What Happens To a Dead Elephant?

This thread is to discuss the possible, credible, and reality based personal ideas of what the future of what we call the GOP might be now that we see its corpse lying in front of us.

Will the weak and minimal vestige of Republican Team Democracy legally dissolve Team Coup by expelling the Sedition Coalition?

Will there be an exodus of actual Conservatives from the Trump usurpation and remade Party of Nationalism? And will they establish the Conservative Party?

Will the country descend into armed civil war, fighting over a dead elephant, resulting in a universal realignment of America's political parties into Nationalists and Conservatives on the right and Moderates and Progressives on the left, ending the existence of the two major parties as constituted?

Will the moneyed class hold sufficient concentration of power derived from wealth to formally change our form of government from republican democracy to oligarchy, ending the Great Experiment?

Will the turmoil and chaos on the right lead to the rise of and conflict between two kinds of populism, that of the working class and that of the privileged class (can they even have a claim on 'populism')?

Those are some ideas of the American future, post-Trump that preclude the assumption of a continuation of who we are politically up to now. Perhaps there will be no real change, just a chronic festering discontent punctuated by occasional isolated violent outbreaks. An existence at a low level of a purported democracy constantly diverted by attempts to destroy it -- a persistence of crippled actual conservatism -- means the loss of America's past power, the tolerance for a climate of criminality and corruption from those who govern, essentially a failed state, and an ever angry, distrustful, ignorant segment of our population that will drag us down lower still into tyranny through sheer weight of fatigue among the "good men."

What fate awaits what was once the Republican Party, and American politics?

No mystery here. Democrats shall repeat their stupendous feats of resuscitating the presumed "dead elephant," the many previous reports of its death having proven "greatly exaggerated."

The Elephant Corpse EXPLODES

Even Rand Paul says tonight that the coup attempt is dead. Insists there will be one vote in the Senate which reconvenes at 8 PM tonight.

The Trump Presidency’s Inevitable, Wretched End
Kevin D. Williamson | January 7, 2021

...The Trump presidency began in shame and dishonesty. It ends in shame, dishonesty, cowardice, and rebellion against the Constitution. For the past few weeks, the right-wing media, including the big talk-radio shows, has been coyly calling for a revolution. Of course they never thought they’d actually get one: That kind of talk is good for business — keep the rubes riled up and they won’t change the channel when the commercials come around on the half-hour. I never had much hope for the likes of Sean Hannity, tragically born too late to be a 1970s game-show host, but to watch Senator Ted Cruz descend into this kind of dangerous demagoguery as he jockeys to get out in front of the Trump parade as its new grand marshal has induced despair.

On May 4, 2016, I posted a little note to the Corner, headlined: “Pre-Planning My ‘I Told You So.’” It reads, in part: “Republicans, remember: You asked for this.” The path that the Republican Party and the conservative movement have taken in the past four years is not one that was forced on them — it is the product of choices that were made and of compromises that were entered into too willingly by self-interested men and women seeking money, celebrity, and power...

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/01/the-trump-presidencys-inevitable-wretched...

When Rush Limbaugh takes his final walk into the
sunset, this modern-day GOP and men like Ted
"seditionist" Cruz, who threw his wife and his father's
memory under the bus, will hopefully disappear into
the dustbin of history.

Amidst the dust and destruction of rampaging berserker MAGAnuts, real America and the worthy heirs to its True Vision were busy cleaning house and building better elsewhere.

Pro-Trump Mobs Riot In Washington As Black Voters In Georgia Take Power At The Ballot Box

Read Local Papers Today

Select quote from editorial from Mobile Press Register site. Whitmire: Mo Brooks didn’t shout fire. He helped set it.

Like so many Republicans who followed Trump over this cliff, (Rep. Mo) Brooks(R-AL) tried to hide behind a law-and-order scrim.

“As strong supporter of Rule of Law, I hope EVERYONE who illegally breached Capitol is prosecuted to fullest extent of the law,” Brooks tweeted when that seemed like the right thing to say.

If he really believed that, he should turn himself in. He won’t.

____________________________________________

Video links from online, public access Arizona Republic, of Phoenix, AZ, showing Republicans "eating their own." Kelli Ward is AZ's GOP Chair, who plans to run again for that office at the urging of Donald Trump.

https://www.azcentral.com/videos/news/politics/elections/2021/01/06/protesters-c...

https://www.azcentral.com/videos/news/politics/elections/2021/01/06/arizona-repu...

https://www.azcentral.com/picture-gallery/news/politics/elections/2021/01/06/tru...
________________________________________
Philadelphia Inquirer has several focused articles on the consequences of yesterday's insurrection,

Philly-area business leaders blame Trump for the Capitol attack,

N.J. to send in National Guard troops; Pa. Trump lawyer resigns, says president used his services ‘to perpetrate a crime’.
__________________________________________
Salt Lake Tribune while its headline is mild, the details of MAGAmob's threats and assaults that took place there yesterday are far more chilling, including an assault on a journalist.

Utah protest was mostly peaceful, although it was marred by several skirmishes or threatened confrontations. . .

Some of the Proud Boy and UCA members at the protest also menaced a man in a motorcycle helmet, escorted him off the Capitol grounds, carrying bats and guns. They shouted that he was a “f---ing commie,” and yelled at reporters and bystanders watching the scene to “stand back,” at one point even screaming at passing vehicles to “drive on!” And, “Go — in case this gets dirty.”

The protesters (militia gang) finally backed off when a Highway Patrol vehicle pulled up.

Pot Calls Kettle Black

Barr is calling Trump's conduct a “betrayal of his office and supporters," according to the Associated Press. The former AG also "said Thursday that 'orchestrating a mob to pressure Congress is inexcusable.'"

Perfect example of one dead elephant rising from the stink of his grave in order to pretend he is a holy ghost.

Republican Party Now Led by Outlaw and It Doesn't Care

Sen. Chuck Schumer, soon to be Majority Leader, called for Trump's immediate removal. From McConnell and Graham, after all their "brave" words last night, all that can be heard is crickets in response to the following events.

In the cold clear light of today, their party leader does this. . . Trump abruptly pulls DHS secretary's nomination after he criticizes 'violent opportunists' who invaded Capitol.

. . .in reaction to that. . .

Wolf issues statement. 10:28 am (January 7, 2021)-"We now see some supporters of the President using violence as a means to achieve political ends.

"This is unacceptable. These violent actions are unconscionable, and I implore the President and all elected officials to strongly condemn the violence that took place yesterday."

Wolf tweets this.
11:28 am (January 7, 2021)- I get White House statement withdrawing (my) nomination to be DHS secretary (not just “acting"). https://t.co/0sQKSJCDd9

The whole thing took exactly 1 hour.

Moribund Republican Ex-Speaker Implores Collapsed Elephant to Resuscitate Itself

Ex-Speaker Boehner after Capitol violence: 'The GOP must awaken'.

I once said the party of Lincoln and Reagan is off taking a nap. The nap has become a nightmare for our nation. The GOP must awaken. The invasion of our Capitol by a mob, incited by lies from some entrusted with power, is a disgrace to all who sacrificed to build our Republic.

— John Boehner (@SpeakerBoehner) January 7, 2021

Sorry, Boehner, you're one of the Republicans who punched what tried to act like an honorable political party in the jaw. Does a consummate hypocrite never retire from being a consummate hypocrite?

A mortally wounded elephant?

Kurt Bardella (Lincoln Project) @kurtbardella | 12:34 PM · Jan 8, 2021:
“Democrats, get ready, buckle your seatbelts. We’re coming."
As @LindseyGrahamSC disingenuously tweets about unity and moving forward, here we have @GOPChairwoman using rhetoric designed to incite for violence and more chaos.

RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel reelected to steer GOP for another 2 years
McDaniel vowed to help GOP win back the House and the Senate in 2022
Paul Steinhauser | Jan 8, 2021

...McDaniel, the former leader of the Michigan GOP, was picked by President Trump to lead the national party soon after he was elected in 2016. She was reelected to a second two-year term in 2018.

Her reelection -- which came at the RNC’s Winter Meeting that is being held this year in Amelia Island, Fla. (Jan 5-8, 2021) -- was expected. McDaniel was backed by President Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, as well as the vast majority of the roughly 168 RNC members.

...Pointing to the 2022 midterms, McDaniel said, to big applause, "We have a lot of hard work to do to take back the Senate and the House in 2022, but I am mad and I’m not going to let socialism rule this country and I’m going to work with every single one of you to make sure we squash it and we take back the House and take back the Senate...So Democrats, get ready, buckle your seatbelts. We’re coming"...

Classic news broadcast of when Oregon decided the solution to a dead whale was to use explosives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6CLumsir34

I can apply that to this situation in many ways, but the title just kept bringing me back.

AK Sen. Murkowski Wants Trump's Resignation, Ready To Leave Party If No

Alaska (Republican) Senator Lisa Murkowski said Trump should resign after his supporters invaded the U.S. Capitol, and she doesn’t know if she can remain a Republican if the party doesn’t split with Trump.

America is not pleased with the appeasers and lickspittles. Mitt Romney and Lindsey Graham were attacked by mocking crowds at airports as they made their way out of D.C.

Lisa Murkowski had plenty to say when safely back in AK, in an interview published in the Anchorage Daily News. She has verbally joined forces with Nebraska (Republican) Sen. Ben Sasse, both of whom now insist that Trump is unfit to serve after organizing and fomenting a coup d'état. They have separated themselves from the appeasers, facilitators, co-conspiractists, and crackpots who populate the once GOP and now Cult of Trump. But, we must question -- how laudatory is it in them to only come to Jesus at this stage?

Here's Murkowski in her own words. . .

I want him to resign. I want him out. He has caused enough damage.

"I think he should leave. He said he’s not going to show up. He’s not going to appear at the at the inauguration. He hasn’t been focused on what is going on with COVID. He’s either been golfing or he’s been inside the Oval Office fuming and throwing every single person who has been loyal and faithful to him under the bus, starting with the vice president. He doesn’t want to stay there. He only wants to stay there for the title. He only wants to stay there for his ego. He needs to get out. He needs to do the good thing, but I don’t think he’s capable of doing a good thing."

Murkowski said that while if the Republican Party has become nothing more than the party of Trump, I sincerely question whether this is the party for me."

Senator, there's no "if" about it. And there hasn't been for four years. Where has your conscience and self-examination been for 1,440 days? Why did you wait so long to come to Jesus?
________________________________________
If you want to read the interview of Alaska Senator (Republican) Dan Sullivan, here's his corresponding debriefing to the same paper.

>14 Limelite:
“Senator, there's no "if" about it. And there hasn't been for four years. Where has your conscience and self-examination been for 1,440 days? Why did you wait so long to come to Jesus?”

I live in North Carolina , just north of South Carolina & within yelling distance of LindseyGrahamSC . When I saw his eleventh hour denunciation of Trump’s faux pax presidency the other day I nearly hallucinated a political cartoon of a rat nimbly leaping from the bow of a ship labeled “Trump” just before it slid underwater. Lindsey started out with an independent opinion then totally became a Trump lap dog to appease the majority of his constituency.

Those folks will say absolutely anything for power and money.

>15 DugsBooks: He was just as nimble jumping onto that ship in the first place...

Michael Cohen, Ex-Fixer, Says Trump Psychotic Now

And in that state might burn down the White House. "Donald Trump would rather burn down the White House, than turn over the keys," he said.

Maybe that's why he's vacationing at Camp David. He can burn down the cabins there. Nobody cares.

Colin Powell Leaves the Stinking Corpse Behind

Former Republican Secretary of State, says he no longer considers himself a member of the party in CNN interview today. When asked if he thinks Republicans who refused to condemn President Donald Trump realize they “encouraged, at least, this wildness to grow and grow,” Powell makes no excuse that that is the case.

“They did,” Powell said. “And that’s why I can no longer call myself a fellow Republican.”

The stench from the rotten GOP offends the moral and criminal sensibilities of real American patriots, forcing them to leave a totally corrupt cult.

The GOP cult has three major things working against it
in this sedition-era. People are starting to contemplate
leaving the party. The stream of big bucks flowing to
reps from large donors is most likely going to be
slowing down. The brown demographic wave is
climbing the voting-age brackets.

BREAKING: McConnell Announces He Favors Impeachment

I was against it before it took war, murder, and destruction to make me for it. Sen. Maj. Leader now says, he's for impeaching Trump immediately, "Purging president from the party by impeachment will be made easier."

And what have YOU done for the past four years but GIVE the GOP to Donald Trump to own and brand with his TRUMP logo? NOTHING!

And since you want him gone, get your ass back to D.C., reconvene the Senate and begin the trial TODAY. Vote GUILTY yourself! Purge him tomorrow. Instead, we get tragedy today and comedy tomorrow.

What an empty suit and what a proven enabler of a traitor you are. If there any vestiges of a Repub Party left, it will purge you from its ranks as well for your eager willingness to destroy it.

GOP Aide Resigns While Lashing ‘Congressional Enablers of This Mob’

A top staffer at the House Armed Services Committee ripped lawmakers who backed Donald Trump’s challenge to Joe Biden's win.

Ranking Member Rogers and Members of the House Armed Services Committee,

All who serve this nation swear an oath to defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to bear true faith and allegiance to the same. Republican members of the House Armed Services Committee have led Congressional efforts to defend the nation and its Constitutional principles from foreign enemies since the establishment of the committee. Year after year, under Republican and Democratic Chairs, the committee has set aside factious contemporary events in the name of national defense. This is a legacy that I am extremely proud to have supported.

The sad, incontrovertible truth is that the people who laid siege to the Capitol were and continue to be domestic enemies of the Constitution of the United States. A poisonous lie that the election was illegitimate and should be overturned inspired so called “patriots” to share common cause with white supremacists, neo-Nazis and conspiracy theorists to attack the seat of American government. Anyone who watched those horrible hours unfold should have been galvanized to rebuke these insurrectionists in the strongest terms. Instead, some members whom I believed to be leaders in the defense of the nation chose to put political theater ahead of the defense of the Constitution and the Republic.

The decision to vote to set aside legitimate electors harmed the ability of every service member, intelligence officer, and diplomat to defend the nation and advance American interests. How are they to effectively defend American democratic ideals when the entire world saw so many members disregard those same ideals for cynical political purposes? Regardless of the motivations behind the vote, these members bear the consequences that the men and women in harm’s way will face for many years to come. I cannot imagine any series of events more damaging to the already fragile US led post-World War II order that has brought more peace and prosperity to the world than at any other time in history. These self-inflicted wounds are a gift to autocrats who seek a diminished America and are fundamentally inconsistent with the responsibility to provide for the common defense. Foreign intelligence services were likely on the scene and will certainly capitalize on the crisis it has caused – our people will pay a steep price. Congressional enablers of this mob have made future foreign conflict more likely, not less.

Going forward, the Committee must play a role in the accounting of this horrible chapter in our history. It is very disturbing that currently serving members of the armed forces participated in this. It is vitally important that the Committee hold the Department of Defense accountable for bringing any participants to justice. These extremist influences are a grave threat to our ability to defend the nation, and they must be expelled from the force immediately. I deeply regret some members may no longer have the credibility needed to accomplish this work.

All of our words and actions in the coming weeks and days will reveal those who believe in defending the Constitution, and those who stand only for self-interest and sectarianism. There can be no reconciliation and healing without accountability. While it is my hope the Committee finds a way yet again to legislate in a bipartisan way for the men and women in uniform in the 117th Congress and beyond, the failure of so many Republican members of the Committee to put the nation ahead of electoral politics compels my resignation from the staff. It has been the honor of a lifetime to serve the men and women in uniform, their families, and the civilians who also serve the Nation. I am proud of the things we have accomplished on their behalf, and the work we have done to strengthen national defense.

In Service,
Jason Schmid

MSNBC: 3rd Most Powerful House Republican Will Vote for Impeachment

Liz Cheney said she will join Democrats and vote yes on their Articles of Impeachment.

What confuses me is that all of the votes about the rules and stuff are still strictly following party lines. Do as I say not what I do?

Longtime Republican Member of Congress Bids Rotten Party of Trump Goodbye

Mickey Edwards gave up his job as a reporter and editor on the Oklahoma City Times when a young man because he believed fervently in the Republican Party and devoted himself full time to growing its membership in a town and state that had "always" been firmly Democratic.

. . .I couldn’t be both a newspaperman and a partisan activist quoted on the front page. I was offered a promotion to editorial writer, but I would have to choose: the GOP or my job. I gave up a job I loved. I became national chairman of the American Conservative Union and one of three founding trustees of the Heritage Foundation.

He went on to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1977-1993 and was a Republican for more than 60 years. But following the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol Building, Edwards has decided to leave the GOP.

In his own words, you can hear how deeply affected he is by his decision, how his identity is wrapped up in the old Republican Party.

"I have been a Republican for 62 years," Edwards explains. "I have been a Goldwater conservative, a Reagan conservative, and a W conservative. And I have now left the Republican Party — a party that has been at the center of my entire adult life, a party that defined me to others and to myself."

But things have changed.

. . .the GOP, in the Trump era, has become "the opposite of what it was" and "has become a cult idolizing a ruler, a trasher of institutions of democracy driven by falsehoods and hatreds." And his decision to leave the GOP after 62 years was inspired by the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol Building and Trump's refusal to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election.
(SNIP)
"For the most part," Edwards laments, "even those Republican members of Congress who didn't join the attempt to overthrow the election remained unforgivably silent out of party loyalty and fear, making them complicit nonetheless in this bloody attack on their own country. I've left the Republican Party. I will not be going back."

Our nation will not thrive if clueless, gullible voters keep re-electing hate-filled
lunatics like Jim Jordan. He is upset because a ranking GOP member, who
admires and respects the party's founder and all he stood for, turned against a
seditionist cult leader. The party has had a major wake-up-call over the last
week. Perps like JJ are the reason the GOP has to reconstitute itself or
disappear into the dustbin of history.

Reading about new R reps Lauren Boebert and the QAnon nut Marjorie Taylor Greene.
I was heartened this morning to listen to new rep from Michigan, Peter Meijer, and Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.),
but like an amoeba, I can't but believe the Republican party is headed to a meiotic event!

RaRa Avis Press Total Memescaping RaRaAvisPress | 6:55 AM · Jan 17, 2021:
Just batting ideas around here, America, but maybe someone with a rapsheet as long as that of @laurenboebert
should never be able to run for office or own guns? Crazy idea, I know, but humour me.
Image ( https://twitter.com/RaRaAvisPress/status/1350773829459697664/photo/1 )
Image ( https://twitter.com/RaRaAvisPress/status/1350773829459697664/photo/2 )
Image ( https://twitter.com/RaRaAvisPress/status/1350773829459697664/photo/3 )

GOP Senate reps appear to be in career-saving modes ~ they want Biden and
the Dems to forfeit the Senate part of the impeachment process so that they do
not have to go on record convicting the con man/cult personality the GOP voters
so adore ~ few profiles in courage or patriotism can be found on the GOP side of
that Capitol chamber. Lincoln must be shedding a waterfall of tears for the
dying party he founded.

>26 margd:

Sarah Palin clone. Well, with Republican elected officials, we all know how much character matters. Not at all. Roy Moore of AL being the poster child equivalent of the conservative Golden Boy.

>27 Molly3028: Lindsey wants healing! Dismiss the impeachment charge!

Narrator: Sorry Lindsey, it doesn't work that way. The Senate must conduct a trial and vote, putting you and the rest of you cowards on record as supporting someone who would undermine democracy in the United States.

I'll stay with the South African post-apartheid model of getting along by trying to unite a divided population.

Truth and Reconciliation Panels. Republicans have to stand before the panel and tell the truth about their perfidy, make a full confession, and await judgment -- prison or recompense?

Then talk to me about reconciliation.

>30 Limelite:

You're correct that reconciliation and healing don't come about just because politicians call for it. It has to be an intentional and organised process. It must be open, transparent, visibly impartial, and inclusive. There has to be buy-in from a significant portion of the population. Ideally it is led by individuals or institutions who can command respect and trust from at least many (albeit not all) people on all sides. In some countries a religious institution can play that role, but probably not in the USA where the churches are so polarised and complicit in the "culture wars". South Africa was fortunate to have Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu; if Martin Luther King had not been assassinated he might have played that role after the civil rights struggle, based on his thoughts set out in his letter from Birmingham Jail, but who knows, and "what ifs" are fairly pointless. A reconciliation process has several elements, including truth, justice and reparations. Justice does not have to mean retributive and punitive justice, which is the dominant model in the Global North; restorative justice can also be explored. There is also a lot of focus these days on "transitional justice" and "hybrid justice", recognising that the normal routine peace-time justice systems may not be adequate for this type of situation. While there needs to be truth and accountability, nevertheless as they discovered in Rwanda and elsewhere you can't imprison half the population; you have to find ways of living together. Reconciliation has differing levels and definitions, and that also needs to be explored. Reconciliation can mean a very deep level of coming together and healing relationships, but that might be more than what is needed. As one South African activist said to me of the situation in Burundi a few years ago, practically speaking reconciliation is the minimum relationship necessary for people to live side by side without killing each other.

It has often been noted that the USA had no reconciliation and healing process after the Civil War. There was a victory by one side, but that was it. Likewise the civil rights movement. It succeeded in changing legislative practice, but there was no healing process after that. And the same might become true of the current polarised situation in the USA. For the moment at least reason and constitutionality seems to have prevailed, at least on the surface, but there is a need to heal the simmering tensions just below the surface. It's worth noting that current conflicts are often rooted in unhealed former conflicts, so a truth and reconciliation process needs to look back a long way. It also needs to be a long-term process into the future. It can't just be done and dusted and let's move on in the space of a couple of years (or a four year presidential term). It needs continued long term work and commitment, which might also mean a lot of psychosocial support, as the process itself can be traumatising on top of the original trauma already caused by the conflict.

There are many models of truth and reconciliation across the world, so the USA should not be starting from scratch. It needs to have the humility to move beyond "American exceptionalism" and to recognise that it can benefit from the experience of others. On the other hand, any truth and reconciliation process has to be home grown. One of the things I have always appreciated about South African activists is that they are very willing to share their experience of truth and reconciliation, but always insist that nobody should try to copy them. Lessons can be learned, ideas can be gleaned, dynamics can be analysed, some mistakes can be avoided, but each situation is unique and needs its own solution. The Rwandan model was very different from the South African one.

Sorry for the mini-lecture, but this is one of the things I do for a living.

Trump, his cult following voters and his enablers have one all-encompassing
attribute in common ~ they find living in the 21st Century distasteful because
they continue to harbor their 20th Century biases. Sadly, that is going to be
hard, maybe impossible, to change.

>31 John5918:

Expertise need never apologize. I'm grateful for having your remarks to read because they epitomize informed opinion. Thanks!

Insurrection Proved 'Trumpism' Is a Cult of Personality

After the attempted coup by so-called Trump supporters, only one conclusion is inescapable the violent and non-violent who took part in the march on the Capitol are not patriots. Don't believe me? Just count the flags by type and note the ratio of various Trump banners to the stars and stripes. Twenty to one? At least.

Whither the allegiance of the insurrectionists? Easy. To their cult leader, not their country. One can imagine their Pledge of Allegiance. . .

I pledge allegiance to the flags of Donald Trump, non-American. And to the cult for which they stand -- one hate group, under him, with liberty and justice for whites.

What unifies their various hatreds under the Trump banner is a common orientation to conspiracy theories and an affiliation for any lie that makes them the righteous victim of liberal persecution, for any "sin" from believing they're Christian, or gunophilic, or privileged by Caucasian birth.

In four years, Trump cultivated his base, a gullible donor base who pay membership fees to their Cult Leader not to enjoy the privileges of his various private golf clubs but to enjoy the privilege of giving their money to non-existent causes -- like the "Stop the Steal" legal fight staged by Trump to bilk believers of donations to prove the unproveable and nullify the certified. They were not told that all donations under a certain amount were going straight into Trump's personal purse, not to the Glorious Cause.

They have been siphoned away from reality symbolized by the Republican Party; they have become the baitfish being gobbled up by Republican political sharks, who have neither loyalty to their country, nor the Republican Party. Trump has demonstrated how easy it is to keep the baitfish schooling around you simply by throwing them crumbs of lies and treats of deception. Never pursuers of the high road, the Hawleys, Cruzs, Lindseys, and innumerable other opportunistic deluded conspiracy nuts, can not stoop too low to attract the white cultists to their specious "stands."

The Republican Party will be starved of money by the exodus from its ranks of the rank and file; by the suddenly parsimonious mega-donors who can't face down the social stigma of giving cash to political pariahs; by the rote donations from corporate givers who will understand the realities of the market place are far more worthy of their monetary devotion than the bankrupt promises of corrupt politicians.

Without the millions in-flowing from the NRA, from the unfunded PACS once supported by the "little" people, from hedge fund managers, bankers, soda-pop makers, athletic shoe manufacturers, and pillow pushers, the Republican Party that once was will wither and turn to dust. Especially, since the populist hustlers in having aligned themselves with the baitfish, have left a leadership vacuum. That's why Ronna Romney McDaniel was reelected Chair of the Repub. National Comm. (RNC).

Her leadership chops are seriously in question, considering the RNC lost two senate seats in GA after the RNC poured in $15 million dollars to preserve them. Likewise, the gains in the House were largely made by Trumpist candidates who defeated the RNC endorsed people in the primaries. There is little prospect that McDaniel will enjoy greater success in the face of greater power within the Party belonging to the Cult.

A combination of financial starvation and rudderless leadership is not symptomatic of revitalization of the historical GOP. But it is a recipe for the continued domination of a two-party system: the Democratic Party and the Anti-Democratic Party, which truly reflects our polarized citizenry. That means a continuing civil "war" between two factions that cannot even agree on the truth. Under our present circumstances, it's hard for a realistic person to be optimistic about America's future. The question that will be decided in the near future is will America be a representative democracy under majority rule, or will it be a dysfunctional territory of cultist conspiracy theorists who only believe in their Leader.

If anything it shows how susceptible people can be to propaganda and that a significant % of Americans have fallen under a spell of one sort or another. The inability of the Trumpista's to critique Trump is dangerous---they would rather hang Mike Pence first and somehow or other they found themselves running up and down the halls of Congress after having fought with Capitol police for hours looking for congresspeople to beat up or kill and so another narrative is created--that they'd somehow been led astray by BLM and Antifa provocateurs--because really they think of themselves as the 'good guys' who do 'good things' and how do you explain yourself coherently after a day spent looting and destroying?---a little self examination might go a long way--not seeing any of that though.

>31 John5918:

Since I mentioned Martin Luther King and nonviolence, this article referring to his daughter Bernice might be relevant:

'We still have a choice': Bernice King calls for nonviolent activism in dangerous time (Guardan)

Minister and daughter of Martin Luther King Jr warns against violence both physical and spoken amid pandemic, racism and insurrection...

This perhaps also demonstrates a difference between those calling for the overthrow of the election, white supremacy and other extreme right wing causes on the one hand, and those protesting for democracy, Black Lives Matter and other progressive causes on the other. The leaders of the former movement incite and stoke violence and then reluctantly try to distance themselves from it when it happens; the leaders of the latter do everything they can to avoid violence, even though they cannot prevent a few of their supporters succumbing to the temptation in isolated instances.

Timing in life is everything

It appears that the GOP is about to experience a lengthy civil war just as the
brown demographic wave is moving up the voting-age brackets. GOPers spent
four long years enabling a life-long con man/cult personality and shrinking the
party. GOPers make up 25% of the registered voters in the country at this
time. Fate is laughing, and the guys in charge of history's dustbin are ready to
collect the GOP's remains.

>35 lriley:

If propaganda didn't work, the ad agencies on Madison Avenue in NYC and
around the country would have gone out of business decades ago.

From the Pickled End of the Republican Party Gene Pool

Comes Lindsey Graham's advice on how to kick a dead elephant. Graham Hopes Trump Stays ‘Leader’ of GOP, Says Enemies Will ‘Get Erased’ If They Try to Oust Him.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) on Wednesday warned fellow Republicans that if they try to “erase Donald Trump from the party, you’re going to get erased.”

“I hope people in our party understand the party itself,” he told Fox News hours after President Joe Biden was sworn-in.

“Most Republicans like his policies. A lot of Republicans like his style,” Graham said. “A lot of people are disappointed with him personally at times but appreciate the outcomes he’s achieved for our country.”

You bet, Lindsey! We understand exactly what the Republican Party is now. It's the political home of white racist liars.

As for Trump's policies, we also know Republicans like demonizing people of color and punishing them for being brown. One would have to be a pithed frog not to clearly see that Republicans are oriented to what's good for the country only in terms of what's good for white patriarchy. Only a sensory deprived idiot wouldn't be able to understand that Republicans are power hungry wealth grabbers who believe that keeping America's working force on the edge of poverty is what will keep them in power. Especially, policies to keep non-whites away from economic power which they will gain through the ballot box.

Hence the driving force behind Republican policies promoted the hardest by Trump is the disenfranchisement and suppression of voters of color because they mostly affiliate with Democrats. Besides, the minorities will soon be the majority, which because of prosecution by Trump and racist Republicans like you, Lindsey, will guarantee that they will work to see to it that no Republicans are elected to any public office ever. Not as long as they espouse and have a record of aligning with Trump and white supremacist attitudes that boil down to disregard for the rule of law if it stands in the way of me getting what I want.

Disdain for non-whites and the law is the pustulance within the Trumpian boil that infects the Republican Party. I suspect the poison will spread and the infection will become worse until it overwhelms the Republican/conservative body politic because the "patient" is too afraid of the pain to excise it and can't handle the truth.

Murderous Death Cult Infuses Republican Party and Controls It

Thank you Donald Trump.

Extremism and Seditition aren't just tolerated by the Republicans -- it's welcomed. Trying to administer justice and consequences to rioters and murderers, conspirators, and inciters to violence, Republicans react with, "move on," "waste of time," "never mind," "overreacting Democrats," "partisan divisiveness." They are so afraid of their base and constituents threats of violence to themselves and their families, and are so spineless in the face of those threats, that all they want to do is appease the mob.

Funny, Democratic Rep., Hakeem Jeffries'family received death threats on his home phone and learned that the man even had his address. Trump's false narrative that he won the election is what motivated his threats.

Funny, Rep. Tom Malinowski of NJ received death threats from Q-Anon fed lies about sex trafficking that the Republican Party specifically quoted and put out. A Republican Party official, when confronted, said, "Oh it's not my job to police what they do with those ads."

Both Jeffries and Malinowski found themselves able to stand up against those death threats and voted for impeachment. A pair of Profiles in Courage.

Republicans would rather placate the marauding horde than stand up to them so they don't lose their seats. They falsely justify their cowardice by insisting that if they resist being run over by the violent rabble, then all their seats will be held by the violent rabble. Talk about Surrender Monkeys!

Having created this monster by the placation of DJT, they now insist that the same placating behavior will tame it. Yeah, that worked. Do it again.

Today, the weekly report from states that report voter registration changes and trends indicates tens of thousands of Republican voters have left the party since the date of the insurrection and killings at the Capitol. Apparently, they are the honorable Republicans still capable of feeling shame in being associated with murderous thugs and usurpers of the Constitution who are the proud boys of anti-democracy movements and racist fascism armed gangs.

The Republican Party is officially dead. It died of cowardice.

Ms. Greene the QAnon GOP House rep from Georgia apparently got a plum committee assignment. It appears the the GOP leaders are shooting arrows into the hot-air balloon that is barely keeping the party aloft. And they wonder why members are planning to leave the Congress and why individuals are leaving the party.

The Genocidal Senate Leader of Trumpism: Josh Hawley

If the mustache fits. . .

https://news.trust.org/item/20210211013256-gp1g4
EXCLUSIVE-Dozens of former Republican officials in talks to form anti-Trump third party

"More than 120 of them held a Zoom call last Friday to discuss the breakaway group, which would run on a platform of "principled conservatism," including adherence to the Constitution and the rule of law - ideas those involved say have been trashed by Trump."

This group has no time to waste. The next election period is just around the corner. The carcass of Lincoln's party is rotting at warp speed thanks to Trump and his cult followers.

>43 Molly3028: Good for them! I think a good name for it would be the Constitution Party so that they would be less likely to forget why it was created in the first place.

Wouldn't it be better to appropriate "Patriot Party" from the Trump Cadre? For sure, his supporters would be confused, and Trump would have to fish around for another name, like "Insurrectionist Party."

More seriously, I think the "Conservative Party" is accurate and creates a broader umbrella of implied ideology for them to found a platform on.

Answering the Topic Title Question

What happens to a dead elephant? We learned today on the last day of presentations of the respective cases for and against conviction of the Republican Party leader for inciting the Jan. 6th insurrection.

The Republican senators perform a necropsy. Tomorrow they will announce the summary of findings and stipulate the cause of death. Well, the Democrats will. The Republicans will argue that there were no organs in the dead animal because the Democrats removed and hid them before the procedure. That, in spite of the fact that everyone watched the procedure on TV and saw the evidence for themselves and all of the organs were there.

What is left of the now rotting carcass? Not much beyond the persistent stink. Decomposition is advanced after four days under the bright lights of scrutiny. Decomposition was accelerated by a breaking story from CNN on the knife fight between Donald Trump and Kevin McCarthy.

By 6:30 tonight, the entire watching world realized that the Republicans had hung themselves out to dry. The Democrats had won the case. Even if the Republicans win the vote, the world knows the truth of Trump's perfidy and conspiracy to overthrow the legitimate government of the country he had been president of for four years.

If the Republicans vote to convict Trump, the cute little manageable crocodile that they've been raising in the bathtub will claw its way out, fully grown, and eat them alive. If they vote to convict, they are also voting to convict themselves since most of them were culpable of the same high crimes and misdemeanors as Trump -- those who voted to subvert the ECVs even after the marauders were cleared out; and those who spread and promoted the Big Lie -- any of them who have not uttered the words that Joe Biden won the election and Donald Trump lost it, fair & square; and those who did not condemn the violence of armed Trump fanatics, especially the racist and cop-killer advocates that has transformed itself into the paramilitary arm of the Trump faction that controls their party -- tribus una omnium dominatur instead of e pluribus unum.

If they vote to acquit, every witness to this week's Senate trial will know that they are in thrall to DJT, afraid of his Red Shirts and cravenly willing to sacrifice democracy out of fear and personal ambition to become the next Donald Trump. In short, the GOP will become a walking dead elephant.

What a contrast to the Greatest Generation, no?

https://www.mediaite.com/politics/poll-record-high-63-of-republicans-think-a-thi...
POLL: Record High 63% of Republicans Think a Third Party is Needed

My take ~ about 80k voters flipped the Electoral College to Trump in 2016. They also sowed the seeds of the destruction of the GOP at the very same time! It is time for GOP reps to be very wary of the gift fate handed to them back in 2016.

LMFAO!!!

Trump: ............2

Witch-hunters: 0

Bye, suckers!!!!!!!!! ;^)

Prox and Tucker Carlson are sounding more and more like twins who were separated at birth! Trump never won the popular vote in any election. A majority of Americans' minds were never captured by the "show" of the life-long con man and cult personality.

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

Donald Trump killed an old saw while killing the GOP. Once and for all he put paid to the lie that any American can be president. Beyond that he proved that a con man who says he's a businessman can become a billionaire -- as long as enough stupid b/millionaires can be conned into supporting him. Here's the story of one such stupid millionaire.

Fred Eshelman, a NC millionaire financier, is out $2.5 million of his personal bank account. He literally bought the voter fraud Big Lie Big Time. And now he's woke to the fact that he's been pwnd. Wednesday morning after election day he got out of bed to find that Trump was on a resolute path to defeat. The battleground states -- in close votes -- broke for Biden and Trump was cooked goose.

(He) and his advisers reached out to a small conservative nonprofit group in Texas that was seeking to expose voter fraud. After a 20-minute talk with the group's president, their first-ever conversation, Eshelman was sold."

Obviously, Mr. E. is a Trump Mini-Me, all gut reaction and little fact based decision making. There's no evidence that the guy even spent 20 minutes investigating facts and comparing them to his bedtime belief of the night before. In two words, he failed to perform a reality check before writing a personal check.

Now, he wants his money back. BWAHAHAHAHAHA!

So, what do rich dupes do that's unlike what rube dupes do when they realize they're suckers who fell for a scam? They sue, of course.

"Documents that have surfaced in Eshelman's litigation, along with interviews, show how True the Vote's private assurances that it was on the cusp of revealing illegal election schemes repeatedly fizzled as the group's focus shifted from one allegation to the next. The nonprofit sought to coordinate its efforts with a coalition of Trump's allies, including Trump attorney Jay Sekulow and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), the documents show," the newspaper reported. "Eshelman has alleged in two lawsuits — one in federal court has been withdrawn and the other is ongoing in a Texas state court — that True the Vote did not spend his $2 million gift and a subsequent $500,000 donation as it said it would. Eshelman also alleges that True the Vote directed much of his money to people or businesses connected to the group's president, Catherine Engelbrecht."

That's partly true, Cath. What she didn't tell is where much of the money also was laundered and then siphoned into the Trump campaign coffers and that was further laundered into Trump's personal accounts for which he is stockpiling millions to defray past, present, and future legal costs and mortgage loan debt that amounts to a figure around $3 billion dollars combined.

While Eshelman has put himself into the class of minnows destined to be eaten by smarter sharks, those smarter Republican big dog financial donors have announced that they will no longer contribute to the Party, nor to the Party's candidates in any election ever again. Even the surviving Koch brother has snapped his purse shut to Republican access and expressed regret for his history of backing the neo-Nazi white supremacist agenda over years.

It doesn't take an accountant to conclude that the Republican Party won't be able to fund all the candidates it hopes to run in '22, much less '24 from Trump supporters who are the biggest voting demographic unemployed, retired, aging, and disappearing faster than young, working voters can (or want) to replace them. Besides, you can count on the moneyed Republicans opposing Trump and his endorsed surrogates in government because the stability necessary for money to make more money won't come from politicians lurching from one QAnonsense conspiracy to another.

At the rate big time donors are turning their backs on the Worst President Ever, there won't be enough moola to bury the dead elephant, and there won't be enough embarrassed bilked billionaires to even come to its funeral.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) Releases Reality Check Video

Titled, Republicans Leaving Party In Droves

>50 Limelite: You are right on the money in more ways than one. All those millions of dollars which poured in from donors who barely have two dimes to rub together, and although some of them will continue to donate, most will be forced to cut their spending on grifting politicians because their churches need those dollars as well.

Eshelman was a sucker, and he can afford to sue, but he's not going to get that money back.

>48 proximity1: Did you really think that the outcome was ever in doubt? Do you think that anyone ever believed that there was enough backbone in the Republican party to vote for the truth? It's not like anyone doubted for a minute that Trump was guilty - even McConnell copped to it, just after he denied it with his vote.

What's happened here is the Republican party got played. It was given not one but two opportunities to show that it is a party which can, in time of need, find a principle and base its decisions on that. And in both cases, it has failed completely and demonstrated just how craven and pathetic it is - Trump is clinging on to their sinking ship and dragging them to the bottom, and the Republicans don't have the balls to shoot him in the head and let him sink on his own.

Don't think the voters have not noticed.

Ex–Ohio State Wrestler Says Rep. Jim Jordan Asked Him to Deny Abuse Allegations
Avery Yang | Feb 12, 2020

Ohio representative and former Ohio State University wrestling coach Jim Jordan aided and abetted in the university's cover-up of sexual abuse within the program, a former team captain said in front of Ohio state legislators on Wednesday.

"Jim Jordan called me crying, groveling, begging me to go against my brother, begging me, crying for a half-hour," DiSabato said Wednesday. "That’s the kind of cover-up that’s going on there."

Adam DiSabato, captain of the team during the early 1990s, told members of the Ohio House Civil Justice Committee that Jordan and other officials ignored former Ohio State doctor Richard Strauss's sexual abuse of wrestlers from 1979 to 1997. DiSabato said that Jordan and other team officials knew about open-shower facilities that facilitated sexual harassment and abuse of team wrestlers. Jordan has previously denied the allegation...

https://www.si.com/more-sports/2020/02/12/jim-jordan-accused-cover-up-sexual-abu...

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/hannity-blasts-sanctimonious-mcconnell-for-slamming-...
Hannity Blasts ‘Sanctimonious’ McConnell for Slamming Trump: ‘The Time Is Now Coming for New Leadership’ in the Senate

My take ~ When a person is a member of a cult, he must see what the cult leader says he sees and hear what the leader says he hears. Truth doesn't exist in a cult follower's world. The landscape of their brains will never allow them to turn away from the lies of their cult leader. Trump and SH are 21st Century Peter Pans ~ they never grew up. Mitch is an adult on the right side of history. The truth about 1/6 will live on in videos and audios for generations.

A cult leader and his loons control the GOP these days ~ it must be nuked.

https://www.mediaite.com/news/pa-county-gop-official-lashes-out-at-pat-toomey-fo...
PA County GOP Official Lashes Out at Pat Toomey for Voting to Convict Trump: We Did Not Send Him to DC to ‘Do the Right Thing or Whatever’

“We did not send him there to vote his conscience. We did not send him there to do the right thing or whatever he said he was doing,” Ball said, offering a stridently partisan view of democratic representation. “We sent him there to represent us.”

The GOP this loon represents must be nuked during the next two election cycles.

In part what's going on with McConnell is his desire to take back the Senate majority in 2022. But another part is almost certainly maintaining his role as head of the Senate Republicans and Trump and friends are a threat to that. I really question whether someone like a Lindsey Graham or Ted Cruz might try to replace him as Senate leader and think it's very possible. What that might mean for a Romney, Sasse or a Murkowski who have set themselves in opposition to the Trumpian's is anyone's guess but I'm kind of thinking they'll be persona non grata and that the Trumpian republican party will move to replace all of them at the earliest possible moment. Romney would probably be the most difficult and his term doesn't end until 2024. Cassidy in Louisiana is in place until 2026.

From the democratic side it's time for DC and Puerto Rico statehood. Doing that is not only the right thing but should give them more breathing room by adding Senators and voting congresspeople. The republican party right now is a mess and there is an internecine war going on between the real RINO's who are the Trumpian's and the old Bushite/Cheney wing. I expect the Trumpian's to win but overall they will lose people doing it. As much as McConnell hopes to win back the Senate in 2022 I don't think it's happening and again there will be a lot more Republican open seats on the ballot and several of their current Senators are not running again like Portman, Toomey, Shelby and Tillis. 2022 actually should be an opportunity for the Democrats to increase their margin rather than lose it.

Burying the Elephant Unnecessary?: Republican Party Explodes All Over the Place

Not quite a cremation by self-immolation, but certainly a scattering of the ashes of the Reagan-Bush GOP. A slew of fallout stories hit the presses today following the inconceivable "not guilty" votes by Republican Senators in the face of the Democratic House Managers' dominant wall of facts that Trump did incite a mob to attempt to overthrow a democratically elected government and did betray his oath of office by not protecting the Capitol and Congress members from murderous attack. Chips, as they say, are falling where the may.

Let's delve into the piles.

In an interview, David Schoen explains that Castor and van der Veen the other two Trump lawyers, were most intent on a power grab, pushing him (Schoen) out of his position as lead attorney. He describes crippling dysfunction within Trump’s impeachment team and his clashes with Trump’s other lawyers. Said Schoen. . .

"The House put on a pretty good presentation. (Castor) seemed to think he was the best lawyer on the team, or something. So he stood up and said, 'I think I better jump in here.' He jumped in and obviously it was like a filibuster. It was not a good presentation.

"I thought, 'This guy's career is going to disappear. I don't know how he's going to get up in the morning.'"

Second story (If not already posted, I'll write up details in another thread.): Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, is suing former President Donald Trump and his attorney Rudy Giuliani for conspiring to incite the Capitol riots in January, in violation of the 1871 KKK Act. I gotta ask, "I wonder why Rep. Thompson would know about this piece of Civil Rights legislation passed back when the GOP was the Party of Lincoln?"

Third story, a cautionary tale to stay away from Fifth Avenue, a whole lot of attempted shooting of selves is going on.: Republican efforts to restrict voting risk backfiring on party, conservative Law School professor Nick Stephanopoulos, who specializes in election law, tells Bloomberg. Why do I agree with Stephanopoulous and believe this is suicidal for the GOP? Most of the 100+ bills being introduced in various state legislatures impose photo ID requirements.

. . .research showing that voter ID laws passed over the last decade not only don’t hamper minority turnout, but may even boost it by motivating angry Democrats and spurring stronger get-out-the-vote efforts.

Provoking backlash in swing states doesn't bode well for Republicans. Georgia, anyone?

Fourth story, another GA story. There's a lot of them. Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan on Tuesday slammed his own party for censuring fellow Republicans for voting to impeach or convict former President Donald Trump. Speaking to CNN host, Duncan said. . .

"This is a tough time for us here in Georgia, but also for us in America, and certainly as a party. But Alisyn, I think (the) majority of Americans are ready for us. . .to use this as a pivot point to move on and talk about real issues."

Camerota then asked Duncan what he thought of Rep. Adam Kinzinger's (R-IL) family members lashing out at him and accusing him of betraying his Christian faith for voting to impeach the president.

"It's cringeworthy to hear people use faith for it," he said. "Our family has been shocked that the perspective that some folks brought us to."

His remark directly cites only one example of Republicans censured by their party for voting their (largely) Christian consciences that taught them right from wrong. Thank you for your hive mind warp, evangelicals!

Fifth story: Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) does the same thing to his state's GOP leadership for censuring him in a unanimous vote.

In a statement, Burr said it was "truly a sad day for North Carolina Republicans."
"My party's leadership has chosen loyalty to one man over the core principles of the Republican Party and the founders of our great nation," he said.

Still think the Republican Party is a political party and not a Trump Suicide/Death Cult?

Sixth story: Could former Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), be turning his back on the Trump Cult like so many fellow Republicans fleeing the GOP in droves? The Biden Administration is also looking at Cindy McCain (widow of former Sen. John McCain). . . .(Flake) is being considered by the Biden administration as a potential ambassador to South Africa, as well as other postings in Europe. Flake served a Mormon mission to Zimbabwe; McCain may get a plum western Europe appointment. Could Biden's willingness to award political sanity over political donors signal to other disgruntled Republicans that hope of life in public service still exits, but beyond the GOP? Also, nice subtle move, "Sleepy Joe" to woo AZ voters into remaining blue.

Seventh and Eighth stories are Republican wah-wahs.

Trump lover, Sen. Ron Johnson of WI. . .

Andrew Desiderio
@AndrewDesiderio
Ron Johnson still going after McConnell this morning on the radio:

“I think he needs to be a little careful... When the leader of the Senate conference speaks, he has to understand what he says reflects on all of us. And I didn’t appreciate his comments, let’s put it that way.”
11:52 AM · Feb 16, 2021

Feeling the burning desire to be Senate Minority Leader in the future, or do you have a vision of yourself as a presidential candidate in '24, sir? Johnson's political style is straight out of Trump's "How To Bully Your Way To the Presidential Pulpit." Remember his shouting match with Sen. Mitt. Romney during the Impeachment II trial? Plus, I'll also bet RoJo is boiling over Biden's visit to his home state while the president is enjoying a 60% approval rating, a percentage that Trump only reached in disapproval. Will there be hell to pay?

Finally, (Fun as it is, I'm getting tired of all this schadenfreude). Pennsylvania state GOP chair lashes out after impeachment: We did not elect Senator Pat Toomey 'to do the right thing'. Instead, the former head of the Club for Growth is getting clubbed by his own party.

Republican state party chairman Lawrence Tabas has advised committee members that he will soon call a meeting to “address and consider actions related to the impeachment vote.” Though the notice didn’t specifically mention Toomey, four party insiders said Monday that there’s growing momentum behind a push to censure the senator.

County parties across the state are already doing so.

“The York County Republican Committee condemns (Toomey). . .“It was overwhelming. There was no debate,” said Jeff Piccola, the York County Republican chairman and a former state senator. “They were cheering when they were voting and when the resolution was being read. . .it wasn’t my idea.”

. . .loyalty to the former president has become an overriding litmus test in the GOP. It suggests Trump will continue to loom over the party as it looks ahead to 2022 campaigns for governor and U.S. Senate.

Confirming the liberal assessment that the Republican Party is little more than a Cult of Personality, aka, the Party of Trump, it's hard to continue the fiction that the GOP mastodon hasn't lumbered into the La Brea Tar Pits.

Rush Limbaugh, the dude who started America on the path to the Trump era, is dead. He died on the day Trump's Atlantic City casino was demolished. The GOP's death knell is growing stronger.

I understand they're already taking reservations for time slots to shit on his grave.

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-gop-2650596877/?traffic_source=Connatix

Trump's continued dominance over Republicans is a 'stage four cancer diagnosis for the GOP'

. . . "It shows the consequences of four years of Trump. But it shows something worse," writes Rothkopf. "It shows the consequences of tens of millions of Americans buying into Trump's lies, embracing his anger, celebrating his prejudices and seeking to make the party stand more as testament to the flaws of one man than it does for any ideas or values of any sort. It is a party that is not just defending but is actively promoting white supremacist domestic terrorism. That is no longer an aberration."

This morning's video of the implosion made me wish this was the perfect metaphor for what (we hope) will happen to anything and anyone named Trump.

https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/beto-we-are-nearing-a-failed-state-in-texas-t...
Beto: ‘We are nearing a failed state in Texas’ thanks to GOP leadership

My take ~ Texas is going to be turning dark blue during the next two election cycles. And, the GOP deserves all of the credit for the colorful political switch. The Dems will most likely control Texas politics from 2022 going forward.

https://www.mediaite.com/news/nikki-haley-goes-on-a-tear-against-anti-trump-medi...
Nikki Haley Goes on a Tear Against ‘Anti-Trump Media’ Trying to ‘Divide Republicans’ in Op-Ed After Politico Profile

My take ~ NH threw gasoline on the GOP's internal war last week. The media is just allowing the war to unfold by itself over the next 2/4 years.

https://www.mediaite.com/uncategorized/fox-nation-announces-new-tucker-carlson-p...
Fox Nation Announces New Tucker Carlson Podcast, Documentary Series

For this reason, and many others, I hope R. Murdoch is going to be taking his finally walk into the sunset pdq. The last thing the country needs is more hate, fear and lies spewing from the mouth of this white nationalist with mental-health issues.

https://www.mediaite.com/opinion/photos-of-ted-cruz-allegedly-fleeing-to-cancun-...
Photos of Ted Cruz Allegedly Fleeing to Cancun During Texas Arctic Blast Disaster Spark Outrage

Texas could have had Beto, but it re-elected this Trump cult follower who threw his wife and his father's memory under the bus. GOPers' infatuation with Trump is hopefully going to be the death of their careers.

McConnell's next chapter: Guiding the post-Trump GOP
BURGESS EVERETT and MELANIE ZANONA | 02/14/2021

...McConnell made clear in a Saturday evening interview that he will not hesitate to wade into future primary races if a Trump-backed candidate — like, say, Kelli Ward in Arizona or the former president's daughter-in-law Lara in North Carolina — threatens his bid to retake the majority.

...though McConnell excoriated Trump on Saturday for a “disgraceful dereliction of duty” during the Jan. 6 insurrection, afterward he quickly reverted to type and avoided the former president's controversies...And he did not elaborate on Saturday comments that appeared to hint Trump may face criminal prosecution.

...McConnell also declined to say if, should Trump seek the White House in 2024, he would stand in opposition: “I’m focused on ‘22.”...his members...are already beginning to trash Biden’s agenda as “far left." It's a strategy that allows Republicans to mostly ignore Trump for a few months, at least.

....not everyone listens to the party leader...Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.)...Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)...half-dozen senators who look to be mulling presidential runs, many under the Trump mantle...(Minority Leader) Rep. Kevin McCarthy...potential presidential hopefuls such as Mike Pompeo.

...Some on the right say Trump’s influence in the GOP isn’t fading just because he is out of office, thanks to his draw on the campaign trail and ability to grab headlines.

...Unlike the Senate, many House members are elected in noncompetitive, gerrymandered districts. That's produced a decidedly pro-Trump GOP conference over the years

...Trump leaves the GOP at a crossroads: It’s hard to imagine the party's next two years will be pretty given its divisions over Trump’s impeachment, his agenda and how to deal with his extra-legal challenges to the election. Soon after Trump's acquittal, state parties began hammering Senate Republicans who voted to convict.

...2022 doesn’t look so bad to (McConnell)...“The difference between now and 2009 is the difference between 40 and 50...I was there in 2009. I know what it looks like after you got clobbered. We didn't get clobbered (2020). We lost the White House.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/02/14/mcconnells-next-chapter-guiding-the-pos...

#68--Losing the two Georgia seats had to hurt--though the Warnock goes back up in 2022. Kind of would be smart of the dems to push DC and Puerto Rico statehood through before 2022. It's not going to happen if they lose the majority. If they do it they'll at the very least add 3 and probably 4.

There will once again be a lot more republican senate seats up in 22 than democratic ones. Already we also have 4 republicans retiring--Toomey,Shelby, Tillis and Portman. Toomey's will be a prime target for the D's. NC has turned purplish though the R's probably have a slight edge. Ohio might be interesting. It's a state Trump just won by 8 points but their leading Trumpian candidate got his ass handed to him by Sherrod Brown in 2020 one of the most liberal Senators. The thing being he's kind of pretty dumb.

2024 is when there will be a lot of dem Senate seats up. What makes me wonder is if Trump if he wins the nomination becomes a ball and chain for them in the general election. We shall see.

Dying Elephant Emits Putrescence

Capitol Police are investigating newly elected Republican Congress members who tried to exert white privileged supremacy by evading metal detectors installed in the Capitol after the MAGA insurrection.

Huffington Post reporter, Matt Fuller is being questioned as a witness to the events. One case involves a member of Congress potentially assaulting a police officer and the other involves a lawmaker trying to bring a gun onto the House floor.

(Fuller) observed Rep. Russ Fulcher (R-Idaho) roughly push his way past an officer who was operating the metal detectors. The best way to describe what Fulcher did was he “manhandled” the officer, a Black woman who was significantly smaller than the congressman.

Fulcher set off the magnetometer. . .(then) grabbed the officer with both hands and pushed past her roughly.

Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) tried to bring a gun onto the House floor. (Fuller) also observed and publicly reported on that incident and was a material witness to Harris (who tried) to get another member. . .to hold his gun for him while Harris voted.

Harris went through the magnetometer that day, set off the machine and then complied with a search with a metal detector wand. The police officer conducting the search located a gun on Harris. . .

Members are allowed to carry firearms on the Capitol campus but are not allowed to carry them onto the House floor, and the District of Columbia requires a special permit for the concealed carrying of firearms.

It is unknown if Harris has a CC permit; Reporter Fuller heard Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.) tell Harris, “I don’t have a license for that.” when Harris attempted to make him take his gun.

What a stink made by two white male "supremacists" sent to Congress by Trump supporters. No doubt they believe, IOKIYAR.

#70--Katko I suspect is on the outs with much of his party now after voting to impeach Trump.

>71 lriley:

Imagine the outs he'll be in after he testifies under oath against Harris.

#72--as it turns out the impeachment of Donald Trump was bipartisan with 10 republican Congresspeople and 7 republican Senators joining ranks with the democrats to say Donald endangered the country and it was a leap for those 17 who are to great extent now considered pariah to their own party base. I also haven't seen any remarks by Katko (not saying there aren't) suggesting he has any intention of testifying against the Vice President Harris. I suspect that fantasy of impeaching Harris (for whatever I don't think even they know) is there for other republicans though.

I do not share the politics of those 17 for sure either. I do think however that Herrera Beutler, Cheney and Kinzinger in particular have really stuck their necks out and there is political courage there in doing the right thing knowing your political life is on the line. So many republicans talk about cancel culture yet here they are censuring those who voted their conscience on this.

Our tax dollars at work:

Marjorie Taylor Greene has figured out a way to get attention from her House colleagues. Force a vote of the full chamber on a motion to adjourn, which she's done for a second straight day. Ties up the floor for about an hour.
- Manu Raju (CNN) @mkraju | 12:43 PM · Feb 25, 2021

>74 margd: Well, if you haven't got any ideas, you might as well make a nuisance of yourself, right?

She knows how the Republicans do.

Arizona republican congressman Andy Biggs is pointing the finger at antifa and black lives matter for postal delays. One has to wonder if it's just pure stupidity or just cynicism taken to the nth degree.

CPAC is Dead

No longer the annual Republican policy strategy convention of yore. CPAC has now become a raucous rally for Trumpism and the reincarnation of "smoke-filled rooms" presidential nomination tasks that in more "modern times" has been the responsibility of primary elections. More evidence of Republican (MAGA) cancel culture? Eliminate the voice of the people by claiming elections are not to be trusted, not even their own primary elections? Then answer that claim with a "solution" that allows only the most strident voices to decide who will be the banner carrier in '24? Looks like it.

Instead of electing its leaders, Republicans have returned to the Age of Divine Right of Kings and will be anointing Trump as their Chosen Orange One. After all, without the customary big donor money that has been cut off, thanks to Trump's traitorous behavior that came to a head 1/6, Republican candidates of the Trumpian persuasion will have to depend on grassroots, ditto-heads, and closet Nazis to fund a campaign. They can hardly count on those financial sources to fund primaries and a general election whose costs mount to hundreds of millions of dollars without major corporate funding. Mr. Pillow, notwithstanding.

Policy concerns? Who needs policies or visions of a better future when promises (empty) and personality (con man) can get it done and return white supremacists to power? In the euphoria that can only come from delusion, today's Republicans have embraced the idea that only a L O S E R can lead them. Talk about your novel virus of an idea! Guess they're tired of winning in the Reality Based Community when one can never lose by living a lie.

I'm so glad that Mitch McConnell heroically flip-flopped again (I've lost count) and enthusiastically proclaimed that he will support Trump if he's his party's nominee in '24. Since Trump flipped GA blue, Trump + McConnell + Mr. Pillow (Trump's potential Veep?) and all the other crazy clowns (I'm looking at you, Cancun Ted) ought to be able to get both themselves un-elected and turn many other states a noble blue, too.

Is it polite to offer thoughts and prayers before the funeral?

Republican Declares His Party "Breathing Its Last"

The author of Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from within on Modern Democracy, Tom Nichols, writes in The Atlantic that, "The GOP has become, in form if not in content, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the late 1970s." In his essay, he underscores the direct parallels between the Communist Party under Brezhnev, who. . .

. . .had cemented his grip on the Communist Party by elevating opportunists and cronies around him who insisted, publicly and privately, that Brezhnev was a heroic genius. Factories and streets and even a city were named for him, and he promoted himself to the top military rank of “Marshal of the Soviet Union.” He awarded himself so many honors and medals that, in a common Soviet joke of the time, a small earthquake in Moscow was said to have been caused by Brezhnev’s medal-festooned military overcoat falling off its hanger.
(SNIP)
Members of the Communist Party who questioned anything, or expressed any sign of unorthodoxy, could be denounced by name, or more likely, simply fired. They would not be executed—this was not Stalinism, after all—but some were left to rot in obscurity in some make-work exile job, eventually retiring as a forgotten “Comrade Pensioner.” The deal was clear: Pump the party’s nonsense and enjoy the good life, or squawk and be sent to manage a library in Kazakhstan.

The comparison is inescapable. As the conclusion will be, too, no doubt.

Another lesson from all this history is that the Republicans have no path to reform. Like their Soviet counterparts, their party is too far gone. Gorbachev tried to reform the Soviet Communist Party, and he remains reviled among the Soviet faithful to this day. Similar efforts by the remaining handful of reasonable Republicans are unlikely to fare any better. The Republican Party, to take a phrase from the early Soviet leader Leon Trotsky, should now be deposited where it belongs: in the “dustbin of history.”

What happens to a dead elephant? I hope I'm wrong, but the way things are going with respect to militant gerrymandering, voter suppression and Fox and company propaganda I'm afraid the answer is going to be - fall down and crush everything. Unless the Democrats can marshal some kind of very effective response in 2022 I have the feeling we are looking at what will be the last two years of the American experiment in democratic government.

If I'm not mistaken if Trump along with his three older children--Don Jr. Ivanka and Eric are convicted of tax fraud and other financial illegality in the New York case being prosecuted by Cy Vance besides whatever jail time they may or may not do they will be barred from running for a federal office. That may put something of a damper on the hold that shitbird family has on the republican party. From what I understand Vance has his tax records dating back to 2011. That would also put Trump's accountants and others who may have played a part in the bullseye of NY State as well and I suspect we will see some flipping of those. This is something that I look forward to seeing.

The nutballs, they're ba-ack... :(

Opening day at the circus #QPAC2021
1:22 ( https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1365480425003614211 )

- The Lincoln Project @ProjectLincoln | 8:54 PM · Feb 26, 2021

---------------------------------------------------------------

Did you prioritize sanity and skip CPAC? Good call. Here are the highlights.
Spoiler Alert: You missed nothing and we’re all in danger.

1:06 ( https://twitter.com/IAmPoliticsGirl/status/1365518259311714307 )
From MeidasTouch.com

-PoliticsGirl @IAmPoliticsGirl | 11:24 PM · Feb 26, 2021

-----------------------------------------------------------------

They built the CPAC stage shaped exactly like legit nazi symbol too! Coincidence? Mmm dunno;
CPAC speaker Rep. Gosar & TX AG Paxton are also headlining the white nationalist AFPAC as well.
Pretty mask-off wouldn't you say?

Image-photo of stage ( https://twitter.com/RobinMelz/status/1365526246340382720/photo/1 )
Image-history of symbol ( https://twitter.com/RobinMelz/status/1365526246340382720/photo/2 )
Image-as worn by (Nazi?) ( https://twitter.com/RobinMelz/status/1365526246340382720/photo/3 )

- TheRobMelz@RobinMelz | 11:56 PM · Feb 26, 2021

#81--don't want to lose that Neo-Nazi/Aryan Nations voting bloc. I bet you those guys are just thrilled that the GOP is once again legitimizing them.

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-cpac-2650821757/
'We are watching a dying political party': ex-GOP lawmaker trashes former colleagues appearing at CPAC

Joe Walsh ~
. . . "we are watching a dying political party. We're watching a political party die, before our very eyes. This Republican party is like one of those far-right, European parties. I think it's done as a national party. What used to be fringe in the Republican Party, this bigotry and this intolerance, the culture war, as you call it -- it's now the base of the party. It cannot be fixed. It cannot be reformed."

#83--They think they're going to win back the House and the Senate. I don't think so. They're like Lucifer's insurrectionist army that got driven out of heaven. Middle fingers for them. Trump got 74 million idiots to vote for him but I'm thinking next time it will be less because for one he's going to shut out anyone who isn't a 'pure 100% true believer cult fucking follower' and Biden with over 81 million would get more because the idea of that fucker running again is going to get even more people thinking fuck you Trump--we're not doing you again. I would vote for literally whoever had the best chance of beating him no matter who. One thing for sure though he's got the militia, white supremacist and Qball voting blocs locked up.

Some states allow independent voters a choice of ballot in the primaries. Think ahead y’all. I was an independent in WV all those years for that purpose. I moved to KY last year and cringing inside registered as a Republican for that purpose. I now get some interesting publications that Joe Average doesn’t.

I still put up Biden-Harris sign in my front yard till Inauguration Day.

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/republican-party-did-have-a-civil-war-and-the-confed...
‘Republican Party Did Have a Civil War and the Confederacy Won’: Matthew Dowd Calls Out GOP for Embracing Hatred of ‘Diverse America’

As usual, MD is correct in his analysis of the modern-day GOP. I doubt that voters in the rising brown demographic wave are going to buy into the tenents of a Confederacy-centered party.

Scoop: Ex-Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale launches super PAC ahead of 2022 midterms
Lachlan Markay | March 1, 2021

Former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale has founded a new super PAC and sister advocacy group, public records show.

...The groups (American Greatness PAC and the nonprofit American Greatness Fund) will allow Parscale himself to back candidates aligned with Donald Trump ahead of the 2022 midterms. They could also be used to deploy his new political data firm and harvest vital voter information for other clients.

...Another former Trump campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, has been tapped to lead a new super PAC aligned with the former president's political priorities.

...Parscale, whose relationship with Trump has improved since he publicly criticized the former president in December, also attended the Mar-a-Lago last week) meeting. It's not clear whether his American Greatness groups are components of any future Trump efforts.

https://news.yahoo.com/scoop-ex-trump-campaign-manager-015445109.html

I, for One, Hope Trump IS the '24 Republican Candidate

I wanna kick his ass again!

Already envisioning Harris' running mate. Dreaming about the coming day when Stacey Abrams is governor of GA. Believe Beto could beat the stuffing out of Cancun Cruz. See a Dem. taking Toomey's seat in PA.

And many more happy thoughts pursue me.

https://www.mediaite.com/news/mike-pence-torched-for-reviving-trumps-false-elect...
Mike Pence Torched for Reviving Trump’s False Election Claims Even After He Was Hunted by Capitol Mob

The carcass of Lincoln's party is rotting away at warp speed. Fortunately, that may mean that there will be nothing left to nuke in 2022 & 24. We must never again underestimate the power of a cult personality in the Internet era.

Reality-based Republicans Flee GOP & Register Democrat

Political extremism in a democratic government proves intolerable. For Republicans appalled by the GOP's continued enthusiasm of Donald Trump and his policies, enough is enough.

In leaning too hard into white identity politics—and perhaps being too focused on what he thought Reagan Democrats wanted—Trump accelerated the rise of a new voting bloc that is, in many ways, the mirror image of the Reagan Democrats.

Call them the Biden Republicans.

Who are they? They're white, highly educated, suburbanites, who support diversity. They don't suffer from "white grievance" syndrome like the blue collar Trump supporters do.

Millennials and Gen Z have a much higher proportion of college educational attainment, and they’re increasing their share of the electorate. The values of those voters continue to be aligned with Democrats.

It's doubtful that a Trump controlled GOP will mount candidates with appeal for these voters. But it's also likely that they will not be monolithic, one-party, straight ticket voters.

That said, the expanding tendency in today's remnant of the GOP is to put forward increasingly extremist nut jobs for office -- out-and-out QAnon conspiracists, loud and proud white supremacists, and shariah law favoring Christianist nationalists, aka Evangelicals.

The "Biden Republicans" acknowledge that the world best functions as a world economy; that the world best functions as a cooperative alliance of nations in opposition to tyranny; that the world's problems are America's problems and can only be solved at a worldwide level, not a national one. Think climate change, pandemics, and nuclear proliferation. In the face of those problems, America can't be "first" and only, like Trump touted. The Biden-Harris Administration recognizes this and is determined to govern in line with world reality, not in line with a cult personality.

At the rate the reality based Republicans are leaving the right wing party, soon the GOP will be peopled only by suckers willing to be gulled by a con man who tells them what they want to hear, no matter how egregious the lie.

Top Republican Donor Busted for Biggest Tax Fraud Scheme in History

Give a billionaire an inch in tax breaks and they'll take a mile in tax fraud. Robert Brockman, former CEO of Ohio-based software company Reynolds & Reynolds, was charged in October with running a $2 billion tax fraud scheme. Yet not a peep of condemnation from the Republican candidates and organizations that took his money.

Is this an example of 'cancel culture' Republican potato heads talk about -- attempts to blank out reality by pretending not to notice?

Department of Justice officials said at the time that the businessman had hidden capital gains income for more than 20 years through various offshore entities in Bermuda and Nevis and secret bank accounts. Brockman has pleaded not guilty to the alleged crimes.
(SNIP)
Representatives of the organizations that are still active did not respond when asked whether they plan to refund or give the total amount of contributions away to charity in the wake of the allegations.

Fear not, Brockman has his own strategy of 'cancel culture' and it involves cancelling his own mental competence.

. . .the 79-year-old Mr. Brockman claims in court documents he can’t be tried because he is suffering from dementia and is unable to assist in his own defense. Prosecutors said in court filings that he could be faking a mental decline. A hearing on his competency is scheduled for June, and if the court sides with Mr. Brockman, the charges could be dropped or deferred.

Obviously, his argument will center on, "I'd have to be really really crazy and non compus mentis to donate to all the right wing nut job candidates, groups, and organization that I did, considering they're such L O S E R S!"

Prosecutors have their own ideas how to cancel his crazy claims.

Court documents and interviews with his former employees, business associates and his younger brother portray him as a brilliant, sometimes penny-pinching executive with an anti-government streak that led him to regard the IRS as a corrupt organization unfairly targeting taxpayers.

It's only unfair if you are a Republican.

Brockman keeps a low profile and is virtually unknown outside his Houston social circle. How unknown is that, exactly?

(His) level of wealth would rank Mr. Brockman around 50th on the most recent Forbes 400 list of U.S. billionaires, well ahead of Twitter Inc. CEO Jack Dorsey and Fidelity Investments magnate Edward Johnson III. Mr. Brockman never appears on the list.

Guess that would be 'cancel culture' by unlisted number.

Anyway, there goes another conservative mega-donor that spells starvation for the GOP. Brockman hasn't recorded any political donations since 2017.

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/watch-lindsey-graham-defends-trump-friendship-admits...
WATCH: Lindsey Graham Admits Trump Has a ‘Dark Side’ But Hopes to ‘Harness the Magic’ for the Benefit of the GOP

LOL

As the brown demographic wave moves higher up into the voting-age brackets, the faster the GOP is becoming a white nationalist/supremacist cult. Apparently, Graham wants Trump to make him the national chairperson and spokesperson for the evolving group. As Matt Dowd said, the GOP had a civil war and the Confederacy won.

Republicans Unite to Kick Their Elephant When It's Down

Not a single Republican voted to pass the Senate amended American Rescue Plan, or COVID-19 relief act. Yet, latest polling shows 59% of Republicans support the bill in spite of the multi million dollar conservative smear campaign against it, and 75% of ALL Americans do. Never in recorded history have the elected representatives of a political party committed hara kiri in so public and so blatant a fashion. One could believe that Republican politicians desire the death of their party.

Was it Twitter that killed the GOP? When an unqualified conman leads your party and spends four years flapping his thumbs rather than working to accomplish anything legislatively to improve Americans' lives, what happens is that one man proves an entire party is incompetent no matter what office they occupy.

Republicans now have ambitions beyond just being consistently on the wrong side of history. Now they're avid to be on the wrong side of their own voters. Well, I have but one thing to say in response.

GO FOR IT!

https://www.mediaite.com/news/ron-johnson-not-threatened-by-capitol-mob/
Ron Johnson Says He Didn’t Feel Threatened by Capitol Mob: I Might’ve Been Concerned If It Was Black Lives Matter and Antifa

The Trump era has made it possible for people to say out loud what they have been thinking and saying in private for decades. The only thing conservatives want to preserve is life as it existed for blacks back in the 1950's. The GOP must be nuked in the 2022/24 election cycles. This white nationalist is destined to be a Murdoch hire when he leaves the Senate.

'Death' of Republican Trickle-Down Econ Myth = Dead Elephant

The first great right-wing conspiracy theory that took root in America's mythology as "greed is good" emphasized that by helping the rich get richer, the benefits of their wealth would trickle down and fill the pools that the poor swam in. You know, more employment, higher wages, more unqualified home mortgages for the American Dream, the end of regulation over raging free market capitalism because it only stifles American Enterprise. The myth that the USA is a special City on the Hill where anyone can get rich, if only we let the rich get richer!

Economists who have always been part of the Reality Based Community were voices in the wilderness, insisting that Reagan's "voodoo" economic theory was a Big Lie -- the original Big Lie. And once again, the Democrats have saved our country. From FDR, to WJC, to BHO, to JRB sensible, pragmatic, science based thinking Democratic presidents have rescued, polished, saved, and directed economic survival of our country. Each of the battles have been waged against rapacious capitalism and do-nothing Republican presidents untempered by intelligent regulation and oversight.

Not since the Great Depression was whipped by socialist ideas like a life-net for old people who can no longer work, well paid government infrastructure jobs when there was no private sector work, establishing a national center for public health (CDC), regulating Wall Street (SEC), protecting the finances of people seeking affordable housing (FHA), keeping people informed over the airwaves for free (FCC), insuring that peoples' hard won savings deposits didn't evaporate for no fault of their own (FDIC), helping farmers, w/o regard to their color, get loans (FCA), and electrifying the rural isolated Americans to bring families into the 20th C. and protect them from devastating floods (TVA) have our people been helped on a similar scale.

Until Joe Biden's $1.9T American Rescue Plan, giving money to those most impacted by the pandemic -- children and individual businesspersons teetering on the edge of poverty and loss and protecting our population from more disease and death on a wartime scale.

Two trillion dollars in the pockets of those on the bottom who never got to swim in those trickle down pools will provide relief to save them from food challenges, housing threats, curtailment of public education, and put them back on their feet instead of flat on their backs plummeting down a chute to economic destruction, homelessness, and starvation.

The Biden Era signals, with this legislation and coming programs, the death of Trickle Down Economics and the re-birth of Bubble Up Economics that will lift the standard of living among the neediest in our society and soothe their anxiety about their futures. Thus all boats will rise on the tide of Democratic socialism once again. No wonder Republicans waste so much effort to scare monger it. It's the destruction of Trickle Down values, their last political plank. The end of Reaganomics. The doom of fat cats and porky pachyderms. An elephant can't survive on racist hate alone.

Dinner at the Dominion Dossier Restaurant

Republican financial woes aren't just attributable to fleeing mega-donors. There's the looming monster that has discovered a taste for pounds and pounds of Republican flesh. An odd phenomenon attends the monster -- threatened with being stripped to the bone, Republicans are eating their own!

What is this fierce monster with a bottomless stomach for Republican meat? The Dominion Dossier, created by the Trump legal team and hailed as

"an explosive report" on the "foreign ties" of election technology company Dominion Voting Systems that Donald Trump’s legal team was sending to state legislators to give them “a rundown” of supposed voter fraud in the 2020 election.

That report hit the legislators desks in December 2020 to give them talking points about how Dominion supposedly stole the election on behalf of President Joe Biden.

Although the dossier's author is listed on its cover sheet as Trump campaign legal volunteer Katherine Friess, she's now insisting she had nothing to do with it, and she's pinning the blame on former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro for distributing the report. Of course, everyone with an ounce of gray matter knows that Dominion Voting Systems had nothing to do with Trump's ass-whippin'. Only American voters did. While the report was an unsuccessful instruction manual on how to disseminate the Big Lie, it has been very successful in waking the sleeping monster, Dominion Voting Systems' banque of lawyers. And they're extremely hungry after years of quiescence.

Lawyers for Dominion have filed $1.3 billion lawsuits against Trump personal lawyer Giuliani, pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, and pillow magnate Mike Lindell for their alleged defamation of the company’s voting software, with more suits reportedly on the way.

Senior Trump campaign officials including the former president and legal team chief Giuliani publicly aired since debunked conspiracy theories about Dominion, from nonexistent ties to Venezuela to fake “deleted” votes. But (Katherine) Friess and (Bernie) Kerik’s claims that a Trump administration aide shared the report with the campaign’s legal team suggests the White House was even more involved in the effort to raise questions about Dominion’s products.

Like the classic circular firing squad, fingers are pointing at fellow Republicans who are pointing them right back. In place of bullets ninja knives are flying and carving up Republicans trying to run away from authorial attribution and the monster who's litigious appetite is nowhere near satisfied.

How many grassroot Go-Fund-Me appeals will it take to raise the $1.3B do you think? Will those Trumpty-Dumbpties dig into their own pockets to pay for the judicial award Dominion Voting Systems is likely to collect when it didn't deliver the election victory that only it could "steal"? It's a little too complicated, I think for them to disentangle. Besides, the favorite thing Trumpty-Dumbpties like to buy into is the Big Lie.

What I can promise is DJT won't donate a penny to defend his most loyal loyalist perps of that Big Lie.

DJT Pumps More Lead into Dead Elephant

Retired Old Orange Florida Man can't stop creating chaos within the Republican Party base. When he told Fox News' Maria Bartiromo this week that Americans should get the coronavirus vaccine, the QAnonknownothing wing refuse to believe it was even their Dear Cult Leader speaking on the phone. "FAKE!!"

"Hi guys, I listened to it again... how he greeted Maria (Bartiromo) and how he spoke to her! That wasn't him," Mary Cue wrote in a QAnon channel on encrypted messaging service Telegram.

"I saw and heard a lot of interviews between him and Maria that wasn't like he speaks to her normally and it wasn't his voice at all...Me and some other people noticed this immediately."

Melissa Weeks added on Telegram: "How do I even know that was really President Trump speaking? They can fake anything."

"I just listen to it again and I have to agree it doesn't really sound like him," wrote Katherine Proudfoot. "Whoever it was was very good at imitating him though."

Ghost Ezra, a QAnon advocate with more than 250,000 subscribers on Telegram, also suggested: "My first take on the interview is that it didn't sound like Trump.

Religious nuts speak in tongues. QAnonnuts insist Trump speaks in code, and they're only too willing to "interpret it" for their fellow cultists who unfortunately do not dwell in the innermost circle of "understanding."

Others also chose to believe that Trump was giving out coded messages to be interpreted by QAnon supporters and did not actually mean people should get the vaccine when he told people they should get the vaccine.

"Come on people he's talking about taking down all the bad people, saving the world," wrote Kim Stephens. "Read between the lines. Anybody in their right mind would not take the vaccine."

"He was NOT talking about the 'COVID' vaccine. He was definitely talking about the operation listen carefully to the interview again," Josh Walls added, without clarifying further.

And if the translation doesn't sit well among the rabbit hole bunny brains, there's always another conspiracy that comes to the rescue. "Something is way off in that he's promoting it in contradiction to his previous statements, it means either he's compromised and blackmailed (maybe one of his family held hostage) or he was never what he seemed to be," wrote George Young. I saw what you did there, George. Hold that thought.

The assemblage of circular firing squads seems to be putting the Orange Leader in the center.

Rob Rock wrote:"Why push a vaccine if the pandemic is a 'hoax'?!? This narrative doesn't make sense. We're getting punked."

BOOM! Can't form a political party around a bunch of MAGArats all running in different directions who no longer believe each other, can't unify around a single conspiracy now that the Big Lie got the axe today, and are turning on their Cult Daddy.

All the Republican Party is now is a bunch of cracked eggs turned into a huge scramble that's frying itself on the pavement (of Firth Avenue?).

Republicans create enemies to distract from their lack of policies.
Ultimately, it’s all just made up garbage to fuel the fear of a group of people
who have all the power and see themselves as the victim.

1:02 ( https://twitter.com/IAmPoliticsGirl/status/1375613317679513601 )

- PoliticsGirl @IAmPoliticsGirl | 8:59 PM · Mar 26, 2021

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https://twitter.com/tangerinelaw/status/1375696342626881541/photo/1

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/03/tucker-carlson-justifies-fascist-takeove...
TUCKER CARLSON JUSTIFIES THE IDEA OF A FULL-BLOWN FASCIST TAKEOVER

Apparently this meathead never read the brown-demographic-wave memo which has been floating around for years. By 2045 over half of the U.S. population is going to be BROWN. White nationalist fascists like him will be outnumbered by them and true red-white-and-blue Americans. Murdoch pays TC big bucks to spew his hate-filled sh*t.

McConnell & Koch Bros Are Sellin', Conservative Voters Ain't Buyin'

Americans who don't have excrement for brains LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the Democrats' For the People Act, aka HR 1 and SB 1. The Republican Party is flat unable to sell the idea to its registered voter that billionaires should be able to buy elections. President Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer united and got out ahead of the right wing noise machine and saw to it that the public got what the public asked for -- Democrats, Indies, and Republicans alike. The entire spectrum of the electorate wants this bill.

Despite misinformation campaigns designed by right wing nut jobs to make mouth-breathing fools of their voters once again, it seems those voters have stopped their ears. For the first time in 40 years (since buying into Ronnie's 'voodoo economics'), "conservatives" are claiming their minds back. In short, Republican Party and Big Donor Billionaire torpedoes aimed at sinking this landmark voting rights legislation are at FULL STOP.

In leaked tapes the public learns that. . .

"When presented with a very neutral description" of the bill, "people were generally supportive," Kyle McKenzie, the research director for the Koch-run advocacy group Stand Together. "The most worrisome part . . . is that conservatives were actually as supportive as the general public was when they read the neutral (non-Republican spun) description.

"There's a large, very large, chunk of conservatives who are supportive of these types of efforts.

"Unfortunately, we've found that that is a winning message, for both the general public and also conservatives," McKenzie said.

It's hard, so hard, to call yourself a political party when your only platform is to destroy voting rights and the wide participation of the people in their own democratic processes of government. But that's what the Grand Old Poachers are spending millions doing -- literally, killing their own.

Kind of makes a disinterested observer hope McConnell and the whack jobs (Rand Paul, I'm lookin' at you!) attack the bill, its backers, and the Congressional Republican supporters. Expect nothing short of an auto-da-fé by the people on the right of their heretical anti-democratic leaders, if they do.

The 2020's GOPers' excuses for their racist speech and actions ~ I 'm not a racist, Antifa and/or BLM force me to say and do what I say and do. This is similar to the age-old excuse of a man who insists that his wife forced him to punch her. The GOP must be nuked in the 2022 and 2024 election cycles.

https://www.mediaite.com/trump/trump-hosts-very-special-person-marjorie-taylor-g...
Trump Hosts ‘Very Special Person’ Marjorie Taylor Greene at Mar-a-Lago: ‘She’s Out There Fighting Hard’

Trump and his enablers are "special" indeed. Sadly, they are the cult heroes of millions of very confused, gullible Americans. Since 1/6, and going forward, that number is hopefully decreasing, however. The GOP hitched its wagon to a fading star.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/04/02/john-boehner-book-memoir-excer...
Panic Rooms, Birth Certificates and the Birth of GOP Paranoia

‘Crazytown’: Fmr. House Speaker John Boehner Goes SCORCHED EARTH on GOP Including ‘Reckless A**hole’ Cruz in Jawdropping Book Excerpt

Read about Democracy Corps' Research Necropsy Report

James Carville and Stan Greenberg of Democracy Corps, a political polling/research firm, conducted focus group interviews of several categories of Trump Republicans and conservatives. Their findings provide a grim diagnosis of the GOP elephant body politic and -- reading between the lines -- hints at how Democratic and progressive political campaigns can make hay out of it in coming elections.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/04/07/gallup-survey-shows-larg...
Gallup poll shows largest increase in Democratic Party affiliation in a decade

It appears that what happened on 1/5 and beyond is causing many Americans to rethink their affiliation with the modern-day white nationalist/white supremacist GOP.

Elephant Necropsy II: The Two-Pronged Death Blow

Democracy Corps may have been the first to carve on the GOP corpse, but they're not the only. Conservative columnist, Jennifer Rubin, has the necropsy report showing how Republican voter suppression efforts is the leading cause of death among Republican supporters. You like stories about when karma bites the deserving in the derriere? Then you're gonna love this.

Like more granular data than the Carville/Greenberg initial polling provided? Got it: TargetSmart Insights issued the report on their findings, and if you like "granular" when considering where information comes from and what it is, you'll love the True Grit sourced in their findings.

In the 150 days since Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were elected, the team at TargetSmart has worked tirelessly to compile and analyze data from state and local election officials to provide the first in the nation look at the electorate that delivered them to the White House.

Today, we have granular data on over 98% of the American voters who cast a ballot.

Here are a few key takeaways based on TargetEarly:

Nationally, total turnout increased by 12% relative to 2016, turnout among AAPI voters surged by 43% and Latino turnout increased by almost a third of all votes cast.
49,984,595 Americans who voted in 2020 didn’t vote in 2016.
16,865,697 Americans voted for the first time in 2020 and comprised 10.9% of the electorate.
Non-college educated whites dropped from 53.8% of the electorate in 2016 to 49.2% in 2020.

You don't need me to underline what that last point means. The biggest demographic of Republican voters and race-raging Trump supporters were and are non-college educated whites and more than 4.5% of them didn't vote in the last election.

So, GA Republicans -- for but one example -- are trying to compensate for their losses of the Uninterested in the GOP by denying voting rights to the Interested in Any Party but the GOP.

In 2020, early voters cast 73.4% of the total votes counted in the 2016 general election.
At least 100,280,060 voters cast early ballots in the 2020 general election.

No one has forgotten the headline stories in the month before Election Day: Across the country, ALL EARLY VOTING showed a substantial Democratic lead.

Have fun rummaging through the TargetSmart Data Mine. The website is packed with highly parsed and focused FACTS on voting activity and voting demographics, etc. -- all substantiated, all BAD NEWS for the GOP. Is it any wonder they're engaging in political shenanigans against all but the non-college educated white voter?

Anyone else of the opinion that the GOP's political strategy of voter suppression will not end well -- for them? Jennifer Rubin's column shows she's one more besides me. Here's an excerpt. . .

It has not occurred to Republicans, as the Atlantic’s David A. Graham has explained, that “they may well discover that they have actually disenfranchised many of their own supporters, even as their push to pass restrictive rules energizes their opponents.” Indeed, post-election analysis suggests that the GOP’s presidential nominee would have lost even in a lower turnout election and that, as a Stanford University report has found, “no-excuse absentee voting mobilized relatively few voters and had at most a muted partisan effect despite the historic pandemic.” In other words, making it more difficult to vote absentee and discouraging turnout overall may well backfire. (on Republicans)

And it's not merely the hemorrhage of "undereducateds" that Trump claims he loves, that killed the GOP in 2020. The second biggest cause of death of elephants in politics is Americans' growing distaste for remaining Evangelicals and church-goers of any type -- even old white ones.

Face it, right-wingers, it's all over except for kicking the dirt over your faces. Don't believe me? That light you see at the end of the bigotry tunnel, ain't your salvation. It's the oncoming locomotive of ranked-choice voting. Then it will be all over for you but the SPLAT!

Walter Shaub (ethics) @waltshaub | 12:14 PM · May 2, 2021:
This may be the most openly corrupt thing any Senator has said.
It's the part everyone knows: these crooks sell access. Others have the sense not to admit it. This is why our republic is broken. Immoral politicians selling power we've entrusted to them like it's theirs to sell.

Quote Tweet
Ted Cruz @tedcruz · Apr 30
To America’s watch-me-woke-it-up CEOs I say:
When the time comes that you need help with a tax break or a regulatory change,
I hope the Democrats take your calls, because we may not.

Starting now, we won’t take your money either.

https://wsj.com/articles/your-woke-money-is-no-good-here-11619649421

Visual Aid To Understand GOP Today

What is taking place in the GOP this month is an example of the Stockholm Syndrome. Liz Cheney is trying to free Trump's GOP hostages, but they prefer to remain captives of the orange lunatic.

>110 Molly3028:

It's just more of the same old-same old. Republicans need to be liars to retain the sliver of America's crazed voters that they cling to. This is a self-induced role that they embrace. As a result, "crazed" is now a determinant qualifier to be in the Republican ruling body.

In order to survive with the sliver of crazed voters, they must conduct a purge of truth-tellers in their party. Liz Cheney is a truth-teller and must be expunged and replaced by a Trump (crazy) sycophant. Otherwise, Trump will split them off, further reducing the cadre of so-called conservatives who vote Republican.

The path they're on should be cheered by Liberals and Progressives because all the facts point to it being suicidal for the Repub. Party. Just do a Google search for "thousands have left the Republican Party post Jan 6th" and it's apparent.

Only the crazed remain as voters and as politicians. That spells death.

What interests me is if so-called Independents and non-affiliateds will join and organize into a political party in time for the 2024 general election. I don't think there's time for them to do so to mount any candidates for the mid-term.

That implies that all the Democrats need to do is back candidates who best appeal to their voters, but offer a "tasteful" alternative to Republicans on one or two issues. Biden did that, in effect, by focusing on a vaccine campaign and sane economic recovery policies. When up against the crazed, campaigning as the sane alternative may be enough for Democrats to hold and increase their majority in the House.

2022 is going to be a watershed election for the Democrats based on if they realize that's a winning strategy, or not. I guarantee they'll lose bigly if they try to win over the crazed instead.

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/hannity-says-liz-cheney-was-ousted-because-of-her-se...
Hannity Says Liz Cheney Was Ousted Because of Her ‘Selfish Agenda’: Has ‘Psychotic Rage’ of All Things Trump

This GOPer's crack cocaine supplier lives in Florida in the winter and New Jersey in the summer. America's Founders must be spinning in their graves, and Lincoln must be shedding a waterfall of tears for his party.

Wow, and the Rs dumped Liz Cheney!

andrew kaczynski (CNN) @KFILE | 10:16 AM · May 14, 2021
New: A since-deleted video from 2019 shows MTG harassing AOC's office through a locked door. Calling her "crazy eyes" and telling her through the office's mailbox slot to "get rid of your diaper" while telling the office to open the door and come out.

2:20 ( https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/1393208622054842368 )

Since-deleted video shows Marjorie Taylor Greene harassing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's office during 2019 Capitol Hill visit
Em Steck and Andrew Kaczynski | May 14, 2021
https://cnn.com/2021/05/14/politics/kfile-marjorie-taylor-greene-alexandria-ocas...

The reason so many republicans are running with the Trump was cheated lie is because is it gives them room to make their voter suppression agenda case. They understand very well that the more voter suppression the better their chances to both stay in power but also one day to take it back. This is what a cynical minority does—it works against the democracy it claims to uphold. It plays to the resentments of its white privileged base because that’s all it really has. They refuse to see a diversified United States because that marginalizes them in every way. They’d rather line themselves up with the fascist Trumpians instead.

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/elise-stefanik-kevin-mccarthy-steve-scalise-appear-t...
Elise Stefanik, Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise Appear Together on Hannity for a Victory Lap After Ousting Cheney

What they meant to convey ~
We dumped the gal who has a conscience. This should definitely appeal to our white nationalist, white supremacist, QAnon voters.

>114 lriley:

It does seem that voter suppression is becoming a major plank of Republican strategy. Very worrying in a country which prides itself on its democratic (small "d") credentials.

#116–they need the lie to take away votes and black and brown votes in particular. Cheney decided she wasn’t playing the game or Kinzinger either and anyway they and 8 others in the republican house voted to impeach the orange clown....and then there was 6/7 Senators as well.

The simplest message is statehood for DC and Puerto Rico. It would mean 4 new Senators and McConnell’s hopes cast permanently into hell. With Senators like Manchin and Synema who seem to want to act like we’re in the 1980’s and some kind of detente with the republicans is possible the democrats are very likely to fuck themselves and the majority of the voting population over. It’s the usual gormless appeasement happy center-right politics leading the way. Pelosi and Hoyer are just as guilty of this. It’s like they’re blind to the republicans scorched earth tactics.

AZ Republicans Fear Ballot Audit Has Done Lasting Damage to Party

An ongoing and extraordinary audit of the 2020 vote count in the state’s largest county — rooted in conspiracy theories and the false belief that Biden’s election was not legitimate — is deepening the schism six months after the election, with no clear end in sight. And some state Republicans are "horrified" that it could end their chances in the '22 mid-term election.

Next year they must defend an open governor’s seat and try to flip back one of the two Senate seats Democrats took in the last two elections.

. . .they worry the audit is the latest sign of the Republican Party marginalizing itself in a state where it once reigned supreme.

“I think there are many Republicans who are horrified by what's going on. I think there are very few independents who aren't horrified by what's going on," said Bill Gates, Republican Maricopa County supervisor.
___________________________________________
UPDATE

See 'Insane lies' from Trump called out by Arizona Republican: 'This is unhinged'

Linn Wood Has SC Republicans Panicked

Far-right, pro-QAnon attorney Lin Wood is running for chair of the the South Carolina Republican Party even though the incumbent, Drew McKissick, is widely expected to win reelection next Saturday. The "Big Lie" is deeply rooted in the state and has the party power base worried about what will happen if the Trumplican voting base doesn't get its way.

Wood — who only moved to South Carolina from Georgia this year — is drawing unusually large crowds as he campaigns on the baseless claim that the election was stolen from Trump, and that GOP officials need to keep fighting to prove it.

Like the other recently elected pro-Trump bullies, Wood is campaigning primarily on not-so-veiled threats.

“Unlike McKissick, President Trump has never conceded the election. Neither have I. I plan to keep fighting to expose the TRUTH: Donald J. Trump won a landslide election and is our President. I pray the SCGOP delegates will choose wisely.”

That Wood is a certifiable nut job is highly likely. In today's political climate prevalent in Red states, that couldn't be a better qualifier for public office.

(Wood) is fostering wild conspiracy theories positing that Biden is actually dead — replaced by body doubles — and that Trump is still president and planning to reveal himself in a phoenix-like fashion to punish his enemies.

And like Trump, Wood is already accusing McKissick of election fraud — without any evidence — even before the first ballots are cast Saturday.

And it's not like McKissick isn't a devoted Trump follower, either. He is. He's just not crazy enough for some of the conspiracy addled brains of the Republican grassroots in South Carolina, that's all.

In Case You Missed It

Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theorists Are Taking Over State Republican Parties In all 50 states GOP state chairs shows a growing number of conspiracists winning control of state party chairmanships. As if the Gaetzs, Boeboes, MTGs, Hawleys, Cruzs, Johnsons, etc., weren't enough already. Republicans are determined to send more of their best & brightest idiots to the halls of power on every level.

First they "kill" all the truth-tellers, then they promote all the nutjobs, pass Jim Crow voting restrictions, and threaten violence against people who insist on honoring the Constitution and exercising their civil rights. This is the Trumplican plan to take back "their" country and make America white again.

No doubt Trumplicans will succeed in taking back the racist banner and incorporating it into their brand. No doubt they'll keep a strangle hold on QAnon extremists. No doubt white supremacist and anti-government elements will flock to their party. While the 'TRUMP' signs are coming down from real estate all over America, he has succeeded in putting his brand on what was the Republican Party.

Why? Because 'traditional' Republicans have either caved and joined the ranks of a$$-kissers, or they've sat around like pithed frogs and done nothing.

Nothing prospers and flourishes better in the conservative mind than the BIG LIE that insists the safest and most honest election in history, the 2020 general election, is the opposite -- a corrupt, rigged, undemocratic exercise where minorities had more votes than whites as it turned out, and women out-voted men, further threatening their historical privileged survival. And conspiracists will do anything to not have to deal with the hard truth, including creating a mythos around an old white male "savior" who is nothing more than a criminal conman. But a very good one.

Their main tool is to pervert the meanings and accepted definitions of words to sabotage reality and replace it with Wizard of Oz delusion and illusion. "Election integrity" in their mouths means ballot box denial, Jim Crow legislation, voter suppression, soliciting foreign interference, propagating misinformation, and blatant criminal cheating. And this is absolutely, totally, and positively A-OK with Trumplican voters and politicians.

Their secondary tool is to point the finger of blame and accuse their opponents of all the nasty, perverted, and criminal things they are actually guilty of to undermine examples of real integrity, disparage actual honesty, and quash oversight into their slimy tactics, whether the light is shone on them by citizens, Democratic politicians, or (most dangerously) the credible press and journalists.

And it works. At least with a segment of the population that is on the right side of the lunatic fringe. However, America's real danger is for the middle and left to be complacent, over-confident in the "goodness" of its citizenry, conciliatory to the crazed, or cowed by their volume in the market place.

Trumplicanism will succeed if that is how Liberal and Progressive factions respond. Trumplicanism is really nothing more than the elevation of bullying to acceptable social and political behavior. From grade school, everyone knows that a bully is only quelled by a solid blow to the face or a quick kick to delicate areas of the anatomy. Distasteful as it is, one, the other, or both will have to be decisively applied in future campaigns until enough conservatives with backbones and recognizably moral integrity gather and form an opposition of non-radical rightist political ideas.

In short, Democrats will have to step up and save America and old-school conservatives from themselves. Again.

Some excerpts from Greene’s speech where she refers to

Nancy Pelosi as Speaker Maskhole,
Cicilline as Mussolini, and suggests
Meghan McCain is a Democrat

1:12 ( https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1395938079744008198 )

Acyn @Acyn | 11:02 PM · May 21, 2021

Opinion: Republican senators managed to outdo themselves in cowardice
George T. Conway III | June 2, 2021

...Four years of Trump have led to the Republican Party becoming a threat to democracy, a declining sect dominated by crackpots, charlatans and cowards. Of these, it’s the cowards, including the senators who killed last week’s legislation, who bear the most blame.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/02/george-conway-republican-sena...

Watch What’s Happening in Red States
In states where Republicans control the legislature, American life is rapidly changing.
Ronald Brownstein | June 3, 2021

Nearly two dozen states have rejected the increased unemployment benefits that congressional Democrats approved earlier this year in President Joe Biden’s stimulus plan.

Half a dozen states, including Tennessee, Montana, Iowa, and Texas, have passed legislation allowing gun owners to carry their weapons without a permit.

Texas, South Carolina, Idaho, and Oklahoma have passed legislation banning abortion when a fetal heartbeat can be detected, after about six weeks of pregnancy (before women typically even know they are pregnant); Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas also passed virtually complete bans on abortion. Arizona approved an extremely restrictive bill that includes barring abortions for certain genetic conditions.

Ten states have adopted about two dozen laws in total targeting transgender individuals, including legislation in seven states that bars transgender athletes from competing in school sports.

Through mid-May, “14 states have enacted 22 new laws with provisions that make it harder for Americans to vote,” and many other laws are still pending...(Restrictive voting laws passed in Georgia and proposed in Texas explicitly outlaw measures used to increase voter turnout in the states’ largest cities (Atlanta and Houston, respectively).)

Florida, Oklahoma, Texas, and about half a dozen other states have passed laws stiffening penalties against demonstrators who block traffic or cause property damage, and several of those states have simultaneously provided civil or criminal protection for drivers who hit protesters

Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Texas have barred public schools from teaching “critical race theory,” which focuses on racism as an endemic feature of American history.

several red-state governors have issued executive orders or signed laws barring local governments from mandating the use of face masks or limiting local businesses’ hours of operation; Florida and Tennessee have passed laws barring local governments or businesses from requiring residents to show proof of a COVID-19 vaccination.

...On a lengthening list of issues, the rules that govern daily life in red and blue states are diverging—and at an accelerating pace. The chasms are deepening not only between states, but within them, as GOP legislators centered in preponderantly white rural and exurban areas more aggressively annul the policy choices of racially diverse, Democratic-controlled metro centers. Bill by bill, this year’s red-state offensive is measuring the continued unraveling of a country that appears to be unrelentingly pulling apart.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/06/republican-state-legislatur...

George P. Bush’s campaign video (TX AG) does not mention his father, the former governor of Florida.
Nor his uncle, the 43rd president of the United States.
Nor his grandfather, the 41st.

But the video does pay homage to former president Donald Trump.

The Washington Post @washingtonpost · 4h
https://wapo.st/2SXHAoE

https://news.yahoo.com/as-trump-restarts-rallies-gop-strategists-hope-against-al...
As Trump restarts rallies, GOP strategists hope against all odds that he won't rehash 2020 election

Are GOP strategists this clueless???? The lunatics at the rallies are going to egg Trump on with nonstop "stop the steal" chants.

Watch How "Republicans" Are Killing Themselves (and the Elephant)

Throwing Relatives Under the Bus for Trump & Ambition

Rs' worst nightmare?

Trump Suggests He May Run for House in 2022 to Become Speaker: 'Very Interesting'
Jason Lemon | 6/4/21
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-suggests-he-may-run-house-2022-become-speaker-ver...

Andrew Feinberg (reporter) @AndrewFeinberg | 8:38 PM · Jun 4, 2021:
This is absurd because the speaker does not need to be a member of the House.

Sure, Trump could absolutely find an easy House district to run and win from. It wouldn't even be unprecedented — John Quincy Adams (another one-term president) spent the last 17 years of his life representing Massachusetts in the House of

...and Andrew Johnson (another impeached POTUS) was sent back to the Senate by the Tennessee legislature after his time in the White House ended.

But if Trump wants to become Speaker of the House, all he needs is 219 votes from Republican members. But he doesn't need to be one.

Can you imagine being so fucked up that you make this national address last night from North Carolina with your pants on backwards? Apparently that’s what Donald did—never even asked himself ‘what happened to the zipper?’

https://www.aol.com/twitter-users-speculate-trump-wore-130825212.html

>128 lriley: Do infants worry about zippers? No. They wear diapers.

Snopes says pants not on backwards? Made me wonder though--at what point is one so demented that one can't defend oneself and thus can't be prosecuted? No such criterion for highest office in the land, though...

>130 margd: contd. :D

Andrew Solender (Forbes) @AndrewSolender | 10:18 PM · Jun 6, 2021
Is this real life?
Image-trending, Snopes says pants not on backwards
( https://twitter.com/AndrewSolender/status/1401725187612188672/photo/1 )

Body Language: Trump vs. DeSantis (0:19)
From The Recount
https://twitter.com/MollyJongFast/status/1451613494764314634

Molly Jong-Fast (The Daily Beast@MollyJongFast | 2:16 PM · Oct 22, 2021:
This is absolutely not accidental

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/watch-jake-tapper-emphatically-calls-out-republicans...
WATCH: Jake Tapper Emphatically Calls Out Republicans for ‘Violations of Basic Decency’ After Mocking Alec Baldwin’s Movie Set Shooting

My take ~ GOPers dropped their decency façade when they became card-carrying Trump cult followers in the summer of 2016. And early this year, after 1-6, they happily renewed their memberships.

Now presiding as FL Gov over 58,000 COVID deaths, Trump wannabe, purported Prez candidate in 2024, Ron DeSantis, photographed as young teacher partying with his under-age students:

https://hillreporter.com/exclusive-pic-ron-desantis-accused-of-attending-drinkin...

Cowboys for Trump Founder Turns Against Trump in Speech to QAnon Conference

I can see clearly now. There's no turning back for the Republican Party to the good ol' GOP after Trump. Republicans were too cowardly to kill Trumpism before it became its norm and now their Party is destroyed. All the running away from Trumpism and the Republican Party that some Never Trumpers did earlier, and the now disillusioned and even more bizarrely radicalized "tyrannists" who have fled the stinking hulk, or are working to hasten the rot have confirmed that the GOP is no more and shall not be again.

Couy Griffin, head of Cowboys for Trump is no longer a fan. In his public remarks, he complained that Trump failed to deliver on many of his campaign promises, left office, then asked to be reelected. What Griffin accused Trump of is not being tyrannical enough. At the Vegas event, Griffin made it clear that there were some things Trump could have done unilaterally.

". . .for four years we cried 'lock her up. Lock her up. Lock her up.' We know she's a criminal. What did the president tell us? 'If I was in charge, you'd be in jail.'"

"Ok, Mr. President, you've been in charge of the law for four years," he continued. "At the end of your four year time, the only ones locked up were men like me, and others like me, that have stood by the president the strongest."

Obviously, anything short of bloody civil war isn't enough for people who still call themselves Trump Republicans. And since Trump is the unarguable leader of the Republican Party, Trump Republicans are all that the former GOP is now. Behold! The Party of Tyranny and the Tyrant-in-Chief, Donald J. Trump.

But even people like Couy who are dissatisfied with the failed bloodless coup aren't happy with what is. For them, any elephantine traces left among Trumpists is insufficiently anti-establishment for him and his 'boys. Looks like the carcass is only supported by a few ribs: Trump, Bannon, Giuliani, Congressional right wing conspiracists and gun nuts, and the remaining vestiges of QAnon adherents and their brothers-in-brains,evangelical white racists. And they're out for blood. Luckily, that hardly totals enough voters to win an election for dog catcher.

The Republican Party is dead.

Andrew Wortman 🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇺🇸 @AmoneyResists | 3:22 PM · Apr 4, 2022
The GOP’s obsession with children and sex crimes is a projection and a confession.

—Donald Trump
—Mark Foley
—Dennis Hastert
—Jim Jordan
—George Nader
—Ralph Shortey
—Roy Moore
—Joel Greenberg
—Matt Gaetz
—Jeffrey Epstein
—Ghislaine Maxwell
...

From MeidasTouch.com
2:05 ( https://twitter.com/AmoneyResists/status/1511061708927864843 )
----------------------------------------------------------
:D
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene @RepMTG · 14h
Murkowski, Collins, and Romney are pro-pedophile.
They just voted for #KBJ.

CPAC, America’s most prominent conservative gathering, convenes in Budapest, Hungary, next month with prime minister Viktor Orban as a keynote speaker. The EU has accused Orban of undermining democracy, free media and judicial independence https://reut.rs/3J7xplT
Photo of Orban ( https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1511412339429744640/photo/1 )

-Reuters @Reuters | 2:35 PM · Apr 5, 2022

Trumpty-Dumbpties in Search of New Foreign Bromancer

The Trump Cult that once praised Putin has been forced to abandon him due to the atrocities his not-warriors committed on innocent and unarmed Ukrainian civilians. Now, they ask themselves, "Where can we turn?" Unable (as yet) to embrace the North Korean leader as their own like their fearless leader has done (Are Trump and Kim Jung-Un still exchanging love poetry letters?), Cultists turn back to Europe, where the field of autocratic wannabees is richer.

In Hungary, Prime Minister Victor Orban looks attractive. He's a Trump-like nose-thumber to doing what's right. He's announced Hungary will joyfully continue to pay for Russian petroleum with rubles. Vic's Enemies List includes:

. . .“the international left, the bureaucrats in Brussels”, the “empire” of the Hungarian-born billionaire philanthropist George Soros, the international media – and finally, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

He's a Trumpian "take credit for what is not due him" personality. For instance, while he claims to condemn the Russian invasion of Eukraine and support EU sanctions, he has not offered Ukraine any defense help, much less allowed such help to go through Hungary or its airspace.

But Orban's laurel wreath that Trumpty-Dumbpties endow him with gives him the lead over other contenders seeking the position of Right Wing Autocrat King is his rollback of democratic values and allegations of fraud which has prompted the European Commission to launch its new

. . .rule-of-law disciplinary procedure for the first time against Hungary, two days after nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, won a fourth landslide victory in parliamentary elections.
(SNIP)
The untested mechanism, designed to prevent EU funds from being misused by countries backsliding on the rule of law, was agreed by all 27 EU leaders in late 2020 and could ultimately deprive Budapest of more than €40bn of EU payments.
(SNIP)
Orbán, in power since 2010, has tightened the noose around academics, NGOs and the media, as well as restricting the freedoms of migrants and gay people. There have also been multiple allegations of EU funds being diverted to Orbán’s friends and family.

Orban is already the European right's flavor-of-the-month. Why shouldn't Trump Cultists jump on the bandwagon? After all, he's a carbon-copy of their Golden Idol; he just speaks a crazy language. Putin loves him and Vic loves him back; Putin sent voluble congratulations on his re-election. His other admirers are the Usual Suspects of the continent's nationalists:

. . .Britain’s Nigel Farage, France’s Marine Le Pen and Italy’s Matteo Salvini were also quick to congratulate Orbán. “When the people vote, the people win,” tweeted Le Pen.

If the goulash haters in the Party of Trump don't like him, there's at least one among the other Usual Suspects who will fulfill their democracy destroying longings. I think Marine is the best fit for runner-up, and she comes with a tasty cuisine to recommend her. (As long as nobody tells the Cult-Rats that the French savor snails and frogs.)

Take your pick, Trump Cult.

>137 margd: Just curious - are these fine American patriots paying their own way or dipping from party member donations?

Good question. I suspect mighty few are traveling on their own private funds?

BREAKING: Federal judge drops bombshell, signals that she will allow the lawsuit brought by Georgia voters to
block Marjorie Taylor Greene from running for reelection
to move forward due to her assistance and support for Trump’s January 6 insurrectionists....

- Occupy Democrats @OccupyDemocrats | 10:36 AM · Apr 11, 2022

NEW: The leading Republican Senate candidate in Ohio, Mike Gibbons, just said middle class Americans need to pay higher taxes. “The middle class is not really paying any kind of a fair share,” he said, echoing the 2022 GOP plan that calls for higher taxes on working Americans.

- No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen @NoLieWithBTC | 9:51 AM · Apr 11, 2022

S. Dakota's Killer AG Being Mauled by His Fellow Republicans

After refusing a year ago to impeach the drunken driving Atty. Gen., Jason Ravnsborg, who ran over and killed a pedestrian in 2020, the state legislature seems to want a mulligan after hearing new evidence from South Dakota Highway Patrol troopers. The presentation was so graphic, at least one legislator's mind has been changed from inaction to impeach the S.O.B.

“After seeing the length of time Mr. Boever’s body was on the AG’s car with his head inside of the AG’s car’s window, and then flying off hitting th

e middle of the lane behind the AG’s car, leaving bone fragments on the road and skidding into the ditch at 65 mph, my mind has changed,” he told The Daily Beast Friday morning. “I now have irrefutable evidence the AG knew exactly what he hit and lied to investigators and the Hyde County sheriff.” But, some other Republicans are coming to the decision with foot-dragging latency. There's never been any mystery in the case. Ravnsborg was driving while impaired, he struck and killed a man, but didn't immediately report it until the next day when he returned to the scene of the accident (cold stone sober now) and "discovered" the body of the man he had struck down. Only then did he report it.

The upshot of the whole affair is Ravnsborg refused to resign, was hit with only three misdemeanor charges, never had to appear in court, faced down an attempt by the S. Dak. legislature to impeach him a year ago, and is seeking reelection this year.

As part of a plea deal, he pleaded no contest to two minor charges, was fined $1,000, paid $3,000 in court costs. and was ordered to promote safe driving. He reached an undisclosed settlement with Boever’s widow.

But now the Republicans are willing to eat one of their own and Gov. Noem is the lead shark. That's a sea change among Republicans! Perhaps. A contingent opposed to the governor probably won't vote to impeach just because they're opposed to the governor politically, damn the law, justice, and what's right.

. . . the probe of a top law-enforcement official seeming to play fast and loose with the law is not playing out in the abstract. It is just one front in a sprawling series of internecine GOP feuds in a state that effectively operates under one-party rule.

This Deplorable Being Pushed Out of the Basket?

Fresh off attending a Trump rally, and telling the public his cocaine orgy story involving politicians he "looked up to" in Washington, Representative Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), declines April 11 primary debate. Wonder how DJT, who has endorsed Cawthorn when no one else will, feels about his golden-haired acolyte running away?

Heck, yeah!

Practically the entire state of North Carolina is fed up with Mr. Cawthorn's cheezy, sleazy, lying time spent as one of their representatives in the House. Only, the cowardly field of Republican challengers for his seat in this year's election are trying to "draw the veil" and pass off the "hot potato" to oblivion.

Critics have said Cawthorn's latest statements are part of a pattern of exaggerations and lies, including that he lived "almost directly" on a district line that was actually miles away, was training for the Paralympics though there was not record of such and that his bid for the Naval Academy was derailed when a 2013 car accident put him in a wheelchair — though his application had already been rejected.

Still, only one of his rivals in the Party primary publicly condemned Cawthorn outright, candidate Michele Woodhouse. The rest of the Republicans were like a bunch of eyewitnesses to a violent crime who, when questioned by cops, say, "I didn't see nothin'." She spoke right up, saying that. . .

"Cawthorn has yet again brought national embarrassment to NC11 and continues to prove himself unelectable."

Pray, more state Republicans begin to shed the scales from their eyes and move to oust their QAnoniacs. I'm looking at you, Georgia, Colorado, Arizona, etc., etc., etc.

"Lordy, I Hope There Are Tapes!"

Former Director of the FBI, James Comey's wishes are coming true!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WSUb9_9Taw

Lordy! Are there ever!! Between the tapes of Rep. MTG (R-GA) and those of Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) being played all over the Internet today and creating headlines of every paper, national and local, the Republicans certainly are not heeding Benjamin Franklin's warning. By gum, they're all hanging together and in their last throes, are kicking a dead elephant.

Who could have imagined that the Leader of the House Republicans would put the noose around his neck by telling the truth on tape?!?! Not even Comey, I bet.

Aaron Ross Powell ☸️@ARossP | 12:42 PM · Apr 23, 2022:
Host of (RE)IMAGINING LIBERTY, a show about the emancipatory, cosmopolitan, and forward-looking case for radical liberty. Find it in your favorite podcast app.

The president of the Heritage Foundation comes out in favor of using government to threaten private companies for expressing opinions he disagrees with.
American conservatism is in a really dire state.

Quote Tweet
Kevin Roberts @KevinRobertsTX | 7:34 PM · Apr 22, 2022:
President, Heritage | PhD, American history, @UTAustin (#HookEm) | Teacher, professor, headmaster & college president | Chair, Texas #1836Commission

Our side is FINALLY winning on this issue, because we FINALLY have conservative leaders willing to LEAD on it. twitter.com/njhochman/stat…

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Nate Hochman @njhochman | 7:24 PM · Apr 22, 2022:
ISI Fellow @NRO. Robert Novak Fellow @TFASorg. Publius '21 @ClaremontInst...

Exxon Mobil just banned LGBT/BLM flags from company grounds, citing the need "to maintain neutrality." The move—likely a reaction to the anti-Disney backlash in Florida—is mostly symbolic. But as I write in @NRO, it's another sign that the tide is shifting

Another Victory against Corporate Wokeness
That’s a good thing — for Exxon, for conservatives, and for America.
Nate Hochman | April 22, 2022

...The Republican base is now demanding that their leaders show some backbone in the culture wars, and is making it politically unacceptable for party elites to cave to corporate interests. Conservatives — particularly those of the social-conservative variety — are realizing that big business is often not their friend, and responding in kind. As a result, the incentive structure is changing before our eyes: Remarkably, “Disney stock continued to fall this week after the Florida House passed a bill revoking the company’s autonomous governmental status,” Brittany Bernstein reported today. “While Disney stock reached an all-time high in March 2021 of nearly $200 per share . . . it has been declining ever since. When the market closed on Thursday, the stock was around $120 per share, a 33 percent drop from one year ago and an 8 percent drop from just two days earlier, prior to the passage of the bill.” On top of that, new polling shows that 68.2 percent of Americans say they’re “less likely to do business with Disney” after the recent controversies; 69.1 percent say they would “support family-friendly alternatives to Disney.”

Pinch me — are we . . . winning? It sure feels like it. Of course, the coming years will be an uphill battle: If the Right continues to notch victories, the Left’s response will surely become more hysterical and aggressive. (After all, they’re not used to losing on this stuff.) But still, it’s difficult to see Exxon’s symbolic withdrawal from the culture war as anything other than a reaction to the recent shift in the Right’s posture on these issues. And that’s a good thing — for Exxon, for conservatives, and for America.

https://nationalreview.com/corner/another-victory-against-corporate-wokeness/

(rough language)

Texas Paul REACTS to megaviral #WeirdGOP Video (3:12)
May 1, 2022

The new MeidasTouch video #WeirdGOP exposes the truly bizarre priorities and behaviors of the Republican Party. While the American people demand solutions to kitchen table issues, the GOP is concerned about the lack of sex appeal in M&M's candy, Dr. Seuss, and waiting for JFK Jr to return to become Donald Trump's running mate... And we're just getting started. Watch Texas Paul react to the new megaviral video!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlGSfEawWT4
https://twitter.com/AdamParkhomenko/status/1520939290477350923
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Texas Paul REACTS to Marjorie Taylor Greene Lying Under Oath! (3:20)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqKP6bsKWgM
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Texas Paul REACTS to Top Republican Using Russian Talking Points (2:21)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsMFB3t2UIw
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Texas Paul REACTS to leaked Kevin McCarthy Tapes! (2:47)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcquB8yTUWM
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Texas Paul REACTS to Shameless Kevin McCarthy Border Stunt! (0:57)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9FVWmI1EQM
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Texas Paul REACTS to Creepy Republican Debate in Pennsylvania (4:38)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGsZl_G9wl0
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via TYT:

Texas TikToker BLASTS Abbott's "Traitorous Truck Stunt"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUoXaZOiybI

Telling lies has become the norm for today's Republicans
John Harwood | May 1, 2022

...For a minority party joining blue-collar voters driven by cultural resentment with affluent donors fixed on the bottom line, gaining and wielding power requires dissembling beyond the conventional equivocation that politicians in all parties have always used to amass popular support...

https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/01/politics/republican-party-kevin-mccarthy/index.ht...

The Party of Big Business Is Getting More Anti-Conservative by the Day
Stephanie Slade | May 1, 2022
(Ms. Slade is a senior editor at Reason)

“Conservatives … once championed free markets and limited government as essential bulwarks against tyranny. Discarding those commitments is not a small concession to changing times but an abject desecration, for cheap political gain, of everything they long claimed to believe.”

“One might doubt the retaliatory nature of Republicans’ corporate speech reversal, but for their inability to quit stepping in front of cameras and stating the quiet part aloud”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/01/opinion/desantis-republicans-disney.html

>148 margd: Telling lies has become the norm for today's Republicans

I wouldn't call that new news. "Lying sack of shit" has been their modus operandi for as long as I can remember.

Rick Wilson @TheRickWilson | 12:20 AM · May 15, 2022:
Lincoln Project co-founder. Ad guy. Pilot. NYT #1 bestselling author. Seemingly unkillable. IFR current and proficient. @mikedurantAL stan account.

1/ In the before times, before the MAGA Republican Troll Party, @EliseStefanik would have pulled the tweet down (white replacement theory*) and moved on with a discreet “I mispoke.”

But the ethos of the emergent authoritarian is a mulish refusal to admit the lie, the mistake, the grand and petty indecency.

2/ She knows — and her staff knows — and her lawyers sure as HELL know that she looks terrible and that the last 48 hour news cycle has been a dumpster atop a mountain of toxic waste.

All her corporate donors wanted the Elise she played behind closed doors still.

3/ Because when she’s raising hedge fund and tech world cash, she doesn’t talk about white replacement or pedos or the rest of the sewage sluice of alt-reich filth.

She abases herself on Steve Bannon’s show, mewling and giggling far right agitporn as his rheumy eye ogles her.

4/ Every little transaction for power is a degradation as with the Trumpian world reduces her further, making her more cruel, more vulgar, more tainted.

She’s a modern Hogarth etching, each panel moving from the country innocent to the mole-speckled, toothless jade.

5/ But…this is the life she’s chosen. Strap in.
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*
Editorial: How low, Ms. Stefanik?
Times Union Editorial Board | Sep. 17, 2021
https://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/Editorial-How-low-Ms-Stefanik-1646574...

Elise Stefanik Blasted for 'Despicable' Facebook Ads Pushing 'Replacement Theory'
Khaleda Rahman | 9/19/21
https://www.newsweek.com/elise-stefanik-blasted-despicable-facebook-ads-pushing-...

ETA: Sept 2021 ad
https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson/status/1526251688469876736/photo/1

Jonah Goldberg (The Dispatch) @JonahDispatch | 6:51 PM · May 13, 2022
My God, what happened to your soul? Please name the “usual pedo grifters.” Clearly you must have names, since you refer to the “usual” pedo grifters. Name them. Who are these pedophiles you’ve done nothing to stop? Or are you just feeding QAnon in an evil cynical enterprise?

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Elise Stefanik @EliseStefanik · May 13
The White House, House Dems, & usual pedo grifters are so out of touch with the American people that rather than present ANY PLAN or urgency to address the nationwide baby formula crisis, they double down on sending pallets of formula to the southern border. Joe Biden has NO PLAN

>152 margd: Very little information is released (except leaks of bad behavior or outright misinformation) to the general public when Republicans are in power that their followers aren't expected to actually look at official sites?

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-takes-important-steps-im... (May 10)

Nancy Pelosi (D), Speaker of the House: "Dear Colleague on the Baby Formula Shortage" on May 13, https://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/51322-1
Follow-up "Floor Speech on Access to Baby Formula Act and Infant Formula Supplemental Appropriations Act" on May 18, https://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/51822-3

President Biden @POTUS · May 12, 2022
https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1524877081380806665

Today, I spoke with retailers and manufacturers to discuss ways we can all work together to do more to help families access infant formula.

My team is working overtime to increase supply as quickly as possible without compromising safety.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/05/12/fact-she...
Leading up to yesterday: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2022/05/18/memoran... in which POTUS transferred power so "all ingredients necessary to manufacture infant forumla" and control of "the distribution of such materials (including applicable services) in the civilian market" is prioritized "for responding to the shortage of infant formula within the United States"

Calls to use the Defense of Production Act were coming from House Democrats.

Meanwhile, what has Representative Elise Stefanik (R- NY) or any Congressional Republican doing to help?

MTG to Elise Stefanik, "Hold my beer!" Immigrant babies, poor babies--Rs are evil, evil people.

PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 @patriottakes | 3:47 PM · May 19, 2022:
Marjorie Taylor Greene blames WIC, an assistance program that helps poor moms buy baby formula, for contributing to the supply shortage: “The WIC program is making it more difficult for (parents not on WIC) to buy baby formula.”

0:57 ( https://twitter.com/patriottakes/status/1527375339302727686 )

Too many Rs are evil, evil people... As a comfortable American on hunt for formula for infant g'son, whom we were babysitting, I can't imagine what parents with fewer means and less time are up against. They have my sympathy. (It turned out that g'son's worried parents stocked up last fall (!), so they will give our small purchase to foodbank or pediatrician.)

Matt Gaetz thinks families using Gov’t. Assistance to buy baby formula should take a back seat to ‘Hard-working’ Americans
David Badash | May 20, 2022

U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said this week babies born into low-income families should not have the same access to food as those born into wealth – or even moderate means – and voted against a bill because, he suggested, it would help them take food away from their more affluent peers...

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

Are there no low income Republican families? Are those in power not worried that they will lose these votes? I can't believe that they continue carrying on like this.

>156 mamzel: There are. They have a long, consistent history of voting for people who will have and will continue to cause harm in their families.

>137 margd: contd.

Molly Jong-Fast @MollyJongFast | 5:27 PM · May 20, 2022:
writing at @theatlantic & @voguemagazine & @onesignalpub
https://twitter.com/MollyJongFast/status/1527763004107939851

This is what (Hungarian PM) Viktor Orbán told the CPAC* audience

Speech by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at the opening of CPAC Hungary
source: Cabinet Office of the Prime Minister
19 May 2022, Budapest
https://miniszterelnok.hu/speech-by-prime-minister-viktor-orban-at-the-opening-o...

Text excerpt ( https://twitter.com/MollyJongFast/status/1527763004107939851/photo/1 )

*Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)
The Conservative Political Action Conference is an annual political conference attended by conservative activists and elected officials from across the United States and beyond. CPAC is hosted by the American Conservative Union. The first CPAC took place in 1974. Wikipedia

Oops sorry. Posting in new thread