Trump 53: Orange Florida Man Awaiting Indictment

[Black Aliss]

On 1/23/2021 at 11:28 PM, Ozlsn said:

I really want to know now where the Republican Congresspeople and Senators were during the attack. Because if they think they were going to be separated out while the others were gassed or whatever then I think they are wrong. So had some separated themselves from the group already? 

AOC has said that she and her staff hid elsewhere because she didn't feel safe sheltering with certain members of Congress. And it sounds like her fears were more than justified, given Boebert's tweeting out the location of Nancy Pelosi during the riot.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/01/aoc-feared-would-die-capitol-riot.html

[SeekingAdventure]

What I don'T understand is why the OFM is the symbol for pro-life?

[fraurosena]

1 hour ago, AmazonGrace said:

He doesn't own this building but I hope it still stings.

Oh, you bet it does. He makes money off of having his name, his brand, on buildings. Every time a building takes his name down means loss of income. 

[Ozlsn]

37 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

I don't understand how a country that still uses the death penalty is even allowed in the United Nations.

The US is in a weird position as far as the UN is concerned. They helped found it, they're a permanent member of the security council, it's located on their territory, they have a lot of power despite not paying dues for several years for mostly domestic political reasons. 

They are one of seven nations who haven't ratified CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women) - the US has signed but not ratified, together with Somalia, Iran, Palau, Tonga, Nauru and Sudan. (Some who have ratified have included amendments to their agreement to water it down considerably, notably Saudi Arabia).

The US is one of three countries to not ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, along with Sudan and Somalia (same caveat about amendments here, including the UK adding one so 17 year olds could continue to serve in the armed forces). 

To be honest the death penalty is one of the things they have in common with a large number of other member states, and certainly politically motivated executions puts them in company with at least one other Security Council member. If the UN kicked out death penalty states, even capricious death penalty states, it'd be a lot quieter there.

[clueliss]

1 hour ago, SeekingAdventure said:

What I don'T understand is why the OFM is the symbol for pro-life?

For over 4 years I've not understood how the 'Christian' right could ever support anything OFM.  And yes, all they seem to see or hear is how someone feels about that one issue and they disregarding literally everything else.  Which I find revolting (and makes me not want to set foot in churches)

[Dandruff]

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

Oh, you bet it does. He makes money off of having his name, his brand, on buildings. Every time a building takes his name down means loss of income. 

And serves as a reminder to him of what his name is now worth.

[47of74]

A new watchdog group is being started up to identify those companies that hire fuck nugget staffers

Quote

The Campaign Against Corporate Complicity, which kicks off Tuesday, said it’s building a list of former officials and aides who were involved in what the group says were the Trump administration’s most controversial actions.

The group said the initiative, which started in the fall, gained momentum after Trump egged on supporters who broke into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 as Congress prepared to certify Joe Biden’s election victory. The organization also cited the administration’s policy of separating migrant families and its response to the coronavirus pandemic among examples of acts and decisions it’s taking into account.

The Campaign Against Corporate Complicity was formed by two public-interest groups in Washington, American Oversight and Accountable.US, which specialize in public records requests and research. Although they call themselves non-partisan, they count significant staffing from Democratic and progressive groups and don’t disclose funding.

Former government staffers are worried about their professional futures now that they’re branded with the “Scarlet T” of working for Trump, Bloomberg has reported, and some lower-ranking staffers have said they’ve had offers withdrawn.

Good.  These people should not be allowed to hide in corporate America. 

[47of74]

YouTube's latest action against pcff and Ghouliani

Quote

Video sharing giant YouTube extended its suspension of former President Donald Trump’s channel indefinitely on Tuesday and restricted Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani’s ability to make money off the platform.

The latest clampdowns: The Google-owned company announced that for the second time in two weeks, it would extend restrictions that block Trump from posting on the platform. The company initially blocked him on Jan. 12 amid fears of additional violence in the wake of the insurrection at the Capitol by Trump’s supporters.

YouTube initially said it was giving Trump his first of three strikes before it would permanently ban him from the site under its content policies, suspending him for a minimum of one week. It extended that suspension last Tuesday for at least another week. But the company offered no timetable for the latest extension, making his suspension effectively indefinite.

YouTube separately said it will temporarily bar Giuliani from participating in a program that allows him to make money off his channel due to repeated violations of its policies against making false claims about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 elections, according to a spokesperson. Giuliani can reapply for the program after 30 days if the issues with his account have been resolved, the spokesperson said.

 

[front hugs > duggs]

Soooooo......when can we unpin this turd?

[Alisamer]

On 1/26/2021 at 1:51 AM, AmazonGrace said:

Using that seal is, um, frowned upon.

 

 

I hope he gets charged with using it inappropriately, even if the result is just a fine. The law is the law.

Walt Disney World has, in the lobby of the Hall of Presidents (which is a small presidential museum, essentially), a rug made of the seal. They have it fenced off so it can't be walked on, and the cast member who works in the lobby between admitting guests for the shows (it's usually an older guy who knows an incredible amount of info about every single president) tells those waiting about how it's one of only two in the world (if I remember correctly) and that they have special permission from the government to have it there. They make it clear that having the seal there is a Big Deal and Very Important and it is a Great Honor for them to be allowed to show it. 

Trump should have his own seal made. I think many of his fans have already come up with plenty of historically-inspired (read: Nazi) ideas he could use.

Edited January 27, 2021 by Alisamer

[GreyhoundFan]

Guess it's no longer "the" place to be seen by rethuglikans:

 

[Dandruff]

3 hours ago, Alisamer said:

Trump should have his own seal made. I think many of his fans have already come up with plenty of historically-inspired (read: Nazi) ideas he could use.

But wouldn't that be telling the truth vs. continuing to try to pervert what's honorable and decent?

[onekidanddone]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Guess it's no longer "the" place to be seen by rethuglikans:

 

Echo echo echo

[47of74]

I wonder how much longer the name will be up there before it goes away? And who would buy that turkey after fuck nugget has to sell it?  I hope whoever buys it takes and guts the place to get rid of the orange stink.  

[GreyhoundFan]

I guess gold plated toilets aren't worth what they used to be:

 

[onekidanddone]

The media had been hyping all the legal trouble for OFF (Orange fuck face) once he left office. I’m very impatient. When will it start?

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump wants a library. He must never have one."

Quote

Former president Donald Trump will have an official portrait in the National Portrait Gallery at some point. And in states where he remains popular, he could have airports, bridges and schools named for him. But Trump must never have an official presidential library, and Congress should move quickly to make sure he doesn’t.

Things would seem to be moving toward establishing a Trump library. On Jan. 20, the day he left office, the National Archives launched the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library website. Already, there are rumors that the former president is engaged with the idea of creating some kind of presidential center, perhaps run by longtime aide Dan Scavino, with a price tag as high as $2 billion. Even before Trump left office, a sophisticated parody site, djtrumplibrary.com, began attracting admirers for its sharp architectural and design satire on what has become the norm in presidential centers. But it also deftly skewered the larger scam that has become attached to the presidency: the use of presidential libraries and museums to entrench perpetual fundraising and hagiography as a permanent part of every post-presidential career.

None of this, however, means that Trump could actually create a presidential center similar to the one planned for former president Barack Obama, or those dedicated to former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. As Anthony Clark, author of “The Last Campaign: How Presidents Rewrite History, Run for Posterity & Enshrine Their Legacies,” wrote recently in Politico, it is unlikely that Trump has the focus, administrative savvy and financial resources to execute a presidential center: “Presidential libraries are complicated. And if you understand how they work — and how Trump himself works — it’s nearly impossible to imagine him actually pulling it off,” Clark writes.

But that doesn’t mean that Trump won’t try and that, in trying, cause further damage to the country. That is why Congress should use this moment to reconsider the legislation that helped create and shape the presidential libraries now administered by the National Archives, not just to prevent Trump from perpetrating one last, giant grift, but to reform the system so it serves the country better. This is long overdue, and would need to be done even if Trump weren’t trying to raise $2 billion for a Trump center. But his intention to do so makes this urgent, even an issue of national security.

Before Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to donate his presidential papers to the federal government in 1939, the documents and paperwork generated by a president usually were considered the outgoing leader’s personal property. Roosevelt recognized an interest in giving the public access to this material. In 1955, Harry S. Truman tried to formalize the process, signing the Presidential Libraries Act, which encouraged presidents to donate their papers, as well as land and a building to house them, which the National Archives would officially maintain. Over the next decades, these privately created, federally administered libraries became increasingly complex, serving as museums, think tanks and shrines, with presidents allowed considerable — often far too much — control over what records were considered presidential and when the public could access them.

Individual presidents used executive orders to make changes, the law was amended and former presidents were required to donate more and more resources to maintaining the federally operated part of these facilities. Finally, in 2017, faced with the possibility of having to donate 60 percent of the total cost of an Obama presidential center to the federal government to cover running the library part of the project, the 44th president opted out of the system almost entirely. When the Obama center opens in Chicago, no official presidential library will be part of the complex, which will be privately built and operated. Obama’s presidential records, the vast bulk of them digital rather than paper, will have to be accessed elsewhere, although the Archives will loan material to the Obama center for exhibitions.

Ordinarily, presidential records can’t be accessed for five, and up to 12, years after a chief executive leaves office. And before leaving office, a president has significant leverage over what the public eventually can see, which documents are delivered to the Archives, which are considered public and which are private, and to weigh in on other matters, including security and the national interest.

The case of Trump is exceptional by any standard, and he should be afforded no discretion over his records or any privilege to extend the amount of time before the public can see them. Trump’s 2017 requirement that the National Archives withhold access to his materials until 2033 should be abrogated, and Congress should begin an extraordinary effort to recover as much of his communications legacy as possible, even material that wasn’t deemed “presidential.” Trump’s presidency mixed public and private interests in a way that was unprecedented in modern American history, so his decisions on these matters can’t be trusted. He incited an insurrection, and many of the people who may have participated in that, including members of Congress, are still actively engaged in public life. The need to know who they are and what they did isn’t just a matter for the FBI, the Justice Department and prosecutors.

As Clark points out, Congress has intervened before in an exceptional presidential records case. A little more than four months after Richard Nixon was forced from office in disgrace, President Gerald Ford signed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act, which gave the government direct custody over Nixon’s records to prevent their destruction. It wasn’t just that Congress didn’t trust Nixon, it also felt “the need to provide the public with the full truth, at the earliest reasonable date, of the abuses of governmental power popularly identified under the generic term ‘Watergate,’ ” according to the law’s text.

It is imperative to the nation’s future that we know how and why authoritarianism became so deeply and pervasively rooted in the Trump administration. Historians, journalists and biographers need immediate access to this material (with the minimal oversight necessary by professional, nonpartisan archivists) to help educate the American public on the greatest threat to the republic since the Civil War.

Nixon was interested, primarily, in keeping the full extent of his criminal and disreputable behavior from becoming public, although he eventually did succeed in creating a Nixon library. The danger of Trump using a presidential library to burnish his image is far more serious, with the ex-president and his surrogates still promoting the idea that his electoral loss was somehow fraudulent. That creates an ongoing uncertainty in American public life, which Trump and even more unscrupulous actors will use to further division, inflame tension, exacerbate racism and delegitimize the American democratic system.

So even a privately funded and operated Trump presidential library, which would be devoted to whitewashing his record and rewriting history, is a terrible and even dangerous idea. Further, given Trump’s alleged misuse of charitable funds, including self-dealing, waste and other illegal activities, at his now dissolved New York-based foundation, any intention to start another public entity can only be considered a crime scene waiting to happen.

If it unfortunately does happen, it probably will be in Florida, where state Attorney General Ashley Moody is one of Trump’s top surrogates and a prominent supporter of his false claims of election fraud. So, on this matter, Americans cannot trust the rule of law in Florida, but they can put pressure on corporate and other entities not to donate to any group associated with any effort to build a Trump presidential center. And the FBI can keep a close watch on any national group created to solicit funding for such an endeavor.

Finally, Congress can improve American record-keeping and preservation by forbidding future presidents from raising money for presidential centers while still in office. Access to presidential records is also expensive and time consuming — even digital documents, the quantity of which has grown exponentially since most communications became electronic, need to be sorted, surveyed and labeled, a process that is laborious. Rachel Vagts, president of the Society of American Archivists, points out that the most urgent need, right now, is better funding for the National Archives, and a better culture of compliance with laws governing record-keeping.

Trump reportedly flouted those laws on a regular basis, tearing up and discarding even paper documents. The extent to which he and his administration destroyed records and communicated outside of federal systems is unknown, which is why he and his people should be cut out of the process of preserving those documents. And Americans should shame anyone — including architecture firms, exhibit designers and corporate donors — who helps Trump perpetuate the lies that nearly destroyed our 244-year-old effort to create a democratically governed republic.

 

[fraurosena]

I have no idea where to put this, so I'll post it here as it was probably at Trump's instigation that they got the stuff in the first place. 

Oklahoma trying to return its $2m stockpile of hydroxychloroquine

Quote

The Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office has been tasked with attempting to return a $2 million stockpile of a malaria drug once touted by former President Donald Trump as a way to treat the coronavirus.

In April, Gov. Kevin Stitt, who ordered the hydroxychloroquine purchase, defended it by saying that while it may not be a useful treatment for the coronavirus, the drug had multiple other uses and “that money will not have gone to waste in any respect.”

But nearly a year later the state is trying to offload the drug back to its original supplier, California-based FFF Enterprises, Inc, a private pharmaceutical wholesaler. 

Alex Gerszewski, a spokesman for Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter, told The Frontier this week that the AG’s office was working with the state health department “to try to figure out a solution.”

Gerszewski said Hunter’s office had gotten involved at the request of the Oklahoma State Department of Health.

Stitt was criticized last year for the $2 million purchase, a move viewed by some as a partisan move to curry favor with conservatives who were defending Trump amid criticism of his own support of the drug. But Stitt defended the purchase at the time by likening it to the race early last year to procure personal protective equipment for Oklahomans, believing it was better to have the hydroxychloroquine stockpile and not need it, rather than to later learn the drug was useful but not have it.

Stitt’s spokeswoman Carly Atchison told The Frontier this week that  “Every decision the Governor makes is with the health and lives of Oklahomans in mind, including purchasing hydroxychloroquine, securing PPE, and now distributing vaccines as quickly and efficiently as possible to combat this COVID crisis.”

The state purchased the hydroxychloroquine stockpile in early April, days after Trump began to tout it as a treatment. While many acknowledged at the time that reports of the drug’s effectiveness were purely anecdotal, Trump said at a briefing in March, “What do we have to lose? I feel very good about it.”

Health officials nationwide immediately began to caution people against using the drug, throwing water on the idea that it could cure a coronavirus infection and cautioning that it could have serious side effects, including irregular heart rhythms and even the possibility of death. The drug was ultimately discredited as a treatment option and the National Institute of Health released a report in November that the drug had “no clinical benefit to hospitalized patients.” 

Though more than 20 states ultimately bought hydroxychloroquine drugs for potential use against COVID-19, Oklahoma, along with Utah, was one of only two states who purchased the drug from private wholesalers, according to the Associated Press.

Stitt wasn’t alone in his support of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the coronavirus. In August, Rep. Justin Humphrey, R-Lane, promoted hydroxychloroquine as a viable treatment after he had contracted COVID-19. 

Though the drug had been widely discredited at that point, Humphrey, who has recently made news for seeking to establish a Bigfoot hunting season in Oklahoma and made waves in 2017 when he referred to pregnant women as “hosts,” encouraged Oklahomans to “take courage and begin treating COVID with Hydroxychloroquine.”

It’s unclear yet how much of the initial $2 million investment in the hydroxychloroquine the state could recoup. FFF Enterprises did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

 

[Alisamer]

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

I have no idea where to put this, so I'll post it here as it was probably at Trump's instigation that they got the stuff in the first place. 

Oklahoma trying to return its $2m stockpile of hydroxychloroquine

I really think they should just donate the stuff to a medical charity (Doctors without borders, maybe?) that works in malaria prone areas, since it is actually a malaria treatment. I think the chances of the manufacturer taking it back are slim, so they could just donate it (if they can find someone to take it) and pat themselves on the back about how "charitable" they are to do so. 

I think if it was a private company rather than a state they'd have done that already, so they could claim the donation on their taxes. 

[fraurosena]

1 minute ago, Alisamer said:

I really think they should just donate the stuff to a medical charity (Doctors without borders, maybe?) that works in malaria prone areas, since it is actually a malaria treatment. I think the chances of the manufacturer taking it back are slim, so they could just donate it (if they can find someone to take it) and pat themselves on the back about how "charitable" they are to do so. 

I think if it was a private company rather than a state they'd have done that already, so they could claim the donation on their taxes. 

But that would mean they were magnanimous and charitable. Neither are words I would use to describe Republicans.

[GeraldineGrainger]

I can't imagine wanting to go to a Trump presidential library. What would be in it? Printouts of tweets? Towers of Diet Coke cans? We always say that Trump wasn't a real president - he just played one on TV. For school we did a timeline of the presidents, complete with all of their pictures. When we got to Trump we just left a blank, and my son wrote, "Nope."

[SassyPants]

4 hours ago, GeraldineGrainger said:

I can't imagine wanting to go to a Trump presidential library. What would be in it? Printouts of tweets? Towers of Diet Coke cans? We always say that Trump wasn't a real president - he just played one on TV. For school we did a timeline of the presidents, complete with all of their pictures. When we got to Trump we just left a blank, and my son wrote, "Nope."

I agree. Just the premise of a “library” and what a library represents is incongruent with Trump and his interests and strengths. Maybe a place that contains/highlights all his and his campaign’s spoofs and F-ups. It could be located right next to the 4 Seasons Landscaping Co.

[Dandruff]

23 minutes ago, SassyPants said:

I agree. Just the premise of a “library” and what a library represents is incongruent with Trump and his interests and strengths. Maybe a place that contains/highlights all his and his campaign’s spoofs and F-ups. It could be located right next to the 4 Seasons Landscaping Co.

The Trump Bigly Museum of Ignominy?

[Audrey2]

I'm thinking somewhere in Russia would be a very appropriate place for the trump library. It doesn't have to be very big as other posters mentioned it just needs to contain all of its tweets which could be held on a tablet.

[thoughtful]

4 hours ago, SassyPants said:

I agree. Just the premise of a “library” and what a library represents is incongruent with Trump and his interests and strengths. Maybe a place that contains/highlights all his and his campaign’s spoofs and F-ups. It could be located right next to the 4 Seasons Landscaping Co.

Perfect! They could rent a cubby in the porn shop.