Arizona grand jury yesterday indicted 11 of the fake electors in that state with conspiracy, fraudulent schemes and artifices, fraudulent schemes and practices, and forgery for their attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Those charged included state senators Jake Hoffman and Anthony Kern, former Arizona Republican Party chair Kelli Ward, and Tyler Bowyer of the right-wing advocacy organization Turning Points Action. The indictment lists seven other co-conspirators, who are not yet named but who appear from descriptions to include Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Christina Bobb, Boris Epshteyn, and Jenna Ellis; Trump campaign operative Mike Roman; and Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows. Bobb is now senior counsel for “election integrity” for the Republican National Committee.
Trump is listed as an unindicted co-conspirator.

@suzianne said
I "misgender" no one.

You, on the other hand, think it's the highest comedy.

For everyone's information I identify as "she". For those of you who are LBGQT phobic, "female" is also on my birth certificate. None of this should matter.

@mchill said
I expect his lawyers are telling him to be very careful what he says. It is good that he gets out there so America will see this human being, being chased into hell like the pitiful character in the movie elephant man. He turned to the crowd and said I am a human being.


Boo Hoo Hoo - This man has lived in luxury and been treated like royalty his whole life, and now he has to follow the same rules as the rest of us - it just breaks my heart. -NOT! 😢

Trump is being treated with with far more leniency than the average citizen. 99.9% of the citizenry would have been jailed or put on house arrest with an ankle bracelet due to daily gag order violations.

@mott-the-hoople said
" He has been convicted of rape. "
straight up lie

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/19/trump-carroll-judge-rape/

@averagejoe1 said
as a Trump supporter, if he has any downfall, it will be these Comments each day. I expect his lawyers are telling him to be very careful what he says. It is good that he gets out there so America will see this human being, being chased into hell like the pitiful character in the movie elephant man. He turned to the crowd and said I am a human being.
One of you actu ...[text shortened]... more, will be spent on the immigrants. They have taken lives of our citizens, and the list goes on.

Why we hate him? He has been taped proudly saying he loves grabbing women by the pussy. He has been convicted of rape. He once said, also taped, that if his daughter were not his daughter, he's like to have sex with her. And then there is the fake charity, the workers he refused to pay. He stole classified documents that belong to our government, not Trump. The list is so long.
Under Biden our economy is growing, unemployment is down, our allies respect him while they laughed at Trump, and he is trying to deal with a climate disaster.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/23/immigration-jobs-economy/

Former president Donald Trump is now on trial in a Manhattan courtroom, where facts are paramount, and a jury will assess the evidence and render a verdict. But as he enters and leaves that courtroom, Trump often stops before the cameras and blasts falsehoods to the court of public opinion, which can apply a different standard to Trump when it comes to facts. Here’s a quick assessment of several claims he made after the conclusion of the first day of testimony in his hush money trial, in the order in which he made them.

“This is a case where you pay a lawyer, he’s a lawyer, and they call it a legal expense. That’s the exact term they use, legal expenses, in the books. And another thing that wasn’t even said was, we never even deducted it as a tax deduction.”

Legal fees are often tax deductible. The fact that the Trump Organization did not take a tax deduction for the hush money payments is a possible red flag that these payments were handled improperly. Trump generally has taken as many tax deductions as possible. For instance, the Donald J. Trump Foundation — which Trump shut down after allegations he used it for his personal and political benefit — recorded a $7 foundation gift to the Boy Scouts. That matched the amount required to enroll a boy in the Scouts the year his son Donald Trump Jr. was 11.

Michael “Cohen is a lawyer, represented a lot of people over the years. I’m not the only one, and he wasn’t very good in a lot of ways in terms of misrepresentation.”

Trump now knocks his former attorney, Michael Cohen, who is expected to testify that he arranged the hush money payments at Trump’s behest, as not “very good.” That raises the question of why Cohen ended up working for Trump for 12 years, including 10 as vice president of the Trump Organization and then as Trump’s personal attorney after Trump was elected president.

“He [Cohen] got in trouble for things that had nothing to do with me.”

This is false. Cohen pleaded guilty to eight criminal charges, including two — “causing an unlawful corporate contribution” and “making an excessive campaign contribution” — that directly relate to the hush money case now being litigated in Manhattan criminal court. The charges laid out how “Individual-1” (Trump) began a presidential campaign in 2016 and how Cohen worked with the National Enquirer to squelch potentially damaging stories about alleged affairs with adult-film star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal. His payoffs were reimbursed by the Trump Organization.

“Cohen caused and made the payments described herein in order to influence the 2016 presidential election,” the Justice Department said in a 2018 news release. “In so doing, he coordinated with one or more members of the campaign, including through meetings and phone calls, about the fact, nature, and timing of the payments. As a result of the payments solicited and made by Cohen, neither Woman-1 nor Woman-2 spoke to the press prior to the election.”

Notably, this case was prosecuted when Trump was president. Geoffrey Berman, at the time the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, revealed in 2022 that senior DOJ officials tried to remove all references to Trump. In the end, a compromise was made to water down the language, specifically to remove references to the idea that Trump acted “in concert with” and “coordinated with” Cohen to make illegal campaign contributions.

“The other thing is: If this were such a great case, why didn’t the Southern District [of New York] bring it, who looked at it and turned it down?”

In his memoir, “Holding the Line,” Berman says the case ended under pressure from Attorney General William P. Barr. The office, with Cohen’s cooperation in hand, began to investigate whether others should be charged in the hush money case. After Barr became attorney general in 2019, he ordered a review of the Cohen case, suggesting that the campaign finance charges be reversed — even though Cohen had pleaded guilty six months before. Specifically, he asked the Office of Legal Counsel to review whether there was a legal basis for the campaign finance changes. That froze any further investigation: “Not a single investigative step could be taken, not a single document in our possession could be reviewed until the issue was resolved,” Berman wrote, saying Barr’s intervention so long after a guilty plea was “highly unusual, if not unprecedented.” Barr eventually was convinced not to seek dismissal of the Cohen charges. But no additional charges were brought.

“Very importantly, why didn’t the Federal Elections [Commission] do anything? Federal Elections took a total pass on it. They said essentially nothing was done wrong or they would have done something about it. They’re tough. … Actually, if you read their letter, they couldn’t even believe it. They were incredulous.”

This is false. The Federal Election Commission staff, in a December 2020 report by the general counsel, said it had found “reason to believe” violations of campaign finance law were made “knowingly and willfully” by the Trump campaign. The report said that Cohen’s $130,000 payment to Daniels was far in excess of the legal limit for individual contributions of $2,700. “The available information indicates that Michael Cohen paid Stephanie Clifford [Daniels’s real name] $130,000 at the direction of 2016 presidential candidate Donald J. Trump, with Trump’s express promise of repayment, for the purpose of influencing the 2016 election,” the report said.

Never rehire someone who was fired, stole sensitive documents when leaving, encouraged others to hang a coworker, and has several pending felonies and lawsuits. NEVER!!!

There are really two major Republican political stories dominating the news these days. The more obvious of the two is the attempt by former president Donald Trump and his followers to destroy American democracy. The other story is older, the one that led to Trump but that stands at least a bit apart from him. It is the story of a national shift away from the supply-side ideology of Reagan Republicans toward an embrace of the idea that the government should hold the playing field among all Americans level.

While these two stories are related, they are not the same.

For forty years, between 1981, when Republican Ronald Reagan took office, and 2021, when Democrat Joe Biden did, the Republicans operated under the theory that the best way to run the country was for the government to stay out of the way of market forces. The idea was that if individuals could accumulate as much money as possible, they would invest more efficiently in the economy than they could if the government regulated business or levied taxes to invest in public infrastructure and public education. The growing economy would result in higher tax revenues, enabling Americans to have both low taxes and government services, and prosperity would spread to everyone.

But the system never worked as promised. Instead, during that 40-year period, Republicans passed massive tax cuts under Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump, and slashed regulations. A new interpretation of antitrust laws articulated by Robert Bork in the 1980s permitted dramatic consolidation of corporations, while membership in labor unions declined. The result was that as much as $50 trillion moved upward from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

To keep voters on board the program that was hollowing out the middle class, Republicans emphasized culture wars, hitting hard on racism and sexism by claiming that taxes were designed by Democrats to give undeserving minorities and women government handouts and promising their evangelical voters they would overturn the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion. Those looking for tax cuts and business deregulation depended on culture warriors and white evangelicals to provide the votes to keep them in power.

But the election of Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 proved that Republican arguments were no longer effective enough to elect Republican presidents. So in 2010, with the Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission decision, the Supreme Court freed corporations to pour unlimited money into U.S. elections. That year, under Operation REDMAP, Republicans worked to dominate state legislatures so they could control redistricting under the 2010 census, yielding extreme partisan gerrymanders that gave Republicans disproportionate control. In 2013 the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision greenlighted the voter suppression Republicans had been working on since 1986.

Even so, by 2016 it was not at all clear that the cultural threats, gerrymandering, and voter suppression would be enough to elect a Republican president. People forget it now because of all that has come since, but in 2016, Trump offered not only the racism and sexism Republicans had served up for decades, but also a more moderate economic program than any other Republican running that year. He called for closing the loopholes that permitted wealthy Americans to evade taxes, cheaper and better healthcare than the Democrats had provided with the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., and addressing the long backlog of necessary repairs to our roads and bridges through an infrastructure bill.

But once in office, Trump threw economic populism overboard and resurrected the Republican emphasis on tax cuts and deregulation. His signature law was the 2017 tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy at a cost of at least $1.9 trillion over ten years. At the same time, Trump continued to feed his base with racism and sexism, and after the Unite the Right rally at Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, he increasingly turned to his white nationalist base to shore up his power. On January 6, 2021, he used that base to try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Republican senators then declined to convict Trump of that attempt in his second impeachment trial, apparently hoping he would go away. Instead, their acquiescence in his behavior has enabled him to continue to push the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election. But to return to power, Trump has increasingly turned away from establishment Republicans and has instead turned the party over to its culture war and Christian nationalist foot soldiers. Now Trump has taken over the Republican National Committee itself, and his supporters threaten to turn the nation over to the culture warriors who care far more about their ideology than they do about tax cuts or deregulation.

The extremism of Trump’s base is hugely unpopular among general voters. Most significantly, Trump catered to his white evangelical base by appointing Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, and in 2022, when the court did so, the dog caught the car. Americans overwhelmingly support reproductive freedoms, and Republicans are getting hammered over the extreme abortion bans now operative in Republican-dominated states. Now Trump and a number of Republicans have tried to back away from their antiabortion positions, infuriating antiabortion activists.

It is hard to see how the Republican Party can appeal to both Trump’s base and general voters at the same time.

That split dramatically weakens Trump politically while he is in an increasingly precarious position personally. He will, of course, go on trial on Monday, April 15, for alleged crimes committed as he interfered in the 2016 election. At the same time, the $175 million appeals bond he posted to cover the judgment in his business fraud trial has been questioned and must be justified by April 14. The court has scheduled a hearing on the bond for April 22. And his performance at rallies and private events has been unstable.

He seems a shaky reed on which to hang a political party, especially as his MAGA Republicans have proven unable to manage the House of Representatives and are increasingly being called out as Russian puppets for their attacks on Ukraine aid.

Regardless of Trump’s future, though, the Reagan Era is over.

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have quite deliberately rejected the economic ideology that concentrated wealth among the 1%. On their watch, the federal government has worked to put money into the hands of ordinary Americans rather than the very wealthy. With Democrats and on occasion a few Republicans, they have passed legislation to support families, dedicate resources to making sure people with student debt are receiving the correct terms of their loans (thus relieving significant numbers of Americans), and invested in manufacturing, infrastructure, and addressing climate change. They have also supported unions and returned to an older definition of antitrust law, suing Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple and allowing the federal government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices.

Their system has worked. Under Biden and Harris the U.S. has had unemployment rates under 4% for 26 months, the longest streak since the 1960s. Wages for the bottom 80% of Americans have risen faster than inflation, chipping away at the huge disparity between the rich and the poor that the policies of the past 40 years have produced.

Today, in an interview with Jamie Kitman of The Guardian, United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, who negotiated landmark new union contracts with the country’s Big Three automakers, explained that the world has changed: “Workers have realized they’ve been getting screwed for decades, and they’re fed up.”
Heather Cox Richardson
Notes:

https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2024/04/07/trump-vs-biden-who-got-more-done-on-foreign-policy/

https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/the-2017-trump-tax-law-was-skewed-to-the-rich-expensive-and-failed-to-deliver

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/13/shawn-fain-president-uaw-union-interview

https://www.meidastouch.com/news/trump-glitches-yet-again-during-rally

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-175-million-civil-fraud-bond-valid-new-york/

https://www.npr.org/2024/01/05/1222714145/jobs-report-december-labor-wages

https://www.salon.com/2024/04/10/theyre-still-playing-games-ex-prosecutor-warns-may-face-asset-seizure-over-invalid-bond/

@shavixmir thanks for posting. It seems to me there are two ways to build wealth in the U.S.; real estate and the stock market. Real estate can easily go bust plus there are costs like property taxes, condo fees and the hassles with renting. You can invest in real estate through REIT mutual funds or ETF's. Diversifying via mutual funds/ETF's through brokerages like Vanguard, has worked very well for me. I think 99% of financial advisors rip off clients. I do like to gamble a bit. I started buying NVIDA in 2018. I have been buying AMD and recently put money into SMCI. 85% of my money is in indexed bond and equity ETF funds, including equities in developed countries. I will probably add the Vanguard dividend mutual fund. Vanguard has the lowest fees in the industry. The concept of indexed funds was invented by John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard. The first Vanguard index fund was introduced in 1976.
I do feel I am overweighed in AI investments. However, I feel it truly is a golden goose unless it destroys civilization as we know it. This is a distinct possibility. AI creators have already warned heads of nations and the UN that their invention poses an existential threat to humanity but they are not about to stop. Governments need to step up and develop regulations. Good luck with that. At least in the U.S., politicians in power are overwhelmingly dumb asses on the GOP side of the aisle and they have too much power.
I would advise those in the US who are investing while still working, put their money into an IRA. If you can pay the taxes now, use a Roth IRA. In both IRA's capital gains are not taxed.

@spruce112358 said
That's a great question!

I don't know because I'm not on his wave-length, but I think it's because he's extremely lazy and believes his own rhetoric. He actually thought he was going to win re-election. He's not energetic or smart or able or any of those things. He just floats along on the backs of more competent people - WELL insulated from reality by his cote ...[text shortened]... l definitely work harder - not for you and me, but to save himself.

This is what he says, anyway.

If the highest levels of the military had been behind Trump instead of the Constitution, January 6th could have been a successful coup.

Republican president Ronald Reagan said: “We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation…. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”