POLL:
— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) January 13, 2021
Which #TrumpCrimeFamily member is most likely to be the first to leave the United States and seek shelter in a nation that doesn't have an extradition treaty with us?
Wednesday, January 13, 2021
POLL: Which Trump Crime Family Member Will Flee from the Country First?
Friday, January 08, 2021
POLL: Where Will the Evicted White House Resident Be on January 20th?
POLL:
— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) January 8, 2021
Where will the evicted @WhiteHouse resident be at 12 noon on January 20th?
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UPDATE:
Within forty minutes of posting my poll, the #SoreLoserInChief emerged from a temporary Twitter timeout and eliminated the first choice, which was, of course, no surprise:
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....and another UPDATE, at 7:45pm on January 8th:
The @realDonaldTrump Twitter account has finally been suspended:
POLL:
— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) January 9, 2021
Twitter exile Tr*mp is looking "at the possibilities of building out our own platform in the near future. We will not be SILENCED!"
What will he name it?
Thursday, January 07, 2021
POLL: What's the Best Way to Remove an Orange Stain from the White House?
After yesterday's MAGAt invasion of the U.S. Capitol, it's hard to imagine you-know-who squatting in the White House for two more weeks. Who do you think should remove him. Congress? The Vice President and Cabinet? Father Time?
POLL:
— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) January 7, 2021
If you could choose your preferred method to remove the orange stain from the @WhiteHouse, would you want Congress to #ImpeachAndRemove, Pence & Friends to use the #25thAmendment, or simply wait two weeks for President Biden's inauguration?
Monday, December 14, 2020
A Couple of Entertainment-Only True Blue Liberal Twitter Polls
Yesterday there was speculation in the The Guardian about Ivanka Tr*mp running for Marco Rubio's Florida Senate seat in 2022, and earlier we have seen multiple articles about Lara Tr*mp running for Richard Burr's North Carolina Senate seat in the same midterm election. That led to the obvious poll question about the other Tr*mp spawn.
And today, we heard from Tr*mp's most beloved henchman and longest-lived White House staff member (not named Tr*mp or Kushner), Stephen Miller, announcing on Fox News that there will be an alternate slate of Tr*mpist electors chosen today as the states' actual electors are voting to confirm President-Elect Biden's November 3rd win.If #PrincessIvanka Tr*mp runs for Senate from Florida and Lara Tr*mp runs for Senate from North Carolina, which states will @DonaldJTrumpJr & @EricTrump run to represent in the Tr*mpist Senate? https://t.co/oW5t1NXi8X
— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) December 14, 2020
POLL:
— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) December 14, 2020
What will Tr*mp Propaganda Minister Stephen Miller's job be after January 20, 2021?
Tuesday, November 17, 2020
Did Rudy Giuliani's most destructive act take place in 1996?
We hear a lot in recent days about Rudy Giuliani's acts in the end stages of Donald Trump's political career, from his activity in Ukraine that helped lead to Trump's impeachment to his current inept attempts to throw out hundreds of thousands of Democratic votes as Trump refuses to accept his overwhelming loss (in the Electoral College as well as the popular vote) to President-Elect Joe Biden.
But what I've been thinking about today is the action of Mayor Giuliani's that may have done as much as any other to lead Trump to the White House in the first place.
In 1996, the Fox News Channel was started by Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, with its main studio in New York. However, it was not immediately available in any major television markets, including New York City. There was no internet method of getting video news in 1996, so Fox News was even more invisible than Trump's current favorite online right-wing channel, OANN, to the vast majority of Americans. The only cable provider in NYC was Time Warner, and they said they had a waiting list of 30 other cable stations vying for space and they didn't have room for a nascent cable news channel from the Australian owner of the New York Post.
"It began with a phone call to Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani on Sept. 20 [1996], an entreaty that would soon mire City Hall in a feud between two media conglomerates. On the line was an old friend of the Mayor, Roger Ailes, a former Republican political consultant who is now chairman of the 24-hour news channel started by Rupert Murdoch." --New York Times, November 4, 1996
It could be just that Ailes was an old friend, or that Rudy's second wife, Donna Hanover, was then working at Murdoch's local station, WNYW-5, or that Rudy saw Fox as a national stage for his own presidential ambitions, or that he was unselfishly trying to save a few hundred NYC media jobs for a fledgling cable station, but the fact remains that he went to bat -- hard -- to get Fox News on New York's only cable provider, engaging much of the mayor's office and staff to do so, and he was ultimately successful.
On a personal level, this has stuck in my head (and craw) because in the same year, 1996, Rudy sold the television station I watched most regularly, the city's PBS station WNYC-31, to a private buyer who immediately stopped showing BBC & PBS programming (he also sold my favorite radio station, WNYC-FM and AM, but those airwaves were bought by a foundation that kept the call letters and they have remained the city's main outlets for National Public Radio content.)
We'll never know if the struggling brainchild of Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes would have survived its infancy if it hadn't been able to move into the New York cable market, but maybe more importantly, we'll never know if tri-state real-estate con man Donald Trump would have become PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP without the Trump/Fox feedback loop that created his political "philosophy" and gave him a similarly-brainwashed audience for his political ambitions. Even though Trump had shown some of his political leanings publicly as early as 1989 when he lobbied heavily for the killing of the (innocent) Central Park Five, he was mainly a tabloid punchline for his marriages and affairs and bankruptcies and real-estate battle with Leona Helmsley; it's hard to imagine Trump becoming TRUMP without Fox News. It's hard to imagine now, but there was a real possibility that Fox News never would have appeared on the television screens in the Trump Tower penthouse without the heavy-handed intervention of Mayor Rudy Giuliani. It may be one of his greatest crimes.
Sunday, November 15, 2020
Start learning German while you maintain social distancing this winter...
Wednesday, November 11, 2020
Ex-President [Expletive Deleted]
From September 15, 1973...
Mike Stivic:
Watergate. Watergate. Watergate. Watergate. Watergate. Watergate. Watergate. Watergate. Watergate. Watergate!
Archie Bunker:
Don't say that no more, GODDAMN IT!
Edith Bunker:
You shouldn't swear like that.
Mike Stivic:
You shouldn't swear like that, Arch.
Edith Bunker:
Ever since this Watergate thing, it's GD this and GD that.
Archie Bunker:
That ain't swearing, Edith, GD. The first word there is God. How can that be a swear word? The most popular word in the Bible. The second word, that's damn, that's a perfectly good word, you hear that all the time, like they dammed the river to keep it from flooding, see? And even in the Bible you read where some guy is damned for cheating or stealing or having "insex" in the family. And who damned him? Who else? God. God damned him. Edith, beautiful words right out of the Holy Book. Don't show your ignorance!
Monday, November 02, 2020
True Blue Liberal Poll: When Will We Know The Winner?
POLL:
— True Blue Liberal - #BidenHarris2020 (@TrueBlueLiberal) November 3, 2020
In exactly 24 hours, polls in many states will be closing. When will we know the winner of the electoral college?#1Day #2020Election #BidenHarris2020 #TrumpPence2020 #Poll #VOTE
What America's Voting System(s) Look Like From Abroad.
The New York Times showed some details of the archaic United States voting system(s) to residents of some of the worlds newer and less baroque (or broken?) voting systems.
"When we showed voters from around the world what American elections are like in practice, they weren’t impressed. But they were impressed with our resilience and determination. So, while the world’s 'oldest democracy' may be a bit creaky these days, let’s be clear: Go vote! That’s really the best way to make a change."
ONE DAY LEFT!
VOTE!
Friday, October 30, 2020
"When a man's frauds have been enormous there is a certain safety in their very diversity and proportions."
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I first posted this on trueblueliberal.org on August 17, 2016 when Donald Trump's chances of a first term still seemed remote (terrifying, but remote). With four days until the election that could give him a second term -- and after all the intervening years with all the new crimes, lies, and misdemeanors from Trump and the #TrumpCrimeFamily -- I still think it's the most important thing that has appeared on this blog about that man. This post explains why vague insinuations about "Hillary Clinton's Emails!" in 2016 or "Hunter Biden's Laptop!" in 2020 can get more media coverage than Trump's sexual assaults and payoffs to porn stars, or his missing tax returns, or the fact that he kowtows to authoritarians like Putin and Erdogan and Kim, or that the First Couple of Nepotism are making millions while working in the White House, or that his last three campaign managers have been arrested, or that he calls Nazis "very fine people," or his impeachment less than a year ago, or..., well, you get the picture. There are too many scandals for any one person to keep up with, which turns out to be his best defense.
So here's the 2016 post again, without further changes.
_____________
My current pleasure reading takes a political turn. |
With legal cases about Trump's so-called "University" still pending, his complicated tax returns still unreleased, a history of bankruptcies, thousands of "minor" lawsuits, and more, the "diversity and proportion" of Trump's financial shenanigans put August Melmotte's to shame (though Melmotte did it from nothing without being given a head start by his father). If we do see any of Donald Trump's tax returns before November 8 (unlikely at this point as he continues to thumb his nose at the voters and the media), the chances are that, unless he gave nothing to charity or paid no taxes, the rule-bending in those thousands of pages would be so financially arcane that it would take teams of forensic accountants to root it out and another team to try to reduce it to layman's terms. It's only "the small vermin and little birds that are trapped at once."
If I entertained any notion that Donald Trump might have the attention span to tackle it, I might think that he had modeled parts of his life on The Way We Live Now.