Well, she’s being a true daughter of South Carolina:
It’s not like Harris was in the Obama administration or really had anything to do with him. She’s against Harris being president because Black presidents are “divisive.” Until Obama was elected and divided us, we didn’t have any of these “problems.” Harris will obviously do the same thing. Because she’s Black. And you know how they are.
And she said it on The Breakfast Club a podcast hosted by Black people. Jesus.
And then there’s this:
Actually, it can’t secede. As that old woke Justice Antonin Scalia said, “If there was any constitutional issue resolved by the Civil War, it is that there is no right to secede.”
Haley is campaigning in her home state of S. Carolina a state that knows from secession.
Oliver Darcy on Tuesday wrote, “Conservatives are going into self-exile.”
The Formerly Republican Party, like Formerly Twitter, “is now led by far-right media forces hoping to cash in on attention from raging culture wars, sealing off its adherents from the rest of society.”
One wonders what’s left of America for Republicans to love. Red-hatted Make America Great Again believers are systematically excommunicating anyone and everyone not not eaten up with gnawing grievances. They have demonized DEI efforts (diversity, equity and inclusion) and seem bent (apt?) on making their clan “the most restrictive country club in America.”
In the 1960s, the conservative slogan was, America: Love it or leave it. Today the message is, America: If you love it, hate it.
From a bird’s eye view, the state of affairs among MAGA Media diehards as it sits today is remarkable. A subset of America actually purports to boycott Disney, the world’s preeminent entertainment company; Bud Light, once America’s most popular beer; Target, the quintessential brick-and-mortar shopping destination; Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company that produced life-saving Covid-19 vaccines; Major League Baseball, the nation’s favorite pastime; and now Taylor Swift, a generational icon and one of the most successful musical artists of all time.
“There’s something striking about watching the far-right tying itself in knots and attacking Swift and [her boyfriend Travis]Kelce that demonstrates how badly the far-right media has alienated itself from most of society,” Charlie Warzel, a staff writer at The Atlantic who covers the intersection of politics, technology, and culture, told me Tuesday.
The culture MAGA Republicans are at war with is America. What does that make them?
MAGA’s political wing of miners and sappers means to sabotage any effort to put the government they serve to work making Americans’ lives better.
Steve Benen teased his latest blog post on Blue Sky:
Democrats: Republicans are deliberately refusing to solve problems because they care more about elections and partisan games.
The House voted Wednesday nightto pass a $78 billion tax package that includes an expansion of the child tax credit, sending it to the Senate, where its path is uncertain.
The Republican-led House passed the bipartisan measure 357-70,using a fast-track process that requires a two-thirds majority. The legislation received broad support from each party: 169 Republicans and 188 Democrats voted for it, while 47 Republicans and 23 Democrats voted against it.
Steve Benen writes this morning that for this House-sponsored bipartisan achievment to amount to much it first has to get by the Senate and Chuck Grassley:
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, cast doubt Wednesday on passing a bipartisan tax bill, saying it could make President Joe Biden “look good” and improve Democrats’ chances of holding the White House in the 2024 election.
Grassley said re-electing Biden could hurt Republican hopes of extending Trump-era tax cuts.
Not even subtle
Benen adds:
The problem is not that the Iowa Republican opposes the underlying legislation; the problem is that his principal concern is avoiding governing successes that might make President Joe Biden “look good” in an election year.
Can’t have that, Benen explains. Because “reducing child poverty is fine, but helping the Republican Party’s electoral strategies is better.”
Some might be tempted to believe that both parties think this way. That’s wrong. As recently as 2020, congressional Democrats put aside partisan considerations and worked to put money in Americans’ pockets during a crisis — without regard for whether it might improve Donald Trump’s re-election prospects. The focus was on families’ needs, not partisan tactics.
Four years later, Grassley’s instincts push him in the opposite direction. He isn’t even being subtle about it.
What’s more, he’s not alone. About a month ago, Republican Rep. Troy Nehls said he’d oppose a different bipartisan compromise for the same reason. “Let me tell you, I’m not willing to do too damn much right now to help a Democrat and to help Joe Biden’s approval rating,” the Texan said. “I will not help the Democrats try to improve this man’s dismal approval ratings. I’m not going to do it.” Nehls echoed the same sentiment this week.
How about that? Republicans are boycotting their own jobs.
‘Dark Brandon’ Rises, the New York Times reported in August 2023. He’s not backing off.
While we were reading accounts of the latest GOP insanities in D.C. and in the states, and about the Fox/MAGA conspiracy freakout over Taylor Swift, plus a random, MAGA-inspired(?) beheading straight out of Se7en, Team Biden was going hard at getting under Donald Trump’s skin. And rubbing his nose in it on Truth Social (Huffington Post):
President Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign flipped former President Donald Trump’s excuses for his verbal stumbles right back at him in a new ad.
The 60-second spot features multiple Trump stumbles and the Republican front-runner’s claims that he does it “purposely” or because he speaks “in long, complex sentences.”
“Have you noticed he’s a little confused these days?” Biden asks in speech footage that is featured towards the end of the clip. The video concludes with reports that Trump is “rattled by Biden’s efforts to get under his skin.”
The ad above posted at 1:03 p.m. Wednesday on Formerly Twitter, the Now Muskian white-nationalist cesspool. It was only one of a flurry of ads from Biden-Harris HQ. I’ve not included all from yesterday, but damn, look at these timestamps.
They’re going hard against Trump’s cognitive decline but also against Trump’s phony worker populism.
Tapper: You called Donald Trump a scab, what do you mean?
Trump: I went up to Michigan to save the United Auto Workers from their union because their union was negotiating a terrible thing. They were negotiating hourly wages pic.twitter.com/NDjHox3fxo
Haley: Trump has made it chaotic, self absorbed, he’s made people dislike and judge each other. He’s left that a president should have moral clarity and know the difference between right and wrong. He’s just toxic pic.twitter.com/8SObnOtzXN
UAW President Fain to Fox: Trump killed organizing contracts and did nothing to support workers on strike. President Biden helped us save communities, bring plants back to life, and stood with members on the picket line pic.twitter.com/pwescnYJdl
Trump on union workers: “They get their little 5 percent, they get another 2 percent… All of a sudden they’re making more money than the people that own the company” pic.twitter.com/IE9CyRjdwv
Reporter: A Teamsters executive board member wrote a letter saying that Donald Trump was a known union buster, scab, and insurrectionist pic.twitter.com/2zVSfVxI8o
Trump, who left office with the worst jobs record since the Great Depression, claims he was creating jobs when he was president
Fact check: Job creation in every year under President Biden has been higher than job creation in ANY year under Donald Trump pic.twitter.com/HC2XhZG30k
It was the same on Tuesday. It’s relentless. I like relentless.
On the Taylor Swift theme, how much is she, as they say, living rent-free in MAGA heads? She’s got Sean Hannity reinforcing for his audience the branding that MAGAs are “racist and sexist and homophobic and xenophobic and transphobic,” etc. That’s stunningly bad practice.
Reporter: “Are you thinking of trying to use campaign funds to pay some of the penalties?”
Trump: “What penalties?”
Reporter: “In the New York fraud case and the defamation case.”
Trump: “I didn't do anything wrong. I mean, that's been proven as far as I'm concerned.” pic.twitter.com/pmw7AJt4Fh
— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) January 31, 2024
This is how Trump convinces his cult that up is down and black is white. He just says something that’s outrageously false, the polar opposite of the truth, with total confidence, over and over again. In fact, his deluded followers often tell reporters that the thing they admire about him the most is that he always tells the truth.
Has there ever been a demagogue in history who was so willing to lie so blatantly about clear, observable facts? They always lie, of course. And they are outrageous in their rhetoric. But this brazen defiance of reality seems to me to be pretty unique. I think religious cult leaders do this and get away with it with their flock. But I don’t know that political leaders have been able to get away with it like this. Obviously, it takes a supporting propaganda infrastructure and a monstrously stupid following. But still, give Trump his due. I think he may be the most flagrant, obvious liar in world political history and he’s succeeded in making tens of millions of people believe everything he says.
Scott Rosenberg’s Hopium Chronicles today provides a vivid description of what’s happened to the right wing in this country, beginning with the descent of Fox News into a full-blown propaganda machine that actually communicates in a discrete language spoken by the MAGA cult:
My friend Greg Sargent once referred to this fictional world as Foxlandia. It’s a place they go where Trump is a strong leader, the economy is in recession, eggs cost $27 a piece, inflation is still raging, Putin is an ally and the West is sinister, antifa is ISIS, dozens of American cities burned to the ground in 2020, vaccines give you COVID, insurrectionists are hostages, children carrying their rapist’s babies is a blessing, assault weapons bring freedom, etc. It is, to borrow from one of my favorite TV shows, Stranger Things, the upside down.
[…]
In thinking about it today what I am describing perhaps should be understood as a form of succession from the United States and our democratic heritage. MAGA may still be physically here in the US, but many of its followers have left our shared information space, and now live in their heads some place else – Foxlandia, the upside down, MAGA – a place of untruth, of strongmen, of Trumpian ding-ding, of danger for the rest of us.
That place of untruth is evident in the MeidasTouch clip above. Trump is no longer it appears even trying to make sense when he speaks. He is so far gone, and the movement is far gone, that you can’t even follow what he is talking about any longer. But this alternative world of untruth is not just a place where Trump lives, most of the Republican Party is there with him now. He is going to be their nominee, their leader, and consider what they are asking us to believe and accept as reasonable right now:
-that the border is a crisis, an invasion is underway, but they will not negotiate a solution to it, are disregarding a Supreme Court decision which would put the Federal government back in charge of the border, and seemingly want it to remain a crisis through the election and ensure millions of “terrorists and criminals” continue to pour into the country; and yes, then it will all be Biden’s fault, and yes we are Impeaching the guy in charge of the border while it is in crisis because he “doesn’t enforce” immigration laws – whatever the fuck that means – something by the way the state of Texas and MAGA are preventing him from doing right now (there may no greater place of right wing lunacy and untruth than on border and immigration issues)
-that their holding up of aid to Ukraine and Israel, their months of degrading both the Defense and State Departments, haven’t emboldened our enemies and caused our troops – somehow Biden’s “weakness” did that
-that we shouldn’t be spending money on Ukraine, but spending it here at home; and then of course they come out for massive cuts of spending here at home
-that Democrats are the party of debt and fiscal recklessness when the last 3 Democratic Presidents saw deficits plummet on their watch, and the last Rs saw them skyrocket
-that the country is being gripped by a crime wave when murder and violent crime rates are plummeting and are a fraction of what they were 30 years ago
-that Biden’s imaginary “war on energy” drove up gas prices/inflation and left us more dependent on foreign sources of energy when in fact oil and renewable production set records in 2023, leaving us more energy independent than in decades; and that high gas prices were actually caused by COVID and disrupted supply chains, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and OPEC’s repeated price hikes, and were of course not somehow caused by anything Biden did for he was doing the exact opposite of what they’ve claimed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
-that Taylor Swift’s rise is somehow a plot by the deep state; that Hillary Clinton ran a “pedo” mill in the basement of a pizza place not too far from my house; that Biden somehow cheated and stole the 2020 election; that Russia never launched a massive campaign to get Trump elected in 2016;
I could go on for days on all this stuff. Lies. Invention. Untruth. Foxlandia. When you put it altogether it is truly shocking. How in the world did all of this happen? How did the GOP become so idiotic, so far gone, so full of cowards that they couldn’t stop this dramatic and ongoing betrayal of our democracy? How could they embrace Trump, the most unfit man we’ve all ever seen, and this insane agenda:
Republicans want Putin to win, the West to lose. The border to stay open. The economy to crash. Women, people of color to lose more freedoms and rights. The planet to warm faster. 10 year olds to carry their rapist’s baby to term, and for more women to die on an operating room table. Tens of millions to lose their health insurance. More dead kids in schools. A restoration of pre-Civil Rights era white supremacy. Big tax cuts for their donors, higher deficits and less for everyone else. Books banned across the US. Teenagers to work night shifts in meat packing plants and not go to school. The minimum wage to stay at $7.25. Mass arrests and mass deportations of immigrants long settled in the US. Insurrectionists to get pardoned. To end American democracy for all time…..
It is not hysterical to point this out. The stakes really are this high. The good news, as Rosenberg points out every day, is that the Democrats are doing much better than you think. They are winning elections and ballot initiatives all over the country and have been for years and the strong economy is finally penetrating the national consciousness. It’s going to take effort to beat them but it can be done.
The Bloomberg News/Morning Consult survey found that among voters in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, 53 percent of respondents said they were unwilling to vote for the former president if he is convicted in one of his multiple criminal cases.
Forty-six percent of respondents said they are “very unwilling” to cast their ballot for Trump if he is found guilty, while 7 percent said they are “somewhat unwilling.” Twenty-nine percent of respondents said they were “very willing” to vote for Trump if he is convicted of a crime, and 11 percent said they are “somewhat wiling.”
The survey found that female voters, voters over 65 and voters with a bachelor’s or post-graduate degree were more likely to say they were unwilling to vote for the former president if he is convicted.
Black and Asian voters were also more likely to say they would not vote for Trump if he is convicted. Three-quarters of respondents who identified as atheist said they would be unwilling to vote for Trump if he is found guilty
I would say that it’s hard to believe 40% of the country is willing to vote for a convicted felon but I do believe it. He could shoot someone on 5th Avenue, yadda, yadda, yadda.
But what happens if the court declares that he has immunity? Considering the long delay now in the District Court I think we have to entertain the real possibility that it might happen. At the very least I think we have to prepare ourselves for the idea that none of the major cases are going to reach a jury before the election. All we might get are the civil trials and maybe Stormy Daniels which is very likely to end in acquittal.
I hope I’m wrong. And if he loses the election hopefully he will face justice in the end. But counting on it to help ensure he doesn’t get re-elected is probably not worth investing too much emotional energy.
UAW President Fain to Fox: Trump killed organizing contracts and did nothing to support workers on strike. President Biden helped us save communities, bring plants back to life, and stood with members on the picket line pic.twitter.com/pwescnYJdl
Supposedly Fox viewers are working class Joe’s who just can’t stand the coastal elites who are ruining their livelihoods. Yet these people have never been particularly union friendly. But it’s a good thing for a union leader to go on Fox and make the case that Trump was bad for the working man, just in case some retired auto workers in Michigan might be watching. You never know …
WATCH: Shawn Sanders and Oneida Oliver-Sanders were in their living room Tuesday morning, less than 48 hours after learning that their 24-year-old daughter, Spc. Kennedy Ladon Sanders, was killed in a weekend drone attack on U.S. service members in Jordan. Then President Joe… pic.twitter.com/gCzus6kgBC
Trump had the nerve to criticize Biden over the deaths of the three US soldiers from the done attack over the weekend. And his brainwashed cultists are all saying that he never lost a life while he was president.
Oh, and he’s also claiming that only he can bring world peace.
It’ usually the debt ceiling or the budget. This time it’s the border. Can this ritualized GOP stunt make Democrats pay this time?
Generally, it’s always fair to assume that the American right wing is 100% hypocritical in all things. They do not practice what they preach and they preach a lot. So, I think we would all have thought that while they desperately want to give Donald Trump dictatorial power, it’s the last thing they would want to grant President Joe Biden. And yet as these negotiations over immigration have played out, it’s clear they want Biden to seize dictatorial powers as well, at least on that issue. I guess we can say that they have some consistency after all.
After years of insisting that the congress must act to “protect the border” and browbeating the Democrats for their alleged failure to do it, they are now giving Joe Biden the green light to use executive orders the way Donald Trump used them. They once railed against such supposed usurpation of congressional prerogatives when a Democrat was in the White House but now they argue that they have no role to play and it’s all up to the president. (They say this, by the way, even as they whine incessantly over Biden’s attempts to relieve Americans of their crushing burden of student loan debt, claiming that he’s behaving like a tyrant.)
All of this is nothing but another right wing kabuki dance, staged by the Republican Party whenever they come close to getting what they’ve asked for. For them, this is all a game in which they believe they can strong arm Democrats into total capitulation. They put on quite a show but it never works.
In the past they tended to play this hand around economic issues, rending their garments over the deficit, demanding that Democrats slash domestic spending to the bone or they will refuse to raise the debt ceiling or fund the government. In fact, they have done just that in the past year which resulted in the ouster of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy by the right wing when he negotiated a deal with the Democratic Senate and the White House to raise the debt ceiling and avoid economic catastrophe. This wasn’t the first time they did this and it also resulted in the resignation of an earlier GOP speaker. This tactic doesn’t hurt the Democrats, it hurts their own leaders.
The plan this year was to jam the White House in an election year over the budget to hammer home the allegedly terrible Biden economy in the run up to the election. But as it happens the economy has made a robust recovery from the mess created by the pandemic so that issue doesn’t look like it’s going to be the big winner they expected it to be. They’ve shifted their focus to immigration after having turned to issue into a roiling “crisis” by shipping migrants to Democratic run cities around the country to own the libs and inflame the xenophobic right.
The idea with the legislation was to up the ante by combining funding for more border security with the vital need for military equipment to Ukraine and further support for Israel and Taiwan. The thinking was that the bipartisan desire to help Ukraine and Israel would push through the border part but it didn’t turn out that way. When he finally started to see the writing on the wall, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell dryly said last week, “the politics have changed” but actually, they really haven’t.
The original concept that everyone would have something to love and hate in the bill and they’d all make their peace with it and move on is how negotiations are supposed to work and there are members who still think that’s how it should be, particularly in the Senate. The MAGA faction however, like the Tea Party before them, think negotiating is for losers. So the Republicans got tough and told Biden that he was going to have to swallow a terrible border deal that offers nothing to the Democrats in return for not allowing Russia to prevail in Ukraine and supplying more military aid for Israel.
Biden capitulated and they got what they said they wanted. And, surprise, it turns out it wasn’t what they wanted after all. Now they say they want Biden to unilaterally declare war on the border via executive order and are refusing to do any deal at all. They argue that the deal that’s being discussed authorizes the president to “close the border” when the number of crossings reaches a certain threshold and that’s just not good enough. Speaker Mike Johnson tweeted this utterly fatuous statement last night: “Any border “shutdown” authority that ALLOWS even one illegal crossing is a non-starter. Thousands each day is outrageous. The number must be ZERO.”
There has never been nor will there ever be “zero” migrant crossings on the US Mexico border. Nothing could be more absurd. But that makes it very clear that they have no intention of doing any kind of deal. They have shifted the responsibility completely on to Biden and that’s where they will leave it.
This is reminiscent of the budget negotiations back in 2011 when then VP Joe Biden got involved in the delicate budget negotiations and agreed to give away the store on Social Security only to have the Tea Party refuse to take yes for an answer. We ended up with a Rube Goldberg sequestration compromise that ended up serving the Democrats better than the Republicans, thankfully. There were no cuts to Social Security and the Republicans lost badly in 2012, largely because the country was appalled by their antics.
The question today is whether the dynamic has changed in their favor or if this issue is more potent than government shut downs and threats of economic catastrophe. This time, the real incentive for the Republicans to tank this negotiation is because Donald Trump wants them to. He has said so plainly, making it clear that doesn’t want the Democrats to have a win on this issue.
The last thing any of them want is to stop the bleeding and that includes the horror of children drowning in the Rio Grande because Trump ally Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, joined by 25 other red state governors, is provoking a constitutional crisis by defying the Supreme Court and refusing to allow the Border Patrol to do its duty. And they are about to put on a full-fledged spectacle by impeaching the DHS Secretary over policy differences, which even their own legal allies say does not fit the definition of high crimes and misdemeanors. And, as we know too well, there can be no conviction in the Senate without a 2/3rd majority so it’s really just another exercise in futility.
The big question is whether or not this latest stunt will succeed for the GOP where all the others have failed. The ongoing chaos in the House and Trump’s blatant demand to keep the issue for his election argue in favor of it ending with a whimper not a bang. But nothing can be taken for granted right now and we have to hope that somehow we find our way through this mess without too many people suffering and dying because of it. It’s not looking very hopeful at the moment.
As MAGAs pitch hissy fit over Taylor Swift and immigration
Axios reports this morning that our Biden-led, post-pandemic U.S. recovery is outpacing other G7 economies:
The United States economy grew faster than any other large advanced economy last year — by a wide margin — and is on track to do so again in 2024.
Why it matters: America’s outperformance is rooted in its distinctive structural strengths, policy choices, and some luck. It reflects a fundamental resilience in the world’s largest economy that is easy to overlook amid the nation’s problems.
By the numbers: U.S. GDP looks to have grown 2.5% in 2023, according to the IMF’s hot-off-the-presses World Economic Outlook, the highest among the G7 economies (Japan was second at 1.9%).
IMF economists forecast similarly best-in-class growth this year, with 2.1% U.S. growth (second place: Canada at 1.4%).
The largest federal investments in infrastructure and manufacturing in decades, championed by the Biden administration, contributed significantly.
Growth in the U.S labor force also helped, Axios adds, “both due to more Americans choosing to enter the workforce and a surge in immigration.” Read that again.
Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics (no, not that one) tells Axios:
“The enormous labor market churn of COVID in 2020-21 had the unintended benefit of moving millions of lower income workers to better jobs, more income security, and/or running their own businesses,” Posen tells Axios.
“We are reaping the benefits of it now in labor force participation, wage growth, and improved productivity,” which was “very different from Europe and Japan where most workers remained tied to their pre-COVID jobs.”
Meantime, House Republicans refuse to do productive legislative work for which you and I are paying them.
The GOP-led House Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday passed two articles of impeachment against Alejandro N. Mayorkas, Biden’s homeland security secretary, the New York Times reports, despite lack of evidence “of a crime or acts of corruption.” Republicans on the panel argue “that the Biden administration border policies he implemented ran afoul of the law. Legal scholars, including prominent conservatives, have argued that the effort is a perversion of the constitutional power of impeachment, and Democrats remained solidly opposed (New York Times):
In an 18-to-15 party-line vote, the panel endorsed a resolution charging Mr. Mayorkas with refusing to uphold the law and breaching the public trust by failing to choke off a surge of migrants across the United States border with Mexico.
That, as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) refuses to take up any remedy for border security. Rep. Robert Menendez (D) of New Jersey let loose on his GOP colleagues.
Menendez: We have not lived up to our oversight obligation on this committee because you all bend the knee to the orange Jesus pic.twitter.com/kGjacyunOr
