Tag Archives: George Santos

No delusions – poor governance in action

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, Economic issues, Election 2022, Law and justice, Political commentary, Re-blogs, Social commentary, voting rights

The U.S. House of Representatives is supposed to be “the people’s” branch of Congress, but today it is anything but. The goals of about half the members of the House do not align with the goal of a government that is “… of the people, by the people, for the people.” Check out what our friend Keith has to say about the House and responsible governance.

musingsofanoldfart

In case you had any delusions that the new majority in the US House would offer up good governance, please note:

– Returning Congress representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar have been seated on Committees by Speaker Kevin McCarthy, after being removed in the last Congress for their inflammatory and inane remarks. When I think of Greene and Gosar, the words reasonable and collaborative are not top of mind.

– New Congressman George Santos, the one with the highly fabricated resume, will be seated on two Committees by Speaker McCarthy. Instead of advocating for his being censured or even removed, Santos gets two Committee assignments. I guess the Speaker holds lying in higher regard than most people. Either that or he needed his vote to remain Speaker and will put up with anything.

– Numerous bills have been proposed to restrict voting. As an independent voter, the greater problem…

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I am not mistaken, I was misquoted (a reprise)

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, History, Political commentary, Re-blogs, Social commentary

Today, our friend Keith reprised a post from ten years ago that brings to mind the quote, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Thank you, Keith, for this walk down memory lane and the reminder that lying politicians is nothing new (although I do think George Santos gets the grand prize for the biggest lies!)

musingsofanoldfart

George Santos is not the first politician to be caught in a lie. I wrote the following in 2013, before the age of Trump. You can tell as if it was written later, examples of his untruthfulness would be hard not to include.

On our way to school this morning, my son and daughter were arguing over who said what. My son told his sister that she is acting like a politician and uttered, “I am not mistaken, I was misquoted.” I almost ran off the road it was so funny. It reminds me that you cannot hide from your comments in this day and age. They may be taken out of context, but they have been recorded somewhere, so you cannot disown them.

Last year, Charles Barkley, the former basketball player and current sports analyst, got some flack for what appeared in his book. His classic response was he…

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So, Where Do We Go From Here?

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, Election 2022, Law and justice, Political commentary, Social commentary

As he so often does, Robert Hubbell has done an excellent job of summarizing the events of last week in the U.S. House of Representatives and what the coming weeks/months might bring.

The loyal opposition!

January 9, 2023

By Robert Hubbell

After the painful spectacle of Kevin McCarthy’s election as Speaker late Friday, I opened the Comments section to all readers to allow them to express their feelings about the confluence of the January 6th anniversary and McCarthy’s corrupt bargain to become Speaker. Several hundred readers took the opportunity to express themselves. Understandably, feelings of upset, anger, disappointment, and dejection were more common than usual from readers of this newsletter. While there is much to discuss regarding what McCarthy’s election as Speaker portends for America, those details will unfold over time (and may shift in the coming days). I want to start my discussion with the emotional reaction to McCarthy’s pathetic victory and our mission as “the loyal opposition” over the next two years.

It is reasonable for people to feel upset and angry over McCarthy’s victory. He is unfit to serve in Congress, let alone serve as its leader. Indeed, he is peculiarly unfit to be Speaker because he participated in the assault on Congress on January 6th by spreading the Big Lie and voting in favor of baseless objections to electors from Arizona and Pennsylvania. (McCarthy has since lied about his votes to overturn the election. See Talking Points Memo, McCarthy Falsely Denies Voting To Overturn Election Results.) And, of course, he was the first major politician to make a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to begin the rehabilitation of Trump only a week after those killed in Trump’s insurrection were buried.

But all of this we already knew. McCarthy’s late-night victory felt like a slap in the face, even though it was based on humiliating groveling before the bottom feeders in Congress and a betrayal of the American people. After fifteen rounds of votes, McCarthy should have slithered out of the House. Instead, he acted like a conquering hero as GOP members chanted “USA, USA!” only moments after saying he could not be trusted to be Speaker. That moment of celebration by a grotesque caricature of a corrupt politician harkens back to the accidental election of singularly unfit Donald Trump to be president.

For some, McCarthy’s election was a replay of election night 2016. One reader (CC), wrote the following in the Comments section:

“Now many of us have PTSD from the first act of Kevin’s Circus, The Clown Show, that just ended in the House of Representatives. It is reminiscent of The Trump Show. But we’ve been through this situation before, and we know how to handle it. We need to stop inundating our nervous systems by listening to constant reporting about the same problems from different sources every day.

I’m not minimizing what we are facing. We’re all sick of having to fight the ugly underbelly of our country. But we don’t need to tackle the next few years all at once. And we really have no idea what tremendous things we will be able to achieve to counter this current set of dangers. We need to take it one day at a time.

We also need to protect our nervous systems from the overwhelming barrage of dung that will be flung from the monkeys in Kevin’s Circus. They will lie constantly. They always do. Expect it.

We fought back against them once. I would have felt a lot better during the four years of the “Trump administration” if I’d known how successfully Americans would fight back against these unimaginable horrors to “right the ship of state.” We have no guarantee, but we need to believe we can do it again instead of sinking into despair, which is easy to do.”

I agree with CC on all counts. We have every reason to be concerned about what McCarthy and the GOP will attempt to do over the next two years—but we are in a position of strength and should act accordingly. (More on that in a moment.) Even so, I acknowledge that it is almost as painful to watch McCarthy thumping his chest after a historic humiliation as it is to listen to Trump bloviate and lie with apparent immunity from Mar-a-Lago.

I am confident we will contain, outmaneuver, and defeat McCarthy over the next two years. But we can’t control the toxic mixture of gratuitous meanness, pomposity, and ignorance that passes for “politics” in the GOP. In the last forty-eight hours, McCarthy has failed to condemn any of the following: (a) George Santos’s use of a “white supremacist” hand gesture from the House floor, (b) a crude and offensive tweet by a freshman GOP member from Florida who tried to connect the Speaker’s gavel to the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, (c) Trump’s claim over the weekend that Ashli Babbitt is a “true patriot”, and (d) the attack on the Brazilian Senate and presidential palace by supporters of defeated former President Bolsonaro.

As reader CC said, we must “expect it” from McCarthy and his gang, but that doesn’t mean we have to accept it. Indeed, our task as members of the loyal opposition is to make McCarthy et al. own every debased, depraved, selfish, corrupt, and ignorant statement made by the reprobates to whom McCarthy has surrendered his manhood. And they are about to start an endless stream of such statements without a moment of reflection on the fact that Americans rejected MAGA extremism in 2022.

With all of that as background, let’s take a moment to put Friday’s events in perspective.

They have McCarthy. We have Jeffries. We win—every time.

The Speaker’s election defined two men: Kevin McCarthy and Hakeem Jeffries. McCarthy is exposed as weak, corrupt, and desperate. He was humiliated on the House floor, begging for votes from Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert. It simply doesn’t get more pathetic than that. Conversely, the Democratic caucus unanimously supported Hakeem Jeffries through fifteen rounds of votes. And then the two men spoke—and the differences could not be more pronounced. McCarthy read his speech like the uncomfortable politician whose skill is in the back room, not the podium. Hakeem Jeffries gave an inspiring, lyrical, passionate speech that worth is watching in its entirety: Watch House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ historic first speech (Start at 4:15 mark).

When it comes time to communicate competing visions of our future to anxious Americans, Hakeem Jeffries will win every time. We should feel great about that fact.

Hubbell continues to talk about the promised/threatened ‘investigations’ and the debt ceiling threat, but the entire newsletter is too long for this post, so I hope that you’ll take a couple of minutes to pop over there and read the rest!

The New Kid In The Party?

Posted on by under education, Election 2022, History, Law and justice, Political commentary

A good governor … and here I am using the term more expansively to include all government decision-makers from state legislators all the way up through the U.S. Congress and even the president … will make every decision based on what is best for the country and for its people – ALL its people, not just white people or male people or Christian people or straight people.  They will sometimes err because they will rarely, if ever, have all the facts upon which to base their decisions, but they will be guided in making decisions by the facts they do have, and their conscience reminding them of their responsibility to the people of the nation.  Federal officials must remember that while they were elected by the people from their state or district, their decisions, their votes and their actions affect every individual within the country, thus they should act accordingly.

I believe there are some in our government who actually do just this, make decisions based on what seems at the time to be in the best interests of the people … ALL the people.  Unfortunately, however, there are more than a few who make their decisions on the basis of what’s in it for them, of their own quest for power, for re-election, for financial gain.  Now, I won’t deny there are some on both sides of the aisle who have forgotten their responsibility, but over the last decade, the Republican Party, aka the GOP, appears to no longer care about either the country or the people.  They have sacrificed integrity.  Their forefathers must surely be doing that proverbial “rolling over in their grave” thing.

I could point to so many, such as Marge Greene who was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives despite being a follower of QAnon, despite believing that Jewish space lasers (hint, in case any Republicans are reading this, there ain’t no such thing as Jewish space lasers) started the California wildfires.  Or the pistol-totin’ barhop, Lauren Boebert who proudly put a photo of all her children holding big guns on her Christmas cards.  And then, there’s Kevin McCarthy, vying to be the next Speaker of the House, whose only platform is revenge against any and all liberal democratic policies and those of us who support those policies.  But for now, I want to focus on one incoming member of the House, a person who will be seated in the House of Representatives next Tuesday, a person who has broken the boundaries of dishonesty:  George Santos.

I wrote about Santos just over a week ago, after the New York Times published a laundry list of the lies he has told … everything from his heritage to his education to his work history to his family to his criminal record to his financial situation … and more!  Last week, a day or two before Christmas, Santos was confronted about his lies and said he would talk about it all ‘next week’ … next week now being this week.  Well, he did.  He admitted to most of his lies, claimed the felony convictions against him for theft in Brazil were false, but the documentation proves the lie.  Did he ‘come clean’ with humility and shame?  Nope … just stated as a matter of fact that yes, he lied, but that he still has every intention of taking his seat in the House of Representatives next Tuesday!  The unmitigated gall left me speechless, but only for a moment.

This is a new low even for the Republican Party and if, in fact, they allow him to be seated in the House on Tuesday, it will be the most definitive statement yet that there is no conscience, no morals, no values, and no integrity within the Republican Party.  One lie of any substance would have disqualified any Democratic candidate, but Mr. Santos told lies about every single aspect of his entire 34 years!!!  I imagine there are some Republicans who are wishing they could crawl under a rock right about now – Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney – but the rest seem to be scratching their heads and wondering how to get this out of the news, how to make it disappear.  Not a single word from the otherwise garrulous Kevin McCarthy … funny that.

This is, for the Republicans, as bad a nightmare as the former guy, an egomaniac, planning to run for the Oval Office again.  I would pity the Republicans, but … they brought this mess on themselves when they first began letting unqualified circus clowns run for office.  It seems to me that a person who cannot even be relied upon to tell the truth about where he went to college (he didn’t), property he claims to own (but doesn’t), where he has worked, his ancestry, his criminal past, where he lives, cannot possibly be trusted to be an honest lawmaker!  I thought Herschel Walker told some mighty big lies, but Santos even makes him look like an amateur.  Santos is right up there with the former guy, who wouldn’t recognize the truth if it smacked him upside the head!  This is NOT what this nation needs … lawmakers who cannot ever be trusted, whose words and actions must always, always be fact-checked!  But alas, this is the new GOP – which, by the way, no longer stands for “Grand Old Party”, but rather for “Gaslight Or Perjure.”

Jaw-Dropping!!! 😲

Posted on by under education, Election 2022, History, Political commentary

In last month’s mid-term elections, a relatively unknown man named George Santos was elected to represent New York’s 3rd district in the U.S. House of Representatives.  Republicans will have a very slim majority of 4 seats in the House come January 3rd.  An article in yesterday’s New York Times about Santos caused my jaw to drop.  Apparently, Mr. Santos is a consummate liar and literally nothing on his resume is to be believed!  A few snippets from the NYT article …

    George Santos, whose election to Congress on Long Island last month helped Republicans clinch a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, built his candidacy on the notion that he was the “full embodiment of the American dream” and was running to safeguard it for others.

    His campaign biography amplified his storybook journey: He is the son of Brazilian immigrants, and the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent. By his account, he catapulted himself from a New York City public college to become a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” with a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties and an animal rescue charity that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats.

    But a New York Times review of public documents and court filings from the United States and Brazil, as well as various attempts to verify claims that Mr. Santos, 34, made on the campaign trail, calls into question key parts of the résumé that he sold to voters.

    Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the marquee Wall Street firms on Mr. Santos’s campaign biography, told The Times they had no record of his ever working there. Officials at Baruch College, which Mr. Santos has said he graduated from in 2010, could find no record of anyone matching his name and date of birth graduating that year.

    There was also little evidence that his animal rescue group, Friends of Pets United, was, as Mr. Santos claimed, a tax-exempt organization: The Internal Revenue Service could locate no record of a registered charity with that name.

    His financial disclosure forms suggest a life of some wealth. He lent his campaign more than $700,000 during the midterm election, has donated thousands of dollars to other candidates in the last two years and reported a $750,000 salary and over $1 million in dividends from his company, the Devolder Organization.

    Yet the firm, which has no public website or LinkedIn page, is something of a mystery. On a campaign website, Mr. Santos once described Devolder as his “family’s firm” that managed $80 million in assets. On his congressional financial disclosure, he described it as a capital introduction consulting company, a type of boutique firm that serves as a liaison between investment funds and deep-pocketed investors. But Mr. Santos’s disclosures did not reveal any clients, an omission three election law experts said could be problematic if such clients exist.

    And while Mr. Santos has described a family fortune in real estate, he has not disclosed, nor could The Times could find, records of his properties.

But wait … it gets even worse!

    Records show that Mr. Santos’s mother, who died in 2016, lived for a time in the Brazilian city of Niterói, a Rio suburb where she was employed as a nurse. After Mr. Santos obtained a high school equivalency diploma, he apparently also spent some time there.

    In 2008, when Mr. Santos was 19, he stole the checkbook of a man his mother was caring for, according to Brazilian court records uncovered by The Times. Police and court records show that Mr. Santos used the checkbook to make fraudulent purchases, including a pair of shoes. Two years later, Mr. Santos confessed to the crime and was later charged.

    The court and local prosecutor in Brazil confirmed the case remains unresolved. Mr. Santos did not respond to an official summons, and a court representative could not find him at his given address, records show.

    That period in Brazil overlapped with when Mr. Santos said he was attending Baruch College, where he has said he was awarded a bachelor’s degree in economics and finance. But Baruch College said it was unable to find records of Mr. Santos …

The first question is … why are we only learning of this now???  How did he manage to bamboozle the Republican Party into the nomination, and why didn’t the Democratic Party do their opposition research homework?  The next question is … will he be allowed to take his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives on January 3rd, just two weeks from now?  The chairman of New York’s Democratic Party has called for an ethics investigation, but given the slim Republican majority in the House, best guess is that nothing much will happen … for now, at least. Mr. Santos is yet another example of what the Republican Party has become.  He should fit in really well with Marge Greene, Loren Boebert, Matt Gaetz and some of the others he’ll be serving with, eh?

I urge you to read the entire article … it’s a bit lengthy, but it is an eye-opener, a jaw-dropper!