The Blue Country Gazette is the successor to the Rim Country Gazette, reflecting our evolution to a nationwide political blog for readers who identify as "blue," liberals, progressives, and/or Democrats. Our mission is to provide distinctive coverage of issues during a time of extreme polarization in the U.S. We strive to provide side-stories and back-stories that provide additional insights and perspectives conventional coverage often doesn't include.
Attribution: AP With combover failing, balding President Donald Trump speaks with reporters as he departs for China on May 12.BUT TELLS REPORTER: "I doubled the size of [my ballroom] you dumb person."
President Donald Trump was not a happy camper as reporters peppered him with questions before he boarded Marine One on Tuesday.
When asked whether the devastating economy factored into his supposed negotiations with Iran, Trump said the quiet part super duper loudly.
“Not even a little bit,” he said. “The only thing that matters when
I’m talking about Iran: they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think
about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”
Admitting that he doesn’t think about “anybody” may be the most
truthful thing that Trump’s ever done. But that honesty disappeared
quickly, of course, when he was asked whether his failure to lower inflation reflects a failure of policy.
"Mypolicies are working incredibly. If you go back to just before
the war—for the last three months—inflation was at 1.7%,” he said. “Now,
we had a choice: let these lunatics have a nuclear weapon. If you want
to do that, then you’re a stupid person. And you happen to be, I mean, I
know you very well.”
Trump got even angrier when a reporter asked about the soaring costs
of his ballroom—which was originally pitched as “privately funded”—whose
price tag has ballooned by hundreds of millions of dollars, including potentially $1 billion from taxpayers.
"I doubled the size of it, you dumb person,” Trump snapped. “You are not a smart person.”
Every accusation is a confession with him.
Trump sound asleep as American citizens await relief that is not coming.
Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich. (photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star)
"Trump screams, hollers, pounds his Mar-a-Lago desk, and threatens
legal action, but there’s nothing he can do. He’s out of office."
Robert Reich/Substack
13 May 26
I had dinner recently with a group of political operatives —
sophisticated people who for years have been advising politicians and
candidates. During dinner they shared with me their fantasy, which they
gave 30 percent odds of becoming a reality within the next four months.
In my dinner companions’ fantasy, Trump’s failed war will elevate gas
and food prices so high and long that much of the Republican base will
begin turning against Trump. And Trump’s mental problems will become
even more obvious.
Faced with all this, JD Vance promises Marco Rubio that he’ll appoint
him vice president if Rubio joins Vance in seeking to oust Trump under
the 25th Amendment.* Rubio agrees.
Vance and Rubio then approach House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate
Majority Leader John Thune for confidential discussions in which they
broach the possibility. Johnson and Thune give Vance and Rubio their
tacit support.
Vance and Rubio then get Pete Hegseth to sign on, promising Hegseth
that he’ll keep his job. They get Todd Blanche to sign on by promising
him he’ll be appointed permanent attorney general.
Vance, Rubio, Hegseth, and Blanche are what Thune and Johnson need to make the 25th stick.
This arrangement serves everyone’s interests. For Vance and Rubio, it
avoids what could be a messy 2028 primary election in which the two are
pitted against each other. As president, Vance gets a head start on
being elected president in 2028. As vice president, Rubio is heir
apparent in 2032 (when Rubio will be only 60 years old) or in 2036.
As president and vice president, Vance and Rubio end Trump’s tariffs
and his war, which have caused prices to soar, upset the Republican
base, and turned much of the world against America.
Hegseth gets the job security he’s desperate for. Blanche gets the promotion he covets.
Republicans in the House and Senate get rid of Trump, who’s become an
albatross around their necks and who they fear, if he remains in
office, will cause them to lose control over the House and Senate in the
midterms — and could lead to a congressional rout in 2028.
The plan is finalized when Trump is away at Mar-a-Lago. It’s executed
in a conference call to Trump — during which Vance, Rubio, Hegseth,
Blanche, Johnson, and Thune notify Trump he’s no longer president.
Trump screams, hollers, pounds his Mar-a-Lago desk, and threatens
legal action, but there’s nothing he can do. He’s out of office.
I listened intently as my dinner companions spelled all this out. “So
you really think there’s a 30 percent chance of this happening?” I
asked them.
“Could be higher if the war continues,” one of them said, and the
others agreed. Another of them thought the odds already higher.
“I can’t decide whether to be elated or worried,” I responded.
They laughed, but I was serious.
_____
A** To remind you: Section 4 of the 25th Amendment states that
“whenever the Vice President and a majority of … the principal officers
of the executive departments … transmit to the president pro-tempore
of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their
written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers
and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume
the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.” Section 2 of
the 25th Amendment states that “whenever there is a vacancy in the
office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice
President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of
both Houses of Congress.
What should be an impossible occurrence has now become routine.
The conservatives on the nation’s highest court continue to undermine
democracy and the Constitution—and if they have to lie to do it, so be
it.
So perhaps we shouldn’t be all that surprised to learn that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Louisiana v. Callais, in which he blithely destroyed the Voting Rights Act, had a major statistical error at the heart of it that undermines a big part of his analysis.
This would be bad enough if it were a genuine error, as that alone
should be a five-alarm fire and require a genuine reckoning with what,
exactly, is going on at the Supreme Court that a landmark civil rights
law can just go poof based on a mistake. But it’s not really an error.
Rather, the Department of Justice was selling—and Justice Alito was
definitely buying—a convenient lie.
The DOJ submitted a friend-of-the-court brief in Callais,
as the federal government wasn’t a party to the case. But Donald
Trump’s DOJ was never going to pass up the opportunity to help dismantle
voting rights. That brief had a hook custom-designed to ensnare Alito, a
man who thinks he is very smart and not at all driven by his partisan
instincts—so he loves to dress up his naked bigotry with a bit of
history or math when it suits him.
The DOJ’s brief provided Alito, who basically did a little bit of a
cut-and-paste, with one of the major factual underpinnings for his
conclusion that we totally fixed racism and therefore the VRA was no
longer necessary: Black voter turnout in Louisiana surpassed that of
white voters in two of the last five presidential elections.
To say this analysis was flawed is a bit of an understatement.
The DOJ calculated Louisiana’s Black voter turnout as a proportion of
the total Black population over the age of 18, and did the same for
white voter turnout. However, that latter group—the denominator of the
statistic, if you want to get fancy—includes people who can’t vote, like
non-citizens or people with felony convictions.
People who actually do statistics understand this doesn’t work, as it
compares two different groups of people. The first is composed of
people who can vote and do, and the latter is composed of people who can
vote and do not, AND people who cannot vote at all. Normally, the
denominator would instead be something like all eligible voters.
Attribution: Drew Sheneman/Tribune Content Agency
When The Guardian analyzed the numbers in the DOJ brief, they found
that Black voter turnout genuinely exceeded white turnout only in 2012.
This likely wasn’t an error by the DOJ borne out of incompetence, but rather malice and mucking about with turnout demographics.
“They had to fudge how they’re calculating the turnout rate to get
there, and they’re not even taking into account margin of error, and all
these other methodology issues about the current population survey to
arrive at that number,” said voter turnout expert Michael McDonald.
“Someone knew what they were doing.”
When asked for comment, the DOJ confirmed its methodology but
wouldn’t say anything more, and, of course, the Supreme Court isn’t
talking, so suck it. You’ll take the gutting of the VRA and like it.
Part of why Alito and his pals are so susceptible to this sort of
thing is that they are too arrogant to know what they don’t know and too
willing to recycle any conservative claptrap that confirms their prior
beliefs.
That’s what happened in Dobbs v. Jackson, where Alito fashioned himself a historian,
spelunking back through time, picking up bits here and there, and
smashing them together incorrectly so that he could gut abortion
rights.
But sometimes, it’s just lies. Like Justice Neil Gorsuch lying about the praying football coach in Bremerton v Kennedy, framing
him as just a widdle guy doing a nice quiet prayer after a tough game
when literal pictures show him leading a giant crowd, including his
players, in prayer from the 50-yard line. But hey, you gotta lie to
figure out a way to force evangelical Christian prayer on public schools
and pretend it is What The Founders Wanted.
There’s also the conservative Christian website designer who got her whole case before the Supreme Court based on her assertion
that she had been asked to make a same-sex wedding website and
therefore had to race to get a Colorado law mandating basic civil rights
protections for LGBTQ+ people thrown out. But there was never a
request, nor had she ever built any wedding websites.
The GOP appointees on the court care as little about facts as they do
about the law. They know their real job is to deliver results for
conservatives, and they’re happy to do whatever they can to help.
Donnie's immoral Kangaroo Court strikes again. How many hits can American democracy take? And how can this "high court" reconcile its purely racist actions with its constitutional responsibilities? The Evil Six would have been great plantation owners. Clarence Thomas, you are a disgraceful Uncle Tom. If your face weren't already black you would blackface it and start tap dancing.
Attribution: FBI The monochrome image, released by the Department of Defense on Friday, displays a background with a dense, speckled pattern and a central crosshair reticle. A dark, circular object is located at the bottom quadrant and right of center of the reticle.
Instead of truth we get blurry pictures of maybe
aliens
President Donald Trump would like the American public to stop talking
so much about skyrocketing gas prices, humanitarian disasters,
governmental corruption, and his own incompetence—and instead focus on
little green men,
Or, to be more precise, blurry and unclear photos that could maybe
possibly (but not very likely) be little green men, or whatever color
alien beings might be.
On Friday, the Department of Defense released files from the
government’s archives of material related to unidentified anomalous
phenomenon, commonly known by the outdated acronym UFOs. In its coverage
of the release, The New York Times had to break
from its generally credulous coverage of Trump, noting, “The initial
files are murky still images that show what could be anything. In one, a
cluster of dots appear on the screen. In another, there are some
strangely shaped objects.”
This is not exactly the “truth” that the classic sci-fi TV series “The X-Files” told us was “out there.”
Attribution: FBIThis
archival photograph depicts the lunar surface as viewed from the
landing site of Apollo 12. This image features five highlighted areas of
interest, labeled “Area 1” through “Area 5,” above the horizon, in
which unidentified phenomena are visible.
To be fair, the official government website
releasing the blurry photos is designed like something out of “The
X-Files.” Animated images and all-caps text promising to “begin the
process of identifying and releasing government files related to alien
and extraterrestrial life” would probably be too embarrassing for
another administration, but it is just another day under Trump.
Further undermining the legitimacy of this conveniently timed campaign is the fact that the administration’s media allies at Fox News were given an advance look at the release. The network published its report
on the disclosure as a “first on Fox” exclusive, meaning they were
tipped to the content before other (more skeptical and independent) news
outlets.
The UFO release is the latest in a series of headline-grabbing
disclosures from the Trump administration. In March of last year, it
released files on the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy, and the following July, it released files on Martin Luther King Jr.
The administration’s willingness to release files on topics from many decades ago stands in contrast to its unwillingness to follow through
on disclosing files related to accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, a
former close friend of Trump. But after all, there aren’t any lewd notes between Trump and aliens like there seemingly were with Epstein. As far as the public knows, at least.
Millions of Americans are grappling with rising gas prices thanks to Trump’s attack on Iran, a conflict that Trump has been bungling since he started it just over two months ago. They’re paying more for products because of tariffs, losing access to healthcare, watching people die because vital foreign aid was cut off, and witnessing rampant corruption they weren’t doing was asking for blurry pictures of maybe
aliens. But Trump delivered, and he wishes people would stop talking
about all those other things.
Attribution: AP originalA man walks past the News Corp. and Fox News headquarters on April 19, 2023, in New York.
Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the
right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and
why you need to know.
They become a cult, marching obediently in Trump's shadow
Republicans are eagerly pushing three wildly unpopular ideas with a certainty that boggles the mind.
President Donald Trump started off the week by asserting
that the shooting incident during the White House Correspondents’
Dinner validated his demands for the construction of a gaudy ballroom at
the White House. These demands were soon backed up by congressional
Republicans fanning out to cable news shows, along with support from
longtime Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
Later in the week Trump’s Department of Justice began setting in
motion the rollback of popular gun safety measures contained within the
Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, including closing the gun show
loophole on background checks. Even Republicans voted for that
legislation just a few years ago.
Attribution: Clay Bennett/Tribune Content Agency
And GOP lawmakers returned to one of their oldest hobbyhorses: renewing a push
for a capital gains tax cut, giving a boost to the ultrawealthy just as
middle- and working-class families contend with increased grocery and fuel costs that Trump continues to deny.
To be certain, many of these unpopular ideas are surfacing because
the Republican Party has turned itself into something that more
resembles a religion or cult marching in the shadow of Trump than a
functioning political party.
But something else is at work.
Conservatives have spent decades
creating an alternate reality that exists separate from the real world.
The narratives of this false world are fed to millions of people via
conservative media—most prominently through Fox News, but also through
right-wing radio, podcasts, news sites and channels, along with
magazines, newspapers, books, and other media.
The point of this fake world is to keep conservative-leaning voters
in a state of constant agitation, fuming about the supposed excesses of
the left while being fed a steady diet of lies about right-wing leaders,
both elected and cultural, fighting against these forces.
In the recent past, senior GOP leaders like former Presidents George
H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, along with other conservative figures like
Sens. John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Mitch McConnell, knew that the
right-wing media world was a fake but necessary political tool to keep
voters in check and casting their ballots in service of the Republican
Party.
But unlike his predecessors, Trump doesn’t just use this right-wing
echo chamber to advance his political agenda: He is a voracious consumer
of that world’s product and largely a true believer. That’s why Trump so often refers to memes and “facts” he saw on Fox News as if the world at large hangs on the network’s every word—like he does.
But this isn’t reality for millions of people. Despite the success of
right-wing media outlets, they haven’t fooled everyone yet.
Fox News launched in 1996 and has since become the most popular of
the three major cable news channels. But it isn’t as if America has
become a one-party state in the past three decades.
Since Fox’s debut, Democratic candidates were elected president in
1996, 2008, 2012, and 2020. And the Democratic presidential candidate
won the popular vote in 2000 and 2016, despite not winning the White
House.
Democrats have also won multiple congressional majorities during that
time period, gaining control of the House and Senate—and sometimes
both, despite the march of right-wing media.
What this shows is that for all of the right’s efforts, the “reality” they never tire of pushing is not dominant.
But Republicans, led by Trump, are operating as if it is. They are
acting counter to the will of the public and have been losing elections
so badly they are trying to rig congressional districts to negate voters’ intent.
Attribution: APThe Fox News logo is displayed outside Fox News Headquarters in New York, April 12, 2023.Actually one-third of America is watching, but Fox News isn't counting.
This latest triumvirate of bad Republican ideas (and many more before
it) exists because people on the right spend so much time talking among
themselves in the phony universe they constructed.
While Democrats and
liberals lack the same level of media platforms and a friendly ear in
the mainstream media, their leaders have had to contend with reality far
more often than the right-wing echo chamber. Thus, Democratic proposals
on a swath of issues, from taxation to education to health care, fall
much more in line with what people actually want.
Sometimes, particularly when elections have a low turnout, the
right-wing bubble is more of a help to the GOP. These are the voters who
fall for lies like the claim that Obamacare was socialized medicine, or
the notion that the U.S. border was wide open under former President
Joe Biden.
But elections that go beyond the base expose the vulnerability of the
fake news universe. Republicans, busily pandering to voters who get
most of their news from figures like Sean Hannity and Megyn Kelly,
demonstrate a disconnect from reality that bewilders voters and can
often send them into the Democratic column.
All signs show that Republicans are headed for electoral disaster in
the midterm elections. A major reason for this is that the party, from
Trump on down, seems detached from the reality facing millions of Americans.
The Republican media machine has been a major success. It’s also why the party is now failing.
I have people who buy gas for me, so I can’t be pestered with such trivialities. Some say the Iran war – started by my personal tax-cutter, President Donald Trump – has something to do with it all. Ho hum.
What bothers me is all the noise, noise, noise coming from the hoi polloi. It’s so bad that Trump’s approval rating dropped to 34% in the most recent Reuters/Ipsos poll,
which I had my butler read to me. Can’t you ungrateful wretches just
calm down and sell one of your lake houses to cover higher gas costs?
It's rude of non-rich Americans to blame Trump for high gas prices
Ah,
the ballroom. Why can’t you gas-gripers embrace the beauty and majesty
ofsplendidly lavish ballroom you’ll never set your grubby feet in?
Trump
should be praised to the crystal chandeliers for embracing my firm
belief that the wealthy must have comfort and luxury so our happiness
can trickle down to the masses. Ballroom scraps for all, I say!
Fortunately, 22% of voters don’t blame Trump for high gas prices, and I’m proud to suspect that the 22% consists entirely of well-heeled Republican lawmakers.
An Air Force veteran and congressional candidate who has made “8647” part
of his campaign is doubling down on its messaging in the wake of the
Justice Department indicting Former FBI Director James Comey for posting
a photo with the numbers.
Mark
Davis, an unaffiliated candidate running in Florida’s 16th district,
drives around with an “8647” license plate, wears an “86 47” hat, and
sells hats and a t-shirt featuring the numbers on his campaign’s
website.
But Davis has no intention of retiring his use of “86 47.”
“Arrest us all. I dare you,” Davis said in an interview with NBC News.
“I am done staying quiet. I’ve got a family, I’ve got kids, and I’m
watching this country get dragged through chaos while people are going
to sit down and shut up. And I am not doing that, and millions of other
people aren’t doing it, either.”
Davis
has been using “86 47” to express his disdain for Trump since he
announced his campaign for the House of Representatives last year.
After the Justice Department indicted Comey, Davis posted a photo of himself wearing an “86 47” hat, posing with his “8647” license plate.
“Thanks a lot DOJ… You just made this a little awkward,” Davis wrote on Instagram.
Davis told NBC News he plans to wear his merch every day until his congressional election.
Comey,
a longtime critic of Trump, was indicted for a second time this past
week for the Instagram post featuring the numbers, which the president
said was a way of saying someone should be killed.
“Well,
if anybody knows anything about crime, they know ‘86,’” Trump said.
“You know what ‘86’ – it’s a mob term for ‘kill him.’ You know?”
Comey,
a longtime critic of Trump, was indicted for a second time this past
week for the Instagram post featuring the numbers, which the president
said was a way of saying someone should be killed. (Reuters)
Comey has denied posting the photo as a message of violence.
Davis told NBC News it was “silly” to interpret “86” that way, describing it as “a restaurant term.”
Davis
is not the only one who has been selling “86 47” merchandise. On
Amazon, hundreds of t-shirts with variations of the numbers are
available for as little as $10. Other websites, such as Redbubble and
Etsy, sell hats, posters and other variations of “86 47.”
Comey
was first indicted by the Trump administration last year on accusations
of lying to Congress. He pleaded not guilty, but a federal judge later
dismissed the case, accusing the prosecutor of being unlawfully
appointed.
This variation on a theme references the 747 Trump was "gifted" (see "bribed") by an Arab nation.
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