Via Undercover Blue at Hullabaloo, Rep. Ilhan Omar:
I started attending political caucuses with my grandfather, who cherished democracy as only someone who has experienced its absence could.Go on, just try to read that out loud without choking up. I dare ya.
I don't have to "understand" the people who cheer this maniacal prattle—even though that's not particularly hard. For the good of the country, their political power has to be crushed, repeatedly, election after election, until we are sure this mockery of democracy never happens again.
I've been saying it for years: These "religious freedom" laws are nothing but a massive power grab by freakazoids.
And there's no place to hide, because the U.S. Supreme Court has just made xian mythology the law the of the land.
The 5–4 ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby prompted a now-famous dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who condemned the court’s decision to use RFRA, a law originally intended to protect religious minorities, to legalize discrimination. “No tradition,” Ginsburg noted, “and no prior decision under RFRA, allows a religion-based exemption when the accommodation would be harmful to others.” Through Hobby Lobby, the court had transformed RFRA from a shield into a sword, creating a license to discriminate with no clear limitations.
Need proof? Here are the freakazoids demanding tens of millions of Kentucky tax dollars to indoctrinate children with their evil mythologyOn Wednesday, the Trump administration proved Ginsburg right. In a decision of startling breadth, the Department of Health and Human Services declared that, under RFRA, a federally funded foster care agency in South Carolina has a right to discriminate against non-Christians, closing its doors to would-be parents of different faiths. As Ginsburg predicted, the administration’s interpretation of the law has no limiting principle: It all but announced that taxpayer-funded adoption and foster care agencies may now engage in flagrant discrimination without consequence, so long as they state a religious rationale for their actions. The grim future that Ginsburg foresaw in Hobby Lobby has arrived.
With several hundred students from private schools looking on in the cold Thursday morning outside the state Capitol, several public officials touted a proposal to offer tax deductions to provide school scholarships.The event was a rally at the Capitol to celebrate school choice and National School Choice Week.
House Majority Leader John “Bam” Carney, R-Campbellsville, told the crowd that he will file a bill in early February that would grant a generous tax credit to those who donate money for student financial aid at private schools.
SNIP
Vandiver said the bill is expected to generate $25 million to help about 7,000 families.
No biggie, you say? It is within the memory of people still alive when xians exercising their "religious freedom" punished homosexuality by firing you from your job, evicting you from your home and denying you civil rights.The tax credit would amount to up to 95 percent of the contribution. “You donate $10,000, you get $9,500 credit,” he said.SNIPThe measure has never gotten out of a legislative chamber’s committee, “but we are optimistic this year,” he said. He acknowledged that the revenue bill would have to receive at least 60 percent of the vote, instead of a majority in each chamber, to pass since lawmakers are not scheduled to pass a two-year state budget this year.Stephanie Winkler, president of the Kentucky Education Association, said her group has “a strong belief that school choice already exists in Kentucky.”“Our organization fights hard for for the commonwealth’s constitutionally-mandated system of common schools that allow any child, no matter their abilities, to have the right to a high quality education,” Winkler said. “The local public schools of these ‘school choice’ activists would benefit greatly from the energy and financial support they give to this cause.”
GOP delenda est.So how do people who think and behave this way respond when the public rejects their agenda? They attempt to use their power to overrule the democratic process. When Democrats threaten to win elections, they rig the voting process, as they did in Georgia.When Democrats win despite election rigging, they strip the offices Democrats win of power, as they did in Wisconsin. When Democratic policies prevail despite all of that, they use apparatchik-stuffed courts to strike down legislation on the flimsiest of grounds.As David Frum, the author of “Trumpocracy,” warned a year ago: “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” That’s happening as we speak.So Pelosi was right about Reed O’Connor’s ruling being a symptom of a “monstrous endgame,” but the game in question isn’t just about perpetuating the assault on health care, it’s about assaulting democracy in general. And the current state of the endgame is probably just the beginning; the worst, I fear, is yet to come.
VOTE! Vote early, vote often. Take your family, take your friends, take your neighbors, take your dogs.Republicans have shown themselves to simply be stooges for the worst president in US history, possessing neither shame or backbone. They are willing to sacrifice our republic to perpetuate their own power and their own twisted world view. Worse, their nominee for the highest court in the land is the same. He’s a spoiled little rich kid who started life on third base who’s goal is to keep normal people from getting to first base. If he gets to the court, you can kiss the principles of fair play, equality, privacy, and voting rights goodbye.
In fact, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the Senate confirmed Kavanaugh quickly, then Roberts fast-tracks Roe repeal and assigns the decision to Kavanaugh, just to give a big “fuck you” to Democrats. That sentiment is after all the primary motivating factor for Republicans, other than giving money to the rich.This is a revolting party, a threat to the republic, one openly flirting with fascism. When Graham threatens that Republicans will simply make up sexual assault claims to destroy future Democratic court nominees, that is fascism. This is a party that combines racism, misogyny, and crushing the poor as its core features. There is no redemption here. We must destroy the Republican Party, making it so toxic that it cannot win elections and is forced to reconstitute itself as something less extreme. That begins in November, but that’s only a first step. Defeating Donald Trump in 2020 is only a second step. In 2009, way too many liberals sat back and thought Barack Obama would take care of their problems. We saw how that turned out in 2010 and after. To save this nation from the Republican menace, we have to continue our onslaught against them under the next president, both in terms of passing policies and confirming judges that move justice forward, but also in terms of candidate recruitment, grassroots activism, and everything else that fuels our wins now. The nation’s future relies on it.
The problem here is not that Republicans were grandstanding over imagined liberal schemes to destroy anyone and anything in pursuit of their poisonous schemes to crush everything good about America. The problem is that most of it wasn’t grandstanding. They believe this deeply and angrily. And it explains the lengths Republicans are willing to go to these days—even to the appalling extent of accepting a cretin like Donald Trump as a party leader. If you believe that your political opposites aren’t just opponents, but literally enemies of the country, then of course you’ll do almost anything to stop them. I would too if that’s what I thought.There are some liberals who do think that—and more and more of them since Donald Trump was elected. But it’s still a relatively small part of the progressive movement. In the conservative movement it’s an animating principle. This is why it so desperately needs to be stopped—not by destroying Republicans, but by voting them out of office. We simply can’t afford to have a major party run for the benefit of fearful whites who are dedicated to a scorched-earth belief that liberals are betraying the nation. It has to end, and Republicans themselves are ultimately the only ones who can end it. We need a real conservative party again.
By the way, destroying America's public education system and turning it into something only the 1% will be able to afford in the future is absolutely the goal of the GOP right now, and they're hard at work dismantling education as a right.Everybody who thinks the repugs running Kentucky state government don't already have plans in place to kill public education here, stand on your head.A Michigan judge ruled last week that children do not have a fundamental right to learn how to read and write.The ruling came in response to a lawsuit filed by Public Counsel, the nation’s largest public interest law firm, on behalf of Detroit students that sought to hold state authorities, including Gov. Rick Snyder (R), accountable for what plaintiffs alleged were systemic failures depriving children of their right to literacy, according to the Detroit Free Press."I'm shocked," said Ivy Bailey, president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers, the newspaper reported. "The message that it sends is that education is not important. And it sends the message that we don't care if you're literate or not."The suit also sought fixes to crumbling schools that, among other measures, Detroit Public Schools Community District officials reportedly said would amount to more than $500 million.After all, the future is going to need a lot of prisoners for private lockups.
This is now clearly a war on all immigration, legal and otherwise. The history of this country would be immeasurably different—and immeasurably worse—if you eliminated from it all those people who came here fleeing violence and oppression. In fact, if you did that, you wouldn’t have a country here at all. Maybe we don’t any more.
Digby:
Don't despair. Fight.Addie Stan clarifies the historical moment for us by throwing a glass of ice cold water in our faces and telling us to wake the hell up:SNIPShe concludes:We’re in the grips of a shift in national identity, one in which democracy and adherence to human rights as stated national values (however flawed in their actual execution) are giving way to an acceptance of authoritarian rule. And we’re allowing our country to align itself against the democracies of the world at the hands of a president who is looking more and more every day like a traitor. A president who is helping to fuel the rise of the authoritarian right in Europe.
Just days after Trump walked away from the G-7 consensus statement with a slam at the prime minister of Canada, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it was planning to “strengthen the northern border.”
And that announcement, you could say, “barely registered.”
Noah at Down with Tyranny:
Very very rarely, a church sign gets it right, and without pleas to invisible sky wizards.
They are traitors. And not just in the neo-confederate wasn't-slavery-great sense. Their hatred of everything that America stands for, everything that, yes, makes America great, has brought us to the precipice of catastrophe.
D.R. Tucker at Political Animal:
The 62 million people who decided to turn the United States into a shithole country by electing Donald Trump fourteen months ago deserve the blame for the disorder and chaos in the District of Columbia. There is no logic or basis to the nonsense that officially began at midnight on January 20, 2018…but there was no logic or basis to the nonsense that was the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
SNIP
Those who claimed to have voted for Trump because he would “shake things up” actually did so because they wanted him to prevent the government from providing any assistance or fair treatment whatsoever to people they consider “undesirables.”
They’re loving this shutdown, because they figure that a profoundly dysfunctional federal government is preferable to a federal government that’s providing “handouts,” “welfare,” “food stamps,” “Obamaphones,” etc.
Their hatred–their fear and loathing for anyone not like them–is responsible for this government shutdown. If they had their way, armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents would smash into the homes of every DACA beneficiary and force those beneficiaries to get on the first plane back to their countries of origin. If they had their way, every woman who marched this weekend would be denied equal pay for equal work, the right to control their own bodies and possibly even the right to vote. If they had their way, the bill that made Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a federal holiday would have been repealed long ago–even though their previous hero, Ronald Reagan, signed that bill into law.
SNIP
... the 45th president is “a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac.” Those who voted for him knew that, but they didn’t care. They’re responsible for the madness we have now. Like an arms dealer who eagerly sells weapons to a tyrant, those voters gave Trump the ammunition he needed to shoot down our democracy.
He is them and they are him. Don't be fooled into thinking he's some kind of anomaly.
The bumbling cruelty of the Trump administration* in response to the disaster in Puerto Rico is not an isolated accident of history. It’s a clumsier manifestation of the way conservative Republican politicians respond to all situations: They draw on their theological devotion to a series of conjuring words while people struggle to get drinking water and to clean the mold out of their houses. One storm follows another, and the answer is always the same. Magical thinking, ideological gobbledegook, and penurious inhumanity. One storm follows the other.
Our political leadership is clearly wanting with both Congress and the president out-competing themselves for utter fecklessness. John Adams saw this in his day: “If worthless men are sometimes at the head of affairs, it is, I believe, because worthless men are at the tail and the middle.” With such conditions, he warned, “remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
Democracy in Chains is a revelation, as politics and as history.
We know a lot about the rise of the Right in postwar America ....
Democracy in Chains assembles all of these fragments into a much more coherent, and much more frightening, whole.
It establishes the Jim Crow roots of the modern right, not just through the GOP’s southern strategy but through shared doubts about the compatibility of property rights and democratic rule. It demonstrates that the lurch right in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Iowa represents not some existential crisis of a forgotten working class but the triumph of a long push to use statehouses as laboratories for autocracy. It understands the post–Citizens United wave of “dark money” as but the most recent chapter in a long history of corporate stealth and influence.
And it reminds us that, however incompetent the current White House and legislative leadership, they are winning handily.
Just like his hero the Orange Loser, Whiny-Ass Titty Baby Mattie can't deal with the reality of elected office.
WEKU:
But as Bevin ramped up his criticism and online dispatches, he’s also blocked more than 500 Twitter users from following him, according to records released this week by ProPublica, a national investigative newsroom.We're not talking about stalkers or people who threaten violence; those should be reportedto police anyway. No, we're talking about people who dared to express on social media their contempt for the poor-bashing, rich-fellating repugs who are destroying the country
Bevin’s list of blocked social media users — obtained by ProPublica through a records request — includes many people who have shared their disdain for Bevin or President Donald Trump.
Attorney General Andy Beshear said his office, which weighs violations of the Open Records Act, has never issued an opinion “about the nature of social media and whether blocking someone violates the open records law.”
To date, no one has filed an appeal challenging a public official’s social media blockade.
Beshear declined to share his views on the matter and called it inappropriate because the office may have to tackle the issue in the future.Democracy sucks, and public office is not a fucking vacation. Deal with it, cowards.
Beshear said he has never blocked anyone on Twitter. The Twitter account of his predecessor, Attorney General Jack Conway, had barred several followers. Beshear said he had his staff unblock those users.
Neighbor of mine still has his Trump Pence sign in his front yard. He won't ever remove it. That makes him a clear and present danger to American Democracy.
DR Tucker at Political Animal:
The greatest threat to our institutions comes from those who choose to embrace nihilism and ignorance at the ballot box—a problem that will remain with us long after Trump has left the White House.But they do. And they always will.
Those who voted for Trump—those who put this madman into power, and who will be eager to put future right-wing madmen into power—threatened our institutions. Those who voted for Trump bear full responsibility for the havoc he has inflicted upon this country. Those who voted for Trump owe an apology to everyone who will suffer as a result of his actions.
Is it too harsh to regard the people who voted for this man as citizens who, with extremely rare exceptions, sought a “safe space” from an increasingly diverse country and a culture trending leftward? Is it too snobbish to regard these voters as the sort of people who, when they say they want “good jobs” to return to this country, actually mean they only want one specific demographic to have access to “good jobs”?
Donald Trump did not make himself President. A significant portion of the American electorate begged for a candidate like Trump—someone who scorned expertise, someone who believed that talking tough constituted leadership, someone who believed America fell into degeneration in the years following Brown v. Board of Education. Trump is the natural consequence of a generation of folks that watched All in the Family and actually thought the Archie Bunker character would make a one heck of a president.
The folks who voted for Trump knew exactly what they were doing. It wasn’t desperation. It wasn’t confusion. It was a willful and deliberate attempt to turn the clock back, to “deconstruct the administrative state,” to live out a fantasy of privilege, prejudice and power.
When Trump attacks our institutions, he is doing so with the full and total imprimatur and approval of those who voted for him. They like what they’re getting. Progressive nightmares are the same as their dreams.
It’s easy to put this all on Trump. It’s easy to say he’s out of control. It’s harder to countenance the idea that those who voted for Trump wanted chaos and disorder, wanted national and international harmony destroyed, wanted to eliminate all vestiges of progressivism and enlightenment in this country. No one wants to believe their neighbors hate them.
The news about the fascist tangelo just gets worse every day. It's easy to give in to despair, but don't do it. Get busy instead. And keep your eyes on the prize: saving democracy.
Similarly, every American should read Yale History Professor and Holocaust scholar Timothy Snyder’s “20-point guide to defending democracy under a Trump presidency.”Among his most important words of advice are “do not obey in advance,” to be wary if the Trump regime attempts to use a terrorist attack or similar tragedy to consolidate its power, and to adhere — especially if you are a lawyer, judge, government worker or other individual who may be called upon to shepherd Trump’s goals into fruition — to professional ethics.
It always has been. Trump has just carried it past its logical extreme.
It is not “liberal elitism” to declare that those who think chasing Mexicans and Muslims out of the country, repealing Obamacare, rolling back civil rights protections and cutting taxes for billionaires will lead to widespread prosperity are factually off-base. It’s basic common sense.
So beating Trump is not enough. Exposing and defeating the right-wing hoax is the goal. And that will take a lot more work than just winning elections.Trump made it this far because he understood that mainstream-media entities would not call stupidity by its name. He made it this far because he understood that there are millions of Americans who still, after all these decades, don’t understand that the Right–all of it–is a hoax, a scam to separate suckers from their money and their dignity. He made it this far because he understood that there are plenty of citizens who will fall for the simplest of cons–and that the Fourth Estate won’t even attempt to tell those citizens that they are just marks for the con.The marks will continue to be played for suckers even if Trump loses by a significant margin. They will continue to demonstrate their limitless intolerance. They will continue to attack elected Republicans they regard as not being hateful enough. They will continue to denigrate our democracy…and they will continue to slow down our march towards progress.
Don't be distracted by the hysteria about the billions of dollars corporations are pouring into political campaigns, both national and local.
First, it's not the majority of political money. Via Political Animal:
Far more importantly, the real harm of Citizens United is in its legitimization of corporate personhood.Nick Penniman and Wendell Potter wrote an op-ed in the LA Times today titled: Citizens United is Only 15% of the Political Cash Problem.According to theBut Center for Responsive Politics, of the $3.7 billion spent in the 2014 congressional midterms, super PACs, nonprofits and other outside spenders made up around $560 million, or roughly 15%. In contrast, $1.5 billion, or 42%, was spent by candidates themselves, with the rest left to party committees.Two other inside-the-Beltway terms — call time and the cash committee — illustrate why hard money is the core problem…Overturning Citizens United or regulating super PACs would, alas, do nothing to free our politicians from this frenetic fundraising. That can only be accomplished by cutting the ties between lobbyists and legislators and redirecting politicians’ time and energy toward small donors.
Think it's bad now? If Congress OK's this fascist power grab, corporations will be able to veto minimum wage, Social Security, affordable health care, clean water regulations and anything else - like the right to vote - that they can imagine hurts their profits by a single fucking penny.
Wave bye-bye to democracy, y'all; Exxon-Mobil will own your ass.
Apologies to Charlie Pierce for lifting his entire column, but This. Is. It. The hill we die on. Compared to TPP, the Keystone XL pipeline is an overturned trash can.
There probably is no more (occasionally overly) judicious voice on the world economy than Jeffrey Sachs. He has taken a look at the soft spots in the monstrous Trans-Pacific Partnership and he has found them to be bad enough to vote down the bill as a whole.The third is a set of regulations governing investor rights, intellectual property, and regulations in key service sectors, including financial services, telecommunications, e-commerce, and pharmaceuticals. These chapters are a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Their common denominator is that they enshrine the power of corporate capital above all other parts of society, including labor and even governments. The fourth is a set of standards on labor and the environment that purport to advance the cause of social fairness and environmental sustainability. But the agreements are thin, unenforceable, and generally unimaginative. For example, climate change is not even mentioned, much less addressed boldly and creatively.That sounds really bad. But, according to Sachs, there is worse to come.The most egregious parts of the agreement are the exorbitant investor powers implicit in the Investor-State Dispute Settlement system as well as the unjustified expansion of copyright and patent coverage. We've seen this show before. Corporations are already using ISDS provisions in existing trade and investment agreements to harass governments in order to frustrate regulations and judicial decisions that negatively impact the companies' interests. The system proposed in the TPP is a dangerous and unnecessary grant of power to investors and a blow to the judicial systems of all the signatory countries. And, as in earlier trade agreements, the United States has pushed through overly strong intellectual property rights that strengthen the aggressive pricing practices of big pharma and unnecessarily extend the copyright protections far beyond their social usefulness.From the start, this thing has reeked of being an investment protection act. This thought has occurred to Senator Professor Warren as well.Because of how costly these awards can be, ISDS creates enormous pressure on governments to avoid actions that might offend corporate interests. Corporations have brought ISDS cases against countries that have raised their minimum wage, attempted to cut smoking rates, or prohibited dumping toxic chemicals. Just last month, a foreign corporation successfully challenged Canada's decision to deny a blasting permit because of concerns about the environmental impact on nearby fishing grounds, and now the company could get up to $300 million from Canadian taxpayers. Will Canada's environmental regulators hesitate before they say no to the next foreign corporation that wants to dump, blast, or drill? The president's devotion to this deal is surpassed in its everlasting mystery to his implacable demand that Congress fast-track a measure that contains uncounted numbers of land mines for ordinary people and the countries in which they live. Sachs seems curious about this as well.Perhaps most disappointing is the lack of creativity in the development, labor, and environmental chapters. Yes, they rhetorically defend global economic development, labor standards, and environmental sustainability, but they do so without specific enforcement powers. Why is it that companies can force arbitration tribunals to defend their investor rights, but workers have no such power? Why is climate change not even considered in the draft, despite the fact that it represents the most important environmental threat of the 21st century, and may have strong implications for future trade rules? Outside of his education policies, the headlong rush into the TPP is going to be one of the only acts of his presidency with which the president justifies the criticisms levelled at him from the left. That's not a bad batting average, but this is an awful exception to the rule.
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