CNN: The Republican nominee for superintendent overseeing North Carolina’s public schools and its $11 billion budget has a history marked by extreme and controversial comments, including sharing baseless conspiracy theories and frequent calls for the execution of prominent Democrats.
Michele Morrow, a conservative activist who last week upset the incumbent Superintendent of Public Instruction in North Carolina’s Republican primary, expressed support in 2020 for the televised execution of former President Barack Obama and suggested killing then-President-elect Joe Biden.
Salon.com: Dr. John Gartner is a psychologist and former professor at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School. Gartner was a contributor to the 2017 bestseller “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.”
In this conversation, Gartner argues that it is actually Donald Trump and not President Biden who is showing diminished mental acuity and dangerous behavior related to aging. Gartner explains that Donald Trump’s escalating dangerousness is connected to what he believes is a diseased mind that will only get worse. Gartner warns that given Trump’s dangerous personality and emotional state, (Gartner describes this as “hypomanic” behavior) he is almost certainly plotting revenge and how to make his “enemies” suffer as revenge for finally being held accountable by the courts and the rule of law. At the end of this conversation, Gartner explains how even on his worst day as an older person, President Biden is a far superior leader and decision-maker (and human being) than Donald Trump.
Boredbat.com: Members of House Republican leadership expressed frustration at Speaker Mike Johnson after a GOP leadership retreat over the weekend, organized to outline plans for keeping the majority, quickly turned into a religious service.
“I’m not at church,” an anonymous attendee said in response to Johnson leading the group in prayers and Christian sermonizing. According to two people in the room the sermon was not well received, with one Rep. calling the session “horrible.”
Johnson was reportedly railing against government, saying that without God in their lives people will turn to the government for guidance. The sermon lasted for a full third of the meeting according to the anonymous members.
“I think what he was trying to do, but failed on the execution of it, was try to bring us together,” the anonymous source said. “The sermon was so long he couldn’t bring it back to make the point.”
Recognizing that their party is dying and that the only way to win elections is to cheat, Florida Gov. (and erstwhile presidential contender) Ron DeSantis and his henchmen in the Florida Legislature last year turned to trimming the voter rolls of pesky Democrats and Independents.
According to the Florida Bulldog, the Republican wrecking crew was responsible for culling nearly 900,000 potential non-Republican voters from the rolls:
Statistics compiled by the Florida Division of Elections show the total number of registered active voters in the state fell from 14,536,811 to 13,540,135 as of Dec. 1. That’s a reduction of 996,676, to about the same number of active registered voters as in 2019 – even as the U.S. Census Bureau reported earlier this year that Florida is once again the fastest-growing state in the nation. Florida’s estimated population was 22.2 million as of July 1, 2022.
… Voter records from South Florida’s three most populous counties reveal similar declines. In Miami-Dade 85,640 voters were moved from active to inactive status, with 90.75 percent being Democrats and NPAs; in Broward, 190,876 were moved to inactive status, with 84.24 percent being Democrats and NPAs; in Palm Beach, the active voter rolls were sliced by 156,148 voters, 82.75 percent of whom were registered Democrats or NPAs.
All this was done in the service of “election integrity” — an even greater oxymoron that “military intelligence” when used by the Republican Party.
Keith Olbermann on “Countdown”: For all those wringing their hands about disqualifying Trump from the ballot via the 14th Amendment without a conviction: What would Donald Trump have done with Joe Biden if January 6th had somehow worked?
Or TO him?
It’s January 20, 2021 and the 46th President-Elect of the United States is prevented by whatever means from assuming office as demanded by the Constitution and Trump remains in power extra-legally, extra-judicially, extra-constitutionally.
And we are supposed to believe that Biden would have been left free to speak in public, on television, on social media, to the press, in the courts, to the Speaker Pelosi or Majority Leader Schumer, to the Democratic governors with their authority over the National Guard?
Trump would have found a pretext to detain him. Or he HAD a pretext to detain him; a plan we just haven’t found out about. Having once crossed the ultimate threshold – ENDING 237 years of American democracy – having retained power as a dictator by some other name, what would Trump have then NOT been willing to do? And most importantly, what Trump would have done with a man he would’ve wanted the world to believe was an extra, illegitimate American president who had somehow plotted against Trump?
He would have had Joe Biden killed.
Listen to Countdown on YouTube or here or anywhere you get your podcasts
Mark Frauenfelder posted an expose on Boing Boing that found that none of the merchandise for sale at the Trump Store in Trump Tower in New York was made in the United States of America (surprise!). But Frauenfelder explains it this way:
My guess is the merchandise was made in MAGA Land, but the tags were made in China. That’s probably because Crooked Joe Biden made a deal with China. Once Trump is running things, he will make sure everything is made in MAGA Land!
The Hill: “Young voters overwhelmingly say they would support President Biden over former President Trump in a hypothetical head-to-head match-up if the 2024 presidential election were held today, according to a poll released Wednesday.
“In the Economist/YouGov poll — conducted via web-based interviews Dec. 16-18 — more than half (53 percent) of registered voters under 30 said they would support Biden, and less than a quarter (24 percent) said they would support Trump.
“Another 10 percent said they would support another candidate, 4 percent said they were not sure, and 9 percent said they wouldn’t vote.”
Axios.com:”Former President Trump, if elected, would build a Cabinet and White House staff based mainly on two imperatives: pre-vetted loyalty to him and a commitment to stretch legal and governance boundaries, sources who talk often with the leading GOP presidential candidate tell Axios.”
Trump and his prospective top officials don’t mince words about their plans:
They want to target and jail critics, including government officials and journalists; deport undocumented immigrants or put them in detainment camps, and unleash the military to target drug cartels in Mexico, or possibly crack down on criminals or protesters at home.
They want to scrap rules that limit their ability to purge government workers deemed disloyal.
It’s Trump’s, not Biden’s, declining acuity on display.
The absurd or the nonsensical, who knows what Trump’ll say.
If you haven’t noticed,
It dates from when Trump was POTUS
To 2017, when he coined his first nonsense term,”covfefe.”
“I’d ask a rhetorical question. If you thought you were best positioned to beat someone who, if they won, would change the nature of America, what would you do?”
— President Biden, quoted by the New Yorker, on his decision to run for re-election.
“While a pregnancy might have been difficult on a 10-year-old body, a woman’s body is designed to carry life.”
— Cincinnati Right to Life leader Laura Strietmann, commenting on the 10-year-old Ohio girl who was raped and had to travel to Indiana for an abortion.
A new Pew Research Center survey “finds that 80% of U.S. adults say religion’s role in American life is shrinking – a percentage that’s as high as it’s ever been in our surveys. … Most Americans who say religion’s influence is shrinking are not happy about it. Overall, 49% of U.S. adults say both that religion is losing influence and that this is a bad thing. An additional 8% of U.S. adults think religion’s influence is growing and that this is a good thing.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) “boasted shortly after he began soliciting private donations for his controversial migrant busing program that there would likely ‘be no cost to the state’ given the outpouring of support from concerned citizens across the country,” CNN reports. “But after nearly two years of fundraising to offset the program’s costs, Abbott’s operation has collected less than half of 1% of the roughly $150 million spent on busing migrants to sanctuary cities.”
A new Wall Street Journal poll finds a plurality of American voters “think Israel has gone too far in responding to the October attacks by Hamas, and a growing share believes the U.S. isn’t doing enough to help the Palestinian people. … The new poll found that 60% of voters disapprove of Biden’s handling of the war, 8 points more than in December, with 31% approving of Biden’s actions.”
“More than 8 million asylum seekers and other migrants will be living inside the U.S in legal limbo by the end of September — a roughly 167% increase in five years,” Axios reports. “That’s up from about 3 million in 2019 — a sign of how the underfunded and outdated U.S. immigration system can’t keep up with the rapidly growing migrant population driven by new border surges.”
Pew Research: “No single issue stands out after the economy. Nearly three-quarters of Americans (73%) rate strengthening the economy as a top priority. That is considerably larger than the shares citing any other policy goal.”