10 votes

Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of December 26

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Tags: usa, politics, recurring.weekly

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

7 comments

  1. cmccabe
    Link
    Fauci's warning to America: 'We're living in a progressively anti-science era and that's a very dangerous thing' https://news.yahoo.com/faucis-warning-america-were-living-181754209.html This...

    Fauci's warning to America: 'We're living in a progressively anti-science era and that's a very dangerous thing'
    https://news.yahoo.com/faucis-warning-america-were-living-181754209.html

    This segment of an interview with Anthony Fauci contrasts the public health response to AIDS with that of COVID, and illustrates the problem of increasing political polarization in the US, and particularly the role of anti-science/anti-intellectualism in the US.

    Fauci mentions the broken state of public discourse in the US, saying that you can no longer get across the complexities of the scientific process because mainstream media operates at the bandwidth of sound bites (my wording). This very much echoes Neil Postman’s warnings from the 1980’s in Amusing Ourselves to Death.

    7 votes
  2. [5]
    psi
    (edited )
    Link
    "George Santos Admits to Lying About College and Work History." The New York Times

    "George Santos Admits to Lying About College and Work History." The New York Times

    “I never claimed to be Jewish,” Mr. Santos told The Post. “I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’”

    5 votes
    1. [4]
      FrankGrimes
      Link Parent
      And to add to that: And yet, he'll happily claim he's not a criminal, and his only sin is "embellishing my résumé". This guy reeks of criminal conduct and the high levels of corruption that have...

      And to add to that:

      Mr. Santos admitted to lying about graduating from college and making misleading claims that he worked for Citigroup or Goldman Sachs.

      He once said he had a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties; on Monday, he admitted he was not a landlord.

      He also acknowledged owing thousands in unpaid rent and a yearslong marriage he had never disclosed.

      Mr. Santos acknowledged that a string of financial difficulties had left him owing thousands to landlords and creditors. But he failed to fully explain in the interviews how his fortunes reversed so significantly that, by 2022, he was able to lend $700,000 to his congressional campaign.

      Of greater potential concern are questions about Mr. Santos’s financial disclosures, where he reported earning millions of dollars from his company, the Devolder Organization.

      The Times had uncovered Brazilian court records showing that Mr. Santos had been charged with fraud as a young man after he was caught writing checks with a stolen checkbook.

      And yet, he'll happily claim he's not a criminal, and his only sin is "embellishing my résumé". This guy reeks of criminal conduct and the high levels of corruption that have become a cornerstone of the modern GOP. Hopefully there are thorough ethical and legal investigations forthcoming.

      4 votes
      1. [3]
        skybrian
        Link Parent
        Did any newspapers report on this before the election?

        Did any newspapers report on this before the election?

        2 votes
        1. skybrian
          Link Parent
          A tiny paper broke the George Santos scandal but no one paid attention (Washington Post) [...]

          A tiny paper broke the George Santos scandal but no one paid attention (Washington Post)

          Months before the New York Times published a December article suggesting Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) had fabricated much of his résumé and biography, a tiny publication on Long Island was ringing alarm bells about its local candidate.

          The North Shore Leader wrote in September, when few others were covering Santos, about his “inexplicable rise” in reported net worth, from essentially nothing in 2020 to as much as $11 million two years later.

          The story noted other oddities about the self-described gay Trump supporter with Jewish heritage, who would go on to flip New York’s 3rd Congressional District from blue to red, and is now under investigation by authorities for misrepresenting his background to voters.

          “Interestingly, Santos shows no U.S. real property in his financial disclosure, although he has repeatedly claimed to own ‘a mansion in Oyster Bay Cove’ on Tiffany Road and ‘a mansion in the Hamptons’ on Dune Road,” managing editor Maureen Daly wrote in the Leader. “For a man of such alleged wealth, campaign records show that Santos and his husband live in a rented apartment, in an attached rowhouse in Queens.”

          The Leader reluctantly endorsed Santos’s Democratic opponent the next month. “This newspaper would like to endorse a Republican,” it wrote, but Santos “is so bizarre, unprincipled and sketchy that we cannot,” adding, “He boasts like an insecure child — but he’s most likely just a fabulist — a fake.”

          [...]

          “We expected it to pop a lot more than it did,” Lally said. For one, he thought that Santos’s opponent, Robert Zimmerman (D), would have made more of the Leader’s endorsement and “pushed” the contradictions his newspaper uncovered into larger publications such as Newsday and the New York Times.

          Zimmerman told The Washington Post there were “many red flags that were brought to the attention of many folks in the media” but that “frankly, a lot of folks in the media are saying they didn’t have the personnel, time or money to delve further” into the story. “This experience has shown me just how important it is for everyone to support local media.”

          7 votes
        2. FrankGrimes
          Link Parent
          I actually had that same question when I read the article a couple days ago. I can't find anything with a quick google, and I don't have time right now to do a deep dive. I'd imagine if any...

          I actually had that same question when I read the article a couple days ago. I can't find anything with a quick google, and I don't have time right now to do a deep dive. I'd imagine if any reputable paper had something solid and verifiable prior to the election, they would have printed it. Or at least I hope they would have.

          4 votes
  3. Omnicrola
    Link
    House Democrats release Trump's tax returns

    House Democrats release Trump's tax returns

    The initial announcement was paired with a report from the nonpartisan congressional committee the Joint Committee on Taxation, which detailed the top findings from the six years of obtained tax returns from the former president and his wife, Melania Trump.

    Notably, the report highlighted that the former president paid $0 in federal taxes in 2020 and just $750 in 2016 and 2017. In contrast, in 2018, he paid $999,466 and $133,445 in 2019.

    4 votes