Culture of Corruption

Who will Saturday Night Live cast to play Li Yang? The Chinese-born pimp is already more famous than Schenectady-born presidential candidate, Obama's former Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurshi, Andrew Yang. She appears to be the new Jeffrey Epstein, whore monger to the Trumpist elite. As well as someone who has been helping to illegally funnel money from wealthy businessmen from China into Trump's campaign coffers.

I was shocked to learn that Jack Abramoff is still working as a DC lobbyist. I thought he was selling kosher pizza for a living. Who would be seen with him? Who would even take his call? He was involved with so many scandals that Wikipedia has a unique page called Jack Abramoff Scandals, not a topic... its own page. A couple of reminders.

Jim McGovern (D-MA) is one of the most progressive members of Congress. His D+9 central Massachusetts district-- which includes Worcester, Northampton, Amherst and Uxbridge-- gave Trump just 36.8% of its vote. Last year McGovern beat Republican Tracy Lovvorn two to one-- 191,332 (67.2%) to 93,391 (32.8%). In the 2 decades between 1998 and 2018, the Republicans had only fielded candidates against him in 2004 (28%) and 2010 (39.2%). He has a safe seat and his 96.7 ProgressivePunch lifetime crucial vote score is in the top 10 in Congress.

Friday, Brave New Films released this short, powerful clip of Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA), Vanita Gupta (of the Leadership Conference) and Sherrilyn Ifill (of the NAACP) at the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on H.R.1, the new bold and decisive groundbreaking reform package that includes voting rights, campaign finance and anti-corruption ethics reforms. They are seen here schooling one of the Republican witnesses/proud voter suppressors.

 Bernie Sanders' November 2016 aggregate approval rating. Net favorable: +18%  Hillary Clinton's November 2016 aggregate approval rating.

by NoahMitch McConnell: Accomplice in Trump's betrayal of America. Call him Accomplice #1. As Majority Leader, MConnell not only pushes Trump's agenda of policies and nominations, he is Trump's eager protector, ignoring his sworn oath, saying and doing nothing to protect the United States and The Constitution.

The Subcommittee on Health-- the membersThis morning I was on David Feldman's radio show and people were happy I had shown the connection between committee chairman and immense bribery flows from special interests the day before. OK, let me follow up on that a bit then.

Everybody does it... except those who don't. Yesterday PhilosophRob, a vegetarian, ran two Open Secrets-based lists of how much money some of the presidential candidates in Congress took from hedge fund managers and from lobbyists so far this cycle. It's easy to talk about cleaning up the corruption in Congress at the root of all the county's problems. But who is willing to walk the walk?

Foreign governments aren't allowed to pay off Trump... but-- surprise, surprise-- Trump and the bevy of crooks around him found ways to skirt the law and enrich Individual One and his family. We don't know if Mueller has been investigating these-- but we do know the Wall Street Journal and investigative journalists for ProPublica have been. And so are federal prosecutors in New York.

It should be a given by now that when Trump wholesale "borrowed" all Bernie’s populist talking points-- albeit with nothing whatsoever behind them-- about cutting the prices of pharmaceuticals, he was just talking out of his ass. Trump will never force the drug manufacturers to bring prices of drugs down to the levels they are in other countries.