Tag: Republicans

Paul Krugman: Republicans are willing to endanger the lives of their own voters in order to ‘own the libs’

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Although the vast majority of Texans still haven’t been vaccinated for COVID-19, Gov. Greg Abbott has lifted coronavirus restrictions in his state — including a mask mandate. Liberal economist Paul Krugman lambasts Abbott for his decision his March 4 column for the New York Times, arguing that Abbott and other far-right Republicans are willing to injure their own red state voters in order to “own the liberals.”

“Not wearing a mask is an act of reckless endangerment, not so much of yourself — although masks appear to provide some protection to the wearer — as of other people,” Krugman explains. “Covering our faces while the pandemic lasts would appear to be simple good citizenship, not to mention an act of basic human decency. Yet Texas and Mississippi have just ended their statewide mask requirements.”

Krugman continues, “President Biden has criticized these moves, accusing the states’ Republican leaders of ‘Neanderthal thinking.’ But he’s probably being unfair — to the Neanderthals. We don’t know much about our extinct hominid relatives, but we have no reason to believe that their political scene, if they had one, was dominated by the mixture of spite and pettiness that now rules American conservatism.” Continue reading.

Shellshocked GOP ponders future with Trump

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Shellshocked Republicans on Thursday said President Trump’s grip on the party is significantly weaker after he incited a mob to attack the Capitol, but some questioned whether their party would be free of his hold anytime soon.

The challenges to Trump are clearly mounting. There is chatter his Cabinet could invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him, an idea favored by at least one GOP lawmaker. Tensions between Trump and his long loyal vice president are clear, and there is evident anger in the Senate GOP with the president.

National Republicans interviewed by The Hill said Trump may have permanently alienated millions of center-right voters who were disgusted by Wednesday’s ugly scene. Continue reading.

How The Party Of Lincoln Became A Danger To The Republic

Off and on for 25 years, I participated in National Review cruises as a speaker. I met lots of wonderful people who were intelligent, curious, and great company — but there were always cranks and conspiracy theorists, too. Once, during the Clinton administration, people at my dinner table were repeating the story that Hillary Clinton had killed Vince Foster. I choked down my bite of chicken Kiev and responded, as equably as possible, “Well, for that to be true, she would also have had to transport his body to Fort Marcy Park without the Secret Service or anyone else noticing.” Several people at the table blinked back at me. Yeah? So?

In later years, I noticed that cruisers weren’t citing mainstream publications for their information. They were getting their news from email lists and subscription newsletters.

There’s a theory that people have rallied around President Donald Trump and alternative news sources because they feel disrespected by the mainstream, liberal-leaning press. There is some truth in this, but my experience with conservatives makes me skeptical of that as a complete explanation. Sure, the urban/rural divide is real — and not limited to the United States — but resentment of elites has always been with us. From suspicion of the First Bank of the United States among the Jeffersonians to the populist movement of the 1890s, “coastal elites” have always been despised by some. But it didn’t drive people into abject lunacy in the past, or at least not on the scale we see today. Continue reading.

Republicans, Religious Leaders and Reporters Testing Positive of COVID-19 in October White House Outbreak

List updated October 14, 2020 at 4:45 PM

  1. President Donald Trump
  2. First Lady Melania Trump
  3. Barron Trump
  4. former Senior Presidential Advisor Kellyanne Conway
  5. Claudia Conway, Kellyanne Conway’s daughter
  6. Senior Presidential Advisor Hope Hicks
  7. Senior Presidential Advisor Stephen Miller
  8. Trump Campaign Manager Bill Stepien
  9. Trump Personal Assistant Nicholas Luna
  10. White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany
  11. White House Assistant Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt
  12. White House Assistant Press Secretary Chad Gilmartin
  13. White House Assistant Press Secretary Harrison W. Fields
  14. White House Assistant Press Secretary Jalen Drummond
  15. Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia’s wife, Trish Scalia
  16. RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel
  17. Sen. Mike Lee, R-North Carolina
  18. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin
  19. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-North Carolina
  20. Coast Guard Vice Commandant Vice Admiral Charles Ray
  21. former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie
  22. Presidential Military Aide Jayna McCarron
  23. an unnamed military aide
  24. an unnamed presidential valet
  25. The Rev. John Jenkins, President of Notre Dame University
  26. Paster Greg Laurie
  27. New York Times correspondent Michael D. Shear
  28. Michael Shear’s wife
  29. Photojournalist Al Drago
  30. a unidentified correspondent

Had to Quarantine

  1. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Millie
  2. Joint Chiefs Vice Chairman General John Hyten
  3. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Gilday
  4. Army Chief of Staff General James McConville
  5. Air Force Chief of Staff General Charles Brown
  6. General Gary Thomas
  7. Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps
  8. Chief of Space Operations General John Raymond
  9. National Guard Bureau Chief General Daniel Hokanson
  10. Commander of U.S. Cyber Command and Director of the National Security Agency John Nakasone
  11. Attorney General Bill Barr
  12. Jason Lewis, GOP U.S. Senate candidate for a second time
  13. Republican Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka
  14. House Minority Leader Kurt Daudt

Trump Sneezes, GOP Catches the Virus

The president’s coronavirus diagnosis added another layer of volatility to competitive down-ballot races that will determine which party controls the upper chamber next year.

The president’s coronavirus diagnosis added another layer of volatility to competitive down-ballot races that will determine which party controls the upper chamber next year.

Trump’s diagnosis adds another layer of volatility not just to the presidential race but to competitive down-ballot races that will determine which party controls the upper chamber next year. Republicans, who hope to continue reshaping the federal judiciary in a second Trump term, hold a 53-47 seat majority but are mostly on defense with a Senate map that continues to widen for Democrats less than one month out from Election Day.

Democrats, eyeing control of both chambers of Congress under a President Joe Biden, need to win at least four seats to take back the Senate majority for the first time since 2014. With an expanding map, Democrats have more than half a dozen opportunities, though they still need to protect a couple of their own vulnerable seats, like in Alabama and Michigan. And one of their top targets – North Carolina – has been roiled by revelations of their nominee’s extramarital relationship. The battle for the Senate remains fluid and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has put Republican chances of holding the chamber at “50-50.” Continue reading.

How QAnon’s Conspiracy Cult Promotes Anti-Choice Politics

On January 7, 2018, Cheryl Sullenger, the senior vice president of the radical anti-choice protest group Operation Rescue, posted an entry on her organization’s website entitled, “These people are SICK!” #QAnon Takes on Planned Parenthood.” The post included a statement from Operation Rescue president Troy Newman thanking the anonymous chan poster “Q” for linking approvingly to a Republican-led congressional investigation into bogus allegations that Planned Parenthood trafficked in baby parts for profit. The investigation was sparked by an undercover operation by anti-choice activist David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress, a group Newman co-founded.

“We are grateful to Q and the Trump Administration for taking the evidence against Planned Parenthood seriously and bringing it to the attention of an audience that may otherwise never have been exposed to the truth,” Newman said. “We hope the QAnon exposure helps wake up Americans to the barbarity of abortion.” In other posts, Sullenger elaborated on the conspiracy theory that Planned Parenthood traffics in human organs with the political protection of liberal philanthropist George Soros.

Sullenger gave Q another shoutout after the conspiracy theorists linked to remarks by Susan Hirschmann, the executive director of the conservative Eagle Forum, presented during Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s 1993 Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Hirschmann accuses Ginsburg of being in favor of child trafficking because of a report Ginsburg co-wrote for the federal government; she was hired to review the federal code and flag everything sexist. One obvious candidate was the Mann Act, also known as the White Slave Traffic Act, which criminalized taking women and girls (but not men or boys) across state lines for “immoral purpose” a catchall that punished consensual sex between adults. Sullenger falsely claimed, citing Hirshmann, that Ginsburg sought to lower the age of consent to 12 years in order to facilitate sex trafficking. Continue reading.

Project Veritas video about Minneapolis ballots probably was part of a ‘coordinated disinformation campaign,’ Stanford researchers say

James O’Keefe and his group, Project Veritas, appear to have made an abrupt decision to release the video sooner than planned, according to the researchers. 

A deceptive video released Sunday by conservative activist James O’Keefe, which claimed through unidentified sources and with no verifiable evidence that Rep. Ilhan Omar’s campaign had collected ballots illegally, was probably part of a coordinated disinformation effort, according to researchers at Stanford University.

O’Keefe and his group, Project Veritas, appear to have made an abrupt decision to release the video sooner than planned after the New York Times published a sweeping investigation of President Donald Trump’s taxes, the researchers said. They also noted that the timing and metadata of a Twitter post in which Trump’s son shared the video suggested that he might have known about it in advance.

Project Veritas had hyped the video on social media for several days before publishing it. In posts amplified by other prominent conservative accounts, O’Keefe teased what he said was evidence of voter fraud, and urged people to sign up at “ballot-harvesting.com” to receive the supposed evidence when it came out. (None of the material in the video actually proved voter fraud.) Continue reading.

Scholar explains how the conservative movement transmits ‘sanitized versions of white supremacist ideology’

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As the longest sustained period ofracial justice protests in American history segues into the heat of election season, dark shadows have appeared, from the vigilante killing of protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin — and widespread conservative defenses of the teenage accused murderer — to ludicrous charges against protesters, including “terrorism,” to the Trump administration’s crackdown on federal antiracism training, calling it “anti-American,” and Attorney General Bill Barr’s call for protesters to be charged with sedition. 

So much for the notions that Donald Trump has no ideology, or, for that matter, that getting rid of him will make America great again. In July of 2016, I wrote about why such views were myopic: “Trump advances core paleoconservative positions,” researcher Bruce Wilson told me, including “rebuilding infrastructure, protective tariffs, securing borders and stopping immigration, neutralizing designated internal enemies and isolationism.”

Trump’s record as president has been surprisingly consistent for such an erratic figure, with his purely rhetorical support for infrastructure as the most notable exception. And therein lies a key to the current moment: With infrastructure removed from the equation — the most broadly popular position Trump’s ever embraced — the remaining white nationalism stands out in stark relief, highlighted in the frenzied push toward violent confrontation around the election, and beyond. Continue reading.

Trump and allies keep accusing Biden of not condemning violence — shortly after Biden condemns violence

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On Sunday at 4:13 p.m. Eastern time, Joe Biden issued a broad denunciation of the violence that has occurred at racial justice demonstrations across the country, saying, “I condemn violence of every kind by anyone, whether on the left or the right.”

About six hours later, at 10:36 p.m., President Trump asked, “When is Slow Joe Biden going to criticize the Anarchists, Thugs & Agitators in ANTIFA?”

We can parse these statements all day long, and the Trump argument seems to be that Biden needs to more explicitly condemn antifa — however much the amorphous group is actually responsible for the unrest. But practically speaking, he condemned violence by them, too. Continue reading.