On Monday, the Washington Examiner reported that the former California GOP lawmaker who once mentored and employed House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy is warning he cannot be trusted.

“You never know what’s inside, really,” former California Rep. Bill Thomas (R), who employed McCarthy for years, said this week. “Kevin basically is whatever you want him to be. He lies. He’ll change the lie if necessary. How can anyone trust his word?'”

Thomas, who once represented the Bakersfield congressional district that McCarthy now represents and employed him as a congressional aide, previously took McCarthy to task in their hometown paper for his handling of the January 6 Committee,

Thomas was also displeased with the fact that McCarthy voted against certifying President Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory even after pro-Trump rioters violently stormed the United States Capitol building.

“‘It was as though they went to an extended lunch and came back and resumed their mission: reinforce, by your votes, the lies of the president,” said Thomas, a former political science professor at Bakersfield College.

McCarthy originally called on Trump to resign in private after the January 6 attack, but subsequently leapt to the former president’s defense, opposed the establishment of a bipartisan 9/11-style commission to investigate, and boycotted naming any Republican members to the eventual select committee empaneled for the issue.

With Republicans winning the House narrowly in the 2022 midterm election, McCarthy is first in line for the Speakership but faces critical obstacles in securing the votes. A small bloc of hard-right Republicans are vowing never to back him for Speaker, and have enough votes in theory to deny him the necessary 218.

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COMMENT

So — McCarthy lies all the time.  Which explains why he is a Republican.

The congressional committee that investigated last year’s attack on the US Capitol recommended Monday that criminal charges be filed against former president Donald Trump.

The House panel unanimously urged the Justice Department to pursue Trump for

1. inciting an insurrection,
2. obstruction of an official proceeding,
3. conspiring to defraud the US government and
4. making false statements.

“The committee has developed significant evidence that president Trump intended to disrupt the peaceful transition of power under our Constitution,” Representative Jamie Raskin said as he outlined the panel’s findings.

“We believe that the evidence described by my colleagues today, and assembled throughout our hearings, warrants a criminal referral of former President Donald J. Trump,” Raskin said.

The committee’s recommendations to the Justice Department will end up with a special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to look into Trump’s role in the Capitol riot and his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election won by Democrat Joe Biden.

COMMENT:  Remember:  The Dept of Justice has already convened a grand jury to hear evidence against Trump and to indict him if necessary.

Justice is coming for Trump

Show Trump a line, and he’ll cross it. That was his record for the past 50 years of business; that was his record as president, down to his last days in office, when he absconded with boxes of government materials as though they were his private property.

Trump has already announced a run for president in 2024. Whatever happens with that run, his likeliest Republican rivals are studying his methods, considering which to emulate and which to discard. The incitement of violence by the head of the government is not an infraction that can be dismissed and forgiven by any political system that hopes to stay constitutional.

For six years, the job of upholding the rule of law against Donald Trump has been passed from one unwilling set of hands to the next. Now the job has returned to where it started. There is nobody else to pass it to. The recommendation has arrived. The time for justice has come.

Trump and his henchmen should end up like Mussolini in Italy.

MAGA World appears to be quiet when it comes to the news coming out of the final meeting of the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on Congress. Other than a few sneers from Donald Trump on his personal social media platform, the House and Senate Republicans haven’t been defending the leader of their party.

Read the Jan 6 Cmte Exec Summary.

Trump said way back when that if you’re guilty of something, you don’t take the Fifth.  Well, folks, one of the things we discovered in the executive summary is the number of people around Trump who pleaded the Fifth.  More than 30 witnesses before the select committee issued the Fifth Amendment privilege, and refused on that basis to provide testimony.

And another thing — the Jan 6 Committee report was not issued in secret.  It’s been advertised for weeks that the Committee would release their findings to the public today.  In spite of the fact that there has been a lot of warning that the report was coming, the Republican Party did absolutely nothing to address, attack, or refute the Committee’s findings.  Republicans did not have a war room pushing out information things to try to counter this powerful story that echoed through the halls of Congress this afternoon.  NO ONE IS STEPPING UP TO DEFEND TRUMP.

 

Jan 6 Cmte asked Trump’s co-conspirators for proof the election was stolen.   They all refused to answer and took the Fifth.

Although President Donald Trump has accused the House Select Committee of turning a blind eye to the purported mass fraud he believes cost him the 2020 presidential election, it turns out that the committee did ask his allies to back up their election fraud claims under oath.

The executive summary of the committee’s final report states that it asked multiple election conspiracists — including John Eastman, Michael Flynn, Jenna Ellis, and Phil Waldron — for evidence of election fraud and that “all invoked their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination” in response.

In addition to this, former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani acknowledged to the committee that he did not buy claims that Dominion Voting Systems’ machines had stolen the election from Trump, and his ally Bernard Kerik acknowledged that “it was impossible… to determine conclusively whether there was widespread fraud or whether that widespread fraud would have altered the outcome of the election.”

In sum, writes the committee in the executive summary, “Not a single witness–nor any combination of witnesses–provided the Select Committee with evidence demonstrating that fraud occurred on a scale even remotely close to changing the outcome in any State.”

Reflecting on Donald Trump’s decision last week to promote “AMERICA NEEDS A SUPERHERO! I will be making a MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT tomorrow,” that ended up being a cheesy commercial hawking Trump digital trading cards for $99 each, the editorial board of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch mercilessly pointed out that the 45th president of the United States has finally succeeded in turning himself into a “national joke.”

The editors joined the pile on — which included longtime Trump advisor Steve Bannon who disgustedly said “I can’t do this anymore” — writing, “After all that Donald Trump has put America through, he owed the country a good laugh.”

They added, “The sound of dropping jaws was palpable throughout MAGA world. If Trump’s earlier suggestion of suspending the Constitution to return him to the presidency didn’t convince his remaining supporters that this man belongs nowhere near power, there are promising indications that perhaps this latest evidence of untethered clownishness finally will.”

More to the point, they added, is that Americans once saw the former president as a threat to democracy — as evidenced by his inciting his supporters to attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 election — and now he is reduced to grifting every dollar he can in his post-presidency years.

The editors also took a shot at the buyers of the NFT’s, writing, “In yet another confirmation of the old adage that there’s a sucker born every minute, the 45,000 nonfungible tokens (NFTs) of the images were in fact gone by Friday morning, according to an independent NFT market monitor. Maybe those buyers thought they were helping Trump’s supposed presidential campaign? If so, sorry, chumps. Trump is just pocketing the money.”

“Trump has repeatedly shown himself to be an existential threat to democracy. But this episode conclusively, finally, reduces him to a national joke. Anyone who ever supported him should be embarrassed. Anyone who still supports him should see a shrink. And America should move on from this idiotic shyster,” they concluded.

You can read the whole piece here.

“Anyone who ever supported him should be embarrassed.”  But they will not be because his supporters are just like him — liars, ignorant, self-centered, pompous, and trashy.

In a furious flurry of posts over 40 minutes on his Truth Social platform early Sunday morning, Donald Trump raged at Democrats, the FBI and the Justice Department and then warned that a “dark period” is coming as the House select committee investigating Jan 6th prepares for one last public hearing.

The former president kicked off his morning by writing, “The Democrats will do anything not to run against me, MAGA, and putting AMERICA FIRST. Remember, they are the Party of MISINFORMATION, constantly saying the opposite of what they really want. I am beating everybody in the REAL Polls, by a lot, so they say, ‘Gee, we want to run against Trump,’ at the same time they spend $Millions to try and beat me, hoping for another candidate. I devoured them in 2016, and again, with much bigger numbers, in 2020, but that Election was RIGGED. MUST DO IT AGAIN!” which was quickly followed by, “The FBI’s Illegal Left Wing DOMINANCE over TWITTER, FACEBOOK, and other Big Tech companies, has been a shock to the World, but remember, this was only one of MANY ways that the 2020 Election was Rigged & Stolen!!!”

Continuing in that vein, he wrote, “DON’T FORGET, THESE THUGS SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!!”

He then added, “The Unselect Committee of political hacks are the same group that came up with the RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA HOAX, not to mention many others. They are Corrupt cowards who hate our Country!!!”

“Republicans and Patriots all over the land must stand strong and united against the Thugs and Scoundrels of the Unselect Committee. It will be a dark period in American history, but with darkness comes light!!!” he added.

The former president concluded, “I’M JUST FIGHTING TO SAVE OUR COUNTRY!”

If so, you are a

SUCKER

During a panel discussion on MSNBC’s “The Sunday Show,” Boston Globe columnist Renée Graham pointed out that Donald Trump is running out of schemes to shake down his followers for cash to pay for his legal bills.

As the rest of the panel ridiculed and expressed disgust with the former president for hawking digital trading cards for $99 dollars each, Graham noted that the former president is being buried in legal fees due to a flood of criminal investigations and civil lawsuits.

Speaking with host Jonathan Capehart, she told him the former president can’t simply ask his fans to pay his bills which is why “the grift never ends.”

“The moment I heard about the NFT thing, and $99, I kept thinking, the man is raising money basically, this is a shadow legal defense fund,” host Capehart prompted. “He has got all these investigations, he has to pay for these lawyers — or is supposed to pay them, whether or not he pays them is another thing but it shouldn’t. Am I wrong to be thinking that this is not just a grift, this is a grift to raise money to help him pay his legal bills?”

“Oh, there is no doubt about it, there is a pattern here,” Graham replied. “This is what Trump does. He is raising this money to use for himself if nothing else, but to pay off the mountainous legal bills he keeps amassing because he keeps doing corrupt, criminal things.”

“So, when worse comes to worse, he can’t ask his followers, ‘send me money,'” she explained. “So he comes to put on some nonsense, ‘Oh I need this or that, here is something I am giving you.’ But at the end of the day, as Tara [Setmayer] said, it’s always about the grift — the grift never ends.”

Kevin McCarthy — who may or may not become Speaker of the House (and no one gives a shit if he does or does not) — says as soon as he becomes Speaker, the GOP-controlled House will pass “big bills”.

Bullshit.

Please. There will be no “big bills.” The only thing Republicans know how to do legislatively is cut taxes massively for the very wealthy. They are a one-trick pony, and that trick was done in 2017.

No one believes this Republican majority is going to pass anything except symbolic, mean-spirited gestures of right-wing grievance to placate their Fox News-addled base. Their entire agenda can be boiled down to three words: “own the libs.”  That’s not a recipe for legislating, it’s a recipe for posturing, posing and preening for the Fox News cameras, the only network these people will ever appear on because they are terrified of being asked serious questions, and they know Fox will always serve them pathetic softballs.

This is a house majority that the majority of Americans are going to sour on very quickly, and that will happen regardless of who Republicans finally decide to name as Speaker. Because:

• Outside of the Fox News bubble no one gives a damn about Hunter Biden. The thing is, Trump and his wretched family have made this country safe for a hundred Hunter Bidens. There is nothing that Hunter Biden could have done in the feverish fantasies of the entire Republican party that could possibly compare with the most criminally corrupt, incompetent and malevolent administration in U.S. history.
• Same goes for Afghanistan: nobody cares anymore, we’re out, and it’s over (finally). Whether it’s fair or not, that’s just how Americans think about Afghanistan, a country that Fox News and the GOP forgot completely about for decades until Biden finally had the sense to leave.
• Likewise, immigration is an issue that riles up the Republican base, even though it impacts virtually none of them personally. Coming from a party that just thwarted a comprehensive immigration bill it’s simply more hypocritical race-baiting from the party that perennially trots out the scary “caravan” in carefully timed stories from — you guessed it — Fox News.
• And as for energy “independence,” well guys, we would have had that decades ago if it wasn’t for the people who pay for your campaigns.

So, no, “history” is not going to be changed over the next two years, whether Kevin McCarthy is elected Speaker or not. Either way, it’ll just be an ugly, vindictive slog through the Fox News playbook, as meaningless and torpid as the “Benghazi” fiasco which no one really cared about either.

Meanwhile, Democrats will attempt to work with — or around –the same people who tried to overturn our democracy, the same ones who enlisted the country’s worst specimens to pursue that failed effort.

Trump and his driver were cruising along a country road one evening when a pig ran in front of the car. The driver tried to avoid it but couldn’t. The pig was killed.

Trump told his driver to go up to the farmhouse and explain to the owners what happened.

About an hour later the driver staggers back to the car with his clothes in total disarray.

He was holding a bottle of wine in one hand, a cigar in the other and smiling happily.
“What happened?” asked Trump.
“Well,” the driver replied “the Farmer gave me the wine, his wife gave me the cigar, and their beautiful daughter made mad passionate love to me.”
“My God, what did you tell them?” asked Trump.

The driver replied: “I’m Trump’s driver, and I just killed the pig.”