Topics

6001

General Discussion / Sad, extraordinary Asian soldier gunned down

« on: February 08, 2021, 04:21:58 PM »

Yale Grad Student and U.S. Army Veteran Gunned Down in the Street Near University

An Asian American graduate student from Yale University was killed in a shooting in New Haven, Connecticut over the weekend. The incident, which is under investigation as a homicide, occurred near the intersection of Nash and Lawrence Streets at around 8:30 p.m. on Feb. 6.

Kevin Jiang, 26, was a graduate student at the Yale School of the Environment (YSE). He also served in the U.S. Army. “I have spoken with Kevin’s mother to express my sincere condolences,” Yale President Peter Salovey said on Sunday. “He was an extraordinary young man, and his loss is a shocking and senseless tragedy for his family, for all who loved him, and for our community.”

6002

General Discussion / This idiot's WRONG baseless accusation cost us tax payers' over $500 million

« on: February 08, 2021, 04:14:12 PM »

 :

A Washington Post analysis has explored the financial impact of Donald Trump's myriad of false election claims, finding that U.S. taxpayers have been left with a $519 million bill which continues to rise daily. Before and after the November election, the former president spread baseless allegations of voter fraud ranging from machine tampering to dead people casting ballots. It culminated in his supporters carrying out a deadly insurrection at the Capitol on January 06 that resulted in five deaths. In response, government agencies were forced to use public funding to increase security and respond to lawsuits as a direct result of actions taken by both Trump and his supporter base.

While legal fees from dozens of unsuccessful lawsuits, enhanced security due to death threats against poll workers and costly repair work at the Capitol were all included in the Post's review of local, state and federal spending records, the bulk of the taxpayer's bill covers the National Guard deployment. To boost security during inauguration week, 25,000 members of the Guard were sent to Washington D.C. and that came with a bill of $480 million through March. The cost of adding an extra 850 members of the D.C. Police as part of a security surge has also cost an additional $8.8 million.

6003

General Discussion / Once you've est. a "negative" FRAUD rep, then lied and got caught red-handed

« on: February 08, 2021, 04:10:15 PM »

...your back pedaling will just dig your LYING hole even deeper..Should n't just done the 12 steps instead  :

Trump's impeachment lawyers argue he only wanted supporters to 'fight' in 'the figurative sense'

6004

General Discussion / Any pet owners? I was watching these folks and thought

« on: February 07, 2021, 09:13:24 PM »

..they really love their dogs and treat it just like their own children  :

6005

General Discussion / Hope there's no strawberry milkshake this time around, good looking frontier IMO

« on: February 07, 2021, 09:01:45 PM »

I see some styling cues from the current gen Taco  :

2021 Frontier

6006

General Discussion / I know you're not fully licensed but couldn't you wait til you get home

« on: February 07, 2021, 08:45:35 PM »

..to pleasure yourself?  :

Georgia elementary school substitute teacher charged with 19 counts of child molestation

Investigators said they obtained photos and video of Amelia Ressler, 30, masturbating in front of a second-grade classroom.

6007

General Discussion / Showing my crew some football love to let them know how much I appreciate them

« on: February 05, 2021, 08:56:08 PM »

Happy Super Bowl Weekend :

6008

General Discussion / No Super Bowl party this year, just the nuclear so we'll be using the Rocket

« on: February 05, 2021, 05:25:52 PM »

..as there's only 3 of us in our nuclear family:

6009

General Discussion / That's one expensive noggin

« on: February 05, 2021, 04:46:47 PM »

Rapper Lil Uzi Vert's $24 million diamond forehead piercing explained

Lil Uzi Vert debuted a new accessory on Wednesday with a video showing off a pink diamond attached to his forehead. Now, people are wondering how the rapper got the stone in place and if the seemingly major body modification is safe.

6010

General Discussion / I'm sure some families will like this Republican's plan even though the end game

« on: February 05, 2021, 04:18:39 PM »

..is to cut welfare  :

Mitt Romney has a plan to give parents up to $15,000 a year

The Family Security Act would offer up to $350 per month, per kid, to help parents raise their children.

In 2019, Mitt Romney became the first Senate Republican to endorse a form of child allowance, where all low- and middle-income parents would get a cash benefit to help raise their kids, regardless of whether or not they’re able to work. At the time, the plan was modest, amounting to only $1,500 a year for kids under 6 and $1,000 for kids 6-17.

But on Thursday, Romney went further and proposed the Family Security Act, one of the most generous child-benefit packages ever, regardless of political party. The plan completely overhauls the current child tax credit and turns it from a once-a-year bonus to massive income support, paid out monthly by the Social Security Administration . (The bill text isn’t final, but you can read the Romney team’s summary here.)

Romney’s plan would replace the child tax credit, currently worth up to $2,000 per child and restricted to parents with substantial income (it doesn’t fully kick in until you reach an income of over $11,000), with a flat monthly allowance paid out to all parents:

Parents of kids ages 0 to 5 would get $350 per month, or $4,200 a year
Parents of kids ages 6 to 17 would get $250 per month, or $3,000 a year
Parents with multiple kids could get a maximum of $1,250 per month or $15,000 a year; that translates to five kids between the ages of 6 and 17. Very large families would be somewhat penalized, but many families with three or four kids will get the full benefit.

Just like the current child tax credit, Romney’s proposal would phase out for wealthy parents — the benefits begin phasing out for single filers with $200,000 and joint filers with $400,000 in annual income. But the phaseout would be implemented on the back end, through the tax code — even the richest parents would still get their $250-$350 per-kid checks in the mail every month; they’d just return the money on April 15. That helps ensure the benefit is truly available to all eligible people and not delayed due to concerns of “overpayment.”

If you’re a liberal reading this and wondering if there’s a catch, there is — but it’s not necessarily a huge one. Romney doesn’t want his plan to add to the deficit, and he wants to simplify the set of child-related benefits the government currently offers. So his plan would pay for the child allowance by eliminating a number of other programs, including some that mostly benefit the poor (more on those below).

According to an analysis from the centrist Niskanen Center think tank, which has backed child allowance proposals from both parties, the deficit-neutral Romney plan would be highly progressive. They estimate that poverty as they measure it would fall by nearly 14 percent across the board (lifting 5.1 million people out), and by one-third for children. The effects would be even more pronounced for extreme poverty, defined as living under half the poverty line. Some critics argue the poverty line Niskanen uses is too low, but the point remains: This plan would do an awful lot to chip away at poverty in the United States.

That poverty effect, Niskanen concedes, is smaller than the effect of Joe Biden’s proposed one-year child tax credit expansion would have during that one year. But that’s only because the Romney plan curtails tax breaks and cuts spending, including getting rid of other programs for low-income people that the child allowance renders redundant. The upside of Romney’s plan being fully paid for, however, is that it would allow Congress to make the measure permanent under budget reconciliation rules, whereas the Biden proposal that relies on deficit funding is a temporary one-year measure.

The Romney plan also has some advantages over the Biden plan as currently presented, even beyond being permanent. Checks are sent in a truly universal manner, which makes for easier monthly payments. As of this writing, the Biden administration hasn’t commented on whether or not its plan will include monthly payments, though some Democratic offices in Congress have told me on background they are pushing for monthly payments. A White House spokesperson told me, “We are working with Congress and the Treasury Department to determine the best way of getting families this relief in the American Rescue Plan.”

The Romney plan has already earned praise from surprising quarters. Matt Bruenig, the leftist writer and founder of the People’s Policy Project think tank who writes frequently about child benefits, told me, “Among the child benefit policies that have been proposed so far, Romney’s is the best. It has the highest benefits and the simplest administration . I’d like to see Romney get rid of his proposal’s benefit phaseout and child cap, which create hassle without meaningful savings, but otherwise it’s a pretty solid proposal.”

Sharon Parrott, president of the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which pushes for expanded benefits for low-income people, was more skeptical. “This proposal shows growing bipartisan support for expanding the child tax credit, but it’s misguided to undercut the policy’s poverty-reducing impact by using deep cuts in other critical forms of support for low-income people to pay for it,” Parrott told me. “They want to talk about it as consolidation, but they are massive cuts. Their own document shows an EITC cut of $47 billion.”


In its current form, the Romney plan may not be able to make it through Congress, for reasons Parrott highlights and detailed further below. But if the Biden administration embraces it and tweaks it, it could hit on a rare achievement: a truly bipartisan expansion of the social safety net that permanently reduces poverty in America.

The background to Romney’s proposal
To understand the Romney plan and why it’s so important, you have to understand a bit about how the child tax credit works now.

Currently, the credit offers parents up to $2,000 a year (up from only $1,000 a year before the Trump tax cuts). But the benefits are sharply limited when it comes to poor families. That’s because households have to earn at least $2,500 per year for the credit to be “refundable,” or for households that don’t have a tax liability to actually receive the benefit. And only $1,400 of the $2,000, at most, is refundable; poor families that don’t make $2,500 a year can never get the full $2,000.

An American without any taxable income — say, a single mom with a kid who lives with family but doesn’t have a job because of the recession or some other barrier — won’t owe any taxes, but because their income falls below that $2,500-a-year threshold, they don’t get any benefit from the current child tax credit. The problem is more severe than that, though, because even above $2,500 per year the credit phases in slowly, at a rate of 15 percent. A parent has to earn at least $11,833.33 to qualify for the full refundable credit, a bar that the poorest households can’t meet.

That has led to a variety of proposals meant to expand access to the credit for poor people. The most modest suggestion, pushed in the Senate by Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Mike Lee (R-UT), was to let families that pay payroll taxes, but not income taxes, claim the credit. That still excluded the poorest families where the adults are out of work. The Rubio-Lee measure failed on the Senate floor during the 2017 tax cut debate (though they did succeed in increasing the credit to $2,000 per child for people with high enough incomes to owe taxes).

Democrats went bigger. During the tax cut fight, Sens. Michael Bennet (D-CO) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) proposed a bill called the American Family Act (AFA) that would make the child tax credit fully refundable — meaning poor families could access the full benefit right away, no phase-ins or income thresholds. They refined the bill with Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Suzan DelBene (D-WA) and reintroduced it in 2019; by the end of the last Congress, 38 of 47 Senate Democrats had sponsored or cosponsored it, as had 188 of 232 House Democrats. The latest version is expected to be reintroduced for 2021 soon.

The AFA looks a lot like the Romney proposal. It would also offer $3,000 a year or $250 a month for parents of kids aged 6 to 16; 17-year-olds would not be eligible, and are not eligible under the child credit now. It offers a lower payment compared to the Romney plan, $3,600 a year or $300 per month, to children under 6. But it also includes no cuts to other programs that might offset the credit’s benefits.

The AFA also envisioned the payments being made by the IRS and/or the Treasury Department, rather than through the Social Security Administration as in the Romney plan. There are advantages and disadvantage to using each agency, Elaine Maag, an expert on child and family benefits at the Urban Institute, told me: “SSA does have experience delivering monthly payments, which is certainly an advantage they have over other agencies … but SSA does not have information about who a child lives with, which means they would likely need to coordinate with the IRS on who should receive the payment.”

Joe Biden, as part of his American Rescue Plan, has essentially proposed implementing the AFA for exactly one year. His plan as proposed does not specify that the payments will be monthly, though his campaign proposal did include monthly payments. Biden’s campaign plan and the American Rescue Plan also include 17-year-olds, which neither the current child tax credit nor the AFA did.

Mitt Romney, a Republican, is calling for an even bigger child benefit for kids than President Biden is. So why might Democrats not immediately want to sign on?

The short answer is the pay-fors. Romney’s plan is deficit-neutral at least through 2025 (when many Trump tax breaks expire, making analysis beyond that year tough), and to do that he pairs his remarkably generous child allowance plan with some cuts to other tax breaks and spending programs.

Romney’s proposal would eliminate:

Head-of-household filing status, which gives income tax breaks to some single parents and caregivers)
The child and dependent care tax credit, which offers tax breaks for parents paying for child care services so they can work
The temporary assistance for needy families (TANF) welfare program, which replaced traditional “cash welfare” after the 1996 welfare reforms and is run as a state block grant
The state and local tax deduction (SALT) in the income tax, which critics decry as regressive but also provides a subsidy for blue states with high income and property taxes
Romney would also replace the earned income tax credit (EITC), which currently offers more benefits to families with more kids, with a flat credit worth up to $1,000 per working adult, with no child-related component. The EITC for adult dependents, however, would be unchanged.

The Niskanen analysis suggests that poor Americans, overall, would come out ahead in this trade. The SALT deduction, for instance, is highly regressive. Per the Tax Policy Center, about 75 percent of the benefit of the deduction goes to the richest 20 percent of Americans; the bottom three-fifths of Americans get roughly nothing from it.

The child and dependent care credit, while well-intentioned, is also poorly targeted. It’s not refundable, so the more than 40 percent of households without a positive income tax burden cannot benefit from it. As a result, the Tax Policy Center estimates only 12 percent of families with children benefited from the credit in 2020. By contrast, roughly 100 percent would benefit from Romney’s plan.

Eliminating the head-of-household filing status, while boosting other benefits for single parents and caretakers (as through a child allowance), is a common feature of tax reform proposals because it makes filing taxes more complex without much payoff. And while TANF is supposed to benefit poor families, in practice states tend to use it as a slush fund to fund whatever they like. For every 100 families in poverty, only 23 got TANF benefits in 2019, while 100 would qualify for the Romney allowance.

That said, the people who do rely heavily on the program might suffer. “Eliminating TANF as one way to help pay for the costs of the new benefit is tricky,” Urban’s Maag says. “TANF is a small program affecting a small population. Eliminating it will likely create difficulties for those families; it’s a relatively small but disadvantaged group.”

But while all of Romney’s pay-fors may appear to be reasonable trades for a generous child allowance, they might create political headaches for the plan in Congress. Democrats in rich blue states like New York and New Jersey are fervent defenders of the state and local tax deduction, with many pushing to repeal even the modest limits on the deduction put in place in the 2017 tax bill. (Less cynically, some tax experts have argued that state and local taxes really should be tax-free, to encourage rich people to live in high-tax states and subsidize their poorer neighbors.)

Meanwhile, Biden has proposed dramatically expanding the child and dependent care credit by making it fully refundable and much, much more generous. Eliminating it entirely obviously goes in the opposite direction.

And, Parrott notes, Romney could have financed the plan with tax increases on the rich, rather than cuts to other safety net programs. “The question is how you’d finance a child tax credit expansion for low-income kids,” Parrott says. “Their answer, largely, is to take away resources from low-income kids.”

The bottom line: The Romney plan would make a real dent in poverty
Democrats do not, on their own, have 60 votes in the Senate, which means that Republicans opposing a bill can block it by filibustering. The only way around that, for the time being, is the budget reconciliation process, which enables 51 senators (or 50 and tiebreaker Vice President Kamala Harris) to pass legislation.

It’s hard to see Romney’s proposal gaining enough Republican support to get the plan above 60 votes, though I’d be thrilled to be proven wrong on that front. But it could easily, with Romney, Democrats, and maybe a few other Republicans on board, make it into a reconciliation package.

The difficulty with reconciliation packages is that they normally cannot increase the deficit after 10 years. When George W. Bush passed his tax cuts in 2001 through reconciliation, those tax cuts had to sunset in 2011. A permanent child allowance, without any pay-fors, would definitely increase the deficit. That’s part of why the Biden administration has so far only proposed a one-year variant of its plan to expand the child tax credit.

So Romney’s plan offers a plausible and appealing alternative. It’s almost as effective at reducing poverty, even when taking into account its pay-fors, as the Biden plan, and because it’s deficit-neutral, it can be enacted permanently as part of a budget reconciliation package. And obviously, a permanent plan is more valuable to poor families than Biden’s one-year package.

If Biden wants to tweak it by slightly changing the pay-fors, that’s fine; I’d prefer a more generous allowance paid for by higher taxes on the rich, to make up for the EITC cuts. But it’s important not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And as it stands, the Romney plan is better than the Biden plan, in my estimation, if only because it’s permanent. A Romney aide told me they have reached out to the president already on the topic and are hoping they can negotiate.

It might not be Chuck Schumer’s ideal plan, but it would help millions of families with children in a straightforwar d way. It would meaningfully slash poverty and provide a base from which to slash it more in the future. Programs that give families cash, according to UC Irvine economist Greg Duncan, result in better learning outcomes and higher earnings for their kids. One study found a $3,000 annual income increase for poor parents is associated with 19 percent higher earnings for their child once he or she grows up. That implies that a child allowance of that size could dramatically improve the lives of children decades later.

Romney’s plan presents an opportunity to enact that kind of profound change in the lives of millions of impoverished children. Congress shouldn’t pass it up.

6011

General Discussion / You can only back pedal and lie to a certain point then you'll still have to pay

« on: February 05, 2021, 04:08:52 PM »

Despite Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene back-pedaled on her support for QAnon and saying she ' has never mention QAnon since being elected', here are the 11 House Republicans who voted to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committee assignments.

Eleven House Republicans broke ranks Thursday evening to join Democrats in voting to remove Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committee assignments.

These lawmakers backed the effort following recently unearthed incendiary and violent past statements from Greene that have triggered widespread backlash...

6012

General Discussion / Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman's son look older than Tom per this fishing photo

« on: February 04, 2021, 09:07:28 PM »

 :

Conner Cruise, 26, Fishing in Open Water

6013

General Discussion / Those of you in snow areas like MN, WI, etc., be careful shoveling snow

« on: February 04, 2021, 08:55:47 PM »

3 Pennsylvania neighbors dead after fight over snow shoveling, authorities say

A fight that erupted over snow shoveling allegedly led to a Pennsylvania man shooting two of his neighbors to death, authorities said.

The fatal gun violence occurred in Plains Township, about 15 miles southwest of Scranton after 2 feet of snow blanketed the area, officials said.

Just before 9 a.m. on Monday, Plains Township police officers responded to a report of shots fired in a residential neighborhood and discovered 50-year-old James Goy and his 48-year-old wife, Lisa Goy, lying dead in the street in front of their home, according to a joint statement by Luzerne County District Attorney Stefanie Salavantis and Plains Township Police Chief Dale Binker.

Residents in the area directed police officers to a house across the street from the Goys' home, but as they approached the front door, a gunshot rang out, the officials said. Inside the house, police found 47-year-old James Spaide deceased from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, officials said.

6014

Faith & Beliefs / Throughout history religion and monarchy tend to hold the power, will the church

« on: February 04, 2021, 08:52:54 PM »

..do the right thing?  :

sitting on billions catholic dioceses amassed taxpayer aid

When the coronavirus forced churches to close their doors and give up Sunday collections, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charlotte turned to the federal government’s signature small business relief program for more than $8 million.

The diocese’s headquarters, churches and schools landed the help even though they had roughly $100 million of their own cash and short-term investments available last spring, financial records show. When the cash catastrophe church leaders feared didn’t materialize, those assets topped $110 million by the summer.

“I am gratified to report the overall good financial health of the diocese despite the many difficulties presented by the Covid-19 pandemic,” Bishop Peter Jugis wrote in the diocese’s audited financial report released last fall.

As the pandemic began to unfold, scores of Catholic dioceses across the U.S. received aid through the Paycheck Protection Program while sitting on well over $10 billion in cash, short-term investments or other available funds, an Associated Press investigation has found. And despite the broad economic downturn, these assets have grown in many dioceses.

Yet even with that financial safety net, the 112 dioceses that shared their financial statements, along with the churches and schools they oversee, collected at least $1.5 billion in taxpayer-backed aid. A majority of these dioceses reported enough money on hand to cover at least six months of operating expenses, even without any new income.

The financial resources of several dioceses rivaled or exceeded those available to publicly traded companies like Shake Shack and Ruth’s Chris Steak House, whose early participation in the program triggered outrage. Federal officials responded by emphasizing the money was intended for those who lacked the cushion that cash and other liquidity provide. Many corporations returned the funds.

Overall, the nation’s nearly 200 dioceses, where bishops and cardinals govern, and other Catholic institutions received at least $3 billion. That makes the Roman Catholic Church perhaps the biggest beneficiary of the paycheck program, according to AP’s analysis of data the U.S. Small Business Administration released following a public-records lawsuit by news organizations. The agency for months had shared only partial information, making a more precise analysis impossible.

Already one of the largest federal aid efforts ever, the SBA reopened the Paycheck Protection Program last month with a new infusion of nearly $300 billion. In making the announcement, the agency’s administrator at the time, Jovita Carranza, hailed the program for serving “as an economic lifeline to millions of small businesses.”

Church officials have said their employees were as worthy of help as workers at Main Street businesses, and that without it they would have had to slash jobs and curtail their charitable mission as demand for food pantries and social services spiked. They point out the program’s rules didn’t require them to exhaust their stores of cash and other funds before applying.

But new financial statements several dozen dioceses have posted for 2020 show that their available resources remained robust or improved during the pandemic’s hard, early months. The pattern held whether a diocese was big or small, urban or rural, East or West, North or South.

In Kentucky, funds available to the Archdiocese of Louisville, its parishes and other organizations grew from at least $153 million to $157 million during the fiscal year that ended in June, AP found. Those same offices and organizations received at least $17 million in paycheck money. “The Archdiocese’s operations have not been significantly impacted by the Covid-19 outbreak,” according to its financial statement.

In Illinois, the Archdiocese of Chicago had more than $1 billion in cash and investments in its headquarters and cemetery division as of May, while the faithful continued to donate “more than expected,” according to a review by the independent ratings agency Moody’s Investors Service. Chicago’s parishes, schools and ministries accumulated at least $77 million in paycheck protection funds.

Up the interstate from Charlotte in North Carolina, the Raleigh Diocese collected at least $11 million in aid. Yet during the fiscal year that ended in June, overall offerings were down just 5% and the assets available to the diocese, its parishes and schools increased by about $21 million to more than $170 million, AP found. In another measure of fiscal health, the diocese didn’t make an emergency draw on its $10 million line of credit.

Catholic leaders in dioceses including Charlotte, Chicago, Louisville and Raleigh said their parishes and schools, like many other businesses and nonprofits, suffered financially when they closed to slow the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

Some dioceses reported that their hardest-hit churches saw income drop by 40% or more before donations began to rebound months later, and schools took hits when fundraisers were canceled and families had trouble paying tuition. As revenues fell, dioceses said, wage cuts and a few dozen layoffs were necessary in some offices.

Catholic researchers at Georgetown University who surveyed the nation’s bishops last summer found such measures weren’t frequent. In comparison, a survey by the investment bank Goldman Sachs found 42% of small business owners had cut staff or salaries, and that 33% had spent their personal savings to stay open.

Church leaders have questioned why AP focused on their faith following a story last July, when New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan wrote that reporters “invented a story when none existed and sought to bash the Church.”

By using a special exemption that the church lobbied to include in the paycheck program, Catholic entities amassed at least $3 billion — roughly the same as the combined total of recipients from the other faiths that rounded out the top five, AP found. Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist and Jewish faith-based recipients also totaled at least $3 billion. Catholics account for about a fifth of the U.S. religious population while members of Protestant and Jewish denominations are nearly half, according to the Pew Research Center.

Catholic institutions also received many times more than other major nonprofits with charitable missions and national reach, such as the United Way, Goodwill Industries and Boys & Girls Clubs of America. Overall, Catholic recipients got roughly twice as much as 40 of the largest, most well-known charities in America combined, AP found.

The complete picture is certainly even more lopsided. So many Catholic entities received help that reporters could not identify them all, even after spending hundreds of hours hand-checking tens of thousands of records in federal data.

The Vatican referred questions about the paycheck program to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which said it does not speak on behalf of dioceses.

Presented with AP’s findings, bishops conference spokeswoman Chieko Noguchi responded with a broad statement that the Paycheck Protection Program was “designed to protect the jobs of Americans from all walks of life, regardless of whether they work for for-profit or nonprofit employers, faith-based or secular.”

The AP’s assessment of church finances is among the most comprehensive to date. It draws largely from audited financial statements posted online by the central offices of 112 of the country’s nearly 200 dioceses.

The church isn’t required to share its financials. As a result, the analysis doesn’t include cash, short-term assets and lines of credit held by some of the largest dioceses, including those serving New York City and other major metropolitan areas.

Dioceses had billions, but received small business aid
Some 112 Roman Catholic dioceses in the U.S. collectively had over $10 billion in cash and other funds when they received at least $1.5 billion from the Paycheck Protection Program. An Associated Press investigation found the dioceses had more money available for expenses than they acknowledged in their financial statements. And despite the pandemic, those funds grew in many dioceses. Below is a sampling of dioceses and affiliated organizations.

6015

General Discussion / If you put your LIES out there and got caught by others, you will have to pay

« on: February 04, 2021, 04:29:49 PM »

...by taking ownership of your WRONGs and completing the 12 steps if you want others to forget it and move on.. :

Election-fraud liars are scrambling to avoid lawsuits, but they can't retract the damage they've done



Trump-friendly media outlets like OAN and Newsmax have walked back their claims of election fraud.

Two voting-tech companies — Smartmatic and Dominion — were made the grand conspiracy's boogeymen.

Outlets that have cynically sowed distrust in democracy can never undo the damage they've caused.

This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The mass delusion that rampant election fraud cost Donald Trump the 2020 election isn't an overnight phenomenon.

It required the steady hum of repetition for it to become ingrained in the minds of Trump supporters.

Whether it was from a meme on Facebook or a conservative news network or a right-wing conspiracy blog, the deluge of lies stuck in the brains of millions.

Some of those consumed by these lies stormed the Capitol; many more say they no longer believe in American democracy.

But now the voting-technology companies that have been slandered, libeled, and had their business' reputations effectively destroyed as a result of these election-fraud lies are fighting back with billion-dollar lawsuits and hints of more to come.

As a result, the retractions from the Trump-media ecosphere are coming fast and furious.

Just Tuesday, Newsmax cut off MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell when he started ranting about Dominion voting machines. One of the hosts then read a prepared statement asserting that Newsmax had seen no evidence of voting-machine fraud and that the election was fair, legal, and over.

But no matter how much they'd like to convince opposition lawyers that they've corrected the record, the Trumpist liars can never retract the damage they've done.