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Steve Bannon

Released From Prison (For Now), Bannon Resumes Spewing Of Election Lies

Former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon was released from a federal prison on Tuesday. Bannon served four months after being convicted on two counts of contempt of Congress in October 2022.

The right-wing podcast host served his time after numerous appeals and rejections, including the Trump-friendly Supreme Court’s June decision to deny another request to delay his prison sentence.

Bannon couldn’t stay out of prison despite being the beneficiary of one of the sloppy pardons Trump handed out at the end of his term in office. He was indicted on federal charges of fraud and conspiracy alleging that he and other organizers of the “We Build the Wall” nonprofit used donor money to enrich themselves instead of actually building a wall along the southern border of the United States. Bannon is still facing similar fraud charges from Manhattan prosecutors.

The Trump loyalist was back to promoting conspiracy theories on his “War Room” podcast just hours after his release on Tuesday. Whether it’s peddling 2020 election lies or ruminating about far-out theories involving ”deep state” psychological operations involving pop star Taylor Swift, Bannon’s podcast is the place where he and people like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene can peddle conspiracy theories about a murky “globalist elite.”

CNN reports that Bannon's podcast has diminished in popularity during his absence, and even a revolving crew of MAGA celebrity hosts including fellow ex-Trump adviser (and ex-convict) Peter Navarro hasn't done much for its ratings. And while many believe Bannon’s show will likely recover now that their No. 1 trainwreck is back at the helm, a spike in ratings might not be enough to have any impact on an election that is only one week away.

“I think it’s going to take some time to bring the audience back and to mobilize them,” Madeline Peltz, deputy director for rapid response at Media Matters, told CNN. “I don’t think the one-week period between now and the election is enough time to complete that, but I think really, you’ll see it kick into high gear in the post-election chaos that we’re all sort of anticipating.”

Bannon’s New York trial for his border-wall fraud was delayed while he served his prison time and is set to begin in December. Thoughts and prayers.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

AOC Warns That Trump Hate Rally Was Rehearsal For 'Another January 6'

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe show on Monday and skillfully reduced Donald Trump’s Nazi-inspired rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday.

"This was not just a presidential rally. This was also not just a campaign rally,” Ocasio-Cortez explained. “I think it's very important for people to understand that these are mini January 6 rallies. These are mini 'Stop the Steal' rallies. These are rallies to prime an electorate into rejecting the results of an election if it doesn't go the way that they want.”

I mean, you have JD Vance literally talking about watering down people's right to vote, depending on if they can viably carry a child or not,” Ocasio-Cortez said, pointing to the low bar of sanity in the Trump campaign. “We have to understand how unhinged this campaign has gotten. And the only reason that their rhetoric has gotten this far is precisely because they are trying to prime the kind of froth that led up to the January 6 attack on the Capitol."

Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made the biggest headlines at the MSG rally, after his truly unfunny act, in which he called Puerto Rico “literally a floating island of garbage,” went viral. The naked insult to millions of Puerto Ricans led to celebrities like Bad Bunny and Ricky Martin to respond by publicly endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris while castigating Trump. Right-wing pundits and politicians everywhere are now scrambling to deflect from the inherent racism of Trump’s Nazi rally by simply dismissing it as a joke.

"Right now the campaign is scrambling, and they're trying to blame this rhetoric on a so-called comedian. This is not a comedian. This is the Trump campaign,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “They invited this rhetoric on their stage for a reason. It was a chorus of speakers on that campaign for a reason. It was vetted and they knew exactly who was going to say what before they went on.”

“The only backtracking that they're doing right now, is just because tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans happen to live in Philadelphia, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “And also the several swing seats in the House in the end, in the House of Representatives that run through the state of New York."

Ocasio-Cortez was clear to detail that the preponderance of junk polling and fabricated claims of ballot burning are all a part of this systematic disinformation campaign by the right to undermine our upcoming elections. And we know what the end game is: Accomplishing what Trump failed to do on January 6, 2021—reinstalling himself over our democratically elected president.

“All of this is exactly a replay of what Donald Trump did on January 6. We don't have to think about if this is what happens,” Ocasio-Cortez told MSNBC viewers. “This is their playbook that they have used that led to the deaths of multiple people on Jan. 6. This led to one of the largest attacks in American history on the American Capitol, on U.S. soil."

'I'd Like To Finish': Harris Beats Back Fox Anchor's Dishonest Ambush

'I'd Like To Finish': Harris Beats Back Fox Anchor's Dishonest Ambush

Vice President Kamala Harris’ first-ever interview on Fox News aired Wednesday. The pretaped segment was expected to be an ambush on the Democratic presidential nominee—and host Brett Baier did not defy those expectations.

Baier immediately tried to bulldoze Harris on the issue of immigration and border security, not even allowing her to respond to his opening “question.” After all, allowing Harris to explain how GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and Republicans decided to exploit border security as an election issue instead of working on a solution wouldn’t make Fox News’ favored candidate particularly appealing.

“I’m responding to the point you raised, and I'd like to finish,” Harris said when Baier tried to bulldoze through a second “question.” She proceeded to detail all of the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to address border security that were ultimately obstructed by Trump and his minions in the Republican Party.

“And Donald Trump found out about that bill and told them to kill it because he preferred to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.” Harris said, steamrolling right through Baier’s interruptions. “And in this election, this is rightly a discussion that the American people want to have. And what they want are solutions, and they want a president of the United States who is not playing political games with the issue."


Harris also set the record straight when Baier tried to downplay Trump’s indefensible threats to sic military forces on American citizens who he deems “radical left lunatics.” She objected when Baier instead showed a clip of Trump joking about being persecuted and comparing himself to infamous gangster Al Capone.

"I'm sorry, and with all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about ‘the enemy within’ that he has repeated,” Harris insisted. “That's not what you just showed.”

The vice president then broke it down for Fox News viewers.

“Here's the bottom line. He has repeated it many times. And you and I both know that. And you and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people,” Harris told Baier. “He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him.”

“This is a democracy,” Harris continued. “And in a democracy, the president of the United States, in the United States of America, should be willing to be able to handle criticism without saying he'd lock people up for doing it. And this is what is at stake.”



Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos


Tim Walz

'That Is A Damning Non-Answer': Walz Drags Vance On January 6 Evasion

Democratic Gov. Tim Walz cornered Republican Sen. JD Vance during Tuesday night’s debate when the subject of the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol came up.

“I think there's a lot of agreement,” Walz said of the debate, “but this is one that we are miles apart on. This was a threat to our democracy in a way that we had not seen, and it manifested itself because of Donald Trump's inability to say. He is still saying he didn't lose the election.”

Walz then asked Vance, “Did he lose the 2020 election?”

Vance refused to answer the question. “Tim, I'm focused on the future,” he said. “Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation—“

“That is a damning, that is a damning non-answer,” Walz responded.

Damning indeed.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

'I'm A Black Nazi': CNN Exposes Mark Robinson's Sordid Online Persona

'I'm A Black Nazi': CNN Exposes Mark Robinson's Sordid Online Persona

A bombshell report about North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the state’s Republican gubernatorial nominee, was published Thursday by CNN. Robinson reportedly posted numerous disturbing statements on the message board of pornographic website Nude Africa between 2008 and 2012.

“I’m a black NAZI!” Robinson reportedly wrote in October 2010. He followed this up with another post the same month, saying, “Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it (slavery) back. I would certainly buy a few.”

The man whom Donald Trump called “better than Martin Luther King” also had some thoughts for the porn forums about the civil rights leader, calling King a “commie bastard,” “worse than a maggot,” a “phony,” and a “huckster.”

And after another forum user accused Robinson of being in the Ku Klux Klan, Robinson reportedly responded, “I’m not in the KKK. They don’t let blacks join. If I was in the KKK I would have called him Martin Lucifer K–n!” using a racial slur in place of King’s surname.

CNN reports that he also regularly used slurs to describe gay people, Jews, and Muslims.

Robinson also reportedly wrote, “I like watching tr-nny on girl porn! That’s fucking hot! It takes the man out while leaving the man in! And yeah I’m a ‘perv’ too!”

Robinson has been publicly cruel in statements about transgender people, telling former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka on a podcast in 2023, “The transgender movement in this country, if there’s a movement in this country that is demonic and that is full of spirit of the antichrist, it is the transgender movement.”

The extensive CNN report provides detailed visual evidence that deftly connects Robinson’s Nude Africa profile to accounts on sites like YouTube, Facebook, the site formerly known as Twitter, and Pinterest. Authors Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck also write that they’re “reporting only a small portion of Robinson’s comments on the website given their graphic nature.”

Hints about the CNN piece leaked out early Thursday, followed by additional reports that Republicans were calling on Robinson to withdraw his candidacy. Thursday evening is the deadline to withdraw from the state’s gubernatorial race. The Carolina Journal reported that Donald Trump’s campaign has barred Robinson from showing up at events.

Karen Brinson Bell, who heads North Carolina’s elections board, told the Washington Post that even if Robinson does withdraw before the deadline on Thursday night, his name would still likely appear on absentee, military, and overseas ballots. “To remove a name from the ballot at this time would be an insurmountable hurdle,” she said.

It seems Bell need not worry about it, though. Ahead of the report’s release, Robinson denied its findings in a video released on his social media accounts. “Those are not the words of Mark Robinson,” he said, adding, “Clarence Thomas famously once said he was the victim of a high-tech lynching. Well, it looks like Mark Robinson is, too.”

Whether evoking corrupt Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his alleged sexual harassment of Anita Hill will work on North Carolina voters remains to be seen.

This is only the latest scandal to plague Robinson’s political career. He has routinely made misogynistic, homophobic, and generally hate-filled statements. Robinson got national attention as a Fox News favorite willing to endorse just about any far-right conspiracy theory out there, including that former first lady Michelle Obama is secretly a man and that singer Beyoncé’s music is “satanic.”

At a Moms for Liberty event in 2023, he said Americans needed to read more writing and quotations of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

In 2021, Robinson told The East Carolinian that once a woman was pregnant, “it’s not [her] body anymore.” And during this election cycle, Robinson attempted to soften his viciously anti-abortion stance, even admitting that his wife had an abortion, while still condemning everyone else that wants the right to consider it.

Also in 2021, he dismissed calls for him to resign as lieutenant governor after he characterized the LGBTQ+ community as “filth.” And he followed that up by comparing being gay to “what the cows leave behind.”

Josh Stein, North Carolina’s Democratic gubernatorial nominee, has maintained a solid lead against Robinson in the polls. And on Wednesday, Stein released a statement saying he had no plans to debate the GOP nominee.

"Mark Robinson has spent his entire public life spewing hate, lying about his record, and spreading dangerous and false conspiracy theories. A debate would only serve to legitimize him and provide a platform for his vile and dangerous rhetoric, and we won't be part of that."

It is unlikely Stein’s position has changed.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Matt Gaetz

Gaetz Scandal Evidence May Soon Surface In Civil Lawsuit

Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz has been out of the news lately, but that may end shortly because a federal judge is expected to soon decide whether to unseal a series of depositions in a civil lawsuit filed by Gaetz associate Chris Dorworth. The lawsuit reportedly includes sealed testimony from a number of women, including Gaetz’s ex-girlfriend, about sex parties and drugs that Gaetz is alleged to have been involved with.

Last Thursday, Dorworth dropped his defamation suit against Gaetz’s former associate Joel Greenberg, a convicted sex trafficker. According to the news outlet NOTUS, this move “sought to bury the scandal,” which has hung over Gaetz, who denies ever having had sex with a minor or engaging in human trafficking. (In late 2022, the Department of Justice recommended no charges against Gaetz in the matter, though a House Ethics Committee continues to investigate similar allegations.)

But on Friday, defense lawyers in Dorworth’s suit against Greenberg submitted papers arguing that the documents in the case should be unsealed, with the alleged victims’ names removed.

In response, Dorworth’s attorneys argue that all the transcripts in the case are “confidential.” However, Greenberg’s lawyer is arguing that the court was already leaning toward unsealing the documents, citing Magistrate Judge Daniel Irick’s comments about keeping the depositions secret.

“This is a case of public importance,” Irick said in court, according to NOTUS. “It is one that there may be media interest in, and it’s one that involves important issues … I’m not seeing any confidentialities that would really overwhelm the First Amendment right for the public to see this case, especially when a plaintiff brings claims in relation to their marriage and spouses and the kind of intimate issues in this case which are laid out in extreme detail in the … complaint. I am unlikely to seal anything because it all seems relevant.”

It is unclear whether Gaetz, who was subpoenaed in the civil case, sat for a deposition and whether any transcripts or video of it would be released if the court unseals depositions. However, any depositions released to the public might help the ongoing House ethics investigation into the Florida congressman. That probe has reportedly gotten its hands on texts and testimony from an unnamed woman who allegedly used to participate in sex parties with Gaetz’s circle of friends. That information could support other reports about the drug- and alcohol-fueled nature of the parties Gaetz was allegedly involved in.

Gaetz has denied all of these reports.

U.S. District Judge Carlos Mendoza, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2014, is overseeing the civil case and may make the final decision about whether to release the depositions. The decision is expected to happen by Sept. 19.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

JD Vance

Lame Lies, Worse Jokes: JD Vance Bombs At Rally Again

On Tuesday, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance stopped in Michigan for another grin-and-bear-it rally, full of pained jokes and gross lies.

“I read a story this morning that her advisers are considering just copying all of Donald Trump’s policies,” he said. “They’re more popular. In fact, I’ve heard that for her debate in just a couple of weeks she’s going to put on a navy suit, a long red tie, and adopt the slogan ‘Make America Great Again.’” Hold for applause.

Of course, Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy remain unpopular. And the same goes for most of his major policy planks, according to polling from YouGov. For example, only 25% of Americans support Trump’s policy to cut taxes on corporations, while 59% oppose it.

At the rally, Vance also replicated Trump’s penchant for embellishing reality, telling the crowd that “overdose deaths were coming down” during the Trump administration. Which is another lie. In 2019, overdose deaths were at a record high, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They also rose during 2020. (Those numbers have dropped for the past year or so.)

In the clip above, Vance also suggests that his mother, Bev Vance, got sober during the Trump administration, but according to Vance’s speech at the Republican National Convention in July, she’s been sober since January 2015. It’s great that she’s gotten sober, of course, but it’s disrespectful to the millions of Americans suffering from addiction to say the Trump administration did anything to stymie America’s opioid crisis.

Vance quit lying just enough to make a few more bad, even offensive jokes.

“Kamala Harris said, ‘When we fight, we win.’ This is one of her favorite taglines,” he said. “And I don't know if you saw it, but then [Harris running mate] Tim Walz stood up and shouted, ‘And even when we don't fight,’ that's what, that's what Tim Walz said.”

Making jokes at the expense of Walz, who is much more popular than Vance, is a tough order.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

'Hope Is Making A Comeback': Michelle Obama Blows Off The Roof

'Hope Is Making A Comeback': Michelle Obama Blows Off The Roof

Former first lady Michelle Obama knocked it out of the park at Tuesday’s Democratic National Convention.

“Hope is making a comeback!” she declared, bringing the crowd to its feet.

Obama offered plenty of inspiration in her speech, but she didn’t shy away from calling out Donald Trump.

“For years, Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us,” she said. “See, his his limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hardworking, highly educated, successful people—who happened to be black.”

But Obama was not done. “I want to know. I want to know who's going to tell him. Who's going to tell him that the job he's currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’?”

But Obama also called on people to act, to fight, to “do something.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

RFK Jr.

Bear With Me: RFK Jr.Tries To Seize Control Of Latest Bizarre Story

Third-party independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is no stranger to controversy. On Sunday, he posted a video to his X account relaying a story about how he once drove a dead bear cub into New York City and left it in Central Park.

The video shows Kennedy telling comedian Roseanne Barr about how a motorist traveling in front of him hit a bear cub. According to Kennedy, he stopped and packed the cub into his own car with the intention of skinning it and refrigerating the meat. (It is legal in New York state to pick up roadkill, but the police need to be notified and one needs to acquire a special tag.)

“It was in very good condition and I was gonna put the meat in my refrigerator.” Kennedy explains to Barr in the video.

As Kennedy’s strange story goes, he was busy falconing, time got away from him, and before he knew it he was headed to dinner with friends in New York City—with a bear carcass in the trunk of his car. His friends, who were drunk (though RFK Jr. says he was sober), thought it would be funny to stage the dead bear in Central Park and try to make it look like a bike accident, as Kennedy had to catch a flight and couldn’t return the car to his home in Westchester.

The famous anti-vaxxer says that while the incident remained a mystery for 10 years, The New Yorker was about to release a story on the matter, which was why he is giving his version of events.

None of this is surprising in retrospect. It’s just the latest bizarre story from a bizarre candidate who has said and done bizarre things. When Kennedy announced his plans to run as a third-party candidate in October 2023, his Philadelphia press conference included a teleprompter mishap that perfectly encapsulated his strange campaign: everything was upside down.

Kennedy’s entire campaign has been a reckoning of his convoluted conspiracy theories around health care, big business, and the government. While he has long promoted the thoroughly debunked idea that the MMR vaccine causes autism, in the past few years Kennedy has gained traction with the right-wing crowd by encouraging the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic was an engineered event.

Kennedy was caught on camera saying that COVID is “ethnically targeted,” and “spares Jews.” He has blamed school shootings on pharmaceutical drugs while lying about gun ownership rates in the U.S. and Switzerland.

In recent months he has questioned the prosecution of Jan. 6 insurrectionists, and had to retract false, conspiracy-theory-laden statements regarding the peacefulness of the mob that descended on the Capitol building.

All of this is capped off by Kennedy being forced to respond to reports that doctors once found a dead worm in his brain—literally.

Kennedy has consistently held low double-digit numbers in polls up through the beginning of June, but in recent weeks those numbers have plummeted. New York Times/Siena polling from late July has Kennedy at six percent in a three-way battle with Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. The Wall Street Journal puts his popularity in a national election down around 4-5% (with an error margin of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points).

Maybe it’s time to release another push-up video.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Republican Whining Only Makes Them Alll Sound More Weird

Republican Whining Only Makes Them Alll Sound More Weird

The National Republican Senatorial Committee suggested in a recent memo that its candidates attack Vice President Kamala Harris for, among other things, being “weird.” Unfortunately for them, this asked the obvious question: Who was weirder than Donald Trump, his new running mate JD Vance, or the Republican Party?

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz gained national attention after he went on MSNBC to laud Harris’ first campaign speech, saying about Republicans, “These are weird people on the other side. They want to take books away. They want to be in your exam room. … These are weird ideas.”

Tagging the GOP and its policies as “weird” has quickly taken off. When asked about Vance’s offensive remarks about “childless cat ladies” running the Democratic Party, even independent Sen. Joe Manchin had to admit, “That truly is just a weird position to take. I’ve never heard that before.”

Republicans are predictably aggrieved by the public acknowledging how off-putting their behavior is. Right-wing wraith and Fox News host Laura Ingraham spent an entire segment of her show trying desperately to paint Harris as the weird one. “Dems: The Real Party of Weird,” read the chyron under her rant.

Vivek Ramaswamy stomped his feet and called the talking point “dumb & juvenile,” only to have Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez break down how “super weird” conservatives are these days.

“Being obsessed with repressing women is goofy,” the New York Democrat tweeted. “Trying to watch what LGBTQ+ people do all the time is abnormal. Punishing people who don’t have biological offspring is creepy.”

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio weighed in on the matter Tuesday, saying, “They called us weird so I’ll call them weirder. That’s what I used to do back in high school.” His I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I defense is undercut by the fact that he and other conservatives spent hours whining about how a five-minute segment of a nearly four-hour Olympics opening ceremony ruined the entire Olympics for them.

It looks like the National Republican Senatorial Committee might be right: Pointing out how “weird” your opponent is might indeed be a winning message.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Marjorie Taylor Greene

Margie Promises RNC: 'Trump Will Make Us Wealthy'

The Republican National Convention began in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Monday. The night’s theme was “Make America Wealthy Again.”

See what they did there? A cavalcade of dumpster fires took the stage to attack President Joe Biden’s administration and rage that America is a criminal wasteland that can only be saved by a strong authoritarian leader like convicted felon Donald Trump.

Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene gave her version of a rousing speech, calling Trump the “founding father” of the movement Trump started.

Her speech was a recital of GOP talking points that included anti-trans rhetoric, immigration fear-mongering, and just a taste of whining about sending aid to Ukraine

She ended by saying one true thing—at least for the people at the very top who benefitted from Trump’s tax cuts for the rich, and the billionaires he has promised to serve if elected again.

“Donald Trump will make us wealthy again,” Greene said. The only question is who the “us” is, because it certainly isn’t regular Americans.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Republicans Block Senate Bill To Impose Ethics Code On Supreme Court Justices

Republicans Block Senate Bill To Impose Ethics Code On Supreme Court Justices

Democratic efforts to impose a shred of accountability on the Supreme Court failed in the Senate Wednesday when South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, joined by some of his fellow Republicans, blocked the bill as he had threatened to do on Tuesday.

“It's important that we make the effort because the American people know something has gone very wrong,” Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said in a floor speech.

The bill, which Whitehouse authored with Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin of Illinois, would require the Supreme Court to adopt a binding set of ethics rules. It’s the only court in the country without one.

This comes after months of reports of ethically dubious relationships that Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have with various billionaire GOP donors.

Durbin’s attempt to pass the bill by unanimous consent comes a day after secret recordings of both Alito and his wife were released. The Alitos’ public displays of election denial have spurred calls for ethical guardrails to be applied to the court.

Democrats held an informal roundtable on Capitol Hill Tuesday to discuss what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez described as a “crisis of legitimacy” on the court due to dark money corruption.

“These are the only governmental officials in the land who are not governed by a binding ethics code,” Rep. Jamie Raskin told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. “There's no process by which we can hold any of them accountable.”

Ocasio-Cortez said that she and Raskin are working on legislation to ban the Supreme Court from accepting gifts of more than $50, matching ethics rules followed by Congress.

“The private corruption of the justices mirrors the public corruption of justice,” Raskin said. He pointed to recent decisions by the extremist court stripping away civil rights protections, women’s rights, and labor and consumer laws.

“So as they grow more and more removed from the experiences of the way the rest of us live,” he said, “the more they're willing to just demolish the protections the rest of us need.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Tuesday that he is still considering whether to bring the bill to a regular vote.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Merrick Garland

Attorney General Blasts Trump For 'Extremely Dangerous' Lies About FBI Murder Plot

Attorney General Merrick Garland did not mince words on Thursday, calling Donald Trump’s claims of President Joe Biden authorizing the use of “deadly force” during a search for classified materials at his Mar-a-Lago resort in August 2022 “false” and “extremely dangerous.”

"The document that is being referred to in the allegation, is the Justice Department standard policy limiting the use of force, as the FBI advises. It is part of the standard operations plan for searches. And, in fact, it was even used in the consensual search of President Biden's home," he said.

Garland’s response comes a day after Trump wrote on Truth Social, “WOW! I just came out of the Biden Witch Hunt Trial in Manhattan, the ‘Icebox,’ and was shown Reports that Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) took time away from embarrassing herself in Congress to embarrass herself on social media, posting that “the Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light.”

Like Garland, the FBI released a statement Wednesday saying that the FBI “followed standard protocol in this search as we do for all search warrants, which includes a standard policy statement limiting the use of deadly force. No one ordered additional steps to be taken and there was no departure from the norm in this matter.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Truth Social

Trump Media Has Lost Over $300M So Far In 2024

Trump Media & Technology Group, which runs Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform, has filed its first quarter revenue numbers to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The good news for MAGA-loving stockholders is that the company, of which Trump owns a reported 64.9 percent of the outstanding shares, pulled in a cool $770,500. Now get your sad horn sound ready: It also reported a net loss of $327.6 million.

In a statement, the company’s CEO, former House member and Republican attack dog Devin Nunes, said the losses were due to costs in finalizing a merger with shell company Digital World Acquisition Corp. Nunes, best known for suing parody Twitter accounts, said Trump Media would now be exploring and pursuing “a wide array of initiatives and innovations to build out the Truth Social platform including potential mergers and acquisitions activities.”

Since going public in March, Truth Media’s inflated valuation led to the stock’s value plunging shortly after an initial rise. The first quarter filing comes just one month after the company’s stock plummeted for a second time after the company announced it was considering adding more than 15 percent more stock to the publicly available shares, devaluing current stockholders’ shares.

The stock ended the trading day only five percent down after the quarterly report was released, NBC reports. However, this seems to go along with what experts have characterized as Trump Media’s “meme stock trajectory.”

Meme stocks show dramatic gains and losses due to their stock value being directly connected to internet popularity on various social media platforms. The inherent issue with these stocks is that they are usually untethered from any material evaluation of the company being traded.

This frequently leads to pump-and-dump activity on stocks like Trump Media, with buyers inflating the value over short periods of time by creating social media buzz and then quickly dumping the stock for a profit.

When Truth Social first launched in early 2022, the site quickly went down with technical issues, potential copyright issues, and executives jumping ship. Even though the net losses this year amount to almost one-third of a billion dollars, the company “believes it has sufficient working capital to fund operations for the foreseeable future.”

Or until Trump dumps his shares for some quick cash.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Marjorie Taylor Greene

Margie Rips Fellow Republicans And 'Sold Out' Speaker On Bannon Show

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene spoke with alleged conman and former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon on his “War Room” show Monday. The interview was what anthropologists might call … bananas.

Greene, who is hopping mad about everything, always, is almost incoherently angry that over the weekend, Congress finally passed long-delayed foreign aid funding for our allies in Ukraine. Greene characterized sending aid to Ukraine as throwing good money after bad.

“It doesn't guarantee a Ukrainian victory because everyone knows they're going to lose eventually. It just is a matter of when," she whined.

Bannon and Greene then spent the rest of the interview accusing House Speaker Mike Johnson and his Republican supporters of not being MAGA enough. Greene seems to talk only with people who agree with her.

I've not seen people this angry since November of 2020. I mean, they are off the charts, off the charts, angry ...They're angry on a whole 'nother level. And here's what really worries me. They're done with the Republican Party. They are absolutely done with Republican leadership. Like Mike Johnson, who totally sold us out to the Democrats, would join the “uniparty” faster than anyone we've ever seen in history, and literally made a night and day change in a matter of months, betrayed everyone, betrayed the entire Republican Party, betrayed Republican voters, betrayed the Republican conference. And voters are so angry this time that I'm really worried. I am really worried. They're so angry. They're not going to give us the majority back in 2025.

Bannon says that there are no longer two major political parties, identifiable as Democrats and Republicans. Instead, it is a war between the “populist nationalists” and “globalist elite.” Greene fears Johnson’s leadership is going to lose the GOP control of Congress.

Those voters are America first, and they are fed up. They're absolutely done. They are hardcore ready to vote for Trump. They're going to jump over every, every hurdle put in front of them to vote for Trump. But they—they are very likely, a lot of them, are going to be skipping the downballot races, which is terrifying.

After fearmongering against her own political party, Greene offered up this bold prediction:

Here's what's happening, Steve. The Republican Party of old is over. It's our job to build the new Republican Party. And that new Republican Party will be MAGA.

Will this fix our government and help improve the lives of Americans? Bannon and Greene don’t seem to be interested in covering that question.

Steve Bannon interviews Marjorie Taylor Greene—it is bananas

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Jimmy Kimmel

Jimmy Kimmel Skewers Trump Over Oscars Joke Tantrum (VIDEO)

Donald Trump attacked late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel in an early morning all-over-the-map social media post Wednesday. That night, Kimmel told his audience that he learned about Trump’s latest attack on him from all the text messages waiting for him when he woke up.

“Usually, like, I'll have maybe four,” he said. “I had 100 because it appears that I once again ruffled the feathers of our Kentucky Fried former president who is—apparently, with all that's going on—still smarting from my joke about him at the Oscars."

After reading Trump’s Truth Social screed out loud, Kimmel joked, "My first thought is I'm impressed by his use of the word 'vaunted.' He was even able to spell it correctly, which is really good!" He added, "But literally everything else is not just wrong, but ‘maybe we should be worried about him’ wrong. Like, ‘maybe we should take the keys away from grandpa’ wrong."

Kimmel then fact-checked Trump’s rant.

He conceded that Trump calling him "stupid Jimmy Kimmel" was a debatable fact. But he took issue with Trump’s claim that Kimmel is not only bad at hosting the Academy Awards, but he was somehow responsible for the show’s “big ratings drop”—a “weird” assertion, Kimmel said, because ratings were up this year.

Does the late-night comedian suffer from “Trump derangement syndrome,” as the Donald claims?

“There's only one person who suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Kimmel said. “His name is Donald Trump."

Kimmel noted that a big part of Trump’s attack on him seems to be rooted in his inability to distinguish Kimmel from Academy Award-winning actor Al Pacino.

"Now, don't get me wrong,” he said. “I wish I was Al Pacino. I'm just not."

As for Trump’s insistence that Kimmel’s wife, along with people behind the scenes of the show, were begging Kimmel to not read Trump's Truth Social attack live on air during the Academy Awards broadcast, Kimmel gave this hilarious blow-by-blow account of how that all went down.

What happened is they showed me what he posted. I looked at it. I said, “Oh, I'm going to read this.”My wife went, “Oh no.”
I said, “Oh yes.”

And that was that. That was the whole story.

Kimmel said he wasn't planning to accept hosting duties again, even though he's been asked, but now that Trump weighed in on it, he has to consider it.

"You know what? Maybe you can watch on the TV in the rec room at Rikers with all the guys," he said.

And since it clearly still bothers Trump, Kimmel played the clip of him making fun of Trump at the Academy Awards by reading out Trump's attack on him.

Kimmel then reminded the audience that his show received better ratings than Trump would have you believe, with a graph showing that ratings have increased in the two years Kimmel has hosted.

"I just want to say that that is not 'down.' You want to know what 'down' looks like?” Kimmel asked, before putting up a graph showing stock plummeting. “This is the value of Truth Social stock, your company. That's 'down.'"

Zachary Mueller is the senior research director for America’s Voice and America’s Voice Education Fund. He brings his expertise on immigration politics to talk about how much money the GOP is using to promote its racist immigration campaigns.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Kennedy Biden

Kennedy Family Visits Biden White House -- Without Disgraced RFK Jr.

Members of the Kennedy family visited the White House Sunday for President Joe Biden’s St. Patrick’s Day brunch, and in case there’s any doubt about the family’s allegiances this coming November, Kerry Kennedy posted an image of the clan with the president, writing, “President Biden, you make the world better. Happy St. Patrick’s Day.”

Erstwhile Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running for president as an independent, was missing from the happy tableau.

The famously Democratic Kerry Kennedy didn’t mention her brother, his strange presidential bid, or his bad ideas about vaccines and public health—but she didn’t have to.

In October, Kerry posted a statement on behalf of her siblings denouncing their brother’s candidacy and throwing their support behind Biden.

“Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment,” she wrote. “Today's announcement is deeply saddening for us. We denounce his candidacy and believe it to be perilous for our country.”

RFK Jr.’s ideas on public health are so out there that his ally list includes speculative running mate Aaron Rodgers, who is an NFL quarterback and enthusiastic conspiracy theorist.

But that didn’t ruin the rest of the Kennedy clan’s St. Paddy’s Day fun. Biden acknowledged their attendance at the event, saying, “Welcome almost home. It wouldn’t be St. Patrick’s Day without you.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.