GOP7 indict

SEE EIGHT 11 24

gop6 slow save

see gerry

SEE QANON TRUMPISTAS

voter suppress

SEE HYPOCRISY Claim Credit Vote Against

see pjt 2025

see crimes felony

SEE SEDITION CAUCUS BIG LIE

SEE RNC RONNA

see poison pill rider

see state gop fail

see thom critique

see red vs blue state

see vaxx covid fail

see reagan revo pivot

see hype fear

see retaliation dirty tricks

see sex scandal fla gop gaetz boebert...

see fail (to protect ppl, pass any bill in house ....

see agnotology earth2 alt facts

merri ok

BAK 11 24

===

AN 11 24

COMM DR

Government watchdogs on Wednesday said they are "not going anywhere" and will continue pushing for U.S. President-elect Donald Trump to face accountability for his 34 felony counts and other alleged crimes, even as the Republican and his allies threatened the special counsel who has been prosecuting him.

"Trump will still be sentenced for the 34 felony counts on which he has been convicted, and other pending legal proceedings must

also move forward," saidRobert Weissman and Lisa Gilbert, co-presidents of consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, which spent Trump's first term exposing corruption and unethical profiteering in his administration.

The group pledged to "mobilize Americans to resist Trump's agenda of cruelty and corruption" as it was reported that Special Counsel Jack Smith, who was appointed by the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Trump's alleged mishandling of classified documents and his role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, was in talks with the DOJ to wind down the federal prosecutions.

Under DOJ policy, a sitting president cannot face prosecution while in office.

Smith filed charges against Trump over the allegations, but the cases were thrown into uncertainty by the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in July that held presidents have legal immunity for "official acts" while in office.

In legal filings that were unsealed last month, Smith argued Trump should not be entitled to immunity from prosecution because he "resorted to crimes" when he attempted to overturn the 2020 election results.

Trump said in recent weeks that he would fire Smith "within two seconds" if he won the presidency.

His allies, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), have also demanded an end to what they call "lawfare" against Trump, with Scalise sayingWednesday that the election results proved American voters want federal and state officials in to "immediately terminate the politically motivated prosecutions of President Donald Trump."

Graham wrote on the social media platform X on Wednesday, addressing Smith and his team, that "it is time to look forward to a new chapter in your legal careers as these politically motivated charges against President Trump hit a wall."

Trump was convicted of 34 state felony counts in New York for falsifying business records related to a hush-money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels. He is currently scheduled to be sentenced on November 26, but his lawyers are likely to ask for an indefinite delay. There's also state case in Georgia stemming from Trump's attempts to reverse his 2020 loss.

The work of ensuring Trump is "not about the law," said Weissman and Gilbert, "will continue in earnest [and] will be more important in 2025 than ever before."

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) said Trump's victory "is making the urgency of accountability and checks on the presidency clearer than ever before."

"We're going to keep standing up against corruption and authoritarianism," said CREW, "as we have been for years."

Public Citizen was among more than 200 groups that announced a virtual eventcalled "Making Meaning of the Moment," planned for November 7 at 8:00 pm. More than 20,000 people had registered as of Wednesday evening.

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an 11 24

four years after losing the 2020 election to now-President Joe Biden, Donald Trump continues to claim that the election was stolen from him — a false claim that has been repeatedly debunked.

In 2024, Marc Elias and other Democratic lawyers fear that if Trump loses to Vice President Kamala Harris, he will try to overturn the election results.

According to Politico reporters Liz Crampton and Kyle Cheney, "Many of the people preparing to cast votes for Donald Trump in the Electoral College in 2024 were involved in his plot to subvert the election in 2020."

"Of the 93 Republicans designated as prospective presidential electors for Trump from the seven battleground states," Crampton and Cheney explain in an article published on November 4, "eight are facing felony charges for signing false Electoral College certificates in 2020, according to a Politico analysis. Another five signed similar certificates in 2020 but were not charged. And at least six others played notable roles in challenging the results of the 2020 election or promoting election conspiracy theories."

The reporters add, "All told, at least 1 in 5 prospective Trump electors from battleground states this year had some connection to the scheme to overturn the 2020 election."

The fact some of these "prospective presidential electors for Trump," Crampton and Cheney note, hasn't hurt their standing in the Republican Party.

"Rather than being punished or shunted aside for their role in an attempt to overturn a democratic election," the journalists observe, "they've been elevated. The GOP has rewarded those accused of felony crimes with a return to the coveted position they stand accused of abusing four years ago."

*Read Politico's full article at this link.

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hey sis did they see missing ballots?

On Tuesday, October 29, Indiana Republican Larry L. Savage Jr. was arrested on theft charges for allegedly stealing or destroying voting ballots.

Savage, now 51, was among the Republicans who, earlier this year, sought the GOP nomination in his U.S. House district.

The alleged theft, according to Kansas City Star reporter Mike Stunson, occurred during a test of voting equipment in Madison Country, Indiana on October 3.

"The charges follow the testing of election equipment in Madison County as part of the Voting System Technical Oversight Program, according to an October 29 state police news release," Stunson reports. "People invited to attend the public test, which included Savage, a precinct committeeman, run pre-marked ballots through the machines to make sure they are properly working and counting votes correctly….. The testing was livestreamed online, and the footage showed Savage fold up two of the ballots and put them in his pocket, authorities said."

Savage, according to Stunson, "is also heard whispering to a Republican auditor candidate about the count of the ballots being wrong, according to court documents obtained by the Indianapolis Star."

"State police said they later found the missing ballots in Savage's vehicle," Stunson reports. "Savage told an investigator he took the ballots because he was told they weren't real, but the surveillance footage showed a woman overseeing the test telling attendees that they were 'live election ballots,' according to the Indianapolis Star."

Madison County prosecutor Rodney Cummings told Indianapolis' WISH-TV, "The ballots weren't there because he took them himself. He creates a controversy that never existed in an effort to undermine confidence in our election process.”

*Read the Kansas City Star's full report at this link.

an 10 24

---x

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an 10 24

Former President Donald Trump's ascendancy and potential election to a second term in the White House is partially due to the moral cowardice of American institutions, according to one columnist.

In a recent column for Bloomberg, journalist Francis Wilkinson wrote that Trump may not be in a position to retake the presidency were it not for people in positions of power failing to stand up to him. He opined that "for every Liz Cheney icily staring down the barrel of MAGA death threats, there seem to be a couple dozen JD Vances sliding belly-first on a stream of pusillanimity."

Wilkinson bemoaned the billionaire owners of newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post cancelling their publications' planned endorsements of Vice President Kamala Harris out of fear of reprisal should Trump prevail in next week's election. He also didn't spare CEOs like JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon, who the New York Times reported was personally voting for Harris but held back from issuing a public endorsement.

"Institutional cowardice has enabled and emboldened Trump’s authoritarian assault at every step," Wilkinson wrote. "But Trump still makes his political bones on personal weakness. He has been exploiting fear — scary Black man, no birth certificate — since long before he ran for office."

The Bloomberg columnist pointed out that Trump's 2024 candidacy is primarily defined by fear-mongering about racial and ethnic minorities. He pointed out that the former president's recent rally at Madison Square Garden was largely focused on ginning up fear of immigrants and making his predominantly white and male base feel victimized by the rise of a powerful, successful Black woman like Harris.

"His message is an endless cycle of Who’s More Frightening? Haitians starting a new life in Ohio? Or the trans kid at the local high school trying to make it through another day? Are Black women counting votes more terrifying than library books recounting history? It’s a close call in MAGA world, but the tie goes to the Black runner," he continued.

Wilkinson included a dig at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) for his own cowardice. The outgoing Senate Republican leader recently told a biographer that he viewed Trump as a "sleazeball" and a "narcissist" who had "done a lot of damage" to both the Republican Party and the country. Despite this, McConnell has still pledged to support Trump in the election, and has warned his fellow Republicans that Harris winning the White House would be the GOP's "worst nightmare."

CNN host Chris Wallace has also questioned McConnell's moral compass. He said that the Kentucky Republican's attacks on Trump feel hollow given his promise to still vote for him.

"I'm not at all surprised that McConnell feels that way. He was pretty clear and really for about two or three years after January 6, refused one to meet with Trump or even to say his name in public," Wallace said earlier this month. "What I find most troubling about this is he believes all that. He says all that on the record and some of that in private but he's going to vote for Donald Trump."

Wilkinson reminded readers that voters will have the choice between continuing America's experiment at building a lasting multiracial democracy, or surrendering to autocratic rule. He wrote that Tuesday's outcome boils down to "whether MAGA will be given the chance to vandalize an emerging world that it finds too frightening to join."

"Tuesday’s election is a referendum on national cowardice," Wilkinson wrote. "Weak men have forced the issue, and a strong woman has answered the challenge. Either the US will take a bold step into a multiracial, pluralistic, democratic, courageous future, or it will retreat into cowardly authoritarian chaos."

Click here to read Wilkinson's column in full (subscription required).

===

Man charged for shooting at Dem field office had 120 guns, 250K bullets and grenade launcher - Alternet.org

an 10 24

Mark Robinson, the GOP gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina and current lieutenant governor, is in trouble again.

Not just because Robinson has referred to himself as a “black NAZI” and a “perv,” expressed support for reinstating slavery, said he watched transgender pornography, called homosexuality “filth” and the Holocaust “hogwash,” and has asserted that “some folks need killing.”

He’s in trouble now because he blew off a vote on a declaration that would have granted Governor Roy Cooper key emergency powers ahead of Hurricane Helene’s landfall. Robinson was the only member on the Council of State — a board of nine — who didn’t vote in favor of the declaration. Cooper got the power he needed, but Robinson is now criticizing him for not doing more in the wake of the storm.

Yet Robinson still commands the support of 63 percent of Republicans in North Carolina, according to an East Carolina University poll released Wednesday.

Something seriously troubling has happened to the Republican Party. It’s become filled with wacko candidates for office who are being supported by large percentages of Republican voters.

The trend started in the 1980s with Rush Limbaugh’s radio program, which attracted a wide audience with a toxic mixture of lies, conspiracy theories, fear-mongering, and thinly veiled racism.

It accelerated in 1996 when Rupert Murdoch hired Roger Ailes to emulate Limbaugh with a new TV channel, Fox News. Additional media imitators followed.

The growing supply of this poison offered the (predominantly) white working-class an easy explanation for why the wages and status of many blue-collar men had hit the skids: They could blame immigrants, Black people, Latinos, “coastal elites,” government bureaucrats, pedophiles, women, secularists, Muslims, liberals, Democrats, and Satan.

In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich saw an opportunity to build the Republican Party around similar lies and conspiracy theories. Gingrich’s efforts attracted the first group of modern crackpot candidates into the GOP.

Starting in 2016, Trump attracted another group, even wackier than the previous one.

It’s become a doom loop. As both the demand and the supply of these lies, conspiracy theories, fear-mongering, and racism have grown, the Republican Party’s base has ventured farther from reality. Meanwhile, sane Republicans have left, reasonable people have drifted away, and normal Republican officials have been purged or voted out.

If Trump loses the 2024 election, the Republican Party won’t change, because its base is filled with this poison. So it will continue to attract more crackpot candidates loaded with even more venom; it will nominate them, and some of them will win.

In the current election cycle, the poison doesn’t begin or end with Trump. It includes a Republican vice presidential candidate who calls women who choose not to have children “childless cat ladies,” claims Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets, won’t concede that Trump lost the 2020 election, and won’t commit to be bound by the outcome of the 2024 election.

It’s produced a slew of Republican candidates for Congress saying similar things. In Ohio, Senator Sherrod Brown’s Republican opponent, Bernie Moreno, is parroting the same racist lies about Haitian immigrants.

In Arizona, the Republican candidate for Senate, Kari Lake, has denied the outcome of the 2020 election, tried to overturn the governor’s race she lost in 2022, appeared at QAnon and white nationalist-tied events, and has a history of violent rhetoric.

Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans of Virginia has called abortion “elective surgery” and compared it to a “Hollywood nose job.”

Wisconsin Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden, who was at Trump’s January 6 rally and appears to have been among the insurrectionists who breached police barricades at the Capitol, calls abortion “genocide.”

Arizona Republican Rep. Eli Crane is promoting conspiracy theories about the assassination attempts on Trump — blaming a mole within Trump’s Secret Service detail and saying that the FBI can’t be trusted to “give us the truth”; that the shooter in Butler, Pennsylvania, didn’t act alone; and that the gunman behind the second attempt is an “asset” of a foreign adversary — despite evidence contradicting all these theories.

Back in North Carolina, Michele Morrow, the current Republican candidate for superintendent of public instruction, has been warning voters about a network of child traffickers and pedophiles that, she says, torture and kill children to harvest their blood for an anti-aging elixir known as adrenochrome.

Morrow says the plus sign in LGBTQ+ “includes PEDOPH*L*A!!” She claims that transgender therapy is “a disgusting plan of Big Pharma to make our children unable to reproduce” and that the World Health Organization has been using vaccines to sterilize people and kill children. She says Satan is “in cahoots” with Democrats, globalists, the “one world order,” the United Nations, China, and Russia “to take down the United States of America.”

Morrow discourages parents from sending their kids to public schools, which she refers to as “indoctrination centers” and “socialism centers.” She was on the Capitol grounds on January 6, 2021, and proposed then that Trump invoke the Insurrection Act, which, she said, “completely puts the Constitution to the side and says, ‘Now the military rules all.’”

Despite all this, Morrow has an even chance to become the state’s top educator. A poll by Raleigh-based WRAL last month found that she is in a statistical tie with her Democratic opponent.

You see the problem. When the base of one of our two political parties both fuels and is fueled by crackpots, some of those crackpots get elected.

The only way forward is with an entirely new Republican Party that rejects and detoxifies the old one and puts an end to this doom loop. Will Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, and some as yet unknown young politicians lead the way?

===

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an 10 24

All across the country, Republican candidates who openly doubt the outcome of the 2020 election are running in statewide elections. This includes Republican nominees for both U.S. Senate races as well as gubernatorial elections, and even candidates seeking to oversee their respective state's elections.

CNN found that of the 51 Republican statewide hopefuls on the 2024 ballot, 23 of them — a full 45% of all Republican statewide candidates – are election deniers. And many election deniers are seeking office in some of the most hotly contested battleground states in presidential elections.

34 states are holding U.S. Senate elections in November. And 14 Republican Senate candidates have gone on the record supporting election-denying narratives. This includes incumbents like Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) and Rick Scott (R-Florida) as well as candidates seeking to oust Democrats like Sam Brown in Nevada, Kari Lake in Arizona, Bernie Moreno in Ohio and Royce White in Minnesota.

Governors also play an important role in safeguarding elections by signing Electoral College certificates after their respective states' electors meet following a presidential election. In the event a far-right election denier becomes governor, it's possible a legislature may have to intervene in order to make sure electoral college certificates get signed.

This possibility has become a concern for many former governors, who recently co-signed an open letter to current governors urging them to certify their states' Electoral College certificates following the November election. Co-signers include former Governors Jeb Bush (R-Florida), Tom Corbett (R-Pennsylvania), Gray Davis (D-California), Jim Hodges (D-South Carolina) and Mark Schweiker (R-Pennsylvania), among others.

"We write as bipartisan former Governors with an eye to December 11th. This is the deadline for issuing and sending Certificates of Ascertainment to the National Archives. This is six days before the Electoral College will meet in state capitals across our nation," the letter read. "While there is much to debate on the campaign trail, we expect all candidates and the American people will agree that this time-honored process during our post-election period is not open for debate. It is simply a ministerial and administrative duty."

Some of the more notable election deniers running for governor include Mike Braun in Indiana, Greg Gianforte in Montana, Mike Kehoe in Missouri, Patrick Morrisey in West Virginia and Mark Robinson in North Carolina. While four of those states are reliably red, North Carolina is regarded as a battleground state, with both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump in a dead heat. Robinson is currently trailing Democrat Josh Stein – the current attorney general — in the gubernatorial race by double digits.

Perhaps the most dangerous office for an election denier to hold is secretary of state, which in most states is the official tasked with overseeing the conducting of all elections. Republican candidates who have gone on record casting doubt on the result of the 2020 election include Denny Hoskins in Missouri, Dennis Linthicum in Oregon, H. Brooke Paige in Vermont and Kris Warner in West Virginia.

Hoskins and Warner are heavily favored to win given their states' strong Republican leanings. After winning the Missouri Republican primary in August, Hoskins insinuated President Joe Biden was not the true winner of the 2020 election, saying: "[W]e have to ensure that none of the electoral fraud that took place in 2020 and stole the election from President Trump happens here."

According to CNN, Hoskins has also urged supporters to watch convicted felon Dinesh D'Souza's debunked film "2000 Mules," which baselessly suggests that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump via ballot drop boxes in Arizona, Georgia and Michigan. He is running against Democratic state representative Barbara Phifer in November.

Click here to read CNN's report in its entirety.

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===

prolly neglect on regular culture war BS

see heartbeat abortion bounty hunter

got covid at superspreader fundraiser

see fucking pow paxton

see voter suppression/student suppression

bak 4 24

---

===

// bb

MAGA judge Michele Fiore convicted of stealing $70k from fallen cop's memorial fund for plastic surgery and daughter's wedding

tina-peters-ex-colorado-clerk-tells-judge-prison-wont-work-out-because-she-needs-a-magnetic-mattress-video

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===

an 9 24

Analysis details bizarre GOP obsession with killing animals

===

an 9 24

For the third U.S. presidential election in a row, Donald Trump is the Republican Party nominee. 2024 actually marks Trump's fourth presidential campaign; in 2000, Trump briefly ran for president with the Reform Party. But he grew disenchanted with the Reform Party and dropped out of the race in February of that year.

It wasn't until the 2016 election that Trump achieved real prominence in U.S. politics, and he has dominated the GOP ever since.

The Atlantic's Mark Leibovich discusses that dominance in a think piece/essay published on September 9, explaining how Trump pulled it off.

READ MORE:[Three-term incumbent braces for 'GOP onslaught' in critical swing state: report

Leibovich recalls a conversation with Trump in 2015, when he launched his first presidential campaign as a Republican. Trump, according to Leibovich, said he was used to dealing with "brutal, vicious killers" — which was his view of people in real estate and gambling.

The journalist recalls, "In contrast, he told me, politicians are saps and weaklings." And Trump boasted to Leibovich, "I will roll over them."

Trump, according to Leibovich, understood the mentality of Republican politicians — and former critics like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) flip-flopped, becoming staunch defenders.

"I'd thought that maybe 2024 would be the year the GOP finally began some semblance of a post-Trump future," Leibovich explains. "At the very least, new voices of resistance had to finally assert themselves…. Yet the speed with which Trump has settled back into easy dominance of his party has been both remarkable and entirely foreseeable — foreseen, in fact, by Trump himself."

READ MORE:['Russia, Russia, Russia' is not a hoax

Leibovich continues, "Because if there's been one recurring lesson of the Trump-era GOP, it's this: Never underestimate the durability of a demagogue with a captive base, a desperate will to keep going, and — perhaps most of all — a feeble and terrified opposition of spineless ciphers."

*Read Mark Leibovich's full essay for The Atlantic at this link (subscription required).

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MMA 8 24

Fox News is championing RFK Jr's view of public health, even as it puts your kids at risk

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 08/27/24

Fox News hosts like Ainsley Earhardt are overjoyed about notorious anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s purported ability to help former President Donald Trump’s campaign appeal to “moms” concerned with public health.

“I think moms around the country appreciate his stance for trying to make our children healthy again,” she said on Monday.

Earhardt noted that in Kennedy’s speech last week endorsing Trump, “he talked about how 75% of the budget from the FDA comes from pharmaceutical companies” and “said it's very profitable when a child is sick,” adding that Kennedy’s condemnation of “corruption in health care” is “music to every mom’s ears."

The culture warriors at Fox aren’t typically invested in talking about public health issues. But in one key health-related fight on which the network aligned with Kennedy — COVID-19 vaccines — the results have proved disastrous. Their combined assault on what Kennedy falsely termed “the deadliest vaccine ever made” helped trigger plummeting levels of support for childhood vaccinations among Republicans, with ongoing consequences for America’s kids.

Fox’s unique pull with its right-wing audience gave it a moral responsibility to encourage viewers to take the life-saving COVID-19 vaccines. Instead, the network — led by stars like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity — pandered to anti-vaxxers like Kennedy.

Fox conducted a yearslong campaign to undermine the vaccines, which the network falsely portrayed as ineffective and dangerous, while talking up the potential of fake cures for the virus. Its hosts were particularly scathing about public health efforts to require vaccination at schools and workplaces, which Ingraham described as a “crime against humanity.”

The right-wing assault on the COVID-19 vaccines led to lower rates of vaccinations among Republicans — and consequently higher death rates. But the anti-vaccine sentiment unleashed by the likes of Fox and Kennedy was not limited to COVID-19: There have been broader impacts on GOP support for the full range of childhood vaccinations.

Gallup reported earlier this month that the percentage of Americans who say it is important for parents to get their children vaccinated has tumbled since the COVID-19 pandemic — and that Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are responsible for that decline.

Nearly 20% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents now say that it’s “not very important” or “not important at all” for parents to get their kids vaccinated, according to Gallup’s polling.

Gallup further found that the percentage of Americans who think the government should require parents to vaccinate their children against deadly contagions like the measles has fallen to 51%, down from 62% in 2019 and 81% in 1991. That decline is largely due to Republicans, 60% of whom now oppose such government mandates.

The result is a looming crisis for America's children. It takes a 95% vaccination rate to achieve herd immunity for measles, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But immunization among kindergartners has fallen from 95% before the pandemic to 93% in the most recent school year. In 18 states, more than 4% of kindergartners have vaccine exemptions.

:{:{}:

The result is skyrocketing outbreaks of preventable and dangerous diseases among children — but things can still get so much worse.

Trump is more than willing to prioritize his political future over your kids. Playing to his base, he all but disavowed the COVID-19 vaccines his administration helped bring to fruition, and he vows that his administration “will not give one penny” to schools that require their students to be vaccinated.

He sought Kennedy’s endorsement and is dangling the prospect of rewarding him with a plum post — potentially secretary of Health and Human Services, where the anti-vaccine activist would wield incredible power. Far from trying to hold him back, Fox hosts like Earhardt and MAGA princes like Charlie Kirk are celebrating Kennedy’s supposed health bona fides.

For a glimpse of what an empowered Kennedy might mean for America’s parents, it's worth reviewing his role in “one of the worst measles outbreaks in recent memory,” as FactCheck.org put it:

In 2018, two infants in American Samoa died when nurses accidentally prepared the combined measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine with expired muscle relaxant rather than water. The Samoan government temporarily suspended the vaccination program, and anti-vaccine advocates — including Kennedy and his nonprofit — flooded the area with misinformation. The vaccination rate dropped to a dangerously low level. The next year, when a traveler brought measles to the islands, the disease tore through the population, sickening more than 5,700 people and killing 83, most of them young children.

That doesn’t sound like “music to every mom’s ears."

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===

an 6 24

alternet-NO LNX

Republicans are playing a dangerous game by weaponizing ignorance

Sabrina Haake, Raw StoryJune 15, 2024

Donald Trump’s felony convictions are fueling another disinformation campaign, this one equal in destructive force to his Big Lie. Orchestrating a unified response reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s, House Speaker Mike Johnson and his Trump acolytes are weaving Trump’s criminality into a false indictment of the American legal system.

Republicans are falsely blaming Joe Biden for outcomes over which a sitting U.S. president has no control: convictions of Trump on 34 felony counts, pursued by an independently elected DA, pursuant to a state criminal code, as determined by 12 independent jurors, selected with the help of Trump’s own trial team.

The GOP’s target? Low-information voters.

Their weapon? Blatant disinformation.

Their allies? Fox News and the right-wing propaganda machine.

Their illiberal objective tracks the geopolitical strategies of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and strongman dictators adversarial to democratic systems in general: Weakening institutions through chaos that exhausts voters, allowing oligarch-backed extremists to seize power, peacefully or otherwise, amid the mayhem.

Feigned outrage to entertain the masses

The performative outrage in this week’s program includes eight Republican senators vowing retaliation for Trump’s convictions by opposing any legislation authored by Democrats; they also promise to withhold Senate confirmations.

Meanwhile, Johnson revealed his “three-pronged approach” to retaliation, including withholding congressional appropriations for the Department of Justice. Declaring that Republicans would “do everything we can” to exact revenge for Trump, Johnson and his Republican colleagues are currently pursuing legislation that would allow Trump to pardon himself of state crimes if he retakes the presidency.

Johnson has also suggested the "Trump-ed up" Supreme Court would “step in” to overturn Trump’s state convictions, the irony of simultaneously claiming that Biden controls the judiciary apparently over his head.

Advocating illegal acts is itself illegal.

Trump strategists Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon — the latter headed to prison soon himself — are openly urging Republican officeholders to use their offices to attack Democrats. They clearly need reminding — almost as much as they need fast, effective counsel — that using public resources for partisan purposes violates federal law.

Demanding that Republican district attorneys open investigations into Democrats, they urge attorneys general in Republican-controlled states to target Democrats for unspecified crimes.

Jeff Clark, the former Trump Justice Department official indicted in the Georgia election case, has broadened the call, urging “brave” district attorneys in conservative areas to file lawsuits in federal court against anyone involved in criminal cases against Trump.

Openly advocating illegal acts, and doing so in writing no less, suggests these fools have themselves for clients.

Republicans’ gaslighting campaign is reckless

Trump, for his part, is priming Fox News viewers for violence in the event he is sentenced to serve time in prison, saying, "I'm not sure the public would stand for (my potential prison sentence) ... You know, at a certain point, there's a breaking point."

The right’s gaslighting-of-the-uninformed campaign is working, as evidenced by online demands for bloody revenge. In trying to dox the jurors in Trump’s Manhattan hush money case, one of Trump’s supporters posted, “Hang everyone. 1,000,000 men (armed) need to go to Washington and hang everyone. That's the only solution.”

A Proud Boys writer chimed in, “Now you understand. To save your nation, you must fight. The time to respond is now. Franco Friday has begun.”

Without considering what comes next when the rule of law is hobbled — paramilitary hillbillies rounding up foreigners come to mind, as do drug cartels dropping roadside bombs from drones — Republicans are defending Trump by viciously attacking the judge, jurors, prosecutor, evidentiary rulings, jury instructions, the attorney general, the Department of Justice and mainstream media; they have also threatened to end the career of any GOP candidate who dares to voice respect for the American legal system.

So much for “law and order.”

Like a man blaming his wife as he kicks her down the stairs, Trump tells anyone who will listen — which apparently includes most media outlets — that Democrats have “forced” him to “take revenge” against government adversaries. Salivating over the possibility that he will finally get to imprison his political foes, brandishing his prison shiv, Trump told Newsmax, “It’s a terrible, terrible path that they’re leading us to, and it’s very possible that it’s going to have to happen to them…”

One is almost tempted to have compassion for Melania.

From whence does the GOP’s amnesia come?

Republican outrage is overplayed, as if everyone has forgotten about Trump’s well-documented criminality, played out over decades.

In 1998, the Treasury Department imposed the then-largest fine of $477,000 on Trump Taj Mahal casino for money laundering; Trump admitted that he pocketed millions of dollars raised from charity; he was ordered to pay $2 million for diverting donations from a televised fundraiser for veterans; in 2023, a civil jury adjudicated him a rapist; he was previously found to have engaged in business fraud to the tune of $354 million dollars.

When his niece Mary Trump sued him for allegedly defrauding her out of tens of millions of dollars — she said Trump extorted her by threatening to withhold medical coverage from a severely disabled nephew — she declared “Fraud was not just the family business — it was a way of life.”

Despite his consistent criminality and organized crime connections, Trump’s felony convictions hit differently, triggering the GOP’s kamikaze declaration of war as three more criminal trials and 54 combined felony counts loom.

Democrats must punch back harder

Republicans are using disinformation as a weapon against uninformed voters to keep them aligned with Trump. Their ploy seems to be working, as Trump informally reported a $52.8 million haul in online donations in the first 24 hours after the verdict was announced.

Instead of confessing to the obvious that Trump’s criminality is driving his legal woes — not Biden, not the “Deep State,” not rigged justice — MAGA Republicans would prefer to round up Trump’s adversaries as political prisoners.

After Trump’s deadly mob wanted to hang Vice President Mike Pence to block Trump’s 2020 loss, they are lusting for another fight; historically, coups are regularly attempted more than once.

It is clear that the United States is under siege by illiberal forces, aided by a relentless propaganda machine committed to fomenting violence. My money is on the justice system — and on voters being smart enough to detect the ruse.

The politically moderate sports announcer Colin Cowherd recently summed it up: “If everybody in your circle is a felon, maybe it’s not rigged. Maybe the world isn’t against you… Trump’s campaign chairman was a felon. So is his deputy campaign manager, his personal lawyer, his chief strategist, his national security adviser, his trade adviser, his foreign policy adviser, his campaign fixer, and his company CFO. They’re all felons… It’s a cabal of convicts.”

Here's to slapping back.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

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Conservative faux-outrage over Kyrsten Sinema’s thigh-high boots is just the latest in GOP culture war stupidity ›

It's science: Trump voters are dumb - Alternet.org ›

'Stupid, ridiculous self-righteous crap': Iowa grandma scorches Republicans’ six-week abortion ban ›

GOP senators slam House Republicans for 'ridiculous' antics at Trump hush money trial ›

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no lnx

Republicans have a death wish for us all

Greg Abbott’s 'gullibility' exposed after he shares 'fake' story about made-up Texas city

Sabrina Haake, Raw StoryJune 09, 2024

In the 1850s, British naturalist Charles Darwin proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection. In his book, On the Origin of Species, Darwin presented years of data, notations he’d made while observing plants and animals in their natural habitats.

Over decades of painstaking observation, Darwin discovered that organisms with traits that favor survival tend to leave more offspring, causing survivalist traits to increase in frequency over time among successful species. In a word, Darwin concluded, successful survival of all living organisms requires them to adapt.

Species that fail to adapt? They go extinct, some more rapidly than others.

We are approaching unsurvivable temperatures

Last year was the hottest of the past 170 years, which is when meteorologists first began tracking global temperatures. According to NASA, the 10 warmest years since Darwin’s 1850s have all occurred during the last decade, with the same predicted for 2024.

Dead monkeys are falling out of trees in Mexico. Other primates are dying, along with toucans, parrots, insects, bats and one million other species. Animals are dying from heat and dehydration at such alarming rates that even Fox News has reported on it — though they have not yet found a way to blame President Joe Biden or the border.

ALSO READ: Justice delayed is not always justice denied

Last week, avoiding the words “climate change,” Fox News quoted thedirector of an eco-conservation park in Mexico saying they’d “never seen a situation like what’s happening right now.” The conservation park resuscitates and rehydrates dying animals for re-release into the wild, but if heat like this continues, the director predicted, “there is not going to be much we can do for the animals.”

As animals go, so go we

Scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology report that a “wet-bulb” temperature of 95° F — a measure that considers both heat and humidity — is the absolute limit of human survival. The human body temperature is around 98° F, allowing for a constant balance between heat loss and heat gain. But there’s a temperature/humidity point at which the human body can’t lose heat fast enough. At that point, everything in the body, from enzymes to organs, including kidneys, lungs, heart and brain, begins to shut down.

According to MIT, a sunny area with 50 percent humidity and no wind will hit an unlivable wet-bulb temperature of 95°F when the thermometer reaches only 109 °F.

Last year, temperatures in many U.S. cities, especially in Texas, Florida and Arizona, repeatedly exceeded 109 °F, to say nothing of newly uninhabitable regions in Mexico, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

Many U.S. cities will again surpass 109 °F this year, causing heat-related deaths and illness. Between 2004 and 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports, heat-related deaths in the U.S. increased by a whopping 439 percent.

Oil-funded Republicans refuse to adapt

No serious debate remains about what is causing the climate to change. Scientists have known, for decades, that this point was coming. We have the technology to reduce carbon emissions and re-develop an energy grid with sufficient capacity; engineers and scientists calculated years ago that there’s more than enough wind, solar and hydro power to meet the needs of all people — and manufacturers — on earth.

ALSO READ: Michael Cohen, Red Finch and the fateful moment Trump lost the jury

The intelligent adaptation to dead animals falling from the sky would be a transition to renewable energy as quickly as practicable, blending a graduated mix of alternative fuels with decreasing reliance on petrofuels.

But instead of modeling Darwin’s survival of the fittest and adapting new energy strategies, Republican governors of southern states — states experiencing climate change at accelerated rates — are modeling what happens when species refuse to adapt.

Emboldened by former President Donald Trump, these strutting dodo birds are attacking climate science while at the same time seeking extraordinary federal funding for climate mitigation. (President Biden: awarding climate mitigation funds to governors who lie about climate science is self-defeating.)

Darwinism on display

In Florida this spring, cities such as Miami were hit with extreme heat even before the arrival of summer.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, addicted to culture wars and language bans, just signed a law that removes the words “climate change” from state publications, forbids the construction of offshore windmills and halts the state’s clean energy goals.

To DeSantis, people concerned about climate change are “radical green zealots.” Meanwhile, his state’s beloved manatees are disappearing, storm-battered Floridians can’t afford property insurance and buildings are collapsing in coastal cities.

In Texas, another of the most threatened U.S. states when it comes to sea level rise, hurricanes and extreme heat, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott refers to Biden’s climate efforts as “an attack” on Texas jobs, and he vowed to “fight” the “climate agenda.”

Even though Texas has ranked first in the number of billion-dollar disasters per year since 2001, Abbott has vowed to “exclude renewables from any revived economic incentive program,” and he supported bills to lower support for wind and solar projects while forcing renewable energy to subsidize fossil fuel expansion.

Livestock farming, a major methane contributor, creates deplorable lives for the animals while simultaneously warming the planet. There are humane solutions that could alleviate both problems. What are Republican governors doing? They are banning or trying to ban cruelty-free meat produced in a lab — dictating to everyone else what they can and cannot eat, and effectively mandating animal cruelty and methane emissions at the same time.

The list of GOP maladaptions goes on. Republican leaders are attacking science overall, while on a parallel crusade to delegitimize truth, the rule of law and democratic institutions. They’re turning American ignorance into a malignant tumor hellbent on killing its host.

DeSantis and Abbott deserve Darwin Awards

DeSantis and Abbott, along with Republican attorneys general in 19 states who just asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block climate action, are entertaining know-nothing voters, attacking climate science frontstage and collecting donations from Koch Industries’ backstage. It’s all performative ignorance, like watching Cro-Magnon men show up at a ballet, dragging women by the hair.

The unfortunate twist is that, as long as we share the same planet, the Cro-Magnon is dragging all of us by our hair.

Darwin Awards commemorate idiots who protect our gene pool by dying in an extraordinarily idiotic manner, thereby improving our species’ chances of long-term survival.

We need a parallel award when the most ignorant members of a species doom the rest of it.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

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an 5 24 post verdict

as supporters of Donald Trump flood right-wing platforms with threats against the jurors and judge following guilty verdicts Thursday in his criminal case regarding hush money payments, fears are growing that the influence the Republican presumptive presidential nominee has over his supporters will soon lead to violence.

"Until and unless he accepts the process, the extremist reaction to his legal troubles will be militant," Jacob Ware, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, toldReuters.

The former president gave no sign of accepting the legal process Friday as he held a press conference at Trump Tower, repeating claims that the case had been "rigged."

Shortly after a New York jury announced its verdictin the case regarding documents that were falsified to cover up payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniel just before the 2016 election to keep her from publicizing an alleged sexual encounter she had=== with Trump, right-wing websites like Gateway Pundit, Truth Social, and Patriots.Win saw an uptick in violent posts from users.

READ:The GOP has chosen hell over America — and there should be no coming back from it

One commenter called for "someone in NY with nothing to lose" to "take care of" New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, while another on Gateway Pundit directed a threat at any and all opponents of Trump.

"Time to start capping some leftys," said the user. "This cannot be fixed by voting."

The reaction is a direct result, said Ware, of Trump's "insistence that he is being mistreated."

Trump responded to the verdict on Thursday by telling reporters he is "a very innocent man" and calling the trial—one of four criminal cases against him—"a disgrace." He is expected to appeal the verdict. On Friday morning, the Trump campaign announced a $35 million fundraising haul following the guilty verdict.

Some Trump supporters signaled they are waiting for instructions from the former president, who is the presumptive Republican nominee for president in the November general election and is set to be formally nominated days after his scheduled sentencing in July.

On Patiots.win, one commenter called for 1 million armed Trump supporters to "go to Washington and hang everyone," while another said the former president "should already know he has an army willing to fight and die for him if he says the words...I'll take up arms if he asks."

While Republican lawmakers have not explicitly endorsed a violent reaction to the verdict that found Trump guilty of 34 felony counts, many have joined Trump in making clear that they don't accept the trial's outcome.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who has said she would not endorse Trump in the 2024 election, saidManhattan District Attorney charged Trump for politically motivated reasons and falsely claimed that he campaigned on prosecuting the former president.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said the "charges never should have been brought in the first place," while House Speaker Mike Johnson accused the Biden administration of the "weaponization of our justice system."

Progressives agreed with Trump on one point Friday, after he pledgedthat the hush money case is "long from over" and said that "the real verdict is going to be November 5" when U.S. voters go to the polls in the general election.

While celebrating that a jury of "everyday people" held the former president accountable and proved that "despite his worst efforts, Trump is not above the law," People's Action executive director Sulma Arias saidDemocrats "must beat him at the ballot box" to keep him from further eroding U.S. democracy, climate action, and other progressive values.

===

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note tropes lib press silence gag twit files laptop whattaboutism...

greivance projection, note attack dem women

running for trump vp

:{alternet- no lnx

Home | Marco Rubio shouts over Kristen Welker in cringeworthy interview about election fraud

Marco Rubio shouts over Kristen Welker in cringeworthy interview about election fraud

:{David Edwardsand Raw Story May 19, 2024

An animated Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) raised his voice and refused to say he would accept the outcome of the 2024 election on Sunday.

During an interview on Meet the Press, host Kristen Welker asked the senator if he would accept a loss by former President Donald Trump in this year's presidential election.

"Will you accept the election results of 2024, no matter what happens, Senator?" Welker asked.

"No matter what happens? No," Rubio insisted.

"No matter who wins?" Welker pressed.

"Well, why don't you, I think you're asking the wrong person," Rubio shot back. "The Democrats are the ones that have opposed every Republican victory since 2000."

"It's Hillary Clinton who said it," he continued.

Welker pointed out that "no Democrat has refused to concede," including Clinton.

"Hillary Clinton said the election was stolen from her and that Trump was illegitimate," Rubio asserted.

"Senator, she conceded the election," Welker noted again.

But Rubio raised his voice as he talked over the host.

"She said that the election had been stolen. Kamala Harris agreed," the senator argued. "And you have Democrats now saying they won't certify 2024 because Trump is an insurrectionist and ineligible to hold office."

"So you need to ask them," he complained. "I think you've ever asked the Democrats this question on your show. I bet you you've never asked the Democrat that question."

Welker reminded the lawmaker what he had said after certifying the 2020 election.

"Democracy is held together by people's confidence in the election and their willingness to abide by its results," Welker recalled. "So by your own definition, are Donald Trump's claims undermining Americans' confidence in democracy, given that he has not conceded the last election?"

Rubio, a possible vice presidential nominee, refused to condemn Trump.

"I think what undermines people's confidence in the election is when you have places like Wisconsin with over 500 illegal dropbox locations, when you have places like Georgia where liberal groups are [paying] people, $10 a per vote," he complained. "You couldn't even talk about it on social media. They would deplatform you."

"I have to jump in here, Senator," Welker interrupted. "You voted to certify the election. Nothing has been censored on this program."

Rubio griped about coverage of a laptop belonging to President Joe Biden's son, Hunter.

"We covered the laptop," Welker said.

"You couldn't even talk about it on social media," Rubio replied.

"And just to note that Chris Krebs, who was a top election official, called it the safest and most secure election in recent history," Welker added.

"But I'm telling you that if it's unfair, we are going to do the same thing Democrats do," Rubio pouted. "We're going to use lawyers to go to court and point out the fact that states are not following their own election laws."

Watch the video below from NBC or at the link.

Marco Rubio shouts over NBC host in cringeworthy interview

www.youtube.com

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May 24, 2024 rww

Frederick Clarkson and André Gagné @ Religion Dispatches: A Reporter’s Guide to the New Apostolic Reformation

The story of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) lives at the epicenter of the intersection of politics and religion in the US—and reporting about it is as essential as it is challenging.

Kathryn Post @ Religion News Service: How is the ‘Appeal to Heaven’ flag spotted at Alito’s house linked to Jan. 6?

‘Throughout the Trump presidency, the flag became a symbol for Trump, for Christian America, for this insurgent Christian nationalism,’ says scholar Matthew Taylor.

Julianne McShane @ Mother Jones: Moms for Liberty Is Coming for the Swing States

The group will launch more than $3 million in ads attacking Biden in several battleground states—but they will not say who’s paying for it.

Roger Sollenberger and Mini Racker @ Daily Beast: GOP Senate Candidate Spent Thousands in Donor Funds on Strip Clubs, Luxury, and Mysterious Wire Transfers

Star athlete and conspiracy theorist Royce White just landed the Minnesota GOP’s endorsement for Senate. They must not have seen his previous campaign expenses.

Jason Wilson @ The Guardian: At least 66 members of far-right group in rural Oregon standing for office

At least 66 members of an anti-government group founded by far-right militia figure Ammon Bundy have attempted to win local positions of influence in the Republican party in Oregon, the Guardian can reveal.

'Deeply alarming' report finds almost one-third of Congress are 'election deniers' - Alternet.org

FARM BILL ~ SNAP 5 24

an 5 24

judge has ruled that Darrell Leon McClanahan III can remain on the 2024 Republican primary ballot in Missouri's gubernatorial race, despite the party's efforts to remove him.

The Daily Beast reported that McClanahan, who was outed as a supporter of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) earlier this year, prevailed against the Missouri GOP's legal challenge on Friday after a ruling by Cole County Circuit Court Judge Cotton Walker. In his decision, Walker ruled that while Missouri Republicans were free to criticize McClanahan as much as they liked, he wouldn't grant their petition to strike him from the ballot based on their argument of not properly vetting him first.

"I’m not sure they ever actually intended to win this case,” Dave Roland, who is representing McClanahan, told the Associated Press. "I think the case got filed because the Republican Party wanted to make a very big public show that they don’t want to be associated with racism or antisemitism. And the best way that they could do that was filing a case that they knew was almost certain to lose."

McClanahan's ties to the KKK came out after the Missouri-based publication Riverfront Times published photos of him from 2019 using a white power gesture next to a hooded man with a burning cross in the background. A separate photo shows McClanahan standing next to a klansman while holding a copy of the KKK's newsletter. The gubernatorial hopeful has since distanced himself from the group, but maintains that he is "pro-white." The photos were initially obtained by the Anti-Defamation League.

"The Missouri GOP knew exactly who I am," McClanahan wrote in a tweet in response to a separate tweet from the Missouri GOP condemning him.

McClanahan suggested that state Republican leadership made racist remarks to him in confidence, namely that Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft — one of the eight other Republicans vying for the gubernatorial nomination — told him in 2020 that "the Blacks are a problem."

"I have forwarded my email communications with the GOP to media and will to any other media that request it," he added, alluding to "recorded conversations" he had with Missouri Republican leaders he decried as "a bunch of Anti-White hypocrites."

The far-right activist confirmed the photos of him at the cross-burning, but maintains that he was granted honorary membership in the KKK for one year but is no longer a member. He downplayed the photo of the event as a "private religious Christian Identity Cross lighting ceremony falsely described as a cross burning."

Term-limited Missouri Governor Mike Parson (R) will not be seeking reelection this year, meaning the primary to replace him in the predominantly Republican state is particularly crowded. Other high-profile Republicans seeking the GOP nomination include Ashcroft, Lieutenant Governor Mike Kehoe and Missouri state senator Bill Eigel.

Missouri's gubernatorial primary election will be held on August 6.

Click here to read the Beast's full report (subscription required).

corp bad actors

thom 3 5 24

— Scientists have developed lab-grown meat that is healthier, easier on the planet, and, when manufactured at scale, cheaper than beef, pork, or chicken. The animal ag industry freaked out and threw a bunch of cash at Republican members of Congress, who are now trying to outlaw the product before the companies developing it can get to scale. Even the buggywhip makers back in the day didn’t think the way to protect their industry was to buy off politicians (of course that was before five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery).

— Climate change is devastating our planet and fine particle emissions from trucks cause hundreds of thousands of deaths and illnesses from heart disease, COPD, asthma, and cancer every year. To solve the problem, the EPA put forward new truck emission standards that will phase in between 2027 and 2032. This week, twenty-seven Republican-controlled states whose politicians take money from the fossil fuel industry sued to block the rules and protect the profits of the trucking and petroleum industries.

— Title IX of the federal code, which forbids gender-based discrimination in education, is being extended by the Department of Education to protect members of the queer community. Rightwing Christian groups, which provide billions of dollars and millions of votes to Republicans, pinged state-level politicians, so now Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, and Oklahoma have filed suit before hand-picked rightwing judges to allow schools to legally trash LGBTQ+ students.

— The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) promulgated a new rule limiting credit card late fees to $8 each, protecting America’s most vulnerable families. The banks pulled the GOP’s chain and Republican senators Tim Scott, John Thune, John Barrasso, Jerry Moran, John Boozman, Steve Daines, Mike Rounds, Thom Tillis, Marsha Blackburn, Kevin Cramer, Mike Braun, Bill Hagerty, and Katie Britt introduced legislation to reverse the policy and allow banks to again screw low-income people.

— In 2003, George W. Bush signed legislation to privatize Medicare through the so-called Medicare Advantage scam, which last year overcharged our government more than $140 billion while denying millions of claims from Americans unfortunate enough to have signed up for it. Republicans on the take from the insurance industry are now pushing a plan to gut or even shut down real Medicare, leaving all seniors to the tender mercies of this predatory industry.

— Ultra-processed foods are accused of causing obesity, diabetes, cancer, and host of other illnesses both physical and mental: American children, who consume as much as two-thirds of their calories from these products, are experiencing an epidemic of obesity and diseases associated with it. With Republican politicians running interference for them, the processed food industry has now succeeded in getting their ultra-processed “food” products placed in thousands of school lunch programs, paid for with our tax dollars. As The Washington Post noted a few months ago, “Republicans have continued to fight stricter standards” and, “Some Republicans are now threatening to block the USDA from further limiting sodium and reducing added sugar in milk…”

===

AN 4 24

House Republicans will now have one more vacant seat to fill this November after yet another member of the majority announced his retirement on Thursday.

Rep. Jake LaTurner (R-Kansas), who was first elected in 2020, stated he would not be seeking a third term in the House of Representatives this fall. In a statement posted online, LaTurner alluded to the stress of the job itself as well as the current wave of "dysfunction" plaguing the lower chamber of Congress.

"[T]he busy schedule of serving in and running for Congress has taken a toll," LaTurner said. "The unrepeatable season of life we are in, where our kids are still young and at home, is something I want to be more present for."

"Undoubtedly, the current dysfunction on Capitol Hill is distressing, but it almost always has been; we just didn't see most of it," LaTurner continued, adding that he remains "optimistic about the future of this country."

LaTurner's retirement makes him the 14th House Republican to announce his decision to leave the 118th U.S. Congress, according to Ballotpedia's tally of departures. While LaTurner will remain in the House until the 118th Congress gavels out at the end of 2024, others have not waited in leaving Washington. Tomorrow, Rep. Mike Gallagher — a 4-term House Republican — is officially leaving the House with six months to go before Election Day, citing constant threats from critics.

"This is more just me wanting to prioritize being with my family," Gallagher said this week. "I signed up for the death threats and the late-night swatting, but they did not. And for a young family, I would say this job is really hard."

Of the 14 Republicans who have announced their retirements, 11 have done so since House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) won the gavel last fall. Some of those departures include high-ranking members, including committee chairs and members from districts considered safe seats not at risk of flipping in November.

Johnson can currently only afford to have two defections from his own party in order to pass legislation, assuming full attendance. His majority suffered a significant blow after Rep. Thomas Suozzi (D-New York) won a special election in February to replace former Rep. George Santos (R-New York), who was expelled following a damning report from the House Committee on Ethics.

The trend of House GOP retirement announces may still continue. After longtime Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colorado) announced his sudden departure from the House of Representatives in March, he suggested others may soon follow suit.

"I think it's the next three people that leave that they're going to be worried about," Buck said of his GOP colleagues.

Click here to read LaTurner's full retirement announcement.

READ MORE:[House Republicans' majority shrinks even further after GOP rep announces surprise resignation

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KIRK 4 ~ MLK 4 24 JUDD

Oklahoma woman facing murder and kidnapping charges chaired rural county’s GOP - Alternet.org

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an 4 24

rural white voters have, in many cases, far more political power than suburban or urban voters, and they’re using that outsized power to push our nation toward disaster. While they’re only 20 percent of the country, for example, because of gerrymandering they control fully 42 percent of seats in the House of Representatives.

The authors of new book, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy point out that rural whites are measurably more bigoted and xenophobic than suburban or urban voters, 13 points more likely to hate on queer people, 15 points more likely to support Trump’s Muslim ban.

They’re also far more likely to agree that setting democracy aside for a strongman like Trump or another Putin wannabee will “fix the mess and drain the swamp.” And fully 74% of the members of Congress who voted to overturn the 2020 election represented rural districts.

The majority of rural white voters disagree with the statement (or have no opinion) that “diversity makes America stronger.” And while only 22 percent of city dwellers believe Trump won the 2020 election and Biden and Democrats “stole” it, a mind-boggling 47 percent of rural whites are certain Biden is illegitimately occupying the White House.

READ:Revealed: What government officials privately shared about Trump not disclosing finances

The astonishing paradox, though, is how Republican politicians regularly crap on their own voters in rural America. Instead of offering help or solutions to rural problems, the GOP and conservative media instead feed them a steady diet of xenophobic and racist fear and hate.

And they eat it up! The racist buffoons among them are one and a half times more likely to be QAnon followers than people who live in cities or suburbs.

Democrats created — and Republicans opposed — virtually all the programs that are keeping rural America from sinking even farther into poverty and despair. Social Security, unemployment insurance, SS Disability, Medicare, Medicaid, over 60 farm subsidy programs that funnel billions in taxpayer dollars into rural communities, food stamps, the Women and Infant Children (WIC) program, anti-addiction programs, etc.

The only real accomplishment of the Trump presidency was passing a massive $2 trillion dollar tax cut for the morbidly rich that had virtually no effect on rural voters. Nonetheless, 71 percent of rural voters cast a ballot for Trump in 2020.

There are still 11 mostly rural states where hospitals are closing and people are dying younger than necessary because Republicans in those states have refused to expand Medicaid.

Republicans in Congress fought against legislation to expand rural broadband access. They constantly try to cut or gut rural health and nutrition programs, and fought against expanding Obamacare in a way that would help rural people.

gerry SUPERMAJORITY

Most of the Red State Republican politicians in America know their seats will never be in danger, so they take millions from special interest groups to write loopholes into the tax code, vote for larger fossil fuel subsidies, and vote against efforts to lower prescription drug prices or do anything about global warming.

They get rich while the people who put them into office struggle to get by. Ted Cruz escapes to Cancun with the $600,000+ in cash he just got for his podcast, laughing at Texas voters all the way. JD Vance, a multimillionaire Wall Street guy, lives in an elite townhouse and travels by first class while people in Ohio watch Republican politicians gut their public schools and try to outlaw abortion and birth control.

Republican members of Congress representing rural states went all the way to the Supreme Court to successfully block President Biden’s first attempt at reducing student debt while rural students carry 60% more student debt than urban students by age 25.

One of the most chilling quotes from the book is about how rural voters are willing to both abandon democracy and embrace a violent rightwing coup:

“[R]ural Americans are more likely to believe that ‘it may be necessary at some point soon for citizens to take up arms against the government.’ Indeed, more than one out of four rural residents agree that Trump should be returned to office by force if necessary.”

White rural voters are more likely than any other demographic group — Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans — to be willing to overturn our democracy, and the people who represent them are in the majority of legislators who voted to overturn the 2020 election the day after the January 6th attack on our capitol.

If, say, Black people held that view, rightwing media would be trumpeting it every day from coast to coast. But because it’s rural white people, the so-called “heartland Americans,” it gets largely ignored by American media.

After all, most mainstream outlets treat rural people as if they’re an exotic species who must be listened to: going to rural diners to interview people is so common it’s become a cliché. In the past month I’ve seen dozens of such interviews played on MSNBC and CNN, but not once have I seen those same reporters go into a city and ask why people are voting for Biden.

The Biden administration has done more for rural America than any president since Lyndon Johnson rolled out Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps. Biden’s American Rescue Plan provided specific tax breaks and credits targeted at rural poverty, subsidized mortgage payments, and provided rent assistance to tens of thousands of rural residents:

— Rural Americans are nine times more likely to lack access to affordable child care, so Biden’s program allocated $39 billion for subsidies for child care providers, with the money disproportionately going to rural communities. There was also $350 billion specifically allocated for small towns in rural areas to help them run basic government functions and upgrade their infrastructure. He even put up $198 million in funding for rural colleges and universities.

— Biden and Democrats delivered a 15% increase in SNAP (food stamp) benefits that have a huge impact in rural areas, reaching “2.9 million people in rural areas, including 800,000 children, reducing rural poverty by 11 percent and rural child poverty by 20 percent.” Biden’s USDA, over Republican objections, also put a billion dollars into rural food banks.

— Biden and Democrats “invested a historic $3 billion in the Department of Commerce’s (DOC) Economic Development Administration (EDA) to build local [rural] economies that are resilient to future economic shocks, including a $300 million Coal Communities Commitment.”

— Biden and Democrats — over GOP objections — expanded hunting and fishing opportunities on 2.1 million acres of public lands, the largest such expansion in U.S. history, and provided $1.5 billion in annual funding for wildlife and habitat conservation efforts. Another $2 billion went “for funding communities in the Rural Partners Network to spur job creation and build infrastructure.”

— They put $5 billion in “investments to help rural areas update infrastructure, boost high-speed internet access, and aid agricultural producers and small businesses in implementing climate-focused practices” and “$1.7 billion in funding to assist farmers, ranchers and foresters in adopting techniques to adapt to the changing climate, such as cover crops, nutrient management, and carbon storage.”

And that’s just the beginning: for a full list of the ways the Biden administration, over the objection of Republicans in Congress, has helped rural people click here.

Not one single Republican in either the House or the Senate voted for any of the things listed above: in fact, almost all voted against these helps to rural America.

Instead of concerning themselves with the well-being of rural people, they’re trying to block clean air standards that prevent rural communities from being poisoned, block clean water standards in rivers that supply water to rural communities, cut taxes on billionaires, and increase subsidies to the fossil fuel and banking industries.

All while taking huge campaign contributions, private jet rides, taxpayer funded junkets overseas, and the promise of million-dollar-a-year jobs when they leave Congress if only they vote the right way.

Because Republican politicians are more interested in feathering their own nests than helping out the people they were elected to represent, rural Red states are massively subsidized by urban Blue states just to keep their heads above water. As the Associated Press recently reported:

“Mississippi received $2.13 for every tax dollar the state sent to Washington in 2015, according to the Rockefeller study. West Virginia received $2.07, Kentucky got $1.90 and South Carolina got $1.71.

“Meanwhile, New Jersey received 74 cents in federal spending for every tax dollar the state sent to Washington. New York received 81 cents, Connecticut received 82 cents and Massachusetts received 83 cents.”

It’s undeniably true (and documented with each hotlink below) that Republican-controlled “Red” states, almost across the board, have higher rates of:

— Spousal abuse

— [Obesity — Smoking](https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/11/10/1994653/-Decades-of-Republican-Mismanagement-Have-Left-Red-States-Mired-in-the-Past-at-the-Bottom)

— Teen pregnancy

— Sexually transmitted diseases

— Abortion (at least before Dobbs; now it would be “forced births”)

— Bankruptcies and poverty

— Homicide and suicide

— Infant mortality

— Maternal mortality

— Forcible rape — Robbery and aggravated assault

— Dropouts from high school

— Divorce

— Contaminated air and water

— Opiate addiction and deaths

— Unskilled workers

— Parasitic infections

— Income and wealth inequality

— Covid deaths and unvaccinated people

— Federal subsidies to states (“Red State Welfare”)

— People on welfare

— Child poverty — Homelessness

— Spousal murder

— Unemployment

— Deaths from auto accidents

— People living on disability

— Gun deaths

So, why do Red state voters tolerate being conned and ripped off by their own elected representatives? Are they just stupid?

One theory is that “they hate the same people we hate.” And, indeed, for a significant and measurable cohort of rural white voters, racial fear and hatred is a primary motivating factor in their embrace of the GOP, although that’s only, according to this new book, about 20% of rural people.

Others vote Republican because the party has been so effective at branding itself with county fairs, NASCAR, country music, and the overall rural lifestyle including a faux paean to rugged individuality and independence.

Having over 1500 radio stations daily broadcasting a rightwing Republican message to literally every nook and cranny of rural America is another large factor. As is the dominance of Australian billionaire Lachlan Murdoch’s Fox “News.”

Will rural voters ever wake up to how badly they’re being screwed now and have been screwed by Republicans ever since Reagan started the whole neoliberal austerity and free trade movement that shipped over 60,000 factories and 20 million jobs overseas?

Or is the GOP’s cynical manipulation of religion, gender, and race enough to keep them voting to hurt themselves and further enrich Republican fat-cats?

So far, all indications seem like that’s the case and will stay that way for at least the next election cycle.

While the media struggles with trying to “understand” the rural white voter every election cycle, instead they should be running stories on how the very real problems and crises of rural America are daily made worse by Republicans in Congress and at the helm of their Red States.

How to break through?

Democrats need to get smart and start using the “negative partisanship” strategies Rachel Bitecofer recommends in her new book Hit 'Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game. They can do this by pointing out, with ad buys and media appearances, just how bad Red state Republicans politicians have been for rural people and their communities.

And they need to do it soon. As the authors of White Rural Rage point out:

“By 2040, 70% of Americans will reside in the 15 most populous states and choose 30 of the 100 US senators. Concentrated in smaller and more rural states, the remaining 30% of the population will elect 70 senators. No matter how distorted these population ratios become, each state is guaranteed its two senators — past, present, and forever.”

Our mainstream media have made it clear, for over 40 years, that they won’t expose the damage Republicans are doing to rural areas because their TV programs will fail if Republican politicians boycott them.

So, the job falls to us and the Democrats. Can we do it? I believe so; we just need to get started.

NOW READ:GOP Senators back away from MTG's 'ridiculous' speaker threat

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Michigan US Senate GOP candidate running on local roots exposed as legal resident of Florida - Alternet.org

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an 4 24 op ed

...If 3 and 10 Republicans believe Americans may have to resort to violence “to set things straight” we are talking about roughly 20 million Americans who feel this way. And even if this poll’s plus/minus accuracy rate is absolutely abysmal, would any of you feel better if “only” 15 million Republicans feel this way? How about ten million? Five million????

Hell, it’s chilling that 1,000 people actually think this is a prudent course. It takes just one nut with a gun to terrorize an entire town, for Christ’s sake.

If you are asking how I arrived at my calculations, I did it this way: Trump got slightly more than 74,000,000 votes in 2020. Thirty percent of that number would roughly work out to 20+ million.

Twenty million-plus people who think we need violence “to set things straight ...”

And what does “set things straight” even mean? I’ll let you decide that, but besides sounding thuggish, in my mind we are talking about returning to a time when white men ran every single bit of everything in this country, and by extreme force.

How many of these Republicans who see violence as a way “to set things straight” are cops? How many of these Republicans who see violence as a way “to set things straight” are in our military? How many of these Republicans who see violence as a way “to set things straight” are in our Congress? How many of these Republicans who see violence as a way “to set things straight” are moms and dads?

We know for an ironclad fact the Republican nominee for president feels this way. He sees January 6 as a reason for celebration, not utter shame. He calls it a “beautiful day” and those who attacked us “hostages.” He told us, “he loves them.”...

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maine state rep against neo-nazi ban 1st amend 4 24

Scientific proof Republicans are killing women - Alternet.org

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alternet-3 24 NO LNX

How the GOP plans to drag America back to the 19th century

Thom Hartmann

March 22, 2024

“Moscow Mike” Johnson and his Republicans in the House are determined to continue to shorten the lifespans of Americans by forcing brutal Red State policies on the entire nation. It’s literally killing people, but they frankly don’t care so long as they can keep taxes on their billionaire owners low.

And now Republicans are officially saying they want to cut Social Security and gut Medicare.

Ronald Reagan is long gone, but a recent report shows how his policies and his party live on and are still hurting us: they’re responsible for millions of lost years of Americans’ lives. The study calls them “missing Americans.”

It wasn’t always this way.

In the 1930s, after FDR rolled out programs to aid the homeless and unemployed across the country, America enjoyed a longer life expectancy — and more healthy years within that life expectancy — than any other wealthy nation in the world.

While some of that was due to the public health crisis echoing across Europe in the wake of World War I, it was largely because FDR’s Democrats in charge of the country were building schools and hospitals like there was no tomorrow.

Republican President Eisenhower followed in that tradition through the 1950s, and in the 1960s LBJ rolled out Medicare and Medicaid. As a result, we continued to have the world’s best lifespans and quality-of-life.

Then came Reagan’s austerity and neoliberalism campaigns in 1981 and America began to become unraveled.

That study, published by the National Academy of Sciences in the journal PNAS Nexus, looked at “excess deaths” (they also called them “missing Americans”) in our country versus others around the world.

The researchers from Boston University School of Public Health, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Harvard Medical School and TH Chan School of Public Health found:

“The United States had lower mortality rates than peer countries in the 1930s–1950s and similar mortality in the 1960s and 1970s. Beginning in the 1980s, however, the United States began experiencing a steady increase in the number of missing Americans, reaching 622,534 in 2019 alone.”

Those excess deaths, it turns out, are almost all entirely the result of Republican policies, both at the federal and state level.

The researchers found:

“Stagnant minimum wages and losses of collective bargaining protections have contributed to widening economic inequality. A scant safety net for working-age adults and the absence of universal healthcare have privatized risk, tying health more closely to personal wealth and employment.

“Additionally, lax regulation of opioids, firearms, environmental pollutants, unhealthy foods, and workplace safety has contributed to elevated US mortality, particularly among lower-educated and lower-income people.”

And it’s worse in Red states:

“Increasingly divergent policies at the state level have resulted in widening health gaps across US states. In those geographic areas of the United States where excess mortality has increased the most, voters have turned towards policy-makers who have further undermined population health, e.g. through refusal to expand Medicaid or to implement firearm regulations.”

While not coming right out and saying that people live longer in Blue states than Red states, that’s largely what the study found. And it’s not a small effect:

“In 2021, there were 26.4 million years of life lost due to excess US mortality relative to peer nations…”

While President Eisenhower ran for re-election in 1956 by bragging about how on his watch millions more Americans had gotten good union jobs or signed up for Social Security, by 1981, when Reagan took office, the 1978 efforts of five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court to legalize political bribery were beginning to seriously take hold.

That’s when everything changed. Since 1981, millions of Americans have died unnecessarily because of neoliberal austerity policies: their lives were sacrificed on the altars of increased corporate profits and lower taxes for billionaires.

— Reagan told us that the “union bosses” were just out for themselves and the best thing American workers could do was to rely on their employers’ good will. He also claimed that the minimum wage actually hurt low-wage workers because, he said, it “prevented” employers from hiring more people.

Both were lies, as history has vividly shown, and both contributed to our epidemic of early and unnecessary deaths, as Red state minimum wages are still as low as $7.25/hour and Red “Right to Work for Less” states make it nearly impossible to unionize.

“Stagnant minimum wages and losses of collective bargaining protections have contributed to widening economic inequality” that leads to early deaths, reported the researchers.

— The Republican backlash to Obamacare extending Medicaid to everybody in the country wasn’t limited to their lawsuit before the Supreme Court that ended up letting Red states opt out of coverage, or to the Astroturf “Tea Party” movement funded by rightwing billionaires.

— To this day, more than a decade later, there are still about a dozen Red states that have taken the five Republican justices up on their offer and refuse to expand the program. Those Republican-controlled states have also thrown hundreds of bureaucratic roadblocks to people getting any kind of state services, from food stamps to unemployment insurance to housing assistance.

“A scant safety net for working-age adults and the absence of universal healthcare have privatized risk, tying health more closely to personal wealth and employment” that leads to early deaths, reported the researchers.

— A collaborative research project between the University of Texas and the University of Toronto published in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that the Red state preference for deregulation and a lack of oversight:

“…explained 9.2% of an enrollee’s odds of receiving prolonged opioids… The correlation between a county’s Republican presidential vote and the adjusted rate of … prolonged opioid use was 0.42 (P<.001). In the 693 counties with adjusted rates of opioid prescription significantly higher than the mean county rate, the mean Republican presidential vote was 59.96%, vs 38.67% in the 638 counties with significantly lower rates.”

— Cancer alley is alive and well in Texas and Louisiana thanks to Republican governments’ in those states refusal to enforce environmental regulations that would keep carcinogens out of the air and water.

— A child living in Mississippi is ten times more likely to die from gunshot than a child in Massachusetts because Republicans in Mississippi refuse to adopt rational, constitutional gun control regulations like Massachusetts has had for decades.

— Obesity and the diabetes, heart disease, and strokes associated with it are vastly more prevalent and thus more deadly in Red states than Blue states because so many more people are living in poverty in Red states and must eat junk food because it is cheaper than healthy food.

— Twenty-nine states, encompassing virtually all the nation’s Red states, have no state-level workplace safety agencies; those only exist in 21 mostly Blue states. As a result, Red Wyoming has 10.4 workplace deaths per 100,000 workers while Blue Rhode Island only has 1.0 deaths per 100,000 workers.

When The Washington Post looked into the differences between Red and Blue states, what they found was shocking.

For example, noted the authors:

“Ohio sticks out — for all the wrong reasons. Roughly 1 in 5 Ohioans will die before they turn 65, according to Montez’s analysis using the state’s 2019 death rates. The state, whose legislature has been increasingly dominated by Republicans, has plummeted nationally when it comes to life expectancy rates, moving from middle of the pack to the bottom fifth of states during the last 50 years, The Post found. Ohioans have a similar life expectancy to residents of Slovakia and Ecuador, relatively poor countries.”

While it would be easy and glib to say that Republican politicians want the citizens of their states to die young, the simple truth is that they don’t care: their priority, instead, is the profitability of the companies in their states and keeping the taxes on their oligarchs low.

Author Mark Jacob noted on Xitter:

“Voting for Republicans is like eating poison.”

In fact, eating poison is a choice. Most people trapped in Red states, though, don’t have the means or ability to move to a Blue state because they’ve been denied a good education, are saddled with medical debt, and/or haven’t made enough at their work to afford the transition.

Blue states, for their part, are fighting back on behalf of their citizens. As Bernie’s poverty advisor Nikhil Goyal wrote for The New York Times a few months ago:

“Fourteen [Blue] states have adopted a state-level child tax credit, with many featuring a fully refundable provision so that families with little to no income can benefit. This year, New Mexico has expanded free preschool seats and made child care free for families earning up to four times the federal poverty rate — roughly $120,000 for a family of four.

“In the upcoming fiscal year, Minnesota will pour more than $250 million of additional funding into early childhood education to reduce the costs of child care and create thousands of new preschool slots. This includes $10 million to supplement funding of the federal Head Start program, which serves children up to the age of 5 and should be bolstered by states.

“Today, nine [Blue] states have universal free school breakfast and lunch on the books. Just last month, the governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, established a $20 million initiative that will help fund grocery stores in food deserts.”

But every action draws a reaction, as Isaac Newton was quick to point out. Republicans are now trying to do to Blue states — to all of America — the same damage they’ve done to Red states over the past 40 years.

In the sixteen months since Republicans took control of the US House of Representatives, child poverty in America has doubled. This is because Republicans in the House refused to renew programs Democrats put in place providing health care, food assistance, housing support, the child tax credit, and subsidized child care: all have now expired.

In the past eleven months, since Republicans in Congress refused to act, 3.2 million children lost access to healthcare, 70,000 childcare and preschool programs have closed, and the child tax credit has expired. So have the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’s emergency allotments. As of last November, 10,046,000 Americans have been kicked off Medicaid, nearly all in Red states.

And it’s all intentional.

Republicans will proudly tell you it’s necessary to keep taxes low for their morbidly rich donors, and to prevent poor people from becoming “lazy.” Speaker “Moscow Mark” Johnson will tell you that it’s the Christian way, just like trashing queer people and forcing 10-year-old rape victims to carry their pregnancies to term.

Welcome to the 2024 GOP and their plans to “deconstruct the administrative state” so they can drag America back to the 19th century.

Mark Jacob was right about the poison part. But instead of Republican voters eating it, their politicians are determined to force it down the throats of all of us, our children, and our grandchildren.

// mark robinson gov cand yikes

nazi cow 3 24

Republican public schools nominee supports political killings and ‘death’ to Bill Gates

Michele Morrow official campaign photo

Jordan GreenandRaw Story

March 08, 2024

GREENSBORO, N.C. — Michele Morrow, the newly minted Republican nominee for superintendent of public instruction in North Carolina, wishes “death” on Bill and Melinda Gates.

She’s advocated killing people she considers “traitors.”

Despite seeking to oversee public education in a state of 10.5 million people, she is herself a homeschooler.

She has no prior political experience.

She attended the Jan. 6 rally to support Donald Trump’s quest to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

She received candidate training alongside a Proud Boys member.

And yet, Morrow upset incumbent Catherine Truitt in the Republican primary on Tuesday.

ALSO READ: Inside the neo-Nazi hate network grooming children for a race war

Morrow, who rallied for Trump in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021, has repeatedly made false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, while calling for death to Trump’s political enemies — and to former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and his former wife Melinda Gates for promoting vaccines.

Morrow could not be reached for comment for this story.

In a post on Twitter (now X) on Dec. 29, 2020, Morrow wrote: “I do support death to vaccine mongers like Bill and Melinda Gates.” (Raw Story reviewed the post on Wednesday, but it has since been removed for violating X’s rules. The post has been archived.)

In another post the same day, she wrote: “We need to follow the Constitution’s advice and KILL all TRAITORS!!!!”

Morrow livestreamed herself with other Trump supporters walking to the Ellipse on Jan. 6.

“We are here to take back America,” she said. “We are here to stop the steal. We are here to ensure that President Trump gets four more years.”

Morrow, who has worked as a Christian missionary, exhorted her livestream followers: “We need to fight back with prayer… May the people of God arise. May the Holy Spirit descend on D.C., and may souls be saved. And may the United States once again return to one nation under God with liberty and justice for all.”

In the aftermath of the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Morrow rebuked a call by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to prosecute those involved. Four people died during the attack — all Trump supporters — and dozens of police officers were injured.

“We do not condone violence and destruction,” Morrow wrote. Nor will we stand for treason and cowardice. Did anyone offer to talk with those entered? Or only force them out and threaten them? Thousands of us were here in Nov & Dec. We never heard from ANY Congressmen. Now you want to talk?”

Following President Joe Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, Morrow took part in the far-right shift towards focusing on public schools as sites for cultural and political struggle.

A post in the private Facebook group Education First Warriors shows Morrow attending a candidate training with a member of the Proud Boys in January 2022. The photo was posted by Sloan Rachmuth, the president of the Education First Alliance.

Proud Boy member John Fischer, who like Morrow would go on to lose a local school board race that year, later attended a rally with other Proud Boys wearing masks and paramilitary gear who harassed patrons at a drag show in Sanford, N.C.

Public schools are 'greatest threat to humanity'

Truitt, who Morrow defeated Tuesday to win the Republican nomination for superintendent of public instruction, has held the post for the past four years.

The person in this position is responsible for developing curriculum and administering state and federal funds in North Carolina K-12 schools.

Morrow’s primary win sets up what’s likely to be a spirited general election fight with Maurice “Mo” Green, formerly the superintendent of Guilford County Schools — the third largest district in the state — who won the Democratic primary.

Green received the endorsement of the NC Association of Educators, whose president declared the election to “be critical to the future of public education in North Carolina” while warning that “anti-public school politicians want to tear down our schools.”

Some of Morrow’s views on public education are outlined in a 2023 Newsmax opinion article that promotes a Christian nationalist vision for education, while claiming that preserving traditional gender roles is a matter of national security.

Morrow wrote that “government-run (read public) schools and medical systems” are “the greatest threat to humanity,” while arguing that removing God “from the classroom, the courtroom, and the public square” is opening “ourselves up to chaos and confusion.”

ALSO READ: Feds gave classified information to neo-Nazi defendant: lawyer

In the same article, Morrow claimed that the American soldiers who liberated France during World War II are being demonized as “toxic.” She also complained that society is “filling our children’s minds with the lie that gender roles are an oppressive, social construct to be rejected” and “telling them that it is ‘heroic’ to block the natural processes of development.”

Green, the Democratic nominee for superintendent of public instruction, is largely refraining from commenting on his opponent.

In a statement to Raw Story, Green said he will work to make the North Carolina public school system the best in the country by advocating for full funding, ensuring staff receives adequate pay and “celebrating the good in public education.”

Morrow, in contrast, has a history of negatively framing public education.

Speaking at a candidate forum during her unsuccessful bid for a seat on the Wake County Board of Education in 2022, Morrow said her children have been educated in public, private and home schools.

“And what worked best for my kids in preparing them to be critically thinking, hardworking and intelligent adults and prepared for entering into the adult world and following and pursuing a career that they are passionate about was homeschooling,” she said.

Morrow added: “I would be more than happy to put my last child, who is in fifth grade now — 10 years old — to put him in the public school system if I believed that the public education system was focused on academic excellence and preparing our children for the career of their choice.”

https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/michele-morrow/

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thom

an 3 24 no lnx

Bill Barr laid the foundation for today’s MAGA movement

How Bill Barr laid the foundation for today’s MAGA movement

Thom Hartmann

March 11, 2024

With nepo-daughter-in-law Lara Trump taking over the GOP, Donald Trump has essentially declared the “old Republican Party” — the party of Reagan and Bill Barr — dead, arguing that it no longer exists in the form it’s taken since the 1970s.

At a Virginia rally a week ago Saturday, Trump said his neofascist MAGA movement has taken over the Republican Party, that it “represents 96%, and maybe 100%” of Republicans, and that, “We’re getting rid of the Romneys of the world. We want to get Romneys and those out.”

While many in the GOP love the nativist, authoritarian turn the party’s taken, others — like former Attorney General Bill Barr — are mourning the loss of the old guard, calling Trump’s actions “despicable” and “nauseating.”

But what is — or was — the old GOP that Bill Barr so loved?

While not as openly fascist as the MAGA movement, the Republican Party of the past five decades or so was frighteningly corrupt and based, itself, on lies and corruption.

Just this week, The New York Times revealed how Bill Barr apparently inserted himself into a Justice Department criminal investigation of a billion-dollar corporation for allegedly corruptly hiding their income offshore to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

As the Times notes:

“In the months leading up to the canceled interview in the Netherlands, Caterpillar had enlisted a small group of well-connected lawyers to plead the company’s case. Chief among those was William P. Barr, who had served as attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration.”

And, the Times reported, one of the lead investigators into Caterpillar’s tax avoidance scheme came right out and complained that because of Barr’s involvement:

“It appears that Caterpillar was given special political treatment that the average U.S. citizen cannot obtain.”

But helping out alleged tax cheats is just the tip of the iceberg of “old GOP” corruption and lies since the days of Nixon and Reagan.

— They lied that if we cut taxes on the morbidly rich, the benefits would “trickle down” to everybody else.

— They lied that if labor unions were destroyed, “job creators” would create “prosperity” and pay workers better.

— They lied that if “originalist” judges were put on the Supreme Court, the rights to vote, abortion, and birth control would be protected.

— They lied that Reagan’s 1983 decision to stop enforcing our anti-trust laws would make business “more efficient” and create opportunities for entrepreneurs and locally-owned businesses.

— They lied that if we forbade the federal government from negotiating drug prices, consumers and taxpayers would save money.

— They lied that if we privatized Medicare, like George W. Bush did in 2003 with his Medicare Advantage scam, the system would save money.

— They lied that racism was “over” in America with the election of Barack Obama, so if the Supreme Court simply let former Confederate states do whatever they wanted, there would be no more suppression and purging of Black voters.

Every one of those lies was intended to increase the wealth and power of the morbidly rich at the expense of average working-class Americans.

But most important, the Bill Barr old-school Republicans lied that they’d protect our democracy and bring honesty and integrity to American politics. Barr’s own history is probably the best example of how dangerous and destructive that lie has been.

The depth and breadth of Barr’s possible crimes against democracy while Attorney General for Trump are just now coming into clearer focus. We shouldn’t be surprised: like Ghostbusters, Bill Barr has been the “Who ya gonna call?” guy for Republican presidents committing treason for over 30 years.

Most people know that when the Mueller investigation was completed — documenting ten prosecutable cases of Donald Trump personally engaging in criminal obstruction of justice and witness tampering to prevent the Mueller Report investigators from getting to the bottom of his 2016 connections to Russia — Barr buried the report for weeks while lying to the American people about its content.

(Merrick Garland, Barr’s heir to the AG job, is still hiding large parts of the report from the American people, another reason President Biden should replace him.)

While shocking, this was not Bill Barr‘s first time playing cover-up for a Republican president who’d committed crimes that could rise to the level of treason against America.

He’s the exemplar of the “old GOP” that helped Nixon cut a deal to prolong the Vietnam War in 1968, worked with Reagan in 1980 to sell weapons to Iran in exchange for holding the hostages to screw Jimmy Carter, and stole the 2000 election from Al Gore in Jeb Bush’s Florida.

Instead of today’s GOP, exemplified by Nazi marches, white trash like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and racist rhetoric against immigrants, Barr’s “old GOP” committed their crimes wearing $2000 tailored suits and manipulating the law to their advantage.

For example, back in 1992, the first time Bill Barr was U.S. Attorney General, iconic New York Times writer William Safire referred to him as “Coverup-General Barr” because of his role in burying evidence of then-President George H.W. Bush’s involvement in Reagan’s scheme to steal the 1980 election through what the media euphemistically called “Iron-Contra.”

On Christmas day of 1992, the New York Times featured a screaming all-caps headline across the top of its front page: Attorney General Bill Barr had covered up evidence of crimes by Reagan and Bush in the Iran-Contra “scandal.” (see the bottom of this article)

Earlier that week of Christmas, 1992, George H.W. Bush was on his way out of office. Bill Clinton had won the White House the month before, and in a few weeks would be sworn in as president.

But Bush Senior’s biggest concern wasn’t that he’d have to leave the White House to retire back to one of his million-dollar mansions in Connecticut, Maine, or Texas: instead, he was worried that he may face time in a federal prison after he left office, a concern nearly identical to what Richard Nixon faced when he decided to resign to avoid prosecution.

Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh was closing in fast on Bush and Reagan, and Bush’s private records, subpoenaed by the independent counsel’s office, were the key to it all.

Walsh had been appointed independent counsel in 1986 to investigate the Iran-Contra activities of the Reagan administration and determine if crimes had been committed.

Was the criminal Iran-Contra conspiracy limited, as Reagan and Bush insisted (and Reagan said on TV), to later years in the Reagan presidency, in response to an obscure hostage-taking in Lebanon?

Or had it started in the 1980 presidential campaign against Jimmy Carter with treasonous collusion with the Iranians, as the then-president of Iran asserted? Who knew what, and when? And what was George H.W. Bush’s role in it all?

In the years since then, the President of Iran in 1980, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, has gone on the record saying that the Reagan campaign reached out to Iran to hold the hostages in exchange for weapons.

“Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan,” President Bani-Sadr told the Christian Science Monitor in 2013, “had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the ‘October Surprise,’ which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.”

That wouldn’t have been just an impeachable and imprisionable crime: it was every bit as much treason as when Richard Nixon blew up LBJ’s 1968 peace talks with North and South Vietnam to win that November’s election against Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

Walsh had zeroed in on documents that were in the possession of Reagan’s former defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, who all the evidence showed was definitely in on the deal, and President Bush’s diary that could corroborate it.

Elliott Abrams had already been convicted of withholding evidence about it from Congress, and he may have even more information, too, if it could be pried out of him before he went to prison. But Abrams was keeping mum, apparently anticipating a pardon.

This was the moment the “old GOP” was at the height of its power and prestige, and Bush and Barr weren’t about to let it be exposed for the criminal enterprise that the “party of Lincoln” had become.

Weinberger, trying to avoid jail himself, was preparing to testify that Bush knew about the deal to hold the hostages and even participated in it, and Walsh had already, based on information he’d obtained from the investigation into Weinberger, demanded that Bush turn over his diary from the campaign. He was also again hot on the trail of Abrams.

So Bush called in his attorney general, Bill Barr — the respectable scion of the “old GOP” — and asked his advice.

At that point Barr, along with Bush, was already up to his eyeballs in cover-ups of other shady behavior by the Reagan administration.

Safire had started referring to Barr as “Coverup-General” in the midst of another scandal — Bush illegally selling weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein — because the Attorney General was already covering up for Bush, Weinberger, and others in the Reagan administration with a scandal the newspapers called “Iraqgate.”

Ironically, that illegal sale of weapons to Saddam Hussein in the late 1980s and early 1990s was cited by George W. Bush, Bush’s son, as part of his justification for illegally invading Iraq in 2003.

On October 19, 1992, Safire wrote in The New York Times of Barr’s unwillingness to appoint an independent counsel to look into Iraqgate:

“Why does the Coverup-General resist independent investigation? Because he knows where it may lead: to Dick Thornburgh, James Baker, Clayton Yeutter, Brent Scowcroft and himself [the people who organized the sale of WMD to Saddam]. He vainly hopes to be able to head it off, or at least be able to use the threat of firing to negotiate a deal.”

Now, just short of two months later, Bush was asking Barr for advice on how to avoid another very serious charge in the Iran-Contra crimes they committed to defeat Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election. How, he wanted to know, could they shut down Walsh’s investigation before Walsh’s lawyers got their hands on Bush’s diary?

In April of 2001, safely distant from the swirl of D.C. politics, the University of Virginia’s Miller Center was compiling oral presidential histories, and interviewed Barr about his time as AG in the Bush White House. They brought up the issue of the Weinberger pardon, which put an end to the Iran-Contra investigation, and Barr’s involvement in it.

Turns out, Barr was right in the middle of it.

“There were some people arguing just for [a pardon for] Weinberger, and I said, ‘No, in for a penny, in for a pound,’” Barr told the interviewer. “I went over and told the President I thought he should not only pardon Caspar Weinberger, but while he was at it, he should pardon about five others.”

Which is exactly what Bush did, on Christmas Eve when most Americans were with family instead of watching the news. The holiday notwithstanding, the result was explosive.

America knew that both Reagan and Bush were up to their necks in the Iran-Contra hostages-for-weapons scandal, and Democrats had been talking about treason, impeachment, or worse.

The independent counsel had already obtained one conviction, three guilty pleas, and two other individuals were lined up for prosecution in the case that lost Jimmy Carter the White House. And Walsh was closing in fast on Bush himself.

The second paragraph of the Times story by David Johnston laid it out:

“Mr. Weinberger was scheduled to stand trial on Jan. 5 on charges that he lied to Congress about his knowledge of the arms sales to Iran and efforts by other countries to help underwrite the Nicaraguan rebels, a case that was expected to focus on Mr. Weinberger’s private notes that contain references to Mr. Bush’s endorsement of the secret shipments to Iran.” (emphasis added)

History shows that when a Republican president is in serious legal trouble, the “old GOP’s” go-to guy was Bill Barr.

For William Safire, Iran-Contra was déjà vu all over again. Four months earlier, referring to Iraqgate (Bush’s criminally selling WMDs to Iraq), Safire opened his article, titled “Justice [Department] Corrupts Justice,” by writing:

“U.S. Attorney General William Barr, in rejecting the House Judiciary Committee’s call for a prosecutor not beholden to the Bush Administration to investigate the crimes of Iraqgate, has taken personal charge of the cover-up.”

Safire accused Barr of not only rigging the cover-up, but of being one of the criminals who could be prosecuted.

“Mr. Barr,” wrote Safire in The New York Times in August of 1992, “...could face prosecution if it turns out that high Bush officials knew about Saddam Hussein’s perversion of our Agriculture export guarantees to finance his war machine.”

He added:

“They [Barr and colleagues] have a keen personal and political interest in seeing to it that the Department of Justice stays in safe, controllable Republican hands.”

Earlier in Bush’s administration, Barr had succeeded in blocking the appointment of an investigator or independent counsel to look into Iraqgate, as Safire repeatedly documented in the Times.

In December, Barr helped Bush block indictments from another independent counsel, Lawrence Walsh, and eliminated any risk that Reagan or George H.W. Bush would be held to account for Iran-Contra.

Walsh, wrote Johnston for the Times on Christmas Eve, “plans to review a campaign diary kept by Mr. Bush.” The diary would be the smoking gun that would nail Bush to the scandal.

“But,” noted the Times, “in a single stroke, Mr. Bush [at Barr’s suggestion] swept away one conviction, three guilty pleas and two pending cases, virtually decapitating what was left of Mr. Walsh’s effort, which began in 1986.”

And Walsh didn’t take it lying down. The Times report noted that:

“Mr. Walsh bitterly condemned the President’s action, charging that ‘the Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed.’”

Independent Counsel Walsh added that the diary and notes he wanted to enter into a public trial of Weinberger represented:

“{E]vidence of a conspiracy among the highest ranking Reagan Administration officials to lie to Congress and the American public.”

The phrase “highest ranking” officials almost certainly included Reagan, Bush, and Barr himself.

Walsh had been fighting to get those documents ever since 1986, when he was appointed and Reagan still had two years left in office. Bush’s and Weinberger’s refusal to turn them over, Johnston noted in the Times, could have, in Walsh’s words:

“[F]orestalled impeachment proceedings against President Reagan” through a pattern of “deception and obstruction.”

Back in the 1990s, Barr successfully covered up the involvement of two Republican presidents — Reagan and Bush — in two separate and impeachable “high crimes,” one of them almost certainly treason committed just to win a presidential election.

And now we learn he apparently went so far as to cover up Trump’s involvement with Putin, leading to multiple opportunities for Trump to extort Ukraine and pass sensitive intelligence along to Russia.

Trump is proudly proclaiming that Barr’s old GOP is dead, replaced by the hateful, nativist MAGA movement. Old-school Republicans are wringing their hands, and some are even leaving the party.

But is the difference really that big?

The corrupt “old GOP” merely laid the foundation for today’s MAGA movement: in many ways Trump was the inevitable next step, after 50-plus years of catering to the morbidly rich while taking a meat-axe to voting rights and the rule of law.

Don’t be fooled: the crocodile tears of those like Bill Barr and the “ex-Republicans” who fill the cable airwaves daily longing for a return of their “Grand Old Party” are every bit the con of Iran-Contra, Bush v Gore, and Citizens United.

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'Horrifying': RNC official blasts 'worst fundraising year' in three decades - Alternet.org

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an 1 24

MSNBC's Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski spoke with Financial Times National US Editor Edward Luce Sunday morning about Donald Trump and the Republican Party's commitment to "worship" and model the leadership of autocrat and Hungary Prime Minster Viktor Orbán.

:{:{"This is a guy — Donald Trump — who has promised to terminate the Constitution," Scarborough emphasized. "He said he was going to ban TV networks that he didn't like. He said he was going to execute generals that were insufficiently loyal to him for quote, 'treason', which by the way sounds like the French resolution with a guillotine. They accused everyone of treason and cut their heads off. And then, he talked about a couple weeks ago, how he could kill his political opponents with Seal Team 6, and be immune from all things.}:

... Talks about Viktor Orbán — you understand that a lot of people, maybe on wall street understand what that means — Viktor Orbán has shut down the free press. Viktor Orbán has crushed all political parts. Viktor Orbán is an autocrat who hates western democracy and freedom. and free markets, the way that Wall Street claims to like free markets. You can't make a deal with the devil. You lose every time."}:

Luce replied, "People around Orban, including the local gas man in his village, the guy who does gas connections, have grown rich beyond their wildest fantasies —the billionaires. Those who are in with him get rewarded, and that is how strong men operate. They don't operate according to free market capitalist rules."

Scarborough continued, "And then on the other side of that, people that owned media empires — people that control newspapers, and control TV stations, that were opposed to him — they got charged with crimes, that literally, the value of the company went to zero, and Orbán said I'll buy it from you, you can leave the country, or go to jail. So yeah, the local gas man got rich. People running the free press got thrown in jail. Politicians get run out of country. This is what America faces under a second Donald Trump administration who brags that Orbán is a strong man that he loves, that he is going to be like."

:{:{Luce said, "CPAC [Conservative Political Action Conference], I mean the conservative movement openly adulate Orbán as the model for Trump. This isn't just paying a compliment to an ideological fellow traveler across The Atlantic. It's a much, much more conscious desire to imitate Orban. Orban is what Trump wants to be, punishing business critics, rewarding business friends, a crony system, a patronage based system, in which if you are a friend of Trump, it could become a monopolist.}:

And so I think business leaders — I don't think that [Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of JPMorgan Chase], Jamie Dimon, is a Trumpian. He is actually a registered Democrat, I believe. But I think his ultimate loyalty is to JP Morgan's bottom line. And he knows that if JP Morgan gets out of line under a second Trump administration, which will be far more serious than the first one, then it will get punished. Trump will have no compunction about using the paths of the presidency to award and punish with favors and fines."}:

:{:{Scarborough concluded, "You know, it's amazing, Mika, that the party that I was in, always has talked about personal freedom, personal liberties, talked about small government, take as much money power and authority out of Washington as possible. Get it into local governments. Get it into classrooms. Get it into local police districts. Here you have a Republican party — CPAC — what a joke! Let's not even get started with CPAC. And the Heritage Foundation, what a joke.}:

The RNC [Republican National Committee]. These institutions that used to praise personal liberty, personal freedoms, small government, are all now — as Ed said — they have readjusted, and now they are in support of autocracy. They are in support of a strong man leader. They are in support, the same people who will b**ch and moan about how, 'Oh, the western cannon, and western values are being destroyed, western civilization is at risk!' Those people, now worship — as does Donald Trump — leader of a failed country, who has said that he hates western democracy. says western democracy is dead. He says, 'I'm an illiberal Democrat.' And that's where they've gone.'"}:

Brzezinski added, "Yeah, and if you get what you want, you're not gonna like it."

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AN AH 1 24

Never Trump conservative and former GOP strategist Rick Wilson's prediction that establishment Republicans would ultimately "bend the knee" to Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election is proving to be spot on. Despite the fact that Trump is facing four criminal indictments, he has been endorsed by Sen. Tim Scott (R-South Carolina), Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) and many other prominent Republicans who aren't known for being ultra-MAGA.

With only two Republicans left in the GOP presidential primary — Trump and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley — much of the Republican Party is consolidating around Trump just as Wilson predicted.

In an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on January 25, Never Trumper Tim Miller — another former GOP strategist — warns that establishment Republicans are being used to make Trump appear less threatening and "authoritarian" and normalize "raw fascistic Trumpism."

"There will once again be a group of patsies willing to be the Trump Administration's frontmen and frontwomen, offering themselves as tributes to the wannabe strongman," Miller explains. "They will be put forth as evidence that Trump will be constrained, that dictatorship is not imminent, that there will still be a few 'adults in the room.' Moreover, there will be mainstream, establishment figures who encourage 'good people' to serve because they still hold on to their belief that Trump can be reined in and the office must be protected."

The Never Trump conservative, a frequent guest on MSNBC, continues, "So brace yourself: In the weeks ahead, you are going to be introduced to 'Committee To Save America 2.0: We Protect. We Serve. We Care.' The new committee will be weaker and more pliant than its predecessor. But like the previous version, it will serve the purpose of comforting the Republican elites and Wall Street Journal-reading voters who want to go to bed at night without worrying that they might be accidentally ending the American experiment."

Miller cites Scott and Rubio as examples of establishment Republicans who have been "obsequious" in their support of Trump as he moves closer to winning the nomination.

"In the end," Miller warns, "a new Trump Administration would be far more radical and dangerous than the last one. And on balance, it would have a much higher percentage of MAGA true believers, from the cabinet all the way down to the interns buying pens and making coffee. Hell, even Vivek (Ramaswamy) could probably get a job. But Trump and his team are not oblivious to perception."

Miller adds, "The new Committee To Save America rollout is coming soon. Don't let the voters who might be persuaded by their act be fooled."

*Tim Miller's full article for The Bulwark is available at this link.

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badash 1 24 an

noted conservative author and former professor of national security affairs is laying waste to the media narrative that Donald Trump’s MAGA followers are America’s “forgotten” people, concluding instead that they, just like their leader, are in it for revenge.

“Trump wants payback,” writes The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, “so do millions of voters who have no one to blame for their sense of humiliation but themselves.”

“Trump and his right-wing media courtiers—who tend to the anger of the older, white middle class the way florists lovingly raise orchids—fed the GOP base a continual stream of rage, especially as Trump started to pile up electoral defeats,” writes Nichols, who has a PhD from Georgetown and taught for 25 years at the U.S. Naval War College. “These voters now want to get even with their fellow citizens not for what’s been done to Trump but for what they feel has been done to them. They were certain that 2016 would finally bring them the recognition and respect they craved. Instead, Trump set them up for a steady diet of ego-bruising rebukes from other voters.”

Nichols also points to a piece by another writer at The Atlantic, McKay Coppins, who “attended a Trump rally in Iowa earlier this month, where he spoke with a nice lady named Kris.”

Kris is “a 71-year-old retired nurse in orthopedic sneakers,” Coppins wrote. She “was smiley and spoke in a sweet, grandmotherly voice as she told me how she’d watched dozens of Trump rallies, streaming them on Rumble or FrankSpeech, a platform launched by the right-wing MyPillow founder Mike Lindell.”

Asked if Trump should still be president, Kris told Coppins, “By all means.”

“And I think behind the scenes he maybe is doing a little more than what we know about,” Kris said.

Asked, “What do you mean?” Kris said, “Military-wise.”

“The military is supposed to be for the people, against tyrannical governments,” she explained. “I hope he’s guiding the military to be able to step in and do what they need to do. Because right now, I’d say government’s very tyrannical.”

Coppins added: “If the Democrats try to steal the election again in 2024, she told me, the Trump-sympathetic elements of the military might need to seize control.”

Nichols asks, “What can turn an ordinary person—a father, the pleasant older lady who lives down the street—into the family powder keg, or even a deluded seditionist who hopes the U.S. military will seize control of the country?”

He says, the “usual answer, when Trump ran the first time, was that these were ‘forgotten’ voters, people ‘left behind’ by globalization and a leftist political culture, who were hurling out a giant primal yawp of opposition.”

Nichols blames the media and politicians for that false narrative that has driven so much of American politics since Trump came down the escalator in June of 2015.

“These were never empirically sustainable explanations, but empathetic reporters and deeply concerned politicians went on listening tours to diners and gas stations anyway. When ordinary Americans would say shocking, indecent, and un-American things, their flummoxed interlocutors remained steadfast in the belief that more listening and more empathetic nodding would put things right in a few years.”

He also chastises MAGA voters for the “alternate reality” they’ve constructed to explain the strings of losses they’ve had to endure, “including the 2018 Democratic-wave election, Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, and the ‘red wave’ that never happened in 2022.”

Antiracism educator Tim Wise responded to Nichol’s piece, writing: “Exactly correct. The media refuses to admit it but the MAGA faithful are mean, vengeful people. Not decent, misunderstood, and ‘left behind’ people, but folks who are not decent.”

Condé Nast Legal Affairs Editor Luke Zaleski, unrelated to Nichol’s piece in The Atlantic, on Wednesday delivered a (possibly tongue-in-cheek) take on MAGA’s alternate reality.

“This is the actual story republicans are going with,” Zaleski wrote. “Trump built the wall and gave us world peace and then Democrats and China (Trump’s pal Xi) made up a phony virus that doesn’t make you sick—and trump caught it and made a beautiful vaccine that kills you and he saved us—before Joe stole the election and trump had to start an insurrection that didn’t happen that Nancy did just so they could make it look like trump did it even though he told the attackers he loved them and would pardon them and Obama secretly runs everything and the CIA and FBI do too and George soros and they started the war Putin started and are behind the Hamas attack as well and trump will stop it all in 24 hours.”

Read Nichols’ entire piece here.

:{===

https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/a-handy-guide-for-translating-republican-speak-into-plain-english/

alternet no lnx

A handy guide for translating Republican-speak into plain English

Thom Hartmann

January 15, 2024

Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley had a spitting match Wednesday night on CNN as they fought for, well, something. Vice president? Unlikely. Beating Trump? Probably not. Book deal? Who knows?

Anyhow, during the “debate,” they both threw out numerous Reagan-era GOP talking points that most people probably poorly understand, so here’s a handy guide to translate Republican-speak into plain English.

Haley: “I think we have to acknowledge that Republicans and Democrats have both done this. I mean, the fact that they’ve done all of this wasteful spending, they did a $2.2 trillion COVID stimulus bill that expanded welfare that’s now left us with 80 million Americans on Medicaid, 42 million Americans on food stamps. That’s a third of our country.”}:

Reality: The economy crashed in 2020 (due to Covid) in a way that hadn’t been seen since Republican President Herbert Hoover oversaw Black Tuesday, 1929, which kicked off the start of the Republican Great Depression. Covid initially cost our economy an estimated $14 trillion, throwing 3 million Americans out of work. Donald Trump was the first president since Hoover to see significant job losses during his presidency. Unemployment hit 15% (Hoover’s was 23.6%).

While a loose money policy by the Fed helped, the main thing that prevented America from sliding into a second Republican Great Depression was Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s success in shepherding through Congress legislation that softened the impact of Trump’s 15% unemployment; without it, if those unemployed people had lost all their demand-creating spending power (which is what drives economies), the nation would almost certainly have slid into a long-lasting depression.

That was apparently what many in the GOP wanted: in May 2020, for example, when Pelosi shepherded through the House a nearly-$3 trillion coronavirus relief bill, only 44 Republicans voted for it, while 130 voted against it. Although it saved America, Republicans like Haley and DeSantis are still complaining about it.

Currently there are around 84 million low-income Americans on Medicaid, our country’s largest and most successful single-payer healthcare program. It’s far more efficient than any for-profit health insurance programs (no executive salaries, dividends paid to stockholders, or commissions to salespeople) and, with tweaks, could be the foundation of a Medicare-for-All national system like Canada, Costa Rica, and most of Europe have.

Republicans see this as a bad thing, though, because they want all our healthcare to be paid for by private, for-profit health insurance companies that will then kick back part of their profits to GOP political campaigns and other now-legal (Citizens United) bribes.

Food stamps (SNAP), on the other hand, reflect a failure of the rules that govern the American economy. Every family should have enough money to buy food, but, with 20 mostly Red states (including all 13 former Confederate states) keeping their minimum wage at or below the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour, in virtually all of those states full-time minimum-wage workers can’t afford to provide their families with shelter, transportation, and food.

Nonetheless, Republicans would like to eliminate that food support. After all, they believe, when poor people are down they will only get up if you kick them hard enough.

Haley: “We’ll go and instead of 87,000 IRS agents going after middle America…”}:

Reality: This wild exaggeration of the number of IRS agents funded by the Inflation Reduction Act is a simple lie, promoted by think-tanks funded by America’s rightwing billionaires. Because nearly every time Republicans control the House, Senate, and White House they cut funding to the IRS, it’s been decades since that agency could effectively audit the nation’s largest tax cheats: those very same billionaires.

While the IRS has 79,000 employees, the largest block (13,000) are customer service representatives, and another 10,000 are seasonal employees who file mail or record data. There are lawyers, office staffers, administrators, etc. Only about 10,000 are agents, and that number would expand with the new money available in the Inflation Reduction Act, but not by more than a few thousand, virtually all of whom would direct their efforts to catching billionaire tax cheats.

This is why the “compromise” legislation being worked out right now between the House and Senate, at Republican insistence, contains a $10 billion cut to the IRS budget: they want to again kneecap the agency so their billionaire patrons can continue to steal our tax dollars.

It’s also worth noting that every $1 spent by the IRS investigating tax cheating by billionaires typically returns between $6 and $12 to the federal treasury. The fastest and easiest way to lower the national debt without raising taxes is to audit billionaires, but Republicans will lay down on railroad tracks to try to prevent that.

DeSantis (arguing for a flat tax): “We have a spending problem in this country. It’s not a tax problem in this country. And if you had something that was simple and transparent, not only would that [be] better for economic growth, it’s also better to end the weaponization of government.}:

“The IRS has been weaponized against conservatives going back to the Obama administration. I was there for that. No one’s been held accountable for doing that. … [T]he weaponization of federal power ends the day I become the president of the United States.”}:

Reality: Last year, the US government spent 22% of GDP, covering everything from the military (the largest single expenditure) to Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, all social safety net programs, education, and administration. But by comparison with other OECD countries, we’re misers: France spends 58.34%, Japan 44.09%, the United Kingdom 44.3%, Sweden 47.32%, Spain 47.11%, and Italy 56.74%

These countries spend more because they cover all or nearly all of the healthcare and educational costs of their citizens, as well as providing quality housing support, unemployment, paid sick and maternity leave, and other benefits.

The rightwing billionaires who own the GOP don’t want our government to do this because they fear their income taxes may be raised — like in those other countries — to fund quality-of-life programs for average and poor people.

A “flat tax” — where billionaires pay the same rate as average working people — has long been a dream of Republicans, with rightwingers like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul pushing it for years. They cite Hungary’s 15% flat tax, although Hungary’s billionaires routinely avoid paying anything close to that by living off money borrowed against assets instead of paying themselves wages (a trick emulated by most American billionaires, which is why they only pay 3%). They’ll also live off capital gains, which are taxed at a lower rate and almost entirely benefit the morbidly rich at a scale capable of supporting a wealthy lifestyle.

The net effect of instituting a flat tax in America would be that low-income people, who currently don’t pay income taxes or pay a very low rate, would have to start paying far more, while billionaires could still run their shell game with regard to their own living expenses. Squeezing the lowest income Americans hard to pay America’s bills is a very attractive prospect to Republican politicians and their billionaire owners.

DeSantis: “We’re looking forward to be able to open up energy production… We’re going to be able to open up production. We’re going to choose Midland over Moscow. We’re going to choose the Marcellus Shale over the mullahs. And we’re going to choose the Bakken over Beijing.}:

“Energy independence isn’t even -- it’s not -- it’s good for consumers. It’s good to reduce inflation. And it’s one of the best things we can do for our national security. So we’ll do that on day one, and we are going to reverse Biden’s green new deal and the electric vehicle mandates. We’ll save the American automobile.”}:

Reality: DeSantis and Haley, afraid to offend the fossil fuel billionaires who’ve funded a massive national support network of think-tanks and get-out-the-vote efforts for the GOP, argue that we should largely abandon any effort to cut oil, coal, or methane production and instead increase our dependence on the rightwing fossil fuel billionaires’ products.

Somehow, they manage to ignore the fact that producing electricity by wind or solar is now cheaper than any fossil fuel, and water power has been for centuries. They claim to love the “free market” but will go to the mat to defend hundreds of billions of dollars a year in federal and state subsidies (including military subsidies) to the fossil fuel industry.

Additionally, electric cars are becoming much cheaper to produce than internal combustion engines (they only have a handful of moving parts, never require oil changes or fluids, and don’t even have a transmission), save thousands a year for the average driver on the cost of gasoline, and are fun to drive (they take off like rockets because they have such great torque).

There are now multiple electric cars available at the very bottom end of the new car market, so affordability is no longer an issue, either. All we need is a national network of charging stations, which is what Biden’s “Green New Deal” (actually, it’s the Inflation Reduction Act) is funding over the next few years.

This GOP fealty to fossil fuels and the billionaires the industry produces could all be described as, “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”

DeSantis: “I supported Trump’s policy vis-a-vis Russia, Ukraine, and it was successful. You know, the Biden policy has not been. But, Nikki Haley is basically a carbon copy of what Biden is. It’s an open-ended commitment. They want another $108 billion. They will not tell you when the -- they have achieved their goal. And this is going to go on maybe hundreds of billions more into the future. I think a lot of people have died. We need to find a way to end this, because our priorities for national security, of course, the border, which we talked about, and people like Nikki Haley care more about Ukraine’s border than she does about our own southern border, which is wrong.”}:

Reality: Trump is owned by and terrified of Putin, a vicious fascist dictator who routinely murders his political opponents and imprisons journalists. Putin has ordered Trump to stop the US from further funding Ukraine, so he can add that nation — the largest country in Europe, about the size of Texas, with some of the most productive farmland and largest oil and natural gas reserves on the continent — to his empire.

DeSantis, trying to do whatever Trump wants so he doesn’t offend Trump’s fascist base, is willing to sacrifice a fellow democracy (Ukraine) just to curry favor. It’s frankly pathetic. And Ukrainians, trying to defend their own country, are dying every single day under Russia’s brutal attacks. As Republicans continue to withhold aid to Ukraine, blood is on their hands.

On this one issue, Haley is right and deserves credit for telling the truth.

Jake Tapper: “Governor [DeSantis], just a point of clarification, do you want to implement Florida’s education policies nationwide?”}:

DeSantis: “It depends on the policy. School choice universal, yes. I don’t want a nationalized curriculum. I think that that’s a bottom up thing. I want to get rid of the federal Department of Education, get that weight off the backs of the state and local governments. …”}:

Haley: “I have fought for school choice in my entire career because I think parents know their children best, and I think we should always do that. That's why we passed charter school legislation in our state. That’s why we empowered homeschoolers in our state. …”}:

Reality: The entire “school choice” movement emerged in America following the 1954 Brown v Board of Education Supreme Court decision ordering the desegregation of America’s schools. DeSantis and Haley — both governors of former Confederate states that exploded in response to that decision — know this well.

Prior to that time, Republican presidents from Teddy Roosevelt to Dwight Eisenhower were promoting public schools and helping build them as fast as possible.

The second major change in Republican attitudes around public education came in 1980, when David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian ticket and part of the billionaire’s platform explicitly demanded public schools in America be shut down:

“We advocate the complete separation of education and State. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended. … We condemn compulsory education laws, which spawn prison-like schools with many of the problems associated with prisons, and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws.”}:

Reagan, enchanted by Koch’s suggestion, put Bill Bennett in charge of his Education Department — the guy who said we could reduce crime in America by “aborting every Black baby” — and called for massive cuts to federal aid for education. The result was that many American students today are largely ignorant about civics and college debt has gone from negligible in 1980 to a nearly $2 trillion drag on American families and our economy today. But it’s very profitable for the banks that donate to the GOP.

jake Tapper (about raising the Social Security retirement age): “Just a clarification, Governor Haley, in 15 seconds, should voters in their 20s plan on having to work until they’re 70?”}:

Haley: “They should plan on their retirement age being increased, yes. We’re going to change it to reflect more of what life expectancy should be.”}:

Reality: Reagan, using the same rationalization of “rising life expectancy” lifted the Social Security retirement age from 65 to 67, made Social Security benefits taxable, and refused to index them to the inflation gauge that reflects the needs of the elderly. Republicans have hated Social Security — calling the program “socialism” or “communism” — ever since it was passed in 1935 as part of FDR’s New Deal.

Now they want to raise the qualification age to 70. As Haley pointed out about DeSantis’ years in Congress: “Three years in a row, he voted to raise [the Social Security retirement age] to 70 years old, three years in a row. Go to desantislies.com and you'll see it. So, now suddenly he's going to tell you because he's running for president and he's not going to do it, you can't trust him.” Well said.

DeSantis: “So, number one, we need term limits for members of Congress.”

Reality: This has been another Republican wet dream ever since the Reagan Revolution for a very simple reason: it increases the power of lobbyists.

Historically, when a new lawmaker comes into office, he or she will hook up with an old-timer who can show them the ropes, how to get around the building, where the metaphorical bodies are buried, and teach them how to make legislation.

With term limits, this institutional knowledge is largely stripped out of a legislative body, forcing new legislators to look elsewhere for help.

Because no Republican has ever, anywhere, suggested that lobbyists’ ability to work be term-limited, in those states with term limits the lobbyists end up filling the role of permanent infrastructure to mentor and guide new lawmakers.

Of course, lobbyists — and the billionaires and corporations that pay them — love this. It dramatically increases lobbyists’ power and influence, giving them an early and easy entrée into the personal and political lives of the individual legislators who lean on them for guidance.

Haley: “And I think we have to always be strong on the fact that, look, we want fair elections and we saw some discrepancies in those elections in 2020 that should be concerning. That’s why I passed voter I.D. in South Carolina. That’s why I think when absentee ballots go out, you should be able to verify signatures.”

Reality: Republicans want to make it harder to vote. As Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, told a group of Reagan campaign workers in a Dallas church in 1980:

“How many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome: good government? They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

For over a century, most states used biometrics to verify voter identity. Signatures done in front of a witness are nearly impossible to fake (unlike IDs, which can be easily faked). Polling place workers would compare the original registration signature with the signature of the person signing in to vote, and if they didn’t match, the worker would disqualify the voter.

When the Motor Voter Act was passed in 1993, not a single state required proof of citizenship to vote, and there was no national problem of voter fraud. The threat of a few years in jail was more than enough to discourage even the most ardent partisan from trying to double-vote or fraudulently vote.

But when Republicans realized that many Democratic voters — low-income people living in cities with mass transit — didn’t have drivers’ licenses, they began a campaign to require “voter ID” not just to register but to vote. It was a solution for a problem of “voter fraud” that didn’t exist: the first Red state to put mandatory ID laws into place as a way of suppressing the urban vote was Republican-controlled Indiana in 2005.

Now they’ve taken it a step further. Because mail-in and absentee ballots — heavily favored by Democratic voters — are authenticated by a signature on the outside of the ballot envelope, the GOP is sending people into ballot-counting venues in Blue cities to challenge signatures.

Once your signature is challenged, your ballot is removed from being counted until you can show up in person at a state or county elections office to produce ID and confirm your identity. Because most people never do this — most don’t even know their ballot has been challenged (it varies from state to state) — this has become one of the GOP’s favorite way of discarding Democratic votes. (See: The Hidden History of the War on Voting.)

— Haley argued that the solution to healthcare unaffordability was to publish prices, so people could comparison shop hospitals and doctors as the ambulance is carrying them from the scene of their car crash. She also argued for expanding the Medicare Advantage scam, because “seniors love it.”

Haley added: “We’re going to pass Tort Reform around this country” because why should you be able to sue a doctor or hospital who harms you? They need to make a buck, too, plus they’re big donors to the GOP.

— Both Haley and DeSantis feigned lack of concern about climate change by claiming that Obama has a big house and John Kerry has a private jet. This is a common diversion from the topic promoted by climate change denial groups funded by fossil fuel billionaires.

— Both also trash-talked trans kids and adults, arguing, as Haley said, “Boys need to go into boys’ bathrooms, girls need to go into girls’ bathrooms.” The medically sound reality of gender dysphoria, known for literally centuries under a variety of names across virtually every culture throughout history, has become a simple punching bag for Republicans. And it’s driving suicides across the country.

===

---

AN 1 24 CARL GIBSON?

A new report shows that former President Donald Trump is far from the only Republican decision-maker who could significantly harm democracy this year.

While the ex-president has openly suggested that he would terminate parts of the US Constitution, rule as a dictator "on day one" and staff government agencies with tens of thousands of political loyalists, he is still currently just a private citizen. Rather, a report from the nonpartisan organization States United suggests another major looming threat to democracy comes from current Republican members of the US House of Representatives and the US Senate.

"[T]he most misunderstood threat comes from Congress," wrote States United CEO Joanna Lydgate in an MSNBC op-ed with former House Judiciary Committee impeachment counsel Norman Eisen. "Inside the very building where our democracy came under attack three years ago, scores of election deniers still hold power."

According to States United, 171 current members of the House and Senate — approximately a full third of Congress — has trafficked in election denial conspiracy theories, with 152 election deniers in the House and 19 in the Senate. 128 sitting members of Congress voted to overturn the 2020 election on January 6, 2021. These members represent 36 states, and more than 100 of them signed now-Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-Louisiana) amicus brief seeking to throw out election results in four swing states President Joe Biden narrowly won in 2020.

Both Lydgate and Eisen noted that in the wake of the deadly January 6 insurrection, Congress passed a law raising the threshold to challenging a state's electoral votes to one-fifth of both the House and Senate. However, they noted that depending on how various Congressional elections turn out in November, that higher threshold may still be within reach. And they both warned that election deniers in Congress have plenty of other tools at their disposal to "cause trouble in many other ways."

"They could use budget powers to defund Jan. 6 prosecutions. Congress, which has a history of erratic election funding, could starve federal agencies that help protect elections. Election deniers could gin up baseless investigations and haul election administrators to Capitol Hill to berate them for doing their jobs in 2024," they wrote. "The Senate could refuse to confirm judges or executive branch officials who don’t give lip service to the 'big lie.' And election deniers with a congressional platform could further poison public trust in elections with more lies."

"Elections are administered by state and local officials, but Americans understand that Congress has substantial influence," they added. "In new polling from States United, 59% of people said Congress has a significant amount of power when it comes to elections. What they say — and do — about our elections really matters."

Click here to read Lydgate and Eisen's op-ed in full.

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What Nikki Haley’s gaffe reveals about the GOP

John Stoehr

December 28, 2023

The new Nikki Haley news is that she refused to say that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. During an event in New Hampshire, she said that the bloodiest conflict on US soil was about, well, anything but slavery: “how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do,” she said, among other ridiculous things.

Magdi Jacobs, an Editorial Board contributor, said that “the fascinating thing about Haley's response was her discomfort. You could feel her flailing as she reached for the perfect combo of a pre-Donald Trump conservative ‘states’ rights’ answer to appeal to centrist voters, all while knowing that the insurrectionists want more racist red meat.”

“This is a balance no one can strike,” Magdi concluded. “It shows how fundamentally weak the current GOP is, even if our political media doesn't want to admit it. You can't win without Trump. I firmly believe – and I think Haley does, too – that you can't win with him either.”

More precisely (and I think Magdi would agree) is that this balance is impossible to strike because there’s nowhere to put it. There’s no such thing as a moderate position inside today’s Republican Party. There’s no foundation on which to build the broad coalition of voters that’s necessary to winning (ie, candidates need more than a base.) If such a position existed, Haley would have found it. It doesn’t, so all she can do is reach for a reason, any reason, as the true cause of the Civil War.

To her credit, Haley quickly walked back her remarks. Perhaps she sensed something was at risk in sounding so unreasonable. “Of course, the Civil War was about slavery,” she said. “We know that. That’s the easy part of it.” Then she went on to say that it was about “more than that,” citing, among other ridiculous things, “the role of government.”

That she walked back her initial remarks may seem “reasonable,” but it won’t matter. Remember, even if she wanted to strike a balance between “conservative states’ rights” and “racist red meat” – and that’s apparently what she wanted to do – there is no foundation inside the Republican Party on which to put it. There is no moderate position.

To be a moderate, you have to sound reasonable, but according to David Atkins, a frequent contributor to the Washington Monthly, the GOP base “doesn’t want even the perception of a more reasonable candidate. They want a dictator to punish their enemies.”

“Haley has zero chance of winning” the presidential election, David told me. “Even if she did win New Hampshire, it wouldn’t help her any more than it did Bernie Sanders in 2016 and Pete Buttigieg in 2020.”

There’s always makebelieve, though. Fortunately, Haley has a lot of help in that regard. The billionaire Koch brothers gave her their blessing. So did the popular governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu. They portray Haley as the champion of “conservative values,” as if “conservative values” was still shorthand for “moderate,” and as if Donald Trump’s gravity has not pulled the entire party to the far right.

While makebelieve is a powerful force in politics, it’s probably not going to be enough for Haley or any of the other GOP candidates. Oh, sure, they did OK while the neutral press was casting them as “legitimate alternatives” to Trump. But once the neutral press gets bored – and the neutral press always gets bored – whatever promise these “legitimate alternatives” once had melts into the air. It happened to Ron DeSantis. It happened to Vivek Ramaswamy. It will probably happen to Haley. Everything begins and ends with Trump. As Magdi said, the GOP can’t win with him and it can’t win without him.

In the following interview with me, David Atkins explains not only why he thinks Haley is doomed, but why, in 2024, the Republicans are, too.

JS: New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu endorsed Republican candidate Nikki Haley after the Koch network did. Could that be enough for her to win New Hampshire? And will that matter in the long run?

DA: GOP megadonors need to come to terms with the reality that their base cannot be controlled. They let the MAGA flames burn out of control and now they get to reap the whirlwind. Haley has zero chance of winning absent some issue impacting Trump’s health, because the GOP base doesn’t want even the perception of a more reasonable candidate. They want a dictator to punish their enemies.

And let’s be clear: Haley is also a radical rightwing extremist, as her embrace of a six-week abortion ban makes clear. She just doesn’t seem like she wants to destroy the entire federal bureaucracy, send Democrats to gulags, weaponize the Justice Department and the IRS against all their domestic opponents, and institute mass deportation camps of immigrants. So she’s not the candidate of the GOP base, which does want those things and wants Trump to deliver them.

The Republican Party’s base isn’t in the thrall of Trumpism; Trump is the avatar of their desires, which is why he will be the nominee. Also, even if Haley did win New Hampshire, it wouldn’t help her any more than it did Bernie Sanders in 2016 and Pete Buttigieg in 2020.

JS: You said the culture war is over. Taylor Swift won, Elon Musk lost. I have written that obituary, too, only to see myself proven wrong.

DA: The culture war is over in the sense that people under the age of 50 in the areas of the country that make up more than 80 percent of the national GDP despise the theocratic conservatism that animates Republican activists. That isn’t going to change.

This doesn’t mean that Republicans can’t win elections, and institute rearguard policy actions, like restricting abortion and LGBT rights. They can. The threat of hard-right fascist dictatorship is very real.

But most of the culture wars can be explained by the fact that the marketplace responds primarily to 18- to 45-year-old consumers in cities, while the electoral system responds primarily to 65-plus-year-olds in exurbia. The electoral system can produce a fascist takeover, but it will do so by oppressing a majority that wants nothing to do with it. Such tyrannies rarely last for long.

In the meantime, the weight of popular culture is increasingly shifting to treat cultural progressivism as normative, if for no other reason than that’s the population advertisers want to appeal to. The engines of capitalism are working against social conservatives now, which is why you see such a growing rift between the evangelical base and the urbanite business Republican crowd.

JS: You said the GOP will lose 2024. You cited the fact that they have lost every special election. Special elections attract partisans. Presidential election attracts everyone. Am I wrong in noting the difference?

DA: It’s no secret that Trump and Biden at the top of the ticket will make for an interesting dynamic in 2024, since neither are popular, at least at the moment. But in this environment, a generic Democrat is consistently beating a generic Republican. If the public’s concerns about both Trump and Biden as individuals were sidelined, and the voters were to choose a party and its policies, Democrats would be marching into a confident victory in 2024.

The key will be to remind voters of the tremendous legislative accomplishments of the Biden administration, emphasize Trump’s rampant criminality and danger to democracy, and remind people that no matter what they think of the candidates, the policy choices are very real. Republican rule would be a cruel disaster.

JS: I think the GOP is going to impeach Biden. How does that factor into your thinking, if it does, that the Republicans are going to lose 2024?

DA: Republicans want to play tit-for-tat by impeaching Biden to take some of the sting out of Trump’s double impeachments. More generally, if they can make impeachment into a routine partisan clown show, then it minimizes and defangs the one tool in the Constitution that’s designed to stop an authoritarian, criminal unitary executive.

The flip side of doing this is that any impeachment of Biden by Republicans on flimsy pretexts is likely to have as minimal an impact on voters as Trump’s impeachments apparently have.

JS: What if there's a major polling error and Trump isn't really a mile ahead of every other Republican candidate? Most of us just assume he's going to be the nominee. Iowa and New Hampshire might be stunners?

DA: What’s particularly interesting about Trump seizing the GOP nomination is the low-key panic among many Republican activists. While Trump’s indictments have so far not impacted his popularity, we are in uncharted territory. It’s impossible to predict what impact multiple public trials and possible felony convictions of the sitting GOP nominee might have on public polling and electoral outcomes.

One could speculate that the polling might be wrong, and GOP voters in Iowa and New Hampshire might choose a different nominee out of self-preservation. But Trump has developed a cult-like following, and one thing that we know about cults is that they are largely impervious to even their leaders going to jail. If anything, it makes them feel like martyrs. So I find it extremely unlikely that Iowa and New Hampshire will surprise us by selecting a Haley or Ron DeSantis.

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Since the Colorado Supreme Court ruled last week that Donald Trump is ineligible to appear on the 2024 Republican primary ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — which says an "officer" cannot participate in an insurrection — three GOP lawmakers have worked to keep President Joe Biden off the 2024 ballot as well, Truthout reports.

Per the report, "In a statement to the far right website *Breitbart*, Rep. Aaron Bernstine (R-Pennsylvania), Rep. Charlice Byrd (R-Georgia) and Rep. Cory McGarr (R-Arizona) explicitly cited the court ruling from last week as their motivation. The GOP representatives described the court's decision as 'lawfare,' despite strong evidence demonstrating Trump did indeed engage in insurrectionist behavior."

Furthermore, the news outlet reports the Republican lawmakers' rationale "has nothing to do with insurrection," but with "disagreements over policies on immigration and border security, as well as" Biden's "'alleged corrupt family business dealings with China,' which Republicans have yet to actually demonstrate beyond innuendo and unsubstantiated assertions.'"

The lawmakers wrote, "The absurdity of radical Democrat judges removing Donald Trump from the ballot in Colorado will be a stain on the American political system for decades. By their very own interpretation of the law, Joe Biden is 100% not eligible to run for political office."

The news outlet reports, "This effort to disqualify Biden from being able to run isn't the only action being taken by Republicans in the wake of the Colorado ruling — Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R), for instance, has similarly said he may try to block Biden from his state’s ballot, citing the same dubious claim that Biden’s border policies make him an insurrectionist."

Truthout also notes, "A snap poll from YouGov the day after the Colorado Supreme Court ruling found that 54 percent of Americans approved of the court's action, with only 35 percent opposed to it. Although quick turnaround polls such as this one aren't the most scientifically accurate, the poll suggests that a significant portion of the U.S. electorate likely approves of pursuing this option in other states to block Trump from being president again."

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Busted: Jim Jordan and James Comer have a new judicial plan

Matt Laslo

andRaw Story

December 25, 2023

WASHINGTON – Republicans in Congress aren’t just doing all they can to impeach the Biden name – and possibly President Joe Biden himself – they’re also going to extraordinary lengths to protect two billionaire GOP megadonors who helped the party remake the Supreme Court in recent years.

For one, House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) are trying to stymie Washington, D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb’s investigation into Federalist Society co-chairman Leonard Leo.

Schwalb is looking into allegations that Leo is illegally profiting off non-profits. Jordan and Comer have responded by threatening to subpoena Schwalb.

ALSO READ: A neuroscientist’s guide to surviving Christmas with Trump-loving relatives

Meanwhile on the other side of the U.S. Capitol, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee walked out en masse, boycotting Democrats’ effort to subpoena Leo and Republican jurisprudence sugar daddy Harlan Crow over the hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts he’s given to Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni over the decades, according to a ProPublica investigation.

The GOP offensive to protect two billionaire donors is blatant hypocrisy, according to ethics watchdogs.

“There are many senators who will say anything. I mean, as long as it's their guy, they'll defend anything, and they have no consistency whatsoever and they're completely hypocritical,” Melanie Sloan, a senior adviser for nonpartisan watchdog American Oversight, told Raw Story.

ALSO READ: Florida judge’s son is a neo-Nazi patron: data leak

In today’s tribal and perpetually warring Congress, it seems even pay-to-play politics are now partisan. While Senate Republicans are vowing to use all procedural tools at their disposal to block Leo and Crow from being subpoenaed, most in the party are also backing the Biden impeachment inquiry because they say Hunter Biden was selling access to his father — an accusation for which they’ve provided no evidence to date.

On paper – paper stamped with GOP letterhead, mind you – the impeachment inquiry is focused on buying access.

“It better be, because, quite honestly, Hunter Biden's personal problems aren't the issue. The issue is whether he was selling access to a vice president willing to provide that access, and whether the vice president at the time – the current president – was enriched by it,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) told Raw Story.

As for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in private jet travel, stays at his private retreat and luxurious free vacations aboard his 162-foot yacht that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni admitted to receiving from Harlan Crow?

“That's not enriching yourself, because you went on a boat ride for God's sake. That's not the same as cash in your checking account,” Cramer said of ProPublica’s revelations.

Cramer argues, if the trips weren’t free “maybe he wouldn't have gone on it.”

“The difference is … he’s a friend. Friends are allowed to provide hospitality for you in their home or on their boat. That's very different than a foreign adversary providing cash to a sitting vice president of the United States through his son. That's barely, barely even in the same ballpark, if at all,” Cramer said. “It’s a stretch, to say the least. It's just, it's not the same thing.”

That’s not even mentioning the free private school tuition Thomas’ nephew – who he raised like a son – received from Crow, which ProPublica estimates could have totaled upward of $150,000.

ALSO READ: Busted: These healthcare nonprofits are accepting millions from Big Tobacco

Senate Democrats, some of whom argue Thomas was in a prime position to rule on cases that effect Crow’s fortune, are particularly interested in whether Crow declared the lavish free vacations and travel as business expenses on his federal taxes.

For Leo – co-chairman of the Federalist Society, including the $1.6 billion fortune it now controls – Campaign for Accountability filed an IRS complaint alleging he’s funneling money from seven nonprofit entities he controls to his for-profit businesses, thus illegally profiting off campaign donations. The apparent interference from Jordan and Comer is appalling to watchdogs.

“Then, at the same time, they're screaming about the politicization of justice when they talk about Donald Trump, but they want to tell a sitting U.S. attorney – you know, the state's attorney for D.C. – who he can and can't look at because they don't want him looking at Leonard Leo,” Sloan said. “They just are bowing down at the altar of Leonard Leo and his $1.6 billion.”

House Republicans deny they’re interfering with an ongoing investigation.

“I’m confused. So it’s OK for Democrats to subpoena Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow, but not OK for us to look into AG Schwalb? Isn’t that literally the definition of a double standard — a.k.a Democrats can do something, but we can’t?” Russell M. Dye, communications director and counsel for the House Judiciary Committee, emailed Raw Story.

ALSO READ: ‘Too preposterous to be real’: College hires ‘pink slime’ publisher as journalism prof

Republicans say there’s no reason for an investigation, because the megadonors aren’t accused of trying to change the outcomes of specific cases before the Supreme Court.

“I really think there's like a fundamental difference here between trading favors and not, right? The difference here is the consideration. I've seen no evidence that any of the Supreme Court justices, least of all Clarence Thomas, offered to give anything back. To me, that’s the big difference,” Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) told Raw Story.

“Now look, if Harlan Crow or anybody else wrote $100 million to a Supreme Court Justice, and say, ‘Hey, please do this thing in my benefit’ — well, that raises some serious problems. But is it the standard that a Supreme Court justice can't have a rich friend?” Vance continued. “If they want to set that standard, it’s up to them, but I don't think that that raises nearly the same pay-to-play concerns as Joe Biden’s situation.”

Gifts are different than business appears to be the current GOP ethical standard for such matters.

“We're not talking about gifts. This is business. So with Hunter [Biden], this is, you know, he's on the Burisma board. He's doing these foreign business deals in Ukraine and China and lots of offices, and he is openly out there selling his dad,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) told Raw Story. “At the very least, he's clearly making money off his father. The question is, did the president benefit from that? That's what they need to answer. So that's why we have the inquiry.”

When pressed on the impeachment inquiry into Biden, former Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) wasn’t up to date on the specifics, even as he proudly remembers getting the investigative ball rolling for House Republicans.

“You’re talking about the substance of it. I’m not sure I can talk about the substance of it,” Grassley told Raw Story. “Except, the process is necessary to complete what [Sen. Ron] Johnson (R-WI) and I started four years ago, and that is to get all the information that Congress is entitled to in our oversight capacity and that's what it's all about, as far as I know.”

The Supreme Court adopted a new code of ethics since the lavish gifts were first reported, so Democrats’ complaints are outdated, Grassley argues.

ALSO READ: You blew it in New Hampshire, Joe Biden. Pray it doesn’t hurt you — and then some

“Because the judicial branch put out their … new regulation, and if that doesn’t take care of it – and we won't know that for a little while, maybe a year or two – then maybe that'd be a legitimate question,” Grassley said. “But right now it’s not a legitimate question considering the initiative of the Supreme Court.”

After all, 10 Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee walked out of the vote to subpoena Leo and Crow on November 30 – allowing Democrats to pass the measure 11-0 – Senate Republicans argue the vote broke committee rules.

“They’re not legal,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) told Raw Story. “Anybody who knows a lawbook from a J. Crew catalog knows they can get those subpoenas quashed in one hearing.”

Because of wholesale GOP opposition, there doesn’t seem to be the votes to formalize the subpoenas on the Senate floor where Republicans are threatening to require a 60-vote threshold.

“You’ll never see this come to the floor,” Judiciary Committee ranking member Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told Politico. “We’ll attack it legally, we’ll vote against it. It’d be a s—show.”

Even as the party hasn’t decided how it will proceed in the Senate, many Democrats expected this.

“We're going after the icons of the Republican Party, Leonard Leo, of course, and, to some, Justice Thomas. They’re very sensitive to that,” Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) told Raw Story. “Public sentiment is overwhelmingly in our favor, so they have got to be strident in opposition.”

The two different standards for Biden and GOP donors is remarkable to Democrats.

“Republicans want to protect the court that they have packed, and they protect the court by maintaining its status as an unaccountable highest court of the land,” Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) told Raw Story. “It looks like they're doing everything they can to keep hidden the secret relationships that are going on at the court with powerful interests that bring cases before the court.”

To the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), this made-for-Fox-and-Newsmax drama shows how completely former President Donald Trump has remade the GOP in his own image.

“It is just sad the way that Donald Trump has completed his stranglehold over the Republican Party,” Raskin told Raw Story. “Donald Trump has taught them – from the Charlottesville riot forward – that there should be no enemies on the right. And they have no enemies on the right, and they will take no principled stance against anybody on the right, no matter how fascistic they are.”

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a far-right Republican House lawmaker is alleging some members of Congress are compromised by “women, drugs, booze,” and suggested they are being blackmailed by Russia.

“This is how it works,” **U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett**(R-TN) told far-right podcast host Benny Johnson (video below). “You’re visiting, you’re out of the country, or out of town, or you’re in a motel or a bar in D.C., and some, whatever you’re, you’re into – women or men or whatever – comes up, and they’re very attractive, and they’re laughing at your jokes and, and they, and you’re buying them a drink, next thing you know you’re in the motel room with them naked.”

“And next thing you know, you know, you’re about to make a key vote and what happens?” Burchett continued. “Some well-dressed person comes up and whispers in your ear, ‘Hey, man, there’s tapes out on you,’ or, ‘Were you in a motel room, on, whatever with whoever?’ And then you’re like, ‘uh-oh,’ and [they] said, ‘You really ought not be voting for this thing.'”

Johnson described Burchett’s description as being “BLACKMAILED.”

“You got powerful people and they write the big checks,” Rep. Burchett said. “Let’s be honest and powerful people in this country, they write the big checks, and they, you know, they’re the ones out on the tarmac when the President comes and visits, and, whichever party they’re in, they’re always either out on the tarmac or in the private room. They’re the ones that write the big checks.”

“They don’t care who’s in, they hate this country, they hate what we’re about, but they love their portfolios and they love their money more than they do anything else,” Burchett continued. “And they protect it and they protect the people that do that and by doing so, you know, the old honeypot. The Russians do that. And I’m sure members of Congress have been caught up – why in the world would good conservatives vote for crazy stuff like what we’ve been saying out of Congress?”

“If it’s women, drugs, booze, it’ll find you in D.C. and in most elected offices, and that’s what people in power influence do. And it’s just, and I’ve been in this game my whole life has been 16 years in the state legislature in Tennessee and eight years as county mayor, and now I’m in my fifth year of Congress, but it’s just it. The stakes are higher but the with the game is still the same.”

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the New York Young Republican Club recently held its annual gala in New York's financial district, and former President Donald Trump gave the keynote address with some of the global far right's most notorious political figures in attendance.

According to Talking Points Memo (TPM), the gala's attendees included not just American far-right politicians like Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado), Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) and Paul Gosar (R-Arizona), but also European right-wing extremists like Austrian politician Gerald Grosz and European Parliament member Susanna Ceccardi, who is from Italy's far-right Lega party. German politician Maximilian Krah — whose party, Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) has been criticized as a "neo-Nazi party" — was also at the event.

"Donald Trump rubbing elbows with Nazi-linked groups might be surprising if Trump’s last month wasn’t defined by him parroting Hitler and Mussolini, and promising to rule as a dictator so he can rip away Americans’ freedoms and round up millions of Americans into detention camps," said Ammar Moussa, who is the rapid response director for President Joe Biden's reelection campaign.

"The American people rejected Trump and his MAGA attacks on democracy in 2020, and it’s why he’s going to lose again next November," Moussa added.

Gerald Grosz was initially a member of Austria's far-right Freedom Party, which was founded by Anton Reinthaller — a former Nazi Party leader and SS officer. Grosz and his colleague Jorg Haider, who was the son of a Nazi stormtrooper who praised Adolf Hitler's regime, eventually joined a Freedom Party offshoot. While they all come from different countries, TPM described Grosz, Ceccardi and Krah as comrades-in-arms in movements that are "staunchly nationalist and anti-immigrant" in nature.

Prior to Trump's speech, he was introduced as the "45th, 46th and 47th presidents of the United States," which alludes to Trump's baseless conspiracy theory that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election. Trump doubled down on his "dictator" comments during his speech, repeating that if elected to another term he would assume dictatorial powers on day one of his administration to build a border wall and "drill drill drill."

The New York Young Republican Club's flirting with global far-right figures is in line with how international political scholars have described the modern GOP. In 2019, Harvard University political scientist Pippa Norris surveyed roughly 2,000 political experts around the globe on the authoritarian leanings of various modern far-right parties. She found that the American Republican Party has more in common with authoritarian, fascist-adjacent parties like Turkey's AKP and Hungary's Fidesz than with their counterparts in G7 countries like the Tories in the UK and the conservatives in Canada.

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rape threesome m4l cofounder wife

Florida GOP chair wants huge payout to quit after alleged rape and three-way sex scandal: report - Alternet.org

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Dear GOP: America is not going to forget — and many Americans will never forgive

Marjorie Taylor Greene ridiculed after her attacks on Biden seem more like compliments

Image via Creative Commons.

Thom Hartmann

December 11, 2023

Dear Republicans,

After the corruption of the Coolidge and Hoover administrations crashed the world economy, kicking off the Republican Great Depression in 1929, it took your party decades to rid itself of the stink.

After Nixon extended the Vietnam War to get himself re-elected, unnecessarily killing over 20,000 American soldiers and a million Vietnamese civilians, and then got busted for Watergate and the bribes he solicited in the White House, it took you almost a generation to rid yourselves of the stink.

But you’ll never rid yourself of the stink of Donald Trump. At least never in the lifetime of anybody around today. Trump’s stench is a tragic part of American history that will last generations.

The entire world knows the foetor of his whipping up a crowd of thousands to try to assassinate the Vice President of the United States and the Speaker of the House.

Trump’s minions urinated on the carpets in the hallowed halls of Congress, smeared feces on the walls, damaged priceless paintings from the founding era of our country, and murdered police officers protecting our nation’s Capitol. That stink will never fade, no matter how often his allies try to rewrite history, blur faces, or tell stories about bizarre “deep state” conspiracies.

Did you think Americans would forget the stink of the 30,000+ documented lies he told America and the world while he was president? Or the lies he routinely spouts every time he speaks in public, so frequent now that even Fox “News” has to correct the facts when covering him?

How about the reek of his dictator-like pronouncements that he will destroy the American Civil Service and fill our government with corrupt toadies, then imprison his political enemies and send the military into the streets like Maduro has done in Venezuela and tinpot dictators do all across the world?

Do you really believe that we would forget the stink of his sucking up to murderous dictators like Putin, MBS, and Kim? Now that effluvium is being smeared all over Republican politicians, one after another, as they follow Trump’s orders — which he no doubt received from Putin — to abandon Ukraine.

You are cowards, all. Covered in your wretched, cowardly, unpatriotic stink.

This is the man who tried to blackmail a democratic ally into manufacturing dirt on his political opponent, withholding aid to Ukraine in the face of Russian attacks. The stink of that crime was so heinous he was impeached for it.

What about the stink Trump created when he referred to mostly-Black nations as “shithole countries” and our veterans who’d died in war as “suckers” and “losers”? When he told General Mark Milley he didn’t want to again share the stage with an injured veteran because such heroes don’t “look good”?

Or when, at the height of the pandemic in April 2020, Trump ordered people back to work and began to ridicule wearing masks, leading to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths (according to his own science advisors: the British journal Lancet put the number at around a half-million)?

At that time, most Covid deaths were in Blue states (CT, NY, WA, NJ) and Trump agreed with Jared that they could politically benefit by blaming the deaths on Democratic governors. An “effective political strategy” they called this decision redolent with the stink of mass death.

That same son-in-law, by the way, who Trump helped hustle $2 billion from the Saudis in exchange, apparently, for downplaying the murder of a Washington Post journalist and looking the other way at how they oppress women. Do you think we failed to notice the reek of nepotism and corruption?

Speaking of women, do you really believe that stink of your support of a man credibly accused of rape and sexual assault by over 20 women, including one as young as 13, would just go away? Even after he was found by a court of law to have raped the first woman whose case finally made it through the courts?

As average working Americans struggle to pay their taxes, Trump pushed through an odious $2 trillion tax cut for himself and his billionaire buddies, creating the largest budget deficit by any president in the history of the nation. Do you think America will forget?

Or the stink of his multiple business frauds? He was convicted and forced to pay millions in restitution to victims of his Trump University fraud; they shut down his phony New York charity; now he’s been found by a New York court to have committed bank, tax, and insurance fraud: they’re just trying to figure out how big the stink is so they can quantify it as a fine.

How about the overwhelming stench of tearing babies from their mothers’ arms at the border and then trafficking them into phony “Christian adoption” services that then vanished, leaving over 1000 grieving families still not knowing the whereabouts of their little girls and boys to this day?

Or the stink from the naked campaign lies he blithely told to get votes, promising a new national healthcare system, a revitalization of America’s infrastructure, or his claims that he supported organized labor at the same time his appointees to the Department of Labor were working to block unionization efforts across the nation?

Even worse, this adulterer — who had affairs outside his marriage with every one of his three wives and never goes to church but still claimed to be a Christian — told sincerely religious people he was their champion. Not noticing the sulfurous smell that surrounds Trump, many believed him and still do. In actual fact, he was only championing the hypocritical multimillionaire TV preachers who shared their hustle with him: he supported their violations of tax law in exchange for their endorsement from the pulpit.

Then he tried to overthrow an election he knew he lost by 7 million votes, and is today threatening to try it again. The whole world is aghast at the stink of that tinpot dictator effort, and terrified that he may succeed the next time.

Germans still struggle with the stink of a leader who referred to his political opponents as “vermin” and promised he was going to “root them out.” Who attacked the press because they told the truth about him. Who played on and amplified people’s fear of “the other.” You will, too, for generations after Trump himself has shuffled off this mortal coil.

Pathetically, you Republican members of Congress have now smeared yourselves with the slime that has surrounded Donald Trump his entire criminal life. Have you noticed how many of your colleagues are fleeing? Do you really think you can ever wash off yourself the reek of your association with treason, an attempt to betray and overthrow America, even worse than what Benedict Arnold tried?

Seriously, Republicans, do you not think America can smell what’s going on? Trump bragging that he ended women’s rights to bodily autonomy? His promotion of guns and assault weapons because the racist nutcases who follow him think they’re going to be soldiers in a coming civil war? His refusal to do anything about the climate change that is now killing Americans every day?

America has had a few truly awful presidents. Andrew Jackson “The Indian Killer.” Andrew Johnson who tried to undo Lincoln’s legacy. Warren Harding and Teapot Dome. Richard Nixon’s criminality, Ronald Reagan’s commitment to destroy America’s middle class, George W. Bush lying us into two wars as part of his 2004 re-election strategy.

But none stink as bad as this miserable cartoon of a man, with his bizarre orange spray-tan, absurd comb-over, and compensatory phallic-length red ties.

America is not going to forget, and many Americans will never forgive.

You will never wash the stink of Donald Trump off yourselves or your party. Never.

===

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an 12 23

Rep. Brandon Williams (R-New York) is accusing two former staffers of blackmailing him by threatening to expose his adult daughter's page on adult subscription site OnlyFans.

According to Politico, Williams says Michael Gordon, who was his former chief of staff, along with former legislative director Ryan Sweeney, threatened to "expose" his 27-year-old daughter's profile on the site after they were both fired earlier this year. The threat appears to stem from a confrontation Williams and Gordon had at a Capitol Hill holiday party. In a video recorded by a Syracuse university student, Williams is seen putting his finger in Gordon's face, saying "you f--- with my family, I’ll end every relationship you have."

Williams said Gordon was "trying to exert some leverage over me," and added "I just simply won’t allow that to happen."

After Williams gave Gordon a notice that he had 30 days to find new employment, Gordon reportedly went to GOP consultant Aaron Evans. The consultant then relayed to Williams that he should "think about the potential embarrassment his family would experience if [gossip site] TMZ found out about his daughter’s OnlyFans account."

For his part, Gordon told Politico "the allegations Congressman Williams has levied against me are categorically false." Sweeney asserted that "the congressman’s allegations are completely false."

On the day before former Rep. George Santos (R-New York) was expelled from the House, the embattled former congressman called for the House Committee on Ethics to investigate Williams for his behavior. Williams was a member of the group of New York Republicans who pushed for Santos' expulsion.

Williams is a freshman member of the House of Representatives who represents a swing district. After winning in 2022 by just one point, Williams' district has been targeted by House Democrats as a top priority in order to win back a majority in the chamber in 2024. Politico chose not to publish the name of Williams' daughter to protect her identity.

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11 23 thom

something terrible and deadly is happening here in the United States, and House Speaker Mike Johnson just announced that he wants to double down on it. More on that in a moment.

If you were born and live in Japan, you can expect to live to 85 years old. For South Korea average lifespan is 83, as are Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Israel, and Australia.

It’s 82 for Italy, Spain, Ireland, France, Finland, and New Zealand.

Cuba (!) and Panama are 79; Uruguay and Croatia are 78.

A total of 61 countries have average lifespans of 78 years or older, ranging from Singapore’s 84 to Estonia’s 78.

And then there’s the United States. Our average lifespan comes in at a paltry 77 years, along with Iran, Tunisia, and Morocco.

And it’s entirely because of Republican policies.

That’s the main conclusion of a new study published in PLOS One, one of the world’s leading publications of peer-reviewed science across a wide variety of fields.

The report, rigorously scientific, was funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), a division of the United States’ National Institutes of Health (NIH).

They concluded that if, in 2019, “liberals” (Democrats) had run all the Red states, then 171,030 fewer Americans would have died that year. On the other hand, if “conservatives” (Republicans) had succeeded in imposing their healthcare, tax, labor, and gun policies on the Blue states, there would have been an additional 217,635 dead Americans.

This follows the Brookings Institution study published two years ago that concluded Republican anti-mask and pro-snake-oil (hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, etc.) policies unnecessarily killed 400,000 Americans during the first year of the pandemic.

That study, along with a report from Congress detailing Trump’s incompetent --> malicious response to the pandemic, provoked psychologist Mary Trump to refer to her uncle as a “mass murderer.”

Add to that the Republican anti-vax propaganda and, as The New York Times reports, GOP policies are continuing to kill Americans:

:{:{“Since Dec. 1, when health officials announced the first Omicron case in the United States, the share of Americans who have been killed by the coronavirus is at least 63 percent higher than in any of these other large, wealthy nations, according to a New York Times analysis of mortality figures.”}:

And the majority of those dying are Republican followers. Not the Republican politicians and multimillionaire TV commentators, who are all well-vaccinated (Fox required vaccination for all employees), but the people who listen to them, watch them on television, and believe their lies about vaccines and masks.

None of this is new and none should be surprising.

In 2014 the International Journal of Epidemiology*published a report titled “US Infant Mortality and the President's Party” looking at the years between 1965 and 2010. They concluded:

“Across all nine presidential administrations, infant mortality rates were below trend when the President was a Democrat and above trend when the President was a Republican. … Republican administrations were characterized by infant mortality rates that were, on average, 3% higher than Democratic administrations.”

The results were, they wrote, solid. Very solid, in fact:

“Conclusions: We found a robust, quantitatively important association between net of trend US infant mortality rates and the party affiliation of the president.”

It turns out it’s not just American conservatives whose policies kill their own people.

Back in 2002 researchers looked at 100 years of data from Australia and England in a paper for theJournal of Epidemiological Public Health(JEPH) titled “Mortality and Political Climate: How Suicide Rates have Risen During Periods of Conservative Government, 1901-2000.”

They controlled the study for years of both war and drought, and concluded that more people kill themselves when conservatives are in power — in both countries, even at different times — than when liberals control the government. The subtitle of an editorial in the JEPH about their paper, in fact, was: “Do conservative governments make people want to die?”

The answer, according to the data, is yes. Noting an excess death rate of around 17% among the 238,431 suicides during years of conservative rule, the final sentence of that editorial was:

“[R]oughly 35,000 of these people would not have died had these Conservative governments not been in government. This is one suicide for every day of the century, or more appropriately, two for every day that the Conservatives ruled.”

Drenching the country in blood seems to be a popular sport for conservatives and Republican politicians.

— United Republican opposition to negotiating drug prices is why here in the United States we’re paying $38,398 for an anti-cancer shot that costs $260 in the United Kingdom.

— Twelve Red states still refuse to offer Medicaid to their low-income workers, even though the federal government pays 90% of the cost. But while you can’t get healthcare in Red states, you sure can get a weapon of war.

— And with 120 guns for every 100 citizens, these deadly weapons — whose sole purpose is to kill humans — have become the leading cause of death for American children, a horror not found in any other country in the world.

— By the end of last year, fully half of American states abandoned all meaningful gun regulations, allowing permit-less carry, further increasing the carnage as The New York Times documented in heartbreaking detail.

— Republican advocacy for fossil fuels and lies about climate change are also killing Americans. An estimated 32,000 deaths a year come about just because of tailpipe and smokestack pollution.

— This doesn’t begin to measure the people who’ve died from extreme weather events causing wildfires across the West, derechos and flooding across the Midwest and South, and warming-amplified hurricanes in Mexico and the American Southeast. Or the people who’ve simply lost everything when their homes and jobs are wiped out.

Instead of doing anything about these issues, Republicans in Congress and state houses vote in a block to support the fossil fuel billionaires who fund their campaigns rather than supporting their states’ citizens who are getting whacked by the carbon pollution that industry lied to us about for over six decades.

And now House Speaker Mike Johnson wants to gut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid because “we’re drowning in debt.” What he fails to mention is that 100% of our nation’s $34 trillion debt was caused by Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts along with the $10 billion in illegal wars Bush and Cheney lied us into.

As my colleague Chauncey DeVegapoints out:

“Social demographers have repeatedly shown that there is actually more early death, suicide, murder, criminality, poverty, prescription drug abuse and other forms of human misery and suffering — on a per capita basis — in ‘red State’ America than in more cosmopolitan, progressive, affluent and dynamic ‘blue’ cities and regions.”

While all this is shocking in aggregate, it shouldn’t surprise us that a political party that swears its first allegiance to billionaires and giant multinational corporations would choose money and profits over health and life.

The Republican Party, as I noted lastyear, has ceased to be a legitimate political party with actual policy positions and become, instead, a loose collection of Nazis, cult-based “Christians,” antisemites, predatory hustlers, misogynists, gun nuts, bigots, and government haters, all funded by billionaires who don’t want to pay their taxes.

This is not Dwight Eisenhower’s Republican Party; it’s barely Nixon’s anymore.

America can do better, but first we must overcome the billions that are being spent right now to put the GOP back in charge of the White House and Senate.

And that means we all have to do everything we can to wake people up and get out the vote.

===

:===

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https://www.alternet.org/markwayne-mullin-2666288268/

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### Brian Stelter: “Fox is still the beating heart of the GOP”

11/10/23 10:24 PM EST

### Brian Stelter: Fox News “seeded the big lie for Trump”

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Moderators must rigorously scrutinize candidates’ climate positions during upcoming Republican debate in Florida | Media Matters for America

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From quashing teachers unions to pardoning Trump, voters reject GOP positions: poll - Alternet.org

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Sean Hannity hosted an on-air pep rally for House Republicans | Media Matters for America

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GOP accused of 'hypocrisy' over efforts to gut IRA while cheering money 'flowing to their electorates' - Alternet.org

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aha big lie, vaxx, agw denial are proof of bona fides, legit member of tribe

an 10 23

a British journalist and academic is warning that because the Republican Party and its members are cementing belief in Trump's big lie about the 2020 election in its national identity, democracy is at risk.

In an essay for the Guardian, Peter Pomerantsev — a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University — opined that the recent election of Rep. Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) as the next Speaker of the House is a sign that the GOP is embracing election denialism as part of its core identity. Pomerantsev added that adherence to lies is a typical tactic of some of the world's most authoritarian governments.

"Agreeing to Trump’s claims about the rigged election is the absurdity you have to pledge allegiance to in order to show you belong to the tribe. It ensures your fealty by making you complicit," Pomeratnsev wrote. "For anyone who has lived in authoritarian regimes, it’s a familiar sight."

To illustrate this point, Pomerantsev noted that even though Johnson had unanimous support from his caucus in the speaker's race, many Republicans "have admitted both publicly and privately that the elections were, in fact, not falsified."

"Yet when journalists faced a gaggle of Republican congressmen and questioned Johnson’s record on this blatant lie, his colleagues jeered and he mockingly said: “Next question” – as if the facts were irrelevant here," Pomerantsev wrote. "And in a sense, they are."

Pomerantsev's essay elaborated that because Republicans have to believe in a claim they privately know is false in order to maintain power, right-wing media must follow suit in order to sate the tribalist nature of their audience. Because of this, he argues, "it will be hard to fact check our way out of this situation."

"The issue can’t simply be resolved by “trusted” sources, even those on the far right, who can communicate the truth about the election to Trump supporters. Instead, sources only become trusted if they agree to the lie," he wrote. "Pledging loyalty to the 'big lie' is more about identity than knowledge – and to fight it entails understanding the need for belonging and meaning it fulfills."

"Authoritarian propaganda can give the illusion of status and at its extremes a sense of supremacy to compensate for the lack of real agency," he added.

Click here to read Pomerantsev's essay in full.

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How 'tribal war' and a 'standard of impossible purity' have rendered the GOP unable to govern: conservative - Alternet.org

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an 10 23

in Franklin, Tennessee (an upscale Nashville suburb), MAGA Republican Gabrielle Hanson's chaotic mayoral campaign ended in defeat when, on Tuesday, October 24, Democratic incumbent Ken Moore enjoyed a landslide reelection and won by around 59 percent.

Hanson, a Franklin alderperson and local real estate developer, ran as a severe culture warrior. She had tried to block a gay pride event in the spring, and according to the Daily Beast, she wouldn't disavow some white supremacists who supported her. But in the end, Franklin voters rejected her extremism.

The Daily Beast's Josh Fiallo, in an article published on October 25, stresses that Hanson's "myriad scandals" were "too much to stomach."

Fiallo explains, "Tuesday's result puts a cap on a chaotic campaign for Hanson, who seemingly found herself embroiled in new controversies weekly on the home stretch of her election bid…. She loudly lambasted the city for planning to install historical markers about historical racial injustice in the area — memorials she deemed to be 'racial terror' markers. She was grilled for threatening to retaliate against a local airport for supporting a Juneteenth festival and was slammed by Nashville cops for spreading false information about a horrific mass shooting at the city's Covenant School."

Hanson, Fiallo notes, "cozied up to white supremacists," including members of a group called the Tennessee Active Club.

"Despite calls from local politicians," the reporter explains, "Hanson never disavowed the group, which was spotted carrying Nazi flags at a drag brunch in Cookeville, Tennessee, earlier this year. She insisted she didn't invite the group to her forum personally, but Active Club members disputed that, saying they were invited over concerns related to 'Antifa.' Hanson's initial efforts to distance herself from the group didn't last long — she was photographed Wednesday grinning next to the hate group's leader, Sean Kauffmann, who has described himself as being an 'actual literal Nazi.'"

Fiallo adds, "In an October 10 board meeting, Hanson claimed she didn’t disavow the group because they were against Antifa. She strangely said to city officials in the meeting, 'This is exactly the seeds that you sowed, and your harvest is now here.'"

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see hype fear

Paul Krugman: FBI figures expose GOP 'politics of fear' on US crime rates - Alternet.org

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an 10 23

legal and political experts are raising red flags about all nine Republican candidates now running for Speaker of the House, warning of their positions, histories, and voting records.

The nine are: House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (MN), Republican Conference Vice Chair Mike Johnson (LA), Republican Study Committee Chair Kevin Hern (OK), Jack Bergman (MI), Byron Donalds (FL), Dan Meuser (PA), Gary Palmer (AL), Austin Scott (GA), and Pete Sessions (TX).

“All vote suppressors, most election deniers. MAGA, MAGA and more MAGA,” warns Democratic elections attorney Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket. Elias famously won over 60 cases that Trump and his allies filed in the 2020 election, losing just one.

“It’s probably an accurate reflection of today’s GOP that 6 of 9 candidates for speaker come from the South and 2 from the Midwest,” notes Michael Li, redistricting and voting counsel at the Brennan Center at NYU School of Law.

With the exception of one, the candidates are all white. And as former U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) observed, “9 men running for Speaker. Where are the women candidates?”

Noticeably absent from running: Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who serves as the Chair of the House Republican Conference.

The candidates are far older than the average American, who is just under 39 years old. Bergman is the oldest, at 76. Emmer is 62. Johnson is 51. Hern is 61. Meuser, 59. Palmer, 69. Scott, 53. Sessions, 68. Donalds is the youngest, at 44.

All come from strongly Republican-leaning districts, as University of South Carolina Professor and Political Science Department Vice Chair David Darmofal notes.

“It’s 2023 and only one of the 9 Republican candidates for Speaker of the House voted to federally codify same-sex & interracial marriages,” Darmofal adds, pointing to former pollster Adam Carlson’s spreadsheet which details just how far-right all nine candidates are.

According to Carlson’s chart and one for Punchbowl News’ Jake Sherman (both below), just two voted to certify the 2020 presidential election on January 6 after the insurrection, which The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent calls “Another mark of the GOP’s descent.”

“Don’t be fooled,” warns activist and political commentator Victor Chi. “While 2 of the 9 Republicans didn’t decertify the election results on January 6, BOTH of them signed an amicus brief demanding SCOTUS overturn the 2020 election. That means ALL 9 Speaker candidates are election deniers. This is not normal. But it’s who they are.”

None voted to impeach Trump for inciting the insurrection. None voted to establish the January 6 Commission.

Just five of the nine voted to avert a government default related to the debt ceiling, and five voted to avert a government shutdown by supporting the current 45-day continuing resolution. That’s an ominous possible predictor of what could happen in less than four weeks, when the federal government will shut down if the House (and Senate) do not pass legislation to fund the government.

Only four voted to support additional aid to Ukraine.

None voted for bipartisan gun control. None voted for the bipartisan Infrastructure Act. Just one voted for reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act.

None voted for ensuring the right to contraception, which some warn is a battle Republicans are gearing up to wage.

What are some other experts saying overall?

“The worst is Donalds. The best of the lot is Emmer,” writes political scientist Norman Ornstein of The Atlantic. Reflecting on the bigger picture of why Speaker Nancy Pelosi was successful while Speaker Kevin McCarthy was not, Ornstein writes:

“Blowing up government is the larger goal. Purity is a virtue. So is disruption. So it is not a great surprise that McCarthy, who spent much of his career, encouraging disruption, and who has no core values, failed. Nor is it a great surprise that they cannot find a replacement.”

House Republicans will meet behind closed doors for a “candidate forum,” Monday starting at 6:30 PM. They hope to elect one nominee who must get a majority of their fellow Republicans’ votes. Tuesday morning, exactly three weeks after Kevin McCarthy was ousted, the House is expected to convene to attempt, for the fourth time this year, to elect a Speaker.

Look at the charts below or at this link. nice

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'Guerrilla tactics against MAGA bullying': House Republicans opposed to Jim Jordan have a plan - Alternet.org

house Republicans opposed to Republican Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan‘s quest to become Speaker have been executing a plan to ensure he not only loses votes but appears to be designed to ensure he loses credibility and respect and suffers, as some are saying, “humiliation.”

Jordan’s candidacy has been strongly opposed by Democrats, largely based on his ties to Donald Trump and the January 6, 2021 insurrection, along with allegations he ignored years of sexual abuse inflicted on his wrestlers when he coached at Ohio State (OSU).

After Jordan lost more votes in the second round on Wednesday than he lost on Tuesday, CNN’s Melanie Zanona reported House Republicans opposed to a “Speaker Jordan” have been “staggering” their no votes.

“Some of Jim Jordan’s opponents tell me they’ve been purposely staggering their ‘no’ votes over multiple ballots — a strategy designed to show Jordan’s speakership opposition is only growing,” Zanona writes. “And that’s why they tell me Jordan will bleed even more support on a third ballot.”

That third ballot currently is expected to take place Thursday at noon.

“I know it’s inappropriate to take joy in anyone’s suffering but Jim Jordan has spent years being a bully and jerk to his own party and the Democrats. Seeing a bully put in his place is always good,” wrote former Lincoln Project executive director Fred Wellman. Later, responding to Zanona, he added: “This is what happens when you’ve done nothing for your colleagues for years except make their lives harder. Some places call it ‘karma.'”

Veteran foreign policy journalist Laura Rozen wrote, “the House GOP is trying to maximize the humiliation for Jordan by having him lose by more votes every time.”

Former Jezebel editor-in-chief Laura Bassett added, “they’re like not only will you not win, we also have a plan to slowly humiliate you.”

Longtime Republican political strategist Mike Madrid called the plan, “guerilla tactics against MAGA bullying.”

Meanwhile, others are taking notice as well. The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake reports, “The non-MAGA GOP finds some backbone — against Jordan and intimidation.”

As NCRM reported earlier, some Republicans are suggesting or even alleging Jordan and his allies have been sending threatening or intimidating messages attacking members of Congress for not voting to elect him as Speaker. Some say their families have also been targeted.

The Washington Post’s Jacqueline Alemany reported that U.S. Rep. Steve Womack (R-AR) said “in no uncertain terms: The opposition against Jordan is ‘profound.’ He notes that the people who are against Jordan do not want anything but are opposed to him ‘on principle.’ He also says Jordan’s ‘tactics’ have massively backfired.”

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'Extremely dangerous': Ex-federal prosecutors call out 'unprecedented' attacks by Jordan, Trump and GOP - Alternet.org

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an 8 23 $

no lnx

Dear Republicans: We tried it your way and it doesn't work

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy with RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel and Rep. Tom Emmer in November 2022 (Wikimedia Commons)

Thom Hartmann

August 29, 2023

The 1970s were a pivotal decade, and not just because it saw the end of the Vietnam War, the resignation of Nixon, and the death of both the psychedelic hippie movement and the very political (and sometimes violent) SDS. Most consequentially, the 1970s were when the modern-day Republican Party was birthed.

Prior to that, the nation had hummed along for 40 years on a top income tax bracket of 91% and a corporate income tax that topped out around 50%. Business leaders ran their companies, which were growing faster than anytime in the history of America, and avoided participating in politics.

Democrat Franklin Roosevelt and Republican Dwight Eisenhower renewed America with modern, state-of-the-art public labs, schools, and public hospitals across the nation; nearly free college, trade school, and research support; healthy small and family businesses; unions protecting a third of America’s workers so two-thirds had a living wage and benefits; and an interstate highway system, rail system, and network of new airports that transformed the nation’s commerce.

When we handed America over to Ronald Reagan in 1981 it was a brand, gleaming new country with a prosperous and thriving middle class.

The seeds of today’s American crisis were planted just ten years earlier, in 1971, when Lewis Powell, then a lawyer for the tobacco industry, wrote his infamous “Powell Memo.” It became a blueprint for the morbidly rich and big corporations to take over the weakened remnants of Nixon’s Republican Party and then America.

They then moved on to infiltrate our universities, seize our media, pack our courts, integrate themselves into a large religious movement to add millions of votes, and turn upside down our tax, labor, and gun laws.

That effort burst onto the American scene with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan.

By 1982 America was agog at the “new ideas” this newly-invented GOP was putting forward. They included radical tax cuts, pollution deregulation, destroying unions, and slashing the support services the New Deal and Great Society once offered people (because, Republicans said, feeding, educating, or providing healthcare to people made them dependent).

Their sales pitch was effective, and we’ve now had 42 years of the so-called Reagan Revolution.

It’s time to simply say out loud that it hasn’t worked:

Republicans told us if we just cut the top tax rate on the morbidly rich from the 74% it was at in 1980 down to 27% it would “trickle down” benefits to everybody else as, they said, the “job creators” would be unleashed on our economy.

Instead of a more general prosperity, we’ve now ended up with the greatest wealth and income inequality in the world, as over $50 trillion was transferred over 40 years from the bottom 90% to the top 1%, where it remains to this day. The middle class has gone from over 60% of us to fewer than half of us.

Republicans told us if we just deregulated guns and let anybody buy and carry as many as they wanted wherever they wanted it would clean up our crime problem and put the fear of God into our politicians.

“An armed society is a polite society” was the bumper sticker back during Reagan’s time, the NRA relentlessly promoting the lie that the Founders and Framers put the 2nd Amendment into the Constitution so “patriots” could kill politicians. Five Republicans on the Supreme Court even got into the act by twisting the law and lying about history to make guns more widely available.

Instead of a “polite” society or politicians who listened better to their constituents, we ended up with school shootings and a daily rate of gun carnage unmatched anywhere else in the developed world.

Republicans told us that if we just ended sex education in our schools and outlawed abortion, we’d return to “the good old days” when, they argued, every child was wanted and every marriage was happy.

Instead of helping young Americans, we’ve ended up with epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, and — now that abortion is illegal in state after state — a return to deadly back-alley abortions.

Republicans told us that if we just killed off Civics and History classes in our schools, we’d “liberate” our young people to focus instead on science and math.

Instead, we’ve raised two generations of Americans that can’t even name the three branches of government, much less understand the meaning of the Constitution’s reference to the “General Welfare.”

Republicans told us that if we cut state and federal aid to higher education — which in 1980 paid for about 80% of a student’s tuition — so that students would have what they told us was “skin in the game,” we’d see students take their studies more seriously and produce a new generation of engineers and scientists to prepare us for the 21st century.

Instead of happy students when, we cut that 80% government support down to around 20% (with the 80% now covered by student’s tuition), our nation is groaning under a $2 trillion dollar student debt burden, preventing young people from buying homes, starting businesses, or beginning families. While students are underwater, banksters who donate to Republican politicians are making billions in profits every single week of the year from these bizarrely non-negotiable loans.

Republicans told us that if we just stopped enforcing the anti-monopoly and anti-trust laws that had protected small businesses for nearly 100 years, there would be an explosion of innovation and opportunity as companies got bigger and better.

Instead, we’ve seen every industry in America become so consolidated that competition is dead, price gouging and profiteering reign, and it’s impossible to start or find small family-owned businesses anymore in downtowns, malls, and the suburbs. It’s all giant chains, many now owed by hedge funds or private equity. Few family or local businesses can compete against such giants.

Republicans told us that if we just changed the laws to let corporations pay their senior executives with stock (in addition to cash) they’d be “more invested” in the fate and future of the company and business would generally become healthier.

Instead, nearly every time a corporation initiates a stock buyback program, millions and often billions of dollars flow directly into the pockets of the main shareholders and executives — while workers, the company, and society suffer the loss.

Republicans told us that if we just let a handful of individual companies and billionaires buy most of our media, a thousand flowers would grow and we’d have the most diverse media landscape in the world. At first, as the internet was opening in the 90s, they even giddily claimed it was happening.

Now a small group of often-rightwing companies own our major media/internet companies, radio and TV stations, as well as local newspapers across the country. In such a landscape, progressive voices, as you can imagine, are generally absent.

Republicans told us we should hand all our healthcare decisions not to our doctors but to bureaucratic insurance industry middlemen who would decide which of our doctor’s suggestions they’d approve and which they’d reject. They said this will “lower costs and increase choice.”

In all of the entire developed world — all the OECD countries on 4 continents — there are only 500,000 medical bankruptcies a year. Every single one of them is here in America.

Republicans told us if we just got rid of our unions, then our bosses and the companies that employ them would give us better pay, more benefits, and real job security.

As everybody can see, they lied. And are working as hard as they can to prevent America from returning to the levels of unionization we had before Reagan’s Great Republican Experiment.

Republicans told us if we went with the trade agreement the GHW Bush administration had negotiated — NAFTA — and then signed off on the WTO, that we’d see an explosion of jobs.

There was an explosion; lots of them, in fact, as over 60,000 American factories were torn down or left vacant because their products were moved to China or elsewhere. Over 10 million good-paying jobs went overseas along with those 60,000 factories.

Republicans told us global warming was a hoax:they’re still telling us that, in fact. And therefore, they say, we shouldn’t do anything to interfere with the profits of their friends in the American fossil fuel industry and the Middle East.

The hoax, it turns out, was the lie that there was no global warming — a lie that the industry spent hundreds of millions over decades to pull off. They succeeded in delaying action on global warming by at least three decades and maybe as many as five. That lie produced trillions in profits and brought us the climate crisis that is today killing millions and threatens all life on Earth.

And then, of course, there’s the biggest GOP lie of them all: “Money is the same thing as Free Speech.”

Five Republicans on the Supreme Court told us that if we threw out around 1000 anti-corruption and anti-bribery laws at both the state and federal level so politicians and political PACs could take unaccountable billions, even from foreign powers, it would “strengthen and diversify” the range of voices heard in America.

It’s diversified it, for sure. We’re now regularly hearing from racists and open Nazis, many of them elected Republican officials, who would have been driven out of decent society before the Reagan Revolution. American political discourse hasn’t been this filled with conflict and violence since the Civil War, and much of it can be traced straight back to the power and influence of dark money unleashed by five Republicans on the Supreme Court.

The bottom line is that we — as a nation, voluntarily or involuntarily — have now had the full Republican experience.

And now that we know what it is, we’re no longer listening to the Republican politicians who are continuing to try to sell us this bullshit.

We don’t want to hear Republicans sermonizing about deficits (that they themselves caused).

Or welfare (that they damaged and then exploited).

Or even whatever they’re calling “faith” these days, be it the death penalty, forcing raped women to give birth at the barrel of a gun, or burning books.

We’re over it, Republicans. A new America is being birthed from the ashes of the Reagan Revolution and you can’t stop it much longer.

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https://www.alternet.org/from-quashing-teachers-unions-to-pardoning-trump-voters-reject-gop-positions-poll/

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https://www.alternet.org/republicans-are-disproportionately-credulous-misinformation/

Why Republicans are 'disproportionately credulous about health-related misinformation': analysis

WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 20: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) speaks to reporters following a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on July 20, 2021 in Washington, DC. The committee heard testimony about the Biden administration's ongoing plans to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and Delta variant. (Photo by Stefani Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images).

Brandon Gage August 22, 2023

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, conservative politicians like United States Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, (R-Georgia), Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R), and former President Donald Trump established themselves as faucets of "wildly conspiratorial" "health-related misinformation," according to The Washington Post's Philip Bump, who examines why those tactics have been successful amongst Republican votersin a Tuesday analysis of KFF surveys.

"Greene, of course, has a well-earned reputation as a purveyor of conspiracy theories and misinformation," Bump notes. "But this particular bit of performed skepticism was not an area in which she was freelancing. In recent days there has been a resurgence in the idea that the government is attempting to manipulate the citizenry through COVID-19, with 'I WILL NOT COMPLY' trending — yes, in all caps — on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, on Tuesday morning. That refusal to comply centers on nonexistent or theoretical mandates, which doesn't seem to have dissipated the energy."

Bump adds that "new research shows the extent to which Republicans are disproportionately credulous about health-related misinformation. It's not just that there is an uprising against an imaginary imposition, it's also that Republicans are consistently more likely to express belief in false claims related to COVID-19 and other things. Greene is by no means alone."

The data, Bump explains, shows that "Republicans were on average 20 percent more likely to state that they believed the false claims were accurate. Foremost among them: the regularly debunked idea that the coronavirus vaccine has caused thousands of deaths in otherwise healthy people. Nearly half of Republicans think that's true."

Moreover, nearly fifty percent "also think thativermectin is an effective treatment for the COVID-19 virus, which it is not. This has long been a leading example of how partisanship infiltrated the discussion about COVID-19 treatments, with other research showing that in places that voted for Donald Trump, people were more likely to seek information about the drug, and more prescriptions for it were written."

Bump points out that there is a correlation between belief in fake facts about SARS-COV-2 and deaths from the disease, mainly due to doubts about the efficacy of vaccinations, stating that "research made public last year found that after vaccines became widely available, Republicans made up more of the COVID-19-related deaths in Ohio and Florida."

Bump continues, "KFF found that abouttwo-thirds of Democrats didn’t believe any of the false claims about COVID-19 or vaccines. Only about a quarter of Republicans — and not many more independents — fell into the same category."

READ MORE: 'Clearly defined body count': Florida and Ohio Republicans experienced 43 percent more COVID deaths than Dems

Respondents were questioned about "other health-related subjects, including gun violence," Bump adds. "Again, Republicans were more likely than Democrats to believe false claims about gun violence. In this case, independents landed closer to the middle."

Bump contends that partisan bias lies at the heart of the disparity, writing, "The claims centered on COVID-19 and vaccines are largely ones that have been debunked by health professionals or government actors, groups that are viewed more skeptically by independents. KFF's research shows that while most Americans trust their personal doctors' health recommendations, that trust drops off when respondents were asked about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or state and local health officials. Independents were less trusting of state and local health officials' recommendation than were Republicans."

Bump stresses that "Democrats are far more trusting of recommendations from the Biden administration than Trump; for Republicans, it's the opposite," which based on KFF's figures is attributable to the absorption of alternative media narratives

"That Republicans often cite Fox News as a source for information — and are about as likely to say they consume Newsmax as they are to view CNN — comports with the higher acceptance of false claims about guns," says Bump. "These are not generally questions adjudicated in the context of public health (despite the obvious overlap with health concerns). Things like Fox News' frequent presentations about gun crime or school shootings, generally framed through a right-wing lens, likely contribute to the imbalance."

Bump observes that "it's probably less that the respondents believe the false claims than they are willing to express some acceptance of them, given how their politics establishes that as a standard response."

Bump concludes, "In Ohio and Florida, at least, this seems to have been proved — at times — deadly."

View Bump's report at this link (subscription required).

BUSTED: ‘Right-wing misinformation’ newspaper gave a GOP presidential candidate up to $5 million in salary

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an 8 23

Revealed: The shocking voter purge crisis of democracy

Thom Hartmann

andRaw Story

August 14, 2023

If you live in the Blue part of a Red state, Republicans don’t want you to vote. And their latest strategy is their most brute-force method: simply remove you from the voting rolls.

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A shocking new study from Demos lays out the dimensions of this voter purge crisis of democracy brought to us by an increasingly desperate GOP.

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Republicans are doing this because they know that their policies are unpopular: most Americans aren’t fans of tax cuts for billionaires, more pollution, deregulation, high-priced drugs, privatizing Medicare, ending Social Security, criminalizing abortion and birth control, student debt, hating on Black and queer people, and the GOP’s war on unions and working people.

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So, the GOP does everything they can to make voting difficult or even impossible, particularly for people in heavily Democratic neighborhoods (which are usually college towns, big cities, and Black neighborhoods).

When Republicans run elections in such areas (typically Blue cities in Red states), they’ll close or change polling places at the last minute to sow confusion and cause people to give up when they show up at their normal polling place and find it closed.

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For example, in this week’s election in Ohio the state changed polling places for mostly Blackvoters in Cuyahoga and Summit counties just five days before the election, as Newsweek noted in an article titled:

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“Ohio GOP Changing Polling Locations Days Before Election Raises Questions”

Ohio voters were outraged, and that outrage spread across X (formerly Twitter) with comments like this:

“The Ohio GOP is playing ‘Your polling place has moved’ with 47,000 voters in the largest African American voting county in Ohio—just five days before the election. Making it harder to vote—in the crucial August 8th special election (deciding if a majority of voters still can amend Ohio's state constitution)—is wrong.”

Another X user noted:

“Ohio Republicans are so damn shady! … This stinks to high heaven. At the last minute, before Ohio’s special election, polling locations were changed in Cuyahoga and Summit counties. More than 47,000 voters are affected by changes to 50 voting precincts.”

The fact that this little trick in Ohio this week got virtually no national press coverage guarantees Red states will be doing more of it in the upcoming 2023 and 2024 elections.

But that’s just the beginning.

Knowing that working-class people are less likely to vote Republican than white upper-class suburbanites, Republicans also engineer polling situations so people paid by the hour will have to wait for hours in line just to vote, losing out on income.

Every year, we’re treated to pictures and videos of hours-long lines to vote in Blue cities in Red states, while lines in white suburbs typically run less than 10 to 15 minutes.

Similarly, many Red states have imposed draconian penalties on people conducting voter registration drives for making even the smallest mistakes, or for failing to “properly register” themselves with the state. This has shut down many voter registration programs, including some from long-term organizations like the League of Women’s Voters.

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As The Kansas Reflector newspaper noted, the penalty for even a minor, inadvertent error is now 17 months in the state prison and a $100,000 fine:

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“The League of Women Voters of Kansas and other nonprofits are suspending voter registration drives for fear of criminal prosecution under a new state law.”

The League has sued Florida, Tennessee, and Texas for their criminalization of voter registration drives as well.

But purging voters — by the tens of millions every election cycle — is where the GOP finds their best result. As the Demos report notes:

:{:{}:

“Between the close of registration for the 2020 general election and the close of registration for the 2022 general election, states reported removing 19,260,000 records from their voter registration rolls. This was equal to 8.5% of the total number of voters who were registered in the United States as of the close of registration for the 2022 general election.”

Additionally, seventeen million voters were purged in the two years leading up to the 2018 election, fully ten percent of America’s voting population, according to the Brennan Center.

Given that the most radical purges took place among Black and youth voters in Republican-controlled Red states, those 8.5 percent and 10 percent “national averages” could well be twice or three times that percentage in the states where these purges are concentrated.

They added, most of the purge activity was taking place in former Confederate Red states that — before five Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in their 2013 Shelby County decision — had to have purges pre-cleared by the federal government:

“The median purge rate over the 2016–2018 period in jurisdictions previously subject to preclearance was 40 percent higher than the purge rate in jurisdictions that were not covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.”

More than a quarter of those purged during this period from 2016-2022 were removed from the rolls either because they failed to vote in the previous election or because they failed to return a postcard mailed out by a Republican secretary of state (that is usually designed to look like junk mail).

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This is called “caging” andused to be illegal, but Sam Alito broke the tie and wrote the 5-4 decision in their 2018 Husted v A Phillip Randolph Institute when the five Republicans on the Court ruled that Ohio Republican Secretary of State Husted could continue his practice of mailing the postcards into Ohio cities with the largest Black populations.

In his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out that only around 4 percent of Americans move out of their county every year. Yet, he wrote:

:{:{}:

“The record shows that in 2012 Ohio identified about 1.5 million registered voters—nearly 20% of its 8 million registered voters—as ineligible to remain on the federal voter roll because [Husted said that] they changed their residences.”

The Brennan Center found that just between 2014 and 2016, in the two years leading up to the Hillary/Trump presidential election, over 14 million people were purged from voter rolls, largely in Republican-controlled states.Then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp purged over a million in Georgia alone leading up to his 50,000 vote 2018 election win against Stacey Abrams.

Calling the findings “disturbing,” the Brennan Center noted, “Almost 4 million more names were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016 [just after the Supreme Court legalized large-scale no-oversight voter purges in 2013] than between 2006 and 2008. This growth in the number of removed voters represented an increase of 33 percent—far outstripping growth in both total registered voters (18 percent) and total population (6 percent).”

Another strategy that the GOP has rolled out in a big way to suppress the vote in Blue areas of Red states is “strict signature matching.” They primarily use this against voters who’ve succeeded in obtaining vote-by-mail ballots, which are authenticated by comparing the signature on the envelope with the voter’s registration card.

Because signatures change over time and often vary a lot when people are in a hurry, this is low-hanging fruit for the GOP. Last year they started a program to field an “army” of 50,000 “poll watchers,” including interviewing candidates from among white supremacist militia groups, for the 2024 election.

While some of thesepoll watcherswill be on hand to try to intimidate or challenge Black and young voters (a practice that’s legal in most Red states), many will be overseeing the counting of mail-in ballots, which are generally more Democratic than Republican.

All they have to do is claim that, in their opinion, a signature doesn’t match and the ballot goes into the “provisional” pile and won’t be counted until or unless the voter shows up in person at the county elections office. Most people never even know their ballot was challenged and not counted.

Meanwhile, the GOP in Texas is quietly recruiting 10,000 white volunteers “courageous” enough to go into Black and Hispanic polling places and confront people trying to vote.

As Jessica Corbett reported for Common Dreams:

“Common CauseTexas on Thursday shared a leaked video of a Harris County GOP official discussing plans to ‘build an army’ of 10,000 election workers and poll watchers, including some who ‘will have the confidence and courage’ to go into Black and Brown communities to address alleged voter fraud that analyses show does not actually exist.”

Voting in Red states has become difficult, and registering voters is now treacherous since five Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized all these little tricks and strategies to purge or discourage Democratic voters.

If you live in a Blue area of a Red state, get ready: the GOP plans to pull out all the stops for the 2024 election.

Double-check your voter registration every month or two, and be sure to double-check it in the weeks just before the deadline for registration, as Republican Secretaries of State prefer to purge people in this window so by the time people discovered they’re purged it’s too late to re-register.

Forewarned is forearmed. Pass it on to your friends in Red states.

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[[

AHA yikes RR nostalgia gipper, but massive dereg now under cover of?

https://www.democracynow.org/2023/7/28/global_heat_climate_crisis_july_2023

...

DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Well, I mean, the short answer is, to limit all of these impacts, we need to reduce carbon emissions very rapidly. And while we have had an incredibly impressive renewable rollout over the last couple of years, all of the graphs are pointing way up. The next decade looks much more promising for renewable energy than most advocates even believed was possible just a few years ago. Nevertheless, they’ve barely dented, if they’ve dented at all, the emissions that we’re producing from fossil fuel generation. So we haven’t actually reduced the share of global power production that comes from fossil fuels from this remarkable renewable rollout. We’re just using those renewables to add to our power capacity.

And that’s really, you know, the change that we need to make. We need to be producing so much renewables now that we can actually draw down fossil fuels, and draw them down relatively rapidly, rather than simply using them to supplement our consumption patterns and power production. And unfortunately, we haven’t really seen a sign of that. At best, it looks like we’re going to be looking at sort of a plateau for emissions over the rest of this decade. And we know from all of the scientific warnings that that’s simply inadequate if we have any hope of meeting some of our more ambitious climate targets.

AMY GOODMAN: In a moment, David, I want to ask you about what would be the most effective legislation in the United States to deal with climate change. But, Dharna Noor, I wanted to first go to your piece. If you can explain what Project 2025 is and what you found in your investigation?

DHARNA NOOR: Absolutely. So, Project 2025 is, essentially, a group of dozens of right-wing organizations. We’re talking about think tanks, publications and the like. And it was convened by the Heritage Foundation, which is, I think, in the climate world, very well known for promoting climate denial for decades, and for even longer promoting this sort of anti-regulatory stance. So, these groups came together in an attempt, essentially, to advise whoever the next president is, if that person is a Republican, so any Republican who takes office in next year’s presidential election.

This is the second time that the Heritage Foundation has led the creation of a sort of transition plan aimed at a Republican president. In the early ’80s, we saw the Heritage Foundation create one of these plans, that actually went on to have a huge influence on the Reagan administration and was framed as a sort of way of taking on the out-of-control regulatory state.

And in this particular iteration, there’s a lot of focus in their new transition plan on unmaking environmental regulations. I’m happy to talk more about this, but there’s a number of previous Trump appointees who have written, essentially, proposals to undo the many powers of the federal administration, from the EPA to the Department of the Interior, all in an attempt to sort of lessen the federal authority to regulate fossil fuels and, essentially, to boost those polluting industries.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, it’s interesting. Polls show now that Biden and Trump, even though he was indicted again yesterday, are neck and neck in the polls for president. You talk about the Department of the Interior part of the plan, in this 2025 plan, being written byWilliam Perry Pendley.You note he controversially led the Bureau of Land Management under President Trump and worked to eliminate drilling regulations. Talk more specifically, and name names.

DHARNA NOOR: Absolutely. So, as you mentioned, William Perry Pendley very controversially led the Bureau of Land Management under President Trump, controversially because he was actually never confirmed by the Senate. This was the case for a number of Trump appointees. And he also was known, before he had a role in the Trump administration, for writing this book called Sagebrush Rebel, that was really in praise of Ronald Reagan, of Ronald Reagan’s anti-regulatory sort of agenda. It’s, I think, unsurprising to see his name in a sort of proposal that’s aimed at, you know, ending the ability for federal regulations to have any real impact on the environment.

Previous reporting from E&E News, from Scott Waldman there, found that Mandy Gunasekara had written another chapter focused on remaking theEPA, really focused on shrinking its authority both by laying off staff, by cutting budgets, with an especially big focus on sort of cutting environmental programs, like environmental justice programming and public outreach programming.

Another name that was in the proposal was Bernard McNamee, who wrote a chapter on the Department of Energy, again sort of in an attempt to say we should shrink the authority of the Department of Energy. He previously served as an adviser to Ted Cruz. And before that, he led this far-right organization called the Texas Public Policy Institute — or,Texas Public Policy Foundation, rather, that really aims to undo environmental regulation and fight renewable energy at the state level.

And so, we’re really seeing, I think, a who’s who of the far right in this attempt to, you know, not only sort of be in the next president’s ear if they’re a Republican, but also, you know, sort of recommend personnel and say, “Hey, here’s who you should staff up with.”

AMY GOODMAN: What role does billionaire Charles Koch play in this project, Dharna?

DHARNA NOOR: So, the Heritage Foundation, who, again, are the far-right foundation that sort of convened this group, Project 2025, has historically had ties, financial ties, to the Koch brothers, who are, of course, billionaires who made their fortune in fossil fuels and related industries. The Heritage Foundation is also a member of the State Policy Network, which is a sort of coalition of these extreme right-wing groups that have targeted regulation, especially climate-focused regulation, in states for many years. And I think, you know, I would just say, I guess, it’s no surprise that an organization with ties to people who have made such a great fortune in the industries that must be regulated in order to take on the climate crisis, you know, have historically been tied to a group that is trying to push that agenda to the presidential level.

AMY GOODMAN: As we begin to wrap up, I wanted to ask David Wallace-Wells to respond to what Dharna is describing right now, and also talk about what needs exactly to be done. I mean, we’re speaking today, the day after the Supreme Court has just OK’d, cleared the way for construction of the contested Mountain Valley Pipeline to resume, lifting a halt on a section of the project that had been issued by a lower court earlier this month after a challenge by environmental groups.

...

ref

GUK

https://yyytheguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/27/project-2025-dismantle-us-climate-policy-next-republican-president

‘Project 2025’: plan to dismantle US climate policy for next Republican president

Rightwing groups penned a conservative wish list of proposals for the next conservative Dharna Noor

Thu 27 Jul 2023

An alliance of rightwing groups has crafted an extensive presidential proposal to bolster the planet-heating oil and gas industry and hamstring the energy transition, it has emerged.

Against a backdrop of record-breaking heat and floods this year, the $22m endeavor, Project 2025, was convened by the notorious rightwing, climate-denying thinktank the Heritage Foundation, which has ties to fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch.

[A burned-out car against a background of charred trees and hills

Deadly global heatwaves undeniably result of climate crisis, scientists show

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https://apnews.com/article/state-legislatures-supermajorities-extreme-policies-5cff2be330289aa034dce295fa0a3a56

no lnx

BY DAVID A. LIEB

Published 9:15 PM PDT, June 16, 2023

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Lawmakers in state capitols this year have been flexing their superpowers.

In North Carolina, a new supermajority of Republicans enacted abortion restrictions. In Vermont, a new supermajority of Democrats imposed a climate-sensitive home heating law. And in Montana, a GOP supermajority booted a transgender lawmaker from the House floor.

In each case, the views of their political opponents ultimately were irrelevant.

OTHER NEWS

Attorney Taylor Meehan talks with Utah House Speaker Brad Wilson during a break in oral arguments for a case challenging the state's congressional districts before the Utah Supreme Court in Salt Lake City, Tuesday, July 11, 2023. (Leah Hogsten/The Salt Lake Tribune via AP, Pool)

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Supreme Court directs Ohio’s top court to take another look at redistricting lawsuit

FILE - Democratic North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper speaks to The Associated Press in a year-end interview at the Executive Mansion in Raleigh, N.C., Dec. 14, 2022. On Friday, June 16, 2023, Cooper vetoed GOP legislation that would ban the promotion of certain beliefs that some lawmakers have likened to critical race theory in state government workplaces. (AP Photo/Hannah Schoenbaum, File)

North Carolina GOP bars promotion of certain beliefs in state government, 1 of 6 veto overrides

FILE - Reggie Weaver, at podium, speaks outside the Legislative Building in Raleigh, N.C., Feb. 15, 2022, about a partisan gerrymandering ruling by the North Carolina Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has ruled that North Carolina’s top court did not overstep its bounds in striking down a congressional districting plan as excessively partisan under state law. The justices on Tuesday rejected the broadest view of a case that could have transformed elections for Congress and president by leaving state legislatures virtually unchecked by their state courts when dealing with federal elections. (AP Photo/Gary D. Robertson, File)

Supreme Court rejects GOP in North Carolina case that could have reshaped elections beyond the state

By at least one measure, political power is at its highest mark in decades. That’s because Republicans or Democrats hold majorities so large in 28 states that they could override gubernatorial vetoes without any help from the minority party.

“Supermajorities give one party a lot of power to do what they want to do,” said Steven Rogers, a political scientist at Saint Louis University who focuses on elections and state legislatures.

There is no single standard for a supermajority, though the term generally is equated with whatever threshold is needed to override a gubernatorial veto. In many states, that’s a two-thirds majority. In some, that’s a three-fifths majority. In six states — Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia — it takes only a simple majority to override a veto. But those states all have Republican majorities around 70% or greater — easily exceeding any definition of a supermajority.

The number of states with supermajorities is at its highest level since at least 1982, with 19 Republican supermajorities and nine Democratic ones, according to research by Rogers.

This year began with supermajorities in 26 legislatures, including new Republican ones in Florida and Montana and a new Democratic one in Vermont. That total grew in March when Louisiana state Rep. Francis Thompson — who had served nearly 50 years as a Democrat — switched to the Republican Party to give the GOP a supermajority. Thompson cited his conservative voting record while asserting that Democratic leaders were pushing issues that didn’t align with his Christian values.

In April, North Carolina state Rep. Tricia Cotham switched from Democrat to Republican to give the GOP another supermajority. Six weeks after Cotham’s switch, she provided a pivotal vote as the new GOP supermajority overrode Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of legislation banning most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy.

Some North Carolina Republicans already are eying other proposals they could pass with a supermajority, including an elections bill containing provisions that Cooper previously vetoed and an expansion of taxpayer-funded vouchers for students to attend private schools.

The supermajority creates an opportunity to “adjust the playbook” to ensure “that we are scoring more touchdowns, so to speak, than we might have previously,” said North Carolina Republican state Rep. John Torbett, chair of an education committee.

The new Republican supermajority in Louisiana also could soon be put to the test.

Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards has said he intends to veto a package of bills that targets the LGBTQ+ community, including a ban on gender-affirming treatments for transgender minors. Louisiana lawmakers have convened for just two veto sessions since 1974. But Republicans now have the two-thirds majority necessary to override an Edwards veto.

Vermont’s Democratic-led legislature is to return to the Capitol next week to consider overriding vetoes by Republican Gov. Phil Scott, including one of a bill expanding child care subsidies for some families. The Democratic supermajority already notched one victory in May — overriding Scott’s veto of a clean-heating-standard bill that credits utilities for energy-efficient technologies and penalizes them for not meeting certain goals.

Scott vetoed a similar bill last year before Democrats obtained a supermajority, but an override failed by one vote in the House.

Republican-led legislatures in Kansas and Kentucky this year also overrode vetoes by Democratic governors, including on bills dealing with transgender issues, abortion and work requirements for food assistance.

Political scientists cite a couple of reasons for the rise of supermajorities.

Over the past decades, Americans have increasingly voted along party lines— picking state lawmakers and even local officials who align with their party choice for president or the top of the ticket, Rogers said. At the same time, politicians in power in many states have gerrymandered voting district boundaries to give their party’s candidates an advantage in legislative elections.

As parties gain more seats in House and Senate chambers, the political ideology of their middle members often shifts further to the right or left, reducing the need to appeal to moderates and virtually eliminating the need to compromise with the opposing party.

“All that we have is our voice,” said North Carolina state Rep. Marcia Morey, a Democratic whip. But now “there’s no need for (Republicans) to have any dialogue.”

Parties with supermajorities also can more easily silence their opponents. In Tennessee, where Republicans hold at least three-fourths of the seats, the GOP supermajority expelled two Black Democratic lawmakers who used a bullhorn on the House floor to protest for gun control after a deadly school shooting in Nashville. Democrats also were upset Republicans had limited debate on various topics.

Following Tennessee’s expulsions, Montana’s Republican supermajority banned transgender Rep. Zooey Zephyr from the House floor. Zephyr initially was silenced after telling lawmakers supporting a prohibition on gender-affirming treatments for minors that they would have blood on their hands; she was exiled for participating in a protest over her right to debate in the House.

When supermajorities run state capitals, some voters may be pleased by the sweeping policies that get enacted. Others may feel like their priorities are ignored.

“On behalf of the voters, it might be a good thing, because it helps clarify responsibility,” said Carlos Algara, an assistant professor of government and politics at Claremont Graduate University in California.

“If you are a voter in California, you know explicitly which party owns policy – it’s the Democratic Party,” Algara said. “So if you don’t like the direction of policy in California, you have a very easy choice.”

Voters in Florida are in a similar situation with Republicans. GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis helped build a Republican supermajority by becoming more involved in legislative races, and the candidates he backed remained firmly loyal during this year’s legislative session.

DeSantis had no problem passing a legislative agenda that included a six-week abortion ban, tougher immigration laws, more power for parents to remove books from public schools and an easier ability for prosecutors to win death sentences, among other things. He now is campaigning on that agenda as he runs for president.

House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell said DeSantis “changed the vibe” in the Capitol. She recalled that lawmakers last year had included limits on how the governor could use funds in an emergency management bill.

“That was when they did not have a supermajority,” Driskell said. “This time, we didn’t see anything that would be a check on his power.”

---

an 7 23

https://www.alternet.org/kevin-mccarthy-2662291480/

no lnx twt

'Five-alarm fire' as GOP adds over 200 poison pills to House spending bills

Brett Wilkinsand

Common DreamsJuly 17, 2023

A coalition of advocacy groups on Monday sounded the alarm on the more than 200 so-called "poison pill" riders attached by Republican U.S. lawmakers to House spending bills in recent weeks in a bid to block funding for a dizzying range of progressive policies and programs.

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According to the Clean Budget Coalition—which is made up of nearly 260 advocacy groups—"at least 104 poison pill policy riders were added to appropriations bills drafted in the U.S. House over the past week."

"Prior to the July 4th recess, it took two months for House Republican appropriators to add more than 100 new poison pills to draft spending bills marked up in committee," the coalition noted. "In the past week alone, the previous total has doubled to more than 217."

"Most of these measures are special favors for big corporations and ideological extremists that have nothing to do with funding our government and could not become law on their own merits," the groups added."Some of them attack women's health, some fuel political corruption, some harm our environment, and much more."

Some of the riders tracked by the Clean Budget Coalition include measures to block proposed transportation safety rules and prohibit funding for the World Health Organization, climate mitigation, gender equality programs, and critical race theory education. Other riders target gas stove bans, funding for high-speed rail, pesticide warning labeling, wildlife protection, reproductive healthcare, and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

"The sheer volume of dangerous riders being included in these draft bills is an overreach and an emergency," Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen and co-chair of the Clean Budget Coalition, said in a statement.

"We cannot allow policy that harms regular people, threatens our rights, hurts the environment, and does any number of other terrible things to ride along with the appropriations package," Gilbert added. "We must put out this five-alarm fire by rejecting the inclusion of poison pills."

To that end, the Clean Budget Coalition is calling on lawmakers to "pass clean spending bills" by removing all poison pill riders and opposing passage of "any legislation that includes these unpopular and controversial special favors for big corporations and ideological extremists."

David Shadburn, senior government affairs advocate at theLeague of Conservation Voters—a Clean Budget Coalition member—said earlier this month that "House Republicans continue using the same tired playbook: They're hijacking must-pass bills with harmful poison pill riders that neither the public nor Congress support but benefit their polluter donors."

"Just as Republican leaders held the full faith and credit of the United States hostage to make it easier to pollute, now they are proposing riders to greenlight pipelines, block clean air and water regulations, stall clean energy deployment, and prohibit the federal government from addressing long-standing inequities," Shadburn added. "These must-pass spending bills are already loaded down with harmful poison pill riders that need to be removed—the last thing Congress should do is add more."

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McCarthy Says He Would Urge for Trump Resignation After Jan 6 in ... ›

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lots of BBB IRA $ goes to red trump states

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demlabs

taking Credit Where It’s Not Due: Republicans flip flop on Infrastructure Bill

Republicans claim credit for 418 infrastructure projects they voted against. Flip flop! President Biden’s Infrastructure Bill includes $1.2 trillion for transportation, utilities and pollution...

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pattern? note what gop votes down en masse party line eg baby formula? (well 9)

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there used to be a distinction between gop and qanon trumpista wackos?

60% want

https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/republicans-united-states-christian-nation/

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Liberian flag

https://www.alternet.org/republican-party-july-4th-tweet/

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no lnx

Is the Republican Party fascist? An expert explains the 7 themes that dominate fascism movements

Kevin Matthews and History News NetworkJanuary 11, 2021

Writing in the Washington Post four years ago, journalist Michael Kinsley gave this blunt assessment of the man about to become president:

"Donald Trump," Kinsley wrote, "is a fascist."

Four years later, it's fair to ask: Is the Republican Party fascist?

It's an incendiary question. It's also a serious one. Even after the assault on the U.S. Capitol, eight Senate Republicans and 138 Republican members of the House of Representatives still voted to overturn a free and fair presidential election. It is just the latest example of a party that is well to the right of most conservative parties in the democratic world.

That alone wouldn't make the Grand Old Party fascist. The word itself is hard to characterize. As one of Adolf Hitler's biographers has put it, "trying to define 'fascism' is like trying to nail jelly to the wall."

But it's also real, as I learned working for an English-language newspaper in Rome in the mid-1980s. There, I attended a neo-fascist rally in the Piazza del Popolo complete with searchlights and elderly men, all wearing the same berets, a sign, my interpreter told me, that they once belonged to Benito Mussolini's infamous Blackshirts.

While no two fascist movements are entirely alike, during fascism's heyday in the 1920s and 30s, they shared several common themes. All of those themes are present in today's Republican Party.

Fascists are anti-democratic

All inter-war fascist movements took part in elections with one goal in mind: to destroy democracy and create a one-party state.

That's happening today in Poland, in Hungary, in Turkey.

Here, it is the idea that only Republicans can legitimately win at the ballot box. While this goes to the heart of the attempt to overturn November's presidential election, the claim isn't new.

The same was said of Barack Obama's elections (he wasn't really born in this country) and Bill Clinton's victories (he only won because of Ross Perot's third-party candidacies). If the elections aren't legitimate, neither are the presidencies. The same strategy will be used to undermine Joe Biden.

More than that, Republicans believe only they deserve to win. As far back as 1984, Ronald Reagan declared the GOP is "America's party.''

Such thinking leads in one direction. If Republicans are "America's party" then Democrats are the "anti-America party." From there it's a small step to believing that only Republicans can legitimately win at the ballot box, that Democrats only win by cheating. If saving the country from such a party means resorting to strategies like voter suppression — or violence — so be it.

Never mind that this turns the American experiment in self-government on its head. If democracy means anything, it means your side sometimes loses.

That simple fact ought to be clear to every American. Yet it, and Wednesday's attempted insurrection, did not stop Congressional Republican diehards from voting to reject the electoral votes of several states for no reason other than the fact that they didn't like the outcome of the presidential race.

Fascists attract followers with the "big lie"

For Mussolini the big lie was the "mutilated victory" after World War I, a stain that would be wiped out by establishing an Italian empire in the Mediterranean.

For Adolf Hitler the big lie was the "stab-in-the-back," that the "November criminals" caused Germany's defeat in the same war, a stain that would be wiped out by getting rid of the Weimar Republic.

For Trump one big lie isn't enough. He has two of them.

Trump's first big lie was what he called "American carnage," a fantasy America overrun by crime, drugs and illegal immigrants.

Whether the crisis is real or not is beside the point. The national rebirth, the liberation will be achieved by one man: the party's leader. He, and he alone will restore the nation to greatness. Or, as Trump declared: "I alone can fix it."

Trump's second big lie is that he won a landslide in the 2020 election — a victory that a new batch of "November criminals" has conspired to deny him and his followers. That was the message of his "Save America" rally on Wednesday, which immediately preceded the attack on Congress.

However, this comparison involves more than individuals. Neither Mussolini nor Hitler could have come to power without the help of established conservative politicians. Both men were tolerated because they brought with them large numbers of voters for whom these older parties had lost any appeal. Once in office, these politicians reasoned, the fascist leader wouldn't know what to do. He would be their prisoner. Meantime, they could draw from his well of new voters to hold onto power. As one right-wing leader said of Hitler: "We are hiring him."

The bargain made by Italian and then German, conservatives was clear: They chose the fascist option. They knew what they were doing, and they did it anyway.

That same reasoning led Republicans like Mitch McConnell to back Trump's bid for the White House. The "adults in the room" would keep him in line. They didn't, and they couldn't.

Even with Trump headed out the door, the same cynicism explains why congressional Republicans jumped on board the effort to reject Biden's legitimate victory — and why some stayed on board even as a pro-Trump mob forced them to shelter in place and then flee the House and Senate chambers. Since more than a few of them have their own presidential ambitions, they don't really want to keep Trump in the White House. They do want to keep his voters, so they can replace him. That is why Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley chose to stick with their protest of the Electoral College vote.

To be fair, some Republicans have stood up to Trump's subversion of democracy. Unsurprisingly, however, their numbers grow the further away they are from the center of national power. While local elections officials bravely carried out their responsibilities, while state officials refused to "find" votes that would tip the results in Trump's favor, some Congressional Republicans also refused to go along with this blatant power grab. Most striking was the decision of former Republican defense secretaries who joined their Democratic counterparts to warn against use of the U.S. military to thwart the will of the American people.

Yet, these examples at the federal level have been few and some are "profiles in courage" only for the most opportunistic of reasons in the Republican civil war that is sure to come.

Fascists celebrate violence

Mussolini was handed power in Italy thanks to the violence and general chaos brought on by his paramilitary Blackshirts. Hitler's stormtroopers used the same tactics in Germany.

The Proud Boys, along with other right-wing groups pledged to back Trump, have not yet become the equivalent of the Squadristi or the Sturmabteilung. And Trump boasting that he would like to "punch" protestors at his rallies may have once seemed like little more than preening.

But these appeals to violence are dangerous. Republicans have done nothing, practically speaking, to stand up to them, even as the level of violence around Trump rallies escalated.

There is an equally disturbing parallel development. As violence spiraled out of control in early 1920s Italy, the police and army moved toward collusion with the Blackshirts in their battles with opponents.

Here, most local and state police officers faithfully carry out their duties every day, not knowing if they will come home that night. Some don't. Capitol Hill Police officer Brian D. Sicknick, died at the hands of Trump supporters while he defended this nation's elected leaders.

Yet around the country, others in law enforcement have shown an affinity for right-wing groups, particularly a shared antipathy toward equal justice protestors. More troubling are reports of growing infiltration of police agencies by the far right.

Whether because of this embrace or because they misperceive the threat, local and state law enforcement authorities seldom have taken action against right-wing paramilitaries, even in the notorious invasion of Michigan's statehouse last year. Escalating provocations went unchecked. The contrast between that and the treatment meted out to often peaceful demonstrators is too obvious to ignore, and was crystallized by the ineffectual preparation for and response to Wednesday's assault — which, it bears repeating, was a violent attempt to stop Congress from carrying out its constitutional duty.

Fascists reject established values and objective facts

Fascists dismiss notions like rationalism, egalitarianism, and scientific enquiry — in short, a fact-based world.

The examples of Trump breaking norms and rejecting reality when it suits him are so numerous that there's no point rehearsing them. What's surprising is that anyone has been surprised at how the rest of the GOP was so quick to parrot what Trump aide Kellyanne Conway infamously called "alternative facts."

The rot was evident in the earlier George W. Bush administration, when an aide told writer Ron Suskind that Republicans no longer inhabit the "reality-based community."

"That's not the way the world really works anymore," this aide told Suskind in 2002, "and when we act, we create our own reality."

The problem with this thinking, of course, is that reality — whether it's global warming, or a pandemic, or the results of an election — cannot be wished away.

Fascists have no time for women's rights

Women are crucial to the fascist ideal as wives of virile fascist men and as the bearers of the next generation of fascist boys and girls. But as for equality between the sexes? Forget it.

Fascist states in the 1920s and 1930s classified single women as second-class citizens. Married couples were pressured to have large families; married couples without children had to pay a tax penalty. Mussolini's Italy outlawed contraception, and both his regime and Hitler's banned abortion. Nazis called the operation "racial treason."

Of course, not all abortion opponents are fascists. But all fascists oppose abortion.

The point, again, is that, with the exception of Poland's Law and Justice party, today's GOP is an extremist outlier when it comes to the issue of women's rights among western conservative parties. The same is true of both Law & Justice and the Republicans when it comes to LGBTQ rights.

Fascists abandon their mass of followers once in power

Although fascists build their movements on the backs of middle- and working-class voters, they're quick to abandon them in favor of alliances with the nation's elites: business leaders, bankers, etc. They will still pay lip service to their base; the demands of their new friends, though, come first.

Mussolini attracted support from industrialists such as the auto giant Fiat, and the tire manufacturer Pirelli. The chemical giant I.G. Farben and other German industrialists quickly fell in line shortly after Hitler came to power. In return, both men guaranteed a workforce unprotected by labor unions and one that could be harshly disciplined.

Republicans are long practiced at claiming to champion "Main Street" while their policies overwhelmingly benefit Wall Street, often to the detriment of the "real Americans" they claim to represent.

The 2017 tax cut, the only substantive legislative achievement of Trump's presidency, is a case in point. Just a year earlier, he had promised to cut the taxes of working Americans at the expense of the wealthy. What Americans got was the biggest corporate tax cut in their history at the price of an additional $1.5 trillion of debt over 10 years.

Fascists thrive in a power vacuum

No fascist movement achieves power without help from its opponents. During the inter-war years, men and women were drawn to the fascists once they decided that politicians were more interested in their own petty squabbles. They were either unable or, worse, unwilling to solve the threats plaguing their lives of ordinary people, climaxing with the Great Depression.

The pull of the far right is evident, today, and so are many of the same problems: joblessness; a widening gap between rich and poor; crime; racial and ethnic tensions; poor health care and educational opportunities; threats from across the globe (then, the march to another world war; now, a pandemic).

Republicans could work with the incoming Biden administration to deal with these crises and restore faith in American democracy. Instead, they seem bent on further undermining that faith, thinking it will set them up to grab power later on.

Before this past week, too many in the GOP seemed too willing to choose the fascist option. Now they have seen what it looks like and where it leads. The question Republicans must answer is simple: Will they choose fascism anyway?

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~ naacp warning? an 623

no lnx

sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) on Tuesday became the object of widespread ridicule on Twitter after he posted a video warning "communists" that they should not even think of coming to visit his state.

"If you're a communist or a socialist... I would think twice if you're thinking about taking a vacation or moving to Florida," Scott said in his video.

Scott went on to state that Florida residents know communism is "not good for anybody" and then added that "we like freedom liberty, capitalism, things like that."

Many of Scott's followers were quick to pile on the senator's video.

"These people are clowns," wrote Brian Klaas, an Associate Professor in Global Politics at University College London. "Every aspect of modern Republican politics is geared toward performative pandering to the extremist base. The idea that a senior US politician would take the time to record a video telling 'communists' not to vacation in Florida…is just absurd."

David Simon, the creator of the acclaimed television series "The Wire," had a comical warning of his own for Scott to stay out of his hometown of Baltimore.

"I'm warning you not to set foot in Baltimore, where when we get the scent of a... submoronic demagogue, we cease all intramural violence and converge in socialist frenzy on the f---er, capture him, then sell him off in parts to pay for our crack vials and Utz crab chips," he wrote.

Princeton historian Kevin Kruse, meanwhile, found it ironic that Scott railed against left-wing totalitarianism but found no time to condemn the neo-Nazis that have been marching at Disney World in recent days.

And Shannon Watts, the founder of the gun safety advocacy organization Moms Demand, pointed out how many residents of Florida benefit from the "socialism" that Scott decries.

"Florida is the second highest state in the nation with the most welfare recipients - including SNAP, TANF and Medicaid - and the second highest number of social security beneficiaries," she wrote.

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2015 anglosphere

https://www.vox.com/2015/12/2/9836566/republican-climate-denial-why

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gop

https://www.rawstory.com/5-elements-of-fascism/

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boast voter suppress

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/**john-cornyn

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4 23 Tenn 3 justins student gun control protest fuckery

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an 4 23

https://www.alternet.org/senate-republicans-equal-rights-amendment/

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fetish tribal vice signal explains why all show at NRA a week after mass school shoots?

xmas card w assault weapons common?!

https://www.alternet.org/insensitive-creepy-and-ghoulish-republicans-are-doing-gunowners-more-harm-than-good-conservative/

an 4 23

no linx

:{:{}:

daily Beast opinion columnist and Never Trump conservative Matt Lewis has his share of disagreements with liberals and progressives where gun control is concerned. Lewis considers himself staunchly pro-2nd Amendment, and he isn't shy about saying that he grew up around a "gun culture."

:{:{}:

But in a scathing column published on April 17, Lewis takes issue with the "insensitive, creepy, and ghoulish" way in which many "Republican politicians" address the gun control issue. And he believes that the theatrics of Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and other MAGA Republicans are doing the 2nd Amendment more harm than good.

"When I was around ten," Lewis recalls, "my grandfather gave me a real shotgun. My dad intervened to make sure that I did not have unfettered access to it, and that I could only shoot it with his direct supervision. My dad was a prison guard and an avid hunter. He took gun ownership seriously. All this to say, I'm not a gun-grabbing city slicker — though I do think there are common sense reforms we should consider, including red flag laws and background checks."

READ MORE: Guns don't kill Americans, Republicans do

Lewis continues, "I’m not offended by law-abiding Americans who have guns for hunting and protection. What I am offended by are weirdos who want to go out of their way to constantly remind you that they are armed to the teeth."

The conservative columnist has no problem with conservatives debating liberals and progressives vigorously on gun control; what he objects to are the "bizarre" and "weird" theatrics — especially when they follow a mass shooting.

"In the wake of all the violence we have seen in recent decades," Lewis laments, "I would expect 2nd Amendment advocates to go out of their way to demonstrate responsible gun ownership. Remember the Party of Personal Responsibility? Instead, it seems like Republican politicians are going out of their way to fetishize guns. They are more than just for protection or sport. They are a way of life, a religion, a culture."

:{:{}:

Even Republicans with strong pro-2nd Amendment voting records, Lewis argues, risk being attacked as "squishy RINOs" by MAGA Republicans if they aren't "performative" enough.

READ MORE: How the gun-loving South dominates these United States

"Clearly, what we are seeing is some sort of vice signaling, presumably because the demand to be perceived as a performatively tough Second Amendment advocate is so intense that mere words and past votes are no longer persuasive enough," Lewis observes. "In addition to supporting the right to bear arms, you now also have to demonstrate that you are a gun fanatic."

READ MORE: Students across the country walk out of school to protest gun violence

Read Matt Lewis' full Daily Beast column at this link (subscription required).

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https://www.mediamatters.org/rumble/rumble-home-harmful-right-wing-content-and-creators-will-be-exclusively-livestreaming-first

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sometimes retaliation FAILs even backfires

// tucker

an 4 23

no lnx vid etc

'The worst case of blackface': Matt Walsh's racist attack on Justin Pearson

Brandon Gage April 12, 2023

Right-wing Daily Wire host Matt Walsh called Tennessee State Representative Justin Pearson (D-86th District) a "gutless fraud" and accused Pearson of "doing blackface" as Nashville officials were voting to reinstate him to his office on Wednesday afternoon.

Pearson and State Representative Justin Jones (D-52nd District) – both of whom are Black – were expelled from the chamber last week by Republicans because they protested the GOP's lack of action to prevent gun violence following the deadly mass shooting at the Covenant School in late March.

A third legislator, State Representative Gloria Johnson (D-90th District), who is white, was spared. Jones was reinstated on Tuesday.

READ MORE: 'Miscarriage of justice': Metro Nashville council reappoints Justin Jones

On Easter Sunday, Pearson delivered a Resurrection-themed sermon at the Church of the River in Memphis in which he blasted his right-wing colleagues for their unprecedented assault on the democratic process.

"The Republican-led supermajority of the Tennessee assembly sought to have a political lynching of three of its members because we spoke out of turn against the status quo of the government after the tragic deaths of six people at the Covenant school in Nashville," Pearson said. "The movement for democracy lives or dies in Memphis. The movement to end gun violence lives or dies in Memphis. We’ve seen those who want to kill the movement in the Republican-led supermajority."

Pearson compared Governor Bill Lee to Pontius Pilate, the biblical Roman official who condemned Jesus Christ to crucifixion.

"Because we walked to the well of the house out of turn, resolutions were unjustly and undemocratically filed against us on these trumped-up charges," Pearson stated. "Because we spoke out against the empire of the NRA of the gun lobbyists; because we demanded an end to gun violence, an end to the proliferation of weapons on our streets, an end to the funerals we attend day after day and week after week and month after month and year after year — because we did that, the Republican-led General Assembly with the support of folks even in this district like Mark White, from our own community, thought it better to get rid of our democratic representation in District 86 than to actually solve the problem."

READ MORE: Tennessee lawmaker: 'Partisan' GOP efforts to oust him were a 'gross miscalculation'

Pearson also penned a blistering CNN editorial on Wednesday in which he admonished Republicans for their "gross miscalculation" in having him removed.

"The spectacle was a gross miscalculation by Republicans in the chamber," Pearson argued. "It turns out that most Americans care deeply about democracy. Most people care about equality and progress. And over two-thirds of Americans — including four out of 10 Republicans — support the kind of common-sense gun safety laws that Rep. Jones, Rep. Johnson and I were protesting in favor of, in the wake of the senseless March 27 Covenant School massacre."

Pearson's powerful oratory triggered a vengeful reaction from Walsh, who launched a racist attack against Pearson:

You know, he doesn't, he, he doesn't really sound like a 1960s civil rights figure, which is what he is trying to sound like and look like. Uh, he sounds like he's doing a parody of one. You know, this is, this is the worst case of blackface that we've seen since Justin Trudeau, except that Pearson's actually Black and he's still doing blackface. Nevertheless, he, he is performing and we know he is performing because now we know what he sounded like before theperformance. It's not at all a convincing performance, of course, in fact, I didn't think I'd see a performance less convincing than Bill and Mulvaney's portrayal of womanhood until Pearson came along. Pearson's really given him a run for his money. This is what the left promotes and encourages – empty performance taken to comical, almost surreal extremes. You know, they give us heroes and leaders who are cartoons. Who are hollow and paper thin, who are, it always turns out conniving, cowards, gutless frauds, andself-aggrandizing performance artists.

Watch below or at this link.

READ MORE: Judges axe Tennessee GOP's halving of Nashville Metropolitan Council: report

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tx trmp judge kacz 4 23

5th conserv upheld a bit?

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an 4 23

Republican supermajority in the North Dakota State Senate recently approved a measure boosting their meal stipends just days after they rejected funding for providing free school meals to poor students, Heartland Signal reported on Tuesday.

GOP lawmakers "passed Senate Bill 2124, which raises the amount of money state senators and their staff can receive from meal reimbursements. Just days prior, the same body voted down House Bill 1491 23-24, a bill that would cover lunch for school children whose parents’ income falls 200% below the poverty line," according to the outlet.

Social media exploded with outrage and disgust.

Sonny J Lewis: "Zilch for the kids but up to $55/day if I'm reading the law right. They should be more than ashamed of themselves."

Linda Hillemann: "Who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch? Oh, and anyone who knows these people should remind them of Jesus’ story about the rich man and poor Lazarus. (Luke 16: 19-31) It doesn't end well for the rich guy. Or in this case, legislators who steal from children."

badger person: "Pick 50 of those students at random and they'd do a better job running the state."

Elon Sucks: "The cruelty is the point."

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https://www.alternet.org/gop-voters-2659695517/

an 3 23

no lnx

author Jeff Sharlet has spent years interviewing conservatives and found many unassuming Americans are ready and eager for violence against their political enemies.

Sharlet's latest book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, is the result of more than a dozen years of reporting on the religious right, compiling numerous interviews conducted throughout the Midwest and Great Plains, and he's more worried than ever about the possibility of civil war, reported The Guardian.

"I’ve been writing about the right for a long time," he told the newspaper. "I’m always interested in the margins of things that tell us about what’s happening at the center. An undertow is a metaphor for that, for the force that’s been pulling us to this place for a long time. If you’d asked me 10 years ago if I ever thought another civil war would be possible in the United States, I would have said no. But to think so [now] is to not understand that the right in America is as dangerous as it is."

He cited a "nice-looking" family he met near Eau Claire, Wisconsin, who seemed like "ordinary" conservatives, as the newspaper described them, but harbored bloodthirsty fantasies rooted in extreme conservative politics.

"[The father said] he had a 'Let’s go Brandon' sticker because he didn’t want to swear around his son," Sharlet said. "They’re a middle-class dad and mom. They were always gun people, but not a lot of guns. Now they’re up to 36, now they are arming up. The father had always been anti-abortion. But now it was like a dream had moved into his and his wife’s mind. He described, in incredibly violent detail, the process of abortion. Then he described, in incredibly violent detail, the punishment he thought he and others were going to give to abortion doctors. They were ready for executions."

The current political moment was rooted in a decades-old struggle against fascism, and Sharlet said Donald Trump, intentionally or instinctively, used its "dream logic" to spellbind his followers, who fill in the unfinished thoughts in his pronouncements with their own beliefs -- and that creates the illusion that he's speaking their truth into existence.

"The free association that happens at Trump’s rallies, the ways people make connections that make no sense – it has dream logic," Sharlet said. "One minute, a scary man is crawling into the window to rape your wife, and then the next minute we’re laughing at windmills, and then the next minute we’re sad for the birds that were killed by windmills. And then, in the next minute, we’re yelling, 'Lock her up.'"

"This is dream logic, and there’s vanity in it, right?" Sharlet added. “'I will interpret what they’re saying and I will bend it.'It’s the vanity of the base, the vanity of the mob, the aggregate grotesque imagination of power. It becomes a spinning whirlpool that pulls more and more people in. These are people for whom reality is not enough."

:{:{}:

The illusion that's created for Trump and his followers feels interactive and very real to them, Sharlet said, and that's where the twice-impeached former president gains his power.

"This is why the right feels they are more democratic than the left," he said. "The intellectual rightwingers are like, 'F*ck democracy, we don’t need it.' But the everyday people, they’re like, 'This is the most democratic I’ve ever felt. I am not only receiving – I receive, I interpret and then I transmit back.'"}:

:{:{Sharlet sees a similar dynamic at work within the anti-abortion movement, which the left sees as an effort to control women's bodies, but the right sees as a cause so righteous that violence is necessary.}:

"Yes, the project is misogynist to the core," he said. "But it is not experienced as such by many on the right. Once you make that move, that we’re talking about children, what kind of person are you if you don’t want to save that child?"}:

"It’s astonishing there hasn’t been more violence," Sharlet added. "I think we’ve had a shield from that violence for a long time and now that shield … I sound like Jerry Falwell saying the hand of God is being removed from America."

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an 3 23 new rep

During former President Donald Trump's four years in the White House, most Republicans didn't have a lot to say about the United States' federal deficit. But after President Joe Biden was inaugurated in January 2021, liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman predicted that the GOP would magically rediscover fiscal conservatism. Sure enough, many Republicans have attacked Biden as a tax-and-spend Democrat, overlooking the effect that the GOP-sponsoredTax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 — a major tax cut for the wealthy and large corporations — had on the federal deficit.

Critics of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act have argued that while it dramatically reduced corporate taxes and made the rich richer, it didn't help the middle class — and that in some states, it became, in effect, a tax hike for the middle class by taking away various deductions that middle class taxpayers had been relying on.

One of Biden's Republican critics has been Grover Norquist, the 66-year-old founder of Americans for Tax Reform. Journalist Michael Tomasky examines Norquist's influence on GOP tax policy in an article published by The New Republic on March 13, emphasizing that he has been a key contributor to higher federal deficits in the U.S.

"Grover Norquist has been running Americans for Tax Reform since the Reagan era," Tomasky explains. "It was back then, in 1986, that he came up with what I must confess has been an effective — if ruinous — idea: the Taxpayer Protection Pledge that his organization asks political candidates to sign…. Norquist's pledge has done more to destroy policymaking and derail the normal horse-trading of the legislative process than any other single development of the era."

Tomasky notes that since 1990, Republicans in Congress "have not voted for a single tax increase." But the journalist stresses that Republicans in state legislatures are less likely to sign Norquist's Taxpayer Protection Pledge because they "live in the real world."

"It’s only in the fantasyland of Washington that Republicans can be so insanely irresponsible," Tomasky argues. "And make no mistake: It is the Republicans who are fiscally irresponsible. Consider these deficit numbers. Jimmy Carter left office with a deficit of $74 billion, which made conservatives apoplectic. Reagan doubled it. (President George) Bush, Sr. nearly doubled it again. (President Bill) Clinton wiped it all away and left the country with a $236 billion surplus."

Tomasky continues, "(President George W.) Bush, Jr. wiped out the surplus and tacked on $460 billion in deficits — that is, adding those two figures, he finished nearly $700 billion in the red. (President Barack) Obama increased the deficit by about $125 billion after inheriting the biggest financial crisis in 80 years, helped along, again, by Republican-led deregulation. Trump increased the deficit by — wanna guess? Try $2.6 trillion. In sum, in the last half-century, Democratic presidents have actually reduced the deficit, because of the numbers under Clinton, while Republican presidents have increased it by something greater than $3.5 trillion. It’s not even close as to which party is more fiscally sound."

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ass kicked by biden sotu

https://www.alternet.org:(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}::{/rick-scott-plan/

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an 2 23

adl violence is gop white supreme

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https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/republicans-dont-care-human-health/

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yikes see state GOP: how much xian nat'l wacko? see earth2 polarization; mtg nat'l divorce

an kos 2 23

In today’s Republican Party it is no longer enough to deny that Donald Trump lost in 2020. The true Republican diehards demand that their leaders deny that Republicans ever lose any election.

That played out at the Michigan GOP convention over the weekend, with Trump’s pick for state party chair being defeated by a candidate who is even more extreme an election denier. It took three rounds of voting—counted by hand because Republicans have also made it an article of faith not to accept voting technology, even at their own convention—but Kristina Karamo prevailed over second-place finisher and Trump endorsee Matt DePerno.

Karamo ran for secretary of state in 2022, losing by 14 points. DePerno ran for attorney general, losing by 8.6 points. But DePerno conceded that he had lost, while Karamo refused to concede. At the state party convention, she made that part of her campaign message, saying, “Conceding to a fraudulent person is agreeing with the fraud, which I will not do.”

When it comes to 2020, DePerno has been an election denier in good standing, having made his name as a Republican and earned Trump’s endorsement on the basis of his quest to prove fraud in that election. He’s even faced a criminal investigation for tampering with voting machines in 2021. That is the kind of stuff that gets you Donald Trump’s endorsement to lead a state Republican Party. But apparently it is not enough for Michigan Republicans. “Matt ran out on us; he didn’t fight for us,” one delegate told The Washington Post.

Election denial isn’t Karamo’s only angle, though. At the convention, she said, “My goal number one as a Christian is to bring people to Christ, and secondarily to save our country.” A few nights earlier, in a speech to a far-right “patriot” group, she went into a little more detail.

“When we start talking about the spiritual reality of the demonic forces, it’s like, ‘Oh, my God, this is crazy, we can’t go there,’” Karamo said. “No. It’s like, did you read the Bible? Didn’t Jesus perform exorcisms? … Scriptures are clear. And so if we’re not operating as though the spirit realities of the world exist, we’re going to fail every time.”

The convention that elected Karamo to lead thestate party was attended by 2,000 delegates—but not one of the outgoing party co-chairs or any member of the state congressional delegation. But Karamo claimed the party would move forward unified. “We cannot wait to get work done as one Michigan Republican Party,” she said. “And we are going to beat the Democrats.”

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President Joe Biden has yet to say whether or not he plans to seek reelection in 2024. But during his 2023 State of the Union address on Tuesday night, February 7, Biden focused heavily on his economic record, bragging that unemployment in the United States is lower than it has been in more than half a century and calling out Republicans who want to "sunset" Social Security and Medicare.

Biden’s speech was followed by a GOP rebuttal from Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was the Trump Administration’s second of four White House press secretaries (Sanders came after Sean Spicer and before Stephanie Grisham). While the economy dominated Biden’s speech, Sanders’ rebuttal was clearly aimed at MAGA culture warriors. And liberal economist Paul Krugman, in his February 9 column for the New York Times, argues that the dramatic contrast between Democrat Biden’s speech and Republican Sanders’ response speaks volumes about the priorities of the United States’ two main political parties.

"President Biden was evidently feeling feisty on Tuesday," Krugman writes. "In particular, he kept baiting Republicans with the suggestion that a number of them are threatening Medicare and Social Security — which they are. Delivering the Republican response, Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed that the United States is divided between two parties, one of which is mainly focused on bread-and-butter issues that matter to regular people, while the other is obsessed with waging culture war. This is also true. But she got her parties mixed up — Republicans, not Democrats, are the culture warriors who’ve lost touch with ordinary Americans' concerns."

Sanders’ speech, according to **Krugman, was quite "revealing" — and not in a way that made the Republican Party look good.

"Sanders’ speech was a diatribe against wokeness," the New York Times columnist observes. “This is standard GOP fare these days and exactly what you’d expect in, say, an address at the Conservative Political Action Conference. But this wasn’t a CPAC speech; it was meant to address the nation as a whole and rebut the president of the United States…. Focus groups suggest that most people don’t know what 'wokeness' means, or why they should fear it.”

Krugman continues, "But wait, it gets worse. Sanders seemed to say — although her syntax was a bit garbled — that woke policy was responsible for 'high gas prices' and 'empty grocery shelves.' So, first of all, how does that work? How did critical race theory cause a global spike in crude oil prices, which raised prices at the pump all around the world? How did it snarl supply chains and cause a worldwide shortage of shipping containers?"

Comparing Biden and Sanders’ February 7 speeches, Krugman stresses, one saw a contrast between a Democratic president who got into concrete specifics on the U.S. economy and a Republican who didn’t.

"Just to be clear, there are culture warriors on the left, and some of them can be annoying even to social liberals," Krugman notes. "But few have significant power, and they certainly don’t rule the Democratic Party, which isn’t locked into a closed mental universe, impervious to inconvenient facts, whose denizens communicate in buzzwords nobody else recognizes. Republicans, however, do live in such a universe — and what Sarah Huckabee Sanders showed us was that they can’t step outside that universe even when they should have strong political incentives to sound like normal people and pretend to care about regular Americans’ concerns."

Read Paul Krugman’s full New York Times column at this link (subscription required)

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OMG

cdv an 2 23

... But DeSantis never really wanted to stop the virtually nonexistent crime of voter impersonation or fraud. His goal, and that of the GOP nationally, has been to strike fear into the hearts of potential non-Republican voters to ensure election victories for his party.

In states like Alabama, Mississippi, and 20 others where the GOP controls both chambers of the state legislature and the governor’s mansion, intimidating voter-tracking police squads could be the next play in an ongoing effort to undemocratically control elections. Such policing efforts would without question disproportionately target communities of color.

While the expected midterm “red wave” of Republican victories didn’t occur nationally in 2022, the same can’t be said for the South. As documented by the Institute for Southern Studies’ Facing South,the GOP actually outperformed expectations, expanding its hold on multiple state legislatures in the region. Prior to the election, analysts had predicted that the Republicans might gain 40 seats across the South; in fact, they gained at least 55. Not only did they take control of at least 25 state legislative chambers — the lone exception, Virginia’s state senate where Democrats retained a two-seat majority — but they also built or maintained supermajorities in legislative chambers in Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, and West Virginia. This means that even if a Democratic governor is in office, Republican legislators can pass extremist bills into law despite a gubernatorial veto.

None of this is spontaneous, nor is it random. Tens of millions of dollars or more from super-rich conservative donors and right-wing foundations have poured into voter-suppression and election-manipulation efforts. Heritage Action for America, a conservative legislative-writing group linked to the Heritage Foundation, spent upwards of $24 million in 2021 and 2022 in key swing states to help Republicans write bills that would restrict voting, targeting Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, and Texas. Consider it anything but a coincidence that the language in voter-suppression bills in those states and elsewhere sounded eerily familiar. As the Guardian reported, at least 11 voter suppression bills in at least eight states were due, in part or whole, to advocacy and organizing by Heritage Action. A *New York Times* investigation found thatin Georgia, “Of the 68 bills pertaining to voting, at least 23 had similar language or were firmly rooted in the principles laid out in the Heritage group’s letter” that offered outlines and details for how to limit voting access.

Contemporary voter suppression efforts, however, go significantly beyond just trying to prevent people from voting or making it harder for them to do so. Credit that, at least in part, to the determination of so many Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans to vote despite restrictions imposed by the states. Consequently, Republican legislators now seek to control — that is, manipulate — election administration, too.Their tactics include the harassment of election workers, far-right activists seeking positions as election officials, and various other potentially far-reaching legal maneuvers.

In fact, in recent voting, attacks on election workers, officials, and volunteers have become so prevalent that a new national organization, the Election Officials Legal Defense Network (EOLDN), was formed to protect them. EOLDN provides attorneys and other kinds of assistance to such officials when they find themselves under attack....

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Although Democrats generally performed much better than expected in the 2022 midterms, many civil libertarians and Democratic strategists have been warning that Republicans in state legislatures haven’t given up on voter suppression. Laws designed to intimidate voters, they warn, haven’t gone away.

Journalist Kira Lerner, in an article published by The Guardian GUK on January 17, takes a look at some of the voter suppression activities coming from Republicans at the state level in 2023.

“Republican lawmakers across the country have already filed dozens of bills that would restrict voting, including proposals in Texas that would increase criminal penalties on people who violate voting laws and enact a new law enforcement unit to prosecute election crimes,” Lerner reports. “The 2023 legislative session comes in the wake of an election that was described by many voting rights advocates as a triumph of democracy, despite the restrictive voting laws that were in place in 20 states for the first time last year.”

Lerner continues, “Before this session, at least 26 states enacted, expanded or increased the severity of 120 election-related criminal penalties. This year, Republican-controlled legislatures plan to continue pressing for laws that they say would help prevent widespread voter fraud, a problem that voting advocates say does not exist but nonetheless continues to be alleged by Donald Trump and his allies. Several pre-filed bills would further criminalize voters and election officials, a trend that has been occurring across the U.S. in the past few years.”

Liz Avore, a senior adviser for the Voting Rights Lab, believes that many of the voting bills coming from Republicans in state legislatures are heavy-handed.

Avore told The Guardian, “We started seeing states introducing and moving and passing legislation that creates new criminal penalties or expands existing penalties for election-related crimes, in particular against election officials. A lot of these bills would criminalize good-faith errors by election officials. In other cases, they criminalize conduct that was previously legal or otherwise encouraged.”

Lerner notes that in Texas, “at least five pre-filed bills” would “raise the penalty for illegal voting from a Class A misdemeanor to a second-degree felony, punishable by up to two years in prison.”

“Under pre-filed bills in both chambers,” Lerner reports, “Texas would also launch an election police force similar to the one created by Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, which has so far come up short of producing convictions or any evidence of widespread voting offenses. Texas’ law enforcement unit, led by state ‘election marshals,’ would be dedicated to prosecuting election and voting crimes…. Other bills in Texas would expand the attorney general’s authority to prosecute election crimes. One bill would allow the attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor for criminal voting cases, and another would allow the attorney general to issue civil penalties to local prosecutors who do not investigate voting crimes.”