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To say nothing of the multiple trillion dollar bills passed under Biden that did nothing but siphon money to leftists. In terms of scale of corruption, all of American history combined looks like amateurs compared to the modern progressive movement. They just manifestly hold an explicit "it's (D)ifferent and good when we do it" mentality and then mindkill themselves into retardation when they get asked questions like "Why does it cost $150 billion to NOT build a rail line?"
If the hand of god reached down and stripped out all corruption from America, Donald Trump would still be a billionaire and half the Democrat party would be wearing a barrel with suspenders.
What bills are you referring to? I'm sure somewhere in the appropriations there might have been a few dozen million that got directed to progressive NGOs -- and I'd consider that a bad thing, mind you -- but nothing to the level of "multiple trillion dollar bills that did nothing but siphon money to leftists".
This is an issue of excessive regulation, not corruption. It's still a big problem and is a stain on California's reputation (and by extension all left-wing governance), but it's different then something like Trump's memecoin.
The Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure bill. Both shoveled out insane amounts of money for ostensible purposes that never materialized because all the cash was absorbed into the pockets of Democrat interest groups that donate to and organize in favor of the Democrats.
Just so with your point about over-regulation. If the state government instructs the agencies to devise "regulations" that siphon money away from ostensible purposes and into the pockets of allied groups that donate back to the politicians, that's actually even worse than regular corruption because it's institutionalized and on-going and metastasizes corruption towards the state in general.
Memecoin, by contrast, is piker shit that only hurts the people involved.
For what it's worth, bills were voted in by congress, the legislative body, which were voted in by voters, so at least in some sense that's the will of the people that insane amount of money were shoveled into ostensible purposes.
Here it's Trump's IRS pitting against Trump's DOJ, both under the executive, making a settlement. Not a judge ordered settlement, but the two comes to settlement (wink wink nod nod) together.
Sarah Isgur (Trump 1 DOJ spokesperson) makes a good point that the proper way would have been to "en banc" the case so that the statue of limitation is frozen. The case would have resumed when Trump is merely a citizen and not the current president, and he would have likely won because the case is pretty solid.
She commented that the judge of the case asked a legal point on how: "It is unclear to this Court whether the Parties are sufficiently adverse to each other so as to satisfy [the Constitution’s] case or controversy requirement.". The judge then asked that both sides submit more information to answer and make claim their position on the point she made. Then conveniently the two teams (and remember, they both work for Trump) drop the case and settle two days before the judge's deadline.
Look, if Congress pass laws to appropriate this $1.7 billion for the same purpose, there won't be an outcry because again, in some sense it flows from the will of the people. Like almost all crimes, it's how you do something that's important, not what was achieved.
edit1: "the outcry would be less justified"
What’s your opinion on the IRS illegally leaking Trump’s tax records in the first place?
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These shoveled money everywhere. Sure, woke leftists ended up getting some amount of it I'm sure. But Texas also got a crapton of money for being the model state in rolling out renewable energy.
I don't know of many, if any examples of this happening. What usually occurs is the regulations have a decent reason to exist but which probably fail a cost-benefit analysis on net, with the reasoning that the optimal number of people dying to environmental hazards is not necessarily zero. And then a lot of them get abused by NIMBYs grasping for any veto-points they can find.
Trump used the memecoin to effectively sell pardons off to people.
Was it here that someone mentioned that green projects run into some of the worst NIBMY obstructionism?
I wouldn't be surprised. The fact that Texas is lapping California when it comes to clean energy initiatives is a dire indictment of leftist governance at the state/local level.
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The hard, reflexive Anti-Trump position tends to rely so much on “Tails you lose, Heads I win” that it barely registers to me anymore, I just assume when most people open their mouths to take these positions they’re engaging in it and I’m rarely proven wrong.
It’s a semi reliable anti-compass at this point; more or less consistently points in the opposite direction of the plain truth.
It's the opposite for me. I've never heard anything convincing from a right con about anything idological, only "X is terrible!", followed by "X didn't happen, you got mad at a fiction." followed as the moon succeeds the sun by "Well the fact that I was so easily fooled shows that X is terrible, even though it didn't happen"
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