Month: February 2023
Sticks and Stones
Donald Trump keeps egging Ron DeSantis on,
Making up nicknames, slinging them hither and yon.
I guess Ron DeSanctimonious
Was just too inharmonious,
So he’s dialed it back to just “Meatball Ron.”
More Than Half of Dems Want Biden to Run
53%
“For the first time since Economist/YouGov polls began asking — in July 2022 — if Americans want Biden to run again in 2024, more than half of Democrats say yes. … Now, just about the same share of Democrats favor a Biden run (53%) as the share of Republicans who support another run by Trump (54%). Trump has generally enjoyed more stable support for his 2024 campaign from Republicans than Biden has from Democrats.”
DeSantis Is in a Tough Spot
“It’s a really tough situation for DeSantis. If he starts punching at Trump, he’s going to anger a lot of the people he needs to vote for him. But if you are viewed as weak and cower in response to attacks from Trump, that will be seen as a proxy for how you will be seen as a Republican nominee and how you’ll be as president.”
— — Democratic strategist Tommy Vietor, quoted by the New York Times.
Investigators Have Trump Laptop Containing Classified Documents
CNN: “Former President Donald Trump’s legal team turned over more materials with classified markings and a laptop belonging to an aide to federal prosecutors in recent months, multiple sources familiar with the investigation told CNN…
“The Trump attorneys discovered pages with classified markings in December, while searching through boxes at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago residence. The lawyers subsequently handed the materials over to the Justice Department.
“A Trump aide had previously copied those same pages onto a thumb drive and laptop, not realizing they were classified, sources said. The laptop, which belonged to an aide, who works for Save America PAC, and the thumb drive were also given to investigators in January.”
Jerusalem Post: GOP Florida Freshman Rep Lied about Being Jewish, Had Nazi Grandfather
Jerusalem Post: “Florida Republican congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna was outed by The Washington Post on Friday for lying about her Jewish heritage in a previous interview with the Jewish Insider in November 2022.
“Not only is Luna almost certainly not Jewish, but also according to several family members, reports the Washington Post, Luna’s paternal grandfather Heinrich Mayerhofer, who died in 2003, served in the armed forces of Nazi Germany when he was a teenager in the 1940s.
“‘I was raised as a Messianic Jew by my father,’ Luna had told the Jewish Insider, clarifying that she identifies as a Christian. ‘I am also a small fraction Ashkenazi.'”
Bannon’s Podcast Is Top Spreader of Misinformation Among Conservative Media
20%
Former Trump White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon’s “War Room” podcast has been the top spreader of misinformation in the conservative media ecosystem, according to a new study.Bannon’s “War Room” shared the most unsubstantiated or false claims in the dataset included in a study published by the Brookings Institution this week. Close to 20 percent of all episodes of Bannon’s show that were assessed featured claims that Snopes and PolitiFact fact-checkers or the terms dictionary flagged as unsubstantiated or false, the study found.
Trump Successfully Pressured Twitter to Suppress Chrissy Teigen Tweet
Daily Beast: “[Former} Twitter officials revealed on Wednesday that former President Donald Trump not only received preferential treatment for years, but he also directly requested the site remove tweets that he didn’t like. At the same time, they also noted that President Joe Biden hadn’t contacted Twitter to take down any tweets or censor content. One tweet Trump especially wanted to be deleted: Supermodel and TV star Chrissy Teigen calling him a “pussy ass bitch” in 2019.”
