During a visit to Liberty University, Jerry Falwell’s “madrasa” in Virginia, a student asks “President” Huckabee what is behind his surge in the polls:
MIKE HUCKABEE: There’s only one explanation for it, and it’s not a human one. It’s the same power that helped the little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people. And that’s the only way our campaign could be doing what it’s doing. I’m not being facetious, nor am I trying to be trite. There literally are thousands of people across this country who are praying that a little will become much. And it has. And it defies all explanation. It has confounded the pundits, and I’m enjoying every minute of their trying to figure it out. And until they look at it from an experience just beyond human they’ll never figure it out. And that’s probably just as well.
True opinions can only prevail if the facts to which they refer are known; if they are not known, false ideas are just as effective as true ones, if not a little more effective.
— Walter Lippman (1889-1974) American writer, editor
The Republican Party’s effort to unilaterally award itself with 20 of California’s 55 Electoral College votes next year has failed to reach its fundraising goals for a second time:
Ballot initiatives tend to fail if California voters suspect the proposition has a hidden agenda.
A proposed initiative that drew national attention for its potential to affect next year’s presidential election will not appear on the June ballot, organizers said Thursday.
Republican backers of the measure, which could have tilted the presidential contest toward the GOP nominee by changing how California awards electoral votes, conceded that they were unable to raise sufficient funds.
Dave Gilliard, the manager of the current campaign, expressed bewilderment over the fact that more GOP fatcats did not pour money into the campaign.
“I was surprised that more people that finance these types of efforts didn’t step forward…We had strong supporters and good supporters but didn’t come anywhere close to making the budget,” Gilliard told the Los Angeles Times.
Gilliard’s “surprise” is itself surprising. GOP big money donors know, just as certainly Gilliard must know, that ballot initiatives tend to fail if California voters suspect the proposition has a hidden agenda.
The stated intent of Gilliard’s initiative was to make the California system “fair.” In fact, the real purpose was to give about 40 percent of the state’s Electoral College votes to the 2008 Republican nominee.
In October, a similar measure failed when the campaign manager discovered that its sole donation had been laundered through a front group to disguise the donor’s identity as a campaign chair and fundraiser for GOP presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani.
What little credibility Bush, and, by extension, the United States, had on Iran among our allies and other stakeholders in the Middle East has evaporated.
Wednesday night, George Bush’s spokesperson Dana Perino was forced to acknowledge in an email that Bush had been lying to the American people both about the status of Iran’s nuclear capabilities and about when he was informed that Iran’s nuclear program had been suspended.
Yesterday, however, when she asked if Bush was “candid” about what he knew and when he knew it, Perino answered, “Yes, he was.” Then, as proof of his candor, she launched into this tortured peroration:
If you look at the rest of that sentence, what the President — the President was clearly told that there was new information that was coming in, but he wasn’t told the details of it. And the President was also told that the intelligence community was going to need to go back and check out to find out if it’s true. What I said is that [Director of National Intelligence Mike] McConnell told the President, if the new information turns out to be true, what we thought we knew for sure is right: Iran does, in fact, have a covert nuclear weapons program, but it may be suspended. He said that there were many streams of information that were coming in that could be potentially in conflict. They didn’t have a lot of confidence in the information yet.
When challenged on the fact that her parsing did not square with what Bush actually said, Perino waved off the gap in credibility with this obviously scripted-in-advance bit of tripe:
I can see where you could see that the President could have been more precise in that language, but the President was being truthful.
The emphasis on “truthful” is hers. (And she will trot out the “he could have been more precise” nonsense twice more in the session.)
The White House press corps was refreshingly aggressive in putting Perino through her paces. As the session wore on, she sounded increasingly like her predecessor, Scott McClellan, in a skirt, deploying McClellan’s usual tricks — holding forth at length to answer a simple question and changing the subject whenever possible — in order to avoid producing a sound bite. On the other hand, she couldn’t entirely avoid that fact that Bush lied:
Q Dana, but listen to what he said: “He didn’t tell me what the information was; he did tell me it was going to take a while to analyze.” Was the President told that there was a possibility that Iran’s nuclear program could be suspended? That’s what you said he was told.
MS. PERINO: Yes, the President was told that there is new information [in August]…
Meanwhile, in the real world, no one — except increasingly desperate neo-cons and Bush-cult dead-enders — believes Perino, Bush or Cheney on this matter. What little credibility Bush, and, by extension, the United States, had on Iran among our allies and other stakeholders in the Middle East has evaporated. And rightly so, why should any foreign government put stock in anything the Bush administration has to say now?
Our only hope is that no serious world crisis erupts until the United States changes leadership in 13 months, and, presumably — hopefully — a normal president and administration take charge at long last.
Pundits say that Trump’s $5,000 midterm bribe was an overreach,
And they agree that if lies were a crime, he’d be impeached.
Despite all the dividend promises he’s made,
The fact is, not one has ever been paid,
So even before the midterms, he already owes us $8,000* each.
*$5000 stimulus checks via “DOGE dividend”; $2000 stimulus checks via a “tariff dividend”; $1000-plus checks via “savings” from expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies
“The man is afraid of the voice of the people and that the people understand and know what he’s doing. He’s trying to stifle the ability of journalists to let the people of America know what’s really going on with their government.”
— “Kamala Harris called President Donald Trump’s ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House ‘absolutely abhorrent,’” The Wrap reports.
“Not one of them is trained in technical skills. Not one research PhD, as opposed to China, where half the cabinet is science and technology PhDs. We’re led by grifters and fools.”
— Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs, on X, on President Trump’s 35-person cabinet.
“Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far… The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”
— Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL), breaking with President Trump in a direct-to-camera video.
“Donald Trump made over a thousand stock sales and purchases worth between $79m and $270m in July,” The Guardian reports. “His two largest sales were of Amazon and Microsoft stock, selling between $5m and $25m each on 20 July. That same day, he also sold up to $5m worth of Oracle and Costco stock, $500,000 to $1m in Nvidia, and bought up to $5m worth of shares in Intuit and Salesforce, among dozens of other transactions.”
“The unprecedented spate of mid-decade redistricting for the U.S. House has changed the congressional districts for one-tenth of Americans and significantly altered the makeup of at least one-fifth of districts, according to a new study,” the Associated Press reports.
A new Fox News Poll finds 71% of voters think the Trump administration lacks a clear strategy for ending the Iran War, including 95% of Democrats, 83% of independents, and 43% of Republicans. Sixty percent say U.S. military action against Iran was the wrong decision, while just 37% say it was right.
“The Trump administration last year spent $9.5 billion on paid administrative leave for federal workers as part of its plan to shrink the government and save taxpayers money, according to a new estimate by a congressional watchdog,” CNN reports.
Reuters has documented at least 470 targets of retribution under Trump’s leadership – from federal employees and prosecutors to universities and media outlets. The list illuminates the sweeping effort by the president and his administration to punish dissent and reshape the government.
