The dumbest political take of the week comes from Stephen L. Miller aka @redsteeze

DeSantis is the only name mentioned as a future replacement for Trump. He tacks close or higher than Trump in casual polling, his name is the first that comes up, even among the Trumpist base, as a preferred candidate. This is a burden no politician should be saddled with. The country and the GOP is one Ron DeSantis scandal away from returning to Trump’s awkward embrace in 2024.

More.

 

 

 

 

 

Imagine Ronald Reagan in 1975 reading this about himself as he's coming off the governorship of California and preparing to run for the Republican nomination against sitting President Gerald Ford.

"Oh my God. The burden! And I signed that damn abortion legislation in California and if anyone finds out, I'm toast! What oh what should I do?"

If Ronald Reagan were alive today he would laugh out loud at redsteeze. Like any skeleton lurking in DeSantis' closet could possibly hold a candle to the smoldering wreckage left in the wake of the SS Trumptanic. 

Ron DeSantis should definitely run against Trump, the biggest LOSER and biggest PHONY to ever make the big time.

Just win reelection in 2022 in Florida first, Ron. And then do run run.

Well, I found one guy with the temerity to point out what a phony baloney plastic banana good time rock n rolla Rush Limbaugh was on immigration

From a good thread discussing possible replacements for Rush Limbaugh.

Commenters get it that playing reruns hosted by loyalists ain't gonna cut it.

Cumulus Media's Westwood One is challenging the time slot of Rush Limbaugh with Dan Bongino.

That should force EIB's hand to up their game.

Meanwhile under George W. Bush, Rush Limbaugh licked his finger, checked the wind, and said what he said. Which was Rush's typical behavior. As Rush told 60 Minutes, he was there to see how much money he could make advertisers pay to be on his show. That meant keeping and growing a Republican audience. Rush was never about principle. He was just about convincing you that he was in order to keep you listening.

 

Everyone's a phony, except for Nathaniel

Even if everyone else is a liar, God is true.

-- Romans 3:4

Jesus saw Nathan'a-el coming to him, and said of him, "Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!" 

-- John 1:47

 

Speaking of phony, between 49% of you and 74% self-report mask-wearing compliance

 There's no way in hell that's anywhere close to true with coronavirus cases soaring by 10 million in two months.

You're all lying through your teeth.

If the Christians exaggerate their church contributions by between 51-115%, it's impossible any of this mask-wearing data is reliable anymore than was the polling data for Biden.

https://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/06/us/contributions-to-churches-are-studied.html

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-1132-9

https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america?view=mask-use&tab=trend

After holding out for $2k/person, the vote for which was supposed to be tomorrow, instead of the $600 in the current COVID relief bill waiting for him to sign, true to form Trump folds like a cheap suit and signs the thing anyway, warts and all

 Along with the inability to appoint the right personnel from the beginning, Trump's inability to negotiate for what he claims he wants has to be the biggest tell that THE ART OF THE DEAL was purely aspirational for him, kind of like following what THE BIBLE says is merely aspirational for Christians.

He's the biggest phony we've seen in a long time, and appropriately now the biggest loser.

Sad!

LOL, Speaker Nancy Phony Pelosi working hard to make sure that the name of George Kirby, you know the guy, right?, is remembered through worthy legislation

 

Got a call today from the Peter Meijer campaign, running for Justin Amash's seat (MI-3)

I asked about Meijer's position on immigration. Got the typical "he supports Trump's position" and favors lots of LEGAL immigration.

When probed on H1B visas the caller didn't know what they were. When I explained they allowed foreigners to work in the US, he offered that he thought Meijer was in favor of lots of those, too, even after I pointed out that tens of millions of Americans are out of work and don't need the competition. 

The campaign worker clearly expected me to be a libertarian who is in favor of lots of immigration, which is what you'll get from Peter Meijer, Republican, if he's elected.

The caller wasn't prepared to encounter a voter who has often voted Republican who is against that.

Shows you how thimble deep Republican thinking is on the issue, and that Trump's GOP hasn't moved an inch in the direction of immigration restriction, mostly because Trump's a phony on immigration.

Won't be checking the box for Peter Meijer.

China's phony case/death counts recede into the rear view mirror as free and open Western societies' case/death counts reveal the true virulence and danger of China novel coronavirus 2019

LOL: Donald Trump's crackpot 35% unemployment in February 2016 is 37% today

Jeffrey Snider:

In February of 2016, then-candidate Trump deployed his typical grandiose, exaggerated style after his win in the New Hampshire primary.

“Don't believe those phony numbers when you hear 4.9 and 5 percent unemployment. The number's probably 28, 29, as high as 35. In fact, I even heard recently 42 percent.

[T]he once fake unemployment rate has become his primary campaign symbol.

Big Fat Idiot Rush Limbaugh 2/5/2016:

We have an audio sound bite here from Obama ... He was heralding first-time unemployment rate as being under 5% for the first time in seven years ... Well, there’s a reason he said it. It’s because it’s the only way you can ignore the 94 million Americans not working, not in the labor force ... This is an abject joke. It’s a total joke.

Ah, content to sit out the election after Trump betrays on immigration, but droning the enemy, that's a step too far!

Phony baloney plastic banana good time rock and rolla alt-right gonna vote Democrat.

Pete Booty Judge is as phony as Pocahonky: His dad's skin is no more brown than any other white person's

The study by Capelli et al. has concluded that the contemporary males of Malta most likely originated from Southern Italy. The study also indicates that Malta was barely inhabited at the turn of the tenth century and was likely to have been repopulated by settlers from Sicily and Calabria who spoke Siculo-Arabic. These findings confirm the onomastic and linguistic evidence presented in 1993 by Geoffrey Hull, who traced the oldest Maltese surnames to southern and south-eastern Sicily, especially the Agrigento district.

Sacha Baron Phony

Trade wars started in 2018 instead of 2017 by default, the same reason immigration wars started after he lost the House

Trump never had a strategy for getting what he ran on, but the GOP had a strategy for getting what it wanted.

Trump should have leveraged this situation to his advantage. You give me my immigration checklist, my trade checklist, I'll give you corporate tax reform and defense spending. Instead, the phony Art of the Deal author caved and gave them everything without getting anything.

Trump wasted the first entire year on repealing and replacing Obamacare, the latter being the fool's errand Trump in his hubris added after securing the nomination. Did he not pay attention to the clash between Democrats in 2009 over the House healthcare plan vs. the Senate plan? It took a Herculean effort to get a compromise, all without Republican input. Like he could get Republicans united for something similar, after ripping them all to shreds in 2016.

Total doofus, surrounded by doofi.

The only thing he's getting right is that he doesn't need anybody to conduct the trade war. Doesn't really matter when he conducts it, but Republicans would have been begging him to end it much earlier if he had started it much earlier. And that is the definition of the art of the deal.

Too bad he didn't think of it.

y/y change US imports of goods from China: Sum Ting Wong long before this

NYU's journo prof Jay Rosen is a total phony

Phony 52 year old "Oregon man" Fidel Lopez gets 60 days for raping dog, dog euthanized

Story.

I think they euthanized the wrong life form.

John Carney: Welcome to Phony Farm Labor Shortage Season

Thread.

Next stop for beer-drinking Cherokee woman Elizabeth Warren: A visit to the hardware store "to get me a huntin' license"

Must be something in the water up there in Massachusetts that turns people into phony baloney plastic banana good time rock-n-rollas. Michael Dukakis in the tank, John Kerry goes a huntin', and now Elizabeth Warren cracks open a cold one in a New Year's Eve chat streamed live. Hm. Tongues are a-wagging. A drinking Indian, huh? Was it an India Pale Ale?

The article forgets to mention the incident involving John Kerry, who served in Vietnam.

 Cashman: Elizabeth Warren racks up another Dukakis moment :

With the beer vid — trying to sell herself as your average beer-swigging multimillionaire former Harvard Law prof who’s a champion of the middle class — Warren has racked up two strikes in short order. Three strikes and … it could be just Beto O’Rourke vs. Kamala Harris on the left side of the Democrats’ debate stage.

 

Ann Coulter: The point isn't being made enough that the Russia investigation began because of Peter Strzok

Here.

It was the hubris and political animus of a single high-level FBI functionary, Peter Strzok, which sought to stymie the political will of the American people who elected Trump by presenting a phony dossier as credible evidence to a FISA court in order to surveil a presidential candidate.

The whole thing is reminiscent of nothing so much as the Lois Lerner affair, when one person in The Swamp used her position to curtail the free-speech rights of The Tea Party during the 2010 revolt against Obamacare and government bailouts of all and sundry except the taxpayers.

"If a nuclear device leveled DC I don't know if I would shed a tear, unless I heard this pile was out of town at the time."

   

Wow, Sen. Mike Lee falls 28,000 feet directly into the sea from Mt. Tea Party Olympus

Another phony like Sen. Ron Johnson and Rep. Justin Amash.

Trump adviser Jared Kushner's father was put in jail by Chris Christie

Byron York recounts the tale, here:

The short version is: In 2004, Jared Kushner's father Charles, a real estate magnate in New Jersey and New York, pleaded guilty to a tax fraud scheme in which he claimed hundreds of thousands of dollars in phony deductions for office expenses at the partnerships he created to manage the apartment buildings he owned. Kushner, a major donor to the Democratic Party, also pleaded guilty to fraudulently making hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions in the names of employees and associates who didn't know their names were being used. Finally, Kushner pleaded guilty to retaliating against a cooperating witness in the case — his sister. He did so by setting a trap in which he hired a prostitute to lure his sister's husband into a sexual encounter in a New Jersey hotel, where the action was secretly photographed and videotaped. Kushner sent the pictures and tape to his sister as revenge, apparently motivated by Kushner's belief that she and her husband were helping U.S. Attorney Christie and his prosecutors. ... [I]n a 2014 interview with the New York real estate publication The Real Deal, Jared called his father's treatment "obviously unjust" and said the experience had soured him on an earlier ambition to become a prosecutor. "If you're convicting murderers, it's one thing," Jared said. "It's often fairly clear. When you get into things like white-collar crime, there are often a lot of nuances. Seeing my father's situation, I felt what happened was obviously unjust in terms of the way they pursued him."