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Autocracy U.S.A.

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 19, 2024

This is not a drill

Republicans and their allies “are engaged in an unprecedented legal campaign targeting the American voting system,” a “wide-ranging and methodical effort … to contest an election that they argue, falsely, is already being rigged against former President Donald J. Trump.”

You heard multiple speakers claim that this week in Milwaukee. It’s not just rhetoric (gift article):

But unlike the chaotic and improvised challenge four years ago, the new drive includes a systematic search for any vulnerability in the nation’s patchwork election system.

Mr. Trump’s allies have followed a two-pronged approach: restricting voting for partisan advantage ahead of Election Day and short-circuiting the process of ratifying the winner afterward, if Mr. Trump loses. The latter strategy involves an ambitious — and legally dubious — attempt to reimagine decades of settled law dictating how results are officially certified in the weeks before the transfer of power.

That’s on top of state legal challenges to Democrats changing candidates in midstream if thatn happens.

Stuart Stevens looks back on his days in Republican politics in Ohio for The Atlantic and ponders how that state went from having a “high-functioning party with a boringly predictable pro-business sentiment” to electing J.D. Vance as senator. The sad truth is “that the old guard surrendered to forces contrary to what it had espoused as lifelong values.” Ohio Republicans have a lot of company from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

“The once staunchly midwestern, mainstream Ohio GOP has now given us the first vice-presidential nominee who has pledged not to follow the Constitution if it stands in the way of political victory,” Stevens writes.

It’s the conclusion that should draw your attention:

As historians frequently observe, autocrats are skilled at using the tools and benefits of democracy to end democracy. In the preface to their brilliant How Democracies Die, the Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote, “Blatant dictatorship—in the form of fascism, communism, or military rule—has disappeared across much of the world. Military coups and other violent seizures of power are rare. Most countries hold regular elections. Democracies still die, but by different means.”

You’re watching that happen in real time … if you let it.

Stevens is watching too.

https://x.com/stuartpstevens/status/1814010989370601559

Stevens is not alone.

But let’s let someone (formerly) close to Donald Trump speak plainly to what’s at stake. BTW, her uncle “is currently out on bail in three jurisdictions.”

“Please, vote accordingly,” says Mary Trump.

But more importantly, do more. Don’t sit on your asses while members of a fascist movement march the streets and run for office where you live. It’s not someone else’s job to defend the republic. It’s yours. With your money, with your time, and with your sweat. That’s my daily public service announcement.

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You Better Think!

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 19, 2024

AOC lays out the stakes

“You better think about the consequences of your actions!“

In an hour-long live-stream, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) attempts to lay out the plusses and minuses of Democrats swapping out their presidential candidate (Joe Biden) this late in the election season. The election isn’t in November, she reminds viewers, it’s in September when the first ballots go out. The end of September to early October.

She’s not seeing Beltway influencers gaming out the consequences of swapping out a presidential candidate without closely examining their watches and their calendars.

Making a radical decision like this based on July polling, she reminds viewers, is unwise. She’s won elections where polling showed her down by double digits.

An open convention at this point is convention is “crazy.” People considering one are not gaming out how that would play out.

I’ve said repeatedly here to those who say, “Joe needs to go,” get back to me with a candidate and a plan and we’ll talk. AOC is in some of the rooms where these discussions among leading Democrats take place. When she asks the “Joe needs to go” faction for their plan, she gets back blank stares. If there’s a plan, she’s not hearing one.

IF Joe Biden were to step aside, VP Kamala Harris is the only logical alternate candidate. Her name is already on state ballots. She’d have access to the $100 million campaign war chest. (Others wouldn’t.) Harris and Biden have been “campaigning their butts off.” But she also worries — she works around Hill Republicans — that Republicans have plans to fight any ballot change in court, especially in key swing states. Guess where those cases will end up?

AOC’s base is working-class voters. Some colleagues are more responsive to their donors than they are to their constituents. These decisions should not be made through theoretical discussions made by people obsessed with polls, a class of elite Democrats and big donors behind the scenes, some of whom want to replace both Biden and Harris.

Me now. Black voters are the backbone of the Democratic base. Many would be pissed to see Biden forced out. Passing over Harris as an alternative sounds both tactically and politically suicidal.

AOC repeats, if you think the people pushing the “Joe must go” narrative are defaulting to Harris as a Biden replacement, “you would be mistaken.”

We must win, says AOC. All the “we’re going to lose” talk irritates her, as it does me. Her constituents cannot afford for Democrats to lose. They cannot afford to weather the storm if we don’t. They are the first deported, the first sent to war, the first sent to Rikers Island.

Americans want to vote for winners. For God’s sake, start talking like winners!

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They Don’t Care About Women

Published by digby on July 18, 2024

Women in America, even the majority of pro-lifers, do not think they should be forced to give birth to their abusive father’s child. They don’t think they should be denied medical care when they’re having a miscarriage or carrying a fetus with fatal anomalies . They don’t think they should be denied IVF if they want to have a family. They don’t think they should be treated as if they are nothing more than a vessel for the purpose of birthing some man’s offspring. We stopped believing all that a very long time ago.

Whatever happens in the next few days with this election, it’s important that we all keep in mind the stakes. We’re not up against Trump alone. He is the figurehead for a fascist movement that places natalism and patriarchy as one of their highest priorities.

Here’s just one example of what we’re dealing with:

“Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, [the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method,” notes [Project 2025.].

The Biden administration proposed the expanded privacy rule in April 2023 in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade and ended federal abortion protections. The proposed rule expanded upon the long-established Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act’s Privacy Rule, which requires appropriate safeguards to protect individuals’ health information. 

While these privacy laws do not usually apply in the case of a criminal investigation, the proposed rule prohibited health officials from divulging records related to reproductive health care — including for fertility issues, contraception, and miscarriages — even if requested by law enforcement.

The following month, Vance and 28 other conservative lawmakers sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra demanding the department withdraw the draft rule. They argued that the Biden administration had overstepped its constitutional bounds and unlawfully infringed on congressional power. 

“Abortion is not health care,” they wrote. “It is a brutal act that destroys the life of an unborn child and hurts women.”

I don’t think there’s anything nuanced about that. Keep in mind, that’s after Roe was overturned. Trump silly “states’ rights” argument don’t hold water (and they’re bad enough.)

The Dull Trump Show

Published by digby on July 18, 2024

I expected more, I must admit

The best dispatch from the GOP convention so far comes from Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir. It has seemed to me that the convention is a bit boring and listless all things considered. You’d think with their main man wandering around with a bandage on his head after an assassination attempt, the energy would be off the charts. And I would have assumed that the Really Big Showman would have orchestrated a much more exciting program even aside from that. But it doesn’t seem to be. There’s a good reason the man himself is falling asleep every night in front of everyone. It’s boring.

You have to read O’Hehir’s vivid (and hilarious) prose to get the real flavor of what’s going on there but I think this observation is important to understand what’s really going on:

The Republican Party under Trump — and someday soon under Vance or some other heir or usurper — isn’t really a party and has no guiding ideology or sense of its own history. My colleague Amanda Marcotte observed this week that the conventional wisdom describing the new GOP as a cult of personality slightly misses the point. She meant that Donald Trump is the funnel through which MAGA energy flows and the wizard who conjured it forth, but he has never truly controlled it. 

If Trump wins this election, he’ll be a lame-duck president in his 80s. More specifically, he’ll be the beloved but decrepit figurehead of the semi-normal popular front of a fascist movement whose darkest and most compelling energies lie elsewhere. That’s what the official, above-ground Republican Party is now. Their convention is a deliberately boring dumb show, listless late-Soviet political theater meant to lull you and me — and most of its actual participants, for that matter — into believing that Trump 2.0 is nothing more than what it says on the box.

Yup. As weird as it seem to say it considering all the drama on both sides, I’ll just say again that the election isn’t really about either of the old guys at the top of the ticket. This is about the battle of two coalitions. And their coalition is fascist.

Houston We Have A Problem

Published by digby on July 18, 2024

Meanwhile:

I have serious doubts the Democrats can win with this dynamic. I don’t know that it will change if Biden gets out but it’s guaranteed that it won’t if he stays in.

This isn’t the first time the press has put its thumb on the scale of the Democratic choice for president. We know that. In fact, they do it more often than not. Maybe this time it’s for the best but it doesn’t make it right. It usually doesn’t work out well for the good guys.

Whither The Ohio GOP Of Yesteryear?

Published by digby on July 18, 2024

Stuart Stevens knows Ohio. He worked for John Kasich, Rob Portman and focused on the state for George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. This piece in the Atlantic about what’s happened to the state since then is a fascinating look at the fascist takeover of the GOP:

What happened to the Ohio GOP? For generations, it was the epitome of a sane, high-functioning party with a boringly predictable pro-business sentiment that seemed to perfectly fit the state. Today, it has been remade in the image of native son J. D. Vance, the first vice-presidential candidate to sanction coup-plotting against the U.S. government.

In a speech to the Republican National Convention tonight that was virtually devoid of policy, he railed against corrupt elites and pledged his fealty to the man he once compared to heroin, suggesting that the American experiment depended on former President Donald Trump’s election.

But don’t make the mistake of thinking this transformation was the result of a hostile takeover; that implies there was a fight. The truth is that the old guard surrendered to forces contrary to what it had espoused as lifelong values.

Ohio was the home of Standard Oil, Dow Chemical, Goodyear Tires, and Procter and Gamble. Garrett Morgan, a co-founder of the Cleveland Association of Colored Men, devised an early version of the stoplight, a symbol of a state that thrived on normalcy. The Wright brothers invented the airplane in Dayton.

The Taft family defined the Ohio Republican Party. Cincinnati-born President William Howard Taft went to Yale, belonged to Skull and Bones, and was anointed by Theodore Roosevelt to succeed him. He trounced the populist William Jennings Bryan. His son Robert was “Mr. Republican,” a senator from 1939 until his death, in 1953. His son Robert Jr. followed him to the Senate. His son Robert III was Ohio governor from 1999 to 2007. That’s a 100-year run of one family dominating the state Republican Party. There’s nothing else like it in American politics. You could argue that this dynasticism was stifling, but you could also say that it was the result of a desire for stability above all else.

He goes on to talk about the ordinariness of the candidates he worked for noting that they all resisted Trump — and failed:

Kasich put up the strongest resistance, but it was ineffective. He refused to support Trump when he won the nomination in 2016. In 2020, he endorsed Joe Biden. After Trump received a Department of Justice letter notifying him that he was a target in the January 6 investigation, Kasich urged his co-partisans “to stand up and say something. And I’d like to see the donors step up and help them. The problem we have now is many people don’t want to make a winner; they want to be with a winner,” Kasich said.

In 2016, Portman was running for reelection in the Senate and tried to stay away from Trump, kayaking Ohio rivers while the Republican convention was held in Cleveland. After the Access Hollywood tape came out, Portman announced that he would not support Trump but added, “I will be voting for Mike Pence for president.” That was a head-scratcher. In 2020, he endorsed Trump. After January 6, he voted not to convict Trump in his Senate impeachment trial. And when Vance ran to replace Portman, the retiring senator remained neutral in the primary and then endorsed Vance.

Gov. Mike DeWine, the last of the “establishment” Republicans in the state has endorsed Trump as well.

Could the trinity of Kasich-Portman-DeWine have saved the party if they’d persisted? We’ll never know. But the emergence of J. D. Vance, the first Ohioan to be on a national ticket since John Bricker ran with Thomas Dewey in 1944, has a Guns of August feel: that of powerful players sliding into a war no one desired or imagined. The once staunchly midwestern, mainstream Ohio GOP has now given us the first vice-presidential nominee who has pledged not to follow the Constitution if it stands in the way of political victory.

As historians frequently observe, autocrats are skilled at using the tools and benefits of democracy to end democracy. In the preface to their brilliant How Democracies Die, the Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote, “Blatant dictatorship—in the form of fascism, communism, or military rule—has disappeared across much of the world. Military coups and other violent seizures of power are rare. Most countries hold regular elections. Democracies still die, but by different means.”

It’s a case study in how establishment Republicans basically let their party be taken over by charlatans and con-men who saw the already brainwashed rank and file of the GOP as a group of very easy marks.

The Martyred Messiah

Published by digby on July 18, 2024

This is a good piece by Sidney Blumenthal in the Guardian about the effects of Trump’s assassination attempt. It’s truly sickening:

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump has transformed the theology of Trump. He has long portrayed himself as an innocent lamb falsely accused, the target of slings and arrows to bear the suffering of believers. Now the bullet and the blood of Butler, Pennsylvania, have sanctified him for the faithful and brought forth a new gospel.

Earlier this month, the Republican National Committee endorsed the party platform, a document that contained a plank pledging to create a new federal agency to defend Christian nationalism: “To protect Religious Liberty, Republicans support a new Federal Task Force on Fighting Anti-Christian Bias that will investigate all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment, and persecution against Christians in America.” The document casts Christians as though they are a sect still persecuted by the Romans, about to be dragged into the Colosseum to face ferocious beasts.

But after the shooting, there was no mention of a platform. There was no reference to the political party. Trump had not simply survived crucifixion. He was not only resurrected. He became his own second coming. He was washed in his own blood. Divine intervention proved he was destined to return. All that is required from followers are declarations of faith. The return is a restoration of the grand course of events that was unjustly detoured by a stolen election. Trump is now a martyr, resurrected and the second coming all at once. All power is invested in the messiah on day one.

“The doctor at the hospital said he never saw anything like this, he called it a miracle,” Trump explained. “I’m not supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be dead. By luck or by God, many people are saying it’s by God I’m still here.” He was reborn.

His sanctification has produced a new narrative by those who wish to be seen as his most fervent apostles. They compete to proclaim the new gospel. “GOD protected President Trump yesterday,” tweeted House speaker Mike Johnson. “God’s hand of protection” held Trump safe, the Rev Franklin Graham told Fox News. “The devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle,” said Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina. “Listen, if you didn’t believe in miracles before Saturday, you better be believing right now.” They are the chosen messengers of the chosen one. The fervor with which they tell the story reveals more than their faith, but also establishes their seat at the table of the apostles.

There’s more at the link.

This display has the media in a massive swoon, unfortunately. They can’t stop talking about the “split-screen” between the grand love affair between Trump and his people at the RNC and Joe Biden walking haltingly up the stairs of Air Force One all alone, a broken man. (He has COVID so it’s not surprising that he’d be halting — and alone.) Trump the martyr and spiritual leader has them in his pocket at the moment. And it’s terrifying.

Crimes Against Capitalism?

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 18, 2024

The Midas Cult strikes back

Rick Perlstein has been punishing himself reading a copy of Project 2025. He’s plowing through the internal contradictions so you don’t have to.

His second installment uncovers needles in that haystack as well as dirty needles in plain view. Among them:

  • They want to get rid of vehicle fuel efficiency standards, a major reason why cars made in the 1970s got under 20 miles to a gallon, but ones made now get over 40. The Heritage Foundation, in a detour to Alice’s Wonderland, says fuel efficiency has “negative consequences for air quality.”
  • They blame the deadly, underregulation-driven failure of the nation’s only independentpower grid, in Texas in 2021, on “pressure to use 100 percent renewables,” which somehow forces installation of power lines that can’t access electricity from any other source. The solution? Support diversity by sticking to “coal, nuclear, and natural gas.”
  • “Eliminate or Reform the Dietary Guidelines,” because those tables we used to read on the sides of cereal boxes when we were kids might become Trojan horses for “objectives unrelated to the nutritional and dietary well-being of Americans” such as “the health of the planet.”
  • “Transition the Safer Choice program”—a voluntary perk allowing companies to slap a label on cleaning products indicating they meet EPA safe product standards—”to the private sector.” On the bright side: If industry chooses the standards, many more will volunteer to participate.

“Discrimination is singled out as a bad thing, to be sure,” Perlstein finds. “Heritage would just render it impossible to fight” by not measuring it. Simply “prohibit racial classifications.” Problem solved! Becasue racial tracking of employees is a crime against “the diversity of the American workforce.”

There’s plenty of weirdness authored by “the reactionary wing of … the Holy Roman Catholic Church.” Perlstein makes this observation on how the faith insinuates itself into policy.

One of the ways Catholicism builds its influence within so many diverse societies around the globe is “syncretism”: emphasizing church teachings that resemble sacred beliefs of its host culture—like enslaved Brazilians being told that Catholic saints were a lot like the panoply of spirits in the local version of West African religion. Here, Heritage deploys a Catholic version of our sacred symbol: individualism. Not the good, liberal kind, where people choose their values from their own experience and self-reflection; that’s a heresy. 

I’ve reflected plenty on our need to sanctify profit-making, another sacred belief of American culture. It’s a principle reason the Midas Cult is determined to divert the hundreds of billions collected for Social Security or spent each year on public education to the private sector:

It’s bad enough that states are not providing education on at least a not-for-profit basis. But it’s far worse than that. They’re giving it away! That’s a mortal sin. A crime against capitalism. The worst kind of creeping socialism. Hundreds of billions of tax dollars spent every year in a nonprofit community effort to educate a nation’s children, and the moguls are not skimming off the top. The horror.

That perspective is reflected in Project 2025 as well. The Project 2025 team will move to privatize more taxpayer-funded services and (one way or another) make them fee-for-service. Among them, free weather reports:

Charging for popular services that were previously free isn’t generally a winning political strategy. But hard-right policy makers appear poised to try to do just that should Republicans gain power in the next term. Project 2025—a nearly 900-page book of policy proposals published by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation—states that an incoming administration should all but dissolve the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, under which the National Weather Service operates. Donald Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, but given that it was largely written by veterans of his first administration, the document is widely seen as a blueprint for a second Trump term.

[…]

Privatizing the weather is not a new conservative aim. Nearly two decades ago, when the National Weather Service updated its website to be more user-friendly, Barry Myers, then executive vice president of AccuWeather, complained to the press that “we work very hard every day competing with other companies, and we also have to compete with the government.” In 2005, after meeting with a representative from AccuWeather, then-Senator Rick Santorum introduced a bill calling for the NWS to cease competition with the private sector, and reserve its forecasts for commercial providers. The bill never made it out of committee. But in 2017, Trump picked Myers to lead NOAA. (Myers withdrew his nomination after waiting two years for Senate confirmation.)

Michael Lewis in his 2018 book “The Fifth Risk” explains that government manages a portfolio of risks that requires “mission-driven” careerists, experts with a dedication to the work, not to making big money from it:

Donald Trump’s administration came to Washington to upend that system. Not to improve it, but to exploit it for profit. They abandoned data collection on anything Trumpers opposed, the New York Times review explained, “like climate change or food safety regulations, or that they didn’t care about, like poverty, or stuff that they assumed were government boondoggles, which was most everything not involving the Pentagon.”

And next the National Weather Service. Lewis followed the Barry Meyers-NWS saga in “The Fifth Risk.” Severe thunderstrorm warnings you get for free on any of your devices (at a cost of roughly $4 per person per year) could disappear if a Project 2025-driven second Trump administration has its way. Kiss those hurrcane warnings goodbye too, Floridians and Gulf-dwellers. Perhaps Heritage will spin off management of the GPS system from the Department of Defense to Barry Meyers. Because in Heritage world there’s no public good but the private good.

Something to look forward to under the dictatorship of the MAGAtariat.

As Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi says: Don’t agonize, organize.

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“We’re 1933”

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 18, 2024

While the republic burns, the press chases clicks

Watching Day 3 of RNC convention coverage last night on a couple of channels, I found most of it as horrible as Donald Trump finds Milwaukee. Republican speakers shamelessly spewed lies, distortions and smears. (Daniel Dale deconstructs just a few for CNN.) Republican conventioneers held signs reading MASS DEPORTATION NOW! (CBS reports it was, in part, a deliberate troll intended to “make heads explode.”)

The convention’s message is horrible, yes, but so is the coverage.

But what made my head spin was a promo during a commerical break on MSNBC, the kind featuring a snappy clips of recent coverage. The montage was all Biden is old, will he or won’t he drop out, etc. Nothing about the stakes in this election for women and for international order and democracy. Nothing about Donald Trump’s incoherence, the GOP’s rejection of the rule of law, Project 2025 plans for terminating our republic (with extreme prejudice), our country teetering on the edge of dictatorship.

The days of news divisions being loss leaders for TV networks were gone decades ago. The Fourth Estate is no longer interested in fulfilling its role of informing the public. What once was news (print included) now is infotainment. Drama is entertaining. Joe Biden is old and could be forced out of the race is entertaining. It draws eyeballs and clicks and sells soap (yes, I’m that old).

Jennifer Rubin has noticed. Networks have moved on from the Trump phenomenon to “Biden is old” because they’ve become bored with Trump.

“The media … has done an abominable job of prioritizing what’s important and what’s not. We are on the brink of going down the road of a dictatorship,” Rubin warns. “That is more important than anything else. I know it’s attractive. You can say people have gotten used to Trump. Why have they gotten usded to Trump? Because the press has gotten used to Trump, because the press does not cover his insanity.”

Sharks and motorboats and Hannibal Lechter, etc. The press got bored with it, says Rubin. Getting bored is not the job of a free press in a free country, she adds. The job is informing the public.

But in a country that places making a buck above all else, that’s fallen by the wayside.

Reporters focusing on the drama surrounding Biden “is not reporting what is there. This is driving a narrative because they think it’s exciting, because it is exciting, and because they are personally offended that they weren’t told that [Biden] has bad days.”

Rubin is “shouting that we should pay attention because we’re 1933. We’re not 1938. We have the chance to stop the train.”

MASS DEPORTATION NOW! suggests the train (of boxcars?) and detention camps might soon be real, not metaphorical. The spectacle will show the world that the U.S. has abandoned its democratic heritage for xenophobia, grievance, and dictatorship. Our global adversaries must already be thrilled.

This morning, George Conway is launching Anti-Psychopath PAC in an attempt to refocus attention on the threat the MAGA movement and its dangerous, lunatic figurehead represents. Trump is “a sociopath or psychopath.”

Laugh or cry as you will, but get busy beating this threat to everything you hold dear.

Update: Just spotted this from last night. “We’re absolutely killing our nominee and our chances of winning.”

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