What happens to the Republican Party now? (3 Viewers)

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    MT15

    MT15

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    This election nonsense by Trump may end up splitting up the Republican Party. I just don’t see how the one third (?) who are principled conservatives can stay in the same party with Trump sycophants who are willing to sign onto the TX Supreme Court case.

    We also saw the alt right types chanting “destroy the GOP” in Washington today because they didn’t keep Trump in power. I think the Q types will also hold the same ill will toward the traditional Republican Party. In fact its quite possible that all the voters who are really in a Trump personality cult will also blame the GOP for his loss. It’s only a matter of time IMO before Trump himself gets around to blaming the GOP.

    There is some discussion of this on Twitter. What do you all think?



     
    www.theatlantic.com

    A Political Party Unhinged From Truth

    What I learned while I worked on a book about the state of the GOP.
    www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com


    The defendant, a 55-year-old health-insurance salesman named Scott Brian Haven, wasn’t protesting his innocence. He openly acknowledged that over the two-year period before his arrest in the summer of 2019, he had placed 3,950 calls to the Washington offices of various Democratic members of Congress, spewing profanities and threatening violence against them.

    But as the prosecutor listed a sampling of Haven’s vile threats in the courtroom, the defendant—a devout Mormon who served meals to homeless people in downtown Salt Lake City—seemed unable to recognize those sentiments as his own.
    Click to expand...


    It took months of reporting before I fully appreciated the pervasiveness of the Big Lie. As I came to learn, the hallucinatory claim that a grand if largely unnamed conspiracy managed to snatch victory away from Trump and hand it to Joe Biden is not a trivial, stand-alone falsehood. Instead, it has become as central to the MAGA belief system as the crucifixion of Jesus is to Christianity. It affirms the martyrdom of their revered leader as well as the incorrigibility of his persecutors. Furthermore, it encourages the belief that the former president’s imagined adversaries across the globe have colluded with domestic malefactors to undermine all manner of American liberties. In these fevered scenarios, Venezuela and South Korea have corrupted our electoral ballots, China has implanted COVID vaccines with mind-control devices, and liberal Jewish billionaires like George Soros have underwritten acts of domestic terrorism. I attended a two-day ReAwaken America convention of right-wing influencers earlier this year at a Phoenix megachurch in which each of these claims was uttered from the stage, to more than 3,000 attendees. And I’m sorry to report that those conspiracy theories were not even the craziest I heard at the convention.[/quote\
    Click to expand...
     
    There’s a story Republicans tell about the politics of rural America, one aimed at both rural people and the rest of us.

    It goes like this: Those coastal urban elitist Democrats look down their noses at you, but the GOP has got your back. They hate you; we love you. They ignore you; we’re working for you. Whatever you do, don’t even think about voting for a Democrat.


    And for the most part, they don’t. Donald Trump won 71 percent of White rural votes in 2020, a significant improvement over the 62 percent he got in 2016.

    That story pervades our discussion of the rural-urban divide in U.S. politics. But it’s fundamentally false.

    The reality is complex, but one thing you absolutely cannot say is that Democrats don’t try to help rural America.

    In fact, they probably work harder at it than Republicans do.

    Let’s talk about just one area that has been of particular interest to Democrats, and to rural people themselves: high-speed internet access, a problem that’s addressed by hundreds of millions of dollars in funding that the Biden administration announced this week.


    The problem is straightforward: The less dense an area is, the harder it is for private companies to make a profit providing internet service.

    Laying a mile of fiber-optic cable to reach a hundred apartment buildings is a lot more efficient than laying a mile of cable to reach one family farm…….

     
    Optimus Prime said:
    There’s a story Republicans tell about the politics of rural America, one aimed at both rural people and the rest of us.

    It goes like this: Those coastal urban elitist Democrats look down their noses at you, but the GOP has got your back. They hate you; we love you. They ignore you; we’re working for you. Whatever you do, don’t even think about voting for a Democrat.


    And for the most part, they don’t. Donald Trump won 71 percent of White rural votes in 2020, a significant improvement over the 62 percent he got in 2016.

    That story pervades our discussion of the rural-urban divide in U.S. politics. But it’s fundamentally false.

    The reality is complex, but one thing you absolutely cannot say is that Democrats don’t try to help rural America.

    In fact, they probably work harder at it than Republicans do.

    Let’s talk about just one area that has been of particular interest to Democrats, and to rural people themselves: high-speed internet access, a problem that’s addressed by hundreds of millions of dollars in funding that the Biden administration announced this week.


    The problem is straightforward: The less dense an area is, the harder it is for private companies to make a profit providing internet service.

    Laying a mile of fiber-optic cable to reach a hundred apartment buildings is a lot more efficient than laying a mile of cable to reach one family farm…….

    Click to expand...

    But rural Americans don't really care. What they care about is guns, property rights and jobs.
     
    ……Raising the debt limit used to be one of those boring housekeeping tasks that Congress had to busy itself with to keep the government running.

    For decades, it was non-controversial, and so routine that at one point in 1979, the House of Representatives adopted a parliamentary rule that automatically raised the limit each time Congress passed a budget.

    That all changed in 1994, when the Republicans regained control of the House for the first time in nearly a half-century.

    Since then, every Republican-led Congress has tried to stymie every Democratic president by weaponising the threat of a catastrophic default on America’s sovereign debt.

    Last year, former Reagan administration Treasury official Bruce Bartlett told The Independent there was only a small number of GOP members who would welcome the result of a default, and those were “all f***ing morons who know absolutely nothing about finance, or how the Treasury operates or anything else”.

    With just days until the midterms, former Republican officeholders tell The Independentthat Republicans won’t hold back in their efforts to hurt the Biden administration, consequences be damned……

    www.independent.co.uk

    All the ways the GOP could upend America if they win the House

    Former Republicans tell Andrew Feinberg about the myriad ways a GOP-majority House could upend the country out of spite
    www.independent.co.uk www.independent.co.uk
     
    It should not be controversial to say that America has a major problem with right-wing political violence.

    The evidence continues to accumulate — yet the GOP continues to deny responsibility for this horrifying trend.


    On Friday, a man enflamed by right-wing conspiracy theories (including QAnon) entered the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and attacked her 82-year-old husband with a hammer, fracturing Paul Pelosi’s skull. “Where is Nancy?” he reportedly shouted, echoing the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, at President Donald Trump’s instigation.

    This comes after years of Republican demonization of the House speaker, a figure of hatred for the right rivaled only by Hillary Clinton.


    The same day as the Pelosi attack, a man pleaded guilty to making death threats against Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.).

    Two days earlier, three men who were motivated by right-wing, anti-lockdown hysteria after covid-19 hit were convicted of aiding a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D).

    In August, another man died after attacking an FBI office because he was so upset about the bureau’s search of Mar-a-Lago. “We must respond with force,” he wrote on Trump’s Truth Social website.

    Then there are all the terrible hate crimes, in cities including Pittsburgh, El Paso and Buffalo, where gunmen were motivated by the kind of racist rhetoric — especially the “great replacement theory” — now openly espoused on Fox “News.”


    This is where any fair-minded journalist has to offer an obligatory “to be sure” paragraph:

    To be sure, political violence is not confined to the right. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) was shot in 2017 by a gunman with leftist beliefs, and in June, a man was arrested for allegedly plotting to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh after becoming incensed about court rulings on abortion and guns.

    Republican leaders cite those attacks to exonerate themselves of any responsibility for political violence. “Violence is up across the board,” Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said on Sunday, arguing that it’s “unfair” to blame anti-Pelosi rhetoric for the assault on Pelosi’s husband.


    Violence is unacceptable whether from the left or right, period.

    But we can’t allow GOP leaders to get away with this false moral equivalency. They are evading their responsibility for their extremist rhetoric that all too often motivates extremist actions……,

     
    Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) voted to send pandemic relief checks to Americans. Nearly $1 million worth of ads from the National Republican Congressional Committee described it as putting money into the pockets of criminals, including the Boston Marathon bomber.

    Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) voted for a sweeping health-care, climate and deficit-cutting law. In September, Scott Baugh, her opponent, began running digital ads saying the congresswoman voted to hire “87,000 new IRS agents to audit middle-income families and small businesses.”

    Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, the Democratic nominee for governor, secured the endorsement of Planned Parenthood. Kari Lake, the Republican nominee, and the Yuma County Republican Party spun that into ads dubiously claiming that Hobbs was “endorsed by radical groups that want to defund our police.” Hobbs has said the exact opposite, with calls for “boosting funding for sheriffs and local law enforcement.”

    Campaign ads have always had a loose association with the nuances of governance. But as the midterm elections tighten into dozens of battlegrounds across the country, a number of GOP ads are showing a breathtaking disregard for accuracy and clarity, with Republican candidates and their allies twisting tangential elements into baseless or misleading claims.

    Donald Trump’s candidacy and presidency erased many of the traditional campaign guardrails in the GOP as Republicans adopted his approach of pushing fact-free arguments.

    Ken Frydman, who worked on Rudy Giuliani’s 1993 campaign for New York mayor and now runs his own communications firm, said, “In a post-truth age of Trump, candidates for office may feel more comfortable in exaggerating their records and inaccurately attacking their opponents.”

    Frydman said he always opposed Trump’s entry into politics “because I knew all about Trump since the 1980s.”

    Jason Reifler, a political science professor who taught in Georgia and Illinois before joining the faculty at the University of Exeter in Britain, said Trump introduced a whole new level of lying in politics.

    After reviewing several ads at The Washington Post’s request, he said they are “the sort of kernel-of-truth pushing the boundaries of what you can get away with” that both parties have run for decades.

    The ads “are inaccurate and misleading but they are not anywhere in the same league” as Trump’s lies about a stolen election, former president Barack Obama’s birth certificate, or linking the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) to the murder of President John F. Kennedy, he said.


    Reifler added: “Thirty-second spots do not really allow for nuanced political discussions and really incentivizes saying things that are as extreme as you can get away with.”.............

     
    Optimus Prime said:
    Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) voted to send pandemic relief checks to Americans. Nearly $1 million worth of ads from the National Republican Congressional Committee described it as putting money into the pockets of criminals, including the Boston Marathon bomber.

    Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) voted for a sweeping health-care, climate and deficit-cutting law. In September, Scott Baugh, her opponent, began running digital ads saying the congresswoman voted to hire “87,000 new IRS agents to audit middle-income families and small businesses.”

    Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, the Democratic nominee for governor, secured the endorsement of Planned Parenthood. Kari Lake, the Republican nominee, and the Yuma County Republican Party spun that into ads dubiously claiming that Hobbs was “endorsed by radical groups that want to defund our police.” Hobbs has said the exact opposite, with calls for “boosting funding for sheriffs and local law enforcement.”

    Campaign ads have always had a loose association with the nuances of governance. But as the midterm elections tighten into dozens of battlegrounds across the country, a number of GOP ads are showing a breathtaking disregard for accuracy and clarity, with Republican candidates and their allies twisting tangential elements into baseless or misleading claims.

    Donald Trump’s candidacy and presidency erased many of the traditional campaign guardrails in the GOP as Republicans adopted his approach of pushing fact-free arguments.

    Ken Frydman, who worked on Rudy Giuliani’s 1993 campaign for New York mayor and now runs his own communications firm, said, “In a post-truth age of Trump, candidates for office may feel more comfortable in exaggerating their records and inaccurately attacking their opponents.”

    Frydman said he always opposed Trump’s entry into politics “because I knew all about Trump since the 1980s.”

    Jason Reifler, a political science professor who taught in Georgia and Illinois before joining the faculty at the University of Exeter in Britain, said Trump introduced a whole new level of lying in politics.

    After reviewing several ads at The Washington Post’s request, he said they are “the sort of kernel-of-truth pushing the boundaries of what you can get away with” that both parties have run for decades.

    The ads “are inaccurate and misleading but they are not anywhere in the same league” as Trump’s lies about a stolen election, former president Barack Obama’s birth certificate, or linking the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) to the murder of President John F. Kennedy, he said.


    Reifler added: “Thirty-second spots do not really allow for nuanced political discussions and really incentivizes saying things that are as extreme as you can get away with.”.............

    Click to expand...

    What is this "get away with" they're talking about. The GOP has completely untethered itself from truth, from reality and from shame. They'll claim anything.
     
    The Republican nominee for governor of Wisconsin sparked a bevy of anger and condemnation this week after a clip of him vowing at a campaign stop to ensure “Republicans will never lose another election” if he is elected went viral online.

    “Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin after I’m elected governor,” Tim Michels tells supporters in the clip taken Monday at a campaign stop.

    Michels, an affluent construction executive, is running against incumbent Governor Tony Evers (D) in a very close race. The Washington Post noted that Michels’ comments carry extra weight with many in Wisconsin as Evers “over his four years vetoed a string of Republican-backed bills that would have changed voting rules in a battleground state that Donald Trump narrowly won in 2016 and narrowly lost in 2020.”

    Wisconsin Republicans are also nearing a super-majority in the state Senate and Assembly, which they already control. A two-thirds super-majority in both chambers would allow GOP lawmakers to overturn the governor’s vetoes in the state..........

    MSN

    www.msn.com







     
    for what it's worth
    ==================

    Americans are dying younger in states run by conservatives compared to those governed by liberals, scientists from several universities have found.

    The authors of a new study write that “simulations indicate that changing all policy domains in all states to a fully liberal orientation might have saved 171,030 lives in 2019, while changing them to a fully conservative orientation might have cost 217,635 lives”.

    The study was released on the platform Plos One, which says it’s “an inclusive journal community working together to advance science for the benefit of society, now and in the future”.

    The authors of the study come from Syracuse University, New York, Harvard, Massachusetts, Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Washington, the University of Texas at Austin and Canada’s University of Western Ontario.

    “Results show that the policy domains were associated with working-age mortality,” the authors added.

    Going against that trend, the researchers discovered that “more conservative marijuana policies” was linked to lower mortality, but the study also found that “more liberal policies on the environment, gun safety, labor, economic taxes and tobacco taxes in a state were associated with lower mortality in that state”...........

    “We estimate that life expectancy in the US would be approximately 3.77 years longer, if it had just the average social policy generosity of the other 17 OECD nations,” they said......

     
    I hope he's wrong that murders of politicians will be the only way to get people to solve this problem
    =============================================================


    Former Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor on Wednesday claimed that American officials are facing a greater threat from radical, right-wing extremism than they faced from terrorists linked to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

    In a panel discussion with Taylor along with former FBI deputy director of counterintelligence, Frank Figliuzzi, said that his sources are "livid" at the Capitol Police for failing to do their job. He noted that it's a long-running problem that began with Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ) and continued with the Congressional baseball game, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and now Pelosi.

    "To continue off of Frank's point, there's a good guy side of this equation and a bad guy side of the equation," Taylor continued the discussion. "On the good guy side, clearly, the good guyed needed to protect themselves better. They need to think how to increase protection. Let's look at the bad guys. We are seeing a surge in terror threats against public servants, unlike anything we have seen in a modern era. The terrorist threat is greater now than the post-9/11 period. We have seen a tenfold increase to threats to U.S. members of Congress since the early years of the Trump administration. That's a massive spike."

    Meanwhile, he explained it isn't just at the federal level. There are county election officials who are being threatened and are wearing bulletproof vests. Even poll workers have become targets of violence.

    "You noted at the top of the problem, it's conspiracy theories like we have seen drive other terrorist movements," Taylor continued. "One group of academics showed the political stress index right now in the United States is at the highest levels it has been since the Civil War. Doing the same thing over and over that we have been doing to try to fix this problem is not going to work. I think regardless of the results after the midterms, we will have to look long and hard not just at public safety reforms to protect members of Congress but at major democracy reforms, rank choice voting and open primaries, to get more moderate public figures elected so we don't have people fanning the flames of this violent rhetoric."

    Later in the discussion, Taylor also explained that, if he wasn't clear before, those responsible for the violence are coming from the MAGA Republican Party.

    "You have been shining a light on this for a long time," he explained. "You know what? People mock us. We are the Chicken Littles of cable news. Okay, the sky is falling, the sky is falling! Since Jan. 6, we have been talking about this. Since that attack, we have had assassination plots against senators, governors, congressmen, cabinet officials, local leaders, and candidates for public office. Now we have an assassination attempt in Pelosi's home that almost -- thank God it wasn't success successful. I worry that's not enough. In fact, it's clear it's not enough to draw attention to it."

    He cited some who have claimed the only way to fix it is a high-profile assassination to wake the country up. Someone will have to die before people understand this is dangerous.............

     

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