I Will Stop You

I think Trump has been worried that he might not get the old money Republicans to go along with his hare-brained schemes, so he's emphasizing his intentions to serve the plutocracy by telling us straight out that he's all for shit-canning every progressive policy that's been put in place since FDR.

• Privatize Social Security
• Voucherize Medicare
• Kill Obamacare outright
• Eliminate EPA and OSHA (and the departments of Energy and Education, et al)

In a democracy, even very poor people have power thru the various agencies and regulatory bodies that their votes got politicians to create, and push those politicians to maintain.

In a plutocracy, people who don't have the money don't have the power.

Are They Waking Up?

This popped up on my Twixter feed this morning:

The rhetoric coming from the MAGA leaders is still pretty vehemently about "voter fraud", and wanting to do nothing but paper ballots, and only one day for voting, and hand counting, and announcing the results that evening. Which, of course, when taken together all but guarantees failure - which, of course again, is probably the point. Kill everybody's confidence in the process, and you can do away with all that inconvenient democracy stuff.

Then this was down the page in the replies:

It may not be so much that the rubes are being fooled, though some certainly are. It seems more like a lot of them have become thoroughly conditioned to accept the contradictions - or they're so caught up in the power game that they've decided to take a full part in it, passing the bullshit on to whoever might buy it, and reinforcing their own commitment to it (?)

Like they know what they're being told is bullshit, but they have to internalize it and rationalize it in order to make it through the day without their heads imploding.

It's a puzzlement, and I have to feel some encouragement that Ayn Rand's rule about contradictions is playing itself out.

Contradictions can and do exist, but they don't prevail, because they can't.

Say What Now?

There's a definite probability that Trump is trying to do his usual Pay-For-Play thing, but I think it's at least as likely that Trump turned against it because it signals an effort in Congress to get something done, and Trump's whole schtick is that nobody can do anything without him. ("Only I can fix it")

And of course, there's some probability that Trump is playing monkey in the middle again, setting up the conflict and looking for his profit opportunity, which kinda knits the whole thing together.

Steve Bannon Suggests Donald Trump Has Been Bought

Steve Bannon, the one-time adviser to Donald Trump, suggested on Saturday that the former president was paid off after a shift in stance on TikTok.

TikTok, the immensely popular video-sharing app known for its predominantly young audience, has once again come under scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers. The app is currently owned by Chinese tech company, ByteDance, which has spurred significant suspicion that its abundance of user data is being furnished to the Chinese government.

While ByteDance and TikTok have dismissed these accusations, lawmakers have continued to consider their options. A bipartisan bill put forward by members of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party last week would work to "incentivize divestment of TikTok" by ByteDance by blocking it from appearing in American app stores and granting Executive Branch authority to take similar action in the future against social media companies operated by a "foreign adversary."

Lawmakers on the House Committee on Energy & Commerce advanced the legislation last week in a 50-0 bipartisan vote to the full U.S. House of Representatives. TikTok, meanwhile, characterized the bill as a ban, and urged users to encourage their local representatives to block it.

Despite his past stances in favor of action against TikTok for its Chinese ties, Trump, the leading candidate for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, wrote in a Truth Social post on Thursday that he opposed the recent bill, citing his oft-repeated false claims about widespread voter fraud during the 2020 presidential election.

"If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck [CEO Mark Zuckerberg] will double their business," the former president wrote. "I don't want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!"

In response to this post, reports noted that the seeming shift in stance from Trump came after a meeting with Jeff Yass, a conservative hedge fund manager who has a $33 billion stake in TikTok. Yass, according to Intelligencer, has been allegedly threatening to pull support from GOP lawmakers who back the bipartisan divestment bill.

American Plutocracy 101: The rigging of the system lies in a rich guy exerting influence over policy by waving his checkbook at the decision-makers.

Bannon, who led Trump's successful 2016 presidential campaign and served as a White House adviser for the first several months of Trump's presidency, took to Gettr to make his suspicions about the situation clear.

"Simple: Yass Coin," he wrote in a post that included a link to an Axios story about Trump's flip on TikTok, without providing further evidence. Newsweek has not seen any evidence that Trump's meeting with Yass and his stance on TikTok are connected.

Newsweek reached out to Trump's office via email for comment on Saturday afternoon. Any responses received will be added to this story in a later update.

In August 2020, Trump issued an executive order ordering ByteDance to sell its U.S. assets and destroy all data within 90 days.

"There is credible evidence that leads me to believe that ByteDance Ltd.... through acquiring all interests in musical.​ly...might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States," the order read.

Today's Deep Fake

Today I Learned

1. Elon didn't start Tesla
2. Tesla was saved by a government bailout loan
3. Elon didn't start PayPal
4. Elon has a god complex just like other uber-wealthy assholes

Trump Lies Update

During his 4 years in office,

very credible sources

have estimated that Trump

mis-led

or

dissembled

or

Straight up fucking lied

over 35,000 times

The false claims that Trump keeps repeating

Tracking President Trump's false and misleading claims

The Fact Checker has evaluated false statements President Trump has made repeatedly and analyzed how often he reiterates them. The claims included here – which we're calling "Bottomless Pinocchios" – are limited to ones that he has repeated 20 times and were rated as Three or Four Pinocchios by the Fact Checker.

Daddy State Awareness

THE BASICS:

• The Daddy State lies as a means of demonstrating power.
• The lies have practically nothing to do with the subject of the lies.
• Lying about everything creates chaos, which helps condition us to stop thinking, and look to them for "guidance".
• Once we're totally dependent on them, we'll accept the premise that they can do anything they want.

The goal is to dictate reality to us.

SOTU Update

Katie Britt didn't just fuck up the performance - seems odd that a party so totally committed to performative bullshit would flop like that - anyway, she did what dog-ass Republican fascist-wannabes do practically all day every day: she flat-out lied by spinning a yarn that had no relation to the truth.

Katie Britt’s false linkage of a sex-trafficking case to Joe Biden

“We know that President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days. When I took office, I took a different approach. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas. That’s where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped. The cartels put her on a mattress in a shoe box of a room, and they sent men through that door over and over again for hours and hours on end. We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it. President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”

— Sen. Katie Boyd Britt (R-Ala.), in the Republican response to the State of the Union address, March 7

If you were watching Britt’s speech on Thursday night, you likely would have thought she was talking about a recent victim of sex trafficking who was abused in the United States and suffered because of President Biden’s policies.

If you did, you would have been wrong. Sean Ross, Britt’s communications director, confirmed that she was talking about Karla Jacinto Romero — who has testified before Congress about being forced to work in Mexican brothels from 2004 to 2008. (A viral TikTok by journalist Jonathan Katz first revealed that Britt was speaking about Romero.) In a phone conversation and a statement, Ross disputed that Britt’s language was misleading.

We disagree. Let’s take a look.

The Facts

Britt’s account of Romero’s experience was a centerpiece of her rebuttal to Biden’s address. The way Britt sets up the story, there is no indication that she is talking about a woman who was working in brothels in Mexico during the George W. Bush administration. This is how the passage unfolds.

• She first blames Biden for the surge of migrants at the border.
• Then she says she visited the border shortly after she took office. That would be 2023.
• At length, she details the story of an unnamed victim that she says she met on her trip. The implication is that the woman recently crossed the border — because of “sex trafficking by the cartels.”
• She strongly suggests that her abuse took place in the United States: “We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it.”
• She ends by reinforcing that such alleged trafficking is Biden’s fault: “President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”

But Biden has nothing to do with Romero’s story. As she testified nine years ago, her mother threw her out of her house at age 12 and she “fell prey to a professional pimp.” She says she then spent the next four years in brothels before a regular client helped her escape when she was 16 years old. There is no indication in her story that drug cartels were involved, though Britt said that in the State of the Union response and has made a similar claim on at least one other occasion. Romero was never trafficked to the United States; instead, she says many men who paid to have sex with her were “foreigners visiting my city looking to have sexual interactions with minors like me.”

In a YouTube video, Britt features images of her hugging Romero during her 2023 trip to the border. “If we as leaders of the greatest nation in the world are not fighting to protect the most vulnerable, we are not doing our job,” she said in the video. The implication again is that this happened on Biden’s watch.

When Donald Trump was president, he regularly decried human trafficking that he claimed was happening at the border, including that “thousands of young girls and women” were being smuggled across the border for prostitution. In 2019, we investigated that claim and found no evidence to support it. Most human trafficking prosecutions generally involve legal border crossings, visa fraud and travel into the United States on airplanes. Victim organizations say there are relatively few cases that involve forced kidnapping across the border. This might be one reason Britt regularly cites a case that happened long ago and did not involve crossing the border.

Ross, Britt’s spokesman, said that Romero’s story was indicative of trafficking that is now happening at the border and that should be clear from Britt’s framing in the speech.

He said the reference to a “Third World country” was generic and was not intended to refer to Mexico, which he said is not a Third World country. Third World is a dated Cold War-era term previously used to refer to poor or developing countries. Global South, indicating low income and high poverty, is a more common expression today. Mexico is considered part of the Global South, though it is also a member of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

In a written statement, Ross said:

“The story Senator Britt told was 100% correct. And there are more innocent victims of that kind of disgusting, brutal trafficking by the cartels than ever before right now. The Biden administration’s policies — the policies in this country that the President falsely claims are humane — have empowered the cartels and acted as a magnet to a historic level of migrants making the dangerous journey to our border. Along that journey, children, women, and men are being subjected to gut-wrenching, heartbreaking horrors in our own backyard. And here at home, the Biden administration’s policies are leading to more and more suffering, including Americans being poisoned by fentanyl and being murdered. These human costs are real, and it’s past time for some on the left to stop pretending otherwise.”

The Pinocchio Test

In a high-profile speech like this, a politician should not mislead voters with emotionally charged language. Romero’s story is tragic and may be evocative of other Mexican girls trapped in the sex trade in that country. But she was not trafficked across the border — and her story has nothing to do with Biden. Britt’s failure to make that clear earns her Four Pinocchios.

Four Pinocchios

Today's Brando

"... they know what's gonna bring everybody to the wrestling matches ..." Brando has touched on that a few times before, and it's worth repeating:

• Trump is a shiny veneer over nothing
• He's all sizzle and no steak
• Style over substance.

He established that on his first day in 2017 during a phone call with Mexico's president Nieto. Basically: "We don't really have to do anything - you talk shit about me and I talk shit about you, and the rubes will focus on that while we pick their pockets." He repeats that scam every chance he gets, and like Brando's said, he knows the Press Poodles will be happy to help him out by reporting on exactly the wrong thing.

There's a lot more than that in this excellent piece. Brando brings it.

Vertical Deceleration Injuries

Was George Carlin a prophet or what?

SOTU

Highlites

Oh my god Katie Britt actually wore the Serena Joy outfit for her State of the Handmaid’s Tale. I’m dying. pic.twitter.com/hGJ8GGUopF

— Chad Chavez (ChadC.bsky.social) (@ChadAChavez) March 8, 2024

Some of the Press Poodles got it about right:

Then there's NYT:

And never mind that the lede paragraph

began with "Biden did great, and then

the GOP sent out this fuckin' loon."

(I may have paraphrased a little)

I encourage everyone to watch this, but you're going to need a stiff drink and a subdued gag reflex.

All it needs is the Sarah McGlachlan music in the background.