W. Niederhut

Hey, speaking of Melania, Trump reportedly called her, "Mercedes," in a D.C. speech this weekend. He also served up another unintelligible world salad in South Carolina. Why is the M$M generally censoring coverage of Trump's dementia? 'Soup pie cane?' Trump's most baffling 'glitches' at latest South Carolina rally www.rawstory.com/trump-rally-2667354340/ February 23, 2024 Former President Donald Trump came to South Carolina Friday with a unique message for his followers: There was an unexpected dump, the soup pie cane is broken, and a friend is a person who sticks with you "in times of bad." Confused? So were viewers of the top conservative presidential candidate's rally just one day before the kickoff of the South Carolina primary. Those who tuned into Fox News did not see the entirety of Trump's speech — anchor Neil Cavuto cut away for a Trump fact-check regarding his statements about the 2020 election, explaining “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts." But on social media, viewers were treated to video clips of Trump's more eyebrow-raising "glitches." Here are the top five: 1. "His soup-pie cane is broken" "Soup pie cane?" asked Bogan Painter. This one was also translated as “supply tain,” “su pie tain," "supply cane" “syphilis.” 2. “All of a sudden there was this big dump. Where did it come from?” “Time for another diaper,” replied GroundChuck.” 3. “They are pumping it as much as they can under the Trump.” "'Pumping under the Trump' is something we can only pray will never be explained in any detail,” wrote BruceGoldberg. 4. “Three years lady, lady, lady, how ‘bout that?” “Lay ladies lay,” quipped @pbstockx. “Lay across my fake gold head.” 5. “In times of bad, she’ll call me up say, “Don’t worry about, sir, you’re doing great.” Said the Biden-Harris campaign, “A lot of people don’t know how smart and respected Marjorie Taylor Greene is.”

Jim, What was the year in which RFK made that public statement? I'm curious about the subject, in relation to the tide of U.S. public opinion about the Vietnam War. As we all know, dissenting voices are usually ridiculed and shouted down when the war drums start beating in U.S. history. Think of March 2003 and Rumsfeld's Shock & Awe bombing campaign in Iraq! Bill O'Reilly ridiculed Gary Hart on Fox News in March of 2003, (during Shock & Awe) after Hart argued that deposing Saddam Hussein could de-stabilize the balance of power between Sunni Baathists and Iranian-aligned Shiites in the Persian Gulf. (How prophetic was that?) Ulysses Grant made an insightful comment about the blindness of war hysteria and American jingoism in his famous memoir. LBJ was re-elected in a landslide after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and it took a while for public opinion about Vietnam to shift, after 1964. The same thing eventually happened in the case of Bush & Cheney's Iraq War disaster.

Kirk, IMO, there's nothing remotely Christian about Trump and his hateful, gun-toting MAGA cult. They worship the Golden Calf. I'll coin an acronym here. Has anyone used this one? They are CHINOs-- Christian In Name Only.

Michael, RFK's public pronouncements relating to JFK's 1963 decision to get out of Vietnam need to be interpreted in light of Cold War paranoia and concerns that JFK would be perceived as "soft" on communism. As a guy who worked for Joe McCarthy's HUAC committee, Bobby Kennedy understood that political dynamic better than anyone. Meanwhile, Michael, would you mind checking the boxes (below) that contain buses-- to verify that you aren't a U.S. government disinformation bot? 🤥 Thanks.

This Mike Roman MAGA psy op to smear Fani Willis has received far too much M$M coverage, IMO. The public should focus on Trump's "perfect phone call" to Brad Raffensperger, and the fact that Sidney Powell and Chesebro already pled guilty to election fraud in Georgia. Also, Fani Willis initially asked Georgia's white ex-Governor, Roy Barnes, to lead the prosecution of Trump's election fraud crimes in Georgia, but Barnes was too afraid of MAGA-Bomber threats to get involved. Instead, Georgia used a black guy, Nathan Wade, to do the dangerous job that the white guy didn't want to do.

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Geez... Remember when this former "progressive" was competing in the Democratic primaries? 🙄 Gabbard to headline fundraiser at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort | The Hill

Steve, If you're planning to disrobe with MTG, watch out for the Gazpacho Police... 🤥

Greene says Judge Engoron ‘should be disrobed’ | The Hill Is this related to MTG's interest in tantric sex, or what? 😂

What a pathetic list. "Uncle Tom," Tim Scott, is an abject, boot-licking embarrassment to African Americans, IMO. Ramaswamy is almost as bad. DeSantis went down in flames, along with his anti-woke, book-banning nonsense. As for Kristi Noem, has anyone else noticed that the scandalous report about her extra-marital affair with Trumpster, Corey Lewandowski, abruptly disappeared from the mainstream U.S. media, without further ado? Why is it that GOP sexual peccadilloes seem to get censored by the M$M-- like GOP House Speaker Jim Hastert's molestation of teenage boys-- while intimate details about the sex lives of Democrats grab headlines?

Matt, I have long suspected that this is a critically important issue in U.S. politics that has remained largely untold-- Republican politicians who have been blackmailed and manipulated by Russian kompromat. The FSB (KGB) is very skilled at this kind of thing. The kompromat may be based on sexual peccadilloes, or financial fraud. That's the Russian stick. The Russian carrot is bribery-- including campaign financing. RoJo is an obvious example, and Rand Paul really flipped a few years ago, to became an abject MAGA gofer. The same thing is true of a number of other important Senators and Congressmen who are currently sabotaging Ukraine funding for Putin-- not to mention Putin's Agent Orange!

I have long believed as much,* and I say this as a guy who asked Santa Claus for a hardback book about American Presidents for Christmas in 1964, at age 7. During the past 60 years, I have read biographies of most American Presidents. We have had previous discussions about this subject on the Education Forum with American history scholars, including James DiEugenio. My own opinion, stated previously, is that the last of the old Jacksonian Democrats, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, have long been somewhat unfairly vilified for their well-intentioned efforts to save the Union and preserve the old Jacksonian coalition between northern Democrats and Southern slave holders. For their reluctance to dissolve the Union, Buchanan was almost hanged in Pennsylvania during the Civil War, and Pierce ended his days as a lonely pariah in New England. Compared to Donald Trump, and Andrew Johnson, both Pierce and Buchanan were well-educated men and, in Pierce's case, a decorated U.S. war veteran (Mexican American War.) Pierce was a Colgate alumnus, and close college chum of the great American writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Buchanan was a diligent, well-respected lawyer and distinguished American diplomat. In similar fashion, Millard Fillmore was vilified by history for his efforts, in 1850, to preserve the Union. Andrew Johnson, the blatantly racist drunkard from East Tennessee who sabotaged proper Reconstruction, comes closest to rivalling Trump for worst POTUS in history, IMO. George W. Bush also deserves a disastrous ranking for his promotion of the specious, multi-trillion dollar PNAC Neocon "War on Terror." But only Donald Trump has done what historian Michael Beschloss called, "the worst thing a President can do"-- refusing to relinquish power. * Official Results of the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey (Link won't copy-- see LA Times article below for link) Experts rank Biden among the best presidents. Trump? Not so much - Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)

Has there ever been a poll here on the Education Forum Robert, Has there ever been a poll here on the Education Forum regarding LBJ's complicity in the plot to murder LBJ? I'd be interested in the results-- including expert opinions about whether LBJ was; 1) a "Mastermind," 2) an Accomplice, or 3) Unaware of the plot to murder JFK.

Posted at DU this morning... 😂 "I tried playing hoops in Trump sneakers, but all I could do was draw charges."

Trump President's Day Sale!!! Everything Must Go!!! President Trump Must Raise $400 Million ASAP!!! Choose From Hundreds of Discounted Trump Items!! Golden Trump Mar-a-Lago Toilet-- Only $799K !! (Used by Donald Trump, Himself, for Crapping and Flushing Documents)

Doug, If we lost WWIII, I think America would look something like this, at least in Nevada...

What a farce... Trump's MAGA goons dragged Fani Willis's father into this fracus and he, basically, dunked on them. The man worked for Nelson Mandela and helped prosecute war crimes at the Hague! Interesting that the white Republican judge overseeing this farce used to work for Fani Willis. I wonder how he feels about the MAGA attorneys asking Wade and Willis, in so many words, "Where did you two N---gers get the money for a vacation?"

Very interesting to me, personally, as an Orthodox Christian convert (from agnosticism and childhood Protestantism.) I have traveled in Greece, but I'm not very knowledgeable about their contemporary culture. My guess is that old-fashioned conservatives will be angry about this legislation, but that most Greeks will accept it.

Michael Roman the man who brought these Fani Willis allegations Mike Roman, seen in his booking photo Aug. 25 in Atlanta, is charged along with Donald Trump for allegedly conspiring to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. (Washington Post illustration; iStock; Fulton County Sheriff's Office/AP) February 15, 2024 Michael Roman is an American political operative and opposition researcher. Roman was a staffer for President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2018. He subsequently worked for the Trump 2020 campaign as director of election day operations. Roman has a history of making misleading and unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud. On Election Day in 2020, he posted baseless and deceptive claims of voter fraud. He delivered the list of false electors for Michigan and Wisconsin to US Representative Mike Kelly who provided them to US Senator Ron Johnson. Staff of Ron Johnson tried to get these lists to Vice President Mike Pence before the count of the electoral votes on January 6, 2021. On September 12, 2022, the New York Times reported that agents of the U.S. Justice Department seized Roman's cell phone in conjunction with 40 subpoenas issued in the investigation of the false electors. CNN reported in June 2023 that Roman had entered into a proffer agreement with the Smith special counsel investigation. On August 14, 2023, Roman was indicted under RICO charges in Fulton County, Georgia, related to activities attempting to overturn the 2020 election. Prior to joining the Trump presidential campaign, Roman headed up an intelligence gathering operation for Charles and David Koch, industrialists and high-profile Republican donors. The now-defunct office surveilled and gathered intelligence on liberal opponents of conservative policies. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Roman Mike Roman is in the spotlight after his bombshell allegations of an improper relationship between Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and a lawyer she hired to help prosecute the former president As Mike Roman spoke to a gathering of fellow conservative activists in March 2022, he offered a glimpse of the intelligence-gathering skills he had honed over the previous decade working as an opposition researcher for Donald Trump and Republican megadonors. “I show my wife this all the time when we go to a hotel,” Roman told the crowd in Harrisburg, Pa., according to an audio recording reviewed by The Washington Post. “She logs on to the Hilton WiFi, and I go on and I ‘tap, tap, tap,’ and I show her everybody else that’s on there and how we could get into their computer.” After spending years digging in the shadows, Roman is now in the spotlight, having landed a damaging blow to the racketeering case that Georgia prosecutors are pursuing against Trump and more than a dozen others — including Roman — for trying to overturn the 2020 election. Roman has pleaded not guilty. In a bombshell legal filing on Jan. 8, Roman’s attorney alleged that Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D), who is heading the prosecution, is in a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, an outside lawyer she hired for the case. While Wade’s firm was receiving more than $650,000 in public funds, Wade — who has been embroiled in a messy divorce — was paying for vacations with Willis in the Caribbean and elsewhere, according to Roman, who alleges that Willis improperly benefited. Roman has asked a judge to toss out his indictment and disqualify both prosecutors from the case, a request that will be the subject of a hearing scheduled for Feb. 15. Whatever its outcome, the salacious allegations have already given Trump ammunition for attacks aimed at discrediting the prosecution. “When is Fani going to drop the case,” he asked on social media, “or should it be dropped for her?” www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/02/02/mike-roman-trump-georgia-election-case-fani-willis/ No paywall archive.is/e3wTH

Michael Griffith's propaganda trope about "scholars" agreeing with his inaccurate defamation of Col. Prouty is risible-- and I say that as a guy who earned academic awards and degrees from two Ivy League universities. Griffith's own educational credentials are hardly impressive. He has been educated, partly, in the U.S. military industrial complex, and he works within that complex. The truth about academia, in the JFKA case, is that academicians have mostly been on the wrong side of JFKA history for the past 60 years, with some notable exceptions, like Peter Dale Scott and John Newman. One of the worst examples was Nobel Laureate Luis Alvarez promoting his cellophane-wrapped melon propulsion theory to explain the violent retrograde motion of JFK's head during the frontal headshot from the Grassy Knoll area.

It's also called, "narcissistic entitlement." I worked with some wealthy narcissists during my career who exhibited that disturbing character trait. It goes hand-in-hand with a general lack of empathy. 🙄

Great post, Cliff. Love the instrumental ensemble and vocals of Big Mama Thornton here, which I had never heard. Far superior to Elvis's version that we all know so well. Oddly, this authentic sounding R&B number was written by the Caucasian song writers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. And, since this is a 2024 Super Bowl thread, I should mention that Leiber & Stoller also wrote the R&B classic, Kansas City, which was a big hit for Wilbert Harrison back in 1959. The Beatles played the song, Kansas City, on Shindig in 1964, (too much teen screaming to enjoy that recording) and they also played it on Peter Jackson's Get Back documentary, during their Let It Be studio sessions in 1969. I heard Paul McCartney perform Kansas City at Folsom Field in Boulder on his 1993 Paul Is Live tour (with Robbie McIntosh and Linda, who was, sadly, not long for this world.) Several of those Folsom Field takes ended up on the Paul Is Live album, but I think the Kansas City track on the album was the take from Kansas City. (Apologies, in advance, to 49er fans.)

So, MAGA Mike Johnson just tried to justify the farcical impeachment of Alejandro Matorkas by saying, "Desperate times call for desperate measures." Mind you, this is the same disingenuous MAGA milquetoast who recently blocked a House vote on the bipartisan Senate border security bill, for Trump.* To paraphrase Winston Churchill, Mike Johnson is like a "slimy salamander, wrapped in a film of fraudulence, inside of a Louisiana swamp rat." * (McConnell, Rick Scott, and Senate Republicans flipped on approving their bipartisan border security bill after Mike Johnson told them that he would not bring it to a House vote.)

The Disgracefulness of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. At a time when the truth is a precious common good, RFK Junior has been spreading dangerous lies. ROBERT REICH Feb 13, 2024RobertReich.Org Robert F. Kennedy Junior has apologized to relatives after his Super Bowl ad last Sunday, which mirrored an ad broadcast by his uncle John F. Kennedy’s campaign in 1960. The Super Bowl ad included images of RFK Jr. spliced into the original 1960 ad and a jaunty jingle that repeated the Kennedy surname 15 times in 30 seconds. RFK Junior said the ad was the work of his SuperPAC and he had nothing to do with it. Rubbish. Junior placed the ad at the top of his X feed, and it remained there Monday. The ad cost $7 million. Timothy Mellon — grandson of Andrew Mellon and an heir to the Mellon banking fortune — gave RFK Junior’s SuperPAC $15 million. Hmmm. Mellon is also a major donor to PACs supporting Trump. RFK Junior’s candidacy is backed by a PAC that also funds Marjorie Taylor Greene. If not for his lustrous name, RFK Junior would be just another crackpot in the growing pool of bottom-feeding right-wing fringe politicians seeking to help Trump. No one should doubt that Trump and Trump donors are behind RFK Junior’s campaign, with the goal of siphoning off enough votes from Biden to ensure a Trump victory. How does RFK Junior intend to get on enough state ballots to hurt Biden? As he told CNN last week, he and officials from the Libertarian Party, which has ballot access, "are talking." In a poll conducted late last year, RFK Junior was supported by 22 percent of respondents and a greater number of independent voters than either President Biden or Trump. In January, Gallup reported that 52 percent of Americans view RFK Junior favorably — a higher percentage than either Biden (41 percent) or Trump (42 percent) received. These results reflect the popularity of the Kennedy name and dissatisfaction with the likely nominees of the major parties. In addition, RFK Junior has not received the public scrutiny that presidential candidates inevitably get. It’s time to lift the curtain on a campaign based on false, irresponsible and self-contradictory claims. At a time when the truth is a precious common good, RFK Junior has been spreading dangerous lies. He claims that COVID-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” and that “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” And that “the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons and we are developing ethnic bioweapons. They’re collecting Russian DNA. They’re collecting Chinese DNA so we can target people by race.” RFK Junior has also promoted the baseless claim linking vaccines to autism. He’s been a leading proponent of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, erroneously suggesting the vaccine has killed more people than it has saved. In his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, he alleged, without plausible evidence, that Dr. Fauci performed “genocidal experiments, sabotaged treatments for AIDS, and conspired with Bill Gates to suppress information about COVID-19.” This is libelous nonsense. RFK Junior’s misinformation about vaccines continues to endanger public health. Friends, I knew Robert F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy Junior is no Robert F. Kennedy. I worked in Robert F. Kennedy’s Senate office in 1967. It wasn’t a glamorous job. I ran the signature machine. But I did have a chance to get to see Bobby Kennedy close up. I watched Robert F. Kennedy stand up for economic and social justice. I witnessed him bringing together people of every race and ethnicity — to demand equal rights and an end to the Vietnam War. The Kennedy brand is political gold, and it could pull away just enough unwitting Democratic voters to tip the race to Trump. Robert F. Kennedy would never have suggested that a deadly virus was targeted at certain races. He wouldn’t have repeated the trope, dating at least to the Middle Ages, that Jews unleashed a plague on non-Jews. Another contrast with his father and his uncle: In 1962, President John F. Kennedy signed the Vaccination Assistance Act in order to, in the words of a CDC report, “achieve as quickly as possible the protection of the population, especially of all preschool children ... through intensive immunization activity.” If not for his lustrous name, RFK Junior would be just another crackpot in the growing pool of bottom-feeding right-wing fringe politicians seeking to help Trump. But the Kennedy brand is political gold, and it could pull away just enough unwitting Democratic voters to tip the race to Trump. Democracy won by a whisker in 2020. Just 44,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin decided the outcome. If RFK Junior or any third-party candidate peels off just a fraction of the vote from Biden, while Trump’s base stays with him, they will deliver a victory to Trump. That the good name of the Robert F. Kennedy I worked for 57 years ago is being used to increase the risk of a Trump victory is beyond shameful. If Junior had any respect for the principles his father fought and ultimately died for, he would withdraw his candidacy immediately.