GOP lawmakers are sticking with the president and the NRA.President Donald Trump briefly raised eyebrows Monday when he tweeted an endorsement of stronger background checks, tied to immigration reform, after the nightmarish mass shootings over the weekend.
But skeptical Republicans familiar with Trump’s mercurial nature didn’t rush out to embrace the idea.
Trump 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 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.
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.
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 Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Thursday that it will resume capital punishment for the first time in nearly two decades.
Only three federal executions have taken place since 1988, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. All five of the death-row inmates named in Thursday’s release were convicted for the murders of children.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons has adopted a regulation that will require federal authorities to use a single drug, pentobarbital, in federal executions, according to the DOJ release. That drug is used by several states for lethal injections.
View the complete July 25 article by Jacqueline Thomsen on The Hill website here.
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”
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.
After Donald Trump ignited a firestorm by launching a racist attack on four Democratic members of Congress, the Beltway press last week temporarily revised a time-honored journalism tradition of forcing members of the president’s party to respond publicly to controversial behavior. The results were utterly predictable, of course, with most Republicans refusing to criticize Trump’s latest bout of open bigotry. But even the recent media questions for the GOP seemed muted, given the stunning and historic nature of Trump’s racist behavior.
The sad truth is, the press mostly gave up a long time ago on holding Republican lawmakers accountable for Trump’s erratic behavior. Faced with a party that has completely capitulated to Trump’s unbalanced ways, reporters seem to have lost interest in the pursuit.
Why isn’t there constant, nonstop coverage detailing how radical the Republican Party has become, and how any hints of dissent in the age of Trump are cultishly hidden from view? Instead of vivid portraits of a party abandoning its principles as GOP lawmakers obediently fall in line behind Trump’s nasty behavior, we get coverage about how savvy Republicans are for holding their tongues about Trump and refusing to hold him accountable—about how strategic Republicans are being in allowing someone like Trump to maintain a stranglehold grip on the party.
View the complete July 21 article by Eric Boehlert from Daily Kos on the National Memo website here.
Republican lawmakers are feeling rattled after a long week capped by a raucous presidential rally where thousands chanted “send her back” at Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a Somali refugee who became a U.S. citizen and one of the first Muslim women to serve in Congress.
President Trump distanced himself from the chant on Thursday, saying it made him unhappy and that he disagreed with it.
But he also did not seek to tamp down the chant when it happened on Wednesday night, and the crowd was clearly responding to Trump’s attacks on Omar and three other minority congresswomen he earlier in the week had said should “go back” to their home counties.
View the complete July 19 article by Alexander Bolton on The Hill website here.
WASHINGTON — The lack of widespread Republican condemnation of President Trump for his comments about four Democratic congresswomen of color illustrated both the tightening stranglehold Mr. Trump has on his party and the belief of many Republicans that an attack on progressivism should in fact be a central element of the 2020 campaign.
While a smattering of Republicans chastised Mr. Trump on Monday, most party leaders in the House and Senate and much of the rank-and-file remained quiet about the president’s weekend tweets directing dissenters to “go back” where they came from. He followed up on those comments on Monday with harsh language directed at “people who hate America” — an inflammatory accusation to be leveled against elected members of the House.
With Mr. Trump far more popular with Republican voters than incumbent Republican members of Congress, most are loath to cross the president and risk reprisals. The case of Representative Justin Amash, the Michigan lawmaker who was forced to leave the party after he dared to suggest Mr. Trump should be impeached, serves as a cautionary tale.
View the complete July 15 article by Carl Hulse on The New York Times website here.
