Fetterman v Oz

Contrary to what some political pundits, prognosticators, soothsayers, and talking heads say, Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race has not “turned ugly.”

It has always been ugly.

Keystone State residents are faced with what has, once again, become a sad reality across this nation:
An extremely wealthy GOPer faces off against the Common Man.

Why people would choose someone so very unlike them to represent them is beyond the scope of imagination. But, “fool me once, shame on you. Fool me… you can’t get fooled again.”

And in that process, the GOPer merely shows their true colors. But unlike the true colors in Cindi Lauper’s song by that same title, they’re not beautiful. They’re grotesquely hideous, and a maliciously macabre mockery.

The nation saw it in Georgia with Kelly Loeffler, the unarguably wealthiest individual ever to warm a seat in the U.S. Congress — House, or Senate — whose financial net worth, with her husband Jeffrey Sprecher, owner and CEO of the New York Stock Exchage, was then valued at upwards of $800 million.

Loeffler is so very wealthy, that after she was briefly appointed by Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp to briefly fill the vacancy created by the resignation of U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson due to declining health from Parkinson’s Disease, she used Trump’s 2017 tax cuts “loophole” to purchase a fancy corporate jet — a 2010 Bombardier Challenger 300 (tail#N830EC) — for a mere $10,000,000 and claimed that she used it for campaign travel.

In fact, under Trump’s tax law changes, the entire purchase price of a new or used aircraft bought by a company can be a 100% tax deductible write-off against its earnings.

What the multi-millionairess did, was to create an “ownership trust,” which is a company that owns the plane, rather than herself personally. By so doing, it offers some degree of anonymity by giving it the appearance of being isolated from the individual(s) whom actually control it. Essentially, it’s a type of “shell company” set up exclusively for the purpose of ownership, and nothing else.

Its greatest single benefit?

It helps avoid taxes.

This has all raised its ugly head because the Oz campaign’s Senior Communications Adviser Rachel Tripp said in an interview with Business Insider published August 23, 2022, that, “If John Fetterman had ever eaten a vegetable in his life, then maybe he wouldn’t have had a major stroke and wouldn’t be in the position of having to lie about it constantly.”

Tripp is an alum of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and one would expect more from a university-educated woman like her, and certainly much, much, more from the one who hired her — Oz, a very wealthy (as in multimillionaire wealthy) retired cardiologist. Of course, Oz has his own baggage, but the difference is, he doesn’t carry his own luggage — he has a porter to carry it for him.

But Tripp’s remark not only shows ignorance, it shows Oz’s true colors… his yellow belly, and forked tongue.

While as a retired cardiologist Oz knows about Afib,

The Republican Party Is Dead. There Are Only 6 Remaining Members.

Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins

A significant number of the American people have been bamboozled, swindled, and otherwise cheated and lied to for at least the past 40+ years, at least since 1980, and beginning in earnest in January 1981 with the Reagan administration.

In actuality, the Republican party’s seeds of destruction were sown in 1964 at the Republican National Convention in Daly City, California when then-New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller warned the assembled delegates that

“The Republican party is in real danger of subversion
by
a radical, well-financed,
and
highly disciplined minority.”  

He was given 5 minutes to address the delegates, but was booed for over 16 minutes.

Why?

He was seeking the inclusion of language in the official party platform which would have said,

“The Republican Party fully respects the contribution of responsible criticism, and defends the right of dissent in the democratic process. But we repudiate the efforts of irresponsible, extremist groups, such as the Communists, the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society and others, to discredit our Party by their efforts to infiltrate positions of responsibility in the Party, or to attach themselves to its candidates.”

One would think that such language condemning and repudiating the Ku Klux Klan, Communists, John Birch Society members, and others, would have been welcomed.

Ku Klux Klansmen rally in support of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, the GOP 1964 Presidential nominee.
Image: Universal History Archive/Getty Images

But, it wasn’t.

That was the year Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater was the party’s Presidential nominee.

That was also the year the GOP suffered one of the greatest losses in American political history.

A mere 6 states – Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina – voted for Barry Goldwater.

Lyndon Baines Johnson won in a landslide with 486 Electoral College votes to Goldwater’s 52.

The Popular Vote was just as decisive:
Johnson 43,127,041 (61.1%), to Goldwater 27,175,754 (38.5%).

The next quadrennial election cycle proved to be a harbinger of things to come.

Nebraska Republican Senator Ben Sasse

In 1968, Alabama Governor George C. Wallace – a stridently biogted racist and segregationist, at the height of his hatred of Blacks – campaigned on the American Independent ticket against Republican Richard Nixon of New York, and Minnesota Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey, who had been LBJ’s Vice President. That year’s election was equally decisive in its victory, but what may be most interesting, is the fact that as a 3rd Party Candidate, the openly racist, bigoted Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, though he was a Democratic governor, campaigned on a platform of racial segregation as a Presidential candidate on the American Independent ticket – and commonly, though incorrectly known as a “Dixiecrat” – won 5 states (AL, AR, GA, LA, MS) and their 46 Electoral College votes, along with 9,901,118 Popular Votes, for 13.5% of all Popular Votes cast. It remains the strongest showing of a 3rd Party candidate in American political history. Not even John B. Anderson in 1980, or Ross Perot in 1992 won any Electoral College Votes, though Ross Perot made a good showing among the Popular Vote with 19,743,821, or 18.9% of all Popular Votes cast, and in 1996, Perot secured 8,085,294 Popular Votes, which was 8.4% of all Popular Votes cast, though he never won any Electoral College votes in any election.

Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski

Wallace’s strong showing among those 5 Southern states in 1968 was resounding evidence of how pervasive, ingrained, and embedded – how thoroughly infiltrated – the message of hate, and he as its chief messenger – along with the Ku Klux Klan, Communists, John Birch Society, and other such elements as then-New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller had mentioned at 1964’s RNC convention – had become in the South. Sadly, Nixon did nothing to help, and rather, relied upon a “Southern Strategy” to win over those very voters – the racist bigoted “Dixiecrats” who had become enured with the Ku Klux Klan, Communists, John Birch Society members, and others – to welcome them into the fold of the Republican Party.

Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” was the creation, per se (it was more an anthropological and demographic analysis of long-term trends than anything else), of Kevin Phillips (b.1940), a brilliant, if not genius (matriculated Colgate University aged 16, graduated Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude, spent his junior year at Scotland’s University of Edinburgh, where he knew more about Scottish history than his Scottish classmates), Harvard Law-educated man who authored the 1969 book “The Emerging Republican Majority“ in which he detailed an ethnographic political strategy that capitalized upon, an exploited alleged hostilities between the Irish, Italians, and Poles, and Jews, Negroes, and affluent Yankees to achieve its goals. He later abandoned the GOP in the 1990’s after becoming grossly disaffected by them.

Having now authored over 13 books, the premise of his first book “The Emerging Republican Majority,” was the presumption that most voters “still voted on the basis of ethnic or cultural enmities that could be graphed, predicted and exploited. For instance, the old bitterness toward Protestant Yankee Republicans that had for generations made Democrats out of Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants had now shifted, among their children and grandchildren, to resentment of the new immigrants – Negroes and Latinos – and against the national Democratic party, whose Great Society programs increasingly seemed to reflect favoritism for the new minorities over the old.”

Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy

In a May 17, 1970 article entitled “Nixon’s Southern strategy ‘It’s All In the Charts’” for the New York Times,

Fool Me Once, Shame On You. Fool Me… You Can’t Get Fooled Again.

Perhaps you’ll recall that butchered line uttered by then-POTUS George W. Bush in Nashville, TN, September 17, 2002 at East Literature Magnet School.

https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/09/20020917-7.html

Yet, the buffoonery and vulgar hilarity of this administration’s utter incompetence is nothing short of poetic irony, indeed!

His bull-in-the-china-shop, burn-it-all-down approach made Bush II look like a piker, a rank amateur, a mere wet-behind-the-ears greenhorn.

But Bush’s malapropisms were a peculiarly, albeit somewhat endearing trait of his.

However, nothing this POTUS has ever said has

Dr. Kermit Gosnell, MD: Is Philadelphia’s horrific murder trial overshadowed?

In an earlier entry entitled “They kill babies… and women, too. West Philadelpia MD indicted on 8 counts murder” posted on Wednesday, January 19, 2011 I wrote in part that “The atrocities of this ONE incident make Nazi madman “scientist” Josef Mengele and madman/mass-murderer Jeffrey Dahmer almost pale by comparison. Body parts and bodies in freezers and refrigerators, corpse mutilation… all in the “City of Brotherly Love.””

Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s murder trial will be starting it’s sixth week, and with testimony such as:
Defense attorney Jack McMahon (heatedly): “After Digoxen and having its neck cut, you’re telling the jury that you saw the baby moving?”
Kareema Cross, 28-year-old employee from 2005 to 2009: “Yes, it was.”
– it doesn’t look good for the former physician, or for his untrained, unlicensed staff.

The indictment against him may be downloaded and read here:
http://www.phila.gov/districtattorney/pdfs/grandjurywomensmedical.pdf

—

Why Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s Trial Should Be a Front-Page Story

The dead babies. The exploited women. The racism. The numerous governmental failures. It is thoroughly newsworthy.

By Conor Friedersdorf

Please note: This post contains graphic descriptions and imagery.

A procedure room at the Women’s Medical Society. / Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office

The grand jury report in the case of Kermit Gosnell, 72, is among the most horrifying I’ve read. “This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy – and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors,” it states. “The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels – and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths.”Charged with seven counts of first-degree murder, Gosnell is now standing trial in a Philadelphia courtroom. An NBC affiliate’s coverage includes testimony as grisly as you’d expect. “An unlicensed medical school graduate delivered graphic testimony about the chaos at a Philadelphia clinic where he helped perform late-term abortions,” the channel reports. “Stephen Massof described how he snipped the spinal cords of babies, calling it, ‘literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.’ He testified that at times, when women were given medicine to speed up their deliveries, ‘it would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.'”One former employee described hearing a baby screaming after it was delivered during an abortion procedure. “I can’t describe it. It sounded like a little alien,” she testified. Said the Philadelphia Inquirer in its coverage, “Prosecutors have cited the dozens of jars of severed baby feet as an example of Gosnell’s idiosyncratic and illegal practice of providing abortions for cash to poor women pregnant longer than the 24-week cutoff for legal abortions in Pennsylvania.”

Until Thursday, I wasn’t aware of this story. It has generated sparse coverage in the national media, and while it’s been mentioned in RSS feeds to which I subscribe, I skip past most news items. I still consume a tremendous amount of journalism. Yet had I been asked at a trivia night about the identity of Kermit Gosnell, I would’ve been stumped and helplessly guessed a green Muppet. Then I saw Kirsten Power’s USA Today column. She makes a powerful, persuasive case that the Gosnell trial ought to be getting a lot more attention in the national press than it is getting.

The media criticism angle interests me. But I agree that the story has been undercovered, and I happen to be a working journalist, so I’ll begin by telling the rest of the story for its own sake. Only then will I explain why I think it deserves more coverage than it has gotten, although it ought to be self-evident by the time I’m done distilling the grand jury’s allegations. Grand juries aren’t infallible. This version of events hasn’t been proven in a court of law. But journalists routinely treat accounts given by police, prosecutors and grand juries as at least plausible if not proven. Try to decide, as you hear the state’s side of the case, whether you think it is credible, and if so, whether the possibility that some or all this happened demands massive journalistic scrutiny.

* * *

On February 18, 2010, the FBI raided the “Women’s Medical Society,” entering its offices about 8:30 p.m. Agents expected to find evidence that it was illegally selling prescription drugs. On entering, they quickly realized something else was amiss. In the grand jury report’s telling, “There was blood on the floor. A stench of

Nazi War Criminal found hiding in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA… City of Brotherly Love.

AP Exclusive: Philadelphia man target of German Nazi war crimes probe; will fight extradition

By Associated Press, Published: September 23, 2012

BERLIN — Germany has launched a war crimes investigation against an 87-year-old Philadelphia man it accuses of serving as an SS guard at the Auschwitz death camp, The Associated Press has learned, following years of failed U.S. Justice Department efforts to have the man stripped of his American citizenship and deported.

Johann “Hans” Breyer, a retired toolmaker, admits he was a guard at Auschwitz during World War II, but told the AP he was stationed outside the facility and had nothing to do with the wholesale slaughter of some 1.5 million Jews and others behind the gates.

The special German office that investigates Nazi war crimes has recommended that prosecutors charge him with accessory to murder and extradite him to Germany for trial on suspicion of involvement in the killing of at least 344,000 Jews at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in occupied Poland.

The AP also has obtained documents that raise doubts about Breyer’s testimony about the timing of his departure from Auschwitz.

The case is being pursued on

WAFF implicates Juggalo of Insane Clown Posse in murder

First, let me say this: WAFF and their sensationalistic baloney “reporting” is the collectively worthless representative work of human beings assembled together for the express purpose of nothing more than getting you to watch their “the sky is falling” crap.

It’s not that the human beings are worthless, it’s what they do which is worthless.

Here’s why.

Marie Waxel – whose published email address is

Extremists and Radicals in the GOP

Official White House photograph of Vice President Rockefeller, 1975

Tonight was another one for the history books.

It was either that, or one for the nearest comic book store.

There was another Republican “debate” among the GOP presidential nominee wannabes. It’s hilarious – not just in a comédie noir sense, but in a genuinely hilarious manner – because those folks actually believe what they say, and hope to foist it upon the American general public.

But from there, it gets dangerous, precisely because they genuinely believe what they say. And that makes it sad.

The crazy “debate” was held this evening with 8 GOP wannabes.

Starring were:

Good News! California’s Nurse:Patient Ratio Law Saves Lives!

Extra! Extra!

Read all about it!

Should that, or

“Told ‘ya so!”

be the cry?

California and her residents, often maligned within and without, on occasion do come up with some good ideas.

Here’s one of the better ones.