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“Democracy”: How Pam Bondi Protected Foreclosure Fraud

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2024 //
3

Our reader, self-named “Democracy,” wrote an introduction to an article about Pam Bondi that appeared in The American Prospect. Please read the introduction and the article. We are only now learning about Bondi’s record as Florida Attorney General. Perhaps Trump nominated Matt Gaetz first to enable Bindi to skate through as everyone breathed a sigh of relief that Gaetz was out.

Democracy wrote:

More on Pam Bondi here:

“June Clarkson and Theresa Edwards were attorneys in the Economic Crimes division of the Florida attorney general’s office, based in Fort Lauderdale. They joined the government to prevent companies from ripping off their customers. In 2010, they heard from an oncology nurse named Lisa Epstein, who delivered information about how law firms across the state were using hundreds of thousands of phony documents to foreclose on homeowners. Lisa knew this because the banks tried to do it to her.

A group of foreclosure victims had found documents that were literally signed ‘Bogus Assignee.’ They had documents dated 9/9/9999. They had documents notarized on dates before they were allegedly created. They traced these documents back to Florida’s ‘foreclosure mills,’ law firms that churned out foreclosures the way a factory churns out sweaters. The false documents were necessary because banks and lenders, striving during the housing bubble to sell mortgages and deliver them to investors, securitized the loans without maintaining chain of title, botching the true ownership records. Instead of rectifying the situation, the banks had the foreclosure mills concoct false evidence and present it in courts to dispossess people.

Within months, the attorney general’s office had opened investigations into Lender Processing Services, Florida Default Law Group, the Law Office of David J. Stern, Marshall C. Watson, Shapiro & Fishman, and other components of Florida’s great foreclosure machine. In the course of the investigation, Clarkson and Edwards deposed Tammie Lou Kapusta, a former paralegal with David J. Stern, who testified that the firm employed offshore foreclosure document shops in Guam and the Philippines, receiving fake documents that the paralegals would sign. Notary stamps were sitting around the office, and anyone on the team would use them and forge the signatures of the notaries.

By October 2010, all of the leading banks stopped pursuing foreclosures in Florida and across the country, because they could no longer do it legally. It was an incredible example of citizen activism making a real difference, aided by Clarkson and Edwards, the first two law enforcement officials who were actually willing to investigate the fraud.

The system was working, until Pam Bondi came to town.”

https://prospect.org/justice/2024-11-22-when-pam-bondi-protected-foreclosure-fraudsters/

Categories Corruption, Elections, Ethics, Failure, Florida, Fraud, Trump

Trump Nominates MAGA Warrior Kash Patel to Lead the FBI

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2024 //
23

Trump is demonstrating his intention to purge the FBI by naming his close associate Kash Patel as FBI Director. Patel has said repeatedly that the FBI is loaded with “Deep State” enemies, and he plans to fire them.

The FBI is supposed to be an independent agency, not a vengeance weapon belonging to the President. Patel has made clear that he will find and punish Trump’s enemies. He will run the FBI, if confirmed, as Trump’s man, serving Trump, not justice and not the American people. He will be Trump’s avenger, as he destroys the reputation of the FBI.

Politico described him:

President Donald Trump announced Saturday night that he has picked staunch Trump loyalist Kash Patel as the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Patel, a Trump transition insider, has been one of Trump’s most visible and vocal allies, showing up at his criminal trial in Manhattan, perpetuating conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. He worked as chief of staff to the secretary of Defense during the first Trump administration, and has been outspoken about calling for a purge of Trump’s enemies from the Justice Department, FBI and other intelligence agencies.

The New York Times wrote:

President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Saturday that he wants to replace Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, with Kash Patel, a hard-line critic of the bureau who has called for shutting down the agency’s Washington headquarters, firing its leadership and bringing the nation’s law enforcement agencies “to heel.”

Mr. Trump’s planned nomination of Mr. Patel has echoes of his failed attempt to place another partisan firebrand, Matt Gaetz, atop the Justice Department as attorney general. It could run into hurdles in the Senate, which will be called on to confirm him, and is sure to send shock waves through the F.B.I., which Mr. Trump and his allies have come to view as part of a “deep state” conspiracy against him.

Mr. Patel has been closely aligned with Mr. Trump’s belief that much of the nation’s law enforcement and national security establishment needs to be purged of bias and held accountable for what they see as unjustified investigations and prosecutions of Mr. Trump and his allies.

Mr. Patel “played a pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, standing as an advocate for truth, accountability and the Constitution,” Mr. Trump said in announcing his choice in a social media post….

Mr. Patel, a favorite of Mr. Trump’s political base, has worked as a federal prosecutor and a public defender, but has little of the law enforcement and management experience typical of F.B.I. directors.

He served in a series of administration positions at the tail end of Mr. Trump’s first term, including posts on the National Security Council and in the Pentagon. Before leaving office in early 2021, Mr. Trump floated the idea of making Mr. Patel deputy director of either the C.I.A. or the F.B.I. William P. Barr, the attorney general at the time, wrote in his memoir that Mr. Patel would have become deputy F.B.I. director only “over my dead body.”

FBI directors are appointed for a 10-year term, so their tenure is allegedly nonpolitical. Although Trump appointed Christopher Wray as FBI Director, Trump soured on him after the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago to recover hundreds of top/secret documents. Trump made clear to Director Wray that he should resign or be fired.

Current and former law enforcement officials have worried that a second Trump term would feature an assault on the independence and authority of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, and for many of them, Mr. Patel’s ascension to the director’s role would confirm the worst of those fears.

Mr. Patel laid out his vision for wreaking vengeance on the F.B.I. and Justice Department in a book, “Government Gangsters,” calling for clearing out the top ranks of the bureau, which he called “a threat to the people.” He also wrote a children’s book, “The Plot Against the King,” telling through fantasy the story of the investigations into Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign’s possible ties to Russians.

He has vowed to investigate and possibly prosecute journalists once he is back in government, adding that he would “follow the facts and the law.”

“Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you,” he said last year. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”

An article in the New York Times in October described how deeply hated Patel was by other high-level members of the Trump administration. He was considered a boastful self-promoter.

After Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election and staff members began an exodus from the White House, Mr. Patel’s upward trajectory continued. Mr. Trump named him to one of the most important jobs at the Pentagon: chief of staff to Christopher Miller, the acting defense secretary.

Gen. Mark A. Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was shocked when Mr. Patel presented him a document signed in Sharpie by the outgoing Mr. Trump ordering a full withdrawal of all American troops from Afghanistan by Jan. 15. General Milley, the top military adviser to the president, had never even seen the order, and neither had several other senior advisers. It turned out it was drafted by Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel named as an adviser to the Pentagon after he impressed Mr. Trump with his appearances on Fox News, according to an account in “The Divider,” a book by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.

Mr. Trump backed away from the Afghanistan plan, but soon sought to again elevate Mr. Patel by making him deputy director of either the C.I.A. or the F.B.I. Only after Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. director, and William P. Barr, the attorney general, both threatened to quit — Mr. Barr vowed that Mr. Patel would become F.B.I. deputy only “over my dead body”— did Mr. Trump abandon the idea.

Mr. Patel stayed at the Pentagon for three months, crediting himself in his book with leading “the biggest transition’’ of the Defense Department “in U.S. history.”

Categories Bias, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Injustice, Trump

Trump Names Jared Kushner’s Father as Ambassador to France: All in the Family

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2024 //
4

Donald Trump believes in nepotism. He has never hesitatated to shower favors on the members of his family. In his first term, he issued a pardon to son-in-law Jared’s father, Charles Kushner, who spent two years in federal prison. Now, Kushner goes from ex-felon to Ambassador to France, if confirmed.

Does Mr. Kushner know anything about France or NATO or Europe? Probably not. Who cares?

The New York Times reported:

President-elect Donald J. Trump announced on Saturday that he would name Charles Kushner, the wealthy real estate executive and father of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to serve as ambassador to France, handing one of his earliest and most high-profile ambassador appointments to a close family associate.

The announcement was the latest step in a long-running exchange of political support between the two men. Mr. Kushner received a pardon from Mr. Trump in the final days of his first term for a variety of violations and then emerged as a major donor to Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign.

“I am pleased to nominate Charles Kushner, of New Jersey, to serve as the U.S. Ambassador to France,” Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post announcing his choice. “He is a tremendous business leader, philanthropist, & dealmaker, who will be a strong advocate representing our Country & its interests.”

Mr. Kushner, 70, pleaded guilty in 2004 to 16 counts of tax evasion, a single count of retaliating against a federal witness and one of lying to the Federal Election Commission in a case that became a lasting source of embarrassment for the family. As part of the plea, Mr. Kushner admitted to hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, a witness in a federal campaign finance investigation, and sending a videotape of the encounter to his sister.

Categories Elections, Ethics, Trump

Trump’s Director of FDA Warns Senate Not to Confirm RFK Jr.

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2024 //
7

One of Trump’s appointees in his first administration urged the U.S. Senate not to confirm Robert F. Kennedy as Secretary of Health and Human services because of his ignorant hostility to vaccines. He warned that a variety of contagious diseases would break out, and people would die. It’s worthwhile to recall that before RFK endorsed Trump, RFK was generally viewed by the press and by medical experts as a crackpot.

Scott Gottlieb, who led the Food and Drug Administration during the Trump administration, on Friday warned that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could “cost lives” if confirmed as the next secretary of Health and Human Services.
“You’re going to see measles, mumps and rubella vaccination rates go down,” Gottlieb said on CNBC, referencing Kennedy’s longtime criticism of federal recommendations for childhood immunizations, and noting a recent decline in childhood vaccination rates. The nation is approaching a “tipping point,” Gottlieb said, where a continued decline in childhood vaccines could soon lead to measles outbreaks and deaths of children.
“We’re going to start seeing epidemics of diseases that have long been vanquished, and, God forbid, we see polio reemerge in this country,” he said.
Gottlieb said he had been warning senators against confirming Kennedy to run the federal health department, although he did not identify with whom he had spoken. He added that Kennedy, who founded one of the country’s most prominent antivaccine groups, had “smart people” around him who could take immediate steps to affect Americans’ access to vaccines, such as changing federal vaccine recommendations.

Categories Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Health, Science, Trump

Trump Selects Financier With No Military Experience as Secretary of the Navy

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2024 //
11

Trump paid off a major campaign donor by naming John Phelan as Secretary of the Navy. Phelannwas never in the Navy. Phelan never served in any branch of the military. But Phelan gave a lot of money to the Trump campaign. Phelan founded the private investment firm Rugger Management LLC.

Apparently, no one ever explained to Trump that you reward your campaign donors by making them Ambassadors to other countries. Phelan might have been thrilled to be Ambassador to The Court of St. James (England) or Italy or Ireland or Japan or Australia. But no, Trump named him as Secretary of the Navy, whose decisions affect the lives of large numbers of servicemen and women, as well as national security.

Military.com described the appointment:

John Phelan is President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of the Navy, the first service leadership position that the incoming administration has announced as it prepares to put its stamp on the military.

In a post to his social media site, Truth Social, Trump said that he is naming Phelan, a financier who appears to have no military experience or experience working on military policy and has never worked for a large defense contractor, to lead the Navy.

The Navy secretary serves as the civilian leader of the military’s second-largest branch and is responsible for the health and well-being of more than 1 million sailors, Marines, reservists and civilian personnel, as well as managing an annual budget of more than $250 billion while ensuring the Navy is able to execute critical national security missions.

Phelan was a massive donor to Trump and Republicans in 2024.

Federal Election Commission records show that, among his many political contributions, Phelan donated $834,600 to Trump’s joint fundraising committee in April. Days after the election, on Nov. 10, he would donate another $93,300, records show.

Phelan also donated $371,700 to the Republican National Committee and another $370,000 to 37 different Republican state committees all on a single day in April.

Phelan hosted Trump at one of his homes for a private fundraiser over the summer where, according to The Guardian, the then-candidate for president went on a expletive-laced rant about immigration and threatened that the 2024 election “could be the last election we ever have” if Vice President Kamala Harris won.

While it is not unusual for service secretaries to have been major fundraisers or donors prior to assuming their duties, what is unusual about Phelan is his lack of any military experience.

Categories Disruption, Elections, Ignorance, Shame, Trump

Brian Deer: RFK Jr. Spreads Misinformation and Lies

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2024 //
17

Brian Deer is a journalist who recently published a book about anti-vaccine activists. In an opinion piece in the New York Times, he described how very dangerous Robert F. Kennedy is. If he should be confirmed as leader of the department of Health and Human Services, Deer predicts, he will surround himself with other quacks and vaccine deniers. Recently, he writes, Kennedy has been trying to obscure his radical views against vaccines by talking about food safety. Don’t be fooled. He does not trust science, and his stance on vaccines is dangerous.

He writes:

In November 2019, when an epidemic of measles was killing children and babies in Samoa, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who in recent days became Donald Trump’s pick to lead the department of Health and Human Services — sent the prime minister of Samoa a four-page letter. In it, he suggested the measles vaccine itself may have caused the outbreak.

He claimed that the vaccine might have “failed to produce antibodies” in vaccinated mothers sufficient to provide infants with immunity, that it perhaps provoked “the evolution of more virulent measles strains” and that children who received the vaccine may have inadvertently spread the virus to other children. “Please do not hesitate to contact me if I can be of any assistance,” he added, writing in his role as the chairman of Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group.

At the time of his letter, 16 people, many of them younger than 2, were already reported dead. Measles, which is among the most contagious diseases, can sometimes lead to brain swelling, pneumonia and death. For months, families grieved over heartbreaking little coffins, until a door-to-door vaccination campaign brought the calamity to a close. The final number of fatalities topped 80.

I was in Samoa during that outbreak as part of my more than 16 years of reporting on the anti-vaccine movement. The cause of the outbreak was not the vaccine, but most likely an infected traveler who brought the virus from New Zealand, which that year had had the biggest measles outbreaks in decades, especially among that country’s Indigenous and Pacific Islander communities. Migration and poverty were likely factors in a sudden spread of measles in Samoa and New Zealand. But, as an editorial in The New Zealand Medical Journal reported, so too was a factor that Mr. Kennedy specializes in: “increasing circulation of misinformation leading to distrust and reduced vaccination uptake.” Samoa’s vaccination rates had fallen to fewer than a third of eligible 1-year-olds.

Vaccine skepticism has ballooned worldwide, and Mr. Kennedy and others who back him have encouraged it. Americans may be well aware that their possible future health leader holds dangerous beliefs about vaccines. The consequences of his views — and those of his orbit — are not merely absurd but tragic.

In my reporting, parents have mentioned fearing vaccines after watching “Vaxxed,” a 90-minute documentary, which had also toured countries such as New Zealand. The film, focused on unproven allegations, was released more than three years before the Samoa measles outbreak. Among much else, it claimed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had committed fraud.

Two of the filmmakers — Del Bigtree and Andrew Wakefield — are buddies of Mr. Kennedy. The director, Mr. Wakefield, is a former doctor whose medical license was revoked in his native Britain in 2010 amid charges of ethical violations. One of the producers, Mr. Bigtree, became Mr. Kennedy’s presidential campaign communications chief.

In the years before the documentary was released, I revealed, in a series of articles, evidence that Mr. Wakefield’s research in the 1990s had been rigged at a London hospital to make it look as if the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine was linked to autism. This research was retracted in 2010. Mr. Kennedy certainly didn’t seem fazed by Mr. Wakefield’s professional downfall. “In any just society, we would be building statues to Andy Wakefield,” he yelled, for instance, from a platform he and Mr. Wakefield shared at an event in Washington, D.C., a few days before he sent his letter to Samoa.

Reports say Mr. Kennedy is reviewing résumés for his possible Health and Human Services Department empire. He’s reportedlyeyeing Dr. Joseph Ladapo, a Florida health official who has questioned the safety of Covid vaccines. I’d say Mr. Bigtree may get a role; Mr. Wakefield is trickier, given how discredited he is, even in the United States. But there are plenty of others in Mr. Kennedy’s circle whose claims ought to concern everyone.

Consider Sherri Tenpenny, a doctor who has been declared by Mr. Kennedy as “one of the great leaders” of the anti-vaccine movement. She has falsely claimed that a “metal” attached to a protein in the Covid shots was making their recipients magnetic. “They can put a key on their forehead and it sticks,” she told Ohio state lawmakers in June 2021. “They can put spoons and forks all over them and they can stick.” I could pluck plenty more outrageous characters from Mr. Kennedy’s circle over the years, including veteran AIDS denialists.

In recent days, Mr. Kennedy appears to have tried to change the conversation around his vaccine views to focus on America’s junk food diets. But his views on vaccines shouldn’t be forgotten. In January 2021, speaking to a gathering of loyalists in Ohio, he outlined a three-point checklist that had to be met for him to consider a Covid vaccine. First, he said, “you take one shot, you get lifetime immunity.” Second, side effects are only “one in a million.” Third, “herd immunity” is achieved at 70 percent public uptake — after which, he stipulated, “nobody in this society” ever gets the disease again.

“If they came up with that product,” he said, “I’d be happy to look at it.”

His audience laughed. But it’s not funny.

Categories Elections, Extremism, Fraud, Health, Science, Trump

CNN: Elon Musk is Bullying Federal Employees

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2024 //
20

CNN reports that Elon Musk has launched a reign of terror against top-level career employees by posting their names and saying their jobs are worthless. Some have received death threats. Is there a crime called cyberbullying? Is it just coincidental that all four of his targets are women?

Elon Musk is really a vile man. He is the richest man in the world, and you can see that his wealth has made him the most arrogant, most uncaring man in the world.

CNN posted:

When President-elect Donald Trump said Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would recommend major cuts to the federal government in his administration, many public employees knew that their jobs could be on the line.

Now they have a new fear: becoming the personal targets of the world’s richest man – and his legions of followers.

Last week, in the midst of the flurry of his daily missives, Musk reposted two X posts that revealed the names and titles of people holding four relatively obscure climate-related government positions. Each post has been viewed tens of millions of times, and the individuals named have been subjected to a barrage of negative attention. At least one of the four women named has deleted her social media accounts.

Although the information he posted on those government positions is available through public online databases, these posts target otherwise unknown government employees in roles that do not deal directly with the public.

Several current federal employees told CNN they’re afraid their lives will be forever changed – including physically threatened – as Musk makes behind-the-scenes bureaucrats into personal targets. Others told CNN that the threat of being in Musk’s crosshairs might even drive them from their jobs entirely – achieving Musk’s smaller government goals without so much as a proper review.

“These tactics are aimed at sowing terror and fear at federal employees,” said Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 800,000 of the 2.3 million civilian federal employees. “It’s intended to make them fearful that they will become afraid to speak up.”

This isn’t new behavior for Musk, who has often singled out individuals who he claims have made mistakes or stand in his way. One former federal employee, previously targeted by Musk, said she experienced something very similar.

“It’s his way of intimidating people to either quit or also send a signal to all the other agencies that ‘you’re next’,” said Mary “Missy” Cummings, an engineering and computer science professor at George Mason University, who drew Musk’s ire because of her criticisms of Tesla when she was at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration….

One of the posts reads: “I don’t think the US taxpayers should pay for the employment of a ’Director of Climate Diversification (she/her)’ at the US International Development Finance Corporation,” with a partial screengrab of an employee and her location.

Musk, who called himself “super pro climate” in an X post last year, reposted and commented: “So many fake jobs.” The post has received more than 33 million views and a storm of negative comments. Some called the role a “fraud job” and others demanded Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency cut jobs like it. One user commented: “Gravy train is over.”

It appears the woman Musk targeted has since gone dark on social media, shutting down her accounts. The agency, the US International Development Finance Corporation, says it supports investment in climate mitigation, resilience and adaptation in low-income countries experiencing the most devastating effects of climate change. A DFC official said the agency does not comment on individual personnel positions or matters.

Musk also called out the Department of Energy’s chief climate officer in its loan programs office. The office funds fledgling energy technologies in need of early investment and awarded $465 million to Tesla Motors in 2010, helping to position Musk’s electric vehicle company as an EV industry leader. The chief climate officer works across agencies to “reduce barriers and enable clean energy deployment” according to her online bio.

Another woman, who serves as senior advisor on environmental justice and climate change at the Department of Health and Human Services, was another Musk target. HHS focuses on protecting the public health from pollution and other environmental hazards, especially in low-income communities and communities of color that are experiencing a higher share of exposures and impacts. The office first launched at Health and Human Services under the Biden administration in 2022.

Categories Billionaires, Cruelty, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism

NYCPSP: The Anti-Vaxxer Appointed by Trump to Lead NIH

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2024 //
25

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is one of the premiere government agencies responsible for research in medicine and public health. NIH is the largest biomedical research institution in the world. Maintaining its scientific integrity is important for the U.S. and the world.

Trump appointed a leading opponent of vaccines to lead the NIH. Others in the medical profession have considered his views to be “fringe,” “extreme,” “out of the mainstream.” Of course, Trump’s choice of Robert Kennedy Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH, has garnered many critics, who refer to him as an unqualified and dangerous quack. And then there is Dr. Oz, the hawker of vitamins on TV, as director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He is said to be a proponent of privatizing Medicare by pushing Medicare Advantage plans owned by private companies.

Why is Trump unleashing his fury on the nation’s public health services? If you know, please share.

Our esteemed reader, who posts under the name, “New York City Public School Parent,” has researched Trump’s nominee to lead the NIH.

She wrote:

Bhattacharya, like Bondi, like William Barr, gets a pass by a liberal media that ignores the worst of their political hackery and their history of dishonesty. Instead of characterizing their actions as corrupt, or demonstrating the utter lack of integrity these folks have, the so-called liberal media instead normalizes their worst actions and mischaracterizes those worst actions as simply “something that rabid partisans on the other side don’t like.” 

When the so-called liberal media was helping the right wing media amplify Bhattacharya’s hyped “evidence-based findings” – that covid was no more deadly than the flu, in spring of 2020, a real journalist, Stephanie M. Lee at Buzzfeed, was reporting on this “evidence” – the very problematic Santa Clara antibody study – financially supported by an airline owner who wanted the public flying again – where Bhattacharya’s doctor wife was caught lying to recruit affluent parents at her kids’ school to participate in a “random” study. Unlike the rest of the journalistic establishment, Lee did more than act as a stenographer, and in 2022 won the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting. From their press release:

“She investigated a study by John Ioannidis and his colleagues [Bhattacharya and another hack] at Stanford that made a splash early in the coronavirus pandemic when it claimed to show COVID-19 was no more dangerous than the flu. Lee uncovered serious flaws in the study; her stories also showed that Ioannidis had organized an effort to lobby the White House against pandemic lockdowns before collecting any data and that the study had been secretly funded by David Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue and a vocal lockdown opponent.”

Bhattacharya is so lacking in integrity that he made Lee’s life hell for daring to report the truth — he accused her of going after his family (directly causing her to be threatened) because she told the truth – that his doctor wife had improperly solicited parents at her kids’ affluent school to be part of her husband’s “random” antibody study to help prove that covid was no more dangerous than the flu.

He also has a lot in common with Emily Oster – two economists guilty of unprofessionally hyping their very flawed data and getting lots of publicity because they were willing to use that flawed data to make claims that just coincidentally happened to support a dishonest Republican narrative. In both cases, far more credible researchers were correctly pointing out how problematic their “evidence” was – but the media ignored critics and amplified these two folks who were more than happy to hype the lie that indisputable evidence and data supported the Republican narrative about covid being no big danger. 

Later, quietly, these political hacks would make revisions to their data, because their critics were correct that they had hyped flawed data that supported right wing narratives.

Despite the fact that no credible researcher would have ever made the claims of certainty (their “data” proves it!), these two never lost an ounce of credibility despite their errors. 

Typical double standard – if you are helping the Republican narrative, your improper actions are barely mentioned and always spun as irrelevant, thus your reputation as a widely respected truth-teller remains intact in the liberal media. If you are telling the truth and the truth doesn’t support the right wing narrative, the so-called liberal media (in the interest of “balance”) will scrutinize your actions to find some misstep they amplify into a major scandal that suggests you should never be trusted.

Lee now writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Bhattacharya is still disparaging her for not acting like the more prominent reporters in the so-called liberal media who specialize in uncritically rewriting press releases amplifying the undisputed “data” and “evidence” supporting right wing narratives.

The media also hyped the Great Barrington Declaration, which had very few credible researchers in epidemology, medicine or science among their signees, but included fake doctors and doctors who were also dead serial killers.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/09/herd-immunity-letter-signed-fake-experts-dr-johnny-bananas-covid

Categories Elections, Extremism, Fraud, Health, Research, Science, Trump

Washington Post: Trump Likely to Fire Every Attorney Who Aided Jack Smith

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2024 //
13

Trump has vowed retribution and revenge against everyone who dared to question his motives and integrity. Let’s see how that goes. The felonious President-elect has former Special Counsel Jack Smith in his crosshairs, according to The Washington Post.

Smith, as you know, indicted Trump for hiding top-secret and confidential documents at his Mar-a-Lago home, stashed away in closets, storerooms, and a bathroom. When asked politely by the National Archives to return the documents, Trump said he didn’t have them. Then, he said he had them, but they belonged to him, citing the Presidential Records Act (which said no such thing). Then his case landed in the court of a judge appointed by Trump, who appointed a Special Master to review the documents. After her decision was overturned by an Appeals Court, Judge Aileen Cannon sat on the case and eventually threw it out, on grounds that the Special Counsel was illegally appointed.

Smith tried Trump in the DC federal courts for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, but Trump’s lawyers managed to stall the case (with the help of the U.S. Supreme Court, which sat on the appeal for months without a decision). The case was successfully killed by these delaying tactics. Trump never faced the accountability he deserved.

Now he will punish Jack Smith for daring to prosecute him.

And he will use the Justice Department to investigate the 2020 election. Will the investigators dare to tell Trump that it was not stolen?

The Washington Post reports:

President-elect Donald Trump plans to fire the entire team that worked with special counsel Jack Smith to pursue two federal prosecutions against the former president, including career attorneys typically protected from political retribution, according to two individuals close to Trump’s transition.

Trump is also planning to assemble investigative teams within the Justice Department to hunt for evidence in battleground states that fraud tainted the 2020 election, one of the people said.
The proposals offer new evidence that Trump’s intention to dramatically shake up the status quo in Washington is likely to focus heavily on the Justice Department, the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, and that at least some of his agenda is fueled not by ideology or policy goals but personal grievance.

Trump still believes, it appears, that he won in 2020 , that he was right to send a mob to lay waste to the U.S. Capitol, and to hide top-secret documents in his home.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fraud, Trump

President Biden Should Pardon His Son Hunter Before He Leaves Office

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2024 //
28

President Biden has said he won’t pardon his son Hunter.

It’s time to reconsider that pronouncement.

Hunter was convicted for crimes that should have been settled with a plea deal.

Politico says, as does almost everyone, that anyone with a different name would not have been prosecuted. The charges would have been settled out of court. But Republicans, especially Trump allies, were determined to crush the president’s son.

He was convicted of tax evasion and registering for a gun without admitting he was using illegal drugs. He pled guilty to all charges in Delaware and California. He will be sentenced in those states in mid-December and faces the possibility of many years in prison.

After going through a long period of addiction and extravagant spending, he seems to have finally got his life together. He is no longer using drugs. He has paid back his tax debts.

His life was destroyed both by his own actions and by the vendetta of Republicans. They wanted to humiliate him as a way of getting at his father. If his name was Hunter Jones, instead of Biden, he would not be facing serious jail time.

He should be sentenced to community service, not prison.

Joe Biden should pardon his son, and ignore the howls of MAGA. The MAGA crowd wants blood, public flogging, and the scourging of anyone named Biden.

Mr. President, ignore the mob.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Cruelty, Elections
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