When will people understand that politicians will lie and do what ever else is needed to get where they want society and government to go to. Especially republican elected officials. Of course it is lies, it always is for these people. I remember being in the military being gay, having gay boyfriends, having been accepted by my command to the point of arranging rooming for me and my boyfriend to then hear republican congressmen say people in the military wouldn’t tolerate gay people in the same barracks, showers, rooms, or even working with them. WTF. Where would you go as a lower income gay person but to a place with super other hunky guys? All of them horny and not getting relief? I had more sex in the years I was in the military than I did when I got out … until I got married. Some were gay, many were straight but OK with it. But when Republicans want something to be different or fail, they create the situation they need. Normally to create a profit or ideological advantage. Hugs. Scottie
Please notice the three factors that drive republicans, racism, money, religion. In that order. Hugs. Scottie
Republicans will then begin lobbying to “reduce spending” by cutting the amount allocated for the vouchers, locking the emerging two-tier status of publicly funded education into place…
In 1776, British economist Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, a book that laid out the principles that modern economies have operated under for centuries (with the exception of the Reagan Revolution years of 1981-2021). In addition to arguing for a strong domestic manufacturing base and high taxes on the wealthy, Smith pointed out that one of the things that most directly constitutes the wealth of a nation is its educated workforce and well-informed populace (as a result of that education).
From Thomas Jefferson creating the first tuition-free American college (the University of Virginia), to Horace Mann’s advocacy of public schools in the late 19th century, right up until 1954, this was an uncontroversial position. It’s why every developed country on Earth has a vibrant public school system and — with the exception of the US since Reagan ended free college in California — most developed countries offer free or near-free college to their citizens.
But in 1954, the US Supreme Court upset the education apple cart by declaring in their Brown v Board case that “separate but equal” schools, segregated by race, were anything but “equal.” That decision fueled two movements that live on to this day.
The first was the rightwing anti-communist movement spearheaded by the John Birch Society, which was heavily funded back then by Fred Koch, the father of Charles and David Koch. They put up billboards across the country demanding that Americans rise up and “Impeach Earl Warren,” who was then the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, for requiring “communist” racial integration of our schools.
The second was the private, all-white “academy” movement that has morphed over the years into charter schools and the “school choice” movement of today. It received a major boost when the white supremacist co-founder of neoliberalism, Milton Friedman, published a widely-read and influential article in 1955 explicitly calling for what he called “education vouchers” to fund all-white private schools to “solve the national crisis” the Court had created.
In 1958 when the Virginia Supreme Court went along with the US Supreme Court’s Brown v Board decision and ordered that state’s schools desegregated, the governor shut down every public school in the state. Prince Edward County’s schools were still closed in 1964, when they were finally ordered to open by the courts.
Hundreds of “segregation academies” opened across the South; in Mississippi, for example, 41,000 white students left public schools to attend these academies in just the one year of 1969. Parents had to pay the tuition themselves, but they were willing to do so to avoid their children having to interact with Black, Hispanic, or Asian kids.
The turning point for the Republican Party was 1964, when President Johnson and a Democratic Congress passed and signed into law the Civil Rights Act. Shortly thereafter, one Southern Democratic politician after another changed party affiliation to the GOP so they could continue to argue against “forced integration” of public schools.
The Republican war on public schools burst into the open with the Reagan Revolution, when Education Secretary Bill Bennett oversaw a 30 percent cut in federal aid to public schools following Reagan’s promise to abolish the Department altogether. Every Republican running for president since has made a similar promise or claimed the need to end the Education Department.
Bill Bennett wasn’t shy about explaining why it was necessary to gut public schools, after the Supreme Court had ordered they must be racially integrated. Bennett wanted to privatize public education — as did Trump’s former Education Secretary, billionaire Betsy DeVos — and is probably most famous for his statement that gives us a clue as to why this idea of ending public education is so persistent in the GOP:
“If you wanted to reduce crime,” Bennett said on the radio, “you could, if that were your sole purpose; you could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”
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Could it be that it’s all about keeping white children away from Bennett’s Black babies? Is simple racism what’s animating the GOP’s antipathy toward public education?
One clue is that the idea of ending public education in America goes back even farther than Bennett or Reagan to a single moment and a single court decision.
When I was born, in 1951, Republicans loved public schools. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower led the charge to build gleaming new public schools all across the United States: I attended one, as did perhaps a majority of my generation.
But then came the Supreme Court, with their Brown v Board decision.
In 1957, President Eisenhower ordered the Little Rock, Arkansas, public schools desegregated. The “Little Rock Nine” — nine Black children trying to desegregate Little Rock Central High School — became nationally famous when Governor Orval Faubus prevented them from entering the school that fall, provoking Eisenhower to call up federal troops to escort the children to class.
Faubus called a referendum — an election — and the good citizens of Little Rock voted 19,470 to 7,561 to shut down their entire school system rather than comply with Eisenhower’s order. That, in turn, led back to the Supreme Court, which, in the fall of 1958, ruled unanimously in Cooper v Aaronthat the Brown v Board desegregation order was, in fact, now the law of the land for public education.
In response, whites-only private schools and “academies” began springing up across the nation, many run by all-white churches. (Jerry Falwell tried, in 1966, to open an all-white school; in 1980 he became Reagan’s main advisor on merging the white supremacist faction of evangelical Christians — also triggered by Brown v Board — into the GOP.)
Thus, in 1958 the governor of Virginia closed all the public schools in racially mixed Warren County, Norfolk, and Charlottesville; Prince Edward County’s public schools remained closed for a full five years.
While that’s the foundational history of what has become the GOP’s war on public education, for most of the past 40 years Republicans have merely claimed vague libertarian principles when they try to explain what they ironically call “school choice.”
It wasn’t until Donald Trump gave them permission — and showed them how politically potent it could be — to unleash their inner racists that the GOP went public with overt white supremacy as a core value for the party.
While Critical Race Theory (CRT) was a little-known 1993 analysis of structural racism pioneered by Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell taught only in law school, rightwing influencer Christopher Rufo popularized the term with an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox “News” show.
From there, it echoed around the GOP for a few months before catching fire across rightwing hate radio, podcasts, and Fox. Pretty soon white supremacist militia members were showing up at school board meetings threatening members that “we know where you live.”
Republicans anxious to stoke the fears of their white racist base began inveighing against teaching CRT in public schools — even though such a thing had never happened — and passing laws so loosely worded as to bar any meaningful teaching or classroom discussion of America’s racial history.
All-white private schools funded with taxpayer dollars have become the darlings of Republicans. In most cases these schools don’t need to flout the law by declaring their segregated status: Black, Asian, and Hispanic parents most often simply aren’t interested in enrolling their children in schools that proudly proclaim they will not allow a drop of “CRT,” true American history, or real science education in their classrooms.
The issue of privatizing public schools came up in Arizona in 2018 with a statewide ballot initiative that would extend free school vouchers to every student in the state: it was defeated by voters by a 2:1 ratio. Writing for The Arizona Republic, columnist Laurie Roberts was unambiguous in her description of the state’s voters’ horror at the ballot initiative:
“Actually, they didn’t just reject it. They stoned the thing, then they tossed it into the street and ran over it. Then they backed up and ran over it again.”
Republicans in the heavily gerrymandered state, though, didn’t much care about the will of the voters. Appealing exclusively to their white racist “Christian” base, they pushed what was essentially that same proposal through the GOP-controlled state legislature and it was signed into law last year by Republican then-Governor Doug Doocey.
In giving every student in the state the ability to opt out of public education with a taxpayer-funded voucher, Doocey established a new benchmark in the war against racially integrated public schools that was matched this year by Florida, Arkansas, Iowa, and Utah.
Legislation to gut public schools and replace them with vouchers for private schools have failed in six states so far (Georgia, Texas, Idaho, Virginia, Kentucky, and South Dakota), but Republicans are not letting go. This year voucher bills were introduced in at least 24 states.
The fact that most of the nation’s public school teachers are union members has given Republicans another good reason, in their minds, to do everything possible to destroy public schools. As Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed last year, in the minds of Republicans the American Federation of Teachers’ President Randi Weingarten is “the most dangerous person in the world.”
Republicans also love the fact that voucher programs mostly subsidize upper-income families, while educationally ghettoizing the children of low-income parents. Vouchers almost never cover all the costs of attending a private school, so they primarily serve as a government handout to the mostly upper-middle-class white families who already wanted to send their kids to today’s version of the segregation academies.
Once the public schools are largely dead, Republicans will begin lobbying to “reduce spending” by cutting the amount allocated for the vouchers, locking the emerging two-tier status of publicly funded education into place.
For the moment, though, private schools are a booming industry as a result of the GOP’s embrace of Friedman’s vouchers. In Florida, for example, they have virtually no rules or standards for the over-one-billion-dollars the state shovels into its private schools: while public schools must disclose their graduation rates, how they spend their money, and let anybody examine their curriculum, private academies have no such rules in many Republican-controlled states, even though they’re receiving public monies.
Many private schools across the country operate with untrained and uncertified “teachers,” have no clear standards for graduation, and refuse to teach “controversial” subjects like evolution, climate science, and the racial history of America.
Which brings us to organized religion, the other recipient of big bucks because of the school voucher movement. Schools affiliated with churches are now raking in billions every month across the US, and Republicans — who continue to push for unconstitutional things like mandatory public school prayer — pander daily to fundamentalists who don’t want their kids exposed to science or history.
Six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized this practice of shoveling taxpayer funds to churches and religious schools in their notorious Carson v Makin decision last year. As Justice Sonya Sotomayor wrote in her dissent:
[In just five short years this Court has] “shift[ed] from a rule that permits States to decline to fund religious organizations to one that requires States in many circumstances to subsidize religious indoctrination with taxpayer dollars.” This decison “continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the framers fought to build.”
Which is exactly what the GOP wants. As SenDem recently wrote for Daily Kos:
“Laura Ingraham claimed that ‘a lot of people are saying it’s time to defund government education or at least defund it by giving vouchers to parents.’ Fox’s Greg Gutfeld similarly declared that private school vouchers are needed because public schools are ‘a destructive system’ and described teachers as ‘KKK with summers off.’
“Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida has called public schools ‘a cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.’ Donald Trump declared, ‘public schools have been taken over by the radical left maniacs.’ And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia called them taxpayer-funded indoctrination centers that need to end, which is a bit ironic since she is the poster child for the necessity of funding public education.”
Sweden has been flirting with libertarianism for a few decades and was the first developed country to offer American-style school vouchers to all kids so they could attend private, for-profit public schools. Just a month ago, their government proclaimed the experiment a disaster and is trying to figure out how to shut down the private schools and re-establish a public education system.
Public schools were the great social and economic leveler for the last century of American history; Republicans want to end that and instead advantage wealthy children over their lower-income peers, particularly those whose skin is darker than Trump’s spray tan.
Public schools (and free college) made it possible for America to produce an explosion of invention and innovation throughout the mid-20th century; now other countries are surpassing us, as the dumbing-down of our kids has become institutionalized in Red state after Red state.
And public schools gave many students their first experience of interacting with people who look different from them and grew up under different circumstances, awakening many young people to the discrimination and unfairness inherent in how America has historically treated minorities.
All of which explains why Republicans so badly want to put an end to public education in America.
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From the producers who brought you “The Producers,” #Trumped is a new musical starring Matthew Broderick, Nathan Lane, Cloris Leachman and the unlikely candidate himself, Donald Trump.
This is nuts! What a pandering liar. No one who ever went to a public school thinks that kids walked the halls and sat in classes armed. What crazy hillbilly fever dream is this. Think of the hormones of kids raging, fights happening all the time, now add guns. Oh yes it would be like it is today with angry upset kids having too much access to guns. Hugs. Scottie
'The media doesn't want to talk a lot about that because it doesn't fit their narrative.'@RonDeSantis says Iowa school shooter was 'hopped up on gender ideology'
The pledge, a vestige of the McCarthy Red Scare era, is not mandatory, but has been signed by candidates for decades, including by Trump in 2020 and 2016.
Former President Donald Trump did not sign Illinois’ loyalty oath when filing his nomination papers to run in Illinois in 2024. The oath, which is not mandatory, pledges he will not advocate for the overthrow of the government. Here, Trump gestures after speaking at a campaign rally at Terrace View Event Center in Sioux Center, Iowa, Friday, Jan. 5, 2024. Andrew Harnik / Associated Press
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President Joe Biden’s campaign Saturday condemned Republican former President Donald Trump for sidestepping a decades-old, Illinois ballot-access tradition this past week in which candidates pledge against advocating for an overthrow of the government.
The Democrat’s campaign statement comes in response to a WBEZ/Chicago Sun-Times report published earlier Saturday that showed Trump did not voluntarily sign the state’s loyalty oath as part of his package of ballot-access paperwork submitted Thursday to the Illinois State Board of Elections.
That omission, coming just days before the third anniversary of the Jan. 6th insurrection for which Trump has been criminally charged, is a departure from his presidential candidacies of 2016 and 2020, when he affixed his signature to the oath both times.
“For the entirety of our nation’s history, presidents have put their hand on the Bible and sworn to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States – and Donald Trump can’t bring himself to sign a piece of paper saying he won’t attempt a coup to overthrow our government,” Biden campaign spokesman Michael Tyler said in a statement Saturday. “We know he’s deadly serious, because three years ago today he tried and failed to do exactly that.
“This is the same man who thinks American troops who died protecting the ideals outlined in the Constitution are suckers and losers – yet calls the convicted felons who violently assaulted and killed police officers on January 6th ‘hostages’. He can’t fathom putting anything – our country, our principles, or the wellbeing and safety of the American people – above his own quest for retribution and power,” Tyler said.
The Trump campaign responded Saturday to the Biden jab.
“President Trump will once again take the oath of office on January 20th, 2025, and will swear ‘to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said.
Under Illinois law, presidential candidates wanting to be on the state’s March 19th primary ballot had to turn in their nominating petitions to the State Board of Elections on Thursday or Friday, and the loyalty oath is a time-honored part of that process.
A WBEZ/Chicago Sun-Times analysis of those petitions found Biden and Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis both signed the oath — as did several lower-tier Trump acolytes in Illinois, but not Trump.
Trump’s omission has stumped some of his critics.
“Why wouldn’t he sign it?” asked former Republican U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who served on the House Jan. 6th select committee and said he signed the state loyalty oath in each of his six terms as congressman.
“Has he been advised maybe not to sign it because maybe there’s some legal exposures…given that oath, if he signed it, would be a violation of everything he actually did on Jan. 6th, 2021, and leading up to it?” Kinzinger said.
In part of the oath, candidates swear they are not communists nor affiliated with communist organizations. In the latter part of the oath, candidates attest that they “do not directly or indirectly teach or advocate the overthrow of the government of the United States or of this state or any unlawful change in the form of the governments thereof by force or any unlawful means.”
Signing it is entirely optional now after federal courts ruledit unconstitutional on free-speech grounds, but Illinois lawmakers left it in state law. Countless candidates, in flag-waving fashion, have signed it through the years even though it’s no longer compulsory.
It’s not clear why Trump chose not to sign the oath for the 2024 election cycle — a time when his nominating petitions are being challenged on grounds that he is allegedly disqualified to run by the 14th Amendment. That section of the Constitution bars insurrectionists from seeking public office.
Biden observed the Jan. 6th anniversary Friday with a blistering speech in which he characterized Trump as a mortal threat to democracy and described his conduct on Jan. 6th as “among the worst derelictions of duty by a president in American history.”
Trump was criminally charged last August by a federal grand jury for conspiracy and obstruction of justice. The charges were connected to his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election by spreading lies about election fraud and sending a crowd of supporters to the Capitol on Jan. 6th, 2021 with directions to “fight like hell.”
The ensuing overrunning of the Capitol, as presidential results were being certified, was linked to seven deaths, attacks on more than 140 police officers and criminal charges against 1,265 people, including for assaulting peace officers with deadly weapons, entering restricted areas with weapons and obstructing an official government proceeding.
More than 700 of those charged have pleaded guilty and entered into plea agreements, while nearly 140 more were found guilty at contested trials, Justice Department data show.
At least 42 Illinoisans are among those charged with Jan. 6th-related offenses, and several have been convicted, the Chicago Sun-Times has reported.
A voting-rights organization called Free Speech for People, five Illinois voters, and two Chicago law firms are contesting Trump’s nominating petitions based on his conduct before and during the insurrection.
Challenges against Trump are pending in 15 other states, according to an organization tracking them, and his name has for now been struck from the ballot in two others — Colorado and Maine. The Supreme Court Friday chose to hear Trump’s appeal of the Colorado Supreme Court decision barring him from that state’s ballot. The case will be argued Feb. 8, the New York Times reported.
On Friday, a campaign spokeswoman for Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, a frequent Biden surrogate, belittled Trump for his campaign’s decision not to sign the oath.
“Pledging not to overthrow our democracy is a hard thing to do when you’ve already attempted it once,” Pritzker spokeswoman Christina Amestoy told WBEZ.
Trump’s main 2024 rival, Biden, signed the Illinois loyalty pledge this year and ahead of his 2020 run. And one of his GOP opponents, DeSantis, did so this year as well.
State election records show that Trump’s other GOP primary opponents, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, did not sign the state loyalty oath. Christie signed the document during his 2016 run for president.
Some of Trump’s Republican political allies in Illinois did sign the oath.
State election records show U.S. Rep. Mary Miller and her husband, state Rep. Chris Miller, R-Hindsboro, both did for this election cycle.
Trump’s endorsement was pivotal in the congresswoman’s 2022 election win against Republican U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis.
Chris Miller attended Trump’s Save America Rally on Jan. 6th but said he did not enter the Capitol or participate in violence. Nonetheless, the Illinois House passed a resolution in March 2021 denouncing Chris Miller for having “participated and publicly promoted his role in a rally that led to a violent insurrection of the Capitol.”
The Millers’ Trump-endorsed ally, former GOP gubernatorial nominee and current congressional candidate Darren Bailey, also signed the loyalty oath. Now running to unseat fellow Republican Congressman Mike Bost in the March primary, Bailey signed the document in both 2022 and 2024, state records show.
On Friday, the Trump campaign observed the Jan. 6th anniversary with a litany of denouncements of Biden, accusing him of “attacking American democracy” and noting that some Jan. 6th criminal defendants “were prosecuted, convicted, or pleaded guilty to ‘parading’ which is simply an expression of political dissent.”
Kinzinger, though, told WBEZ Trump’s actions — he signed the loyalty oath before the insurrection, and didn’t now — should be interpreted literally by voters.
“What was the world like when he signed it in 2016 and when he signed it in 2020? Well, at that point, there had not been an attempted insurrection on the federal government,” Kinzinger said.
“The difference between the last two times he did it, and this time when he didn’t, is he has a track record of trying to overthrow the government,” Kinzinger said.
Dave McKinney covers Illinois government and politics for WBEZ and was the long-time Springfield bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times.
Nearly 17,000 people may have died after taking hydroxycholoroquine during the first wave of Covid-19, according to a study by French researchers.
The anti-malaria drug was prescribed to some patients hospitalized with Covid-19 during the first wave of the pandemic, “despite the absence of evidence documenting its clinical benefits,” the researchers point out in their paper, published in the February issue of Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy.
Now, researchers have estimated that some 16,990 people in six countries — France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the U.S. — may have died as a result.
That figure stems from a study published in the Nature scientific journal in 2021 which reported an 11 percent increase in the mortality rate, linked to its prescription against Covid-19, because of the potential adverse effects like heart rhythm disorders, and its use instead of other effective treatments.
Researchers from universities in Lyon, France, and Québec, Canada, used that figure to analyze hospitalization data for Covid in each of the six countries, exposure to hydroxychloroquine and the increase in the relative risk of death linked to the drug.
In fact, they say the figure may be far higher given the study only concerns six countries from March to July 2020, when the drug was prescribed much more widely.
Hydroxychloroquine gained prominence partly due to French virologist Didier Raoult who had headed the Méditerranée Infection Foundation hospital, but was later removed amid growing controversy.
It was also considered something of a “miracle cure” by the then-U.S. President Donald Trump, who said: “What do you have to lose? Take it.”
And why? I still don’t fully understand what made Trump and the GOP decide to deny vaccines publicly (while often taking vaccines privately) and to turn every medical decision into a toxic political decision based on misinformation. Why was this in their interest? Once they started down this path, they just kept doubling down, leading to the ridiculously unqualified and dangerous Florida State Surgeon General currently in power.
It’s exactly why Rand Paul invested in hydroxychloroquine early on in the early months of COVID, and then regularly attacked Dr Fauci…as the good doctor was bad for Brillohead’s bottom line.
I think it’s a combination of things. It brews mistrust of experts, education, science, and medicine, which keeps people afraid. It’s a cult in that way, you must trust the leader and exclude information that might potentially prove them wrong. By putting in a mistrust of one area of expert, it can be extended to others as well, cementing that only the in group can be trusted.
By denying that people are dying, they make people distrust reports of people dying. When people do get sick, they wait or take ineffective ‘treatments’, which then overtax the hospital facilities if/when the person actually goes in for real treatment – and then the cult leaders can say that the hospital system is failing and can’t save you, only dear leader can.
But ultimately, I think they simply don’t care. As you say, they privately take the vaccines and have top flight health care. Everyone else is less than a pawn on the board to them.
At this point on the right the tail wags the dog. These memes are coming from somewhere and being picked up by people looking around down the Q and other right wing rabbit holes. The Republican leadership has little in the way of actual leadership. First it was Limbaugh and company but now it’s faceless, nameless internet bot farms setting their agenda. They can’t hold on to power without pandering to this shit and they are more afraid of losing power than killing their own supporters.
There’s little leadership in our politics. Few Democrats supported gay marriage until public polling showed a majority in favor. If that had been the case earlier in our history how long would it have taken for civil rights laws to be enacted or interracial marriage to be legal. We didn’t get to 50% in favor of interracial marriage until the late 80s! I realize you can’t be too far off public opinion and get elected, but leaders should be leading public opinion, not following it. Consensus can be created if people with good writing and oratorical skills get out there and make the case. Of course that means risking your access to power if you don’t succeed and that right there is the big problem we face in our politics.
Remember, it’s all part of Putin’s plan to undermine democracy. Part of that is to undermine the trust in any institutional authority. As soon as Covid hit, they realized it was easy to spread lies and made up stories, and they did. Eventually, it pitted some people against other people, which is exactly the goal. And when a mass of people are distrustful of government all the grifters realize they can get viewers by fanning the flames. So it spreads around and feds on itself. And it worked! If some people die, who cares?
Echoing Randy Ellicott & Houndentenor. Republicans intentionally sow so much distrust against doctors and research that they can promote quacks into their ranks without consequence.
it was in their interest because these people gain power by making other people afraid of anything and everyone. It was in their interest because these people gain power by making other people not trust respectable and respected authorities. It was in their interest because fear, doubt, confusion, And the politics of resentment are always in the interests of authoritarians, conmen, and grifter.
Evangelicals (the MAGAt base) quite literally worship a genocidal deity. Extend that fantasy into their nearly hermetically sealed reality and voila, we have a cult with a full on death wish.
Politics because the CDC and the “Democratic appointed” Fauci had to be opposed by GOP and for no other reason. Well, yes, because Trump had no idea how to act as President.
See, the problem was that they didn’t follow all of TFG’s advice and drink bleach and stick UV light in their butts after taking the hydroxychloroquine. /s
Republicans’ successful sowing of distrust towards science and doctors during the pandemic is the biggest consequence. When President Obama successfully led the creation of the H1N1 vaccine, no one blinked. But Trump and his like-minded lackeys lied and lied and lied about the vaccine that many Republican voters trust a rando podcaster or anti-vax preacher on the street more than peer-reviewed research.
And while these anti-vaxxers scam their viewership and rake in the $$, they take the vax behind the scenes.
Touting quack remedies instead of effective treatment for a disease that can kill you, or leave you seriously disabled for long stretches, is not the finest re-election tactic–especially when your opponent is urging his voters to get highly effective vaccines.
Touting quack remedies instead of effective treatment for a disease that can kill you, or leave you seriously disabled for long stretches, is not the finest re-election tactic–especially when your opponent is urging his voters to get highly effective vaccines.
This is profit. Yet Republican James Comer claims that Biden getting a loan repaid by his brother and his son when he was not in office is corruption. He mocked the reporting of tRump doing what they are trying to impeach Pres. Joe Biden for, which again Biden did not gain any profit. The republicans are so full of bull. They want to do to Biden what they did to Clinton with the Benghazi hearings. They held 9 hearings, were going to hold a 10th, even after the first 9 found no wrong doing or crime by Clinton. But the constant accusations on Fox and other right wing media tarnished her for something she did not do and brought her poll numbers down. The republicans are desperate to do that to Biden because their candidates suck. Hugs. Scottie
Arthur Delaney
Updated ·5 min read
Donald Trump’s businesses received nearly $8 million in payments from foreign governments while Trump was president, according to new research by Democrats on Capitol Hill.
Unlike Republicans in their efforts to pin corruption on President Joe Biden, Democrats on the House oversight committee have receipts — more than 400 pages of them — that show payments to Trump’s businesses from foreign officials likely seeking to influence the U.S. government.
Trump refused to divest from his business empire when he became president, creating an opportunity for anyone hoping to win his favor to put money straight into his pocket by staying at his hotels.
“When he arrived in the White House, Trump was determined not only to keep this well-branded global corporate empire going but to seize a new and unprecedented opportunity to make it ever more lucrative for himself and his family,” the oversight committee’s Democratic staff, led by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), said in their report.
Democrats and nonpartisan ethics experts have long argued that Trump’s refusal to divest violated the U.S. Constitution’s ban on presidents accepting gifts or “emoluments” from kings, princes or foreign states. Trump faced emoluments lawsuits, but the Supreme Court declared the cases moot after he left the White House in January 2021.
Meanwhile, since 2019, Democrats on the House oversight committee have sought records from Trump’s accounting firm reflecting his foreign income. After a federal court awarded access in 2022, Democrats said they’d found records reflecting more than $750,000 in payments from foreign officials at Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C. Despite a court order requiring more material to be turned over, Republicans quietly shut down document production last year as they launched their quest for dirt on Biden.
Using documents obtained by the court order, plus already-public records, Democrats tallied $7.8 million in foreign payments from 20 countries during Trump’s presidency. Most of the sum came from Chinese sources, including China’s embassy in the U.S. and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, a state-owned enterprise that leased property at Trump Tower in New York. Democrats suggest in their report that the payments from ICBC could have affected the Trump administration’s decision not to sanction the bank for ties to North Korea in 2017.
Democrats stressed Thursday that their report was based on records from only two years of Trump’s time in the White House, and that the $7.8 million is likely an undercount of the full money Trump received from foreign governments.
“What we have is essentially the tip of the iceberg,” Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) told reporters. “So this $7.8 million is just a small window ― obviously a significant amount of money, but a small window ― into what is likely a fairly large sum of money and gifts.”
Though Democrats presented their report as a continuation of their investigation into Trump’s violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, it’s clearly intended as a rebuke of the impeachment inquiry against Biden. The House of Representatives could hold an impeachment vote sometime in the coming months.
Republicans have accused Biden of improperly benefiting from his son Hunter Biden’s business deals, through which the younger Biden received millions of dollars from foreign nationals in China and Ukraine during and after Joe Biden’s time as vice president. Republicans have said Joe Biden may have accepted foreign bribes through his son’s work.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) speaks to journalists on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on Dec. 13.
The only problem with the allegations is that there’s not much proof. Republicans have sifted through years of Hunter Biden’s bank records without finding any significant cash flows to the president ― except for four $1,380 transfers that were apparently reimbursements for truck payments the president made on his son’s behalf in 2018. House oversight committee chair James Comer (R-Ky.) has nevertheless said that because Hunter Biden’s money came from foreign sources, the payments to his father were tainted, even if they were loan reimbursements.
As HuffPost has previously reported, the foreign payments that went directly to businesses controlled by Trump himself might be better examples of the kind of corruption Republicans are talking about.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a leader of the impeachment inquiry against Biden and one of the former president’s top defenders in Congress, deflected a question last year about Trump’s conflict of interest by pointing out that the former president donated his pay back to the government.
“President Trump didn’t take a salary,” Jordan said. “President Trump did so many good things for the country, did more of what he said he would do as president than any president, certainly in my lifetime.”
Raskin on Thursday ridiculed the no-salary argument.
“You don’t get to choose to refuse your salary and then take money from foreign governments instead,” he said. “The founders were emphatic that the president of the United States be someone who gets his money not from foreign governments, but rather from Americans.”
As for the impeachment inquiry against Biden, Raskin called it a hopeless wild goose chase.
“They found nothing, and look what we’ve been able to determine when we finally were able to extract just two years of information,” Raskin said.
Using documents from the Mazars settlement, Democrats tally $7.8 million Trump's business received from foreign governments while he was president https://t.co/8EOqw0RGHD
Donald Trump’s businesses during his presidency received at least $7.8 million in payments from the foreign governments and officials of 20 countries, according to a report released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. https://t.co/VqLafn1JOS
Donald Trump’s businesses received at least $7.8 million from 20 foreign governments during his presidency, according to a new report released by House Democrats.
Of course Stinky has received buttloads of cash from foreign governments, while president. Hell, the goddam Saudis were perpetually renting out 2 floors of Trump’s DC hotel, despite no one staying there most of the time.
This is why Trump likely assumed that Biden also received boatloads of foreign cash, because he has, OR he’s following Goebbels’ protocols.
Or when he’s accused of quoting Hitler, unwittingly reveals that he’s familiar enough with Hitler’s speeches to claim that he has used somewhat different phrasing. He’s ever the dangerous imbecile.
Watch the MEDIA let this SLIDE like ALL his other OUTRAGES! Never a WORD of media complaint or warning about his relentless FASCIST rhetoric, even about his stochastic terrorism!
Every DAY we heard about Hillary’s emails in 2016! WHEN do we hear about the REAL danger posed to the national security by the over 100 documents dealing with nuclear secrets that Trump held on to ILLEGALLY after he left office?! MEDIA, WHERE ARE YOU?!
Scottie's Playtime 