Saturday Report 12/21/24 - Trump is already walking back his promises. Why don't the headlines simply say, "He Lied"???

The Best of the Rest of the News

— Republicans in Congress kick the can down the road to March. Democrats in the House and Senate pitched in and helped pass a stopgap funding continuing resolution to keep the government open until March. It does not include the lifting of the debt ceiling which Trump and Musk wanted to prepare for the next round of borrowing trillions from American taxpayers to give to their billionaire friends as tax cuts. Nor did it cut entitlement programs, which so pissed off rightwing Republicans that 34 of them voted against the bill. But those corrupt Republicans who love the morbidly rich and hate average Americans haven’t given up hope; here’s the operant sentence from the article in today’s Washington Post about the vote: “[Johnson] proposed a handshake deal with fiscal hawks in his own party to try next year to slash mandatory spending — programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ health care and food stamps — by at least $2.5 trillion while raising the debt cap by $1.5 trillion, according to three people familiar with the details.” That’s how they plan to get to a $4 trillion tax cut transfer of wealth from all of us to the top 1% this coming spring: Get your popcorn.

— Why is President Musk endorsing the “German neo-Nazi Party”? Both President Musk and his sidekick Donald Trump are in deep with the Chinese Communist Party (which has given millions to the Trump family and where Musk makes roughly half of his Tesla cars and many of his billions) and Vladimir Putin (both are reported to have had multiple phone calls and other communications with the Russian dictator over the past two years, including Musk cutting off Starlink internet access for Ukrainian drones that were supposed to attack the Russian fleet in Crimea). Musk this week also endorsed the Nazi-infested German racist, far-right party Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) and in the past has endorsed other European hard-right politicians and parties including in France and the UK. Putin’s involved in a major effort to disrupt democratic governments around the world, mainly through using social media and video channels, and it increasingly appears that an anti-democracy coalition is forming here that includes several American and other rightwing billionaires and the Trump operation. Ruth Ben-Ghiat expands on this extensively in her excellent Lucid newsletter this week; it’s well worth the read (and subscribing to). Meanwhile, Senator Rand Paul (R-Crackpot) has suggested Republicans in the House should make Musk their Speaker (and third in the line of succession for the presidency), an idea that’s been endorsed by Marjorie Taylor Greene and others. The Constitution doesn’t have a citizenship requirement or election requirement for the job, so it’s a real possibility, although probably wouldn’t get the necessary votes if Johnson is taken down. No matter what, though, unless Musk and Trump get into some sort of major personality conflict (which I consider unlikely; Trump just wants to play golf and be loved, while Musk wants to get involved, presumably to protect the billions he gets in federal government grants and subsidies), it looks like the Muskrat is going to be America’s new overlord regardless of having or not having any official position.

— Trump is already walking back his promises. Why don’t the headlines simply say, “He Lied”? The main promise Trump made to American voters before the election was that he’d “immediately” lower grocery and other prices. Anybody with even a tiny bit of civics education knows that’s nearly impossible; the president doesn’t control any agency or have any power other than the bully pulpit to affect marketplace prices. Just ask Jerry Ford and Jimmy Carter, who were both one-term presidents largely because of inflation. Nonetheless, Trump repeated that promise over and over and voters believed him. Now, as Todd Beeton points out in his excellent Big Picture newsletter, Trump has dismissed this promise as something he never really intended to do because, as noted, it’s simply not possible. When asked on Meet The Press if he’d keep his promise to lower prices, he replied bluntly, “I can’t promise anything.” Right. He’d also promised he didn’t know anything about Project 2025 and their plans to gut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other popular government programs; now he’s stocking his administration with the actual authors of that document. He’d also promised to end the Ukraine war the day after his election; now it just looks like he’s going to leave that democratic nation and its millions of people to the tender mercies of Russia’s brutal tyrant and his rapist soldiers. Finally, Trump promised not to attack Social Security with his campaign sending out literally millions of flyers to homes in swing states saying he’d protect the program; that’s already in the crapper as the DOGE caucus and Musk’s people are examining the program for cutbacks. Republican Rep. Greg Lopez went so far as to bluntly tell Social Security Works’ president Alex Lawson, ‘there will be some cuts’ to Social Security. The three areas where it appears Trump may keep his promises are putting an anti-vaccine crackpot in charge of our vaccine programs, cutting more taxes for his billionaire donors, and setting out on a revenge spree once he controls the Justice Department. This is going to get ugly fast.

— President Biden says debt student debt cancellation is coming for public servants. When he first came into office, President Biden had expansive plans to drastically cut the $2 trillion in student debt that’s holding back entire generations of Americans from buying homes, starting businesses, and starting families. Republican attorneys general immediately sued him before the Supreme Court, where six bought-off Republicans on the Court blocked his efforts with a bullshit interpretation of the Constitution. This week Biden took a final bite at that apple, going as far as the law and SCOTUS would allow him by giving $4.28 billion in debt relief to 25 million borrowers. Student debt — something that doesn’t exist the way it does here in any other developed country — isn’t just a problem; it’s a crime against America committed by greedy banksters and the Republican politicians and judges they’ve purchased (with SCOTUS permission in Citizens United).

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