Lessons of History and Trying To Avoid the Same Mistakes

[Sixties Fan]

 

[struth]

Do not worry. I am laughing myself so hard.

All of that said with a straight face and no evidence to take to court. ROTFLMHO

Um it’s no secret he help set up the Electors Trust in 2016

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[struth]

wow only an idiot would actually believe we are spending 40 percent less today then we were in 1980

i tell ya what, show us…

 

[Sixties Fan]

[ There goes the Hunter case........ ]

An Internal Revenue Service criminal investigator who has accused Justice Department officials of show-walking a long-running probe into President Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s tax affairs has cut off communication with a key congressional committee amid questions about the veracity of his claims and his motivations for coming forward.

The special agent, Gary Shapley, is a veteran of the IRScriminal investigations department who on Thursday revealed his identity in an interview with CBS News.

Mr Shapley is set to give evidence in a closed session before the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday. That panel, which has jurisdiction over the IRS, is led by Representative Jason Smith, a Missouri Republican.


But even as he is poised to testify before the House panel, the 14-year IRS veteran has now cut off communication with the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees the Internal Revenue Service, after his attorney met with committee representatives.

Mr Shapley has also cancelled a scheduled interview with that committee, which is led by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon.

A Finance Committee source told The Independent that staffers from both the GOP and Democratic sides of the committee had met with one of the attorneys known to represent Mr Shapley, a former federal prosecutor named Mark Lytle.

“Democratic and Republican Finance Committee staff previously met for several hours with counsel representing an IRS whistleblower, and counsel were made aware of the committee’s investigative procedures. Committee staff on both sides agreed with counsel to meet directly with the whistleblower next week, however the whistleblower has since backed out of that agreement and declined an attempt to reschedule,” they said.

The source added that Finance Committee Chair Senator Wyden and his staff are “ready to arrange a meeting on terms that comply with laws protecting taxpayer data and ensure a fair and rigorous investigation”.
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He added that in his experience, prosecutors “usually” win arguments over whether to bring charges in a particular case, even in politically sensitive matters such as an investigation into a sitting president’s son.

Mr Strzok, who once served as the Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, also suggested that the fact that only two of the investigators have chosen to go to Congress with allegations of favouritism towards Hunter Biden is a sign that the special agents in question have an axe to grind.

“There’s a whole team of people … if there was a real problem, I would have expected to see more,” he said.

“It sounds very much like at least this one [agent] believes that charges should be brought. But at the end of the day, it’s not his call. He’s not trained as a prosecutor, he’s not thinking about, the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, he doesn’t know what hurdles are going to exist in the courtroom”.

Mr Strzok added that if the concerns raised by the agents in question were valid, it’s highly likely that prosecutors in Mr Weiss’ office would have already resigned over a decision not to charge Hunter Biden if improper political influence was being exerted over the probe.

Identity of Mr Shapley’s other attorney raises alarms

In his interview with CBS, Mr Shapley said he is a registered Republican and suggested that he should be thought of as “not a political person” because he has never been involved in political campaigns, though his position as an IRS criminal investigator means participating in political campaigns would be a violation of federal law.

He also told the television network that his legal efforts are being aided by a nonprofit staffed by former Republican congressional staffers in addition to Mr Lytle, a former federal prosecutor who has experience representing federal employees who’ve been accused of political bias as well as white-collar criminal defendants.

But it is the involvement of that nonprofit, Empower Oversight, that has raised suspicions of political motivations among people close to congressional oversight efforts, particularly after Mr Shapley declined to speak to the Democratic-led Finance Committee.

In addition to Mr Lytle, Mr Shapley has also been represented in his whistleblower matters by the founder of Empower Oversight, Tristan Leavitt.

Mr Leavitt is a former Trump administration appointee to the Merit System Protection Board who also spent time working for the Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal agency charged with enforcing whistleblower protection laws as well as the Hatch Act, a New Deal-era statute which prohibits federal employees from engaging in certain partisan activities while on the government payroll.

Since leaving government service at the end of the Trump administration, he has been involved with representing a group of former FBI special agents who call themselves “The Suspendables”.

The ex-agents claim they were unlawfully retaliated against for expressing what they describe as conservative political viewpoints and for voicing concerns about excessive use of force when arresting suspects charged with crimes stemming from participation in the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

Mr Leavitt testified alongside several of the agents at a congressional hearing last week, during which two of his clients admitted to receiving funds from a prominent ex-aide to former president Donald Trump, Kash Patel.

While Mr Leavitt claimed in his testimony that his clients were unlawfully retaliated against for making protected disclosures of alleged wrongdoing, a top FBI official stated in a letter reported by The New York Times that one of the agents in question had his security clearance revoked for having “espoused an alternative narrative about the events at the US Capitol” in communications with supervisors, as well as refusing to carry out orders to join an FBI Swat team to aid the arrest of a suspect known to own multiple AR-15-style rifles and who belonged to the Three Percenter anti-government extremist movement.

According to sources familiar with congressional efforts to verify Mr Shapley’s allegations, Mr Leavitt’s involvement raised “a big red flag” because of allegations that his clients may have lied to the House Judiciary Committee regarding their receipt of funds from Mr Patel and in their description of events leading up to their dismissal from government service.





(full article online)

IRS ‘whistleblower’ who claimed Hunter Biden case was mishandled won’t cooperate with Senate probe

EXCLUSIVE: Whistleblower has cut off communication with the Senate Finance Committee even as he prepares to testify before a GOP-led House panel, writes Andrew Feinberg

news.yahoo.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

[ 1984 - Big Brother is Watching You ]

 

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[Sixties Fan]

Debt ceiling deal: What's in, what's out of the agreement to avert US default

President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy have reached an agreement in principle on legislation to increase the nation’s borrowing authority and avoid a federal default. McCarthy, R-Calif., said the House will vote on the legislation on Wednesday, giving the Senate time to consider it...

www.aol.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

This agreement is good news for the American people, because it prevents what could have been a catastrophic default and would have led to an economic recession, retirement accounts devastated, and millions of jobs lost.

The agreement protects Congressional Democrats’ and my key priorities and legislative accomplishments, including the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, the PACT Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act -- the most aggressive action in our history to tackle the climate crisis, invest in environmental justice, and create millions of clean energy manufacturing jobs.

This agreement also protects the economic gains we’ve made together: 12.7 million jobs created and the lowest unemployment rate in more than 50 years.

And, this agreement keeps my commitment to the American people. No one will lose their health care, no one will be pushed into poverty, and we will continue to invest in programs that working families rely on.

Now, this agreement represents a compromise, which means not everyone gets what they want.



Joe Biden

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

[ Pedophilia looking for a place to stay ]

 

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[Sixties Fan]

[ This is our Former President on Memorial Day ]

Donald Trump predictably made Memorial Day all about himself on Monday.
The former president began a post on his Truth Social platform innocuously enough when he wished a “happy Memorial Day to all.”

But it then devolved into a ranting screed as he continued:

“But especially to those who gave the ultimate sacrifice for the country they love, and to those in line of a very different, but equally dangerous fire, stopping the threats of the terrorists, misfits and lunatic thugs who are working feverishly from within to overturn and destroy our once great country, which has never been in greater peril than it is right now. We must stop the communists, Marxists and fascist ‘pigs’ at every turn and, Make America Great Again!”

See the whole, all-caps post here:

TRUTHSOCIAL.COM
Trump was similarly self-indulgent on 2018’s Memorial Day when he suggested fallen soldiers “would be very happy” about the state of the economy under his administration.



Veterans group VoteVets at the time described it as the “most inappropriate” Memorial Day comment ever from an American president.

Donald Trump Marks Memorial Day With Unhinged, All-Caps Rant

The former president has a long history of making offensive and insulting comments about military members, despite never serving himself.

www.huffpost.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

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[Sixties Fan]

In the recesses of the internet where some of Donald Trump’s most fervent supporters stoke conspiracies and plot his return to the White House, suspected con artists have been mining their disappointment over the last presidential election for gold.

They’ve been peddling “Trump Bucks,” which are emblazoned with photos of the former president, and advertising them online as a kind of golden ticket that will help propel Trump’s 2024 bid and make the “real patriots” who support him rich when cashed in.

John Amann told NBC News he bought $2,200 worth of Trump Bucks and other items over the past year only to discover they were worthless when he tried to cash them in at his local bank. So he’s gone on Twitter to warn other Trump supporters not to fall for this scam.

NBC News has identified the Colorado-based companies behind the Trump Bucks as Patriots Dynasty, Patriots Future and USA Patriots and reviewed dozens of social posts, online complaints and hundreds of misleading ads for the products. Additionally, NBC News has found at least a dozen people like Amann who say they invested thousands of dollars after watching the pitches on Telegram and other websites that strongly suggested that Trump himself was endorsing these products.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

‘Trump Bucks' Promise Wealth for MAGA Loyalty. Some Lose Thousands

An internet scam that peddles "Trump Bucks" as a kind of golden ticket to Donald Trump supporters has led some to lose thousands of dollars.

www.nbcphiladelphia.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

What a Vietnam War Riot Says about Today’s Culture Wars​

Missing from history books is a key moment in America's culture wars.

It took place 50 years ago and is now called the "Hard Hat Riot."

The tactics used by Nixon to stoke division then are strikingly similar to those used by modern right-wing extremists like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.

In 1970, hundreds of construction workers pummeled around 1,000 student demonstrators -- including two of my friends -- during a protest against the Vietnam War in New York City. The "Hard Hat Riot," as it came to be known, ushered in an era of cynical fear-mongering aimed at dividing the nation.

 

[Sixties Fan]

For Timothy Bachleitner, a Republican Party leader in this small Wisconsin city, his party’s collapse in a spring election for state Supreme Court was demoralizing enough. But what really hurt was when a Mack truck rolled through Ripon not long after, wrenched up a building revered as the sentimental birthplace of the GOP, and plunked it down on a commercial corridor a little more than a mile away.

The Little White Schoolhouse, where a group of Whigs, Free Soilers and Democrats met to form a new, anti-slavery party in 1854, had been moved several times before, and the building’s owner, the Ripon Chamber of Commerce, said the new location would make it easier to accommodate visitors when Republicans hold their national convention in Milwaukee next year. But the National Register of Historic Places was not impressed, telling officials the schoolhouse would be delisted. The episode sparked a minor controversy in Republican Party circles around the state.

Whatever the logic — more parking, a planned visitor center with actual bathrooms in an old bank building next door — this piece of GOP history now sits across from a vape shop, near a car dealership, a Culver’s restaurant and a sewage treatment plant. For Bachleitner, chair of the Fond du Lac County GOP, it seemed evocative — not so much of the party’s history as, at least in Wisconsin, its decline.

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t’s been going a lot like that for Republicans in Wisconsin lately, which has been jarring for a state that, post-Barack Obama, had seemingly been shifting to the right. For more than a decade, Republicans have used aggressive redistricting and other heavy-handed tactics in the state Legislature to press a narrow advantage into a seemingly permanent upper hand over Democrats. It began with the election of Republican Gov. Scott Walker in the tea party wave of 2010 and continued through a bold but unsuccessful effort by hard-line Republicans to decertify the state's 2020 presidential election results. But Joe Biden won the state in 2020. And in the April election, liberal Milwaukee County judge Janet Protasiewicz beat conservativeformerstate Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly by a whopping 11 percentage points, flipping the ideological majority of the court.

In the aftermath, even Republicans here are acknowledging that the state has now shifted leftward, and abortion has a lot to do with that. The end of Roe v. Wade last year effectively reinstated Wisconsin’s 19th-century abortion ban, which is already being challenged — and those challenges will likely be decided by the state Supreme Court. That’s why Protasiewicz campaigned heavily on protecting abortion rights, and the election turned almost entirely on the issue. Turnout was staggering. In 2015, in a similar spring election, a liberal state Supreme Court justice won reelection in a contest in which about 813,000 people voted. This year, the total number of voters who cast ballots in the Supreme Court race more than doubled to top 1.8 million.

To gauge how the state GOP was assessing those results, and before meeting Bachleitner in Ripon, I drove to a Lincoln Day Dinner in rural Merrillan, Wis., a couple of hours west. In the parking lot, I met a family on their way in. The husband, Chris Faeth, told me flatly that “the Republican Party is dead.” His wife, Ann, said she could see the liberal swing of the state in its demographics — the cities of Milwaukee, Madison and La Crosse — and in the “fake news” that she said left conservatives with “no voice.” Chris’ father, Norm, told me that coming back is “going to take some time.”

“Republicans,” he said, “need to solve this abortion issue.”

Inside the supper club, I met state Rep. Donna Rozar, a Republican who told me she’d been “disappointed, obviously” with the election. She called the political climate “challenging,” which is the assessment of Republicans pretty much everywhere in Wisconsin.

“We got our butts kicked,” Rohn Bishop, Bachleitner’s predecessor as chair of the Fond du Lac County GOP and, now, mayor of the small city of Waupun, told me. “What the Republican base demands and what independent voters will accept are growing further apart.”

Bishop and I were eating lunch in a bar. The only way forward for the GOP in Wisconsin, joked a man drinking Jack and Coke beside us, might be to “kill the millennials.”

It wasn’t long ago that no Republican in Wisconsin was talking like that. Donald Trump in 2016 carried the state for the Republican Party in a presidential race for the first time since 1984. And even after Biden won it back for the Democrats in 2020, there was — and still is — a credible case to be made that of all the swing states, Wisconsin might be the likeliest for Republicans to flip in 2024.

For one thing, its demographics, unlike the rapidly diversifying states of Georgia, Arizona or Nevada, still look good for the GOP. In the 2020 election, 86 percent of voters were white, while people without college degrees — one of the Republican Party’s most reliable constituencies — made up two-thirds of the electorate. The state’s incumbent Republican senator, Ron Johnson, who entered his reelection campaign last year as one of the most vulnerable incumbents in the country, won one of the year’s most expensive Senate races.

And even in the April elections, two conservative-backed ballot measures passed — one making it harder for people to get out of jail on bail, the other an advisory-only measure in which Wisconsinites said able-bodied, childless adults should be required to look for work in order to receive welfare benefits.

There was a reason, said Brian Schimming, chair of the Wisconsin Republican Party, that the Republican National Committee had picked Wisconsin to host its convention next year. He has been telling RNC members, he said, that “the atmospherics are very good for us in Wisconsin next year.” Even in a losing effort in April, the Republican base “got out big-time.” Turnout will be higher in a presidential election on both sides, and the issue set will likely be broader than abortion alone.

That’s what Republicans who have won elections in Wisconsin are betting on. When I asked Walker, the former governor, about the party’s prospects in Wisconsin, he wasn’t downtrodden. Given the explosion of the vote in left-leaning Madison and shrinking margins for Republicans in the Milwaukee suburbs, he said, the party had an urgent need to make inroads with young voters. It also needs to focus the electorate more on the economy and public safety than issues of abortion or disputes about the 2020 election, he said.

But then he said something that surprised me. The common refrain from Republicans in Wisconsin is that the state is “purple” if not “right-leaning.” But Walker didn’t view it that way. He called his own electoral success — and Johnson’s — an “exception.”

“Wisconsin has historically,” he said, “and I think largely continues to be, a blue state.”




(full article online)

‘Numbers Nobody Has Ever Seen’: How the GOP Lost Wisconsin

Did abortion make Wisconsin a blue state again?

news.yahoo.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

[ More of this in the coming year ]

Former President Donald Trump angrily disowned his former press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, after she claimed that Ron DeSantis was closing in on him in the polls.

In a post on Truth Social page, Trump accused McEnany of citing the "wrong" poll numbers on Fox News and suggested that she was a "RINO," or "Republican in name only."


"Kayleigh 'Milktoast' McEnany just gave out the wrong poll numbers on FoxNews," Trump wrote.

"I am 34 points up on DeSanctimonious, not 25 up. While 25 is great, it's not 34. She knew the number was corrected upwards by the group that did the poll. The RINOS & Globalists can have her. FoxNews should only use REAL Stars!!!"

Trump apparently meant to say "milquetoast," an adjective meaning a weak or feeble person, which derives from a popular comic strip from the early 20th century about a timid character called 'Casper Milquetoast.'

McEnany made the claim during a Tuesday night interview with Fox News host Jesse Watters.

She was apparently citing data last week by Trump's pollsters, McLaughlin and Associates, which found that DeSantis had gained nine points against Trump, reducing his polling lead from 34 to 25 points.

McEnany was an ardent Trump loyalist, and served as White House press secretary for much of 2020, defending his response to the COVID-19 pandemic and backing his false claims of victory in the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden.

After leaving the White House she has worked as a Fox News contributor, and advised Trump to delay announcing his 2024 candidacy after the GP's disappointing 2022 midterm results.


[full article online]

Trump angrily disowned his loyalist former press secretary as a ‘RINO’ for citing poll numbers that didn’t show him beating DeSantis by enough

Trump took issue with Kayleigh McEnany citing poll numbers to Fox News that suggested his 34 point lead in Iowa had been reduced to 25 points.

news.yahoo.com