It was reported that a handful of Democrats sided with Republicans in the House of Representatives to censure 77-year-old Rep. Al Green and his walking cane for protesting the $880 billion in proposed cuts for Medicaid. House Republicans claim that Medicaid is not mentioned "specifically" in their current spending bill, but the CBO points out that such cuts are the only way to pay for the extension of tax cuts for billionaires.
Green was ejected during Trump’s lie-laden speech before Congress the other day, and Democrats once more proved they are as spineless as they are without a “message.” They could have sent a message that they totally opposed Trump’s anti-people, anti-worker and anti-free speech agenda by simply walking out of the chamber en masse along with Green, and pointing out the hypocrisy of no action taken against these two during a Joe Biden State of the Union address…
…and the hypocrisy of the so-called "freedom of speech" agenda of FCC chairman and Project 2025 co-author Brendan Carr. But they did not, just sitting there nice and quiet, only allowing some members to hold up ridiculous little signs. The “response” provided afterward by Elissa Slotkin again proved that Democrats have this weird idea that appearing to be “sensible” and not fighters for the working class and the Constitution actually “works.”
News organizations other than Fox News had a field day fact-checking Trump’s plainly super-hyper-partisan commentary that proves nothing save he is man with bull-shit grievances as far as they eye can see. He is simply a man with severe psychological handicaps, such as avoidant personality disorder, described here 1 as “a mental health condition that is characterized by avoiding social situations or interactions that involve risk of rejection, criticism, or humiliation,” but mainly the more mundane, like psychopath (a person who lacks empathy, remorse, inhibitions, has an inclination to violence, is manipulative, impulsive and yet has a veneer of “normalcy” which fools many people), as well as a narcissist, racist and an inhuman beast.
It is being reported that Trump intends to revoke humanitarian parole for 240,000 refugees from seven countries, including Ukraine, Afghanistan and Cuba. Puppy-killer Kristi Noem is being seen on a "public service" commercial offering immigrants a "deal" if they "cooperate" with ICE and save DHS some money if they leave the country "voluntarily," that they have a "chance" to return to the country "legally."
But here 2 the Cato Institute notes how today it is almost impossible to immigrate to this country “legally," especially if you are from what Trump and Stephen Miller call "shit-hole" countries. Of course there are "exceptions"; the only way to “legally” immigrate to this country these days (if you are not a millionaire or billionaire) is if you are from, say, India, and there is a company (say Google, Amazon, Microsoft) that has Indian managers who claim they can’t find “qualified” American citizens, and abuse the H-1B visa program. But can you blame them if they don’t want to live in a literal “shit-hole” country, which is no "joke":
People can and do lie or accept being lied to even when the truth is the only thing left in the room. They do it every day; hell, lies are like garbage—they come by the truckload and nothing can stop it from polluting the world. People know something is wrong with the U.S. Postal Service, for example, and it is only getting worse:
People lie to themselves when faced with the truth even when people have long since stopped listening to them. I happened to come across a relatively recent complete “live stream” YouTube video apparently made by diehard Amber Heard shills providing their self-serving “interpretation” of the Virginia trial in which Heard was found guilty of defaming Johnny Depp.
Apparently there are still people who didn't see what an unnamed juror who spoke to ABC News said he and his fellow jurors saw: that Heard was clearly lying throughout the trial, and they were particularly put-off by her terrible acting "skills" and “crocodile tears” that were obviously put on for show, especially in light of her demeanor during cross examination that revealed someone who they could readily believe was an evil personality in private.
The mainstream media, of course, supported Heard and only reported her version of events. Thus it isn’t surprising that according to Google AI, falsehoods and Heard’s lies on the stand is still being reported as “fact”:
Not mentioned here is that the jury found Heard liable for $10 million in damages (not including punitive damages), which was reduced in their "settlement" to $1 million; Heard received nothing from Depp in the "settlement." But the big "lie" is that $7 million being "all" donated to "charity."
Google AI doesn't take into account social media, which is where people were actually reporting the truth in real time. Here we see Heard lying about those donations to make herself “look good,” and then we hear an ACLU representative admit that Heard was lying:
Here we found through persistence it took a half-hour to unravel Heard’s pathological lying, but in the end we finally hear her admit that what she claimed she did was a lie, and then she tried to follow it up with another lie—implying that she had to pay her legal expenses with those “donations,” and not in fact by millions in insurance funds provided by Travelers and New York Marine, the latter which tried to back out of paying Heard because of her deceptions:
Yet people still believe the lie. People point to the UK trial, which was decided by a judge and not by a jury. Not only does the UK judge’s ruling reveal that he deliberately dismissed evidence of Heard’s lies and any testimony against her as “biased,” but here we see in this graphic this corrupt judge's connections to “interested parties” supporting Heard and The Sun, who his own son was employed by:
And for those who still insist that Heard didn’t “lie” about the “injuries” she claimed that endured at Depp’s hands, I discuss my theories about why the Virginia jury cast doubt on their truthfulness here 1 . Here 3 I transcribed a podcast interview with actor Steven Crowley who knew Heard before she became involved with Depp, in which he talked about her drug abuse and abusive relationship with Tasya van Ree (the victim in the case that Heard was arrested for at SeaTac Airport in the commission of domestic violence) the description of which as told to him by Heard sounded like she was simply repeating the same stories in regard to Depp.
It is interesting to note while listening to those audio tapes that Depp has a much different personality than another one of the bi-sexual Heard’s former “boyfriends,” who she apparently uses as much as she uses and then discards her female “friends” when she doesn’t need them anymore—Elon Musk. Depp has a low-key personality, and we hear Heard constantly berating or demeaning him to get some kind of “reaction” out of him; that was much different than with Musk, who we learn in that recent biography that he and Heard got into frequent shouting matches, apparently instigated by Heard when she was done using him for his money and wanted to make it appear that he was at “fault” for their “break-up.”
Not that I feel “sorry” for Musk, of course; but it might help explain the personality defects he exhibits today. Maybe he should be paying more attention to his own "business" with respect to the latest SpaceX explosion and find out why those "smart" people can't get it right.
By the way, we are learning that Heard is “pregnant” with her second child. Well, actually not “pregnant,” but from another surrogate mother. Heard hasn’t actually “worked” since her last low-budget project was filmed in 2021, for which she was paid $50,000 (don’t feel sorry for her; the film, In the Fire, grossed less than half that amount, according to Wiki).
So where is she getting the money to play both "mommy" and "daddy" in Spain? Well, it could be money stolen from Depp and weaseled away in a secret bank account (Depp sued his money manager when it couldn't be "explained" to him what happened to all his money during his brief marriage to Heard). Or it could be from an unnamed “sugar daddy" paying child support? We do know that while they were together, she and Musk combined their eggs and sperm for embryos kept in storage, although after their break-up Musk tried to get them destroyed. But the truth is if it looks like a rat and smells like a rat, it probably is one.
We didn’t always live in a world where lies and self-deception was “normalized.” When I was attending a Catholic school in Wisconsin, I recall that students in the higher grades were invited to cast their own vote for president in the 1972 election between Richard Nixon and George McGovern. I didn’t know any teacher who expressed any support for “Tricky Dicky”—quite the contrary—and so it came as a “surprise” when the final vote was announced over the intercom, it came out 36 to 33 in favor of Nixon, which seemed to be a huge disappointment to the teachers who thought their opinions mattered.
But one suspected that the students were only following their parents views, since other than McGovern winning Massachusetts, Wisconsin was one of 6 states that McGovern “only” lost by less than 10 percentage points, and the school "vote" more or less reflected that.
The thing about Nixon’s landslide victory was how quickly it all unraveled. Shouldn’t we have known that the Watergate break-in was much “bigger” than people suspected, or did they allow themselves to be misled? And would it have made a difference in the election if voters had known the truth, instead of the lies that Nixon himself was the orchestrator of? “I’m not a crook” he famously said--and people might have remembered the "Checkers" speech, which he defended taking bribes and kickbacks by talking about a "gifted" dog his kids loved.
But as we found out, illegal activities and “break-ins” had been going on long before Watergate, under the direction of Nixon-linked stooges (and presumably Nixon himself) such as “The Plumbers” and the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP)—the latter of which, coordinated by G. Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt, planned the Watergate break-in of the Democratic Party headquarters, in which a CREEP operative, James McCord, and four ex-CIA agents participated in, in order to steal top secret documents and bug phones.
So why didn’t it affect the election? After all, the Washington Post reported two months before the election that the former Attorney General and then Nixon campaign manager, John Mitchell, coordinated a secret Republican campaign slush fund to finance the break-in; it was never revealed who supplied that “secret” funding. The Watergate burglars were indicted that September, as well as Hunt and Liddy; most would plead “guilty” and say nothing.
McCord chose to stand trial and was convicted. Facing a long jail sentence, he wrote a letter to Judge John Sirica, in which he implied direct White House involvement in the break-in, although only after the election. It also wasn’t until well after the election came the Bernstein and Woodward stories based on the revelations of “Deep Throat,” the Senate investigation in which relied almost solely on the testimony of John Dean early on, and much later the revelation that there were Oval Office tapes of all of Nixon’s conversations there.
But in the meantime the administration declared the break-in a “third-rate” operation that it had no connection to, and the media mostly bought it. The mainstream media mostly ignored it in the beginning, focusing its criticism on McGovern, a “radical” lefty running a “disorganized” campaign, while the Nixon campaign was praised for being “poised,” apparently unaware that behind the scenes there was chaos, as desperate measures were being taken to cover-up White House involvement.
That is if anyone was “interested” in the truth. Nixon himself believed the story would be “forgotten,” despite efforts by Dean to convince him that a “cancer” was infecting the White House and that those involved were becoming more interested in saving themselves than the president. As Tom van der Voort wrote for the Miller Center of Public Affairs wrote:
As the Watergate Committee prepared to begin its work, Nixon tried once more to contain the situation. In a nationally televised address on April 30, he presented himself as completely innocent, blaming his aides for keeping him in the dark and telling the nation that Dean, Haldeman, Erlichman, and Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, a longtime friend, had resigned. And he vowed to take charge of the investigation in a quest to discover the truth. In short, Nixon looked directly at the American people and lied. For all those protecting Nixon, the message could not have been clearer: you may have to be sacrificed.
For a time it was Nixon’s “word” against everyone else’s. Few in the public could believe a president could be that personally corrupt. It wouldn’t be until the uncovering of the “smoking gun” tape that the leaking dam could no longer hold back the truth, that Nixon was a liar and that he had orchestrated the cover-up from the start. Nixon's chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, would be heard on that “smoking gun” tape recorded in June, 1972 suggesting to Nixon that the CIA could tell the FBI to block the investigation of the break-in, which Nixon agreed to.
It was during this time that there was a conversation in which 18 minutes would later be erased; I recall Nixon’s secretary demonstrating how she “accidentally” erased the taped audio with her toe on the tape machine located beneath her desk as she reached over for the phone:
What was on the tape was subject to much speculation, but there was little doubt of its “damning” implications. When far-right Senator Barry Goldwater visited Nixon to tell him personally there were no longer the votes to prevent a guilty verdict in the Senate, Nixon decided to resign.
But that was 50 years ago. Donald Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts in one trial, was impeached twice, including for inciting an insurrection to overthrow an election, and people “accept” the fact that he lies and exaggerates every time he opens his mouth for reasons of pure vindictiveness, that he is causing great harm to this country.
Yet here we are. Outside a few news outlets like MSNBC (we’ll see how long that lasts) and social media, the fact that Trump has thrown the world into chaos not because he has a “plan,” but because only one person exists in his universe, and that is himself. Everyone one else, even his own family, only have meaning as a "reflection" on himself and his megalomania. He destroys for the sake of destroying; even Republicans are stupefied why he wants to end the successful CHIPS program. But it isn't that "hard" to understand--he needs to be the "top dog," and anything his predecessors did that he doesn't have the character to equal, must be destroyed.
Another thing
that is different than even as late as 2008 former Sen. John Edwards quit the
Democratic presidential race with the discovery that he had an extramarital affair. It
seems that Democrats are more susceptible to punishment than Republicans for
moral and ethical deficiencies. Republicans claim to be “Christians,” yet they only "respect" the Ten Commandments on paper; they don't expect their presidential candidates to follow "the word." There are more "important" things to do, and besides, Mike Johnson will do their "praying" for them.
Hypocrisy is rampant in both the Republican party and its “base,” but who “cares” in this day and age? Trump has no fear of people turning on him as long as he is president. They will continue to lie for him and do his dirty work because they know he has their “back,” and any crime they commit will be “forgiven” by presidential pardon. They know that, so there is no ethical or moral boundaries they need to concern themselves with, nor should his stooges need be concerned with unlawful or unconstitutional actions because Der Fuhrer’s “word” is the “law.”
No one really knows the end result if the far-right extremist organizations like the Heritage Foundation (via Project 2025) and the Federalist Society (handpicking judges) taking full control of the country with Trump and Musk themselves as merely being their fronts, but that is how this country operates: it sits and watches, and is reactive rather than proactive in the face of dangers to every conceivable problem--even those which are product of deliberate action as we are seeing. Today, the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans are full-speed ahead creating chaos without taking a moment to examine the effects of what they are doing. And they lie, lie, lie and tell more lies to justify what they are doing.
They lie so much that their own constituencies are demanding they explain themselves at town hall meetings, which when they cannot do so, simply walk out. Republican lawmakers are being told to refrain from communicating directly with their own constituents because they cannot expect everyone to believe their lies, especially when they cannot back them up with anything that be interpreted as “believable.”
People say they want “change,” but the razor-thin margins in Congress and Trump barely winning the popular vote against a candidate that many Democrats felt was not their “choice” is not a mandate for the kind of “change” people are seeing, but what a far-right fringe being given their one golden opportunity to destroy democracy and human rights as we know it wants. What they are doing is short-sighted, of course: a “progressive” Democrat in the White House with the same unfettered executive power can completely unravel their “changes.”
To repeat what the anti-Nazi theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, in a political environment where lies pass for “truth,” we are in a phase today where facts fall on “deaf ears”:
Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.
Constitutional government was established in this country in 1789, and since then it has made slight, but necessary, evolvements to insure that this country remained a government by the people and for the people, and not by kings, dictators or oligarchs. The intent of Project 2025 is to turn this country into a dictatorship, and as we have seen in “red” states that voted for Democratic governors, Republican in state houses have passed laws to weaken their power and keep power in the hands of the far-right.
But how can you fight against this if “the people” vote in ways that are blind, deaf and dumb? Trump, with the bootlicking support of Republicans in Congress, want to destroy the very foundations of government for the people, and "building" in its place a Potemkin facade that when the people come calling, they find that there is nothing there. Are we going to have to wait foe people to open their eyes as the country must go through another “New Deal” if the actions of Trump and his stooges sends the country into a spiral of destruction?
