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Month: July 2022

Of course, it’s all the fault of the beyotches

Published by digby on July 6, 2022

You just can’t trust ’em

Here’s the bow-tied 19 year old, right wing virgin lecturing his dorm mates on a Friday night about what’s wrong with the world:

And of course, they’re angry. They know that their lives will not be better than their parents’. They’ll be worse. That’s all but guaranteed. They know that. They’re not that stupid. And yet the authorities in their lives — mostly women — never stop lecturing them about their so-called privilege. “You’re male, you’re privileged!”

Imagine that. Try to imagine an unhealthier, unhappier life than that. So, a lot of young men in America are going nuts. Are you surprised?

The “populist” Swanson Foods heir is really going for it, isn’t he?

Evan at Wonkette asks the right question:

Is this the shooter’s manifesto or Tucker’s? Because it sounds more like Tucker’s, but that is just us making our own confused golden retriever face about why Tucker is always so mad on behalf of loser white men who aren’t him.

Why so mad, Tucker?

Why so mad? Why so angry about all of it? What is it? Mommy left and then you saw a gay guy in the bathroom and now everything is just GRRRRR?

What is it?

Laura Ingraham is blaming pot:

And this one’s a real doozy:

Yes, they are blaming women, pot and SSRIs. And, of course, video games.

Women are half the global population. And yet we are the world’s leader of mass gun violence. Also:

Of course it’s the guns.

And by the way, if anyone’s influencing young men to pick up guns and start shooting people I’d look here before I’d look at the women in their lives:

That certainly shows a healthy culture…

What’s the matter with Texas?

Published by digby on July 6, 2022

Is it possible they are having an epiphany?

This is very, very interesting:

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s lead over Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke narrowed to 6 points last month, according to a poll conducted by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. That’s a smaller gap than when Republican George W. Bush ousted Democrat Ann Richards in 1994 with a 7.6-point win.

Abbott’s unfavorability ratings are also the highest they’ve ever been at 44%, according to the poll, which was conducted after the deadliest school shooting in state history and almost entirely before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion.

Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project, said the mass shooting in Uvalde and scrutiny over how it was handled could have contributed to Abbott’s increased unfavorability, but it’s hard to say how much exactly.

The political poll did not include specific questions related to the shooting in Uvalde, but it did ask participants to rate Abbott’s performance on handling gun violence. About 36% of participants said they approve of how the governor has handled this issue, while 45% said they disapprove.

The mass shooting in Uvalde and the overturning of Roe v. Wade have laid the groundwork for a contentious final four months in the race to lead the state. While O’Rourke works to harness the anti-incumbent energy spurred by the seismic events of the past few months, Abbott is banking on a general election centered on stronger issues for him: the economy and the border.

Mounting expectations over how the Supreme Court would rule on abortion access could be another factor that contributed to Abbott’s weakened ratings, Henson said. Although the poll ended the same day Roe v. Wade was overturned, it included questions about abortion access that show how voters feel regarding the issue. About 36% of participants said they approve of how Abbott has handled policies related to abortion access, and 46% said they disapprove.

Now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned and Texas is poised to completely outlaw abortion access, it will likely be a pivotal topic in the upcoming months, Henson said.

“If we look back at the half dozen times we’ve asked the standard abortion questions since 2014, no more than a quarter of Republicans have ever said that by law abortion should never be permitted,” he said.

Voters will see that reality reflected in how Abbott and O’Rourke discuss abortion access in the upcoming months, he said.

“In terms of that affecting the election, we can expect Democratic candidates to talk about this a lot, and we can expect Republican candidates to not want to talk about it very much,” Henson said.

I don’t want to get my hopes up. It’s Texas. But it does make me question this conventional wisdom that since the polls don’t show abortion as a priority that it won’t be a motivating issue in November. Mid-terms need heavy base turn-out, after all.

Dave Weigel discussed this in his newletter:

Pat Ryan signed up for one of the worst jobs in Democratic politics — a swing-seat special election in New York at a lousy moment for his party. His plan to win on August 23? Exactly what Democrats refused to do in 2018, when they flipped the state’s 19th Congressional District. 

“We are going to nationalize this race,” Ryan said in an interview. “I believe this has to be a national referendum on Roe. It’s our first chance to send this message, that the country is not going to tolerate this erosion of our fundamental rights.”

Just days after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade, suburban Democratic candidates put it front and center in their paid messaging, marched at abortion rights rallies, and seen an uptick — small but noticeable — from online donors. They see an issue that can motivate liberal voters who are running out of other reasons to vote. When pollsters find the electorate furious at President Biden, but ready to elect a Democrat to Congress, strategists suspect the invisible hand of Justice Samuel Alito.

The evidence? It’s not in polls, which continue to find abortion badly trailing inflation and other economic questions as voters’ top concerns. It’s in a race that Democrats lost last week, a special election in Nebraska that Republicans expected to win by double digits and ended up winning by 6 points. 

“I think that the Dobbs decision helped me get people geared up and paying attention,” said Nebraska state Sen. Patty Pansing Brooks, the Democrat who lost last week’s election to Rep.-elect Mike Flood, a Republican. “If the decision had come out a week earlier, it would have been even more helpful.”

Democrats have waited for a post-Roe backlash to emerge, and hoped they saw one even before the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision was handed down. They were hopeful, when Texas Republicans passed an abortion restriction that polled terribly, that it could help them polarize last year’s election in Virginia; at the very least, maybe it could be used against Republicans in Texas.

That didn’t happen, and the Nebraska result was still a defeat. And days earlier, Texas Republicans flipped a majority-Latino House seat that national Democrats decided not to aggressively contest. Their theory was that GOP nominee Mayra Flores would win under the current lines, but lose when the November election was held on a friendlier, bluer map; the losing Democrat’s campaign manager told the Texas Tribune that the party groups had “failed at their single purpose of existence.”

But Lincoln, Neb. is not heavily Catholic South Texas. Neither is the Hudson Valley, where Ryan is running; neither is Alaska, whose sole House seat will be filled in a three-way special election next month. In each race, the Democrat pushed the Dobbs decision in her or his messaging, while Republicans briefly reacted and moved on.

Pansing Brooks went on the air about abortion two weeks before the election, and shortly before the Dobbs decision, with a spot that covered both a “Supreme Court assault on women’s rights” and voters’ economic jitters. “I’m the only candidate for Congress who will defend women’s rights and fight inflation,” Pansing Brooks said in the spot. Flood’s advertising hit inflation, but did not touch on the conservatives’ victory over Roe.

The result was a close race in a district then-president Trump had carried in 2020 by 15 points. It was close thanks to Democratic strength in Lincoln, the district’s biggest and most liberal city, and other eastern Nebraska suburbs. 

Flood, who had been challenging a scandal-plagued incumbent who resigned after a campaign finance conviction, won everything in rural Nebraska; Pansing Brooks carried Lincoln’s Lancaster County by nearly 10,000 votes. “We can’t win all the conservative districts,” the Democrat said, “but we can narrow the gap.”

On the air, Pansing Brooks did not get terribly specific about what should happen to legal abortion after Roe, a stumbling block for other Democrats. In a short time frame, she didn’t need to. Gov. Pete Ricketts, a Republican, had discussed banning abortion in the state, and Flood cheered the Dobbs decision. 

The Democrat showed up to abortion rights marches and opposed an abortion ban, and the shock of the decision drove up turnout, with Lancaster, always the district’s biggest source of votes, making up more of the electorate than it had two years ago.

In New York, Ryan was employing a similar strategy, in a district that actually voted for Biden in 2020; it became vacant when newly appointed Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado left the seat to run statewide. Ryan’s first paid ad went up the day of the Dobbs decision, starting with a recap of his military service and how he fought for “freedom,” before the candidate turned to camera to say something else: “Freedom includes a woman’s right to choose.”

The timing of the decision, said Ryan, changed his campaign — he spent the weekend after it going to emergency rallies across the district, and had the best fundraising days of his campaign since his launch. (The decision came one week before the quarterly fundraising deadline, making the impact somewhat harder to trace.)

“We saw a massive influx of grassroots support,” Ryan said in an interview, describing the weeks after a draft Dobbs decision leaked to Politico, and activists began to mobilize. “We immediately made the decision that this is the central issue in my campaign.” 

Republicans say that Democrats are making an error with this strategy. But they’re not saying it very loudly. When approached for comment last week before the July Fourth break, the Molinaro and Flood campaigns did not provide an on the record response. Molinaro had previously reacted to the decision by emphasizing that nothing would change in New York. 

Before Dobbs, Molinaro had released a newsy poll that showed him cruising to a win; after Dobbs, Ryan put out a poll that found the race narrowing to single digits once voters focused on abortion. If there is a unified Republican message on abortion, it’s not about the policy, but about why Democrats are so interested in discussing it when voters are far more focused on inflation.

“Pat Ryan is either ignoring every recent poll or living in a dream world if he thinks this election is about abortion,” said National Republican Congressional Committee spokeswoman Samantha Bullock in a statement. “Voters care most about soaring prices and they hold Democrats responsible.” 

For now, national abortion rights groups haven’t said much about the race Ryan calls a “referendum” on abortion; they didn’t respond to questions, either. Far more attention is going to a vote that’ll happen before New York’s court-delayed primary — the Aug. 2 primaries in Kansas, where a measure that could ban abortion in the state Constitution, pushed and endorsed by Topeka Republicans, is on the ballot. 

But having lost Roe, Democrats are acting on the poll-tested belief that voters didn’t want it to go, and that the Republican position in each race will be tougher to explain and sell. In Alaska, which has not elected a Democrat to Congress since Richard M. Nixon’s presidency, two Republicans are now facing one Democrat in a runoff. 

The Democrat, Mary Peltola, immediately reacted to the Dobbs decision by condemning it, and raising some money. The Republicans, Nick Begich and ex-governor Sarah Palin, said little on social media, then said at a candidate forum that the court had done the right thing, returning the issue to the states — stopping short of endorsing the national abortion ban that Democrats want to campaign against this year. A referendum on abortion, right now, sounds better to Democrats than a referendum on just about anything else.

They need something and you’d think that a GOP trying to force 10 year old girls to endure childbirth and shrugging off people being mowed down with automatic weapons every other week would be one way to do it. These are NOT POPULAR.

High gas prices are bad but they are temporary. Most people understand that. This other stuff is killing people and destroying the country permanently. Maybe there are enough people who actually care about that.

Praying with the Supremes

Published by digby on July 6, 2022

This is not right

The country is now being run by a cabal of ultra-conservative Catholic extremists. What would the founders think about that?

At an evangelical victory party in front of the Supreme Court last to celebrate the downfall of Roe v. Wade last week, a prominent Capitol Hill religious leader was caught on a hot mic making a bombshell claim: that she prays with sitting justices inside the high court. “We’re the only people who do that,” Peggy Nienaber said.

This disclosure was a serious matter on its own terms, but it also suggested a major conflict of interest. Nienaber’s ministry’s umbrella organization, Liberty Counsel, frequently brings lawsuits before the Supreme Court. In fact, the conservative majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which ended nearly 50 years of federal abortion rights, cited an amicus brief authored by Liberty Counsel in its ruling.

In other words: Sitting Supreme Court justices have prayed together with evangelical leaders whose bosses were bringing cases and arguments before the high court.

Nienaber is Liberty Counsel’s executive director of DC Ministry, as well as the vice president of Faith & Liberty, whose ministry offices sit directly behind the Supreme Court. She spoke to a livestreamer who goes by Connie IRL, seemingly unaware she was being recorded. “You actually pray with the Supreme Court justices?” the livestreamer asked. “I do,” Nienaber said. “They will pray with us, those that like us to pray with them.” She did not specify which justices prayed with her, but added with a chortle, “Some of them don’t!” The livestreamer then asked if Nienaber ministered to the justices in their homes or at her office. Neither, she said. “We actually go in there.”

Nienaber intended her comments, broadcast on YouTube, to be “totally off the record,” she says in the clip. That’s likely because such an arrangement presents a problem for the Orlando-based Liberty Counsel, which not only weighed in on the Dobbs case as a friend of the court, but also litigated and won a 9-0 Supreme Court victory this May in a case centered on the public display of a religious flag.

The Supreme Court did not respond to a request for comment. Liberty Counsel’s founder, Mat Staver, strenuously denied that the in-person ministering to justices that Nienaber bragged about exists. “It’s entirely untrue,” Staver tells Rolling Stone. “There is just no way that has happened.” He adds: “She has prayer meetings for them, not with them.” Asked if he had an explanation for Nienaber’s direct comments to the contrary, Staver says, “I don’t.”

But the founder of the ministry, who surrendered its operations to Liberty Counsel in 2018, tells Rolling Stone that he hosted prayer sessions with conservative justices in their chambers from the late-1990s through when he left the group in the mid-2010s. Rob Schenck, who launched the ministry under the name Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, described how the organization forged ministry relationships with Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and the late Antonin Scalia, saying he would pray with them inside the high court. Nienaber was Schenk’s close associate in that era, and continued with the ministry after it came under the umbrella of Liberty Counsel.

Louis Virelli is a professor at Stetson University College of Law who wrote a book about Supreme Court recusals. He’s blunt in his assessment: “Praying with a group that filed an amicus brief with a court,” he says, “is a problem.”

They clearly do not care in the least about conflicts of interest. We know that by the fact that the wife of one of them was involved with an attempted coup if nothing else. And the right would scream bloody murder at the idea that there’s anything wrong with personally praying with people who file cases before the court. Don’t even try to go there. As Lauren Boebert said the other day, they believe religion should direct government.

Nonetheless, I think we have to grapple with the fact that a large conservative majority of Supreme Court Justices are all highly influenced by an extreme traditionalist theology. These are the kind of folks who think the Pope is a liberal shill. They aren’t mainstream Catholics.

Trump needs that “get-out-of-jail-free” card

Published by digby on July 6, 2022

He’s talking about announcing his 2024 bid early

If there’s one thing former president Donald Trump knows very well, it’s the fact that the Department of Justice has a hard and fast policy against indicting a sitting president. He heard it hundreds of times during the Mueller investigation from every TV lawyer in the country as well as his own, including the White House counsel. And even though the Mueller Report laid out several possible counts of obstruction of justice, clearly intended to be triggered once Trump was out of office, nothing ever happened. It’s pretty clear that Trump understands the presidency to be a “get-out-of-jail-free” card. Right now he probably could use one.

On Tuesday, the special grand jury convened by the Fulton County Georgia’s District Attorney’s office issued a number of subpoenas to Trump’s Kracken election team to testify about the Trump campaign’s post-election pressure to overturn the election in 2020. Lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, Cleta Mitchel, Jacki Pick Deason and Kenneth Chesbro were called along with Senator Lindsey Graham.

Giuliani, you’ll recall, testified at a hearing after the election in which he claimed he had proof that Georgia election workers pulled suitcases full of ballots out from under a table to pad Biden’s vote count, a charge which was investigated and totally refuted by the Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office. That didn’t stop Giuliani and others, including Trump, from spreading the lie anyway, resulting in death threats to the election workers they targeted with their bogus story, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, both of whom movingly testified before the January 6th Committee. Giuliani has never backed off his claims to this day.

John Eastman, the constitutional scholar most responsible for the plot to have Mike Pence single-handedly reject the electoral college votes on January 6th, also appeared at a hearing and told Georgia officials that they had the power to simply appoint new electors for Donald Trump, which is, of course, crazy. Ellis wrote some memos passing on the same rationales and she and Deason spoke at the same hearing. Chesbro is alleged to have worked with a local GOP chairman to get fake electors to meet secretly in the state capitol. Last, but not least, Sen. Graham called up Geogia’s Secretary of State twice to see if there wasn’t some way they could throw out absentee votes for Biden.

Trump himself wasn’t subpoenaed but since Raffensperger has reportedly already testified and they may have introduced the audio recording of Trump attempting to coerce him into “finding” one more vote than he needed to overturn the election, perhaps it’s unnecessary. There’s plenty of evidence of his attempts to strong-arm Georgia officials into cheating on his behalf without hearing a word from him.

These subpoenas come on the heels of a flurry of activity in recent days by the Justice Department in which John Eastman and former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark were served search warrants and various GOP activists and officials around the country who were involved in the fake elector scheme were served with federal subpoenas.

The fake elector scheme is of particular interest to the feds for the simple reason that there is a paper trail showing that in Wisconsin, Nevada Georgia, Arizona, and Michigan they signed certificates which claimed they were their states’ “duly appointed electors.” (In two other states, someone had the presence of mind to add language which said those votes would only be counted if the courts determined that the original count was invalid.) According to various legal observers, these false statements could easily lead to charges of defrauding the United States.

They tried to fraudulently cast votes in the electoral college. It truly is the most egregious example of election fraud in U.S. history. The irony of that is so thick you can only cut through it with a chainsaw.  

Meanwhile, we have the January 6th Committee making news every week with more evidence of Trump and his henchmen organizing the attempted coup from the White House. The last hearing, featuring testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to the White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, showed that Trump was aware of the potential for violence on January 6th and even knew there were armed people in the crowd when he riled them all up and told them to go to the Capitol. Trump was particularly perturbed by this testimony and had been engaged in hysterical character assassination every since, posting insult after insult on his Truth Social account day after day.

All of this coming to a head, with reports that big donors are spending heavily on some of his potential rivals for the nomination who smell blood in the water, has Trump and his people putting out the word that he may be planning to announce his candidacy for 2024 before the midterms, perhaps any day now. It may be that he wants to crush these nascent candidacies and there are good reasons for him to want to get the money flowing away from such upstarts as Ron DeSantis, who is almost certainly preparing a bid. According to the New York Times, Republican officials are ambivalent about this early announcement because they don’t want to relitigate his false claims of election fraud and give Democrats a chance to use Trump as a foil during the midterm elections.

But Trump doesn’t care about that. His personal needs are far more urgent. The Guardian, reports that “Trump has reportedly told advisers that declaring a run for the White House now would allow him to strengthen his argument that other criminal investigations against him in New York and Georgia are politically motivated.”

It’s also possible that he believes that the DOJ, being burned by the scandal with James Comey and the Hillary Clinton email debacle of 2016, simply cannot indict a former president, presidential candidate and front runner for the nomination before an election, even if it’s years in advance. He would certainly make hay out of it if they tried. The sooner he announces the safer he believes he will be.

Sadly, he may be right.

Salon

The times call for righteous anger

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 6, 2022

Not one man bland

Still image from Sherlock Holmes (2009).

It seems Jennifer Rubin is on the same page as my earlier post below. Pres. Joe Biden’s hope to “lower the temperature” in Washington, she writes, “has too frequently ceded rhetorical energy to Republicans and has demoralized his own side by coming across as blasé in the face of outrageous developments.”

The times require righteous anger. But:

Biden’s first reaction to the shooting in Highland Park, Ill., on July 4 was illustrative. Granted, he was speaking to military families on a holiday, but his words Monday afternoon struck the wrong note. “You all heard what happened today,” he said, not even using the word “shooting” or mentioning the location. He continued, “I know many Americans look around today and see a divided country and are deeply worried about that fact. I understand. But I believe we’re more united than we are divided.”

Actually, we’re more divided than ever — and increasingly so thanks to the Supreme Court. And the worry is not that we are divided, but that our democracy is imperiled.

Biden’s written remarks were somber and more heartfelt, but devoid of anger. “Jill and I are shocked by the senseless gun violence that has yet again brought grief to an American community on this Independence Day,” the statement read. “As always, we are grateful for the first responders and law enforcement on the scene.” He noted the gun reforms he recently signed into law and meekly offered that “there is much more work to do, and I’m not going to give up fighting the epidemic of gun violence.” It sounded depressed, not defiant.

Telling Democrats you’re fighting for them or that you will fight once elected is obvious empty rhetoric that will not get them off their couches to vote this fall. People need to see you fighting. At least throwing rhetorical punches.

“The murmurs of dissatisfaction rolling through the Democratic Party in part stem from a sense that his serene, platitudinous language and disinclination to fully denounce the GOP only minimize the dangers we face and disguises the extremism of democracy’s opponents,” Rubin writes.

In this environment, Biden gets rolled. Govs. J.B. Pritzker (Ill.) and Gavin Newsom (Calif.) get it. The White House? Not so much.

Cedric L. Richmond, a former Democratic representative from Louisiana now works in the Biden White House. “The country didn’t elect Joe Biden because they wanted a Democratic Donald Trump to go out there every day and divide the country more,” he told CNN, suggesting more aggressiveness from Biden is the “the same foolishness that got us Donald Trump.”

And that’s the same foolishness that loses elections when Trump is not on the ballot.

Rubin responds:

That’s just daft. It shows an utter lack of appreciation for the nature of the GOP and the critical need to mobilize the rest of the country in defense of democratic values. Surely, Democrats are hoping the rest of the administration doesn’t buy into this.

[…]

Unlike Biden, Democrats up and down the ballot appear to recognize we are at an inflection point. Rather than wait for direction from the president or some unified message from advocacy groups, they should continue doing precisely what they have begun: Highlight the cruelty, extremism and unfitness of their opponents. Run on women’s autonomy and ending senseless gun violence. Put initiatives on the ballot to draw voters to the polls. Condemn a radical, out-of-control Supreme Court and vow to reform it — by filibuster reform if necessary.

The problem is, Paul Waldman once acknowledged, “what the system really rewards is the appearance of fighting for something, rather than waging actual battles where the outcome makes a difference …”

In fact, “the single most important bias in the news media is not in favor of any ideology, it’s a bias toward conflict. Fights, whether genuine or contrived, have all the dramatic elements that outlets look to build our stories out of. ” Why do Republicans seem to get more face time in the media? They generate conflict.

A fireside chat won’t cut it. A little fire-breathing might.

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.

Democrats who bump back

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 6, 2022

“They’re coming after you next,” says Gov. Gavin Newsom

“There are things that go bump in the night, and we are the ones who bump back.” – from Hellboy (2004)

What Democrats lack is leaders with enough moxy to battle Republican extremists who dominate the media battle space by trolling the left and tossing red meat to the right. If Democrats expect to hold back the conservative neofascist putsch, they had best do more than promise that if elected they will “fight for you.” They’ll have to audition.

A pair of Democratic governors are doing just that.

Even before the Independence Day mass shooting in Highland Park, Ill., California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) had bought a 30-second ad in Florida criticizing that state’s aspiring autocrat, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), the man who would be Trump 2.0. Newsom also took a swing at Florida Sen. Rick Scott (R).

Republicans in Florida are banning books, making it harder to vote, restricting speech, and criminalizing women and doctors, Newsom tells viewers. We’re not having that in California, says Newsom. Hell no. He reminds Floridians that (Democratic) California stands for American values Florida is attacking. He cast DeSantis as an enemy of liberty. It’s about time some Democrat with a national platform did. And Newsom did it in Florida.

Newsom already pushed back against moves in other states not only to criminalize women’s reproductive freedom, but to punish them for seeking to exercise it in states where abortion remains legal in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe. In June, Newsom signed legislation providing additional funds to support services for women who travel to California to exercise their rights:

“The measure comes as lawmakers in Missouri advance a proposal to allow private citizens to sue Missouri residents who have an abortion out of state, as well as their providers and anyone who assists them in seeking an abortion,” Newsom’s office explained in a news release. 

“This is not just about women. This is not just about choice. This is not just about reproductive freedom. They’re coming after you next,” Newsom said during the signing ceremony.

“California will not hand over patients who come here to receive care and will not extradite doctors who provide care to out-of-state patients here,” Newsom’s office declared in a tweet again on Tuesday.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) responded to the Highland Park shooting by declaring that if people are angry about being robbed of any sense of security and joy by gun violence, “I’m here to tell you, be angry.”

“It does not have to be this way,” he said. “And yet, we as a nation continue to allow this to happen.” We celebrate the Fourth of July once a year. But mass shootings are now a weekly American tradition.

Pushing back against the right-wing evasion that “today is not the day” to address gun proliferation, Pritzker insisted. “I’m telling you there is no better day and no better time than right here and right now.”

Prtizker attacked the notion that our 18th century founders intended Americans to go about with assault weapons, and that somehow the Second Amendment trumps Americans’ right to live.

For confirmation that Pritzker’s message hit a right-wing soft spot, I give you Bill O’Reilly’s freakout.

When you’ve cut the other boxer over the eye. Work the eye.

You sure that isn’t James Woods *playing* Bill O’Reilly?

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.

Here Come the Christian Nationalists

Published by digby on July 5, 2022

“Just mount up and ride to the sounds of the guns, and they are all over this country” — Rick Scott

These people aren’t fringe anymore. They have a super-majority on the Supreme Court and they are all armed to the teeth:

The shape of the Christian nationalist movement in the post-Roe future is coming into view, and it should terrify anyone concerned for the future of constitutional democracy.

The Supreme Court’s decision to rescind the reproductive rights that American women have enjoyed over the past half-century will not lead America’s homegrown religious authoritarians to retire from the culture wars and enjoy a sweet moment of triumph. On the contrary, movement leaders are already preparing for a new and more brutal phase of their assault on individual rights and democratic self-governance. Breaking American democracy isn’t an unintended side effect of Christian nationalism. It is the point of the project.

A good place to gauge the spirit and intentions of the movement that brought us the radical majority on the Supreme Court is the annual Road to Majority Policy Conference. At this year’s event, which took place last month in Nashville, three clear trends were in evidence. First, the rhetoric of violence among movement leaders appeared to have increased significantly from the already alarming levels I had observed in previous years. Second, the theology of dominionism — that is, the belief that “right-thinking” Christians have a biblically derived mandate to take control of all aspects of government and society — is now explicitly embraced. And third, the movement’s key strategists were giddy about the legal arsenal that the Supreme Court had laid at their feet as they anticipated the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

They intend to use that arsenal — together with additional weaponry collected in cases like Carson v. Makin, which requires state funding of religious schools if private, secular schools are also being funded; and Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, which licenses religious proselytizing by public school officials — to prosecute a war on individual rights, not merely in so-called red state legislatures but throughout the nation.

Although metaphors of battle are common enough in political gatherings, this year’s rhetoric appeared more violent, more graphic and more tightly focused on fellow Americans, rather than on geopolitical foes.

“The greatest danger to America is not our enemies from the outside, as powerful as they may be,” said former President Donald Trump, who delivered the keynote address at the event. “The greatest danger to America is the destruction of our nation from the people from within. And you know the people I’m talking about.”

Speakers at the conference vied to outdo one another in their denigration of the people that Mr. Trump was evidently talking about. Democrats, they said, are “evil,” “tyrannical” and “the enemy within,” engaged in “a war against the truth.”

“The backlash is coming,” warned Senator Rick Scott of Florida. “Just mount up and ride to the sounds of the guns, and they are all over this country. It is time to take this country back.”

Citing the fight against Nazi Germany during the Battle of the Bulge, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina said, “We find ourselves in a pitched battle to literally save this nation.” Referencing a passage from Ephesians that Christian nationalists often use to signal their militancy, he added, “I don’t know about you, but I got my pack on, I got my boots on, I got my helmet on, I’ve got on the whole armor.”

It is not a stretch to link this rise in verbal aggression to the disinformation campaign to indoctrinate the Christian nationalist base in the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, along with what we’re learning from the Jan. 6 hearings. The movement is preparing “patriots” for the continuation of the assault on democracy in 2022 and 2024.

The intensification of verbal warfare is connected to shifts in the Christian nationalist movement’s messaging and outreach, which were very much in evidence at the Nashville conference. Seven Mountains Dominionism — the belief that “biblical” Christians should seek to dominate the seven key “mountains” or “molders” of American society, including the government — was once considered a fringe doctrine, even among representatives of the religious right. At last year’s Road to Majority conference, however, there was a breakout session devoted to the topic. This year, there were two sessions, and the once arcane language of the Seven Mountains creed was on multiple speakers’ lips.

The hunger for dominion that appears to motivate the leadership of the movement is the essential context for making sense of its strategy and intentions in the post-Roe world. The end of abortion rights is the beginning of a new and much more personal attack on individual rights.

And indeed it is personal. Much of the rhetoric on the right invokes visions of vigilante justice. This is about “good guys with guns” — or neighbors with good eavesdropping skills — heroically taking on the pernicious behavior of their fellow citizens. Among the principal battlefields will be the fallopian tubes and uteruses of women.

At a breakout session called “Life Is on the Line: What Does the Future of the Pro-Life Movement Look Like From Here?” Chelsey Youman, the Texas state director and national legislative adviser to Human Coalition Action, a Texas-based anti-abortion organization with a national strategic focus, described the connection between vigilantes and abortion rights.

Instead of the state regulating abortion providers, she explained, “You and me as citizens of Texas or this country or wherever we can pass this bill, can instead sue the abortion provider.” Mrs. Youman, as it happens, played a role in promoting the Texas law Senate Bill 8, which passed in May 2021 and allows private citizens to sue abortion providers and anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion. She was exultant over the likely passage of similar laws across the nation. “We have legislation ready to roll out for every single state you live in to protect life regardless of the Supreme Court, regardless of your circuit court.” To be sure, Christian nationalists are also pushing for a federal ban. But the struggle for the present will center on state-level enforcement mechanisms.

Citing the fight against Nazi Germany during the Battle of the Bulge, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina said, “We find ourselves in a pitched battle to literally save this nation.” Referencing a passage from Ephesians that Christian nationalists often use to signal their militancy, he added, “I don’t know about you, but I got my pack on, I got my boots on, I got my helmet on, I’ve got on the whole armor.”

It is not a stretch to link this rise in verbal aggression to the disinformation campaign to indoctrinate the Christian nationalist base in the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, along with what we’re learning from the Jan. 6 hearings. The movement is preparing “patriots” for the continuation of the assault on democracy in 2022 and 2024.

The intensification of verbal warfare is connected to shifts in the Christian nationalist movement’s messaging and outreach, which were very much in evidence at the Nashville conference. Seven Mountains Dominionism — the belief that “biblical” Christians should seek to dominate the seven key “mountains” or “molders” of American society, including the government — was once considered a fringe doctrine, even among representatives of the religious right. At last year’s Road to Majority conference, however, there was a breakout session devoted to the topic. This year, there were two sessions, and the once arcane language of the Seven Mountains creed was on multiple speakers’ lips.

I’ll just let you sit with that for a while.

We’ve been writing about this stuff here for a very long time. It’s gotten much more organized and much more mainstream as you can see by the fact that US Senator Rick Scott who is not even thought of as one of the true crazies in the GOP (although he is.) And look at the violent imagery these leaders are evoking among a fanatical following that is also armed with deadly weapons. We’re sitting on a powder keg.

COVID Funds Paying for Tax Cuts

Published by digby on July 5, 2022

We knew it would happen, right?

This is infuriating:

As gas prices climbed toward record highs this May, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) secured a pause on the state’s fuel taxes — a $200 million plan he helped pay for with a pot of federal funds awarded earlier in the pandemic.

The policy was intended to save money for local drivers and state coffers alike. But it also appeared to mark a potential violation of federal law — and the latest skirmish in an escalating clash between GOP officials and the White House over how states can use generous federal stimulus dollars.

More than a year after Congress approved a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, Republicans in nearly two dozen states have ratcheted up efforts to tap some of those funds for an unrelated purpose: paying for tax cuts. The moves have threatened to siphon off aid that might otherwise help states fight the pandemic, shore up their local economies or prepare for a potential recession.

The intensifying Republican campaign targets one of the signature programs Democrats approved as part of President Biden’s American Rescue Plan last year. At the urging of the nation’s mayors and governors, Congress delivered what largely amounted to a blank check for every city and state to bolster their budgets.

Congress ultimately laid down few conditions for how local leaders could use the pot of money, which totaled $350 billion nationally. But they were clear about one thing: The federal government would not subsidize state tax cuts. Lawmakers led by Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) said at the time that Washington should not be on the hook to pay for reductions in state tax revenues, since that could leave major budget holes once federal aid ran dry.

Since then, however, GOP leaders have challenged the tax cut prohibition in federal courtrooms and state capitals. Attorneys general in 21 states have fought to overturn the Biden administration’s policy, federal court filings show, backed at times by powerful groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose corporate members have lobbied conservative-leaning states to reduce their tax bills. In nearly every case, these legal efforts have prevailed, hamstringing the Treasury Department while opening the door for states to pursue their own tax cuts.

In Florida, the legal wrangling has enabled DeSantis and his political allies to leverage about $200 million in federal coronavirus aid to help pay for a planned suspension of the gas tax this October, according to state budget documents. Lawmakers essentially adopted a law that deposited its allotment under the stimulus program into the state’s general fund, then appropriated the money for the tax holiday, records show.

The policy, set to take effect later this year, could be in direct conflict with the federal tax restriction, local lawyers and advocates say. But Christina Pushaw, a spokeswoman for the governor, blasted the tax prohibition in a statement, calling it “not legally valid.”

The spending decisions have troubled some fiscal experts, who fear that the push for aggressive tax cuts this year could leave state budgets lacking much-needed revenue in the event of a recession. The moves also have flummoxed local advocates, who say that every federal dollar devoted to lowering tax bills is one less available for targeted relief — from improvements in housing to investments in aging infrastructure.

I think this was the money they wanted to retrieve for the new COVID relief package that didn’t pass this year. So they get to use it for their sacred tax cuts and running around like big heroes while the states that need more money because they used the original grant to save lives pay the price. Same old, same old …

Dispatch from the Heartland

Published by digby on July 5, 2022

Making America Great Again

From @atrupar who calls this “a normal political ad in Minnesota’s Wright County Journal Press”

QAnon, Quantum Financial System, NESARA/GESARA, Sovereign Citizen/”Maritime Law,” dead famous people are secretly alive... it’s all there. And more!

So, so angry

Published by digby on July 5, 2022

They just can’t contain themselves

One of the reasons they are so up in arms (aside from just being perpetually pissed about everything) is this non-stop propaganda:

November’s midterm elections are still months away, but to many conservative commentators, the fix is already in. Democrats have cheated before, they say, and they will cheat again.

Never mind that the claims are false.

In Lafayette, La., Carol Ross, host of “The Ross Report,” questioned how Democrats could win a presidential election again after a tumultuous few years in power. “They’re going to have to cheat again,” she said. “You know that. There will be rampant cheating.”

In Greenville, S.C., Charlie James, a host on 106.3 WORD, read from a blog post arguing that “the Democrats are going to lose a majority during the midterm elections unless they’re able to cheat in a massive wide-scale way.”

And on WJFN in Virginia, Stephen K. Bannon, the erstwhile adviser to former President Donald J. Trump who was indicted for refusing to comply with subpoenas issued by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, summed it up this way: “If Democrats don’t cheat, they don’t win.”

Mr. Trump introduced the nation to a flurry of false claims about widespread voter fraud after his electoral loss in 2020. The extent of his efforts has been outlined extensively in the past couple of weeks during the hearings on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot — including a speech that day in which he falsely said Democrats changed voting laws “because they want to cheat.”

Republican politicians and cable outlets like Fox News have carried the torch for Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories ever since. But the loudest and most consistent booster of these unfounded claims has been talk radio, where conservative hosts reduce the jumble of false voter fraud theories into a two-word mantra: “Democrats cheat.”

I suspect that most Republicans actually know they are the cheaters and rationalize it as being necessary to save the country from the threat of liberalism. This cacophony of lies justifies their belief. But there are some nuts among them who are livid that Republicans are being called out on this and that half the country is refusing to capitulate.