Tag: GOP

Video games. Homelessness. Social media. After shootings, Republicans have avoided talking about Trump and white nationalism.

Washington Post logoTrump and Republican leaders are largely focusing their talking points following two mass shootings — including one in El Paso in which the suspect may be charged with a hate crime — on everything but the obvious factors: They discussed video games, homelessness and social media. Largely left out: guns; and the rise of white nationalism and whether Trump’s racially divisive language factors into that.

President Trump’s own FBI director has indicated that white supremacy-related domestic terrorism is on the rise. That rise has been frequently noted in the past few weeks, as Trump has been escalating his anti-immigrant rhetoric.

In an address Monday, Trump acknowledged the racial hatred apparently at play in the El Paso shooting by saying something he rarely does: “In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy.” He made no connection between those things and his own racially divisive rhetoric.

View the complete August 5 article by Amber Phillips on The Washington Post website here.

Republicans won’t go back to ‘normal’ after Trump

AlterNet logoThe planned retirement of Texas Republican Congressman Will Hurd has shaken Republican circles in more than one way. Most notably, it has turned GOP jitters over the possibility of Texas becoming a blue state in 2020 into a full-blown panic. There has been a wave of Republican retirements in Texas, and the statistics on voter shifts are looking ominous unless Trump’s party can somehow win back suburban voters they are hemorrhaging. The loss of incumbents in vulnerable districts puts Republican efforts to claw their way back to a House majority even deeper in the hole.

The planned retirement of Texas Republican Congressman Will Hurd has shaken Republican circles in more than one way. Most notably, it has turned GOP jitters over the possibility of Texas becoming a blue state in 2020 into a full-blown panic. There has been a wave of Republican retirements in Texas, and the statistics on voter shifts are looking ominous unless Trump’s party can somehow win back suburban voters they are hemorrhaging. The loss of incumbents in vulnerable districts puts Republican efforts to claw their way back to a House majority even deeper in the hole.

The planned retirement of Texas Republican Congressman Will Hurd has shaken Republican circles in more than one way. Most notably, it has turned GOP jitters over the possibility of Texas becoming a blue state in 2020 into a full-blown panic. There has been a wave of Republican retirements in Texas, and the statistics on voter shifts are looking ominous unless Trump’s party can somehow win back suburban voters they are hemorrhaging. The loss of incumbents in vulnerable districts puts Republican efforts to claw their way back to a House majority even deeper in the hole.

View the complete August 3 article by David Atkins from The Washington Monthly on the AlterNet website here.

‘Take Texas seriously’: GOP anxiety spikes after retirements, Democratic gains

Washington Post logoRepublicans have long idealized Texas as a deep-red frontier state, home to rural conservatives who love President Trump. But political turbulence in the sprawling suburbs and fast-growing cities are turning the Lone Star State into a possible 2020 battleground.

“The president’s reelection campaign needs to take Texas seriously,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said in an interview. He added that while he remains optimistic about the GOP’s chances, it is “by no means a given” that Trump will carry Texas — and its 38 electoral votes — next year or that Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) will be reelected.

For a state that once elevated the Bush family and was forged into a Republican stronghold by Karl Rove, it is an increasingly uncertain time. Changing demographics and a wave of liberal activism have given new hope to Democrats, who have not won a statewide elective office since 1994 or Texas’s presidential vote since Jimmy Carter in 1976.

View the complete August 2 article by Robert Costa and Robert Moore on The Washington Post website here.

The simple math that should keep Republicans up at night Add to list

Washington Post logoThe most common age of Hispanics in America is 11. For whites? 58.

Two demographic trends are expected to reshape the United States over the next 30 years. One is that the average age of Americans will creep steadily upward. The other is that the density of white Americans as a percentage of the population will slip steadily downward.

On Tuesday, we got a vivid reminder of the existence of those two trends, courtesy of analysis from the Pew Research Center. Pew’s Katherine Schaeffer looked at Census Bureau age data by race and ethnicity and came to a startling realization.

The most common age in the United States is 27, a function of the population boom that marked the millennial generation and of the natural effects of the baby boomers getting older. But that most-common age is not the same across racial or ethnic groups. Among black Americans, the most common age is 27, as it is for nonwhite Americans overall. The most common age among whites?

Fifty-eight.

View the complete July 30 article by Philip Bump on The Washington Post website here.

Columnist reveals why Trump and the Republicans’ love of Israel is actually about ‘maintaining white Christian dominance’

AlterNet logoThe Christian Right, which has been an integral part of the Republican Party since President Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, is known for its strident support of Israel as well as its belief that fundamentalist Christianity is the only way to escape eternal hellfire and damnation. It’s a bizarre contradiction: far-right white Protestant evangelicals believe that Jews will receive a one-way ticket to hell unless they become fundamentalist Christians, yet they profess to be unwavering supporters of Israel — even going so far as to denounce others as anti-Semitic for not being pro-Israel enough. Journalist Peter Beinart takes a close look at the Christian Right’s supposed love affair with Israel in a thought-provoking piece for The Forward, and he concludes that their obsession with Israel is not rooted in a love of Judaism, but in a white nationalist viewpoint.

The Christian Right, which has been an integral part of the Republican Party since President Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, is known for its strident support of Israel as well as its belief that fundamentalist Christianity is the only way to escape eternal hellfire and damnation. It’s a bizarre contradiction: far-right white Protestant evangelicals believe that Jews will receive a one-way ticket to hell unless they become fundamentalist Christians, yet they profess to be unwavering supporters of Israel — even going so far as to denounce others as anti-Semitic for not being pro-Israel enough. Journalist Peter Beinart takes a close look at the Christian Right’s supposed love affair with Israel in a thought-provoking piece for The Forward, and he concludes that their obsession with Israel is not rooted in a love of Judaism, but in a white nationalist viewpoint.

“Republicans no longer talk about Israel like it’s a foreign country,” Beinart asserts. “They conflate love of Israel with love of America because they see Israel as a model for what they want America to be: an ethnic democracy.”

View the complete July 30 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

The GOP’s questions to Mueller seemed bizarre — unless you watch Fox News

Washington Post logoTreating right-wing conspiracy theories as smoking guns shows that Republicans are mostly speaking to their base.

When Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) had his turn to quiz former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III during the hearing Wednesday morning, he came armed with what he seemed to think was a smoking gun: that neither Glenn Simpson nor Fusion GPS were mentioned in Mueller’s report.

Most Americans no doubt shared Mueller’s apparent confusion about the line of questioning. He said he was not familiar with Fusion GPS, a private strategic-intelligence firm, and that Simpson, the organization’s founder, was outside the scope of his investigation. Yet as the hearings wore on, Republican lawmakers returned again and again to Simpson and Fusion GPS, treating them like household names. And for conservatives on a steady diet of right-wing media, they are: the linchpins of a conspiratorial witch hunt to impeach President Trump.

The GOP’s laserlike focus on Simpson, Fusion GPS, former FBI agent Peter Strzok and other bits of right-wing lore probably played well in conservative media (and, as a consequence, in the Oval Office). But it was almost certainly inscrutable to any American who is not dialed into Fox News, right-wing talk radio or conservative-leaning Facebook feeds. That has real consequences for a party that, in learning to speak to its siloed-off base, has forgotten how to reach a wider audience.

View the complete July 24 article by Nicole Hemmer on The Washington Post website here.

Televangelist Jim Bakker Warns His Flock That Christian Leaders And Republicans Will Die If Trump Loses In 2020

Jim Bakker, otherwise known as half of disgraced ’80s televangelist power couple Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker — pictured above with his current wife, Lori — has spent the past decade and a half quietly rebuilding his empire after serving nearly five years of a 45-year prison sentence (for fraud and conspiracy-related charges) from 1989 to 1994. (Not to be confused with the drugging and rape allegations from actress Jessica Hahn which had previously derailed his career in 1987.)

In the present, it should come as very little surprise that the “reformed” Bakker is back on his bullshit, now as a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump and spewing dangerous rhetoric. In a sermon recently flagged by Right Wing Watch, Bakker told his followers that if Trump doesn’t get reelected in 2020, that “leaders of the gospel and the political conservative leaders” are going to be murdered. By who? Presumably AOC and the other women in Congress who Trump supporters chant “send them back” at rallies about? Dark lord Nancy Pelosi? Satan? Your guess is as good as ours! Continue reading “Televangelist Jim Bakker Warns His Flock That Christian Leaders And Republicans Will Die If Trump Loses In 2020”

Republican lawmakers who backed Trump’s tax cuts now freak out over bipartisan spending deal

The bipartisan congressional leadership and White House reached a two-year budget deal on Monday, seemingly averting another government shutdown and preventing a default on the national debt that has grown to an all-time high under President Donald Trump.

But despite previously backing the 2017 tax cuts for the rich that have helped fuel the largest monthly budget deficits in American history, several self-styled deficit hawks in Congress are now signaling their opposition based on claims of fiscal conservationism.

The deal — which Trump praised on Twitter as “a real compromise in order to give another big victory to our Great Military and Vets!” — will provide more than $1.3 trillion for agency spending for each of the next two years and suspend the nation’s debt limit until after the election. This will prevent the government from defaulting on its debt payments for the first time in history and avert some of the spending cuts agreed to in the 2011 Budget Control Act.

View the complete July 23 article by Josh Israel on the ThinkProgress website here.

Study: GOP Rejection Of Medicaid Funds Caused Over 15,000 Unnecessary Deaths

Republican opposition to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) appears to have deadly consequences, according to a July study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

“Our estimates suggest that approximately 15,600 deaths would have been averted had the ACA expansions been adopted nationwide as originally intended by the ACA,” Sarah Miller, Sean Altekruse, Norman Johnson, and Laura R. Wherry wrote in the NBER study.

The study examined the mortality rates among low-income people aged 55 to 64 in states that opted to expand Medicaid under the ACA and those that did not.

View the complete July 22 article by Dan Desai Martin on the National Memo website here.

A meme called four Democrats ‘The Jihad Squad.’ A state GOP group is sorry for sharing it.

NOTE:  We have chosen not to include the article’s tweet with accompanying graphic.

Washington Post logoMinnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar’s face is contorted into an attitude-filled pout and she appears to be toting a large gun. Below her are the doctored images of three fellow Democratic congresswomen: Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts.

According to the movie poster-style picture that was recently shared to an official Facebook page for Republican leaders in Illinois, the four minority lawmakers are the stars of “The Jihad Squad.” Continue reading “A meme called four Democrats ‘The Jihad Squad.’ A state GOP group is sorry for sharing it.”