— Republicans created the morbidly rich and stuck America with the $40 trillion debt. For decades, I’ve been pointing out that in 1981 Ronald Reagan adopted a strategy proposed a few years earlier in the Wall Street Journal of spending like a drunken sailor when a Republican is in the White House to stimulate the economy and create the illusion of good times, while running up the national debt to astronomical levels, all so that they could scream about the national debt and demand cuts to social programs whenever a Democrat came into office. Republicans have been religiously following this ever since; the only Republican president to deviate from it was George HW Bush. The result, of course, is our $40 trillion national debt. With that $40 trillion, we could have had a national healthcare system and free college for all Americans, but instead we got Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, had a whole collection of bizarre billionaires. Finally, thankfully, both economists and Democrats have figured this out and are finally starting to speak out. It’s insane that the GOP has gotten away with this scam as long as they have…
— Donald Trump claims we have a new category of crime: publishing numbers he doesn’t like. When the Center for American Progress ran the crime data for Washington DC after Trump threw thousands of National Guard troops onto the streets and found that they not only didn’t reduce crime but also burned through more that $1.7 billion in our tax dollars, Trump went nuts. His personal lawyer sent a 9-page letter to CAP demanding a retraction, an apology, and cash (of course), backed by the threat of a $5 billion defamation suit. Always classy, Trump’s lawyer closed the demand letter with the all-caps “PLEASE GOVERN YOURSELVES ACCORDINGLY.” He also floated the possibility of going after CAP’s donors, the sort of Putin-esque or Stalin-esque action that FIRE’s Aaron Terry called (correctly) “wholly incompatible with a free society.” Meanwhile in Florida, Trump toady Joe diGenova has his DOJ investigators demanding to interview the FBI officials who executed the Mar-a-Lago search — which turned up more than 100 classified documents Trump had stolen and was criminally in possession of — in pursuit of the theory that thief Trump, rather than the US government, was the actual victim. Is this still America?
— Trump’s inspectors general have found our government’s waste, fraud, and abuse: It’s them. You’ll recall that Trump fired over 20 Inspectors General across most all of the federal government’s major agencies, replacing these watchdogs with MAGA grifters and lapdogs. The IG for the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, Cheryl Mason, demanded a private bathroom suite for her office, apparently because she didn’t want to rub elbows with the riff-raff. She claimed that Senate-confirmed appointees are legally entitled to a private bathroom, a law that literally doesn’t exist. There is a $5000 cap for renovations, which wouldn’t begin to touch the cost of what she did. She also commissioned a personal flag at more than a thousand dollars at the same time she was largely ignoring the “stop fraud and waste” job of an Inspector General while she slow-walked reports on electronic health records, and cut criticism of the VA’s physician shortages out of final drafts. Over at the Labor Department, losing Republican Congressman Anthony D’Esposito fired the staff overseeing corruption and now campaigns alongside Trump. At HUD the acting IG told his staff that instead of looking for waste, fraud, and abuse, they should instead become the Secretary’s “strong right arm.” Audits are, as a result of all this corruption, down 15% and investigative reports down by a quarter. As fired Interior IG Mark Greenblatt put it plainly: “You’ve co-opted the umpire and made them part of your team.” Veterans get the shortages, Mason gets her very own flag.
— The Democratic establishment is now upset that they’ve spent a decade begging young people to run for office. Over on Fox “News” they’re loving James Carville, who’s now aligned himself with a “moderate” group that wants to hang onto control of the Democratic Party, as he blasted the DSA for borrowing the Party’s “godd’mn” name. This is part of a broader pattern among the neocons and neoliberals who’ve largely run and profited from the Party since Clinton flipped it in that direction in 1993, as documented by Fair Media Watch’s Raina Lipsitz. Young progressives are getting into races across the country, and the old Party “establishment” is recasting their participation as some sort of sinister infiltration. The problem Carville, Axelrod, et al are having is that a new Berkley Institute of Government Studies poll found that Democrats in California back candidates who call themselves progressive fully 60% of the time, and back those who call themselves “democratic socialists” 58% of the time. So-called “mainstream Democrats” are only supported 48% of the time by Democratic voters. And that’s among all ages; when you look at voters under 40 the gap is even wider. Meanwhile in the real world of actual Senate races, Roy Cooper is advertising that he opposed defunding the police, Iowa’s Josh Turek is running an ad boasting that he sided with Republicans more than 700 times, and Mary Peltola is promising Alaskan voters that she’ll take on Democrats too. A party this eager to apologize for existing may want to consider what it’s asking anyone to vote for.
— Judge Emmet Sullivan, forty-one years on the federal bench, has run out of F’s to give about the Justice Department’s ongoing Epstein/Trump child rape coverup. Yesterday, Sullivan gave AG Todd Blanche until next Thursday to explain why his department keeps hiding a trove of foreign-language Epstein documents, along with FBI agents’ interview notes from women accusing Epstein and Trump of rape and sexual abuse. This is the same case — brought by Katie Phang — where the judge issued a preliminary injunction way back in June ordering the DOJ to remove redactions including email exchanges about a torture video and video interviews with a woman who accuses Trump of raping her when she was a minor. Sullivan noted that Blanche has basically admitted he’s covering up for Trump by breaking the law known as the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and at a hearing earlier this month one of his DOJ lawyers refused to commit to any timetable whatsoever for compliance. Sullivan is threatening these attorneys with contempt, but odds are they all figure Trump will pardon them and billionaires will hire them no matter what. The cover-up continues, as the billionaire-owned corporate press yawns…
— Big corporate American employers are advertising jobs that don’t exist just to terrify their employees. It’s psychological warfare against workers, this scam run by major corporations where they spend a few pennies to post job opportunities similar to their own existing workers’ jobs not because they plan to hire people but to intimidate their existing employees into not asking for raises. The job platform Greenhouse found that 18 to 22% of its own postings were never filled by the companies posting them, an analysis of LinkedIn put the U.S. figure at 27.4%, and BLS data showed a shocking 2.2 million advertised openings in a single month that produced not even one single hire. When pressed, nearly one in three employers admitted that they posted roles with no intention of hiring anybody. Welcome to the end point of 45 years of Reaganomics where unions are struggling, workers are under psychological warfare attack, and the middle class continues to be converted into the working poor by the GOP and their corporate buddies.
— Crazy Alert! Rosie O’Donnell closed out her week guest-hosting Kimmel with an extraordinary rendition of “Danny Boy.” Back from her new home of Ireland, where she’s lived since 5 days after Trump’s second inauguration, O’Donnell spent the week refusing to say Trump’s name, instead calling him “Mango Mussolini” and “President Oompa Loompa.” She dedicated her final number Thursday night to Trump with the classic Irish song Donny Boy as the screen behind her showed his polling graphs collapsing, the Reflecting Pool turning green, the ballroom, the Iran war, and measles. She wrapped it up with the chorus, “Come on, resign and make this country great again.” She also thanked Jimmy Kimmel for reminding everyone that free speech still exists here in America, a reminder of how FCC Chairman and Trump lickspittle Brendan Carr tried to take him down and is still harassing Disney/ABC. It was perfect!
Comments on Friday’s Daily Take:
Trump Takes a 58-Year Republican Election Playbook to a Terrifying New Level
I did call my senators office to remind her that there needs to be much more push back to the criminal anti voting the Republicans are pushing. They ( Democrats) need to get really loud and pissed off about what the thugs in the Republican Party are doing. Of course we have no real mainstream media that will publish Democratic push back
~ Patricia Lane
Why aren’t we calling this what it is: a coup? Perhaps if we actually defined it in such a way, we would recognize the need to fight back, fight to save our country from the evil that is destroying it.
~ Marilyn
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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.
I have Rosie's performance saved on my DVR, and will watch it when I need a pick me up.
What worries me about Judge Emmett Sullivan's, case is that Todd Blanche will defy his orders, and there is nothing that Judge Sullivan can do.
Who is going to serve a subpoena on Blanche? Blanche? Who is going to arrest him and try him?
Blanche?
The nation is in the hands of scoff laws, because they control the law and the police powers of the state.. They don't obey the law, but they make us submit at the point of a gun. Ex: Good and Pretti.
“A party this eager to apologize for existing may want to consider what it’s asking anyone to vote for.” That is the question. We can’t leave the Democratic Party to the likes of Carville, Axelrod, or any of the invertebrates whose cautious, moderate, appeasing, “pragmatism” paved the way to today’s fascism. Democracy depends on it.