I Hope The Biden Republicans Help Us Beat Trump. But What Happens If They Take Over The Democratic Party The Way They've Taken Over So Much Of MSNBC?

David Brooks is a conservative Republican-- but not a Trump-Republican. He's more a Bush/Clinton/Biden Republican. He's all for the old-fashioned anti-family Austerity and elitism they all love so much-- without the messy proto-fascist populism and overt lying. In his column Friday, he laid out the "five gigantic changes happening in America right now" and described them as "reflecting a huge crisis and hitting all at once, creat[ing] a moral, spiritual and emotional disaster. Ready?

• The first is that we are losing the fight against Covid-19. Our behavior doesn’t have anything to do with the reality around us. We just got tired so we’re giving up.
• Second, all Americans, but especially white Americans, are undergoing a rapid education on the burdens African-Americans carry every day. This education is continuing, but already public opinion is shifting with astonishing speed.
• Third, we’re in the middle of a political realignment. The American public is vehemently rejecting Donald Trump’s Republican Party. The most telling sign is that the party has even given up on itself, a personality cult whose cult leader is over.
• Fourth, a quasi-religion is seeking control of America’s cultural institutions. The acolytes of this quasi-religion, Social Justice, hew to a simplifying ideology: History is essentially a power struggle between groups, some of which are oppressors and others of which are oppressed. Viewpoints are not explorations of truth; they are weapons that dominant groups use to maintain their place in the power structure. Words can thus be a form of violence that has to be regulated.
• Fifth, we could be on the verge of a prolonged economic depression. State and household budgets are in meltdown, some businesses are failing and many others are on the brink, the continuing health emergency will mean economic activity cannot fully resume.

Since Biden doesn't have a real platform-- nor even a reason for running other than because he's always wanted to be president-- he could run on Brooks' moaning and groaning.

Brooks wrote that "Americans look around the world and see that other nations are beating Covid-19 and we are failing... America doesn’t seem very exceptional." Doesn't he read Krugman? Krugman explained why we're losing the fight against COVID-19: Trump and his enablers, who couldn't even take the most basic precautions-- like admitting there was a problem and, then, requiring the use of face masks, the way normal countries did. "In times like this," wrote Brooks, "you’ve got to have a theory of change. The loudest theory of change is coming from the Social Justice movement." Sounds good to me... just not to Brooks and his class. That's where his warning about a "moral, spiritual and emotional disaster" comes in.

And sure enough: "I know a lot of people aren’t excited about him, but I thank God that Joe Biden is going to be nominated by the Democratic Party. He came to public life when it wasn’t about performing your zeal, it was about crafting coalitions and legislating. He exudes a spirit that is about empathy and friendship not animosity and canceling. The pragmatic spirit of the New Deal is a more apt guide for the years ahead than the spirit of critical theory symbology."

White Supremists Don't Fight Against Anti-Semitism-- White Supremicism IS Anti-Semitism

German Nazis in black and white; North Carolina Nazis in color

Watching Trump's ugly fascist supporters howling for Ilhan's blood in North Carolina this week, sent a shiver up my spine. By birth I'm a Jew. What would it take to turn that mob against me and American Jews? Ten words from Trump? Five? I was watching authoritarian and fascistic-oriented Americans in that audience. And to hear a neo-Nazi like Trump using some bullshit against AOC, Ilhan, Ayanna and Rashida as "anti-Semitic" was flat-out galling, sickening. I've been involved with an organization called Young Elected Officials (YEO) for many years, and long before either ran for Congress, I've seen the spectacular work Ilhan and Rashida have done as state legislators on behalf of their constituents and their communities in Minneapolis and Detroit. They were both elected to open seats last year because of how their constituents-- not Trump (detested in both cities)-- viewed their records and because of the quality of the their ideas and of their characters. Neither is remotely anti-Semitic, unless you define refusing to pledge allegiance to Benjamin Netanyahu as the definition of anti-Semitism... which would make a majority of American Jews anti-semites.

Yesterday, in her NY Times column, Michelle Goldberg, seems to have noted the same stunning hypocrisy and the "increasingly bizarre turn that American discussion of anti-Semitism has taken," not just among North Carolina rednecks but throughout the regime of a cunning and indisputably racist president.

She began by talking about Trump's actual in-house Nazi, Hungarian fascist Sebastian Gorka routinely accusing Jewish intellectuals and activists of anti-Semitism and Jew-hating. "If this were just Gorka," she wrote, "you could dismiss it as trolling. But his tweets were only a particularly brazen example of how right-wing gentiles are wrapping themselves in a smarmy philo-Semitism to attack the left, even when that means attacking either individual Jews or the political interests of most Jewish Americans.

Republicans routinely defend Trump's racist taunts as having something to do with "protecting Jews." I'd feel a lot better if he were protecting Jews from Confederate racists than from The Squad. But, as Goldberg wrote, "This is a president who regularly deploys anti-Semitic tropes and whose ex-wife said that he slept with a volume of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. When speaking to American Jews, he’s called Israel 'your country' and Benjamin Netanyahu 'your prime minister,' suggesting that in his mind, we don’t fully belong here any more than Omar does."

Is far right Montana Senator Steve Daines a Nazi?

I don't know if Montana Senator Steve Daines is a neo-Nazi or not but he seems to be behaving like one, tweeting his solidarity with Trump by proclaiming that "Montanans are sick and tired of listening to anti-American, anti-Semite, radical Democrats trash our country and our ideals." That sounds like a Nazi to my Jewish ears. And it did to the Montana Association of Rabbis as well, who sent Daines an open letter stating that the rabbis in Billings,  Bozeman,  Missoula, and Whitefish are "unanimously appalled by the ongoing torrent of racist incitement and personal attacks that President Trump continues to direct against Democratic women of color in Congress" and by Daines' complicity. "Montana," they wrote, "deserves and expects more from its representatives. It is not the Montana way to personally attack others for their political viewpoints or positions. It is not the Montana way to promote bigotry or hatred, as the senator himself stated with his fellow representatives on December 27, 2016:  “We stand firmly together to send a clear message that ignorance, hatred and threats of violence are unacceptable and have no place…in Montana or across this nation. Collectively, as Montana’s rabbis, we are the experts on antisemitism in Montana; we have studied it, lived it, and know it when we see it. We refuse to allow the real threat of antisemitism to be weaponized and exploited by those who themselves share a large part of the responsibility for the rise of white nationalist and antisemitic violence in this country. Accusing these representatives of antisemitism is no justification for telling them 'to go back to where they came from' or inciting violence against them. In a direct affront to Montana’s Jewish communities and Jewish leaders, Senator Daines has decided to join in the president’s rhetoric of hate, a rhetoric which presents a serious threat to Jewish communities. We do not feel safer or supported by Senator Daines’ comments, rather we fear the legitimization the president and the senator are giving to racism, xenophobia, misogyny and hatred."

Such Christian appropriation of the fight against anti-Semitism reached its grim nadir this week. As Trump’s racist invective against Omar and three other freshman Democratic congresswomen has dominated the news, the president’s defenders have used Jews as human shields, pretending that hatred of the quartet is rooted in abhorrence of anti-Semitism. On Tuesday, an evangelical outfit called Proclaiming Justice to the Nations accused the Anti-Defamation League-- the Anti-Defamation League!-- of siding with anti-Semites after the ADL called out Trump’s racism. The group even had the audacity to hurl a Hebrew denunciation-- “lashon hara,” or “evil tongue”-- at the Jewish civil rights organization.

Republicans are only a short step away from such shamelessness when they try to deflect from the president’s racism by accusing his foes of anti-Semitism. “Montanans are sick and tired of listening to anti-American, anti-Semite, radical Democrats trash our country and our ideals,” Senator Steve Daines of Montana tweeted on Monday, proclaiming his solidarity with Trump.

When the right presents Trump as an enemy of anti-Semitism, it goes beyond hypocrisy. Jews have thrived here as they have in few other places in the world because America at least aspires to be a multiethnic democracy, not an ethnostate. If Trump succeeds in making citizenship racialized and contingent, that’s an existential threat to American Jews.

Trump and his accomplices are simultaneously assaulting the political foundation of Jewish life in America and claiming they’re doing it on the Jews’ behalf. As the Montana Association of Rabbis wrote in an open letter to Daines on Wednesday, “We refuse to allow the real threat of anti-Semitism to be weaponized and exploited by those who themselves share a large part of the responsibility for the rise of white nationalist and anti-Semitic violence in this country.”

...It’s worth thinking about how we got to a point where anti-Semitism can be exploited as it has been this week. What we’re seeing is the absurd but logical endpoint of efforts to conflate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, and anti-Zionism with opposition to Israel’s right-wing government. Only if these concepts are interchangeable can Jewish critics of Israel be the perpetrators of anti-Semitism and gentiles who play footsie with fascism be allies of the Jewish people. Only if these concepts are the same can an evangelical group claim that Jews are being anti-Jewish when they protest Trump, because Trump loves Israel.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of the liberal Zionist group J Street, puts part of the blame for this rhetorical derangement at the feet of the American Jewish establishment. Its leaders made an alliance of convenience with right-wing Christian Zionists, who support the state of Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and a bulwark of Western values in the Middle East, but care little about pluralism in the United States.

The Jewish leaders, said Ben-Ami, “made a deal with the devil. And what they’ve done is they’ve laid down in bed with white nationalists and racists and bigots.” Now white nationalists and racists and bigots-- and those politically aligned with them-- feel entitled to use their backing of Israel as an alibi when their leader indulges in racist incitement.

“When they start asking people to go back where they came from, that’s the first line of attack on the Jewish people over centuries,” said Ben-Ami. It’s terrifying enough to have a president who says such things. It’s an almost incalculable insult for Trump and his enablers to act as if he’s helping the Jews when he adopts the language of the pogrom.

ABC News interviewed Rabbi Avi Olitzky of Beth El Synagogue in the middle of Ilhan's Minneapolis district. He had the same feelings any sentient Jew hearing those chants of the North Carolina Trumpists. In an OpEd he wrote for the Times of Israel he warned that "We cannot fall victim to the political tricks that rely on racism, and the meme of antisemitism, to bolster both sides, while still doing immense communal harm... even if [Ilhan] disagrees with the policies of the current Israeli government, I cannot stay silent today. I stand fully beside her-- and her colleagues-- and support her in the face of the recent racist tweets of the president. This is not how we engage in civil dialogue. This is not how we do business and politics in this country. We are and have been better than this. We need to be better than this," And he told ABC's Briefing Room that "this is a very eerie wave of similar situations in history, be that Nazi Germany or elsewhere," noting that the Trumpists seem to have some kind of permission to be "publicly hateful and publicly loud.

"And from the pastors of my favorite evangelical group, Vote Common Good... a t-shirt all Americans should be proud to wear:

Another NY Times Republican columnist yesterday, David Brooks, seemed as disturbed as Goldberg about Trump's fascist rantings. "The real American idea," he wrote in a column titled Donald Trump Hates America, "is not xenophobic, nostalgic or racist; it is pluralistic, future-oriented and universal. America is exceptional precisely because it is the only nation on earth that defines itself by its future, not its past. America is exceptional because from the first its citizens saw themselves in a project that would have implications for all humankind. America is exceptional because it was launched with a dream to take the diverse many and make them one-- e pluribus unum. Trump’s campaign is an attack on that dream. The right response is to double down on that ideal. The task before us is to create the most diverse mass democracy in the history of the planet-- a true universal nation. It is precisely to weave the social fissures that Trump is inclined to tear."


Tony Schwartz wrote The Art of The Deal. No one understands Trump and Trumpism better than he does.

How Does It Feel To Have Someone In The White House Working Against The Best Interests Of The Country And Its Citizens?

Can anyone deny that for Putin, the Russian investment in the election of Trump, is the gift that keeps on giving? In his NY Times column yesterday, Republican pundit David Brooks observed that "The Trump era has been all about dissolving moral norms and waging vicious attacks. This has been an era of culture war, class warfare and identity politics. It’s been an era in which call-out culture, reality TV melodrama and tribal grandstanding have overshadowed policymaking and the challenges of actually governing." As David Graham pointed out in his piece for The Atlantic Monday, The Worse Things Are, the Better They Are for Trump, the last moves by the satanic pig-fucker Putin put in the White House "suggest his goal is not to fix the system, but to exacerbate turmoil for political gain... Trump and Lenin share a strategic instinct. Lenin reportedly said, 'The worse, the better'-- meaning that conditions that were more miserable for the people were likely to help his political aims. Trump’s approach to immigration and health care, both in the past few days and throughout his presidency, evince a similar understanding of power."

A friend of mine, an independent who has never contributed politically except twice to Bernie, once in 2016 and once this year, always tells me that if Trump cleans up the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) problem, he'll be reelected. I've been telling him for over 2 years that Trump hasn't the tiniest interest in cleaning up the MS-13 problem, only of exacerbating it so he can use it to scare his low-IQ base.

Graham continued that last week Señor Trumpanzee announced plans to end assistance to the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, or as Fox & Friends put it, "3 Mexican countries." Señor T on Friday: "No money goes there anymore. We’re giving them tremendous aid. We stopped payment." That's about $450 million, including money to support law-enforcement efforts against gangs. "The actual cash is a minimal amount-- a little less than 8 percent of the $5.7 billion Trump demanded for his border wall when he shut down the government in December, and less than 2 percent of the $25 billion the administration estimates the wall would cost overall. The fact that the aid numbers are small doesn’t justify spending them per se, but there’s a strong consensus among Latin America experts that these cuts are counterproductive. It’s common to talk about push and pull factors in immigration. Pull factors are things that draw migrants to a new country: the promise of better work, for example. Push factors are those things that drive migrants to leave home: unstable politics, high crime, poor economies. Trump has worked to reduce one pull factor by trying to make it harder to get asylum, but he has limited options beyond that, because no president wants to make the economy worse in order to deter immigration (though Trump has been willing to risk hurting the economy to install protectionist tariffs). But Trump’s decision to cut aid to countries that are major sources of immigrants to the United States seems likely to only increase the push factors, driving more people to attempt the journey as conditions in their home countries stagnate or worsen."

Many of Trump’s decisions on border issues seem designed not to solve any problem. This includes Trump’s standing threat to close the border with Mexico; his decision to end DACA, a program that he has said achieves goals he favors; and most prominently, his decision to separate unauthorized immigrant families arriving at the border. None of these do anything to solve or reduce what Trump has called a crisis at the border. In fact, they are likely to only worsen the crisis. Separations, for example, became a costly and distracting circus, taking up already short space in detention centers and then necessitating a major effort to reunite families and restore the status quo ante when courts predictably rejected the policy.

Along similar lines, it’s more politically useful for Trump to be in a lengthy fight about building a border wall than it is to have actually built it. If and when the wall is built, it will become clear that it isn’t a panacea for immigration, but in the meantime, it’s a useful political wedge. The more migrants are coming toward the United States, the more Trump can warn of an “invasion” and inflame nativist fears that he thinks will help him win reelection. Trump isn’t really interested in solving immigration. A permanent crisis is more useful to him.

The same dynamic holds true on Obamacare. Last week, the White House told a federal appeals court that the Affordable Care Act should be thrown out entirely. Trump then announced that he was calling on Congress to produce a replacement for the law. The decision was reportedly made over the objections of Trump’s attorney general and secretary of health and human services, and it has received a chilly reception from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

When the GOP controlled Congress in 2017 and 2018, it tried at length to repeal Obamacare and failed, and there’s no chance a Democratic House will be amenable to rescinding or replacing the law. In the absence of legislative movement, Trump has worked to weaken the ACA throughout his presidency. He has cut back on outreach and advertisement, slashed subsidies, supported repeal of the individual mandate, and enabled so-called association health plans, which a judge struck down last week, calling them “clearly an end-run” around the law.

The cynicism of Trump’s latest move on the ACA runs deep. The administration still doesn’t have any plan for what it actually wants to do on health care. Meanwhile, Axios's Jonathan Swan reports that the president doesn’t expect to win in the courts: “Trump has privately said he thinks the lawsuit to strike down the Affordable Care Act will probably fail in the courts, according to two sources who discussed the matter with the president last week.” For Trump, it’s a political win-win. Either he gets Obamacare thrown out, or judges rule against him, giving him another chance to rail against the judicial system, delegitimizing it and further undermining the rule of law.

None of these steps would make any sense if Trump’s goal was to improve health care, just as cutting aid to the Northern Triangle would make no sense if the president wanted to reduce immigration. But increasing turmoil is the point, since the worse things are, the better things are. For Donald Trump, at least.

Babies in Cages by Nancy Ohanian

In the file of "purposely making things worse for political gain, let's also look at a development Betsy Woodruff reported on Tuesday for the Daily Beast: Homeland Security Disbands Domestic Terror Intelligence Unit. This is a win-win in Trumpworld: a wink and a nod to his neo-Nazi support base and a way to make a bad problem worse. What could be more Trumpian? "The Department of Homeland Security has disbanded a group of intelligence analysts who focused on domestic terrorism," reported Woodruff. "Numerous current and former DHS officials say they find the development concerning, as the threat of homegrown terrorism-- including white supremacist terrorism-- is growing. 'It’s especially problematic given the growth in right-wing extremism and domestic terrorism we are seeing in the U.S. and abroad,' one former intelligence official told the Daily Beast."

The group in question was a branch of analysts in DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A). They focused on the threat from homegrown violent extremists and domestic terrorists. The analysts there shared information with state and local law enforcement to help them protect their communities from these threats.

Then the Trump administration’s new I&A chief, David Glawe, began reorganizing the office, which is the DHS component that has a place in the Intelligence Community. Over the course of the reorganization, the branch of I&A focused on domestic terrorism got eighty-sixed and its analysts were reassigned to new positions. The change happened last year, and has not been previously reported.

“We’ve noticed I&A has significantly reduced their production on homegrown violent extremism and domestic terrorism while those remain among the most serious terrorism threats to the homeland,” said one DHS official.

Former officials pointed to a spate of domestic terror attacks in recent years as evidence that DHS erred by shuttering this branch. From the massacre that left 11 people dead at a Pittsburgh synagogue to a shooting targeting Republican members of Congress in June 2018 to bomb threats that a deranged Trump fan directed at prominent Democrats and CNN, violent attacks informed by homegrown hatred have left Americans increasingly terrorized.

...Nate Snyder, a former DHS official who focused on violent extremism, said the department’s move undercuts Trump administration claims that it takes domestic terror seriously.

“You hear the secretary and this administration say how domestic terrorism is a clear priority and how resources will be bolstered, but you can’t say that and then all of a sudden get rid of the unit that’s there to detect threats and share information with our first responders, law enforcement, and federal partners,” Snyder said. “You can’t have it both ways.”

All Aboard! by Nancy Ohanian

Unending Kavanaugh Saga Sputtering To A Conclusion... For Now

Friday morning-- AGAIN-- the battle over Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation completely dominated the news. The blockbuster NY Times investigation into Trump's history as a fraudster seems to have disappeared entirely from the headlines without a trace. These were the top xxx headlines on Memeorandum on Friday morning. Don't choke:

• Wall Street Journal: I Am an Independent, Impartial Judge by Brett M. Kavanaugh
• Washington Post: We Were Brett Kavanaugh's Drinking Buddies. We Don't Think He Should Be Confirmed by Charles Ludington, Lynne Brookes and Elizabeth Swisher
• Wall Street Journal: Friend of Dr. Ford Felt Pressure to Revisit Statement by Natalie Andrews, Rebecca Ballhaus and Sadie Gurman
• Washington Post: editorial Vote No On Kavasaugh
• Axios: We Don't Have 50 by Mike Allen
• New York Times: A Complete National Disgrace by David Brooks
• Axios: GOP nervous ahead of Kavanaugh vote: “We don't have 50 right now”  by Jonathan Swan
• New York Times: editorial How Brett Kavanaugh Failed
• Fox 13News: Man Threatened To Kill Members Of Congress Over Kavanaugh Vote, Deputies Say by Aaron Mesmer
• USA Today: Democrats' big miscalculation: Conservative women like me won't abandon Brett Kavanaugh by Stephanie Gutmann
• The Hill: GOP senator may miss Kavanaugh vote for daughter's wedding by Tal Axelrod
• Palm Beach Post: Retired Supreme Court Justice: Kavanaugh does not belong on high court by Lulu Ramadan
• USA Today editorial: Vote no on Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation
• Politico: GOP leaders all but guarantee Kavanaugh confirmation
• Slate: Christine Blasey Ford Changed Everything by Christina Cauterucci
• WDAY-TV: EXCLUSIVE: Heitkamp reveals Kavanaugh vote and reasoning to WDAY News by Kevin Wallevand
• Salt Lake Tribune editorial: Hatch attack on alleged witness is despicable
• NY Post editorial: End the farce and confirm Kavanaugh
• Raw Story: Trump supporter arrested for threatening to slaughter senators and their families for not supporting Brett Kavanaugh by Sarah Burris

Meanwhile the top story at Google News was an NPR piece, Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court Nomination Passes Key Senate Vote. McConnell shut down debate 51-49.



Back to the opinion pieces above: Yalies Charles Ludington, Lynne Brookes and Elizabeth Swisher, classmates of Kavanaugh wrote that Kavanaugh "lied to the Senate by stating, under oath, that he never drank to the point of forgetting what he was doing. We said, unequivocally, that each of us, on numerous occasions, had seen Brett stumbling drunk to the point that it would be impossible for him to state with any degree of certainty that he remembered everything that he did when drunk."

David Brooks' was correct when he wrote that "What we saw in these hearings was the unvarnished tribalization of national life. At the heart of the hearings were two dueling narratives, one from Christine Blasey Ford and one from Brett Kavanaugh. These narratives were about what did or did not happen at a party 36 years ago. There was nothing particularly ideological about the narratives, nothing that touched on capitalism, immigration or any of the other great disputes of national life." But he got it wrong when he wrote that "There is no corroborating evidence either way." There is. Trump and McConnell just made sure it would never come to light. Brooks can't be that stupid. Can he be?

Trump couldn't do it alone-- remember Ted Cruz and Dean Heller at the polls next month

Paul Ryan Needs More Media Exposure

Republican thinkers seem to find it Ok to heap all kinds of deprecations on Trump's head without hesitation. Even when their dissatisfaction and criticism are actually aimed towards Paul Ryan, it appears to be more comfortable for them to just use Trump's name instead. This week Joe Scarborough had no problem at all using a Washington Post OpEd, Trump's Mental Meltdown, to point out that Trump is mentally unstable, suffering from dementia and that there is some kind of consensus among people dealing with Trump that he's off his rocker and dangerous to the country. "That is a verdict," wrote Scarborough, "that was reached long ago by many of the president’s own staff. More than a few politicians and reporters across Washington have shared similar fears... Any Fortune 500 company would have fired a chief executive exhibiting similarly erratic behavior long ago. Unfortunately, the Washington leaders most strategically positioned to limit the damage seem to be frozen by fear." That's a clear reference to Paul Ryan, without even using his initials. "If Republicans don’t find their bearings soon, it may be America’s safety and security that are next to go," concluded the former Republican congressman from Florida.

Yesterday, David Brooks was even more brutal-- both to Señor Trumpanzee and to the unnamed speaker of the house from Janesville, Wisconsin, in his NY Times column, The GOP Is Rotting. Instead of going after Ryan, he picks a much sillier target to pair up with Trumpanzee: Roy Moore. Trump, he wrote, makes it impossible for Republican officeholders to just keep their heads down "until this whole Trump thing" passes "because Donald Trump never stops asking. First, he asked the party to swallow the idea of a narcissistic sexual harasser and a routine liar as its party leader. Then he asked the party to accept his comprehensive ignorance and his politics of racial division. Now he asks the party to give up its reputation for fiscal conservatism. At the same time he asks the party to become the party of Roy Moore, the party of bigotry, alleged sexual harassment and child assault. There is no end to what Trump will ask of his party. He is defined by shamelessness, and so there is no bottom. And apparently there is no end to what regular Republicans are willing to give him. Trump may soon ask them to accept his firing of Robert Mueller, and yes, after some sighing, they will accept that, too."

The Republican Party is doing harm to every cause it purports to serve. If Republicans accept Roy Moore as a United States senator, they may, for a couple years, have one more vote for a justice or a tax cut, but they will have made their party loathsome for an entire generation. The pro-life cause will be forever associated with moral hypocrisy on an epic scale. The word “evangelical” is already being discredited for an entire generation. Young people and people of color look at the Trump-Moore G.O.P. and they are repulsed, maybe forever.

...It’s amazing that there haven’t been more Republicans like Mitt Romney who have said: “Enough is enough! I can go no further!”

The reason, I guess, is that the rot that has brought us to the brink of Senator Roy Moore began long ago. Starting with Sarah Palin and the spread of Fox News, the G.O.P. traded an ethos of excellence for an ethos of hucksterism... The rot afflicting the G.O.P. is comprehensive-- moral, intellectual, political and reputational. More and more former Republicans wake up every day and realize: “I’m homeless. I’m politically homeless.”

I counted a dozen places in his column just calling out for Paul Ryan. It amazes me that David Brooks didn't invoke it even once. I guess voters will just have to refer to PolitiFact to find out about Ryan. He's been repeating a lot of the same lies Trump does about the Tax Scam, for example. A few weeks ago PolitiFact found is claim that the Tax Scam was "aimed at giving breaks to the middle class, not high-income earners" was "mostly false."

The statement of Ryan's they were referencing was made on Sean Hannity's show, where only lies are permitted: "People who are low- and middle-income, they’re the ones who are literally living paycheck to paycheck, who are worried about losing their job or they haven’t gotten a raise in years. This is about them and not about people who are really high-income earners getting a break."

The Tax Policy Center analysis found:

The framework would collapse the seven individual income tax rates-- which range from 10 percent to 39.6 percent-- to three: 12, 25 and 35 percent. The higher percentages are applied to those who make more money. Ryan says the current 10 percent rate is reduced to 0 percent.

The framework would also, among other things, increase the standard deduction, eliminate personal exemptions, increase the child tax credit and eliminate most itemized deductions.

So, depending on the details, the provisions could all increase or decrease an individual’s federal income tax bill.

One bottom line, according to the analysis: The top 1 percent of earners would receive about 80 percent of the tax benefit. This income group would see its after-tax income increase 8.5 percent, whereas the bottom 95 percent of earners would see an average 1.2 percent increase in their after-tax income.

Other details from the analysis:

• In 2018, all income groups would see their average taxes fall, but some taxpayers in each group would face tax increases. Those with the very highest incomes would  receive the biggest tax cuts. In 2027, taxpayers in the 80th to 95th income percentiles   would, on average, experience a tax increase.
• Looking ahead, in 2027, some higher-income taxpayers would pay more in taxes, but the richest would still get breaks. Taxpayer groups in the bottom 80 percent of the income distribution-- those making less than about $150,000-- would receive average tax cuts of 0.5 percent or less of after-tax income. Taxpayers making between about $150,000 and $300,000 would on average pay about $800 more in taxes than under current law. About 80 percent of the total benefit would accrue to taxpayers in the top 1 percent, whose after-tax income would increase 8.7 percent.

The analysis also included this important caveat: The framework does not specify the income brackets to which the individual tax rates would apply, nor the maximum size and phase-out parameters of the increased child tax credit. So, to some extent, projections are hard to make.

But while some in the middle class are projected to see tax cuts, the better-off do even better, according to the Tax Policy Center analysis.

...[I]t’s worth noting that some provisions in the framework specifically benefit the well-to-do, as PolitiFact National found in rating False a claim by Trump that the plan has "very little benefit for people of wealth." The plan would:

• Eliminate the alternative minimum tax. This is a calculation that guarantees that certain higher-income taxpayers with large deductions pay at least a minimum amount of tax.
• Eliminate the estate tax. Currently, for estates worth more than $5.49 million, the estate is generally 40 percent.
• Reduce from 39.6 percent to 25 percent the tax rate for "small and family-owned businesses conducted as sole proprietorships, partnerships and S corporations"-- collectively, these are referred to as "passthrough" income. (Ryan argues that most small-business owners in Wisconsin, after business expenses are considered, are middle-class.)

Our Rating

Ryan says the Republican tax reform proposal is focused on tax breaks for the middle class "and not about people who are really high-income earners getting a tax break."

Missing details in the framework for the tax reform make it difficult to tease out exactly how various taxpayers would fare, so it’s possible there will be more for middle-class taxpayers. But based on the framework, while there are some benefits for the middle class, what’s more clear is there are specific provisions benefiting the wealthy.

For a statement that contains only an element of truth, our rating is Mostly False.

How High A Percentage Of Republicans Are Drunk When They Vote? Chomsky And Brooks On The GOP Base

On July 4 NY Times in house conservative establishment guy, David Brooks, penned another of his what's wrong with Republicans? pieces. Short version: Trump is Satan and congressional Republicans, for a variety of horrifying reasons, won't stand up to him. And look what they're doing to working class voters, which Brooks, identified as a "core Republican constituency." He wants to know why "working-class conservatives seem to vote so often against their own economic interests." Drunkenness? Really?

My stab at an answer would begin in the 18th and 19th centuries. Many Trump supporters live in places that once were on the edge of the American frontier. Life on that frontier was fragile, perilous, lonely and remorseless. If a single slip could produce disaster, then discipline and self-reliance were essential. The basic pattern of life was an underlying condition of peril, warded off by an ethos of self-restraint, temperance, self-control and strictness of conscience.

Frontier towns sometimes went from boomtown to Bible Belt in a single leap. They started out lawless. People needed to impose codes of respectability to survive. Frontier religions were often ascetic, banning drinking, card-playing and dancing. And yet there was always a whiff of extreme disorder-- drunkenness, violence and fraud-- threatening from down below.

Today these places are no longer frontier towns, but many of them still exist on the same knife’s edge between traditionalist order and extreme dissolution.

For example, I have a friend who is an avid Trump admirer. He supports himself as a part-time bartender and a part-time home contractor, and by doing various odd jobs on the side. A good chunk of his income is off the books. He has built up a decent savings account, but he has done it on his own, hustling, scrapping his way, without any long-term security. His income can vary sharply from week to week. He doesn’t have much trust in the institutions around him. He has worked on government construction projects but sees himself, rightly, as a small-business man.

This isn’t too different from the hard, independent life on the frontier. Many people in these places tend to see their communities the way foreign policy realists see the world: as an unvarnished struggle for resources-- as a tough world, a no-illusions world, a world where conflict is built into the fabric of reality.

The virtues most admired in such places, then and now, are what Shirley Robin Letwin once called the vigorous virtues: “upright, self-sufficient, energetic, adventurous, independent minded, loyal to friends and robust against foes.”

The sins that can cause the most trouble are not the social sins-- injustice, incivility, etc. They are the personal sins-- laziness, self-indulgence, drinking, sleeping around.

Then as now, chaos is always washing up against the door. Very few people actually live up to the code of self-discipline that they preach. A single night of gambling or whatever can produce life-altering bad choices. Moreover, the forces of social disruption are visible on every street: the slackers taking advantage of the disability programs, the people popping out babies, the drug users, the spouse abusers.

Voters in these places could use some help. But these Americans, like most Americans, vote on the basis of their vision of what makes a great nation. These voters, like most voters, believe that the values of the people are the health of the nation.

In their view, government doesn’t reinforce the vigorous virtues. On the contrary, it undermines them-- by fostering initiative-sucking dependency, by letting people get away with their mistakes so they can make more of them and by getting in the way of moral formation.

The only way you build up self-reliant virtues, in this view, is through struggle. Yet faraway government experts want to cushion people from the hardships that are the schools of self-reliance. Compassionate government threatens to turn people into snowflakes.

In her book Strangers in Their Own Land, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild quotes a woman from Louisiana complaining about the childproof lids on medicine and the mandatory seatbelt laws. “We let them throw lawn darts, smoked alongside them,” the woman says of her children. “And they survived. Now it’s like your kid needs a helmet, knee pads and elbow pads to go down the kiddy slide.”

Hochschild’s humble and important book is a meditation on why working-class conservatives vote against more government programs for themselves. She emphasizes that they perceive government as a corrupt arm used against the little guy. She argues that these voters may vote against their economic interests, but they vote for their emotional interests, for candidates who share their emotions about problems and groups.

I’d say they believe that big government support would provide short-term assistance, but that it would be a long-term poison to the values that are at the core of prosperity. You and I might disagree with that theory. But it’s a plausible theory. Anybody who wants to design policies to help the working class has to make sure they go along the grain of the vigorous virtues, not against them.

The following day, also in the Times, George Yancy reached out to the great Noam Chomsky and asked, "Given our 'post-truth' political moment and the growing authoritarianism we are witnessing under President Trump, what public role do you think professional philosophy might play in critically addressing this situation?" And he wanted to know more about this "Republican base." Chomsky's vision was entirely unrelated to Brooks'.

We have to be a little cautious about not trying to kill a gnat with an atom bomb. The performances are so utterly absurd regarding the “post-truth” moment that the proper response might best be ridicule. For example, Stephen Colbert’s recent comment is apropos: When the Republican legislature of North Carolina responded to a scientific study predicting a threatening rise in sea level by barring state and local agencies from developing regulations or planning documents to address the problem, Colbert responded: “This is a brilliant solution. If your science gives you a result that you don’t like, pass a law saying the result is illegal. Problem solved.”

Quite generally, that’s how the Trump administration deals with a truly existential threat to survival of organized human life: ban regulations and even research and discussion of environmental threats and race to the precipice as quickly as possible (in the interests of short-term profit and power).

...Of course, ridicule is not enough. It’s necessary to address the concerns and beliefs of those who are taken in by the fraud, or who don’t recognize the nature and significance of the issues for other reasons. If by philosophy we mean reasoned and thoughtful analysis, then it can address the moment, though not by confronting the “alternative facts” but by analyzing and clarifying what is at stake, whatever the issue is. Beyond that, what is needed is action: urgent and dedicated, in the many ways that are open to us.

...I don’t think things are quite that bleak. Take the success of the Bernie Sanders campaign, the most remarkable feature of the 2016 election. It is, after all, not all that surprising that a billionaire showman with extensive media backing (including the liberal media, entranced by his antics and the advertising revenue it afforded) should win the nomination of the ultra-reactionary Republican Party.

The Sanders campaign, however, broke dramatically with over a century of U.S. political history. Extensive political science research, notably the work of Thomas Ferguson, has shown convincingly that elections are pretty much bought. For example, campaign spending alone is a remarkably good predictor of electoral success, and support of corporate power and private wealth is a virtual prerequisite even for participation in the political arena.

The Sanders campaign showed that a candidate with mildly progressive (basically New Deal) programs could win the nomination, maybe the election, even without the backing of the major funders or any media support. There’s good reason to suppose that Sanders would have won the nomination had it not been for shenanigans of the Obama-Clinton party managers. He is now the most popular political figure in the country by a large margin.

Activism spawned by the campaign is beginning to make inroads into electoral politics. Under Barack Obama, the Democratic Party pretty much collapsed at the crucial local and state levels, but it can be rebuilt and turned into a progressive force. That would mean reviving the New Deal legacy and moving well beyond, instead of abandoning, the working class and turning into Clintonite New Democrats, which more or less resemble what used to be called moderate Republicans, a category that has largely disappeared with the shift of both parties to the right during the neoliberal period.

Such prospects may not be out of reach, and efforts to attain them can be combined with direct activism right now, urgently needed, to counter the legislative and executive actions of the Republican administration, often concealed behind the bluster of the figure nominally in charge.

There are in fact many ways to combat the Trump project of creating a tiny America, isolated from the world, cowering in fear behind walls while pursuing the Paul Ryan-style domestic policies that represent the most savage wing of the Republican establishment.

...The most important issues to address are the truly existential threats we face: climate change and nuclear war. On the former, the Republican leadership, in splendid isolation from the world, is almost unanimously dedicated to destroying the chances for decent survival; strong words, but no exaggeration. There is a great deal that can be done at the local and state level to counter their malign project.

On nuclear war, actions in Syria and at the Russian border raise very serious threats of confrontation that might trigger war, an unthinkable prospect. Furthermore, Trump’s pursuit of Obama’s programs of modernization of the nuclear forces poses extraordinary dangers. As we have recently learned, the modernized U.S. nuclear force is seriously fraying the slender thread on which survival is suspended. The matter is discussed in detail in a critically important article in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in March, which should have been, and remained, front-page news. The authors, highly respected analysts, observe that the nuclear weapons modernization program has increased “the overall killing power of existing U.S. ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three-- and it creates exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.”

The significance is clear. It means that in a moment of crisis, of which there are all too many, Russian military planners may conclude that lacking a deterrent, the only hope of survival is a first strike — which means the end for all of us.

...In these cases, citizen action can reverse highly dangerous programs. It can also press Washington to explore diplomatic options-- which are available-- instead of the near reflexive resort to force and coercion in other areas, including North Korea and Iran.

...[W]ho is the [Republican] base? Most are relatively affluent. Three-quarters had incomes above the median. About one-third had incomes of over $100,000 a year, and thus were in the top 15 percent of personal income, in the top 6 percent of those with only a high school education. They are overwhelmingly white, mostly older, hence from historically more privileged sectors.

As Anthony DiMaggio reports in a careful study of the wealth of information now available, Trump voters tend to be typical Republicans, with “elitist, pro-corporate and reactionary social agendas,” and “an affluent, privileged segment of the country in terms of their income, but one that is relatively less privileged than it was in the past, before the 2008 economic collapse,” hence feeling some economic distress. Median income has dropped almost 10 percent since 2007. That’s apart from the large evangelical segment and putting aside the factors of white supremacy-- deeply rooted in the United States-- racism and sexism.

For the majority of the base, Trump and the more savage wing of the Republican establishment are not far from their standard attitudes, though when we turn to specific policy preferences, more complex questions arise.

A segment of the Trump base comes from the industrial sector that has been cast aside for decades by both parties, often from rural areas where industry and stable jobs have collapsed. Many voted for Obama, believing his message of hope and change, but were quickly disillusioned and have turned in desperation to their bitter class enemy, clinging to the hope that somehow its formal leader will come to their rescue.

Another consideration is the current information system, if one can even use the phrase. For much of the base, the sources of information are Fox News, talk radio and other practitioners of alternative facts. Exposures of Trump’s misdeeds and absurdities that arouse liberal opinion are easily interpreted as attacks by the corrupt elite on the defender of the little man, in fact his cynical enemy.

Not that that negates the drunk and stoned theory of a good part of the base, right?

Both Parties... Are Fumbling Around In The Dark Looking For An Identity

Fareed Zakaria had GOP establishment NY Times columnist David Brooks on his CNN show Sunday to talk about Señor Trumpanzee’s role within the conservative movement. I don’t know who watches Zakaria’s show-- no one I know-- but I bet there was a lot of teeth gnashing from Republicans when Zakaria opened the segment by setting up a comparison between Saint Ronnie and Trumpanzee. “Where does conservatism go from here? Where does the Republican Party go from here?… Is there a new conservatism developing?”

Brooks said he doesn’t think so-- “not in this administration.” In his universe Democrats want to use government to enhance equality and Republicans want to use government to enhance freedom. Most Republicans who want to use government to enhance freedom are thinking about the freedom of the rich and powerful to lord over the rest of us-- it’s like the freedom for everyone to have access to really expensive healthcare… if they have the money to afford it. But what he doesn’t mention is that the Grifter First Family wants to use government to enhance to enhance its own wealth, pure and simple. Is the Russian brand of kleptocracy the new conservatism? Brooks, I’d bet, hopes not.

Trump, Brooks says, opened a new debate-- populism vs statism-- but hasn’t delivered on the promises of his campaign “because there’s not a lot of Trumpians in the world of policy. So he hasn’t exactly helped the people who got him into office. He staffed his administration-- to the extent it is staffed-- with people who basically believed in the Reagan bargain of 1984… cut tax rates, reducegovernmoent regulation… I think he opened the door too a new kind of conservatism but has not fulfilled it. That’s for somebody in the future.” [This vicious little jerk?]

So what about Republican politicians? Do the party’s elected officials want to swing in a more populist direction? Trump, he says, punctured the worn out Reaganism balloon and now conservatives have nothing; they’re in a period of chaos, Trump’s preferred milieu. He sees various paradigms competing within the Republican Party for dominance-- libertarianism, Buchanan-like paleo-conservatism… But, he said, “if I had to bet, I would like an Alexander Hamilton open trade, lot of immigration, lot of economic dynamism… When I look at the polls, there aren’t a lot of people who want what I want. The Steve Bannons of the world, that’s where a lot of the people are; they’re older, they’re economically disadvantaged; they want a national conservatism that will protect them.”

Really? They want-- or will accept-- a snake oil salesman and kleptocrat like Trump, rather than a sensible populist like Bernie? I bet there were an awful lot of Trump voters at Bernie’s Sunday night rally in Charleston, cheering wildly when he called for Medicare-For-All, not exactly a conservative policy goal-- although it is certainly one that “will protect them.” There were over 2,000 in the Charleston Municipal Auditorium for his Protect Our Health Care Rally. Remember, Bernie pulverized Clinton in the West Virginia primary-- 123,860 (51.4%) to 86,354 (35.8%) but Wassermann Schultz had fixed the system so in the end, Bernie got 19 delegates and Clinton got 18. Bernie won every county in the state-- even the counties considered parti of the DC suburbs-- although Kanawha (Charleston) was close-- 48.0% to 45.0%. Bernie and Trump had virtually the same number of votes in Kanawha too.

If the Democratic Party was united, the ideological battlelines would be much clearer, with the Democrats behind a set of policies wildly popular among the American people while the Republicans argued about the benefits of a society with no rules and regulations versus a fascist state. Instead… the conservatives of “moderate” Republicans is competing for dominance of the Democratic Party under the guise of New Dems and Blue Dogs, “pragmatism” and-- the same kind of kleptocratic tendencies run wild under Trump. Last week, Lee Fang, writing for The Intercept helped focus attention on this unfortunate tendency with the Democratic Party elite-- Prominent Democratic Fundraisers Realign to Lobby For Trump’s Agenda. These are the people who call the shots at the DNC and who tell Pelosi and Schumer what’s to be done and not done. Fang points out that many Hillary backers who expected too be part of her administration are now “cashing in as lobbyists-- by working to advance Trump’s agenda.”

This is the Wassermann Schultz, Steny Hoyer, Joe Crowley, Chuck Schumer and Pelosi crowd:

Lobbying records show that some Democratic fundraisers, who raised record amounts of campaign cash for Clinton, are now retained by top telecom interests to help repeal the strong net neutrality protections established during the Obama administration.

Others are working on behalf of for-profit prisons on detention issues, while others still are paid to help corporate interests pushing alongside Trump to weaken financial regulations. At least one prominent Clinton backer is working for a health insurance company on a provision that was included in the House Republican bill to gut the Affordable Care Act.

While Republican lobbyists are more in demand, liberal lobbyists are doing brisk business that has them reaching out to fellow Democrats to endorse-- or at least tamp down vocal opposition to-- Trump agenda items.

“These cases are clear, disturbing examples of the gulf between the interests of many of the Democratic Party’s big-money donors and those of the party’s progressive base and America’s working families,” said Kai Newkirk, co-founder of Democracy Spring, a progressive coalition.

Remember when Hillary mumbled something about being part of the resistance?

A well-known lobbyist who runs in powerful Democratic circles, Heather Podesta, volunteered for Clinton during the New Hampshire primaries. She collected at least $407,000 for the campaign. In recent months, Podesta has tweeted from the Center for American Progress Ideas Conference, an event billed as a platform for the “Resist movement,” and has continued to give cash to congressional Democrats.

Podesta, however, whose New Years Resolution was to “Make Lobbying Great Again,” has adapted to Republican rule by rebranding her lobbying firm from “Heather Podesta + Partners” to “Invariant,” a name change to reflect “an expanding bipartisan team” with ties to the Trump administration.

Records show Podesta has lobbied this year on behalf of financial management and insurance giants Prudential and New York Life on the fiduciary rule, the regulation fought for by the Obama administration that was designed to require financial planning companies to act in the best interests of their clients. Early in his administration, in a decision cheered by the industry, Trump ordered a delay in the implementation of the rule.

Other Democratic lobbyists have found that their corporate clients’ interests align with the Trump administration. Some, like Podesta, are taking financial planning industry cash to work on the fiduciary rule.

Steve Elmendorf, a former senior advisor to Clinton’s 2008 run, maintained a high-profile role with Clinton’s 2016 run, raising $341,000 for the campaign. He is now one of the most prominent corporate lobbyists in Washington, D.C. Records show that Elmendorf, too, lobbied on the fiduciary rule. His client, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, a trade group for firms like Prudential, has made delaying the rule a major goal and celebrated Trump’s move to delay implementation.

UnitedHealth, the health insurance giant, is also an Elmendorf client. Filings made to ethics officials on Capitol Hill reveal that Elmendorf is helping UnitedHealth work on issues related to the Affordable Care Act, including the health insurance industry tax, a provision of the ACA that UnitedHealth has made clear it seeks to repeal or delay. Congressional Republicans have said that, if they are successful with their overhaul of the law, the tax will be gone.

A former Democratic National Committee fundraiser from Bill Clinton’s days as president, Richard Sullivan, served as a major fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s campaign last year. He bundled at least $345,218 for the campaign, according to Federal Elections Commission records. Sullivan is also registered lobbyist for the public relations and lobby firm Capitol Counsel, where he works on behalf of private prison giant Geo Group to convince lawmakers of the “benefits of public-private partnerships in the delivery of secure residential care in correctional and detention facilities.”

The Florida-based Geo Group is particularly close to the Trump administration; it was one of the few firms to donate corporate money to a Trump SuperPAC during the election, finance the inauguration, and openly celebrate Trump’s decision to vastly expand the detention and removal of undocumented immigrants. The firm was among the first private companies to win a contract from the Trump administration for a federal immigrant detention center, a deal worth $110 million.

Lobbyists often use their ability to bundle cash for candidates and party organs as a way of win an audience with lawmakers on behalf of their clients. As The Intercept has reported, lobbyists for Goldman Sachs and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the trade group, raised big money for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, using their sway to pressure the party to adopt policies favorable to their industries and to abandon economic populist messaging that targeted the financial sector.

Trump’s election has been called a “bonanza” for Washington lobbyists, as K Street seeks to enrich itself by harnessing the administration’s zeal for rewarding corporate allies. For many Democratic insiders, there is fortune to made even in electoral defeat.

The Intercept spoke to several progressive activists who expressed outrage that leading Democratic Party officials are now advancing the Trump agenda, but were reluctant to comment on the record, for fear of angering powerful Democrats. But a few activists, like Democracy Sping’s Newkirk, decided to speak on the record.

Becky Bond, an activist and former Bernie Sanders adviser who also spoke out, said, “When Democratic insiders team up with Comcast and the private prison industry, they make it pretty difficult to see how the party can rebuild relationships with the voters it needs to bring back into the fold.”

“Destroying the internet and maximizing the profitability of mass incarceration,” she added, “is not what I would call a winning strategy for Democrats who want to take back power in 2018.”

A friend of mine is running a congressional campaign for a progressive candidate and he told me this morning that he’s about to get an endorsement from Howard Dean. I told him to think that through carefully before making a big deal of it. Today, Dean is known to many activists as just another Clinton shill who makes a living as a lobbyist for drug manufacturers and the old Howard Dean who inspired so many people is now just an historical monument unrelated in many people’s minds to the guy running around today being paid to push an ugly and despised agenda.