The Alleged News®

by Jake Johnson A right-wing dark money group controlled by Leonard Leo—a legal activist who has played an outsized role in packing the U.S. Supreme Court with conservative ideologues—was the beneficiary of a massive, possibly unprecedented donation of $1.6 billion from a shadowy electronics mogul with ties to the Koch network. The enormous infusion of cash, first reported Monday by the New York Times, could bolster and embolden right-wing efforts to drag the U.S. judicial and political systems even further to the right for decades to come, imperiling the climate, what’s left of abortion rights, the franchise, and other freedoms that have come under growing …

Read moreTax Dodger Donates $1.6 Billion to
the Guy Who Owns the Supreme Court

Monday evening The Former Guy released a statement which began, “These are dark times for our nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents. Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before.” This unexpected signal that the Justice Department may eventually bring the law to bear on the individual in question sent a tidal wave of schadenfreude across Blue America. Coming, as it did, amid what had been an apparent drought of consequences, the wounded, self-pitying tone of the statement—“They even broke into …

Read moreWho Says Mondays Are No Fun?

by Jake Johnson In the month of June, as the House January 6th Committee revealed alarming new details on former President Donald Trump’s coup attempt, corporate trade groups and Fortune 500 companies donated more than $819,000 to the Republican members of Congress who voted against certifying the 2020 election results. That’s according to a new analysis provided to Common Dreams by the watchdog organization Accountable.US, which has been tracking corporate contributions to the so-called “Sedition Caucus”—the group of 147 Republican lawmakers who, just hours after the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, voted to overturn the 2020 election in an attempt to help Trump …

Read moreCorporate Interests Have Given $21.5 Million to GOP “Sedition Caucus” Since Jan. 6th Attack

by Jake Johnson Defenders of Social Security on Tuesday urged the U.S. Senate to block President Joe Biden’s little-noticed nomination of Andrew Biggs—an American Enterprise Institute senior fellow with a history of supporting Social Security privatization—to serve on the independent and bipartisan Social Security Advisory Board. Social Security Works, a progressive advocacy group, is leading the charge against Biggs, highlighting his role in the George W. Bush administration’s failed attempt to privatize the New Deal program in 2005. At the time, Biggs worked on Social Security as an associate director of Bush’s National Economic Council. “Andrew Biggs has advocated for Social Security cuts throughout his …

Read morePrivatizer Nominated for Social Security Board

Could a future televised Congressional hearing ever surpass the one held on Tuesday? Sure. Nothing to it. Just swear in a witness from Alpha Centauri. Or 133 year-old Judge Crater, who mysteriously disappeared 92 years ago. How about Bat Boy, brandishing a birth certificate declaring that Hillary Clinton is his mother? Short of something on that order, though, Tuesday had to be a high-water mark. Granted, we had previously known that a sitting President—with one impeachment under his capacious belt already—had denied the legitimate results of the 2020 election, assembled a mob of followers at the Ellipse, and called upon them to march on the …

Read more“I Don’t F’ing Care That They Have Weapons.
They’re Not Here To Hurt Me.”

Scrolling through our Twitter feed on Tuesday, June 14th—our No. 1 choice of distractions while avoiding productive work—we encountered a tweet from @newtgingrich. “Did you know in 1949 National Flag Day was established by an Act of Congress?” it asked. “Find out more at http://flagpoleoffreedom.com.” Unable to resist, we clicked and were astonished. In the midst of a broad vista of low, forested hills, fringed off in the distance by blue ocean waters, rose a flagpole of such gigantic proportions that, in comparison, the treetops below might as well have been some grassy greensward—or, considering the oversized golden finial atop the pole, a golf course …

Read moreA Flag Day That Will Live In…We’re Not Quite Sure What