Tag: GOP

The famously secluded Amish are the target of a Republican campaign to drum up Pennsylvania votes for Trump

Washington Post logoMANHEIM, Pa. — In 2016, when more than 6 million Pennsylvanians voted in the presidential election, the state’s 20 pivotal electoral votes were decided by a margin of less than 45,000 voters.

Pennsylvania is home to more than 75,000 Amish people, and most who are eligible don’t vote.

For two Republican operatives, those two numbers together add up to one major opportunity — to convince the traditionally reluctant Amish to come out to the polls, where their votes might be tremendously influential. Their project, which started in 2016 with billboards and newspaper ads urging Amish people to vote for Donald Trump, goes by the name Amish PAC.

View the complete October 9 article by Julie Zauzmer on The Washington Post website here.

GOP, Trump look to smother impeachment inquiry

The Hill logoRepublicans in Congress are coalescing around a slow-down strategy designed to stifle the Democrats’ impeachment investigation into President Trump.

It’s a strategy that mimics the administration’s largely successful efforts to hamper investigations into Trump’s role in Russia’s 2016 election interference. The White House refused requests for disputed information in those probes, and the battles are now bogged down in the courts.

Republicans are now pulling a page from that playbook in hopes of smothering the impeachment inquiry arising from Trump’s communications with Ukraine before it gains any more steam.

View the complete October 9 article by Mike Lillis on The Hill website here.

Fact Checker: The GOP theory that Ukraine ‘set up’ Trump

Washington Post logo“That’s the piece of the puzzle I’m here to report today, that unlike the narrative of the press, that President Trump wants to dig up dirt on his 2020 opponent, what he wants is he wants an accounting of what happened in 2016. Who set him up? Did things spring from Ukraine? There’s a good piece we got an Oversight [Committee] letter on from Politico in 2017. Let me quote the article. It says: ‘Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump.’ They did so by disseminating documents ‘implicating a top Trump aide in corruption,’ suggesting they were investigating the matter. Ukrainian officials also reportedly ‘helped Clinton allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers.’ There is potential interference in the 2016 election. That’s what Trump wants to get to the bottom of, but the press doesn’t want to.”

— Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Oct. 6, 2019

Never mind that the rough transcript released by the White House of the July 25 call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shows that Trump said, “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great.”

Johnson says that what Trump really wanted to find out from Ukrainian officials is what happened in 2016. “Who set him up?” he asked. “Did things spring from Ukraine?”

View the complete October 8 article by Glenn Kessler on The Washington Post website here.

Colin Powell: The Republican Party Needs to ‘Get a Grip on Itself’

Former secretary of state Colin Powell said the Republican Party needs to “get a grip on itself.” “Right now Republican leaders and members of the Congress, both Senate and the House, are holding back because they’re terrified of what will happen to any one of them if they speak out,” he told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria during an interview at the New Albany Community Foundation in Ohio, referring to President Trump’s behavior and the impeachment inquiry. Powell, who served as national security adviser to President Reagan and secretary of state under President George W. Bush, then touched on the recent debacle between Trump and the National Weather Service, when Republicans backed the president’s inaccurate rendering of a hurricane projection map. “In my time… one of us would have gone to the president and said ‘Mr. President, you screwed up,’” Powell said. “… This is not the way the country is supposed to run… And Congress is one of the institutions that should be doing something about this.”

View the complete October 6 article by Audrey McNamara on the Daily Beast website here.

Fallout from Kavanaugh confirmation felt in Washington one year later

The Hill logoIt’s been a full year since Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court but the fallout from that day — and the acrimonious weeks preceding the vote — looms large over Washington.

Senators who voted for him are finding themselves in some of the toughest reelection campaigns of their careers. Activists, seeing a raft of anti-abortion laws weaving their way through the courts, worry how Kavanaugh’s presence will swing the Supreme Court’s view of Roe v. Wade.

Democrats, perhaps even more than before, fear losing a progressive justice on the bench before regaining control of the White House.

View the complete October 6 article by Rebecca Klar on The Hill website here.

A disease claims another victim: How I lost my dad to FOX News

NOTE:  The holiday season starts this month. With that come family gatherings and the chance of political conversations over the dining room table. Sometimes those don’t go well. This commentary documents one son’s loss of the dad he knew to conservative media.

AlterNet logoMy dad’s been my hero for a long time.

I don’t think that’s out of the ordinary for someone that was fortunate enough to grow up with loving parents. But, still- it’s something I cherished. A relationship I knew plenty of others weren’t lucky enough to have. He taught me how to always listen to what folks have to say, and never be afraid to ask for advice, because everyone has something they can teach you. He was always positive, and even when we didn’t agree on things, we always got along.

My dad has led an interesting life. He’s a Vietnam veteran, and in the 1960s, he was a staunch Democrat. Vociferously anti-war after he was discharged, he became an activist- even ending up on one of J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO lists. He was also a mover and shaker of some note in the Iowa Democratic Party, a staunch Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy supporter who never got over the “backdoor, smoke and cigar filled room” way that Humphrey badgered his way to the nomination in ‘68.

View the complete October 4 commentary from the Daily Kos on the AlterNet website here.

With Flimsy Claims, Right-Wing Figures Constantly Demanded Obama Impeachment

As Donald Trump finds himself at the center of an impeachment inquiry, his backers in right-wing media have been working overtime to play defense for the embattled president. From Fox & Friends in the morning to Hannity and Tucker Carlson Tonight in the evening, Fox News has remained (mostly) unwavering in its defense of Trump. Breitbart, The Daily Wire, the New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, and so many other constants of conservative commentary have dutifully deflected and defended their political champion.

However, it wasn’t so long ago that conservative media sang a different tune on impeachment. Barack Obama’s time in office marked a period of rapid-fire demands from right-wing media for the president’s removal from office. It’s instructive to see how much the bar for “high crimes and misdemeanors” has shifted since then, helping gauge how seriously we should take the words of conservative pundits when the president is a member of their own party.

Less than two months after Obama took office, right-wing radio host Michael Savage declared, “I think it is time to start talking about impeachment.” He was angry about Obama’s use of executive actions, and he called the American people “a bunch of schmucks” for sitting idly as they were “watching a dictatorship emerge in front of their eyes.” Despite occasional criticism, Savage has been largely supportive of Trump and recently accused Nancy Pelosi of being an “illegitimate speaker” of the House intent on destroying the Constitution by opening a Trump impeachment inquiry.

View the complete October 1 article by Parker Molloy from Media Matters on the National Memo website here.

Republicans show signs of discomfort in defense of Trump

The Hill logoRepublicans, even as they generally show support for President Trump, are showing signs of discomfort amid an impeachment fight that has engulfed the country.

The battle over Trump’s actions toward Ukraine marks the biggest test to date for Republicans, who are juggling the president’s demand for loyalty with questions about his push for a foreign government to investigate a political rival.

While the party has largely rallied behind him against the Democrats’ impeachment push, there are some signs of cracks just days into the scandal that is likely to dominate the rest of 2019.

View the complete September 28 article by Jordain Carney on The Hill website here.

Republicans Say Impeachment Will Backfire. History Says It Won’t

  • Nixon’s resignation boosted Democrats in the next election
  • Clinton impeachment helped Republicans win back White House

Citing their experience in the 1990s, Republicans warned Democrats this week that an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine would backfire politically.

History, however, doesn’t back up that assertion.

Only three U.S. presidents have ever faced a serious threat of removal by Congress – Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton — and in each case the party that initiated the inquiry ended up benefiting in the next election.

View the complete September 26 article by Ryan Teague Beackwirth on the Bloomberg website here.

‘Unbelievable!’: Fox News show bursts into chaos when Juan Williams accuses co-hosts of using Trump talking points

AlterNet logoFox News show “The Five” devolved into outrage and shouting on Wednesday afternoon when host Juan Williams — the token liberal on the panel — not-so-subtly accused his co-hosts of spouting talking points from the White House.

Those talking points, meant to defend the president from the deluge of criticism he is facing amidst the ongoing Ukraine scandal, were revealed when they were inadvertently sent to Democrats in Washington D.C.

“Just listening here, I think, boy, those talking points, they’ve made the rounds! Because the reality is —” Williams said.

View the complete September 25 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.