Crooked Media - What A Day: Forged George

- Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) not making anyone feel more comfortable with George Santos being seated on House committees

We haven’t dedicated much space to freshman Rep. George Santos (R-NY) and his merry-go-round of lies, because there were often bigger fish to fry and also, frankly, because the lies are so numerous they’re getting kind of hard to keep track of. That changes now!
 

• So what are some of his marquee whoppers? For starters, he claimed to hold degrees from NYU and Baruch College, where he claims to have been a volleyball star. Not only did he not graduate from either institution, there’s no record of him ever having attended, let alone having played volleyball. Same goes for Horace Mann, an elite prep school Santos claimed to have briefly attended in his biography, which also had no record of him. He claimed to have worked at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, and not only is that demonstrably false, Santos admitted to having lied about all of the above claims, chalking it up to the idea that everyone pads their resume. You almost have to admire this level of delusional confidence! 
   

• But wait, there’s (much, much) more! There’s also that Santos repeatedly claimed to be Jewish, including to the Republican Jewish Coalition, but in a recent Fox News interview he insisted that he had not lied and had only referred to himself as “Jew-ish” (I wish we were kidding). As if that weren’t bad enough, he claimed his maternal grandparents escaped from the Holocaust. He has since admitted to being raised Catholic, and genealogists confirmed that his maternal grandparents were born in Brazil.
   

• Of course, you can’t have a New York Liar without a lie about 9/11. Santos claimed in a tweet that his mother died in the 2001 terrorist attacks, but then five months later, claimed that his mother died on December 23, 2016. A review of Santos’s mother’s employment history found no signs of her ever working or living anywhere near Ground Zero. Is she even dead? Apparently yes. Is his name even George Santos? Who the hell knows?! We’re seriously not sure. As recently as 2019, Santos was introducing himself publicly as “Anthony Devolder” a combination of his middle name and his mother’s maiden name.

Somehow, we’re not even close to finished yet. 
 

• According to one of Santos’s own friends, his peers in Brazil knew him only as “Anthony” or by his drag name “Kitara.” Santos said back in October that he is “openly gay,” and has “never had an issue with my sexual identity in the past decade.” Well wouldn’t you know, Santos was married to a woman, whom he divorced less than three years ago. He supported Florida’s draconian “Don’t Say Gay” bill, and aligned himself with the far-right members of the House who have demonized drag shows. Santos also appears to have founded and run a fraudulent animal charity, and even absconded with $3,000 of funds that were raised for a lifesaving surgery of a dog owned by a homeless veteran. It’s like this guy is going for the World Record.
   

• New York State Democrats and Republicans alike have called for his resignation from Congress, with New York Republicans saying that he “disgraced the House of Representatives,” but Santos has remained obstinate and refused bipartisan calls for his withdrawal. It probably helps that Santos isn’t facing any such calls from the actual House GOP caucus or leadership, who have signaled that he will be given committee assignments like any other member of Congress. 

At some level, we expect Republican politicians to be liars, but Santos has raised it to a pathology (I would have said an artform, but he’s not a good enough liar). Still, it says a lot about the current Republican apparatus that in his own party’s House leadership, no one is batting an eyelash. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has pledged to seat Santos on committees as normal, and for all we know he’ll probably be the next president of the United States.

Remember how Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) resigned in disgrace in 2021? Well his successor, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) is already embroiled in scandals of her own less than two years on the job. After a protracted battle, Hochul’s nominee to be New York’s highest-ranking judge, the chief judge of the state court of appeals, was rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Judge Hector LaSalle’s confirmation hearing lasted five hours, during which Democrats rigorously questioned him about his decisions, which they said demonstrate a bias towards prosecutors, employers, and anti-abortion groups. Hochul chose LaSalle last month from a list of seven candidates, many of whom had more progressive records and were supported by New York Democrats and progressive advocacy groups. LaSalle was a prosecutor for 15 years before becoming a judge in 2008. 

The Republican National Committee sat down with all of the mainstream news networks it always purports to hate in an effort to  persuade one of them to host the Republican primary debates. 

In a similar story, the re-election inauguration for Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) was bankrolled by companies he repeatedly bashed during his campaign like Disney and BlackRock. 

Disgraced former president Donald Trump is preparing to return to Facebook and Twitter as his 2024 campaign from hell gets underway. 

Investigators from Ukraine’s internal security service have launched a probe into the cause of a helicopter crash that killed at least 14 people today, including Interior Minister Denis Monastyrsky and at least one child. 

Newly-released records show that a top engineering executive at Tesla testified in 2018, after a fatal crash, that the company’s 2016 video promoting “self-driving” technology was staged, and that the company’s technology does “not make the vehicle autonomous,” despite the company’s and Elon Musk’s claims to the contrary. Cool, so, fraud?

The Church of England announced today that it will not allow same-sex couples to marry in its churches and that “Holy Matrimony is between one man and one woman for life.” Lotta nerve coming from the church founded by Henry VIII so he could divorce the wife he was cheating on with a woman whom he would later behead!

When an industry or corporation spends money to recruit enough supporters and spread enough misinformation to mimic a grassroots campaign, we call it “astroturf.” That’s exactly what happened in Ohio, where years of this exact kind of lobbying culminated in Gov. Mike DeWine (R-OH) signing a bill this month to legally redefine natural gas as a source of “green energy.” Supporters characterized this move as the cherry on top of an organic political groundswell in the Buckeye State, but as with most legislation tied to the fossil-fuel industry, that isn’t true. Two major dark-money groups, the Empowerment Alliance, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, both riddled with ties to the fossil-fuel industry and overwhelmingly conservative, helped Republican lawmakers push the narrative that methane gas is “clean” (it’s not) and then get the redefinition legislation over the finish line. Considering how often Fox News types invoke Orwell’s 1984 to describe (basically any) Democratic legislation, this is some real Ministry of Truth shit.

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The United States Supreme Court again rejected a request from New York firearms dealers to block parts of recent state gun-control laws. Kick rocks, gun-nuts!

A new interactive tool from the Department of Transportation can help customers get refunds from canceled flights.