BC GOVERNMENT
Saved by @Alex1Powell

1/ How do we prevent the next grifter-in-chief and stop Congress from enabling criminals in government?

 2/ Trump and McConnell are both pushing pardons. Trump wants pardons for his criminal cronies, enablers, and children. McConnell wants pardons for meat packing plants and corporate criminals.
3/ Although past presidents have had family members working for them - Attorney General Bobby Kennedy is a famous example - none have ever had to pardon their family members for criminal activity in the White House. Until Trump.
4/ Trump’s family of grifters have been extracting money from our government and the American people since day one, starting with the inaugural fund scandal. Just since he lost the election. Trump has raised over $170, million: the grift continues!
5/ Trump has sold out our country and our values. He’s given top-secret information to foreign adversaries, embraced dictators and autocrats around the world, and enthusiastically damaged our relationships with allies. It’s almost as if he’s working for a foreign government.
6/ Now we are experiencing 9/11 death rates every single day caused by a virus Trump refused to save America from. Why did he let a quarter million people die and several million become severely disabled from Covid? Incompetence, treason, or a new grift?
7/ Our healthcare system is collapsing; except for the wealthy person‘s stock market, the economy is shredded; and every day average people across America are getting multiple fundraising appeals from Trump.
8/ Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell wants America’s worst corporations pardoned for forcing workers into situations that cause death and disability, both from Covid and other conditions. And he’s holding Covid aid hostage until he gets his corporate pardons.
9/ With very few exceptions, pretty much every elected Republican in the country is supporting both these men in their corrupt pardon demands. Which is crazy.
10/ Since Reagan, Republican ideology has had at its core the fantasy that corporate behavior should never be regulated; when corporations do bad things, the marketplace will punish them so government regulations are unnecessary.
11/ It’s crazy, of course, but it’s the excuse Mitch McConnell is using to say that big corporations in America like meat packing plants and warehouses should not be held responsible if they make decisions that cause their employees to get sick or die.
12/ McConnell’s demanding pardons for corporate criminality in the Covid relief is as obscene as Trump preemptively pardoning his children and criminal co-conspirators. Republicans screamed for years about Bill Clinton pardoning Mark Rich, but now? Crickets.
13/ Trump and McConnell are revealing the true essence of what the Republican Party has become since radical right-wingers took it over with the so-called Reagan Revolution in 1981.
14/ In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich doubled down on the new Republican grift with his Contract on America, where 6 of his 10 points were variations on tax cuts for rich people and his giant corporate funders. Gingrich is now in deep with Trump’s new email fundraising grift.
15/ Republicans’ Reaganomics grift poisoned our air and water and froze workers’ wages for 40 years, while making CEOs and GOP politicians like David Purdue mind-bogglingly rich, all rationalized by a rightwing echo chamber so most Americans didn’t realized how poisonous it is.
16/ Now the GOP’s “Government can’t do anything” grift is out in the open; it’s killed a quarter-million Americans, and led to open, naked, unabashed criminality in the White House, where even second- and third-level functionaries proudly flaunt the Hatch Act and election law.
17/ Trump wants his pardons for himself and his family and criminal buddies; McConnell wants his pardons for the corporations that give him money. Both will probably get away with it, but we need to make sure this level of corruption and criminality never happens again.
18/ After Trump leaves office, we need to revisit the 1970s when Congress passed multiple laws regulating money in politics to protect American from criminals in the White House like Nixon and Agnew. This is so much worse: Congress must act!

More from Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann
@Thom_Hartmann
1/ Rebuilding trust in democracy and our American government requires both holding seditious Republicans accountable and restoring the protective functions of government. Here’s what Democrats must do and why. (THREAD)

2/ The reason tens of millions of Americans don’t believe Joe Biden won the election is a 40-year betrayal of the American public’s trust by Republican politicians, grifters, and con artists exploiting the once-good name of Lincoln‘s Party.

3/ Science, religion, and conspiracy theories are all, essentially the same thing: systems or attempts to explain the unknown, to make sense out of things beyond our senses or immediate, touchable reality. Thus, our vulnerability to con artists like Trump.

4/ It’s impossible for any individual to know or understand everything. We believe electrons make our computers work, but for all but a few scientists who’ve actually seen and measured electrons, it’s only a belief. We must trust their word.

5/ This is why trust is central to science, and why scientific norms and institutions require multiple layers and dimensions of confirmation before things are asserted as true or even probable.
DEMOCRACY
Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann
@Thom_Hartmann
1/ The Nightmare Scenario SCOTUS is Plotting For the 2024 Election Takeover:

2/ Six Republicans on the Supreme Court just announced — a story that has largely flown under the nation’s political radar — that they’ll consider pre-rigging the presidential election of 2024.

3/ Here’s how one aspect of it could work out, if they go along with the GOP’s arguments that will be before the Court this October:

4/ It’s November, 2024, and the presidential race between Biden and DeSantis has been tabulated by the states and called by the networks. Biden won 84,355,740 votes to DeSantis’ 77,366,412, clearly carrying the popular vote.

5/ But the popular vote isn’t enough: George W. Bush lost to Al Gore by a half-million votes and Donald Trump lost to Hillary Clinton by 3 million votes but both ended up in the White House. What matters is the Electoral College vote, and that looks good for Biden, too.
ALL
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Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann
@Thom_Hartmann
How can America prevent Republicans from stealing the 2024 election and installing a fascist? /1

Republican threats to have individual states choose electors for Donald Trump even though their citizens voted for Joe Biden are not about this election; they’re about putting a fascist in the White House in 2024. /2

And the reason Republican elected officials across the country are letting this drag out, even though they know Trump has no chance because Biden‘s margin of victory is so large, is to see how far they can push this in anticipation of 2024. This is a test. /3

The next election will not feature a failed, indebted businessman buffoon at the top of the Republican ticket; instead, it will almost certainly be a very competent neofascist, someone like Tom Cotton or Ted Cruz. /4

And their strategy to put him in power won’t be to win the majority of the votes: it will be to take the electoral college, either outright or through Republican-controlled state legislatures simply making it happen. /5
ALL
Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann
@Thom_Hartmann
(1/26) On April 18, Bob Woodward recorded Jared Kushner saying that Trump had taken control away from the doctors and was going to open the country back up. Why then? What was happening right around that time?
POLITICS
Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann
@Thom_Hartmann
1/ It’s time to defund the GOP. In yesterday‘s rant, I laid out all the reasons why Democrats should put at the top of their priority list “defunding the Republican Party.“ Here’s a little background, and how to do it. (THREAD)

2/ Back in 1981, the Republican Party decided to defund the Democratic Party. While the Republican party had principally been funded by rich people and big business since the 1920s, the Democrats were largely reliant on the labor unions.

3/ So Ronald Reagan, as part of his “Reagan Revolution,“ figured the best way to destroy the Democratic Party was to destroy America’s unions. His first shot was to destroy Patco, the air traffic controller‘s union, and he did it in less than a week in August, 1981.

4/ He, with Republicans in Congress and conservatives on the Supreme Court than embarked on an eight-year campaign to eliminate unions from the American landscape, thus wiping out the Democratic Party’s ability to win elections.

5/ It worked, and by 1992 American union membership, and their ability to fund elections, had collapsed so severely that Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party had to take money from giant corporations and billionaires to prevail in that election year.
FOR LATER READ

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Riley J. Williams is charged in the Capitol riot.
She allegedly stole a computer from @SpeakerPelosi’s office, & now @FBI is investigating a tip that she intended to send the computer to a friend in Russia who’d sell it to Russian intelligence.
Williams appears to have “fled”.


From the affidavit against her: Riley Williams’ former romantic partner called the FBI several times in the days following the riots to report that they had seen her in videos inside the Capitol, but friends of Williams had shown the tipster a video of Williams taking a laptop...

... computer or hard drive from Speaker Pelosi’s office. The witness told the FBI that “WILLIAMS intended to send the computer device to a friend in Russia, who then planned to sell the device to SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service...”

“... but that the transfer of the computer device to Russia fell through for unknown reasons and Williams still has the computer device or destroyed it. “This matter remains under investigation.”

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SandeepParekh
SandeepParekh
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How does a government put a legislation on 'hold'? Is there any constitutional mechanism for the executive to 'pause' a validly passed legislation? Genuine Koshan.


So a committee of 'wise men/women' selected by the SC will stand in judgement over the law passed by


Here is the thing - a law can be stayed based on usual methods, it can be held unconstitutional based on violation of the Constitution. There is no shortcut to this based on the say so of even a large number of people, merely because they are loud.


Tomorrow can all the income tax payers also gather up at whichever maidan and ask for repealing the income tax law? It hurts us and we can protest quite loudly.

How can a law be stayed or over-turned based on the nuisance value of the protestors? It is anarchy to allow that.
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Cleveland Documenters
Cleveland Documenters
@cledocumenters
Last week, @CleCityCouncil started reviewing Mayor Frank Jackson’s proposed city budget for 2021. There was robust discussion, and Documenters were there to cover it. Here’s a thread of what we learned last week about the #CLEBudget

First, it helps to know where we are in the budget process. From today through Feb. 24, the council will meet about the General Fund budget. The council will then agree on a budget with their changes (if any); 15 days after doing so, they can vote to make the budget official.


In other words, there’s still time to use your voice! The #refundcleveland tool can help. Create the #CLEBudget you want and send it to your council member. Click “Change the Budget” on the homepage and follow the on-screen instructions from there.

Want to know the budget basics? Our #CLEBudget primer details the timeline, different types of budgets and the funds involved, and defines budget-related terms. It can be a helpful guide during City Council’s discussions.

And don’t forget: all these meetings are livestreamed on City Council’s YouTube channel. They’re slated to start at 9 a.m. every business day from today through the 24th. You can also follow along with #CLEDocumenters live-tweet threads and
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Yet Another Columnist
Yet Another Columnist
@Sime0nStylites
Typically excellent piece from @dsquareddigest The exponential insight is especially neat. Think of it a little like fishing...today you can’t export oysters to the EU (because you simply aren’t allowed to), tomorrow you don’t have a fish exporting business (to the EU).


The extremely small minority of people who known anything about this who think that Brexit will be good for the City make a number of arguments which I shall address in turn...

1. They need us more than we need them. This is a variant of the German carmakers argument. And we know how that went...Business will follow the profit opportunity and if that has moved then so will the business...

And what do we mean by us / we. We’re not talking about massed ranks of Euro investing / trading etc blue blooded British institutions.

Au contraire. We’re talking about the London based subs of US, Asian and indeed European capital markets players...As soon as they think the profit opportunity has moved then so will they...it’s a market innit...
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KANTESHA means Prabhu full of brightness.
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You can’t see the Sun as it is now, but you can see it as it was about 8 minutes ago. You can’t see Alpha Centauri now, but you can see it 4.4 years ago. You can see the Andromeda Galaxy as it was 2.5 million years in the past. And so on.

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1. I was walking in the woods yesterday and I had an epiphany. It wasn’t one I wanted to have. I was thinking about today’s class, where we are reading Kimmerer’s ‘Gathering Moss’. I’ve taught Braiding Sweetgrass in multiple classes every year since 2016. It’s eminently teachable

2. Both books are beautifully written. Students uniformly enjoy them as assigned reading. They do a great job communicating to non-Indigenous folks the contours of basic Indigenous relationships to more-than-human beings. They’re wildly popular with white readers.

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4. As the popularity of ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ has soared, I’ve seen more and more white folks wax on about ‘braiding knowledge’. But they often don’t know any of the lineages of these concepts beyond what is presented in this one book. They confidently run with this.

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MUST READ TILL END:
FB POST BY MR PRABEER BASU,
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" Received a hurtful post from an old friend and colleague. He was on my daily Broadcast list of WhatsApp. He requested that I do not send him any of my posts on 'political' issues. I gave him a long explaination
>2

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on why I write and what I write. But he was not convinced.

Being alerted by him thus, I felt I should clarify to all who read my posts on what exactly I think and do.

The charge against me is that I wrongly support our current Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi..
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and that it establishes I am not rational and impartial anymore.
Let me try and explain.First and foremost,I do not write on 'political' issues. I write on 'national' issues. For example, I have no opinion on whether Rahul Gandhi should be President of his party or not.
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Similarly, I have no views whether BJP is a better party than Congress or vice versa.
Even after 36 years in the IAS I have no MLA, MP or anyone involved in politics whom I can classify as my friend or even acquaintance.
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So, naturally I don't care which party wins or loses as long as the winning party runs an honest government doing good to my nation.
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1. There are more people added on the list of arrests and executions of famous people but no further intel is available at this time.

ARRESTS and EXECUTIONS OF FAMOUS PEOPLE 2020 UPDATED
Explanation of the latest military tribunal arrests and executions of famous people in 2020.

2. The tribunals are arresting these people in plain clothes. We saw the Obama’s arrest, although we didn’t know it was an arrest at the time. The arrest was done nonchalantly so as to not get noticed by the public.
All arrests of these famous people were done this way.

3. If the person is convicted of child sex trafficking, crimes against humanity or treason, they will be executed.
If the person arrested has evidence on someone else to help their prosecution, or is willing to help Trump, & they want to cooperate, they may be allowed to do so.

4. A sentence of execution down to life in prison may be accepted if their evidence is worth anything.
When a plea deal is done, the defendant must present evidence they have to make their sentence lighter. This information is given to the prosecution, defense, and to the judge.

5. If evidence is accepted, they are presented the plea deal. They will have to make a guilty plea to the crime with a video confession & written statement. That is how all plea deals work.

All famous people arrested were either treasonous or involved in satanic worship rituals.
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