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Tag: 2020
GOP Lawmaker Who Signed Fake Electoral Certificate Ran Pro-Trump 'Troll Farm'

GOP Lawmaker Who Signed Fake Electoral Certificate Ran Pro-Trump 'Troll Farm'

Arizona Republican State Representative Jake Hoffman made news this week when it was revealed he signed a forged “certification” falsely stating Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, won his state’s Electoral College electors.

Video that’s gone viral of Hoffman shows him defending signing the forged documents in which he falsely identifies himself as a duly elected elector for Trump.

His defense: “in unprecedented times, unprecedented action does occur.” He goes on to claim, “there is no case law, there is no precedent that exists as to whether or not an election that is currently being litigated in the courts has due standing.”

He called the forged electoral documents “dueling opinions” in this video:

The video has been viewed over 800,000 times in just 14 hours.

Hoffman, it turns out, was banned from Twitter after his company, Rally Forge, worked with Charlie Kirk’s far right-wing political activist group, Turning Point USA, during the 2020 election, establishing “a domestic ‘troll farm’ in Phoenix, Arizona. It employed teenagers to churn out pro-Trump social media posts, some of which cast doubt on the integrity of the US election system or falsely charged Democrats with attempting to steal the election, the Washington Post revealed,” according to The Guardian.

The Washington Post also reported that “the posts are the product of a sprawling yet secretive campaign that experts say evades the guardrails put in place by social media companies to limit online disinformation of the sort used by Russia during the 2016 campaign.”

Some of those teens, the Post noted, were minors.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

CBO: If Congress Does Nothing, Deficit Gone Before 2020

The United States Congress–to be fair, the Senate in particular–is great at inaction.

Despite a Democratic trifecta in government from 2009 to the end of 2010, the Employee Free Choice Act, a cap-and-trade bill to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and a litany of key economic policy appointments–especially to the Federal Reserve Board–died in the world’s most “deliberative” (read: slow) body.

But two charts released Wednesday by the CBO and flagged by Brian Beutler at TPM point out what most of us don’t realize–if Congress stays true to form and does nothing, and lets existing law go into effect over the next decade, the deficit (not the debt) conservatives and Tea Party types can’t get over will be erased entirely.

This assumes the deficit-reducing Affordable Care Act–Obama’s healthcare law–stays in effect, but perhaps most importantly, that the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of 2012, as the law currently requires.

Also important is that a doc-fix–artificially boosting reimbursement rates by Medicare at the behest of the powerful doctors’ lobby, something Congress does every year–isn’t put into place, draining the federal treasury of far less revenue.

Then again, if Congress really acts like its normal self, howls for extending tax cuts for everyone–even the mega rich–and doling out subsidies to entrenched interests will fall on receptive ears, and lawmakers will be jilted into action, exploding the deficit before going back into hibernation, occasionally waking up for the “serious conversation” about controlling the debt. [Talking Points Memo]