Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., is running for reelection, so it’s unlikely that the I don’t think the Democratic Party he’s criticizing is the one he leads in California. It must be the national party led by Pres. Biden and V.P. Kamala Harris, Newsom’s former state attorney general. He certainly sounds like a candidate in the 2024 Democratic presidential primary.
From CaspianReport, the video below, “Ukraine War from Russia’s Perspective” is a well produced, a fast-moving 14 minutes that offers an insight into a Russian world view that is likely unfamiliar to most Americans. […]
LEFT: Il Douche – Donald Trump emulating fascist dictator Benito Mussolini by shoving Montenegrin PM Dusko Markovic out of his way at an international summit; RIGHT: Il Duce – Benito Mussolini, Italian dictator from 1922 to 1943
Jason Stanley is a Yale professor and the author of five books on fascism and its basis in the politics of us versus them. In this nine-minute video from Big Think, he defines fascism based on 10 traits that authoritarians use to gain and maintain power.
Sen. Ted Cruz, like Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott and others watch Trump carefully trying to learn his dark arts. They emulate his blood lust and joyful sadism at causing pain and creating havoc, but, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, they just can’t conjure up his dark magic.
Former Republicans operative Steve Schmidt spoke with Rachel Maddow on Sept. 24 about the ominous rise of anti-democracy forces inside the shell of the former Republican Party and its march toward autocracy under Donald Trump.
Fascism is a word that gets thrown around a lot, but it specifically refers to anti-democracy movements and political parties. Steve Schmidt, Bill Kristol and many other former Republicans are sounding the alarm. Fascism isn’t coming. It’s here. This is what American fascism looks like.
It was hard to imagine before this year that the California GOP could become more pathetic and unpopular. They’re already the smallest of California’s three voter groups, under Dems and Inds, with just 24% of registered voters. And yet, in an unbelievable act of political stupidity that took six tries in 24 months, they found a way to piss everybody off. By recalling Gov. Newsom, they wasted $300 million in taxpayers’ money and disrupted the state’s economic recovery with needless and reckless chaos.
And bonus for Californians now: Because of CAL GOP, we get to do it all again in just a few months when the regularly scheduled governor’s race begins!
Slate.com: “[While] metro areas grew, vast stretches of the country continued to bleed population. About 53 percent of all U.S. counties shrank between 2010 and 2020. You can see them in the sea of burnt orange on the graph [above], rural regions and small towns that often have few residents to begin with. In total, they were home to about 50.5 million people in a nation of more than 331 million.”
“This isn’t a new story per se. Rural America and small towns have been losing residents for decades. But the trend seems to have accelerated. From 2000 to 2010, for instance, only around one-third of all counties lost residents.”
This will undoubtedly exacerbate a longstanding inequity of representation in Congress.
Terror Attacks: Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2021 (left); US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021
The Republicans’ use of the terrorist attack on the 2012 US consulate in Benghazi as a political cudgel is a classic example of the power of their dark arts. Their objective was to weaken then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whom they perceived as a formidable future presidential candidate. Ignoring the fact that secretaries of state have no command authority over troops or their deployment, the investigated her role in the security failure at the US Benghazi diplomatic outpost ten times, six of which were conducted by GOP-led committees.
Using carefully constructed slander, congressional Republicans created a fictionalized version of the attack, one in which Secretary Clinton was responsible for the deaths of US security personnel as well as her friend, US Ambassador Christopher Stevens. Compounded with dozens of similar attacks on Clinton during her 30-year career in public service, the facts-free insinuations worked. Her approval rating, once in the mid-60s, began to drop. She “lost” the 2016 presidential campaign despite a 3 million vote advantage in the popular race.
We’ve all been recruited to be on Madison Cawthorn Watch,
To keep up with when he’s lying or wearing lingerie and such.
It’s hard to take him seriously
When he just laughs deliriously,
When his friend videotapes his hand on Maddie’s crotch.
“Even if we cut some slack for Esper and all the others who served as honorably and conscientiously as they could until they were faced with either the dead end of resignation or being fired, the fact is that these men and women remained silent for far too long once they were out of government service. They held back important things that the American people and their elected representatives needed to know. They kept them as their own personal secrets, either out of some misplaced sense of bureaucratic propriety, or because they had a book deal and didn’t want to steal their own thunder from release day.”
“As Thomas settles into his fourth decade on the Supreme Court, his influence, even his control, is ascendant. Thomas began his career as a justice as a near outcast – an ideological fringe figure and a scarred veteran of a brutal confirmation fight. Today, he is a revered figure in the conservative movement, and he is watching ideas he championed from the margins turn into the law of the land.”
“Bill O’Reilly’s really talented. He’s more talented than I am… But I think there’s a deep phoniness at the center of his shtick… built on perception that he is the character he plays… The moment that it’s revealed not to be true it’s over.”
— Tucker Carlson, on C-SPAN on September 13, 2003.
The percentage of roughly 450 total deadly political attacks in the United Sates committed by right-wing extremists in the past decade as counted by the Anti-Defamation League, according to the New York Times. The ADL found that 20 percent were committed by Islamic extremists and 4 percent by liberals.
“The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol issued subpoenas on Thursday to five Republican members of Congress, including Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, who refused to meet with the panel voluntarily,” the New York Times reports. “The committee’s leaders had previously been reluctant to issue subpoenas to their fellow lawmakers. That is an extraordinarily rare step for most congressional committees to take, though the House Ethics Committee, which is responsible for investigating allegations of misconduct by members, is known to do so.”
“In what may prove to be Florida’s last stand as a battleground state, Democrats are launching a $15 million voter organizing effort ahead of this year’s elections,” Politico reports. “Democratic candidates up and down the ballot — even those running in contested primaries — have agreed to pour in money that will be used to hire at least 200 organizers and open as many as 80 offices as part of a coordinated effort to pump up turnout across the state.”
A Yahoo News/YouGov poll found that confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court has dropped nearly 40 points among registered voters since 2020, when former Pres. Trump began packing the court with right-wing extremists. Overall confidence in the Court is down from 70 percent in September 2020 to 51 percent today. Among those who expressed no confidence in the court, the number has risen 19 points, from 7 percent in 2020 to 26 percent today.
Charles Gaba: “For the full year 2021, official Covid deaths ran more than three times higher in the reddest tenth of the U.S. than the bluest. This is something I’ve been tracking and writing about for nearly a year now, so while it’s pretty dramatic, it’s nothing new.” “What is new is the ‘other’ excess deaths in 2021: They ran a jaw-dropping twenty-one times higher in the reddest decile than the bluest… nearly 50 per 100K residents vs. only ~2.3 per 100K.”
