Saturday Report 10/5/24 - Will Oklahoma Taxpayers Buy 55,000 Trump Bibles for Their Public Schools?

The Best of the Rest of the News

Image by Michael De Groot from Pixabay

— My new book is out and you can now order The Hidden History of the American Dream: The Demise of the Middle Class and How to Rescue Our Future. I believe you’ll find it enlightening and will want to share it with others. The opening chapter is online here.

— Trump is lying in a way that could get people killed. Will right wing media echo him? Donald Trump is a notorious liar; he’s been a grifter, con man, and salesman extraordinaire his entire life. It wasn’t a big deal when he was lying to people about the square footage or maintenance of his apartments, but now he’s telling lies that have already led to the death of 8 people (including 3 police officers) on January 6th, terror among legal Haitian immigrants in Ohio, and, most recently, could set off somebody who lost everything to Hurricane Helene to try to kill somebody. Specifically, Trump is alleging that the Biden administration is doing what he did during his presidency when he withheld aid to Puerto Rico for years because the Democratic mayor of one of their largest cities had criticized him: he’s claiming that the Biden administration is withholding FEMA and other aid from Republican-dominated parts of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee. It’s a naked, blatant lie, but that’s how Trump rolls and has his entire life. It’s beyond disgusting — and dangerous.

— Oklahoma’s Superintendent of School Instruction Ryan Walters wants his state to buy 55,000 Trump Bibles so they can put millions into Trump’s personal pocket. I’ve previously mentioned the scam with his watches (you can buy the $100,000 watch with bitcoin, so it’s a great way for foreign governments or billionaires to personally bribe Trump and it’ll be untraceable), which raises the question: “What does Walters want from Trump?” With Republicans, after all, such things are always transactional; Walters isn’t doing this just for fun or because he thinks Oklahoma’s students really need a Trump Bible. He specified that the bibles must include the Pledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the U.S. Bill of Rights; the only Bibles in America right now that contain those specific items are the Trump Bibles. And he wants the expensive and profitable ones that are leather-bound. And they have to be delivered within 2 weeks, so no other Bible publisher could possibly meet Walters’ requirements. Bottom line: Trump has fully turned the GOP into a giant grift, and there’s no shortage of Republican grifters eager to get in on it. Does Walters expect a kickback? An appointment as ambassador to some pleasant place if Trump wins? A cabinet position like Secretary of Education? It’s sick enough that Walters wants to inflict the Bible — with its extreme violence, pornography, and incest — on the schoolchildren of Oklahoma; but to turn it into a hustle is over the top. So, what does Walters want? Is Trump bending his arm? Threatening him? Promising him something? Inquiring minds want to know…

— Election denier Tina Peters sentenced to nine years in prison. She’d clearly been betting that the judge wouldn’t hold her to account for costing Colorado over a million dollars when she let a group hack Colorado’s voting machines, made a national tour bragging about her election denial, and ridiculed having to wear an ankle bracelet on her podcast. Instead, the judge threw the book at her, calling her a “charlatan” and hitting her with almost nine years in prison. Hopefully, news of this election official’s perfidy and heavy sentence will travel far and wide to the hundreds of Trump followers who’ve embedded themselves in the elections apparatus of over two dozen states and are planning to do this fall what she did in 2020. They can’t say they haven’t been warned.

— The Wisconsin Green Party wants to “teach Democrats a lesson” by pulling votes away from Kamala Harris and handing the election to Donald Trump. I’ve noted before how I’ve known Jill Stein for years, since I moderated her 2012 debate with Libertarian Gary Johnson, and always thought of her as a narcissistic grifter. Now the Elections Committee Chair for Wisconsin Greens, Pete Karas, is clear about their goal: “We need to teach Democrats a lesson…” Right. Just hand the election to Trump and Putin and see how that works out for the Greens. America needs instant runoff voting so we can all vote for any niche candidate we want, but this is no way to make it happen. In the 2016 election, Stein took 31,000 votes in Wisconsin, causing Hillary to lose that state to Trump by roughly 23,000 votes. The same is true for every one of the swing states Trump won: in every one of them, Stein’s vote total was larger than Trump’s margin of victory. Like with Ralph Nader in Florida in 2000, had Stein not been on the ballot Clinton would have become our president. Stein, meanwhile, is killing the Green Party while taking money and/or support from both Russia and Republicans. The Greens need new, ethical leadership and we need to reform our voting systems.

— One of deadliest hurricanes of the modern era... Hurricane Helene is now up there with Katrina in terms of death and destruction, a record-breaker almost everywhere it hit. Here’s a thought experiment: If a school shooter killed a dozen kids in a school, do you think the media would report on the injuries and the school but never mention that there was a guy with a gun who caused all that mayhem? No, of course not. But our media, almost without exception, only rarely mentions climate change as the “shooter” of Helene, and never mentions the fossil fuel industry’s role in that, or their decades of lies to keep up their trillions in profits rolling in from their carbon pollution. A reckoning is coming, but our media has totally dropped the ball in identifying what’s really happening and why.

— The UAW Slams Trump-Vance as a “Menace to the Working Class.” President Biden got Congress to appropriate $500 million to help jump-start an electric car manufacturing plant in Michigan, but Trump and Vance are willing to kill the project on behalf of the fossil fuel billionaires who fund their campaign. The United Auto Workers’ response was straightforward: “Trump and JD Vance are invading Michigan and threatening the $500 million investment the Biden-Harris administration made in the General Motors Grand River Assembly Plant and the union jobs that investment would provide. The bottom line is that Donald Trump and JD Vance are a menace to the working class and are openly threatening to double down on Trump's legacy of job destruction.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.

— Crazy Alert! “They Can Control the Weather,” Claims Marjorie Taylor Greene After Deadly Hurricane Helene Kills More Than 200. The bizarre Republican from Georgia is at it again, telling her followers that a shady “they” (Jews? Democrats? Space aliens?) are behind the high levels of destruction from Hurricane Helene in Red counties. She published a map of the storm damage superimposed on an electoral map, showing that mostly Red counties were wiped out, as if “they” planned it that way. This from the “Jewish space lasers” woman who adheres to Qanon ideology and lies with the same easy facility of Trump and Vance. If I still lived in Georgia, I’d be profoundly ashamed.

— Hunter in a Farmer’s World Alert:

Tired of Tossing & Turning? ADHD’s Secret Sleep Fixes Revealed

— Wisdom School Alert:

In Praise of Shitty First Drafts & Talking To Yourself