BADFAITH bak

ESTB 2 26

maybe redumbdent to gaslighting? hypocrisy?

prolly neglected as biz as usual

SEE PERFORMATIVE VICE SIGNAL // TROLL

merri ok

the term can be weaponized / co-opted like "fake news" (one can use the charge in bad faith, in fact Barr did)

1219 interesting article on satire/comedy left vs outrage right reflects hard-wiring on brain v complexity

see hype/ fear soc media can be monetized and converted into political power, red meat to trumpita fox base

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NO LNX

Trump is persecuting Christians — thanks to the media

U.S. President Donald Trump prays during a group prayer during the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 5, 2026. REUTERS/Al Drago

John Stoehr February 07, 2026

In Washington this week, at the National Prayer Breakfast, the president actually took credit for the Bible being a bestseller.

“In 2025, more copies of the Holy Bible were sold in the United States than at any time in the last 100 years,” Donald Trump said.

In and of itself, this is not amazing. I remember as a child watching a commercial on Sunday afternoon TV about how “The Good Book” sold more copies than any book in human history.

What is amazing is Trump taking credit when that credit would traditionally be given to the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, especially by the traditional folk at the National Prayer Breakfast.

It’s also amazing that someone as religious as, for instance, House Speaker Mike Johnson can tolerate blasphemy when such tolerance would be inconceivable for a Democratic president.

You would think that Don the Evangelist would understand the power and the glory of the Word, given his suggestion that his presidency is why America is returning to God. (Sources told Publisher’s Weekly “the sales boom” is attributable to “people seeking spiritual footing amid today's tensions and troubles.”)

That would be a mistake.

“Mike Johnson is a very religious person,” the president went on to say. “He does not hide it. He'll say to me sometimes at lunch, 'Sir, may we pray?' I'll say, 'Excuse me? We're having lunch.'"

I’m sorry to point out the obvious. Donald Trump claimed to be ignorant of the reason why “a very religious person” would call for the religious practice of praying before a meal at an event named after the religious practice of praying before a meal.

Even if Trump were only playing dumb, and I don’t know that he was, it’s again inconceivable that ignorance of a traditional religious practice, even in jest, would be tolerated if he were a Democrat. Yet Johnson lets it slide. The Republicans let it slide.

Indeed, if a Democratic president were to claim credit for God’s handiwork, there would be a nationwide outcry beginning with the rightwing media, spilling into the Washington press corps, before occupying highly visible pages in op-eds sections of elite papers with headlines echoing the GOP view of godless liberals not only looking down on Christians, but claiming to be God.

I think it’s worth asking why.

A typical explanation is bad faith – that the Republicans don’t mean what they say. It’s OK to blaspheme if a Republican does it. (Another explanation is power is religion to the GOP. As long as the blasphemer is powerful, his blasphemy is sanctioned by God.)

But I’m not satisfied with that answer. It fails to explain why there are so many good people of religious conviction in this country who are fighting tyranny on expressly religious grounds, but who are not getting credit for their religious expression. Pastors, ministers, rabbis, imams – there is a huge multifaith resistance taking shape, especially against Trump’s immigrant purge.

And you probably never heard of it.

That would not be the case if the roles were reversed – if, say, a “liberal” government were murdering or disappearing people and “conservatives” were protesting on expressly religious grounds. I have no doubt the narrative would be framed as good versus evil.

The entire anti-abortion movement can be described as such, with “the unborn” being those murdered or disappeared by the state, and “conservatives” being those crusading against God’s enemies. No one in America has any doubt about which side of the abortion debate claims to be on the right side of God.

While there is a smattering of news reports about Christians being divided over Trump, there is nothing like the tidal wave of coverage you would otherwise expect. Remember what it was like after September 11, 2001? The framing was, more or less, God and America against the infidels. That’s what it would be like if the roles were reversed. That’s what it should be like now.

The best explanation is often the simplest. Some religions count. Some don’t. And, of course, the difference depends on who.

If you live in a rural community in a rural state, or if you live in an area associated with white conservative politics, yours is an authentic religion entitled to national attention and respect.

If, however, you live in a city (even a small one) or in a state associated with multiracial liberal politics, your religion isn’t authentic. It might be given lip-service now and then, as is happening now, but there’s something not quite real about it. Anyway, it’s not as real as the religion of good country folk.

For their protest of crimes against immigrants, a broad spectrum of faith leaders have been intimidated, manhandled, arrested, and denied religious expression, all at the hands of the state. Their sanctuaries have been profaned, congregants terrorized. One pastor was shot in the head with pepper balls while praying.

Yet all serve “blue” communities. That’s why you don’t know about their holy rebellion. Their religion doesn’t count.

Here’s how Mike O'Malley put it, in a different context.

The reason is the “iron journalist rule.”

“Some people are authentic and some people aren’t,” the George Mason University historian wrote. “Farmers? Authentic. College professors? Not. There are around 1.9 million farms in America, and 1.5 million college teachers. Farmers aren’t authentic because there’s more of them. It's because journalists love cliches.”

These cliches, myths and tropes – Thomas Jefferson famously declared that “those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God” – mean genuine acts of religious expression by nonwhite or urban-dwelling believers won’t be represented as such by the Washington press corps. Instead, their religious expression will be downplayed and represented as political.

This tradition of privileging “authentic” Americans over everyone else among professionals tasked with representing reality favors bad actors who are bent on distorting reality to their advantage.

Consider what happened last month in the aftermath of what has been called the Minnesota church protest. On January 18, it was reported that a group of anti-ICE demonstrators “rushed” into a southern baptist congregation in St Paul during Sunday services to protest a church leader who is also a field director for ICE. Attorney General Pam Bondi swiftly vowed to prosecute those responsible for a “coordinated attack” on religious expression.

Missing, or minimized, in news reports of the protest was the religion and religious expression of those who protested. Virtually absent was the fact that one of the group’s leaders, Nekima Levy Armstrong, is herself an ordained minister.

Here’s what she told CNN.

We did not rush into that church. We actually went and sat down and participated in the service. And after the pastor prayed, that is when I stood up and asked him a question in response to his prayer. And then he responded to me. And then I proceeded to ask him about Pastor David Easterwood and how is it possible for him to serve as both a pastor and the director of ICE for Minnesota?

And instead of responding to me, as soon as I said the name David Easterwood, the pastor said, ‘shame, shame.’ And that is when I led us in chants ‘Justice for Renee Good’ and ‘Hands up, don’t shoot.’ So I want to clarify that we didn‘t rush in. We didn’t bust in. We were a part of the service until I got up and posed that question to the pastor.

Knowing this, it’s clear the framing of that story – anti-ICE protesters versus devout Christians – is problematic at best. A more accurate framing would be devout Christians versus devout Christians, with one side objecting to David Easterwood preaching “love thy neighbor” and “snatch thy neighbor” in the same breath, while the other uses the Gospels to defend ICE.

Such a framing might have invited us to see the church protest as the reason why we have the First Amendment right to religious expression, as religions can and do disagree so fiercely over matters of faith that conflicts arise. When they do, each side has certain inalienable rights that shall not be infringed by the state.

But such framing does the regime no favors, as it contravenes its preferred narrative of godless liberals not only looking down on devout Christians, but claiming themselves to be God, and on the strength of that narrative, its plan to use the power of the state to persecute religious people who are challenging the regime.

The regime wants us to believe multiracial democracy threatens religious expression when, in fact, it’s the regime that’s using a phony defense of religion to threaten all faiths everywhere.

There is, quite literally, a rebellion bubbling up from below in the name of God. The regime knows its potential. It knows it can inspire even more resistance. And it’s taking steps to crush it.

That goal might be obvious if the press corps treated everyone’s faith as equally authentic, hence equally legitimate, but it doesn’t.

It distorts reality.

And in doing so, it enables the persecution of religion.

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SEE EMERGENCY // HYPOCRISY 2 FACE, LIE PWR Any means NOTE 1 26 UNDERMINES COURT RATIONALES EG TARIFFS

AN 1 26

Trump blames welfare fraud investigation for 'violent' protests in Minnesota

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2X SAME DAY ADMIN WORDS BITE ASS

AN 1 26

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to respond to President Donald Trump's claimthat a national emergency justified his drastic tariff moves. However, the Constitution allocates tariff-regulation power to Congress, not the presidency.

The New Republic's Greg Sargent spoke with MS NOW's Steve Benen on Monday morning, noting that Trump’s own words may be the strongest case against his tariff powers. The two analysts argued that Trump has repeatedly blown up the legal and political rationale for his trade war in public statements.

During a morning podcast "The Daily Blast,"Sargent and Benen dissected Trump’s recent threats to increase tariffs on parts of Europe not because of some economic reason but because the countries sent military to aid in the defense of Greenland from the U.S.

Trump keeps publicly admitting that his “emergencies” are more whims and leverage plays. Trump threatened tariffs on Brazil for multiple reasons and also claimed that France rejected his Gaza 'Board of Peace.'

Trump boasted that he raised tariffs from 30 to 39 percent after a call with Swiss President Karin Keller-Sutter “rubbed [him] the wrong way,” then lowered them after being courted by industry executives who brought him a Rolex and a personalized gold bar.

The two incidents make it clear that there isn't an "emergency" necessitating a tariff, but that Trump is using them for his own personal gain, the men agreed.

Benen argued that these anecdotes from the president undermine the administration’s legal claim that Trump is using emergency powers under the 1977 law to address a genuine economic emergency, namely trade deficits.

He continued, saying that Trump is "so far gone, is so wrapped up in his own delusion that he forgets he’s supposed to maintain the emergency pretense." Trump then ends up “confessing in public that the entire rationale for his policy is a sham.”

The trade deficits that Trump claimed are an emergency, Benen said, are not inherently harmful.

He explained, “You and I have trade deficits with our grocery store,” and they have been shrinking, not exploding into crisis. The Constitution vests tariff power in Congress, through Article I, not to the presidency. It's the main reason most legal scholars and experts think Trump is likely to lose at the Supreme Court if the justices follow the statute and the Constitution. In fact, one of Trump's own officials thinks the policy might fall at the high court.

The two men go on to skewer House Speaker Mike Johnson, who praised Trump’s supposed “Article II” tariff power, which simply doesn’t exist. Tariff authority sits in Article I, Benen told Sargent, making Johnson’s hands-off posture “completely antithetical” to the system he claims to revere.

Meanwhile, Republicans who privately dislike tariffs are allowing Trump to proceed unilaterally, even though it is "pushing prices up and that it’s becoming a drag on the economy."

Sargent agreed, saying, "It’s very, very clear that affordability is an enormous issue in these elections." Those high costs are hammering voters and it could cost the GOP the House, and possibly the Senate, in 2026.

If the Supreme Court upholds Trump’s approach despite his public admissions, Benen said, it would mark “a breakdown of American governance at crisis levels,” normalizing an enormous abuse of power with no institutional check.

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AHA NO TOPIC GENERATES AS MUCH BAD FAITH Rationalization hypocrisy than tariffs?

Greg Gutfeld: Tariffs create higher food prices that “disincentivizes” eating

02/13/25 MMA

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NYT columnist David Brooks didn't mean any of it

New York Times columnist David Brooks sits next to Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, in this image from the U.S. Justice Department’s file of late financier Jeffrey Epstein, released by the House Oversight Committee Democrats in Washington, D.C., U.S., on December 18, 2025. House Oversight Committee Democrats/Handout

:{John Stoehr December 24, 2025

David Brooks, the conservative columnist who is beloved by liberals, wrote last month that the Democrats make too much of the Epstein story. He said they’re acting as conspiratorially as the Republicans.

Brooks said he was “especially startled” to see leading progressives characterizing all elites as part of “the Epstein class.” If he were a Democrat, he said, he’d be focused on “the truth”: “the elites didn’t betray you, but they did ignore you. They didn’t mean to harm you.”

Brooks went on to say: “If I were a Democratic politician … I’d add that America can’t get itself back on track if the culture is awash in distrust, cynicism, catastrophizing lies and conspiracymongering. No governing majority will ever form if we’re locked in a permanent class war.”

Sounds noble, but he didn’t mean any of it.

Last week, it was discovered that David Brooks had palled around with Jeffrey Epstein. Pictures of him were part of a trove released by the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. It was deduced that they were taken at a 2011 “billionaires dinner.” A 2019 report by Buzzfeed identified Brooks, among others, along with Epstein, who had pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for sex just three years prior.

Buzzfeed: “In 2011, after Epstein had been released from a Florida jail, it was an exclusive gathering, dominated by tech industry leadership. A gallery of photos taken at the event by Nathan Myhrvold, formerly Microsoft’s chief technology officer, named 20 guests, including just one media representative: New York Times columnist David Brooks.”

While defending Brooks, the Times inadvertently confirmed Epstein's presence at the dinner. “Mr. Brooks had no contact with [Epstein] before or after his single attendance at a widely-attended dinner.”

Sure, but Brooks knew Epstein was there. If he didn’t know about his crimes, which is doubtful, he still chose to write a column warning the Democrats against waging “permanent class war” without disclosing his non-trivial association with the namesake of “the Epstein class.”

It’s bad faith, up and down.

“I think that's what we get when (very) wealthy people are shaping opinion,” said Denny Carter, publisher of Bad Faith Times, a newsletter. “We can never really know the depths of their conflicts of interest, whether it's covering for a known pedophile ringleader or promoting a cause or politician or company that will benefit them financially.”

In 2023, Denny wrote a piece highlighting the importance of bad faith, which is to say, if you don’t put it at the center of your thinking about rightwing politics, you’re going to be very, very confused. He wrote:

“Republicans today support women’s sports (if it means barring trans folks from participating). They love a member of the Kennedy family. They’re skeptical of Big Pharma. They hate banks. None of it – not a single part of it – makes any sense unless you understand bad faith.”

They never mean what they say.

Denny brought my attention to that two-year-old piece by reposting it. I immediately thought of Brooks. Scolding the Democrats about demonizing “the Epstein class” while fraternizing with “the Epstein class” (it was a “billionaires dinner,” for Christ’s sake) – that’s the kind of behavior you might expect from a man who’s ready to betray you.

“You see these op-eds about supporting the fossil fuel industry and continuing to accelerate climate collapse in the guise of electoral advice for Democrats without having any idea if the writer means what they're saying or has some financial stake in promoting Big Oil and its various subsidiaries,” Denny told me in a brief interview. “You assume good faith among these writers and influencers at your own peril.”

In a 2023 piece you recently reposted, you said the world is upside down. The right loves Russia. The left hates Russia. This is confusing for those of us who remember 20 years ago. What happened?

This one, I think, is pretty straightforward. The right despised the collectivism inherent in Soviet ideology and the left was curious about how it might look in action. The fall of the USSR (eventually) led to a totalitarian fascist Russian state ruled by a vicious dictator who used religion and "traditional values" as a weapon against his many enemies, or anyone who dared promote democracy in Russia.

Listen to Putin and you'll hear a Republican babbling about “woke” this and “woke” that and positioning himself as the last barrier between so-called traditional society and some kind of far-left hellscape.

It's the same script every modern fascist leader uses, and it appeals very much to Republican lawmakers and their voters. You sometimes read stories about Americans fleeing to Russia to escape the “woke” scourge, only to deeply regret it. That's always funny or tragic, depending on how you look at it.

You say bad faith explains the upside-downness, but you also suggest the center has not held -- that social fragmentation brought us here. You even cite David Bowie. How did you come to that insight?

I've been a Bowie superfan for a while now, and like a lot of folks who spend too much time online, I've seen the viral clip of Bowie explaining the world-changing potential of the internet way back in 1999.

He was right on a few levels, but most of all he identified the internet's potential for destroying any sense of commonly held reality. Here we are today, a quarter century later, trying to operate in a political world in which there are a handful of different realities at any one time.

A traitorous right-wing mob tried to overthrow the US government in 2021. We all saw the footage. We all know what happened. Yet there are tens of millions of Americans who believe January 6 did not happen or was in fact a walking tour of the US Capitol.

We can't even agree that there was a coup attempt orchestrated by the outgoing president because social media took that event, broke it into a million pieces, and allowed bad actors to piece it back together to fit a politically convenient narrative. I wrote about it here.

You suggest that simply telling the truth won't fix things. Why?

I don't mean to sound cynical but if we've learned anything over the past decade of small-d democratic backsliding, it's that the truth doesn't mean anything anymore because of the societal fragmentation created by social media. There is no truth. We can choose our own adventure now because our phones will confirm our priors about what happened and why.

Pro-democracy folks in the US can't rely on facts and figures to win the day. They won't. The Harris campaign reached a highwater mark in August 2024 when they were ignoring facts and figures and coasting on vibes. It was a heady time because it seemed like Democrats had finally learned their lesson: good-faith “Leslie Knope” politics [facts will win the day] has no place in the modern world, if it ever did.

The right has a gigantic media complex and it's getting bigger. Twitter, CBS News and soon perhaps CNN -- all are right-coded or soon could be. Are you seeing recognition among liberals and leftists that this imbalance is unsustainable? If so, what's the plan?

Look, there are plenty of pro-democracy folks in the world with more money than they could spend in 50 lifetimes. A little bit of that money could go a long way in establishing pro-democracy media outlets that operate as propaganda outlets for the kind of liberalism that has been washed away by the right's capture of the media. Democracy needs to be sold to Americans just as fascism was sold to them, first in the seedy corners of the internet, then on Elon Musk's hub for international fascism, then in mainstream outlets run by people cooking their brains daily on Musk's site.

I'm not sure of a specific plan. I'm just a blogger. But people are awash in fascist propaganda 24 hours a day on every major social media site. It has ruined a lot of relationships and radicalized Americans who spent most of their lives ignoring politics as the domain of nerds.

There has to be a flood of pro-democracy messaging in the media and that can't happen without billions being invested in a massive network of outlets that can effectively push back on the right's unreality.

I wrote about the selling of democracy here.

The meaning of "elites" is central to the fascist project. As defined by David Brooks, they are educated liberal-ish people who drive Teslas, or used to. With an affordability crisis underway, liberals and leftists have a chance to redefine "elites" for the long haul. Thoughts?

I think engaging the right on the meaning of "elites" is probably a road to nowhere. They will label as "elite" anyone who has ever read a book or graduated from college. I would say the left can and should point out the vast gulf between real populism and fake right-wing populism. Media outlets, of course, have conflated these two because the media assumes everyone in politics is operating in pristine good faith.

But pointing out that Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are real populists while Trump and his lackeys talk a big populist game while selling the country for parts to their golf buddies and business associates could offer people real insight into what it means to be on the side of the working person. Barack Obama has toyed with the idea of rejecting Trump as a populist; I think every pro-democracy American needs to push back harder on that label because it's disingenuous and a powerful tool for fascist politicians who have nothing if they don't have at least some working-class support.

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In an article for the New York Timespublished Sunday, Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, argued that modern political outrage operates according to what he calls mob logic, a form of communal outrage grounded in shared expectations and social coordination.

Pinker began by describing how theassassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk elicited an intense wave of symbolic reactions: Kirk was sanctified as a martyr, and dissenters were attacked for failing to show proper devotion.

The response, he contended, aligns with the phenomenon that economist Thomas Schelling and anthropologist John Tooby termed “common knowledge,” in which an event becomes a shared social signal that everyone knows, and everyone knows that everyone knows, and so on.

According to Pinker, communal outrage follows a predictable sequence:

A public attack is framed as targeting a person because of group identity. The story spreads rapidly — sometimes amplified or distorted. The victim becomes a symbolic figure for the group. The incident is treated as an intolerable violation, and doubt or questioning is stigmatized.

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The group then retaliates disproportionately, often targeting perceived enemies regardless of their actual involvement.

Pinker sees the post‑Kirk reaction as a textbook case: political leaders threatened reprisals, agencies pressured media, and public figures called for broad retribution. Meanwhile, private citizens demanded firings and punishments of anyone whose statements deviated from the sanctified narrative.

*The psychologist distinguished communal outrage from calculated revenge. He noted that revenge is targeted, proportional and strategic. Communal outrage, by contrast, solves a coordination dilemma — the problem of how a group acts in concert when multiple strategies exist but only one can succeed. Outrage becomes a focal point: a visible, unanimous act that signals dominance and enforces internal solidarity, he argued.

He identified two coordination problems that outrage resolves:

Dominance contest, when a group that fails to defend a member signals weakness and invites further attacks. A conspicuous rebuttal reasserts status in the face of the audience of rivals.

Internal cohesion, which means Individuals may hesitate to act unless they see others doing so. An outrage incident makes public the moment to unite and act together.

Pinker drew parallels with historical episodes of communal outrage — from the U.S. battleship Maine explosion, to the Reichstag fire, to the Arab Spring, to the reaction sparked by George Floyd’s killing — and notes that the outcomes differ depending on how the incident is framed and how “outrage entrepreneurs” shape the narrative.

"It’s often been pointed out that Mr. Trump and the MAGA movement have a chronic sense of being disrespected. Mr. Trump fumed for decades about being looked down on by coastal elites, and his pique has grown with each investigation, indictment and impeachment. For many of his followers, these insults merged with a smoldering resentment at the creeping takeover by leftist values in public life, from government mandates to popular entertainment," Pinker wrote.

He added: "Mr. Kirk’s killing is, for all of them, a perfect outrage incident. As an advocate of MAGA willing to take the battle to the enemy, Mr. Kirk was a pre-eminent symbol of the coalition. And his suspected killer, an internet-addled loner with a gun, nonetheless has enough left-adjacent trappings (a transgender partner, some antifascist memes) that he can be mentally fitted into a vast liberal conspiracy. The shooting was an unendurable public offense, which mobilized the coalition to muster its forces, in this case a combination of government muscle and social media shaming mobs, to rectify the affront."

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AN 9 25

MSNBC Daily opinion editor Jarvis DeBerry said Tennessee State University security did the right thing when they escorted two uninvited Charlie Kirk wannabes off the HBCU’s campus.

Both without permits, the two white men set up a table on the Nashville grounds, taped inflammatory signs to their table and dared Black students to “debate” them in Kirk’s “Prove Me Wrong” style. Students responded instead with jeers, gestures and laughingly bolted away with their signs before security intervened and escorted them away, seemingly for their own safety.

“The pair’s provocation was not received well at TSU, which, of course, was the visitors’ point: to be rejected, to characterize the Black students as intolerant of debate and to gloat that they’d won their arguments by virtue of the Black students being intolerant of their presence,” wrote DeBerry, noting the two made a point to record their dismissal for MAGA online fans to crucify.

DeBerry said it was unfortunate to see so many people on social media claiming TSU students, should have responded by debating the pair, especially since the men were not looking for debate.

“The proposition that the students should have debated their obnoxious guests reminds me of a theory being promoted in journalism circles some years ago,” said DeBerry, citing requests by editors that opinion writers and columnists sound off in comment sections.

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“[Reporters would] be showing that we’re real people, our editors insisted, and we’d be encouraging similarly civil people to participate, which would help transform the tone of such sections,” said DeBerry. “The guidance was based on the faulty premise that people were in the comments section for a good-faith exchange of ideas — when most were there only to be obnoxious and “pwn” the opposition.”

It was a faulty argument, and foolish to think “folks with such a mindset were interested in debate,” said DeBerry, who described the online exchange as a “waste of time.”

“This is good advice in real life, too,” DeBerry added. “That’s why the students shouldn’t feel any embarrassment or shame in not falling into the ‘debate me’ trap. Because that’s all it is: a trap.”

Real debates are intellectual exercises between people who are factually prepared and open to persuasion, said DeBerry. The ultimate goal is a pursuit of truth, not “owning” the opposition or grandstanding.

“It’s a shame that since Kirk’s death, arguing in bad faith has become characterized as virtuous and edifying. It’s not. And it’s not beneficial to try to rebut people making bad faith arguments because, by definition, people making bad faith arguments can’t be persuaded of anything,” DeBerry said. “No, the students at TSU didn’t owe the so-called debaters any of their time or attention. Like so many HBCU students since Kirk’s death, saying “Leave us alone” is enough.

Read the full MSNBC report at this link.

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AN 9 25 BULWARK

Bulwark writer Philip Rotner says American law did not account for a bad-faith actor in the Oval Office, and it shows.

“Time and again in just eight months back in office, Donald Trump has advanced norm-busting assertions of presidential power far beyond anything ever attempted — or even dreamed of — by his predecessors,” said Rotner, referring to Trump declaring national emergencies that would typically require congressional approval or regulatory review. This include his unilateral tariffs, sending the military to Los Angeles, federalizing the Washington, D.C. police force, militarizing the southern border, ending birthright citizenship, deporting foreign students, targeting colleges and law firms and destroying the independence of administrative agencies.

“As tempting as it may be to call these actions ‘blatantly illegal,’ the truth is actually worse,” said Rotner. “The constitutional and statutory ambiguities Trump is attempting to exploit really do exist. Indeed, strategic ambiguity has until recently generally been viewed as a feature, not a bug, of our legal system.”

Rotner said the Constitution is framed in generalized language, with phrases like “due process” and “equal protection” left largely undefined. But broad, nonprescriptive constitutional and statutory language is only a virtue when the American public puts good-faith actors in the White House. In the hands of a bad-faith leader, strategic ambiguity becomes a weapon.

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“Trump is a bad-faith actor with a wide authoritarian streak,” Rotner said. “He is systematically testing the limits of the law, probing for soft spots, loopholes, and ambiguities to increase his power and provide him legal cover to do ‘whatever I want.’”

And he trusts the courts will allow him enough leeway to expand his power vastly beyond "what anybody had previously imagined," Rotner said. It does not matter when his assertions of presidential power are thin or nonexistent in the eyes of most legal scholars. Scholars don’t get the last word,’ Rotner said. That belongs to the courts, which appears to rule by unexplained shadow docket decree.

“A clear pattern has emerged in the Court’s repeatedly putting its thumb on the scale in Trump’s favor, often ‘without a murmur of explanation,’” Rotner said. “Virtually all of the cases will require the Court to interpret vague, ambiguous statutory language drafted by Congress to permit presidents to act swiftly and decisively in times of crisis.”

But the Republican majority Congress has ceded some of its powers to the executive branch, said Rotner, and it will be up to a future Congress to get us out of the mess by no longer assuming good faith when it drafts legislation or amends existing statutes.

“The rules of the game have changed and good faith can no longer be assumed,” Rotner said.

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SEE BAD FAITH LIE TRUMP CONSTANTLY SAYS NO CUT SOC SEC; GOP SAY SAME BUT PASS BILL TO CUT 800M NO OTHER WAY

an 525

'Under cover of night,' Republicans unveil plan to kick over 8 million off healthcare

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AN 4 25

Discussing the history of conservatism in the United States, veteran Washington Post columnist George Will used the word "bookish" to describe Republicans of the past. And Will, who is very much a Never Trump conservative, meant that in a good way.

Will was applauding those conservatives of yesterday for, as he saw it, their detailed focus on policy. And he is no fan of the performative theatrics of the MAGA movement.

Salon's Amanda Marcotte cites three recent examples of such theatrics in an article published on April 28, calling out "performative temper tantrums" by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-Georgia), Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Trump White House adviser Stephen Miller.

"If there were an Oscar for the category 'hard to watch,'" Marcotte argues, "I'd have to nominate the video of Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., barking expletives at a constituent after he asked her if she would have a town hall soon. It's produced in a beauty supply store instead of a movie studio, but in a brief minute and 42 seconds, the video finds its place in the canon of horror films shot from the villain's perspective…. Most adults who act like Mace in public immediately wish to disappear off the face of the Earth in shame. But not our Nancy! No, she's the one who posted this video online, proud of her emotional incontinence."

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Marcotte adds, "She even offered a homophobic gay panic defense, by describing the man as 'wearing daisy dukes, at a makeup store'….. To people outside the MAGA bubble, it's a baffling choice. She's not even a fun villain."

Marcotte laments that "what most adults find embarrassing, the MAGA base will eat right up."

"Despite this effort, Mace didn't even come close to nabbing last week's gold star for the most histrionic MAGA performance," Marcotte observes. "She was outdone by Stephen Miller, whose usual register on TV is 'verge of a nervous breakdown,' but got so shrill on Fox News Tuesday that Lauren Tousignant at Jezebel worried she'd soon have to 'look at Stephen Miller's face as he pops a dozen blood vessels as his brain explodes'…. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth turned in two performances that would cause Al Pacino to tell him to settle down."

Marcotte adds, "While carping about "the fake news media" during the White House Easter egg roll, Hegseth's whining got so pitched his voice started to crack, while his children stood behind him, embarrassed at the spectacle….. All this yelling and bellyaching serves a pragmatic purpose: to distract from how what they're saying makes no sense.

*Amanda Marcotte's full article for Salon is available at this link.

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6 24 maga mike rant about biden slow on XO border but no mention he killed bill for trump

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mar-a lago hysteria 8 22 trump assassination plot by biden 6 24

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-guest-grover-norquist-record-fall-gas-prices-bad-thing

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Mainstream media don’t have to take the right's phony outrage over Biden’s “garbage” comments seriously

Written by Gideon Taaffe

Published 10/30/24 mma

Some mainstream media outlets aided the inevitable right-wing outrage cycle regarding President Joe Biden's comments about a racist joke made at a Trump rally by adopting right-wing media's framing.

Speaking to nonprofit Voto Latino, Biden reacted to a comedian at Trump’s weekend rally calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” saying, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American. It’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done, everything we’ve been.”

NBC senior White House correspondent Gabe Gutierrez initially reportedthe comments as Biden calling Trump supporters “garbage”; Biden later clarified what he said, writing on social media, “Earlier today I referred to the hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump's supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally as garbage—which is the only word I can think of to describe it. His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable. That's all I meant to say. The comments at that rally don't reflect who we are as a nation.”

basket of deplorables problem? trying to get last few undecided?]

The next day, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris told reporters that Biden “clarified his comments, but let me be clear: I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.” She mentioned that she had called for unity in a speech the previous night, saying, “You heard my speech last night. I believe the work that I do is about representing all the people, whether they support me or not. I will be a President for all Americans.”

Even though Biden clarified his comments, many in the mainstream media posted headlines suggesting Biden called Trump supporters “garbage” and that his comments could give the right “a way to pivot away” from the overwhelming racism at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally.

The Associated Press incorrectly wrote that Biden “suggests Trump supporters are ‘garbage’ after comic’s insult of Puerto Rico.” ABC News wrote up right-wing media’s bad-faith outrage, saying in a headline that Biden “angers GOP associating ‘garbage’ with Trump supporters.” NPR framed Biden’s comment as “a divisive remark” in a piece titled “Harris urged unity in her closing argument. Biden's ‘garbage’ line undercut that.”

Biden’s comment predictably led to a deluge of apoplectic reactions from right-wing media figures, who falsely claimed that the president called all Trump supporters “garbage” and made comparisons to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment during the 2016 election cycle. (That comment was also misleadingly covered at the time, with some saying she was referring to all Trump supporters, when Clinton was specifically talking about voters who supported Trump for “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” reasons.)

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk fearmongered that Biden “is using dehumanizing language towards 80 million Americans,” adding, “They think you are garbage, therefore worthy of elimination.” Fox News called the comments the “2024 campaign’s October Surprise.” The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh said that the comments are “the kind of seething, anti-American contempt that you only find among Democrat elites.”

While right-wing media engage in bad-faith outrage over Biden’s comments, Trump has repeatedly disparaged the United States and Democrats during his campaign. He recently said America is “like a garbage can for the world” and has ramped up demonizing rhetoric toward immigrants and political foes. Trump has called Democrats “evil,” “dangerous,” and “enemies from within,” going as far as suggesting he will use the military against “radical left lunatics.”

By adopting the right-wing framing about Biden’s remarks, the mainstream media are enabling a false narrative that both sides are ramping up hostile rhetoric. They don’t need to engage in the right’s latest efforts to deflect from Trump’s racism and extremism.

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an 12 22

Among the many problems endemic to the Washington press corps is the dearth of reporters and producers born into ultra-conservative religious traditions but had, by the grace of God, found a way out.

If there were such people involved in deciding what’s news, we would scarcely see stories about the difficulties facing white evangelical Protestants when it comes to voting for people like Donald Trump and his offspring, such as former football star Herschel Walker.

We would not see opinion pieces laboring to explain why white evangelical Protestants are hypocrites for supporting a Republican candidate who has admitted to paying for abortions in addition to fathering a covey of children with multiple women he did not marry.

We would not see, in other words, a Washington press corps grown complicit in a decades-long effort by white evangelical Protestant leaders to gaslight America into thinking their zealotry is not at all dangerous to democracy despite all appearances to the contrary.

The bad faith of white evangelical faith

Two days ago, National Public Radio aired a piece with this headline: “Evangelical voters grapple with Herschel Walker's controversial image.” “Grapple” connotes soul-searching, but the interview subject, Timothy Head of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, didn’t seem as vexed by the choice as much as he was vexed by press corps scrutiny of it.

NPR clearly does not have anyone in key positions who was born into ultra-conservative religious traditions but left. If it did, the radio network would not have given Head a chance to explain why white evangelical Protestants are still good people though their vote for Walker signals their deep desire for a return of Jim Crow caste.

That person, in a news meeting, would have said whoa hold up. These people are going to vote for a Republican no matter who it is. Religion has nothing to do with it, unless by “religion” we mean the political power to protect social hierarchies that give white people advantages. In that case, sure, it’s about religion, but let’s say that. Let’s not give an ultra-conservative zealot a chance to gaslight us.

That person, though holding unfamiliar news judgment, would have seen their premonition bear out. Incumbent Raphael Warnock won Georgia’s run-off, but Walker gleaned 48.6 percent of votes, most of it from rural areas dominated by white evangelical Protestants.

NPR isn’t alone.

The Times ran this howler: “‘Saved by Grace’: Evangelicals Find a Way Forward With Herschel Walker.” That’s pure comedy gold to anyone who grew up in an ultra-conservative religious tradition but left.

Why? Because that person would say anything can be rationalized by a religion that’s predicated on the idea that it is right and all others are wrong. Their choices are right before they have made them. Walker was toxic, but voting for him was right, because they are.

When white evangelical Protestants “find a way forward,” it’s not because they are wrestling with hardship, controversy, whatever. The decision has been made. The “finding a way” is justification. Sure, they vote according to the demands of their faith, but it’s bad faith.

Perhaps the worst offenders are liberal intellectuals possessing no conception of the bad faith undergirding white evangelical Protestantism. They then judge politics according to liberal values. The Guardian ran this Tuesday: “Georgia Senate voters have a moral choice. White Christians are choosing hypocrisy.” [Hard groan.]

No, “white Christians” are not choosing hypocrisy. They are overwhelmingly unconcerned with intellectual integrity. If they contradict themselves, so be it. They’re right. Their vote is right.

Instead, they are choosing a Republican who will preserve “their way of life” – or bring back a two-tiered system of law and democracy according to which white people get to step on everyone else and everyone else is forced to put up with it. That’s not hypocrisy.

That’s saying what you want.

Having it both ways

Anyone who was born into but left such ultra-conservative religious traditions knows this. Alas, such special people are virtually absent from the ranks of the Washington press corps. The obvious result is endless reporting about religion as if religion had nothing to do with politics – as if bad faith were not central to white evangelical faith.

If the press corps had more special people like this, perhaps we’d see reporting on how white evangelical Protestants are being held morally accountable for their choices in addition to more stories about real moral “grappling” as a result of being held accountable. In that alternative reality, they’d learn that true freedom isn’t what you can do to other people. It’s what you can do for yourself and others.

As it is, white evangelical Protestants have it both ways.

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DIRTY TRICKS

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/16/democratic-strategists-launch-war-room-00065498

group of top Democratic strategists are launching a multi-million-dollar hub to counter an expected investigative onslaught by the likely incoming House GOP majority — digging into President Joe Biden, his administration and his son, on top of potential Cabinet impeachments.

The newly relaunchedCongressional Integrity Project initiative, details of which were shared first with POLITICO, will include rapid response teams, investigative researchers, pollsters and eventually a paid media campaign to put congressional Republicans “squarely on the defense,” founder Kyle Herrig said in an interview.

It’s designed to serve as the party’s “leading war room” to push back on House Republican investigations, Herrig said in an interview. He added that the project would “investigate the investigators, expose their political motivations and the monied special interests supporting their work, and hold them accountable for ignoring the urgent priorities of all Americans in order to smear Joe Biden and do the political bidding of Trump and MAGA Republicans." [vid]

a team of researchers has already begun scouring public records, press clippings and other documents in a bid to immediately undercut House GOP leaders, from Minority Leader — now speakership hopeful — Kevin McCarthy to the likely committee chairs expected to manage probes of Biden and his network.

The House GOP views investigations as a key piece of its agenda for the next Congress once it takes the narrow majority that’s now expected, particularly as much of its legislative wish list is on track to stall thanks to the Senate filibuster and Democratic president. McCarthy has privately talked with committee chairs-in-waiting to coordinate plans, making the swift launch of the outside-group pushback plan a potential godsend to Democrats.

Democratic leadership on the Hill has been briefed about the project’s relaunch, according to a person familiar with its plans.

Brad Woodhouse, a longtime Democratic strategist who is part of the project’s new leadership team, called the House GOP’s looming investigations a “vendetta” after two impeachments of and investigations into former President Donald Trump while Democrats controlled Congress, including the bipartisan select committee probing the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

The project “will exploit every tactic available,” Woodhouse said, adding: “It’s not enough to wait and see what they’re going to do and how far they’re going to go.”

Republicans wouldn’t formally take the House until January, but its leaders are already vowing to cut a broad investigative swath. As McCarthy put it during his conference’s recent agenda rollout: “Every committee has responsibilities for oversight.”

“They’ve virtually outlined no substantive agenda for governing,” Herrig said of House Republicans. “This is what they’re going to do ... so you really need a concentrated effort that’s doing this every day.”

In addition to Herrig and Woodhouse, the project’s leadership team will include Leslie Dach, a well-known Democratic communications specialist who has led progressive organizations for decades, served in the Obama administration and advised the Biden administration’s pandemic response.

In a sign of the important role the initiative will play over the next two years — and its proximity to the White House — other senior advisers include Jeff Peck, a former Biden aide during the president’s time in the Senate who served as treasurer and vice chair of the Biden Foundation as well as a senior adviser to the Biden-Harris transition.

The Congressional Integrity Project leadership team will include Leslie Dach, a well-known Democratic communications specialist who has led progressive organizations for decades. | Brian Stukes/Getty Images for Protect Our Care

For the final two years of Biden’s term, Republicans will be aided in their oversight push by a coalition of outside conservative research groups that have already mapped out potential targets and started digging into issues ranging from Hunter Biden’s business dealings to immigration policy.

And GOP lawmakers have left their own investigative breadcrumbs that make it clear where they intend to go. Likely Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) will lead the Hunter Biden investigation, with Republicans already preparing to elevate the probe to Joe Biden although no evidence has publicly emerged that his decisions were affected by his son’s business dealings. Comer recently told POLITICO that he and likely Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) would provide a public update this week.

Jordan, meanwhile, is preparing to use the gavel he’s poised to take for conduct a sweeping investigation into the Justice Department and FBI, two frequent targets of Trump’s ire. That probe is likely to touch on everything from the search at Mar-a-Lago for classified documents to tracking threats against local school officials, which the GOP slams as an effort to target parents despite denials from the bureau. [vid]

other GOP areas of interest include the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Ukraine aid and a coronavirus probe that is likely to sweep up longtime public health adviser Anthony Fauci.

McCarthy and his allies are under pressure from their base and some members of their own conference to pair their investigations with impeachment articles; some in the party are clearly itching for payback after then-President Trump was impeached twice. Though impeaching Biden is likely a heavy lift — and a step that McCarthy isn’t endorsing for now — Republicans see Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as a more likely target for attempted removal from office.

congressional Democrats and others close to the administration view Republicans’ vows to investigate Mayorkas’ department and the border as the latest sign that they aren’t serious about trying to pass immigration legislation. And they slam Republican investigative plans writ large as thinly veiled attempts to help Trump, pointing to Jordan’s public remarks earlier this year that characterized GOP probes as helping “frame up the 2024 race.”

The Congressional Integrity Project is also aiming to raise funds for a paid media campaign, including dedicated websites, digital ads, mobile billboards, newspaper ads and, occasionally, TV ad buys. Its public opinion research will be shared with like-minded organizations and congressional allies to contrast GOP investigations with issues the American public cares most about, project leaders said.

Their goal is to prevent a repeat of the 2016 presidential campaign when Republicans also controlled the House and created a select committee to investigate the 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans. That GOP select panel ended up zeroing in on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as she prepared to ascend to the Democratic nomination, culminating in an 11-hour grilling of Clinton.

Republicans’ two-year Benghazi investigation spent $7 million in taxpayer money and dogged Clinton on the campaign trail before finally producing an 800-page report that didn’t focus on the former secretary of state.

Then-Majority Leader McCarthy quipped in 2015 to Fox News’ Sean Hannity that the Benghazi committee had successfully driven down Clinton’s poll numbers. “He took a lot of crap for it, but in the end, it was true” that the investigation hurt Clinton politically, recalled Woodhouse.

Rather, Democrats hope the flood of investigations will lead to a repeat of the 1998 midterm elections, held amid the GOP push to impeach then-President Bill Clinton. Voter backlash against that move helped Democrats defy historical trends in House races that favor the party that doesn’t occupy the White House gaining seats.

POLITICO---

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ref

axios

gop Republican congressional aides huddled this month with conservative think-tank leaders on Maryland's Eastern Shore to hone tactics and messaging for Biden administration probes, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: If the GOP wins control in the midterms, leaders want to kick off high-profile investigations as soon as the new Congress is seated. Republicans plan to draw on investigative power from allies across Washington.

Details: The retreat was hosted by the Heritage Foundation, theConservative Partnership Instituteand theAmerican Accountability Foundation, a nonprofit run by Trump administration alumni that's dogged Biden nominees with independent investigative work.

In attendance were aides to the top Republicans on the House Transportation and Infrastructure, Ways and Means and Oversight committees, as well as a senior aide to Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), who is considered a leadership contender.
Aides toSenate Banking Committee ranking member Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) and Sens. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Mike Braun (R-Ind.) also attended.

The big picture: With unified Democratic control in D.C., Republicans have been limited in their efforts to wield Congress' probative powers around high-profile issues such as a southern border immigration surge, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and economic shocks that threaten a U.S. recession.

If they win congressional majorities, Republicans plan to use that power in retrospective fashion to dig into Biden administration conduct going back to his inauguration.
That will mean a congressional microscope on Biden administration policies and spending. It will also bring stepped-up GOP scrutiny of private sector actors such as tech companies that Republicans see as politically adversarial.

Behind the scenes: Over two days, congressional aides at the retreat got briefings from prominent conservative activists and organizations on a host of investigative tactics.

Gene Hamilton, a former senior aide in Trump's Justice Department and a board member of the America First Legal Foundation, briefed staffers on how to use legal experts and the federal court system to conduct research and "advance conservative priorities in the courts."
Alexa Walker, the Banks aide and the Republican Study Committee's coalitions director, and Scott Gast, a former senior aide in the Trump White House counsel's office, discussed strategies for coordinating congressional oversight with outside research and investigative groups.
Mike Howell and Roman Jankowski of the Heritage Foundation led a training on the Freedom of Information Act.
AAF chief Tom Jones briefed attendees on tactics for investigating presidential nominees and appointees.
Phil Reboli of CPI trained staffers on effective communications strategies to sell oversight efforts to outside groups and the press.

What they're saying: "We are pleased we brought together senior staff and leading outside researchers to focus on enhancing oversight skills, particularly since we're expecting increased oversight opportunities in the future," Jones said in an emailed statement.

"The American people are deeply frustrated by the failed policies and lack of leadership of the Biden Administration. They expect good government groups like ours and Congressional leaders to work together to hold this administration accountable."

Howell, who leads Heritage's Oversight Project, t0ld Axios the goal of the event was to ensure congressional staff members are equipped to kick-start investigations as soon as the new Congress is gaveled in.

"What's going to happen next Congress is, you've got to do four years of oversight in two years. That's going to be an immense lift, and it means that they cannot wait to get these committees situated," he said in an interview.
"There are thousands of people who served in the Trump administration, myself included, who experienced what was probably the most intense congressional oversight to date," Howell said. They "are now chomping at the bit to deploy these skills that they've learned back at the Biden administration."

Between the lines: The event provides a glimpse of where Republicans see potentially fruitful oversight avenues.

Senate Banking has been at the center of Biden nomination fights, with committee Republicans successfully sinking two high-profile nominees.
The Oversight Committee, whose chief counsel for oversight attended, has a broad mandate. Its ranking Republican, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), has recently signaled scrutiny of Biden's immigration policies, his son Hunter’s business dealings abroad and tech companies' ostensible political bias.
The Transportation Committee's Republican general counsel wrote in a disclosure filing that the training would help the committee ensure "fiscal stewardship and effective oversight of the recently passed infrastructure bill and other items within T&I's jurisdiction."
The Ways and Means Committee, which sent two Republican aides to the retreat, is a powerful panel with oversight jurisdiction over tax and financial policies at the center of a national furor over inflation.

Republican oversight won't be confined to federal agencies or the White House, Howell said.

"Big Tech is in the crosshairs," he said. "They're going to be subject to document requests and subpoenas and depositions."
Howell pointed to the subpoena power wielded heavily by the Jan. 6 select committee, which has sought private phone and bank records, among other documents.
"It's really a whole new frontier that has been opened with a whole bevy of new tactics and techniques, which were once thought out of bounds. They're now going to be a tool in the hands of the other side."

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ref axios lachlan markey

https://www.axios.com/2021/09/14/conservatives-aft-withdrawal-biden-nominee

david chipman nom atf scalp

even before President Biden formally withdrew his nominee to be the nation's top firearm regulator on Monday, a new conservative opposition research group was ready for a victory lap.

Why it matters: Democrats honed a research operation during the Trump era that effectively opposed some of his top nominees. Two veteran Republican operatives behind the American Accountability Foundation didn't see a comparable apparatus for the GOP, so they set out to create one.

AAF co-founder Tom Jones was a senior staffer to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.).
Matt Buckham, the other co-founder, worked in Donald Trump's White House Office of Presidential Personnel, which oversees nominations to Senate-confirmed posts.
"We know they put [David Chipman] up because he aligned with the Biden administration on guns. ... You know that there's gonna be issue advocacy galore out there," Buckham told Axios. "But is this individual qualified, what is his character, what is his background? Those are the questions that groups weren't digging into."

Driving the news: Chipman, who lobbied for gun safety group Everytown after leaving ATF, was the first high-profile Biden nominee to withdraw from consideration.

His nomination immediately drew opposition from gun rights groups such as the NRA.
In withdrawing the nomination, the president conceded Chipman was unlikely to get the 50 votes in the Senate needed for confirmation.

What's new: During an interview, Jones took credit for helping to unearth and publicize allegations from Chipman's former colleagues at ATF — where he was a special agent until 2012 — that he'd disparaged agents of color who received promotions.

Jones said he learned of the allegations while speaking to some of those former colleagues personally. AAF compiled all they could, he said, then shared its findings with the Daily Caller.
Within a week, another outlet, The Reload, had spoken with other former agents who corroborated the story. After it published additional details, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee demanded a new hearing on Chipman's nomination.
AAF also helped organize a letter to Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, from seven retired ATF agents and investigators opposing Chipman's nomination.
Jones shared Chipman research memos with Judiciary Committee Republicans — while also publishing the memos publicly on the AAF's website — and suggested potentially damaging lines of questioning for Chipman's hearings.

Between the lines: AAF's research largely ignored policy. Its strategy more resembled the type of research that political campaigns compile on their opponents: public records digging and research focused on Chipman's background.

The group remains focused on a suite of high-profile Biden nominees, and it has set up a website, BidenNoms.com, as a public repository of its research.
AAF was formed early this year as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, meaning it can't engage in political activity — despite its founders' backgrounds in GOP politics.
It expects to operate on a $750,000 budget this year, a spokesperson told Axios. During the interview, Jones and Buckham declined to identify any of their donors.

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girl blood of pal

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/andy-biggs/

Andy Biggs (R-AZ), the former chairman of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, announced he is boycotting Wednesday’s House hearing on gun violence, claiming it exploits children.

The hearing, which is currently being held, is focused on the victims and survivors of the recent mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, in which 29 people in total, including 19 elementary school children, were killed.

“I will not be physically attending the first panel of the House Oversight and Reform Committee’s hearing on gun violence today,” said Congressman Biggs, who sits on that committee. “I object strongly to the Democrats’ exploitation of children who have been victimized so recently in Uvalde.”

In a statement, Rep. Biggs accused House Democrats of exploiting “children who have been victimized so recently in Uvalde.”

USA Today reports the child who is testifying is “Miah Cerrillo, an 11-year-old who smeared herself with her slain friend’s blood to play dead during the May 24 mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas.”

Her father, Miguel, told USA TODAY this week that Miah is sharing her survival story to “make safer schools.”

Biggs claims he has “no objection to holding a congressional hearing that considers crime, violence, and guns in America,” but the “child who is being brought to testify before the Committee this morning was recently victimized and traumatized. The Chair of this committee is re-victimizing and re-traumatizing this child for political purposes,” Biggs says.

No one is being forced to appear before the House Committee, those testifying are appearing of their own free will.

In 2019 Biggs called a Democratic-sponsored gun control bill “unconstitutional.” Earlier this year Biggs bragged he was leading the effort to “curb” the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) “assault on Second Amendment rights.”

Last year at the far right Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Biggs declared his opposition to the Biden administration’s nominee to head the ATF: “The first thing you’ve got to do is stop the guy that’s going to enforce the laws.”

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dems always have a plan/policy/principle , gop just wants it to fail so won't fund it or call it commie plot;

make sure all is fucked up going into midterms? prove gubmint does not work by breaking it?

obstruction/ stick it to libs/Biden? strict fr free mkt makers/takers BS?

an 5 22

Republicans just voted against two bills to ease the baby formula shortage they have spent weeks falsely trying to pin on President Joe Biden.

In tweets and in floor speeches, Republicans have been attacking President Biden for the nationwide baby formula shortage caused by one manufacturer’s recall and closure of its plant for bacterial infection after two infants died.The shortage has been exacerbated by a trade agreement signed by then-President Donald Trump that makes it extremely difficult and expensive to import formula from other countries, and the fact that 90 percent of baby formula in the U.S. is manufactured by just four companies. Also, hoarding, and price-gouging.

Last week President Biden sat down with manufacturers and retailers to map out a plan to get more formula onto store shelves immediately and directed the Food and Drug Administration to help get the plant reopened. This week he went two steps further: he invoked the Defense Production Act to force manufacturers to produce more formula and produce it ahead of other products and created a program to use federal planes to import baby formula from other countries.

House Democrats last week also opened an investigation into the baby formula shortage.

On Wednesday the House voted on two emergency bills to further ease the shortage.

One example of Republicans falsely attacking President Biden and the left is House GOP Caucus chair Elise Stefanik‘s now-infamous tweet accusing Democrats of having “no plan” as she labeled them “pedo grifters.”...

one bill would give FDA $28 million to add staff, work to help get more formula to consumers, and create a long-term strategy, including increased safety inspections so this cannot happen again. The second would dramatically increase supply from foreign sources to consumers using the federal Women, Infants and Children (WIC) Program.

192 House Republicans voted against giving FDA $28 million to help fix the crisis and ensure it does not happen again.

Nine House Republicans voted against making it easier for WIC customers to get access to baby formula.

Many Americans are becoming outraged as the news from last night’s votes is spreading online.

[Here’s the list of 9 members of Congress (all Republicans)who voted NO:

Marjorie Taylor Greene Matt Gaetz Louie Gohmert Lauren Boebert Paul Gosar Thomas Massie Andy Biggs Clay Higgins Chip Roy.]

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note bad faith; note violence is always defensive and he is careful never to explicitly call for it.

180 pp gt replace manifesto, dad bought him one of the guns?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/matt-gaetz/

amanda

in the 16 months since Jan. 6, 2021, Donald Trump and the hosts Fox News hosts — especially its top-rated personality, Tucker Carlson — haven't exactly been subtle in approving of what happened and longing to see more right-wing violence. Trump has publicly mused about issuing pardons to the Capitol insurrectionists if he wins back — or rather steals back — the White House in 2024. Like many of the far-right Republicans in Congress, Trump has also made a martyr out of Ashli Babbitt, the QAnon believer who was shotduring the Capitol riot when she tried to break into a secure area and quite likely attack members of Congress. Carlson, meanwhile, has been at the forefront of popularizing various often contradictory conspiracy theories, mostly intended to portray the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as noble patriots and lambaste any Republican who dares say otherwise. While these GOP leaders and media personalities are generally careful to avoid direct calls for violence, their overall message of sympathy and support for right-wing terrorism is undeniable.

So Saturday's mass shooting in Buffalo, while horrifying, is really no surprise.

The alleged shooter who killed 10 people and injured three others in a Buffalo supermarket is 18-year-old Payton Gendron, who appears to have target a busy location in a predominantly Black neighborhood. As has become far too common with these kinds of mass murders, Gendron reportedly live-streamed the massacre on video, and apparently also published a manifesto that echoes many of the paranoid right-wing talking points one can hear every day streaming from the mouths of Fox News hosts and Republican politicians: a series of scurrilous lies about "critical race theory," George Soros and the "great replacement."

Now a familiar refrain will commence. No doubt we will be hear a great deal of umbrage in the coming days from Republican leaders and right-wing pundits. "How dare you blame us?" they will proclaim, in almost hysterical terms, acting shocked, shocked, that anyone would suggest that their words have had horrible consequences. The point of this fake outrage will be to make it too emotionally exhausting to hold them accountable, and to reinforce the ridiculous victim complex that fuels the American right as it increasingly slides into fascism. But let's not mince words: These folks share the blame. They have been encouraging violence, and violence is what they got.

The "great replacement" theory has been a favorite of Carlson's for some time now. This particular paranoid hypothesis is deeply rooted in neo-Nazi and other white nationalist circles. A cabal of rich Jewish people, the theory holds, has conspired to "replace" white Christian Americans with other races and ethnic groups in order to gain political and social control. Carlson doesn't actually say "Jews," and generally blames the sinister plan on Democrats, socialists or unspecified "elites," but otherwise has kept the conspiracy theory intact. (Antisemitism remains the mix by singling out individual Jewish people especially Soros, as the alleged ringleaders.)

It's not like Carlson only invokes this narrative on occasion. As Media Matters researcher Nikki McCann Ramirez has documented, Carlson is obsessed with this idea that the people he calls "legacy Americans" — a not-so-veiled euphemismfor white Christians of European ancestry — are under siege from shadowy forces flying the banner of diversity. He uses anodyne terms like "demographic change" to make the point, but has gotten bolder more recently, using the word "replacement" to make it even clearer that he's borrowing his ideas from the white-supremacist fringe.

Carlson has also explicitly linked this conspiracy theory to the threat of violence, repeatedly "warning" that America faces a new civil war unless these fictional conspirators stop trying to "replace" his cherished "legacy Americans." The GOP base has been getting the message. A poll conducted in December showed that nearly half of Republican respondents buy into the idea that there's a conspiracy to "replace" white Christians with different racial and ethnic groups. That proportion has probably risen since then, as Carlson's deluge has further mainstreamed this delusional and dangerous notion. Unsurprisingly, there has been a concurrent rise in hate crimes, of which this Buffalo shooting is merely the most dramatic recent example.

When called out for stoking a conspiracy theory that is likely to inspire violence, Carlson inevitably plays the victim, accusing liberals of being "hysterical" and characterizing these criticisms as "cancel culture." This only encourage his viewers to embrace the conspiracy theory even more, telling themselves that they (and he) are bold truth-tellers fighting against the forces of liberal oppression. That's why the how-dare-they posturing we will almost certainly see from Carlson and other right-wing pundits in coming days so predictable. This article, for instance, will quite likely be characterized as hysterical name-calling or an attempt to censor bold political speech. But let's understand this feigned outrage for what it is: an attempt to leverage an act of terrorism in a way that leads people to accept it or even condone it.

The "great replacement" theory fits in with the larger pattern of right-wing Republicans (especially our former president and his allies) and Fox News pundits encouraging not just right-wing paranoia, but the inevitable acts of violence that flow from it. The most straightforward example of this, of course, is the relentless rewriting of the history of Jan. 6, which began in the immediate aftermath and continues to this day. Republican leaders in Congress voted down Trump's impeachment only weeks after the riot and have tried to block congressional efforts to uncover exactly how the attempted coup went down.

Over this past winter, Fox News, Trump and other GOP leaders made another big push towards political violence, hyping outrageous conspiracy theories about COVID vaccines and encouraging their audiences toward aggressive acts of so-called resistance. As with Carlson, these threats are often packaged as "warnings," as when Trump declared on Fox News in February, "You can push people so far and our country is a tinderbox too, don't kid yourself." Around the same time, Carlson, Sean Hannity, Carlson and Glenn Beck all started pushed the idea that anti-vaccination fanatics were potentially justified in using violence as "self-defense."

Indeed, as the shooting was unfolding in Buffalo, there was an overt call for right-wing violence at Trump's rally in Austin, Texas, where oock geezer turned gun advocate Ted Nugent told the crowd of 8,000 that he'd "love" it if they all "went out and just went berserk on the skulls of the Democrats and the Marxists and the communists." In his speech afterward, Trump praised Republican politicians in Texas, including Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, who have slavishly proven their loyalty to him.

Many of the people arrested for their actions on Jan. 6 , 2021, have stopped being apologetic about what they did, and are now portraying themselves as martyrs and heroes. Last week, one of the most prominent ringleaders on the insurrection,Tim "Baked Alaska" Gionet, a troll to the very end, dramatically declared at a hearing that he was changing his plea. He had agreed to plead guilty to a lesser offense, but now wants to plead not guilty, even though he filming himself inside the Capitol during the riot and put the evidence online. Other Jan. 6 defendants have also become more confrontational, including pulling a gun on probation officers, acquiring new guns in defiance of a court order, or claiming that their actions on that dayamounted to "self-defense." In fairness, why shouldn't they feel emboldened? Most Republican voters, along with the party's leadership, are more interested in making excuses for Trump's coup than holding anyone accountable for it.

And all of the above doesn't even touch on the way Republican politicians and right-wing media have mainstreamed the QAnon conspiracy theory by regularly slurring Democrats, LGBTQ folks and their allies as "groomers." Demonizing political opponents with false allegations of pedophilia is unbelievably slimy, even by Republican standards. It also serves to inspire or encourage potential acts of violence, by dehumanizing their targets and creating a delusional narrative that makes such attacks seem justified.

Perhaps the horror unleashed in Buffalo on Saturday will cause Carlson and his allies to rethink their paranoid, racist and inflammatory rhetoric. That is doubtful, however. After all, this is just the latest in a series of mass shootings inspired by the "great replacement" theory, including the

Just this week, the conspiracy theory got another round of hype as Republican pundits and politicians pretended to believe that President Biden was stealing baby formula from Americans to feed "illegals," their slur for refugees applying for asylum. Those who would support deliberately starving babies for racist and xenophobic reasons aren't likely to feel any real empathy for the victims and their families in Buffalo. We cannot legitimately hope that they will be chastened by this latest round of violence, but we can make clear that their hateful rhetoric helped to unleash it.

---

how much is (legit? felt?) fear and how much devil term cudgel // commie?

stop steal and coup fueled by qanon wingnuttery? that in turn spawned by (russian) disinfo?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/gop-qanon/

Over the last few years, QAnon has slowly infiltrated the Republican Party, replacing its traditional conservative values with far-right conspiratorial theories that have nothing to do with reality.

Now, NY Mag's Jacob Silverman is explaining how QAnon has practically overtaken the Republican Party. While the radicalized beliefs were previously verbalized among factions of the political party, Silverman notes how those beliefs are progressively becoming more mainstream.

"QAnon’s adherents tend to espouse some selection of bizarre beliefs from the conspiracist’s buffet that includes accusations of pedophile politicians eating children, secret political tribunals in Guantanamo Bay, a great bloodletting, and Donald Trump swooping in to free us from evil. One day. Or maybe the day after. The prophecy is flexible, which is why it has evolved and endured."

Explaining the timeline of the political party's downward spiral, Silverman noted how the actions of Ginni Thomas, wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, are an example of the radical shift in Republican values and belief systems.

"The latest exemplar of the GOP’s descent into anything-goes nuttery is Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a well-connected conservative activist who recently admitted to attending the January 6 Stop the Steal rally in Washington, D.C.," he writes. "Ginni’s right-wing beliefs have long been known, but leaked texts between her and then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows revealed Thomas’ commitment to overturning the election, based on an apparently sincere belief that Joe Biden had stolen the presidency. She encouraged Meadows to help put a stop to Democratic perfidy. 'The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History,' went one message to Meadows, encouraging him to stand strong."

Silverman is also highlighting Republican lawmakers' latest actions that signal the party's shift toward more extremist beliefs.

"The signs of the Republican slide towardfull epistemic crackup are all around us," Silverman writes. "One can see it everywhere lately, not only in the 'why do you want to hurt children?'-type questions hurled by Republican senators at Jackson, but also in the revanchist anti-LGBTQ laws being introduced in Texas and Florida and in fearful talk of teachers 'grooming' children on Fox News. Theginned-up moral panic, centered around the child exploitation themes that helped give life to QAnon, is now a regular part of Republican political rhetoric."

---

this rachets up on builds on d'souza BS about how dems are predatory on POC AA?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/free-base-pipe/

no lnx vid twt?

Right-wing website made up viral fake claim Republicans like Marco Rubio are now pushing: report

[Marco Rubio embarrasses himself again by doubling down on false attack of defense secretary]

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement February 10, 2022

This week Republican lawmakers and voters have had a great time pushing a false claim that the Biden administration is spending tens of millions of dollars to pay for "free crack pipes" for drug abusers. The claim came from a report by the right-wing website Washington Free Beacon, including a quote falsely attributed to an HHS spokesperson, according to The Daily Beast.

It's no surprise The Daily Beast is calling "a lie" made its way to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and a U.S. Senator's Twitter account.

"The Washington Free Beacon seemed to take a big leap to assert that free crack pipes would be part of a harm reduction package," The Daily Beast's Roger Sollenberg reports, calling it "a lie rocketed around conservative media."

The report, published Monday and titled “Biden Admin To Fund Crack Pipe Distribution To Advance ‘Racial Equity,’” cited an HHS spokesperson as confirming that a sweeping harm reduction package “will provide pipes” to smoke, quote, “any illicit substance.”

The Free Beacon's article reads: “A spokesman for the agency told the Washington Free Beacon that these kits will provide pipes for users to smoke crack cocaine, crystal methamphetamine, and ‘any illicit substance.’”

The Daily Beast reviewed the email chain between the Washington Free Beacon and HHS. It's unclear how the Free Beacon made the "any illicit substance" claim, given the HHS email specifically states no federal laws would be broken.

In fact, The Daily Beast reports the HHS spokesperson says the Free Beacon “omitted the information shared with him about the grantees needing to comply with federal, state, and local laws—the very language that would prohibit crack pipes.”

The damage has already been done. The "free crack pipes" claim is now one more myth in conservatives' false reality.

Arizona far-right Republican U.S. Congresswoman Debbie Lesko made the false claim on the floor of the House of Representatives:

:{:{}:

Florida Republican U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, linking to an article literally titled: "Biden administration denies funding programs that hand out crack pipes to prevent infection and promote 'racial equity'" says in a video posted to his Twitter account, "The Biden administration is going to be sending crack pipes and meth pipes, targeting minority communities," a claim he knows is a lie.

:{:{}:

Fox News entertainers Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity both made the most of the claim, with The Daily Mail reporting: "Tucker Carlson slams policy to hand out free crack pipes and needles warning it 'will result in addicts shooting up on the streets.'"

The genie is out of the bottle, and no one on the right has any intention or desire to put it back.

---

an 12 21

Midterms are coming. In case that phrase doesn't already inspire enough dread, it looks like this particular round will be defined by an escalation of the already gross "woke wars" going on in the Democratic ranks.

A chorus of increasingly loud voices in the Democratic Party aren't focused on the threat of gerrymandering, voter suppression, or that whole thing where Republicans plan to simply void elections when they don't like the results. Dealing with that problem is hard and requires serious actions like ending the Senate filibuster. So instead, the ire is being turned on a soft and easy target to blame: the small number of people in the Democratic caucus who use politically correct terms like "Latinx" and "pregnant people."

In a recent piece for the Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein writes about centrist critics who argue that "Democrats have steered off track on cultural issues because the party is unduly influenced by the preferences of well-educated white liberals." (Its an argument that ignores that Black Lives Matter, the movement that most angers the cultural right, is spearheaded not by white liberals, but Black activists.) In a similar piece in the New York Times, Thomas Edsall notes the evidence that "working-class defections from the Democratic Party are driven more by cultural, racial and gender issues than by economics," and that many political strategists believe "Democrats should stand down on some of the more divisive cultural issues."

A particularly humorous example of the genre arrived this week from writer Zaid Jilani's newsletter, in which he chastised the AFL-CIO for sending out a tweet celebrating International Pronouns Day. "Most Americans are probably wondering what in the world International Pronoun Day has to do with wages, benefits, or conditions," he griped.

Most Americans?

The tweet in question, as of this writing, has 32 retweets on it and 35 likes. And that really underscores the major flaw of this argument: It presumes that right-wing anger at the left is an authentic and unmediated direct reaction to anything real-life Democrats are saying and doing in the world. And the evidence for that presumption is weak indeed.

None of this is to deny that the majority of white Americans, especially non-college-educated white Americans, are in a constant fit of outrage over "wokeness." I, too, have Facebook and two working eyeballs and can see that is true. But they're mostly not reacting to anything the Democrats are actually doing. No, mostly what gets white America going is bullshit, and lots and lots of it, being heaped out at an astounding rate from a well-funded GOP propaganda machine whose reach dramatically eclipses even the fondest dreams of any Democratic communications specialist. And that bullshit-generating engine doesn't need progressives to say a single, solitary word to keep their bullshit generation systems going. All progressives could shut up forever, and the right-wing noise machine wouldn't skip a beat.

Look, for instance, at what the two biggest news stories the shameless hucksters at Fox News are hyping right now: The Jussie Smollettguilty verdict and the arson of the Fox News Christmas tree. I would absolutely bet my life savings that both stories have a lot more Americans talking than the AFL-CIO's opinion on pronouns. And both are being hung by the propagandists around the necks of Democrats, even though Democrats have literally nothing to do with either crime.

Fox News is running with a bunch of "gotcha" attacks on prominent Democrats, such as Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who initially supported Smollett in the days after he claimed, falsely, to be the victim of a hate crime. The bad faith of this is extreme, of course. Those folks are more properly understood as Smollett's victims because he took advantage of their generosity in order to perpetuate this hoax. But it doesn't matter to the liars of Fox News, because this one random man's bad actions are useful for perpetuating a hoax of their own: The claim that racism isn't real, and that it's just something Democrats make up to score political points.

The umbrage over Smollett's fake hate crime is particularly hypocritical, as Fox News is currently in the process of also falsifying a hate crime against themselves. The Christmas tree burning did happen, to be clear. But it is not a "hate crime," as multiple pundits at the network falsely claimed. (Which is a designation they refused to acknowledge for the Charleston church shooting.) And it certainly isn't comparable to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, as oneFox News yapper dramatically declared. It appears it was committed by a mentally ill homeless man who blamed the arson on "mothers who rape their daughters." But that didn't slow down the faux outrage or efforts to pin the blame on Democrats.

No doubt the right-wing propaganda machine went out of their way to make progressive Democrats like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota national figures, but it's naive to think that it's really due to anything either of those women say or do. It's because both are good-looking young women of color, and because Omar wears a head covering. Just the look of them sets off all sorts of ugly instincts in some white men, instincts that are tied up with, let's face it, a gross mix of racism and sexual desire that produces some really nasty emotional reactions. That stuff is way more powerful than words can ever be, and the GOP propaganda machine shamelessly exploits that.

The bleeding of white working-class voters from the Democratic Party has been going on for a long time — indeed, the decline started before Ocasio-Cortez and Omar were literally born — and unsurprisingly, the loss of those voters correlates strongly with the rise of right-wing media empires.

Which isn't to say that the audiences for the AM talkers and Fox News, much less the people who breathlessly share every bit of fake news generated by Russian bots they find on Facebook, are merely empty ciphers for this crap. There are very real changes going on in the United States. People of color are an ever-larger share of the population. Kids really are moving away from small towns and suburbs for college and never coming home. There's nothing that Democrats can or should do about that.

But the real problem here is a huge, well-funded machine on hand to tell aging white voters in rural and suburban areas that their resentment of these changes is justified, they are the real victims here, and they are right to be hiding in their homes, too afraid of the larger world to bother to get to know it.

Democrats can try to run away from the culture war all they like, but it won't work. It won't stop the two changes driving all of this white resentment. More importantly, it certainly won't stop the relentless churn of lies generated by Republican propagandists feeding people's worst instincts. Unfortunately, the only real way to deal with this culture war is to win it. Only by making a forceful case for progressive values and taking right-wing nonsense head-on is there any hope of defanging it.

We saw this most recently in Virginia, where a GOP hoax about "critical race theory" took over the gubernatorial race, helping GOP candidate Glenn Youngkin defeat McAuliffe. "Critical race theory," at least how Republicans use it, is just a nonsense scare term. But with only a little digging, it was easy to discover that the right-wing agenda underneath all the hype — removing all negative portrayals of slavery and Jim Crow from public schools — is utterly indefensible. Sure enough, once liberals in the state finally started to push back against the book burning posse, the right lost the argument and the left won. But by then, it was too late to save McAuliffe's campaign.

Looking further back, we saw the same thing with the debate over same-sex marriage. Republicans leveraged lies about "threats to traditional marriage" for years as a wedge issue against Democrats. But when Democrats stopped running from the issue and instead decided to fight back — and win — they defanged it completely. Now most Americans support same-sex marriage and Republicans basically gave up talking about it.

Bashing progressives and telling them to shut up is always a temptation, not because it works, but because it feels easy. It's certainly easier to tell progressives to shut up than, say, pass the Build Back Better plan so Democrats have something to run on, other than a bipartisan roads-and-bridges bill that Republicans can also take credit for. And it's a whole lot easier to tell progressives to shut up than it is to build up the kind of media empire that could compete effectively with right-wing propaganda.

But just because it's easy doesn't mean it's effective. Time spent on pursuing easy-but-useless strategies instead of rolling up sleeves and starting in on the harder-but-more-effective solutions is just time wasted.

---

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/louisiana-s-kennedy-dabbles-modern-day-mccarthyism-n1284201

no lnx

louisiana's Kennedy dabbles in modern-day McCarthyism

If Sen. John Kennedy's line of questioning against Saule Omarova sounded familiar, it's probably because it echoed Joe McCarthy's tactics.

Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., speaks during the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.Patrick Semansky / Pool via AP

Nov. 19, 2021, 6:27 AM PST

By Steve Benen

Senate fights over the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency are not especially common, but the dispute over Saule Omarova's nomination is proving to be unusual.

At face value, Omarova's story reads like a classic American story. She was born in Kazakhstan, before the collapse of the Soviet Union. She immigrated to the United States, studied law and business, became an American citizen, took on a role in the Bush administration's Treasury Department, and ultimately became a law professor at Cornell University. see WITH pod]

President Joe Biden nominated her for a position in which she'd be responsible for regulating bank assets — she specializes in financial regulation — and yesterday, Omarova's nomination arrived at the Senate Finance Committee for a confirmation hearing.

Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana apparently thought it'd be entertaining to take aim at her personal background, starting with this question: "You used to be a member of a group called the Young Communists, didn't you?" The Washington Post took it from there:

But this isn't where Kennedy was headed. Instead, he spent his designated time suggesting that Omarova was a communist sympathizer, beginning with that loaded question. Omarova indicated that she wasn't sure what group he was referring to, a bit of caution that Kennedy wasn't interested in. Kennedy, reading from handwritten notes, identified the group by name: "the Leninist Communist Young Union of the Russian Federation," also known as the Komsomol.

:{:{}:

As a child in a USSR country, Omarova's participation in Komsomol was not optional. The professor patiently tried to explain this to the Republican senator, who didn't seem overly concerned about the relevant details.

:{:{}:

"I don't mean any disrespect — I don't know whether to call you professor or comrade," Kennedy said.

Of course, why would anyone find such nonsense disrespectful?

As part of the line of questioning, the Louisiana Republican sought proof that Omarova "resigned" from the school program as a child. She explained that participants didn't have to formally quit the group, since they simply "grow out of it with age."

Kennedy, either confused or willfully ignorant, wasn't satisfied, seeking some kind of letter of resignation. No such letter existed, because the question didn't make sense.

The Post's analysis added, "It's safe to assume that Kennedy, who attended Oxford University during the Cold War, is aware that Soviet youth were conscripted into party organizations and that socialist views are not communist ones. But he is a politician representing a deep-red state, and he clearly understands that it's easier to submarine a presidential nominee using old-school Red scare tactics than it is to challenge her actual belief systems one by one."

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It was notable in large part because contemporary examples of McCarthyism usually aren't this literal. Kennedy was, for all intents and purposes, on the lookout for communists. If that meant unfairly smearing a qualified nominee — who is not, in reality, a communist — so be it.]

"My family suffered under the communist regime. I grew up without knowing half of my family. My grandmother herself escaped death twice under the Stalin regime," Omarova explained. "This is what's seared in my mind. That's who I am. I remember that history. I came to this country. I'm proud to be an American, and this is why I'm here today, senator. I'm here today because I'm ready for public service."

It was a good answer to a bad question.

To be sure, Omarova's confirmation will be difficult for reasons that have nothing to do with her family history or experiences as a child in Kazakhstan. Some moderate Senate Democrats have expressed reservations about her nomination because of her opposition to a financial deregulation bill several years ago. Despite her qualifications, experience, and expertise, it's unfortunately easy to imagine her nomination coming up short in the evenly divided Senate.

But that doesn't make Kennedy's display and Joe-McCarthy-like tactics any less offensive.

And yet, visitors to the Louisiana Republican's website this morning were greeted with one prominent headline, splashed across the homepage near the top: "Kennedy questions Biden nominee on membership in communist organization."

It was cheap and ugly — and for Kennedy, a source of pride.

---

precursor to midterms

An absolute frenzy': Columnist explains how the GOP is using a Virginia race to road-test ‘fake outrage’

Alex Henderson

October 28, 2021

In Virginia's 2021 gubernatorial race — which will be decided on Tuesday, November 2 — Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin has been aggressively campaigning against "critical race theory." And it may...

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aldous p kos no lnx

'War on Christmas' manufactured early this year with hyperventilating reaction to Fauci comments

Aldous Pennyfarthing and Daily Kos October 10, 2021

The War on Christmas comes earlier every year. Sadly, I fear it's become far too commercialized and has totally lost the spirit of the first War on Christmas, which was all about wholesome, time-tested traditions, like driving a vicious wedge between Americans based on religious belief and preference. You know, as God intended.

Journalist and tweeter extraordinaire Aaron Rupar has collected some of Fox News' opening salvos in this year's War on Christmas, and—oh, guess what!—they're totally dishonest about what's really happening. It's almost as if they're bringing this up just to rile Christians, who are so monomaniacally devoted to their worldview they think Jesus walks on water or something.

But before we watch them blow holiday rum balls out of their nostrils in a performative, minotaur-like rage, let's take a look at what Dr. Anthony Fauci actually said on CBS' Face the Nation on Sunday to kick off this year's phony fight against the "socialism rules, Yule drools" crowd.

Anthony Fauci says on CBS Face the Nation that it’s “too soon to tell” if Americans will be able to gather for Chri… https://t.co/e1QV8xlpQp

— Marie Oakes (@Marie Oakes) 1633274616.0

MARGARET BRENNAN: "Do you think we can gather for Christmas, or is it just too soon to tell?"

FAUCI: "You know, Margaret, it's just too soon to tell. We've just got to concentrate on continuing to get those numbers down and not try to jump ahead by weeks or months and say what we're going to do at a particular time. Let's focus like a laser on continuing to get those cases down, and we can do it by people getting vaccinated ..."

Okay, well, it's nice to know Americans are still No. 1 in the world when it comes to manufacturing outrage, because Fox took that reasonable, measured answer to a specific question about Christmas and ran naked out into the street with it. Enjoy:

(Fauci was specifically asked about Christmas) https://t.co/j4faDCpy1y

— Aaron Rupar (@Aaron Rupar) 1633549377.0

put words in Fauci's mouth, basically fabricating a quote 2. get very mad about fake Fauci quote 3. cite how m… https://t.co/3cr1DdPcby

— Aaron Rupar (@Aaron Rupar) 1633549888.0

(Fauci never called for the cancelation of Christmas) https://t.co/4bYZvEGnWz

— Aaron Rupar (@Aaron Rupar) 1633550431.0

Okay, let me explain it to these folks like they're kindergarteners. If you eat your spinach, you get dessert. And if enough Americans take the vaccine, all this awful stuff will be over before you know it. And then Dr. Fauci—who, to be clear, isn't ordering anyone to stay home on Christmas Day—will fade back into obscurity, which I can only imagine is exactly where he'd like to be.

Unfortunately, Fox News is at the vanguard of our country's crusade to kill more and more humans, so the most straightforward and most workable solution to our nearly two-year-long collective nightmare is a nonstarter. Instead, they'll just scream some nonsense about Dr. Anthony Fauci wanting to strangle the baby Jesus in his crib.

I'm certain God would approve. He's all about gifts and grifts, after all. Preserving and honoring human life? Not so much, it appears.

---

gOPers fake outrage over Kamala Harris visiting the border after demanding she visit the border

Meaghan Ellis

June 24, 2021

For months, Republican leaders and right-wing conservatives have been calling for Vice President Kamala Harris (D) to travel to the southern U.S. border.

Now, Harris has announced her plan to take the trip...

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/right-wing-media-distort-sen-schumers-remarks-erase-very-real-threat-anti-abortion

Following comments from Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) regarding an upcoming Supreme Court decision on abortion rights, right-wing media rushed to paint abortion rights advocates as dangerous while ignoring the very real threat of anti-abortion violence -- and right-wing media’s own role in stoking it.

On March 4, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in June Medical Services v. Russo, a case about a law in Louisiana that requires abortion providers to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. During an abortion rights rally in front of the Supreme Court in support of overturning the law, Schumer, “I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

Schumer’s comments called out President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court appointees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh for potentially rolling back reproductive rights. After right-wing media and conservative figures -- including Chief Justice John Roberts -- condemned Schumer’s remarks as “threats” against the two justices, the Senate minority leader clarified that he was talking about “political consequences” and not referring to acts of violence. Schumer explained that Republicans were “busy manufacturing outrage over these comments” and didn’t actually believe their claims against him.

Following Schumer’s initial comments, however, some in right-wing media took the opportunity to dishonestly condemn abortion rights advocates as violent, saying Schumer was speaking in front of a “mob” and “sending a dog whistle to crazies out there.” Such reactions served as another attempt by right-wing media to paint Democrats and abortion rights advocates as “extreme” on abortion and ignored their own role in perpetuating anti-abortion violence.

Here are right-wing media’s nonsensical reactions to Schumer’s comments:

On Fox & Friends, Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich said, “Look, he was in front of a crowd. They were fanatically committed to the maximum opportunity to kill children, and they were all revved up, he was revved up, and he got carried away. And what he said was pure demagoguery -- it was totally irresponsible and dangerous."

Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitanoclaimed Schumer was trying to show that the justices could be “intimidated by a mob outside of the courthouse” and the senator “might actually be sending a dog whistle to crazies out there.”

Kristan Hawkins, president of the anti-abortion Students for Life of America and Fox News guest:

Fox & Friendsalso allowed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) a platform to falsely assert that Schumer’s comments were because he “wants the Supreme Court to uphold unlimited abortion on demand in every circumstance with no limitations whatsoever.” According to Cruz, “Where Senate Democrats are right now, they are so angry that they're willing to try to get what they want through threats and through really naked intimidation.”

Washington Examinercontributor Kimberly Ross:

Conservative radio host and former National Rifle Association spokesperson Dana Loesch told Fox & Friends that Schumer “focused the rage of the mob” against the two justices. She also said that “this is irresponsible, it’s reckless, it’s dangerous, and I think that they’ve seen the consequences of their rhetoric before,” referencing the 2017 attack on the Republican congressional baseball team.

BlazeTV’s Allie Beth Stuckey:

On America’s Newsroom, Fox News guest anchor Julie Banderas and contributor Andy McCarthy both called the rally of abortion rights advocates a “mob,” with McCarthy claiming that “the mob is out there, and Schumer is agitating them because it works, that's the reason they do it.”

Townhall’s Guy Benson:

On Hannity, Fox News’ Gregg Jarrett said Schumer’s comments are “especially dangerous, as the chief justice pointed out, because it's in front of a crowd that's already angry and enraged in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. It could easily and tragically be misinterpreted by some, triggering or provoking or encouraging violence.”

The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh:

Conservative author and Trump pardon recipient Dinesh D'Souza asserted on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle that Schumer’s remarks demonstrated “how deranged our politics, particularly around the pro-life issue, have become.” D’Souza dismissed the Louisiana law at issue in June v. Russo, saying it is “a very moderate law,” and “if that causes Schumer to go into such a paroxysm of rage, you can just imagine the craziness that we’re in for as the court begins to shift and as landmark decisions do come into question,” referring to the court’s potential to undermine or overturn Roe v. Wade.

Right-wing media are ignoring the reality of anti-abortion violence -- and their role in perpetuating it

Right-wing media’s reactions to Schumer’s comments ignore the very real and ongoing threat of anti-abortion violence in the United States and right-wing media’s role in stoking it.

Eleven people have died as a result of anti-abortion violence in the U.S. since 1993. Numerous others have been injured, and still more have found themselves and even their families targeted with personalized harassment from abortion opponents. And the trend has intensified in recent years, showing little sign of abating. In May 2019, the National Abortion Federation (NAF) released a report that analyzed violence, intimidation, and harassment of abortion providers from the previous year. According to the report, NAF abortion providers and clinics encountered 21,252 incidents of hate emails and internet harassment, 1,135 incidents of trespassing, and 1,388 harassing calls or hate mail in 2018. Abortion providers also told NAF that they received 57 threats of harm or death threats and were subjected to 15 cases of assault and battery that year.

Some right-wing media outlets have also helped fan the flames of resentment against abortion providers, patients, and clinics. In 2009, an anti-abortion extremist murdered abortion provider Dr. George Tiller while he was attending church with his family. Before Tiller's assassination, former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly had openly bullied Tiller on his program numerous times. According to Rolling Stone, “O’Reilly had waged an unflagging war against Tiller that did just about everything short of urging his followers to murder him.” O’Reilly repeatedly called the doctor “Tiller the baby killer” and said there was a “special place in hell for this guy.” At one point, O’Reilly said, “And if I could get my hands on Tiller – well, you know. Can't be vigilantes. Can't do that. It's just a figure of speech. But despicable? Oh, my God. Oh, it doesn't get worse. Does it get worse? No." After Tiller’s assassination, O’Reilly claimed he only “reported accurately” on Tiller and wasn’t responsible for the provider’s murder.

In 2015, an anti-abortion extremist who killed three and injured nine at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood reportedly offered the phrase “no more baby parts” as an explanation for his actions. His comment seemingly referred to an oft-repeated right-wing media talking point based on deceptive undercover videos from the anti-abortion group Center for Medical Progress. The New Republic reported on the admitted shooter’s penchant for right-wing media such as Fox News and Infowars, saying it shaped his paranoid and conspiratorial views about abortion and Planned Parenthood and may have influenced his actions.

Right-wing media have also amplified sensationalized anti-abortion rhetoric and misinformation. In 2019, Fox News aggressively pushed the malicious lie that Democratic support for abortion access amounted to “infanticide.” A Media Matters study of how abortion is discussed on prime-time cable news programs explained that the network fueled the right-wing media talking point by relentlessly echoing this inaccurate claim.

Why is this really happening?

Rather than expressing legitimate concerns about pro-choice violence -- itself an “absurd lie,” as abortion clinic escort Lauren Rankin wrote for New York magazine -- right-wing media’s outrage over Schumer’s comments serves only as dishonest political fodder for the 2020 election cycle. Once again, right-wing media have latched onto a non-story to bash Democratic support for abortion as “extreme” and to demonize those that advocate for abortion access. Indeed, right-wing media and abortion opponents already harassed and attempted to stigmatize some of the speakers from the rally on social media. Rather than pointing fingers, right-wing media should examine the power and danger of their own rhetoric on abortion.

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felt sorry for him for a hot minute bc thot he was bumbler in over his head, but now just a dick:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/trump-supporter-carter-page-is-calling-for-reparations-to-go-to-conservatives-people-do-have-to-pay-for-this

no lnx

Trump supporter is ‘calling for reparations’ — to go to conservatives: ‘People do have to pay for this’

Written by Bob Brigham / Raw Story March 6, 2020

Former Donald Trump campaign advisor Carter Page called for reparations on Fox News, but not the kind generally discussed.

There is a movement in America to provide reparations to the descendants of slaves, as their family wealth remains lower due to the theft of their labor.

But Carter Page suggested a different kind of reparations during an interview with Sean Hannity.

“Sean, it has just done so much damage to so many individuals. And yes, I have some initial legal action going right now, but I also am calling for reparations for all the other innocent Americans whose lives were put at risk, you know, like you were just talking about Mr. Schumer — all of these lies and these threatening statements have just caused so much damage for so many people,” Page said.

Conservatives have complained about Schumer’s comments that Justice Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh will be held to account if they rule against abortion rights.

“People do have to pay for this terrible assault on our democracy,” Page concluded.

Acyn Torabi

@Acyn

Carter Page calls for reparations for “all the other innocent Americans whose lives were put at risk”

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an 1219

Bill Barr attacks FBI for ‘bad faith’ probe of Trump campaign in stunning interview

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