Month: April 2021

Categories
Congress Crime

Matt Gaetz’s Current Legal Problems Have An Interesting Connection To Jeffrey Epstein

Would it surprise you to learn the accusations against Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) that he sexually trafficked an underage girl have a lot in common with the late convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who died in federal custody back in 2019?

Former federal prosecutor Shan Wu spelled out that connection Saturday during an appearance on CNN, noting that federal authorities don’t want to see another high-profile figure escape justice for his possible crimes:

“I think one important context is the Epstein case. Because the Justice Department has messed this up once before, letting a sex trafficker go with just a slap on the wrist. They’re not going to let that happen again.

“This is a different environment than it was before. The testimony of any of these complainants, particularly the underaged minor, will be devastating. This is a new time. We care about victims, and this is a problem for Gaetz.”

Oddly enough, Gaetz was one of the few public officials upset when the Epstein case was reopened in 2019, eventually resulting with Epstein being charged by federal prosecutors for allegedly engaging in sexual relations with underage girls. Specifically, Gaetz said he feared such actions by the Department of Justice (DOJ) would set a “dangerous’ precedent for prosecutors.”

At the moment, Gaetz is facing prosecution for numerous felonies, including sexual trafficking, which could result in him being sentenced to life in prison.

Things got even worse for Gaetz when an attorney for co-conspirator  Joel Greenberg confirmed that his client was cooperating with the DOJ and had accepted a plea deal from federal prosecutors who are also pursuing Gaetz.

There’s another connection between Gatez and Epstein: Both were longtime friends of failed, one-term former President Donald Trump, who was once accused of “repeatedly raping” a 13-year-old girl with the late sex offender. Trump also spoke glowingly about Epstein, just as he has about Gaetz, whom he lavished with praise while he was still in the White House.

Since the accusations against Gaetz have come to light, however, Trump has been mostly silent on the Florida congressman’s legal plight, perhaps showing that even a man as depraved as the former president doesn’t want to risk defending someone suspected of such a heinous crime.

Here’s Shan Wu courtesy of CNN:

 

Categories
Joe Biden The Biden Administration

Biden’s Approval Rating Soars – His Policies Are Wildly Popular With Americans Of Both Parties

At the moment, Joe Biden is one of the most popular presidents in recent memory, and even Republicans are giving him high marks for the job he’s doing battling the coronavirus pandemic and his plan to rebuild American infrastructure.

Morning Consult released a poll this week which shows that the Biden agenda is wildly popular among those surveyed, with 65 percent saying they approve of paying for the president’s infrastructure package by increasing taxes on corporations for the next 15 years. Only 21 percent said they’re opposed to raising taxes on big business.

Even 42 percent of registered Republicans said they support higher taxes on corporations, with 47 percent of GOP voters telling pollsters they were opposed to such a plan.

A closer look inside the Morning Consult numbers also has good news for the administration, with 53 percent of those responding saying they they still support tax hikes and only 27 percent saying they wouldn’t support such a plan.

And then there’s this from the poll, which is almost certain to terrify Congressional Republicans:

“When taxes and other potential funding sources aren’t mentioned, Biden’s infrastructure plan enjoys the support of 60 percent of voters, including 84 percent of Democrats, 51 percent of independents and 35 percent of Republicans.”

Americans realize our infrastructure is falling apart and needs to be rebuilt, whether it be roads and bridges our updating schools across the country.

On Biden’s other signature issue, the COVID relief package and plan for getting the majority of us vaccinated, the numbers are also encouraging, with 70 percent saying they think Biden has done the right thing to slow and eventually eliminate spread of the deadly disease.

While Republicans continue to whine and shoot themselves in the foot, President Biden is being rewarded for his bold and decisive ideas. That alone is all the proof you need that the current president is a unifier, unlike his predecessor.

 

Categories
Crime Donald Trump Jr. WTF?!

Paranoid Don Jr. Whines That Everyone Is ‘Plotting’ Against Him

Ever since his father lost badly to President Joe Biden, Donald Trump Jr. has been getting more unhinged and absurd, spewing lies and bile on social media when he isn’t making videos that show him looking coked to the gills and screaming about how the election was stolen from his daddy but providing zero proof to support his assertions.

Now, however, Junior has totally jumped the shark, telling Newsmax that he’s upset Major League Baseball pulled the 2021 All-Star game from Atlanta after the state passed one of the harshest voter suppression laws in the country.

What’s most disturbing about what Don Jr. told Newsmax is that the level of paranoia he exhibits is off the damn charts:

“If those people step up, they start pushing back, they start being vocal, they stop cowering in a corner afraid of being canceled, I promise we can get through this thing! If they don’t try to cancel me 50 times a day I wonder what’s going on. I start to wonder how they’re plotting against me! We just can’t be afraid of the nonsense!”

Don’t you just love how right-wingers try to suggest that someone wants to “cancel” them when they’re the ones who favor censorship, regulation of social media, and boycotts of anyone that doesn’t do what they want?

It didn’t take long before Don Jr. got royally mocked on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/DunesAllegedly/status/1379794271104950275?s=20

https://twitter.com/ldluglio/status/1379818621711613956?s=20

Tune in next week when Don Jr. complains he’s being mistreated because everyone is laughing at him.

Categories
Donald Trump Joe Biden The Trump Adminstration

Biden Is Already Reversing Trump’s Attempt To Pack The Courts With Extremist Judges

During his four years in office, failed one-term former President Donald Trump made a lot of appointments to the federal bench, including two right-wing Supreme Court justices, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

But that was only part of the impact Trump left on the federal bench, Washington Monthly notes:

“With Sen. Mitch McConnell’s help, the Senate became a judicial confirmation factory. Not counting the Supreme Court, Trump got 231 judges with lifetime appointments confirmed. No president got more lower court judges confirmed in a single term since Jimmy Carter.

“After flipping three Circuit Courts from majority-Democratic to majority-Republican, Trump left office with 7 of the 13 appellate-level courts staffed by a majority of Republican appointments. And when counting up all of the appellate-level and district-level judges at the end of Trump’s presidency, Republicans had more: 17 more to be exact.”

Yet despite all of the judicial appointments McConnell managed to get confirmed, President Joe Biden is on the verge of reversing nearly all of the gains Trump made during his term in office:

“Biden’s first set of judicial nominations this week is the beginning of something big: almost certainly by the end of this Congress, the majority of lower court seats will be filled by Democratic appointees.”

Yes, you read that correctly: By the time the current Congress is finished in 2022, the majority of lower court seats in the federal system will be held Democratic appointees.

But that’s not all the good news.

There are also rumblings that some of the current Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices could also be ready to retire. The name most often mentioned is Clarence Thomas, who is 73 and reportedly tired of being on the bench.

Justice Stephen Breyer, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, may also be close to retiring, since he’s been on the bench for almost 30 years and is 83 years old.

Even if Thomas and Breyer stay on the high court, many of the lower courts are about to be populated by Democratic appointees, and that means decisions will be favorable to the Biden administration as its moves forward with its legislative agenda.

In other words, Donald and Mitch may have thought they had hijacked the courts, but it turns out their efforts are about to come to naught.

 

Categories
Congress Elections GOP

GOP Congressman Says He’s Convinced Lauren Boebert Knew About The Jan. 6 Attack In Advance

A member of the House Republican caucus is speaking out and letting it be known that the GOP in its current form has utterly capitulated to the lies and lunacy of former President Donald Trump, and that he cannot sit still and watch as his party is destroyed without sounding an alarm.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) has long been a critic of Trump, but remarks he made to The New York Times Magazine are some of the harshest yet, with the Illinois congressman noting:

“I made the decision early in my career that I would be willing to take a potentially career-ending vote. But I thought that vote would be for something like a Social Security reform bill. I never thought it would be for defending democracy.”

The vote Kinzinger took to defend democracy was when he voted to authorize the creation of a bipartisan commission to examine what happened on January 6 and who is responsible for the Capitol insurrection which left five people dead.

Kinzinger was especially critical of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA):

“Kevin gave a great speech the week after that, and then he went to Mar-a-Lago and charged the paddles and brought Trump back to life. That’s the moment when I realized, Oh, man, this is a problem. You come to understand that when the party and party leaders talk about unity, and in the same breath, say that Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party, what they’re talking about isn’t unity. They’re talking about capitulation. When under the guise of unity, you act like Jan. 6 was just whatever you want to make of it, that is capitulating to a false narrative and to a dangerous attack on democracy. I will certainly talk to Kevin if he wants to. But I don’t see how we’re ever going to come eye-to-eye on this until there is a recognition that we can’t be the party of insurrection.”

And yet the GOP has indeed become the party of insurrection, with almost no Republicans being willing to say what needs to be said: That what transpired on Jan. 6 was a direct attack on the United States and an abomination that must be condemned in the strongest possible terms.

Of special concern to Kinzinger is the fact that he suspects there are current Republicans in Congress who knew what was going to take place on the fateful January day, yet didn’t say a word or warn their colleagues or the authorities:

“I will say, if you just looked at Twitter — the whole reason I brought my gun and kept my staff home and told my wife to stay in the apartment was looking at Twitter. I saw the threats. When Lauren Boebert — I will call her out by name — tweeted ‘Today is 1776,’ I don’t know what that meant other than this is the time for revolution. Maybe it was a dumb tweet that she didn’t mean. Fine. I’ll give her that credit for now. But if you have members of Congress who were involved in nurturing an insurrection, heck yeah, we need to know.”

Fortunately, a select committee is now investigating what happened on Jan. 6. And if it finds that some members of Congress did indeed have advance knowledge of the attack, they need to be booted from their seats and handed over to the Justice Department for prosecution.