long game big picture

3/19 this is evil rw vs strategy left legit

do i need another generic node for short v long range thinking (non-political strat?) // me v we?

AHA CONST AMEND IS LONG TERM BIG PICTURE

SEE MINORITY RULE GERRY TEXAS 7 25 VOTER SUPPRESS DIRTY TRICKS

koch dad JBS --> libtard movement --> anti-gubmint --> trump --> coup

ROBERT REICH VID? RECENTLY SAID LEFT NEEDS LONG TERM PLAN?

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an 2 26

A stark report from one of the main independent European think tanks says there is no going back to any sort of pre-MAGA America, and warns that even after the Trump years, unless drastic action is taken, the “core fascist” political beliefs of the MAGA movement won’t quickly disappear.

“By the 2030s, the vulgarity, corruption, buffoonery, cult-like loyalty to Donald Trump and gratuitous cruelty of this regime may fade into history,” writes Lincoln Mitchell for the Institute for International and Strategic Affairs (IRIS). “As these most visible aspects of MAGA disappear many will choose to believe that the country has been reunified, but the core fascist political beliefs of the MAGA movement are unlikely to fade away so quickly.”

“As the Trump regime continues to sink into fascism and corruption, it is increasingly evident that the US will be forever changed by this era,” he continues. “If the US emerges from the Trump years as a functioning and cohesive, just in the legal sense, country, something that cannot be easily assumed, it will look very different than it did before Trump announced his candidacy in June of 2015 and almost immediately became the dominant figure in American political life.”

Mitchell, a political analyst, essayist, and lecturer at Columbia University, points to other times of crisis in American history, such as the Civil War or the 1960s and 1970s, and warns against those who “say that if we survived that, we can survive this.”

“That view cannot be ignored, but if we take it seriously, we must push back on the idea that the US simply survived those crises,” he writes. “The social movements that led to greater racial equality and expansions of rights for women, people of color, LGBT people and others-and the backlashes to all those movements that soon followed-still drive much of our political life and political conflicts.”

He says that even if, post-Trump, “the MAGA fervor cools a little,” it will be possible for Americans to reform the political system just enough to say to themselves that the fascist MAGA threat has passed — but they may be fooling themselves. The issues that spawned the MAGA movement will still be “central to our political life.”

Mitchell says it “should be clear” to all that now, more than a decade after Trump launched the MAGA movement, “there is no going back.”

He suggests that the question Americans need to answer is whether they want to return to “ineffective center-left administrations” or “fascist or fascist adjacent ones.”

Mitchell warns that to defeat MAGA, a few Democratic Party wins at the ballot box will not suffice.

“It will require an earnest rethinking not just of what American democracy can be, but of what the US is. It means accepting that the Constitution is no longer the core document that governs the US, so our political imaginations must not be bound by it.”

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an 1 26

With President Donald Trump suffering low approval ratings in poll after poll, Democratic strategists are felling increasingly optimistic about flipping the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2026 midterms. And Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) Chair Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York) is saying that the U.S. Senate isn't out of reach for Democrats.

But Salon's Chauncey DeVega, in an article published on January 18, warns that Democrats are facing "a coordinated effort by Trump and the anti-democracy right-wing to secure victory before a single ballot has even been counted."

As on Monday, (January 12)," DeVega explains, "the events of January 6, 2021 were a trial run. Then, he 'pressured Republican county election officials, state lawmakers, and members of Congress to find him votthe Washington Post reportedes after he lost his reelection bid. Now, he's seeking to change the rules before ballots are cast.' These strategies include 'challenging long-established democratic norms' and making 'unprecedented demands that Republican state lawmakers redraw congressional districts before the constitutionally required 10-year schedule, the prosecution of political opponents, a push to toughen voter registration rules and attempts to end the use of voting machines and mail ballots.'"

The Trump Administration, according to DeVega, "has installed election deniers and other conspiracists — believers in the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen — in key positions throughout the FBI, the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and other parts of the government."

"In short," DeVega argues, "the wolves are watching the chicken coop….. Republicans and other members of the antidemocracy right-wing have repeatedly used language about the 'quality' of voters and 'voter integrity,' and they have made false allegations of widespread fraud in 'urban areas' to signal their belief that the votes of Black and brown people are not legitimate."

The Salon journalist continues, "The ultimate goal is to create a 21st-Century version of Jim and Jane Crow, where Black and brown people are made into second-class citizens…. If Trump and his MAGA forces and the broader right-wing can execute even some of their plans, the integrity and legitimacy of the country's elections will be further undermined. The result will be what political scientists describe as 'competitive authoritarianism.' In such a pseudo-democracy, the United States would be like Putin’s Russia, where there are elections but a victory by the ruling party is all but assured."

*Chauncey DeVega's full article for Salon is available at this link.

...Trump’s authoritarian chaos machine is running amok. Pro-democracy Americans — and those simply hoping for a return to normalcy — are pinning their hopes on a Democratic victory in November’s midterm elections. But that salvation will not be easy or cheap. Their hopes will face a coordinated effort by Trump and the anti-democracy right-wing to secure victory before a single ballot has even been counted.

As the Washington Post reported on Monday, the events of Jan. 6, 2021, were a trial run. Then, he “pressured Republican county election officials, state lawmakers, and members of Congress to find him votes after he lost his reelection bid. Now, he’s seeking to change the rules before ballots are cast.”

These strategies include “challenging long-established democratic norms” and making “unprecedented demands that Republican state lawmakers redraw congressional districts before the constitutionally required 10-year schedule, the prosecution of political opponents, a push to toughen voter registration rules and attempts to end the use of voting machines and mail ballots.”

The Trump administration has installed election deniers and other conspiracists in key positions throughout the FBI, the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and other parts of the government. In short, the wolves are watching the chicken coop.

Trump expressed regret in a recent interview with the New York Times that he did not send in the National Guard to seize voting machines in the 2020 election, which he has falsely claimed was stolen by Democrats. He has also suggested he could deploy federal law enforcement or the National Guard to Democratic-led cities to monitor elections for so-called fraud, which would be a form of voter intimidation, and is taking steps to systematically dismantle programs designed to protect the integrity of the country’s elections from foreign and other malign actors. His administration has installed election deniers and other conspiracists — believers in the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen — in key positions throughout the FBI, the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and other parts of the government.

In short, the wolves are watching the chicken coop.

The Post’s analysis did not fully account for the administration’svoter suppression and nullification campaigns targeting Black and brown people, young people, students and other likely Democratic voters. Voter suppression efforts in Georgia and other battleground states are estimated to have cost the Democrats millions of votes — and potentially the 2024 election. The right-wing justices on the Supreme Court are also poised to gut the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, which protects the voting rights of racial minorities by ensuring that voting districts are representative and not diluted by gerrymandering. Republicans and other members of the antidemocracy right-wing have repeatedly used language about the “quality” of voters and “voter integrity,” and they have made false allegations of widespread fraud in “urban areas” to signal their belief that the votes of Black and brown people are not legitimate. The ultimate goal is to create a 21st-century version of Jim and Jane Crow, where Black and brown people are made into second-class citizens.

Jon Ossoff bets his 2026 race on protecting ACA subsidies

Trump and his allies have placed election deniers in key local positions onelection boards and in election offices.

Compared to Democrats, centrists and mainstream liberals, the Trumpists and the broader anti-democracy right are revolutionaries who think in decades and centuries — and build the networks, relationships, institutions and resources required to win. Democrats’ lack of vision and adherence to obsolete normal politics is one of the main reasons why they have been so ineffective in resisting the rise of authoritarianism and neofascism under Trump.

Even if Republicans somehow lose the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election, they will still seek to boobytrap the country’s governing institutions.

“This is the big one,” political scientist Barbara F. Walter explained in an essay exploring the dangers of institutional sabotage. “Watch for changes that would constrain a Democratic House even if Democrats win. Last-minute regulations that take years to undo. Executive orders are designed to be irreversible. Budget maneuvers that limit congressional power. Court appointments that lock in a conservative judiciary for decades.”

If Trump and his MAGA forces and the broader right-wing can execute even some of their plans, the integrity and legitimacy of the country’s elections will be further undermined. The result will be what political scientists describe as “competitive authoritarianism.” In such a pseudo-democracy, the United States would be like Putin’s Russia, where there are elections but a victory by the ruling party is all but assured.

As Walter warned, we can’t “assume the midterms will save us. If we’re not actively defending the democratic process right now, we may find there’s nothing left to save come November.”

Trump is a fighter. He does not retreat. Like other autocrats and authoritarians, the weaker his position, the more aggressive he becomes. In an interview with Reuters earlier this week, the president once again suggested canceling the upcoming midterm elections, saying, “It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms… When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

This was the third time this month Trump suggested that elections are unnecessary now that he holds power. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended Trump’s remarks as a “joke,” insisting that “he was speaking facetiously.”

Dictators, autocrats and other malign actors strategically use humor as a type of diminutive to minimize their real intent and to distract the public and media. Trump’s public behavior, such as the plot to nullify the 2020 election and his stated desire to be a dictator, are two of many examples showing how serious his threats to end the midterms really are.

On Thursday, he threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy the military to quell ongoing protests and civil disturbances in Minnesota, a week after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Good, an unarmed United States citizen who was acting as an observer.

The protests and unrest in Minneapolis and other cities were sparked by Good’s killing and a broader pattern of increasingly aggressive and reckless behavior by ICE and other federal law enforcement who are waging Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

If Trump were to invoke the Insurrection Act, voting and elections could be suspended or outright canceled in the blue states and other parts of the country that support the Democratic Party. Under such a scenario, he would take an action — such as ordering ICE to target Democratic-led cities in a very aggressive and provocative manner — that would create widespread protests and unrest. He could then claim that the situation is an emergency and invoke the Insurrection Act, declaring that elections cannot take place in such an environment.

We have a very long year ahead, and the American people and our democracy are going to be greatly tested.

Do we have the stamina and patience? The world will soon find out.

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an 11 25

In Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, political theorist Laura K. Field explains how "under [President Donald] Trump, post-liberal intellectuals have abandoned tradition for radicalism and scholarship for vulgarity," according to a review in The Atlantic.

"For the past decade or more, the intellectual energy in American politics has been on the right," writes George Packer.

"The MAGA ideologues who provide America’s new ruling elite with any claim to having a world view should be understood as offspring of a shared parentage, not unlike the Lovestoneites, Trotskyites, and Shachtmanites of 1930s and ’40s communism," he continues.

"More reactionary than conservative, their political ancestry is in the underground of the American right — Strom Thurmond, Joseph McCarthy, Patrick Buchanan — rather than the forward-looking Reaganite libertarians who dominated the Republican Party for four decades," he adds.

MAGA's modern hero, Packer says, aren't philosophers or even a Nazi theorist of authoritarianism.

"They share a revulsion toward liberalism and pluralism, which, they believe, have corroded the moral and spiritual fiber of America by accommodating false ideologies and harmful groups. Their modern hero is Viktor Orbán," he writes, of the authoritarian Hungarian president.

Field's book explains how this affects American democracy today.

"The American experiment in egalitarian, multiethnic democracy fills these intellectuals with anxiety, if not loathing," Packer writes.

"As Field notes, they often express undisguised hostility toward women, sexual minorities, the 'woke Marxists' of the left, and the cultural elites of the 'soulless managerial class,'" he explains.

The mood of MAGA intellectuals, Packer notes, is "overwhelmingly negative."

“The movement is, in many respects, untethered from the ordinary decency and common sense that characterize America at its idealistic best, and from the pluralistic reality of the country as it exists today," Fields says.

Packer says that Field's "background perfectly positions her to deliver this lively, devastating taxonomy and critique of MAGA’s ideologues."

"She was originally trained in Straussian scholarship — a reading of classical political thought that criticizes the modern turn away from the sources of moral authority toward liberalism and, in Strauss’s view, nihilism," he explains.

Packer notes that "anti-liberal intellectuals made a Faustian bet that this coarse real-estate developer and reality-TV star would be the vehicle for realizing the Good, the Beautiful, and the True."

"Trump was the strongman brought to bring liberalism to heel,” Field writes.

Packer says that "in attaching themselves to MAGA, they did less to influence the new regime than Trump did to corrupt them."

"The MAGA right has filled a vacuum created by popular disenchantment with globalization, neoliberal economics, mass immigration, political corruption, technological power and democracy itself," Packer adds.

There's one thing Field doesn't have the ability to explain in her book, Packer writes.

"A question that Field touches on but never analyzes in depth is why liberal minds haven’t produced an equally potent answer" to the MAGA right.

"Liberals are in the necessary but untenable position of having to defend democracy from right-wing assault in an age of broad discontent," Packer explains.

"They need their own theorists and influencers, their own institutes and manifestos, to undertake the historic task of not only reversing America’s self-destruction, but showing the next generation why liberal democracy offers the best chance for a good life," he concludes.

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AN 7 25

Six years after Trump demanded Geogia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “find” him enough votes to win in 2020, Republicans are still trying to find him votes.

“Now, he’s calling on Texas Republicans to find five congressional seats — before a single vote is cast in the 2026 midterms. And the GOP is answering that call,” said MSNBC co-host Symone Sanders Townsend.

Townsend referenced Texas Republicans proposing a heavily gerrymandered congressional map this week that gives Republicans control of 30 out of 38 House seats, despite 42 percent of the state voting for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in 2024.

If enacted, Townsend said the Republican map would “erase Democratic power in one of the most diverse states in the nation.”

IFrame Content

“We’ve seen this kind of maneuver before,” said Townsend. “After the 2010 tea party wave election, Republicans launched a nationwide campaign called the Redistricting Majority Project (REDMAP) to win control of state legislatures ahead of the 2011 redistricting cycle. That effort paid off. Republicans gerrymandered themselves into durable congressional majorities in states like North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin. A decade later, we’re still living with the consequences.”

The map, she said, “slices up Black and Latino communities,” particularly in urban centers like Dallas and Houston and gives an advantage to a white population that only comprises about 40 percent of the state’s population. The Texas Tribune reportsat least 54 percent of lawmakers were white in 2023, and half are white men.

“Now, Trump is attempting a mid-decade REDMAP 2.0 in Texas, a state that already had one of the most gerrymandered congressional maps in the country and has a long history of using racial gerrymandering to suppress voters of color,” Townsend said.

This is part of a broader Republican Party strategy, said Townsend, which targets not only congressional maps but also state legislative lines.

“And that matters, because America’s policy doesn’t begin in Washington,” she said. “It starts in state capitols. Bathroom bills. Book bans. Voter roll purgers. Attacks on trans children. These policies are born in Republican-controlled legislatures and then bubble up to the national level.”

She added that Republicans know this, and "have been playing the long game," unlike Democrats

The public is already fighting back with hundreds of protestors showing up at redistricting hearings in Texas this week, but Townsend said Democrats need to get serious about investing in and flipping state seats or they could “lose a fair shot at the House not just in 2026, but until 2032. A full decade of minority rule.”

Read the full MSNBC report at this link.

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rOBT r AN 12 24

Today we don’t know if the United States government will shut down tomorrow because, first, Elon Musk followed by his co-president Donald Trump, persuaded House Republicans to vote against a compromise bill, and then, last night, Republicans couldn’t summon enough votes for a stripped-down continuing resolution because Trump insisted that it contain a measure lifting the debt ceiling.

This is not governing. Trump and the Republicans are not a governing party.

What’s the back story to all this? It’s the oligarchy that put Trump into the presidency.

A half-century ago, when America had a large and growing middle class, those on the “left” wanted stronger social safety nets and more public investment in schools, roads, and research. Those on the “right” sought greater reliance on the free market.

But as power and wealth have moved to the top, everyone else — whether on the old right or the old left — has become disempowered and less secure.

Today the great divide is not between left and right. It’s between democracy and oligarchy.

The word “oligarchy” comes from the Greek words meaning rule (arche) by the few (oligos). It refers to a government of and by a few exceedingly rich people or families who control the major institutions of society — and therefore have most power over other peoples’ lives.

So far, Trump has picked 13 billionaires for his administration. It’s the wealthiest in history, including the richest person in the world. They and Trump are part of the American oligarchy, even though Trump campaigned on being the “voice” of the working class.

America has experienced oligarchy twice before. Many of the men who founded America were slaveholding white oligarchs. At that time, the new nation did not have much of a middle class. Most white people were farmers, indentured servants, farm hands, traders, day laborers, and artisans. A fifth of the American population was Black, almost all of them enslaved.

A century later a new American oligarchy emerged comprised of men who amassed fortunes through their railroad, steel, oil, and financial empires — men such as J. Pierpont Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Andrew Mellon. It was called the Gilded Age.

They ushered the nation into an industrial revolution that vastly expanded economic output. But they also corrupted government, brutally suppressed wages, generated unprecedented levels of inequality and urban poverty, pillaged rivals, shut down competitors, and made out like bandits — which is why they earned the sobriquet “robber barons.”

World War I and the Great Depression of the 1930s eroded most of the robber barons’ wealth, and much of their power was eliminated with the elections of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.

America demanded fundamental reforms — a progressive income tax, corporate taxes, estate taxes, limits on the political power of large corporations, antitrust laws, laws enabling workers to form unions and requiring that employers negotiate with them, Social Security, the forty-hour workweek, unemployment insurance, civil rights and voting rights, and Medicare.

For the next half-century, the gains from growth were more widely shared and democracy became more responsive to the needs and aspirations of average Americans. During these years America created the largest middle class the world had ever seen.

There was still much to do: wider economic opportunities for Black people, Latinos, and women, protection of the environment. Yet by almost every measure the nation was making progress.

Starting around 1980, a third American oligarchy emerged.

Since then, the median wage of the bottom 90 percent has stagnated. The share of the nation’s wealth owned by the richest 400 Americans has quadrupled (from less than 1 percent to 3.5 percent) while the share owned by the entire bottom half of America has dropped to 1.3 percent, according to an analysis by my Berkeley colleagues Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman.

The richest 1 percent of Americans now has more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined.

The only other country with similarly high levels of wealth concentration is Russia, another oligarchy.

All this has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the political power of the super-wealthy and an equally dramatic decline in the political influence of everyone else.

While the Biden administration sought to realign America with its ideals, it did not and could not accomplish nearly enough. Trump’s lies and demagoguery exploited the anger and frustration of much of America — creating the false impression he was a tribune of the working class and an anti-establishment hero — thereby allowing the oligarchy to triumph.

In 2022, Elon Musk spent $44 billion to buy Twitter and turn it into his own personal political megaphone. Then, in 2024, he spent $277 million to get Trump elected, also using Twitter (now X) to amplify pro-Trump, anti-Harris messages.

These were good investments for Musk. Since Election Day, Musk’s fortune has increased by $170 billion. That’s because investors in Tesla and SpaceX have pushed their value into the stratosphere.

Trump has put Musk (and another billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy) in charge of gutting government services in the name of “efficiency.” Musk’s investors assume that Musk will eliminate the health, safety, labor, and environmental regulations that have limited the profits of Musk-owned corporations, and that Trump will put more government money into SpaceX and xAI (Musk’s artificial intelligence company).

Unlike income or wealth, power is a zero-sum game. The more of it at the top, the less of it anywhere else.

The power shift across America is related to a tsunami of big money into politics. Corporate lobbying has soared. The voices of average people have been drowned out.

The American oligarchy is back, with a vengeance.

Not all wealthy people are culpable, of course. The abuse is occurring at the nexus of wealth and power, where those with great wealth use it to gain power and then utilize that power to accumulate more wealth. Today’s robber barons include Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Charles Koch, Jeff Yass, Ken Griffin, and Rupert Murdoch.

This is how oligarchy destroys democracy. As oligarchs fill the coffers of political candidates and deploy platoons of lobbyists and public relations flaks, they buy off democracy. Oligarchs know that politicians won’t bite the hands that feed them.

As long as they control the purse strings, there will be no meaningful response to the failure of most people’s paychecks to rise, nor to climate change, nor racism, nor the soaring costs of health insurance, pharmaceuticals, college, and housing, because those are not the main concerns of the oligarchy.

The oligarchs want lower taxes, which is what Trump, Musk, and other oligarchs are planning — an extension of the 2017 Trump tax cut, with an estimated price tag of at least $5 trillion.

They want no antitrust enforcement to puncture the power of their giant corporations. Instead, their corporations will grow larger, able to charge consumers even more. Trump is replacing Lina Khan, the trustbusting chair of the Federal Trade Commission, with a Trump crony.

There will be no meaningful constraint on Wall Street’s dangerous gambling addiction. The gambling will only increase.

Wall Street is already celebrating Trump’s victory. The stock market has reached new heights. But the stock market is inconsequential for most people, because the richest 1 percent own over half of all shares of stock owned by Americans while the richest 10 percent own over 90 percent.

There will be no limits to CEO pay. Wall Street hedge fund and private equity managers will also rake in billions more. Government will dole out even more corporate subsidies, bailouts, and loan guarantees while eliminating protections for consumers, workers, and the environment.

It will become a government for, of, and by the oligarchy.

The biggest divide in America today is not between “right” and “left,” or between Republicans and Democrats. It’s between democracy and oligarchy. The old labels — “right” and “left” — prevent most people from noticing they’re being shafted.

The propagandists and demagogues who protect the oligarchy stoke racial and ethnic resentments — describing human beings as illegal aliens, fueling hatred of immigrants, and spreading fears of communists and socialists.

This strategy gives the oligarchy freer rein: It distracts Americans from how the oligarchy is looting the nation, buying off politicians, and silencing critics. It causes Americans to hate each other so we don’t look upward and see where the wealth and power have really gone.

The way to overcome oligarchy is for the rest of us to join together and win America back, as we did in response to the oligarchy that dominated America’s last Gilded Age.

This will require a multiracial, multiethnic coalition of working-class, poor, and middle-class Americans fightingfordemocracy and againstconcentrated power and privilege.

It will require that the Democratic Party, or a new third party, tell the truth to the American people: that the major reason most peoples’ wages have gone nowhere and their jobs are less secure, why most families have to live paycheck to paycheck, why CEO pay has soared to 300 times the pay of the typical worker, and why billionaires are about to run our government, is because the market has been rigged against average working people by the oligarchy.

The agenda ahead is simply stated but it will not be easy to implement: We must get big money out of our politics. End corporate welfare and crony capitalism. Bust up monopolies. Stop voter suppression.

We must strengthen labor unions, give workers a stronger voice in their workplaces, create more employee-owned corporations, encourage worker cooperatives, fund and grow more state and local public banks, and develop other institutions of economic democracy.

This agenda is neither “right” nor “left.” It is the bedrock for everything else America must do.

It may seem an odd time in our history to suggest such reforms, but this is the best time. Trump and his oligarchy will inevitably overreach. The lesson from the last Gilded Age is that when the corruption and ensuing hardship become so blatant that they offend the values of the majority of Americans, the majority will rise up and demand real, systemic change.

It’s only a matter of time. A government shutdown that hurts average people, engineered by the richest person in the world, might just hasten it.

NOW READ:**Elon Musk shows Mike Johnson who's boss**

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no lnx

alternet-

New lessons for progressives — from the far right

Thom Hartmann December 24, 2024

Recently, I mentioned that I’d be sharing more specifics on how to reform the Democratic Party and seize control of our country back from the racist, misogynist MAGAs. This is the first article along those lines.

Progressives shouldn’t just be fighting the GOP: we should be learning from them.

No, we shouldn’t be learning from their bizarro economics; we shouldn't be discovering their selfish morality, misogyny, or racism; or selling ourselves out to the world’s richest man.

But there is a vital lesson progressives must learn, which is how the far right took control of the Republican Party over a decade ago and forced the entire Conservative establishment to lurch so far to the Right that they’ve even dumped people like Liz Cheney and George W. Bush.

If progressives hope to have any shot at influencing today’s Democratic Party and kicking out the corporate sellout Democrats and replacing them with real-deal progressives, then we need to get to work right now to do exactly what the Tea Party did a decade and a half ago to take power.

And it starts in our own backyards.

Let me introduce you to the now-defunct Concord Project, a right-wing organization that, a decade ago, was in charge of helping the Tea Party take over the GOP.

The Concord Project expanded their get out the vote strategy beyond just traditional phone banking, canvassing, and putting up “vote Republican” signs. Instead, they decided to infiltrate local politics by encouraging Tea Partiers and conservatives more generally to become “Precinct Committee Members.”

Here’s their pitch in their own words from one of their Obama-era YouTube training videos:

“What’s the most powerful political office in the world? It is not the President of the United States. It’s Precinct Committeeman.”

So why is a Precinct Committeeman (or person) so important?

“First, because precinct committeemen and only precinct committeemen get to elect the leaders of the political parties, if you want to elect the leadership of one of the two major political parties in this country, then you have to become a precinct committeeman.”

As in the oldest and most basic governing reality in a republic: political power flows up from the bottom.

It starts with Precinct Committeemen and women — people who are either appointed or win local elections with very few votes at stake, in some cases only 10 or 20 votes — to gain positions that pretty much anyone can hold but which wield enormous power.

It’s Precinct Committee Persons who elect district, county, and state party officials and delegates, who choose primary nominees that then go on to hold elected office, and who help draft a party's platform.

They’re also generally the first people who elected officials meet with when they come back into the district. And those officials listen carefully to what Precinct Committee persons have to say.

So, the Concord folks told their people, if far right Tea Partiers moved in and took over Precinct Committee seats then they’d also be able to nominate a slew of Tea Partiers to hold higher offices within the Republican Party and for primaries.

And those Tea Party Republican Party primary candidates would then be winnowed down in the primary to one Tea Party Republican to run against the Democrat in the general election. This way, Tea Partiers would end up dominating the GOP.

That was their pitch: take over the party from the inside, from the bottom up. And it worked.

Control the primaries — as the Precinct Committee Members do — and you control the ultimate candidate, the election, and ultimately the nation, as we’ve seen repeatedly since the Tea Party era.

This is from a video they posted in January of 2010, with the same Concord Project Representative encouraging people in the Tea Party to do exactly what I just described:

“This video is for all the people out there in the Tea Party movement, the 9/12ers, just good decent people who are really fearful of what’s going on in the country and want to do something to fix things and they’re not sure what to do. Well, I’ve got a solution for you. The best way to ensure that conservatives win that all-important primary election is to become a real ball player in the ball game of politics. And that ball game is called party politics.

“And this is a secret, they don’t want the party establishments, any incumbents don’t want you to know about this and that’s why I’m telling you about it. Only precinct committeemen get to vote for, to elect party leaders. Only precinct committeemen can vote to endorse candidates.”

Again, that was in 2010, 11 months before the elections.

In 2008, half of the Republican Party’s Precinct Committeemen positions around the country were vacant.

But by 2011, motivated by the efforts of people like the Concord Project, the Tea Party (which has now mostly morphed into MAGA) had swept in to fill the gaps: They’d filled up the Republican Party.

And we saw the results of the Precinct Committee takeover first in 2012 and most recently last month: the GOP is now being driven largely from the bottom up by activists who’ve taken over the party and are also running for school boards and other local offices.

In 2012, after this campaign to get movement conservatives into the GOP, Tea Party candidates got onto nearly every ballot around the country and picked up 87 new seats in the US House of Representatives and 9 new seats in the Senate.

And even though the Tea Party didn’t then control a majority within the GOP in Congress like MAGA does now, they did control the Republican Party’s platform because they had control of the Precinct Committees.

Progressives need to do the same thing, only within the Democratic Party.

The rules about how to become a Precinct Committee Person vary from state to state, so step one is to show up at your local Democratic Party, sign up, and find out who the players are and what the rules are.

Even the names of these positions vary, as former Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper notes on his excellent Substack newsletter Pepperspectives:

“In Cincinnati, we call them ‘precinct executives.’ Elsewhere, they are called ‘committeemen’ or ‘committeewomen.’ In other places, ‘ward chairs.’ Whatever they’re called, they are the basic unit of each city or county party structure in the country.”

If we’ve learned one thing over the last few years, it’s that the Democratic Party shifted to the corporate “center” with Clinton and Obama and its establishment has been highly resistant to adopting real progressive change or elevating genuine progressives (like AOC) to senior/leadership positions.

And as we see right now in Biden’s and Harris’ apparent inability to call out Trump and his parade of horribles, this unwillingness to stand up and fight is leading to an endless stream of Republican victories and the dismantling of programs that progressives fought so hard for over the entire last century.

We have been too often losing these fights, and to win them takes more than union protests in Wisconsin, a women’s march in DC, or voting, although those are all important.

But to really take power, like the Tea Party did in one short year, it will take an infiltration of the Democratic Party itself through claiming Precinct Committee positions, as well as simply showing up regularly at the meetings.

If this year, starting now, we execute the same strategy the Tea Party did when the billionaires funding it first set out to take over the GOP, then we can move the Democratic Party back to its progressive roots and finally see the progressive reforms — and election victories — that we’ve been fighting for.

We have 23 months before the next national elections and your mission is to show up at your local Democratic Party headquarters and begin the infiltration.

Good luck and get started!

NEXT UP: How to turn power over to billionaires who will leave you behind

===

CDV note sys

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/donald-trump-an-american-monster/

quite long]

...Dowd surmises that it never occurred to Donald Trump that a president openly plotting a seditious coup "would be a debilitating, corrosive thing for the country. It was just another way for the Emperor of Chaos to burnish his title." The House Jan. 6 committee's first prime-time hearing, she writes, played out as "a horror story with predatory Proud Boys and a monster at its center that even Mary Shelley could have appreciated":

In his dystopian Inaugural speech, Trump promised to end 'American carnage. 'Instead, he delivered it. Now he needs to be held accountable for his attempted coup — and not just in the court of public opinion.

...But who created this American monster? Donald Trump was not built by a deranged scientist in a secret lab. He is not an orphan, and did not emerge out of nowhere. He was the almost inevitable result of a decades-long assault by the "conservative" movement aimed at ending American democracy (especially multiracial democracy) and replacing it with a pseudo-democratic authoritarian state, perhaps organized under the system political theorist Sheldon Wolin described as "inverted totalitarianism."

As part of that long-term assault, most or all the historic victories of the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement, the gay rights movement, the labor and environmental movements and other struggles for human dignity and a more just society are being rolled back. If this project succeeds, America's already threadbare social safety net will be virtually eliminated. White Christian fascists and corporate plutocrats will forge a ruling coalition with near-total dominion over American life and society. The separation of church and state, along with the guarantee of free speech and most of the Bill of Rights, will disappear.

There is no longer a "normal" or "traditional" version of the Republican Party for so-called conservatives to return to. Even those conservatives who have disavowed or denounced the Trump movement are implicated in his rise. They are like political Dr. Frankensteins, horrified by what they have created but unable to kill it. Over the course of decades, they painstakingly built the monster and created the blueprint for American fascism.

As Wajahat Ali wrote this week in the Daily Beast, some of Trump's "most prominent enablers" are now trying to distance themselves from the "ongoing, concentrated, right-wing effort to overturn the 2020 election":

Even though most of these ex-Trumpers will fail up in their careers—as is often the case in Washington, D.C. — it's important for the rest of us to recognize them as utterly complicit actors who deserve to wear that MAGA hat on their heads until the end of time….

If you believe that there is a 'team normal' in the modern GOP, then you'll also probably believe that fewer doors and arming teachers will reduce mass gun shootings, banning books will save your child from being transgender, and climate change is a hoax created by China.

Either way, you're not acknowledging that the GOP is now a weaponized cult that no longer produces 'rational' Republicans, but instead caters to the festering, fevered paranoid swamp of dangerous conspiracy theories and white supremacist ideologies. This persistent right-wing disinformation has now radicalized its base, in which many membersbelieve violence is necessary to 'take back' their country. The reality is that Team Normal and Team Crazy both play for the GOP, wear the same uniforms, and, for now, worship the golden calf known as Trump.

Ultimately, Donald Trump is not some type of monstrous Other or outsider. He was not conjured up in some other dimension ruled by Lovecraftian demons, only to descend on America out of the ether to sow destruction, chaos, misery and death.

In reality, Donald Trump — as a man, a symbol and a political leader — and everything he embodies is the product of our society, driven by extreme social inequality, consumerism and greed, unfulfilled dreams, widespread alienation and loneliness, anti-intellectualism, racism and white supremacy, the cult of the spectacle, our fetish for violence and a range of related antisocial and anti-human values and tendencies.

In a recent essay for ScheerPost republished at Salon, Chris Hedges offers a powerful diagnosis of our corrupt and failing American political system, arguing that the House Jan. 6 committee will do nothing to correct it:

The two established wings of the oligarchy, the old Republican Party represented by politicians such as Liz Cheney, one of two Republicans on the committee, and the Bush family, are now united with the Democratic Party elite into one ruling political entity. The ruling parties were already in lockstep for decades on the major issues, including: war, trade deals, austerity, the militarization of police, prisons, government surveillance and assaults on civil liberties. They worked in tandem to pervert and destroy democratic institutions on behalf of the rich and corporations. They desperately work together now to stave off the revolt by enraged and betrayed white working men and women who support Donald Trump and the far right.

There are other systemic failures as well. America's mainstream news media, through both habit and laziness, have approached Donald Trump, and American politics more generally, as a running narrative of "great men" (and, more recently, "great women"), singular figures who are the main characters in an unfolding drama largely independent of history, culture or economic reality.

This partly explains the media's obsession with polling and public opinion, the addiction to horserace coverage and the drive to identify "winners" and "losers" on a daily basis. Of course the mainstream media is also driven by profit, and compelled to shape the news so as not to offend advertisers or alienate the political establishment and other social and cultural elites.

Media practitioners are also trained to avoid moral language when describing domestic politics, although they routinely use such language when discussing foreign affairs, and especially Americans' official enemies. The result is that most mainstream American political journalism remains an exercise in stenography and superficial commentary, almost always bending the knee to such totems as "moderation," "normal politics," "fairness" and "balance," concepts that were likely never helpful or transparent and are now totally inadequate to the task of confronting America's democracy crisis.

Many in the media still refuse to see the Trump movement and the modern Republican Party as destructive revolutionary forces, rather than as traditional political movements with an investment in the existing system. At this point, the media's willful or compulsive refusal to comprehend the nature of the threat has become a pathology. Journalists at mainstream outlets would benefit greatly from reading "The Authoritarian Playbook: A Media Guide," a new report from the nonpartisan nonprofit group Protect Democracy. It offers the following advice:

To the extent that the authoritarian playbook has a central theme, it is that democratic erosion is a process of power concentration and consolidation. While all political actors seek to accumulate power, authoritarians, uniquely, seek to entrench that power and protect it from external checks. Experts generally agree that democracies don't tend to die at the hands of individuals alone. Rather, contemporary attacks on democracy only succeed when they are coordinated, systemic, and undertaken by broad parties or movements.

If Donald Trump the American monster is somehow banished from American political life — through criminal prosecution, advancing age or some other force — another such monster will rapidly appear. In fact, Ron DeSantis and other leading Republican-fascists are eagerly waiting for Trump to leave the stage, and could well turn out to be more competent and more effective than him. Trumpism is a hydra-headed movement, no longer dependent on Trump as an individual: Chop off one of its heads and another will grow.The only long-term solution is to drain the swamp that birthed the monster.

proto-arabella? millionaires ~?

vogel politico says rove dark $ death star is ctr/mirror?

2010 tp wave origin? mirror?! this was ctr to BO win 2008?

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/36841_Page3.html *Rove, GOP secretly plot vast network to reclaim power

By: Mike Allen and Kenneth P. Vogel May 6, 2010

The Republican Party’s best-connected political operatives have quietly built a massive fundraising, organizing and advertising machine based on the model assembled by Democrats early in the decade, and with the same ambitious goal — to recapture Congress and the White House. The new groups could give Republicans and their allies a powerful campaign apparatus separate from the Republican National Committee. Karl Rove, political architect of the Bush presidency, and Ed Gillespie, former Republican Party chairman, are the most prominent forces behind what is, in effect, a network of five overlapping groups, three of which were started in the past few months. The operating assumption of Rove, Gillespie and the other organizers is that despite the historical dominance of Republican fundraising and organizing, the GOP has been outmaneuvered by Democrats and their allies in recent years, andit is time to strike back. “Where they have a chess piece on the board, we need a chess piece on the board,” said Gillespie, who is involved in all five groups in roles ranging from chairman to informal adviser. “Where they have a queen, we shouldn’t have three pawns.” The network, which doesn’t have a name,attempts to replicate the Democracy Alliance, an umbrella group — founded in 2005 and funded by George Sorosand other billionaires — and to borrow tactics from liberal groups established to help Democrats regain power after eight years of the Bush administration. Two organizers of the Republican groups even made pilgrimages earlier this year to pick the brain of John Podesta, the former Clinton White House chief of staff who, in 2003, founded the Center for American Progress and was a major proponent of Democrats developing the kind of infrastructure pioneered by Republicans. Rove, currently on a book tour, has provided “a laying-on of hands” for the groups — as one organizer put it — by encouraging major Republican donors to support them as part of the GOP’s path to revival. “Karl has always said: People call us a vast right-wing conspiracy, but we’re really a half-assed right-wing conspiracy,” he said. “Now, he wants to get more serious.”

While separate, the five entities are so closely related that three share an 11th-floor office near the White House.

The groups are: *American Crossroads * American Crossroads — designed to counter spending by labor and progressive groups, including the AFL-CIO, Service Employees International Unit and MoveOn.org — will focus on voter contact with the potential to move into ground game and turnout efforts. Organized under the tax code as a Section 527 organization, meaning it can spend directly on political activity, it’s set an ambitious budget of $52 million and says it’s already received commitments for $30 million of that.Its president and CEO is former top U.S. Chamber of Commerce executive Steven Law; its political director is veteran GOP operative Carl Forti. The chairman is Mike Duncan, former RNC chairman; the treasurer is Jo Ann Davidson, former RNC co-chairwoman; and the secretary is Jim Dyke, former RNC communications director. To try to avoid undercutting RNC Chairman Michael Steele, who has alienated some givers, Duncan tells prospective donors that the party structure is “an important part of winning” and that he is looking for people who “want to go above and beyond.”

*American Action Network * American Action Network, modeled on the Center for American Progress, will conduct polling in key races, and plans to put up TV advertising since it is allowed to engage in explicit political activity as a group organized under Section 501c(4) of the tax code. Former Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota is the CEO; Fred Malek, a longtime top GOP financier, is chairman; andRob Collins, a former top aide to House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, is president. Board members include former U.S. Sens. George Allen and Mel Martinez and former House Reps. Tom Reynolds, Jim Nussle and Vin Weber.

*American Action Forum * American Action Forum, a policy institute linked to the American Action Network,also will mirror CAP.Coleman is also chairman of this group, which as a501c(3) organization, is prohibited from directly endorsing or opposing candidates. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Congressional Budget Office director and campaign adviser to Sen. John McCain, is the president. Board members includeformer Govs. Jeb Bush of Florida and Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania.

*Resurgent Republic * Resurgent Republic co-founded a year ago by Gillespie and Republican pollster Whit Ayres, says in its official description that it is “modeled on Democracy Corps, which has made important contributions to the public debate from the left and has proven to be a valuable resource for labor unions, environmentalists and liberal congressional leaders.” The group has released a series of polls and offers itself as a message-testing laboratory to help GOP lawmakers develop policies.

*The Republican State Leadership Committee * The Republican State Leadership Committee, which focuses on down-ballot races for statewide and legislative offices, raised $22 million in the last campaign cycle. Gillespie took over as chairman earlier this year. Its goal is to raise at least $50 million to $70 million to influence congressional elections this fall and to road-test an agenda for a future Republican House and, ultimately, a Republican president. Colemanrecalled in an interview that he admired the left’s financial prowess so much that until recently, he gave potential donors copies of “The Argument,” a book by Matt Bai that chronicles progressives’ rising financial power. “This is what the left does — we need to do it on the right,” Coleman said he told people. Democrats say the new GOP network has the potential to tip Republicans back into the House majority, since the formal party structures will burn through money as they struggle to compete in a record number of House seats. Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said he is worried about the groups as a potential “conduit for a lot of special-interest money to flow into campaigns.” The Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission opened possibilities for groups like American Crossroads, American Action Network and others backed by corporations, unions or huge donors to be more aggressive in supporting or opposing candidates. Democrats in Congress are pushing legislation that would curtail its effects, but right now the decision is emboldening donors - particularly on the right - who had grown reluctant to open their wallets to outside groups, said Charlie Spies, a GOP campaign finance attorney on Resurgent Republic’s legal advisory board. ...

brulle 2021 obstructing:

...Our analysis also supports the finding that funding strategies differ between progressive and

conservative philanthropists.We find a striking stability in funding over the 16-year time

period. The funding strategy of the conservative movement was laid out in the so-called Fat

Memo(Miller 2005), which informed the giving practices of theOlin Foundation, the first

major conservative philanthropy, and subsequent conservative donors. These funding efforts

focus on the development and promulgation of a clear conservative viewpoint. To realize that

effort, conservative philanthropies have funded a range of organizations that act to realize that

goal on a long-term basis. This strategy focused on the creation and maintenance of conservative

think tanks, development of public intellectuals (“thought leaders”), and promulgation

of a consistent ideological message. Additionally, conservative foundations focus on building

institutional capacity in organizations with strong communications capabilities (Covington

1997; Barley 2010).

This consistent and long-term funding strategy has enabled the development of a cohesive

institutional network of conservative organizations that work collectively to promulgate a

consistent message. This strategy stands in marked contrast to the funding strategy of

progressive foundations, which focus on individual research projects and short-term efforts.

Consequently, the progressive activist organizations and think tanks form a very loose and

disconnected network(Barley 2010, p. 792). This differs significantly from the very tight

network of organizations and think tanks that comprise the conservative movement. The

analysis confirms the long-term stable funding that maintains the CCCM.

This analysis still leaves Senator Whitehouse’s question unanswered. The source of over

three-quarters of the funding of the CCCM cannot be identified.While some of this funding

could come from small donations, the existing IRS disclosure rules do not enable any further

investigation in this area. Further research is needed to develop new means to extend our

understanding of the unidentified funders that created and maintain the CCCM.[refs]

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/trump-nixon/

an 121 salon

Americans were shocked to watch as American stormtroopers assaulted the U. S. capitol building, smashing windows, roaming through the building and the floors of both Senate and House, including sitting in the seat of the Senate's presiding officer, leaving incendiary devices nearby, etc.).

This was more than a whiff of fascism. This is what fascism looks like.

So, we have to ask: beyond the lying, insurrection-instigating, so-called President, how did we get here?

The story actually goes a long way back.

First, the more obvious Republican side of the story:

Although his administration did eventually oversee some environmental protections, President Richard Nixon gained the White House via a law and order campaign in 1968, appealing to the so-called "silent majority" who were frightened, if not alienated, by the images of antiwar protesters, inner-city "rioters," and counterculture "freaks" during the 1960s.

The mass media, of course, fed this dynamic by refusing to take seriously the actual claims of Black, antiwar, and feminist activists; instead, making sure the public saw the most inflammatory examples of their behaviors and appearances. That's a story I have documented elsewhere.

Nixon's election and his "Southern Strategy" set in stone the future of the Republican party, although it remained for Ronald Reagan to seal the deal. Reagan's rhetoric about basic "decency" and "family values," fed the grievances of those who felt left out of, or alienated by, the '60s. But crucially, Reagan's actual policies focused on eliminating ways the government addresses public needs, instead cutting taxes on the wealthy, rebuilding a huge military complex and aggressive foreign policy, and deregulating the economy.

However, the people drawn to so-called conservative rhetoric — whether religious traditionalists, rural folks or members of the white working class — were not the actual winners under Reagan. Instead, they lost more and more ground economically. They basically got symbolic gratification. Their attention was instead diverted to the Democrats, liberals and "Eastern elites" who "caused" their problems.

That's the path that leads directly to Trump and his True Believers.

What, then, of the Democratic Party?

That, too, is a long story. In the midst of the Reagan years, smarting from Nixon's humiliating victory in 1972 and Reagan's in 1984, Democratic centrists — names like Dick Gephardt, Sam Nunn, Bill Clinton [TONY COELHO]— took steps to move the party away from its more liberal wing and into the corporate-dependent center. In its more liberal moments the Democratic Party typically expressed hopeful rhetoric about defending the rights of minorities, women and LGBTQ people, defending the environment, etc. The reality consistently fell far short of the rhetoric.

So, in our two-party system, Republicans have been all about give-aways to the rich while manipulating the emotions of less well-off white Americans. Democrats have essentially ignored the latter populations, becoming increasingly dependent on corporate money while also manipulating the aspirations of marginalized communities.

Neither party speaks a word against a capitalist system that feeds inequality, threatens the planet's ability to sustain life, and generates a foreign policy marked by militarism and war. The "problem" is always the "other party."

In their more liberal moments, Democrats embrace what is often called "identity politics" — race, gender, and sexuality in particular. This rhetorical embrace is used by Republicans to feed the emotional attachment of their rank and file supporters. Democrats gain support when Republican rhetoric becomes outrageous. Clearly, the political center, with all its sanctimonious rhetoric, is reinforced when something like the Capitol assault occurs.

Yet the country remains stuck in this see-saw battle that goes nowhere. Beholden to corporate wealth, neither party dares to confront class inequality. Yet, unlike identity concerns about discrimination, hate speech, and oppression — all serious problems — class analysis reveals the systemic forces that lie behind these and keep both parties' rank-and-file in their place at the margins of American politics.

Ultimately, the only way out of this will occur when enough people becomeaware, not only of the seriousness of the hazards facing us, but of the need to come together in a well-mobilized mass movement addressing systemic concerns.We already see where we're heading if we don't do this.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

'naked ballots' crisis triggered by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court just put 100,000 votes on the line in the key state

jig up wht pwr

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/the-supreme-court-is-finished-republicans-have-killed-it/

...They've turned the courts into a kennel for right-wing puppies, willing to sit there with floppy ears and their tongues out, panting and waiting to decide cases in favor of the billionaires who put them there. That's why there is a cottage industry of right-wing legal groups like Judicial Watch, Alliance Defending Freedom, Claremont Institute and the Center for Individual Rights, all of them funded by tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions in right-wing money. They make no bones about the fact that their job is to go out looking for plaintiffs to sue on behalf of big business and right-wing political interests to overturn laws they don't like. They have been behind the challenges to the Affordable Care Act and every anti-abortion lawsuit ever filed, not to mention suits against immigrant rights, civil rights, LGBT rights — you name it. And waiting in federal courthouses all over the country are Trump and Mitch McConnell's judicial poodles....

aha: reduction = retaliation = transaction

terministic screen/tunnel vision limits to small number of visible things right here and now self-ish vs larger complex system/ long term; also zero sum

long term means more entities, more events thus more complexity (tho a story can simplify/screen)

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/americas-enemies-perceive-weakness-in-donald-trump-foreign-policy-expert-explains-how-the-president-squandered-us-exceptionalism/

no lnx audio

c de v

bot line chaotic makes him weak/played

president of the United States takes the following oath at his or her inauguration: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Donald Trump has repeatedly betrayed this promise, and should long since have been removed from office for doing so.

The Constitution deems that the president is commander in chief of the military. As revealed in famed journalist Bob Woodward’s new book “Rage”, Donald Trump believes that members of the U.S. military who have been wounded or killed in battle are “suckers” and “losers” for not being as selfish and cowardly as he is. Trump also believes that disabled veterans should not be seen in public because they somehow shame or embarrass the country.

Trump also has no respect for the United States military’s role as defender of the country’s democracy from threats both foreign and domestic. To that end, he attempted to order military commanders to attack Americans who were (and are) exercising their constitutionally-guaranteed civil rights by protesting against his regime in response to the police killing of George Floyd, as well as in support of social justice more generally.

Fortunately, military commanders put the institutional legitimacy of the armed forces ahead of the president’s whims by deflecting his orders. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has also apologized for appearing alongside Trump on the streets of Washington.

Trump has repeatedly suggested that he is likely ignore the results of the 2020 election, and may seek to use the military to quell protests or other acts of resistance, perhaps by invoking the Insurrection Act.

Trump has also pardoned accused or convicted war criminals because he idolizes cruelty and lawlessness. Trump and his regime, in fact, views war criminals as useful tools in his authoritarian campaign against American democracy.

Many of the United States’ most senior retired military personnel, members of the intelligence community and diplomats, as well as other elites in the national defense community, have publicly condemned Donald Trump as an extreme threat to the country’s safety, security and democracy.

Overall, Donald Trump has made the United States less safe, less respected, less powerful, less influential, and less respected as a world power. In the Age of Trump and the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. has become a pariah nation, shamed before the world.

Is there any strategic logic to Trump’s decision-making about the United States and its role in the world? How do Trump’s ignorance, selfishness and authoritarian beliefs, combined with his conviction that his own personal interests are identical to the nation’s, imperil our safety and security? Does the Trump regime’s contempt for the truth and empirical reality endanger the long-term future of our nation?

In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Jim Sciutto, CNN’s chief national security correspondent and co-anchor of “CNN Newsroom.” Sciutto previously served as ABC News’ senior foreign correspondent and during his extensive career has reported from more than 50 countries, including Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. His new book is “The Madman Theory: Trump Takes on the World.”

At the end of this conversation Sciutto warns that the consensus among many of the country’s senior defense and intelligence professionals is that Donald Trump idolizes Vladimir Putin, and is somehow personally bound to him. If this is true, Trump’s fealty to a foreign leader has fatally compromised his ability to make decisions in the best interests of the United States and the American people.

You can also listen to my conversation with Jim Sciutto on my podcast “The Truth Report” or through the player embedded below.

How are you feeling, given all that is happening and has happened with Donald Trump and his administration?

I’m feeling stress for my country. That is not a political sentiment. I love my country. I’ve spent a lot of time outside of it for professional reasons. As a foreign correspondent, you end up loving America more because you live in places where they do not have our freedoms or institutions, many of which we take for granted. When I see those institutions being undermined here in the United States and people losing confidence in their own country, I am very concerned. I am still an optimist, but there is much to be concerned about here in the United States because of Donald Trump and all that has happened.

How does America look from abroad?

There is not a lot of respect right now for the United States. I do not want to overstate that because, frankly, there are many countries in the world with much bigger problems than this country right now.

For example, the COVID outbreak. The U.S. has certainly been one of the worst in terms of responding to it. That is not a political statement. It is based on the data. Europe is doing much better for example than the United States with the pandemic and its deadly consequences and other problems.

The state of the country’s political discourse is also not good. Is the United States able to solve problems in the way it did not too long ago? Pew polling shows that the world’s opinion of the United States has greatly diminished. The world is viewed much worse than it was during another low point, which was during George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

How are career diplomats and other public servants reacting to the Trump regime and its assaults on norms and values? These are government professionals who have served in multiple administrations. How are they making sense of this tumult?

Here is what is different. There have always been disagreements about policy and how best to accomplish those goals. What is different now is that there is an assault on the truth. There is not an agreed-upon set of facts. At first, I thought that maybe having to confront a pandemic would do that. Another example would be Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. There was a bipartisan judgment that Russia interfered, and that the Russians did so to help Trump win.

It came out of committees, as well as the intelligence agencies. Trump attacked those findings and took them personally. That was a consensus not just of a bipartisan committee but the country’s intelligence community as well. Intelligence findings can be attacked more easily because it is still a matter of interpretation.

But in the middle of a pandemic, there are hard facts. People are dying. You can count the number of people dying. You can count and document the positive infection rates.

You can count the number of infections. One can easily disprove Donald Trump’s claims that cases are only rising because there is more testing, because the percentage of people testing positive is also going up. But not in this environment where even the facts are disputed. Conspiracy theories existed well before Donald Trump, but he has super-turbocharged them to the point where they are leaking more and more into mainstream conversation. Democracy cannot operate without an agreed-upon set of facts and the country is miles down that rabbit hole right now.

Does Donald Trump have an ideology? Is his administration guided by some overriding principle that orients its approach to the world?

He has an approach and a view of the world. It is an open question as to whether he has a strategy — and that is a question raised by people who worked for him. For my new book, I spoke only to people who worked for Trump and were appointed by him at the highest levels.

When I asked those officials to describe Trump’s view of the world it was described as transactional: “What can you do for me? I scratch your back. You scratch mine.” Trump has done that equally with adversaries and allies. Trump has no worldview beyond that. There is no understanding of the ancillary benefit of friendships and alliances.

[Former national security adviser] H.R. McMaster told me how much trouble he had convincing Trump that there was more to alliances than just some sort of quid pro quo bottom line. These include shared history, shared values, a shared interest in the rule of law, sharing of intelligence to fight terrorism and other understandings. Trump does not see the world and alliances in that way. As such, Donald Trump will just as easily upend a friendship as he will antagonize a competitor. The United States is on a path of confrontation with China. But the United States also has highly antagonistic relationships now with our closest allies in Europe. With South Korea, the president is demanding they quintuple their contribution to the deployment of U.S. forces there and is threatening to take those forces away in the midst of the worsening standoff with North Korea.

Or even consider Canada, arguably one of our closest allies. Trump has used national security powers to impose economic sanctions on them including tariffs. In essence, Donald Trump has labeled Canada a national security threat.

Donald Trump does not read. He is proudly ignorant. He is a malignant narcissist. How is it even possible to have a coherent foreign policy with such a president?

Trump’s national security advisers knew and realized that he was not reading any of the briefing notes. So early on, McMaster’s team came up with the idea of boiling the briefings down to note cards with just three bullet points, thinking that would get through to Trump....

aha: 620 part of GOP long game is to take out dem up and comers (trending in webodec is mostly gop?]

eg (also clinton, gray davis) turnipseed jumper cables?

ivy meerpol the nation 6/20

EG: How do you think Cohn was affected by the homophobic and anti-Semitic environment of Washington, D.C.?

IM: Do you know the story of Lester Hunt? He was a senator from Wyoming. Around the time that Cohn was in Washington, Hunt was a very popular Democrat. The Republicans, including McCarthy, were always trying to figure out how to get him out of the way, because he was powerful, beloved, and very progressive. At one point, Hunt’s son was arrested for propositioning a male undercover police officer for sex, and this was discovered by McCarthy and some other senators. They confronted Hunt, saying they’d go public with this story if Hunt didn’t pull out of his race for reelection. Hunt tried to stay strong and fight back, but they threatened again, and rather than face that kind of humiliation and the humiliation of his son, Hunt committed suicide.

interesting long v short, me v we: limit immigrant will hurt economy

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/trumps-most-lasting-legacy-analyst-reveals-the-presidents-worst-mistake-in-economic-policy/

...Admitting fewer immigrants generally means less economic growth, since labor force growth is an important element of economic growth,” Anderson explains. “It is economic growth that improves the standard of living in a nation. Using the public charge rule to reduce legal immigration means lower long-term economic growth may be Donald Trump’s most lasting legacy.”

Anderson backs up his assertions by citing data from Macroeconomic Advisers as well as economists at Oxford University. Macroeconomic Advisers’ Joel Prakken, Anderson notes, has estimated that cutting legal immigration in half in the U.S. would reduce the country’s rate of economic growth by about 12.5%. And Oxford economists, Anderson observes, have said that the majority of economic gains the U.S. enjoyed from 2011-2016 would have been wiped out without immigration

Anderson also points out that Ruchir Sharma, chief global strategist for Morgan Stanley, has cited immigration as an importance source of economic growth....

doh! incubators! also mis-education

intercept

all in all, Long admitted, it had been a tough year, in which some 376 anti-plastics bills were introduced, and the perception of the plastics industry has continued to “spiral down exponentially.” The Plastics Industry Association is taking its cratering image seriously, working to offset it with pro-plastics presentations for elementary and middle school students, a plastics ambassadors program and, so young people can “feel good about” working in the industry, Long said, a “future leaders in plastics” group.

Scott Walker won’t go away.

The former Republican governor of Wisconsin, once seen as a leading presidential contender before his short-lived 2016 campaign flamed out, appears poised for a political comeback, only months after he was ousted as the Badger State’s top executive in last fall’s midterm elections. Walker announced this week that he is re-entering the political fray with a series of new endeavors aimed at strengthening the Republican Party and promoting conservative policies nationwide.

On the same day that a Wisconsin judge ruled against Walker and Republican legislators — who tried to strip power from the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general during a lame-duck session late last year — Walker announced that he will be the chief fundraiser for a Republican group dedicated to protecting partisan gerrymandering across the country. The group will focus on drawing maps for Congress and state legislatures.

“There is not nearly the level of intensity right of center as there’s been on the far left,” Walker told Politico, admitting that his new job is a direct response to Democratic efforts to fight partisan gerrymandering. “I know firsthand the impact the other side’s efforts can have on this,” he said.

After years of Republican dominance, Wisconsin staged close to a clean sweep last fall. Democrat Tony Evers defeated Walker, and voters also re-elected Sen. Tammy Baldwin and a Democratic secretary of state, along with voting in a new Democratic attorney general. But even as Democratic candidates for the state assembly garnered 54 percent of the popular vote, Republicans held enough seats to control 66 percent of the legislature due to extreme gerrymandering. That didn’t save Walker, and Evers, the new governor, has proposed a nonpartisan redistricting process in his new budget. Walker now appears to blame national Democrats for his political misfortune.

“Barack Obama and Eric Holder want to gerrymander Democrats into permanent control, so we are working to ensure that our side has the organization and resources to combat their efforts,” Walker said in a statement.

Holder, who was Obama’s first attorney general, has overseen a national effort to redistrict gerrymandered districts across the country. Last year his group helped liberals in Wisconsin sue Walker to force him to schedule special elections for two open seats in the state legislature. Holder’s group, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, is back in the Badger State this year for an upcoming race for the Wisconsin supreme court.

“We’re not here to gerrymander for Democrats,” Holder said at a stop in Milwaukee last week. “I just want to have a fair process and I’m confident that if we have a fair process, Republicans, conservatives, will not do as well as progressives, as Democrats in a fair fight.”

Litigation over Wisconsin’s maps began in 2011, the year Walker signed off on them as governor. By all accounts they are among the most extreme in political history. His new effort to stave off nonpartisan redistricting commissions comes as the GOP prepares for the 2020 census, after which politicians will redraw congressional and state legislative district maps. Walker’s group, the National Republican Redistricting Trust, plans to raise $35 million to fight court battles over political maps.

Before he left office in January, Walker signed three controversial bills to limit Evers’ powers as governor and pushed through 82 appointments to various state boards and commissions. These lame-duck moves were immediately challenged in court and a Wisconsin judge ruled on Thursday that the entire session had been unconstitutional. The GOP had attempted to prevent newly empowered Democrats from withdrawing from a multistate challenge to the Affordable Care Act. The law signed by Walker also stripped the state’s attorney general of discretion and gave the legislature powers usually and exclusively reserved for the attorney general. After the judge’s Thursday ruling, Evers withdrew Walker’s 82 appointments the next day. It was an ignominious end to Walker’s comeback week.

On Monday, Walker garnered profiles in major publications for his other new job when the Center for State-Led National Debt Solutions, a nonprofit established by a former tech executive in 2015, announced the former Wisconsin governor as its new chairman. The group advocates for the so-called Article V movement, a push for an unprecedented national convention to amend the U.S. Constitution to require a balanced budget amendment. In 1995, a proposed amendment passed the U.S. House of Representatives but failed by one vote in the Senate.

Under Walker, Wisconsin became the 27th state to pass a resolution in support of an Article V convention — named for the article of the U.S. Constitution that allows such a process. According to the Constitution, two-thirds of the states must request such a convention for one to occur and three-fourths of states must vote to ratify any amendment. Walker has been tasked with convincing six other states to follow suit.

“This is really going to have to be state driven,” Walker told the Washington Post this week. He said he plans to “elevate” the issue during the 2020 presidential election and intends to campaign for the issue in states like South Carolina, Virginia and Minnesota this year.

Walker, who often boasts that he balanced Wisconsin’s budget every year in office, drastically cut public school funding — including to the University of Wisconsin system — to do so. Since coming into office, however, President Trump has overseen a major increase in both the national debt and deficit, as Republicans passed a massive corporate tax cut without making significant cuts in government spending.

So Walker’s most recent push could set him up as a credible outsider equipped to take on profligate spending by Republicans in the Trump era, as the Washington Post’s James Hohman noted.

“Common-sense conservative ideas are making a comeback and they are turning our states around,” Walker said to announce his new weekly column in the conservative Washington Examiner. As the Post reported, Walker’s also signed with a speaker’s bureau and is eyeing an opportunity to guest-host a news-talk AM radio show in Milwaukee. He’s running for something; we just don’t know what

Walker told the Post that he might be interested in running for governor again, or perhaps for the U.S. Senate seat that Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican, has hinted he will vacate in 2022.

“I would defer to him,” Walker said. “If he chose to run again, I wouldn’t run.”

With Robert Mueller’s report now complete (if not yet released to the public), Republicans may soon start seriously looking around for a conservative challenger, either to run against Trump or succeed him. Don’t count Scott Walker out just yet.