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Month: March 2023

Trump and the GOP schism

Published by digby on March 6, 2023

Is CPAC done?

Last Friday I took a look at the first day of this year’s CPAC gathering where it was obvious that the attendees were overwhelmingly Trump followers but the crowds were also thinner than usual, which says something —but nobody can agree on exactly what it is. Since that dispatch reporters and other observers of the event have characterized this CPAC as an unusually desultory affair that didn’t improve much as the days wore on. Speeches were sparsely attended and the presentation was lackluster. Everyone seemed bored with the outrage.

Could it be that after seven long years of Trump-style politics, they’re finally getting worn out?

According to this report from Laura Jedeed at The New Republic, attendees she spoke with felt that having the event in Washington was a mistake. They suggested that instead it should have been held in Orlando, as it was last year. After all, Florida is now the center of the Republican universe. Florida Governor Ron Desantis, the new GOP dreamboat, didn’t show up, instead opting to spend the weekend at a donor retreat, signaling that he didn’t think it was worthwhile to mingle with the MAGA faithful. Apparently, he believes that his record of destruction in Florida will be enough to bring them into his fold.

Jedeed also pointed out that CPAC has competition from the more exciting Turning Point USA confab called AmericaFest. She describes its December event as “a bacchanale, an indoctrination session: ComiCon for politics nerds” where “speakers emerged onstage to thundering bass, a light show, and often pyrotechnics.” Poor old CPAC could only come up with this:

The GOP has been declared to be cracking up many times and it didn’t happen so I’m not going to suggest that. But the truth is that there is a growing schism around the Trump cult of personality and many of the rest of the party who are anxious to move on. It’s not about ideology, around which the aspiring presidents club is pretty much in agreement: “woke” is bad, China is bad, Democrats are bad and America First blah, blah, blah. What’s starting to happen is some very serious infighting and calamity among important players and it includes the right-wing media apparatus as well as the political actors.

We all know about Fox News’ implosion with their Dominion libel case revelations. But as Jedeed reports, there is also the implosion of Project Veritas, this throwdown between the Club for Growth and CPAC, the Matt Schlapp sex scandal, a feud between  The Daily Wire vs Stephen Crowder and more. Despite the reluctance of those who are running or planning to run in the GOP presidential primary to take on Trump directly, it’s only a matter of time before full-scale war breaks about among them. Trump has already declared war on on the GOP establishment which probably illustrates the current state of the GOP better than anything else:

Needless to say, the Big Lie about the 2020 election also remains in circulation, especially by Donald Trump. And the list of lies in his big final speech of the event was even longer than the cumulative total of everyone else’s. That’s just to be expected. His plodding yet angry speech went on for 90 minutes and he did not seem happy, most likely because the not-very-big room was only three-quarters full. It was a very dark speech. He claimed that “for seven years he had been engaged in an epic struggle to rescue our country from the people who hate it and want to absolutely destroy it” and promised, “we started something that was a miracle. We’re going to complete the mission, we’re going to see this battle through to ultimate victory.” But the line that will be remembered in the history books will be :

In 2016, I declared: I am your voice. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.

He’s not making any bones about the fact that he’s running to wreak revenge on his enemies, and they are legion. 

He also said we are going to have WWIII but also that he’s the only one who can prevent WWIII. He promised, “before I arrive in the Oval Office, I will have the disastrous war between Russia and Ukraine ended… I know what to say.” Sure he does.

His crowd seemed happy enough to see him. But it wasn’t the delirious love fest we would have seen a couple of years ago. I have to wonder what would have happened if he’d decided to deliver a speech with the theme of his latest video instead of the negative pile of grievance upon grievance. The video is called, “A New Quantum Leap to Revolutionize the American Standard of Living”

He wants to use federal land to create 10 new “freedom cities” where “hundreds of thousands of young people and other people — all hard-working families — a new shot at homeownership and in fact, the American dream.”There would be “baby bonds” to create a new “baby boom” (no doubt so immigration can be blocked) which he characterized in his typically crude way in the CPAC speech:

He also wants to invest in flying cars and tear down ugly buildings in a beautification campaign so that’s nice.

This is what passes for Trump’s “positive agenda”, which he just mentioned in passing in his dark “retribution” speech at CPAC. Would it have resonated better these days than his usual litany of complaints and threats? I don’t know. The right has been addicted to grievance for a very long time. But from the sound of it this event didn’t thrill the folks like it used to. With all the infighting and angry diatribes against “wokeness” you have to wonder if this Disneyfied, fascist “Tomorrowland” vision of the future might be the antidote. 

Is there a Misanthropes Anonymous?

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 6, 2023

‘Crazier and crazier’ supplemental

Gov. Wokety-woke DeWoke, the guy who dumps any woman who dares contradict him (see Pt. 1), means to bully Floridians into submission to his (they really are fascist) policies. That’s not BDE, as Kari Lake suggests, it’s a coward compensating (with lift shoes and or/bronzer).

“DeSantis says ‘woke’ so often it begins to lose all meaning,” says John Oliver. Clearly.

If there isn’t a Misanthropes Anonymous, there should be. With fewer than 12 steps.

Digby covered some of this ground last night, but this Florida Man seems dangerous to more people than himself. Anyone ready to follow a guy like him might do anything. Other Florida Men already have.

Better Late Than Ever Dept.

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 6, 2023

“New infrastructure projects still threaten communities today, critics say”

https://brokensidewalk.com/2008/standing-under-the-highway-regretting/

An occasional hiccup in canvassing neighborhoods near the interstate is having political software direct volunteers to street numbers that don’t exist. The list says to knock at 372 on a block that dead ends at 310. That’s because when planners put through the interstate decades ago, they cut the neighborhood in two. The street numbers pick up on the other side of the interstate. It’s most likely a Black neighborhood.

It seems there are plans to “remedy” some of that, Axios reports:

In an attempt to reverse the socioeconomic harm of planning decisions made decades ago, the federal government is doling out $1 billion over five years to remove highways that divide communities.

Yes, but: That’s a modest sum compared to the billions the government is pumping into new highway expansion projects that critics fear will repeat the same mistakes.

Why it matters: Highways and rail lines are supposed to help people get to where they want to go. Yet infrastructure can also be a barrier that divides neighborhoods and cuts residents off from economic opportunity.

President Joe Biden’s “Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program” funded in his 2021 infrastructure law has “has awarded $185 million in grants for projects in 45 cities.” The Department of Transportation has received $2 billion in requests.

Details: Buffalo, New York, is getting the largest award: a $55.6 million grant to build a cap and tunnel over a 1960s-era six-lane expressway, which segregated Black residents from the rest of the city.

    • Some 600 homes were demolished to make way for the highway, which cut off residents’ access to necessities like banks and grocery stores.
    • It also led to high unemployment and increased health problems, per DOT.

While in high school, I was asked to join a community advisory panel involving a proposed interstate loop around downtown. One proposal for the northern arc involved razing homes in a very poor Black neighborhood and relocating residents. What likely killed it was the route’s proximity to streets in a historic white neighborhood west of it. The loop was never built.

https://compote.slate.com/images/641458d0-69ef-4b7b-a83a-d96a7ff789ad.png?crop=538%2C538%2Cx0%2Cy0

That approach was no accident.

Backstory: The U.S. Interstate System, created under President Eisenhower in 1956, was touted as “the greatest public works project in history.”

    • Routes were chosen where land costs were the lowest, or political resistance weakest — which usually meant cutting through low-income and minority neighborhoods.
    • An estimated 1 million people and businesses were displaced to make room for the highways, according to DOT.
    • Some neighborhoods were completely razed. Those left behind were often isolated — physically, socially, and economically.

Rectifying past damage will likely inflict more elsewhere, the report notes. Proposed projects from Jersey City to Salt Lake City will demolish “residential homes, businesses, and even churches to make room for the expanded highways.” It comes down to whose ox is gored.

It’s not that removing highways cannot improve neighborhoods (below). The problem is that our cities “are still being built around cars, not people.”

The pedestrian bridge in Greenville’s Falls Park on the Reedy that replaced a highway, spurring over $100 million in private investment in its first two years.
https://t4america.org/2020/12/07/four-recommendations-to-undo-the-damage-of-urban-renewal/

Don’t get me started on public-private partnerships on related highway deals.

Crazier and crazier

Published by digby on March 5, 2023

Florida has gone completely around the bend

Maybe I’m wrong (I hope not) but I have a feeling that these monsters are going way too fast and are pushing the limits of what normal people will tolerate. If not, we are in big trouble:

Florida legislators have proposed a spate of new laws that would reshape K-12 and higher education in the state, from requiring teachers to use pronouns matching children’s sex as assigned at birth to establishing a universal school choice voucher program.

The half-dozen bills, filed by a cast of GOP state representatives and senators, come shortly before the launch of Florida’s legislative session Tuesday. Other proposals in the mix include eliminating college majors in gender studies, nixing diversity efforts at universities and job protections for tenured faculty, strengthening parents’ ability to veto K-12 class materials and extending a ban on teaching about gender and sexuality — from third grade up to eighth grade.

The legislation has already drawn protest from Democratic politicians, education associations, free speech groups and LGBTQ advocates, who say the bills will restrict educators’ ability to instruct children honestly, harm transgender and nonbinary students and strip funding from public schools.

It shall be the policy of every public K-12 educational institution … that a person’s sex is an immutable biological trait.— Florida House Bill 1223

“It really is further and further isolating LGBTQ students,” said Sarah Warbelow, legal director for LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign. “It’s making it hard for them to receive the full support that schools should be giving every child.”

Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors, warned that the legislation — especially the bill that would prevent students from majoring in certain topics — threatens to undermine academic freedom.

“The state telling you what you can and cannot learn, that is inconsistent with democracy,” Mulvey said. “It silences debate, stifles ideas and limits the autonomy of educational institutions which … made American higher education the envy of the world.”

Sen. Clay Yarborough (R), who introduced one of the 2023 education bills — Senate Bill 1320, which forbids requiring school staff and students to use “pronouns that do not correspond with [a] person’s sex” and delays education on sexual orientation and gender identity until after eighth grade — said in a statement that his law would enshrine the “God-given” responsibility of parents to raise their children.

“The decision about when and if certain topics should be introduced to young children belongs to parents,” Yarborough said in the statement. “The bill also protects students and teachers from being forced to use language that would violate their personal convictions.”

The proposed laws have a high likelihood of passing in the State House, where GOP legislators make up a supermajority. Even before Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) landslide victory in November, very few Republicans pushed back against his policy proposals, instead crafting and passing bills that align with the governor’s mission to remake education in Florida from kindergarten through college.

This year’s crop of proposed education bills accelerates those efforts, expanding on controversial ideas from the past two years and adding a few more. 

I guess everyone’s waiting on the courts to back these people off. But this really has to be rejected by the pubic or it won’t stick. Do suburban voters really want their kids going to schools that are primitive experiments in authoritarian state domination of education? Maybe they do. But I’m not really sure they want to roll back the clock quite this far back.

These people are feeling their oats and it seems to me that they’re overreaching. I guess we’ll find out.

Up is down and black is white

Published by digby on March 5, 2023

Bizarroworld is bigger than we knew

They didn’t start the fire?

Comments by Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, were met with laughter at an international conference in India, when he said that the Ukraine war had been “launched against” his home country.

Speaking at the Raisina Dialogue, a politics and economics event in Delhi, Lavrov also claimed that Russia was trying to stop the war.

“The war, which we are trying to stop, which was launched against us using Ukrainian people, of course, influenced the policy of Russia, including energy policy,” he said, briefly stumbling over his words as people in the audience laughed.

Lavrov continued: “And the blunt way to describe what changed: we would not any more rely on any partners in the west. We would not allow them to blow the pipelines again,” in a reference to the explosions that damaged the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea in September.

Contrary to Lavrov’s claim, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, launched an invasion of Ukraine on 24 February last year, in what he called a “special military operation”.

Right.

He went on to question America’s war in Iraq and he’s got a point. The US can’t claim a whole lot of moral superiority on this topic. On the other hand, at least Iraq wasn’t a peaceful democracy, so there is a tiny bit of daylight there.

A call for genocide at CPAC

Published by digby on March 5, 2023

I’ve heard more than few transgender folks say in anguish, “they just don’t want us to exist.” It’s heartrending. And it’s true:

During the second day of CPAC events, Michael J. Knowles, a political commentator and Daily Wire host, made a series of pointed comments towards the trans community that many are viewing as genocidal.

Ramping up to his speech on Saturday, Knowles called for the banning of transgenderism entirely in a recent episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” adding that it wouldn’t be genocide to do so as “It’s not a legitimate category of being.” Behind the podium on Saturday, he leveled up those initial remarks.

“There can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism,” Knowles said in his CPAC speech. “It is all or nothing. If transgenderism is true, If men really can become women, then it’s true for everybody of all ages. If transgenderism is false — as it is — if men really can’t become women — as they cannot — then it’s false for everybody too. And if it’s false, then we should not indulge it.”

Continuing his Socratic rant, Knowles drove his point further saying, “For the good of society, transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,” gaining a wash of applause from those in attendance.

Knowles is having a fit today, threatening to sue anyone who says he called for the eradication of transgender people. Of course he did. It’s on tape as you can see. But they all just retreat to the old “you can believe me or your lyin’ eyes” and it works.

He said it, he meant it and people there applauded it. It’s as grotesque as anything you’d see from Pol Pot or Hitler. Seriously.

He’ll stay until they drag him away

Published by digby on March 5, 2023

And he’ll incite his cult to violence if they try it.

They asked him if he’d drop out and he says he won’t. It appears he thinks it will actually help him:

Former President Donald J. Trump said on Saturday that he would not drop out of the 2024 presidential race if he was indicted in one of several investigations he is facing.

Mr. Trump made the comments to a group of conservative media before his speech to the Conservative Political Action Coalition conference in National Harbor, Md. It was the first time Mr. Trump spoke publicly about how he would respond if he was indicted while actively seeking the presidency, an event that would roil the 2024 campaign.

Mr. Trump is facing two state investigations — one in New York City and one in Fulton County, Ga. — as well as two federal investigations led by Jack Smith, a special prosecutor. Mr. Smith is investigating Mr. Trump’s attempt to thwart the peaceful transfer of power after losing the 2020 election, as well as Mr. Trump’s possession of hundreds of classified documents and presidential material at his private club, Mar-a-Lago.

The precise status of the efforts is unclear, but the two state investigations are believed to be in advanced stages.

Mr. Trump was definitive when asked Saturday whether he would stay in the race if one of the prosecutors brought an indictment. “Oh absolutely. I wouldn’t even think about leaving,” he said, adding that he believed an indictment would increase his poll numbers.

It isn’t unusual for a candidate who is facing legal problems to say they will stay in a race regardless of whether they are prosecuted or to claim that an investigation is politically motivated. But it is uncharted territory for a former president running as the poll leader in primaries to intertwine a candidacy with a defense against investigations.

Several people close to Mr. Trump have said he believes his presidential campaign can be used as a cudgel to hit back against the prosecutors. In his remarks on Saturday, Mr. Trump repeatedly cast the prosecutors as corrupt and politically motivated, citing no evidence. As he has for years, he cast the investigations not as result of his own actions, but as an effort to silence the voices of his supporters.

This is his new slogan:

Retribution shall be mine!

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 5, 2023

Shrinking CPAC wants what Trump wants

Donald Trump’s fading star has not kept media outlets from covering him the way he wants to be covered. Almost any attention is good attention. The “deeply wounded narcissist” has a bottomless need for it. Almost as much as his followers’ need for retribution against the citified and nonwhite unworthies slowly eating into their political and cultural supremacy.

“I believe former President Trump to be a deeply wounded narcissist, and he is often incapable of acting other than in his perceived self-interest or for revenge,” said Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer during Trump’s administration. “I think those are the two compelling instincts that guide his actions.”

Trump said it himself at CPAC:

“In 2016, I declared: I am your voice,” he said, speaking for just over 100 minutes from a bright blue and red stage in a cavernous ballroom at the closing speech of the CPAC event in Maryland. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution,” he said.

And you are just fawning tools, Trump did not say. Fewer are lining up, but the press still covers him/them.

Marcy Wheeler offers a brief thread on where Trump press coverage goes wrong:

The way to cover Trump’s CPAC speech is NOT to cover his promise to stay in the race if he’s indicted, it’s to point out how similar THIS SPEECH is for things he may be indicted for.

Emphasizing its inflammatory nature makes you part of the coup attempt. 

Trump’s play is not about the next election, per se. Reporting it as such is malpractice.

Trump’s play is to make prosecuting him an existential challenge for democracy, where his partisans will take out law enforcement to undermine the case. 

Trump’s play is to ALWAYS reinforce division in society, to ratchet it up, so that his supporters will continue to piss away their lives by attacking democracy to save him.

His play is to keep his supporters distracted from the enormous fraud he commits against them. 

Want to report on Trump’s outrageousness?

Report on how his people are paying FBI Agents to spy on the investigation into him and his followers.

Blasting CPAC to audiences who would otherwise have ignored it just distracts from all that. 

And I agree that @svdate‘s coverage of the speech–including its emphasis on how poorly attended it is–is far better than most.

Trump Brings His Usual Grievances Back To A Diminished CPACThe coup-attempting former president brought his usual grievances back to a diminished CPAChttps://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-cpac-return_n_640262fce4b0e45e2f8e7346

You can tell two stories:

Trump went to a failing conference and ratcheted up a partly empty room with the same incitement.

OR

WOW, Trump is so powerful even a “witchhunt” indictment can’t stop him from being President. 

Odds are that whatever sells more papers will drive coverage. It’s the capitalism, stupid. I don’t see how that changes.

(h/t Laffy)