Once again, ‘cuz it’s Friday
The Darwin Award contestant next door.
They’re still dying “like men.” Because FREEDOM!
"what digby sez..."
Month: January 2023
Learn some new tricks, Democrats
Democrats had best get their act together. The lunatics running the Capitol Hill asylum may succeed in further souring Americans on Brand Chaos. Voters demonstrated in 2018, 2020 and 2022 that America on the whole is not buying what Republicans are selling. Nevertheless, Ron DeSantis’ Florida is vying to be the first among the Fascist States of America. Where Republicans are in control elsewhere they are working hard at consolidating minority rule and turning the Land of the Free into the Home of the Knave.
Maria Ressa, 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner, warns that 2024 will be “the tipping point for democracy globally. As of now, 60 percent of the world is living under autocracy. We’ve rolled back to 1989.” The dis-ease is palpable.
Democrats need to up their game.
Greg Sargent suggests they look to Michigan to counter “the virulent reactionary turn in red states.” Democrats there have a trifecta, holding the governorship and both legislative chambers, for the first time in decades. They are using it:
After flipping the state legislature and reelecting Gov. Gretchen Whitmer last year, Democrats opened their legislative session with a barrage of culturally liberal legislation, including new LGBTQ protections and repeal of an onerous antiabortion statute, which Republicans had blocked in the majority.
Michigan State Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D) (remember her?) offers her take:
“I hope that we do become the model,” state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who represents a district in the Detroit area, told me. She said Michigan should become a “microcosm for reinvigorating the American Dream” around the principles that “everybody is welcome” and “we talk about our past in honest terms.”
“For this to come from a state from the Midwest” and not a “coastal Democratic state,” McMorrow said, will illustrate a “different way forward.”
“Even Republicans admit their culture-mongering has become a loser,” Sargent writes. Heather Williams, acting head of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, tells him, that in 2024 Democrats will tell voters “what they did [to improve their lives] with the power that they had.” Democrats must do more than complain about MAGA reactionaries. Where they can they must retake lost ground by frontally attacking the MAGA agenda:
Some Democrats are showcasing examples of this in red territory. One bill in Missouri would expressly allow teachers to discuss LGBTQ history to promote tolerance. A proposal in Texas would repeal restrictions on critical race theory. Meanwhile, a Virginia bill would bar removal of instruction materials solely on grounds that their subject matter includes classes protected from discrimination.
With recouped state-level power, Democrats can do more of that. It would illustrate to the country contrasting cultural values shaped around the idea, as The Post’s E.J. Dionne notes, that “the efforts to close minds” by a “willful ideological minority” will not make our nation “stronger” or “more moral.”
Michigan filmmaker Michael Moore condemned legal cheating by Michigan Republicans and recommended that Democrat-controlled states use ballot proposals (in the 26 states where they exist) to outlaw Republican gerrymandering. A nonpartisan commission now draws districts in Michigan. Those states Democrats control should pass an initiative process [timestamp 36:55] where they do not now exist, Moore offers.* (See “Slay the Dragon.”)
Franklin Foer writes at The Atlantic that President Joe Biden has a role. As Vice President, Biden chaffed at Barack Obama’s reluctance to market his legislative wins. The technocratic Obama operated from the flawed liberal assumption that good policy sells itself. It doesn’t:
Obama frankly admitted that he took “perverse pride” in how his technocratic administration constructed policy without regard for political considerations. The 2009 Recovery Act included tax cuts, but intentionally didn’t advertise them. The government quietly withheld less money from paychecks, a dividend that almost nobody noticed. This furtive tax cut was theoretically effective, because consumers were less likely to save money that they didn’t know they possessed. But it was also a political nonfact.
Good policy is useless without good politics, Biden believes. Now president, Biden will hard-sell his own large-scale legislative achievements:
Overseeing these investments will allow Biden to fulfill the two grandest ambitions of his presidency. The first ambition is both lofty and self-interested. He has long argued that democracy will prevail in its struggle against authoritarianism only if it can demonstrate its competence to the world. That means passing legislation. But he believes that non-college-educated voters, the neglected constituents he wants to take back from the Republicans, hardly know about the big bills emanating from Washington with banal names. And they won’t believe in their efficacy in any case, unless they can see the fruits of the legislation with their own eyes.
Biden intends to deluge this group with relentless salesmanship—christening new airports and standing next to local officials as they break ground on new factories and tunnels. When he daydreams in the Oval Office, he imagines omnipresent road signs announcing new government projects in his name. In his mind, there will be Biden Rest Stops as far as the eye can see.
But seeing is not enough, my friend Anat Shenker-Osorio says. People don’t operate on the “I’ll believe it when I see it” principle in this polarized environment. They’ll see it when they believe it. Biden needs to make believers of non-college-educated voters. Jobs and paychecks can do that more than rest stops.
Biden’s ambition includes that, Foer argues:
His second ambition is far trickier. He doesn’t just imagine scattered projects. He wants to comprehensively change the economy of entire regions of the country. By geographically concentrating investments—in broadband, airports, semiconductor plants, universities—he can transform depressed remnants of the Rust Belt into the next iteration of North Carolina’s Research Triangle. By seizing the commanding heights of the industries of the future, he can reindustrialize America.
All of that is good. If it happens. But “good politics” means more than selling good policies. Democrats have to upgrade the way they sell themselves and conduct more imaginative campaigns on the ground. What one sees out here in the provinces is Democrats in a rut, doing the things they’ve always done because that’s the way they’ve always been done.
At a recent confab of dusty testosterone here, aging politicos pined for the days of N.C. Gov. Jim Hunt when men were men, when precinct chairs knew everyone in their precincts and turned them out on Election Day. With early voting in most states, that model hasn’t been active in decades and isn’t coming back. The few activists under 35 rolled their eyes.
It was clear early on that Cheri Beasley’s 2022 U.S. Senate campaign lacked the juice it needed to turn out the votes she’d need to beat Ted “Monster Truck” Budd. But she opened her campaign with a TV ad that was as least 20 years old. Her media consultants? A firm led by a DSCC veteran. I prayed for some kind of “Hail Mary” move that would snatch a win from the jaws of defeat. It never came.
Michigan Democrats are demonstrating how to innovate legislatively. Biden, whether he runs again in 2024 or not, is acting as salesman-in-chief. But if Democrats expects to push proto-fascist, red-state reactionaries, yellow dogs need to learn some new tricks. And not count on glitzy new tech to do it for them.
* Caveat: Californians recognize how the initiative process itself can be rigged.
We’re going to be hearing a lot more about Mike Pompeo’s new book and it’s actually promising to be an interesting sideshow. Trump isn’t going to be happy about it, so it’s not all bad. From the Triad:
Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, is coming out with a memoir to promote his 2024 presidential candidacy. In it, he writes that in early 2020, President Trump tried to quash Pompeo’s criticism of China. Here’s Pompeo’s account, according to an early peek at the book, as reported by Shelby Talcott and David Weigel in Semafor:
Donald Trump told former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “shut the hell up for a while” about China at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak in order to avoid angering the country’s leader, according to a memoir that Pompeo will publish next week.
In “Never Give An Inch,” Pompeo recounts a March 26 call between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, one day after the secretary of state said that China had “repeatedly delayed” sharing information about the virus and engaged in a “disinformation campaign.”
According to Pompeo, who listened in to the call, Xi told Trump that his cabinet member was jeopardizing the “phase one” trade deal that the principals had just agreed to. . . . [A] few days later, in the Oval Office, Trump told Pompeo that he was “putting us all at risk” by angering Xi, in part because the United States still needed protective health equipment from China.
This isn’t the first time the trade deal has come up in reporting about Trump, Xi, and COVID. Here’s the rest of the early 2020 sequence, as I previously outlined it in Slate:
John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, directly witnessed Trump asking Xi for help in getting reelected through a trade deal that included Chinese purchases of American crops. Trump signed the deal on Jan. 15. On Feb. 10, three days after his call with Xi, Trump boasted at a campaign rally that the trade deal would “defeat so many of our opponents.” In the early months of the virus crisis, Trump referred constantly to the deal and hailed China as a benefactor.
In the Slate article, I traced Trump’s behavior during those weeks: He adopted Xi’s talking points on COVID, defended Xi’s efforts to suppress bad news about the virus, and tried to copy some of Xi’s suppression tactics in the United States. Pompeo’s story backs up that analysis. Xi threatened the trade deal, and Trump responded by telling Pompeo to shut up.
Later, Trump pretended to be tough on China. He blamed it for the virus and accused Xi of covering up the emerging crisis, when in fact Trump was in on the coverup. Now the GOP is refashioning itself as the anti-China party, with a whole House committee dedicated to confronting Beijing.
Pompeo’s story is a reminder that the GOP’s actual foreign policy—as practiced by Trump for four years, with the complicity of Republicans in Congress—wasn’t about defending freedom or standing up to China. It was about sucking up to China in pursuit of money. To get that money, Trump played down the threat of COVID and silenced U.S. officials who spoke out about the virus and the coverup.
And it wasn’t just China. All over the world, Trump reduced every relationship to money:
He said he wouldn’t defend NATO countries if they didn’t pay more dues.
He portrayed Western Europe as an economic competitor, not an ally.
To protect lucrative arms deals with Saudi Arabia, he refused to accept U.S. intelligence that implicated Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
He agreed to leave troops in Syria only after advisers persuaded him that by doing so he could extract revenue from Syrian oil.
Trump’s focus on money was a huge reason why Vladimir Putin helped Trump win the 2016 election. As the CIA noted in its assessment of that operation, Putin “had many positive experiences working with Western political leaders whose business interests made them more disposed to deal with Russia.”
So let’s not pretend that today’s Republican “leaders” are committed to defending freedom or standing tall against tyrants. Many of them were happy to look the other way when a Republican president abandoned those values. And given the same incentives, they’ll do it again.
Trump isn’t really educated, doesn’t listen to anyone and doesn’t read so he applied his understanding of everything as crude economic determinism and applied it to America’s foreign policy. He often sounded like the boy who didn’t read the book giving a book report when he talked about it.
Recall how he was received by other leaders:
The right wing is obsessed with children’s nether regions
This is so sick. More red state proposals for children’s genital inspections. Here’s North Dakota this week:
The North Dakota House of Representatives has introduced a bill that would strictly prohibit expanded use of pronouns outside of the gender that the person was born.
House Bill 2199 restricts the definition of gender to the person’s natural gender at birth and then requires that all pronoun use be reflective of that same gender. Any violation by anyone who works at an institution that receives state funding, including public schools would be subject to a $1,500 fine.
If gender is challenged, the bill puts the responsibility on the individual to prove their gender.
“Say, they’re a boy, but they come to school and say they’re a girl. As far as that school is concerned in this bill, that person is still a boy. If it becomes contested, the burden will be on the girl, the so-called girl, or the boy, to prove that he is a girl,” said North Dakota State Senator David Clemens while speaking in favor of the bill.
State Representative Beth Liston (D-Dublin) today issued the following statement after the House of Representatives passed House Bill (HB) 151, legislation requiring high school athletes to prove their gender by submitting to intrusive inspections of their genitalia and other invasive tests.
Florida’s House of Representatives has passed a bill that would prevent transgender athletes from competing in women’s and girls’ sports in schools and colleges, while also subjecting students to “physical examination” if their gender was disputed.
Ron DeSantis is the only one to actually sign one of these bills into law so far, which he did with a flourish back in 2019:
The Republican governor made a show of signing the bill on Tuesday by highlighting a well-known example of transgender high school sprinters from Connecticut besting their competition on the track.
DeSantis, flanked by student athletes from the Jacksonville-based Trinity Christian Academy on stage, streamed a video of transgender athlete Terry Miller winning a race in 2019, then introduced one of her competitors, Selina Soule, to address the audience. Soule, a Connecticut high school track athlete who has been outspoken against allowing transgender athletes to compete, told the crowd her experience losing to transgender girls was “frustrating” and “demoralizing.”
DeSantis has signed into a law a slate of conservative-leaning bills from the GOP-led Legislature, including measures cracking down on Big Tech, loosening Covid restrictions and tightening voting rules, ahead of his reelection and possible bid for the White House in 2024.
Some 11 transgender athletes have applied since 2013-14 under the Florida High School Athletic Association’s participation policy, which allows students to petition to play sports regardless of the gender listed on their birth certificate. Democrats attempted to use this rule as an example that the law was unnecessary in Florida. The only in-state instance of transgender athletes that lawmakers could reference during session involved bowling.
This obsession with trans kids is truly warped especially coming from people who are equally obsessed with pedophilia. More projection? Sure looks like it.
By the way, they’ve been at this for a while. A Virginia politician proposed this back in 2016. He wanted to make sure no trans kids were using the “wrong” bathrooms, setting up the prospect of genital inspections at the restroom door. This proves it has nothing to do with fairness in girls sports, by the way. Of course.
If anyone was thinking (as I was) that the so-called GOP moderates who won in swing districts carried by Biden would sign on to a discharge petition early enough to have it work (it’s a long arduous process) we all need to wake up. They are going to drag out “negotiations” to cut the shit out of government programs that benefit actual humans (that’s what they all live for) and then it will be too late:
House Republicans from swing districts are flatly rejecting the White House’s position that there be no negotiations with Congress over raising the national debt ceiling, insisting that they won’t bend to the Democrats’ take-it-or-leave-it approach to avoid the first-ever debt default with no conditions attached.
The Republicans, many of whom hail from districts that President Joe Biden won or narrowly lost and are seen as the most likely to break ranks with their party’s leadership, said they are not willing to back a “clean” debt ceiling increase, insisting there must be some fiscal agreement first. That view is in line with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who is calling for negotiations with the White House before a possible default occurs later this year.
But the White House and Senate Democratic leaders, wary of the ferocious fiscal fights with the House GOP that dogged then-President Barack Obama, see little upside in giving in to any of the GOP demands to impose spending cuts on domestic programs, believing instead that McCarthy and Republicans will cave facing the prospect of a looming default and with no viable legislative alternative.
The White House is badly miscalculating, Republicans say.
“I don’t think that a clean debt ceiling is in order, and I certainly don’t think that a default is in order,” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a moderate whose Pennsylvania district Biden carried, told CNN, indicating he planned to engage in bipartisan talks next week over a compromise proposal when lawmakers return to Washington.
The early back-and-forth underscores how Washington is heading into a period of deep uncertainty with global ramifications – with a newly empowered House GOP majority eager to use its leverage in the debt limit fight to enact priorities that otherwise would be ignored by the Democrats running the Senate and the White House. Some congressional sources in both parties believe that McCarthy may ultimately be jammed by the Senate and forced to vote on a bipartisan compromise crafted in that chamber, though that scenario would take weeks if not months to play out.
To work around McCarthy, Democrats would need to win over some potential GOP swing votes to sign on to a “discharge petition,” which could force a House floor vote if six Republicans signed on to the effort with the 212 Democrats currently in the chamber.
Republicans insist there’s little chance of that tactic succeeding at the moment – especially if it’s to force a vote on a clean debt ceiling increase with no other conditions or concessions.
“I’m not in favor of Biden’s no-negotiating strategy, and I’m not inclined to help,” said Rep. Don Bacon, a Republican whose Nebraska district Biden carried, indicating Republicans campaigned against government spending and inflation. “The GOP can’t demand the moon, and Biden can’t refuse to negotiate. There needs to be give-and-take on both sides.”
Bacon said there needs to be “good faith” talks with the White House and some “commitment for fiscal restraint” before he would even consider signing onto a discharge petition.
Democrats are supremely confident that the Republicans will be blamed for the standoff and that this will benefit them in the 2024 election. In fact, many of them didn’t even try to convince Sinemanchin to raise it in the lame duck because they are so sure that everything will turn out all right and the GOP will be blamed for any fallout from the hostage taking.
I hope they’re right. But what this suggests is that some Democrats (I’m looking at you Chris Coons) actually wanted this stand-off so they could justify cutting spending. They had to know that they would end up at the negotiating table and if past is prologue, the GOP may pay a political price, but the American people will pay a price too. The last time we barely escaped without cuts to Medicare and Social Security — which the White House endorsed! Luckily the nutcases refused to take yes for an answer and wanted even more. Let’s just see if this ends up on the menu again.
You can bet the media will be cheering it on. They already are. On CNN this morning they were all wringing their hands over the White House “refusing to negotiate in good faith” (to slash the budget to appease the unappeasable.) They are already insisting that the White House must meet the crazed terrorists halfway.
Hoping the wingnuts refuse to take yes for an answer to the worst of it again is not a plan. The last time we ended up with sequestration which delayed the recovery from the financial crisis by years — until Donald Trump came in and took credit for it.
Oh really?
Newly unsealed transcripts from Donald Trump’s deposition in the E. Jean Carroll case show that the former president mistook Carroll for his ex-wife Marla Maples in a photo.
The transcripts show that during his October 2022 deposition, Trump was shown a black and white photo where he is interacting with several people, including with his then-wife Ivana, Carroll and her then-husband.
“I don’t know who – it’s Marla,” Trump said when shown the photo. “That’s Marla, yeah. That’s my wife,” he says when asked to clarify.
Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, then interjected and said “no, that’s Carroll,” according to the transcript.
I’ll just leave this here:
The low expectations of soft majorities
The GOP’s psych profile fits a certain… “moral flexibility,” as Martin Q. Blank once put it.
Republicans once had rules they enforced about behaviors by their members that brought disrepute to the caucus. Actually, they were more like guidelines, as Dr. Peter Venkman once put it.
Steve Benen highlights the history of Republicans’ flexibility in light of the cascade of lies told by freshman Rep. George Santos (if that is his name) of New York.
Seriously, the man allegedly scammed $3,000 he’d raised on Go Fund Me page for cancer treatment for the service dog of a disabled, homeless veteran. (The dog died.) He lied about his mother working in the World Trade Towers on 9/11. (She was in Brazil.) The rest of his resume is fabricated. Is he even a U.S. citizen? If so, under what name?
Kevin the Spineless just awarded George Santos/Devolder/Zabrovsky committee assignments, arguing that 1) Santos (if that is his name) was duly elected, 2) he may be under investigation but hasn’t been formally charged, and 3) disciplining Santos (if that is his name) is up to the Ethics Committee.
How low can the GOP go? As people observed during Trump’s administration, there is no bottom.
Benen remembers when Republicans still had some standards:
When House Republicans surrendered their majority in 2006, it marked the end of a difficult period in which an astonishing number of GOP members were caught up in ugly scandals. Names like Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney, and Mark Foley became nationally notorious for a reason.
And so, four years later, when Republicans retook the House majority, GOP leaders went out of their way to make clear that they wouldn’t allow a replay. The new Republican majority, House GOP leaders said, would constitute a “zero-tolerance policy” for members caught up in embarrassing controversies that reflected poorly on the party.
For a while, they even seemed to mean it. In 2010, then-Republican Rep. Mark Souder acknowledged that he’d had an affair with a congressional staffer. GOP leaders urged him to resign, and he did. Less than a year later — at which point McCarthy was a member of his party’s leadership team — then Republican Rep. Chris Lee was caught trying to meet women through the personals section of Craigslist. GOP leaders urged him to resign, and he did.
In 2014, then-Republican Rep. Vance McAllister was filmed kissing a staffer who was not his wife. GOP leaders urged him to resign, and though he refused, at least they made the effort. (McAllister lost his re-election bid soon after.)
In each of these instances, House Republican leaders didn’t simply leave matters to voters. They didn’t care that the members hadn’t been formally charged with any crimes. They didn’t punt concerns to the Ethics Committee. For all of their faults — and there were many — GOP leaders in the chambers set standards for their members and enforced them when members were caught up in humiliating scandals.
That was then. Before The Man of 30,000 Lies took control of the Republican Party and proved beyond any doubt that its standards were as flexible as they are situational. But you knew that.
Benen: “McCarthy is ignoring principles because the House Republican majority is tiny, and the new speaker can’t afford to see it shrink.”
McCarthy’s already suffered significant shrinkage.
(Graphic h/t BS)
Thank you, Trumpublicans
When Black men in droves begin arming themselves with tricked-out AR-15s and roaming the streets in body armor, the Second Amendment crowd will suddenly have second thoughts about their guns-everywhere philosophy.
It’s somewhat less costly to challenge efforts to privatize public education that divert tax dollars to religious schools and profit-adjacent charters. But the approach is not dissimilar. “Little Devils Academy,” anyone?
The setting is the Iowa General Assembly.
Iowans got a chance to comment on Gov. Kim Reynolds’ latest bill to fund private school tuition with public tax dollars during a Tuesday public hearing held by the Iowa House Education Reform Committee.
House Republicans have fast-tracked the proposal so it skips several steps that bills normally go to before they reach the House floor for debate, including financial vetting through the Appropriations and Ways and Means committees. According to estimates Reynolds’ staff provided to other media outlets, the plan would cost $341 million annually once it is fully phased in.
The new plan would eventually allow any Iowa student to receive $7,598 annually from the state to pay for private school tuition and other related expenses, but a twist is that public schools would receive $1,205 per pupil in categorical funding, which would remain with the district whether or not the child attends a public or private school and this would even include current private school students.
West Des Moines School Board Member Fannette Elliott spoke out against the bill. She noted that private schools, unlike public schools, can pick and choose their students. Elliot also said even a fraction of the nearly $1 billion in new money allotted to it over the first four years alone would benefit her district greatly.
“In the spring of 2021, the district cut over $2 million from the budget, which resulted in us having to cut the eighth-grade arts program,” Elliott said. “This trend will continue, more cuts will be made which always means less for the students in our care.”
Several rural Iowa school board members also spoke out against the proposal.
Jacob Bolson, a farmer and president of the Hubbard-Radcliffe School Board of Education, said he is sure that he shares the same conservative, Christian values as a lot of people in the room and asked Republica House members to use common-sense accountability for Iowans’ tax dollars.
“I take great pride in our public schools and how our team works diligently each and every day to provide a development and nurturing environment to our students regardless of their background,” he told legislators.
“I emphasize that they are required by law to serve all students; there are no student entrance exams here.”
Joe Stutler, a disabled veteran from Marion, was registered to comment as pro on the bill but gave a satirical speech instead. He noted he would normally be opposed to bills like this, but with Iowa becoming redder politically, it’s best to take the approach of joining them if you can’t beat them.
“Having said that, I’m starting Little Devils Academy,” Stutler said. “Little Devils Academy will be a K-12 school aimed at very targeted schools because, quite frankly, I want a nice chunk of this grift money too. As long as you guys are going to be handing out money, why not let a veteran handle it.”
from the 1st district.
Christine Bothne, president of the Bode-based Twin Rivers School Board, was one of dozens of people who were camped out in the hallway or the Capitol rotunda who didn’t get a chance to address the committee directly due to the time limit, but she told Starting Line why she was opposed to the bill.
“There are so many people employed by the public education system that you’re going to see within three years if this passes, you’re gonna see massive cuts and massive layoffs only because there isn’t the funding for it,” Bothne said. “You can’t pull $400 million out of a system that has already been stretched to its limits.”
Bothne also talked about the lack of transparency with private schools compared to their public counterparts.
“They will not tell you what their budgets are, what their expenditures are,” she said. “They don’t have to have any accountability at all. And that’s why when you have a publicly elected school board, your tax money is in their hands and you have somebody that you could go to and say what’s my money doing.”
Supporters of the bills who spoke during the hearing told a variety of stories about why it’s important to them.
Separately, a mother and daughter duo from Sioux Center talked about how important it was for their Christian beliefs to be part of their education, and how this bill would help their family continue to afford that option.
Patty Alexander, a member of Moms For Liberty— a Florida-based right-wing nonprofit “dedicated to fighting for the survival of America”—accused public schools of wanting a monopoly on children and said those institutions have a liberal agenda.
“If public education would have stayed true to its purpose, which was to preserve liberty, we wouldn’t be having this discussion,” she said. “Public education has become socially disruptive, ruled by selfish elitists that do not care about our family values or society in general.”
Chuck Hurley, a lobbyist for the Urbandale-based socially conservative Family Leader organization, said he supports the bill and hates the argument that public money should go to public schools because those restrictions don’t exist elsewhere when it comes to public funds.
“Think about it for just a moment. Is that how we deal with our medical care? Do we say that Medicaid money can only be spent at a government hospital or with a government voucher? Do we say that food stamps can only be spent at the government grocery stores,” he said.
“It’s kind of absurd on its face to hear that and so we want education, we want to help people with medical problems, and we’re going to help poor people with food.”
Charter schools, private school vouchers, tax credit scholarships … they’re all scams by people who fundamentally do not believe in the public good. There is only “I” and “ME” in their America. They’ve abandoned American tradition that since the founding viewed universal public education as a cornerstone of a healthy democratic republic. But then, as we’ve seen again and again, they’ve abandoned democracy too.
Update: Another video
Note that he says he was loyal to America, not to Trump. Trump is no doubt sharpening the shiv as we speak.
This was interesting considering the bromance between Trump and Kim:
Former Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo wrote in his new memoir that his secret meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jung Un in 2018 began with a “joke about assassination.”
“This small, sweating, evil man tried to break the ice with all the charm you would expect from a mass murderer. ‘Mr. Director,’ he opened, ‘I didn’t think you’d show up. I know you’ve been trying to kill me,’” Pompeo’s memoir, which Fox News obtained a copy of, reads.
“My team and I had prepared for this moment, but ‘a joke about assassination’ was not on the list of ‘things he may say when he greets you.’ But I was, after all, director of the CIA, so maybe his bon mot made sense,” he added.
Pompeo’s memoir, “Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love,” is set to be released on Jan. 24 amid speculation that the former Trump Cabinet secretary could announce a 2024 presidential run. Pompeo said last month that he will announce his 2024 plans this spring.
In the first chapter, obtained by Fox News, Pompeo writes his meeting with Kim was a “complete secret” and his goal was to “correct the failed efforts of the past that had not eliminated North Korea’s nuclear weapons of mass destruction.” After the North Korean leader opened with an assassination joke, Pompeo said he responded in kind.
“I decided to lean in with a little humor of my own: ‘Mr. Chairman, I’m still trying kill you.’ In the picture taken seconds after that exchange, Kim is still smiling. He seemed confident that I was kidding,” Pompeo said in the memoir.
And then there’s this little valentine:
He’s a nasty piece of work. Remember how he treated his staff and the press? And, like DeSantis, he doesn’t have a fun side. Not even a little.
His allies don’t understand anything
You all remember anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist, don’t you? The guy who said they wanted to made government so small you can drown it in the bathtub? He hasn’t had much to say the last half decade but suddenly his issue is front and center. Unfortunately, today’s Republicans don’t understand what they’re supposed to be doing because they are very deluded and very stupid. And he’s upset:
As part of his deal to become House speaker, Kevin McCarthy reportedly promised his party’s conservative hardliners a vote on legislation that would scrap the entire American tax code and replace it with a jumbo-sized national sales tax.
The assurance got relatively little attention at the time, drowned out by the many other concessions McCarthy made to win his gavel. But with Democrats already attacking the proposal, some conservatives see it as a political headache in the making.
“This is a political gift to Biden and the Democrats,” Grover Norquist, the dean of D.C. anti-tax activists, said in an interview. “I think that this is the first significant problem created for the Republican Party by the 20 people who thought that there was no downside to the approach they took.”
Yeah, it’s hardly the first problem they’ve caused or the last. But for Grover, it’s all that matters.
I don’t think any of these new MAGA Reps even know who Grover Norquist is much less care about what he has to say. He might as well be … George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan. Those ancient saints are completely irrelevant to the new breed. Yes, they want to slash spending and cut taxes. But their goal is to own the libs and install fellow conspiracy nuts in power so they can defeat the forces of diversity, tolerance, science, logic and knowledge. Their enemies. They are not driven by ideology, they are driven by primitive emotion. And they are real live Know-Nothings. They are ignorant and proud of it.
Not that Grover really cares, as long as they go along with his program. But he knows that proposing a 35% national sales tax and eliminating all other taxes is politically suicidal. Will they listen to him? Doubtful. They are very, very sure of themselves.