Clear and Present Danger

Capitol rioter Guy Reffitt, who was found guilty of multiple felonies earlier this year, is receiving his prison sentence this week — and NBC News reporter Ryan Reilly believes it’s going to be the stiffest January 6-related prison sentence yet.

Writing on Twitter, Reilly translates some legalese delivered by Judge Dabney Friedrich in which she said she was setting his offense level at 29 as the basis of her sentencing decision.

“Translation: Guy Reffitt is almost certainly to get the longest Jan. 6 sentence to date, it’s just a matter of how many years he’ll get on top of the current 5.25 year (63 month) record for Jan. 6 cases,” writes Reilly.

A level 29 offense carries a sentencing range of between 87 and 108 months in prison, which means the judge would have to radically depart from guidelines for him to not break the current record for January 6 defendants.

Reffitt became infamous earlier this year when his own son, Jackson Reffitt, testified against him at his trial.

Among other things, Jackson Reffitt said his father sent messages to the family promoting a new civil war, while also talking about “rising up” and “destroying” the United States government.

In all, Guy Reffitt was found guilty on charges of transporting a firearm in furtherance of civil disorder, guilty of obstruction of justice, guilty of entering the Capitol with a firearm, and guilty of obstruction law enforcement officers.

Here’s a song dedicated to this piece of shit.

. . . husband arrested for exposing himself to teenaged girls; she and husband have string of minor arrests.  Yet she’s a member of Congress.

Who votes for a fool like this?  Republican fools.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) said that a lack of firearms is to blame for the practice of eating dogs in Venezuela.

During an interview on Newsmax with host Sebastian Gorka, Boebert recalled how she had confronted Democratic politician Beto O’Rourke after he suggested that assault-style weapons should be banned.

“I was compelled to go to him because I saw that a disarmed populace — if the citizenry in America is disarmed then we are no longer citizens, we are subjects,” Boebert said. “You know here in America we have gourmet treats for puppies. We have these amazing groomers for dogs.”

“In Venezuela, they eat the dogs and it started because they do not have firearms to protect themselves, to defend themselves against a tyrannical government,” she added.

The Daily Mail reported in 2018 that dog eating was not a new practice in Venezuela.

“Stray dogs are not a new problem in major cities of the country, with reports from two years ago suggesting that the nation’s poorest have always hunted and eaten them,” the report said.

One America News (OAN) was dealt another major blow when Verizon announced that it would quit carrying the far-right cable news channel on its FiOS service, effective this Saturday, July 30. This comes after OAN being dropped by AT&T’s DirecTV in April.

Journalists Jeremy W. Peters and Benjamin Mullin, in an article published by the New York Times on July 26, stresses that between Verizon and DirectTV, OAN has lost access to millions of potential viewers. DirecTV has around 15 million subscribers, while Verizon FiOS has around 3.5 million.

“OAN’s remaining audience will be small,” Peters and Mullin explain. “The network will soon be available only to a few hundred thousand people who subscribe to smaller cable providers, such as Frontier and GCI Liberty, said Scott Robson, a senior research analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence. OAN also sells its programming directly to users through its OAN Live and KlowdTV streaming platforms, but those products most likely provide a fraction of the revenue generated by traditional TV providers.

By losing Verizon, the Times reporters note, OAN has lost a “a major stream of revenue: the fees it collects from Verizon.” Robson told the Times, “I really think this is the death blow for the network.”

Like its competitor Newsmax TV, OAN prides itself on being to the right of Fox News and Fox Business and even more pro-Donald Trump than those outlets.

According to Peters and Mullin, “While OAN doesn’t have the influence wielded by the much larger Fox News, the top-rated cable news network, the fees from its deals with Verizon and AT&T provided a substantial stream of income, about $36 million a year by some estimates. And once it is gone from millions of television sets, OAN will be in a weaker bargaining position with advertisers — fewer potential viewers most likely mean fewer companies willing to pay as much to promote their products on the network.”

Peters and Mullin note that losing Verizon after losing DirecTV “comes at a particularly bad time for OAN” because of the lawsuits it is facing from the voting technology companies Dominion and Smartmatic, both of which have also filed defamation lawsuits against Fox News and Newsmax. Following the 2020 presidential election, Fox News, OAN and Newsmax all promoted the Big Lie — which falsely claims that the election was stolen from then-President Trump.

“The voting technology companies Smartmatic and Dominion are suing OAN over false claims that their machines enabled Mr. Trump’s enemies to switch votes cast for him to President Biden,” Peters and Mullin observe. “One employee of Dominion, Eric Coomer, is also suing the network. Mr. Coomer received death threats after OAN named him in a report as an alleged collaborator of Antifa, the far-left movement…. For OAN, the litigation has so far not gone well, as judges have rejected its attempts to have the cases dismissed.”

The Times reporters add, “In one ruling, a judge concluded that OAN had acted “maliciously and consciously” in perpetuating falsehoods about Dominion, and that its chief White House correspondent, Chanel Rion, had failed to exercise even the most minimal journalistic scrutiny. In her report, Ms. Rion cited a conservative podcaster and activist, Joe Oltmann, who claimed to have eavesdropped on an Antifa conference call before the election. She reported that ‘Antifa-drenched engineers are hell bent on deleting half of America’s voice’ and referred to Mr. Coomer.”

Photos from Bedminster NJ, July 27-29, 2022.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By now you probably know that Donald Trump came back to Washington, D.C., this week for the first time in more than a year, and, in a speech that clearly was intended to foretell his 2024 Presidential bid, offered a little taste of what he’d do with a second chance at power. (Hint: It seems pretty sinister!) But maybe just as important as what the former president said is where he said it.

Trump spoke at the first annual summit of the America First Policy Institute, an organization launched by former administration staffers and allies of his who are now working to translate Trump’s whole schtick into a policy framework. You can think of AFPI as a kind of MAGA think tank, or a grown-up Turning Point USA. And understanding this group matters, because if Trump—or, frankly, any other MAGA-style Republican—runs in 2024, he will have something that didn’t exist before: a bank of advisers prepared to back up his rants and grievances with actual legislative proposals. The institute “is going to do for the next few years what the Heritage Foundation did in 1979, 1980” for Republican politics, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told the audience: provide a set of rules and guidelines to help the party achieve electoral success. (Never mind that the magic of Trumpism has always seemed to be that it never adhered to rules at all.)

The two-day summit can best be described as an elevated Trump rally—a Trump rally for the swamp-dwelling elite, if you will. Instead of a fairgrounds or concert venue, it was held in the basement ballroom of a Washington, D.C., Marriott. Instead of burgers and fries sold from food trucks, mini croissants and bottles of Perrier were on offer. And where country music or classic rock might have been blasting over the sound system, the event hosts played soft and slightly grating Muzak between panelists.

The America First agenda was helpfully outlined on glossy paper and passed around to attendees, listing panels like: “Make the Greatest Economy in the World Work for All Americans”; “Give Parents More Control Over Their Children’s Education”; and “Finish the Wall, End Human Trafficking, and Defeat the Drug Cartels.” Speakers included state and local leaders, as well as Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senators Ted Cruz, Rick Scott, and Steve Daines. During panel discussions, I sat between reporters from The Epoch Times, Breitbart, and something called American Liberty News.

The AFPI isn’t the only organization formulating the intellectual underpinnings for Trumpism. The Claremont Institute has worked on this, and so has American Greatness magazine. But all of these “America First” efforts boil down to three broad pillars, William Galston, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan research group the Brookings Institution, told me. First is a reexamination of America’s international deals and commitments through a transactional, what’s-in-it-for-us lens. The second is the development of an economic agenda that appeals to working-class voters who’ve recently joined the party’s ranks—without necessarily resorting to big-government solutions. The third “is a vigorous, deep, no-holds-barred waging of the culture wars,” Galston said.

Still, despite the panel titles and a few strange guests (“Stop the Steal” candidates Mark Finchem and Kristina Karamo; hosts from the delusional Right Side Broadcasting Network), the event itself was stuffy and occasionally boring, like any other D.C. political conference. It failed to capture the freewheeling, wild energy of a Trump rally—the vibes that made Trump so successful. Even Trump sounded sleepy when he started to speak yesterday, reading his 2024 policy plans off a teleprompter. After all, policy specifics have never really been his thing.

It wasn’t until he went off script with a few jokes about transgender athletes that Trump really seemed to get animated. Then, toward the end, he repeated a familiar refrain to his biggest applause of the night—a refrain that apparently works at rural rallies and D.C.-swamp events alike. “I ran for president; I won. Then I won a second time,” he said. “Did much better the second time; did a lot better.”

Donald Trump appeared in Washington, D.C., for the first time on Tuesday night since he slunk off into the night, breaking with all tradition and common decency, skipping the inauguration ceremony for President Joe Biden. Trump was in town to give a speech to a new member of the Republican network of shady, money-grab “institutes,” the America First Policy Institute. And if the intent of Trump’s speech was to show that not only is America under threat, but also that irony is stone-cold dead, he absolutely nailed it.

The focus of Trump’s speech—when he wasn’t whining about the House select committee on Jan. 6—was on law enforcement. In short, he wants a lot of it. In fact, he wants the U.S. to be more like—wait for it—China. Police on every corner. “Very short trials.” And mass executions. Trump also praised the way crime is handled in the Philippines, where over 12,000 people have been executed for drug-related crimes. And while the police were busy shooting everyone they suspected of selling or using drugs, Trump also insisted they force homeless people to leave the cities for tent-based camps erected in the wilderness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let me clear it up for you: “Christian Nationalists” wear crosses instead of swastikas, but they are still Nazis.