Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

With their abandonment of the military, it’s nothing but firewood

It’s time for another scintillating Republican presidential primary debate in which a group of people with no chance to win the nomination will face off against each other at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley California on Wednesday. The front runner, Donald Trump, won’t lower himself to attend such an event with the lesser candidates but he’s rejecting this particular one for other reasons as well. According to Politico, the former president is fit to be tied at the library for hosting “A Time for Choosing,” a two-year long speaker’s series, envisioning a “fresh look — through reasoned, intellectual discussion — at the issues, ideas and policies that will define the Republican Party for decades to come.” Probably the most widely disseminated of these talks were those from Trump nemesis Liz Cheney and Reagan Foundation board member Paul Ryan the former Speaker of the House, who said, “it was ‘horrifying to see a presidency come to such a dishonorable and disgraceful end.'” Apparently, the entire board of the Reagan Foundation agrees.

This is not surprising. The legacy of Ronald Reagan was once the crowning glory of the conservative movement, a movement that has now been displaced by Trump’s MAGA cult. Reagan has no cachet among the GOP rank and file anymore most of whom are uninterested in the ideology that once ruled the Republican party. That ideology was best described by Reagan himself who saw the conservative movement coalition as a three legged stool with one leg representing traditional family values, another representing small government and the third representing a strong national defense, the idea being that the coalition could not stand without all three legs of the stool.

Trump never much liked Reagan. He thought he was too soft. Under the tutelage of sleaze monger Roger Stone, Trump took out a full page ad back in 1987 to complain about Reagan’s foreign policy, making the case that other countries weren’t paying their fair share. (No, Trump has not had a new idea in 40 years.) Today, when asked what he would do about the Ukraine war he says he’d end it but won’t say how and then inevitably goes into his usual rant about how Europe is taking the U.S. to the cleaners, just as he did for four years as president when he whined non-stop about NATO failing to pay up. He told Fox News, “the money is number one. I’d tell Europe – you’re about $100 billion plus short. Okay? You gotta pay. Because Europe is smiling all the way to the bank”

It is literally the only foreign policy he has ever had. On everything else he just winged it. Once he became president, he became hostile to the military because they weren’t like the heroes he’d seen in the movies, he was baffled by diplomacy as a tool to retain power and influence, he had no interest in the rest of the world except as a source of financial gain, and saw all threats, domestically and internationally as potentially subject to military violence if he didn’t get his way. People around him had to work night and day to keep him from making a catastrophic mistake from either ignorance or impulse.

If Trump were the only Republican with such a shallow understanding of national security and foreign policy perhaps we could all just hold our breath and do everything we can to ensure he stays a retired president dealing with his legal and financial problems as a private citizen. But he’s not. The Republican party is now full of elected officials who are equally incoherent and it seems to be getting worse.

For instance there is freshman Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville who is holding up hundreds of military promotions in order to force the Pentagon to change a rule that allows service members to take paid leave to travel to a state that provides abortion services. It’s an absurd issue that only someone with an advanced case of Fox News brain rot would even think of but he’s managed to completely alienate the military brass and frustrate the entire US Senate for months now. This would have been unthinkable for a Republican to do just a few years ago. The military was the one sacred institution in the US government and funding it or following its guidelines was always an untouchable GOP priority. Not anymore.

But why would Tuberville think any differently? After all, we have the former president calling the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff guilty of treason and declaring that he should be subject to the death penalty so it’s not as if there’s any requirement that Republicans be respectful of the military.

Last week the Speaker of the House, locked in a death struggle with his right flank, decided it was in his best interest to snub Ukrainian president Vlodymyr Zelensky to demonstrate that he’s sympathetic with the pro-Russia faction in the House GOP. Again, just a few years ago the idea that we would be talking about a pro-Russia Republican faction would have been ludicrous. That they would be essentially backing a Russian invasion of its neighbor is beyond belief. But the movement among Republicans to withdraw funding from Ukraine, stop all assistance to the war torn country and force a surrender on Russian terms is growing in the US Congress.

Over the weekend, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy backed off the commitment he made to Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to stop all support for Ukraine in the Pentagon spending bill saying that some arcane rules make it too difficult to do but it’s not the last we will hear of it. Greene and her cohort are determined to stop the funding so they can bring the war home to the U.S. southern border.

Yes, their argument is that we should not be helping Ukraine defend its border when we aren’t defending ours. And yes, it’s a colossally fatuous argument to compare an armed invasion by the Russian military with migrants seeking asylum, but that’s just how they think. So Republicans are talking about a literal war with Mexico ostensibly to stop drug traffickers and Trump is right there with them having thrown out the idea of bombing the cartels and then lying to the Mexican government and saying “no one would know it was us,” and that he’d be willing to lie publicly about it. This is rapidly becoming GOP policy.

The conservative movement led by bomb throwers like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, hate talk radio king Rush Limbaugh and Fox News’ Roger Ailes ushered in much of the obnoxious, vulgar smash mouth politics that Trump leads today and the party’s descent into ideological incoherence has been well documented. But I have to admit that I never thought I’d see the day that we’d see the Republican party supporting Russia, denigrating the U.S. military and drawing up plans to start a war on the North American continent. Reagan’s three legged stool is now nothing more than fire wood to burn down the Republican Party.

Salon

Solidarity works

Washington Post:

Negotiators for Hollywood studios and the Writers Guild of America reached a breakthrough agreement after five straight days of negotiations — a tentative deal to end a strike that has halted most TV and film scriptwriting in the country.

The terms of the agreement were not immediately shared by the WGA, which said in a statement Sunday night that the deal was “exceptional,” adding that it included “meaningful gains and protections for writers in every sector of the membership.”

The union said it was immediately suspending picketing, though its more than 11,000 members were warned not to return to work until the deal is put into the language of a contract, then approved by WGA leaders and general membership in coming days. “We are still on strike until then,” the statement said.

But the deal stillmarks the most hopeful sign of progress since May, when the WGA and a consortium of major studios and streaming services failed to renew their old contract. The sides were divided over issues such as pay for writers and the use of artificial intelligence to create scripts. The WGA strike has lasted nearly 150 days, making it one of Hollywood’s longest labor-strike disputes.

Jennifer Rubin wants to make sure people understand why striking writers and autoworkers are so pissed at how insane pay for top executives in the auto and entertainment industries has become (emphasis mine):

First, both confront companies whose chief executives’ salaries have gone wild. The Detroit News reports: “Ford CEO Jim Farley received nearly $21 million in total compensation last year,” while the Detroit Free Press finds that Carlos Tavares — CEO of Chrysler parent company Stellantis — “had total compensation of $24.8 million.” And at the top of the heap, according to Automotive News, General Motors’ Mary Barra earned almost $29 million in 2022.

CBS News put that in perspective: “Overall CEO pay at the Big Three companies rose 40% from 2013 to 2022, according to [the Economic Policy Institute].” Barra makes “362 times more than the typical GM worker, while Tavares makes 365 times more, according to company filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Farley at Ford makes 281 times more, filings show.”

Put differently, between 1978 and 2021, “executive compensation at large American companies increased by more than 1,400 percent,” Politico recently noted, citing the left-leaning EPI. “It climbed 37 percent faster than stock market growth and 18 percent faster than average full-time worker pay over the same period, the EPI analysis found.” It’s hard to tell workers they’re asking too much or don’t appreciate the fraught economic picture when CEOs are gorging themselves at the salary trough.

The same is true for entertainment companies. Yes, there are a few hugely paid actors (and athletes), but the Bureau of Labor Statistics “estimated the median actor pay was $17.94 per hour.”

Rubin adds:

You can make all the arguments you want about the labor market for chief executives and their responsibility for billions in earnings. But major companies cannot expect average workers to accept that this is simply the way things are. Management and shareholders need to understand that the gross imbalance between CEOs and average workers is going to result in labor unrest. And if the chief executives’ companies are losing tens of millions because of strikes, perhaps that should be taken into account during their next salary negotiation.

The economic inequality endemic in what some like to call “late-stage capitalism” is one of those situations that the elite will ignore and ignore and ignore until they find themselves facing the torches and pitchforks Nick Hanauer warned of nearly a decade ago. “Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.”

“Why, oh why, are the common folk are so mad at us?”

No intervention in sight

H. L. Mencken is not around to see history confirm his bleak, 1926 assessment of public wisdom. But nearly one hundred years later, his observation suggests that the mania of our age is not unique to it. Unlike Mencken, however, we are cursed today with having to live through it. Trumpism needs an intervention, but there is none in sight.

The leading Republican presidential candidate for 2024 has no use for nor interest in learning what the Constitution says. Just elect him so he can again make a mockery of swearing an oath to uphold and defend it and be about pardoning himself for his federal crimes and wreaking vengeance on all enemies domestic and domestic. Especially on those who would dare prosecute him for crimes his presidential pardon cannot reach. Donald Trump thinks the Preamble begains, “ME the People.”

Yet again Donald shows he has no idea of what’s in our Constitution.

States run their elections as they see fit unless Congress overrides.

Nothing in motor voter violates our Constitution.

What it does is make our elections more representative of the people as a whole. pic.twitter.com/KpzeaPpo8M

— David Cay Johnston (@DavidCayJ) September 25, 2023

Trump says that Comcast and NBC are enemies of the people, should be investigated for treason, and suggests as president he will remove them from public airwaves.

(They will probably cover this one) pic.twitter.com/EgCZ5MuRYW

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) September 25, 2023

What would a Trump 2.0 administration look like? Marcy Wheeler invites us to gaze upon the Republican Party in her former state. “I really wish people would start comparing what has happened to the MI GOP in the wake of their capitulation to Trumpism, as compared to the GA GOP, which stood up to it,” she posts to formerly Twitter. Wheeler cites a Detroit Free Press account of the latest state Republican meet-up (pay wall):

The audience rose in a standing ovation Saturday when Michigan Republican Party Chair Kristina Karamo was introduced to deliver a “dramatic reading of the Declaration of Independence” before a Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference unlike any other.

An hour later, Karamo stepped to the podium again to tell the conference that Darwin’s theory of evolution is a fraud and a hoax and that man was created in his present form by God, but that leftists cling to evolutionary theory because when children are taught that one part of the Bible is false, they are more inclined to also question its other teachings.

This is the doctrine of biblical literalism evangelicals discovered in the wake of Darwin. Instead of insisting that their holy scripture is a book of faith, they downgrade it to science text. But I digress.

Paul Egan reminds readers that Michigan Republicans had their butts handed to them in 2022, losing both the state House and Senate. Conference attendance this year was down. National GOP figures declined to attend. Nor did corporate sponsors kick in. The atmosphere was of unity. But it was mainly “unity by subtraction,” Egan notes.

Only two of Michigan’s six Republican members of Congress were in attendance, and U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Tipton, faced some minor heckling during his session with U.S. Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Midland, after Walberg referred to the U.S. as a democracy.

“Constitutional democracy — we’re not a democracy,” a woman shouted.

You get the idea.

Karamo, who took office in February, has faced criticism over alleged interference in the business of county parties and handling of party finances. She said Saturday rumors of her pending resignation are false and her internal detractors can “pound sand.”

Which is the kind of non-governance the GOP and Trump offer the country. The Party of Trump is opposed to expanding the voting pool, Greg Sargent notes. Democracy : bad.

A striking admission: Donald Trump just openly stated that making it easier to vote in Pennsylvania is a direct threat both to the Republican Party and to *his own presidential campaign.* pic.twitter.com/UmffcTrxFs

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) September 25, 2023

“I mean this sincerely. If one of the virtues of right wing populism is that it has subterranean majoritarian appeal that’s being suppressed by liberal elites, then why aren’t the right wing populist thinker types in favor of making voting easier?” Sargent adds. You know why.

A Trumpist GOP that postures hollowly about family values has no use for governing. It is prepared yet again to shut down government and services Americans depend on if it cannot muster the votes to work its will. The party proves day after day that its only interest is in increasing and maintaining its ability to dictate. Their invocation of freedom is a cruel joke. The country they would mismanage would be the global joke Trump fears he himself is.

And it will probably work…

Will they fall for this? The Christian Right has said they believe abortion is murder and Roe v. Wade created a genocide. Now Trump’s saying they need to set that aside so he can win the election. He may know them better than most people think. After all, these people who believe it’s murder and genocide have spent the last five decades saying they just wanted to “let the states decide” when that was a total lie. So why not? They’re political actors not religious people.

It looks like he’s thinking about it

Please someone talk this kook out of this:

For months, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said he plans to continue his long-shot challenge against President Biden in the Democratic primary rather than dropping out to launch a third-party bid.

But lately Mr. Kennedy’s message has seemed to shift, including publicly telling a voter who asked about his plans that he was keeping his “options open.”

If Mr. Kennedy does decide to leave the party of his famous father and uncles to run in the general election, one potential landing spot may be the Libertarian Party, which at the moment lacks a widely known candidate but has excelled at securing ballot access.

In July, Mr. Kennedy met privately with Angela McArdle, the chair of the Libertarian Party, at a conference they were both attending in Memphis — a meeting that has not previously been reported.

“He emphasized that he was committed to running as a Democrat but said that he considered himself very libertarian,” Ms. McArdle said in an interview, adding that they agreed on several positions, including the threat of the “deep state” and the need for populist messaging. “We’re aligned on a lot of issues.”

“My perspective is that we are going to stay in touch in case he does decide to run,” Ms. McArdle said. “And he can contact me at any time if that’s the case.”

In a June interview with the libertarian magazine Reason, Mr. Kennedy acknowledged his ideological disagreements with the party — including on issues like environmental protection, abortion and civil rights — while also saying, “I’ve always been aligned with libertarians on most issues.”

In a general election, Democrats worry that a third-party run by Mr. Kennedy could draw votes away from Mr. Biden and help elect former President Donald J. Trump. They have expressed similar concerns about No Labels, the bipartisan group trying to recruit a moderate candidate for a third-party run, and also about the progressive scholar Cornel West, who is already in the race to lead the Green Party’s ticket for 2024.

Matt Bennett, a co-founder of the centrist Democratic group Third Way, has been helping coordinate Democratic efforts to stop the No Labels effort. He said the hope in the party has been that Mr. Kennedy would “go away” after losing primaries to Mr. Biden.

“It would be very bad” if Mr. Kennedy runs as a Libertarian, Mr. Bennett said. “We’ve been very clear that third parties in close elections can be very dangerous and would almost certainly hurt the president. That would be true of a No Labels candidate and it would be true of R.F.K.”

His campaign manager says it’s not an issue:

Dennis Kucinich, Mr. Kennedy’s campaign manager, said there was “no truth” to the idea that Mr. Kennedy could run as a Libertarian. He said the meeting with Ms. McArdle simply offered “further proof of Mr. Kennedy’s appeal across the political spectrum.”“We have not sought the favor of any other political party,” Mr. Kucinich said.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Kucinich may not have any control over this and is clueless about what his candidate has in mind. And that’s because RFK Jr is nuts. I’m sorry to say it but there’s something very wrong with him and it’s not just the anti-vaxx madness. If he does this it will be the final nail in the coffin of the Kennedy legacy. And it might be the final nail in the coffin of the country.

Oh please let them do this. Please.

Mike Lee on Fox News is talking about Republicans continuing the impeachment inquiry of Biden *even if the government is shut down*. The optics of that would be interesting! pic.twitter.com/BhdfAOvYKU

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 24, 2023

A former James O’Keefe antagonist believes that if the law can hold Trump accountable then it’s possible. I wish I felt confident that they were following the same path but I’m not

During its 13-year history, the right-wing group Project Veritas tried to infiltrate progressive organizations, political campaigns and mainstream media organizations, and it published selectively edited videos intended to discredit those groups and compromise their operations.

In February, the tables turned, as Project Veritas founder and president James O’Keefe was questioned by his own board for what it called “financial misconduct.” (Allegations that O’Keefe has disputed.) He left the organization, and it sued O’Keefe some months later. Now Project Veritas has announced that it’s suspending operations indefinitely.

When O’Keefe founded Project Veritas in 2010, he unwittingly provided a model for Donald Trump’s MAGA Republican right.

When O’Keefe founded Project Veritas in 2009, he unwittingly provided a model for Donald Trump’s MAGA Republican right.

Both Project Veritas and the MAGA movement were built around powerful, egocentric leaders who see themselves as above the law. Both were also constructed on the quicksand of conspiracy theories and lies.

Veritas was brought down by a combination of outside demands for accountability, O’Keefe’s egotistical overreach, and internal divisions. And it appears that a similar fate awaits Trump’s MAGA empire.

In his first big “sting,” O’Keefe, purportedly dressed as a pimp, created a widely watched, selectively edited video in which he and a colleague approached Juan Carlos Vera, then an employee of the community organization ACORN, to get ACORN’s assistance with an ostensible scheme to smuggle young women into the United States from Mexico to work as prostitutes. What their video did not show was that Vera informed the police about the incident after they left.

The next year, the California attorney general issued a report that exonerated ACORN, and in 2013 O’Keefe settled a lawsuit brought by Vera for $100,000. But it was too late for ACORN. O’Keefe’s videos had frightened away its major financial backers, and the organization collapsed.

The ACORN sting began a long line of operations, all aimed at luring targets into making comments that could be edited in ways to discredit them — and to support right-wing conspiracy theories and candidates like Trump.

An investigative team at The Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for its series that documented Veritas’ attempts to trick the Post into publishing false information about Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore. Earlier this year, Veritas edited together some clips from a conversation with a Pfizer employee to claim that the company was “mutating” the Covid-19 virus (scientists who reviewed the video called the employee’s comments “bumbling nonsense”).

And in 2016 my firm, Democracy Partners, was infiltrated by Project Veritas operatives.

At the time I was a consultant for the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. I oversaw a program that worked with local leaders to do press events to promote the Democratic message on the same day, in the same media market, wherever Trump or his running mate, Mike Pence, campaigned. Overall, the program helped coordinate and/or generate 368 press events.

The Project Veritas attack on Democracy Partners was well planned and involved excellent spy-craft. Early in 2016, a Veritas operative, who many months later would come to work for our operation, had secretly recorded an organizer in a bar-room conversation. During the banter, he mentioned my name.

Later, the operative told the organizer that he had a “donor” who wanted to support our efforts. I talked to the “donor” and we agreed to have a drink — where he secretly recorded our conversation. Afterward, he called to say that his “niece” wanted to volunteer to do political work. I set her up with some of our organizers, where she did well. Still later, he called to say that his “niece” was moving to Washington, D.C., and would love to intern with us. Several weeks later, she began helping out in our office. Without our knowledge, she was also secretly wearing video recording equipment.

Project Veritas claimed to be “investigative journalists,” when it would be more accurate to say they were in the business of political espionage.

One day she accompanied me to the Democratic National Committee headquarters. O’Keefe would later write in his book “American Pravda” that his operative was “literally living out her character in America’s capital city much as Americans overseas did in Moscow during the Cold War.” He bragged that it was the first time an operative had infiltrated the DNC since Watergate. Project Veritas claimed to be “investigative journalists,” when it would be more accurate to say they were in the business of political espionage.

Three weeks before the November election, after a lunch with another Veritas operative posing as a donor adviser, I was ambushed by an interviewer from Sinclair Broadcast Group who showed me two of Veritas’ misleading videos and asked for comment. One of them purported to show me entertaining a scheme being pitched by a Project Veritas operative to bus voters from state to state to vote illegally. Their clip excluded that fact that I made clear in the same conversation that such a scheme was illegal and that we would have nothing to do with it. O’Keefe was planning to release the videos, alleging a variety of misdeeds, including trying to provoke violence at Trump events. Of course, none of our 368 press events had involved any violence whatsoever.

That evening, my lawyers demanded a meeting with the Sinclair reporters and subsequently with Sinclair’s editors and lawyers. After they had reviewed the full footage and the facts together, Sinclair never ran anything. But Project Veritas proceeded to release its misleading videos as best it could.

In 2017, Democracy Partners filed a civil suit against Project Veritas, and in the fall of 2022, a jury ordered Veritas to pay Democracy Partners $120,000 for violating wiretapping laws and for fraudulent misrepresentation.

Ours was not the only legal action that brought O’Keefe and Project Veritas to account. O’Keefe and his collaborators pleaded guilty to entering a federal building under false pretenses after they entered a U.S. senator’s New Orleans office, some of them disguised as telephone repairmen. Veritas was sued by a chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, and attempted to prevent The New York Times from reporting on its activities. After the FBI raided the homes of Veritas employees (including O’Keefe) in 2021, two Floridians pleaded guilty for delivering the stolen diary of Joe Biden’s daughter Ashley to Project Veritas ahead of the 2020 election in exchange for $20,000 each.

There was other outside pressure. Democracy Partners’ Lauren Windsor began a website called Project Veritas Exposed, which revealed the identity of more than 140 Veritas operatives.

And internal division began to mount. When he was ousted, the Veritas board accused O’Keefe of misusing the group’s funds for his own personal use. In one example offered, O’Keefe is accused of spending $14,000 “on a charter flight to meet someone to fix his boat under the guise of meeting with a donor.” They accused him of spending $150,000 on luxury “black car” services and $10,000 on a helicopter trip to Maine.

Veritas’ own employees became infuriated with O’Keefe’s behavior. In a memo, disgruntled employees complained that he abused staff. According to the Daily Beast, one staffer accused O’Keefe of being “a power drunk tyrant.” In August, the Westchester County district attorney, in New York, confirmed his office was investigating O’Keefe.

O’Keefe’s willingness to lie and his sense of being above the law were a precursor for Donald Trump.

The final blow came just this week, when Project Veritas announced it’s finally going dark.

O’Keefe’s willingness to lie and his sense of being above the law were a precursor for Donald Trump when he entered the presidential race, riding down the escalator at Trump Tower, accusing immigrants of being rapists and “not sending their best,” and later claiming he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose political support, or brazenly offering to pay the legal bills of anyone who would “knock the crap out” of those who disrupted his rallies. 

O’Keefe was even the Trump campaign’s guest in the spin room after the last 2016 presidential debate.

O’Keefe allegedly treated Project Veritas’ funds like his own piggy bank — much the way Trump treated the government’s classified documents, which he famously says are “mine.”

Like O’Keefe, Trump is now beginning to be held accountable by the courts and prosecutors who disagree that he is above the law.

And now, like the team at Project Veritas, the MAGA Republicans in Congress — and across the country — are increasingly divided, in disarray, at each other’s throats.

America — and democracy — are safer now that Project Veritas is done. It will be much safer yet when the entire MAGA movement follows Project Veritas into the dustbin of histor

Sick, sick, sick

More evidence of the war on science gaining ground:

For years, groups at the vanguard of the anti-vaccine movement had been operating with relatively small budgets and only a handful of staff.

Now, they’re awash in cash.

The Covid-19 pandemic has produced a remarkable financial windfall for anti-vaccine nonprofits. Revenue more than doubled for the Informed Consent Action Network and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense in 2021 compared to the year prior, according to a POLITICO analysis of tax filings. The nonprofits that survived on operating budgets of around a few million dollars just a few years prior are now raking in more than $10 million each.

“Covid vaccines have been the foot in the door for the more general anti-vaccine movement. And unfortunately, that door is open pretty wide now,” said Dr. Dave Gorski, a Michigan-based oncologist who has been tracking anti-vaccine efforts for two decades.

The funding spike reflects a sea change for once-fringe entities. The anti-vaccine movement has now emerged as a modern political force. In practical terms, greater funds enable anti-vaccine groups to expand their public reach, sue federal agencies and organize like-minded activists at the state level, as well as expand their reach abroad.

Though these groups have been trying to roll back vaccine requirements for years, the movement has gained new traction in a post-pandemic world. Earlier this year, a lawsuit funded by the anti-vaccine group Informed Consent Action Network forced Mississippi to allow religious exemptions for mandatory childhood vaccinations for the first time in more than four decades.

That case, perhaps the greatest policy achievement for the movement to loosen vaccine requirements in schools or workplaces, alarmed public health experts. Depressed vaccination rates have led to more deaths from Covid-19, and have the potential to enable the return of potentially fatal childhood diseases such as measles.

This is simply outrageous. Nuts like RFK Jr are becoming folk heroes for their nonsensical stands and people are going to die. And it’s helped by the likes of Ron DeSantis who is listening to the ant-vaxx quack doctor he named as Florida Surgeon General.

Some Republicans think that McCarthy spent too much time on investigations and not enough on dealing with actual governing. Haha. Ya think?

House Republicans have vowed to take a long, methodical approach to investigating President Biden over potential wrongdoing.

“I want this to take a long time. I really do,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a member of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, said in a recent interview.

“We’re just going to keep plowing ahead, doing our work,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, told reporters Thursday.

But there are whispers from some rank-and-file Republicans that their leadership got too fixated on these investigations, losing focus on processing the government funding bills from the House Appropriations Committee.

That’s now left the House GOP certain to face the blame if there’s a shutdown of the federal government starting next Sunday — unless they can pull off a fast legislative trick.

Moreover, when the House Oversight Committee gathers Thursday for its first formal hearing on the impeachment inquiry, the shadow of the looming shutdown will blot out any spotlight the GOP hopes to shine on Biden — leaving the hearing to play at least second fiddle to the ongoing machinations to fund the government.

“We allowed ourselves to basically get so distracted with all the other shiny objects that we didn’t actually get ahead of our real job, which is to be appropriators,” Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) told reporters after leaving an emergency GOP meeting late Thursday.

There’s a certain irony for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to have his own members blaming the impeachment focus for the looming shutdown.

After taking a longer-than-usual 46-day legislative break in the late summer, McCarthy’s first day back in the Capitol, Sept. 12, turned into a frenzy as he unilaterally announced that the Oversight, Judiciary and Ways and Means committees were entering an official impeachment inquiry.

His rank-and-file Republicans saw the move mostly as a ploy to try to quell angst among far-right lawmakers ahead of the Sept. 30 deadline to keep federal agencies funded. Those ideological warriors dismissed the impeachment move as something otherwise overdue and then ratcheted up their demands on cutting government spending.

Rather than focusing on impeachment, the far-right faction of 10 to 15 Republicans has instead paralyzed the House and set in motion a convoluted strategy with little hope for success.

Mills, a freshman who has not previously been part of the far-right troublemaking crowd, declared “I blame leadership” because the entire summer drifted away without resolving this mess.

“We had the time to do this. We had the entire month of August; we had all of September,” he said.

The speaker is fond of defending his leadership style by saying that he allows for a wide-open process that would allow for plenty of oversight investigations and legislation. “People can actually have a say. It’s not one way or the highway,” McCarthy told reporters Tuesday morning.

McCarthy’s allies, in a briefing with reporters on Friday, suggested the negotiating process with fellow Republicans took so many months because so many newcomers had never been in the majority and didn’t understand how government funding works.

“This was a new concept to some members‚” said Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.), who was McCarthy’s lead negotiator on the debt-and-budget deal with Biden administration officialsearlier this year.

Still, House GOP leaders set a rather lackluster overall timing and pacing for the summer and early fall, given that this funding showdown has always loomed large for McCarthy. In early January, arch conservatives forced him through 15 rounds of voting and obtained many concessions on the appropriations process before allowing him to become speaker.

Once the deal with Biden in late May set a two-year framework for spending, the House seemed poised to get moving on the 12 spending bills.

Then the far-right crowd opposed those spending levels as too high, using the narrow, four-vote margin to tie the House up in knots by defeating procedural votes. Instead of finishing up those talks in the early summer, House Republicans drifted into a series of unrelated distractions.

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The last couple weeks of June were dominated by McCarthy’s decision to force a censure vote against Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) for his leadership of the 2019 impeachment effort of ex-president Donald Trump. And Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) forced a vote on her resolution calling for the immediate impeachment of Biden, which prompted a wild, expletive-laden shouting match between Boebert and Greene over who should get credit for pushing impeachment.

Republicans blocked that resolution and referred it to committees on June 23, and later that day, the House broke for a longer-than-usual 17-day recess over the Fourth of July break.

In mid-to-late July, the House floor was dominated by debate over the annual Pentagon policy bill, for which conservatives won major concessions on social culture war issues. In the last week of July, the House approved the usually noncontroversial funding outline for the Department of Veterans Affairs and military construction projects.

However, facing right-wing objections, McCarthy pulled consideration for the also usually noncontroversial bill to fund the Department of Agriculture. That left 11 of the 12 government funding bills languishing.

The House then adjourned for its lengthy summer break.

Put another way, from June 24 through Sept. 11, the House was in session just 11 days. And after returning to the Capitolthis month, Republicans spent their first week focusing on whether Biden should be impeached.

Letting the MAGA fanatics run things probably wasn’t the greatest idea in the world. But what choice did he have? After brainwashing their voters for the past 30 years, they have completely lost control of the agenda — and now they’ve lost control of the caucus.

More on Sideshow Bob Menenedez and his gold bars and stacks of bills (U.S. News):

It was the second time Menendez has faced serious legal trouble. He avoided conviction on different federal bribery charges when a jury deadlocked in 2017, and he successfully ran for reelection in 2018.

But this time, Democrats – who are demanding accountability for former President Donald Trump and who are battling GOP claims that the Department of Justice has been “weaponized” against Republicans under President Joe Biden’s administration – are not rallying around Menendez.

In a stunning rebuke of a member of his own party and state delegation, Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy Friday afternoon called on Menendez to resign from office, saying the “deeply disturbing” allegations “are so serious that they compromise the ability of Senator Menendez to effectively represent the people of our state.”

“Therefore, I am calling for his immediate resignation,” Murphy said in a statement.

As the day went on after the bombshell indictment, Democrats began bailing on their legally troubled colleague. New Jersey Democrats, including state assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin, state Democratic Party Chairman Leroy Jones, Rep. Andy Kim and Rep. Mikie Sherrill, and former Rep. Tom Malinowski called on Menendez to step down from the Senate.

Kim has announced he will primary Menendez in 2024.

The three-term senator, whose vote is essential to the Democrats’ single-seat majority in the Senate, was forced to give up his gavel as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, per caucus rules.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington quickly called for Menendez’s resignation from the Senate, with CREW president Noah Bookbinder saying that “the stain of corruption continuously taints Menendez.”

John Fetterman, freshman Democratic senator of Pennsylvania, he of the hoodies and cargo shorts, is having none of it:

“Senator Menendez should resign,” Fetterman wrote in a post on social media. “He’s entitled to the presumption of innocence, but he cannot continue to wield influence over national policy, especially given the serious and specific nature of the allegations.”

“I hope he chooses an honorable exit and focuses on his trial,” Fetterman added.

I want the contrast with how Republicans defend and even bow before their (until proven guilty) miscreants. The GOP, always unctuously insisting we must restore Americans’ confidence in elections (that they’ve spent decades eroding), will not take a stand against their 2024 frontrunner. Democrats have to police their own.