Who needs Colbert?

Taylor Swift inspires new MAGA fever dream

Steve Bannon’s latest theory on Taylor Swift is the craziest conspiracy yet

By Walter Einenkel for Daily Kos

Former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon has a new addition for the right-wing conspiracy theory world. During an interview with former Breitbart editor Raheem Kassam on “Bannon’s War Room podcast,” the two men talked about the obstacles facing Trump this election season, including the psychological operator Taylor Swift.

If you don’t know, according to conspiracists, Taylor Swift is not-so-secretly being used by deep-state forces hellbent on reelecting President Joe Biden. Bannon plussed-up the conspiracy theory by implying that Swift’s successful tour’s dates were not coincidental. Cue dramatic sting!d More

BANNON: 

This is the Taylor Swift situation. I don't believe in coincidences. Her tour, which is the biggest tour, I think, in music history, stops on 20 August and doesn't pick back up until mid-November, early to mid-November. To be fully available after Labor Day to do whatever. And she's pretty adamant. 

She got involved in the ‘22 midterms, and Taylor Swift, with TikTok in back, is a formidable presence. And anybody that doesn't believe that, I don't think is looking at the demographic and the power she has with that demographic.

Nihilism, Fascism, and the Failed United States Donald Trump Delivered

And the very worst may still be yet to come.

REBECCA GORDON in theTomDispatch

Sometimes the right wing in this country seems like a riddle wrapped in an enigma encased in a conundrum.

Do they want to strengthen the government in line with the once-fringe doctrine of the “unitary executive,” concentrating most official power in the hands of a president who would then rule more or less by fiat? That’s the fascist position.

Or would they prefer to destroy the government, to “starve the beast,” something anti-tax activist Grover Norquist used to call for decades ago? “I don’t want to abolish government,” he declared. “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” That’s the anti-government nihilist position.

You might not think that those two goals could coexist comfortably within a single party. And of course, you’d be right if you were talking about an ordinary American political party. But the Republicans are no longer an ordinary party. 

In many respects, in fact, they have become the however-fractious sole property of one Donald J. Trump. That former and quite possibly (God forbid) future president has no trouble simultaneously advocating contradictory, not to mention devastating, ideas. 

That’s because, for him, ideas are an entirely fungible currency that he deploys primarily to maintain the attention and adulation of his — and it is increasingly his alone — GOP “base.” And precisely because Trump has so little invested in actual policy, the right wing believes he’s a weapon they can point and shoot in whatever direction they choose.

Final House Covid Panel Report Exposes 'Reckless' Trump Pandemic Response

Report details Trump's political interference and "Failed stewardship in the fight against COVID

BRETT WILKINS for Common Dreams

And they're still dying.

A congressional panel on Friday published its final report on the Covid-19 pandemic, highlighting the Trump administration's "failed stewardship" and detailing how a "persistent pattern of political interference undermined the nation's ability to respond" to a crisis that has claimed more than a million lives in the United States.

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis report notes that "the United States was underprepared for a major public health crisis for years before the coronavirus pandemic," and that "chronic underfunding and long-standing health disparities put many Americans at heightened risk of becoming infected and developing severe illness as a result of the coronavirus."

"The Trump administration's reckless pandemic response resulted in devastating and lasting harm," the Democrat-controlled subcommittee contended. "The toll of the coronavirus fell hardest on those who were already most vulnerable. Communities of color suffered disproportionally high rates of coronavirus infection, hospitalization, and death. Nursing home residents suffered high levels of infections and deaths, exacerbated by understaffing and meager wages and benefits for their workers."

Nothing but contempt

By Michael deAdder

 

The Democrats' Secret Sauce for Winning the Midterms

It could counter Biden's rock-bottom ratings. 

ROBERT REICH for robertreich.substack.com

The beginning of May before midterm elections marks the start of primary season and six months of fall campaigning. The conventional view this year is Democrats will be clobbered in November. Why? Because midterms are usually referendums on a president's performance, and Biden's approval ratings are in the cellar.

But the conventional view could be wrong because it doesn't account for the Democrats' secret sauce, which gives them a fighting chance of keeping one or both chambers: Trump Sauce.

According to recent polls, Trump's popularity continues to sink. He is liked by only 38 percent of Americans and disliked by 46 percent. (12 percent are neutral.) And this isn't your normal "sort of like, sort of dislike" polling. 

Pop quiz

For more cartoons by Jen Sorenson, CLICK HERE.

 

Come visit the White House-in-exile

For more cartoons by Ruben Bolling, CLICK HERE.

 

Former top Trump advisor Steve Bannon calls for the beheading of Dr. Fauci and FBI Director Wray

"I'd Put the Heads on Pikes"
By Jake Johnson, staff writer for Common Dreams

By Jack Ohman, The Sacramento Bee

In the middle of a tense election battle in which fears of right-wing militia violence are already running high, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon took the incendiary rhetoric to a dangerous new level Thursday by suggesting that Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray should be beheaded as a "warning to federal bureaucrats."

During an episode of Bannon's online show "War Room: Pandemic" that was shared widely on social media, the far-right provocateur said Trump should fire both Fauci and Wray if he secures a second term in the White House.

"Now I actually want to go a step farther but I realize the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man," said Bannon, who is out on bail after being arrested in August for his role in a fraud and money laundering scheme. 

"I'd actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I'd put the heads on pikes, right, I'd put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you're gone—time to stop playing games."

Jack Maxey, Bannon's co-host, followed the former Trump adviser's comments by noting that "just yesterday, there was the anniversary of the hanging of two Tories in Philadelphia, these were Quaker businessmen who had cohabitated, if you will, with the British while they were occupying Philadelphia."

"That's how you won the revolution," Bannon responded. "No one wants to talk about it. The revolution wasn't some sort of garden party, right? It was a civil war. It was a civil war."

Life in the stupidverse

For more cartoons by Tom Tomorrow, CLICK HERE.

 

Can't happen here

By Jen Sorensen

 

"We Build the Wall" wall is falling down

New Engineering Report Finds Privately Built Border Wall Will Fail

By Jeremy Schwartz and Perla Trevizo, Texas Tribune and  ProPublica 

Texas Tribune Photo

It’s not a matter of if a privately built border fence along the shores of the Rio Grande will fail, it’s a matter of when, according to a new engineering report on the troubled project.

The report is one of two new studies set to be filed in federal court this week that found numerous deficiencies in the 3-mile border fence, built this year by North Dakota-based Fisher Sand and Gravel. 

The reports confirm earlier reporting from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, which found that segments of the structure were in danger of overturning due to extensive erosion if not fixed and properly maintained. Fisher dismissed the concerns as normal post-construction issues.

Donations that paid for part of the border fence are at the heart of an indictment against members of the We Build the Wall nonprofit, which raised more than $25 million to help President Donald Trump build a border wall.

Former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon, We Build the Wall founder Brian Kolfage and two others connected to the organization are accused of siphoning donor money to pay off personal debt and fund lavish lifestyles. All four, who face up to 20 years in prison on each of the two counts they face, have pleaded not guilty, and Bannon has called the charges a plot to stop border wall construction.

We Build the Wall, whose executive board is made up of influential immigration hard-liners like Bannon, Kris Kobach and Tom Tancredo, contributed $1.5 million of the cost of the $42 million private border fence project south of Mission, Texas.

Last year, the nonprofit also hired Fisher to build a half-mile fence segment in Sunland Park, New Mexico, outside El Paso.

Company president Tommy Fisher, a frequent guest on Fox News, had called the Rio Grande fence the “Lamborghini” of border walls and bragged that his company’s methods could help Trump reach his Election Day goal of about 500 new miles of barriers along the southern border.

Instead, one engineer who reviewed the two reports on behalf of ProPublica and The Texas Tribune likened Fisher’s fence to a used Toyota Yaris.

Breaking the news

https://www.dailykos.com/user/Tom%20Tomorrow

Look who's on the board of Steve Bannon's fraudulent "We Build the Wall" group

Trump’s former nationalist guru arrested for fraud on border wall project

Bannon’s Arrest Has Trump Quaking In His Golf Shoes

By David Cay Johnston, DCReport Editor-in-Chief

Thursday’s arrest of Steve Bannon, the last manager of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, carries powerful messages that strike fear in The Donald. 

The arrest of Bannon and three others on fraud charges grows from a pair of 2019 DCReport articles by Grant Stern.

If federal prosecutors can flip Bannon, a 66-year-old man ill-suited by health or personality to prison life, it would be devastating for Trump. Although the president enjoys immunity from federal indictment, that privilege ends the moment his presidency does.

Subpoenaed records are virtually certain to result in the indictment of Trump.

The Bannon arrest also helps explain why Trump tried, and failed, to install his own man in the federal prosecutor’s office in Manhattan: Bannon’s fraud case involving a $25 million charity scam to build a wall on the Mexican border.

That case is only one of the criminal cases threatening Trump personally that Southern District of New York prosecutors are pursuing. Any one of them could, as early as Jan. 21, result in Trump’s indictment.

Adding to Trump’s very bad morning, Federal District Court Judge Victor Marrero ruled Thursday that Trump’s business and personal tax records since 2011 must be turned over to a state grand jury in Manhattan. Trump has no immunity from state criminal prosecution. His federal pardon power would not protect him from state criminal prosecution.

Betraying the ones who love him

How Trump Has Betrayed the Working Class

By Robert Reich

For a century the GOP has been bankrolled by big business and Wall Street. Trump wants to keep the money rolling in. 

His signature tax cut, two years old last Sunday, has helped U.S. corporations score record profits and the stock market reach all-time highs. 


To spur even more corporate generosity for the 2020 election, Trump is suggesting more giveaways. Chief of staff Mick Mulvaney recently told an assemblage of CEOs that Trump wants to “go beyond” his 2017 tax cut.

Trump also wants to expand his working-class base. In rallies and countless tweets he claims to be restoring the American working class by holding back immigration and trade. Incumbent Republicans and GOP candidates are mimicking Trump’s economic nationalism. 

As Trump consigliore Stephen Bannon boasted recently, “we’ve turned the Republican party into a working-class party.”

Staff evaluations of the "stable genius"

A tale of two foundations

Guess which one was corrupt to the core and which one genuinely helps save lives

By Joe Conason / AlterNet

Nobody ought to be surprised to hear of the belated demise of the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a racketeering enterprise under investigation by the state authorities in New York for the past two years. 

Barbara Underwood, the state attorney general, announced that the foundation will dissolve and its assets distributed to bona fide charitable groups. 

She seeks to prohibit its overseers, President Trump and his adult children, from serving on the board of any nonprofit in New York for the foreseeable future.
       

Raking through the foundation's records since 2016, Underwood found what she described as "a shocking pattern of illegality," which included not only various self-serving schemes to bolster Trump businesses and stroke Trump's ego but also multiple (and unlawful) expenditures to advance his presidential campaign. 

The largest donation went to restore a fountain outside the Plaza Hotel in New York when Trump owned it. 

The smallest went to the Boy Scouts and appeared to be Donald Trump Jr.'s enrollment fee.
       

Blockchain has a far-right past.

Does it have a future in Rhode Island?

By Will Weatherly in Rhode Island’s Future

Here is a list of some of the figures who have shown interest in bitcoin cryptocurrency and its associated “blockchain” technology: white nationalist Richard Spencer, who called bitcoin “the currency of the alt right.” 

Former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon, who has had private meetings with cryptocurrency investors. Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder and libertarian venture capitalist who quietly advised the Trump administration for months. 

And in Germany, the rising far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), who had its co-leader speak at a cyptocurrency conference as a ““economist and bitcoin entrepreneur.”

And now? Governor Gina Raimondo and Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello, who both spoke at the first Rhode Island Blockchain Summit at the Omni Hotel in Providence on Thursday, an event the former Trump press secretary (of 10 days) Anthony Scaramucci was rumored to attend.

It would be a grave mistake to overgeneralize, or to argue that sharing a curiosity for cryptocurrency at all entails a substantial agreement between Rhode Island leaders and these crypto-stakeholders’ far-right stances. There are now 1,952 cryptocurrencies in existence, making the technology a particularly wide tent. 

Republican candidate for governor and former state senator Giovanni Feroce has made blockchain a pillar of his campaign, calling for voters to make him the “blockchain governor” and proposing the technology be incorporated “directly into the government’s own administrative infrastructure.” 

They had to drive a stake through his heart

Trump's Mad Monk departs

By Peter Dykstra for the Environmental Health News

For more cartoons by Mike Luckovich, CLICK HERE

Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was a larger-than-life figure from a century ago – a mystic self-appointed cleric who was sort of Steve Bannon to Tsar Nicholas in the last days of Imperial Russia.

A big part of Rasputin's legend was his apparent immunity to assassination. 

The Bannon analogy fails because Bannon was swiftly run out of office by President Trump.

By contrast, Scott Pruitt defied a months-long death watch before finally succumbing Thursday beneath a deluge of petty scandals.

While folklore may have enhanced Rasputin's durability, he is said to have survived a serious stabbing in 1914, then, in 1916, a sort of trifecta of murder efforts – a poisoning, more poisoning, then three gunshots – the last one right between the eyes.

Pruitt survived multiple scandals, any one of which would have felled other cabinet members.