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.
Montage of clips from Dementia Trump’s NC rally today where he mangles and mispronounces words, garbles syntax, and spews gibberish and nonsense while sweating profusely. pic.twitter.com/JlIsOkROh7
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.”
Russian opposition media site meduza.io collected some of the funniest memes from Tucker Carlson’s “interview” with Vladimir Putin so you don’t have to watch it. Some of them are pretty funny. The one where Putin’s leg starts to crawl away reminds me of the scene in “Dr. Strangelove” where the doctor’s hand keeps doing a Hitler salute as he fights with his own body part.
Jose Paglieri of the Daily Beast has a trenchant analysis of the likely outcome of the Trump Organization’s New York fraud case, and it’s all bad news for Donald Trump. Besides the hundred millions of dollars in fines, two obscure state laws look set to balloon the fines into the fiscal stratosphere.
The first is a requirement that he immediately put up the amount of the fine before he can appeal the decision, and the second is a sky-high 9% state interest rate that could add another $200 million to the minimum $370 million fine the attorney general has requested.
As Paglieri lays it out:
Whatever the enormous judgment will be, the state-mandated 9 percent interest rate on the sum is likely to date back to the start of AG Letitia James’ investigation in 2018, which means Trump could be in the hole for nine-figures more. If the judgment against Trump is, for instance, $370 million, he would face an additional $33.3 million tacked on annually to the base amount of the original judgment. It’s simple interest, which means it only applies to the original judgment, but if the time period stretches back six years, Trump would automatically owe 54 percent more than whatever the judgment comes out to be. (In this hypothetical of $370 million with six years of interest, it’d be almost exactly $200 million more.)
…
Then there’s the matter of Trump’s inevitable appeal. The $315 filing fee will be the least of his worries. According to New York state court rules, Trump will have only a month to front a massive appellate bond worth anywhere from 110 percent to 120 percent of the judgment. Experts who spoke to The Daily Beast said Trump has two options: pay it directly to the court system, or find a surety company that would provide the state a guarantee on his behalf.
But if the Trump Organization is dissolved, as AG Letitia James wants, Paglieri notes, “Trump might not be able to rely on tainted goods to pay off the punishment for having tainted goods.”
Except it’s not. Gov. Ron DeSantis gave his State of the State address yesterday to open the Florida Legislature’s 2024 60-day session. It was a tissue of lies, exaggerations, misrepresentations and coverups of the reality on the ground in the Sunshine State. Lil’ D did not bother to paint a vision for the state’s future because his focus is on his losing bid for presidency.
“It was a speech written for Iowa and New Hampshire voters, House Minority Leader Fentrice Driskell, D-Tampa, said afterward,” reported the Tampa Bay Times. “I was surprised that there was no real vision for Florida,” Driskell said. “I came away feeling, OK, so where do you want to take us next?”
DeSantis’s “small government” is more intrusive in citizens’ lives, his robust state budget relies on federal handouts and his anti-woke agenda is based on curtailing individual constitutional freedoms of assembly, speech and privacy.
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.
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.”