letter to the RNC, NRCC, and the NRSC, ordering these organizations to stop using his name in their fundraising campaigns. His takeover, and ultimate destruction of the GOP is now unavoidable. The Republican party that we came to know and disagree with no longer exists; in 2016, the party handed trump the keys to the kingdom and he’s now burned the whole thing down. He’s coopted the entire organization with all of its members, and now has cut off the money they were using to perpetuate themselves.
Think about it – CPAC this year was nothing short of a Trump coronation. Every single speaker worshiped him, and declared him the only brand the GOP had. Hell, they even had a golden idol of Trump and everyone wanted to be photographed standing next to it. No Republican will oppose him on any policy or even publicly disagree with him. Trump has so amassed support for himself with a radical (and violent) base that he’s cowed the entire Republican delegation at the local, state, and federal level. After handing the party over to Trump, he’s now cut off the money so he can take it all for himself.
After coopting the party, he’s now using the same tactics he’s always used in life – lawsuits. Trump’s primary tool, besides prolific lying, is to use lawsuits as a bludgeon to force capitulation to his demands. That didn’t work as president, but it most certainly works in private life, and now he’s turned it on those who have handed him their party and their fundraising apparatus. Trump’s plan is now crystal clear – when he announced at CPAC last week that he’s not starting a third party, what he meant was there was no need to, because he was taking over the GOP. Now party leaders have a decision; start a new party to siphon people away from Trump, or just lay low, hoping that one of the criminal cases against Trump sticks enough to take him out of the limelight.
This will be interesting for those of us on the outside of this soap opera to watch. I can only hope it continues to weaken the GOP and its really bad ideas.