LaxPower Back-Up Stick

High profile republican politicians are such losers. It is so expected it has ceased to be funny.

r's and their cult ilk are idiots.

Candace Owens says we should invade Australia. “Australia currently, make no mistake, is a tyrannical police state. It’s citizens are quite literally being imprisoned against their will. So when do we deploy?”

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/stat ... 9293953028

Aussies are at 61 deaths per million people compared to US's 2200+. They are doing just fine; and they also get universal health care and everyone is FORCED to vote. The humanity!

October 22, 2021
Heather Cox Richardson
Oct 23

This morning, Jonathan Martin at the New York Times reported that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has warned Republican political consultants that they may not continue to work for both him and Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), who is vice chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

While Republican lawmakers are trying to sweep the insurrection under the rug, Cheney is calling out the attack and demanding sunlight on what happened. Republican leaders are lining up behind former president Trump in hopes of retaining his loyalist voters, but Cheney is repeatedly, and increasingly clearly, suggesting that the president was responsible for the events of that day.

That McCarthy is trying to make her a pariah indicates a fight over the future of the Republican Party. While one fund-raising company has already cut ties with her, Cheney is not operating from a weak position. Her father is Richard (Dick) Cheney, who was President George W. Bush’s vice president and, perhaps more significant for today’s events, President George H. W. Bush’s secretary of defense. The Cheneys are likely not unaware of what is happening among intelligence officials, which seems likely to involve some current Republican lawmakers.

And Liz Cheney’s stand against McCarthy and Trump is not hurting her politically at home: she has raised more than $5 million for her reelection, compared to the $300,000 raised in the last two months or so by her Trump-backed opponent.

There is an important story behind McCarthy’s attack on Representative Cheney. She presents a threat to the pro-Trump Republican Party not simply because she is standing strong against the former president and the attack on our democracy.

She is offering to women and men in the suburbs a reasonable alternative to those pro-Trump representatives like Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) whose pistol packing and aggression gets attention for all the wrong reasons. Trump Republicans have lost the support of suburban women, and Cheney seems to be picking them up and explaining that Trump and his supporters, including McCarthy, tried to destroy our democracy. That McCarthy felt it necessary to try to undercut her this way suggests they see her as a major threat.

McCarthy had another reason to be unhappy today. Longtime readers of these letters may perhaps remember that McCarthy took money from a Ukraine-born U.S. businessman, Lev Parnas.

Parnas worked with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani to try to find dirt on Joe Biden’s son Hunter in Ukraine. In 2019, prosecutors said that money was illegal: Parnas had taken $1 million from Ukraine oligarch Dmytro Firtash and had illegally funneled more than $350,000 to pro-Trump political action committees and other Republican lawmakers in 2016.

Today, a jury found Parnas guilty of making illegal campaign contributions.

In other developments that might be making Republican lawmakers uncomfortable, Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department attorney who wanted to help then-president Trump stay in the White House despite losing the election, is scheduled to testify before the January 6th committee next Friday.

According to CNN, Alyssa Farah, who was Trump’s director of strategic communications, has met voluntarily with Cheney and Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who, along with Cheney, is on the January 6 committee.

It appears there is concern about the mounting evidence before the January 6th committee. In an interview with National Review, John Eastman, who wrote a very clear memo outlining how then–vice president Mike Pence could overturn the results of the 2020 election, called that scenario “crazy.”

Meanwhile, business journalists are suggesting that the new Trump media company is not a failure at all, because it was never actually meant to be a media company so much as a way to siphon money out of investors.

Matt Levine in Bloomberg outlines how a vehicle called a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), which is a publicly traded investment company, is designed to merge with a new company that is not yet public, to allow investment in that SPAC based on expectations of future income thanks to the new company. (Someone explained this to me by saying it’s like a sea slug taking over a shell so it can do business as the shell organism quickly and without oversight.)

In this case, the announcement that the new Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) would merge with a SPAC called Digital World Acquisition Corporation (DWAC) sent DWAC’s stock soaring by as much as 160%. It was the most traded stock on the New York Stock Exchange, with more than 260 million shares traded by midday.

The company never has to produce anything. Investors can make money just based on how people think the company might perform—or not—in the future.

The man behind this scheme is the person to whom McCarthy is demanding the Republican Party demonstrate absolute loyalty.

https://i.imgur.com/vV4JpBx.png


And this clown wants to be your next president.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... hio-trump/

"J.D. Vance is running for the GOP nomination for Senate in Ohio, but he has a problem: He has criticized Donald Trump, which for many GOP primary voters is immediately disqualifying. So he’s atoning for his heresies by positioning himself as the true keeper of the flame of Trumpism.

Which in turn is providing a glimpse into just how hollow the ideology of Trumpism truly is. For those who want to salvage from the Trump era an ideological space that will endure — a Trumpist “populist nationalism” — Vance is demonstrating the vacuousness of this as a political project.

All this arises from a remarkable new Politico report on the battling between Vance and the leading contender for the nomination, former Ohio state treasurer Josh Mandel. This war is all about who is more slavishly loyal to Trump and his legacy.

Two super PACs supporting Mandel have launched nearly $1 million in ads hammering Vance’s past criticism of Trump. These include Vance’s admission that he didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, and Vance’s descriptions of Trump as “noxious,” “reprehensible” and “an idiot.”

Vance has groveled for forgiveness for his anti-Trump apostasy, but those quotes live on. So he’s now arguing that he’s much more faithful to the ideology of Trumpism than Mandel is.

To accomplish this, Vance is highlighting the funding of these ads by the Club for Growth, a group that favors standard-issue plutocratic GOP priorities on taxes and deregulation. Vance’s campaign says the plutocrats are desperate to keep a true Trumpist populist out of the Senate:

“J.D. is a strong supporter of President Trump, and his rapid rise in the polls is scaring the same pro-China, globalist D.C. establishment that spent millions of dollars attacking President Trump in 2016, because they’re terrified of someone who stands with Trump and working-class Americans on tariffs and a pro-America trade policy getting elected to the U.S. Senate,” said Taylor Van Kirk, Vance’s press secretary, in a statement.
The mythology here is that Trump’s 2016 victory represented a triumph over the GOP donor class. Trumpist populism, in this narrative, challenges that class and its ideology with something much more pro-worker.

But notably, Vance’s need to frame all his positions around the idea that he represents the true heir to Trump’s legacy requires a wholesale rewrite of the Trump presidency.

Vance tells a similar story to Trump’s 2016 narrative. Elites with no loyalty to the nation or its people have hollowed out the virtuous American heartland through globalization (more immigration, fewer trade barriers) and donor-class trickle-down economic dogma that prioritizes “free” markets and refuses to use government power to protect workers and boost wages.

But probably the single largest Trump “accomplishment” was a multitrillion-dollar tax cut that largely benefited corporations and the rich. Not only did the GOP donor class enthusiastically champion this; it also largely failed to deliver on its promises of more societally beneficial corporate investment and supercharged wages. It both acted on and reminded us of the falsity at the core of the very trickle-down ideology Trumpism was supposed to challenge.

Meanwhile, the real action in challenging this ideology is on the Democratic side. Democrats are nearing a deal on a multitrillion-dollar package that would constitute a far more dramatic move in the other direction — and would act more substantially on some of Vance’s own stated priorities — than anything emanating from Vance and his fellow travelers.

For instance, as a recent Niskanen Center study demonstrated, the package’s expanded child tax credit is both pro-family policy and would deliver disproportionately large benefits to rural and less populous parts of the country.

Vance has built a brand around telling a story about the social crises that have taken hold in such places after their abandonment by globalists and plutocrats. But as Paul Krugman notes, Vance appears more interested in demagoguing this by blaming it on the supposedly anti-family values of elite cultural liberalism than he does in concrete policies to boost them.

Indeed, by helping remove barriers to the flourishing of struggling families, and by boosting their purchasing power — and with it regional demand and opportunity — the Democrats’ expanded child tax credit might help mitigate such a sense of decline. Vance is generally supportive of pro-family policies. As senator, would he vote to extend this specific policy?

Meanwhile, the Democratic bill would also prevent multinational corporations from evading taxes with profit-shifting chicanery abroad, which starves the nation of revenue. It would beef up IRS enforcement to prevent wealthy elites from enlisting high priced lawyers to avoid paying taxes they already owe.

As Binyamin Appelbaum notes, such policies might reinforce faith in our system among ordinary Americans who cannot avail themselves of such elite gamesmanship of the rules. One might add that this might help restore some social cohesion and sense of obligation to the nation. The fraying of both of those are a big time preoccupation of conservative populists.

Vance talks a lot about preventing financial elites from rigging the system to pay less in taxes and about taxing the globalist elites who have “plundered” the nation. Where will he come down on these specific solutions?

There are good things about Vance’s conservative populism. But he is offering up a version of it that’s saturated in performative anti-cosmopolitan posturing and demagoguery about elite cultural liberals, about critical race theory, about tech oligarchs, about immigration. He wants to raise taxes on corporations … to punish them for standing up for the voting rights of African Americans.

All this flows from Vance’s obvious goal of casting his populism entirely in the image of Trump himself. The need to pander to the Trump worship of GOP primary voters makes a reality-based conversation about the very problems Vance himself identifies impossible."

DEPLORABLE

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/stat ... 2708031488

Steve Bannon tells Lindell he is “a genius” because of his new plan to file his lawsuit the day before Thanksgiving. Bannon says that Biden was hoping families would come together again, but Lindell’s lawsuit will ruin the holidays by causing families to get into fistfights.

October 26, 2021
Heather Cox Richardson
Oct 27

For all the news stories that seem to tug us in one direction or another, there is just one overarching story in the news for Americans today.

We are in an existential fight to defend our democracy from those who would destroy it.

People seem to hark back to films from the 1930s and 1940s and think that so long as we don’t have tanks in our streets, our government is secure. But in this era, democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint.

You can see this in Russia, where Vladimir Putin gradually concentrated power into his own hands. You can see it in Brazil, where Jair Bolsanaro, whose approval rating in late August was 23%, claims that the country’s elections are fraudulent and that “[e]ither we’ll have clean elections, or we won’t have elections.” You can see it in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán has quite deliberately dismantled liberal democracy and replaced it with what he calls “illiberal democracy.”

On paper, Hungary is a democracy in that it still holds elections, but it is, in fact, a one-party state overseen by one man.

Orbán has been open about his determination to overthrow the concept of western democracy, replacing it with what he has, on different occasions, called “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” He wants to replace the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stop the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and reject “adaptable family models” with “the Christian family model.”

No matter what he calls it, Orbán’s model is not democracy at all. As soon as he retook office in 2010, he began to establish control over the media, cracking down on those critical of his party, Fidesz, and rewarding those who toed the party line. In 2012 his supporters rewrote the country’s constitution to strengthen his hand, and extreme gerrymandering gave his party more power while changes to election rules benefited his campaigns. Increasingly, he used the power of the state to concentrate wealth among his cronies, and he reworked the country’s judicial system and civil service system to stack it with his loyalists. While Hungary still has elections, state control of the media and the apparatus of voting means that it is impossible for Orbán’s opponents to win an election.

Hungary is in the news in the United States because Americans on the right have long admired Orbán’s nationalism and centering of Christianity, while the fact that Hungary continues to hold elections enables them to pretend that the country remains a democracy.

In 2019, Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson endorsed Hungary’s anti-abortion and anti-immigration policies; in that year, according to investigative researcher Anna Massoglia of Open Secrets, Hungary paid a D.C. lobbying firm $265,000, in part to arrange an interview on Carlson’s show. Recently, former vice president Mike Pence spoke in Budapest at a forum denouncing immigration and urging traditional social values, where he told the audience he hoped that the U.S. Supreme Court would soon outlaw abortion thanks to the three justices Trump put on the court. Further indicating the drift of today’s right wing, the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) will be held in Budapest.

In their embrace of the illiberal democracy of Hungary, those on the right argue that they are defending traditional American values.

Like Orbán, they focus relentlessly on immigration; “caravans” of immigrants have once again made the right-wing news, as they always do before an election. They worry that traditional families are under attack, hence Texas’s S.B. 8, which outlaws the constitutional right of abortion by empowering vigilantes. They insist that “real” America is being destroyed by multiculturalism; hence the hysteria over Critical Race Theory, an obscure legal theory from the 1970s that is not taught in K–12 schools, and the calls for “patriotic education.”

And, crucially, those on the right are openly embracing voter restrictions and the replacement of nonpartisan election officials with partisans.

Astonishingly, John Eastman, the founding director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence and a member of the powerful Federalist Society, wrote a six-point plan for overturning the will of the voters in the 2020 election. Although he went to the reputable National Review to cover his tracks by saying his plan was just a thought experiment, just tonight a video appeared in which he told an apparent supporter that his ideas were right, and that it was Pence’s establishment biases that made him unwilling to implement them. His plan to overturn the election barely failed.

The 33 new election laws in 19 states will not fail. They are designed to replace the idea of democracy with a hierarchy in which a minority will determine our fate.

If it seems odd that a group of people who claim to be trying to “Make America Great Again” are taking their cues from a central European country of about 10 million people, it is worth noting that they are not simply talking about Critical Race Theory or Texas’s so-called heartbeat bill. We are in a larger struggle over the nature of human governments. And when American thinkers are praising Hungary, they are tapping into a long history of our own.

When the Founders declared it “self-evident, that all men are created equal,” they were making a bold declaration about the nature of governments that flew in the face of western tradition and thought. They denied that some individuals were better than others and had an inherent right to rule the rest. Governments, the Founders said, derived legitimacy not from religion, or heritage, but instead were legitimate only to the degree that those who lived under them consented to them. “[T]o secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” the Founders said.

This was a revolutionary argument. It rejected not just King George III, but all kings, claiming for the people the right to rule themselves. For all its limitations—the Founders could conceive of this idea in part because they excluded from their vision women, Black people, and all people of color—it was an astonishing declaration.

And yet, the idea that all men are created equal and that governments derive legitimacy from the consent of the governed began to fall apart in the late 1820s. Southern Democrats wanted to take control of Indigenous peoples’ lands in the Southeast in order to spread the wildly lucrative system of plantation agriculture. Then, when they had displaced the tribes, they spread across those lands their economic system based on human enslavement.

But because southern leaders were outnumbered by Americans in the North who objected to their economic system, within a decade they were arguing that true democracy meant not that government depended upon the consent of the governed as a whole, but rather that local or state governments could choose how everyone, including enslaved people, women, Indigenous, and Mexican people, would live. And, of course, they limited voting to a few white men, who voted to keep themselves in power.

In 1860, southern white elites declared the American concept of democracy based in equality, government based in the consent of the people, to be obsolete. They declared they were going to start a new country, based in a hierarchy of gender and race, that they believed reflected God’s will.

In a speech in March 1861, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who would soon be the vice president of the Confederate States of America, explained to an audience that Jefferson’s belief that all men are created equal was ​​“an error” and that anyone who still adhered to that idea was an insane “fanatic.” Stephens told listeners: “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

And there it was: the replacement of the idea that all people are created equal with the idea that some people are better than others, and that those people, who truly understand God’s laws, should rule.

It is not an accident that the insurrectionists of January 6, 2021, carried the Confederate battle flag.

We are today in a struggle no less dangerous to our democracy than that of the 1860s, for all that it is fought with Facebook memes and cable television rather than artillery. And when our leaders talk fondly about Viktor Orbán, or Jair Bolsonaro— former president Trump endorsed his reelection today—we would do well to listen.

CU88, thanks. Another great post, likely falling on deaf, ill-informed and frightened ears and eyes.

seacoaster wrote: ↑Wed Oct 27, 2021 8:55 am CU88, thanks. Another great post, likely falling on deaf, ill-informed and frightened ears and eyes.

The point of this "article" is what, again?

keep trump warmed up and relevent?

geez......no deaf ears as to why the POTUSA race was even that close in the first place?

You think the US is a democracy

Prometheus is giving us fire again

seacoaster wrote: ↑Wed Oct 27, 2021 8:55 am CU88, thanks. Another great post, likely falling on deaf, ill-informed and frightened ears and eyes.

Neither heather Cox Richardson nor you have ever been to Hungary, that I am sure of.

It’s a beautiful country with amazing architecture and fantastic people.

Why are you and she so intent on making Hungary sound like some scary buzzword?

seacoaster wrote: ↑Wed Oct 27, 2021 8:55 am CU88, thanks. Another great post, likely falling on deaf, ill-informed and frightened ears and eyes.

Yes, witness that someone has gotten out of the penalty box, guns blazing, trolling away...

MDlaxfan76 wrote: ↑Wed Oct 27, 2021 12:03 pm

seacoaster wrote: ↑Wed Oct 27, 2021 8:55 am CU88, thanks. Another great post, likely falling on deaf, ill-informed and frightened ears and eyes.

Yes, witness that someone has gotten out of the penalty box, guns blazing, trolling away...

Yep, back to my old axiom.

Diplomats Seethe at Getting Bumped by Senate Veterans and Widows

Of the countries represented at the upcoming G-20 summit, the US has four...FOUR...ambassadors confirmed for duty.

It's an historic freeze on confirmations being waged by Senate Republicans (Ted Cruz specifically) and is really just one more reprehensible way that today's GOP seeks to sabotage the governance of our country. It's just shameful.

The man behind the holdup, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), has vowed to stall nearly every State Department nomination until Biden implements congressionally imposed sanctions on Nord Stream 2, a natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany that has already been completed. Until Biden implements those sanctions, which he waived at the request of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Cruz has promised to use Senate procedure to require hours of debate over each nominee before a vote could be held—which, given the backlog, would eat up the entire congressional calendar.

As a result, there have been only five ambassadors confirmed to an overseas post in 10 months. The average State Department nominee has waited 108 days to be confirmed under Biden, nearly twice as long as the previous administration and four times as long as nominees under President George W. Bush. Nearly 20 of them, all career diplomats, have been on hold for more than six months.

“There is not another major power in the world that would leave the vast majority of its embassies without an ambassador in place for many months,” State Department spokesman Ned Price told The Daily Beast. “The bottom line is that America is made less safe because the majority of our senior national security leaders are being forced to sit on the sidelines due to an unrelated policy disagreement by one senator.”

Write Ted today and ask him to stop being such a douchebag.

..

seacoaster wrote: ↑Wed Oct 27, 2021 8:55 am CU88, thanks. Another great post, likely falling on deaf, ill-informed and frightened ears and eyes.

You listen to "on point" yesterday, on NPR? Great guest.

When pressed as to what was really " bad" about the new voting laws, the guest could only come up with "reminders" of the very awful, hateful days of 50 years ago....that was all.

This is the boring ole playbook, voting rights for the "left".....fiscal conservative rants from the "right".......

.....meanwhile, your boy Biden is letting in UNvaccinated people.....if they "promise".

voting rights........such a lame distraction. like trump. stay relevant, the walls are closing in faster than that Monty Python knight.....

seacoaster wrote: ↑Wed Oct 27, 2021 12:27 pm

MDlaxfan76 wrote: ↑Wed Oct 27, 2021 12:03 pm

seacoaster wrote: ↑Wed Oct 27, 2021 8:55 am CU88, thanks. Another great post, likely falling on deaf, ill-informed and frightened ears and eyes.

Yes, witness that someone has gotten out of the penalty box, guns blazing, trolling away...

Yep, back to my old axiom.

it IS great having him on "ignore"

him......being mdlaxfan.

the great CONservative candidates for office:



https://i.imgur.com/f2YDut3.png

Keeping up with Mike Flynn, criminal and crazy person:

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1454192710148136961

Fauci is Mengele. Sure.

Trump's strategy to overturn the 2020 election didn't work. Next time it might

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/28/10498411 ... surrection

Robert Costa (co-author with Bob Woodward of the new book about the 20200 election and events around January 6 riot /invasion of the Capitol called
"Peril")

Some pretty scary stuff and it may explain why many of those involved don't want to appear and testify to the House Committee and likely also to DoJ (which IMHO needs to appoint a Special Counsel in investigate this ASAP)

"It's a well-known part of the U.S. Code, and if someone wants to look it up, it's 18 U.S. Code 371. It means that if you have one or two people conspiring to commit an offense against the United States, to defraud the U.S., then you have committed a crime and you shall be fined or imprisoned for possibly up to five years. This is a crime, and it's been prosecuted many, many times."