lies – R&R – Reachout and Rebuild

Tell Truth to Lies.

David Posnett — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 23:40:35 +0000

By James Ewing

On Wednesday Jan 6, 121 members of the US House of representatives rejected the election results from Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada.

138 House members rejected the results from Pennsylvania.

Authorities have called this election the most secure in our history. No results, none, were challenged within states themselves. No meaningful fraud was detected anywhere, by any judiciary, all the way up to the Supreme Court.

And yet these elected GOP officials, “leaders” as they are called, chose to oppose the results anyway.

Our representative Lee Zeldin, was among those opposing the results of all contested states.

I have no doubt that the majority, if not all of these representatives, knew the election results were accurate. I assume their objections were based upon narrow ambitious calculations tying their fortunes to the deranged, personality cult of one very damaged man, Donald Trump.

We generally presume that our elected leaders have reliable information and act reasonably on what they know. We depend on our leaders to keep us informed, help us understand what is going on in their respective realms of authority. Leadership is defined as “an act or instance of leading; guidance; direction, the position or function of a leader, a person who guides or directs a group”.

Ideally, If we are to be governed wisely and well our leaders must tell us the truth, speak truth to lies, without posturing with what they think we want to hear. In 1868, a New York Democrat declared “if a man is ignorant, he needs the ballot for his protection all the more”. For our protection we need our leaders to be truthful. Rather than leading with truth, Lee Zeldin, along with his nefarious GOP congressional cohorts, have spoken lies to truth. By endorsing the lies of election fraud and thereby telling supporters that they actually had a chance to overturn this past election, Zeldin has utterly failed his leadership responsibilities. He has inflamed inane conspiracy theories and false accusations. And finally, last week, by thoughtless, senseless opposition to these many valid state election results, he almost certainly encouraged an actual insurrection with deadly violence done to our precious, fragile, and now stunned constitutional representative democracy.

Lee Zeldin can no longer claim to legitimately represent our constitutional democracy nor serve the good people of our CD1 district. He has lost the credibility, respect, and basic trust a real leader deserves. He should resign immediately from his position.

He and his various colleagues in opposition are now probably even liable for the federal crime of sedition—“conduct or language inciting rebellion against the authority of a state; incitement of discontent or rebellion against a government”.

Trump’s Sabotage of Healthcare

David Posnett — Wed, 19 Feb 2020 16:44:17 +0000

In spite of Trump’s SOTU lies, healthcare disinformation (with Lee Zeldin’s complicity), here is where we are on health care:

A recent poll shows Americans disapprove of President Trump’s handling of the Affordable Care Act by 56 to 35 percent and prescription drug prices by 54 to 30 percent.

Dismantling Pre-Existing Condition Protections – While President Trump lies to the American people that he supports protections for people with pre-existing conditions, he is in federal courts waging a campaign to eliminate these lifesaving protections and destroy every other protection and benefit of the Affordable Care Act. At every opportunity, President Trump has tried to undermine protections for people with pre-existing conditions. An excellent recent review demonstrates how Trump’s efforts to sabotage Obamacare are going:

1. Individual mandate eliminated 2. States allowed to add “work requirements” to Medicaid 3. Cost-sharing reduction subsidies to insurers have ended 4. Access to short-term “skinny” plans has been expanded 5. Funds to facilitate HealthCare.gov sign-ups slashed

Caving to Big Pharma on Drug Price Negotiation – After promising to negotiate drug prices “like crazy” before he was elected, President Trump caved to Big Pharma and has abandoned his pledge to support the drug price negotiation that House Democrats delivered in the Lower Drug Costs Now Act. Again and again, President Trump has pulled his punch on Big Pharma, making vague and unworkable announcements that have left seniors and hard-working Americans on the hook for sky-rocketing drug prices.

President Trump’s latest assault on health care: his new illegal Medicaid block-grant scheme.

The Administration’s plan for states to cap and slash Medicaid would push Medicaid recipients off lifesaving medicines, impose unaffordable premiums to maintain coverage and leave more vulnerable families exposed to catastrophic medical bills – with ruinous consequences for rural hospitals, for families seeking opioid addiction treatment for their loved ones and for middle-class seniors with long-term care need.

House Proudly Passed Lower Drug Costs Now

During this difficult time, the House will continue our strong legislative agenda For The People: lower health care costs by lowering prescription drug prices, bigger paychecks by building the physical and human infrastructure of America, and promoting cleaner government.

American seniors and families should not have to pay more for their medicines than what the drug companies charge people in other countries for the same drugs. That’s why Democrats proudly passed H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act, in December! This legislation finally levels the playing field for American patients and taxpayers:

Gives Medicare the power to negotiate directly with the drug companies, and creates powerful new tools to force drug companies to the table to agree to real price reductions, while ensuring seniors never lose access to the prescriptions they need.
Makes the lower drug prices negotiated by Medicare available to Americans with private insurance, not just Medicare beneficiaries.
Stops drug companies ripping off Americans while charging other countries less for the same drugs, limiting the maximum price for any negotiated drug to be in line with the average price in countries like ours, where drug companies charge less for the same drugs – and admit they still make a profit.
Creates a new, $2,000 out-of-pocket limit on prescription drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries, and reverses years of unfair price hikes above inflation across thousands of drugs in Medicare.
Reinvests in most transformational improvement to Medicare since its creation – delivering vision, dental and hearing benefits – and turbocharging the search for new cures.

The Democratic House has sent Senator McConnell more than 275 bipartisan bills – yet, calling himself the “Grim Reaper,” he still refuses to take them up! The American people deserve and demand action. In this New Year, we will continue to turn up the heat!

Another good article on the topic:

‘Trump is trying to kill Obamacare again and Democrats couldn’t be happier”

Published Sat, Mar 30 2019, 9:55 AM EDT. Updated Sun, Mar 31 201911:11 AM EDT

Promises Broken

David Posnett — Mon, 14 May 2018 19:11:46 +0000

Trump campaign promises (which some liberals supported) remain largely ignored. He ran as an economic populist and bucked the GOP’s economic brand, contributing to his appeal. But he has violated every one of his promises.

Donald Trump promised to negotiate the price of prescription drugs covered through Medicare. “we’d save $300 billion a year,” “We don’t do it. Why? Because of the drug companies.” “We’re going to negotiate like crazy.” On May 11th, Trump announced the federal government would NOT directly negotiate lower drug prices for Medicare. And he chose not to allow American consumers to import low-cost medicines from abroad.
there will be no infrastructure bill this year. Contrast that with promises of hard-hat jobs modernizing roads and airports across the country. Instead we got a regressive tax cut, with a huge increase in the deficit.
Trump promised over and over to pull out of Nafta and renegotiate a much better deal. Nafta was the ultimate culprit for declining blue-collar wages. He promised a better deal: “I don’t mean just a little bit better, I mean a lot better.” But, there is no easy “better” trade deal to be negotiated.
Trump also repeatedly promised universal health care. “Everybody’s gotta be covered. … I am going to take care of everybody, I don’t care if it costs me votes or not” But he never compromised with Democrats and sabotaged the existing program. And now the rate of uninsured is climbing again.
“Draining the swamp” … Trump promised to enact reforms to reduce the power of lobbyists and business. He specifically
promised:

A constitutional amendment imposing term limits on members of Congress
A ban on federal employees lobbying the government for five years
A ban on members of Congress lobbying for five years
Tighter rules about what constitutes a lobbyist, instead of letting people call themselves consultants
Campaign finance reform limiting what foreign companies can raise for American political candidates
A ban on senior government officials lobbying for foreign governments

All empty promises!

In stead Trump embraced Washington sleaze with unprecedented gusto. This includes lobbying for foreign governments: Michael Cohen was a conduit for business interests to buy their way into Trump’s good graces.

Trump also promised, to raise taxes on the rich, including on himself.
“It’s going to cost me a fortune, which is actually true,” he said. Instead, the only promises he has kept are the ones that put money in the pockets of Trump and his cronies.

Broken Promises should represent a guide for the 2018 campaigns across the country to turn Congress blue. Sitting Rep. congress members that have backed Trump, like Lee Zeldin, are all complicit in these lies to their constituents.

The G.O.P. Kool-Aid

David Posnett — Sat, 19 Aug 2017 08:13:45 +0000

From The East Hampton Star – letters to the editor

East Hampton, August 13, 2017

Dear David:

Republicans owe America an apology.

Sadly, we have arrived at a point at which the White House, the political crown jewel that the G.O.P. so ardently sought, is in disarray, which has taken down the G.O.P.-led Congress as well.

After making President Obama’s failure its number-one priority (so much so that it became an obsession), the G.O.P. worked hard to get a rich white guy — any rich white guy — to take the mantle of leadership after Mr. Obama. In pursuing its obsession, it abandoned its stated principles and abandoned those it promises to serve.

Republicans refused to negotiate honestly when Democrats spent months seeking Republican support for the Affordable Care Act. Then they tried repeatedly over seven-plus years to take away that health care — not, as it turns out because they had a better idea, but because it was Mr. Obama’s idea. Even worse, for 70-plus years Congress has worked to create, and then perfect (or try to) a safety net that would protect working-class America and the disadvantaged among us from financial and social ruin. The current Republican credo, adhered to from the top of the ticket to its most local echelons, holds dear the destruction of those protections.

Yet, in the last election cycle, all one heard from G.O.P. candidates was the mantra that working-class America had been “forgotten” and only they were the ones capable of repairing this so-called injustice. Decrying the political opposition by fomenting race-based paranoia allowed these candidates to camouflage their real agenda. It is not the furtherance of the “forgotten,” it is the furtherance of unscrupulous greed.

Help the forgotten? Not President Trump. The policies that have actually been implemented by the Trump administration, with the help of a Republican Congress, reflect a disdain for ordinary working-class Americans. Shortly after Mr. Trump took office, he and the G.O.P.-led Congress rejected numerous Obama-era regulations that were actually designed to support workers, including rules barring worker discrimination, rules designed to enhance workers’ wages, and rules enhancing workplace protection, such as barring companies with a history of wage, labor, or workplace safety violations laws from receiving federal contracts. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

So, the G.O.P. agenda has no intention of protecting the forgotten. Its true colors are shown in its efforts to rip away health care, savage the social safety net, and, in so doing, leaving the forgotten to fend for themselves. Under the G.O.P. agenda, the forgotten will soon be the trampled.

The sad truth behind the G.O.P. camouflage is that millions of hard-working Americans drank the G.O.P. Kool-Aid, believing that the party truly cared for them and would make good on promises to deliver wealth, improve health care, and preserve the all-important safety net protecting these folks. For some, it was hard not to be seduced by Mr. Trump and his G.O.P. cohorts.

However, like everyone else who has succumbed to Mr. Trump’s wiles, these voters too have been had.

And for this, the G.O.P. owes America an apology. And the lesson for voters from all this is that old adage: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Let’s not be fooled again, either in our local elections this year, or next year, when the G.O.P. Congress has to face the music. Trust not the G.O.P. Kool-Aid another time.

Sincerely, BRUCE COLBATH

John Oliver Blasts ‘F–king Egomaniac’ Trump for Leaving Paris Climate Accord

David Posnett — Mon, 05 Jun 2017 19:06:15 +0000

By now we should all know, the Paris agreement was about “2 degrees Celsius”. If global warming exceeds these 2 extra degrees things become irreversible. Bad things.

Most people understand this, which is why it was possible (although not easy) to get nearly all nations to sign on to the Paris agreement (except for Nicaragua and Syria).

You can look at the list of nearly all major companies that are highly critical of the latest Trump move, you can take a look at the first ever tweet of Lloyd Blandfein (CEO of Goldman Sachs):

“Today’s decision is a setback for the environment and for the U.S.’s leadership position in the world. #ParisAgreement” (Note: Lloyd Blankfein had never used twitter before, this was his first tweet and it got over 10,000 retweets and 23,000 likes.)

or you can check the fact checkers on Trumps speech trying to justify his (or Bannon’s?) move. It is apparently full of lies and deceptions:

and the list goes on and on…

Or you can just throw up your arms in despair (as I did) and watch this by John Oliver! It is better for your mental health and you might even smile!

Finally, if you care about what Europeans think of all this, and if you like opera, check this out! (Courtesy of Margaret Backman).