What happens to the Republican Party now? (2 Viewers)

[MT15]

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?

 

[bird]

Trouble brewing?

Another convict like Dinesh D’Souza.

 

[GrandAdmiral]

I've never heard of that guy before. Seems like anyone can call a press conference these days.

He was one of the organizers of the Stop the Steal rally on Jan. 6th.

 

[Optimus Prime]

Wasn’t sure if here or speaker thread was best place for this
====================
The US right has this week been staging a clown show that has had liberals in that country and beyond pulling up a chair and breaking out the popcorn.

There has been a karmic pleasure in watching the Republicans who won control of the House of Representatives struggle to complete the most basic piece of business – the election of a speaker– but it’s also been instructive, and not only to Americans.

For it has confirmed the dirty little secret of that strain of rightwing populist politics that revels in what it calls disruption: it always ends in bitter factional fighting, chaos and paralysis. We in Britain should know, because Brexit has gone the exact same way.

Start with the karma that saw House Republicans gather two years to the day since they sought to prevent the peaceful transfer of power from one party to another: often overlooked in the anniversary recollections of 6 January 2021 is that, mere hours after rioters had stormed the US Capitol, a majority of Republican House members voted to do precisely as the rioters had demanded and overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Yet here were those same House Republicans on 6 January 2023, having prevented the smooth transfer of power from one party to another – except this time, the party they were thwarting was their own.

It should have been straightforward. Republicans won a narrow majority in the House in November, which gave them the right to put one of their number in the speaker’s chair. The trouble was, while most backed Kevin McCarthy, about 20 rebels did not.

By Thursday night, they had gone through 11 rounds of voting – the most since the civil war era– without McCarthy or anyone else winning a majority. The result: deadlock.

It was a study in incompetence. A party asks the electorate to give them power; they get it and then freeze, unable to take even the first step towards using it. There’s no clear political logic to the stalemate.

The rebels are devotees of Donald Trump, but McCarthy himself is a tireless Trump sycophant – patronised by the former president as “my Kevin” – who begged for and won the backing of the orange one.

The pro-Trump rebels are divided among themselves: one rebuked Trump for sticking with McCarthy, while another voted to make Trump himself speaker.

It’s telling that the rebels’ demands are not on policy but on procedure, seeking rule changes or committee seats that would give them more power. Otherwise, they can’t really say what they want.

They succeeded in getting metal detectors removed from the entrance to the chamber, so now people can walk on to the floor of the House carrying a gun, but apart from that, and their hunger to start investigating Democrats, including Joe Biden’s son Hunter, nothing……..

After Brexit and Trump, rightwing populists cling to power – but the truth is they can’t govern | Jonathan Freedland

The farcical scenes among US Republicans have echoes in our Tory party. Both promise disruption, then deliver exactly that, says Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland

www.theguardian.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

 

[GrandAdmiral]

"By the time I'm done, the whole world's going to know it..."

Oh snap.

 

[MT15]

What was that definition of insanity I heard?

 

[MT15]

Maybe we need a new thread just for the House idiots?

 

[Optimus Prime]

this could have gone in a number of threads
==============================
Anew trend seems to be all the rage for anti-LGBTQ+ parents, who have been increasingly touting the need to “deprogram” their progressive children and turn them conservative.

A recent report from the New York Post features a group of mothers who say their children refuse to talk to them after being “indoctrinated” with “gender and race ideology” by progressive high schools and colleges.

The article likens progressive values to being in a cult and details the mothers’ desire to find a “deprogrammer” to jolt their children back to reality.

The mothers were inspired by another story from the New York Post, that of Annabella Rockwell, a pharmaceutical fortune heiress, a rightwing activist, and a Mount Holyoke alumna who claimed that her mother hired a $300/day “deprogrammer” to turn her conservative after college.

“I saw Annabella’s story and my life turned upside down,” said 54-year-old Beth Pensky, whose son and daughter don’t speak to her.

“I realized I wasn’t alone and I saw what happened to her was similar to what I think happened to my kids. I never even considered trying to find a deprogrammer. I didn’t know they existed. But I think it’s too late for me and my kids. They won’t even talk to me.”

A mother named Dorothy, whose last name was not given, also connected to Rockwell.

“Reading about Annabella was the first time I connected the dots to everything that had happened with my daughter,” she said.

“She had what she called ‘an awakening’ and became very angry at me and her father. It was a big personality change. We are conservatives so [our political views] became a huge problem. We were not allowed to visit her on campus. She went on a mission to convert her brother against us. She told him that he should be against us because we’re conservatives and that we all should be against men.”.

Pensky and Dorothy also both claimed they did not have any problem with the fact that they each had daughters come out as gay. Rather, they say it was the way their daughters treated them in the aftermath that was the problem.

The article also featured an anonymous mother of five daughters who she claimed were turned against her by the upscale New York City private school Dalton and then further lured into the cult of progressivism in college.

“The emotional stress is unbelievable,” she said. “I consider myself a Democrat and a liberal but it doesn’t matter. I’ve had fights with some of my girls just because I wouldn’t get myself a Rainbow pride Starbucks cup. The cup itself became this huge battleground. Apparently it matters what cup you hold.”

And the deprogramming business is apparently booming.

36-year-old K. Yang was once a trans and gay rights activist who used they/them pronouns but has since “deprogrammed” herself. She said she is extremely busy these days as a full-time deprogrammer

Yang’s website claims to be “exposing the trans agenda.”..........

MSN

 

[Optimus Prime]

The Republican House has finally, after 15 votes, managed to elect Kevin McCarthy as speaker. That means they can get on to their main business: impeaching Joe Biden for something. Or for anything.

Of course, Democrats control the other chamber of Congress. The chance of a frivolous House impeachment getting the 60 votes in the Senate for removal is somewhere between zero and zilch. So why are Republicans so obsessed with taking a nonsense vote on a nonsense issue that will result in nothing?

I think the answer is that the nonsense is the point. Republicans want to impeach Biden in a clearly partisan, obviously illegitimate way because they want to delegitimize the impeachment process. They dislike that process because it was used against Republican president Donald Trump when he committed serious crimes.

It’s no secret that many in the House majority want to find some excuse (or no excuse) to impeach Biden. In 2020, before Biden was even elected, Iowa Senator Joni Ernst said that Republicans would impeach him as soon as possible for something regarding his son Hunter Biden’s involvement in Ukraine. In 2021, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham threatened Biden with impeachment for pulling troops out of Afghanistan. Georgia Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene, a key McCarthy ally who has tried to downplay the violent January 6 attack on the capital, tweeted on January 1 of this year that, “2023 will be a great year to impeach Joe Biden!” She offered no rationale.

It’s not just elected representatives either. A poll last May found that 68 percent of Republican voters think that Biden should be impeached.

Barton Gellman at The Atlantic argued that impeachment is the natural consequence of Trumpian election denial. Republicans, contrary to all evidence, see Biden as an illegitimate president who stole the 2020 election. Impeaching him seems natural and right.

No doubt that’s part of the impetus. But Republicans also want revenge for the fact that the impeachment process was twice used against Trump. Trump was impeached once because of revelations that he had tried to blackmail Ukraine into aiding him in the 2020 election, and once following his involvement in the violent January 6 coup attempt. Trump and his allies saw impeachment as a personal humiliation for the President. They want revenge.

Turnabout, the Republicans believe, is fair play. “The Democrats weaponized impeachment,” Texas Senator Ted Cruz said in a podcast in early 2022. “And one of the real disadvantages of doing that . . . is the more you weaponize it and turn it into a partisan cudgel, you know, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

Cruz doesn’t believe that Biden has committed an impeachable offense. On the contrary, he wants to impeach Biden, he suggests, precisely because Biden has not committed any serious crimes. The goal is to impeach Biden as a kind of joke or parody, to mock both Biden and the impeachment process itself.............

Voices: Why Republicans really want to impeach Biden

 

[bird]

this could have gone in a number of threads
==============================
Anew trend seems to be all the rage for anti-LGBTQ+ parents, who have been increasingly touting the need to “deprogram” their progressive children and turn them conservative.

A recent report from the New York Post features a group of mothers who say their children refuse to talk to them after being “indoctrinated” with “gender and race ideology” by progressive high schools and colleges.

The article likens progressive values to being in a cult and details the mothers’ desire to find a “deprogrammer” to jolt their children back to reality.

The mothers were inspired by another story from the New York Post, that of Annabella Rockwell, a pharmaceutical fortune heiress, a rightwing activist, and a Mount Holyoke alumna who claimed that her mother hired a $300/day “deprogrammer” to turn her conservative after college.

“I saw Annabella’s story and my life turned upside down,” said 54-year-old Beth Pensky, whose son and daughter don’t speak to her.

“I realized I wasn’t alone and I saw what happened to her was similar to what I think happened to my kids. I never even considered trying to find a deprogrammer. I didn’t know they existed. But I think it’s too late for me and my kids. They won’t even talk to me.”

A mother named Dorothy, whose last name was not given, also connected to Rockwell.

“Reading about Annabella was the first time I connected the dots to everything that had happened with my daughter,” she said.

“She had what she called ‘an awakening’ and became very angry at me and her father. It was a big personality change. We are conservatives so [our political views] became a huge problem. We were not allowed to visit her on campus. She went on a mission to convert her brother against us. She told him that he should be against us because we’re conservatives and that we all should be against men.”.

Pensky and Dorothy also both claimed they did not have any problem with the fact that they each had daughters come out as gay. Rather, they say it was the way their daughters treated them in the aftermath that was the problem.

The article also featured an anonymous mother of five daughters who she claimed were turned against her by the upscale New York City private school Dalton and then further lured into the cult of progressivism in college.

“The emotional stress is unbelievable,” she said. “I consider myself a Democrat and a liberal but it doesn’t matter. I’ve had fights with some of my girls just because I wouldn’t get myself a Rainbow pride Starbucks cup. The cup itself became this huge battleground. Apparently it matters what cup you hold.”

And the deprogramming business is apparently booming.

36-year-old K. Yang was once a trans and gay rights activist who used they/them pronouns but has since “deprogrammed” herself. She said she is extremely busy these days as a full-time deprogrammer

Yang’s website claims to be “exposing the trans agenda.”..........

MSN

Oh, great, another collection of hacks preying on bigots.

 

[MT15]

This is such a stupid idea:

 

[MT15]

So, thank goodness the House majority is so slim. This will be vetoed, I’m sure.

 

[cuddlemonkey]

So, thank goodness the House majority is so slim. This will be vetoed, I’m sure.

So the first order of business for the GOP-led House was to add 100 billion dollars to the deficit while eliminating 87,000 jobs for Americans.

 

[MT15]

This lady is a good follow on Twitter. She seems to truly practice her faith, which I admire. I didn’t want to start a new thread, and decided this could go here because the right wing “Christians” have become inseparable from the GOP.

Her observation is such a truism. A corollary we learned when we had our small business: if a new customer comes in and brags unsolicited about how “money isn’t an issue” then money is most definitely an issue.

 

[Optimus Prime]

After a bruising battle over the speakership, House Republicans kicked off their legislative agenda on Monday. It was a farce.

The GOP’s first policy bill would defund President Joe Biden’s efforts to help the Internal Revenue Service crack down on tax cheats. It’s a bill that’s predicated on disinformation, whose only real constituency is wealthy people who don’t want to pay their fair share. And it underscores how the Republican Party’s so-called populism isn’t about empowering the working class — it’s about exploiting them.

After a historic struggle to become House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy immediately tried to rally the troops on Saturday by promising to “repeal funding for 87,000 new IRS agents, because the government should be here to help you, not go after you.”

It was classic red meat for the base: For months, Republicans have messaged that the new agents would be recruited into a heavily armed “shadow army” designed to weaponize the IRS against the middle class. Conservative activists and media, which have frequently and wrongly accused the IRS of bias against the right, enthusiastically encouraged these claims.

This narrative is a work of fiction. In reality, the funding is going toward an understaffed federal agency in desperate need of personnel to perform its basic functions. The IRS’s staff size today is the same as in 1970, and there are a lot more tax returns to deal with today. The 87,000 figure refers to the total number of employees that would be hired by the Treasury Department, and a majority will not be agents involved with enforcement. According to the Treasury, just 1 percent of new employees would be agents assigned to details that require carrying firearms.

Additional IRS funding would not be a worry for the middle class, but for elites. As experts like Georgetown University’s Don Moynihan have pointed out, an understaffed IRS is of greatest benefit to the rich, whose finances are more complicated to evaluate, and who are more adept at finding loopholes. “The audit rate for individuals earning more than $1 million has been divided by 4 since 2010, feeding massive tax dodging,” he noted in August. (The IRS has had its budget cut nearly 20 percent since 2010.)

The Treasury Department has said it will focus on hiring staff with experience working with large corporations and high-net-worth individuals. It also says that taxpayers making less than $400,000 a year will not see an increase in audits, but they will get better customer service with extra funding...................

MSN

 

[BullSheetBuddha]

This lady is a good follow on Twitter. She seems to truly practice her faith, which I admire. I didn’t want to start a new thread, and decided this could go here because the right wing “Christians” have become inseparable from the GOP.

Her observation is such a truism. A corollary we learned when we had our small business: if a new customer comes in and brags unsolicited about how “money isn’t an issue” then money is most definitely an issue.

She's got this right. My wife and I would be out for a walk somewhere and look at each and burst out laughing.

 

[Optimus Prime]

The Missouri House of Representatives has started off 2023 receiving scrutiny nationwide as they have debated the proper attire that women legislators should wear when they are on the floor of the Capitol in Jefferson City, reports the St. Louis Post Dispatch.

The state of Missouri, which was under the nation's critical eye during the racial discrimination protests at the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2015 and 2016, in the immediate aftermath of the Michael Brown killing in St. Louis, has now garnered attention for their House of Representatives for opening a debate that many female lawmakers have decried as sexist.

In this particular case, the Missouri state legislature is considering a ban on women's apparel that exposes bare arms.

St. Louis Democrat Pete Merideth roasted his Republican colleagues for even making this a topic of discussion.

"The caucus that lost their minds over the suggestion that they should wear masks during a pandemic to respect the safety of others is now spending its time focusing on the fine details of what women have to wear (and specifically how many layers must cover their arms) to show respect in this chamber," Merideth tweeted.........

MSN

 

[coldseat]

The Missouri House of Representatives has started off 2023 receiving scrutiny nationwide as they have debated the proper attire that women legislators should wear when they are on the floor of the Capitol in Jefferson City, reports the St. Louis Post Dispatch.

The state of Missouri, which was under the nation's critical eye during the racial discrimination protests at the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2015 and 2016, in the immediate aftermath of the Michael Brown killing in St. Louis, has now garnered attention for their House of Representatives for opening a debate that many female lawmakers have decried as sexist.

In this particular case, the Missouri state legislature is considering a ban on women's apparel that exposes bare arms.

St. Louis Democrat Pete Merideth roasted his Republican colleagues for even making this a topic of discussion.

"The caucus that lost their minds over the suggestion that they should wear masks during a pandemic to respect the safety of others is now spending its time focusing on the fine details of what women have to wear (and specifically how many layers must cover their arms) to show respect in this chamber," Merideth tweeted.........

MSN

The American Taliban continues to show us who they are. Many voters either just won't believe what's right before their eyes or they want the American Taliban in charge.