Amy Barrett Lights Trump’s Election Theft Fire

 

-by Harvey Wasserman

Team Trump’s latest Court coup has lit the fire on his 2020 coup d’etat. With Amy Barrett joining her John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh co-conspirators, The Donald is set to steal the election. They all did it before in Bush vs Gore.

With Barrett, three of the seated Supremes were direct conspirators in the 2000 Bush v. Gore decision that gave George W. Bush the White House despite his losing the popular vote.

As of right now, with the all-but-certain compliance of Supremes Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito, and with the agreement of enough Republican-held state legislatures, there is no legal barrier to Trump’s second term, no matter what the voters say.

In real terms, the only practical wall against such a coup might be a massive anti-Trump national vote-- but it would have to be overwhelming enough to make his would-be dictatorship politically unsustainable.

As for the Constitutional path, the road has been cleared. The calculation is simple.

Under the original Constitution, the power to choose electors to the Electoral College that chooses the President rests with the state legislatures. In fact, in diminishing numbers, they did that from the 1789 selection of George Washington to the popular election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 (who won the presidency in a four-way race with less than 40% of the vote).

By then the rise of grassroots democratic sentiment had redefined the young nation. The choice of electors was transferred to popular state-by-state votes, to which the legislatures deferred. But they never formally surrendered.

A gumbo of customs and laws includes the 1887 Electoral Choice Act and the 12th, 14th, 20th and 25th Amendments. Armies of lawyers, scholars, high-paid advisors and dirty tricksters (hired to create chaos) have struggled to find consensus. Any number will give you a “definitive” answer.

But, as in Bush v. Gore, confusion and contention are Trump’s ultimate allies. He can win merely by denying clarity and thereby getting the final word to his Supreme Court.

It goes like this:

Biden is highly likely to win an overwhelming popular majority.

In anticipation, Trump has been screaming since 2016 that this election will be a fraud. His “trifecta” of stripped voter rolls, subverted early voting and vote by mail, and a flipped electronic vote count has been set to guarantee just that.

How deeply he can cut into the final tally of the massive public rejection coming at him remains to be seen. No matter how it goes, he will be kicking and screaming that it is fraudulent.

From there, his bar is very low. He only needs to throw enough swing states into chaos to deny Biden the needed 270 electoral votes. He does that through state legislatures ready to step in and trash the public will.

That stage was set in 2010, when a team of Koch Brother Tricksters used limitless dark money to take gerrymandered state legislatures deep into the Republican swamp. Majorities and super-majorities emerged in 29 states, including Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Arizona, Kansas, Nebraska, Montana, Iowa, Kentucky and others.

With the least excuse, any or all could cite “fraud” and “irregularities” while trashing the popular vote and appointing Electoral College delegations for Trump.

There are many complications between that and the coronation. You can Google endless legal tracts on most of them. But for Trump, just getting it to the Supreme Court means game over.

Until the ram-rodded appointment of Barrett, there seemed a glimmer that John Roberts might jump ship, deadlocking the Court at 4-4.

But Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett all did legal work for Bush v. Gore in Florida 2000. Clarence Thomas actually voted for it. And extreme conservatives Samuel Alito and Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch are unlikely to flinch.

So where does that leave the popular will?

If a Biden landslide is big enough, Trump could run short of states to steal. Claiming overridable chaos in tight races may be do-able in Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin.

But as Barak Obama showed in 2008 and 2012, there are limits. Even in an absurd, obsolete, thoroughly corrupted electoral system like America 2020, there are numbers beyond which Trump (who went bankrupt four times) may be unable to tread.

And thus the outcome of this election can be simply summarized: If Trump loses by big enough margins in more states than he can get his vassal legislatures to steal short of 270, his clear path to dictatorship becomes impassible.

If such an election can be fairly tabulated while denying the Supreme Court the final word, he loses.

But to do that, millions of citizens must be reinstated to the voter rolls; their ballots must be protected one-by-one at thousands of tables within the local election boards; the electronic scanning machines that will tally the votes must be saved from hacking.

None of this is rocket science. We have (hopefully) learned some hard lessons since Florida 2000.

But this coming week demands the absolute focus of everyone and anyone who cares about living in a democracy, or on a sustainable planet.






History Professor and author Harvey Wasserman co-convenes the Grassroots Emergency Election Protection Coalition. His People’s Spiral of US History awaits Trump’s departure at Solartopia.

The First Lawsuit Against Fox For Misleading The Public On COVID-19 Has Been Filed In Seattle

Early into the pandemic-- with Trump endangering peoples' lives daily with his lies and misinformation-- I asked a few of the legal scholars I know if he could be sued by the the families of people who followed his false information and died. The answer was the same from each: nope. Fox News, on the other hand, is another story.

There has been a great deal of chatter online about class action law suits against Fox for broadcasting a steady stream of coronavirus misinformation-- and not all of it from Trump. Last week, the Seattle Times published a piece by Sara Green about a Seattle nonprofit suing Fox in the King County Superior Court. The Washington League for Increased Transparency and Ethics (WASHLITE) is claiming Fox and the Murdochs "violated the state’s Consumer Protection Act and acted in bad faith by disseminating false information about the novel coronavirus through its television news broadcasts and minimized the danger posed by the virus as COVID-19 began to explode into a pandemic."

They claim that "Fox New Fox News engaged in unfair or deceptive acts by representing the coronavirus as a hoax in broadcasts that aired in February and March. Those broadcasts caused viewers to fail to adequately protect themselves or mitigate the virus’ spread, and therefore contributed to the public-health crisis and preventable mass death, the lawsuit says.

Yakima attorney Liz Hallock, who is running for governor as a Green Party candidate, is representing WASHLITE in the lawsuit against Fox News.

“We are not trying to chill free speech here. But we believe the public was endangered by false and deceptive communications in the stream of commerce,” Hallock said in phone interview Friday. “There are a lot of people who listen to Fox News, and they’re not taking the recommendations of public-health officials seriously. This is not about money; it’s about making sure the public gets the message this is not a hoax.”

According to Hallock, several members of WASHLITE live in King County and one of them has COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the virus.

...Though the lawsuit does not fully enumerate instances when Fox News personnel characterized the virus as a hoax during the two-month period, it points to March 9 broadcasts by Fox hosts Sean Hannity and Trish Regan as examples.

On that day, Hannity said, “They’re scaring the living hell out of people and I see it as, like, ‘Oh, let’s bludgeon Trump again with this new hoax.'”

Late Night host Seth Meyers on Wednesday lampooned Hannity over his comments, playing the March 9 clip alongside one from nine days later in which Hannity said his program has always taken the coronavirus seriously “and we’ve never called the virus a hoax.”

Regan’s March 9 broadcast prompted her dismissal from Fox Business News. A video posted on The Daily Beast’s website shows Regan delivering a monologue next to a graphic that reads, “Coronavirus Impeachment Scam.” Regan accused the left of creating mass hysteria over the virus and shutting down the economy, saying COVID-19 wasn’t as significant as other recent disease outbreaks such as SARS and Ebola.

“So why the melodrama on such an agitated scale right now? Why are the markets acting like this? I’ll give you two words: Donald Trump,” Regan said in the video.

Hallock said her clients are seeking only nominal damages and reasonable attorney’s fees. Ideally, she would like a judge to find Fox News violated the Consumer Protection Act and to tell the media organization to stop disseminating false information about the virus. She’d also like to see Fox News issue a clear retraction and an apology to viewers.

She said the classic example to demonstrate the limits of free speech is someone yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater when there is no danger. In contrast, Hallock said of Fox News: “They’re yelling, ‘There is no fire!’ when there is a fire.”

The Daily Beast reported that "Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch are girding for a pandemic of public-interest lawsuits over misinformation and conspiracy theories dispensed by certain Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network personalities... According to a top Murdoch executive, the father-and-son media moguls are ready to go to war with potential plaintiffs such as the Washington League for Increased Transparency and Ethics." Fox is screaming "frivolous lawsuit" every time it comes up. Besides, Fox isn't the worst media outlet. There's a genuine fascist one, OAN, Trump's favorite. Watch John Oliver explain what OAN is:

Want To See Bernie Defeat The Two Conservatives And Become President? Keep Fighting

Almost everyone I know is desperate to see Trump defeated in November-- but no one wanted it to be this way. CNN analyst Stephen Collinson reported yesterday that Trump is being forced to lead the country into what is shaping up to be one of its most tragic months in history "as experts say the coronavirus pandemic could kill more citizens than the Vietnam and Korean wars combined." But instead of a figure the country could rally behind, we are stuck with a self-congratulatory, divisive sociopath. "It’s no exaggeration." wrote Collinson, "to say Trump faces the most critical month of his presidency yet-- and how he conducts himself will be crucial for the country and his own hopes of reelection. But there are signs that he does not fully understand the stakes nor is willing to relegate his own interests in favor of the common good. Trump still appears to be marveling at the spread of the virus, which he says no one could have predicted. Health experts had anticipated its arrival in the US for months as he predicted a miracle would occur and it would just go away. And on a day when so many Americans died, he boasted at one point that his hair blowing in the breeze in the White House Rose Garden was his own, marking an inappropriate tone for a harrowing national moment. Trump blasted reporters for asking "snarky" questions when they use facts and his own words to point out shortcomings in the effort to combat the virus in the United States, which now has more confirmed infections than any other nation. His reaction did not dispel the impression that he is more interested in protecting his reputation than fixing mistakes that may worsen the pandemic."

With Trump in the thick of his reelection race, his daily early evening briefings are increasingly fusing with his political strategy, and the crisis is already shaping the 2020 race.

On Sunday, he embraced warnings by senior health officials that 100,000 or more Americans could die from coronavirus if he failed to extend his self-distancing guidelines. Trump alone among senior officials had been itching to ease the measures.

There was a subtle yet significant shift in his rhetoric on Monday.

"By very vigorously following these guidelines, we could save more than 1 million American lives. Think of that: 1 million American lives," the President said.

The comment suggested that at the end of a national disaster that has been exacerbated by his leadership failings, he will bill himself as a victorious wartime President who rescued many Americans from death.

...Trump's news conferences remain a self-serving mix of the most positive developments in the coronavirus fight, saved up for campaign-style announcements. On Monday, Trump posed like a game show host's assistant as he lifted a new testing kit out of its box for the cameras-- and the President basked in testimonials to his leadership from Cabinet officials and invited corporate CEOs.

The reality of the coronavirus crisis appears far less upbeat on the front lines than it does from Trump's boisterous sessions in the White House Rose Garden, however.

Maryland's Larry Hogan, a Republican who's one of several governors who introduced tough stay-at-home orders on Monday, warned that the Washington metro area was likely to replicate the difficult scenes in New York soon.

"We're just two weeks behind New York, with... higher numbers here than they were at two weeks ago," Hogan told CNN's Wolf Blitzer.

Hogan warned that warnings by the federal government's top infectious disease specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci that 100,000 Americans could die in the pandemic were a best case scenario.

"Just to put that in perspective, that's more than the number of Americans that died in the Vietnam war and the Korean war added together. And we're not talking about over a number of years. We're talking about in a very short period of time," Hogan said.

The Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor piece in yesterday's New Yorker, Reality Has Endorsed Bernie Sanders, spread online like wildfire. But if you get your news from corporate media-- particularly from Comcast-TV, the beating heart of the #NeverBernie movement-- you will never hear about how Taylor personified the debate over the role of government in addressing income inequality, housing insecurity, debt accumulation, and health care to the battle between Bernie on the one hand and the two conservative candidates, populist-right Trump and down-the-center establishmentarian Biden on the other. "It is difficult to articulate the speed with which the U.S. and, indeed, the world, has descended into an existential crisis," wrote Taylor, a professor of African American Studies at Princeton. "We are experiencing an unprecedented public-health event whose diminution and potential resolution rests with a series of prescriptions, including settlement-in-place orders, that will annihilate the economy. The deadly spread of covid-19 demands enclosure as a way to starve the searching virus of bodies to inhabit. The consequences of doing so removes workers from work and consumers from consumption; no economy can operate under these conditions." The Act Blue thermometer on the right is where you can contribute to Bernie's campaign and to the progressive congressional candidates running on his platform. You may want to use it when you think more about what Taylor had to say.

American life has been suddenly and dramatically upended, and, when things are turned upside down, the bottom is brought to the surface and exposed to the light. In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath ravaged the Gulf Coast, it, too, provided a deeper look into the darkness of U.S. inequality. As the actor Danny Glover said then, “When the hurricane struck the Gulf and the floodwaters rose and tore through New Orleans, plunging its remaining population into a carnival of misery, it did not turn the region into a Third World country, as it has been disparagingly implied in the media; it revealed one. It revealed the disaster within the disaster; gruelling poverty rose to the surface like a bruise to our skin.”

For years, the United States has gotten away with persistently chipping away at its weak welfare state by hiding or demonizing the populations most dependent on it. The poor are relegated as socially dysfunctional and inept, unable to cash in on the riches of American society. There are more than forty million poor people in the U.S., but they almost never merit a mention. While black poverty is presented as exemplary, white poverty is obscured, and Latinos and other brown people’s experiences are ignored. As many as four in five Americans say they live paycheck to paycheck. Forty per cent of Americans say that they cannot cover an unexpected four-hundred-dollar emergency expense.

...Thus far, the Trump Administration has predictably bungled the response to the coronavirus. But the Democratic Party’s response has been hampered by its shared hostility to unleashing the power of the state, through the advance of vast universal programs, to attend to an unprecedented, devolving catastrophe. About half of American workers receive health insurance through their employer. As job losses mount, millions of workers will lose their insurance while the public-health crisis surges. In the last Democratic debate, former Vice-President Joe Biden insisted that the U.S. doesn’t need single-payer health care because the severity of the coronavirus outbreak in Italy proved that it doesn’t work. Strangely, he simultaneously insisted that all testing and treatment of the virus should be free because we are in crisis. This insistence that health care should only be free in an emergency reveals a profound ignorance about the ways that preventive medicine can mitigate the harshest effects of an acute infection. By mid-February, a Chinese government study of that country’s coronavirus-related deaths found that those with preëxisting conditions accounted for at least a third of all covid-19 fatalities.




Dismissing the necessity of universal health care also shows an obliviousness to the power of medical expenses to alter the course of one’s life. Two-thirds of Americans who file for bankruptcy say that medical debt or losing work while they were sick contributed to their need to do so. The costs of medical treatment become a reason for postponing visits to the doctor. A 2018 poll found that forty-four per cent of Americans delayed seeing a doctor due to its cost. Already, half of Americans polled have said that they worry about the costs of the testing and treatment of covid-19. In a situation like the one we are in, it becomes easy to see the ways that encumbered access to health care exacerbates a public-health breakdown. N.B.A. players, celebrities, and the wealthy have access to the coronavirus test, but attending nurses and frontline health-care workers, community health centers, and public hospitals do not. Health-care inequalities are problems that have been left unattended, creating so many small, imperceptible fractures that, in the midst of a full-scale crisis, the structure is collapsing, shattering under its own weight.

The case has never been clearer for a transition to Medicare for All, but its achievement clashes with the Democratic Party’s decades-long hostility to funding the social-welfare state. At the heart of this resistance is the pernicious glorification of “personal responsibility,” through which success or failure in life is seen as an expression of personal fortitude or personal laxity. The American Dream, we are told, is anchored in the promise of unfettered social mobility, a destiny driven by self-determination and perseverance. This ingrained thinking evades the fact that it was the New Deal, in the nineteen-thirties, and the G.I. Bill, in the nineteen-forties, that, through a combination of federal work programs, subsidies, and government-backed guarantees, created a middle-class life style for millions of white Americans. In the nineteen-sixties, as a result of prolonged black protest, Lyndon Johnson authored the War on Poverty and other Great Society programs, which were intended to lessen the impact of decades of racial discrimination in jobs, housing, and education. By 1969, with Richard Nixon at the helm, during an economic downturn that ended what was then the longest economic expansion in American history, the conservatives attacked the notion of the “social contract” embedded in all of these programs, claiming that they rewarded laziness and were evidence of special rights for some. When Nixon ran for reëlection, in 1972, he claimed that his campaign pitted the “work ethic” against the “welfare ethic.”

This was an attack not only on public aid and subsidized housing but also on the people using those programs. Republicans successfully tapped into the racial resentments of white suburbanites, who decried “their” tax dollars going to unruly, rioting African-Americans. They resented “forced integration,” “forced busing,” and “the bureaucrats,” as Nixon derisively called the previous Democratic Administrations. It is important to understand that this was not demonization for its own sake or because of some irrational antipathy toward African-Americans. This was about keeping the corporate tax rate low and reëstablishing the profitability of capital in the aftermath of another, longer economic downturn. It is hard for businesses and their political representatives to counsel ordinary workers to do more with less. It was easier to blame welfare queens, welfare cheats, and an oblique, yet black, underclass for the end of these “wasteful” programs. In 1973, Nixon unceremoniously declared an end to the “urban crisis”—the catalyst for much of Johnson’s welfare state. This created the pretext for his gutting of the Office of Economic Opportunity, the office that managed the web of anti-poverty programs created by the War on Poverty.

The eventual defection of ordinary white voters from the Democratic Party to the Republicans meant that the Democrats soon aped the right’s strategy of downplaying the structural roots of inequality while portraying black communities as ultimately responsible for their own hardships. By the end of the nineteen-eighties, the Democratic Party was championing law-and-order politics and harsh, racist attacks on welfare entitlements. In a 1988 column for the Post of Newark, Delaware, titled “Welfare System About to Change,” the then Senator Biden wrote, “We are all too familiar with the stories of welfare mothers driving luxury cars and leading lifestyles that mirror the rich and famous. Whether they are exaggerated or not, these stories underlie a broad social concern that the welfare system has broken down-- that it only parcels out welfare checks and does nothing to help the poor find productive jobs.” This statement was hardly extraordinary; it reflected widespread efforts to transform public perceptions of the Democratic Party. By the early nineties, President Bill Clinton was promising to “end welfare as we know it,” which he succeeded in doing by the end of the decade.

This is the historical backdrop to the hypocrisy of U.S. government-spending priorities today. Bipartisan denunciations of big government do not apply to the obscene amounts spent on the military or the maintenance of the nation’s criminal-justice system. The U.S., across all levels of government, spends more than eighty billion dollars annually to operate jails and prisons and to maintain probation and parole. The budget for the U.S. armed forces topped out at a stunning seven hundred and thirty-eight billion dollars for this year alone-- more than the next seven largest military budgets in the world. Meanwhile, social-welfare programs-- from food stamps to Medicaid, to subsidized and assisted housing, to public schools-- are forced to provide on the thinnest margin, triaging crises, rather than actually pulling people out of poverty.

When Bernie Sanders’s critics mocked his platform as just a bunch of “free stuff,” they were drawing on the past forty years of bipartisan consensus about social-welfare benefits and entitlements. They have argued, instead, that competition organized through the market insures more choices and better quality. In fact, the surreality of market logic was on clear display when, on March 13th, Donald Trump held a press conference to discuss the covid-19 crisis with executives from Walgreens, Target, Walmart, and CVS, and a host of laboratory, research, and medical-device corporations. There were no social-service providers or educators there to discuss the immediate, overwhelming needs of the public.

The crisis is laying bare the brutality of an economy organized around production for the sake of profit and not human need. The logic that the free market knows best can be seen in the prioritization of affordability in health care as millions careen toward economic ruin. It is seen in the ways that states have been thrown into frantic competition with one another for personal protective equipment and ventilators—the equipment goes to whichever state can pay the most. It can be seen in the still criminally slow and inefficient and inconsistent testing for the virus. It is found in the multi-billion-dollar bailout of the airline industry, alongside nickel-and-dime means tests to determine which people might be eligible to receive ridiculously inadequate public assistance.

The argument for resuming a viable social-welfare state is about not only attending to the immediate needs of tens of millions of people but also reëstablishing social connectivity, collective responsibility, and a sense of common purpose, if not common wealth. In an unrelenting and unemotional way, covid-19 is demonstrating the vastness of our human connection and mutuality. Our collectivity must be borne out in public policies that repair the friable welfare infrastructure that threatens to collapse beneath our social weight. A society that allows hundreds of thousands of home health-care workers to labor without health insurance, that keeps school buildings open so that black and brown children can eat and be sheltered, that allows millionaires to stow their wealth in empty apartments while homeless families navigate the streets, that threatens eviction and loan defaults while hundreds of millions are mandated to stay inside to suppress the virus, is bewildering in its incoherence and inhumanity.

Naomi Klein has written about how the political class has used social catastrophes to create policies that allow for private plunder. She calls it “disaster capitalism,” or the “shock doctrine.” But she has also written that, in each of these moments, there are also opportunities for ordinary people to transform their conditions in ways that benefit humanity. The class-driven hierarchy of our society will encourage the spread of this virus unless dramatic and previously unthinkable solutions are immediately put on the table. As Sanders has counselled, we must think in unprecedented ways. This includes universal health care, an indefinite moratorium on evictions and foreclosures, the cancellation of student-loan debt, a universal basic income, and the reversal of all cuts to food stamps. These are the basic measures that can staunch the immediate crisis of deprivation-- of millions of layoffs and millions more to come.

The Sanders campaign was an entry point to this discussion. It has shown public appetite, even desire, for vast spending and new programs. These desires did not translate into votes because they seemed like a risky endeavor when the consequence was four more years of Trump. But the mushrooming crisis of covid-19 is changing the calculus. As federal officials announce new trillion-dollar aid packages daily, we can never go back to banal discussions of “How will we pay for it?” How can we not? Now is a moment to remake our society anew.

The RealClearPolitics head-to-head general election averages show Bernie beating Trump by nearly 6 points. The average is 50.5% to 44.8%. The most recent poll (last week by Harris) shows Bernie beating Trump 53-47%, exactly the same as the most recent Emerson polling of the week before.

It doesn't matter if Bernie has far more support in California than Biden does because no matter which candidate faces Trump in November, California's 55 electoral votes will go to that candidate. Nor does it matter that Biden has far more support than Bernie does in South Carolina because no matter how much huffing and puffing Jim Clyburn does this fall, South Carolina's 9 electoral votes are going-- uncontested-- to Trump. But you know what is important? Swing states, where the winner of the 2020 election will be determined. The RealClearPolitics polling average of Wisconsin shows Trump and Biden tied all year-- 45.0% to 45.0%. Democrats need those 10 electoral votes, that their status quo candidate lost in 2016. And Bernie has been ahead of Trump in Wisconsin all year-- and their average right now shows Bernie leading 46.2% to 45.2%. The average in Florida shows Biden and Bernie both losing to Trump, Biden by less... but the polling this year shows that Florida's 29 electoral votes are going to Trump no matter who the Democratic candidate is. That just makes Michigan's 16 electoral votes all the more crucial. Again, the Democrats' status quo candidate lost Michigan to Trump in 2016. This year Bernie is ahead of Trump 46.3% to 41.8%. Trump is so unpopular in the state that even Status Quo Joe is ahead of him-- albeit by a bit less than Bernie: 46.2% to 41.8%. Both Bernie and Biden lead Trump in Pennsylvania, Minnesota and North Carolina. And Trump is ahead of both in Texas, although Bernie is closer and has a better chance of closing the gap. It's the opposite in Georgia where Trump leads them both but Biden is closer.

MSNBC has done everything its corporate masters have demanded to make it look like the race is over and that Biden is the nominee. It isn't over and yesterday Juan Cole noted that elections will be conducted in such a way going forward that will be advantageous to progressives and harm those who have benefitted from keeping voting to a minimum, namely the conservative establishment. He began with Trump's admission on Fox News "that a mail-in ballot program that made it possible for the public to vote with ease and increased turnout would keep Republicans from ever being elected again."

Hispanics are now 18 percent of the US population, up from about 6 percent in 1980. In order to win fairly, Republicans needed to gain a significant proportion of that vote. The Bush’s knew this, and cultivated that constituency. George W. Bush typically attracted 40 percent of the Hispanic vote. But the dominance of Evangelicals and xenophobic southern and rural whites turned the party increasingly xenophobic and anti-immigrant. (Most Hispanic Americans are not immigrants, but many whites coded them that way). The increasingly vitriolic racism of the Tea Party and the Republican base against Hispanics drove some of them out of the party. Trump only got 28 percent of the Hispanic vote, very substantially off from Bush’s percentages. His favorability ratings by late last fall had further fallen among Hispanics to only 25 percent.

Then, Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders now make up 6 percent of the US population, up from 1.6 percent in 1980. They now comed to over 20 million people. Many were conservative and business-oriented and the old Republican Party had a shot at them. But the racism has also caused many of them to flee. They heavily now favor the Democrats and they really don’t like Trump.

Further, according to Pew, white evangelicals as a proportion of the population have plummeted from 23 percent in 2004 to only 16 percent today. Pew finds that among white Protestants, evangelicals have retained their proportion, but not in the general population (i.e. many fewer Americans identify as Protestants or as religious at all). So white evangelicals could help put Bush in the White House, but just don’t have that kind of moxie any more.

And another thing: the proportion of whites in the population has fallen to only 60 percent from 75 percent in 2000. The number of counties that are majority non-white is rising. So since some significant proportion of whites vote Democratic, you can’t get elected just with what’s left of the white vote. Trump got in only because a few tens of thousands of traditionally Democratic whites in the Midwest switched to him because he said he’d bring jobs back from China and because there was a significant fall-off in the African-American vote, at least a point in Michigan, for instance.

So the lesson is that Republicans can now only win by poaching whites from the Democrats and by suppressing the minority vote.

They succeeded in 2016 (and the lackluster campaign of Hillary Clinton helped). But in the electoral college, Trump’s victory was by the skin of his teeth in three Midwestern states. The old saying attributed to circus impresario P. T. Barnum is that “A sucker is born every minute.” But the opinion polling in Michigan, at least, does not support the notion that white workers are likely to be suckered again.

So if Trump can’t steal some white Democrats this time, that really does leave only one hope, which is to find ways of preventing African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians from voting.

The Republican Party has obviously made some very bad choices. Gravitating to the Neo-Fascist Breitbart crowd, the nativist crazies, the rapidly declining evangelicals, and generally old white people has been stupid policy. But it is in many ways Nixon’s legacy. What worked in the 1980s may not work in the 2020s. And if the numbers are any indication, the Republicans could become a long-term minority in the near future, as there were from 1931 until 1952.

The arc of history may or may not bend toward justice but it sure as hell bends toward reality.

Many People Say Trump Started The California Wildfires As A Kind Of Sick Revenge

Rep. Mark DeSaulnier represents a district (CA-11) northeast of San Francisco and Oakland-- most of Contra Costa County: Walnut Creek, Concord, Pittsburg, Danville Antioch, Mount Diablo-- where people are always vigilant to the dangers of wildfires. Mark sits on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and on the Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials. This morning, as the California wildfires continue to cause devastation, he reminded us that "California has some of the strongest environmental laws in the country, but the effects of climate change are causing fires to intensify, and the anti-environment policies enacted by the Trump Administration are only making matters worse. Trump’s attacks on California’s leaders are baseless, and he is grasping at straws to gin up support from his political base. If the President acts on his threat of stripping funding from California, it will be met with fierce opposition."

The California fires are no laughing matter, but Trump is a joke, albeit a tragic one. How predictable is it for him to try blaming the raging California fires on... Adam Schiff and on other Democrats he doesn't like. The L.A. Times covered it over the weekend. James Rainey wrote that "Autumn in California now comes not only with fierce, wind-driven wildfires but with routine claims from President Trump that the state’s leaders are to blame for the disasters, followed by assurances from experts that the president doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The cycle renewed again Sunday, when Trump tweeted that Gov. Gavin Newsom and U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank) had failed to properly manage the state’s forests, causing a string of recent blazes. Newsom 'has done a terrible job of forest management. I told him from the first day we met that he must clean his forest floors regardless of what his bosses, the environmentalists, DEMAND of him. Must also do burns and cut fire stoppers,' Trump said in an early-morning missive on Twitter.

A few hours later he concluded a slam on Democrats for their impeachment inquiry against him, concluding, “Corrupt Adam should clean up & manage the California forests which are always burning!”

The president tossed in a shot at the state for its “ridiculously closed” water distribution policies.

The missives drew a combination of incredulity and anger from many Californians, in part because the vast majority of the acres consumed by fire since early October were grasslands and chaparral, far from the forest.

Residents also remarked on the president’s failure to express sympathy for the thousands of people displaced from their homes in recent weeks.

The online fracas did little to illuminate the realities of forest or water policy in California.

Of the 33 million acres of forest in the state, 57% is controlled by the federal government and even the timber industry-- which Trump appears to be trying to support-- has slammed the U.S. for doing too little to manage those vast holdings.

California’s leaders have acknowledged the need to reduce the fuel buildup in the forest the state does control. Gov. Jerry Brown signed a series of bills last year to streamline regulations for thinning forests in fire zones, allow limited removal of some larger trees and force cities and counties to plan better defenses for homes and communities. And Newsom has continued fire threat-reduction initiatives since he took office in January.

“You don’t believe in climate change. You are excused from this conversation,” Newsom responded to Trump via Twitter. The governor later issued a statement: “We’re successfully waging war against thousands of fires started across the state in the last few weeks due to extreme weather created by climate change while Trump is conducting a full on assault against the antidotes.”

The state government’s expanded commitment to wildfire prevention under Brown included a $1-billion pledge over five years to clean up thousands of acres of deadwood, scrub brush and forest — California’s biggest-ever program to reduce fire fuels.

That $200 million-a-year annual commitment and other spending are helping the state by “reducing fuels in the forest, increasing forest health, and defensible space around homes,” Newsom’s office said.

Countering Trump’s contention that the governor is in the thrall of environmentalists, his office said he had waived environmental regulations to fast-track work on 35 critical fire breaks to protect 200 of the state’s most vulnerable communities.

Newsom’s office contrasted California’s stepped-up efforts with what it said was the federal government’s slashing of spending on the same kind of work.

The U.S. Forest Service has reduced the forest it plans to “treat” through thinning, controlled burns and other measures to 220,000 acres, from the previously promised 310,000 acres, Newsom’s office said.

And California said Trump’s 2020 budget cut $40 million from hazardous fuels reduction.

But that discussion is all about forest land, while the fires that have bedeviled California for several weeks have mostly ignited far away from the tall timber.

The most destructive of the wildfires broke out in brushland near the 405 Freeway on L.A.'s suburban Westside, not far from the Getty Center museum. It was similar terrain that sparked the Easy fire, which threatened the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley.

The Hillside fire began in national forest land in the San Bernardino National Forest, before quickly burning downhill into a San Bernardino neighborhood.

Although the massive Kincade fire in Sonoma County burned some forest, it also shifted into grass and scrub country alongside vineyards.

“These fires are not burning in forested landscapes where you could go in and do anything to alter the forest,” said Glen MacDonald, a geography professor at UCLA and expert on climate change and wildfire. “These are scrublands and grasslands and a discussion of forest management is completely not applicable.”

Trump’s statements also fail to acknowledge the amount of work California has done to correct a legacy of fire containment that has left some forests overgrown and loaded with fuel, said Jay Ziegler, director of policy for the Nature Conservancy in California.

“California’s pace and scale of action in addressing this issue at the end of the Brown administration and now under Gov. Newsom is really unprecedented,” Ziegler said.

Trump’s slam was the latest in a series of attacks on California, coming after his attempt to reverse the state’s stringent fuel efficiency requirements for cars and trucks and his blaming of government for the exploding homeless population.

The White House issued no official statement on wildfires, but it appeared the president may have been responding to an interview in which Newsom accused Trump of “a full-on assault” on the state’s attempts to rein in Earth-warming greenhouses gases.

Trump concluded his string of three tweets on California’s wildfires with his attack on the state’s water regulations.

“Also, open up the ridiculously closed water lanes coming down from the North,” he wrote. “Don’t pour it out into the Pacific Ocean. Should be done immediately. California desperately needs water, and you can have it now!”

That embraces the position of some of the state’s farmers-- that too much water is being allowed to flow into the San Joaquin and Sacramento River delta to support salmon, other fish and endangered species.

But it belies the fact that greater snowpack in 2017 and 2019 allowed bigger water allotments to Central Valley farmers, Ziegler said.

“It’s really misleading to tell farmers they could do better and get more water in future years,” Ziegler said, “when we are right at historic export levels because of the big winters we had in 2017 and 2019.”

Trump’s latest broadside comes just short of one year since he attacked California for “gross mismanagement of the forests.”

As with his most recent tweet, he then threatened to withdraw funding from the state, saying “Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”

Among those chastising the president then was the president of the California Professional Firefighters. Brian Rice called Trump’s message and threat to withhold aid “ill-informed, ill-timed and demeaning to those who are suffering as well as the men and women on the front lines.”

A couple of months before that, Trump had used Twitter to claim that wildfires were “being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amount of readily available water to be properly utilized.”

Again, experts closest to the scene corrected him. “We have plenty of water,” said Scott McLean, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “We are not having any issues with a lack of retardant or water.”

In his latest message Sunday, Trump said that the yearly pattern of fire in California was routinely followed by the state “coming to the Federal Government for $$$ help.” He added: “No more.”

That pronouncement particularly infuriated those who had read just three months ago how Trump had told Russian President Vladimir Putin that the U.S. stood ready to send aid to fight massive wildfires in Siberia.

Tweeted one disgruntled American on Sunday: “You forgot to send your thoughts and prayers to those affected by the fires....but of course we in California didn’t help get you elected so you don’t give a damn about us.”

In 2016, Hillary absolutely pulverized Trump in California--  8,753,788 (61.73%) to 4,483,810 (31.62%). And two years later, just in case Trump didn't get the idea about how the state feels about him, half of California's Republican members of Congress were defeated by Democrats-- 7 out of 14. Orange County was once to the GOP what Bavaria was to the Nazi Party in Germany. Now there is not a single federally-elected Republican left in the county-- 4 having gone down in the 2018 midterms. Next year, a competent DCCC would take down the rest of the California Republicans or at least win the LaMalfa, Nunes, Hunter and McClintock seats as well as the open Cook seat... but there hasn't been a competent DCCC in decades. You can help turn California bluer by clicking on the 2020 California thermometer on the right and contributing what you can to the progressives running against LaMalfa (R), Nunes (R), Republican-lite Blue Dog Jim Costa and one other very special California Democrat who opposes Medicare-for-All and the Green New Deal.

Rep. Barbara Lee, like most people in California, is angry at the way Trump is approaching the fires. "Trump," she told her supporters, "is threatening to pull federal aid for those affected. Thousands of people have been forced to evacuate their homes while thousands more watch the radar in fear as new areas fall under critical threat. For Trump to threaten to pull federal aid for those desperately in need makes me sick. My heart is with all those impacted by these terrible wildfires. I’m so grateful for the first responders who have been working tirelessly to keep us safe in California." She asked people who would normally be contributing to her to give what they can to the California Community Foundation’s Wildfire Relief Fund to help all those impacted by the California wildfires.

Who Goes To Prison First-- Barr Or Giuliani?

An economic survey for CNBC that was completed before the Ukraine scandal and impeachment mania shows that Trump's job approval rating has continued to collapse and is now at an all-time low for this poll-- 37% approve, 53% disapprove (minus 16). Because of recent developments, the survey is out of date and superseded by more recent polls showing even worse numbers for Trump.

My favorite pollsters this cycle, Change Research, went into 31 Democratic-held districts-- districts that Trump won in 2016 but that Obama had won at least once-- after Pelosi had come out for impeachment, but before the Ukraine scandal had broken wide open. 63% of likely voters in these fairly key districts-- 71% of Hillary voters and 51% of the mentally challenged morons who are stupid enough to have voted for Trump-- are following the news closely. Key findings:

• 63% of likely voters are very closely following the "news of the recent intelligence community whistleblower complaint about President Trump’s communications and actions concerning Ukraine.” 71% of Clinton voters are currently following this news very closely compared with 51% of Trump voters.
• 45% of likely voters, including 85% of Democrats and 42% of independent voters, say “President Trump’s communications and actions concerning Ukraine” raise very serious concerns. (By comparison, just 36% of voters are very seriously concerned about “Joe Biden’s dealings with Ukraine while he was Vice President.”)
• Voters in these Trump-won seats are evenly split on the impeachment issue: 49% support “opening an impeachment inquiry, while also working on other priorities,” including 43% who support it strongly. 49% also support “voting to impeach” the President at this time. Already, 72% of the white college women who were so critical to Democrats’ gains in 2018 support impeachment, as do 48% of independents.

As Jimmy Kimmel said on his show, you can't say Trump is unravelling because it implies he was once raveled. And Kimmel wasn't the only late night comic making fun of Trump's pathetic twitter-campaign against impeachment. Watch Trevor Noah and Colbert. And here's Seth Meyers:





Does Trump have a plan to avoid being impeached? Politico reported his team is scrambling to come up with one and that right now there's no plan, no strategy and not even unified messaging to fight back. Just Trump, high on Adderall making a jerk out of himself on Twitter. This attitude probably will sink him:

“He doesn’t need a war room,” said Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and an informal Trump political adviser. “This is not about impeachment. This is just a coup d’état.”

The infighting over the fate of a war room reflects the long-standing operational styles of the Trump White House and 2016 campaign over the past four years, during which personnel battles often overshadowed any well-honed strategy. The president has always preferred to run his White House with a team-of-rivals approach, with aides fighting over various policies or political options and Trump alone as the decider at the center of the action.

As John Harwood reported for CNBC, as Trump and his enablers in Congress and the White House "have feverishly sought to redirect a whistleblower’s complaints toward Democratic adversaries, the evidence makes mincemeat out their weak parries. Hardwood reported that GOP defenses for Señor Trumpanzee's conduct on Ukraine "simply don’t hold up... [E]ven cursory scrutiny of evidence that has emerged so far knocks down assorted GOP arguments like shanties in a hurricane... 'The fissures are growing,' GOP former Rep. Carlos Curbelo told me. 'I’ve heard from members who are at the end of their ropes. They just feel trapped.'" And now even 23% of Republican voters support an impeachment inquiry. Drip, drip, drip.

Even while the Trump grievance machine is reaping millions for his campaign (and defense)-- 50,000-plus new donors and $8.5 million in two days-- David Frum wrote in his Atlantic column how Trump is taking the opposite approach to impeachment strategy that Bill Clinton did. "During the Lewinsky scandal, Clinton focused on doing his job. Trump isn’t even pretending... Trump may have no impeachment war room, but he does have an impeachment strategy. He deployed it this past weekend. It’s the same strategy he brought to his presidential campaign, then to his presidency: all base, all the time. In 1998 and ’99, Bill Clinton directed his anti-impeachment messaging to voters who did not necessarily approve of him, but who feared impeachment as disruptive. Trump’s message is aimed only at his most all-in supporters, those who see him as a victim of plots and persecution by shadowy, unseen forces."

One reason why Trump's defense is in a shambles-- aside from his own nature-- is that Giuliani and Barr have a contentious relationship. A team of Wall Street Journal reporters wrote that Barr thinks Giuliani is, basically, a clown and an incompetent and assert that Señor Trumpanzee's "relationships with his private lawyer who once aspired to be his attorney general and the man who currently has that post are complicating White House efforts to build a legal and public-relations strategy to keep Mr. Trump in office." Señor T "is receiving advice from two very different lawyers: Mr. Giuliani, who blankets the airwaves morning and evening with combative interviews and is prone to exaggeration; and Mr. Barr, a more measured figure but one who has drawn criticism for appearing overly close to Mr. Trump. As Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Mr. Giuliani’s job is to defend the president; as attorney general, Mr. Barr’s is to defend the Justice Department and the institution of the presidency. Yet Mr. Trump at times refers to the two men almost interchangeably. In a July call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which Mr. Trump pressed his counterpart to investigate Democrat Joe Biden, Mr. Trump didn’t draw a distinction between the roles of Messrs. Giuliani and Barr, saying repeatedly that he would have both of them call to discuss the possible Biden investigation and other matters."

“When he was in private life, Trump was accustomed to having lawyers where he was the client, he would give directives and they’d do their best to fulfill his directives,” a former senior administration official said. “The government works a little bit differently. That was something he didn’t know, didn’t appreciate and I’m not sure if he’s ever fully comes to terms with.”

Mr. Barr was surprised and angry to discover weeks later that the president had lumped him together with Mr. Giuliani on the phone call with Mr. Zelensky, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Justice Department said Mr. Trump never asked Mr. Barr to contact the Ukrainians.

House committees on Monday subpoenaed Mr. Giuliani for documents related to his efforts to pressure Ukraine to probe Mr. Biden. Mr. Giuliani didn’t respond to a question about whether he would comply.

Democrats have used the Trump-Zelensky phone call to raise questions about Mr. Barr’s own conduct. “I do think the attorney general has gone rogue,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said Friday on CNN. “Since he was mentioned in all of this, it’s curious that he would be making decisions about how the complaint would be handled.”

...In the days since House Democrats opened an impeachment inquiry, Mr. Giuliani has been a near-constant fixture on TV, declaring himself a whistleblower and confirming he would deliver a paid speech at a Kremlin-backed conference, only to reverse himself hours later. Mr. Barr, in contrast, departed for Italy for a previously scheduled trip and hasn’t spoken publicly.

On Monday, a Justice Department official said Mr. Barr had asked the president to make introductions in several countries that may have information relevant to a federal probe into the origins of the Mueller investigation, which Mr. Trump has repeatedly decried as a “witch hunt.”

One such introduction was to Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, whom Mr. Trump recently called at Mr. Barr’s request, two government officials said. The FBI opened its counterintelligence investigation in July 2016 after the Australian government tipped off the U.S. that another foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign appeared to have foreknowledge of the release of hacked material by Russia.

Despite legal careers that intersected under Mr. Trump, people close to Mr. Barr say he and Mr. Giuliani have never been close and that he is privately mystified by what many in conservative legal circles view as Mr. Giuliani’s meddling in matters that should be handled by officials in government. Mr. Barr has privately told associates that he believes Mr. Giuliani’s behavior in general isn’t helpful to the administration.

Mr. Trump likes and respects Mr. Giuliani but his perception of him is “cyclical” and varies depending on the day, a person close to the president said. The president so far appears to appreciate Mr. Giuliani’s very public defense of their Ukraine strategy. On Wednesday, speaking at the United Nations, Mr. Trump called Mr. Giuliani a “great lawyer” and said: “I’ve watched the passion that he’s had on television over the last few days. I think it’s incredible the way he’s done.”

“The only person that likes Rudy on TV right now is Trump,” said another person close to the president, adding that Mr. Trump “likes people who get on TV and fight for him.”

Giuliani has known the president for decades, but bolstered his standing with Mr. Trump with his loyal support of his campaign in 2016. Mr. Trump didn’t always return the favor. He often needled the former mayor for falling asleep on long flights, and joked about whether Mr. Giuliani was looking at cartoons on his iPad, a former aide said.





Mr. Trump also berated Mr. Giuliani in front of others at the wedding of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in 2017. The president complained that Mr. Giuliani was spitting while he was talking and ordered him to stand elsewhere, the aide said.

After the release of the Access Hollywood tape weeks before the election in which Mr. Trump was captured making lewd comments about women, few advisers were willing to go on the Sunday talk shows to defend the candidate. Mr. Giuliani taped all five shows-- after which Mr. Trump attacked him for his performance. “Man, Rudy, you sucked. You were weak. Low energy,” the candidate told him, according to a book by two former campaign aides, Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie.

Mr. Giuliani rarely complained about such treatment, jockeying with other aides and advisers to sit next to Mr. Trump at dinner or on the plane. “Rudy never wanted to be left out,” one former aide said. “If you were ever between Rudy and the president, look out. You were going to get trampled.”

After the election, Mr. Giuliani was eager for an administration post-- foremost, that of attorney general. He didn’t get it.

Yet Mr. Trump valued his loyalty. In staff meetings at the White House, the president would pre-empt complaints about Mr. Giuliani’s behavior on television by interrupting and making clear that he appreciated how hard the former mayor was fighting for him.

“Everyone shuts up after that,” a White House aide said.

Mr. Trump didn’t know Mr. Barr well before tapping him as the country’s top prosecutor on the recommendation of his legal advisers. Their relationship grew stronger during the final stages of the Mueller investigation, an administration official said, adding that Mr. Trump was pleased with the way his attorney general handled the end of the probe. In the months since, Mr. Trump has often privately praised Mr. Barr, and the two speak regularly.

Mr. Barr unrolled the Mueller team’s findings in a way that favored Mr. Trump, prompting criticism that he appeared overly interested in defending the president and risked the Justice Department’s independence from the White House. It was Mr. Barr who determined, along with then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, that Mr. Trump hadn’t obstructed justice, after Mr. Mueller opted not to make a decision on that matter, citing a Justice Department policy barring the indictment of sitting presidents.

A couple days ago right-wing journalist Joel Gehrke reported that Giuliani's incompetence led to what looks like Trump's impeachment. He reported that Giuliani was conned by Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuri Lutsenko, "a disreputable official who hoped to avoid being fired by President Volodymyr. "Lutsenko, 54, convinced Giuliani," according to Gehrke, "that he had evidence of corruption involving former Vice President Joe Biden. But his back-channel meetings are widely perceived as an attempt to forge the kind of political alliance with Trump that would make it difficult for Zelensky to oust him.

When Lutsenko’s allegations provoked Trump to recall the top U.S. ambassador in Kiev, Kurt Volker, the other key American diplomat in Ukraine policy, downplayed the issue by casting doubt on the outgoing prosecutor’s motives.

“Other people in Ukraine are trying to use the U.S. domestic politics as a vehicle for their own engagement, either in fighting their domestic enemies inside Ukraine or trying to feel like they’ve got some special relationship with people in the United States,” Volker, who resigned last week as the State Department’s special representative for the war in Ukraine, said in May.

That was Volker’s explanation for a series of explosive allegations that Lutsenko aired throughout the spring, as Zelensky surged in the presidential elections. Lutsenko claimed to have evidence that Ukrainian officials helped 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign by leaking information that would lead to the indictment of a Trump campaign adviser.

Lutsenko also suggested that Biden had protected his son, Hunter, by pressuring Ukrainian officials to fire a previous prosecutor who was investigating a company that had hired the younger Biden. Trump would echo these suspicions in his now-famous July 25 phone call with Zelensky, but Ukrainian activists counter that Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor Biden denounced, was in fact refusing to investigate the company.

“He was dismissed because of a lack of willingness to investigate this particular case as well as other important cases,” Daria Kaleniuk, director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, said in July. “[Lutsenko] wanted to become a person with whom people in the United States wanted to talk, and then probably he found Giuliani and found a sexy story that fit into the Giuliani agenda.”

Lutsenko had a motive for resorting to these tactics. The prosecutor general was an ally of the outgoing president, Petro Poroshenko, the oligarch who came to power after Yanukovych was ousted in 2014. When Lutsenko was appointed in 2016, he had a “reformist” reputation due to his record as an enemy of Yanukovych, but that would change.

“By the time Zelensky was running, it was pretty clear that all of these corruption investigations under Poroshenko and Lutsenko's watch wasn't going anywhere,” Shevel said. “And so, clearly the idea would be that there would be changes.”

Lutsenko lost his job at the end of August, but Giuliani kept pursuing the allegations against the Bidens. Now, the ex-prosecutor is now undermining those efforts, portraying Giuliani as pushing him to “start an investigation just for the interests of an American official” and adding that he knew of no illegal activity by either the former vice president or his son.

“The president has done things ... based on his obvious presumption that there is something to be found about Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton in Ukraine,” said the central European specialist. “What if there's no there there? It means, then, that Giuliani may have drawn Trump into a situation which is, politically, extraordinarily damaging-- for no purpose.”

Many Americans look forward to seeing both Giuliani and Barr behind bars-- sooner the better.

Republicans Stick Like Glue To Trump-- He Really Does Represent What They Are

Like their dear leader Trump, 9% of Americans think there's no such thing as Climate Change. Trump has convinced himself that the Climate Crisis is nothing but a "Chinese hoax. Everyone else, according to a new poll from CBS News, now recognizes that Climate Change is for real and most Americans feel we've got to address it or suffer the consequences. Most Republicans poo-poo the whole idea of it, another reason these people just do not belong in government on any level.

That's the problems with the critique of Trump from the right. Conservatives tend to be nearly as dangerous to the country as he is. Just as the neo-fascist Michigan GOP joined 4 other extremist state Republican parties to openly fix the Republican primary for Trump, one of his opponents, ex-Tea Party congressman Joe Walsh claimed that the GOP has turned into a cult. "State law," wrote Malachi Barrett, "prevents Michigan Republicans from joining other states to cancel their presidential primaries, but the state party adopted changes all but assuring its delegates will go to President Donald Trump and not his long-shot GOP challengers... Michigan Republican Party spokesperson Tony Zammit said the state party’s delegate apportionment rules were changed this year, requiring candidates to receive at least 20% of the primary vote in order to receive any delegates. The other Republican parties with neo-fascist, fully authoritarian leadership who have bowed to the Trump campaign's demands are in Arizona, Kansas, Nevada and South Carolina... Trump’s challengers said cancelling primaries disenfranchises voters and silences criticism of the president." Trump's excuse: "The four states that canceled it don’t want to waste their money. If there was a race, they would certainly want to do that. But they’re considered to be a laughing stock. They’re considered to be a joke. And those four states don’t want to waste their money. Having primary campaigns and having a primary election is very expensive."

3 Stooges by Nancy Ohanian

Walsh says his campaign is strictly about one thing and one thing only: Trump. And he said the Republican Party leaders, singling out House minority leaders Kevin McCarthy, seem to be "scared to death" of Señor Trumpanzee, which, he said, is "an absolute shame." The shame is that the Republican Party remains moored in the backwards politics of conservatism-- and that includes not just McCarthy but Walsh as well.





"Look," said Walsh, "I believe Trump is unfit. I believe he lies virtually every time he opens his mouth. I believe he’s a danger to this country. I guarantee you most of my former colleagues privately, they feel the same way about Trump. And what they are hoping for, David, is that he loses in 2010. They know, Kevin McCarthy knows, that because of Donald Trump, the Republican Party is losing young people, they’re losing people of color, they’re losing women, and they’re losing people in the suburbs. Donald Trump is destroying the party but yet they want him to leave in two years in 2020, and then they think they can pick the pieces up again. That’s cowardly and that’s wrong... All Trump cares about is Trump. So Trump will use racism and bigotry and xenophobia and anything-- he’ll use anything if it helps Trump... Look, this election is not about Trump’s tariffs or Trump’s debt increases. This is about Trump. It’s a referendum on Trump. The man is unfit. Conway knows that and I know that."

But... ask any of the anti-Trump Republicans about Climate Change. Ian fact-- ask any conservatives about Climate Change. They're too busy with materialism to learn about the threat it poses. No, don't ask Republicans or conservative Democrats about the Climate Crisis... ask Bernie instead: