These are typical, sleazy, disingenuous attacks by Republicans and people on the right who know they can't survive politically without lying early and often! This isn't about democracy or the health of our country, this is only about the power they and their donors want and their attempts to destroy our democracy and undermine it with lies to get their way! They have no integrity and they aren't interested in being public servants. They are addicted to money and power and are psychologically and emotionally sick and deranged! Yet the people they manipulate are oblivious to the ring they have put in their noses!

Jim Jordan spearheads 'cynical' and 'wildly partisan' GOP effort to chill anti-disinformation research - Alternet.org https://www.alternet.org/jim-jordan-2661568445/

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPLies
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPTreason

"A combination of universities and think tanks have been sounding the alarm about disinformation, warning that outright lies could influence the outcome of elections in the United States. But some Republicans, according to the New York Times, are not happy about their work — including House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (D-Ohio) and former Donald Trump aide Stephen Miller.

In an article published by the New York Times on June 19, journalists Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel report that Jordan and others GOP lawmakers are claiming that the anti-disinformation efforts are designed to suppress conservative speech online.

"The House Judiciary Committee, which in January came under Republican majority control, has sent scores of letters and subpoenas to the researchers — only some of which have been made public," Myers and Frenkel explain. "It has threatened legal action against those who have not responded quickly or fully enough…. Targets include Stanford, Clemson and New York Universities and the University of Washington; the Atlantic Council, the German Marshall Fund and the National Conference on Citizenship, all nonpartisan, nongovernmental organizations in Washington; the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco; and Graphika, a company that researches disinformation online."

In Louisiana, Miller, who heads the MAGA group America First Legal, has filed a class-action lawsuit against anti-disinformation researchers — making, Myers and Frenkel report, similar claims to Jordan on the House Intelligence Committee. The Trump ally has described his lawsuit as "striking at the heart of the censorship-industrial complex," but Miller's critics believe he is the one trying to silence those he disagrees with.

Jeff Hancock, founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, views the GOP attacks on anti-disinformation researchers as disingenuous and misleading.

Hanocck told The Times, "We see it in the media, in the congressional committees and in lawsuits, and it is the same core argument, with a false premise about the government giving some type of direction to the research we do…. We have not only academic freedom as researchers to conduct this research, but freedom of speech to tell Twitter or any other company to look at tweets we might think violate rules."

Jameel Jaffer, who serves was executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at New York City's Columbia University, is critical of the Republican lawmakers as well.

Jaffer told the Times, "I think it's quite obviously a cynical — and I would say wildly partisan — attempt to chill research.""

These supporters have been grifted and lied to by Republicans and their media for decades. They were never the brightest bulbs in the first place! These are the types of voters the GOP has been cultivating with their anti-science and anti-education policies, messaging and their sabotaging of public education through underfunding and voucher programs. A dumb electorate is easier to lie to and snowjob and that's what the GOP and their obscenely wealthy donors want!

'He didn’t mean to': Trump fans tie themselves in knots to explain he didn’t break the law - Alternet.org https://www.alternet.org/trump-fans-didnt-break-law/

#GOPHatesEducation
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#TheyWantTheirSerfsBack
#GOPIsThePartyOfGreed
#GreedKillsDemocracy
#GOPInBedWithTheRich

"Supporters that came out for Donald Trump as he was arraigned in Miami, Florida on Tuesday were interviewed by the comedy group "The Good Liars." They had a lot of questions about the basic facts of the case that many MAGA loyalists didn't know.

One of the videos shows a Trump supporter claiming that the former president declassified everything. When told that Trump was on audio saying he didn't, the supporter refused to believe it.

A loyal Trump supporter told the "Good Liars" that he doesn't believe for a second Trump meant to steal the documents and that he probably didn't know the laws. He didn't explain why Trump refused to give the documents back.

Another video with Davram Stiefler showed a Trump supporter asking about the "Lock her up" chants and a man said Hillary Clinton was never investigated. He was told that the FBI announced the investigation 11 days before the election, and they had no idea.

What became clear to Jason Selvig is that none of the people were getting their news from actual news sources, and they were parroting the messages that Donald Trump has given. Instead of excuses, Trump has deployed the "what about" questions about Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.

At one point, a woman told Stiefler that Fox News never had to pay any money for lying to their viewers. He kept trying to tell her that Fox admitted to lying to them, and they paid a ton of money because of it. She refused to believe it.

Another woman refused to believe that Donald Trump would keep boxes of documents in his bathroom. She claimed that the bathroom with two chandeliers looked "like Joe Biden's bathroom." She maintained that Trump would never be so "messy." Selvig explained to her that the photos were in the indictment. They were in the court documents.

The Good Liars are known for going to many events. "The Daily Show's" Jordan Klepper was also known for doing the same kind of interviews, but due to the writer's strike, the show has been off the air."

A good one highlighting the hypocrisy of the GOP. They make noise about the deficit when they don't have the white house, but once they have it, they bloat the deficit again in their fawning attempts to please their obscenely wealthy masters/donors!

#GOPHypocrisy
#GOPInBedWithTheRich

Congress just cut IRS funding. It costs even more than we thought. - Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2023/irs-enforcement-costs-congress-funding/

#GOPHatesAvgAmericans
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPIsTheBitchOfTheRich

"The White House and Congress recently agreed to claw back more than $20 billion earmarked for the Internal Revenue Service. This deal was, ostensibly, part of a grand bargain to reduce budget deficits.

Unfortunately, it’s likely to have the opposite effect. Every dollar available for auditing taxpayers generates many times that amount for government coffers — and the rate of return is especially astonishing for audits of the wealthiest Americans, according to new research shared exclusively with The Post.
...
This means that while the upfront costs of auditing the wealthy are usually higher — perhaps suggesting these taxpayers aren’t worth going after — the average return on investment is much better.

Another way to think about this: On average, the direct revenue collected from audits exceed costs by a factor of 2 to 1. But, that payoff varies by income. For money spent auditing the bottom half of taxpayers, the IRS only roughly broke even.

Meanwhile, the agency pulled in $3.18 for each dollar spent auditing the top 1 percent, and $6.29 for the top 0.1 percent.
...
In the years after a taxpayer gets audited, they start paying much more in taxes voluntarily. Maybe, post-audit, they stop taking some dodgy deductions (counting a personal car as a business expense, for example). Or they start reporting income they had previously accepted off the books.
...
These additional taxes equal about three times the revenue raised from the initial audit, on average, over the 14 years of data the researchers had access to. So in other words, the biggest returns from doing more audits come from deterrence effects.
...
That multiplier — three times as much revenue from deterrence effects as from the initial audit — is relatively consistent across the income distribution, with both rich and poor adjusting their post-audit tax habits significantly. Which still means that in raw dollar terms auditing the rich has bigger payoffs.
...
Consequences of the deal to claw back money from the IRS
So what do these numbers tell us about Congress’s decision to claw back money from the IRS? They suggest that existing projections for long-term costs likely underestimate the massive hole this policy will blow into federal budgets.
...
Again, the authors instead find the opposite, that the long-term deterrence effects are huge, much larger than the upfront bounty that comes from the audits themselves.
...
For every additional dollar spent auditing people in the top decile of the income distribution, the government can expect to get 12 times that amount back.

Twelve! As any tax-dodging billionaire can attest: It’s pretty hard to beat that return on investment.

In other words: If the IRS spends more money on audits, and those resources actually target high earners, the payoff could be enormous — far greater than has usually been assumed.
...
Audits of millionaires (and megacorporations) have dramatically declined in recent years, according to data from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

Certainly Republicans have fearmongered that the IRS will devote all its new money to deploying “armies” of gun-toting IRS agents to hound honest, middle-class taxpayers. So what evidence do we have that the agency will pursue higher-earning, higher-ROI tax-shirkers instead?

For one, President Biden, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and others have pledged to raise audit rates only on households earning more than $400,000 (which is close to the top percentile, in this study’s data). Two, the agency is now equipped with better information about how to spend its dollars most efficiently, thanks to this new research.

“The evidence suggests going after higher-income taxpayers has higher returns, and that’s reassuring given the recent policy focus on auditing wealthy individuals,” says Ben Sprung-Keyser, one of the study’s co-authors
...
In any case, the revenue Congress just agreed to leave on the table by rescinding $20 billion from IRS’s long-term budget could be substantial. Based on that 12 to 1 multiplier found in this study for marginal returns from auditing high earners, that could mean Congress just gave up about $240 billion in revenue, for a net cost to the budget of $220 billion ($240 billion - $20 billion cut from IRS budget = $220 billion).

So much for trying to reduce deficits."

The GOP leaders and elected representatives plot daily to undermine our democracy and turn the country into an authoritarian oligarchy/theocracy. They violate their oaths of office and are antisocial, greedy, power-hungry sociopaths! And, their supporters/base are all on board with this it seems. They are fine with voter suppression, insurrection, discrimination and violence against minorities, gaming the judiciary and installing a gun-worshipping theocracy as long as it maintains their privileges and prejudices. Sad and discouraging but at least they are a minority and we know what we are up against.

The GOP is an anti-America party - Republicans hate America and don’t care about national security -- Salon
https://read.letterhead.email/standing-room-only/letter/16388?

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPHatesTheConstitution

"Republicans hate America and don’t care about national security

In the least surprising results ever, a new poll from CBS shows only 12% of Republican voters think it’s a crime now to steal nuclear secrets and put them in a ballroom for Russian and Chinese spies to thumb through. Trump was right that they’d forgive him if he committed murder. After all, he sent a mob to murder Mike Pence, and they don’t have a problem with that.

This news is still causing centrist pundits to reel, because they believed the lie that Republicans are a “national security” party. If they ever were — a big if! — that time has long passed. This isn’t just about loyalty to Trump. The GOP has become an anti-American party, so of course they don’t really care if foreign adversaries gain knowledge they could use to undermine or even destroy us.

Harsh, I know, but consider this: Trump attempted a coup to overthrow our democracy. His reward has been that he’s fast-tracked to the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. His fellow Republican politicians talk about him like he’s their god. This isn’t because they’re unaware that he’s a fascist. It’s because they agree with him and think he’s still got the best shot at accomplishing the goal of ending the American experiment.

That’s why Republicans don’t care if truly evil actors like Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping get some kind of leverage against the U.S. Tearing the U.S. down and replacing it with a fascist government is also the goal of GOP primary voters. In that sense, foreign adversaries are their allies. For the fans of Tucker “I Heart Putin” Carlson, having some outside help as they rip this country apart is a good thing. So of course they shrug at Trump violating the Espionage Act. "

The GOP couldn't care less about average Americans. They say they want to fix the debt, but really just want to stop any programs that don't benefit the wealthiest. Who has benefitted the most in the U.S. over the last few decades, the wealthiest. They can most afford additional taxes. Yet the GOP is not interested in even thinking about that.

Nothing could make it clearer that they are the party of the rich and don't govern for the country as a whole, but only for their obscenely wealthy donors. The obscenely wealthy and their puppets, the GOP, are all so selfish, no society could function for long if they were in charge or the majority. They are parasites who aren't even remotely interested in what is good for the majority of the country.

Republicans Literally Laugh Off Idea of Taxing the Rich to Fix Budget | The New Republic https://newrepublic.com/post/172782/republicans-literally-laugh-off-idea-taxing-rich-fix-budget

#GOPHatesAvgAmericans
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPIsTheBitchOfTheRich

"Republicans have said they want to reduce government spending and increase U.S. revenue—but not if it inconveniences rich people, apparently.

When a reporter asked House Speaker Kevin McCarthy if he would consider raising taxes on wealthy Americans, he answered with a short “No” before the question was even finished. Republicans standing around him groaned and shook their heads. They then began laughing when McCarthy asked where the reporter was earlier.

McCarthy explained that wealth taxes weren’t necessary because the United States has a revenue of 20 percent of gross domestic product, as opposed to 17 percent in previous years. Instead, inflation was due to the Democrats spending $6 trillion after winning the presidential election in 2020.

McCarthy’s statement about revenue is technically true: The U.S. revenues in 2022 totaled 19.6 percent of GDP, according to the Congressional Budget Office, compared to the annual average of 17.4 percent in the five decades prior. Most of that revenue comes from income taxes.

But raising taxes on the wealthy, even by a little bit, would produce huge amounts of revenue. In 2021, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders proposed charging billionaires a 3 percent wealth tax, and households and trusts worth between $50 million and $1 billion a tax of just 2 percent per year.

This would only apply to a tiny fraction of Americans, but it could produce about $3 trillion in revenue over the next decade, University of Berkeley economists predicted.

In his budget, President Joe Biden proposed increasing taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations and using the revenue to expand health care, childcare assistance, and housing aid. Not only have Republicans fought this plan, but their own budget proposes punishing lower-income Americans to benefit the wealthy.

Republicans’ solution to the debt ceiling crisis is focused on mere pennies in comparison to what a wealth tax would do. The bill calls for work requirements for Medicaid, food stamps, and cash assistance programs—which would barely make a dent in U.S. debt. Work requirements would save the government only about $1 billion per year, according to the CBO, nowhere near how much actually needs to be recouped. And that’s assuming, of course, that such requirements actually work.

The U.S. is just weeks away from defaulting on its debt, but Republicans and Democrats remain at a logjam over how to solve the problem. The GOP seems ready to take it out on the backs of people who can least afford it."

Lacking the mandate through our election process to achieve the policies that the GOP wants, they've decided, again, to hold our economy hostage using the debt ceiling, a dated relic that no longer serves any useful purpose. Again, they couldn't achieve these policies with the votes and power that our democracy accords political parties, so instead the GOP uses this relic to hold our economy hostage to the demands that their donors have placed upon them. This is not the way democracy works! This is yet another example of a party that doesn't care about democracy using any trick it can, to get its way, when democracy did not give it the mandate to do so legitimately.

GOP Hostage-Taking on Debt Ceiling Must Be Stopped to Avoid Economic Calamity https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/debt-ceiling-economic-calamity-gop

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#DebtLimit
#DebtLimitHostageTaking

"(If) nothing is done except the federal government fails to fulfill its spending obligations, economic calamity will ensue: People who depend on programs like Social Security and food stamps will suffer, and the spillover effects on the larger economy would certainly cause a recession—and a truly horrible one if the stalemate lasted for any significant amount of time.

The factor forcing this terrible outcome would not be any implacable economic reality, it would simply be Congressional Republicans weaponizing the absurd political institution that is a statutory debt limit that can only be adjusted through acts of Congress. With a responsible Congress, the debt limit would be a silly inconvenience to policymaking. But twice in the past 12 years, Republican-led efforts in Congress have brought the nation to a near-crisis—and the current near-crisis could still graduate into a real crisis in coming weeks.
...
In 2011 (the last instance of protracted debt limit brinkmanship), the GOP demands for large spending cuts did mammoth damage to the living standards of U.S. families by sabotaging the economic recovery from the Great Recession and financial crisis of 2008–09. This time around, the GOP demands are not just for recovery-damaging spending cuts, but also for a complete do-over on already passed legislation; Speaker McCarthy’s recently released list of demands includes rolling back student debt relief as well as the Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) climate provisions and enhanced enforcement against the nation’s rich tax cheats.

The cuts to IRA climate provisions would be literally catastrophic—the act’s climate provisions are the only thing keeping the U.S. economy on a path of needed emissions reductions to contain the worst damages of climate change. Further, hundreds of billions of dollars of planned private investment have already begun based on the incentives provided in the IRA. Stripping these climate provisions away would snap the economy back to a path toward climate catastrophe and be a huge waste of society’s resources.

All of this clearly calls for abolishing the debt limit to keep irresponsible Congressional majorities from holding the nation’s economy hostage to its policy preferences in the future. But what makes today’s debt limit showdown so bad is how normalized it has become—often with the encouragement of too many in D.C. policymaking circles who should know better. Many institutions and people who had argued forcefully in the past that the debt limit should not be wielded to force policy concessions—from business lobbies to former Treasury Secretaries to bipartisan think tanks—have instead this time blessed the absurdly shallow “deal” put forward by Speaker McCarthy. If this drive to normalize debt limit brinkmanship does not spark an economic meltdown this time, we all know where it leads next time.

This makes it imperative that the Biden administration does whatever it takes to keep the debt limit from binding our nation’s continued prosperity (yes, the nod to Mario Draghi is intentional). Their negotiations with Speaker McCarthy cannot include spending cuts or special legislative processes that make it easier to enact cuts going forward (no supercommittees).
...
If the Speaker doesn’t agree to that deal, then the administration should use the range of accounting and legalworkarounds available to them to keep the debt limit from binding. These are all suboptimal relative to debt ceiling abolition in the short run, but in the long run they will end up implicitly codified (unless the Supreme Court wants to take responsibility for forcing an unnecessary economic crisis) and will take the prospect of a debt limit crisis off the table of future presidents and Congresses. This would be a huge gift to the future."

Yet another example of right-wing billionaires trying to control and crush independent media and make it more like Fox News. They don't want to inform you, they want to disinform you with their propaganda so they can get away with their ongoing dismantling of our democracy, especially via buying up media, with minimal resistance.

CNN staffers enraged at CEO's move to crush internal dissent over Trump town hall: report - Raw Story - Celebrating 19 Years of Independent Journalism https://www.rawstory.com/town-hall-of-trump-voters/?

#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#TheRichHateDemocracy
#MostMediaIsNotJournalistic
#TheRichOwnTheMedia

"CNN is reeling from overwhelmingly negative reviews of last week's town hall with former President Donald Trump at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire, during which he aggressively talked over moderator Kaitlan Collins, told a series of lies too fast to fact-check, and spoke to a hand-picked audience of hardcore Republicans who, while they were instructed not to boo the former president, were allowed to cheer and laugh as he mocked author E. Jean Carroll's account of how he allegedly raped her.

Now, according to The Daily Beast's Confider newsletter, CNN's chief Chris Licht is trying to force employees to toe the company line about it — and his threats and heavy-handedness are beginning to anger staffers.

The drama began after top CNN reporter Oliver Darcy publicly criticized the town hall.

"Less than a year after Brian Stelter was shown the door, Oliver Darcy’s reported dressing down is an inflection point that CNN talent, executives, and staffers who spoke with Confider over the last few days said has marked an especially dark chapter of Licht’s now yearlong tenure," reported Lachlan Cartwright and Justin Baragona. "As Puck first reported, Licht pulled aside Darcy and his Reliable Sources editor Jon Passantino to scold the pair for their newsletter’s highly critical coverage of the town hall’s 'spectacle of lies' aired by CNN—an internal version of the intensely negative reviews that incensed Licht. The meeting took place shortly after a Thursday morning editorial call in which Licht unsubtly took a swipe at Darcy. Puck’s sources claimed the media reporter was 'visibly shaken' after the meeting because Licht and other execs had 'put the fear of God into him' and told him his coverage was 'too emotional.'"

According to the report, Licht's allies then went behind everyone's back to anonymously tell other news outlets that the rest of the staff was angry at Darcy — which upset staffers because in fact, many of them agreed with Darcy.

"While CNN employees were already troubled by the CEO’s actions after Puck’s story on Friday, it was a Fox News Digital follow-up article, in which an anonymous Licht ally claimed CNN staffers were 'appalled' by Darcy, that appears to have been a bridge too far for many," said the report. "'People are really bothered,' one CNN executive told Confider, noting that their phone had been ringing off the hook from network employees 'flipping out' over the situation. 'I heard zero complaints about Darcy’s newsletter—in fact, the opposite. People were glad someone was calling this out,' a CNN on-air personality added. 'And it’s a terrible look that he’s being muzzled or intimidated simply for saying what everyone is thinking. He’s not in PR. He’s a journalist.'"

The report continued that as all this was going on, Licht is meeting with Tim Alberta of The Atlantic for a media profile: "Alberta was in the audience for the Trump town hall, which was described to Confider as 'our Chernobyl' by one CNN staffer, as network spin doctors work overtime hoping to generate a glowing profile of the boss."

Licht himself has publicly come out in defense of the town hall's format, saying that "While we all may have been uncomfortable hearing people clapping" for the mockery of an alleged rape survivor, "that was also an important part of the story" and the people who did it represent "a large swath of America.""

The Durham probe was a complete failure, because in spite of what Trump and his GOP and media enablers would have you believe, there was never any there there!! The links between Trump's campaign and the Russians were extensive and we haven't even gotten to the bottom of that. This was just an attempt to gloss over the collusion between Trump's campaign, Republican operatives and Russia. It failed, bigly!

And yet, look at the GOP leaning and favoring headlines that this report received. It is time to realize that much of the mainstream media isn't liberal, but rather owned by wealthy people who are all for the GOP, less regulations and more tax cuts and hence want to make dems look bad, confuse and disinform the electorate and keep their oligarchy going.

Journalism/media, the fourth pillar of democracy, has long been infiltrated and bought out by the wealthy who don't want democracy at all. They just want more power, control and money! Pretending otherwise, leaves us defenseless against their ongoing attack on our democracy.

Morning Joe gloats over Durham's 'humiliating' flop: 'Bad writing and bush-league posturing' - Raw Story - Celebrating 19 Years of Independent Journalism https://www.rawstory.com/durham-report-fbi/?

#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#TheRichHateDemocracy
#MostMediaIsNotJournalistic
#TheRichOwnTheMedia

"Trump-era attorney general William Barr tapped Durham to re-examine how the government investigated possible links between the Trump campaign and Russian election interference, but the $6.5 million probe failed to send a single person to jail and resulted in two acquittals, while a former FBI lawyer pleaded guilty to altering an email that a colleague used to seek court approval for surveillance of a Trump adviser.

"This guy was the longest serving special counsel, four years, and the report [issued Monday] offers us no new charges, no new revelations, not even new suggested rules for the FBI," the "Morning Joe" host said. "I mean, they were so horrible, he didn't even suggest any new rules. He also had investigations into political matters that he ended up offering no advice on, just more bad writing and more bush-league posturing to Trumpers. He relitigated cases that he lost in front of juries he faced in the last four years -- not any convictions. It's another sad, pathetic attempt to make suckers -- and we remember this because we showed their headlines -- he wanted to make suckers of pro-Trump cable news hosts and right-wing newspapers that already got burned pedaling his lies before."

"What was his goal?" Scarborough continued. "His goal was to trash premier law enforcement organizations in America and attack the men and women who serve every day at the Department of Justice. The only good news is at least his four-year taxpayer funded boondoggle, that was funded by working Americans, paying him to walk through the fevered swamps of Trumpism is over. Durham has nothing but a tarnished reputation to show for it, but it underlines, again, the fact, and if you listen to what people are saying about this report on the Trump right, it underlines the fact that, well, they hate the FBI. They've turned the premier law enforcement organization into a political punching bag that they say they want to defund. They want to defund the people that protect us from terrorists, protect us from gangs, that protect us from the people who are actively trying to kill us every day."

"It's just absolutely crazy, and this whole report, what was it to do?" Scarborough added. "It was to trash the FBI, it was to investigate the investigators. It went on longer than the underlying investigation. four years, millions and millions of dollars, and nothing to show for it but some really bad, humiliating headlines for pro-Trump newspapers.""