"WOULD YOU BUY A USED CAR FROM THIS GUY?"

 

IT WAS THAT EASY, MR. PUTIN

 

Americans have become so uncaring about their country that this announcement by a private citizen doesn't cause rioting in the streets.

Apparently Americans are willing to roll over like a fat, overfed puppy dog and get their tummies scratched by any plutocrat. 

These are the kind of people who'll be running the country for the next four years.

UnitedHealth, employer of slain exec Brian Thompson, found to have overcharged some cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%

 

This is for skudrunner who still insists, without evidence, that the Biden administration is a failure.

 

FUN FACT: Trump is a month and a half behind on his promise to "end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours after I'm elected."

America's shame

 

This man-child who hasn't a drop of humanity, honor, or kindness in him, was gifted to US by his MAGAs and other deluded, benighted people.

Trump won the presidency and hasn't the decency to keep his miserable ungracious mouth shut, but instead continues to denigrate those who are better human beings than he is or will ever hope to be.

We will not have an adult leading us but instead a whiney, little weak man who is full of hatred and jealousy. Read this appalling post from him and weep.

I am so very proud that I and many others knew enough NOT to inflict this disaster of a human being on America again.

YOU WERE WARNED

 

Rick Wilson:

"Imagine a country perched on the edge of a political cliff, trembling in the shadow of an authoritarian leader. Elected officials, business elites, and even everyday citizens know they’re dealing with a dangerous man who does not respect democratic norms, the rule of law, or basic human decency. 

He wants others like him by his side—deficient, broken people—the cruel, sadistic, ugly, and jealous. He wants this broken soul reflected in the distorted, dirty glass of the mirrors held aloft by his minions. He wants men whose character is a slurry of greed, lust, avarice, and weaknesses. 

Donald Trump is that authoritarian, and Pete Hegseth is the modern-day American Psycho Trump wants in charge of the Defense Department."

[skip]

"Watching the pathetic, groveling Republicans in the confirmation hearings for unqualified and morally vacant party-boy Pete Hegseth, that was the most potent takeaway: these people are terrified. Joni Ernst, who knows better, practically invited Hegseth over for a kegger and some time in the hot tub. The yahoos—Tuberville, Mullin, and a few more—reveled in their lowbrow bro-fest, but the normie Republicans reek of raw terror."

[skip] 

 "Here’s the brutal truth: fear doesn’t stop authoritarians. It feeds them. Fear, like oxygen to a fire, only emboldens these leaders to become more dangerous, violent, and unrestrained. Too many people fail to grasp this fundamental political dynamic. 

Call it Putin’s Law: the more fearful a nation’s people, business leaders, and elected officials are of an authoritarian leader, the more they inadvertently incentivize increasingly dangerous, destructive, and violent behavior from that leader."

CONGRATULATIONS, PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN

 

On your work in negotiating the Gaza cease-fire and hostage deal.

"The prime minister of Qatar, a key mediator, said the agreement would come into effect on Sunday, and President Biden said it would last for 42 days. The Israeli cabinet still has to ratify the deal and some details remained unresolved."

 

"At the White House, Mr. Biden told reporters that his administration had worked tirelessly for months to convince the two sides to halt the fighting. He called it “one of the toughest negotiations I’ve ever experienced” and gave credit to “an extraordinary team of American diplomats who have worked nonstop for months to get this done.”

We have only one president at a time. This happened (with help from some Trump people) during Joe Biden's administration; Joe Biden rightfully gets the credit.

Are we sleep-walking into autocracy?

 IMO, yes we are.

Here is the NYTimes piece that lays out how this is happening right now before our eyes. I've posted the entire essay by Kim Lane Scheppele and Norman Eisen because it is behind a paywall and too important to be missed:

Since Donald Trump’s election victory, we have witnessed striking accommodations to his narrow win and mandate, what has been called “anticipatory obedience.”

Are we sleepwalking into an autocracy? We hope not, and would be glad if the threat does not materialize. But as close observers of people and places where democracy has come under pressure and occasionally buckled, we see creeping autocracy as a distinct and under-discussed possibility. We know well other nations, including Hungary and Poland, where leaders have steered policies that lead to a backsliding of democracy. We see eerie similarities between what transpired in those countries and what Mr. Trump and his transition team have already done and promise to do.

Fortunately, we also have examples of countries that have pushed back on threats to democracy, and we can learn from them.

The Trump transition has featured the rapid-fire appointments of several cabinet officials who are both unqualified and potentially dangerous to the security and health of the American people. The transition has also included a flurry of actual and threatened libel actions against critics, followed by several media executives and owners caving in.

Business leaders with economic interests dependent on the federal government have also made nice with the president-elect, who has threatened to use his regulatory power to pick favorites.

In a second term, Mr. Trump’s actions may be even more dangerous because he is now following the playbook created by Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, who after losing and then regaining office moved his country from a democracy into an “illiberal state,” as he put it. It was one of the faster collapses of a robust democracy on record.

As we have seen in others democracies, autocracy is not built out of the whims of a leader but only becomes entrenched when it has been certified by legalism — exploiting legal means to serve autocratic ends. After Mr. Orbán paid his third visit of 2024 to Mar-a-Lago in early December, and after revelations that Mr. Orbán’s people were involved in influencing policy in Mr. Trump’s second term, Mr. Trump’s affinity for the Orbán playbook should not be surprising.

Mr. Orbán used law as a weapon against Hungarian democracy. When he came to power in 2010, he unleashed a pack of laws designed to bring the courts to heel and to scare the media and political opposition into submission. He consolidated power in an ever-expanding Office of the Prime Minister, bypassing his cabinet and giving orders directly to the bureaucracy, which he had reconstructed by changing the civil service law to fire those who were not already on his team and elevate allies to key positions. Mr. Orbán’s rise to power was accompanied by the aggressive use of libel actions to drain the resources of critics and to chill the aspirations of new challengers. He packed the courts with loyalists.

Mr. Trump promises to do much the same, including through his embrace of Project 2025 ideas and their proponents, many of whom are populating his administration. Project 2025 lays out a 180-day playbook for capturing government quickly, using legal tools.

The plan envisions a bulked-up White House Office and Executive Office of the President of the United States embracing a unitary executive theory that “it is the President’s agenda that should matter to the departments and agencies that operate under his constitutional authority.” Project 2025 then relies on reinstating Mr. Trump’s 2020 executive order creating Schedule F, which permits the reclassification of civil service positions as at-will jobs so that the president can remove bureaucrats who are not on his team.

Even before Mr. Trump’s appointees have entered their designated offices, however, Mr. Trump and his admirers have launched libel cases and threats of criminal investigation to intimidate journalists and political opponents, just as Mr. Orbán did. ABC News just settled one such case for $15 million rather than risk the cost and Trumpian ire of defending its journalist. Mr. Trump has made no secret of wanting to weaken the landmark Supreme Court case New York Times v. Sullivan, which creates a high bar for proving libel against public officials. (In 2014, Mr. Orbán’s government changed the country’s libel law to make it easier for public officials to win libel cases after a constitutional amendment nullified the Hungarian Constitutional Court decision to the contrary.)

By entering office with a blitz of legislation and outrageous policy proposals in 2010, Mr. Orbán divided the opposition. Those who cared about media freedom embraced one set of initiatives; those who worried about judicial independence started another; still others focused on prisoners and migrants. Crucially, the opposition only rarely united when faced with attacks on multiple fronts.

Mr. Trump is already using this tactic of flooding the zone with legal challenges designed to divide and conquer his opposition. His political opposition may be next. Strongly united during the presidential campaign, it must take care not to splinter. Some are prioritizing the coming fight against mass deportations; others are doubling down on trans rights; attorneys are focusing on protecting the Justice Department from bringing wrongful prosecutions against Mr. Trump’s political opponents (and responding if it happens); former judges are focused on judicial decision-making and appointments if the rule of law comes under attack.

But the unified purpose and energy that dominated the presidential campaign must be maintained, making political opposition resistant to a divide-and-conquer strategy.

Lessons from other attempts at autocratic takeover provide more guidance for democratic self-defense.

In Poland, where the Law and Justice government also cemented its power by law using the Orbán playbook, masses of Polish citizens went to the streets demanding protection of the judiciary. When the next election neared, opposition parties set aside their differences to establish a campaign that focused on the threats to constitutional democracy. They won, albeit narrowly, in 2023.

But the Polish electoral victory also shows how hard it is to un-entrench a government that has entrenched itself by law. With the holdover Law and Justice-affiliated president blocking new legislation with his veto and the packed Constitutional Tribunal overturning other initiatives, the government that ran on a platform of restoring democracy can barely make headway and is already falling in the polls because it looks ineffective.

The lesson Poland teaches us is that would-be autocrats can be pushed back if the opposition is united, but also that a country stands a better chance of recovery if it blocks autocracy before it becomes legally entrenched. As in Poland, Mr. Trump was able to solidify a clear majority at the Supreme Court during his first term, and its rulings contributed to the delay for any possible reckoning by a federal court for his conduct.

In Brazil, where Jair Bolsonaro ruled like Mr. Trump with whim and revenge, the 2022 election narrowly toppled him, after he cast doubt on the process.

But because Mr. Bolsonaro, like Mr. Trump, did not fully entrench himself by law in his first term, the still independent Supreme Federal Court was able to disqualify Mr. Bolsonaro from running for office for eight years, and the still-independent federal prosecutors are now examining overwhelming evidence that he had planned a coup. Here, too, however, democratic recovery depends on crucial institutions remaining independent and not packed with loyalists during the period of attempted autocratic capture.

Defenders of democracy will have to stay united, focusing on ensuring that checks and balances remain intact and that crucial democratic watchdog institutions elude capture. Otherwise, America will indeed find itself sleepwalking into autocracy.

Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton University, lived and worked in Hungary for many years as a researcher at the Hungarian Constitutional Court and at Central European University. Norman Eisen is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former ambassador to the Czech Republic. 

The Hegseth hearings

 Imagine if a Democratic president nominated a person for Secy. of Def. who stated this about Republicans/Conservatives:

"Hegseth has settled an accusation of sexual assault, appears to have a history of alcohol abuse, and has been accused of financial mismanagement at two small veterans’ nonprofits. But he appears to embody the sort of strongman ethos Trump craves. Jonathan Chait of The Atlantic did a deep dive into Hegseth’s recent books and concluded that Hegseth “considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically.” Hegseth’s books suggest he thinks that everything that does not support the MAGA worldview is “Marxist,” including voters choosing Democrats at the voting booth. 

He calls for the “categorical defeat of the Left” and says that without its “utter annihilation,” “America cannot, and will not, survive.”

An email from a friend:

"As a victim of MST (military sexual trauma), I find it reprehensible that anyone would think an alcoholic who has been accused of sexual assault and who paid his victim off is the best choice for SECDEF. 

Then again, they also elected an adjudicated sexual assaulter and convicted felon for POTUS."

Donald Trump would have been convicted over 2020 election, says special counsel

 

Report by Jack Smith says evidence ‘was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction’ had Trump not won re-election in 2024

Tell us something we didn't know!

What a failure of the judicial system that something, which was visible for all with eyes to see,  took almost four years to affirm!

A third of the American voting populace knowingly elected a felon and a sexual assaulter who tried to stage a coup to illegally hold onto power. 

We now know that many Americans don’t care because their attitude is that character and criminality aren’t important to this country anymore. IMO, Trump voters have completely lost their moral compass.

Now America and the world have to live with a criminal, a sexual assaulter, a liar, cheat, and fraud for four years. 

We are now a sham democracy presided over by a criminal supported by an oligarchy and toady sycophants. Not an exact definition of a banana republic but getting pretty close.

The American electorate failed this test miserably. 

Maybe Trump winning the election needed to happen to expose how shallow we are as a people.

The Worst = Trump and Musk

 

The Worst Doing Their Usual, Appalling, Worst

It would be nice to think that, just once, Donald Trump and Elon Musk could show some humanity, decency, and good taste. It would have been nice if they expressed their horror at the fires, and offered to help in a meaningful way.

Instead, they used the occasion to score points and push buttons. Trump immediately blamed Democrats, called California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, a juvenile name and said he should resign; and Musk, as usual, pushed out claims he read on his own platform without really understanding them — or ever acknowledging the obligations that come with wielding a huge megaphone.  

For example, the assertions that California had cut its firefighting budget. It is true that, one month before the fires broke out, the Los Angeles fire chief said that budget cuts were “hampering the department’s ability to respond to emergencies.” (The city budget did decrease by $17.6 million, or 2 percent, between the 2023-24 and the 2024-25 fiscal years — although huge, one-time purchases weren’t factored in). Meanwhile, the state fire budget has nearly doubled since 2019, as has the number of firefighters. 

Here and there, more accurate and thoughtful accounts could certainly be found. For example, Juliette Kayyem, a former US Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary, observed in a radio interview: 

No city is built for a municipal water system to deliver assistance during what’s essentially a wildland fire. … The best way to fight a wildland fire is by using helicopters and dropping water on it. We don’t have that capacity now because of the winds and because you’re in populated areas. So they’re essentially doing hand-to-hand combat.

Referring to rumors that there was no water, she explained,

This has nothing to do with the supply of water. It has to do with the pressure in the system. Everyone was grabbing it at the same time. … There wasn’t enough pressure to deliver that water to hilly areas like the Pacific Palisades, which is essentially sort of a cliff area over the ocean.  

Kayyem also tweeted in response to Trump’s blaming Newsom and falsely claiming he had failed to sign a water restoration declaration: 

In all my years in and studying disaster management, I have never seen a president-elect blame a jurisdiction while the disaster was still out of control. It distracts, is cruel to first responders and victims, and could impede effective response.