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.
Don Jr. and Bettina are finding out marriage ain’t a walk in the park,
Not even when your daddy is a self-proclaimed genius and wannabe monarch.
It began with a small private wedding ceremony,
But the after-parties were where it really got tony,
With fireworks and a private Bahamian island, paid for by a Russian oligarch.
“The cesspit of corruption that is Donald Trump’s presidency is finally getting the attention it deserves. It’s about time. And if a massive blue wave sweeps Washington on November 3rd as polls now suggest, Democrats should put corruption front and center of their agenda in Congress. … The level of corruption that Trump has engaged in and enabled in others is completely unprecedented – self-dealing that, as Trump would say, is like nothing anybody has ever seen before.”
“We’re not talking about socialists, these are communists, Marxists and anarchists. You got to be kidding. They want us to call them democratic socialists, there’s nothing democratic about these people.”
“We are no longer the woke department or the weak department. Simple translation of that: no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors. Just tough, ready, committed troops. The ideological clowns are out. The patriotic cowboys are in, with testosterone testing on top.”
— Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, quoted by the New York Post.
Wall Street Journal: “The U.S. added 29,000 jobs in September, far short of expectations, in a sign that the labor market remains steady but may not be able to deliver consistent and sizable employment gains like it did in the past.”
G. Elliot Morris: “Voters aren’t confused about the motive, either. 62% say Trump made the promise mainly to win votes in November, and only 13% think he genuinely intends to send the money. … Moreover, 71% of adults say it is inappropriate for a president to promise government payments that depend on his party winning an election, including 53% of Republicans.”
“Donald Trump made over a thousand stock sales and purchases worth between $79m and $270m in July,” The Guardian reports. “His two largest sales were of Amazon and Microsoft stock, selling between $5m and $25m each on 20 July. That same day, he also sold up to $5m worth of Oracle and Costco stock, $500,000 to $1m in Nvidia, and bought up to $5m worth of shares in Intuit and Salesforce, among dozens of other transactions.”
“The unprecedented spate of mid-decade redistricting for the U.S. House has changed the congressional districts for one-tenth of Americans and significantly altered the makeup of at least one-fifth of districts, according to a new study,” the Associated Press reports.
A new Fox News Poll finds 71% of voters think the Trump administration lacks a clear strategy for ending the Iran War, including 95% of Democrats, 83% of independents, and 43% of Republicans. Sixty percent say U.S. military action against Iran was the wrong decision, while just 37% say it was right.
