Jacobs Jettisons Trump

When Congressman Chris Jacobs first announced his candidacy for the House of Representatives, he posted a pretty racist video to his Twitter page that was just vicious towards Spanish-speaking economic migrants from Mexico and Central America. When Jacobs ran for the State Senate in 2016, he was publicly silent, never answering questions about whether he supported Donald Trump. Behind the scenes, he told union audiences that he did not support Trump. In 2019, however, the Erie County Republican Committee, which has various close ties to Trump, coordinated a Trump endorsement of Jacobs. That led to a congressional campaign where it almost seemed as if Jacobs was Trump’s running mate, or vice-versa.

Jacobs narrowly won a special election in June, and he is now running for his first full term in Congress. June, you’ll notice, was only four short months ago. Yet in that short span of time, Jacobs has gone from full MAGA TRUMP TRAIN to Trump who?

His latest TV ad makes no mention whatsoever about Donald Trump. Trump‘s name and image do not appear – not audibly or visibly. What a difference four months makes.

Look at him. He’s a “job creator” through his real estate investments. He gallivants about the district, maskless, pretending to “fight” to protect people from insurers discriminating against them due to pre-existing conditions. Donald Trump is nowhere. He is appealing to the people in the middle who are disgusted by Trump. It is amazing what the epic mishandling of a hundred-year pandemic can do.

Here’s an example of what Jacobs’ ads looked like before Trump caught the ‘vid and went crazy on Dexamethasone.

Big difference.

Chris Jacobs repeated the Trump Administration’s fraudulent lie that the New York Green Light Law justified the termination of Trusted Traveler status for New Yorkers. He deliberately backed Trump propaganda that was not only false, but represented an unprecedented punishment of a state’s residents by the federal government to which they pay taxes over a manufactured political issue.

Chris Jacobs is just another flaccid opportunist who has taken another step up the ladder of political power. He has no plan to better your life or the lives of the people hurting the most in this post-Covid reality.

Donald Trump has ruined this country. He has deepened class, racial, political, religious, and economic divisions that were already well-carved. Especially since his impeachment acquittal, which showed him he could engage in unprecedented conspiracies for political gain with impunity, he has carved out the closest thing this country has had to a strongman dictatorship in its history. Donald Trump is a disaster, and Chris Jacobs is part of that disaster.

He went so far as to vote “no” on a bill to strengthen the U.S. Postal Service, and I don’t think it was a mistake. When you surround yourself with brazen liars, why should we take you at your word?

What we can glean from Jacobs’ current propaganda is that Donald Trump is polling poorly enough in NY-27 that it’s best to not mention him, and that people like Obamacare insofar as it rendered illegal insurance company discrimination against people with pre-existing medical conditions. But Chris Jacobs would probably tell you he opposes Obamacare. The problem is he has no alternative plan available for review.

And that’s what really matters about the Republican Party – its only ideology now is belligerent lying and nihilism. It is only against things and people and groups. It has no plan except “whatever Trump says.”

The 27th has had enough of millionaires named Chris who are too timid to answer to – and serve – the people whom they purport to represent.

“I Am Sickened By This”: Right Wing EmoCringe

Here is a perfect example of knee-jerk, fact-free, emotional, feeling-based hatred of Obama. There’s something sickening, alright, but it isn’t the supposed absence of “enough flags for Rus Thompson to not become physically ill”. 

First: 

The outrage grows: 

WHERE IS THE FLAG? Our correspondent is sickened!

LOOK AGAIN! NO FLAG! OUTRAGE!1!

Voice of reason criticizes getting “crazy”:

Forget the fact that Obama has a flag on his lapel, for God’s sake. There’s a flag embedded within the Presidential seal on the bug on the screen. The apparent optics of having a flag in the shot is so important to Rus Thompson that he says he becomes physically ill at its absence. This is, people, utter and sheer insanity. 

Diagnosis: Acute Obama Derangement Syndrome.

Prognosis: Poor.

RX: 10mg Chillaxa PRN

I Guess We are Two Americas, Right. ?

The conservative Heritage Foundation and its PAC have taken President Obama’s re-election really well. 

They’ve declared war on him. Not figuratively, as far as I can tell, but literally. This is propaganda that would make any dictatorship proud. 

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7D0d7ztLY0]

You can’t blame them. After all, the Heritage Foundation invented Romneycare/Obamacare so that a REPUBLICAN could take credit for introducing universal health insurance to America. 

Paladino and his BFF Romney

In case you wanted to see how local, poorer version of Donald Trump handled the re-election of President Barack Obama, 

ObamapelosimuslimchinaBenghazicommunism. For fun, I had a friend of mine who is a licensed psychologist analyze Mr. Paladino’s screed. Here’s their conclusion: 

First of all, did it come to you with the half black/half blue font? I tried to figure out if that was on purpose or just a weird formatting thing. He could be trying to emphasize certain points with the font color but I could not find a pattern that made sense. 

The blatant misspelling of Obama to O’Bama in the second paragraph either means he (or whoever wrote it for him) is an idiot or did it purposely to show how much he disrespects and dislikes the president. It’s hard to figure out which one is the case because he is both an idiot and horribly disrespectful.

I also found it interesting that he says right off the bat that most of his 500 employees are voting republican. First of all, I doubt that is the case, but clearly he has tried to bully them into doing do. I can only imagine the other emails and notices hes sent to his employees “encouraging” them whom to vote for. Was this an email sent to his employees? If so, it’s pretty much him telling them, ‘you’d better vote for Romney or you won’t be working for my anymore.’ It’s straight up bullying. He’s telling them he is the boss, is stronger than they, (he using strength and references to it a lot) and they better follow suit.

Overall, the whole email is right in line with how his whole campaign was, full of bullying and misinformation. It’s fearmongering at its best, scaring people with nuclear warhead talk and that Obama is a crazy socialist Muslim whose only goal is to take all our money from us. 

What I also think what he’s trying to do is make people feel disgust and shame when they hear Obama’s name. Humans are genetically engineered to act accordingly based the disgust we experience in certain situations (it keeps us aware from harmful disease and contaminants). By trying to conjureup feelings of disgust and associating it with Obama (and gays, blacks, welfare recipients, Muslims, etc) it causes us to shun and treat people unfairly and think of Obama as ‘dirty’ which can then lead to even more malicious thoughts and views. The same goes for shame…everyone hates the feeling of shame…no one wants to feel shame and if they can defer those feelings and blame someone else, they will. Throwing in his hatred of all other cultures by saying its shameful to ever align ourselves with the Chinese or Muslims, that’s just classic Paladino.

Paladino fits the mold of the extremely conservative right-winged ‘religious’ republicans very well. The more extreme you are the more you are hiding (like his extramarital affair and illegitimate daughter). The more moral you say you are, the more likely you are hiding lot of amoral activities. It’s a common defense mechanism to ignore our past mistakes and look down upon and criticize those who make the same mistakes as we have.

Carl, for his part, is taking it all in stride. 

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship”. – Alexander Tytler 1787 (unverified)

“Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.”

Four more years of Obama will make permanent the decline of the America we have known at the hands of the liberal progressive movement and it’s inept control of our government. 

The republican establishment is to blame for letting the movement grow out of control for the past 2 decades.  They gave us the weakest of the candidates to run on the republican ticket by supplying the money for him to destroy Gingrich and the others with a total disregard of the parties rank and file, three quarters of which favored the other candidates, playing right into the hands of Obama’s strategists who knew that Romney would be easiest to beat as the very rich Mormon defending the rights of Billionaires to earn unconscionable money.  His  platform emphasized class struggle by insanely stating that the superrich should not pay more.  How much money do people making a million dollars a year need? 

Romney was out of touch with rank and file republicans and independent voters. They condemned the tea party as extremists who live somewhere in the woods when in fact they are two thirds of the rank and file of the republican and conservative parties and independent voters.   He had no appeal to the young or the working man.  He chose to side with the 1% rather than the 99%.  He is an elitist.  No, billionaires do not create jobs.  They don’t share.  They are not nice people.  They are self-centered, greed driven and arrogant opportunists who found ways to game the system.  Like liberal elitists the feel guilt about the rest of us so they want the government to take care of the masses but to do so with money they collect only from the middle class.

Instead of pummeling Obama when he had him on the ropes over Benghazi,  Romney let him off unblemished while trying to look presidential.  Looking presidential was somehow more important than beating your opponent into oblivion.  Terrible advice from faceless and nameless advisors (some say they were disgruntled former Obama campaign staff) who could not have run a worse campaign.

The old guard of the republican party is washed up and finished both on a national and state level. They live in the past and have shown that they can’t lead.

Benghazi has legs.  Insofar as they don’t want to be complicit in the cover-up,  I predict that Hillary, Pretraeus and Panetta will resign shortly.  They are respected leaders with backbones and I can’t believe they will carry Obama’s water on Benghazi.

Without any real jobs plan or economic plan, with no effort to put trade restrictions on China and force them to raise the value of their currency, with our small businesses and the middle class refusing to invest in the economy because they don’t trust their government, with the tax increases to take effect in 2013 and 2014, with government intrusion and regulation and with the pending loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs in the defense industry, I predict that our nation will suffer a second dip into recession if not an outright depression dragging the rest of the Western world with it. Obama’s scheme is to create economic chaos from which he thinks a socialistic society will evolve. 

By weakening America’s military and advocating that America will be an equal partner to the rest of the world, Obama will allow the warring tribes of the world to advance upheavals, wars and terrorism the likes of which we can’t imagine.

I firmly believe that Obama is diabolical and evil.

If I was a paranoiac who had just been rendered essentially part of an electoral minority in this country with waning influence over national elections, I might lash out, as well. I’d probably keep it to myself, however. 

A Local CEO Implores His People to Vote Romney

A tipster wrote, saying that the following screed was emailed by a local business owner to all employees on the morning of election day.  The man sending it is David Buonerba, CEO of Trans American, a local customs brokerage. I don’t quite understand why businessowners can’t be satisfied with having a loyal set of hard-working employees, and has to give them a set of lies and try to force them to vote a particular way, especially when it’s palpably against their own interests.  

A message from the C.E.O. on Election Day Nov. 6, 2012

Today is a very important day. I am voting for Republicans and urge all of you to do the same.

Gov. Romney has not only solid business experience but has the necessary leadership skills to lead our country in the right direction.

Not really. Governor Romney is a vulture capitalist. To the extent that “Bain Capital” is a business, it exists to swallow and regurgitate struggling businesses, using other people’s money as leverage. It’s a fantastic way for the rich to get richer, but hardly indicative of “leadership skills”. 

Some facts about Gov. Romney:

He is of impeccable moral character
He is a good father and husband
He is a very successful self-made businessman
He is well educated with an M.B.A. and law degree
He donated ALL of his (family) inheritance to charity
He donates at least 20% of his annual income to charity
His “15% tax rate” is our Capital Gains tax rate… he has already paid either corporat tax at 35% or personal income tax at 30%+ on the money that he has invested (that he pays the 15% on!)

Self-made? While he may have donated his inheritance proceeds, by the time George Romney died, Mitt was already quite wealthy. For him to be “self-made”, we’d be assuming that his father didn’t support Mitt throughout his youth. After all, Ann Romney explained that she and Mitt struggled through college, selling off parts of his stock portfolio just to buy Chateaubriand. As for Romney’s track record of taxpaying, we learned in the waning days of the campaign that Harry Reid was right – Romney likedly avoided paying any tax whatsoever for years through a carefully crafted loophole available only to the superwealthy. 

Unfortunately, we know very little about Barack Obama’s background because he REFUSES to release his academic and personal records. Obama has never run a business and has no idea how to create value to grow the economy.

Mitt Romney didn’t release more than one solitary complete tax return, for one year. He released no academic or other personal records. Romney supporters have unclean hands on this particular whine. You don’t have to run a business to know how to run a government. See Collins, Chris. 

Every single member of the TA family of companies knows far more about economics than Obama… we all (actually) balance our budgets. Obama promised to cut the national debt in half… he increased it by $6+ trillion. What’s a trillion $?…If you spent a dollar a second it would take you 2,700 (two thousand seven hundred) years to spend a trillion $.

Of course, this ignores the depression spiral in which the country was falling in the latter half of 2008. Also, the trillion-dollar war in Iraq paid on credit, which was waged by choice, not out of necessity. 

President Obama has no business experience and is a poor leader surrounded by a bunch of nuckleheads. He recently admitted, “I can’t change Washington from within!” What a profound admission.

Frankly, I agree with him and he should leave Washington ASAP, because it sure is a mess! Barack Obama won election 4 years ago on “Hope and Change”. The definition of hope is “to have a wish to get or do something”… we need more than more wishes after 4 years!

You can’t change Washington from within. You need people – the grassroots – to help change Washington from without. To attack that notion is to attack the very principles of representative democracy. As for Hope and Change, we got both. President Obama pulled us out of that depressionary spiral through the stimulus, which didn’t kill jobs, but grew them; which contained more tax cuts than any previous law ever passed. 

On another very serious note, the Benghazi attack that killed our Ambassador and 3 CIA operatives on Sep. 11th continues to seep out each day and you’re going to learn in the very near future that Barack Obama has outright lied to us about what really happened… an left American’s behind.

This is a right-wing trope that has been repeatedly debunked, and also ignores the Iraq war, which killed thousands based on lies. 

Gov. Romney has a plan to grow the economy that includes reducing taxes (for everyone), getting rid of obamacare and making the U.S. energy independent which will take our country in the right direction. The U.S. has more oil and gas reserves than any other nation in the world. Every time you fill your gas tank, just think of what you could do if you were able to keep at least half of those dollars in your pocket! I most strongly believe that if we have 4 more years of Obama, as Americans we will be much worse off than we are now.

Gas prices went from an average of under $1.50 before the Iraq War, and shot up past $3 and 4/gallon around the time of Katrina, and haven’t significantly dropped since then, except in the midst of the Bush global recession of 2008. The Republican answer to energy problems is to drill – a “solution” that takes 10 years to take effect. 

I invite everyone to take time off during the day or leave early today to vote. Please coordinate with your Supervisor to ensure that we have no lapse in client service.

I hope they all voted for Obama to teach this asshole a lesson. 

Is It Illegal To Instagram Your Completed Ballot?

@MarkPoloncarz on Twitter

This seems to be the burning question this afternoon on Twitter, as people post images of their ballots with Obama or Romney ovals completed as instructed. Gizmodo and others are on it, and our local journalists are smelling a story. After all, the County Executive Tweeted a picture of part of his ballot. 

The law everyone is citing is Election Law section 17-130(10). It reads: 

Any person who…[s]hows his ballot after it is prepared for voting, to any person so as to reveal the contents, or solicits a voter to show the same…is guilty of a misdemeanor. 

First of all, no one is prosecuted under this section. In my review of the times in which this statute has been cited by New York State Courts, the only such case dates from 1979 where a person’s provisional ballot was invalidated because he put his name on it; (that violates subsection 11 of the statute). That’s it. 

The reason why the law exists? To prevent people from selling their votes; offering to vote a particular way, and having to show the completed ballot to the payor as proof before payment is made. It also exists to prevent intimidation of voters or otherwise violating the secrecy of the vote. However, the statute has not been updated to make it a misdemeanor to photograph one’s ballot for any purpose, or to show the photograph – only to show the ballot itself. 

So, Instagram the shit out of your ballot, and don’t worry about it being invalidated or about you being arrested. After all, political speech is offered the highest protection of all speech, and what’s more political than Tweeting a picture of your ballot. I’d wish the authorities good luck in overcoming the 1st Amendment challenge to that misdemeanor charge. 

Also, the New York State Board of Elections issued a statement today indicating that it’s perfectly legal. So, there’s that. 

Election Day 2012

Please go out and vote today. While it’s true that New York’s electoral vote outcome is firmly in Obama’s corner, there are many very important downballot races that really need your vote – your support, your minimal effort as a citizen to spend a bit of your day at your polling place to help select how you will be governed over the next term of office. I have seen election days in countries where the choices were non-existent and pre-determined as part of an institutional dictatorship. I have seen election days in countries where the choices were for political parties more than they were for people. We as Americans don’t have a perfect electoral process, but it’s the only one we have right now. 

It’s a common refrain from political junkies like I to lecture you on your civic duty of voting. It’s more than that. You really don’t have very many duties as a citizen of this nation, except to pay taxes and obey the law. Voting is one of those unique and fundamental rights that you hold to help choose the direction of your town, city, state, and country. It’s a right that millions around the world do not have. It’s a right that has been kept away from American women, different races, and ethnicities throughout our history. You probably attend July 4th parades, firehall picnics, fireworks displays, and the like to join in our occasional totemic displays of patriotism. All of that is window-dressing. Going out to vote; taking that minimal time to make your most solemn voice – your political voice – to be heard is the real thing.

If you truly think the President is a disaster, you need to go vote for one of his opponents. If you think that your Assemblyperson, your State Senator, or your United States Senator is doing a good or bad job, you need to fill in an oval on a piece of paper, scan it, and tell them. 

My endorsements, again are here. They are:

Barack Obama (D-POTUS)(incumbent)
Kirsten Gillibrand (D-US Senate)(incumbent)
Brian Higgins (D-NY26)(incumbent)
Kathy Hochul (D-NY27)(incumbent)
Mike Amodeo (D-SD60)
Justin Rooney (D-SD61)
Ray Walter (R-A146)(incumbent)
Christina Abt (I-A147)

Incidentally, although I made no endorsement, I voted David Shenk for County Comptroller. Given the choice between marginally qualified town finance nerd and wholly unqualified former sensational journalist, I opted for the former. 

If you have a sense of humor and you’re not offended by curse words, you can humorously find your polling place here.  If you want to find it in a way that’s more safe for work, try this. Every state is different, but polls throughout New York State are open from 6am – 9pm. If you’re in a different state, please consult this list. 

Tonight, I will join others to report on and live-Tweet the reactions and results of this election using the Twitter hashtag #WNYVotes. I leave you with President Obama’s closing argument, and the last political campaign speech he will ever give, delivered last night in Des Moines, Iowa, where his road to the Presidency began in earnest in 2007. 

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZHKZPMkx0A]

Go vote.  

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Donald Trump: How to Destroy a Brand

The Trump name used to stand for opulent, rococo luxury. For most people with some taste, it was always over the top; kitsch, but quality kitsch. He’s always been a colorful public figure, brash and opinionated. Unfortunately, this year, he has taken the Trump name and essentially thrown it in the toilet. 

He has now supplanted Orly Taitz as American birther-in-chief. His recent anti-Obama public political pronouncements have been offensive and loaded with thinly veiled racial animus – claiming that the President is foreign, socialist, evil, doesn’t have America’s best interests at heart. Even many Obama detractors who think his policies are wrong would concede that he hasn’t led the country over the last four years like the Bolshevik some make him out to be. 

It’s telling that Mitt Romney doesn’t rebuke or distance himself from Trump’s awfulness, but instead uses him as a surrogate. 

Not Trump though – he’s become Carl Paladino with more money, a bigger mouth, and more fascinating hair. His beclowning became final last week when he offered to pay a paltry-for-him $5 million if President Obama would disclose certain personal records to Trump’s “satisfaction”. As any normal person would do when confronted by a bully, Obama has pretended that Trump doesn’t exist, except while mocking him on the Late Show. 

Yesterday, Trump Tweeted something about how Obama was going to somehow force Chrsyler parent Fiat to send all Jeep production – even domestic production – to China. (Why would Obama do that? Because he’s as communist as the Red Chinese? Even though Red China has been only nominally communist for a generation?) Even though Romney has made a similar claim, it was handily debunked by Chrysler itself. It’s easier for Romney to lie about Obama – it’s much harder for him to lie about 3rd parties who have more flexibility publicly to debunk the lie. 

Chrysler’s VP of product design, Ralph Gilles, is also on Twitter. Here’s how he – appropriately – responded to Trump. 

 Take a look, by the way at how many people re-Tweeted and favorited Gilles’ Trump rebuke. Now compare to Trump’s original Tweet (as of 6:00 am Friday): 

That, folks, is how you ruin a brand – you take a crazy, fringe political viewpoint and broadcast it in a way that is equal parts arrogance and ignorance. As for economic stewardship, Trump companies have gone bankrupt four times, avoiding legally binding debts. So, he’s exponentially worse than Paladino, who at least has the good business sense to remain afloat.

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