Bigger Fatter Politics is a fact based news source for all things fat and political. We present news and presidential politics from a fat centric and food centric perspective.
The mass vaccination site at Dodger Stadium was reportedly shut down for about an hour on Saturday after a group of anti-vaccination protesters gathered around the entrance to the stadium’s parking lots.
Authorities at the scene reportedly responded to the arrival of the protesters — estimated to be around 30 in number — by closing off the facility, leaving hundreds of drivers and passengers to wait in line outside the stadium.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Fire Department closed the entrance to the stadium around 2 p.m. as precaution. One witness at the scene tweeted his car was eventually allowed in at 2:53 p.m. once the protesters stepped aside when police reinforcements arrived.
The LAPD later tweeted that all scheduled vaccines will be delivered despite the delay, and clarified it wasn’t them who closed the gates. California Gov. Gavin Newsom also responded to the incident, saying the state wouldn’t be deterred or threatened from delivering vaccines.
Among the protesters were members of anti-vaccine and far-right groups, per the Times, with signs urging people to not get the vaccine. The group reportedly went out of their way to avoid political apparel:
A post on social media described the demonstration as the “SCAMDEMIC PROTEST/MARCH.” It advised participants to “please refrain from wearing Trump/MAGA attire as we want our statement to resonate with the sheeple. No flags but informational signs only.
“This is a sharing information protest and march against everything COVID, Vaccine, PCR Tests, Lockdowns, Masks, Fauci, Gates, Newsom, China, digital tracking, etc.”
One of the protesters apparently livestreamed the incident, which can be seen here. One witness told the Times that the protesters were baselessly telling people in line that the the coronavirus is not real and the vaccine is dangerous.
The Capitol decked out in a fur hat with horns is now willing to testify against his former heroDonald Trumpat the former president’s impeachment trial, according to his lawyer.
Jacob Chansley of Arizona, who calls himself the “QAnon Shaman,” feels that he has been “betrayed” by Trump, who failed to pardon him and others who attacked the Capitol, said attorney Al Watkins, The Associated Press reported.
Watkins said in a statement Thursday that Chansley is willing to discuss “whether the words of former President Trump were understood by Mr. Chansley to be nothing short of an invitation to go to the Capitol with the president to fight like hell,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
Chansley — also known as Jake Angeli — had been “horrendously smitten” with Trump, and believed he was following the then-president’s orders in the insurrection at the Capitol, Watkins explained.
Watkins said he hasn’t yet spoken to any member in the Senate since announcing his offer Thursday.
Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate is set to begin the week of Feb. 8. Testimony from someone like Chansley, who believes he was following orders, could be critical in determining if Trump is guilty of the “incitement of insurrection” article of impeachment that was filed against him by the House.
Chansley told investigators he came to the Capitol “at the request of the president that all ‘patriots’ come to D.C. on January 6,” according to court records.
Staunch Trump supporter Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is absolutely opposed to the idea. “I cannot think of a better way to turn the upcoming impeachment trial into a complete circus than to call the QAnon Shaman as a witness on anything,” he tweeted Friday.
But Watkins thinks Chansley’s testimony is crucial. “If the pending Article of Impeachment has merit, the voice of Mr. Chansley, and the voice of others in like position, must be heard and believed,” Watkins said in his statement.
“Let’s roll the tape,” Watkins told Missouri’s NBC-affiliated television station KSDK last week. (Check out the video up top).
“Let’s roll the months of lies and misrepresentations and horrific innuendo and hyperbolic speech by our president designed to inflame, enrage, motivate,” Watkins added. “What’s really curious is the reality that our president, as a matter of public record, invited these individuals, as president, to walk down to the Capitol with him.”
Republican strategist Sarah Longwell warned Thursday that Donald Trump will control the GOP for the next decade if Senate Republicans don’t vote to convict the former president for inciting the U.S. Capitol riot.
Longwell, who founded the Republican Voters Against Trump group that before the election released ads featuring rank-and-file members explaining why they ditched the party, told CNN’s Don Lemon that GOP lawmakers should “get past” their fear of Trump because “this impeachment vote is their off-ramp.”
“This is their best chance to put a stake through Donald Trump’s political future,” she said. “If they don’t take it, Donald Trump is going to control this party for the next 10 years.”
Under Trump’s influence, Longwell warned, the GOP will become the party of the QAnon conspiracy theory-supporting Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.).
It’s “not just dangerous for the Republican Party,” she cautioned, but “an existential threat to the country to have one of the two major political parties controlled by people who are out there spreading conspiracy theories.”
“And I’m not talking about Marjorie Taylor Greene,” Longwell clarified. “I’m talking about (House GOP Minority Leader) Kevin McCarthy and (Florida GOP Rep.) Matt Gaetz and so many others in Congress who voted to object to a free and fair election, who told voters that it was stolen from them, who followed Donald Trump and it led to a violent attack on the Capitol.”
Longwell said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) should be saying that “this is our chance to be done with Trump.” But she added: “I am worried that that is not the direction they are going to go.”
Trump’s Senate impeachment trial is slated to begin the week of Feb. 8.
A total of 67 votes are needed to convict the former president. On Tuesday, some 45 Senate Republicans voted to dismiss the trial, suggesting there’s not enough senators willing to convict Trump and ban him from running for office again.
‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years – ex-KGB spy
David Smith in Washington
Updated
Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the Guardian.
Yuri Shvets, posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares the former US president to “the Cambridge five”, the British spy ring that passed secrets to Moscow during the second world war and early cold war.
Now 67, Shvets is a key source for American Kompromat, a new book by journalist Craig Unger, whose previous works include House of Trump, House of Putin. The book also explores the former president’s relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
“This is an example where people were recruited when they were just students and then they rose to important positions; something like that was happening with Trump,” Shvets said by phone on Monday from his home in Virginia.
Shvets, a KGB major, had a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Russian news agency Tass during the 1980s. He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship. He works as a corporate security investigator and was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in London in 2006.
Unger describes how Trump first appeared on the Russians’ radar in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. Trump became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB.
According to Shvets, Joy-Lud was controlled by the KGB and Kislin worked as a so-called “spotter agent” who identified Trump, a young businessman on the rise, as a potential asset. Kislin denies that he had a relationship with the KGB.
Then, in 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St Petersburg for the first time. Shvets said he was fed by KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into the politics.
The ex-major recalled: “For the KGB, it was a charm offensive. They had collected a lot of information on his personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.
“This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be the president of the United States one day: it is people like him who could change the world. They fed him these so-called active measures soundbites and it happened. So it was a big achievement for the KGB active measures at the time.”
Soon after he returned to the US, Trump began exploring a run for the Republican nomination for president and even held a campaign rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On 1 September, he took out a full-page advert in the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe headlined: “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.”
The ad offered some highly unorthodox opinions in Ronald Reagan’s cold war America, accusing ally Japan of exploiting the US and expressing scepticism about US participation in Nato. It took the form of an open letter to the American people “on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves”.
The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful “active measure” executed by a new KGB asset.
“It was unprecedented. I am pretty well familiar with KGB active measures starting in the early 70s and 80s, and then afterwards with Russia active measures, and I haven’t heard anything like that or anything similar – until Trump became the president of this country – because it was just silly. It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.”
Trump’s election win in 2016 was again welcomed by Moscow. Special counsel Robert Mueller did not establish a conspiracy between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. But the Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, found the Trump campaign and transition team had at least 272 known contacts and at least 38 known meetings with Russia-linked operatives.
Shvets, who has carried out his own investigation, said: “For me, the Mueller report was a big disappointment because people expected that it will be a thorough investigation of all ties between Trump and Moscow, when in fact what we got was an investigation of just crime-related issues. There were no counterintelligence aspects of the relationship between Trump and Moscow.”
He added: “This is what basically we decided to correct. So I did my investigation and then got together with Craig. So we believe that his book will pick up where Mueller left off.”
Unger, the author of seven books and a former contributing editor for Vanity Fair magazine, said of Trump: “He was an asset. It was not this grand, ingenious plan that we’re going to develop this guy and 40 years later he’ll be president. At the time it started, which was around 1980, the Russians were trying to recruit like crazy and going after dozens and dozens of people.”
“Trump was the perfect target in a lot of ways: his vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through his election.”
At the beginning many republicans were saying Trump's goal was to destroy the Republican party but is partially backfired. His plan was to beat the shit out of the Republicans on the 2016 Republican primary stage. Trump knew Republican voters were incredibly stupid and depraved but he underestimated the stupidity and depravity of the GOP base. He portrayed himself as a cartoonish pig of a man and the GOP base related to that and love it. Trump didn't want to win.
LOOK AT THE BIG PICTURE!
Trump’s goal was to destroy the Republican party. It’s obvious. He succeeded. Trump had nothing to gain personally for lying about COVID-19. His goal was to kill off his supporters. He knew in March how deadly COVID was. Trump suckered his supporters and the final blow was when he abandoned them at the Capitol attack. Trump crushed the GOP and he did it masterfully. His lie about having vaccine stockpiled and he anti-Mask rhetoric was to kill off more of his supporters and it worked. His lies about about COVID will end up putting over 1 million of his supporters in early graves. They don’t call him Don the Con for nothing. His super spreader events were the greatest use of biological warfare and psy-ops ever.
His arguments with the Dems is all political theater. He’s been working with them all along.Check his quotes and it will become crystal clear.
Trump also knew that Republicans are total liars and scumbags but then again he underestimated the depravity of the Republican base. The only Republicans Trump knew well were the ones in the Northeast. He never dealt with trash like, Joni Ernst, Rand Paul and Lyin Ted Cruz and their supporters.
Jan 12, 2021 · Yes, beginning in 2015, the entire US establishment arrayed itself against GOP populism. It did so in fear of President Trump’s threat to rejigger a postwar consensus that had worked out very ...
Aug 20, 2015 · Election – Not Over Yet Donald Trump stands accused of "trashing the GOP brand" by many of the same GOP politicians and pundits who have no reluctance in "trashing" the most consequential recent...
Jan 07, 2021 · Representative Ilhan Omar was preparing articles of impeachment. A who’s who of current politicians, ex-politicians, and military leaders had accused Trump of instigating a …
Dec 09, 2020 · Republicans' devotion to Trump pits them against democracy, history – and reality Lloyd Green The supreme court tersely rejected a bid to overturn to the election result but much of the GOP …
In Sasse's editorial, titled "QAnon is Destroying the GOP From Within" the lawmaker states that the riots that took place at the Capitol were not a result of a "few bad apples" but rather a "seed ...
In 2016, Trump tapped into these currents and, as president and leader of the Republican Party, he channeled those populist passions destructively, rather than in the constructive ways that other ...
Jan 06, 2021 · The storming of the US Capitol yesterday by a group of fired-up Trump supporters was a tragedy for the Republican party, for conservatives and populist nationalists, and for Donald Trump …
Caveat: I want to see the GOP further self-destruct and splinter so I want Trump out of prison for a while. He'll name names, tell lies and his MAGAts will pretend to believe it and there will be 3 way races and there will be a lot of semi moral and competent Republicans primaried. Q-Anon will chime in with their BS and forment more subversive attacks from Trump's savages.
No matter what the GOP does, it's going to get ugly. All you guys have is your depraved base of gun-federates, nuts jobs, traitors dimwits, and degenerates.
A message to Moscow Mitch
As to your career Mitch, you got filthy rich as a senator. There most be something else you like doing besides being a DC scumbag. Maybe you'd like travel, hunting, fishing, painting, hanging out with real people, doing charity work, learn another language, kayaking etc.. People in KY like you bet everybody else thinks you're an ass. Prove them wrong.
I'm old enough to remember when Republicans didn't suck. I almost voted for Gerald Ford and I liked Ron Paul. His son is a shit. An Intervention and Exorcism To Save Lindsey Graham's Soul and the Souls of Other GOP Traitors
Uphold the law Lindsey. Honor your Oath for once. Convict that Orange Traitor.
Don't be a fool. Whatever Trump has on you will leak out eventually. You can bet he's run his mouth to a lot of people willing to make a quick buck. Most people think he's blackmailing you and others think you are simply a traitorous weasel.
Even if you are able to weasel out of some of it, it's still gonna suck for you. You don't need the stress. You can live like royalty as a ex-pat. The press will leave you alone and the law will look more at Cruz and Hawley.
The idiots at Q-Anon are still cooking up stuff and that could get ugly. They'll turn on you. They They make Alex Jones look sane.
You got rich serving the donor class so take the money and run. There are whole lot of countries that don't have extradition treaties with the US.
If you have even a shred of morals and honor consider this. Trump sent his mob into the capitol to hang Mike Pence. Like you Lindsey, Pence faithfully licked Trump's balls for 4 years and look how Trump repaid him. SHEEESH!! You can't trust him not to turn on you like the snake that he is. When it comes to snakes, Trump is way out of your league when it comes to sleaze. He probably fucks his own daughter.
Is it worth your soul?
Do you think you are already destined for hell?
Do you think you are beyond redemption? I don't. That video of you praising Biden and that video of you telling the truth about the depravity of Trump the anti-Christ tells me there may be some good in you.
Do you think something bad that you did cannot be forgiven?
Do you think hell is a bunch of BS? Maybe it is but are you willing roll the dice? You are at a crossroads Lindsey and time's a wasting.
Confess and amend your life. It may save your very blemished soul.
Here's another thing. Most of the Republican base is going to hell for their loyalty to the Anti-Christ. Sure the GOP base dumber than dirt but they knew what Trump and Cruz are and so do you. Do you really want to spend eternity with those assholes?
Do something moral, courageous and magnanimous and then get out of Dodge.
According to screen captures posted by users on social media, Kellyanne Conway’s account (@KellyannePolls) shared an image of her topless teenage daughter using Twitter’s recently launched Fleets feature, which deletes posts after a 24-hour period (similar to Instagram and Snapchat’s stories). The Fleet was removed but not before Twitter users documented it.
On TikTok, Claudia Conway on Monday posted videos confirming that the picture was authentic; those have since been deleted from her TikTok account but Twitter users repostedcopies of the videos. In the videos, a visibly upset Claudia Conway speculated that her mother may have accidentally posted the image. “I’m assuming my mom took a picture of it to use against me one day and then somebody hacked her or something,” she said. “I’m literally at a loss for words. If you see it, report it.”
In one of the TikTok videos, Claudia Conway said that “nobody would ever have any photo like that, ever. So, Kellyanne, you’re going to fucking jail.”
Last week, Claudia posted a series of TikTok videos accusing her mother of physical and verbal abuse, according to reposts of the clips on Twitter.
In 2019, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel cited Kellyanne Conway for repeated violations of the Hatch Act, an ethics law prohibiting government officials from using their official capacity to advocate for or against political candidates. The OSC’s report, which recommended that Trump fire Conway, found that she had on numerous occasions “disparag[ed] Democratic presidential candidates while speaking in her official capacity during television interviews and on social media.”
UPDATE, 11:15 a.m. ET: In several TikTok videos posted Tuesday morning, Claudia Conway urged people to “stop calling authorities.” She said that she and her mother will be “taking a break from social media” and will work on their relationship. Claudia emphasized that making threats against her family also puts her in danger. “I know that my mom would never, ever post anything to hurt me like that intentionally, and I do believe she was hacked,” Claudia Conway said in one of the TikTok videos Tuesday.
