Tag Archives: Donald Trump

More Trump Dirty Tricks. Please read!

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Donald Trump recently posted deepfakes online that appeared to show pop music superstar Taylor Swift and her fans endorsing him for president.

What are “deepfakes”?

  • Deepfakes are sounds, images, or videos generated using so-called “artificial intelligence” (AI).
  • This is not science fiction or paranoia.
  • Existing AI technology is powerful enough to make deepfakes that are essentially indistinguishable from the real thing.
  • In fact, deepfakes are already being used — nefariously yet effectively — in real-world elections both here in America and elsewhere in the world.

To be clear, Taylor Swift has not endorsed Donald Trump.

And here’s what I told the national media:

“The deepfakes of Taylor Swift are yet another example of AI’s power to create misinformation that deceives and defrauds voters. The potential harms to our society that could result from such misinformation, including abuses of our elections, are wide-reaching and immensely damaging.”

In July of 2023, Public Citizen formally petitioned the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to require that political deepfakes be labeled as such. Frankly, it’s the least that the government agency tasked with safeguarding the integrity of our elections should do.

But — over a year since we asked the FEC to take this obvious step — we’re hearing that the agency may reject our petition and shirk its duty to prevent deepfakes from undermining the 2024 election.

We are running out of time to make our voices heard before the FEC makes a potentially disastrous mistake. Take action right now, even if you’ve taken action before on this critical issue.

To the Federal Election Commission:

The FEC’s core responsibility is to safeguard the integrity of our elections. And one of the most serious threats to our democracy is the emergence of political deepfakes. You can still get this right and require that political deepfakes be labeled as such. Democracy itself is hanging in the balance.

Click to add your name now.

Thanks for taking action.

For democracy,

– Lisa Gilbert, Co-President of Public Citizen

Some Vital Information on Who Best Serves the Everyday American. Read This!!!

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Image by SJ Objio on Unsplash

If you are considering voting for Trump in spite of all of his past illegal actions because he is “such a good businessman,” please read Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters from an American” below and then subscribe to her free newsletter. Subscribe for free to  Heather Cox Richardon’s daily letter here: heathercoxrichardson@substack.com

Two big stories today that together reveal a broader landscape.

The first is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics today released another blockbuster jobs report. The country added 272,000 jobs in May, far higher than the 180,000 jobs economists predicted. A widespread range of sectors added new jobs, including health care, government, leisure and hospitality, and professional, scientific, and technical services. Wages are also up. Over the past year, average hourly earnings have grown 4.1%, higher than the rate of inflation, which was 3.4% over the same period. 

The unemployment rate ticked up from 3.9% to 4%. This is not a significant change, but it does break the 27-month streak of unemployment below that number. 

The second big story is that Justice Clarence Thomas amended a financial filing from 2019, acknowledging that he should have reported two free vacations he accepted from Texas billionaire Harlan Crow. While in the past he said he did not need to disclose such gifts, in today’s filing he claimed he had “inadvertently omitted” the trips on earlier reports. ProPublica broke the story of these and other gifts from Crow, including several more trips than Thomas has so far acknowledged. 

Fix The Court, a nonprofit advocacy group that seeks to reform the federal courts, estimates that Thomas has accepted more than $4 million in gifts over the last 20 years. As economic analyst Steven Rattner pointed out, that’s 5.6 times more than the other 16 justices on the court in those years combined.

These two news items illustrate a larger story about the United States in this moment. 

The Biden administration has quite deliberately overturned the supply-side economics that came into ascendancy in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan took office and that remained dominant until 2021, when Biden entered the White House. Adherents of that ideology rejected the idea that the government should invest in the “demand side” of the economy—workers and other ordinary Americans—to develop the economy, as it had done since 1933. 

Instead, they maintained that the best way to nurture the economy was to support the “supply side”: those at the top. Cutting business regulations and slashing taxes would create prosperity, they said, by concentrating wealth in the hands of individuals who would invest in the economy more efficiently than they could if the government interfered in their choices. That smart investment would dramatically expand the economy, supporters argued, and everyone would do better.

But supply-side economics never produced the results its supporters promised. What it did do was move money out of the hands of ordinary Americans into the hands of the very wealthy. Economists estimate that between 1981 and 2021, more than $50 trillion dollars moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

In order to keep that system in place, Republicans worked to make it extraordinarily difficult for Congress to pass laws making the government do anything, even when the vast majority of Americans wanted it to. With the rise of Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to the position of Senate majority leader in 2007, they weaponized the filibuster so any measure that went against their policies would need 60 votes in order to get through the Senate, and in 2010 they worked to take over state legislatures so that they could gerrymander state congressional districts so severely that Republicans would hold far more seats than they had earned from voters. 

With Congress increasingly neutered, the power to make law shifted to the courts, which Republicans since the Reagan administration had been packing with appointees who adhered to their small-government principles. 

Clarence Thomas was a key vote on the Supreme Court. But as ProPublica reported in December 2023, Thomas complained in 2000 to a Republican member of Congress about the low salaries of Supreme Court justices (equivalent to about $300,000 today) and suggested he might resign. The congressman and his friends were desperate to keep Thomas, with his staunchly Republican vote, on the court. In the years after 2000, friends and acquaintances provided Thomas with a steady stream of gifts that supplemented his income, and he stayed in his seat.

But what amounts to bribes has compromised the court. After the news broke that Thomas has now disclosed some of the trips Crow gave him, conservative lawyer George Conway wrote: “It’s long past time for there to be a comprehensive criminal investigation, and congressional investigation, of Justice Thomas and his finances and his taxes. What he has taken, and what he has failed to disclose, is beyond belief, and has been so for quite some time.” A bit less formally, over a chart of the monetary value of the gifts Thomas has accepted, Conway added: “I mean. This. Is. Just. Nuts.”

As the Republican system comes under increasing scrutiny, Biden’s renewal of traditional economic policies is showing those policies to be more successful than the Republicans’ system ever was. If Americans turn against the Republican formula of slashing taxes and deregulating business, those at the top of the economy stand to lose both wealth and control of the nation’s economic system. 

Trump has promised more tax cuts and deregulation if he is reelected, although the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently projected that his plan to extend the 2017 tax cuts that are set to expire in 2025 will add more than $3 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. In April, at a meeting with 20 oil executives, Trump promised to cut regulations on the fossil fuel industry in exchange for $1 billion in donations, assuring them that the tax breaks he would give them once he was in office would pay for the donation many times over (indeed, an analysis quoted in The Guardian showed his proposed tax cuts would save them $110 billion). On May 23, he joined fossil fuel executives for a fundraiser in Houston.

In the same weeks, Biden’s policies have emphasized using the government to help ordinary people rather than to move wealth upward. 

On May 31 the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced that it will make its experimental free electronic filing system permanent. It asked all 50 states and the District of Columbia to sign on to the program and to help taxpayers use it. The program’s pilot this year was wildly successful, with more than 140,000 people filing that way. Private tax preparers, whose industry makes billions of dollars a year, oppose the new system. 

The Inflation Reduction Act provided funding for this program and for beefing up the ability of the IRS to audit the wealthiest taxpayers. As Fatima Hussein wrote for the Associated Press, Republicans cut $1.4 billion from these funds last summer and will shift an additional $20 billion from the IRS to other programs over the next two years. 

Today the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued five new reports showing that thanks in part to the administration’s outreach efforts about the Affordable Care Act, the rate of Black Americans without health insurance dropped from 20.9% in 2010 to 10.8% in 2022. The same rate among Latinos dropped from 32.7% to 18%. For Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, the rate of uninsured dropped from 16.6% to 6.2%. And for American Indians and Alaska Natives, the rate dropped from 32.4% to 19.9%. More than 45 million people in total are enrolled in coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

President Biden noted the strength of today’s jobs report in a statement, adding: “I will keep fighting to lower costs for families like the ones I grew up with in Scranton.” Republicans “have a different vision,” he said, “one that puts billionaires and special interests first.” He promised: “I will never stop fighting for Scranton—not Park Avenue.”

 

Subscribe for free to  Heather Cox Richardon’s daily letter here: heathercoxrichardson@substack.com

—

Notes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/06/07/may-jobs-unemployment/

https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/jobs-report-may-06-07-24/index.html

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/07/jobs-report-may-2024-us-job-gains-totaled-272000-in-may.html

https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-gift-disclosures-harlan-crow

https://fixthecourt.com/2024/06/a-staggering-tally-supreme-court-justices-accepted-hundreds-of-gifts-worth-millions-of-dollars/

https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-money-complaints-sparked-resignation-fears-scotus

https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/

https://apnews.com/article/treasury-income-taxes-irs-audits-direct-file-04c3b4b55ca0d37b2c40697a392c78aa

https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2024/06/07/biden-harris-administration-releases-data-showing-historic-gains-health-care-coverage-minority-communities.html

https://thehill.com/business/budget/4652668-extending-trumps-tax-cuts-would-cost-us-trillions-of-dollars/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/16/donald-trump-big-oil-executives-alleged-deal-explained

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/22/trump-oil-industry-campaign

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/11/us/politics/trump-biden-affordable-care-act.html

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/06/07/statement-from-president-joe-biden-on-the-may-jobs-report/

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A newsletter about the history behind today’s politics by Heather Cox Richardson Over 1,500,000 subscribers.

One No Trump for dVerse Poets, May 17, 2024

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 One No Trump

I must begin this sad narration

with these words of sad regret

for the state of our lost nation

 that has lost that noble way

carefully  planned in its gestation,

perfect in its founders’ minds,

but somehow skewed in maturation

by takeovers from the Trumpster set

 led by an idiot’s vain oration!

The dVerse Poets Magic 9 prompt today was to write *a poem in 9 lines
*meter and line-length at discretion of poet
*rhyme, a b a c a d a b a, with c and d unrhymed

Go HERE to read other poems that followed the propt.

 

 

Pretty Scary News!!!!

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From Heather Cox Richardson, Apr 30, 2024:

This morning, Time magazine published a cover story by Eric Cortellessa about what Trump is planning for a second term. Based on two interviews with Trump and conversations with more than a dozen of his closest advisors, the story lays out Trump’s conviction that he was “too nice” in his first term and that he would not make such a mistake again.

Cortellessa writes that Trump intends to establish “an imperial presidency that would reshape America and its role in the world.”

He plans to use the military to round up, put in camps, and deport more than 11 million people. He is willing to permit Republican-dominated states to monitor pregnancies and prosecute people who violate abortion bans. He will shape the laws by refusing to release funds appropriated by Congress (as he did in 2019 to try to get Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to smear Hunter Biden). He would like to bring the Department of Justice under his own control, pardoning those convicted of attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and ending the U.S. system of an independent judiciary. In a second Trump presidency, the U.S. might not come to the aid of a European or Asian ally that Trump thinks isn’t paying enough for its own defense. Trump would, Cortelessa wrote, “gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.”

To that list, former political director of the AFL-CIO Michael Podhorzer added on social media that if Trump wins, “he could replace [Supreme Court justices Clarence] Thomas, [Samuel] Alito, and 40+ federal judges over 75 with young zealots.”

“I ask him, Don’t you see why many Americans see such talk of dictatorship as contrary to our most cherished principles?” Cortellessa wrote. No, Trump said. “‘I think a lot of people like it.”

Time included the full transcripts and a piece fact-checking Trump’s assertions. The transcripts reflect the former president’s scattershot language that makes little logical sense but conveys impressions by repeating key phrases and advancing a narrative of grievance. The fact-checking reveals that narrative is based largely on fantasy.

Trump’s own words prove the truth of what careful observers have been saying about his plans based on their examination of MAGA Republicans’ speeches, interviews, Project 2025, and so on, often to find themselves accused of a liberal bias that makes them exaggerate the dangers of a second Trump presidency.

The idea that truthful reporting based on verifiable evidence is a plot by “liberal media” to undermine conservative values had its start in 1951, when William F. Buckley Jr., fresh out of Yale, published God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom.” Fervently opposed to the bipartisan liberal consensus that the federal government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, protect civil rights, and promote infrastructure, Buckley was incensed that voters continued to support such a system. He rejected the “superstition” that fact-based public debate would enable people to choose the best option from a wide range of ideas—a tradition based in the Enlightenment—because such debate had encouraged voters to choose the liberal consensus, which he considered socialism. Instead, he called for universities to exclude “bad” ideas like the Keynesian economics on which the liberal consensus was based, and instead promote Christianity and free enterprise.

Buckley soon began to publish his own magazine, the National Review, in which he promised to tell the “violated businessman’s side of the story,” but it was a confidential memorandum written in 1971 by lawyer Lewis M. Powell Jr. for a friend who chaired the education committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that insisted the media had a liberal bias that must be balanced with a business perspective.

Warning that “the American economic system is under broad attack,” Powell worried not about “the Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system.” They were, he wrote, a small minority. What he worried about were those coming from “perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.”

Businessmen must “confront this problem as a primary responsibility of corporate management,” he wrote, launching a unified effort to defend American enterprise. Among the many plans Powell suggested for defending corporate America was keeping the media “under constant surveillance” to complain about “criticism of the enterprise system” and demand equal time.

President Richard Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court, and when Nixon was forced to resign for his participation in the scheme to cover up the attempt to bug the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel before the 1972 election, he claimed he had to leave not because he had committed a crime, but because the “liberal” media had made it impossible for him to do his job. Six years later, Ronald Reagan, who was an early supporter of Buckley’s National Review, claimed the “liberal media” was biased against him when reporters accurately called out his exaggerations and misinformation during his 1980 campaign.

In 1987, Reagan’s appointees to the Federal Communications Commission abandoned the Fairness Doctrine that required media with a public license to present information honestly and fairly. Within a year, talk radio had gone national, with hosts like Rush Limbaugh electrifying listeners with his attacks on “liberals” and his warning that they were forcing “socialism” on the United States.

By 1996, when Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch started the Fox News Channel (FNC), followers had come to believe that the news that came from a mainstream reporter was likely left-wing propaganda. FNC promised to restore fairness and balance to American political news. At the same time, the complaints of increasingly radicalized Republicans about the “liberal media” pushed mainstream media to wander from fact-based reality to give more and more time to the right-wing narrative. By 2018, “bothsidesing” had entered our vocabulary to mean “the media or public figures giving credence to the other side of a cause, action, or idea to seem fair or only for the sake of argument when the credibility of that side may be unmerited.”

In 2023, FNC had to pay almost $800 million to settle defamation claims made by Dominion Voting Systems after FNC hosts pushed the lie that Dominion machines had changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, and it has since tried to retreat from the more egregious parts of its false narrative.

News broke yesterday that Hunter Biden’s lawyer had threatened to sue FNC for “conspiracy and subsequent actions to defame Mr. Biden and paint him in a false light, the unlicensed commercial exploitation of his image, name, and likeness, and the unlawful publication of hacked intimate images of him.” Today, FNC quietly took down from its streaming service its six-part “mock trial” of Hunter Biden, as well as a video promoting the series.

Also today, Judge Juan Merchan, who is presiding over Trump’s criminal trial for election fraud, found Trump in contempt of court for attacking witnesses and jurors. Merchan also fined Trump $1,000 per offense, required him to take down the nine social media posts at the heart of the decision, and warned him that future violations could bring jail time. This afternoon, Trump’s team deleted the social media posts.

For the first time in history, a former U.S. president has been found in contempt of court. We know who he is, and today, Trump himself validated the truth of what observers who deal in facts have been saying about what a second Trump term would mean for the United States.

Reacting to the Time magazine piece, James Singer, the spokesperson for the Biden-Harris campaign, released a statement saying: “Not since the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today—because of Donald Trump. Trump is willing to throw away the very idea of America to put himself in power…. Trump is a danger to the Constitution and a threat to democracy.”

Tomorrow, May 1, is “Law Day,” established in 1958 by Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as a national recognition of the importance of the rule of law. In proclaiming the holiday today, Biden said: “America can and should be a Nation that defends democracy, protects our rights and freedoms, and pioneers a future of possibilities for all Americans. History and common sense show us that this can only come to pass in a democracy, and we must be its keepers.”

To subscribe to Heather Cox Richardson’s Emails,  visit https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/account

Notes:

https://time.com/6972021/donald-trump-2024-election-interview/

https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/just-security-clearinghouse-manhattan-da-trial-motion-for-contempt-order-april-30-2024.pdf

https://abcnews.go.com/US/live-updates/trump-hush-money-trial/trump-removes-all-9-social-posts-cited-by-judge-109798916?id=109760957

https://time.com/6972022/donald-trump-transcript-2024-election/

https://time.com/6972024/donald-trump-fact-check-2024-election-interview/

https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/assets/usa-courts-secrecy-lobbyist/powell-memo.pdf

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/bothsidesing-bothsidesism-new-words-were-watching

https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-news-quietly-deletes-hunter-biden-mock-trial-special-following-lawsuit-threat

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2024/04/30/a-proclamation-on-law-day-u-s-a-2024/

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Sam’s Scary Post

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Go here to read Sam’s post: https://mcouvillion.wordpress.com/2023/11/08/100-years-ago-today-hitler-made-his-failed-coup/

The Look!!!

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A friend sent me this. Thanks, Joan. Had to share it with you. Spooky!!!!

Joke of the Day

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Sent to me by my sis. Not sure where it came from. If you know, tell me and I’ll credit them.

Reblog of M.Oniker’s “Democracy’s Death Rattle”

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Below is just the heading and opening paragraph of a post by M. Oniker that gives voice to exactly how I and many of my friends have been feeling. She gives a link to an article she is responding to, but if you follow it, please come back to this page and click on the link below it to read the rest of her essay.

Due to trying not to stress out too much, I cannot read a lot of the news in depth any more. I am no longer a news junkie. I read enough to keep aware of what is going on. For the most part, that seems like: Same song, different verse. However, two news themes have been recurring frequently, getting my attention, and they are making me tense up. Those are the crazy book censorship agendas that are spreading with wild-fire speed, not only in schools but in public libraries, and the other is the news that so-and-so is a proclaimed election denier and is running in this or that state’s primary election for some public office, and that so-and-so has won the GOP nomination. This, of course, is in addition to the news from Ukraine, environmental disasters, abortion rights, gun violence, inflation, and Will Smith hitting Chris Rock at the Oscars.

Today The Washington Post smacked me in the face with the headline that “More than 100 GOP primary winners back Trump’s false fraud claims.” . . . .(more) To read the rest of M. Oniker’s post, please click on this link: https://wtfaioa.wordpress.com/2022/06/14/politics-democracys-death-rattle/

Party Talk at Mar-a-Lago

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Party Talk at Mar-a-Lago

It’s a nightmare of prattle disguised as discussion,
but if you ask me, it is merely percussion.
They are not ennobled by the words that they speak
about all the profits and glory they seek.
They can buy costly furnishings but not good taste
with these fortunes collected in greed and great haste.
See their vain postures as they sip and feed?
We can only hope fate makes them pay for their greed.

 

Prompts for the day are: nightmare, prattle, disguised, ennoble and taste.

Tyrant: NaPoWriMo 2021, Day 19: The Rant

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Tyrant

Your arguments are specious, without a gram of proof,
but when we try to point this out, you only seem aloof.
Though you fancy that you’ve sex appeal and charm and woo and sizzle,
your expected rain of compliments turns out to be a drizzle.

That odor you find fragrant with which you mask your stench
would not be necessary if you were just a mensch*,
but the bald reality that you need to face
is that most of your actions are selfish, rude and base.

All your resolutions sworn to in the past
were but fabrications never meant to last.
In short, you are a narcissist thinking of you alone
with a thousand selfish vanities for which you won’t atone.

That’s why, my dear, you sit there in your ivory tower
wondering why your riches, your accomplishments and power
somehow do not satisfy when done for yourself only,
for all your grand accomplishments just leave you feeling lonely.

*mensch: a person of integrity and honor

The NaPoWriMo prompt today is to write a humorous rant. In this poem, you may excoriate to your heart’s content all the things that get on your nerves.
Prompts today are sizzle, fragrant, past, specious and reality.images from Unsplash, used with permission