#gopinbedwiththerich — Public Fediverse posts

These are typical, sleazy, disingenuous attacks by Republicans and people on the right who know they can't survive politically without lying early and often! This isn't about democracy or the health of our country, this is only about the power they and their donors want and their attempts to destroy our democracy and undermine it with lies to get their way! They have no integrity and they aren't interested in being public servants. They are addicted to money and power and are psychologically and emotionally sick and deranged! Yet the people they manipulate are oblivious to the ring they have put in their noses!

Jim Jordan spearheads 'cynical' and 'wildly partisan' GOP effort to chill anti-disinformation research - Alternet.org https://www.alternet.org/jim-jordan-2661568445/

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPLies
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPTreason

"A combination of universities and think tanks have been sounding the alarm about disinformation, warning that outright lies could influence the outcome of elections in the United States. But some Republicans, according to the New York Times, are not happy about their work — including House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (D-Ohio) and former Donald Trump aide Stephen Miller.

In an article published by the New York Times on June 19, journalists Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel report that Jordan and others GOP lawmakers are claiming that the anti-disinformation efforts are designed to suppress conservative speech online.

"The House Judiciary Committee, which in January came under Republican majority control, has sent scores of letters and subpoenas to the researchers — only some of which have been made public," Myers and Frenkel explain. "It has threatened legal action against those who have not responded quickly or fully enough…. Targets include Stanford, Clemson and New York Universities and the University of Washington; the Atlantic Council, the German Marshall Fund and the National Conference on Citizenship, all nonpartisan, nongovernmental organizations in Washington; the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco; and Graphika, a company that researches disinformation online."

In Louisiana, Miller, who heads the MAGA group America First Legal, has filed a class-action lawsuit against anti-disinformation researchers — making, Myers and Frenkel report, similar claims to Jordan on the House Intelligence Committee. The Trump ally has described his lawsuit as "striking at the heart of the censorship-industrial complex," but Miller's critics believe he is the one trying to silence those he disagrees with.

Jeff Hancock, founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, views the GOP attacks on anti-disinformation researchers as disingenuous and misleading.

Hanocck told The Times, "We see it in the media, in the congressional committees and in lawsuits, and it is the same core argument, with a false premise about the government giving some type of direction to the research we do…. We have not only academic freedom as researchers to conduct this research, but freedom of speech to tell Twitter or any other company to look at tweets we might think violate rules."

Jameel Jaffer, who serves was executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at New York City's Columbia University, is critical of the Republican lawmakers as well.

Jaffer told the Times, "I think it's quite obviously a cynical — and I would say wildly partisan — attempt to chill research.""

These supporters have been grifted and lied to by Republicans and their media for decades. They were never the brightest bulbs in the first place! These are the types of voters the GOP has been cultivating with their anti-science and anti-education policies, messaging and their sabotaging of public education through underfunding and voucher programs. A dumb electorate is easier to lie to and snowjob and that's what the GOP and their obscenely wealthy donors want!

'He didn’t mean to': Trump fans tie themselves in knots to explain he didn’t break the law - Alternet.org https://www.alternet.org/trump-fans-didnt-break-law/

#GOPHatesEducation
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#TheyWantTheirSerfsBack
#GOPIsThePartyOfGreed
#GreedKillsDemocracy
#GOPInBedWithTheRich

"Supporters that came out for Donald Trump as he was arraigned in Miami, Florida on Tuesday were interviewed by the comedy group "The Good Liars." They had a lot of questions about the basic facts of the case that many MAGA loyalists didn't know.

One of the videos shows a Trump supporter claiming that the former president declassified everything. When told that Trump was on audio saying he didn't, the supporter refused to believe it.

A loyal Trump supporter told the "Good Liars" that he doesn't believe for a second Trump meant to steal the documents and that he probably didn't know the laws. He didn't explain why Trump refused to give the documents back.

Another video with Davram Stiefler showed a Trump supporter asking about the "Lock her up" chants and a man said Hillary Clinton was never investigated. He was told that the FBI announced the investigation 11 days before the election, and they had no idea.

What became clear to Jason Selvig is that none of the people were getting their news from actual news sources, and they were parroting the messages that Donald Trump has given. Instead of excuses, Trump has deployed the "what about" questions about Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.

At one point, a woman told Stiefler that Fox News never had to pay any money for lying to their viewers. He kept trying to tell her that Fox admitted to lying to them, and they paid a ton of money because of it. She refused to believe it.

Another woman refused to believe that Donald Trump would keep boxes of documents in his bathroom. She claimed that the bathroom with two chandeliers looked "like Joe Biden's bathroom." She maintained that Trump would never be so "messy." Selvig explained to her that the photos were in the indictment. They were in the court documents.

The Good Liars are known for going to many events. "The Daily Show's" Jordan Klepper was also known for doing the same kind of interviews, but due to the writer's strike, the show has been off the air."

The GOP leaders and elected representatives plot daily to undermine our democracy and turn the country into an authoritarian oligarchy/theocracy. They violate their oaths of office and are antisocial, greedy, power-hungry sociopaths! And, their supporters/base are all on board with this it seems. They are fine with voter suppression, insurrection, discrimination and violence against minorities, gaming the judiciary and installing a gun-worshipping theocracy as long as it maintains their privileges and prejudices. Sad and discouraging but at least they are a minority and we know what we are up against.

The GOP is an anti-America party - Republicans hate America and don’t care about national security -- Salon
https://read.letterhead.email/standing-room-only/letter/16388?

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPHatesTheConstitution

"Republicans hate America and don’t care about national security

In the least surprising results ever, a new poll from CBS shows only 12% of Republican voters think it’s a crime now to steal nuclear secrets and put them in a ballroom for Russian and Chinese spies to thumb through. Trump was right that they’d forgive him if he committed murder. After all, he sent a mob to murder Mike Pence, and they don’t have a problem with that.

This news is still causing centrist pundits to reel, because they believed the lie that Republicans are a “national security” party. If they ever were — a big if! — that time has long passed. This isn’t just about loyalty to Trump. The GOP has become an anti-American party, so of course they don’t really care if foreign adversaries gain knowledge they could use to undermine or even destroy us.

Harsh, I know, but consider this: Trump attempted a coup to overthrow our democracy. His reward has been that he’s fast-tracked to the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. His fellow Republican politicians talk about him like he’s their god. This isn’t because they’re unaware that he’s a fascist. It’s because they agree with him and think he’s still got the best shot at accomplishing the goal of ending the American experiment.

That’s why Republicans don’t care if truly evil actors like Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping get some kind of leverage against the U.S. Tearing the U.S. down and replacing it with a fascist government is also the goal of GOP primary voters. In that sense, foreign adversaries are their allies. For the fans of Tucker “I Heart Putin” Carlson, having some outside help as they rip this country apart is a good thing. So of course they shrug at Trump violating the Espionage Act. "

Lacking the mandate through our election process to achieve the policies that the GOP wants, they've decided, again, to hold our economy hostage using the debt ceiling, a dated relic that no longer serves any useful purpose. Again, they couldn't achieve these policies with the votes and power that our democracy accords political parties, so instead the GOP uses this relic to hold our economy hostage to the demands that their donors have placed upon them. This is not the way democracy works! This is yet another example of a party that doesn't care about democracy using any trick it can, to get its way, when democracy did not give it the mandate to do so legitimately.

GOP Hostage-Taking on Debt Ceiling Must Be Stopped to Avoid Economic Calamity https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/debt-ceiling-economic-calamity-gop

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#DebtLimit
#DebtLimitHostageTaking

"(If) nothing is done except the federal government fails to fulfill its spending obligations, economic calamity will ensue: People who depend on programs like Social Security and food stamps will suffer, and the spillover effects on the larger economy would certainly cause a recession—and a truly horrible one if the stalemate lasted for any significant amount of time.

The factor forcing this terrible outcome would not be any implacable economic reality, it would simply be Congressional Republicans weaponizing the absurd political institution that is a statutory debt limit that can only be adjusted through acts of Congress. With a responsible Congress, the debt limit would be a silly inconvenience to policymaking. But twice in the past 12 years, Republican-led efforts in Congress have brought the nation to a near-crisis—and the current near-crisis could still graduate into a real crisis in coming weeks.
...
In 2011 (the last instance of protracted debt limit brinkmanship), the GOP demands for large spending cuts did mammoth damage to the living standards of U.S. families by sabotaging the economic recovery from the Great Recession and financial crisis of 2008–09. This time around, the GOP demands are not just for recovery-damaging spending cuts, but also for a complete do-over on already passed legislation; Speaker McCarthy’s recently released list of demands includes rolling back student debt relief as well as the Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) climate provisions and enhanced enforcement against the nation’s rich tax cheats.

The cuts to IRA climate provisions would be literally catastrophic—the act’s climate provisions are the only thing keeping the U.S. economy on a path of needed emissions reductions to contain the worst damages of climate change. Further, hundreds of billions of dollars of planned private investment have already begun based on the incentives provided in the IRA. Stripping these climate provisions away would snap the economy back to a path toward climate catastrophe and be a huge waste of society’s resources.

All of this clearly calls for abolishing the debt limit to keep irresponsible Congressional majorities from holding the nation’s economy hostage to its policy preferences in the future. But what makes today’s debt limit showdown so bad is how normalized it has become—often with the encouragement of too many in D.C. policymaking circles who should know better. Many institutions and people who had argued forcefully in the past that the debt limit should not be wielded to force policy concessions—from business lobbies to former Treasury Secretaries to bipartisan think tanks—have instead this time blessed the absurdly shallow “deal” put forward by Speaker McCarthy. If this drive to normalize debt limit brinkmanship does not spark an economic meltdown this time, we all know where it leads next time.

This makes it imperative that the Biden administration does whatever it takes to keep the debt limit from binding our nation’s continued prosperity (yes, the nod to Mario Draghi is intentional). Their negotiations with Speaker McCarthy cannot include spending cuts or special legislative processes that make it easier to enact cuts going forward (no supercommittees).
...
If the Speaker doesn’t agree to that deal, then the administration should use the range of accounting and legalworkarounds available to them to keep the debt limit from binding. These are all suboptimal relative to debt ceiling abolition in the short run, but in the long run they will end up implicitly codified (unless the Supreme Court wants to take responsibility for forcing an unnecessary economic crisis) and will take the prospect of a debt limit crisis off the table of future presidents and Congresses. This would be a huge gift to the future."

First of all, people who invested enough time and energy into merely acquiring obscene amounts of money, are imbalanced, warped and dysfunctional in some way. Then you see these same emotionally warped people certain that the world would be better if they were in charge and committed to making even more money by gaming control of our political system, and the extent of the problems they are causing for all of us begins to come into focus.

Time to clamp down on all donations/legalized bribery and reduce the excess money they have lying around that they feel they can use to by our system by taxing the hell out of them and their estates!

Clarence Thomas' Citizens United vote enabled billionaire benefactor to boost political power
"The Crows used their fortune to buy access to and curry favor" with elites, one advocate said
https://www.salon.com/2023/05/03/clarence-thomas-citizens-united-vote-enabled-billionaire-benefactor-to-boost-political-power_partner/

#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#TheRichBoughtTheGOP
#CampaignFinanceReform
#TheGOPIsTheBitchOfTheRich
#PartisanCaptureOfJudiciary

"A report published Monday highlights potential connections between the political influence of Harlan Crow's family and the billionaire GOP megadonor's yearslong endeavor to shower U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas with lavish vacations and other undisclosed gifts.
...
In "Travel Rewards: What the Crow Family May Have Bought by Hosting Those Luxury Trips for Justice Thomas," ATF shows how Thomas' vote in the 5-4 decision that effectively legalized unlimited political spending has allowed the Crows to increase their average annual campaign contributions by 862%, from $163,241 pre-Citizens United to $1.57 million post-ruling.
...
"The Crows used their fortune to buy access to and curry favor with one of the most powerful officials in Washington, then benefited from his central role in loosening rules meant to limit the influence of money over politics and policy," said ATF executive director David Kass.

"It's a vicious cycle that can only be short-circuited by restoring meaningful campaign finance rules and by demanding a much fairer share of taxes from billionaires, which, among other good results, will leave them less money to distort our democratic process," Kass added.

"The Crows' influence-buying and political spending are emblematic of a larger problem: the ongoing attempt by billionaires to purchase our democracy."
...
In a report published last summer, the group documented how "billionaires are increasingly using their personal fortunes and the profits of connected corporations to drown out regular voters' voices and elect hand-picked candidates who further rig the nation's economy—especially the tax system."

Not counting dark money contributions, billionaires dumped $1.2 billion into the 2020 elections, 65 times more than the $16 million they donated in 2008, the report found. By last June, a few dozen billionaires had already pumped tens of millions of dollars into the 2022 midterms—mostly to support Republican candidates, including several election deniers—in a bid to ensure that Congress is full of lawmakers willing "to make their wealthy benefactors even richer."

"Billionaires shouldn't be able to buy political access and influence with their enormous fortunes," ATF tweeted Monday. "It's well beyond time for Citizens United to go, and to put real action towards making billionaires pay their fair share in taxes. Our democracy depends on it."
...
For instance, four years after Thomas helped deliver a victory to U.S. oligarchs in Citizens United, Crow purchased a property owned by Thomas for $130,000 and made improvements to it while the judge's mother continued to live there.

Thomas is not alone when it comes to conflicts of interest on the high court. Last week, Politico revealed that just days after his April 2017 confirmation, Justice Neil Gorsuch and his business partners sold a 40-acre Colorado ranch for almost $2 million to an undisclosed person. The buyer, Brian Duffy, is the CEO of a law firm that has since been involved in 22 cases before the court.

Despite growing evidence of possible corruption, Chief Justice John Roberts has refused to accept an invitation to testify at an upcoming Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on potential reforms to the Supreme Court, which is currently controlled by six far-right justices, most of whom were appointed by Republican presidents who lost the popular vote.

Progressives have demanded far-reaching changes to disempower the country's "rogue" justices, including adding seats—a move that has been made seven times throughout U.S. history—and enacting robust ethics rules."

I certainly don't agree with all the things that Biden has done, but by and large, he really has done a very good job and compared to the Republicans and neoliberals who preceded him, he has done a great job! He can do better, but given the failed, fascist, in-bed-with-the-rich and fear mongering of the GOP, he would be a very good president to have for 4 more years.

How Bidenomics Has Finally Defeated Reaganomics
Two years into his presidency, Joe Biden has revolutionized America’s economic policy—both home and abroad.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-bidenomics-has-finally-defeated-reaganomics

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPInBedWithTheRich

"The last thing many of us expected when Joe Biden became president was that he would be a revolutionary. But just over two years into Biden’s presidency, there is no doubt that he has done more to dramatically transform U.S. policy and thinking in more areas than any of his predecessors since Franklin Roosevelt.

America had failed to adequately invest in its infrastructure for over six decades when Biden made it a priority once again. Biden’s prioritized investment in combating climate change to a degree that no past administration ever did. On foreign policy, he executed the pivot away from a Middle East and terrorism focus to a long-term commitment to placing the Indo-Pacific region and our rivalry with China atop our list of priorities.

Remarkably, he did this while simultaneously handling the threats associated with Europe’s largest land war since World War II and reinvigorating America’s most important alliance, NATO, in a way few thought possible just years ago.
...
From day one, Biden has profoundly transformed U.S. economic policy—and related social and international policies. Biden is the man who finally slew Reaganomics and the huckster’s brew of “trickle-down” and “the markets know best” policies at its core. He is the one who at last put an end to the “Washington consensus” that has served the rich worldwide and left the poor to struggle with too little support. He, at last, ended the slavish deference of Washington neoliberals to Wall Street, and the consequent grotesque growth in inequality and injustice it has fueled.
...
He has systematically taken steps to prioritize economic approaches that benefited America’s middle class and those who were left behind, approaches that sought fairness in our tax codes and their enforcement, approaches that strengthened the U.S. from within in an effort to better compete and succeed internationally.

Some of the steps he has taken were major but received too little attention, such as the effort (led by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen) to create a minimum tax to be paid by corporations worldwide. Some of the bold changes were revealed in policy choices that made headlines—like his decision to place the concerns of the people working in the real economy ahead of the preferences of Wall Street in his American Rescue Plan, his initiative to invest in our infrastructure in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, and his steps to invest in our green economy and combat rising costs for average Americans in the Inflation Reduction Act.
...
In just one illustration of this, Carlos Roa wrote in The National Interest that the National Security Adviser’s “remarks mark a profound shift in American strategic and economic thinking; a confession that much of what the United States has been doing and saying for decades has been wrong, and a recognition that painful and urgent reform is necessary.”

Some old school economists who have been peddling the failed or damaging policies the administration has sought to undo decried the fact that the new approaches represented too much meddling with markets by government officials.

But of course, that is just the point. Biden, Sullivan, Yellen, and their team have finally acknowledged that growth for its own sake—or good performance by markets—are not the only metrics we should have as we make economic policy decisions.

Markets don’t have consciences, neither do they take into consideration the security interests of nations. Companies are by law required to place their bottom line interests ahead of the interests of the rest of society. Therefore, government has an obligation to step in and take steps to ensure that critical social goods are advanced.

Finally, after many decades of deferring to the financial and corporate interests who also happen to be big political donors, a president and his team have come along to say, “enough.” It is time to make economic decisions that serve all the people and address the damage done by the policies of the past."

The GOP doesn't care about gay marriage or trans people, they care about riding their vilification into power so they can entrench themselves and their rich people-first policies. They are, the lowest of the low!

Republicans deny they want to erase trans people — Montana silencing Zooey Zephyr proves otherwise
https://www.salon.com/2023/04/28/montana-proves-wants-to-silence-trans-people/

#GOPLovesPower
#GOPFascism
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#NothingChristianAboutTheGOP

"...They do care very much about doing whatever they can to silence, erase, and yes, eradicate trans people. As Zephyr told NBC News, she is not being "hyperbolic" when she says Republicans are killing people with anti-trans bills. Studies show anywhere from 40-56% of trans and non-binary young people have attempted suicide, with higher rates in red states.
...
Republicans have been shown these statistics again and again, but they keep banning this life-saving care anyway. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Republicans would rather have young people be dead than trans. Sounds harsh, but this is the same party that's more avid about banning books than banning guns, as well. And the same party that is passing draconian abortion bans, even as the evidence piles up that it's maiming and will likely start killing women to do so. Republicans simply don't care who their policies kill, so long as they get to control who you are, how you use your body, and even what you're allowed to think about.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Republicans would rather have young people be dead than trans.

With Gianforte, the cruelty is incredibly personal. His own son, David Gianforte, identifies as non-binary and has publicly pleaded with his father to veto this anti-trans bill, writing that "these bills are immoral, unjust, and frankly a violation of human rights." Yet Gov. Gianforte has publicly demurred when asked if his own child's concerns bother him enough to reconsider signing a bill he has been eagerly supporting so far. I wouldn't hold your breath, however, waiting for Greg "Body Slam" Gianforte to start showing signs of humanity.

Meanwhile, outside of Montana, the genocidal impulse towards LGBTQ people continues to animate the Republican Party.

In Florida, Republicans dramatically expanded the "don't say gay" bill to high school students, in an overt effort to force teenagers back into the closet. They also passed provisions to criminalize gender-affirming care for minors, threatening parents and medical providers with prison if they want to save the lives of trans youth. To make the situation uglier, Florida Republicans have also passed a bill that would make it legal for the state to remove trans children from the homes of parents who support their gender identity.

The United Nations classifies the abduction of children to "re-educate" them as a "grave violation." ...Taking someone's child to brainwash them to hate themselves and/or their family is taken that seriously as a human rights violation, for good reason. Not that Republicans care how much psychological damage they would do to children by going this route. Causing pain to those who they see as "different" is the entire point.

Zephyr, for her part, remains defiant. During her speech before she was officially banned from the floor, she said she refuses "to be complicit in this legislature's eradication of our community."

Republicans simply don't care who their policies kill, so long as they get to control who you are, how you use your body, and even what you're allowed to think about.

Rex Huppke of USA Today argued there is "some good to be found in seeing what the smallness of Republicans in the Montana Legislature did to Zooey Zephyr. By trying to silence her, they made sure she was heard."...Just by being visible, Zephyr is doing the necessary, if basic, work of showing people that may not know much about trans people that she is not a scary figure at all. She's just a woman trying to do her job and live her life. She's not a threat to kids, but she is trying to protect them.

That visibility terrifies Republicans. It's why they threw a national tantrum over Budweiser sending some beers to trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney. They see Mulvaney, who has 1.8 million Instagram followers, as a threat simply because she's cute and charming. She reveals the truth they want so badly to hide, which is trans people are fine the way they are and should be allowed to be themselves. Not erased from existence, as Republicans clearly intend with their anti-trans legislation. "

All the GOP wants is power!! They really don't care at all about democracy! They lie, cheat and steal to have power and this woman has been behind this dogged determination to disenfranchise voters and entrench the GOP in power for decades. Why? Could be Christian nationalism, could be fear of liberalism and progress, could be racism, could be she hungers for power and the rewards the obscenely wealthy lavish on her to enact their agenda. She is a traitor to our democracy and she has lots of company there!

"EXCLUSIVE AUDIO: Trump coup attorney Cleta Mitchell wants to "combat" voting on college campuses, citing North Carolina and Wisconsin, and says that when Republicans win the state Senate in Virginia, they can eliminate 45 days of early voting and same day voter registration."

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#ChristianNationalism
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPInBedWithTheRich

Here's a link to the audio:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1649075730687352833

The mainstreaming of the Republican effort to suppress the vote. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/04/republican-effort-to-suppress-the-vote.html

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPFascism
#GOPTreason

"It’s bad enough when a trio of voter suppression groups led by charlatans gets together at an annual secret conference that is sponsored, in part, by a group created by the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo to talk about all the ways they might make it harder for people to register or vote in future elections. But it is much worse when the participants in that secret conference also include secretaries of state and other top election officials from 13 Republican-led states, plus Don Palmer, a member of the United States Election Assistance Commission, plus counsels to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the House Administration Committee’s Republican staff, and a sitting Texas state senator. The entire conference—whose existence was revealed in a blockbuster report by the Guardian and Documented last week—shows that there is a thriving network of interlocking organizations working with elected and election officials to use unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud to try to mess with fair elections for partisan advantage.
...
Dark money donors capture the courts and the levers of government to make actual vote tallies irrelevant to who holds power. This story didn’t start in Tennessee or the Amarillo district court. For nearly two decades, we have been chronicling the actions of members of the Fraudulent Fraud Squad who have been active in perpetuating claims of voter fraud to make it harder for people to vote.
...
former President Donald Trump’s aborted Voter Fraud Commission. Documents from that commission later revealed a purposeful effort to generate enough smoke around nonexistent election shenanigans to cajole Congress into allowing states to require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. In other words, the commission was an elaborate search for a solution to a problem that never existed, but it made a play that has since been repeated elsewhere.
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All of this voter suppression requires an infrastructure. To help support it, Heritage and PILF have teamed up with Leonard Leo’s Orwellian-named “Honest Elections Project” (HEP), headed by Jason Snead, to run a new conference for election officials and the representatives of Republican lawmakers. Leo, lest we forget, has been in charge of reshaping the federal courts, selecting Donald Trump’s judicial nominees, and figuring out how best to spend gobs of billionaire-donated money to reshape culture and democracy. The chillingly dishonest HEP not only supports these efforts to make voting harder but also the “independent state legislature theory,” ...
The election suppression noises are truly coming from inside the house.
...
this is no longer just a lobbying effort shored up with big, often untraceable money, coming from players outside the system. What’s no longer hidden is the involvement of lawmakers and their staffs, who say the quiet parts out loud. Their enthusiastic participation in these efforts shows that these groups are not offering false and exaggerated claims of voter fraud merely to raise funds or even to delegitimize Democratic electoral victories by convincing the Republican base that when Democrats win elections, it is inevitably by fraud. Instead, the conference is powerful evidence of coordination between the decades-old voter fraud–industrial complex and state and government officials who actually have the power to make rules over how elections are run. To put it in the simplest terms, the election suppression noises are truly coming from inside the house.
...
Finally, the very existence of this conference also highlights the coming together of the fringe elements of the Republican party with its allegedly saner mainstream."

Opinion | At the NRA convention in Indianapolis, nonsense floated on guns - The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/16/nra-convention-republicans-guns-democracy/

#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPLovesPower
#GunsBeforeReason

"The nonsense floated in Indianapolis — based on the idea that our national addiction to high-powered weaponry has nothing to do with America’s unique mass shooting problem — speaks to a deep ailment in our democracy. It has both partisan and (perverse) philosophical roots.

The GOP’s conversion to gun absolutism is the heart of the problem. But politics doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It often follows from cultural and moral innovations.

For roughly four decades, American conservatism has identified firearms as a marker of a manly rejection of urban cosmopolitanism and gun ownership as a right more important than any other. As DeSantis said in his video, the right to bear arms is “the foundation on which all our other rights rest” and essential to Americans’ “ability to rule themselves.”

“Why do Joe Biden and the liberals want our guns?” asked Gov. Kristi L. Noem of South Dakota, another speaker. “Because it will make it easier for them to violate all our other rights.”

It comes down to a variant of the old Maoist slogan: All liberty grows out of the barrel of a gun. When Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani told a White House rally before the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, “Let’s have trial by combat,” he was speaking for a sentiment that runs deep in the gun rights movement.

A particularly dramatic example of how opposition to gun regulation is increasingly linked to efforts to undermine democracy itself: the Tennessee House Republicans’ recent vote to expel two duly elected legislators for protesting against the body’s inaction on guns after the Nashville school massacre.

It was no accident that the two since-reinstated representatives, Democrats Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson, are not only both young and Black but also represent urban areas — Jones is from Nashville, Pearson from Memphis. Republican legislators, in Tennessee as elsewhere, regularly diminish the power of the big metro areas through gerrymandering and state overrides of local control.

Republican legislators may tout states’ rights, but with many cities in red states growing into significant islands of Democratic influence (and support for gun regulation), local control is not part of the GOP’s program.

Undercutting the ability of voters to cast ballots is another habit of those who privilege the Second Amendment over all the others. As Politico’s Kathy Gilsinan reported, Tennessee’s election laws allow gun permits as voter IDs but not college student identifications. There is no waiting time to buy a gun, but citizens have to register at least 30 days before an election. “It is absolutely easier to get a gun than to vote in Tennessee,” Democratic state Sen. Charlane Oliver told Gilsinan.

Our attitudes toward guns are often ascribed to our frontier past and a veneration of the Old West. But in truth, radical opposition to gun regulation is a relatively recent development, even in the NRA. Founded in 1871 by two Union Civil War veterans and a former New York Times reporter, the organization was initially devoted to improving urban marksmanship.

The group was long open to sensible rules around weapons, and the NRA helped Franklin D. Roosevelt draft the 1934 National Firearms Act and the 1938 Gun Control Act. It was not until 1977 that the NRA was engulfed by extreme ideologues. Our country, including the Supreme Court, thus embarked on a dangerous new path.

The good news in this story is that radical opposition to sensible gun laws is not embedded in the American character. It’s the product of an ideology that overtook a less dogmatic form of conservatism and seized control of a political party.

With Americans increasingly angry over the violence wrought by weapons of war in our schools, our banks, our shopping centers — pretty much everywhere we gather — the era of gun absolutism could finally be over, if the popular will on guns is allowed to prevail. But this depends on defending the democracy that so many, at the Indianapolis gathering and in Tennessee, deeply mistrust."

It's hard to imagine how Greene's call for secession serves the interests of the oligarch's/obscenely wealthy, but it certainly serves Putin's desire to foment chaos and wreak havoc on our country and democracy. Are the oligarch's pulling her strings or is it Putin? She's not smart enough to accomplish much in the way of policy suggestions on her own. Unfortunately, the entire GOP has now become a disaster for democracy and our country. They are all either insane, in Putin's pocket or puppets for the obscenely wealthy who are making a play for eliminating the federal government as a force that can rebuke them, reign them in or make them not poison or impoverish all of us.

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Civil War https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/marjorie-taylor-greene-secession-civil-war/673142/

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPArePutinsTools
#GOPRacists
#GOPFascists
#GOPTreason

"It was only a matter of time before Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene—a peddler of far-right conspiracy theories, a speaker at white-nationalist rallies, a supporter of political violence, and an all-around unhinged individual—would renew her call for secession.

The temptation of many people, eager to move past America’s political freak show, will be to ignore her comments and dismiss her as an outcast, a fringe figure, deranged but isolated. The less said about her, the better.

That’s unwise.

Greene is not just a member of Congress, not just a member of its Committee on Homeland Security; she has become a confidante of Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy. He has “forged an ironclad bond” with Greene, according to The New York Times.
...
“If you’re going to be in a fight, you want Marjorie in your foxhole,” McCarthy told the Times. “When she picks a fight, she’s going to fight until the fight’s over. She reminds me of my friends from high school, that we’re going to stick together all the way through.” He’ll even stick together with those arguing for secession, apparently.

Greene is not alone in her views. She is giving voice to a widespread and growing sentiment in the Republican Party. Among Republicans in the South, for example, support for secession was 66 percent in June 2021, according to a Bright Line Watch/YouGov poll.
...
Last summer, thousands of Texas Republicans approved a platform that called on the state legislature to authorize a referendum on secession from the United States.
...
The Republican Party, forged a century and a half ago in the fight against secession, now finds the move worth contemplating.

Civil War–like secession isn’t going to happen in the United States, at least not anytime soon. But all of the emotions that are attached to a desire for secession—seething resentment, existential fear, an unforgiving spirit, contempt and hatred for those who disagree with you—are stoked by the kind of rhetoric employed by Greene and those who see the world as she does. Such language will further destroy America’s political culture and could easily lead to extensive political violence.
...
But I doubt that many Republicans, aside from courageous figures such as Utah Governor Spencer Cox and Liz Cheney, the former chair of the House Republican Conference, will call Greene out. (Senator Mitt Romney of Utah and former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan have shown integrity throughout the MAGA years as well.)
...
What the rest of us learned during the Trump era is that a party led by craven men and women—some of them cynical, others true believers, almost all afraid to speak out—will end up normalizing the transgressive, unethical, and moronic.

Trump did horrifying things at the end of his presidency, including attempting a coup and inciting a violent mob to attack the Capitol. The majority of Republicans tolerated what he did, to a degree that simply wouldn’t have happened at the beginning of his presidency. It took time for the corruption to fully take hold, for the party—lawmakers and the right-wing media complex—to fall completely into line.
...
Greene and McCarthy—one crazed, the other cowardly—embody a large swath of the modern-day GOP. Any party that makes room for seditionists and secessionists is sick and dangerous."

Murdoch has damaged the democracies of Australia, the U.K. and America, all for greed, power and god knows what else. He needs to be held accountable! The people who have most benefited from his actions, the obscenely wealthy and their foot servants, politicians, media personalities, lobbyists, etc., want democracy to fail so they can do whatever they want with no oversight or regulations. They would love to siphon all the money out of education, social security and medicare, while they're at it. Rupert has been their go-to guy, helping them destroy democracy and the middle class.

Twitter Foes Call For Rupert Murdoch To Be Deported After Peddling Fox News Lies | HuffPost Latest News https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rupert-murdoch-american-citizenship-deport-twitter_n_63f15168e4b0c87f32f1abd2

#TheyWantTheirSerfsBack
#GOPLies
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPIsTheToolOfTheRich

"The billionaire's critics are raging on social media to boot him out of the country.

Twitter critics are lining up to demand Australian-born right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch be stripped of his U.S. citizenship and deported after undermining American democracy with a cascade of recently revealed Fox News lies about the 2020 presidential election.

Murdoch, whose media operations frequently rail against immigration, became an American citizen in 1985, which allowed him to circumvent a law barring foreign nationals from owning more than 20% of a U.S. broadcasting license.
...
Despite Murdoch’s lucrative citizenship switch, he’s apparently no big fan of U.S. democracy. He and Fox News continued to peddle Donald Trump’s baseless claim of a fraudulent presidential election that news hosts and executives didn’t believe, according to a bombshell brief filed earlier this week.

Murdoch blasted a memorably unhinged press conference by Trump ally Rudy Giuliani and lawyer Sidney Powell after Trump’s election loss that bizarrely claimed voting machine software had been manipulated in a plot spearheaded by Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, who had been in the grave for seven years by then.

“Really crazy stuff. And damaging,” Murdoch wrote in a November 2020 text message, revealed in a brief filed Thursday by attorneys for Dominion Voting Systems. The company is suing Fox News and its parent Fox Corporation for $1.6 billion over alleged defamation.

Carlson said in a message obtained by Dominion that Powell was “lying” about having proof of her wild claims and called Trump a “demonic force,” according to the brief. Fox executives were so worried about the danger Trump posed that they refused to allow him on Lou Dobbs’ program on Jan. 6, 2021, deeming that to do so would be “irresponsible,” the brief noted.

Yet despite that, Murdoch’s Fox continued to support Trump and his tale of a rigged election to pander to the former president’s supporters.

Now, his enemies are raging on Twitter to boot him out of the country."

Part 1
Wealthy right-wing extremists are trying to "buy" the racist, oligarchic, Christian nationalist country they want and dismantle public education, democracy and the separation of church and state. They are actively plotting and working to destroy our multi-ethnic, liberal democracy!

“Parents Defending Education” is overwhelmingly funded by big donors’ dark money rather than by “concerned parents.”

Tax Docs Link Right-Wing “Parents Group” to Leonard Leo’s Dark Money Network - Truthout https://truthout.org/articles/tax-docs-link-right-wing-parents-group-to-leonard-leos-dark-money-network/

#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#Fascism
#RightWingHatesDemocracy
#TheyWantTheirSerfsBack

"Right-wing operatives are increasing their attacks on U.S. public education with an expanding number of legal complaints to censor books and target teachers on an array of issues —preventing them from teaching U.S. history accurately, treating LGBTQ+ students with the respect they deserve, and forming support groups for kids and teachers of color. These attacks will likely continue to escalate through 2024 as wedge issues intended to feed the right-wing voting base and lay the groundwork for redirecting funds from public schools to private recipients.

One of the main players in these attacks is Parents Defending Education (PDE), a dark money nonprofit group launched in 2021 in the midst of the Virginia state election cycle. Over the past two years, PDE has become a central actor in the right-wing assault on public schools across the nation. The group has trained local agitators to grab media attention, sued school districts for supposed anti-white discrimination, and railed against the teaching of social emotional learning, accurate U.S. history, and even ethnic studies in schools.

Lawyers affiliated with PDE filed at least four complaints in January with the U.S. Department of Education claiming affinity groups for kids or teachers are illegal. These are just a few of the many complaints the group has filed over the past two years.

As dark money in education expert Maurice Cunningham has written, PDE’s “real goal” in filing lawsuits and complaints appears to be to “create media attention and promote chaos and disruption.” Then groups like PDE can claim the solution to the chaos is increased right-wing “parental supervision” over school boards. That supervision appears to involve a minority of vocal, politically motivated parents dictating what other people’s kids are taught or what they can read, based on whether such lessons or books are consistent with their right-wing religious beliefs and political opinions.

PDE’s speakers are often portrayed in the media as simply “concerned parents,” despite the group’s ties to the network of oil billionaire Charles Koch, far right politicians and school privatization efforts. Due to the timetables for the filing of nonprofit IRS forms, the amount PDE had raised to mount these attacks was unknown — until now.

PDE’s 2021 990 nonprofit IRS form shows that the group raised more than $3.1 million in its first year, even though many genuinely local grassroots efforts take years to raise that much money. That form does not reveal how much money PDE raised in 2022, during the congressional midterm elections; the amount it received to fuel its operations last year is likely even higher than 2021. The $3.1 million disclosed for 2021 also does not include any money raised that year by PDE Action, its (c)(4) advocacy arm.

What does the new filing show? First, it reveals that although PDE describes itself as a group of concerned parents, almost all of its funding came from major donors rather than dues from parents. Specifically, PDE raised only $77,272 from membership dues out of the $3,178,345 it was given that year by funders who were not members.

That is, only 2 percent of the group’s funding came from local parents who paid a $10 fee for membership. The vast majority of PDE’s funding comes from big secret sources underwriting the attacks on public education, sources that paid the group a lot more than $10 in membership dues.

PDE’s figure and its disclosed fee suggest that around 7,700 people have paid dues, which would constitute .01 percent of all of the parents in the U.S. It’s a case study in the squeaky wheel getting the grease..."

Part 2
Wealthy right-wing extremists are trying to "buy" the racist, oligarchic, Christian nationalist country they want and dismantle public education, democracy and the separation of church and state. They are actively plotting and working to destroy our multi-ethnic, liberal democracy!

“Parents Defending Education” is overwhelmingly funded by big donors’ dark money rather than by “concerned parents.”

Tax Docs Link Right-Wing “Parents Group” to Leonard Leo’s Dark Money Network https://truthout.org/articles/tax-docs-link-right-wing-parents-group-to-leonard-leos-dark-money-network/

#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#Fascism
#RightWingHatesDemocracy
#TheyWantTheirSerfsBack

"...Accordingly, the services Leo’s CRC Advisors provided to PDE are not publicly known.

Leo’s ambitions are, however.

Following on his success in capturing the Supreme Court — he hand-selected Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch for Donald Trump and opposed Democratic nominees to the court — Leo announced his plans to dominate other parts of society. He told The New York Times in a 2022 interview that he sought to take the lessons learned from his decades of experience pushing the law to reflect the right-wing agenda and apply them to “other areas of American cultural, policy, and political life.”

Leo’s desire to influence public education seems clear through the efforts of the groups his network is known to be funding.
...
Free to Learn was active in the 2021 gubernatorial race in Virginia, where the right-wing media credited the win of Republican Glenn Youngkin to his success in leveraging attacks on the state’s public schools. In September 2021, the group dropped more than $1 million in ads targeting Loudoun County alone. PDE was launched that year and was also intensely focused on public attacks on Virginia’s public schools.
...
IWF actively attacked Virginia schools as “toxic” during the 2021 governor’s race and has increasingly attempted to discredit public schools by promoting anti-trans fear mongering and assailing masking and vaccine requirements designed to keep students and staff safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. IWF has also supported an array of measures to privatize public schools or redirect public school funding.
...
For example, in 1986, Robert Thoburn, who later joined the Council for National Policy — a secretive group of powerful Christian/Catholic nationalists where Leo has been and may still be on the board of governors — explained in his book, The Children Trap: “I imagine every Christian would agree that we need to remove the humanism from the public schools. There is only one way to accomplish this: to abolish the public schools.” He urged Christians to run for school boards with the intent “to sink the ship.”

The Christian and Catholic right-wing has had significant success since then in targeting public schools. Since 2020 in particular, right-wing political operatives have sought to take over local school boards — throwing money into flipping control of boards of education across the country — with recent wins in some districts in Texas, California and Florida — and pushing for the banning of books they disapprove of in public schools.

PDE also filed an amicus brief in a pair of cases before the Supreme Court, where the right-wing supermajority is poised to gut affirmative action at the behest of a veritable army of Leo-tied groups. These groups, which Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) has dubbed the “amicus flotilla,” provide support for the right-wing justices on the court to undercut Americans’ rights and overturn long-standing legal precedents.

Those cases were brought forward by the right-wing group Students for Fair Admissions, which itself received a quarter-million dollars from Leo’s 85 Fund in 2020. Ed Blum, who sits on PDE’s board, is a plaintiff in the joint case, despite not being a student at either of the universities being sued.

All this shows how PDE’s sudden arrival has been met with major funding from secret sources as it continues to portray itself in the media as merely “local moms.” The local activists PDE has aided are not paid the big bucks that PDE’s president pays herself, but they are benefiting from a multimillion-dollar infrastructure Neily has created to assail schools and teachers across the country, an operation that appears to be expanding as the group enters its third year of operation and eyes the 2024 elections."

The GOP's M.O. is to create division even where it doesn't really exist. Division is one of the easiest ways to create fear, anger and outrage, all the primary ingredients in the GOP's recipe for power, authoritarianism and fascism. They don't care if they harm the country through their division and fear as long as they get power and can kill taxes and regulations on the wealthy and corporations.

Economist Paul Krugman: Why 'rural resentment' fails the 'scrutiny' test - Alternet.org https://www.alternet.org/why-rural-resentment-fails-scrutiny/

#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPFomentsFearAndHatred
#GOPCultivatesDivision
#GOPLovesPower

"From Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a frequent claim among far-right GOP culture warriors is that urban and suburban Democrats disrespect and ignore rural areas. A recurring theme in the MAGA movement is that rural areas are “the real America” and that major urban centers are not.

Right-wing media outlets such as Fox News, Fox Business and Newsmax TV, although dominated by urbanites, regularly and eagerly feed the resentment and anger of rural Americans. But liberal economist and syndicated New York Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman, in a late January column, argues that the “justifications for rural resentment don’t withstand scrutiny.”

“Rural resentment has become a central fact of American politics — in particular, a pillar of support for the rise of right-wing extremism,” Krugman explains. “As the Republican Party has moved ever further into MAGAland, it has lost votes among educated suburban voters. But this has been offset by a drastic rightward shift in rural areas, which in some places, has gone so far that the Democrats who remain face intimidation and are afraid to reveal their party affiliation.”

READ MORE:Political science experts explain how rural voters’ growing 'resentment' fuels a rural-urban 'apartheid'

Krugman goes on to lay out some reasons why the “perception” that rural areas are “ignored by policymakers” and “don’t get their fair share of resources” is “largely wrong.”

“I’m sure that my saying this will generate a tidal wave of hate mail, and lecturing rural Americans about policy reality isn’t going to move their votes,” Krugman argues. “Nonetheless, it’s important to get our facts straight. The truth is that ever since the New Deal, Rural America has received special treatment from policymakers. It’s not just farm subsidies, which ballooned under President Donald Trump to the point where they accounted for around 40 percent of total farm income. Rural America also benefits from special programs that support housing, utilities and business in general.”

Krugman points out that although rural areas of the United States have some legitimate complaints — poverty, job losses — those areas “disproportionally benefit” from “major federal programs” because they “have a disproportionate number of seniors receiving Social Security and Medicare.”

“Because rural America is poorer than urban America,” Krugman observes, “it pays much less per person in federal taxes. So, in practice, major metropolitan areas hugely subsidize the countryside. These subsidies don’t just support incomes, they support economies…. What about rural perceptions of being disrespected? Well, many people have negative views about people with different lifestyles; that’s human nature.”

Krugman notes a major double standard in U.S. politics: Republicans can get away with insulting urban areas, but Democrats won’t dare insult rural areas.

The New York Times columnist writes, “‘I have to go to New York City soon,’ tweeted J.D. Vance during his senatorial campaign. ‘I have heard it’s disgusting and violent there.’ Can you imagine, say, Chuck Schumer saying something similar about Rural Ohio, even as a joke?”

Is the GOP refusing to raise the debt limit because:
They want to make Biden look bad, so they can take back the White House?
They want to destroy democracy and replace it with authoritarianism, so they choose chaos to undermine faith that democracy can work?
They just blindly do whatever their nutjob, wealthy benefactors, who truly hate social security, and Putin, who hates democracy, asks of them?

Unstable, Petty and Dangerous https://politicususa.substack.com/p/unstable-petty-and-dangerous?

#GOPIsUnworthyOfOffice
#GOPKillsEconomy
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#ChaosIsThePoint4GOP

"Republicans are openly identifying as the party of economic instability, danger and pettiness.
...
House Republican Budget Chair Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-TX) said that his party’s tactic of using the debt ceiling as a bargaining chip could not only turn dangerous, but it has to turn dangerous.

@andrewrsorkin: “The question that I’d ask you is whether you think this debt ceiling is going to be used as a bargaining chip in a way that could turn dangerous?”

House GOP Budget Chair @RepArrington: “I believe it will and I believe it has to.”

This is very odd. It’s not normal or business as usual to admit that your party’s strategy is meant to be dangerous to the economy. This is recognition that their party stands for economic instability, because they believe that is how they can get the policy outcomes that they can’t get by regular order and traditional methods of debate on the floor, in daylight if you will.

It’s not a secret. Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C) wants cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and “other welfare programs” (notice that big business, big oil, big pharma subsidies and tax cuts are not mentioned).

The reason they can’t win their policies in the sunlight is because cutting Social Security and Medicare are not popular ideas and are theft from the people who’ve been paying in to Social Security their entire working lives.

But still. The party that was fine with increasing the total national debt by 39% to $27.75 trillion under Donald Trump. They voted to suspend or raise the debt limit three times under Trump, twice when they controlled the House and Senate.
...
It turns out, they don’t even have an end game that will stop their assault on our economy.

“McCarthy has members of his conference who will vote against a debt ceiling hike no matter what's in the package.

"No," Greg Pence told me when asked if he would vote to raise the debt ceiling if it included "every" single one of his priorities,” CNN’s Manu Raju reported.

So this economic terrorism is not actually even about policies.

What else will happen if they default? Moody's has estimated default could result in 9% unemployment, a $15 trillion loss in household wealth, and a 4% drop in GDP. Also, at least temporary default on payments like Social Security, veterans’ benefits, etc:
...
Ok, so they want to cut Social Security but also there is nothing Democrats can give them that will stop their default, if certain Republicans are to believed.

Perhaps the point is to inflict pain upon the Democrat in the White House out of pettiness because their party lost. After all, it has long been established that Republicans deploy the terrorism tactic of holding the entire U.S. economy hostage when there is a Democrat in the White House. Yes, this is a fact and it’s not “both sides,” no matter what the New York Times’ social media tells you.

Here’s an analysis of this issue from Aaron Blake:
...
In the 10 debt ceiling votes under a Republican administration, an average of 65 percent of House Republicans and 74 percent of Senate Republicans voted in favor of adjusting or suspending it. But in Democratic administrations, those numbers decline to 24 percent and 20 percent, respectively.
...
A generous take on this behavior is that the Republican Party has fallen to a performative party of sadistic glee that is ruled by self-interest of the kind that plays to the cameras for that Fox News hit of themselves owning the libs by punching a snowflake veteran and a hungry child in the financial gut. This is what their base wants, having been fed vindictiveness and rage by the billionaire funders of conservative media for over a decade and now the base controls the party.
...
The less generous take is that these folks are out of their minds due to something going on behind the scenes, thus inflicting chaos to undermine democracy is their goal.
...
The motive for this behavior is harder to ascertain but the likely outcome is known to them, and so it’s important to ask WHY. Most likely, it’s a combination of both takes depending on the individual. But the bottom line is party first and American people last. It’s certainly not patriotic behavior."

Part 2
The GOP is so dirty!! They have colluded with Russia to steal elections and destroy our democracy--neither Putin or the GOP have any use for democracy. They've created unwarranted investigations, as the House GOP is about to start more, they've weaponized the Justice Dept. even as they falsely claim that Democrats did that, they worked with a high-ranking Justice Dept. official, who just so happened to be on Putin's payroll, to "steal" the 2016 election from Hillary, and they all worked together to steal the 2020 election. They are guilty of treason among other heinous crimes against our country and democracy! They don't care about governing or helping our country, they only care about seizing power anyway possible and lavishing tax cuts and gutting regulations on their donors/benefactors. When is their base going to wake up to how shamelessly they have been manipulated and used to destroy our country and democracy!

Opinion | Barr is the one who outrageously politicized the Justice Department - The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/30/justice-department-barr-dunham/

#GOPLies
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPInBedWithPutin
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GreedKillsDemocracy
#GOPGreedy

"...Joyce White Vance concurred:

"Three responses are warranted, although sadly none is likely to hold Barr accountable.

Jaw dropping reporting. Lots here including an explanation of why Durham's colleague resigned: under pressure from Barr to release an "interim" report damaging Clinton & the FBI as the election drew near, Durham had a draft prepared that wasn't factual."

First and foremost, Attorney General Merrick Garland should have the spine to remove Durham for gross misconduct. Moreover, any report issued should remove the names of those exonerated in court or who were never charged. They are victims of a political smear, which Garland should not enable by allowing baseless allegations to circulate publicly. Don’t hold your breath, however. Garland has shown little willingness to revisit the department’s conduct in the prior administration. (As an alternative, the inspector general could investigate Barr and Durham.)

Frankly, Garland erred in never conducting a top-to-bottom review of politicization during the Trump era (including Barr’s politicization of sentencing recommendations and the department’s misrepresentations in the U.S. Census case). Instead of prioritizing the department’s outside reputation over the need to remove the stench of corruption, Garland should have gotten to the bottom of the Barr/Durham debacle long ago. (At the very least, it would have preempted the false MAGA narrative that Democrats have been the ones engaged in misconduct).

Second, Barr and Durham should face disciplinary action just as coup architect John Eastman (coincidentally on Thursday) was charged with 11 counts by the California state bar for “violating a variety of attorney ethics rules in multiple episodes, court cases and other conduct,” as CNN put it. Unless and until attorneys such as Barr and Durham face accountability, the threat of professional disgrace and the loss of their law license, other lawyers will be tempted to engage in such shenanigans.However, Eastman, Jeffrey Clark (facing bar proceedings) and Rudy Giuliani (suspended from practice in New York) have sadly been the exception to the rule of sloth and passivity from state bars. Scores of attorneys who signed onto frivolous lawsuits after the 2020 and 2022 elections (including challenging Kari Lake’s defeat in Arizona) have yet to face any penalty.

The list of attorneys who participated in the effort to overturn the 2020 election but as yet have faced no consequences (Kenneth Chesebro, Cleta Mitchell) is far too long. (And none of the members of Congress who signed onto the utterly baseless Supreme Court brief seeking to disenfranchise millions of Americans has been taken to task.) State bars need to do their job to restore integrity to the legal profession.

Finally, Congress should be investigating Barr and Durham’s gross misconduct. You can be sure, however, that MAGA Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee and the “weaponization of government” select subcommittee won’t be interested.

Two options remain, however. Senate Democrats can take up the matter, hold public hearings and demand answers from Garland as to why he has not cleaned house already. In addition, Democrats on the weaponization subcommittee should press at every hearing to investigate this matter and, when Republican witnesses are called, demand they respond to the facts regarding Barr and Durham.
...
In sum, just as Garland seeks to hold accountable political leaders who threatened our democracy, he must hold his own department lawyers’ responsible for misconduct. If not, an inspector general, state bars and congressional Democrats should do the job.""

Part 1
The GOP is so dirty!! They have colluded with Russia to steal elections and destroy our democracy--neither Putin or the GOP have any use for democracy. They've created unwarranted investigations, as the House GOP is about to start more, they've weaponized the Justice Dept. even as they falsely claim that Democrats did that, they worked with a high-ranking Justice Dept. official, who just so happened to be on Putin's payroll, to "steal" the 2016 election from Hillary, and they all worked together to steal the 2020 election. They are guilty of treason among other heinous crimes against our country and democracy! They don't care about governing or helping our country, they only care about seizing power anyway possible and lavishing tax cuts and gutting regulations on their donors/benefactors. When is their base going to wake up to how shamelessly they have been manipulated and used to destroy our country and democracy!

Opinion | Barr is the one who outrageously politicized the Justice Department - The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/30/justice-department-barr-dunham/

#GOPLies
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPInBedWithPutin
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GreedKillsDemocracy
#GOPGreedy

"House Republicans are right that politicization of the Justice Department has been a jaw-dropping abuse of power. They’ve got the wrong culprit, however. As a blockbuster New York Times article made clear, then-Attorney General William P. Barr and special counsel John H. Durham engaged in unethical, abusive manipulation of the Justice Department in pursing the baseless conspiracy theory that the intelligence community had conducted a witch hunt of then-President Donald Trump in connection with Russian manipulation of the 2016 election.

The Times reported that “the main thrust of the Durham inquiry was marked by some of the very same flaws — including a strained justification for opening it and its role in fueling partisan conspiracy theories that would never be charged in court — that Trump allies claim characterized the Russia investigation.” Durham brought two baseless cases, both resulting in acquittal. When Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s thorough investigation debunked their entire theory, Barr tried to pressure him to keep it under wraps. Then, as he did with the Robert S. Mueller III report, Barr publicly mischaracterized and trashed the report.

Durham also used a grand jury to pry into the record of major Democratic donor George Soros. Moreover, while supposedly operating independently, he met frequently with his pal Barr, in violation of the basic precept that a special counsel must operate with a high degree of independence. (From the Times article: “Mr. Durham visited Mr. Barr in his office for at times weekly updates and consultations about his day-to-day work. They also sometimes dined and sipped Scotch together.”)

Worst of all:

Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham never disclosed that their inquiry expanded in the fall of 2019, based on a tip from Italian officials, to include a criminal investigation into suspicious financial dealings related to Mr. Trump. The specifics of the tip and how they handled the investigation remain unclear, but Mr. Durham brought no charges over it.
Their conduct was so egregious that several career prosecutors quit rather than participate in (to borrow a phrase) the witch hunt. In the end, Barr conceded there was no there there — but only after the 2020 election.

Former prosecutors reacting to the Times report were outraged. Andrew Weissmann tweeted, “This is all about the Trump weaponization of the DOJ — but we know that the House Rs won’t give a damn about it.” ...

The GOP uses racism, fear and outrage to fire up its base for support/votes while cutting taxes and implementing policies that benefit its rich benefactors/donors, usually at the expense of the suckers that make up its base! Their base doesn't care if they don't have health care, living wages or retirement security, as long as blacks and other minorities don't have them.

In blocking an AP Black studies course, DeSantis tells us who he is
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/23/desantis-african-american-history-college-board/

#GOPRacist
#GOPAllianceOfDeplorables
#GOPDogWhistles
#GOPFascists
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#TheyWantTheirSerfsBack

"...DeSantis has made a name for himself by harassing Black voters, setting up a system to sue teachers for teaching race in ways that might offend Whites, singling out LGBTQ youth (while gagging teachers) and engaging in extreme gerrymandering to reduce the voting power of minorities.

Now he’s gone full-blown white supremacist, banning the College Board’s Advanced Placement for African American studies course from Florida’s schools.

In what is surely among its most explicitly racist actions, the DeSantis administration determined (on what basis?) that the course is “inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value,”
...
Jean-Pierre...pointed out that state officials “didn’t block AP European History. … They didn’t block our art history. But the state chooses to block a course that is meant for high-achieving high school students to learn about their history of arts and culture.”
...
I hate to point out — for fear of putting a target on its back — that the University of Florida has an esteemed African American Studies program (as does virtually every other well-regarded university). “The African American Studies program is one of the fastest growing majors at UF,” the college’s website explains.
...
The university goes on to provide the essential historical context for the program: “Before 1958, a state law in Florida banned black attendance at public universities in undergraduate, graduate and professional programs. Between 1945 and 1958, 85 black students applied for admission to all levels of UF, and all were rejected.” The University of Florida, like many institutions in the South, was the site of “massive resistance” after Brown v. Board of Education mandated desegregation:
...
This is fact-based history, and Florida did not explain how the AP course supposedly contravened state law. If it is referencing last year’s Stop WOKE Act, which blocks the teaching of material that could make students feel guilt or responsibility for historical racism, then one has to wonder whether something as simple and straightforward as the state’s own history of segregated education can be studied.

The DeSantis administration’s actions put to lie the notion that the attack on “critical race theory” is aimed at “socialist ideas” or educationally suspect pedagogy. This is about rewriting history to wipe out a critical part of our American experience, to deny the wrongs done to millions of Americans and to exempt institutions from the obligation to take a hard look at remedying past injustice.
...
Janai S. Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told me, “If the new Advanced Placement Course on African American Studies violates Florida laws, as alleged by the Florida Department of Education, it only proves the unconstitutionality of the state’s laws.”
...
Historically, a key aspect of white supremacy has been the denial of Blacks’ own suffering, their historical experience and their current scholarship. It’s the ultimate expression of contempt for certain Americans as unworthy and peripheral to the story of “real” — read “White” — America. The goal here is unmistakable: eradication of African American historical experience.
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The long effort to exclude a complete history of America has left millions of Americans sadly ignorant.
...
DeSantis and those playing to White grievance may prefer that students never learn about such figures and incidents. But considering the damage already done in under-educating Americans, perhaps African American studies (and a complete study of the diverse American experience) should be included in every K-12 curriculum for every student.

Ron DeSantis should remind us that if we want a fully aware, educated population capable of functioning as competent citizens in a diverse democracy, the rest of us need to push back against nefarious attempts to erase history."

The GOP's only real proposals benefit the rich at the expense of the rest of us. Yet their base is too ginned up on hate and outrage to pay attention to what's really going on.

The GOP tax plan is to let the rich pay less and make you pay more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/23/biden-tax-gop-sales-tax/

#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPIsTheRichsTool
#GOPHatesAvgAmericans

"President Biden, consistent with his idea of building an economy from “the bottom up and the middle out,” has tried to get the rich and big corporations to pay more taxes. The MAGA GOP, abandoning all pretense of populism, has a scheme to junk the progressive tax code and replace it with a national sales tax, with devastating results for the middle class.

That tells you a lot about the contrasting visions of the two parties. One still fights for the little guy in practical, concrete terms while the other proposes one harebrained scheme after another with no regard to the needs of average Americans.
...
Keeping his promises not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year and to get businesses to pay more, Biden raised $300 billion in revenue in the Inflation Reduction Act by placing a new tax on stock buybacks and enacting a minimum tax on big corporations. To the chagrin of tax cheats (and their sympathetic Republican politicians), the law also boosted funding for the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on tax evaders.
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More far-reaching plans to increase the individual top marginal tax rate, to boost the corporate tax rate, to equalize tax treatment of capital gains and ordinary income for those making more than $400,000, and to eliminate the step-up basis for the estate tax never passed.

The principle underlying all of these measures, which would be comparatively small adjustments that would not hit the vast majority of Americans, was simple: The rich have made out very well and should pay more taxes; working- and middle-class taxpayers shouldn’t.

“Over the past 40 years, the wealthy have gotten wealthier, and too many corporations have lost their sense of responsibility to their workers, their communities and the country,” Biden said in a speech in September 2021. “CEOs used to make about 20 times the average worker in the company that they ran. Today, they make more than 350 times what the average worker in their corporation makes.”
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That grotesque widening of income inequality offends most Americans, who consistently tell pollsters the rich should pay more.

GOP politicians and their wealthy donors see things differently. The first tax measure proposed by the MAGA House was to try to take back funding for the IRS to chase down tax cheats.

“The debate should focus on one accurate and alarming number: the IRS has 2,284 fewer skilled auditors to handle the sophisticated returns of wealthy taxpayers than it did in 1954,” Chuck Marr of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities wrote. “The decade-long, House Republican-driven budget cuts have created dysfunction at the IRS, where relatively few millionaires are now audited.”

But allowing tax cheats to avoid paying what they legally owe is not the sum total of the GOP thinking on taxes. “As part of his deal to become House speaker,” Semafor reported, “Kevin McCarthy reportedly promised his party’s conservative hardliners a vote on legislation that would scrap the entire American tax code and replace it with a jumbo-sized national sales tax.”

A mammoth 30 percent sales tax would be grossly regressive, socking it to the same working- and middle-class families Republicans ostensibly worry are paying more at the pump and grocery store because of inflation.

...Even Norquist knows that because the poor and middle class spend a much higher percentage of their income on necessities such as food and clothing, the impact would be devastating.

Unsurprisingly Democrats leaped at the chance to blast the scheme. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted:
"Hold on: House Republicans want a national 30% sales tax on everything from groceries to gasoline? They want to raise taxes on working-class & middle-class families while slashing them for millionaires & billionaires?

Are they TRYING to show exactly how out of touch they are?"
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The GOP plan boils down to this: Let rich tax cheats get away with not paying what they owe while redoing the entire tax system so the overwhelming burden will fall on those less able to pay.
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The plan is unlikely even to get a vote. But it is indicative of the utter lack of seriousness that pervades the GOP. They throw out one boneheaded idea after another, hoping to please some segment of their base or donors, with nary a care in the world for the needs of their constituents nor for the actual challenges we face."