MAGA Republican Congressman-Elect George Santos caught in even more lies before even being sworn in, he’s in hiding.
Not only did he make up diplomas and work history, claiming to have graduated from and worked at institutions that have never heard of him, not only did he brag about his charity that has no paper trail, no evidence of ever dispersing donations, and never even reported collecting donations (which he almost certainly pocketed, just like Trump did), not only did he forget he’s a criminal fugitive from Brazil where he stole elderly bed bound people’s checkbooks and went on spending sprees before fleeing the country, but he even made up a back story for his grandparents, claiming they were successful Ukrainian Jewish business people who fled the holocaust to Brazil and started over, but records show they were both born in Brazil and never lived in Ukraine.
Every single thing about this man is a lie….he’s so your guy.



Guaranteed Republicans won’t care, won’t investigate, won’t remove him or even punish…truth means nothing to you. Absolutely nothing.

How’s that Tesla investment doing? Down ANOTHER 10% today. Ouch. Sadly PE is still well into the “don’t even think about it” range. Never buy above 25PE, Buffet says don’t buy anything over 15….and NEVER GO ALL IN ON ONE STOCK…..but you know better. Carry on. (Just understand you put all your eggs in one basket AND counted your chickens before they hatched…then someone dropped the basket)

Your bonus- it recently came out that under Trump American life expectancy dropped to the lowest since 96. Hilariously, righty propaganda is trying to ignore the nearing 1.2 million deaths from Covid, 90% of which were preventable with a proper pandemic response according to the CDC, and blame the rise in deaths on the fairly stable number of 100000 deaths from drugs and alcohol per year…because they know your ilk doesn’t understand statistics and will just believe stupid nonsense. So you know, 1.2 million is more than 100000, so has more effect on average lifespans.

Edit: Turns out Santos also isn’t gay. He tried to hide that he was married to a woman until 2019. More MAGA lies.

Sure, because Obama never once took a question from any reporters or from right wing media...remember them, those non reporters who would repeatedly ask about his birth certificate being fake, or Benghazzi because then every single American life lost from a lack of foresight was reason for removal and prison unlike now when 80000 dead at Trump's tiny feet is a win in their eyes and not the president's responsibility at all, or lies about the ACA they knew were lies (death panels), etc.

Trump should know exactly how to deal with Incessant bashing , second guessing of every move, decision over last 3 years... even outright lies designed to make his presidency illegitimate, that's exactly what Trump was doing 3 years into Obama's administration. If you can't take it, don't dish it out snowflakes.

Trump failed at leadership at every turn here, from ignoring the danger for months until public outcry finally got some minimal actions, clearly too late and weak actions like halting only some Chinese from the quarantine zone but letting 40000 people from the area in without testing or tracing or quarantine. From continuing to facilitate shipping American PPE to China and elsewhere through March and maybe later, long after there were massive shortages here, to ignoring American manufacturers who in early February were offering to ramp up production and charge regular price, not a 1000% markup like Trump's federal distributors do, from absolute denial of the problem to debunked conspiracy theories that barely mask the underlying racism featured in this latest attempt to shirk any responsibility for his administration's failures that cost 80000+ American lives...the buck never once stops with Trump in his mind, the direct opposite of being presidential. *facepalm

If nothing is your responsibility or fault, you're far too impotent to fix anything. That's Trump.

Trump is a racist coward who can't answer even softball questions from Fox sycophants without looking stupid and naive. If you don't have the backbone or intelligence to answer basic factual questions with calm civility, you don't belong in ANY public office, much less the highest one.

Have I mentioned how much I like reading pieces by Thomas Frank?

He had a piece in the Guardian two days ago about the Podesta emails and it's just brilliant. Excerpt:

This genre of Podesta email, in which people try to arrange jobs for themselves or their kids, points us toward the most fundamental thing we know about the people at the top of this class: their loyalty to one another and the way it overrides everything else. Of course Hillary Clinton staffed her state department with investment bankers and then did speaking engagements for investment banks as soon as she was done at the state department. Of course she appears to think that any kind of bank reform should “come from the industry itself”. And of course no elite bankers were ever prosecuted by the Obama administration. Read these emails and you understand, with a start, that the people at the top tier of American life all know each other. They are all engaged in promoting one another’s careers, constantly.

Everything blurs into everything else in this world. The state department, the banks, Silicon Valley, the nonprofits, the “Global CEO Advisory Firm” that appears to have solicited donations for the Clinton Foundation. Executives here go from foundation to government to thinktank to startup. There are honors. Venture capital. Foundation grants. Endowed chairs. Advanced degrees. For them the door revolves. The friends all succeed. They break every boundary.

But the One Big Boundary remains. Yes, it’s all supposed to be a meritocracy. But if you aren’t part of this happy, prosperous in-group – if you don’t have John Podesta’s email address – you’re out.

Based on the book The Rebel: The Outlaw Josie Wales, written under a pseudonym by Asa Earl Carter, a White supremacist. There was a This American Life (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/527/transcript) which goes into AEC and The Education of Little Tree. It's interesting how, based on that, AEC's pecular point of view comes across quite clearly in this clip--the distrust of Blue Coats, the disdain for government, and even viewing the Native American as a "Noble Savage".

They took the hair part thing from This American Life. Credit where it's due.

ok, so you have a peaceful revolt...




...then what?

saying you're pissed is easy. Saying there is a problem is easy.

But where is your solution to address these ills. How do you plan to stop it from happening again?

I find it interesting that you seem to imply that violence is a tool of a state. That's rather disingenuous, don't you think? As if the state is more predisposed to use violence than other groups? the state, like every organization, is made up of people. so if the state is violent, it's because people are violent and we really haven't solved that problem yet, have we. Violence is still part of the human condition and not an inherent part of the state...or playing video games, etc.

I would argue that many of the conflicts we are currently in are because of monied interests and their influence on gov't. remove that influence as I suggested and I'd wager that we've have a less violent gov't.

and I'm sorry, I must have missed something, but are you implying that Obama personally shut down Occupy Wall Street? gonna need you to provide a citation for that. Speaking for my city. The local occupy group was evicted from it's spot by our governor, a republican, but not that it matters because the whole Occupy movement was poorly thought out to begin with. very few people want to camp out 24/7 on with college hipsters and homeless people. It was just a badly implemented idea....period. It was one of the few times I genuinely agreed with our governor. While I might have agreed with Occupy's intentions, they were absolutely ineffective at conveying any meaningful message and an absolute nuisance to the area.

Bottom line, is that as that Japanese general alluded to, America is a sleeping giant. For all the rhetoric and for all these ills you have mentioned, the average American citizen is still largely insulated from it. American life has not fundamentally changed during the administration of Bush and/or Obama despite what the pundits on either side try to cry wolf about. Because we have an all-volunteer military, even the average american citizen is largely insulated from our wars as well.

When those things change, then maybe you'll see something happen.

And yes, I know my view is optimistic. But optimism works. Wasn't that long ago that many things we take for granted today was viewed as optimistic but niave or unrealistic.

This voice mail was also played and analyzed in an episode of the radio show This American Life:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/461/take-the-money-and-run-for-office
If you're interested in this stuff I heartily recommend this episode, for me it was an eye-opener.
It talks about how organized the fund raising from lobbyists is, and how it is more organized by policians than by lobbyists.
And (if I recall correctly) this also explains part of Eleanor Holmes Norton's call, senior members of influential committees are expected to raise more money, and then redistribute that money among less influential policians within the party. Holmes Norton also mentions that in some part of the voice mail (not played by Cenk), that she has had criticicisms from other politicians that she was not pulling her fund raising weight.

I swear I've heard that first picture-taking joke from someone else. Maybe on This American Life... Does it sound familiar to anyone else?

Vimeo description:

Animated by Austin illustrator Divya Srinivasan, this animated video depicts three sleepy ghost kids following a heterochromic fox through a snowy twilight. When the group discovers an impromptu critter disco in a forest clearing, the spirits and strays dance in harmony until a cranky babushka bemoans the noise and breaks up the party. Thus, the spectral youths return to the astral plane... but not without a final farewell to their new found animal friends.

Divya Srinivasan has previously created animated videos for Spoon ("Everything Hits at Once"), They Might Be Giants, The Sundance Channel and Wonder Showzen, and worked on Richard Linklater's "Waking Life" feature film. Divya's illustration portfolio includes numerous pieces for the New Yorker magazine, as well as the album artwork for Sufjan Stevens' Illinois and This American Life's "Stories of Hope and Fear" collection.

"I Saw The Bright Shinies" is from The Octopus Project's album "Hello, Avalanche," released in 2007 on Peek-A-Boo Records. The "Bright Shinies" video appears on the "Golden Beds" enhanced CD EP released in 2009 on Peek-A-Boo Records.

peekaboorecords.com/octopusproject
theoctopusproject.com
myspace.com/theoctopusproject
pupae.com/portfolio

*length=4:10

Radio: My favorite discovery of 2012 is "Radio Lab", a story telling show reminiscent of another favorite, 'This American Life', but with a much more sophisticated sound design. All episodes are available for free in the podcast section of iTunes.

Music: I fell in love with the New Orleans second line scene after Issy and I paid a visit to the crescent city this year. We saw the 'Rebirth Brass Band' live and had a great time. We also had a mini-meetup at the show with @dotdude. New Orleans music culture is like no other.

Music: Louis Cole & Genevieve Artadi: Highly unique and energetic electro-acoustic music. Hard to explain.

Music: Austin Texas band 'The Black Angels' - Dark, bluesy rock obviously influenced by the Doors. To be honest, I'm not crazy about blues rock or the Doors, but 'The Black Angels' manage to meld these influences into something I really dig.

Music: UK band, 'Metronomy'. Their sound is eclectic, hooky and heavily influenced by all the cool British 80's bands I loved as a kid. Goes down easy. Works in the background as well as the fore.

Movies: Django and Looper were the two films that captivated me from start to finish. Both films by gifted auteurs, one at the top of his game, the other on the rise. Great writing. Great Directing. Great performances.

Horror movies: The Cabin in the Woods (A clever and absurd meta-horror mashup) and the The Lady in Black (A classic, classy ghost story) both satisfied. It's nice that there were a couple of diamonds in sea of Paranormal-Activity-esque-found-footage detritus.

TV: same stuff that everyone else likes - BB, GoT, DoAb and Sherlock. I also got into Always Sunny in Philadelphia this year - very dark, very funny.

Books: Started a bunch, finished very few. Nothing to recommend. "Checklist Manifesto" is pretty interesting so far - it's about how the brain functions (or fails to function) in the information-dense present.

Games: 'Xcom' was a worthy update of the original. Loved all the detailed micro/macro strategy. 'Journey' was beautiful and fairly moving for a videogame.

I hate these bullshit moralizing segments about how decent honorable American workers are losing their jobs to the perfidious Chinese. Why should we value American jobs more than Chinese ones? If the American workers were being replaced by robots, I could appreciate the concern, but that's not what's happening. They're being replaced by other human beings. The only way this counts as a tragedy is if you value the well-being of the average American more than that of the average Chinese person, and that, I submit, is a morally bankrupt position. It's the same kind of attitude that leads Americans to bemoan the loss of even a single American life to foreign terrorists, but not bat an eyelash at hundreds of thousands of foreign deaths at American hands.

Just bought it. I heard her tell a funny story on This American Life about run-ins with Taylor Dane.

"Diversity has been written into the DNA of American life; any institution that lacks a rainbow array has come to seem diminished, if not diseased".
Joe Klein

Looks like ol' Joe may need to expand his horizons ... It's obviously NOT just for Americans anymore =oD

*promote this touching piece.

I've got into 'This American Life' over the last few months, and just love listening to it while I walk to/from the train. David Rakoff's bits were always so wonderfully worded, and he reads them so well. So I was sad to hear of his death so soon after my discovery of him.

80 percent of the country may claim to be Christian, but the real question is, how many of those are born again? I would be surprised if the number was even half of that. This pseudo-christ may have some points, but it's based on a faulty premise; that America is still a Christian nation. It was at one time, but no longer; it all started to change when Americans rebelled against biblical morality in the 60's and 70's. Before that, we had Christian values and a Christian culture. It wasn't perfect by any means; there were many problems. But on the main Americans were a moral people, and this was a wonderful country to grow up in. Now, after decades of secular indoctrination, the foundations have been ripped away and replaced with secular values and secular culture, and we see the fruit of that, in all areas of American life.

As far as helping people is concerned, Christians are by far the most charitible people in the country..who do you think is running all of those food banks and homeless shelters? Those making 49,000 or less gave 3 1/2 times more than secular citizens with the same income, donated twice as much of their time, were 57 percent more likely to help a homeless person and two thirds more likely to donate blood. Another interesting fact is if you compare two secular people..one raised in a religious household and one who is not, the one with a religious upbringing is twice as likely to donate money to charity.

Because religious and secular citizens tend to cluster together, you also have different parts of the country that are more charitible than others. For instance, arkansas is one of the most charitible states, whose citizens give around 3.9 percent of their income, versus the citizens of Massachusetts, who only give 1.8 percent of their income, which is one of the least charitible. Or that the citizens of South Dakota give away 75 percent more of their income than the citizens of San Francisco.

That still isn't really that significant for what we are commanded to do. Christ called us to a higher standard, one that is separated from the gross materialism of this age. I can agree with the criticism in that manner, but God intends to have Christians reach people in different ways. He gives all of us different gifts, but He intends for us to use those gifts for His purposes. It is okay for a Christian to have wealth, if He is using that wealth to do Gods will.

In any case, the church in general will certainly have a lot to answer for when Christ returns, but this commentary is not an accurate reflection of that. It's simply another anti-christian vehicle that atheists will all nod their head and agree with without any thoughtful analysis.