Trump's legacy: Sabotaged federal functions & starving the beast

WHY ARE YOU FUNDING THE ENEMY? -- “Woke” companies across our country have been using the profits from our purchases to fund their own agendas — many of which destroy American freedoms, opportunities, and rights. This MUST change. -- STB (Starve the Beast) (Clearly, these fine folks want you to buy from un-woke companies)

One of the ex-president's major legacies is a more effectively sabotaged federal government. Of course, he alone does not get all the credit for damaging the federal government. The Republican Party has been actively attacking and sabotaging the federal government since before Reagan said in the 1980s that government is the problem, not a solution.

But the ex-president brought the toxic power of that government-hating dogma to new and more lethal levels. The rot that T****, his rotten administration and the Republican Party left behind and still defends to this day does not just include the sabotaged withdrawal from Afghanistan and the human lives it cost. It is spread all over the federal government. The neo-fascist Republican deep state is alive and thriving in the big crevices that Democratic Party incompetence leaves in its wake.

This one is about the Secret Service, which has had occasional problems for years. The Washington Post writes:

Secret Service leaders are downplaying any risk to national security after four of its employees — including an agent assigned to protect first lady Jill Biden — were allegedly hoodwinked by two men impersonating federal agents and plying them with gifts, telling congressional committees and allies that the severity of the breach has been overblown by prosecutors and the media, according to people familiar with the conversations.

But several former Secret Service officials warn that the alleged infiltration of the elite protection agency reveals a major vulnerability extending well beyond this particular case. They said the revelations suggest that agents who had regular access to the White House and the Biden family — and who are supposed to be trained to spot scammers or spies seeking to ingratiate themselves — were either too greedy or gullible to question a dubious cover story.

“If you can compromise Secret Service personnel by cozying up to their agents and their uniformed officers, unwelcome sources can get to the president and the first family,” said Jim Helminski, a retired agency executive and former leader of Joe Biden’s vice-presidential detail.

The Republican Party (RP) wants government to fail so it can be eliminated as much as possible. That has been an explicit RP goal since before Reagan. The RP sabotages and installs incompetence wherever it can, whenever it can. None of this is new or secret. The RP "Starve the Beast" strategy has been in place for decades. Wikipedia writes on Starve the Beast:

"Starving the beast" is a political strategy employed by American conservatives to limit government spending by cutting taxes, in order to deprive the federal government of revenue in a deliberate effort to force it to reduce spending. The term "the beast", in this context, refers to the United States Federal Government and the programs it funds, using mainly American taxpayer dollars, particularly social programs such as education, welfare, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.  

On July 14, 1978, economist and future Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan testified to the U.S. Senate Finance Committee: "Let us remember that the basic purpose of any tax cut program in today's environment is to reduce the momentum of expenditure growth by restraining the amount of revenue available and trust that there is a political limit to deficit spending."

The tax gap is a stupendous example of RP sabotage of hated government. There is a logical connection between refusing to provide a budget for the IRS to collect taxes and the net tax gap, now estimated to be up to about $1.4 trillion/year (much less by corporate anti-tax sources like Deloitte). If the US government cannot collect the money it needs to be competent, then it will be incompetent. Incompetent government is what the RP has wanted for years. That gives the RP a great excuse excuse to get rid of the broken government that it worked hard to break.

Judge gives OKs lawsuit against ex-Hamilton County deputy accused of baptizing woman after traffic stop

 Apr. 9—A U.S. District Court judge gave the go-ahead Thursday to a lawsuit against a former Hamilton County deputy accused of baptizing a woman against her will after a 2019 traffic stop.

In addition to ruling that the suit against Daniel Wilkey, 28, may proceed, Tennessee Eastern District Court Judge Travis R. McDonough ruled that several aspects of the complaint against former deputy Jacob Goforth could not continue. Wilkey allegedly called Goforth to witness the baptism and Goforth recorded the incident on his cellphone.

While excluding Goforth from most complaints in the lawsuit, the judge did say the former deputy had failed to protect the woman from Wilkey's use of excessive force.

"Goforth is qualified for reasonable immunity and summary judgment on this claim," the judgment said. However, the ruling also found that Goforth had ample time to stop Wilkey from committing an unreasonable seizure.

"And, if anything, the truly bizarre nature of these facts should have put Goforth further on notice that the seizure was inappropriate," the judge wrote.

Goforth had said he believed the woman to not be under police custody because she arrived at Soddy Lake in her own vehicle, but the judge stressed in his ruling that the woman might not have thought she was free to go until she was baptized by Wilkey.

McDonough went on to say that "in view of all of the circumstances surrounding the incident, a reasonable person would have believed he was not free to leave" or "would feel free to decline the officers' requests or otherwise terminate the encounter.

"There are genuine disputes of material fact concerning whether [the woman] was coerced into the baptism, whether she would have faced harsher penalties had she refused to be baptized, and whether Goforth should have known that [the woman] was being coerced," the judgment said.

The lawsuit against Wilkey and Goforth accused both men of excessive force, assault and intimidation, among other charges.

Ultimately "claims against [Goforth] individually for unreasonable search, failure to protect and render aid, negligence, battery, assault, and intentional infliction of emotional distress" were dismissed in the judgment.

On Wilkey's baptizing of the woman, McDonough said it violated the woman's choice of religion as well as violating the state's own duty to respect the persons' choice.

"If citizens are subjected to state-sponsored religious exercises, the state disavows its own duty to guard and respect that sphere of inviolable conscience and belief which is the mark of a free people," the ruling said. "Baptism of detainees by law-enforcement officers runs directly counter to the government's substantial interest in guaranteeing the free exercise of religion without government intervention. Any seizure for the purpose of conducting a baptism intruded upon [the woman's] liberty without furthering any government interest and was therefore unreasonable."

On Feb. 6, 2019, shortly after 9 p.m. Wilkey stopped the woman who was driving through the Soddy-Daisy area. After Wilkey asked her what she had in her car, the woman admitted to having a marijuana cigarette in her pack. Wilkey instructed her to exit her car and he searched her twice.

The woman claims Wilkey inappropriately touched her crotch, where he found a "marijuana roach." Wilkey told the woman that if she allowed him to baptize her, he would let her go with just a citation.

It was then that Wilkey called Goforth to witness the baptism.

Wilkey faces numerous lawsuits in several cases involving alleged excessive use of force, including the alleged unlawful body cavity search of a man while performing a traffic stop and the alleged groping of female minors. The requested damages in the lawsuits total around $11 million.

According to Hamilton County Court documents, Wilkey has been indicted on 44 charges, including six counts of sexual battery, two counts of rape, nine counts of official oppression, extortion, stalking and assault, among others.

https://news.yahoo.com/judge-gives-oks-lawsuit-against-080400702.html

MORE:

After being pulled over by a Hamilton County Sheriff's deputy, a woman claims that the officer stripped down to his underwear and forcibly baptized her in a lake. Now, she's suing the county for $11 million.

She claims that Wilkey followed her in his vehicle and pulled her over outside the home of a friend of Riley's on suspicion that she had methamphetamine in her car. He ordered her to leave her vehicle and performed a full body search, including demanding that she "reach under her shirt and pull out her bra and shake the bra and shirt." Riley said she requested a female officer conduct the search, which Wilkey refused.

Riley said that when the body search came up with nothing, the deputy asked if she had any illegal substances in her car. Riley admitted that a single marijuana "roach" was in the vehicle, hidden within a pack of cigarettes.

Wilkey searched the vehicle and, according to the lawsuit, began to verbally abuse Riley. He then asked her if she believed in Jesus Christ and was "saved."

https://www.newsweek.com/woman-claims-deputy-stripped-baptized-lake-1462705

Doesn't he look like a nice wholesome white copper, how could he be guilty of something like this?

The grifter fleeces the murdering kleptocrat?

Murdering kleptocrat Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) of 

Saudi Arabia with grifters Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump

Sometimes reality is just too strange for anyone to make it up. This one is a total hoot, but with one serious lesson in American politics for all to absorb. The lesson is that the Republican Party is not just neo-fascist, morally rotted and corrupt. It is incompetent to its core. Kushner could not even set up a reasonable-sounding investment vehicle to hide a $2 billion political payback in.

Dessert second. The New York Times writes about a business deal where MBS puts his political payback into a sham investment run by the grifter Kushner:

Before committing $2 billion to Mr. Kushner’s fledgling firm, officials at a fund led by the Saudi crown prince questioned taking such a big risk.

Six months after leaving the White House, Jared Kushner secured a $2 billion investment from a fund led by the Saudi crown prince, a close ally during the Trump administration, despite objections from the fund’s advisers about the merits of the deal.

A panel that screens investments for the main Saudi sovereign wealth fund cited concerns about the proposed deal with Mr. Kushner’s newly formed private equity firm, Affinity Partners, previously undisclosed documents show.

Those objections included: “the inexperience of the Affinity Fund management”; the possibility that the kingdom would be responsible for “the bulk of the investment and risk”; due diligence on the fledgling firm’s operations that found them “unsatisfactory in all aspects”; a proposed asset management fee that “seems excessive”; and “public relations risks” from Mr. Kushner’s prior role as a senior adviser to his father-in-law, former President Donald J. Trump, according to minutes of the panel’s meeting last June 30.

But days later the full board of the $620 billion Public Investment Fund — led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler and a beneficiary of Mr. Kushner’s support when he worked as a White House adviser — overruled the panel.  

Mr. Kushner played a leading role inside the Trump administration defending Crown Prince Mohammed after U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that he had approved the 2018 killing and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi columnist for The Washington Post and resident of Virginia who had criticized the kingdom’s rulers.  

The Saudi fund agreed to invest twice as much and on more generous terms with Mr. Kushner than it did at about the same time with former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin — who was also starting a new fund — even though Mr. Mnuchin had a record as a successful investor before entering government, the documents show. The amount of the investment in his firm, Liberty Strategic Capital — $1 billion — has not been previously disclosed.

This is how Republicans routinely do their business, as quietly and opaquely as possible to always maintain plausible deniability for their crimes and ethics sleaze. The NYT article points out that ethics experts say that Kushner's investment deal creates the appearance of a possible political payback. It looks like a $2 billion political payback because that's what it is. 

Fortunately for corrupt grifters like Jared and Ivanka, the Democratic Party and the Biden administration has mostly or completely given up on applying the rule of law to elite criminals, especially Republicans. That leaves ethics rules, which are mostly non-existent or toothless mirages. Republican Party elites do not care one iota about the rule of law or their own ethics, so their own crooks and thugs get to run free and wild with impunity. Republicans, elites and rank and file, are complicit by their stone cold silence about the crimes of the Republican ex-president, his criminal family and other elite Republican Party crooks.

Not surprisingly, the GOP cares a whole lot about the ethics and crimes of Democrats. They are happily expressing hypocritical partisan outrage at Hunter Biden and all the horrors he committed doing whatever it was that he did (allegedly, tax fraud, money laundering, unregistered foreign agent). Who knows, maybe the Democrats will prosecute their own criminals, which they should, while letting Republican criminals off the hook, which they should not. 

Maybe Jared and Ivanka should be investigated for tax fraud, money laundering and being unregistered foreign agents while in the White House, which is what they actually were. Of course, that is just a pipe dream. Republican elite's crimes are immune from prosecution. Ethics for elite's sleaze is a cynical joke. Case closed, the people and the rule of law lose, while the crooks win.

Why aren’t there any significant institutional investors from the US?

The Affinity principal would like to avoid media attention at this time. Accordingly, Affinity has approached international institutional investors on a very discreet basis (especially PIF as Affinity’s cornerstone LP) to anchor the launch of their inaugural fund.

Saudi staff wrote that Mr. Kushner was trying to avoid public attention by initially courting only international institutions like the Saudi Public Investment Fund for his new venture.

Source: Minutes of the Board Investment Committee of the Saudi Public Investment Fund, June 30, 2021

Quick update on American fascism and abortion

My post yesterday referred to Don T**** Jr and T****’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows as neo-fascist traitors because they plotted a coup. Today, it appears that some other people are starting to see the same thing. Newsweek writes:

Trump Jr. Accused of ‘Treason’ After Pre-Jan. 6 Texts to Meadows Revealed

Legal experts are calling for Donald Trump Jr. to face criminal proceedings after newly revealed text messages obtained by the January 6 House committee show he sought to prevent certification of the 2020 election and install his father to a second term.

While votes for the 2020 election were being counted, Trump Jr. texted then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows laying out a strategy to keep President Donald Trump in power by throwing out election results of key swing states, CNN reported Friday. The disclosed texts shed further light on recent revelations of Trump and his inner circle's efforts to block the certification of the 2020 election.

“It's very simple,” Trump Jr. texted to Meadows on November 5, according to CNN. “We have multiple paths We control them all.”

Fortunately for the morally rotted traitor DTJ, his treasonous father and the traitorous Republican Party thugs in congress, the administration and elsewhere who supported the coup attempt, Democratic Attorney General Merrick Garland is on duty. He’s doing his best to defend rich and powerful criminals and traitors from prosecution. It’s that good old plausible deniability thing. Plausible deniability is the white collar criminal’s tippy-top best friend.

Meanwhile, Dissident Politics has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in Peace. The nomination is prompted by yesterday’s brilliant post, A quick reminder: Neo-fascism is alive and aggressive in the US.

And, don’t forget. Our Christian nationalist Supreme Court will be handing down its anti-abortion decision in coming weeks. The decision will probably mostly or completely wipe out Roe v. Wade and most abortion rights. It will probably drop into the punch bowl in mid- to late-June. 

Some parting thoughts on what is happening and will happen once the Amwerican fascists rise to the full power they lust for. 

Thought 1: This has almost nothing to do with inconvenient facts or inconvenient logic. It has almost everything to do with tribe and cult loyalty. 

Thought 2: Texas Public Radio reports in a piece, Texas woman charged with murder for ‘self-induced abortion’:

Police in Starr County on the Texas-Mexico border arrested and charged a woman last week with murder for allegedly performing what they called a “self-induced abortion.”

The Starr County Sheriff's Office arrested 26-year-old Lizelle Herrera on Thursday. TPR confirmed Friday night that Herrera was in the custody of the Starr County Sheriff’s Office with bond set at $500,000. By Saturday night, Herrera was released from custody. Her arraignment was scheduled for next week.

The Starr County grand jury's indictment, dated March 30, stated that Herrera "did then and there intentionally and knowingly cause the death of an individual J.A.H. by a self-induced abortion."

Thought 3: The most likely outcome, the court mostly or completely obliterates Roe and leaves abortion law to the states. The less likely, but most Christian nationalist outcome, the court makes all abortions in all states murder and makes anyone helping in any abortion an accomplice to murder and just as criminally liable.

Thought 4: American fascists are mostly Republicans and most of them are radical Christian nationalists. They oppose civil liberties that God says are bad. That includes (i) abortions, (ii) voting rights, (iii) free and fair elections, and (iv) protections for non-heterosexual people and non-White people. 

There is an American fascist apocalypse underway right now. It's comes in the form of Republican Party politics. Abe Lincoln warned us what was coming. He was right.

A quick reminder: Neo-fascism is alive and aggressive in the US

This is just a quick reminder of the neo-fascist mindset of Republican Party elites. There is nothing pro-democracy about these people. CNN writes: 

Two days after the 2020 presidential election, as votes were still being tallied, Donald Trump's eldest son texted then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows that "we have operational control" to ensure his father would get a second term, with Republican majorities in the US Senate and swing state legislatures, CNN has learned. 

In the text, which has not been previously reported, Donald Trump Jr. lays out ideas for keeping his father in power by subverting the Electoral College process, according to the message reviewed by CNN. The text is among records obtained by the House select committee investigating January 6, 2021. 

"It's very simple," Trump Jr. texted to Meadows on November 5, adding later in the same missive: "We have multiple paths We control them all."

There is not one shred of concern about the actual election outcome or what the American people wanted. Not one shred of concern. These people are neo-fascist traitors. Their only concern is power and wealth concealed by as much deceit, lies and crackpot excuses as they can dream up, no matter how ridiculous.[1]

Question: Are most Republican Party elites (~97% ?) mostly neo-fascists, some or most of whom are traitors, or mostly democrats?

Footnote: 

1. The New York Times writes:

In a statement, the younger Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Alan Futerfas, confirmed that the text message was sent but suggested it was someone else’s idea that Donald Trump Jr. was passing along.

“After the election, Don received numerous messages from supporters and others,” Mr. Futerfas said. “Given the date, this message likely originated from someone else and was forwarded.”

That blithering drivel, someone else done it, ranks right up there with classics like “But the dog ate my homework!”, “But I didn’t do it, honest, I’m a good boy!”, “I’m just a Capricorn, so I just can’t help it.” and “It’s not my fault, I didn’t think you’d find out.”

Actually, I bet DTJ really didn’t think we’d find out. But we did.

🙃

The neo-fascist, traitor Don Trump Jr. with the 

The neo-fascist, radical Christian nationalist traitor

Mark Meadows

DTJ texted this to MM:

“We have multiple paths  We control them all.”

Democracy’s ends days are upon us: The fall of the courts and the rule of law

Democracy dies slowly due to thousands of cuts from all directions. One quick, big coup de grâce is not how the death plays out. The last cut will end it in a probably small, quiet, final blow and a last twitch of democracy. The cuts that American neo-fascists, concentrated mainly in the Republican Party, are inflicting in these end days of democracy include, but are not limited to:

• Increasingly crippling attacks on and subversion of pro-democracy government institutions including law enforcement, the courts and civil liberties such as voting rights and protections against discrimination

• Increasingly crippling attacks on and subversion of a free press and investigative journalism

• Increasingly crippling attacks on and subversion of social trust, tolerance, secularism and pluralism

• Increasingly crippling attacks on and subversion of experts with inconvenient messages, e.g., climate science experts

• Increasing acceptance of deceit, lies, slanders, irrational emotional manipulation and crackpot motivated reasoning as truth and sound, honest reasoning, including divisive and/or deceptive special interest propaganda (special interests include the Republican Party)

• Increasing acceptance of corruption, conflicts of interest and nepotism as normal and acceptable aspects of governance

• Normalization of vulgarity and disrespect in political rhetoric, while vilifying manners and respectful speech as evil, tyrannical political correctness run amok

• Acceptance of routine double standards and hypocrisy by the neo-fascist team and its supporters, but rejection and attack on the same as outrageous and unacceptable by political opposition

With that for context, the Washington Post writes in an opinion piece on the crippling and politicization of federal courts, Opinion: The Supreme Court is broken. So is the system that confirms its justices:

The confirmation process for Supreme Court nominees is broken, and so, I fear, is the Supreme Court itself. These developments, mutually reinforcing, were both on sad display this week.

Not long ago, whether to confirm a Supreme Court nominee was not a predictably party-line affair, with a handful or fewer of defectors. In 2005, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was confirmed with 78 votes, and Democratic senators split equally on the nomination, 22 in favor and 22 against. That lopsided tally — earlier confirmations were, for the most part, more lopsided — is now a quaint artifact of a less polarized era.

The Senate finds itself now on the verge of a dangerous new reality, in which a Senate controlled by the party opposing the president might simply refuse to confirm a nominee, period. A tradition of deference to presidential prerogatives — of believing that elections have consequences, as Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) liked to say in one of his earlier incarnations — is over. If the Senate majority is big and unified enough, it will defy the president.

Just wait and see. Republican senators were willing to caricature Ketanji Brown Jackson’s record in search of any excuse to vote against her — even though her addition to the court won’t affect its ideological balance. Imagine what would happen if a Republican appointee were to leave the court during a Democratic presidency. Actually, no imagination needed. Consider what the Senate did — or didn’t do — when Merrick Garland was nominated in 2016 to replace the late Antonin Scalia.

We could endlessly debate how things degenerated to this point: Republicans point to the Bork hearings, the Thomas hearings, the Gorsuch filibuster and the Kavanaugh hearings; Democrats bemoan the Garland blockade and the hurried Barrett confirmation. Neither side has clean hands.  

But increasingly, the court is using its emergency powers [the shadow docket] to step into disputes on the side that the majority favors — outside of the normal procedures and without written explanation.

Why? Because it can.

Just as bad as that, for unknown reasons the Democrats have abandoned the rule of law as applied to rich or powerful criminals. Presumably it has something to do with internal party politics and Dem politician re-election, possibly Biden’s own re-election. The WaPo writes in a different opinion piece:

The unpleasant display of a Democratic House Oversight Committee chair accusing President Biden’s Justice Department of obstruction probably made former president Donald Trump and his Republican loyalists grin from ear to ear. But looks are not deceiving. Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) has gone public with her charge that Attorney General Merrick Garland is “interfering” with her committee’s probe into the 15 boxes of records that the Trump team took from the White House to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

Without strong and compelling evidence that the attorney general is impeding a congressional investigation of Trump’s actions, the Oversight Committee should take care that it itself does not impede an ongoing federal investigation. Garland has said his department will “look at the facts and the law and take it from there.” Disruption only aids those who may have flouted the law.

Reportedly among the records recovered from Mar-a-Lago were documents so sensitive that they may not be able to be publicly described in an unclassified inventory. That’s enough to send shivers down the spine of the U.S. intelligence community. Those national security officials know that the chief beneficiaries of mishandled U.S. classified information are foreign adversaries.  

Trump loyalists can complain all they want about the peddling of fake news. But an investigation of Trump’s handling — or mishandling — of U.S. government records at Mar-a-Lago should not be considered politically motivated.

By now, Biden and Garland have had plenty of time to prepare and indict the ex-president for multiple obstruction of justice felonies. Compelling evidence was laid out in the April 18, 2019 Mueller Report. That was three years ago. So far there is no indication that the ex-president will be held accountable for the crimes documented in the Mueller Report.[1] For rich or powerful criminals, the rule of law is falling or has already fallen, and now the federal courts are corrupted and broken, just like congress. 

However with lots of luck, assessments of broken courts and congress and a fallen rule of law will all prove to be premature or otherwise false. But don’t hold your breath. That tactic could prove to be fatally flawed.

Footnote: 

1. For reasons I can’t recall, maybe because none were given, the American people still have not seen the entire report without redactions. Apparently Biden’s DoJ wants to keep as much of the document secret as it can, just as the DoJ under Barr and T**** did. Wikipedia comments:

On April 19, 2019, House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler issued a subpoena for the fully unredacted report.[507] A DOJ spokesperson called Nadler's subpoena “premature and unnecessary”, citing that the publicly released version of the report had “minimal redactions” and that Barr had already made arrangements for Nadler and other lawmakers to review a version with fewer redactions.[400][401] Barr offered to let twelve designated members of Congress view the less-redacted report in a secure room at the Justice Department, and forbade them from sharing the contents with other legislators. Several Republicans took advantage of the offer; the six Democrats refused, saying the conditions were too stringent.